BY Jenn Q. Goddu

Dexter Bullard isn’t keen on adding the words “physical theatre company” after or before any mention of Plasticene. When the ensemble was formed in 1995, it was simply known as Plasticene.

“We wanted to call ourselves Plasticene and that’s it,” said Bullard, the ensemble’s artistic director. “It’s almost like a rock band. You don’t call the Rolling Stones, the Rolling Stones Musical Ensemble Company. We didn’t feel like we needed to have to brand it.”

Still the troupe soon began to see that calling themselves a physical theatre “would be the best way to let people know what the work is interested in, which is particularly actors in action, bodies in motion.”

Yet, nearly 10 years later, Bullard still hates the term. “It’s a stupid term,” he said. “All theatre should be physical.”

What makes Plasticene’s productions distinct is the heightened physicality of the shows. This doesn’t mean they add circus arts, dancing or clowning. Instead the Plasticene mission is to look “at the actor’s body, objects, light and sound as materials.

“We use physical action as decoration, as illustration, as energy, as sensation,” says Bullard. “Really a Plasticene show, in some ways, can just be a string of full performance art ideas put together as a show.”

Yet this approach doesn’t mean the company can’t tell a story, said ensemble member Leigh Barrett. “We have an unlimited number of stories and characters to use using physical spectacle to tell the story. Because we’re theatrically based, not gymnastic or circus based, we really embrace the more quiet and subtle elements of physical theatre.”

Consider the company’s latest effort, One Fal$e Note: How to Rob a Bank, playing at the Storefront Theatre through Nov. 5.

Examining the history of bank robbery in the United States, the show considers the psychology of bank robbing as well as the political and sociological aspects, with a three-piece rock band providing a soundtrack, and Plasticene artists performing a “human kinetic docudrama” taking the audience “in a highly theatrical way, [through] both the history and the mechanics of what bank robbery is in America,” Bullard said, adding, “This show is probably one of our funniest to date.”

One Fal$e Note is being staged as part of the city’s 2006 physical theatre series, yet while the burst of attention to the form is welcome, Plasticene’s members are quick to point out they’ve been doing this work for more than a decade already.

The great thing, said Bullard, is that there are so many different forms of theatre in the city. “We are so lucky to, in Chicago, have different kinds of people solving theatre in different kinds of ways.”

And it makes sense, he said, that the physical theatre form would thrive here. “It’s highly Chicago. It comes right along the same tradition of the visceral kick-ass acting style.”

Plasticene solves theatre with a collaborative process that can be broken down into five components: Resource, Exploration, Scoring, Performance, and Exchange.

Resource refers to the initial idea Plasticene uses as a jumping off point and the tools they will use in physically developing the piece in rehearsal. For instance, for One Fal$e Note, they decided the focus was on bank robbery and that the resources would include four actors, steel cubes, bank stanchions (you know, those spring-loaded ribbons attached to poles that delineate where one should wait in line) and little guns.

In the Exploration stage, all of these materials are brought to the first rehearsal, where there is not yet a script, and everyone involved in the show shares what research they have done about bank robberies. This really means everyone, Barrett said. Actors, director, designers, stage manager and “anyone who happens to have their meat hooks on it” give their input in the development of the piece.

“One of the things that makes it different is that everyone’s voice is valuable,” Barrett said. “Dexter knows that people will have a much stronger ownership of the show if they have had more to do with creating it.”

Then the performers get up and explore the stories, themes, statistics and physical props. “It’s exactly like a bunch of 10-year-olds in their garage,” Bullard said. “We are working in a Jackson Pollock right brain kind of way.”

Next up is Scoring, which is “almost like a band putting together a CD release,” Bullard said. It’s taking everything that has come up in rehearsal and figuring out how to give it a structure that will tell a story. The ensemble then is rehearsing and writing simultaneously, always cutting things and adding them back in as they fit the overall piece. “You don’t get to do that with Hamlet,” Bullard said.

Performance, for many companies would seem the final stage, but Plasticene shows “grow immensely over the run” as the actors come into contact with the audience. In addition, the ensemble doesn’t consider a show done once it opens, since there is the awareness that it’s more than likely they will remount the production again in a few years.

So the Exchange stage has impact on the current performances and the future ones. The idea is to use the performance to learn from the audience and to educate the audience. The ensemble also gets involved in teaching workshops and touring to pursue the idea that, as Bullard puts it, “art doesn’t just stand still.”

The company considers its approach a quintessential example of new play development. “We actually create Chicago work right now,” Bullard said. The ensemble stages only one new show and a remount of a past show each year and the works evolve in the collaborative process. “If we want to cut something or add something, we can, because it belongs to us. It doesn’t belong to Samuel French or any tradition,” Bullard said.

What helps create a sense of cohesiveness in Plasticene productions is that the company’s 12 ensemble members are always offered the right to refuse to be in a show. In other words, the assumption is that any ensemble member who wants to work on any particular show can do so.

“What makes it an ensemble theatre is the fact that you dedicate to the idea that you are going to work with these people,” Bullard said. The company does cast outside of Plasticene for its shows but typically only one or two outside collaborators are included in each individual production.

The people brought in are usually people who have taken some of Plasticene’s physical theatre workshops. Or perhaps attended one of the company’s residency programs at a college or university campus. “We do bring people in and we just fold them into the ensemble,” Bullard said. “What the dialect is like is very playful.”

That’s playful collaboration with a consistent goal. As Barrett puts it, “The aim is to entertain, the aim is to educate, and the aim is to fire up the audience’s imagination in a way that they may not be expecting. I don’t think any audience member goes away from a Plasticene show with the exact same experience as the person sitting next to them. Because so much is left to the imagination, because we don’t spoon feed the information.”

But what does Plasticene aim for in its own future?

Bullard would like the company to do more teaching and more national and international tours. He’d also like to grow the company enough to pay people better, but really, he said, “We’re never going to grow bigger. It’s absolutely not our mission to become the next Steppenwolf.”

Staging only two shows a year – the one original and the remount – means, for instance, the company can eschew the need for a permanent space or a subscriber base. “We don’t need all of the things that you would think of as the material success of a theatre,” Bullard said. “Really I feel like we’re always meant to be the size that we are.”

He offers a metaphoric view saying that he sees Chicago theatre as a garden. All the small storefront theatres are the grass. There are some tall trees that are the heavy-hitters, there are some saplings or dogwoods that represent the mid-level companies and then there are the “fantastic ornamental bushes” such as Plasticene. Bullard said, “We’re never going to grow into an oak tree, but we make Chicago’s landscape more interesting because we’re there.”