Taipei-based Riverbed Theatre (河床劇團) will return to the Experimental Theater next weekend to explore the mysteries and multiple world of illusions and delusions of US filmmaker David Lynch with Dreaming David Lynch.
Blame it on Eraserhead, the 1977 black-and-white horror movie that was Lynch’s full-length feature film. It tells the story of a man left to care for his badly deformed infant in a bleak, desolate industrial landscape. Pretty heady stuff if you are a high-school junior already heavily involved in theater.
At least that’s the way Riverbed cofounder and director Craig Quintero tells it.
Photos Courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
“Watching it with friends late at night, I enjoyed the sensation of seeing something completely unknown. There was a family, a house, but it was completely unexpected, I had a hard time putting the pieces together. But I enjoyed it, the feeling that I didn’t have to try to make sense of it,” he said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
“Watched Blue Velvet; again shots of suburbia, then the zoom in on the grass, the severed ear with ants. It was an image of peace, contentment, but then within it an image of violence,” he said. “The decay of life was a seminal experience in my artistic development. The defamiliarization of the familiar.”
“Almost 30 years later and I’m still trying to create work like this, theater that sets off a mind bomb in the audience’s mind,” he said in PAR magazine.
Quintero said he had thought about doing a show on Lynch for a long time, but puzzled over how to tackle it. However, Dreaming David Lynch is not the first time Quintero and the 17-year-old Riverbed have taken a biographic subject and run with it.
They staged Life and Times of Robert Wilson, inspired by the seminal US experimental theater director and playwright, at the Experimental Theater 11 years ago.
In the PAR article, Quintero said Riverbed and Lynch was an ideal match, like “french fries and ketchup.”
Lynch “has a very distinct language. The films bleed together … the way a camera moves down a hallway. Our performance is trying to address that vocabulary, that language,” Quintero said. “We are using a lot more film and projection; a fairly massive amount. It is pushing us to do more with shifting lenses, the transition between film and theater.”
Riverbed is famed for its non-linear, image-based “total theater” productions, so he laughed when I asked if there was a storyline.
“There are people who inhabit the world and reappear several times. There are characters and things happen to them,” Quintero said, adding: “Think Mullholand Drive.”
“There is not a plot, but things are happening. There is a beginning, middle and end, but it stays true to Lynch’s multiple realities,” he said.
The production team for Dreaming David Lynch includes multimedia artists Blaire Ko (柯智豪) and Tseng Yu-chin (曾御欽), painter Wang Tzu-ting (王姿婷) and company cofounder Carl Johnson, who instead of his usual jobs as set designer and painter has an onstage role.
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