Finding Interaction in Pub Going

New Lounge
Live Performance
Shunt
London
13 May – 30 June 2010




“The New Lounge, not unlike the old Shunt Lounge, is both a platform project for artists and the most unusual late night member’s bar in town.” (Shunt, 2010)

As a platform project, Shunt created an exciting programme of art works that includes film, live music, circus, visual arts, performance, theatre, installation and the odd pole-vaulter within the damp brickwork space. The underground corridor itself is very unusual for spectators, also Shunt depends on this dark, long, high, rough underground space of London Bridge indeed. As mentioned before, immersive performance relies on the space for taking place, due to aesthetics is one of the most important characters of immersion.

However, I would like to define The New Lounge as pub going rather than site specific performance. There is a bar there, in fact, with a quality selection of drinks, and lots of tables, chairs, and sofas in various styles, with entertainment establishments, like table tennis, which provided more options and a more relaxed environment for audiences. Everything just looked like a bar as usual, which opened art to a wider range of audiences in a social environment.

As a mixture of site-specific project and late night pub going, The New Lounge gained an exciting outcome of a cross-fertilisation between artists and audiences as following methods:

Firstly, audiences are allowed to go through the performance space. Since there was no stage frame to separate stage area and audience seats, the whole tube became a social public space shared with every person equally.

Apart from that, audiences got the authority of selection of what they watch and when they go. All of the artworks of the multiple choices New Lounge took place in diverse time and locations, opening to limited quantity of watchers as small group performances, which forced viewers to make their own schedule of attendance.

Last but not least, audiences were invited to take a part of creators. The products of the fish workshop (one piece of The New Lounge), were used in dance performance, as setting and dancer’s costume, which put participators’ fish making into two times of interaction experience.



Reference:

Shunt Theatre Company, http://www.shunt.co.uk/newlounge.htm [last accessed 25 June 2010]

Finding Interaction in Cyberspace Game Playing

Best Before

Live Performance

Rimini Protokoll

ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts)

London

30 June - 3 July 2010

“Best Before pulls the multi-player video game out of the virtual realm and plugs it into an intimate theatre setting. Each audience member navigates an anonymous avatar via a gaming pad, to interact with a panel of on-stage experts - an electronic artist, a game tester, a politician and a traffic flagger. As audience and panel clash, collude, remonstrate, a simulated city, BestLand, gradually develops. Taking its inspiration from Vancouver's gaming industry, BestLand lives and dies through a decision making process that encompasses the personal, social and political. ” (ICA, 2010)

When I held the joystick and asked to take control of the avatar-projected role onto a huge screen, I felt glad with getting involved in, as a part of collective. Since every avatar-projected role has been connected to the every member in auditoria, with sex, name, appearance, job and props representing it’s identity, and grew up from time to time, this role-playing game became a completed imagined world created by audience and practitioner together.

Game playing, to be exact in cyberspace, has been distinguished as a kind of immersive performance in my critical paper, but Best Before is defined as “reality theatre” by Protokoll itself. Sometimes, I feel confused to classify a performance into a concept. I said that the features of immersive theatre differ from political are reduction of reality, aesthetics, emotional and resonance. Out of question, Best Before is a product of reductive experience from fictional world or an imitation of the physical experience. However, Best Before not immersed audience through audio or video effect as a role-playing game. Instead, audience was asked to show him or herself from seats when he or she win or lose the game. Start from this aspect, spectators noticed by third person frequently, which blocked them reach to the "total immersion" stage and reminded awareness of fiction games, then this piece could be belong to the political theatre, with social meaning.

That is my understanding of Frankfurter Rundschau’s comment “lies above all in the fact...that life could gain the upper hand, and theatre could lose control over itself." (Frankfurter Rundschau, 2010)

I would like to call Best Before as a product of image theatre. Due to each spectator gets the right to modify the “real image” (i.e. the image of reality, the world as it is), in order to show in “a visual form how it may be possible to move away from actual reality and create the reality we desire” as “ideal image” or BestLand as ICA said before (Boal, 1992: 3). In this way, this piece arrived to an image that represents a consensus among all the participators by thinking with their own images and speaking with their hands.

When the man next to me pated me on the back and said “hey, the winner with medal is me”, I can say this piece is succeeded in interaction.


Reference:

Institute of Contemporary Arts:
http://www.ica.org.uk/24619/Live-Art/Rimini-Protokoll-Best-Before.html [last accessed 14 July 2010]

Boal, A. (1992) Games for actors and non-actors: Second edition. Trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge.

poster

pictures from lab one

theatre sketch for interm show

stage plan

poster for lab

multi-screen

The two-screen and multi-screen works which come from different films connected by lots of centain connection, e.g. sounds, same period, same theme etc., instead of playing montage in one screen. They made so much imagination on me.


"against what? against whom?" in raven row

unusual watching mode

The stage not have to looks like a stage, the performance is not necessary to present as a usual way.

Moving stage, moving audience, from outside to inside, from ground floor to first, second, and negative on the first floor,which a live show give a inexpectant experience.


"money" in shunt

non-truth

The difference between photograph and painting is: the former one have to be objective rocording, while the later one can be factual distortion.


"truth, compassion, tolerance" in zhen shan ren art exhibition