Performance Practice Lecture

Performance Practice Lecture

Delivered at NCN, Nottingham on 18 October 2006

When I first arrived at Lancaster University in 1994 the first show I saw was Forced Entertainment’s Hidden J. The show starts with a cast assembling a small shed in which one woman spends most of her time shouting in some made up language and out of which a man emerges drinking vodka and holding a balloon over his cock. As the closest I’d come to drama before this was Shakespeare – I didn’t do GCSE or A-Level Drama which some universities said was a good thing - my first thought was ‘What fresh madness is this?’ What made it worse was that everyone around me was nodding in some kind of silent, knowing approval.

I felt like an outsider on an in joke. Students around me with an A Level or a B-Tec would say ‘It’s very Brechtian.’ And I’d be sitting there thinking ‘Who’s this Brechtian chap?’ The other question I was asking was ‘Why?’ and frankly at that stage ‘Why not?’ wouldn’t have been a good enough answer. But then I guess I wasn’t asking them – Forced Entertainment – and I was too scared to ask the students around me – I was asking myself. And I spent the next ten years trying to answer the question. So when you ask yourself ‘Why?’ after an exercise or a movement we do or make for no apparent reason at the time you might want to ask yourself ‘Why not?’ That’s what I mean when I say your jurnal should focus on the why not the what. Because sometimes the why can only be found by doing the what in the first place.

As Goat Island Performance Group who I’ll talk about later say about their work;

We have discovered a performance by making it.

http://www.goatislandperformance.org

I’ll give you an example. I devised ten shows with Metro-Boulot-Dodo. The company name means commute work sleep but we did plenty of commuting, plenty of working and not a lot of sleeping. That’s eight weeks to make each show and then about 12 weeks of touring each one. That’s 20 weeks a show. That’s 200 weeks. That’s nearly 4 years of making and touring. Waking up at 5 in the morning. Sleeping in the back of a van with a hat over your face to keep warm. Eating pot noodles from service stations with pliers. I made more shows than had hot dinners. Sometimes we’d get to a motorway junction and couldn’t work out which way was north or south. I called it Disintouria. And sometimes when we worked our 20 hour days for £50 a week (between four of us) we asked ourselves why? It wasn’t for the money. It wasn’t for the fame. There was no money. There was no fame. It was for the love. But it was more than that. It was for the love of making something live. The happy accidents. The moments of madness. The moments of beauty. The moments what would never happen again.

In one show we needed to sense time passing – four academics were observing an experiment. Bored. On the edge of angry. On the cusp of drunk. We had four beer bottles. For some reason during the devising process we were doing an exercise and one of us put their bottle on their head. Then another did. Then another did. So we all did. And it stuck. And it said bored. And it said on the edge of angry. And it said on the cusp of drunk. But noone would ever come into rehearsal and say ‘I know, let’s all put our bottles on our heads.’ That would be stupid. It just happened. And sometimes that’s not the why, because if you stopped to ask yourself why you wouldn’t do it. That’s the why not.

I always preached a do then think attitude when making work – then after 200 weeks of doing without thinking I decided to stop. I’ve been thinking ever since. Sometimes thinking gets in the way of doing but generally it means what I do is better. I had 18 months to think about The White Album. And that was just the words. That’s 16 months more than we had to think about every aspect of each show. No wonder we didn’t have much time to think. We just did. But I don’t think the thinking would make the doing better if I hadn’t done the doing then thinking first. If in doubt put a bottle on your head. Although, if you are in doubt, it’s probably too late. Devising is a bit like clothes – never discard anything without trying it out. Yes. Devising is a bit like clothes – sometimes you can’t explain why something fits you just know that it does.

I’ll give you another example, Blownup the last show I was involved with was like the show we will see tonight. A show without words. Only movements. We were going to interview many photographers – to find out how they felt capturing moments, using photographic terms like focus and exposure to structure the piece. But one photographer told us of how he met his first wife. He asked her how and when she would like him to take her photograph and she said ‘Turning cartwheels in a field.’ We couldn’t write poetry like this as beautifully as he could say it during the interview so the interview became a voiceover and the only voice heard in the show. We wanted to tell a story of love and loss against a backdrop of the development of a photograph. A real-life love story taking place against a real-time process. We used Focus to introduce the characters, Capture to illustrate the moment when they first met, Negative to show when they separated. All the time a photograph was being developed onstage which emerged at the end of the piece as an image of the Hindenberg exploding. The Hindenberg being constructed, flown and blowing up was shown on video throughout as a metaphor for the rise and fall of the relationship. The reason the Hindenberg was there was a conspiracy theory about it being blown up by the flashlight left by an amateur photographer.

This idea of time passing is something we will return to. And something that has emerged in my own practice. It is perhaps one of the key aspects of working in a live media. You are conscious of something happening against the construct of time. In The White Album, the play was written to the duration of the record, the duration of the Beatles watching The Girl Can’t help It, the duration of a man dying from an overdose. Timelines colliding within the narrative like the lines that denote spaces have collided within Take Out. As Tim Etchells says about their nine year retrospective in which time and space were reconfigured and the company slipped in and out of first and third person narration. ‘They knew that something strange had happened to time.’

So it begins with Forced Entertainment. Except it doesn’t. That was just the beginning of my education. And it never ends. And it never begins. You can trace it back but not to a beginning. Only to a begetting. Let the begetting begin. Forced Entertainment beget most experimental theatre today because they’re on the syllabi of most universities likely to produce companies to take on the mantle. The question remains can you be seen as experimental when you are accepted and studied within the academic arena? What are you providing an alternative to if your work is prescribed viewing? As Forced Entertainment slip onto larger stages in front of more mainstream audiences are they still experimental? The question remains if students inspired by FE create similar theatre which is in itself to a reaction against a reaction then what does theatre have left to react to. Will it be experimental to be more conventional? Certainly the profliferation of technology-led performance in the nineties is dying down to show a return to the purest values of performance. As Tim Etchells says of their piece Speak Bitterness;

As if after years of evading it we’ve finally come down to some irreducible fact of theatre – actors and an audience to whom they must speak, and in this case, confess.

ETCHELLS, T., 1999, Certain Fragments. London: Routledge (p94)

Over recent years the experimental scene has seen companies such as; Deerpark, Imitating the Dog, Metro-Boulot-Dodo, Third Angel, Stan’s Café emerge from contemporary performance degree courses with performative or workshop contact with the work of Forced Entertainment. Something about these grey, municipal, post-industrial landscapes inspired a dearth of paradoxically named companies. More would follow, as if tumbling from a tombola; Desperate Optimists in Ireland, Uninvited Guest in Bristol, Lone Twin in Nottingham. The names reflecting the polarities of the 80s and 90s. Boom or bust. A generation of theatre makers were born into a climate of anti-establishmentarianism determined to protest – but not about the climate of the culture but about the culture itself. The conventions of performance, both how it was supposed to be made and the stories it was supposed to tell.

Interestingly at about the same time as Forced Entertainment were emerging in Sheffield, Mole Wetherell graduated from Nottingham Trent University’s Theatre Design Course to form Reckless Sleepers still based in Nottingham. Again interested in the real time and the real life Reckless Sleepers often work from found texts of hostage situations, crisise both personal and political and trace a forgotten or imagined language onto a forgotten or imagines landscape. For Last Supper they recreated the last words of the famous whilst serving an audience the last suppers of inmates on death row. The audience take up 13 seats on each side mirroring the seating plan of the table in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Each performer has a glass of white wine, tears, red wine, blood and an apple, knowledge and devours the last words written on rice paper after reading them out. The myth of the death often collides with the reality of the death e.g the Romanov Family or Che Guevara and we are left sitting somewhere between the perceiver and the perception, the virtual and the actual. Baudrillard refers to this in philosophical and cultural theory;

Reality has passed over into the play of reality, radically disenchanted.

KAYE. N., 1994, Post-modernism and Performance. London: MacMillan Press

It is this tone of resignation and condemnation, this combination of activism and apathy that is conjured up by the names and works of experimental companies. Sometimes the activism is just an act, Sometimes the apathy is just an act. Sometimes it is hard to discern the difference. Disenchantment of a different kind emerged from Forced Entertainment’s show Club of No Regrets. Performers onstage at the whim of directors calling out stage directions and hurling water as tears, flour as smoke and ketchup as blood. Again the set is assembled as part of the action. As Tim Etchells explains;

In the end, as far as set design went, all we could put on the stage was another stage. Inside the larger building of the theatre, our crude wooden stage on the theatre's own stage, our crude scaffolding and worker's lamps proscenium inside the existing proscenium of the theatre. As if to say: this pretending is our topic.

HEATHFIELD, A. ed., 2004, Live: Art and Performance, London: Tate Publishing

As my contemporaries at Lancaster would have said ‘Very Brechtian.’ And yes Brechtian or Brecht as I came to call him did beget Forced Entertainment but not directly. The link is more Schechnerian than Brechtian but they shared certain traits. And what was Brechtian was also in some ways Beckettian.

Rather than live or 'be' the character, an actor must show and portray them - become a representation of that person. Brecht, in rehearsals, advised actors to speak in the third person, the past tense and even say their stage directions in order to help this. Another way to achieve this is to show the actors changing costume and becoming different characters in full view of the audience; the play is cemented as not being real and the focus can move back to the message.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A4986840

In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot two characters wait for, as Beckett put it, ‘Nothing to happen, twice’ but at one point as Estragon heads for the toilet from a set that represents a wasteland in the middle of nowhere, Vladimir reminds him ‘End of the corridor, on the left.’ This is clearly a reference to the location of the toilets in the venue where the piece is being performed. This is self-referentiality. Aware of itself as a piece of theatre performed in a venue. These real life moments and recognition of the relationship between self and source, performer and audience permeate Beckett’s text.

For the self is ever-elusive, split into the perceiver and the perceived, the teller and the told, the tale and the listener to the tale and ever changing through time, from moment to moment, that after all is what all art is trying to capture. That is the aim and objective of Beckett’s art.

ESSLIN, M., 1984, Theatre of the Absurd. London: Penguin

When Forced Entertainment first arrived at their universities in the early 80s. Incidentally they all got 2:1s. They might have said ‘What fresh madness is this!’ to a video of performers building a house on stage blacked up with a backdrop of hardcore porn featuring themselves performing explicit acts. They might just as well have asked ‘Why?’ They probably spent the next 20 years finding out. The video they did see and to which Tim Etchells refers in Certain Fragments was of The Wooster Group’s seminal 1981 performance LSD – Just the High Points. The Wooster Group beget Forced Entertainment.

Constructed largely through a collage of found texts, actions and images, The Wooster Group would seem to put the formal and thematic boundaries of their performances into question.

KAYE. N., 1994, Post-modernism and Performance. London: MacMillan Press

Formed in 1979 and named after the Wooster Street where they found and still run their garage studio performance space. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, herself a protégé of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, and featuring Spalding Gray and Willem Defoe, The Wooster Group are the pilgrim fathers of Forced Entertainment and the current generation of experimental work. And it was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, set not long after the Mayflower found land that would see the group’s reputation really set sail.

LSD - Just the High Points started out as a hybrid concoction of accounts of Timothy Leary’s and Aldous Huxley’s 60s experiments with hallucigens taken from recordings of symposia at the time and readings of the author’s works. Juxtaposed with this were excerpts of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible performed at breakneck speed by a blacked up cast. The common denominator was LSD as the company chose to film themselves performing The Crucible on acid and then recreate it as part of the performance. Apparently, the performance was so dreadful – lines forgotten – performers lost in their own meanderings – that only some of the film was chosen, Just the High Points.

The show went well until one of the company thought it would be a good idea to invite Arthur Miller. Two days later a letter arrived stating that unless the text was removed from the performance straight away Miller would sue the company. Apparently he objected to his words being ‘mangled.’ Instead of choosing to cut the text as requested, LeCompte simply urged the company to mangle the words even more. Lines were rewritten, performed at even more breakneck speed to render the text unrecognisable. The legal requirements affecting the new version were almost more potent than the LSD affecting the first. However, when there were slippages and performers uttered a discernible fragment of The Crucible a buzzer would sound. This then made apparent the use of Miller’s text even though it was no longer supposed to be present and no longer readily audible. The absence became a presence. The buzzer simply triggered the response in an audience fully aware of the legal situation ‘That’s the space where The Crucible takes place.’

In fact, Miller’s protest merely guaranteed the show’s longevity and gave the piece the added subtext of authorship, censorship and artistic persecution. Issues Miller was fully familiar with having been tried in the McCarthy witch trials for links to communism that he refused to yield. An experience which inspired The Crucible in the first place. The Wooster Group were not staging The Crucible they were reappropriating it. And by Miller withholding the rights they were reappropriating the rights as well. As Elizabeth LeCompte says;

The performance is calculated to distance the spectator, to transform him into a ‘witness’ before whom the play becomes an ‘exhibit’, a historical and theatrical document.

SAVRAN, D.,1986, Breaking the Rules, Michigan: UMI

The Performance Group beget The Wooster Group. Richard Shechner’s Performance Group performed in the Garage before LeCompte’s own splinter group took up residence. It was used as an experimental forum where audience was treated as a mass, a chorus and the lines between performer and audience member, protagonist and witness became blurred. It was also a culture in which, like Julian Beck’s Living Theater also in New York at the time, the process was as much if not more important than the final product. These were not just companies but communities with not just directors but leaders. This system was beget by Jerzy Grotowski – a Polish American director who achieved such a fusion between the emotional and physical fabric within his laboratory that performers could manifest welts and bruises just by thinking of them. One of the tangents to this is that Grotowski also beget Goat Island Performance Group. Karen Christopher – one of its founding members studied with him in the States and would later say;

Memorize to perform. Perform to remember.

Letter to a Young Practitioner, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 16 March 2000

As Adrian Heathfield describes in his workshop notes observing the creation of their piece Earthquake in my Heart, the notion of process rivals product;

Their aesthetic is deeply engaged with an ethics of performance. As with their immediate contemporaries such as the Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment their aesthetic arises from a sustained practice of living with the material with which they work, so that a ‘final’ piece takes the form of an organic melding of elements, a life-world which the performers inhabit… One might say then, that Goat Island’s ethics of performance is resident both in their process of creation and their aesthetic: the two are inseparable.

HEATHFIELD, A. Notes from a Process. March 2001. Chicago.

Goat Island were formed in 1987 and bring together performers and directors from a range of backgrounds; writers, dancers, film makers, musicians, carpenters. The work they do borrows heavily from Black Mountain College. In the sixties Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Yvonne Rainer developed a way of working together that embraced serendipity and was based on task and response. Goat Island start a process by gathering material but are always open to accidents. Their director Lyn Hixson will set them a question e.g How do you repair? And the process will be made up of responses to these questions in the practitioners chosen artform; text, movement, film. The responses will be incomplete. For example the task might be create a dog but rather than the detail of the dog the dog will just be hinted at. The audience colours in the dog. The outline is drawn to be filled in by the viewer. Responses only come in fragments and often Lyn Hixson will interrupt the thought process to break up the field of enquiry if it is becoming too narrow. The aim is to retain a sense of openness in the work – for it to be writerly not readerly. Importantly the company do not sit and discuss the work. The work itself is the discussion. Also – the collaborators are encouraged to crossover into non-specialist fields e.g. the dancers may write, the writers may dance. Goat Island are obsessed with process and structure – how the piece sits in space and time – often a work is presented in two versions with two different structures to investigate how the structure can affect the meaning. Often the work is given a time code, like a film and edited to a sequence e.g. Fibonacci. Space configuration is affected by the research e.g. playground. Whereas the Wooster Group work with deconstruction of text to build in connections. Goat Island research the work and make constructions to build out connections.

So Goat Island were beget by Grotowski. Grotowski in turn was beget by Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty. Artaud was the pinnacle of an arts movement post-surrealism which insisted that the man and the art were inseparable, Artaud was seen as a visionary and his theatre was the vision. The line between life and art has rarely been more blurred and it is often stated that Artaud’s greatest work was his rapid rise and equally rapid demise from feted film star to forgotten lunatic. Artaud publicly dismissed the surrealist movement in pursuit of his own form of performance detailed in his very failure to find it in letters that would become The Theater and its Double.

We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single theatre of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator placed in the middle of the action is engulfed and physically affected by it.

ARTAUD, A., 1938. The Theater and its Double. (s.n.).(s.i)

And so contemporary performance carries with it this baggage, this debt of begetting, this lineage for both performer and audience, where each is aware of each other and aware of the context and unspoken contract between them. Work now focuses on the very nature of performance and is no longer placating or appeasing but confronting and problematising this relationship. In the words of one of the performers in Forced Entertainment's Showtime:

There's a word for people like you, and that word is audience. An audience likes to sit in the dark and watch other people do it. Well, if you've paid your money - good luck to you. However, from this end of the telescope things look somewhat different - you all look very small and very far away and there's a lot of you. It's important perhaps to remember that there are 'more of you' than there are of us. So, if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win.