The 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.
