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Intimate and Elemental: The World of Wedding Band Jason Ardizzone-West, Awoye Timpo and Arminda Thomas
Awoye Timpo and Arminda Thomas in Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
During a break from rehearsals for Wedding Band, TFANA Artistic Associate Peter Cook convened a Zoom conversation with Scenic Designer Jason Ardizzone-West, dramaturg Arminda Thomas, and director Awoye Timpo to discuss the design process, which began with an October 2021 research trip to Charleston, SC.
AWOYE TIMPO We really started the design process in Charleston. Jason, we probably chatted a bit before [that trip], just talking through the play. I can't remember where we had those conversations. Probably early-morning, 8:00 AM Zooms, like we like to do.
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST Yes, while I was walking the dog, probably.
AWOYE TIMPO But we knew that we wanted to go to Charleston. That was the catalyst for our design conversations: “Let's go and walk around Charleston and see what it feels like, what's the energy of the place.” ARMINDA THOMAS It was humid in October, which is great. For some of us. [Laughter] And just the architecture... Charleston really doesn't look like most cities at all. It has a whole different feel to it, which I had not accounted for.
AWOYE TIMPO Some of [the photos Jason took] architecturally helped us figure out what the design would be. But also, we were like, oh, that's the energy that we want to infiltrate.
ARMINDA THOMAS I don't even know how Jason saw anything before he started downloading from his camera, because all he did was snap, snap, snap. But we discovered—should we even say that? I shouldn't say that.
AWOYE TIMPO Yeah, we should.
ARMINDA THOMAS We discovered the benefits of bringing a Jason along on a trip, because Jason would
INTIMATE AND ELEMENTAL: THE WORLD OF WEDDING BAND
just heedlessly be like, "Okay. I'm gonna go walk around this backyard." And Awoye and I are like, "We are gonna not get shot. We're just gonna stay right here."
AWOYE TIMPO The benefits of travelling with a tall and handsome white man, yes. [Laughter]
Walking around Charleston now, [it’s] a very gentrified city. And I think that you can feel the ghosts and the spirits of what was there before. The energies of the people who occupied this space are still very present, as you're moving through the streets.
The people who were brought; the people who have since been displaced; you feel the energy of all of that as you're walking around. So, I feel like a lot of our task has also been reactivating the energy of these kind of spirits from the past. You can still feel the energy of them in the air.
ARMINDA THOMAS [We were looking for] Freedman’s cottages, which would be the kind of cottage that Fanny had.
AWOYE TIMPO I'm looking at Arminda's hand over her head. That was most of our trip, actually, just stopping at houses and being like, "Huh, look at that. Oh, that's interesting." The cool thing about finding these Freedman’s cottages was that there's only, I think, 18 or something of them left in Charleston. Once we found out about them, on the first day as we were doing [library] research, it was great to go on the hunt.
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST There's some misunderstanding about the history of the Freedman’s cottage. For a while it was thought that it was the first freed slave architecture. And that turns out not to be entirely true. It was, though, a working-class, vernacular, residential structure that was ubiquitous in [1918, when Wedding Band is set], and is typified by the fact that it's either a one- or two-room, very simple structure, always with this side porch. Sometimes with a third room, but usually one or two.
Very, very simple, compact houses where [both Black and white] working-class people lived. This is the type of structure that's not normally written about in history books, or recorded in architectural history books. It's unusual to have a good record of that type of structure. It just typically isn't recorded.
A restored Freedman's cottage in Charleston. Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
INTIMATE AND ELEMENTAL: THE WORLD OF WEDDING BAND
Then that informs what is called the Charleston cottage, which is sort of an expanded version of the Freedman’s cottage, a two-story version that's much more ubiquitous. There's tons of these throughout the whole city. Some of them are getting restored, renovated, and resold. But that very basic structure really informed the entire residential texture of Charleston in a pretty major way.
AWOYE TIMPO [One] thing we came to love about Charleston was this architecture of a front door that leads onto a front porch, an outdoor front porch. It was so beautiful. Then we came to find out that that's a staple of architecture in Barbados that kind of came over to Charleston. But it's so beautiful. It's just stunning.
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST They are so specific to the climate. Aside from being visually interesting, [the porches] are essentially a natural air-conditioning system to capture the breeze and let it circulate as much as possible, pre-air conditioning. ARMINDA THOMAS I really covet those porches. I cannot lie. I cannot lie.
AWOYE TIMPO Really our trip was doing a house hunting for Arminda, for the perfect front porch.
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST A lot of these [cottages] are in disrepair. Some of them are being knocked down, or renovated. Some of them are simply rotting into the ground, and there's something about the earth sort of taking back over time, reclaiming the architecture as the vines grow up into the roof and the green stuff takes over. [We kept noticing] the intersection between the natural environment of the ground, the growing things, and human-made architecture.
ARMINDA THOMAS We wanted to go down Line Street because that was where Childress lived with her grandparents when she was a young child.
AWOYE TIMPO It's important to say that one of the ways that we learn many of the things that we learn is
A Freedman's cottage on Line Street in Charleston. Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
INTIMATE AND ELEMENTAL: THE WORLD OF WEDDING BAND
Arminda has projects that she calls “Arminda stalking the dead.” [Laughter] That's how she discovered the address that Alice Childress’s grandmother lived on, [on] Line Street.
Also, there are a couple of streets that are referenced in the play, a couple of locations. So we knew that, on our walking journey, we wanted to visit those places as well. One thing that was surprising about Charleston is that—at least the kind of downtown area—it's not huge. We were able to walk around most of the downtown area in the couple of days that we were there. It gave us a bit of a sense of both the secret, tucked-away places, but also the intimacy of the city itself. Like, what it means for the Bellman to roam the streets. How far are Annabelle and Herman's mother travelling in order to get to any one other location?
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST Awoye mentioned gentrification and that's huge. Line Street, [where] Alice Childress's grandmother’s house was… there's very few of [those houses] left, and the ones that are left are literally being picked up and moved out of the way as these large residential buildings are springing up. This was just a very kind of palpable, dramatic example of the layers of history continuing to peel away.
We were realizing, getting glimpses into it, [Charleston has] this complex layer of spaces that range from public, that are right next to the sidewalk, to kind of semi-private, these porches that have a front door on them, but they're wide open, people on the sidewalk can see in.
And then there's this space behind the house that you can only get a glimpse of, that feels much more private, and you can't exactly see what's back there, but you get a little glimpse of it. That really relates to a lot of the conceptual ideas that we [developed], of concentric layers of nested privacy and [the] boundaries that the characters are negotiating in the play.
We kept talking about Russian dolls in terms of the nesting levels of privacy that are, at least to us, written into the script. You know, Julia's bed, her bedroom;
"That little sliver of an invitation to the world beyond." Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
INTIMATE AND ELEMENTAL: THE WORLD OF WEDDING BAND
the porch; the yard; the fence; the sidewalk; the city; the state; et cetera, et cetera.
ARMINDA THOMAS That feeling of an entrance into a place that you can't really know. You know, that there's a world going on back there, and it's just beyond our gaze.
AWOYE TIMPO As Arminda is saying, [it’s] that little sliver of an invitation into a world beyond. It's exciting. What's the history of those two buildings being put next to each other like that? They're not quite connected, and yet there they are, slammed against each other with nature growing in between them. There's nature growing in the cracks and on top of them, and it feels like this very complex interweaving. What's been lost? What's been lost on one side and what remains?
So much of what we came away with is elemental. Even those Freedman’s cottages, right? You're like, okay, this is the earth of this place, and this is what people have built upon it. And that felt really, really beautiful. But that natural element, that natural energy that we saw both in Charleston, being surrounded by the sea, and also on the islands was really beautiful. And we wanted to capture that energy in the space.
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST We took this incredible bus tour of Charleston, then also to the islands, and on the way there we passed through this sort of marshy, brackish, sweetgrass wetlands area. Sweetgrass is just everywhere in this area. [The] former slave plantations that we drove past, [with] beautiful Spanish moss blowing in the breeze was definitely one of those haunted places. [And] the Angel tree that we visited. That really was palpable.
ARMINDA THOMAS The one on the island? That huge tree.
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST Yeah, the huge, huge, huge tree. Which was really beautiful. They described it as this place where people get married and stuff. But you walk around this tree and you just feel all of this stuff that has happened there.
Angel tree outside of Charleston. Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
INTIMATE AND ELEMENTAL: THE WORLD OF WEDDING BAND
ARMINDA THOMAS Mm-hmm. Yep.
AWOYE TIMPO The souls. I mean, it's the souls.
ARMINDA THOMAS It's Julia, when she says that you can feel the spirits, that they're just buried underneath a layer, and still [have] the power to wrap around your own bones. There's something palpable about the history of Charleston.
[After Arminda and Awoye returned to rehearsal, the conversation with Jason continued.]
JASON ARDIZZONE-WEST There is an author that Awoye and I both love, Ben Okri, and I found this quote listening to an interview talking about literature. This is in the context of literature and the notion of naturalism.
[Okri] says, "Naturalism did not speak about certain aspects of the world I grew up in. Naturalism only speaks about the world that you can see and implies that everything that happens to us as human beings has a cause and effect that is visible. But the tradition that I grew up in also has that element—that part of the world that you see, the most important part of it is the world that you don't see, and that's not in naturalism. So, if you're going to tell a story about the part of the world that I come from, you have to break the box, basically."
That really resonated with us because we felt like it wasn't going to serve this play, now, in this space, to try to interpret these architectural research photos into any kind of literal recreation of a house or a yard. This play really felt much more elemental, for lack of a better word, and wanted a more open place in which to be told.
We were also really inspired by this movie called Daughters of the Dust [1991, dir. Julie Dash], which is just a beautiful movie - and it is set on these islands outside of Charleston, and does a really beautiful job of juxtaposing very simple human-made objects with the natural landscape.
So, that's why we started with, “Can we create a place in which to tell the story that is made with something
Mold on a wall in Charleston. Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
INTIMATE AND ELEMENTAL: THE WORLD OF WEDDING BAND
more elemental, like water and grass and dirt and raw wood?” And these ideas of concentric, nested zones of privacy, of private-to-public, and the desire to incorporate the whole room, the whole theater space, in a three-dimensional way…. Before I started designing anything, [those] were the things that were swirling around in my brain.
Sweetgrass is a natural type of marshy grass that likes the saltwater. Charleston floods very often, which is part of why sweetgrass is so ubiquitous. It's traditionally the source of a local art form of weaving and crafting, which now is a tourist thing. You can buy a sweetgrass basket. We were drawn to it because of its connection to the water and the ground. [It’s] this kind of timeless, elemental, natural growing thing that is rooted to these layers of history embedded into the ground and in the water. [It’s a reminder] of the connection of the city to the water and the slave trade and the plantations, and how all of that is still in the earth.
The way that we want to use water is for a ritual. We think that it is a ritual to have people coming together in a space to share a story, and for the actors to take on these personas and then to shed them at the end. [And] within the script there's, I think, a ritualistic transformation that happens to Julia where she decides to expand her definition of love and family to include her community, that she's been sort of guarding herself against throughout most of the play.
That ritualistic transformation feels like it needs something very elemental to support it, and that's where the water comes in. The water will appear at the very end as part of this transformative ritual that is both within the script and also beyond the script, that extends into, hopefully, a ritualistic transformation of everyone who's in the space.
Awoye, and I have been talking a lot with Stacey [Derosier, Lighting Designer] and Rena [Anakwe, Sound Designer] about how sound and light can work together with space to shift the boundaries or level of intimacy of the space. There's this very mutable, fuzzy line between what is the yard and what is Julia's space. That boundary shifts throughout the play based
Marshland with sweetgrass outside of Charleston. Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
INTIMATE AND ELEMENTAL: THE WORLD OF WEDDING BAND
on how Julia is taking control of her space or not throughout the story.
It took us a while to get here, to feeling like we didn't have to create a naturalistic room, but we could create a space where Julia's bedroom could just be the bed, plus this suggestion of a boundary that's made with grass. Obviously, it can be supported by the use of lighting, carving out space with light, and supported by a shift in the quality of sound that feels more interior than exterior. So we're going to be playing a lot with that scale of private to public in terms of boundary, using light and sound and scenery and human bodies in space.
Awoye and I share the desire to always take into to account the room that we're in, the theater space, as part of the design, thinking holistically about the space that we're occupying. And [the Scripps Mainstage] has, as part of its architecture, these surrounding balcony levels with staircases that you can see that are expressed very similarly to the Freedman’s cottage porches. It was interesting to discover that the vernacular architecture of Charleston shared this fundamental structural geometry to the theater space, and we're going to use the whole room—not having just the stage be the place for actors, but letting that world expand to the outer walls, these surrounding and upper levels of the architecture of the theater, and beyond.
Another thing that Awoye and I talk about a lot is, when are we? In my mind, there's this kind of simultaneous time scale. It's the time period that the play is set in, 1918; it's the time when Alice Childress wrote, in the '60s; and then the present moment, in that we are gathering now in a room to share it. Those are all very different time periods, and they're all connected and disconnected, happening simultaneously and in different planes. And so, I think there's something about stripping this space down to the elements that makes it easier to live in those different times together and let them speak to each other a little bit more easily. •
The balcony porches of a Charleston Cottage. Photo by Jason Ardizzone-West.
