Art as Service: Realizing the Value of Theater through Exit 11’s “The Bacchae”
I am standing in my kitchen, in sweatpants, making a typical 20-something dinner: fried eggs and toast. I crack the egg against the counter with one hand and fumble to make sure none of the shell gets in. Folksy, eerie music pours through my headphones, making the simple act of cooking an egg feel strange. I feel anxious for some reason. Perhaps it’s because I have no idea what I’m about to listen to. Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing? Will my Bluetooth disconnect? The music is simultaneously cheerful and unsettling, beautiful with a dark undertone. It repeats in a cycle, and with each return to the beginning I wonder—will the play start now? How about now?
If I were attending a typical theater performance, I wouldn’t be cooking an egg or standing in my kitchen in sweatpants. I wouldn’t be carrying my food to the same coffee table I eat at every day. My roommate and I would be leafing through programs, chatting, or glancing around at the rest of the audience instead of sitting side-by-side on the couch and staring at our screens with our respective headphones on. I miss the crowd. I miss the clamor of voices and the children running up and down the aisles until the lights dim and their parents hiss, Come back to your seats, now! The theater always reminds me of childhood memories, of my cousins, siblings, and I toting popcorn or drinks in fancy clothes, giddy with nervous excitement. I miss the unsettling swoop into darkness before the curtain is lifted, the sudden hush as the orchestra plays the first trembling note.
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The Bacchae is a 90-minute immersive audio adaptation of Euripides’s classic Greek drama. It was performed, recorded, and delivered by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company: a cross-border performing arts company that investigates global issues through artistic practice. The piece, developed remotely amidst a global pandemic with artists in nine time zones across seven countries, was released to a virtual audience on Oct. 17, 2020. It was directed by Ethan David Lee, adapted by Tzy Jiun Tan, and includes original music from Mary Collins. The piece received a grant from Art Jameel’s Research and Practice Platform and was commissioned by the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi.
The play begins with a monologue by Dionysus, performed by Arianna Gayle Stucki. Dionysus is a genderless god. “I have come,” They begin. Their voice grabs my attention despite the fact that I’m sitting on my couch with every distraction in the world at my fingertips and nobody to shush me or tell me to put away my phone. The monologue is simultaneously performative and intimate. Dionysus’s voice is distorted and mangled with sounds that are both technological and demonic, then lapses back into humanity and sweetness, helping to build the picture of Their godliness. Sometimes, the words of the speech escape, and I find myself simply listening to the sounds and letting them wash over me.
The opening monologue sets the stage for a theme that pervades the entire piece: the layering and twisting together of modernity and history.
In the play, the Greek god Dionysus comes to earth in the form of a woman and rallies a group of local women—the Bacchae—to sing, dance, and drink in honor of Them because They have been scorned by the leader of the city, Pentheus. What unfolds is a story about the power that is available to women under immense patriarchal constraint and the horror that can unfold from such patriarchy. While the story is ancient, there were many points in this play in which I found myself frowning, able to relate, or angry because I’ve met some douchebag like Pentheus myself. I’ve known what it’s like to be called crazy or to have my “feminine” occupations be degraded by men. The play probes and battles against notions of gender, pushing back against the need for gender roles and traditional identities through gender-fluid Dionysus and a scene where the male “hero” cross-dresses. This layer of modernity is furthered by the lightning-quick and effortless anachronisms. A character mentions a Bose speaker and a silent disco. Dionysus’s final curse involves bowl-cuts. These references are effortless because the conversations that exist in the original story are still questions we are asking today.
The Bacchae’s script lead and co-creative director, Tzy Jiun Tan, said, “I didn’t want to repeat the trope where two men [Dionysus and Pentheus] fight each other and drag the women along with them. I figured that if Pentheus was such a masculine, patriarchal character, his rival would be someone opposite. Someone who both attracts and infuriates him. That’s how Dionysus’s gender ambiguity came about. When contemporary elements were layered onto those existing gender dynamics, the play felt so much more present. The same figures and mindsets in the story are still around. Today we have the same ideological splits; autocracy and patriarchy remain just as powerful.”
The drama is interspersed with songs that echo the folksy, eerie music that began the piece, as well as sound design elements that sometimes gory and sometimes lullaby-like with a sense of softness. I find it difficult to sustain my focus throughout the entire play. Sometimes, I slip. Sometimes, I scroll through Instagram or Twitter. I’m sure I can pay attention to two things at once. Then I realize I’ve lost the plot and need to focus again to return to it.
When I asked the director of The Bacchae, Ethan David Lee, about his choice to deliver a radio play with a global cast to a global audience in the midst of a global pandemic, he said:
“Live theater is incredibly powerful because it implicates us in the performance and brings us together to experience the same emotional and cathartic moments. The question became: how can we still create emotional closeness in a socially distant environment? We turned to immersive sound design and music, as well as incredible actors, to illicit a new kind of response from the audience. By premiering The Bacchae live and having a group chat for the audience, we could still experience it together.
This need for community, emotional release, art, and theater is more important than ever in the middle of a pandemic when it’s so easy to feel trapped, anxious, and isolated. It’s also not just about the audience. As artists, we needed this. To feel connected in our isolation, to feel a sense of community and have an outlet to process what was going on around us. What was magical about this experience was that, due to the pandemic, that community could be spread across the entire world. When it’s not safe to leave your house, it doesn’t matter if your team lives next door or on another continent.
The biggest challenge was that we didn’t know what we were doing. This was a completely new way of working for us. I am a stage director by training and I’ve never directed for audio, and I’ve certainly never directed over Zoom before, which I learned requires a different approach.”
To create art is always a kind of service. Artists are in the business of serving our audiences as well as ourselves. We make work that is supposed to delight, rattle, unnerve, and even horrify our audiences because art is about what people need. It feeds us and our communities in a way nothing else can.
Despite our separation, isolation, travel restrictions, emotional exhaustion, and exacerbated mental health challenges, the pandemic has shown us that people will continue to make art, even when it seems impossible. When the pandemic began, especially during lockdown, I noticed a surge of creative activities that could be done alone. On my university campus, people took up knitting, embroidery, and watercolor painting. My co-editor started a socially-distant photography series that eventually ended up in The Independent. People were creating to self-soothe and to return to joy when they couldn’t find joy amongst each other. Many of us will remember the first time we watched a video of someone playing the violin on his or her balcony (I remember being surprised to find myself choked up.). During lockdown, Postscript started a quarantine archive to give people a place to display their art made in isolation, and we noticed that people seemed to be making art for the fun of it. Art became a way of serving ourselves, and it was comforting, but it wasn’t enough to sustain us forever.
Theater is the most collectively-experienced of all the arts. It is rare to watch a play alone, and it requires the greatest number of people to put a piece of theater together. Lockdown put 70% of theater jobs at risk. Independent artists and theater companies were hit hardest by the pandemic, and some theaters were forced to close for the foreseeable future because they couldn’t pay their artists a living wage. Artists like the folks at Exit 11 have found ways to adapt, and they continue to find imaginative ways to surpass today’s restrictions. The pandemic, while heart-wrenching and brutal, has served the arts in some sense because it has forced us to expand our definitions of the collective and see art as something worth saving.
Now that we’ve returned to some sense of normalcy, people are reaching out to each other again: trying to find joy in the collective even when we can’t meet in crowds. While we were making art during lockdown as a way of feeling better in an uncertain world, we’ve realized that we crave art as an experience that can be enjoyed together. We want to go back to concerts, raves, plays, gallery openings, poetry readings, book signings, and movie theaters. We want to sigh together, laugh together,— and make eye contact with someone across a crowded room, raise our eyebrows and tell each other what we think without speaking at all. Art anchors us and reframes our realities. It acts as a lens through which we are able to consider ourselves and the systems and networks we live in. It is not simply something we do for fun—it is a service that the artist does for his or her community and should be valued (and paid) as such.
While I didn’t have a typical theater experience during The Bacchae, the imaginative rendering of the ancient story as an immersive radio-play made me wonder how else the pandemic can push us to rethink our beloved artistic traditions. It is no longer safe to crowd into a dusty theater in our best clothes and stare wide-eyed at a stage. I don’t know how long it will be before I leave a theater, dizzy with the kind of drunken excitement that only comes from experiencing live art. But the pandemic might be an opportunity for art to sneak more wholly into our lives and our more mundane spaces. I can imagine myself dipping my fingers into a radio-play while I’m cooking dinner, or replacing my daily scroll through social media with, oh, I don’t know, an online literary and artistic journal.
The pandemic has shown us the necessity of art for survival. How else would we have filled our time during the lockdown? What keeps us sane and feeds our emotional needs when we can’t see each other in person? Museums, galleries, concerts, movies, and theaters are hubs for human happiness. Like a delivery food driver or primary school teacher, the artist provides an essential service. The Bacchae ends with the words, “That’s how this went / Today.”
Artwork by Garreth Chan