Staging a play: The Glass Menagerie is Matija Ferlin’s abstract dance theatre performance based on Tennessee Williams’ brilliant play The Glass Menagerie. It was first staged late last year and has since received many positive reviews. Englist’s team was very fortunate to be able to attend the show for a very affordable price and even arrange a small discussion after the play with Matija Ferlin, the director, main choreographer, and dancer, Maja Delak, a dancer, and Luka Prinčič, the coordinator of music. We are very grateful for this opportunity and would like to thank the lovely Katarina from Bunker at Stara mestna elekrarna Elektro Ljubljana for making this learning experience possible.
Although I am not very familiar with this type of …show more content…
Matija sought to eliminate the main apparatus in classical theatre, which is speech, and replace it with the body, which is traditionally not deemed very important. This is a research of form, not necessarily content, he claims. It explores what the dramatic body is and what it can offer. According to Matija, the choreography does not stem primarily from the text, but from the body and what it can achieve. You might wonder how much of the movement is choreographed and how much is improvised in a play like this. Maja Delak explains that about 80 - 90% of the movement is choreographed and the rest is improvised. She claims it is important for the movement not to be descriptive, so as not to suggest any specific interpretation to the audience, but it should still be sourced in the text. She says it mainly takes a lot of practice to learn how to translate the actual lines of text to body movement and the correct facial expressions, which should not be too straight forward. Another goal of this play was not to be predictable, but to create tension. It was not to be obvious, but to break the habits of ordinary …show more content…
And to me, the music was indeed the best part of the performance. It reflected the atmosphere of each act beautifully, featuring mainly looped melodies that brilliantly inform the audience of the almost claustrophobic atmosphere in the beginning of the play, changing with each break and reintroduced only more complex with each following act. In fact, Luka Prinčič explains that most recordings were based on the actual records that Tennessee Williams mentions for this play, and they have been backtracked and looped to create and sustain this bleak atmosphere of the play. Luka claims that working with music means working with states and that each scene announces a particular state. Yet even the musical component of this performance is meant to be interpreted extremely liberally. He claims that music only gives a certain direction but that is it possible and even desired that a certain piece should be interpreted by one person as sad and extremely optimistic by another. This view, however, challenges the idea that music is universally perceived in the same way. Do minor chords, for example, not sound inherently sad and major chords inherently happy to us all? Would classical music, which is based on narrative, even be able to build said narrative if such associations did not exist? That
Although I am not very familiar with this type of …show more content…
Matija sought to eliminate the main apparatus in classical theatre, which is speech, and replace it with the body, which is traditionally not deemed very important. This is a research of form, not necessarily content, he claims. It explores what the dramatic body is and what it can offer. According to Matija, the choreography does not stem primarily from the text, but from the body and what it can achieve. You might wonder how much of the movement is choreographed and how much is improvised in a play like this. Maja Delak explains that about 80 - 90% of the movement is choreographed and the rest is improvised. She claims it is important for the movement not to be descriptive, so as not to suggest any specific interpretation to the audience, but it should still be sourced in the text. She says it mainly takes a lot of practice to learn how to translate the actual lines of text to body movement and the correct facial expressions, which should not be too straight forward. Another goal of this play was not to be predictable, but to create tension. It was not to be obvious, but to break the habits of ordinary …show more content…
And to me, the music was indeed the best part of the performance. It reflected the atmosphere of each act beautifully, featuring mainly looped melodies that brilliantly inform the audience of the almost claustrophobic atmosphere in the beginning of the play, changing with each break and reintroduced only more complex with each following act. In fact, Luka Prinčič explains that most recordings were based on the actual records that Tennessee Williams mentions for this play, and they have been backtracked and looped to create and sustain this bleak atmosphere of the play. Luka claims that working with music means working with states and that each scene announces a particular state. Yet even the musical component of this performance is meant to be interpreted extremely liberally. He claims that music only gives a certain direction but that is it possible and even desired that a certain piece should be interpreted by one person as sad and extremely optimistic by another. This view, however, challenges the idea that music is universally perceived in the same way. Do minor chords, for example, not sound inherently sad and major chords inherently happy to us all? Would classical music, which is based on narrative, even be able to build said narrative if such associations did not exist? That