Interactive show merges reading, theater experience using Virginia Woolf texts
the theater is a blank page, a much-heralded collaboration between the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) Company and celebrated visual artist Ann Hamilton, presented at Royce Hall by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. This immersive performance installation utilizes the entirety of the theater, as the audience is led through the balconies, to the production shops, into the wings and finally onto the stage itself. With text drawn directly from Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, the novel’s evocative language and inventive narrative make it a fertile point of departure for artists of different disciplines to find deep kinship in a collaboration addressing the experience of reading and being read to. the theater is a blank page will be at Royce Hall April 28–May 12. Find more information and purchase tickets here.
"The literary hub of Powell Library and performance space of Royce Hall will come together for an immersive, staged reading experience.
The Saratoga International Theater Institute Company’s “the theater is a blank page,” which will run from April 29 to May 12, entwines literature and theater in three hours. The interactive project will feature art installations based on a novel by Virginia Woolf alongside performers who will lead audience members through Powell Library and Royce Hall to experience reading as a live group activity.
The SITI Company’s production integrates text from the novel. Visual artist and co-director Ann Hamilton said the experience is not about the plot of the books, but about the conditions in which the audience receives the story. Through the crossover between visual and performance art, co-directors Hamilton and Anne Bogart said they hope to recreate the experience of reading a book in a live community setting.
“It’s such an extraordinary layout that you have the architecture of the theater (in Royce Hall), which is set up for voice and motion, face to face with Powell Library, which is set up for books and reading and the silence of that,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton said she and Bogart were interested in the ways reading a book and viewing a play are similar – both require the viewer to immerse themselves in the story. By combining the two mediums, they are trying to regulate how audiences experience literature both on their own and in a group setting, Hamilton said."— Kristin Snyder, Apr. 29, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
Find more information and purchase tickets to the theater is a blank page here.
Read more about the Center for the Art of Performance here.
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