Immersive for Indoor Kids Vol. 5: Where The Audience Is
Nothing is normal
The following accompanies this week’s ‘Indoor Kids’ newsletter. You can find all the current listings at the Now Playing: Immersive For Indoor Kids page.
Hello There,
The review machine has picked up this week, and the team has cranked out pieces on ‘The Girl On The Phone,’ ‘444 Tempus Fugit,’ Theatre On Call’s ‘Invisible City,’ and ‘YouEscape’. There’s more what that came from as darn near the whole team is on assignment at present, including the online edition of Tribeca’s Cinema 360 which launched today on Oculus TV. We’ll have our notes on that up as soon as we can.
There’s also plenty of food for thought for you out there, as the back and forth over the fate of theatre in the coronavirus era is a hot topic. Solo performer Siobhan O’Loughlin crafted a response to an essay that had caught wildfire which made the case, essentially, that theatre makers should sit this one out. Obviously, we side with Siobhan, which is why we asked her if we could curate her response.
Oh, and some of the work that has been circulating made it into The New York Times thanks to a Critic’s Notebook piece by Alexis Soloski. Disclosure: I get quoted in it, but that’s not why I’m drawing your attention to it. Actually, this is:
Where The Audience Is
2020 is a lot weirder than any of us anticipated, I bet. The kind of year where the improbable becomes reality. There’s bad improbable: global pandemic. There’s good improbable: a new Fiona Apple album.
Then there’s just fucking weird improbable: suddenly there’s all this immersive work being done online. Maybe we shouldn’t even call it “immersive” maybe “experiential” is the right way to go but labels, labels aren’t as interesting as the craft behind the work. The “what” that is being made not the “what” we call it.
Stranger still: before the world shut down NYTimes theatre critic Alexis Soloski was on track to attend the HERE Summit & Festival. It was something I wasn’t running around crowing about, but I was excited. We had a chance to get the small scale intimate immersive work we love into the national conversation in a real way. Better still, we had a murder’s row of talent that were sharpening their work up. I was ecstatic to get Soloski and other members of the national press into work by E3W, Scout Expedition, Capital W, Linked Dance Theatre — so many of our usual suspects. Years and years of work set to culminate in what was basically going to be our coming out party.
Then COVID-19 and all the tragedy and tragic farce that’s followed.
So when we do finally get name checked in the Times it is in the context of remote work, something that most creators are just getting their feet wet with.
As I read the piece, and informed by the interview we had, I can tell that Soloski really tried to connect with the work she explored. It reads like most of it didn’t connect for her. That’s okay. That happens and it’s fine. Not every piece is for every one. We seem to think that it needs to be but it really, really doesn’t. The mistake, however, would be ignoring the feedback that is being offered up here.
There’s a big lesson to be taken out of Soloski’s piece, which is that we’re in this improbable moment creators are very much forced to “meet” the audience right where they live. To connect with them in a time when many of them can’t choose to disconnect from the flow of their daily lives and create moments that let them come into themselves.
All of the tricks and techniques that you’ve relied upon before? They might not work anymore. For every person who — like me — is sheltered alone and is going a little stir crazy there’s an Alexis Soloski who is sheltered with family and is going a little stir crazy in a different way.
This is the design challenge of the current moment: to meet the audience where they are mentally. Stressed out. Lonely. In need of escape. Scared. Frustrated. Angry. Exhausted. It’s systemic, and odds are it isn’t going away very soon. If you are making work right now and you’re not wrestling with this, you’re missing a big opportunity to speak to the zeitgeist.
Because Pandora has opened her box and loosed these griefs upon the world. Yet remember what was left inside once all the terrors had been unleashed.
Now reach out and grab it.
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