Discussion with Darren O'Donnell

Thank you Darren and Heidi

2007-01-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

This on-line discussion site was a very good first experiment of this kind for the GVPTA. Thank you Darren and Heidi for volunteering your time to generate a great cross-country dialogue for theatre artists. The site will remain up for future reference. I would like to organize something like this again, so if you have ideas for topics or people to invite, you can post them here or send them to info@gvpta.ca

Susan Stevenson

BYE

2007-01-17T08:29:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone who participated and to Susan at the GVTPA. Time to shut up and get to work. The blog is now is closed.

Peace.

Being the audience

2007-01-14T13:07:00.000-08:00

Welcome Vicki Stroich and Eric Rhys Miller to the discussion - check out their comments under the last post. Eric introduce's some of Ann Bogart's criteria for theatre - which are quite different than the Criteria for Beautiful Civic Engagement. Vicki responds from an audience perspective to the pieces in Calgary, and reminds me to consider the audience experience in the midst of the rhetoric.

On Friday night, I saw Forced Entertainment's Exquisite Pain. I compared responses with two friends afterwards, and we'd all had radically different experiences. One was inspired to think about how she would write the piece differently using the same source material from Sophie Calle (98 repetitions of the same story, contrasted to 98 stories of the speaker's most agonizing moment), preferring the directness and rawnes of Quizoola to this much more contained work. The other considered how the use of repetition evoked the boredom of suffering, and that while he enjoyed it, he could imagine a reviewer quoting the title of the work in a less than charitable way. I wept profusely for about a third of the performance, as I contemplated my own catalogue of most-agonizing-moments, and those of the people close to me. I thought how stupid the whole exercise was. I experienced an emotional roller coaster that contrasted completely the controlled, evenly-read stories by the two performers. I had a barely controllable urge to leap from my seat and take over the performance, tear the pages apart and generally disrupt the procedings. I wondered if that had ever happened at one of the performances. I thought about how arrogant my whole response was, and then I started to marvel at the response the work had provoked, and to wonder if anyone else was having such a volcanic reaction. All in all it wasn't a pleasant experience. It was extraordinarily painful. And I wonder where that reaction fits in our general ideas about what we want to offer our audiences.

Please keep talking amongst yourselves - as you've proabably noticed, my blogging frequency is more akin to the Slow Food movement than folks fully embedded in digital culture. I'll check in and respond as I process.... slowly.

Costumes and representation

2007-01-12T10:02:00.000-08:00

I encourage folks to follow the comment threads to read Maiko and Neil's responses to Darren's thoughts on relational aesthetics versus the theatre presented in BioBoxes. I'd liek to pick up on the question about representation and costumes that Maiko and Darren were debating.

Costumes
A costume doesn't necessarily dictate that a performer is different than themselves - whatever a performer wears is their costume, which could signify information from an imaginary or a literal reality. It signifies on stage, even if that signification is "I am myself without artifice." As Maiko argued, a Pakistani vest in Calgary could be read as a sign of validation from the previous participants in the project. What looks like a costume in one context (say a cocktail dress, fishnets and heels in a school gym) is simply the correct social attire in another (an urban cocktail bar). In Judith Butler's conception of gender as performance, we're all always in costume, choosing (consciously or subconsciously) how we wish to code our identity in the contexts we're encountering. In the artworld context, thrift store or pseudo-thriftstore garb is often juxtaposed with very design-conscious glasses and footwear. So taste, investment, individuality - these are also signs on stage. If Darren were to appear for a Q & A wearing a suit from Moore's, the piece would be different than if he's in jeans and those cool rubber-toed leather boots. The fact that a suit isn't his regular choice of clothes for the day signifies somethng to his audience about where he is situated in our culture, and that has an impact on the piece. Performance artists use costuming extensively in conceptually-based work, taking the meaning-production of surfaces into the manipulation of their skin and skeleton as signifying elements (check out Julianna Barabas' seamline, Orlan or Marina Abramovic). Assuming that what you wear isn't meaningful on stage is pretty selective analysis. In the Q & A context, representing the non-performative self really just means representing the day's choice of costume, which has something to do with our social status, taste, economic realities, the weather, and demonstration of allegiance to our social group through fashion.

Having trouble posting?

2007-01-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

if you're having trouble leaving a comment, send to me at heidi@playwrightstheatre.com, and I'll put it up for you.

thanks,
heidi

Magic and modes of representation

2007-01-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

Thanks, James for contextualizing the Bio Boxes. The conjunction between Theatre Replacement's interview-based project and Mammalian's Q&A is interesting. In a previous post, we were talking about the creative coming into the design of the audience experience, more than or instead of into a virtuosic performance. So the whole design of the interviews, of the boxes themselves, and the parallel with the video is already taking the experience away from the well-made play we are all so bored of.

There's a book called From acting to Performance, by Philip Auslander, that investigates the political nature of presence, and how it is invoked or refused in different modes of performance. It's the non-contextualized charismatic performance that feeds into hook, line and sinker acceptance of the ideology being promoted by the performer. Interaction with the audience is one of the primary modes for disrupting the accepted norms of representation, and I think it's this level of interaction that's toughest when we're creating something that includes metaphorical language, poetical flights of fancy, or sustained development of a physical image. The contract with audience member is, don't interrupt me, I've got something you should listen to. Signing on for that contract is a bit different if there's a potential for the audience to have more agency (they can move where they want to, they get a turn, they help create the content or the circumstances). And I think it's that modelling of agency that begins to bring political change in a real way into our theatrical games.

I think perhaps the audience is able to read more layers of pretend than we are trained to represent. Audience members like to play roles too (reality TV trains them to be confessional, but also that they're creating a sound bite).

Is Darren's question abut poetry and metaphor? Or the contract that asks the audience to follow rules that limit their agency more than the piece requires?

James Responds

2007-01-10T05:58:00.000-08:00

(he sent this to me personally)

Your dumb ass blog won't let me comment

so i'll give to you - i just tried to get t it on
again - if it isnt there by tomorrow would get it up?

----------
It is spelled Jamie. But for you we will stick to
James.

To answer your question I would blame my loserdom on
being white, middleclass and an actor the three areas
of self hatred that have fueled your entire career.
The actor thing still fueling much of your criticism.

And in response I would like to pose some new forums
for discussion.
To what extent has the shape of Darren’s ass degraded
since he’s turned forty?
Should he now be forced out of those jeans and into a
looser fitting chino?

but staying on some kind of topic...
Why so unwilling to suspend your disbelief? Those
little pink ears in White Mice were oh so satisfying.
If they weren’t pink and you were not waving a tail
around a fake block of cheese a lot more people would
have been leaving in droves screaming soapbox - as my
older brother did.
By the way he keeps a file on your ass.

We gave six fantastic artists the opportunity to
interview people and then create pieces based on those
interviews. Maiko and i once discussed the actors
exactly mimicking the interviewees, that notion
dissolved quickly. This show was about people spinning
on their meetings and discussions with real people.
The show is about the languages they share and hearing
those languages in close quarters. Its about getting
close for a little storytelling (you are a godfather
to better get used to pretending – that little
guy/girl won’t be able to cut your hair (s) for a few
years). It is about the real projected on the wall in
conflict or in conjunction (depending on your
perspective) to what the artists made in the boxes.
The interviewees were displayed on the video (we
apologize for the sound but our hands were tied
technically). The tech in Vancouver will be better
and allow for a more integrated fact with fiction. I
encourage people to sit and watch the video. Although
most are too keen to get inside the make believe boxes
to take the time.

Granted, the best shows are going to be the ones the
actors do for the original subject – I won’t get to
see them sadly but I look forward to the report. It
would be nice to see how the performances change from
stranger to subject. Perhaps a hidden camera.
That may be where the real conflict lies. How the
actor acts when faced with the person they have been
representing to audiences.

We could have skipped the actors and asked the 6
interviewees to put their heads in the boxes allowing
them to field questions, or sit in chairs with a video
behind them but that is a mammalian show. That's what
you do you big social scientist “gaylord” – (and go
get something beyond a BFA already)
We still like to trust creative instinct and have a
little fun with the material – and fun can be
constructed.

And we have discussed the lab coats. I just ironed
mine.
--------
jl

The gloves are off!

2007-01-09T15:42:00.000-08:00

Well, those of us in Vancouver will have to wait to see whether we also consider the lab coats an extraneous element in Bio Boxes. I encourage you all to weigh in here, defend the lab coats, etc. You too can now post a comment without creating an account. Do it. Don't censor yourself, but be prepared to meet the other posters in person.

Now, back to those Bio Boxes.

check out www.pushfestival.ca to find out how to see stuff here in Vancouver over the next three weeks.

Now, Back to Theatre or What Sux about Theatre Replacement's BioBoxes

2007-01-09T12:46:00.000-08:00

A couple of things.

First of all, what's with the lab coats? You walk in and Maiko, Jaime and Chris Nelson are standing there wearing lab coats and holding clip boards. It just seems so unnecessary, so obvious and so patronizing to the audience. Oh, you're scientists! I get it. Zzzzzzz. No, you're not scientists, you're theatre gaylords.

I love the project, I just don't think it needs all the extra fixings. I feel it reveals a lack of faith in the fact that they as theatre practitioners are legitimate social researchers, they don't have to force us to think of them as scientists.

But, why not? Why pretend to be scientists when you can actually BE scientists by approaching the work with some of the chops a social scientist might. Which they do. A little. But if they were really scientists I think the exploration could be more specific and the quantitative connections between the boxes more refined. But I was only able to catch 3. I feel like there's another conceptual level that's missing. And trying to wrap it all up in cheesy lab coats just won't cut it.

And then all the acting. Good acting. But acting nonetheless. In their promo stuff they talk about "intimacy" but being intimate with the audience is more than seating them close enough to smell what you ate for lunch. It requires exposing some vulnerability both in the performance and in the creation. And these, like pretty much all shows, was an airtight affair with no room for any real intimacy. I feel strongly that if your gonna perform in my lap then you should be open to my participation. But here were slick, beautiful, little pieces, often slightly expressionistic or something, cleanly memorized and recited by the actor. The text was taken from real interviews but had been tinkered with too much to get a satisfying sense of the real person behind the performance. Again, I think another lack of faith is revealed. A lack of faith in the potential for their subject's unadulterated stories to be interesting. Less would have been much more.

But formally, the things were great. It was very much like watching a huge budget show. Fantastic effects and lots of mesmerizing Magic of Theatre. What show wouldn't benefit from a budget that would allow for babies to drop from the grid, sand to pour from the ceiling and walls to be crumbled in front of us? All that was gorgeous. But, like I said about the Electric Company offering at Hive, I want to be dazzled AND moved.

I offer these criticisms with the understanding that I think Theatre Replacement's work is among the 2% of theatre actually worth talking about and is, therefore, excellent. But within the narrow band of excellence I think there's still lots of work to be done.

PS: after hassling Maiko about the lab coats, she hassled me about the shirt I was going to wear for A Free Show for the People of Pakistan at the PCC and I realized that she was right and I changed it. Now, let's get back to talking about those lab coats....

Friction and Flirtation

2007-01-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

No friction. Just seeing if getting personal will generate some discussion.
Jaime is more flexible along particular lines. Me along others. But that still doesn't answer the question of those mysterious scratches.
And speaking of flirting, Cindy Mochizuki read my palm and told me I would have 3 kids. Then she looked at hers and said she, too, would be having 3 kids. HELLO!!

I knew I should have gone to PCC

2007-01-09T08:18:00.000-08:00

What fun to deconstruct the given circumstances for the last flurry of posts - it sounded like the BioBox people were hanging out with Darren. hilarity ensues. flirtation definitely. But also some friction. (JL is way younger than DO, and is way more flexible, so you decide loser status, dear reader).

Now, since this is a professional blog and not my own personal one, I guess I should try to bring the discussion back to theory and practice of theatre... but I think one of the most challenging and slippery elements of Darren's social acupuncture project is that it isn't about character, it's about us. So how do we bring the fun and frivolity into the discussion of our practices?

I think by seeing each other face to face. So those of you in Vancouver, meet me at the PuSh festival. I'll be at lots of shows, including Theatre as a Drug, the PuSh Cabaret at the WISE Hall Jan 26th, (Quizoola opens the festival tomorrow night) and at the Assembly, Feb 2-4. Let's make the PCC look like math class.

What do you call Itai Erdal on Ecstasy?

2007-01-08T15:19:00.000-08:00

Happy.

Is Anita Rochon the next big thing?

2007-01-08T15:17:00.000-08:00

I think yes.
Comments?

Why is Jaime Long a Loser?

2007-01-08T15:16:00.000-08:00

Anyone care to comment?

And where did all those scratches on his body come from while he was at the PCC?

Hello to Kevin McDuff

2007-01-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

Why aren't you getting in on the discussion? Too busy getting people pregnant? Congrats, I knew you had it in you. While Maiko is lying around sick you should be commenting on this discussion. You're the smartest theatre artist working at the hospital.

Calgary Q & A

2007-01-04T16:06:00.000-08:00

Darren, you're doing Q&A in Calgary this weekend. Any developments of that piece/process given your experiences of the form in Pakistan?

Beautiful Civic Engagement

2007-01-03T10:02:00.000-08:00

I think Darren's list of Criteria to Determine Beautiful Civic Engagement deserves some thought and analysis. These are galvanizing social strategies, and I think there are a few that are really crucial to distinguish community-based art from the social acupuncture that Mammalian Diving reflex enegeages in. For four seasons, I have worked with Public Dreams on community-based outdoor celebrations, with the goal of stimulating the growth of healthy communties through participation in the arts. The events are highly successful in terms of number of participants in both the set decor and performative aspects, and in attendance, but there are limited pockets of criticality in the events - they are beautiful, engaging, surprising, galvanizing, but also tend towards earnestness. They are missing items 6 and 8 (Questioning Social Assumptions and Fruitful Antagonisms) from the list of criteria. Public Dreams strives for inclusiveness, and is grappling with how to make productive antagonisms and social change a part of the events not only in their creation, but also in their content.

For the creator who is comfortable with the antagonism and questioning that genuine civic engagement can engender, the challenge perhaps comes up when practising items 4 and 5 (Inversion of Hierarchies and Offering Agency). Who determines when a hierarchy has been successfully inverted? How much agency is offered, and how does an audience know? If they don't does that matter?

Darren told an anecdote in his workshop dealing with an instance with a participant in Q & A who rather than talking about his homelessness insisted on talking about his criminal past - raising the discomfort quotient for some of the audience, who didn't necessarily read the participant's level of agency, instead seeing an exploitative relationship between the theatre makers (in the power position) and the homeless guy who used his agency in an unexpected way. That example does seem to play on antagonsisms - but were they fruitful?

Response to Heidi's post Expanding the Imagination

2006-12-30T08:34:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-28T22:23:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-27T13:59:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-27T13:40:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

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?

Introductions

2006-12-20T10:51:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome. Please wait for our guest and moderator to post their introductory messages to launch this discussion group on December 27 before posting to this site. Cheers and Happy Holidays.