Meta meta (and a dance by a caped crusader)

What does Nature Theater of Oklahoma's No Dice, a 4-hour epic of sandwiches, accents and the occasional dance...


...have to do with tv shows like 30 Rock?


They're both royally post-post-modern in a meta fashion.

In the first clip, the performers in No Dice begin to discuss dinner theater. As their conversation progresses, their description increasingly resembles what they are actually doing - the goofy costumes, odd accents, inflated acting, etc. They are subverting the oddness of what they are describing by enacting it and, furthermore, have begun to fuck with conventions of accepting the inherent falsehoods of theater.

In the second clip, Liz Lemon talks about a wireless provider service with her colleague, only to turn and face the camera and directly address that same provider, asking where their check is. She has broken both the conventions of the tv fourth wall and of quietly accepting product placement.

Both the performance and the tv series have an awareness of the paradigms of their medium and a desire to display this awareness. In the past decade, more and more entertainment along these lines has populated the theater and creeped into mainstream television - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (toying with teen and horror genres), Family Guy (cartoons and tv), Mark Haim's Goldberg Variations (expectations of dance/movement vocabularies), etc.

It seems like an interesting trend to watch... But that interest could be influenced by the intoxicating combination of cheap sandwiches, dr pepper, a little whiskey, a lot of time in a vacant office space and a nightcap involving tv reruns on my laptop.

To take this out on a random note - the dance starting at 1:35 in the following video of No Dice will remain a highlight of things I've seen this year (listen carefully and you'll hear the performers proclaiming "I'm a sexy robot").