Well Different: The sunset of the Everyman
There was a time when talking about mental health was something of a cultural taboo.
That changed in recent years and recent festivals, but still the spotlight has mainly only shone on depression and addiction.
This year our research kept uncovering artists telling stories about very troubling episodes in their life. Of psychosis, disability, prejudice and trauma.
In many ways live performance might seem the most difficult arena to tell these stories. You could write about them, post about them, make a film about them without having to eyeball a lost tourist from Basildon on a Tuesday.
Each in their own way though was using what makes live performance unique deliberately. That very close proximity of the audience, the intimacy of small venues, the verbal and unspoken feedback between performer and artist was what they were looking for.
Their goal in doing so did not seem to be simply communicating a unique story as many might guess. It was much more to invite the audience in to experience what makes unique life experiences universal.
Each performance was an invite to see how a story that only one person can possibly tell connects everyone watching to the stories of everyone else.
In other words, we have not just broken the taboos we’ve accepted that what’s normal is diverse.
To make a story universal we used to make the protagonist an everyman figure. Now we are starting to do the opposite.
A lot of what’s on fringe stages will surely hit other media soon, but this will also have a lot of implications beyond that.
ALL OF US TOGETHER, BEING TOTALLY DIFFERENT
Shows like:
could each be called confessional shows.
This has become a format audiences know and love in recent years, and the marketing for each played into the genre.
Yet the creative team behind each told us in each interview that they were playing with those expectations. They were subverting what people expect of them in order to connect (maybe even implicate) the audience in the story in a new way.
Now before you put this into the box of ‘gen z trends’ we should note this cut across generations and styles in important ways.
Each show we have spoken about so far breaks out from a taboo but also a diagnosis, refusing to let stories be entirely medicalised.
The Nature of Forgetting was one of a range of shows that looked at the experience of memory loss, and dementia, in new and beautiful ways.
These are diverse stories we seldom see onstage, but this summer we saw a host of them at the same time.
THE CONTEXT
In Edinburgh in August we saw an art trend, but this connects to a powerful social trend.
More and more of us have what government tends to call an ‘access need.’
We know that we are an ageing society but also 16.1 million people in the UK, or 24% of the population, are now classified as disabled. This number has increased over the past decade, with 3.9 million more disabled people than ten years ago according to Activity Alliance | Disability Inclusion Sport.
Yet from policy makers, to city planners, to product designers we have not yet seen much of a shift in how we think about the future as a result.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR PEOPLE WHO
MAKE NEW THINGS
On a basic level, this August in Edinburgh showed a pretty convincing case for the idea that a host of new stories will be bubbling up into tv and media in the coming years.
The break away from the everyman character seems set.
Yet that is surely only the start.
Neurodiversity, mobility access needs, ageing are all routinely treated as edge cases by designers in all kinds of disciplines.
That is increasingly economically short-sighted, but will soon surely be socially unacceptable soon.
Difference is now default, and its faulty not to see it.
How will we design products, experiences and brands when we no longer presume that the user is ‘typical’ or has no access need?
Will a sports brand still thrive that only celebrates an old idea of fitness?
In fact how long can festivals like the fringe go on accepting that so few of their venues are accessible?
Change happens slowly then suddenly. Remember all those industry conferences that suddenly discovered they had kept programming all male ‘manels’ for years after it was already a problem?
History doesnt repeat itself but they say it often rhymes.
