Cultural Exhanges - Andy Lavender

My second Cultural Exchanges experience was held by Andy Lavender on the topic of ‘Cultivating the Hybrid: blended theatre and performance’, of which I had no pervious knowledge. In fact through out most if this Lecture I had almost no idea what Andy Lavender was talking about. I am not a drama student; neither do I have much of an interest in theatre or any performance art for that matter. I didn’t understand the terminology he used or the jokes he made using it. I was lost for half of the lecture, however I feel like the parts I did understand were the most interesting. This might have been because they were the only parts I actually heard, because although I was listening intently and trying to grasp reason and meaning from the words spilling out of Andy Lavender’s mouth I wasn’t truly hearing and understanding. I may feel like they were the most important parts of the lecture because they were the only parts I actually took away from the lecture and remember fully. These parts were the descriptions of the plays, or performance theatre acts, he was describing. They were interesting because it wasn’t just one media being used to make once piece of art, it was many being used to make one epic performance that tickled all five senses of it’s audience. There were smells and tastes and videos to watch as well as characters to act out so you were literally in the performance yourself. I found this part of the lecture interesting because it was as if every act from the performance was a piece of art on it’s own, and yet together it created something so original that can only be described as genius. On the other hand I suppose it could be described as pretentious but a bit of pretentiousness hurts no one and intrigues many. I would very much like to see one of these performances, I use the term ‘see’ loosely of course, and I would suggest that seeing a performance such as the two Andy Lavender described to us last week in that lecture for Cultural Exchange week would benefit us culturally more than the lecture did.

Rachael Byrne