Paul Herwig
For 36 years Paul Herwig has worked as an actor, director, and scenic designer in the U.S., Canada and France, creating interdisciplinary performance with an emphasis on visual theater, physical performance, and a reoccurring special interest in mask. He is a graduate of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981-1983).
In the 80’s Paul performed throughout rural France, at the Szkene Theater in Budapest, and at the Avignon and Edinburgh Festivals. He traveled across 25 US States, performing at a range of venues from the Painted Bride in Philadelphia to Theater Artaud in San Francisco. In the 1990’s he worked in Canada as a freelance actor and movement coach for many Toronto theaters. Paul re-located to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1998, and along with dance artist Jennifer Ilse co-founded Off-Leash Area, with whom he has co-created 27 original productions. He has received numerous regional individual artist grants and recognitions.
My primary focus is creating small-scale performance works with large-scale designs for intimate audiences. I am a self-taught designer. My design work has a DIY magic, a “made before your eyes” quality, where the hand of the artist is always present, never hidden. I strive to be innovative in how I use materials, and improvise with what’s laying around in the workshop. My designs transform and develop throughout a performance, manipulated by the performers. I conduct both systematic and intuitive research, drawing from science, art history, and nature. I often focus on a central character who resides in a marginalized place in society – a combat veteran, an immigrant child, a failed artist, a young woman suffering the onset of mental illness – who struggles, transforms, and perseveres while seeking to achieve growth and fulfillment in the face of personal and societal barriers. I build an experiential visual journey around this character that is uniquely presented, and universally recognizable. I create an intensely compressed emotional space between artist and audience, which opens unique performative dimensions where a naturalistic presentation of everyday reality and the normal passage of time gives way to an out of body experience, which many audiences have described as otherworldly, and even spiritual.
I grew up in a small town near the edge of the Great Plains. I have low vision, and always looked very closely at things. I imagine worlds, and then imagine me as a character that inhabits them. Then I build that world, and spend some time there.
Clips from “Afterwind” (2017), by Off-Leash Area. Performers in view: Jesse Neuman Peterson, Jennifer Ilse, Karoi Kenmotsu, Darrius Strong, Paul Herwig, Scenic Designer: Paul Herwig
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