Unpopular
Art: Local Stories and Spatial Narratives
by
Ken Hudson
"The
hybrid or meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation."
Marshall McLuhan
On the cusp of the millennium, I undertook two distinct yet related
theatrical endeavors simply and directly in short measure and
without any funding. These two productions, Flying
Dog Show, and The
King #5 Henry, were both created under with the premise
of "making art with whatever you have around the house"
or exercising the basic human freedom of expression. They both
productions utilized (for the most part) local amateur talent
and both were staged in alternative theatrical venues. These works
were created, in addition to their artistic merits, as a gesture
to illustrate how any artistic work may be produced effectively
without the trappings or dictates of economic forces. It was also
my aim to show that those works created outside the traditional
production confines of "the theatre" would have a lasting
transformational impact both on the local culture and on the participants
themselves.
We live within mass culture and the constant inundation of images
and ideas that arrive to us through countless media definitively
impact our lives. Marcuse says that "today... private space
has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass
production and mass distribution claim the entire individual...."
The images of mass culture have a cumulative effect upon us. The
fabric of our society is woven with the constant reinforcement
of a semiotic of consumption, a hierarchy of value, and set of
inverted moral precepts which passively, over time, have been
accepted as the norm. We are, in essence, surrounded as in McLuhan's
"spherical and resonant acoustic space," with all our
senses engaged simultaneously.
The
resultant cultural anxiety has forced the mass citizenry to retreat
into the hypnotic trance of consumptive non-action. The major
cultural media of our day: movies, the internet, television, and
video games, all serve to create a docile population which now
can judge themselves active based on virtual accomplishment, rather
than on actual action. Habermas says, "The consumption of
mass culture leaves no lasting trace. It affords a kind of experience
which is not cumulative but regressive. " And it is this
regressive trend that my works address. I am proposing that the
act of creating theatre is a cumulative tonic for the regressive
trends of mass culture:
Folk
Art = Child's play
This aesthetic stance was once that of the avant-garde, the historical
Dadaists, Surrealists, Beats, and the theatrical revolutionaries
who "happened" in the 1960's. But today, even the most
progressive of artistic ventures has become, for the most part,
just another wing of the great media dragon. The avant-garde exists
only now as "a group of well-paid cultural functionaries [that]
has risen from...bohemia to the respectability of the managerial
and bureaucratic elite. What...remains is the avant-garde as an
institution...[and]...a continuing alienation between, on the one
hand, the productive and critical minorities of specialists and
specializing amateurs---who keep up with the processes of high-grade
abstraction in art ...and on the other hand, the great public of
the mass media."
To distinguish my art from this state, I ventured to create works
distinctly outside of recognized superstructures. Not only the bureaucratic
ones, but also the literal structure of the physical theatre. These
works, one is a storefront on a busy downtown street, and one in
a hockey arena, created both new theatrical paradigms and at once
revealed the inherent and implied theatres hidden in those spaces.
In this way I created an anti-environment which permitted perception
of the original environment. Space as character recognizing that
"environments are not just containers, but are processes that
change the content totally…" .
During
the summer of 1999 I created the "spontaneous theatrical happening"
Flying Dog Show in a storefront on Queen Street in Toronto. During
the 10 week run, a natural theatre was created by the physical enactment
of various comedic narratives in the store's window, and by the
unsolicited participation of bewildered passersby. The show was
not advertised or formally promoted because the venture was itself
an advertisement. The medium was the message, and the content of
the weekly show supported the humorous angles of flagrant self-promotion.
While the street might slow down, it never stops. It became not
one show but many shows with all of us playing together and a street
culture was revealed to everyone: Street theatre and a theatre of
the street.
In
April 2000 I adapted Henry the Fifth to explore the mythical dynamics
of a hockey arena, emblematic of the Canadian national identity,
and to present my adaptation of the play itself, in the works for
many years previously. The resulting epic on ice, The King #5 Henry,
sought to evoke the spirits of the play by overlapping it in a charged
environment. This palimpsest did not interpret Henry V in light
of any specific Canadian historical moment, but instead strove to
place both actors and audience into a vortex of meaning, allowing
each individual's experience of this spectacle to be differentiated
in its similarity. Of course, my own meanings were presented, and
my theatrical aims in merging these two forms were realized. In
Canada, hockey is Shakespeare. From the speed of the skaters evoking
horses, the use of the stick as a weapon, the hockey-helmeted armor,
and so forth, including the arena itself, which is our Canadian
"wooden O." In my adaptation, all of these tropes coincided
at once.
We
live in a society that sits on its intentions all day long. The
physical apprehension of moving active creative people inspires
everyone to move, to act, to create, in short, to live. When we
witness people having fun, we naturally want to participate. I believe
that each of us is a unique and active creative artist and that
every day we each pull together an elaborate act which functions
as both lens and filter to the world. We know this in the theatre
as the mask, as the persona. But make no mistake: The guile which
actors claim as their own is as common as the dust from which we
came. People can all act. They just need varying levels of polish
to make it digestible to the observer.
As
we witness each human institution transferred, one by one, from
private experience to public circus via the next wave of reality
based television programs, I am strongly advocating an opposing
grassroots movement which will claim for each individual "the
option" of telling their own real stories themselves. Therefore,
I support a conscious and radical democratization of theatre in
order to preserve last effective vehicle left for alternative and
independent public expression. Let those of us with experience teach
those who want to learn. Let us be open to making works that both
involve and enliven local communities. Let us get small together
and roll in field of our own invention. To do this, we must work
to eradicate the hierarchical divisions that separate amateur from
professional theatre. We are all expertly human enough, each with
a story to tell, to be considered either.
In
the Flying Dog Show episode "Shakespearean Prophecies,"
Bruce Wayne elegantly portrays this sentiment when he says, "The
world's a stage and all the people on the earth are merely people
acting." While Marshall McLuhan notes that under satellite
conditions, we live in a global theatre where the population reverses
from content or spectator into actor and participant. If under the
proscenium of the satellite, the world is indeed all a stage, then
I respond with one simple direction:
ACTION
There
is a feeling we experience when we are together with one another
watching people move their bodies to the truth of their thoughts,
their feeling, their lives. This is an irreplaceable content in
understanding ourselves. As we become more isolated in our vast
mass connections, we must also remind ourselves to breathe together
occasionally and share ourselves publicly for all to behold
_______________________
An
earlier version of this essay was first delivered at the Festival
of Original Theatre, Centre for Graduate Study in Drama, University
of Toronto, March 2003. It has been included in the archive of Canadian
Adaptations of Shakespeare at the Univesity of Guelph.
Copyright ©2004 Ken Hudson email
Mr Hudson
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