The itinerary
The “montage” … long tech nights
DIRECTOR’s NOTE: Sometime in the early 90s, I had my first computer and Internet access. That was a time when online interaction with other people filled the everyday emptiness I experienced. Bonds created during that time linger today, some over the Internet and others have transcended to a face-to-face territory. I left Asunción and moved to New York as a Fulbright scholar 3 years ago, and it was the Internet that allowed me to be close to my family and loved ones through a tiny camera. We celebrate birthdays, mother’s day, father’s day, Easter, Christmas, New year and every other possible Holiday, joining our tables with a Webcam: the long table in Asunción and our small one in New York. These very personal experiences are only the surface of what inspired me to conceive the idea of a theater piece about the Net. Underneath that surface, there’s a recurring concept in most of my artistic creations … Loneliness. The question is how can loneliness exist within a subject about massive, globalized and absolute communication? For me, communication and loneliness are absolutely attached and come hand-in-hand. It’s the same loneliness that makes us seek for the answers where there’s only silence, and companionship in the most unexpected places.
MY mETHOD …
“Nothing”, as a starting point is just a way to put it. Yes, it’s true, there was never a pre-conceived script; but I did start out of a specific six months research about the subject. Almost paradoxically, once again out of loneliness I decided that a project about this particular topic demanded to be created jointly, in collaboration. Internet is so diverse, it has so many faces that I didn’t think it was adequate to imprint my personal vision alone. At the same time, to be surrounded by colleagues working in New York, gave me the idea to bring them onboard, especially the ones who are used to a multidisciplinary collaboration and creation of their own work beyond conventional theater. That’s how my method was born:
COLLABORATIVE TABLE NEW YORK: 6 multidisciplinary artists from New York’s current theater scene, with whom I’ve worked 6 months creating the original concept for this play. Individual meetings, discussion of concepts first to process everything later getting to my own conclusions. All of them were committed to this project, passionate about the subject and above all intrigued for what it meant to work on something for Paraguay.
COLLABORATIVE TABLE PARAGUAY: 7 Paraguayan artists representing different artistic disciplines, Music, Film, Visual Art, Web Design, Dance, literature and also Sociology. They visited the rehearsal room once a week to witness the work in process, the handcrafted construction and the creation as a puzzle. Critiques and opinions from this table were fundamental in this collaboration process.
CREATIVE TEAM AND DESIGNERS: Set, scenery, props, costume, music, lights, audiovisuals. Artists who worked on the show since the very first week in Asunción. I didn’t think it was appropriate to call the designers to work based upon concrete ideas fully underway. Instead, I thought convenient to make them part of the creative process as the play was being created. One discipline informing and completing the other, a “net”work in which everybody contributes on the construction of a piece from beginning to end.
THE CAST: The raw material. This is where everything initiates. I had decided to call for virtual auditions, first because of logistic needs, but essentially because the main theme (Internet) demanded a virtual experience from point zero. We started creating 3 times a week for 2 weeks (“creative warm-up”) until it was transformed into an intensive daily work. It wasn’t easy. There were fantastic creative runs when the majority of the piece was created in a short amount of time and there were other not so good runs (plateaus) when we were stuck. It was an unconventional way of creating theater. The transformation of literal actions involving a computer and virtual reality into abstraction, and the “literalization” of abstract concepts into every day situations were two of the biggest goals for every rehearsal. Actually, more than “rehearsal”, I should refer to it as the creation process. Rehearsal, as we normally define it, didn’t happen until two weeks prior to opening night (when we had an actual play to rehearse). Another challenge was the search for the actors’ creative side, beyond their mere performance side. Learning specific lines, repeating those lines, blocking scenes and costume parades were not enough for this project. I’ve asked them to bring more things to the table, I’ve asked for creativity, and above all I’ve asked for their trust to put themselves blindly in my hands.
PRODUCTION TEAM: pre-production started in New York. The line work of a different Executive Production was established from the very beginning, in agreement with the professional view required and often lacking in our theater. Specific and clear roles and objectives carefully assigned made this experience much more effective.
Joining all these teams together I gathered more than 30 people, a very uncommon number in the production of a theater piece. This was a very important challenge for me: to absorb, chew, accept, reject, 30 different points of view only to come to my own conclusions later. It was easy when everybody agreed on something positively or negatively; but extremely hard when dissenting opinions ruled. What to do with that? I had to find different answers to this question. Mostly I carefully considered each collaborator’s backgrounds and artistic discipline in order to decide which direction to take according to the dialogue that these ideas had with my initial concept of the whole.
The play ….
I had two existential dilemmas. On one side, the action of “being” online (Internet) is an intimate, personal, still, silent event …. Absolutely NONTHEATRICAL.
On the other side, if the result of creating a play about the Internet only would have meant to watch a scene with an actor writing on a laptop on stage …. It wouldn’t worth the effort. Theater must go beyond reality. Realism, today, is not enough for theater. There’s a thin line between reality and what’s beyond it that I intended to cross with this play. Being created as a puzzle, it ended up being a “virtual” experience of what an Internet navigation should looked like on a stage and in front of an audience that should be willing to navigate beyond reality as well. There isn’t one real technological object on stage in this production. According to props design, laptops, computer desktop, cell phones and webcams are made of cardboard.
For the same reason as above, reality (a conventional real computer) wasn’t enough. Audiovisuals were also worked from the literal to the abstract, conceptualizing out of the visualization (Art Director) as another element transporting us to a different level of reality.
The content ….
Even though the play started in the Internet, about the Internet and using the Internet, it ended with very human situations, emerging once again feelings like: loneliness, the need to communicate in order to exist, the filling of our silence somehow and our own heartbeats. If the human being wanted to avoid loneliness before the time of the machines and did the same thing right after time of the machines: us, human beings will continue the same timeless search. Loneliness embraces more than just the word, it has many different meanings and readings, individual loneliness, collective loneliness, accompanied loneliness, mute, quiet, loneliness.
The stage ….
The idea to bring the PANOPTICON to the stage (a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, allowing an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to know whether they are being watched) started from the COLLABORATIVE TABLE NEW YORK and was re-interpreted by the scenic designer according to the space we had. The situation of inhabiting each of our own little spaces, physically and emotionally reduced (cubicles/cells), the impossibility of seeing each other, sharing without knowing the same search, everything in front of the attentive sight of the “tower”, the eyewitness of it all (the audience). Chairs are also key elements in this production, differentiating Ma Elena’s chair even more, being gray and “memories” from a lifetime hanging all around it.
The characters ….
Characters in this play exist and also don’t exist. I’ve created a thin line between reality and fiction where the actors share their own experiences, feelings and situations as regular people (actors = not regular people) but taken to fictional territory because they happen to be on a stage.
The title ….
It was born the night before printing playbills and posters. I’ve handled a thousand options, none of them seemed to fit. I didn’t want any technological/virtual connotation, because the piece had already extended itself way beyond the Internet. Bordering on madness and writing stupid titles on, Darío Cardona ( Collaborative Table Paraguay) suggested the medical definition of “arrhythmia”: An irregularity in the force or rhythm of the heartbeat. Would it be a cliché to say that my heart started beating faster? It still wasn’t enough and the rest, “So silence is not so loud” came out of one of the play’s “Key Speeches” closing the cycle of heart beats and communication, and the play’s own structure in which its rhythm goes up and down from one scene to the next. 
Puzzle creation. The pieces in chronological order:
KEY SPEECHES
CONCEPT: I’m interested in repetition, experimenting with text putting the same words in different situations with different voices. I wrote 3 key speeches that are repeated by the actors throughout the play, not only in words but also in Sign Language: “When everybody leaves, there’s nothing, too much silence. Have you ever felt so lonely, that your inner voice just gets louder and louder?”, “Sometimes I pretend I’m surrounded by a lot of people. They all know me and I know everybody, so silence is not so loud. Sometimes I pretend I’m with somebody”, “Smoke signals, signs, vital signs, heartbeats, once again. You hear me? Once again. Information era, digital era, computer age, space age, knowledge era, once again, the feelings age, under the skin era. Once again. Do you understand?”
PENSADOR + 21 GRAMOS
THE THINKER + 21 GRAMS (laptops choreography)
CONCEPTS: machine and gestures / The simple LITERAL gesture and the abstract and emotional interpretation of that gesture and-or the technological and virtual event /The machine collapses, shuts down, restarts and continues / Communication, the need to communicate through different channels, the spoken language and other types of language / The mix between Hot and Cold mediums of communication (McLuhan)
3N1 (relationships)
CONCEPTS: communication, the lack of / couples, different roles, different sides / virtual communication tools transported to a “face to face” level where reality and virtuality are mistaken, mixed and intertwined / audio and image break downs. 3N1 is divided in 4 segments: Past pluperfect, Past, Present and The End.
HISTORIA DE LA TECNOLOGÍA
THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY
CONCEPTS: simple as it sounds, the chronological history of how technology has evolved throughout these years (oriented to communication, image, sound, computer, the Internet) This sequence was created based on the actors’ own experiences, taking their own words, tone, shapes and even order in which things were told.
SOLEDADES: SOLEDAD LATIDOS/SOLEDAD INTERRUMPIDA/SOLEDAD MUDA SOLITUDES: HEARTBEATS SOLITUDE-LONELINESS/INTERRUPTED SOLITUDE-LONELINESS/MUTE SOLITUDE ( choreographed movements with loneliness and the Panopticon as starting points)
CONCEPTS: Different faces of loneliness / Delay / ON-Off / Buffering / Real Time – Virtual Time / Freeze (audio and image) / connection shut-downs (personal and virtual connections) / The contrast between an excess of information and data, and the simplicity of things shown through the Paraguayan flower “diente de león”, that flies away by a simple blow, it flies with extreme LIGHTNESS.
FAMILIA
FAMILY
CONCEPTS: Searching for different ways to explore the character “Ma. Elena” (older woman), confused between reality and fiction: its her journey from point A to point B, where she “finds” people, situations, events that transform her in between into something else, “Alice in Wonderland” analogy.
PERFILES + ANTIPERFILES
PROFILES + ANTI PROFILES
CONCEPTS: social network profiles / reality and manipulation of reality when showing ourselves to the world / the profile is what we are NOT and the anti profile is what we really are but we choose to hide.
COMIENZO
BEGINNING
CONCEPTS: starts out of the loneliness of our everyday reality / hearing nothing but our own heartbeats / day by day routine / how to avoid reality and go to a better place or the memory of a better place, at least in our minds.
CAOS
CHAOS
CONCEPTS: excess of information / cut and paste taken to the extreme / lost and erased data recovery / automatization.
FINAL
THE END
CONCEPTS: arrhythmia / heartbeats / the abrupt up and downs of pulsation / solitude and companionship / technology and communication / successful encounters and failed ones / silences and sounds / extreme humanity.
This journey had a beginning (loneliness) and has an end (communication, companionship) from point zero to opening night. Personal ideas and my own concepts, New York based colleagues, Asunción based colleagues, actors, artists, creative team, production, management, members of the collaborative tables (NY/ASU), all did their part in our efforts to break with loneliness. I would like to extend my gratitude to all public and private institutions who made this happen. The final instant (or the very first) is the encounter with the audience. You made this possible and you are the final reason for everything. To all of you … THANKS!
Paola Irun
Opening night.
Curtain call.
