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Essay Question: Contrast the ways an audience can read and make meaning of a post-dramatic / physical theatre piece of performance, with the ways they read and understand realist theatre. Consider how the relationships between performer, role and character are handled, how ambiguity is dealt with and how narrative is created. Providing examples from Tim Etchells’ Forced Entertainment. Freedom of thought is a liberation of individual thinking, to believe what you want to believe is something that people in the world are still fighting for or are even unaware of its existence today.
Nevertheless each factor in life will influence the mentality of people to a certain degree, impacting how they read and interpret situations, text and draw a meaning from. Mentally liberated or confined everybody has a different point of view. Theatre communicates a variety of experiences though presentational and representational forms. With each member of the audience bringing a different perspective to a performance, undoubtedly every interpretation will differ.
Although there is no complete control over the audiences interpretation of a performance, it can be manipulated into a certain direction. A Realist production constructs a performance as close to reality as possible, using character and narrative to help portray a specific theme and help the audience passively come to a designed conclusion. Where as Contemporary Theatre, alike presentational, dabbles in the form of ambiguity to allow the audience to actively participate in their own interpretation by stimulating their imagination.
Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment is a post-dramatic theatre company which depicts a range of human experiences illustrated through open-ended, penetrating and compelling performances. How an audience reads Forced Entertainment’s work in comparison to Realist theatre differs due to their separate approaches to theatre conventions and control over ambiguity. Realist theatre develops a believable narrative, as if it were a recording of someone’s life, narrowing the performances ability to connect and relate to everybody in the audience.
Realism takes the audience on a journey through their story, building connections by creating empathy for the protagonist, making an emotional connection. An audience will interpret and read the circumstances the characters are faced with, more often than not it is openly explained in the conflicts in the narrative. Some spectators may be able to relate to the circumstances or relationships in the performance, so much so that they can feel what a character experiences. To perhaps even take that feeling home with them; a tale which relates to their own.
But the difference between relate and incorporate is where Realism and Post-Modern theatre differ. Tim Etchells’ Forced Entertainment performs simple, fragmented stories addressing common concepts of human experience. Their 1996 production Showtime explores a collection of themes with the most prominent being death. With a dying man in agony being faced with a feeble questionnaire and a detailed description by a woman in a dog suit of how she would commit suicide, it is clear that these are not realistic circumstances.
These scenes together do not sustain a linear plot nor provide any connection to one another other than overlapping themes. But at the same time, as condensed scenes, they provide a heightened experience. The audience is asked to actively interpret each scene because it is not simply laid out for them. They are encouraged to question, why is this man being asked these questions? What is his answers and what do they say about him? During this time another actor is on stage popping balloons and letting the air out of them slowly in a long and agitating squeak.
A noise so distressing, at the time of a characters slow death, can only bring a spectator, who cannot escape the room, closer to the action. To hear the action, to feel the same distress. Allowing the audience to connect the emotion or theme relevant in the scene, rather than a specific characters circumstances, to their own life experience. A person can relate to a Realist theatre, but a person is incorporated into the Post-Modern performance by design. To feel every scene, to actively interpret every scene; not to have it fed to you.
Characters in a Realist performance rarely change roles, and if so it is made inconspicuous, to maintain the idea that this is a portrayal of real life. These characters are designed to comprise the entire identity of one person, their history, what they do in life, how they think, how they act, they are designed to be as real to us as a friend. If they are asked a question, it will be answered solely as that character, they may represent the view point of many people, but they are still their own ‘person’ in the performance.
Here the audience can remove themselves from the action and just watch the drama unfold before them as a passive observer. Forced Entertainment explore the characterization of their characters in different ways, here Tim Etchells describes: “We often work with the idea of levels – a baseline of performers-as-performers and above that levels of pretences, assumptions of character or whatever. We like the effect of a kind of slipping between these layers or levels. ” (Reader) As explained Forced Entertainment create different layers of characterisation, choosing to change between them throughout the performance.
Alike Epic Theatre, Forced Entertainment change characters to give a disjointed nature and to develop subtle juxtapositions or to just radically change direction. For example, in their performance Showtime there is a woman in a dog suit, who for the first two thirds of the production yaps and persistently barks like a dog, crawling on all floors around the stage. The actor asking questions starts questioning the dog, to which the dog replies in perfect English and then proceeds to take off her costume head to tell a long and dark story of how she would commit suicide. another reference, paraphrase? ) Inhabiting the nature of a dog, then suddenly becoming a common person assists in the creation of levels between characters. By changing and forcing the audience to constantly re-evaluate every new character and their purpose, places the audience as active spectators, who have to mentally keep up with the game of the performance. As most Realist theatre has specific themes it wants to address to the audience, ambiguity in its performance is best avoided.
Which is why Realist theatre has maintained such a structured set of conventions and ‘rules’ for stage performance. Clear action, conflict and characterisation all assist in the portrayal of a theme to heard the audience into the direction it wishes them to follow. As Realism tries to deflect ambiguity, Post-Modern theatre thrives from it. “… to see what understandings of contemporary experience emerge when the art work dissolves the divide between the original and the secondary. In this deliberate confusion the lines between the spontaneous nd the pre-scripted, reality and fiction, the immediate and the distant, bodies and texts, event hood and representation and the live and the recorded are often made to fade away. ” (Void Spaces, pg 20) This undefined state between spaces is what can grip an audience to long for understanding, to give them space to fill the gaps in with their own imagination. Ultimately making the play apart of their own world in that moment. This enticing space allows the audience to employ their own freedom of thought, whereas Realist theatre likes to shape their interpretation into a certain outcome.
Realism provides the audience with a catch, supplying engaging characters and taking the them on a journey in order to coach the observer into the same ride as everybody else in the audience. Leading towards the same themes and ideas that the audience can relate too because they have experienced that with the character on their one and a half hour journey. It is a ride that people can sit and enjoy without having to struggle to understand the purpose of the performance because it is just like real life, they are watching someone else as a removed spectator, they are not apart of it.
Forced Entertainment and Post- Modern theatre incorporate the viewer into their performance, so that they are no longer a spectator but a participant. Engaging the audience in a completely different way, Forced Entertainment deliver fragmented work and deliberate spaces of ambiguity encourage the audience to actively participate in order to make meaning of the performance. To allow them to come up with their own interpretation and connection to the meaning and themes. Allowing the audience to employ their own freedom of thought, to become one with the performance on their own level, not to have an interpretation shaped for them.