Vivian Girls closes in on Kickstarter goal

With less than two weeks left in her latest Kickstarter campaign, Stacy Sims is especially pleased by the number of strangers who have helped fund a New York workshop of her Cincinnati-born play with music, The Vivian Girls. It shows that in a social-media influenced world, the creative works in one city can transcend borders and, she hopes, build a lasting piece of art.

What started as a New York museum visit has become collaborative play with music for Sims, a Cincinnati artist/teacher/dancer/entrepreneur/program director who defies easy categorization. She’s working with composer Peter Adams and choreographer Heather Britt to create The Vivian Girls, an exploration of how people – in particular teen girls -- create identity, as told through adolescent figures first sketched by folk artist Henry Darger.

This month, Kickstarter featured The Vivian Girls as a “Project of the Day,” which was a special boost to more than Sims’ morale. “It is a huge deal because of how many awesome international projects are on there all the time,” she says. “Financially, we got about an $800 bump that day, and the cool thing is that we don't know many of our backers this time.”

So far, she’s nearly three years into the process, which took shape after hearing Adams’ work under Britt’s choreography for the Cincinnati Ballet. An initial fundraising campaign on Kickstarter in 2010 led to initial work on the project. “Forty-nine backers funded the first Kickstarter project we did,” Sims says. With less than $3,500, the trio ran a Cincinnati workshop of the first act, including a week of CCM workshops and paid actors, stage managers and more.

The new campaign’s goal of $4,500 provides for taking the production to the American Folk Art Museum, where Sims first got the idea. The Museum’s Darger Study Center has offered to host a week of rehearsals as well as a May 12 work-in-progress performance.

While she talks Kickstarter and logistics, Sims also continues to work with her collaborators on shaping the play into a creatively satisfying whole. “We are all challenging our ideas and trying to let the work tell us what it should be,” she says.

In the beginning, she saw the story unfold in static scenes, much like Darger’s collages themselves. “Making them blend together in movement and story is a different trick,” she says. “And I am so grateful to the collaborators for helping me see what I cannot and making the VIVIAN GIRLS world more full and vibrant.”

By Elissa Yancey
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