Voorjaarsontwaken Festival, Den Haag, April 2006

“This is a picture of a person I don’t know” is a multidisciplinary solo performance about the concept of loneliness and the idea of nostalgia as a way to escape from it.

Considering the phenomena of musicals as part of the collective memory and as part of the performer’s own history, some known musicals scenes from “A chorus line” or “Singing in the rain” are used to deconstruct the mechanism of seduction in Broadway’s dance shows and taken as narrative tools to expose the performer’s most personal conflicts.

Mixing existing musicals video material with footage recorded with a small video camera, “this is a picture of a person I don’t know” proposes a complex structure of time and memory that allows the audience to travel through their own history as well as trough the history of the piece itself. The spectator is addressed directly and is conceived as another character in a very close relation with the performer.

Trying to discover new spaces between theater and cinema, between recorded and live, between reality and fiction, “this is a picture of a person I don’t know” proposes an emotional journey through memory and nostalgia in a humoristic, but poetical way; complex, but transparent; personal, but accessible.

Every time I perform “This is a picture of a person I don’t know” I look at the eyes of somebody of the audience for a little bit less than a minute. And I record it. I look how this person looks when he looks at me, or at the camera.
"Watching you" is a short video film created out of some of these spectators, spectators of the show, but performers of this movie.

People needed:
- pere faura: performer
- ellen knops: lights operator
- adnan hasovic: video operator
- ivo bol: sound operator

Time needed to build up:
between 4 and 6 hours.
Important note: 5 minutes before starting the piece there is a dance recording that finishes with recording the audience coming into the theatre. So it’s extremely important that the piece is presented at the beginning of the program or after a break, meaning when the audience comes in.

Equipment brought by the company:
- 1 photo-video camera
- 1 video mixer

Equipment needed from the theater:
- 1 video projector (beamer) on stage
- 1 television on stage
- 1 wireless hand microphone
- 1 microphone stand
- 1 little stool or chair
- 4 BNC cables from the technical cabin to the stage
- audio mixer
- light board

Sound needs:
- audio-mixer (4 channels)
   · wireless microphone
   · cd player
   · audio from video-camera
   · audio from computer

Light needs:
   > see light plan (pdf)
   > see audio-video plan (pdf)
- general white light*
- general blue light (174)*
- 1 white PC focusing the audience
- 4 white Profiles
- 1 blue PC (220)
- 3 pars 64 on the floor (135, 205, 147)
* the general white light and the general blue light are adaptable to the facilities of the performing space.

The space:
- white floor
- white horizon or white back wall
- the dimensions of the space are flexible but minimum 8m x 8m