In this episode, Christopher Christensen, IT Support, meets with Associate Professor Jessica M. Rosenberg (Literatures in English) and Cornell senior Tess Lovell to discuss BIOphelia: A Performance Infused Scholarship Symposium. The two part event will incorporate student-centered practice-based-research, performance workshops, scholar-led discussions, and communal engagement.
Click HERE to see more episodes.
Transcript
Music 00:00
Chris Christensen 00:11
Hello. I'm Christopher Christensen. Welcome to Episode 61, of the PMA podcast. In this episode, I met with Associate Professor Jessica Rosenberg and Cornell senior Tess Lovell to discuss BIOphelia, a performance infused scholarship symposium. The two part event will incorporate student centered, practice based, research, performance workshops, scholar led discussions and communal engagement. How has everybody's week been?
Jessica M. Rosenberg 00:39
It's been pretty good-- it's busy!
Tess Lovell 00:40
Yeah,
Chris Christensen 00:41
Yeah?
Jessica M. Rosenberg 00:42
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 00:43
What's the best thing that's happened so far for both of you this week?
Tess Lovell 00:48
Oh, man. Well. Daveed Diggs, came-
Chris Christensen 00:51
Okay!
Tess Lovell 00:51
-to campus, yeah.
Chris Christensen 00:52
Did you attend the dinner?
Tess Lovell 00:54
I attended all possible events. I did the workshop. I went to the Q and A. It was just so surreal. He had us... we had to write a scene based on this prompt. And the prompt was take a song and adapt it into a scene and use the song as kind of a beat sheet for your scene. And so my partner and I did Space Oddity. Are you familiar?
Chris Christensen 01:07
Okay. Oh, really! Yeah, the David Bowie. David Bowie, very good.
Tess Lovell 01:44
So that's what we did this week. We wrote the scene and then we did it for him, and it was very special.
Chris Christensen 01:55
Oh, that's great,
Tess Lovell 01:56
Yeah.
Chris Christensen 01:56
Did you get that filmed by chance?
Tess Lovell 01:57
No!
Chris Christensen 01:59
All right,
Tess Lovell 01:59
I know.
Chris Christensen 02:00
Well, easy enough. That's it. Impermanence,
Tess Lovell 02:02
Exactly.
Chris Christensen 02:03
Yeah,
Jessica M. Rosenberg 02:04
It will live in your memory forever.
Tess Lovell 02:06
It's ephemeral.
Chris Christensen 02:07
Nice, nice. How about you? Jessica,
Jessica M. Rosenberg 02:11
That's a good question. So I would say so this week, I took three different groups of students into the rare book room in the library. Okay, one of them was one of Theo's classes doing BIOphelia stuff. And we looked at a bunch of old herbals, okay, which were, you know, from 5 to 600 years ago, and which were totally gorgeous. And then I went in with another class, and then another class. So there were like, 10 hours this week spent with 500 year old books, which is kind of my idea of a perfect week.
Chris Christensen 02:42
Do you have to wear special gloves when you handle those books?
Jessica M. Rosenberg 02:45
You don't, you don't. You should make sure you haven't put, like, lotion on your hands, or like, ketchup or something
Chris Christensen 02:53
Cheetos.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 02:54
Yeah, don't come in right after the Hot Cheetos. But yeah, the paper is, like, so much tougher than current paper anyway, it's made from rags that have been broken down and then pulped and then reassembled into paper, and it's it's not going anywhere. Yeah,
Chris Christensen 03:13
Let's take a moment to just sort of kind of do a little bit of introduction and tell me and our listeners a little bit about yourselves.
Tess Lovell 03:21
Care to begin?
Jessica M. Rosenberg 03:23
Sure. My name is Jessica Rosenberg. I'm an Associate Professor in Literatures in English here at Cornell. I moved here last year from Miami, so I'm making some botanical adjustments to this. But my interests are in Shakespeare and literature of the era of Shakespeare, but also in the history of science and thinking about plants in the natural world, and how people sort of approach that, how it was part of their lives and part of their world in that period. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that.
Chris Christensen 03:54
Okay, Nice. Thank you.
Tess Lovell 03:58
My name is Tess Lovell. I am a senior here. I'm a PMA and English double major. I'm from Brooklyn, New York. I transferred here from the University of California Irvine. So quite a quite a swap. Went all the way across the pond, so to speak, and then back again. And I love theater, and I have two dogs.
Chris Christensen 04:25
You have two dogs?
Tess Lovell 04:26
Yes!
Chris Christensen 04:27
Nice,
Tess Lovell 04:27
Thank you. And a cat. I don't want to erase her from this narrative either.
Chris Christensen 04:31
Hugely important,
Tess Lovell 04:32
I know!
Chris Christensen 04:32
That just needed to be a part of the conversation.
Tess Lovell 04:34
I totally agree.
Chris Christensen 04:35
Yeah, so you both came from warm climates and you came to Ithaca. Winter is approaching. Are we thinking positively about that, or we're just going to take it as it comes?
Jessica M. Rosenberg 04:45
Well, today it does not feel like it's coming, so I'll take that.
Chris Christensen 04:50
Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that.
Tess Lovell 04:54
Yeah, I just find that I can't prepare mentally for the winter. It just happens, and then I'm in it, and then when it's over, I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe I did that. Do you get that? Like when spring comes back around I think about the winter, and I'm just so impressed with all of us for getting through that.
Chris Christensen 05:11
Absolutely. I've been here for, well, 51 years. Why have I never left? I just think to myself, why don't I move someplace warmer? So, yes, I go through it every single year, and it's around February that you think I can't do anymore, can't take this any longer, and then you just muddle through.
Tess Lovell 05:28
So it's still hard for you, though, even having grown up-
Chris Christensen 05:31
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, right around now is the time where you recognize that, oh, it's dark when you wake up and dark when you- You know, earlier, much earlier. So, yeah, yeah.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 05:39
Yeah. The light's a real difference, but seasons are also good. Like, I definitely-
Tess Lovell 05:43
I agree!
Jessica M. Rosenberg 05:44
-missed having four seasons.
Tess Lovell 05:45
Did you grow up in Miami?
Jessica M. Rosenberg 05:46
I grew up in Philadelphia.
Tess Lovell 05:48
Oh!
Jessica M. Rosenberg 05:48
So I'm a, like, natural four seasons person- -In my inner clock. And I definitely missed it. It's like I felt a sort of like innate anticipation of it when, like, September, October, something's supposed to be happening, and then again, in April, something's supposed to be happening, and it wasn't happening. And that was very troubling.
Chris Christensen 05:52
I think I would have a hard time if it was consistent all the way through.
Tess Lovell 05:52
Yeah, Yeah, it's a little bit odd.
Chris Christensen 06:12
Yeah. I enjoy the changes in color, seeing the various flora beginning to sort of emerge and disappear all of those things. Yeah. So speaking of that, thank you. Tell me a little bit about BIOphelia. Do you want to give me an overview?
Tess Lovell 06:32
Okay.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 06:33
The general idea of BIOphelia is there's a series of events throughout this fall that Theo Black has organized that are about in one way or another, Hamlet and Ophelia and Shakespeare's play in the natural world. So there's a visit to the Botanical Garden, there's a discussion with a environmental engineer, there's a really exciting workshop with a local herbalist named Taylor Ray. And those are all leading up to this symposium on October 19, which will be over the full course of the afternoon about- that's called BIOphelia. And draw- includes student performance, which Tess will talk about in a moment. It also includes presentations by scholars from a range of fields and practitioners. So a soil scientist, a bio archeologist who works on weeds, I'll be talking some about historical plants, endophilia. So a whole range of people, a speaker from outside who works on Shakespeare in ecology, named Randall Martin will be speaking. And that will all be sort of supporting and framed by and framing performances of scenes that are ecologically inflected in different ways. And I'll hand it off to Tess on that, who is the real expert.
Tess Lovell 07:50
Yeah. I am working on the prong of the symposium that is the embodied performance. And it's going to consist of three scenes. The first is the scene between Ophelia and Laertes, which is the first scene where we see Ophelia in the play. And then it's the Mad scene, quote, unquote, where Ophelia is giving out flowers to the members of the family that signify different things, and it's after her father has been killed, and it's right before Hamlet is exiled, if I'm correct.
Chris Christensen 08:28
We're gonna assume that you're correct.
Tess Lovell 08:29
And I am. And we just got to go ahead, I am correct. And then the last is a speech that Gertrude delivers where she kind of illustrates Ophelia's death by drowning in this poetic, lyrical way with a lot of organic imagery. And so flowers and plants are they kind of underline ophelia's journey throughout the play in these different ways. And what we're doing in this performance is we're trying to bring them out as CO-stars, and think about how Ophelia interacts with them, how they interact with Ophelia, and how they give her agency in this play where she only appears in 5 out of the 20 scenes in the play. Not to say that she's not a significant character, but traditional interpretations of her sometimes skew her as this like blushing flower that gets dragged around by the men in the play and then dies and so we are, as Rebecca LaRoche says in her paper, we're trying to use the plants to talk back to that narrative.
Chris Christensen 09:32
Okay, what drew you to the symposium? What drew you to become involved?
Tess Lovell 09:39
Do you want to go first?
Chris Christensen 09:40
Either of you, yeah.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 09:41
Sure. I mean, it's a amazing collection of people and ideas and skills and talents that Theo's brought together on this both on the artistic performance side. He has a wonderful sonographer, Adam Schulman, who's bringing together. Other plant matter illustrations. I think Tess, you can probably talk more about your work with him, but it's so rare to be able, as someone in the humanities, to get to talk to people in the sciences and do it in a creative and informed and open ended and experimental way. So it's not just that we're sort of learning how the other side thinks, but it's that we're actually creating something together and doing that work together. And that's really fun, that everyone is, I think, open minded and curious and interested in what's going to come of this. It's really process oriented and collaborative in a way that's pretty rare. So that definitely drew to me, and as a new Cornell Professor too, getting the chance to meet people from across the university who are doing that different kind of work is also really wonderful.
Chris Christensen 10:47
Very nice.
Tess Lovell 10:49
Yeah, echoing all of that, but also it definitely is Theo that brought me onto this project, and his passion and enthusiasm for both the philosophies behind this project and the execution of it itself are really inspiring. But I think for me, eco-theater is just not something I've ever explored in practice until this year and last semester, when Theo's acting class did this Shakespeare performance in the Botanical Gardens, where we were trying to use the gardens as set pieces for these scenes and then kind of bring out the eco-inflections in the text. But theater is this beautifully visceral experience, and it sometimes feels detached from the sciences, and so I'm excited about the prospect of bringing together, like we all have these concerns about the climate crisis, and, you know, coral bleaching and whatever the issue is that worries you. And theater, I'm curious about how we can ask, How can theater function in ways that aren't just us going to the theater, experiencing a great story and then leaving, like, how can it interact with practices that help the world?
Chris Christensen 12:11
Okay,
Tess Lovell 12:12
Yeah
Chris Christensen 12:12
That's a question that I had a little bit later. But do you want to expand on that a little bit in terms of how the symposium...how does the symposium contribute to its own themes or the themes that are surrounding it?
Tess Lovell 12:28
I think partly just by nature of the structure of the symposium, having the scenes sandwiched in between these talks from scientists and experts forces us to kind of intertwine the experience of hearing and processing that information with seeing the plants in action in the scene, and experiencing that in the kind of right brained way, if I may put it like that. And then, yeah, it is in partnership with Rootwork Herbals, which is an organization in Ithaca, which we will talk about in more depth, but, but there's certainly a theme that undercuts the whole Symposium of, how can we, how can we take this work and bring it out into our community?
Chris Christensen 13:11
Okay.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 13:12
Yeah, I would just also add to that, building on what Tess said a moment ago, that we sort of all know and worry and are troubled by living in this moment of climate change, but it often in our everyday lives, is charts, maps. We know something terrible is happening, but we don't necessarily. There's the novelist and scholar Amitav Ghosh has this idea that he called us The Great Derangement. That both things are changing, but also that we don't necessarily have imaginative tools and things like novels and films that are putting us and putting it in front of us in tangible ways. So the kind of work that Tess was just talking about with Ophelia as someone for whom plants are real, right, which she's not usually been represented as usually she's going mad and doesn't have real plants, but to imagine those as real plants and a real connection to nature allows you to see the kind of suffering she's going through, the way her world is falling apart, as something in which the plants are characters, our agents are forces of their own. And I think that is that changes the way that we relate to the environment and the way we relate to environmental change and environmental suffering too. It makes it character based real in a way that I think it isn't always in the newspaper.
Chris Christensen 14:38
I think I saw something in the description on the website about ecofeminism, which you've alluded to a little bit talking about Ophelia. Do you want to dig into that a little bit?
Tess Lovell 14:48
Sure, I mean, I would defer to you for a formal definition of ecofeminism, but I think I understand the broad strokes.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 14:56
Yeah. Well, I think you've already pointed at it Tess and. A so a scholar who's written a lot about eco-feminism, feminism and Shakespeare, is Rebecca Laroche, who will be meeting with participants in the run up to the symposium and an essay of who's called "Ophelias Flower: Ophelia's Herbs and the Death of Violets", we've all read and part part of her point about this is that there's feminist work in recovering what Ophelia's real connection to plants is a that she has and would have had in that period as a noble woman, kind of hands on expertise about the medicinal uses of plants. So there's a like historical work and historical understanding to gain there, but there's also a kind of intervention into seeing her as a mad woman and seeing her relationship to plants as something delusional and fantastic, and part of her losing control, if we look at that moment instead as something where she is suffering, and all of the plans, as LaRoche points out, are ones that are ease, internal pain of different kinds. So fennel, rosemary, pansies are called heart's ease sometimes. So what if she's not losing her mind, but she's actually gone out into the garden as part of a medicinal practice. So rethinking it around that is part of what eco-feminism is, and it's also taking that and that different relationship to nature, but also a kind of informal expertise, one that's not been made official in the history of medicine, but is very real and very powerful, and continues to be powerful, and is the kind of work that people like Rootworks, Herbal in Ithaca are doing that the people's medical people's people's medicine school that they work with is doing that Taylor Rae flower herbals, who's coming to do a workshop With the BIOphelia group is doing. So there's a longer tradition of that of sort of unofficial, sometimes ignored, medicine and medical technique as a way of relating to nature that is itself a feminist tradition. And you know, a lot of the things she says are abortifacients too, right? There's also a reading there of, like kind of secret medical knowledge and knowledge of plants and their powers that women have access to and that have been coded as feminine and therefore sometimes not valued. And so the symposium is also thinking about that, returning to that, giving the kind of attention to that that it deserves. And that's part of it, as, I think, an eco-feminist project.
Chris Christensen 17:38
Okay, thank you. My brain is going in about 20 different directions right now, and I'm trying to think, what do I want to ask next? It's pretty cool, right? Oh, absolutely, absolutely, very involved. You've touched on the number of people who are participating, various names. What are you hoping that participants get out of this from the experience itself.
Tess Lovell 18:02
I hope that it lights the fire under people's bellies for being more involved in eco-centered activities in their community. I just hope that the dual practice of the symposium, the lectures in the symposium, and the experience of watching the embodied part invigorates a new excitement, instead of doom, for people in terms of how they interact with ecology in their community.
Chris Christensen 18:37
Is there anything you're starting to feel for both of you, as you're part of this, are there things that are starting to sort of manifest in you, things that are coming up where you're feeling empowered to become involved communally or on your own?
Tess Lovell 18:54
I mean, I think that just reading and thinking about Rebecca Laroche's paper that Dr. Rosenberg mentioned that kind of outlines the thesis of at least the the embodied performance. Part of of our work is um, was so exciting to me, just finding these, these kind of back roads into giving this character agency in places that she isn't explicitly given it in the text by allowing her to have these plants and finding out what each of them mean for like an early modern audience, and actually how much significance that holds. It's just exciting. I really like that kind of script analysis work.
Chris Christensen 19:38
You touched on a bit about herbal works here in town. Let's get into that a little bit and its significance, because we're looking at actual communal involvement assisting people locally. There's a bit of an anti racism approach to this as well.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 20:00
Yeah, sure, I can start on that there. I mean, there, we live in an area with a really wonderful community around some some of the kinds of, some of these issues, and with herbalists with specifically anti racist practices, and who do a whole lot of educational and therapeutic work. As I said, I think Taylor Rae will be coming in. It's also a moment where one of the sort of most important sort of mainstays institutions of that right now, Rootwork Herbals, has also been struggling with and fighting against a lot of racist discrimination at their site. So I also and so I think spreading awareness of the kind of work that they do is a really important, I hope, outcome of this too. And I do encourage anyone listening to the podcast to check them out. Can go to their Instagram. They have a GoFundMe right now to help support them as they're fighting some of this, some of that's literally in court right now in Caroline. So yeah, let's show up for Rootwork Herbals, and for all of the people doing this kind of super important anti racist herbal work, medical work in Ithaca
Chris Christensen 21:18
and the GoFundMe campaign has now reached. A significant amount of funds have been raised. It's really looking very positive. And I heard that there was an extraordinarily gracious donor that donated a significant amount amount of money. So yeah, what do you hope that people will do in terms of engagement? Are there things about the symposium that will help them feel empowered and engaged later on.
Tess Lovell 21:44
This is a learning experience for me too. I I really have not trod outside of this campus since getting here, and have not gotten super involved in the eco-community in Ithaca, so I don't know, I'm learning how theater and ecology interact in doing this project. And I think I will probably make that discovery the day of the symposium, at the same time as the rest of us,
Chris Christensen 22:13
When you say- so this is an interesting thing, A lot of students who come here, they rarely step off campus, yeah, because it's, I mean, Cornell is kind of a city unto itself. Are there places you've been to yet? Tess, now that you're feeling a little bit more pulled off the campus, have checked out some local places of natural significance?
Tess Lovell 22:36
Good q-I mean, I go to the the old classics, Flat Rock, Second Dam,
Chris Christensen 22:40
Okay.
Tess Lovell 22:41
First Dam,
Chris Christensen 22:42
Yeah,
Tess Lovell 22:42
Etc.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 22:43
All the dams!
Tess Lovell 22:44
Yeah! Third dam in the works. We don't have one yet, but
Jessica M. Rosenberg 22:49
We got, we got the beavers. They're ready.
Tess Lovell 22:53
Um, yeah. So that's about, that's about, yeah, all I've explored.
Chris Christensen 22:59
Have you seen Taughannock Falls?
Tess Lovell 23:02
Oh, yeah. I have.
Chris Christensen 23:03
I was hoping you would,
Tess Lovell 23:04
Yeah, no, no, totally.
Chris Christensen 23:06
And then we have Montezuma Wildlife Refuge at the far north of Cayuga Lake-
Tess Lovell 23:11
Yeah,
Chris Christensen 23:12
-definitely worth a visit. While you're here, are you planning on? Well, I don't know. Maybe you're not thinking that far ahead, but after you graduate and stick around Ithaca for a little bit,
Tess Lovell 23:21
I'll probably- I'll definitely linger.
Chris Christensen 23:22
Okay, yeah, yeah, Montezuma's great, absolutely beautiful. Finger Lakes National Forest, which is situated kind of Between the lakes, great place to go visit. Yeah, we have, we have a lot of natural beauty around here. Yeah.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 23:37
And a lot of cool sort of projects and eco-entrepreneurialism too, in different ways. So small farms, beekeepers, orchards, all of that stuff where people are sort of doing sustainable or renewable kinds of things. And something I've just learned about in the last couple weeks, or learned more about, and been to for the first time, is the soil factory just south of town, which Johannes Lehmann in Soil Science, who's part of the symposium, helps to run too. So that's another cool art science collaborative zone that I've learned about, and I'm excited to be more involved in this.
Chris Christensen 23:39
Have you seen the signs for bee cities? No, I just noticed one popped up outside of T-burg within the last year, and it says Bee City, USA. And apparently there's different if you, if you look up bee city on the web, you will find different pockets throughout the United States where large numbers of beekeepers exist and hives are being you know, community or what do they call them? Not communities? What a bee colony is being kept alive and, yeah, rather interesting. I need to dig into that a little bit more myself.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 24:49
Cool. Tess was in a wonderful scene in the spring from 'Taming of the Shrew' that involved much stinging like. The language of stinging. And I think you guys thought a lot about, yeah, bees and wasps.
Chris Christensen 25:04
You know, sadly, I will have to admit I am not.
Tess Lovell 25:04
Well, I think we were thinking. We were like, how can we transpose ecology onto this scene? And- are you familiar with Taming of the Shrew, Chris? That is okay. You're forgiven.
Chris Christensen 25:19
Thank you so much.
Tess Lovell 25:21
Two characters, Petruchio and Kate, are just fiery lovers that kind of butt heads, and they have this tumultuous, but hot dynamic, and it kept we all roads led back to pollinators. We just kept thinking about pollinating and how that was sort of this beautiful, natural parallel to what these two had going on in their scene and so, so yeah, we we inserted a lot of lines about bees and wasps and stinging, and Petruchio had all these misconceptions about the cruelty of wasps that Kate was correcting him on. It was quite fun.
Chris Christensen 26:05
Where did you do this?
Tess Lovell 26:06
We did this in the Botanical Gardens. This was that project. ,
Chris Christensen 26:08
Ah, okay, I was gonna say, this doesn't sound PMA-ish, I don't remember [this] going on. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Yes, where are things right now? In terms of, I mean, we've talked quite a bit about it, but in terms of the symposium itself, it's preparation. This is the first time you two have worked together, yes, and you've met just through the symposium itself.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 26:32
I mean, I think we met in the spring when Tess was in the Eco Shakespeare course. But I think this is definitely a more involved, totally process of research, performance, development. And I'd also just gotten here last year, or, I guess was that the spring or the fall, we met in the spring, and this was the spring, spoke to the class. That was the spring. You had just gotten here at that point. Yeah, just gotten here. Wow. So that was, like, my, my first contact too, with any Cornell actors, and with PMA. So that was a really great entry point for me. So this is a nice, a nice next step.
Chris Christensen 27:10
Okay.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 27:10
A good escalation.
Chris Christensen 27:11
Nice. Yeah, usually at this point, when we're talking about a play, I can say, you know, where are you in production? How is the lighting coming along? Where's the sound design? I don't even know the questions to ask in regards to the symposium, are there, have there been challenges in terms of putting it together? Are there certain successes where you're just ecstatic about where it's going?
Tess Lovell 27:33
It's been a really unconventional process for me, at least so far, and I'm just kind of along for the ride. We've got all of these threads going at once that I assume are going to come together in the days before the symposium, if not the day of but I've just been working on the scenes with my fellow actors learning to duel. Not gonna spoil, but there is a duel involved, if that strikes anyone's fancy, and so I have had very little contact besides Dr. Rosenberg, with the scholars that are involved. But it's kind of exciting in that way too. I'm I have no idea what this project or what our scenes look like in the context of what they will within which they'll be presented on the day of. So that's exciting to me, but I'm going in kind of blind.
Chris Christensen 28:25
Okay.
Tess Lovell 28:26
Yeah.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 28:26
So one of the conversations that we had earlier, and what I know has been an ongoing conversation about the performance, is where plants are involved too, and where plant materials are involved. And that's something where the field's been closely in touch with people in the Botanical Gardens who actually have some of the particular herbs that they've been, you know, growing small versions of that might be involved. And so I don't want to have any spoilers, and I don't know if it's finalized even, but there will be some plant materials. People might be going home with plant materials. Yeah, it's like bobblehead night at the baseball game, right?
Chris Christensen 29:04
Love it.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 29:07
No promises, but so I don't know, has that so one of the things we were talking about early on, too, was also how that might relate to things like costuming props, involving the audience with some of those materials. But I don't know, have we have you settled costuming choices along those lines still in process.
Tess Lovell 29:25
I had a meeting with Adam a week and a half ago. Adam Schulman, our sonographer, eco-sonographer, and he presented this really crazy model of my costume, which I'll be building in the first scene and then wearing in the last scene on it was on like a Barbie doll, and there were like leaves sticking out of it. So I haven't seen the real thing, but I have seen the concept art, and I know that real plants will be involved. And that's all very exciting.
Chris Christensen 29:55
Okay.
Tess Lovell 29:55
Yeah.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 29:56
One of the things that's fun about that from the Shakespearean point of view too, is that Ophelia, in these moments, seems to be coming apart, that she's sort of dispersing herself. Pieces of herself aren't holding together, right? She's not holding it together. And that giving away the plants as a sort of is a way of like literalizing that in the scene, that pieces of her are being dispersed. And that's what happens when she drowns too. Is she's sort of covered. She's no longer a sort of solid single creature. So her costume can play with that in certain ways. There are ways that using the material, I think, brings out some of those psychological themes. I think that's another eco feminist dimension in this. So some of the interdisciplinary play, and having costume designers, and having the sonographer, and I think there's even, there's someone, there's going to be, there's someone in AAP, I think, who is helping with doing lino cuts that are going to be based on early modern woodcuts of plants. So the interdisciplinary range of talents that's going in there, I think, will be really immediately felt in the performance.
Tess Lovell 31:03
Definitely, yeah, and I think that we're, we're trying, at least to reactivate this kind of sensory exchange between the performers and the audience that existed more for early modern audiences who had real associations with these plants and like for them, to hear Ophelia say that that all the violets are withered is actually a really extreme and-- and grim statement. And I think in having real plants on stage, we're trying, at least to reactivate that kind of exchange between the audience and the actors and the plants as that as the bridge.
Chris Christensen 31:50
I like the way you phrase that, just thinking about real life experience with plants, that is something that is really lacking. I think, in terms of societal experience, I don't you were saying, Jessica, that you're from Philly. I don't know Philly all that well, but I know that when one lives in a large urban area, you don't get quite the experience of being around greenery, whereas if you're here in Ithaca, we have, we have such an abundance of it. I know that when I was in college, I would go out to the arboretum, I would go check out all these places. A lot of people that I went to school with, they had no interest in it whatsoever. So it's just just thinking about how, how that brings that to life on stage and connects the audience with with, yeah,
Tess Lovell 32:41
Totally.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 32:41
Yeah. And I think the I mean thinking about both how you feel about greenery, greenery when you're in an urban setting where you're often very far from it, and also how an image like all the violets have withered, is it puts you really, and sometimes devastatingly, emotionally, in touch with what it's like when there are no plants, when they all die, right? That image pushes towards the apocalyptic, but it also kind of pushes towards winter, right? It pushes towards scenes of urban blight, or areas where there aren't trees or and like, I started thinking about plants and early modern plants in an intellectual way when I lived in Philly, New York, like I lived in, like, fifth floor walk ups where I couldn't grow anything. And I was realizing I was going to books for that in the same way that people would go to, like, tiny, little pocket gardens right in these, I mean, these cities were really smelly during Shakespeare's time. Like you really wanted the greenery. You wanted it to smell better. So I think, you know, we were talking earlier about winter in Ithaca too, and the experience of, like, color disappearing and then color coming back, like that seasonal cycle of color coming and going is something I think Hamlet as a play is super interested in, and it's something that I think this performance of being immediately in touch with plants also brings out, you know, like there's something rotten in the state of Denmark in Hamlet, right? It's growing rank with weeds. It's like there's a seasonal problem there. Anyway.
Tess Lovell 34:15
Well, said.
Chris Christensen 34:16
Yeah, thinking about as you're mentioning that when you were saying about where you lived and not having greenery, and just some of the most I don't know, feeling of desperation or absolute emptiness that I've experienced as being in spaces like I had a cousin who lived in Bushwick at one point, and where he lived was where these old knitting factories were. And when we got off the train and we stepped up onto the street, there was nothing. There was no greenery. It was pure concrete, steel, and it was just it felt apocalyptic. It was void of everything that I'd become accustomed to. What life feels like growing up around here, I feel so badly for people who never experience greenery, they you know, we walk around here just taking a walk up the trail to go see Taughannock Falls just that beauty of being in a gorge. I take it for granted. It's five minutes from my home. I try to remember every time I step onto that trail, I am super fortunate to be here.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 35:21
Yeah, and a ton of Shakespeare's audience too. So he lived in--these performances in London were happening in an era where the population of London was like doubling over the course of 50 years. So a huge number of those people, some were immigrants from other countries, and a lot were people who moved in from the countryside, so people who had had their childhood there, but we're now in this much denser city. It's not quite coming out of the subway into Bushwick, at least in terms of the physical infrastructure, but there's definitely a familiarity that isn't always available to people in city life. So as they're standing there in the theater and hearing Ophelia talk about violets and columbines and fennel and all of it there's there is a kind of intimate, tactile familiarity that isn't always in their hands, in their everyday lives anymore, too.
Chris Christensen 36:08
I don't want to use the pun. It's not intended, or maybe it is, but I'm thinking of the cross pollinations taking place.
Tess Lovell 36:18
Nice one.
Chris Christensen 36:19
So, are there ways in which you as as a performer, are now finding yourself, perhaps pulled towards the more academic of all of this, or getting involved? I'm not sure what the word is. I'm looking for. But also, Jessica, are you feeling yourself sort of pulled towards performance for yourself at all, just thinking about the way that being involved in the symposium kind of influences people.
Tess Lovell 36:49
like I said before, the analysis of what these plants do for Ophelia's autonomy has been so exciting to me, and I was always intrigued by eco-theater as a concept, but really never saw it put into practice and so it's cool to, like, get to see it and be a part of it as my introduction to it. I'm both in it and watching it, and I just, I know that my currency will always be in theater, or at least right now I feel that way. It's the thing that I love and that I feel like I can use to convey whatever message or do or say, say whatever thing I want to say. And so I rely on awesome people like Dr Rosenberg to come in and give me this, like, rich, scientific intellectual perspective. But I know that I'll, I feel that I'll always rely on those other sources, so it's always going to be a partnership. But that makes me really happy, and that has been super fulfilling so far.
Chris Christensen 37:59
Okay,
Tess Lovell 37:59
Yeah,
Jessica M. Rosenberg 38:01
Yeah, and, and Tessa's a double major too, yeah. Would you say? May I ask you how that has so like up to this point? Do you think that's shaped your performance work? Have they been in sort of separate tracks? Are they- Have they come together at all? For you, curriculum
Tess Lovell 38:19
wise, there's really only crossover in Shakespeare classes, but I I care a lot about the mechanics of storytelling, and that comes from being an English major here, I think. And so I used to think of acting as this very like, ephemeral, emotional thing and and I just wanted to get out there and have an experience. And now I think I have a more balanced approach, where I am trying to cultivate this spontaneous experience for myself. And I love the feeling of that so much. And then I also need to think about what, where the thing I'm doing stands in the context of the larger story, and how I can serve that, and I need to be able to read a script comprehensively. And I learned all of that from just reading and writing a lot in English classes. So yeah, I think they're totally intertwined now in the way I think about theater.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 39:18
Cool. For me, yeah. No one is about to see me. You know, tripping the light. Fantastic. Anytime soon, okay, but I definitely, and I'm learning a lot about collaborative work and really enjoying that so that, and that's not something that in the regular career path of an English professor is structured for usually, it was arriving at an institution where it's possible and where these things are nearby, and you can begin to do it. Usually we're just like plunked in a library and told to write article after monograph after article after monograph, and this encourages a different kind of thinking, allows us to work with other kinds of people more creatively. Is-- that definitely is opening up a whole set of pathways. I'm definitely leaving the actual performance to talented people, like Tess, but I feel like I'm learning a lot from her and from other people in the symposium. So that's something I look forward to more of.
Chris Christensen 40:24
Fantastic. Is there anything I didn't ask you today that you really wanted to talk about?
Jessica M. Rosenberg 40:31
Tess, is there anything more about your how you're approaching Ophelia as a character that you think has shifted through this process?
Tess Lovell 40:38
Oh, man. I mean, I think that this process has kind of been an exercise in being a beginner too, like just being a total beginner in the thing that I'm doing. That's what I feel like when I talk to you and Theo about the ecological underpinnings of all of this stuff. It's just something I've never thought about before. So learning all of that and putting that into practice has definitely been a new challenge. But also then I've had these rehearsals with Bruce, which are very acting centric, and he is really, he's, like, not at the helm of the the 'eco' part of this, but he is just a capital "D" director, like just a total Shakespeare expert. And so when I work with him, you know he's, he's bringing out operative words in the text, and like, asking me what I'm literally trying to do to Laertes in this moment, and we're staging it so we can both have me go over and interact with the dress and like, and activate all of the plant implications in that way. But also, like, how can I be in the most central part of the lobby so the whole audience can see me and so, so, yeah, it's, I'm kind of like, learning how to balance both the ecological messaging that we need to have undercut this whole project and the classic how to do Shakespearean acting, which is still already a massive challenge for me. So yeah, the "crosspollination", if I may, give a little call back there of those two fields has been a new and exciting challenge.
Chris Christensen 42:30
And you mentioned Bruce, which we didn't mention earlier.
Tess Lovell 42:32
Yeah, no, shout out Bruce.
Chris Christensen 42:34
Yeah, absolutely. So his role is, he's directing.
Tess Lovell 42:37
He is directing the scenes, yeah,
Chris Christensen 42:38
Okay, Tess Lovell 42:39
Yeah,
Chris Christensen 42:39
Very good.
Tess Lovell 42:40
Yeah,
Chris Christensen 42:40
Yeah. Well, thank you both so much for being on the podcast. Nice to have you here on a Friday morning.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 42:46
Thank you so much, Chris.
Tess Lovell 42:47
Thank you, Chris.
Jessica M. Rosenberg 42:48
This was really fun to talk about.
Tess Lovell 42:49
Yeah.
