Tag: collaborate:create
0
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.
0
The Tortured One by Jason Sofge
Theaterlab, New York City.
The Tortured One was developed for the May 2013 Forward Flux collaborate:create "Power of Silence" 3-week residency at Theaterlab. For more info click here. With David Riley and Joyana Feller. As we struck up a conversation on our first meeting, Jason Sofge had an idea for a character to be able to use silence as a weapon. In this harsh power struggle, one character would always speak, while the other would remain silent throughout. In addition to the peculiar disproportion in the dialogue, the final text provided a fascinating directorial challenge: how to stage a piece in which, due to the extreme violence described in detail in the text, what occurs can hardly be shown on stage in a realistic fashion? With the freedom we were given to explore by the playwright, the actors and I discovered an uncanny territory of ambiguity between the heightened language of the piece and an everyday situation around a tea table.THE OPPRESSOR. Verminous game, thou art caught! Ensnared as a loathsome bug stuck in the great spider’s silken strands.