Marija Gavrilovic

Gaps The gap is an element in space and time completed by human performance and wonder. It is a vessel for the realm of experiences that are informed by human instinct on how to use and perceive the space. This field, rather than a mere set of objects, evokes an experiment, imagination, wonder, stillness, presence, engagement, flux. There is a layer of time that interacts with this space, rather than a loop of time when and where built environments are carefully prescribing on what to do, how to feel, who to be. This investigation emerges from of a built environment that is overly designed, overly declared, fixed, almost sealed, exhaustively polished, and then labeled. There is no space for the gap, for the flux, experiment, imagination, wonder, stillness, presence, engagement.

Every design is completed with human presence in a certain way. People’s manner of using and seeing a built form is the component of the gap: a role play that breaks and liberates the mind and body’s dry routines, replaces subject and object, creates a scenario that is shaping the way space is experienced by people, as well as the way people are experienced in that space. Two entities, humans and spaces, come together in shaping each other’s nature as a whole. In this way, a character is informed between a built form and the way people interacts with it, within a third space, or third event1. Roosevelt Island is the site where the ambition of my project is tested. There is an abandoned hospital on this island, a mysterious and peaceful ruin that lays between Manhattan and Queens and has the most beautiful panoramic views over the two New York City’s boroughs. Yet, each has a different nature of a built beauty and people.

The character within a third space is an important component of the gaps because design that is all fixed and declared does not allow this character to unfold throughout time. The gap is an element in space and time bridged by human performance and wonder. We live in constant change: that is the essence of our universe and the only constant. Therefore, built environments

1

Siobhan Burke, “Faye Driscoll's Tingling Force Field With the Dance Audience”, The New York Times, November 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/arts/dance/exploring-the-space-between-performer-and-audience.html

both incorporate and shape people’s lives and their characters throughout time. For this reason, I cleave to performing arts. More so, the way space can change the physicality and perception of a performance, and vice versa.

Peter Brook, an English theatre and film director, works and writes about the ways an audience completes a set design during the theatrical performance. Titles of his books such as The Open Door2 and The Empty Space 3 already suggest how space is a dominant element in Brook’s practice. Paradoxically, or rather most surprisingly, is that his stage design is very much reduced to bare structure where people are completing the space continuum with their own imagination. This is Brook’s own manner of looking at the gap in space where characters are performed, discovered and rediscovered. In his book The Empty Space, he writes: If one starts from the premise that a stage is a stage -not a convenient place for the unfolding of a staged novel or a staged poem or a staged lecture or a staged story- then the word that is spoken on this stage exists, or fails to exist, only in relation to the tensions it creates on that stage within the given stage circumstances.” Here, I am looking at the way Brook is writing about the given circumstances as something that can limit the unfolding element of time and characters, if considered as an isolated and fixed element. We can also replace stage design with interior design in the same sentence, and the meaning would not be altered.

Declared design goes along with the unnecessary manifestation that Brook explains as “a terror that if we are not somehow signaling all the time that we exist, we will in fact no longer be there”. Gaps open and soften those tight and controlled spaces and the characters who occupy them whereas the format of dramatic arts calls for an exploration of an identity. This exploration goes through doubles, multitudes, paradoxes, various characters that human nature contains, and the gap between them. Theatre represents a human condition. Its rawness, sensual 2 3

Peter Brook, The Open Door (Macmillan Publishers) Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Touchstone), 37

environment, bare and bone human presence claim the magic of the theatrical limelight. The paradox of this limelight is the fact that most of theatrical plays explore the shadow archetype of human nature, unconscious, features we wouldn’t call representative. Either way, this element exists together with good manners, empathy, confidence and well-behaved behaviors: it is all part of who we are as a whole. That is why people are drawn to theatre, movies and television, but there is something unique to time and space of the theatrical format that is always challenging and expanding throughout time. For example, the Shakespearean characters are dominant on world stages for almost five hundred years. To this day, people empathize with them because their stories are fully embracing human nature in a very graceful and truthful way.

This grace and shame are part of the story, part of the existence. In his radical approach to theatre, Brook based almost all his work on Shakespeare. Therefore, there is a significant bond between the way he designs stage for the unfolding of Shakespearean characters, and the way he chooses characters in the first place. Consequently, the gap between audience and play is completed with spectator’s empathy with characters on stage. This is the essence of any dramatic form, to show how we are all same, we all share the experience of being alive and we all have both shadow and light archetype in our nature as part of the collective unconscious. The empty space reinforces empathy because it is reduced to a pure form, life form, the gap in design that calls for the imagination, wonder, stillness, presence, engagement, flux.

Gaps Piece of Theatre Roosevelt Island, NYC Summer 2020, 22:00 Some of the characters have already spent several weeks on the field preparing for the show.

Different stages will be slicing through the ruin and will be used to frame different human conditions during the show. The audience will cross the gap between the theatrical limelight and the shadows, go backstage during the piece and explore the way the story was crafted into a site-specific outdoor performance that has elements of immersive theatre, contemporary dance choreography and Shakespeare’s soliloquies. The built environment will incorporate and shape

people’s life and their characters throughout time. For example, intimacy of the soliloquies will have different frequency than a contemporary dance. The space will embrace the emotion and challenge its expected theatrical representation. However, the space will shape the way we see and memorize those emotions. Ruin is the main character. Here is the piece of main actor’s diary.

April 4 Today was the first time we rehearsed this act. I wrote my soliloquy with the rouge. Words expand all over the reflective glass wall inside the ruin. When the wall opens, the zig zag slide motion makes my written soliloquies mingle. I cannot distinguish the words anymore whilst the ruin and the reflection of Queens and Manhattan create an infinity mirror at angle.

March 12 Twisted mirror dimension portrays the gap between ruin and the reflective glass, renovation design element. It embraces the ruin as part of herself. Surrounding is also an element of this image, as much as myself writing these words in between. The rouge breaks because it is cold now. We rehearse for summer when the soft texture will be easier to apply.

May 18 Each time we need to rehearse again, I clean the words, but there is never enough time, so the windows started to incorporate color and texture of the rouge. One day, it will not be different from the red stage that lays on the other side of the ruin if the director doesn’t slow down the gaps between rehearsals and give me more time to properly clean the glass from the rouge. She can also send someone to do that for me. I am a man and an actor, let alone the fact that I am already putting this rouge onto the reflective glass and my own lips. What a shame. Audience cannot even see this whole gesture as the glass is covered with the ruin walls. Partial view seats for everyone.

June 1 Gap between the installed pieces and the ruin scared me at first. Director told me to look as it was a gap between the enclosure and the world. Pearl and a shell, if I wish. She also pointed out that I am afraid of my own imagination. I see that as a problem for green screen actors, not me.

Here, everything already exists in space and time. Window openings of the enclosure have the same shape as the window openings on the ruin parallel to it. The double frame between our dressing room and New York City is now reframed with red roses someone brought for Julia.

She left them restlessly and went into the city to dance.

June 17 While waiting for her to come back and rehearse the dance and my soliloquy together, I saw myself watering the roses to keep the red color fresh. Presence of this ruin is transforming, nurturing, allowing, opening, revealing. Her nature contains doubles, multitudes, feminine beyond gender. Gap between us is tinier and tinier as time goes by. I let her bare stone become my bones and the red stage become my veins.

June 29 Gaps between our characters are breaking the fine continuity. Gaps strive towards completion using our imagination, experiment, wonder, stillness, presence, engagement, but they remain.

We can just keep building spaces, times: pieces of theatre that will tell stories about the blending field of separate objects which can only be imagined, therefore performed.