Theatremaker, performance artist, director and producer – Stephen Bain makes many things, most of them surprising.  He’s a stalwart on the Auckland theatre scene, well known for pushing theatrical boundaries. Recent travel and work in Europe has opened up some new possibilities. 

He directs When Animals Dream of Sheep, a spectacular new outdoor performance combining drama, music and dance, within the space of Myers Park in the CBD.  The performance incorporates a Skype connection linking Dutch outdoor dance-theatre group TragicTrio (performing in the Netherlands) within part of the performance, bringing daytime to night-time and subconscious into reality.

Renee Liang talks to Stephen about his take on theatre and performance.

What's best for an audience - entertainment or provocation?

Well that’s a weird question I suppose because ‘an audience’ is as vague a thing as ‘a human’ or ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’. So I guess there can be no best either. There can only be something that someone really wants to communicate and ultimately that can be provocative AND entertaining. Artists are often lumped with the responsibility of what an audience wants, which I guess is a hang over from our new economic world view where all relationships are given a kind of economic framing. There was a time not so long ago that people were described for their animal-like qualities.

What does theatre (ideally) do ?

Theatre for me is like everything living, it’s sometimes inspiring, sometimes boring but it always has a vitality and focus that we find hard to pinpoint in daily life. A minute of performance might have had a hundred hours of thought and preparation gone into it and at best we can feel this concentrated focus of energy and thought as an audience. Somehow that ephemeral quality is the essence of theatre because it is ultimately the ‘moment’ that burns on our memory, not the artifacts that might be left behind.

What would you like to see more of in our theatres and festivals?

It’s sometimes difficult to bring things to life when we are made so aware of our constraints. Finding that freedom to think and play is sometimes difficult to hunt down. The most memorable performances I have seen have come out of some remarkable and infectious sense of freedom where, for some unknown reason, someone has put themselves in a remarkable head space – often places we find it very difficult to go ourselves (can’t help thinking of Werner Herzog when as I write that). The theatres and festivals work best when they help to overcome those restraints.

Is there a difference between the way Europeans and NZ audiences regard theatre?

In the last three years I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of work from Western Europe through touring. You know it’s a luxury when you start to realize that you no longer look for differences but similarities. We have so many similarities to every living person in the world, so when we relate to someone who at first seems a million miles from us culturally, you get a genuine kick out of it. There is a lot that comes from having larger touring networks in Europe and there is no doubt that some work can benefit from long development periods, but the thing I like best is how the germ of an idea is so similar to our own.

Do you think there's a healthy relationship between "commercial" and "fringe" theatre in NZ at the moment?  Is there anything we can do to improve it?

Well Fringe is label that tends to be associated with anything that doesn’t appear to be immediately commercial. Often ‘fringe’ shows go on to show that they are very ‘commercial’ so the question becomes how do our theatres view their relationship with things that are new. Often there is a suspicion that new will be a marketing nightmare because the rules of economics are grounded in statistical certainty. But we all know that’s not true too, just as we know that there is no such thing as statistical certainty. So what Fringe represents to those that seek out the commercial is a disinterest in following the development of something. The more we are able to see the benefits of developing something from a small thing into a fully fledged production, the more we will see commercial and fringe disappear from our vocabulary.
What has tended to happen is that our ferociously consumer culture has allowed specialization where the manufacture or genesis of an idea or a product is completely hidden from our view. So with our example of theatre, you can put on hit shows every month that arrive in the post with ‘all sorted out, just add water’ on the cover, without any awareness or apparent interest in where or how it was developed.

Of course culture is at it’s most rich when it’s part of a continuum – coming from somewhere and going somewhere, not just snapping pictures at it as it whizzes by. That’s when we start getting more interested in the packaging than the object itself (like McDonalds) and culture becomes reduced to quick reference points that seem familiar. I think we run the danger of producing too much of this kind of theatre that is more preoccupied with packaging and a great marketing campaign rather than concerning ourselves about the complexity of the meal inside.

Do you prefer to do theatre outside of actual theatres? Why?

I’ve been really interested in performances that happen in unconventional places recently. I wonder if it is because we are aware of so many more realities nowadays. I love being in an audience and discovering somewhere for the first time through some kind of performance. For When Animals Dream of Sheep at the moment, we’re using Myers Park – an inner city park I pass through many times in a week, yet through performing in there I realize so much more about how it functions as a public space than before. Theatres are places you want to get out of as soon as the actors stop performing, yet buildings can keep on performing for hundreds of years. Every time you bring people into a space and ask them to stand or sit there, not as a voyager but as an audience, you ask them to be part of that dialogue that is going on secretly without them realizing.

Has your collaboration with Nisha Madhan changed the way you both work?

Nisha and I have done a few projects together recently, I guess it’s like a conversation that keeps taking new turns. The next one is a show called What Have You Done to Me? Nisha developed ideas for it last year when we were away in Brussels where we were talking about and seeing a lot of stuff that didn’t care if it was theatre or performance or dance and we both saw a great freedom in that. So when we started working some of her material into this show it naturally became a bit like our conversations – a bit wild, funny, just happy to be what it was, and to my surprise it was less about the words and more about the relationship to the audience. So we started trying to use lies and half-truths as the text to start to deliberately undermine the audiences’ reliance on the words. What we’ve ended up with is really satisfying to play and our first performance in December had the audience laughing yet not completely sure who was being lied to, us or them. I think we’ll make some more work together.

When Animals Dream of Sheep is a two year project... how did it start, and where do you hope to go?

Yep this project started when I was visiting a festival in Netherlands called Oerol Festival. It’s the weirdest festival, there are 50,000 people crammed onto a small island of 30km for 10 days, living in tents amongst the forest and biking every day through the sand dunes to see theatre shows. Then I discovered there were deer on the island too and I wondered how the hell they got there. Turns out it’s a great story and so similar to the New Zealand story of introducing wild animals to the forest. Two years later and 40 thousand phone calls later we’ve been jointly commissioned by The EDGE in Auckland and the Oerol Festival in The Netherlands to make a performance about it. I hope you’ll come to Myers Park next week and have a look.

Further Information

Winning Productions and STAMP at THE EDGE presents

When Animals Dream of Sheep

Lower Myers Park, Auckland CBD, 23 – 27 February, 8.30pm, 2011.

Auckland Fringe Festival 2011

As the sun fades, and dreaming and waking life overlap, the strange in-between place of animals and humans reveals itself …