Maybe it’s a cop-out to say that you needed to be there, but the totality of the design-as-performance Transformations remains impossible to describe. The process involved 8 different women bringing their reactions and talents in their individual fields to Anne Sexton’s poetry rooted in the fantastical world of fairy tales. Curated and directed by Megan Reilly with the assistance of Sarah Mosher, and performed by nine women, the pieces included film, dance, movement, animation, spoken word, and traditional performance.

Megan Reilly’s Director’s note:
Long ago, there was a strange deception.
The truth is that by the time most of us reach our thirties, we no longer believe in a prince coming to rescue us, and we know that marriage and relationships aren’t about happily-ever-afters. But we still tell our daughters these stories, and in doing so continue the deception; we continue to keep ourselves and our daughters asleep and numb from the pain of realizing what “living in a man’s world” actually means. And the truth is, as women we do this to ourselves. We tell ourselves these stories, these myths, we keep ourselves asleep and afraid to really rock the boat or step outside the “normal” life proscribed to us by our culture. And as artists we often hear that we can’t have both a thriving freelance career and also raise a family – and we can pretty much guess which is the path others prefer us to take. Sexton wrote about her own tragedies in her “Transformations” poems, and the dark meanings are impossible to deny. But I also see these poems as inspiration for finding our own unique paths. There aren’t many things to me more beautiful than the line from Rapunzel, “we are strong, we are the good ones,” but arriving at that point takes us through dark woods containing secret truths about ourselves and our world.

After a revised performance of Megan Reilly’s Mark Cohen New Works Festival piece “Rapunzel” for Sandy Stone’s Dream and Delirium class in the fall of 2006 Travis wondered aloud if she could do another hour and fifteen minutes of that style of performance art to create a full night of theatre, and who in town we could pitch it to to produce.

The answer’s were yes, and no one – and so Cambiare Productions was born to be a place where that sort of production could be created. Even if it didn’t come from Travis and Will’s head.