Toward a Future Theatre

Conversations during a Pandemic

Caridad Svich

• Verlag: Methuen Drama
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350241084
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Thema: Schreiben von Theaterstücken

Featuring conversations with theatre makers in the US and UK during the first 8 months of the Covid-19 lockdown, this collection reveals the innovations in digital theatre as artists, companies and theatres had to adjust to the restrictions and formulate new ways of working and reaching audiences. Besides documenting in their own words the work that was generated, this book captures the artists' dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic injustice are addressed. With conversations grouped under 5 broad areas, a host of theatre makers candidly discuss the present and the future of theatre: * R/evolution: How should theatre evolve rather than re-set? What kind of field could this be, if the arts sector is to survive in the US and UK and if white supremacist, classist, ableist, and patriarchal structures are dismantled, and acts of regeneration and reformation occur? * What does theatre look like at the local and hyper-local level and when working with young people and communities at risk? * What are the challenges of creating work in the digital realm and/or exploring socially distanced performance in new ways? * How may theatre address social inequalities and be a place for acts of political and artistic resistance? How has the pandemic galvanised their commitments to communities, arts advocacy, use of languages on the stage and page, and considerations of the living archive? * Acts of communion with audiences, readers, fellow artists, students, and within ensembles and collectives. How do we find new ways to gather and make when liveness and the shared experience are challenged?

1 R/evolution

Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen

Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen are American theatre-makers specializing in documentary theatre. They are writers, actors and directors and together, they are the authors of The Exonerated (2002), How to Be a Rock Critic and Aftermath (2009). Their piece Coal Country, with music by Steve Earle, premiered at The Public Theater in New York City, when Covid-19 lockdown began in New York in mid-March 2020. Their piece The Line premiered on 8 July 2020 online at The Public Theater, with music composition by Aimee Mann and Jonathan Coulton, and music produced by Michael Penn. This interview was conducted over Zoom on 18 August 2020. Audio transcription by Maya Quetzali Gonzalez.

CS How has lockdown been for you?

JB Coal Country, which we’d been working on for four years, had just opened at The Public Theater on 3 March 2020. We’d been in previews for a few weeks before that, but we’d just opened. We were right at the beginning of that crest and then everything suddenly changed in one day.

The story of the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster that Coal Country tells was sort of a microcosm of the story of what was happening in the first days of the lockdown because it really tells the story of how, when corporate interests and monied interests and the interests of power systematically over time undercut institutions and systems that are put in place to protect ordinary people that one crisis can come along and completely decimate a community.

When our show was suddenly closed, we were stunned and trying to get our bearings. And then the producers of the 24-Hour Plays called us and asked us to do a monologue for their Viral Monologues series. We interviewed a New York City hospital nurse about what she was experiencing. This was during the first days of the peak, when they were changing the rules about PPE every day. It was a moving and intense interview. At the same time, we were still in almost daily contact with The Public Theater and we pitched them this idea of a rapid-response documentary play called The Line based on interviews with frontline New York City medical workers. A few weeks later, The Public said ‘yes’.

EJ The urgency of the moment kept pushing us forward. My anger too, at the total lack of an executive branch, federal response, bothered me down to the soles of my shoes. My great-grandfather was a judge, and my grandfather was a cop, and I was raised in a household in the Midwest that taught me that the government was there to help, that there was equality under the law and that we’re all in this together. To wake up and realize that we’re not in this together and we can’t get it together without leadership was shocking and disturbing to me.

JB George Floyd was murdered just as we had completed the interviews. While we couldn’t start all the interviews over from scratch at that point, it was really imperative that we include the reckoning that happened in the wake of his murder as part of the moment we were talking about in the play. We reinterviewed a few people, so those resonances are also in there.

EJ I consider the people I interview as teachers. Making The Exonerated, twenty years ago, was my entry into the justice system and how it really works and how inherently racist it is. It was my entry into learning that there is no equanimity in the judicial system, and it doesn’t work, and it is broken. Seeing the public execution of George Floyd take place in my hometown of Minneapolis rocked me to the core. I realized the system was not merely broken but it was doing the things that it was designed to do. Making The Line, I realized that that system just did not exist in policing, it also existed in our hospitals. The Line for me became a bit of a rallying cry because I was waking up and I wanted other people to wake up with me. That is what all writers want.

CS What are your hopes and dreams for theatre’s future?

EJ Let me answer your question in a weird way. When I was in college, I attended my first Grateful Dead concert. Structurally, The Exonerated (for me internally, anyway) was based on that Grateful Dead concert. One song leading into the next, actors playing off each other, a direct audience address, that sort of breathing that the band and us experience together. My hope for the theatre is that it becomes more communal and captures more of our real experience and casts a wider net. Digital opportunities have created a situation where audiences are potentially more multi-ethnic now. We can get younger audiences in now. It’s like listening to a Beatles record instead of going to see the band. One thing feeds the other. One doesn’t take away from the other. My hope is that that communal experience is spread out like a net and captures as many imaginations as possible.

JB As a director, I think about my rehearsal rooms or sets like a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ – that’s not my term, it’s from the author Hakim Bey (original name Peter Lamborn Wilson) and his 1991 book of the same name. The idea is: institutions take on their own sort of life over time and become confining, oppressive, etc.; but in a temporary space we can reinvent the rules. When I run a room, I’m trying to do that every day. In the most idealistic of worlds, if we use it right, the theatre itself could become a Temporary Autonomous Zone, because of its transitory, impermanent nature. We have opportunities all the time to create microcosms of what an equitable and just organization of human beings could look like, to experiment with interacting creatively and productively in ways that are non-oppressive. As Erik was saying, our system is inherently oppressive and must be completely reinvented, right? All of us must unpack and deprogramme the ways we’ve been conditioned by the system we’ve been raised in, which is an ongoing process. But art is an iterative process of doing that. We’ve got a little petri dish we can all work in together. In the best of all possible worlds, that is what we do.

EJ The virus exposed systems. It focused us all to take a pause while dealing with grief and fear and forced us to re-evaluate what our place in that system is. As a cis white male who is in the most privileged position, that means I need to evolve, and adjust my ideas about how I’m listening and who I’m listening to. The virus is forcing our whole country to do that work, and to see it for what it really is and not to live in the fantasy of it. Theatre is fantasy and imagination, but we do not want to perpetuate the fantasy of our society with it. We want to address it, change it and evolve it. The only way to beat a virus is to evolve faster and change quicker than it.

CS What advice do you have for people that are entering the field now?

JB Keep making work. I came to New York and started out as an actor just before 9/11, which was like another moment that was seismic. When 9/11 happened, we’d just had the first readings of Exonerated and that project was just starting, and there was this moment where people were like, ‘Are we ever going to make theatre again?’ We didn’t know. We just kept putting one foot in front of the other and kept making things. We didn’t have resources. Except for people. We called everybody we knew, and asked them for help, and if they wanted to collaborate. The advice is to make stuff, build community and take care of your community. Mutual aid.

EJ I had a teacher in high school named Dennis Swanson who saved me from a difficult family situation (in conjunction with the second teacher that I had in college, named Victoria Santa Cruz).

Dennis taught me what I needed to know innately, that I had a voice and that I had something to say and that there was a conduit for that. Victoria taught me that I didn’t know how to listen yet. The advice that a lot of young writers get is the write what you know thing and I never found that to be helpful. I spend far too much time with myself for that to be interesting. It is what I don’t know that feeds me. Living and not knowing is okay. You must stay curious in that not knowing.

JB And learn to love it. Erik said to me incredibly early on in our relationship/collaboration the three most beautiful words in the English language next to ‘I love you’ are ‘I don’t know’. That is a guiding principle for us creatively. It is something I teach. We must make friends with it.

EJ Traumas teach us things. It’s like a tree. A tree bends in the wind and it cracks, and you can hear it crack, and hear it get hurt as it moves in a big storm. But what is happening is all those little cracks in the tree are healing. It is coming out stronger. The not knowing and the pause that we are in right now is a real opportunity for us to examine what is important. People have started to suss out what is important are other people. Because other people have been taken away from us. Some people are realizing their values and some people are just starting to realize that they have been had and that they bought into an illusion. In the not knowing and in the fear, we are like those trees. We are cracking and bending, and it hurts, but ultimately, next year we are going to grow that extra layer and get a little taller and a little stronger.

JB Theatre is ritual. There is a ritual structure to making a new play and rehearsing it and putting it up and riding the run and then closing it. That ritual was interrupted. There’s something that feels wrong about that. I know that we will find – I don’t know what form it is going to come in – but we’ll find ways to complete that circle. When it’s safe to breathe the same air again.

Michael Garcés

Michael Garcés is a Cuban-American playwright and director and artistic director of Cornerstone Theatre Company in Los Angeles. This interview was conducted on Zoom on 6 November 2020.

CS How has lockdown been for you?

MG This pandemic is one that everyone in the world has experienced collectively, yet each of us is having such a highly individual experience. There’s a dissonance between the self and the existential threat we share in common. As an artist, I’ve found it to be a time for me for reflection and response. For the company it’s been a galvanizing time. Cornerstone had a crisis of contraction which was mostly financial two years before the pandemic hit. We lost two of our major funders here in California; both stopped funding the arts altogether. It was a huge blow for us because we lost a big chunk of our income. Property values also rose astronomically in our neighbourhood. So, we lost our space. This all happened pre pandemic.

There’s still a tremendous amount of uncertainty and fragility in any not-for-profit, but our mission is more vital than ever. We’ve had very robust conversations among our ensemble and company members and board, looking at the roots of our company, and at overcoming what in our company – intentionally or not – mirrors white supremacist structure. The truth of the company’s DNA is that we were started by a group of young idealistic white people from Harvard as a response against more conventional LORT theatre structures while at the same time not entirely disengaging from those structures. We’ve been really trying to see what about our structure and practice we can and should change.

CS What are your hopes and dreams for the field?

MG I’m trying to think about this time as not about before and after, but rather as simply part of a continuum in which we’re living. We’re coming through things and we’ll enter new phases, but we’re in a years-long continuum of grappling with what we’ve done to the climate, and our necessary and inevitable reckoning with history continues unabated.

There have been plagues before in human history and this one won’t be the last. My hope is that we will take advantage of the forced awakening from the sort of somnolence that many of us were in as a society. This can only be a boon for theatre artists in terms of their own awareness and awakening as they hopefully grapple with an audience that is eager to explore similar questions about existence.

Theatre works best when the critique of whatever is happening on stage is one that the audience is hungry for and for which they might not agree with the answers. Right now, we’re all very open for the critique, and we’re also open to celebrate together and mourn together. This is potentially a moment in which great art can flourish.

I think about some of the theatre and live experiences I was privileged to see in Chile after Augusto Pinochet left power. There was this eruption of performance art and theatre because our audience was hungry for new work. I’m not saying audiences in Chile then liked everything they saw, but the curiosity and hunger was strong because the entire society was coming out of a very turbulent and yet deeply repressed time, and as sentient beings they were seeking to gather in theatres to grapple with questions around what the country had endured.

I’m hopeful that we as a field lean into that kind of hunger instead of settling for specious ideas around the bourgeois contempt for political theatre, which has been a real inhibitor for many years for artists in this country. There were formulas we lazily repeated, ideas about how things ‘had’ to work; we accepted as fact that the systems in which we worked were inevitable.

We understand how these systems are not a given. We understand that these systems and structures are weak and brittle. In that breakability there’s limitless possibility. I’m optimistic that as artists we can be part of a social movement towards shattering those brittle, inflexible systems and creating new, supple, fluid, inclusive, open structures.

Maybe we can finally make work where there is deep engagement with other human beings on their own terms and have conversations we enter innocent of and genuinely curious about the outcome as opposed to engaging in conversations which are really just a devious form of marketing in which we – the instigators – knew exactly what we want and are just trying to trick people into thinking there was a genuine give and take. That’s a lie and the kind of lie that’s deadly in the theatre – as opposed to the lie we all accept together in mutual consent because we want to make something beautiful that’s alive and created with reciprocity of feeling. When the lie of theatre is not one of mutuality but of deceit, then it is corrosive. It prevents authentic vulnerability, kills the possibility of breakthrough.

CS What about Cornerstone? Future goals?

MG The only constant at Cornerstone is change. I think our response to the uprising following the murder of George Floyd surfaced some concerns for us about things we had not been talking about as a company quite as deeply as we should....

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Related Titles
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• A poet dreams: Three earth samples
• 1 R/evolution
• 2 Local and hyperlocal
• 3 Virtuality
• 4 Resistance and faith
• 5 Communion
• Note on the Author
• Copyright Page