\"Documentaries Turn Downtown\"

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Credibility, Criticism, Collusion Panel, Superscript, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2015. Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy of Walker Art Center

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U p Fr o n t

C r i t ic al M as s Tom Sellar minneapolis — It would be fair to say that the international arts journalists and critics who assembled at the Walker Art Center in May 2015 made a wary and beleaguered bunch. Superscript, a three-­day conference cosponsored by the media platform Mn Artists, brought together writers, editors, curators, and academics to reflect on the effects and possibilities of digital publishing and social media on arts writing. Those of us in the practice or profession have heard these debates often, having been told for the past decade that “everyone’s a critic” now that everyone can post their opinions online, and that print or “legacy” media face imminent extinction. So the opening reception — with bracingly loud dance music, a cash bar, and typewriters spread around the lobby next to peppy signs exhorting us to “share your best line of criticism” — left some partygoers skeptical. But Superscript’s prompts still mattered, even if they weren’t exactly fresh. Can and should criticism democratize, or at least move over to give some column inches to curators, artists, and other interested parties to give their own context? Could new publications, such as Triple Canopy, Hyperallergic, New Inquiry, Frieze, and e-­flux, not only traverse traditional disciplinary lines but also straddle diverse platforms and technologies in their attempts to cultivate new conversations, readers, and contributors? Does negative criticism have more, or less, power in a viral media environment? Now that comment boards look like relics and debate takes place in the hyperniched, gated microcommunities of Facebook and Twitter, does “public” dialogue mean anything? Are we giving away the store and becoming exploited labor when we amass free content for those corporate sites? Can meaningful institutional critique issue from platforms serving powerful neoliberal interests? These were the questions raised, but mostly not answered, in Minneapolis. There were rock-­star moments, such as Ryan Schreiber’s account of how the music publication Pitchfork launched and stayed independent. “Can there be an art version of Pitchfork?” wondered one presenter later. Author Orit Gat pointed out that little has changed in

Theater 46:1 © 2016 by Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre

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sel l ar and bruin the art world’s hierarchies since online art and commentary took over; what’s in circulation, and why is it so often uncritical? Claudia La Rocco, one of the only participants from the dance, theater, and performance sector, questioned the assumption that online communities ought to be created at all. “Connectivity and community are the lies of our age,” she said. “How would anyone feel connected via the Internet?” The hyperlinked but never genuinely “interactive” digital infrastructure, outmoded before it even settles into place, reminds La Rocco of the enduring complaints in the theater that traditional audience members remain passive and unengaged. Her solutions? Trust your boredom, for starters, and look for something “small and respectful.” Looking around the hall, I saw a plethora of visual arts journalists, with some music, film, and literary people in the mix. Where were the theater editors, critics, and journalists, and why weren’t they part of this contemporary conversation? Amid all the talk of forming communities and broadening the dialogue with new formats and platforms, I couldn’t help but think that theater — always content with its archaic traditions — was missing out on criticism’s digital evolution. Theater 46:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-3322706 © 2016 by Tom Sellar

D o c u m e n tar i e s Tur n D ow n t ow n David Bruin In May 2015, Anthology Film Archives hosted a series called Downtown New York Theater: Behind the Scenes featuring documentary films of prominent American theater-­making ensembles such as Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma (ntok), and the Wooster Group. As the title suggests, the domain of these films is not the work onstage. If, as the Living Theatre collective’s legendary director Judith Malina proposes, theater is the meeting of the prepared and the unprepared, these documentaries focus squarely on the preparations — the costumes to be cleaned, the scenes to be rehearsed, the sleep to be neglected — and each comes off as unique as its subject. The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma Is Calling You! chronicles twenty-­one days in 2013 in which the group undertook a Herculean amount of work in New York and Berlin, which included the creation of the documentary itself. The film is composed of alternating diary entries from ntok’s founders and codirectors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, and consists of voice-­overs played over footage from the day’s events. Aligning with the ensemble’s life-­into-­art aesthetic, it combines the mundane (a trip to Costco) with the monumental (shooting screen tests with more than a hundred Berliners in mere hours). Between petty frustrations with equipment and emotional self-­reflection, the final notes of gratitude for their success and their collaborators (some of whom seem to be editing the documentary itself for the film’s duration) resonate powerfully. Standing By: Gatz Backstage, directed by Shaun Irons, evocatively captures life with Elevator Repair Service backstage — actors clutch their props, crack jokes, and 2 Published by Duke University Press

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up f r ont Still from Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma Is Calling You!, 2015. Courtesy of Nature Theater of Oklahoma

silently watch a Wimbledon match. The series also featured numerous short Wooster Group documentaries spanning from 1991 to 2011. Fittingly, one segment captures the decades-­old ensemble watching a Polish-­language documentary in an attempt to reconstruct Jerzy Grotowski’s actor training with absolute precision, resulting in a sort of meta-­documentary. Scheduled future releases include documentaries about the 1970s American avant-­ garde milestone opera Einstein on the Beach and — especially noteworthy — the first documentary about the 1990s Iranian-­American director Reza Abdoh. Directed by Adam Soch, Abdoh’s longtime projection designer and videographer, Reza Abdoh — Theatre Visionary surveys this provocative artist’s career and mourns his untimely death from aids in 1995. The preliminary cut of Abdoh I viewed drew from a polyphony of testimonies, from actors to stage managers. But rare footage showcasing Abdoh’s astonishing oeuvre speaks loudest — a record of Abdoh’s influential work and a gift to audiences who never saw it performed live. No doubt when completed these features will be available to scholars with access to well-­funded libraries, but what about artists and the general public? Will these films spark interest in viewers unfamiliar with progressive theater? And what exactly are these works documenting? Ensembles that create theater may be combinations of personalities above all; only temporarily embedded cameras can record and convey those collaborations. In the Nature Theater of Oklahoma documentary, an exuberant Liska confesses, “Kelly and I are so much smaller than the characters we play in public.” Perhaps the big screen is best suited to explore the relationship between the creators’ struggles and the triumph of creation. Ultimately these new theater documentaries — together an exciting new tendency — capture not just the ephemeral form of performance but something much more elusive: the unseen lives of the artists themselves. Theater 46:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-3592703 © 2016 by David Bruin

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