I have been brainstorming about what contraptions to build and use on stage, and have come up with a new"protagonist", which I call "The Geek ". He mans a thoroughly 21st Century machine with a 19th Century Steampunk esthetic, a spoof of what a computer might have looked like 150 years ago. At it's core will be an old typewriter, a large computer monitor, and a live cam housed in an old bellows view camera:
Everything will be mounted on a box on wheels equipped with handles, and will be carted around the stage by "The Geek" like a large TV camera. Something along the lines, but not quite as elaborate as "The Brain" in Caro and Jeunet's "City of Lost Children":
"The Geek" will be manning the live cam, from wide view to close up, and to some extent interact with the other characters at the same time. He will at times tap the keyboard in rhythm with the music, but also be a "stagehand on stage", helping with the set changes, pushing the bed or the wheelchair around, cranking the front set up, etc...
In the course of my research, I ran across a Polish Theatrical Genius I had never heard of before, not mind you because he is obscure, but because of my own ignorance of 20th century theatre history: Tadeusz Kantor.
Born in 1933, he was active from 1940 to 1990, and was at the same time a Painter, a Sculptor, a Set Designer, and a Theatre Director of tremendous vision and talent. I was so impressed with what I read and saw that I started a new blog that envisions which way to take things further afield than just the Frida Show:
http://theabsurdisttheatrecooperative.blogspot.com
I now want try to reconcile both things, and make Frida an integral part of the new vision that is evolving out of that discovery. Kantor's work was often called "The Theatre of Death", and that fits squarely with my idea of Death being the second main protagonist next to Frida herself, rather than Diego Riveira. I was already planning on making the props (bed, wheelchair, easel, prosthetics, corsets, etc…) an important part of the show, and that also fits very well with the Kantor inspiration. I was seeing the show almost as a non linear vaudeville, a sort of Frida Carnival Show, highly stylized and "overacted", a succession of loosely tied together iconic scenes. That too is akin to the Kantor style of "avant-garde theatre". For Kantor, there are no vulgar props, they are works of Art in their own right, and that fits with my intentions to use my own sculpture as props. Lacking in my preliminary vision of Frida were the Absurdist context, the use of mannequins, and the dadaist wackiness of the scenes and of the props.
I now see puppets playing the part of the child Frida, the tortured Frida(spine stretching, surgery, amputation), and a larger than life Diego Rivera.
In light of the general demise of Communist regimes (for all practical purposes, although keeping the label, both Russia and China have become de facto rabid capitalist states, the Party leaders having transformed into Oligarchs), I see the belief of Frida in the communist Party then as philosophically absurd now.
I want to build a tabletop Test stage in the studio to play with projected images and staging ideas. My work table is 48" deep, and the actual stage is 12 ft deep, so the 1/4 scale will be perfect.
I will use 3/4"" conduit for the four vertical posts, the back ones being 36" tall and the front ones 60". The front ones will be bolted to the front of the table for stability, and have pulleys on top to lift the front set, which will be cut out of 1/2" plywood :
The back set will be also cut out of 1/2' plywood:
Rectangular tubing will tie the posts, and a beam will hold the lights. The side walls can be cut out of white cardboard. All the doors and shutters are hinged, front and back set.
After testing counterweights, I switched instead to a crank wench and sisal rope; I like the idea of doing set changes in front of the public, and having one of the actors crank the front set up from the side. But I will need to find a larger wench.
