IF YOU’RE SHOPPING (or STALKING) THIS COURSE
A JOKE:
“Two elderly women are at a Catskill’s mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible’; the other one says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions!’
WHY I REPEATED A JOKE FROM ANNIE HALL (and apologies to all for the citation from a Woody Allen film):
Last March I tuned in eagerly to watch Zoom Theater, to watch Zoom dance. And in concurrent Zoom conversations with friends and colleagues, I kept repeating, wow! Zoom “theater” is really bad. Is it theater? And the reply was often, yeah, I know! Really bad. And only a few of the shows star Oscar Issac!
BECAUSE I WATCHED A LOT OF ZOOM *THEATER.*
And really, was that theater?
There was a fast and furious outpouring of theater and performance that quickly migrated online – everything from the starry Sondheim tribute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A92wZIvEUAw to the Viral Monologue 24 Hour Plays of Instagram (now on Round 16! @24hourplays https://www.instagram.com/24hourplays/?hl=en. I watched so much. In my sleepless anxiety state during the first month of the pandemic, I found the link to a recording of the seminal production of Tadeuscz Kantor’s The Dead Class https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a235hHGFIps, and I watched it on the Cricoteka website https://www.cricoteka.pl/pl/en/. Cricoteka is the Polish foundation for the preservation of Kantor’s work.
Institutions around the globe opened their archives – performance documentation of live shows, which had been so closely guarded and inaccessible to a viewing public, often due to copyright limitations,hit the internet like a tidal wave. I could watch digital videos of recent, highly acclaimed theater productions at place like London’s National Theater (National Theater At Home!) https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home or at Thomas Ostermeier’s Schaubühne https://www.schaubuehne.de/en/premieres/index.html (sadly over) – when weeks before, the barriers to obtain tickets for these shows as an audience member without tremendous advanced planning for someone living in the US, were prohibitively high.
Travel just to see a show? For most people is an infrequent treat because of the expensive. Instead, what I was able to view in those months was astounding. All *theater* was accessible to me in my little Cambridge apartment, most for only the cost of internet access.
But did I continue to watch it all? Me, who studies and teaches theater at Harvard and thinks of myself as a performance omnivore?
Well, really, not so much.
WHY?
Well…. little of what I watched, I liked. I think I liked the idea more than the reality.
This class is mean to explore why that is so. We will look at the qualities of performance that remain important to us. And I suspect there are many complex reasons form my disinterest in most online performance.
MAYBE WE CAN CALL THE THEATER THAT WAS MADE IN THE BEGINNING OF THE PANDEMIC RAPID RESPONSE THEATER.
What was fun about RAPID RESPONSE THEATER was the running chat that accompanied the show. It didn’t feel new exactly, but it was now a staple on online theater – something that wouldn’t be tolerated in most institutional theaters. And I don’t want to diss the fast move to migrating performance to the web. I also watched to support my friends and the industry as a whole – I know that theaters, theater artists, choreographers and dancers often felt compelled to continue their work online to maintain their presence, at the very moment that the sources of their income vanished, for working in performance may not always be a good living, but we need to keep working to pay our bills, to keep our skills honed, to explore the possibilities of our art.I did however constantly read about performance work that folks were making in this moment – dance, theater, performance art, and even more work that couldn’t be contained in one discursive category– taking place over Facebook, IG, IG live, on institutional platforms, on Twitter and Whatsapp and Houseparty. But after Zoom teaching and Zoom meetings that took up the bulk of my day, staring at the screen to fufil the reasons why I loved theater and performance didn’t feel good – and, it didn’t feel like theater or performance. At best, much of what I saw felt like a placeholder for something else yet to come, that was still figuring itself out. But it was good to experience it with others.
TALKING ABOUT PERFORMANCE… IS THAT A KIND OF MUTUAL AID?
What I enjoyed more, and could watch far more easily, were the conversations about performance. Those also flourished — here were so many that I could easily access. These felt like a form of mutual aid. for me they were nourishing reflective moments when the “product” was paused in favor of listening to live conversations (that were also archived and recorded) between artists, performers, curators, designers, producers and artistic directors who were using this time to rethink the terms of the art, what forms it can take, why we do it and why we are invested in its survival. At times they referenced super interesting projects and experiments that were often interdisciplinary, probing, thoughtful – I had access to others’ creative ideas that were in concert with the pressing needs of the moment. Those conversations also became what archivists call the “finding aids” that allowed me to better search for new forms of impactful engaged “performance” – work that felt energizing rather than fatiguing. The fact that I got to listen to the artist’s thought process and then could choose what I’m interested in investigating make me also feel more autonomous. Bertolt Brecht and later, Augusto Boal, theater theorists and practitioners warned us about the effects of passive spectatorship. And the reflective quality of the artist conversations also allowed me to understand that I am not looking to the artists for the “solutions” for this moment — that they, like I, am just part of a community figuring out something together.
THE FUTURE OF PERFORMANCE, THEATER & DANCE?
At the moment when the state is depending on spectacular forms of disaster, violence and disenfranchisement to make us all more compliant and passive, the world that we imagine, the complex technologies used to create and distribute that artistic work, and the processes by which we invent new means and models of assembly matter even more. Although also a difficult and contested artist, it’s worthwhile to look at Antonin Artaud writings. In a chapter from The Theater and Its Double, titled “No More Masterpieces” Artaud wrote:
There is in addition the presence of a plague epidemic which
is a physical incarnation of these powers . But the whole in a
manner and language that have lost all touch with the rude
and epileptic rhythm of our time. Sophocles speaks grandly
perhaps, but in a style that is no longer timely. His language
is too refined for this age, it is as if he were speaking beside
the point.
However, a public that shudders at train wrecks, that is
familiar with earthquakes, plagues, revolutions, wars ; that is
sensitive to the disordered anguish of love, can be affected by
all these grand notions and asks only to become aware of them,
but on condition that it is addressed in its own language, and
that its knowledge of these things does not come to it through
adulterated trappings and speech that belong to extinct eras
which will never live again. (75).
OUR CLASS’ CONTRIBUTION TO UNDERSTANDING AND SEIZING THIS MOMENT
In this course we will survey, locate, and assess where and how artists are creating forms of engagement with performance, dance and theater, inventing “trappings and speech” for these historical times. We will seek a variety of models including “rapid response theater,” trans-medial performance, socially distanced performance, performative political actions, socially engaged art, immersive online performance, repurposed performance that have responded innovatively to the pandemic’s restrictions on face to face assembly and endeavor to make an impact on the political contingencies of this contemporary moment.
We will find our case studies by scouring the internet. And we will use those case studies to ask the question, why are these works still though of as “performance” or “theater?” Why is that necessary to do so? What are the key properties of those arts when in the work’s migration to digital platforms, the possibility of face-to-face assembly, its ephemerality, its capacity to respond to embodied energy is lost? What then becomes of theater and performance at this moment – what are the qualities that make it not film? Not digital media? Even when it engages with both mediums)?
We will develop our own keyword glossary that describes the properties of the form of performance each case study embodies, deconstruct the way in which it is innovative, and teach one another the political interventions the work attempts to enact. We will write about them and teach what we have found to one another. And open up our findings for the public to read and to experience.
Recent posts from our class: