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Asking all the right questions

Six-hour performance tests the limits of knowledge — and endurance

December 5th, 2007 issue

By Martina Čermáková

Quizoola!

When: Friday, Dec. 7, at 5
Where: Café Krásný ztráty (Náprstkova 10, Prague 1–Old Town)
Tickets: 150–250 Kč, available only at the door

For the Post
The stage setup is minimal, with a string of light bulbs enclosing two performers in smeared clown makeup. The atmosphere is casual, the location anything but standard theater and the audiences are free to arrive and leave as they please. Sooner or later, it makes one wonder: Is this staged? Is it improvised? Can I get involved?
Stretching the parameters of what normally defines a performance, Forced Entertainment, an experimental British theater company, pokes the audience’s minds with such questions in Quizoola! For their one-time Prague performance of the piece (part of Alfred ve dvoře’s Live in Prague festival), three performers from the Sheffield-based ensemble are bringing a suitcase full of light bulbs and questions — many written down, but many hovering in the air, waiting to be asked.
The three performers work in shifts, asking each other questions like, “What are trees?” or “Have you written your name in the sand at the beach?” The questions and answers roll around and around, sometimes in a quizlike manner, sometimes in an interrogational style and sometimes on a casual, friendly basis.
But all these questions pose a bigger question about the nature of knowledge. Tiptoeing around this timeless inquiry, Quizoola! proposes that knowledge is not absolute and changes with circumstances — in this case, with time and a shifting audience.
In fact, the same question may be raised several times during a performance, yielding different answers, “mirroring how shaky information is, how there’s no definite truth,” explains Cathy Naden, a member of Forced Entertainment since its conception in 1984 and one of the performers of Quizoola!
As played in this piece, the game has a few simple rules and verity of the answer isn’t one; the key rule is to keep on asking and answering. The script, continuously added to since the first time the piece was staged 10 years ago, now accommodates 2,000 questions of all sorts. But strings of improvised follow-up questions permeate the dialogue, injecting live energy into the performance.
Quizoola! has spent most of its days in smaller, more intimate spaces, so Prague’s café Krásný ztráty should be a good fit. Intentionally, odd and evocative locations are chosen, such as abandoned bars, abandoned gymnasiums and, once in Beirut, abandoned toilets.
“[These unconventional locations] allow the audience to go on a journey out of the ordinary and everyday, stimulating their minds,” says Naden. Even non-English speakers can stroll along, judging from past performances staged across northern Europe, Italy and Beirut. “There’s no need to understand the words to understand that it’s a game,” she says.
The unconventional locations also blur the lines between the stage and the audience, prompting spectators to ask questions themselves. “When we performed in New York, my colleague asked me: ‘Do you want to go to the toilet?’ ” Naden recalls. “I wasn’t even thinking about it and answered, ‘Yes.’ This woman in the front row was really concerned and told me: ‘If you wanna go to the toilet, I’ll take over for you.’ So then you have to deal with it and somehow get back on track.”
A six-hour piece, Quizoola! tests the limits of both the performers and the audience. But Naden remembers a 24-hour work, Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me?, for which audience members brought clothes and blankets and slept through parts. This raises a good question for Forced Entertainment, Naden observes: “When the audience is asleep, it makes you wonder: Is it still a performance if no one’s watching?”
Ultimately, for Naden, it’s about the performers and audience experiencing something together, be it called a performance or otherwise.
Martina Čermáková can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (5/12/2007):

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