Fringe Lab: Experimental Performance 08/05/2011 3:24pm

Editorial
All art is, to some extent, an experiment. You never know at the outset of any creative project what the final result is going to be. It could be brilliant and exhilarating, or a sprawling and chaotic mess, or anything in between. And the more variables you have, the greater the risk you take that something will go wrong. Few art forms invite more risk than live performance. Even the most basic performance requires a successful collaboration between producer, director, performers, crew, and volunteers—each of whom must rely on one another to do their part, all while knowing that even the best-laid plans often require some last-minute configuration (to put it mildly). So it is nothing short of miraculous that, even with the risks involved in putting on, say, a production of Twelfth Night, there are plenty of brave souls willing to venture into the uncharted territory of experimental performance—enough, in fact, to populate Fringe Festivals the world over. People love Fringe. But what do they love about it? And what, exactly, makes it a “fringe” event? This is an especially important question to ask as Fringe continues to grow and to draw a more “mainstream” element. Many participants say what they appreciate about Fringe is the opportunity to experiment—to try to do something they’ve never done before—and this goes for both performers and audience members. But what are they experimenting with? And how do they know whether or not their experiment worked? One way to tell is by reading reviews—or by asking people what they thought. If there’s one thing people love more than seeing Fringe shows, it’s talking about them afterward. Fringe veterans will reminisce fondly over the “good” shows and laugh (or cringe) about the “bad” ones. But getting people to open up about what makes something good or bad is considerably tougher. It might be an issue of quality—writing, staging, performance, even lighting—or of the topics the show addresses. Sometimes you’ll hear, “I love shows like that,” or occasionally, “I didn’t get it.” Rarely will you hear someone, critic or audience member, give an assessment of whether or not the show “works”—an incisive breakdown of all its various parts that leads to the conclusion of whether or not those parts led to a whole greater than their sum. And that’s what this blog is all about. If you look at a performance as being somewhat akin to cooking (number of ingredients, steps, levels of complexity, the time and effort put in to the development of a “secret sauce”), you’ll recognize that some cooking styles entail greater risk than others. Jell-O is pretty hard to mess up (although it can be done—ask my former roommate about a delightful concoction I once made). But it will still be Jell-O. A Pavlova is a considerably more difficult dessert to make—but it still involves the use of a recipe, one you must follow to the letter in order to avoid stomach-churning disaster. What I am interested in are the Iron Chef performances—assembled quickly with available materials around a challenging key ingredient. These are the shows that could not possibly take any other form—shows that may be entertaining but, more than anything, contain some vital nutrient that’s necessary for human survival. These are the shows that have the power to change your life. Sometimes they will be works of art—they’ll find a form of their own, which their creators will polish to perfection. Other times they’ll be a beautiful, glorious, irredeemable mess. What excites me is that I have the opportunity to see them both, and to give both the artists who created them and the people who want to love them the information they need to make their decisions. Live performance, as I said, entails a certain element of risk. No one wants to feel as though they’ve wasted time, effort, or money on a bad show. But a live performance is a two-way street—a relationship between the performers and the audience members. The performance company must give the audience a sense of what to expect ahead of time so that they enter the theater in the right frame of mind. The company must understand what they promised and be prepared to deliver. In return, the audience members must enter the space the performers create in good faith and let themselves be guided through the experience from beginning to end, knowing that even if they find themselves troubled by something along the way, it is all a part of the process, and that all will be revealed before the final curtain. That bond of live performance is a sacred trust that involves the deepest aspect of the human psyche—the place where art lives, and maybe the soul, too. It is a bond that should never be entered lightly on either side. You should know when you’re playing with fire—especially in a crowded theater. My hope, over the next couple of weeks, is to act as a mediator between the creators of experimental performance and those who want to understand and appreciate it. Being rather new to the world of theater reviewing, I feel I should be up-front about my experience, tastes, and preferences—the last thing I want is to state my personal preferences as authoritative judgments. Having begun my life as a performing artist in a very traditional background of music and theater (I’ve played my share of Bach and sang in many a church choir and high school musical), I soon grew bored and frustrated with art that “tells it like it ain’t” (a subject I plan to expand on in an upcoming blog). So I studied a wide variety of theater and performance styles (from Dylan Thomas to Yoko Ono) and have co-created experimental art in the Twin Cities for many years. I’m a former member of Afunctionul, an artist collective that put together multidisciplinary art projects and events between 2000 and 2004 (including participation in the 2003 Spoken Word Fringe), and I produced Fringe shows in 2008 and 2009. What I’m looking for is anything that moves me on a fundamental level. I won’t carp too much about creaking performances or awkward phrasing, so long as the intention, the soul, comes through in a way I can readily grasp. Most of all, I’m looking for a show that works. And I can’t wait to get started!
Headshot of Sarah Wash
Sarah Wash
Fringe Lab: Experimental Performance : All art is an experiment. But some experiments are more…well, experimental…than others. With some, you know pretty well what the results will be. With others, you can't be sure. What do you get when you mix baking soda with vinegar? Carbon dioxide (and, on occasion, an enthused five-year-old). What do you get when you put on a show and there's no one to see it?