We're talking about time this week. To get us started, I'll post this brief little bit of humor many of you have likely seen already:
Fun times (SWIDT)?
For Wednesday, you have a chapter about watching performances of the group Forced Entertainment. It's from a book by scholar Jonathan Kalb about the experience of watching various kinds of long (loooooong) theatre. You also have the YouTube about the slowest music humans can hear and still recognize as music.
Quinn gets us started with this prompt:
When examining the material for today, one main question came to mind.
Is there a limit to considering something as art? Is it possible to push a piece of art so far past its boundaries that it is no longer considered the same form of art that it once was?
This question came to me after reading about Quizoola/Speak Bitterness and hearing about John Cages’ As Slow As Possible piece. All three works of art push the boundaries of their respected forms of art. With Quizoola, two performers sit in a chair next to one another taking turns asking each other questions. This theater performance consisted of two people wearing clown makeup asking each other questions for hours on end. Speak Bitterness has a similar approach. It starts with six performers instead of the two that Quizoola uses. However, instead of asking questions, the performers take turns telling everyone in the room confessions. Both pieces are very different from traditional theater. There is plot or story arc in the performance. With Quizoola, it goes on for far longer than a traditional theater show. These two shows push the boundaries of what is considered theater. As slow As Possible does the same with music. The piece of music is one that is taking over 600 years to play, with a new note played each year. This piece, however, exist outside of the perceptual present, meaning that the listener will not be able to hear any connected notes or rhythms. This piece pushes the boundaries of music by trying to take as long as possible to complete. Both of the theater works and this piece of music push their art forms to their absolute limit. Have they pushed so far that they can no longer be called theater or music? In the video about John Cage’s piece, the man says that Cage’s composition could be consider more as a performance piece than music. For my artifact, I have given a link to a clip of each of the three performances to reference when reading my question.
He includes three videos (which you should watch) of the Forced Entertainment pieces referenced as well as the John Cage multi-year piece.
A word about Forced Entertainment. I'll admit that the first time I heard about them was in an academic paper presentation at a conference. The presenter described one of their shows, shared their name, and I though, Holy crap, what a pretentious bit of torment that sounds like! I hated the whole idea. And then I kept hearing and reading about them. And I watched some of their videos. And I read Kalb's chapter. And now they're one of the companies that I reference most often.
The work they do--and they've been doing it for over 20 years--is often categorized as a kind of postdramatic theatre. Like "Absurdism," postdramatic theatre is one of those scholarly terms offered by a critic (in this case Hans-Theis Lehmann) to describe a the work of a cluster of performers and groups all doing . . . something . . . that our normal categories of theatre/performance don't have words for. Lehmann's book Postdramatic Theatre lays out a dizzying array of qualities that this kind of performance may exhibit. Among these are the idea that the written script isn't the primary (first or most important) element of the production.
Many postdramatic theatre pieces originate not as a fixed script but rather as the result of a set of clearly defined rules. In Quizoola, the rules are: one person asks questions and the other person answers them. Occasionally the question-asker asks if they'd like to switch, and if the answer is yes, they do. This goes on for some set amount of time. For Speak Bitterness, the rules are that performers each take a turn reading a confession from an impossibly long list of confessions.
Here's a longer taste of Quizoola (try skipping around and seeing how different performers handle the challenge):
Forced Entertainment does a multitude of other kinds of shows. See if you can catch the "rules" for their And on the Thousanth Night . . .
Or 12 AM: Awake and Looking Down
Or Complete Works: Tabletop Shakespeare
(another clip)
Sometimes the rules (and the appeal) are obvious. Other times, if you're like me, a Forced Entertainment show is something you need someone else to explain to you. Consider Real Magic (here's Tim Etchells, a FE member, explaining it with some clips):
I wasn't sold on this show until I read this account of the performance, which makes it sound funny, haunting, and glorious. I actually love hearing these kind of secondhand descriptions of shows, the kind of "wait, I know this sounds silly/boring/pretentious at first, but hang on: here's what it was like." A lot of really good theatre, I think, is like that. After you experience it, you have to share that experience with someone else.
Have you experienced a show like this? Not for everyone, a hard sell, but you loved it so much you had to share it?
I encourage you look at the work of other postdramatic theatre artists and groups, like Elevator Repair Service
or the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.
Cool stuff.
See y'all tomorrow.
JF
No comments:
Post a Comment