scenic La voix humaine - The telephone been commissioned to design the sets and costumes for a show that accepts only two acts on stage as well radically different as La voix humaine by Poulenc and The telephone Menotti, I led a discussion and research on the historical and aesthetic context provided by the two tracks. The two pieces now, I have brought to mind the environments represented in the paintings of Edward Hopper.
As Jean Cocteau, author of the book, typed and La Voix humaine in 1929 is that as an argument the private drama of a woman within the four walls of a room, the artist assumes the U.S. Hopper ' arduous task of preserving images of ordinary life in the city on the web, she left as a witness of the era.
The work of the American as well as the scene of this show is stripped of ornaments and symbols, being naked and empty, and the lack of communication becomes the subject of discourse, which is revealed in a monologue in two, phone, Cocteau and frivolous talk on the phone by Menotti.
In the works of Hopper dominates a distant vision, but careful, a voyeuristic look into the anonymity of living spaces in the ruthless "machines for living" which are the cities.
The little things, the banality, the anonymity and, above all the boredom, become, twenty years later, the subject and theme of existentialism, just when Poulenc will complement the work of Jean friend, putting it in music. The windows of the domestic space from which the audience become so protected, it is possible to observe the lives of others. The two works of Poulenc and Menotti not tell important stories, if not for the protagonists themselves. In both pieces we are given to assist in human voices and talk protected from the walls, which fill the space up to channel them in more subtle passages of households, a telephone cord.
This attitude has become subject Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock's famous film of 1954, which puts the voyeurism at the heart of the story. In the movie the main character, a photojournalist who has seen enough of war, forced into the chair for his broken leg, banishes boredom spying on the neighbors having to sacrifice a Grace Kelly in a silver platter. And 'the spectacle of banality, work on private and irresistible curiosity not having to watch the intimacy of others, nothing new, therefore, for those accustomed to the theater.
The scene that I drew, then, came from these reflections is intentionally similar to a movie set, but twice and turned so that they are simultaneously inside and outside of the room, leaving open can be observed and observers. A horizontal composition, panoramic Cinemascope, where it is built only what fits in the frame, alternating empty and full, convex and concave, inside and out. As it is evident that the two spaces seem simultaneously, just as it denied the needs that exist at the same time.
It is not that the story of Lucy, for example, follows the rule of the protagonist, anonymous, once again, the human voice, as both are held in an unspecified time in the memory of the place itself.
Many of Hopper's paintings are not faithful representations of existing architectures, but elaboration of sketches made of the car, parked in front of the place chosen by the artist, who drew such suspicion and concerns of residents. When Hopper realized the paintings that inspired me the scene of the show lived in the neighborhood of Washington Square in New York. His paintings I mentioned in the stage were lit interiors suggested that the artist saw when he walked at night through the streets of the city, and then reassembled in his study, as memories of clues to investigate.
The combination of the two events La voix humaine and The telephone stimulates reflections on marital relationships and the different approaches of the two women with the man she loved, devoted and touching the first, the frivolous and fickle second, fleeing frantically from one idea to be able to belong to someone, for what he is loving and caring.
Hotels in Hopper's paintings were chosen by me as places of alienation and exile. Imagining of wanting to take refuge in an intimate and private, perhaps escaping from a love that consumes us, often it is decided, a bit 'by instinct a bit' out of necessity, to make the case for change to bulk air, little matter the goal, it is better if a big city maybe in the afterlife, the ocean.
So he imagined that the interpreter of the first piece has decided to leave Europe for refuge in a quiet room on the third floor of a hotel in New York. The same room has hosted Lucy, the lively girl, already emancipated, of which Ben is madly in love, so that follow, we assume business trips that the girl willingly concludes with evening entertainment. Purposefully on stage is nothing spectacular, even when Lucy is beautiful, it does so on the way out.
