Ultimate Theatre

ULTIMATE THEATRE

We fight for life when we love someone. We give up when we have no one to love.

Do we have to wait until we are in a life or death situation before we tell people we love them, that we think they are brilliant, that we think they are annoying, to shut up, that you wished you could have been closer, that you felt they didn't need you, that you wished they hadn't left you, that you are grateful for everything...? What does it take to make that happen every day?

Tick Tock by Len Chi

Roller coasters and ghost tours are theatrical means of creating adrenaline and people either love them or hate them. The best piece of theatre I have ever seen was when I was taken by surprise: my siblings and I were visiting Port a Ventura in Spain and we queued for a roller coaster which we had been on the previous day. This time however the queue line was leading somewhere else. We were detoured away from the entrance to the ride and taken on a ghost tour instead. We were led through some huts and haunted houses by an actress who taunted us and let us heckle her. It was terrifying and I remember grabbing my siblings, wondering if this was supposed to happen, and at the same time laughing a lot. At the end we came out through a door to the original roller coaster platform!

The boys in Lord of the Flies had to fight for their lives for a year on a desert island and as a result some died, natural born leaders emerged etc. This idea was made into a successful reality TV show called Shipwrecked. The shows popularity comes from the audiences interest in what happens to people and their relationships in situations that test them. Shipwrecked is such a brilliant example of a theatre that shows real human beings. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty tried to communicate to an audience's inner unconscious without dialogue, by affecting its audience emotionally and physically (although it was only achievable to an extent) by exposing them to the cruelties of life. Shipwrecked if tweaked to Artaud’s theatre of Cruelty could have brought his vision to life.

You only need to look at what happened in USA with the two towers to see how disasters bring people together. Why? Because suddenly what is happening outside of our world can potentially affect what is inside of it. I talked to my tutor Kate Nelson about capitalism and I asked if she thought we’d ever stop caring about money. She said global warming might become a catalyst for us to all start doing things without regard for our wealthy gain. Only when it begins to affect our own small worlds will we sit up and take notice? Is there anything else as detrimental as global warming which threatens mankind?

What else threatens us on a smaller scale which I can tap into - death? What is most likely to kill us these days and which one of these is most likely in Scotland?

Survival Stories

I continued my thoughts about portraying real live human behaviour through looking at real live survival stories:

Anne Frank

Joe Simpson in Touching the Void

Wenselao Moguel who was shot 8 times

1872 flight 571 crashed and the college rugby team had to eat their dead.

The surfer girl who survived a shark attack.

 

Aron Ralston cuts his own arm off. Now made into a

feature film called 127 Hours by Danny Boyle.


127 Hours 10/1/11 by Danny Boyle

“Its Cast Away meets Saw” (Nathan 2010). Nathan, Ian. 2010. 127 Hours [magazine] Empire Dec 2010.

Trailer - 127 Hours (2010)
 

127 Hours is a real life story about a man who got his arm trapped by a boulder in the middle of a desert for 127 hours before finally cutting his own arm off to get free. What propels him eventually to do this is a mixture of no other options as well as a vision he had where he sees his unborn son.

Soundtrack - Dido 'If I Rise' played at the end when he cuts his arm off

“He went in there broken and came out whole” says Boyle on his Film.

“Boyle adores Touching the Void, Kevin MacDonald’s searing documentary of Mountain Climbing Tragedy and Survival” (Nathan 2010).

“We travelled into the canyon with him, and only leave it through his unpeeling imagination...He thinks, he regrets, he dreams, he hallucinates. With death round the bend he peers into an impossible future. The film follows what Boyle terms “his evolving psychology”” (Nathan 2010).

“Franco went out and tried to get into Ralston’s head by going on solo hikes, rock climbing, lost weight, read the book and spent time talking with the real deal” (Nathan 2010).

“Film Making depicting filmmaking as survival. Aron was almost destroyed by nature, he was saved by society. Boyle thinks he discovered he wasn’t this lone star, he was part of the big picture, part of a family” (Nathan 2010).

Cast Away

Cast Away is not a real life story but it is a brilliant movie showing what can happen to a person stranded on a desert island.

 I tried to hang myself and I couldn’t even do that right. I had no power over anything. Then a warm feeling came over me and I knew all I had to do was to keep breathing and stay alive. So that’s what I did and all my logic told me I’d never see this place again. But that logic was proved all wrong when the tide came in one day and gave me a sail, and here I am talking to you, I have ice in my glass and I’ve lost her all over again. So I guess I’ve got to keep breathing, keep on living. Because you never know what the tide will bring in (2000).

Time:

The modern world in the film is illustrated through the concept of time shown through watches and travel, however on the island the watch soon runs out of battery.

The protagonist, Chuck, is a time-obsessed systems analyst, who travels worldwide resolving productivity problems at FedEx depots. At the beginning of the film Chuck is seen screaming at one of his teams in Bulgaria through a translator. Chuck is angry that it took 84 hours to send an egg timer with FedEx to Bulgaria from the USA.

His girlfriend gives him her grandfather's pocket watch with her photograph inside The fact that the watch is an heirloom contrasts with the commercial society he is about to leave behind and it is this object he has with him when he is cast away. He tells her that he will leave it on Memphis time.

After four years we see he has been keeping track of time by writing down the months on the wall of his cave. When he begins to build his raft he says to Wilson “we don’t have much time. Let’s not commit the sin of forgetting time” as he makes the decision to set sail in March when the tides are less fierce

Nature:

Nature is depicted furiously throughout the film as a deciding factor on what happens to Chuck. Stormy weather crashes his plane and the waters stop him from leaving on his raft. On his first escape attempt, Chuck runs towards a flashing light he sees in the distance and stabs himself on some coral, preventing him from going any further. In one of the first shots of him on the island we see the cliff peak he will inevitably try to kill himself from in the background. And at night he watches as the waves crash towards the island and eventually wash away his first attempts at escape.

In the day time the island and weather is always calm and beautiful and even after the storm that wrecks his raft out in the middle of the ocean the day is calm and bright as he loses his companion Wilson to the sea.

Company:

When Chuck first lands on the island he is shipwrecked alongside a bunch of FedEx parcels. In one of the parcels is a football which comes with the note “The most amazing thing in this world is life itself” to which he disregards as he hits the ball meaninglessly to the side. Very quickly he draws a face on the front of the ball and it becomes his only friend for the next four years. His companion keeps him sane. Unfortunately when Chuck decides it's time to take his chances on the raft, Wilson falls into the ocean and floats away. 


Resolution

When Chuck returns home he finds that the love of his life has mourned Chucks passing and moved one. Now newly married and with children her world is turned upside down when Chuck returns. For him she is what kept his hope alive on the island and what ultimately saved him. They part ways and Chuck is left with an open road ahead of him.

Pina Bausch 

Pina Bausch’s real theatre: In 1985 when a woman skipped around a stage fifty times, repeating the phrase ‘I am tired’ until her body was overcome with exhaustion.

“Bausch demonstrates that nature is an abandoned object of hopeless yearning...” (McMullen).

The effect Ultimate Theatre has

“We talk as if the real and the playful were separate. But we know that isn’t true. After Psycho the shower is not the same place…”

 “In all of these games there was perhaps one thing in common - the sense of the game as a secretive intervention in everyday life…Those games were rewriting the everyday. Quite simply changing the world by any means necessary.” Like on a city walk ghost tour. Our guide reminded us that we wanted something scary, something tragic to happen, but she asked us to think about how we would feel if it actually did.