Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "A new home can be an exhilarating experience, especially when the stress of moving is past.
Attack Theatre's first creation in its new home in Pittsburgh Opera's building in the Strip District draws inspiration from its new environment.
'We can't help ourselves being incredibly affected,' says the company's co-director Michele de la Reza. 'Our new neighborhood is very different from when we were on Penn Avenue' in Lawrenceville."
4 comments:
This type of theatre has always fascinated me. Being inspired by your surroundings and creating something from that is such a rare thing to see in big name broadway shows. In fact that practically never happens. But with small groups like this, they experiment and truly create works of art.
The discussion of a system of movement used to tell a narrative is incredible intriguing. The fact that the creation of a time line was more driven by the beauty of similarities rather than story telling is bound to produce interesting results.
I also think this is a very appropriate piece for Pittsburgh as it is a city with very distinct neighborhoods. The audience will clearly understand the references made in the movement to the actual environment of the neighborhood around them.
I think it's great that Attack Theatre focuses on creating new pieces of theatre rather than reworking older pieces and putting new perspectives on them. I also think it's interesting that they feel that their new venue is affecting and influencing that art form. It's not necessary, but it is always cool to see how a piece of theatre and the venue in which it is performed interact and enlighten each other.
The idea of the uncertainty of urban encounters is something that hadn't really occurred to me much until recentley. Growing up in Raleigh N.C. there was a downtown area but the majority of the area was suburban. In the suburbs the spread out nature of things means you get where you're going by car not foot, and there's a lot less day to day interaction. In a city, or on a college campus the sheer number of people in close contact with each other changes the dynamic radically. Crowds may feel anonymous but sometimes mutual connections still occur, and I think addressing this in performance is a smart choice because anyone who's lived in a city can grasp a small part of the concept.
I have visited the strip district many times and it has becomes one of my favorite places in Pittsburgh. I can defiantly see how the strip would provide great inspiration for theatre because as described in this article the atmosphere is infectious. Not only is this a place where many different people come together but many different things happen at the strip and so all the people are there for very different reasons. I cannot think of better more culturally diverse place from which to draw great examples of human interaction.
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