LA Bitter Lemons: I have wanted to do a little write up on this show The Day Shall Declare It since I saw it last week but I’ve been too freakin’ busy, however, I’ve just been told they are extending, and while they probably won’t need me to help fill their house, I wanted to let everyone know that they should go see this and go see it now.
There are much better and smarter writers who have been heralding the immersive and subversive here in LA – Noah Nelson for one – well I’m gonna go one better than all of them and just call this thing what it is: “submersive theater”. It seems to fit. Especially for this show.
4 comments:
I am not exactly sure what “submersive theater” is, but I imagine it is something like immersive performance art, and if it is getting rave reviews, for something that is on the fringe, it must be good. I like to try and go see the experimental pieces on the off chance that one of them might really be that something special that develops into a new hit or is the birth of a new genre. People and groups that are really truly driven to create their own art is where the energy is at. It seems to me that no matter how cool the concept and how revolutionary the storytelling method is, there is no entertainment, no draw or fixation of the audience without really tangible energy of some sort in a production. If a show can manage this, I think it can do anything.
There are a couple things with this article I want to touch on. The first: for a critical theater review, he did very little reviewing. For eight paragraphs of text, he only talked about the show in two of them and nothing he said made me want to particularly see the show. He spent the other six paragraphs explaining what seemed like irrelevant things. But that’s neither here nor there. The other thing I wanted to talk about is stories and themes. He said something along the lines of “as long as you are telling a good story you are exploring a theme”, what does this say of theater that doesn’t tell stories? Abstract theater (shoot, abstract art) exists and while it almost always explores a theme or idea it doesn’t always have a beginning, middle, end story to it. It’s limiting to theater to make the assumption that you’re supposed to walk away having learned something, whether that be a lesson or the background of some family, etc. Often times it’s just to evoke emotion. And what’s with the people standing on their heads is that from the show?
I agree with Alex, I do believe that this author did not really review the play that he saw in great detail. Even though I do not live anywhere near LA from this article I would not be that interested in seeing this play because he did not make the play sound that interesting. When I read a play review I want that author to give me a good insight into what the play is how how they particularly felt about the piece. I also did not understand what he was trying to get at with "subversive" theatre. I did not think that he explained this term in the best way for the person who is not familiar with this term.
A few things. First of all, I am not really sure what “submersive” theatre is. “Submersive” is not a word in the English dictionary (I checked this out) unless it is some mutation of the word “submersible” which is an underwater craft. So. Since this theatre is not a submarine, I’m going to say that it might be something like immersive theatre, or something like that that tries to invest the audience completely by surrounding them completely with the world of the play. Aside from the quality of the review, the photo of the show looks interesting, and it seemed like a new kind of dance piece that would be fun to see. If this is an emerging style of theatre in LA, I hope that we hear more about it soon. Hopefully, the author of this review will elaborate some day and explain what kind of theatre they are actually talking about.
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