So Long Migration has other meanings for women When film is theater
Having the feature film So Long as its score, this multimedia piece reunites five women who were involved in the production of the film. As they pursue their present personal goals and confront each other, these women engage in the further writing of the script.
As questions arise regarding what is happening, what they are talking about, what are they building, what is the real reason to have been summoned, what is the context of the reunion, why the film has so much power to determine the characters, the analysis of the recorded and edited images re-opens the scriptwriting process to include the input from the characters.
The projection is transformed into a part of the scriptwriting process. Thus, the piece gives a way of occupying the space of projection of the film, transforming it into a workspace, the film is produced in the exhibition, and continues to flow in the projection which is transformed into a workspace. Elements such a as sound, regain their independence to engage in new interactions with other materials such as characters, voices, visual images.
The piece exhibits the personal creation of the characters-performers and their negotiations between reality and fiction.
The piece will produce a new narration, perhaps story, or a project for a piece. This will depend on the audience and the context of projection.
This theatrical version is a re-appropriation and comment to the original film.
1. Project The project consists of a multimedia performance that includes reading, video projection, sound, music, and performance, which emerges from a film recorded and edited on how women travel in the context of the male migration from Mexico to United States. Several voices and simultaneous dialogues are displayed in space.
So Long is a polyphonic piece that put together five women: Renata, who thinks she is going back home after working in the US, Natalia, who is waiting for her husband to return from the North, the actress playing Renata and Natalia, who seems to unable to leave the set after the shooting is over, the director, who wants to make a conventional film, and Mary, an American woman who fled her family home and is randomly traveling in the US, narrate what means to travel North. Without a geographical reference, the five women have become word. Trapped in their narration, a space which they can not leave, they comment on the actions of the others, find them purposes, revealing their dimensions. The narration of the women has an existence outside the feature film that put them together in a first instance.
It is an intertextual narrative inspired in the multi screens and the editing inside the screen creating reflexive footnotes and commentaries.
Escaping from linear narrative, women become both narrative agencies and recipients of the texts of others. They do not narrate what they live but the interstices of what they live, what they cannot formulate but actually experience as the real thing. They dialogue and reflect among each other, they intrude into the others ́ discourse. It is an exchange in the Olympus of phrases, the characters have become voice, what remains of migration.The female protagonist parts herself, becoming several women, what is the woman's journey. As they are work on a new script for the film establishing a dialogue among all the elements of the piece, the presence of women is revealed as borderline: between the living and the image, between fiction and reality.
If the journey is narration and physical displacement in the man, in the woman it is only narration.
At the same time, the piece exhibits fragments of the film that the text resists, deepening the absence of communication and confronting the desire of cinema to present a coherent world.
The narration exists detached from the plot.
The film's journey and the woman's journey intersect and become one with multiple dimensions that help understand the complexity of the female movement. The elements react to, and question, or reveal questions and contents that edited images hide, interrupt the sound, additionally, the bodies have left the film and have been placed in the space of projection.
The editing of all elements creates a collage, a discontinuous and heterogeneous space, an image composed of different layers and fragments. The piece breaks the typical image of the cinematographic framing with overlapping frames, that continue out of the screen to dialogue with the context, and re-appropriations of the original film.
In this way, the film follows the rhythm of the writing, images are edited using the grammar of the written language, even when the word explodes when it is linked with other words and with the other elements, creating multiple meanings. It is the rhythm of the narrative of the migrant, narration that is basically verbal.
Things are happening elsewhere or the woman is elsewhere.
By delivering their narrations, the characters can create a new version of the film and produce a change. The piece is a laboratory to explore and create the intermediary space that the woman inhabits. The texts are the documentary part of the film because the majority belongs to women from rural and urban migrant communities of Veracruz, and to the actress, in addition to those written by the author of the project.
At two moments, the director will interrupt the multimedia performance to open a script workshop with the audience to discuss the storyline and the goals set to each character at the beginning of the piece. Thus, we’ll include the audience in the work process. ! In summary, even though there is a riot or score, the piece is open and will change in accordance with the actors, the context and the audience during the presentation.
2. Requirements: - Projection space - 4 video projectors and 4 screens - one monitor - sound equipment: microphones and speakers - five chairs and a table
3. Modules of the score: a. Performers reading texts: The performers are chosen in the place, through a public call posted days before the presentation, and there is a rehearsal of two days. The performers should come from different walks in life, only the actress will be performed by a professional actress.
Renata From a hotel where she waits to be crossed to the other side, Renata narrates her probable return to Veracruz of a trip to the United States and her desire to leave again.
Natalia She narrates the return from the North of a migrant who is looking for his American wife, who left him, while she refuses to be involved in the male project of family reconstruction. ! Actress She narrates her experience of living between the two characters of the film, a space that she can not leave. At the same time, she reveals other realities and purposes of these characters that question her status as an actress.
Director She narrates moments of the process of production of the film and share theoretical reflections. Also, she narrates the other characters and tells things that they do not know. From a first person point of view, she observes the others.
Mary Using the texts written by Mary Kingsley, an English woman who explored parts of Africa in the nineteenth century, in a dialogue with archival images, Mary recounts her journey through the United States, turning it into a strange territory after having abandoned her family in an American town in the Midwest.
b. Projected texts These texts belong to the five characters; second thought or comment, and they will be projected to dialogue with the image and with the reading of other texts.
c. Video image Fragments of the four versions of the feature film are projected, sometimes simultaneously, generating overlays and continuities, others linearly, and at times the projection will be suspended. ! d. Music and sound The pre-recorded music belongs to David Sanchez, Marcos Miranda and Lorelle Meets the Obsolete. The sound will also include dialogue lines as well as incidental sounds, recorded on location and in studio. Both can accompany the image or can be heard separately.
4. Segments: - Four editings of So Long, each 60 minutes in length and a video of Mary projected on a monitor to the side of the five performers - texts to be projected - texts to be read by the five characters - music: original music by David Sanchez and Marcos Miranda, and songs by Lorelle Meets the Obsolete - sound
5. Exhibition: - Presentation in a stage space that will be recorded - Duration of the piece: 65 minutes. - Questions and answers session on expanded script and production of So Long