Crave

Crave
video/mp4
320 × 240
04:56

I participated in the design and implementation of the live digital projections in the theater play “Crave”, using the software Moldeo. The first season of the play was at El Lavapiés Theater, Buenos Aires, between May 20 and December 9, 2006, and was followed by further runs in 2007, 2008, and 2009 at the Theater NoAvestruz, also in Buenos Aires. Directed by Cristian Drut.

Crave was the fourth play by British playwright Sarah Kane. In it, four characters, named A, B, C and M, create an uninterrupted, almost musical, flow of voices. The fragmented, and at times intertwined, dialogue about obsession, love and death exists not in a physical plane, but rather in the emotional space that it creates inside each member of the audience.

Sarah Kane didn’t leave any directions about the mise en scène. This fact, combined with the entirely subjective nature of the play, made it well suited to experiment with the resource of live digital projection. A minimalistic staging which involved digital images projected onto the walls of the stage was chosen. These images were generated live by a Moldeo operator interpreting a predetermined “visual score”. The images were painterly renderings reminiscent of coastal landscapes. During the play, these images smoothly changed one into the other, following the musical rhythm of the dialogue, yet avoiding to directly echo its meaning. The continuity of the images was broken at times by the use of more geometrical figures, like lines and curves, that were also projected on the wall.