How Micaela Taylor turned pandemic stillness into a creative explosion at the Wallis Annenberg Center in February. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein
When a writer and a composer who were once as close as brothers decided to collaborate on a new musical piece, they called it an “experiment” — and hoped it would be, for lack of a better term, a success.
But when the team of director and composer Micaela Taylor and composer Andrew Lichtenstein brought their collaborative work, “Stillness” to life on stage late last year, the result was a triumph, an artistic triumph for the artists, as well as an emotional one.
More than that, though, “Stillness” may be the most important new work of art that Taylor has ever produced.
An artist-about-town, Taylor is the director of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and she has spent decades building a reputation for her work, which is rooted in both classic theatre and contemporary, multi-disciplinary exploration. She began in New York, before moving to California in 2012, where she has lived ever since.
“With this project,” she says, “I’m trying something completely different. I’m trying to use the Wallis Annenberg Center as a place where I can use technology to do something different and something else.”
The new piece is her most ambitious work to date, and she has been a bit cautious about it, she says, for the first year or so, because she did not want to be too aggressive with herself. When she finished the show, though, the work had won her friends and colleagues, as well as public and critical success, and she decided to do it, with a few changes, even if the show was a little more experimental.
“The first year of stillness was very much a project,”