When Jane Wang was putting together the Art of the UnGrand Series, she asked me if I would develop an experimental theater contribution. I was happy to take that on. It has been sort of my brand over the decades (though she didn't put it that way). But this begs a couple of questions, in particular because it's been about 30 years since the phrase "experimental theater" attracted very much attention. What is the "theater" of this piece, and how is it experimental?
I am familiar with the pejorative, not to mention outright hostile, associations that are sometimes attached to the word "theater", and I'm not going to give space to those here. What I'd say is "theater" about this piece as it's developing is: 1) its aesthetic impurity, and 2) its partial use of preexisting materials.
Theater has permission to use preexisting materials, typically though not exclusively called "scripts." The emphasis here is on permission rather than requirement. Even a cursory look at global theater history and practice shows that it's not all been about play production, nor has all play production followed the Western mainstream/commercial model. And this is not a play.
There are five of us in this performance, but I'll only write here about what I plan to do. I will be using three pieces of preexisting material: one song from a Weimar Republic musical theater piece, a fragment of a piece of concert music from around the same era, and gestural material derived from a video produced 30 years ago by a still well-known performance artist. That's all I will say - if you are reading this and come to the performance, I don't want to generate confused expectations. I selected these materials over the past few months because they have spoken to me for decades. That is, it became more or less inevitable that I would use them.
It's not too much to say that I experience a process something like alchemy in the transformation of writing or other forms of notation (musical scores, actions on video) to live performance. I am attracted, frequently, to preexisting material because I have a sense that it will contribute strongly to my work. I have a sense that it will provide a matrix for a series of actions or moments, with their associated exact flows of affect or feeling-tone, that are irreplaceable and have no equivalent in anything I would "create" directly. So I transform them by incorporating them into my work. We know how this works from mashups and collage. This also has to do with my deep commitment to an idea of work that is based in present-moment doing, as compared with an intellectual property-related concept. Work is what you do, as compared with what you (literally or figuratively) sign your name to.
And experimental? Well, it's not the mashup part, as that set of techniques is well established. My question going into this is, will the five of us developing Low Concept create a container that holds both the preexisting and the spontaneously generated material? Because there will also be a good deal of the latter. For me, this is still unfamiliar territory.
(Cathy, Jed, Alisia and Joanne may or may not be using elements of preexisting material in what they do. That's up to them. I'll mostly find out about this at the same time the audience does.)
