DC Theatre Scene: It’s funny that, as influential and as storied as the experimental theatre of the 1950s and 1960s is, it remains, for the most part, lore — something you read about, think about, but don’t experience. I don’t know of any theatre company that has tried to revive Dionysus in ’69. Even the pieces that have published scripts, such as Viet Rock, are infrequently performed. One reason that I chose the play The Tooth of Crime at WSC Avant Bard was that everyone produces the mid- and late-career work of Sam Shepard, but hardly ever his more experimental stuff from the 1960s and early 1970s.
3 comments:
I truly wish I could see this performance! It sounds like it will be fantastic. I love the details the company has paid attention to. For example, even just the way the different designers are referred to as "noisemakers" or creating the "videoscape" demonstrates the otherness of the process. The way they understand Cage's interest in chance operation is great and I wonder how it compares to immersive environments. I also enjoyed reading about their and Cage's approach to having multiple things happen at once whose only meaning is assigned by the audience.
I don't claim to know a whole lot about the experimental theatre, but it is definitely an interesting perspective -- that despite all its acclaim it isn't really seen frequently today. I how much of it's because we've moved on culturally, or even if that kind of theatre was not as successful to begin with -- if its style was so different as to be confusing but still enough to prompt change in the theatre world. Based on the description, it sounds very much like performance art, which often has a bad reputation of being too out-there. Randomness, while intriguing, can sometimes be very bewildering and even distracting because people are always looking for patterns and meaning. The ideas behind the show sound really cool -- the value of silence, and of just noise -- but it also seems like the kind of thing that is hard to do well. It will be interesting to see if the show ends up getting remounted or not.
As an avid lover of John Cage, his work, and especially his theories, I have to say I am very excited but have very high expectations for this piece. John Cage's ideas about sound and silence are such natural things, that I'm afraid it may appear forced to put these ideas in a theatrical format without contradicting their ideals. In fact, I myself have created various art pieces based off his idea that all sound is music and that music is all around us all the time. It is extremely hard to do without appearing cliche or simply inaccurate. That being said, I have confidence that this professional theater company has done its research, and the article gives me hope that it will be a truly incredible production.
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