Friday, February 01, 2019
Liu Xiaoyi: Bending Space And Time In The Theatre
The Theatre Times: His latest work for the 2019 Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts is inspired by the late British playwright Sarah Kane’s final play, 4.48 Psychosis. I’m almost tempted to run with the wry dig–the founder and artistic director of experimental theatre group Emergency Stairs has a gleeful penchant for puns, wordplay and inside jokes. But I’m on a tight deadline and I pick the morning of the 7th.
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4 comments:
As a regular art viewer, it always amazes me how physical art can be. The willpower and stamina of artists like Liu Xiaoyi really redefines what art is, and what it means to make art. Putting the 448 into perspective, I usually spend that amount of time in school (or at least I did in high school). That means that for every moment I was learning or goofing off at school, he was cultivating a production, and spending all that time making charcoal sketches in a room. He is not only pushing the boundaries on his own willpower, but he speaks specifically to pushing the boundaries in the physicality of his exhibits. He's put his exhibits in car parks and whiskey bars, and while I'm sure they do a fine job housing art, they would never be my first choices for an exhibit location. Lastly, it's also interesting how he considers the audience while creating these performance artworks. In the theater world we work on conveying ideas to an audience, but most of the time we do this through story, and there's still a slight disconnect between the artist and the patron. He has people emailing him before even showing up to the exhibit. That's direct encounters with the audience, meaning that it becomes very personable and vulnerable.
I’m a huge fan of this kind of more experimental, expository theatre. Xiaoyi strips back what we assume to be the traditional norms of illusion-making in theatre by revealing the process behind a show as the show itself. This also leads to a more engaged audience interaction with the piece; a part that stood out to me was that visitors are able to contact Xiaoyi over email prior to the performance. I also found it undeniably true that a show does not start and stop in the theatre space, but can begin when you are first looking into the show and potentially never end, as the memory of it lingers or as the idea of it is recycled. In a sense, the impact that a show is able to make within its performance time affects the duration of the existence of the show. I am really looking forward to following more of Xiaoyi’s work and exploring more abstract means of approaching time and space.
This is an interesting approach to directing. A director is often described as an "advocate for the audience," responsible for keeping the audience in mind and making sure that the production will be effective for them. Normally, that takes the form of the question "will the audience like this?" or in the case of more serious pieces at least, "will the audience understand this?" However, Liu Xiaoyi takes a different approach, arguably a more direct one: "How will this affect the audience?" I'm not sure this always makes for a more enjoyable production, but it could be arguably more efficient than traditional theatre in achieving the larger goal of theatrical work: being meaningful to the audience. At the end of the day, this is the higher goal; if you can change the audience and stay in business at the same time, it doesn't really matter how you do it. Experimental and abstract works run the risk of audiences not getting or enjoying them, but they also escape from the specificity of the traditional proscenium bound story, and can therefore achieve more when done well.
I'm always looking for this kind of immersive form of performing arts. For the past few hundred years, according to our textbook, people has been searching for objective perspective in the mainstream theater works. The other forms of the art are underappreciated by the mainstream audience, for a reason that is complicated and blur. The proscenium stage helped the audience to maintain their objective, which is a strength of such kind of performing art. But the immersive and environmental theater carried a opposite purpose. Again, neither form of the layout is superior to one another. But only through more different forms, can the audience receive wider caliber of the world in others' eyes. It is such a inspiration to see a off-stream artist gaining the spot light of the theatrical realm.
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