Projects — UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
So, this is what I’ll be up to for the next month or so as one of the writers of the Virtual Performance Factory. I’m fascinated to be learning about these new modes of writing/ designing.
I’ve been thinking lately about the need to find other paths through my life as a playwright. The regional model is timid and broken; it’s about product and (as Morgan Jeness puts it) serving the oligarchy. And frankly, my plays are not going to function well as “product” in those contexts. In one of the most thoughtful reviews of Trojan Barbie, the writer said “The playwright is not interested in our comfort, though there are many entertaining moments in her writing. Instead, she asks that we consider the suffering of people we do not know in lands we may never visit. ”
And that is true, but it doesn’t mean I want to insult or alienate an audience. I want them to come with me in looking at something painful, but in a form that’s beautiful and compelling so that we can bear to do it. I think a feeling of truth in art, and moments of beauty (formal or thematic) are rare joys and the pathways to these experiences for audiences are systematically blocked through lack of arts education, a frantically materialist culture, and the deeply patronizing view that audiences aren’t up to–nor up for– complex, intense, problem-posing art.
However, as Spencer Golub has said repeatedly, it’s all in the frame. Perhaps it’s just that they(we) are not up for being sat in rows and made to look at the same thing together any more. The blackboard, the stage, the monument… there’s something about those forms that seems to recede into the 20th century already.
The question, then: what IS the relationship (or array of possible relationships) between work made for performance and its audience? Maybe it’s fractal rather than perspectival now. The relationship of a physically unified audience to a singular spectacle on a proscenium stage dates to Renaissance discoveries in painting, and is organized around the God-king’s eye. Now we are all tiny gods with our insect-eye computers and iPhones, and perspective is multiple and dispersed, although still very much formed in and by a field of power relations. This new connectivity is both too intimate and too fractal for the stage. Yet there’s something about bodily presence that I still believe we crave–it’s telling that isolation is the least bearable of stresses in captivity.
So that’s what I want to figure out. How to write supple, intimate, fractal performance texts that have form and shape but function as strands in a web of dialogue with an audience. Preferably by June. Any clues, post ’em here! And I’ll write more about the VPF as it unfolds.
Tags: new writing, theatre, virtual performance