“Where do you get your ideas?”
No matter how cringe-worthy a question this is, some brave soul at some convention or festival or dinner party is always willing to offer it up to some cornered poet or panel of authors who have long tired of their ready answers.
It’s a question frequently poked at writers, but rarely asked of other artists. The sound designer, props artisan, choreographer, actress, or scenic charge are usually assumed to be interpreting the writer’s work, or executing someone else’s design, but the truth is that they each and all have their own influences, and tastes, and biases, and inspirations. We couldn’t work productively or creatively if everyone in the room wasn’t bringing to the table their own aesthetic world and offering up their artistic loves, the inspirations most important and personal to each of us.
At Brave Spirits we emphasize the text and the centrality of the author. We pore over the words and interpret them, paraphrase them, scan them, diagram them, render them as dashes and curves, look them up in well-thumbed lexicons, pester our curious and patient dramaturg Claire what else they could mean, compare editors’ takes, and finally try to bring them to consequential form in someone else’s ear. But when we get on our feet and the words become actions that text work is always paired with images, or references, or feelings, or shapes – something that a page cannot contain but which is born there in the words.
The authors we present were themselves inspired, turning and returning to the market of stories and reshaping old ideas in new forms. The greatest love story ever told has already been retold several times by the time Shakespeare crossed their stars, and Webster wasn’t even the first to adapt the story of the real-life Duchess Giovanna.
As we near the end of our run of the Lunatic Rep and prepare for the ambitious Histories, here is a look back at twenty-odd sources for our production of The Duchess of Malfi. These are all images, or works, or ideas that informed the creation of our show. The influence of some is probably easy to pick out of the performance, others may have simply informed a moment or sparked a conversation. Some were specific to this production, with this cast, in this space, while others feel like artistic lodestones that I circle back to artistically and personally, the ghosts that haunt us.
— Casey Kaleba, Director