CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Lisa Gaye Dixon moves deliberately across the floor of the rehearsal stage, throwing her arms wide, hunching her shoulders and extending her hand from her forehead like a feather. Her expression is sometimes questioning, sometimes intense. Her costume includes a floor-length skirt supported by a crinoline underneath and a white ruff around her neck, echoing a picture of a black Elizabeth I on a board at the edge of the stage.
The solo performance centers on perceptions of race and gender, Dixon’s work in the theater and how she challenges preconceived notions of the roles she plays. Or, as she says in a video about the production, “How does a black girl from the Midwest wreak havoc on Shakespeare?”
Leslie’s work with Dixon is part of a multiphase development of the piece over three years. In the past several weeks, Leslie and Dixon have been refining the piece. An open rehearsal of “My Case is Altered” is at noon Saturday (May 2) at the Colwell Playhouse in Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The company will present portions of the piece and talk about the process of creating it.
The subtitle of the piece comes from a play from the 1600s about a woman dressing as a man in order to take control of her life. The story parallels Dixon’s experience in the theater. She wanted to perform Shakespeare, but she found it difficult to get cast in classical works in America – how she was perceived didn’t fit the parts she wanted to play. So Dixon began playing male roles.
Her conversations with Leslie about her experiences grew into discussions about theater in general and other women – including Elizabeth I – who have contradicted the assumptions about their traditional gender roles. Dixon first questioned why she wasn’t being hired for certain roles.
“It became a larger inquiry to me – a personal exploration of myself as an artist and woman in American society, and how I’m perceived in London as an artist versus how I’m perceived in America as an artist,” she said.
Leslie’s approach to theater is to guide a process of “devised theater” – a collaborative process in which a group works with the associations and imagery generated by an idea, and together shapes the language and movement to portray the story on stage.
Eight boards in the rehearsal space for “My Case is Altered” represent eight themes explored in different scenes in the play, or eight different aspects of a character that appear at points along a journey. Each of the boards is covered with text and images – a three-dimensional representation of the ideas the team wants to convey on stage.
The writing includes “dragon poems” written by Dixon, Shakespearean sonnets, a speech given by Sojourner Truth and a passage by poet and activist Audre Lorde. The images include a black Elizabeth – a black woman portraying Elizabeth I, wearing a large white ruff; a photo of a model with an Elizabethan lattice covering her face, by fashion designer Alexander McQueen; Margaret Thatcher; and freed slaves.
“They developed the physical vocabulary for each (theme), gestures, that came from a long physical improvisation,” said Robert Anderson, a theater professor who is the producer of the play. “Usually people work with text first. This is really moving from the physical impulse to the text.”
As part of developing the text, the team working on the play took relevant parts from Shakespearean sonnets and plays and other texts, both ancient and modern, to create a new script from them.
The performance will premiere at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, in October before going on tour in the U.K. in 2016. They hope to also perform the finished work at the U. of I.
Much of Leslie’s work involves directing and staging choruses, from Greek tragedies to contemporary operas. During his residency at the U. of I., he conducted workshops with students, faculty members and local artists, including a workshop on movement, a Shakespeare master class, and a full-day devising theater workshop.
He also worked with classes in theater, dance and landscape architecture. Leslie said he tries to train students to be proactive, rather than reactive, and to make choices about everything they do.
“Part of the rigor of their training is giving them guidelines or structure and really challenging them to think deeply of a moment in a scene and be aware of it, and how they move through their lives on a daily basis,” he said.
His approach translates to other disciplines, as well. For example, the physical environment created by landscape architects can change the behavior of people walking through it, Leslie said, just as characters on stage can change one another’s behavior by their actions.
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