The Bacchae

This performance will take place in two adjoining rooms.

 

In the first room, a group of 4-7 year old children will perform.  They will be viewed by an audience of adults who are not their parents.  The performance (play) of the children will be decided exclusively by themselves, without the instruction or direction of any adult.

 

The story and themes of The Bacchae will be presented through the children’s environment: the objects in the room, the costume pieces available to them, and most importantly, the audio environment. The audio environment will be constant for the duration of the project, a recording of text and music created by Ilya Bernstein and Jed Sherer that will always play from start to finish, and whose length (roughly an hour) will determine the length of each performance. Another constant part of the environment will be a live video projection along one wall, showing the parents of the children.

 

In the second, adjoining room, the parents of the children will watch a live video feed of their children in the room next door. They do not enter the performance space. While watching the live video of the children performing, the parents will in turn be recorded on video, and the image projected in real time into the room with the children & spectators.

The same group of children will meet and play regularly over a span of time. Each one of these meetings will be considered a performance and be open to invited spectators. This project is a workshop to pilot the idea, lasting 10 sessions (September 7th to 17th, 2011). A longer project (in which kids will meet once a week for a year) is planned for 2012 in Tokyo.

The Bacchae will take place at the COLLAPSABLE HOLE in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from September 7th to 17th 2011, at 4pm. There is no performance on Sunday Sept. 11th.

The performances are invitation-only, not open to the general public. If you have a specific interest in the project, or you are a parent who is interested in having their child participate, please send us an email.

Why?

Do it again

I think a lot about rehearsals. Specifically, I wonder what they mean relative to the final production, how they impact the performers / creators who participate in them, and finally, what is the theoretical mechanism that makes them function.

 

I think there are basically two types of rehearsals: ones in which the events that will occur in the final production are chosen and perfected, and ones where the rehearsals develop the technique of performers to facilitate an improvisational performance. 

 

So, in the first type of rehearsal (in which the events that will occur in the final production are chosen and perfected), the process is based on repetition. (Anne Bogart used to say: “repetition with variation”). This is no front-page news: the French word for rehearsal, after all, is répétition.  Do it again. Let’s take it from the top. One more time.

 

Why do we do things over and over again in a rehearsal? The repeated action is always compared to an action which does not exist in real space, a mental action-image. Based on this comparison, we repeat to try to get the performed action closer and closer to the imagined one, even when the imagined action is a flickering, shape-shifting shadow. And so, the process of repetition in a rehearsal is a molding process, where actions are molded more and more minutely to fit a projected ideal.

  

The problem with this approach is that is fundamentally retrogressive: since all repetitions are subservient to (indeed, are led by) their proximity to a pre-existing ideal, the action created in performance gestures toward an idea-belief held previously. Of course, since it is very rarely the case that performed actions (no matter how well they were rehearsed) match an ideal action perfectly, the ideal is rarely seen and almost impossible to directly acknowledge, question or critique. And so paradigms and ideas spread without ever being directly confronted, understood, or chosen.

 

Do It Again

Is there any other way to make a performance? Or rather: is there any other paradigm of repetition that could change our understanding of how repetition functions in creating intentional public acts (ie performance)?

 

Children (my own and others) love and utilize repetition in a way that seems radically different from ideal-driven repetition of the Theater. Children’s rampant use of repetition has been noted by many, including Freud, Piaget, and Walter Benjamin (“…the child is not satisfied with twice, it wants the same thing again and again, a hundred or even a thousand times”).  And though these men have put forward theories of how repetition functions in the child’s process of skill acquisition (education), or how it is driven by psychological processes to reduce trauma, in fact all such “developmental” theories take as their basis an assumption of a stable end-point to childhood learning, and a stable psychological goal that leads children’s behavior.  In other words, all presuppose that children’s behavior is developing.

 

Here I propose to look at the use of repetition by children not as a developmental phenomenon, but as a model of how repetition may be used.  In this project, children function as creators, and will not be regarded as incomplete or moving towards completion.  The children will create, repeat and vary any actions they choose inside a highly suggestive narrative and performative environment. Their choices will never be instructed, directed or commented on by the director.

 

Because my interest is in the relationship between repetition and performance, this core investigation forms the basis of a complete performance event, which will incorporate other structures to form a greater system which can function as a performance, and which has at its center an opportunity to observe a novel use of repetition as rehearsal/performance. This project is “The Bacchae.”