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annamonteverdi's blog

Personal BLOG about DIGITAL ART BY ANNA MARIA MONTEVERDI.

Anna Maria Monteverdi (ITALY) is an expert in the media studies. She teaches “Forms of the Multimedial Show” at Dams of Imperia and “Digital video & Performing Arts” at the Academy of Brera (semestral contract). She has published several essays, books and monographs about theatrical and technological artists (Robert Lepage, Giacomo Verde, Patrick De Geetere, Motus, Studio Azzurro, Michele Sambin, Living Theatre).She has recently published NUOVI MEDIA NUOVO TEATRO (FrancoAngeli 2011) and with Andrea Balzola, “Le arti multimediali digitali”(Garzanti 2004; 2°ed.2007). She regularly takes part to international meetings about theatre and intermediality.Moreover she belongs to a technotheatrical group called “Xlabfactory”, with whom she has realized as project manager, a crossmedial project named “La Fattoria degli Anormali” and the interactive shows “I Racconti del Mandala”, "Messagein a bottle" .She regularly writes for magazines about digital art, such as, Cut-up.net, atetro.it, digicult.it, My media and she has been local manager for MASBEDO.

ROBERT LEPAGE: METAMORPHOSIS OF THE TECHNO THEATRE

Metamorphosis of the stage:

The far side of the moon and Elsinore

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Before Galileo turned his telescope toward its surface people believed the moon was a polished mirror, its dark scars and mysterious contours reflections of our mountains and seas. The soviets launched a probe to circle the moon. We faced a far and unseen side ofthe moon: a marked and disfigured face by scars ‘cause of meteorite.

R. Lepage, The far side of the moon.

In the South-central District of Montréal, in the premises of the C factory (former industrial ovens transformed today into a multi-functional stage for its founding company Carbon 14), at the Festival of Theatres des Amerique (2001) Robert Lepage presented The Far Side of the Moon with an original score by Laurie Anderson, the same year as Kubrick’s Odyssey.

The exploration of the moon (up to Galilee “mirror of the Earth” as is said in the Prologue) is the metaphor used by Lepage to speak about another search, that of the internal, intimate and private space. It’s the story of two brothers, a meteorologist and a doctoral student also a subscriptions sale man always fascinated by extraterrestrial investigations. Estranged by their very different life style and dispositions, they meet again for their mother’s death. The moon and the mother, with their respective mythical and symbolic apparatus, are the spectacle’s two central theme which ceaselessly interlace. The two brothers’ life is spattered by “domestic investigations”: the circular shape of the astronauts’ helmet and that more common, of a washing machine’s window blend in a strange exchange being transformed at the same time into the maternal uterus, the image of Earth seen in Tv’s whether report, into the Moon, or also into a goldfish tank. Daily life and History, personal recollections and collective memory, both shaped by “an index” of image archives, are mingled the one with the other until they merge.

We came to the world like little astronauts who breathe for the firs time after the umbilical cord-back of the new born child, given by the midwife, thanks to which he breathes in his firs oxygen blow, setting in the breathing process.

Will somebody really manage to build this enormous “Eiffel Tower” (reminiscent of Tatlin’s Monument for the third international) which, set up beyond the stratosphere, as we are told at the beginning of the spectacle, should be able to pick up what remains a secret to us: the hidden side of the Moon? Which probe will ever manage to discover the most mysterious and repressed side of our Self?

THE ACTOR and THE MIRROR

Autobiography, the journey and concrete objects are the inspiring motives of this show:

“There are two departing points: the first idea was to work on the concept of the cosmos, the Moon, the second was to create something related to my mother, who died two years and a half ago. The two themes didn’t seem to be linked at first, but met bit by bit: the moon is a rich and interesting subject, either for mythology or for the scientific aspect, but mostly it is the symbol of the mother. It is then that I understood that the first subject contained the other one. Then I wanted “to play” not only in the sense of the English verb, but really to play as a child; I looked for the object capable of creating a link between the various themes and one day I found in the street, among waste, the window of a washing machine At first I saw the scientific aspect (the object to travel in space) then the common object . I still remember a laundry where my mother had taken me when I was a kid. At the time it had seemed to be Nasa’s power plant”

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The autobiographical theme, as an embryo for theatrical creation, seems to be constantly present in Lepage’s solo show (Vinci, Les aguilles et l’opium, Elsinore, Andersen Project). The chosen method to create the right distance with the particular episode (moral questions, the loss of a friend or a mother, a love crisis) and, at the same time maintain this background of authenticity and transform a confession into fragments of collective memory and experience, is the creation of a couple of character bound to each other in different ways. The central figure autobiographical, is linked to a character who actually is not really an antagonist but more or less an alter ego (also present under the shape of an electronic double), a living mirror which sometimes takes the role of a famous historical figure (Leonardo, Cocteau, Miles Davis).

The unfolding of the spectacles always shows, not the contrast among the various personality but the simultaneity of an internal individual conflict and an identity with multiple and complex facets, of a platonic dialectic of opposites[2] : “Fragmentation of identity allows Lepage to balance person and character in a complex negotiation of self and other in which neither takes precedence”.

The double or the binary multiple of the narrative has a result which is particularly more complex since it is exactly about spectacles conceived for a single actor on stage; it is the story’s role then to evoke the spectre of technology.

Image-producing technology machines, the electronic apparatuses, panels, screens, are always, indeed, metaphor of a glance, internal or multiplied, and come and show the repressed, the hidden side of reality, exactly as the characters, historical or imagined, called to plead as witness-antagonists, are nothing but projections (mirrors or reflections) of an internal self, manifestly divided and literally broken in two, which calls for its own existence: “I used to look for my reflection in his courage, he was my mirror and today he is dead”; this is how Philippe, the protagonist of Vinci speaks about his friend Marc, who has committed suicide.

If in The far side of the moon the characters-mirrors are the two brothers, united in amniotic liquid and by the mother’s umbilical cord, but separated in life, in The needle and the opium, it is the protagonist who relives his own love drama (suffered as an abstinence crisis) following the model of well known stories of dependencies (Cocteau), of passions and separations (Miles Davis and Juliette Gréco). In Vinci the protagonist, a Canadian photographer, arriving in Europe after the death of a friend, makes a journey on Da Vinci’s grounds and finds himself confronted with the genius of humanism by raising questions relative to his own “artistic and moral integrity to protect it from profit-making mentality”: “An artist like you, who has inspired by the beauty of things, who loathed human suffering and feared cataclysm –how do you explain that you invented war machines, engines of destruction?” Art is a paradox.

THE ACTOR and THE MACHINE: Elsinore and The far side of the moon

Elsinore, a spectacle conceived for a single actor on stage is based on a place, Elsinore and it is the exploration of Hamlet’s mind: all the characters as Lepage himself clarifies- are places in his mind: “The father is the ear, the mother the eyes, the actors the mouth”.

All the characters in Hamlet are thus, parts or interior projection of his same Self.

In 1910 Edward Gordon Craig had thought of representing Hamlet in Moscow as a “mono-dama” lived through the point of view of the protagonist; in the scenic indication which illustrates the drawing concerning Act1, scene 2 (The gold Court) where Hamlet is shown separated from the reigning couple and court thanks to a balaustrade, lying in a sacrificial position and in the shadow Craig expalins that alla the drama’ characters are only projections of Hamlet’s own imagination.

In his dream Hamlet materializes alla around and over him the court of Denmark, the place of all impiety, exactly as it appears to his eyes: “You see the stage divided by a barrier. On the one side sits Hamlet, fallen as it were into a dream, on the other side you see his dream, on the other side you see his dream. You see it as it were through the mind’s eye of Hamlet (…). It’s not an actual thing –it’s a vision” (G.Craig, Towards a new Theatre).

elsinore

To further underline the dynamics of the action, Craig manages to intervene in a decisive manner on the text, showing how it is necessary to think of the drama in its entirety with, in fact, the idea –which didn’t materialize – expressed by Craig to Stanislawsky during a study day in Moscow, to always keep Hamlet on stage:

“I would like Hamlet to always remain on stage, in every frame, during all the drama; he can remain on stage, in every frame, during all the drama; he can remain far, lying down, sitting facing the person acting, on the side, at the back but the spectator should never lose sight of him. I want the public to feel the existing contact between what is happening on stage and Hamlet: and in that way to feel, more strongly, the horror of Hamlet’s situations".

For Lepage a single scenic element through a mobile device holding multiple possibilities of movement and through the relation which it establishes with the character that lives inside its mechanisms, shows this indivisible and opposite polarity. Its only attribute is the ability to transform.

“The combination of the moving set, continually creating new relationships between the performer and the space and the depiction of a range of backstage areas configures a number of the play’s themes. Elsinore is about instability, about a whirly of activity around a central figure, about continual tensions between a human figure and a piece of machinery which one could express, metaphorically as a tension between individual and state or even the human and the cosmic”

Elsinore is the place, at the same time, physical and mental of the tragedy, at the centre of which Hamlet is placed, forced to stay in-between to live separately-close to the corrupt court, relegated to an impossibility of free movement, while the stage ceaselessly moves around him. This machine (“humanized” as the stage designer Carl Fillon likes to define it), subject to variations and changes, a true theatrical mask, takes expressions, faces and different personalities, transforms constantly, lives its won life. If all the scenes have been built as a basis for the movement of the scenic device itself, the actor is forced to follow its rhythm, its breath. He can cross it, remain suspended, lean on it and thus create a relation of symbiotic complicity. He can have a dialogue with it, and find some protection in it but also mortal dangers between its cogs; a reversal of roles definitely takes place: the machine which has crushed its last artificial determinism to become a body, is the true protagonist and the actor a kind of “actorial supermarionette”, is the spare part. If the machine is humanized, the actor becomes machine: “For me he machinery is in the actor, in his way of saying the text , of approaching acting: there is a mechanics in there also”.

Craig’s prediction seems to turn out right: “I tell stories with machines. The actor himself is a machine: I know that several actors do not like being spoken of as being machines but when you make theatre, it’s little like that” .

But in Elsinore the machine is also the X-ray machine which penetrates into the meanders of Hamlet’s thoughts, and carries to his consciousness recollections and truths in the shape of images and which, as Horace, will tell his story. The technological theatrical machine becomes a lie detector.

The far side of the moon is, by certain aspects, the closest to Elsinore’s universe. Lepage creates, in fact a dark grey metal background which occupies all the depth of the stage, and which hides environments split by sliding panels; on its surface some images are projected which are extracted from documentaries on the moon’s discovery, super-8 films of the character’s life (memory as a television images store). An opening in the middle, shows a glimpse of always different objects and environments: a cupboard, an elevator, rooms. Interiors.

To this background also corresponds a fourth phisical wall: an enormous mirror which extends on all the legth of the stage endowed with movements of rotation which transform it, either into an object of the stage, or into a reflecting ceiling, giving to the spectators, at the end of the spectacle, the impression of a duplicated body engaged in dance almost in absence of any gravity.

Like the screens of the <<kinetic-visual>> theatre of Gordon Craig (“the thousand scenes in one”, sliding panels, by the English director and the theorist for the Moscow Hamlet of 1912, the stage of Lepage’s mobile mobile face transforms thanks to movement and light: “The theatre is the art of transformation at all levels. Transformation becomes not a manner, but really the actual foundation of the work”.

Assembling the spectacle requires three complete working days and a team of fourteen people. The used mechanism makes one think of the mechanisms and machinery (“ingenii”), of the Renaissance theatre, the time of invention of mobile stages and a true mixture of marvels and ars mecanica (quoting Vasari’s stage and the periaktoi an Buontalenti’s inventions for the Theatre of Office in Florence). Everything occurs as if there was another spectacle behind the spectacle: technicians and sound and light engineers, but also numerous “manipulators”, activating, behind the stage slaves move panels in a second, set up the scenic arsenal. And steer projectors by the means of ropes. As if they were activating a marionette. To explain the importance of the backstage, Lepage refers to Japan:

“The first time I assembled a show, I played an improvisation in front of the technicians and machinists. The technician is the first co-worked and the first spectator. When I was in Tokyo, a person said to me that he worked in the “shadowy part” of the show; he explained to me that the Japanese theatre is a matter of balance between the light part and the shadowy part of the show because there are two sides of the same medal. The Japaneses are aware of the fact that theatre is a totality and that what takes place behind, at the level of technique or organization, has the same importance as what takes place on stage. Occidental theatre, on the contrary, is obsessed by the visible part of the scene, by the stage alone”.

The constant characteristic of Lepage’s theatre is a metamorphic stage, which transforms ceaselessly, amd becomes all that the narration needs to develop and thi, in all visibility to the spectators: technology is unmasked, its functioning is at sight because “People are not worried by the technology which they understand”. Also “Video has become totally domestic and common, one can thus use it on stage. The principle is understood and, as a result, the spectators accept that technology can contain poetry”.

A technology, therefore, which does not want to arouse bewilderment, which doesn’t want to amaze the spectator but, on the contrary, reassure him: its use on stage always implies in fact, an effort of collaboration and creation between the two parts of the game (it is the purpose of theatre).