Jess Drew
THTR 566
August 30, 2012
Class
Notes
·
Jennifer – opened the conversation about Sara’s
post about a group of children (ages 6 – 12) who performed Hanke’s Offending the Audience in Los Angeles.
·
Sara – took place at the Panorama Theatre;
restaging it in a place with an aura of illusion, with children who can’t help
but be children (à la States); the goal of the production was to empathetically
understand Hanke’s piece, but it’s also really funny to see kids using this
language; similar to the Annie piece;
·
Justin – thinking about the typical actors who
get this script, they’re given blank roles and rules (no specific characters),
it’s about un-training the actor - - - get out of your head, so you can make
the audience do the same thing. Perhaps the children automatically become the
listeners or watchers.
·
Ming – I loved the bouncing off the article, re:
Cody, the dog becoming the dog; morality of the dog
·
Cody – ethical issues? He doesn’t agree with States’
earlier discussion of semiotics and linguistics, glad that Sara commented on
what he was saying and let him know that he got it.
·
Ming – the dog being a dog has brought the moral
sensibility to the stage
·
Cody – talks about the States’ argument about Macbeth,
taking away his humanity by making him an image of a hypothetical man out in
the world?
·
Sara – what States’ was emphasizing, in theatre,
the image of the man is more than just an image, he’s an actuality; animals and
kids don’t yet have the skills to obscure that truth, their being-ness comes
through; States says that there is that danger and that is vital; without that
awareness the Hanke piece is not possible.
·
Ellen – expand on your ethical concerns?
·
Cody – issue of consumption, issue of the theatrical
team who are ultimately going to get notoriety because of this child onstage;
namelessness – name of the hypothetical person, doesn’t matter who they are in
reality, in the theatre, they’re just an image; Hanke refutes that – the stage
is and is not the world; he’s very confused about the whole thing
·
Whitney – I responded to Dorothy’s post that the
director’s lying to the girl about sticking with it no matter what; thinking of
Whitmore’s article, perhaps an ideal in early modern times that made kids underdeveloped
creatures; if we’re treating them differently, training them differently in
terms of theatre training, do we see them as cognitively underdeveloped or
neutered?
·
Dorothy – I wasn’t talking about training kids
versus adults; I meant that kids don’t know as much as adults do through the
passage of time; the difference is adults know we’re not supposed to sit down
on the floor and cry, but kids do just
sit down on the floor;
·
Whitney – I went to the place that the director
is feeding the line to the child, different direction to a child versus an
adult
·
Jenna – do we consider kids to be emotionally
incomplete or less formed? what is the difference between the Annie clip kid and the Offending the Audience kids? In States,
when you place kids in a particular context, it makes us ascribe what they’re
feeling – must be humiliated, must just want to try to get through it; different
contexts created different reactions in me
·
Ming – interested in the idea of how we receive
children and how that’s change; I think of them as cognitively underdeveloped;
what are the forces for shaping this? What’s the reason why we want to slap
them if they’re annoying?
·
Amy – someone brought up Toddlers and Tiaras; is there something about the society when
children are being staged? Whitmore is arguing that there is a certain kind of
work they’re unwittingly being asked to do; does that change? Could you do a
present-day Whitmore-ian analysis about where we are?
·
Jenna – Yes? The Annie clip is going to help me - - the annotations on the YouTube clip
say “You’re going to enjoy this! Just you wait!”; this is not just another
precious moment of a precocious child - - - stay watching, don’t get bored!
·
Justin – It overlooks the thought that the
performance would just want to be watched by an audience, and enjoyed
·
Jenna – When you’re depressed, you look at cute
animals online, it’s one of the ways that children are useful!
·
Amy – I will tell them that, certainly!
·
Ellen – there’s a sort of Marxist suspicion
creeping into the conversation; Annie
seems to be very overdetermined, familiar, expectation of virtuosity in
child/dog; also the schadenfreude side where we expect the package coming
apart, where by the leakyness of the package will be part of the pleasure; is
that ethical? How conscious is the pleasure we take on these errors? During a
tech rehearsal of the The Beggar’s Opera
– the couple singing a romantic duet were parted by a Clydesdale who let a
super-long fart rip (seven minutes!); there’s a possibility of free laughter in
that environment, which isn’t possible in front of a child or a dog; let’s
nuance the cognition difference between these creatures, beyond experience or
training; big difference between a dog and a gerbil, or snake; different
animals process audiences differently; exploitation and use; consent is on a
spectrum and meta-theatre/consciouness, but States perhaps didn’t have the
vocab to talk about it yet; not part of the academic conversation at that
point.
·
Amy – one could also dump into the conversation
the kind of categorization on the early modern stage of teenage boys as women,
because they weren’t considered men; biology and cognitive development were not
in the same place as they are now; consent, semiotic excess, precosity, all
these things are not expected are in creatures like the gassy Clydesdale - - -
we imagine the perspective of the horse, and that makes it funny – creating a
theory of the mind of the horse makes it interesting; some of the freak show
stuff in the 18th – 19th century – bringing back of zebras,
pygmies, as unconsenting creatures without the same cognitive development as
the English elite as they discovered them in their “habitat”
·
Dorothy – raises the question of how much we
care about their ability to consent? I was reading about human zoos and how
these two people in 1895 found some random black people in San Francisco after
they found out that the boat with the African people was late; there’s a
generosity in assuming that children can’t consent, different races, or does
their consent have the same power as mine? Or someone else?
·
Whitney – anybody read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel García Márquez? A
smelly dude falls out of the sky, people are initially afraid of him, but store
him in a chicken coop, but he’s then seen as an angel; goes in a corner and
talks about nothing, refusing to buy into being an angel; people stop coming
because they have no way to understand him, no dialogue between them; who are
we as an audience if we’re only interested in images we can be involved in?
Hanke says “No, you don’t get to play, we get to offend you”; so what is the
role of the audience? how can we make them think differently?
·
Ming – deviating from the script, the magic is
broken when the script is deviated from; when stuff goes badly, it becomes
really awkward; deviating is not comfortable
·
Dorothy – the Cage clip makes me wish people
would deviate from “the script”, because if they don’t, they are making the
script incomplete; if you sit silently, you’re stopping the creation of music;
no one ever stands up and screams, but would make this piece maybe more
legitimate and interesting; it’s more pleasant when people don’t know what’s
going on; in Music 101, the prof. performed the piece, and the students are
thoroughly confused; at the end, there’s a moment of “What did you hear?” at
the end, and there’s a conversation; being an audience is not just direct theatre/audience,
but the cultural context of how to act in a theatre, as an audience;
·
Whitney – stand-up comedy treats audiences
differently; I’m so intrigued about how uncomfortable people are when they go
up onstage, even if they’re doing of their own will; the expectation, when we
go to stand-up, is different than what we see in theatre, but we treat it as if
it’s not; maybe the room is set up a particular way, or an expectation that we
are supposed to receive enjoyment and if we don’t we get uncomfortable with
that;
·
Natalie – expectation alone is not all; how is
desire working for the audience; a friend of mine who is an experimental
musician and he gave the audience instruction, and the chance to be a performer
and the chance to feel rebellious and yell, but people ended up making a lot
more sound and he played it to them afterwards; that piece and 344 is
structurally the same, no authority of script, but something about people not
just having the expectation of participating a certain way; we have to remember
to talk about desire and the audience;
·
Ellen – it’s always a challenge to think of an
audience as desiring to participate; maybe they came in with a preconcieved
notion of the performance?
·
Dorothy – I don’t desire for participation, but
I desire meaning; when people in 344 are quiet, I think of a desire to know
what’s going on; the first critique of my senior show was “Was that supposed to
mean something?”;
·
Natalie – what kinds of desire are operating in
audiences? Desire to participate? Friend’s doing this piece, I should help him
out, etc.
·
Ellen – the Cage clip is interesting – played it
on the radio for a trivia contest and the DJ had to assure listeners that the
radio was still working, because people think the radio is broken, dead air;
there’s an interesting idea of consuming practices of symphonic music; to
purchase a copy of that piece (apparently people do – a fully realized score),
to listen to it on the radio versus seeing it are different; they’re not
listening to non-music, they’re feeling like the onus is on them, to pretend my
attention is on the thing that is not happening; there’s a theatricality to the
three section, the audience is performing their own respect for this piece of
avant-garde music; the distinction b/w mediums is very helpful to think how the
practices of the concert hall work; they’ve been more visible to the broad
audience population than the notions of consent;
·
Dorothy – Cage was an alum of my school; the
evolution of listening to 344 - - - not
always so polite, yelling, protesting, leaving the auditorium; I’ve witnessed
people really deeply listening to it; I wonder if interrupting 344 is possible?
or are you adding counter-point to the extant sound? His credo is 13 pages of
poem, in caps;
·
Courtney – State’s point is that newness is
really upsetting (ie: chair on stage); this is a tragic piece, how dare they
put chairs on the stage; audience members learn what’s okay and what’s not;
·
Jennifer – what’s the end goal? What do they
want the audiences to be? There’s one scene where they’re going to perform King Lear – the audience dresses up as
the character they want to be, they get cast, if the audiences don’t like your
performance, they can tell you to leave and replace you; is this their goal?
·
Ellen – do you agree with that reading of Hanke?
He’s a tougher nut to crack than that. That idea of a total lack of separation
b/w actor and audience is part of the 1970’s; tons of performance groups that
embraced precisely that conceit; a happening, all empowered, no hierarchy, no divide,
etc.; that’s now a very predictable avant-garde, and that tells us how far
we’ve gone along the lines of thought that States’ is proposing (though he’s
not as goal-oriented towards the theatre as Hanke); Sara’s video link was very
helpful; performing a manifesto – rhetorical form that’s always already form,
it undoes itself once printed; this whole idea of trying to convey a revolution
in an act of scripted performance is complex in all kinds of rich reasons; I’m
interested in this sense of the complexity; the clip is just awesome for
bringing out this very fraught, vexed, question; what is Hanke’s agenda? these
readings are pointers for your own definitions of performance and of what
you’re looking for in performance, what lights your fire in relation to
performance; Hanke is making a cri de
cœur about what performance should be
·
Cody – he’s charting what he doesn’t want to
see; for me, it was the goal to put the audience on trial, and that was the
real performance; to me, that’d lead into an abyss, maybe that’s what he wants;
he’s trying to break down this wall between stage and audience;
·
Ming – the instructions for the actors I viewed
as a key, legend; there’s nothing you can do to prepare for performance
·
Ellen – so anything that’s prepared for is performance?
·
Ming – or maybe that we’re always preparing for
the performance we’re performing?
·
Amy – the verbs used here in these rules are
insightful because it’s not “enunciate”, “don’t interrupt other actors”, “don’t
skip a line”, “don’t trip on the chair” - - - what are his rules? What is he
asking them to do?
·
Cody – experience, listen, rather than do;
watch, see
·
Whitney – every day stuff, stuff that would
potentially be considered sounds and sights of the every day
·
Courtney – it’s very pop-culture of the 60’s,
70’s
·
Amy – so presumably we could imagine what he
thinks the actors are going to get from that, but why doesn’t he just say what
he wants them to have gotten from all of this?
·
Jennifer – doesn’t States make a point about us
analyzing our imagining of plays versus just seeing one? Maybe that’s more
effective to imagine it?
·
Amy – there’s a real kind of staged manifesto
that he’s hoping that the actors stage by and with themselves, prior to then
doing this; in a way, it’s saying “I can write what I want theatre to be, so I
want you to have an experience.”; acting with a chair on the stage is radically
different (both watching and doing) than not; there’s something profoundly central
about having an embodied experience that exceed what he’s capable of
articulating in some diatribe about what it can and should be
·
Jenna – it related to a section where the
performers talk to the audience about it’d be better if you were standing,
watching this performance; you mentally process your space, how you inhabit
that;
·
Derek – pg. 18 – 19 in Hanke “People enjoy...”,
“Standing you would be more individual...you would give in to fewer illusions”;
that section struck me and made me think about how, in early June, I saw “Henry
V” at the Globe in London, and I was standing for that performance; not an
epiphany, but it was hugely different from reading “Henry V” or seeing a film
of “Henry V”; it was uncomfortable - - I was standing for a really long time,
shifting my weight, I noticed the people around me, had to move to see around
people; it was a different experience from any other theatrical experience I
had prior; I could imagine how in the early 17th century you could
have people in the pit yelling back at the actors; the actor playing Henry
directed his lines to us a lot; when it started to rain, he actually worked it
in to the performance, he worked in the rain that was falling on us; it was a
crazy moment for me, to have that experience;
opposing the theatre more resolutely, being of two minds - - this
reminds me of Brecht, where you’re not trapped in an illusionary world onstage,
but you’re able to look at it from a critical distance;
·
Ellen – did other people find an overlap between
Brecht and Hanke? Artaud and Hanke?
·
Justin – Brecht and Hanke; there’s something
beyond the performance, after you leave, put what you saw into action;
phenomenological ruptures that makes you think, afterwards I can be socially
active, politically engaged; Hanke – break those audience rules to take this
experience out in the world with you
·
Derek – Hanke frames this as a prologue – this
will come before everything you do from here on out
·
Amy – are there ways in which he’s
echoing/deploying Artaudian tactics?
·
Andrea – I saw the experiential element of this,
see this, communicate in your performance – that comes more from Artaud for me;
it’s not just like Brecht, where you’re conditioned to make a choice about an
idea;
·
Amy – to be offended is not to dispassionately
make a vote, there is a way that you’re agitating them to some kind of action;
one point Derek made about ways in which theatrical spaces are built to create
certain reactions in audiences; Shakespeare or Aeschylus didn’t write for those
audiences, Hanke wrote for people who wanted to be comfy; the power of the
performance space is insisting/requiring the audience’s performance;
necessitates some reactions and forestalling others; when Henry is agitating
the audience at the Globe, the audience is already standing, must have
terrified the anti-theatricalists; very different in a proscenium space;
·
Ellen – Brecht, pg. 34 – “Values of all...” –
this sense of the apparatus driving the content is very central to Hanke’s
premise; in that way, he’s ferociously Brechtian. Any ways he breaks from
Brecht?
·
Ming – taking offense is a norm-dependent thing;
I saw the apparatus as a structure of norms; what that detracts/takes away; the
entire business of judging/controlling habits is norm-dependent;
·
Cody – apparatus are dependent on structures;
the idea of Hanke saying “You Nihlists, etc.”, it was very relevant to that
idea - - - norms are relative to the dominant structures of the time, relevant
to class, race, etc.
·
Dorothy – the dominant social constructs and how
they get destructed in these communities where people would be aware of Brecht
and his ilk; in experimental music school, you acquire a lack of offendedness
because of the apparatus you’re a part
of; it becomes rebellious when someone sings a Mozart aria versus masturbating
onstage; what about when people cease being offended? there’s an assumption
that people can be offended, and I’m not sure that’s a valid one;
·
Natalie – the phenomenology is connected to
these structures, these apparatuses; there are other bodily comportments that
go with them that make them offensive;
·
Courtney – Hanke sets up before the curtains are
opened, but it’s only going to work for audiences once, and most might know
what they’re in for already
·
Ellen – brings up “culinary”; hard to bring up
what Brecht is critiquing in Mahoghanny,
an avant-garde opera – it’s avant-garde-ness is too tasty for a consuming
public; that’s the risk of any manifesto - - by the time we appreciate it in
our apparatus, it’s lost what’s really offended us, grabs at our skin; it’s
become classic; it’s always hard to maintain or recuperate that; would Brecht
say Hanke is instantly culinary, or is there some aspect of the work that he
would have thought meets his standards? He doesn’t compliment anyone but Helene
Weigel, I think.
·
Natalie – talks about Shaw as a playwright
generally, not specific plays or performances.
·
Jenna – I had a lot of trouble staying attentive
when it was repetitive, a change would happen, then it would become repetitive.
·
Kelly – fighting this whole trance thing - - -
if I was watching, I would probably shut down; maybe that was the brilliance of
having kids do it, you can’t shut down while they do it
·
Cody – was struck by similarity of Hanke piece
to Beckett’s Not I
·
Sara – Hanke acknowledges the fact you’re
checking out; use your boredom to educate you in your own passivity, à la
Artaud;
·
Courtney – you figured it out! – Hanke
·
Dorothy – all this stuff, in reading it, makes
me think of Robert Ashley, a musician; I have read scores that are like this,
and there are a lot of them; Beckett gets used all the time for music pieces
that are performance/theatre pieces; it’s interesting to me the idea of
repetition of blanking out and not getting it, because you’re getting
“not-getting it”; primacy of words over sounds?
·
Ellen – language as sound? States; Not I’s requirement of ejecting
inappropriately dressed audience members before the show - - it’s so awesome!
It brings out, like the Cage performance, the idea of performing as an
audience; discomfort; if that is never an objective that can be achieved, not dividing
actor and audience, it does something at least as potent; the normal
expectations are being put under examination here; the point of avant-garde –
questioning, re-evaluating the norms coming out of the theatrical apparatus;
forcing audiences to re-evaluate their consent;
·
Justin – I hated it six years ago, but I
appreciate it now;
·
Jenna – do audiences realize that people give up
their time in seeing theatre?
·
Cody – the actor is also giving up their time,
too, by being in theatre
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