Author: Jon Keevy

Open Door Collectives

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Thoughts on artists, FTH:K and particle accelerators

The internet is a good place for ideas. It’s sort of like that Hadron Collider thingy, smashing bits together at high speed to see what does or doesn’t come out. Here’s an interesting sentence I tripped over in an article on New York theatre troupe Superhero Clubhouse:

“Superhero Clubhouse describes themselves an open door collective, embracing both the value of longstanding relationships as well as the transient nature of artists.”

I’ve seen a number of companies get formed and break up. This week I heard the official news that FTH:K was losing two more of its key people: Rob Murray and Liezl de Kock, who’ll be heading out to work with Ubom! in the Eastern Cape (their blog for more about this). The company is emphatically not breaking up, but it does put the question of its future into the scrum. But there definitely will be a future.

As captured in the quote, artists are transient. They like collaborating and creating, they don’t like repetition. After 6 years it’s probably time for a change – it’s good for the company and good for the artist. Much like the particles in that super collider thingy, artists need to move about and come into contact with new ideas and people at high speed if they’re going to change (I’d say grow, but that’d definitely be mixing up the analogy).

Like Superhero Clubhouse, our institutions need to understand artists and let them move, the problem being that for any company less than 10 years old it is a monthly, weekly, daily struggle to survive. Finding funding is hard. Even what we think of as established companies like Magnet and FTH:K aren’t immune. What will happen when the founders move on? Will there still be a company?

FTH:K has always emphasized the management side of its operations. It has everything in place to continue, having mentored and nurtured the next wave of its ranks to take over. Could this be the first South African ‘open door collective’ in a truly sustainable sense? The next couple of years will tell, but I have faith in the staying power of a good idea well executed.

Theatre vs Film: Round One

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I like movies. Really I do. I like theatre too. Our modern culture is now so saturated in film and television as our primary mode of storytelling that it’s hard sometimes to separate what’s what. Other than the screen versus live actor thing. The differences are far more profound though, they certainly stem from an essential difference in production and presentation but these affect every aspect of story and design.

I wrote this article back in 2009 after watching Done London.

Plays that want to be Films

July 18, 2009

Theatre is finally dead. Awesome. After years of watching its slow decline I have finally seen its death. It has ceased to be, passed on and moved up to that big playhouse in the sky. Except its corpse won’t keep still. Oh, no it will not. Like a blank-eyed zombie it still lurches around, empty of its essence, its life-force seeking out not braaaaaaains but boxoffice. What is motivating this shuffling cadaver? What has taken up residence in place of theatricality? Film.

I like film, it’s a beautiful medium used by many great storytellers to great effect. But it is a different medium to theatre, something my generation of writers seems to have forgotten. Film and theatre have always swapped their promiscuous lovers since before the Lumière brothers’ film spectacles – Eisenstein even started his career in the theatre – so there is a lot of common ground between the two. The very nature of each medium, the qualities that create their own special blends of advantages and disadvantages, means that they tell stories in very different ways. The stories differ in ways both dramatic and subtle, the kinds of performances that are given by the actors are worlds apart and the arrangements of narrative elements are especially divergent. All these factors mean that despite interrelated forms, you cannot tell a story onstage the way you would on film.

Done London is the latest culprit I’ve seen of writing and directing theatre for film. It is rooted in a film genre – slice-of-life multi-plot – and features naturalistic story, dialogue and acting, ‘montages’ set to genre music for time passing, linear narrative progression and multiple locations. None of which would make this a play in film drag by itself, but taken together they move the play out of play categories. And so audiences get what they’re used to seeing on flat screens in dark rooms.

All of which would be fine if theatre was in fact dead. It’s not. It’s vibrant, exciting and theatrical. Whatever experiment is carried out by the playwrights, directors and performers in theatre, let it not be an experiment in disguising the nature of the form. Audiences may be in love with movies and TV, but that does not mean theatremakers should be giving them what they see in movies and on TV. Ultimately there is really only one way to kill theatre – use it to imitate another medium.

http://stagedog.wordpress.com/2009/07/18/plays-that-want-to-be-films/

Now I wonder if I was right at all.

The dominance of film has essentially changed our vocabulary, we all understand the concepts of montages to music, of cuts and long versus close up shots. I watched Neil Coppen’s Abnormal Loads last month and it made me question my antipathy to theatre using film techniques. In the hands of a creative designer/director like Coppen stage directions calling for long shots of a village sprouting in a valley, or a dream juxtaposing a rapid fire number of images ‘out-film’ film.  The same potential is there in Beren Belknap’s developing style – no accident that both these director/designer/writers are as immersed in modern media as theatre.

So I must abase myself to admit I was off the mark to condemn theatre using filmic techniques and stylistic flourishes as theatre in film drag, because it’s not hard and fast like that. Instead what we’re seeing are artists are using the creativity of theatre magic to speak in the vocabulary of film to tell their stories. Some artists are just doing it a lot better than others.

Cannibal’s Pie: Theatre Competition

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There’s this thing called market share. You may have heard of it. It’s a pretty literal term measuring how big your slice of the pie is. For some calculations the pie is made of money and for others it’s a cannibal’s pie made of people.

I’m concerned about the cannibal pie right now. Audience. And what I really want to know is: how big is this pie? When I first started thinking about pies and such I had a little revelation: there are no slices in this pie, the market isn’t saturated. The same people who watch the Mechanicals’ Rep season will go check out the Artscape Spring Season and pop into Kalk Bay to see what’s playing there. Like most of my revelations it got replaced by another one that said the opposite in a louder voice. Having been at the opening of the Pink Couch’s Mafeking Road last week at the Intimate and of Solomon and Marion on Saturday at the Baxter I could use my keen powers of observation to tell that they were completely different people. Of course that’s a pretty small data set – statistically insignificant is the term – but it supports the slice analogy, and a good analogy is totally awesome.

Now there are two ways to increase the size of your slice: Take someone else’s or make the pie bigger.

So because stealing is frowned upon in our society unless you have a official title it stands to reason that we need to make the pie bigger to make our slice big enough to fill our stomachs for the month. That’s one of the goals of the Pink Couch – get the next generation watching theatre. Pretty sweet goal. But it should also be one of the goals of the big companies. Right now Solomon and Marion is R130 for students. That’s pretty steep for students. But it’s also a fair price. And is Solomon and Marion really aimed at the next generation anyway?

The big theatres have the big slices of the pie, fair enough. They’ve been around for ages, they build and maintain audience bases, they provide secure employment in an industry where most people don’t know what they’ll be doing in 4 months, they have programmes promoting and supporting new work. But maybe that first revelation I had wasn’t so crazy after all. What if the pie can be shared? What if there was pin board up at the Baxter or the Artscape or the Fugard that listed productions at other venues? By small, independent companies? The more theatre people see, the more they’ll want to see and the pie will miraculously get bigger.

The market isn’t saturated. We can afford to say that there’s other theatre out there. Let the big theatres have their big slice and share it too, and let the independents work on making the pie bigger. After all the tattooed hipster of today is the tattooed ballie of tomorrow and we need to get him into the auditorium now if he’s going to be shelling out R180 for a ticket tomorrow.

Numpties on Safari

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So my last post got a certain comment, pointing out that I addressed the letter to theatre-makers. Whose job is to make theatre, not market it.

My first thought was: Am I on a safari? Because a buck was just passed.

Most of the theatre-makers I know do the majority of their marketing themselves. But let’s say just for a moment that they didn’t, that they have a dedicated Marketing Minion to do it (the ideal world for some). They would still be responsible for the shitty poster/garbled press release/passive-aggressive facebook invite that the Minion produced. Why?

Because it’s your play.

Theatre isn’t run by a sinister cabal of producers who set ticket prices, lay down budgets, dictate casting and collaborations and take every decision away from the powerless theatre-makers. Sometimes it feels that way (and a half decent argument could be made that the economy serves this function), but it isn’t. So just like you don’t cast an utter numpty in your play, you don’t let an utter numpty do your marketing. Even if that numpty is you. If you can’t hire a professional Marketing Minion and you can’t use your flirty eyelashes and boyish hips to get some pro bono, and your friends are all marketing numpties too then READ THE MANUAL. And by this I mean do some research, use the internet, ask for advice, look at publicity you think works and rip it off, etc, etc, etc.

Here’s something you may not know.

A play happens between at least two people. The performer and the audience. It can have a story. It can also not have a story. It can have words or not, music or not, lights or not. But it will have a relationship between at least two people. And that relationship, the interaction and reaction, is the play.

People who say that the job of theatre makers is to make theatre, not market it don’t understand what theatre and marketing are. They are two parts of a relationship. It’s not just about bums on seats, it’s perception, values, expectations.

Don’t leave that to a numpty.