This Would Look Good On You
Written & Performed by Orietta Crispino
Directed by Liza Cassidy
Open Rehearsal
August 21, 2021 at 5pm
FREE with reservation.
Email theaterlab36@gmail.com to reserve your tickets
On March 8th 2020 for our MINIFEST, a festival of miniature works, I offered a first view of This Will Look Good on You. It was a 20minutes snippet of a piece that looks at the many identities we play in our lives though the clothes we desire and collect.
As we all remember, a week later the pandemic shut us down and the piece was put to rest until now.
Exactly a year later, I started working on it again and recorded a version on camera, hoping that I would be able to perform it live before the end of this year.
But the piece is not finished and before I open it in the fall, I will offer open rehearsals for the public to experience it live and in person.
Would you come to watch me work? Could you give me a garment that you don’t wear anymore but that you are not ready yet to toss and you think it would look good on me?
Each garment a story, I will weave it in the fabric of my performance, if you let me.
How I work: The series initiated with LMCFY is a carefully crafted version of some pivotal experiences of my life in translation.
I script ideas and images in space. I first set to paper a sequence of texts, which I use to guide me while I create actions and gestures, generate more stories and find a ‘proper’ sequence.
After every performance, I script the new findings and integrate them in the structure. It takes time to shape it. It took me a whole of 20 live performances to set the arc and stories of my previous piece Let Me Cook For You. When the piece is set, and it’s repeatable I build into it areas in which I can always improvise finding in the moment new materials without changing it’s shape so the piece ideally it’s always fresh and I can offer an always seamless artful playing without a safety net.
As a director at the beginning of my career in Italy (a long time ago), I would have never allowed any public eye into the process, nor would I ever have imagined to script in the first person airing publicly the knots of personal history.
But performance art has traditionally put the testimony of the self in the flesh at the center of its composition and it’s this space that This Would Look On You inhabits. This is where the character of me lives serving you the stories of the many identities I have played with through the clothes of others.