Frightening was the main word that came to mind watching the run through today, at least when I wasn't laughing. We were pushing the edges when we made First Night back in 2001 and the piece doesn't seem to have mellowed. I had shivers several times, as well as a strange alternation of flashbacks and memory blanks - thinking 'oh yes, I remember' one moment and then 'er, was it always like this?' the next. Three performances in London at Toynbee Hall starting Friday 8 June - details here.

Following the Dream of a Performance posting on Monday, Ant Hampton from Rotozaza mailed pictures of a couple of texts by Gordon Craig.

"Your staircases thing yesterday immediately reminded me of a Gordon  Craig 'vision', and i started looking for the book, but couldn't find  it. Later it turned up at B's place and I went home with that and a whole pile of other books i'd lost... What's really strange is that  it's written more or less in the style of a notebook / blog entry,  and then today I'm reading your 'dream of a performance', an idea   also very in sync Craig's 'stage visions'... I'll stick the whole page in here - you probably have this already. i find the way he  writes quite endearing, if not always that 'clear'.."

Ant's amusing pragmatic solution to sending me the text; to take pictures of the book (you can see his hands there, to the left) doesn't work so well at the size of picture I'm using here, so I've retyped a couple of the nicest passages below. I don't really know Craig's writing but from this stuff it seems like an interesting, anecdotal, slighlty antique take on some good ideas. If you want to read more the book Craig On Theatre is edited by J. Michael Walton and you can find it on Amazon here.

Ant is heading to Minneapolis today to present Rotozaza's table/headphone performance Etiquette. It's at the Guthrie though I'm not sure about exact dates and times... so I guess use Google if you happen to be in the area and want to attend.

"There are two kinds of drama and... they are very sharply divided. These two I would call the drama of speech and the drama of silence  and I think that Maeterlink's streams, fountains and the rest come under the heading of the drama's of silence - that is to say dramas where speech becomes paltry and inadequate... If we pursue this thought further we find that there are many things other than nature which enter into this drama of silence. [For example]... architecture. There is something so human and so poignant to me in a great city at a time of the night when there are no people about and no sounds. It is dreadfully sad until you walk till six o'clock in the morning. Then it is very exciting. And among all the dreams that the architect has laid upon the Earth, I know of no more lovely things than his flights of steps leading up and leading down, and of this feeling about architecture in my art I have often thought how could one give life (not a voice) to these places, using them to a dramatic end.. And so I began with a drama called The Steps. This is the first design, and there are three others. In each design I show the same place but the people who are cradled in it belong to each of its different moods."

*

"Here we see a man battling through a snowstorm, the movements of both snow and man being made actual. Now I wonder whether it would be better if we should have no snowstorm visualised, but only the man, making his symbolical gestures which should suggest to us a man fighting against the elements. In a way I suppose this would be better.

Still I have some doubts; for, following that line of argument in its logical sequence, then, would it not be still more near to art if we had no man, but only the movement of some intangible material which would suggest the movements which the soul of man makes battling against the soul of nature? Perhaps it would be better to have nothing at all."

What was most strange perhaps, watching Dirty Work again last night, nine years since we first performed it in England, was that it almost felt easy - or at least *not difficult* - in the way that the culture changes around things over the years, making them possible, or thinkable somehow. Back in 1998 it seemed like a big ask (or even a provocation or an affront) from us that an audience would just listen to a performance that consists of talking for an hour; that a piece would so self-consciously refuse to have any action, that it would instead conjure action virtually, through language alone. Watching the piece now that all seemed perfectly OK, a possibility everyone in the room could admit to, a fact that left the piece quite free to simply get on and do what it wanted and needed to do. It went really well.

I was shocked by how *material* some of the text seems. How much really like an event in the room it can be when Cathy says, for example, describing one scence in the 'imaginary performance' which the whole piece comprises:

"The dissection of the corpses begins,
in an atmosphere of unease.
Cuts are made from adams apple to abdomen,the skin is peeled back and clamped..."

Another strange thing is how short the piece feels! Just (almost) an hour in fact. These days we'd make it twice the length I'm sure... And with that there'd come a whole new difficulty!

One more performance in Toynbee tonight (6 June) and then we move on to the other piece First Night. See this previous post for all the details on place, dates and times.  Checkout the rest of the Artsadmin Summer Season too - there's lots of interesting work there including two projects from Wendy Houstoun, a new piece from Gary Stevens and something from Michael Atavar.

_{The photo above is by Hugo Glendinning.} 

The stage is a dip. We're looking down a hill of rich green grass and the performers walk slowly form the bottom at the start of the show, coming up the hill to speak with us, the audience, as one might arrive to a picnic and greet friends who've arrived already and  settled in some nice spot. We can see them coming for a long time. Once they've said hi they turn around and walk back down again. There is some kind of house-structure at the bottom, with plaster peeling on the walls.

Later they are dancing outside the house-structure and after a while I'm making gestures to the performers that certain people should hide or lie down. It seems important that we get a scene with one person alone. On-stage it's the regular crew of Forced Entertainment, with the addition of Franko B who's whole presence is not surprisingly very different than the rest, and who I find myself watching too much. At one point he's watering a tree, the watering can containing some kind metallic glitter. Its great but kind of distracting.

Later still everyone seems to be playing-dead - corpses strewn around on the grass - and a couple of performers, down there at the bottom of the hill are slowly dragging the bodies from off the grassy slope and off-stage. It looks like the scene of a massacre, something almost rural. I guess related to images we saw in the Deutsche Historische Museum last week showing Nazi slaughter of whole Czech villages where they suspected resistance fighters might be based. In the performance there's music playing. Its very moving - the scene with the slow removal of the bodies from the hillside down there at the distance and I know we're onto something - but the music is something vaguely ethnic and lamenting and its too much, too suitable, too cloying somehow. I'm yelling on to the stage and gesturing that they should find something 'more rock, or maybe rap.. something with energy' to counteract the tone. Clipse would be good maybe. Or Patti Smith. It will be moving anyway, I am yelling as people onstage rifle thru CD's to find something else,  we don't need the sad music, lose the music. It will be more moving if the music cuts against the scene.

When I wake I'm still half in the dream, trying to work out if the sight-lines to a descending hill of this sort might make such a setting practical or not.