Just writing (below) to Barbara Campbell (1001 Nights Cast) about my own work with Forced Entertainment which circles some of the same territory by very different means, titled And on the Thousandth Night... Wondering now about how these simple rule-based performance pieces are so hard to describe. I guess it's something about the balance between the explicit rules and the ones which are more implicit/unspoken; 'rules' created in fact by having a shared sensibility and frame of references. I guess this kind of shared knowledge is really important to a work like And on the Thousandth Night..., a fact that's something like the flip-side of what I was writing about here.
'And on the Thousandth Night...' is entirely improvised. The only rider to that is that over the years we have done it people have 'favourite' narratives/things they like to work with. These though have to fight and find their place in a structure that is always emerging in live negotiation and strife.
The piece works as a game. One player begins "Once up a time..." or "there was once..." and starts to tell a story. Once it has begun any other player can interrupt *at any point* with the word STOP after which, and starting with "Once up a time..." or "there was once..." begins their own narrative. This process continues, with 8 players/performers, usually for 6 hours. The audience can arrive, depart and return any time they like.
Within the rules of the game (as above) we play a kind of compositional thing - some stories are allowed to go long - 5-8 minutes I guess. Others are cut short ("Once upon a time there was a man..." Being an amusingly short story).
There are a few rules re the stories themselves - no names for people, countries, cities etc. Instead: A policeman, an unhappy queen or a prince or a famous motorcycle stunt rider. A town far away, a small country etc. This means everything takes place in generic story-universe, slightly folk-tale in feel, which serves to level the ground between contemporary stories about love, outsourcing, gardening etc and evidently folk-loric or fairy story-like tales about princesses and dwarves or gothic horrors, or murder stories or sci-fi adventures involving spaceships.We constantly invoke, shift, disrupt and disturb genre in the piece and, in addition to these moves, quote liberally (and incompetently) from narratives we can remember from movies, traditional tales, recently-read fiction and elsewhere. People often steal or reinterpret elements from each others stories, and come back to stories they have begun elsewhere in the piece. Every time a player speaks tho they are obliged to begin at the beginning. There's no sense in which we are collaborating to make *a* story - instead many many competing narratives and versions of those narratives are proposed.
We try to balance the preposterous competitive atmosphere of interruption and general fooling around with allowing space for stories that actually work, or have space to get somewhere even tho no story is ever ever allowed to complete. We try to keep the tone fluid - comical one moment, horrific, tense or intimate or banal the next. It's not unusual for performers to start telling a story about which they know nothing other than the first sentence... The 'game' of the piece is very much about the process of live invention - the desire, struggle and obligation to make something happen, using words.
Following the previous post on Fénéon's Novels In Three Lines, I walked past this - entries in an as yet entirely incomplete compendium of narratives involving different minimally identified 'characters'.
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Following my entry about Cormac McCarthy's powerful book The Roadhere, Ant Hampton mailed pointing at a Guardiancomment piece by George Monbiot which uses the book as a starting point.
have you read felix feneon's 'Novels in Three Lines'. Fantastic.
Since this message didn't come from a number stored in my phone I was puzzled. I could see it was a New York number though and my brain was soon spiralling the list of possible senders of this kind of info, who also (a) happen to have my number but (b) whose numbers I don't have saved. A tricky contemporary problem of sets and subsets - not the first time I've stared at my phone thinking 'who the fuck would send me that'. I was even wondering for a brief moment if this message was some kind of viral spam dreamed up by a weird (or desperate) publishers. Mystery still unsolved I succumbed and texted back to say:
Sounds cool. Who is texting me btw?
(Best to deal with these things head on). To which the reply was:
Graham. New phone.
So that was all solved.
The book - collecting Fénéon's sequence of three-line items for the Parisian daily Le Matin in 1906 - does look like a really great catalogue of super-boiled, narrative poetics and I'm looking forward to picking up a copy. It's translated by Luc Sante too whose Low Life (about historical drink, drugs and other pleasures in Manhattan) is extremely good. Graham (admitting that he had time on his hands) even sent a picture of Novels In Three Lines later. Second time since I started this notebook that someone sent me a picture of a book. Here's a link to the previous.
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Mike Harrison just posted some interesting notes on Long Relay, and blogged this story last week in which an apparently random action gets supposedly explained, and then after years of further research, unexplained again. A new idea of scientific progress.
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This Storm drama here, unfolding in the background 24-7, is pretty gripping too.
Workshop in Amsterdam at AHK the last couple of days, working with Edit Kaldor on her pilot research project about contemporary dramaturgy. Forced Entertainment's Bloody Messis a case study and the 13 students are working two weeks around the piece, exploring practically. It was a pretty intensive/exhausting two days of focus for me and now they continue with Edit alone, headed towards showings next week.
What I liked most perhaps was the potential for miss-hearing and misunderstanding; the ways in which instructions in this context are often taken in unexpected directions. This, for sure, happens more in this workshop situation than in FE rehearsals - since a workshop like this one is a temporary group of people drawn from different disciplines, all with their own baggage and concerns, and who in any case have very different levels of familiarity with the aesthetic of the performance work they're looking at. I really liked this combination of unruly-ness and hesitation though. I liked that there's a friction, a pulling into new places as well as a sensitivity to the rules and frames that are set up, and the work - produced in between these things - was often really strong.
Watching the workshop in the morning yesterday I was already talking with Edit and making temporary assumptions about what material could be useful, and what was destined for some sort of revision or scrap heap. But I tend to be slow, and rather than act immediately on this set of inclinations we tried to keep things open, throwing some of the less defined material into a couple of open-ended improvisational structures, 'just to see'. This was the highlight for me.. Seeing the stuff that had been unclear at first get space and time to be something, to make its potential clear. And seeing how this process also unlocked other material, other potential in the work. I had to remind myself a bit how valuable it can be to take time, to work with things, to see where they can go... instead of making snap judgements. Know nothing as a kind of operating principle. Or maybe know as much as you can and then try to forget it for a while.
(All this of course, in a context where there's a totally absurd short amount of time. So in this instance 'taking time' means pushing something for an extra hour....)
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