Over the next five months, we are excited to take you “Behind the Scenes” by sharing with you video updates about the creative process of The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. The videos will focus on different aspects of the production, from music and choreography to set design and puppetry. Our first video update focuses on the development week during early January at The Washington Ballet studios. Click

While the show’s creative team (made up of artistic leaders from both Imagination Stage and The Washington Ballet) has been working for many months to create the libretto and music, the January development week marked an important test for the material. After sitting around a table and seeing every moment of the production in our minds, we were finally able to gather the artists together in a week of intensive rehearsals to watch how the choreography, music, scenes, and puppets would all combine in order to tell the story of four children who famously find a magical world on the other side of a wardrobe.

 We had chosen to shape our version around the character of Edmund, the archetypical troubled “middle” child who cannot find his rightful place in his family. Through his journey into Narnia and his interactions with The White Witch and Aslan, Edmund confronts his demons and eventually finds peace and unity with his siblings. Edmund’s story and that of the other three children are embodied in our production by two performers for each character—a dancer and an actor/singer. We discovered during our rehearsals that this technique proves highly effective. Through costuming and gesture, we see that the audience will clearly understand that the two performers are trading off the story-telling from scene to scene in order to express the children’s inner lives and feelings, as well as what they say and do in the story.

 Another success was the work puppeteer and set designer Eric van Wyk has done with his prototype for the 8-foot-tall and 8-foot-long puppet of Aslan. Eric animates the puppet with two puppeteers inside the lion and a third positioned to one side operating his head. It took many hours of practice to create a believable walking and running gait for the puppet. But by the end of the week, our giant lion was rearing up, leaping about the stage, and performing a death scene to rival any Hamlet!

 As is always the case, the experience of seeing part of the play more fully realized and “on its feet,” inspires and clarifies the production ideas for the creative team in the next phase of the show’s creation. The set, costume, and lighting designers are now sketching out their ideas with a good sense of the practical as well as the aesthetic needs of the script in mind. We will be using Skype to bring everyone back together over the next couple of months as we hammer out the final choices for the production. Most of all, I think the benefit of this particular development week has been to demonstrate to the 14-strong performing company that they are now part of a magnificent project, one that allows them to tell an epic story with an unprecedented range of expression. We all feel as though our “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” is well on its way to being a WOW for children and families in the metro region this summer.

 Please check back next month for more updates on this exciting collaboration.

 - Janet Stanford, Artistic Director

The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, June 20-August 12, 2012
Tickets and Show Schedule

Reprinted with permission by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Arts Education Department

Vice President: Sandra Bowie
Assistant Vice President: Sanaz Hojreh
Associate Director of Performance: Verushka Spirito
Writer: Arthur Wilson
Editor: Linda Fowler

P.Nokio, a hip-hop musical written and directed by Psalmayene 24 for Imagination Stage, is a clever nod to Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) and some of its original characters: the puppet of the title; Geppetto, a carpenter; the Fairy with Turquoise Hair; Fox and Cat; and the Innkeeper.

In P.Nokio, however, the boy puppet is a computer-generated figure come to life and G.Petto is a video game designer. The Graffiti Fairy’s magic is manifested by spray paint; Fox and Cat are disguised as muggers to defraud P.Nokio of his “street credits.”

P.Nokio is set in Hip-Hopia. The action begins with an audience call and response led by G.Petto to summon P.Nokio from a computer screen. (“He’ll be able to rhyme and dance … He’ll almost be real.”) When G.Petto realizes P.Nokio has jumped from the computer, his employment dilemma begins. The petulant Machine Master—G.Petto’s boss—arrives in a fanfare with his assistant, Crony, to view the design promised to bring him big cash!

Carrying a sacred “Book of Rhymes” presented to him by G.Petto, P.Nokio heads for The Old School to learn style, swagger and ways to help the community through hip-hop. In a series of comical raps, P.Nokio is pushed through a course of events that challenge his judgment, his ability to obey G.Petto, and his desire to stretch the truth. He plays hooky from The Old School and encounters a talking Fork in the road, whose alternate path tempts him toward Fun and the Land of Fools. As in the original story, when P.Nokio lies, his nose grows longer.

When G.Petto finds himself in danger of becoming Machine Master’s next profitable computer gimmick, P.Nokio learns about selflessness and forgiveness through a courageous act of sacrifice. This good deed, of a real boy, is accompanied by G.Petto’s words, “We all make mistakes … but it’s what we learn, and what we do after those mistakes, that count.”

P.Nokio: The result of rhyme and effort

As the playwright, director and actor in the title role of P.Nokio, Psalmayene 24 (a.k.a. Gregory Morrison) is a true triple-threat artist. Growing up in Brooklyn, he was immersed in hip-hop culture and was eager to combine it with his love of theater.

“Using a hip-hop aesthetic immediately makes the play relatable to the youth of today,” he says. “The rhythms and sounds of Hip-Hop reflect their pulse and energy.”

According to Psalmayene 24, there are three main lessons to P.Nokio. “A, you always have an opportunity to redeem yourself. We see this through P.Nokio’s journey in the play. B, unconditional love supports redemption. G.Petto exemplifies this as P.Nokio’s faithful father. And, C, when you are your authentic self, good things happen. When P.Nokio finally rhymes the truth in his heart, he is able to achieve transformation.”

P.Nokio is Psalmayene 24’s second premiere commissioned by Imagination Stage, a Maryland-based, nonprofit theatre arts organization that produces professional theater with an arts education focus. “My first project with Imagination Stage was Zomo the Rabbit: A Hip-Hop Creation Myth, an adaptation of a West African trickster tale,” he relates. “That experience, from conception to production to touring, was absolutely wonderful, so we decided to do another project together.”

A prominent figure in hip-hop theater, Psalmayene 24 (pronounced sal-may-any) performed at the first Hip-Hop Theater Festival in New York City. His solo play, Free Jujube Brown! appeared in the anthology Plays from the Boom Box Galaxy: Theater from the Hip-Hop Generation (Theatre Communications Group, 2009). “Psalm” was the co-writer and co-star of The Hip-Hop Nightmares of Jujube Brown and nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for his performance. His play Undiscovered Genius of the Concrete Jungle was commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

Psalmayene 24 also is founder of the folk-hop band PS24, which has opened for Erykah Badu and has performed frequently throughout the East Coast.

Two of his collaborators from Zomo are on board for P.Nokio. Musician Nick Hernandez is the composer and sound designer. Paige Hernandez, the choreographer, also plays the Graffiti Fairy. She is an advocate for hip-hop education and helps teachers understand and incorporate hip-hop culture into their curriculums. Also on the creative team are Ethan Sinnott (sets), Kendra Rai (costumes) and Andrew Griffin (lighting design).

“A brilliant person once said, ‘It takes a village to raise a play,’” says Psalmayene 24. “I couldn’t agree more.”

The real-life adventures of Pinocchio

Pinocchio’s coming of age exploits are probably best remembered by Walt Disney’s legendary animated film of 1940, Pinocchio, which uplifted audiences with an Oscar winning score (“When You Wish Upon a Star”) and a benevolent plot line. As writer Rebecca West put it, “Disney followed adaptations (of Pinocchio) much more than the original—as he modified the sadism and violence in order to bring to the screen a lovable, cuddly Pinocchio.”

In the Disney version of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), the large cast of characters is pared down to a few well-drawn protagonists and antagonists who interact in a morality tale of good triumphing over evil. Contrasting Disney with Collodi, essayist Derek White reasons that “Pinocchio is not nearly the moralistic tale that Disney paints it to be—for Collodi’s Pinocchio is far from innocent, but is more of a Huck Finn type, most of the time a mean-spirited brat … and Geppetto is not exactly the provincial model citizen but lives in poverty, on the fringes.”

This tendency to reinvent the original has solidified Pinocchio’s longevity—the character endures after more than a century of creative transformations—and the story’s substance continues to attract artists such as Hip-Hop theater’s Psalmayene 24. Adaptations of the Pinocchio tale have entertained generations of youngsters and the original book still ranks among the best-selling children’s classics.

Pinocchio has been portrayed as a comical character in the Shrek films (2001-2010), as well as on Broadway in Shrek the Musical (2008). Spanish illustrator Salvador Bartolozzi depicted him in a weekly children’s publication, Pinocchio, in 1925. In addition, The Adventures of Pinocchio has been adapted for television and made into dozens of English-language films. Countless other versions span the globe, in Italian (Roberto Benigni in the 2002 movie Pinocchio), French, Russian, German, and Japanese. Myriad philosophical and thematic differences evolved while moving this allegorical tale forward, but even in our age of quick-changing invention, a constant remains: Pinocchio’s nose grows as he stretches the truth.

P.Nokio flips the original story by dressing it in four elements of hip-hop culture: bboying (dancing), graffiti writing, MC-ing (rapping), and DJ-ing. The show abounds with these elements. Director-playwright Psalmayene 24 describes his P.Nokio as “a mischievous, hip, digitally-designed man-child with a heart of gold and a fantastic ability to rap and dance.”

To establish the puppet’s state of aliveness at the beginning of the musical, he has P.Nokio jump from the computer screen and hide from G.Petto by slapping a lampshade over his head. In comparison, Collodi’s Pinocchio assumes life even before being fully carved into a puppet and speaks as each of his extremities is whittled into shape.

Psalmayene 24 says he was attracted to the traditional story of Pinocchio because “at its core, it is a story about redemption.” He and his collaborators discarded Collodi’s tragic ending (Pinocchio is hanged), but maintain the heart of the fable about a misfit who wanders off the path, yet discovers self-awareness through education and personal sacrifice.

“Pinocchio goes astray many times before he finally matures and becomes a real boy,” says Psalmayene 24. “Redemption is the universal, timeless and ageless human impulse that runs through the story. That’s what motivated me as I wrote my adaptation.”

Arthur T. Wilson, a poet, playwright and co-publisher of Attitude magazine, has served as a residency artist at NJPAC from ground-breaking to the present. He holds master’s degrees from New York University and the University of London.

P.Nokio: a Hip-Hop Musical, February 1-March 11.
Tickets and Show Schedule.

Now in our thirty-second year, we at Imagination Stage continue to strive every day to fulfill our mission of producing children’s theatre and arts education programs which nurture, challenge, and empower young people of all abilities.  We envision a future where theatre experiences are a fundamental aspect of children’s lives, nourishing their creative spirit, inspiring them to embrace the complexity and diversity of their world and helping them overcome their challenges with hope, courage and, above all, creativity.

Our fall classes in creative drama/acting, dance, musical theatre and filmmaking for ages 1-18 begin during this week honoring Arts in Education and we look forward to welcoming many hundreds of eager, open, creative students.  We are most definitely in the spirit, and hope you are too. Sing a little song, do a little jig,  take a moment to be a drama queen and enjoy Arts in Education Week.

You could say that my job as Director is to make sure that Mulan’s story is told in the clearest and most compelling way. And that it’s Scott’s job to create beauty through movement; Keith’s job to make the actors sound glorious; and Linden’s job to add excitement. (Or maybe I should call it “fight-citement”! Disney’s Mulan is a story about a girl who goes to war, after all.) But as we work on this music-filled script, we find that there are no hard delineations between what each of the specialists does. Scott, whose genius for creating stage pictures and exciting movement astounds me, will turn to Linden for advice on Tai Chi moves, or a punch that occurs in the midst of a movement section. I turn to Scott for help with how the masks of Mulan’s ancestors float through a scene. Keith will have the guys sing a musical line in falsetto and ask us, “Is that too silly?” Several times it has happened that when we finish a scene, all four director “specialists” descend on the cast with acting, movement, fight and music notes. And, magically, we all seem to be seeing the same vision of where the scene should go. I’ll say something to an actor and he’ll reply, “Oh, Scott just told me that.” “Linden just made that change.” “Keith fixed it.”

This is one of the mysteries of the rehearsal room that I have experienced before and been humbled by: a cast of 11, and four directors all with a passion to tell a particular tale, somehow communicating through intuition rather than words. I am not superstitious but I do believe in a sixth sense that artists inhabit when we create. To quote Mulan, “Sometimes, what can’t be achieved with one’s muscles can be achieved by one’s mind.” In the best theatre, it’s not so much the intellect as the spirit and “one mind” is what the whole artistic team—from designers to performers to deck captains must share in order to move and amaze our audience.