Nohayquiensepa (NoOneKnows)
Imagistic performance landscapes about how we deal (or don't) with the death of strangers.
Imagistic performance landscapes about how we deal (or don't) with the death of strangers.
This piece is amultidisciplinary work inspired by contrasting events in two places:a Colombian river town on the fringe of great violence, and thecontainment of death (of those who are dying and those gone) inToronto. It has been developed through a non-text-based creationprocess, and was presented for the first time at Harbourfront’sHATCH series of emerging performances. Our second workshoppresentation took place at the SummerWorks Festival in Toronto,August 6 – 16 th , 2009.
What makes this showunique is its hybridity: it was created through a process thatborrowed from Colombian and Canadian approaches to collaborativeperformance creation - it involved the input of artists in the fieldsof dance, theatre, and visual arts - and it was created from theground up with artists from a diversity of background cultures.
“Ingenious,stimulating work ...” -- Jon Kaplan, NOW magazine
What makes this showunique is its hybridity: it was created through a process thatborrowed from Colombian and Canadian approaches to collaborativeperformance creation - it involved the input of artists in the fieldsof dance, theatre, and visual arts - and it was created from theground up with artists from a diversity of background cultures.
“Ingenious,stimulating work ...” -- Jon Kaplan, NOW magazine
opening sequence - video capture from first workshop.
Aestheticand professional context: the use of projection in performance from adesigner's perspective. Toronto, 2008.
Rememberwhat it was like to paint realistically before the discovery of3-point perspective? Or measuring before yardsticks... how abouttrying to run before you could walk?
I oftensee video in performance that seems dead to me – that someone madea movie to play for us during what I had been told would be a livepiece of theatre. Video projection on stage is creating a new hybridmedium, and I think we have only occasionally learned to speak thelanguage it is teaching us. We are still too full of thetelevision-and-movie worship of the moving image to enter what is –from a designer’s perspective – a paradigm shift in the controlof lighting and imagery in a live environment. Despite theinevitable mediocrities, however, we have seen enough success to beencouraged. We know that there is poetry in this new voice.
Tounderstand this medium, we must kep in mind that every thing we see on stage in performancetells a part of a story. The level of theatrical abstraction in ascenic environment, costumes, and lighting all tell us about theworld we are being asked to witness as an audience – its style, itstime and place, its mood. With the introduction of the projectedimage to the stage, the potential complexity of that visual fieldincreases by an order of magnitude. How it is used transforms thecontext of a piece.
I offer anexample: an image of a baby brings the idea of a baby to the stage;but it also demands to be understood as an imposed image in thecontext of that staging. A baby-image on a big screen in a room fullof screens could be abstract surveillance of a baby, or a memory, orwhatever a character onstage says it is to make it into a practicalrepresentation (a Doctor says “here is your ultrasound,” and wecan then understand the stage to represent a medical facility). Nowlet’s say instead that we project the baby-image onto a woman'sbelly. We suddenly have a stronger context for it – we understandthat we are seeing something within her, or perhaps imposed on her,and without any dialog support we have an association that lets usinterpret: perhaps she is with child. We also understand that we arein a world that uses a figurative visual language, and position ourunderstanding, as an audience, accordingly. In different ways, thebaby-image demands to be interpreted not just as a baby, but asan image. In theatre, a projected image isalways more than just blanket information – it tells its own storyjust by being there, because it demands that you to figure out why itis there in the first place.
I believethat this understanding is often only partially understood andexecuted in many theatre productions that make use of the medium ofprojection today. This project is an experiment in pursuit of some strategies for the use ofvideo in performance through a deeper understanding of the newdemands that this medium is beginning to require of us.
As thelead artist for this project, I am a scenographer working in severaldisciplines: set design, lighting design, and increasingly, videodesign. As a relatively new medium, the use of video in theatre isin its infancy. Keenly aware of a need to refine our approach to it,it seems to me we won’t know what it can do unless we take a chanceand break its subservience to scripts which mandate its use inrestrictive ways, and try to create a performance work that givesvideo projection precedence in the creative process.
Rememberwhat it was like to paint realistically before the discovery of3-point perspective? Or measuring before yardsticks... how abouttrying to run before you could walk?
I oftensee video in performance that seems dead to me – that someone madea movie to play for us during what I had been told would be a livepiece of theatre. Video projection on stage is creating a new hybridmedium, and I think we have only occasionally learned to speak thelanguage it is teaching us. We are still too full of thetelevision-and-movie worship of the moving image to enter what is –from a designer’s perspective – a paradigm shift in the controlof lighting and imagery in a live environment. Despite theinevitable mediocrities, however, we have seen enough success to beencouraged. We know that there is poetry in this new voice.
Tounderstand this medium, we must kep in mind that every thing we see on stage in performancetells a part of a story. The level of theatrical abstraction in ascenic environment, costumes, and lighting all tell us about theworld we are being asked to witness as an audience – its style, itstime and place, its mood. With the introduction of the projectedimage to the stage, the potential complexity of that visual fieldincreases by an order of magnitude. How it is used transforms thecontext of a piece.
I offer anexample: an image of a baby brings the idea of a baby to the stage;but it also demands to be understood as an imposed image in thecontext of that staging. A baby-image on a big screen in a room fullof screens could be abstract surveillance of a baby, or a memory, orwhatever a character onstage says it is to make it into a practicalrepresentation (a Doctor says “here is your ultrasound,” and wecan then understand the stage to represent a medical facility). Nowlet’s say instead that we project the baby-image onto a woman'sbelly. We suddenly have a stronger context for it – we understandthat we are seeing something within her, or perhaps imposed on her,and without any dialog support we have an association that lets usinterpret: perhaps she is with child. We also understand that we arein a world that uses a figurative visual language, and position ourunderstanding, as an audience, accordingly. In different ways, thebaby-image demands to be interpreted not just as a baby, but asan image. In theatre, a projected image isalways more than just blanket information – it tells its own storyjust by being there, because it demands that you to figure out why itis there in the first place.
I believethat this understanding is often only partially understood andexecuted in many theatre productions that make use of the medium ofprojection today. This project is an experiment in pursuit of some strategies for the use ofvideo in performance through a deeper understanding of the newdemands that this medium is beginning to require of us.
As thelead artist for this project, I am a scenographer working in severaldisciplines: set design, lighting design, and increasingly, videodesign. As a relatively new medium, the use of video in theatre isin its infancy. Keenly aware of a need to refine our approach to it,it seems to me we won’t know what it can do unless we take a chanceand break its subservience to scripts which mandate its use inrestrictive ways, and try to create a performance work that givesvideo projection precedence in the creative process.
Aestheticand cultural context: towards integrated performance creationprocesses. Bogota, 2008.
AlunaTheatre is in the midst of conducting an artistic exchange based on aunique method of “Collective Creation” developed in Bogota,Colombia by the Teatro de la Candelariaand the Corporacion Colombiana de Teatro. Arising from a community-supported effort in a country in crisis,theatre makers like Santiago Garcia, Patricia Ariza, and CarlosSatizabal (among many others) have worked over the past 40 years tobuild an indigenous theatre where no theatre had previously existed. They have done it by evolving a guided approach to workingcollaboratively in groups, improvising, and analyzing their work. Theirs is an iterative process that leads to a collectiveunderstanding of what the material at hand means to the group as awhole, as well as its larger societal implications. By digging intothe concerns they share (consciously and unconsciously) as artistsand human beings, they develop work that speaks deeply to thecommunity in which they live in a way that larger media outlets donot. They then follow these intitial discoveries with substantialresearch, further improvisation, and rehearsal, to produce work ofsuperior quality. We will be borrowing heavily our work with theseartists to develop fresh approaches to our work here in Toronto.
Amalgamatinginfluences
I see theColombian approach to theatre as a useful alternative model toapproach our aesthetic concerns about the integration of video intothe work we create onstage. We have amassed content for discussionamong several artists, and will spend several days on exercises andinvestigations into this material. At that point - what in atraditional theatre creation process would be the time for a writerto sit down and begin writing a script – we will set up severaldesign experiments and movement concepts – and attempt to create anumber of moving canvasses that explore the material onstage, with apriority on exploring the visual elements of the subject matter asthe entry point into this art practice.
What this has allowed us to do is place the staged environment - using sound, lights, and video elements that can respond in the moment to the actions of performers onstage - as another set of characters in the improvisations that form the basis of the show. Live drawing, in the sequence above (with music by, in this case, Emiliana Torrini) gives us an immediate interaction between video / light and action. Below, we attempt a similar exchange with live manipulation of video feedback.
AlunaTheatre is in the midst of conducting an artistic exchange based on aunique method of “Collective Creation” developed in Bogota,Colombia by the Teatro de la Candelariaand the Corporacion Colombiana de Teatro. Arising from a community-supported effort in a country in crisis,theatre makers like Santiago Garcia, Patricia Ariza, and CarlosSatizabal (among many others) have worked over the past 40 years tobuild an indigenous theatre where no theatre had previously existed. They have done it by evolving a guided approach to workingcollaboratively in groups, improvising, and analyzing their work. Theirs is an iterative process that leads to a collectiveunderstanding of what the material at hand means to the group as awhole, as well as its larger societal implications. By digging intothe concerns they share (consciously and unconsciously) as artistsand human beings, they develop work that speaks deeply to thecommunity in which they live in a way that larger media outlets donot. They then follow these intitial discoveries with substantialresearch, further improvisation, and rehearsal, to produce work ofsuperior quality. We will be borrowing heavily our work with theseartists to develop fresh approaches to our work here in Toronto.
Amalgamatinginfluences
I see theColombian approach to theatre as a useful alternative model toapproach our aesthetic concerns about the integration of video intothe work we create onstage. We have amassed content for discussionamong several artists, and will spend several days on exercises andinvestigations into this material. At that point - what in atraditional theatre creation process would be the time for a writerto sit down and begin writing a script – we will set up severaldesign experiments and movement concepts – and attempt to create anumber of moving canvasses that explore the material onstage, with apriority on exploring the visual elements of the subject matter asthe entry point into this art practice.
What this has allowed us to do is place the staged environment - using sound, lights, and video elements that can respond in the moment to the actions of performers onstage - as another set of characters in the improvisations that form the basis of the show. Live drawing, in the sequence above (with music by, in this case, Emiliana Torrini) gives us an immediate interaction between video / light and action. Below, we attempt a similar exchange with live manipulation of video feedback.
At this point in our development of the show we are revisiting the versions of the sequences created since January 2009. In November 2010 we travel to Bogota, Colombia, to shop a preliminary verison of the piece, and in March 2011, we premiere the full piece in Toronto, Canada.
More info to come.
More info to come.
