22.
If I’m arguing for a return to the notion that theatre is not just an experience you have but a place you go to congregate with others and share that experience, we had better for a moment consider the site-specific. This is a category of work that like so many others is regrettably hidebound by our continuing failure to distinguish form from content. Which is to say that our excited focus has been on the site. Partly this is media-driven – do me a Titus Andronicus in a bus station and you can have a photo across three columns. A previously unused site will seem to equal novelty, even if what’s placed there is no more than an arrangement of reupholstered deckchairs on the same old Titanic. What’s deep and culturally urgent about the site-specific is not the site but the specific, which theatre has always struggled with. Prefabricated theatre is always conceived in a blur of generalities. To be specific is to be responsive not just to the site of the work but to its audience, to its social context, to its cultural moment, to the weather. Theatre is made here and now specifically between us, and whatever is not is not worthy of the name.
Showing posts with label blurs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blurs. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
2.
In this dream, it’s 1996 and I am a dog. We are in a theatre. In fact we’re in this theatre. There’s a man on stage with a fake bomb, made out of fake sticks of dynamite, strapped to his chest, and he’s talking sort of ironically about stage craft. Some people in the audience are laughing and some aren’t. // As a dog, I find it hard to imagine whether I would be laughing or not if I were a human. My vision goes blurry for a moment. The dynamite looks like sausages. // I am watching from the side of the stage. No one has seen me. I have a bomb strapped to my chest. It is real. // I want to sniff the fake dynamite strapped to the man’s chest. I want to know if it smells like dynamite. Or sausages. Or maybe it has no smell. // I trot out on to the stage. I am a real dog and I have a real bomb strapped to my body. I am breathing. The bomb is ticking. I have nothing to say about stagecraft, and I have no real use for, like, the ironic as a category. And my bomb smells like dynamite.
In this dream, it’s 1996 and I am a dog. We are in a theatre. In fact we’re in this theatre. There’s a man on stage with a fake bomb, made out of fake sticks of dynamite, strapped to his chest, and he’s talking sort of ironically about stage craft. Some people in the audience are laughing and some aren’t. // As a dog, I find it hard to imagine whether I would be laughing or not if I were a human. My vision goes blurry for a moment. The dynamite looks like sausages. // I am watching from the side of the stage. No one has seen me. I have a bomb strapped to my chest. It is real. // I want to sniff the fake dynamite strapped to the man’s chest. I want to know if it smells like dynamite. Or sausages. Or maybe it has no smell. // I trot out on to the stage. I am a real dog and I have a real bomb strapped to my body. I am breathing. The bomb is ticking. I have nothing to say about stagecraft, and I have no real use for, like, the ironic as a category. And my bomb smells like dynamite.
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