02 Sep Guest Blog | The Red Light District
KSF Artists of Choice is open to artists across the disciplines of dance, theatre, musical theatre and film. Over the next few weeks, we will post guest blogs from some of our 2016 grant winners about how the grant has impacted their work. Applications will be open in early 2017.
Name | The Red Light District - Ted Witzel
Project | Lulu
Year Awarded KSF Grant | 2016
What does the KSF grant mean to you and your project?
We’ve done four work periods over two years on shoestring budgets. KSF’s significant contribution means that we can both begin work on the project and demonstrate to other funding bodies that the project is viable and already supported. Having this funding in place will allow me to shift my focus from fundraising to the creative work.
What inspired your project?
Really, it was Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. I try to start any project by thinking about who it is that I want to see it and how I want them to engage. Being asked to be an artist in residence by Brendan Healy was a real gift. Buddies is the world’s largest and longest-running queer theatre company. It has built a loyal, progressive, and diverse audience over the last thirty-five years: an audience who have already have participated in a certain amount of discourse around sex, gender, power, and queerness. I wanted to push that conversation further into a place that was beyond their comfort zone and my own. Lulu is a text I’ve wanted to take on for a while, and it seemed a great match for this audience.
Talk about your journey prior to the receiving the award. What kind of difficulties or roadblocks did you encounter along the way? How did you overcome them?
I’ve been trying to create this series through a process of collective adaptation—which means incorporating contributions from over seventy-five artists, trying to fit them into a series of pieces (we’ve made four already). The challenge is always to present something complex and clear, to refine the questions we’re asking and balance the “yes but what ifs” that make this dialogue so interesting.
Money is always an issue in the arts. I’ve made four complete shows over the last two years. Each of them cost less than $5,000 and should have cost over $30k a piece. They’re big shows. Figuring out how to execute these pieces for very little is frustrating, but can also reveal really creative solutions. Our designs have always been drawn out of the architecture of the space we’re in, because we can’t afford to hide that, nor do we want to.
What would you say have been the most defining moments of your career thus far?
The moment I knew that I would be making theatre for the rest of my life happened in a small town in the middle of Germany where I’d been assistant directing. The theatre we were in was built into the ruins of a 1,200 year old monastery that had been torched by Napoleon on his way through Germany. The director was playing one of the leading roles in the show and the night before opening she threw her back out. For her first scene she had to come onstage in a burlap sack, get molested and tossed around and then dropped down a trap door. Since she didn’t show her face, it was decided that I’d do that scene for her. So I’m sitting in this crypt below the stage, in a full-body burlap sack, between a bucket of plastic fish and a giant marble tablet with some Latin writing on it. It was at that moment that I knew there wasn’t anything else I could do.
Do you have any advice for emerging artists?
Get good at email, budgets and spreadsheets. If you look organizationally certain, people give you space to be creatively uncertain, which is a really fertile place to sit.
Read more about Ted’s project here.
Ted discusses the project here.