I do not imagine a theater, because I live theater, breathe it in and out; I dream it. But, if I had to imagine a theater, then I'd like to imagine that the languages that have been forgotten, which are still spoken in many parts of the world, would be part of this new playwriting.
The public wanders through a collection of rooms, each with a different performance, exhibit, reading, meeting, game, discussion. Their experience is not fixed. They wander without moorings, the way a curious reader meanders through the pages of a magazine, not knowing what they’re searching for.
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?
You find yourself in front of a nun’s convent, and when the doors open, a child appears, and with an air of wisdom that only children can have when they stand in their power and carry their own agency, takes your hand to guide you in. It is an unusual situation, to surrender to a silent young stranger this way. You feel the power shifting.
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.
Wish-full thinking. It contains a wish, a hope, a possibility, a thought experiment, a fantasy, a “what if…”, the potential of the performance to enact change – political or social change, maybe, or a change in the energy of the room, or a psychological change, momentary or lasting, in the spectator.
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.
Couchscore works with and through distance to make a choreography possible even when the performers – and the audience – are not in the same physical place.
It is the fantasy of a body discovering new relationships with itself. Silvia wants to be where there are no dimensions, neither internal nor external.
The play begins / The play does not begin.