There’s this thing happening, right? This raw uncut shit we’re all doing every goddamn day, playing ourselves like we’re method actors who forgot we’re acting. I’m not talking about the sanitized Broadway version of life, the stuff you package up nice for the tourists. I’m talking about the performance embedded in just being, the way I hold my cigarette or slouch at the DMV or perform “interested listener” at your tedious party.
What I’m fucking with here is fundamentally different from constructing those hermetically sealed dream boxes that pass for theatre, those Wolfgang Iser joints where you cordon off the imaginary from the actual, build a moat around fantasy land. Iser’s entire hustle is this: narrative isn’t copying reality like some third rate cover band. It’s manufacturing an imaginary space that lets us think about what we can’t otherwise access in the meat puppet world. Fiction becomes this diagnostic tool. You slam the imaginary against the empirical, watch the sparks fly, see what breaks and what doesn’t. The gap between them, that’s where the truth leaks out.
Performance art, the real shit, not the trust fund navel gazing, recognizes that everything’s already performance. It exposes the machinery, the artifice baked into so called normalcy. You follow the unwritten rules, hit your marks in the social contract, and suddenly you’re seeing how completely constructed ordinary behavior actually is.
But here’s my gig: as a theatre director, I’m hunting something else. I’m trying to understand how a culture draws the fucking line, how it says “this space here, this is where we build imaginary worlds, where the ‘as if’ takes over.” Real bodies enacting the hypothetical, usually wrestling with dense, contrary texts that mutate in performance, corrupted by actors’ tics and directorial obsessions.
That contamination, that messy collision. That’s everything to me.
Traditional American theatre? It’s ossified into high church ritual. Proscenium arch performances have become the classical music of drama: precious relics for people who’ve forgotten how to be genuinely curious, who want their entertainment pre digested and non-threatening. And black boxes, just the chamber music version.
And pop culture performance? Don’t even get me started. Pseudo rebellion packaged and sold back to you. All these calcified conventions pretending to be transgressive while operating strictly within the permitted boundaries of carnival, that safety valve release that changes absolutely nothing.
Sure, dramatic texts are tyrannical, univocal, repressive as hell. But my gamble, what keeps me from bleading out in a bathtub, is that by demolishing the theatre’s fourth wall, creating site-specific, paratheatrical interventions,aGrotowski coined “paratheatre” for this visceral, boundary-erasing approach that obliterated the performer-spectator divide. He took this work outdoors, into Polish forests, as anti-performance events. Post-1975, he abandoned public theatre entirely, moving through Paratheatre (1969-78), Theatre of Sources (1976-1982), Objective Drama (1983-86), to Art as Vehicle (1986-present). His legacy continues at the Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy. you can crack open the text, let it breathe differently, create these charged zones of material intensity.
Obviously, just dragging shit outside doesn’t solve anything. Performers need to unlearn their training, designers need to torch their playbooks, and audiences…
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