1. Premises
It is time to make a theater that is truly native to the city. A theater that lives not just in isolated theater spaces but in all urban locations, including the mundane and the public. Our theater will take the entire urban landscape as its natural environment. It will not hold its rehearsals in "neutral" studio spaces and then later move outside, but will immerse itself from day one in the available world of streets, parks, alleyways, empty lots, elevators and rooftops, as well as schools, libraries, churches, hospitals, and living rooms.
In the modern city, a limited range of theatrical style implies a limited audience. Where the audience has a global perspective, a theater of "realistic comedy" or "traditional ballet" or "stylized drama" will only interest a small segment of society. In order to make sense in relation to the entire city, we must draw on the full range of theatrical technique. All performative categories should be considered potentially useful, from realism to storytelling to dance to documentary to formalism to carnival. All types of content should be accessible, from the topical to the eternal to the abstract. And the result of this diversity must not be a patchwork of recognizably quoted material, but a coherent whole drawn from the most varied palette of theatrical tools we can imagine. The model for such synthesis is the city itself, which achieves a unique coherency via a mixture of intentional design and organic growth.
All of this requires research to achieve. A "research theater" is one that is as rigorous and objectively-oriented as a "theater laboratory," but which functions as part of an open system with the rest of society rather than in isolation. Following the model of archeologists rather than theoretical physicists, the heart of our research theater will be the urban expedition, a kind of pilgrimage through the city as well as a research mission. This might include travel by train or car but will be done mostly on foot, and it should include both private and public spaces and should address the social and historical aspects of the city as well as its physical structure.
The expedition should be part of the theater process from beginning to end, from rehearsal and workshopping to performance. It should provide the basic environment for training and development. Since the requirements of an empty parking lot, a busy intersection, and a subway car are so different (not to mention those of a living room or cafeteria) an expedition-based theater must be radically flexible. Its craft must include movement through a varied landscape. Instead of altering locations to match a preconceived "set design," or purposefully staging a "site-specific" version, we should assume from the beginning that everything we do must be at home in any urban space.
2. The Material Environment
Theater artists are uniquely skilled to investigate the relationship of the human body to its environment. Our work is both intellectual and embodied. Our research into human culture is incarnated in material questions. What is the structure of possibility presented by a given physical landscape? How does sound work across varied architectures? How can a space of play and liminality be defined or created within a complex social grid? How can a tone of seriousness be established where shallow interactions are the norm? What is the nature and range of communication among strangers in an urban setting? When and how is the "city as temple" revealed? How to sing a song that touches people? How to move so that others feel you moving? How to speak and be heard? These are ancient and eternal theatrical questions that demand new answers for every moment in which they are asked.
In the city, the animal body of flesh and blood is wrapped up in a manufactured body of clothing and cars and buildings. Within this second skin, the human animal continues to walk and sing and make love and eat and shit and do everything that animals do. The work of the urban actor begins at the point of interface between the animal and the urban. To begin with, we ask: Who lays their hands on the body of the city, and why? Who treats the street as a place in itself? Who lives not on the city but in the city? The answer begins with street vendors, garbage collectors, bike messengers, skateboarders, graffiti artists, joggers, and the homeless. These people can give us not only poetic inspiration but also concrete methodology and technique. We can also look at where the animal manifests itself suddenly in the urban, such as instances of public anger or public sex, the behavior of children and the insane, the presence of sickness or death, and the impact of weather. Each of these is a point of contact between the urban and the animal.
We will search continually for open spaces: Spatial gaps such as parks, empty lots, and alley ways, and temporal gaps such as red lights, traffic jams, and blackouts. What can be done in a crosswalk while the cars are on pause? What are the regular and irregular patterns of music being broadcast in public spaces? Large urban structures exist in time as well as in space. As urban artists we should be trained to follow the rhythms of the city as a sailor follows the rhythms of the sea. Our work should be built on the patterns of traffic lights, rush hours, the work-week, and other more seasonal changes.
In addition to these basic features of the urban landscape, our theater will need to be intimately acquainted with the legislation and enforcement patterns that govern behavior and spectacle, especially in public places. All of this research, from the rhythm of traffic lights to public obscenity laws, could eventually prove useful not just to other urban theaters but to anyone hoping to organize parties, rallies, festivals, or social gatherings of any kind. In mapping the possibilities for performance in the city, we will also be charting the overall relationship between the human animal and its constructed environment.
3. The Social Environment
The primary audience of our theater must never be the traditional audience of ticketed consumers. This is the difference between working in the city and working in the theater world. A ticketed audience brings with them the fourth wall. We want other audiences: Those who invite us into their community, those who offers room and board as payment, those who trade instead of purchase, and those who stop to watch us on the street. We are looking for the city-as-audience, which may not always even include other people. It is possible to perform for the benefit of a bridge or to work in relation to an inanimate landscape.
What is important is not the feelings of the performer but the nature of the overall phenomenon and its effect on the city. Everything must be directed towards the production of concrete results. In this way we will avoid being tourists, coming always as fellow citizens rather than outsiders, and prepared to offer ourselves in exchange for the experience. Our relationship with the city must be reciprocal, so that the expedition is both research and result. Our theater must be community service.
At times there may be two audiences. In that case, the audience described above, which can be animate or inanimate, which can include anyone, anywhere, at any time, and which is defined by our reciprocal relationship to it, always comes first. It is for this audience that we perform. If there is a second audience, an "art audience," its members will be present only as witnesses to the more essential relationship that exists between the performers and the city.
Similarly, the strength of our theater will be measured by its relationship to the city in which it lives rather than by success in the theater world. Rather than hoping to perform in black boxes at theater festivals around the world, our tour should take us across the divisions that mark our own city, and into the mystery of the local. We will commit to an ongoing process of urban touring. Our impossible goal will be to play in every church, library, and school within the borders of our city, as well as on every train platform and line, in every vacant lot and open space, in each neighborhood and in every kind of community. We will need a serious program of outreach and networking. And just as if we were an organization for housing or other social concerns, we will need to establish relationships with other urban institutions and maintain a reputation for integrity.
4. Results
A city is a microcosm. New York City is the largest city in the United States. It is not necessary to travel to India or Africa in search of powerful dances, primal rhythms, or living rituals. There are sacred mysteries in Chinatown, the south Bronx, Central Park, Wall Street and Staten Island. Hundreds of languages are spoken in Queens alone. If shamans and magic circles and secret communities and ancient traditions and sacred songs exist in the world, then they also exist in New York City. It is just a question of finding and recognizing them in their urban forms.
What is the place of the sacred in the city? Where are the manifestations of the ancient human traditions of communal story, communal song, and communal dance? Where does the shaman go? Such questions cannot be answered through speculation or fancy, but require concrete research and constant practice.
To produce theater that is native to the city means, by extension, to produce human beings who are native to the city. As urban performance artists we aim to rediscover the meaning of citizenship. The citizen is one who is both comfortable and useful in every urban space, from the street to the community center to the boardroom. For us, the craft of theater is a key to the city, and performance is a model for active engagement. The people who work in and with this theater will develop a new relationship to the city, both its inanimate body and its inhabitants. This will be our contribution to the ongoing development of the urban animal.
Wroclaw, Poland
Cambridge, Massachusetts
July - August 2004