Sunday, December 13, 2015

INTERESITNG 2015 OFFENDING THE AUDIEENCE PERFORMANCES

Dear Micheal,
Yes,
I did !

If you wanna translate, some more from french : 
You'll find some more infos in english on th eFTA site where I presented it in french in 2013.

My version is without actors.
The text is said by synthesis speeches.
It's not to heavy to tour !
And it works really well.
I do film the audience and make a time "trick" that reveal the score so much...
I was told many times that it seems like if the play was written not a long time ago to be done like that, some people even told me that it was some kind of definitive version like if the play took 50 years to find it's final destination.
I'm not sure about that but it was always surely nice to hear.

I know the play will be 50 years old soon.
I made a french and english version. 
I'd love to tour it more and maybe make a german version but I wonder who could present that in germany or austria for 50th...

The company that produce it paid for your rights through Davis Britta.

I hope you're all good !

Christian

https://nowtoronto.com/stage/summerworks-review-offending-the-audience/




============================================



Playwright, Director and Artist Misha Neininger
Misha als Mensch

In a fierce new adaptation that takes Handke's experiments into the 21st century, Misha Neininger and John Berendzenorchestrate a complex musical, visual and conceptual score out of the original bare-bones text: sonically, rhythmic sung- spoken textual textures interact with an electronic soundscape; surveillance technology confronts the audience fumbling with messy feedback loops in the dark.


In 1965, Peter Handke began writing the seminal work of anti-theatre, Offending the Audience: a stripped-down, genre-defying and hilarious verbal happening that shook the establishment of the day. 50 years later, Portland performance group Liminalcreates an original multidisciplinary adaptation, reworking Handke's avant-garde classic for the modern age of pan-surveillance and fractured media self-reflections.
The play will be performed in German and English. There may or may not be subtitles. The ghosts of Edward Snowden, Joseph Beuys and Samuel Beckett may perform acts of defiance and nude interpretive dances. WARNING: They really, really dance.
Will you be offended? Answers Handke, "You don't have to feel offended. You were warned in advance."
Offending is one way to relate, adds Berendzen. "No one is offended by anything in the theatre anymore. Either way that's not the point. We want to democratize the space between us and the audience, a level playing field. We want you to feel involved."  
Misha Neininger came all the way from Berlin to find new audiences: “There is a real buzz from swarms of cyborg insects in the Northwest. People are getting pissed off. I watched people swatting drones with flip-flops. But who knows, the audience in Portland may just turn out to be a dismal failure. For the audience to be a smashing success, it needs to balance the fear of surveillance with the desire to be seen.”
In the end you may ask yourself: How do you look back at whoever is looking atyou
Written and directed by Misha Neininger and John Berendzen
Media and surveillance art by Misha Neininger
Sound design and music direction by John Berendzen 
Electronic smart costumes by Jenny Ampersand
Performed by Misha Neininger and John Berendzen with returning founding member Amanda Boekelheide and Starr Ahrens, Evan Corcoran, Carla Grantand Alex Reagan.  
“Sie werden kein Schauspiel sehen.
Ihre Schaulust wird nicht befriedigt werden.”
About Peter Handke
Best known for his screenwriting collaborations with Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Wrong Move), Austrian Peter Handke was a major voice among the anti-theatre experiments of the latter 20th century, along with Stein, Beckett, Fassbinder, Foreman, and other theatrical subversives. Simultaneously linguistic clown and ontological terrorist, he eviscerates language itself in order to expose its comic failings, giddily exploding false theatricalities in order to reveal beneath the pure presence of the raw, exhilarating and liberating liveness of the performance event. This series marks Liminal's third plunge into the depths of Handke, following 1998'sHandke Salmagundi (an amalgam of early writings) and The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other (2000), a completely silent play.
About Liminal
Liminal is a nonprofit Portland-based network of theatre, performing, and media artists. Liminal is known both for its uniquely staged plays (as in 2013's OUR TOWN), and also for its large-scale live walk-through performance installations (as in 2012's Liminal presents Gertrude Stein). Liminal was founded in Portland in 1997 and has produced nineteen original full-scale projectsLiminal has received numerous Portland Critics Circle (Drammy) awards, including Best Original Production (2000, 2003, and 2005); Best Choreography (2003); Best Sound Design and Best Music Direction (2000 and 2003).


Offending the Audience Submitted by Michael Neininger on October 22, 2015 - 2:13pm Playwright, Director and Artist Misha Neininger Misha als Mensch In a fierce new adaptation that takes Handke's experiments into the 21st century, Misha Neininger and John Berendzen orchestrate a complex musical, visual and conceptual score out of the original bare-bones text: sonically, rhythmic sung- spoken textual textures interact with an electronic soundscape; surveillance technology confronts the audience fumbling with messy feedback loops in the dark. In 1965, Peter Handke began writing the seminal work of anti-theatre, Offending the Audience: a stripped-down, genre-defying and hilarious verbal happening that shook the establishment of the day. 50 years later, Portland performance group Liminal creates an original multidisciplinary adaptation, reworking Handke's avant-garde classic for the modern age of pan-surveillance and fractured media self-reflections. The play will be performed in German & English.

===========================
Offending the Audience
Fictitious Theatre Company, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., through Oct. 11, 563-4330
Be warned: I am about to give away the one and only surprise of the evening, which occurs the second the play begins.
The Austrian playwright Peter Handke's 1966 playOffending the Audience isn't a play. The actors do not play characters. The stage does not represent some other place. The time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time. Time passes as it passes in real life for the audience. There is no illusion. There is no play.
How do we know this? The actors tell us. When the curtain parts, four actors come out, the house lights come up, the actors stare at us and they tell us that this is not a play, that the stage does not represent some other place, that the time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time, that time passes as it passes in real life for the audience, that there is no illusion, that there is no play.
Handke's play (or whatever it is) is an hour-long polemical lecture about the theater, taking place in a theater, that tries to be as unlike theater as it possibly can be. We are asked to abandon every expectation, to be the subject of the actors' gaze the way that they are usually the subject of ours. There is nothing offensive in what is represented on the stage; the offense of the title is that nothing at all is represented.
To her credit, director Rosemary L'Erario keeps her four actors moving around, creating more variety and visual interest than Handke probably wanted. And the four actors (Fleur Frascella, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, Doug Thomas and Neil Wax) deliver their hour-long polemical lecture with charm and elan - again, perhaps more than Handke wanted.
If you have spent a lot of your time thinking a lot about the theater, you will find the subject of this lecture quite fascinating. I must confess that I've always wanted to see this play. It lacks the sheer theatrical brilliance of some of Handke's other experimental plays of the '60s: it's not a clown show about language and identity like Kaspar, or a game about theatrical meaning like The Ride Across Lake Constance. But I always imagined that the piece would be sustained by the sheer brilliance of its polemic.
Well, now I've seen it. I'm glad I have. And I was wrong.
-Cary M. Mazer
======================

Offending the Audience

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Offending the Audience is a play byAustrian writer Peter Handke. It is sometimes called an "anti-play" because of its renouncements of theatricality. It was originally published in German under the title Publikumsbeschimpfung (which better translates as "Insulting the Audience"[1]) in 1966. It premiered in June 1966 at the Theatre am Turm in Frankfurt, Germany as part of the "Experimental Theatre Week." The play was first produced in London in 1970 at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho by the Interaction Arts Cooperative's TOC (The Other Company) directed by the Israeli writer and theatre director, Naftali Yavin, the cast included Andrew Norton, Judy Monahan and Jan Chappell.

Contextual information[edit source | edit]

In a 1970 interview Handke said that the idea behind his plays was "making people aware of the world of the theatre--not of the outside world." He goes on to say that specifically in the case of Offending the Audience, his "point was to use words to encircle the audience so they'd want to free themselves by heckling; they might feel naked and get involved." He further goes on to explain his intentions:
The idea was to have the spectators in the orchestra thrown back upon themselves. What mattered to me was making them feel like going to the theatre more, making them see all plays more consciously and with a different consciousness. My theatrical plan is to have the audience always look upon my play as a means of testing other plays. I first intended to write an essay, a pamphlet, against the theatre, but then I realized that a paperback isn't an effective way to publish an anti-theatre statement. And so the outcome was, paradoxically, doing something onstage against the stage, using the theatre to protest against the theatre of the moment--I don't mean theatre as such, the Absolute, I mean theatre as a historical phenomenon, as it is to this day.[2]

Plot synopsis[edit source | edit]

In Offending the Audience there is no plot. No story is being told at all. Instead, the audience is made aware that what they see is not a representation of anything else, but is in fact quite literal. The actors continuously repeat the point that this is not a play, and that nothing theatrical will happen.
The first lines of the performance are "You are welcome. This piece is a prologue."[3] A prologue, that is, to all future theatrical performances.

Plot analysis[edit source | edit]

Handke used this rejection of traditional play structure to reinforce his anti-theatre intention. His point was to get the audience to consider what exactly theatre does, in particular, the role of language in the theatre.

Character guide[edit source | edit]

The only cast the play calls for are 'Four Speakers'. However, this has been performed with a cast of upwards of twenty actors.[4]Rather than placing the focus on themselves, the actors instead turn the audience into the main point of interest by making them aware of how they are breathing, sitting, thinking, etc. They draw attention to what they are wearing and how they have gone through the motions of "going to the theatre."

Character analysis[edit source | edit]

Four Speakers, a mixed group of men and women. The four characters in this play do not assumes a “role” in any traditional sense. The speakers remain merely anonymous actors who address the audience in the author’s words. They are also largely indistinguishable from one another and even from the members of the audience. Their clothing is ordinary casual dress. It is expected that the men, in both the audience and on stage, will be wearing dark jackets and white shirts with plain ties. Women are expected to be dressed in subdued colors. During their time onstage, the four speakers address the audience directly without singling out any specific individuals. They speak in a bland litany, free of emotion, vocal inflection, or any significant gestures. Nor are any specific lines assigned to the individual speakers. The characters merely pick up and leave off the discourse in a random order, speaking for varying lengths of time. Frequently, and without explanation, they contradict themselves and one another. In doing so, however, they give no indication of their own feelings about what they are saying beyond a general statement to the audience that their opinions may (or may not) be the same as those of the author. At the end of the performance, the four speakers react to the audience in exactly the same manner regardless of whether the audience’s response to their work has been favorable or unfavorable.
Since there are no actual characters, the actors' job is merely to recite the lines to the audience. The more objective they are, the closer they are to Handke's intention of isolating the actors from the audience in order to emphasize the language. Handke listed some "Rules for the actors" at the beginning of the script including such things as watching "the behaviour of tramps and idlers as they amble on the street and play the machines in the penny arcades."[5]

Genre[edit source | edit]

It is difficult to classify such a non-play play into a specific genre. In some waysOffending the Audience could be considered a dark comedy since it utilizes irony so heavily. However, Handke's intention was for it to be unclassifiable as anti-genre and anti-form.

Style[edit source | edit]

Offending the Audience falls under the style of epic theater as established by dramatist Bertolt Brecht. A major characteristic of epic theater is alienation, which is used to prevent the audience from becoming emotionally involved and distracted from the underlying issue of the play. In this particular case, the fact that the actors are not pretending to be other characters and are instead speaking straightforwardly to the audience is an alienation effect. Some other aspects of epic theater are minimal staging, anti-illusionment, and telling what is to come—all of which are seen in Offending the Audience.
Offending the Audience also falls heavily under the style of postmodernism since it is so unconventional in the fact that it lacks plot and characters.

Language[edit source | edit]

Handke wished to challenge the relationship of language and reality and to make the audience "intensely, unbearably conscious of the fundamentally arbitrary connections between words and things, until the linguistic mucilage that holds the world and our minds together crumbles."[6] The most prominent way of how Handke challenged the meaning of language is found at the very end of the play. The actors first begin to compliment the audience on how perfect they were and then proceed to call them various insults. The names the actors call the audience seem to become more and more random. The point here is to createacoustic patterns in the words so that they eventually become meaningless.

Theme/idea[edit source | edit]

As is evident from the name, the whole show leads up to the point at the end where the audience gets "offended." The significance of the insults at the end is questioned—what exactly makes these words (any words for that matter) more than just noise, but items which hold meaning.
Handke wanted to take the ideas of language and theatre—two subjects which were often accepted as they were without question—and point out why they didn't get questioned or challenged very often.

Spectacle[edit source | edit]

In theme with the whole anti-theatre idea,Offending the Audience has very minimalistic production values. The stage is usually bare, but there could be a false set in order to deceive the audience into thinking that it will be a conventional play.

Music[edit source | edit]

Handke was influenced and inspired by the music of the time. One the his "Rules for the actors" is to listen to "Tell Me" by the Rolling Stones. He was especially influenced by the Beatles. Two more of his rules are to see the Beatles' movies and "watch Ringo's smile" in "A Hard Day's Night."

Sample production history[edit source | edit]

Offending the Audience has been performed all over Europe since its German premiere in 1966, and after its translation was published to English in 1970 in Michael Roloff's translation as part of KASPAR & OTHER PLAYS bv Farrar, Straus & Giroux and then in individual editons by Eyre Methuen. First peformance were directed by the translator and Michael Locascio's troupe at various locations in New York City in 1969, subsequently at Herbert Berghof's HB STUDIO
Subsequently it was produced at numerous locations, especially, colleges. all over the U.S., Australia, China, South Africa and the U.K. Roloff, meanwhile, has put up a site that indicates how the insults at the end of the play can be kept being brought up to date:http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
Roloff's handke.drama blog contains a list of three 2015 performances that show the variety of approaches that a director may want to take:
It was revived in 2008 at The Flea Theaterin New York City.[7]

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