 |
| The Cast of I am I |
By Mike Czuba
When Dancing Monkey Theatre produced I AM I in 2009 at the Players’ Theatre, we wanted to push the ideas of what independent, contemporary, new works could be. We also understood we weren’t attempting anything new. We were simply creating a new Mash-Up. We took some of the tastier bits of theory from Brecht, Artaud and Brook, the slickness of film and the sonic boom of a live concert. We didn’t turn our back on our old friend Aristotle and his elements of Tragedy (Story, Character, Thought, Diction, Music and Spectacle), but ignored his descending order of importance, flattened it all out and let them exist in the same time and space. So in the end, Spectacle becomes just as important as Story. We also gave ourselves an internal code of conduct which explicitly stated that ‘good-enough’ is not good enough and in fact is unacceptable.
