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Posts Tagged ‘sibiu’
Antigone Pictures
Sunday, June 10th, 2007inter/national design
Sunday, March 18th, 2007This summer is looking to be quite exciting on the travel front. I will be working outside of New York for several months on a variety of projects. I find traveling to different cities for work to be truly invigorating. The new and changing locales help to give new life to the work I am doing and cause me to think much more fundamentally about the choices I am making in the various works.
In June I will be in Rumania working on the Antigona. This one woman adaptation of the Antigone story is very powerful and I think will be quite exciting. The text is very engaging as is the space we are performing in. I have never been to Rumania so this is quite a new adventure for me. Not only are we performing in Sibiu in the chapel of a fortress, but we might be performing in a bar in Bucharest. There are a few days between these dates, so there will be some nice opportunity for sight seeing. Perhaps even a little bit of travel can be arranged depending upon how the final dates work out.
After that I return to New York to work upstate at Glimmerglass Opera, assisting lighting designer Robert Weirzel. They are doing an entire season of operatic versions of the Orpheus Myth. We are doing Gluck’s Orpheo. I studied with Robert at NYU and have assisted him a number of times in the last few years. Its always fun, so I am greatly looking forward to this.
After Cooperstown I will be traveling to Berkeley, CA to light an opera of my own. I will be lighting a production of Verdi’s Aida with the Berkeley Opera directed by my friend Yuval Sharon. Being from Berkeley it will be a wonderful chance to spend some time with family and friends as well as having the opportunity to work on this rather compelling take on an operatic classic.
After that it is a bit of a mystery. August and September have some interesting prospects although nothing yet is settled. I am in discussions about projects in Scotland and Ireland, but there are still a lot of logistics to figure out. I may have another project in the Bay Area in November, but that too is still in the process of working through logistical questions.
All this travel is certainly thrilling, but before we get there we have a very New York series of shows what with assisting at New York Theatre Workshop, lighting the New York Theatre Ballet, and lighting a play for Gotham Stage Company.
I must say, I really am enjoying 2007.
Site Specific Surprises
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007The Rumania project is an interesting thing to try and wrap my head around. I had to draft up a lightplot and send it in prior to having any artistic meetings with the director. It was a curious thing and a bit risky too as I may well have to make a lot of changes on site. Of course the nature of site specific works is that many unexpected things turn up once you arrive at the site.
I have done quite a few site specific pieces, in Theatre and Opera as well as many other miscellaneous events and art projects. Every one of these presents its own unique set of challenges and mysteries that can only be known once the show up. In a way this is true of all live performance, but is amplified many times when working in a non-traditional space.
Working out a light plot for this piece was rather simple. The space itself is formal and leans towards a certain kind of movement of the light through the space. Being a one woman show the piece allows for greater flexibility in areas of lighting that I find interesting and reduces the need for more general lighting.
The text is very interesting. Having worked on a production of Antigone last November the basic story is quite familiar to me. Working on that play I read not only the Anouilh translation I was working with, but another as well. I also went back to the original Greek to try and glean some additional meaning out of the work. This Antigone, or rather Antigona, is adapted for a single performer who serves as a narrator. All the other characters break out of this Narrator and are played by the narrator.
Who this narrator is becomes a surprise within the text and lends some interesting new dimensions to a very familiar story. It takes the best aspects of the Sopholces and the Anouilh, combining them for a contemporary audience. The piece becomes something of an archeology of performance, returning a Greek story to the roots of a single performer.
Doing multiple versions of a single story so close together makes it clear how little the plot relates to the story. The plot is a skeleton at best. It is a vague outline upon which a story is told. The story is composed of text and image and sounds and movement. The plot is merely a bullet pointed list of things that happen.
The story, quite often, does not truly come to light until the show is up on its feet, on stage, in costume and under light. Every element of a show; word, fabric, light and sound adds an aspect to the story that was not there before. As each element is added it changes the contextual environment of everything proceeding it. The text is changed by the actor even though the words are not different. The action is changed by the costume, both in how the performer’s actions shift while wearing it and how it frames the body that is speaking the words.
Works in a site specific venue have a special kind of energy about them. No matter how beautiful a piece of scenery is, there is always something false about it. Artificial or synthetic. We know that the other side of that wall is just bracing, unpainted and meant to be ignored. This is why scenery, to be most effective, must accept its inherent artificiality. It must embrace the theatricality of the situation or risk appearing untrue. In a site specific work the setting is a real and tangible thing. It allows for the most powerful of theatrical possibilities, the dramatic transformation.
A location, specific and known for a particular use suddenly becomes something wholly other. New and different. It is two thousand years ago, and yet we are here and this place is real. We become participants in an act of simultaneity by virtue of being in a too too solid place. Lighting can and does do a large part of the work in creating this transformation, but more than that, a prioi is the performer.
The performer makes us know that we are not just in the chapel of a Transylvanian castle, but we are also in ancient Greece. In the performance, these two aspects of the presence of the present collide. In that collision, something new and exciting and never before seen is born.
Preview
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
The Politics of Political Theatre
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007I mentioned yesterday that Antigone was accepted to the Sibiu Theatre Festival. Well I have been getting calls from the director every few days to weeks saying it is “more official” or “more likely” and so this morning I got another call saying it is “more official.” We talked about fees and some other logistics. It looks like 2007 is the year I start earning Euros. Thank goodness for a stable currency!
When I did Anouilh’s Antigone in November I had a great time. I think the text is a wonderful piece of early 20th century literature. It clearly speaks to the politics of major power direct conflict and the resulting socio-political effects of living in the midst of such a reality. The play is an act of Fourth Generation Warfare used to resist third generation tactics. For its time it was an amazing piece of Ontological Terrorism and a powerful piece of political theatre that spoke against the ruling fascist state.
But those days are over. One of the problems I had with the production in November, to no fault of the production itself, was that it presented the text as is and did not liberate itself from its contextual origins. That is, it spoke to a politics that is already in the past. It is impossible to get the early 20th century out of that text without altering the text itself. And there is nothing wrong with that, it is a specific kind of theatre that is greatly enjoyed by many people. I love the text and find it to be a fantastic work of literature.
This new Antigone highlights the conflicts we face in the contemporary world. It takes both the classic Greek and the French Antigone and using them as a base, builds a story directly relevant to our modern world. The male characters become decentered as Creon gets pushed to the side, Heamon is a minor character. Even Antigone herself falls back as the tale is told by a female Narrator.
The pathetic corruption engendered by power itself is the focus of this piece. How power corrupts the soul and infects a kind of emotional decrepitude into the actions of those who catch this paralyzing disease is what we watch. Nothing is inevitable as written by some divine author, nor dictated by the will of an absent god. No these are all the plain and simple and horrible actions of ordinary people. Two brothers consumed by greed, an old man launched to a position of power he never expected. Still the tragedy remains in the life of an ordinary young woman who amidst this folly and destruction is simply and earnestly trying to do good.
It is a powerful and important lesson. One that can be learned any number of times and still holds resonance. The power of simple actions is not to be discounted. That ordinary goodness, kindness and concern stand out as much as powerful grandstanding. In fact it may even be these simple acts of kindness that in the end make the world worth living in.
There is a Buddhist tale of a wealthy man who wanted to learn from the Buddha the tools of enlightenment. But this man was a true miser to not only those around him, but himself as well. He asked the Buddha what he could do. The Buddha replied that his was quite a severe case, that he must start first by practicing giving. “I can not do that” he replied, “I don’t know how.” The Buddha told him, “start by taking a gold coin in your left hand. Then, give it to your right hand.” From this simple practice he started and years later grew to be one of the kindest most selflessly giving people and a greatly compassionate human being.
The simplest acts of kindness, one gold coin, a handful of dust, can be a powerful catalyst for major beneficial social and global change. Political theatre need not have political subject matters or politicians and rulers as its main characters. A Doll’s House was for its time one of the most intensely political works written. Walking rather than driving can be an intensely political act. The butterfly’s wings are both small and simple.
International Networks, Theatre and Sleep Mode
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007I got a new phone yesterday. It was a fairly painless process. I got a better phone than I previously had for free without the hassle of dealing with rebates. I do have a new service provider and a slightly smaller plan, but the monthly bill is going to be more than a third less than it has been. Very exciting. But rather than showing you a picture of the phone, I’ll let you see a picture it took of my computer running its screensaver designed by my friend Spot:
OK, so the camera is about the same, but the service is much better, so I am happy about that.
Antigone has been accepted to the Sibiu Theatre Festival, so I should be heading to Rumania this spring. This is not the Antigone I lit last November, but another one. I am quite excited about this project. I have worked with a lot of Europeans, but have not yet worked in Europe. This version of Antigone is adapted for a single female performer. It is very exciting. It takes the best elements of the Sophocles and Anouilh and reworks them to make a truly contemporary text. The journey for Creon is a failed redemption after the fall from grace engendered by the “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” idea.
It speaks to the contemporary United States as much as any other contemporary fascist state. I think it will translate well to an audience in a former Communist/Fascist state. Of course we won’t really know until it plays, so we shall see.
A foreigner crossing Thebes on his journey
Would witness a town of order: a king that rules and a town that calmly works.
He would not see the turbulences underneath the tamed waters.Who would say that a girl is dying out of mercifulness?
In more local news, I will be working at the New York Theatre Workshop this spring. It is an assisting gig not a design position, but I get to hang out with my friend Mark for a few weeks, so that will be fun. I have only seen him a handfull of times since he graduated NYU. We worked together for a year in the dance department there. It will be nice to hang out. Um, I mean work.
I have a chiropractic appointment soon, and then off to a runthrough for Last Word. I am excited to see what this thing is looking like. We load in to St. Clement’s next week and enter previews the following Tuesday. I ended 2006 with a one person Off-Broadway play, and start 2007 with a two person Off-Broadway. It makes for a nice continuity.
