The always restless American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage has launched an online journal of provocations, HowlRound. Here is Meiyin Wang on "The Theatre of the Future":
Theater will be performed by audiences—as in Rotozaza’s Etiquette—where
two participants sit across from each other at a café table, listening
to instructions over headphones, moving around objects and participating
in the enactment of a narrative. Or, as in Gob Squad’s Kitchen,
where the collective attempt to recreate Andy Warhol’s underground
movies, where by the end, the four performers are replaced by four
audience members on stage, participating in this quirky meditation of
the unknowability of the past and optimism for the future.
And furthermore:
I quote Ben Cameron, from the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, who spoke
so beautifully at Under The Radar this January—who compared the
religious reformation in the 15th century and our current
Arts Reformation—“which is dramatically shaped by new technologies and a
massive redistribution of knowledge. With the means for cultural and
artistic production and distribution having been democratized. There is a
term, pro-am, amateurs who are doing work professionally—a group
expanding our aesthetic vocabulary, even as they assault our traditional
notions of cultural authority and undermine the assumed ability of
traditional arts organizations to set the cultural agenda.”
With increasing interactivity and participation from audiences who
are no longer satisfied to be on just the receiving end, content
changes. Form changes. Authorship changes.
