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.
I too agree that audience participation; and when I say that I mean an inventive new approach to audience participation (not the typical intrusive approach) is where advancement/theatre evolution will likely occur. I'm not quite sure how to go about doing this without it coming off as a shtick, but the Improv Everywhere sketch that you mentioned could carry over some concepts to introduce new approaches to audience participation in staged events as well. Perhaps actually having an audience member or two come on stage and be introduced as a guest or guests during a dinner party scene would be an interesting idea? Incorporating an element of unpredictability, and engage the audience in a way they didn't expect.
ReplyDeleteMichael, that video made me so uncomfortable and I loved it.
ReplyDeleteGarrett covered all the good stuff, but I want to mention that I think this is a great tactic to get people to see truth in acting and it's a great video to show that even non actors can believe in imaginary circumstances and play them believably if the stakes seem high enough, which is interesting to show through audience participation.