Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 2016
Adapted from the comedies of Moliere by Michael Fields, Donald Forrest, Michelle Linfante and Jael Weisman
To say that Moliere had it out for doctors would be putting it mildly. His farces about medicine include The Flying Doctor (1659), The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), Love is the Best Doctor (1665) and The Imaginary Invalid (1673). The Imaginary Invalid would be his final play. He suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. While he was playing Argan, the hypochondriac, Moliere was seized by a fit of coughing. He finished the performance but collapsed and died a few hours later of a hemorrhage in the brain at the age of 51. Ironic indeed is the well-known story about a conversation between Louis XIV and Moliere in which the King asks how he gets along with doctors. Moliere responds, “ Sire, we talk together. He prescribes remedies for me. I do not take them and I get well.”
The Dell’Arte Players in their adaptation, Malpractice, borrowed from all of Moliere’s comedies about doctors. The doctors in Moliere’s plays never cure anyone and are on stage only long enough to enact their incompetence. The character of the Doctor is borrowed by Moliere from the Italian Commedia Dell’Arte, which emerged in Venice no later than 1538 during Carnival. Its roots extend back to the Comedies of Plautus (254-184 BCE) and the Atellan Farces (391 BCE). The Commedia Doctore is a charlatan who flaunts his knowledge confident that his patients are ignorant. He convinces, charms and frightens people. For money.
An audience at a Moliere play was accustomed to discovering meaning presented aurally in music, visually in set and costumes and kinesthetically in dance and pantomime. Plays involved masks and disguises and seemingly disjointed episodes of comedy melding the traditions of Court Ballet, French Comic Theatre and the Italian Commedia Dell’Arte. All of these elements orbited around the central theme of the play. Love is the Best Doctor was performed at the Court of Louis XIV to the King’s pleasure. Jean Baptiste Lully, as the preeminent composer for his Court, composed the play's music.
I blended the Dell'Arte adaptation, which continues to carry the fresh breeze of street theatre with the sense of an imagined performance for the Court. Its musical sub-score incorporates Lully’s music mixed with Scott Joplin Rags, and Vaudeville accordion music to situate the Doctor’s patter scenes and lazzi that the Dell’Arte Players so ingeniously wrote.
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 2016
It began with a poem.
The Dead are waiting on the Incline. Sometimes they hold one Hand up to the Light as if they were alive and they draw it back into their usual Darkness which blinds us.
-Heiner Müller
When reconstructing the dance this fall the third section was recreated with the plight of the Syrians in all of our minds. More than 850,000 have crossed the Mediterranean and Aegean Oceans this year fleeing war, persecution and violence. The choice to embark on such dangerous journeys seems the only way to give their children a chance for survival and safety. The suffering caused by Diaspora is our human heritage. All races and cultures have been affected within our human history on earth.
By Marivaux
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin
Who was the first to be unfaithful? Man or woman? The Dispute by Marivaux and translated by Neil Bartlett sets up an experiment to finally determine the answer.
What if four children had been kept locked away in darkness and complete isolation since birth? What if, tonight, they were to be released? How would bodies and minds reared in darkness respond to the first words, the first lies, the first kisses? What if you got to watch? Cruel, erotic and elegant by turn, The Dispute is rightly regarded as one of Marivaux’s masterpieces.
-Neil Bartlett
By Ted Hughes
Adapted by Simon Reade and Tim Supple
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 2009
Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed Into different bodies. Some are transformed just once and live their whole life after in that shape. Others have a facility for changing themselves as they please.
-Ovid
The cast of Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid was comprised of actors, dancers, and musicians. The actors, musicians, and dancers fulfilled multiple roles and functioned as stage crew. The world of this play was dream where the opposites, man and woman, good and evil, collided.
Above all Ovid was interested in passion. Or rather what a passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis-passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural.
-Ted Hughes
Review
Ruth Griffin, who directs the highly effective “Tales from Ovid” (a translation of free verse by Ted Hughes), has a keen tactile sense of the inherent dysfunction of the material. She also finds a sense of human redemption within its often-bizarre parameters, which is just as important.
Every fiber of this production pulses with movement. This title was a great pick for Griffin. By bringing together both dancers and actors from Fresno State — and freely interchanging their duties — she’s managed to craft a show that has its own powerful rhythm. An added bonus is a moody and atmospheric original score by Fresno State music professor Brad Hufft.
- Donald Munro Fresno Bee
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 1997-2010
Within the crafting of dance I search for the intrinsic geometry of the guiding metaphor of the work. From abstract to theatrical dance research and source work imagery and music provide the keys to the movement, music, costume, set and lighting design. Always the goal is to create a world that the audience co-imagines into being.
For Water, Earth, Air and Fire
Moments of transcendent beauty are woven through this choreography to Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet. It takes the very complex score of this String Quartet and visualizes the sound into imagery and motion. No small feat.
-Bradley Huft Professor of Music
Scripted and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 2007
The work with the cast began with questions:
1. When did you idea of sin begin?
2. Why are these sins deadly?
3. Why are there 7?
Research uncovered clues in Early Gnosticism belief 1-300 A.D.
The earthly sphere was associated with matter, flesh and time. The soul was born from the eternal world of God into human life, which was a kind of fall from grace. If the soul within the human life was successful it made its journey through earthly life back to a state of perfection with God. Earlier still as in 4000 years earlier the idea of a journey was present in an Egyptian Pharaohs’ path in the afterlife. One idea of the deadliness of the sins was that they severed the connection to the divine. The significance of 7 I found related to the ancient astronomers discovery of what they termed 7 planets.
The idea of journey catalyzed the structure of the dreamers progress through the stations of the different sins. The haunting lines from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding gave me the idea of the child discovered at the end.
The work began with this text spoken.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know it for the first time.
Review
I sat with my jaw dropped the entire time I watched The Seven Deadly Sins.
I was mesmerized.
-Bradley Myers Professor of Acting
By Carlo Goldoni
Adaptation by Lee Hall
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 2011
This play comes to us from the 18th Century. It is steeped in the culture of the Italian Renaissance Commedia Dell’Arte where stock characters abound. Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) was an aspiring tragedian. Even so in 1745 he received a commission to draft a scenario for a famous actor who played Arlecchino. He wrote the scenario for A Servant of Two Masters that was pinned to the side of the stage for the actors to fulfill with improvisation, as was the tradition in Commedia Dell’Arte. The production was an immediate and enormous success however when Goldoni saw it he was appalled by the indulgence of the actors and in a fury wrote down a script for the actors to learn. In so doing he preserved the centuries old tradition of the improvisers and dealt a wounding blow to its freedom. Even so his script in a distinctive way tracks the flow and sequence of one present moment to another and reveals its alliance with the improvisers legacy and the evolution of the plays’ characters from the cyclical rhythm of carnival. Lee Hall’s adaptation from 1999 follows closely the structure of Goldoni’s original introducing some modern flourishes and asides.
Review
Has director Ruth Griffin figured out how to subvert the laws of physics? There are moments in the delightful and inspired “A Servant to Two Masters,” when it seems as if the whole cast’s center of gravity has been joyfully altered.
-Donald Munro The Fresno Bee
By Polly Teale
Directed and Choregraphed
by Ruth Griffin 2012
The play Brontë poignantly evokes the real and imagined worlds of the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. They grew up isolated on the edge of the expansive moors. Left to their own they generated fantasy worlds. These worlds reached into their adult lives. Biographical story telling is woven with fictional threads from their novels. Shared Experience, an ensemble based physical theatre in the UK, devised this play, which combines text-based theatre with physical theatre. The style for my production is expressionistic incorporating elements of melodrama, dance, Japanese Noh Theatre and surrealism.
Review
The production, directed with care and insight by Ruth Griffin, deserves high commendation for tackling such an intellectually rigorous subject with such theatrical finesse.
-Donald Munro The Fresno Bee
By Mary Zimmerman
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 2012
If you can save one life by telling a story, what story will it be? Start thinking about it now. You never know when you’ll be called to tell it.
-Literary Times
And so the frame story comes to us a king betrayed by his wife commences to woo, marry and slay a virgin each night.
Scheherazade vows to save the women of her city and goes to the king to marry and be slain. She saves her own life and heals the king populating the darkness of his nights with imaginary characters. These are tales to entertain and instruct. An ensemble of 16 actors embodying 45 characters tells our tales.
Review
In temperament and effect, “Arabian Nights” has an ethereal, touching quality, not unlike being treated to a bedtime story. Beautiful to behold, you wouldn’t really call it a play with dancing. More like a play that dances.
-Donald Munro The Fresno Bee
Play by Samuel Beckett 1963
Quad by Samuel Beckett 1981
The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco 1948
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin
Play
A work in two repeating parts, is typical of Beckett’s mature style in presenting a stream of consciousness monologue—in this case, three monologues—obsessively recalling events of the past—here, an adulterous affair. As is common in Absurdist plays, the characters do not speak to each other but rather are trapped within their own minds, an idea made concrete in this play through the urns. Oblivious of each other, the characters only truly respond to the light.
Quad
More than most playwrights, Beckett crafted the total performance of his plays, including lights, sound, sets and control over the actors’ bodies and stage movement. In Quad the players persistently turn to the left, avoiding the center. In his essay Alchemical Dances in Beckett and Yeats, Mimako Okamuro writes, “The four players revolving in a square may be understood to represent the four elements of the alchemical concept of nature [fire, earth, air, water].” They enact a ritual around a center that is never to be traversed.
The Bald Soprano
The first play by Eugene Ionesco, a Rumanian émigré living in Paris, The Bald Soprano is said to have been inspired by Ionesco’s efforts to learn English. The Bald Soprano revels in language as pure sound increasingly disconnected from meaning in much the same way that the abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollack liberate color and form from representational realism. Ionesco also drew inspiration from the Dada movement in poetry and cabaret performance, which originated in neutral and multi-lingual Zurich during the First World War. Dada rejected logic and reason to embrace what movement co-founder Hugo Ball called “spontaneous foolishness.”. In other words he strove to awaken “the capacity for surprise.” The Bald Soprano premiered in Paris in 1950 to an audience of three; despite this inauspicious start, the play became a hit and is still running today, making it one of the most performed plays in the history of French theatre.
-Beehive Blog
Review
The choices Griffin makes and provides for her students and audience members involve nearly all of the teachings of arts and science…those involved in any way must grip with philosophy, literature, history, mathematics, psychology, etc.
I say all this to simply applaud what Griffin brings to Fresno.
-Stephen Dobbs
By Jean Genet 1947
Directed and Choreographed
by Ruth Griffin 2014
Mirrors
At the heart of all Genet’s fiction and plays are people caught in a maze of mirrors, trapped by their own skewed reflections. In this game of mirrors each apparent reality is revealed as an illusion, which in turn is revealed as again part of a dream. Thus the characters in his plays have a vertiginous equilibrium. Along with all aspects of human identity, gender, for Genet is fluid. In The Maids the action consists of the Maids’ attempt to play out their special game to its conclusion. The fantasy of the game allows them to transform there fixed station of servitude. It also functions to deliver them into a trance state where the “unspeakable.” will be accomplished. Claire and Solange, the Maids, find themselves loathsome because they do not exist for themselves but as Sartre writes only in the way that they are ”being for others.” They can only be the person that they see reflected in the eyes of Madame and they are imprisoned as outcasts in her service. Madame has her own instability as a mistress and not the wife of a man of the petit bourgeoisie.
Reviews
Griffin has a natural choreographic affinity for putting movement front and center in her shows.
-Donald Munro Fresno Bee
Just a quick note to emphasize how fantastic the production was. Another stellar production all the way around. All in our party were enormously entertained and delighted. I am sure it was frightening material because if not done right it would go way wrong.
Genet is tough, he doesn't have that rich vein of humor that Beckett used so well. And American ears are not well suited to his themes and tropes -- the point of view of the criminal, degradation, betrayal, fetish. He makes the Beats look like boy scouts, and is similar to Celine, but smarter and more likable.
-Robert Navarro Attorney at Law
Thanks so very much for your willingness to be so esthetically vulnerable with this play. The way you interpreted the dynamics in this play entered me on a cellular level. Every gesture was nuanced. The psychology is physically recognizable for me. This must have been just an excruciating experience for you at some level. But you transformed it into a beautiful and meaningful experience. Very deeply painful but so aware.
-Marij Bauman Abstract Expressionist Painter
Choreographed and Directed
by Ruth Griffin 2015
Voice professor Anthony Radford, who produced “Carmen,” brought together two figures at Fresno State known for their innovative and passionate work: Thomas Loeweneheim, who conducted the orchestra with the razor-sharp determination that we’ve come to expect from him; and Ruth Griffin, a crossover from the theater department, who gave the production an innovative flair with her stage direction.
Griffin’s nimble staging and stylized choreography helped give a fluidity and grace to the production that made it seem bigger. I was intrigued by Griffin’s psychological interpretation of the material — she sees “Carmen” as Don Jose’s story, a romance written for the entertainment of the white male audience of the time — and positions the title role as more of an archetype.
This “Carmen” was ambitious and fulfilling.
-Donald Munro Fresno Bee
Review from Donald Munro Fresno Bee
One of Donald Munro's top cultural events for 2016
Choreographed and Directed
by Ruth Griffin 2016
Passion Play’ swirls with motion and meaning
Griffin embraces the play’s Magical Realism with perceptive choreography and stylized movements that never seem superfluous or ostentatious.
I close my eyes and can still see the moment: A clump of bodies on stage becomes the swirl and pounding of a dangerous ocean. One fragile human is carried along the hoisted shoulders of ensemble cast members in a forward, wave-like motion that feels violent yet somehow also gently all-encompassing, as if the sea is reluctant to open its deadly embrace.This is the magic of theater: taking us to a place in which the literal is reconfigured, where we observe a moment not just as bystanders but as co-conspirators in a carefully crafted world.