Connecting through the intimacy of a phonecall
comment added 25.3.2025:
- "During Italian lockdown in 2020, Marche Teatro borrowed the \"Poetical consultancy\" format by Fabrice Melquiot to offer the audience a Poetry-Doctor consultation against isolation. Someone will call you on a specific time and date, have a brief chat about who you are and what you were experiencing in lockdown, and prescribed you a poem, that the Doctor will read."
How a travel ban made an artist think of different ways of dissemination. The show has no director or set and a new actor for each performance. The writer's voice is an integral aspect of the script and though he is not present one can feel his presence. As part of the script the writer's email is shared with the audience so they can write to him and share their thoughts.
It is interesting how the creator of the show works with an online conference platform and makes it an incredibly intimate space for the audience.
Presence which theoretically should not be present is a very intense form of liveness.
The spectre of death (conjured into the now) is very 'live'.
The subject of Kaegi's animatronic-robot performancen 'Uncanny Valley', Thomas Melle, is himself a writer and was invited to write much of the text. The writing has an urgency and honesty that allowed me, as a viewer, to emotionally 'buy into' the robot in the same way I would if Melle were performing himself. The subject of the Christian holy theme park 'Tierra Santa', in Argentina, is of course God. God apparently created everything (not just this theme park). His and Jesus's voice is heard at various points in many of the animatronic shows that are staged there. For most visitors, suspension of disbelief is a given: it comes suspended. And for them too, the writing has an urgency that allows them, as viewers, to emotionally 'buy into' the robots in the same way they would if God were speaking Himself.
the entries speak for themselves in this connection
This connection explores the difference between reading a play script, and a live performance where the reading out loud *is* the event - where people's efforts and the risks involved in getting involved are the point of the event: these may be referenced within the content (eg OK OK) or not (Your Words in my Mouth), but the fact is that the gap between the reader and that of the person whose words they are incorporating is never fully closed. The unrehearsed participant can never be a fully transparent 'servant' of the text.
In the event of not being able to gather how can we broadcast theatre as a means of distributing live performance to a dispersed audience
#participation
A performance by a robot which has travelled alone to the venue. #idea
Kate Moss... Billie Whitelaw...
There's also the example of Tupac Shakur playing live at Coachella.
Event scores as invitation to co-create as seen in the example of Grapefruit
We are going to create a dance festival
where the different pieces are exercise videos that we commission.
Each exercise video is a dance.
A dance which you learn, which you incorporate.
By learning this dance, you also exercise.
The dance festival 'programme' will be curated so that each dance - each exercise video - works on a different part of the body, or mind.
La Otra Gente - 2021
I think that it's interesting that this piece can exist in a live way if you simply read out the rules. The projection or threat of the resulting event is already quite palpable, but that a group of people once actually did do this (apparently true - there are photos) somehow grounds it even more - like the weight and inertia of that drunken evening is carried through into the here and now, simply through reading out the instructions / rules of the so-called 'game' - not least of course because the 24-hour news cycle has not stopped since they originally played it.