American Decameron

Practicing with the Kinect

On May 14^th, I participated as a storyteller and dramaturg in Phillip Baldwin’s American Decameron, held in The Tank on

W 45^th St.

The performance gave me an important insight into what the show really was, as well as confirming several ideas I’ve had floating around about collaborative storytelling.

Jose Ojeda ran music from his laptop at the foot of the stage

American Decameron was Phillip’s take on Boccaccio’s Decameron in which a group of young Florentines, men and women, flee the plague and tell each other stories in a remote villa. American Decameron only did minimal homage to Boccaccio’s poem. We crowd-sourced stories on themes that interest Phillip such as getting out of pink-collared jobs, sex, American society as a pyramid scheme, meeting attractive singles, and so on and so forth through a pair of blogs. He selected some of us to tell stories from the blogs while using a Kinect to VJ stock video and audio on a projection-wall behind us. During the course of the play, we stopped using the Kinect. As it turns out, it was only a distraction from out stories. I suppose it was similar to playing the piano while telling a story – your hands and body act separately from your mouth – but none of us had enough experience with the Kinect to play it while we told our stories. So about half-way through American Decameron became one person after another walking to the front of the stage and telling a story. That tells me that that is what it always was at its core, and the Kinect and the other toys that Phillip insisted on using were only fluff that got in the way of American Decameron being what it really was.

So American Decameron was about stories culled from our blogs, not about the Kinect. I’m not sure that crowd-sourcing through blogs is the best way to gather stories for a theatrical event. Blogs are a way to facilitate minimal communication. For example, I can talk to you through this blog when I choose. But I don’t know who I’m talking to, nor do I necessarily expect a response. I could very well be speaking into a vacuum. Because of my low expectations, you don’t have to respond. Were we speaking in person, I would know who my audience is, and I would expect and probably get a response. A real conversation could happen. These blogs are poor substitutes for conversation. They are helpful, in the case of this blog, when the potential interlocutors may be in the next state, the next time zone, or the next country. But in the case of American Decameron, all of the interlocutors shared a common geographic location at least once a week. The use of blogs and crowd-sourcing actually inhibited the creation of American Decameron.

Warming up with the Kinect and music

A better approach would have been that of classic devising, as I know it from Amy Jensen’s [here now then]. A small group of people meet in the evening and tell each other stories on the themes set out by the director. The director would then guide the ensemble through improvising on those stories to create a single show with a single spine. We would add in toys like the Kinect only if they actively contributed to the spine of the play. We would have known what we had before we were on stage. American Decameron has potential, but only if it ceases to be distracted by new technologies that only serve to cloud what it really is: a storytelling revue based on themes inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Locker No. 417B

On May 12^th I saw my friend Amy Jensen’s new play, Locker No. 4173B, a New York Neo-Futurist production being held at The Monkey on West 26th Street, for which Amy worked as their dramaturg. It’s playing through May 21^st, and is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking production.

An intersection of archaeology and theater, Locker is the result of Neo-Futurists Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo buying a foreclosed storage locker in an auction, and trying to reconstitute, from the stuff in their new property, the lives of those who had lost the locker. They brought their findings to the stage in the form of a docudrama.

Locker is fascinating on many levels: it’s a network of interesting stories, Borg, Rizzolo, and Yeauxlanda Kay performed beautifully, and the list only goes on. I would like to focus on just one aspect of this play: the way it humanizes archaeology, or, more specifically, archaeology’s subjects. The subjects of Borg and Rizzolo’s archaeological endeavor are, most likely, still alive. They may not be, however, and this crisis of ignorance of the current whereabouts of the subject is particularly meaningful from a Native perspective, from the perspective of an archaeological subject. Museums and archaeology, in their fixation on the past, often ignore the living members of their subject group. This oversight, at least in the experience of Native people, leads to the myth of the “vanished Indian” and the feeling I sometimes have that people think we all died at Wounded Knee.

If they are alive, and even if they’re dead, what are the moral implications of this invasion into their privacy? Borg and Rizzolo, and therefore the audience, wrestle with this question as well. At one point, Rizzolo says that a paranoid schizophrenic subject of their theatrical study may not be crazy after all: having her life pored over by a group of strangers in a higher social class is just the sort of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would fear. Later in the show, Rizzolo enters from the coat room with an audience member’s purse. He asks her how she would feel about him rifling through her stuff then and there and showing everybody her possessions. They finished the show by asking us to think about all our possessions – from treasures to junk – and which of those things we would want a stranger to study and judge us by.

Locker No. 4173B was simultaneously awkward and needed. I felt awkward going through strangers’ lives without their permission. But isn’t that the point? The dead and the living are never objects: they are people. Locker gracefully exposes a dehumanizing flaw in the archaeological method, a flaw that we living and marginalized subjects of archaeology, and its cousin anthropology, have been aware of for years. That the New York Neo-Futurists are telling this story to the hip, young and mostly white off-off-Broadway crowd is an exciting step in the right direction.