What can appear in this space?
more and more that’s the question that fascinates me–what are the rules of appearance? IN theatre, yes, but also in the spectacular and theatrical arena of everyday war, the public sphere with its visible superbowl stadiums and hidden returning coffins, its jivin’ mardi-gras balls and (shockingly hidden in plain sight) third world city on the Levee, its everywhere ROTC units and hidden iraqi dead.
michael herr, in Dispatches from Vietnam :
You are as responsible for everything you see as you were for everything you did. The trouble was, you often didn’t know what it was you were seeing til years later, it just stayed stored behind your eyes.
I love this. I don’t think it means I CAUSED everything I see but that untangling its meanings, and the invisibility hidden behind appearance, is my job– to not just stay hypnotized by appearance. (And more and more, by non-appearance— by what’s missing from the picture.) One of the things that’s in the picture, if I’m there looking— is me. It may not seem like it at the time. When we look, we sometimes forget that we are there looking, organizing or holding that picture in place. Why else do charities publish pictures of adorable orphans from war zones?
what can appear in this space– what is the organizing matrix, the ruling system, of what is before us? and how does it “make us look”— in both senses of “make us look” —
how does theatre (and mediated war) fictionalize its audience and or involve our own fiction and meaning-making machinery?
Just been reading Tadeusz Kantor’s wonderful book, A Journey Through Other Spaces and thinking how strongly his writing on theatre resonates with some of Forced Entertainment’s work.
here are some snippets:
‘The s u r f a c e s of all phenomena should be treated with all due respect. It should be enough to stay on these surfaces rather than go inside them, towards inner interpretation and commentaries.” 35
‘The creation of reality, which is as concrete as the auditorium, rather than the creation of illusion, which makes the audience feel safe, should be the ultimate goal on stage. The drama on stage must be ‘created’ rather than ‘taking place’. 37
WAYS OF TREATING MATTER/ PHYSICAL ACTIONS WITHIN AND WITHOUT MATTER:
COMPRESSION/ CRUMPLING/ CRUSHING/ CONTRACTION/ COMMIXTURE/ KNEADING (as one does with dough) POURING/ LEAKING/ FLOATING/SWIMMING/ BRANDING/ THROWING/ SPLASHING/ DABBLING/ TEARING/BURNING/ RAVAGING/ ANNIHILATING/ STITCHING/ BLEACHING/ DIRTYING/ SMEARING.
And on my favorite object, the umbrella:
‘An umbrella is itself a particularly metaphoric Emballage; it is a ‘wrapping’ over many human affairs; it shelters poetry, uselessness, helplessness, defencelessness, disinterestedness, hope, ridiculousness.’ 82
Thinking about umbrella space–there is something here about opening a space, unfurling a surface that did not exist before except in folded form. So this space–newly unfolded–is both imaginary and real.
I miss melodrama. I miss the blood and the fainting and the wonderfully fake gestures, and being able to dismiss the emotional trajectory which is whole-heartedly committed to serving a creaky and pre-ordained plot. I often feel that the American theatre is melodrama in disguise— emotionally and plot wise, it’s as creaky and predictable and flatly unbelievable as melodrama, but with none of the joyous embrace of tacky stage tricks (“Susan and Richard are happily married in Manhattan, when a Middle Eastern stranger intrudes on their marriage and changes their lives forever. They must choose between…” blah blah blah synopsis-speak).
This is the worst of naturalism, whose impulse was radical— it’s as if melodrama were uncomfortably squeezed into the severe corset of naturalism, to the detriment of both.
Or maybe I’m just having a bad day.
What can appear in this space? This is Tim Etchell’s question (from rehearsal blog notes, The World In Pictures)This is THE question, I think, for post-dramatic theatre and also in a wider sense for theatre. If (and we are) doing something other than suspending disbelief and entering fictions in the theatre, then we are surely concerned with appearances. The regional theatre is certainly concerned with appearances— the facsimile of art, in fact, which is increasingly a sealed loop of representation. The truism that art (increasingly forced to justify itself through other guises such as Doing Good) reflects life has become a diminishing fishpond of mirror-ball hypnosis between an aging white upper-middle class audience, and a timid not-for-profit theatre that tries to cater to it by “reflecting” it. (more…)
I took this pic in Vancouver but it pretty much describes Providence right now. 
Theatre is supposed to be in the present tense, though always in struggle with others. After watching all these Forced Entertainment performances, both live and recorded, I have the peculiar and mournful feeling of having fast-forwarded through lives I didn’t live. Because I saw Quizoola and Exquisite Pain in Vancouver, the performers there (Robin and Cathy) first appeared to me as their forty-something selves. Now, as if the past were out-takes of the present, I’ve been watching their younger and younger selves perform. I feel like some kind of time vampire, perched evilly at the screen, as if it is my attention that is creasing their time-lines — but of course this is dumb hubris. (more…)
The chronology of this blog is weird. I haven’t seen these shows in the order they were made so what’s here is my own idiosyncratic encounter with the work. First Night was made in 2001, the year I began teaching on September 11. (It was a wash; most of my students came from New York and for the very first and only time I can remember in the US, no-one could say anything. Unfortunately, that’s been rectified with a vengeance.)
In First Night, structured as a kind of desperate and bad vaudeville performance, there’s a sequence where the performers emerge from behind red velvet curtains and form a line downstage, smiling fixedly at the audience. Even though I saw this on video, I could smell the sweaty fear and resentment emanating from the performer’s faces. (more…)
So, here (from Dublin) is a scene from some yet-to-be-staged performance…
I want to return to The World In Pictures, the Forced Entertainment show I saw in Dublin and wrote about several posts back (‘the story you write…’. I think I was being grumpy and more fixed on what it wasn’t than what it was when I wrote about it in Dublin. (more on that soon). Why do I think this? Because images and moments from the show keep coming back to me. For some reason I’m seeing astroturf, the hysterical green of fake grass, and Terry’s deadpan slide show of images of banal, everyday things like meat in plastic wrap. I don’t actually remember whether there WAS this lurid fake grass in the show, or if I’ve furnished it to fit some mental mise en scene. But this is the thing with shows, if they are alive they mutate and keep dividing in memory long after the event.
(more…)
