I've been writing for a performance lecture as part of a big Post-Modern Dramatrugy Conference in Frankfurt on Saturday:
I know that I often talk about mistakes in performance (or in text), about errors, and about the liveness and dynamic force (of rupture) that comes from those things.. but watching the kids pantomime late last year I was suddenly aware of how controlled the work I've done, alone and with Forced Entertainment is, always, in fact - how very stage-managed and on top of the game we like to be. That first night of the pantomime was a huge rolling exhibition of distraction, nervous ticks, absent-mindedness, costume-tangles, nose-picking, disputes about cues, miss-timing and generally ill-advised stage behaviour. I’m sure it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary as a performance involving 38 kids goes but it was pretty complex.
My favourite scene was the one where the whole of the Royal family, the court, Aladdin, Widow Twankey and a motely crue of hangers on, servants and townspeople were supposedly frozen into statues by a spell from the genie, as instructed by the evil Abanazer. The sight of 38 kids on the stage, 36 of them attempting to be perfectly still was pretty captivating, mainly because so few of them could get close to it. Almost everywhere you looked there was wavering and blinking, fidgeting, cramping or just a good-natured lack of concentration. The kids performing were so very very there in it though, so revealed, so visible in everything they did, intentional or not, that it was impossible not to love this scene, for all its failure as an illusion of magically induced stillness.
I guess the big difference (between the kids as performers and ourselves) is that if we ever did such a thing as this 'frozen scene' in rehearsal/improvisation for a theatre performance we’d very likely spend the next six weeks studying the tape of it, notating and plotting the timeline, trying to understand its dramaturgy, isolating key or feature moments, comparing one improvised version to another and another and another, cherry picking good bits. This done we'd probably end up trying to fix some things, or simply letting them settle as such things do inevitably by dint of repetition, so that in the end the scene's broad shape could be more-or-less reproduced (a scene with a structure, a piece of time that unfolds with a particular direction, a piece of time with a particular weight that can be used as point or counterpoint in a larger dramaturgy) even though the scene's detail would stay live, playable, endlessly contingent in the way that performance always is.
In early research and rehearsals with Forced Entertainment. The collective talking, fooling and digging around for clues, trying to get a scent or catch a hold of something we want to pursue. This part is always hard hard (hard hard) work, and in some way (perhaps an optical illusion) always seems to feel harder than ever before. Ratio right now must be something like 5 hours talking to one hour of practical work. In the studio we are circling and looping and blundering around in the same territory though so something seems to be happening, unable to get a clear position but slowly certain landmarks become clear as they come into view repeatedly thru the fog and the mud. Seems strange that a process so utterly unforgiving (florescent light/no daylight, relentless pulling apart of ideas, diet of coffee and water, room is concrete) can also have me crying with laughter some days. And sometimes, when you really expect nothing, people make the smartest moves in improvisation and suddenly the whole conversation is turned on its head.
When dancer and choreographer Wendy Houstoun first worked with us on Bloody Mess she wrote this piece describing “… a sense of waiting for some silence to fall over the group – of waiting for everyone to give up trying to make it better.” After this kind of silence is generally when something can happen.
Kate McIntosh, whose Loose Promise rehearsal I wrote about recently here, mailed me an image from the studio.
I had some really interesting back and forth in email with Julie Tolentino, who sent more thoughts about her work, and the text I wrote about her 24 hour dance performance A True Story About Two People, recently here and here. Here's a part of what she wrote:
"what captured me... was that you discussed the 'leaving'. after the premiere of this work in NY, this was the most memorable and poignant experiences, as well as the most visceral and palpable. if there was any sensation that was heightened, it was as if i could feel the start of the departure between me and my [dance] partner - ages it seemed, before the partner would actually leave. or if i didn't feel it, i was acutely aware of the palpable 'exiting trail' - the moment [of] the last separation of physical touch. i was shocked every time at the depth of sensation, the pliable withdrawing, the real sense of loss. also the manoever. what was slipping away in the form of composure and decision-making. also, it was as if i was a butt of my own joke, unplanned and unexpected.... i think i was surprised at the continued, still surprising density of those experiences in the berlin presentation."
Watching Kate McIntosh rehearse in Leuven day-before-yesterday. The piece is called Loose Promise and it's a project that I've contributed some text to via a series of triggers/frames that Kate sent to myself along with a number of other writers (Deborah Levy and Mike Harrison included). Green carpet was one of the triggers; there really had to be a green carpet somewhere. Great watching the rather disparate fragments accumulate in the space and through the time of the piece, and great watching Kate accumulate the traces of the stories too through the actions and images that she's slowly building up around them. At this point the text itself - strewn as pages on the floor, folded in clumps, shredded in piles - is a major presence in the performance. Very often its under duress - torn, soaked, falling to pieces in her hands.
Still reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts which is also dripping in text - at the level of structure you're navigating layers of stories, and texts nested inside each other etc but as you drop into the vivid madness of the story itself you soon find characters hiding out in vast labyrinths of books, carrying stolen letters as psychic decoys, or throwing bombs made of fireworks and typewriter keys. In a beautifully Burrough's move (with echoes of his essays in The Job) Hall's central character periodically hides his presence in a room by placing dictaphones in its corners playing back tapes in which other people have been recorded as they talk or go about their their daily lives - the result a kind of identity camouflage.
There's a great pleasure reading strange, intelligent, funny and compelling fiction that happens to come from, and is at times set in the north of England. Some perverse pleasure in seeing your own landsacpe mythologised. With Hall and Tony White Sheffield Hallam University starts to look like quite a little contemporary fiction-factory. Raw Shark is very smart. There's a nod to House of Leaves, to Philip K. Dick maybe, and something of a David Mitchell-ness to it but there's plenty of originality, invention and wit in how its put together. I'm liking how these ideas books (like Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Tibor Ficher's The Thought Gang...) are so full-on in embracing plot as a device - action and super-abstract ideas all tangled up with each other. It's an interesting moment.
Just now posted a new story to Barbara Campbell for tonights 1001 Nights Cast. Written on the move between Brussels and Graz, with a connection through Stuttgart. Pleased with the results, but not with the travel-sickness/nausea produced by trying to write in the van that picked us up from the airport. Ughhh. Barbara's live webcast performance of the story will be at around 7pm, thereafter it will be added to the archive at 1001.
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