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…