4: Taking Theatre Online
In a post-pandemic world where creators and collaborators of all kinds have been forced to revisit how they make and present work, what does it mean to bring an audience together in a virtual space?
Paula Varjack is a multi-disciplinary creative whose work is firmly rooted in performance art.
Her work includes stage productions in theatre settings as well as shows specifically designed to be enjoyed online.
Paula is also the dramaturg and digital artist for Proteus Theatre's stage production, Indestructible.
“I, Melania was a show that.. fully took place on social media and began and ended on a platform called Gather, where you arrived as an avatar and saw the audience before the show began. And then you could come back to that space to have a post-show conversation as your avatar.”
In this compelling deep-dive into the motivations and mindset of an outstanding performance artist, Paula discusses her work, her career, and the artists who have inspired her with show-host Mary Swan.
Chapters
1:25 Digital culture, popular culture and theatre
4:33 The draw of solo theatre
5:47 Training as a theatre technician
7:17 Pandemic productions - I, Melania and The Baby Question
13:40 Moca North - building a fictional gallery website
18:30 The joy and pain of Woody Allen
23:13 The experience of being marginalised
-
Mary Swan 0:03
Hi. Thanks for joining us for Indestructible, the podcast connected to the show created by Proteus and touring nationally in 2024. I'm Mary Swan, artistic director of Process and Director and writer of Indestructible The Show, and my guest for this edition is Paula Vijay. She's an artist working in performance, video and participation, making work as a way of making sense of and communicating with the world. In every show she makes, she aims to find the balance between making audiences question themselves and feeling like they've had a fun night out. Paul has been commissioned to make work by the Barbican Battersea Arts Centre, amongst many others, and she's been involved in the creative process for Indestructible from the very start, and is creating the digital fictional exhibition related to the show. Paul is joining me today to talk about her brand as an artist. Her views on if we can separate the art from the artist and her experiences as a woman in contemporary theatre. Hello, Paula. Hello.
I thought quite interesting to talk about your practice as an interdisciplinary artist, and particularly your work in the digital realm, because that's some of the stuff that I've really, really enjoyed and sort of participated in and how you managed to make that participatory.
Paula Varjack 1:25
So my whole relationship to that nebulous word we call digital, which I sort of hate because like, what does it even mean? Like sometimes people mean it's made with digital equipment and sometimes it's shorthand for work, that it's online. But I guess first and foremost, I'm really interested in popular culture, and I think you can't talk about popular culture without talking about digital culture because they're so intertwined in terms of making it participatory. I'm always thinking a lot about audience, including the unseen audiences that we might interact with online. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that, in particular in 2020, when I couldn't access a live audience in the way I was used to with my theatre work. And so it became this kind of deep meditation on who is it that I'm talking to and I want to be talking to and how do I centre that audience in the relationship I have as a maker. And that led to be making a whole series of different digital experiments. And then me and my art collaborator Chuck Buhari, making I Melania, which was a show that you saw that fully took place on social media and began and ended on a platform called Gather where you arrived as an avatar and saw the audience before the show began. And then you could come back to that space to have a post-show conversation as your avatar.
Mary Swan 2:42
I was great. I loved it. Melania. When you talk about unseen audiences online, just explain a little bit more about that.
Paula Varjack 2:51
So if I think about making a piece of work for a theater audience, most of what I've made is is a solo show, but it still has a sense of dialogue. Everything I make has direct address. I'm only interested in my own practice and making stuff that acknowledges the fact that the audience is there and it's very much pitched to and for them. But if I'm writing a social media post, or if I'm writing a blog or I'm posting a video, I don't know who it is necessarily that's interacting with that. I might have some ideas from looking at analytics, but I don't have that immediate sense of who I'm connecting to. And I guess actually where it starts for me is that I was a blogger before I was a performance maker. So in a weird way, I guess my practices kind of are also rooted in the internet for that reason. And me coming to performance came from me writing blogs, telling stories of characters and experiences I was having when I moved to Berlin some time back, and suddenly the audience for these blogs was growing bigger and bigger and bigger, and I knew who some of them were, but I didn't know who any of them were. And I got really aware of this idea of having an audience, of posting something and then seeing how many views that it had had, but not necessarily knowing where those views came from. And I got quite excited about that. And that then led me to going, I actually don't just want to be making work for that audience. I want to know what it's like to tell these stories in person. And so there's this very bizarre, like cyclical loop of talking back to the audience online, but hopefully trying to figure out more ways to do both like we are on this project.
Mary Swan 4:19
Yeah, Yeah. It's really interesting because the way you describe that journey of developing a performance practice feels almost much more akin to performing arts than theatre, essentially. Have you always been quite interested in performance art?
Paula Varjack 4:33
Oh yeah. I mean, I've always been interested in theatre, mainly because we don't find out what performance art is when we're young. People are certainly like, I didn't. I didn't even know about the idea of solo theatre, I think until I was well into my early twenties and by that point I'd actually already gone to drama school to study technical production. But I think as soon as I became aware of solo theatre and then at the time in the late nineties there was performances happening in clubs and like physical theatre was a really big thing. And the idea of dance theatre, like all these other sort of realms, came up. And then I think I also got really excited in what were then also referred to as like monologues, so specifically performance artists who were telling their own stories in first person, the whole kind of balding grey lamp on their desk. I was really excited about that as a form of someone who was telling their actual true life story to an audience that was very resonant for me for some reason. And I think in part it's because alongside theatre, I've also always been very excited about documentary, and so maybe there's something about it drawing on both of those forms.
Mary Swan 5:36
Yeah. And you were saying you sort of came to it from training in a technical background. What made you start making work as opposed to technically supporting work?
Paula Varjack 5:47
Oh yeah. Well, funny thing is, the original dream was to be a director. So my cunning plan as a teenager was that I would train to be a stage manager, which would mean that would be a job that I would get when I graduated. That would mean I'd also be working very closely to the director, and then eventually I would gain enough experience where I could start directing. That was the idea. And then I went to RADA and I. It was a really important experience for me to go there in terms of training, but it completely killed my love of theatre. And I think that had a lot to do with not feeling excited about the shows that we were producing some issues to do with race and class within the culture. The course, definitely the division between the acting students, the technical students was really, really dire. And also I suppose mostly the people in the technical theatre course weren't really interested in talking about theatre. They were proper techies who were just geeks about building and design or whatever. So for me at interval to be like, I don't really know about this larger play, what do you guys like? That was not I did not fit. I was very much an outlier and so I ended up going into film instead and video production. And it was only like years and years later, having had a career in that, that blogging was just the thing that it was doing. I found it exciting to tell these stories to an unknown audience, and then it was almost a joke to go, Oh, well, what would happen if I perform some of these live? And then as soon as I did, there was nothing else I wanted to do. And that's kind of been that really.
Mary Swan 7:11
Which is great. And the show that you've had out recently, the baby question is essentially a film, isn't it? Yes.
Paula Varjack 7:17
Yeah, Yeah. But both the baby question and I'm Melania and the iterations that they landed in are very much products of the pandemic because I'm Melanie was also meant to be a stage so like a very multimedia stage show that was going to be like projection and like screens everywhere. And then it became a digital performance because we were meant to have this industry showcase at the Barbican March 18, 2020 or something. And the baby question was also meant to have a two week run at summer hall and like a three week run at Battersea Arts Centre. Obviously none of those things happened and everything was cancelled. And so first with I, Melania became well, Chuck and I had all these residencies set and we thought, okay, well we've got the time. Is there a way we can continue to develop the show when we can't be in a room together? And that led to this whole collaborative, online remote practice that both of us very much still draw from. And with the baby question, my producer at the time, I just remember saying, Oh, you know what? If it wasn't a theatre show, what would be a digital show? And at first I was like, Absolutely not. It is meant to be live and people have to be in the room and then the more and more I thought about it, it became, Well, it's that or maybe it never happens. And that felt worse. And I guess the other thing with the baby question is we'd always conceived it as being set in a TV studio. Like the framing of it was the live recording of a Top of the Pops style show. So it wasn't a huge leap to just make it for screen. And by that point I'd been working more and more with Chuck, and Chuck has like a film background as well. And so it just made sense. And now again, it's one of those things where I can't imagine it as a theatre show, but I'm so excited about the form that it's landed and it feels really right in it. And it also means we have much more flexibility with how we screen it. We've screened it in theatres and art spaces obviously, but we've also screened in cinemas. We had a really interesting screening actually for 90 junior doctors as a part of their training and now we're really looking at schools. So removing it from the theatre means that there's all these different ways that you can present the word.
Mary Swan 9:27
And it's an interesting piece because it does retain its theatricality. It's not a film, but it surprises me in a really good way because your concept was that there's a live host and so you were saying sort of in some places that's been. ADG In our case, that was the wonderful Becky Booboo, who's our cabaret hostess extraordinaire.
Paula Varjack 9:47
Neared bingo in disco cocktails in New York City.
Mary Swan 9:50
We did disco musical bingo and cocktails, but it was such an interesting concept to have this very theatrical film. And then Becky doing the disco musical Bingo. But then also getting into some really serious questions that the piece raises. And for me, that was so fascinating around how that participatory element came in with the audience in a way that I had not expected at all. I wonder, I thought, is that something that you're looking at exploring with with work coming up?
Paula Varjack 10:22
Yeah. I mean, I think everything comes back to this idea of what is my relationship to audience and who is the audience and what is the role of audience. And I think again, going with the baby question, I mean, initially our first idea was that it would be a stream like live performance. And the more and more we got excited about what we could do in camera, what we could do with editing. Like poor Chuck, I think it kind of ran away with it. So we ended up basically shooting a feature in four days, which I 100% do not recommend to anyone. And the fact that we all continued to love each other is a testament to how wonderful that team is, because it could very easily gone another way. It was incredibly stressful, but I think even in making a screen based work, I guess the other thing I remember in this period of like the acute stage of the pandemic is that I remember that there was a film coming out and I think it was a sequel to Candyman. I don't remember Candyman was a horror film also, I think nineties, early aughts, and I remember the filmmaker deliberately delaying it because she was absolutely adamant that it had to have a theatrical release at a time that lots of films were just being pulled and going straight to streaming because it just felt like there was a lack of confidence about how much would audiences return to cinemas? And she was absolutely adamant that as a horror film and as a horror film pitched also at an African-American audience, it needed that sense of community that you get when you watch a film together. And I think that also left an impression me of like, Well, what does it mean? Actually, even we make a screen based work to really stand on the fact that the work can go wherever it goes. But there is something particularly we want to hold on to about the audience being together when they watch it. That felt really important with that project specifically.
Mary Swan 11:59
Yeah, no, I could see that completely. I just there's something fascinating around where all this might go because working on Indestructible, which is much more probably an almost leave for you traditional piece, although there is you know, we break the fourth wall and there is some there is audience interaction on it. But the idea around also playing with things like artificial intelligence, which we were doing in the making of it, what do you see that influence seeing in your work? How do you think you might be using that in the future?
Paula Varjack 12:30
I don't know. I've, as I said, like this is stylistically very different for the way I make work in some ways. But it also has taught me so much that I want to draw from in terms of having other people in the room collaborating who are literally that collaborators without set roles that are just feeding into the process. That was really interesting and inspiring for me. And then even at this later stage where we've done Preview recently and the fact that you've got this very curated, steady, vast invited audience that you can bring in that stage in and be really discursive with them after normally like I hate the feeling of scratches and like this open dialogue but it's clear that it's a nourished long term relationship and it's nice to also hear people disagree on points. Normally I'd be like 100%. I don't want to work in that way. And after that evening, I was left going, Actually, maybe I should talk to Mary about us like scratch. But I think here with this specific group of people, because this feels quite nice.
Mary Swan 13:33
Tell us about the website, the exhibition, tell us all about it and hopefully we can get some people to go and visit it.
Paula Varjack 13:40
Yeah, so it's the website for MOCA North, which is the gallery that is representing you. You can't see this, but like Mary is glowing, so she's very tickled by this idea of glad Mary gave me this great provocation, which is just I want some kind of digital complimentary artwork. And I was like, I don't know what that is like. Is it a recreation of the work? Is it some video version of the work? And then having sat in the room with a generous offer of being in the room, suddenly it occurred to me that the whole show was revolving around this exhibition that was going to happen. And so I thought, What if we show that exhibition? Like we're not showing the exhibition in the show? It's alluded to in some of this beautiful projection design that Chris has done. What do we fully extend that Mary was like, Oh, I love that idea. Then it became, okay, well, where would you look at the website? Initially, Ben and I were just talking about it being an online gallery, and then we decided to take it a step further and go, No, we're going to make the MOCA North Gallery, which has the website, the Image Gallery. And then it became like, what would be the elements? It's like there might be an interview with the artist, there would be some blurb you could download an exhibition guide, and the current stage is thinking about what are our cheeky ways we can kind of link through to the actual show. So anything, for example, that would normally take you to where the gallery is, like how to get here or contact us and so on. All of that will link through to the website for Indestructible, but the idea is that it's something that people see the show could look at after and will extend the world of the show, but also blur the fact and fiction of the show a bit, which is what I'm particularly excited about.
Mary Swan 15:19
Yeah, it's I mean, it looks fantastic and we've had so much fun and have you were photographing Mary Rose is playing Catherine you're referencing sort of Marina Abramovic and Sarah Lucas and all those. How has that been in terms of recreating the art? Because you've also been talking to some artists, locals voice in Basingstoke around being featured in the exhibition. Is the Emerging Artist to me.
Paula Varjack 15:43
Yes, yes. Because within the show the idea is that she's curating this show, which is featuring the larger showing of her work, but it will also feature all these other female artists alongside her, some that are more established and some that are more emerging. And so within particularly within the emerging artists, it was like an opportunity to open it up to real working artists. And, you know, you gave me that brilliant contact with Naomi Scott, who's been incredible and looking to meet some people. But what that also means in terms of the website is that when you click on their images in the image gallery, you will go through to their their Instagrams and websites and they're all they're all real working artists. So these are the places where the is this a real gallery or not? Is Catherine a real artist or not? Is Catherine a real artist that the actress Maya Rose is playing? Maybe like it's been written and portrayed in such a way that that's what it seems and that's sort of the juicy bit.
Mary Swan 16:37
Yeah, I really like that too. You know, you have to dig to find out what's real and what's not real. But yeah, it's been really interesting journey, hasn't it, Talking to some of those artists and sort of thinking about how to feature them. And we have a link through to the Lee Miller estate on there as well. And that's been great and that's been fascinating as well. I think dealing with, with real artists too in this and realising what those gatekeepers are for us to access them, because I think that's the one thing this website does is makes you realise how difficult it must be for visual artists. We find hard enough in theatre to get the name out, they get the work out there, but you realise how difficult it is for visual artists. The breakthrough is that it's crazy.
Paula Varjack 17:23
And so for the people that I've spoken to in visual arts, what interests them is it's a very unique way. Obviously for a theatre show to be working with some kind of digital output. But it's also a very unique way for visual artists to be linking to and profiling their work within a fictional world. So the whole thing just becomes very conceptual, hopefully in a way that's, that's quite playful.
Mary Swan 17:46
Yeah, No, totally. I think that's the nature of the piece, isn't it, as well? Commenting on commenting on a lot of things, but commenting on the visual art world as well and what that means and that playfulness is definitely what I love about your work. And that's definitely in there in terms of talking about art and artists. One of the central things we talk about in the show is separating the art from the artist and can we do it? Should we do it? How do we tackle that? And I don't think, you know, no one's suggesting there's a definitive answer. It's a process. But I've been asking everyone, is there a particular person where something came out about them that disappointed you more than anyone else?
Paula Varjack 18:30
Yeah, I think probably my biggest one is, is Woody Allen. But it's interesting because when I think about people who really get tied up in knots about artists who let them down when they discover something about their past or brought their behaviors, like, for example, I had a lot of straight, baffled friends who really have never gotten over Louis C.K. And I think it's routine, this idea of when an artist's work or the idea of their character really speaks to you and you really identify with them. I obviously don't identify with Woody Allen, but as someone who, you know, one of my earliest dreams of being a filmmaker and I love romantic comedies and I loved his use of dialogue and his sense of humor and even didn't mind that he was kind of telling the same story over and over again. Like I liked that about his work. And I was you know, Manhattan in particular was absolutely one of my favorite films, a real formative. It led me to want to be a filmmaker kind of film. And I think when I think specifically about that film, Manhattan and also about Kill Bill, which was another one of my favorite films of Tarantino, it's not that I would think any less of anyone who continues to like their work or likes those films, and I still think that they're really strong films. But once, once I know about the behaviors that happened on set of both of those films, I can never enjoy those films ever again. And that makes me feel really sad because because I would love to watch Manhattan on a rainy day like today. But once, you know some things, you can't unknow them. And then how you process that, how you hold it is difficult. But then I'm also I'm a queer person who loves hip hop, and that has involved endless workarounds in my life around that culture, maybe slightly less so now, but it's one of those things. So I think it's really interesting the mental gymnastics you will sometimes put yourself through to still hold on to art that holds meaning for you, or maybe you just like to dance to what you hear. There is also this thing of Would I still dance if someone played Blurred Lines at a party? Like maybe. And then at some point I might still be a bit like, Oh God, yeah. But on another night, if I was really drunk, I might just dance to it. I don't, I don't know.
Mary Swan 20:44
Yeah, it's really difficult. And Woody Allen's come up before, I'd say almost out of everyone. Maybe Michael Jackson as well being the other one. But I think that for most people is incredibly crushing and disappointing. It's a tricky moment. You were saying about kind of for you, it's around how you view the onset as opposed to whether or not whatever else in his private life might have happened.
Paula Varjack 21:04
Yeah, I mean, I think there's something it's one thing to go like, here's an older man who continues to tell the story of him being involved with much younger women who are always incredibly stunning, who find him absolutely irresistible. I have no idea what he's like in person. Maybe he is incredibly charming. I think it's possible, given the way many actors talk about him. But to then find out that he is casting women in that role and then in the filming of it, he is taking advantage of that situation when he literally has all the power on the set because the role was with an actress who was at the beginning of her career and is like 15 or 16. I mean, it's a different issue. But with Kill Bill, the idea of like Tarantino spitting in Uma Thurman's face, I can't let go of that now. I think another maybe for me, like good example, I'm a big fan of community, the TV series and Dan Harmon, the creator, was pulled off of community because there was this whole really nasty situation with him being obsessed with like again, much younger female writer on the team. And it just the whole set kind of ended up breaking down because of the tension got so bad. But the thing that I respect about Dan Harmon is like after the fact, you know, he came back and he said, I knew my behavior was wrong. And the dirty fact is I just went ahead and I did it anyway. And I feel like I hadn't heard that up until that point, particularly with man, I heard a lot of men saying I wasn't really aware or if someone was offended. Then it was like, No, actually I own up to the fact that what I did was unacceptable. It hurt my marriage. It hurt like the project that I made, which was also like the lifeblood of a very, very large team of people. And to just fully stand by that.
Mary Swan 22:55
The other thing that I've asked a lot of people is around what your experience as a woman has been and obviously a lot of that in Indestructible is around Katherine as a female artist and the hidden aspects of it. Do you feel things are getting better or do you think we're kidding ourselves?
Paula Varjack 23:13
Oh God, it's so difficult. It's really difficult to answer that. I mean, I don't know specifically if I can speak to differences in terms of being a woman, but I just think in terms of general relationships to various sides of being marginalized, like being a person of color and being queer and so on as well. Thinking about when I was in like most of my education, to be honest, even though I trained with some really incredible people and I went to really brilliant institutions, for example, like when I went to film school, I was one of maybe like four women in my year. We literally had a class where one of the teachers who was in his late sixties, maybe in early seventies, one of these like retired Riverside Studio guys, said, Oh, you ladies will be all right with this because you know how to at least sewing machines. So, you know, if I think about that or if I think about experiences I had in drama school where me and like a handful of the other people of color who were in the acting course would be like quietly getting together in like a corner of the canteen going, Oh, this made me feel a bit uncomfortable about this behavior with other people in my cohort, or I won't even get into like casting decisions. Marry that. I mean, that is like, I would say like a national issue when it comes to drama training. Unfortunately, probably still. But I mean, equally teaching in higher education and in the last years, I've witnessed some pretty appalling behavior towards female students and students of color. I think things are better in the sense that if I look at young people, it seems like they have much more agency and clarity about addressing what they feel is like unacceptable behavior in their places of education. For example, in a way that I 100% did not feel like I could talk back to my teachers, like I could raise issues to people running those buildings. I felt like I just needed to get through the course and then find a way to work in the industry. And then even when I started to work, it was like, I'm going to have to work unpaid for this period of time and I'm going to have to just make endless cups of tea and eventually someone might notice me and give me an opportunity. And that did happen for me. But I really admire that the younger generations coming up now are like, Why do I even need to be working for free? Why do I need to make idlis cups of tea? Also, I already have like a really exciting practice I can offer from this point. Now, also, I can already reach this number of people within an audience without any kind of machine around me. And so in that way I think things are getting better. I mean, you have daughters who are like, how how old is your oldest now going.
Mary Swan 25:53
To be 21 in January.
Paula Varjack 25:55
Yeah. So what kind of conversations do you have about this kind of stuff?
Mary Swan 25:58
Oh, he comes I mean, she's she's studying politics.
Paula Varjack 26:02
She's okay.
Mary Swan 26:03
Slightly to the left of Marx, my eldest. She's she's very, very sure around calling out what she sees sometimes to an extent. I worry a little bit about that, and I have to check my own dampeners on that of like, Oh, don't call out too much. And my youngest is 17 and both of them are very alive to where there are inequalities and where there isn't representation or where they're not seeing themselves or people of color or, you know, they're both very much on the ball on that, which is really positive. And I think most their friends are. But then as parents, we have rose colored glasses a little bit, don't we? So let's hope so. And also the young. So sometimes he kind of his life goes on, you get a little bit beaten out of you, but but yeah, I'm positive. I think they are definitely alive to it in a way that I definitely I don't think I was at the time. So that's got to be a good thing.
Paula Varjack 27:01
And I think there is also something that I think is rooted in Internet culture. It's much easier for you to be aware of these issues on a global scale than it was when we were younger because, I mean, obviously, like you will have books by activists and so on and you have like whatever is passed down to you by your parents and your friends and so on. Like I grew up in D.C., which is obviously a very politicized city and seen and so on. But the fact that like right now you can share a story about something and with the click of a key, you can instantly connect with loads of people who also have that experience, who can express solidarity. It's much easier to be aware that you are part of a larger tribe and that you are sharing struggles of other people. And I think maybe it was before.
Mary Swan 27:52
Just with one of the things I've asked everyone is to bring a female artist that you think more people should know about or to highlight someone that you feel more people should know about. And I wondered who you think.
Paula Varjack 28:07
I don't know how to say her name, so I'm going to guess. And I'm really sorry, Miranda, if I mess this up because I don't know how to say your name. So if I read it phonetically, it's Mira el Boughey. She is a filmmaker. She recently graduated from Nft's in London, and she set up an initiative in the last months called Connecting Gaza, basically. So I didn't know this and I consider myself fairly techie, but as well as like actual tangible SIM cards that you have in your phone, you can also get e SMS. And so e SMS are basically like digital remote SIM cards that you can use in any phone. It also means you can use them in different territories. And so what she's done is through this Connecting Gaza initiative is basically coordinates for people worldwide to buy e SMS, not activate them, send a screenshot of the QR code to this Google account that she's set up for it. And then those esims are being allocated to people in Gaza in order for people to be able to communicate when there's Internet blackouts. I'm always really amazed by people who can come up with simple, resourceful ideas that instantly have a very practical implication to a cause, particularly a really dire situation that we're dealing with right now. The idea that someone who I think is in her twenties as a film student who just graduated can be coordinating that from afar in a way that has been so effective. It's mind boggling.
Mary Swan 29:38
I love that and obviously must have much wider implications. I had no idea that you could do her. Amazing. Countless. Incredible. Thanks, Paula. We have quite a lot of things,
though. Thanks for joining us. For Indestructible, because connected to this young crazy white bird is entering Disney in 2024. If you like what you've heard, please share, subscribe and leave a five star review. It really helps us reach other listeners. In the next episode of Indestructible is available to listen to right now wherever you get your podcasts. And that's it for this edition. I'm Mary Swan. Thanks again for listening. I look forward to your company next time.
Credits
The Indestructible podcast is a Creative Kin production for Proteus Theatre Company.
Executive Producer & Producer: Jason Caffrey
Mixing and Mastering: Adam Double
Production Music: DEX 1200
Artwork: Y Designs
