The public wanders through a collection of rooms, each with a different performance, exhibit, reading, meeting, game, discussion. Their experience is not fixed. They wander without moorings, the way a curious reader meanders through the pages of a magazine, not knowing what they’re searching for.
What if we define values, principles, and methodologies, resisting the pressure to define outcomes? What if we focus on what drives us and on how we want to live and work together, but leave the imagination open to the concrete shapes our collaboration can take?
It is raw, it is real, it is happening with you in the room and can only be experienced in the “here and now.” It is open to a multiplicity of heres and nows depending on the realities, perceptions, localities... of those present.
We have to do better to offer arts programs in under-resourced schools. We have to do better to offer arts programs in communities of color. We have to do better in the future. But how are we doing better now?
Can we compose a performance that sails to you across a virtual arc, like these words, with the harp vibration of a telegraph, and no risk of contagion? How do we shrink this microscopic stage?
It is possible to imagine this room, because you have been in it before.
This landscape offers things up to you – and your body takes its place among them. Rest for a moment. You do not need to make anything appear; so much is already here, and you are not even close to being in control.
Use sticks from the wings to tip over glasses of water. Tug at strings to pull out chairs for ghosts. Be in the building but NEVER be seen, no part of us.
I’m a playwright by trade, and like Wainwrights and Shipwrights, in this modern world Playwrights are pretty useless. It is a dying art. Seriously disrupted.
Our theatre languages – not one, but many – will reflect the myriad visual, physical, social, musical and storytelling lives of our place and time, in the local vernaculars.