Martin Denton wrote a very nice review for Madness of Day. This show is certainly not everyones cup of tea, but for those who like this sort of thing, it really is quite a wonderful show.
Posts Tagged ‘madness of day’
Madness Review
Monday, March 10th, 2008Madness of Day Opens
Friday, March 7th, 2008Madness of Day opens tonight.
This show contains the longest light cue I have ever written (2 hours) and the fewest cues of any play (4) I have designed.
Fair Trade
Saturday, October 21st, 2006Nothing, it seems, is ever certain in the land of freelance design. Madness of Day was supposed to open mid-November and has been postponed until the Spring. That show, which was to go on with the support of SVA, has had to reschedule due to problems with the venue, currently under renovation, not being ready in time for the originally scheduled performance dates. So the Spring it is. However, I have been asked to light a show, around the same time, that is happening at FIT. So one show at a TLA educational facility for another. Funny how things work out like that!
This new show is interesting. Set in St. Thomas in the late 19th/early 20th Century addressing events surrounding the Coal-Carriers Revolt of 1892, it is a play with music. Not quite a musical, but certainly not a straight play either. The action centers around Queen Coziah who was instrumental in the revolt. The lighting inventory at the space is very limited and I have to receive a budget, so I do not yet know what this thing will look like.
This play is particularly interesting to me now as I have recently moved to a predominantly West Indian Neighborhood. Aside from a local connection, the play looks to be a fun project to work on although it will only play for two days. What interests me a lot is the way in which the dialog, music and dance all intersect. The style feels derived from the musical theatre genre, yet the song and dance is wholly organic within the piece. It in no way feels forced, a fault I often find with musicals. Staging could always change that, but on the page it reads very well. And the dance elements are equally well integrated.
On another dance note, it looks like I might be lighting a dance show in Massachusetts in December. There are some details yet to be worked out, so it is not definite, but it would be fun to get out of New York for a bit. I have not worked outside New York City since February, when I assisted on an Opera in Chicago. This January I will be assisting on an Opera in Norfolk, VA where I worked two years ago. Its a great little town, with an amazing organic coffee shop that I can not wait to go back to. Oh, and this fantastic little breakfast place that serves up a mean plate of grits.
One of my favorite things about working in other cities is getting to experience the locality for a short time. Spending a week or two in another town and finding little local treats is a fantastic experience. Becoming a “regular” for a week and building little friendships with the coffee shop staff and so forth. Finding great music stores or just wandering unfamiliar streets. That, as much as the work itself, can be infinitely enjoyable.
Moving to a new neighborhood can be a lot like those different towns. Especially in New York City, where each neighborhood can be so radically different from one another. I recently moved from one Caribbean neighborhood (Washington Heights) to another (Flatbush). Yet the differences are striking. English and French are the dominant languages here rather than Spanish. The foods are very different too. There is a strong Indian and African influence in the food and culture as opposed to Spanish.
But it is still New York. Getting out of the city and experiencing these other places is important to my work. Living around and working with people from different places and backgrounds helps to expand my understanding of humanity as a whole and consequently improves my ability to read and interpret a text for the stage. I can not imagine anything more important for an artist than travel. I feel it is important as a Human Being in general, but truly essential to the life of art.
The Negation of Self
Sunday, October 1st, 2006Wow! I saw a reading/rehearsal for Madness of Day and it truly blew me away. I really enjoy the text and I find it to be an amazing piece of literature and (obliquely) philosophical discourse. But I was honestly skeptical that it would work as a stage piece. I was optimistic, but skeptical. But skeptic no longer. The text moves beautifully through time as a dramatic work. Layers of meaning and nuance that simply do not exist on the printed page, became alive and filled with significance as the actor lunged towards the brink of madness and came back. Transformed.
We are running into some logistical issues as the piece is being sponsored, in part, by SVA. The space we were planning on performing in is undergoing contractual negotiations and may not be available to us for the previously scheduled time slot, so the dates may be pushed back to the Spring. That may in the end be best as late November is a tricky time to build momentum for an small Off-Broadway show, what with all the various holidays and so forth late in the calendar year.
The text of Madness of Day deals almost entirely with identity and the meaning and significance of Self. Yet that self is so elusive. It is never there, the place of self is a gravitational locus with no mass. It is a mystery around which various physical and psychological objects orbit, but does not itself exist in any tangible sense. They are, as we discussed after the reading, “fragmented landscapes across which consciousness travels.”
It is very clear that the text falls into the deconstructive tradition that results in the decentering of the Subject. The subsequent reconstruction finds the Subject to be almost a ghost in its intangible construction. We know all the elements that compose it, yet it can not be formed into a coherent story or narrative. That narrative of Self is found to be a fiction. A Fiction held up by the necessities of social negotiation. The text calls into question the very nature of Self.
These questions become imperative in an age when classic, modern and post-modern notions of Self are all inadequate to describe the phenomenon of identity. What is the “Self” in a time of social networking technologies where aspects of self are distributed across the globe on various computer servers in numerous guises. Is the physical self more real than the MySpace self? Is the consciousness inside the mind more real than the streaming links in del.icio.us? The whole notion of the real is called into question on a daily basis. When video games often look more “real” than the images we see of war on the news, which is more real? And what of the “soldier” in the game versus the soldier in the war? Are those quotation marks perhaps misplaced? What is the value of human life when a government leader asks for permission to hold potential innocents in secret prisons and torture them for information, all in the name of “Freedom”? Is Slavery really Freedom? What is the truth?
These are the questions Blanchot asks in Madness of Day. These questions are central and essential to our lives today. Without a knowledge of self we have no way of judging actions. Without that ability to judge actions, all becomes equal. It becomes acceptable to begin wars under illegal and fraudulent terms in order to accrue wealth and power because the purpose of power, is power. And power can only exist when it is given. And we give it away willingly every time we do not inquire into our own actions, our own Self. Each time we fail to explore our Self and truly Know the why and wherefore of our actions we cede power to those who do know what they want. Power.
Amid the full madness of the day we are subjected to a total and direct knowledge of Self. It is not possible to form a narrative from that. A single story can not be constructed from that knowing. Yet those who would take all the power they can must by necessity believe in that singular story, for power can only exist as a singularity. It fails when confronted with multiplicity. This is why China could never allow a thousand flowers to bloom. The multivalent constructs of identity become too much for Power to handle. Nuance, subtlety and complexity cannot be tolerated.
Perhaps, in the end, the social networking tools that at one level allow the watchers to seek out and easily find vast quantities of information about us will also be the final resistance to Power. Why else are totalitarian regimes so afraid of blogging? It not only allows for the distribution and dissemination of information, but it fragments the Self and allows the Ideational Self to continue its direct social influence even after the Physical Self has been tortured into submission.
This is the reality of the Day found in Madness.
Sorry I have not been around, I was busy deconstructing my reality
Monday, September 11th, 2006My my my has it been a busy few days! The Children is gearing up. I have been in rehearsals the last few nights and I sure do like what I am seeing. The show is deceptive in its complexity. On reading it, one certainly gets a sense of the complexity, but it is only when it is on its feet and we work through the scene transitions that the true complexity comes about. There are a lot of elements. There are a lot of locations. The scenery has been designed with the minimum needed to tell the story. A few simple pieces that reconfigure in many different configurations. Still it is quite complex.
The story is taken from a 1980 horror film. The writers have kept the same sense of pacing, with the exception of the addition of the songs, and even there some of them keep that timing. But filmic timing and stage timing are two very different things. It is an interesting conceptual challenge to try and maintain the sense of a video crossfade or a cut followed by a tracking shot on a stage. The two are very different things. Once again proving that lighting and video are two highly distinct mediums, even though they both deal with the manipulation of photons.
It has been an interesting challenge all around to get at the right tone for this piece. Not just in terms of design, but in staging and acting as well. It is very easy for the play to fall into cartoonish caricature. There are times for that, but a balance must be struck with that on the one hand and the humanity of the people on the other. It is quite the group effort to make this work. One must be willing and able to set aside ego and put ones self in service of the text. Not the script, the text.
Design appears to me more and more a service industry. The job of the designer is to serve the text. In no way do I mean to slavishly adhere to every minutia the playwright puts in the script. For they are part of the service industry as well. In fact the script is not the text. It is a text, but not the final text that is placed in front of an audience. The ‘text’ as I mean it is often called ‘the production.’ But that term has economic connotations that I wish to avoid for the moment.
When an audience comes to a theatre they come to read a text. They come to read the text aurally and visually. The text is comprised of sound and word, of form and fabric, of light and shadow. The text is incomplete without the audience for only then can it enter into dialog with experience. The experience of the creators is of course intimately woven into every aspect of the text. But it is experience as terminus. A kind of death in order to allow for rebirth. In the experience of the audience, the text becomes whole and is able to negotiate the world. The text become a point of birth. A beginning. An origin. And so we return and begin again.
The play begins to deconstruct itself almost from the very beginning. It both plays to and against the stereotypes of its genre. It is aware of Scream but sidesteps the trap of excessive irony. It accepts the sincerity of the original film, but allows the absurdity of that sincerity to bleed through.
And it is fun.
The fun is important as I gear up for a Fall comprised of rather dark material. In October I will be lighting Windows a new play written and directed by Sylvia Bofill. Produced by INTAR at The Workshop Theatre the play follows three generations of Puerto Rican women through the mind of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It is a powerful meditation on loss, sadness and regret.
In November, I will be lighting a production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone followed by an adaptation of Maurice Blanchot’s Madness of Day.
December will find me lighting Becoming Adele for Gotham Stages the producers of last spring’s Sake with the Haiku Geisha. And then the fun returns with The Nutcracker. If you have young children, I highly recommend this show. New York Theatre Ballet puts on one of the best children’s shows I have seen.
There are a few other things in the works that I will of course keep everyone updated on as the time approaches. So, there is a bit of a preview of what I am up to this Fall. I am excited about all of these projects and looking forward to the rest of this year.
Accidental Research
Friday, September 1st, 2006There was no signer, by right, before the Declaration [of Independence], which itself remains the producer and guarantor of its own signature . . . The self rises forth here or extends credit to itself, in a single “coup de force,” which is also a stroke of writing, as the right to writing. The “coup de force” makes right , founds right or law, gives right, brings the law to the light of day, gives both birth and day to the law. Brings the law to the light of day, gives both birth and day to the law: read The Madness of Day by Maurice Blanchot.
-Jacques Derrida, Negotiations
I am working on an adaptation of Maurice Blanchot’s Madness of Day. We will open in late November. The original text is a stream of consciousness narrative spoken by a single subject and translates well to a one man dramatic monologue. The work is a deconstructive text in the guise of a narrative monologue. The Subject is slippery, like memory, and constantly falls in on itself exposing its lack of foundation.
I picked up a copy of of Derrida’s Negotiations to do a bit of reading on politically minded deconstructive texts. The idea was general and largely fell into a category of interest that I hold independent of any projects I may be working on. So I get to his reading of the American Declaration of Independence and there I discover his reference to Blanchot, and the precise text we are working with on with this project. It was a wonderful bit of coincidence to have my subway reading turn into a direct piece of research that set me off thinking about the visual language of the play in a number of simultaneous directions.
Taking a clinical setting and applying a Noir aesthetic has so far been a lot of faith on my part. I felt the impulse was right on a gut level from my reading of the text, but could not fully understand it. I now find that directorial impulse becoming clearer in my mind. The world of Noir often has within it issues of mixed or hidden identity. Sometimes this is intentional and sometimes it is a matter of memory loss. Either way, the notion of fixed identity and a solid past are called into question.
Just as the Declaration of Independence creates the United States of America through the written act of signing the document, so too does the ontological experience of the creation of Self occur through the speech act of “I.” Be it verbal or non-verbal, that primal speech act is the creation of Self and does, in the final analysis, determine this particular instance of a mutable identity. For speech need not be merely aural, but can and often is kinetic or visual. The act of cooking is a kind of speech act and exists as much in the combination of food items with heat as it does in the aroma created thereby. The two can not be extracted from one another.
The memory of torture, now fever, can not be extracted from this ever changing self. Rather the Self exists as a continually evolving Mash-Up experience, unable to extract itself from an equally mutable contextual situation. Like the Noir genre and its ever changing broken light revealing a face, now silhouette, now a single hand. The Self, as contextually determined through its constant negotiation with Shadow, and Shadow’s corollary, Light.
“I see this day, and outside it there is nothing.” The perpetual mutability of Self is inescapable. One can alter environment and context but the Self is immutable only in its constant presence. A presence of change. “When [The Law] had recognized my right to be everywhere, it meant I had no place anywhere.” The supreme act of creating a Subject is always already an Objectification of the self. Just as the State comes into to being through the act of the Signature, so too does the Subject become Object through its own recognition of Selfhood.
A bifurcation of the self occurs the moment one becomes authentically autonomous as the Self becomes at once an object of inquiry. One thinks of Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly as a kind of nihilistic realization of this event. Yet, this moment is not static, but rather one stage of an organic process of death and rebirth that echos throughout consciousness. “I had allowed myself to be locked up. Temporarily, they told me.” One might find these confines in Language perhaps, “One became the other. The words spoke by themselves.” Or maybe light, “That was the truth: the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all reason; it assailed me irrationally, without control, without purpose.”
It’s French for Junk Food
Sunday, August 20th, 2006James wants more junk food. Well, theatre as junk food. Theatre that is so bad it’s good. The perfect B-Movie. Or B-Play. There are plenty of B-Movies. From the reports I have heard thus far Snakes on a Plane is just that. I am going to to see it next week with my girlfriend and am very much looking forward to it. But what about theater as junk food.
James got me thinking about this and I agree, there is not enough theater as junk food. It does make me pleased then to be working on The Children, a musical based on a 1980 zombie flick. The Phaedra adaptation I lit for the fringe might also fall into this category.
Both of these plays in their own way are ultimately too smart to be pure junk food. Rather they employ the techniques of entertainment junk food to make a broader point. Ok, The Children is really just a fun Zombie flick. A really fun zombie flick. No really.
It is interesting to me thinking about these plays in relationship to a piece of deconstructive literature that we are adapting to the stage, The Madness of Day. There are no direct links between these pieces. Both the visual and textual narrative styles are as different as one could get. Yet in a way they still exist as necessary eruptions within our contemporary socio-political framework. La Femme est Morte and Madness of Day both critique a war culture that sees violence and aggression as the proper means of achieving one’s goals. The former falling firmly in the American theatrical deconstructive tradition of Charles Mee, while the latter is quite strongly French. As a result, one exists directly on the physical plane while the other lives in the realm of the psychological.
I spoke a while back about having to jump from project to project as a freelance designer. It makes for an interesting series of exchanges as I discuss one text and find myself thinking of another, making connections between them that I would not come up with without these works.
Lighting design operates at an almost stream of consciousness level. The projects slide one into the next and cross-pollinate in a most wonderful way. Working through a zombie flick can provide insights into French deconstructive texts. Some of this is a matter of sleight of mind, interrupting a train of thought with a meeting about another project and resulting in a more satisfying solution to the first problem than would have been achieved through direct effort.
This is how over thinking can destroy a work. The research must be done so it can be abandoned. Trusting in your knowledge of a text and allowing the visual dramaturgy to manifest unfettered by intellectualization is a difficult task. But it is one that must be achieved for a work to be successful. The mind-state might be said to be akin to no-thought in its purity and grounded practicality. One must not “think” so much as one must “act.” In so doing one can truly and purely create.
Sitting at a tech table writing light cues feels to me like sitting in a zendo breathing. There is a wonderful calm that settles in once I sit down and put my headset on. “Group one at full” and we fall into no-thought.
Parabolic Hyperbole and Minimal Lyricism
Thursday, June 29th, 2006In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem.
–Aristotle, The Poetics
One gets the sense reading Ajax that Sophocles was trying to break free from the conventions of the Dramatic Literature of his time through the bifurcation of the story he was telling. Ajax at once falls too neatly into two different sections for a dramatist as skilled as Sophocles to not be doing this intentionally. Further, the work feels like a mirror, or perhaps a parabola, extending infinitely in either direction from the event of the death of Ajax.
The death of Ajax is like a node where all the events from the first half flow to and all the events of the second half derive from. Blanchot does everything Sophocles wishes he could do. Yet in a way Sophocles does attain to this degree of effort. Ajax’s death is marked by the words of farewell a lover might give their beloved. He bids farewell to the sun and the earth, his father and his wife after asking forgiveness and pity from Zeus and the Furies. It is a ceremonial farewell spoken with words held as in religious ceremony, only to end the speech with a mildly ironic turn of phrase, “These are Ajax’ last words on earth: whatever else I say only the Dead will hear.”
Yet if we remember, we are but phantoms, “we’re counterfeits, we mortals, we’re shadows, blown on the wind.” Even in the certain actions of Sophocles we are uncertain, for we are but shadows. The madness of Ajax that brought us to this place of dramatic revelation could be continuing still. All action is become suspect. We know no more than Blanchot’s narrator if the ground we stand upon be true. The uncertainty of life continues to the uncertainty of death. The Hero turned base scoundrel and madman is persecuted by his own mind in life only to find exoneration and vindication in death. His worst enemy in life becomes his savior in death.
Unlike Blanchot’s Madness of Day where the destination is of far less importance than the journey, or Antigone where we watch two unwavering characters act out a battle of will, Ajax takes us on a journey that can only lead to despair and yet we do not. We can not despair. For Ajax was not a hero until vindicated in death. In life his deeds of the utmost bravery were ignored because of the clever words of Odysseus. His vengeful anger at this oversight triggered a madness that reduced him to little more than a common criminal. His suicide was neither noble nor redemptive. It was a cowardly act perpetrated by a man cornered in desperation. At the moment of his death he was no hero. He was the opposite of hero. He was in fact the most miserable character that could possibly be.
The very force of his fall was also cause for his restoration and redemption. His plight so extreme, he could only be raised to the highest of heights allowable to a mortal man. He is the opposite of Blanchot’s narrator, who through his too human suffering can go nowhere but back to where he began. Another aspect of this tension is alluded to by George. It is the play between poetry and prose, between literality and metaphor, madness and clarity that gives power to these works.
Ajax appears to achieve escape velocity from his prescribed fate and arrives in death a Hero. In mirroring his fall from grace, by showing us the opposite action in the second half of the play we are constantly reminded of the fall as we watch the ascent. In this way the two events, that lie upon a temporal spectrum, are compressed into a single experiential moment. Life and death and rebirth exist at one and the same time. We are able to see the Hero walk across the stage only after his mortal self has been taken from our world. Ajax is become immortal as Blanchot’s narrator becomes eternal. All of time and experience are compressed into this single moment, and for that instant, we too are forever.
