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All art has a tendency to get trapped in styles. While I find that current modes of theatrical production do make for some wonderful engaging and quite beautiful work from time to time, too often it falls short of the mark. Some of the problem is technological. Theatre does not yet have adequate technology to reflect the technologically advanced world we live in. This often comes down to using video or talking on cell phones, which tends to be a reductionist approach, but that is a separate post. Too often the use of technology is something other than the text. The production is a play with technology, rather than a work infused with technology.
I have seen glimmers and outbreaks of the possibilities of technology but nothing conclusive. I am hesitant to say that Theatre is a mode of artistic creation that falls short of fully engaging the contemporary world, but it is a possibility that one must entertain. This is nothing to do with theatre being 'dead' or 'deadly' or 'dying.' This is a fact that our modes of discourse are so radically different than they were not even twenty years ago that the theatre has not fully absorbed this. The changes are not such that they necessitate putting cellphones and laptops on stage. This can work but it is not necessary.
More than anything we are witnessing a transformation in our ways of seeing. The basic core mode of utilizing vision for information gathering has transformed. We are moving away from discursive language to a language of symbols. Rather than letters and words and sentences being our sole means of gathering information, we now have pictures, emoticons and so on. In a way we are getting much closer to a language that resembles mediaeval times where bible stories were told in stained glass windows rather than through reading of books. Diamond Age imagines a future world where language has become almost totally imagistic, at least for a certain class of society. This is very close to our contemporary world and something worth exploring.
Too often I see plays where the only concern is solely the placing on bodies in space. This is an important if not primary element of play making. But in an increasingly visual and symbolic world, it seems reductive and lazy to ignore the larger visual stage picture. The body must exist within a larger context in order to make sense. A complex of symbolic networks must be erected around and through the body for it to fully exist on the stage.
Some of why I am strongly attracted to Opera and Dance as mediums is that choreographers and Opera directors tend to have a stronger sense of visual symbolism. Some of the issue might lie in the literality of language. Words lend themselves to a kind of specificity that might overlook other modes of discourse. In the end words on their own can not encompass the entirety of the situation, so they are spoken by a living human being whose body interacts with the words. This body must needs exist in some context. To ignore the importance of that context leaves out a necessary element to contemporary theatre making.
How this relates to the current form of my blogging endeavors I am not quite sure. The two may be parallel issues not necessarily related. Perhaps they are the same thing. I wonder at times if in the end I am simply a conceptual lighting designer, that the plays I do are elucidations of what I write here. After all, if I say "imagine a sunrise" I have perhaps created a stronger image in the mind than any combination of lights could create. Light is at once filled with meaning and meaningless. It is everything and nothing. Everywhere and nowhere. The true identity and the blogger persona are simultaneously true and diametrically opposed. Wave and particle.
Perhaps a blank stage with worklight is the most contemporary thing we can do.
Perhaps the future is broken.
November 15 2006, 18:55:19 UTC 5 years ago
Robert Edmund Jones warned us.
(Also - many of the more inventive small companies mistake 'vision' for having capital to make it 'pretty')
2. The Name producers and directors aren't of the next technological wave. The technology isn't air and water to them. They're not endowed with Techno-Vision in the same way. Wait for a bit of generational attrition. As you are well aware, theatre is a bit dense about somethings ;)
November 16 2006, 06:13:47 UTC 5 years ago
Anonymous
November 15 2006, 23:46:44 UTC 5 years ago
Josh here, weighing in
(LiveJournal is forcing me to post anonymously)A couple of thoughts on all this.
You say: "A complex of symbolic networks must be erected around and through the body for it to fully exist on the stage." That's always been true -- look at The Globe.
People still talk to each other. People still have fights and break down and cry and hold each other. People still fall in love while looking into each others' eyes. Technology has changed our lives, but it hasn't changed that and I don't think it ever will.
And form and content are not totally distinct. Different forms of art are better at addressing different parts of the human experience (though I'd hesitate before reducing this to a formula).
The problem with theatre today isn't that it's irrelevant. The problem is that the percentage of good productions to crappy productions is so low. And that's caused by a whole host of issues -- playwright flight (a term I think I just coined), lack of training, etc.
I think what I'm trying to say is that there are (and, I believe, always will be) plenty of stories that can be told with not much more than people together in the same space. Technology changes our frame of reference, but it doesn't change how meaningful our interactions are when we do put down the device and look at each other face to face.
November 16 2006, 04:37:20 UTC 5 years ago
Re: Josh here, weighing in
Josh,I think I agree with just about everything you said here. My point is that the Globe was a map of sorts for the worldview of Elizabethan Human Being, yet that same analog does not exist today. The proscenium is a 19th century worldview, arena and thrust stages are fun experiments but more detour than journey.
My question is, what is the contemporary equivalent of the Globe. My hunch is that it is reclaimed decaying or abandoned spaces. But that might also just be my own aesthetic. But there is something directly relevent to transforming an otherwise decaying space into something new. It happened with the Medea I did in San Juan, the Seven Deadly Sins in Oakland, and about every warehouse party I have lit. There is something so profoundly NOW about these experiences, something I can not put my finger on but I know exists.
That is the context I am talking about. Like I said "Perhaps a blank stage with worklight is the most contemporary thing we can do." But what and where is that stage? That is the critical question.
Anonymous
November 16 2006, 06:36:47 UTC 5 years ago
Re: Josh here, weighing in
Me again. I was thinking about asking you if I could write a guest post here about what I'm about to talk about, because it's off topic for my old Hamlet blog. But anyway.I saw three good plays in a row last weekend -- three plays that worked. Just seeing one play like one of these is pretty rare. Three in a row, all in Berkeley, was amazing. The first was Love is a Dream House in Lorin at the Shotgun Players. A new play based on interviews with the community in Shotgun's new south Berkeley neighborhood, and spanning the whole history of the location (all the way back to the Ohlone).
The set for the show tried to get at the idea of the Globe, but specific to the subject matter of the play. The center was the main room in a run-down old Berkeley house. The playing area spilled out downstage on either side to be the yard or the street nearby. The action sometimes moved to the "roof" of the house as well. The back wall was painted like a cute line drawing of the Berkeley hills, and the walls of the house were made of some kind of fabric that could be transparent under the right light. Sometimes the house went transparent and the back wall lit up, and we were outside before the Europeans arrived on the scene.
I think the challenge with each play is to find a way to create its universe on stage. The Globe worked partially because there was a fairly common structure for the plays that were presented there -- Shakespeare's plays have big casts with characters from different classes and lots of scenes in different locations. We don't have such a commonly shared structure for our plays these days, so I don't think there's a single answer for all this.
But I'm not convinced this is a new challenge that speaks to the death of theatre. That's all I'm really saying.
November 16 2006, 07:20:15 UTC 5 years ago
Re: Josh here, weighing in
I agree with you. Stop arguing with me. I am glad you are seeing good plays. I like seeing good plays. Yes you can guest blog about this. I would certainly be interested in your thoughts on the stage as physicalized manifestation of the contemporary zeitgeist. That would be hot. It can be a multi part post if you have a lot to say.