I have tried quite a number of blogging adventures over the years. Perhaps on the order of six different blogs. Several have been creative writing, a few have been(or started out as) wholly anonymous endeavors. This current iteration is interesting, but I am finding I have trouble engaging with my work in the manner that I do on this site. Ultimately I am trying to work out various aesthetic issues on the different projects I am working on. Of course there is some degree of simply reporting on what I do. But mostly this has been for me to explore, look at and work through issues that I find myself facing in my work.
All art has a tendency to get trapped in styles. While I find that current modes of theatrical production do make for some wonderful engaging and quite beautiful work from time to time, too often it falls short of the mark. Some of the problem is technological. Theatre does not yet have adequate technology to reflect the technologically advanced world we live in. This often comes down to using video or talking on cell phones, which tends to be a reductionist approach, but that is a separate post. Too often the use of technology is something other than the text. The production is a play with technology, rather than a work infused with technology.
I have seen glimmers and outbreaks of the possibilities of technology but nothing conclusive. I am hesitant to say that Theatre is a mode of artistic creation that falls short of fully engaging the contemporary world, but it is a possibility that one must entertain. This is nothing to do with theatre being ‘dead’ or ‘deadly’ or ‘dying.’ This is a fact that our modes of discourse are so radically different than they were not even twenty years ago that the theatre has not fully absorbed this. The changes are not such that they necessitate putting cellphones and laptops on stage. This can work but it is not necessary.
More than anything we are witnessing a transformation in our ways of seeing. The basic core mode of utilizing vision for information gathering has transformed. We are moving away from discursive language to a language of symbols. Rather than letters and words and sentences being our sole means of gathering information, we now have pictures, emoticons and so on. In a way we are getting much closer to a language that resembles mediaeval times where bible stories were told in stained glass windows rather than through reading of books. Diamond Age imagines a future world where language has become almost totally imagistic, at least for a certain class of society. This is very close to our contemporary world and something worth exploring.
Too often I see plays where the only concern is solely the placing on bodies in space. This is an important if not primary element of play making. But in an increasingly visual and symbolic world, it seems reductive and lazy to ignore the larger visual stage picture. The body must exist within a larger context in order to make sense. A complex of symbolic networks must be erected around and through the body for it to fully exist on the stage.
Some of why I am strongly attracted to Opera and Dance as mediums is that choreographers and Opera directors tend to have a stronger sense of visual symbolism. Some of the issue might lie in the literality of language. Words lend themselves to a kind of specificity that might overlook other modes of discourse. In the end words on their own can not encompass the entirety of the situation, so they are spoken by a living human being whose body interacts with the words. This body must needs exist in some context. To ignore the importance of that context leaves out a necessary element to contemporary theatre making.
How this relates to the current form of my blogging endeavors I am not quite sure. The two may be parallel issues not necessarily related. Perhaps they are the same thing. I wonder at times if in the end I am simply a conceptual lighting designer, that the plays I do are elucidations of what I write here. After all, if I say “imagine a sunrise” I have perhaps created a stronger image in the mind than any combination of lights could create. Light is at once filled with meaning and meaningless. It is everything and nothing. Everywhere and nowhere. The true identity and the blogger persona are simultaneously true and diametrically opposed. Wave and particle.
Perhaps a blank stage with worklight is the most contemporary thing we can do.
Perhaps the future is broken.
