Regular readers of Noises off will know that a cloud of despair has hung over the theatre blogs in the last few weeks. Whether it's disillusionment with the current system of theatre training or anxiety about the financial state of the industry, no one seems very happy at the moment.
So it's nice to start this week's roundup on a more upbeat note. According to Rebecca Coleman at the Art of the Business blog, the International Theatre Institute's World Theatre Day is coming up on 27 March. Coleman has teamed up with the Next Stage blog to throw a World Theatre Day party. "Everyone's invited," she exclaims. To kick it off, they have created a new blog for people to exchange ideas about how to mark the day.
This is all great in theory, but there does seem to be something paradoxical about the idea of a World Theatre Day. After all, it is true that great art should be able to reach across cultural and geographical divides. But theatre, as a live and communal event, is something that cannot easily be separated from the location in which it takes place. As such, it is surely impossible to create any kind of meaningful theatrical experience which can be shared by people around the world. But maybe we should just wait until 27 March and see what happens.
Chloe Veltman at Lies Like Truth is also staying upbeat. She responds to an article suggesting that ongoing improvements in CGI technology for films could one day make the need for "real" screen actors obsolete. If this were ever to happen, says Veltman, the outcome for theatre could be extremely positive: "Bored of sitting in front of zombies made of bits and bytes, audiences might start flocking to see plays, musicals, comedy shows and operas. Wow. Imagine that. The mind boggles."
Awards season is in full swing. We recently had the Whatsonstage.com awards and before long there will be the Oliviers. Now you might think that this would be another reason for cheeriness, but the blogosphere still doesn't seem terribly happy. David Jays at Performance Monkey is questioning the division of acting awards along gender lines. Who says men and women can't compete on an equal footing? "Aren't Judi Dench and Ian McKellen," he asks, "engaged in a similar process on stage and in rehearsal?" In one sense, he is absolutely right. But the trouble with this, as one Everycritic points out in the comments, is that there are still simply far more parts available for men than women on stage and on screen: "If we disbanded the two categories, we'd occasionally have female winners but male winners would be far more common."
Elsewhere, Isaac Butler at Parabasis explores whether artists should be more honest in their criticism of each other's work. He cites one example of a workshop he took part in with a number of other directors where "I saw plenty of bad work and heard a lot of absolute horse shit thrown around in our group discussions … In fact, the visiting artists who worked with us routinely said we were too nice to each other."
Tom Loughlin at the Poor Player picks up on this point, and suggests that one reason why people are unwilling to be genuinely critically engaged might come down "in some measure to the fact that we, as teachers, do not teach our students very well about how to be constructive critics, and this lack of skill simply carries over into the professional arena".
Perhaps if artists can learn to say more than "Darling, you were marvelous!" to each other after a show, then they will end up producing much better work in the future.
