Working Social

This past week has been filled with reflection as I attempted to create a manifesto, a treatise on my understanding of art.  Sounds easy, no?  As I have been working on this assignment, I have recalled many moments from my life in the theatre, and one moment continually pops back into my consciousness.  As I have been reading Shannon Jackson's Social Works:  Performing Art, Supporting Publics this week, I came across this passage:  "the child is riveting because of her potential to destroy the aesthetic frame; in her phenomenological presence and her social unpredictability, she is a walking threat to the divide between art and life" (241).  Jackson's work attempts to expand the realm of theatre as she examines the impact and construction of performance studies and more experimental approaches.  She provides many examples of the work she is impacted by, the work she values, however the passage above has wiped all those out of my head in favor of this one memory:  I taught a Shakespeare camp in urban Kansas City for two summers in which the campers performed an abbreviated version of a show at the end of camp.  The summer that we taught Othello, I had a camper named Tarran.  Tarran was a scholarship camper, eight years old, and a poor reader, and yet he was there in my Shakespeare camp.  With his wonderful energy and humor--he used to do "The Tarran" for us when we played Freeze Dance--Tarran tackled language far beyond his experience.   Tarran played our Roderigo.  Now, when his big death scene came, Tarran was to be stabbed, and then crumble to the ground.  At the performance, on a professional stage, Tarran took his stabbing with conviction and proceeded to take an entire minute to die.  His death was tragic.  As he stumbled his way downstage, weaving through his bewildered and giggling cast mates, he found the stairs that lead to the audience, draping himself dramatically across them, he locked eyes on Iago, extended his pointed finger and proclaimed him an "inhuman dAWg!" and succumbed to his death.  The audience roared with laughter and applause as Tarran picked his head up, shot the audience a smile and wave, then let his head fall back into death.  None of it was planned, and it was wonderful.  This moment refers to exactly what Jackson is intimating, and yet stands beyond Jackson's words as a beautiful example of why I love the theatre and what it means to me.  The experience goes beyond theory. 

This past week I was also lucky enough to watch Bill Irwin's Regard of Flight.  In it Irwin fights against an immutable proscenium as he interacts with the reincarnations of the theatre.  In case you've never experience this piece, here is a brief link.  But these two experiences, born out of distinctly different levels of proficiency, speak to the same thought:  that the theatre can be so much more than just a framed picture with warm bodies moving about within instead of cold pixels.  What Tarran and Bill both achieved in these moments was beautifully pure interaction and play with the audience and for the audience.  As Jackson tries to take us into what she believes the future of the theatre will look like, I see Tarran and his spontaneous, joyful, living moment.  The theatre should be joyful, even when it makes you cry.  The theatre should be spontaneous if for no other reason than because it can be.  The theatre must live so that it will not die. 


Jackson, Shannon.  Social Works:  Performing Art, Supporting Publics.  New York:  Routledge, 2011. Print.