notes from "Programme Notes: case studies for locating experimental theatre"

unfinished posting

notes from
"Programme Notes: case studies for locating experimental theatre"
a Live Art Development Agency publication, 2007

Programme Notes is concerned with how theatres might shift their programmes, and in so doing, their audiences. This short selection of interviews and essays asks how theatres might alter their artistic aspirations through new approaches and in dialogue with a different range of artists and theatre makers.
Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine, Live Art Development Agency
David Micklem, Arts Council England

All kinds gather, a place of provocation, a challenge to both the artist and their audience. An exciting possibility.
A bridge is built reflecting our own contradictions, in the bridging - a process of transformation - these opposite forces connect and reflect our human existence.
This is an act of artistic creation. This becomes the reality.
Juliet Ellis

Experiment is the lifeblood of theatre.
The influence of work seen in tiny studios and galleries across the country has a direct impact on our larger stages. I would like the National Theatre to be the lens through which audiences and practitioners can experience the broadest range of theatrical experience. To this end I’m keen to encourage more diversity and greater experiment as we develop a vibrant 21st century theatre.
Nicholas Hytner, Director
National Theatre

It is essential for the mainstream to acknowledge the debt it has to those working outside the traditional structures and that doesn't just mean giving them a gig and then moving on!
It is essential to invest in the process of nurturing the work and develop a muscle for holding that particular space in which this work can grow in.
Phelim McDermott, Artistic Director
Improbable

Theatre, at its most radically distinctive,
is the place where people gather together to invent their future.
Consequently experimentation is its only viable practice:
not merely a training ground, not a marginal self-involvement,
but theatre fully and faithfully encountering itself in public.
It's hard to imagine a more vital optimism.
Chris Goode

Lyn Gardner: There is Something Stirring.

What we are seeing is a movement which has the potential to put live art and theatre right at the centre of our culture as it breaks down all the old divisions and suspicions between theatre and live art, the playhouse and the gallery, the text and the visual and physical...
Unlike traditional theatre that takes place behind the closed door of the playhouse, it shuts nobods out, and it allows the audience to take themselves to the event. It has a plasticity which ensures that it is what every individual member of the audience thinks it is … and reclaims a place that belongs to us and where we can play and dream. This is art which allows us ownership of our own lives and own imaginative processes.

Increasingly audiences see through these marketing scams and hunger for cultural experiences which not only are different but which have an authenticity.

Many young people are creating a substantial wave of new practitioners who don't want to make drama but who do want to make theatre, who couldn't care less about plays but who care very passionately about live art.

The audiences are already storming the barricades. It is up to the rest of us to give them a helping hand because the revolution has already started without us, and it would be such a pity to miss it.

notes from Peter Handke's "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams"

Peter Handke
"A Sorrow Beyond Dreams"
Written January - February 1972

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to her suicide."

Some of his words that have made a strong imprint on me:

P.10
The worst thing right now would be sympathy, expressed in a word or even a glance. I would turn away or cut the sympathiser short because I need the feeling that what I'm going through is incomprehensible and incommunicable; only then does the horror seem meaningful and real. If anyone talks to me about it, the boredom comes back, and everything is unreal again.

P. 11
When I write, I necessarily write about the past, about something, which at least while I am writing, is behind me. As usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine.

P. 16
For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of young men -a girl's future was a joke.
No possibilities. It was all settled in advance: a bit of flirtation, a few giggles, a brief bewilderment then the alien resigned look of a woman starting to keep house again, the first children, a bit of togetherness after the Kitchen-work, from the start not listened to, and in turn listening less and less. Inner monologues, trouble with her legs, varicose veins, mute except for mumbling in her sleep, cancer of the womb, and finally, with death, destiny fulfilled. The girls in our town used to play a game based on the stations in a woman's life: Tired / Exhausted / Sick / Dying / Dead.

p. 22
This period helped my mother to come out of her shell and become independent. She acquired a presence and lost her last fear of human contact: her hat awry because a young fellow was pressing his head against hers, while she merely laughed into the camera with an expression of self-satisfaction. (The fiction that photographs can “tell us” anything – but isn’t all formulation, even of things that have really happened, more or less a fiction? Less, if we content ourselves with a mere record of events; more, if we try to formulate in depth? And the more fiction we put into a narrative, the more likely it is to interest others, because people identify more readily with formulation than with recorded facts. Does this explain the need for poetry? “Breathless on the riverbank” is one of Thomas Bernhard’s formulations.)

p. 29
And so she was nothing and never would be anything; it was so obvious that there was no need of a forecast. She already said “in my day” though she was not yet thirty. Until then, she hadn’t resigned herself, but now life became so hard that for the first time she had to listen to reason. She listened to reason, but understood nothing.

p. 32
And so an emotional life that never had a chance of achieving bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, the system in which “So-and-so is my type but I’m not his” or “I’m his but he’s not mine” or in which “We’re made for each other” – in which clichés are taken as binding rules and any individual reaction, which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation. For instance, my mother would say of my father: “Actually, he wasn’t my type.” And so this typology became a guide to life: it gave you a pleasantly objective feeling about yourself; you stopped worrying about your origins, your possibly dandruff-ridden, sweaty-footed individuality, or the daily renewed problem of how to go on living; being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness and isolation; he lost himself, yet now and then he was somebody, if only briefly.
Once you became a type, you floated through the streets, buoyed up by all the things you could pass with indifference, repelled by everything which, in forcing you to stop, brought you back bothersomely to yourself…

p. 35-38
(Of course what is written here about a particular person is rather general; but only such generalisations, in explicit disregard of my mother as a possibly unique protagonist in a possibly unique story, can be of interest to anyone but myself. Merely to relate the vicissitudes of a life that came to a sudden end would be pure presumption.
The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten – like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is literary ritual in which individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.
These two dangers – the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences – have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is true of every literary effort, but especially in this case, where the facts are so overwhelming and there is hardly anything to think out.
Consequently I first took the facts as my starting point and looked for ways of formulating them. But I soon noticed that in looking for formulations I was moving away from the facts. I then adopted a new approach – starting not with the facts but with the already available formulations, the linguistic deposit of man’s social experience. From my mother’s life, I sifted out the elements that were already foreseen in these formulas, for only with the help of a ready-made public language was it possible to single out from among all the irrelevant facts of this life the few that cried out to be made public.
Accordingly, I compare, sentence by sentence, the stock of formulas applicable to the biography of a woman with my mother’s particular life; the actual work of writing follows from the agreements and contradictions between them. The essential is to avoid mere quotations; even when sentences look quoted, they must never allow one to forget that they deal with someone who to my mind at least is distinct. Only then, only if a sentence is firmly and circumspectly centred on my personal or, ir you will, private subject, do I feel that I can use it.
Another specific feature of this story is that I do not, as is usually the case, let every sentence carry me further away from the inner life of my characters, so as finally, in a liberated and serene holiday mood, to look at them from the outside as isolated insects. Rather, I try with unbending earnestness to penetrate my character. And because I cannot fully capture her in any sentence, I keep having to start from scratch and never arrive at the usual sharp and clear bird’s-eye view.
Ordinarily, I start with myself and my own headaches; in the course of my writing, I detach myself from them more and more, and then in the end I ship myself and my headaches off to market as a commodity – but in this case, since I am only a writer and can’t take the role of the person written about, such detachment is impossible. I can only move myself into the distance; my mother can never become for me, as I can for myself, a winged art object flying serenely through the air. She refuses to be isolated and remains unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness and lie scattered on the paper.
In stories we often read that something or other is “unnameable” or “indescribable”; ordinarily this strikes me as a cheap excuse. This story, however, is really about the nameless, about speechless moments of terror. It is about moments when the mind boggles with horror, states of fear so brief that speech always comes too late; about dream happenings so gruesome that the mind perceives them physically as worms. The blood curdles, the breath catches, “a cold chill crept up my back, my hair stood on end” – states experiences while listening to a ghost story, while turning on a water tap that you can quickly turn off again; on the street in the evening with a beer bottle in one hand; in short, it is a record of states, not a well-rounded story with an anticipated, hence, comforting, end.
At best I am able to capture my mother’s story for brief moments in dreams, because then her feelings become so palpable that I experience them as doubles and am identical with them; but these are precisely the moments I have already mentioned, in which extreme need to communicate coincides with extreme speechlessness. That is why I affect the usual biographical pattern and write: “At that time… later”, “Because … although”, “was … became nothing”, hoping in this way to dominate the horror. That, perhaps, is the comical part of my story.)

p. 44
Christmas: necessities were packaged as presents. We surprised each other with such necessities as underwear, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and the beneficiary said he had WISHED for just that! We pretended that just about everything that was given to us, except food, was a present; I was sincerely grateful for the most indispensable school materials and spread them out beside my bed like presents.
(me: I remember this and wonder at just what moment presents crossed over into being things we wanted rather than needed?)

p. 47-48
From the first she was under pressure to keep up the forms: in country schools the subject most stressed for girls was called “the outward form and appearance of written work”; in later life this found its continuation in a woman’s obligation to put on a semblance of a united family; not cheerful poverty but formally perfect squalor; and gradually, in its daily effort to up appearances, her face lost its soul.

p. 49-50
No machines in the house; everything was still done by hand. Objects out of a past century, now generally transfigured with nostalgia: nit only the coffee mill, which you had actually come to love as a toy – also the GOOD OLD ironing-board, the COSY hearth, the often-mended cooking pots, the DANGEROUS poker, the STURDY wheelbarrow, the ENTERPRISING weed cutter, the SHINING BRIGHT knives, which over the years had been ground to a vanishing narrowness by BURLY scissor-grinders, the FIENDISH thimble, the STUPID darning edge, the CLUMSY OLD flat-iron, which provided variety by having to be put back on the stove every so often, and finally the PRIZE PIECE, the foot and hand-operated Singer sewing-machine. But the golden haze is all in the manner of listing.
Another way of listing would be equally idyllic: your aching back; your hands scalded in the wash boiler, then frozen red while hanging up the clothes (how the frozen washing crackled as you folded it up!); an occasional nosebleed when you straightened up after hours of bending over… the eternal moaning about little aches and pains, because after all you were only a woman. Women among themselves: not “How are you feeling?” but “Are you feeling better?”
All that is known. It proves nothing; its demonstrative value is destroyed by the habit of thinking in terms of advantages and disadvantages, the most evil of all ways of looking at life. “Everything has its advantages and disadvantages.” Once that is said, the unbearable becomes bearable – a mere disadvantage, and what after all is a disadvantage but a necessary adjunct of every advantage?
An advantage, as a rule, was merely the absence of a disadvantage: no noise, no responsibility, not working for strangers, not having to leave your house and children every ay. The disadvantages that were absent made up for those that were present. So it wasn’t really so bad; you could do it with one hand tied behind your back. Except that no end was in sight.
Today was yesterday, yesterday was always. Another day behind you, another week gone, and Happy New Year. What will we have to eat tomorrow? Has the post come? What have you been doing around the house all day?

notes from douglas wright's "terra incognito"

Douglas Wright
writing about making what would become his 2006 dance work “black milk” in his second book: “Terra Incognito”

P. 64
But as I know from experience, you can plan everything down to the last detail and then discover the first day in the Studio that you have to Scrap everything and think again. Still, I had a good feeling in my bones about my Strategy and was eager to try it in the flesh.

In any case I never adhere Strictly to my plans, however Cherished. Their primary function is to free me from fear so that I can stay open to the swarm of fugitive possibilities that always arise in the studio when I'm working with people rather than ideas. Or then again the plans are like the balancing pole a tightrope walker carries, with the difference this pole is alive and as paranormally sensitive as a cat's outstretched whiskers plumbing the dark equilibrium as it stalks nocturnal prey.

One of the greatest joys of my life is the dropping of the mask of expertise by admitting to myself that I just don't know and allowing that ecstatic dumbness to take its first steps into the unknown.

Reading over what I've just written I picked up the scent of a dichotomy. On the one hand I describe the process of planning a work in Some detail yet on the other hand I exalt in the technique of letting go of all preconceived notions and abandoning myself to Childlike play with no thought of any outcome. Therefore, one movement in the mind in creative work is active and conscious while the other is passive and unconscious. Just as Samuel Taylor Cole ridge once observed I experience these two opposing forces as being at the service of a third: the imagination, without which they would not exist. The act of invention is essentially rhythmic. Like breathing. On the inhalation we draw in and gather up all our accumulated Knowledge As if Contracting a precisely Selected group of muscles then on the exhalation we let it all go by using the Coiled energy to leap without premeditation in a purblind, artless Spring into the dark: a jump that hopefully lands us closes to If not in, the desired terra incognita. Artists need to be persistent. We leap and land again and again with indefatigable zeal. The action itself seems to bring relief to the questing mind and to actually find an Unforgettable scrap or hint of soul- dazzling poetry is eureka.

I believe this how the human mind moves as it Struggles to create continuously alternating between active and passive. Just as the mechanics of breathing are the direct result of the wings of the heart beating, so the imagining mind is propelled in jagged spurts towards its bashful quarry by the intensity of its longing. Eternity lives in the gaps between breaths. In the serene pauses where every mind forgets coming and going, in and out, and simply surrenders. I hope that some glad day one of these gaps will open wide enough to let me through to my long home.

Still I don't know if there is anything left to be discovered in our sub-lunar post human mindscape. Often what I initially believe is Virgin Soil turns out to have a Macdonald's just around the corner. But art born of cynicism is poison to my spirit so whenever I am not working as an antidote I constantly read books, watch films, and look at paintings and photographs choosing works that marvel and question rage lament and celebrate. They help me to say a joyous ‘no’ to the death-in-life I see around me every day.

P. 164 ->
In trying to describe a process that is largely submerged, like a human being swimming, I can only observe the parts of the process I am conscious of. Whenever I am brewing a new dance there is a subconscious apparatus constantly at work: I'm intermittently aware that it never stops sorting, choosing, matching up, rejecting, accepting and filing away anything it deems might belong in the work, bringing anything it eventually selects as a definite possibility to my conscious awareness for consideration.

It's a kind of metaphysical secretary, pimp of the invisible, with immeasurable influence on all my decisions. But I don't know the full extent of its operations and don't want to because I trust it. Another way of looking at this process is that the ideas or images choose me as their opportunity to see the light of day and try to seduce me with their ability to capture and hold my attention - what I call their haunting power. I won't accept anything that doesn't haunt me, any though I now have a dynasty of ghosts as part of my extended family, it is not always the obviously Strange or grotesque that keeps coming to mind and Coming to mind repeatedly. Sometimes I feel I am the one being auditioned to see if I'm brave enough to reject the thing I know will 'work' and choose instead the image, idea or approach that requires me to drop my old bag of tricks and start from 'the big don't know'. In this respect I am often a coward, but a coward emboldened by the knowledge that Cézanne was content with the same mountain, tree and bowl of fruit with skull for decades yet never reached the end of the bounty that comes with the tireless unflagging unveiling of the eye. It never fails to astound me that the thing I'm searching for with such complicated intensity is usually where I least expect to find it Sitting right under my nose. I want to see like brother dog.

P. I66
It is quite difficult to signal subtle variations in human relationships without words, or without resorting to the stilted language of traditional balletic mime...
One technique I had used successfully in the past was to ask the dancers to write and learn a verbal script based on the relationships I wanted to convey have them act the scene out with the words over and over until the words became lodged in their bodies as seeds of gestures. Then we would video the dancers performing the scene With the maximum of natural Unforced gestures - be Italian I'd say - and then we'd start to copy the minute conjugations and combinations of gesture from the video frame by Frame re-learning what had been improvised. I would Select some of the words and find a way to musicalise them within the body to dance them, and insert these little movement phrases as highlights within the whole gestural dialogue. The next step was to perform the copied and invented scene with the dancers saying the words under their breath, so as to retain the link between word and gesture which prevents the movement from going stale, and finally to take the words away but to urge the dancers to keep saying them in their minds as they moved: the spirit of the words made flesh.

This is time-consuming but a good way to represent the human animal in relationship without words. There is an alphabet of gesture, words and sentences, paragraphs and chapters, stories can be told if you take infinite pains. You have to want it more than anything else or it doesn't work. It falls apart at birth without the life-dealing want.

As Rumi once said:
The body is a device to calculate
The astronomy of the spirit