Vance Garrett

“A shrine of pillar candles and pictures of lost revolutionaries sits in one corner of the room. The trail of roses leads the men upstairs into the big room. We discover an unfamiliar cavernous hall. Glimpses of bars, ropes, candles, and petals appear in the distance, but a scene at the very center of the room illuminates the whole space…For about one hour, we see one gorgeous, impeccably dressed man dancing the tango, alone. He uses prison bars as his partner…”

This is just one of the scenes in Vance Garrett’s remarkably thorough treatment for the Black Party. The 13-page document also describes walls plastered with revolutionary paraphernalia and ticked with the chalk marks of a prisoner tracking his cell time. And of nuns muttering a blessing to the Virgin Mary -- probably begging her for forgiveness -- as each Black Party attendant checks his belongings at the door.

Garrett has been working for The Saint at Large since 2005, with increasing responsibility for the look and feel of the Black Party. Today he is its director and scenarist -- this year mixing Argentine culture, the political upheavals of the Infamous Decade, leather and bondage, and high camp into one coherent, stimulating, storytelling dance party.

Creative Genesis
Prior to joining The Saint at Large, Garrett was active in publicity, performance, and nightlife, so he taps into many fonts to determine a Black Party theme.

Choosing that theme is a running internal dialogue, he says. “Even today I was thinking about what could happen next year. It’s intoxicating to look ahead.” Yet making the final decision “comes much later than people would realize. You could argue that we’re still not there with this one, as we’re still setting up the performers and stages. We may not name what’s going to happen until it’s happening.”

Even so, Garrett sounds deeply satisfied with this year’s alluring Weimar-tango-muscle-coup amalgam. “We nailed the zeitgeist,” he says.

Behind Nailing the Zeitgeist
Garrett has extensive experience in theater: Among other achievements, he earned a certificate in music theater at Northwestern, shared a professional debut with Jennifer Hudson in Big River, and scored considerable work in aerial acrobatics.

That background begins to explain the synthesis of themes in this year’s Black Party. (It also gets at Garrett’s physique. Imagine Spider-Man’s older, Greco-Roman wrestler brother. Gratuitous.) Recalling his performance in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Garrett recognized that that play “holds ideas that are relevant to me now.”

He continues: “We toyed around with the idea of Weimar Germany; that’s a world that houses a lot of the characters and performers we work with year in and year out. But that feels beaten to death. If you move it to Argentina -- because at the end of the day this is a work of fiction -- we got to play around with [themes of political unrest and cultural subversion] differently. And maybe it’s sexier to go south of the equator, which corresponds with the Black Party’s history of celebrating the vernal equinox.”

From Idea to Execution
This year’s 13-page treatment is common, Garrett says. “I write all the time. The treatment tells all the designers what’s happening, and when you’re telling a story that’s 18 hours long, 13 pages almost seems too short.”  

While Garrett gets to tap the designers with whom he’d like to realize his treatments, much of this talent is ostensibly in-house. “A lot of these guys have been here as long as I’ve been here,” and Garrett credits Black Party producer Stephen Pevner for identifying that talent. Garrett collaborates with each of them, from the video editor who cuts the Black Party trailer to costume designers and the ambient lighting expert.

Translating the treatment into three dimensions isn’t onerous. “I would argue that the specificity of what I ask of the designers doesn’t inhibit them at all,” Garrett says. He then invokes Samuel Beckett, noting, “To do anything possible leaves you with nothing. If you have to be incredibly specific about everything a performer is doing, it feels uncomfortable at first -- but the performer learns that there’s so much freedom within those boundaries.”