We’re in the homestretch now. It’s the last two weeks of the workshop and the company members are working on making decisions about how they want the pieces they have written to sound and look, practicing, and recording their performances. We’ve been going thorough our own metamorphosis and it’s been very hard work. This year’s group has bravely embraced the unknown of the video-performance hybrid that is virtual theater making. We’ve all had to change our ideas, work with new perspectives, make difficult things work, embody strange ideas, and work towards the precision, commitment and discipline needed for performance. The transformation is almost complete and we’re all going to emerge having gained new ideas and new skills.
This year we tried to emphasize the versatility of the virtual medium during our early explorations so we could more easily think of ways to break away from simply performing in front of our cameras. What scenes should be filmed away from Zoom? Should we use digital editing techniques or just figure out how we can do things do things practically?
Our early work seems to be have been quite fruitful, as every piece is taking advantage of the digital medium in different ways. The use of voice-over to dislocate the dialogue you hear has been very useful for the Beckett group. Being able to layer one image over another is a handy trick the Miyagawa group is making good use of. And the Kondoleon group is using several different techniques to create their many vignettes, such as editing together footage shot asynchronously and layering audio recorded individually to make a choral speaking effect.
The target story of Echo and Narcissus has proven to be a juicy piece of mythology for our explorations. In the course of our short performance you will see beauty and terror, irreverence and deep reverence, longing and rejection, unrequited love and learning to love yourself. There is music, and dancing, and singing, both wild and chaotic and melodious and beautiful.
This year’s workshop has been an incredible journey. We learned a lot last year and we used that knowledge to venture out into deeper waters of the virtual medium this summer. I hope you will join us for the performances and see the magic this band of theatrical adventurers has made together.
From Our Participants:
Bernie Poulter:
Why did you want to participate in the workshop this year?
I participated in this workshop because I love theatre. This is my third year in the workshop and I have to say that every year I love it even more. The first time I participated I was just getting into theatre. This workshop pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me a better performer. It still continues to do so. I love being able to write our own plays. Performing something that you created is exhilarating. When it was announced last year that the workshop would be online I knew I would participate no matter what. It was a learning experience for all of us and we only scratched the surface of what we could do in an online medium. Last year’s workshop was really fun but it felt like more of a replacement for live theatre. This year we’re using the digital platform more to our advantage. It feels like something entirely different from live in person theatre. I miss being able to work in real life, there are some things that you can’t do on a digital platform that I wish we could do. However, if I had a choice I think this year at least I would still choose to do this online. There are just so many fun things that we’ve been able to do that would never work in live theatre. Plus, this is experimental theatre. What’s more experimental than doing something in a completely new way?
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