Events

Theron Schmidt (King’s College):

‘Theatre at work: The life and times of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’

The theatre is a strange place to seek an escape from alienated labor, given its long association with dynamics of abstraction, representation, and reproduction.  One possible approach was tendered in the task-based procedures of performance in the 1960s, which sought to avoid artifice and restore a sense of reality and authenticity to performed actions as “real work.” But, as the lines between work and non-work become increasingly blurred in the 21st century, a more recent tendency has amplified the theatrical rather than the performative, producing not an escape from commodification but rather what Nicholas Ridout has called the “commodification-squared temporality of the theatrical” (Passionate Amateurs, p. 132).  In this paper, I will consider the ongoing project Life & Times by Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which, rather than trying to create moments of “real life” that would redeem theatre’s falseness, instead ambitiously (and impossibly) sets out to create a theatre that swallows up an entire life – including the life of its audience members – within its capacious artifice.

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