One of my favorite examples of dark matter in film is from the 2007 film Funny Games. The movie, a shot-for-shot remake of the 1997 film of the same name, is an experiment in the deconstruction of the "torture porn" sub-genre of horror. Two young guys decide to mentally and physically mess with a family and force them to play a series of twisted games. All of the violence, the juicy parts that made the Saw and Hostel franchises so popular, happens just outside of the frame. You can hear it and see everyone's reaction to it, but almost everything is right out of view of the audience. While violence here is the dark matter of the film, we discussed for a while in class about how the audience can sometimes be categorized into dark matter. Throughout the film, the fourth wall is repeatedly broken when the two guys wink at the camera (to let the audience know they're in on a joke) or even asks the viewer a question at one point. Funny Games is a wonderful exploration into the dark matter of violence and the audience as these are two things the horror genre almost depends on. The movie fully acknowledges that the viewer is present, but then refuses to give it want it wants. It's a brilliant movie and makes me feel sick in the best ways.
I struggled with this second part for a while, and when I first read the prompt it just made me mad that I even had to face this question. It's like asking me to shoot a dog with rabies - inevitable and unwilling. I decided that theatre, the stage, is just not the vehicle for representing the Holocaust. I've been thinking all week of plays that deal with particularly sensitive real moments from history. Theatre never shows events and grand pictures. Theatre zooms in, and focuses on how an event/war/movement affects a group of people. Hair focuses on WWII but only shows how it affects a group of hippies. Often, theatre uses an event as a backdrop and chooses to focus on how the event affects someone. It doesn't strive to accurately depict a whole event. Clybourne Park, 1776, Spill, Aftermath… all of these shows deal with an event, but don't actually show the event. You could almost call the event the dark matter. Theatre is just not the place to represent the Holocaust. I feel like film could depict it on a larger scale than theatre could. You would get a better image, a clearer idea of the big picture. Imaging a set designer designing an internment camp for a show is horrifying. Casting actors for SS officers and Jewish people is even more uncomfortable. It's just not the medium an event of that magnitude belongs in. If not handled with care, it could even come off as a parody, or just generally unfaithful to history. You can show people dying in a movie and it can be incredibly powerful and seem "real". It holds weight. Deaths are never particularly believable or strong on stage. It's very difficult to represent accurately. You can't show believable death on stage. It just seems too mocking and playful. An accurate, complete, faithful representation of the Holocaust belongs on the screen, not the stage.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Friday, September 19, 2014
We Will Feed Them Technology (Entry #4)
"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
-Albert Einstein
A disturbance that I often think about is Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar's installation entitled "A Logo for America". Now before you roll your eyes, thinking, "Michael, the prompt said the theatre world," I would like to bend the lines for a second between theatre and art. Couldn't we argue that theatre is art and a type of art is theatre? Great. Now that we're on the same page, back to Jaar's installation. Every night in August of this year, for three minutes from 11:57 PM to 12:00 AM, all the digital billboards in Times Square, NYC, were replaced with stark black and white images stating "THIS IS NOT AMERICA" and "THIS IS NOT AMERICA'S FLAG". Talk about a disturbance, right!? Can you imagine being a tourist in Times Square at that time, loving life, and then all of a sudden those images came up? I'd be terrified that a terrorist attack was happening. It definitely brought a change about in how, or where, we see art. That would be typical inside of a museum, but towering over you in an iconic American attraction? Nuts.
It took me a while to figure out what Jarr was trying to say, but the point of his art **SPOILER ALERT!** was that we often think of America as just the good ole USA, but America actually comprises both North and South America. We rarely think of Canada and Mexico as America. I think this artistic protest of sorts was very effective. It would definitely catch anyone's attention who was in Times Square. It made me personally look up Jaar and his mission, and I think while some might have been initially frightened if they didn't know what was happening, some might welcome the break, albeit short, from the monotonous onslaught of ads. (Read more about Jaar's work here, if you want.)
I think there are three major things the modern theatre artist can do to bring theatre into the 21st century, and reinvigorate community attendance. Tweet Seats, Immersive Theatre, and Fringe Theatre.
Tweet Seats
Sarah Stevens and I were talking about this after class today, and it's something that Karli Henderson has continuously brought up in Swine Palace meetings. Today's 20somethings, the crowd most able to return to the theatre, have phones glued in the hands. It's just a fact. So don't tell them to turn them off! Encourage phone use! Take pictures and videos, Instagram it, Facebook it, Tweet it, Tweet about the show, share the show on as much social media as you can handle. Text your friends how good the show is! Phone screens can be distracting to an audience, so designate some "Tweet Seats" in the mezzanine and chop a few bucks off the general ticket price, and bam - your show now lives a second life online.
Immersive Theatre
What better way to get people wanting to go the theatre than putting them in it? Stage a performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest inside of an old insane asylum. Put a production of A Midsummer's Night Dream in the Enchanted Forest behind the MDA. Build the set around the audience and have them sit alongside the actors. Involve people! Push them around, get them on their feet, change venues, don't have seats. Or like NOLA Project just did with Adventures in Wonderland, have three versions of the same show going at the same time. Or if you really wanna blow them out of the water, check out Sleep No More. So. Cool.
Fringe Festivals and Fringe Theatre
Sometimes we don't need lavish sets. Sometimes we don't want things to make sense. Sometimes quick and rough and messy is the way to go. I went to the New Orleans Fringe Festival for the first time last year and it was a whirlwind. Theatre in bars, in backyards, in churches turned opera houses. Most of the shows were less than an hour, and if you planned your night right, you could see 4-5 performances in one night. And then, poof, you'll never hear of most of these shows ever again. Rouge theatre has some real possibilities to bring theatre into the 21st century, and with a huge all-consuming culture, where news comes and goes and social media is all the rage, quick theatre might be the way to go.
-Albert Einstein
A disturbance that I often think about is Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar's installation entitled "A Logo for America". Now before you roll your eyes, thinking, "Michael, the prompt said the theatre world," I would like to bend the lines for a second between theatre and art. Couldn't we argue that theatre is art and a type of art is theatre? Great. Now that we're on the same page, back to Jaar's installation. Every night in August of this year, for three minutes from 11:57 PM to 12:00 AM, all the digital billboards in Times Square, NYC, were replaced with stark black and white images stating "THIS IS NOT AMERICA" and "THIS IS NOT AMERICA'S FLAG". Talk about a disturbance, right!? Can you imagine being a tourist in Times Square at that time, loving life, and then all of a sudden those images came up? I'd be terrified that a terrorist attack was happening. It definitely brought a change about in how, or where, we see art. That would be typical inside of a museum, but towering over you in an iconic American attraction? Nuts.
It took me a while to figure out what Jarr was trying to say, but the point of his art **SPOILER ALERT!** was that we often think of America as just the good ole USA, but America actually comprises both North and South America. We rarely think of Canada and Mexico as America. I think this artistic protest of sorts was very effective. It would definitely catch anyone's attention who was in Times Square. It made me personally look up Jaar and his mission, and I think while some might have been initially frightened if they didn't know what was happening, some might welcome the break, albeit short, from the monotonous onslaught of ads. (Read more about Jaar's work here, if you want.)
I think there are three major things the modern theatre artist can do to bring theatre into the 21st century, and reinvigorate community attendance. Tweet Seats, Immersive Theatre, and Fringe Theatre.
Tweet Seats
Sarah Stevens and I were talking about this after class today, and it's something that Karli Henderson has continuously brought up in Swine Palace meetings. Today's 20somethings, the crowd most able to return to the theatre, have phones glued in the hands. It's just a fact. So don't tell them to turn them off! Encourage phone use! Take pictures and videos, Instagram it, Facebook it, Tweet it, Tweet about the show, share the show on as much social media as you can handle. Text your friends how good the show is! Phone screens can be distracting to an audience, so designate some "Tweet Seats" in the mezzanine and chop a few bucks off the general ticket price, and bam - your show now lives a second life online.
Immersive Theatre
What better way to get people wanting to go the theatre than putting them in it? Stage a performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest inside of an old insane asylum. Put a production of A Midsummer's Night Dream in the Enchanted Forest behind the MDA. Build the set around the audience and have them sit alongside the actors. Involve people! Push them around, get them on their feet, change venues, don't have seats. Or like NOLA Project just did with Adventures in Wonderland, have three versions of the same show going at the same time. Or if you really wanna blow them out of the water, check out Sleep No More. So. Cool.
Fringe Festivals and Fringe Theatre
Sometimes we don't need lavish sets. Sometimes we don't want things to make sense. Sometimes quick and rough and messy is the way to go. I went to the New Orleans Fringe Festival for the first time last year and it was a whirlwind. Theatre in bars, in backyards, in churches turned opera houses. Most of the shows were less than an hour, and if you planned your night right, you could see 4-5 performances in one night. And then, poof, you'll never hear of most of these shows ever again. Rouge theatre has some real possibilities to bring theatre into the 21st century, and with a huge all-consuming culture, where news comes and goes and social media is all the rage, quick theatre might be the way to go.
Friday, September 12, 2014
Show Me the Gun, or Shoot Me With It (Entry #3)
"When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality."
-Julie Taymor
I went to the New Orleans Fringe Fest for the first time a year ago. It was a doozy. I saw a show called Nightmares that a troupe from NY did in an old church (it was nightmarish, in a bad way). I saw a show at a lounge called Murder Ballad Murder Mystery done by a group from Austin, Texas, which was wacky and fun and also needed some major script rewrites. But the show that I truly loved and had laughter tears over was The NOLA Project's Oregon Trail: The Play. It was exactly what it sounds like. For those unfamiliar with Oregon Trail, it was an old PC game that looked like this. The show was the best 60 minutes of theatre I have seen in a while. Rapid fire comedy, creative ways to handle dying of dysentery and crossing a river on stage, and even included a part of the play for the audience to go hunting, complete with nerf guns that you fired at actors on stage while they were trying to, you know, act and stuff. What made it so awesome though was that even though the entire show was based on one specific computer game, it was written in a way that made it appeal to anyone, even an audience member who had never heard of the game before. It was incredible.
It was also almost the anthesis of "true" theatre. It was a play written about a computer game. Nothing in the play ever made me go, oh my god, that's so relatable. I left repeating some of the jokes, but I didn't walk out with a new outlook on life.
The show that convinced me of something true was Sojourn Theatre's How to End Poverty in 60 Minutes. The show ended and I walked out of the room overwhelmed, stressed, enlightened, deeply troubled, impressed, and totally blown away. It was part of last year's Dept. of Communication Studies' HopKins Black Box season. The production was described as
I do think there is a difference between performances that offer some kind of truth versus performances that strive for documentary "verbatim" reality. It's a subtle one, but I do think it's notable. Performances that offer a kind of truth often hint at the truth, or nudge it in your direction in hopes that you'll want to pick it up and examine it. It's often masked inside of a story or placed in a metaphor. My second show example isn't the case here, but I find that this is usually how it goes. A performance that strives for "verbatim" reality, however, seems to bash it over my head. It's often angry and looking to make a statement. It's loud and has a call to action and is thrashing around violently in hopes of getting you to feel a certain way.
Martin says on page 5, "Is documentary theatre just another form of propaganda, its own system of constructed half-truths for the sake of specific arguments? Typically its texts and performances are presented not just as a version of what happened but the version of what happened." That's the problem I have with documentary theatre. It almost insists that it is right, that "this is what happened." It presents itself as the truth. Like a rare occasion to watch history come to life on stage. It doesn't give me a chance to think, it tells me how I should feel. It's in your face.
Performances that offer some kind of truth and performances that strive for naturalistic reality differ in their approach of telling the story and of influencing the audience. One places the information there and allows you to examine it, while the other presents itself as fact that you should accept. The trouble then lies in the accuracy of the "fact", the gathering and compiling of the "fact", and what the person with the "facts" wants me to know (or not know).
-Julie Taymor
I went to the New Orleans Fringe Fest for the first time a year ago. It was a doozy. I saw a show called Nightmares that a troupe from NY did in an old church (it was nightmarish, in a bad way). I saw a show at a lounge called Murder Ballad Murder Mystery done by a group from Austin, Texas, which was wacky and fun and also needed some major script rewrites. But the show that I truly loved and had laughter tears over was The NOLA Project's Oregon Trail: The Play. It was exactly what it sounds like. For those unfamiliar with Oregon Trail, it was an old PC game that looked like this. The show was the best 60 minutes of theatre I have seen in a while. Rapid fire comedy, creative ways to handle dying of dysentery and crossing a river on stage, and even included a part of the play for the audience to go hunting, complete with nerf guns that you fired at actors on stage while they were trying to, you know, act and stuff. What made it so awesome though was that even though the entire show was based on one specific computer game, it was written in a way that made it appeal to anyone, even an audience member who had never heard of the game before. It was incredible.
It was also almost the anthesis of "true" theatre. It was a play written about a computer game. Nothing in the play ever made me go, oh my god, that's so relatable. I left repeating some of the jokes, but I didn't walk out with a new outlook on life.
The show that convinced me of something true was Sojourn Theatre's How to End Poverty in 60 Minutes. The show ended and I walked out of the room overwhelmed, stressed, enlightened, deeply troubled, impressed, and totally blown away. It was part of last year's Dept. of Communication Studies' HopKins Black Box season. The production was described as
"This is not a play; it is not a lecture; it is not an interactive workshop; it is not a physical theatre piece; it is not a public conversation. "How to End Poverty in 60 Minutes" is all of these things. Most significantly, it’s an opportunity to challenge a different audience every show with the question: how do you attack the problem of poverty in America?"It was heavy stuff. There was a script that a group of actors used as a jumping off point. They would present an idea through dialogue and performance, and then they would all break off and lead a small discussion with broken off chunks of the audience. You as a small group and actor/guide would have to come up with a decision to whatever the question was, and then that actor would bring it into the performance and suddenly your ideas and thoughts were in the performance. Everyone paid $7 to get in, and at the end of the night, all of the groups had to decide what the biggest problem in Baton Rouge was. Was it the education system, the city infrastructure, homelessness, etc. Each topic represented a real business or organization in Baton Rouge related to that topic. The topic that had the most votes was rewarded with the show's profits from that night. It was quite literally jaw-dropping. There was an urgency from the moment I walked into the room that I needed to do something NOW, and I left hot and ready to discuss these ideas with people. It took very real situations that affected me and people I knew personally and with the aid of theatre and performance, presented the facts and brought up questions in a way that forced me to think about them collaboratively with people I never knew in ways I never thought. Truth was bleeding from that production at an alarming rate.
I do think there is a difference between performances that offer some kind of truth versus performances that strive for documentary "verbatim" reality. It's a subtle one, but I do think it's notable. Performances that offer a kind of truth often hint at the truth, or nudge it in your direction in hopes that you'll want to pick it up and examine it. It's often masked inside of a story or placed in a metaphor. My second show example isn't the case here, but I find that this is usually how it goes. A performance that strives for "verbatim" reality, however, seems to bash it over my head. It's often angry and looking to make a statement. It's loud and has a call to action and is thrashing around violently in hopes of getting you to feel a certain way.
Martin says on page 5, "Is documentary theatre just another form of propaganda, its own system of constructed half-truths for the sake of specific arguments? Typically its texts and performances are presented not just as a version of what happened but the version of what happened." That's the problem I have with documentary theatre. It almost insists that it is right, that "this is what happened." It presents itself as the truth. Like a rare occasion to watch history come to life on stage. It doesn't give me a chance to think, it tells me how I should feel. It's in your face.
Performances that offer some kind of truth and performances that strive for naturalistic reality differ in their approach of telling the story and of influencing the audience. One places the information there and allows you to examine it, while the other presents itself as fact that you should accept. The trouble then lies in the accuracy of the "fact", the gathering and compiling of the "fact", and what the person with the "facts" wants me to know (or not know).
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Performativity and Butts (Entry #2)
"My Anaconda don't… My Anaconda don't… My Anaconda don't want none unless you got buns hun." -"Anaconda", Nicki Minaj, 2014
Warning: This post and its related links might be "shocking" or "inappropriate" for some and contain images and language not meant for some readers. The attached video, although found on YouTube, may not be suitable to view in a classroom setting. You have been warned. Thank you.
The somewhat controversial performative act that I chose to explore is the music video for Nicki Minaj's latest single, "Anaconda". Before diving in, I suggest you watch the video below. (If you'd like to follow along, lyrics can be found here.)
Wasn't that lovely? At first viewing, you might find this to be your standard, run of the mill, sex filled, foul language everywhere, don't let the kids see this music video that has become pretty commonplace in our media crazed world. And for those Nicki fans out there, this loud and colorful performance is nothing new. Thanks to fellow classmate Genna Guidry, Nicki's "Anaconda" has been bouncing around my head for the last few days. It samples directly from Sir Mix-a-Lot's 1992 magnum opus, "Baby Got Back", and feeds my narcissistic side because she even mentions my name! Sweet!
All of this aside, I think Minaj's performative act (I'm going to call the entire music video here the "act") is intentionally performed to mean something totally different to what the video implies. For the first two thirds of the video, I thought the video went with the lyrics. Lots of butts, lots of butt shaking (I hear "twerking" is what the youths are calling it), lots of sex, and phallic imagery abundant. However, things take an almost (I'm going to say it) feministic turn during the "cooking show" portion of the video. Minaj, disgusted with the banana (male anatomy/man/all Men?) thinks about eating it, looks disinterested, decides to chop up the banana, then finally throws it out. Awesome. If this wasn't clear enough, Minaj then proclaims how she feels quite clearly with the lyrics:
"Yeah, he love this fat ass
Yeah! This one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club
I said, 'Where my fat ass big bitches in the club?'
Fuck the skinny bitches,
Fuck the skinny bitches in the club
I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club, fuck you if you skinny bitches. What? Yeah!"
This article from TIME Magazine puts what Minaj is doing quite eloquently: "You may enjoy what I do, but make no mistake - this isn't for you." I think Minaj is furious, done, over men controlling her own lifestyle as well as that of other women in the entertainment industry. It's such a bold way to say it, but she does it proudly and with gusto. You can hear it in her almost crazed but powerful cackle towards the end of the song. She's done. She's not going to stand for it. I think that with this video, she's in control and almost threatening those naysayers and potential controlling influences, all under the guise of a sexy, outlandish video. It starts out vague, but by the end, she's hitting you over the head with it.
Minaj's performative act of shoving sex in your face is intentionally performed to mean that she's in control of herself and what she chooses to put out there. Personally, I think it's such a badass way to show that you aren't going to take anything from anyone, and it's misleading in the best of ways. Leave it to Nicki Minaj to challenge your way of thinking about dance and sexual content in music videos.
Monday, September 1, 2014
What is performance? (Entry #1)
After reading Carlson's introduction about trying to define what "performance" actually is, I realized that performance has no singular, concise definition. Then I realized how bizarre and mind-bending that is. As soon as one begins to define performance, "however"s, "except"s, and "although"s begin to cloud one's explanation.
One idea that Carlson presented that I found particularly interesting was the idea of a "restored behavior". Restored behavior, defined by Richard Schechner, is pretending to be someone other than oneself. He talks of a certain distance between "self" and behavior, similar to an actor and the role the actor plays on stage. "Even if an action on stage is identical to one in real life, on stage it is considered "performed" and off-stage merely "done" (Carlson, 4).
I was so excited when I read this passage because this almost mirrored the in-class discussion where we talked about routine, almost mundane actions like doing the dishes or standing in line at the bank. I recall thinking that if I was doing dishes at home, this doesn't necessarily qualify as performance or performance art, but if done during a scene in a show, it could hold great value or meaning. I also connected this to a point I made in class about how I think the smallest (sometimes unspoken) agreement must be made between performer and observer for any act to be considering an act of performance rather than an act of doing. For me, this point that Carlson made helped me to have a somewhat clearer understanding of what performance is, if not what performance definitely is not.
Later in the passage Carlson brings up another idea of the possibility of all human activity potentially being considered performance. The defining factor, then, would be in attitude - "we may do actions unthinkingly, but when we think about them, this introduces a consciousness that gives them the quality of performance" (Carlson, 4). I totally agree with this line of thinking. If I am consciously aware of how I am doing the dishes, doing them with care or lackadaisically, if I am aware of how I look and appear, whether others are in the room or not, once awareness and thought is attached to an action, it does seem to become a performative act rather than a "doing" act.
An event I remember a while back that, to me, challenges the notion of "performance" is when actress Tilda Swinton performed The Maybe at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. You can read more about it here. Swinton, throughout the year, would sleep in an elevated glass box for museum patrons to view like any other piece of art.
If we were to try and categorize her art, and use Carlson and Schechner's idea of "restored behavior", Swinton is technically a performer doing a piece of performance/performance art. If Swinton chose to sleep in her bed at home, there would not be much thought behind that decision. I am tired, therefore I will go to sleep. That act of sleeping would not be performance, but merely doing. Sleeping in a glass case in the middle of a museum gallery, however, requires a large amount of thought.
Swinton's Likely List of Performative Thoughts:
- What to wear to her performance
- What to include in the box with her (in this case, a jug of water and cushions)
- When to perform this (randomly, without notice)
- Initial sleeping arrangements
- To explain what she was doing or let the work speak for itself
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