The Failure Project

Following on from the last post...

2009-09-29T15:08:00.002+01:00

So after my last post, which Chris Goode very kindly replied to (A response! On this blog! Unbelievable) he pointed me towards a post on Carousel of Fantasies, a blog written by Matt Trueman, about the very same topic. I wish I had seen it when it first came out, which was right before I handed the Failure Project dissertation in (always nice to have someone on your side that you can quote in these things).

Anyway, he (and Chris in a subsequent comment) explain the whole thing in a much succinct and successful way than I ever could...as my old English teacher used to say, "this gets it".

read it here

Hello again!

2009-09-28T02:53:00.006+01:00

I’m back, and after many months of what can accurately be described as “crap” I’m starting to be creative again – I’m even properly starting on a new project (although The Failure Project may rear it’s ugly head once or twice again in the future).

This is largely due to the fact that I am now gainfully employed, and even better, in an environment that stimulates me – in a theatre company that, as well as producing new writing, also has a strong and very inspiring education programme. And even though I don’t get to play any creative role within this company, just being around people who are passionate about theatre as I am is good enough for me right now. AND of course, now that I have a job, I have money – not much, but enough to start hiring out proper rehearsal space and not revert to the ridiculous situation of rehearsing physical performance work in my bedroom.

SO…now that everything’s “coming up Milhouse” I’m filling my boots with as many trips to the theatre as I can manage (God bless the free tickets for under 26s scheme). The shinning moments among my visits was, undoubtedly, The Author, on now at the Royal Court…I managed to catch a rehearsal of the piece and was completely blown away by it. This is the type of theatre I look for and seem to so rarely find – brave, immediate, theatre that really questions the act and process of creating and viewing theatre, how and why we do it, without descending into cold irony. It is honest, human and open. The feeling of tension amongst the audience was quite unlike anything I’ve ever felt when watching theatre – as well as feeling uncomfortable, I felt invigorated by it.

I also went back to the Central School of Speech and Drama to see what the current students of my old MA course were up to, in the Festival Of… which they are holding this month. I’ve seen two pieces so far and am going back next week to see another too; so far, the work is playful, explorative, and truly experimental…not in that way people mean whenever something unconventional is onstage, but in the true sense of the word – actually trying out stuff to see what happens in the hope of discovering something new rather than just reaffirming old prejudices.

Other things didn’t light my fires so much – I spent a day watching shows at the Decibel showcase in Manchester (my first time in Manchester! Very exciting) and although I admire the emphasis on diversity in the theatre, which is of course important, some of the shows were downright awful. And really, there’s no excuse – it doesn’t matter what agenda you’re pushing; the content of your work still has to be worth something or there’s no point. I also saw Punk Rock at the lyric and though I found it enjoyable, and the cast very talented, I wasn’t sure I understood why it was there – for anyone that has seen it, seriously, why? It didn’t seem to be saying anything particularly new to be about the ‘youth experience’ (not to me anyway) and some of the dialogue was just too eloquent and quick-fire to be coming from anyone, let alone a bunch of insecure teenagers. The climax (I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it) seemed a bit far-fetched, even with the build-up beforehand. But, everyone else loved it, so…

Having talked about new things in my life, it’s a little bit strange, and regressive, to get back to talking about the Failure Project, but the topic has been propelled into my mind by a fascinating dialogue on another blog.

Chris Goode is someone I admire greatly; having first come across him as a poet, reading/performing his work at Sussex University where I studied, I’ve been hooked. I’ve since come to learn about his theatre work and his blog has become essential reading for me: intelligent, insightful and passionate.

Anyhoo, he wrote a post on his blog a while ago which happened to be about failure in performance, and was critical about companies and artists that acknowledge failure within their work. I don’t want to paraphrase and get it wrong, so here is a chunk of it:

“...All of us who work in theatre get asked the same question over and over: Why on earth would you work in such a medium? It turns out a lot of practitioners don't have an answer to that question, and so they embed it self-regardingly in their work. Even companies I really like and admire -- Apocryphal comes to mind -- fold into their work a kind of pre-emptive admittance of failure and absurdity. This is more or less what intellectual practice in theatre now means (part of the large shadow cast by Forced Ents): a kind of (supposedly) candid despair at the preposterousness of the theatrical response to the world around it. In terms of the experience of individual makers, there may be a certain honesty in the presentation of that despair; but in terms of the wider culture, it seems to me sort of unscrupulous in its insistence that no more than this can be done. There is something kind of tyrannical about its narcissistic pessimism. Every criticism made of it is already located somewhere in the piece or in the expectations of the people making it. When people behave like this, it looks a lot like childish sulking.”

A resulting conversation between Chris and Julia Lee Barclay from Apocryphal which has now been posted on the blog has made me question again the processes and meaning behind my work. Before I launch into it I should mention that Chris has not seen The Failure Project and does not, to my knowledge, follow this blog (although he did comment once on a video I had posted). So what I’m writing isn’t a straight up response to him, as what he wrote was not about me in the first place – I’m just trying to figure out what it might mean for my work.

It may seem a little strange for someone whose blog is called ‘The Failure Project’ to argue that failure is not the focal point of their work. I’ve often come across problems because of the title of the work: people hear “the failure project” a make a number of assumptions, many of which are untrue. It’s my fault, I picked a title that is obviously misleading (I know I can’t pick titles for toffee). Let me address some of these assumptions:

That when I’m talking about failure I’m talking about a subjective idea of whether something (whether it be a character, a text, a scene or an entire piece) ‘worked’ or not. Back when I was looking into clowning as a possible link to the project I interviewed someone who was well-versed in the form: he couldn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t talking about scenes that were rubbish or that the audience didn’t like and straight away I knew I had a problem. What would be the point of putting something deliberately rubbish on stage? To confirm what exactly: that audiences don’t like bad theatre? What a surprise that would be. And how could you be sure that everyone would agree with your opinion anyway? I mean, look what happened to the Producers. I needed to make sure that each failure, if they happened, could be clearly definable and located within the body and NOT within the aims of the piece as a whole – and that is because I wasn’t interested in the concept of failure as something to do with value judgements; not in my piece. I think it also places the work in a different context to meta-theatre pieces that are about “The preposterousness of the theatrical response to the world around it” (another Chris Goode quotation).
That the point is to fail. A few people thought that the performers were failing on purpose on stage. AHHH! It makes me sad to hear that, as it means they will have viewed the piece from a completely different starting point to the one that was intended. The integrity of the project rested upon the fact that the performers could NOT fail intentionally, and that they could not WANT to fail in order to further the piece. The personal nature of the devising process was key to this – by developing tasks that deliberately pushed the individual buttons of each performer, a sense that something real and important to each performer was at stake became present– ‘I can’t fail this – this means something more to me’. What then became the focal point, and the real purpose of the piece, was the process that each performer goes through – their attempts not to fail their task and all the emotions and elements of their real personalities that leak through when in their unguarded state. The physical leads into the emotional. What was nice was that it made the occasional moments of success all the more sweet – you can’t help but feel for the performers and will them to succeed.

(As a side note, it’s funny that some audience members simply cannot believe that something is not pre-planned or that it is improvisational, even if you tell them it is.)

That I’m only interested in the failure itself – I hope it’s clear from the first two points that this is not the case. I’m interested in everything that comes with failure - as something that drives performers and all people – the fear of failing, the struggle against failing, and the outcomes when you do or don’t fail (which can be humorous, sad, uncomfortable…a million different things, as many different outcomes as there are human responses). THIS is what is fascinating to me, because it touches upon what to me is the single most powerful and important element of theatre, and the reason why I create it – its liveness. You get to see, if only in fleeting moments, the real people behind the performers. You get to see moments that have not been pre-planned and that are not intended, but must be dealt with directly. As a spectator, you become a part of something that implicates you also; for you are seeing these moments of revelation and struggle, these moments that just happen, and you must decide, as a witness to it, what part you’re playing in it and how to respond, too. This is live, and it makes me feel the true liveness and immediacy of theatre.

More difficult to argue against is the argument by Chris that the allowance of failure in work “minimises the harm that those moments of 'failure' or self-conscious lapse actually do to the activity of the work.” It’s true. I hope that in ‘The Failure Project’ the personal nature of the tasks has raised the stakes somewhat and tried to make up for this, but I won’t have made up for it entirely. And I guess that’s the failure of the project. It’s an unavoidable paradox of the piece: The performers may not be OK with failing, but the piece is.

I guess that’s enough rambling: it’s almost three o’ clock in the morning and this all seems like old news anyway. I will move on to the new project now, I promise!

Celebrating my 50th post with a small blogging holiday...

2009-07-08T01:22:00.001+01:00

Pina Bausch died last week. I unfortunately never got to see her perform live, but as a practitioner focused on the body in performance she has of course been a constant presence in the background of everything I have done, never understood or known except through clips on You Tube and bits and pieces read in performance books.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this but I was reading this article on her in the Guardian and it pretty much summed up for me why, in terms of my own practice (which still has a long way to go) she was important to me.
Sanjoy Roy writes: “She was real with movement, too, making you notice the panting, the sweat, the bruises. Take the finale of her Rite of Spring (the only version I know in which the choreography actually matches the force of Stravinsky's music). The stage is covered with peat, and the entire cast is smeared with soil and sweat. When the woman collapses at the end of her harrowing solo, you sense the exhaustion is real enough. Notice also the man lying behind her, his arms outstretched for the whole dance. He is still, but you feel the ache building in those arms.”
Here is the clip:

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While we’re on influences, I’ve found myself looking at a practitioner in a new light lately.

I had never considered myself to be particularly Grotowskian in my approach. I read about him extensively at the beginning stages of my MA degree and I remember reading a textbook on Grotowski that stated that the performers had to literally transcend the normal experiences of the body, which seemed to contradict my own ideas on the body in performance (I’m not big on the idea of the transcendental, unified performer). Anyway, I came across this recently, which has made me see his techniques in a new light (from ‘Fifty Key Theatre Directors’ by Shomit Mitter and Maria Shetsova:

“The purpose of performance was not to play a role but to lay bare one’s self in the presence of the audience…(Grotowski) embraced the idea of theatre as reality”
“Only by facing situations of immense physical and psychic difficulty do human beings generate the self-respect required to shed social masks and genuinely be themselves” (page 108).

And then later, in direct response to my earlier worries that a transcendental approach was alienating to the spectators:

“the sheer physical virtuosity of their performances alienated audiences by giving them an example they had no means of following…The via negativa is the application of the principle of Poor Theatre to the art of the actor. Just as Grotowski’s stage was bereft of sets and props, so also his actors had to shed their arsenal of skills and tricks so as to lay themselves bare in all humility – as simple human beings.” (Page 109)

How did I miss the obvious links to FP the first time around? I have to re-read all my Grotowski texts!

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In other news, I’m taking a short break from the blog for the time being:
1) I need to ‘regroup’ as they say (whoever ‘they’ may be) – get back into reading, watching, thinking, and let it all stew in my mind without disseminating it all into blog format (although it is incredibly helpful in ordering my thoughts, I want to give myself more time and actually take the project in a new direction rather than re-tread old ground…as well as the Grotowski revelation I’ve also found a few other things that passed me by when I first worked on the project and that I would like to investigate (including the philosopher Paul Virilio, the Japansese concept of ‘Wabi-Sabi’ and Tehching Hsieh) in order to start the developing the project in an even deeper way.
2) I need to focus some attention on some new projects that have been brewing in my head for a while now.

That’s it. Only two reasons. It’s also probably slightly due to the fact that I find this blog a massive challenge to write in and that since I am essentially talking to myself I don’t feel like I am breaking off a dialogue that can’t be continued outside of cyberspace.

I’ll write again
a) If and when I have news regarding the project (i.e. a performance coming up, or a breakthrough in the direction of the project)
b) Possibly if I find a nice video I want to upload onto the blog (relevant ones, I promise).

But until then, see you soon, folks!

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P.S. I sometimes wonder if the blog is a good thing… am I running the artistic illusion by talking about, dissecting and documenting everything? Am I making it too accessible, ruining the mystery? And then I think: I hope I am! What makes me think I and my work are so sacred that they can’t be touched or accessed by other people? Why create an ‘artwork’ where the process is invisible, as if the performance just appeared out of the clear blue sky?

2009-07-03T11:19:00.001+01:00

An issue has come to the forefront of my thinking in terms of The Failure Project and possible new avenues to explore, and it’s one that had first came up last year, soon after first showing the piece at the Festival.

I’d been submitting the piece to a few performance nights and festivals and had been accepted to do one in October. When I forwarded the details onto my performers, one of them came back to me, saying that they had something else they had to do on that night that they couldn’t get out of. I still wanted to do the show and didn’t want to let this setback stop the plans so after having a quick think I decided I could step in the absent performer’s place.We didn’t do the performance in the end – another performer couldn’t make it and by that point it didn’t seem right to continue with half the original cast absent, but the idea of one performer undergoing tasks deliberately created for someone else started a train of thought for me…

Let me digress for a moment in order to make my point: I’m not a big fan of direct explanations. I attended a poetry night the other evening and watched one poet explain in detail the background and technique behind one poem (she was borrowing Carol Ann Duffy’s technique of writing about big events through the eyes of the important women on the peripheries of said event, and that this particular poem was from the eyes of Sherlock Holmes’ maid on the scene of a murder blah blah blah…) I always feel that if you have to explain the artwork, you’re doing it wrong – otherwise, just write an essay.

An artwork that doesn’t explain itself directly to the spectator often means that some things get lost, particularly in an art form such as performance which already has is ephemerality built into it (I think I made up a word there, but let’s roll with it) but I think that as well as ensuring artists become more focused, sharper and considered in their choices that this can actually be quite beautiful – you are in the presence of something which is impossible to know completely and which in that moment, only exists for you, in the way you have created it. Who knows what pictures I could have painted in my head if I had just been allowed to hear the reading of the poem, it’s language, rhythm, structure, without being told beforehand what to think (possibly not much – it wasn’t a very good poem –but you never know).

During the scratch nights I would often get frustrated about elements of the show which I found fundamental which, due to my insistence we wouldn’t’ lecture the audience, got lost – some spectators found it hard to imagine that we hadn’t scripted the whole thing, which perhaps says quite a lot about the type of theatre people are used to seeing, and are conditioned to expect on stage. One major element which I was always unsure that the audience were ‘getting’ was the personal nature of each of the tasks – the fact that each task was tailor made to the performer undergoing it, designed to highlight, explore, and bring to the surface their particular performative vulnerabilities (with the idea that these vulnerabilities could not help but bleed into those they hold beyond the stage, and into ‘real life’). Each task had a complex and profound link to the history of the performer undergoing it.

This was one idea why I included the film in the first performance of the project: I wanted to share with the audience. Even that, though, was lacking: the camera screen was just another separating layer between performer and spectator and even then, I didn’t want to give the whole game away, just provide snippets, clues that the spectator could pick up on if they wanted to. My main hope was that, though unspoken, it would be evident - in the faces and body languages of the performers before, during and after each failure (or success), in their struggles and responses, in their relationships with the other performers and the spectators. It would just be there, unspoken but felt by everyone present.

What would be interesting then, is to see what would happen if this is switched round, and the tasks, although still constructed in the same way, are then ‘performed’ or undergone not by the performer they were inspired by but by someone else – would it be wrong to lose that or could there be potential for something interesting to develop, something that could explore identity and the existing ideas of failure, liveness and physical/emotional exposure from another perspective?

I once watched my course leader Ana Sanchez Colberg performed a dance piece that was strongly autobiographical – unfortunately I can’t remember what it was called now but it was developed in collaboration with another choreographer, who would observes Ana’s unique idiosyncrasies, mannerisms and patterns of movement and then show them back to her. This then formed the basis of the piece, which was performed by Ana on her own – Ana performing someone else performing Ana.

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of discovering hidden aspects about your self through others – it’s always strange when someone mimics your voice or your mannerisms. When one catches ones voice recorded on film, it’s usually a strange and unnerving experience (well it is for me, anyway). The students in my MA course had a long running joke regarding one of the students, who would often make a particular movement with his right hand when talking and which he hadn’t even noticed until we pointed it out to him. It’s always a classic joke in films and TV shows that when two characters get trapped in each others’ shoes or are pretending to be each other, they use that opportunity to reveal truths about each other:

Now I don’t want the performers to pretend to be each other or mimic each other, but I do think it would be interesting to see what would happen if each performer could see their own task from a distance – what could they discover about themselves through doing such a thing? A good idea for a rehearsal rather than a performance – the tasks would be even more inaccessible to the audience if they weren’t performed by the very people they are supposed to be for. And if I ever get the chance to develop the piece into a series of workshops (which I don’t think I have mentioned before but I want to do – one revelation is the amount of people, performers and non-performers, who have approached me afterwards and have said they would like to undergo the same process) then I think that could be a key revelatory process for the participants.

It’s just an idea for now…

Catching Up: Part Two

2009-05-18T20:52:00.002+01:00

(Written last Friday night)

I'm on a train now, back to London after spending the evening in Brighton watching my friend Marion perform in a piece she also wrote and directed (this is starting to sound like some awful travelogue. I have a banging headache, it;s late and I want to go to bed, so what better time to work on the blog? None better time.

So...another major thing that has happened recently was the SPILL Festival for which I was a volunteer throughout. Despite the sometimes tedious experiences it entailed (volunteers always get the lamest jobs) I met lots of cool people (fellow volunteers, mainly, but also a few of the artists and the Pacitti Company team who are thoroughly nice chaps) and got to see the shows I helped in for free, which was a major plus as I have approximately zero money at the moment.

I haven't quite honed my reviewing skills so I won't go into each show in depth, but as you may expect from festivals it was a decidedly mixed bag; some highlights (That Night Follows Day and Orgy of Tolerance for me, even though some people seem to hate hate hate the latter), some that are so-so (Void Story and Porcelain Project), and some I thought were duds (sorry Aftermaths: A Tear in the Meat of Vision, you might get 3 stars from Lyn Gardner but certainly not from me).

And, being the sort of person I am, its the duds that I find myself thinking of the most, that have stayed with me, also because now that I am an "emerging artist" I find myself facing an uphill struggle of trying to find platforms and funding for my own work. I may not have liked Aftermaths (I thought it was repetitive, and found its use of horror genre aesthetics ridiculous rather than disturbing) but at least I could recognise an element of artistry in it, a structure, and a visual/textual language that the artist had created and obviously thought about. An effort was put into it. The last piece from the festival I saw, however - I Feel Love! - felt like it had been slapped together at the last minute, the theatrical equivalent of a first year Uni student stocking up on red bull and coffee and writing a few hours before it's due in (I'm sure it wasn't, but still, that's how it seemed).

Taking as its inspiration the dance marathons held in America in the 1920s and 30s, it featured the artist, on a podium, in Soho Square, half naked, shuffling his feet (calling it dancing would be too much of a stretch) to an endless loop of Donna Summer's I feel Love. For six hours. Now, this may have just worked if the artist had made any effort whatsoever to engage with the task at hand or the audience in any way. But nothing. A bit of online research tells me the artist was performing in character, an exhibistionist pron star character. No sign of that. He looked compeltely bored, like he wanted to be somewhere else, like he was thinking about whether or not he forgot to turn the heating off before leaving the house, or what he might like for dinner that night.

Perhaps he was having a bad day, and it was all meant to pan out differently, I don't know. But if you give me (as an audience member) nothing, what right have you to ask for anything in return?

And it's this that bothers me about a lot of shows I see. It's nhot enough to just have an idea and then that's it; not enough to say 'I like dance marathons so I'm going to have one on my own for people to watch', or 'drama is essentially play so let's everyone have a game of musical chairs' (I'm thinking back to the scratch night here), or 'lets describe a non-existent performance, just listing things about it, and then the audience can just imagine it ' (I'm looking at YOU, Forced Entertainment). You then have to do something with that idea, develop it, play with it, challenge it, emerse yourself completely in it and explore what else you can do with it.

It's like: 'Yeah...and?'

I strongly belivee in the death of the author, in challenging and provoking audiences to actively respond to a piece and even help create it, through their presence, during the live moment of performance itself, authoring it for themselves. But I think there is an implicit relationship of trust between performer or artist and audience, a mutual exchange and investment in the piece - the audience can become active only if the artist has compelled them to do so through creating something that sparks the imagination and interest, something that the artist also cares about deeply and passionately.

I feel bad now, dissing other people's work. I'm not perfect myself - I think The Failure Project could be improved in this regard, and hopefully one day I'll get the chance to show an hour-long version of the piece and really delve into my ideas and questions in a more complex way. But I am trying.

Oh yeah...

2009-05-14T23:52:00.003+01:00

Oh yeah...here are some pics I managed to snatch from the night, it was all I could squeeze from the company arranging the evening.

Catching Up: Part 1

2009-05-14T23:50:00.002+01:00

How many times have we been here before? The lengthy delay between posts followed by an apology and a promise never to do it again. I’m so predictable. But never mind, this time so much has happened in between posts I just haven’t had the time to write here (I always find it takes ages to update the blog. Why is that? They are only thoughts after all; I’m not writing an essay).

Where to begin…I suppose with the scratch night, which seems like an age ago but was really just over a month, and which I promised to write about. It was a bit of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants moment – the technical set-up wasn’t perfect (in fact, they were doing the get in while we were supposed to have our technical rehearsal which wasn’t ideal). Our ‘rehearsal’, therefore, was mostly a mad dash to figure out where things should go for the performance.

The night itself was an interesting mix of pieces: each one was genuinely different from the others, which goes to show how vague and subjective the term ‘physical theatre’ actually is.

They were of varying degrees of success – some showed real signs of promise and imagination (there was an interesting one with a drummer and his a growing drum kit – I’m afraid I can’t explain it any clearer than that without using up lots of time), one was very well executed and entertaining but, to me, didn’t have much going on under the surface, one had a good idea that was let down by an A-Level-style execution and one was just baffling. I don’t have any time to go into more depth and I apologise for leaving you with these mystical statements but hey, I’ve got a bed to get to and work in the morning so let’s push on through.

Ours, in my opinions, is the one that was the most genuinely experimental – we were shoving out our very un-mainstream ideas and moments on stage to see what would happen, and was also difficult to watch (or even perhaps enjoy) due to its very rough, raw, unready state. HAVING SAID THAT…I think it went rather well for an initial testing-of-the-water. We essentially took the structure of what usually is the final scene and extended it to the 15 minute limit we had for the night. I picked our tasks carefully, as always, after much observation and thought, after lots of discussions, exercises, games and soul searching, and the tasks nicely varies in their rhythm, use of space, dimensions and types of physicality (I won’t say more, because you have to see it for yourself!) As always, the textgame was present alongside it.

It was messy, it wasn’t timed right, we were unused to doing the whole thing but the tasks were onto something and as ever I strongly believe in the ideas of the piece and it’s potential to transform into something beautiful, shocking, horrible, funny and thought-provoking. Overall we got positive feedback – people seemed intrigued with the concept. One woman said there was something beautiful in the fact that we were trying to ‘communicate something impossible to communicate’ which was an interesting thought but sadly, there was not enough time to ask her to elaborate on it. People were interested by their own reactions while watching; caught between wanting to help and wanting to leave us, finding it funny and finding it horrible – all classic Failure Project reactions.

Some doubt over the soundtrack (which was the bleep test) – some found it too obvious. I’ve cut down it’s presence since but would never want to get rid of it completely – it provokes quite strong childhood memories and emotions in people which I think opens out the piece a bit more to the audience. It does so, too, without being emotional within itself – one of my bugbears is overly dramatic or manipulative music in performance; I find it lazy and it often produces the opposite effect in me (for example in Romeo Castelluci’s Inferno – the music was so full of pathos at one point I switched off entirely). Some doubts also about the length, too – one girl said that it became more and more fascinating, peaking at the 12 minute mark, at which point it dropped off as we were too exhausted to do the tasks with any success. While I understand where she’s coming from, I disagree completely – I find the aftermath, the point after which the failure is obvious and it becomes clear they’re doomed, to be really interesting. The piece shifts at that moment, in tone and mood as well as energy, and enters a new phase – more contemplative, more sad, more stripped down - it seems more human.

Enough about this – it was only 15 minutes! To come:
1)The SPILL Festival
2)Failure Project at Scenepool
3)Thoughts on all this scratch night malarkey, and where we’re going next

Until next time!

Videos!

2009-03-25T15:23:00.005Z

While faffing around on the laptop I realised that there were a few more videos of the process which I haven't uploaded onto the blog...so here they are. They are ones I made to accompany the dissertation and focus on particular elements of my arguments.

In the meantime...

2009-03-25T14:51:00.005Z

Thoughts on how the Scratch went, and future plans, are coming up in the next few days, but until then... time for another word cloud? Yes!

At the start of something new...

2009-03-12T18:20:00.002Z

It’s been an unusually busy week this week, which goes some way to explaining why my mood has been a lot brighter this week, too. I still have no job (not enough experience for properly paid jobs, too much experience for trainee jobs, too poor for unpaid internships) but things are looking up for the week ahead as I start a few new projects (more details in the future).

Things are up and running with The Failure Project: Part Two, in what has fast become a bit of a whistle-stop rehearsal process. Some things I learnt: collaborative work cannot function fully without someone, ultimately, being in charge. Especially if you’re working on a piece with your mates and are easily distracted by cups of tea and general matey chit-chat. Since this is my ‘baby’, as it were (although I hope I would not be so precious with it as that) I am taking on more of a directorial air, although for some reason have been reluctant to take on the role fully, something that will need to be remedied if we go and perform it in different venues in April and May (which is looking likely). It needs a more defined focus, a drive, but for now, for our Scratch performance this Saturday, we’ll be OK. Luckily, it’s the sort of thing that actually benefits from more talk and less actual rehearsing – the more you rehearse, the more you practice and cushion yourself against the risk of truly exposing yourself physically and mentally. And I have to say, there is a naughty thrill in knowing you have a performance in a couple of days and you haven’t rehearsed it…who knows how it will turn out (which, again, is sort of the point).

What we’ve done is develop a 15-minute version of the opening and closing scenes from the original piece, in which we introduce ourselves and then undergo our separate tasks simultaneously. I’m used to creating task from others through careful observation and questioning but this time, I’ve also had the strange experience of assigning my own task, something I was against doing but had to as the other participants couldn’t think of anything for me (which in itself is interesting – was it because I have resisted revealing much of myself to them? Because they haven’t noticed my foibles (or haven’t wanted to notice)? Or because I’m so boring I have none?). I ended up picking something that I think focuses on something that makes me tick, but is it how possible is it to have that sort of objective insight into oneself? And what kind of mental processes are necessary in order to make such a decision (besides masochism?!)? Maybe I’ll have a better idea on Saturday and in the weeks ahead as we continue with development. Hopefully there’ll also be some photos and films to show in the days/weeks ahead, too. Will post soon with news on how it went.

A note on performance and confession

2009-03-01T22:25:00.002Z

Since the last time I wrote here, quite a lot has happened, performance-wise – myself and three colleagues from Central decided to make the leap and officially form a performance group (I say ‘officially’ but nothing official actually happened, we just sort of sat around a table and said, OK, enough faffing, let’s do it), came up with a name (Jeremis Iron Arts Collective), entered the 21st Century and set up email and twitter accounts, and started a blog which is not completely underway yet. And of course, we worked on some pieces – The Failure Project (part two) is well underway as well as a little acorn of an idea which we hope to shown in May.

I don’t think I mentioned this before but I have also been asked to help out as an assistant director with a piece being put together by an old friend from University, due to be shown at the Brighton Fringe Festival. All in the early stages but it promises to be an interesting few months ahead and it gives me something to focus on while I struggle to get a job that isn’t completely mind-numbing and depressing and hopefully even get paid for doing it.

Anyway, back to the point of this post…so, as ever, this edition of the Failure Project continues with the same ideas of exposure, risk, of showing the ‘real’, etc. etc. And so in preparation for our first intensive all-day rehearsal we have decided to fill in a number of different questionnaires designed to help us all learn about each other more in order to develop the right tasks for the piece, to give us ideas for exercises and games during the day, and to get us all used to the heightened openness and honesty required of the piece.

I’m talking about this now because it seems to coincide with a few things: my entrance into the strange and pointless world of Twitter, a recent trend I’ve noticed on Facebook for people to fill in and send to their friends a note called ‘25 things you don’t know about me’, and a recent performance of Forced Entertainment’s durational performance Speak Bitterness which was streamed live on the internet.

It seems everyone wants to confess, to reveal in public, these days, and I wonder why. Our society seems to possess a collective feeling of guilt and wish to unburden itself – or maybe it’s just a need to be recognised and noticed in public, to gain fame or notoriety. I won’t try to come to any conclusions about this, but it does suggest to me that what we are dealing with in The Failure Project actually has some direct relevance to modern life and our ways of interacting with each other. Hmmm…maybe we should move The Failure Project into more of a multi-media direction…

Where I think The Failure Project differs from these other examples, I think, is that it doesn’t offer the comfort blanket of anonymity to the performers participating, which makes it potentially a more confrontational and difficult experience. The ‘confessions’ or nuggets of personal information offered to the reader in Twitter or the ’25 things…’ post on Facebook, in which you almost always know the identity of the writer, almost always fit under the ‘quirky’ category – cute little snippets designed to remind the reader just how wacky/funny/cute/interesting etc. the writer is. The only times in which true exposure occurs, in the revelation of information that is truly personal and difficult to reveal (for whatever reason) is when this comfort blanket is offered. Postcript was a book and website and ‘ongoing community art project’ I came across a couple of years ago; anonymous people offer up their deepest, darkest confessions on postcards and send them in…and that’s it. We don’t know which are really true, and which are false, but some seem so specific it is impossible to imagine they were the product of someone’s imagination (one recent example: “I work in healthcare, and I love when I see a man’s penis on an x-ray”. It’s fascinating and uncomfortable to read through these confessions, which are funny, upsetting and shocking, and although you can’t relate to all of them you do find yourself thinking about your own failings, foibles, dirty little secrets. The confessions read aloud to the audience in the six-hour piece Speak Bitterness are always preceded by the pronoun “we”, effectively absolving any particular person from direct responsibility: “We thought that Black Watch was a musical…We lived our lives in front of the webcam…We made our lovers weep and then said ‘oh, you’re so beautiful when you cry’”. It is this that makes Speak Bitterness so powerful; it manages to implicate everyone, by implicating nobody directly at all.

Both these examples, through the honesty that anonymity allows and the anonymity itself, achieve a connection with the spectator that causes them to reflect upon their own lives. What I am trying, I think, is more difficult. The spectator gets to know each performer as a real person, witnessing their failures and confessions as they happen. It is so personal as to be confrontational: “here, this is me, here are my failures, my weaknesses, unvarnished, what do you have to say about it?” And as such, it thrusts upon the spectator not only their own complicity in the events they are watching (I’ve spoken about this loads before, so won’t go into it again) but makes their own resulting personal reflection less stable, less comfortable, as a result, constantly bombarded as they are with confessions that are real and truly personal, coming from ‘I’ as well as ‘we’, and actions performed in the present that are doomed to become future confessions. I hope to make it multi-layered experience, an exchange between spectator and performer, performer and spectator (again, something I have spoken of before).

Maybe I’m punching above my weight – the previous Failure Project did explore these ideas but did not go all the way, was never truly committed to them. Now that I am working with performers I have a previous knowledge of and am close to, we can perhaps get down to the really difficult stuff sooner. It won’t be easy though. I’ll let you know how the first rehearsal goes. I think I’m losing the thread of my argument now – I should really write my blog posts earlier in the day and not when I’m tired and about to sleep.

Not so much of an illusion

2009-02-18T01:14:00.000Z

So I noticed this recently on the Guardian website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/feb/10/painfully-good-theatre

If you haven’t yet, go and read the article and the comments below it, which make up a pretty interesting discussion on the nature of theatre and its relationship to the ‘real’. About a month too late for my dissertation but it’s great to see that people are talking about the mechanics and effects of this type of performance, especially since The Failure Project, now tentatively entering its second stage, is back on the scene and will be shown at the Space on March 14^th as part of a night of new ‘physical theatre’.

At the risk of repeating myself, I (unsurprisingly) agree completely with Lyn Garner’s views here – the whole reason I created The Failure Project was my own fascination with this particular element of physicality in performance – real bodies at work, with no pretence at perfection, no pretence that what they are doing on stage as part of a performance does not also have a real-time, real-life effect on their bodies, whether in a major or more subtle sense. I like theatre that knows it is theatre – not necessarily in an obvious, self-reflexive way but in also in a way that tacitly acknowledges that the performers are doing, and not just pretending to do.

This to me was always inextricably linked with the liveness of a performance and of the performer-spectator relationship; a performance that acknowledges and complicates the presence of a performer in this way also acknowledges and complicates the inherent liveness of the theatrical moment, which operates between two modes of time: that of the piece and of the context in which the performance is taking place. A performance that truly feels live is also one in which you can feel that the future is still uncertain, up for grabs, and not completely pre-determined, that introduces risk and the possibility of failure into the theatrical space and doesn’t just ignore it (I never liked the phrase “the show must go on” – it always seemed so stiff and uncompromising).

It also necessitates a complicity in the spectator that I find fascinating - when the boundary between real and staged becomes blurred, what happens then to the role of the person watching this? I wrote in my dissertation about Tim Etchell’s idea of the witness in the theatre – essentially a spectator to a real event, and therefore with an increased awareness of the implications of what they are watching and of their own position, watching it. From the audience feedback I received on The Failure Project it seemed that this transformation of the spectator’s role did occur to some extent in those present. They commented afterwards on their own feelings not only towards the performers and the tasks they were undergoing but also, significantly, towards themselves for watching it, and how the piece reflected on them as spectators.

I always find it curious when people say that nothing in the theatre is real, as one commenter does on the blog - are we supposed to think that the actors just switch off when they are on stage, as if in some out-of-body experience? That if a character on stage kisses another, they are not also doing this in real life? That if a dancer completes a dance routine, they are not left more out of breath at the end of it? The same commenter states that he/she wants “(the performers) to induce the emotion in me, not to watch them emoting whether for real or for fake”. This comment is particularly puzzling to me. Each to their own, of course, but what I want from any performance I watch is a sense of exchange between myself and the performer/s, not a sense that I am simply in the presence of a machine provided for my own emotional gratification, with nothing to add for myself to the situation except to passively except whatever emotion is being “induced” in me. Both these comments deny the very human nature of the theatrical experience, the fact that real human beings are present and (re)presenting in front of other human beings, despite the presence of an artificial narrative or fictional ‘world’. What is exciting about performances like those Lyn Garner talks about is that, to me, they explore the potential of this aspect of performance through the very structure and nature of the piece itself, and by doing so promote an active exchange between performer and spectator…and now I think I may be getting back to what I said a few days ago about connection.

Enough for now…time for bed.

Audience connection and the public/private

2009-02-13T09:57:00.000Z

I am, at the moment, attempting to get some sort of piece (or idea of a piece) together to submit to the Accidental Festival, which is curated by BA students from the Central Speech of School and Drama. The theme for this year’s festival is ‘connection’, which obviously can be interpreted in many different ways but, after a conversation I had recently, has become prominent in my mind in a specific way.

I was having a very general discussion with someone about art when he told me about a friend of his, who had said that she didn’t like the theatre because she didn’t like encountering art in public (or something to that effect). I’ve never met this girl, which is a shame because as soon as I heard that I immediately wanted to pick her brains and ask her for more information (maybe a lucky escape for her) but the statement got me thinking about the unique relationship theatre has with its audience, and of how audiences experience different forms of art.

None of this is new – practitioners (and artists in other art forms) have always been concerned with the relationship their work has with the spectator, and I’ve be attempting to find ways to address the issue in every piece I’ve created in the last year. But I’d never considered it within the dichotomy of private vs. public and I wonder if it might be an interesting road to go down for my contribution to the festival. A similar discussion seems to have taken place between a few people on Chris Goode’s blog (an endless source of stimulation and inspiration): http://beescope.blogspot.com/2009/01/of-late.html - they talk about (if I’ve read it correctly) the possibility of creating a theatre space that can encourage the kind of quiet reflection and contemplation one usually finds in churches, and have a discussion over the nature of such an experience – whether it can be communal, an exchange between those present, as well as a solitary, introspective experience.

This is the kind of experience I hope for every time I go to the theatre, and would hope that it didn’t take a special kind of venue or theatre space to produce, but I do recognise that not enough performances facilitate such an experience, in which a spectator can feel like a vital part of the performance without having to take part in some tedious audience participation exercise (in which the spectator “matters”, as Chris Goode says), in which they are given the mental space to make their own reflections without feeling like they have detached themselves from the piece and the performers (i.e. my experience of watching Spectacular which I should maybe get out of my system at some point on the blog).

So…how to facilitate these connections between artist, work and spectator and space within the Roundhouse theatre? That is my next question. But coming back to the original concern: how can one make the experience of watching a performance in a traditional theatrical space feel private, even if the spectator is surrounded by many others and is inescapably in the presence of performers? Because this is also important: someone who craves a private spectatorship may view the liveness of theatre, in which each element present is existing and evolving live in front of the spectator’s own eyes, as an insurmountable barrier preventing them from really connecting (there’s that word again) with the piece and with the experience of being in an audience. I wonder if, in a situation in which the actual theatrical space cannot be manipulated, the answer lies in creating a performance that, through structure and style, mimics the response we want from an audience…

I recently went to see the Bobby Sands film Hunger – truly fantastic and if you haven’t seen it; check it out now. I won’t get bogged down in the politics of the film now as it’s not relevant here (and actually, I don’t think that it is a film that has a blatant political message, despite its subject matter). But what I found so compelling about the film was its use of long takes, most famously a 15-20 minute continuous sequence which contains most of the speech in the film, but also through a number of other notable scenes including one incredible one (my favourite scene) in which a prison officer cleans pools of urine from the prison corridor floor. The camera, motionless at the end of the corridor, displays the officer immersed in his task from beginning to end, without cutting away once. Now I love a long take, I mean, REALLY love a long take. It’s the musical equivalent of handclaps in songs – if it’s there, I automatically love the film/song a little more. And what I love about the use of the long take in Hunger is the demands it makes of the spectator. “Listen, watch, and pay attention” it seems to say, and I did, completely engrossed in the banal and fairly unpleasant task of the prison officer. Not only was I completely immersed in the actual action of the scene, in the character and what he was doing, but the simplicity and determined focus of the scene also gave me space to engage with the film as a whole, with the significance of what this man was doing and what my attitudes and thoughts were towards the entire film. What we need is the theatrical equivalent of the long take, something that compels the audience to engage, pay attention and reflect, to feel that connection to the piece: moments of respite from plot and spectacle, with give time to reflect and engage the brain yet still have something relevant to add to the drama and atmosphere of the piece. Moments that do not simply ask for reflection, but compel it by being reflective themselves.

Rant coming up...

2009-02-09T16:10:00.000Z

So, I went to see Shun-Kin by Complicite last week at the Barbican, and it has thrown up all sorts of interesting questions in my head. Not so much from the piece itself (although I found it beautiful, despite the eye-ache of switching my gaze from the action on stage to the subtitle screens on either side – now I know why the cheap seats are in the front row) but the various reactions to it.

I’m going to try and explain without sounding like I’ve prematurely aged into a cranky, elitist old coot, the sort you see on Grumpy Old Men/Woman who seem to have a permanent grudge against everything. BUT…as I was sitting in the audience I couldn’t help but sense a nagging feeling that I have absolutely nothing in common with most of my generation. The story centred on the intense and complex relationship between a violent, spoilt blind woman names Shun-kin and her servant/lover Sasuke, who she regularly abuses. The piece represents Shun-kin as a child through puppetry, and the moment when the puppet is exchanged for a living actress is so subtle and so delicately performed that you don’t realise it is happening until long after (indeed, I had an argument with my companion afterwards about when the actual exchange took place). It’s really something. The vocal talents of the woman who portrays Shun-kin as she ages are amazing. Some bits seemed superfluous; the scenes with the narrator and those with the writer sometimes seemed a bit underdeveloped. But the main story of Shun-kin and Sasuke was always engaging, even though I couldn’t relate to it or feel it’s relevance to my own experience in the same way that I did with A Disappearing Number…although who says that it should have to offer that? Lyn Gardner said she didn’t know what the piece was for…but does it have to be for anything? Does theatre need to have an easily defined social/philosophical/political/whatever purpose? Can’t it exist purely to tell a story, to open up a world previously inaccessible? To create or show something beautiful (or horrific)? Or to do a million other things? To just exist? I;m sure the piece has its own purpose…but does Lyn Gardner need to ‘get it’ for it to be a good piece? Again, I don’t know. I just always get the feeling that if an artist wants to send a really specific message to his/her audience, with no equivocation or chance of confusion, maybe a piece of art is not the best method in which to do it. Just write an essay instead. I don’t think art should preach – just present. Let the audience decide for themselves. That's not to say that I don't think a theatrical piece should have a political, social etc.etc. force behind it, driving it forward and towards a certain existence...in fact I think it would be impossible to create a piece that did not have these concerns lurking somewhere in the background. I just get wary when I hear creative-types egotistically talk about the message they're giving to the 'people'. I get the feeling I'm not explaining myself well.
And now let me contradict myself horribly. There were scenes in the piece depicting the sado-masochistic nature of Shun-kin and Sasuke’s relationship. Let me tell you what I learnt during one such scene:

Child + man + puppet + sex + violence = hilarity (apparently)

Yeah I didn’t think so too, but apparently some people (specifically the teenage school groups I heard giggling endlessly behind me) could only respond to a very difficult scene (child has sex for the first time with her servant, an older man, and beats him savagely throughout) represented with grace and elegance, with childish giggles. It made me very, very sad. They didn’t have to like it – I am firmly of the position that once an artist presents a piece to an audience they effectively give up any control they had over it – it is for the audience to dissect and interpret as they will. Death of the author and all that. But the way they acted was, in my opinion, was so profoundly disrespectful (and dare I say it, racist? Each time the Japanese-ness of the piece was emphasised through the speech of the characters the giggles seemed to come)…I’m at a loss for words. I read a review of the piece in the Telegraph that accused it of being Orientalist, of succumbing to racial stereotypes of the East (despite the fact that the story and essay that the piece were based on were both written by a Japanese man and are both explicitly concerned with the difficult relationship between East and West) but for me, the Orientalism lay in the giggles, and the ‘this comes from a geographical/social/cultural/psychological place I can’t comprehend, so I’ll cut myself off and laugh’ attitude that came through in each one. And now I really sound like an old git.

Let's try one more time, shall we?

2009-02-07T19:31:00.000Z

It’s been so long now since the piece finished, it seems almost pointless to be writing in the blog now – yet here I am. Since the last time I wrote here, I wrote up my work on the piece in my final dissertation, realising some important elements of the piece in the process. I had always meant to discuss these new discoveries in the blog while I was writing the dissertation, but guess what? I didn’t. Which is evident here. I’ve never been able to keep a diary (and that’s what this is, isn’t it, and what most blogs are – public diaries). It seems too obvious to say that this blog is probably my biggest failure during this process.

But here I am, months later, trying to start it up again, now that I have loads of free time and am (drumroll, please) starting up the project again for a new cast, which I’m looking forward to and think could be quite an exciting undertaking. Now that I’ve finished the MA and have no academic deadlines to work towards, it would be so easy for me to get pessimistic and lazy with this, but I really want to do the whole thing properly, starting with this blog. So there.

Before I launch into phase two of the project, here is a website that floated around my head whilst working on the piece first time round…now off I go to read some infinitely better written blogs and try and get my act together.

A blog centred on failure that I didn’t come across until after the piece was over (typical):

http://failblog.org/

And from the blog, here is quite a fascinating instance of failure by the customer services department of an internet service provider:

The Failure Project - Rehearsals!

2008-10-17T12:05:00.001+01:00

The Failure Project - Open Space Performance

2008-10-17T10:44:00.000+01:00

Not I

2008-10-13T16:41:00.000+01:00

Another film from the process. Wha is it with me and food-related tasks? I guess it's just that the addition of food to a performative exercise is not only unusual to see, but it also adds so many interesting dimensions to a performance - issues of disgust, pain, abjection, violation, emotion, involuntary actions, fluids, sounds, smells...

Open Space... and some thoughts on Aesthetics

2008-10-11T11:03:00.001+01:00

A week ago, my performers and I staged 'The Failure Project' at Open Space, part of the International Workshops Festival. A very weird experience...

All that time ago, when I first sent in my application form to be considered for Open Space, I was very early on in the process. I didn't even have my performers back then, except for Hayley, and the whole piece was a speck in my mind at that point.

We arrived on the Saturday and immediately, two elements jumped out at me that worried me - firstly, the space was MASSIVE. Much bigger than Performance Space 1. I was concerned that the space would be too big for my performers, and would drown out the piece. We didn't have much time to deal with the bigness of the space either. Secondly, the lighting. I already knew that the lighting of the space would be simple - that's fine, I thought, we can deal with that. I had read on the website that there was a lighting rig and thought we could come up with something simple but atmospheric. When I arrived, I realised that by 'simple' lighting, they meant 'the lightbulbs on the ceiling' - no lighting rig at all. AH!

OK, I thought, never mind, we still have the music, our props, and most importantly of all, the performers, their tasks, and their interactions with each other and the audience.

So evening came along and it was time to perform - we were third out of four pieces to be shown that night (the other three pieces were all dances). I took my seat and watched my performers on stage.

My first instinct was: it's bombing. In fact I whispered to my boyfriend in the middle of it "(the audience hate it!)". My boyfriend looked at me and nodded in sympathy. Oh bloody hell. My performers marched through the performance valiently, giving it energy, trying to use as much of the space as they could, trying to connect with the spectators, but they didn't have an audience to bounce off of like they usually do. Which is fair enough, I guess - the audience are not obliged to do anything.

Sarah Jane told me that she had received some really positive comments after the show from audience members who had come up to her...Mandy also had the theory that dance audiences tend to be very subdued in general, whether they like something or not. I don't know about that...So was I wrong in thinking it went badly? I won't get the chance to receive proper feedback from the audience there that night so I probably won't ever know. I have confidence in this piece, and in the performers. So I don't feel bad about Open Space. But for me, what I was watching in front of me that night felt - as alien and strange.

What became clear to me on that night is just how much of the piece has been constructed and designed. I hadn't realised, but I made it for Performance Space 1, and outside of that context, without the lighting I had designed, with the restrictions on our actions due to the dance floor, without any of the filmed material, the atmosphere was completely transformed. This is reassuring for me to know. I had been having some problems before the festival about the aesthetics of the piece - despite all my talk about construction the design of the piece is fairly minimalist (I think), with many elements dependant on the improvisational nature of the piece, and I was worried that people could then conclude that because it wasn't conventionally beautiful, I hadn't put any thought into it. Having now seen the difference it makes to the piece, I don't think that now.

So where does that leave us in terms of taking the piece to other places? I still want to, and I don't think I have to compromise the peice in order to do so. So if I'm going to find a way of negotionating these two worries, I need to take the same time I did in creating the aesthetic for the original piece, in order to create a NEW aesthetic for a NEW space and context. A one hour technical rehearsal, never having seen the soace before,is not going to cut it.

Yes, Lets

2008-10-10T23:09:00.000+01:00

An epic tale of an afternoon spent with The Failure Project performers. The game 'yes, let's'...played to the extreme. The idea was to get everyone feeling more comfortable with each other, to open up, to be silly, to let go.

Retrospective

2008-10-02T21:09:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the lack of posting recently. I have meant to write something here quite a few times in the past couple of weeks, but with the festival and everything, I have had barely enough time to think, let alone write a coherent blog.

But now that the festival has finished…Ahhh. Time for the retrospective post, the one written after it’s all over, though for me it isn’t really since I will be continuing with my investigations into failure at least until I have graduated. The post filled with snappy lines about how much we’ve all learnt. Sorry, just realised how sarcastic that sounds. For me at least, I have learnt a massive amount. The process of putting on a piece in general, any piece, has been a valuable experience just in terms of the practical stuff, of setting up lighting, props, sound, of putting all the technical stuff into place, organising rehearsals and, yes, health and safety (shudder). Of course I’ve done all this before, but never as the sole, lone director.

Directing (or facilitating, whatever you wanna call what I did) four other performers has also taken me on a huge learning curve – I had to discover a tougher, more assured side to my personality and basically be a ‘leader’, which is something I had to work on as it doesn’t come naturally to me. When my boyfriend Jefferson (who wrote and animated the text shown in the film) came to watch a rehearsal, he commented afterwards on how weird it was to see me be authoritative. I had to watch each rehearsal like a hawk, concentrating on everything I saw and detecting the relationships and dynamics of each performer to the tasks, the other performers, me, and themselves, using these observations to inform how I then devised each following task, considering who did what and with whom. I won’t go into the details now of what exactly I perceived these dynamics and relationships to be – this isn’t the right forum to go spilling into a psychological analysis of everyone. And anyway, perhaps the performers already have a clue of what my observations might have been. But it has become clear to me that this was one of the most important elements of this process – that I try and gain as much information as possible about these performers and everything that made them tick (which is why as well as my own observations, we would spend a lot of time in each rehearsal chatting about how each task felt for each performer. I also gave each performer a questionnaire to fill in, and invited two other people to witness rehearsals and discuss with me their own observations).

This emphasis on the uniqueness and individual personality of each performer during the process, and then in the piece itself, was crucial – the piece was about stripping away, or peeking through, the layers of artifice, or ‘performance’, that we see on stage so often, exposing the human being that is live, in the flesh, there on the stage in front of us. Of witnessing a piece of theatre that was truly present, live, ‘now’ through witnessing struggle, weakness, failure.

My performers were performing, and not performing, at the same time.

Am I talking rubbish? I feel like I’m going off on one…

In general, I think I am a better director, deviser, practitioner, than I was at the beginning of this process. I still think that ‘failure’ has not been exhausted as a concept. I also think there are ways that I could have made the piece better – for example…I had always seen three shows as three experiments, and marketed it to audiences that way. The way I devised it, as improvisational and task-based, fitted this too. I tried as much as I could, therefore, to change the variables of each of these experiments, changing the music each night, changing the nature of Sarah Jane’s tasks (both in the messages she reveals to the audience and the structure of the tasks themselves), and of course, as it was improvisational, expecting the performers to improvise with new material every night, approaching the tasks in new ways each time and giving the audience new information in the introduction and conclusion. I do think, however, I could have gone even further with it – ideally, I wanted to change the order of the tasks, perhaps play around with the lighting or sound more, even give them new tasks – for obvious practical reasons, however, none of this was really possible. In terms of the course and what I was required to do, it would have been too messy to change all this stuff, too much like I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and just changing stuff for the sake of it rather than to actually examine if it changed the nature of the performance, and anyway, the technical and production staff wouldn’t have stood for it.

Watching the piece in the three performances was a strange experience for me – I felt a great sense of pride at seeing my ‘baby’ up there on stage, obviously, and it was very gratifying to hear the audiences responses (whether it was laughter, applause, cheering, or even in some cases, sighing and noises of frustration or suspense). I was also proud that the performers threw themselves into it so much – each of them, in different ways, whether emotionally or physically, pushed themselves in the live performances, and revealed more and more of themselves. It’s not an easy thing to do. There will always be a certain amount of self-censorship present in people, but given more time with this group, I can’t help but think about the possibilities, about developing this idea of exposure into different areas, different types of performance, different questions, etc. etc. I wonder what the performers have taken from the experience – hopefully, they will have gained, in some sense, a better awareness of their own behaviours, they way they think and behave not just in performance but in everyday life.

The audience responses were very interesting too – many audience members were torn between laughter and discomfort, between wanting the performers to succeed and wanting them to fail. Let’s take, for example, Darren’s scene, and the range of responses it garnered. Some found it entertaining and funny, some found it deeply uncomfortable (the most difficult task to watch, in fact). As the performers and I discussed recently, some cheered whenever Darren caught a sweet in his mouth – but only so that he could fill his mouth completely and fail and the speech task. Many people seemed thoughtful after the show, and wanted to ask more questions and find out more about the process. All of these responses are brilliant to me – firstly, because it is just so interesting discovering how people respond to what are very emotive topics (success and failure). Secondly, because I wanted to play with these emotions by juxtaposing them – some people recalled laughing and then feeling very uncomfortable straight afterwards, wishing someone to fail then feeling very guilty for wishing that in the first place, feeling upset at someone’s failure then seeing something that suddenly renders the whole thing ridiculous, or finding the whole thing entertaining but then being struck by and suddenly realising a performer’s emotional and physical investment, or exposure, in a scene. Thirdly, I didn’t want to stamp my own opinions too much onto the piece. I wanted to create an experience that encouraged each spectator to bring their own personalities to the piece and how they viewed it, creating their own version of events, if you like.

I think I’m babbling…

I’m glad I have done this piece, and that I have done it with these performers. It has been a long, difficult, tiring, sometimes exhausting and exasperating experience. It has also been littered with failures. But I am so glad I have done it.

The Wise Words of Tim Etchells

2008-09-15T14:24:00.000+01:00

'Investment is what happens when the performers before us seem bound up unspeakably with what they are doing - it seems to matter to them, it appears to hurt them or threatens to pleasure them, it seems to touch them, in some quite and terrible way.
Investment draws us in. Something is happening - real and therefore risked - something seems to slip across from the private world to the public one - and the performers are 'left open' or 'left exposed'.
To be bound up with what you are doing, to be at risk in it, to be exposed by it. As performers we recognise but cannot always control these moments - they happen, perhaps, in spite of us.'

We, performers of the Failure Project, need to invest. With a week to go we need to push against, stretch out and commit to our given tasks. Seek, discover, embarrass and expose. Who cares if we don't?

'Investment is the bottom line - without it nothing matters'

2008-09-09T12:03:00.001+01:00

Hi.
Blog post number 1 from the biggest failure in the group...having failed so far in not contributing to the blog.
Just checking to see if this works and I am promising you all that I will write something a little more in depth this evening!
Hope you are all well and looking forward to Failing.

Love H x

Inevitable Failure

2008-09-07T20:01:00.000+01:00

Exposure - Questionnaire

2008-09-02T08:37:00.000+01:00

Full Name
Amanda Castro Romasanta

Date of Birth
17th April 1985

Height
I make a point of not knowing this as it is a sore subject – but I imagine it’s 5ft 1 or 2

Weight
51 kilos – I know this because the doctor told me recently

Eye Colour
Brown

Hair colour (both real and fake if applicable)
Brown

Shoe Size
Mostly 4, sometimes a 5

Clothes Size
Mostly 8, sometimes a 10

Nationality
Spanish (both parents are from Spain, I was born in London)

Distinguishing physical features
Frizzy, curly hair, shortness, no scars but all the women in my family have a mole on the back of their neck.

What is the first album you bought?
Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morrissette – I must have been going through my angry woman phase but I stand by my purchase!

What is your favourite film?
I can never answer this question but just for the heck of it…The Big Lebowski. To my mind, it’s perfect in every way.

What is your guilty pleasure (something you should be ashamed to like)?
This is a recent one, but during the bank holiday weekend I found myself sucked into watching more MTV than I usually would, and now I am obsessed with The Hills. I’m sorry. There is something fascinating about watching idiots live lives that don’t correspond to my experience of real life on TV.

What was the last argument you had and with whom?
It was probably with my sister – I was ordering pizza over the internet, and she asked me to order something in particular which I didn’t hear, even though I was sitting right next to her. When I got it wrong she got pissed off at me so I told her to order her own damn pizza and walked off, laptop in hand. I feel stupid even re-telling this story.

What is the song that you feel most represents you?
I've thought about this long and hard and have NO idea.

If you were on a desert Island and could have only one item what would it be?
Jefferson Toal (although I wouldn’t call refer to him as an item). I literally couldn’t get by without him.

If you were animal, which one would you be and why?
I’ve always admired cats for being independent and intelligent and beautiful and just generally being very cool and although they’re a bit too selfish for my liking I’ll go with them anyway, because they’re also very funny (especially when they fall over).

What was the last lie you told?
I lie all the time at work, so it was probably there…it wasn’t a specific lie, but this morning I did pretend to go and do something work-related when actually I was making a personal phone call. I also spent over half an hour reading over my boyfriend’s dissertation instead of working. In my defence, I make up for constantly taking breaks by working hard and being quite good at my job the rest of the time (and I’m a fast typer so I can get away with it)

What was the biggest lie you’ve told?
I never really tell major lies...I did get myself a job on the understanding I would stay for at least a year, I when actually I was secretly planning to leave after six months and go travelling. When I left, I told them I was going to make documentaries in India, and they believed me (only the first half of it was true)
I heard yesterday of a friend of a friend who pretended to be blind for two years…now THAT is a lie.

What are your 3 most positive character traits?
I think I am caring, creative and passionate.

What are your 3 most negative character traits?
Probably that I am impatient, sarcastic, and lacking in confidence.

Now get a close friend to answer questions 21 and 22.
My ‘close friend’ (i.e. Jeff) refused to answer the question properly, but eventually said:
Positive Traits: Nice, funny, and intelligent.
Negative Traits: She won’t play ‘Braid’ (a computer game), she makes me answer stupid questions, she doesn’t 'get' Lost (which I do, I just don’t think it’s that great).

What was the best day of your life?
Hmmm…I can’t really say. I don’t really think I’ve had anything good enough to label ‘the best day of my life’, wasn’t that excited when I got any of my exam results, haven’t won anything major, not married, no kids…that’s usually what people pick. I was pretty darn happy when me and Jeff got together though; that was pretty good, and it had been preceeded by a pretty wicked day hanging out with him and one of my best friends Sahil on the Sussex Downs.

What was the worst day of your life?
The day my grandmother died. She had been taken to hospital about a week earlier suffering from pneumonia – the doctors had expected her to make a full recovery but one night she suddenly took a massive turn for the worse and there was nothing they could do for her. The whole family came to the hospital, sat in her intensive care room, and watched her die. I remember obsessively staring at the screen that showed her heartbeat and breathing, waiting for something to happen. My grandfather’s death would also be up there except that when my grandmother died, I was already pretty depressed due to other problems in my family and general stress at school.

Tell me a secret.
I won't ever allow different foods to touch on my plate.

What character traits do you admire in others?
Bravery, kindness and humour.

What character traits do you despise in others?
Rudeness, being inconsiderate of others, and cowardice

What is the most pain you have ever been in?
When I was about 5 years old, my mum was in the kitchen ironing. I was in the kitchen too and for some inexplicable reason decided it would be a good idea to touch the hot side of the iron, which I did, with my entire hand. Thankfully I don’t remember the pain, only the screaming and shouting and being picked up, and then later showing off my bandaged hand to everyone in sight.

What has been the biggest failure in your life?
As I’ve said before I honestly don’t feel like I have encountered any massive failure. I do wish though, that I wasn’t one of those people that is terrible at most physical stuff. I can dance (in a club), I can do a forward roll, and swim enough to not drown, and that’s it. I feel like people get kudos for being naturally good at this stuff and it’s something that I’ve never been able to access, even when I try practising.

What has been the biggest success in your life?
I take great pride in the fact that I funded my travelling and my entire MA completely by myself, without help from my parents. If I’m honest, I have a slight chip on my shoulder about it. It’s very important to me to have that level of independence (although I do still live at home which I don’t particularly want to do).

What was your biggest failure on stage?
When my boob fell out of my top in the middle of a show (which, incidentally, was a absurdist version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream)…I want to curl up and die when I think about it, I truly do.

Name a physical action you have never been able to do.
Cartwheel, amongst many other things.

What scares you the most?
I would really, REALLY hate to die by drowning, I don’t know why but to me it would be a terrifying way to die. I’m even more terrified of getting Alzheimer’s – my grand father had it and it was the most heartbreaking thing in the world to see him deteriorate day by day. When you have it you become a different person – you not only lose your mental faculties like memory, but your personality, the essence of your being. To me, Alzheimer’s killed him way before he actually, physically died.

What excites you the most?
Performing and performance can give me a real buzz that is unlike anything else. I also like rollercoasters.

When was the last time you cried?
I think it was when I saw a really graphic picture of someone dead on the internet – it was a girl who had died in the middle of an exorcism. I am usually quite mentally strong when it comes to stuff like this, but it was unexpected and a very, very horrible picture. Not in the sense that it was bloody and gory or anything – she just looked terrifying.

What is your biggest regret?
Not being there for Jefferson when he was going through a really tough time (I was travelling).

What makes you laugh?
Lots of things…I have a sense of humour that can be very dark, but I love very silly things too. One thing that has been making me laugh non-stop at the moment is this You Tube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLGfbL9Cfxc

What is your most burning desire in life?
To make a good career out of my passion for performance (never gonna happen, is it?)

Fill in the gap:
SIAC!

Exposure

2008-08-20T19:39:00.000+01:00

I had been planning to write a post on the blog about the difficulties of the facilitator/director's role in a piece like this. During rehearsals I have always feel a complex mixture of emotions - an envy where I wish that I could be doing the tasks too, a (some would say machiavellian) desire to set the performers even more difficult, arduous and mean tasks, and a guilt at setting these tasks and then just sitting back and watching, unable to fully take part. These last two emotions have been the most difficult to negotiate - how can I balance them both? How can I push my performers but do so in a healthy, happy, accepting atmosphere? I feel like I had already been making progress (our blindfolding exercises, for example, get better, more engaging and adventurous every time we do it) but realistically we just don't have the time to develop each task in the same way.

I had conveyed these emotions to a colleague, Jessica Hartley, who is at the moment writing a PHD thesis on risk, fear, exposure and failure in performance and pedagogy. She agreed to come to a rehearsal and, in her words, 'poke' us, with games and exercises based on physical and emotional exposure.

It was a fascinating experience.

As a group we were hesitant, we held back, and were overly polite and nice to each other - we obviously still have some way to go in terms of truly exposing ourselves as performers and people. However, what pleased me the most - apart from what I learnt about my performers, how they work, what they are like, and how they interact with each other through watching them during these games, was their positivity and commitment to the project in future rehearsals, to pushing themselves, and allowing themselves to be pushed.

I came to the rehearsal looking for validation, for the green light to be the facilitator/director that I want to be, and happily, I found it. Future rehearsals may have a completely different feel to them now...

I am in the present and only the present matters to me.

2008-08-18T17:09:00.000+01:00

As I continue my research for my portfolio I have observed the existing argument between imagination and presence. Actor training still currently relies on Stanislavski's system. Actors are encouraged to use their imagination to 'transform' themselves into a character, and the emphasis is placed heavily on the individual. It is interesting then to look at eastern styles of training, such as Suzuki, whose aim is to train the actor to be present at all times, constantly ready to accept and react to the unexpected. The emphasis is on the ensemble working together, and in order to do so, the actor can not escape or drift into his or her own imagination.

Today Darren and I participated in what has been labeled as 'the blind fold exercise'. Throughout Darren was really taunting me, tapping me in different places, lifting and spinning me, and overall, completely disorienting me. By the end I was truly exhausted, primarily physically, but my emotions had begun to creep in as well. Feeling abused and fatigued I felt on the verge of tears. Naturally I do not know what the experience was of watching this performance. However, I imagine this real human experience was theatrically interesting. Some would say this was not acting; however, I would argue that 'acting' is a subjective term. We naturally begin to portray a performative self when placed in front of others or a camera in this case. Furthermore, as the exercise progressed stories start to creep in. I imagined I was a prisoner of war at one point, then it seemed as though we were lovers fighting. See? It is impossible NOT to involve the imagination. But it is my belief that the answer to creating exciting theatre is through liveness (being present and allowing anything to happen), whether that is through true physical pain, exhaustion, or failure.

www.uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2sZbrclbwTs

2008-08-16T15:49:00.001+01:00

www.uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2sZbrclbwTs

Just tried the other link and it didn't work maybe this one will?

www.uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2sZbrclbwTs

2008-08-16T15:49:00.000+01:00

www.uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2sZbrclbwTs

Just tried the other link and it didn't work maybe this one will?

2008-08-16T15:46:00.000+01:00

www.uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2sZbrclbwTs

Failure.

2008-08-16T15:35:00.000+01:00

Well Fridays rehearsal was interesting. I left with a feeling of failure and by what, a recorded series of bleeps. I felt a genuine sense of failure at not completing that bleep test so much so that I really want to do it again with some shoes on just to prove to myself that I can do it.

Anyway heres a link thats quite funny and involves both restriction and failure. Enjoy.

Bringing the Performer's Own Identity into the Room

2008-08-14T23:22:00.000+01:00

My own research has focused on the use of the performer's identity in the devising process and in performance. I am interested in how the performer's own opinions and natural reactions can influence the process. As an experiment I asked everyone to participate in an exercise we had done previously (The White Moment). This time; however, they were not allowed to make up a random, fantastical topic. Instead, they were asked to give a presentation on an issue they truly care about (for instance, I spoke about my inability as an American to get a job in this country). In previous attempts at this exercise no one truly reached a 'white moment', the moment at which the individual realizes he/she is standing in front of an audience and has just exposed their self by ranting to such an extreme that he/she has lost all sense of time and place. To achieve this the individual must let go of any inner constraints and allow themselves to be completely uninhibited. Perhaps this is why everyone was even more reserved when speaking as their self. The absurd topics that were generated served as a sort of mask. Everyone seemed astonished by themselves when they finished, often saying "I swear I don't know where that came from; I don't know why I said those things." When forced to speak on a real-life issue there was no mask to hide behind, and each individual subsequently became more self-conscious. No one built to a climax. Instead, each time someone got a bit worked up, he/she would quickly back down; perhaps fearing that the others would judge him/her as bad-tempered? It would be interesting to see how we perform this same exercise under the guise of a mask or a costume. I am finding this to be a key element in accessing deeper aspects of the performer's true self.

Still, Silent, Exposed

2008-08-14T16:13:00.000+01:00

The "Stomp" in Tadashi Suzuki's training is a physical reminder for the performer to be in touch with their body, their mind, and their environment. Each stomp forces the performer to be present; the foot pounding the earth is the constant reminder "I am here now... now... now".
Having trained in such physical forms, I am capable of engaging with my body and mind to be present in each moment when physically active. However, being still with nothing to do terrifies me. I struggle to engage moment by moment and fear that every member of the audience can see my excruciating discomfort. As for my presence, it becomes either bad/negative or non existent.

I began to wonder; how then is it possible to achieve presence when there is no physical reminder? How can a performer be and remain present with the performer is still, quiet and unmoving? And how can I challenge my fear of being immobile and silent on stage?

Ariane Mnouchkine observes 'that presence increases with the capacity of the actor to be naked'.
As such I became the Exposed Body; to magnify my weaknesses, to challenge my comforts, to be naked and exposed to what ever is happening and who ever is watching, to discover how, where and if it is possible to be present when my task is to do nothing.

An Introduction to Speed Reading (Version Two)

2008-08-13T19:12:00.000+01:00

I think Google is having some problems with its videos these days, so I don't know why I'm even bothering to upload this, but here it is anyway: version two of 'An Introduction to Speed Reading', this time with the text included.

Word Cloud

2008-08-11T21:41:00.000+01:00

I came across a cool little website on the internet that takes blogs and turns them into 'word clouds', in which the most used words are displayed largest. Take a look at the word cloud generated from this blog:

What word is notable by its absence?

FAILURE.

I cant even find where 'failure' is, though I'm sure it must make an appearance somewhere. I started wondering what this meant and realised I was relieved to see that it wasn't the main feature there.

To be continuing to center on 'failure' as the sole focus of my work would to me mean I wasn't doing it right, that I wasn't developing my ideas and taking them depper, further. It's becoming about more than failure, now - through the frame of failure in the performing body I am looking at other things, asking other questions, making other discoveries.

This isn't failure for the sake of failure (can that technically even exist?) - it is there in order to uncover profound questions about performance, about the way performers and people deal with their bodies and with others, about presence, about liveness and the moment in performance, about honesty and spontanetity in performance, what they mean, and why they are important.

So, what words feature most prominently? 'Performers', followed by 'body' and 'moments'...hooray!

I think I'll keep making word clouds throughout the process, as a visual aid to my explorations and how they are progressing.

This is where it all happens...

2008-08-10T14:37:00.000+01:00

So now we have our four performers, they have all met each other (although we have yet to see everyone in the same room together), and we’ve started some, perhaps tentative, tasks.

I have defined each performer’s ‘thing’:

Sarah Jane: the exposed body.

Hayley: the enduring body.

Mandy: the displaced body.

Darren: the restricted body.

Now is the time to start pushing it.

To start pushing the performers, their limits, their bodies, their emotions, their everything, to run the risk that they will hate me by the end of this process but do it anyway because hopefully we can create something great.

An Introduction to Speed Reading.

2008-08-09T14:04:00.000+01:00

What’s the difference between an homage and a plain old rip-off? I’m not sure I know.

I’ve been deliberating over text within the piece – will there be text at all? If so, where will it come from, how will it be generated, and how will it be incorporated within the piece?
Jane Munro set me the challenge of finding a text which I could potentially use in the Failure Project – this may not be it, but it’s a damn fine text to start with. I took Chris Goode’s ‘An Introduction to Speed Reading’ and set my performers the task of, yes, speed-reading it. I’ve been meaning to set a task based on speech, sound and the movements of the mouth so this seemed perfect.
I’ve edited the results here in my ‘homage’ to both Chris Goode and Beckett’s ‘Not I’ (which I will try to find a video for to add here). Follow this link to read about various productions of ‘Not I’, and the difficulties the actresses who performed in it faced – for some, it became a terrifying but illuminating experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_I

2008-08-07T00:07:00.000+01:00

Can 4 solo performances co-exist on stage???

This was the question that has been plaguing me recently. I didn’t know how to bring each performer’s experience together on stage without it becoming jarring and messy to the spectator.
I used to think I would solve this problem with staging; just mess about with the staging in some way so that each performer is in their self-contained space, never interacting with the other performers. I came up with a million complicated staging ideas with this in mind.

This is now a terrible idea to me!

Each performer will follow their own unique journey, but bridges and cross-overs between have already become apparent and should be recognised and built upon. What I as director need to do now is create a structure to the piece from which the performers can improvise on the night – integrating and juxtaposing those moments of solitude with those including the other performers, moments of tension with moments of release, moments of connectedness with fragmentary moments, playing with the dynamics, shapes and tensions of the action etc. etc…to make something (hopefully) beautiful which the performers can play with and within.

Yes? No!

2008-08-01T23:43:00.000+01:00

Sometimes the simplest-seeming tasks can be the most impossible.

Have you ever played the yes-no game? We did it all the time in my school.

There used to be a gameshow on TV called Take Your Pick, hosted by Des O’Connor. In order to get through to the next round, contestants had to pass the yes-no game, in which they were asked a series of questions to which they were NOT allowed to answer with “yes” or “no”. It seems pretty simple, right? Our performers certainly thought so…I had a few confused looks from them when I suggested it as the very first exercise in our process.

It is actually incredibly tough - as they all found out - simply because it involves suppressing an action which, although small, is extremely instinctual. “Yes” and “no” are the sorts of words that can roll off the tongue without you even knowing you’ve said them, so often are they used in everyday life. The game is about the elimination of habitual and almost natural-seeming actions – replacing a normal response (“yes”) with one which, in the context of the question, seems completely unnatural (“I DO have Turkey at Christmas!”).

It’s an ideal game for the Failure Project…in the film below, we see our performers struggle as they fight off impending failure, and react as they, inevitably, fail. Notice their body language – often tense, on edge – and their emotional responses – laughter, anger, frustration, and often, disbelief.

The Failure Project: Brie Sandwiches

2008-07-21T20:58:00.000+01:00

This is the scene that inspired me when setting myself the grapefruit-eating task.

In the special features on the Twin Peaks DVD, the actors speak about their reluctance to go as far as David Lynch wanted, and their fear of looking stupid, and I think this comes across in the scene - in my opinion, they could have taken it a lot further. So how does a performer let go of this fear, and how can a director encourage this fearlessness? I hope to find out.

Archiving Practice: The Film

2008-07-21T15:19:00.000+01:00

Here is the video my colleague Brody made of my experiments during the Archiving Practice Workshops with Chris Clow.

Responses to Failure: playing the blame game

2008-07-15T21:12:00.000+01:00

Another 'psychic' - James Hydrick, who claimed he could move objects with his mind, being debunked on live TV by the sceptic James Randi, who has asked Hydrick to perform his 'gift' under controlled conditions designed to prevent cheating.

Pay special attention to James' face at around 11 minutes 55 seconds. He is approaching his imminent failure, and he knows it - what do you think is going through his mind at this moment?

Responses to Failure: denial

2008-07-14T14:24:00.000+01:00

Sylvia Browne is a famous "psychic" and medium. She appears regularly on American TV, has published a number of books, hosts her own radio show on paranormal issues and gives psychic readings. She is a controversial figure and critics argue that she is a fraud, using 'cold reading' in order to give the ilusion of psychic ability.

This is a short video showing two of her more notorious failures in her premonitions whilst appearing on the Montel Williams show (excuse the weird comedy music and text the makers have added to the video):

I suppose one way of dealing with failure is to pretend the failure never occured...

The ******* Project

2008-07-08T20:18:00.001+01:00

So…I’ve been thinking a lot about Failure at the moment (what else?!) Particularly, the word Failure. I’m starting to question my use of this word in reference to this project. When in doubt, I turn to the dictionary:

fail·ure

1. an act or instance of failing or proving unsuccessful; lack of success: His effort ended in failure. The campaign was a failure.

2. nonperformance of something due, required, or expected: a failure to do what one has promised; a failure to appear.

3. a subnormal quantity or quality; an insufficiency: the failure of crops.

4. deterioration or decay, esp. of vigor, strength, etc.: The failure of her health made retirement necessary.

5. a condition of being bankrupt by reason of insolvency.

6. a becoming insolvent or bankrupt: the failure of a bank.

7. a person or thing that proves unsuccessful: He is a failure in his career. The cake is a failure.

When looking at these definitions, I can see links between them and my own ideas, which feature various failures that can take place in the performing body (particularly in definitions 1-4). They are broad enough for failure to be what the subject makes of it. However, when thinking about the various responses to my project, perhaps the definition of failure is still an issue in my work. Perhaps it is too negative a word to use – when I use it, some people immediately prescribe value judgements to it, assuming that I am talking about ‘good’ or ’bad’ performance and ‘good’ or ‘bad’ performers. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Failure Project is NOT a negative one, it is not about telling performers there is something wrong with, that they are rubbish, it is not about judging the value of things. It is about honesty – being honest about one’s own physical limits, quirks and foibles, confronting them, and then utilising them in performance. I’m reminded of Jon Davison’s clown workshop, in which the performers were encouraged to confront the emotions they were really feeling, in the moment of performing, particularly if their improvisations were ‘failing’ (i.e. not funny), and to use these emotions in their performances. It was in recognising, confronting, and utilising this ‘truth’ that their scenes and improvisations came alive.

Maybe the whole enterprise should be renamed ‘The Honesty Project’?

A Stage of Transition...Part Two

2008-07-07T15:25:00.000+01:00

And so, with these considerations in mind (among others), I took part in the Archiving Practice Workshop led by Chris Clow. I had no idea what these workshops would entail, and was completely unprepared when I turned up on the Tuesday, to be told I would need to have some practice ready to show and to be filmed the next day! This year I'm having to get used to working in ways which don't seem natural to me - it felt strange prescribing everything I was going to do and explore next term in my Research Proposal - I would usually let my process develop more organically - and it felt strange here, rushing into practice when I didn't feel ready to. Sometimes, though, using different working methods can bring illuminating results, and it did here with the Archiving Workshops.

On Wednesday I spent most of my 'practice time' explaining to Chris my interests - I then followed this with a silly exercise between me, Elpida and Hayley, almost like a version of Follow The Leader, where Hayley and I had to follow Elpida through a series of difficult dance moves (at which I was embarrasingly terrible). It was all thought up on the spot - I hadn't given any consideration beforehand to it - and as a result it wasn't very engaging or illuminating.

I knew I had to have something more interesting and engaging the next day, and one which had more relevance to my project. I decided to set myself a task, in the same way I planned to set my performers tasks in the process leading up to my Festival piece - a task which was relevant and unique to me.

I arrived the next day with a text I was going to read to my audience (admitedly, the only part of the task I did not put too much thought into - originally, the content of text itself wasn't important, I just needed it to have something to read, but of course, every text brings it's own added meaning to the situation, which I realised quickly). The text was 'Molloy' by Samuel Beckett, which I was currently reading in my spare time. I brought with me a Grapefruit and a knife. I slowly ate the entire Grapefruit, cramming as much of it into my mouth as I could, whilst reading my text.

There were a few questions I wanted to address with this task?

Could I manage both tasks together (to eat and to read) and could I succeed at both of them?
I hate grapefruit - how would I deal with eating an entire one? What issues does it bring up in terms of the body, disgust, and violation?

I didn't know how the task would go - to my surprise, it became in engaging, fascinating, difficult, even distressing moment. The spectators who witnessed it (Chris and Elpida) told me how they couldn't take their eyes away from the scene, how they were moved from laughter to ............., how it was difficult and uncomfortable to watch me in obvious discomfort but how at the same time they willed me to continue and finish. There were also issues of voyeurism at play - I was locked in my own private world during the task, never once acknowledging my 'audience', and at times they wondered if they should be watching me at all.

As the 'performer' in the task it was a strnagely intense experience - extremely physcial and psychological, constantly battling opposing emotions; one willing me to stop before I was sick, the other willing me to continue to the end, the other telling me not to think about any of it, just read the text and eat the fruit.

The next day I recreated the task with another food and another text, but it had lost it's 'magic' from the previous day. We all knew what we were in for this time, and the change in text (this time I chose a deliberately light-hearted one, in response to a request from Chris) and food (celery - les messy than Grapefruit) didn't add anything interesting.

But I think I'm onto something here. I can't quite quite theorise or explain it right now - for the moment, it only exists in the moment, in practice- but I'm excited.

A Stage of Transition

2008-07-07T15:13:00.000+01:00

Once again, it has been ages since my last post...if I fail at anything it'll be this blog, that's for sure. Since our performances at CGP, it's been a period of reflection and analysis, culminating in a Lecture-Presentation we gave a couple of weeks ago and a Research Proposal we handed in last week for the summer term. All of which has served as a bridge between CGP and the start (or continuation) or our process for the Festival in September.

So what has arisen from this process? It would be too long (and possibly too boring) to go into it in massive detail, so let's have it in bullet points:

My work this year has been:

Self-reflexive
Concerned with manifestations of authority in art (or the institution, of the performer, etc.) and what happens when these authorities are questionned or played with
Task-based and improvisational

Where I need to take my investigations into Failure:

Needs narrowing down - too broad, even if it is just focused on the performing body
Needs awareness of the thin line between failure and success - how are these concepts judges, at what point does one become the other, and where do my investigations stand in relation to this?
How can I bring in considerations of the audience into my investigations?

...and more...

More clowns, less failure?

2008-06-06T08:50:00.000+01:00

It's been longer than I intended since my last post...I'm not very good at this bloggin malarkey, am I? Well, since then, lots and lots (and lots) of things have happened - most notably, our performances at the Centre George Pompidou on 29th May.
Yes. It finally happened. After months of preparation, countless revisions, rehearsals, tearing out of hair and minor mental breakdowns, fires in train stations, national strikes, postponements and possible cancellations, it actually happened.

The extra time that we have had to devote to the CGP Project has had one unfortunate consequence, which is that we have mostly had to ignore, or perhaps even for some people, abandon entirely, our personal projects for the Developing Your Disciplines Project (hence the terrible lack of posts on this blog). So where does that leave the Failure Project now? Well, it will play a part in the Viva Voce I have to prepare and present as assessment for this course, albeit in a slightly different way and less visible form than I had first imagined. The main task now is to look at it in the context of the work I have done at the Pompidou Centre, discovering, interpreting and analysing the links and divergences between them. Hopefully, I will be able to devote more time to this Project in the summer.

Anyway...another day, another clown workshop, this time by Jon Davison, and a very different atmosphere and direction to the workshops I observed from John Wright. I sensed a shift in focus in the act of clowning, which semms to lead to a shift in the performer-audience dynamic.

Jon Davison placed great emphasis on honesty of emotion in performance: about each performer being honest about the emotions they were experiencing at that very moment, in real life, as it were, which would then be used in the performance. For example, when an exercise performed by two of the participants in the workshop seemed to be failing, with the scene becoming uninspired and boring, Jon encouraged the performers to use the real feelings of frustration and discomfort that they were experiencing when continuing with the scene. As a result, the scene almost immediately picked up, becoming more interesting, more engaging, and more funny. As Jon himself said at the time "when you don't like where you are...that's a good place to stay". It was all about committing yourself as a performer to the emotion present, whatever it may be, whether positive or negative, whether reasonable or completely weird, without fighting it or trying to change it or lie about it. In this way, the clown character was more of an extension of their real selves and personalities, rather than an outside character added on quite artificially (as I sometimes sensed in the John Wright workshop).

Because of this, I feel the focus of this workshop was more performer-centered, rather than the more heavily audience-centered workshop from John Wright. I felt that during the exercises, the performers were encouraged to focus primarily on what was NOW - what they knew to be present at that very moment, i.e. their own emotions, rather than what they anticipated in the audience later (such as laughter).

Now, in all honestly, the performances and improvisations in the Jon Davison were a lot less funny than the John Wright workshop, and so if you were to judge clowning on terms of its comedic value and of how funny it actually is, John Wright wins (although it may just be that the performers in his workshops were funnier, rather than the method having an influence on how funny it was). However, I found Jon Davison's methods to be more interesting in relation to my own practice, and particularly, the links I feel are present with my interests in the Failure Project. I found his focus on the use of the performer's real experiences in the moment to generate material for performance pertinent to my own ideas of the Failure Project, in which I have asked:

"Failure can often point to the individuality and uniqueness of the performer (each person has their own unique physical limits and traits) – could a performance be created that fully utilises these aspects? In what ways can a performer make him/herself visible when performing and what does this add to or detract from a performance?"
(My Scheme of Work)

I intend to try and get in contact with Jon Davison so I can discuss these issues with him...watch this space.

Clowning: John Wright

2008-05-25T16:07:00.001+01:00

Failure forms the basis of many aspects of comedy (one can think of a million examples of comedy based on the failure of a person, or people, to correctly carry out a task, communicate with others, or interpret a situation correctly).

This is particularly true in the physical comedy one finds in clowning.

No investigation into failure would be complete without an investigation into clowning, and so as part of my research for this project, I went to watch a clowning workshop led by the director John Wright. Wright also very kindly allowed me to interview him via phone, and although my interviwing skills leave much to be desired I was able to gain some very valuable and interesting insights from him.

What struck me most during both the workshop and the interview was the emphasis placed on the audience, or perhaps more accurately, the interaction between the audience and the performer. Throughout the exercises demonstrated to us in the workshop, John could constantly be heard shouting out to the performers "For us! For us!" or "Find us!" ('us' meaning the audience) stressing the need for the performers to establish, and then maintain, a dialogue between themselves and the audience. For him, failure meant a breakdown in this interaction, a lack of interest and engagement in the audience. He calls it the "angel of death", to be avoided at all costs.

For John, the idea of failure in performance was completely located in the audience's reception - whether or not they engaged with a performance, were interested in it, thought it funny or moving...in short, whether a performance ultimately succeeds or fails. And although I of course agree with this, I want to broaden the idea of failure into other areas:

The ability of the performer - what happens if a performer is required to complete physical, vocal or emotional tasks that they are unable to fulfill completely?
Accident and mistake - in what ways does this manifest itself in performance and what effect can it have on performance?

Most importantly, how can a performer negotiate these 'failures' if and when they happen so that they create an interesting and valuable addition to a performance - so they they can move beyond failure and into success?

2008-05-25T00:05:00.000+01:00

One week, 3 days ago, my grandmother - my abuela - died.

I had written a post about this, and intended to include it in this blog - in some ways it seemed to fit the ideas and concepts of failure that I'm looking at - but after a lot of debating with myself have decided to withdraw it. It's not the right time.

The failure begins here...

2008-05-12T22:19:00.000+01:00

Hmmmm. It's difficult to know where to begin these things...

This blog will document my progress (or failure to progress) through the 'Developing Your Discplines' Unit of my MA, Performance Practices and Research. I have decided to focus on the concept of failure in performance during this term, specifically the failures of the performing body (although I'm open to other areas, too). This blog will be a document of my thoughts, musings, ideas etc through this term.

I've never successfully kept a diary before, and blogs often seem like virtual diaries - so we'll see how things go with this. It's interesting, and strange, how many people choose to make their private lives public in this way, but that's another story.