The Experiment Center Colon Theater presents “Frankenstein, the internet and the total work of art“, a cycle of talks created by the novelist and scenic creator Florence Werchowskyand the composer and conductor Oscar Strasnoy. It is a performative and interdisciplinary show, which alternates talks on topics as diverse as music, robots, the internet, literature, plastic surgery, cyborgs, fear and the future. Each talk will trigger one of the operas from the tetralogy of Richard Wagner “The Ring of the Nibelungs”.
“The starting point is Wagner, but later we relate it to other works of total art. Frankenstein it’s an example. Creating a living creature, a life, is a total work of art. An independent being. Starting with Frankenstein, we talked about cosmetic surgery, about the internet as a collective creation: if we all add a part, the whole is more difficult to track and that it has so many possibilities that in the end it looks like anything”, he explains. oscar strasnoy to NEWS.
“Frankenstein”, the work of the British writer Mary Shelley, talks about a being made from dead body parts. “We link that with an artist who modifies his body, or certain characters in the Wagner’s tetralogy that are reminiscent of the creature from Frankenstein, like Siegfried, who is a human weapon, a creature made to fulfill a very precise objective, he is made like a pit bull. As a creature of manufacture, it resembles Frankenstein”, adds Strasnoy about the linking process between Wagner and other themes and works.
The dynamics on stage will be a hybrid between conference and performance, interviews and various stage languages; and will culminate in a tour of the public around the Wagnerian ruins, reconstructed with pieces of scenery, props and costumes from the stagings of the Wagner Cycle of the Teatro Colón. “We arranged these sets so that the viewer walks through them like the ruins of a lost civilization: another fragmentation,” explains Strasnoy.
The project was born five years ago when oscar strasnoy He gave a course at the CTC del Colón where he experimented with playwrights, composers, people who come from staging. When the pandemic hit Miguel Galperin, who was running the CTC at the time, asked him and Werchowsky to make two filmed classes. Both creators took two operas, “La Boheme” and “Bluebeard”, and they applied the same procedure of making free associations around those works with others that resemble them. Now, the duo recreates that format with these Wagner operas.
Based on this combination of languages, formats and resources, there will be projected interviews, interventions by specialists in folk tales about the relationship between Wagner and the norse mythology. There will also be a singer who will perform Wagner arias, a meme specialist who will talk about the internet, memory and mnemonic signs, and there will even be a simulation of plastic surgery performed on a mannequin.
The quote is the Thursday 18, Friday 19 and Saturday 20 August at 8:00 p.m., and on Sunday, August 21 at 5:00 p.m., the Teatro Colón Experimentation Center. Tickets are on sale and can be purchased online through www.teatrocolon.org.ar. Also in person at the ticket office of the Colon Theater (Tucumán 1171) and at the Tu Entrada location that operates at Viamonte 560 (Local 5) from Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 16:00.
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