MAIDing

I was recently invited to join a production by Cadartin Produktionen. Story written by argentinian Lola Arias is called "Dream with Revolver" and it will open in Raum 33 in Basel on 19th of September. It will be part of Treibstoff 2009 festival. (Hey cool, on the Treibstoff homepage there is a photo of "Fleisch und Blut" from 07 festival. Did the light to this too =)

I was very happy to sign in when director Charlotte von Bausznern called me, since I knew ms. Arias through Rimini Protokoll and Stefan Kaegi and was really curious to read her text. I had also previously worked briefly with Christa Wenger, light designer with Bendwerk, who was contributing to the light concept. Christa had been kind enough to suggest me to Charlotte when they were looking for collaborators in Basel, so it's actually thanks to her that I'm in the project.

For the upcoming project we wanted to do little try-out already now in May, to experiment on some functional ideas we had come up with during the pre-designing. This try-out was called "MAIDing" and we had two performances.

Mirrors, reflection and transparent
In MAIDing we had two main themes to explore. First of them was the possibility to use mirrors and create somehow indirect point of view to the performance / action. We placed couple of huge mirror-folio frames in the gallery-like space and then some smaller real mirrors on notestands on the floor. Set design is by Peter Meier.

Looking from below to the mirror hanged from the ceiling.

This part of our experiment worked really well and all the spectators were really fond of the idea. To me it was curious to realise how many ways of looking the spectators actually found, it was ways more complex than I could have imagined.

Looking from below, through the mirror
to the action taking place behind the vertical mirror.

To me probably the most fascinating thing was to see how you can dissolve all the sense of direction and turn things upside down etc. The action turns into something very ethereal and poetic and the spectator can easily forget who and what is above and below.

Upsidedown? Who?

The mirror experiment was a total success and this will be something to work on and develop further also in autumn.

Switches -DIY scene-
The second part of our experiment was giving the command to the spectator. For this we had been fondling the idea of giving each and every spectator their own switch so that they can control their own individual source of light on stage. We wanted to let the the audience decide what and how clearly they can see.

A very luminous moment.
On stage: Esther Becker and Elina Meyer

When a spectator is coming to the seating there is no way of knowing which switch will do what. So, quite understandably, there was relatively lot of blinking in the beginning. The sources varied from traditional theater fixtures via light-organ to minuscule desk-lamps. One could end up having a switch to more general source or to a very fine detail. And first of all one needs to figure out which one responds to the switch.

But in the end I was very surprised to see that there actually seems to be some kind of collective understanding of, or attempt towards, aesthetical appearance. The audience started to built up rough scenes on stage and choose what fits together.

Moving towards more designed light.
Costumes: Susanne Ehrenbaum

The spectators admitted that the idea of switches is curious and they found it interesting in the beginning. But somehow it also becomes slight burden and repsonsibility having to remember your light and your switch and using them, which disturbs one's concentration on following the story.

Graphic moment.

To us it also turned out to be a fact that the switch-idea is too coarse as a medium to be used for this particular text of Revolver Traum. The space in Raum 33 is so white and luminous, that it would have been working against the space itself to built delicate enough set-up for the switching. The only way of presenting the necessary intimacy and privacy of the text would have been to cover the whole space in black if you don't want to open it all up. With the mirrors we still have the possibility of showing only a glimpse or partial image of somebody's private moments.

Focusing and concentrating the scene.

The very end.

Conclusion.
I was exhilarated to have a chance of this kind of exploration. The results were far more complex and multi-leveled than I could ever have imagined. It shows yet again how you grow blind to your own thing. One should think that they have pondered the possibilities from every possible angle, but rest assured, there will always be surprise.

The switch-thing is something that will have it's time and space somewhere in the future, but it just didn't fit to the concept of this text and the world the text reveals. The mirrors are beautiful, poetic and very powerful in expression. Those are sort of easy concept of offering many possibilities to the audience.

I'm really looking forward to end of summer to really get my hands on this. This makes me feel very positively energetic. Yeah!

Stay tuned for follow-ups!!