The Metal Shop Performance Lab

To create a locus of experimentation in intersectional, co-creative processes, and to build theatrical events that foster radical community-building and authentic exchange between artists and audiences.

 

The Metal Shop is a space to experiment with intersectional, feminist ideas and methods of theatrical process and performance. In our increasingly disconnected world, The Metal Shop seeks to create authentic encounters between audience and artists through an experience of exchange and connection. Metal Shop projects seek to transform traditional methods of community-based practice in order to generate conversations and to forge new relationships with the individual members of its audience every night, inviting them to permanently alter the project through their presence and participation.

 

In a metal shop, recycled materials and natural elements are melted, joined, and forged with fire into new life.

 

Co-Creative Process: all artists are part of crafting the vision for the project, and play specific roles in its execution. Co-creation is a non-hierarchical collaborative process that honors every artist and contribution in equal measure. 

 

Process over Product: Artists are paid an hourly wage (currently $25/hr) to be in the creative process together. There is no expected outcome of the time spent in process, so artists are free to experiment. There are time limitations and public sharings of the work in process.

 

Performance as Process: Metal Shop performances are a continuation of the process, in which community members are invited to take part in shaping the piece through their presence and participation. 

 

Deconstructed from Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen, A Wakening centers the generational trauma between mothers and daughters, inviting community members to break the generational silence and shame around the sexuality of young women through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous exchange between artists and community. 

 

The Vulnerable Year
The Vulnerable Year is a virtual interactive performance for one performer and community participants, inviting the participants to consider the role vulnerability plays in self-knowledge and self-love. Co-created by Grace Dolezal-Ng (performer), Maria Simpkins (writer) and Alex Mallory (director), The Vulnerable Year is The Metal Shop’s first experiment in co-creative process.