Hey, what's up? So this past week in addition to all that fun movement work I've been part of the less fun but still important and necessary work of teching through our production of Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead/Han Muerto.
Now, generally speaking, teching a show can be a long and frustrating process. Teching two shows (one in a language foreign to half the cast), outside, in a public park, across multiple site specific locations... it's a lot! And it's required a lot of hard work, dedication and a long hours, the challenge of which all involved have risen to and to my compatriots I say bravo! We're almost at the finish line! Yeah!
And I'm very excited to see this show go up. I have to say, as much of an added difficulty as it can be, I really like doing site specific theater. I mean in a very literal sense, all theater is site specific because of the relationship between live performance and space, amIright? I think Peter Brooks defined theater as an observer watching a body moving through space, something like that, I don't know I haven't read The Empty Space since I was a freshman in college (and even then I didn't read it that closely or particularly get it). But definitely, the room or the place where you put up a show is an integral aspect of the audience experience whether or not you draw attention to it as a bare black box or an elaborate period set up or what have you. I think the site specific or environmental aspect of these pieces though enhances the things that make theatre worth watching as opposed to say a DVD, or just staying in and taking a nap. One of my favorite things is watching a story unfold, not just in the sense of the literal narrative but seeing what places that story might go to. New environments always surprise and excite me. This is something I've always enjoyed about certain video games, like say The Legend of Zelda, where that sense of exploring and discovering a world is so integral. And site specific theatre, whether or not it's as immersive as something like Sleep No More or more static like our show, brings that to the forefront of the experience.
So yeah, I hope I can see more shows like this in the future and be part of them as well. And hopefully Apollinaire has been empowered to continue doing this kind of work, because have I mentioned our Kickstarter campaign? Cause that shit just got funded! Oh yeah! I know Apollinaire wasn't able to do a show like this last year, after something like ten years of doing it, because several financial backers fell through. Well it's back, and with a brand new source of funding... the internet.
Kickstarter really is incredible. It makes it easy and fun for people to find and support the kind of work they want to see in the world, and for artists to find those people and take their money to go off and support those endeavors. Of course, the artist/patron model is a pretty old one, but this really democratizes the whole thing and takes the power to give life to meaningful work outside of the realm of just the wealthy and empowers anyone anywhere to take part in whatever way they can afford to. Probably much better essays have been and will continue to be produced documenting this phenomena. But what Apollinaire is doing is really special from a social justice stand point, in that it's bringing art to an underserved population, the people of Chelsea and by extension the whole community of people who I've been taking the 111 with every day, who rarely have the oppurtunity to see live performance much less in their own language (which is for a lot of them Spanish). And making art and especially theater accessible to these underserved, under represented groups is important, because increasingly people don't give a shit about live theater and they should because it's really something special, and powerful and the only way to inspire the next generation of great artists is by bringing art to them.
More on this project later, when we've brought it to them. Until then... oh shoot, I've gotta be at rehearsal.
No comments:
Post a Comment