Thoughts around Theater

An imperfect list.

2011-06-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

What are the responsibilities of an artist?
To offer dreams and visions of new possibilities.
To offer courage to face nightmares.
To unmask universal failures with individual shortcomings.
To lie, cheat and exaggerate so that truth may be revealed.

To entice the world to ask questions.
And stay on the world's back until it finds the answers.

An artist has no responsibility to be a politician.
An artist has no responsibility to be a scholar.

An artist dances through a multitude of truths, which shall threaten and anger and titulate and tease.

An artist knows in the marrow of her bones that no truth is more true than another.

Eye language

2011-06-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Situation

A discussion arising out of a weekly training session we are hosting in our rehearsel space "Zone" sparked several thoughts which I'm going to try to get down on virtual paper here...

This training session is being led by Beni Ocker, a certified Action Theater teacher. This time around I'm not going to discuss this very good training method, which is extremely rejuvenating my non-mask acting "organs", except to say that it has a lot to do with the 80s West Coast theatrical culture and aesthetic in which I began my professional career.

I mentioned to Beni that I was on that day feeling rather incapable of looking the other performers in the eye. Or even looking at them at all. I felt "connected" to them, but not in a way that would be visible to an audience member. It was irritating. Perhaps it had something to do with the three days performing masked walk-acts - improvisational encounters with the public - at the Rheinau Island festival.

Beni brought up the idea of mask-work and pantomime being for him like another language.
This idea brought me farther. The masks we were using were mostly animal masks such as our ravens. Their eyes do not correspond to ours. When I perform my raven, I am actually looking out of his slightly open beak. When I look a person in the eyes, the mask is so far tilted up. The person experiences a raven looking over his head. When person experiences the raven looking at him, I the performer am looking at this person's diaphragm. Or shirt button.

The Idea

Languages are not only composed of speech. Languages – and dialects – include gestures and facial expressions and entire dynamics of being. If you learn a second language and speak it long, you will begin to change in all these categories as well. This is something that I notice when I return to California – at first I stumble between both languages, and then I return to another persona that is the "American" me. Not very different, but nonetheless different. I also notice this in Franziska, my wife and colleague. I have watched her perform in German, Swiss-German and French. Each language brings different aspects of her personality to the forefront.

Now let's regard performing with a mask. As I put on the mask, I endeavor to lose my persona and take on this other creature. In order that his eyes become alive, in order that the audience experience a thinking, feeling, breathing creature, I have to restructure my posture, my dynamics of moving... and move my "eyes" to a location about two inches out from my temples with maybe a 15-degree angle difference. When I encounter a audience member and have a dialog (consisting on my part of gestures and tiltings of the head), I am literally focusing and funneling my energy through these eyes. My own eyes are not taking part in the encounter, they are gathering information from my perimeter - are there obstacles in my way, is the person still interested in the encounter, etc.

Performing like this for three days is like speaking another language, a language with an imaginary face in front of my own. Thus it is obvious that for the first moments performing without a mask, I will be a bit confused, automatically looking at my partner's chin instead of her eyes... and not involving my eyes in the performance energy.

Interesting to note, though, is that acting is in itself a language. During the festival I took off the mask and became myself, much easier in fact than if I had performed without a mask. I had a few seconds of irritation but that was all. No, the confusion occured during the training, when I entered the performance arena, so to speak. I infer from this that performance is another language.

Hmmm. There are implications there.

I also notice that I am speaking of a performed body that is not identical to my physical body. This leads me back to a theory of pantomime that I developed back when I was teaching at the Spielstatt Ulm Theater Academy. I called it "The performance matrix" ... and then the movie with Keanu Reeves came out, based on William Gibson's very similar yet very different Matrix.
But that's stuff for another blog entry.

not me and not not me – Event and Theater

2011-05-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

The world in which we live is a construction known as civilisation. We live by it’s norms, we strive for the goals it sets forth for us, we succeed or we fail.

But there is always a part of us that believes that there is more to existence than this construction. In moments of bliss or of pain we realize this. When we remove our eyeclaps and really look at the natural world outside our door, we know in our hearts that this construction pales in the face of Creation – whatever that might happen to be.

I write this because I am pondering an event in which we performed a weekend ago. It was the opening of a castle restaurant, a castle with nearly a thousand years of history vibrating in the stones. We used half-masks to create two light-hearted ghosts of former castle servants. As these fictional charactors had witnessed 500 years of castle history, we were able through them to impart some of the story of this location and give the event’s participants – local citizens that would hopefully embrace the new restaurant as their own – a new perspective on this ancient fortress that had lost some of it’s attraction in the last decade. This was our mission, should we decide to accept it (as opposed to just entertaining the folks and driving home with our wage).

I have learned to love such events and such „missions“. For one we have immediate contact with our audience. We know directly when they enjoy our performance and when we bore them. For another we have the most intricate and astounding backdrops in which our charactors bound about: ancient wooden stairs, real paintings of historical people, dungeons, scenery, even lightning storms and rainbows become part of the performance, our „mitspieler“, our fellow players, so to speak.

But back to my first lines... especially with our commedia-like half masks we invite if not demand that the audience enter a fantasical world only slightly differing for the daily world we live in. We as performers experience the moment when an audience member forgets that he is talking to a man with a piece of paper-maché covering his face and begins to talk to a castle ghost. Of course the audience member continues to know that we aren’t ghosts, but he/she also experiences that the ghosts are not not present. Somehow the fiction coexists with reality.

Now, one occurance runs through my head that both we and the audience enjoy particularly. The event began as the audience parked their cars and began walking up to the castle. There in the parking lot were our two ghosts greeting them with sentences like „Greetings! We have been waiting for you, Baron... excuse me, what was your name again? Right, Baron Michael! Oh (looking at the ten-year-old boy holding his hand) and you’ve brought the young prince with you! How wonderful! Did you arrive by horse?"

The audience loves this moment, and I am trying to understand why it’s so special. My theory is: in this moment a tiny part of them has entered that fictional world in which they actually are princes or baronesses, and there is a inner, probably subliminal, recognition that yes, they are entitled to that other world. The construct of civilisation loosens it’s reins on them and their experience of themselves as something larger than „themselves“ is in a fun and non-threatening way tangible.

Why do we human beings have such a fascination for stories, for worlds that aren’t there? Perhaps... because they ARE there.

Does Theater have a Future?

2007-06-25T05:42:00.000-07:00

Freiburg, Sunday June 24 2007

Let me approach this theme non-linearly. Closer to real life, don‘t you think? I mean, the various experiences in the various worlds of one‘s life (one‘s work, one‘s love life, a chance meeting with the neighbor, the news on TV or the radio, an accident) don‘t just play themselves out in neat separated stories. They come at you in little packages, arranged by chance, throughout the days and weeks and years. Each world is a separate story in its own right. But the most interesting story of your life is told through the „random“ order of the various chapters of these various stories. A thought expressed in a cafè, an article in the paper, the memories of a distant city... all clash and combine and create: the new.

Non-linear. Random Acts of Beauty. Your life. Theater.

Where and when does theater have vitality? Where and when does theater continue or resume a strident role in the shaping of society – or cease doing so. When does the public recognize this vitality and choose to become an audience, thus validating theaters existence?

Thus having defended a meandering blog I begin:
My father, an avid amateur performer, once stated that he believed that true theater was amateur theatre rather than professional theatre. There is something of great importance in those words. This and several recent events came together in my mind today and created the urge to write this second blog.

1) The moving performance of our tenth vocational projekt with dm-drogeriemarkt „Abenteuer Kultur“ or „Adventure: Culture“. Twenty-four young apprentice druggists, one man and twenty-three woman of very different ethnic backgrounds created and interpreted theatrical stories to the theme „Friendship“.

These young people had no experience in acting whatsoever, but yesterday evening they all had their outstanding moments of transcendance. Thanks to them I came upon this thought: one of the most central functions of theater is to provide a framework or vehicle that allows us to witness „das Wesen“ or the „being-ness“ of another individual. The story, the charactor, the lighting... all is just the setting for that jewel of a moment when an actor becomes transparent and I see into her soul and through her soul into whatever it is beyond us all.

But not only these moments were important. The contributions throughout our structured process of discussion, discovery and rehearsel reinstated Franziskas and my conviction that everyone has something to say on stage. On the very first day these young women stood alone onstage and told us their hopes and their stories of friendship. Most of them were scared to death to stand up there alone and speak. But still they did with an honesty that provided a wonderful foundation for our work with them.

The stories that theater tell should not only come from the „great wise ones“ of the past or from the established theater institutions, but also from the people. I think that one of the reasons that theatre loses so much grounds these days is an overemphasis on professionalism. When you make theater your living, you have to work so hard that you are in danger of losing contact with the real world. Especially in the state theater system here in Germany, the actors and directors and dramaturgs are so caught up in the rehearsels and performances that they rarely leave their world of concrete, halogene spotlights, black walls and scuffed wooden stages. How can they know what is going on out there?

2) That said, the state theater here in Freiburg is making wonderful efforts to re-vitalise itself. Today I heard about a lecture on the theater‘s main stage on „globalisation from a leading professor of sociology Saksia Sassen, and decided to attend. Her lecture was extremely interesting, seeing as how she made it clear that the central acts of globalisation take place on the national, or even local level. At least, that is what struck me. Seeing as how we are working next week with our acquaintances from Matsuyama, and in light of our upcoming production „On the Tip of the Iceberg“ the whole process of international communication and regulation and activism has become extremely interesting for me.

What I had not realised was that this lecture was part of a 24-hour theater event. The cavernous backstage had been transformed into a place to meet, dance, and partake in discussions centering on the theatre‘s unusual project „Orbit“.
What the state theater is trying to do is something that has been going on for a long time in the free (independant) theater scene here in Germany. The Freiburg Civic Theater and several of its fellow theaters (Heidelberg and Essen) are searching for ways to reach out into the neighborhoods, find out what‘s going on, and to involve the public in active, creative collaboration. Typical projects have to do with empowering so-called „fringe“ groups to theatrically „voice“ their experiences, dreams and criticisms of society. There are many different projects with many different approaches.
The whole day got me to thinking about collectivism in theater.

Collective collaboration in Theatre... of all the productions that we have produced since we became „Theater R.A.B.“ – I just counted all pieces longer than 20 minutes and our workshop productions with dm-drogeriemarkt and in Elsass… I came up with 50 productions! – not one was written by a single person. One or two plays were „written“ by one person but only as the results of ensemble improvisation. Some of our workshop productions had scenes from classical plays or were modified versions of Shakespeare, but all were so extremely modified that they were basically new plays. But most often the text is a collaborative process. The original idea is modified by the actors and then again modified by the director. Or, even more interesting, a fragment of text created by one performer becomes part of a dialog between two other performers.
In our educationally driven productions this has become a central part of the work.

The student participants perform something that has to do with themselves – but not only themselves. They encounter the words of masters such as Shakespeare or Ilse Aichinger – but not as something foreign but as something bound up with their own personal statement. Their personal humor enrichens the work without being bound by television clichés. They don‘t stand there like fenceposts reciting dead prosa – they enact stories that have become their own.

They learn that they are creative people with the ability to say something. And they become part of a larger society.
The structure of the last century or two, in which a single person focuses on an aspect of society and then writes a play for others to interpret and bring on the stage.... perhaps this is no longer the structure that can sustain the interest of the community at large in theater. Certainly individual authors have their place in theatre. But this does not make theater unique and I do not think that the works of individual authors draw people away from the Competition and into the playhouses.

I (and probably you, the reader) am part of a dangerously small community of people in the (western) world who are convinced that theatre still has a viable and central role to play in the greater theater of society. I see that Film and Television and Pop/Rock and the Internet have their unique contributions to society, and have drawn large audiences away from the stage. But I still believe that there is something about theater that these mediums do not at all replace. And I believe that if we theatre people can just get a grip on this „something“, audiences will return in large enough numbers. Just as bookstores are making a comeback, the live performance will again become popular.

(When I say again, I don‘t mean that there are not successful thriving theatre communities out there. There are. But in society at large, there is no drive or push, no sense that you are not „with it“ if you don‘t go to theater. This used to be the case.)
So, I guess this is going to be one wordy blog! If you‘ve born with me this far, I‘d appreciate your comments and questions.

Beginning a theater blog

2007-05-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

This will be a blog in which I will try to record thoughts, impressions and experiences about theater. Theater has been in my life since I was three, so I guess there's a lot of material floating in my brain. Who knows what will make its way through the labyrinth and into cyberspace.

Tonight is another nicht of juggling. We have four different performances in three days coming up. Just the logistiks of loading and unloading costumes, props, masks, sets in our bus "Jack Pumpkin" makes my head spin. And then I have to think of performing at 150 % capability!

But the amazing thing is how quickly the sense memory works. We put up the set of "Waldzauber" in the rehearsel room and immediately the story of the two old ladies in the magical forest came to life. Only a few minutes before I was completely immersed in the world of animal neighbors that we are creating with the French kids in Colmar. And on Thursday night the smell of the mask interiors, the way the masks press into my face and the first sounds of Ro's music will no doubt - knock on wood - immediately bring the baroque world of "Wentzingers Dream" to life.

So... I have to keep a watch on tomorrow's lunch, which is simmering on the stove. I think that's a satisfying start. A lot of the themes that I want to write about already springing out onto the virtual page.