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César Alvarez and Sarah Benson talk FUTURITY on NPR (The Leonard Lopate Show)

 photo credit: Ben Arons courtesy of Soho Rep/Ars Nova

Working in the Theatre: Polyphone

The American Theater Wing made a mini-documentary about Polyphone, which is a festival for new musicals I founded with Joanna Settle in 2015 at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Watch on Vimeo
Watch on YouTube

Musical Theatre of the Future

In February 2017 I went to Norway to talk to experimental LARP designers about making a participatory space musical. I got to share a lot of my beliefs about musicals, participatory theater and transforming the civic sphere with art. You can watch:

Watch it on YouTube
Also check out Lizzie Stark's primer on Nordic Larp HERE.

The Skin of Our Teeth at Theatre for a New Audience

Eric Farber and Fred Epstein | Photo by Henry Grossman 

Photo by Henry Grossman

Photo by Henry Grossman

I wrote original music including 4 songs for TFANA's production of The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. This play summons the eternal story of how humans endure total catastrophe. After working on it for months I feel like I finally arrived at its key insight: that our desperation to survive, the love of our communities and families, and the truth we discover through arts and sciences will always carry us through the darkness.

New York Times Feature: "Why Thornton Wilder Matters in the Trump Era"

New York Times Review: "In ‘The Skin of Our Teeth,’ the End of the World as We Know It"

NOISE

Jenna Rush | Photo by Eric Wolfe

Photo by Eric Wolfe

Photo by Eric Wolfe

NOISE was inspired by a little piece of critical theory, which proposes that music, as the organization of noise, was the earliest expression of civilization. And if music precedes all forms of political economy, it follows that we should be able to make a musical which designs a new and better society. Right? RIGHT?!


NOISE was a commission of Playwrights Horizons Theater School.
Jack Moore of the Public Theater talks about it in this podcast. (Minute 42)


Here's a demo of a song from the show:

The Elementary Spacetime Show

photo by Eric Wolfe

“The universe doesn’t care if you live. It just doesn’t want you to die as the result of a false impression."

The Elementary Spacetime Show
Music, Book and Lyrics by César Alvarez
Directed by Andrew Neisler
Choreography by Sonya Tayeh and Ben Hobbs
September 10-24, 2016

Co-presented by The University of the Arts and FringeArts
TICKETS AND INFO HERE

REVIEWS:
The Philadelphia Inquirer - 'Spacetime Show' probes teen suicide with humor, music, physics
WHYY/NPR - Fringe Reviews: 'The Elementary Spacetime Show'
Broad Street Review - University of the Arts/FringeArts co-production asks, "Why live?"

FUTURITY

Sometimes you come up with an idea, and you work on it for eight years. And a bunch of wonderful people start to believe in you, and help you, and it grows and grows and grows. And you see it slowly turn into the thing that you always wanted it to be. It is an incredible feeling. When you finally see it fully-formed it makes all the heartaches, stomach aches, and difficulties you encountered along the way seem distant and well worth it. Thank you to everyone who came and collaborated on this big beautiful beast.

Illustration by Adam Hayes   

Music by César Alvarez with The Lisps

Lyrics and Book by César Alvarez
Directed by Sarah Benson

FUTURITY won the 2016 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical and received 5 nominations.

FUTURITY won the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Musical

NY Times Review HERE

sohorep.org/futurity

arsnovanyc.com/futurity

Washeteria

 

This is a song from my episode of Washeteria: A site specific, immersive theater piece for children. Louisa Thompson designed a fantastical laundromat inside an former auto parts store in Brooklyn. I wrote a mini-musical for the piece. My episode (Directed by the luminous Annie Tippe) is called Consuela and the Great Genie of The Laundry Bag. It's about a woman trapped inside a laundromat by an evil manager, and a genie who loves granola bars.

One thing that is interesting about this show is that that as we've been rehearsing, every single day we are visited for an hour by a different second grade class from The Brooklyn Arbor. I love the idea of making a musical in front of an gaggle of squirming second graders.  

Tickets are HERE.

Ursula K Le Guin on Science Fiction

"Truth is a matter of the imagination" - Ursula K Le Guin

Image Credit - The Left Hand of Darkness by David Lane

I recently read Ursula K Le Guin's legendary novel The Left Hand of Darkness. In the introduction she lays out a really compelling meditation on the role of science fiction in culture.  As we are ever more altered by our technology, it bears repeating that the metaphors of science fiction might help us create a more intelligent society.

Introduction

"Science fiction is often described, and even defind, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing." Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life.

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens.... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed. The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to shwo that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted- but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

The Universe is a Small Hat - BABYCASTLES RESIDENCY

The Universe is a Small Hat is a multiplayer immersive musical that tells the story of a space colony leaving earth in order to devise a more rational society. I've been developing this piece for two years now, and it isn't quite like anything I've ever created or experienced. Part game, part performance, part social experiment, part Utopian concept album, part party. We can't make the piece without willing participants. Come out and play.

OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Trailer HERE

An Octoroon

From left, Chris Myers, Danny Wolohan and Amber Gray. Credit Pavel Antonov 

Composing for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon at Soho Rep this past spring was one of the most exhilarating artistic experiences of my life. The song I wrote for the end was meant to be a moment of healing or reflection after the intense discomfort and insane melodrama that the play intentionally creates. Lester St. Louis is the fantastic cellist who makes it happen in the show.

NY times Review HERE.

Here's my original demo of the closing song:

"When You Burn It Down."
Music and Lyrics by César Alvarez

The Universe is a Small Hat - 1st Play Test

Engineering meaningful participatory theater.

Photos by Nora Mericicki from the Berkeley Rep Ground Floor workshop/playtest June 21, 2013. 

The Witness Training. Safiya Fredericks (background) as The Founder and audience member/colonist Melissa Nigro

During my time in The Civilians R and D Group and the Berkeley Rep Ground Floor Program I have been studying how to turn the experience of my musical into an immersive and interactive game. My piece is entitled The Universe is a Small Hat and tells the story of a techno-Utopian space colony which encounters a mysterious non-human atmospheric intelligence. Each audience member plays the role of a colonist and has to choose how to behave and interface within the micro-society on the ship. The decisions that colonists make influence their experience of the piece, opportunities they have, their access to the ship itself, and ultimately the ending that they experience.

A Song from the show:

“A game is an experience created by rules.” - Anna Anthropy (Rise of The Videogame Zinesters)

Games are systems and so they are well-suited to tell stories about systems. Small Hat is at its core about a society, which is a network of shared laws, customs, and/or organizations. My piece also deals with physics which is a system of laws capable of describing and predicting aspects of our Universe. The idea for turning my piece into an immersive experience first came from this video of futurist Jason Silva talking about his experience of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. 

When I found the Jason Silva video I was trying to figure out how to tell a futuristic story in a theatrical context, but I feared that being conventionally presentational would come off as hokey. My sense is that science fiction has a bad reputation in theater. Perhaps science fiction works better in novels and films because both forms are so good at immersing us in a fictional future. Silva connects Sleep No More to virtual reality and frames its (albeit analog) interactive environment as an evolution of the video game and “the future of storytelling.” I think he has a point. For centuries theater has served to create a moment of physical rest and reflection after a day of labor. But now, as more jobs than ever require hours of isolation sitting in front of a screen, plugged into a network, theater might be well positioned as a place to engage our bodies, and allow us to interact with one another in physical space. George Lucas recently came out with a similar point in his Times article The Future of Movies. 

The Healer Training

"Games are a kind of theater in which the audience is an actor and takes on a role – and experiences the circumstances and consequences of that role.”  - Anna Anthropy

Below I've presented some game concepts alongside a few thoughts on how we are integrating the concepts into The Universe is a Small Hat. The words that game designers use to describe their work have been helpful as I try to merge these two worlds. My hope is that more theater artists will start creating work that generates story-driven interactivity. In the two large playtests we've done I've found an incredible willingness on the part of audiences to participate as long as the system makes some sense to them.

Player Character - is a character in a video game or role playing game who is controlled or controllable by a player, and is typically a protagonist of the story told in the course of the game.

In Small Hat the “player” is the audience member. And as I develop the “script” I am viewing the audience member as an actor in the play. The script should be a delineation of circumstances that allow for a mediated experience full of sensation, story and choice. The audience members will not be asked to “act” or play a character other than themselves. Since they are cast as members of the space colony we are asking them to be themselves exactly as they are, or as they'd like to be. Each colonist is given one of five “identities,” or jobs, based on an evaluation, but each individual can embrace, switch, or reject the identity as they see fit.

Non-Player Character - any character not controlled by a player. In our case, the actors.

Reward - The reward is the positive consequence of conquering the challenge; it can be anything from an increase in score, new items, or a scene.

The Bluelight

Risk - a situation involving exposure to danger, or in the case of a game, the loss of points, rewards, or status.

Cutscenes - A cutscene is a sequence in a video game over which the player has no or only limited control, breaking up the gameplay. Cutscenes are used to advance the plot, strengthen the main character's development, introduce enemy characters, and provide background information, atmosphere, dialogue, and clues.The video game form of scene/gameplay/scene/gameplay reminds me of the musical theater form of scene/song/scene/song. In Small Hat we will move the narrative primarily through songs, direct address, and gameplay, with few scripted scenes between characters. The colonists also have a lot of time to interact directly with the drones, in which case the drones will be improvising based on their understanding of the world.

The Belief Ladder

Items – Objects which play role in the story. The might contain clues, unlock elements of the story, offer powers or privileges.

Score - In games, score refers to an abstract quantity associated with a player or team. Score is usually measured in the abstract unit of points, and events in the game can raise or lower the score of different parties. Most games with score use it as a quantitative indicator of success in the game, and in competitive games, a goal is often made of attaining a better score than one's opponents in order to win.

Playtesting – This is an idea in games that you have to play the game in order to gauge its effectiveness. Is it challenging? Too repetitive? Too easy? Interesting to both expert players and novices? Factors of the game can be tweaked and adjusted according the to subjective experience of the playtesting. I thought playtesting is the game design version of workshopping in theater, but I've actually discovered it is more analogous to rehearsal. We actually need the players (audience) to see even the most basic elements of the piece on their feet.

Skill and Chance – This is a polarity that is present in many games. There is a randomizing element (dice or cards) but also a system of rules which can be employed though a player's skill. Specific strategies will allow Colonists to achieve higher and reach greater depths of the world. But the randomizing elements will add unexpected outcomes.

Level - In a video game a level is the total space available to the player during the course of completing a discrete objective.

Audience members fill out exit surveys after the playtest.

César Alvarez - Creator/Composer
Sarah Benson - Director
Ivan Safrin and Syed Salahuddin - Game Designers

For more information on the The Universe is a Small Hat tweet or contact César.