AMERICAN THEATRE: César Alvarez will tell you how he came up with the imaginative idea for his musical Futurity, a coproduction between Ars Nova and Soho Rep now playing at the Connelly Theater through Nov. 15. Alvarez was driving through Virginia on his way home to perform in North Carolina when the image of Civil War soldiers in the woods popped into his head. “I had this silly idea,” Alvarez says with a laugh. “I wondered if any of the soldiers were into science fiction.”
2 comments:
Reading articles like these is always a wonderful activity. Its message probes me to an interesting question, however, because it discusses something that we, as drama students, are constantly being told t do: take the form, and reinvent it. Or, as Alvarez says in this article, interrupt it. I wonder at this message, not because of its supposed results, but because of the way it is being taught. We absolutely need to defy the norms and experiment, that is a given for our desire to progress, but are their imaginative ways to teach that inspire that kind of thinking? At CMU we do a pretty decent job of this, but it often seems as though we are plagued by our reputation to put work out that will satisfy high-minded critics that will rank us among schools. I recognize the struggle of this, and the balance that is necessary, however, as Alvarez teaches his students at his festival that I have never heard of, we must hear the call to push the limits regardless of the limitations that other people are subscribed to. Our education has to push itself to expand our imaginations, and we, as students, have to push ourselves to do the same, and then put that imagination into our work.
I think the premise of this musical is fascinating, although that wasn't the main focus of the article. To me it seems like one of those ideas that is just weird enough to be interesting, but not so bizarre that it totally alienates a potential audience. Growing up in Tennessee, Civil War history was the focus of every field trip and history day at school and at this point I could probably tell you more about it than I could about the Revolutionary War. To see this topic from a new angle, but still using the main themes and ideas with which this war will always be approached, makes me realize how much more there is to be said about it. Using a literary genre like science fiction to approach a historical topic could also draw in viewers with interests in either domain. I think the hardest part of tying these two things together would be making the correlation seamless and not too gimmicky. To make the show appealing, I think he would have to clearly express how two seemingly unrelated topics actually used many of the same ideas.
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