Steampunk.
You’ve heard the word.
You’ve seen the aesthetic.
Right?
STEAM – PUNK.
This is what it is, says me, briefly.
It’s captured a lot of imaginations.
It comes from a lot of imaginations.
One of them,
the one we’re dealing with in this post,
is right here in this town.
“Steampunk’s the meeting of my two favorite genres,”
says Audrey Sansom, director of the new show
Steam, Rose-Colored Goggles, and the Flight of the Victoriana,
currently running at Salvage Vanguard Theatre
under the pop-culture auspices of Gnap! Theatre Projects.
“It’s the meeting of my two favorite genres,” says Sansom.
“Historical fiction and science fiction. So I became kind of obsessed with it.”
Almost traditionally at Gnap!, obsessions can become stage productions –
improvised or otherwise. This show is definitely improvised, the talented cast
bounding off their brass-chased background into new adventures each week,
based both on audience suggestions and on what’s occurred in previous episodes.
They’re doing this for four weekends: Friday & Saturday nights, through Jan. 28.
The second weekend is this weekend.
The plot thickens.
“Other than the steampunkiness of the show,” says Sansom,
“it’s very focused on the characters and their relationships,
on their struggles in this world we’ve created.”
Excellent.
And of course there’s bound to be interpersonal drama
among the greater intrigues as the airship Victoriana takes to the skies;
there’s bound to be the sort of intensity that group intimacy can bring …
but let’s never mind the other-than for a moment.
Let’s focus on the steampunkiness: The trappings. The costumes.
Where does someone get those old-timey, gear-enhanced …
“One of the best ways to get stuff for a steampunk costume,” says Sansom,
“is to be looking around all the time, wherever you go, and finding little bits and
baubles everywhere. I’ve found pieces for my costume on the street, I’ve found
them in thrift stores. Some of our performers went the vintage-store route, but a lot
of things we just made ourselves. I think the idea of being a steampunk is to create
and manifest and alter the world around you.”
(Bruce Sterling, as Savlov knows, would agree.)
“A steampunk doesn’t need a lot of money to create what they want to create,”
says Sansom. “It’s more about reinventing ourselves, and doing that
by manipulating the objects already in the world around us.”
Intrigued?
You’d do well to manipulate the Internet a bit, citizen,
make a few clicks – or whatever it takes in this more digital world
to score yourself some tickets before the series ends.
This article appears in January 13 • 2012.