Talk:Monday July 6: Writing Live in Performance

"The Great Deviser." www. youtube.com. 11June2009. Forced Entertainment Performance group. 4 Jul 2009 FIRST RESPONSE: Jessica Hoover In the youtube clip, three of the actors from the "Forced Entertainment" ensemble try to bring clarity to the notion of writing live and bringing improvisational work a sense of balance. The clip opens up with a video of the group's, "First Night". The company's webiste describes this work, "First Night begins with a grand welcome, but soon disintegrates into dark predictions of the future, psychotic escapology acts, unexpected dances and unhinged show-biz anecdotes." As an audience, we want to see emotions run rampant and characters be pushed to thier linits, especially when it all started so sweetly. The group discusses the idea od using the terms "cheques and balances" in thier rehearsals. Although the groups wants to create something new and exciting, there must also be an understanding within the cast about what needs to happen onstage. By working through rehearslas, they know that if someone were to start the unscripyed show with a monologue about jumping form a building, there must also be something to counteract with that and baclance it out. No one wants to watch a show that stays at the same pace, that constabtly deals with the same emtotions and the "forced" ensemble knows this. I watched a dvd on "The Great Deviser" and in it the group continues to discuss how their work has no goal in mind but by doing this work, they can manipulate the show in several different ways, no matter where its heading. One of the actors describes the work saying, "Even if you know what you're looking for, we go into the kind of improvisational mode when we're working and you basically find things that you are collectively fascinated by...i think the thing we talk about a lot is that moment in an improvisation...where you know that the temperature has changed." (The Great Deviser, Disc 1, Title 10: Chapter2) What I took away form this was that the group works in hundreds of ways in order to avoid ever being stuck for ideas onstage. They collectively know, from working with everything from duct tape to gorilla suits, what will work and what will not. There is this understanding and this beauty to the fact that they do not script thier work, rather work so insanely close together on so may different levels that the work can rarely fall flat, or short of what they may have wanted. "Forced" actors do not enter the performance with a pay off in mind. There is another part of the "Deviser" dvd where the analogy is used that,a composer can eaither write music and then teach it to his orchestra OR he and his musicians can write it together and see what else can come out of all these different creative individuals and I think that sumns up exactly what Forced Entertainment is striving to do in thier rehearslas as well as shows. -sorry for all the spelling errors, in a hurry.

RESPONSE: Keitha Tetreault In the words of Maya Chowshry "What is live art? For me it's anything time-based or performance based, so basically it has the essence of theatre ...It's innovative, it pushes the audience to re-think their experiences; it pushes the performer to find a truth in what they're saying" (42). Experts have said that live art has a set of strategies or disciplines, which is similar to playwriting. In order to write a play you must follow a well-made play format and use content, structure and other strategies and disciplines to create a play. So both art forms have set structure to aid in the creation process. I don’t' believe that live art or performance art will ever replace play's or writing. Both types of art forms attract a different type of audience. The history and culture behind playwriting, I believe will hold strong through the centuries. Live art is something that appeals to some people, but not to all, and the same with traditional or modern plays. Both forms of performance relate with each other, but will never compete, destroy or replace the other one.