Off the charts 03/11/2011
 
Here is a graph of WAKE LESS, as of three weeks ago. It may or may not contain spoilers.
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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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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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From the file marked "obscure and tangential":

Returning to 1994's Transport Tycoon after maybe 10 years of not playing it (the things you can do when you're not rehearsing anything), I'm interested in how political it all is, the ideology. I think Brownlee and friends would enjoy it, since it behaves like their kind of world.

The game puts you in charge of some kind of privatised transport company, linking industries and towns with trains and planes, and then as time goes forward, with monorails and jets. There is, thank god, no government or citizenship on the isometric map- you're answerable to no-one but the market. Its a disturbing little window into behaviour in a world which doesn't require ethics. That church where your busstop wants to be? Bulldozer tool! Plane crash with 21 on board? Why wasn't it full to capacity?

I used to spend all day in this mindset. I was just playing trains.

This time round I've left it running for days at a stretch and its now 2500AD, I have 150 trillion dollars, the coal keeps gushing out of the mines, and the world, though more populated, is the same as it was back at the millenium. The cities will grow forever.

There are no national parks in Transport Tycoon.

***

I dislike listening to CDs these days, not because they're clunky or scratch easily, but because they don't keep a playcount so it doesn't feel like I'm making any progress.

-Ralph
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A Poem

There's no denying that these festival actors are
Indescribably different from everyday actors.
For a start, they are a lot further away.


PS- To Whom It May Concern Did you notice that in New World Metro, the packs of fruit- four pieces shrinkwrapped in a styrofoam tray- are hosting messages? Instead of the obvious "apple/mandarin/kiwifruit/banana" label, there's a bunch of them which declare, among other facts about people, "Lana is single and looking." Better check they're not saying anything about you.
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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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