Hello again!

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...

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?

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

(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...

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

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!

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.