Orange You Glad to Be Here?
Battling a New York Summer, peeling stickers off hundreds of oranges, creating necklaces, errands galore, eating bagels on the High Line, and not being able to look at oranges the same way again. A look into my production assistant internship for Gathering with Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre at The Shed.
My first day started with me waiting at the wrong entrance. In my defense, I was just around the corner when I realized, and it was my first time at Hudson Yards and I didn’t account for how many entrance points The Shed has. Upon walking to the correct location and spotting the U-Haul where several boxes were being unloaded, I introduced myself to those who were there, both from Yaa! Samar and The Shed, and I begin helping to unload. My first day, as Frances the production manager and also my supervisor had outlined to me, was essentially a load-in day for production. I was introduced to the rest of the team, ran my first errands to the store and got acquainted with the surrounding area, was sent to Queens to pick up tumbling mats, helped to unpack boxes, and began tackling the oranges. I spent the following weeks working with around a thousand, real, oranges. Part of my first day included peeling off all the stickers from them, and though Frances explained to me that it is indeed a tedious job but there’s no other way around it, I reassured her that I did not mind in the slightest and if anything, this is exactly why I’m here. I propped myself in the corner of our rehearsal space, was surrounded by the smell of citrus and a dozen crates, and one by one I went through them, removed their stickers, put them back into the crate, and then separated them from the unfinished ones. I ended up going through a majority of them that day, and the following day I only had maybe three or so crates left to go through.
ORANGES ON ORANGES
Each day, as my supervisor outlined for me, I had different tasks to do. The first days saw a lot of orange work, both on the real ones with the stickers and also the fake ones. Along with the thousand real oranges, there were maybe 300 fake, empty, and plastic oranges, and around 50 fake-filled oranges. These were my next objective. As Frances explained and showed me, these were an orange styrofoam ball, cut in half, the insides were scooped out, magnets were glued to the top, they were sewn together at their bottom, a paper clip was inserted on both sides to prevent the thread from coming undone, glue was applied to the styrofoam to prevent any pieces from sprinkling out, and they were to be filled with kinetic sand. Over the coming weeks, these oranges went through a variety of transformations.
Initially, they were filled completely with this sand, then the sand was reduced, then they were replaced with shredded paper so the sand had to be removed, and then we ran into a problem: the oranges aren’t staying closed, even with the magnets. The dancers had to be able to open the oranges during the performance so it couldn’t be so difficult, so Frances and I then began experimenting. We tried green spike tape, orange spike tape, clear tape, and a piece of fabric that would have a removable pin. In the end, the orange spike tape was the winner. The oranges had a removable stem, so the tape was placed over the stem hole. It was long enough to keep both sides secured and closed, and then the stem was inserted back, going directly into the tape, keeping everything in place.
My orange journey, however, did not stop there. Along with working on orange props, I also helped to create necklaces; where some of them featured dried oranges! In total, I may have made more than a hundred necklaces or so, all in different varieties. There were silver, gold, and bronze options, short and long sizes, and different pendants used including dried flowers and the dried oranges. In my final days, as I battled an unprecedented cold and a growing sense of bittersweetness, I used our remaining orange pendants and created necklaces for the entire team, both for Yaa Samar!, and notable team members from The Shed.
I feel very fortunate enough to have worked on a show like Gathering and to have worked with the YSDT team and to have learned and gained all that I did in that time. Apart from the experience being rooted in the industry that I want to work in and in a position that I thoroughly enjoy, the show itself and its story resonated with me in such a haunting way. To the point where I view oranges much differently now, and the meaning of gathering and what it means to come together holds a new interpretation.
Gathering played performances June 20th to June 22nd in The Griffin Theater at The Shed.