Fantasy Fanatic

I think another topic related to sports that is deserving of attention is the betting/gambling component. For example, my boyfriend right now is obsessed with watching every professional football game to see how many points his chosen players accumulate to see if he won the bet for the week in fantasy football. Also, appropriate in timing, the World Series are being played and every day on Facebook I see people placing bets on the winner.

Gambling in sports has been a component since the development of organized sports. In my research of social class and sports, I found that the first organization, the New York Knickerbockers that developed baseball as an organized sport in the 1840s, developed this out of gambling. And it wasn’t until they realized that they had a higher chance of winning more money, that they invited lower-class citizens into their group.

I think investing, betting, or gambling money is a huge factor in defining a “fanatic”. Would I consider my boyfriend to be a fanatic? Yes. He bets his hard earned money on football players, but since he watches so much football, he feels confident in not losing that money.

Also, my boyfriend has special rituals and superstitions when it comes to watching sports. For example, when Notre Dame plays he has to be at home watching the game in his Notre Dame attire. He will not watch the game until he is wearing all parts of his attire. These are his superstitions that he thinks will help his favorite team win.

Time, emotions, money— these are all the things that are invested in sports which up the ante in being classified as a fanatic.

"Based on" OR "Dictated by?"

“Community-based arts…” Yes, it’s a fascinating concept, but I’m thinking about how far we should or should not take it. I recall a quote I liked from the Cornerstone manual: “The voice of the community joins with and colors the voice of the writers,” or something like that. After we had our first meeting with the community and we got so much information and feedback, I was really excited. But I remember, after I started sifting through all the material we’d collected, I started to worry about how much to include.

On the one hand, the second part of this class title is “community-based arts.” We obviously have to have the community input in order to write the show; otherwise this would just be writing a play with all of our own ideas: the boring, ordinary way. While this class is a community in its own way, that would kind of defeat the purpose of the class to just use ourselves.

Yet, I don’t want the community to have too much control or influence either. We’ll obviously be using some of their words, the ELPs, etc. I understand if they want to edit some of that stuff. But if we show one of our community members some of our scenes we’ve been writing and they say “I don’t like that. You should change it so that Tom Brady says all the lines and the other people all leave the stage.” I want the power to reply, “No. This is our creation. Thank you for your input, but we make those kinds of decisions.”

Now, I don’t expect that to be a big issue with us. Firstly, I doubt most of our community members remember that this project actually exists and the others probably want us to have as much artistic freedom as possible. But besides that, with us being an official class writing a show for the Mainstage season, I feel like we have the final say about most everything.

But that does lead me into my next question which is, where is the line between community involvement and private composition is larger companies, like Cornerstone? They seems to be all about the community, so would they make a one-man show featuring Tom Brady? I hope not, there’s got to be some distinction between providing-information and making-art, but where does it fall? Which side has more power most of the time? Are there power struggles? What’ll happen if the community decides halfway through to shut out the company?

It sounds like a nearly impossible balancing act, but… How many communities would get that fervent over a play? Would most be kind of like ours? “Oh, that’s what you’re writing about? Why are you telling me?”

Get excited!

The most interesting point I took from our latest readings was one I almost read right over. I got through a few more words, paused, shook my head and reread. Yes, I’d read it right, and it said:

Design the performance with the idea that, as with a sporting event, the spectators should come away with it full from it full of opinions about what they have seen. “I didn’t have to be that way!” “She should’ve done this!” “He could’ve done that!” “If he’d only…” “Well he was up against…” “Did you see that one time, the way she dealt with the…” “You know what I would have done if it were me…”

Isn’t this true? I know that every time my dad’s football team had a bad game, he’d come home listing off dozens of things they could have done better. It hadn’t occurred to me that it’s possible to do the same thing with theatre. Make the audience think, “You know, if I’d been in that position, I would have solved that problem much easier.” It kind of reminds me of Boal’s idea of forum theatre, just without the audience actively participating during the performance. Still, they do get the mental stimulation of “How would you be able to fix that?”

But what really captured my attention was the comparison between theatre and a sporting event. We’ve come up with many similarities between the two (audience anticipation, hours of practice, rehearsal/try-outs, etc), but that was one we’d missed. What could we do to provoke that kind of reaction in our audience? I feel like we should try to make our target audience relate to the play so much, they feel like they were the inspiration for one of the characters (which, in this case, may be true!).

It seems to me like theatre doesn’t really do that often. Maybe because, while a sports game can be wild, unpredictable, random and suspenseful, theatre seems more static. If you’ve read Othello, then go see it performed, you know how it’s going to end. No matter what was cut or who the actors are, (SPOILER ALERT) Othello is still going to smother Desdemona and Iago will still stab his own wife. On the other hand, which players are playing and which plays they use can greatly affect the outcome of a football game, basketball game, etc.

I’ve certainly never walked away thinking, “You know, if I was Desdemona, I would have just stayed awake and explained the whole thing to Othello.” Why? Shakespeare is old and it’s been read and performed thousands, maybe even millions of times, it’s practically its own tradition! What’s there to change? But a sports game is now, it’s in the moment, and it’s different every time. Even if the same two teams play each other and the same team wins, all the plays won’t be the same, the final score will be different, etc.

I hope that, in creating something brand new that’ll hopefully be exciting for our audience; we can create those same feelings in them that a game would. I also wonder if our big focus being on sports will affect that at all… Whether it will or not, I definitely want us to try and infuse that kind of hype and excitement from sports into our piece.

Sports Theatre

So, as I was diligently researching correlations between theatre and sports, I made an interesting discovery: theatresports. And, no that’s not the unoriginal name of a blog whose creator is obsessed with both theatre and sports (though that would have been very helpful…). Theatresports is just that: Theatre as a sport.

Here’s a brief description from the website of a Seattle-based theatresports group, along with some of the history of the theatresports concept. I find it very interesting that they address a few of the questions we’ve been asking in class:

“Theatersports is comedy, improv, theater, and sports all rolled into one! Teams of improvisers create scenes based entirely on audience suggestions and are scored by a panel of judges…

Theatresports^TM was developed Keith Johnstone, first in England and then in Calgary. It began as a formal performance mechanism for a series of improvisational exercises for London's Royal Court theatre.

"Its aim was to help playwrights overcome writer's block by short-circuiting our natural tendency to edit ourselves. While self-editing is an important tool for getting through life, it can cripple the creative process. Johnstone's exercises constantly sought to trick the mind out of its habitual dulling of the world." [Johnstone, Impro, page 32]

In 1976, Keith Johnstone and a group of his students formed the Secret Impro Group to perform noon-hour shows at the University of Calgary. The following summer they regrouped to form The Loose Moose Theatre Company. Since then, Theatresports has spread to over 22 countries.

Johnstone created Theatresports^TM as a response to two main concerns. The first was the audience. Why, he wondered, did things like sporting events draw so well while theaters were half empty? Could it be that the connotations of "culture" kept people away? People would go to a football game without knowing beforehand if it would be a good game; they were, however, assured of excitement and the opportunity to participate, to vocalize, and to invest something of themselves in the event and the outcome. Keith would speak of envying the "passion" of a sports audience. The goal, and the result, of Theatresports is to attract people who wouldn't normally go to the theatre. Johnstone was also concerned about the performers. He wanted Theatresports to provide training for improvisation. It would help in recruiting new performers, and its structure would allow for a greater number of participants.”

So, it seems someone else noticed the huge difference between the number of sports fans and theatre fans. But Johnstone tried to figure out why and fix the problem. “Two competing teams playing a match to determine the winner.” That’s sounds like a pretty accurate description of most sports I can think of, who’d have thought of applying that to theatre. Some research presentations has pointed out that the competitiveness is one aspect that draws people to sporting events…

Obviously, theatresports hasn’t received quite the following as a “real” sport, given that I hadn’t heard of it before today, but I’ll bet that a lot more people attend theatresports matches than they do Shakespeare.

Why so complicated?

You know that saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes? Well, sorry to break it to you, but you can’t do that. It’s impossible.

You’ve already gotten a good description of what an Everyday Life Performance (ELP) is, and maybe you thought “Wow, that sounds tough,” or “Ha, seems easy enough.” Either way, you’re wrong. It’s not just tough, it’s the furthest thing from possible you can make an attempt at. I volunteered to perform a segment from my interview first. When we first received this assignment, it came with the helpful advice, “You’re going to fail.” And I did just that.

I’ll describe my preparation process briefly: First I transcribed about 45 second of my interview, one entire story my subject told me. Then, I read the transcribed words while playing the recording and used an orange pen to write in every “um,” “uh,” or “mmmm.” Then I continued reading, speaking and listening to the story in unison until I’d memorized the gist of the story and the placement of the vocal filler. Then I watched the video and used a green pen to mark every time she made a physical gesture (this was a mistake, I realize now, which I’ll explain later). Now, I practiced the whole story with the video, speaking and moving along with her as best I could, over and over again until I was consistent. Then I closed my laptop and kept practicing without the video.

Now here’s the problem: My interview subject (in fact, all people) are so much more complicated that the few aspects I studied! For example, the physical actions that I marked were only ones that involved her hands or were very noticeable head movements.

One of the first notes that I received was that my subject uses her eyebrows and shoulders a lot when she speaks. I honestly hadn’t even looked at them during the dozens of times I watched that video clip. I was too focused on the big things that the refined details went right past me, and it was noticeable.

After my presentation, I pulled up the clip and searched for other things I’d missed. I noticed instances where she furrowed her eyebrows. And several times she showed these little fleeting smirks that vanished after half a second. Even simple things, like how much of her teeth she showed when she laughed.

I started feeling a little creepy watching her over and over again, but it was fascinating how much I’d gotten wrong.

That got me thinking… I wonder how hard it would be to do an ELP of myself. Not immediately after of course, but what if I recorded myself telling a story, then stored that recording without looking at it for 6 weeks, then went back and tried to mimic myself? Honestly, I think it’d be just as hard. Trying to get every inflection, every twitch and shift and sigh exactly right… It seems just as impossible as trying to do it for someone else. It’s interesting to think how my movements might still seem fake, even if they were my own.

So, I can’t even walk a mile in my own shoes and get it right?

Story

After reflecting upon the discussion from our last class, I've been thinking about the story for this show. I understand that we are endeavoring to reach out to both the theatre and sports communities with messages of understanding, but should we go about it in such a heavy-handed manner? By heavy-handed, I mean that, as of the last discussion, my understanding (and I may have misheard an item or two) is that we will be going to each of the realms and deal with a particular issue, with some sort of story to weave them all together. While that does enable us to convey the messages to the audience with all due meaning, will the manner in which we extol these ideas be misunderstood? In my opinion, a great story should be written, something that the audience, be they sports or theatre, will find compelling. The messages, "things about which to think", or whatever one may deem them, should, in my opinion, be subtle. Going with the ideas that Amy e-mailed us this morning, perhaps we should portray not only the theatre kids, but also the athletes. This way, the idea of coming together would come much more naturally since the audience will be able to see both communities. As for the ELP exercises, their implementation should be subtle as well. Instead of stopping the show to display the interview and performance of the interview, perhaps they should come into play at some point during the show. Sometimes the appearance of Serendipity is a good thing, in that if it appears that the realization of some great message comes organically, in my opinion, the audience will be much more likely to take it to heart. Again, these are just a couple of opinions of mine.

Merit

After scanning the blog posts, I noticed a comment which mentioned that U of L is striving to become a premier research and athletic university. One thing to keep in mind is that U of L is also the only college in the commonwealth on Kentucky which offers MFA program in Theatre Arts. Thinking back to one of our discussions as well, we certainly do not want to appear as if we are "whining" or ungrateful for the funding that the theatre program receives. I think it may be time to take a realistic look at the state of the program and wonder if it is being used to its full potential, not by the university, but by us. Are we exerting every iota of energy to further the art of theatre? Are we drawing the kinds of crowds that warrants a bigger cut of the university's budget? I am not as familiar with the history of the program as the rest of you, but has there ever been a filed of study similar to the community based acting with which we are involved? With this show, we need to show that this truly is not only a viable form of theatre, but also that it is the breaking point of a new era in U of L theatre. I was taught, and still truly believe, that acting is reacting. Yet, in order for an action to happen, a change must occur. The U of L theatre department needs that change: The change of community.