Simultaneous dramaturgy, image theater, and forum theater made me think about improvisational comedy/theater. I'm going to focus my post on long-form improv, as practiced by the Up Rights Citizens Brigade because that's the style I practice.
Performances that conform to the conventions of regular theater, sketch comedy for example, create and enforce definite boundaries between audience members and performers—with one allowed to communicate and one relegated to spectating. The actors too usually get very little say on their characters' decisions, let alone agency over the overarching narrative—scenes are dictated to, not formed at the behest of the performers nor the audience. The stage crew, actors, and audience work together to realize an illusion—they see a world, not a workplace.
Improv disrupts these conventions. Performers work in dialogue with audience members, prompting audience members for ideas, through interviews, word requests, etc, and taking audience sounds in account to calculate their character decisions. While we the performers have no idea where the scene will go, we work in collaboration with one another to discover and create characters, settings, and a larger narrative—we find direction through dialogue. This dialogic and dynamic construction is perceived by the audience. Starting scenes without wardrobes, props, stage sets, scripts, etc., the audience isn't allowed to fully immerse themselves in the scenes they're watching: at some level, they are aware of the performers' effort and thoughtfulness—they are arguably alienated from the performance in a Brecht esque way.
This stand-up set is my performance art of choice. I am thinking about how the typically monologing and non-dialogic nature of stand-up creates/emboldens hecklers. In this video, a person stands up to take a call during a set—treating the set as a static and non-reactive and not respecting the comedian as an artist working, she feels emboldened to disrupt Nimesh's performance. In response, another audience member makes a racist comment to put her in her place—attempting to remove her agency and presence. I wonder how more interactive modes of comedy, such as improv or the strategies of the Theater of the Oppressed, can create systems of accountability and community that prevent situations like this.
What a wild clip, Ahmad, and Patel handles both hecklers well. What do you think it might look like to use improv or Theatre of the Oppressed to improve the "systems of accountability and community" that might prevent this kind of behavior? Is it training with others in the community (comedians, I suppose), or is there something you think Patel could have employed in the moment to better handle this moment?
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