Friday, September 24, 2010

"Ala de Criados"

I saw this play a couple of weeks ago, I think I've been procrastinating writing about it because I LOVED IT in such a way that I don't really know what to say. It just really made me want to make some theater RIGHT NOW. I...I...I really can't form a coherent sentence about this. Acting! Absurdity! Truth! The "ugly-hot" aesthetic!!

After seeing the show, I got to attend an interview with the writer, who also directed the show. I took notes like a beast. Here are some things he said that stuck with me (sorry if the translations are awkward) :

1) The idea of the director as a creator of discourses that draw from the text, but don't necessarily exist innately within it. The actor, too, is a creator of discourses. In this sense, everyone involved in the creation of the work is a "playwright."
2) The contemporary notion of realizing a play is more than just placing a text in a space. The text has one meaning which is then joined with a multitude of others, creating something entirely new.
3) The casting process: looking for actors who manifest the characters in a way you hadn't imagined before (like looking at the sky and seeing a cloud transform into a dog, he said!)
4) You shouldn't commit to one existing technique, rather learn them all and use what works for you (he said he's read everything Stanislavki ever wrote and only ended up keeping about three pages for his personal use, but it was worth it for those three pages)
5) The ideal actor works in two "energies": TRUTH and POETRY. That is to say that the character belongs at once to the real world and to the autonomous world of the play.

Okay, that's enough pretention for now! More to come at some point, I'm sure ;)

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