Romania’s former royal family put “Dracula’s Castle” in Transylvania up for sale Monday, hoping to secure a buyer who will respect “the property and its history,” a U.S.-based investment company said.The Bran Castle, perched on a cliff near Brasov in mountainous central Romania, is a top tourist attraction because of its ties to Prince Vlad the Impaler, the warlord whose cruelty inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula.”
Posts Tagged ‘rumania’
I wasn't able to go there when I was in Rumania last month
Monday, July 2nd, 2007What I saw
Monday, June 11th, 2007This was the view from my friend’s apartment in Bucharest.
What a view to wake up to!
Who has a tune like the Blues Brothers?
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006The lightplot for Nutcracker went out today. Nice to get one project off my desk for the time being. It’s looking a little crazy right now. The desk is covered in paperwork and note pads and drafting supplies and the walls are covered in lightplots and scenic drafting. But everything will be done by December 1 when I go into tech for three shows back to back. Tech is the easy part. Once you are there you just sit back and make pretty things. The prep work is hard. Getting everything oraganized, and budgeted is like a huge puzzle that reconfigures its parameters every time you solve one aspect of it. Fast switching between four projects today, on top of a lot of errands I had to run this morning, picking up some equipment I had loaned out, seeing a venue for a show in February. I did get to see an amazing bit of lighting though, the sun reflected off an office building onto the smaller building across the street.
Two of my shows in December need a lot of cloud patterns. I practically never use cloud patterns and now here are two shows with them in one month. One is the dance piece in Williamstown. The other is Becoming Adele with Gotham Stages, the company who produced last spring’s Sake with the Haiku Geisha. I have been working primarily on the latter today. I want to get bids out to the shops by the end of the week. Thursday preferably. Of course I don’t actually have scenic drawings yet, so its a bit of a guess, but that’s the way it goes some times.
Adele is performing in The Clurman. Its a nice 99 seat house on Theatre Row. I lit Hitting the Wall there last summer for SPF. The lighting package that comes with the space is barely enough to light the stage. Our budget is not large as this piece is fairly straightforward. It has only one character, but must be firmly grounded in the time of day. The lighting is deceptive in its needs. Fortunately we are able to abstract the idea of time of day enough to make our modest budget cover all the lighting needs of the play. It will take a bit of work to make sure it has both the range of looks the script calls for and the fullness the light demands. It should work out nicely in the end.
Tonight I have a production meeting for Mad Forest produced by QED. It is one of two shows I currently have scheduled for February. I really love the play so it will be fun to work on it for the first time. Though I must say after spending so much time with Rumanians recently it feels a little odd doing an English play produced by Americans about Rumania. But so it goes.
Voicu, the owner and producer of Green Hours, a theatre company in Bucharest has expressed interest in working with me at his theatre. I might be going there with a one woman adaptation of Antigone this summer. This show is not to be confused with the Antigone I just lit for QED. We’ll see how that all turns out. The summer looks to be filled with a variety of interesting projects, coming up. A nice change from the summer of festivals that last summer was.
you can’t do that on television
Friday, August 11th, 2006Ajax falls into a chair weeping as Athena leaves him with Odysseus looking on in fear and awe. A silence filled with the dim cold flicker of a television set tuned to nothing. A campfire in hell. Athena reenters transformed. The other two begin to morph and change. Another television fades in giving a dull glow to these three now circling an unknown center. Orbiting a mystery. They transform, now become chorus speaking fluidly from one to the next; birth, growth and decay in fast forward, they try to understand the horror they see before them. Unable to believe it is true.
Scandal.
Odysseus whispers it,
drops poison in every ear.
Oh, they believe him, easy, easy,
they pass along your shame, and laugh to hear it.
Who slanders little men?
Only the great are envied,
heroes, princes,
our bastions in battle.
Even there, in the clatter and roar of war,
spite yaps at their heels.
Damn I love rehearsal! It is always amazing to me to see these words come alive in the bodies and voices of the actors. To see the movement of the piece burst forth from the mind of a director. To see a hunch on my part turn out to be an incredibly strong choice.
Ajax presents a first for me. I have used a lot of “alternative lighting” sources in my work. It is something I have a little reputation for. But, until now I had never lit a show with televisions. That thin and pale blue light. The cold flicker like the flames of hell or madness, unsettling in its dance. Working in a rehearsal with lighting is a wonderful luxury. Even if only for a day or two, having the time to play along with the actors and director finding the shape of the work is a wonderful opportunity to have.
I have always loved the look of television light on people’s faces, or flickering on a window. It is one of the few truly random lights we ever get in our otherwise highly organized world. The flicker can mesmerize us. Millions sit transfixed by this dull flickering light for hours on end every day of the week. I have never been a big fan of watching television, with the sole exception of The Simpsons. While not a fan of the programming, I do truly love the light. It is very exciting for me to light a play with televisions.
We are not lighting the whole show exclusively with televisions mind you, but they are a primary mode of illumination. Enough to keep my reputation for “alternative lighting“. But truly they operate as a strict and necessary storytelling element. This tale of madness and despair can not be told without them. They are as necessary as a gun in Romeo + Juliet.
What is truly exciting to me is that Thursday evening, one of the actors mentioned how they were interested in exploring the televisions interrupting the action, an idea supported by the director and of course one that I find very engaging. Ajax is a perfect text to explore interruptions. Structurally the play is a series of interruptions and near interruptions. The psychological way in which the text is being staged calls even more specifically for such moments. What all will be possible in the workshop setting remains to be seen. But there is a lot of potential.
For the “open rehearsal” on Sunday we are only presenting a fragment of the piece. The intent of the event on Sunday is to find producers for an eventual full production in New York. We are also taping the run through to be sent to Sibiu Rumania for a production next summer. The rehearsal is open only to guests and at specific times. If readers here would be interested in attending please contact me and I can arrange for you to view the event.
