Antigone first premiered in Sibiu, Romania at the Cisnadioara fortress as a site specific work. This adaptation
of Antigone was conceived to be performed by a single female actor. The text was translated from Watanabe's Spanish
poem into English and Turkish. A single woman, the Narrator, inhabited all the roles in the play morphing from Narrator to
Creon to Tireseas to Antigone herself.
By reducing the number of actors on stage to one, Watanabe's text allows the emotional power dynamics to play out in a strong
and direct way. Each character is exposed in a way that is not familiar to other versions of this story. Standing alone
and solitary, every character must confront their own motives, their own desires and their own needs. While there are nods
to other versions of the Antigone story, like the Anouilh, this version is wholly its own, finding new discursive paths to
traverse on the road to authentic understanding.
Dramatically, we were interested in exploring the idea of the storyteller archetype. The Narrator became for us a kind of
retro-future Mother Courage character traversing time and space to tell her story in the midst of war. Every war. Watanabe
draws the narrator as a kind of ancient cum modern Cain, cursed to wander the Earth and tell her story to all who will listen.
Time became for us a very important element of the storytelling. The Narrator was a character who traveled through time,
forwards and back, existing simultaneously in numerous places telling and retelling the same story. These notions of simultaneity
were embodied in the single costume that became cape, hood, mask and armor depending upon the need.
Shadows took on an important role in the visual storytelling, allowing the narrator to be one and many at the same time.
By playing with the shadows and causing them to move and dance, the Narrator interacted with the many characters in the play
and was able to lend the feeling of a full stage of performers while being only one person.
The space itself embodied these notions of simultaneity. A 13th century Orthodox chapel in a fortress in the Transylvanian
mountains, the walls on the far side from the performances space were covered with plaques marking the deaths of soldiers
who died in World War One. Outside the chapel were stone walls with openings for archers to fend off the attacking hordes.
Inside we performed, a single woman, in a transformative costume that evoked at once ancient Greece, a cyberpunk future and
everything in between.
More a staged dramatic poem than a traditional theatre piece we embraced a minimalist aesthetic for the visual storytelling.
Lighting was ascribed to the various characters and would shift and recombine as the characters on stage would change and
recombine. The shadows would move and shift across the walls. We maintained a high contrast in the feel with powerful highlights
and deep shadows.
The color palette was tightly contained so as to focus more strongly on the shifting angles and shadows of the lighting.
Through a careful rendering of the light we were able to make the space vast and confined, deep and wide, short and tall.
All Photography courtesy Brian Dilg
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