Offending The Audience
Emily Mast / The Panorama Theater
www.panoramaonview.org/news.html
Offending The Audience is an 'anti-play' or a play-as-manifesto that was
written in 1966 by the Austrian avant-garde novelist and playwright
Peter Handke. In essence, it is an hour-long lecture about theater that,
by necessity, must take place in a theater while attempting to be as
un-theatrical as possible.
The stage is bare and there is (seemingly) no plot, no characters, no
costumes, no stage direction, no scenery, no representation and no
illusion. Speech is abruptly directed at the audience to acknowledge and
emphasize their presence (as equally, if not more, important than the
actors' presence). The script is literal, blunt and self-reflexive: the
actors describe their surroundings, they state moment-by-moment what is
happening in the room, they discuss audience expectations, they declare
that nothing theatrical will happen, they make audience members aware of
their physical bodies by drawing attention to what they're looking at,
what they're wearing and how they're breathing, and state that the
audience is in fact the subject of this piece. They eventually
compliment the audience on how 'dreamy' and unforgettable they are, how
they 'saved the piece' and then proceed to insult them with names that
become increasingly random and ridiculous ('chuckleheads, fence-sitters,
superfluous lives'). An acoustic pattern arises that eventually renders
their words meaningless nonsense. At this point, the curtain closes and
roaring applause is piped in through loudspeakers.
While this play undoubtedly inspired a certain amount of shock and awe
in 1966 when it was unleashed on unsuspecting German patrons, plenty of
theatrical works have since dealt with the ossification of traditional
theater. The play has been restaged a handful of times in the last
decade (once in Lithuania and twice in the United States) but has
produced less than enthusiastic responses. When conveyed by professional
actors, Handke's dissection of the theatrical experience tends to result
in pretentious-sounding, offensively repetitive gibberish.
In this particular adaptation, seven children between the ages of six
and twelve remove the audience from the artificiality of a critical
discourse of artifice by introducing real play into a play that, for all
of its avant-garde seminality is, to a contemporary ear, far too
self-conscious to be listened to. The childrens' lack of pretense allows
the audience to experience the piece empathetically.
This new take on Handke by no means resembles a conventional children's
play. Rather, it is a conceptual gesture that will be staged in a
conventional theater.
-----
With: Zane Amundsen, Amber Barbell, Mathew Davis, Bailey Garcia, Kaitlin
Morgan, Gerald Orzikh & Talyan Wright
Director : Emily Mast
Assistant Director: Kenard Bunkley
Lighting Design: Chris Kuhl
Sound Design: Jake Viator
Emily Mast is a LA-based visual artist who works primarily with people,
movement and sound to advocate uncertainty as live sculptural material.
Last November she staged 'Everything, Nothing, Something, Always
(Walla!)' at X-initiative in New York for Performa 09. She has presented
her work at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, Samson Projects in
Boston and the Paris Project Room in Paris, France. She was a resident
artist at Yaddo in 2010 and at Skowhegan in 2006. She participated in
the Mountain School of Art and unitednationsplaza Berlin in 2007. This
past May she was part of a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York entitled 'Audience Experiments: Contemporary Art in the Age of
Spectacle'. Please visit www.emilymast.com for more information.
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
