Month: July 2012

I am repeating regularly these days that I am through with theater. I thought I’d see a couple of plays here at the Festival d’Avignon and then decide for myself whether this position is justified. Avignon has the reputation for programming the best theater of Europe. A reputation that turns out to be mostly unfounded.

I’ve seen four pieces here of which three turned out to be very poor. Yesterday I walked out of both plays that I had for that day, of which the first was boring as fuck and the second piss poor (see the Guardian about La Mouette) and without English surtitles¹. This from a festival that deems itself an international theater festival, where international means the rest of the world is allowed to cater to a French audience.

I think I am allowed to judge theater because I have seen a ton of theater (most of which poor) and critically I am rather close to one of the Netherlands’ leading theater critics. Added to that my media consumption is not that of the geriatric theater audience. My current point of view increasingly is that things that are not interactive are more or less broken.

The discipline of theater is changing, but not quickly enough. The current European funding cuts will be good in so far as they expedite change. There are some things things that still work in plays:

• Large scale plays by some well-known European auteur-directors (Luk Perceval, Kornél Mundruczó, Johan Simons, Theu Boermans, Gisèle Vienne) who break new ground and stage interesting treatments of old and new plays and draw large audiences. Figuring out who these are at any point in time is the difficult part. I have been pleased with what I’ve seen and heard of the names above.
• Performances such as musical theater, opera, dance or regular theater with music integrated add a much needed liveliness and reduce boredom for audiences that are used to sophisticated media mixes. Most music will have an effect, but here too you see famous electronic musicians combine with the directors above: Sun O))) with Gisèle Vienne, Ben Frost with Falk Richter, Junkie XL with Ivo van Hove.
• Mixed media is underused in almost all plays, but when done well it achieves dramatic parity with the actors. Projections are only one form and much more work needs to be done still in this area. Traditional directors are however very squeamish when it comes to time-based media and computerization of stagecraft.

I will be far more reticent in visiting theater from now on. I have enough to do not to spend my money to rid myself of free time.

1. I tried to get my money back to no avail. The English website does not list a language for the play which obviously means it is in French. Obviously. [↩]

Ever since the recent re-enactment of Hamlet by Luk Perceval, I have wanted to see something by the Hamburg Thalia theater. Last year I saw Luk Perceval stage Disgrace at TA which was a good display by itself, but still the Thalia remained elusive.

Yesterday night then finally, I saw Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns at the Festival d’Avignon in the courtyard of a French Lycée. A play treating the world financial crisis based on a recent text by Elfride Jelinek. This is a topic whose absurdity and scale are still baffling and which has not seemed to reach a reasonable conclusion, even though everybody thought things would change (read this interview of an employee of a ratings agency by Joris Luyendijk).

Instead of a headlong approach that bored us to death (like Ten Billion), yesterday’s ensemble was very well aware of the challenges brought forth by such a complex theme and a vague but terse text by Jelinek. We were encouraged by Nicolas Stemann to step in and out during the play to get a drink at the bar in the garden. That made the entire ordeal of three and a half hours rather bearable.

The play progressed through all the stages we have gone through with the financial system. The naiveté, the promises made, the excuses, the horror at capital evaporating, the shamelessness and reach-arounds, the hope of a united Europe, the anger, so much anger.

The actors perform pornographic routines, confidence tricks, laments and lullabies. They tell us that we didn’t have a lot of money but that it did make them so happy when it burned. That our insecurity is their security. That they don’t know what to make from the flesh of our children. Shall they turn it into sausages? That the money may come back but that it will be too small to recognize. That it may come back to somebody else. That the most important part of making money is believing. That we need to keep the faith. We have to believe. That that is what is important about money.

We, the audience, have to sing that we are all so very individual. We sing that the rest of us is the bank. There is more music. Post-rock instrumental soundscapes combine with chorals lyricizing about the state of our finances. Gainsbourg’s song turned into: J’achète. Non, je n’achète rien. Heal the banks, make them a better place, for you and for me and the entire European race. That may be the best summary of the play: it is an elongated Ne me quitte pas for the capital that has forsaken us.

At the beginning along with introductions we are given a countdown very similar to the progress indicators in ebooks. It starts at 99 and shows the number of pages left in the script. This was a very useful aid to pace visits to the bar with. At the end of it those who have sticked around —with some pride for having accomplished that— have witnessed a tour de force that makes twisted sense of the capitalist experience.

I just went to see “The Coming Storm” at the Festival d’Avignon. In an interesting open setup, bits and pieces of stories are performed by the ensemble who continually interrupt each other. While one actor is telling a story the others perform variety like diversions using props, music and each other.

The stories initially do carry some novelty and absurdity and are performed adequately. After a while unfortunately they become repetitious and there isn’t a lot funny about them (though the easily excitable French audience seemed to disagree). Half an hour before the end I concluded that this was the tritest thing I’d seen on stage in years without any hope for salvation. That was €22 and an hour of free time wasted.

In the performance “Ten Billion” at La Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon Stephen Emmott, a scientist, performed a soliloquy about the state of the world and the environment. He took a message we already have known since the Club of Rome and rehashed that in front of a theater audience over the course of ninety minutes.

Standing in a reproduction of a contemporary scientist’s office, Emmott did a reasonable Al Gore impersonation. He monotoned a large barrage of numbers supplemented by custom projections with moving graphics and graphs. The entire thing was put together to a high standard but that did not prevent it from devolving into a standard university lecture. Emmott stood there saying mostly: “Look at me. Aren’t my numbers big!?”

The performer started by disclaiming that he is not an actor but a scientist. That needn’t be a big problem. For this kind of non-fiction presentation having actual knowledge about the topic is much more valuable than any kind of acting skills you could bring to the table. The piece then only came alive in those moments where Emmott made some off the cuff remarks or recounted a personal experience. Techniques from page zero of Presentation Zen that weren’t used (intentionally?).

Targeting this kind of broad audience, it turns out it is altogether too easy to fall into the trap of patronization. ‘We may not have heard’ some things, discounting that we may have and simply reached different conclusions about them. I’m not detracting from the truth or importance of the message presented. In the Q&A afterwards some people influenced by Russian propaganda in fact disagreed. This is a message that bears repeating, but for those that already know it, this play does not offer anything new. Scaremongering does not seem the best way to get people to act where earlier scaremongering has failed.

I have been thinking about the possibilities of collapse and thrivability myself recently and I came upon this model by Venkatesh Rao that I think very effectively captures many of the things we are trying to do with society. Faced with uncertainty, the most rational outcome is to create social/economic structures that feed on that uncertainty to become more resilient. I agree with Emmott that many of the global systems currently are too fragile, but that is a solvable problem.

Emmott himself discussed the two solutions in the top quadrants: behaviour change (the Spore narrative) and technological progress (the Hydra narrative). He dismissed both rather summarily. So the play consists of presenting an audience somewhat convincingly with a well-known fact and then not giving them an actionable solution. All this in the hope that people will be so disconcerted that they will become wholesale activists when they get home.

This seems something of a leap of faith to me stemming from a partial understanding of the underlying problems. Emmott said that he did not know why people faced with these insurmountable truths do nothing. Current thinking on cognitive theory, communications and behavioural economics quite competently explains this behaviour. If you ignore that, you may well throw up your hands into the air and reach the conclusion Emmott reaches (the Dark Euphoria narrative): that anything we attempt right now will either not work or be too late.

I’m an optimist myself out of necessity, but not a ‘rational optimist’ as described by Emmott. I count on the pools of irrational illegibility both in the world’s systems and future developments to work together cushioned by social measures and capitalist balancing of supply and demand. When talking about Hydras we are not talking about purely technological solutions (that are indeed easy to dismiss), but about a complex set of systems in media, politics, science, technology and the arts that work together in blind concert to deal with system problems. It may not be pleasant, but it is too early for despair.