Monday, September 22, 2008
Genre-Mixing Shows Are Born Here in Here’s Experimental Lab
NYTimes.com: "LIKE so many shows at Here Arts Center, “Oh What War” is hard to define. In some ways it’s a musical revue, drawing inspiration from “Oh! What a Lovely War,” Joan Littlewood’s 1963 satire of World War I. But “musical revue” hardly communicates how the director Mallory Catlett evokes a bunker where soldiers have fled from conflict."
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6 comments:
Because theater is such a collaborative profession, I think that creating productions that can be classified and labeled as one thing and not another is very dangerous. The audience is going to come into the show with wildly different experiences and points of view, but somehow you need to affect them all in one way or another. One way of doing this is by incorporating multiple types of performance art and art in general into your projects.
What Here is doing seems to be a really good idea. I think that they are doing important work that will advance the industry into the modern age in which we live and passed that to the future.
I am happy for this organization, HARP. It makes me believe I wont crash and burn once i hit my mid years. The article was interesting and extremely exciting for me becasue i have this bond with experiemental theatre! Like off
Broadway, I feel that experiemntal theatre is the same testing grounds for huge, ground breaking shows! Which should give everyone a new, found appreciation for the show. Even though it sounds a bit odd... we can all appreciat the things it says and the actors who have wok because of it!
This type of theatre seems to be becoming more and more "mainstream" every year. I think audiences are going to start filling up these shows that they have been receiving the proper press. Word of mouth also is one of the biggest helps for experimental shows like this. If someone respected in the theatre community enjoys the show, then others in the community will probably come out to see the show at least once.
It's very admirable that someone was able to develop something so original and so successfully. However, experimentation in theater is never a bad thing, even if it turns out to be a horrific failure. Since the show is getting pretty substantial coverage, it is likely to pique the curiosity of potential audiences.
I'd really like to learn more about the video game aspect in this performance. It could create a whole new venue for programs like the ETC to explore.
As always, the collaborative nature of theater is one of the best parts about it. I'm really excited to see what theater can evolve into when it starts to encompass more and more innovative mediums.
Its a wonder that organizations like HARP exist and yet most of us still don't know it. Being from NY, I am continually reminded here at CMU how small my scope of knowledge of the larger artistic community is.
HARP sounds like an intriguing place to attempt to reinvent oneself, or rather one's artistic themes and conventions. So often do we see artists of any kind fall into a rhythm or a rut, churning out the same style of work year after year. That's not to say that having certain thematic or artistic threads that are consistent between your works is a bad thing, I am merely commenting on the fact that at a certain point, people stop creating and just regurgitate because its easy and it pays.
The great thing about organizations like HARP, or really any intensive and immersive collaborative artistic process, is that it affords one the opportunity to look outside their comfort zone. It allows others to suggest and critique, it allows one to explore other avenues, other mediums, other styles in a sort of sheltered environment that will not impact their career.
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