- Venue
- New Life Berlin Festival
- Location
As the late afternoon sun blazes in through the glass frontage of the ‘Assisted Living studio’ and our host, ‘Martha Scissors’ takes her place on set, four audience members and four crew members wriggle uncomfortably in the oppressive heat. In this suffocating still air, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine we’re in a Berlin of the near future; a world where global warming has reached its height and ‘vitamin D-blocker’ pills are widely used to prevent overdose in the sun’s unshielded rays. This is my third time in the 'live studio audience' of the futuristic show Assisted Living and I’m curious to see how the work has developed since the first two episodes on the 3 and 4 June. As Joanna Loveday highlights in her introduction to this project (http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_559), this work 'has the potential to raise diverse and fascinating topics…This could be a collective documentation and presentation of just what our fears, hopes and concerns are for the future', and perhaps also an interesting critique of how we live now…
In the stifling heat we sit and listen to the sickly sweet cooing of our all-American lifestyle show host. To my surprise, four out of the seven features on today’s Assisted Living programme (8 June) are items that I’ve seen before, repeated almost word for word, including the futuristic recipes and home DIY furnishing ideas. In this sense, the exciting opportunity to experiment with this daily TV show format has, in the most part, been passed over. However, the aspects of the piece that have developed since last week – notably those that involve the voluntary ‘crew’ members who have signed up to participate in the project via the New Life Berlin website – are relatively fresh and introduce a new dimension to the show. One of the crew participants is invited onto the set as ‘expert in genetically modified pets’, and an earlier skit about protective sunglasses has now expanded to include ‘swimsuit model’ Carlo, whose playful posing adds a welcome comic lightness as he shows off (paper cut-out) full body swimsuits with daringly skimpy Speedo and bikini prints. It’s clear the participants take pleasure in performing a parody of our current overvalued preoccupation with physical appearance and the lengths to which our exploitation of animals might extend. Hopefully, as the performance develops over the next few days, more of these chances will be taken to showcase ideas about future social standards.
Today’s episode of Assisted Living also includes more nods in the direction of television production: one crew member sporadically holds up an ‘applause’ sign, and each scene is counted in and ‘cut’ by the cameraman. However, the relationship between the crew, Martha Scissors herself, and the studio audience, and in turn the relationship between those present today and the ‘home viewer’, does not seem to be employed to its full potential. We are implicitly invited to take on a role within this parody, but the level of actual engagement with us as audience is minimal, leading to an uncertainty on our part about why we’re really there. Although there is some interaction between crew and audience, Martha Scissors herself doesn’t engage with us ‘off-camera’ between her sketches. We haven’t been eased into our audience role as far as, perhaps, a brief ‘warm-up’ sketch, of the sort used on an actual TV set, might allow. The ambiguity of the audience’s position and lack of informal relationship with our host, along with the almost unbearable heat, result in a less receptive atmosphere. We are uncertain whether we are being addressed as the (unacknowledged) live studio audience of the future, the home viewer of the future, the live audience of Marisa Olson’s performance today, or just a bunch of people who happen to be in the room while this show is rolling. Rather than creating an interesting discussion point about different levels of spectatorship and an interaction between our past and future selves, this uncertainty jars our response and leaves us wondering if we’ve missed something significant.
Whilst waiting for the show to start we were asked to write down a prediction for the future. Predictions from previous performances are still pinned to the wall and they reveal a wealth of imagination (albeit heavily weighted towards the effects of global-warming), ranging from the sombre (“We will all die sooner or later”) to the comical (“Big rock candy BOOM!”). These predictions aren’t referred to later or incorporated into the episode, so whilst the show continues to rely on the audience’s imagination to read detail into what they see (cf. Joanna Loveday) and their ability to place themselves within the work, it doesn’t open the discussion up to them intellectually as it unfolds.
This apparent reluctance to try different ideas for each episode, and the failure to fully engage with the audience makes Assisted Living feel like a rehearsal for something else later on down the line: maybe the final show on Saturday 15th, which is listed in the festival’s printed publicity, or perhaps a showcase for when the project returns to the US. The context and potential of the piece don’t seem to have been fully thought through, from the oversight that Martha Stewart, the subject of the parody, is not as well-known in Europe as she is in America, to the unacknowledged levels of spectatorship at play. Perhaps this lack of preparation and the repetition of material is due to the small audience numbers and an attitude that only a large audience ‘counts’ (one of the participants tells me there have been between 3 and 6 viewers each day since the 30 odd at the opening night). Maybe Olsen chooses not to try a whole new set of scenes for each episode because she is wary of demanding too much of the voluntary Assisted Living crew participants, who are already giving several hours every day to prepare and perform the show. Or perhaps the unfinished nature of the work is an intentional statement, allowing us to focus on how we might see the present as a rehearsal for the future, our current behaviour impacting on how the world will be in 30 years, and therefore take responsibility for our actions today? Whatever the reason for it, the treatment of the show as a ‘warm-up’ rather than as an experiment in its own right denies a full exploration of the implications of the concept and abruptly halts our imaginings of the overheated future Berlin that might exist temporarily beyond the confines of this room, or somewhere in our collective imagination. Assisted Living is heating up, but in contrast to the rest of the planet, perhaps a little too slowly.
Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer and arts facilitator, currently based in Brussels delivering communications for IETM – International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts. Contact [email protected]
This text was developed as part of the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin critical writing initiative http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/
Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and [email protected]
