Most people know how a scientific experiment works: you have a thesis, or initial question, create a controlled scenario where you can test that thesis, and through testing, you can come up with a tentative answer to the question you are asking. The answer is important, but if you don’t set up the test right, then the answer doesn’t mean anything.
This isn’t all that different from artistic experimentation. The experimental spirit is one of creative investigation. Like a scientific experiment, an artistic one requires a set of ground rules or questions, what you might call the work’s thesis. The process of creating a work is the testing of this thesis, and the results the, well, the results. The thesis might be a little bit broader than a scientific one (what would it look like if we devised this show using each cast-member’s interpretation of the word “joy”), and it might not necessarily be conscious. But every creator who is experimenting enters into the work with a spirit of discovery.
The Dead White Zombies’ 2018 production of Holy Bone in South Dallas is probably the clearest example of this creative spirit I can think of. Intending to create an interactive piece, members of the company went to public spaces where they recorded people’s reactions to a series of questions. They then refined the questions and identified different species of response. In this way they were able to figure out how audience members would react to different scenarios, and build scenes out of it. If you want a definition of an experiment, you can’t get much closer than that: asking questions until those questions transform into art.
But the real spark that turned Holy Bone into a production I still think about three years later was an accident. The Zombies wanted to perform in an abandoned factory in South Dallas, but the fire marshal said they couldn’t have more than ten people in the space at once. The artistic director, Thomas Riccio, realized that, while they couldn’t put a bunch of people in one space, they could take a small amount of people through a series of different spaces. According to D Magazine:
Riccio started to think about creating a piece of theater that didn’t necessarily take place in any particular space, but rather used the entire city as its theater, expanding the definition of a theatrical production so broadly that the Zombies could claim any space in which to perform.
The result was something that I find difficult to describe except with academic labels like “immersive”, “processual”, or “ritualistic,” that are ultimately inadequate. Through accident and deliberate experimentation, the Zombies created an experience akin to an individualized spiritual journey, where I wandered through an unfamiliar neighborhood with only a loose idea of where I was supposed to go. Intermingled with people drinking beers out on their porch or walking their dog in the humid night was a shaman who offered to help me understand what I needed to give up to move forward in my life. The woman who cast my fortune as I entered into one abandoned home was just as much a part of the scenery as the folks in the taco stand we all gathered at afterward. I lost myself time and again, but being lost was just part of the journey. For a few hours that evening, the zombies convinced me that spirits were real, and communion with them as practical as breathing.
Now, the Zombies are an experimental theatre company. Riccio once told me that he chose the name Dead White Zombies so that they would never do anything normal. But for me, Holy Bone transcended the dichotomy of normal and not normal. It simply was what it was, a fully realized entity that did not strive for pretense. Holy Bone was experimental, yes. But its experimental aspect came from a “how”, a manner of doing, not from its resemblance to other experimental artwork.
On the Shoulders of Giants 