thoughts on performance

the nexus

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 15:45:06 -0500

Shakespeare's classic work about deception and power, Julius Caesar, explores the tension between public ambition and personal morality. Brutus betrays his ambitious friend, Julius Caesar, in the name of what he claims is the good of Rome, stopping Caesar's drive for power. Conversely, viewers turn in weekly to watch the Real Housewives expose their personal lives to the world, sacrificing personal integrity, in pursuit of media glitz and fame. They are two sides of the same gold coin, reflecting back on one another, describing this moment of celebrity obsessed empire, blind to its own decadence, ready to revel in its paradox.

The Real Housewives franchise traffics in intrigue, deception and backstabbing. The way our pop culture paints the image of women you’d think the 21st century had spawned the caricature of the conspirator/friend poised to cut, ready to let blood over a slight, even mere inclination of a social climb. Meet the progenitors of these Real Housewives, the definitive conspirators: Marcus Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Trebonius, Ligarius, Decius Brutus, Metellus Cimber and Cinna of Ancient Rome and of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar; a conspiracy evident of a culture in decline and the parasitic hunger for power that eats empires alive.

In spite of dropping wages and rising unemployment, the popularity of Bravo’s Real Housewives—housewives decidedly more botox parties and chardonnay than overdue electric bills and kids to feed—continues to flourish. We’re at a nexus of financial and cultural collapse that demands to be examined. As we watch markets plummet and morals devalue, the ladies of LiveFeed have a lot to learn from our bloodletting predecessors, from those men that looked over the edge and took out their brothers in response.

The “cat” fights and biting comments of The Real Housewives are trivialized—mere hair pulling histrionics. But what does this willingness to emotionally degrade our comrades, our sisters, mean about our society overall? What can we learn from the callous murder of a rival? And how far is “reality” from reaching this fever pitch?

The result is LiveFeed’s creative exploration: Julie S. Caesar: The Real Housewives of Trevi will reveal how Bravo and Shakespeare tell the same story of people driven to extreme, unthinkable acts, for the sake of glory and power. LiveFeed seeks to create an exciting, entertaining theatrical experience that uncovers the demons lurking behind everyone's guilty pleasure.

misogyny in the empire

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 07:53:29 -0500

Jennifer Pozner, in her chilling book, Reality Bites Back, examines how reality television portrays women to be hostile and competitive towards one another, with only nasty things to say, who care for little else except their appearance. She makes the compelling point that reality television works on women’s insecurities to sell us products that the shows equate with happiness and success: Skinny Cookbooks and high heels, plastic boobs and lip gloss. Anyone who has watched five minutes of the Real Housewives series knows this to be true. The hyperbolic histrionics depicted reach a shrill decibel capable of shattering chandeliers, and the women scream about things that most of us find to be so petty we can’t help but gluing our eyeballs to the screen to see what preposterous thing happens next. Always presented as dramatic and suspenseful, what happens next is incredibly predictable and never changing on this show: the women fight. It’s obvious that the ladies are doing this for the camera and for our viewing pleasure, but why? Is this really the only thing that we want to see from women?
It’s what is expected. Reality television is successful because it exaggerates assumptions we all have lurking in our psyche, and then comforts us by showing us that we are right! See..the world works the way we have been taught! Many people, umm, men I mean, have gained a lot by promoting the idea that women are shrill, vindictive backstabbers, incapable of working together towards a common vision. The Real Housewives franchise just exploits this commonly held belief. It lures its subjects in by promising fame and fortune then mocks them by exposing their naked ambition. But the audience of the show is not men, it is women. We are watching it, because its about us, right? And this is where it gets tricky, because yes its about us, but what about us? And this is where it gets ugly, because some of the worst misogynists are women, a disturbing truth that I don’t want to accept, because it feeds the idea that women just hate each other. We don’t. We love each other and support each other through birth, motherhood, friendship, adolescence, senility, all of it. But we also teach our friends and daughters the bullshit that has been handed down about how to be a “good girl” a “pretty girl” a “nice girl.” The Real Housewives just cycles through the familiar schpiel and feeds it back to us. And we clap our hands and say “What a bitch! I hate her!”
And now for the contradiction. Because in that hatred there is admiration. The mean girl is a powerful girl. If we could only teach ourselves to direct that histrinonic energy towards constructive, meaningful debates we could be disagreeing over the length of state supported maternity leave or the terms of the peace accord rather than who wore it best.

pictured above: Orson Welles’ 1937 production of Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theater.

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:48:07 -0500

The telling and retelling of stories is one of the great functions of theater. At the same time it reinforces the continuation of civilization, it affirms the necessity to create it and recreate it anew with each generation. Shakespeare did not seek to reinvent the wheel with his plot lines but still managed to make innovative, compelling and prescient plays rife with theatricality and heaping mounds of intellectual chow. But I don’t need to spend anytime singing this guy’s praises. He has already made a name for himself. And it’s not even the point. The point I am trying to make is that the old stories, the classic plays, ask us to remake them for our time because it is how we see what is going on actually. Through the familiarity of the old we are able to see the otherwise unseen haze of our own time. Shakespeare was not the first to use old time stories that everyone knew and reconfigure them to exploit them for new purposes, but he was so good at it his versions become monoliths eclipsing all others. So artists change the time and place of his plays but don’t alter the order of events, or the language or alter the characterizations so the time and place alterations have nothing to do with what the characters are doing or saying. The affect is awkward and disjointed. In order to retell the story and to remake the myth over for the needs of the here and now everything must be changed, touched, re-imagined. Events must be switched around, certain characters come to the forefront, others fade in the back. We steal, yes, but for our own purposes, to make the myth That’s what William Would do.

Audience Autonomy

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:02:31 -0500

I have been a spectator all of my life. Whether I have chosen to be or not. It is the truth of the capitalist urban landscape, the geography of the home. Wherever I go there is someone trying to get me to listen to this message to get me to think about this to buy that to dream about just this little thing to go here to do whatever to buy to buy to buy and then to feel restless so I can go in search of that special something else all over again. The messages infiltrate my home through my own invitation. the remote control. the computer click click click take me somewhere special please. The television the internet the phone. Then the internet again, oh wait let me check my phone again. ENTERTAIN ME my overstimulated brain shrieks in fear of the pulsating silence. I text my amiga I don't see the puke I've sat in on the bus, see I'm not bored. I'm happening. I'm popular. TV TAKE ME AWAY.I walk outside and there are more opportunities to watch and to consume ideas images products food. Through the portals of luminous LCD I am tricked into thinking I know what New Orleans looks like how hot the Sahara is what people in China eat. I've been there I've experienced that because I saw a picture on the Wikipedia televisual geography of shape-shifting-space-defying-digital-madness, I am always a captive. Audience. So the theater, the place that is the place, has to be the place, has to exist in space, in time, the old fashion way, the underline to the here and now, has to become the arena where we watch how we watch, and the only way to do this I believe is to give the audience total and free reign to be challenged to abandon all of the conventions of passivity to get out of the chair, to talk back to eat at inappropriate times to mill about to consider with a new orientation how the business of watching is done. I don't want to demand passivity from my audience through the accepted channels of proprietary obedience. I want them to be so active in their decision about what to watch and being made aware of why they are making that choice and how they are making that choice I am willing to give them total and complete freedom to do and experience the work however the fuck they feel like it. And if it means I have obnoxious women come to my work and talk loudly through the whole thing about their boyfriend who won't call them back while her friend texts then I will do it (and be very, very thankful, obnoxious women are little slices of heaven let's be honest). Because I don't want them held captive in their seats pretending to be listening. I want them to either actually listen or show their fellow space mates that they don't give a fuck, because then they get to be watched too and then we start to think about what we watch and why we watch it and what it means to live and what it means to perform and suddenly the activity is alive again, in the hands of the now and the breathing, and not just the same old same old colgate commercial.
http://nymag.com/news/features/69267/