a few interactive theatre links

November 23rd, 2008 • research, social gaming, teaching

A minor link-dump of companies and performances I’ve been mentioning in lectures and workshops over the last few weeks:

1. The Neo-Futurists: Chicago-based company, regularly staging new work but probably best known for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind - 30 plays in 60 minutes.
2. Who Wants to Be? - an audience-led interactive show created by London-based company The People Speak. Applied drama students take note:

Did you know that in the ‘Ask the Audience’ bit of the TV game show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire‘, the audience is right 98.9% of the time? ‘Who Wants to Be’ was born when we realised that if the audience could set the questions, as well as giving the answers, and and making up the rules - we’d have a recipe for social change.

3. Superstruct - the massively-multiplayer collaborative performance forecasting the world in 2019.

“in service of the play”

October 23rd, 2008 • teaching, theatre

A post from Lyn Gardner on the Guardian theatre blog that might be useful to my current 1st year students:

Walk into the Royal Court upstairs to see Leo Butler’s Faces in the Crowd and you are in for a bit of a surprise. Back in the 1980s I recall the upstairs space being used with real imagination for the promenade premiere of Jim Cartwright’s Road, long before promenade performances were fashionable in British theatre.

In recent years we’ve become quite used to seeing the Court’s upstairs space configured in many ways or simply used as a bare space, and now it sometimes feels slightly disappointing when you walk through the door to be confronted by rows of seats. But William Fricker and Rae Smith’s design is something else. It turns the acting area into a sunken bear pit and places the audience around the edges looking down from a height as if observing dangerous animals in a zoo. It’s brilliant, but for a play about debts (monetary and emotional) I did wonder how much the whole shebang cost.

It is a hugely effective device that creates a feeling of being a voyeur as you peer down, but is the design of the play more interesting than the play itself? Is it genuinely in service of the play or there to disguise the play’s deficiencies - or make it seem more than it is?

And there’s that recurring question: how do the specific decisions you make in staging service the play? How do they relate to what you want that performance to achieve?

If you like, it’s part of an exercise in broader consciousness raising: realising that conventions of performance are not accidental or incidental, but choices to be made rather than default positions to be assumed.

not gone, not forgotten

June 19th, 2008 • teaching, theatre

I think have to disagree with Lyn Gardner’s assessment that post-’68 political and radical theatre is undocumented and in danger of being forgotten - not least because the majority of companies she references (Red Ladder, Joint Stock, Monstrous Regiment, Inter-Action and Welfare State) turned up on the course I taught at Glasgow University last semester.

I’ll admit that some of the playtexts concerned are hard to find (as my students will attest) and that the pool of scholarship isn’t as deep as that surrounding other periods of theatre, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into an amnesia amongst theatre practitioners or scholars.

Where to start? Lizbeth Goodman’s formidable Contemporary Feminist Theatres (alongside her series of interviews with women in contemporary British theatre) are both invaluable and gladly still available. You could read John Fox’s Eyes on Stalks, an account of his work as artistic director of Welfare State International.

More recently, there’s Max Stafford-Clark’s Taking Stock, a collection of nine production casebooks which brings together Stafford-Clark’s contemporary diaries with interviews of cast members. Baz Kershaw (currently teaching at Warwick University) has published several books on radical performance from the period - pick up The Politics of Performance or The Radical Performance if you can.

Archives of an increasing number of theatre companies - including Welfare State, the Half Moon Company and Gay Sweatshop - are now accessible, many through institutions within the greater London area.

There is, though, still need for projects like Unfinished Histories. Even with the sources suggested above, the experience of teaching a course on such companies has shown that there’s no danger of a surplus of available material. Oral histories in particular may present an especially valuable opportunity to explore and record the personal relationships between ideology and theatre practice in the period.

But in danger of being forgotten? Not quite yet.

copyrighting culture

June 8th, 2008 • research, teaching

Jackson Publick - interviewed at The AV Club about the new series of The Venture Brothers - says something that chimes with the arguments Lawrence Lessig has repeatedly made about the way our culture has evolved until extremely recently:

Our characters were part of the world that we were, and they love and remember and hate the same things that we did, and it’s affected their lives. That’s why it kills me when we get legal notes about some of this stuff, because you’re just like, “I don’t understand why I can’t use that, or talk about that, or reference it. I was bombarded with this on television when I was 6. Somebody spent a lot of money making sure that I would never forget this, and now when I act like it’s a household word, I’m not allowed to use it.” There’s your irony!

The relentless, unthinking pursuit of copyright - unlimited by any time limit or condition of fair use - is the death of culture.

next semester

June 5th, 2008 • teaching

A few days of head-to-desk pounding and I think I’ve finalised the plays and playwrights I’ll be teaching on my new Honours course. I’ve listed the current line-up after the jump. A small prize if you can guess the topic of the course.. Read more »

the view from the audience?

June 2nd, 2008 • teaching, theatre

Depressing commentary of the day:

The number of people now applying for a place on a three-year acting degree course has reached unprecedented levels. And yet, according to Geoff Colman, the head of acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama, thanks to audition-based TV shows, finding quality students has never been so difficult.

“This year, we received more than 4,000 applications for a place on our degree course,” Colman says, “and that figure is going up every year. But we’re finding that fewer and fewer of those applicants will have ever set foot in a theatre…”

Ouch.

I’m thinking that this can be read in a few different ways: applicants who don’t see theatre as any kind of route for a career in acting, applicants who don’t have any performance experience but like the idea of acting, or applicants whose experience of drama is solely from watching TV or film. Or a combination of all three.

Still, it raises an interesting question: just how important is the experience of watching live theatre as an audience member to the education of a performer?