T R A N S C R I P T

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I will just discuss one aspect of the space of "Monkey Business Class" , which deal with the theme at hand. The proscenium stage is stratified into three horizontal zones or registers, each with distinct rules: the stage floor, the video screen, and the fly loft, which, of course, is not meant to be seen. Performers can move vertically through the registers. But when the broker, for example, arrives in the second register, he is subject to the laws of video: he can be duplicated, cut up, fast forwarded... When the performer is hoisted into the third register, into the fly space, he is off stage and suspended 40' over the stage floor, available to the audience strictly through a mirror pitched up at 45 degrees.

The chorus is made up of three singers, each a cultural stereotype associated with the three principle collaborators. The music remixes traditional popular music of those cultures. Each of the singers escorts a rolling video trolley which features his or her own pre-recorded video double. The songs are performed in various combinations: duets between singer and taped double, lip-synced sequences which slip in and out of register, songs in groupings using a variety of combinations of live and pre-recorded characters. "Moving Target," is a dance-theater work in collaboration with Charleroi/Danses in Belgium. The production was loosely based on the recent publication of Nijinsky's uncensored diaries in which the scatological and bestial side of this modernist hero and diagnosed schizophrenic are first revealed. The work is about the ever-shifting definitions of the normal and the pathological. Our first question was: what is normal for the theater? For the sake of provocation, we decided to use the temporal structure of broadcast media. Rather than dividing the performance into scenes and acts, we interrupted the continuous performance with commercial spots. Five spots make up the serialized ad campaign for a fictional sponsor who cures the everyday pathologies of a post-psycho-therapeutic culture. We adjusted the rules of the proscenium stage. In the traditional theater of illusion, the proscenium safely separates the narrative space of the stage from the space of the audience. "Proscenium" means literally "pro-" in front of, "-scenium," the scene... in front of the scene. Using a 45 degree mirror above the stage floor, we developed an "interscenium," that interrupts the narrative space of the stage and splits the frontal, singular focus of the audience.

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