May 10 & 11 5pm-9pm
Spring Show 2005
721 Broadway
at Waverly Place
4th Floor
South Elevators
New York, NY 10003
For additional
information email
itp.inquiries@nyu.edu
or call 212.998.1880
| Online Performing Arts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Peter Vigeant | |
| Instructor: | Migliorelli, Frank | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://www.opatheater.com | |
| Every high school in America requires students to study at least one Shakespeare play – most of the time in book form. Without experiencing the sight and sounds of that period in theatre, students have a very difficult time understanding Shakespeare’s story. I intend to gather high school students from around the country to immerse themselves in recreating Romeo and Juliet on the computer screen. By producing different scenes through visuals and audio the students will appreciate Shakespeare in a new way – for each decision they make will affect the audience’s reception of the play. | ||
| Focus: The best way to understand theatre is to be involved in a theatrical production. Direction: Web technologies offer the perfect stage for inexpensive and affective theatrical collaboration. | ||
| Personal Statement: | Theatre is not me. I tried theatre on like a pair of pants and, like most pairs of expensive pants, theatre proved uncomfortable. Perhaps I see theatre as more of a hat, an accessory that comes and goes with weather or baseball games. Or maybe I am not worthy to be labeled a “theatre person.” I graduated Marymount Manhattan (a self-proclaimed performing arts college) with a degree in “Theatre Arts: Writing,” but found myself more interested in activities off of the newly renovated stage, such as radio drama and writing for television. As I prepared myself for my first summer as Camp Director, my hazy dream of living as a playwright faded into oblivion as other, more interesting pursuits entered my imagination. Then a communications teacher, Susan Jacobson, told me about ITP and that new path took shape.
Of the punctuated subjects in my life, theatre is but a small role. I can claim to be one of the first computer born ITPers, having been plugged in since the age of five (or before). This grants me a certain comfort, as with a family pet, that simplifies and expedites anything from fixing or building to coding computers – though my single year of RIT Computer Science revealed my hatred of being forever confined behind a screen. Children are also a main theme and perhaps my most cherished. If further work can hold out this single summer, I will be Camp Director for my third year, an employee of a camp for my thirteenth. I have also found great intrigue in experiential education, a mode of thinking that teaches valuable skills such as teamwork and trust through non-competitive challenges. One fond memory is running this genre of games every week for a group of teenage girls from a halfway house and seeing them support one another and grow as a team. Computers, camp and facilitating experiential education granted me moments that theatre never could – moments where I knew I was the best person for the job. The Interactive Telecommunications Program challenged me to combine these talents in an indirect way. I have a habit of taking “fun” courses, from learning about digital comics to helping run Pac Manhattan to prototyping a children’s show about technology to doing a museum exhibit about my ex-girlfriends. I certainly will not go down in the ITP hall of fame for being a great artist or a great programmer, nor is that really important to me. What matters is that I learned new ways of displaying my true interests and gained skills that will help me succeed in my original ITP goal – taking theatre, computers, children and experiential education and squishing them together into something I codenamed OPA. I thought of OPA, or Online Performing Arts, while writing a play at Marymount Manhattan. At the time my explanation was, “if you’re studying ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in Montana and it’s not being performed there, you can only rent the movie – which is not a good representation of theatre.” I even hinted at OPA in my personal statement to ITP 2 years ago. The idea was, at best, fuzzy and not easily explained. In fact, the most stable vision was a message board that allowed students to ask the characters questions and a second one to query the actors. Although the undertaking has haunted my dreams since coming to ITP, I have done my best to push it aside… until now. The latest and hopefully greatest version of OPA came to me after several days of no sleep during last semester’s hell week. OPA still includes the message boards – as those are pretty good ideas – but the actual application is more of an education tool than a stage. Ideally the end product will be attractive enough that people will want to watch it, but the process of creating the online theatre is not for real actors but those students who want to gain a deeper understanding of the stage (in this case Shakespeare). Built into Shockwave (for several reasons… mainly because that’s what I know best), groups of students from around the country will be assigned different aspects of production – stage design, costume design and vocal talent. The designers will be given a scene or two to concentrate on and direction will be given by an actual director (to give the play unity). The production will resemble a series of storyboard stills with live voices behind them and will be recorded in Shockwave so it can be accessed any time. My vision is to have at least one, if not many, plays set for release during thesis week – and, of course, have several high school students see “Romeo and Juliet” as they never would have simply reading the text. Rushkoff loves to use the word “meta” in ways that I sometimes have great difficulty understanding. I think, though, the best description of OPA is Pete Vigeant going meta on Pete Vigeant. Or maybe it’s Pete Vigeant going meta on theatre. Regardless, it’s simply the hat on my thesis costume – and perhaps my life. | |
| Background: | Many different factors influence my initiation of OPA. I’ve been involved in theatre my entire life, and yet there was never a place where I fit in perfectly. Acting was always just for fun and I was more of a goof than a professional. Directing was always very challenging and I found that interpreting other director’s choices was much easier than making my own. Stage management was a little too time consuming and deadline based than my organizational skills could handle. Writing came naturally, but I’ve never been as satisfied with my written words as those that rest in my head. OPA is my way of doing theatre in a format that I’m actually good at. Many theatre professionals are behind the curve when it comes to computers and the fact that computers are my second language gave me a big boost when imagining this concept.
Besides just being an anomaly of a theatre person, education or more specifically experiential education has always been the way I learn best. From going to countless museums as a child to building my life out of Legos to figuring out how to make computers by making computers, the majority of the knowledge that stuck in my brain has not been from simply reading books. Also, my work as the Camp Director and Project Challenge Facilitator at the Lakewood-Trumbull YMCA showed me that most children learn more by doing and being active instead of passively getting fed information. Even though I was in love with the stage, Shakespeare took many years to understand. Similar to learning a foreign language, there was a *click* in my brain sometime during my freshman year of college when the words started making sense. I remember high school English and being one of 30 or so honor students who could recite passages from Romeo and Juliet and even analyze them without fully comprehending them. I believe that a large part of this was because we were never able to make our own interpretations, as they were fed through our teacher, the *two* movies that we watched or those wonderful liner notes. Also, most of the class was more attentive of the words on the page instead of the characters who spoke those words or the situations that arose. OPA evolved as a way of allowing students anywhere to not only voice their own ideas, but create something that is closer to Shakespeare’s stage than black and white text. My goal is to show students how to make their own theatrical decisions and to create a place online for theatre of all types to be created, discovered, interpreted and shared by those who want to learn wherever they may live. My long term goal is to continue OPA and get funding for productions to happen year round – or maybe every day. I want a library of these shockwave productions that can be accessed at any time for those who want to see many viewpoints instead renting the movie and just seeing one. Also there will be online forums for discussions regarding all aspects of the plays – with areas where actors from certain pieces can be questioned and even characters can be asked questions. Although this sounds silly, a main influence of this work is a cartoon on Adult Swim called “Tom Goes to the Mayor.” I was struggling with trying to figure out how students from around the country could make scenes that fit into one another easily – something that video would not do very well. This particular cartoon is not animated; it’s more of a set of storyboards shown with speech and music on top. Seeing this as a successful form of storytelling, I decided to use the concept for OPA – as a group of students can either make story panels on a graphic program or just collage them and scan them into a computer without any large amount of computer literacy. This also would simplify the production process as I can get a director to sketch out storyboard ideas and allow the students to build off of those sketches. Besides that, my influences are mainly in radio drama and the absence of theatre online. OPA is being made to encourage anyone to create and share instead of sitting on their ideas. Hopefully the public will see OPA as a better use for the internet than obsessing over news and commerce. Maybe OPA will show the internet off as a platform for collaborative theatre projects. The main goal, though, is not for the audience but for the actors and designers to see and experience a form of Shakespeare and the stage that they otherwise would only get from producing the play themselves. This is why the true “audience” I wish to reach are those who collaborate with me and not those who merely see the finished product. When these young actors and designers finish production in May and perform a live rendition of Romeo and Juliet online for the world to see, I hope that they get that *click* that took me so long to obtain. If there is no immediate *click*, then my goal is to inspire them to continue learning theatre through forms similar to OPA instead of the traditional reading assignments. There is a chance, though, that I am wrong and this process will not cause any further understanding. I will conduct exit interviews with both the students and their teachers to gauge the results. If there was no improved comprehension, then at least my experiment can serve as a guide for others attempting to create experiential education in theatre. There are many challenges that I face in undertaking OPA – most of which I am going to have to primarily solve myself. The obvious first challenge is the programming side, as I have never been a stellar programmer. I chose to do the project in Director (Shockwave) because I know that language best and am fairly confident that most of the programming is within my reach. From a technology standpoint, syncing up microphones from computers around the country for a live performance without running into problems with firewalls and other such annoyances will probably be my greatest difficulty. I don’t think I will have trouble finding willing participants from schools, but my preference is to have a computer savvy teacher / mentor around which may be hard to locate. As long as I keep to a schedule, the production time will not be an issue – I’ve been thinking long enough about this that I can start gathering both participants and code within a couple of weeks. My very first goal (after I finish this questionnaire and attend class) is to make a timeline / production schedule on my blog so I keep up on my work. After that, putting together an exact storyboard of the different aspects of OPA, including documentation that will be sent out to the schools, will get me to make some definite decisions about the way that the site is going to operate. I have a friend who is a director who I may collaborate with, otherwise I will probably visit the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts and see if they have some student directors who would work with me. I’m not sure if I completely described what I see OPA as, nor did I see a question that addresses that, so I am adding that to the end (imagine this as the post script). OPA (Online Performing Arts) is a web site that has three main sections: create, witness and discuss. In the create section, students can sign up to either act or help design a play. Preferably the designers will work in small groups and the actors will work in pairs (so there is an understudy). Each participant will be given a schedule – the actors for rehearsals and performances, the designers deadlines for submissions. The designers will be given certain specifications (like size and number of panels), a specific scene or group of scenes and the director’s storyboards. Depending upon the director’s preference, the characters may be given certain heads to keep it consistent throughout the play or wear certain colors. The actors will be given a site address that takes them to a karaoke style room where they are cued up by the director and given advice and direction from a chat box (for they will speaking into a mike). This way when there is a live performance, the actors do not have to depend on just listening to one another to be cued up, they can actually see the director’s cues happening in front of them. The witness part of the page is where live performances and archived performances are stored. On a certain date, the actors will jump online and read their parts live as the visuals flash by page by page. All cues will be handled by the director who will have a modified version of the program which allows her to both cue up scenes and lines as she wishes. This live performance will be captured (somehow) in Shockwave and have the ability to be replayed anytime in the archive section exactly as it was shown live. Theoretically, if many dress rehearsals are held the performance should be worth replaying. The discuss part of the page will be a forum section where the designers can defend their decisions and the actors could answer questions about their characters. There will also be a section where questions can be posted to the characters and the actors or teachers could post responses in the characters’ voices. What exactly is my thesis? What am I researching? I have a project, now what am I setting out to prove? These questions get to the heart of what I’ve been failing to voice. I have an idea for a project – a pretty good one. One that will do exactly what final projects are supposed to do, take all of my newly found ITP skills and bring them together. But having a project is not the end task, merely a product of a semester or more of theoretical work. The piece that I create is simply an experiment in answering a question, a huge question that will mostly be addressed in research and theory and only briefly by this display. If OPA is the answer, what exactly is the question? There are several levels to my thesis. First, I suppose I can state the Theatre Arts is not taught well in public schools. Of course, I have little proof beyond that of my own experience, so it is not a very good statement. And I don’t mean Theatre Arts as a strict discipline, either, as I’m sure Theatre Arts class is done fairly well wherever one ventures. A more accurate version of my idea is that the Theatre Arts taught in English class in most public high schools in America is done wrong. That’s a little better, but also incredibly harsh. I am not 25 yet, and judging an education system so strongly is fairly pompous and naïve of me. In creating change, negativity is an enemy, not an ally. Theatre Arts taught in English class in most public high schools could be aided by the Internet. But why? Ah. Theatre Arts is best taught through experience. Is this true and how do I know this? In general, I believe that anything is best learned through experience, from riding a bicycle to navigating the ocean but that’s not a very strong argument. A better argument is that William Shakespeare never wrote out his own works – well, not in the way that the public sees his plays today. Shakespeare made productions scripts, a group of partial pieces aimed at specific characters. This made a great amount of sense to him because the only people who ever saw these scripts were actors. The educated can theorize all they want about the existence of Shakespeare, but whoever imagined those plays that are considered some of the best writing of humankind did not imagine them in black and white ink. They imagined a group of men thumping around a stage in a busy fair atmosphere vying for the crowd’s attention. And surprisingly, they normally got it. The point is that most theatre – both old and new – is not made for books. This means that regardless of how great the educator is, the words will not come alive in English class until the student witness an actual production, something that is not always available. But why replace the availability of a local production with an overproduced blockbuster movie? Why not take students to the next level and have them produce the play themselves? The thesis is coming clearer. Putting on a play is difficult work. Besides the space and time requirements, there are monetary issues that plague schools across the country. And many teachers have a plan that tells them that Shakespeare must be done in no more than 3 weeks – hardly enough time to create any worthwhile theatre comprehension. Why is theatre comprehension important? Simply reading Shakespeare or Brecht or Miller does not require the students to make decisions. Mostly, students are paying attention to silly minutia that the teacher is likely to put on a quiz, instead of imagining why the characters are reacting to one another. If only the students could somehow be required to make actual decisions about what the characters look like, what the set looks like, what mood everyone is in and similar, they may unlock secrets about the play that only the elite theatrical scholars know. If Shakespeare is so difficult to understand, then why is the Bard taught in High School English? Perhaps the students just need to learn by making their own interpretations and seeing their work… and perhaps this can be done in a way that makes it accessible to all students regardless of where they are, their disabilities or their schools funds. This probably answered my initial questions. I am making a form of theatre that is accessible regardless of what educational situation exists. Even the greatest teaching communities could benefit from sharing the experience of creating theatre – and that will bring them to higher appreciations and understandings of the stage. | |