Vision
'You Have The Right to Remain Silent' is a theatrical play, written by Francisco Oliva, a Gibraltarian journalist and published author. The word 'play' falls short of being an adequate description of the real intentions of this text, as it is merely the starting point of a more ambitious artefact, whose goal is not just entertainment.
The aim is to create a collective experience that can shake the general awareness, using many different tools to communicate with the public. According to the purpose of the author, the play gives rise to an artistic project, an investigation in which different languages combine to induce a kind of parallel world where the boundaries between reality and fiction are thinned.
The same author maintains:
“The point of the show is to demonstrate how reality as we have come to understand it, as the integral, straightforward, recognizable context in which the comfort zone of our daily lives unfolds, can easily be manipulated and unsettled, using theatre as a pretext. ‘You Have The Right to Remain Silent’ seeks to illustrate how the fragile threads that ordinarily sustain the structures of our comprehension can be cut loose without warning; how the accepted rules and conventions of regular human co-existence and behaviour can be changed, surreptitiously rewritten and distorted, to create a surrogate reality, a fictional nightmare posing as something authentic. The real time experiment that follows will become the centre of a vortex; an elaborately packaged, carefully stage-managed sensory experience that seeks to create a sudden state of vertigo, one that can defy awareness, subvert and interrupt the flow of information that, by and large, facilitates an instant grasp of our surroundings.”
Plot
The show can be divided into three basic parts.
In the first part, more distinctly performative, the public will not know that the show has began and will be immersed in a spiral of events to make them doubt what is true and what is part of the show.
The second part consists of a long monologue accompanied by video projections, where the public will be asked what the role of truth in our lives is.
The third part is to reveal the fiction and help the public understand how easy it is to manipulate reality using limited resources in the right way.
Society and medias
We are living in complex times. Old media - TV ads, magazines, radio - and the enormous amount of social network platforms - Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube etc - show us a miscellaneous and kaleidoscopic world, where human beings are the absolute protagonists of the story. The question is: where do we stand as observers of this? How are we using the media?
A central issue is the massive presence of sensory stimuli that accompanies the human image. Digital pictures, sounds, colours, messages, voices, comics. The overwhelming quantity of images and inputs we receive every day from the mass media is, most of time, erased by our minds very quickly. The way we assimilate these stimuli is the key to understand which role we want to play.
Relation between theatre and arquitecture
Theatre is like a big box. You just need to know what you are looking for and find the better way to achieve it.One of the most valuable opportunities that theatre gives us is the possibility to combine various languages into a common space. This issue, which gained importance in Wagner's research, investigating the achievement of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, is still at a pioneering stage.
Via the perspective that only architecture can give, we gave way to the impression we received by reading the play. Starting with an interpretation of the text in order to figure out its spatial dimensions, we discovered how our respective disciplines could challenge and enrich each other, with the aim of creating a hybrid outcome.
Architecture is the manipulation of space. Theatre is a manipulation of actors. This was our starting point. By this perspective, we could give form to a great idea, a way to make real what the author suggests in the text. Our goal is to use and to mix different artistic disciplines, to recreate a fake reality, to lie to the spectators, in order to achieve a new level of enhanced awareness.ie to the spectators, in order to bring them towards the awareness raising.
