- Venue
- Wooloo
- Location
- Germany
The audience are invited to travel 30 years into the near future. On arrival, they become the live studio audience for a daily taping of Marisa Olson’s futuristic parody of Martha Stewarts American TV hit show. Promised an insight in to the lives and practicalities of ‘coping with the health and environmental challenges of living a life prolonged by technology’ – the audience anticipate their own programmed participation as well as that of the crew.
Welcomed into the derelict Berlin shop front by crew in neon t-shirts, we are script read an invitation to take our positions in the ‘future’, by ‘whooping’ through paper chain curtains before the camera roles. I take a front row seat expecting some hefty ‘action’. Little comes. The day time TV formula is rolled out, with humorous futuristic anecdotes in a slick American accent by Marisa, and then cut; my experience in this ‘time machine’ is over.
After a frantic and eye opening ‘googling’ of Martha Stewart, I finally look in to the crystal ball of modern online ‘reality’ and find the bizarre arts, crafts and recipe tropes of US day time TV, and all the parody comes flooding at me like a perfumed paper bouquet with ‘Martha Stewart’ cookie sprinklings on top. For a US audience maybe the gags would have gone down easier I wonder, only having managed a wry smile in the actual performance.
Billed as a look in to the near future, the audience’s imagination more so than the artist’s creativity is most heavily called upon here in this shell like shop front with chairs, two staging lights and a paper cut out backdrop of a TV set. The framework of taping this ‘TV Phenomenon’ in front of a varying live studio audience daily throughout the festival, has the potential to raise diverse and fascinating topics. A collective documentation and presentation of just what our fears, hopes and concerns are for the future perhaps. Contextualised in the New Life Berlin festival, ‘Assisted Living’ strongly fulfils the festival theme of New Modes of Moving and Existing, yet the second show of 14 tapings seemed more reflective of our own personal lack of capacity to keep up with the world in the present day, never mind the future. Seventies outfits and modern recipes we can no longer make highlighted our inefficiencies as humans in even realistically forecasting our near future and paper chains with plastic food left me more with a war time ‘make do and mend’ ethos, than one of a futuristic 2038.
Joanna Loveday
Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing for performance and live art. http://www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com/. Contact: [email protected]
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