An empty stage. Apart from a table to the side where the stage manager sits, with computer and technical wizardry on another table.
STAGE M. Act one beginners call. This is your act one beginners call.
The words ‘Scene 1: The Opening’ type across the back of the stage. Stage manager looks pleased, gives a small laugh of ‘Yes, I did that’.
Man walks from side of stage with microphone slowly, positions microphone with stand center stage and stands behind it. He looks to Stage manager with a puzzled look.
Pause.
STAGE M. …Oh! LX 2, Go!
A spotlight comes up on man, which he smiles at then leans forward to microphone
MAN. Testing.
Delay – The word comes a moment later through the speakers. Pause.
MAN. Testing.
The word arrives late, again.
Stage manager looks confused then plays with a couple of cables under desk before sitting back up and holding thumb up.
MAN. Testing.
The word comes at the right time.
MAN. Testing, testing. One, Two, Three.
He looks pleased, takes a moment, and then turns to Stage manager who presses a button.
That’s life by Frank Sinatra begins to play. As the man sings, the stage is rushed by 4 or so people setting up two live feed cameras, connecting to two televisions at either side of the stage, a projector at the very back with a large projection screen in front for it to project onto, just behind the man. The audience sees everything being made before their eyes. The company finishes setting up the stage and leave as the song finishes.
Bobcat Goldthwait returns with his friend Robin Williams and an amazingly sad story from a very dark carnival. Then, Robin and Bobcat leave, and it’s kind of hard to follow them, so Mayor Harmon plays D&D and talks to a girl about sexism or something.
A Dream You’re Having (Interlude) – RuPaul, Realness (2015)
“If this is a dream, does that make it any less real?”
So the idea of what is real and what isn’t real is something that transcends and has fascinated the human psyche, no denying, and it’s this idea of what is real and what isn’t that surrounds the idea of ‘Theatre’ too. Realness and non-realness is something that becomes even more interesting when multimedia is in play. For example, using a live feed of a live human body that is acting. You’re watching a person with a fake persona being filmed, thus creating a fake image of a person with a fake persona.
And that’s just theatre… How fake are we in our own lives?
I turn to the supermodel of the world, RuPaul to help show some light on this. RuPaul is a drag queen, which already plays with the idea of fake gender identity and the idea of fake personas. Ironically, when drag queens describe their ‘look’ they describe it as ‘realness’. When a queen says “I’m serving realness”, what they mean is that they are wearing an outfit and makeup that makes them look like an actual woman. I find that this can be the same with every single person, though. Makeup, clothes, hairstyles… We all have our own version of ‘drag’ as it were. As RuPaul said herself; “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag”.
This train of thought only came over because I just bought her new album Realness, which again, ironically, uses more autotune and remixing than she has ever used before.
This idea of what is real and what is not is something very interesting to me and I’d love to use it as the premise of a performance. Gender, identity, honesty, stories, mediated image, cat-fishing… the list goes on. I’d just love it, especially in this class. So I thought I better just bring this up for anyone who doesn’t look at the picture and the 4 paragraphs and go ‘Meh’. Congrats if you read this.
Now, to play me out, I leave you with the queen herself…
“The implications of [Saban censuring and forcing the removal of the POWER/RANGERS short from Vimeo and YouTube] I think are obvious. But what are we really losing by capitulating? The scarier thing is the implication of story in and of itself. Story is the most fundamental building block of human civilization. It’s the historical scaffolding we build our moral codes on, and it ultimately synthesizes into mythology, religion, politics. For most of ancient humanity story was a malleable art form that changed due to the error proneness of verbal communication. Only in the modern age of the printed word do we expect perfectly influctuate narratives.
“This gets even scarier when you realize every story being told to you is copyrighted and owned by someone. And especially when it comes to the young, their stories are owned by corporations. Comic books, movies, television, whatever, the youth is only being told stories by businessmen. So when you combine this idea that the vast majority of morality tales told to young people are controlled by corporations with a legal restriction that these tales cannot be personally interacted with, there’s some pretty absurd results. Like if this were true, it would now easier to to change and start a new religion than tell an alternate story about Power Rangers. You literally have more control over Jesus than Tommy Oliver.
“Look, I make commercials for a living, so I know the shakedown. You may not agree with what we did with the Power Rangers, but you must feel more powerful as a human being if you live in a society that lets artists critique the imagery that dominates your lives. Whether it’s Banksy fucking with Ronald McDonald, Warhol with Campbell’s [soup], or us with Power Rangers, you want to let artists interact, test, and kick the tires being sold to you.
“Most people when they do projects always say they’re fans, but 90% are lying just to please the fans. I was already shaving in 1993 when Power Rangers came out. It was aimed at 12-year-olds. I would have been weird as hell if I was going into clubs raving about a reappropriated Sentai show for kids. I would have never gotten laid (which I didn’t anyway so what did it matter). It was an interesting experiment to play with reboot culture and tone control. When I finally made it I was fully invested in the characters and the property but I didn’t come into it to please a fan base, per se, but to experiment with pop culture.”
Update: Based on feedback from the Facebook group, here’s some additional context surrounding the short being removed from Vimeo and YouTube, as well as some insight on the rationale behind the making of the short by producer Adi Shankar, who at one point muses on the unsettling implication of the Power Rangers essentially acting as child-soldiers.
