Right Here, Right Now, It's Ted's Birthday (Entry #8)

     On any given night when one goes to the theatre, the play one sees falls anywhere from an hour and a half (if you're lucky) to two and a half hours, sometimes up to three if you're seeing August: Osage or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In the second act of August, the family eats dinner for almost the entire act (which runs about an hour) which is really cool because usually when people eat meals on stage it only lasts for a few minutes. There are other plays, though, that fit months or years of moments into a brief hour and a half. Time is always flexible on stage.
     For the theatre we discussed last week, time is a powerful element in reinforcing the reality effect. In Single Tweet theatre, you have very little to work with time and almost nothing to work with pace. Since the entire play takes place in one tweet, there's no pacing involved. As far as time goes, you can play with extending time with an ellipsis ("I mean to tell you she's… dead"), but not much other than that. This reinforces the reality effect because it mirrors the come and go, constantly updating, read and forget style of Twitter. You tweet something out, it gets read with other tweets as the reader scrolls by, and then the reader moves on to something else. The play ends as it begins, so the time it takes one to read it mirrors how one interacts with other tweets.
     Multi-Tweet Twitter (MTT) dramas, then, reinforce the reality effect in a different way. Instead of mirroring the workings of Twitter, MTT plays aim to give a more life-like sense of time passing similarly to Act II of August. Tweets are tweeted over the course of a few weeks or months, allowing the play to play out in the actual time it would happen, not having to worry about being bound by the time limit of the physical theatre. If a twitter character is in love, they might tweet back immediately. If a twitter character is pissed off, they might tweet back a week later. In MTT drama, you can really explore time and pacing and mirror real life using the platform of Twitter, a very "real life" communication medium.
     For durationals, reality is looked at in a new way yet again. Durationals tend to focus more on the human spirit and the way the body and mind works, taking a more meta approach to theatre in general. The durational is less focused on plot, story, and giving the audience the typical evening of theatre, but rather experimenting in the human limits of presence and energy. The durationals we read about in class dealt with performers having to be present for hours on end, and how, over time, performers changed physically (looking physically worn out, exhausted, slumped over, weary-eyed) and mentally (losing their wit and ability to improv, not caring as much about the task at hand, losing their energy and presence on stage). The reality here is not concerned about telling a story in real time that mirrors real life, but aims to show the reality of working for 6 straight hours, or the reality of the toll it takes on someone after hours upon hours of truth. Someone in the article about Quizoola! mentioned how they felt like the whole show managed to fit an entire life in the length of the show, how every bit of human nature wound up in the performance. It's an entirely different angle on reality.
     The next step a performance artist could take to get closer to the "right here, right now" of theatre is to bring the audience along for the ride and make them part of the "real". In an Improv Everywhere sketch called Ted's Birthday, a bunch of actors pretend that it is the birthday of some random stranger they picked out in a bar. They bring the guy gifts and hug him and have school and work backstories, and totally believe it. The stranger, Ted, jokingly plays along for a while, trying to figure out what's going on, but as the night goes on he slowly starts to almost believe it, and almost takes on this persona of Ted. If you watch the video (do it, it's great), at the end he's still wearing the hat his "ex girlfriend" gave him. I think this was a successful step closer to the right here, right now, because a group of people were playing for an audience of two, and I think such a small audience was helpful in pulling them into the work. They became a part of it without even realizing it, and "Ted" was very much in the "right here, right now". Theatre is crazy, y'all, and makes you do crazy things, like almost believe it's your birthday and you're leading this double life.

Part of Your (Site-Specifc) World (Entry #7)

     We've all seen our share of good and bad productions of Disney's The Little Mermaid. I've heard of productions where actors wear roller skates to float around the stage. I was in a production where we blurred the lines between land and sea with huge amounts of blue fabric used in different ways. But imagine how awesome it would be to see a production of The Little Mermaid that actually takes place in the water. 

     If I was directing this, I would stage it at Sea World in the enormous whale tank where they stage the whale shows. The audience is positioned in a way that they can see what's happening above the water, but they can also see what's happening below with plexiglass windows on the sides of the tank. (I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, but for reference…) The tank is large enough that you could fit a believable size boat in it for Prince Eric and crew, and the boat could also be used as a playing area for actors. I would use rain and wind machines to simulate weather and thunderstorms. The platforms built into the space, normally used by the Sea World performers, would be transformed into another playing area. The most important playing area for this show would be the actual water. Actors could float, swim, dive, splash, and jump through the water. The whole show is about being "Under the Sea", so I would adapt the show to focus more on water choreography and dance, a la Cirque du Soleil's O. It would maintain the storyline and musical elements of the Disney show, but in a totally reimagined way. I'm not sure if staging it in water would make the show more abstract or more literal, but I think either way would be incredibly exciting to see.

     The framework of site-specific theatre would both positively and negatively affect my production. From an audience perspective, I think people would fall in love with it. Water is such an interesting element in theatre because you have little to no control of it. You might float away from your scene and have to swim back to it. I think it would also be exciting to see how the production changes from the one you would normally see on stage. From an actor's standpoint, I think the show would be fun but grueling. You would have to be comfortable performing in water, in great physical shape to swim and dive and project lines, and have to deal with all the troubles that performing a show in a giant pool would bring about. It would be difficult for all involved - water-proof costumes, mics and sound vs water, floating props, water-proof set pieces, trying to decide if having real fish in the pool with actors is a good idea or not. It would challenge everyone artistically in a really interesting way.

     I disagree with Kantor's quote. I don't think the theater "has been completely sterilized and neutralized by centuries-old practices". Yes, most shows follow the standard creation process of a show, and are lit, sound designed, and set designed in similar ways, but I'm not convinced that staging or devising a production outside of a traditional theatre is the only way to lead to some new marvelous creation. I think a great example of that are productions that place in the Reilly. Look at August: Osage or Five Flights. Although the Reilly is technically a transformed place from the start, it is now an adapted thrust stage at heart. Time and time again, designers break "centuries-old practices" in this space and create new and interesting designs that you normally wouldn't see. While site-specific theatre is a wonderful way to materialize drama, the "traditional theatre" is just as capable of breaking tradition. 

The Life and Death of Journalism and Live Theatre (Entry #6)

     This week's prompt sounds very similar to another classic arguement that affects my other major in school, journalism. Just like everyone wonders what a student will do once they graduate with a theatre degree (we will work, obviously, idiots), people often smirk and think they have the upper hand, finding out I'm also a journalism major and snarkily replying, "You know, newspapers and magazines are dying out too. Then what are you gonna do?" I will adapt, idiots. You're telling me no one will ever want to read news in any form? People will always want tangible news in magazine or newspaper form, but even if those mediums slowly lose their importance in our world, I can still tweet the news, Facebook the news, do something to get it out there. I will work.
     I relate this example, then, to the first question in the prompt. I don't think theatre will ever be so diluted that it melts into other forms such as film, images, and technology. I'm not saying that these elements won't be heavily incorporated into works of theatre and performance art, but theatre will never cease to exist as an art form. It's ironic, actually, that we fear losing theatre to film, as theatre-to-film performance is a growing interest in the United States. National Theatre Live and Fathom Events are two increasingly popular ways to see theatre that would otherwise be unavailable to someone, especially someone in little old Louisiana. NTL and Fathom record live performances of plays, Shakespeare, ballet, opera, and concerts and screen them in movie theaters. I've seen Noël Coward's Private Lives, a show from London, from the comfort of Cinemark Perkins Rowe. The Manship seems to have a piece of streamed theatre or ballet happening every week. Instead of worrying if theatre is being diluted into other forms, embrace it! In a world with an increasingly staggering amount of technology, there's no use fighting it, so make it work to your advantage.
     These screenings, then, would ideally make people want to rush out to their local theatre and see what they just watched on screen right in front of their eyes in real life. It would hopefully make patrons even hungrier for a live performance. There's something about the sizzling energy of the shared space between audience and actor that you just can't beat. Actors can mess up, things can go wrong, an audience might be in stitches or silence, and all these if's make live theatre an invincible art form. We will never lose the only truly present artistic expression because it demands to be seen. The demand might be from a slightly smaller audience that a few years ago, but it still exists, and it is our job as artists and creators to pull them back in. Adapt, maybe, but never give up. Something stops living because we let it, not because someone else kills it.
     I think an interesting example of "imagined memory" that rings true for me is the media's presentation of Hurricane Katrina. Although I lived in Baton Rouge at the time, the media's presentation of New Orleans made it look foreign to me. I grew up there for a few years, but I suddenly did not recognize the images I was being shown day after day. I think the average American viewer could not fully realize the effects of the storm and how it devastated a city and state. You didn't really get it unless you were there. I knew what was happening, because I heard story after story from family members who had to evacuate and from my dad who was back and forth because of his work. Even then, it was hard to visualize literal feet of water inside of a home, a flooded city. The media showed these images daily, but it was too easy to separate yourself and just watch as a bystander. I think this relates to my first part of the answer between recorded theatre in movie theaters as opposed to live theatre in playhouses. There's a separation, a comfortable distance that changes the way you view and feel about art. The media serves as our recording of Private Lives, but having to evacuate your home, losing your house, living in that hell is seeing theatre live. There is a frantic energy that is simply not felt between audience and screen. It makes it safe. No amount of media sensationalism can give you what it's like to actually be somewhere witnessing and experiencing something.