Post 8: Time
Well, we’ve certainly had the long and
the short of it this week, huh? Sigh. So many dad jokes, so little…time. Sorry.
Let’s palate cleanse with a little Pink Floyd:
Our readings this week dealt with short
form plays, long form theater/performance art, and the concept of memory as
attached to theatrical performance. It was an interesting week of reading,
because it forced us to think about the value we place on the length and weight
of the performances we consider theater. Can 140 characters really be
considered a play? Can a concerto that takes 635 years to perform seriously be
considered music? What if the title of the concerto is “Ode to Erica?” And how
do we as artists deal with the inevitability that all performances fall prey to
the jaws of time: every utterance of every show happens only once and is then
lost to memory, regaled or forgotten depending upon the impact it had on that
particular audience. Maybe it’s best summarized by Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
who wrote in The Little Prince, “It is the time you have wasted for your
rose that makes your rose so important.”
If brevity is indeed the soul of wit, as
Shakespeare put forth, then one wonders what the bard himself would have
thought of Twitter plays. I have to admit, my initial reaction was a roll of
the eyes and a reach for the glass of wine on the kitchen table. I wondered if
these things were really an art form or merely an exercise for writers. When,
on the second page of 140 Characters in Search of a Theater, John Muse
asks the question, “Does reading [Twitter] updates in private count as
attending a play?” I screamed into the ether, “NO!!!!” But he does make a
compelling case for the necessity of writers and artists to embrace the
technological advances of the day in an effort to reach an audience of more
than blue-haired rich people who can afford Broadway plays. Twitter provides a
venue in which writers can spread their stories out among many different
formats. It can be used as a marketing tool, as Next To Normal did, it
can be a one-off avant-garde inspired forum for one-tweet plays, or it can be
home for long form storytelling, as in Jeremy Gable’s The 15th Line. As
Gable himself states in the supplemental reading, “A Twitter play is not an
interruption of the audience’s life, but a companion that happens alongside
their life.” Meaning, one doesn’t have to take time out to go and sit in a
theater, but can experience the story as something that is folded into the
everyday actions of one’s life. Twitter is indeed a form of stage, playing to
an audience no less real than one in a theater. It makes you think about the
possibilities. Like Punchdrunk did with Sleep No More, what would it
mean to devise a play that ranges from Twitter to Snapchat to Facebook to
Match.com…how many digital platforms could you use to tell a compelling and
affecting play?
Our second reading, Jonathan Kalb’s Great
Lengths, veers in the opposite direction from the Twitter plays. Durational
theater pieces devised by the group Forced Entertainment, which aim not to
construct a traditional “play” experience, but rather a long form event that
has no real narrative and desires to break free of the “tyranny of the theatre
economy.” The moment that resonated the most for me in Kalb’s writing was when
he talks about the effect of experiencing Quizoola! as being reminiscent
of “living through an entire life in a single day.” The idea that these long
form works of theater are designed to test both audience and performer,
exploding traditional forms of theatricality in a way that forces you to focus
simply on the life unfolding onstage in front of you. The people behind Forced
Entertainment view the audience as a witness, believing that what happens on
stage is slightly less important than the fact that we come together to observe
that it has happened at all.
Finally, we read Alexsandra Wolska’s
article, Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance. If Twitter
plays had me reaching for the wine, this article had me climbing into the
bottle. “…to retrieve performance from transience and other derivative
categories of loss, we need to reckon with the notion of time, for ‘only
through time time is conquered.’”
The chord this article struck with me,
and which synthesized all of the readings this week, is the
idea that we as actors spend so much
of our artistic pursuits grappling with time: tightening a moment here, adding
breath and space to a moment there, honoring a beat, a pause, a silence…so on
and so forth. All the while knowing that once that curtain comes down and the
audience leaves, the performance is over. Never to be recreated in exactly the
same way again. We may be the stuff that dreams are made on, but we are
temporary nonetheless, strutting our hour upon the stage and then we are gone.
But as the Rube Goldberg performance underlines, it’s not about how long or
short the show is, it’s about the struggle to perform the show at all that
gives it life.
So. Your prompt for this week is
twofold:
Step
1) Write your own 140 character Twitter play that centers around a character
losing something. It must involve at least one line of dialogue.
Step
2) Discuss the idea of length in a piece of art that you admire.
Something that goes outside the accepted idea of what is appropriate. This can
be a play with an unusually long silence, a song that is either extremely long
or short but that you love, or even a painting that exceeds the bounds of what
you would normally think art should be. Crunch on the importance of length in
art and theater.
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