“The Moment Before the Moment Of: Preparing to Get to (the) Theatre”
Jeanmarie Higgins and Michael Schweikardt
Performance-makers in 2020 have been obliged to wrangle both the constraints and possibilities activated by the year’s shuddering uncertainties even as they have explored how our constant calibrations of nearness and distance might activate creativity, connection and community.
– Brian Eugenio Herrera, “In Defense of ‘Remote Theatre’”
“I have been spending the summer making quilts out of the fabric scraps I had left over from making Covid-19 masks.”
– Robin Shane, “Hexes: Choosing a Color Palette”
The first issue of this journal, “Teaching Theatre With Things,” was a collective attempt to answer two questions—what can you teach someone about theatre in under five minutes via video, using a thing you find in your home? and, How might this video inspire an essay? But seen in a different way, we created this journal because the Penn State design and directing graduate students wanted to do something. Rather than wait to design a show for a fall season that might never happen (it did not), they decided to join in this journal experiment. Seeing how the practices of theory, pedagogy, and theatre practice might inspire each other in a digital space was a placeholder for being in physical spaces with their classmate collaborators. They repurposed their skills in design and presentation, putting them to use.
Lately, theatre artists have been doing many things, but none of them has involved making a live performance for a live audience. Many of us have learned that in order to “do theatre” in a virtual space, we must redefine our terms. In Prompt’s first guest essay, “In Defense of Stuff,” Sarah Bay-Cheng convened this conversation with attention to both history and hope, suggesting that new media in digital spaces offered the same promise that a “traditional” theatre event in a “real space” might promise, that a body—whether real, virtual or imagined—was just about to occupy that space. To do this, she meditates on a drawing of a staircase. Adolphe Appia’s rendering of a placid, rhythmic grey staircase is notable for its lack of a human figure. His stairs beckon the viewer to climb the heights of this virtual world, making the viewer—not the staircase—the subject of this work. This occupation of space by a living figure, an actor, pointed to the possibility of performance taking place in a theatre of mind, the historical designer providing a mise-en-scène for imagining a time when we can all gather again: “These images remind us not only of the sensations of being in shared physical space, but of the bodily actions required to navigate it. The three-dimensionality of the stairs restores a sensation of performance materiality even when expressed in two dimensions.”
If Bay-Cheng brought a lyrical optimism to our collective predicament, Brian Herrera brings us down to earth, stating that we are not waiting for theatre to restart. We are instead experiencing it through different media and in different audience configurations, many of which are here to stay (and should be). Herrera convenes Prompt’s second issue (“Teaching Theatre with Things: Take Two”) with some answers to Bay-Cheng’s provocations. In “In Defense of Remote Theatre,” he says of his recent prolific theatre going: “As I maneuvered this different manner of theatre-engagement, negotiating disparate time zones and divergent technological platforms, I found myself increasingly using the term ‘remote theatre’ to describe whatever it was I was engaging.” Defining what we have fumbled to name for the past eleven months, Herrera offers “remote theatre” as an emergent form that challenges us to think deeply about proximity itself. This is arguably a worthwhile pursuit for artists and audiences whose habit it is to create meaning through the arrangement of things and people: “Remote performance activates our awareness of relational proximity — defined not only as nearness in space and time, but also as distance — between ourselves and the performers, between the performance’s co-creators, and between ourselves and others gathered as audience.”
Like Bay-Cheng’s imaginary figure poised to ascend Appia’s staircase, in A Little Play by William Doan About Lines and How I’m Eager to Stand In Line Again, Bill Doan imagines a queue of famous artists as theatregoers anticipating attending a live event, while they argue about the nature and uses of the compositional element of Line. This dialogue is in response to scenic painter and designer Rosalind Isquith’s “Teaching Theatre With Things” video, “Use Your Noodle.” Here, Isquith introduces line as a compositional element. Where Doan’s characters fight amongst themselves about whose approach to composition is right and whose is wrong, Isquith asks us to consider implied line. Overlaying pasta onto a color print out of “The Last Supper,” she hails both the artist and the audience. Laying a piece of dried spaghetti from outside corner to the middle of the supper table, she asks “Where does the artist want us to look?”
In “Seeing: Elements of Design” costume designer Charlene Gross introduces all of the elements of design—not as a list to memorize, but as a set of spatial practices animated by a humble piece of fruit. Using a box of clementines that reveal dimples, tears, and variations in color when viewed up close, Gross introduces the difficulty of naming a thing as (only) orange or (only) round or (only) smooth. In her video, she stages the moment of realizing that something—everything—can never be what it first appears to be. Rolling one orange across a table, Gross transforms the thing from “a piece of round fruit” to “a sphere with a job to do,” that is, to “go for a walk.” By setting the orange in motion, its essence both reveals and belies itself. In “‘When a point goes for a walk’: Accessible Design and the World of the Play,” disabilities studies scholar Samuel Yates responds to Gross’s essay asking, “What if the orange cannot walk?” Here again we are asked to imagine the spatial patterns of audiences, not yet seated but getting to their seats before the play happens. The figure on Appia’s staircase, the ghosts of Gaudi and DaVinci in Doan’s playlet about waiting in a line, the spectators who do not walk—who perhaps instead roll or glide—to arrive at their seats.
But as Ryan Douglass writes, “Props might be the aspect of theatrical spectacle that survives the pandemic most easily.” Douglass paints a post-pandemic scene where only the most humble of stage languages remain. Interesting, then, that the theatre’s “survivors” in this issue’s videos use edible things as the objects of their object lessons. Add to Isquith’s pasta and Gross’s orange, actor Julia Chereson’s cup of coffee in “Sense Memory through Props.” Douglass’s point becomes clear, as close up in video, we see a humble cup of coffee become an acting partner as Chereson acknowledges its specific material qualities—its temperature, its weight, and our feelings toward it. Other food has the power to animate itself under the hand of the videographer. Julia Moriarty’s video, “Spicy Blocking,” hews to Ali Morooney’s video from Issue One, “Rehearsing Thread: Staging,” where Morooney describes strong and weak stage positions with spools of thread on a wooden table. With the greatest respect to theatre historian Julia Moriarty, “Spicy Blocking” is the most eccentric of the set, since instead of setting up a table to illustrate her stage directing lesson, she uses the interior turntable in one of the lower cabinets in her mother’s kitchen. Moriarty’s video challenges us to make a space where there is woefully little of it. As theatre designer Wes Pearce would undoubtedly agree. In the issue’s most universally familiar essay, “Domestic Spaces Unbecoming,” Pearce describes the townhouse he shares with his husband as “simultaneously [ . . . ] a workspace, a creative space, and a get away from workspace. In our home the dining area is more often than not a conference room and the dining table is now a workspace.” No one would argue that with remote work, our homes have become stages. In our increasing isolation, have objects become actors within these stages?
Finally, Robin’s Shane’s video lesson, “Hexes: Choosing a Color Palette,” provides an alternative method for the process—choosing hexagonal pieces of fabric, wrapping these around a paper shape, and then hand-stitching them together into shapes other than the traditional circle. Shane presents an alternative way to teach color theory in hope that the tactile relationship the user develops with their materials will present new ways of looking at color relationships. In presenting an alternative to the color wheel, Shane urges us to develop a relationship to our materials that is tactile and concrete, rather than removed and abstracted. If color choice is spatial practice for Shane, for Sarah Marsh Krauter’s aquarium observer, it is kinetic. Marsh Krauter’s essay, “Of Color Theory and Cephalopods,” re-introduces chaos into Shane’s proper lesson, meditating on the changing color palettes an octopus reveals as it glides through the water in an aquarium. Like so many of the essays in this issue, Marsh Krauter shifts our attention away from the theatre-maker and toward the theatre audience.
If, as Herrera notes, proximity has become the analytic for a condition of theatre, then collectively, these teaching videos feel like a group rehearsal in a set of spaces that are each remote from the others. What is missing is not the “real” theatre space that makes theatre theatre—the tables and lazy Susans and workspaces of the videomakers are inarguably performance spaces—but the reassurance that someone is “there,” signalled maybe by what Doan describes in the opening stage direction of his tiny play: “How their cologne (or some other odor) made a beeline for my nostrils,” a sensation that would cause a line of people standing close together to panic, unfortunately, in current circumstances. As Douglass writes, “We have to recall theatre seats that are just a little too close together, and a little too hard for three hours of sitting. The experience of being the shortest person in the audience seated behind the tallest, or having to relive your seat neighbor’s pre-show dinner at a restaurant that seemingly served only garlic.” In classical semiotic terms, the symbols theatre creates are something to long for, while the indexes of theatreging–noisome, loud, and crowded –are thankfully absent these days.
Prompt is a journal of theory, practice, and teaching, and our next issue focuses on practice. We will continue to look at things and alternative “real” spaces for staging dramas, but in “Revitalizing the Scenic Model,” the “thing” will be the performance space, specifically, the scenic model. Designers are accustomed to interpreting a playscript’s world into a stage set. But how can a scenic model inspire drama? Stories? Will the set model become the main character? Will new characters inhabit it? Will playwrights imagine the model as a set, or as a virtual world onto which we can project actors (or ourselves)?
BIO
Jeanmarie Higgins is an associate professor of theatre at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She’s the editor of Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge 2020) and the dramaturg for #HereToo, a theatre for social change project that amplifies youth activists’ voices.
Michael Schweikardt enjoys a successful career as a set designer working for opera and theatre companies across the United States and abroad. He has published essays in Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge 2020), and Text and Presentation, 2019 (McFarland 2020). He serves as managing editor for design at theatretimes.com. His work can be viewed on his website: www.msportfolio.com.