by Alice Chauchat


Alice Chauchat  During your work in September, you soon made the choice of working with still life scenes rather than action scenes. Which sense of time do you seek to establish by such an accumulation of suspended moments?

Cuqui Jerez  The fact of imagining many possible beginnings of a show that starts with a still life scene brings exactly what you say, an accumulation of suspended moments. And for the idea of a beginning this is quite interesting because it helps each time to go back to zero, go back to a new possibility. It is like rewinding each time, playing a game of erasing the previous moments, but of course this is impossible and this is what is interesting, because you experience time in one direction but at the same time you play to experience it in multiple directions and I think this relationship is quite fun.

CJ  We started trying both possibilities, action and still scenes, but very soon we realised that using a still life situation was more interesting to work in the concept of version linked to the idea of versions of a possible beginning; as a still life situation raises a lot of expectations because somehow you are waiting for something to happen, you are waiting for the action.

CJ  Originally the idea was to work just with the light of the stage, so in the beginning we thought of using a stage with nobody, just props. Then we didn’t like it so much as we wanted to work with expectations, and the fact of not having anybody on stage was not going too far in that direction. So we tried with action scenes, but then we realised that as soon as there is some action on stage you follow it and you don’t watch so much the rest, and I am very interested in how the space changes. So then we tried with still life actions and in a way it worked quite well, because it creates a lot of expectations and at the same time you are able to perceive the changes and variations on each version.  

AC  During your work in September, you soon made the choice of working with still life scenes rather than action scenes. Yet these scenes create suspense. How do you consider "action" in your work? Where does it take place?

CJ  That is an interesting question because it is a kind of dilemma I have now. I love to work with action on stage, especially when we perform the pieces, so I still don’t understand it so well.
That’s an interesting question because it is a kind of dilemma I have now. In a way it feels strange to me not to have action on stage, I still don’t understand it so well. But for the concept it works quite well as we are working on the idea of imagining many possible beginnings of a show, so that the fact of having a still life scene creates a big expectation and as a spectator you wonder what will happen after that situation. But even if the concept is very interesting, there is something about it that feels weird even if the action is somehow in the two people that are imagining how the show will start but not on stage. Anyway in the last days of the residency in September we started to try a different direction of the work where there is action on stage exactly because it feels quite weird to have the audio recorded and no action on stage, so somehow it feels more like a movie rather than a live situation, and there is something too static about it for the moment. I am not so sure if it would be very fun to perform after a while… That is why I would like to think more about it.

CJ  Suspense was something that appeared very soon as a tool that allowed us to create many beginnings.

CJ  Suspense was an interesting discovery in the process, because it allows us to think a lot about what expectation means.

CJ  The fact of using a scene with a dead body is very interesting to work on suspense, because we have all these references of cinema but also because as a spectator you wonder what happened before, how did this person die etc…

CJ  The fact of having a dead body on stage allows us to play a lot with the suspense of the crime scene and to think of many different versions of how this person was killed or how did he die and put him in very different scenarios. It works more on a narrative level.

AC  During your work in September, you soon made the choice of working with still life scenes rather than action scenes. Following your interest for versions, how much can a still life vary?

CJ  When we watched still life scenes we realised that the perception of the space, objects, light, colours, textures was more interesting because we realised that as soon as there is some action on stage you follow it and you don’t watch so much the rest.

CJ  We started trying both possibilities, but still life scenes allow us to work more with other elements of theatre like the lights, objects, textures and colour, which is one of the goals of this project. I think still life can vary in infinite ways and on many levels like aesthetic, formal, narrative, semiotic, spatial… But for us it is not a matter of finding infinite possibilities; it is more about showing the process of choosing.

AC  Following your interest for versions, how much can the exact same scene vary in a spectator's mind?

CJ  I love little variations and how these changes create a completely different reality, like the game of finding the seven differences. What I am interested in is the gap between an image and the version of it. The jump created from the reference stored in your memory to the new one.

CJ  I love little variations and how these changes create a completely different reality, like the game of finding the eight differences. What I am interested in is the gap between an image and the version of it. The jump created from the reference stored in your memory to the new one.

CJ  I like very much small variations and how these changes create completely different realities (like the game of finding the differences). What I am looking for is the gap between an image and a version of it. To observe how the reference stored in your memory jumps to the new one.

CJ  I LIKE VERY MUCH SMALL VARIATIONS AND HOW THESE CHANGES CREATE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT REALITIES (LIKE THE GAME OF FINDING THE DIFFERENCES) WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR IS THE GAP BETWEEN AN IMAGE AND A VERSION OF IT. TO OBSERVE HOW THE REFERENCE STORED IN YOUR MEMORY JUMPS TO THE NEW ONE.

CJ  I like very much small variations and how these changes create completely different realities (like the game of finding the differences). What I am looking for is the gap between an image and a version of it. To observe how the reference stored in your memory jumps to the new one.

AC  Images occur in two "spaces" in this work: in the audience's imagination and on stage. There is an unavoidable difference between these two media, yet you also make variations in the way a spoken image is transferred into a staged image. Can you explain some of these variations?

CJ  I think what is interesting about announcing something and then show it is to observe what the variation in the announcement produces in your imagination, how much information you give and what kind of information, how complete or incomplete or subjective or whatever it is and what does this create in your projection of the image.
Anyway I think in this transfer there will always be a change, even if we give a lot of details of what will be the image produced, the audience will always create or project their own image before actually seeing the one that will be produced on stage, so yes there is one more gap there. If I tell you that I will show you a red car, then you will imagine first your own red car and after you will actually see the red car I want to show you, but even if I explain extremely detailed how this car is I think it will always be a different car from the one you imagined, probably similar but different.
This is an interesting question especially when you work in collaboration with others (in this case the two people talking, us). Even if you are talking about the same thing one will have a different projection on an image and in fact this is what we do; one of us proposes a possible beginning and the other says that he / she imagined it differently, so what we do is to show the two possibilities. But at the same time the audience has a different projection of the description of the image.

CJ  I would say that the images occur in three spaces: in our imagination (the two people talking and imagining different beginnings), in the audience's imagination and finally on stage.  

AC  Are you interested in constructing a narrative throughout the piece? How do versions build a story?

CJ  We still don’t know if we want to construct a narrative or not. Or how narrative the narrative should be. For now we are staying every time in the same moment, the very beginning. We are dealing with choices, to show many possible choices for one single scene, the starting scene. The accumulation of possibilities (or possible choices) creates a kind of narrative but we still don’t know how far this can or should go. Sometimes we make a little step forward and we decide something, we decide that something will stay for sure in the hypothetical piece we are imagining and when this choice is in connection to the next one it creates a narrative. But we still have to research a lot on that, we need to understand it better.

CJ  I am not sure if I am so interested in creating a story through the versions, or at least I don’t know what this story could be. On the other hand it think there is a story created between the people imagining the scene. So in a way I think the level of the two people imagining the scene is more narrative than what is happening on stage.

CJ  I think the narrative aspect of the versions is a matter of accumulation, it is the fact that you see one possibility after another and this creates a narrative through time, not necessarily a narrative very "narrative" but a narrative anyway.
 
AC  I think different narratives develop in the piece: the story of the speakers, the story of the scene, the story of the translation from a described scene to a performed scene are three of those. Do you consider the game the audience plays in connecting these layers as another narrative? If yes, how do you write it?

CJ  Somehow yes, but I see it as the text that the audience produces. So I guess this is the text that the audience writes, not me.

CJ  Yes, but I think I am not the one writing this text, I think it’s the reading of the audience that produces a text, so the audience is writing this text not us. But like in every piece, I think. There is always this text that each member of the audience is writing through their own reading.

CJ  Yes. I think that is where the audience has his/her space, so it is a text but that is not my space it is the space for the audience to navigate through these narratives and connect things the way they want. So I think it is a space about an experience that creates the writing, not the other way around.

CJ  Yes, I think this narrative is something created by the audience. Of course through feedback we understand it better what this narrative is, and we can direct it more in one direction or another, but I think it is important to leave this space for the audience, so they can produce it the way they want.

CJ  Yes and no. I think this is something that the audience can read or not. I think it is very personal and subjective on how you read the work and what kind of connections you make between these layers.


Interview made by e-mail in November 2010
Initially published in Le Journal des Laboratoires Jan.-April 2011