Fussing over Foss

Last Friday, The Stage printed what is, quite frankly, an inexcusable and indefensible dismissal of interactive theatre by critic Roger Foss. Mercifully, this week the industry paper is giving over a similar space for the artistic directors of the BAC, Davids Jubb and Micklem, to respond. While I am looking forward to read their perspective on the importance and vitality of such work, I wanted to get in there first and tear Foss’s argument (of sorts) apart.

Now I don’t lay claim to strictly syllogistic thought processes in my ramblings, but Foss’s argument (of sorts) makes such leaps of logic that it is utterly impossible to spot a route through, let alone follow it. Foss displays a total lack of understanding or, even worse, a positive misunderstanding of the work under discussion. For the most part this results from his tangled confusion over the vocabulary used. More damaging, however, is his stubborn refusal to accept the work on its own terms. No - in fact it’s worse than that. From the start, Foss denies such work the right to even exist. He knows what theatre is and what it does because he’s seen it. It does what it’s always done. End of. Game over. Now, shit off, I’m trying to suspend my disbelief.

Alright, so maybe that’s a little too facetious (if not downright obnoxious), but Foss certainly makes his position obvious from the start. He does not arrive at it through the course of an argument. Instead, he starts out with a definition (of sorts) that rules out anything that doesn’t match a very stringent model.

Foss’s first (and foremost) mistake is to view interactive theatre from the outside: “try and work your thoughts to imagine a theatre where there are no actors and no stage...” By asking us to visualise such a theatre, Foss manages to define an audience as those who watch. To do so is to miss the point of interactive theatre, that it is about doing not watching. Admittedly, there is little to be gained from watching someone take part in, say, Rotazaza’s Wondermart. It would consist in following a ‘shopper’ wearing headphones and an unusual expression of bemused enjoyment as they stalk the aisles of a supermarket. However, Wondermart is not designed to be watched. It exists to be experienced, to be undergone, to be interacted with.

In fact, compare it to the same company’s Etiquette. Here, the jigsaw might well piece together into something concrete or readable, even a narrative of sorts. It functions both from the inside and from the outside, when experienced and when viewed. It is designed in such a way that its being experienced translates into something worth watching. Crucially, however, the two modes of receipt bring about very different understandings of the piece. Almost to the point whereby one could even go so far as to separate experiencing and watching Etiquette entirely.

Having initially pitched himself outside of the work, Foss mistakenly continues with this notion when he comes to examine the experiential aspects. When he writes about what it is to undergo or to take part in interactive theatre, Foss does so in terms associated with making theatre or performing a play. He writes as if there is a distinct, external audience to whom we are performing when we participate. Hence, his use of phrases such as “audience members will play all the roles” or “anyone can become living art” and his subscription to the moniker “citizen-actors.”

The fact is that we are not citizen-actors or performers, but participants. We are not living-art, we are taking part in art. The game, the concept, the structures are the art. The taking part is the experience of it – just as looking at a painting is not itself a work of art – and this experience is itself a product of the art. Suddenly the flaw in Foss’s logic becomes obvious when he writes, “who needs artists or sculptors when you’ve got citizen-statues?” Without the artist, there would be no work. We are merely materials, particularly in the curious choice of example Foss uses: Gormley’s fourth plinth project, One & Other.

Secondly, when we are taking part we do not act, we do. At the heart of both actions is the notion of choice, but the difference them is the nature of those choices. An actor’s choices are governed by aesthetics and a participant’s by ethics. By this I do not mean to infer that performance cannot have ethical motivations nor that everyday actions cannot stems from aesthetic concerns, but that the primary impulse in each case is different. The actor addresses ethics at one remove – choosing how to present ethics aesthetically. The participant must decide how to act in the moment. Of course, this may be governed by aesthetic principles, but even in such events the choice is, first and foremost, an ethical one.

The very best interactive work places the participant in starkly ethical encounters, dilemmas even. On the wheelchair rickshaw that is You, Me, Bum Bum Train, I was genuinely shocked by my own impulsive actions. In the speed of the moment, acting solely on impulse, I threw a punch in a boxing ring and uttered some attempt at Swahili (of which, unsurprisingly, I know nothing) when asked to translate in a press conference situation. In retrospect, both actions are somewhat embarrassing.

But Foss refuses to allow a distinction between good and bad interactive work. When he writes, “whether it’s amazingly brilliant or utterly pointless, non-narrative theatre ticks all those artistically correct boxes for Arts Council England funding wonks,” you feel as though he’s writing not about individual works, but about the genre as a whole. (Of course, his repeated confusion of terms severely undermines his position as mere temerity. The differences between performerless, interactive, automated and non-narrative theatre are too many to name. However, anyone who can write, “the trouble is that there’s no instant label for actor-less theatre. Site-specific? Instalation? Stunt? Happening?” should not be given a platform to call for its abolition. Anyway...)

For Foss the whole form is dismissed as inconsequential play. “I can see some attraction in becoming a kidult and playing with a doll’s house in a romper room for a couple of hours.” The point is that, at its best, interactive theatre is not just a game, but reaches beyond the rules imposed and into life. It remains real. It remains connected with the real world. Unlike Monopoly, for example, game-based theatre is not about winning, but about how you play. It’s looking at both who you choose to be (as defined by your chosen actions) and also who you are. If it’s play, it’s play at its most serious.

Foss’s conclusion stems from fear that interactive theatre will supplant more traditional forms. (You know, stories, stalls and sweets in the interval.) To deny that interactive work has the value of traditional forms is blind and obnoxious. To do so thus, as Foss does, is moronic:

“Don’t let’s kid ourselves that vogue-ish theatrical interactivity is anything more profound than a chance to grab a slice of live, edgy action in a bland, broadband world. Otherwise, we’ll devalue the traditional playwright with a view on life and downgrade the link between author, actor and audience that makes theatre a unique, lived experience.”

Firstly, the two are in no way mutually exclusive. The truth is that we can want both without contradiction and both can happily co-exist. In fact, they need to feed off one another if each is to improve. Secondly, interactive work is arguably more of a “lived experience” than more traditional theatre.

Finally, and most damagingly of all, the world we live in today is dominated by the mediatised and the virtual. The everyday revolves around these forms. We sit in front of screens and absorb more than ever before. So, what’s wrong with a form of theatre that provides something else, something as necessary as traditional theatre was/is to the societies out of which it emerged. Theatre is made for man as social animal, not vice versa. To quote from Alan Read’s Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement, what’s wrong with thinking of theatre as “a more prosaic evolutionary adaptation for circumstance: to the gradual increase in the appetite for affect in the screen-world of virtuality, the nostalgia for agency and the consequent retolling for action over reaction, the rediscovery of the potential for pleasure and increased states of excitation...” In short, if interactive theatre fulfils a function in today’s flatscreen society, how can you dismiss it in its entirety?