Welcome LUBDUB THEATER COMPANY to our space as they bring the joy of magic and family gatherings to our space in The Uncle Geoff Magic Show! Read below our interview with our resident artists and start to see the magic for yourself!
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Target Margin Theater (TMT): Tell us a little more about LubDub as a company and how this residency came to be
LubDub Theater Company (LDTC): LubDub is a physical theater company based in NYC. We take our name from the stethographic sounds of a heartbeat, and we make multidisciplinary work at the intersections of dance, immersive performance, installation art, new writing–and magic! We’ve admired Target Margin for a long time, and Caitlin Nasema Cassidy (one of our Co-Artistic Directors) has recently performed in a number of TMT works including Pay No Attention to the Girl and Now Go and Act Accordingly. Our company developed the beginnings of our show On the Lawn (which will be performed outdoors in NYC later this summer) at Target Margin in 2018, and since then, we’ve been dreaming about what a LubDub piece might look like in the Doxsee. When David Herskovits reached out to let us know that the uniting theme of this summer’s Labs would be Magic in Plain Sight, we were so excited. Geoff Kanick, our other Co-Artistic Director, is a magician in addition to his work as a director and performer, so we have long been interested as a company in fusions of stage magic with other types of performance. We are also obsessed with the talents of Anthony Vaughn Merchant and Isuri Wijesundara–both magically gifted actors–so this Lab felt like a great opportunity to weave together all of these threads.
TMT: What was the inspiration for creating this work?
LDTC: The Uncle Geoff Magic Show grew out of a real tradition in Geoff’s family: every summer, he travels back home to the West Coast and performs a special magic show for his nieces and nephews. Over the last year we’ve been thinking a lot as a company about how, in addition to literal stage magic, we really miss the magic of family and the magic of live theater. So we wanted to try and combine all three of these types of enchantment as a way of celebrating our ability to make a show together again. We interviewed all six of Geoff’s nieces and nephews (aged six months to 14 years old) and asked them about their favorite parts of these family performances. We also asked them what they would like to see happen in an Uncle Geoff Magic show if ANYTHING was possible–and we are using the magic of theater (and a bit of audience imagination) to try and bring that vision to life.
TMT: What do you envision for this production post TMT residency?
LDTC: Especially in this moment of chaos, it has been a true gift to design a performance specifically for this place and time, and for this live audience! We’re not sure what will happen next with the piece–but we will definitely find a way to share it with Uncle Geoff’s nieces and nephews on the West Coast!
TMT: Why is this the right time for audiences to hear the message of this show?
LDTC: We are filled with joy to return safely to live performance. For us, this whole creative process has been animated by our joy to be back in a room with our collaborators, and back with in-person audiences. Motivated by that joy, we’ve tried to make a piece that invites laughter and fun–we want to play a small part in welcoming audiences back to live performance while expressing the shared jubilation that accompanies this return.
TMT: As a company, how did you all overcome the hardships that came with the pandemic?
LDTC: For us, it’s been important to be truthful with ourselves and one another about the difficulties of the past year. Rather than resist change, we’ve tried to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway puts it: we had to let go of the year we had planned and root ourselves in our new reality. At some points, it wasn’t possible for us to make work–and we tried to voice that that was ok. It’s not imperative to be productive at every instant. And amid the vast difficulties of the past year, some of which will rest with us forever, there have also been moments of great light: new ways of working have offered us unexpected connections with audiences and collaborators all around the world, and a long pause in performance has allowed us to re-examine what aspects of theater are most important to us moving forward. Right now, we’re prioritizing hospitality, joy, and adaptability–we’re trying to center those values in our work this week, and we’re excited to discover how they inform our future. And we are meeting this moment with deep gratitude and enthusiasm–we hope never to take for granted the miracle of shared breath at the moment the curtain rises!
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