Blog 3 Summary Post

My apologies for the tardiness of this summary post. The FSU/LSU exchange sucked up much of my energy and time, though it was well worth the effort, I think. Onward:

Mike recalls a bravura performance by Dame Judi Dench (in David Hare’s Amy’s View) that leads him to conclude that “you can only be so real on stage before it starts to get in the way of story. Yes, we strive for naturalistic truth under imaginary circumstances, but always in such a way that the story is being faithfully served. In the case of the scene from Amy's View, the best way to illustrate the "realness" of the scene was to set it in a way that was actually less than real.”

Emily shares the creeps with her discussion of Slenderman, creepypasta (a scary version of copypasta—“copy paste” material that gets recirculated via social media), and “Ritual Pasta.” Worth a look—if you dare.

Austin shares an immersive (and gruesome) production of Macbeth, where the rape/murder of Macduff’s family (wife and infant) takes place off stage. The murderers then invite the audience to view the remains. This is a different kind of wink, playing into our sick desire to see (scopophilia). Creepy in a whole different way.

Erica shares an “exercise” from one of her old professors that, well, confirms every negative stereotype of bad acting teachers, specifically the kind that can’t distinguish “traumatic experience” from “authentic learning experience.” I have a good amount of cynicism toward the pedagogical models of the “break you down/shatter you” variety. I have even more cynicism toward the kind of bullying (with added racist/jingoist overtones) on display in that exercise. Blech. So sorry you had to endure that, Erica. Definitely the wrong kind of “real” for an acting class.

Andréa provides a similarly disturbing experience (though she was watching instead of participating). Soooo many acting techniques like that (especially bastardized method-esque ones) seem indistinguishable from psychological abuse. BDSM has better safety measures. Again note the romanticizing of trauma/abuse as “real”; the fact that the actors involved both seemed appreciative of the exercise doesn’t assuage my discomfort (what else are you gonna tell your respected acting teacher in the moment?). I just had the undergrads in the collaboration touchstone class read this article about the years of abuse that went unreported at Chicago’s (now defunct) Profiles Theatre. and even praised under the guise of gritty realness. I want them equipped to be killjoys when presented with any kind of exercise or process like that. Ugh. (But then, maybe I’m missing something. I made the choice early on not to go the route of “professional actor,” so perhaps I know not of which I speak. What do you all think about the gritty/abusive/real discourse in acting training?)

I highly recommend Sarah’s post on Exhibit B, which (as she writes) has generated a great deal of controversy. On the one hand, it seems to replicate the scopophilic, objectifying “black bodies on display at the behest of white people” that it ostensibly wants to critique. The staging, however, often finds ways to subvert the normal, “powerful spectator standing aloof from powerless subject” dynamic in, well, most of culture and history. The bodies stare back, reversing the gaze, refusing spectators the privilege of “I’m just watching.” Now, regarding the larger “so what?” factor…there’s an ongoing debate. It’s tricky to take sides without discounting either the don’t-you-know-better/did-you-have-to-do-this of the director or the agency of the performers (many of whom have, as Sarah points out, vocally criticized the critics). I have a friend (Megan Lewis, herself from South Africa) who has written specifically about this project.

Lisa’s post on Dog and Pony’s Beertown provides a great talkthrough of the power and pitfalls of immersive/interactive performance. How lucky to encounter them—and in Omaha of all places. Dog and Pony had a residency here at LSU a few years ago. I think there was some excitement at the thought of students being inspired enough to devise and stage their own interactive events. This hasn’t happened, though. Why do you suppose that is? How might LSU better encourage such interactive productions?

Osi writes about a couple of different experiences, from War of the Worlds (the original radio broadcast) to a production of Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity which seems to have crossed the line from “representing rejoicing” to “actually rejoicing” in a cool way. She also shares a story of a friend of hers getting a little too into Bald Soprano by Ionesco. (If you’ve not read it, I recommend taking a gander; it’s a lot of fun.) Funnily enough I have something of a similar story about that play from a friend of mine. Playing one of the dreary-boring couples at the beginning, exchanging dreary-boring dialogue, he and his partner onstage looped back a page or two, repeating a significant amount of the scene—and they didn’t notice until the stage manager told them about it after the play. Power of theatre!

Dharmik presents an alternative (encouraging in my mind) to the quasi-abusive acting classes others have written about. In his story, the teacher recognizes that the student was going too far (for her) and stopped the exercise. Dharmik presses a bit further, though (to his credit), asking about performance art. As we know, a number of performance artists seize on and lean into that uncomfort zone between “reality” and “illusion,” actually injuring themselves. How different is that, Dharmik muses, from definitely-not-just-performing acts of suicide protest (self-immolation)? There’s a lot of intriguing work being done on this kind of performance art. Kyra Smith (PhD student here at LSU) has researched some of it.

Finally (of course, it’s only finally in terms of the order I read the posts in)—Mark shares a couple of intriguing stories. For anyone who thinks Come Back Little Sheba is too quaint to “work,” Mark relates how in one performance an audience member jumped up to stop the actor playing the husband from chasing after his (the character’s) wife. I’m very curious what the performers did. As Mark says, “the show’s attending context was one big infrastructural wink”—a signal that most audience members get. No such winks assuaged the weirdness of Mark’s other story, hearing a baby’s cry from a baby that turned out to be a fake, a prop/tool intended to “teach” youngsters the trials of parenting. Mark reflects on how this attempt backfired, noting that “72 hours of disturbed sleep and agreeably roughing it with an occasionally noisome chunk of silicon doesn't paint an accurate portrait of the sustained involvement a flesh and blood baby requires.”

Good work, all! I look forward to your responses to Andréa’s post prompt.