Joe Taylor is the creative director, songwriter, and frontman of Kid Scientist and has performed alongside international artists such as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Ben Kweller, and Ibiyinka Alao, the Nigerian Ambassador of Art. He has collaborated as a composer, music director, and actor with ERA and director Lucy Cashion on Faust: go down with all the re$t, Snow White, Oedipus Apparatus, Trash Macbeth, and Moscow!. In addition to composing music for and performing with Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, he has produced several immersive works of music and theatre, including Kid Scientist’s A Report from the Future. Joe holds a Bachelor of Arts from Washington University in St. Louis where he studied German language and literature and physics.

PRESENTATION OVERVIEW

This is a presentation about adapting four traditional, European, literary works into experimental, avant-garde performance for midwestern American audiences. The presenters are the creators of these performances: Lucy Cashion, director and writer; and Joe Taylor, composer, performer, and writer.

In this presentation, we demonstrate our process of making new interpretations of old works: 1) first we examine the dramaturgy, structure, and history of a work; 2) then we discover our intuitive connections to the work; and 3) finally we recreate it for contemporary context based on our analytical and instinctual responses. The result is a production of an entirely new work of theatre. The four works from which we present examples are: FAUST (go down with all the re$t), adapted from Goethe’s Faust, Part One; Oedipus Apparatus, adapted from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; Snow White, adapted from the Grimm brothers’ Schneewittchen; and Trash Macbeth, adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Our versions of these works were all created and produced in St. Louis, Missouri within the last four years. Conceptually, they were all created between tradition and contemporaneity.

We spend ten minutes discussing each work, providing photos and videos of performances, and sections of script. We compare text from the original works with our own adaptations to show how the works are transformed by our process. 

During the remaining fifteen minutes of our presentation, we engage in interactive discussion with the audience, answering any questions they might have, and/or providing additional examples of work. Between the three of us, my collaborator and I are fluent in English, French, and German, in case that is helpful in facilitating discussion.