Nod to the Odd
Teddy Bergman is frustrated. The artistic director of the Woodshed Collective, Bergmans been on the hunt for the perfect space to stage the companys spring show, an adaptation of The Tenant. He thought hed finally found it: a large warehouse space in Greenpoint, but the real estate folks he contacted wouldnt lower the price to work within his small budget. They were not exactly the amenable or artistic sort, Bergman says.
As the Woodshed Collective envisions The Tenant, inspired by Roland Topors book of the same name, an industrial hangar space will host an investigation into the relationship between who we are and where we live. Similarly, organizations committed to alternative theater like Woodshed challenge the ritual relationship between performance and place, and feel the rigid geography of a proscenium arch with a stage and captive, seated audience is out of date. The time has come to rethink the boundaries of the theater.
The theaters that we normally play in have become very fixed and kind of dull places, two dimensional sometimes, claims Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of P.S. 122 and curator of Hotel Savoy, currently taking place at the Goethe-Institut across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
While the Woodshed Collective sees traditional theater as a static monologue, Jake Margolin, who is creating Marriage: 1 for HERE Arts Center with husband Nick Vaughan, believes that proscenium arch theater is a totally dictated experience [that] tells you exactly how you should be watching what youre watching and when you should be watching what youre watching. Margolin prefers an audience to approach art without the controlling boundaries imposed by the atmosphere of a theater.
This trend toward staging theater in unusual spaces has existed for generations, but it has gained more currency beyond those dedicated solely to experimental performance since it breaks down the traditional roles of viewer and viewed, re-imagining the relationship between audience, space and performance. In the last few years, New York City audiences have experienced a broad array of theater that has been presented in apartments, on boats, in churches, in subway cars and in hotel rooms. Though the form has gained significant popularity, the actual process and struggle to locate a space for the eventual performance has not gotten any easier. That doesnt stop a dedicated and growing cohort, however, from attempting to find the next weird place that doesnt resemble a stage in the traditional sense.
Gantner says hes dedicated to staging performances in odd spaces since it affords a sense of intimacy. Its not so much about the space, he explains. The reason why its exciting is not because the stairwell is particularly pretty, although it is, but because it creates a mood and makes you engage with the lives and the experience. Hotel Savoy is a clear example, with ballrooms covered in creepy plastic and scenarios taking place in a room made of mirrored doors and corners of rooms populated with birds nests and other objects, but its actually the actors playing characters who try to engage visitors with the built space.
Margolin and Vaughan have a different perspective, and emphasize the importance of the spaces physicality; each often designs pieces specifically for a particular area. During their Pittsburgh installation, for example, a dilapidated elevator that happened to be in the gallery became a key focal point for one of their sculptures in a piece titled Preparations for Marriage. For them, what makes for a direct and honest performer-audience relationship is what sets their work apart from traditional theater.
Were trying to obliterate a sense of frame, or constructed context, Vaughan explains. The relationship between our viewer and our performer is something thats very direct and exists in the space that both are sitting in.
And its meant to be more than a marketing gimmick. When Woodshed Collective presented Confidence Man aboard a U.S. Coast Guard ship docked at Pier 40, audience members were barred from the passive involvement typical of a traditional Broadway show. And in P.S. 122s Hotel Savoy, visitors are exposed to the Goethe-Instituts building, which has been empty and languishing in obscurity.
Woodshed sells out all of their shows, which are presented free of charge, thereby generating thousands of prospective money-spenders for any neighborhood where the Collective take up residency. The Woodshed audience is consistently younger than Broadways, according to Bergman, and will travel to an outer borough specifically to see theater in a non-traditional setting.
Margolin and Vaughan plan to utilize the entire HERE complexfrom bathrooms to sidewalksfor Marriage: 1 because each of these different spaces is so wonderful on their own, and all together make the building that is the HERE Arts Center, that it feels almost false to put something in only one of the rooms.
As with most innovative ideas, the movement is plagued by challenges. Finding suitable, affordable spaces is difficult when residencies can run four months and budgets are tight. We manage to create a great spectacle and keep it free by really, really, really stretching a dollar, Bergman explains. As a non-profit, any landlord that would donate space could write off the rent as a donation in kind, but it can be a hard sale to a businessman.
The very non-commercial nature that makes alternative theater attractive often makes it a prohibitively pricey endeavor. While Woodshed gets thousands of non-paying viewers through its shows in each of its runs, Hotel Savoy can be seen only by a tiny audience of 32 on any given night, and can only hope to show the rebuilt and transformed interior of the Goethe-Institut to a total of about a thousand people. Theres no way of making money out of this stuff most of the time [But] I think rethinking how the audience sees things, rethinking how you plug into the audiences brain and how you plug into their ideas and their imagination, is absolutely the way of the future for theater, Gantner says. So in that sense, its the way of the futureif we can find the cash.