MAIN ASSIGNMENT

As a group choose one sentence you like best of the first page of the script “Vallende man”.

Then think about a way to realize this sentence within a performance of five minutes (max!). Important: do not tell the sentence you chose. Take the following components into account:

- Stage design (maybe a virtual background on zoom, maybe trying to find elements you all have in your room, you name it)

- Lighting (get creative with what you have)

- Video (share your screen and show a video, mirror your screen and show the person talking, etc.)

- Music

- Actors (It can be you, your hands [or other body parts], or objects)

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Vallende man – Falling man

It was no longer a street but a world, a time and space of descent like a nightly darkness. He walked through rubble and mud towards the north and was passed by people with a towel to their face or a jacket over their head. They ran and fell, some, baffled and clumsy, while debris came down all around them. The roaring was still in the air, the disruptive noise of the collapse. This was the world now. Smoke and ash cashed over the streets like big waves and flushed into side streets, thundered down side streets, a seismic tide of smoke, while office papers flew by, the standard format with sharp edges, which whizzed by and sailed along, unreal things in this death shroud of the morning. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase.

There was glass in his hair and his face, marbled globules of blood and light. On the inside things were far and quiet, where he himself should have been. He saw people, water splashed from them whilst they were running, body and clothes wet from the sprinklers. There were shoes left on the street, handbags and laptops - a man was coughing up blood on the sidewalk.
The world was also this: figures in front of windows at three hundred meters height which fell into free space, and the stench of gasoline fires and continuously screaming sirens. Then there was something else, beyond all this, apart from it, in the air. He saw it coming down. A shirt came down from the high hanging smoke, a shirt that floated upwards and around in the meager light and then came back down, towards the river.

Somewhere he saw a shopping cart, standing there, empty. Behind it stood a woman, her face turned to him, with police tape wound around her head and face; yellow police tape with which crime scenes are demarcated.
He crossed Canal Street and somehow started to see things differently. Something crucial was missing about the things around him. They were unseen - the shop windows, loading platforms, walls with graffiti. Maybe that’s what things look like when there is no one to watch them. He heard the sound of voices in the distance. There it went, the Northern tower. He tried to convince himself he was still alive, but that idea was so obscure, that he couldn’t grasp it.