As is so often the case at TBA, I had no idea what to expect from this performance, and I was a little put off initially by the frenetic pace of the introduction. Blue-suited actors moving us quickly through the shiny space with salesperson banter and spiced cantaloupe were distracting and frankly made me a little nervous that the next hour would be more irritating than provocative. I found myself drawn in, however, once we began on our on-the-fly urban planning episodes, arranging our pieces on a board, debating (briefly) the appropriate whereabouts of the library, farmer’s market, and free clinic.
What interested me the most was the responses of the group I was in, the uniformity of our views and our values. It would not be especially difficult to plan a city with these other audience members; I imagine we could come to consensus fairly quickly, but I’m not sure the city would be entirely livable, even for us, and probably not for all those people who are not us, people who would not choose to put the strip mall next to the chemical waste disposal site, for instance. We’re happy to hide the means of production, uninterested in business parks and factories. It was great fun to vote by remote and declare as a group of fifty that we would prefer to live by a prison than a Wal-Mart, but also slightly troubling. It would be fascinating to see this show outside of TBA, drawing a different crowd in some other context.
What I came out of this show very aware of is that I belong to a class whose idealism grows out of always having had enough. The question was posed, and posed well I think, how our wants and our needs differ, and how (or whether) we can meet everyone’s needs if we meet some people’s wants. The inference was that we couldn’t. That in order to meet the needs of all, we must make the ethical decision to curb our wants, or to change them.
My group, when offered the ability to kick out a few pieces of our city, chose to get rid of the luxury high-rises, but nobody even mentioned the single-family homes. It occurs to me now that since one of the important points had to do with limited space, high-rises, luxury or otherwise, probably make better sense… yet we the voters were mostly those of the cute-bungalow-owning class. There was an awareness of this in the room, of course, brought by the viewers and also the actors, especially in a discussion performed on a tightrope about how to choose the right home to buy. The conversation was a familiar one to me. I am not yet ready to consider even the possibility of living in a community that has been planned, a neighborhood of condos like the one we were in, or an idealized version somewhere else, as long as that cute bungalow is a possibility. Few of us are, I suspect, and what happened during the performance was that for the first time the issues surrounding this issue felt personal to me, something I couldn’t avoid just because I live in quite a small city with a lot of wilderness nearby.
I’ve picked up the term “provocateur” from pedagogy, referring to a person whose job it is to create invitations for children to learn by building an environment and experience that inspires open-ended thought. TBA does that on a regular basis, and this performance did it well, posing a few questions that demanded that others (though which ones?) be asked, by involving the “audience” in very real ways, with discussion, through writing, and through our mildly uncomfortable physical experience as we rushed through the space. I experienced the performance as thought-provoking more than aesthetic, nearly forgetting that it was “art”. I’m intrigued by that, because it was certainly well-executed art; if it weren’t, these issues which I often pay little attention to would not have become so real for me.
Certainly we must find a way to reshape our wants. And a sense of home, a sense of place, is a need, I believe. The trick is how to create homes, communities, cities, with their sense of individuality and creativity intact which are also well-planned. It is when large groups of the educated middle-class do not have their more modest desires met that creative solutions to problems begin to emerge. Perhaps art is exactly the right forum for these questions–how to create a world in which form, content, and soul resonate with one another and with the individual as well.
Taya Noland
