An empty stage, one projection of a live feed video of back stage on a delicate hand slowly moving a pill bottle backwards and forwards. The hand goes to pick them up multiple times then choses against it the whole time the audience make their way to their seats. The lights go down, he begins. “Mr President, on this occasion of your birthday…”
The camera pans up to show Marilyn backstage in her own world, holding the pill bottle.
“Mr President, Marilyn Monroe…”
Nothing.
Marilyn is greeted by panicked looking stage hands on screen.
“Let me just say… Here she is!”
She makes her way out of the dressing room and onto the stage…
She leaves, the cameras follow her, she falls to the floor and cries, clutching where her womb would be. She mimes something – we can’t hear what, to the stage hands, they carry her off back through a door. Poor Marilyn just wants a baby.
Imagine a show where we see past the images we’re so used to. Where we can see into Marilyn’s dressing room, or to the men that made Martin Luther King. We can ask odd questions like ‘What does 9/11 sound like?’ and ‘What did the moon landing look like made out of television pixels?’
I have this image of a completely monochrome show, everything in black and white. The set, the live feed cameras, the projection, the costumes. Replicating the ‘Newspaper Pictures’ we see every day. Taking something that has inherently got no technology (Newspaper) and breathing life into them. Moments from history presented in new ways, ways that are only achievable through technology. JFK’s assassination, Hitler’s death, signing of the treaty of Versailles and the end of World War 1, The titanic, The Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ shot, fall of the Berlin wall, Nazi book burn, Bill Gates!
The possibilities are endless, and we can show so much with technology, from recreation, addition, focus on some tiny detail.
Stuff like that will make an interesting show – and entertaining when audience learn what is being shown.
The scene titles can be made from other newspaper headlines to create a sentence or phrase, projected up onto a screen so the audience can read it.
For example, the Marilyn scene can have “Birthday Song by Late Woman” – simplifying events in the word form but overcomplicating them physically on stage by adding so much more.
This composition of a monochrome stage* with images of history is something that just fascinates me, and I think it does exactly what we were asked to do. Show something that can only be shown with technology.
*Also a monochrome stage would look cool if certain things were in colour, for example, one girl in a red dress against a black and white stage would be stunning.
What do you think?
