Looking for the future - Alice in Wonderland

Description:

“Alice: How long is forever? White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.” -Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland. 

On Friday, September 11th we went to the Gran Teatro Nacional near Javier Prado where we saw a ballet style adaptation of Lewis Carroll's world wide acclaimed novel Alice in Wonderland. It was directed by the costume designer Pepe Corzo and coreographed by the costa rican dancer Humberto Canessa which focuses on a silent ballet performance where focuses upon the design elements arises and intrigues the audience. The play "Alicia" echoes Lewis Carroll's prestigous novel, illustrating through ballet the story of a sensible girl who's innocent dreams drived her from reality to an everlasting journey, Wonderland, a world ruled by fantasy and imagination. By seeing this ballet style play, it served us as inspiration to record our first impressions and our creative approaches that can be staged  in next year's school play, coincidently about Alice in Wonderland. 

Analysis: 

The ballet of Alicia was presented in the Gran teatro nacional. We went to see it since it is the same play we want to do for next year's play except for one difference, the theatre style. Rather than presenting it in ballet style, we will do it on the basis and conventions of surrealism theatre. From observing this interpretation of alice, we used it as a guideline to record our first impressions about the play and evaluate if they are appliable for next year's schoolplay which is a adaptation of Alice in Wonderland mixed with Alice through the looking glass.

Firstly, we could observe and qualify the scenery and use of the space in the Alicia ballet as a potential source of inspiration for next year's school play. The use of the hyper-dimensional cyclorama contributed in the painting the stage, creating unreal atmospheres without necessarily using exaggerated props and actual scenery to illustrate the magical and distorted world of wonderland, Alice's childhood adventure. The design of the cyclorama varied according to the scene presented. For instance,  scene XII focused on the Queen of hearts' courtyard garden as the cyclorama displayed a garden filled with white roses. To make the scene more interactive and fictional, the queen's gardeners were using paintbrushes with red paint poured out of a metal bucket as if they were actually painting the white roses red like in the actual novel when the queen commands it. Therefore, the displayal of a white rose bush turning magically into freshly red painted roses contributed to the fictitious scenery of the garden by not necessarrily placing literaly bushes or a water pilette to connote the environment of the courtyard garden in the queen of hearts' palace.  For our play, perhaps we could find a gif of white roses turning red while the queens' gardeners paint unethusiastically the bush since it will be surrealistic theatre, demonstrating their boredom of painting useless roses for a selfish and unwanted queen. In case if we couldn't find a gif displaying a lively bush of white roses, we could play with the lights by using the frontal fresnels covered with red coloured filtres with a strong intensity of light to represent the red roses. Continuosly, if the angle of the lens is closed, it can focus on giving colour to the cyclorama, especifically to the colourless roses while the queen gardener characters with paintbrushes are doing a sequence as if they were colouring the roses themselves. Thus, this will contribute to one convention of surrealistic theatre which is the action is going beyond a realistic situtation , transforming into a dream-like fantasy sequence. 

Continuosly, another interesting usage of the cyclorama was after alice's fall through the rabbit hole when reaching the hall of doorsto demonstrate Alice's random and ilogical size changing when drinking the Pishsolver potion to shrink and eating the Upelkuchen cake to grow. The cyclorama displayed the coloured doors increasing in size when Alice drunk the potion to attempt an entrance into the small portal that leaded her into Wonderland. By the use of the cyclorama displaying the increasing size of the doors in comparison to the microscopic size of Alice helped creating this sense of entrapment in a distorted reality of simple colorful doors growing with no logical explanations. However, when Alice tried eating the Upelkuchen loaf, she grew enormesly; making the cyclorama display rather than large doors, extremely diminute doors she couldn't even fit in. Therefore, the cyclorama contributed to the spacial setting of the hall of doors, illustrating Alice's perspective  in constant change regarding her surroundings. In order to create this moment, we could use two relative sized doors and one smal door to mark the entry of Wonderland. The two relatively sized doors could go each on one side of the stage while the small door can be closely attached to the cyclorama displaying a gif of doors increasing and decreasing in size. Otherwise with the use of fresnels, by opening the angles of the lens they could give a wider ilumination to the cyclorama showing the doors or reflecting specially the two colorful wooden doors to emphasize there huge size. Perhaps, there could be a mini blackout where backstage changes the regular table found in the hall into a tall legged table to demonstrate the microscopic size of Alice kneeled down in comparison to her surroundings which they are unattainable for her to reach .When eating the Upelkuchen, the cyclorama could display a hall of diminute doors where Alice is extremely big sized. Therefore, during the growth there could be another blackout where the tall legged table is changed for the regular table once again while Alice is perhaps in a stretched position.In terms of the light, the fresnels could close their angel of lens to shorten the size of the doors.   

For the school play, we don't need to necessarily in every scene use a specific and exaggerated scenery, instead corporal movements and body expressions can express more than words. In scene II, the fact that there was minimalistic stage use and  no physical scenery was literally staged gave emphasis upon the formation of circles and spirals  the silhouete characters performed to create a distorted reality, an unwaitened fall into a rabit hole which is the secret passage to the mad and illogical world of Wonderland. The absence of a structured scenery was covered by the use of black and white lights blacking out while there were silhouetes observed surrounding Alice, forming spirals and doing spins to create a disorder in the stage. For the silhouettes to portray the fall of Alice formed with their body close to one another building  stairs as if Alice when climbing it falls literally into the hole. As effect, it made Alice's fall magical and unique which catched the audience's immediate attention and placed them at the same time, in the same confused state of mind as Alice herself. Therefore, the used of silhouetess produced a confusion beyond reality, distorting it completely and renacting Alice's inlogical fall through a rabbit hole which with her conscious, she created the mysterious and mad world of Wonderland. For our play, I believe it would be effective in not doing a literal hole but accompanied with a turbulent and magical tune or several blackout of the fresnels, cenital and cans lights in order to mark the contrast between the real world near the river creek and Alice's unconscious creating her insane childhood adventure in Wonderland.