Cherry Blossoms (from Chekhov)
Theaterlab Gallery, New York City.
Cherry Blossoms was developed for the May 2013 Forward Flux collaborate:create "Power of Silence" 3-week residency at Theaterlab. For more info click here. With Rebecca Tucker and Kelly Sloan. I see silence as the zero-point energy of theatre, the point where everything can be created from nothing. How can a short scene expand – and to what extent – into a longer piece, and at what distance lines and fragments of the text can still cohere or instead become other? To attempt a response to this question, in “Cherry Blossoms” I explored the silence between lines and words, as a place for events to occur in the absence of speech. The actors and I devised three versions of the same brief dialogue from the first act of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. Two sisters, Anya and Varya, reunite after one of them has been on a long trip. The different lengths of these versions – about 1, 3, and 5 minutes – depend on how the silence in the interstices of the text is either ignored or allowed to blossom.What is there in the empty space of the role? [...] You have to discover material for the role and organize the scenes in pauses, between phrases, between the lines and even between words.