Dispatch #2: Cuarto Oscuro - Theater as Work
By Lucia della Paolera and Seth Tillett | 12/23/2024
Featuring a cast of six newly arrived New Yorkers, Cuarto Oscuro documents a series of theatrical experiments conducted in September 2024. There were no hiring criteria for the potential collaborators we met at the entrance of Randall’s Island migrant shelter, other than the desire and availability to work. The production involved re-stagings of Jacob Riis’ seminal flash photos of 19th-century tenement life in New York City, as well as a reenactment of a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, interwoven with real footage and reconstructions of the cast’s life and migration journeys.
This video shows the cast’s first encounter with theatrical work, as well as tests of a new system designed to live-stream our efforts. It includes experiments in braiding images and language generated from the process in Spanish and English.
For The Clemente’s Historias Launch Block Party on September 28, 2024, Cuarto Oscuro was projected at a 40ft scale onto the building’s facade on Suffolk Street. Our collective experience left us all wanting to do much more. A nine-minute cut of the video will be shown at ID Studio in March 2025, as part of Carnegie Hall’s initiative “Nuestros Sonidos.”
“Cuarto Oscuro es como... me da la impresión de que trae muchas sorpresas, porque no sabes lo que hay en medio de esa oscuridad. Hay muchas realidades.” - David
(Cuarto Oscuro is like... it gives the impression that it brings many surprises, because you don’t know what you’ll find inside that darkness. There are many realities.)”
A Chronicle of the Collaborative Process
September 2024: During the first two weeks of September, we recruited our cast outside the city-run migrant shelter on Randall's Island.There were no hiring criteria for our potential collaborators other than the desire and availability to work.
We had a budget for a cast of six, and we hired the first people who committed to the work. After describing the project, we had interviews and meetings at the river’s edge to set our production schedule.
Our cast, from left to right: Ingrid, David, Adrian, Johana, Jhonny, Caro, all from either Venezuela or Colombia. Jhonny dubbed us "una familia de desconocidos," a family of strangers.
September 16: First we toured the Tenement Museum with a guide and the full cast and crew, learning about earlier waves of migration to NYC.
September 16: We then embarked on our first shoot by re-staging a series of famous Jacob Riis photos in the Tenement Museum’s original historic settings.
September 20: Our next three shoots were live streamed from ID Studio Theater in the Bronx. Using three cameras plus an original subtitling program fed through a video output mixer, we live-edited our theater work, layering a range of live and pre-shot images with words gathered in the moment.
September 20: We began each working day with lunch for the cast and crew. Our conversations from each meal guided our artistic direction for the day’s shoot.
September 20: Larson Harley from the International Center of Photography took tintype portraits of our cast with a large format camera apparatus from the early 20th century, and developed the images on the spot.
September 20: During our first work session at ID Studio, we got to know one another and experimented: we shot our cast as they restaged Riis photographs, moments from their own lives, and a series of theatrical exercises, capturing their actions in bursts of light in the dark room (cuarto oscuro).
September 22: Throughout the project, one of our cast members sent us footage from his journey north from Colombia and his daily experiences on Randall's Island. We wove these recordings into the live streams of Cuarto Oscuro.
“Es un espacio para encontrar lo desconocido. Hay la posibilidad dentro de toda esa oscuridad de que cuando prendan esa luz pueden ver algo más allá, algo más de la realidad, algo más a la luz, a lo bonito. Y que hay muchas cosas bonitas también en la oscuridad... estamos mostrando una realidad en un mundo gris pero a la vez sale ese rayito de sol bonito. Hay cosas buenas dentro de todo el caos y el desastre.” - Ingrid
(It’s a space to find the unknown. It’s possible that, within all that darkness, when you turn on the light, you’ll see something beyond, something beyond reality, something toward the light, toward beauty. And there are many beautiful things in the darkness too... we are showing the reality of a world that is both very grey but from which rays of sun and beauty also emerge. There are good things within all the chaos and disaster.)”
September 22: Our cast took on the roles of both photographed and photographer.
September 22: During each live streamed session, we overlaid our new material with images and footage contributed by our cast.
September 23: For our last shoot, we re-interpreted scenes from Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. We drew our bilingual subtitles for this chapter from stories the cast told us and from our direction of the scene.
September 28: We projected a 30 minute edit of Cuarto Oscuro onto the Clemente Center's facade as part of the Historias festival. Future screenings of Cuarto Oscuro are in the works for 2025.
Cuarto Oscuro is the first iteration of the silent 2nd act of Oklahama!, a live three act theater production inspired by Kafka's abandoned novel, The Missing Person (Amerika). Kafka’s book narrates the wanderings of an immigrant named Karl, who, in the final pages, sees a poster for The Nature Theater of Oklahama that promises to hire anyone who applies. We’ll enact Kafka’s allegory by casting only among new immigrants to the U.S. We’ll pay all participants the same hourly wage and stage a reverie of what a Nature Theater of Oklahama might perform. Oklahama! is planned for production in 2025.
Both Oklahama! and Cuarto Oscuro offer an inversion of theatrical norms. The object of our work is not the public but the cast, whose employment might increase their chances of not becoming 'missing persons' in their adopted country. By directly impacting our player’s lives, every penny invested in the show is an investment in their future, and therefore in ours. From that perspective, Oklahama! is a hit before anyone sees it.
“Allí en Randall’s somos todos un bloque. Aquí tenemos la libertad de ser muchos.” - Jhonny
(There on Randall’s Island we are all one mass. Here, we have the freedom to be many.) ”
Cuarto Oscuro was conceived by Seth Tillett and Lucia della Paolera, and created with Adrien de Mones, Nicole Fernandez, Ingrid Garza, Michael Guidetti, Larson Harley, Justine Lugli, Sandie Luna, Johana Maldonado, Adrián Pérez, Shirley Carabali Piedrahita, Nicole Rauscher, David Rosales, and Jhonny Alberto Sinisterra Ruiz.
This project was commissioned by The Clemente’s Historias Initiative, with support from ID Studio Theater, the International Center of Photography, Joel Fitzpatrick Studio, and the Tenement Museum. All photography is by the Oklahama! team unless otherwise credited.
The Historias Dispatch editorial committee includes Libertad Guerra, Sofía Reeser del Rio, Samantha Sacks, and Sally Szwed. Dispatch webpage by Claudia Cortínez.