Giladon-line » theatre

Beckett Shorts

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 04:02:39 +0000

I just got back from the Beckett Shorts production – a collection of short Beckett plays at the New York Theatre Workshop directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and featuring new music by Philip Glass with video by my good friend Mirit Tal. Eh Joe is the fourth play in the lineup, and is definitely the most impressive. It was presented with the front scrim down, and a huge projection focused on Baryshnikov’s face.

Most theatre productions I’ve seen that use video projections usually take away from the experience. The video diverts and takes up the audience’s attention. But in this case, it suited the scene, which I found later on, was originally written for television. What I also found later, was that this specific setting (with the large video projection) premiered in Dublin, in April 2006. The extreme contrasts between the hugh twitches on the scrim compared to the motionlessness of Baryshnikov’s physical body on stage creates a unique and extremely expressive atmosphere.

Congratulations Mirit! Here’s some background about the play:

Eh Joe is a piece for television, written in English by Samuel Beckett, his first work for the medium. It was begun on the authorâ€™s fifty-ninth birthday, 13th April 1965, and completed by 1st May. â€œIt [was] followed by six undated typescripts (numbered 0 – 4 and â€˜final versionâ€™).â€

…At least thirteen versions have been preserved on tape making it far and away Beckettâ€™s most produced teleplay.It was first published in Eh Joe and Other Writings (Faber, 1967) â€“ although the version published is closer to Typescript 3, mentioned above, than the version as broadcast. (source)

[tags] new york, theatre, beckett, new media, video [/tags]

Theatre vs. New media :: on breaking the fourth wall

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 08:35:46 +0000

In theatre, when an actor performs, he receives immediate feedback from the audience. His presence feeds the audience, who then react back. In theatre, presence usually refers to the relationship between the actor and the audience.

The fourth wall is a theatrical term which refers to an imaginary wall at the front of the stage, through which the audience sees the actors. The term has been adopted by other media forms such as cinema, television, comics and video games and more generally refer to the boundary between the fiction and its audience. The fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief. The audience is usually passive, accepting the presence of the fourth wall without giving it any direct thought, enjoying fiction as if they were observing real events. The presence of a fourth wall is one of the best established conventions of fiction and as such has led artists to draw direct attention to it for dramatic effect.

“Breaking the fourth wall” generally refers to when a character is showing his or her awareness to the audience. Most often, the fourth wall is broken when a character directly addresses the audience through dialogue or by interacting with objects outside the context of the act. Various artists have used this effect to make a point. In his plays, Bertolt Brecht is known for deliberately breaking the fourth wall to encourage his audience to think more critically about what they were watching. Breaking the fourth wall is quite common in video games. This is usually done as a form of comic relief or even when the game goes into tutorial mode.

I often get annoyed with socializing through the computer, and how it makes it oh so easy to “stay in touch with everybody and anybody” but doesn’t REALLY make me feel connected. Even though it is comforting to see the little green dots on my IM or Gtalk lists, I long for tools that will help preserve some of my more meaningful connections with people and to places. This is precisely where I see potential similarities between the effects of breaking the theatrical fourth wall and breaking the computer’s fourth wall -> taking interaction outside of the screen. Finding innovative ways to interact with the computer. Breaking the convention of the keyboard, mouse and screen in order to generate a stronger connection between users and digital content.

The Red Tent

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:32:42 +0000

Last night I saw this great theatre production of The Red Tent, an interesting look at the biblical story of Jacob through the eyes of his one and only daughter, Dinah. It took part in the Arab-Hebrew theatre, in the old city of Jaffa. What was so spectacular about the performance was how the story completely drew me in. There were various reasons – the space was compact and warm. An old stone building, with several arches. Men sat on one side, while women sat on the other (or at least the director wished for that… didn’t really work out last night, as there were much more women than men in the audience!).Â In the beginning, when each character came onto the stage, their bags would spill sand onto the bare ground, creating the scenery as the characters themselves evolved. This was ultra effective, helping to draw the audience into the performance as the story evolved. Towards the middle of the first act, the floor was filled with sand.

Sand was also utilized in later scenes – acting as a waterfall, which surprisingly worked really well. With the proper lighting, sand falling on stage can have a stunning effect (made me think of Compana Nacional de Danza’s piece which ended with a tall sand waterfall). At the end of the play, a red utah hidden under the sand was raised as the red-tent. The actors were intense and did not need much props/set pieces to make me completely fall into their tale. This production plays for a couple of days every month. Needs all the support it can get.

The Red Tent is a novel by Anita Diamant, published in 1997 by St. Martin’s Press. It is a first-person narrative which tells the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph, a talented midwife and proto-feminist. The book’s title refers to the tent in which women of Jacob’s tribe must, according to the ancient law, take refuge while menstruating or giving birth, and in which they find mutual support and encouragement from their mothers, sisters and aunts. (source: wikipedia)