HWY Rachel: A non-traditional performance experiment

After having to wait outside in downtown Greensboro for visiting troupe, HWY Rachel's, moving performance piece to start, a very animated woman leapt from inside the door to Elsewhere Artist Collective, clad in a yellow vintage dress and holding a fake bottle of gin in her hand. "Come on in, I'm not even kidding, come on in! We've got the seal of approval!" this character shouted. She personally ushered in and addressed each person in the audience- a group of 15 to 20 people- telling participants how ravishing and beautiful they all were.

Everyone was encouraged to come and meet this lady's "husband," another woman dressed in a white vintage dress, complete with two pairs of glasses covering her eyes and goggles over her hat, clutching a stuffed animal.

"Damnit, you're all here," 'he' turned to his wife, "Now tell them why they came on a very important day." Apparently, participants were going to be looking for the odd couple's missing daughter. Then the journey began.

The first stop came to two of the performers in strange, puffy pajama outfits pretending to kiss underneath a little cubby hideout with clanking sounds and strange underwater-like lighting. "Look at these things! Do you think this is famous?" the wife asked the audience, coming across as quite random. Eerie-sad oldies music played from a boom box. From here the couple led the audience through various exhibitions that were described as "episodic" by performer Annie Levy.

Audience members witnessed a mock puppet show, a librarian-like woman reading blurbs from an animal book and a Greensboro Massacre flier, a snooty-girl mock phone conversation in a great northern accent, and a wedding from behind a picture frame. Once participants "found" the missing child, she began talking to us in philosophically dreamy poetic lines, "If I could choose between the present and the future, I'd choose the past."

The seven ladies in the HWY Rachel group came down from New York to do a residency in Greensboro's Elsewhere Artist Collective on Elm St. from Aug. 11 until the date of the performance, Aug. 25. A newly formed troupe, the group had never done a piece together, and didn't do any planning for the performance until they arrived in Greensboro. The group is non-hierarchal so the piece was an experiment in collaboration: in directing, writing, acting, and working together with seven women all on the same level in production.

The material for the piece came together when the women of HWY Rachel began rifling through the thrift store "junk" in Elsewhere and eventually found themselves in the streets of Greensboro. HWY Rachel interviewed various people, including students on campus, and discovered what it really meant to live in Greensboro and the South. Members played games and participated in composition exercises to come up with their non-written material. The purpose of their work does not lie entirely in the final product. Instead, an emphasis is placed in the joy and learning experience en route to production.

The piece performed at Elsewhere on Aug. 26 incorporated stories of historical women in different social and economic positions, relayed through episodic scenes.

"The stories were fictionalized and filtered through modern eyes," said HWY Rachel founder, Melissa Shaw.

Entangled in the stories was a general message of "developing collaborative works that combine gender politics, performance anxiety, pre-apocalyptic tensions, and object based art," as stated by HWY Rachel's press release. The piece also had influences from the writings of Foucault, Wittgenstein, Aragon, and de Certeau.

The women in HWY Rachel are all educators with a background in acting. One member runs a non-profit organization, Take Back the News (www.takebackthenews.org), a forum for women to share stories of violence. Another member is a theater director, design teacher, artist, and poet. After their work at Elsewhere, experimenting with and utilizing various objects and space in the collective, HWY Rachel's members are now able to call themselves "environmental architects." Though there was no official title, Levy called the piece, "We're Doing This for the First and Last time: A Work in Progress." After the performance, as the audience shared home made cookies and coffee mugs of beer, Shaw modified the title, "We're Doing This for the First and Last time: A Work in Progress…in Drinking Beer."