Our theater is made for an audience.

Seems pretty obvious, no? Jess, Mary and I had a discussion on Friday about this statement. They feel that most theater these days is just like TV, or, to quote Jess as I steal from our e-mail chain, “made as a masturbatory artistic gesture to one’s own brilliance. (i.e. They don’t serve cookies. They do serve long silences.) What it means is that we are always making theater that is welcoming and appreciative of the people that come to it. So, it will never smell like horse shit, be 200 degrees, or force the audience to cry from pain or boredom.”

And, can I be honest? Our cookies are damn good.

-L

Tuesday evening I went to support my classmate, who was performing with Shen Wei Dance Arts in their site-specific dance response to Ernesto Neto’s anthropodino installation at the Park Avenue Armory. It was awesome–a huge installation exploring the human body that assaulted the senses with various smells (spices filled in these dripping shapes) and textures (there was a gigantic bean bag structure and a plastic ball pit). The dancers navigated the space and weaved through audience members (there were 900 people in the first show!) It reminded me of SCHOOLED because at first spectators anxiously shuffled out of the way when dancers approached them. I  was struck by the level of focus it required–I saw several dancers stop immediately with startling precision when a spectator accidentally cut off their path. If the dancer faced an obstacle, he or she would stop and jump in front of it before changing direction. By the end, when dancers walked up to audience members and jumped before them, several people started jumping back as a ritualistic greeting or response. It was a cool lesson on the willingness of an audience to improvise when thrown into the performance space. Very relevant! 

Here’s a picture of the anthropodino exhibit:

CAM

Sitting in the Theatre de l’Odeon in Paris, which is very oblong- so much so that from the nearest balcony seats to the stage, you miss about half of the action- I was reminded that theatergoing experiences in the “olden days” were as much about seeing the audience as seeing the play. Today, we should go to the theater for the same reason. If you want to just have art wash over you, you can get enough of it on the internet. To go to the theater is to commit to a night out, a celebration as important as a fancy meal or a night bar hopping. We should expect that it will be as fun, exciting and (on some occasions) scary or even ugly. 

Another quick note on subverting expectations. The show was a Feydeau farce, and I had described it to people as, “you know, lots of doors”. I got there and the doors were planks on the floor attached to a pully system that made them rise up only when necessary. fantastic. I did want the doors to spin in the air though, which they didn’t do. 

score 1, theatre de l’odeon, which says: 

The theater, a temporal art, is first and foremost an art of the times, our times. It exists through the encounter between its actors and its audience, the voices that emanate from the stage and the eyes of the spectator. The theater is a space of sharing.

nice.