{"id":10373,"date":"2019-03-28T21:36:24","date_gmt":"2019-03-29T01:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=10373"},"modified":"2019-03-28T21:37:18","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T01:37:18","slug":"caryl-churchhills-love-and-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2019\/03\/28\/caryl-churchhills-love-and-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information"},"content":{"rendered":"

About one month ago, my acting\/directing class performed Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information.<\/em> The production was produced through the Residential College’s drama department,\u00a0one week before\u00a0SMTD’s production of the same play. Both productions were done in accordance with the Caryl Churchill festival happening around Ann Arbor, which featured a weekend of free staged readings and lectures to celebrate the ingenious playwright.<\/p>\n

To give some background, Love and Information<\/em>\u00a0is a jam-packed play consisting of a multitude of short vignettes<\/span>. The scenes give a glimpse into the different lives of lovers, family members, and friends, evoking laughter, sadness, and more.\u00a0The script for the play, as well as several others by Churchill, is unique in that it is structured in a way that encourages creativity. There are little to no stage directions, no scene numbers, and no named characters.<\/p>\n

When rehearsing the show, the lack of information was a blank canvas that\u2014while incredibly intimidating\u2014forced the director and actors to think for themselves about the direction each scene went when rehearsing it. With\u00a0limited punctuation and lines interrupting each other, it was initially daunting to successfully define the messages we wanted to send. Besides\u00a0understanding the text, we were challenged to present a story within a short scene. Additionally, as a<\/span>rtists, we weren’t the only ones being intellectually and emotionally challenged; audience members were often left to draw their own conclusions for the stories on stage.<\/p>\n

By being both an artist and audience member for this show, I had the opportunity to view the stories through different lenses. To see different renditions was thought-provoking and entertaining. The build up and collapse of relationships between the scenarios varied greatly upon interpretation. For my performance, I played a high schooler, sister (revealed to be a mother), lover, friend, and girl in love with artificial intelligence. It was interesting to see these same roles executed by the SMTD cast. Some scenes were taken in a different direction, whether more comedic or serious than my drama class’s.<\/p>\n

Apart from the structure of the play, the stories themselves spoke volumes.\u00a0<\/span>The play questioned the balance between knowledge and love, particularly with modern technology. Can one exist without the other? What happens if a person ignores one to rationalize the other?<\/span> The short scenarios brought life to different characters, situations, and storylines that sparked these questions. Additionally, the use of technology by characters in the scenes acted as either a boundary or a tool in their attempts to communicate with one another. This use of modern technology added an extra layer that contributed to the play’s thought-provoking manner. Overall, through performing scenes, watching other students’ work, and seeing SMTD\u2019s production, I\u00a0gained an immense appreciation for Churchill’s play, Love and Information<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About one month ago, my acting\/directing class performed Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information. The production was produced through the Residential College’s drama department,\u00a0one week before\u00a0SMTD’s production of the same play. Both productions were done in accordance with the Caryl Churchill festival happening around Ann Arbor, which featured a weekend of free staged readings and lectures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10373"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10670,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10373\/revisions\/10670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}