We (Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone – known collectively as 600 HIGHWAYMEN) are a theatermaking duo who are aiming at a radical approach to making live art by creating intimacy amongst strangers and illuminating the inherent poignancy of people coming together. Our work, which we’ve been making since 2009, exists at the intersection of theater, dance, contemporary performance, and civic encounter.
The work is performed by diverse bodies, pushing on the parameters of what we call virtuosity. We work with people from various backgrounds (some experienced performers; some complete novices). The rooms where our work rehearses and performs are inclusive, unpretentious, and authentic. We want audiences and performers to never lose sight of what’s really going on in our public events, which is people sharing time and space together.
With an overlap of gesture, movement, athletics and sculpture, the work we make fixates on the surface of the body and its inherent vulnerability, and what the body can communicate. We hunt for the precise physical language that reveals each performer. It is as if the performer would say aloud, “I am simply me, moving this way. I am me, doing this dance.” Our performers are not pretending to be someone else; rather they are themselves –– for us, for now. Perhaps if the performers can lead with openness, authenticity, strength, and curiosity, the entire room can do the same.
As a pair, we write the words that are spoken, and we build the specific verbal and physical language around all the people in the room. The words should seem both innate to the performer, yet also borrowed and external. We’re asking the audience to meet the text halfway – to hear the words we have written and find themselves in the space between the words and the performers. We’re not after any sort of realism other than the realism of being together in a room. That is transporting enough.
Through all of this, we are trying to boil away for audiences all the things that are assumed to be required in a theater. We like story, but it isn’t essential. We like acting, but it isn’t essential. We like words, but even those aren’t always needed. To us, it’s always and only about an exchange between the audience and the humans who are performing. Period. This obsession with the very nature of performance – the ephemeral transfer of energy between the people who’ve agreed to come into a room – is the very thing we’re chasing. It’s an attempt at connection, community, and care for everyone who is present.
We’re interested in what we cannot grasp and what we’ve never done, and thus each of our projects is a different imperative composed of a new process, partnership, cast, and risk. We’ve come to realize that the way we collaborate and the curious nature of each journey is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, an antidote to our unrest and a balm for our obsessive curiosities. We’re after the heart of something big – which leaves us always searching, an ongoing process of peeling away at this fragile, impermanent, yet utterly indestructible art.