Threatening and manifesting

Kris Joseph over at Struts and Frets posted this today and it has me thinking about things I'd perhaps forgotten or overlooked of late. In his post, he talks about the real threat to theatre: the theatre community. The theatre has been dying for years, if you ask many of us, and yet it has endured and survived through all manner of hardship, including its outright ban in certain times and places. So perhaps we shoud acknowledge that no outside force is capable of silencing the theatre for good. If anyone or anything is killing it, it is the theatre's artists, with misplaced priorities and agendas, with the industrialization of training and of productions, with whining in place of action. As Kris Joseph put it, "We're kicking the horse and screaming about animal abuse at the same time."

Which leads to the question why do we do theatre? Why do we make the choices we make? How did we start out on this path and why are we still here? Sure, we were all bright-eyed and idealistic once upon a time, but the real world takes that out of you little by little; it can lead you astray. Which leads to the other talk online about theatre manifestos--Ian Mackenzie contributes productively to the discussion (as always) at Theatre is Territory 2.0, summing up the latest and issuing a call to write! Manifestos give us direction, help us to re-establish our goals, principles, and priorities. By writing them, or revisiting them, we can see how far we've strayed and how to get back on track. Certainly it is difficult, especially as you are beginning a career in a recession-obsessed world, to hold onto your ideals in everything you do on a day by day basis. But if you were looking for something easy, you probably shouldn't have picked theatre in the first place. So why are you here?

For Kris Joseph, his theatre and its survival are about service: "Passionate creators and artists connect their theatrical work to a reverence, respect for, and a desire to serve the audience." And for me, well, I am inclined to agree. It is through this service that theatre will continue to survive and endure. By placing our emphasis on serving, we bring the audience in and create a theatrical community much greater than ourselves, both individually and as a group of artists. It becomes about more than our egos or our bottom lines or even just the story. It becomes about a group of people and a conversation--theatre should always be a conversation. It also recognizes the audience as a more active participant in the creation of theatre. And much like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to keep the theatre alive.

And so I leave you with these words of wisdom on serving the audience from one of my favourite (and most brilliant) RADA teachers, Gregory de Polnay:

"Hamlet was not talking to the fucking cupboards. You have to take the audience with you. You can take them by the hand and lead them to paradise or guide them up the garden path and slit their fucking throats, but take them with you..."