How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Zoom Theater
The great poet Wendell Berry urged us to avoid screens, and live a 3-dimensional life. But in this new reality, a 3-dimensional life must be re-imagined to include a screen.
I am an anti-technology snob. Books are better. Live performance is more worthy. As a lifelong theater artist, I am excellent at justifying the ridiculous hours, under-compensation and bizarre funding streams (silent auctions of dog massages to fund paying people a living wage?!), and incredible imbalance of effort to impact. Except for a few periods of extreme burnout and existential crisis, I believe in what we do. Sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a room with other people watching other people generates a fundamentally different relationship to story, character, and emotional engagement than being along on the couch with your laptop. Holding a script rather than a cell phone generates a fundamentally different relationship to the words, your memory, your body, and the others in the room.
I've never been a fan of videotaping performance. Watching recorded performances – especially at the youth, community, and regional theater level – always seems to minimize the triumph of the live experience.
I hate skyping in designers to production meetings. I lose the collaborative feel of the table, and I feel out of control of the conversation with disembodied voices. My timing feels off online, like I'm conducting an orchestra where half the musicians hear the beat half a beat late.
I'm a private and solitary person with a huge need to connect and perform, who craves collaboration and independent work in equal measure, half introvert and half extrovert, powerfully protective of my personal space and hungry for hugs. Directing theater is resistance training for those muscles that, if left to themselves, would happily read books and go for solo walks. To force myself into uncomfortable chairs, windowless rehearsal rooms, through 10 out of 12s and 3 hours of first stumble throughs – this is part of why theater works for me. Directing theater is a necessary balancing act for my health and well-being, a way for me to balance my engagement in the world.
So imagine my surprise when, in response to social distancing protocols, I moved my youth production of King Lear from the rehearsal hall to Zoom....and loved it.
I want to bring people together when it would be so easy to let them drift apart.
I love the way it makes me feel triumphant rather than defeated. Because I value access. Because I want to be the person that creates something in the face of the impossible. Because I want to bring people together when it would be so easy to let them drift apart. Because I love language and any opportunity to revel in it brings me joy.
I love that the same delight I take in my students' idiosyncrasies in person comes through online, that a generation raised on video chats is somehow oddly more at ease displaying vulnerability on camera. I am fascinated in the way this student leans in and that leans away, how some over-exaggerate expression and some default to a mask of screen glaze.
I don't like thinking about what I look like during rehearsals, and if I'm in a dance studio the first thing I'll do is cover up the mirrors. I've always hated video calls, because I can see myself and there's always this disconnect between how I feel I look and what I see. But it turns out that when I'm directing on Zoom, I don't mind seeing myself, because I'm in character. Directing on Zoom is akin to being an actor in the dressing room – gazing at yourself in hair and makeup and finding something elevated, something beautiful, something ready to express and connect. Because of course, to connect deeply with others, you first need to connect to yourself.
I'm so grateful my students' needs have pulled me, kicking and screaming, into a place where I can zoom forward.
I don't know where my current project is headed. We may have a chance to perform live in a month; we may none of us be gathering together for many months to come. I look forward to working with my students to explore what collaboration looks and feels like, and what elements of performance will serve them in this new medium.
The great poet Wendell Berry urged us to avoid screens, and live a 3-dimensional life. But in this new reality, a 3-dimensional life must be re-imagined to include a screen. Any teacher knows that it's the students who teach you in equal measure - I'm so grateful my students' needs have pulled me, kicking and screaming, into a place where I can zoom forward.