Friday, March 18, 2011
Punchdrunk Transforms Chelsea Warehouses for ‘Sleep No More’
NYTimes.com: "IF New York’s junk shops, antiques fairs and confectioners have fielded some odd requests recently, it may be because the British theater company Punchdrunk is coming to town for the first time. The props list for its show “Sleep No More,” an environmental, stylized mash-up of Shakespearean drama and Hitchcockian noir, reads like the contents of a madman’s shopping cart: plastic teeth, animal eyes, hair samples, several kinds of blood, caramel spray.
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4 comments:
I'm interested to find out more about how this production of Sleep No More will differ from the American Repertory Theatre-hosted production. The Boston production took place in an abandoned elementary school, which (a) was a lot smaller and more claustrophobic than this sprawling six-story production seems, and (b) hosting it in a desecrated school had a particularly eerie feel, especially around the children's bedrooms. That said, the article captures the most amazing part about this show - the story and space are gigantic, but there is so much detail that you could explore for hours. I would be interested to see if they could maintain and sell the space as a museum, even if they cut out the Macbeth performance aspect.
Nice to hear about a piece of environmental theatre. I particularly like that it mentions scent as a design element; I can only think of a couple other instances of this because as I recall it usually isn't particularly effective.
This article is timely in paralleling some our our recent foundations of drama conversations about how the audience adds to the performance (here the audience is moving around and wearing masks), and the format of this is similar to Information for Foreigners.
As Daniel pointed out, I think scent design is fascinating. It is yet another element that brings audience members closer to the world we are trying to create. I admire the care that this company has been into every single detail of their production. It seems to me that environmental theatre brings with it a new set of problems for the creative and management teams involved. I wish that the article could have gone more in-depth in its explanation of the show and the process of its performance. I like the idea of this type of theatre, but I wonder if the immersive nature of the piece ends up actually distracting some audience members instead of captivating them. Either way, this company provides a good example of the kind of detail work that some productions require, which speaks to why we, as theatre artists, should learn to be more detail-oriented.
Punchdrunk does a lot of very interesting things with productions on both sides of the pond. I had the opportunity to "experience" one of their projects in London about two years ago. It took place in an old railroad storage tunnel under the city and had little scenes and exhibits spread out throughout the space. As a viewer I found it incredibly frustrating to make my way through the "show," because there was seemingly no order to it, and we received no guidance on what to look at and where. I don't regret doing it (especially because we got in for free...), but I would be hesitant to see another of their shows for fear of being just as frustrated.
I can't even imagine what a chaotic event this would be to plan for anyone on the production end of the spectrum. It is probably quite a challenge. And, I hope, a little bit fun.
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