Site Specific Performance

Dancing On The Street Where You Live

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Producer David Binder did a short TED Talk about arts festivals. He mentions a number of new festivals which are engaging directly with communities in site specific events.

However, it was the first one he mentioned, Minto: Live Sydney Festival 2011, that fired my imagination most. The people of Minto, accompanied by some cooperating artists, performed on their lawns, driveways and garages as the audience moved by. I am not sure if it was planned or spontaneous, but one story Binder relates almost sounds like some residents who weren’t part of the original tour got caught up in the spirit and began performing on their lawn.

I saw a lot of applicability to the current discussions about creative placemaking and community engagement.

But what I saw as the most compelling element of this practice is that it reinforces the value of the arts and play for kids right where they live. When asked about what got me started in the arts, I often refer back to a role in my 8th grade play.

But like a lot of people in the arts, the reality is, my siblings and I would perform for our family and friends at gatherings.

A festival like this would demand greater sophistication, but heck with arts in schools, performing at home would reinforce the value of the arts for the kids, the parents and the whole community literally right where they live. It would be interesting to see if residents of Minto felt the experience changed their perception and participation in arts activities.

Just as annual tours of historic homes emphasizes the value of their presence and engenders a sense of pride in the neighborhood, (though perhaps some resentment in the kids who have to help clean their home in preparation), a neighborhood arts festival could advance the cause of the arts, inspire pride and perhaps surprise people with the hidden talents of their neighbors.

I don’t really think this would or should be a substitute of arts in schools, though it might spur renewed community interest in offering instruction. Rather, I was thinking that at one time a home piano was once the center of family activity. Participation in a neighborhood arts festival might serve to fill that absence to a small degree.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rttG3xyHcw&w=560&h=315]

Cherry Orchard? Check The Freezer Section

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Given my brief foray into site specific theatre last Spring, I have been keeping my eyes open for other projects. Via the Fast Company website is a The Cherry Orchard inspired piece set in an empty department store in Brighton, England.

The Fast Company site has some images, but architectural photographer Jim Stephenson has an entire walk through of the building on his blog, talking about what an attendee experienced.

A lot of it sounds like fun–entering the freezer and finding yourself looking at a winter snowscape with a model of the Cherry Orchard house. You move to the next room and you find yourself in the house modeled in the snowscape. At other times you move from the 19th century Russian house to a more contemporary Russian department store.

Take a look. See if you are inspired.

What Do You Do With A Stolen Actor?

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I attended a talk by minor theater deity Richard Schechner last week at an open event for the International Brecht Society Conference. He was speaking about environmental theatre (aka site specific). We just finished a site specific work last month so I was interested to hear what a person who had been doing it for decades had to say on the subject.

There were things he spoke of which matched my original desire for the work but which got scaled back by the artistic team due to various limitations and considerations. The good thing was that one of the people on the artistic team was there listening as well so we will have a common frame of reference for our next event. The talk was scheduled for longer than I thought it would be so I couldn’t stay until the end to ask questions or speak to those friends also in attendance.

I wish I had been able to speak with him because I would have liked to know how he might balance making a performance a more interactive experience with the alienation/intimidation factor of what he was doing. Some of the things he spoke about struck me as “only in a big city like NYC.” He made groups split up on entering so that they would be forced to explore the space more trying to find each other. And if they didn’t like it, they didn’t have to see his show because he had a full house every night. (That option came up a lot as he spoke about the performances he had done.) He also spoke about leaning folding chairs against the wall and letting people set them up wherever they liked without consideration of whether it would be in the way of the performance or technical operations.

My first thought was that while people may crave a more interactive experience, many are already intimidated by the thought of attending as a passive observer. How much worse might their anxiety be if they set themselves up right in the middle of some intense action? I mean I think there is too much contact when I go to a Cirque de Soleil show and one of the performers somersaults right into my lap. Okay, well that is probably too much contact for anyone, but even watching the performers move around the room playing with audience members raises some anxiety that I may be next. Though if you don’t introduce people to the concept, people can’t become more accepting of that type of interactivity. I would imagine setting has a lot to do with it. A performance in a nightclub where you expect to be bumped into and jostled might not cause the discomfort that the same activities in another place would.

The thing that really intrigued me were the rules he set up for his performances. In his production of Dionysus in 69 which is based on The Bacchae, Pentheus has an opportunity to avoid being killed. The actor goes into the audience and picks someone and starts to caress them. If the person doesn’t resist and the actor obtains satisfaction, by his own definition, from their physical contact, Dionysus loses, Penethus lives and the play ends. Schechner said there were only two times that death was avoided. Once, Pentheus ended up in a fairly torrid embrace with an audience member and left with her when they came up for air. The second time, a group of people who had seen the show and decided Pentheus was getting a raw deal abducted Pentheus when he went into the audience. The audience was dissatisfied that the show wouldn’t be concluded and Schechner called for a volunteer who would be fed the lines and actions as he/she was stripped down, anointed with blood and underwent a simulated dismemberment. Schechner said a 16 year old boy stepped forward and you could see him trembling with both fear and excitement. That is one of those powerfully visceral moments that theatre people constantly seek. Everyone is engaged in the moment because even though it is scripted, no one knows what is going to happen.

He told of another instance, I believe with Mother Courage, where they chose 15 people to come up on stage. If you were chosen you could either go up, pass being chosen on to the person next to you or leave the theatre with no recourse to return. But the show wouldn’t continue until they had 15 people. Schechner said one evening the audience apparently decided to test their resolve and the show was delayed at that point for four hours. I would say this is another one of those authentic moments in theatre, though less sought after.

I am sure people have played with the idea of propagating rules for a performance that can end it all in a potentially dissatisfying manner, but it is one of those “new to me” situations which fires the imagination. There may not be anything new under the sun, but parts of this production from 40 years ago might point the way to creating a more interesting environment for people who haven’t considered themselves as theatre attendees.

Wheels Begin To Turn

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I had a really productive meeting today to plan a site specific performance on campus for next Spring. We have never done this sort of thing before so I am starting conversations as far in advance as I can so that I can uncover problems and answer questions early on.

About six weeks ago, I approached a woman about putting a performance together than would involve our students and perhaps people from the community at large. She was excited by the prospect right out of the gate. I think what piqued her interest even more was my vision of having other members of her group conduct workshops starting next fall whose work would feed into the Spring performance. For example, we will probably have workshops in mask making and mask work and stilt work and perhaps revisit the fabric climbing tissue workshops students participated in last fall. My hope was to have these workshops open to the general public as well as our students.

What I felt was most productive about today’s meeting was that I managed to get one of our professors to agree to involve his acting class in this project instead of creating the regular spring drama show for our lab theatre. When I proposed this idea to him, his only concern was that the project didn’t replace his class or displace him as the instructor. My vision was that he would spend his class periods as he usually does, except that he would be working with his students to prepare part of a larger piece.

The academic concerns answered, he was really energized by the whole vision that the lead artist and I laid out. By the end of the meeting, he had actually negotiated another slate of workshops for his students. Not that he is a person who craves control, but I was fairly impressed by how willing he was to cede control of a project he traditionally directs.

There are a few more people I need to bring on board and a million details to resolve in the next year. This is one of the projects I was thinking about when I wrote yesterday that were there special funding or tax breaks for employing 100% local creativity, I was confident at least one of our shows would qualify every year.

Also, even though I would have likely worked on generating this partnership regardless of whether it existed, I have been inspired by the Creative Campus project. I think our program is too small to qualify for participation, (though I just realized upon linking to it, that the program is open for another round of grant applications), but I am encouraged by the efforts of other campuses around the country who are attempting the same sort of things.