Actress Sara Fay Goldman sends another missive from rehearsals for Raiz, this year’s Day of the Dead celebration opening next week:
Arturo comes to us from making theatre in and around Rome, and has lived in Portland for only a few months. He told us about one of his last projects before crossing, on tour with Peter Pan, traveling around Europe with a refrigerator strapped to the roof of a van.
One of the first things we as actors learned about Arturo as a director is that we will be speaking film, with references to classic cinema as a vehicle for communicating with each other and trying on ideas. In terms of devising a script, iconic moments in film serve as common cultural ground and will hopefully help our audience connect to our impressions of an abstract past.
These moments of exploring shared memories in rehearsal often extend beyond the world of film into television, literature, and music. Here are some pieces collected from the cast, all referred to us by our director in the research phase of our writing. They have all somehow influenced the production, though it’s hard to say how, so you may prefer to explore them either before or after attending Raíz. Enjoy!
- Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Annie Hall, and Bullets Over Broadway
- Fru, an animated short by Ivan Maximov, which you can watch online
- The dance “Cafe Muller” by choreographer Pina Bausch
- The Singing Detective, a 1986 BBBC miniseries by Dennis Potter
- Myazaki’s Spirited Away
- Federico Fellini’s I Clowns
- Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre
- The title sequence to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut
- The Club de Silencio scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr