Context: Experience design

The attraction

Theatre was my first destination after Gymnasium. As a boy, I naturally indulged in the illusion of a limitless future. Thinking in possibilities was attractive. The films that have had an influence on me fed my interest in storytelling. Stories, in which roles can be assumed without a lifelong commitment, seemed to be a good way to live many lives in one life. How does art inform reality? I had to explore the reality of making art, of staging a performance.

The opportunity

Being close to a stage did not encourage me enough to stay and continue with theatre. I ran the opposite way, to business school. Theatre became an analogy for organizing business. As Pine II and Gilmore point out in The Experience Economy, "Work is theatre and every business a stage."

The spectacle on a stage lost meaning as an artistic form of expression and acquired more meaning as a model for realizing ideas, which is foundational for being a producer. Forgoing theatre opened the opportunity to use it as a model for creating experiences that have more to do with trade than with entertainment. Also, the Internet moved into focus, offering new, exciting ways to enact information.

The distraction

Theatre, as a way to enact information, is not my preferred medium. It distracts from the process of delivering value to the user/audience (something that Experience design addresses explicitly):

• A theatre production is usually more concerned with itself and the subject matter than with the audience.
• A theatre performance invites admiration, delivers inspiration as a byproduct, and change as a chance product.
• Those who benefit are primarily the cast and crew, who live through the story and the process of making it. Therein lies the value and satisfaction. Audience members are not expected to have that same level of satisfaction.
• Theatre is an isolated event, consumed for the joy of it, and sought as a place for retreat, entertainment, or for being with friends. It is not embedded in real local communities, with real behavior-altering effect. Theatre should be more pervasive than paying taxes. It isn't.
• Theatre is usually authoritarian, inspired by works of established authors, and not by people's immediate lives in surrounding communities. Surely, the authors emerge from their own community, and good work takes time, but my point is that theatre is produced to be looked at, and not to transform life explicitly.

I imagine theatre with a stronger focus on developement — as an integral part of local community life; not as an intellectual challenge, but as an outlet for change; not as a punctual event, but as a regular practice; not as inspiration, but as a mirror of issues in surrounding life; not as a refuge from life; but as a piece in it; not as a celebration of art, but as an artful practice of living reality.