So I wrote this thing for my mate’s punk and comics webzine. It’s about DIY punk, and DIY theatre. And mostly how we can learn from each other. You should go and read it, it’s over here. Go on. What are you waiting for? It has swear words and lots of semicolons. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT. Clicky. Also, when I was writing it, James of ace performance duo Action Hero sent me some of his own thoughts on being ‘DIY’ in theatre. Just after I sent my finished article off, but I’m reposting them here, with his permission, because they say a quite similar but still really useful thing.
“I think a comparison between DIY music and DIY theatre is long overdue. Not least because theatre suffers so much from an identity crisis and I think it could benefit from the association!
I would identify the work that Gemma and I do as Action hero very much as DIY but there’s an important distinction to made between two ways of using that terminology. There is much talk in theatre of a ‘DIY aesthetic’ and its a phrase often used to describe our work (I think we even use it to describe ourselves on our website) but the DIY element of our work is not ‘an aesthetic’ it comes from a genuine do it yourself approach. We sometimes do make decisions to deliberately use things that are lo-fi because of the way it changes the relationship an audience has with the work but more often than not its a genuine response to trying to make something with very few resources. So not an aesthetic choice as such. What interests me more is the punk use of the term DIY which doesn’t mean ‘ooh look their set is made from cardboard’ but is about an approach and a way of working that deliberately avoids mainstream modes of production. Continue reading DIY Music and DIY theatre
