April 7, 2011
"The Alice Project" Re-imagines Lewis Carroll Classic with Blending of Performance and Technology
Filed under Press Releases
Photos by Louis Stein
On April 14, “The Alice Project” takes Lewis Carroll’s Victorian sensibility and drags it kicking and screaming into the present-day to be tattered and transformed.
Directed by faculty member Marianne Weems, this highly anticipated interdisciplinary performance explores the character of Alice through a modern-day lens of technology. The production uses layers of multimedia, including several live cameras, projection surfaces and soundscapes on an overwhelming three-story steel maze of a set that fills the Philip Chosky Theater.
In the model of her previous work as Artistic Director of the award-winning theatre company The Builders Association, Weems is leading a collaborative process with an ensemble of artists dedicated to a unified vision of re-imagining “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There”. Over the past year, a collaborative team of graduate designers, undergraduate directors, and graduate dramatic writing students have collaborated together with the director, actors, and technicians to develop the performance.
Plunged into a “looking-glass world”, Alice tip-toes through a set of seemingly arbitrary and fluid rules in order to progress through a game of chess and become Queen. She meets a series of melancholic and delusional creatures unable to move outside of their own ‘squares’. “Alice is bombarded with questions about who she is”, says second-year graduate directing student Katherine Brook. “Each encounter is a struggle with power, with strangers who try to force her to define and defend her identity.” Alice is seen and named by a variety of characters in multiple ways. As they struggle to define her, the story reflects fragments of different perceptions of Alice.
The scale of the three-story steel structure of the set, each with multiple “cells” for various characters, combined with live action captured on video and encompassing soundscapes heightens this multi-varied perspective and creates a complex pictorial frame. Weems notes that “this use of multimedia creates connections and disconnections which offer the viewer a window into this contemporary reading of Alice.”
The Alice Project performs April 14 – 23rd in the Philip Chosky Theater located in the Purnell Center for the Arts.
For more information and tickets, please click here.