Monday, December 20, 2010

City Inside 02: Design Outline

 

Prague is known as a ‘walking city’. St Anna’s cathedral, the site for the ‘Now/Next Performance’ space is situated in Praha region 1, with easy walking access to the town square and attractions.

The performance to be staged here is a play ‘Father was a Peculiar Man’, originally directed by Reza Abdoh. This is a contemporary adaptation of the Dostoyevsky classic ‘The Karamazov Brothers’. The modern work was presented over two hours as a journey across four New York city blocks. The main locations were a picket fenced house, a graveyard, a meat locker and an execution chamber.

My design for this play is based on a consideration of how the audience in New York would have experienced the production. This was not a typical audience sitting in rows of seats with the play enacted in front of them. This audience needed to select their own view point, move around to see the action, and experience the play in dark stairwells and alleys.

The themes from the play include deception, crime, punishment, loss of innocence and family disintegration. These are acted out in the city locations where architecture becomes a theatrical set. The space inside the church is designed to feel like walking through a city; sometimes having little light, sometimes finding a scenic view point, needing to use particular routes to get to a destination.

The performance space is designed specifically with ‘Father was a Peculiar Man’ in mind. The spaces evoke unnerving, shadowy, hidden areas. The cathedral is set with four stages and a series of channels that the audience use to view the play. The audience proximity to the performers can be at a distance or very intimate. The interplay of planes as seen in a perspective of an alley is a connection to the cubist architecture in Prague. The faceted planes bring focus to the play of light and the energy of the slicing planes.

The top level, a bar, is accessed by a lift. On exiting the lift the patron can see the theatre space through a hole in the floor. This overview of the space should coincide with an overview discussion of the performance once it is complete.

The aim of the design is to challenge audience expectations and perceptions. The impact of the play will be different with the audience being in motion. And depending on the involvement of the audience member, the intensity of the play will vary. “The more aggressive you are as a member of the audience, the more you see. You have to pick the things to watch. There's no way you can see everything.” Mira-Lani Oglesby in New York Times.

Collins, G. (1990, July 19). Street Theater Audience Must Make a Choice. Retrieved from The New Yourk Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/19/

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