notes on a friend's piece

There were a few things she tried, and even succeeded at, which I think I've argued can't be done. The first is, at a certain point in the piece, an almost constant saturation of projected image, projected text, live speech, movement and live music. The result, though chaotic, was not impossible to enter as an audience, and while I'm sure some people were shutting out one or more elements at certain moments, I don't think it diminished the impact of the whole. She utilized two (possibly three?) projectors from near the back of the house, one dedicated to images, the other to text. In the clip below, you can see text scrolling on the bottom/front of the stage, while a large image of a trash-strewn gutter is projected on a screen behind the stage. At the last moment, text starts cascading down the screen, and then passes over the people on stage. These moments were very engaging, the image we had been studying for several minutes suddenly has new levels of complication and meaning by virtue of the texts (which were, variously, quotes from the IPCC, sets of the digitis "1" and "0" followed by ".", titles of poems she was drawing from).

The relation of speech to the texts was also very interesting. Instead of focusing on the most informative/meaningful parts of the IPCC, the speakers read only the citation, a little paranthetical phrase of the form "IPCC4" or, later, "ibid." Eventually, the ibid's overwhelmed any other text and started repeating over and over again, so that you hear a dozen or so people repeating this very strange sounding word. Aurally, the effect was awesome. In terms of its relation to the text, I thought two things: that it could be a play on how quickly the IPCC is trying to establish a kind of global authority on the subject of climate change, and how its reiteration in so much news reporting may be eroding its meaning and impact- it's just the same reference/same news, repeating itself. I'm not sure either of these are intentions or effects I want to see tudy 2013 repeating, but it was interesting to see someone else grapple with this text in a context similar to ours.

Other cool moments in the piece included cell phone conversations between the people on stage quoting passages of the IPCC to eachother as though they were parts of a conversation, and the end, in which everyone sat down at the foot of the very high Mills Hall stage, with their legs dangling off, playing "Go Fish" with concepts of the new environmentalism: "anyone have sustainability", "anyone have social justice and equity". When no one could come up with the latter, the audience was asked to turn over their program, where a little card had been printed into the back, each of which turned out to be, if not unique, of a few smaller sets. So they could ask the question, anyone have renewable energy, and only a few hands in the audience would be raised. This surprise bit of interactivity, at the end of the piece, was particularly involving, in that this was a moment where audience was very much trying to process and get a gloss on the whole. The aesthetics were also very warm and friendly, the whole cast hanging out out of character playing some game from everyone's childhood (reminded me of the way the "You Can't Do That On Television" always ended, if anyone can go there with me).