Pragmatic Aesthetics II: Reality Keeps On Knocking

Matt Trueman in the Guardian's theatre blog has an apt criticism for some theater:

Time and again, I find myself watching a production that is a shadow of the show it wants to be. Props and furnishings stand in not for their fictional counterparts, but rather for the props and furnishings that would have been bought had the funds been available. Actors, too, are widely miscast – often the wrong age or physical build – in the hope that we'll see through them to the ideal cast and beyond to the characters. It feels unfair to name and shame, but recent symptomatic examples include an Ikea-heavy noughties living room for a play set firmly in the 90s, fancy-dress maid's uniforms worn by the staff of a glossy five-star hotel, and the fluffy halo and tulle angel-wings combo used as a travelling player's costume, despite the play's 1936 setting.

In short, far too much fringe theatre begs our leniency and forgiveness. To do so, however – to apologise in advance – is inexcusable. Theatre cannot make excuses for itself, no matter how tight its budget or how short its rehearsal process. If materials don't suit the aim, either change the materials or change the aim. Find another way.

When the artist's focus is the work of art itself, then dreaming big may seem like the right strategy. After all, the theater-going audience will, sometimes, suspend their disbelief and use their minds to give you the props, special effects, etc. that you need. They see what you're trying to do, imagine it being done, and see whether they think that would work. And when a play is in development hell, this is an ally; this is what allows a staged reading to attract people's attention to the play's potential.

In play development, the focus of the event is the play itself. And that's why play development workshops and play-readings tend to be an insider thing -- because they're invested enough in arts to want to spend their time watching a play that isn't ready yet.

But for the average audience, they want to be effected, directly. They want the artist to do their own work. And therefore, when you're creating a work for the real audience, not the insiders-there-to-help-you-make-that-work-happen, the focus should be on the effect the play has on the crowd.

If you focus on the goal of the work rather than on the work itself, you will be forced to, rather than gesturing at the solutions you wish you had, think creatively of solutions that still work towards your goal. I get it; you can't set off fireworks in your 99 seat black box. But there are a thousand ways to fill in for that act. You have to choose the one that most effectively works toward the original goal in that moment, rather than the one you think would be most effective when the work is fully realized.

There's no reason why a bare-bones production can't be effective; but if you try to evoke a form you can't fulfill, the audience will simply desire to go see a work that can fulfill its desires. When you present a work to an audience, you're trying to transmit knowledge and experience to them. But in order for that bridge to be formed, they have to trust you. You need to have legitimacy (an idea which is very important to me).

The problem with unfulfilled work is not that it asks the audience to imagine -- you can get a lot out of asking the audience to imagine. The problem is that you ask them to pretend that something is true that isn't; you're asking them to pretend your work is fulfilled. Asking the audience to accept an untruth will make the audience more skeptical of the truth of the other knowledge and experiences you're putting forward.

Jon Stewart once said that the reason he likes Obama is that whether or not they agree on everything, he gets the sense that Obama isn't bullshitting him; "He doesn't tell me that it's not raining when it's clearly raining outside."

Don't tell your audience it's not raining. Given rain, figure out how to make the rain work toward your goal.

Two Corrections

I kind of like The Guardian's blog's "Noises Off" feature. It always signals to me the moment a debate has been over for a little bit and it's time to summarize it. Journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, but the "Noises Off" feature is basically the second draft: rarely is The Guardian's blog a primary source of discussion, but it's a nice way to round up everything that went on. At any rate, if I want to link to a complex discussion (like the one we had about Quality/Diversity or the one we had about Thomas Garvey -- good times!), it's a lot easier to link to their index-of-important-moments than to try and hit all the original posts myself.

That being said, they don't always get it exactly right (as is always the case with the second draft of history. And I thought it would be worthwhile to correct two quick points, both in reference to myself.

Firstly, in this post, I'm described as an "actor-turned-playwright." That makes it sound like I don't perform anymore... contrary to popular belief, I do still act! In fact, if you want to see me act, my show is still running this week:

Thursday at 9:30 PM

Friday at 7:30 PM

Saturday at 2:00 PM and 8:30 PM

All at 721 Broadway's 2nd floor Shop Theater. I'd love to see you there, and you can see for yourself that I still perform. Granted, I also wrote the play, but I am a performer!

Secondly, in this post, my brief response to Nick Clegg's liking Samuel Beckett is summed up in the sentence, "Clegg did come in for criticism from some quarters." Actually, when I said that "As usual, liking theatre is apparently on par with the worst opinions of bigots towards black community members," I was not criticizing Clegg, I was criticizing the horrible cultural atmosphere we have that makes Clegg's statement so rare.

I'd much prefer if Clegg's statement was the norm, just one of many intellectual acknowledgments that politicians made. Instead, it landed in the cultural sphere like a bombshell -- Somebody cares about us! The implication behind all of the glowing praise of Clegg was, "How politically risky it is to approve of the arts!" That's what I meant. That's the problem. Certainly I didn't criticize Clegg for not playing into it.

Also, I do have to say that this mischaracterization of my meaning (which I will accept some responsibility for, because that was kind of a throwaway post) does come at least in some part because of the common journalistic formula that gets applied often, not only here but in many media. The formula goes something like:

Token Liberal said: XXXXX

Token Liberal 2 agreed, saying YYYYY. Token Liberal 3 explained further, ZZZZZZ.

Not everyone agreed with Token Liberal, however. Token Conservative said AAAAAAA. Another Token Conservative said BBBBBBB.

Obviously that's almost insultingly reductive, (and I'm using Liberal/Conservative in place of any reductive "with-us-or-against-us" mentality) but when I saw how I was quoted in the Noises Off it seemed to me that I was suffered by being shoehorned into the wrong paragraph.

Just setting the record straight.

Diversity XXIII: The Checklist

I was reminded by the Guardian's blog post today about our last dust-up about diversity, which started with Scott's lottery proposal. (I won't link to all the significant conversation it started, but the Guardian blog post is a good overview)

At the time, I hashed out pretty clearly what my disagreement with it was, but I forgot to say the one philosophical point on which I agreed with it -- that it tried to find away to address implicit bias in the selection process. As I'm sure I don't need to say, even casting directors/hiring managers/etc. who think that they are open-minded demonstrate biases in their hiring practices. To cite just one example, a study in the American Economic Review found that blind auditions significantly increases the chance that women will be advanced or higher. The reason for this is because it takes away all of the extraneous biasing factors out of the hands of the auditioner and allows them simply to judge on the music. This is why many theaters that judge plays also judge blindly, and that's not exactly a new tactic.

But recently, I heard Atul Gawande's interview on NPR (and was reminded of it by The Daily Show's interview) about his book, the Checklist Manifesto.

The crux of the manifesto is this: every time a checklist is developed of things that you have to remember to avoid infection, and you force doctors to go through that checklist, rates of infection go down. The increase in positive medical outcomes is measurable, and at the end of the process, 80% of doctors say that the checklist improved outcomes and saved lives-- and 92% say that they want the doctor who's operating on them to use a checklist.

But the key revelation, I found, was the difference between those two numbers - the 12% of doctors who think the checklist is hogwash, but still want their doctors to use it. Partly that might be Pascal's Wager at work, but Dr. Gawande has some insight on why else that might be.

You see, even though he developed a checklist and insisted on its use, he didn't think he needed it himself. He thought the checklist was for other doctors. And yet, he too couldn't escape the data: his patients did better when he had a checklist. He didn't make as many mistakes.

The case in which checklists were used were to prevent carelessness. But I think the checklist idea might be able to address diversity... if you can figure out what belongs on the checklist.

So I call upon you, internet: say I'm the head of an organization who wants to ensure diversity in hiring practices. What would you have me put on my checklist?

If You've Just Come To This Blog From The Guardian

I'm always pleased when the Guardian's online blog includes me in a recap of one of the theater-sphere's rolicking debates. Earlier today, they posted a recap of the debate around race sparked off by Thomas Garvey's response to RVCBard.

I just wanted to say two things, if you're just arriving now and missed it:

1. I responded to Isaac's charge, quoted at the end of the piece, that I was taking Thomas Garvey in good faith here.
2. One odd omission from the Guardian piece is RVCBard's stance on the issue, since after all it was her comments that Garvey latched onto and started the whole thing, and without her the issue would probably have died away much quicker and been less interesting. Anyways, this is her biggest response to the debate, and this is her last one. They're crucial to understanding what happened.

Quality IV: Middle-World

So, if we can throw our minds back to the distant past, to a raging conversation about Diversity that blew across the like a hot wind, and specifically to Scott Walters' posts on the lottery (I and II) and the conversation it sparked, I'd like to continue my thoughts on quality that Scott and August Schulenberg helped sharpen for me, and expand a little further. The point I made about quality back there that I want to bring back to mind before I continue is when I said:

I disagree that relativism reduces every argument to absurdity. I think that in our post-modern times, a false opposition was created: Objectivism versus Absurdity -- Objectivism versus nothing. If there's no objective truth, there's no truth at all.

The other day, a close friend of mine mentioned that he was starting to feel that, philosophically, he was a nihilist. I was concerned, because the idea that there is some sort of meaning in the world is very important to me. I asked him what he meant when he said nihilist (because obviously the term is one thing and the actual meaning of the term is another).

He said to me this: in the end, we all die, so what does it matter?

I told him my personal answer to that question, which is that although in an absolute sense, nothing we do matter, because on the scale of the absolute, everything we do turns to dust. (Those of you to whom there is another version of eternity -- whether it be the persistence of energy in the universe or a seat by the hand of God or a transcendent state of nirvana -- have already parted ways with me, assumption-wise. I beg you to indulge two atheists debate the theology of their atheism, if you will).

This is where my point above comes into play. Even though our lives might mean nothing in the absolute, it might still mean something in the relative.

Suppose I am at a moral cross-roads -- whether or not, for instance, to save a drowning child. In the absolute sense, this decision is meaningless. The child dies, now or later, happy or sad, whether or not I intervene.

But at the scale in which we live our lives, this moral choice has meaning. We live our lives on the minute-to-minute scale, and therefore the idea of a child dying now or dying after having lived many years of life is a huge change in both my life and the life of the child.

To some, it seems as though these two statements are a contradiction, or that one gets to the heart of the matter more than the other. To some, the meaninglessness of the absolute wins--all our attempts at meaning are just the pretensions of molecules. To others, the meaningfulness of the everyday wins, and they project that meaningfulness into the absolute -- creating an absolute whose sense of values are exactly the same as ours.

(This is my personal belief as to why advances in astronomy are treated sometimes warily by religion; man was made in God's image, because God is a concept that only makes sense in a human scale. What does the book of Leviticus have to say about Quantum Mechanics or Black Holes?)

At any rate, I happen to believe that it's okay for things to be desperately important to us and unimportant "in the grand scheme of things," for the same reason I think it's fine for theater to be so deeply important to me when, really, we know that we'll only touch so many people in our lives and who is to say how much it will actually impact our culture.

My ideas on this subject were largely shaped by Richard Dawkins. Not only his book The Selfish Gene, but more importantly, this TED Talk:

Middle-World. The scale in which we live our lives. Everything we do is based on those assumptions. And we have the capacity to understand the other scales, increasingly, but there will be limits. That's fine. At the end of the day, we live our lives here in Middle World.

And within middle-world, there's also differences in context, differences in understanding. I'm not saying we need to accept the limitations of our own little contexts, but at the same time, it's fine to have our own yardsticks and contexts. The degree to which people can share that context is the degree to which people can agree on common standards, can form a common culture. And our ability to bridge contexts and translate across contexts is one of our greatest strengths, and one of our highest goals.

When we talk about quality needing to be right from the perspective of the audience, what we mean is, it needs to at least on some level match the assumptions or understandings of that audience. We want to push boundaries, but we don't have to push all of the boundaries--in fact, if we make our desire to "provoke" or "surprise" too central, we'll lose that common context we share with our audience.

I once worked with a director who shared a very different perspective with me on this. We had a big argument, us the cast and him the director, on how we should relate to our audience. One of the cast-members said, "If we make this choice, it's going to hit the audience in the face with a shovel." To which the director responded, "YES! Exactly!"

This is what is wrong with trying to tear apart all of the structures and understandings a person has -- it just simply doesn't work. You can't communicate with them. In William James' Pragmatism, he discusses how people learn. He says that we slowly accumulate theories, assumptions, understandings, and facts, and cobble them together into a web of ideas. When a new theory or fact comes along that doesn't mesh with what we have, we make the smallest adjustment possible to make all of the facts and theories mesh together again. As an artist, you can massage along their understanding, but if you try to shake apart their web of ideas too hard, the easiest thing for them to do will simply be to dismiss you.

This, I think, is what commenter Kiley meant by saying:

... consumers tend to measure new products, services and ideas against that which they are most familiar with, rather than being open to experimenting with something new or unknown. This is despite how potentially beneficially those ideas or experiences might be to them personally or to their collective community. Under this premise, I believe that some / many consumers initially reject most art, consciously or not, particularly that which is not of the immediately pleasing or pacifying nature. Arts ability to prod, provoke, and challenge thus suffers in my mind when it is not wholly support by means external to the marketplace.

I don't know if I agree with the "wholly" part of that sentiment, but the core of it is what I agree with. When faced with an idea that is outside of their own personal "middle-world" (remember that we are all, literally, at the center of our own experiences), they will be hesitant and need some coaxing to come along. You can entice them outside of their comfort zone, but you can't beat them.

In America, this is made more difficult not only because of the market forces, as Kiley rightly mentioned, but also because of the competitive landscape. Consumers can choose what they entertain themselves -- and even if they decide to choose something intellectually stimulating, they can choose to be intellectually stimulated by people who agree with them.

That's part of quality, or of value, or of resonance -- finding that delicate spot where you entice people to some place they didn't think they wanted to go, showing them the other worlds while still resonating in the one they have to live in. Boy that is difficult.