Response to Heidi's post Expanding the Imagination

Yeah, Heidi, you make some terrific points and pose the problem in new ways for me. I had always sort of thought of the rigor as needing to move from one place to another - mostly from the execution or performance to the conception. But your observation that greater imaginative power is needed for more relational work is I think true and your travelogue/trip analogy is a good one. So rigor is still demanded for the execution.

I like the way you've identified the problem with these two sentences:

The artist's job isn't to conjure the totality of the experience, but to set up sign posts, assist the timing of the passage, figure out the means of transport. But this type of performance also puts the social and political concerns of the artists and audience in play.

I think, in many ways, it's all about event design with the range of ingredients now opening up well beyond those used in classical theatre (by classical, I mean any work that sticks pretty close to Aristotelian poetics, which would still include folks like Beckett and MacIvor) . The most fundamental new ingredient being social dynamics. And, of course, all choices will reveal - whether the artist likes it or not - the artist's concerns, biases and imagination in a way that is, I think, more concentrated, stark and undeniable than in classical work. The classical dramaturgical imperative "show don't tell" must now deepen to read something like "Don't tell, don't show but BE or MANIFEST or ACTUALIZE." And yes, it's sort of like the traditional writer's role but mixed with the role of the director as well as the impresario. The term I like is 'social impresario' because it mixes that dry and discredited term 'social' with that garish and discredited term 'impresario'.

To get back to the concerns of your first paragraph, I agree that there's a lack of critical context for talking about, evaluating and creating new kinds of theater. I'm looking for a way to make work - in theater and otherwise - that is directly engaged with civil society, finding new ways to collaborate in new fields to create new ways of being. Below is a list of criteria that i think is helpful to evaluate beauty and success in this realm.

Criteria to Determine Beautiful Civic Engagement

1. Gluing the Grease and Greasing the Glue: conflating the imperative to grease the wheels of commerce with the imperative to glue the social fabric; in other words, hauling the community into the commercial and the commercial into the community to spread, or equalize, power.

2. Diversity: age, race, sexual orientation, religion, occupation, etc.

3. Atypical Encounter: people doing things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, or would ordinarily do but in an unordinary context with people they wouldn’t ordinarily do it with.

4. Inversion of Hierarchies: those who normally have the power give it up, or participate in service to other less powerful participants.

5. Offering Agency: creating a context that provides agency to those who would not ordinarily have it.

6. Questioning Social Assumptions, Imperatives: creating a context where taboos are challenged by actions that reveal the taboo to be based in social control.

7. Atypical use of public and public/private space: playing where we’re supposed to work and working where we’re supposed to play.

8. Fruitful Antagonisms: triggering friction, tension, and examining the ensuing dynamic in a performative arena where all is easily forgiven.

9. Volunteer Ownership: providing opportunities for volunteers to participate to foster a wider sense of ownership.

10. Blurring of Roles: passersby become observers; observers become participants; participants become collaborators and volunteers become creators.

11. Generating Buzz: where the media is on par with other aspects of the project; the media as collaborators—slippery collaborators—but collaborators, nonetheless.

Expanding the imagination

Darren's preferences make sense in relationship to the project of foregrounding the performer-audience relationship as both the form and content of theatrical performance. I share a frustration with the lack of theoretical context for both the training of theatre makers and the creation of theatre, where forms are mostly bound in modernist assumptions, ignoring the way that postmodern strategies have shifted every other form of communication and art creation. The main barrier in breaking through the old styles and means of creating performance seems to be the lack of critical context for even our best writers. Virtuosity is not enough.

I would argue, though, that relational performance, if I can call it that, requires a more rigorous form of imagination than performance based on an imaginary reality. Imagination triggered by the actual given circumstances of the relationship with the audience, circumstances that shift and reveal themselves as the performance transpires, is far more risky than the endlessly rehearsed well-made play. The artistry, or writer or director or dramaturg's role, I would argue, comes into the design of the experience. It feels like the difference between watching a travelogue and going on a trip. The artist's job isn't to conjure the totality of the experience, but to set up sign posts, assist the timing of the passage, figure out the means of transport. But this type of performance also puts the social and political concerns of the artists and audience in play.

How does the selection of the performers, the audience, the performance context, and the activities dictate or reveal the artist's concerns, biases and imagination? Is this the equivalent role to the writer's role in traditional theatre?

the imaginary in my practice

I thought the best work at Hive left plot, character and conflict in the dust and concentrated on what was happening between the audience and the work. Best examples of this were: Theatre Conspiracy's 21st Century Peep Show, The Chop's 2 Truths + 1 Lie = Proof, the New World piece and the Radix piece.

The work that relied on familiar conventions - even some of the great stuff like Theatre Skam and the Electric Company - still left me feeling distant from the work. The Electric Company's piece, while displaying incredible technical virtuosity, only managed to dazzle me but not particularly move me. The pieces I mention above did both. So, to answer your question, I'm tired of playing pretend and nothing in Hive changed my mind about that.

HIVE

I think the most successful aspect of Hive - or the most exciting aspect - was its ability to trigger interaction between audience members in the times between seeing the work. I attended a workshop about Hive during the GVPTA conference and, from what I understand, it was inspired by Swarm the visual art event where a bunch of galleries opened up at the same time and had a community-wide event. In the visual art world these kinds of things are common. Perhaps the most striking example - in Canada, anyway - was Toronto's Nuit Blanche, which happened this last September. There were 130 art events happening around the city for one night and they reported an attendance of 1/2 million people. It was quite a remarkable event, with the streets crawling with people until 4am. It's telling that, other than myself and Thom Sokolosi, no theatre artists (that i'm aware of) were invited to participate. I think this is because of the rigidity of the way people are forced to consume theatre - even most site specific work. Things like plot, character and conflict get in the way of contemporary ways of thinking about and interfacing with the work. And while much of Hive did still force the typical kind of interaction, there were some pieces that were starting to show fissures. But, again, for me, the most exciting aspect of Hive was the way the audience had to experience the work and each other, not the work itself, though there was plenty of good stuff.

HIVE and Social Acupunture

Having participated in Darren's workshop for the GVPTA Making a Scene Conference, I am interested to hear his response to HIVE, one of the most exciting theatre events of the 2006-07 season here in Vancouver. HI VE, a co-production of the eleven companies that make up progresslab, was a spectacular event made up of 11 short, small-audience pieces, with a central bar where audience figured out how to participate in each of the shows. The site, a former funeral chapel, insired some site-responsive performances (for example, New Worlds' autopsy of doughnuts in the embalming room, and Radix's conversation with the dead), and provided blank canvas rooms for others (Felix Culpa's Trojan War with action figures, or The Only Animal's The Tempest in a bed). The participatory nature of the event definitely stuimulated conversation amongst audience members - exchanging useful information about how to see each show, how long each would take, and what their top picks were, but also, a bit of one-upmanship about the number of shows seen. The free-flowing alcohol and dance party atmosphere kept the social interactions flirty and fun.


HIVE was a successful example of how event-based programming can shake up performer-audience relationships, which I think is an element of where Mammalian Diving Reflex's Social Acupuncture wing has been headed. The performers in HIVE used quite a few classic texts and straight-up theatre techniques (including fourth wall), though, not to mention really imaginative other worlds. Where does the imaginary live in Social Acupuncture? Did seeing HIVE shift your thinking on the place of the imaginary in your own practice?

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