The New York Times: About a year ago, when such things were possible, a friend and I bought cheap, same-day tickets to a preview of “West Side Story,” directed by the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. Our assigned seats were in the second row of the orchestra, on the extreme left, below the lip of the stage. Which means that we saw most of the performance via the 30-foot-tall LED display at the back.
2 comments:
At its core, the article talked about the many and varied reasons and outcomes for this technologically reliant way of delivering a sort of theatrical experience. At first, I felt like this was alluding that technology will one day make theater obsolete. A point which was touched upon, but I strongly disagree to. Theater exists because of a need for human interaction, of something live and unique, something that ties you in while so obviously being fabricated. So no, even with this addition – instead of saying replacement – I don’t think theater is going to be gone. Then they proceeded to define what theater was and if any of this could be considered theater. I think I’ve come to define theater as a continuous act, so where a movie would get edited in-between scenes a theater screening or performance would be presented all in one go. There’s a fine line to walk here, and it seems like the answer will depend heavily on who you ask instead of it being a solid fact. Overall, the article opened a very necessary and interesting conversation about the present state of our industry.
This article seemed to make it a point to point out all of the different opinions people have about theatre online. Both sides of the “is online theatre real theatre?” debate had fairly good arguments. In my opinion, I don’t think online theatre is real true theatre. The reason I fell in love with theatre rather than film was the idea of having an audience in an auditorium and immersing them into the world on the stage. The reason why I love being in the workshop and building set pieces is because those set pieces are what’s going to take the audience away from whatever life they’re living outside and transporting them to a different city, country, or even a different time period. I do agree that the accessibility of virtual theatre is a great positive. However, I can’t deny that I love working on a show with a full audience in the house or being part of that audience and be taken to a different world myself. The very last sentence of the article struck me. “The saddest thing about screen-based shows? There’s no applause at the end.” The sense of community that comes from live, in-person theatre is what I love about it.
Post a Comment