About 2 1/2 years ago, Josephine, Dave, and Sarah approached me about the possibility of collaborating with the Dream Cab on a project. They knew some of our work, and we knew some of theirs, and several of us Cabbers got together at UB for a demonstration of the possibilities of VR by Dave, Josephine, and Stuart. (The main thing that struck me that night was not the possibilities in the creation of virtual worlds, but the weird interplay of levels when someone walks in front of a projector or something else jars the viewer out of the illusion and back into, ahem, "reality.")
Sometime around this point, Sarah proposed two plays we might want to consider working with in one way or another. So the rest of us went home with scripts of Jarry's Ubu Roi and Bruchner's Woyzeck. The original idea was to pick one, given how different they are in terms of history and tone, but we ended up discovering all sorts of points of contact between them and decided to create a mash-up of the two, much like smartass DJs have been doing for the last 10 years or so. One crucial commonality was the fact that neither play exists in a definitive version, inviting all manner of rearrangement. Early on, we toyed with all kinds of approaches, the most radical of which would have involved cutting up the scripts and pulling fragments out of a hat, or improvising scenes as they appeared on a Wheel of Fortune-style spinner. Another early idea was to have the Ubu cast appear only on film, or have the Ubu-ites be performing a carnival watched by Woyzeck and his wife. One thing we decided quite soon was that Ubu was practically written for the Dream Cab, and that "real" actors should handle Woyzeck.
A year or more went by, during which both collaborating groups went on with other projects of their own, and two "teams" formed to adapt the plays. (Sarah and Josephine worked on Woyzeck, and Holly on Ubu with feedback from Brian.) When we regrouped, we did several table reads of the two separate pieces, weaving them together in a fairly instinctual way. (This photo is from a bit later in the process, but you get the idea. Add in some more comfy furniture, lots of junk food, a few cats--one violently insane--and you're there.)
As I recall, our first stab at the mash-up was not too far from what we've still got now--I remember how amazed we all were at how easily certain pivotal events in the two works lined up. We moved one entire character and two minor walk-ons from Woyzeck to Ubu, but the rest stayed largely the same. Somewhere in here IPS did a staged reading with actors (none of whom are in the current production) and some VR elements (ditto, I think) during last summer's Infringement Festival.
Once we had the two scripts compressed into one, we brainstormed ways to stage Ubu: the premise became starting off with live actors and then moving deeper and deeper into various media--a TV sitcom, Eyewitness News, a slasher film, a PowerPoint presentation, and so on--until there was no human presence onstage by the end. Logistics have led us to fudge that a bit, but it's still more or less the basic concept.
For a very long time, the show was purely hypothetical, until some very generous funding allowed the IPS folks to rent a rehearsal/performance space on Main Street near Lafayette, at which point things started rolling pretty fast. Our core group of six or seven expanded to incorporate computer science folks, robot designers, and, eventually, actors. Before we knew it, we had performance dates, and discussion-based meetings gradually evolved into rehearsals.
And now, somehow, opening night is a mere eight days away. So, back to real-time updates.
No comments:
Post a Comment