[-empyre-] January wrap -empyre-

[The Paul Annears <the.paul.annears@gmail.com>]

Dear January -empyre- participants (visible and invisible).

Thank you for this opportunity to sum up my impressions of this
fascinating month on-line.

Presumably I was invited to participate because of an on-line project
of mine, The Concise Model of the Universe (www.xxos.net).  That is to
say I was invited because, amongst other little projects,  I am a
practitioner of what could be characterised as 'on-line theatre'.

Anyone who has visited the Model would have found no surprises in my
contributions to this forum.

What I am doing could be called web theatre.  Not theatre as
performance but theatre as audience engagement and participation (that
happens to be authored by an Aotearoan living with a cute smart
girl-friend and a dumb ugly mortgage, in New Zealand).  An operating
theatre, a forum for no limits discussion of issues of great
importance for all of us. A place to move beyond cozy assumptions.

I suppose that I would have to consider my contributions to -empyre-
as successful as they have at least engaged the feelings of some
people.  What I was striving for, however, was to engage their
intelligence and sense of humour as well.  In that regard perhaps I
have failed.

Are we here in Aotearoa a people who find 'Eating Media Lunch'
offensive? 'Blackadder offensive?  'Team America' offensive?  Fellini,
Almodovar, Greenaway, Caro or Campion offensive?  Hepworth, Brancusi,
McCahon, Walters or Hodgkins offensive?  Frame or Morrieson, Rushdie
or Derrida offensive?  Debbie Thwaite, Sandy Stone, Lance Boyle and
Neil Singleton offensive? Do we find Lemi Ponifasio's 'Paradise'
offensive?  Would we have walked out of Antonin Artaud's 'The Theatre
and the Plague'?

Can we really be so ego-fragile and strung out on caffeine as to want
to lynch the auteur because the play seems to be about us?

A Paul Annear

-- 
The Paul Annears
www.xxos.ne