>WHY?
(thanks for the 'wonderfully inventive' part... it's not that original,
thou. a similar technique, but using the 'i ching' is used by John Cage in
'Europera V', and i guess in other pieces as well)
my idea was not to 'encode' the position within the text, but to decide
(beforehand) which position the actors would take based on the text. this
was suggested by the fact that the actor is standing on a grid. i used a
technique like this one on a chamber opera (deciding the position and
direction of each player from the name of the small piece he was to
perform).
if we use it, we should work with each text, feed it into a program that
would infere the position and give us a list of positions for each text.
then this position would be _printed_ in the script, and would be rehearsed
(this was not intended to be 'real time').
by using this method you get something that usually looks quite weird
onstage (ie. the actor going to a corner of the stage, and whispering to
another actor on the front, etc.)
Why? to change the way the play is performed. usually position is decided
by the actor or the director. this way the text decides the position. in
contemporary music this kind of techniques are used to free the music from
traditional concepts and inherited 'rules', so as to get something that is
really 'new'. i know this may not be the purpose of this play (to find new
ways to perform a play, besides the 'internet' thing), and that this may be
more suitable to 'dance-theater' (do you know it by that name?) than to a
play.
anyway i still think this kind of technique should be used, otherwise we'll
be doing classic theatre by internet, and i'm sure theatre has grown quite
a lot since the classics. (have you ever heard classic music played with
contemporary instruments, or with the addition of a drum machine, like Luis
Cobos, Rondo Veneziano or the like? that's what i'm afraid of).
i know oudeis cannot in any way be 'classic', but i'm sure the 'modern'
(contemporary?) part of it should be everywhere, not only in the world-wide
span of the stage.
wishing you all a good year,
santiago
mailto:jaco@overnet.com.ar
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/3721/
music is dressed silence