I just got back from this show, “Circus in Progress,” put on by a circus arts/physical theater studio. It was a great show, but more than that, it really got me thinking about just how hidebound the publishing industry is.
In high school, I got into clowning and Commedia, and I took it pretty seriously. I also did some modern dance and contact improv (weird touchy-feely theater stuff), so while I’m not in the theater scene, I’m familiar with the way it was at that time.
More modern than Cirque du Soleil
The thing that really impressed me about this show was how damn modern it was compared to the state of things ten years ago. We were right there, just a few feet away from people doing hilarious water-spitting duels to Ennio Morricone music, spinning around on the Spanish web, etc. It wasn’t like the beautiful, but remote Cirque du Soleil — it was, well, just more modern.
The performers weren’t beautiful works of art; they were entirely human. Their costumes, for the most part, were utilitarian with a little symbolic accessorizing, and I get the feeling that the audience was made up of a lot of the perfomers’ friends. So not only were the performers open about how human they were, they actually were playing themselves. People were coming to see them do their thing, not for the story or characters they were acting out.
Is fiction resisting change?
I couldn’t help but feel dissatisfaction at being in an industry that, by contrast, is such a slow-moving glacier compared to the cutting-edge stuff I saw tonight. Sure, there are a lot of reasons why my perception may be false, such as…
- I’m already in fiction, and it’s hard to escape your frame of reference, just like it’s hard to see how big your children get when you see them every day.
- The show may have been very traditional, or re-hashing of some “modern” fare that came on the scene in like the 70s, but I’m just not aware of it.
- It’s easier to attach the perception of speed to live-performed arts. They’re immediate and intimate, and you experience the output in real time, unlike recorded music and written fiction.
But still, electronic music also changes fast, and musicians adapt well to change. I remember reading an interview with a sample artist, a while back. When faced with the prospect of not being able to sample anymore, he just shrugged and said, “Well, we’ll have to make our own samples, then. It’s just the way it goes.” Photography, too, has always had one foot in technology, and photographers are generally a future-adaptive bunch.
I’m not saying that innovation is necessarily good. Or that we should chuck all the wisdom about storytelling out the window to do something incomprehensible just because it’s modern. But sometimes, it feels that fiction writers actively resists change (and I don’t mean just the business side), and I’m wondering if that’s true.
So help me out — what are the innovations in fiction that I can’t see? I know the field must be changing, but I just can’t escape the frame.
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