Incorporating their prowess of visual art into theater performance is THE MILLION UNDERSCORES (Nicolás Noreña & Timothy Scott) leading the second week of the NEWS OF THE STRANGE LAB, running June 6 – June 23. The Million Underscores’ lab, 1001SUR, runs from June 13 – 16.
Who are The Million Underscores? Where do you come from? How did you meet and start working together?
We are Nicolás Noreña, Timothy Scott, and everyone who has worked with us in our projects over the years. We have been working together developing original theater pieces since 2013. We make work that has one foot in the theater and one foot in the visual art world. We believe in the plasticity of the theater. Nicolás is originally from Colombia and Tim comes from Chicago. We met at the Experimental Theater Wing at New York University and have been working together since.
What inspired you to tell The One Thousand and One Nights in the way you are imagining it?
Nicolás – I began thinking about The One Thousand and One Nights almost three years ago. What initially drew me to it was its structure: stories within stories within stories. As we began exploring the material, the idea of setting the piece in an extended strange loop of the Cultural Silk Road through South America was important to me. As a Colombian, I am part of that loop, a strange road of culture that has many ties (both direct and long and windy) with the Middle East, with Europe and with North America. We exoticize all and are exoticized by all as well.
The multilayered structure of the One Thousand and One Nights is perfect to engage with these odd subjects, it can hold so many stories, so many truths, so many topics, so many ideas at once, it seems like the proper way to begin engaging with these topics…
What has the creative and collaborative process been for the team thus far? What compelling things have you discovered? What has surprised you?
We started working as a group in two workshops before being invited by Target Margin. We entered the Nights through a bunch of different ways: the performance of the exotic, story as a material, the elements of narrative, the structure of the nights, it’s history etc. What’s been compelling is seeing how much of a labyrinth this story is. Being inside is tricky, it is like a fun house, you can get lost in it, you move something here and it transforms something elsewhere in the text. You think this will take an hour to work on and it takes a week, you think that this is impossible and it is solved in the easiest way… The One Thousand and One Nights is like playing with strange matter.
What can audiences expect to experience on this “journey into the realms of the exotic”? What do “wishes”, “dreams”, and “desires” mean to you?
Dreams, wishes, desires are as exotic to us in a way as the stories themselves. They point at something else, somewhere else, they are an alternative to what is. I believe that there is value in this kind of thinking, I believe imagination is what allows societies to transform, reinvent themselves. I feel there is a war against imagination that is actually crippling our capability to imagine change in new philosophical terms. In my mind, this piece is called Dreams of a Borderless World. What this borderless world means is still not totally clear, I guess that is where the intention comes in. Dreams, wishes, are action like throwing a rock towards the future.
What are you guys most excited to share with audiences?
Everything!!
What’s next for The Million Underscores? What’s your news to the strange?
We are starting to work on LAPA, a short play by Daniil Kharms. We’ve never worked with a text that we haven’t written so this is strange to us. We will be presenting a short excerpt as part of NewWorks!? at The Brick in July.
1001SUR created by The Million Underscores (Nicolás Noreña & Timothy Scott)
June 13 – 16 @ 8:00pm, June 15 @ 4pm, June 16 @ 5pm
1001SUR is a reimagination of 1001 Nights as told in a roadside bordello on the frontier of two undisclosed South American countries. It is a journey into the realms of the “exotic,” where layers of wishes, dreams and desires intermingle and transform reality. 1001SUR is an exploration of transcultural fantasies, an inquiry into the origins of narrative, an ode to Imagination.
The Million Underscores is an experimental theater company based in New York City under the artistic direction of Nicolas Noreña. Founded in Summer 2013 the company has developed alongside a qualitative study of numbers, and experiments in aesthetic drive, abstract composition, and collaborative writing. Nicolas Noreña is a Colombian theater director and actor based in Brooklyn. He has worked with Richard Foreman, Mary Overlie, The Talking Band, Ernesto Pujol, and Katherine Brook/TELEVIOLET among others. He is currently a LEIMAY fellow and was a resident artist with MABOU MINES 2015-2016.
Photo credit: Frank Poon