Symposium Response

Symposium Response Theatre Symposium attendees; Jay Malarcher, moderator [Editor’s Note: At several points in the discussion, the actual speaker became obscured to the point that the transcript cannot distinguish speakers. In cases where the speaker is known, such indication is made.] Jay Malarcher [JM]: Ideally this Symposium Response is a chance for the keynoters to chime in on some of the papers they’ve heard, some of the ideas that might have been suggested in the papers that add to their body of knowledge, add to something that they conceive of. What they did yesterday at the roundtable (since we were all there for it), you got the idea that they were speaking very specifically about their areas of interest. Now, let’s just sort of open it up and respond to connections among papers; you know, within the panels most of the time they were fairly coherent, but there might be a paper from a panel on Friday that actually speaks more directly to a panel on Sunday, and again that’s one of the beggaries of putting a conference together, not knowing from the abstract the full import of an idea. Audience Member [AM]: Something I found in all of the papers, taken as a group, was the way that sites can be shaped by a performance and then how it works the other way: it’s a dialectical relationship . That’s really exciting for me because my particular interest was the, the invigoration of a site that had no ideological or historical significance to anyone in any kind of shorthand way. Talking about a performance activity—that brings that site to life. It names it, you know, even just for a moment. And then others were talking about how important the actual site of something happened, that happened to a community that Symposium Response 125 was historically significant, which could resonate not only with that performance but with the ideas of democracy and American history and, I think although not always expressly stated, constructions of race and ethnicity , especially in the American imagination. So that’s something that really excited me about this topic was that in talking about inside and outside and the way that, that Susan [Kattwinkel] kind of started the whole conference, we’re not talking about a one-way relationship, and that it, it just opened up my thinking, about how it can work both ways. JM: The expression “site-specific” was mentioned more than anything else (except “outdoor historical drama”), and that’s great: the relationship with the audience again. And for those of us who saw Amadeus last night, I can’t conceive of PlayMakers having any kind of really deeprooted idea about the relationship of the audience to that play, whereas most of the plays and performances we’ve been talking about very much included the audience in the dialogue. The actor-audience relationship is palpable in these plays. And in something like Austin’s thing, Esther’s Follies, that’s knowing who’s around, you know; it’s almost like, if history includes today, then that’s an historical drama as well because that’s who we are in Austin and this . . . it’s almost like Our Town. [laughter] . . . I’m going into the stage manager speech: “This is who we are in Austin, Texas, on this Friday night.” It’s kind of a weird way of looking at it, but again, it maybe shows the democratization of the drama in these, in these kinds of forms. AM: Well, there’s something about moving outside that automatically does that because outside is more site-specific than inside. Inside, you could be in any building in any place that happens to be built that way, but as soon as you’re outside, you’re in a very specific place. Besides that, that ends up being an element of any performance that’s outdoors, because it’s outdoors and therefore the specific place of it becomes very important , just like as I mentioned yesterday, I think the other thing that happens as soon as you move outdoors is you lose an element of control, which is another interesting thing you...