Mouthpiece. Norah Sadava
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to admit it, to proclaim it? Why were we, women in 2014, still afraid to accept that, in order for change to occur within the society around us, we had to be the ones to change it? Us, right now, today. This idea smashed everything to pieces.
We quickly realized we had to make a play about our own questions, our own realities. From then on our writing came from a more honest place. We tried to peel down to and reveal our deepest and most shameful thoughts, the cognitive dissonance we experience constantly, the layers of internalized male gaze and patriarchal oppression that have been bred into us across many generations, the hypocrisy that we ourselves perpetuate.
This play is a document of our personal journey. We distilled three years of intense conversation into sixty minutes of theatre with some added narrative devices for the purposes of storytelling. This play is a naked, vulnerable, raw set of truths that we have been terrified to expose, and that we have been completely liberated by. The writing, creation, and performance of Mouthpiece has changed us both as artists, as activists, and as women. We are grateful the work has led the way, and we are humbled by the great guiding force of so many women before us.
Performance History
Mouthpiece was first presented as part of Why Not Theatre’s RISER Project in Toronto, 2015
Created and performed by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava
Directed by Amy Nostbakken
Movement direction and dramaturgy by Orian Michaeli
Lighting Design by Andre Du Toit
Sound Design by James Bunton
Music Composition by Amy Nostbakken
Subsequent Performances
The Theatre Centre, Toronto, April 17–May 3, 2015
Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Dawson City, Yukon, January 23, 2016
Pivot Festival, Whitehorse, Yukon, January 29–31, 2016
CANOE Festival, Edmonton, February 4–6, 2016
Undercurrents Festival, Ottawa, February 10–13, 2016
In The Soil Festival, St. Catharines, Ontario, April 29–30, 2016
Fem Fest, Winnipeg, September 21–23, 2016
Nightwood Theatre at Buddies in Bad Times, Toronto, October 21–November 6, 2016
High Performance Rodeo, Calgary, January 25–29, 2017
The Cultch/PuSh Festival, Vancouver, January 31–February 5, 2017
The Odyssey Theatre, Los Angeles, June 2–3, 2017
Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 3–27, 2017
Spark Festival at the Belfry Theatre, Victoria, March 13–17, 2018
Nightwood Theatre at Buddies in Bad Times, Toronto, April 11–22, 2018
Notes on Performance
Movement
The style of movement between the two performers through the entire piece is one of complete familiarity, to the point where you forget there are two. One finishes the other’s gesture, moves her foot just as the other steps, bends as the other reaches, all without having to look at one another. Each performer can sense what the other will do before she thinks of it herself. This is especially apparent in the morning ritual and in applying makeup while singing ‘All I Need.’
Then of course there is the synchronicity. It needs to be so fine and nuanced that audience members can hardly believe what they are seeing.
For the three eulogy numbers, we discovered, when researching trends in dance from the beginning of the twentieth century until today, that the technical moves themselves have not changed all that much; rather, it is the way we perform them that has shifted. Orian Michaeli’s choreography takes a core movement sequence and adapts it to suit the small, tight, conservative movements of the 1940s, the wild, messy, liberated vibe of the 1960s, and the sexy/militant Beyoncé-like language of our current day.
As with the narrative of the musical compositions, the subtle layers of meaning in the choreography create a richer and more layered experience for the audience. Even if observers struggle to find words for what they are watching, they feel it somewhere.
Music
The music in Mouthpiece reflects the inner state of Cassandra while integrating the history of the female voice into the current world of the play.
For as long as musical composition has been recorded and archived, we know that even when women couldn’t speak up, when they couldn’t vote, or assert control of their bodies, or be published or perform or direct or defy, they could sing. And they did. They do.
The musical narrative takes the audience on a journey: through a mother’s lullaby, a Southern hymn, a Bulgarian chant, an opera duet, Billie Holiday, the Andrews Sisters, Janis Joplin mixed with Tina Turner, Joni Mitchell, and finally a Nicki Minaj/Beyoncé mash-up. These musical inspirations communicate how much progress women have made, all the while slapping us with the reality that we must climb much further.
Then there are the vocal compositions that fit outside what is commonly defined as music: the guttural, the squealings, the glottal stops. We use the parts of our throat we don’t normally access to communicate emotions in public, the ‘ugly’ noises that women seldom hear other women producing. These sounds surface throughout Mouthpiece; they are one of the most important aspects of the score and yet are totally open to interpretation. What is the sound of cognitive dissonance? What is the music of a woman unravelling or a penny dropping? What is the sound of the noise in our heads when we resist taking off those rose-coloured glasses? In our experience, the best way to access these noises is not to think too hard about it and let it come intuitively, without censorship.
The play as a whole should be considered a musical score. Every breath, every pause, every moment, contributes to the rhythm and dynamic of the entire piece. When looking at individual sections of the play, always keep in mind how it is contributing to the musicality of the whole. The loud can only be loud because the quiet is quiet, and the pace can only be lightning speed because it also has moments when it slows to a halt.
Transcriptions of the songs are included at the back of this book, in order of appearance. Not included in the notation are dynamics, articulation, and other modes of expression. These should be explored during the process with the performers and the director. Bar lines are in some cases merely a guideline and should be ignored when necessary. Keys can be adjusted to suit the performer’s range, if necessary.
Performance Style
The only way to achieve the high level of physical and vocal harmony that exists within this play is hours and days and weeks of practice as a unit. In front of a mirror, humming in the bathtub, hitting a note at the same time at the right pitch over and over. The more time the performers can spend together, both in and out of rehearsals, the better.
Another challenge we found when trying to speak in perfect unison was that the cadence and lilt of natural speech tends to flatten out. To work against this, one performer recorded how she would realistically say a line and we both memorized its melody, like learning a song.
To balance the virtuosic and often poetic relationship, the individual sides of Cassandra’s persona should be anything but lyrical. Cassandra is hard. She is cynical. And although choreography exists within each woman’s monologues, the performance style is loose, free, totally candid. The key to this performance also lies in Cassandra’s relationship to the audience, which is direct, personal, and straightforward. She speaks bluntly with no pretense.
The two parts of Cassandra’s brain are their own personalities: unpredictable, undefinable, ever changing. No matter how