LUCY CASHION
ARTIST & RESEARCHER
Multimedia performance
Collaborative process
Theatrical form
HOW I MAKE WORK
I make theatre through experimental processes that investigate how material conditions create unique theatrical situations — in the story, in the room, and in the final theatrical form.
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The site moves through the recurring elements of that process: formal experiment, material conditions, divine process, new information, and sustained curiosity.
1. FORMAL EXPERIMENT: a dramaturgical or cultural tension demands a structured intervention
Featured Experiment: THE BRECHTFAST CLUB
THE BRECHTFAST CLUB began as a joke--what would John Hughes' 1985 cult-classic look like reimagined as a play in the style of Bertolt Brecht? Then it became a real question: what would The Breakfast Club become if its iconic American high school vacuum were told with Brechtian techniques? The experiment exposed what the film leaves untouched: context, history, politics, the Cold War, and the question of individualism vs. collectivism.
2. MATERIAL CONDITIONS: the experiment happens under real conditions.
I work with material conditions on two levels:
Inside the story:
What social, economic, spatial, historical, and institutional structures belong to the story and how are the characters' actions shaped by them?
Inside the process:
What are the actual time, space, resources, collaborators, permissions, technologies, and constraints that determine our process? When we accept these conditions, they create a unique situation for artistic process and the production's theatrical language.
Featured Experiment: ROMANOV FAMILY YARD SALE
Once the formal experiment and the material conditions are clear, making the piece becomes a series of theatrical problems to solve.
The central experiment of ROMANOV FAMILY YARD SALE was formal: to make a real play and a real yard sale occupy the same event. The production was not a play pretending to be a yard sale, or a yard sale used as decorative theatrical business. It had to function as both: a fully realized theatre work and an actual yard sale, with objects, prices, bargaining, spectators, performers, and transactions all operating inside the same frame.
3. DIVINE PROCESS: theatre also requires a process that allows for magic.
Featured Experiment: ANTIGONE: REQUIEM PER PATRIARCHUS
Art is like a religion and each artistic process is like a holy day. Devoting oneself to an artistic process implies believing in the metaphysical, irrational, and transformative dimensions of art and art-making. But humans (even artists) cannot devise miracles or summon god. We cannot expect magic to visit us because we are making art. We can only follow the process with as much integrity and humility as we can muster. We must create art in a way that trusts in the value of the unknown and uncontrollable phenomena of each distinct process--this time, this space, these resources, these unique characteristics of each of these collaborators, these accidents, and these anomalies. Divine inspiration lives in the unknown, in everything we can't control, and it will only visit us if we believe in the process, whichever one we find ourselves in. We control what we can and we plan for what we know, but we must leave room for the unplanned metaphysical properties of a work of art if we believe that they exist and that a work has the power to signal through the flames.
ANTIGONE: REQUIEM PER PATRIARCHUS was developed across university, prison, and professional contexts, with seven Antigones caught inside a story they are sentenced to reenact until they can make it end without tragedy. The process held theatrical making as research, ritual, testimony, and transformation.
4. NEW INFORMATION: An experiment leads to discovery.
Featured Experiment: R + J: A TELEPHONE PLAY
The production process produces new information: about the text, the room, the collaborators, the audience, the conditions, the art form, and what the work can become in the next iteration.
R+J: A TELEPHONE PLAY asks what an artist does by engaging six authors in a game of playwriting telephone. The experiment turned how a play is made into the subject of the work: a study of form, authorship, interpretation, and theatrical meaning within a structured and specific process made visible. From conception through closing, we learned a lot about the play that we could only learn from making it. Artistic experiments are in process until a hypothesis is proven or disproven.
5. SUSTAINED CURIOUSITY: Each project leaves behind new questions.
Featured Experiment: R + J: A TELEPHONE PLAY
The production process produces new information: about the text, the room, the collaborators, the audience, the conditions, the art form, and what the work can become in the next iteration.
R+J: A TELEPHONE PLAY asks what an artist does by engaging six authors in a game of playwriting telephone. The experiment turned how a play is made into the subject of the work: a study of form, authorship, interpretation, and theatrical meaning within a structured and specific process made visible. From conception through closing, we learned a lot about the play that we could only learn from making it. Artistic experiments are in process until a hypothesis is proven or disproven.
Experiments
My work.
