Wild Theater (a collaboration)

PURPOSE

With this project, we aimed to explore how we could take one scene from a structured script (“Equivocation” by Bill Cain) and play with “wild” performance to create different genres outside of that structure. The scenes are all separate videos, in order to break down structure even further, allowing you folks to watch the scenes in any order. Also because each of the scenes are roughly 7 minutes long and there are multiple scenes, and it’s the same scene repeated over and over again in many different ways, feel free to jump around and watch only as much as you want/need to.

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*Note: We planned to put the videos two-by-two (to be a little less linear), but the HTML isn't cooperating.

 

Context 1 & 2
Here is background information about the entire play and the scene that we’ve chosen and our ideas for making this scene “wild.”

 

Cold Read
Marian plays this part in the show, but Abby does not, so this is the first time she is reading this scene out loud, so it is a “cold read” for her. Caleb plays the audience.

 

Tragedy
This is the scene as it written to be, which is mostly tragic and dramatic.

 

Spatially Constrained Comedy
(a.k.a. Hamster Cage) In this take, we took the words from a tragic scene and tried to make them comedic inside a constrained space, which was the inside of the fountain.

 

Intimate Still Neutral
This is a cold read for Caleb, meant to resemble two friends talking at a sleepover.

 

Melodrama in Space
Here we tried to utilize the space as much as possible. We placed the microphone in the middle of the space, so often the proximity of the camera to the actors does not correspond to the expected volume of the dialogue.

 

Foul Fiend
These are our concluding remarks, detailing our final thoughts on being wild thespians in an outdoor theater.

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REFLECTIONS

Marian
I don’t know whether this project was a success or failure. It was certainly interesting to create – a wild acting exercise. Throughout this semester, I’ve been seeing parallels between things we talk about in class and this show, “Equivocation,” that Abby and I are in. In trying to think of what we could do for this web event, I had so many ideas that had to do with the many different “ecological” aspects of this play, but I kept thinking that the easiest thing to do would be to just write a paper on these themes – that’s not very wild though. Adding the multimedia angle to this project definitely made it much more difficult, but I’m glad we did it because we ended up taking this project in such a…weird…direction. Being in the show and playing the character Tom, I’ve been doing this scene over and over again, yet always in the same general way – as a tragic scene. So when we first tried making it comedic, it was a really weird feeling – the words and the structure that I’m so familiar with were completely thrown out the window and it was pretty uncomfortable at first. The more we kept playing with the scene in our filming though, the more fun it got. I especially liked doing the “melodrama in space” interpretation, because we were trying to use as much outdoor space as possible (in opposition to in the tragic scene in which my movement is pretty restricted), and then watching it later, it was really interesting to see how the audio volume often did not match at all the actors proximity to the camera – it’s never what you’d expect, and that unanticipated variance, I think, could be interpreted as kind of wild. It was also just fun coming up with the many different ways we could read and perform the script, and then coming up with genre titles for the scenes (sometimes they got a little ridiculous). Seeing what worked and what didn’t was pretty interesting – I think the one that was probably the least “exciting” was the “still intimate neutral” scene. Makes me think about how much movement, pace, and space are a part of creating performance genres. I thought it also generally added sort of an “ecological” feel to the films doing the performance in an open space (not unlike the open air Globe where the play is actually set…interesting that it is set in an open air theater but usually performed in a closed, dark theater…), not cutting out mistakes or people who walked through the cloisters during filming, and filming bits of us just talking through our ideas. Lastly, to clear up the guaranteed confusion, our “concluding remarks” is actually part of another scene in the show, so I’m actually not just making up words. All in all, was this project a failure? Maybe, I don’t know. Did it feel pretty wild to create? Absolutely.


Caleb
Some scrambled thoughts…

This project made me realize how difficult it is  to push the boundaries of conventional genres. At first, it seemed fairly straightforward to use the text as scaffolding and deviate from the typical genre of tragedy, but this proved much more difficult as we went on. Each version in itself was an acting exercise, where not only did we try to deviate from expected inflection—on auto-pilot, I accidentally shouted “NO MORE QUESTIONS” in the first part of “intimate still neutral”—but we also tried to get away from expected staging (“blocking” in theater lingo) and conventional film framings. In filming, I allowed myself to become “distracted” by the place the actors were situated in. Listening to their lines detached from conventional play movements was quite something; it’s a kind of visual/audio metaphor. Decoupling the visuals and the words—what we see is maybe not what we get—adds a new depth, context, and meaning to the words themselves. The viewer watches at the actors, then looks at their setting, and returns again to the “stage”. In our project, the visual stage has a much broader boundary, and the visuals explore it throughout—following the actors’ movements, keeping them at a distance, drifting to look at the architecture. The audio stage is also broad. While centered on the actor’s language, the microphone stayed in one place. In much of the film (especially in the “melodrama in space”, sound reverberates in between stone arches and actors’ voices are clearly heard only when their bodies are close to the space’s center.

Theater, as a storytelling devise with a particular way of using verbal and body language, has some major confines as a genre in itself. I’m wondering now what we could have done additionally to make it more wild: maybe we could have  combatted a single-narrative perspective by using multiple cameras (like strapping a camera to each actor)? Maybe we could have explored the audio/visual disconnect further? Maybe we could have pinpointed better our target genres—or rather, thought up direct ways to unlink them from convention and hone in on Gary Snyder’s definition of "wild writing"?


Abby
This was an odd one. When I first envisioned some sort of critical, “wild” multimedia project, I must say I was thinking of something a bit more planned. I know that I have a tendency to think that if something is unstructured, less work is going into it and therefore less will come out of it. This was one of the most organic projects I’ve ever done and is presented with little to no editing.  As an actor, I found our different takes fascinating. They all reminded me of exercises that I’ve done which help to get an actor ‘out of their head,’ so to speak. I’m quite guilty of this—focusing too much on the words and what I want them to sound like. A physicality exercise forces you to take the focus off the text, for when you’re running or moving the words themselves become secondary, and you must exist in the moment first and foremost. When brainstorming ways to engage with this text critically, we focused on all the connections we could find—perhaps a focus better suited to an analytic essay. When we came up with our idea for a ‘wild’ way to interpret these scenes, we inherently took the focus off the text, not unlike an exercise to ‘get us out of our heads’. I also mentioned in one of our context videos that we were treating these scenes like neutral scenes—scenes that have no context and all of the choices are to be made by the actors. This let us play with genre too though—can a non-neutral scene cross those lines of genre? We played with this a bit when we were titling things as well. From “Melodrama in Space” to “Spatially Confined Comedy,” we found that a traditional genre did not fit the ‘wild’ versions of this scene we were creating. I don’t know if the language of success or failure fits this project—to me it felt more like a beginning. I would be up for a round two, perhaps with slight improvements like having lines memorized, or scenes with more people, or in different spaces. Maybe we could be more specific with our genre choices, or maybe the spontaneity was what added to it.