The light at the end of the tunnel

I have seen the light at the end of the tunnel. The subway on the Rise Park estate where there used to be a painted rainbow before vandals defaced the community mural. Nothing is left of my childhood. Everything has changed. I have had an epiphany. I have found hope at the bottom of the glass. As the bridesmaids say in Act Two:

BD 1 The glass was half full

BD 2 The glass was half empty

I can write what I want to write. These are the criteria:

It has to be pleasing for me to write
It has to be pleasing for the group to perform
It has to be pleasing for the audience to experience

The process of performance has been distilled into a tryptych of such simplicity. So obvious. There can be no holding back. Even now. I am typing without thinking. Writing without worrying. This is where I need to be to create. No hesitation. Hesitation comes later. I don't know if I should be writing the piece. Or writing about writing the piece. Or writing about writing about writing about the piece. A film crew following a film crew. The project is beset by Derrida's idea of undecidability. Is it a piece of theatre? Or film? Or Performance Art. Am I writing performance or performing writing? Am I a writer or a performer? These are the questions I am asking. Every artwork must ask some questions of art. By writing and performing a piece of amateur dramatic theatre as part of a Performance and Live Art MA am I rendering the amateur into art or rendering the MA into amateur? Right now. I want to write about a drama group enacting an act of drama.

'And so often. A show about a bunch of people presenting a show. A troupe who are not the actual Forced Entertainment troupe but a set of distorted versions of them. A troupe who present a show that is not our show but theirs, and their struggle to get their show right is our show. Let's hope their show goes badly and our show goes well. It's funnier that way.' - Tim Etchells, Live Art and Performance

A play about plays they have and haven't done. Can and can't do. Because plays are an act of ministry - an arm of church outreach - they cannot contain certain words e.g. God becomes Gosh. Damn becomes Dash etc. There are confessions of censorship. There are lines of connection. Acts of communion. Personal and theoretical. Between amateur and professional. Mainstream and experimental. From The White Album to The Curious Savage. From the amateur to the academic. From the religious to the secular. But most of all from the amateur dramatic world where I started to the experimental world where I ended. And perhaps in this act of communion. In this meeting of exaggerated make up and no make up, over the topness and under the bottomness, high end and low end, I resolve my artistic career and find out what I want to do when I grow up.

'In any case if it was theatre it always smelled a bit of the show trial, or of awkward press conference, or of public interrogation, or of stand-up comedy headed to the wrong edge of funny or of vaudeville gone wrong, or of freak show, or of incompetent lecture demonstration, or of the drama enacted for children, or of over-enthusiastic performances on amateur stages.' - Tim Etchells, Live Art and Performance