by AJ Weissbard
I know of no other space that incorporates so many artistic disciplines in one place: music, dance, text, movement, spectacle; alongside architecture, carpentry, painting, costuming, and the mysteries of light. The sheer number of people who unite to make one single theatrical event is often hard to grasp.
Magically, all this comes alive before our eyes, in the communal act that is the Theater. While we may employ tricks, we cannot lie: no computer-generated imagery, no cinematic editing, no shifting of scale. Still today, as in the ancient theater of Epidaurus, audience and performer share the same air, the same time, the same charged space. This makes the illusions we experience all the more extraordinary.
I began making theater when I was just a child. I remember the enchantment of how quickly we could construct an entire world on stage, the energy born from creative collaboration, and the harmony of the many moving parts converging into a singular, ephemeral event. Perhaps Theater is our oldest art form. As humans, we yearn to share our stories. Around the bonfire, our first stories were told, sung, or acted out for family, for community. Now we have all sorts of technology, architecture, design, and artifice to frame them, but the act of storytelling remains the same. For theater to exist, we need only gather for a time, in partnership: performers and public, in the age-old art of storytelling.
As a theater artist, I endeavor to invite the audience into a world we share, if only briefly. Today, our attention is strained, with the digital world luring us with endless distraction. But a meaningful story takes a little time; the theater makes space for that. My aim is not to lecture, but to open a door to let the audience step inside a space filled with echoes of the human condition: joy, sadness, grief, forgiveness, empathy, and love.
BURN is a project born from my respect for the theater and all it holds. Bringing together artists from varied cultures, with distinct techniques, styles, and backgrounds, BURN celebrates our differences, and what we can create when we explore and build upon them. Inspired by a play, BURN rises from our past, evolves in our present, and looks to our future.