Love's Labors Lost: If you feed them, they will come

March 26, 2010

If you feed them, they will come

99Seats has a post that started out being about the Digital Age but wound up talking about food. There's also mention of orgies.

This conversation, although currently seeming to wrestle with the purpose of theatre in the age of Twitter and iPhone, reminds me of some ideas I offered up a while back about how to get more butts in seats. Nevertheless, I find it's still relevant because what I hinted at (without really knowing it) was putting the liveness of theatre front and center instead of merely making it TV or film with four walls.

For me, debating whether our wired world is friend or foe to theater is sort of moot. We are in a wired world. That's it. There's nothing anyone can say to really change that (unless what you're going to say is, "I've invented a time machine, and it works.").

I'm more interested in figuring out how to take the world as it is to create new possibilities - which is what theatre does anyway. Like cgeye, I'm inclined to believe that "we have to start renegotiating the tacit contracts we've made with our audiences, and I don't know if we want to do that."

What are the "rules" we've set up for the actual act of going to see a play (no tardiness, no food, no walking around, no talking, no cell phones, no cameras - funny how these rules are all things you're not supposed to do)? What happens if we break them? What other live art forms can we take inspiration from (concerts, perhaps)? What other communal activities can we learn from (for example, church)?

I'll let you in on a little secret. I love going to the movies with a predominantly non-White audience - especially horror movies*. Know why? Because it's not just a movie. It's an event. If I just want to see the images on the screen, I'd be better served by watching it on DVD at home. But I want the full experience, and that experience includes popcorn, soda, candy - and people talking to the screen. To be very honest, sometimes the audience makes a shitty movie good just by their reaction. And sometimes a great movie becomes phenomenal when you get an "Oooooh, shit!" or a "Daaaaaaamn!" tossed in there. The third (fourth?) time I saw Return of the King was by far my favorite because of how people were reacting to it. The jokes some audience members were cracking had me laughing so hard, you would've thought I was watching Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.

(* This is why MST3K never caught on with me - I did that shit anyway, although without the robots. Although I had toys. Did that count?)

But it's not just the audience either - it's the popcorn too! Things just don't feel complete without a little bag of corn-flavored air and grease to stuff into my mouth, followed by chocolate, Twizzlers, "fruit" candy, or some other high-calorie, low-nutrition substance. It doesn't have to be junk food per se - just something to eat. For some reason, perhaps because I'm a closet foodie or something, being without food and drink at a movie just feels wrong, so wrong that it's hard for me to focus on the movie because I keep thinking about how nice a bag or tub of buttery goodness followed by high fructose corn syrup with water in it. I can't figure out why that is, but I think it might be worth rooting it out.

2 comments:

cgeye4/02/2010 3:36 PM
American Theatre this month's featuring theatre and food:

http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/apr10/home.cfm
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Drama, Daily4/03/2010 7:59 AM
I am with you on this! The only place other than the U.S. that I've seen theatre is Ireland, and I was really fascinated by the cultural differences in audience behavior-- most relevant to your post, the fact that people can be heard crunching on chips and reacting more freely and boisterously. For a show I'm directing this spring, we are having popcorn nights. If a little more noise and mess means happier viewers, then I'm all for it.
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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932