BY MARK BOSCH
In the Moment: A Collection of Interactive Improvisations
Hosted by Ryan Martin as part of Sydney Fringe Festival
Red Rattler Theatre, 21 September.
I feel a bit special. I enter Marrickville’s Red Rattler Theatre 10 minutes before the Sydney Fringe Festival show is due to start, and – during this peaceful moment – I am the only audience member present.
The performers are quietly joking around, messing with the tech, working on logistics. I drolly introduce myself as ‘the reviewer’. Frankly, it feels like a lie: I’m nothing more than a friendly interloper. I sit down and share a laugh with the performers over some-or-other joke or technological mishap. In any other space, I might be tempted to entertain those adversarial feelings so archetypal to the ill-tempered critic, furiously scribbling in the notebook. But instead, I’m put totally at ease by the room’s relaxed atmosphere.
I sit and patiently await the show to come. Soon enough, other audience members begin to join me, too.
In the Moment is known for its intimate, high-concept experiments in audience participation. Collapsing the boundary separating performer and spectator is very much the MO for all-rounder (guitarist, improviser, composer, and in this case MC) Ryan Martin, whose Extemporisation for Audience and Soloist relies entirely on suggestions of musical material from the audience. I suppose it’s a blessing in disguise that the audience size is intimate, because it means we all can have our say. In the moment, however, I feel a bit put on the spot, and all I can think to say to him is ‘play something funky’.
I could have been so much crueller. But at no point am I or anybody else seduced by the Machiavellian thrill of suggesting something ridiculous to lead the performers astray. Audience contributions are always constructive, building positively off others’ suggestions. Miracle of the commons.
Above: The audience progressively creates this ruleset for a group improvisation in Digital Monkeys.
Martin’s solo improvisation is the least conceptual of the four sets. The night’s opener, Word Games by Jennifer Brady, invites the audience to contribute freely associated words to which Brady responds, and which are spoken back through a looping station. I offer the words ‘molecular’ and ‘multiplicity’, but the snowball effect of the looping station means that they are quickly lost in a hypnotic hodgepodge of attempts at meaning-making. This makes me think about how too many words results in confusion and, ultimately, the cancellation of meaning. I’d rather write — let alone read — a pamphlet than a philosophical treatise! (At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I do feel this is something more smarty-pants scholars should admit.)
At the opposite end of the program was Digital Monkeys, a group improvisation powered entirely by a ruleset progressively added to (line-by-line) by the audience. My passing concerns about the passivity of the audience in Julian Day’s Game On back in July are well-answered here. Cast a glance (image above) at the ruleset we put together throughout the course of the improvisation. Note that the presence of spoken word artist Lewis-Alan Trathen onstage means that the rules we write are often more narrative than musical. Regardless, the marriage of speech and sound is extraordinarily coherent given the contingencies involved.
Before Digital Monkeys, though, is the tremendously fun, completely convincing Narrative Generator (for Living Machine), in which genre suggestions are taken to craft a narrative; the course of which can then be altered by holding up cue cards on which are written words like ‘psychosis’, ‘showdown’, and ‘slow motion’. Three silken stories are woven by two-time Australian Poetry Slam state finalist Trathen, who is backed by Martin, flautist Grace Leung, and guitarist Michael Brady in an utterly compelling display of multidisciplinary magic.
The first story is a steampunk romance featuring the characters of Sarah and Marie (Leung offers a leitmotif for the latter, which is a gorgeous touch). The second, a homoerotic western for androids. The third, a pulpy horror-romance which features the characters transforming into grisly, quasi-feline beasts. To relate these stories any further would be to betray their ephemerality. They were never meant to be committed to the page.
That’s the most beautiful thing about In the Moment, I think. It is just that: a moment, shared among a very lucky few. Transient; lost now. But thoroughly memorable for its humour, its hazy soundworld, and, most of all, its high-concept experiments in audience participation, all four of which are hugely valuable.
Images by Mark Bosch, captured with permission from the artists. Photo: Ryan Martin, Lewis-Alan Trathen, Grace Leung and Michael Brady perform Narrative Generator
