SP Escola de Teotro, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Per Hüttner, Stephen Whitmarsh and Jean-Louis Huhta joined forces with Brazilian actress Teresa de Almeida Prado and Portuguese actor Pedro Penim to revisit at Samuel Beckett’s last play “What Where.” The session took place in Sao Paulo in November 2014 and was divided into two sections. The first was devoted to recording and the second to performing the recorded material:
In the first part, the two actors read and acted the play while their movements were recorded using a camera and turned into a digital score. At the same time their brain activities, eye and head movements were recorded using an EEG.
The second part was a public performance that formed a part of the OuUnPo session in Sao Paulo. The two actors’ movements that had been recorded in the previous session were transformed into music that was refined using a modular synthesizer. The music was played back and functioned like a metronome. The actors used print-outs of their brain activities as scores to define their movements and acting. Teresa moved in a circle and moved forward according to when she had moved her head during the reading. Pedro shifted his attention to his inner and outer self by opening and closing his eyes based on how he had performed this during the reading of the Beckett play. Both actors threw the pages of the score in unison (each page roughly corresponding to one minute) as they recreated their mental, muscular movements from the reading of the play.
The performance was rounded off by Pedro reading the final lines of the play and a short introduction by Stephen and Per about the process of creating the performance.
