People! Elissa!

Happy weekend! Our Kickstarter jumped $800 in 2 days! Amazing! On! Exclamations!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
sailing on with Elissa Goetschius

Elissa’s official bio:

Elissa Goetschuis
@egoetschius

Elissa Goetschius is a DC-based artist. Recent projects include an inter-disciplinary installation piece for the 24 Hour City Project presented at the Intelligent Cities Conference and again as part of Digital Capital Week. Recent theatre work includes developing and directing a tour of short plays with patients at St Elizabeths Hospital (REFLECTIONS, Wandering Souls) and directing NIGHT SWEATS with the interdisciplinary EMP Collective in Baltimore. Formerly the Literary Manager at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, she developed many world premiere plays including Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl, boom by Peter Nachtrieb, and Fever/Dream by Sheila Callaghan. She has worked as a dramaturg at Portland Center Stage, Marin Theatre Company, Florida Stage, Rorschach Theatre, Forum Theatre, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She has worked for Manhattan Theatre Club and the Royal Shakespeare Company, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, studied at the British American Drama Academy, and holds a degree in English from Columbia University.

Elissa and I have been friends since our sophomore year of college, when we both showed up for a Shakespeare troupe. She wore green and talked about being a competitive volleyball player in high school.

Two years later she directed The Skryker, with my art direction, and I watched her take a confused, dense story with two incredibly challenging lead roles and turn out a production that was, quite simply, magical. She commissioned our mutual friend to build her her set from steel and scrap metal, cast a troupe of fairy tale creatures who danced across the stage, and let me draw on her cast members with markers.

At the time I thought it amazing that she had found this play, pulled from a vast library of plays that she has always seemed to have on hand in some rich mental bookcase, and decided it was possible to make into a decent production with a group of 22-year-olds. I confess that I thought maybe she was being a little too ambitious. I was so wrong. It was so gorgeous.

I asked Elissa to join twenty-four in part because she’s a dramaturg; incredibly focused in ways that many of us never even notice. My impression of dramaturgy is that it is an exercise in exploring and respecting the enormous stories that inform the tiniest details. Why must this object be placed just so on the stage, and why does a character use this piece of slang instead of that one? Elissa asks these questions, in the quest of world-building.

I asked her to join in part because she’s great to work with, and I have seen her develop fierce friendships and protective instincts with the people she directs. I remember sitting in the audience with her halfway through the run of Skryker, gripping each other so tightly that we might have crushed the tiny bones in our hands, as one of our actors dislocated her shoulder on stage. I remember Elissa shooting out of her seat and running around the hallway to the backstage with me right behind her, our shoes sliding on the wooden floor.

And I asked her in part because I hate her taste in shoes. I know it’s odd; bear with me. Elissa and I share a common love of rather strange fashion, and of elaborate personal presentation. Take a whirl through her tumblr to get a sense of what I mean. This is one of my favorite sources of curated images online, anywhere. And every time I see her, Elissa is wearing tall, elaborate, usually wedge-heeled shoes, along with her feather earrings and brilliant colors. I can’t get over wedges, but I love seeing how Elissa thinks about what she wears, and how her choices make sense within her own sense of aesthetics, simultaneously in line with and extremely divergent from my own.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Elissa! I can’t wait to see you soon!

Below, Elissa’s portrait, from my portrait project. (I did Elizabeth too.)