Exciting Announcement!

This piece started out as my Senior Honors Thesis Project, but honestly it has turned in too much more.  

This project started with a panicked dream during the Pandemic. I neared the end of my Junior year of college, and was preparing to begin work on my senior honors thesis over the summer.  Thats when the quarantine began, and I soon realized that we weren't headed back to normal anytime soon.  So what was I to do?  I started looking at all the theatre being produced during the Pandemic.  Every zoom reading showed the great resiliency and ingenuity of artists faced with adversity, but it began to feel like we were doing theatre in spite of the digital platforms. They were our barrier.   I thought, might it be more fun and interesting for the audience if we did theatre with zoom rather against it?  So I started my project with this question:

How do we use zoom (or other online platforms) as an active choice in the storytelling process rather than an obstacle to ignore? 

I had to figure out how to do that.  Experimentation was the next step, and I thought, what better way to experiment with at than through inspiration taken from the Avant Garde!  I came this conclusion for a few reasons:

The era that inspired the rise of the Avant Garde movements closely mirrors our current day:  

• Global turmoil and tragedy during the first world war, 
• a rapidly increasing sense of globalization, 
• the rapid growth of technology and industry. 

These led to a broadening of awareness of other ideas, as well as a time for deep philosophical reckoning in the fast changing world.  Reflecting on all these factors, I drew a comparison- 

• oh look!  We were also experiencing a time of global tragedy (Covid), 
• expanding Globalization and technology (Internet, zoom), 
• widespread turmoil (racial reckoning).  

Therefore, why not try those principles the avant gardists came up with to see what and how they could be useful in our similarly changing world?

Ok ok, that sounds pretty cool but… where do I start so that it’s not just an overwhelmingly abstract performance art piece you’d see parodied in a hipster film?? 

Well, thats why I chose Alice in Wonderland.  This story would fit what I wanted to do perfectly:

• It was episodic in nature, allowing me to try different principles in clearly defined areas
• Had an open world which would allow for room to play with it’s conventions
• Had an isolated protagonist, in that she was never tied to another character romantically, etc, so the zoom barriers would be less awkward.
• It has a fairly known story, which means I can worry less about an audience adjusting to a new story as well new conventions. 
• It’s a fun, often silly story, so I could explore some comedic applications of avant garde principles, as opposed to the drama or tragedy or scare factor that was often present in their original works. 
• I wanted to the audience to enjoy it!
• Also… I could adapt the book myself for free- no licensing fees!

So then it was time for the practical application of my my goal.  I wanted to play with the virtual platform itself, so through my entire process I kept in mind:

•  how an audience views a two dimensional screen, 
• how the actors can relate to 
  • themselves, 
  • each other, 
  • and the world of the play
• using the boundaries and relationships to the boundaries of their screens.  

Above all else I wanted this to not be 6 people from the waist up saying lines.  I wanted the story to feel wholly represented within the medium of our screens.

So thats a brief overview of the story behind this piece. At the end of the day, the story itself is what's important, so I hope the piece to affects you, and I hope you enjoy it.   And I hope, most of all, it will help you agree with Alice that "so many strange things have happened lately, I have begun to believe `very few things are, indeed, impossible."