Re: RAT Collaborations question

["Erik Ehn" <shadowtackle@worldnet.att.net>]

About Audience:

     20-25 is plenty. The larger the audience, the greater the appetite for the new, for spectacle; a general move away from narrative, precision, repeatability, and the personal. To get audiences of any kind, including bigger ones - "yes" to the sense of event, plus - how are you working with the audience instead of at them? Much energy in classes, slams (classes are theater, slams are theater); are you performing in their spaces as well as yours and what's the difference? (malls, private homes, railroad tracks are theaters). When audience-development work feels like it's taking you away from your art, either you've found the limit of your trade/craft (you want to play short stop and sometimes second but will be dependent on others to make up the team; you've found questions you can't answer), or consider: what's a script (for example) except audience development? Repainting a theater or using playwriting to teach literacy are esthetic expansions, as well as business plans; expansions of what a script is.

     I'd like to find ways where size of audience isn't a financial issue (difference between a house and a motel). We don't pay our rents by charging our lovers for loving or our guests for their company. We pay with our day jobs. Spaces need day jobs. Then we have the nightly liberty of throwing a shoe into the gears of the daily grind. [I think "sabotage" comes from an old French word for "shoe - sabot... striking shoemakers threw shoes into the works. Theater is the sane science of sabotage, the habit of anarchy.]


peace,

e

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