Deb Sivigny
Invisible Lines
Designer, playmaker and educator Deb Sivigny is the kind of multi-hyphenate we at Outer Voice love to talk with. Driven by curiosity and a strong mission, she builds theatrical worlds that deepen the experience of both audience and performer. Along the way, she seeks new avenues for expression, teaches a new generation of theatrical designers and works on productions across the country.
She sat down with us to talk about what drives her work, her love/hate relationship with detail, and recognizing a growing need to be seen.
“I like to think that the world is linked together by a whole bunch of invisible lines. It's my job to find them.”
Having worked with the likes of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, the Kennedy Center, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, Olney Theatre Center, Arkansas Rep and Company One, it could be easy for Sivigny to sit back and ride out the quarantine, knowing she has work in the pipeline and an attention-grabbing resume.
Instead, as COVID-19 brought theatres across the country grinding to a halt, Sivigny found a new creative outlet in Draw with Deb, a series of Facebook Live drawing sessions. She has spoken out with the #racismisavirus campaign, contributed to online theatrical experiments and managed to finish a semester teaching at George Mason University online.
As we anxiously consider the post-corona live performance world, Sivigny wonders how our time experimenting with alternate forms will affect our development process.
“I’m thinking about it a lot in the moments where I'm kind of like, ‘Am I done? Is my is my theatre career as I knew it over?’ she says. “I hope that we slow down a little. I think there's so much pressure to produce, even when theaters started closing, everybody hopped to get online really really fast. It's amazing all the stuff that's come out but I do wonder what we're going to learn. Now that we know that we could program 24/7 online, will we do a little bit more of that … or will things have longer developmental phases and we won't be so quick to shove work that's not ready in front of faces? I think our perception of time is really going to change the field.”
Sivigny is no stranger to long development periods. In 2017, as a member of the playwriting collective The Welders, Sivigny finished a two-year (and lifelong) development process, premiering her play Hello, My Name Is…, a semi-autobiographical piece inspired by her experience as an adoptee and her journey to Korea to learn about her past.
“Nothing will ever prepare you to go back to a country you've never seen,” she says. “I had literally not ever seen Korea in my life beyond being five months old … the land of adoption was always a bit of a mystery but it has always been part of my life.”
After traveling to Korea, Sivigny interviewed other Korean-American adoptees and began building a show that would expand into the stories of three people with vastly different experiences. “I essentially split myself into three characters,” she explains.
“I went in full throttle to this world that I actually had never really engaged with,” Sivigny says. “I actually pushed it away when I was a kid because I didn't want to be different. When my parents were like, ‘Why don't you go to this camp for Koreans?’ I was like, ‘No!’ I essentially told my parents like ‘I want to be white, I want to be part of the majority here,’ because growing up in really an all-white space … it affects you, you know.”
Hello, My Name Is… was performed at Rhizome DC, a community arts space located in a two-story home in Takoma Park. Sivigny made the most of the venue, creating an immersive experience in which audience members traveled from room to room as the play progressed.
How does a deeply personal and cathartic piece translate to audiences? “I brought in a lot of strangers to come look at it and I brought in a lot of adoptees as well to come look at it … to give their feedback, and it was very emotional for them too. So I knew that at least I hadn't built an experience that was only for me. You know, kind of the fear that I had written something so personal there was no room for anyone else.”
This is indicative of Sivigny’s entire design approach, which is collaborative and community-minded. She observes actors, interrogates directors and disassembles plays to build the worlds that she brings to the stage. Whether it’s costume and/or scenic design for Vietgone at Company One, She a Gem at the Kennedy Center, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at 1st Stage or Yellow Face at Theater J, Sivigny digs deep and mines for detail.
“There's something about having my hands in the process, whether in the making or the idea phase, which is what I love the most … chatting theory around why are we here and why do these characters do all this stuff,” she says. “I both love and hate details at the same time … Every detail in a costume or set is an example of a struggle of a small conflict or a small win or something … that it might be a spark for an actor playing a character, or it might be a spark for someone in the audience who's like, ‘Oh, I know that space.’”
With a thriving design career and a professorship at George Mason University, Sivigny may seem to have all the answers, but she continues to look within.
“I have admitted to myself, and I need to continue to admit to myself, that there's a part of me that wants to be seen,” she says. “I've gotten to a place in my career, my artistic life myself where I'm feeling more comfortable with the world, with who I am … I spent a lot of years apologizing for who I am and why I exist, and I'm trying to figure out how to step out of that while also maintaining the humbleness.”
