I'm the assistant director
on S.O.S. and high-tech staging is new to me. S.O.S. is the first production I've worked on that privileges video and still requires
a lot of movement from the actors. It's amazing to see them
exercise multiple acting muscles at once. The Big Art actors are
filmic and theatrical at the same time. How do they do it?
Caden either has a specific
physical structure in mind, or he lets improvisations inspire the staging.
As I have discovered in furiously scribbling it all down, the blocking
is two-fold. It includes the spatial relationships on stage and
the positions that produce images on screen. In each scene the
actor establishes a distance from the camera that will produce the desired
picture – close-up, mid-shot, or far shot. He steps in front
of the camera and arranges himself dynamically within the frame, using
the viewfinder that's been flipped back towards the lens. Neutral
images are met with Caden's direction to "make it interesting."
A prop held in the foreground looks better than one on the same plane
as the actor; an upshot is menacing; the more varied and interesting
the shape an actor's body makes in the frame, the better.
The camera is hard on the actor. On a huge proscenium stage, an actor in tableau can blink and breathe
– but projected video brings the audience closer, giving them much
more room to scrutinize. A "frozen" pose has to be totally
frozen or it doesn't work; the wobbles and shakes may take up the
whole stage. The actor's rigor and physical control become important
in the extreme.
Because the screens are what
feel closest to the audience, Caden often asks actors to relate to the
others through the screens.
For example, in one scene, the character Raccoon is following an argument
between Deer and Wolf. Instead of looking towards the speaking
actor, Racoon has to turn his head in the opposite direction - because
Deer and Wolf are flipped on the screens behind Raccoon's screen.
This counterintuitive direction makes for some funny moments in rehearsal
as the actor trains himself to turn the right way. He's denying
not only a lifelong instinct but a basic theatrical assumption - we
watch the person who speaks. It's not easy! I filled in for
Deer one day in rehearsal, and trying to relate to the others via screens
made me feel really spastic and uncoordinated, like a kid learning to
pat her head and rub her stomach at the same time.
Luckily all the actors in S.O.S
are longtime collaborators.
by: Kathleen Amshoff