Dance + Live Performance | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper: Imagine a dance performance where you choose what you will see. Now imagine your choices give you an experience that somehow colors your perceptions of the dance performance differently than many of your fellow audience members report experiencing. This intriguing scenario is at the center of If | Maybe | Then, the latest brainchild of outside-the-box-thinkers Attack Theatre.
3 comments:
I find this type of theatre rather really cool. The more theatrical experiences progress, the more interactive they become. I've seen and done shows where you pick the ending at intermission or vote someone off the show, and those are the shows where I've had the most fun and felt satisfied with the experience of the show. By giving an audience member a stake in the performance, the show achieves a level of intimacy that can't really be found when the actors are hiding behind a fourth wall. Attack theatre is an excellent experiment and I really think that it has the potential to revolutionize theatre, especially the use of media in theatre. Technology is still a relatively untapped tool in theatre, the only people who really see its potential are the designers and electricians, but the people who ned to start experimenting are the actors, dancers, and directors who rely on tradition to achieve a performance.
This show intrigued me the second I read the headline. I am always interested in seeing interactive theatre because for me it is either an amazing fit or a huge miss/mess. For the opening line, it seems like an amazing idea. I don’t fully understand from the article how it plans on having the audience choose their own adventure besides choosing what group they go into. I think it very interesting that it a dance piecing being turned into interactive theatre because I feel I hear about dance performance structure being changed the least. I hear a lot about experimental styles of dance but never about having an audience travel through a space watching a dance performance. The stage manager in me, of course, is dying to hear about how the show is called but the audience member in me wants to experience this show. I am so intrigued by dance in general and I feel like this new take on it would be incredible to experience. As interesting as it sounds, I am still a little skeptical about the execution but hopefully, it turns out for best and sparks more dance performances of its kind.
I absolutely love hearing about performances that blend technology with live forms of art such as theatre, music, or dance. Each performance I read about seems even more innovative than the last one, and incorporates all kinds of new and exciting media I’ve never heard of before. I think the concept of putting on a show in an unexpected location-- in the case of this dance performance, a former Office Depot space-- both provides challenges and opens up tons of new and exciting avenues for creativity and experimentation. Just from hearing intents and insights about shows in the warehouse and loading in plays that perform there, I’ve been introduced to a lot of new concepts about problem-solving and innovativeness. As the article states, there exists also a sense of collective viewing and togetherness that brings the audience together by viewing art that blends technology with live performance in an unexpected place.
Post a Comment