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.

THE INCIDENT

It’s absolutely part of it … loosing information. ONE CLICK AWAY.

“Digital information : there’s a lot of dualities inside of it … the ones and the zeros … the ON and the OFF … saved and deleted …  and how it gets corrupted, I don’t understand anything about that … but we know when you see a corrupted digital file, it’s all … it looks like gobbling to us but it’s following some set of rules …… there is, in theory, someway in which you can get another outlet and run it through the information and set it right, turn it back on to the way that you can understand.”

DUALITIES

“A series of choices, and choices of choices, and choices inside the choices, many choices to be made.

They are all switches, YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO … ones and zeros, that’s what they are.”

Translating those dualities (YES/NO, X/Y, ON/OFF etc) into other things … emotions, feelings, personal things.

BEING ALONE … BEING WITH SOMEONE

LOVING … HATING

They all seem very extreme … BUT … all these technological dualities are nothing but extreme. I lost David’s first meeting because of one of those choices and that particular moment in time is lost forever. Even though we’re trying to resurrect right now, it’s not the same, it’ll never be the same. Extremes …

A STUDY ABOUT YOUNG CHILDREN (1 to 5 year olds) AND TV

Yes, it’s harmful, but why?

“It’s not necessarily the content of the television show itself that is potentially harmful ….… it’s the editing. It’s the fact that the eye, at that young age, can’t track something over a period of time, that you’re seeing a different thing every time, that the way that the synopsis are connecting cause one the need to change their stimulus all the time. They don’t know how to follow something over time, which relates to a lot of things potentially. I can see that sort of affecting an audience going to see theater, that’s all about, your relationship to something over time.”

The need to be interrupted. The need to be taken in different directions after a period of time. The need not to be shown the same thing over and over again.

First Meeting

“For me, the thing that one cannot escape no matter how hard one tries, being in the theater is the fact that there is an experience happening over time. There’s a real-time event despite whatever else is going on, whatever other ideas, or techniques, video, or something that is happening somewhere else in the world while we’re in there. There is also the experience of the audience and the performers, which is happening, evolving over time, right here, right now, right here, right now. That can’t ever be forgotten. We have to admit that in whatever theater we want to make. We always have to embrace that somehow.”

You can embrace things by contradicting them.

“ I tend to trust the theater less, that is trying to interact with me as if I’m watching a film, so that, what’s going on onstage is happening no matter what my reaction is; or that the thing that is unfolding is so crafted that there is not an element of being in the moment.”

ART CONFERENCE / ONE OF THE MAIN SPEAKERS: THE FOUNDER OF MTV

“It was a conference for the live arts, live performance. There was a few artists invited for this, I was one of them as a choreographer ……. This guy said, you know, theater is dead, live art is in trouble. You have a generation coming up in the world that are used to choosing their content whatever they do. They rate, 4, 3.5 stars. They rate movies. Online, their experience is guided by their choices, own choices ……. And he was saying that theater doesn’t offer that. Theater can’t offer that. Theater is just, seat and watch this thing unfold. And I think there’s a way to make a theater that speaks to that younger generation that chooses content but also as an antidote , a relieve from the media and the constant pressure to be ON, to be ONLINE, to be connected.”

The “problem” to make theater out of the Internet event: the most “untheatrical” event on stage, no sound, no movement, no text, very personal, very intimate. To show just an actor in front of a laptop and to project on a screen whatever it is that he’s watching on this laptop ….. I might just stay at home with my own laptop. If I’m going to make people go to the theater for this … there’s got to be much more than that, reality and realism must be pushed, boundaries must be broken and then, only then, it can be theatrical.

“There’s a theater that wants to control an audience … talking about On/Off … and there’s a theater that has a looser grip on an audience: You’re welcome to look at what you want. You’re welcome to take from this as you will, there’s plenty of meanings”

I’m not going to present an answer whether technology is taking over our lives and humanity. I don’t want to present the Internet as our only choice of communication and our only choice to be “connected”. I just want to show different views and takes on “it” and then let the audience leave with their own conclusions … or spend more time trying to find their own conclusions after they had left my show.

BIG EATER (David’s piece) – similarities

ADVANCED BEGINNER GROUP

“You’re taking on something that is really, and enormous idea and how do you make something specific out of it? ……. I really went out on a limb without having a real foundation for this piece. I knew some things. I had some connective ideas that reached across a lot of the source material I was using from 19^th Century Ballet to YouTube videos, autobiographical material, and then I found this one piece, this source that I kept coming back to. And it took me a while, I didn’t know that until one day I went … oh, that seems to be the theme.”

MY INTENTION OF CREATING A “HYBRID” PIECE OF THEATER (in terms of style)

“I don’t know anything about the theater in Paraguay, but I do know that if you’re doing a piece about the Internet somehow, or a relationship to this phenomenon, that a HYBRID version of performance … I think people will understand that. What is this? … what was this about? … you might get some kind of that frustration.”

CHAOS – TOO MUCH INFORMATION

“It makes me think … to teach the audience what too much is. To test their limit. Can you do a little bit more? A little bit more? How about this?.”

And the most important thing is what happens next … what happens after the chaos? The image after that is the most important image of the whole play!

“In the end, that really is our question, isn’t it? Can we hack it? We just keep adding.”

ARRIVING – LANDING

The creative process has changed location … from New York to Asunción … June 6th 2010

Still nothing concrete but a list of CONCEPTS to go one by one creating MATERIAL out of them.

I WANT A HYBRID PIECE OF THEATER

I want a mix of styles all part of the same piece: traditional text/dialogue, realistic scenes, then movement, then surrealism, then too much silence, then a video installation as a whole, then very technological, later very very simple, it’s a dance, it’s a two character straight forward scene, it’s a broken language mix of short scenes, it’s all about the transitions, it’s all about characters coming out of a ChatRoulette structure and materializing in front of the audience, it’s Spanish, it’s Guaraní and a lot of other languages, it’s a panopticon set and it’s a set made out of light designing ……………… it’s so much more in hopefully 90 minutes and no intermission.

I want to walk a thin line where I give them (an audience) things very Paraguayan and things that speak directly to the country, as well as I want to give them things that are universal. In fact when you’re dealing with the Internet as a theme, there’s no way you could restrict it to only one country. When you think about it, it’s the world-wide web ……. Now, how it affects a specific culture? That’s something else.

I want independent interconnected stories:

- multiple independent stories that come together with one event … maybe at the end. (CHARACTER #1 starts, all the other are introduced and when the SATURATION happens, the event is that they all decide to go without the Internet/technology at once … as an example)

- multiple independent stories that are interconnected from beginning to end.

- multiple apparently independent stories but one event in each story triggers the event on the next and so on and so on until they’re all connected or everything clashes down at the end until it disappears. (Dominos effect and also no Dominos effect because you see characters and stories more than once)

And then, there was LIPSyNCH

CHARACTER #1 is the first one we see, then we only see little bits of information here and there while all the other are being introduced, and it’s only at the end when we get to see the whole story about CHARACTER #1.

And then, there was SHORTCUTS (before Magnolia, Babel, Crash, etc, etc, etc)

Ok, so different independent but interconnected stories ALL framed by the Internet, not because they met through the Internet but because we live in a time when the Internet is an intrinsic part of our lives.

LONELINESS

It’s been said that loneliness is the disease of the century. I say the disease has been with us since the beginning of everything (whenever that was and I don’t want to get into that). We are human because loneliness exists and we don’t want to be lonely we would do ANYTHING to avoid loneliness even if we don’t say it out loud or if we try to fool ourselves. Life is so short to keep wasting time fooling ourselves, when each second we waste alone is gone forever … but sometimes it’s not our choice.

The lonely bench on Smith St. ....... and a smoothie.

At the end … for me … everything (all this) comes out of LONELINESS.

THE REVELATION OF CHARACTER #1 ………… finding the computer out of loneliness. Computer means everything that comes with it, but it’s mostly about filling the emptiness, giving silence a meaning, creating a virtual social life where there’s any.

STRUCTURE #1:

CHARACTER #1 is independent but has a journey. From the FLOWER to the COMPUTER, or the other way around. Through her journey and in the tech chaos, we present and develop other characters attached to other Internet phenomena like ChatRoulette, Human Flesh Search Engine, Social Networking mania, Avatar obsession and so on.

STRUCTURE #2:

CHARACTER #1 goes through his journey (FLOWER/COMPUTER) and finds the other characters along the way within Internet phenomena.

STRUCTURE #3:

CHARACTER #1 is searching for something/someone and goes on ChatRoulette. We create our own ChatRoulette and the other characters/stories come out of the ChatRoulette structure (the problem of showing it live).

“In terms of like the nature of the Internet, the net, right? Maybe the CHARACTER meets one or two and then they introduce us, as an audience, to another two; and then another five, and then one and then back to the original (CHARACTER #1) …. It’s all happening, at least somewhat simultaneously, they’re overlapping, once you’ve established what they are”

EMBRACING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES as part of the show. INCORPORATING THE MISTAKES …the MALFUNCTIONING.

INTERNET STORY:

going from a normal and silly slide show to a religious gathering, to a very academic lecture to a press conference, then to a Q & A interaction with the audience … jumping from one style to another.

“You might even want to play with the idea of what is it when the Internet starts. It’s a button pressed? Do we hear the sound of a Mac starting up? ……. How do we understand, it’s sort of like curtain opening in theater, that lets us know that something has begun.”

Maybe the Cell phone announcement to turn them ON, happens only during the INTERNET STORY. When something rings … then something happens (a specific task or choreography for the actors), something that is predetermined but it gives the play the sense of not being predetermined because if cells are ON, something can ring unpredictably (if nothing does, then that’s the moment to be determined and make it happens at least once).

“As a form, it’s playing with the LIVENESS of theater …….It’s so interesting when you go see a play several times and things happen differently each time, especially when it’s built into the structure.”

What about the infinite possibilities living inside a concept about the Internet? There’s no way I can show a piece about the Internet (The Internet as a whole) in 90 minutes. The sense of a never-ending subject has to be part of the show somehow.

“That’s also very true to our understanding of the Internet … it’s like: I know these things, but I also know that there’s a lot of other stuff out there.”

THE PANOPTICON structure ….

Is this my scenic design?  The characters live independently in each little cell and there’s a big eye (the tower) in the middle watching everything and everybody at the same time. The big eye tower could be the audience point of view or, taking turns, each of the characters leaves their cells, positions himself in the middle to bring focus to him at a particular moment.

ONE OF THE BIGGEST PROBLEMS THIS PLAY FACES IS …

that the action of being online is very lonely, individual, very personal, it’s you and your computer and that’s not very theatrical, is it?

“There’s not a lot of movement, there’s not a lot of stuff to do if you’re going to realistically picture what a person does online … I sit there almost like I’m in a coma, with it on my lap just … if nobody was watching it’d be boring, or maybe not.”

This is a place where David Neumann’s SCALE EXPERIMENT comes into place: playing with scale, what’s small, what’s huge, going back and forth, making something big by repetition or by making all the actors do it at the same time it’s amplified already, or by picking a small gesture and making it into something else more abstract (it becomes bigger by the abstraction of it): eyes movement, one finger moving lonely, a half-smile.

SCALE and also TIME … for how long can I maintain these moments?

WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT’S NOT REAL – playing with reality

“In everything I’ve seen you do and all the plays I’ve seen you write, all the work that I’ve seen that has come from you that’s original, so far, has an element of  what’s real and what isn’t real, reality versus non reality; or as I like to think of it, because I gravitate towards work like that, the idea that more than reality exist in that one time … you can have the world that you see and then the world that you don’t see ……. Maybe you want to keep meditating on that as per this project.”

- do we become less and less human by using the computer more and more, do we lose a little bit of our soul each time?

- can a computer virus do more than erasing your files? Can it do something outside the computer?

- the existence of a superior being controlling the net and watching all of us.

- The Antichrist

- could we cross over when online? Literally go to places and materialize ourselves somewhere else?

- could we communicate with the people who are no longer with us through the Internet?

- missing person search: looking for the virtual person because you know the real person is gone … or is it not? (finding the person on ChatRoulette but only for a few seconds and then it’s really lost, you will never see him again, what are the odds of finding the same person twice?)

- creating the boogie man who doesn’t exist but exists in the mind of the person who’s looking for something/someone (dictatorship, the boogie man is a torturer, it’s a spy/pyragué, it’s a policeman).

Smith St … still on the lonely bench and the smoothie.

Endless, endless, possibilities in which reality as we know it, or at least as we’ve known it for a long time, can be explored and twisted and broke apart to find other sources of reality that could coexist in the world that I’m about to create.

Now we actually have this thing … the INTERNET, in which people can do all sort of “magical” things and has been accepted as part of our lives.

“A couple hundred years ago, the idea of being able to tap into another reality where other people existed and one could communicate or one could change themselves so they’re seen as another person or whatever, that’s all witchcraft and magic … a couple hundred years ago that would be considered something that only lived in the area of shamanism and madness and witchcraft.”

The feared questions of WHAT IS IT ABOUT? … or WHAT’S THE DIRECTOR’S POINT OF VIEW?

What it’s about isn’t necessarily the synopsis of the play and the POV doesn’t necessarily involve having to say what’s bad and what’s good, giving away only one possibility for the audience.

In either case, questions needed to be answered out of the rehearsal room and not out of the initial concepts. I’ll start searching for these answers on June 5th, the first rehearsal in Paraguay.

“What’s the point of view? ……. then you’ve created a situation where you’re like: I don’t have to tell my audience what the POV is. I’m telling them that they just need to realize that things may be real and may not be real in this world, and that’s just a fundamental truth. That’s all they have to know. They don’t have to know if I think it’s a good thing or if I think it’s a bad thing. They just have to know that they may be thinking about this in a very sort of like small way, and that there may be other elements at play.”

DIRECTING/DOCUMENTING/RESEARCHING/CREATING/WRITING … coming up with stuff

“You’ve been doing a lot of research. You’ve been doing a lot of documenting, and in a lot of ways, doing a lot of directing already before you’ve even got actors in the room. You have to decide, I think, before you step foot into that first rehearsal room, how much are you willing to let them come up with stuff.”

Filed under: Collaborative Table NEW YORK, Krissy, Structure, The Internet Story Tagged: cell phone announcement, Multitasking, scale ]]> http://borradorenconstruccion.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/krissy-smith-st-brooklyn-may-20th/feed/ 0 paolairun2 P1400606 P1390744 P1400615 P1400609 http://borradorenconstruccion.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/lvs-language-videos-and-the-key-speech-in-its-3-versions/ http://borradorenconstruccion.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/lvs-language-videos-and-the-key-speech-in-its-3-versions/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 15:25:52 +0000 paolairun2 http://borradorenconstruccion.wordpress.com/?p=494 Continue reading →]]> LVs:

A group of short videos of … people … people from different cultures, different nationalities, different backgrounds and different points of view about personal subjects and the internet itself as the communication media.

Doing a piece about the Internet is impossible (at least for me) without acknowledging different languages, and people communicating/connecting through it in different languages.

The idea is to have these LVs scattered throughout the piece.

KEY SPEECH:

This is a very particular phrase ambigious enough to be part of any story, to be used by any character and to be repeated as many times as possible not only in Spanish live onstage (Paraguayan cast) but in all the other languages through the LVs.

I’ve written 3 different KEY SPEECHES to keep my options opened when the time comes in Paraguay to choose the KEY SPEECH that speaks to us the most or keep the 3.

THIS VIDEO:

This is the backstage of the LVs. I’m still missing SPANISH and ITALIAN.

In the meantime, I wanted to share the rest and give an idea of what they really are or what they could become.

I only speak Spanish … and a little English. I edited this video before getting all the translations and following the actors emotions and what I told them to talk about. I also directed all the videos in the same way … not speaking all these languages and gave them the KEY SPEECHES in English.

KEY SPEECH 1 ONCE AGAIN

KEY SPEECH 2 HAVE YOU EVER…?

KEY SPEECH 3 SOMETIMES I PRETEND…

Standing ovation for THE BLOW.

Concert at GLASSLANDS – Williamsburg, Brooklyn, May 13th, 2010

KHAELA MARICICH – The Blow

Dean & Deluca coffee and napkin ... David Neumann's sunglasses ... David Neumann's reflection on the table (down left corner) ... and THE GADGET in question

We can’t deny the advantages of TECHNOLOGY in our lives today.

information

communication

immediacy

learning / education

etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

you name it

I can’t deny the advantages of gadgets/machines/electronics in our lives and work

they just make things easier and faster

and the whole list above

Although sometimes the information/data/work/ can be lost forever … losing all the information and documentation is just one click away.

Without the recorded actual words and the audible documented proof … THE MEETING NEVER HAPPENED.

WHO IS TO BLAME?

Of course, I’m not going to say it was human error. Somebody needs to defend us humans, human beings with no ERASE BUTTON attached to the sides of our human equipments.

so, who is to blame? THE GADGET itself!

Right now, I’m trying to reconstruct the meeting and make it REAL and DOCUMENTED again.

It’s all part of the process. Everything can be used as material ………………. it’s the only way I can calm myself down.

Please watch the gap between the train and the platform.

AND ONCE AGAIN … the next station is … Bronxville.

THE STRUCTURE #1

One character and a journey from NO TECHNOLOGY … and getting to it.

From nothing … to a computer.

And all the craziness will be placed in the MIDDLE PART (as much information as possible). The suitcase image: we keep adding and adding information to it, eventually it’ll collapse and we’ll bring another bigger suitcase or we’ll change the material the suitcase is made of.

The journey: is this a birthing process? The mother giving birth to this baby? Or is this about appendages, armors being added to? YES TO THE THIRD QUESTION

I think it’s a transformation, things being added to in order to evolve into something else because of LONELINESS.

“It’s interesting that you have this path down and you say this is lonely (MOM) and this is full (THE COMPUTER at the other end). When I think about sitting at a computer … I think of that as lonely. Maybe these are just two things that resonate … I know that for a performance, you need, it needs to happen in time. So, you need to go from one place to another but these things, they coexist. Maybe, something your project is … that you’re going this way (in reverse, from down to up)”

Absolutely! I needed to start out of something, that something became STRUCTURE #1 … the journey exists in order to be changed and the direction now exists so it can change (or not) along the way.

“You’re on to something and this is, I think, I fundamental tension.”

MIDDLE PART – THE STAGE AS A COMPUTER SCREEN

I’ll try to resemble (re interpreted) a computer screen as much as possible, TABS, things popping up, windows opening and closing, flashing messages, MULTITASKING etc.

“I think it’s already embedded in ……. That our idea of how we represent things, just because of how language has been constructed, we do it on a flat plane. So, the book and the television, and the movie screen and the computer screen … these are all flat things. So, it makes sense that the space of theater is also this kind of flat space.”

Proscenium stage

Thrust stage

Theater in the round

Black box / Flexible theater

Found space

Arena stage

Alley/Corridor

Touring stage

Site specific

In reality, I’ll be dealing with a traditional PROSCENIUM stage. Can we find ways/possibilities to “transform” the space with our interpretation of a computer screen?

So, suddenly that flat squared surface becomes something else, something that goes way beyond just breaking the fourth wall.

“I don’t think this is hard-wired aspect of performance … that there are other geometries possible. And I’m sure, computers, maybe in the future, that we’ll just have like a sphere, a crystal ball”

THE PANOPTICON

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience. (Wikipedia, of course)

……. In other words, a circle prison consisting of many little cells which you can watch all at once by standing in the middle.

“……. You have basically a penitentiary structure in the same way you have these little theaters in the circle around a central gaze, so it has this kind of polar symmetry, so there’s one gaze in the middle that can see everybody.”

“When you look at something like Facebook, you explode into like another kind of topology and you can imagine that when you sit at Facebook … you’re in the middle of that panopticon and you get to see everybody. You get to basically do surveillance on everybody around you and you imagine that nobody sees you … in reality, everybody is doing the same activity. (EVERYBODY IS AT THE CENTER AND EVERYBODY IS BEING WATCHED AT THE SAME TIME) So we can’t represent it in three dimensions anymore ……. That’s the way we experience it, the way technology allows us to create the space ……. It’s like a poli panoptic structure and in reality there’s a grand master who’s actually looking above the whole system and sees everybody’s gaze, and whatever everybody is looking at, or clicking on.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

WE CAN’T REPRESENT IT IN THREE DIMENSIONS ANYMORE.

EVERYBODY IS IN THE MIDDLE AT THE SAME TIME BUT IMAGINING THEY’RE WATCHING EVERYBODY ELSE.

AND … THE GRAND MASTER.

We’re on our little computers on our little desks in our little houses/apartments and we think we’re in control, controlling our computers and our Internet experiences. We think we are doing things because it’s our fingers and again, on our computers.

“There’s another structure on top of it where we’re inside. When you’re on the Internet you’re inside that cage and basically people know exactly what you’re doing … where you’re mouse is on the screen, even when you’re not clicking on something, do you put your mouse over a certain link and just let it sit, you know, there. There’s a lot of information they know, and they know where you’re geographically.”

THE DECODER RING

ChatRoulette as a decoder ring and all its possible interactions.

You go from one person to the next, clicking NEXT, the same way people run into you … we all get paired up with other people and the ring keeps turning with endless possible combinations. There’s no stopping and there’s no final result but to keep pairing people up.

“It’s not just roulette because it’s random. It’s roulette because we’re all together in this system and we just get paired up with each other.”

SOUNDS OF THE INTERNET OR SOUNDS TECHNOLOGY MAKES

“The relationship I have with this device (cell phone) is very personal. When it vibrates in my pocket, I have an immediate anticipation of who it is. Is this a loved one? Is it my sweetheart? Is this work? It’s an anticipation, might have anxiety associated with it. When we’re in the public space, when you hear that message sound, it’s something that you apprehend as a very personal sound and you can have the same anxieties ……. Even when it’s not for you.”

CHATROULETTE

The ChatRoulette structure … just imagine stories instead of people.

“There’s a lot of men there like looking for women. So they’re looking at other men, they’re clicking, clicking, clicking … when they see a woman, they stop clicking. But then, that person clicks away from them ……. Your heart is very present, but then it’s just …”

disposable.

MULTITASKING

Not meaning showing one person on stage doing more than one thing at the same time, but pushing the envelope as much as possible.

“Multitasking being performed is when the focus is broken ……. And you can hear it in my voice. When you’re on the phone with someone and you’re talking to them, talking to them, and then you know the minute they’re looking at the Internet because you can hear that they’re drifting … they’re drifting”

and one last thought …….

“We lose the sustained presence. And that’s what live performance gives us. In performance that person is there and they’re still there.”