Adrift in more ways than one, the New Orleans-based theater company called EgoPo is planning a permanent relocation to Philadelphia.
Lane Savadove and his theater troupe left New Orleans on August 27, 2005 for a brief visit to Philly's Fringe Festival, then to return home to the Crescent City. Two days later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
"It took over a month until I could get back to see our city," said Savadove in November, "and it is in worse shape than television has shown. Rubble and garbage are piled everywhere, overturned cars fill the street medians, and you have to stand in line for hours to buy water or to pick up your mail. It'll be a long time till anyone there thinks about going to theater."
His artistic associate with EgoPo, Anne-Liese Juge Fox, says that her native city is unrecognizable, three months after Katrina. "It's a ghost town. I grew up here, and I take familiar exits and it's like `Where have I landed?' You feel like you're in a zombie film." She taught at Loyola and Tulane but both colleges suspended operations until the Spring semester.
The home Savadove rented was in eight feet of water. The roof was blown off their theater and costumes, scenery and props were ruined. He says that future prospects in New Orleans are grim. And the idea of relocating somewhere close is unacceptable.
"New Orleans has been a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous city,"says Savadove. "Macho Cajun guys got off the oil rigs and came to the theater. You can't get anything close to that world within a thousand miles. We are so far south of the South that we're practically European. Nearby cities like Baton Rouge and Jackson, even Houston, just don't have the same type of audiences." Savadove says if a northeastern city like, say, Baltimore, was destroyed, cultural companies could relocate to DC or Philly or New York, but the South is different.
When Savadove lived in New York a few years ago, he says, "everyone talked about leaving Manhattan and moving to New Orleans." So when he saw an opening in Loyola University's theater department, he applied. "I was there a day, and I fell in love with it and its multi-culturalism. But what will the new New Orleans look like?
"Recent settlers in New Orleans, like Asians, ex-New Yorkers and collegians, might not return to the city. And if what's left is the very poor and the French aristocracy which never welcomed outsiders, they are not a good base. Aside from that, who is going to contribute to a theater company while a city needs rebuilding?"
The members of EgoPo are without work and income. They are homeless, and they've scattered to the residences of relatives from Louisiana to California to the Midwest. Savadove says he's learning the intricacies of the food stamp and welfare programs. Members of the troupe are emotionally depressed, for good reason.
Anne-Liese Juge Fox, 36, is living in a FEMA trailer in Louisiana with her husband and two young children. Her husband's family's printing shop in New Orleans has been destroyed. "It's been awful to lose your community in one blow. I grew up here and have ties here. Otherwise I'd leave. All my friends are scattered. I told Lane he'd be crazy if he wanted to come back. I'm determined to work together with him again because he's incredibly brilliant and a good leader, but I don't know how I'll be able to do it. Lane was a dream to work with both as an artist and as a human being."
Savadove, 38, grew up in Pennsylvania and graduated from Haverford College in 1989 but has been away from the Philadelphia area for many years, working in New York, San Francisco, Europe and New Orleans. Terrence Nolen, artistic director of Philadelphia's Arden Theater, helped EgoPo by dedicating a performance to them and donated the proceeds. Fringe Festival performers sold Mardi Gras beads and gave the cash to EgoPo members. "The Philadelphia community was so supportive that I fell in love with the city," Savadove says.
Savadove stayed briefly at Philly's Doubletree Hotel where rooms were provided free to hurricane victims. Late in October he flew South, rented a U-Haul and drove his belongings from New Orleans to a newly-acquired apartment in downtown Philly.
Savadove used to fantasize about doing theater in Bucks County, "where the ghost of Oscar Hammerstein sits on his porch and looks out at the cornfields, and Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman party by their swimming pools." He even discussed this dream with his New Orleans company æway before Katrina. Now he's planning seriously to move his operations to that area. If not Bucks County, then into Philadelphia itself, which adjoins Bucks County.
"We can't dawdle for a year. The company thrives on doing work." EgoPo had been planning a production of Eugene O'Neill's 1926 mask play, The Great God Brown. Juge Fox studied mask work, as well as acting and mime for five years in Paris after graduating NYU's Tisch School. This would have been a great opportunity to use her talents.
The avant-garde theater company was founded by Savadove in 1991 and moved to New Orleans in 2002. He directed twelve productions during his three years in New Orleans and trained close to a hundred young people in Viewpoints, acting, and directing.
EgoPo has an innovative approach to theater classics, believing that listening to the body and following its impulses leads an actor to emotional truth. The company's slogan is "emotions are born of the body." The company name combines the ego, or self, with the French word for skin, peau, re-spelled.
EgoPo does classic plays with a permanent ensemble where actors share duties such as scenery and costume making. Savadove is a teacher as well as director, and he says it normally takes an actor a year to fully get this technique, with rigorous physical training being essential. So Savadove is looking for a space where his company can teach, rehearse and perform.
James Haskins, director of the Philadelphia Theater Alliance, provided introductions for Savadove and suggested locations for them. "They would bring something new to Philadelphia," says Haskins. "They are movement based, but, unlike Pig Iron and other Philadelphia companies, they use classic texts." EgoPo's productions include plays by Genet, Beckett, Maeterlink and Cocteau. EgoPo's work at the Philly Fringe was Savadove's conception of Genet's 1947 play, The Maids, which was two versions of the same text: one with three female actors, then one with three male actors playing the roles.
One of Lane's mentors was Anne Bogart of American Repertory Theater in New York. Working with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in the early 1990s, she created systems of stylized movement. "We are friends, but we have differences," Savadove says. "She is a post-modernist, a proponent of stereotype without inner life. I'm a modernist. I fuse the physical with the psychological."
Both Bogart and Savadove use Viewpoints, a training technique based on modern dance. "But I meld Viewpoints with Gratowski," says Savadove, referring to the Polish teacher and director who brought his methods to New York in the 1970s.
He wanted his actors to bare their souls and expose themselves to the audience. Savadove compares him to the choreographer Martha Graham because of his intensity of personal expression: "He asks actors to share the secret parts of themselves with the audience. Gratowski says open all movement possibilities and you'll free up feelings that have been suppressed." He says that Gratowski's weakness is that the actor can be so focused on his emotions that he loses his relationship with space and with the other performers.
Viewpoints, on the other hand, can be likened to choreographer Merce Cunningham, rather than Graham. It stresses the relationships of bodies and the architecture of space. Savadove incorporates elements from these two contrasting methods.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian called a production of Beckett's Company, "A symphony of sounds and words precisely orchestrated by director Lane Savadove and his nine actors." The Brooklyn Heights Press said his Cat On a Hot Tin Roof showed "a delicious ear and appreciation for language and dialogue."
Michael Reisman in The National Performance Art Journal said: "EgoPo has created a unique, physical style of performance. While their texts are from theater, their style borrows heavily from dance and if the audience is any indication they have managed to cross over in both forms."
Savadove's work is controversial, provoking enthusiasm and occasional hostility. For example, David Cuthbert, the respected theater critic of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, praised Ego Po's production of The Maids as "a flat-out brilliant production [that] illuminated the text in myriad ways and was truly a stunning piece of work."
But Richard Read, who heads an offbeat theater group called Running with Scissors, wrote that when he attended he felt "trapped in a room for nearly two hours with 30 other people who'd rather be shoving needles in their eyes."
In response, JJ Brennan of New Orleans wrote: "Lane Savadove's directing yielded the most inspired theater I've experienced to date."
"My work is raw, emotional and expressive," says Savadove.."We use a kind of training and a kind of work that's different from others and I think we can be an addition to Philadelphia's theater community."
The Philadelphia Theater Initiative, supported by the Pew Foundation, has a contingency fund that may provide seed money to help EgoPo put together a plan to attract foundation money. "But first, we have to find a space," says Savadove.
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