The Pittsburgh Tatler: Dear Reader, over the next 6 weeks or so I’m going to be writing about the Pittsburgh Festival of Firsts (FoF) in addition to the fall season of plays at our local theaters. If you don’t know what the Festival of Firsts is, well, all I can say is: get your head out from under that rock, high thee over to the Cultural Trust website, and make plans to see some of the performance and visual art that will have its World, US, or regional premiere right here in the ‘Burgh!
2 comments:
Quite coincidentally, in the comment I wrote yesterday, I stated that the ambitious next step for theatrical innovation would be theater for the blind, and in a sense, here we are.
Though “Blind Cinema” is aimed to deprive sighted people of a sense and re-orient their experience, I think this format could be applied in an interesting way to visual arts for the blind.
Another interesting coincidence, just an hour ago Beth sent our paints class on a color matching scavenger hunt and I ended up in a design studio on the third floor, sifting through fabric swatches and passively listening to a phone conversation that Wendy was having with an 11-year-old girl. I now understand the things I was hearing and am glad that I found a resolution of sorts in this article because I was very interested in what Wendy was saying on the phone but didn’t actually know what she was talking about.
The concept of depriving someone of a sense in order to re-orient their “viewing” experience is intriguing and creative and I will be keeping the concept in my back pocket for future projects. It’s also useful to experiment with such concepts so that they can be applied or developed into alternative forms of viewing for blind or deaf audiences as well as an interesting experience for sighted/hearing audiences.
There are a million different ways that the idea of deprivation could go. Oftentimes we think of expanding our parameters in order to breed creativity, but I think it works better the other way around. The more limitations you place on a person, the more creative their solutions have to be.
Take the question: How do you create a theatrical experience for someone who cannot see and cannot hear? Where do you go from there? Do you create a sensory experience involving movement and the feeling of textures or smells? Do you compose a piece of music focused on the idea of vibrations?
The grand questions here are when does art become impossible to experience? Is theater defined by its audience? And then what is theater and what isn’t?
This article and my mild eaves-dropping have really opened my mind up to the possibilities of closing my mind.
Woah, this seems like a really interesting experience…. I can’t quite tell if it would be enjoyable though, as it sounds quite uncomfortable to me. But that doesn’t really seem the point of the exercise. When I started reading this, I was expecting it to be accessibility based: cinema for the blind, rather than a deliberate experience of making people blind to push them to experience the film through another perspective. I think it is worth noting that the actual movie does not sound enjoyable, at least from the loose summary that was described. The experience is not so much about the movie but about the child who narrates it, the story not that of the movie but that of the child. That is certainly what the article seizes on, and the actual movie’s plot is merely a side note. I think that element of being forced to embrace the child’s perspective is certainly an impactful one, or could be at least. It also might be more powerful the older you are, and therefore the more removed from childhood and its peculiarities in perspective and experience.
Post a Comment