AT25: An Eye on the Future
Jay Scheib, director, writer and designer, Cambridge, Mass., and New York City
I've developed most of my work outside of traditional theatre institutions, which causes me to see the future as an ongoing, disparate collection of events. My thinking about the future is really very short-term.
In the past 10 years I have tried to assemble my creative process into makeshift seasons. The first season lasted from 2003 to 2007 and was titled "The Flight Out of Naturalism." This season was comprised of about nine productions and focused dually on Naturalism and Cinema Vérité. I was interested in Reality.
My interest is now in Fiction. The upcoming season is called "Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems," and it looks like this: a trilogy of science-fiction performance works (of which part two, Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, will be developed in Salzburg, Austria, then New York); an opera about ice in Antarctica composed by Eric Sanko (premiering in Australia); a documentary performance with Andrew Andrew (on North Korea) and another with Tanya Selvaratnam (on Sri Lanka); a play by Brecht in his hometown state-theatre in Augsburg; an evening of songs about the life and times of Peter Lorre, with the World/Inferno Friendship Society (at the Spoleto Festival, and later at the Vancouver Winter Olympics); a choreographic installation for a solo performer based on All's Well that Ends Well; and Motion Studies, an opera with composer Keeril Makan and Alarm Will Sound (to premiere in New York).
This is roughly my Future, for three years.
This Future relies on relationships with a dozen or so producers and theatres, a host of collaborators, some six or seven countries, and several institutions. In this Future, Organization is the price of Independence. I'm not sure that this is what the future should look like, but I suspect it is not so different from that devised by other independent theatre artists.
In the American theatre we are so Independent. We barely have a center toward which to aspire, or against which to rebel.
But we have a Market, and we have a rich history in need of synthesis. In this Market, however, the discussion of synthesis is usually swallowed by the noise of Negotiations. Many of my friends speak with optimism about the collapse of the Market because in the silence which remains, a discussion is beginning to emerge, and it is getting louder and louder.