Page 29 - BusinessWest July 24, 2023

“There’s a whole journey that the audience follows, and whether you’re at the front or the back, you’ll experience the whole thing. You won’t miss out on anything, although each audience member experiences it differently.”
noted. “We come together once or twice a year, and we train together, and sometimes we present each other’s work. So it’s really a cool thing.”
Hannah Rechtschaffen, director of Greenfield Business Assoc., who recently came on board Double Edge as its team and relationships man- ager, called the organization one of the most well- organized and communicative companies she’s ever worked for.
“You don’t find that in a lot of arts organizations. Sometimes the art is taking over so much that
the business side lacks a little, and I think one of the real strengths of Double Edge, and one of the reasons that we rise as a real leader and attract people from many sectors, not just the art sector, is because, though our message is really complex, it’s also very clear because it’s being rolled out in a way that a lot of different people can relate to.”
Living History
Klein founded Double Edge in 1982 as a femi-
nist ensemble collective alongside co-founder and
emerita ensemble member Carroll Durand and sev-
eral other women, performing in six-week rentals of various Boston theaters.
In 1985, the ensemble located a parish hall in Allston, a long- unused building at the Episcopal Church of Saints Luke and Marga- ret. Following renovations, this was its home for the next 12 years. In 1994, the company located a new home in Ashfield, precipitated by the economic impossibility of paying exorbitant rent in the Bos- ton area, and by the desire to house overseas guest artists for long periods.
After driving back and forth for a couple years, the Double Edge team opened their first performance space in Ashfield — in a con- verted barn — in 1997.
In addition to its spectacles, which launched in 2002, Klein and her team have created seven performance cycles, or series of plays,
The concepts of ‘living culture’ and ‘art justice’ are integral to the training and performance work going on at Double Edge.
that have toured around the world, including:
• The Garden of Intimacy and Desire (2002-08), a cycle exploring
distinctive visions of magic realism in Jewish and Hispanic culture; • The Chagall Cycle (2010-15), which was imagined entirely
from the visual art of Marc Chagall; • The Latin American
Cycle (2015-18), which began as an effort to come to artistic terms
Double Edge
Continued on page 44
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