Over the past couple of weeks, I have tried to explain why my one year as a film major ended with a transfer to theatre education. This weekend, had anyone been by my side, they would have had an understanding beyond my stated excuse, "All we did in the film program was sit in silence in the dark, watch movies, and write papers."
My production at the high school, Cyrano de Bergerac, opened on Friday night. It has not been an easy production. It was a very large cast (30+), which has it own difficulties (managing schedules and needs of 30+ people), but it is also a difficult show for high school actors - the language, the swordplay, the elevated emotions. My schedule did not help my stress in pulling it all together, and I figured that if I could just get it behind me, I would be happy. I believed that the cast had done a good job, but I might have been too close to it. And, how many people in our community would be interested in a 19th Century French play? I didn't know what to expect.
But then we opened. We had a larger than expected house on Friday, especially considering we conflicted with state girl's basketball. The actors took hold of the show and ran. And the audience was right with them. I sat and watched what these teenage actors did to capture the grand emotions of Romanticism and a crowd of children, teens, and adults was rapt with what would happen next. It was a show that I had never seen in rehearsal. Everyone in that auditorium contributed to a successful production. It was even better on Saturday night. And I realized that it is the vitality of theatre that won me. In the end, maybe 700 will have seen the show. It will only exist for those two hours each night, and then in the memories of those involved. But the memory will be there because they all contributed.
I remember plays I saw as a child in Montana (my Gram took me to West Side Story, my mom to King Lear), and they stay with me more than films of my childhood. Bazin equated film with embalming. Theatre does not embalm, it resurrects a text. I have not had a media experience as visceral as any theatre experience, and I don't know if I can.
On YouTube, you can track views, you can post and read comments, you can parody or respond with your own work, but still it does not have the community that I have experienced in theatre. Media can be collaborative, but mediation places a distance between creator and audience. As I sat with a smile on my face, watching my students understand the text better than they ever had before because of the audience's reactions (Wait, that is funny! Whoa, this moment really is heartbreaking.), I could see whay these students devoted so many hours to it, why over a hundred students auditioned to be in it. Film started by replicating theatrical conventions, but soon found its own language. Theatrical conventions cannot survive on film. It does not work. In the reading for Sharon's class there are theorists who discuss how media are losing their individual identifiers and becoming more alike. But new media is not like this weekend with hundreds of people breathing the same air and sharing a story.
So, I am happy, and I hope my students are, too. We have one night to go, which hopefully will be as great as what they have already done. We can talk about community, and phenomonology, and interaction with media, but untimately it pales to theatre. Maybe not forever, and not for eveyone, but at least for me now. I can use this comparison in my theatre classes to talk about how new media is trying to capture the communal theatrical experience and see if students have had media experiences like unto theatre. It will be interesting to see if their perceptions are similar to mine, or having been raised on new media, if they view those experiences as more communal than theatre for them. If they feel that the experience is similar or greater to being in a live production or the audience of one, I will be sad, but it will link new media and theatre more in my mind, where a rift now exists.
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