performance roundup, spring-summer '20

hello mes amis ;

a weird performance setup i made in my house for a show

i’m writing to share three of the best performances, digital or otherwise, that i have seen over these quarantine times. i’m not talking about the Met’s Wozzeck streamed digitally (though i did watch that), but indie artists just like you and i who have been forced to pivot and adapt, who had no experience or backlog of material for this thing.

i’m sharing these to contextualize the work that i’ve been doing lately. Water House Collective is doing a staggered release of 4 short digital theatre experiments that we’ve been working on over the past 7 months-- we’re still calling the collection of plays A Minute Flowering like our festival last year, but now you can watch it in your underwear. i don’t speak for the whole team about these influential artworks (though Sy and i watched most of them together), but i wanted to call them out as personal landmarks in the new performance landscape.

in addition to working i’ve also been doing a great deal of not working, scrambling, panicking, protesting, reevaluating my life, moving, crying, clinging to my loved ones, video chatting, painting, sleeping, being sick, and living in crisis. part of the reason i love the following pieces is that they ethically and logistically inspired my work and my thinking to adapt beyond given production timelines and expectation of emotional (and temporal!) availability.

enough gabbing. the work :

1. RHPSlive - the interactive online Rocky Horror experience. i have a number of friends who do live shadowcasts of Rocky (and other cult films and shows-- shout out Newly Human Productions), and i somehow never expected them to do something digital that would capture the raucous, sexy, awkward, nerdy experience of a live shadowcast, but Dr. Scott, they’ve done it. you can do callbacks during the show (via typing), throw digital popcorn at the screen, and watch TRULY dedicated freax crawl around their living rooms in their undies with their dogs.
   
   how did this inspire Water House? it renewed and refreshed my perspective on audience interactivity in the digital world. i love being able to comment on my friends’ livestreams, and i do it in appropriate places like drag shows (shout out Charlie and Vik and Hex) and more inappropriate ones like new music conferences (shout out Niko for truly dealing with my bullshit in several places). but the platform RHPSlive has built embraces the audience on a whole new level, making them an integral part of the video experience. i could never hear every callback as it happens in a noisy cinema, but i can see them all pop up on my screen, meaning i never miss a joke, no matter how bad. while i don’t have the technical capabilities to build something like that for Water House (yet), we value audience and performer laughter, feedback, and commentary in a similar way.
   
   p.s. you can catch this show again, with different performers! come up to the lab on 9/5/20.
   

2. E-viction - the link takes you to a Vice article which describes the show as it happened fairly well, so let me explain my enthusiasm for this project by asking: have you ever gone to a digital event that you stayed more or less tuned into for 12 hours? this was my first! there was a consistent stream of news, information, puzzles and riddles, performances, art, digital fuckery, sheer high class sexy content, AND shopping. truly, sex workers (the ones at Veil Machine and Kink Out at least) know better about digital performance than any of the rest of us.
   
   how did this inspire Water House? this show taught me what a digital show should be: comprehensive. a live show has so many elements other than just the content; there’s the merch table, the bar, the people you meet, the bodega across the street where you buy a sandwich, the banter, the technical difficulties. E-viction made an art and journey of these disparate elements; want to meet fellow attendees? chat in the comments section of a google doc. want to pay the artists? ads will pop up to show the many places to do that, from buying merch to tipping to subscribing to their OnlyFans. want to comment on the performance? type something or unmute yourself in the Zoom, the choice is yours. the digital world ought to enhance our experience of performance and make more accessible ways for us to connect. E-viction inspired me to think about the whole picture of A Minute Flowering. it can still feel like a festival, even if you’re the only one there.
   

3. Decameron Providence - okay, admittedly, this doesn’t really count as indie or DIY in itself, but the artists performing in it do (peep the lineup at the link!), so i’m including it. this was my first live in-person show since February. 😰 it featured walking between performances, and a meticulous and well signposted social distancing protocol. chiefly thrilling to me though, the playwright and structure nerd, was the spectacle surrounding the format; yes, we’re walking to different performance stations out of necessity to reduce audience sizes, but there are bells heralding this movement, making it almost a ceremonial experience. yes, we’re all wearing masks, but the leader of my brigade was wearing a Sleep No More-esque eye mask in addition to his mouth mask. why can’t the functional aspects of the pandemic also be stylish?
   
   how did this inspire Water House? in part, it was a lesson in how one might go about holding live shows in the future, which we definitely do plan to do some day. there’s no reason one can’t have audience and performer safety in mind even when there isn’t a pandemic on anymore (this is crucial to accessibility). equally as impressive was that the performance was not only performance, but contained space for dialogue, meditation, and banter-- much of it on racial justice. we don’t need only to be entertained, we need to listen the marginalized actively and ask how we can be accomplices in the struggle for liberation.
   
   p.s. the Wilbury Group, who organized the above, are also producing Shey Rivera’s new show  in October 🥺 and you know i will be attending it.

in all of these reflections i’m saying the same thing in different ways about audience commentary and participation, i guess. i enjoy the virtual and distanced dialogue. i’m also saying that the play lives between the audience and the performer (mild shout out Sherry Kramer), and in that way, a digital play shared through social media made through videocalls and emails and spliced up recordings such as A Minute Flowering is a live performance every time you, my friend, watch it.

our first play comes out on Friday - and whenever you see it, i’ll see you there.

flyer by me, logo by Sy Bedrick.