dctheatrescene.com: Rather than drinking wine at 10 a.m. and eating all the cookies, Theater J spent the latter part of the summer expanding consciousness—their own and their audiences’. They enlisted Rachel Grossman, a D.C. area director, playwright and performer, to create and lead “How to Become a Raised-Consciousness Audience Member,” a Zoom class with guest speakers, short readings, videos, and (gulp!) homework.
4 comments:
This article is particularly relevant, which is unfortunate. Change does not come immediately, but it still needs to come faster. I live in Rochester, NY which is having a very hard time with the issues discussed in the article. Our police chief just resigned after the coverup of Daniel Prude's tragic murder. People are calling for the mayor to resign as well. While it is good that this is bringing change, no one should have been hurt in the process.
In my stage management class at my old school, we talked a lot about representation in the casting process. We discussed if Anne Frank should be played by a Jew. I’m Jewish and I still don’t know what the answer to this question should be. I think it is interesting how the class in the article used her story as a display of bias. The line about how people want to see themselves on stage really stuck with me. Hopefully there is no doubt that representation is incredibly important on stage, but that is just another reason why it is so important. There is no reason that we should not have representation in general, especially on the stage, and it is terrible that this has not yet been fully realized.
-Ariel Bernhard
Starting conversations like this one is long overdue, but the hardest part is starting. I appreciate that they thought about doing this in the first place. That a group of people could sit down and really think about how their identity shapes their job, whether they want it to or not. I do want to comment however, that they should be doing their research as they delve deeper to not end up misinforming themselves or others. I’m alluding to an exercise they did and mentioned in the article, to which I hope they could look back at it and see how they were phrasing the question was fundamentally flawed. Although not very, roles that require the performer to be a certain ethnicity or race should be respected as such. I will say that overall, I hope more companies start doing work on education about inclusivity and like I mentioned begin to have conversations about it.
I think this is an interesting approach to a problem that I have been thinking about for years. Many theatres have to play a treacherous game when building their season where they have to balance the theatre that they want to or should do with the theatre that their audiences want to see. Not all audiences are at the same level of consciousness, openness, and willingness to sit with unusual or uncomfortable work. This course purports that theatremakers can (and maybe should) create pathways to raised-consciousness for their audiences. I can not make up my mind about that idea. It appears to have been successful because people self-selected to educate themselves; if audiences do not self-select, there is only so much a theatre can do. On the other hand, I wonder if theatres could garner substantial interest from long-time subscribers who are hungry to consume more offerings from their favorite institutions.
How an audience receives a work (theatrical or otherwise), some would argue, is more important than what the creator sought to convey with the work itself. Thus, while it is still up to the creative team to make something that "works", the audience has to do their own training on how to properly receive it. In a perfect world, everyone would know everything that this four week course taught. However, we all know that this is not true, and this kinds of training is necessary, though some make view it as unorthodox. But while this class was designed specifically to be for an audience viewing theatre, the skills taught are immensely applicable to the all facets of daily life. Being able to objectively view and work around your implicit biases, working with the historical complexities of nearly anything and learning how that affects you and your thinking today, these are important skills in this day and age. I can only hope that this DC theatre gets more attention and interaction for this very substantial program they've created.
Post a Comment