Process

Only a few months after Watchface’s first attempt at offering a series of performances in a
repertory format in the spring of 1987, they were invited to perform at the Fringe Festival in Los
Angeles that fall. When offered two weeks in the new club performance space at La Mama,
the group had assembled previous shows and several premieres for the engagement. Nine
different works were performed on the three evenings of the two weekends, three on each
bill. For the Fringe Festival they again revived some pieces and created new ones. This time
none of the eventual eight shows had a second performance at the festival: unique two-
show programs were scheduled for each Friday and Saturday of the two week run.

This opportunity to showcase new work encouraged Kurt Fulton to ask Maggie Siena to collaborate
on a two-person piece, Life and Times, to premiere at the Fringe Festival. The initial springboard for the performance was Kurt’s fascination with the creation myths of various primitive cultures that he had been exposed to in his early college studies in the subject of Cultural Anthropology. For Maggie, the creation myths recalled her own studies in Developmental Psychology and the “creation” of a human being. They decided to combine these interests for their performance.

As the two continued to discuss and form the sections of the show, they chose to also
represent what they found were three essential fundamentals in a life – balance,
responsibility, and hope. With the sequences on creation myths and human development as
the opening, they decided their abstract presentations of these three principles would
comprise the second half of the piece. Maggie suggested adding folktales to humanize the
work. Conceptually, the legends would mesh well with their other elements. Maggie chose
a Tibetan and an Icelandic tale and wrote a modern folk story of her own.

In creating the choreography for the piece, Kurt and Maggie did not want to be influenced
by their knowledge of how the movements would eventually be used and in what context.
Most often, they asked the other five members of Watchface to create Emblems, Walter
Kendall Fives, and take notes during Abstractions and Bodies in Space exercises.

The initial image of the performance was Kurt and Maggie posing as if taking a family
portrait. The first section, Creation 1, grouped similar components they found recurring within
multiple creation myths. They grouped the related writings, which became their script. The
result was six brief segments of text. Creation I script In Creation II, which had no text, the two
went from newborns to toddlers taking their first independent steps.

For Creation I they performed movement taken from Emblems and Bodies in Space
sessions based on ideas inspired by the creation myths, such as Vast, Stillness, Chaos, and
Heavy, as they recited lines of the text, both individually and in unison. The choreography
also made use of a chair that Maggie had been sitting on for the show’s opening pose. A
lushly orchestrated recording of the French tune “Plaisir d’Amour” that gradually became
distorted accompanied the section.

Creation II consisted of a series of Walter Kendall Fives that came from a list of activities done
by young children before they begin to walk, including Sleep, Eat, Shit, Cry, Fall, Observe,
and Anticipate. They began the sequence of movements by sitting in two chairs facing
forward. The section culminated with Kurt and Maggie taking their “first step” in unison. They
then walked to behind the chairs, squatted down, wrapped their arms around the back of
their chair, and began rocking back and forth. This final movement represented Nostalgia
for Paradise Lost. Creation II script

The three fables were next, each followed by a piece on balance, responsibility, or hope, in
that order. The first of the folk tales began after the performers moved the two chairs to the
back of the stage and carefully folded their clothes on them as they undressed to only white
t-shirts and full white boxers. For the Tibetan tale, they became human canvases as each
told half of the story and made primitive markings on the other to punctuate plot points. The
markings were made with thick chunks of chalk in various earthy colors on the other’s white
underwear and exposed arms, legs, hands, and feet. marking notations and cues

The Icelandic folk tale was next. The staging for the story was quite ambitious. Kurt and
Maggie moved constantly as they told the tale. At various sessions, they improvised
movements inspired by the plot as different Watchface members read the story, with
additional members viewing the Bodies in Space and making notations of the movements they
found interesting and suggestive of the story. Kurt and Maggie then organized their notes
into the final choreography. Two chairs were utilized to help give the illusion of the various
locales and situations described. Bodies in Space notations

Again, the choreography for the final tale was intricate and complex. For Maggie’s story of
a young woman spending a frenetic day running errands in a big city, the movements were
gleaned from the same Bodies in Space process used for the Icelandic story. To give the
effect of a bustling cityscape, Kurt and Maggie layered additional elaborate patterns onto
their other actions. Using three chairs this time, they were constantly moving around,
through, and over them on various paths in differing directions.

The three brief representations of balance, responsibility, or hope that followed the
enactment of each of the folktales were presented simply. Abstractions and Jams were
used to elaborate upon a single movement and phrase that was created to embody each
idea. Kurt and Maggie then organized the resulting text and movement phrases into the final
order for performance. script and choreography for “Hope”

With the exception of the opening sequence, the sections were executed without
accompaniment. However, for the brief interludes between them, when chairs were placed
or costumes taken off and put on, snatches of orchestral music by composers such as Aaron
Copland and Erik Satie were played.