I asked a friend, yesterday, about what kind of art he wants to spend the rest of his life making. I'm gonna ask him again, later, when I can write down his responses...but it got me thinking about a couple of things:
(1) I haven't been seeing enough theatre lately. It's expensive here, I'm tired, it's been a crazy few months. Excuses. I'm a better artist when I'm seeing more art (be it theatre, film, dance, visual art). You gotta stay fueled. When you start wearing a groove in the pavement between home and work, you're doing your art a disservice. You gotta stop and notice things.
(2) I started thinking about all the art I've seen in my life, and what's stayed with me. This was a nice thing to think about, when I was walking to school this morning. Here are a few. I hope this becomes a running list:
- in Chicago, Redmoon Theatre did this piece IN the Jackson Park Lagoon. It was at night. The play happened on a series of floats and boats, lit up against the night sky, using the canvas of this whole lagoon and its distant shores. Do I remember what it was about? Not so much. Do I care? No. Because sitting there, on the shores of the lake, watching these moments unfold in the dark...it was magical. It moved me. It made me see the world through different eyes, at least for the duration of the piece (speaking of duration -- if you're talking the language of Viewpoints, this was a piece that was very much about duration).
- In New York, Young Jean Lee's "Untitled Feminist Show" was another one that (without words) moved me beyond words. It was a different way of framing women's nudity onstage, of staging female identity and relationships. It was funny, it had intention, and it was smart. I was sitting next to a gay man at the show who appreciated it, I think, but I walked out feeling like I had been given this gift of being seen, of having a part of myself that is hard to articulate articulated onstage...without words.
- In Chicago, a site-specific performance of TAPE. Not the best show on the planet, but there was this sense, being one of 10 people on folding chairs in a real hotel room, watching this story unfold in real time, of seeing something special. And the performers went at it with total intention and dedication. It was one of the first times I found myself thinking about naturalism and site-specificity as things that could lend a great deal to each other.
- in Austin, the various iterations of THE METHOD GUN. Each, in its own right, had plenty going for it, and I really appreciated the kind of low-tech, DIY aesthetic of the pieces -- taking odds and ends and using them to transform a space and a story into something different. But more than that, it was the insistence on experimentation, on "this isn't done yet, but it's worth your time and attention," that invitation to the audience into the experiment, into the mess, that opened up the idea of development of a piece, that created, for me, a different understanding of the relationship between audience and performers. And it was, you know, beautiful, which helped.
- In New York, BAM's Production of Richard III. Both for Kevin Spacey's performance, which was great, but even more for the set design and staging, which worked together in such a way that a basically blank stage kept on opening up and opening up and revealing itself in new ways, with very little work. Brains beating brawn, in terms of a smart set design.
- In Austin, the Casket of Passing Fancy, where a Woman (actually a man) sat at a small table, and invited the audience to have certain experiences...and we sat, considering which experiences we'd like to have, raising our hands or not, leaving to have our experiences, until the room was empty. Was it theater? Yes. But a very different way of thinking about theater.
What do these moments have in common? They all, in different ways, open up different possibilities for how to think about theatre, and the role of theatre, and the relationship between audience and performance. In some ways, it's like they invite me to form new neural pathways, as I'm thinking about my own role in the creation of something like theatre. They were all exciting, even when they were slow. They were all different from each other. They all, even the ones that were probably expensive to make, relied more on imagination (the makers' imagination and the audiences' imagination) than any other thing. They gave at least equal weight to audience experience as they did to story.
Anyway. Some ideas to chew on.
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