Realism Is A Luxury

           Christopher Herold once told me, “Realism is a luxury.”  We were in a directing class studying performance styles, and I didn’t completely understand what he was talking about.  After all, if realism is the status quo, then how can the status quo be luxury?  I realize that question could be shot down faster than a black guy pulling out his wallet for the cops, but that doesn’t bring me closer to an answer.  I can’t say I’ve finally figured it out, but several recent performances bring Herold’s statement to the forefront of my mind, and I’m determined to uncover even the smallest kernel of understanding.

            A couple performances that contributed to the present meditation were produced in this year’s Best of Playground Festival.  Net, by Geetha Reddy, Gymnoépdie #1 by Kenn Rabin, and John Jacob O’Reilly Smitherton’s Bid to Save the World by Erin Bregman all refreshingly depart from the verisimilitude we frequently see on TV and stage.  These pieces use words, instead of sets, to create the world of the story, a style similar to that employed by Word for Word, a Bay Area company that theatrically performs literary texts verbatim.  In this style, characters verbally express both the external and internal realities of the story as it unfolds, creating a tantalizing dynamic tension between the described and observed, the imagined and perceived.  Suicide penetrates deeper into our psyche when the dying describes the feeling of impending death, discovering it moment by moment and relaying it in real time to the audience.  This poignant style combines the expansive power of imagination with the visceral experience of live performance.  And it’s cheaper than building a set (depending on who wrote the words, of course).

            But there must be something more to the luxury of realism than it’s low costs.  After all, many non-realism plays cost plenty to produce.  Wreckage by Caridad Svich, currently performing in the Boxcar Theatre but produced by Crowded Fire Theatre Company, certainly departs from realism with its poetic language and repeating structure, but its set didn’t look cheap.  Three different platforms at different levels, suspended sheets of semi-transparent plastic, a real sand pit, a mini TV, and a projector displaying recorded film that was edited and digitally altered; none of that is cheap.  So what made Wreckage a non-luxury?  My answer: language.  Words may be cheap for replacing a set, but the price of understanding them is not always low.  Svich’s dialogue discards the convention of everyday speech in exchange for language that exposes the complicated matrices of human conflict within a seemingly simple plot.  She even goes so far as to largely discard the luxury of names.  If the audience did not liberally apply patience and attention, they would quickly have lost track of the story.  What makes Wreckage a non-luxury is that we cannot passively absorb the story, we must actively engage with it just to understand who is doing what, to say nothing of absorbing the play’s larger meaning.

            This understanding of realism as a luxury because it requires more attention might have sealed the deal for me, but then I saw What Men Want, the latest project from Scott Wells and Dancers, part of the SF International Arts Festival.  Dance is easily the performance style least associated with realism, for the unconventional and often difficult movement performed therein defines the genre.  But Modern Dance, I might contend, is frequently misunderstood because it sometimes utilizes realism as a style of dance.  It seems like a total contradiction.

For example, in What Men Want, the dancers circle up and engage in humorous, but apparently ubiquitous, dancer warm up exercises that involve pretending to be a samurai.  At the completion of the performance, my friend turned to me and said, “If I’m a pianist, it’s not art to perform scales onstage, why should I pay to see that?”  His question seems awfully similar to the one I presented in opening this essay.  It strikes directly at the underlying difference between the present incarnations of theatre and dance, and illuminates part of the answer I’m seeking.

It seems to me that maybe Theatre’s dominate performance style is realism, Dance’s dominant performance style is non-realism, and any departure from the dominant performance style is interpreted as a non-luxury.  Is this because it requires more attention?  Maybe the luxury of a performance style is defined by how easily we can interpret and absorb it, and the dominant styles are the easiest.

But if this is true, then we must acknowledge the social construction and circumstantial influences on both realism as a performance style and it’s categorization as a luxury.  It’s all about what we expect to see.  Is that what Christopher Herold was trying to say?  I’d like to think so, but I expect my preconceptions to be challenged, otherwise how am I supposed to grow?  Maybe that’s why I really liked watching dancers do their warm up exercises.  Or it could be because they were half naked with beautiful bodies.  What can I say?