The New York Times has a nice long piece on Ant Hampton and Rotozaza here. It's great to see the work getting attention. Can't remember but NYT may require a log-in to read stuff, in which case I'm sorry - at least you only have to do it once.
The troupe had already been practicing an unusual brand of cerebral theater, building darkly psychological dramas about surveillance, communication and modern love that use a mix of actors and unrehearsed guest performers who are told what to do and say by an Orwellian voice offstage. This chilling aesthetic is based on a certain uneasy ambiguity among viewers over whether a guest performer knows the script or is just following instructions.
But if the line between audience and performer seems blurred, Rotozaza’s new drama, “Etiquette,” which they created with Paul Bennun, erases it entirely.
This afternoon at the Star Wars exhibition with S.
Weird to be somewhere so very like a museum for something that doesn't even exist, which never existed. The artefacts are all there though, in their dim-lit cabinets, with all their labels and explanations in three European languages, so you more or less have to accept it.
But perhaps what's even more strange than the exaggerated/mock reality the films are afforded here, is to somehow imagine the opposite. To think that on a certain day in the early 1980's someone called George Lucas sat down and hand-wrote a ten page outline for a film that had not yet been made and called it Star Wars. And that subsequently he and certain other people sat down to imagine the characters, locations and objects of its world - making drawings and plans of what they might look like, going through versions until they were happy with these plans. I say this is strange because it can seem from the current moment, that these things must have always been known. It's so familliar, so much part of the background these last twenty odd years, even though I'm not remotely a fan of the films. To think that it all had to be invented, even to imagine that it might have turned out otherwise, to see it as something other than a cultural given, is minor-league unsettling, like one of those first incidents that plague characters near the start of Philip K. Dick novels, before they really start to go crazy.
06/08/2007 14:16 wish i could take an aerial picture of my brain 06/08/2007 14:16 cos all my thoughts are very well organized that way 06/08/2007 14:16 its when they try to get on the paper the problems begin
Like all its neighbours the street is jammed incoherence in the form of restaurants and bars, part-Spanish, part-Turkish, part-Mexican grill, a lot of Italian, some Zorba the Greek, some Dim Sum, some Indonesian, some non-descript and some Indian. Your eyes take a beating first-off from the jumble of signs (some neon, some not) and the overlapping maze of job-lot discount plush and patio furnitures that are breaking ranks all over the street plus its hard not to wonder why the décor/colour-schemes of these places look like they got chosen by the managers cousin or by his brothers second-wife or like they were simply determined by some bloke who sold them the remnant 12 litres of paint left over from some other place he’d painted elsewhere. Anyhow. It’s not a spectacular area in any way – to call it run-down would give it a glamour that it doesn’t have. Its more a kind of roughly approximated but somehow defective acceptability that seeps, grows and cancers everywhere just like the narrow pavement with its topping of sporadic food remains and broken wine glass. No big deal.
A young guy, skinny, looks like he might be Spanish, sporting Superman t-shirt and with him a girl in white shirt and jeans - could be his younger sister or maybe girlfriend, impossible to say. They come hurrying determinedly through the crowds of people that are looking for somewhere to eat, or who maybe have just eaten already and want to find somewhere they can go to forget about it, which probably won't take long. They come past the dazed or stoned Australians and the drunk English and the grim Germans, and the family packs of Americans - all kids with braces walking single file and yelling ahead to their dad - and the occasional groups of Dutch-guys-in-suits-and-ties types (impossible to read). In her hand she (the girl with the Spanish guy in his Superman t-shirt) is carrying a muffin or a cake of some kind, wrapped in cellophane, and as they come through the crowd past the table where we are sitting, they break their stride, just for a very short moment, in which she holds the cake flat in her hand and he photographs it, with the small digital camera that he has, and once the picture is taken they are gone - vanished in the endless flow of pedestrians and incomplete and incomprehensible narratives that make up the night.
*
S's nightmare, he said, seemed like an episode of something, because first it was happening and it was horrible and then it stopped, and he thought it was over, and then it all just started up again.
My friend K. wrote about starting rehearsal work on a bunch of text material she's using in a new project, with words from different writers (me included). First work in the studio has simply been reading the texts aloud. I really like what she says below about this part of the process, and her articulation of the relationship between text and performer, very smart.
Of course as soon as I'm trying this - the main questions come up....One thing is - why have a body in space telling these stories? Why
not leave them to be read - published, or on the net. This has got me
into the area of 'what are these stories doing to me/you as I tell
them?' - something about what happens to a body when it is taken over
by the images it is reading. It's reminding me of stigmata - a story
that takes over a body, or maybe a body that takes over a story, anyway, that the thing leaks into the body of the teller, and the
listener too. That helps a bit necessitate the telling of them.
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