The Theatre Times: Maybe 13 is an unlucky number? Contemporary theater’s annual Festival/Tokyo is known for its focus on young artists and edgy productions, but for its 13th edition it has had to deal with the pandemic like many other events of its kind.
Speaking at a recent press conference to announce details of this year’s lineup, dramaturge Kaku Nagashima, the festival’s co-director, told reporters, “The influence of COVID-19 may continue for a few more years, and there could also be another new pandemic.
6 comments:
I’m always interested in hearing how different companies have gone about letting the show go on throughout the pandemic. It kinda excites me when I see new innovative ways to share our craft. Like many other theaters, this festival has chosen to downsize their season and turn to online performances. Which…isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There must be a reason many people are doing it- it’s working. Online is the new black. I’m wondering, though, what other ideas may have come up in those meetings as to how to go about continuing productions and what were the reasons for not doing them/leaning towards online. One of my favorites thus far has been the reviving of an old show in Vegas and redoing it in a way where it’s more of a visual experience, sticking to social distancing guidelines. I think what would be nice to do is to look at the core of what we do and why we do it and try to reformat that in a way that it’s still theatre and still something that entertains the audience yet following COVID protocols. For example, for scenic designers- we enjoy creating worlds. We read, analyze, research and conceptualize ideas to create worlds. I’m sure there is way to do this, that’s not the traditional theatrical application involving actors onstage, sticking to safe guidelines. Immersive theatre seemed to have been becoming a thing. This may be a good avenue for scenic designers to create engaging worlds and experiences. Of course, this requires a team. But there’s no reason a “work bubble” can’t be formed with a team to make this happen and put it on display as a show. It can even be linked to play, if you want to continue leaning towards theatre. I personally would enjoy experiencing the world that, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, occurred in. There can even be sounds playing to make this feel more real. I think there’s so much that we as artist can be exploring right now.
It’s always interesting to see how people are adapting to COVID-19; as we have seen, the pandemic took a huge toll on the entertainment industry and creators have needed to be innovative in their thinking to continue presenting their art to the general public. I really enjoyed this article, as the festival has so many groups and artists developing new ideas to proceed with the festival in a COVID conscious way. I think my favorite performance is We Assemble Together, where dancers are in individual boxes to be socially distant, and the audience can wander as though through a museum exhibit to watch the live dancing. I find it to be an incredibly innovative idea, combining COVID regulations and the idea of a museum to create this type of performance that is completely different then what we expect. This article is a wonderful example of artists finding ways to continue creating during the pandemic.
These types of articles always catch my eye because I’m really interested to see how the world is adapting to COVID, especially the theatre world. I think, so far, everyone has done a good job of getting online quickly, but I’m not sure about completely adapting to the new lifestyle and workstyle. I think that a lot of people were really confused about how to restructure themselves or their curriculum for example, which makes sense since no one has really ever gone through this kind of thing before. But with this came a lot of setbacks and delays which resulted in inproductivity and lots of resources not being used to their full potential. The approach was also more of a conversation than a finite decision, which I think is a good idea but also there are some people who are not equipped to tell you how to handle a pandemic and adapt to it.
It is fascinating to me all of the different ways that theater companies have reacted to and adapted to the global pandemic. There have been so many creative solutions to find wasy to perform and present theater art to the world. While personally I am not the biggest fan of online performances, it is what we can work with in the safest way right now and it is facinating all of the various ways that people utilze this medium.It is also interesting as things reopen to seee how theaters work around masks, testing, and social distancing to create a show that is safe. This is definitely an interesting time in theater and the world and it is facinating to see how they reflect towards each other. I can tell that everyone is anxiously waiting for theater to be able to be performed in person like the way everyone was used to and I hope that we can reach this goal soon.
It seems like this company is being very inventive and finding ways to create pandemic-safe art. I wish we at CMU could do things like this, but we are limited by academic equity and access requirements. Although I stand behind these limitations, I have been in a lot of meetings listening to the creative teams come up with cool ideas that are likely going to be disallowed. It is certainly frustrating. The museum-like piece with the dancers in boxes could work really well for episodic or devised work, for example. I wonder if we could do a version of the touring sets idea, or maybe a static outdoor set that could be visited by local audiences. I wonder if part of the trick to virtual theatre might be segmenting a single show out into different types of live experiences. All that said, I am unsure that there is any way we can keep production folks safe, and Japan is doing far better than the US at containing COVID.
This article is yet just another example of theatre makers overcoming the challenges at hand to make performative art during this prolonged pandemic.The article talks about this contemporary company moving toward screening performances prerecorded in Seoul as opposed to on stage live in Tokyo. One thing that i have been thinking about is that with this medium, as with any sort of performance medium, there are always positive and negative aspects to producing work a certain way. A hidden blessing of this new zoom and prerecorded world we live in is that distance and location are no longer limitations for who can experience a certain event. This is a really good thing, but it also brings up questions about the quality and integrity of the work. There is no replacement for sharing an experience live with a group of audience members and that aspect is felt very absent in the prerecorded programing.
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