Flux Theatre Ensemble

by August Schulenburg

One of the moments I love in Dog Act is when Vera, pretending (or is she?) to be the deity Wendy, explains to her new Scavenger followers why the Vaudevillian has a protected status in the world of the play:

"You are treading on the hem of a great mystery. I will say this, my children, listen thou well. The vaudevillian is the repository of all that was and all that may be. She is the key. She is translator of our souls. More than this, more than all, listen thou, dear scavengers: she is that rare and precious pearl lying in this dark, drear, perilous sea: she is entertainment."

Note that Vera/Wendy climaxes with "entertainment", not "art." Yet in the usual ranks of righteousness, Art is seen blazing pure at the right hand of the deity, while Entertainment perniciously capers on more pandering planes below.

Wading into dangerously semantic estuaries, I think there is a useful event horizon to find between Art and Entertainment; a boundary that is fluid and dependent on context but real and important all the same.

This boundary emerges from the idea of cognitive dissonance, a theory discussed in depth in this excellent podcast interview with Carol Tavris, author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. I believe this idea of cognitive dissonance is at the center of the difference between art and entertainment.

The short version is that once the our brain believes something to be true, it has a profoundly difficult time in changing that belief. In fact, it actively curates experience to protect a pre-existing belief from any evidence that contradicts it, leading to the saying, "Believing is seeing."

As Tavris says, "Once we have a belief, we see the information that will confirm that belief, and we stop seeing what we don't want to see, don't expect to see, have no wish to see; that's the blind spot in how we perceive what other people say and do, (and) how we evaluate our own behavior." Our brain does this automatically, and it takes a great deal of mindfulness to even notice that it's happening.

This mindfulness, this deliberate courting of doubt and uncertainty, of trial and error, is best embodied in the scientific method; but as Tavris explains, the scientific method runs directly counter to the momentum of the brain, which prefers to simplify the complexity of experience through perceiving only that which reinforces pre-existing patterns of belief, even if those patterns are harmful.

I believe that the difference between art and entertainment is simply the amount of cognitive dissonance we are required to engage in by the work. When a play reinforces pre-existing patterns of thought, that comfortable feeling is called entertainment; but when we are forced to hold new, potentially uncomfortable truths in our minds - truths that may require us to change what we believe - that friction is called art.

With this definition, the boundary between art and entertainment is fluid and depends on social context. As accepted norms differ from culture to culture, a play may very well be entertainment in one culture and art in another. A production of A Midsummer Night's Dream can be entertainment but it can also be art, depending on how much cognitive dissonance the production decides to illuminate within that deceptively pleasing play.

It may be that what we recognize as genius is simply the manifestation of a cognitive dissonance that persists across time and culture. Certain works of art never lose the searching edge that destabilizes what we think we know, and creates within us the possibility for change.

In our mission, we talk about transformational theatre, and Isaiah recently wrote a powerful post of how that manifests itself in our staging choices. Our work explores how to harness that searching edge of cognitive dissonance, as dizzyingly uncomfortable as it can sometimes be.

I believe this frame also underscores the importance for funding the arts. It's natural that entertainment would be profitable: we love being told that our beliefs are right and just and we should keep on keeping on. But we need to be challenged, to court doubt and uncertainty, to look at belief as a process and not a destination, to value curiosity as deeply as faith. We need the searching edge of art to continue to evolve as social, moral creatures.

But, hey, that's just what I think right now. I'm not holding onto any idea too tightly. We never step in the same river twice. Doubt is my faith, so bring the change. Read the full story

Isaiah here with yet another overly-long, thoughtful-to-the-point-of-pedantry post.

So, over at HowIRound there's a very interesting piece by Lydia Stryk about this "theatricality" thing. You should definitely read the whole thing (and the comments, and the response at Parabasis, and the comments there), but here's the money quote if you're pressed for time:

Theatricality in America today, I would argue, is an MFA-inspired phenomenon produced almost solely by playwrights and duly supported by directors. The resulting highly theatrical plays teeter on the edge of magical realism or plummet over the top with plot elements and stage directions that seem derived from a handbook on wizardry. It’s worth noting that this new theatricality is woven into the plot, making it impossible to ignore in the way the old stage directions (She stands, he sits) were and are ignored.

The implication here is that "stage directions that are woven into the plot," particularly whimsical ones, are (a) something unique to recent American theater, and, because they cannot be ignored, (b) bad.

In a comment on the original post, Taylor Mac has already made a case that realism is actually the recent trend, so I want to respond to the second implication. I want to ask this: what's wrong with stage directions out of a wizard's handbook? Yes, they can be used lazily. Yes, they can be spectacle. Yes, they feel contrived or out of place or distancing. When they do these things -- and I won't lie, they often do -- they fall on their face.

But they aren't necessarily so.

The image I used above is the last moment of The Lesser Seductions of History, Flux's most well-received show, and I believe its greatest artistic triumph (so far!). A brief overview: the play was set in the 60's, and each scene was a different year. With each new year, one of the 10 characters makes a choice between a life of personal fulfillment and a life devoted to a greater cause. Those 10 lightbulbs were in the ceiling the whole time, a new one lighting up as each character made that choice and a new year dawned. Then, in the final scene, they descended as eight of the characters, each for deeply personal reasons, danced, then slowly became the astronauts on the moon, before finally forming a circle looking in at the eleventh character, One, who is the force of History that "seduced" them (hence the title) and in her final monologue asks, "wasn't it worth it?"

The lightbulbs were the years, and the characters, and the choices, and the stars, and pretty, all at the same time. This is just the sort of thing that Lydia doesn't like. It's wizardy, and it's weird, and it's whimsical. It was also profoundly moving, BECAUSE it was those things, not in spite of them. That moment wouldn't have worked, or would have worked in a profoundly different and (I believe) less successful way, without those lightbulbs, or some other director-picked design element that ostensibly served the same purpose.

Flux has talked a lot about what we mean by "Transformative Theatre" (sometimes we've even used other words for it); it's so central to what we do that it's in our mission statement as well as our list of aesthetic values. One of several things you can't do in a film, but you can do on a stage -- and therefore seems like the best definition of a term ("theatricality") whose definition few can even agree on -- is make something be two or more things at the same time. In the film version of Lesser Seductions, if you wanted to see the moon landing you'd show the footage. You'd probably cross-cut that with the characters, and others around the world, watching it at home (that's what the very powerful HBO documentary From the Earth to the Moon did). Which works great for film.

But there's something amazing, and powerful, and theatrical about seeing the other actors, who you've spent the last two hours with, dance around the stage as though on the moon, and it spoke to the central idea of that moment: that on July 20, 1969, it was as though everyone in the world, no matter what they were doing, was bouncing about the lunar surface with Neil and Buzz. I've got to say, I'm just thinking about it and I'm still moved by the memory of creating that poetic moment on stage. And I wasn't even alive in 1969.

I guess what I'm saying is that there are plenty of highly theatrical moments out there that you can effectively create with a whimsical stage direction or two. Lydia talks about the process by which she arrived at her theatrical stage directions -- essentially shoehorning them into her play to make it more marketable -- and I agree that this is a lousy way to create art that you're proud of, and it's almost guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth for the whole process, and make seeing other such attempts that much more grating. But I'd encourage her not to throw the theatricality baby out with the marketability bathwater.
Read the full story