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Borrowers and Lenders (2013) - Punchdrunk: Performance, Permission, Paradox

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Abstract

This essay explores the techniques that Punchdrunk uses to generate a sense of freedom and empowerment for the individual audience member. Second, it analyzes the fiscal, spatial, and conceptual restrictions of this system of empowerment. Finally, it examines the material nature of the production and the commercial realities of its current iteration.

Article

Punchdrunk: Performance, Permission, Paradox

Punchdrunk's theatrical installation pieces have significantly influenced both contemporary installation art and theatrical practice. Though Punchdrunk has been well known for nearly a decade in Europe (tickets to a Punchdrunk piece sell faster than many rock concerts in London, where the group is based), U.S. artists and audiences have connected with Punchdrunk's work through Sleep No More, which currently runs in three disused warehouses in New York City and previously played in abandoned elementary schools in suburbs of Boston and London. Based loosely on the plot of Macbeth and invoking the visual rhetoric of Alfred Hitchcock films, notably Vertigo and Rebecca, Sleep No More is a vast art installation populated by nearly silent actors. Audience members don masks and choose their own route through the performance space.

Punchdrunk frames their work in a rhetoric of audience empowerment and emphasizes the role of each audience member's individual choice in their pieces. Punchdrunk argues that their work disrupts the traditional role of the spectator, which Punchdrunk sees as intellectual rather than emotional or instinctual (Machon 2009, 89). The first part of this essay will explore the techniques used to generate this sense of freedom. Sleep No More and other Punchdrunk pieces create an extremely intricate system for the integration of audience members into the world of the installation. Inside the piece, performers often directly avoid audience members, refusing to provide a single linear narrative and encouraging individualized plot experiences.

Second, I will explore restrictions on this system of empowerment. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, Punchdrunk installations limit, guide, and often directly control the audience's gaze and narrative experience. The performance spaces of pieces such as Sleep No More are themselves full of physical barriers and spatial divides. Finally, this essay will explore the profoundly object-based nature of Punchdrunk installations. Full of a wildly intricate series of props and detailed set adornments, Sleep No More often presents a clearer narrative through stationary objects than through performers. The commercial nature of Sleep No More's current New York run also poses chall...

Notes

  1. ↑ Particularly among narrator-visitors under age forty, who comprise the majority of ticket-buyers.
  2. ↑ Like their productions, Punchdrunk's website is designed as a confusing visual landscape. The page that describes the company's work cannot be linked to directly and can be found only by wandering the landscape of fields and isolated buildings to its outer limits. To me, the site evokes Myst and other early graphic adventure video games, which also play out the contrast between user freedom and scripted outcomes.
  3. ↑ In my six visits to Sleep No More, five in Boston and one in New York, the actual text spoken by the guide varied, but always contained these three elements.
  4. ↑ Three floors in Boston, six in New York. Once inside the installation, the narrators use stairwells to access the other floors.
  5. ↑ I experienced two of these "one-on-ones" and had several others described to me by colleagues and fellow narrator-visitors. While the actual content of the encounters vary widely, they always end with the actor bestowing a small gift on the narrator-visitor: an inexpensive necklace, a shot of alcohol labeled as absinthe, etc.
  6. ↑ However, actors can communicate remotely with the Stewards from different rooms. When a friend and fellow narrator-visitor unwittingly blocked an actor's route, the actor picked up a nearby phone and called a Stewart to remove the narrator-visitor.
  7. ↑ Donors are given an increased number of "keys" to the Punchdrunk website based upon the size of their gifts. Certain keys unlock sections of the website that reveal details of forthcoming work.
  8. ↑ In addition to their self-imagined productions, Punchdrunk has taken on commercial projects designed for private corporations, including Sony, Stella Artois, and Louis Vuitton.
  9. ↑ The narrative of the disenfranchised fan I have described is constantly repeated on the production's fan blogs, notably the "Sleep No More Crossover Fanfiction Blog": there are complaints that the Massachusetts production was vastly superior to the Manhattan staging, that the increased attention and publicity have made the performances too crowded, and that the cost prevents die-hard fans from returning and exploring further.

Notes & References

  • About. 2012. Punchdrunk. Available online: http://www.punchdrunk.co.uk [accessed 10 March 2012].
  • Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. London: Palgrave.
  • Marin, Louis. 1984. Utopics: Spatial Play. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
  • Ridout, Nicholas. 2006. Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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