Picture
Chandelier at the lobby of the Grand Summit Hotel
__  Perhaps the catchy phrase “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” would not exist if it weren’t because of the Hotels that there are in Vegas. Following this logic, there might be a little bit of Vegas in every town. In fact, hotels themselves are more alike than different in this hermetic quality.  Walking through the hallways of most inns, one can experience the same sense of ambiguity when thinking what is at the other side of each door:  Is the room empty, neatly prepared for the next guest? Or is the room inhabited? And when we say inhabited are we suggesting a specific way of inhabiting a hotel room? Being anonymous to a space, not having any other reference to our own selves other than our luggage, might give us some kind of benefit that we might choose to take advantage of, or not. But in any case, this is just one of the many possibilities that this kind of spaces seduces us with, and one of the many options that the group of writers and directors of the internationalists might have stumbled upon, as they took a deeper dive into the story of the Grand Summit Hotel this past Monday.

  The visit consisted of an extensive tour to the rooms were each of the performances will take place. The spaces selected for the project offer a wide range of dramatic tones. Each one of them has a particular way of receiving light, of responding to sound; each one has its own scent, and in a way screaming for a particular type of guest. In an effort to immerse the creative team into the singularity of the space a series of extensive interviews were conducted; conversations with the concierge, Mr. John August, the assistant general manager Michael Marino, and Ms. Alayah, one of the front desk agents, prove to be fruitful, and revealing “You never know what people have been gone through before they set foot in this rooms” says Alayah. Moreover, taking into account the age of the hotel, these persons have been working a relatively short time in this space. The creative process gained great momentum; it wasn’t difficult to sense more stories leaking from the 144 years old walls.    

           
 At the end of an intense day of conversations and exploration, and as a way to inaugurate the writing process, the writers flipped a coin to select their suites, as if giving the chance to each room to choose its writer.

  Can we find in the privacy of a hotel room another version of ourselves?  Can we be seduced with postponing the return to an undesired routine allured by other possibilities? It is said that Coco Chanel lived in a hotel almost three decades, Nikola Tesla, the great inventor, lived his last years in a room of the New Yorker hotel, in which he eventually died. And most recently we heard the scandalous story of an IMF chief in a hotel room, also in New York. There might be many types of Hotel stories, but they tend to have a particular tone; the sign of intimacy marks them. Those are stories that rarely transcend the private dimension. The Hotel Project is in the path of giving you the chance to experience truth from the first row, from the one seat available.



 


Comments




Leave a Reply