Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The play's the thing, not its location
TheStar.com: "Over the last decade, we've seen theatre on the beach, dance in parks, Shakespeare under the Gardiner Expressway, drama in a leaky warehouse, staged history in a hot storefront and choreography over an abandoned railway track."
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5 comments:
This reminds me of a foundations lecture in which Chemers describes the helicopter in Miss Saigon coming on the stage and that being the spectacle of the show. I don't consider myself a theatre purist by any means but whatever happened to the suspension of disbelief. Back in the day plays were performed on the street and wherever they could be, but we progressed into using dedicated spaces for some good reasons if you recall. It was to remove a lot of the variables from the production (but also so tickets could be sold). The second you get outside of a purpose built venue you lose all of the things we take for granted that are designed into a theater. Lighting, acoustics, sound proofing, and of course seating. This really is not the optimal theatrical situation but it seems like a popular trend. Yay Comedia.
I think an unusual location can be advantageous in certain circumstances, just perhaps not in the experimental way described in the article. While theatre is definitely about conjuring a setting or event with the use of spectacle, with recreating an experience, not giving the audience the experience itself, it seems like a non-traditional, "real" location could help the right production, could literally transport the audience to a space and time where the audience can be completely with the play. I feel like this article to harshly judges the use of "authentic" spaces over a theatre. Where's the harm in experimenting? Where's the harm in combinnig the real with the imagined? Granted it may not always work, like this critic describes.
Well, it's always good to try something different I suppose. By making theater less conventinoal you have an opportunity to attract less conventional audiences, and I think it's cool to try to get more people involved. However, on the flip side you are automatically deterring those who like conventional theater. People who want to sit down and watch a show rather than battle with physical stamina to see the art. With a productino scheme like this, though, I can't even begin to imagine the planning difficulties.
I don't think that it is important for theatre to be able to appear "real" anymore, and the audience is willing to suspend their disbelief, so moving the plays do a different location can be a good idea, even if all of the tech stuff needs to be exposed. this can be hard for a designer, though, because it can really impede the deisgner's vision of the show when their design is impeded by some natural force or something.
Willingness to suspend disbelief is an essential part of theatricality. I am not saying that an actual location is necessarily a bad thing, but transforming a space into something it is not is a part of theatre. And transforming a huge room with seats, lights, speakers, and of course actors into a setting in Russia (not Moscow) can be more powerfull than actully buying a plane ticket to watch a bunch of sisters in another country.
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