THE PLAY
The play premiered in 2018 within the "Family Project" cycle curated by Maruja Bustamante at UBA'S Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center. The audience disposition to the stage is frontal. Lorena Vega speaks in first person through a standing microphone. She narrates her life in relation to her family’s printing house. Her half siblings appropriated the workshop, located in Lomas del Mirador, La Matanza, after their father's death. She will trace a tour of her personal story accompanied by visual documents, machine sounds, interviews with her brothers and, actors and actresses who will recreate the conflicting events that took place at the workshop. This way, the raptured workshop is inhabited, once again, from a theatre hall.
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SPACE
The scenography tries to recreate the interior of a small and handcraft printing house. Work table, wooden pallets and an ink-stained locker. Following the spirit of the decaying space, there is also a small wooden staircase made with pallets where the actors and actresses remain on stage after recreating the scenes from the past.
COSTUMES
It is based on the saturated colors of the 80s photos, combined with shades close to sepia. The performers clothing is current in their morphology, reinforcing the idea that they are there at the service of representing the scenes from the past without having to "illustrate" that past. As for the moment they wear blue collar workers clothes, the uniforms were donated by workers of a printing house, taking advantage of the wear and tear of the garment and the actual ink stains they have.
LIGHTING
The lighting design has four axis. The first one is based in the use of non-colored lights, as if it were a conference, for the moments where Lorena speaks to the public. The second one is based on the use of cold lights that surround the entire space, recreating the printing house atmosphere. The third one uses warm lights for the set-up of the scenes where they recreate past moments and, for the fourth axis, color lights are employed, accompanying the group's closure choreography.
MUSIC
The sound field of the play is organised by the machines sound. A recording day was held in a printing press workshop to record different machine sounds. And they have been used both, in combination with the projection of the photos, and in the musical compositions. Repetition, gear and rhythm are the concepts music and machines have in common. The musical compositions mix the industrial sounds of the printing workshop with the guitars, drums and violins that provide a sensitive frame to the climax moment of the play.
AUDIOVISUAL
Here we have interviews and archive material. In the interview, a classic camera setting with several frame values is proposed. The interviewee is the protagonist, being present in all the frames. The location and the clothing belong to the interviewee to emphasise the informality of the interview. The stage lighting goes along with the natural light that comes through the window to reinforce the "natural" and homey effect, as well as the camera movements that haven't been hidden during the editing montage, following the same approach. The archive material was worked on, trying for the interventions not to be visible, invisibly pushing the meaning without leaving marks, respecting the documentary spirit of the project, generating material that simulates being raw material and that suggests "truth". On the other hand, images were searched, that could illustrate the comic (tragicomic) essence of the narration that goes along with the audiovisuals from the scene.
Genre: Documentary Theater
Target audience: Adults
Language: Spanish
Duration: 80 minutes
Assembly time: 120 minutes
Disassembly time: 30 minutes