The Song Trilogy (1985 – 2000)

1985: Founder Stacy Klein, joined by members of the Ensemble, went to Odin Teatret in Denmark for three months to research her PhD dissertation and to Sardegna, Italy to continue training and research begun in 1976 in Poland with her teacher Rena Mirecka, founding actress of Grotowski’s Laboratorium. Out of this journey both the Song Trilogy Cycle and the “extra- theatrical” Republic of Dreams projects were born (1985-2000). The expedition resulted in a documentary of the same title. The Song Trilogy derived from the genocide of European jewry and the remaining traces of the Jewish Culture in Central Europe and its surrounding neighbors. Republic of Dreams project research was undertaken throughout Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. This was the first entirely original performance cycle and brought DE to work in the ruins (and rebuilding) of Central Europe, with the influences of a once vibrant culture amidst its near extermination.

1994: DE began the move to the rural town of Ashfield. This move was precipitated by the absolute economic impossibility to pay exorbitant Boston rents and to house overseas guest artists for long periods. The Ensemble had seen and participated in examples of barter in Central Europe and determined that sustainability might be easier found in a rural environment. The dream of living in Ashfield and maintaining performance space in Boston dissolved by 1996 — after two years of traveling three hours back and forth to Boston with young children in the car; and, of equal import, being shunned by villagers who could not imagine a theatre that did not perform, and facing a doubtful Ashfield community, who wondered if DE was some sort of commune or cult!

1997: A year later we opened our first performance space in Ashfield — the Barn. The impact of the move to the Farm was so far reaching that it can be said that if the Ensemble had not moved, as serendipitous and tenuous as that move was, Double Edge more than likely would not exist today.

1994- 2002 were challenge years in Ashfield both internally and externally. The hardship of moving and settling a group dominated the first years in Ashfield. Some in Ashfield contributed to DE’s predisposition to being outsiders through a range of suspicions of the ‘other,’ including the conservationists insinuating we would violate the land that was for hundreds of years cultivated as farmland. Other offenses by a very small but unfortunately present part of the population cast a more egregious and even an anti-semitic shadow (a package of Nazi propaganda thrown in our driveway, comments made) and aspersions on the immigrants from the Middle East, Indonesia, and ultimately South America that composed the Ensemble. On the other hand, DE was embraced by several rooted Ashfield families, who helped with relations which would later become invaluable.

1996: Carlos Uriona arrived from Argentina and soon became a leader in the Ensemble, bringing with him a unique view on alternative economic systems. Carlos’ work grew out of his former theatre’s (Diablomundo) response to the Dirty War in Argentina, which was to hold large–scale actions of music, dance, and spectacle in the Plazas of Argentina, as creative protest. Uriona partnered with Stacy Klein to bring the inner training and performance process, the cultural research from Central Europe, together with his own grassroots work to Ashfield. One major collaboration in those years, The Consortium of Theatre Practices (a US-Poland Theatre Exchange, with Gardzienice Theater, Kadmus, and DE) in 1999-2001, grew out of the Klein-Uriona partnership and the international collaborations of DE and ultimately led to the Summer Spectacle.

The Song Trilogy Performances

Song of Absence in the Fall of the Ashen Reign (1988)
Song of Songs (1992)
Keter, the Crowning Song (1996)