The commentary below is from Alice Tuan, head of Writing for Performance at CalArts School of Theater. She’s helping lead the Lear/Layer theatrical experiment this week between students and faculty from CalArts and Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea. She’ll be blogging about the creative process in action.
CalAng!
That’s the sound that a collaboration makes when creators from CalArts and Chung-Ang University are in a room together. We are excited to see Chung Ang’s adaptation of Lear, but also to have a hands-on opportunity for CalArts and Chung Ang artists to create a new piece of global theater. How synchronous that the Lear/Layer collaboration will present during CalArts’ annual Arts in One World gathering.
On January 22, Chung-Ang presented Lear, concise and contemporary. On January 28, audiences will watch the theatrical fruits generated from a week of CalAng collaboration. The idea is to explore Lear’s madscape, and layer language (Spanish, Korean, English et al.), animation, music, movement, hallucination, repetition atop Chung-Ang’s theatrical ideas and make a new textured experience.
Particularly fertile is not only the chance for CalArts students to interface with the Chung-Ang team, but that they can interface with each other—a chance for CalArts students from Music, Dance, Animation and Theater to collaborate and better understand their disciplines, not to mention find affinities for future collaboration.
Travis Preston, the new dean of our School of Theater, has coined a powerful term, so apt for our moment: Diversity of Aesthetics. That even if we don’t share similar artistic visions, we can still converse and collaborate and better understand where we stand as artists. For now CalAng is about building a culture of creativity and finding communication to best provide an environment in which all of our cultures may thrive and express. Thank you collaborators, all–
CalAng!