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.

In the meantime...

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...

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

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.