What if we define values, principles, and methodologies, resisting the pressure to define outcomes? What if we focus on what drives us and on how we want to live and work together, but leave the imagination open to the concrete shapes our collaboration can take?
It is raw, it is real, it is happening with you in the room and can only be experienced in the “here and now.” It is open to a multiplicity of heres and nows depending on the realities, perceptions, localities... of those present.
A theatre foyer. Night. It is empty. The doors are locked. But if there were a woman there...
Duse’s superpower: her capacity to disappear, leaving only her plaster hands as evidence that she was a material presence in the world. Disappearance. Reproduction. She knew the theatrical drill.
It should be noted that the history of populism in the Americas is deeply entwined with the history of the balcony.
We Balconies will continue to sing our endless songs, our revolutionary shouts and pings: “Other worlds are possible even in impossible times!”
Can we compose a performance that sails to you across a virtual arc, like these words, with the harp vibration of a telegraph, and no risk of contagion? How do we shrink this microscopic stage?
What makes me who I am, or lets me become what I am not?
This was a long way from the contained theatre of a Chekhov play presented over a couple of hours and yet it was the same play. Instead, the audience was living with the characters in that house.
This raises the question of whether theatre pieces that engage with race as a concept should direct audiences towards particular kinds of arguments. And if there are inexplicit arguments about diverse casting and performance in this imagined piece, will they be evident to audiences?