Sample Works

Puntos de Fuga

Puntos de fuga
(Vanishing Points)

a multimedia play
written by
Angeles Romero

artistic direction
Johannes Birringer

design direction
Christina Giannelli

1. Synopsis of Play under development

Puntos de fuga (Vanishing Points) features Amalia Velásquez Mena, a young female maquiladora worker from Cuidad Juárez who finds herself in custody with US Homeland Security after being rescued by the fictional character of Amelia Earhart (the play is set in the time of the George W. Bush administration and its War on Terror). The mythic pilot encourages Amalia to undertake a rescue mission of her own, seeking to find the numerous missing bodies of young women on the Texas/Mexico border. Amalia is interrogated by officer E. Lauder who employs the services of a Spanish speaking interpreter, Marina Rossell Berg, whose complex role as a mediator – structured after the historical model of La Malinche - intensifies the political and ethical dilemma in the relations between US authority and the undocumented, disenfranchised workers on the southern border. The play thus dramatizes, on the one hand, the role of interpretation as well as the function of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ languages in today’s political reality. On the other hand, the young woman’s hidden power of brujería challenges the technological surveillance apparatus of the US authorities while she recaptures – through a series of visions in the dramatic ritual climax of the performance – the events leading up to her rescue, namely her horrific journey to the dark side, the mythic and totemic underworld of the Juárez border, in search of her kidnapped sister.

2. The World of the Play

[excerpt]

The mise en scène of Puntos de fuga (Vanishing Points) is conceived as a multimedia production with a dramatic and ritualistic composition, accompanied by the use of film projections (virtual characters and scenes) and audiovisual technologies in close interaction with the three stage characters. The total cast is seven: three real characters and four virtual characters (on film). The production uses the theme of “translation” throughout by presenting all dialogue in English and Spanish; during the climactic scenes, Totonacan language from Veracruz (Amalia’s hometown) is used as well.

The space is envisioned as a kind of fortress or castle (gated, protected island), a technologically hyper-secured and prison-like building of the NSA (National Security Agency) with several corridors, transparent/opaque mirrors which also function as projection surfaces for film, monitors and other high-tech office equipment, and a central interrogation chamber which is adjacent to the women’s bathroom, a semi-private space used by the young detainee and the Argentinian interpreter, Marina Rossell Berg.
Puntos de Fuga takes place in the beginning of the 21st Century and a time of globalization characterized by increased political, cultural and ethno-religious tensions that were feebly described, in the 1990s, as the “clash of civilizations” but recently gained a more sinister aura of terror after 9/11 and the U.S. military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The wide-spread economic imbalance between the North and the South, which also gave rise to the maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border and the continuous flow of legal and illegal immigration to the wealthier capitalist countries of the North, occupies a much less explored side of the fall-out from economic inequality and the new constructs of Empire with its rhetoric of “enemies” (terrorists) and its practices of violence. State-ordained practices of violence shadow the older, continuing dilemmas that have plagued modern biopolitics and shaped the experiences of people living in poorer or conflicted (border) regions where cheap labor, prostitution, drugs, and migration develop a particular dynamic of violence.

On a first level, therefore, the “fortress” world of the play appears to protect citizenship from such violence, but it is also founded upon violence and the policies that are executed both by the State and by the criminal organizations operating in its shadow. The fortress itself is porous, and the play hints at this throughout by undermining the “soundproof” character of the interrogation room and by its numerous references to airplanes and an “aerial” or fantastic space not framed by delimitations.
The world of the play is marked by the border and the crossing of borders, and much research for the writing was conducted on the Texas-Mexico border and also influenced by the playwright’s first hand experience as an interpreter in Houston where she encountered numerous cases of the plight of undocumented workers suffering from harassment, work-related accidents, health insurance or worker compensation problems and family complications arising from separations and domestic violence. At the factual core of the play lies the horrific history of femicide in the border region of the cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso which over the past decade became the killing fields for young women, the site of over 400 unsolved (often ritualized) murders.

The Intermedia Form of the Production: Staging Concepts

[excerpts]

3.1 The script

The script for this type of play can be understood as the creation of a blueprint or score which delineates all that happens live on stage, as well as that which is “virtually present” (in digitally mediated form), and very much real to the world of the play—other characters, memories, fantasies or psychological spaces created on video and through audio. The virtually present scenes will be shot on digital film and edited for live projection in the performance environment. There is also a real-time dimension of intermediality, simultaneous presences of the characters created through live video feeds (cameras/projections). With this in mind, Puntos de Fuga is a hybrid script that can bring about a unique theatrical experience contingent on careful integration of all mediated possibilities (live and prerecorded scenes).

3.2. Audio-Visual Scenography

1. Conceptual
The production uses a fully integrated interactive audio-visual design in a multi-media performance that mixes the action continuity on stage with real-time and prerecorded “virtual” scenes (video projections, monitor scenes, audio playbacks and audio amplification of voices). The composer will provide a structure for a soundscape and the use of particular musics in a few scenes. The interrogation scenes will not have any sound accompaniment except when audio cues are required, but some of the filmic scenes and dream scenes/memories will have a distinct sonic quality. The ritual scenes at the end are scored, and score will attain quality of film music.
The scenographic method is based on the playwright’s and director’s previously tested staging approach to multimedia theatre (AlienNation Co.) using the following characteristics of its “media casting”:

1. SOLO (Double)—
a. fractions or versions (doubles) of the same character represented by the media (video actor) creating the possibility of cross-cutting between stage character and film character. (same object/different action)
b. cross-cutting between stage character and film character (using same action/different context)
c. cross-cutting/cross-dissolve between stage character and film character (using close up of action under action on screen. (same action/different perspective)
d. cross-cutting/superposition between stage character and film character (stage character stands behind half screen; film match of character’s other half: same action/different parts of the character)
e. cross-cutting/superposition between stage character and film character (coordinated action/different time frame)

2. DUET—Dialogues with other characters
a. Simple--stage character A speaks to and is altered by film character B
b. Simple—stage character A speaks and alters film character B.
c. Complex—both stage and film characters interact and are affected by one
another. (telematic set up/telepresence allows beaming of distant character into site)

3. CHORUS—stage character interacts with a collective

4. PHYSICAL SPACES—Stage character moves with filmic depiction of physical
space (remote location, fantastic/fictional space)

5. PSYCHOLOGICAL SPACES—Stage character interacts with a memory, a dream, a fantasy, a hallucination

6. Sensorial Insert—filmic images that are projected for sensorial effect. (e.g. Stage character is looking for her kidnapped sister. Sensorial insert shows a shoe half-buried in the desert sand and as the wind blows it is uncovered slowly).

7. Parallel narratives—Stage plot progress along with another plot on film, intersecting indirectly/directly or the film plot can be the main narrative mediated by the human stage voice via live dubbing.

8. Telepresence/telematics—performer[which can be an audience member] experiences being fully present at a live real world location remote from one’s own physical location. In such an environment were used in the production, the participant would be able to behave, and receive stimuli, as though at the distant site (a possibility suggested by characters in Amalia’s family or her activities at the border or the role of the pilot Amelia Earhart, as well as Officer Lauder’s dscsription of his flights over Scotland. In this connection, the production may explore the real-time use of GPS (geographic positioning system) or Google Earth to bring the “realities” of Cuidad Juarez closer into the perceptional space for the audience.

In such an intermedial audio-visual performance environment, the action can integrate video, communication and network technologies to enhance the sense of political and counterinsurgent surveillance spaces operative in the play-world. that can make possible international co-production and project management.
The production will create its realistic and surreal/fantasy scenes through the concentrated mixing of all of these media casting levels. The production therefore requires an extensive period of pre-production to develop the film scenes in close planning and dramaturgical realization of all the stage actions and the spatial realizations (as well as the precise cue to cue utilization of the vide inserts and audio scenes needed in the play scenes) intended in the staging.

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