Re: writing oudeis

santiago pereson (jaco@overnet.com.ar)
Tue, 4 Mar 1997 14:33:20 -0300

>>Oh, second thing is the use of the mother tongue. So do we expect the
>>audience to read the dialogs? I know that we will probably not make it
>>without the use of subtitles - the screens - but I am not very fond of thi=
s
>>idea, because it can easily look like a helpless try to tell our story.
>
>I have been giving this a lot of thought and I agree with what you and the
>Vienna group originally thought about performing the dialogue in English.
>To do otherwise and use each location's mother language would mean that in
>one scene we could have a combination of real and virtual actors speaking
>to each other in German, Spanish, and English. While conceptionally this
>may be a cute idea I think the novelty would wear off after a few minutes.
>Also, this would make our production seem more like the Tower of Babel than
>The Odyssey.

i strongly dissagree on this subject. for one part there's the added
difficulty for most of the actors to speak a language that's not natural
for him. even if he can speak english, he will have a noticeable accent,
and this accent will make the text sound funny... it won't sound like Babel
but will sound like an english for foreigners class. and another (more
important) point is that people on each stage will not hear the local
language. we loose the 'world-wide' part of the idea (in fact if we do it
in english the best would be to have only actors from the USA, UK or
Australia).

to do the play in english will only help audiences on Chicago and Perth.

i can re-post all the discussion we had about this last year, but i think
it's not necessary.

>Also, if each location has a screen in which its mother language is shown
>(including the English speaking locations) we should be protected against
>the problem you mentioned earlier regarding the transport of audio data.
>If the worst were to occur, the performance would obviously lose the
>dimension of audio but it would not come to a grinding halt and would still
>be understandable to an audience until the situation was hopefully
>corrected. Our other options would be to pause in the performance and/or
>show the netlag storms. The limitations to these other options would be
>the loss of dramatic momentum, continuity, and the fact that if these
>problems are chronic the performance could last well over an hour.

this is more of a tech subject, relating to the idea thing. it's
technically possible to transfer audio data without much problem between
stages, and without loosing sound quality. each stage will have its own
sound server (dedicated mainly to the broadcasting of actors' voices), and
a fast connection to internet. our experience as low-end users (i think
most of us have a modem connection) can not be compared with the connection
the stage will have.

anyway if problems arise (and i should repeat that the problems that may
arise are not the same we users have), i think the net-lag storm (which
would be a combination of sounds and images) is a far better 'solution'
than to have the audience read the text on the screens.

desde Buenos Ayres, y en castellano porte=F1o.

un abrazo,

santiago

mailto:jaco@overnet.com.ar
http://www.geocities.com/~yaco

check oudeis, a world wide odyssey
at http://iguwnext.tuwien.ac.at/~oudeis/

music is dressed silence