After some agonising, I have decided that all profit from performance of Agony/Ecstasy will be donated to SACOM in Hong Kong.
SACOM is an activist organisation of students and academics which struggles for the ethical and moral rights of workers in China. They continually release reports and research on labour rights, and are particularly focused on Foxconn (key supplier for Apple) as a huge employer continually violating these ethical and moral standards.
Their website is here.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Mike Daisey Analysis by Andrew Fuhrmann
I like Andrew's work. Along with Jana and Alison, they are the ones I
read. They are educated (partly by institutions but mostly, I think,
off their own steam), intuitive, they are developing as they write each
crit, they provoke your work and move it in different directions, they
are interested in writing first and theatre second, measured (but
sometimes delightfully biased), and most importantly I think,
independent and even democratic (probably as much as a writer could be).
Recently all of Neandellus' reviews were taken off the website, probably by him (including his dissection of my No-Show, which I have preserved in violation of his copyright). By and large, they can no longer be read.
Andrew interviewed me prior to the first performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and his article, which was published today over at Artshub, is here.
Recently all of Neandellus' reviews were taken off the website, probably by him (including his dissection of my No-Show, which I have preserved in violation of his copyright). By and large, they can no longer be read.
Andrew interviewed me prior to the first performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and his article, which was published today over at Artshub, is here.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Why do you hate on the Media so bad, Richard?
Some more rigourous self-examination leads me to again consider the question of: why did I want to stage Mike's work?
Some revelation came in the family car when a rendition of "Pumped Up Kicks" slopped out from the radio and arrested me from my exit across the road to Benalla's fantastic second hand bookstore, which I visit every time I come home.
I love this song because it is the ultimate in ironies, a song from the perspective of a schoolyard killer that has somehow become a hipster anthem, now active in selling XXXX's new Summer Ale.
As I swim through the emo-painy ecstatic half-melody, entering the blissful state of moral and ethical collapse it demands, I think about how shit get appropriated so much nowadays. How those few bastions of resistence (against what? why?) are swallowed up by commercial interest, how those who champion something are so seldom rewarded unless their championing serves some "safe" cause, how those things which sit awkwardly or are only championed by a handful of people as far as I can see, and the world's survival seems dependant on those few individuals continuing their struggle, continuing to sacrifice the mobility, possibility, pleasures for the sake of a humanity they surely have become too cynical to believe in any longer. All of this is blindingly obvious, I knew its politic when I was 8 years old. We all know it.
But doesn't it seem unfair to you? That a handful of people, these "renegade" figures, should shoulder the burden for the rest of us, that they should be bastions of truth and justice while the rest of us simply comply with whatever it is we are told, or jump on a skeptical bandwagon when it presents itself?
It's a staged binary - but doesn't it sound familiar? A hero narrative - resonant, but so obviously flawed. It describes perfectly our existence. It is fed by the media, it is fed by individuals following its line, it is fed by this fame-drug we seem to all be on nowadays. As if surrogates can fulfill all of our fraught desires, and we can appreciate them from an armchair.
And it begs the question, if its resonance is any indication of its truth: Shouldn't the rest of us take some fucking responsibility as well?
Some revelation came in the family car when a rendition of "Pumped Up Kicks" slopped out from the radio and arrested me from my exit across the road to Benalla's fantastic second hand bookstore, which I visit every time I come home.
I love this song because it is the ultimate in ironies, a song from the perspective of a schoolyard killer that has somehow become a hipster anthem, now active in selling XXXX's new Summer Ale.
As I swim through the emo-painy ecstatic half-melody, entering the blissful state of moral and ethical collapse it demands, I think about how shit get appropriated so much nowadays. How those few bastions of resistence (against what? why?) are swallowed up by commercial interest, how those who champion something are so seldom rewarded unless their championing serves some "safe" cause, how those things which sit awkwardly or are only championed by a handful of people as far as I can see, and the world's survival seems dependant on those few individuals continuing their struggle, continuing to sacrifice the mobility, possibility, pleasures for the sake of a humanity they surely have become too cynical to believe in any longer. All of this is blindingly obvious, I knew its politic when I was 8 years old. We all know it.
But doesn't it seem unfair to you? That a handful of people, these "renegade" figures, should shoulder the burden for the rest of us, that they should be bastions of truth and justice while the rest of us simply comply with whatever it is we are told, or jump on a skeptical bandwagon when it presents itself?
It's a staged binary - but doesn't it sound familiar? A hero narrative - resonant, but so obviously flawed. It describes perfectly our existence. It is fed by the media, it is fed by individuals following its line, it is fed by this fame-drug we seem to all be on nowadays. As if surrogates can fulfill all of our fraught desires, and we can appreciate them from an armchair.
And it begs the question, if its resonance is any indication of its truth: Shouldn't the rest of us take some fucking responsibility as well?
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Elly Varrenti's Review
Today the action I am making received its first piece of formal criticism.
I have been reading The Age since I was a kid and it used to come every day to our breakfast table. So how strange to see my name in it, in the place where others have been thousands of times. Here is the review and then I talk about it after.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/theatre/the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs-20120528-1zf3w.html#ixzz1wFEwPbAg
I have been reading The Age since I was a kid and it used to come every day to our breakfast table. So how strange to see my name in it, in the place where others have been thousands of times. Here is the review and then I talk about it after.
The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs
Elly Varrenti
May 29, 2012
La Mama, June 3,10,17 & 24
(3 stars)
AMERICAN writer-performer Mike Daisey - a kind of Mike Moore meets Spalding Gray - created a furore recently when it was discovered he'd taken poetic licence in his investigative expose of substandard working conditions at the factory in China where 50 per cent of the world's electronics are manufactured - in particular, a large chunk of Apple products. Sprung bad, Daisey delivered a retraction on American Public Radio's This American Life: presenter Ira Glass calling Daisey to account for his major ethical stuff-up made for seriously compelling radio.
Agony & Ecstasy is not really about the ''techno libertarian hippie'' and Apple founder Steve Jobs, but rather a first-person monologue-cum-call-to-arms charting Daisey's obsession with Apple technology: ''I am a worshipper at the cult of Mac''. Daisey goes on a pilgrimage to Shenzhen, where he witnesses Apple's underbelly and interviews traumatised Foxconn factory workers (some made up, it turns out).
Melburnian Richard Pettifer delivers Daisey's intermittently fascinating monologue with a tokenistic nod to the recent scandal: we hear an excerpt from the now-famous on-air retraction and Pettifer sports a T-shirt emblazoned with LIAR. He does a decent enough job imparting the text, although reliance on notes interrupts the flow and overall, the presentation could have done with a bit more sculpting. Pettifer's take on Daisey's story, given its controversy, is underdeveloped. As theatre, it lacks coherence, but if you're not familiar with Daisey's brand of theatre-as-weapon, it's well worth a look.
(3 stars)
AMERICAN writer-performer Mike Daisey - a kind of Mike Moore meets Spalding Gray - created a furore recently when it was discovered he'd taken poetic licence in his investigative expose of substandard working conditions at the factory in China where 50 per cent of the world's electronics are manufactured - in particular, a large chunk of Apple products. Sprung bad, Daisey delivered a retraction on American Public Radio's This American Life: presenter Ira Glass calling Daisey to account for his major ethical stuff-up made for seriously compelling radio.
Agony & Ecstasy is not really about the ''techno libertarian hippie'' and Apple founder Steve Jobs, but rather a first-person monologue-cum-call-to-arms charting Daisey's obsession with Apple technology: ''I am a worshipper at the cult of Mac''. Daisey goes on a pilgrimage to Shenzhen, where he witnesses Apple's underbelly and interviews traumatised Foxconn factory workers (some made up, it turns out).
Melburnian Richard Pettifer delivers Daisey's intermittently fascinating monologue with a tokenistic nod to the recent scandal: we hear an excerpt from the now-famous on-air retraction and Pettifer sports a T-shirt emblazoned with LIAR. He does a decent enough job imparting the text, although reliance on notes interrupts the flow and overall, the presentation could have done with a bit more sculpting. Pettifer's take on Daisey's story, given its controversy, is underdeveloped. As theatre, it lacks coherence, but if you're not familiar with Daisey's brand of theatre-as-weapon, it's well worth a look.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/theatre/the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs-20120528-1zf3w.html#ixzz1wFEwPbAg
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Technology Infiltrated the Theatre
Today someone tried to enter the theatre late, during the performance.
I realised later during a conversation with Andrew and Andrea that I should have just let them in to come and sit down. Why didn't I do it? I thought to myself. I realised that the idea had not even entered my head. Which was weird. I mean, they are human beings. They are trying to see theatre (unless they were just coming for rehearsals or something). I love people who try and see theatre. I mean, they have left the house, gone out into the cold, they have tried and failed to make it to the theatre on time. They wanted to engage with an age-old tradition of a small group of people under lights trying to say something of importace to a larger group of people in darkness. More people should try and see theatre. And I especially love anyone who tried to come to some action which I have made, because I feel honoured.
And then I realised something else.
My laptop was on.
I realised later during a conversation with Andrew and Andrea that I should have just let them in to come and sit down. Why didn't I do it? I thought to myself. I realised that the idea had not even entered my head. Which was weird. I mean, they are human beings. They are trying to see theatre (unless they were just coming for rehearsals or something). I love people who try and see theatre. I mean, they have left the house, gone out into the cold, they have tried and failed to make it to the theatre on time. They wanted to engage with an age-old tradition of a small group of people under lights trying to say something of importace to a larger group of people in darkness. More people should try and see theatre. And I especially love anyone who tried to come to some action which I have made, because I feel honoured.
And then I realised something else.
My laptop was on.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The Un-Reviewable
I have (again) tried to make something critic-proof.
I have had a hunch for a while that Un-Reviewable theatre was probably good theatre.
It sometimes feels like critics rock up to something, they watch it, it appeals to certain terms of reference and doesn't to others, then they go home and write about it, and they often feel a bit shit about themselves because they have to say it sucked, mostly because it didn't break new ground. Or if it happens to have the resources and/or the nouse to successfully sit on the cutting edge of contemporary theatre, they can review it positively because it sits in the space where "progress" lies. And then they're like "thank god".
It should be no surprise that within this admittedly bullshit binary a good idea to look for a third option, as the first is not good for anyone and the second only really works if you're the latest wunderkind, or trying to be.
Therefore to try to create Un-Reviewable theatre is both to try to protect oneself from that shit feeling when you get a bad review, and also to operate outside of convention.
I have had a hunch for a while that Un-Reviewable theatre was probably good theatre.
It sometimes feels like critics rock up to something, they watch it, it appeals to certain terms of reference and doesn't to others, then they go home and write about it, and they often feel a bit shit about themselves because they have to say it sucked, mostly because it didn't break new ground. Or if it happens to have the resources and/or the nouse to successfully sit on the cutting edge of contemporary theatre, they can review it positively because it sits in the space where "progress" lies. And then they're like "thank god".
It should be no surprise that within this admittedly bullshit binary a good idea to look for a third option, as the first is not good for anyone and the second only really works if you're the latest wunderkind, or trying to be.
Therefore to try to create Un-Reviewable theatre is both to try to protect oneself from that shit feeling when you get a bad review, and also to operate outside of convention.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)