The story you write

The story you write is never the story that happened.

This phrase came to me walking home through windy, chilly Dublin on this January night, post-show, post-drinks, and came truer than I expected, here in this B&B that pretends to have WiFi when it’s nicked from over the road and the weak signal flickers out. My blog draft died shortly after the bit about the story of falling, jumping/ falling, from the top of a tall building. In the show I saw tonight The World In Pictures, this introductory story left “you” suspended—

Next stop Dublin

I’ll be seeing Forced Entertainment’s newest show, The World In Pictures, in Dublin on Jan 19 and 20th. It will be interesting to see one of the big-scale shows with all the bells and whistles after the intimate performances of Exquisite Pain and Quizoola.

The show’s on at the Project Center in Dublin. More soon on all of this!

Exquisite Pain

The company presented Exquisite Pain on Thursday evening at Performance Works for the Push Festival. The venue is a lovely small black-box theatre on the Granville Island tourist wharf. The set is bare except for two wooden tables and chairs, set side by side with a space between them. On each of the tables, an identical bottle of water, a glass, an unbound script.

Playing with Real Things (take 2)

In the Push Festival artist talk that performer Cathy Naden gave, in dialogue with (pre-recorded, video-image) Forced Entertainment director Tim Etchells, she referred to what they do as “playing with real things”. The phrase lingered for me, crystallizing a certain paradox in the work— its upfront artificiality which nevertheless frames states, emotions, fragments of the everyday that we barely notice, because we live in them or move through them, and don’t consider them theatrical or story-worthy. Ordinary things, sub-tragic, that follow an incremental dramaturgy. Like the thoughts that break off when the traffic lights change, only to recur in some other city, jumbled in with shopping lists and the pain of lost friendship.

The artist dialogue, structured as an email correspondence between Cathy and Tim (who couldn’t be in Vancouver for the Festival) over a week or so between Xmas and New Year, is presented live by Cathy and digitally by Tim.

Cooled Down Space

There is a cooled-down space in durational performance (like Quizoola) where things happen that can’t take place in a short, fully scripted theatre show. A kind of gentle, almost tepid, inviting-in. More like being in a gallery, or perhaps a cafe on a rainy day, than in a fourth-wall theatre show. After last night’s performance of Exquisite Pain, which is also a kind of cumulative experience rather than what one might think of as “dramatic”, the performer Robin spoke of Forced Entertainment’s turn towards these simple, pared down shows, after a testing time for the company.

Four Inches from Drowning

Quizoola, one of the two Forced Entertainment shows on at the Push Festival in Vancouver, is a rotating 2-hander, involving three performers. Its structure is simple. The duo performing take it in turns to interrogate one another, drawing from a large sheaf of papers one of them holds (the script). The third (resting) performer sits at the door, looking bored, taking tickets. The questioner asks questions. The respondent replies. It’s basically a take on the game shows the name suggests.

Snow

So, out my window in the Ramada Inn is thick, falling snow. The Fahrenheit Club is outside the window. There is a large purple and red neon parrot right across the street. The building to the left has large glass windows the size of the rooms. On one floor, ballet. On another, what might be aikido. In pulsing fluorescent tubes, in floors stacked vertically, I watch black-glad graceful bodies dance, fight, move, across bare rooms with wooden floors. It’s lovely– like the visual equivalent of cello — bartok or someone. Snow, jetlag, 20 hours awake or in transit… and of course (being forced entertainment) the show I’m going to see is a durational performance in an old cement factory. I feel like I’m reciprocating with my own durational performance.

I’d better stop this and actually turn up my collar and trudge out into the blizzard in search of art. More soon.

Arrival

So, I’m in a small mushroom colored room at the Ramada Inn and Suites in Vancouver. It’s snowing heavily. It’s 4.30pm and tonight’s performance of Quizoola happens at 6pm. It’s one of Forced Entertainment’s “durational performances” That means audience can come and go at any time, which is just as well because jet-lag and the blizzard may make for an early pumpkin hor.

I first saw this performance in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 2000 as part of an international theatre festival, while visiting Belgrade-based Dah Teatar. That was nearly seven years ago, Milosevic had just been extradited (what a word!) to the Hague and the ruins of war were still in everyone’s nostrils.

Travel and writing

This is an adventure in writing about performance. I’m off to Vancouver tomorrow to watch Forced Entertainment’s two shows at the Push Festival, and want to write daily about it. Trying to match the immediacy of live performance with fast, scratchy, note-pad type writing. To write it down before it works into the smoothness of archived memory, with its rewriting/ replaying function almost hidden.

Later, I’ll work these writings into something— a chapter, I hope— but let them be raw first.
I hope to keep some of the weave and rough edges of different times and modes of writing in the finished product.