Just be here 21/01/2012
 
More from Tim Etchells.

"If there were a tangible contract between the performers and the audience, what in your opinion is the most important thing this contract would include?

For me the most important thing as an audience member is an openness to being there - to watching and experiencing what is actually happening. That sounds very simple, but I think for most of us, myself included, that’s hard, because you come with other things on your mind, with expectations and preoccupations and it’s very easy to get confused between what you’re looking at and what you wish you were seeing. I suppose that in some way every performance strives to create that quite fundamental contact, that contract, which is to say: We are here, you are there, and this is the moment we are engaged in together.
...
This focus on engagement-  on presentness - is a struggle against the idea of the audience as a passive consumer of spectacle, against performance in which those watching are not implicated, not truly present. I know, this is a cruel way to think about an audience; a hungry animal that needs something to happen, bloodthirsty, eager for quick pleasures."

-Tim Etchells (Full interview here)

Reminded me of this post and of some of the stuff we're learning and thinking about in Wake Less.
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At your service 30/08/2011
 
Doing pre-show for Wearable Arts, crowd work, silly stuff. Having fun. Inevitably, behind me, between sips of sparkly pinot gris, nice and loud so I can hear; "I wonder how much he's being paid". A reminder that these are the same people who's latte cups I washed this afternoon in my hospo job.  A reminder that this is, after all, a service industry...
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Not many people will know, or remember, that Binge Culture's first performance out of uni, and second performance ever was at Canaan Downs New Years Festival. Now as we contemplate the possiblity of performing at Splore 2012, I just stumbled across this article, which puts forward the argument for more theatre at this unorthodox kind of venue: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/theatreblog/2011/jul/21/theatre-music-festival-latitude
-Joel
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Don't know if you spotted this in the Dom Post the other day, I couldn't find it online so I've had to type it out: 

7/11/2010
Theatre managers around New Zealand are "dismayed" by pirated copies of their performances appearing on the streets- often before the work has even premiered. "They must sneak into the $15 previews," one representative of a Wellington theatre said, "and so outside on the footpath there are these cheap knock-offs for sale which are inferior in every way. Its dismaying."

The "ripped" performances undermine legitimate theatre's profits by drastically undercutting ticket prices. However, as the plays are performed entirely from the memory of one performance, the quality is markedly inferior. One bystander, who asked not to be named, described a "rip" of  Circa's My First Time: "they got the intonations and general blocking right, but heaps of the lines had been learned wrong, bits were missing- and the motivations were shakey."  However, having paid a mere $2.50 for the experience, he admitted he wouldn't fork out for the theatrical version; "what would be the point? I feel sorry for the actors if they lose money, but frankly I don't have the spare cash to be scrupulous at the moment." He added that he never pirated New Zealand plays.

In spite of the threat posed by performance piracy, theatre owners are confident the superior quality of plays performed in theatres will keep punters coming back for the real thing. "We've got lighting, seating and protection from the elements, which is more than you’ll get on some dirty footpath. There's no substitute for actually being there. Sooner or later, people are going to realise what they're missing out on."
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It's a bold choice to put people in the dark. When you light your audience, as has been the norm for most of the theatre's history, you provide the space for a real time negotiation with them. You signal your openness to their engagement, boredom, puzzlement, or anything.

Shared light counters the voyeurism of most theatrical performances by setting up an atmosphere of openness and respect. This is especially true when audience members can see one another as well as the performers. We say: yes, you can look wherever you like, and in return we want to know where you are looking and how.  We want the right to see if you are with us or examining the lighting grid, because looking at the lighting grid is a truthful reponse to a performance.

It is a scary idea for the performer, because its hard to relax into what worked in rehearsal when you can see that more people are looking at their shoes than at your blood-stained hands. Or that most people are doing that grimacing thing.

Shared light reminds us that we are making the performance for this audience, not for ourselves, or the abstract idea of an audience. It allows them be a gathering of individuals rather than a unified bunch whose reponse we can summarise in the green room with theories that they "liked" or "didn't understand" what we did.

When the audience is lit, a commitment is made that the performance is going to happen in the here and now of play, rather than the there and then of presentation and masterpiece.

If we find this instinctively uncomfortable, maybe its because we're confused about the difference between the theatrical experience and the online experience, where you can be elsewhere from the action and in your underwear, while eating cereal.  Come on; be here, with us.
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When it comes to activist theatre (if not all theatre) clearly there is a problem of distribution. How can the performance reach enough people to have any kind of effect? Thus, I was intrigued by this video of a piece by L.M. Bogad, which is not only used to expand the audience, but also acts as a step-by-step guide for doing similar action. It would be interesting to know if anyone has followed its example...I mean if it worked for flash mobs...
-Joel
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with apologies to Howard Barker.
1.       You are probably making theatre for the wrong reasons.
2.       Few people go to the theatre to have a bad time and be improved. How will you target them in your marketing?
3.       Poetry may make nothing happen but it lacks theatre’s social aspect.
4.       Shared light is spooky, because look how hard you are working and how still the audience is.
5.    The banks have gotten pretty chummy recently, haven’t they? 
6.       Evolutionarily, it may not be in your interests to be happy.
7.       Nihilism in the elderly is disconcerting, isn’t it?
8.     Truth in the theatre is quite hard to define. 
9.       All that junk food is altering your perception of things.
10.    When the actors are having a bad time, comfort them by calling out things like “its ok! None of it is really happening!”
11.    Try getting up there and helping out. See what they do.
12.   Discussion of Facebook will not, in itself, make the work avant-garde.
13.    All this coffee is making you edgy. Have you added up what it costs you in a week?
14.    Lists can be written more quickly than novels.
15.    If you want to watch people bored at work, there are fast food places where you can do it for free. 
16.    It is more about the asking of questions than about being so presumptuous as to proffer answers, wouldn't you say?
17.     You will see all these things differently in a few years. 
18.    The news media in this country is very emotionally invested.
19.    We are doomed with or without your scholarly concern.  Stop reading those depressing books and go outside, its sunny.
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Where all your Beckett royalties go
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Comedy 05/05/2010
 
Seeing the hilarious Sammy J at Downstage last night added to a feeling that other performers have a bit to learn from comedians in terms of audience acknowledgement and presence. From Sammy's casual remark on the topic of his home renovation: "I've knocked down the fourth wall and now I've got a great view of the audience" to the almost unnoticeable "bless you" as one of us sneezed in the middle of an emotional speech - it just seemed, you know, right. As in, not a big deal. Here's to that.

Before that I'd been enjoying this clip from Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First as a kind of cross between stand-up and performance art. It seems to me like a twist on the idea of the comedian in this context as a sort of educator, the one against the many, getting up and sharing with us how the world really is. And again, we've got a part to play in the performance.
In a not unrelated vein, here's a really interesting article exploring the pleasures and perils of audience interaction (as recommended by Tim), and it reminds me of some recent debates on theatreview about active audiences, and some problems we've had with our own work. Who really has the power in these situations, who's really taking the risks?

"On the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 one company had the not-so-bright idea of making an interactive show about Auschwitz, which cast the audience as Jews being led to the gas chambers. The performers (who played the camp guards) were so hectoring and aggressive that one critic physically resisted them. After the show, artists and critic got involved in a brawl, and the show’s director was given a formal warning by the police."

And I'm sure it seemed like such a clever idea at the time...
Full article
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"I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did was not acceptable," said Woods, looking composed and speaking in a steady voice. His wife, Elin, was not with him. (full story)

Tiger Woods has taken a break from his golfing career to perform a solo version of Forced Entertainment's landmark 1994 piece Speak Bitterness, in which the guilty take turns to take the blame for everything. Ok, so even if this isn't the actual intention (lord knows its hard to find and speak in one's own voice as an artist), Woods' performance is best read as a homage. Its all there: from the queasy, duplicitious exploration of sincerity, motives, justifications and the need to confess, right down to the garish blue background. The desire of the performer to tactically humble himself gives a stong element of ritual to this type of theatre. Look at the faces of the audience, playing the game with him, fully illuminated and there to be spoken to directly.

As for coming back to the PGA Tour, the planet's best golfer said: "I do plan to return to golf one day. I just don't know when that day will be. I don't rule out it will be this year."

Great dissection of what on earth is going on here (and with MPs in NZ, and guilty celebrities everywhere) in the New Yorker.
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Fantastic. I love stuff polls, even the more sensible ones like the one shown above. Who needs boring old Radio New Zealand when we've got this calibre of news info-tainment and logical mind of Michael Laws at our fingertips. (Oh god I'm so ashamed.)
-Ralph
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Few of you, I think, will even be aware of the passing on January 1st of one of theatre and performance art's most underappreciated geniuses.  I'm of course a long time admirer of Wyszchi,  so I thought I’d set myself the (daunting) task of listing the works of his which have inspired and touched me the most. So in no particular order:

-His series of Shakespearean "Absence Plays" in which the lead character (or characters as in his Romeo and Juliet (1972)), were removed, meaning that there were extended pauses where the text of their soliloquies "should" be. This cycle reached its artistic zenith with his Hamlet (1981) in which all the speaking roles were excised save for Horatio, who played his part as normal through the four hour play despite having lines in only seven scenes. Audience response was mixed, but Wyszchi countered that they didn't understand the production's "singular, troubling poignancy and cost effectiveness."

-His The Vanishing! trilogy (1973-76) explored in depth the philosophical question, familiar to all rehearsing actors, of where wallets, letters, swords, and other imaginary props "come from" during rehearsal, and where they "go" once given to other actors in the scene while blocking. He effectively asked: "when we, as actors and human beings engaged in imagined acts, give each other imagined pet rabbits onstage, and then release them because in five lines time we have to hug each other and we obviously can't have anything in our hands, where do those rabbits go, and isn't it time we paid attention to them?" 

-After the painful break-up of his marriage to Julia Wyszchi following her decade-long affair with  another man, he immediate cast them all in a three hour piece consisting entirely of the three of them on stage, being awkward and making tea for one another.  Critics praised it as "quite uncomfortable."

He is of course most famous to the public for his year-long full- immersion projects, which included:

-spending all of 1969 on public transport using a single daytripper.

-Living the entire of 1970 darwinistically.

-In 1990 he didn't speak all year and, flattered by repeated calls for an encore, repeated the work three more times. The New York Times called it "a breath of fresh air".
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