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I also went and saw a show with Bret on Thursday night called Hey Girl! It pulsed with all these intense, dreamlike images and expensive electric props, and it was supposed to address issues of the feminine image, I think. It wasn’t very good–as Bret pointed out after the show, it seemed to be stuck in the most shallow and obvious symbols and images, and failed to explore anything in a particularly involved way. It succeeded very well in pushing visceral buttons cheaply, though–a loud sound, a compelling trio of images, a violent, disturbing scene–and so it wrenched the gut in a sort of delightfully satisfying way, but without providing much real insight.

That said, there were some moments in it that took my breath away. At one point, there was an incredibly tight and bright green laser beam shooting directly into the ear of the main performer as she cocked her head, and words were projected on the back wall of the stage, one at a time, slowly at first and then faster and faster, pausing occasionally for a split second, apparently random but occasionally easy to make connections between. I was amazed at the ability of the brain to pick up so many of those words as they went flashing by so fast I could barely see them, but they made impressions anyway. I was overwhelmed with the sensation of mental tickling, my mouth was open, I felt like I was in the Matrix learning some new crazy mental skill, I was astonished. There was another beautiful moment at the very beginning when the woman emerged naked from a pile of flesh-colored, dripping goo (silicon? something crazy that oozed off the table in glops for the entire rest of the performance). An electric sword that burned whatever touched it, so that when the woman covered it in a folded-up sheet, a stripe was burned all the way through it so that when she picked it up and unfolded it there was a perfect, brown X on it, and she wore it like a cape while talking about the beheaded queens. Perfect circles everywhere. The black woman’s body being coated by the white woman in silver paint so that she danced with the lights off and we saw the glowing body in the near-dark and nothing else. These things and more filled me with wonder.

So when you have a joyful experience, even if the thing that produced it was not what you would call great art, how do you react? I decided in the moment of the curtain call that I’d much rather live in a world where I respond to my delight than to my critical mind, and I gave the clunky piece a standing ovation. Later, I felt slightly guilty for doing so. Should I really inflate the value of that piece of theatre by publicly lauding it, potentially increasing its value in the minds of the theatregoers around me and increasing the likelihood that mediocre theatre will be praised as exceptional? Am I contributing to a sort of creeping complacence around theatre, allowing it to die an ugly death because I don’t hold it to high standards that would demand better art?

But…I can’t choose sitting down with my dour critic’s mind, refusing to applaud when the child in me really wants to. And as a producer of theatre, I know how much pain and hope goes into even a terrible show, and surely my genuine joy can’t really be hurting anything?

Oh, I don’t know. What do you guys think? To deliver the unwarranted praise and be happy about it? Or to maintain a rigorous critical mind and, full of integrity, reserve my standing ovation for the rare piece that really changes everything?

Baffled by the ethics of having an opinion,
Alissa

I had the super-cool opportunity to go to Olympia to hang out in the state capitol on Thursday. There was a bill up for debate in the state House and the Senate about renewing a hotel/motel tax that’s been a large source of arts funding in King County for the last decade or two, and a call to action in the nonprofit community sent us all scurrying down there to show up in support of the bill (which the hotels and motels, quite understandably, would like to die a nice quiet death.) Anyway, the experience of sitting in the legislative session was surprisingly awesome. I have this general notion of legislative politicians as being the doofy sum of their dorky/dumbed-down campaigns, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that in fact, our state government is run by people who seem reasonably competent and intelligent! Who knew? For each bill that was up for debate, the chairwoman called up testimony for and against, and then the representatives would ask perceptive and well-informed questions of those there to debate the bill. There was a woman sitting at the side of the room whose nameplate had the title “research analyst” and it appeared to be her job to answer all the informational questions about the content of the bills themselves. I kind of want her job! Actually, Mom, this would be an awesome job for you. She was there to know all the bills inside and out, anticipate and research circumstantial questions (”is one of the proposed sites of effect on the Indian reservation?”) and explain the information to the lawmakers in the room who don’t have time to research all that. Holy moses! What power!

The other nice thing was that the architecture of the capitol building (and the corporations building/office of the Secretary of State) was lofty and grand and white-marbled and gold-lettered and columned and beautiful. I know it’s naive, I know it is, but I walked in and felt a sense of greatness and accomplishment, and pride in what we flawed humans have made of ourselves despite enormous logistical difficulty. I mean, our government is messed-up and bureaucratic and inefficient and full of compromise, and is responsible for many horrible things, but at least it functions, and some stuff does get done. That’s not trivial when you’re representing millions of people who all disagree about what, exactly, should be done, and how. I felt, wandering under those high ceilings across those impeccably clean white marble floors, a bit like I feel when I walk into a cathedral–I may not agree with everything that goes on here, but god damn this reverent setting gives me hope and a sense of faith.

Crossing the campus of the capitol, though, Bret and I had to laugh at the old oak trees growing next to the pedestrian path. They all sported huge, unwieldy branches that would certainly have broken and crashed onto the sidewalk or overbalanced the trees themselves had they not been held up by serious and elaborate metal-and-concrete scaffoldings, permanently installed. How like a bureaucracy.

Rubbernecking with the best of ‘em,
Alissa