The Stellas: A Fugue for Day Players
IFE’s expanded cinema installation The Stellas…takes a single scene from a 1960’s soap opera and expands it to a cross-talking, looping drama played by 10 actors, seen on multiple projections and monitors. Emerging from the looping repetition is a dialogue driven fugue, borne of heightened formulaic suspense that is the staple of soap opera.
Based on a single scene from a classic 1960’s TV show, Peyton Place, the drama plays out between Stella Chernak and Inspector Fowler and revolves around the recent suspicious death of Stella’s father. In the 1960’s TV original the scene is played by two actors on a single set and takes 3min 30 seconds.
Our reconstructed version takes the form of a spoken-word cinematic canon, looping for 45 minutes. 10 actors continually repeat the 16 minute loop in a rambling, dilapidated early 20th century house that is rigged with ten static cameras and one roving steadicam. Each actor plays both Stella Chernak and Inspector Fowler over and over again, changing costume every 8 minutes in full view of the cameras, in an ongoing audio-visual fugue.
The multi-screen presentation allows the audience to experience and understand the continuous nature of the action throughout the house going on in different rooms simultaneously. At any one time there are five actors playing the scene: two Stellas, two Fowlers and one actor in the costume room transforming from Stella into Fowler. Five actors are always waiting, every 3 minutes Inspector Fowler exits the house and a new Stella is enters the drama.
The choice of a script from a soap opera is purposeful. Soap operas have a circular regularity, their currency is melodrama. Over the years the characters become comfortably familiar to the audience. The Stellas compresses and amplifies this trait — not with one actor playing an habitual role but many actors playing the habitual roles.
Concept and Direction
IFE – Simon Lee, Volkmar Klien, Eve Sussman — more Info
Performers
Gillian Chadsey, Marie Estrada, Cate Giordano, Thea Lee, Xavier Markey-Smith, Elsa Mollien, Eric Ruffin, Scott Shepherd, Rob Swanston, Tony Torn
Camera
Andreas Burgess
Sound Engineer
Jared Arnold
Costumers
Zarah Green, Niki Jividze
Production Assistant
Sam Douma
