What OWS Might Show Us about Staging
Just about two months to the day it began, the original Occupy Wall Street’s run was over. It didn’t exactly get the kind of perceived permanence that shows like Miss Saigon or The Lion King achieved a few miles north around Times Square, but it’s not simply coincidence that the terms “staging” and “staged” appear frequently in conjunction with news stories about OWS locations around the U.S. That’s because, like any interactive phenomenon, organic or premeditated, these protests have shown some level of production values.The crowd-sourced “microphone” — the practice of waves of attendees passing the comments of speakers back into the crowd to avoid the use of a PA system or bullhorn that would trigger a noise complaint and police action — is both an elegant plot device and a PA manufacturer’s bad dream. And while OWS studiously avoided evidencing any hint of hierarchical leadership, certain functions necessary to any production emerged on their own, including on-site medical tents and someone churning out press releases.
So after two months of the center stage in Manhattan, and what could be months to come of other OWS Hoovervilles, especially in warmer climes around the country, what does Occupy Wall Street, The Show, have to tell us about staging?
Lighting
Once you’ve hit a certain level on the nightly news radar, your lighting issues start to be taken care of. High-wattage electronic news gathering crews illuminated Zuccotti Park rather well, enough to read by, even if their presence tended to ebb and flow with the newscast hours of 6 and 11 p.m. This also created focus points on the Zuccotti “stage,” intended or not, that had a kind of Bonaroo effect, bringing attention to various groups in the camp as their level of activity increased, from bongo playing to full frontal assaults by the NYPD. Anytime there was an announcement from within the camp that all hands (literally, nothing happened without unanimity, shown by silent raised hands) had agreed to, the media accommodatingly focused their high beams on the speakers. Aside from the stage that was Zuccotti Park itself, supplied for as long as it was by a timid and confused private owner and a conflicted Mayor Bloomberg, OWS got one of its biggest production costs provided for free.
Video
There were no massive Daktronics screens in Zuccotti Park, but OWS did have a video component. Press coverage, which was scant early on in the occupation, picked up markedly after amateur video surfaced online showing a police officer using pepper spray on protesters. The New York Times reported that video of confrontations with the police, often filmed by the protesters themselves, propelled further television coverage. And for more than half the time, the Zuccotti Park encampment was still there, one observer constantly live-streamed events from his cellphone camera. The Times reported that, according to the live-streamer’s host site, Ustream, at the peak of the protests, 30,000 people were watching his shaky video feed at any given moment.
Sound
Lacking any kind of sound reinforcement for the reasons mentioned above, Zuccotti Park’s audio was mostly a background buzz of OWS’ large cast punctuated by police radio and bullhorned warnings and scored by constant percussion. What some pay $150 to see Blue Man Group do in a theater, the residents of the Financial District in lower Manhattan got for free, damn near nonstop. But the star of the show appeared only at the end, part of the raucous denouement: the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) that shot blasts of pain-inducing tones from its array of piezoelectric transducers into the crowd at a reported 162 dB, far in excess of the pain threshold at around 130 dB. Think of the LRAD as the ultimate line array: the outer transducers are not completely in phase with the inner transducers, canceling out some of the outermost waves and making the sound less audible outside of the beam, whose width is rated as narrow as 15°. Now that’s focused audio.
Soundtrack
David Crosby, Graham Nash, bongos. Move along. Nothing to see here. Go back to your homes and families.
A Narrative
Regardless of their claims to the contrary, “reality” shows are heavily scripted, and even fluff like awards programs have a narrative thread in their teleprompters. OWS’ narrative was written on the fly by its proponents and opponents, creating the kind of conflict that keeps your attention. Woodstock and Altamont set the narrative tone for music festivals for decades to come, creating a hopeful character saddled with its own dark side. Even the disasters become part of the plot, and we stay until the end because we want to know how it all turns out.
Obviously, I’m being a bit facetious here, but the takeaway is that the tightly-planned, highly-controlled staged event isn’t the only one out there. Flash mobs and Twitter-guided takeovers are being co-opted for commercial use. How to — and to what extent it’s possible to — apply the principles of conventional staging in a more organic, ad hoc and spontaneous social environment will be a challenge for those who want to occupy the live event business in the future.
