Too true 30/05/2011
 
Jenny Holzer: Truisms

As list-art goes, this is pretty top of the list. I saw these on five of those stock market scrolling things in the Tate Modern, blue and vertical and moving really fast. Mesmerising.
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Two really cool devised theatre videos form Youtube- one is a clip from Kate McIntosh's "Dark Matter", which Fiona saw in Munich and wrote about earlier this year. The other one is a great recent video about process from Forced Entertainment.
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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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Clips from our Elimination Rounds Tour, 2010.
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In the days before "pelican eats pigeon", there was "eel eats seagull". And it happened here.
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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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Nothing to do with the massive earthquake
 
when I disperse
these words in chunks
like so

is that enough
to make you read this
as a poem?

i'll mention here 
that Christchurch
has basically collapsed

mainly to add gravity
in the absence 
of rhythm or meter
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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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Off our chests 21/08/2010
 
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We were sarcastic to babies. We left jellyfish on the beach access steps, we wrapped a piece of dry ice in bread and fed it to a seagull, we crucified tuataras by the tracks in national parks. We thought our deodorant would get us laid by two girls at once- we weren’t even half right. We amputated the wrong limb- we had been drinking. We saw Jermaine in Patel’s and acted like he was our friend. We mouthed the national anthem, we pissed on the field. We paid her $150,000 on the quiet, which is almost $40,000 per vertebrae and not a bad hourly rate.  We needed constant distraction, a soundtrack, we had to be occupied all the time, we hated gaps, we had no attention span, we were never satisfied doing one thing at a time. We laughed at three legged dogs and sometimes we'd make them jump for food. We went around pouring raro into people's hot water cylinders. We declared war on God when we knew he was omnipotent. We sold pictures of the tumour to Woman’s Day. We hosted breakfast television; we were naked from the waist down. We knew 9/11 was going to happen and we could have warned people but our bed was warm and we didn’t have money on our phones. We rewrote Shakespeare with happy endings. We changed our relationship status to “it’s pointless.” We did our calculations in imperial instead of metric, four astronauts were asphyxiated. We tried to kill ourselves but messed it up, so we did the research and wrote a book called SUICIDE FOR DUMMIES- it was a bestseller, life got better. We put your toothbrush where the sun don’t shine. We put pornographic Harry potter slash fiction in the children’s library. We wrote fucking disgusting things with your magnetic poetry. We joined causes on Facebook.  Our ipods were full of pirated NZ music. We couldn’t keep conversations going, we found it difficult to read between the lines, we were borderline all sorts of things. We wore bangles to indicate to the boys what we were willing to do- green meant oral, blue was for with a condom, red without- we turned our collars down to show him we were up for it. We were small fish in a tiny pond. We’re guilty of static, of white noise, polystyrene packaging and bubble wrap, we put the huge amount of junk information in your DNA. We got into the stranger’s car- the offer was just too good. We cried when people died in movies because we couldn’t help thinking it could be you. We got our gum caught in your pubic hair. We wore Che Guevara T-shirts. We misplaced parts of the infant’s body, we buried her incomplete. We yelled at cicadas. We knew where Carmen San Diego was all along.
A selection from in-rehearsal explorations of Speak Bitterness in 2008. Written by Rachel, Claire, Simon, Ralph and Joel, after Forced Entertainment. Continues- click "read more".
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