Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Friday, 13 August 2010
label
title of work: Solo Club
Shunji is interested in audience actor inter-relations in society.
Theatre is the art by which human beings, as part of a community of society, “make” or “find” human action “worth watching”, in a “measured” time and place. Theatre makes us to recognize ourselves and does this not in book to be read in private, but to be shared in public. It holds up the mirror to human nature. As a result, theatre becomes a place in which the community truly comes into being. Instead of a purely entertainment, theatre, as living community of a collective of individuals, has been expanded into a wider social science sphere, to be understood as one of socio-semiotics in general.
Some of us “make” theatre – all of us “are” theatre.
Friday, 30 July 2010
a taste of invisible
The Playgoer, is a new experiment of interaction spectatorship. In previous projects, I have tried several methods to achieve this object, such as position interchange, role infliction, and light irradiation to oppress audience. In this piece, I tried to build an invisible theatre by using invisible actor (body replacement) , but sound display. The purpose of replacement of actor's body, is to raise audience’s essentiality in the balance of audience actor inter-relations.
This performance alternated with other's, as prologue and ending, since the unawareness of theatregoing is essential for invisible theatre. But I put the form of The Last Supper into it, to avoiding excessively performance scenarion and continuing role infliction part.
The pressure in this piece could be found in these points:
1, ask to swich off mobiles and cameras;
2, ask to tuck napkins into their T-shirts;
3, ask to draw food order down on their white plates.
In the aim of achievement of participation, I chose theatre of the oppressed to forcing visitors instead of offering more freedom to them, as that the apectator today should walk out of the stage of emotional resonance, and then realize rational criticize.
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Monday, 19 July 2010
Finding Interaction in Body Displacement
Les Chaises (The Chairs)
Video Recording
Eugene Ionesco
Modlin Center for Arts
Richmond, Va
2006
I am keeping on exploring audience actor interaction, and looking for methodologies of participation realization, then ignored that there is something called “absurdism” opposing the idea of realism. It accentuated the “paradoxical invisibility of spectators” (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 106), which explains spectator’s significance in another point of view.
Artist “Ionesco’s game of presence/absence, placement/ displacement, reality/ unreality serves to accentuate the invisibility of the spectators in the modern theatre and their phenomenal disembodiment as they sit in the dark. Like the onstage chairs, those in the theatre auditorium serve as seats of displacement for an audience that surrenders to dramatic mimesis and assumes invisibility through the self-effacement of theatrical watching (a spectatorial disembodiment, as Worthen notes, often central to the aesthetic of realism).’’ (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 106)
In The Chairs, as video presents, empty chairs were arranged as queues on the stage, as those in auditoria, with a huge mirror projecting them, then actors shuttled back and forth among the rest, which looked as a routine “speaking theatre” “promising a spatial and material field for linguistic self-extension and for a regaining of self-possession through speech” (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 104). Then those audiences sitting in dark were playing the role of pure witness outside of “theatre watching”, and they, in my opnion, had nothing difference with the spectators of television or film.
Ionesco’s game of paradox of theatre audience (both there and not there) was playing audience itself presence as absence (visible as invisible), by declining spectator’s appearance:
The chairs explores the paradoxical status of this theatre audience that is both there and not there---- that, paradoxically, is there by making itself not there---- and Ionesco’s ending underscores the mutual, though problematic, entailment of embodiment and disembodiment: “We hear for the first time the human noises of the invisible crowd; these are bursts of laughter, murmurs, shh’s, ironical coughs; weak at the beginning, these noises grow louder, then, again, progressively they become weaker. All this should last long enough for the audience---- the real and visible audience---- to leave with this ending firmly impressed on its mind”. In Ionesco’s metatheatrical game, these “real and visible” audience members may have been less “present” than their chairs. (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 107)
Since the interpretation of absurdism: “[The] divorce between man and his wife, the actor and his sitting, is properly the feeling of absurdity (Camus, 1955: 23)” and Ionesco’s saying “personal identity is rendered unstable in the general confusion of placement and displacement (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 105)”, my understanding of this separating of affinity stuffs or unstable rendering for confusion in absurdism is purposive reversing explanation. Then this practice of making visible body as invisible is just in order to make awareness of the consequence of spectator’s presence, through absence of physical body in phenomenal to get an inside bodily self experience in awareness, perception, knowledge and intention which beyond audience’s physical boundaries.
Reference:
Camus, A. (1955) The Myth of Sisyhus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’ Brien. New York: Random House.
Stanton B. Garner, Jr. (1994) Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press
Finding Interaction in Invisible Installations
The Edges of the World
Large-scare Sculptures
Ernesto Neto
Hayward Gallery
London
19 June -- 5 Sep 2010
Before starting the discussion about the application of interaction in The Edges of the World, it is worth making a clarification of Neto’s large-scale sculptures are theatres, in specific invisible immersive theatre.
Firstly, we should go back to the question what theatre is? In comparison with fine art installation, for me, the theatre is an installation with (within) body and his action. At this point, the incorporating spaces both for view and for play of The Edges of the World allows visitors to move freely through and around it, then it is a theatre as the combination of bodies’ movement and installations.
Secondly, what kind of theatre can be called as immersive theatre? As previous arguments in dissertation defined, the identities of immersive theatre are reduction of reality, aesthetics, emotional and resonance. Then taking these characters in The Edges of the World, visitors are encouraged to “wander through fabric installations, relax in cushioned soft spaces, ascend stairs into artworks overhead and, following on from Neto’s signature ‘nave’ works, venture barefoot through an all-encompassing nylon vessel […] whether submerged in a sculptural pool or balancing on an undulating path, visitors find themselves becoming active participants in the artworks”. Those abstract biomorphic quality creations are reductions of reality (or at least they are produced according to the real human organ and celling), and they achieve resonance by creating sensuous sculptures and then raising echo in emotion.
Finally, The Edges of the World will be put in the theory of invisible performance. Augusto Boal said: “in invisible theatre the spectator is transformed into a protagonist in the action, a spectator, without ever being aware of it. He is the protagonist of the reality he sees, because he is unaware of its fictitious origin (1992: 17)’’. Any space without actual actors but with body action can be named as invisible theatre, and its invisible actor is unawared audience, its invisible acting is just spectator’s movement, which accords with Neto’s formulation people“in between is a kind of dance”.
Neto successfully created “an art that unites, helping us to interact with others, showing us the limits, not as barriers but as a place of sensations and of exchange and continuity”. However, there are still some promotion spaces, for example taking videos of engaged participators to create another interaction piece for video watchers.
Reference:
Boal, A. (2002) Games for Actors and Non-actors: Second Edition. Trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge.
Southbank Centre
http://festivalbrazil.southbankcentre.co.uk/ernesto-neto/exhibition [last accessed 2 July 2010]
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