The Voice in the Closet

 

An adaptation of Raymond Federman’s novella, The Voice in the Closet, StageLab Festival, Edmonton, Alberta 2012

 

Click image to view video clip

Click here to view selected photos from the play

The video above, recorded during the dress rehearsal, shows one part of the film installation I made for the play. It features a close-up of lips telling a story shot in standard 8mm B&W film projected alongside a 16mm loop of film countdown. The lips belong to Rea Zivkovic, a Holocaust survivor (you can find her story here), and the countdown that constantly fails to actually get to the start of the film, resonate with the "aesthetics of failure" that, according to Piet Defraeye, characterizes Federman's text:

"The Voice in the Closet is an incredibly intimate text, which at the same time continuously eludes and undercuts the subjective. His desperate effort to narrate an earth-shattering experience from the author’s youth – the sudden arrest and subsequent disappearance of both his parents and his two sisters by the Nazis, in Paris during WWII – is a project doomed to fail. The world conjured by the text is one of fragmentation, ellipsis, obfuscation, repetition, resistance, redundancy and excess, false starts, without ending. As we are trained in our cultural practice to look for recognition, signification and meaning, we also deflect and reject failure – though it remains overwhelmingly a structuring principle in our interactions and certainly in our iterations. Federman’s text embraces failure as its main aesthetic."

For this installation, 8mm film was shot by Marko Zivkovic, and the 16mm film was shot by Patrick Arés-Pilon. Film/Art Conceptualization by Gordana Zivkovic.

 

Director & Project Coordinator – Piet Defraeye
Stage Manager – Justine Moelker
Sound Design & Music – Scott Smallwood
Lighting Design – Patrick Arés-Pilon
Film/Art Conceptualization - Gordana Zivkovic
Visual Designer & Technical Assistant – Marko Zivkovic
Arts Contributor - Sylvia Grist

Performers
Gerry Morita
Kristine Nutting
Zachary Polis
Jake Hastey