The first night of the last weekend ...

... was nuts on the Ubu side. Absolutely nuts. From looking at these shadowy onlookers near the beginning of the evening--

--you probably would not guess that they would be our wildest audience yet. They took the notion of "play" to unprecedented extremes; several of us seriously worried we might have a riot on our hands. NOT the kind of riot Ubu provoked in its first incarnation, when people thought it went too far, but the kind of riot where they were eager to go even farther than we were willing to. Trust me, the place looked like a frat house after a beer blast by the time we (er, they) were done.

As the Carnival Barker, I am partly responsible for the mayhem, because I gave these otherwise innocent-looking folks the very weapons they would soon use against us. (Ever been shot in the face with a Nerf dart?) But I don't think I added that much more to the mix last night than usual. These people just felt like getting rowdy. Spring fever, perhaps? And don't assume it was younguns--the oldest two people in the crowd were the ringleaders.

Ironically, we had originally thought this level of madness might transpire every night, and then when it didn't, we started to take for granted that all future Ubu viewers would be polite and respectful and suss out the unspoken etiquette of our unusual setup. But no!

Me, I thought the whole affair was fascinating as a study in mob psychology. (As Ma Ubu put it after the show, "I've never been on the receiving end of a 'Power to the people!' chant before this.") Then again, I wasn't the one getting pelted with plastic paratroopers and dodging 70 exploding confetti bomblets.

What will tonight's final (and already long sold-out) performance bring? Stay tuned!

WoyUbian Whiplash

Last Saturday I sat on the Woyzeck side of the show. As I had expected the
the Ubu projections served the Woyzeck play by appearing to be the character Woyzeck's hallucinations. What I didn't anticipate was how jarring the process would be: how over the course of the performance the feeling grew that I was not only wrenched back and forth between two plays but between two mutually exclusive world views. Until I began to hate Woyzeck - because he increasingly personified hopelessness, greyness, death. The Ubu visions burst in defying his relentless life, but he didn't learn anarchic joy from them, instead he found a road to murder. His side crushed life.

I was glad to see him go through the wall and away. But then the Ubuites came out through that same wall, popping into existence right there in front of me. And suddenly, what had been brash and funny, was horrible. They were horrible. They no longer represented life but were voyeuristic, vampiric consumers of other people and their painful lives. They were on the side of the evil dead, and the poor Woyzeck, now staring out of the projection, was the only thing worth nurturing. Whiplash!!!!

Transhumans, tweets, games without frontiers, and the joys of turning in your fellow citizens

Time for another collection of items that caught my attention recently because of their connection to aspects of WoyUbu:



•This hourlong episode of the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge devoted to computers is a must for anyone interested in the ramifications of techno-culture. I recommend the interviews with Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of Creative Commons, on copyright issues raised by mash-ups and other digital art; Sherry Turkle of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self on the ways in which we are developing relationships with personal robotic devices; and sociologist James Hughes, executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, on the quest to merge human flesh with computer technology in search of immortality and/or "transhuman" interspecies breeding; plus a couple of quick mash-ups by GirlTalk and DJ Spooky. But the real treat for Ubu-ites is surely the segment on video game designer Jason Rohrer; I have no idea how well known he is among those in the know, but his work sounds pretty remarkable and far beyond the average computer game. (Here's Passage, about mortality, and Between, a game about dreams and "stale evidence" of the Other. And here's Rohrer's homepage, which contains links to more games and all kinds of other stuff.)



•Much of what Rohrer says about games is echoed in intriguing ways in this brief segment from another public radio show on Peg Tyre's book The Trouble with Boys, and specifically its take on violent fantasy in video games (like the one in our Ubu). In a nutshell, Tyre argues that such games can potentially serve a beneficial role as an outlet for natural tendencies. She, like Rohrer, has much to say about the essence of "play" in the lives of both adults and children.

•This is the funniest (and smartest) thing I've ever encountered about the phenomenon of Twitter and Facebook status udpates. Three cheers for Brian Unger!

•Finally, courtesy of BoingBoing, an ad campaign from the London police urging citizens to report suspicious activity:

Cory Doctorow notes the "stupidity" of

the idea that you should report your neighbors to the police for looking at the creepy surveillance technology around them. This is the first step in making it illegal to debate whether the surveillance state is a good or bad thing.

Perhaps this weekend I will encourage the Ubu audience to report any Woyzeck spectators they catch staring at the surveillance cameras aimed at them ...

(S)mash it up

Ever since we first discussed an online component to WoyUbu: An Intermedia Mash-up, I've been wanting to include some links to actual musical mashups and never quite got around to it. Most of my favorites are at least 5 or 6 years old--an eternity in internet years--and I've long since quit seeking out new ones. Mash-ups are an odd phenomenon--one portion of society has still surely never heard of them, while a much smaller contingent is surely so over them by now that they must be cringing at the mere mention of the term. (Even so, I've noticed the word popping up in all sorts of new contexts in the last year, in much the way "deconstruction" made its way from architecture to critical theory to People magazine within about a decade. But it seems to me that WoyUbu really does exactly what crafty DJs do, as noted in this preview of the show.)

What I will mention here is the recent work of internet sensation Kutiman. Like at least 3 million other people, I first learned about him through a friend's email, although the best intro to what he's all about is this recent NPR segment. On second thought, his cut-and-paste videos speak for themselves (albeit in the words and music of collaborators he's never met). Here's one I particularly like:



Got a favorite mash-up? Share the link with us in the comments section.

Ubu from the audience's perspective

Tonight's performance was pretty hoppin'--thanks in large part to the crowd. And talk about crowded! We turned away at least 20 people, and crammed about twice as many people into the Ubu/"Play" side as we've ever done before. (If you're planning to attend next weekend, be sure to reserve your tickets ASAP!) Here's a small portion of the Ubu-ites, just before the show:



Tonight I passed a camera around and asked these lovely folks to shoot whatever they wanted. Alas, the batteries died about 15 minutes into the show, but here are a few examples of what they found photoworthy during that time:








Later in the show some of these same folks, and many other Ubu audience members, provided live Twitter updates of what was unfolding before them (or in their sordid imaginations). You can read what they wrote here (I think).

Live from our second Friday night show!

Here we are, live on the Ubu side of the wall, during our 3rd performance. Going well, so far, I'd say. Well, things are not looking so good for Pa Ubu or Woyzeck, but that's none of our concern. Let's hear what the Ubu audience has to say thus far:



FREE CANDY!! - Catherine Willett

Definitely choose the "playing" side... mad fun. - Matt Uebbing

Playing drinking games with my son on the "action" side...fun! CHRIS UEBBING

I ... I saw a bear lose its head! - Christopher Schobert

who wants to play Super Ubu Smash Brothers? the playing side does ... Jared Mobarak

You like that don't you? Adam Boyle

Boggerlas is h-o-t-t hot ~Stacey Kromer

The robots are awesome!! Brandon Passno

Live from the week 2 pickup rehearsal PLUS! We've got Twitter now!

First things first: We've got a Twitter account now, so if you'd like to get a special message from midway through the show (or any other time when you least expect it), just become one of our first followers and we'll tweet you right.

Now, then, bearing in mind John's apology for not including more Woyzeck images in his ever-more-ravishing slideshow, here's a shot (taken about two minutes ago) of the soldier and his captain from a perspective absolutely no one can see during the play proper:



I think it's safe to say that we all feel like the first week of the show was about a month ago, so it's nice to be reuniting for our weekly pickup rehearsal just to make sure we're all remembering who does what and what happens when. On the other hand, it's oddly regressive to be back in an empty room again, sans audience. If you haven't seen the show yet--or even if you've only seen half of it--we looking forward to seeing you in the next 2 weeks!