just this...? (a short thought on the ephemeral)

After one week of a lot of work, our performance "happened" yesterday and now nothing left of it.. Only memory...
I always found strange and sad this ephemeral "truth" of theatre and performance. But this is also what makes it magical. It makes it immortal, because time cannot touch it.
Being an architect, I have the experience of building something that lasts... (it actually lasts "forever" for the period of my life). And I have always been attracted by ruins: buildings but also objects that time has passed over them, leaving its trace on them. I like seeing the layers of time on the walls and on every material. This is the fate of the material world.
This doesn't exist in a performance. A performance is always young. It happens and it disappears. And this is what makes it unique amongst other arts.
Because this is the truth of life as well: Nothing lasts forever...

theatre - cinema

“Throughout the twentieth century, not only did live performance integrate film into production, but both mainstream and experimental theater also competed with cinema in terms of its own sense of spectacle, and theater became more cinematic in conception, particularly in the latter half of the century. Playwriting saw increasing use of short scenes, cross-cut parallel action, and the use of flashbacks and dramatic time shifts, while theater staging drew inspiration from the cinema, increasingly employing neocinematic devices such as the introduction of incidental music and the use of lighting to create sharp montage or gentle dissolve effects. This aimed to intensify the theatrical experience, and to approximate cinema’s absolute control of space and time, and the flow and location of the audience’s attention.”
Steve Dixon, “Digital Performance”

dream_1

Last First Friday that we had to present work, I continued with the idea of projecting on the water and this time I made a short video.
I was reading a short story of Edgar Alan Poe “The fall of the house of Usher” and I thought in doing something with a scary atmosphere. So the video is like a dream where a woman appears and disappears like a shadow, on the surface of the water. I wanted to play with the objects and their shadows, meaning with what is real and what is not real. What exists in reality and what in our imagination. A ghost story is a good example to play with this.
In the installation, the shadow (projection) could be the shadow of the puppet-woman but it is not. The tree could be the reflection of the real branches. Objects and projections of other similar objects can create an interesting illusion. And the element of the water connects everything as it is reflective and it is something between material and non-material. It is nor a concrete object, neither an abstract one.
I need to think and experiment more on these ideas. This is a beginning that I hope to drive me somewhere...