Anne's Madrid blog

Friday 18th November 2011 — posted by buzby

Thursday 17 Nov 2011
Alex and I were at Matadero, working with Puctum, helping to set up in another studio as the normal space was not usable.

Puctum’s project, Conectado –Connected- is one of El Ranchito’s virtual projects using skype and rehearsals have started: the project began in mid October and will end mid December. This is the 1st time El Ranchito have tried this sort of project production so Puctum are very much the guinea pigs.

This virtual theatre piece combines documentary theatre with virtual (skype) and it is set up look like a an internet cafe. Although the stories are real -from the lives of the participants – the end result will be fictionalised.

The set up includes 2 screens, computers and a projector: one screen is used to show pre recorded scenes and images, all relevant to the lives of the participants, the other screen uses live skype. The Artistic Director is from Argentina and she works with 2 other people who live in Argentina although one is originally from Germany, plus another friend from Argentina who is documenting the process.

There are 5 people participating live and on screen, from Colombia, Dominican Republic, Senegal, and Bangladesh: none are professional actors but all have interesting and often very amusing stories: I think they were all recruited from Madrid. They are shown talking with the families via skype, and brought in personal objects and said what these meant to them and why, and they were encouraged to talk about their hopes and dreams

We will be back with Puctum later today and some of next week, and we will find out more onthe project. The whole production is in Spanish so it’s not possible to grasp everything that is taking place without some discussion aftrwards.

In the evening we went to our first En Danza festival performance, Punto Ciego, from Spanish Artist Director & choereographer Chevi Muraday. The 3 excellent dancers (including Chevi) performed a contemporary dance to striking music: I hope other festival performances will be as good as this one.