"Theater That Uses the City as a Stage"

Upcoming site specific performance piece in NYC reported in the NY Times(thanks peggy):

From the top of One Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, to the Chrysler Building to the Roosevelt Island tramway, Deborah Warner had scouted locations since October. The search was not for a film but for an environment in which to place a site-specific performance installation called "The Angel Project." That project, which Ms. Warner regards, quite simply, as "a walk," is the theatrical feature of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, which starts next week.
While the Kirov Opera is filling the Metropolitan Opera during the festival, theatergoers taking part in "The Angel Project" will be led one by one at five-minute intervals through an individualized journey to nine locations, many in the area of 42nd Street. The walk is scheduled to begin on Roosevelt Island, where people will be given a guidebook to follow as if on a kind of theatrical treasure hunt.
Everyone goes on the same journey, but, Ms. Warner said, each person "will see something entirely different by virtue of the canvas being so huge." The audience will help to define the experience. It is, she said, "like inviting somebody in, giving them a key to a house and leaving them to it."

July 3, 2003
Theater That Uses the City as a Stage
By MEL GUSSOW

From the top of One Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, to the Chrysler Building to the Roosevelt Island tramway, Deborah Warner had scouted locations since October. The search was not for a film but for an environment in which to place a site-specific performance installation called "The Angel Project." That project, which Ms. Warner regards, quite simply, as "a walk," is the theatrical feature of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, which starts next week.

While the Kirov Opera is filling the Metropolitan Opera during the festival, theatergoers taking part in "The Angel Project" will be led one by one at five-minute intervals through an individualized journey to nine locations, many in the area of 42nd Street. The walk is scheduled to begin on Roosevelt Island, where people will be given a guidebook to follow as if on a kind of theatrical treasure hunt.

Everyone goes on the same journey, but, Ms. Warner said, each person "will see something entirely different by virtue of the canvas being so huge." The audience will help to define the experience. It is, she said, "like inviting somebody in, giving them a key to a house and leaving them to it."

Strange and often startling things will happen at the various locations, as rooms in the buildings chosen are animated and become the equivalent of interactive museum installations.

Because ticket holders will move at their own pace — the trip should take from two to three hours — there may be some unintentional overlapping among visitors. The size of the audience will be limited. Despite the fact that the project will run for the entire festival, from Tuesday to July 27, on most days from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., only 2,350 tickets will be sold — at $90 apiece. A limited number of student discount tickets will be available at $20.

Ms. Warner, best known in New York for her productions of "The Waste Land" and "Medea" (both starring Fiona Shaw), has directed plays and operas on the widest diversity of international stages.

Her work ranges from one-person shows like "The Waste Land" to a spectacular "Coriolanus" 10 years ago at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, with 50 actors, 250 extras and 15 horses. These productions and others have led to Ms. Warner's ranking as one of Britain's most innovative directors.

Those previous ventures dwindle logistically next to "The Angel Project," which will have to allow for New York's multiplicity and traffic, human and motorized. Theatergoers will proceed by foot and by subway to the sites. Some 40 performers, most of them nonprofessionals (many pretending to be angels), will work in two shifts along with 20 production assistants to create the project.

A version three years ago, at the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia, sprawled through 13 buildings. It has been a far greater challenge for Ms. Warner to choose locations in New York and to persuade people to open their buildings to her world of theater. As she edged toward the preview performance next Monday, she said: "I can't think of a more difficult city to do this in. It's dizzying, but I'm also excited by the possibilities."

Ms. Warner described the journey as "a silent communion" in which people can find "a poetic relationship with their city." As she said, "There isn't a room at the end of the project where everybody gets together and discusses their experiences." After the walk, the project is "your own rightful property."

"It uses architecture as a framework to reopen imaginative space," she said. "Where other forms use words, we directly use architecture." The project plays off "the heights and depths of the city," and the goal is to see buildings — some familiar — as if for the first time.

Ms. Warner offered clues as to what might be held over from the Perth production. There, one room was filled with "living lilies planted in a garden of snow" (though the snow was actually salt). In another room, a fax machine continually spewed pages of "Paradise Lost."

Although she made it clear that the project "will be unique to New York," its roots go back to "The St. Pancras Project" at the London International Festival of Theater in 1995. For that, she reopened the long-abandoned but still palatial Midland Grand Hotel next to the St. Pancras rail station for "a fantastical walk."

In 1999, the piece continued to evolve as Ms. Warner and her collaborators regrouped at the empty Euston Tower office building in London. This "Tower Project" filled the top three floors with sights and sounds, including winged angelic figures and a striking view of a miniaturized London below.

From that came Ms. Warner's concept of "reading a building's silent text, very much the way one would read a text of a play or a score." Her exploration of New York actually began in 1996 when she and Ms. Shaw scouted locations for "The Waste Land." Looking for a place to stage their dramatization of the Eliot poem, they traveled across the city from Ellis Island to the empty 26th floor of the World Trade Center, rejected because it gave Ms. Warner vertigo. Finally, she produced "The Waste Land" at the unused Liberty Theater on West 42nd Street. Seven years later, 42nd has been renovated and the Liberty is now unseen behind Madame Tussaud's, but it will be reopened for "The Angel Project," a fact that seemed to please her. This is, she said, "the most hidden, anchorite-like, beautiful, walled-upped" building in the city.

On her return to New York, she revisited some sites, like the once elegant Cloud Club at the top of the Chrysler Building, which in the intervening time has been stripped of period detail. Another area in that building is scheduled to be one of the stops. The Empire State Building and Grand Central Station were eventually discounted because they are so well traveled. While looking for places with iconic resonance, she wanted to avoid a hint of tourism.

She investigated Grand Central from the glass walkway overlooking the station to the subterranean area once inhabited by the homeless, but she concluded that the restoration — though authentic — had made the building lose its integrity. She said there was "a marvelous viewing platform at Rockefeller Center, but it's now been merged with the foyers of the Rainbow Room." A catacombed underground electrical substation — a high-tension Frankensteinian lair on the West Side — was also rejected as not useful except for someone seeking a history of electricity in New York.

In her search she often found herself going down blind alleys. After she chose a place, it was not always available. All the sites in the three cities have been provided at no charge. For her, One Times Square was a real find, a towering structure filled with history and memories but now vacant. The electronic billboards provide the income to support the building.

From the director's point of view, the project is related to her other theatrical work, including "The Waste Land" (in its use of found space) and "Medea" (because the audience was encouraged to take away variant ideas about the play).

At the same time, the work is closely allied to environmental artists like Antony Gormley and Richard Serra. "The best theater that I saw in the last four years is in the Tate Modern," she said. "The interaction of the public with the huge installations in the downstairs space is a form of theater. If it's a living human in relation to empty space, and he's moving, I guess it's an act of theater. I don't think theater is defined by the spoken word."

As for the Angel Project, "The ticket holder puts himself in the position of performer, writer, director and possibly designer." She laughed and added, "In that respect, the ticket is very good value."

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Posted by sfisher at July 7, 2003 09:42 PM