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Motus Dance .
how they describe
themselves: A nonprofit
modern-dance company
based in Fountain Square
that teaches classes, holds
workshops, collaborates with
other artists, and presents
original, contemporary dance
performances. /// what
they’re known for: “Sitespecific
dance works that
are not conservative,” says
executive artistic director Heidi
Phillips. Their performances
often take on topics like suicide,
bullying, and exclusion.
Roving Cinema .
how they describe themselves: An offshoot of the Indianapolis International Film
Festival that brings movies to unusual (but topic-appropriate) places. /// what they’re
known for: Screening Fight Club in the catacombs beneath City Market (below), Field
of Dreams at Victory Field, and The Big Lebowski at Jillian’s Hi-Life Lanes.
theater companies in town. Indy went without
Shakespeare for more than a decade after the
Indianapolis Shakespeare Festival went bankrupt
in 1991. Then came Heartland Actors Repertory
Theatre in 2006, Garfield Shakespeare Company
in 2008, and, more recently, Hoosier Bard,
EclecticPond, and IndyShakes—each with its
own approach.
“Theater isn’t a competitive sport,” says
EclecticPond founder Cardwell. “Even if you had
five different companies all doing a production
of the same show that opened on the same date,
it still really wouldn’t be a competition because
you would be doing it in a different way.”
Cardwell, who’s from across the pond in
England; his wife, Cat; and another friend started
the company after moving to Indianapolis, Cat’s
hometown. Their goal: Create a company that
does adaptations of Shakespeare and other
classic works, with a focus on taking the shows
to schools. “To show that this is not stuffy and
boring and dull,” said Cardwell, who works as an
actor at The Children’s Museum and in the Indiana
Repertory Theatre box office, “but fascinating,
fantastic, fun, frightening, scary. Whatever you
want them to do, they are still relevant.” So
EclecticPond performs shows like a family-friendly
version of Dracula, complete with songs and
slapstick humor, and 10 x 10, which is Shakespeare’s
top 10 plays in 10 minutes each.
Hoosier Bard, by contrast, is giving Indy—
and the world—a scholarly take. The troupe is
run by IUPUI professor Terri Bourus, an Equity
actor who’s also a general editor for the New
Oxford Shakespeare Project. The university
hired Bourus with marching orders to make
meaningful connections between the campus
and the Indianapolis arts community. She and
company dramaturge Gary Taylor do that by
using lots of local actors to examine and perhaps
reconsider Shakespeare’s work. “Lots of people
do Shakespeare, and lots of people do Shakespeare
beautifully,” says Bourus. “But there are no other
companies that I know of that do Shakespeare in
quite the way we do it.”
After putting her acting career on hold for
several years while she raised a family, DePauw
University theater professor Amy Hayes founded
IndyShakes two and a half years ago to get back
in the game presenting Shakespeare and classicsbased
theater. She looked around Indianapolis
and thought the time was right. “Mass Ave had
exploded, and as I became acquainted with people,
I thought something could happen here,” she says.
“There seem to be people who pay to see art.”
So she went to her friend Ronn Johnstone, who
has a company called Wisdom Tooth Theatre
Project, and asked him to produce her. IndyShakes
is now a branch of Wisdom Tooth, which presents
its first season at IndyFringe beginning this fall.
THE TICKET 2014 | IM 2 1