Light Cue 23

Revisiting a story I worked with less than a year ago is an interesting process. Antigona is a VERY different play than the Antigone I lit last November. Where Anouilh is concerned with the futility of action, Wanatabe explores the burden of duty. Reducing the performance to a single actor really helps to focus and condense the storytelling and illuminate the themes in the story.

The Gandhi quote from yesterday further illuminates these ideas of duty and justice as they relate to the play. The idea of non-co-operation as not only not in conflict with ones duty towards a government but is in fact an active part of ones duty towards it when the government acts in violation of its duty toward the populace.

Wanatabe’s Antigona explores the duty one has to act in the face of injustice. It is a sharp and precise text. Where Anouilh is like a clouded morning fog that slowly dissipates, Wanatabe strikes right to the heart of the matter. Visualizing these two texts, the differences becomes apparent at first hearing the words. Sharp lines and shadow beg for presence with the words of Wanatabe. It is cruel and harsh.

Wanatabe brings the text back to its ancient and classical roots while at the same time propelling it into a wholly contemporary setting. It becomes in a way timeless, or rather out of time. The Narrator exists like an archetype or a god divorced from time, like Cain marked for eternity and cursed to wander the Earth forever in debt to the God he disobeyed.

There is nothing old about the Anouilh text. It is so fully of its time that in many ways the text can not escape its historical predicament. There is no movement in the text that allows it to propel past the historical incident of its first writing. It can exist as an entertaining and fascinating exploration of an historical time, but at least in our current historical setting it does not and can not achieve escape velocity.

What is Wanatabe’s narrator? Our discussions have revolved around such postmodern notions as simultaneity. We looked at the text as a kind of zero point along a long and ever changing spectrum that extends both forward and backwards in time. Cyberpunk and Steampunk both became areas of exploration for locating the visual style of the play. A visual style that embodies this collision of temporal locations and events is critical to this text.

We are also exploring other texts like Dougals Rushkoff’s Testament wherein a classic story is revisioned into a contemporary setting, telling both at the same time.

And that of course feeds back into the idea of the Narrator as archetype. Contemporary society does not have a narrator per se. Rather we have a weakened form as the rock star or the pop musician. The storyteller translated through 20th century capitalism only to land as the commodified preacher of the 21st century.

Relocating these ideas back to the play we have discovered our narrator to be a kind Cyber-Monk. The rockstar storyteller of a retro-future running parallel to our own world. A perpetual beggar wandering the earth in debt from her lack of action and failing her duty, cursed to wander the Earth and tell her story to everyone who can listen.