Hacking Art Reality

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Theatre hacking: what's it all about?

Coming to a theatre near you …? The Sun's website was hacked in July 2011 by hacking collective Lulzsec. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

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Thursday 10 May 2012

An audacious theatremaker has provided audiences with a tongue-in-cheek audio guide to someone else's production. Cue outrage

Forget the antics of Anonymous or LulzSec or even News International. For my money, the most audacious hacking in recent memory took place at a Montreal theatre last November. Local playwright Olivier Choinière held one of his occasional déambulatoires théâtrals – a kind of promenade theatre where the audience is directed around a public space while listening to an audio play on an MP3 player.
Instead of roaming the streets of Montreal, however, the audience for Choinière's Projet blanc – as this one-night event was called – found themselves being led to outside the city's classical theatre company, the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM).
There, Choinière's audience members were furnished with second-balcony tickets to a production of Molière's The School of Wives and given top-secret instructions to hide their headphones and only put them back on once they were in their seats and the lights went down. When this audience hidden within the larger audience at the TNM pressed the right button at the appointed moment, they were treated to Choinière's wry, running commentary on the production they were watching – a monologue that revolved around the question of why we revive classics in the first place, and asked whether the director had really found the contemporary resonances in Molière's comedy that he claimed in the promotional materials.
Choinière – whose best-known play, Bliss, was presented in a translation by Caryl Churchill at London's Royal Court in 2008 – has dubbed what he executed a "hacking". The philosophy behind it: "to enter, to penetrate another cultural event without necessarily bothering or breaking or destroying." Indeed, Choinière's inaugural theatrical hacking flew under the radar at the time, completely unnoticed by the theatre's staff.
Since word got out, however, a debate over the ethics of Choinière's surreptitious infiltration of another artist's work has been raging. Like any high-profile hacker, the 38-year-old playwright provocateur is being held up as a hero by some, a villain by others. Irritated by what she sees as an aggressive act of disrespect, TNM's artistic director Lorraine Pintal has derided Choinière's work as "parasitical". (In private, she used even harsher language – accusing Choinière of perpetrating a kind of theatrical "rape".)
But an article last month in Montreal daily Le Devoir suggested that Choinière was following in the illustrious artist-as-hacker footsteps of Banksy, who famously smuggled a stuffed rat wearing sunglasses into London's Natural History Museum and hung his own artwork in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Of course, long ago, the theatre had a puckish proto-hacker in another Royal Court playwright, Joe Orton, who with his partner Kenneth Halliwell snuck books out of the library, then returned them with subversively altered dust jackets and blurbs. We can only imagine what Orton's sock puppet Edna Welthorpe would have got up to if s/he had had access to the internet. Personally, I find Choinière's theatrical adaptation of the art of hacking a pretty clever way of making a point – and, ultimately, not any more disruptive to the sacred space of theatre than, say, the current fad for "Tweet seats", reserved seating in which theatregoers are encouraged to post their responses to the play online.
In fact, my mind's been abuzz with ideas for how anarchic artists might secretly spirit audio overlays into all kinds of theatrical productions. And, perhaps, if newspapers do eventually die out, I might find a second career providing commentary tracks to accompany plays – the way US critic Roger Ebert has provided audio commentary for DVD releases of Citizen Kane and Casablanca.
In any case, I eagerly await to see what cultural event Choinière will hack next. And if the TNM remains angry, they should be creative in plotting revenge. As an online commenter on an article about the Canadian controversy recently suggested, why not organise a Molière flash mob to infiltrate one of Choinière's promenade pieces?