An interview with some of the creators behind Miami Motel Stories
Juggerknot Theatre Company’s Miami Motel Stories returns this year for their second production. Last year, the company took the neighborhood of Little Havana by storm; this time around, their sights are centered around the former Gold Dust Motel in the neighborhood of MiMo. This three year immersive theatre project aims to shed light on local stories by exploring Miami’s “past, present, and future, one room at a time”; it is also funded in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as part of its Knight Arts Challenge.
We caught up with Mia Rovegno, director for Miami Motel Stories MiMo, and Tanya Bravo, Artist Director of Juggerknot Theatre Company, to learn more about this ambitious project.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
No Proscenium (NP): What is Juggerknot Theatre Company and what is Miami Motel Stories?
Mia Rovegno (MR): Miami’s Juggerknot Theatre Company breaks boundaries between performers and audiences to deliver immersive theatre works in a collaborative exchange between Miami and NYC artists. Miami Motel Stories is a site-specific immersive performance series that takes place in motels across the developing neighborhoods of Miami.
This is the second production in the series. Miami Motel Stories MiMo will tell stories of Miami’s past, present, and future in an iconic motel slated for imminent demolition, restoration, and development, the iconic Motel Blu (formerly the historic Gold Dust Motel), located on Biscayne Blvd in the MiMo Historic District. The play’s interweaving narratives reflect on the undercurrent of the neighborhood’s history, both real and imagined, to bring artistry, responsible growth and home-grown craft to Miami’s ever-quickening rush to develop.
Miami Motel Stories MiMo provides the unique opportunity for a NYC-based guest director to collaborate with local artists in Miami to make this new work of immersive, site-specific theatre that navigates the rich, multi-layered narratives of migration, segregation, immigration, gentrification, and cultural cross-pollination that have defined this ever-evolving neighborhood.
Led by actors, audiences are invited to the Gold Dust Motel’s tiki-themed grand opening party in 1957, the actual moment where it all began. Attendees are invited to wander the rooms of the motel to encounter the neighborhood’s past as characters who frequented the motel over the past six decades come into focus. “All Access Check In” ticket holders can choose from three storyline tracks to follow by selecting a Blue, Pink, or Yellow motel room key. They might meet a ’60s CIA agent encountering an informant with Cuban ties on the brink of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or be asked by a ’70s feminist youth to help picket against the Bunnies at the Playboy Club across the street (now an auto shop), or hear about Ernest Hemingway’s son, who came of age when coming out as Gloria in Coconut Grove’s burgeoning trans community in the ’80s. If audiences choose to return, they can request a key of a different color, giving them access to a completely new story track and experience of the show.
NP: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background in doing immersive work, Mia?
MR: I’m a Brooklyn-based director, playwright, puppeteer and theatre professor. I’ve written and directed immersive works created for site-specific spaces in several cities across the USA. I got my feet wet as a young actor and puppeteer making experimental work in Chicago with Redmoon Theater, Bread and Puppet in Vermont and Shadowlight in San Francisco. In San Francisco, I was a member of a multi-use arts collective space called CELLspace, which, during the first dot-com boom, became a vital meeting and performance space for artists and social justice organizers being evicted amidst the soaring rents of tech development. Our 10,000 square foot warehouse, holding on for dear life to a thirteen-year lease, became a community hub for folks needing an artistic home in which to make their work. We hosted everything from Bboy competitions to nonviolent communication summits to touring musical circuses, and everyone who inhabited the building added a layer of history to the space. As a director, I found myself inspired by the possibilities that opened up when I made work in this unconventional performance space with its own set of renegade rules defined by the artists ourselves.
I was always unsatisfied by the limitations of traditional theatre venues. I joked that theatre was the land of “make believe”, that our job was to make our audiences believe in a temporary, constructed reality forced into these controlled, neutral spaces. I was hungry to interact more holistically with architecture and design from the moment pre-production began, but the economic limitations of space rental and staffing in conventional venues posed a barrier to that kind of integrated artistic practice. So I started making work in found spaces, dead spaces, re-imagined spaces not intended for theatrical use — like a barge or a living room or a tree house or a library. Rather than work to erase the space in an effort to make it neutral, I’d collaborate with my design team and performers to bring forward the narrative vitality embedded inside these spaces. I felt that if a space was showing evidence of its history, why erase it with our presence? I was more interested in letting the site talk back to us to inform the stories we wanted to tell.
I now teach courses in site-specific performance and experimental interdisciplinary performance that encourage young artists to think outside the box, in order to make work that thrives outside a black box — or any space confined by conventions of a controlled performance space with a fixed audience relationship. Right now I’m teaching a Script Analysis unit to my students at NYU/Tisch where we treat found spaces as the driving text for a performance, and activate spaces not intended for performance by mining the stories they have to tell. These are not simply spaces, they are Places, fully alive with narrative before and after our theatrical interventions, inseparable from the social conditions that have come to define them over time. These are not the neutral, blank canvases of conventional theaters, and they are begging to be collaborated with.
These days, the bulk of my directing work focuses on this unique approach to making art. It has expanded my vision of what’s possible in the theatre, and has made me a stronger artist and collaborator. I’m finding that audiences are eager to abandon their spectator role to connect with work in a personal, embodied, visceral way. In this technological age, it seems more and more like a radical act to gather an audience in a room together to remember how to be present and connect with one another. For me, making site-specific, immersive work is a way to bring meaning to our relationships with each other and the landscapes around us that are abundant with story before we even step into them. Making this kind of work asks for a different inquiry when approaching story and script, and invites the question of how you, the maker, and your audiences are an inevitable extension of the narrative.
NP: What other immersive productions have you worked on?
MR: Most recently, my production of nothin’s gonna change my world transported audiences by ferry to a floating barge where actors performed episodic vignettes, played live music, and served a meal as the sun set over the Statue of Liberty. My next production of The Way They Live with The Civilians, staged onsite in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was named in The New Yorker’s Favorite Cultural Moments of 2015. This past year, I was an Associate Director for Tooting Arts Club’s immersive Sweeney Todd at Barrow Street Theatre, which became the longest running production this iconic musical has seen.
NP: Mia, how did you get involved with Juggerknot Theatre Company?
MR: Tanya Bravo (Artistic Director) contacted me because she knew I was a maker of immersive, site-specific performance and Juggerknot is invested in inviting cross-pollination between NYC and Miami artists. I met Tanya, Michelle Antelo (Managing Director) and Juan C. Sanchez (playwright) in Brooklyn for a late night chat after a marathon rehearsal day putting in a new Sweeney Todd cast at Barrow Street Theatre. We quickly discovered we were like-minded artists who spoke the same language and within five minutes we were brainstorming ideas for the production.
I’m obsessed with how place informs identity in our ever-changing American landscape. As a native New Yorker, I am invested in the need to preserve the narratives of a city I see disappearing amidst the rapid change of unrelenting urban development. This project synthesizes my artistic mission to tell stories that reveal the complex histories of an ever-evolving American cultural landscape with my passion for making site-specific, immersive works that break an audience’s expectations of what an evening of theatre can be. I really can’t think of a more ideal collaboration, and it’s been a total dream to work with our incredible team.
NP: Can you tell us a little bit more about this edition of Miami Motel Stories? How will it differ from the previous version?
MR: Unlike last year’s production in Little Havana, this year’s show takes place in the former Gold Dust Motel (later known as Motel Blu) in the MiMo district on Biscayne Boulevard, bringing the audience new stories and characters drawn from our interviews with community members who’ve inhabited this space over the years. The building itself brings with it a completely different physical layout, as it was built during the boom of the MiMo district. These signature 1950s motels came to define this strip of Biscayne Boulevard (and still do today), with their pastel color schemes, motor inn courtyards, neon signage, and angular rooftops designed to entice the road trip motorist’s eye from a vehicle moving down the boulevard.
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Since its inception in 1957, The Gold Dust Motel and its surrounding neighborhood have gone through extreme economic shifts, transient populations, immigration patterns and political climates. Our show glimpses vignettes across several decades to spark the memories this particular building holds, through all its highs and lows, bringing invisible layers of history to the surface to be made visible again.
NP: Why choose to tell the history of Miami in this way?
MR: Miami Motel Stories is such an exciting series because every production unearths and preserves different histories at every step of the way — in our research, in our interviews, in our pre-production time getting to know the site and the stories the architecture has to tell, and in bringing in our cast to embody these stories. The final piece of the puzzle is complete when the audience arrives and brings their own histories and narratives to the piece as they reflect on their relationship to the city, the neighborhood, the motel itself, and the stories of the characters that inhabit it.
Everyone will have a different experience of the show, and our hope is that bringing the space to life by embodying these stories will bring about memories, associations, and reflection on each and every audience member’s own personal relationship to this city they hold so dear.
NP: Can you tell us a little bit more about the venue for the production?
MR: The preparation for this production required a much more extensive process than a typical play produced in a traditional theatre venue. Once we secured the motel site over the summer, Playwright Juan C. Sanchez and I worked to develop the script remotely between NYC and Miami as he gathered research and interviews with local historians and community members to develop the stories that would populate our motel rooms. I traveled back and forth to Miami to get to know the site with my collaborators.
As the motel is slated for construction, our design process involved an intensive collaboration between director, producers, designers, and developer Avra Jain to make quick decisions around what original architecture would remain in use, what elements could be enhanced by our design team, and what accommodations needed to be made to make this transitional space safe and accessible for attending audiences.
The motel space is such an exciting playground for our cast. The production design makes use of found architecture and real furniture pulled from the hotel itself. The motor courtyard layout sits below two stories of motel rooms and the pathways below lead to a sprawling riverside back patio bar area and a recently defunct diner overlooking the boulevard.
NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work and how are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?
Tanya Bravo (TB): The “All Access Check In” ticket gets you access to our more cinematic experience on the second floor which consists of three different tracks. Each “key” opens the door to a different decade; we’re trying to execute the evolution of Biscayne Blvd. The audience will walk in four people at a time. The scene really happens around them. The audiences are spectators. They may be spoken to, but really they’re spectators. However, they’re free to roam or sit wherever they want. We see it as a “close up” or a “zoom in” to the 1960s or the 1990s or the 1950s, asking, what was it like in that hotel at that time?
The “Check In” ticket allows access to the downstairs, which is an open floor format, so the audience can go in and out of the rooms as they please. There’s a 1950s diner and you can meet a character there. She might pour you coffee. The audience is free to hang out and talk to her. There’s someone by the river who’ll give you the history of the Miami River. It’s all under the premise that you’ve been invited to the opening of the Gold Dust Motel. So when you first come in, you’ll be in a parking lot with cars from that time period and the managers of the hotel (who really did live on site during that period!) will invite you to explore. You’ll get to explore everything downstairs: the diner, the speakeasy, the manager’s room, and more. You can walk into each room and stay as long as you want.
With the show, we’re in different time periods and each decade is really clashing with each other in this show. The building is “remembering itself” to a certain extent.
NP: What’s surprised you so far during the development of the show?
MR: It’s been amazing to discover that everyone we meet who hears about the show has been touched by the neighborhood in such personal ways. Just mentioning the location has sparked people to share so many stories of memories on the boulevard, fishing in the river, restaurants and businesses that have come and gone, kids going to the Playboy Club for dinner with their parents, anecdotes about working and living in the motel. Before they’ve even seen the show, Miami residents are already finding themselves inside the show’s narrative, and creating this space for personal reflection is exactly what we hope to do for our audiences.
NP: Who is the ideal audience member for this show?
MR: The stories of Miami Motel Stories are so universally relatable and yet so specific to the experience of what it is to live and breathe Miami, day to day, generation by generation.
Whether you’re a Miami native or visiting for the very first time, you’ll unearth glimpses of Miami history deeply embedded in the communities of this city that also speak to the experience of living in an American landscape constantly in flux. There’s something in it for everyone and the show is a true celebration of Miami culture.
TB: The ideal audience member could be a tourist or someone who’s lived in Miami but wants to learn about the history of the city in a really fun, interactive, immersive way. It’s a great night out with live music and drinks.
We’ve noticed that we can’t really pinpoint exactly the demographic for the show. We’ve got older Miamians who’ve lived through these stories, younger Millennials eager to learn, citizens who are just really passionate about Miami, and people who are visiting from out of town. Instead of going to a club and having a glam Miami night out, this is different way to experience what’s at the heart of Miami.
NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?
MR: I see our production as a kind of archeological dig. We are inviting the audience to participate with us, to celebrate the history of this unique space and all the stories this motel has witnessed inside its walls over the past six decades.
My hope is that the experience will invite stronger ties between communities by honoring the history of the architecture we inhabit as we hold space for these stories to be told. I hope audiences will walk away feeling that they were included in a truly special experience, where they are able to reflect upon their own relationship to the inevitability of change, and the importance of sharing the stories that keep our community’s histories alive.
Miami Motel Stories MiMo will run from November 30 to December 23 at the former Gold Dust Motel on 7700 Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. Audience members are welcome to return multiple times to see different tracks. Tickets are $45–75.
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