The difference between the life one leads outside, in public, and the life she leads inside, within interiors (i.e., those places where she can hide herself from the outside world and feel safe) has always been very striking to me. What was unsettling, however, was this nagging idea I had that a person’s identity could still be shaped within her private realm by certain external forces, by (let us call them) windows through which she observes the outside and through which she is also being observed (windows such as internet [skype, various social networks, etc.] and television).If we see anything, it is mediated through these windows. What do we make then of a person’s identity? Are we all just cogs in some great machine, carefully observed and controlled from a distance, merely a small part in a homogeneous mass? Is anyone unique?
How a person constructs her identity is a question we are exploring via another question, which is how does an actor create her character. Do actors’ choices belong to them, or do they belong to their family, or perhaps other actors they have watched? To explore some of these questions I decided to adapt Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, a play that happens entirely within interiors. This show is a window into ‘A Doll’s House.’
‘Monitoring [A Doll’s House]’ sits somewhere between theatre and visual art. The piece will run as a combination of three scheduled theatrical performances and a live installation that happens in between the theatrical performances. The whole project is an ongoing durational piece for 50 hours so that the audience can stop by at any time.
Performance History:
2012 Monitoring[A Doll’s House] Studio T, SFU Woodwards, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Vancouver, Canada
Credits:
Concept and Direction by Pegah Tabassinejad
(Based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House)
Actors: Angela Ferreira, Aryo Khakpour, Victoria Lyons, Daniel O’Shea, Gina Readman, Natalie Schneck, Benjamin Stone
Collaborators
Project Counselor: Bojan Bodružić
Stage Manager: Cherry Song
Technical Director: Jonathan Kim
Dramaturgue: Steve Neufeld
Assistant Director: Nazli Akhtari
Set: Emily Neufeld
Multi-Media: Sammy Chien
Videography: Nima Soofi, Bahar Nourizadeh and Bojan Bodružić
Sound: Nancy Tam
Lighting: Jonathan Kim
Costume: Pardis Tabassinejad