Breaking Miranda Warning

by Eli Commins

with Stéfane Perraud

produced by 10’52

Breaking / Miranda Warning le 25 mars 2011 lors de Pros Via, Mons (BE)

Breaking: Current Events on the Stage

Breaking is based on messages posted on the Internet, by people who are confronted to life-changing events. By following these witnesses in real time, Breaking creates a network of narratives about the world as it is today, thereby offering a new perspective on what mass media call “the news”.

During the performance, the spectators are gathered in an immersive environment, which is populated by the words, the sounds and the images that are uploaded to the web by those we are following. All these stories are related to events which are still unfolding as the performance is underway, such as a natural catastrophy (eruption of Mount Redoubt, Alaska, in March 2009 ; earthquake in Haiti and Chile, January-April 2010), a political conflict (elections in Iran, June-July 2009), or any other phenomenon. Future projects include crime stories, social uprisings and other types of situations.

The personal narratives featured in Breaking reconnect us with one of the most archaic functions of theater : to inform us about the world as it is today. This is made possible by the new forms of textualities available on the Internet.

At a time when mainstream media news is undergoing an unprecedented crisis, Breaking tries to offer a new outlook on current events, through subjective testimonies, through which the spectator can navigate as he wishes to. The points of view are multiple, contradictory, and paradoxical.

Breaking wants to offer us an alternative to the “industrialization of affects” that mainstream media promotes. A space where one is given the possibility to listen and to stop listening.

Breaking : current events on the stage

Theatre / performance

Duration : 1 hour

Video , actors

texts in real time

internet

A New Theatrical Standpoint

The events covered in Breaking can be a few months old at most, or a couple days old at the least. As a consequence, it is impossible to foresee what a given cycle of performances will be about.

Breaking is essentially based on messages posted on Twitter, a microblogging site which gives its users 140 characters to write their texts.

The scenography changes at each new cycle of performances, depending on the topic. Nevertheless, it follows a few guidelines :

- It provides an immersive environment where there is no separation between the stage and the public.

- The public is central in the scenography. Actors, recorded sounds, and videos surround the spectators, who decide freely what to focus on.

- The public can move anywhere on the set, at anytime. Its movements trigger new texts and changes the textual geography of the performance, in real time.

A New Theatrical Community

Breaking is both theater and document. Theater, because the real timeline of the performance, during which the spectators are gathered, is at the heart of the story itself. Document, because the collected items - texts, sounds, videos, photos - are posted by people who are currently taking part in events that are still underway at the time of the performance.

The idea of bringing together the time of performance and the time of “reality” is meant to create a space that is shared by the public and those who are present on the web.

Thus, the spectators are no longer watching characters and fictions : they are confronted to actual persons, and have to find new ways of relating them, either through proximity or distance.

Breaking demonstrates that live performance has something unique to offer in the field of information, which has been monopolized by mass media for a long time.

Furthermore, this work takes place in a long-term interest for new forms of relations between the public and the stage, and for the material form of textual objects intended for the stage : a book doesn’t yield the same theatrical situation as an electronic text.

An Electronic Text Onstage

“Breaking is different from a traditional theatrical text, as it is not linear and is not printed on paper. At each performance, the text is modified in an unpredictable way, depending on how the public moves in space, and also on the most recent messages posted on the web by our correspondents.

During the performance, each spectator can choose to listen to a given stream rather than another one. To do so, he walks to one of the sections of the stage, thereby turning on or off different textual tracks.

My work on real time transformations of performative texts started with 120 times, an electronic text where the public could choose what would come next in the performance, during short interruptions of the action onstage.

Subsequently, I started to work on continuous forms of interaction with a text, that is without the interruptions. In Breaking, the solution is to consider that when a spectator listens to someone, he is actually acting. This translates onstage with a scenography based on different “listening points” that are dispatched on the set.

Breaking / Miranda Warning nous emmène sur la frontière entre le Mexique et les Etats-Unis, en Arizona, là où les immigrants clandestins traversent à pied « l’autoroute du Diable », un corridor de trois déserts qui mène les plus chanceux vers El Norte.

Auteur et metteur sn scène: Eli Commins
Plasticien: Stéfane Perraud
Equipe de comédiens pour Breaking / Miranda / Warning :
Voix: Dolorès Lago Azqueta, Eli Commins, Natacha Mendes
Comédiens plateau: Vanessa Liautey, Yanecko Romba, Fanny Rudelle (juillet 2010)
Lise Akoka, Renaud Bechet, Eléonore Pourriat (décembre 2010)
Musique originale: David Krutten

Crédits photo: Viola Berlanda