Memorable Moments plus another thing

So i've thought about the question some more and have come up with a couple of moments that were really significant. a number of shows come to mind: godspell by theater three in edmonton, indulgence by augusta company in toronto, the panel and sick by dna theater in toronto, the noam chomsky lectures by brooks and verdecchia,. simone moir's video store make-out and gustavo artigas' rules of the game.


godspell - it was the moment at the beginning of the intermission when they sing some song that has the line: "let's have some wine" and they offer the audience wine out of some big barrell. i was about 11 or 12 at the time and was blown away that they were interacting with the audience in such a banal way - handing out little cups of kool-aid or something.

indulgence - it was my first encounter with full-on postmodernism in theater. it was a series of connected but disjointed scenes that all toyed with various established conventions but in such an unconventional way. what differed from other attempts at that kind of thing was that, as much as it was abstract, it wasn't actually indulgent unlike most of the experimental theater i had seen to that point. it was rigorous yet made no sense but was easy to understand because each section or image or whatever referenced some recognizable trope. inspired, i believe, by the wooster group.

noam chomsky - again more postmodernism but now with a dense weave of information and analysis. something i had never seen before nor, sadly, since.

the panel and sick - more pomo. hiller managed to mix a panel discussion with dance and live insanity, performance art etc. but again, as nutty as it all got, it still was very familiar. for ex: actor chris williamson was dressed kind of line a david lynchian bellhop and he would walk around with cart filled with liquour and mix the audience free drinks. daniel macivor lay in a bed and slowly died of aids for the whole show while sigrid johnson would come in and occasionally apply a defibrilator to his chest and give him some shocks.

video store make-out - moving into the realm of relational aesthetics (really important book with some really important insights for theater: relational aesthetics by nicolas bourriaud). simone put out a call for participants and anyone who was interested could come to a number of video stores at a predetermined time and in the Action film section could encounter other people who were there to potentially make out. participants had to navigate the whole thing really carefully because you never knew who was cruise for kissing and who was cruising for movies. it took performance into a whole other level.

rules of the game - a performance that i've only read about but which has been at the forefront of my thinking on new forms of performance. it was an event which took place in the Tijuana neighbourhood of La Libertad, a crossing point for many illegal immigrants entering the United States, as part of ‘InSite 2000’. Two football teams and two basketball teams from local US and Mexican high schools were invited to play simultaneously on the same court, so not only did each team encounter the usual adversary, but each game was pitched against the other, vying for space. Although this represented antagonistic conditions that could be analogous to many situations, the vicinity of a political and geographic boundary (tijuana and san diego essentially occupy the same space with only a border dividing them) steep the piece in immigration issues – essentially the accommodation of the other. they had four sets of cheerleaders and a trophy that depicted two atheletes clashing, a soccer ball and basketball between them. i love how this piece brings in "real" people doing their own thing, changes the terms so simply yet so drastically while making a full engaged social comment.

anyway, the unifying traits with this stuff was that they all convention busted, acknowledged the audience was in the same room, and rejected narrative, character and, for the most part tried to induce either an intellectual or visceral experience, not bothering with trying to induce an emotional response. the only exception was godspell which i included because it was the first time i saw such simple but strong contact with the audience.

ANOTHER THING - i'm willing to play along but after reading the description of the blog more carefully, i'm not so sure how useful this line of thinking is. i care about the audience but only as they encounter what i really care about: my work. to try to answer "who they are, what they want and what we can give them" is to approach the question from the wrong angle. they're not homogenous, they want a bunch of different things, and we can only give them the fruits of our own interest and experimentation. it seems a bit obvious to say it but, as creators, we only have to answer who *we* are, what *we* want, and what do we feel like giving. theater creators are a much more homogenous group, with common triats that can be identified and i think the "problems" with theater right now stem from this fact. briefly, we are mostly actors with limited life experience (most of us have been in rehearsal full-time since high school) and who are poorly educated (actor training is still not addressing the needs of creating, still too attached to a classical paradigm and not congnizant of developments in most of the other humanities since the 60s - but that's another discussion)

i would like to know from adrienne why this question is relevant. why do you want to know these things. what are you trying to address? are you trying to figure out why there isn't much interest in theater these days, why, as a social force, it's fallen off the map? or what exactly?