Theatre and Technology: "my imaginary problem?"

A week or two ago as a way to battle the pre-exam-study-boredom a strip of masking tape placed on someone’s t-shirt for the duration of the day/night (at times hours, minutes, seconds) developed into some very funny, strange and at times magical moments. In my flat in Barcelona we began to created stories that grew and developed as our lives –granted, in the confines of our flat –progressed.

What started out a simple comments on the state of the persons mental health –“exhausted lover of chocolate and green things in general in search of inspiration from a higher being or failing that from someone taller or failing that with a better idea or failing that a cup of tea with a chocolate biscuit followed by a sleep" –to a more elaborate playful characterisation –"Eskimo, sad, returning home with an empty fish basket".

Although at times stupid, ridiculous, bearing no relation to anything -and often more a reflection of the person writing the ‘tapped-on-tag’ -occasionally they would give you a perspective you’d never seen. In a way they gave you another person’s abstracted perspective of the person they were labeling and in doing so built a situation around them for anyone else watching. (I’ve no idea if that make any sense but just hold on it’s trying to go somewhere). If you can open up another way of seeing something by simply putting a tag on it how does that affect the stage and people making/viewing the action and space?

We are making/viewing theatre in an age where most theatres have multi-media facilities that can project any backdrop onto the stage, where functioning houses can be built in theatres, where settings can seem more real than what exists outside the theatre. But if the audience don’t have to invest anything in believing what they want to see and the performers aren’t worried about provoking the audience’s imagination are both loosing something?

Fragments of stories

We started with ourselves, with poetry we were read, with stories we were told, with memories we had and memories we were told. We talked about holidays, about ice-cream, about making cakes, about the smells of mud, pets, and our bedrooms. We thought of the toys we played with, the ones we had, the ones we wanted, the ones we were glad we never got.

We went to the space and played; we didn’t think about any of the things we had before. We gathered bits of whatever we could find. We played games. Made up rules we didn’t follow, fought when the rules didn’t make sense and then changed them until it didn’t matter. We forgot about words; got lost in stories. For hours we didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing.

We found the story we didn’t know how to tell. We played some more; got more and more lost. Forgot the story we had found and started telling something else. Kept playing. Kept lost. Then we stopped and looked at what we had made in our play.

We finished with fragments we had unknowingly found. We were still lost but we knew where we had come from. We had told our version of the story we didn’t know how to tell. The story was all us. Fragments of us.