actsofcommunion

Acts of Communion

2006-11-30T12:25:00.000-08:00

The Project

A site-specific project devised as an act of communion between research and practice, absence and presence, amateur and academic.

The Installation
13 - 14 November 2006 12pm - 3.30pm The Powerhouse, Nottingham Trent University

Michael Pinchbeck presents the Church on Rise Park Drama Group's stage directions. The setting - The stage. The time - 1978-1981. The drama group will not be present.

The Performance
22 - 24 November 2006 7.30pm The Church on Rise Park, Nottingham

The Church on Rise Park Drama Group presents Acts of Communion. The setting - The Church Hall. The time – Now. The drama group will be playing themselves.

And the Curtain Falls

2006-11-23T05:50:00.000-08:00

Photography: Julian Hughes

Bibliography

2006-11-23T02:48:00.000-08:00

This is the bibliography for Acts of Commmunion: The Performance, The Installation, and The Writing. Where citations are used in the rest of the blog and reflexive journals I list the source and date.

APOLLINAIRE, G., 1972, Zone with an English translation by Samuel Beckett. (s.n.): (s.i)

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

BARTHES, R., 1977, Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press

BARTHES, R., 1957, Mythologies. New York, Hill and Wang

BAUDRILLARD, J., 2004, Fragments, London: Routledge

BECKETT, S., 1965, Waiting for Godot: a tragicomedy in two acts. (s.n.): (s.i)

BECKETT, S., 1971, Breath and other shorts. (s.n.): (s.i)

BERGER, J., 1965, Success and Failure of Picasso. Middlesex: Penguin

BLAZEVIC, M. and GOULISH, M. ed., 2005, Frakcija No. 35 Spring 2005. Croatia: Bauer

BOAL, A., 2000, Theater of the Oppressed. New Edition. London: Pluto Press

BOCK, V. and VINCENZI, S., 2004, Invisible Dances… From Afar: A show that will never be shown, London: Artsadmin

BROOK, P., 1968, The Empty Space. Middlesex: Penguin

CANETTI, E, 1962, Masse und Macht. London : Gollancz

COPPARD, H and MEADE, C., 1988, The Wedding: exhibition catalogue. (s.n.): (s.i)

CURTIS, R., 1995, Four Weddings and a Funeral. (s.n.): BCA

DARLEY, A., 2000, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacel in New Media Genres, 2000. London: Routledge

DE OLIVEIRA, N., OXLEY and N., PETRY, M. ed., 1996, Installation Art, London: Thames and Hudson

DE OLIVEIRA, N., OXLEY and N., PETRY, M. ed. 2003, installation art in the new millennium: the empire of the senses. London: Thames and Hudson

DEBORD, G., 2002, The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone

DERRIDA, J., 2005, Writing and Difference, New York: Routledge

ESSLIN, M., 2000, Antonin Artaud. (s.n.): (s.i)

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

ETCHELLS, T., 1999, Certain Fragments. London: Routledge.

FOUCAULT, M., 2006. The Order of Things, New York: Routledge

GABLIK, S., 1995, Conversations before the End of Time. London: Thames and Hudson

GOAT ISLAND, 2000, School Book 2, (s.n.): (s.i)

GOLDBERG, R.,1998, Performance, London: Thames and Hudson

GRAY, C. and MALLINS, J., 2004, Visualizing research :a guide to the research process in art and design. (s.n.): (s.i)

GROSSVOGEL, D, I.,1975, Four Playwrights and a Postscript. 2nd Ed. (s.n.): (s.i)

HARRISON, C. and WOOD, P. ed. 1992, Art in Theory 1900 – 1990. Oxford: Blackwell

HEATHFIELD, A. ed., 2000, Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium and the Marking of Time, London: Black Dog Publishing

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

JONES, C. A., 1993, A History of Nottingham School of Design. Nottingham: NTU

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

LACAN, J., 1988, Freud's papers on technique 1953-1954. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

LACAN, J., 1988, The ego in Freud's theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis 1954-1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

LAING, R. D., 1999, Self and others. 2nd Ed. (s.n.): (s.i)

LAING, R. D.,1999, The divided self :an existential study in sanity and madness. 2nd Ed. (s.n.): (s.i)

LECOQ, J., 2002, The Moving Body, London: Methuen

NEWLING, J., 2004, Stamping Uncertainty. (s.n): SWPA

ODDEY, A.,1994, Devising Theatre, London: Routledge

PEREC, G., 1999 2nd ed., Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin

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

SCHECHNER, R., 2002, Performance Studies, London: Routledge

SCHECHNER, R., 2005, Performance Theory, New York: Routledge

SMITH, J., 2005, Jacques Derrida: Live Theory, New York: Continuum

SONTAG, S., 1977, Illness as Metaphor, London: Penguin

WILLET, J. and MANHEIM, R., ed., 1970, Bertolt Brecht collected plays Vol 1. (s.n.): (s.i)

Interview

2006-11-23T02:47:00.000-08:00

Interview with Nottingham Trent University's Platform magazine.

What was it that first made you interested in the field of theatre and playwriting?

Interestingly - amateur dramatics. My dad was always performing in a play at the Church on Rise Park and I used to go along. When I was old enough I would have a small non-speaking part and then I was a main character in a play there in 1993. I talked about the show in my interview to get into Lancaster University to study theatre and that was that. I've never been that interested in playwriting as such, more the possibilities of performance. I write but I don't consider myself a playwright. My work takes on a variety of forms including text. I find scripts quite restrictive. I was involved in devising work with Metro-boulot-dodo - a theatre company I founded on graduating. But it is the most appropriate method for the MA project. And it was the most appropriate method for The White Album at Nottingham Playhouse. I think it depends on the context. In the mainstream or traditional context I'm a playwright but I am interested in how I can challenge theatrical convention within those specific contexts.

Why did you choose to come back to Nottingham to continue your academic study?

I returned to Nottingham two years ago and decided to undertake the MA after speaking to friends who were on the Performance and Live Art course last year. I had always wanted to get back into academic study but ten years on the road with MBD put that on hold. I felt the time was right to reflect on my current thinking as a writer and artist. I was working on The White Album and a four year live art project The Long and Winding Road. NTU seemed the best place to develop a multi-disciplinary practice within a critical and supportive framework.

How are you finding the course at Nottingham Trent?

It has been a Long and Winding Road. The course has challenged the way I think about the work I make and invigorated my practice. It has given me the confidence and ability to work in other media and helped to untrain my theatrical brain. At the same time - working as an amateur and an academic - I have remembered why I love what it is I do. More than anything - and I don't know why I had to do an MA to discover this - I have learnt that less is more.

Acts Of Communion is going to be showing in Nottingham this week. When you thought of the idea for this play, did you have Rise Park Church specifically in mind?

Acts of Communion is a site-specific project. The play was written with the Church on Rise Park Drama Group. I wanted to explore the acts of communion that take place in the church hall. Weddings. Christenings. Funerals. Plays. My work draws on self and site as source and I chose to respond to the space using amateur dramatics as it seemed the most appropriate medium and is in itself an act of communion. It was important to return to the church hall where I had discovered performance as both an amateur and an academic. As part of the project, I created an installation with the drama group's old stage blocks in the Powerhouse with stage directions from the plays performed upon them. The plays collided in an act of communion in an empty space and the amateur stage was transposed into an academic context.

It has been said that your work disregards theatrical convention. Is it your purpose to try and break to mould of what is seen to be traditional theatre?

Absolutely. We performed the play last night and even though people thought it was 'different' it was still a success. I think because it belongs to the drama group, to the community, to the church. I strive to balance thought provoking with entertaining and I am interested in how we can explore new vocabularies, new ways of working in traditional contexts. A piece of writing the length of a record with a non-linear narrative at the Nottingham Playhouse. A play within a play in the Church on Rise Park where the drama group perform themselves. We make our own moulds.

Do you have any more future productions in mind for Nottingham that we can look out for?

The Long and Winding Road is ongoing. I drive a car from Nottingham to Liverpool over four years. The car is packed with mementoes wrapped in brown paper and string, tagged and logged. In 2008, I drive the car into the River Mersey. I am looking for opportunities to show the work and invite people to join me on the journey of a drivetime. For more information or to become a member of the steering committee please contact info@blurbgarden.com.

And lastly, do you have any pointers for current students or future playwrights?

Less is more.

Performance Evaluation II

2006-11-21T14:41:00.000-08:00

Part two

It is 2am and I am still awake. I am suffering from the post-show adrenalin rush that my Dad and other members' of the drama group have talked about in the interviews. The show went well. The audience responded enthusiastically to the style and content and though some people thought it was 'different' it was a 'good different' not an 'indifferent'. The drama group was inspired by the positive reception and this was by far the best run we have done. The fact that my mum is mentioned early on in the text makes it seem a part of the action if she is called upon.

HARRY What happens if I forget one?

MICHAEL It's OK. My mum's the prompt.

There were some moments when the audience involved themselves in the performance. When one of the cast mentioned 'Big D' - a hardware shop that used to be a feature of the shopping parade in the 1980s - one of the audience was heard to say 'That's going back a bit.' When Harry said Kath was getting ready for the funeral. Someone in the audience whispered in a worried way 'Whose funeral?' For the mostpart the audience were happy to follow the fragmented narrative and perhaps the material that triggered more laughter than I thought it would served as an anchorpoint. The local connection was important but the content was not exclusively engaged with by the local community. In fact if there is a sense of community it is the audience themselves. The teabreak saw academics chatting with churchgoers. Solicitors talking to teachers. None of whom had met before the show. All of whom were sharing an act of communion.

There were technical hiccups. We lost four lanterns in two nights. Half way through the first show one of the two surviving lights fizzled out of action. The technician spent 20 minutes wandering around at the back of the church hall trying to fix it and so the show continued in half-light. The lights we did have had to be operated manually so the act of switching on and switching off was visible to the audience. The lighting stands were gaffer taped to the PVC windows and the curtains were open. This - in the same way as the installation - is somehow turning the mechanics of performance inside out. There is no pretense here. Apart from onstage. On and off.

I was asked to deliver the housekeeping duties. This lent an interesting circularity to the evening. I found myself saying 'Ladies and Gentlemen thank you all for coming etc.' The motif of my MC character recurring. Bookending the double bill. I was intrigued by how much this might frame or outline the context of performance, the boundaries of amateur dramatics. There was an interesting intervention during the tea break. My mum was serving tea and coffee on her own. Noone else from the drama group was available to help. Because they were all in costume they didn't want to be seen in the auditorium before the show. Their costumes are their own clothes and in fact one of them is dressed in his own clothes as a caterer - so it seems odd to feel too in character to cater. Anyway it was resolved but it raised interesting questions about presence and pretense. We are there but we are not there. We are ourselves but we are not ourselves. We are onstage but we are pretending to be offstage. We are offstage but we are pretending to be onstage. We are the Church on Rise Park Drama Group but when do we stop performing.

I am proud of Acts of Communion. I am proud of the process. I am proud of the product. I am proud of how it has developed my thinking and relocated my practice. This evaluation will continue over time. We will edit a film for the drama group. Compile photographic and written documentation. But this is the end. The MA finishes next week. The written deadline is today. There are some people I have to thank. The Church on Rise Park Drama Group. The audience. Kevin Edwards for constant support. Frank Abbott. Alain Ayers. All at NTU. Any others for whose ommission from this list I sincerely apologise.

Performance Evaluation I

2006-11-19T05:46:00.000-08:00

Part one

This evaluation is in two parts. Part one written before the first public performance and part two written afterwards. Tonight we had the last dress rehearsal. Lights. Costume. Action. Lines were learnt. Shloer was poured. People went to the toilet. We took pictures.

It is difficult for me to evaluate the performance objectively because I have become so connected to the process and so conscious of the act of communion that is taking place. It is absolutely not about the quality of the work it is the quality of the experience - for those performing and those witnessing. We see beyond the rough edges, the bed sheets used as masking, the homemade programmes, the house lights being switched off onstage and we immerse ourselves in the enthusiasm. I don't really know how people will respond to the performance. It is different, but not that different from the other show in the double bill. Perhaps Breakfast for One has a clearer narrative and more defined characters but in some ways the narrative of Acts of Communion is the drama group defining the narrative and finding that the characters they are playing are actually themselves.

This is my main concern. Usually the audience's positive response is because of seeing people they know do things they wouldn't usually do. This is the attraction for many of amateur dramatics in the first place. The question is, in casting them as themselves, have I removed this vital piece of make-believe? The illusion is no more. We declare ourselves to be who we are and where we are. The Church Hall.

The piece is written to be delivered fast. The learning of lines. The pouring of Shloer. The movements from wedding to christening. The toasts. All slow it down. I wonder if this exposes the writing's frailties and makes the onstage action less dynamic. If people do not follow the narrative flow then there is not much for them to look at. Even the Evening Post photographer was disappointed there were no props. I wrote the wedding and the christening when I was doubting the project and doubting myself. You can tell. It does not have the confidence of the raffle and the funeral and it is interesting that we all perk up as soon as Ian and Louise start to draw tickets. This could be relief after what has come before but I believe these scenes are stronger because they were written after I made my breakthrough over the summer. What I learned from the MA. Less is more.

With hindsight I wish I could have had more time to develop the earlier sections of the writing to improve them. Make them less complicated. Make them more confident. But within the amateur dramatic framework you have strict line learning deadlines. In this respect I failed due to a lack of focus at these stages. I was still trying to make this act dovetail with another act. So that the absence in this one would be a presence in the other and vice versa. In some ways as the ideas developed so did the theme - the acts of communion that take place there. Weddings. Christenings. Funerals. Plays. I found that this part of the project dealt more with the stage presence and the presence of pretense. Absence is only hinted at but in the sense of what is not there. A cake. A Bride. A Groom. A baby. A table. Absence as in loss or change. Nothing is left of my childhood.

There will always be changes I could have made. I would have liked to have worked with silence. Have a missing scene. A dance routine where everyone has an invisible partner. But these 'could haves' and 'would haves' could go on forever. The scenes I am still not happy with are still there and we have to make them work. We will see tomorrow night whether the audience object to the style and content. There are moments I am proud of. Dealing with the taboo of life after death in a church play by having the character who dies come back as the woman who played her. Jonathan reading the wedding cards from members of the drama group that are sitting beside him. The Raffle. Overall I am more proud of the process than the product. I will miss meeting on a Wednesday night. I have known the church and the drama group in a different and brighter light. We have shared an act of communion in making the show. I hope that comes across in the writing. That this is our voice not my voice. I wanted to explore the acts of communion that take place here. I only hope the audience will feel the same way. To acts of communion.

The Evening Post

2006-11-19T05:33:00.000-08:00

Over the last eight months, we've rehearsed 17 times, we've worked on six different versions of the script, we've drunk 142 cups of coffee, we've taken delivery of a new stage, we've received regional press coverage in the Evening Post and obtained sponsorship from Shloer. What you're about to see is the result.

The Get In

2006-11-19T05:24:00.000-08:00

Today we assembled the stage for this week's performances at The Church on Rise Park. Usually, with the old stage it would take ten people two days. This morning it took four people one hour. We rehearsed this afternoon in front of a small audience. The show is coming together but slowly. As lines are learned and movements rehearsed. It'll be alright on the night etc. But the night is one rehearsal away. We are amateurs. I am reminded of a line from The White Album. John Lennon talking to Donovan on the Maharishi's roof about his mother teaching him how to play the banjo. 'An amateur practises until he gets it right. A professional practises until he can't get it wrong.' We only have to get it right. But if we don't it's alright. My mum's the prompt.

MA Exposition

2006-11-16T12:48:00.002-08:00

The MA Exposition launches on Friday night at the same time as the last night of the performance. Due to the difficulty of documenting the project at such short notice I have submitted a slideshow of images from the process to a soundtrack of interviews with the drama group. It seems to capture the aims of the project without presenting itself as the artwork. It is difficult to demonstrate the breadth of research and practice in a four minute showreel but I wanted to focus on the idea of amateur dramatics as a form of escape for which the EXIT sign has become a project motif. I wanted this film to be the voice of the drama group, of which I am now a member again.

The film raises issues of the role of the drama group in the church and the local community, the role of drama in the members' lives, and the feelings they have for it and get from it. It also features Harry talking about how he learns his lines - the inspiration for the installation - and an image of the stage blocks as they were found in the store room. I am keen for people to interpret this slideshow as a snapshot of the creative process I have undertaken in researching, developing, realising and documenting Acts of Communion.

Installation Evaluation

2006-11-16T02:14:00.000-08:00

It was important to install the stage blocks into the Powerhouse as they were found at the Church on Rise Park. I configured them at the same angle to the door as they had been arranged when we entered the store room to collect them. The transplantantion from amateur to academic, from offstage to onstage was complete.

By opening doors that were usually left closed during performance, by switching on the working lights, by taking down the tabs I was turning the venue inside out. By playing the stage directions - the words that were never meant to be heard - with silences where there are lines - I was turning the material inside out. By arranging the stage blocks as I found them I was commenting on the memory of performance that resides within the wood and exposing visible traces of their theatrical history - palimpsests of paint, scraps of brickwork wallpaper, fliers wedged beneath the wood.

The technical equipment was arranged around and inside the stage blocks and made as visible as possible - wires trailing, LCD displays glowing. It occurred to me, during very useful and challenging discussions with Frank Abbott, that this was installative not performative, and any attempt to use stage lighting, or hide or tape down trailing wires would go against the anti-theatrical nature of the installation. To some extent I had to learn how to unprogramme my theatrical training. I come from a world where everything is meant to be hidden. There would be no presence of pretence here. I had experimented earlier with hiding the amps beneath the stage blocks but it made more sense for the mechanics of the installation to be on show, like the mechanics of performance (stage directions) heard in the audio, and the mechanics of the theatre (backstage area) exposed in the Powerhouse. I wanted visitors to feel they could walk around the backstage area, the green room, the toilets ('at the end of the corridor on the left') the kitchen, the technical cupboard. Everything became a part of the installation, an abandoned script, the scaffold tower, a blue gel on the floor, a drum kit, a fire exit.

I was interested in the proliferation of Fire Exit signs now visible in the venue. Exit as stage direction. In contrast to the handpainted sign at The Church on Rise Park, these were illuminated and came with strict health and safety guidelines. In conversation with Sophia Lycouris about how distracting these can be in a performance environment, it occurred to me that by exposing these signs and not wanting to hide them I was making this act of Acts of Communion site-specific to the Powerhouse. I had always assumed the 'site' in 'site-specific project' referred to the stage - the stage as the 'site' - and the installation could happen anywhere, but in this incarnation, the 'site' was the venue. The empty performance space, with the buzz of the working lights, the seating bank 'at ease' and the light outside the venue door which says 'Performance in Progress' deliberately left off. The work was intended to be encountered in this space in a way in which this space is rarely used. In fact, given the Powerhouse's uncertain future, it could be seen as a eulogy for the space's own performative past, involving as it did the detritus of performance.

There is a sense of absence as you enter the empty space to experience the stage directions from four acts of four plays performed on these abandoned stage blocks. Absence of narrative. Absence of physicality. Absence of action. Absence of emotion. Interestingly, two visitors to the installation, perhaps liberated by experiencing the work alone, chose to enact the stage directions they heard and film them. Sitting down, drinking from invisible cups of tea, laughing or sighing, as the disembodied voice described these actions. Physicalising perhaps what happens in our heads when we experience the work. We complete the picture. The theatrical act is made imagined. The collisions and echoes between the four acts of different lengths generate endless coincidences and feed a master narrative understanding of the work, impossible to physicalise, a world where one act's silence is filled with another act's action.

Overall, I was happy with the way the installation took shape and responded to the resonances of the space. There were moments when the porters would walk through the installation to make a cup of tea. The boiling kettle in the kitchen then became an extra layer of sound and mirrored moments in the recordings when doors slam, buses brake and kettles boil. I recorded the audio at home after finding that the amateur style best suited the amateur content. A technician would wander in to find a light. Again the work situates itself in this world of off-duty performance. Perhaps a world where the amateur meets the academic, the performed meets the unperformed, as in Richard Schechner's 'performance mobius strip.'

'real life - pretending - acting on stage - simulating - real life' Schechner, R., Performance Studies, 2002, London: Routledge

Interestingly this progression is present in the performance but it seems more forced. Here it happened without prompting, without writing, without acting. I am becoming aware that this installation seems a more appropriate vocabulary for and expression of my aims for the project. The absence of performer(s) and the importance of the encounter with the work in an empty space seems more pertinent to my research questions and this idea of 'to puzzle'.

I will develop the installation visually, aurally, technically and experiment with the work in different contexts and in different configurations. Criticisms I could make of this work in progress was that the configuration of stage blocks and technical equipment could have seemed 'too considered.' It was simply a case of placing it in an available space to see how people would interact with it. I agree it was 'considered' but I feel this what I am on the MA to do.

Interestingly perhaps only because this is a performance space do the problematics of placing the work 'centre-stage' surface, drawing as it does on the performer / audience relationship. If the work was exhibited in a gallery space then perhaps this would not be an issue.

I feel that this installation marks an important shift in my thinking from performance / live artist to visual artist and it is interesting that it is a shift I am more than comfortable with. I am beginning to think that the performance could be my last act and I will work more in the visual / installative medium in the future thanks to this MA.

No Exit

2006-11-15T04:54:00.000-08:00

‘I suggest we call ourselves - wait! - absentees. Have you been - been absent for long?’ - Jean-Paul Sartre. No Exit (p75), Four Contemporary French Plays. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Random House, 1967.

The empty space

2006-11-15T04:42:00.000-08:00

'I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage' - Peter Brook, The Empty Space

Documentation

2006-11-15T04:29:00.000-08:00

Presence.
The moment.
The now.
Thrown back on your own devices. I will not help you with this. You have to ‘deal’. Which means cope with un-meaning. Or with the possibility of un-meaning. Or cope with not coping. Or with me not meaning. The trembling of this moment.'

- Live: Art and Performance, Tim Etchells p217

Installation Text

2006-11-12T11:52:00.000-08:00

The Church on Rise Park Drama Group

1978

The Chiltern Hundreds
By William Douglas Home

The action takes place in the sitting-room of Lister Castle. Summer, 1945.

Act I

Scene 1 – General Election Day. Lunch Time.
Scene 2 – The next morning. Breakfast Time.

1979

Fish Out Of Water
By Derek Benfield

The action takes place in the lounge of an hotel on the Italian Riviera.

Act I

Afternoon of a hot summer’s day.

1980

Wedding of the Year
By Norman Robbins

The action takes place in the living room of the Murchinson home.

Act I

Scene 1 – Saturday morning
Scene 2 – That afternoon

1981

Pickle in Paradise
By Sam Bate

The action takes place in Paradise – the home of the wealthy Fairfield sisters.

Act I

A summer afternoon

Aims of Communion

2006-10-30T04:46:00.000-08:00

For my MA, I am investigating the presence of pretence and absence as substance in a performance and an installation.

I devise, write, direct and perform a play with the amateur dramatics group that was my introduction to theatre. The piece explores amateur dramatics as an act of communion and the events that take place in the church hall – weddings, christenings, funerals, plays. There are no stage directions.

I exhibit an installation with the drama group’s old stage. I record stage directions from plays they performed on the stage blocks with silences where there are lines. These are the words that were never meant to be heard. The first acts are played back in an empty theatre as an act of communion.

Press Release

2006-10-30T03:49:00.000-08:00

Sent to Nottingham Evening Post, BBC Radio Nottingham, BBC Online, Saga FM and Metro on 30 October 2006. Evening Post requested a photoshoot and Radio Nottingham hosted an interview and a BBC online feature. Read the preview and hear the interview here.

Press Release
Acts of Communion

‘The Church on Rise Park Drama Group presents Acts of Communion. The setting - The Church Hall. The time - now. The drama group will be playing themselves.’

The Church on Rise Park Drama Group stages their annual production in November. A Double Act includes: Breakfast for One a comedy by David Foxton and the World Premiere of Acts of Communion by Nottingham artist Michael Pinchbeck – writer of The White Album at Nottingham Playhouse

Michael Pinchbeck grew up in Rise Park and performed with the Drama Group in 1993 before studying Theatre Studies at Lancaster University. He was a founder member of Metro-Boulot-Dodo Theatre Company until becoming a writer and live artist. His play The White Album was performed at Nottingham Playhouse in March and is now touring the USA. He is studying for an MA in Performance and Live Art at Nottingham Trent University.

‘Acts of Communion is part of my MA project’ says Pinchbeck, ‘I wanted to explore the acts of communion that take place in the church hall – weddings, christenings, funerals and plays. In the end, I wrote a play about a wedding, a christening, a funeral and a drama group performing a play. I was interested in blurring the lines between actor and character so the drama group play themselves. It’s a celebration of the drama group and the role it plays in the church and the community. Amateur dramatics is itself an act of communion.’

A spokesperson for the drama group said ‘We feel very pleased and fortunate to have the services of Michael Pinchbeck as playwright, performer and director for this production. We would also like to thank Shloer for the Shloer!’

Venue: Church on Rise Park, Revelstoke Way, Rise Park, Nottingham
Dates: Wed 22 / Thu 23 / Fri 24 November 2006 7.30 pm
Cost: £5.00 / £4.00 conc.

The installation beta test

2006-10-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

Station House Opera

2006-10-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

Review of Roadmetal, Sweetbread by Station House Opera at Nottingham Arts Theatre on 24 October 2006.

Roadmetal, Sweetbread occupies overlapping realities that collide in a hinterland between past and present, onstage and offstage. That the two protagonists enter and exit the stage and the screen, repeatedly questioning our notion of live-ness – until one spots an erratic tic or an out of position table – is testament to Station House Opera’s craft. They make a habit out of creating worlds that sit as uncomfortably as the viewer between media, genre, time and space.

The piece is tied to the theatre – we see a man on film arrive by tram and walk, whistling, towards the venue. As he enters the auditorium, the door slams behind us and we turn our heads to watch him wander down the aisle. The play between filmed and performed bubbles over as a woman struggles to fit a lightbulb and it falls to the floor. On screen the bulb is fitted and we sit in silence contemplating her failure to live up to her video self. Then the man walks onstage with a broom and sweeps up the broken glass as if to say ‘This was meant.’

This is a study of absence. As scenes are re-enacted with performers missing or misplaced. An exploration of domestic violence. As violent undertones are presented as an onscreen counterpoint to the onstage action. A digital love triangle. As a third character enters the fray to create an extra tension between the two existing characters fighting or performing for our attention and their survival. Whether they are slave to themselves, each other, the technology or the audience is up for debate and perhaps the question the piece is posing. But as the last onstage image renders itself – a meticulous recreation of the detritus of a murder scene on screen, we see the live finally bleed into the recorded.

Bock and Vincenzi

2006-10-22T00:48:00.000-07:00

‘Everything that appears is an image of the invisible.’ - Dance Theatre Journal Vol. 20 no. 3, 2004

Frank Bock (performer / choreographer) and Simon Vincenzi (director / designer) have worked together since 1995. Together they have explored the relationship between the language of movement and mystery of the image through a series of theatre / dance projects. They have undertaken extensive research into notions of absence and nothingness. Information taken from www.artsadmin.co.uk

On the 20th March 2003, in a 'dark' theatre in London's West End, Bock & Vincenzi presented: invisible dances from afar: a show that will never be shown.

In the empty auditorium sat just one person; the poet and theatre maker Fiona Templeton (The Watcher). As she watched, she recorded her experience of this extraordinary two-hour long performance, so that an audience might later hear it on the telephone. The nine performers knew that if they stopped performing their audience would have nothing to describe and that if she stopped talking that the show would disappear. Individually the dancers explored different relationships between the external body, communication technologies and absence. Through personal earpieces they responded to different 'soundtracks' - a specially commissioned work inspired by the internal sounds of the body, specific instructions for the performers' movements based upon journeys undertaken by someone unknown to them. James Brown (The Medium) was also invited to investigate and record the presence of a spirit audience in the theatre building during the performance. Outside the auditorium sat artist Rose English (The Witness), writing about hearing but not seeing the performance. A fourth person, Henrik Thorup Knudsen (The Photographer) documented the entire show from the back of the stage, taking images with the Hasselblad shutter open for the full duration of each of the 36, three minute, 20 second scenes. As 'part of' the show he also took portraits of the performers, capturing their image as they finished presenting work.

This work explored how an audience could experience a physical event that can not be seen; how a poetic world that is open to the personal interpretation of those present is translated; how you describe the indescribable. The vivid and haunting account of The Watcher could be heard as a sound work for the telephone, by dialling the number advertised on fly posters designed by artist Duncan MacAskill. The piece could only ever be heard by telephone and will never be performed in front of an audience.

Interview with Simon Vincenzi commissioned by Dance 4 exploring absence as substance.

MP Michael Pinchbeck
SV Simon Vincenzi

MP How did your research process begin for Invisible Dances?

SV We began by going out and making dance you could perform in the street that noone could see. Like using a bus-stop pole, organising movement in a public space that was invisible as a dance and then bringing that back into the studio. Going out and trying to recall the directions of the streets you were going down.

MP Here, As If They Hadn’t Been, As If They Are Not is a play with no plot, no beginning and no end, that reveals the stories that are contained within the absent body. You describe the piece as ‘Elegiac in its search for narrative’. Why?

SV In Dance Theatre a lot of it has become about stories. In Dance a lot of it is about the body and how it moves. We had no space. No money. So all we had was nothingness. The use of nothingness changed into the idea of absence and stories that are contained within the absent body and how it moves or doesn’t.

MP How do you see the research as sitting alongside or within the practice?

SV Research and creativity blur as a result of people working together for a length of time. The show isn’t fixed – there is no internal structure – it is always different. Because it is always different – we’re always exploring the idea of liveness. Even though it is always different – it still has to be done incredibly precisely.

MP If it is never fixed and not there how do you know when it’s finished?

SV It’s never complete. I don’t know what complete is.

MP Twelve performers, both blind and sighted, present different ‘states’ created and guided by different rules and interpretations of representation. How?

SV We had dancers wearing blindfolds. Dancing with wild abandonment. We filmed them dancing. Then made them watch it. Then got them to recreate a dance that was never made to be recreated. This is a world of abandonment and beauty, exploring appearance and disappearance and whether all is ever visible.

John Newling

2006-10-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Interview with John Newling exploring mediating an idea, currency and value, responsibility, site-specificity and context, the ontology of absence, sacred and secular, theology and philosophy and acts of communion.

MP Michael Pinchbeck
JN John Newling

Mediating an Idea

MP There are three strands I want to explore: ideas of site-specificity, working within a community and working with references to religion. One of my research questions at the moment is Theatre in and for a community – does it have to be dumbed down to succeed? It’s a problematic question but working in Q Arts I have experienced participatory work that I always had issues with – how did you put it in your talk on Chatham Vines? – ‘I’d always thought of community art as abhorrent’ and I wondered if you could take that as a starting point:

JN I think certainly my education was early seventies and the idea of community artwork then was a mural. And the idea of that having any value whatsoever was never there. Commissioning money often means there usually has to be an education strand. Up until about 5 years ago I would say ‘Well I’ll do the work and then you can sort out the education strand’. Then I became interested in what people were doing and I realised it was something very important. They were mediating an idea. One of the central ambitions that I’ve had has been that you can take truthful but difficult challenging ideas to a wider public but in order to do that a) you’ve got to know what you’re talking about and b) you’ve got to be able to articulate that not in simplistic terms but in simple terms so that people can understand it. You can’t start off by saying ‘My work is about free will and it’s relationship to Heidegger’. But you can say ‘How many things in life do we think are predetermined?’ Then you can start to get access.

One of the revolutions that I think is perhaps happening in arts practice is much more attention is being paid to the dissemination of ideas around the project – not describing the work ever but exploring the ideas that the artist is exploring. I think art’s too important as a proactive tool in society just to allow it to be a commercially driven marketed product from metropolitan cities. The other option is to talk about what is happening and what it is felt by those experiencing work.

Currency and Value

MP You’ve just had your estate valued – what value does the work have to that community and that audience?

JN Currency and belief and currency and art fascinate me. The history of money is interesting because it’s moved from weight to electronic transactions. In a way ‘value’ is a key word for arts strategy and production and artists need to evaluate the ‘value’ of art as well as the ‘value’ of their art. I think traditionally we have had a problem with the fetishisation of the individual where artists are immensely articulate about their art but less articulate about art in general. The really good artists I know are highly articulate about art not just their art.

MP By that do you mean they can place their work within the broader context?

JN They can value the transactions that take place in art as playing a crucial part in culture and society and that is a completely different type of value – it could have a monetary value attached to it but it’s not really about that. I think questioning things and displaying risk and courage is dampened down by the situation in which we’re living, The fear of doing that is prevalent. Art is one of the few things that displays risk and courage and part of its value is that it does this.

Responsibility

MP You also talked very passionately about the responsibility you have as a funded artist. When you receive this financial transaction you have the responsibility to the community in which you are working.

JN I think that’s a responsibility that’s grown over the years with a dawning realisation that I wasn’t just getting away with it. None of my work can happen without a team that I support and manage. My work often arrives in a town in another country and it’s cost a lot of money. It’s very important that a community gets as much out of me as possible and that a debate takes place to try and stop the arguments that actually don’t happen in other countries but only happen here. Which is the cost of it. That’s starting to dissipate a bit. People are less obsessed with the fact that an artwork could cost the same as an air ambulance.

MP Yes. A nurse’s salary for a year or even a tabloid journalist’s salary for a year. And in terms of Chatham Vines how did that dialogue work with that community?

JN It worked globally because of the remote cameras. Very good marketing was involved prior to the cameras going live. Locally – and this was luck – the editor of the TV station is a wine expert so he did monthly bulletins on his news programme to inform people about how the vines were progressing. Then the local newspapers picked it up and the people of Chatham had public events they could go to. Part of the deal was to do a series of lectures at local universities. Visually you could see what was happening because the lights were on all night so the church was illuminated. The whole community knew what was going on.

Site-specificity and Context

MP My question is can something be site-specific to a community without it being exclusive to that community?

JN I think it can be contextually specific. Round by us there’s a sweet shop that’s grey but it’s referred to locally as The Pink Shop. I found out recently that at one point somebody owned it and painted it pink. It caused quite a rumpus in the area and was eventually painted back to grey. It became mythical. The gap between the event and how people refer to the event gave it a name. That place will forever be called The Pink Shop.

So in a sense one has that local investment in context and places and if you jump into you’ve got to be quite conscious of histories. Also if you go into places like factories or prisons you have to be very conscious of context and the work often isn’t a response to that context but if it isn’t then I wonder what the point of that work is. I think it has to be. It can be wonderfully useful for other things e.g, social services or a parallel education or community project that is related to the work but is just an excuse to talk about unemployment.

Artwork can open all of that up because people don’t consider it to be important. In a sense it has a wonderfully impish way of sneaking into places which it wouldn’t normally sneak into. The debate is very interesting.

MP This idea of The Pink Shop puts in mind your project in Temple Bar – Mad Helen’s – and that building’s importance, history and resonance to a locality. Also in that talk you mentioned the Ontology of Absence.

The Ontology of Absence

JN The Ontology of Absence influenced a lot of artists in the late seventies and early eighties in Europe. Boltanski, Sophie Calle, myself, a lot of us were interested in working in disused spaces. You’d walk into a place and it might be an old hospital ward and you might see evidence of where the bed legs had been, four shadows on the floor. You might go into a disused factory and see a hammer or a pay slip. Artists view those objects in a different way or a heightened way. The pay slip becomes not just a pay slip but all the pay slips, so you need to think about the consensual responsibilities of occupying the space.

MP Do you see that pay slip in a different way because of your interest in value or currency?

JN I think so but it’s also to do with walking into a disused space where there are objects. Most people have a tendency at that point to almost fetishise, not to sacredise, but make important the objects that were mundane at a certain point. A hammer’s a hammer. But a hammer left alone on a disused factory floor and the poetics of that hammer is different to the poetics of a hammer in Wilkinson’s hardware store. Artists work with that a lot – really from the 20th Century.

Du Champ was classically aware in theological terms of the ontological absence, Anselm of Canterbury, the always beyond argument. Duchamp was also aware of Aristotle’s argument about substance which is again connected to the ontological argument. And when Duchamp put a urinal in a different space he opened up a medieval theological view. That to me is his great legacy. Not just that he knew it but that he did it. Transubstantiation. Ontolological argument. Secularised it by using a urinal. Revolutionised art. Great. He’s a good artist.

MP Again I think you see these objects and you create narratives. The history of that urinal and if someone pisses in that urinal as somebody did it creates new narratives and a new legacy. The ontology of absence also relates to the absence within the church in Chatham Vines, just the fact that it had been abandoned, and those clues you found within it. Abandonment creates new narratives. How does that then inform the process? I read the installation within it and the detritus of the community, the remnants of congregation as separate things. They were already there. You were installing alongside those traces.

JN The first idea of that project was to data collect to make an inventory. It was extraordinary. No tidying up had been done. Then the next impetus was how do you make something living and hugely problematic within the space. It was hugely challenging and hugely risky. The responsibility there was really heavy. The nightmare of making sure the plants were looked after was massive. That feeling of getting the money and then thinking ‘What I’m doing?’ I get that a lot.

It was important to have something that was alive of nature. That was given ‘plant heaven’ and we all felt that enormously. That connected to an American project I was doing called Mine – which involved small gilded calves with the word Mine stamped into them like a logo. Part of the deal for that was we purchased a calf and we looked after it for a year and gave it everything we thought it could ever want. They wouldn’t pay for it in the end but it would have been great. So it was a responsibility, if you like, to look after something living.

MP The project I’m planning is located within a suburban church. Rooted in the site-specificity of the church site. It was a Methodist church so they use Shloer for the blood of Christ. So when they host wedding receptions you can’t drink alcohol. Every year they have an amateur dramatics show. The funds go towards the church so the funds buy the Shloer. I’m exploring symbolism and iconology. The dichotomies between the live and the recorded. Populism and elitism. Secular and religious. Am dram and MA dram. The similarities of both communities. Could you talk a little bit about the religious and wine symbolism?

Sacred and Secular

JN I recently did a lecture at Ludlem University of Poland. I’m doing a project for the museum of modern art there. It’s a place that’s highly charged religiously. Catholic and Jewish in a cultural sense. They wanted me to talk about sacred art. I don’t consider my work to be sacred. I started off by saying when I was a kid I really hated singing ‘There is a green hill far away.’ It made me sick I hated Christians. I couldn’t work out when I was a kid how Easter eggs connected with killing someone. I was not an easy kid but they let me paint the Easter Service backdrop it was a huge crucifix and it had them gasping as the curtains drew back. I started with that and the audience stood up and started applauding.

My view comes from being at distance from religions. I am interested in all religions and in the difference between belief and faith. I think faith is absolute and belief is easily changed. In Poland they thought I did ‘sacred art’ because I’d worked in Cathedrals and churches. It isn’t sacred art but what it does is gently challenge the premises of religions. I am much more of a humanist. I understand the perceptions of God because I’ve researched it and I believe that we need it. We need psychologically the notion of a constant other. Of something beyond ourselves.

MP By researching it did you find that you don’t need it?

JN No I need it. All of my writing I about these areas is based on personal experience. I know that at very difficult times like anybody else I’ll pray.

MP To an unknown other

JN To an unknown entity. At very good times I’ll pray to say thank you. Have done since I was a kid. I don’t know where that comes from but I’m willing to go along with it. My interest is personal because I think religion is personal in many ways if you start to really unpick it. It is part of what makes us human and the need for it and the community aspect of it is increasingly important. Also it is completely taboo in terms of artists. If you say to an artist you are making work in a cathedral they’ll immediately assume that you’re making religious work and therefore that’s not valued in terms of contemporary arts practice.

Theology and Philosophy

MP So you don’t refer to your work as religious work?

JN A lot of people say ‘Are you religious?’ And at first I used to say ‘No’. Now I won’t say that because I don’t think that’s correct and it sounds like I’m copping out. What I will say is that I’m really interested in religion and that I have a personal sense of the necessity for God and the elegance of communion and all the rituals associated with the Eucharist. I have a personal sense of the danger globally at the moment with religions getting it wrong. Getting very confused in their powerbases and using religion for political gratification. Theology is a parallel to Philosophy. So I’m not anti-religion.

MP Could you say your art is your religion?

JN I think if you take the deepest thoughts not necessarily in faith but in theology and the deepest thoughts that exist in philosophy you find parallels. If you take a 20th century Theologian like Paul Tillock and the essay he wrote when he was 23 which is when we all stop trying to identify God because that’s a fruitless task. He talks about risk and courage being the evidence of God. I can buy into that and I think artists at their best display risk and courage – sometimes naively, but to keep going as an artist requires it. Problematics arise when you question the relationship between God and contemporary art. I have done talks for the Arts Council and they are aware of the resources of empty churches and theological, philosophical thought that people like Damien Hirst have played with – in my opinion with a lack of understanding. It’s no good saying things like ‘God is Dad’. It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to throw yourself into it and really try to work it out. Warhol’s multicoloured crucifixes are amazing. His work is beautiful and it becomes sacred when it’s agreed. Sacredness is an agreement between people. A flower can be scared. Chatham Vines can be sacred.

MP Interesting how that can be used as a secular adjective.

JN I think it is. In all the work I do I look at the secular. I look for comparison. Sometimes connections between what I’ve read and thought about between the religious and the secular. I find parallels.

Acts of Communion

MP How does your wine, the gestation of this immense project, being filtered literally through this communion service fit into this idea and how does it make you feel as an artist?

JN It makes me feel very nervous because we’ve bought the bottles, made the labels – we’re going to have 24 bottles.

MP Is that a symbolic choice?

JN No it’s how it turned out. The final phase of Chatham Vines which is the Liturgy of the Eucharist at Rochester Cathedral is a much bigger deal than I thought it would be. It isn’t a service it’s more that that. It’s an all night vigil. It opens at Five O’Clock in the morning. It’s the first Eucharist. And to think people are actually drinking the wine. In a way I distance myself from that. There was a moment in the church where the Chatham Vines project was where we had Bishops turning up to bless the vines. It was absolutely amazing. What I can say is that what people are drinking there is wine that has come out of a very particular context that has been made with a full sense of responsibility and a huge amount of work. That it’s been blessed all the way through. You sense that the next thing is that it will be out of our hands when it enters the communion process. It will become the responsibility of the Bishop of Rochester.

MP How important to you is it that the congregation know that?

JN It’s not important at all but there will be a reference to it in the service. TV wanted to film it but I don’t think it’ll be allowed because it’s a very personal act. They will be filming it but from a distance. Very discreetly.

MP To what extent is it an art project or an act of communion on that day?

JN The first time I used communion wine was at the V&A. It was laminated between glass and you looked through the wine at the objects in the Church Plate gallery really reflecting their purpose and function. People don’t understand why they exist. They just think they’re really ornate gold things but they’re really important objects some of which have been melted down and recast. They know their history at the V&A. They gave me a 1304 Irish chalice to work with. That was the first time but I am still enchanted with the notion of communion and the notion of transubstantiation and this notion of drinking blood. Wine is chosen because it’s the colour of blood and vines are things of nature. Difficult to grow. They are amazing and I think religion is predicated on nature.

MP Will you be taking communion? Would that sit well with your faith?

JN I think I might. It would be my first time. I’m not sure. I’m still not sure.

MP Will you actually taste the wine?

JN I will

Doug Fishbone

2006-10-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

Interview with Doug Fishbone exploring site-specificity and context, high art and low art, audience and culture.

MP Michael Pinchbeck
DF Doug Fishbone

MP I've seen your work live at the Powerhouse and at the Angel Row annex. Site Gallery on my own and Beacon project with my parents. Different contexts. Different content. Different locations. Different audiences. Different responses. How do you edit / rearrange the content to suit the location or nature of the showing - live or recorded, gallery or theatre? How definite is the structure - i.e. do you have a narrative thrust that you can achieve with different material or does it vary?

DF Not sure exactly here as you are talking about two distinct projects. In Sheffield and at Angel Row I showed a video work, as opposed to the live performance. The video and performance work share the basic gesture of spoken word and still images but they are distinct projects with different intentions and modes of operating. That being said they are strongly linked, as my style in using this type of gesture was developed out of an artist talk/slide lecture I did on my MA, which was the first time I ever played with found imagery in that way. That being said, I have only been doing this performance work for a short term so it is too early to generalize. I make some local variations depending on cultural reference - It started out in Lincolnshire, and then I made a slightly more vulgar variant for London, since I was showing it in a gallery space as opposed to the more open community based idea at Beacon. The London version incorporated a few dirty jokes and a smattering of pornographic images. I have also performed in NY and Milan. The basic project is the same, though I have added bits and bobs here and there. In NY I changed a number of the British references that would not have made sense to an American audience and added a few more US specific jokes. The vulgarity remained as well, and it was fun to present the work in a nightclub environment. Given the importance of stand-up comedy in the conception of the work, it is a coming home of sorts.

Using the stand-up model for construction, as I do, things can be added and changed around, more in a syncretic way than a standard approach to narrative might allow. That is a strength and potential weakness in the work, as it sets the stage for allowing it to go all over the place. I play with this looseness quite often, allowing things to go off the rails at times. That is a general feature of my mode of storytelling since I wanted to adopt a framework to allow for maximum flexibility. I am planning future work that will be much more literary in tone, which will need more coherence visually and narratively than I have been working with up until now. In terms of changing content based on context, then I would say it shifts somewhat based on location then, to allow for different cultural reference to make sense, and on other variables - the Beacon guy asked me to keep it cleaner than I might normally. The performance is not meant to be seen recorded, so the live/recorded issue is not one I confront. That is a video versus performance issue which is a whole other kettle of fish. And that being said I have only worked through the one performance, so I hesitate to generalize too much about a new project.

MP How did the preparation for the Beacon performance in the village hall differ from this in terms of the audience you were expecting? How did their reception of the work differ from an urban audience and from your expectations of their response?

DF I did not factor the audience into the preparation except in a generic kind of way. I wanted to write the piece and perform it, that simple. My interest was in developing a live way of working with similar devices that I use in my video. It was more of a pre-conceived intention that I was glad to have a venue to try it out in, than a site-specific, purpose-written thing as it were. The audience at the point of reception was quite different in that there were many children and older people who might not normally visit galleries, and they would not have known about the work in much detail in advance, whereas a London gallery audience might have more idea what to expect given my other work. It was interesting to see how the edgier political bits went over in the Beacon - people laughed at some of the racist humor more than I expected. However, people have tended to laugh at the same points as they did in London or NY. The London version had a few extremely nasty jokes that would necessarily change the reception of the piece, adding an element of confronting the audience that the Beacon version might not have had, but all this is mediated by the self consciousness of an art audience watching an art project in a gallery. Things are taken immediately as art, which certainly affects the vibe. So how might a porn-infused thing have worked in Beacon? Or how much does it change the flavor to make only a few changes but have them be dramatic - such as the inclusion of vulgarity? Not sure.

MP What discussions did you have with John Plowman about how to engage with the audience within the Beacon project?

DF None of any note. He offered me a platform and I decided to develop the performance. We discussed issues like my panhandling (which John actually did, shaking the hat), but he had no editorial involvement in the creation of the work, except as mentioned, in asking me to be generally aware of a certain sensitivity - ie no porn.

MP You say in the BAS brochure that you are 'investigating the language of mass media to critique some of the more problematic aspects of our culture... by using its own delivery of imagery as the basis for the work.' How much is the language and your critique of it cynical - and if so - can it be aligned with Oscar Wilde's view 'A cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.'? Does your piece not cancel itself out - like the Chinese proverb about the fish?

DF It is certainly cynical. I see myself primarily as a satirist, so that would be hard to do without cynicism. In terms of investigating media language, I aim to reflect the kind of visual overload and bizarre visual juxtapositions that we are bombarded by and exposed to at all times. I think it is important to note that I don't identify a particular agenda. Sometimes the narrator seems pc and fairly wise, sometimes vulgar, offending the very ethnic groups he seems to be a part of. It is a mirror of sorts. Whether that cancels itself out, I cannot say. I think not, because I think the work has a very ethical and political stance because of the way it operates. The evenness of tone in the voice over is very studied, and it is actually a gesture to highlight thing rather than minimize them, but through the act of minimizing, there is a point in one video in which I am talking about a whole series of very significant things as thought they were merely simple lifestyle choices. As though obesity and bulimia were equivalent choices with cannibalism and shit-eating and people rooting through the garbage for trash in Indonesia. Clearly eating trash is not a lifestyle choice in the same way a sexual fetish like shit eating would be. However placing them all in the same framework allows some of the dichotomies between developing and developed world to be shown - gross excess versus deprivation, and so on - in an unexpected way. Evening them reveals how truly uneven they are. It is cynical, of course, and one might question the exploitation of images of suffering of others. The broader question of whether art is politically effective, or makes any difference in any larger way, even social critique of this nature, is a different story, of course.

But I think using the tones and gestures I work with does allow for a powerful cynicism that has a distinct if not blatantly stated message. That is my intention and my means of operating. The cancelling out is very studied, and is its own critique of how that process operates on a larger media level. My work is meant to be viewed many times, though, as it is tightly designed and the various stories and jokes tie together. So what might come off as gruff indifference or whatever in one viewing shifts when the viewer gives the work more time. The quieter way it operates reveals itself.

MP You said in your talk at Nottingham Trent University as part of the British Art Show that you don't want your work to be just a one-liner - how does a piece of work that is a string of one-liners fit into this ambition? Where does it sit between political satire, stand up comedy and academic lecture? Why?

DF I would say the same as above. Stand-up is a stylistic influence - the huge range of topics, piece-meal approach to form, ability to change directions without any real segues. The formal use of still imagery relates to a wider range of contexts - academic lecture, business talk, and so on. I am interested in the authority that obtains when still photographic imagery is used. Because of the various associations with different contexts of information delivery, it allows for a lot of fun - things stand out against the formality in some cases, in others the format can be exploited to different effects. My point about the conceptual tightness of the material - in particular in the video I have in the BAS - is to say that it is not merely a string of one-liners. The jokes all reflect the broader themes of cultural misunderstanding and relativity between different world views. So they reflect my broader points about the arrogance of Western thinking and the fluidity of notions of scientific truth, or what have you, and are not a series of empty one-liners. I cannot of course determine fully how people take the work, but I can explain the intention behind its creation. It adopts many conventions of stand-up but isn’t fully that, since it tries to fail at times, tries to hit walls and derail its own momentum, things that traditional stand-up would not risk perhaps. I see it as operating fairly fluidly between a number of modes - nor do I see any necessary distinction between political satire and comedy.

Reckless Sleepers

2006-10-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Interview with Tim Ingram of Reckless Sleepers exploring the company aesthetic, (de)construction of text, attention to detail and tracing the arc in contemporary performance.

MP Michael Pinchbeck
TI Tim Ingram

MP How was The Last Supper conceived?

TI All artists attending the Ghent Festival in 1999 were invited to present a new piece of work inspired by The Last Supper. Mole, Pascal and I decided to create a piece with the idea of eating people’s last words. We collated the last words and these were written onto rice paper. There was a fine line between fact and fiction, perhaps faction. We experimented with fictionalising the last words of the living e.g. Elizabeth Taylor. About eating or not eating. We explored the mythologies around the death of Che Guevara. There are many different accounts of the last ten minutes of his life. This created a mini-argument onstage with contradictory evidence presented – discrepancies in describing the same incident but described within the same time-construct. We focussed on the minutiae of the details in descriptions of the assassination of the Romanov family. Military accounts of the time were forensic but suffused with the political – there were discrepancies in how many bullet holes were in the ceiling and who was shot first etc.

MP What was the thinking behind the aesthetic? There is something Perecquian in Reckless Sleepers attention to architectural or spatial detail, The description of a room and its contents in In The Shadow for example.

TI We were describing locations with the text so needed an ambiguous space. Mole comes from a Theatre Design background so the set design always comes first, He is fascinated with the architecture of the space and it was important to reflect Da Vinci’s Last Supper. We looked into the numbers of disciples, theories, sciences. 13 disciples mulitiplied by 3 gave us an audience maximum of 39 etc. We looked into the ritual and symbolism of the head table at a wedding and biblical references such as water / wine / apples – the blood of Christ. The people in the text are all in some way connected to Christ or numbers or in some way connected to each other within the narrative. For example Marie-Antoinette and Marilyn Monroe were both wearing Chanel no. 5. Elvis Presley was apparently reading a book on the toilet about the Turin Shroud. John Lennon famously said The Beatles were bigger than Jesus. We were threading these connections.

MP What were you as performers focussing on within this narrative and how did you shift modes from direct address to audience interaction?

TI We as performers interact and how much we interact with the audience is up to us. The text is a bombardment of facts so the presentation of the meal – their last supper taken from the final food requests of prisoners on Death Row – was a device of pace. Giving audience time to breathe. Any move we make is very significant in the stillness. There is a fine line between casual and formal, humour and pathos and in many cases we kept the delivery the same tone to let the words speak for themselves. For example, the last words of Bobby Sands create a very emotional and politically charged piece of text. It would seem wrong to characterise or to ‘act’ it.

MP Why do you think it is a trait of experimental theatre to almost resist acting?

TI Contemporary theatre avoids emotion to get away from the distinction with mainstream theatre. There was a love letter in Schrodinger’s box that I had to read. This text is based on real experiences and putting emotion into it does it no good at all.

MP In mainstream theatre where there is this temptation to inject emotion into everything actors often speak of ‘tracing an arc’ through the character and action.

TI In The Last Supper there is an arc, from meeting and greeting the guests, toasts, speeches, drinking and the piece shifts from very formal to more casual and laidback. We wanted it to reflect the pace of wedding reception. Where the mood becomes more laconic after a few drinks. The last few pages of text are more humorous and yet there is a neutrality of a newsreader to the delivery. After all, the piece is a choreography of facts – all facts apart from the lies – and we as performers are restricted in our expressions.

MP Are you conscious of your stage persona and how this might caricature yourself?

TI Of course you are always aware you are onstage – always conscious of your stage persona and always reining the persona in. Sometimes you think ‘Oh my God, I’m acting! Stop it. You know it’s right when you’re not acting but if you stop and think then you probably are. It is easy to ‘ham’ especially when working in another language. But more than anything we ate trying to be just ourselves. The hand gestures are our own. Something new to put in or to develop when’s good to eat an apple of drink the wine.

MP There is an aural texture to the performance that adds to the musicality of the voices.

TI The Last Supper could be a voice piece. Could be a radio show. The soundtrack is a series of lasts. The end of the music to Marilyn Monroe’s last film. The last track John Lennon recorded. The last few bars of a composition of a classical composer. The music stops when he stopped. This adds to the solemnity of the text.

MP What decisions were made in terms of mood and the atmospheric journey?

TI We mix up and make up last words – from the mundane to the profound. From Einstein gazing at planets and stars saying ‘My work is done’ to a victim of Hiroshima saying ‘I’m going to the shops do you want anything?’ Often the ordinary is more poignant – to commemorate and pay homage to the everyman – like on death row.

MP How does your work evolve and are you conscious of your practice over projects?

TI We take the experience from one show and it becomes something else. Houes on the Hill – a one-man show I was involved in – was the bi-product of another project. We are always using and reusing material. Moving on, developing, referencing, taking forward etc. At the end of the devising process so much is thrown away. We are constantly trying to reanimate ideas and devices otherwise it is a waste of material.

MP Are you a different performer in different projects – e.g. non-Reckless Sleepers?

TI I suppose there is a Reckless Tim and a non-Reckless Tim but I have to strike the balance between frustrating and liberating, concentration and compromise. All the work I do tends to have a fragmented form of text or language but with one overall voice.

MP So who does this voice belong to? The company / the collective / the director?

TI In Schrodinger – it is a series of monologues united by the presence in the same space. In the Shadow was more interaction-based, using questions and answers, facts and descriptions. I suppose the voice is always that of Reckless Sleepers but the voice is different. The audience know someone is going to say something but don’t know what. Is it pre-conceived? Does it matter? In Spanish Train Mole referred to the door banging because the door of the venue was banging but it still becomes part of the piece’s voice. In In the Shadow there was more of a storyline and when I was nervous it was my persona not a character. I am still Tim being nervous, Tim being angry through a shift of delivery or physicality. There must always be a way of surprising an audience. People come to see us as a company and may know us as performers but do they know what we are going to say or how we going to say it? That is the voice of Reckless Sleepers.

Performance Practice Lecture

2006-10-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Readerly and Writerly

2006-10-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barthes

Readerly Text: Both the "readerly" and "writerly" are ways of reading which Barthes implicitly interrogates throughout his texts; "S/Z", however, is perhaps the best and most explicit text in terms of watching how these definitions are fleshed out ("From Work to Text," an essay from "Image--Music--Text" (1977) also serves as a great analogous parallel look at the active and passive, postmodern and modern, ways of interacting with a text). As has already been implied, it is important to note that the "readerly" and "writerly" are more like positive or negative habits by which the modern reader brings with him or her to texts themselves. Regardless, there remains a spectrum of literature Barthes terms "Replete Literature," which are "any classic (readerly) texts that" work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (S/Z p.200). A readerly text, in other words, is one wherein the reader need not "write" or "produce" his or her own meanings but one where one can find, by passive means, meaning "ready-made". In another variation upon the "readerly," Barthes writes that these sorts of text are "controlled by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5).

Writerly Text: Unlike the required passivity before the readerly text, i.e. one which is "replete" with meanings already easily discernable, the goal of any "writerly text" for Barthes is the proper goal of literature and criticism: "...the goal is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4). "Writerly texts" and ways of reading are, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts that Barthes implies should never be accepted in its given forms and traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as "product," the "Writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). In the end, for Barthes reading "is not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing," but rather a "form of work" (10).

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Happening and un-happening

2006-10-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

'Writers and artists have always veered between contrasting versions of history. On the one hand, it is argued, history is about global events - war, conflict, famine, terrorism, mass movements of people around the planet - and to record history means being in the front line, at crisis point, bearing witness to violent change. On the other hand there are those who see history as the slow march of time, with most of us largely untouched by political turmoil, since our lives consist of what human life has always consisted of: birth, work, procreation, friendship and play. One view values journalistic reportage, the other eternal verities. One view is happening the other, un-happening.' - Faith Blakemore, Different Views - The Guardian 21 October 2006

Last Supper

2006-10-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

Questions sent to Mole Wetherell Artistic Director of Reckless Sleepers re: Last Supper 20 November 2006:

1. How do you deal with the idea of last-ness?
2. How do you deal with the idea of absence?
3. How do you deal with missing information?
4. How do you deal with the words of the dead?
5. How do you deal with the gigantic details (or the massive narratives)?

Answers received 29 November 2006:

Last - there is a predictability about the Last Supper, or the last meal requests, to know the number of seconds left in your life must be a terrible thing, to know that you will no longer eat anything because this will be your last, its planned, its no accident, it is going to happen...

Its very present, and very much about something that will happen in the future, In this respects its very orchestrated, or choreographed, I am sure that there are a whole number of rituals that go with an execution, it is very planned, And i get an impression, that it isn't a very upbeat experience.

There is a drama about knowing that something is going to happen...to another person, I cant imagine for a minute what those last things are like, I remember on a school trip we wen through the Doges palace, through the bridge of sighs, which is the last view of the outside world that prisoners get, before they are executed, executed between the statues of the devil and the deep blue sea, but then i remember having a series of firsts, i think that it might have been 1984 with my friend Neil and i had my first cigarette of 1984, my first cup of Tea, told my first joke, laughed for the first time and crossed over the road in a minor drunken fashion, for the first time.

I've had my last drink, and that is the last thing that i will say about that.

Its late its not that late, but i don't want to make too much noise,

In the Last Supper there are several references (i had to go for a walk to the kitchen to get that Last word in my brain) references to Last, Last meal requests, last words, last moments, Last works, painters musicians, there is a whole series of last compositions, which was created by Gerrit especially for the last supper, so we
have within the piece the last composition (unfinished) by Mozart, the film score from the last film that James Dean was in, the list is long

There are 19 tracks in total, but in the last supper, its not just about the last words, there is a morbid fascination with them, and plenty of sources of information about last words or last statements, and for some its important to know, but these may be the last words uttered by someone in a morphine state, not making much sense, but we hang onto these last words as if they were precious, as if these words will continue to live on, like the maid who was asked what were Einstein's last words and she said I dont know i dont speak, German...

For me my favourite last words are the ones that I have invented, and it starts with Newton, - Marylyn Monroe - Einstein with Newton his last words seemed fake, they seemed fabricated too complete too long winded, and so what we get from Tim is what was an improvised section, but is now clearly set,

Newton - his last words

Tim - I dont know? I dont know how to, i dont know what i may seem to the rest of the world...and then he rambles on, its pretty much set, but has the impression that this might take a long time, he is gently
interrupted, By

Leen: Norma Jean Mortenson"

Mole: Later"

Leen: Norma Jean Baker"

Mole: Later

Leen: Marylyn Monroe

Mole: Later

Leen: around 10 A.M. Wearing nothing but channel no 5, a telephone in
one hand...Jo...Jim...Arthur..Jim...

Mole: Lying in his deathbed, Albert Einstein a flashback to his early youth making little sense in German, refusing to take morphine so that he can think straight, see straight, think of one last thought...

(i have the whole text of this I send it...

These are fabricated moments and idea of what might have been their last moments, its a very sad moment in the piece, because there is a sense of loneliness with this part, its MM calling to her X husbands and lovers, alone.

I felt a real sadness there because my mother died this year, i wasn't around when she died, i went to get a cup of tea from the hospital canteen, whilst the nurse was busy, we came back and she had gone, I think that she had waited,

But i know what her last words were, and it wasn't anything grand, or huge or massively important, it wasn't what she said, it was how she said it, My mum was a nurse and she worked worth old people so she knew the ropes, she knew the drugs routine or ritual, and she refused to take the morphine, i could see it in her eyes she didn't want to give this life up, she wasn't ready to go yet.

And so her last words take their place in the new version of The Last Supper,

That may be the Last Time that i mention this,

My mum, and the reason why i bring her into the last Supper is that she is everywhere in it, her favourite perfume Channel No 5 the last bottle that i bought her for Christmas has replaced the one that we lost in that place, her birthday is July 14 Bastille and when she came to see the performance as the Marseilles is playing in the
background on the announcement of the largest of the last meal requests, the Birthday Cake, it seems fitting that my mum should get the Birthday cake, which she did.

My Dad who was dying when i was writing the last supper isn't in the Last Supper, there is a moment in Spanish Train where i always think of him, and there is a moment in The Last Supper when i will always think of my mum,

So

Question 2,, there is a sense of absence, a strong sense for me of people who arent there any more, its more prevalent for me because ive lost 2 very close people in my life, very recently, so i cant put this Last Supper show to bed, to sleep as it were its too relevant for me at this moment in my life.

We do start with a, no we dont we start with people choosing a seat a bingo ticket, the performance starts with a toast, which starts with I am ready which was someone's last words, or its the most common last words before an execution.,and then we toast those who arent there any more, a list of nicknames to Al Tikriti (Sadam Hussein), To
shy Di (Diana Spencer) these are familiar names, and i always think of the New year celebrations, not like my first crossing the road, but the strange dance that is done, or was done, in the house parties that we used to have, in the 1970's and 1980's (early)

And i always had to first foot, there was no coal, but i always had to go outside at 12 and ring the bell and be let into the house even though i had a key and even though i dont even think the door was locked any way, but there is something nostalgic about the last supper, there is something about not being there also, about only really understanding these moments as a witness,

These are people who are not here any more but we still celebrate their Ideas, Relativity was 100 years old recently it was Mozart's 400th Birthday, and we are still bound by Newtonian physics, Gravity still exists so far many of the celebrities their ideas or work are still relevant, or celebrated they arent here but we still remember them, the prisoners however are different, this is the strange thing
about the Last Supper as there are moment within this piece where the audience or visitors reaction amazes me, for instance the food when presented normally gets a small applause or laugh, after the candles are blown out of the birthday cake this action receives applause, and yet these are the last requests of someone who isn't around any more, and this meal has everything to do with death, is celebrated,

Of course this isn't wrong.

Absence,

I like that gaps are left to be filled, and what im trying to say here is that i dont think its necessary to say everything and these absences are crucial to the last supper (we the audience fill in the gaps) well i hope that we do, i always have an image of MM and Napoleon and Einstein playing in my head when i speak or hear these
descriptions.

Missing Information, well, we cant know everything can we, i dont have a clue what you thought when you read that last line, you perhaps smiled as i am now, well im imagining you smiling, we cant know everything and we cant describe everything, we cant describe how to move across the room, i cant describe every painting in Van Goughs room the one where he died, the room that he painted with the small single bed and a couple of Van Gough chairs in there and i think on the walls there is a painting of sunflowers or a vase and a filed there's a small window, and i imagine that his brother in the room holding his hand.

Im not saying everything there that happened, but im trying to do is paint a picture plant an image in your head, so that you can move the scene on you can imagine it, and i think that is what i really like about the last supper, there is too much information at times, dates and locations, and thats not theatre its a list of who said what and where and when and you can but that in a book.

This is why i like the Newton-MM-Einstein part because we dont really have any information about what happened, just someone else's impression, in The Romanovs we have too much information so much so that the room is filled with the noises of the information that we have, and in a way this is used like a machine we broadcast as much information as we can, and what we have is half of what information that we have as i cut so much of it because there was too much information about where a person was shot what happened how they fell, pages and pages or accounts of what happened, and so i deal with that by editing it out,

In Che we had many conflicting ideas about what actually happened and what he said, so we show this, Franz Kafka wrote his last words on small pieces of paper, which we have (the small pieces of rice paper that we eat) JFK 'thats obvious" was his last words, but we are so familiar with the events surrounding his death that we dont have to say that much, Lee Harvey Oswald follows "I have nothing more to say to you"

The wicked witch is the only fictional character in the Last Supper, Sadam Hussein No 2, 3, and 4 dont have jobs any more Saddam Hussein No. 1 is now on death row. i dont know what im saying here perhaps you can make sense of it tomorrow..

Dealing with the words of the Dead, I dont put too much weight on them, i dont hold on to it any way, and part of me doesn't quite believe what passes as credible research as fact, in the original LS we found the last words of Oscar Wilde, iN Paris in a hotel room which were quoted as either that wallpaper goes or I do, well after
a bit of time and some space id had time to read the final pages of the biography of Oscar Wilde whos last words were reportedly My Wallpaper and i are fighting a duel to the death, one or the other of us will have to leave, which sound more credible, but no one got it, people used to hear the quick wit of the first, and the second just
didn't work so Oscar isn't in it any more, well he might be if we ever do the show in Paris. Because if we did the show in Paris there would be plenty of references that we could link in.

I think that we are pretty sympathetic about how people are presented, Bobby Sands we keep to his last diary entry its such a strong piece of text, and there are so many associated images surrounding that whole time that its always very strong.

In The Hiroshima scene we eat 38 last statements in quick succession were not pointing a finger at anyone, and again this is a scene that doubles our visitors laugh at this scene because we find it difficult to speak, but then there is normally a realisation that these are the last words of people in a city, and this really happened, and it can happen to us, i could have easily said 9/11 or Tsunami, or another event in history,

So the words themselves arent that important to me, and i dont trust many of them I'm suspicious that many of them, especially Victorian reports of last words are jokes, rewritten modified, I believe John Lennons, JFK's and Kafkas last words, so they are in, but we dont even Know what Elvis's last words were so we dont say them, and no
one seems to mind,

The Last bit, i think what i want to say with the last supper is that the massive narrative is that this happens again and again throughout history we go through the same conflicts and same arguments and the same love affairs and the same things happen and we all have one last thing to say,

And that cycle of history repeating itself is very clear to me.

French Revolution - Russian revolution - Velvet Revolution - Invasion of Iraq - Civil War

Scapegoats and executions

Marie Antoinette - Tsar - JFK - Sadam - so this for me is the big narrative, and then the smaller things are the bigger things too like the small conversations in the Hiroshima scene, MM desperate to speak to someone, Andy Warhol on the Phone to his brother Van gough holding his brothers hand.

Goat Island

2006-10-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

'We have discovered a performance by making it' - Goat Island

Akin to Michelangelo's claim that he was merely finding the sculpture within the marble, Goat Island find the performance within the process. The company place as much if not more importance on the process as the performance and their task and response devising strategy means the performance is almost a bi-product of the process. This post will present a review of a Work in Progress performed by Goat Island Performance Group at Chelsea Theatre, London on Friday 8 September 2006 alongside excerpts from an interview with company members Lito Walkey and Karen Christopher. This will form the basis of a research paper entitled The Detail of Worship, The Worship of Detail. Taken from www.goatislandperformance.org

The performance situates between two audiences. Its temporal structure reflects the historical trajectory of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, a triple life: church/mosque/museum. We consider these not conflicting theologies, but movements encountered on different planes.

Part 1: A dance in 13 rounds. Each round adds a triad of detailed movement. Through the course of the 39 movements, the performers diverge and reconverge, in accordance with hybrid mathematics, to a regular beat with irregular measures.

Part 2: Not performance, but instructions for performances. The community enters the work as instruction-givers. A micro-performance on a bare stage answers each recited instruction: a universe in simple words, a journey of attention with no destination.

Part 3: A concert begins, a Vaudeville Deluxe, of three-minute acts, a weave of The Last Waltz / The Last Picture Show: how to take a stand; how to spurn a lover; how to look at a building; how to recall “the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning”; how to say goodbye.
Interview with Goat Island exploring absence and compositional structure of time and space.

MP Michael Pinchbeck
KC Karen Christopher
LW Lito Walkey

MP I'm fascinated by the way your time and space structures are come upon and how they're balanced.

LW The structure of how we work. That's where balance finds itself. The structure that is directly connected to the content e.g. mathematical pattern. And the structure of how we work. I think that one of the essential things about how we work is based very much on never having enough time. There is this leaving for short periods of time. We are going to answer one question or bring things in to show each other or we're going to redo something we've done before. There's just enough time to touch on something. That structure of never having time to say 'This is our concept and this is our time to achieve that' but instead there are just these little sparks that along the way tell us how to approach the material and how to shape it.

MP And that idea of doing exercises for 55 seconds rather than a minute does this tie in with the idea of never having enough time?

LW I think that comes in connection with 'unfinishedness' - the idea that you're not going to have enough time. So in that state of non-completion comes another kind of specificity. You have to ask yourself other questions when you know that you have to cut yourself short. You detach. You let yourself go. Contrary to that there is this approach of saying what happens when you don't indulge in things taking over because you feel that's where they're going but you think 'This is the border of where I have to go to'. Somehow you cme back to how a very small thing can fill up that time. One of the things we realised is that a tiny fragment can take over a whole structure. Take over a whole hour of what you want to pay attention to.

MP It's the 'gigantic detail'?

KC Also I think originally why it was 55 seconds instead of a minute was that people don't really listen when you say a minute. Because that sounds like a generic time frame. Oh a minute. Oh an hour. Oh a couple of minutes. So if you tell them 55 seconds. When we said 2 minutes we meant 2 minutes but people thought we meant a short piece. What we wanted was for people to be rigid about time. What matters is that they've spent time considering time. When you consider a choice of words. In some cases people don't listen if you just use ordinary words. It's like the flight attendant who says 'I found a brown wallet... I have to tell you some safety instructions...' Especially in the workshop and in rehearsal we use it a lot. I'm not standing here on my own worrying about am I good enough is my idea good enough. I'm standing here with time and the time it takes me to stand here.

MP How do you reconcile the idea of 'unfinished-ness' with 'last-ness'?

LW We’re showing the first and the third section.

KC It’s only a five minute section of the third section. The third section will be longer. We’re in a situation where we have to present something that feels like a piece even though it’s not. Whoever comes to see this this is the show they’re seeing. The first work in progress we did there was a first section and a second section. Now we’re just doing the first section and a short part of the third section. I think that’s why the second section isn’t quite there. It’s problematic. It’s stopped there. It has its own integrity. But it’s not ready. So we do the first and the third section knowing what already happens in the second section.

LW We did have the idea that we would try for the first time to not show the third part ever.

MP So it would exist?

LW So we would work on it but it wouldn’t be in the work in progress. We would only show part one and part two so there would be an unfinished form in it. Now we want to show a part of it to show the energy it has. I like this idea that because Goat Island has used work in progress over the two year process there is a lot of generosity in that. It’s a nice idea to keep something.

KC So we broke our rule about not presenting the section.

MP. There are echoes of End Time Now. Adrian Heathfield describes how Tehching Hsieh paints for 13 years but never presents the results. He only presents the statement ‘I survived’. I’m exploring the notions of absence and presence. Heathfield talks about the images of the same artist punching in and taking self-portraits of himself as part of his One Year Performance

KC It is just stills but when you see them all together. You see his hair grow. You see his face change. And he stands in the same position every time.

MP He talks about this as ‘nowhen’. An absent presence. This moment in between. I wonder how this notion of ‘nowhen’ applies to the shifting structures you have. The gaps you have. The missing beginning. The entering of the void to find it. The way you turn the work inside out. Do you have any thoughts about your work in terms of absence and presence?

LW In September Roses there was a specific focus on these missing parts. These moments when we would be still for 55 seconds and then move again. We were missing out words. We were pointing out voids. And if we approach these spaces by letting those absences be there then we’re questioning what happens to the presence. Maybe something that is a little more real that connects directly to the nervous system. The non-presence is there. We had a question that we each asked someone out of the company to answer with five steps. We came back to make a performance that followed these steps. The performance that resulted in these tasks there is the idea of doing these things without representing the body. Instead of making the focus on the body the focus is one the instructions on the body and the traces made by the body in the space. This deals with absence and presence. In contrast to the first section when we are very present in our bodies.

KC I want to say something about the void in September Roses. There was a sense of the idea of repair. How do you represent something that is unfinished, broken or incomplete because everything you show is complete. So some of the stuttering and stopping was an attempt to do that. Also – I feel that people are terrified of nothing. Of that moment when nothing happens. ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’ There’s a line somewhere you can draw between that discomfort and how we deal with this void? This emotional void. There was a connection to the idea that we were responding to the United States reaction to 9/11. We were on tour when it happened and the effects of it were going on in the world. The idea of the void. The response to void. The response to the missing. The response to death. The reflection on existence. The idea was repair being a response to that sort of disaster instead of attack.

MP It’s a much more healthy word than fix.

KC So we looked at Paul Ceylan who set out to repair the German language after the holocaust and part of his method of repair included holes or absences because so was much was missing in the world. We would all have very different ways of explaining the absences within the work.

LW We circle around the same notion without discussing the work.

KC The discussion happens in action. In making the material. That’s the converation.

LW I think the conversations we carry forward are about the happy accidents.

KC I don’t think any of the performances tie something down to the meaning we had when we thought about it. One always hoped there is more than one meaning. It’s interesting to see the effect it has on other people. The mystery.

MP Sometimes the balance happens in the ambiguity. Not defining meaning.

KC It’s one way of avoiding argument. It’s also a way to live in a community.

MP There’s a quote from Stephen Bottoms about ‘negotiatiating community’ – about how you exist as a unit and your unique way of working. Also – you say ‘Memorize to perform, perform to remember.’ I wonder what that means to you?

KC How do you remember anything – there’s an activation of some internal thought process. Something that moves you. Something that makes sense. There now you have a memory. You need these memories to have a fertile thought process. In some ways performance causes this – an alchemical thing – a reaction in your brain – something catalyses – and you all either performer or audience have some intellectual or emotional response – you have a new memory.

MP Are you flirting with that chemical response by reconfigurating material?

LW Then that becomes a sequence of course the path is changed but what we perform becomes a sequence that doesn’t have open ends on a ‘what we do’ level. We make it complex but when we’re performing we always get to similar points. We have our routes.

MP How much freedom do you feel as a performer within these structures? Is there a frustration in working within such a rigid outlline?

LW There’s a frustration that comes with a liberation. There’s a surprise that comes from doing something always in a similar way. An extreme example. It’s 25 minutes long and there’s a beat every second. There’s a movement every beat. I have difficulty breathing. Because I start to lose the movement. That’s where a freedom can take over but it’s a question we’re asking but still we can’t let go of it because we’d lose the beat.

KC We can’t lose ourselves in it because we have to find the movements. Everytime I get to 8 I panic because I can’t remember whether I’ve started over. There’s always a panic that you’ve gone on automatic.

LW This is the difference between meditative and automatic. How I do find it exhilerating is that it becomes very concrete. The epression as the performance of this measured movement is in the urgency of the action. It is not feeling. It is in the doing.

KC I have to remind myself of that everytime I start. Why did I agree to this purgatory? It’s really hard. It’s not difficult to do. It’s difficult to get it right. If you’re looking at it from the point of view of a very structured dance and everybody is doing it the same where uniformity is the idea – then we have freedom – because though we have a structure our movements are radically different. Our personalities imbue the movements with an individual quality.

LW Another point is how Lyn directs us or how Lyn doesn’t direct us. It is never in relation to how we are doing something. Those details are up to us. Very quickly what we do in rehearsal becomes part of that path. That’s another point where we do not have a discussion. The doing is established.

MP You allow yourselves to show.

KC It’s not about personality but there is an individuality. It’s not a phsycology or an emotionality but it is an individuality.

MP I’m making a peformance with an amateur dramatics group and it started with the idea of them as themselves. There’s a sense of self and comfort within that role. Is that sense in your work e.g. Brian’s clockwise lecture in September Roses.

KC It depends. Brian brought that in and performed it as himself and that was that. Then there are times when you imitate someone else. It’s still us. There is no pretend going on. But it’s us showing you how we do this person. There has still got to be an availability in how we do it.

MP What do you mean by availability in the transaction between performer and audience?

KC I don’t know what that means ‘availability’ because it’s more permeable than that. It’s not definitive. Less interior. I don’t think soulless is quite the right word but you have to give something of the performer. Make yourself more available. More permeable. Less like a shield I think. Because it’s important to keep the small connection to people. When we have an actual connection between actual people we care more.

MP Can that connection remain if it’s something that you’ve done before?

KC If I enliven it. But I have to enliven it each time.

The man who flew into space

2006-10-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

Written in response to Ilya Kabakov's 1980-81 installation The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment

1

Fragments are all that are left. Story debris. Charred words. Splintered sentences. Out of the wreckage we piece together what might have been. We find molten metal mixed with molten man. Like black fabric to the naked eye. Steel bent double as the city cries. We build crosses out of girders seeking solace out of shame. We build walls to the world out of new questions. The question mark traces the path of his ascent, descent and point of impact. We ask what did this stand for? Who built it? What killed him? Why here? And we wonder what if. What if the wind had changed? What if the clouds had come? What if the trajectory had not been the same? We knew it had to happen but wonder how and what will fill the holes in the hearts of those left behind, the city and its children. Sticks and stones will never hurt. Bricks and mortar will never heal. All that is left fizzes and crackles across history, across screens, across faces, and our bloody nails halo our fingers as we reach out to the light when we realise that we can’t live life like something beautiful when we die.

2

Every time I look out of my window. I etch his face upon the sky. Whether moulding clouds into his likeness. Or tracing stars with half-closed eyes. Every time I listen to the wind I score his voice upon its staves. Longing to hear a loving whisper. Though the voice is not the same. Every time I feel the rain I sense him falling down. He permeates the concrete. He penetrates the ground. Every time I see the picture of the room he left behind. The hole still serves to haunt me. More than it reminds. He is the sky, the earth, the stars, the sea. His face, his voice, his history. But I know he’s standing next to me. Every time I look out of my window.

3

He worked all day and he worked all night. Noah-like. Know-it-all. Waiting for a flood that never came. Blood, sweat and tears stained his face, his clothes, his Black and Decker. Hammers fell and nails succumbed, wilting into wood. Occasionally fainting. Screws followed their endless thread into grain. Palms blistered. Brow wet. Splinters drove themselves into thumbs. Hot swarf snagged itself on sweater. Sleeves rolled up and forehead creased, ‘For crying out loud!’ he cried out loud. No one heard his cries. They heard his music. Mike Reid sings Ugly Duckling. His father’s dusty vinyl distilled by a rusty stylus. They heard his hammer. They heard his drill. Whirring. Worming through the ceiling. Shaking vases next door. Curtains twitched and eyebrows raised at what he might be doing. For days locked away in number 42a. Packages arrived. Left by the door. Noone left the flat anymore. Binbags built a bunker around him. Filled with plaster, wallpaper, springs and things. And inside, for forty days and forty nights he built a hole. A hole through the house. A hole through his heart. And then on the last day, he rested. Then he took off his shoes. Sat down. Waited. For a sound like a thousand spinning coins coming to a heavy halt.

4

There once was an ugly duckling with feathers all stubby and brown and the other birds in so many words said ‘Oi get out of town’ Oi Mush. ‘Get out’ Yeah you. ‘Get Out’ Move your Harris. ‘Get out of town.’ And he went with a quack and a waddle and a quack and a flurry of eiderdown. There he went waddle waddle all on his Jack Jones and he didn’t half have the hump. That poor little ugly duckling went wandering far and near but everyplace they said to his face ‘ere do us a favour, get out of here.’ Cor' what a prawn. ‘Get out.’ Cop the boat race. ‘Get out’ I can’t stand it. ‘Get out of here’. And he went with a quack and a waddle and a quack and a very unhappy tear. All through the wintertime, he hid himself away and ashamed to show his face, afraid of what others might say. All through the wintertime in his lonely clump of weeds till a flock of swans did spy him there and very soon agreed, ‘You’re a very fine swan indeed.’

5

One morning he was awoken by the sound of flight. A pigeon crash-landed in his kitchen. Indoors, out of context, the miracle of flight is more potent. The displacement of air by the wings more tangible. The space taken up by the bird as it wrestles with its own piece of personal sky more intrusive. He felt her feathered backlash as she struggled to find airspace without walls. Coaxing. Cajoling. He opened the window as far as it would go. But she was impossible to comfort. He left the room, with her in it, trying to escape this domestic land with its electric plant life and its glass trees. Crockery clattered, light shades swayed, water splashed across the ceiling and slashed the walls. Like upside down rain. All rules of sky were broken, turned inside out. In time, she was gone, leaving only a feather and the freshly beaten air. Sometimes lying in bed, as the dawn bleeds through the curtains, he awaits the sound of her return. His eyes pretend night has come back and he can find dreams again.

6

Experiment in the notion of the nature of escape. First catch some flies in an old jam jar. Screw the lid on nice and tight. Then place it on a windowsill with its bottom pressed against the glass in daylight. Carefully, unscrew the lid with the jar remaining in a horizontal position. The flies will try to exit the jar towards the window and not realise that the only exit is behind them, through the neck of the jar. Most will continue to thrash and to strain at the sight of their glassy-eyed freedom. Some will perish through wing fatigue. Some will be thrashed to death by the frenetic wingwork of the others. Some will give up trying and lie down to die. None will escape despite the ease with which they could. Try it with bees, wasps, ladybirds, butterflies, daddy long legs, mosquitos, any winged insect reacts the same. Nobody has ever tried it with humans. Nobody has ever known a glass jar big enough. Nobody has ever wanted enough jam. Except flies.

7

The bones of the wing of a pigeon are similar in many respects to the arm of the man; the lower arm has two bones like a human forearm. After the wrist joint the bones, as in the case of a pigeon’s foot, are considerably elongated compared to human bones. They are joined on to the finger joints or the phalanges of the wing. Also at the wrist joint is the pollex or thumb. Round this thumb is a tuft of feathers known as the bastard wing. The exact purpose of this bastard wing is not known, but it is suggested that pigeons use it on landing to break up the airflow over the wing, and it acts very similarly to the way slots are used on some aircraft. Others believe it is the pigeon equivalent of the coxix or the appendix, that it has become obsolete through evolution. Still, no one has ever removed the bastard wing to see what effect this has on its flight. Neither has anyone ever caught a pigeon in an old jam jar.

8

Oh those bones, oh those bones, oh those skeleton bones. Oh those bones, oh those bones, oh those skeleton bones. Oh those bones, oh those bones, oh those skeleton bones. Oh mercy how they scare! With the toe bone connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone connected to the leg bone. With the leg bone connected to the knee bone, and the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, and the thigh bone connected to the hip bone. With the hip bone connected to the back bone, and the back bone connected to the neck bone, and the neck bone connected to the head bone. Oh mercy how they scare!

9

Three times whilst drunk he thought he could fly. Three times, he very nearly tried. Three times, he had been saved by a knock at the door, the ring of a phone, or the return of a loved one. Maybe next time, he won’t be as lucky. He felt for the floor far flung below and saw it as a cushion, a pile of cardboard boxes, a concrete trampoline. He saw the clouds as stepping-stones and the blue sky as malleable to man, like treading water, but easier on the arms, legs and lungs. Once, he walked out onto a fire escape in his pants, held onto the railing and imagined diving, and he thought if he fell, the car park would open up in gravelly waves, the lines that denote spaces would rise and fall and the curbs would splash up the walls. He stood on the edge of the roof and marvelled at the feeling of freedom that must come between jumping and landing. A third time, he found himself wondering if he would survive falling into a fire screaming ‘What this party needs is a burning man!’

10

The healing power of pigeons has often been noted and commented upon. A bird will return from a race badly injured after hitting an unmarked wire, but within a matter of days the wound heals up and the bird, after being rested, can be sent again. This healing ability is due to the rapid circulation and the richness of the blood. The heartbeats of a pigeon are much faster than those of a human heart. The pigeon is pumping round blood rich in both red and white corpuscles. The special function of the white corpuscles is the healing of damaged tissue and the combating of disease; thus the high rate of blood circulation makes possible the rapid healing of injuries. The blood has, of course, the other functions of carrying digested food throughout the body and of transferring the life-giving oxygen to every part of the body. No connection has ever been made between the healing power of pigeons and the purpose of the bastard wing. Still, no one has ever removed the bastard wing.

11

Summer rain is fallen from a cloudless sky and in the haze, the blaze of wet concrete causes a sixties glow. Cement and toil alive again. If only scent for a moment. Orange night, lit by still-born dawn and tungsten light, breathes a sigh of relief at burst cheeks and broken promises. He dances in his dreams to the drip-fed freedom. Insomniac neighbours who never talk rush to windows, shuttered up for the summer. One by one the shafts of light from homes, from smiles, strike the dead, damp night. Turning tired eyes lids wide open to the wet – catching tears – a backward cry. The humidity ends its smothering hug. He can sleep again. If only sent for a moment. When summer rain is fallen from a cloudless sky. Sometimes lying in bed, as the dawn bleeds through the curtains, he awaits the sound of its return. His eyes pretend the black of night has come back and he can find his dreams again.

12

‘Write something beautiful.‘ She asks him. When planes fall out the sky. And we numb, held still by the blink. Do we lie? ‘Now our life is butterflies sucking honey through a syringe’ he tells her. ‘You’ll never get another shot when trains collide.’ And in the slam, the screech, the shrill silences. The heart brakes. Have we died? Our bloody nails halo our fingers as we reach out to the light. She holds him. When cars leave the road. Upturned and burning. A blush with death after rush hour sex. How he sighs. His lipskin parts to gritted kisses. Imagining his fate. All this flies through his mind as he sits and waits. For a sound like a thousand spinning coins coming to a heavy halt. He writes. As he holds the pen that feeds him. About his life. When he was born. When he will die. Why he can’t write something beautiful. When he tries. Silence.

Artist's Statement

2006-10-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Michael Pinchbeck
Artist’s Statement

My work is both an illustration of loss and an autopsy of experience. I operate autobiographically by using self and site-as-source to create narratives about what is not there.

I aim to challenge conventions of the chosen artform; text, performance, film or installation, to uncover the content, explore bits in between and remove pieces of the puzzle. I am interested in moments when the work ceases to mean and how we can reconfigure the meaning at these moments.

For my MA, I am investigating the presence of pretence and absence as substance in performance and installation with reference to work by Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Ilya Kabakov and Aneta Grzeszykowska. I have devised a site-specific project as an act of communion between research and practice, absence and presence, amateur and academic. The project involves a devised performance in a local church by the amateur dramatics group with whom I performed my first play. At the same time, I will exhibit an installation with their stage, playing stage directions from previous productions with silences where there were lines.

Contemplating loss

2006-10-10T05:25:00.000-07:00

Critical dialogue with Rhiannon Jones established earlier in MA.

RJ Rhiannon Jones
MP Michael Pinchbeck

RJ: My first question to you is what exactly do you mean when you use the term catharsis, in relation to your project? There are many definitions for catharsis and it can become over used - can you define 'it' in less than 10 words - what is it for you in this project?

MP: One could argue that all creative acts are in some way cathartic, being dependent on the artists’ mood, mindset or source of inspiration. Especially when leaning towards self-as-source and creating stage-personalities that are meta-personae of performers. The space I am using in Rise Park is a place of personal resonance. I am a divorcee making work about the religiosity and secularity of weddings. But I strive to objectify emotions not to exploit them.

My starting point for the MA was a cathartic journey. The definition of catharsis that first alerted me to its relevance was a celebration of releasing emotion OR an evacuation of the bowels. That would be my 10 word definition of catharsis. It is a celebration or commemoration of objects or spaces that I am interested in not of emotions per se. And in the case of the car project by stripping the objects of value and eventually discarding them – as with The Cathars – I was keen to reject their materiality in favour of spirituality. The emotions triggered by the audience interaction with these objects or spaces are beyond my control. I was interested in how the project and reactions to it - when people knew the reason for the journey - straddled the line between a perceived celebration of emotions and a purgation of the bowels. In the car project the act of celebration and of purgation is exhibiting and destroying the detritus of grief.

I was going to interview artists about the force of the cathartic within their work. One schizophrenic artist told me he ‘made work that showed his condition was a blessing not a curse’. But I realised that in some ways the most important facet of producing work was the work itself not the reason behind it. Did we have to know he was schizophrenic to appreciate what he was creating? No programme note, gallery interpretation or biog should be needed to understand the work. It should stand alone. In Acts of Communion the journey is more communal than cathartic. A shared not a solitary experience. More for the sake of the audience than for the sake of the artist. In Stealing the Mona Lisa, Darian Leader suggests artists make work as a self-defense mechanism. Perhaps it is more a form of self-attack. Daring oneself to be different. When exploring cathartic work or reasons for making work it seemed to me that it was a form of unspoken therapy. Where art becomes a means to express something one could not easily do without being looked at strangely, referred to a doctor or locked up. That is my definition.

RJ: My second question is to do with the 'soul' of the work, where does it lie? What is it that is at the heart of the project for you? It is very important to retain a sense of what this is because further down the line for your own motivation and focus of meaning for the work.

MP: There is a german word – lebensart – that means many things. Life as art. Way of life. The art of life. It is a broad brushstroke to describe the work I make. Using self-as-source and ‘notes to self’ to create a product that can be identifiable to as many as possible. Turning the personal into the universal, the private into the public. In this project there is a personal factor – the resonance of the church, the resonance of am dram, the resonance of the wedding reception.

I wanted to live as an artist. Make art my religion. Be like Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali or Joseph Beuys. But I didn’t want to be referred to a doctor or get locked up (see answer above). Perhaps when Joseph Beuys locked himself in a gallery in New York (I love America and America Loves Me) with a coyote he was not only commenting on his views as a visitor to the United States but also on the life of an artist in society. Lebensart. The coyote is the critic. The non-artist. The audience. The objector. The dissenter. The Daily Mail saying ‘An artist got £30,000 to turn a tree upside down outside a health centre. Why didn’t they just pay a nurse for a year? Or buy some life-saving equipment?’ I always feel the journalist in question should just sacrifice their salary for the good of the NHS. Why can’t they see the beauty in an upturned tree? Can’t someone in the health centre for whom every breath’s a struggle look out of the window and smile? I seek beauty. Beauty in words. Beauty in images. Beauty in the unexpected. Beauty in an upturned tree. I see beauty and I am always trying to write something beautiful. I portray loss. Loss of life. Loss of love. Loss of loss.

In Acts of Communion my central question is What is not there? I am interrogating this idea of absence. What we do and don’t need to know to appreciate what we see. Whether it’s an interpretation on a gallery wall or six missing characters in a rendition of Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding. I keep writing down ‘I am interested in what is not there’ and crossing out the letters. To see when it stops making sense. Difficult when I know what was written in the first place. But that is what it is like making work. You have to forget what you know. Or you become too absorbed in the making to remember the fact that it is for the audience not for the artist. I don’t want to make work with hidden references and meanings. I want to make work that can engage an audience. So at the moment the heart and soul of this project is about presence and absence. How do we remove something from something else and create a new narrative? How do we make something make sense with the minimum and maximum of information? What do we add? What do we leave out? What is the residue? How do we problematise something by removing a part of it or adding something to it? How does loss affect text we think we’ve heard or images we think we’ve seen? How does it cease to mean. How does it puzzle? I am reminded of Joseph Beuys' lecture:

'Art has to come over people like a cloud and, in the final analysis a picture should keep alive a profound question in people. Art is as such a puzzle. A puzzle that wants to be solved - but not straight away.'

This idea of loss is implicit in everything I’ve done. As William Blake was inspired by the death of his brother so was I. I think to understand loss is to understand love. To see beauty in death. As William Blake said ‘Exuberance is beauty.’ I want to be exuberant in the work I make. In the way I live. In my lebensart.

There are some people we have to thank

2006-10-10T04:45:00.000-07:00

From now on, until after the performance, this blog will focus more on the theory behind the practice. To locate my practice more firmly within a theoretical context. To deal with research questions and areas from my learning agreement. To orientate the strands of the project more closely around the rationale. So to end this account of the making of Acts of Communion I quote from the end of the show.

MICHAEL There are some people we have to thank

AUDREY To Paul Seaman – the set

BETTY To Trevor Walker – the set

KATH To Derek Hyde – the lighting

TONY To Vivienne Pinchbeck – the prompt.

LOUISE To Marion Britten – the washing up

DONNA To Trevor Britten – the photography

JONATHAN To all front of house helpers

IAN To any others for whose inadvertent omission from this list we sincerely apologise

HARRY To the Caterer

Stage Directions

2006-10-10T04:10:00.000-07:00

'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 reading the back catalogue of plays I made a conscious decision to limit stage directions. In fact most of them have been pencilled in during rehearsal. KATH made her own decisions about when to enter and exit making the staging as devised as the text. Where there are specific stage directions they are referenced by actors in the script. Strands of self-referentiality and theatricality as topic have evolved organically during the process. We talked about how the Drama Group's performance style might contrast with the mode of performance of Acts of Communion. How pace and levels could better accommodate this difference for an audience. We discussed the meta-theatrical possibilities, for example, what would happen if someone had to be prompted when thanking the prompt. There is always this sense of a drama group in the act of performing a drama - perhaps that is the message, and how them as people and them as performers collides. There is a sense of their collusion in the conclusion e.g. KATH writing the ending and they have been guiding the process as much if not more than me. Where I asked them questions during the interviews, I ask them now in performance. Where material ran out in rehearsal, we mark it in the script and move on to something new. Where there are scene changes e.g. from wedding to christening, I outlined possible arrangements of stools. I had a suggested drawing for each scene and it was the first time I have experimented with this diagrammatic approach. Reminiscent of Beckett in Come and Go. These diagrams were tried and modified by the group. In some cases suggestions of direction and text were vetoed. This week, without books, I want to work on how we animate the piece beyond the words and the stools, because much of it is performed seated I want to see how we can make more visible the transitions from actor to character, onstage to offstage.

Perform to remember

2006-10-10T03:39:00.000-07:00

'Memorize to perform. Perform to remember.' - Karen Christopher (Goat Island), Letter to a Young Practitioner, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 16 March 2000

In learning lines I am (re)discovering the separation between performer and text that takes place during the process of remembering. And how my text is a new text. A subtext. Separate from the knowledge and understanding of the overall text. Even though I wrote it. We create new narratives out of words extracted from an existing narrative. I recorded my lines onto tape and played them repeatedly in a bid to help remembering. If I write them here now - they can be read outside of the context of the text, the church, the play, the drama group. They exist just as words. Words on the page. Words in the memory. I watched a film last night about belief, a man held out a crucifix and said 'If it wasn't for words, this would just be two pieces of wood.' (Northfork 2004). These are my words. Written to fit into a (w)hole. Extracted in order to be remembered. Highlighted in a flourescent pen. This is my subtext within the main text. This is my own narrative journey within the piece.

MICHAEL The Church on Rise Park Drama Group presents Acts of Communion. The setting - The Church Hall. The time – now. The Drama Group will be playing themselves.

MICHAEL Michael. Acts of Communion was written especially for the Drama Group. What you are about to see here tonight is the result.

MICHAEL I started by asking the group questions. I wanted to explore the acts of communion that take place here.

MICHAEL I asked the Drama Group how they choose their plays

MICHAEL I could give you more

MICHAEL I just did

MICHAEL He’s not here. But you play him later

MICHAEL I asked the Drama Group what it was like performing with their parents

MICHAEL She’s not here. But you play her later.

MICHAEL No – we’re going to have more scenes like this

MICHAEL The church hall

MICHAEL We’re pretending to be off stage but we’re actually onstage

MICHAEL There isn’t a set

MICHAEL The play takes place in the church hall

MICHAEL I asked the Drama Group how they learn their lines

MICHAEL You just did

MICHAEL My mum’s the prompt

MICHAEL Act One – The Wedding

MICHAEL Ladies and Gentlemen – Thank you all for coming

MICHAEL Now could I remind you if you have mobile phones

MICHAEL Please do switch them off

MICHAEL We wouldn’t want them to ruin the speeches

MICHAEL I’ve been to weddings here before

MICHAEL But today I’m the MC – Master of Ceremony

MICHAEL We are up against the clock as the hall is needed by the drama group

MICHAEL Before we start just a few housekeeping duties

MICHAEL The toilets are at the end of the corridor on the left

MICHAEL Can I also remind you that confetti is not permitted on the premises

MICHAEL And that photography should be reserved until the cutting of the cake

MICHAEL The speeches and the guests are being filmed

MICHAEL If anybody has an objection to their featuring in the wedding video

MICHAEL Please do let me know

MICHAEL So I ask you now pray silence for the Father of the Bride

MICHAEL I asked my father how he met my mother

MICHAEL I asked the Drama Group about previous shows they had performed

MICHAEL I asked my mother about wedding cakes

MICHAEL That was as far as we got with the wedding

MICHAEL The Christening

MICHAEL There isn’t a baby

MICHAEL We move on to Act Two

MICHAEL Act Two – The Christening

MICHAEL Ladies and Gentlemen -Thank you all for coming

MICHAEL Now could I remind you if you have mobile phones

MICHAEL Please do switch them off

MICHAEL We wouldn’t want them to ruin the speeches

MICHAEL I’ve been to Christenings here before

MICHAEL But today I’m the MC – Master of Ceremony

MICHAEL We are up against the clock as the hall is needed by the drama group

MICHAEL Before we start just a few housekeeping duties

MICHAEL The toilets are at the end of the corridor on the left

MICHAEL Can I just ask the owner of the Silver Vauxhall Astra parked outside Church House to return to your vehicle as you’ve blocked the minister in

MICHAEL I get the bus

MICHAEL Well usually the 16 but sometimes the 71A

MICHAEL The parents of the child would like to say a few words

MICHAEL That was as far as we got with the Christening

MICHAEL Act Four

MICHAEL Act Three The Raffle

MICHAEL That was as far as we got with the raffle

MICHAEL The Funeral

MICHAEL Act Four The Funeral

MICHAEL Ladies and Gentlemen - Thank you all for coming

KATH [To Harry] Tuck your shirt in

MICHAEL Now could I remind you if you have mobile phones

MICHAEL Please do switch them off

MICHAEL We wouldn’t want them to ruin the speeches

MICHAEL I’ve been to Funerals here before

MICHAEL But today I’m the MC – Master of Ceremony

MICHAEL We are up against the clock as the hall is needed by the drama group

MICHAEL Before we start just a few housekeeping duties

MICHAEL We’re gathered here today to remember Kath

MICHAEL It is a shame she can’t be with us today

MICHAEL That was as far as we got with the funeral. But Kath wrote a note.

MICHAEL There are some people we have to thank

ALL To Acts of Communion

Making Amends

2006-10-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

This week is the deadline to learn lines for the Drama Group. I have made amends to make sense of the changes of topic and introduce the more esoteric content / devices. I realised that my character - The MC - or MICHAEL - is undeveloped and it is difficult to know who I am speaking as and to. I am now more of a narrator - talking about the process and guiding the audience through the performance as well as speeches. I am always blurring the line between me as performer and me as a person. Me as an ex-member of the Drama Group and me as an ex-member of the Church on Rise Park. I introduce each act as the MC with a reference to the fact that I have been to Weddings / Christenings / Funerals here before. The site is rich with cognitive memory. I was confirmed here. My brother was baptised here. His funeral was here. I found and lost my faith here. This self-as-source device is embedded in my practice, working from autobiographical experience to create new narratives. In this project in particular, the lines between the self and the pretend self seem to be merging more readily. The presence of pretence creates a tension between the real and the fictional, the off stage and the onstage. I have found myself reimmersing myself in the church community, the coffee mornings, the network, the newsletter, seeing old faces in old places, being a member of the Drama Group. I am making amends.

The Long and Winding Road

2006-10-01T00:31:00.000-07:00

Concurrent to the MA I am undertaking an ongoing drive art project The Long and Winding Road. I installed the car and the items by the River Trent as part of Hinterland - a collection of transitory artists projects. A temporary site to explore the dialogue between town, country and suburbia, Hinterland examines how the actual and imaginary landscape can converge within an artwork or research.

Taken from www.hinterlandprojects.com

The Long and Winding Road began on the 17 May 2004 when Michael Pinchbeck embarked on a journey in a graffiti covered car from Nottingham to Liverpool. The car was packed with 365 mementoes wrapped up in brown paper and string. Each item was given a registration number – like a car (e.g. R350 ACH – R – 1998.) The project will last until 17 May 2008 when the car will reach its final resting place in the River Mersey.

The mementoes in the car are items that belonged to the artist's brother who died in an accident in 1998. Michael travelled to Liverpool where his brother had been a student, to pack a car with his things. The Long and Winding Road is a memorial by the artist to his brother. It is Michael's intention to exhibit the project in galleries and garages between Nottingham and Liverpool.

The objects will spill from the boot. Log books, photo albums and maps of the journey so far will litter the dashboard. Audience members will be invited, three at a time, to join the artist in the car for a personal car history. The artist will offer passengers a travel sweet before introducing a film of The Long and Winding Road and sharing the reason for the journey. Passengers will be invited to join the project steering committee.

I have been refecting on how The Long and Winding Road connects with the themes of absence and presence I am exploring within Acts of Communion. There is a sense of absence as loss. Absence as sadness. Absence as grief. The objects have become devoid of recognisable shape or function in a bid to objectify emotion. Absent of meaning. The car appears abandoned with no explanation of why or how it came to be there, in that colour with those contents. Absent of narrative. The film humanises the journey with the presence of a driver but there is no sense of his being present in the car. Only the detritus of the project so far - of places the car has been, the driver has seen. The car is an ark. An arc. An archive. A carchive. A cathartic icon. A secular relic. A vehicle for the baggage of loss. A memorial to someone's absence. A celebration of someone's presence. A eulogy for recovery. A souvenir of self-discovery. There is the sensation of presence when visitors take a seat in the car. Sucking a travel sweet amidst the mildew of two years of storage, their physical presence animates the objects wrapped up in brown paper and string. Their leafing through maps and diaries makes the journey tangible. Their listening to the songs and lists of items makes the details audible. Their flicking through photo albums makes the journey visible. Their view of the river from the car parked at 27 Degrees North West pointing in the direction of Liverpool places them firmly on The Long and Winding Road. Only when the presence converges with the absence does the project begin to make sense.

The Church Newsletter

2006-09-29T00:08:00.000-07:00

DRAMA GROUP IS ON ITS STARTING BLOCKS - 22 to 24 November 2006

Do come to see the Church’s Drama Group as never before on the newly acquired staging blocks, funded from proceeds of previous productions supplemented generously by a grant from a local charity and an advance from Circuit funds.

Two One-Act Plays will be performed this year each night on Wed. 22, Thurs. 23 and Fri. 24 November 2006 in the Church Hall, starting at 7.30 p.m.:-

- BREAKFAST FOR ONE - a bright and breezy (and only very slightly saucy) French-farce style comedy of mistaken identities providing the cast with the additional challenge of French accents; and

- ACTS OF COMMUNION - a comedy written especially for the Group’s present members by former member and home-grown local playwright Michael Pinchbeck, containing many personal and nostalgic references to the Church and the Estate.

Tickets @ £5, £4 concessions, will be available from early October onwards from Donna Thorne, 65 Rise Park Road (tel. 8408207 or 0777 4824482) or through any member of Drama Group. Please book early to avoid disappointment

The Group is ALWAYS on the look out for new members to perfom and/or helpers to assist behind the scenes both in this type of production and in drama for Church services and will warmly welcome any enquiries. Please contact Tony Pinchbeck (9534608) or Betty Walker (9552756) for further details.

The Stage

2006-09-28T07:11:00.000-07:00

Photographer: Kevin Edwards

The Dissertation

2006-09-23T00:15:00.000-07:00

Title and Topics

An investigation into amateur dramatics as a mode of performance using experimental theatre as a reference point in the form of work by MBD, Reckless Sleepers, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and The Wooster Group. A critical account and review of Acts of Communion including interviews with other artists.

∑ Presence of pretence

Theatricality as topic. Exposing process. Making visible what is usually not. Off stage is onstage etc.

∑ Absence as substance

Ontology of absence. Exploring the bits in between. What is not there. Negative is Positive space etc.

∑ Self as source

History of author(s). Reflection on experience. Catharsis. (Auto-)biography. Private is Public etc.

∑ Site as source

History of space. Reflection on shared experience of site. Site-specificity. Context is Content etc.

∑ Narratives of nostalgia

History of relationship between author(s) and site. What has changed. Archive. Memory is text etc.

Alterity

2006-09-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

'Alterity - lack of identification with some part of one's personality or one's community, differentness, otherness.' Shawver, L. (2006). Nostalgic Postmodernism: Postmodern Therapy

What happens when you remove the words that were meant to be spoken from a written text. Each act of each play begins with a description of the setting and ends with the phrase 'The Curtain Falls'. I will record one act of each play performed upon the stage blocks then play them at the same time. An empty play on an empty stage. Acts of Communion.

The Curious Savage
Act 1
Scene 1

The living room of The Cloisters in a town in Massachusetts. The room is large and charmingly furnished, with many deep chairs, covered in flowered chintz. The wallpaper is bright and in good taste. A large square rug covers most of the floor. There is a double sliding-door leading from the hallway stage R. A single door, stage L., leads off to the front offices.

Florence:

When Fairy fails to answer she looks up from her game

Hannibal:

Fairy starts and turns to him

Fairy:

Florence:

Fairy:

Shakes her head

Jeff:

He crosses down to Florence

Florence:

Solicitously

Jeff:

Florence:

She extends her hand fondly, which Jeff holds for a moment

Hannibal:

Jeff:

Smiles

He goes back to the books as fairy crosses down from the window

Fairy:

Hannibal:

Tuning his violin

Plunk

Plunk etc.

He begins his two-note sawing of the strings again, Mrs Savage conducts with enthusiasm as...

The Curtain Falls

Abolish the stage

2006-09-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

'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.' - Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double (1938)

The new stage arrrives tomorrow. This will be the first year where a performance is not preceded by a week of blood, sweat and tears as mostly retired amateur dramatists lift, move and assemble a makeshift stage out of wood - wearing wallpaper and nails from previous shows. Am negotiating with the drama group about whether I can have their previous stage blocks. The stage blocks they have performed 20 years of plays upon. They want to get rid of them. They want to take them apart. I want to get rid of them for the group. I want to 'stage' the stage blocks. Arrange them as I find them in the Church on Rise Park Store Room in an empty theatre space. Put the offstage onstage and let the stage directions from previous productions play. Aural footprints or an oral archive of performances the stage blocks have seen. I want to take the stage blocks apart. To make the deconstruction the action. To abolish the stage.

Exit Velocity

2006-09-09T05:12:00.000-07:00

Entering the final phase of the MA and choosing image and copy for Exposition catalogue. This is a handpainted fire exit sign at The Church on Rise Park. No exit. Exiting the MA. Exiting the building. Exiting the stage. Exeunt dramatis personae. Copy below:

Acts of Communion

The Church on Rise Park Drama Group present Acts of Communion. The setting - The Church Hall. The time – now. The actors will be playing themselves.

A site-specific project devised as an act of communion between research and practice, absence and presence, amateur and academic.

Michael Pinchbeck
The Powerhouse, Victoria Studios
www.actsofcommunion.blogspot.com
MA Performance and Live Art

The Poster

2006-09-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

This is the first draft of the poster for The Church on Rise Park. Designed by Tony Pinchbeck - a solicitor - the poster has a lo-fi aesthetic using Times New Roman. It is as much a publicity machine as a professional production, with proof-reading, printing, distribution and advertising in the church newsletter. There is a ticket cost for the performance. This will go towards the new stage the drama group have acquired and the church funds - so will contribute indirectly towards the purchase of communion Shloer.

The Photoshoot

2006-09-05T04:46:00.000-07:00

Photographer: Kevin Edwards

Shloer Sponsorship

2006-09-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Sent to Shloer on 1 September 2006:

Dear Shloer

I am an MA student of Performance and Live Art at Nottingham Trent University and am working on a new show with an Amateur Dramatic Group in a local church. The show is set at a wedding, a christening and a funeral and toasts are proposed throughout the evening. Because it is a Methodist Church and a performance we are using Shloer to drink onstage. We are getting through quite a lot of it as we rehearse every fortnight and there are approximately 50 toasts in the show. The performance is at the end of November. I wondered if it would be possible to receive some form of in kind support from Shloer - a donation to the arts of a box or two of your sparkling juice drink. We would happily promote your product in any publicity and the word Shloer is already in the script at least five times - we can say it more if you like. Thanks in advance for your help.

Yours shloerly,

Michael Pinchbeck

Received 19 October 2006:

Hi Michael,

Please accept my hugely overdue reply to your email regarding your forthcoming Amateur Dramatics show in November.

I have arranged for a case of White Grape Shloer to be delivered to you and I will let you know when they get back to me on the date of this delivery.

Good luck with the show and I hope rehearsals (and the Shloer!) are going down well!

Kind Regards,

Zoe

Shloer Assistant Brand Manager

The Outline

2006-08-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

I found diagrams in scripts of the previous plays the Drama Group have performed - suggested sets - they are outlines reminiscent of the blueprints of the church. I started tracing these outlines onto the same page. Layering the suggested sets for different shows. Walls collide. Furniture overlaps. A table on a chair on a bed. I started thinking about tracing the sets onto the same space. This could be the setting for the installation. They remind me of Dogville or the chalk outlines of a body or the aesthetics of experimental theatre. Uninvited Guest's masking taped architecture, The Wooster Group's onstage constructions and Forced Entertainment's crude stages. The promise of the real that fails to deliver. The presence of pretence. A possible dissertation title. The project has now got three strands.

Act One - The Production - The Church on Rise Park
Act Two - The Installation - The Powerhouse
Act Three - The Dissertation - The Critical Review with Interviews

The stage is the set

2006-08-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

'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.' Tim Etchells - Live Art and Performance

There is no set. There are no costumes. The drama group will be playing themselves. They have recently disposed of the stage blocks they used for 25 years - I wanted to use them for the installation but they were too cumbersome and hazardous to move. They have bought some new staging which will make its 'stage debut' for Acts of Communion. The stage is the set. The setting is the Church Hall.

BETTY Where’s the set

MICHAEL We don’t need a set

AUDREY But why can’t we have one

TONY Because we’ve spent all our money on the stage

IAN So the stage is the set

MICHAEL The play takes place in the church hall

TONY The church hall is the set

HARRY So what happens in the church hall

TONY Weddings

JONATHAN Christenings

IAN Raffles

KATH Funerals [KATH leaves]

MICHAEL Plays

The learning of lines

2006-08-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

I started thinking about the line learning process. How one of the cast said to me: 'I read the whole play through out loud in front of a tape recorder but the part I've got to learn I read at sotto voce.' I started thinking about the phrase 'sotto voce.'

sotto voce \SAH-toh-VOH-chee\, adverb or adjective:
1. Spoken low or in an undertone, as not to be overheard.
2. (Music) In very soft tones. Used chiefly as a direction.

I started thinking that it represented the notion of absence that I was interested in but was finding it difficult to manifest through the development of two different pieces of work. I started thinking that the way people learn their lines is an interesting experiment in itself - the highlighting - the recording - the listening. I started thinking about recording one part of a play and leaving silence for the rest. I started thinking about recording all the parts of a play but onto different tapes and playing them - either with silence in between cues or triggering manually. I started thinking about recording the stage directions - the words that the writer never meant to be heard - and leaving silence where people speak. I started thinking about how the meaning would become slippery, how images would be conjured up in the space. The space between stage directions and the space in which you were listening. I started thinking about recording the stage directions from all of the plays the drama group have performed onto different tapes and playing them at the same time. I started thinking about the way in which they all end with the line 'The Curtain Falls' and whether they would finish at the same time. I started thinking about placing the tape players on the same stage the drama group will be performing on.

All of this responds to an idea of absence - absence of content, absence of meaning, absence of the writer, absence of the reader, absence of the speaker. It flirts with the philosophical research I have been doing. Logocentrism - the view that speech not writing is the centre of language. Derrida's argument that speech may be a kind of presence, because the speaker is simultaneously present for the listener, but writing may be a kind of absence, because the writer is not simultaneously present for the reader. My experiment would be a recording of a reading of writing (but only the writing that was never meant to be read) read by a speaker who is not present. It also draws interesting parallels with the Arthur Miller text used in The Wooster Groups 'LSD... Just the High Points' where Miller famously forbade the company from 'mangling' his work. In later versions of the show a buzzer replaced his words. None of the plays will be licensed to be read but then none of the words are meant to be. As a writer of plays it interests me to be reading the words of other playwrights. By my reading them within the context of an artwork do they become mine.

These are all questions and observations I am making now at what has become another turning point. I will start recording plays onto tapes - a dying artform onto dying technology - and proceed to experiment in the space. I imagine an installation with tape players on a stage. This could be my final piece with the Church performance more of a 'sideshow' - exploring roles of actor and author, site and self.

I highlighted the script and worked out percentages of lines for each performer. The idea of a 'line audit' indicates how action and speech is spread and perhaps how much absence would be 'present' if one or more performer were 'absent.'

MIC 51 – 8%
AUD 58 – 9%
BET 75 – 12%
TON 83 – 13%
IAN 54 – 9%
JON 48 – 8%
KAT 96 – 15%
LOU 63 – 10%
DON 62 – 10%
HAR 38 – 6%

The Exposition

2006-08-19T11:50:00.000-07:00

Working on image and text for MA Exposition brochure and found press cutting in the drama group archive. There is something Sarah Lucas about this as an image. The staged-ness. The 'forced entertainment.' The direct address of the photographer / audience. It reminds me of the Gob Squad in its kitsch-ness. I like the low art / high art clash between review in local paper and preview in MA brochure. The review comments on the merits of a performance that is by its very nature amateur. The review is probably written by an amateur reviewer. The project too hopes to contribute to this debate. I want to find an image that is both generic and specific about the aesthetic. To hint at the style of the work without prescribing the form of exposition the work will take.

The Conclusion

2006-08-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

The first draft is finished. Kath who plays GMOB attends her own funeral as herself. She can't attend it as her deceased character because this is a church drama group and they can't deal with the afterlife. She reads a note she left behind before she died:

To the Church of Rise Park Drama Group. By the time you hear this I will be gone. The show will be over. The curtain will fall. The cast will leave the stage. The audience will leave the building. Nothing will be left but words. Words on a page. A page in a pocket. We’ve been through a lot together in this Church Hall. I’ve been here since the beginning. My initials are on the wall. Weddings. Christenings. Funerals. Plays. We’ve said our thank yous and proposed our toasts. We’ve remembered our pasts and considered our futures. Now nothing is left for me to do. Except ask you to raise your glasses and think of where you have been and where you are going. To thank you for coming and say sorry you are leaving. To say I hope you enjoyed your evening. To wish you a safe journey home. And to tell you the toilets are down the corridor on the left. Then and only then will it be the end of Acts of Communion.

This reminds me of 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.'

The Introduction

2006-08-18T06:22:00.000-07:00

Always found it difficult to initiate the self-referential tone with the drama group. Reworked introduction to a meta-theatrical level. May not work but seems less incongruous than talking about line-learning during the fictional sections. May be better to separate fact from fiction, performers from characters. Also - on a topical note - the group are negotiating the purchase of a new stage but there are some issues over budget and whether they can afford it. Seems appropriate to include it in the text. I have written myself as the writer more into the story. The Drama Group play themselves. The setting is the church. The set is the stage.

Acts of Communion

MC Ladies and Gentlemen. The Church on Rise Park Drama Group present Acts of Communion. The setting - The Church Hall. The time – now. The Drama Group will be playing themselves.

FOB: Tony

BD 1: Donna

BM 1: Jonathan

BD 2: Louise

FOG: Ian

MOG: Audrey

MOB: Betty

GMOB: Kath

C: Harry

MC: Michael

MOB: Table for One was a success

MOG: Yes – good audience tonight

FOG: What happens now?

BD 1: We’re doing the other play

BD 2: The one that starts with us introducing ourselves

FOB The wedding

BM The Christening

GMOB The Funeral

C Sounds like a barrel of laughs

MC I’m a bit worried that it’s not very funny

MOG We can make it funny. We can make anything funny. We made a tragedy funny once.

FOG We’ve never done a tragedy since

C Now that’s a tragedy

FOB It’s always so difficult finding a play that fits

BD 1 It’s always so difficult finding a baby sitter

MOB One where we’ve all got a fair share of lines

BD 2 It’s not worth getting a baby sitter for a walk on part

GMOB That’s all I do – walk on and off.

[GMOB gets up and goes]

BM: What are you doing?

GMOB It says ‘Kath gets up and goes.’ See.

FOG I just have to sit here and look bored

C I haven’t got many lines in this one.

MC I can give you more

C Are you sure?

MC I just did.

FOB I’m not sure about my make up.

MOB It looks good. Old and tired. Just what it says in the script.

FOB I haven’t put any on yet.

MOG How’s my hair?

FOG Great. Where did you get the wig?

MOG: It’s not a wig

BD 1: How do I look?

BD 2: Awful. How do I look?

BD 1: Awful.

BD 1 / BD 2: We’re ready.

FOB / MOB: We’re ready

FOG / MOG: We’re ready

C: I’m ready

[GMOB returns]

GMOB: I’m back

BM 1: I’m having trouble doing up my tie.

[FOG helps BM tie tie]

FOG: That’s all right it says here I’m supposed to help you

BM 1: Thanks Dad

FOG: I’m not your Dad in this. I’m the groom’s dad.

BM 1: Where’s the Groom.

MC He’s not here. But you play him later.

MOB: Sounds very confusing.

FOB: Why can’t you write plays that people understand?

MC I’m trying

GMOB: I’m off again. [GMOB leaves]

C Isn’t it going to be difficult for the audience to follow?

MC No – we’re going to have more scenes like this.

BD 1: So what happens now

BD 2: We introduce ourselves

BM 1: We’ve already done that

FOG: No we introduce our characters

MOG: So who are playing now

MC The Drama Group will be playing themselves.

[GMOB returns]

GMOB: It's just like that show where I had to play six different characters except one of those characters is actually me.

BD 1: I get it

BD 2: I don’t

MOG: So where are we now?

MC: The church hall.

MOB: Whereabouts onstage?

MC: Well you’re pretending to be off stage but you’re actually onstage.

GMOB: I’ve been going off stage a lot recently. Why can’t I stay onstage.

C Because it’s a walk-on part.

MOB: Where’s the set?

MC We don’t need a set.

MOG: But why can’t we have one?

FOB: Because we’ve spent all our money on the stage.

FOG: So the stage is the set.

MC The play takes place in the church hall.

FOB: The church hall is the set.

GMOB: I have to go again [leaves]

C So what happens in the church hall.

FOG Weddings

BM Christenings

MOB Funerals

MC Plays

BM 1 We’ve got an audience.

BD 1 We’ve got a script

MC Has everybody learnt their lines

MOG: I don’t learn my lines until quite near the end.

MOB: I probably do a page at a time

[GMOB enters]

GMOB: If it’s a play where you’re on from start to finish I usually just tape it

[GMOB leaves]

FOB: I read the whole play through out loud in front of a tape recorder

FOG: I have a haphazard approach to learning lines.

BD 1: I read through it on my own for a while then I practise with my Dad

BM 1: Your real dad or your stage dad?

BD 1: I don’t have a stage dad

BM 1: Oh sorry.

BD 2: I’m rubbish at learning my lines. I don’t really look at the book.

BM 1: Just reading them will do. I never had too much of a problem

C: I don’t have any lines to learn

MC You just did

GMOB: [returns] I’m back again.

BD 2 We better get started then

Bipolar Disorder

2006-08-18T03:03:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with the process is I am entering a period of creative difficulty. I recognise the symptoms. I was diagnosed with suffering from Bipolar Disorder after starting The Long and Winding Road in 2004. It was an intense time. Euphoria. Inertia. At one point I stood with my head beneath the cross at the Church on Rise Park and thought I saw the sky change colour. I read codes in road signs, deciphered registration plates, thought that songs were speaking to me etc. There may be a connection with resurrecting the project later this year for Hinterland - an off-site festival of work in Nottingham. There was a moment when I considered using Bipolar Disorder as a framework for the piece - the two acts being the two extremes of Manic Depression. Positive and Negative. Present and Absent. I was reluctant to do so as I didn't want Acts of Communion to become too cathartic. I didn't see why research was deemed to be more significant if it was scientific. I want interviews with the amateur dramatic group to be research. I want the history of the drama group and the church to be research. I want investigations into contemporary performance to be research. I am finding it difficult to confirm my research questions. I start researching one and then become distracted by another. Perhaps there is something of a Bipolar Disorder in contemporary performance that I need to reference; a world of undecidability and indecision, nihilism and optimism, existential disillusionment and 'laughing amongst the ruins'

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder

Bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) is a psychiatric diagnostic category describing a class of mood disorders in which the person experiences depression and/or mania, hypomania, and/or mixed states. There are classes of Bipolar Disorder' Bipolar I & Bipolar II. Left untreated, it can be a disabling condition. The difference between bipolar disorder and unipolar disorder (also called major depression) — is bipolar disorder involves elevated mood states and might also involve depressive mood states. The duration and intensity of mood states varies widely among people with the illness. Fluctuating from one mood state to the next is called "cycling". Mood swings can cause impairment or improved functioning depending on their severity. There can be changes in one's energy level, sleep pattern, activity level, social rhythms and cognitive functioning. During these times, some people may have difficulty functioning.

Early in the course of the illness brain structural abnormalities may lead to feelings of anxiety and lower stress resilience. When faced with a very stressful, negative major life event, such as a failure in an important area, an individual may have their first major depression. Conversely, when an individual accomplishes a major achievement they may experience their first hypomanic or manic episode. Individuals with bipolar disorder tend to experience episode triggers involving either interpersonal or achievement-related life events. An example of interpersonal-life events include falling in love or, conversely, the death of a close friend. Achievement-related life events include acceptance into an elite graduate school or by contrast, being fired from work (Miklowitz & Goldstein, 1997).

Veteran brain researcher Robert Post M.D. of the U.S. NIMH proposed the "kindling" theory [1] which asserts that people who are genetically predisposed toward bipolar disorder experience a series of stressful events, each of which lowers the threshold at which mood changes occur. Eventually, the mood episode starts (and becomes recurrent) by itself. Not all individuals experience subsequent mood episodes in the absence of positive or negative life events, however.

In her book, Touched With Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., writes:

The clinical reality of manic-depressive illness is far more lethal and infinitely more complex than the current psychiatric nomenclature, bipolar disorder, would suggest. Cycles of fluctuating moods and energy levels serve as a background to constantly changing thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. The illness encompasses the extremes of human experience. Thinking can range from florid psychosis, or "madness", to patterns of unusually clear, fast and creative associations, to retardation so profound that no meaningful mental activity can occur. Behavior can be frenzied, expansive, bizarre, and seductive, or it can be seclusive, sluggish, and dangerously suicidal. Moods may swing erratically between euphoria and despair or irritability and desperation. The rapid oscillations and combinations of such extremes result in an intricately textured clinical picture.

Terminal Rehearsal

2006-08-18T02:18:00.000-07:00

This was the last rehearsal in the Powerhouse. A week ago. Working on text with a bare set. Cups of tea on stolen stools. A laptop on a table. Now I'm sitting in the Powerhouse again. Writing. No sound except Bob the porter playing his guitar to the dying whisper of a kettle. There is an overriding sense of the blank canvas in an empty stage. It is both liberating and terrifying. An air of ominous possibility pervades the Powerhouse in the time it takes the halogen lights to warm up. I could sit here in the empty space and imagine anything taking place. It would become my own private performance. Noone could ever see what I see. Any attempt to enact what I imagine would fail. Perhaps it is best left where it is. Unrendered. Unrealised. But I come here to visualise the words being spoken. Stage directions being followed. There is something about writing on the edge of the space and the silence you are trying to fill. In the margin. I find it hard to be as energised, as enthused, as confident in my abilities when there are others here or when I am at the church rehearsing with people I worry think what I've written is not good enough. Or not funny enough. Or too confusing. Or not right. If I write the show I want to write. They won't like it. If I write the show they want me to write. I won't like it. I'll be selling out. If you can sell out by writing for no money. So I'm staring at the black tabs. The mottled floor. The masking tape. In the black box space I still get a thrill from. A thrill of endless potential. Wondering what to write. Who to write for. The running man on the Emergency Exit sign is me. I remember helping my Dad paint the Fire Exit sign for the Church on Rise Park. When I was in MBD the Emergency Exit sign was a motif. Now it's mocking me. As I sit. Thinking. Waiting. Wanting to write.

The Terminus

2006-08-16T11:32:00.001-07:00

Rise Park is the end of the line for Nottingham buses no. 15, 16, 88, 89 and 71a. I get the bus to rehearsal every other Wednesday night and make notes on what I see. This is an opportunity to capture a snapshot. Paint a picture in words. Document my journey from here to there, now to then. Always feels a bit like travelling backwards.

A 12 year old
With a beard
Kicks a football
At me
An England flag
Twice as high
As the house
Where it waves
A woman in a
Black tracksuit
Mowing matching
Stripes in her lawn
A children's day nursery
That used to be a
burnt out pub
At the bottom of the street
Where I was mugged
Punched in the mouth
For a pound coin
A road sign
A Tesco that's about
To get knocked down
With half a car park
Where I learnt to drive
Subways I used to survey
When I was at school
With a boy from Top Valley
Who I taught how to spell
Who now writes for
The Evening Post
The schools I used to go to
Children sitting on the kerb
Next to a skip full of
Formica furniture
A mother in reflective
Sunglasses staring
At the sun
A toddler
Sucking a dummy
Wandering into a subway
On her own
A white van
Parked in the bus lane
A man sitting at the bus stop
Wanting to get on
Before I get off
Chip shop blondes
Sea King Fish Bar
Spend it
Cabelodouro Salon
Where my friend David's
Mum made him go even though
It's where girls and mums go
The Post Office
The Newsagent
Where my brother got
Threatened with a cricket bat
By Balwinder
Barbed Wire
Kwik Save where I was when
I arranged my first date
The slope we used to sled down
Peppered with pet poo
A can of tango
A dartboard in a
Plastic basket
A tooth paste tube
Trodden on
A pot of Ben and Jerry's
Cookie Dough Ice Cream
Thawing on
A pool of mushroom soup
Pouring on
The pavement
Flowers blossom
By walls bruised
By footballs
A name written
On the step
CCTV camera
In a cage
Outside the church
Broken concrete bollards
Broken illuminated cross
A door handle
You're making a donation
Christian Aid

The Playground

2006-08-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

Taken from fellow MA student Rhiannon Jones' website www.archivedactualities.com

I was with my friend Tim French on the playground near my house in Rise Park, Nottingham. It was one of those with a high slide where the top of the slide was in a cage it was so high. My mum wouldn't let me go down it. The ground was concrete. Tim and I were on the swings trying to go higher than each other. I shouted 'Watch this!' and attempted to jump off the swing when it was at its highest point. But I fell - and landed on my face. Apparently I blacked out for a couple of minutes and when I came round there was blood gushing from a hole in my chin. Tim said 'You can see the bone!' and rushed me home. I had to go to hospital and have stitches, a tetanus injection in my bottom and wear a massive plaster for a week.

In 2000 I fell over during a rehearsal in Morecambe and reopened the wound. I was trying a Titanic-style stance - arms outstretched leaning forward and again landed on my face. The floor was slippy. I was wearing socks. I didn't black out this time but there was more blood. And again the people there said 'You can see the bone!' More stitches. More plasters. More scar. A couple of years later one of the stitches fell out in the shower. Now it scares me when I shave and I grow a beard more than I would without it.

The playground soon got covered with wood chippings and they took away the slide with the cage at the top of it. Rumours at school were that someone had fallen off the top and died.

Church-ness

2006-08-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

Tonight I missed a church rehearsal. I was ill. Still had the guilty feeling I associate with a lie-in on a Sunday. Reminds me of the obligation to attend church when I was young. We used to sit through services knowing that we could go to the sweet shop afterwards. Sometimes it felt like we were being bribed by sugar. Wondering if the church-ness of the site should be referenced more in the text. Perhaps the performance is part-wedding, part-christening, part-wake? The same characters at the different events. Three events bound by the same seating plan. The same absent buffet. Now that the piece is focussing solely on the church it makes more sense to investigate acts of communion that take place there. The reason people come to church. The reason people perform in the church drama group. Asylum. Escape. Catharsis. Pretense. Play. Make-believe. Stress-relief. Exercise. Fun. Fellowship. Worship. Laughter. To become someone else. There is a danger in my applying self as source techniques to the project that I prevent the usual transactions taking place. There are introductions to each performance. Inductions. Safety instructions. Please turn off your mobile phones. The toilets are 'Down the corridor on the left etc.' I showed one of the videos to the MA Group and they suggested the introduction seemed joyless and contradicted the joyfulness of the performance - or why people perform. In some ways these rules - these parameters of the experience are there to comfort us - just as the rules of the church are there to provide guidelines to the way we live.

The light at the end of the tunnel

2006-08-16T05:34:00.003-07:00

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

The Decision

2006-08-16T01:52:00.000-07:00

'Then playwriting itself became a nettle, became several in fact; the shallowness, the wasted time, the messiness of other minds, the hopelessness of pretending - in the garden of the arts, it was a weed and had to die.' - Ian McEwan, Atonement

There is an inevitability that this blog will unwrite itself as the project develops and my original intention rights itself. This was the third workshop with students from Nottingham Trent University. The second workshop with a full compliment of performers. I created a text to the compositional structure - featuring fragments of the material I have already listed here. Political. Personal. Wedding protocol. We read it through and enacted certain scenes. Do Re Mi. My Favourite Things. The problem is - I can't find the tone of voice I'm looking for and my focus is becoming more involved in researching and writing for the amateur dramatic Act. The initial binary opposite (AM Dram / MA Dram) I was investigating is no longer the aim - populism and elitism as an area of investigation is too slippery to pinpoint - especially in a year. The students I am working with though able and enthusiastic are not the polar opposite of the cast of the Church on Rise Park Drama Group. Two of them are Fine Art Students with no professional experience of performance. In this sense - they are as much amateur as the amateur group. Perhaps I needed to work with professional experimental theatre practitioners. So what is left of Act One. The fact that it can be more abstract, more thought provoking, more able to shock. This is not necessarily the right justification for creating a new piece of work. I have set out to realise two performances and a film of these performances. I have foreseen the product, the 'end point', the 'exit velocity' before entering the process. I must now reevaluate where I am going and what I need to do to get there. I experienced the academic circuit whilst touring with MBD and have no need or desire to explore that performance context now. The dualities between the two arenas that I intended to explore are present in just the one act. Does the fact that members of the drama group take time off work during a show make it their job? Are they both professional and amateur? Can the piece they perform not have elements of experimental theatre? I have become too immersed in their world to create another world whose only aim is to be different. There is a rich dynamic in their words - from interviews, from rehearsals - that will inform the process. I will focus solely on creating a new piece of work for the Church on Rise Park. The edge of the map is the blueprint.

The Blueprint

2006-08-16T01:37:00.000-07:00

I visited the Nottinghamshire Archives to investigate the history of the sites. Records were thin regarding the Powerhouse although I found blueprints for other NTU buildings. However I discovered original documents about the building of the Church on Rise Park.

In September 1968 the church opened as a member of the Bestwood diocese. Churchgoers were both Anglicans and Methodist. In 1969 the church became a place of ecumenical worship. In 1978 the Drama Group started rehearsing and performing on an annual basis.

I found planning records submitted on 16 March 1966 for the patch of land on Rise Park Farm set aside for a commercial centre, church, public house, a car park and petrol station. The artefact itself - hand drawn in black ink - has an air of personal history to it. A pencil-written note on a blue slip of paper is clipped to the plan of the building site.

'The site officer considers these details to be satisfactory and he recommends that they be approved.'

This is where I grew up, the church I attended, the pub I was scared of, the car park where someone ran over my parents car. Literally. And left dents in the roof. The petrol station has now gone. The tangible lines of ink and pencil seem to connect with the narratives of nostalgia that I am threading through the texts.

The Toast

2006-08-16T01:34:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the idea of absence and the narrative of nostalgia emerging in Act Two I devised a series of toasts in Act One reflecting on the changes in the locality. The radius of reference was equally short but inclusive to the community of the audience.

MC To the things that were meant to disappear

G To the Creative Arts Course

B To the MA that began in January

BM To the Victoria Studios

B To the crossing opposite the Victoria Centre

MC Look left. Look right.

[All look left. Look right.]

BM To being knocked down

G To the car park they knocked down

B To the building next to the car park they knocked down

MC To the buildings we don’t remember once they’ve gone

BM To the cranes

MC Look up. Look down.

[All look up. Look down.]

B To the Odeon Cinema

BM To the ABC Cinema

G To the Broadway

BM To Beatties Toy Shop

B To the CO-OP

BM To CO-OP Arts

G To Allders

BM To Littlewoods

B To C&A

BM To the Xylophone man

MC To the people we only remember once they’ve gone

Narratives of Nostalgia

2006-08-16T00:35:00.000-07:00

To deal with the notion of absence I investigated the idea of what was no longer there. I grew up in Rise Park and many of the local 'landmarks' have been knocked down. Mobile phone masts go up. Shops change names. The church is fenced off. Surgeries move. The car park is always empty. As the list grew the group became involved in remembering. An act of reminiscence. There are moments with the group where it begins to feel more like a devised piece. The final text includes their contributions and ad lib responses. As we workshopped the text the reminiscences became toasts e.g. To the big slide with the cage at the top. This fused with the back catalogue - another narrative of nostalgia. These are perhaps anchorage points for an audience. Appealing to their communal memory of their community. Pricking their communal conscience. This was an act of communion.

GMOB: [To BM 1] Hello. What an interesting dress.

FOB: Tesco in Top Valley

GMOB: Did you make it yourself? It looks like you did.

BD 1: The bride got them made for us

GMOB: I made my bridesmaids dresses out of sackcloth and string.

BD 2: Your granddaughter

GMOB: It was the war so we had to make ends meet.

MOB: Grandways

GMOB: None of your ends meet

BD 1: Her mother measured us

GMOB: Your seam’s not straight.

BD 2: Your daughter

GMOB: The zip’s a zig zag

BD 1: Her grandmother made them

GMOB: The hem’s hamfisted.

BD 1 / BD 2: You

MOG: Big D

GMOB: [changing subject] Do you know where the toilets are?

BM 1: The surgery on Blantyre Avenue.

MOB: Mother, Tony’s trying to speak

BD 1: The dentists on Portree Drive.

GMOB: Well don’t let me stop him

BD 2: The tall slide with the cage at the top

BD 1 / BD 2: At the end of the corridor on the left

FOB: Nothing is left of her childhood.

GMOB: Jansys

MOB: Oh yes. They did fantastic knitting wool.

FOB: Shops close down. Mobile phone masts go up.

The Back Catalogue

2006-08-04T00:25:00.000-07:00

At the same time in Act Two I am collating a collage of references to previous plays performed by The Church on Rise Park Drama Group. I am finding a voice for each piece and establishing focal points. The sources of fragments to fuel the text range from the political to the parochial, the global to the local, the amateur to the academic.

BD 1: Do you come here often?

BM 1: Always the best man never the groom.

BD 1: I’ve been a bridesmaid so many times I could…

BM 1: Dress seven brides for seven brothers.

BD 1: How did you know?

BM 1: I heard it in a show.

FOB: I’ve watched her grow, from show to show.

MOB: Wedding of the Year

FOG: Fish out of Water

MOG: Pickle in Paradise

BD 2: Down to Brass Tacks

BM 1: Lucky for Some

BD 1: I’ll Get my Man

MOB: The Man Outside

FOB: Just the Ticket

MOG: Happy Days

GMOB: Play On

BM 1: The Camel’s Back

FOG: The Curious Savage

To Parenthood

2006-08-03T23:34:00.000-07:00

I have found out that my girlfriend and I are expecting a baby. This changes the landscape. An amazing feeling made all the more amazing because we never expected to feel it. Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans. At the same time, I was working on a scene where the parents of the child propose a toast.

DONNA We’d like to propose a toast to parenthood

ALL To parenthood

BETTY To wiping dribble from their chin

AUDREY To singing them to sleep

LOUISE To putting stabilisers on their first bike

IAN To taking the stabilisers off their first bike

HARRY To picking them up after they fall off their first bike

IAN To putting the stabilisers back on their first bike

BETTY To picking them up after their first day at school

KATH To watching them in their first play

TONY To walking them down the aisle on their wedding day

JONATHAN To holding them in their gown at their christening

The Cake

2006-08-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

For the last rehearsal of Act Two I interviewed my mum about wedding cake protocol and initiated a cake off between the MOB and the MOG. I am interested in the clashes that could occur at the table e.g. the FOB and the FOG arguing about road directions.

All: To the mother of the Groom for the cake

FOB: Tell me how did you get it so… hard

MOG: You have three tins of different sizes

MOB: Do you line the tins with greaseproof paper before you put it in?

MOG: You wrap brown paper or newspaper around the outside because they have to bake on a long, slow heat until they’re cooked.

MOB: Do you cook them all for different lengths?

MOG: In my oven I can only fit one in at a time.

MOB: In my oven I could have fitted all three

MOG: You cook them several months ahead if you can and then you store them and you keep putting brandy or sherry or whatever in them when you want to feed them.

FOB: Sounds like a good life to me

MOB: You turn them upside down and pour it into the bottom of the cake.

MOG: And then you put the almond paste on and then you leave that to dry out.

MOB: Because if you put the icing on too quickly it turns yellow.

MOG: Then you either use royal icing which is made of egg white

MOB Or you buy fondant icing which you can roll out.

MOG: The old fashioned way is to have pillars between each tier

MOB: Or you can just put them on top of each other and put your flowers on

GMOB: Of course the tradition is that you keep the top tier for the christening

MOG: Well they better get a move on because the top tier’s a sponge cake

MOB: Why didn’t you make it a fruit cake?

MOG: Because I was told someone had an allergy

FOG: I’m allergic to dried fruit

FOB: I’m allergic to marzipan

BM 1: I’m allergic to egg white

BD 1: I have a nut allergy

BD 2 I’m lactose intolerant

MOB: I’m allergic to sherry

MOG: I’m allergic to brandy

GMOB: I don’t like sponge cake

MOG: Well I don’t suppose anyone will eat it at the Christening either then

The Line Up

2006-07-21T02:25:00.000-07:00

This dialogue takes place during the introduction to Acts of Communion Act Two - based on the interviews with members of the Church on Rise Park Drama Group. I wanted to create a scenario where performers break out of character to reveal themselves. This could be Brechtian, this could be self-referential, this could be post-modern, but actually, as one of the performers pointed out;

'It''s just like that show where I had to play six different characters except one of those characters is actually me.'

MC: Michael

FOB: Tony

BD 1: Donna

BM 1: Jonathan

BD 2: Louise

FOG: Ian

MOG: Audrey

MOB: Betty

GMOB: Kath

MC: Master of Ceremony

FOB: Father of the Bride

BD 1: Bridesmaid 1

BM 1: Best Man 1

BD 2: Bridesmaid 2

FOG: Father of the Groom

MOG: Mother of the Groom

MOB: Mother of the Bride

GMOB: Grandmother of the Bride

BM 1: [To BM 2] He’s my best friend

BD 1 / BD 2: [To each other] She’s my best friend

BM 1 / BD 1 / BD 2: We met doing this show

FOG / MOG: [To G] He’s our son

FOB / MOB [To B] She’s our daughter

GMOB: She’s my granddaughter… I think

BM 1 / BD 1 / BD 2: [To B and G] They met doing this show

MOB / MOG: We’re very proud

FOB / BM 1: We’re very nervous

BD 1 / BD 2: We’re very drunk

FOG: We’re very bored

GMOB: [loudly] We’re very hard of hearing

FOB: [to GMOB loudly] We’re very proud

GMOB: You’re very loud

BD 1 / BD 2: We’re very disappointed in our dresses

MOB / MOG: We’re very disappointed in the bridesmaids

FOG: We’re very disappointed in the script

BM 1 / FOB: We’re very worried about our speeches

GMOB: We’re very worried about the toilets

All: At the end of the corridor on the left

GMOB: The Line Up took forever

MOG: I don’t practice my lines until quite near the end. What I do I type them out. I type each act out. I don’t type the whole lot just a few lines before. I just read them and really and truly learn the lines.

MOB: I go down and I probably do a page at a time and I go back and I go back.

GMOB: If it’s a play where you’re on from start to finish I usually just tape it. But if you’ve only got this or that I don’t bother.

FOB: I read the whole play through out loud in front of a tape recorder but the part that I’ve got to learn I speak at sotto voce.

FOG: I have a haphazard approach to learning lines.

BD 1: I read through it myself on my own for a while then I practise with my Dad. He knows the play, the plot, the lines before I do.

BD 2: I’m rubbish at learning my lines. I don’t really look at the book really. I guess I’ve just got a bit of a knack.

BM 1: Just reading them will do. I never had too much of a problem except where the lines don’t follow on in a normal conversation.

Absence and Presence

2006-07-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

absence

• noun 1 the state of being away from a place or person. 2 (absence of) the non-existence or lack of.

— PHRASES absence makes the heart grow fonder proverb you feel more affection for those you love when parted from them.

leave2

• noun 1 (also leave of absence) time when one has permission to be absent from work or duty. 2 formal permission: seeking leave to appeal.

— PHRASES take one’s leave formal say goodbye. take leave to do formal venture or presume to do.

— ORIGIN Old English, related to LIEF and LOVE.

I now realise that the project aim is to interrogate the notion of absence. The dichotomy of high art and low art and the tension between the live and the recorded are relevant to the context not the content. The content centres around a series of dialectics; absence and presence, death and birth, divorce and marriage, debt and wealth, depression and happiness, disability and health. Themes are antithetical to demarcate the territory and harness the cynicism of the academic approach and optimism of Amateur Dramatics. Negative and Positive. The themes are personal and universal and lend structure to the performance and installation. Investigating Act of Communion as; wedding, friendship, fellowship, amateur dramatics group, MA group, coming together to make a performance or coming together to witness a performance.

The MC

2006-07-12T15:22:00.000-07:00

I play the MC in both shows. Adapted in each case to each site and each community. e.g. Act One - a university audience. Act Two - an amateur dramatic audience. The first draft of text is below. This was written in an attempt to reflect the reality of the situation. The speeches were sourced from confetti.com and are there as a template. Although I will work with found text.

Acts of Communion

MC: Ladies and Gentlemen – I do hope you all enjoyed the wedding breakfast. I know I did. The facilities here never fail to amaze me. Now could I remind you if you have mobile phones and know how to use them. Please do switch them off. We wouldn’t want them to ruin the speeches. Unless of course it’s the Best Man ringing up to tell us where he is. Thankfully, two of the Grooms other friends have stepped in at the last minute to share the burden. It’s their first time. It’s not my first time. I’ve been married before. I don’t need to tell you what happened. But today I’m the MC – Master of Ceremonies. I’ll be guiding you through the speeches. Telling you when to stand, sit, clap, laugh and cry. We are up against the clock as the hall is needed by the WI in exactly an hour from now. Before I start just a few housekeeping duties. The toilets are at the end of the corridor, on the left. Can I also remind you that confetti is not permitted on the premises. And that flash photography should be reserved until the cutting of the cake. Can I also point out that for posterity, the speeches and the guests are being filmed. If anybody has an objection to their featuring in the wedding video please do let me know. So I ask you now pray silence for the Father of the Bride.

FOB: Normally, I'm a rather timid public speaker, but today we are so thrilled to see Rhiannon happily married to Thom that I can barely summon up a single nerve …

Standing here today, my mind can't help but return to all those unmentionable years ago and the day I myself got married …

It's been an absolute pleasure to give away my daughter today. My only regret is that I didn't do it years ago …

Sadly, my wife is no longer with us, so what I want to say is for the both of us. I know that, like me, she would be very proud and absolutely delighted to see Thom and Rhiannon getting married here today.

It's not every day you get to walk your daughter up the aisle and see her marry the man of her dreams. Which is quite a relief, believe me, when you know how much this whole thing cost!! Seriously, though …

MC Now the Bride and Groom won’t mind me telling you this. But they’re both students of the arts. In fact they both study Performance and Live Art at Nottingham Trent University. That’s how they met. That means that they’ve got absolutely no excuses when it comes to public speaking. However, it means they’ve got every excuse when it comes to getting married on the cheap. She got her dress from the costume cupboard. The groom went to a charity shop. Everything you see here is set and props. The total budget was £80. And didn’t they do well. They booked this hall through the university. I booked it for them. I asked around and was told that room booking could be done via the Virtual Learning Portal, that the procedure was detailed in the Student Handbook and didn’t I get the email about it. I didn’t get the email so I just came over here and booked it. We’ve only got it for an hour because of the WI. But that did save us money. It’s not a cracking anecdote but it does illustrate that bureaucracy as with weddings can be far too complicated. I know mine was. I’ve been married before. I don’t need to tell you what happened. Sometimes you’re better off doing it on a budget. In an hour. To a small audience. In a small hall. So without further ado I give you The Groom.

G: A very warm welcome to everyone here today, at the end of what has been a fantastic week for sales of Imodium...

(after a protracted engagement)
I knew at once that I had made a powerful impression on Rhiannon, because within weeks of our first meeting, she fled the country for an entire year...

Before I go any further, I'd just like to cordially invite you all to my best man Michael's wedding in six weeks' time, at which I'll be best man and he'll be the groom. I'm sure you'll all want to see the truth of that old saying: "Revenge is a dish best served cold...."

Normally, it's the duty of the best man to get the groom to the church on time, fully dressed and stone-cold sober. As soon as I chose Michael for my best man, however, I knew that the roles were likely to be reversed. Still, one out of three's not bad, is it?

(pretend nervous)
Unaccustomed as I am to pubic spanking... er, I mean...

MC: Some of you bought raffle tickets when you came in – we’re trying to raise some funds for the roof. We don’t need a new one we’re just trying to raise it. Raise the roof. I’m wasted on weddings. I’m wasted. The raffle has already been drawn. It’s an entirely truthful raffle that’s taken place in secret. 1st prize. No. 783. Bottle of Australian Chardonnay. Bin 65. If you’ve been 65 you can have it. 2nd prize. No. 874. Chocolate Fondue Set. Come on. Someone must have bought it. 3rd prize. No. 761. Family biscuit selection. 4th prize. No. 759. Rossini Tumbler. If you put in the right amount of water it sings the theme of the thieving magpie. 5th prize. No. 561. Decorative candles. You’ve always wanted a decorative candle. Now you can have one. 6th prize. No. 852. Swiss handkerchief set. That’s pronounced Swiss. Not Swizz. That concludes the prize draw. If you did play the raffle and you did have a winning ticket please see me on the way out. If you did play the raffle but you didn’t win then maybe next time. If you didn’t play the raffle then please make yourselves known to the caterers because we’re a bit short on cake. Now. It’s no coincidence that some of the raffle prizes shared a striking similarity to items on my wedding list. I’ve been married before. I don’t need to tell you what happened. Next up. The Brides’s speech.

B: You may have noticed that in our ceremony today, I made the decision to 'respect' rather than 'obey' my new husband. It looks like we're going to be together for some time, so it's a good idea to make it clear who's boss from the start …

I always thought being a bride meant you didn't have to do a speech. But then when I got wind of the nonsense that Thom was preparing to say, I knew at once there was no alternative …

(second time around)
There's a first time for everything - and sometimes a second. Voltaire the philosopher put it differently: "Once a philosopher," he said. "Twice a pervert." Well, before we go any further, let me reassure everyone that I'm not in any danger of making the same mistake twice. In fact, in marrying Thom, I am confident that I'm making an altogether different kind of mistake …

While I was racking my brains trying to come up with a way of starting my speech, someone said to me, 'Why not mention the fact that the two of you share the same star sign?' I decided against this idea, however, on the grounds that I'm not much of a one for astrology. Which is unusual for a Scorpio...

Even though we're at the start of a new millennium, some of you here today may still not be very familiar with the idea that the bride gets to give a speech too. Well, wait till I tell you how I proposed...

MC: You know they say in Arabic beliefs, that there exists a bird with one wing that cannot fly. Instead he waits for another bird to come along who only has one wing so cannot fly. Sometimes, he meets a bird who has one wing, but it’s the same wing. They realise they won’t be able to fly together so they exchange pleasantries through coos and flaps and go on their respective ways. Sometimes, he meets a bird whose one wing, which is the right wing or the left wing, whichever wing he doesn’t have, has been so badly strained through her attempts to fly that it is too weak to fly even with the help of his other wing, the right wing or the left wing, whichever wing she doesn’t have. Sometimes, and this happens very rarely, he meets a bird, with the right wing, who feels just like him, who wants to fly but cannot. They embrace; wing over wing, and in their coupling they find they are whole. They fly off into the sky. At first fumbling and tumbling. Then soaring. High above their home, their hurt and their dreams. Now I didn’t write that. I don’t know who did. But I’d like to think that The Bride and Groom are those birds. Flying high above their home, their hurt and their dreams. And that all the other birds the Groom found just didn’t have a good enough wing. I know mine didn’t. I don’t need to tell you what happened. But I did have two Best Men. So let me introduce The Groom’s stand-in wing men. The Best Men.

BM: I realise that I'm probably not the person most of you expected to be speaking at this point, so by way of explanation (removes piece of paper) let me read the following telegram. 'Sorry I couldn't be there today, but I'm unavoidably detained in hospital. Would love to have given the speech today, but will have to make do with watching you sweat it out on the video. All the best - love to bride and groom. Michael.' (Replaces piece of paper.) Well, thanks for that Michael. I'm sure we all wish him well, and hope he makes a speedy recovery from whatever it was that put him in the STD clinic in the first place …

The Powerhouse

2006-07-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

Two sessions have taken place at the Powerhouse at Nottingham Trent University, This is Act One. MA Dram. As opposed to Act Two. Am Dram. The cast is as follows:

Bride - Rhiannon Jones
Groom - Ben Hargraves
Best Man - Hugh Dichmont
MC - Michael Pinchbeck

So far we have workshopped movement and text. Four Weddings and a Funeral. A Wedding. A Respectable Wedding. The Wicker Man. A transcript from one of the flights on September 11th. We have worked on removing characters from Brecht's A Respectable Wedding to see how absence affects the action. I am realising already that perhaps more than populism and elitism the main area of investigation is absence and presence.

B [To Father] Eat up Dad you always come off worst.

G Damn Good.

G Cow’s don’t eat cod they’re vegetarian

BM It’s a good light for cod

B Really father it’s too nasty

B Consumption of the spine

BM Cheers old chap

G Cheers everyone

B Every bit. My husband planned it, made the drawings bought the wood, planed it all down, and glued it together, and it really looks quite nice.

BM It looks marvellous. I only wonder how you found the time.

G Evenings, quite often in the lunch hour, but mostly first thing in the morning.

B He got up at five every morning and worked.

B He wanted to do the whole thing himself. Later on we’ll show you the rest of the furniture.

B Longer than you or any of us lot. When you think what went into it. He even made his own glue.

G You can’t trust that rubbish you get in the shops.

B I can never see anything funny in your stories

G I think Father tells a wonderful story

BM First rate. Specially the way you make sure you don’t miss the point.

B They’re too long

G Rubbish

BM Concise. Simple. Artistic.

We have improvised around The Aristocrats joke - an obscene account of a talent scout - substituting the family for the guests at the head table. We've read out wedding cards to records. This is a period of play that is integral to the dynamic of the group. New text evolved during these sessions and has a self-referential tone.

B - Bride
G - Groom
MC - Master of Ceremony

B / G We were working on this show. It was an MA piece and we were roped into playing the Bride and the Groom. We’d never met before but as we were both from Cambridge we talked about what hospitals we were born in

MC I was born in Cambridge too

B / G What schools we’d been to

G She said St Mary’s

B He said ‘Ooooo’

G She said ‘I know’

B He said my Dad’s a vicar

G She said ‘Oooooo’

B He said ‘I know’

B / G We hit it off straight away

The Interviews

2006-07-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

"All the material in this book not derived from my own observation is either taken from official records or is the result of interviews with the persons directly concerned, more often than not numerous interviews conducted over a considerable period of time. Because these 'collaborators' are identified within the text, it would be redundant to name them here; nevertheless I want to express a formal gratitude, for without their patient cooperation my task would have been impossible." - Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Betty Walker
Am Dram

Right at the very beginning when they started doing it here. They asked if anyone was interested and I thought mm yeah quite like that idea so I came along. It was just an interest in just coming along to see what happens and I’ve been in every play we’ve done since. I can’t remember. It was the first one we ever did. It must be. It was fairly early on. It must be twenty years ago I would think. I can’t say exactly because I don’t remember the date but whenever we did the first play. I was just interested in doing. I didn’t know if I could do it or not. I’d never done it before. When I was younger I’d been in. I lived in a village and we used to have little concerts and I’d done one or two bits like that. Sometimes it was singing and sometimes it was little parts not really plays. That was an interest that I’d always had I suppose and then when it came here I thought Yeah! Yeah I can remember there was a gun in it and Jack and Molly Stones were in it and Bob Buckley he did. I’m hopeless with titles. I can’t remember what it was called. If my husband was here he’d tell you straight away because it’s always been his favourite play. I’ve still got it at home. I’ve got all my plays but I can’t think what it was called.

Making people laugh. That’s why I think it’s. We’ve only ever done one serious play. I enjoyed doing that but I think making people laugh. It makes us laugh. We have good fun. Good fellowship and we enjoy it. Sometimes we don’t but most of the time we enjoy it. Gets a bit stressful sometimes but most of the time that is the key thing for me. Making people laugh. Because we all know each other so well. It’s quite nice to be able to get together. It’s a fun time. When I’d first started I’d got the children. I don’t think I was working at the time. But when I was working to me it was a break from doing something you know organised and it was a way of relaxing in one respect. I was a secretary. I had a part that I liked doing. But again don’t ask me what play it was because I won’t remember. I played somebody who was a little bit ‘simple’. And I really enjoyed that part it I really did was a lovely part to play.

Come on. Well I always I must admit I’ve been a bit more slack recently but I always used to read my lines last thing at night before I went to sleep because and I’ve not realised this but I’ve heard some actors say it but that is the best time because you retain it but I didn’t realise it at the time. I have a piece of paper. I go down and I probably do a page at a time and I go back and I go back. I do it from the book. Move down. Bit by bit. Sometimes when I used to go to work. Sometimes when it got a bit close and I thought I need to keep reading it I would sit there. That was about it. Quite a way beforehand. Sometimes they learn them a bit too soon I think. Because of the fact that we only meet once a week we’ve got to start fairly early. We have anyway we’re all getting old now. You think about the characters I think more. You don’t really think it’s people you know unless the lines all go a bit haywire. Then you think Ow Help. But usually you think of the character well I do anyway. They know us. To be honest the audience doesn’t really worry me. When you’re on stage and you hear people laughing. You know immediately who the laugh is coming from. You can tell. I don’t think it makes a difference to me. I must admit it my mind goes like that. Come back to me but at the moment when you ask me on the spot. I can’t think.

Wedding

I can tell you how I met my husband. At the erm oh crikey I can’t remember it wasn’t the Palais it was the other one. See I’m getting old I can’t remember. But I met him there on New Year’s Eve and we actually got married on April Fools’ Day our wedding anniversary is April 1st thought he’d never forget it but he nearly always does. We got married in the village that I was born and brought up in. Willoughby on the Wold. Don’t know if you know it. Near Keyworth. Got married in the Methodist Chapel there. Thirty nine. It will be our Ruby Wedding next April 1st. Bit traumatic beforehand but a wonderful day.

Audrey Seaman
Am Dram

Urr do you know I can’t remember how I got in to it. I think I came to see them. Oh I know what it was it was your Dad. I read the lesson one Sunday. Your Dad came up to me afterwards and said do you feel like doing Drama. I said I’ve wanted to but I never thought I was good enough and then I came and said I’ll come and give it a try and the rest’s history. About fifteen years I think. I really enjoyed it. I’ve done acting. I’ve done props. I’ve done stage management. I’ve been prompt. And I’ve directed so I’ve done quite a few things considering I wasn’t any good at anything. From reading the plays I like the way it comes together in the end. You going through week after week and you’re thinking oh I’ll never learn my lines and you know I’ll never get this bit right. Then all of a sudden you have a terrible dress rehearsal then on the night it all comes together. It’s wonderful when the audience are laughing I mean that really makes a difference. As long as it’s a comedy. If it’s a tragedy and they’re laughing then you’ve done it wrong. No but you know. If it’s a comedy and they laugh and the more they laugh the more you play up to them then it’s great. I enjoyed playing the drunk a couple of years ago. Yes yes. The vicar’s wife. Bit close to the bone for the church yes it was. Think probably because it was the biggest part I’ve done and I had to I had to I don’t know if I was any good but I had to act in it. It wasn’t just a bit part. I think so. You’ve got to really to get into it. Otherwise you wouldn’t get into it. You’ve got to really live the story otherwise there would be no point.

I remember ages ago my Dad had a terrible cold and his nose was running as he was performing and he took his handkerchief out and blew his nose and it was like that’s my Dad blowing his nose and that’s the way he blows it. It’s not the character it’s my Dad.

What I do I type them out. I type each act out. I don’t type the whole lot just a few lines before. I just read them and really and truly learn the lines. I just read them over and over. I find that helps. If I type them out onto sheets then I’ve got the sheets I don’t need the whole book I know my part is that if you know what I mean. I just keep reading that over and over again. Otherwise if you read the book you just go mad. I know that from experience being a prompt. Hard work. You daren’t take your eyes off it really – if you glance up and then somebody’s forgotten their line you think Ahh! The worst thing is when they come in at the wrong place or something like that. You think Do I correct them? Do I leave them and hope they turn themselves around? You know. I mean if someone misses a line and someone else cuts in then I would never come in with the line but only if they’ve got themselves in a muddle. Luckily I think there’s only one play where they missed a few pages out. It’s a bit hard because you sit there thinking they’re not supposed to know I’m here. I try not to shout but I’ve got such a quiet voice. Your mum’s good she’s critical but a good critic. She can spot things. I was an accountant. I don’t practice my lines until quite near the end I’m a bit naughty. I tend to. If I learn them early I tend to get them mixed up. I forget them. I get them in my mind and then I think
That’s not right and I start putting other words in that aren’t there so I like to leave it to… not the night before but you know I don’t like to learn them too early I mean Harry used to learn his before rehearsal he knew all his but then he went wrong you see because he wasn’t looking at the book and doing the moves and things.

Wedding

It was a blind date. We were introduced by mutual friends. I worked with a girl and Paul worked with her husband. She went to a party and was introduced to Paul. He was telling her he lived on his own with two children. She said I’ve got a girlfriend who lives on her own with a little boy. She didn’t say anything to me for about three weeks and then at work they were teasing me. I was saying I’ll never meet anybody decent and she went Oh well. Anyway she gave me his number and he rang me and the rest was history. Ha Ha.

We got married at Shakespeare Registry Office because in those days when you’ve been married before they wouldn’t let you get married in church so when we had our 25th last year we got married again in church well had a blessing which was absolutely wonderful.

It is a family. People have even stopped me in the supermarket and said you were in that play. Want me autograph? It is nice. The whole church is a family that’s the nice thing about it. You know each other. You know each other’s family.

Really good sitting at the head table at my son’s wedding. Her parents we know them very well. It was really nice. It was a blur at my first wedding. It was awful. I don’t remember a bloomin thing about it. When the photographs came I couldn’t remember them taking half of them. I couldn’t eat anything at the reception I was too nervous. But no my son’s was a fabulous wedding it really was everybody enjoyed it everybody was talking about it for weeks afterwards. It was one of those sort of it was a lovely day. It weasn’t really sunny but it was really nice. There were 150 guests. We’d got our friends there and her parents took their friends. And we knew some of them and they knew some of ours. So it wasn’t like one of those weddings where you go but you don’t know anyone. It was at Linden Hall in Northumberland. She’s a Geordie.

‘Have you met Donald… my husband… the vicar… the vicar… my husband… Donald.’

If it’s a good play you find yourself laughing. I get a bit fed up of it towards the end. Especially if you’re the prompt or the director it does get a bit boring towards the end. But when it happens on the night it’s all gone again. Oh yes. Adrenalin kicks in. At night it’s really good. Brilliant. Especially if you’ve had a good night.

Louise Walker
Am Dram

I did drama at school and I left school with three O levels and one of those was in drama, the other was in art and the other one was in maths so I figured I needed to do something with one of those. My mother was doing it too so that was it really. I don’t think I’m like my mother but I did follow her into it. Although, gosh I’m really racking some memory cells now – I’ve got a feeling that when I left school I did go and join another drama group in Nottingham and did something vaguely there. It’s just something I love doing.

I’m quite an outgoing character so I find that it’s just natural for me so I quite enjoy just standing on stage being larger than life. I just love that buzz that it gives me. Even with the work I’m doing now although it isn’t drama I do like standing in front of people. I work for a building society and have done for a long time. I’ve just changed jobs and my job title is I’m a coach. I do lots of coaching but one of the things I really enjoy is presenting, speaking to a large group of people, putting on a bit of a performance as well.

There are lots of different things I do to conquer nerves. I use different techniques. Anchoring techniques. If I was in a stressful situation I would have an anchor. An elastic band around the wrist. If I ping the elastic band it triggers a memory, A happy memory or something that went well. You relive that moment. As you relive it you’re setting yourself an anchor. You keep reworking it until eventually just a click of the fingers or the ping of an elastic band can trigger that thought. You can conquer the world.

It doesn’t make a difference. Performing in front of people you know. Although perhaps it does. Now you’ve asked me I’m going o have to think about this. They’re people you know and you want to be good and you want them to think ‘wow she can do this.’ I don’t get nervous. That’s really bizarre. I know a lot of people do but no because I love doing it. The only thing I’m apprehensive about is forgetting my lines. But once you get through the door. No nerves at all. Adrenalin. Big style. I know we only do it for a few nights once a year but certainly I take that time off work because I know once we’ve finished I won’t sleep when I get home.

I’m rubbish at learning my lines. I don’t even look at the book really. I perhaps just have a bit of an ability that when we come an just read through them every week it sticks with me. I’m probably quite lucky. The last thing we did I learnt the lines the night before. I had to shout ‘Quick Trace run the bus is here’ and wear some really terrible clothes. I looked dead classy. Don’t tell anyone. I’m also not afraid to make it up a bit – it puts other people off but I’m a loose cannon. It wouldn’t worry me to improvise at all. I’m aware that the other people on stage wouldn’t be too impressed if I suddenly went off on one but I feel quite confident that if I forgot the lines – I don’t like being prompted – I would try and get by without it by saying something that would hopefully bring us back on track. I don’t like being prompted because that’s a sign of failure. I don’t fail. I don’t want to do things wrong. I’m a complete perfectionist in everything I do. I usually beat myself up and just think I wasn’t good enough but what I’ve learnt as I’ve got older is that it’s not that I’m not good enough it’s that my standards are up here and I’m not where I want to be. I’m a very confident person.

I do remember having to wear a really horrible dressing gown in one show. I was an artists model and I had to come downstairs in this dressing gown after being drawn. I can remember lots of things about them but I can’t remember lines. I can remember one show with Andrew Grindrod – Kath Hyde’s son-in-law – I had to wear lots of nice, posh dresses and I was married to him and had to be really horrible to him which came quite naturally really. Quite scary. But I liked that one.

Do you mind that my dad is often married to your mum?

I’ve been married to Ian. I’ve been married to you. Remember. I was the nurse in the old peoples’ home but I was married to you. The numbers are dwindling so it gets quite limited. Who’s married to who etc. We have a wide range of people and ages means we have to adapt to find something to fit in. She’s not my mother when we’re here – she’s just someone else in the group and that’s cool. I think when we’re onstage I think as the other members of the group as the people they’re playing not the people they are.

Wedding

I’ve been to a few weddings here. I’m not a wedding fan. Don’t get me going. I feel very passionately about weddings because I really hate them. I just think they’re a complete farce. It’s all a big fuss to me about something that’s personal between two people. I think it’s all a big stage, a big show, and it should be something different to that. I have got some strong views about it maybe because I’ve never been married I don’t know.

I was a bridesmaid once. To my cousin. I was little. I was about 12 or 13. Pink dress with a dark pink sash tied around my middle which my mother made. We sat at the top table.

Tony Pinchbeck
Am Dram

Well, the drama really came after the singing I suppose. First recollection is being involved in a chorus of Pirates of Penzance in the first year of college. Then singing led to doing odd bits of drama. Did a play at church the acting became incidental. Generally since I’ve been involved in the drama group I’ve not done any straight drama. I prefer being part of a musical number than being a straight part. I get more out of singing than acting but I come to enjoy acting almost as much. Well shortly after moving to Rise Park they were starting the drama group and inviting people to come in and read. I read for one or two of the parts and ws made the stage manager. Just moving props around in between scenes and just checking people were where they should be. Nothing too odious. Moving furniture around. I had to bash a table tennis bat on a biscuit tin to simulate a gunshot.

No particular lines stick in my mind. I enjoyed trying to grapple with an American accent for the Curious Savage. In the Sunday school in Wesley Chapel I was always pitched in with readings etc. so I was not unused to saying things in public. There is no drama involved in that. I quite enjoy being in the chorus having my little moment of fame and then slipping into the chorus again. There is something about the safety in numbers.

Escapism really. You have to concentrate on it entirely so it’s being on an alternative plane. You can just concentrate on that and nothing else matters. Saying it’s escapism makes it sound negative. I do get the adrenalin buzz from it. This adrenalin. Waiting in the wings. Remembering your first line. On stage hoping everyone remembers theirs. I dried once in the middle of the song. Sang the wrong verse. We’ve only done one straight play and it was very hard to gauge the audience reaction without the sound of laughter.

If it’s gone well I feel very on a high for a while in the evening it’s a while before you can contemplate going to bed. If it’s not gone well your mind works overtime and you think you’ll have to do better next time. I usually take time off work to do a show. Usually I use bus journeys and tram journeys to learn a few pages at a time. Try to be able to repeat the lines in the order in which they come. They do say if you scratch a solicitor you find a frustrated actor. Problem is if you have to make up your script as you go along. Solicitor in his wig. Minister in his robes. Visual experience. Theatricality.

I try to avoid catching anybody’s eye. Possibly until the curtain call. I try to focus on a line or a spot at the back of the hall. Hopefully the consistency of performance will result. Knowing that there are people out there that you know makes the adrenalin flow a bit faster because you want it to be a performance. I try to imagine the other people on stage as their characters. Sometimes something happens to break the spell. If you forget to take a prop onstage for example. You have to negotiate with each other without speaking. When your mind is half thinking ahead it can be a bit hairy. Sometimes the mind plays tricks on you and you think you’re said something you have and you haven’t. Part of my mind is always thinking ahead to what’s coming so that process gets out of synch.

At one stage the Drama Group could have been called the Church Council at play. All the people who have taken part have been members of this or other churches. I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone who isn’t church minded. That’s never been put to the test. The Drama Group is one arm of the church so we are trying to bring people in, make them aware. There is a sensitivity about whether our play will offend the audience, will our play offend the powers that be. There was one show which had an out of body experience and we had to be careful about it. Where people come back from the dead. You can never comfortably do that kind of thing without it causing bad vibrations.

Wedding

I think it was serendipity really. Am dram was the social circle in which I was moving. Throughout rehearsal period I hadn’t really spoken to mum at all. I’d noticed her during rehearsal but it was such a dire show for men to be in, only had two notes to sing, we had to construct a bed for My Favourite Things for the children and Maria and that was about it. I remember my one line. ‘Oh Ulrich blocked the driveway.’ We used to say we were the best dressed prop shifters in town. The first time we spoke we were invited to a night club with David and Delia. I noticed mum was with David and Delia and didn’t appear to be attached. Before we had booked I noticed on the board that David had booked three tickets. I thought someone there isn’t attached. The men performed alternative songs that they’d written back stage during the long breaks in between cues. Adelweiss – Ill advice. I had a dance with Mum. Arthur Hunter – acting as Von Trapp – was playing guitar.

Ill advice ill advice
What a session this autumn
Ill advice ill advice
What a lesson we’ve taught ‘em

Poor old Arthur collapsed – is there a Doctor in the house? After he’d been taken to hospital by his nephew who was in the chorus I grabbed mum and danced. Very proud. The party was over. I took three people home. Took a girl to St Giles. Then dropped Alwyn in North Hycombe – a person I had a strong affection for who’s since had a brain tumour. I took Mum home last – even though it was a circuitous route. She invited me in for a drink. We had an affectionate moment on the sofa. Just a kiss. I believe to this day I was probably her first boyfriend. It wasn’t until later that we heard that Arthur had died.

The Church on Rise Park Drama Group

2006-07-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

"And if I laugh at any mortal thing -
'Tis that I may not weep" - Byron

Foreword

"A play comes to life only when the reader or actor is in sympathy with the playwright's intentions. The wrong interpretation of a play distorts its meaning. Overemphasis where none was intended destroys the delicate balance of values and the play then becomes either pointless or in bad taste." - John Patrick, The Camel's Back

The picture you see here is the cast of The Camel's Back performed by the Church on Rise Park Drama Group in 1993. I'm at the back on the left. I was 16. This was my first experience of performance. I talked about this show in my interview to study Theatre at Lancaster University. She asked about my last project. I got in. I formed a theatre company. From amateur to academic to professional to academic to amateur. I'm back at university and back in the Drama Group. Acts of Communion is underway. In May I presented my project to the Drama Group. They said yes. The cast is as follows:

Bridesmaid 1 - Louise Walker
Bridesmaid 2 - Donna Thorne
Best Man 2 - Jonathan Pickering
Father of the Bride - Tony Pinchbeck
Mother of the Bride - Betty Walker
Father of the Groom - Ian Pickering
Grandmother of the Bride - Kath Hyde
MC - Michael Pinchbeck

In June I began a series of interviews with the group. I asked them how they got into drama, what they enjoy about it, how they get into character and learn lines. We discussed the rush of adrenaline that follows a show - my dad (the one in the hat) can never sleep. We talked about weddings - how they met their partner and whether they had any cracking anecdotes. This will be material. The interviews are transcribed in the next posting.

Acts of Communion

2006-04-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

Introduction

This blog hopes to unpick the thoughts I have as an MA student of Performance and Live Art at Nottingham Trent University in 2006. I hope it has a resonance to anyone interested in my practice as a writer / performer / director / deviser / live artist / drive artist. I undertook this MA in order to reflect on my experience as a member of the UK experimental theatre scene and to contextualise my current work. I am seeking a period of creative refection and consolidation, to bring together my past experience with my present thinking in an act of communion.

Background

As co-founder of METRO-BOULOT-DODO Theatre Company I devised, directed and performed in ten productions for national and international touring. METRO-BOULOT-DODO is Parisian slang for Commute–Work–Sleep. The work was non-linear, multi-media, multi-layered and often explored dualities; life and death, laughter and despair, flight and falling. We fused a sense of existential disillusionment with a belief in humour as relief and an overriding notion of routines from which we seem to seek the ultimate escape – be it freedom or failure. The company won numerous awards including TOTAL THEATRE Best Newcomer at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival. I left MBD in 2003 to pursue my own interests within the broader fields of live art and creative writing.

The Long and Winding Road

I started a drive art project – The Long and Winding Road – a cathartic journey of self-discovery – an illustration of loss – an autopsy of experience. A four year touring installation involving a graffiti car, 300 items wrapped up in brown paper and string, a steering committee, log books and film projected on the windscreen. The project exists as a manifestation of the detritus of grief. My brother died in Liverpool in 1998 and the journey ends in the River Mersey in 2008. He fell down some stairs and broke his neck. It was an accident. There were 13 steps. I came here with the intention of resurrecting The Long and Winding Road and using it to structure the MA in a study of catharthis – an auto-mobile-biography. Taking slip roads. Making pit stops. Having an academic MOT. I was interested in the phonetics of registration plates. The numerics of petrol pumps. Decoding the road. Telling stories about dents in the bonnet and scars on the skin. Making eye contact only via the rear view mirror. The dichotomy in defining catharthis as either a release of emotion or an evacuation of the bowels. This will still form the basis of a dissertation. Locating my practice within a broader context of catharsis I will look at other artists that draw heavily on self as source and address the question ‘Do you have to know the reason behind a piece of work for it to work?’ I am conducting interviews with artists that frame their work within a cathartic form and studying boundaries between creativity and instability, artistic and lunatic.

The White Album

Concurrent to the MA, I am writing and rewriting a play for Nottingham Playhouse – The White Album. In many ways as fragmented as an MBD piece – written as it was in scenes not songs, sides not acts – the play bears the hallmarks of an experimental theatre performance but on a mainstream stage. The rehearsal process and the return to a theatrical setting has rewhet my dramatic appetite. The observations I am making of the artistic director will be used as a learning mode to feed into a new piece of work that continues my exploration of art in any form as an autopsy of experience. The play, the car project and in some ways all of my creative writing have touched upon death, the materiality of mortality and that moment of regret that must come between jumping and landing. However, I am keen to explore new territory within theatrical conventions and will take this notion of absence to a theatrical extreme. Exploring a new ontology of absence.

Acts of Communion

As a practical strand to my MA I now intend to write a new play asking questions of theatrical expectations and audience perceptions. Drawing parallels with arguments over arts and crafts, professional and amateur, populist and elitist, low art and high art, it is important to me to have two performance contexts. Two casts in two venues will perform two one hour pieces called Acts of Communion.

One cast (Act 1) will be a group of fellow MA students performing at a university venue to a university audience. The other cast (Act 2) will be an amateur dramatic group performing in a church hall to a regular audience of church goers, the community and amateur dramatic fanatics. The two Acts take place during the same hour at the head table of a wedding reception from the moment the last fork is placed down after the last course to the final breath of the final speech.

The two casts represent the full compliment of the head table guests, however each Act only has half of the characters present e.g. Bride, Groom, Best Man in Act 1 and Parents of the Bride and Groom in Act 2. Both Acts will be Mced by a Master of Ceremonies – in Act 1 - me, in Act 2 – my Dad – inter-generationality.

Where one character is not present in one Act his or her chair will be empty but he or she will still be addressed or referred to leaving pauses for their response. In the other Act the chair of the person addressing them will be empty and the audience will hear the other half of the conversation. There is a literal absence. However, both Acts must ‘work’ as a piece of performance in their own right.

The final phase of the project will be a four-screen video installation entitled Communion. Shown simultaneously will be both performances and both audiences from both Acts. The final audience will experience the synthesis of the piece and at the same time questions will be asked of theatrical contexts as we observe both filmed audiences experiencing each Act in its own original context. There is also the potential to perform both pieces on the same night and stream both shows live via the internet for a virtual audience to experience Communion.

Communion

The essence of the concept is one of bringing things together; elements of a play, experience of seven years in a touring theatre company performing to a ‘theatre aware’ audience and experience of performing in an amateur dramatics group performing to an audience that does not judge critically but responds instead in an entirely different and arguably more honest and personal way. The church hall was the first place I performed to an audience. It is also a venue for wedding receptions and was the location of my brothers’ wake. There is a definite connection between the religious and the secular, celebration and grief, love and loss, life and death. The ritual of ceremony and the ceremony of theatre. The Methodist church to which the hall belongs does not permit alcohol on the premises so communion services administer Shloer to represent Christ’s blood. There is something innately and absurdly extra-theatrical about this. The proceeds from each annual amateur dramatic performance fund the church so in some ways pay for the Shloer. There are opportunities here for me to further my interest in site-specificity, researching the history of the church hall and exploring its personal emotional resonance for me and other members of the community.

Am Dram Versus MA Dram

The act of performing in an amateur dramatic group, be it religious or not, is an act of communion – a social gathering, an opportunity to do something you would not normally do. An act of escape. An act of catharsis. A release of emotions and arguably often an evacuation of bowels. These will remain recurring themes in my work. It is no secret and no surprise that the resulting product of the amateur dramatic process is often not deemed to be of a professional quality and yet it is often more well received and recognised by an audience who identify not only with the cast but with the amateur dramatic context and come to it without any critical or analytical cultural baggage. However few would call it art. Likewise, a student production will often embed itself firmly within an academic framework, performance theory and self-referentiality – creating a piece of theatre from text books - wearing, like a suit of armour, an awareness of its own artistic identity. Validated as art by the very fact that it is taking place within a school of art. Perhaps forgetting that theatre can be performed as a form of entertainment, this work is often akin to that of Forced Entertainment – a theatre company that shares aesthetic interests with am dram, lo fi, ‘warts and all’ or cabaret theatre. There are also times in MA theatre when an audience response is triggered solely by the fact that the audience knows the performers or recognises a reference to a shared micro-culture. It is also, importantly, performed not as a professional (ie. fee paying) piece of theatre. It is perhaps more a form of ‘academic amateur dramatics’. It seems to me that there are many shared similarities between both of the theatre forms and their unique theatrical contexts.

The Wedding

There seemed to be great scope for using art… and present day ephemera to explore personal feelings and ideas about a subject which can bring up such strong and contradictory emotions. After all, weddings are public performances, art works in themselves on which often a great deal of time, thought, work and money is spent on one brief display.

(Hattie Coppard, 1988, Curator of touring exhibition entitled The Wedding)

The wedding and the wedding reception in particular lends itself perfectly to an act of theatre – each character at the head table being prescribed set roles and responsibilities. It is rich in terms of text and rich pickings in terms of cliché. It is also a subject that has been dealt with heavily in film and performance. I am interested in the cliches of separation. The cathartic acts of the jilted partner. Cutting up the wedding photos and dividing the CD collection. I am particularly interested in the notion of the wedding reception as ‘The Last Supper’ of a relationship.

Research

I have already discovered interesting techniques in work by Beckett in terms of annotating movement – he practically prescribes seating plans and hand movements in plays like Come and Go and Acts Without Words. This is a style I am keen to explore in order to aid the direction of both Acts of Communion. Other reading includes Apollinaire, Artaud, Barthes, Baudrillard, Brecht, Martin Esslin, Freud, Suzy Gablik, R. D. Laing and Richard Schechner.

Performance references range from Peter Brook to Robert Le Page with a strong focus on contemporary experimental practice. Contemporary artists and companies also continue a fascination with the aesthetics of the long table; Forced Entertainment, Zoo Indigo, The Wooster Group and Nottingham-based Reckless Sleepers whose last piece was called The Last Supper. There are references to be made and researched with work by Robert Altman, Peter Greenaway, Stephen Poliakoff and, to a comedic extent, Richard Curtis.

There are other connections to be explored with John Newling’s recent Church project Chatham Vines and a project MBD conducted in a village church in 2001. Also Reunion, MBD’s 1998 performance set at a family ‘do’ which explored the grotesque of reception and was an act of catharsis itself.

The Last Supper as an iconic image has been explored and deconstructed in many forms and has also been used as a representation of hyper-reality – a style I am keen to pursue.