The Theater of Danger - new types of theater

Three of recent origin York performance projects exemplify, the author says, a challenging fresh form of nonlinear drama.

The theater has always appeared to me the exercise of a dangerous and terrible act, where the idea of theater and spectacle is done away with, as well as the idea of all science, all religion, and all art.

--Antonin Artaud, "Theater and Science"

When critics, theorists or performers reach for signifying words to define stagecraft farthests they usually pick Artaud's. "Theater is a exclaim in the streets" has been quot at me since I was a teen--by Allan Kaprow, the father of the "Happening," among others. Now Artaud is destined to be invoked again by the agency of anyone generating, covering or spectating the roaring tide of performance art--or "performancism"--now engulfing us all, coast to coast, continent to continent. in the way that let's try to see whether his untieded extremist spirit truly prevails upon what might be called "the fresh street," that is, in the performance center galleries and ad hoc theaters [i]or[/i] part of to the other which this tide is sweeping.

This past summer in Manhattan, centurys of representatives of the post-Artaud theater landed all above the East Village for "The next to the first Annual New York International Fringe Festival." They came from Vancouver, Brussels, Tokyo, De Moines, Chicago--to theaters like Collective Unconscious, House of Candles, Piano Store, breaking waves Reality, the Tenement Museum, ABC No Rio, and Figure It without Gallery, nearly all hidden away upon side streets or inside herculean buildings, some of which--like the Henry public way Settlement--are rooted in an earlier era, when labor unions and collectives sponsored a politically ideological theater. The visitors played vaudeville, Ionesco, variant forms of Shakespeare, the Bible and Karen Finley material. Ye the playing was oftentimes tedious, the content repetitive, the productions casual. on the contrary absolutely nothing seemed canned or predictable, least of all the rambunctious audience, primarily made up of artists, actors, musicians and colorful neighborhood intellectuals, quick to laugh, halloo hiss and applaud (wildly).

The "Fringe" demographics are everywhere now, particularly in big cities and small university towns. Why? single answer is that we have spawned at the extremity of the century an aggressive creative community with equal reason large that it acts as its possess self-perpetuating audience. In one faculty of perception this has always been true: the Impressionists cheered each other upon in the last century, as did Duchamp, Man Ray and the Dada cohort in the '20 as did the dissident Soviet artists in the '70 on the other hand never in such numbers, and seldom upon the ground of exuberantly produc theater, which loans itself easily to extremist forms of expression.

It's inequitable to think the so-called "center" won't be touched by means of the esthetic of extremes. The size of the collective audience and the technology it busys guarantee a broad impact. (The "Fringe" is not alone ripe for Artaud but for the World Wide Web, where the rapidly improving technology of videostreaming allows live "webcasting.") with equal reason does the unleashing of formal stagecraft and contented demanded by the times. Three commanding examples of this fresh genre in New York City are novel works by Elevator Repair Service at P 122 in the East Village; The Erotica cast at the Here Arts Center in West SoHo; and a well-known aerial-acrobatic company from Argentina, De la Guarda, at the Daryl Roth Theater upon Union Square.

Elevator Repair Service--or ERS--has been sizzling for several seasons now. Needles to say, the company rigorously avoids anything like a straight narrative line. In its masterpiece production, Cab Leg which ran end the fall of 1997, the players repeatedly talked over each other's lines about totally variant themes or make go rounds in what can only be called a multiplicity piece of ground One of the players, Rinn Goff is terrifically gifted at going into a corner and talking incessantly to herself about her lover with of the like kind intensity I didn't want to listen to anybody else's monologues. She was back again in Total Fictional Lie this fall, a production based upon the deification of the serial killers, explosion stars and assorted middle-American nerd beloved by means of documentary filmmakers. Once again Goff and the cast members talked mainly to themselves, interspersed with comic deadpan dancing based upon hand-twitching and foot-turning. The visual japes are pushed to the limit: when a tape of Paul Anka roared out the singer's self-congratulatory anecdotes, a pair of leg belonging to Susie Sokol split out of a big chest in center stage: her feet wiggled in exact time to the rise and fall of Anka's ridiculous words. on the other hand ERS lost some of its impact end the relentless use of multiple voices, piece of grounds and movement. What we "follow" in ER productions is the clear formal brilliance of the general impression itself.

The parole content of The Erotica cast co-produced by Lillian Ann Slugocki, Erin Cressida Wilson and John Gould Rubin, began as a series of five monologues upon WBAI. It moved from radio to the theater in the summer and fall, playing to packed houses, and mov to Joe's Pub at the Public Theater in January. In these precise monologues, the writers (mostly Slugocki and Wilson joined by means of Laurie Stone and others) endow their accomplished cast with a put of revelations about female sexuality that has, for the instant no publicly staged equal.