An original visual theatre performance created in residency at Villa Nappi, Associazione Inteatro, Polverigi, Italy
Project blog: http://trackingshottheperformance.blogspot.com/
Although the opening night for Tracking Shot was over a month ago, I’m still assimilating everything that I learned and experienced on my European placement project in Polverigi, Italy. I was a pleasure working on this project first as Writer and then as Assistant Director and Stage Manager. Being a part of such a diverse team, adapting to a new working environment and meeting day-to-day challenges meant that I’ve been able to explore my own strengths and weaknesses, learning new aspects of building narrative structures while revising old ways of working.
A detailed documentation of our process and production can be found on our project blog but I’m going to use this space to briefly outline our idea and process.
Tracking Shot was devised as a completely original piece of visual theatre by a team of 12 students from our MA programme under the guidance of director Pete Brooks. We approached the project from two different directions of Dramaturgy and Design, me being one of four people devising the dramaturgical structure and text for the performance. From the outset we were interested in an experiment. We wanted to create a kind of “cinematic” theatre: a live performance that could interpret the experience and the language of film for the stage, a idea that rapidly took shape for us once we were given access to an extraordinarily large, empty performance space by Inteatro.
Story and Narrative
At the crux of it, Tracking Shot is a filmic journey through the life and on-screen career of an ageing Italian actress Monica. She is ill and dying but she comes to Roberto – a director she once worked with – with a request for him to re-edit the end scene of a film they made together 30 years earlier. The lead actor playing opposite her in the film was the only man she ever loved off-screen but before she could tell him how she felt, he died. She wants to change the end of the last film they made together because in doing so she hopes to find resolution or redemption in some way. It is a pointless gesture to re-edit the film, but a poignant and meaningful one all the same.
the crux of the matter
time, film and audience
In performance, the audience of 6 travels through a series of film scenes that Monica has acted in over the span of her career. She tells us the story of her life in snippets of filmic dialogue, between voiceovers and in the film itself that she wants to change. A wagon containing the audience and the “point-of-view” as it were, physically moves forwards, backwards and pans left and right in the simulation of a camera frame. The soundtrack and music are delivered to the audience via individual headphones located in their seats providing a sealed, hermetic sensory expereince.The “scenes” meanwhile assemble and disintegrate in the empty space around the wagon allowing the viewing frame of the wagon to montage them together.
"Tracking" the shot
possible wagon movements
simulation of the audience's view
We interpreted the character of Monica as that of the ultimate actress of Eropean cinema. She takes us through the 20th century, reflecting the changing attitudes and concerns of film, the shifting political landscape of the times she lived in, and the intellectual dissociation that came with it. To us she is Bergaman’s Liv Ulman, Godard’s Jean Seberg, Monica Vitti, Anna Karenina and Anita Ekberg all rolled into one. She thinks of herself in terms of the characters she has played, having lived through each of them one at a time. The gap between fiction and reality is an imperceptible one. Which is the original and which is the simulation we wonder.
Production Still: Trevi fountain scene by Olesya Borisova
Production Still: Cornfield scene by Zsofia Kocsmárszki
Tracking Shot was first performed in Italian at the Teatro della Luna in Polverigi in 18 performances between May 14 and 18, 2010. To know more about the performance, please do visit the project blog.
The following video is uncut and in Italian. I hope to post a sub-titled version in the coming weeks, but till then, here it is:
All images (C) Ruchita Madhok, 2010. All rights reserved
