Parabasis

Fin Kennedy on Video Games And Theater

By Isaac Butler

Maybe it's that I haven't had my coffee yet, but I really do not understand what Fin Kennedy is talking about in this piece for the Guardian and as a fan of video games I'd like to.   He stars out by talking about L.A. Noire, a video game I'm planning to skip due to Rockstar's long history of making turgid overlong pastiche of much better movies. But that's cool. To each his own, right? 

Then Kennedy pivots, writing "It's been hard not to feel like it leaves my own art form [theatre] standing in the dust," due to the game's " fusion of real acting and gaming technology uses facial scanning of actors to produce the most emotionally textured, lifelike world modern consoles have yet seen."  

This is my first moment of confusion.  

Theatre, of course, is automatically pretty far ahead of video games on the emotionally textured faces part, along with the lifelike people. Because it's, you know, made with real humans. On an environmental/world creation level, I suppose video games in general win out simply because of the amount of visual detail they can pack it.  I'd argue that the comparison doesn't totally work because the mediums are so different, but that's a small quibble.

Then we get these two paragraphs:

I've also been having stimulating chats with director Ellie Jones, a longtime collaborator, for whom the gaming/theatre fusion is a real passion. She directed The New World Order, a walkthrough site-specific version of Pinter recently finished at the Brighton festival, and we're developing a new play for next year's festival together, to be performed in a real hospital, where the audience get "cast" as either patients or medics.

True, some companies have been doing this for years. Many will be familiar with the usual list of Coney, Punchdrunk, dreamthinkspeak,Stan's Cafe and others who are pushing the theatrical form in this way. But more traditional, playwright-led theatremaking seems a little reticent in this respect – with one exception.

So LA Noire with its immersive environments and almost life-like faces leaves theater in the dust in some department (I'm still not sure which other than the obvious one of popularity). And then we pivot to talking about site-specific theater. Maybe it's the title "Can Video Games Help Theatre Reach The Next Level?" (which Kennedy probably didn't write) but I'm left wondering what these two paragraphs, and indeed the rest of the blog post, have to do with video games. Site specific theater way predates Pong. 

From there we get a few paragraphs about:

a new scheme for playwrights I was starting up, in my role as associate artist at Tamasha. We recruited eight playwrights to come into Mulberry School for Girls in east London, take part in a series of structured workshops with the students, and write a short play in response. Part of the offer for our writers was to work with my colleague, film-maker Tanya Singh, on including a multimedia element to their play ideas.  Many of the writers... enthusiastically [took] this up – and not just to augment their stories, but to shape the very concept. We've got plays set entirely within Facebook, or in Blade Runner-style dystopian futures, on live TV talk shows, or which feature a character which is a digital double, or show how innocent smartphone film clips of a dead friend can unhelpfully prolong the grieving process.

But I still don't understand what any of this has to do with video games. I actually- and keep in mind I'm a fan of both the medium and cross-medium influence in general- am really skeptical that video games have much to offer theatre. As they are not currently a primarily narrative-driven medium (although that's changing), they lag way behind theatre on both story structure and content.  And their visual aesthetics are based on entirely different considerations from theatre's.  Sure, there are a few plays here and there that might be able to use the concept of the video game to interesting effect. Apparently there was one at the Brick during the video game festival that used the old Sierra adventure game structure as a way of pondering Beckett-type questions about existence. But still. 

I think what Kennedy might be trying to say with this piece is that we shouldn't dismiss things like video games and Facebook as possible material simply because the kids these days with their rap music and their nose pierces and their love of Twilight like them.  And here, I'm in complete agreement.

Theatre, like all art forms, is going to find itself needing to respond (not necessarily directly!) to the world today's teens are growing up in, a world that's increasingly mediatized, on the internet, vocationally-driven, and always at war. A world those teenagers are about to find out doesn't want them, whose politicians don't even pretend to represent their interests, where there are no jobs, and when there are jobs, no careers. A world in which they carry a historic debt burden. A world that simultaneously has a popular culture (particularly in film) dedicated to infantalizing them.

Certainly, using the materials of our youth to critique the worlds of our youth can be very successful. Part of why MilkMilkLemonade works is the way it borrows from children's plays and television shows to tell a skewed nightmare of childhood. So if video games can help with this, I'm all for it, although I'm skeptical of how both the aesthetics and story elements translate. 

Joe Sacco Discusses His Work at the Walker

By Isaac Butler

Enjoy!

 

Joe Sacco On Footnotes in Gaza

By Isaac Butler

Courtesy of the good folks at GRITtv:

 

David Mamet and the American Theatre

By Isaac Butler  

Chris Wilkinson has a good round up (including yours truly) of the web's response to David Mamet's latest "provocative" political musings.  

One point that I think often gets lost in all of this is that two things that Mamet attacks with the most passion and vitriol (and regularity)  are the nonprofit American theater system and the American nonprofit university education system. It's worth pointing out that Mamet absolutely would not have a career were it not for these two systems.  The latter provided him with a regular income prior to his adventures in Hollywood, and without the former, no one would know who the fuck he is. In order to engage in this kind of blather, Mamet has to commit to an odd kind of revisionist history where he's always been a figure of commercial theater and Hollywood which makes, frankly, no sense.   

Don't Eat Your Vegetables!

By Isaac Butler

Metaphorically, that is. Eating your vegetables in the literal sense is probably something you should be doing more of.  

But as artists-- and perhaps this is particularly American-- we sometimes get stuck in the equivalent conversation about art. Eat Your Art Because It Is Packed With Vitamins and Minerals!

Laura Miller, in discussing William Deresiewicz A Jane Austen Education brings up the obvious question: if Art is supposedly so good at making us better people and expanding our empathy... why are so many people who are really into art such jerks? This leads her to declare:

So while I thoroughly enjoyed "A Jane Austen Education," I didn't entirely buy it. Its narrative seemed constrained by the very American (and fairly puritanical) notion that culture proves its worth by demonstrating that it leads to self-improvement. This approach, at its worst, can make literature seem like some dull but nutritious foodstuff that must be dutifully chewed and swallowed, however little pleasure it may give. That's not why I read Jane Austen -- it's not even why I read "A Jane Austen Education" -- and I suspect it's not why Deresiewicz reads her, either. 

You could substitute Shakespeare in there for Jane Austen and theatre for reading, and this paragraph would still stack fairly well, methinks. And this all ties in to Louis Menand's recent essay in the New Yorker where he contemplates what, exactly, a college education (and specifically one in the humanities) is supposed to be for, anyway. 

Both pieces are centered around a question that I don't think we have a good consensus answer on yet anyway: Why study XXXX piece of art? For Menand and Miller, it's reading, specifically. Why are we reading this book in this class? or Why should you read Jane Austen?  or What is college actually for?

Unspoken within these pieces is a different question, it seems to me. And this is a question people who want theatre to be more popular, to reach more and different audiences, to appeal to other demographics have to grapple with: Once you take love out of the equation... what are you left with?

Most people I know who teach don't necessarily love teaching, but they do love learning. Not (again) necessarily in an institutional setting. But they still love it. They love reading on whatever subject they teach, discussing it with people, maybe writing (ahem blogging) about it.  They love doing informally the things we formalize in the classroom. This may in fact make them (or to be honest, us) not particularly well suited to helping a student who doesn't enjoy any of those things.  Because they (we) don't really understand it. Instead, the most often taken tactic is to try to inspire in our students through a kind of performative enthusiasm the same love we have. 

When this fails, though, we are left staring at the gaping abyss of why? Not why do we love it, but why, if you don't love it, or if you don't even like it particularly, what value does reading and discussing books critically have? There are all kinds of answers for this question, there's a lot of literature surrounding it. I think most readers of this blog think that the idea of being able to engage with "texts" defined broadly and think critically about how they work, where their meaning comes from is a fairly valuable skill set, but if you want to talk about it more, that's what the comments are for. Or as Menand puts it, that:

"In a society that encourages its members to pursue the career paths that promise the greatest personal or financial rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only what they need to know for success. They will have no incentive to acquire the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being. College exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing"

So with theatre we have a similar issue, but now we take away the fact that people are required to come. And so we stare again at the abyss of why.  The answer to that why should be the mission statements of our companies. The Keen Company thinks you should come to their plays because they are a refuge for sincerity in an irony suffused world. The Civilians think you should see their shows because they are works of investigation into vital questions our nation faces. Instead of these kinds of answers, most institutions have a bunch of identical boilerplate meant to allow the artistic staff to pick whatever the hell they want.