Contemporary Theatre and Its Diversity

1. Contemporary Theatre and Its Diversity

2. The years since the late 1960s have been noteworthy for challenging dominant cultural standards and demanding the diversity of American society not only be acknowledged but also accepted and celebrated. • Efforts have been made to open mainstream theatres to plays about groups (African American, Asian American, Latino or Hispanic American, Native American, women, gays and lesbians, and others) previously marginalized or ignored and also to establish theatres to give these groups their own voice.

3. Alternative Theatre Groups • In the 1960s, the Living Theatre, more than any other organization, epitomized rebellion against established authority in all of its aspects: values, behavior, language, dress, theatrical conventions.

4. Alternative Theatre Groups • Founded in New York in 1946 by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, it was originally devoted to poetic drama but during the 1950s was influenced increasingly by Brecht, Artaud, and anarchist theory. • The most extreme of the Living Theatre’s pieces was Paradise Now.

5. Alternative Theatre Groups • It began with actors circulating among the spectators, denouncing strictures on freedom (to smoke marijuana, travel without a passport, to go nude in public, and the like). • Thereafter during the performance, both spectators and actors roamed the auditorium and stage indiscriminately; many removed their clothing and some smoked marijuana – in other words, many of the strictures they denounced were defied.

6. Alternative Theatre Groups • Actors provoked some spectators into voicing opposition and then overrode them, often by shouting obscenities or even spitting them; at the end, the company sought to move the audience into the streets to continue the revolution begun in the theatre.

7. Alternative Theatre Groups • Its aggressive behavior, combined with its anarchistic politics, won the Living Theatre enormous notoriety and called attention to several challenges to long-accepted theatrical conventions, especially those that distinguished the fictional from the real: They treated space and time as real; actors played themselves rather than characters; actors wore their own clothing instead of costumes; the subject matter, political and social issues of the day, was pursued through improved confrontations rather than through predetermined text.

8. Alternative Theatre Groups • Continued assaults on the conversations of polite behavior, and the inability of authorities to prevent violations, gained tolerance of behavior previously considered unacceptable. • Nudity and obscenity first came to Broadway in 1968 in the musical Hair, a good-natured plea for tolerance of alternative lifestyles.

9. Alternative Theatre Groups • Although the most radical, the Living Theatre was not the only group seeking to change society through theatre. • Among these, two of the most effective were the Bread and Puppet Theatre (founded in 1961), which used both actors and giant puppets to enact parables that denounced war and the futility of materialism, and the San Francisco Mime Theatre (founded in 1966), which performed satirical pieces promoting civil rights, equality for women, and various other causes.

10. Poor and Environmental Theatres • All of these groups had limited resources. Most never controlled a theatre and had to perform wherever they could. They were what Jerzy Grotowski, director or the Polish Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw, Poland, called “poor” theatres, Grotowski also made his own a poor theatre, nor out of necessity but out of conviction.

11. Poor and Environmental Theatres • Grotowski hoped in his way to rediscover the essence of theatre. Eventually, he concluded that only two elements are essential: the actor and the audience. • Because of the actor’s central role in performance Grotowski devoted much of his attention to actors training.

12. Poor and Environmental Theatres • He coupled intensive physical exercises with training designed to remove the performer’s psychological inhibitions; he also sought to develop the actor’s voice as an instrument capable of exceeding all normal demands.

13. Poor and Environmental Theatres • Grotowski concentrated on creating spatial relationships among spectators and actors that would permit the audience to interact unselfconsciously. • For The Constant Prince, in which the title character patiently accepts mistreatment and suffering, the theatre was arranged so that all of the spectators looked down into a space that resembled a hospital teaching theatre where, as Grotowski put it, psychic surgery takes place.

14. Poor and Environmental Theatres • Grotowski viewed the theatre as the modern equivalent of a tribal ceremony. • During the late 1960s, Grotowski became a major influence on theatre in Europe and America. • His influence was further disseminated through his book Towards a Poor Theatre (1968).

15. Poor and Environmental Theatres • The Open Theatre (1963-1974), based in New York and headed by Joseph Chaikin, was also a “poor” theatre. • Above all, Chaikin was concerned with “transformation” – a constantly shifting reality in which the same performer assumes and discards roles or identities as the context changes.

16. Poor and Environmental Theatres • The Open Theatre scripts, which sought to reveal fundamental moral and social patterns buried beneath troubling contemporary events or preoccupations, usually evolved in its workshops in close collaboration with its playwrights.

17. Poor and Environmental Theatres • One of the Open Theatre’s most successful collaboration was with Jean-Claude van Itallie on The Serpent, in which the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and of Adam and Eve and other biblical events to suggest that God is a force that sets limits on our behavior and that the Serpent is a force that tempts us to breach those limits.

18. Poor and Environmental Theatres • In 1968, Richard Schechner, having examined various contemporary practices, including those of the “poor” theatres, sought to describe the conventions of an approach to performance that he labeled “environmental theatre.” • During a performance, “focus is flexible and variable” – that is, a production need not be shaped by the assumption that all spectators must be able to see the same thing at the same time.

19. Poor and Environmental Theatres • Instead, several scenes may be going on simultaneously in various parts of the space; spectators are free to choose which they will watch. • Environmental theatre blends categories long treated as distinct during performance: acting space and nonacting space; performer and spectator; text and performance; sequentiality and simultaneity.

20. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • Even as the “poor” theatres were restricting their means, other theatres were emphasizing the very elements that the poor theatres were seeking to eliminate. • Living as we do in the “electronic age”, it seems inevitable that the theatre would exploit electronic devices.

21. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • Electronic media affected the theatre by creating the desire to make the representation of place in the theatre as transformable as it is in film and television. • The best-known multimedia experimentation was dome by the Czech designer Josef Svoboda.

22. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • One of his projects, Polyekran (multiple screen), used filmed images entirely but sought to overcome the “visual paralysis” of a single screen by hanging screens of differing sizes at various distances from the audience, projecting different images on each, and changing the images at varying time intervals – thus creating a dynamic visual field and giving the audience a choice of images to watch.

23. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • These developments are related to others then occurring in the visual arts. • Stimulated by dissatisfaction with restrictions imposed by the media in which they worked, painters sought to overcome the restrictions by such devices as gluing thee-dimensional objects onto paintings.

24. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • Sculptors, to overcome the static nature of their medium, attached motors to sculptures to make them move or used light to vary the appearance. • Out of such experiments eventually came happenings, pioneered by the painter Allan Kaprow, who argued that not only the art objects on display but also the space and all of those who attend must be considered essential parts of the total artistic experience.

25. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • Subsequent happenings varied, but most had common characteristics with implications for theatrical performance: • Happenings were multimedia events that broke down the barriers between the arts and mingled elements from several. • Happenings shifted emphasis away from creating a product to participating in a process. • Because there was no single focus, emphasis shifted from the artist’s intention to the participants’ awareness; each participant, as partial creator of the event, was free to derive from it whatever he or she could; no single “correct” interpretation of the artwork was sought. • Happenings did much to undermine professionalism and disciplined technique because anyone could participate, and there was no right or wrong way of doing anything.

26. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • Many aspects of happenings and environmental theatre recall futurism and Dadaism. • Perhaps because they were anarchistic, happenings soon passed out of vogue. But the artistic impulse that had prompted them remained and resurfaced in the 1970s as performance art.

27. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • Because some performance artists have used nudity, obscenity, unfamiliar conventions, and attacks on authority, it has been at the center of several attempts in recent years to censor art or to curb government support of the arts.

28. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • The major creators of performance art originally came from the visual arts, dance, or music; they were attracted to performance art in part because it disregarded boundaries among the arts, thereby greatly expanding the means of expression.

29. Multimedia, Happenings, and Performance Art • Performance art continues to be useful as an indication of the contemporary tendency to break down barriers between the arts and as an acknowledgment that “performance” can take many forms. • Perhaps the most influential force in performance art today is P.S. 122, an organization based in New York.

30. Postmodernism • The ideas and practices of environmental theatre and performance art are related to postmodernism, a label that is imprecise but that suggests major changes in modernism. • Postmodernism melded categories by ignoring or deliberately violating differentiations and breaching the boundaries between the arts, as in performance art and multimedia; by breaking down the barriers between spectator and performance space, as in environmental theatre; by removing distinctions between audience and performers, as in happenings.

31. Postmodernism • Another sign of postmodernism is the blurring of distinctions between dramatic forms, as in absurdist and much other contemporary drama. • Since the early 1970s, Peter Brook has been exploring the theatrical conventions of various in an attempt to bridge cultural and language barriers (his best known Mahabharata).

32. Postmodernism • French director Ariane Mnouchkine, working with her company the Théâtre du Soleil, has drawn on Asian performance conventions in productions of several of Shakespeare’s plays and in a tetrology of Greek plays presented under the title Les Atrides.

33. Postmodernism • Many aspects of postmodernism came together in the theatre pieces of Robert Wilson, among them A Letter to Queen Victoria, Einstein on the Beach, CIVEL warS, Time Rocker, and many more. • Most of the pieces were very long, from four to twelve hours, one lasted seven continuous days and nights.

34. Postmodernism • According to Wilson, in his pieces there is nothing to understand, only things to experience, out of which each spectator constructs his or her own associations and meanings. • Many spectators have been infuriated or bored by the length and lack of clear-cut intention in Wilson’s pieces, but many critics have called him the most innovative and significant force in today’s theatre.

35. Postmodernism • Even when Wilson stages classical texts, however, he avoids visual elements that merely illustrate what is in the text; rather, he seeks to suggest other dimensions through imagery not literally related to the text.

36. Trends in Directing • Postmodernism has influenced directing in several ways, perhaps most significantly by altering attitudes about the director’s relationship to the playwright and the script. • Most radical reinterpretations have involved plays by authors long dead. Bur since the 1980s, some directorial decisions have elicited strong objections from living authors.

37. Trends in Directing • Some important questions raised by the productions at this time: • Can playwrights protect their work from distortions? • Are directors justified in reshaping a script to suit their own vision even if it distorts the playwright’s intentions? • What are the implications of demanding that directors adhere to playwrights’ notions about how their works should be staged? • Should playwrights’ preferences be honored even after audience tastes and staging conventions have changed? • What the role of the director? None of this questions can be answered definitively, but they have created heated debate.

38. Cultural Diversity • Broadway, because it is a sign of professional acceptance, continues to represent for many people the test for the theatre in America. • On Broadway, usually no more than twenty-five productions are running at the same time. About thirty-eight theatres are classified as Broadway houses. Their prices range from $25 to $75 for most plays and $25 to $100 for musicals.

39. Cultural Diversity • During 2001, more than 360 not-for-profit theatres scattered throughout the United States presented 4,700 productions for a total of 81,800 performances. Total attendance was 22,5 million. Ticket prices were considerably lower than those of Broadway theatres.

40. Cultural Diversity • Both Broadway and regional theatres tend now to see themselves as serving all segments of society through universal appeals independent of race, class, or gender. • Much of what has happened in theatre since the 1960s calls these assumptions into question. • The argument is that instead of trying to achieve homogenization, America would be better if it acknowledged, accepted, and valued differences.

41. African American Theatre • Theatres and plays concerned with African Americans have probably made the greatest impact. • African American playwrights and producing organizations have greatly increased since A Raisin in the Sun was first produced.

42. African American Theatre • The most durable of the companies was the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), founded in New York in 1968 by Douglas Turner Ward. • The upsurge in African American theatrical activity provided a corresponding increase in opportunities for actors, directors, and playwrights.

43. African American Theatre • Among recent playwrights, one of the most successful has been George C. Wolfe, who first gained wide recognition in 1986 with The Colored Museum, a series of eleven exhibits about African American life that combine satire and anger.

44. African American Theatre • Wolfe is now one of the most influential figures in the American theatre. • Suzan-Lori Parks is perhaps the most admired female African American playwright with The America Play, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, In the Blood, and TopDog/Underdog.

45. African American Theatre • Perhaps the most praised African American playwright is August Wilson, who has declared his intention of writing a play about black experience in each decade of the twentieth century. • His first success came in 1984 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

46. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom • The entire action of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom takes place in a recording studio in Chicago during one day in 1927. • Ma Reiney, “mother of the blues” and her band (all of them are black), are preparing to recording. Their two white managers have no respect for black musicians and their music, the only thing they want is money.

47. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom • When the band arrives for recording, without Ma Rainey and her companions, tension begins to rise. The struggle of power begin to take shape. • When Ma Rainey finally arrives, dressed in furs and other finery, with her nephew, Sylvester and her girl friend, Dussie Mae, trouble begins.

48. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom • The white men had decided Levee should play an introduction to Ma Rainey’s signature song, she had decided that Sylvester, who has a pronounced stutter, must introduce it with a spoken passage. • After several attempts, Sylvester does succeed, but they find that line to the recording booth was disconnected.

49. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom • During the interruption that occurs, Dussie Mae wanders down to the rehearsal room and, despite the warning from others about Dussie Mae’s relationship with Ma, Levee fondles and kisses her. • Eventually the recording gets completed, after which Sturdyvant informs Levee that he is no longer interested in his music. Toledo accidentally steps in Levee’s shoe, the rage is redirected, and Levee stabs and kills Toledo.

50. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom • Wilson seems to suggest that this violence is an outgrowth of the treatment of blacks that has been discussed and dramatized in the play.