Hello everyone!
Hope you all are doing well and have a lovely week ahead of you.
Here is this weeks etude, skip past the ramble if you want to see my suggestions for things to catch this week.
A ramble
It's been really hard writing. I know I'm not the only one who has been feeling that there's something daunting about looking at a blank page on your screen. I've started using a piece of diction software, to sort of help me. That allows me to just keep talking for a bit before I get to an idea and then I can stop and right away and edit around it. I'm still useless with grammar and unfortunately the software isn't advanced enough to pick up a comma from time to time.
So I'm currently speaking to my laptop in a room. Having the words flashed up that I'm seeing in front of me is a little bit distracting. It helps me think a bit more. So I do apologize if this is written a bit weirdly. I mean, it feels weird to say written, weirdly all wrote weirdly. I'm already correcting myself. I don't know if it is correct. I'm pretty dyslexic…
I may leave that in.
I'm not exactly writing this, I'm speaking out loud and hoping that I make some sort of coherent sense, but yeah, I apologize if it doesn't, if it isn't as fun to read. Maybe something that's better to be heard out loud. I would put a audio version of this online, but I don't think I'm there yet with putting my voice out online. I'm still getting used to hearing back these recordings.
This week's listings are a mixture of things that will be presented for the first time in a digital space and some things that have been around for awhile. Also in this week's mailing there's a little bit about what I've learned whilst writing this. This week has taken a bit of a different turn and you'll see why further down on the page.
I did want to talk about digital spaces this week, but I didn't really know what the best things to say or what I would be offering by talking about them.
There's an article in Vultre, about how Fake Friends created Circle Jerk and what lessons they learnt about making it digital. One thing I want to highlight is the face they hosted the show on their own website rather than sending a link through to a Vimeo or YouTube channel. It made it feel like Fake Friends had created their own personal stage on their terms. I wonder if this is something to consider for artists presenting digital work moving forward.
I spent some time this week in the Tender Absence space and it was incredible. It was something that felt really new and radical for performance. It felt like that VR chat game where you can go in as an avatar of your favourite anime character and you can be a bit daft and weird with strangers online. It was really big, It seemed big at the beginning of 2019. Tender Absence felt like a nice arty version of that. It used the same mechanics of choosing an avatar and you moved around the space that's been specifically created for Tender Absence.. You are greeted by a guide who was a little ghost and they talked you through the space and helped you out, you then went into the stage area at your chosen time and interacted with the performance. The performance I saw was Behind Your Eyeballs by Salma Said & Miriam Coretta Schulte, an intimate discussion about shaping futures through dissenting acts influenced by the Egyptian revolution in 2011. It was so much more than just zoom theatre.
I really, really encourage everyone to book, basically everything on the tender absence program.To really experience what that feels like. It was just great.
This week as well. I've seen a lot of things about, well, it wasn't even this week. There's been a few conversations that I've been a part of, talks about digital theatre and there seems to be a lot of conversations about theatre now just being presented on Zoom and how because of that, it’s turned a lot of people away from digital theatre. It’s a bit frustrating.
I think back to things like Circle Jerk and how its mad merging of forms from cyber spaces to meat spaces was really exciting to witness. The slickness of the tech mixed in with the theatricality of performing made it feel so alive. It was a mad cosmic Brechtian dash which felt like the author of the Turner Diaries was trying to make their words go viral through a tik tok dance routine. It wasn’t just using these theatrical and cinematic languages to influence the performance but was acutely aware of how the audience received these forms, it felt like doom scrolling down a feed the cool kids didn’t invite you to. It knew how audiences sat and watched things. Not just 2 hour plays, but 20 second videos.
I then think about Dead Center’s How To Be a Machine and just how cool that was. There's something really fun about tech and playing with tech in theater in that…. It's just cool. I know that's not interesting interrogating insight into that whole process, but it was just really cool. There were so many little tricks that they pulled in front of you and you had a little robot version of yourself sat in an actual theatre watching an actual actor do things in front of you. I don’t want to spoil it because I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s presented online again at some point. If it comes around please do book in for it.
Zoom can be good for theatre. It can sit alongside these works that play with these different toolkits. I think maybe we give ourselves more time and resources to play around with it a bit. How can we pull tricks in front of audiences and what does being aware of how an audience enter, take their seat and exist in front of a Zoom chat do to influence the work you’re creating.
I think it's okay to admit that theater is dying,
like a lot of forms. Um,
We have this carcass in front of us, let's sort of take the interesting bits, the bits that would probably sell well at a black market or be used in a potion made by a witch and make something unique from it.
Let's create Frankensteins.
I think that's one thing that is a big challenge for a lot of makers and myself included. How do you adapt? And I don't necessarily think it's about adapting. I think it's about inventing which actually sounds harder and probably is harder.
Maybe adapting or inventing aren't the right words. I don't know what the word is, but merging mutating from other forms, mutating theatre.
Use this decaying cadaver and sew it onto other dead bodies and see how it runs.
One thing that I'm learning from using this diction is that I've started to ramble more when writing. Well, with “my writing” My points aren't as strong, but I feel like it lends something to it. Maybe it’s abstracted enough that you can tell that this is a stream of consciousness.
The room that I'm in is also quite echoey. So the thoughts are audibly bouncing around me in the least metaphorical way compared to If I was just thinking inside my head.
It feels more open.
This weeks listings…
Live from Thursday 3rd December, 8pm
Maelstrom Under Glass by Yewande 103
Live until 3rd December
School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh
On Demand
On Demand
ALPHA by Erwin Maas & Stef de Paepe
On Demand
Notes on what I’ve learnt so far
When looking through the stats about what people have been checking out, I’ve found that people are tending to click on links of the more established names I’ve mentioned. This isn’t really as much of a surprise, the mailer can act as a reminder that a personal favourite has a new show on, and I wondered what I could do to change that up a bit. This week, I’ve replaced images with GIF’s of the shows. This means that you can get a better idea of the feel of the show. Theatre is a living thing and sometimes a static photograph won’t entice you to check it out as much as something thats moving. As it stands, I’m not writing about each show as I don’t want my opinion of the pieces to directly influence if you engage with it or not and using GIF’s can give you a better impression on if it’s your cup of tea or not.
I’ve also removed stating what kind of show it is. In the past I’ve labeled shows are dance, experimental or in another category all together. I found doing this particularly difficult as a lot of these words can be fairly subjective to the viewer. I could call something dance and another could be more specific with it. I also think the GIFs do a lot of the heavy lifting for describing what the shows are. Example in this weeks is that the GIF of Maelstrom Under Glass shows audiences that there will be some form of dance in there.
The GIFs have also made me a bit more aware of the curation of these listings. I wasn’t going to curate these selections until much later in the life of etude, a mixture of me finding my feet with it and not knowing how to curate for this platofrm. Having the GIFs alongside each other gives you an idea of how varied the offerings can be, for the first time I’ve replaced a show that I decided on earlier this week with a different show I’ve selected from the big excel sheet of links. I thought changing where the reccomendations sit on the page would help but it just didn’t feel right. It’s not that the show I replaced was identical to another, it’s that it had fairly similar vibes. This week I wanted to avoid that but another week I may lean more into that. Vibes are another subjective thing. Some times they’re good for some and not for others. Opening the door into curation has made me push forwards a couple of ideas I’ve been having and I think through December there will be an element of curation in each one. I’ll give you a heads up on the weeks its more curated
An Apology
Just a quick one to say sorry for sending last weeks mailer out late on a Sunday. I forgot to schedule it when clicking publish. My bad.
It also reveald to you all that last weeks was a bit rushed. I spent at entire week thinking about what I should write at the start that I didn’t end up writing anything. lol. Hopefully this weeks has offered something a bit different to last week.
Thanks again for subsciribing and taking the time to read through.
If you watch any of the shows or have any feedback drop me a message on twitter and please do share with people!
Hope you have a lovely week and talk soon!
Josh x