Hypocrite voyeur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! : The Author

I walk into the Royal Exchange Studio with anticipation, and something close to smugness. I saw Tim Crouch’s England last year, and I expect to be discomfited, to be made intimate with horror. I am in the know. On one side of the narrow traverse, the front row is empty. I sit in it, feeling slightly superior, because I am the sort of person who is not afraid to sit in front rows. I am aware of Crouch opposite me, one row higher up, but don’t see the woman I know, even closer, until she smiles at me. I tell her I shouldn’t be surprised. I only know a couple of dozen people in Manchester, but they’re all the kind of people who would go to this, people who make theatre, teach it, study it. I am not surprised when two more of them walk in.

I keep my feet, my parka, my bag away from the narrow strip of stage, wondering how they will use such a narrow playing area. They won’t; we are the playing area. I look around, seeing two of the other actors quickly, by their poise. They look as if they know what’s going to happen next. I wonder which one is Chris Goode. I read his blog regularly, with ecstatic agreement, occasional bafflement, and an intellectual humility not usual to me; I have no idea what he looks like. I decide he’s the one with hair, there’s something in the face that says the mind behind it could have written the words I’ve read. I know there is a woman in the show, but I can’t decide which of the faces around me is hers, I scan them. There are several pretty, well-groomed women in the room. Women like that always look confident, knowing. They all look like perfomers, she could be any one of them.


* * * * *


Whatever you go to see, you bring yourself to it. This may be more true of The Author than of anything else I’ve seen. So much so, that I’m not sure a verb as passive in its implications as “to see” is the right one.

The self who is me brings a heightened awareness of this space, the different ways I’ve seen it arranged, the columns behind my seating bank and the double doors beyond, the staircase behind them leading to the dressing rooms. Did I not say I was an insider? Have I not performed here, all of twice?

I boast to myself of this, even as I resolve to set aside my superior knowledge, to be the audience that is needed (as if any of us could be anything else).

As it progresses, I am aware of the backstage tannoy, bringing fragments of dialogue and chant, faint as echoes, from The Bacchae in the main house. I try not to intellectualize this, but it is so very apposite. I remember that the horrors of the ancient Greek stage were spoken , not shown.


* * * * *


There is no impatience in the long space between the closing of the house doors and the first line spoken. There is curiosity in the open gazes all around, bright with the expectation of pleasure. The actor whose name I will learn is Vic makes friendly faces at me. He makes a corkscrew gesture with his finger, near his head. I think he’s saying something about my curls. I don’t know how to respond. I shrug, drop the contact.

Later, in another pause, I fish out my notebook. I have impressions to write down. I sit with it in my lap, unable to bring myself to stop looking at people long enough to write.


* * * * *


Chris speaks first, confidingly, as if we were all in the same position. I wonder if we are meant to believe that we are.

In the long, expectant pause afterwards, as we chat to each other in a way that feels spontaneous though we know it’s orchestrated, I sound out the girl next to me, to find out what she made of that first interjection. She says it makes you look at everyone in the audience differently, wondering who else might be in it. She says she thought I might be. Flattered (though I suspect it’s only my theatrically gaudy sweater that misleads her, and not the quality of my presence) I tell her I’m not. I point out Tim Crouch, and Vic, explain my reasoning. The woman behind us leans in to listen. Though I clock her curiosity, what must be her amusement, I am still surprised when, later, she turns out to be the fourth member of the cast.

The long pauses continue to unfold, in between the shaping, from the different angles, of the story of a fictional production, a fan’s experience of theatre, a writer’s immersion in a sensory deprivation tank.


* * * * *

As the listening becomes more difficult, I watch our faces change, become guarded, watchful. I see the glances away, at hands knotted in laps, at the floor. I promise myself I will not look away.

It’s the story about the Italian that gets me. It is Esther speaking it, and she is seated behind me. I have turned to watch her before, and will again, but this time I can’t look at her or anyone else. I don’t know that it’s the worst story. I know that it’s the story for which I can look only at the blue painted boards of the floor.

I am slightly shamed by this, and spend the rest of the show with as open a gaze as I can muster. By the end, only the actors are gazing back.


* * * * *

It is a supremely intelligent piece of work, this. Yes, like England, it’s at some level, about the complicity of the comfortable with horror. It goes further though, seeming to indict the very act of imagination. And if pretending is somehow morally suspect, isn’t pretense that skirts so close to autobiography the most untrustworthy of all?

All along, it creates reflections. What one character says or shows lingers, sharing the space with other things said. The juxtapositions become uncomfortable, then something is so cosy that we laugh in recognition, then the recognition is rendered more uncomfortable still.

The particular horror at the centre of this (if there is only one), no less central for coming near the end, is not the kind of horror the ancient Greeks shied from staging. It is a horror of commission only in the most distanced and indirect way. Mostly, it is a horror of conjuction; it brings together things that must not be brought together. So did The Author; it brought them together in the space and time we shared, in the social sphere that was all of us in that theatre, but most insidiously, in the space of each of our minds.

This is what it means to break taboo.

* * * * *

I have read a bit about it on the internet, and I am putting this on my blog. Virtual space, too is part of this. Though the show is technically minimal, all about shared presence and space, the ghost of the internet is here. It’s in the text, and the story, it’s also on my mind.

I’m here because I read Chris Goode’s blog, and what I read about this made me want to see it. I know that Hannah Nicklin’s written about it , having seen it recently. I did not read her piece, won't read it until after I've posted this, but I know the title. It says she didn’t clap.

When it’s over, neither do I. I think I would have done the same without knowing that title.

I do not seek out the people I know for an analytical chat. I linger for a while, near the sign that announces the price of the play text, but no-one appears to sell it to me, so I go.

It is not that I was horrified, or shamed. I was both, but not to the extent I was expecting, not viscerally. It is not either that I wanted to contemplate the beauty of it, though it was very beautiful. I needed to pick at it myself, at my own scab, to try to understand, or rather to pinpoint my several understandings.

I think it may be a masterpiece. I think it may be a dead end. I can’t imagine anyone going further down this road, or more intelligently.

If, as Le Corbusier said, a house is a machine for living, The Author is a machine for making the audience look at itself. It comes up to you in a frank and friendly way, takes you by the hand and leads you down pleasant paths to a dark place; a dark place with a mirror in it.

A Little Bird Told Me . . . at Emergency

A Little Bird Told Me…will be part of greenroom’s annual free festival of contemporary performance, Emergency


What constitutes eavesdropping when all utterances are public? How are statements changed by being spoken, or read, by being overheard, retold, retweeted? What is signal and what is noise? What would it be like if physical space were as full of words as digital space?

The idea behind this durational performance is twofold: One the one hand, we’re going to fill greenroom’s bar with spoken and written text, using any tweets about the event as our source material. So, if you tweet something like: “Enjoying the weird and wild performances at #emergencymcr, great stuff!” or “I don’t understand what’s going on at #emergencymcr, what kind of performances are these, anyway?”(or indeed any tweet with the #emergencymcr hashtag) your tweet will be spoken aloud in the bar and also written down on a twitter-bird-shaped piece of paper and used to decorate the bar. All tweets with the hashtag will also be on display as a Twitterfall on a computer monitor at one end of the bar. This part of the show is about translating the amount of digital utterances that we users of the social media fill our screens and brains with into physical space.

On the other hand, we’re going to be eavesdropping on the event’s audience, and tweeting what we overhear, minus people’s names and plus the hashtag, from the dedicated account @albirdtoldme. Of course, since we are using the hashtag, this means that anything we overhear will also be spoken and written down as part of our performance, and displayed in the bar. This bit is all about the different conceptions of public and private that operate online and in real life: People are happy to tweet or post their thoughts for everyone to read, are they equally happy to be eavesdropped on? Why/why not?

This will start at 12:00 PM on Saturday, last for most of the day and culminate at 8:30, when I hope you’ll join in, reading out your favourite tweets from the event, singing along to our favourite song, and generally helping us to create a digital, physical, cross-platform hullabaloo.

How to participate:

Attend Emergency

Use the #emergencymcr hashtag

Follow @albirdtoldme

Join us at the bar at 8:30PM on Saturday to read aloud, tweet, sing, even dance if you feel so inclined.

Review: 1984

I recently decided to abandon my university-inspired attempts to integrate live performance with video and the new media and return to my first love, which I still think of as “real theatre”. It’s ironic that the first play I went to see after this decision should be so saturated with video as the Northern Broadsides/ Duke’s Theatre co-production of 1984, directed by Conrad Nelson .

Orwell’s dystopian novel, of course, is greatly concerned with the omnipresence of television, both as a tool of propaganda and surveillance, so the video screens embedded in the set are no mere device, but integral to the theme and plot of the show. The adaptation, by Nick Lane, is an intelligent and evocative one, allowing the cast of five to speak selected lines of description and commentary from the source text as well as dialogue, and building a remarkably complete picture of an oppressive society in a very short time.

Except for Nick Haverson, who speaks sometimes in character as Winston and sometimes descriptively of him, but is never associated with any other personage, the boiler-suited ensemble switch from a sort of chorus-like narration to playing any number of characters. They do it vividly and precisely, seamlessly stepping in and out of the third-person, changing the performance space through the well-choreographed movement of the set’s several wheeled doors along the way. In the very first moments of the production, this chorus tells us how Winston winkles himself into a tiny alcove to write, away from the constant gaze of Big Brother, and their impassive regard underscores not only the voyeurism of the Party, but also our own.

Over the course of the play, plot comes to dominate and narration retreats. Chillingly, Winston and his lover Julia, (Kate Ambler), are never alone in the space, always observed and commented on by the rest of the company. Robustly carnal and touchingly naïve as their relationship seems, it is constantly undermined by the staged regard of the chorus. In contrast, the distressing scenes where Winston is tortured by Chris Garner’s O’Brien are observed only by the audience; in the world of 1984, torture is more intimate than sex.

There is some lovely world-building, in the way the cafeteria worker dishes out meals to nonexistent party members with the same bored precision as to the ones played by the other actors, in the giggling malice of the choral schoolchildren angry at being denied the spectacle of a hanging, in the way Winston and Julia meet among the slogan-chanting crowds. I was struck by the power of some of the smaller vignettes, particularly by Carolyn Tomkinson as a memory of Winston's mother, and Andrew Price’s portrayal of a man who’d rather see his family’s throats slit than enter Room 101.

Which brings me to the only thing I really didn’t like, the video. The TV screens with which the set is studded work well when, as in the novel, they serve as vehicles for propaganda. When we are exhorted to hate Goldstein (Steven Finegold, who like Jill McCleary’s announcer appears only in these recordings), or to do our calisthenics, they are omnipresently oppressive, turning the audience themselves into denizens of Oceania. They are less effective in the animated sequences, showing close-up drawings of the actors, inevitably just out of synch, or when illustrating Winston’s dreams. Worse, they fail utterly to convey the peaceful beauty of the countryside where Julia and Winston’s first assignation takes place: The narrated words, and Julia’s fluid, exultant ownership of the space make that woodland clearing for us, the framed, colourful images just emphasize the grey, constructed nature of the set. Worst of all, the animated rats in Room 101 and Winston’s recorded voice wishing them on Julia instead carry only a tiny fraction of the emotional weight of the previous scenes of physical torture. Having followed Winston to this lowest point, I wanted to experience it through him. This Room 101 was not so much a horror of horrors as a damp squib. I know why it was done that way; Haverson’s Winston could then be seen but a moment later, neatly dressed and perfectly composed, seated in a café, a true devotee of Big Brother.

Though I understand the device, I regret it. The show’s best moments were created in more traditionally theatrical ways. They lay in the considerable skill of the cast, the lighting, and the changing arrangement of the set, and fine moments they were, many more than I can mention; packing emotional and philosophical punch. As the house lights came up at the end, the man seated behind me said, softly: “More powerful than the book.” Animations notwithstanding, I couldn’t disagree.

Sales Pitch, warts and all

Sales Pitch 16/09/2010

The end of the MA: My Artist's statement

Introduction

The bulk of this post is the artist's statement I wrote and submitted for the Masters' degree in Contemporary Arts Practice I've been studying towards at Lancaster University. I haven't received my grades yet, but I assume I've passed. Before you read the statement, I want to come clean: I've been speaking to lecturers, and writing on this blog (which has served to document my work towards the degree) as though I were interested in researching the relationship between live theatrical performance and the various media, live and recorded, old and new, which are playing an ever-greater role in theatre. That's how I've written the statement below, too. This was not a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth.

The whole truth is somewhat more contentious. You could summarize it like this: I hate most of the theatre that I was encouraged, as an an undergraduate, to reflect on. I hate most of what my university-educated contemporaries and those they admire, make. Whether you call it live art, performance art, contemporary performance, post-modern theatre, experimental, or avant garde; I hate most of it. I like quite a few of the people I know who make it personally, and I don't wish to offend them, but much of what I see I find predictable, self-indulgent, elitist, untheatrical, and alienating. Most importantly for the purposes of a degree intended to help me make my way professionally, I can't see myself making anything of the sort. I'll restrict myself to broad generalizations here, but go will into more detail in another post. Briefly then, most of the contemporary work I see has one or more of these characteristics: Autobiography, not-acting, repetitiveness, non-linearity, non-narrativity, non-fiction, obtrusive use of technology (mp3, video, the net, live feeds, audiences with headphones, etc), audience participation, abstraction, pop-cultural references, social commentary, being task-based, and formal experimentation.

For pragmatic reasons, including the presumed dearth of acting work for 40-year old Greek women with mid-Atlantic accents and no great facility with British ones, an ill-informed choice of undergraduate course, the lack of a conservatoire within commuting distance, and my being a single mother and loath to move my kid away from the father he loves and the school where he is happy, this is the theatrical environment in which I've been attempting to thrive. Of all the characteristics of the kind of work I encountered and felt I should be attempting to emulate, it seemed that obtrusive technology was the one I could make the most use of, partly because I was interested in building a larger audience for theatre, but mostly because I could still tell stories with it, about fictional characters. I presented myself as a person who was interested in the relationship between live theatre and technology because it was one of the aspects of contemporary performance I found least objectionable, and potentially most practical, not because investigating it was an overriding preoccupation.

So much for the long-overdue confession.

Artist's Statement

The first time I saw video used on stage was in Deborah Warner’s production of The Power Book in 2002. By 2009/2010, about half of the performances I saw used some technological medium or another: Lisa Hammond and Rachael Spence used mp3 players in No Idea, Nic Green’s Trilogy used video and live mobile telephone calls, and recorded video and animation were integral to Imitating The Dog’s Tales from the Bar of Lost Souls. These are by and large, experimental companies working at experimental venues, but I’ve also seen animation in Horse and Bamboo’s Veil, and live and recorded video in their Deep Time Cabaret. Even stuffy theatrical institutions are doing it; the National Theatre broadcasts live performances around the world, and the RSC described a tweeted version of Romeo and Juliet, which took place entirely online, as “theatre”.

This intrigues and troubles me: On the one hand, I am interested in how theatre might expand its audience against the competition of other entertainments. On the other hand, I passionately define theatre as a live and proximate form, with the performers as the primary carriers of meaning. Watching work into which technological media intruded, I concluded that they tended to undermine the artistic contribution of the actor to the quality of the performance and the degree to which the audience, collectively, was involved in creating the shared imaginative experience. To test this conviction, I decided to make work that, while dependent on various media, was rooted in the live.

I first tried to integrate live but remote audience input into theatrical improvisation through the use of mobile technology and the social media. Although this led to some work that I found interesting, including two durational performances and a game which was in Manchester’s Future Everything and London’s LIFT festivals, it failed, for technological, financial, and other pragmatic reasons to produce a replicable model that could be presented for academic assessment.

I decided to try another angle, seeing how theatrical storytelling might compete with the hyper-realistic visual storytelling of cinema. So, Sales Pitch , drawn from the same source material as many Science Fiction blockbusters, the stories of Philip K. Dick, is a direct response to them. It uses theatrical techniques to convey what I believe to be the stories’ intent, and bring them into the 21st century without losing the flavour of the period in which they originate, or the emphasis on the actors.

I’ve always been most interested in what actors bring to performance, so knowing and being able to rely on the artistic intelligence of the performers was a key consideration. Many of the choices I’ve made have been pragmatic, resulting from the very limited availability of the actors I chose. Others were dictated by a very tight budget and my limitations as a maker and a puppeteer. Ironically, a lot of the solutions were inspired by early Science Fiction television, from Doctor Who and Raumpatrouille Orion to the Clangers. Science Fiction has a long history on film and TV. Few people other than Ken Campbell have attempted to stage it.

I‘ve proven to my own satisfaction that mediated and live performance can be integrated to the detriment of neither; and that I’m not, on my own, the person to do it. This process has highlighted my limitations as a manager of time, budgets, and technology; indeed of theatrical space. I’ve decided that unless I can attract collaborators willing to shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for such areas, I am better off doing what I can do well on my own; adapting text and performing it as a storyteller. My next project will involve telling a story that’s in the public domain, as well as I can.

Staging Science Fiction: Sales Pitch

Sales Pitch will be at the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster on September 16th 2010



The living unit of Ed and Sally Morris, 23rd Century.


Over and over, when talking about this project, I’ve made, or heard, comparisons to TV shows. Sometimes I talk about Raumpatrouille Orion, the German 60’s TV show in which spaceship instruments are ornamented with intricate protuberances, occasionally made of thinly disguised kitchen implements. At other times, when I was explaining how I intended to make the set, people would start reminiscing about the crafts in children’s shows . I use these comparisons as a sort of shorthand, to convey some of what it’s starting to look like, but using them rankles, somehow. Yes, I'm using video in the show, but live not recorded, and I'm trying to use it in as theatrical a way as I can. After all, the whole idea for me was to see whether I could reconcile my interest in technology and the future with my love of theatre; live, immediate theatre, not the recorded media of film and TV.

Science Fiction in theatre is rare, and difficult; to Americans the very phrase evokes a TV show. Everyone knows that Science Fiction works on TV. TV and movies, with their photographic clarity, seem hyper-real. Even though we know that they are as carefully artificial as anything in theatre, even when they are stylized, even when they use the most spectacular of effects, the camera gives them a certain plausibility. Theatre cannot, with the same plausibility, show events or materials so far outside our direct experience. Theatre cannot plausibly show you a non-humanoid alien, or a supernova. Theatre can implausibly show you anything, all you have to do is agree to pretend.

Because I’d railed so often at how different movie adaptations of Philip K. Dick were from his marvelous stories, I decided to start with him. It was partly a way of poking fun at my own ambitions: in one corner Aliki Chapple, in the other, a group of Hollywood blockbusters! It was also because his stories are so well-made that they could easily be adapted, so prescient that they still had things to say.

From the beginning I knew that I would be working within the constraints of my small skills as a prop-maker and even smaller budget. I also knew that I wanted it as much as possible, to be live. I started work in adapting Sales Pitch in February. Most of the decisions I’ve made since have been about how to work within these constraints; how to create the story on the stage, not plausibly, but imaginably. I could never disguise that my spaceship and planets were hastily made with the cheapest of materials, and if I tried to, I’d lose the goodwill, the willingness of the audience to pretend, that was my greatest asset. So I decided to be obvious about it. I’m making spaceships out of plastic water bottles, planets out of papier mache, 23rd Century living units out of box files.

I want the audience to make no mistake, to see that the staging of Sales Pitch is saying “Let’s pretend.” not “This is so”. And it’s that quality, despite the different nature of the media, that it shares with early Science Fiction television shows; and why I should, after all, embrace comparison with them. The people who made those shows didn’t allow their imaginations to be restricted by the limitations of their skills and means. Neither do children who make robots out of tinfoil-covered boxes. They dare to imagine more than they can represent, and invite you to join them; so do I.

A Little Bird Told Me . . . At The Bluecoat

Paper birds with tweets written on them.

We had very little chance to rehearse together before our performance last weekend at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. As a result, the performance was more a scratch than anything else. Other than assigning tasks, and a rough structure, we left it very loose, so that we could adapt to whatever the atmosphere turned out to be.


Part of the Bluecoat's courtyard garden, where people sat to enjoy the day.


In the event, it was a beautiful day, and as a result, much of our durational performance in the foyer took place in front of no-one much, the bulk of the 'poolside Emergency festival's attendees, when not watching something in one of the spaces, preferring to sit outside. Who could blame them?

Perhaps this was the reason, too, that we received so few tweets. Or maybe Twitter isn't as popular among the patrons of live art as I had assumed. We had been hoping to put together remarks we had eavesdropped the old-fashioned way from those in the Bluecoat's public spaces with the tweets that people sent about the 'poolside Emergency festival using the #poolem. There were almost none of those, though, and the few we got were, I suspect, sent by Bluecoat staff and volunteers for the sheer amusement of hearing their words repeated. In this way, A Little Bird Told Me . . . turned out rather more like the Request Robot than I'd ever imagined. Not for long, though. For most of the last two hours we performed, the only tweets using that hashtag were our own, transcribed by us from conversations we had eavesdropped on.

We learned a lot doing it, and I'll try to write more coherently on the subject soon. There's a also a video, in partial documentation of the event, and as soon as I've transcribed and edit it , I'll see what I can post. In the meantime, here's what the Bluecoat looked like after we had finished:



The concrete results of our abstract efforts.