They're showing That Night Follows Day in Rotterdam as part of De (Internationale) Keuze van de Rotterdamse Schouwburg
in September and are busy working on a publication to go with the
season. For the publication there are interviews but they've also set
up a complicated email thing whereby different artists in the prgoramme
get to propose questions to each other. So, yesterday, this in email:
"The question that Pavol Liska and Kelly Cooper of the Nature
Theater of Oklahoma ask you is: 'How specifically do you subvert your
habits? How do you trick yourself, on the most practical level,
so your own work keeps changing and surprising you? How do you
cultivate your creative longevity?'"
And my answer:
"I don't have a strategy for this. I get tricked by accident - by
being too tired, too busy, by being distracted, by getting fascinated
with something that is happening, by becoming delirious (in a banal
way, not thinking of hallucinogens), by making mistakes, generating
accidents or by following a flow. I guess a 'strategy' could be putting
yourself in a position where all that is more likely, however one would
do that wether over a period of hours, days, weeks, months or years. As
if creativity were a matter of making mistakes that you quite like and
then trying (with all your best 'craft') to live and deal well with the
consequences."
I also proposed a question to Pavol and to Kelly, and to Lina Saneh
and Rabih Mroué from Lebanon, and the other artists in the season
including René Pollesch and Romeo Castellucci. Do they consider
themslves to be optimists? I'll post here if there are any responses.
Strange. With our own opening for That Night Follows Day coming up in
the evening but the cast of kids all at school of course, we somehow have the whole day free. Seemingly (and sadly) unable to face a day in the Brussels sunshine or
doing something other than work Richard and I find another dark room with no windows to sit in and go to watch a rehearsal
for a new performance by Edit Kaldor, a piece called Point Blank.
Its going to be great I think. Her first solo piece Or Press Escape
remains a real highlight performance for me from the last ten years, and this new
one looks set to be a great follow-up to it – related in its formal
structure and conceits, but pushing out in new directions too. In these
pieces looking at how our lives and thought-processes can be approached
through the model of the computer screen and software, and the
computers’ structure of folders, communications and data storage,
Edit’s doing something that I think very few other people (in
performance at least) are approaching.
The funny thing about watching other people’s
rehearsals (or visiting their studios) is that somehow things (issues,
structures, problems) can often seem so much more visible to you than
they are when you're looking at your own work. At times this is very much a
mirage, I know. But often it seems you can see the problems that other people are facing -
including dilemmas and possible avenues for solution and escape - in
ways that you can't with your own material, which is always somehow too
close and too overly invested-in to be seen clearly.
In Brussels already for the opening of That Night Follows Day. All
looking good so far. The fact that we had to make decisions about text
(and almost everything else) months ago so that the kids could have
fair chance to learn it and feel confident, means that things for us
have been pretty relaxed in this final period. The kids are doing an
amazing job. Last night's rehearsal was kind of weird though because
throughout it the kids were dropping like flies with minor variations
on the old ‘stomach bug’ and ‘it's hot in here I am fainting’ routine.
Started the run with 17 onstage (how it should be) but within twenty
minutes we were down to 15 and ten minutes later down to 13. As the
last of these left the stage clutching his stomach I think I let out an
audible ‘Christ’ - fearing I guess that soon we’d be down to a mere
handful of kids in the lines, all of them tottering on the edge of
hysterical/sympathetic collapse.
Things picked up after a while though and by the end we were back to 15
onstage, the other two lain down in the dressing rooms. Post
run-through there was a photo-shoot for which, by some magic, everyone
managed to be well.