`The Room (3) Working Images

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These are just working images that I have in mind for `The Room, especially as they relate to the violence behind housemaid abuse and its physical and psychological effect.  The acting, the layout, the lighting, the soundtrack will all converge to hit the audience viscerally and make everyone squirm in his or her seat.  

`The Room (2) Cross Art, Multimedia Projects

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`The Room is a cross art, multimedia project focused on housemaid abuse and domestic violence in general.  Besides its staging, I want to create a film that parallels the play, but because it is a different art medium, it will expand on the play and portray the theme differently.  But before embarking on that film, I want to create a set of short films, including animation, that can reach a wider, world-wide audience.  I want to tell the stories of these victims as well as their perpetrators, if at all possible, via photography and poetry.  So such an exhibit, perhaps set up on stage, will be part of it.  Finally, I plan on an advocacy initiative.  What if we can eliminate housemaid abuse and domestic violence? is what I ask myself and others.

So, in summary, `The Room consists of five projects:

1. A five-act play
2. A feature-length film
3. Short films, including animation
4. Photography-poetry exhibit
5. Advocacy initiative

I've already sketched out the play, but over the next few weeks, I plan to resume my research and to draft the script in earnest.  If you're interested in knowing more or getting involved, please e-mail me at Ron.Villejo@drronart.com. 

`The Room (1) Introduction Notes

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The scenes of this family look ostensibly real. Normal. But as in an Anton Chekhov play, there is also surrealism about all of this. We never see members of the family together. They interact separately through the Housemaid.

I want to the play to take on an air of timelessness and placelessness. The actors will be of different nationalities, so as to remove any semblance that this is a logical or even a unified set of relationships and events.

In this play, I want to sacrifice reality for art – for drama. I want to challenge notions of time and space. I want to compress distance. I want to bring different planes of reality together on stage.

Abuse in this will be brutal. But we will do so without a single show of violence – no hitting, no kicking – and no bruises, no blood, nothing. We will convey abuse through expression, silence and lighting.

I wrote these notes five years ago, when I crystallized an idea for a play.

I had visited an official locale in Dubai for Overseas Filipino Workers, and it was a huge, two-story villa.  Now picture this: 60+ women crowding its two bedrooms, second floor landing, and first floor space, for their accommodation.  They were runaway housemaids, who were neglected, abused, and otherwise mistreated by their employers.  It was heartbreaking to see them all there.  A year or two later, I heard that those numbers ballooned to over 100 women seeking shelter.

`The Room will tell their story.