15. Learning by Making and Doing: Group Project - Part 2

With the ten practical questions in mind, we decided to make the initial setting of the “auditorium” a bit strange by putting the chairs all facing different directions, but this auditorium was also framed by lighting and darkness around, making it a bit mysterious. I played a servant-like role with a Commedia dell’arte half-mask, walking around the auditorium to enhance the framing, but also played with the subversion/dialectics in the usual relationship between watching and being watched in “conventional” theatre—making the watchers sitting in the auditorium the watched while they were waiting to watch something.

(Preparation for video-making: drawing different possibilities of Hamlet)

Then this servant character welcomed the spectators and showed a video of comic drawings that re-told the “story” of Hamlet from an unusual format of documentary mixed with a tone from the detective genre, to bring everybody more or less on the same page regarding Hamlet’s basics but also question such presentation or interpretation. This act also framed the spectators as participants with an assigned role of investigator and a mission to explore the truth behind the Hamlet case.

(Setting up for the one-shot video-taking)

I made the video intentionally with an explicitly DIY style, with hand-held style of shooting and drawings in an unprofessional comic style contrasting/contradicting the “serious” canonical text of Hamlet. The mixture of shooting static drawings with a moving camera than made a video in an uncut one-shot style, was also intended to play with a dialectics between the dynamic and static, between the expectation of fineness and the reality of roughness, between a seemingly serious task and a childlike game, etc.

The content of the video intentionally avoided putting Hamlet as the “protagonist” and paid efforts to present many possible versions of stories based on the same set of “facts/given information” and to question who told these different versions of stories and who were the witnesses—sources of information—and their reliability and motivation as witnesses.

In short, I tried to make the video itself and the Hamlet "stories" represented therein multi-dimensionally dialectical, and while the video and the stories represented therein also formed another dialectical relationship with the rest of the show/game/event.

(The video I made for the Prologue section for the basics of Hamlet but presented in a reflective manner)