REPETITIVE STRAIN

More weeks in New York

2011-11-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

8th Ave, NY, 17th October 2011, 14.15

Avenue B, NY, 18th October 2011, 14.33

East 9th Street, NY, 18th October 2011, 14.54

North 7th and Kent, Brooklyn, 22nd October, 17.45

Nassau and Bedford Ave, 23rd October, 1.05

Brooklyn Bridge, NY, 23rd October 2011, 18.35

On the G train, October 25th 2011, 17.12

Wooster Street, 28th October 2011, 18.12

A week in New York

2011-10-16T13:06:00.001-07:00

West 27th Street, Sunday 16th October, 1.30pm

34 St Penn Station subway, Thursday October 13th, 11.35pm

Espace, Hell's Kitchen, Thursday October 13th, 11.10pm
Angela Bassett at the party for the opening of The Mountaintop on Broadway. Spike Lee wore a ridiculous velour hat.

Occupy Wall Street, 18.00pm
CHANGE is in the air

Occupy Wall Street, Sunday October 9th, 5.15pm
The first Spanish language General Assembly had been going on for about an hour, and these women gathered next to it and laid out these two flags, then a series of pink crucifixes and long powder blue evening gloves with slogans and ideals written in black pen.

Occupy Wall Street, Sunday 9th October, 4.55pm

Looking up in Bryant Park, Saturday 8th October, 18.30pm

*Not pictured: Spiderman the Musical (urgh); The Creators Project in DUMBO with FourTet; tacos at Paquitos; 5.40am at the Brickyard, Hell's Kitchen on Saturday morning watching Wales lose to France in the Rugby World Cup.

A week in London

2011-10-11T13:15:00.001-07:00

Liverpool Street Station, Thursday October 6th, 14.22pm
This child has amazingly lizardlike hands.

Liverpool Street Station, Thursday 6th October, 14.15pm
This man was standing underneath the departures board. I asked him "Is it ok if I take your photo?" He calmly looked at me and said "Everything is".

Soho, Wednesday 5th October, 3.15pm

Broadway Market, London Fields, Saturday 1st October 1.50am
A woman aged 30 was shot at the bus stop just before 2am. I was cycling home and approached the bus stop about 10 minutes after the police arrived. They were putting up cordons. The shirtless man was extremely drunk and harassing a policewoman to find his shirt for him. The policewoman was trying to take a witness statement from the young man in red, who gave the drunk man his jacket.

Friday 30th September, 1.55pm

An empty greeting

2011-09-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

Shoreditch High Street, September 30th 2011.

Djokovic v. Nadal: This Time It's Personal

2011-09-27T03:38:00.001-07:00

September 12th 2011. A day later than scheduled, a day after the most portentous date in the American calendar. A day after the day that sparked two wars - one barely masquerading as over, the other the longest in US history, whose casualty toll reaches over 250,000, showing no signs of abating, as renewed attacks from the Taliban have seen the intelligence agencies of the US and Britain. The eve of that portentous date, a truck bomb in central Afghanistan killed 5 Afghans and injured 77 US soldiers. A day which signifies unending, fractious offensives; offensives which come with deeply embedded psychologies: military cruelty presented as the fight between ideologies.

24 hours after that portentous date - and itself a day later than planned - a different kind of battle, between two foreign powers.

The US Open Tennis Men's Final.

World no.1 Novak Djokovic, bulldozing his way back from 2 sets to 0 down against Roger Federer in the semi finals (for the second year running), against defending champion Rafael Nadal - defeated Wimbledon finalist, 5 times losing finalist to Djokovic in 2011. Their rivalry this year has felt more like a war, in which the reigning king has been eroded and exploded by the Serbian's unbelievable resilience and strength in depth.

This was a battle. Brutal. Attritious. Contentious. And not just competitive - but combative. A battle whcih Djokovic inevitably won - but nonetheless a match which, over 4 sets, took nearly 4 and a half hours.

It hurt to watch. The two men were beating each other to a pulp, running so hard and striking the ball with such power that each shot really was that: a shot. Discharged with inconceivable force; two men armed. Literally. Weapons growing out of their shoulders, at times firing canons; at others, tricky, terrifying snipers, seeking the lines and corners.

This mammoth, hugely entertaining battle marks a new rivalry: Djokovic and Nadal. But unlike the previous rivalry which dominated men's tennis - that between Nadal and Federer, who have competed in 8 Grand Slam Finals (Nadal victorious in 6), and produced the greatest match of all time in the Wimbledon Final 2008 - this one will not be as dazzling in the ability of both players to bring the best out of each other.

Nadal and Federer's games fit each other like gloves - they challenged and responded to each other in ways previously impossible. But Djokovic and Nadal will not reign together. They'll wax and wane in turn: because their rivalry, with two styles so similar, is one of outdoing. Djokovic's game is effectively modelled on Nadal's (whose game was modelled on beating Federer's): phenomenal fitness, incredible returns, defence-into-attack, the grinding of opponents and the surprise unleashing of rocketing forehands. The elements they do not share between them - most clearly exposed on clay to Nadal's advantage, and on the hardcourts of Australia and the US for Djokovic - is unbelievable spin (Nadal's power) and a probing, split-second backhand (Djokovic's power - and Nadal's weakness).

So why, with games so similar, has Nadal always had Djokovic's number before? It's not just because Djokovic has only really reached competing levels of fitness and consistency this year. Nadal's greatest weapon, when all other weapons fail, is a huge heart and the steeliest of minds. The power to convince himself against the inevitability of an apparent loss: the ability to just keep the ball in play, to plant a seed of doubt in the opponent's mind, to hide out, to battle and play dirty until the dominator trips himself up. As well as his own waspish forehands and offensives, he plays so well into the self-confidence of others: he finds a way to undermine their faith in their strongest assets.

Yet in the heart of the second set of the Final, after Nadal had gone 2-0 up (as in the first), only to be hauled back to 2-2, at the end of a 17 minute game of brutal attack and impossible playmaking - Djokovic broke him. And that steely reserve cracked. Beneath it we saw what that outer armour protects: a little boy, eager to please, determined to succeed, bullied and buoyed by his uncle Toni. Skinny, a little desperate and full of willing - but out of ideas.

On September 12th, as the CIA building in Kabul slept nervously, suspicious but unaware of the attack awaiting it, Rafael Nadal faced up to a new enemy. An enemy that may well be himself.

Novak Djokovic beat Nadal at his own game. He played the same style of tennis, and now, emphatically underlined by Djokovic's unstoppable victories all year, he was playing it better. Constantly. And Rafa - with nowhere to hide under the lights and the cameras, no teammates, just one individual so eager to win, to please, that he re-programmed his body to play left-handed - faced the truth. That his refusal to lose had become a kind of denial....a negative. He went through his usual armoury: defence into attack, denying the loss, clawing back; but his classic refuse-to-lose game lacked one element. Belief. Even in the exhilarating fight of the third set. which saw Nadal come back from 4-1 down to take the set on a tie break, won by flashes of electric forehands, the moments of transcendence felt like a suspension of disbelief on Nadal's part. Half an hour where he forgot that he doesn't believe he can beat Djokovic right now.

The media loves to spin itself into a frenzy about form and fitness - endlessly fretting over the 'torture' Nadal inflicts on himself like an over-protective mother cooing over a grazed knee. The only torture for Nadal is mental. He was on fine form - and velocity - in the US Open, the second week especially. His first 2 sets against Andy Murray in the semi-final (won 6-4 6-2 3-6 6-2) were an example of the terrifying fluency of a top player at total ease. Nadal, who knows Murray's game so well, and knows how to beat it, was gorgeous: improvising with his own game, experimenting with length and depth, taking to the net. Just like with Federer's game, Nadal has cracked the formula with Murray: he knows the rhythm and rigour he needs to apply. The men on the other side of the net are known quantities. And with this knowledge, this comfort, he can relax and play great tennis.

But - what of this new enemy? This brusque, dark-haired, slim pine tree of a man, who makes Nadal look nervous and strained, exposing a weakness in Nadal's game he never thought he'd need to improve: that strong, strong resolve. How has Djokovic got inside his head?

The answer is in the Serb's own constitution. After several years showing promise, he has come to terms with his own head and heart. Sure, djokovic's superb fitness, the change to a gluten-free diet and good rest all contribute. But as he says, he hasn't changed his game so much. The key to his year of superhero tennis - only 2 losses in 64 games - is an alignment of a powerful mind to that powerful body. Exuding positivity and - in his own words - 'aggression', Djokovic has found a place for his personality within his game.

In previous years watching Djokovic play, you could see his undoubted talent - his victory in the Australian Open 2008 an obvious signal - but it always came in gasps, usually separated by periods of petulance, wilting fitness or variable form. Djokovic's relationship with his mind and personality was a bit like Murray's: the mind is a danger. It should be kept separate from the game; leave it off the court so it doesn't distract you.

As we constantly see with Murray, this causes problems. Try to lock up your mind and soul in the locker room and it will find a way of creeping out in your shoelaces, appearing on the inside of your towel as you wipe the sweat and change ends, in the yellow fluff of the new balls you're now nervous to serve with.

Djokovic has realised this year that personality - heart as well as mind - has a crucial place in a champion's game. He's not going to win just by playing good tennis. He has to have the attitude, the feeling to match. In his own words:

"...I had difficulties approaching semi-finals and finals. I would wait for players to make mistakes. I didn't have the positive attitude. That has changed now - the 2010 US Open [four-set defeat by Nadal] was the turning point.

"I guess it just clicked in my head. It's just that I'm hitting the shots that I maybe wasn't hitting in the last two, three years now. I'm going for it."
Djokovic's heart is in his tennis now - his character and his energy no longer struggling to stay subdued in the locker room.

Just look at that astounding exhibitionism after his match-point-saving forehand in the 5th set against Federer in the semis. or his unselfconsciously ridiculous robot dance at the end of the first week. His playmaking in set 2 of the final. Or his cold, clinical bulldozing of the 4th - a no-nonsense close out. Djokovic - a great mimic, a joker, a cheeky chancer, a bit arrogant but also, crucially, an enigma, a coolly fierce solider - has let his personality play tennis.

Now his mimicry - once reserved just for joking around or terrible adverts - is being used on court, to embody the styles of other players and beat them at their own games. This audacious mix of calm cockiness, one-upmanship and flair is - this year - an almost impenetrable fort. Opponents look across the net and see themselves...parodied.

And that was what made the US Open Final such a terrifying, pummelling bout of a game. It was personal. Like part of these players' identities was at stake. Like they were fighting for who they were: fighting for the right to be called champion, two players so similarly matched that the battleground was really a mental one. Two men playing a style of tennis which, on paper, is very similar. Two men divided and engaged by the net: drawing these similarities into battle.

The divide between them was not equal, though. The net a window to one, disguised as a mirror to the other. Nadal in the interrogation room - staring into the glass to only see himself, whilst Djokovic stoof on the other side, seeing his every move.

The component which turned the scrutiny on Nadal, and hid Djokovic's direction and probes from the Spaniard? That Djokovic has made that defence-into-attack style a purely attacking on. He's turned a 'negative' style of tennis into the most aggressive, open, incisive play around.

So now that Djokovic has brought his head game to rival the strongest head and heart of all - what is going to decide the future of this rivalry?

It will be the physical state of each player which redresses the current divide. To fix the mind, Nadal must go back to the body. Focus, train, and stop worrying about Djokovic. Focus on improving the backhand, serving under pressure, finding depth of groundstrokes. Only through playing the game, getting absorbed in it, can he find himself. Regain confidence, find enjoyment - and that form which found him winning the French, Wimbledon and US Opens in 2010. Time will pass. Djokovic will get a little tired, or the magic making this incredible year will run out; maybe that old mentality will peek in even for a second, if he isn't careful; maybe he'll drop off his workrate (though that seems unlikely...). Time will tell whose body will fatigue and confidence will falter.

Just look at that country plunged into war by that portentous day before September 12th. What a lot of self-belief and aggression it showed in the face of an enemy. And what a lot of damage and error can be caused when that self-belief goes awry. Or when it's not founded on anything. It becomes denial. The enemy adapts, survives, learns your game, finds its rhythm. And retains its own element of surprise. And the war grinds on: in it for the long haul, charting the shifts in power like spikes on a heart monitor.

During the match, Rafa must have felt like he was fighting a cause he didn't believe in. But in the press conference afterwards, Nadal's attitude was superb. And in a way - having, as he says, a new 'goal', a new target, is brilliant for him. He needs something to aim for: someone to attack. Djokovic is still soaring, but behind him - despite his humility and sense in interviews - Rafa is aggravated. Aggresive. In sport, that can cause an explosive renewal of offense, or a terrible implosion. A desire to finish this once and for all. Because in tennis at least, wars can be won and lost. They can be measured and tabulated and put in snippets on Wikipedia and ATP player bios. We're playing at being in battles. And if someone gets hurt, they don't get buried in a mass grave. They have a massage. Or cramp in a press conference.

horrible/beautiful

2011-09-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

Uprising & The Art of Not Looking Back//
Hofesh Shechter Company //
Dance Xchange, Birmingham, September 24th 2011

scribbled down last night, in my notebook:

"teeters between the
horrible

and the
beautiful

... neither one - nor the other - but

both

at the the same time

"

the agony of others: the US Open and its injuries

2011-09-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

Expecting a match report and some press feedback on Rafael Nadal's victory last night in the US Open 3rd Round against David Nalbandian, I went to the tennis tournament's website. across the homepage was a video, whose screengrab just looked like a normal press conference. I clicked on it and found this (I feel sort of weird linking to this, as I don't know how I feel about this video being posted):

The most popular video on the US Open site, unavoidable on the scroll-through video gallery which keeps landing you back on it, was nearly 2 minutes of Rafael Nadal wincing and cramping, as the camera, rock-steady, recorded imperviously on. I made it through about a minute before realising 1) they aren't going to cut to anything else, let alone report on the match and 2) this is horrible.

What good is it to me, or anyone, to gawp at a tennis player suffering cramp at a bad time? Some of the comments below were ridiculous - one woman, Elizabeth David if I remember rightly, said that 'it was agonizing - how dare they put up such a video - look at what 'we' put them through'... (the response from another user, predictably deadpan, was along the lines of 'not agonizing enough for you to stop watching...')

Let's pull this into perspective. There are several things going on here. Yes, Elizabeth David, there is something cruel or weird about the posting of this video. But cramp isn't that cruel or weird thing. The odd thing going on with the video is the seeming lack of empathy or sympathy for a player in an awkwardly-timed spot of bother. Even weirder, or greedier, is the way that this footage was immediately advertised - and of course, picked up - by media outlets across the globe, hitting the homepages of ElPais, the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald (that at least has a sense of, not a sensationalist, humour) and so on within minutes - as a collapse/ shock/ OUTRAGE!!!

stop! press! RAFAEL SLUMPS TO THE GROUND....with cramp.

Cramp is painful, yes, but it passes. Press conferences too are painful, but they pass, with the same old 'he played well, tough first set, but I played some good points' soundbites. The only thing which makes the press conference special is that we happen to have seen what is an otherwise banal moment in a sports person's life, when thet have to lie back, breathe deep and wait for the spasms to subside.

Nadal's irritation with the persistent camera-snapping silence is understandable. But that's the only thing that makes the video interesting: imagining the silent, poised journos, gawping at an 'agony' that is merely inconvenient. And then this moment becomes the story of the entire game - it eclipses the sport completely. Nadal played a good game, and yet once again, the media will be fawning over this bruised solider, who is pushed 'too hard' by the tennis calendar.

Yes, the tennis calendar is punishing, but I have a feeling that no one is more punishing on himself than Rafael Nadal. The difference between he and Nalbandian was exactly one of mentality, a mindset solidified years ago and now paying off: Nalbandian, as everyone keeps saying, was one of the great hopes of a few years ago. He never really made it, and looking at the match up between he and Nadal yesterday, you could see why. It was written in their bodies, their body language, their movements and muscles. Both have talent, but what differentiates them is the amount of hard work and pain Nadal has put himself through to get to 10 grand slams.

But back to that video a second. It has since been removed from the US Open site, all full 2 minutes of boredom. A few rogue youtube versions remain here.When you relay its contents, it sounds funny (and then first comment for this video is: 'looks like he's getting a blowjob lol'): a world class athlete slowly disappearing from view under a table at a press conference. Fine, that is kind of funny - when you tell it to someone else.

But watch it, without thinking that. What is it that makes the event, the banal insight into an athlete's cramp, creepy? What does that unswerving, anonymous camera remind me of? Michael Haneke's Caché. A film that supremely deals with the mind games caused by the camera, the unglinting focus on the everyday; and how the viewer, intent on finding meaning, will turn the everyday, the uninhibited, into the ominous, the treacherous. (Incidentally, the trailer is a perfect example of the opposite - Hollywood's all powerful need to subsume and convert the tone and focus of any film into a deceptive 'thrill ride'; to reimagine the spasms of the death drive only in relation to death.)

What is baffling about this video and its eeriness is its complete absence of necessity, or even of meaning. (And see how desperately I am now flailing to give it meaning, to fit it into something sensical!)

I understand why it was recorded - but I don't understand why the US Open let it be posted, unedited, to the world. The two minutes are not dissimilar to those two hours of footage of Binoche and Auteil's house in Caché: unending, with no narrative, no change, no seeming purpose outside themselves. So why share it?

It is necessary, for other events, for a camera to unswervingly capture the agonies of an individual, or a nation. Pain and suffering DOES belong on the news: so too does reporting it objectively.

The word 'objective' is worth pausing over: post-modernism has torpedoed any sense of faith in 'objectivity'. Objectivity instead is always a relative term. The camera is not a passive nor innocent thing; it shapes and changes behaviour; and for the viewer it frames events into stories. Yet the objectivity - or otherwise - of the camera, is incredibly fluid; whilst in art we know it is oppressively present, it can be used with more urgency, and less calculation.

In a field such as journalism, especially within war and conflict reporting, the mere presence of a camera is important. Finding the right place, following the right people, until the filming can be done. But when recording takes place, there is little time, or consideration, for how 'objective' the framing. The focus is on what is in front of the camera, the rest, once the camera rolls, is simply trying to keep pace. Because the snatched footage from an al-Jazeera camera, or a mobile phone, are immediately in dialogue with a much bigger picture, a much bigger version of events.

Having a view into the torture and atrocities committed by non-elected and elected governments is imperative - and dangerous. In politics, video is perhaps the closest we can get to counterbalancing the mind-numbing (and often desensitising) raft of words - spoken or written - which use the recurrent themes: civilian casualties, air strike, unrest, humanitarian crisis. So in the context of ongoing unrest, the necessity of seeing a Syrian detainee being slapped and humiliated by a solider loyal to President Bashar al-Assad (in the link above), speaks for itself. It is not pain for pain's sake: it is one human face of the troubles which are recevied outside of the Middle East in largely dry and stylised (sterilised?) forms: reports, new legislations, meetings.

But in the context of the US Open Press Conference (and the endless press circuit), an athlete's cramp does not speak for itself; and footage of this is useless, empty, unless we can understand where it fits. Those 2 minutes become a strangely dull pornography, where the viewer persists in the hope of a weird titillation or enough disgust to turn off: haha he looks like he's getting a blowjob...Oh my god isn't this terrible and awful!!!...yeah but isn't it still kind of hot...

For the most part, the video does little but raise an odd, passive aggressive disinterest, much like the disinterest of that 'unobtrusive' camera, turning us into the gawping rest of the press conference. Which is what makes this little glimpse of a player in pain so weird. It has no story; no outcome. The big games of professional tennis, unlike most other sports, give the viewer unblinkingly direct access to the players in moments that merge agony and ecstasy; and those emotions are always part of a bigger narrative. We're driven to expect them: but to expect them in the right places, like finals, career-defining moments.

Like with Caché, the presence of the camera here is not the dangerous thing: the viewer is. So far beyond the argument for the objective gaze, we now give the camera an overwhelming subjectivity, projecting our own meanings or feelings, filling in the gaps the way you might in a film, or an art installation.
It has to be telling us...something...it must be watching for a reason....
Thanks to the increasingly theatrical coverage of sport in the UK, even the journalistic camera is expected to give us a gazumping great tragedy, or triumph - rather than simpy document a passing moment. (And that's what Haneke's film plays with so brilliantly...in fact, maybe the overblown trailer was deliberate - to further highlight the expectation for titillation that the viewer presents.)

Of course, the journalists present to question Nadal were doing their job; what is more, no doubt the footage stops when it does because afterwards other figures rush in and the moment is lost. But those lonely 2 minutes are a curious pause for reflection: on the state of empathy in a culture which so obsessively yearns for any taste of the extraordinary and exalted few that it becomes distracted, and defined, by the mediocre.

But let the extraordinary be the focus once again. In tennis terms at least, Nadal (as the Guardian's Kevin Mitchell wrote) 'is back'.

re: Talent, Wasted

2011-08-24T04:28:00.001-07:00

I was just about to take this down and re-write it, because I realised that my thinking on it isn't fully fleshed out in a lot of parts. And it's about a lot of people and things, currently all jumbled together. But instead, am going to leave this initial brainspasm as it is and have a think about a longer/more intricate piece over the next week.

So keep your eyes peeled.

In the meantime, some really good hip hop that still carries a few of the devices and tics I feel confused and weird about. But passion, realness. That's life.

Talent, Wasted: hip hop deceived by its own devices

2011-08-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

Several times in the last few months, mostly at clubnights (most of them run by these guys, who also have a radio show on NTS ), I've heard this amazing Busta Rhymes' verse getting played in the middle of a set. It's over a kind of hazed--out electronic beat, sounds like a melted glitch, and Busta spits about 200 words in a minute over the top. Usually it cuts in over the end of Break Ya Neck, or some other piece of Busta audacity. And it's amazing.

I had no idea where the verse came from. But I thought, shit, if that's a verse, and the production is that good, this must be an incredible song. So I do a little searching and I discover

THIS

Oh God. Chris Brown. This is a horrible song. What's more - it's just pop music! That verse of Busta's that might have been a moment of sublime rap is...a bad commericial pop song.

It is also the most openly cynical 'selling' of a horribly pastiched 'gangsta' schtick I have ever seen. A perfect example of how 'HIP HOP' has become a commodity, a device, to make money; a collection of simplistic images, tics, phrases and gestures. In the video, Brown wears a series of shirts and hats for various sports teams across different cities in the US. He's not even representing something, or somewhere, he's just...representing. He bangs his chest. He tries to look hard. His entire body, from the tattoos criss-crossing all over his body, to the jewellery to the endless emblazoning of different cities across his chest, is a kind of vacuum, neatly polished with mindless 'signs' of 'HIP HOP'.

Has anyone else ever stooped that cynically low?Chris Brown is dressed in the video exactly like S.Mouse, Chris Lilley's parody of Soulja Boy (and Brown)-esque Rice Krispies-lite 'hip hop' stars. the video is nothing but cynical styling, money making without a statement from start to finish.

Brown is a pop star. Kind of clean (although his first hit 'Run It' had him boasting about his sexual prowess that would have us saying he couldn't be 16...), definitively boring. He went out with Rihanna. And he treated her extremely badly, resulting in physically attacking her in 2008. I can understand that he says feels terrible about this, and does not want to be the only thing by which he is judged for the rest of his life.

But songs like this make a mockery of the physical abuse of Rihanna. How to put uncomfortable domestic violence behind you, Chris? By reinventing yourself as a gangsta parody, a trite amalgamation of commercial hip hop cliches, preaching the same violence, the same misogyny, in his songs. Idiotic, ignorant mechanics, which do nothing but perpetuate a myth that these kind of violences are all ok. All in the game.

What's more, apart from the production and that Busta verse, it really is a shit song; Chris Brown's entire contribution competes only with Lil Wayne for casually offensive triteness and lack of originality. The whole endeavour smacks of the most cynical meeting point between pop star ego and record label greed.

Listen to the laziness of Chris Brown's 'dick' verse and then Lil Wayne at the end.

.......I hate myself for it, but I still want to listen to it. That Busta verse! The insistence of the rapping, faster and faster, over that lazy, oozy beat....it's so....ahhhhh....alluring. And that's really what bites about the song. Not the trite hip hop cliches. They're not clever. What is clever is using someone's virtuosity - Busta's vocal talents as an MC, one the key original disciplines of hip hop - to peddle this shit. To disguise the messages, to distract.

I let myself get taken in by what's being done, I let what's being said slide, because LISTEN TO WHAT THE FUCK BUSTA IS DOING WITH HIS MOUTH.

And yet- and yet - I can't totally turn a deaf ear. I still hear those words, though I wish I didn't.

And this is my problem with (even vaguely) commercial hip hop - I never feel able to say I like someone like Busta as a rapper - because for the incredible vocal dexterity and skill he has, the things he actually says are deplorable, and the stories he tells aren't worth listening to. All the old-school devices and talents of hip hop, are being unravelled from their origins and being used to essentially sell pop records. Hip-pop. Brilliant wordplay all to inform us about your lifestyle choices. What do I know or care about his cars and shaved pussies and all the other posturing that is his life? What do I care? Why don't I listen to more (god who doesn't hate this term) 'conscious' hip hop?

You know why? Because for all the Mos Defs and Talib Kwelis (amazing lyricists, neither commercial rappers nor insecure gangsta fakers), the fact is that they don't have the sick beats that Rick Ross, or Pusha T or Noreaga might pull out. And I hate most of the things that guys like Cam'Ron say: but I love the way they say them.

So I can almost understand how, caught up in the seductive 'way of saying it' - the beats, the vocal dexterity, the production and the energy - we can let so many terrible statements slide. But I have no idea why we can actually listen to that stuff, and then praise what it is being said. Or even repeat it. I thought that the obsession with 'realness' in hip hop might mean that the majority of listeners being rapped to by millionaires in basketball jerseys riding Segways inventing ridiculous dance moves, would see the bullshit.

What part of life are they rapping about? Even Watch the Throne...it's full of disses, and still packed with traditional devices of old school hip hop...but Jay and Kanye, if you're the only 'gods' up there in the clouds, who's this 'you' you keep hating on? If no one else can touch you, the only people you're hating on must be your listeners, the plebs and groundlings that you gotta tell how amazing you are, how above them you be.

Fuck keeping it real. It's finding the real we should worry about. There's always been exaggeration, self-construction and fantasy in hip hop - the whole movement arises from a culture and peoples whose economic reality and social repression and exploitation means that life revolves around money (not having it, or having it and spending it) - but reality should have a place.

Even Grandmaster Flash was driven by real stories, giving a voice to the ghetto: the music was an incredibly imaginative way of showing the world these stories. The majority of hip hop that gets heard and played these days - and not just purely commercial stuff but also by a lot of hip hop heads, radio stations and the like - seems to feel pressured to imagine something to rap about....instead of looking at the real shit around them. The majority of hip hop listeners are being told about 'real life' that sounds like a fantasy, or some overblown dream.

Who is someone like Kanye keeping it real to now? Who lives that life that he raps about? Footballers, basically. In the UK at least. They're some of the few people in the world who share a lifestyle and economic freedom similar to massive rap artists. Talented performers who have been awarded staggering amounts of money by an originally working class, communitarian, movement/pursuit, that is now enthralled by commerce and consumerism. Converted into gods by money. And encouraging a culture of waste; throwaway materials, throwaway people....and throwaway talent.

It would be easier if Kanye West - and even our original adversay, Mr Chris Brown - was a talentless douche. Kanye is very smart, witty, insightful. And Chris Brown is actually a great dancer. Not a special singer, but as a dancer, amazing. So why doesn't he spend more time working on what he's good at, and being even better at it? And why does Kanye West use that talent he has to endorse and further embed the dominance and wealth of the few over the many? And what positive thing is Busta doing with his doubtless talents, apart from getting paper with the help of the teen dollar that Brown brings in?

Money is in hip hop. It's a crucial part of it. I am not an orientalist utopian idiot who likes to think that back in 79 it was all about peace and love and emancipating black people together. That's another form of ignorance. Hip hop arose out of a web of social and economic factors, that impinged enough on a certain group of people, on their spirit, put pressure on, so that this new way of expression, combining music, lifestyle, dance, emerged. What I'm saying is that it came from feeling. From a real, deep experience, an impulse and desire to say somethign new, to express - and breakdancing, MCing, djing, swagger, became devices to do that.

But what I don't understand is why, and how, money seems to have become the dominating factor in hip hop and in contemporary society. If there is still 'real' hip hop, real protest, then it's surely about using talent and insight to present the alternatives; to show society that there is another way of structuring your life, so that it doesn't revolve around getting paper. Not just for the streets that hip hop set out to speak for, but even for the record execs and the record buying public and the millions of people now affected by it. Use talent, the virtuosity and audacity, to move us differently.

Barrios Beats and Blood

2011-08-23T02:43:00.000-07:00

This morning I watched, again, this documentary about young men in Ciudad Juarez who use hip-hop to talk about the violence and corruption suffered by their city.

It's brilliant and apt, especially watching it in London now. The young people of Juarez, generally aged between 15 and 30, are known as 'Ni-ni' (neither-nors): 'ni escuela ni trabajo' (no school nor work). Their situation is very extreme, but the fingers of free market capitalism (encouraged by the much-maligned North American Free Trade agreement) have played a massive part in the undoing of these young people's lives, as the very agreement which Mexico willingly signed to allow the US an Access All Areas pass to its resources and labour force, is the the same agreement whose porous borders permits the drug trade to hoover up swathes of lives and aspirations from the coca leaves of Colombia up to, finally, the noses and pipes of the world's biggest cocaine and crack market, the United States of America.

Northern Mexico, essentially a zone of vigilante justice, where there are as many criminals in the police force as there may be on the streets, has the highest murder rate in the world. Yet it has shamefully little coverage. Two prominent massacres - the most recent within the Juarez jail - receive little attention in international media, least of all neighbouring United States. It truly is a war; and not just over drugs, as President Obama and Felipe Calderon would have you believe.

The war, of which narcotics have become the symbol, is actually a battleground where the results of adopting a free market economy tumble and scream and slide: voracious and unchecked globalisation of capital; privatisation of welfare services; overwhelming emigration of cheap labour forces; the conversion of society and community ties themselves into a 'free market'; the resultant alienation, lack of legal employment.

Equally disturbing is the fact that the femicide in Juarez - a big campaign for Amnesty and other human rights and women's rights groups at the end of the last decade - has been forgotten outside the North Mexican desert.

Hundreds of women, many of whom were immigrants working in the maquiladoras, some as young as 12, installed the Mexican side of the border for their cheap labour costs, were found dead, usually showing signs of rape and mutilation, dating from as early as 1993, until around 2008. The frequent appearance of new bodies, murdered with almost a complete lack of motive, led many to label them the result of 'blood sport' in which men who felt free to act outside the law - policemen as well as cartel members - would ride around Juarez, and rape, kill and dump women's bodies for fun.

It is essentially one of the biggest 'unsolved' mass murders of all time - in which the identities of several perpetrators are not a mystery at all, but are in burned or buried case files; despite brave campaigning, it seems that a fear of violent retribution, and a murky legal process rife with misdemeanour, means that the authorities keep the case open, and the truth closed.

This is important. Real. And happening now. So why does nobody want to watch this here in London? These factors are at work in the society in which we live - we made it so because we adopted the same policy, the same economics - and we cannot simply ignore Mexico because it is 'culturally' different.

Is there a way that the virtual media, that we often use to distract us, or to facilitate or ignorance of what is physically occurring on our streets or on the bus (we can cloud it all out with an iPod!), can actually tell these real stories?

In a town where words and deeds are themselves corrupt and corrupting, music, dance, sport, performance, seem to be the few ways of practically, honestly allowing the Ni-Nis to communicate with those in their town. And photo and video documentary, made by journalists like Rancho Aparte, seems to be one of the most practical, honest, ways of sharing these troubles with the world. This photo blog here is one case in point.

Barrios, Beats and Blood demonstrates the extent to which a real and perceived lack of support, trust, and governance in the official and municipal fabric of the city has allowed such corruption and doubt to unravel. These young men are perceptive, intelligent and funny. They talk and joke with each other (Axer lists the weapons he used to carry 'a 38mm...no, 2 38mm...and a few grenades...' he kids) with the resilience and innocence of youth, but the stories they tell and their insight makes them seem like the only adults with cool heads in a world where authority figures and institutions are either completely corrupt, or struggling against a mentality which now perceives them as corrupt and untrustworthy.

And weirdly, the presence of the camera, for which of course we all perform, feels candid. It somehow invites smart observations from its interviewees - and makes smart observations of its own, simply by being moved around. And because it isn't a person, it doesn't have its own voice which is inherently corruptible, it somehow becomes trusted. An object that can capture, and be confided in.

Ultimately, what keeps me coming back to this film is that the life within these young MCs fights that cynical notion presented by Mexico's media and politicians that in Juarez, it's lose lose. It is hell and there's little to save it - you try to find a way to make peace in hell and they say you must be the devil.

That 'lose-lose' perspective in the UK has also resulted in some pitifully reactionary shit being spouted by local citizens to the Prime Minister, about how to 'deal' with the apparently violent, mindless criminals terrorising 'our Britain'. Behind those reactionary missives is the message to the young people of the UK that they're in hell, they made it, and there's no way out.

A complex problem, one which requires care and, more than anything else, attention, simple attention to the circumstances which created it, is turned into a doctrine. You are bad, you're a devil, or you are good; that's what the coalition is telling us. The bad will be punished. The good will prevail. Just when we discover how brutally economic policy has mutilated social, ethical and working life in urban Britain, the government is going to bury the case file, and call this a moral crusade. A simple battle between good people and bad people. Nothing to do with money, or any of those complicated things, at all.

Yet just one glimpse at Ciudad Juarez is enough to show us all how laughable that ideology is.

Hackney Road, Sunday 21st August

2011-08-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

About 3pm.

Security Measures tighten on the edges of the City

2011-08-19T03:06:00.001-07:00

Chatsworth Road, E5

2011-08-19T02:48:00.000-07:00

On a very eerie road in Clapton -
where gentrification and smart delis collide
but don't communicate -

with tyre repair businesses

remnants of white working class industry

African and Caribbean food shops and cafes

skinny white 20 somethings on thing bikes speeding past young black kids doing wheelies.

all watched over by machines of love and grace?

the only big brother watching is this one, probably. not even sure it should be considered an advert.

The Louys Project

2011-08-19T01:41:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd use this little pocket of cyberspace to eschew reviews for a moment and write a little on the performance I'm currently working on.

It's with a very new company called Lifeguard Productions, set up by Farah Merani, who I met at a TAMASHA training course. Farah asked me if I'd be interested in directing a devised project she was trying to get off the ground, and I said...yes.

We've been working from a book of poems called Les Chansons de Bilitis, with a group of five women (the performance at the moment has four as the delightful Ari Phillips has been busy with new job).

We're grappling with the curious identity crisis behind the writing of the poems - passed off as the discovered works of an ancient Greek poetess but actually the imaginings of a middle aged French man in 1894 - and once we knew about the authorship of the poems, the whole project became about 'who speaks for women?'

We realised that we couldn't 'perform' the story of Bilitis, because we didn't really believe it. It was essentially a series of changing relationships between identity and desire: the shifting position that her body takes with the world around it. Childhood and openness; first desire and nervousness; discovering sex and wanting to fuck the world; giving yourself totally, wildly, and becoming jealous, possessive, betrayed.

These are all somewhat conventional patterns of behaviours - or relational norms - which women are still encouraged to perform. But in 2011, we're encouraged to perform these shifting positions by the media in all its forms, from newspaper articles to magazine covers to pop videos to self-help books. Like Louys' presence in the Chansons de Bilitis, these media are the shadowy voices of authority that stand behind our experiences of desire and instinct, shaping not only how we communicate them - but perhaps dictating how we feel and act in the first place.

So the project as it stands at the moment is a summary, a collage of observations, of contemporary 'authority' figures which dictate how or what women should feel as they grow. This is done physically by the performers: we see them pluck at their bodies in an invisible mirror; be transformed from nervous self-conscious wrecks into a punching army of aggression and 'self-assertion' (fascistically, utterly controlled by one leader); turn everyday situations of irritation and pressure into pop idol dance moves. This is paired with the equivalent poem or moment from Louys' shaping of Bilitis' life.

In many ways, we're playing into dangerous hands here - because rather than straight out rejecting these existing authorities and their versions of womanhood, we're trying to adopt them without getting lost or brainwashed. It's risky: but I want to push further into these shapes and 'versions' of womanhood, to find a truer and realer voice, a voice which emerges through the exhaustion of these conventions and cliches.

Because I think that if you don't address what exists, if you start as if none of these other patterns and version influence you and bombard you every day, you'll just self-consciously replicate them. You have to know the rules - or at least recognise them - before you can break them.

Tonight's the last performance of part one - the 'collage of observations' on who speaks for women - at the New Diorama Theatre. I've been writing a few blogs on the rehearsal process on the company website here (designed by Dylan Spencer-Davidson). And there'll be more. Brain is whirring constantly so over the weekend expect some knee-jerk missives (and hopefully a few more reflective ones) on where we go next. Have got lots of spinning-top thoughts and am figuring out which ones to keep whirring.

London political weather forecast 2

2011-08-08T14:30:00.001-07:00

Monday 8th August, late afternoon.

Clarence Road, Hackney.

A heavy and darkening cloud engulfs parts of the city. Police response, radio and television coverage looks set to further hyperbolise reality over the week, with increasing risk of continued turbulence.

London political weather forecast 2

2011-08-08T14:23:00.000-07:00

Monday 8th August, evening.

Grouping clouds meet developing smoke. Fires further south.

A chance of increasing helicopters across Hackney and Greater London.

Sirens and constant whir overhead.

London political weather forecast

2011-08-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

Saturday 6th August, evening

Riots in Tottenham Hale.
Rainbows in Hackney Central.
Sirens moving north.

The office: a journey in percussion

2011-07-26T04:52:00.000-07:00

The internet has a worming effect on your body and mind, burrowing in between them and creating gaps or channels where you thought there was harmony. Your mind moves at a million miles an hour; it tries to make the body void and null. Nowhere have I more acutely felt this than in my part time job with a company which exists solely to play Google, and make its clients more prominent in cyberspace.

Sitting down and staring at one thing for such a long period of time is unnatural. The dull thrum of your nerves pulsing into the swivel chair, the self-prohibited desire to get up and run around or at least laugh at loud a lot, forms a kind of bass-kick somewhere in your body. Fingers absentmindedly flicker and snap. Mouths open and close silently. The pace and length of the strides from the kitchen to the desk to the toilet quicken and slacken.

Far from this activity dulling or diminishing the body's natural energy - it simply short circuits it. The energy and movement which might power a human body is harnessed to one spot, given a very short leash, and HAS to be rechannelled - into spasmodic eructations on your phone, trips to the toilet, another cup of tea. The office becomes a music and a dance. A duet between body and computer, a dialogue of energy between collective and individual; a flurry of tap-tap-tapping keys and click-click-clicking heels, with the snare and slide of a chair across the carpet.

This short-circuiting of my energy usually leads me, with that internet conditioned click-it-and-see impulse, to YouTube, and music. Whilst I previously thought that my listening choices were a little freedom amidst the invisible office straitjacket, I've realised that music does more than that for me.

I tend to listen to similar songs when I'm working; and I think that the music I choose does what my body wishes it was doing. The music is movement - in sound rather than action. It dances for me, for all of us and our short-circuited energy. I wonder whether the songs I choose chart this daily journey, of body and mind slowly splitting, admitting (or not) to a common beat and re-emerging in time for the end of the day.

A typical morning starts somewhere like here. There's a sense of unity, or openness. Words and rhythm are in a half-blended haze, something optimistic and straight forward, the heat and awareness of the outside enters the office and rules it for the first half an hour.

Then that soulful sunniness sits down, settles and things become more insistent - that beat becomes more regulated, just as the office has clicked into gear and is clap clap clapping through. Meanwhile, the individual, like the voice of Pharoahe, kicks away from that rhythm, unconsciously or not. The harmony of the first half hour dissipates as body and mind split.

And then the mind kind of takes over. The beat quietens down as the office subdues, caffeine buzzes trickle away, and like an unstoppable stream, the random synapses of the over-stimulated mind kicks in, clicking between two screens, or 23 open tabs across 4 windows, emails, scorecards, Google results. A collection of divergent references and unfinished thoughts, like Def here skipping from disco to techno to soul and back. (This video reminds me of an internet-era Beckett's Not I: a disembodied mouth that can't do anything but let the thoughts pour out unstoppably, constantly distracted and shifting. The rhythm, the chaotic monotony of being online.)

But inevitably, this surge fades away into a dulled almost-silence, just the hums of the piano (or, in my world offline, the computers). Confronted with the mind at a dead-end, and a body switching off. At this point, an attempt to jump out of the lull by imagining or identifying yourself with a class, a drama, or a struggle, that will make you feel authentically real, or turn the dull feeling into an identifiable story. But this is self-dramatizing and little more.

It's after lunch and there's still several hours to go. Blood pumps around the stomach and the office is slumped, echoes of the morning (like Burial's traces of the night before) reverberating gently and muggily around the desks. That post-eating haze, as workers finally all arrive back from their breaks, begins to wear off and the first beats of the afternoon settle in. A metronomic pulse overlayed with tiny offshoots and tributaries, as some sink further into the monotony, and others pick up and propel themselves into meetings or tea breaks.

By this point, the montony has become kind of fun. So consistent and strong that you can build off it. My wayward mind has started finding ways to do what I like without paying too much attention to the work I have to complete. I begin to care less about the overall thrum and more about how I can fit new rhythms and ideas into that steadiness, without being caught out.

And by this point, we're less than an hour before the end of the day, and I can feel it. I can't quite pay attention to the beat of the overall office anymore, because a fidgety feeling takes over, itching in and around, resisting any steady rhythm. I go get a glass of water. I sit up, I sit down. I have a chat with a colleague. Everyone begins to splinter, recovering tiny gestures, motifs, and overlaying them on the general office monotony.

This persists, revs, and releases itself, deliriously scattershot onto the streets outside, meeting a thousand others, and cycling home.

Missives from Months Lost: The Government Inspector

2011-07-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

This was on at the Young Vic in June, and to be honest, I haven't thought about it much since, so I can't imagine typing up my original scribblings will be much surprise.

A Study in Deference
'in defence of deference'

Typified by its unwillingness to probe or question its (undeniable) stars. Julian Barratt, poor man, who looked desperate to be given something other to do than lope around stage and pump his fingers into his palm whilst trying to get his lines out as quickly as possible without forgetting them, is a wonderful actor wasted. It felt like he came to this looking for a challenge and a chance to explore a more body-ful way of performing not used in the facical tics and wonderful timing of his TV work - and was instead greeted with a cynical campagin on the YV's part to sell, at all costs, this show as 'The Mighty Boosh''s Julian Barratt. Just likethe poster.

(The audience was certainly comprised of people in their mid 20s, mostly in suits, who seemed to be waiting for subtle Boosh references and had perhaps been big fans at uni when the show first came out.)

It felt like he'd been directed to be Howard Moon and nothing else. You saw glimpses of him leaping out of that oddly ill-fitting demeanour (go with your instincts, Julian! You're right! Acting for TV isn't what you want to do on stage! Don't listen to or worryn about what the director tells you!) - at the very end a physical and vocal spasm as the realisation of the Mayor's mistake dawns on him. Like a jolt of electrivity had been shot through him, Barratt fitted and convulsed, the words coming out so much easier and truer because he wasn't thinking about them. He was doing.
He doesn't strike me as a prima donna, so it's curious that the direciton showed such deference to him + his career - ultimately suggesting a lack of faith. "Just do what you normally do, Julian" stops being a mark of respect 9even sycophancy) and becomes if unchecked, a tool of fear/ A director scared to push a performer and a performer suddenly scared that s/he can't do anything else. Then the words become terrifying, tangible: like the ghost-train neon INCOGNITO which flitted around the walls of the mayor's home.
Kyle Soller meanwhile had the life of 6 people flowing through his wiry frame. I could not take my eyes off him - neither could the audience nor the rest of the cast.
I ddin't completely understand the mish-mash design either - at once retro then clashingly futuristic, or rahter, very 'nowness', with its cut-and-paste references and mingling of aesthetics which ultimately left it feeling oddly styleless...?

Really, I thought it would be less boring.
And more funny.

It seemed that the mayor's anxiety - so potent in the play - had influenced the rest of the skittish productions; with the exception of the bottle rocket 'Government Inspector' - an enigma in the cast and an enigmatic expception to the other largely strained performances.

Kyle Soller, on the otherhand, was the reason for not leaving at the interval. He was mesmeric, and had the effect of a sports star or a dancer at his or her best, who you simply watched open-jawed with their virtuosity. His energy was the kind that, for two hours, makes you fall completely in love, forgiving everything else around you.

Missives from Months Lost: The Passion in Port Talbot

2011-07-25T03:40:00.000-07:00

Back in April, National Theatre Wales, a company that really explores and expands old binary ideas of what a 'national' theatre is, with a real openness and curiosity about how Wales as a country and the company as a group of artists can work together, finished up its inaugural year with The Passion in Port Talbot, a 3 day festival, sort-of-but-not-quite recreating elements of the Passion in this South Wales town by the sea.

I had tickets for the opening day - Friday 22nd April - and then ended up coming back the next two days as well (though I missed bits and pieces.)
Anyway, this is from the floor of Aberafan Shopping Centre on the Saturday 23rd, in a break between 'scenes'.

What is brilliant is the bodies of the people - the social body - the polis

First day, first performance: nervous, shuffling and obedient
by Saturday 3.44pm they're sitting on the floor of the shopping centre - a real accidentally -on-purpose sit-in relaxed and non-conformist in a way that they won't even notice
maybe they do notice maybe - maybe their feet and their torsos and shoulders feel different - perceptibly to me imperceptible to them or vice versa who knows
but from where (and how) I stand, this event is relocating and rearticulating the crooked social body, giving different and new flight to a mangled group of people who are not in themselves broken or mangled at all, but impinged upon - by the overpass, by the steelworks, by economic recession, by an undeserved reputation
but a body will fly again will pick itself up - it does not need to reconstitute BECAUSE IT IS NOT BROKEN IT IS NOT FRAGMENTED NO
it is squashed and all it needs to do is stretch once more; stop crouching, lift the head and elognate the spine, raise the head a little closer to the blue skies, relasing the lungs and the diaphragm letting the fresh(ish) air in and in this new - yet age-old - stance, TAKE A STAND, make itself stand up and sing unstoppable but also inevitable

it isn't about a lack or an abolition of control it is about a recolation
[ A RELOCATION where there is usually DIS-LOCATION

putting our head back on the shoulders
+
breathing in
not forcing up and out but by nature
being empowered rather than experiencing power as a bitter gust that rallies under the doors and through the pillared corridors created by the overpass -
taking breath - inspiration - a movement of air from within + without the body itself, chemically, naturally connecting inside + out; shared + minutely individual
not just the hot blasts of gorgeous wind on Aberavon beach, nor the whistling whirs of the M4 traffic but air (dirty and clean) that passes through the many membraned insides of the flesh+blood human beings who live amidst the concrete + sea somewhere between industry & nature
AND THAT'S WHERE + HOW THEY MUST STAND UP NOW - not bi-partisan, not pro-mountain, anti-M4, not pro-sea, anti-steelworks, but somewhere, something uniting the two, something that acknolwedges history + economy's impositions & recognise that these people & this nature has absorbed these things - suffered but SURVIVED: a regenerative, mournful but maybe maybe changing process, generous process which industry cannot perform no
NATURE, human nature, can & does suffer these impositions: it is generous (sometimes too generous) and quiet (sometimes too quiet) in ceding a place to all these inventions
industry in its arrogance imagines it has won. imagines it dominates the landscape. Imagines that the story is its own. But one look at the beach at Aberafan tells you different. This is Nature's story - whether a tragedy or a comedy, or something unheard of before, this is not about industry. Industry does not win. Industry is incoporated. It is a theme, perhaps, a well-realised motif.
But Nature is all: subject, object, within + without, wheezing as well as singing, patching itself up even whilst it is being torn apart.
This is a passion of mine.

It's pretty clear that the 'story' being written about isn't the narrative of the piece of theatre, but the impulse of the event itself. The story of the people of Port Talbot. The story of Nature and Industry battling over human beings' lives.

I remember a sudden, massive response to the feeling, of being one of and with the people and the history of the town in some ways - and perhaps surprise at experiencing that feeling. Of great pride and faith and connection to the people and the landscape, and being part of that somehow, not just as an audience member, but as someone born and brought up down the road, who went to the town's Lido a few times, but mostly drove over it, as most do, to get to Swansea, or back home to the Vale.

I could never write any kind of 'review' of the show. That said, I thought Lyn Gardner did a non-job of it here - especially to give it 5* then give little more than a summary of what happened. As a piece of theatre - a dramaturgical whole - it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

And if I judged it as a cohesive show then I don't think it would stand up so well. But then it took place across so many platforms, and involved so many times and places that it was not possible to see everything. And certain elements were simply interactions with other people, with Port Talbot community groups and so on. There were moments of great beauty and well-crafted poise - Owen Sheer's writing for the Llewellyn Street passage was stunning, as ghosts of the town, people unhoused by the building of the overpass, emerged from the pillars of the M4 to rebuild, by imagination and voice, the homes they once knew.

Yet for the most part, we were running around in the hope that something would become clear that never quite did. The traditional passion stuff all happened - but this didn't quite weave into what the narrative was trying to do (so we have a slightly inexplicable 'punishment' of an amnesiac Teacher who refuses to take responsibility for being involved in a uprising in the town - crucifixion!). Really, Port Talbot was Christ in this story, and my only wish was that this had been more fully committed to and explored in fabric of the piece. Still, as an event, a community gathering, it was second to none. And perhaps even trying to judge it, or understand it, as some kind of narrative whole or dramaturgical pattern, is ridiculous when considering thousands of people. In many ways it was a patchwork - a reflection of the different (and soemtimes conflicting) expectations of what the participants were making - of theatre, song, spectacular, promenade, fete, funeral, film. Its power was what it did to and for people.
A rightful celebration.

Missives from Months Lost: Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde

2011-07-20T06:34:00.001-07:00

My brother was staying the night I saw this. June 3rd 2011. I hadn't seen him for ages and I knew he was at home with wine and food and friends, so my mind wasn't on this show. Plus I'd had a really good day of workshops with a group of TDA alumni, and I just wanted a beer in the sun.

The Sadlers Wells website says:

Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde! is about the search for love and the human form. Using humour to tackle taboo subjects, it features 20 dancers, naked both literally and figuratively. A narrator leads the audience on a journey through their emotions as the performers leap with a primal urgency, or lie crumpled and defeated on the ground, before climaxing in a breathtakingly beautiful and moving finale.

I failed to make it that far -I made to an hour and twenty minutes then had to leave. As soon as I got on the bus I started scribbling -

So little to do with either ferocity, brutality or tenderness that perhaps that's what kept the audience: there must be something coming, there must be something.
It hated men and it hated women. And it seemed to hate itself but not in any way that might have illuminated or changed our attitudes or lives. Not at all.
Not even the sensational or the sensationalist. It made me feel scared of sex and intimacy and other people. It worried - no it confirmed, in those 80 minutes - a (ridiculous and unfeeling) notion that human beings just want to hurt each other or consume everything in one gulp. There was no link, no real judgement or new message or revelation about how humans are or why humans are the way they are. Even a disrespect of the dancers, their faith and their bodies. Because we never saw the bodies being honest or open

NUDITY

but never nakedness. Not rawness. Not a truth. Not one truth or exposure.

The opening five minutes very promising - an impassioned and desperate attempt to breach an impasse - the woman reaching and grabbing more and more for the other, seeking tenderness. The first man's passivity = symptomatic of the whole show. Its complete lack of empathy, compassion or the HUMAN. As he turned his back on this heaving woman's body so too the entire piece turned its back on us and on 'tendresse', never to make any link between why a disconnect between audience and performer, lover and lover, consumer and product MIGHT ACTUALLY BE WORTH DANCING ABOUT. it made life feel redundant.

...

why does a show like this gain so much press? because the idea of parading nudity as an 'idea' is so totally unexamined by a bodydead/braindead society and media that we give it the kind of credence and authority it NEVER MERITS NOR WORKS FOR.
We've been flipped over and fisted into submissions, not penetrated by anthing resembling something reproducutive something that might generate ideas, seeds, new connections.

A lot of that writing is a bit cringy and extreme, in retrospect. But it did manage to hit a really tender nerve, not of outrage at nudity (yawn) but outrage at how it treated people. I think it's the only show I can remember having left before the finish. It also sounds like the angriest I've been in a while. I remember bubbling and boiling on the bus.

What was the most irritating was the feeling of exploitation. For a brief second I regretted leaving, thinking that perhaps the finale was a worthwhile tonic. But then emerging onto the street, several others had already given up and were having cigarettes outside, with haunted and exhausted looks. They weren't going back either; what came before was enough to make it beyond redemption. Jenny Gilbert's review in the Independent:

The tone darkens markedly after the cast put their clothes back on. In a crude steal from Pina Bausch the men shout "Frappe-moi!" and hit themselves hard in the face, over and over. In another sequence, Sabrina is offered the choice between a man and a chocolate cake. She takes off her knickers and goes for the cake.

I remember that bit. Just before I tipped over the edge. And whilst very often the intense anger I feel watching a show gives way to a more sustained realisation after I leave, I still think the same thing about Un peu de tendresse. I just feel a lot less. And what did the haunted smokers and I miss when we left? Not much, it seems:

Despite the plea implicit in its title, there is a good deal more bordel than tendresse in this long and often tediously barbaric show. Only in the final minutes does peace descend, as the 24 dancers, naked once more (but who really cares?) skid silently about the wet stage surface like seals at play, finally curling up as happy couples.

Missives from Months Lost

2011-07-20T05:14:00.000-07:00

At the risk of suggesting that I spend all of my time at Sadlers Wells, I've decided to publish a few missives from months gone by.

It's an experiment in blogging. I'm curious to see what something retrospective does in a realm as present-and-future-tense as cyberspace.

We'll see.

I tend to see a lot of things, or have a lot of thoughts which are scribbled down passionately, then by the time they arrive on a computer screen, an email inbox, an article, they've been tailored and made cohesive - or reductive. With a mixture of bravery and stupidity, I want to see my scribblings word for word alongside my typed thoughts today. Less writing in the past, more putting two presents together.

hyperbole, literally: football pundits and political mother

2011-07-16T03:52:00.000-07:00

I have always been prone to exaggeration.

When I was younger, I loved hyperbole. Not in an adolescent ‘I hate my life’ way (I didn’t), but more in a ‘what can language do’ way. Even before my oestrogen levels took a hike, I had a tendency to get a bit passionate in conversation, and swing between outright worship or mistrustful indignation and anger. It got other people to react and it was fun to see what language could do.

But lately, in conversation, I've noticed another, more generalised use of hyperbole. I use it the same way I rub invisible bits of dirt in the corner of my eye: to put painful, laborious emphasis on something that wasn't there in the first place.

It’s a tendency I dislike in others and myself - ‘it was the worst night of my life’ about a fairly routine Friday evening; 'I'm dying here' on a slightly fatigued Monday morning in the office. Being 'ok' is not enough, we have to be 'great' or 'on the edge'. A linguistic muddle where the mundane has become the startlingly extreme.

On the Guardian's football homepage this weekend, there was this article on a similar phenomenon: the desperately hyperbolic football punditry of Jamie Redknapp and his categorisation of 'top top top top' players.

(Jamie Redknapp this is not personal; you were an affable Liverpool captain and pretty good player, but it is difficult impossible to understand your habit of making terrible adverts and inability to buy a pair of trousers that fit...just one size up, and you’ll be able to stay seated without wincing. Imagine the freedom!)

'top top top top' is an example of hyperbole that remains mostly within the football punditry world; a world without a clear, common consensus by which to judge quality. But what about Jamie's love of 'literally'? Redknapp uses it all the time. The video link in the previous sentence is just one case in point. Commenting on the difficulty of defending against the Gunners in 2009, tells us- "you literally have to have your head on a swivel as a defender".

Aside from the fact that now it’s possible to survive the Arsenal defence with severe whiplash, there’s something more troubling – and recognisable - going on with Jamie’s turn of phrase.

‘literally’ here makes the real unreal, spinning us into a realm where footballers, like owl-ish marionettes, are all swivelling their heads in contentment to stop Cesc Fabregas. Instead of taking us to the concrete, it refers to some imagined, virtual playground of sorry metaphors that we're all assumed to have in common.

And that’s the scary thing. Jamie's punditry is symptomatic of a widespread anxiety of communication. We use ‘literally’ all the time, without even hearing it, to say things we don’t – can’t - think or feel.

‘I was literally on fire’

‘It was a nightmare....literally.’

We even use it to emphasise things we would do –

‘I literally want to take all my clothes off.’

- but we'll never do them, of course, because we can just say it really, really, like, strongly...

The result isn’t just a weird hiccup of meaning. It's a crisis: a rift in social communication and subjective experience.

The tendency to say we 'love' things when we don't, or describe anything as the 'most x experience of my entire life' masks an insecurity about how we experience, understand and communicate our feelings. They're flourishes of social storytelling which happens most acutely with groups of three or more people. We feel some invisible pressure to present ourselves, and our lives, as sensational.

But what does that mean for those big, sensational experiences when a hyperbolic, ‘unreal’ figure of speech, would usually have been used. Linguistic hyperbole, a collection of wildly exaggerated empty phrases, is used by me, and the Sky Sports pundits, and lots of our friends, to refer to nothing but other figures of speech. How can we get closer to the truth when the adverbs denoting 'the real' or the true have been hijacked? Can we understand how we feel if we can’t rightly express it?

The first time I saw Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother, on July 15th 2010, I emerged from the auditorium flapping and crunching and convulsing inside (I did convulse outside too- in the toilet though; Sadlers Wells audiences are polite). It was an almost religious experience. And trying to communicate that, it wasn't even like I wanted to use big words or extravagant speech; but like I had a massive phrase inside me, in my nerves and my blood. The only way to communicate...whatever it was...was in shapes, movement, shouts.

I saw the show twice last week, 'The Choreographer's Cut', on its return to Sadlers Wells. And as I left, that feeling came back again: like I needed to bounce around everyone; like I had devoured language; hyperbole was pointless.

Political Mother is so loud, so visually frantic and so powerfully manipulated that you can barely think, only feel its argument, the frustration and fury, recognise the enslavement of all these brothers and sisters in humanity, fighting against their own bodies, having their movements and freedoms released and absorbed and appended by all manner of shifting lofty powers - the band; rhythm itself; the lights; the military dictator, the politician, the rock god persona screaming and contorting atop the stage.

It shows us how power shapes and squeezes the way humans communicate. How we share the same human impulse to commune, to express and share with others. And how the rhetoric of power, of the state, orders and organizes physical movement; and how the very shape and organisation of these movements dictates the impulses and shapes of the rebellions against them.

But it isn’t a simple case of institution=bad, individual=good. Rather, Political Mother literalises hyperbole. It shoves political exaggeration down into the body and its synapses, then let’s it play out amongst a group of people. How this squeezing and organising of impulses shoots off in new directions - new dances – but also how the same shapes come back around.

All these recurring themes: raised arms and bowed heads of the dancers, which arises again and again; lined up facing the audience, overseen by a man in a gorilla mask; backs to the audience, sat down obediently, arms raised to the rock bad above. And their faces – either downcast, chins to their chests, heads bowed; or reverently upwards, the tilt of a worshipper, be it of a late night rave or a military dictator; or both at the same time, headbanging in what seems like the smoothest, most cohesive wave.

It’s dance as an argument, made all the more true, and apt when text intervenes at the very end, coyly illuminating LEDS in pairs of words:

WHERE THERE IS PRESSURE THERE IS FOLKDANCE

The text is both a dictum and a joke; a statement made tautological when you actually see the bodies DOING it.

And when this phrase flashes up, with some titters of laughter, you realise just how profoundly you have been sucked into the argument too.

We are another group, crowd, that is being exercised upon by the rhetoric of power. The dancers, for the most part, face the same way as us. They see what we see. We see their backs, as they too stare up at the flashing lights; we look the same way, up at the figures of power, with a mixture of fear, disbelief, excitement and, at times, reticence. (The wonderful moment when one by one the worshippers turn away as their buttoned up politician does some dancing of his own.)

For me the show is not a straight criticism of structures of all power, but of believing too much, of giving up totally to the 'logic' of the rhetoric, the logic of the system. Losing your grip on reality - and in turn losing your grip on your body, and how you express the most simple of impulses and feelings. Which is why audiences leave so energised, so hyped: because they have been pumped full of this message and set back onto the world, suddenly released from the darkness of the auditorium into the drizzly greylight of the street.

And ultimately that argument doesn’t just take place on stage: it takes place in the spectator, in the feelings and assaults on the senses. Does it just make us another appended body, another absorber of rhetoric? Probably.

But experiencing Political Mother is experiencing why language is so muddled at the moment...it makes real and tangible the rhetorical desperation, the trying to pin down security, meaning, of life. It makes expressing yourself, physical expression, a crisis. Just because we don’t believe extreme language anymore doesn’t mean that extremity and its consequences have gone away. Hyperbole itself has become irrelevant in language, but desperate in feeling.

getting myself lost in translation: rosemary butcher

2010-10-08T07:16:00.000-07:00

One of the main developments in my activities over the blog's dormant period has been a growing interest in dance. Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother remains one of the highlights of my year, along with two strikingly different performances seen in February: the intimate trio of 'With Which To Tell' at RAG, and the fascinating intricacy and breadth of Danza Contemporanea de Cuba's first visit to the UK.

I mention this because writing about dance inevitably means that I come with a theatrical rather than purely choreographic perspective to the shows. Whilst I have been expanding the range of contemporary work I have seen, and reading where I can, I am well aware that part of what excites me about dance is the thrill of being mid-discovery of it, still not sure of the vocabulary and history with which to contextualise the images and energies in performance. However I have never felt that this has been an obstacle to my enjoyment or engagement with any dance piece, as what I lack in technical understanding, I supplement with a kind of visceral experiential fascination, and a particular attention to how the shifts and shapings of a dance can tell so much about drama and performance.

With this in mind, I would like to offer a few thoughts on Rosemary Butcher's Lapped Translated Lines last Friday night, part of the Festival of Miniatures which she curated at Sadler's Wells' Lilian Baylis Studio. Butcher is celebrated as a truly unique, minimalist choreographer, and this work seems to be no different in presenting a pared-down, meditative piece of solo dance, performed by Elena Gianotti.

It was easy to see how the piece's construction related to the title: in the back corner, upstage right, were two overlapped metal structures, tracing silver lines almost like a heartbeat monitor pulled out of shape. Upstage right, a huge screen projecting an equally meditative, slow film of Gianotti performing the movements we saw live, but crucially unsynchronised and shot with extreme close-up at times, disorientating our sense of the very fixed routes which the dance was taking. Indeed, it was only in the form of this live presence that we saw the guidelines and fixed points of the piece, the straight lines on the floor which the dancer was tracing and building upon. Gianotti was something to be read: her movement seemed to make sense of and justify the presence of each element. Her dance became something between an argument and a meditation on the piece's existence.

And it is with this idea of meditation and live presence that I'd like to stay for a moment. Gianotti, and Butcher's choreography had a long applause at the end - and deservedly so because it was evident that the dancer had worked hard and that this kind of project signified a huge journey for those involved. However the audience was in no way part of this. The piece felt...esoteric, uninterested in those watching - even in the moments when Gianotti turned, painstakingly slowly to eyeball us in the dark.

Indeed, the slowness was one of the things which I found myself getting frustrated at. The piece refused to engage with any rate of change, always moving forward at the same pace: lapped rather than overlapped, stubbornly repeating structures at the same pace. I enjoyed the seeming arbitrariness of the ending - it could have happened at any point, I felt - but this was the first dance show I've seen where I have felt that terrible pang of the lonely audience member "but I don't understand it!".

I am always telling myself and others that performance, dance and theatre equally included, isn't meant to be simply 'understood'. And I believe that. Perhaps as someone with only very basic experience as a dancer, I did not fully appreciate the technical work of the piece. Yet I know that that isn't it.

My problem remains the fact that it seemed to lack...performance. I've never seen a dance piece before that wasn't also a performance. That magic thing that creates a triangle on stage, rather than a flat line between actor and director, making the audience feel like a peeping tom or unwelcome voyeur. This felt like second circle drama: the performer was working hard, and pushing through something, but connected only with the rehearsal process and offstage crew, with little concern as to what we were to do as viewers (and I heard several people in the audience echo these sentiments).

I wasn't surprised that Judith Mackrell's review for the Guardian was glowing, but I was surprised how lightly it skimmed across the surface of the piece. This was, if anything, a very intellectual and intellectualising piece of dance, in which it was difficult to see anything but the mind thinking. Like the looping film and metal sculptures, it seemed to be a lot of pre-fabricated structures being repeated and carefully measured. For all Gianotti's grace and precision, her body didn't seem alive so much as under total obeyance of her head, calculated and concentrating, with her memory slowly drawing the images and impositions around her.

I would love to hear from others who saw the show and have something to contribute - I am more than aware that my opinion of the piece will no doubt change over time, and my understanding of Butcher's practice will get deeper. None of my reaction is in any way due to feeling that it was 'bad': rather, I could understand how it was good, and clever and philosophical, but I couldn't see or feel it. I'm a simple girl: I like to see bodies moving, that's why I like theatre, it's why I like sport, it's why I like dance and debate and gesture and anthropology. But I struggled to see anything dancing, being live, thinking physically: it felt like the retracing of a thought. And perhaps in making such a statement I am eschewing the very preconceptions about dance which Butcher's work challenges.

you know who your mates are

2010-09-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

Put it down to ennui, unemployment or orientalism but last week I packed three Latin American films into less than 24 hours in my pursuit of things to do. And the three experiences of that short period all left remarkable, and different, impressions.

First was El secreto de sus ojos, Argentinian winner of 2010's Best Foreign Language Oscar and starring Soledad Villamil and Ricardo Darin:

I've already got into a few minor skirmishes (verbal) about the film, but I have to say that the Time Out review immediately raised an issue which I was surprised to have overlooked myself.

In it Dave Calhoun observes that this film, enjoying an extensive release in the UK due to its Oscar success, beat both The White Ribbon and A Prophet to the Academy Awards; he reminds us that such an achievement does not indicate that it is a better film than Haneke or Audiard's, but that the voters have bad taste. For some reason, such an obvious statement jolted me. Was I, like the Academy itself, persistent in pretending that the 'foreign language' award is somehow for the 'edgy', alternative or 'risky' films of world cinema, when in fact such exoticising patronisation of such superior film-makers totally disguises the real agenda, which is to honour the kind of films that would win 'Best Picture', and only fail to do so because they are not in English?

My own surprise at reading Calhoun's review made me reassess my own enjoyment of foreign cinema, especially my attitude towards Latin American films, which I consider to be some of the most inventive and exciting in contemporary film-making. Had I been guilty of exoticising? Like the Oscars, do I treat these films as 'special' because they are foreign, non-Hollywood, or can I simply enjoy them as films?

My attitude towards Secreto probably confirms the latter. The film itself, despite all this preamble, felt...flimsy. Like a lot of Oscar-contenders that attempt to pack in all the right references, events and stylistic notes to please but not challenge the audience. It isn't awful - Ricardo Darin is the kind of performer you could watch for hours - but its seeming lack of integral ambition results in the kind of film-making and acting which is competent without ever working up a sweat. Having last seen Darin in the sublime XXY - a phenomenally-shot film set in Uruguay in which he plays the father of a 15 year old hermaphrodite hitting puberty, which dealt subtly and provocatively with issues of gender, identity and expressed sexuality in South American society - this felt phoned in.

What is more, the film itself seemed structurally unsure of itself. Despite spanning 25 years, it displayed little to no interest in engaging with or evoking the considerable political and social changes which Argentina experienced since the 1970s; history was quickly nodded to with a few costume changes and a shot of Eva Peron. Unlike The White Ribbon, whose acutely detailed, claustrophobic atmosphere was all the more allusive and relevant to the history of modern Germany because of its specificity, this felt caught between periods, genres and stories. Whilst such in-between-ness can have incredible effects when it is deliberate, here it felt confused. This was neither a thriller, a love story nor an historical chronicle. It was somewhere between all three without being any of them. There were plenty of allusive themes and threads which we were referred to in passing rather than invited to dwell on.

Thus the overarching links of the script - memory, silence, the unspoken trust of true love - were named, and even discussed, but never really seen acting or moving through people, or through the edits and compositions of the film. So we have a scene - earmarked 'crucial' by its dark lighting and close-ups - in which two characters discuss the nature of memory and its ability to reinvent; this is half-heartedly carried into the structure of the film itself, which slips between old and new Argentina, with a few dodgy flashbacks. And that’s it! We are given no further clues as to how memory might work here.

The conceit of Darin's character writing a novel problematises, rather than illuminates, this evasiveness. It multiplies the perspectives of the film, almost denying that Darin is the real central character, the author, through whom there is at least a little clarity. Instead the constant shifting, which flirts with lucidity then seems to quite deliberately obfuscate it again, makes it difficult to connect.

This is, at best, a 3* Hollywood film. It has plenty of good ideas but I can't help feeling that it is coyly disguising the fact that, at heart, it doesn't have much to say. Like the novel written by Darin's character, it seems to suffer from wanting to be everybody, in every place, at once, yet endeavouring to tie things neatly together in the end – a neatness which its very generic profligacy would surely make impossible. (Of course this being a Hollywood film with big stars, we do get that attempted neat conclusion, patterned by a few motifs and repeated images, which still don't bear that much meaning when the two lovers finally seem to unite....I had no real idea that the lovers were going to unite - or that they were in love in the first place....!!)

There is a lot of telling, a bit of showing, but not a whole lot of doing here. It is ironic that Darin's pursuit of the widower of a rape victim whose case begins and ends the film is driven by a fascination with this bereaved man's ability to love. In one scene, he notes how the widower is alive, pulsing with love for his dead wife: we get the sense that Darin is almost jealous of this - because he knows he is incapable of doing love, of being it. His is a struggle to say I love you: the film returns to a note he scribbled as he falls asleep - TEMO (I fear), becomes TE AMO (I love you), when he connects his writing with the battered typewriter from his love’s office, on which he now writes, which is missing an A key. There is exciting in the potential here - a possible exploration of the real fears and self-prohibitions which go along with love and male sexuality in an increasingly 'equal' or developed society - but we only get the superficial nod towards it. Instead, this is a classy, well-executed box ticker and box-office hopeful, which doesn't get to the heart of its own questions: a heart whose pulse defies the very security of terms such as 'developed', 'equal' and 'love' in modern Latin America.

A film which does strike at the heart (literal and political) of contemporary Argentina is Plan B, recently released on DVD, the debut of Norwegian/Argentinian Marco Berger. This brilliant film, set in Buenos Aires, explores identity, sexuality and self-realisation in a country which this year became only the second in the Americas to legalize gay marriage.

The ‘plan B’ of the title refers to jilted Bruno, left by his girlfriend (though still occasionally sleeping with her) who plots to ruin her relationship with new boyfriend Pablo by befriending the former and pulling the two apart. However this initial idea quickly reveals the possibility of a more successful plan: seduce the shy Pablo, who has apparently experimented with men.

What ensues is a superbly acted, generous, honest film directed with attentiveness and humour by Marco Berger. It continues to quietly slink into my head weeks after having seen it. This isn’t a film about ‘queer’ love, or male homosexuality, so much as a gently opening of the binaries and divisions society often places between homosociality and homosexuality, and more broadly, the kind of impositions and systems of thought which find ourselves misidentifying the erotic and the Platonic without seeing them as part of the same spectrum.

With a simplicity that Secreto sometimes presented as contrivance, the film finds visual poetry and composition which converses with the stories and experiences shared by Pablo and Bruno: the building-block towers of Buenos Aires recall Pablo’s admission of his fascination with architecture, and identify him unconsciously with the simple, geometric ‘bucket and spade’ he describes himself as to Bruno.

This visual poetry is somehow natural and obviously composed, and kind of ripple effect of the story itself. Like Bruno’s B-plan, the cinematography feels beautifully uncalculated: there is an accidentally-on-purpose feel to the film which neither points gratuitously to some kind of notion of fate nor indicates an attempted ‘effortless cool’ which kills the energy of the story. Instead it feels like an intuitive piece of directing and acting, which has given time and patience to those involved, trusting every element of the piece, and in doing so revealing a profundity unexpected at the beginning. So too, Bruno’s envelopment in his plan mimics is kind of accidental discovery: not a huge self-revelation, rather a conjunction of time, space and feeling which is happy and alive.

One of the images which keeps returning to me is the punctuation of scenes with wonderful, almost stumbled-upon shots of straight block structures being crossed, intersected, by a diagonal line. It might be a ladder, a phone line; something visible in the distance or crossing the glass of the camera itself. These architectural happenstances became a kind of visual signpost, as my memory continued to turn over the film, of the entire piece’s trajectory, a beautiful way of using cinema and the camera’s often independent eye to tie the counter-currents of the city’s buildings to the equally newly acknowledged counter currents of emotion and desire that are challenging and struggling to be heard and told in Argentinian society.

This idea of counter-currents, landscapes and sexual desires is also at the centre of the film completing my trilogy, aptly titled Contracorriente (Undertow). Berger’s architectural spots of urban countercurrents here become poetic and metaphysical in this film set at the shores of a tiny fishing village in northern Peru.

If anything this is a more traditional film than Plan B, in both its rhetoric and execution: effectively a triumph-against-the-odds love story. What marks it apart is that, like the remote village away from the cities and superstructures of power, the story’s genre is dislocated from conventional cinematic models. What we see are novelistic devices and tropes – and a supernatural magical realism most famously celebrated in Latin American novels – now being employed filmically. A brave choice, but one that works.

Just as the central character, Miguel, married and expecting a child with his wife, and a respected community figure, is torn between his secret love of painter Santiago, a outsider from the city, so too the film delicately plays against itself, at times subverting cinematic norms and engaging the viewer with the kind of hypnotic richness that readers usually experience.Indeed the location, landscape and costuming is what provides some of the most interesting dwelling points and investigations of role-playing and self-acceptance in the film. Miguel and Santiago meet in half-complete buildings and rocky caves, contrasting with the bright walls and simple, clean lines of his home with Mariela.

What we see in Contracorriente is the kind of love Secreto hints at but never commits to. As a film it goes deeper into the psychological conflicts which affect the men and women at the centre of the story. Not only does it question what it is to 'be a man' in contemporary Peru, it questions what it is to be a male lead on film: how do we access the male characters, what are we allowed to see or not see? This is Miguel's story, and in focusing on him, we get a complex dissection of issues of identity, sex and responsibility; yet this inevitably means that Santiago is more of a stranger.

And what do we learn about love? Is the love in Contracorriente 'greater' than that in Secreto, because it is evident and acted upon? Or is it simply more attractive, more obvious as a story because in Contracorriente it is more impossible – that we see why Miguel prohibits himself, and we see why society might also prohibit him, whereas Secreto gave us no hint of any real obstacles? We come up here against an issue of both love and film: the story itself and how it is conveyed by the camera are inextricably entwined. Film mathematics dictating how much or little of a story we can fit in. Secreto attempts to tell a subtle story but inevitably ends up with a love-declaring finale, turning feeling into love, not through the power of the love or the characters, but through the will of film itself, and the spectre of Hollywood love stories. And Contracorriente gives us a more intriguing, pensive exploration of the conflicts surrounding Miguel's choice of 'mate', at the expense of allowing us to contact the other characters with the same depth.

As with all three films, Contracorriente is superbly acted. It isn’t simply that the two leads – particularly Miguel – are good. Miguel’s wife Mariela is a standout performance in a role that could very easily have been trite, undervalued or simply crass. Nevertheless her character remains one whose perspective we rarely get to see from. This lack of female perspective is perhaps one abiding link between all three films.

Whilst Latin American cinema continues to interrogate the machisto traditions and stereoptypes which have shaped and hampered its societies, now colliding with the growing Americanised ‘development’ of its industries – there remains a gap, on the international stage at least, where the female perspective should be.

I cannot expect Contracorriente to become about Mariela – the story is not hers – and I think that films which cast a homosexual perspective on societal relations in Latin America are essential – however my concern is that these male homosexual perspectives must then be challenged and re-viewed again. It would make me happy to see a film which tackled these issues from a heterosexual female perspective; and from a homosexual female perspective.

Perhaps, as I have touched on already, it is an issue of media and genre. Do certain types of art open themselves more accessibly to certain voices: are there different media more available to Latin Amercan women? Certainly on a local scale performance and performance art is much more available and utilized by Latin American woman, from independent artist and dancers to organizations such as FOMMA, which work through performance to deal with politics and indigenous relations with identity in Mexico.

Whatever happens, the stories of women in Latin America, and how they stand to be affected by the kind of social, sexual and political changes which (uniquely) impact each unique country in the region, deserve to be told. Otherwise the national identities of the region risk perpetuating nothing but a more nuanced version of its machisto relics which still do not embrace equality.

After all, what makes Contracorriente and Plan B remarkable is that they are not films about homosexuality, but about love and relationships. To say a film was purely about homosexuality would be to confirm an inner prejudice that such a thing was purely scientific, or isolated, or able to be studied as some kind of medical or social condition. Instead the films explore different ways of loving, friendship, homosociality and homosexuality.

The difference, then, between Secreto, Contracorriente and Plan B is not the difference between heterosexual and homosexual relationships, but between attitudes, versions of love. Social preconceptions – and cinematic conventions – which allow ideas of love on film to be reconfigured and explored. And this openness and exploration is something that mainstream American film consistently struggles to achieve. When it comes to male relationships, all love stories end in death, all friendship stories in marriage. The only exploration of homosociality which social preconceptions will allow in Hollywood are the ‘bromances’ of I Love You, Man.

These bromances are comedies which flirt with the idea of homosocial love and its potential erotic ends, whilst seemingly being forced to neutralise the potential destabilising effect of eroticism in male friendship through laughter - and having a quiet female partner in the background. These encourage white males growing up in late capitalism to identify with such films, to form male bonds whilst pronouncing disgust at the idea of homosexuality, but nevertheless allow them to find identity through being part of a group, by being the same as the men they hang out with. Not homosociality but homogeneity: men who, in these bromances, are traditionally ‘scared’ of marriage or unable to hold an identity in relation to their wives or female friends. Identikit films about males becoming identical – an attempt to reform a ‘man’s man’ group, tribe, that really lets you know who your mates are .

We know who our mates are.

Do we?

Isn't the key idea holding this blog together the fact that we don't know who our mates are: the confusion over who to settle with, who to sleep with and who to hang out with seems to be the key point holding together the Latin American trilogy I began with and the Hollywood bromances I am finishing on.

Or maybe even more specifically, these adverts and films only tell one side of the story, confirming that men don't know who their mates are. All the pieces mentioned deal with this crisis of male sexual and social identity: the difference is that Plan B and Contracorriente seem to be drawn unstoppably into that search for real identity, taking us on a journey in which ‘your mates’ become your mate (i.e. partner), demonstrating that ‘you know who your mates are’ is more than just a beer advert. It’s a statement of intent, designed to combat a dilemma of choice and self-definition in male ‘heterosexuality’. If anything, it lays bare the truth, that there is no such thing as homosexuality or heterosexuality, simply sexuality: and the elasticity of the role and identity of ‘your mates’ displays how easily friendship becomes love, becomes family and so on.

But we must be careful. That phrase ‘you know who your mates are’, opens up a can of worms in relation to biology, gender, reproduction and social structure. Once more it completely overlooks the female perspective, instead constructing a world of societal relations through a male gaze (be it self-identified as homosexual, heterosexual or homosocial). Isn’t what we find in cinematic treatments of male friendship, and adverts such as Carling’s, a dangerous elision of the female role to little more than a reproductive ‘mate’? Laura in Plan B is someone to have sex with, rather than someone we see Bruno really in love with; Mariela is seen suffering but we can only identify her as an image, a pregnant wife, a new mother. We only glimpse her suffering through Miguel’s story.

And perhaps this has something to do with cinema and women, the role of the predominantly male gaze. Yet it also seems to hint at social and linguistic gender issues. Isn’t it for women that the term ‘mate’ never seems to really make sense: it does not give her a chance to form her own identity. And if ‘mate’ is such a male-gendered word, whose meanings seem to have been totally defined by male social relations, how can a woman make friendships, build relationships with these homogenous tribes? What words can she use? What models or networks exist for her to do this? Is there a return to an Athenian concept of society where male friendship, spending time with your real ‘mates’, is far more edifying than loving a female? Are women becoming in fact, the ‘obstacles’ to true love, in ‘bromances’ and in love stories like Plan B and Contracorriente? I am unsure whether is this age of increasing self-consciousness, women oblivious to this occurrence - or complicit in it.

Who will make a film which has a woman at its centre trying to piece together her own identity with a vocabulary (linguistic, filmic and perhaps even societal) that has been defined by men?

the six month itch

2010-09-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

HELLO EVERYBODY

especially for you all, to coincide with London Fashion Week so we can all keep busy between shows, the launch of REPETITIVE STRAIN's A/W 2010 collection.

it has been nearly six months since we last got active on the blog here, and after a long spring/summer of finding employment, writing dissertations and taking shows to edinburgh, it is time for the dormant beast to raise its head and let forth a great yawn of verbiage. and maybe a few photos.

coming up in the next few weeks, i will be endeavouring to create a truly non-linear collage of many things that have provoked thought in the last half-year, including Edinburgh musings, some thoughts on dance and location, orientalism and the foreign language Oscar winner and much, much more...

please be a little patient, these fragments to be shored against our ruin may come in fits and starts --

- -

but they are coming.

HAPPY BELATED WORLD THEATRE DAY!

2010-03-29T02:28:00.000-07:00

Did you miss it? I certainly did.

Reading Karen Fricker’s round-up of “theatre’s special day” on the Guardian theatre blog yesterday, it struck me that something crucial had been missing from this celebration.

It was not Dame Judi Dench’s official address, no, that had been delivered with her usual stateswomanship. Nor was it the alternative version, the cyber-hi-five issued to Obamaesque political idealism by American playwright Lynn Nottage, whose message was accompanied by a leisurely theatre montage, and a soundtrack which makes as if someone just died. And it was not the baroque ode to theatre proffered by London Theatre Blog’s Andrew Eglinton in quasi-versified aphorisms and enigmatic film clipettes.

The Guardian came close when someone decided to give Fricker’s article the headline: What’s your World Theatre Day fantasy? This seemed too good a question to allow the Guardian subs to answer, especially when you see what they wrote, mistaking the word fantasy for the word favourite: ‘Whether it’s a night in the West End or tackling a Howard Barker epic…’ You can’t help but think they could have thought up a better dilemma.

Judi Dench’s suggestion that ‘in many ways every day should be considered a theatre day’ certainly makes sense coming from a jobbing actress, but for the rest of the world this must be considered a damaging consequence of the culture industry’s inexorable (execrable?) momentum. In London, where Lord-knows-how-many plays can be seen each night we are many worlds away from the festival of Dionysius, and the theatres of other ancient civilizations, in which the cultural significance of the experiece was reflected by its occasional position in the community. Is it barbarian to suggest that seeing theatre too often (every week? every month?) reduces it from the extra-special to the ultra-mundane?

It is exactly this distinction that is missing from the virtual birthday party, the irruption of that which makes theatre worth celebrating, I don’t know: imagination? hopefulness? disappointment? the pure joy and real sorrow of fantasy.

If this is theatre’s special day, you fully hope and expect she’ll get stroppy, throw a tantrum, scream until she turns blue, demand a larger and more calorific cake, more numerous and costly presents, throw someone out, invite too many unsuitable guests, get drunk on supermarket vodka, puke over an elderly relative, wreck her parent’s house, go missing and return after a not-inconsiderable emergency services search operation, and sob fat tears of contrition into a forgiving parent’s jersey.

Last week I went to the opening of the International Istanbul Theatre Festival and was struck (or, rather, bored) by the lack of evidence that the organisers recognised what it was that theatre is good at: a breaking with the everyday, creating a sense of occasion. A woman whose oratorial skills were nothing short of disastrous stood up in front of a screen with the logos of the festival’s sponsors printed on it and read out the entire listings of the festival, the details of which we all had on printed handouts. The mere fact of ostentatiously giving a significant sum of money to a worthy arts cause does not in itself enough, there needs to be a sense that theatre is not just a poor cousin, but an important part of the family. In the same way, it doesn’t seem too much to expect that the UNESCO-sponsored World Theatre Day do something more than simply broadcast a indirect call for world-piece under the guise of a vaguely-worded appreciation of theatre.

We need to stop using the same old words and start saying things which make it clear we mean them. Unsurprisingly, Samuel Beckett knew this: ‘to speak of happiness one hesitates those awful syllables first asparagus burst abscess’. Which syllables for us now?

MY YR WORLD THEATRE FANTASY DAY OF A LIFETIME

It all takes place, of course, in the smoldering ruins of The Globe – restored once more to the archeologists of the future in an all-too-historically-faithful revival of ALL IS TRUE.

The rivers of the world have been dredged, Kurt Schwitters has been exhumed for one last merzbau, Sir Nicholas Serota is pasting the walls with luggage labels and cigarette cartons and free newspapers. Shocked dolphins, the figureheads of shipwrecks, decommissioned nuclear warheads and rare whales all orbit in a cosmological mechanic aquarium, and it drips brine on your sister’s hair.

The audience are all suspended from the ceiling on swings of blue and orange rope and driftwood, which rise and fall and catapault someone into the nightsky: you hear them enter the Thames, and you see their occasional beaming betowelled reentrances, waving to you, waving to their family and friends.

It’s all in a language you cannot speak but do understand: it is spoken in phrases repeated in refrains, and written in the movements of one hundred bodies: the actors are all dancers and the musicians are all dancers and the dancers are all your past lovers and you find it is the story of your life you’ve always lived in your head, heard and seen for the first time.

Scarab beetles crawl in the embers, owls are nesting in the balconies, and the chef from an Ethiopian restaurant throws spices into the fire, spices which send your mother to sleep, and bring her long-forgotten bittersweet dreams until she falls off her swing and Kevin Spacey kindly leads her out of the auditorium.

The South Bank’s human statues have quietly followed you in and now run along the charred roofs their naked bodies daubed in thick paint all the colours of the world flags, juggling candles, scattering coppers, handfuls of almonds, raining playing cards flutter past your head.

The girls who followed you along the riverside and disappeared when you gave them coins now parade through the ashes, their ashen skin, the dots incised in their high cheeks, their wrackish rhythms, their infant rhythms, their shrieking gypsy song.

Some hungry Community Support have followed the girls in, but they have laid down their batons, and are being taught to dance, their radios echo angrily unanswered across the arena.

A tribe of children from the local school ride in on animals liberated from the local zoo, dismount and execute a dozen proud foxtrots on the splintered stage.

A troupe of deaf choreographers carry placards which say THUS I PARTICIPATE IN LIFE and other, cleverer things and someone has told them to scream, in beautiful disunion: I love you, I love you, you can never disappoint me.

A thousand men and women are queueing up outside with TVs under their arms – it has been bring your TV to work day but they are all redundant – and break ranks to surge inside and haul their TVs onto the dying fire and the mutinying crew of Doctor Who have dragged a stolen Tardis from the BBC studios, strip it to kindling and feed the fire, which now grows greedy with renewed intent.

Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen perform an increasingly frantic fire safety drill, piggybacking thrilled air stewardesses whose hopping scalded feet scratch their august autographs into the glowing cinders.

Someone from the BBC crew is giving the schoolchildren a lesson in elementary electronics dissecting the Community Support radios.

A sewage pipe bursts beneath the stage and riverwater is sucked back and sent high into the air, dousing your feet, fish falling flipping on the embers. Seagulls circle. The fire seethes.

The girls and the Community Support, the chef and the statues and the children and the BBC crew, Sir Nicholas Serta and Kurt Schwitters and Kevin Spacey, the actors and dancers and musicians gather and reach out their arms to receive the water, wash themselves and each other.

You don't know any of your neighbors, infact you've never seen anyone like them, but in the constant intervals you just get chatting, you love the way they’ve dyed their hair, the pieces of jewellery they wear, and when dawn breaks you go for dinner in a little place nearby that makes faraway food taste homemade and someone plays the accordion improbably well and you’re all like What a fantastic day it’s been and We should do this again and though you don't live anywhere near one another you share a cab home and the driver discourses prettily on the national deficit and the fare comes to less than you thought because you realise you share an childhood obsession in John Hughes movies and one of you invites the other on some unrehearsed pretext back to a small but welcoming flat, with posters of great art works on the wall, and you fall exhausted onto a single bed where one of you cries and is held in the other’s arms. You promise you’ll see each other soon, though you both know that you won’t, and you promise never, ever to forget.

BABY I CAN SEE YOUR HALO

2010-03-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

Who You Aren't

2010-03-16T03:57:00.001-07:00

What It Was

Last night, Monday 15th March 2010, Chris Goode's one-off work 'Who You Are' set in Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.

What might be called a 45-minute sound installation around Goode's response to the space and his preparatory thoughts on the audience.

Where I'm At

Somewhere - - disappointed.

After a lot of walking, talking, thinking, strolling, rehearsing lately, I've been thinking about journeying and audiences. About thinking walking - about thinking as walking, a movement, but also about clearings, about Heidegger and revealing, dwelling, technique as techne, letting appear... Feeling also other journeys through acting work involving Viewpoints, Grotowski plastiques and the notion of self-penetration: acting as a deepening and stripping away - a technique of unravelling, of movement into the self, transforming the space of the body that is already there - the body as another Heideggerian clearing, showing us its boundaries and springing away from them.

Continuing to think about journeying last night, it strikes me that Who You Are did not travel into the deep corners, or rather, rejected a collective, metaphysical expedition through the vastness of Balka's great black hole. Definitely an in-stall-ation not an ex-plor-ation.

Where It Was

Still walking-thinking a bit about Heidegger and audience journeys and self-penetration - surely the point of the exhibit is that it isn't a black box...it's actually quite light. It does transform and transmogrify its own distances; revealing unexpected qualities.

It's quite soft in places, hard and cold in others. The walls are deliberately different textures from the floor: they are invisible, glimpsed only in absence, whereas the floors give light, glow grey in patches, moulded by the shadows or shapes of others.

What It Wasn't

Indeed, having a cast of silhouettes sharing the space does not mean that we are 'deprived' of sight, or that our attention to sound is vastly heightened, as the piece ironically notes during one 'scene' in which Goode and the familiarly parodic Tate 'Visitor Experiences' manager discuss why nudity is inappropriate 'in the dark' of How It Is.

Deliberately or no, it was quite difficult to hear anything with the balance of the speakers.

What's more, the sense that really needed to be arrested was touch....sitting against the almost furry soft-brushed suedeness of the back wall of the piece made me increasingly aware of how I would like to be made more aware of my own body and its relation to the constructions around it - other skeletons and bags. Telling us doesn't really do the same job.

If It Weren't -

Another sense - that the piece did not feel intricately thought through - and at times it seemed to fall prey to a technique which too literally takes techne as letting appear and still prioritises the gaze - using nakedness (physical or emotional) as a shield.

After the dialogue with the 'Visitor Experiences' manager, its clear-cut play with the dark space and the imagination, bodies in the dark and the audience's implantation of sexual imagery amidst suggestive dialogue, Goode moved to a dimly-lit lectern on the edge of the open-end of the box, and began a self-interrupting torrent of personal testimony, biography, snatched memory.

The 'confessional', the foregrounding of the artist's honesty (an ironic thing to need foreground...), outpouring of personal detail, becomes a defensive shield. It protects the piece from examining a difference type of naked vulnerability, which is that of the audience and the relationship between performer and audience. It closes the gap between audience and performer, between audience member and audience member, by pretending there is no gap - no connection, just two sets of people in totally different worlds.

Almost antagonistic. Or rather, passive aggressive.

So such nakedness, the self revelation which could not feel like a revelation, instead presents, at poorly chosen junctures, a retiring back into the self - an almost-sentimental 'show' of passion and significance, whose show nearly succeeds in deflecting attention away from the emptiness behind it.

A closing of the gap between audience and performer - because that gap might be a door.

And the performer decides to shut it.

To not admit.

To think there is no light seeping in under the cracks.

When there is always light and shape in shadows.

How We Are

It felt, then, that such a performance carried some un-considered assumptions about the audience and the dark.

Firstly, in shrouding the audience in mysterious impersonality, in reading us randomly-generated names of people who might (not) be watching in America, in telling us that we are scary, that he knows nothing about us, Goode missed out on a glimpse, a genuine connection, with the peculiar type of darkness that the audience experiences.

Yes we might all be strangers to you (though several of us are not) - but are we strangers to each other? Don't we often see familiar faces, or go to the theatre with a friend, a lover, a family member, a colleague? Aren't I here with several people I know - some I knew were coming, others who I happily bumped into?

Isn't the point that this darkness, this audience shroud, is not equalising or even totalising. Isn't it sort of suspending? Not like the shut door, not a deadening or rejection, not a push into nothingness: rather it is a shifting encounter within a fixed time and fixed space. We become aware that maybe we can't move - or we shouldn't move - but we want to. We might want some water but we can't really open our bag in the dark - can't make that noise.

Doesn't this suspension of chronological time, ticking life, reveal something to us? Does it not let appear certain relations, feelings, characteristics, boredoms, excitements? Sitting in the suspended dark with a friend can often make you more acutely aware of each other.

Maybe that someone keeps looking at you to check your reaction, or maybe you become nervously aware of your own position; maybe your own relation is suspended, allowed to play out or reveal itself in a new form. Perhaps this is just How I Am but this must then be a part of How We Are...

I couldn't feel much engagement with this real intimacy of the audience; the shape of the dark, the contours, much like the architectural fascination we find in In Praise of Shadows.

More than anything, this felt under-done, made resoundingly timid by the grandness of the space it took place in, a space whose work with experientiality should not be competed with but complemented and confronted, expanded: exposed, perhaps, with a flash of light, made actually, temporarily, vulnerable and naked, intimate and imposing. They very grinning photo Goode describes on his first visit to the box, amidst the snapping teenagers.

Who It May

It strikes me that maybe sometimes Chris Goode is afraid of the audience...that he turns it into a thing, an 'enigma' and this is somehow scary - and so, to avoid getting entwined in this shadowy presence, it is safer to be almost aggressively, pre-emptively naked himself - to stop anyone else doing so.

But if we start to expect that 'nakedness' (in whatever form) from a piece of theatre, it ceases to be nakedness and starts to become a piece of artistic vocabulary: the dreaded nudity that Goode so deftly deconstructs in The Forest and the Field.

Who I Are

But what shape has a shadow got? How much of performance is there for the performer - how much is there for the audience? What happens if these figures become embodied in the same person? How can performance be intimate without being private? Or particular without being personal? Should theatre play a therapeutic role?

Is that Who We Are? or Who You Are when I go to the theatre. Someone around me who might make me better.

Who is sick.

Who is curing.

Who You Are made me feel oddly impersonal, indifferent to two things in particular:

1) to the audience; even sitting between two friends I felt only myself without pushing further towards my own experience or into the experiences of my two friends either side of me;

2) to the space. I felt it could have taken place anywhere; what's more, it would have been more effective in a busy train station or underneath a bridge with a handjob, anecdotally.

Did it try to fit neatly into the dark. Did it not fit. Was it not dark?

Are we not in the dark.

Is that it?

Ivo van Hove and a fragile democracy

2010-01-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

The problem of theatre in our lifetime is not an aesthetic one. It is social. It is not that we do not know 'how' a play should look, or what a theatrical form should take: it is that we do not know how to make it. We are unable to grasp the importance of theatre, for theatre's sake, understood on its own terms.

Because we cannot see theatre in theatrical terms, we cannot understand its position in society. And so every time we go to see a play, our reaction expresses discomfort. Not discomfort over particular social actions or circumstances: but discomfort with theatre's way of telling it.

Theatre seems constantly to be telling us about something else's view of the world. It is society's little secretary. A secretary which thinks its speech combines the polyphony of voices and stratas in all aspects of the corporation. But in actual fact, in losing itself, in becoming a mouthpiece with no mouth of its own, it simply keeps the boss in charge.

If theatre is a secretary, what is the political shape of the world in which it functions? Is there a power in being secretarial? And how does this relate to an understanding of democracy - or otherwise - in the cultural and social landscape? Does a secretary not represent many of the most repressed, and repressive, aspects of representative democracy?

Who do we elect to represent 'Theatre' now? And why does it need representing?

Theatre wants us to fill in a form. Age, name, date of birth, postcode, email, tick this box to receive further details.

How can we move it to a position of asking questions?

Several months ago I saw Toneelgroep's Roman Tragedies at the Barbican, directed by Dutch-born Ivo van Hove. The Hall was transformed into a muzak-filled corporate lobby: grey block sofas across the stage, a bar, first aid area, and internet zone all occupying the space. The audience were invited on stage, moving between dispersed video screens and relays of the action. An electronic ticker tape below the main projection screen showed the latest world news, noted forthcoming scene changes, and even provided a Roman history countdown: 3 mins til the death of Julius Caesar; 75 minutes til the death of Antony, etc.

At the end of the performance, when many members of the audience were already heading for the door, there was a projection of 40 questions concerning politics, theatre and acting.

Is it possible to have politics without a desire for power?
Is anti-political rhetoric the key to popularity?
Are all politicians actors?

I am interested in how van Hove's questions, and the extraordinary, sprawling-yet-minutely calculated 6 hour collation of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra might encourage some consideration of theatre escaping its reflective duties of echoing social 'reality' and theatrical tradition.

There is something in the overt posing of questions which abrogates a sense of self - and simultaneously a sense of invitational, inclusive debate - so rarely seen (unless in pure egoism) in contemporary productions of Shakespeare. Roman Tragedies was not mute secretary; we were handed no forms. Instead we were confronted with a brief epilogue which challenged the timid assumption that theatre interrogates social reality only through dramturgical cleverness and mimesis.

Yes, Toneelgroep's production had sublime moments of dramaturgical re-visioning: playing Calpurnia's bad dream scene with Julius Caesar face to face with Brutus' final night with Portia; choosing to cast Octavius Caesar as female. Yet it also did something I have never seen in theatre: it combined this subtly woven re-vision with direct questions. It literally turned to the audience and said "what do you think? What does theatre have to do with politics?"

Whilst I was surprised how many people were already ignoring these directed challenges by the end of the show, apparently the London audience paid them most attention.

This was one of the observations made on Thursday 21st January when van Hove gave a talk and a round-table discussion at King's College London of his recent work and general practice.

A sleek, well-dressed man in his forties, van Hove is not particularly well-known in the UK, though his international reputation, having begun his career primarily in New York, is weighty.
More of us should know who he is.

In the roundtable discussion, Van Hove said that he treated the plays - Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra - as if "Shakespeare had sent them to me that morning". (Somewhat eerily - or perhaps she had heard it before - Lyn Gardner's review for the Guardian makes the same observation almost word for word).

Read only what is there, not what other readers and directors have found there.

Of course, we could argue that each text of Shakespeare is itself an historical construction which must be scrutinised; but not in the realm of a theatrical production. Not in the beginning stages of bringing a text to the stage. Van Hove's comments insinuated that his process was one of mapping, of plotting points in the plays' existing fabric against his own points of view ('the end must be slow'; Antony and Cleopatra would always come last; the snake had to be real): creating lines and planes of dialogue, a fresh play.

The ferocity of the vision must take precedent in this process; but van Hove equally remembers where it came from. The triumphant epic quality of Roman Tragedies came from within one quick reading of Antony and Cleopatra on an aeroplane: it is a direct response to something that clearly is conversant within Shakespeare's Roman plays.

A distinctive quality of van Hove's work is his insistence on an element of the 'real' - usually a very fleeting encounter which once again forces a tumultuous reevaluation of the context. He attributed this to his background in performance art. In Roman Tragedies, this came with Enobarbus' speech prior to his death:

I fight against thee? No, I will go seek
Some ditch wherein to die; the foul'st best fits
My latter part of life.

In every performance, the actor playing Enobarbus fled the auditorium, followed by a camera which then relayed the outdoors back indoors to the audience members huddling around the grey sofas of the 'conference centre' playing space.

Van Hove noted in the discussion in January the importance of place in the success of this 'real' moment. It is a moment when, in a playing space already dissolving lines between audience and actor, we are abruptly reminded that there are thousands of other barriers, spaces and borders to be dissolved. The actor crashes into the Barbican carpark: eerie but for the comical sight of my friends Rachel and Hugh having a sneaky cigarette mid-performance, stepping out of their 'moving'-audience role assigned in the auditorium, to another role. The borders, it seems, are not just dissolved and reconstituted: they choose and change themselves.

Van Hove's favourite city for this moment was in Amsterdam, as the play was staged in a theatre located on the city's most central square: Enobarbus would emerge into the scream of traffic, trams, taxis, commuters, hawkers, vendors, businessmen, beggars, fighting amidst the din to have his own wailing heard.

Van Hove construed the production as a study, charting from republic to empire and onwards 'the fragile birth of democracy'.

What might an understanding of birth, fragility and democracy make me see when I think now about Shakespeare, and about this nominal democracy of Britain 2010?

I think about voices, and about van Hove's earlier comment on treating a script as if the writer finished it this morning. About having certain approaches or techniques when it comes to staging, but never becoming an aesthetic brand. About being delicately democratic with a text - any text, Shakespeare or otherwise - rather than despotic or tyrannical.

I also think about van Hove's practical approach with his actors, a mode of being which he calls 'intense relaxation'. The performers are at ease, yet are able to change gear into moments of real violence or extreme emotional ferocity swiftly and believably.

Van Hove's approach to theatre is unremittingly even-handed. Respectful. There are no heroes or special stars. Of course he has favoured actors, preferred venues; but as he himself admits, there isn't a recognisable 'van Hove' style. Instead he treats each play, each performance, as if it were born then and there. He reads a text and asks what it wants to be, not what it has been before.

With regards to Shakespeare, or otherwise, his approach is something which every British director can learn from.

It strikes me that there is something ridiculously undemocratic, and brittle rather than fragile, about attitudes to Shakespeare productions in English, in this country. Roman Tragedies was lauded, and rightly so, for its sublimely Brechtian puncturing of political and theatrical precepts. Yet I cannot help thinking that its unrivalled praise in the British press was also gilded by its foreignness; by its not being in English. After all, we love Shakespeare in another language - a Japanese Titus Andronicus, a Polish Macbeth. It allows us to focus on the poetics of the stage, on the physicality of the bodies and sounds, rather than the semantics.

Yet this wild praise for foreign language Shakespeare insinuates a still-existing tyranny of language: that the words, the exquisite "poetry" (always 'the poetry'!!) of Shakespeare are all, or nothing. The absent marker in the Dutch muscularity of Roman Tragedies or the central lynchpin of Trevor Nunn's woeful read-a-long Lear for the RSC a few years ago. English productions of Shakespeare become more and more like radio programs, or audio books; international productions are subsequently expected to dazzle us with 'physical theatre' (a term which only seems to exist in theatre communities in Britain: other cultures just call it "theatre") - something to make up for that absent "poetry".

Any English production that does dare to change the language or structure significantly is itself accused of violence: it is arrested, and taken to the gallows for its insult on the sovereign of our great literary landscape.

Declan Donellan's seriously under-appreciated Troilus and Cressida in 2008, was criticised heavily for some of the staging choices and cuts. by a press unwilling - or perhaps unable - to engage with the reasons for those choices.

It seems that the English press can only judge any Shakespearean performance against Shakespeare, and the history of shakespeare in performance. Different rules seem to apply: you even get it in the US; take a look at recent press for Young Jean Lee's Lear-less LEAR at the Soho Rep in New York. The New York Times critic judged the piece a brave failure because it did not 'speak' sufficiently to the themes of original Shakespeare text.

I think about how this severity, this unchanging reification of a writer's plays into one voice, "Shakespeare", might bear similar traits as the voice of an ex-Prime Minister who, nearly a decade after some of the twenty-first century's most devastating political decisions, declares that he would 'do it all again' with half the chance.

Blair's attitude is a resolute, though highly self-motivated, failure to acknowledge the undeniable restlessness of political reality. The unending festering of social life which means that people cross borders, bodies are buried under rubble, decay and are never found, stock markets change every instant, money changes hands, languages interfuse.

And in Blair's stony declaration, I hear echoed the radio-friendly tones of a certain booming, boring Shakespearean theatre which has been 'doing it all again' without ever noticing that the decision to play it like that was wrong in the first place!

The man who agreed to invade Iraq was wrong, though he made a spectacularly elaborate attempt to derive empirical justification from absolute fiction. The practitioners who decide to 'read' Shakespeare to their buttock-numbed audience have trodden the same path - not in relation to this one writer, but in enslaving and corrupting our theatre in its entirety. They have bastardised it in constituting it, and given it a nice name badge to wear.

In Iraq that name badge reads 'democracy'. In theatre, I have no fucking clue what it reads, but I don't like it.

I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's 'Introduction' to A Thousand Plateaus, and of my friend Jonny, who will read this post, with whom I discussed just what this might mean for a theatre-maker:

We assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why
have we kept own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make
ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not
ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's
nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody
knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where
one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any
importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will
know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

And just what might this mean for a theatre-maker dealing in the biggest oak-tree of them all? What tiny dendrite or little polyp can weld and weed itself about this monumental structure? Surely the only way for an oak like Shakespeare to keep growing is laterally, subterraneously: re-germination, decay, cutting, trimming, suturing as re-construction not de-construction. Trimming to stimulate growth: or simply delving into the soil - soil is a false surface; not a plane but a planet of its own, a dense forest - to seek out the freshest, most living part of Shakespeare. The part that can thump on your desk at 9am this morning - underneath your hands and in your fingernails like sods of mud. The part that is still growing, even whilst the tree above, in all its hopeless verticality, dries out.

The [boss] is dead, long live -
!!

...Now boast thee, Death, in thy possession lies
A lass unparalleled.

MODERN TIMES: A LITTLE COLLAGE OF THINGS

2010-01-19T09:01:00.001-08:00

Some youtube wizard, the imperceptibly named dabble778, is responsible for the above. Bringing Bob Dylan's 2006 album Modern Times into glorious dialogue with Charlie Chaplin's 1936 movie of the same name, finally initiated me into the joys of Charlie Chaplin, after just about everyone else on this planet.

I've always venerated Dylan in a totally unhealthy way, but with Charlie Chaplin I suppose I assumed his raggedy limbs and musical hall clothes had nothing to do with me. All it took was a simple gesture combining the not-quite-arbitrarily-connected two, to unlock a world of pleasures. Well, four minutes of it.

In a link so tenuous it should have a new title, the Modern Times: Responding to Chaos exhibition just opened at Kettle's Yard Gallery, in Cambridge, bringing into an extraordinary conversation drawings and films by an astonishing variety of different modernist artists.

To name some names: Pollock, Malevich, Mondrian, Grosz, Klee, Pollock, de Kooning, Giacometti, Bourgeois, Beuys, Serra, Judd, Twombly, Boccioni, El Lissitsky.

Especial treats included a fourteen-minute-long video by Ferdinand Léger called Ballet Mécanique (which you can watch here), and a small drawing by Kurt Schwitters, entitled 'Koi'. This I had to bend forward to inspect properly, and I found it rewarding in a way no drawing ever has been. The lightness of the marks made, the careful deployment of colour and shade, and the way it lingered on the brink of signification (and its opposite), meant it revealed itself incredibly slowly. Several days later, its presence in the exhibition remains far more problematic than the bolder works of abstract expressionism which surrounded it, busily proclaiming their new language for art.

A friend remarked it looked like a drawing-board offcut, and intriguingly it did seem to bear the imprint of industry once more important but no longer otherwise accounted for, quietly commanding all your attention.

trying to be nice - Trilogy at BAC

2010-01-18T03:02:00.000-08:00

After a conversation with my flatmates this weekend, I have been thinking a lot about justice and theatre. Justice, that is, as 'rightness'; the particular set of rules which may or may not apply when we consider a piece of theatre and how it makes us feel or act.

We had been talking about how performance studies was becoming increasingly popular as a training tool for medical and legal professionals, with actors used to create 'lifelike' situations of crisis or dispute which the training doctors or lawyers could use to respond to appropriately.

I thought a lot more about how performance encourages or prescribes response; but more than that, about how attitude and theatre might have an interesting relationship; a relationship which can sometimes be coached or trained, just like the actors in medical instruction videos attempt to train doctors to exercise more 'gentle' or human responses to their patients particular illnesses or tragedies.
Is it possible to use something like a theatrical performance to 'coach' people into being nice?

And what is it about this tricky word 'nice' that makes me think of Nic Green's Trilogy?

The piece is a self-proclaimed feminist performance in three parts, a runaway success as at the 2009 Fringe which enjoyed a recent run at the Battersea Arts Centre and will transfer to the Barbican this weekend.

As the name might suggest, the piece works in three parts.

The first, about twenty minutes in length, is exposition with dance-moves. Green and friend and collaborator Laura Bradshaw enact a 'celebration of womanhood' which culminates in about 50 female volunteers naked and dancing on stage. Which is exuberant sheerly because its participants are exuberant.

This is followed by the longest - and most arduous - part of the show, which is inspired and driven by lengthy projections of Town Bloody Hall, the film of a public meeting on Women's Liberation in 1971, chaired by infamous misogynist (and bad sex novelist) Norman Mailer, featuring Germaine Greer and Jill Johnston.

Projections of the the two speeches delivered by Greer and Johnston are accompanied by - and interspersed with - the five strong company (four female, one male, as in Hall), reciting in unison various statements and parts of the discussion. They begin the section by telling - and sometimes showing us - how they were born; they end, naked, in a cluster, upstage; seven members of the audience, clothed, tracing circles with their arms gather downstage and move across the diagonal so that the groups switch places. (Greenm in preparing the audience for this moment, assures that their presence at this point will make sense when it happens...it does not.)

Finally, a shorter section which makes Trilogy an argument or a structured piece of gentle rhetoric rather than a discursive performance. A mini lecture about women's rights abuses, a proposed solution in the form of a 'Womanifesto', and the culmination: all the audience on stage, some of its female members unclothed, singing Jerusalem.

Re-reading what I have just described, I am surprised (as someone who does consider themselves a feminist but also a fairly critical cynic) that I enjoyed myself. Not least because I notice how different my voice, and experience, becomes when I write retrospectively about something I have seen; when I try to place it in an order or category of meaning or ideology. I thoroughly enjoyed being at the BAC on Saturday; it was as if I was filtering out my apprehensions, saving the political commentary for the blogpost, or the aftershow discussion.

And there were numerous points which jumped out mid-piece that threatened the political integrity of the piece by being so singularly idealistic.

In the third part, Green 'accidentally' showed us a slide, mid 'Womanifesto', of a lady getting stoned to death. The woman was buried up to her shoulders, in a white shroud and sobbing, keening to one side. The image was profoundly affecting - I spoke to many people (all women) afterwards who said that from that point on they were in tears.

Yet I found the inclusion of the picture a little cheap; as if this woman was a victim of great physical torture and injustice, that was becoming a representational ('poetic'?) injustice too. Green did not tell us who this woman was, where she was from, what year the photo came from, or exactly what the situation or conditions of stoning-as-punishment are. Such necessary details make an unjust event more telling, more clearly atrocious, but equally, they are fairer to the event itself.

There is something troubling in grabbing a picture off the internet (even if Green herself knows exactly what it means and where it's from), using it to powerfully influence the emotions of the audience (just before you are about to ask them to take off their clothes and sing Jerusalem, a wildly misread, politically manipulated tub-thumping England song) and not giving that audience sufficient information to contextualise and truly empathise with the victim.

And here is the rub. Green's piece was about celebrating difference, she cried, the difference in every female body, in every name and history of woman; yet there was very little consideration of ethnic specificity, or class struggle. Money, race and gender score a very desperate, confusing trio: and perhaps the key to really finding a place for feminism in 2010 is to acknowledge rather than condemn the inextricable bonds between all of these issues.

What is more, there was a sense in which Green seemed to be aiming for a kind of non-theatre. Sometimes we were watching dance; sometimes we were being sung at; sometimes it felt like a motivational exercise video, sometimes like a weird power-church.
The form was flawed, but it had good intentions, which almost seemed to misplace themselves, unsure whether to wholly unite or respectfully differ. I am thinking here about the role of nakedness in the piece.

I recalled Chris Goode's latest incarnation of The Forest and the Field, and its consideration of the distancing artificiality of nudity, which tries to cast the unclothed body in some kind of interpretive or eroticised, art-ified fabric, opposed to the honesty of nakedness. Trilogy's physical nakedness was underpinned by a certain ideological nudity, or prettifying; a particular attitude which wanted to use performance, to stage openness, in order to make people more open. Like those instructional medical videos, it was acting in order to get us to act nice, in our own lives. But was it giving us the naked truth?

Perhaps such honesty is impossible in a medium which relies on poetic license. Yet at times Trilogy felt like it didn't want to be theatre at all, so little did it use the forms and conventions of its space and tradition.

There was an element of the show which, my friend Jess rightly pointed out, felt a little like a sermon. I am thinking specifically of the final part. Whilst its attitude was not sermonising, delivered in that long, considered, too-smiley broad cadence which seems to have infused contemporary theatre which addresses its audience face on (I think again about the different - thought nonetheless considered, weighted speech of Tim Crouch's The Author ), but the effect it achieved, and the effect it aimed for, seemed to be one of making us sweet; coaching us, like doctors in those instructional videos, to be more 'human' (I am keeping 'human' in deliberate speech marks), as if we had none of that humanity already.

Though I was troubled by some aspects of the piece whilst watching them, I nevertheless appreciated, more than anything else, the opportunity to feel genuinely included and appreciated in a theatre. I am sure that the feeling of security which I experienced at one point of the performance was not entirely shared by everyone, but I believe that it was respected by everyone. As I mentioned in the beginning, its lack of obscurity meant that I as an audience member felt myself in an expansive space of personal contemplation (and this may have been as much due to my mood that night as the performance itself).

But something about Trilogy allowed me to dislocate my very analytical, often quite harsh, defenses and enjoy the event in real time, rather than anticipating all the points or criticisms we might throw at it later. I am aware that this generosity I felt from the performers may well be the effect of a theatre which deliberately appeals to women; I went with four female friends, and afterwards we stayed and talked for a few hours about our mothers, children, changes in feminism through our families' recent generations.

Yet however much our female discussion might have been conducted in a post-euphoric glow after having been naked amongst strangers on stage, or given the optimism and singular simplicity of Nic Green and her company's idealised vision for contemporary sexual attitudes, it was important.
The piece barely registered, its aesthetic accessories- and they were accessories: save for a beautiful moment when the five core cast created a kind of step ladder out of their naked bodies, draped one over the back of the other, and brushing the hair of the person behind them, created a kind of wave of spiralled movement up and down the ladder.

It was the moment of having a throng of naked bodies (all female, bar one) on stage which made me think. Nothing more.

Is it simply because I am female, and this is theatre about 'feminism' that I felt engaged? What did the male spectators think? What did the male actor think?

I feel confused about my response to Trilogy because I cannot pinpoint anything in the form of it which was thoughtful or so discursive; yet it did encourage me to think about what it felt like to be a woman, to be a woman in a theatre, to be a woman in 'the' theatre, to be in a theatre full of women and men, to be a naked woman in a theatre full of women and men.

My confusion over its meld of form and content has led me to believe that this wasn't a piece of theatre at all: it was a display of attitude, its own manifesto, an instructional example.

If we conclude that it is no longer a piece of theatre but an attitude, a display, I wondered whether it was possible to be precisely critical about an attitude or emotional offering? Is it ok for me to morally judge the impulse behind an action, or are we confined to making a more secure judgement of the presentation and execution of that action onstage? Is it ok for me to say the piece was... nice?

I thought about several different aspects of the relationship between attitude and theatre, and between justice and attitude and response. This consideration of niceness, of artistry and attitude also made me wonder about the role of the critic. It is inadequate for me as critic to celebrate a piece for having good intentions even if its resulting art is less satisfactory, or purely transitory. Yet it is human nature to work with the best of intentions and perhaps not quite achieve: it would be social and emotional cruelty to condemn failure to follow through, because we fail at it all the time.

It then made me think about the differences between the collective and the individual experience at the theatre. Perhaps it is impossible to create a collective critical response; but it is infinitely plausible to engineer a collective experience. The difficulty is that I find my sensory reception and my critical disagreement occurring together, offsprings of their mutual conflict.

So whilst I enjoyed the warmth and contact, so absent from contemporary theatre and our daily lives, of the final section as we stood shoulder to shoulder and sang Jerusalem, I felt deeply troubled by Jerusalem itself.

Firstly, as a former English student who knows Blake's prophetic books a little, and disagrees entirely with the cortarizing of this piece of verse from the bulk of Milton.

Secondly, as a feminist and political being who is uncomfortable with any song that has been trumpeted by the Conservative Party for campaigning purposes.

Thirdly, as someone who is Welsh, not English, aware that equalising cultural, ethnic, circumstantial differences for political unity can lead to a dangerous kind of ideological imperialism which feminism both fights, and flirts with, everyday.

Perhaps a show like this can only achieve an either/or: either political engagement and scrutiny; or a celebratory inclusivity, an interactive event. Trilogy will surely be criticised (mostly be some men I know, and respect very deeply) for squaring itself solely at women in a mode which is unable to be as egalitarian as the maxims it preaches. A play about women for women. Thus some might see it as an entrenchment of several divisions between the sexes: after all, no men were invited to come up on stage and take off their clothes.

Nevertheless, it made a necessary and eagerly non-discriminatory gesture which tried to incorporate the women of the past within and about the women of now. And for this particular reason, its singular focus on the female body was an attempted compensation for the deletions of history. Showing the female body, calling on the female presence today, in order to remind us of the physical similarities that bind women together. With a generosity directly opposed to the denigrating gaze which separates viewer and viewed, woman from woman, until they become competing objects for attention. To present the body in a way which is not primarily sexual.

In this sense, Trilogy is not a piece of theatre, but an opening of parentheses, a long moment. For creating a moment of community within the theatre, which transcended actors and audience, it should be acknowledged. But it must be questioned for its own politics, its particular form which seemed so eager to share yet did not offer a spoken dialogue or discussion of issues. It relies upon the men and women watching to do all of the critical thinking: to separate themselves from that collective moment in order to contemplate it.

So what legacy are women to take up now?

SADISTIC JERKS: A HAPPY NEW YEAR MESSAGE

2010-01-05T07:17:00.001-08:00

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but this blog has at times felt like pouring a whole carton of grape-juice into a bottomless abyss.

The feedback we've received so far has been almost exclusively related to layout. It seems people think the juxtaposition of purple and black has been challenging and colourful where our prose has not.

So, as a concession to our readers (the unhappy few), to show we can take criticism (and would infact welcome some comments), but most importantly to ease your eyes and soothe those saccadic jerks, our purple prose has a new background.

Thank you for reading

chartered territories: The Forest and the Field

2009-12-22T04:48:00.000-08:00

It has taken a long time to get anything concrete written about Chris Goode's performance of The Forest and the Field. Its absence from the blog so far derives not from a lack of things to say; rather a struggle over what it might mean to wholeheartedly praise or criticise it.

Originally a lecture given nearly two years ago at the Miscellaneous Theatre Festival in Cambridge, this current - admittedly transitional - incarnation found itself playing out in the rumbling darkness of Camden People's Theatre in mid-November.

The argument webs van Gennep's theories of liminality with collective spatial analogies which posit theatre as potentiate forest, suggest a future as a magical-post-liminal field and - a new addition for this evening's performance - finally proposes an archipelago.

The work is entirely grounded in the personal: in finding conversation between the convictions and experiences true to Goode, and the representative trends of the world about him. Indeed, the earnestness which suffuses his critical and creative writing seems propelled by an anxiety over the ethics of working in this kind of big, traditional proscenium arch theatre. The commercial, bums-on-seats type of theatre which typifies the RSC, NT or West End, is the very space for which Goode is most desperately contesting – these are the arenas, after all, which can claim to have a socially-integrated force and scope on a comparable scale to the theatre traditions which Goode recalls.

But the ethical dilemma is that the wider-audience reaching antics of these big Theatres are underpinned by an adherence to a late free market capitalism which has sustained and - in part - constructed these edifices. It is a dilemma which Goode himself flags up during the lecture with a quotation from Keston Sutherland:

and as we know, since we know enough, and since we eat enough, living under capitalism is not an act anyone can desist from, terminate, or even pause in. Try doing it now.

Try doing it now. Sutherland captures more than the anxiety over the Theatre as business; it taps into an anxiety over being itself in a late capitalist context. There is no escape; there is no fantasy forest: more than that, there is no way of saying so, no way of observing our entrapment circumscribed by capitalist exchange without further participating in it.

Yet I feel that Goode has secret hope harboured against Sutherland’s claims. There is always an air of escapism in his statements of what the theatre could be; yet the fantasy that theatre-as-representation can do things which pure language (or pure lecture) cannot, are still subjunctive rather than perfect.

As I suggested at the post-show talk, the logical end of Goode’s Forest project seems to involve shifting the essay’s ideas out of printed form and into a poetics of theatre where these arguments could be made in the embodied vocabulary of performance: not expressing an idea about theatre but articulating it. I had expected, in Goode’s own terms, a theatre more like theatre, rather than a lecture trying to say something about theatre. It struck me that Goode had not quite engineered that shift of presentation which would allow his ideas to articulate themselves as dramatic joints and counterpoints.

The most solid and exciting indication of where this might reach if translated into the poetics of performance came from the projector. In one of the lapses after Goode's deft deconstruction of 'The Empty Space', the projector lit up. There was no image or quotation to be projected with it.
The simple action of the light, creating a glowing-black square on the back wall, punctured Brook's essay articulately and decisively: the light, the switch on, reveals itself both as content, and reveals even more the wall-as-wall, as undeniable, lived-in space.

In the projector becoming visible through its 'empty' light, this innocuous illumination proved a point of genuine engagement with theatrical space as space, moving the inquiry on the page into a physical dialogue with Camden People's Theatre which achieved more insight than drawing shapes in salt.

The fleeting nature of those moments confirms that this is still a piece of work in transition, with several undecided notions of theatre, and space, at stake. In focusing on Shakespeare as a propagator of 'liminal' theatre in what was also a liminal time for theatre history, we miss out on the subtleties of pre- and post-Shakespearian space. More than that, it collapses certain binaries that are assumed but unacknowledged in the piece: what is the difference between Theatres as buildings, as spaces in themselves, and ‘the theatre’? Do the same spatial analogies hold? Why are the forest, field and archipelago such rural and idyllic fantasies of predominantly urban theatre practice? And what about the tension, alongside this, between indoor and outdoor?

Outside the transitional ontology of Shakespeare’s theatre, there is an absent-ed tradition which – perhaps because we know less about it – enacts an invisible pull on Goode’s radically ‘conservative’ vision.

It is the amphitheatres of Greece, which pose a united affront and an answer to the scope of F&F's argument. They are open-air, on the outskirts of the city, and using the landscape as backdrop: on all of the frontiers between Goode’s binaries of rural/urban, indoor/outdoor, building/area. In this model, the playing space, the wilderness and the city are all visible, and interactive, in the same ritual event. Space becomes function, and function space.

And in the neo-classical nostalgia of Goode’s manifesto, it is clear that he wants to return to ancient Athens, not to Shakespeare’s London. This antic theatre, and its spectators, implicitly present to Goode an economy still far enough from modern free market capitalism, a society where the arts had a designated function and appeal, special to itself and no other art form.

Yet there is a potential exclusion inherent in Goode’s retroactive vision of theatre which ensures the happiness of a society of men at a price.

Where is there a place for women? The proto-liberalism of both ancient Greece and early modern England present theatres where women might mingle in the audience, but not on stage. If we take a historicist slant at these spaces, something yet to be woven into the lecture, we must see first and foremost their own individual boundaries and limitations.

Whilst theatre was perhaps one of the few social occasions of ancient Greece which allowed women a spectatorial, participatory role, this cannot be lifted out of its wider contemporary social context, where women were nevertheless second class citizens and breeders. Shakespeare may have had a female monarch, but even her power was problematised by conceptions of femininity and propriety more actively repressive in the populace.

So before we ask any question about fully integrating theatre into society, we must first ask whether theatre is able to integrate society in its fullness, into its practice. However much I am seduced by the earnestness of Goode's argument, and his dissection of Shakespeare’s spaces, how can I be prepared to follow a theatrical vision in which women seem, by proxy, not to exist?
If Sutherland is right and we cannot escape the pernicious value-making of late capitalism which requires the unfreedom of the many to ensure the freedom of the few, then any theatre with a completely integrated social function is not just impossible, it is criminal.
Theatre must speak to more than the theatre community. Ideas of Otherness, of property and ownership, must be available to explore in their greatest scope; yet how can we achieve this with such a small, homogenous pool of artists? The danger of Goode's desire that theatre become more like itself is that it will indeed count itself a little world, a fragile O which still teeters dangerously close to isolation when it comes to reflecting not just the concerns, but the literal demographics and pragmatics of society.

I believe that Goode sees and acknowledges these tensions, the claustrophobic creative and social conditions of theatre which mutually limit each other. Yet his proposal takes us back to the crisis of unfettered resistance in ‘Try doing it now’. Like the making of a Utopian theatre, making any great statement about what that theatre should be, involves a choice and valuation, a corruption of the whole in order to instate the particular. In making his personal claims, Goode must – and does – sacrifice certain social facts, closing off certain paths in order to open up others.

Such is the tension also between the limitless limits of the forest, the field and even the archipelago. No boundary is un-violent; no space is empty; no border is innocent. I wonder whether Goode, whilst acknowledging all of these facts, is still reluctant to spill any blood. Perhaps such encountered claustrophobia, such narrowness in modern theatre’s reaches is what sees him leap immediately outside the city limits to bright, expansive spaces; ironic when he favours so often very dark, quite enclosed spaces in which to stage his productions.
Yet leaping over such boundaries into the next meadow/mountain range/plateau ignores the fiercest and most crucial battles along the frontiers. And out of respect to himself, and his dream of the theatre, it is partly Goode’s responsibility to tackle them.

IT'S WHAT YOU DO TO ME: A REVIEW OF COCK

2009-12-19T06:53:00.000-08:00

Before I saw Mike Bartlett's Cock (and I'm going to make an attempt to avoid all possible puns) in the last week of its run I’d really wanted to dislike it: because of its name, because of its popularity in the newspaper reviews. Thankfully it wasn’t to be so, and I felt strongly in favour of the piece by the end, I liked it, even.

It seems possible, however, that to enumerate my several reservations, here, might productively contribute to whatever is this repetitive strain.

The piece centred around a man, John (Ben Whishaw), who has committed an infidelity with a woman, 'W' (Katherine Parkinson), and told his male partner, 'M' (Andrew Scott), and has promised both that he will end relations with the other.

It was very funny. As in Simon Stephen’s Sea Wall, Andrew Scott’s performance, and especially his Irish accent, lent a great warmth to the performance, which at times felt slightly too seductive. There’s nothing like comedy for instantly identifying a consensus and a hierarchy of thought, an us and a them, and the orthodoxy here felt chauvinistic. It’s an allegation made against gay men I have heard before - that they don’t need women, so they don’t respect them, and that’s why catwalk models are so skinny & c & c. Some of the humour depended on the reversal of a more ‘typical’ situation in which it is the gay relationship which is the shameful: John is agonised at the thought of his female lover coming to his workplace. This notion is predicated on the idea, and wrong I think, that being gay has been totally normalised.

The play’s love triangle structure immediately recalls Pinter’s Betrayal, and before that, Racine’s Andromache, and it is a really viable attempt to newly write this human situation. The geometry of Bartlett’s play is disrupted by the arrival of a fourth, and largely inconsequential character: shortly before the dinner at which John is going to have to tell his two lovers which he is going to commit to, there is a knock on the door, and his male lover admits he has called his father for ‘backup’. This seems a daring joke, a very modern moment of bathos, unfortunately the flaws in the father character – whether badly written or badly acted or badly directed – was the greatest disappointment of the evening. His main speech, in which he sets out what it is to be gay in our society, is largely a succession of clumsy psychoanalysis and sham genetics.

The plays’ several explicitly political moments troubled me: a character talks about the starving in Africa (as if repeating a generalised concern for an entire continent in any way productively contributes to the debate), another by the father about how he says grace since he saw the thing on the telly about Bangladesh ‘or whatever’. In this way voicing the opinion that we are unrelated to ‘the third-world’ un-relates us. An argument over who should eat a satsuma could think more productively about politics than the occasional reference to wars abroad, or the needy at home. Pretending to care about foreign affairs or domestic civil liberties infringements should not be a necessary part of contemporary theatre-writing.

At another point in the play, 'M' tells John: ‘I would torture for you’, and we return to the debate voiced in my earlier post on Dennis Kelly, that is to say, the glib equivalence asserted between love and human rights abuses. The attempt to exclude forms of fascism from love is more honestly made in the poetry of Keston Sutherland, in light of whose work these plays appear dully complacent, as if it were not possible in the theatre to really want something.

In the context of the totally pathetic thing raging at the moment between Boris Johnson and the Ben Bradshaw, over whose candidate should run Arts Council London, it seems that the politicisation of art within mainstream British politics is inevitably accompanied by a neutralisation.

Cock’s playtext begins: ‘There is no scenery, no props, no furniture, and no mime. Instead the focus is entirely on the drama of the scene.’ This play is making a claim for purifying our focus on what drama is. I liked that the clothes worn in the piece could have been the actors’ own. It has decided drama is not things, but bodies and speech.

In between scenes Ben Whishaw drinks from a water bottle on the desk of the prompter, in full view of the entire audience. This act, however unaudacious it is in light of more experimental performances elsewhere, encourages me.

In spite of this, we are told things like characters are sitting when they are still standing, or take of their jacket when they are wearing no jacket. This constant interplay between what is being acted, what enacted, and what is not being done at all, felt at times tiresome. There is a joke about a fake dog , which is vaguely gestured towards at the side of the stage. But of course it is not there: it is a fake fake dog.

Dramaturgies are often predicated in what is present and visible, what is absent and what we are asked to imagine. John asks his partner, ‘M’, take off your top. Andrew Scott does not move, but John says thank you, and we are asked to imagine ‘M’ has. Had he actually done it his real shivering body - so close - would have made an extraordinary dramatic moment, when ‘M’ asks whether he has made his decision now, and John says: Yes. Yes. I think. Yes. The decision to underplay the extremity of such moments is one thing, but the decision that theatre consists of people just standing and talking, is less defensible. This asking us to imagine where no act of imagination is theatrically necessary, emphasises the extent to which this model of theatre is still undecided, uncommitted.

These moments, however, are justified by a strain of meta-theatricality in the play. One character talks of ‘a personality – a character’. John (or was it Ben Whishaw?) is told, about ten times, to ‘be yourself’. This is beyond a joke. The (relative) lack of conventional boundaries between audience and actor is undermined by this need to claim that we are all essentially actors a lot of the time: performing gender, sexuality etc.

At points I wondered whether the dilemma existed only for that the wrong questions were being asked. John explains his confusion in actorly terms: imitating other peoples’ voices until you can’t remember what your own one is. The conceit at the centre of the play is this: imagine you are an actor who can suddenly no longer work out whether you are playing a role, or being yourself. I’d be more tempted, perhaps predictably, to imagine the dilemma at the heart of this play to be less about sexuality than the theatre.

The model for theatre envisaged at the Royal Court seems to be that a playtext is produced as ‘new writing’, then reproduced as ‘new writing’ theatre. This places the newness of the playwright at its centre, to the exclusion of those other elements central to what theatre is: dramaturg, director, actor, audience. For me this is a fallacy: Derrida said ‘writing is inaugural’, and the idea that writing could be done without the act of imagining the theatre for which finger touches keypad (etc.), seems naïve, even regressive. Far better to write for a new theatre than new writing for an old theatre.

One of the play’s most sustained motifs is the notion of ‘going round in circles’. The movement, of actors within the ply-wood cock-pit theatre constructed ‘Upstairs’, is eloquently choreographed. They encircle one another in small, quiet steps, enter or leave through one of the two exits, or ‘sit out’ one scene on the stairs at the side. But the presence of the father character confuses the subtle balance of earlier movements: the dialogue doesn’t viably extend to a foursome, the square stands uneasily within the circle.

One character exclaims: Are we all waiting for something to happen? It struck me that there were points at which the piece was felt meta-theatrical where it should only have been theatrical. This play privileges the dilemma whilst urging it towards a solution, paradoxically admitting the impossibility of saying anything productive whilst waiting for a conclusion. The wrong questions have been asked, staged with almost maximum effectiveness.

That not knowing is at the heart of this play. The challenges made to the self of the person who finds themselves in love with two people; the challenges a theatre-writer poses to his own theatre practice.

The play’s achievements were most clear at the point ‘W’ made a last attempt to secure John’s commitment, sketching out the possibilities of their future together. She remembers their shared plans to travel to Paris, talks about becoming pregnant, she names their children, and numbers their grandchildren, even though she remains nameless. The absurd sentimentalism of this vision of heterosexual life is, by this point, laughable, and the greatest act of brutality: what the play had done to our vision of the possibility of happiness in a life together.

THEATRE OF OPERATIONS: A BRIEF REPORT FROM THE IRAQ INQUIRY AND THE ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICE

2009-12-18T07:57:00.000-08:00

One luxury my involuntary post-university ‘gap year’ has afforded me is time. Living in Central London has meant much entertainment and culture within walkable distance. This paradigm, however, has extended further and further, proportionately with the ever longer and colder jogs with the capital’s unemployed along the southbank. On Thursday I walked from Queen Mary’s in Mile End to the British Library via a circuitous route which allowed for a peek inside the Whitechapel Gallery, the extraordinary St. Alban’s Tower, and Leadenhall Market, feeling like a rather uninspired psychogeographer with no winter coat and the wrong kind of shoes. But I wanted here to detail some observations from two unusual (for me) outings: an afternoon spent at the Iraq Inquiry and a morning at the Royal Courts of Justice.

The inquiry was held at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre opposite Westminster Abbey, in a small peripheral room decorated in the blue ‘Iraq Inquiry’ branding. Apart from the panel, and a small group of associated officials on laptops around a democratically circular table, the audience was populated of Whitehall types and women who I imagine must either have been unemployed or retired: one was knitting and another was wearing a palestinian scarf (away from whom the video camera recording the event edged sheepishly).

I was fortunate enough to catch the entirety of Tim Cross’ testimony to Chilcot’s very merry team of peers and knights. Cross, a major general of the British Army, was discreetly assigned to Jay Garner’s Organisation for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) in Washington, established before the war on Iraq was declared to be resposible for post-war planning. He later followed Garner to Kuwait, again before Britain’s commitment to the war had been declared, and entered a while after the invasion. ORHA were tasked with establishing essential things such as transport and currency. Incidentally, there was no mention of links between companies and ORHA, though last week’s Private Eye identifies a potential conflict of interest between Jeremy Greenstock’s post as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (2003-4) and his directorship of De La Rue, who successfully pitched for the lucrative contract to print Iraq’s currency the month the invasion began.

Cross, an exceptionally intelligent and articulate individual, took the panel through his experiences in the lead-up to the invasion: his difficulties in communicating with Whitehall his concerns that ‘planning for the aftermath’ was deeply insufficient. In Cross’ account of the half an hour he spent with Tony Blair before leaving for Kuwait, it became clear that whatever Cross said, then as well as now, the pragmatism of his task has rendered his position in the operation depressingly insignificant. Though it was clear to Cross from a very early stage that the invasion would be carried out ‘successfully… at least from a military point of view’, Cross said he was surprised at the lack of coherence in visions for post-war Iraq, his initial response to ORHA was ‘There must be more to it than this.’ When he arrived in Iraq an even greater shock was that the structural insufficiencies were less the result of war than long-term neglect.

The most colourful aspects of the experience for me were the phrases Cross used which most explicitly spoke of army attitudes and Whitehall bureacracy: ‘logistic assets’, ‘he [Garner] wanted to follow the sound of guns’, ‘various internecene rivalries in Washington’, ‘theatre of operations’, ‘the southern option’, ‘Fortress Baghdad’ and the three T’s for reconstruction: ‘time, treasure and talent’.

The different components of the team assembled in Washington to discuss the reconstruction were brought together in what the Americans, according to Cross, called ‘a dog fight’. At one such meeting Cross perceived that one colleague had been doing an unusual amount of research: the colleague was invited to join Garner’s team, but later left, or asked to leave. An inquirer asked why and Cross replied ‘he was challenging the paradigm’. ‘What was the paradigm?’ ‘[The paradigm] was the plan is we do not need a plan.’

This moment of dialogue, amongst others, made me feel that this was a privileged experience of political insight. Of course all the information of the inquiry is being transmitted onto its website, but it felt more important to be there. The gentility of the panel (though politeness to Cross felt justified by his ostensible cooperation) was suspicious and I was reminded that the process of their selection has been the subject of much criticism.

A comparable experience, in aim and effect, is perhaps David Hare’s Stuff Happens, and the numerous other pieces of theatre in Britain devoted explicitly to investigating the War in Iraq. The value of Hare’s piece, as well as the others, is the speed in which theatre has been able to respond to important moments of policy and politics, but one can’t help feeling that informationally theatre has often failed to communicate ideas, by staying too close to the format of The Inquiry, an increasingly popular political phenomenon. Indeed Hare’s The Power of Yes celebrated its author’s own personal inquiry into the recession, whilst doing great damage in suggesting theatre is unable to develop its own forms of inquiry. Hare himself has claimed the speed with which theatre is able to respond to contemporary events as a triumph for theatre. When this comes accompanied by the sacrifice of the integrity of theatre’s ability to communicate thinking, or its unique ability to reformulate the ways in which we receive information, it is of no use whatsoever.

The Times’ quote attached to the publicity of Enron - ‘The political theatre of the 21st century...’ – has had me wondering recently what it might actually look like. In the context of my earlier discussion of Dennis Kelly, and soon to be posted review of Cock, the case of former Guantanamo inmate and terror suspect Binyam Mohamed has interested me recently, and I went along to witness the second day of its appeal session. No need to sketch out the background of the case, the media has been doing a lot of that, and they are playing a significant part in it.

The appeal concerns the right to make public the whole judgement of the Divisional Court which apparently contains a number of paragraphs whose content David Miliband claims is sensitive according to the best interests of national security. The paragraphs are known to contain details, admitted by the Americans, of the torture techniques used to extract a confession from Mohamed he now disowns. Mohamed’s legal team and the legal teams of the UK and US media claim that Miliband wants to reduce embarrassment to the Labour government by preventing the details of our collusion with torture and extraordinary rendition to be known. The legal counsel working on behalf of Miliband claims the CIA and USA Secretary of State have indiated that said release of the information could force the USA to reconsider their intelligence sharing agreement with the UK.

The barrister acting on behalf of the government is Jonathan Sumption, whom it has been said is the most expensive man in the business, brough in by Miliband for the appeal case in particular. The lateness of his introduction may have been the only concession to thrift made. Sumption’s submissions to the court were masterfully clear and deliberate close reading – unsurprising from a man who is currently written a multi-volume history of the Hundred Years War – as he effortlessly disparaging the judgements of the previous hearing. Representing Binyam Mohamed was Dinah Rose, the integrity and intellect of whose rhetoric was extremely impressive. It seemed strange that the inmates of Guantanamo were for so long denied access to a lawyer and here were around twenty of them in one room discussing the release of seven paragraphs of information.

What I saw was the battle of almost no consequence whatsoever, something publicly admitted by all parties. What the paragraphs contain is apparently so similar to information already in the public arena that quoting it would, according to Rose, prejudice the court’s decision. The parties opposing the Foreign Secretary are struggling for an ever-diminishing moral victory, to make public that which has been known for a long time. The Labour government have consistently resisted publication of the information we need to know our involvement in practices which run directly against the values for which the British nation is claimed to represent, through the clever evasions of some highly talented and astronomically well rewarded individuals.

Just as the temporary architecture of Brian Haw’s protest, initiated in 2001 in response to sanctions on Iraq, has been mutated into a paradoxically permanent establishment, it seems impossible, once you start to consider the extent to which we have been ethically compromised by this Labour government, you could ever stop protesting.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLITICAL CHANGE

2009-11-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

A couple of nights ago, caught in a heavy downpour of freezing rain, I passed between two structures:

Brian Haw's encampment at Parliament Square (established in 2001), and the Houses of Parliament (established c.1100).

WATCHING DRY PAINT: A REVIEW OF PAINS OF YOUTH AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE

2009-11-26T14:54:00.000-08:00

A strange comic duo, Mitchell & Crimp’s Pains of Youth has been playing at the Cotteslowe Theatre for a while now. The reports haven’t been good, one friend left in the interval and said it was ‘very, very boring’, I’ve been avoiding the newspaper reviews, but it sounds as if its reception has at best been mixed.

The play consists of a series of fairly dramatic events which take place in the rooms of two female medical students at a European university at some point, it seemed, during the 1920s. The play as well as its characters appear on the cusp of knowledge of Freud’s discoveries, almost as if the principle of the uncanny were being applied to itself.

The first thought that crossed my mind was, as usual, why have I come to this? And then, what is the point in fourth-wall naturalism? And then, how much more could we achieve if we just stopped doing it for good? Where is Katie Mitchell’s engagement with liveness, in all its artifice, present and visible in Waves and …some trace of her? The considerable achievements, however, of this surprising exercise in a nineteenth century theatrical model, have very gradually revealed themselves to me.

hit me if you won’t forgive me

It has long appeared that Crimp’s project has been a careful dismantling of dramatic theatre. This is often manifested in a strangeness of dialogue, which at once appertains to the theatre of Ibsen or Chekhov and the anti-naturalism of Artaud or Beckett.

hit me then if you’re not a thief

Repetition (and its frequent correlative, boredom) seems very much at the forefront of his practice. During one argument, a character says the same line ‘sit down’ four times. Bruckner’s script has been delivered into lucid and elegant English. Words between lovers are rendered with stark brutality.

I won’t let you go until you’ve hit me

Crimp’s repetitions, however, at points felt excessive, almost too easily written. Whilst his dialogue often appears thrillingly incisive on the page, it does not always translate into utterance entirely at home on stage.

he wouldn’t hit me

Nevertheless, many moments suggest that Crimp has accomplished that much-coveted thing – an achievement exclusive perhaps only to David Mamet, Harold Pinter, debbie tucker green and Caryl Churchill – a personal literary language indigenous to contemporary theatre.

he wouldn’t hit me, kiss me harder

A puritanical aesthetic is not the same thing as austerity, or restraint. Vicki Mortimer's set looked simple but expensive; it might have been co-designed by Bang &/or Olufson. An obsession with immaculateness has long evident on the page, in Crimp’s scripts, and on stage in Mitchell’s production. This lies at odds with Mitchell taste for drastic intervention in classic texts, and for this reasons has often baffled critics and audiences. I found myself thinking back to Jeremy Hardingham’s one man King Lear, and wondering: what’s wrong with making a mess? Then I thought of Patti Smith’s Babelogue: “I would measure the success of a night by the way by the way by the amount of piss and seed I could exude over the columns that nestled the PA…” and realised: theatre doesn’t merely reside in the light and shadow of bodies in space. Blood, ink, sweat, mud, paint, are all crucial ingredients. They must be spilt before they can dry.

And I’d rather watch paint dry than dry paint.

The eloquence in the opening and closing of a door were for me the closest approximation to a poetic act (for want of a better term) in this kind of theatre, and a testament to Mitchell’s dedication to detail. In contrast, the apex of of bad naturalism - pointless scene changes – abounded, to the extent that I began to suspect it was all a big joke about theatrical convention. This was corroborated by the (questionable) humourousness of Mitchell’s approach to scene-changes: the entrance of people in sharp suits and forensic equipment felt ultra-pretentious as one of those post-modern beer adverts. Yes; we know Germans (Austrians, whatever) are rigorous, precise, nihilistic etc.

In spite of this, precision is clearly something at which Mitchell’s team are extraordinarily adept. They are an artistic Vorsprung durch Technik. But there must have been more to it, I found myself wondering: was this a very clever pastiche? The lighting, by Jon Clark, was a masterpiece of heightened naturalism. At points it seemed to be that the production was lit solely by the three lamps visible onstage, but this state would shift subtly towards an unnatural and stylised destination. Another aspect of stagecraft, the props, were reinvisioned as a vocabulary of equal importance to the plot: the carefully articulated object-journeys of bottles, books, money, threatened to displace human narratives at the heart of the play. Only a director as accomplished and celebrated as Mitchell could have coordinated such a careful experiment, drawing together conventional theatre’s component parts into an uneasy unity.

Other good things: there were some lovely bits of yoga. Lydia Wilson’s charisma and Geoffrey Streatfield’s distracted brilliance were exemplary, at the heart of the play’s successes. A moment in which the pretty-but-principled maid is convinced to prostitute herself, was particularly affective, perhaps the high-point, it felt like the reason we were there.

We hope to be impressed (or at least titillated) by the progressiveness of what shocked audiences almost a century ago, but this is hard to compute, for we live in the twenty-first century where we can watch, on 4OD, reality tv-shows like The Doctor Who Hears Voices. When the decadence of Bruckner’s play is no longer shocking, what remains to be seen?

The second half jerks between an annoyingly insouciant social satire, languid weltschmerz, and a series of unconvincing proto-existentialist declarations. The characters display an unsentimetalism about medical practice possibly shocking to earlier audiences, but the play itself seems at times deeply sentimentalised decadence. And in spite of the lip-service paid to the play’s rigorous interrogation of scientific objectivity, I remain uncertain as to whether it scrutinised its characters decadence or merely indulged it. The plot – thankfully – proves to be totally irrelevant. (It has just occurred to me that this perceived occlusion is an embarrassment of content which may be my own. I don’t know; you tell me.) The realisation, for which we wait over two hours, is extraordinarily banal. I forget the exact wording, but it went something like this:

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,
Life goes on, bra
La la how the life goes on

A while ago, attending a deeply uninteresting performance of a play by Chekhov, I listened to Jeremy Hardingham working his way tremulously through a packet of individually-wrapped boiled sweets. It seemed to me the simplest, most intelligent intervention in the ineptly conventional spectacle being staged in front of us. In the same spirit, if I were to offer some advice as to how one might go about enjoying Pains of Youth it would be to listen for those moments of interference,and watch carefully for the flickers of artifice. The characters constantly question whether they should “embrace bourgeois existence”, and this indeed seems relevant to the production itself. Since reading Nicholas Ridout’s Theatre & Ethics I have been wondering whether the most interesting endeavour of Crimp’s theatrical practice resides in engagement with and resistance to the role theatre plays in bourgeois subject-formation. This endeavour is at its most successful when resistance is most forcefully attempted, or argued for. The less pleasing – more dissonant or boring – the production was, the more I liked it, the more important an endeavour it seemed. When you don’t care what the characters are saying (“I’m going to commit suicide…”) you are more free to admire the wallpaper, untroubled.

But is this anything more than a jaded theatre, which thinks its own cynicism clever? Crimp’s writing is at its best where it is most ethical, and this is most often at the points in which the pressures of parenthood are central. This piece, so interested in the uncertainties of youth, feels deeply ambivalent. Should it, like Bruckner’s protagonist, do the decent thing and commit suicide? In the context of last week’s revelation – Chris Goode’s The Forest & the Field – it seems that unless a theatrical intelligence is motivated towards the creation of something hopeful, which in turn hopes for something to be created good, this kind of cynicism feels more than just unimaginative – deeply unclever, troublingly unproductive.

This is the bit of the NT programme designed to embody the nation’s most successful experiments, and "pure art" free from bureaucratic concessions to diversity, opportunity, accessibility. But this is avant-gardism revealed to be aesthetic, palatable, and its conclusions foregone. It only remains to ask whether this isn’t the most successful of experiments but the most compromised.

no innocent line// [no innocent party]

2009-11-26T02:12:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it is only because I have been reading it very closely this week, but the comments made by Michael Billington last night in conversation with John Stokes seem to work a neat parallel alongside Baz Kershaw's observation of contentions between modernism and post-modernist in The Radical in Performance.

Kershaw argues that 'radical performance' - as moments of theatrical presentation- most effectively emerges in a field where modernist and post-modernist visions of the world collide and interact: where symbols and semiotic systems are interrogated by deconstuctive, self-reflexive, participactory tendencies that destabilise heirarchies (between audience and actor, meaning and sign, tradition and representation).

As far as I can tell, post-modernism is not at work for Michael Billington. Whilst Kershaw neatly points out that post-modernism signals an "as yet fictional historical phase", he rightly notes that post-modern thinking has suffused the world in which we live. Billington, it seems, wants to save, or re-instate a modernist world in which certain theatrical principles, and ways of seeing, can be taken for granted.

'Experiential' theatre which takes place outside designated 'Theatres' is dismissed as leaving no lasting trace, and existing only in the present. Billington - not unjustifiably - fights the cause for the text, the playwright. Yet it feels as if rather than placing these undoubtedly elemental skills and materials as part of an ongoing dialogue in an ever-changing tradition (which acknowledges, as Kershaw does the encountered 'limitations' of theatre vs. the troubling 'limitlessness' of performance), Billington wants to preserve them at the expense of everything else.

Billington tells an anecdote about Augusto Boal attempting to set a play about domestic servitude in Argentina in the houses of the women he is working with; when Boal suggest that they set the play in the houses where the work, the site of their servitude, the women demur: they want their play in a theatre! The point is spot on, and undeniable in its relevance: Billington chuckles. It is a delightful ('seriously funny'?) observation on the potential hypocrisy of 'on the streets' theatre; but he asked the audience to remind him of Boal's name.

There is absolutely nothing reprehensible about Billington's obvious tastes and preferences - who are we to judge or deny Pinter, Shakespeare or Chekhov as great dramatists? - however, there is something suggestively dubious about saving what he calls 'texts' at the expense of all else.

After all, contemporary theatre practitioners' work contributes as much to our understanding of theatre as any new play. Not to mention plenty of companies like Complicité and Cheek by Jowl whose relationship to a host of practitional traditions, international theatres and languages create a newer challenge to conventional ideas of borders, frontiers and definitions.

More than that, it would be a fascinating (and necessary) extension of Billington's State of the Nation if its social/theatrical historical dialogue mapped out a conversation between these bodies that existed in foreign languages, with touring international companies as well as British companies working in other languages, inimical to the flux of exchange and ever-altering equivalencies and identities in a Western free-market capitalist 'performative democracy'.

More Kershaw there. He points out that so much of this tension extant in contemporary exasperations over Theatre/theatre/performance/performativity lies in the imagined binary that is figured like Cressida's split gaze: the post-modernist eye twitches at the (perceived) 'limitations' of "theatre" and with the other modernist eye waters at the potential 'limitlessness' of "performance".

The point is that the above binary, like Cressida's split gaze, is a division where there is actually pollination. Modern theatre/performance's perspective is cross-eyed, not doubly-divergent: these eyes should meet, however squ-iff they might be.

Yet Billington seems to represent the modernist slant on theatre so far as to resist the value of post-modernisms' slippery interjections and discursive attempts to connect to a society where theatre≠ the Theatre, and text is not the only loading bay for meaning, memory and lasting experience.

I ask him, with reference to a quotation from Chris Goode's The Forest and the Field [F&F-related post forthcoming....] about whether he means that theatre can only be 'more like theatre' inside under a proscenium arch with a comfortable middle-class audience. (The Guardian, Billington's paper, recently described Goode as "British Theatre's greatest maverick talent"; yet Billington draws a complete blank when I naively add, "who I'm sure you know" as I describe Goode and his work.)

He doesn't really answer the question. The space/place issue, so central to Goode's earnest engagement with the dichotomies of theatre(//performance - dare I add it) is turned into a binary where the dark spaces of the Jerwood Upstairs are edgy sites for exploring new texts whereas 'trendy' warehouses in East London exist only to displace the middle class audience and hand them a slice of superfluous 'cool', a momentary experience with no residue, no text, nor history.

When he is then pressed on what audiences can and should do to help theatre find itself, he cites Travelex £10 tickets as the greatest change in theatre in the last 10 years whilst still evading all notions of class that do not disappear just because the price goes down. (Though he does add that if theatre was free, class would not be a problem.)

But what are we to do, then? Are all performance experiments outside a theatre bound to die a death the moment the 'experience' finishes? Does that mean we can't do a text-based play in a warehouse? Why are we still assuming that a text has to be a written piece of script? It is as if Billington has pitched his tent on the modernism side of a debate which Kershaw demonstrates is now an illusion: that modernism=theatre and post-modernism=performance.)

All the exciting potentials, freedoms, obstacles presented to contemporary theatre (and I deliberately say theatre here, not performance) seem ready to be abandoned.

?

Discussing his late friend Harold Pinter, Billington noted"that there is no innocent line" in a Pinter play. But let's not stop there, Michael. There is no innocent line full stop. There are no innocent parties, political or otherwise; there is no innocence in a world, or theatre.

Where Billington stands, and what kind of theatre he likes, was made perfectly clear via his un self-conscious dismissals and appraisals. I have no designs on 'tastemaking' - I am not on some Arnoldian project - but why raise up and list anybody's tastes if not to dissect and truly discuss them?

Stokes never interrogated anything, he simply added a few more names to the set menu. It's shame he was not taking questions too: there is a lifetime of discussion to be siphoned from his throwaway analogy between Pinter and (our peripatetic Arnoldian) T.S. Eliot, in which Billington's assertion of the impossibility of the existence of modern British 'theatre' (I have no idea what that word means these days) without Pinter is vacuum-packed with Stokes' statement:

"modern poetry would not have existed without T.S. Eliot"

Yes it would. It would be a different prospect, yes, but it is dangerous to play the father-son artistic reproductive game in a cultural epoch that demonstrates the usurpation of physiological filiative principles by dissolution, the fracture and dissolution of fixed systematic principles; the negotiation of allegory and symbolism itself, surely?

It is a shame that the we as audience could not temper our own politeness with a little more incision.

festival d'automne iii // The Shipment

2009-11-15T03:01:00.001-08:00

iii

Issues of comfort, discomfort and familiarity were central to the latest offering from New York-based Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, The Shipment. The piece deals with white perceptions of black culture, and more than that, black participation in the white-codified realm of Western theatre, using a five-strong black cast, in a structured show which constantly teetered between exposing and playing the stereotypes.

Music plays a central role, becoming a key site for exposing the struggle for agency, identity and theft between black and white constructions of self in American culture. [I feel compelled to both include and erase 'American' there, as it is clearly the intention of the piece to deal with more than Obama-era American race politics - yet its choices and scenes are very specifically rooted in North American traditions and prejudices.]

The opening is a dance by two men in dinner suits to what the notes call "the whitest" song the company could find, with obvious moves taken from minstrel dancing. This is followed by an unwavering piece of extreme stand-up: its content and delivery conveyed in such a way that I could not call it a parody of black male comics or archetypal 'white-folk/black-folk' jokes, only an example.

The most accomplished, technically brilliant and ideologically interrogative element is the middle piece, in which the rap ambitions of young city-dwelling Omar are played out, to audience, in a series of gestured tableaus/ signifying physical remarks that are so coded, so semiotic in themselves as to recall late Renaissance and early Restoration theatre and performances of gender (interesting gender parallel of these tensions in Stage Beauty; indeed, gender is also constantly at play in the piece).

It is brilliant, hilarious and entertaining: by accident, fortune, mistake and intention, Omar turns one-time crack dealer, jail inhabitant, rap star, drug addict; the audience laughs but remains uncertain, I feel, at excatly what it is laughing at. Are the stereotypes being confirmed? or created in front of eyes, completed and constructed by those watching, as if controlling the mannered twitches of each actor as if he or she was a puppet.

The climax comes at the very end of this part, as the audience seem to take a gasp from the laughter. The one female cast member and the actors playing Omar and Desmond (Omar's one-time crack dealing boss, shot in a drive-by) move to the edge of the stage and stare at the audience. They then sing, after around two minutes silence, a beguiling acapella version of another 'white' song, 'Dark Centre of the Universe' by Modest Mouse.

It is a moment of utter transcendence, as the three voices interweave in harmony and syncopation. Yet, again, it is a reminder of the marks of oppression and definition that characterise the nature of black artists and art in mainstream culture: the acapella sound is not just an African tradition. This particular type of popular vocal singing is also one which was so neatly marketed by white singers in barber shop quartets; one of numerous examples of white culture appropriating and blanching black traditions and expression for its own success.

Yet The Shipment is not trying to deal a good ticking off to white culture. Nor is it simply presenting these tensions, these inter-filiations of thefts and gifts and offerings, as comment c'est. The power of the performance emerges through the stereotypes that are recalled, created and extinguished on stage. Lee herself says "I work with stories that I find trite and embarrassing", and that the rehearsal, devising and performance all work to emphasise the problems and difficulties of the texts at work; that is, the triteness of stereotypes is the heart, the drive of the piece.

And this play on the trite scraped close to simply presenting a series of white-contrived black stereotypes to a predominantly white middle class in a renovated theatre complex on the outskirts of Paris. Yet its honesty in its relationship with performance - its acknowledgement of the stage existing, of the construction taking place - made it a far superior political tool than Cohen's Golgotha.

What do I mean here by honesty (especially in a medium which, as Quizoola! showed us, best reaches truth via honest mistakes or dishonest disguises)? Our understanding of the term honesty is itself too contorted by the Puritanical strains and humanist ideals that haunt the theatre even now. In relation to The Shipment and its unabashed willingness to stage the process of cliché production as well as the clichés themselves, I mean, quite simply not-hiding.

The piece did not choose to reveal anything, like Golgotha; it did not pretend to be telling us anything new. It placed production and product side by side. Like the blurred make-up of the performers in Quizoola!, its honesty, its truth, was in its refusal to pretend that certain elements of theatre are off-stage, pre-existent, fixed. Like ideological play with identity and race, all is play, all is up for grabs. Lee's theatre shows you it is making theatre, it does not pretend that all arrived pre-conceived: it constructs space, set, music, archetype, climax, before your eyes.

And these honest machinations are crucial. Before the final part (indeed, the weakest in the entire piece), a forty minute 'white' urban dramaticule in whic a party becomes ever more absurd, LaBute-inspired collapses of decorum and violent 30-year-old itches, the entire set, meticulous glass by glass, was brought in.

Through this set-dressing, the audience was told the entire story of the dramaticule before it began. First on the empty stage came a brown leather sofa. This could be Omar's sofa? Could even be in a crack den at a push (maybe he really did lose it after he reached rap stardom; surely that's how all rap stars go...that's what we're all thinking, right?). Then a carpet. Then a modernist coffee table, huge stacks of thick books underneath. A lamp. The sofa becomes decorated. A drinks cabinet. Martini. Cranberry juice. A few tasteful candles. Some nibbles.

The acapella must have signalled a change: suddenly we are dealing in white stereotypes. The mental process encouraged by watching these painstakingly laid-out furniture items was itself a way of demonstrating signifiers of race and prejudice: I knew the moment the coffee table came on that this was in fact a white apartment. Indeed, in all the slightly flabby psych-101 drama that follows, the punchline is that the people we are watching are, of course, white, as they play Library and sip whiskey and worry about being lonely. Yet really, the punchline is that we thought that the moment we saw the furniture.

As with all the pieces mentioned in this blog, you might again wonder why Jean Lee has chosen to do this play. Why, as a Korean-American theatre maker has she deliberately addressed black/white relations? The company artistic statement notes:

When starting a play, I ask myself, "What's the last play in the world I would ever want to write?"
Then I force myself to write it.

So perhaps The Shipment is not just a piece dealing with America, or American race relations. It is, of course, specifically dealing in that vocabulary, in a country which has the audacity to call itself 'post-race' (see Kai Wright's review).

Yet the deliberately singular focus allows it a wider relevance. Its difficulty, in creation, devising and execution does not more than tell us that 'race is an issue'. In being the anti-play, the play Young Jean Lee does not want to create, and in rigorously examining the traditions, prejudices and tendencies of certain popular cultural practices (where each section of the show is, like the stand-up, an example, not mere aesthetic parody or reference, not just there to make a facile neo-liberal point), The Shipment examines the gaze, the spectating, and perceptions that create or maintain stereotypes. It performs the very constructions or ideas we are told are natural and innate.

In a greater sense, then, this is a piece about identity. With this on the brain, Ramsay Burt's chapter 'Looking at the Male' from The Male Dancer springs to mind, as it deals with the centrality of performance and liveness to the formation (and negotiation - or negation) of a notion of race, masculinity, universality. Indeed it could very easily be a piece about gender as well as race: how these two 'identity markers' are themselves created by acts, by performances of gender, or performances of race. Those performances, though, are not "Race"; yet the idea of race, or indeed of gender, could not exist without such enactment and experimentation, such codification and disruption.

And Young Jean Lee does not shy away from what might be trite in these ideas of marking and unmarking, of being marked one way and totally unmarked in others . After all, triteness or discomfort is often that which, like cliché, gets very close to truth.

festival d'automne ii // Quizoola!

2009-11-15T02:40:00.000-08:00

ii

A piece which genuinely did interrogate the notion of liveness, 'performance' and prescription was Quizoola! by the ever-inventive Sheffield-based company Forced Entertainment, showing on Saturday afternoon in 315 at the Pompidou. Based on a written text of 2000 questions by Tim Etchell (one of the company's artistic directors), the piece is a durational 6-hour affair with the audience dropping in and out as the two seated performers in grubby clown make-up and casual clothes (three in total; they all swap roles) play question-master and answerer.

The piece has been in action for over five years; you can see a snippet of a 2003 version at the Tate Modern here. There is clearly a formula; there are ground rules (never question the question seems to be one); there are certain set questions which recur over and over, or which arise in every performance with the same response [-what is the definition of comedy? -timing]. Yet at the same time there are clearly entire sections that appear to be intended to topple the other performer into uncontrollable laughter - or out of 'character'.

The inexhaustible cleverness and simple appeal of the piece is that we have no idea what 'character' is here. Which points are personal? Which points are simply constructed to raise a wry smile? How much control do the performers have over timing, over invented questions?

It is an utterly compelling way to show that genuinely exciting, convention-challenging theatre can be made on the most simple of premises: Quizoola! manages to be deeply existential, totally daft, (quite British), not at all exclusive, baffling, moving, seductive and intellectually exciting. At one point the entire body of people present collapse in laughter as the female answerer's clever responses to the male questioner's tightening circle of queries hit an ingenious/inevitable impasse of one upmanship and self-exposure:

-Why do always have your hand down your trousers? - ....Because I'm.....masturbating.
- Why don't you have any friends? - Because I masturbate all the time.
-What do you do when you are not masturbating? -....Shoplifting.

Both performers are holding on to prevent themselves from uncontrollable laughter; yet the personal, the sexual and the false are all played off each other. The straightness of the female response becomes a defense, a bettering of the male's intrusive questions. The status shifts and we are all in on the (serious) joke.

Thus the audience is always completely involved because constantly trying to ascertain 'what is real'; who to believe; where the illusion begins or ends. Like the performer's face paint, it's a blurred line.

And such a blur is even more compelling for being performed by actors accustomed to and comfortable with the structure of the piece. Thus, the negotiation between distinction and uncertainty, performance and genuine reaction becomes even more meshed: as the 'actors' are in a state where the "performing" element of the piece, the "scripted" or "enacted" parts, are just as naturalised or comfortable as the "real" parts. Those two parts are, in fact, the same.

festival d'automne i // Golgotha

2009-11-14T06:35:00.000-08:00

i

"I don't actually know what the fuck performance art is, yet I'm brilliant at it."

Not my words, but the words of Stephen Cohen, South African-raised, French-based performance artist whose 'Golgotha' was applauded with ferocity by a higbrow crowd at the Centre Georges Pompidou last Friday.

As much as I, like Stephen, admit to not really knowing "what the fuck" performance art is, I do know what the fuck I saw, and I am pretty certain that it wasn't "brilliant".

The Grand Salle at the Pompidou, like an opened cardboard box on its side, enveloping the audience and drawing the gaze downstage, was adorned with a series of wrought, beautiful/horrible images before the artist emerged. On either side of the white floor, two huge ceiling-to-stage photographs. In one the artist wears elaborate butterfly make-up and a suit, balancing on "skullettos" (his words, not mine) impossibly high teetering platforms made with the balls of the feet placed on genuine human skulls; on the opposite, with the same make-up and shoes, he wears an overwrought, embroidered and mirrored corset, which also stands downstage right, on a mannequin. Next to this is another dressmaker's mannequin with a skeleton bent around it to imitate a tutu and bodice.

On the downstage left area, a box/climbing frame construction, of metal and muslin screens, which the artist later used to attach himself to and swing from. On the studio floor, a massive crucifix created with tiny lamps, animal figurines, flowers and black sheets of perspex. The back wall was a massive screen projecting images of the artist first in the mirrored corset, a kind of delicate prologue; then, for the rest of the hour and a half, in various states of balancing, in the skullettos-and-suit garb around the streets of New York.

Creating a web between the numerous images, videos and costumes (especially shoes), the piece promised a dynamic live exploration of issues of identity, body image, male-ness and capitalism. Yet the only true watchable element of it was the artist's struggle with - and ability to - balance in ever-more-impossible footwear. At the midpoint, in a green khaki suit which sat somwhere between guerilla bee-keeper and jungle spaceman, with no sound but his wheezing breath, wearing huge boots loaded with metal, he painstakingly raised his foot and crushed every single illuminated animal on the crucifix.

One of the friends with whom I saw the piece loved it, saying that it excelled in providing what she deemed as the ultimate goal in theatre: a series of beautiful images. I think her idea of such aspirations come more from the Mediterranean/south European theatre tradition in which she has worked. I on the other hand was hoping for at least some kind of attempted connection between the images and the potential thoughts/dangers/points that the artist was making. Or at least what I mentioned earlier: a conversation between every element, where each element (live or no) could be experienced, surprising.

Yet the most effective slippages (why was he very hairy in the films and completely and utterly hairless on stage? why include the footage of the genuine electric chair execution?) fell by the way side, in favour of overwrought, repetitious underlining of empty incidents. It seemed as if the real risky moments mentioned above were passed over in favour of an over emphatic silent monologue on the artist's part:

Look at how I spent nearly $2000 on two real human skulls, each costing $895 each from a store named 'Evolution' in the heart of Times Square. Isn't that ironic? And look how I am wearing a suit and crossing the road outside the stock exchange on Wall Street, the capital of capitalism. And look how I am pretending that nobody is watching, that I am the normal one. I'm making a point, you see? Looking like a freak death butterfly and crossing the road. I am showing you that you are the weird ones. Isn't that clever? Me being so superweird to expose how fucking fucked up you all are? Aren't you all just awful? Look at how I put the skulls on my feet! See how painful this is! See how much it hurts to wrench my body this way, with the money, and the shoes, and the death. I can barely stand.BEAUTY HURTS. I am telling you something about your own lives. I am your preacher. LOOK AT ME!!

And so Golgotha revealed itself to be as needless as the mindless spending of the free market capitalism so desperately flagged up yet not dealt with. Really, with the $900 skulls, this entire piece was little more than worship of the beast (is this the point of the religious touches; to admit we have all sinned?). Spending for spending's sake. (Surely we are a good decade or two beyond the time when such an exercise could actually have any new or interesting effect or appeal?)

Because there seemed no idea aside from the structure and the shoe changes, the moments which could have genuinely formed intersections of liveness and premediation, seem like stunts and shams: the use of a video of real electric chair execution displayed amidst the S&M climbing frame; the recreation of the twin towers with the skullettos; the name of the piece itself. Simply having a crucifix and a couple of skulls does not really provide sufficient justification for calling a piece Golgotha. Why choose such a suggestive, and heavily Christianised, evocative title if there is barely any acknowledgement of that religious power (or loss thereof)?

Does Cohen think he is Christ, a muscular, though ephemerally-decorated, Messiah, tottering through his streets where money is religion and he is being once more gawped at, bearing his cross as two skulls on his feet whilst the tourists on Wall Street and Broadway take ut their mobile telephones and video him crossing the road? Or are we to acknowledge that we live Golgotha, that we have killed any hope of redemption?

Perhaps. And if faith and spiritualism were really at stake, the piece would not have threatened sleep on several spectators. It could have fulfilled Cohen's own maxim "about letting you see the work as I am making it" if the pre-recorded and installed elements had not been presented as pre-existent, native, always-already there.

What a fallacy! This was a piece of such pre-meditation, such self-involved naivety: does Cohen really think that him being there in person, balancing between things, is enough to gloss over the mammoth amount of preparation and construction involved prior to the live show? There was no risk in the piece itself, no sense of fraying around the edges: it was all pre-edited, pre-beautified, utterly betraying its own vanity.

It left a residual distaste over the evident expense on show, amplified by the unquestioningly enthusiastic response of the Paris audience. Despite the power of its images, its inability (and unwillingness) to interrogate the construction of said images, the ideologies and processes which go into them, expose the event as the work of little more than a self-involved big spender, who thinks he's "brilliant", with little awareness of anything outside his undeniably well-trained, maquillaged body. Well, "fuck performance art".[That's still his quote.]

AS SEEN ON BANKSIDE

2009-11-03T02:56:00.000-08:00

ITS ABOUT GETTING YOUR PRIORITIES RIGHT

WHAT YOU SEE AT YOUR LOCAL PARK: ORPHANS BY DENNIS KELLY

2009-11-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

I witnessed one of the last nights of Dennis Kelly’s Orphans at the Soho Theatre, having transferred from a successful run at the Traverse in August. Horrified, but satiated by attacking my companion’s lack of outrage on the bus home, it wasn’t until reading Michael Billington’s review I felt moved to offer a written response. So to offer a meta-review, a review, and an apology for both:

Fundamental to my outrage at the play’s form was its reliance on manipulation, something which the review notes:

“Kelly is not above manipulating character to suit his thesis”

It certainly felt problematic that the play shared in the most irresponsible values of its protagonists, and we might read instead: Kelly is not above [his] manipulating character[s]. Manipulation was at the heart of the play as well as its characters; centred, as it was, around a number of lies drawn out for as long as possible before a devastating revelation was the only possible release.

Billington’s description of this process feels inadequate on a number of accounts:

“Liam's claim that he went to the aid of a knife-slashed stranger lying in the gutter is soon exposed as a pathetic lie.”

First, only the most exhilarated spectator could believe that this exposition was ‘soon over’. Pathetic, however, is right on the buzzer, but it is not clear whether Liam is to blame for being a rubbish liar, and an implausible character, or Kelly himself. Whilst the aspirations of a dramatist who leaves the fourth-wall pristine allows the accurate observation of people’s mediocrity, one might hope that a dramatist could conceive of a liar talented enough to conjure as plausible a drama founded on deceit as the ‘real’ one which emerges once the ‘untruths’ have been revealed. The drama was impelled not by a withholding of the truth, but by creative deceit which, when we remember that the integrity of a ‘thesis’ is at stake, vitiates any possibility of insight, let alone honesty, truth, or any of those words which, in this context, feel like they might have been carted out of an eighteenth-century exhibition at the British Museum.

But Kelly’s thesis, for which we have to endure so much, is that (in Billington’s words)

“our society is so worm-eaten and corrupt that even decent liberals will resort, under pressure, to torture.”

‘Kelly’s thesis’, which hardly merits the possessive, is no more than the stock response of the gullible to their daily newspaper: that the world is somehow uniformly getting much much worse. ‘Even decent liberals’ is a phrase which exactly describes the level of sophistication which Kelly’s social critique maintained. Billington’s use of the future tense – liberals will – is similarly symptomatic of the play’s confused vision of society: a deluded and hysterical dystopian vision of the present, making claims for itself as a clear-sighted but saddened pragmatism. Kelly’s play is not proof that liberals resort to torture: it is a rhetorical imagining. Kelly’s representative liberal does resort to torture, and we understand that Kelly believes we would too.

“Kelly creates a genuine moral dilemma and along the way makes some salient points.”

Whilst Billington takes Kelly’s play as proof that a liberal can be moved to torture he forgets that the liberal state has and does legitimise torture on its own citizens as well as citizens of foreign countries. Binyan Mohammed’s case is the latest of such unnecessarily frequent reminders. The point about Kelly’s play is that whilst it may darkly allegorise something ‘genuine’, in order to illustrate our complicity with such suffering, it only has hyperbole at its disposal. In the play, these are revelations sensationalised to the extent that, paradoxically, they are as totally banal, the quotidian rantings of a tabloid editorial.

Again, paradoxically, it would be a more dangerous, and useful, revelation to draw the link between, say, eating a bowl of Cinnamon Grahams and the torture of suspected terrorists in US military facilities. That would be literary realism taken to its most satisfactory extreme, and is a common trope in contemporary drama. But is it possible that we, unlike Tom Cruise in Minority Report, would be able to extract ourselves from complicity in crimes committed daily? That really would be fiction.

“McGuinness does his best to convince us of the dithering Danny's plunge into the inferno.”

Billington’s journalistic love of the alliterative epithet here reminds us that Kelly’s most reprehensible move is to implicated in a hysterically world only possible in the imagination of a sociopathic Daily Mail literalist shortly after being verbally abused on the way back from buying a pint of milk.

And here Roxana Silbert’s production fails to recuperate the script; behind the hopelessly yuppie couple’s wallpaper stand oversized iron railings, a slightly freakish papier mache version of what you see at your local park, an amateurish evocation of the social violence of the world outside. What, an urban dystopia? Pinch me, I must be in a piece of post-war British drama!

Billington’s review ends in a satisfactorily arbitrary moment of Conservative bashing:

“The play makes chilling viewing. But in a week when David Cameron has been spouting nonsense about our allegedly "broken society", I find it disheartening for a talented young dramatist to be aiding and abetting his cause.”

Moreover, that Kelly’s youth should have any symbolic currency is dismaying, and it is here that Billington is most complicit with Kelly’s failure: to achieve any single moment of lucidity in presenting the world unprejudiced around us. Perhaps the author’s heroism, staring into the abyss of British society, is no more different to the saddened but steely resolve of the blue-sky politician in the neat suit. And in this similarity an obsession with dirt masquerading as a desire to clean up.

zero sum - Complicité's Endgame

2009-10-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

'Since that's the way we're playing it, let's play it that way'

Hamm's croon stands out of the current Complicité production. (H)ham(m)-ing over his arm-cum-wheelchair, Mark Rylance purrs it with clear relish; the audience laugh obediently. The actor gripes and gestures please, the audience laughs thank you. Gambit accepted.
In this neat exchange, where Actor and Audience cancel out (x-y= 0) we find perhaps the most literal extension of this production's simplification of the script's radical mathematics (where x≠ y, x/y --> ∞) .

Endgame is in many ways a play about playing, especially in considering its primary French incarnation as Fin de Partie. At its funniest - and most painful - it stares hard in the face of the worst-feared possibility: there is no end, no final whistle, but an irreducible fraction.
Yet in in Complicité's (highly reputed) hands, Beckett's explicit and meta-theatrical 'play'ing seems translated into a surprisingly safe play between playing styles. Beckett's piece treads a very fragile line: its entire enterprise is towards simplifying and balancing the equation formed by the bodies on stage. Yet the keynote is that we are not dealing with simple integers and equivalences: like Lear, reducing to zero is always-already impossible, because the component parts are not isolated figures but unstable fractions. We try to resolve, to reduce to zero, but if we ever land on such a reduction, we cease to represent the infinite and ceaseless truth. And Beckett stages the action of this: dying/living/acting-out, we call it many things. Theatre, in its repetitiousness, never wholly disappears, nor tangibly exists. Life too, in Endgame's parlance, is the same. (It is with this kind of deft dramatic achievement that Beckett has gained his reputation for speaking to al human existence - and perhaps now such glorification is sadly canonising him...the pat-on-the-back self-congratulation of the audience as well as the acting might suggest that. Has he become safe? Neutralised?)

Yet this uncomfortable tension is absent from WC2. Complicité does not work through with the play's attempts at balancing out, at solving that problem of reduction which plagues theatre and life: instead, it interprets, posits, a solution prior to the performance. And what we see is not the working-out, but the (reductive) solution, over and over. The play has lost its playing: it is just conclusion, in a series of stiff tableaux. Thus the discordant complementarity between Hamm (Mark Rylance) and Clov (Simon McBurney), is reified as a competition of two very different, though geo-historically intertwined acting techniques, which are thrust to the fore in the first fifteen minutes of almost-silent action.

Rylance's Hamm is Olivier, he is the English stage of the early twentieth century; he is the butt of Hamlet's actorly advice to "not saw the air too much with your hand". A good rendition of a very bad cocktail of Stanislavsky and speech lessons. Recalling, in his verbosity, B from Rough for Theatre 1 (though he is physically blind as A), he scatters half- stories ad inifinitum; he is the landowner, decaying bourgeosie - but more - he is the perpetually isolated blindman, gesticulationg in the dark and unable to sustain the act on his own.

Part parody, and almost all pastiche, Rylance's pandering to the Duchess audience rather than his on-stage cronies is again sympotamatic of a very modern, very British acting tendency which Tim Crouch's The Author scrutinised: that desperate need for unconditional approval. Such a need courses through Hamm as a character - but Hamm's audience is also Clov and the dustbins. It is no coincidence that - talented an actor as Rylance is - he stands for a very particular type of RSC-friendly conservative theatre. A theatre which can only play out, to its very quiet, very appreciative audience, as if they were behind a screen. (Which tonight, they are: a not-even-ironic fourth wall gauze slips down at the start and end of the performance!)

In this staged battle of opposites, Simon McBurney's Clov is stood to represent Complicité - and by proxy, much more than that. His jerky Clov, who cannot sit down and thus seesaws on his joints around a blind master who cannot stand up, is France, he is a line running through Artaud and Marceau to LeCoq, that also takes in the Russian and Eastern European influences of Meyerhold (and later Grotowski), he is a figure so desperately focused on the body that every line seems to arrive at his tongue already broken and crumpled. Speech seems not to fit him. It is instead reluctantly forced out in order to play the game.

And the two seem more like strangers. Like floating units. Complicité seems to have panicked and dropped the ball here, reading the piece as a concrete, barely-developing meditation...on what I cannot fathom. Isolation? The apocalypse? But this is done by crudely striking divisions and decisions through all of the key relationships in the play, as well as between audience and actors. As if these fixed binaries are the answer!

So Clov is all muscle, leg and torso; Hamm is all tongue, hand and throat. Such contrasts should be mindless/effortless, not foregrounded: because this play has been playing forever, it always will, the game is that there is no end.

Yet neither Hamm nor Clov seem used to each other - or tired of each other - enough to suggest that this endless rehearsal is second-nature to them. Perhaps because as yet, for the actors on stage, this performance is not second nature to them. (McBurney at times abandons - or alters - his hugely mannered walk, rendering its entire laborious construction ineffectual.)

Either way, the indifference between Rylance and McBurney is not that of Hamm and Clov's utter habit (and dependence). They seem unrelated: unrelatable. And this is indicative of the production's larger problem.

Complicité has not done its maths. None of Beckett's famous pairs can be carved up and given exclusive attributes: they are a mutual unity, the two play off each other and we must view even partially between the actors some verbal or imagined space where they play together.

This production's single-minded obsession with playing against means that another mathematical strain of Beckett's is reified and trivialised: the importance of Nag and Nell, the two stump(ed) parents of Hamm who live in dustbins at one side of the stage.

Hamm and Clov speak as if to themselves, individually. As such we do not get that sense of Nag and Nell having a private, quite beautiful though obsolete, irruptive energy of their own, which mingles and reconfigures what would otherwise have been a x=y, zero sum of a play. The intelligence and pathos of Beckett's text is that his characters cannot help but listen to each other, cannot help but respond. Here we feel that no such connection exists.

Thus the mutuality between the complementary pairs of Hamm/Clov and Nag/Nell are not allowed to mix and play, but instead, Miriam Margoyles and Tom Hickey do a tender job which is out of place in a production which would rather keep them under their lids.

And herein lies the problem: poor inversion on the director and actors' parts. Endgame is not simply a play about mutilation, but a mutilated play: it is a complex, fractious jigsaw that does not fit together.

For Endgame is dynamic, dramatic: it is no zero sum, no reducing to empty, no resistant little fractions that refuse to move away...yet to Complicité, it all seems to add up, and rest neatly behind the veil dropped over the scene at the start and end - an extra sfaety curtain as if we needed reminding who is in charge here: in this creaky proscenium, the fourth wall rules, x=y with no remainder, the arithmetic is absolute and Beckett belongs to the canon. Nothing more.

lean upstream

2009-10-24T02:57:00.000-07:00

something to do with november:

http://www.leanupstream.info/

eyes peeled for the forest and the field performance.

A SAFE PLACE IN THE WORLD: THE AUTHOR

2009-10-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

As hoped, we start on a positive, girding our skirts revealing inelegant ankles, in inarticulate admiration of Tim Crouch’s The Author.

The move towards writing something in response to the theatre I see was initially motivated by outrage: at Simon Stephens’ latest offering, Punk Rock, and its response, the inexplicably uncritical chorus of praise from the capital’s theatre reviewers. Its other, and more enabling influence has been the inestimable Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire. There still aren’t enough critical responses to theatre in the UK. This is the beginning of a small cyber-redress. Okay:

Tuesday 30th was one of the press nights of The Author, and the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs comprised of two opposing structures of raked seats, and no stage, only a narrow walkway between them. “Don’t you love this?” says a performer in our midst, “It’s such a versatile space!” The glee with which the audience greeted the first ten minutes, thrilled and terrified by the piece’s self-reflexivity, I found tedious at times, but the ease with which this humour was revealed to be invested in the play’s bleak destination, was a masterclass of theatrical implication.

The reviewers, distributed evenly throughout the rows, have never been more visible. The Times reviewer, sitting next to me, harrumphed and cheated, flicking through his copy of the playtext. The presence of Dominic Cooke, in the far corner across from me, was compelling; presiding over a piece which questioned the value of a type of play for which the Royal Court theatre has received much attention. These types of plays, whose graphic representation of disturbing acts has not yet been the subject of serious critical interrogation, have had a lasting influence on Western theatre and its audiences.

The basis of the piece was the account of another, fictional play written by the ‘famous’ author (‘… the darling of the universities…’): Tim Crouch. There is a war, dismemberment and incest. These representations, he tells us, are motivated by the ethical imperative not to ignore those things which disturb us in the world. The account of the effect this fictional play had on those involved points towards a deeply held conviction, following Plato, that theatre’s inclination towards social ills contaminates both its audience and its actors. The piece remains deeply uncertain, troubled even, by this paradox. The theatre-maker does not want to shy away from the problems he or she sees in the world, but is concerned at the effects of doing so in excess. Surely, I thought sagely, the answer is moderation. But, as one performer reminds us, art is all about extremes. The only extremes this piece allows for, however, is either to attempt to take on all of the world’s problems, or to shy away from them; the first wildly unrealistic, the second cowardice. The self-referentiality of the play is its own egress, and its effervescence.

The most extraordinary presence was Jules, Tim Crouch’s wife. She, namechecked often, sat next to her husband, beamed at his compliments whilst all the time forcing the danger of the climax to an extreme. Meanwhile I sat in the darkness, grateful for the brief respite the blackouts bring, listening to Tim Crouch’s final speech, appalled by the lengths to which his argument was extended and, to my shame, exhilarated.

A performer asks us, and the play is clever to pose its most convincing arguments first as questions: “Isn’t this the safest place in the world?” A curious accusation, but undeniable. I thought then about the theatre as a social exchange, a permeable membrane realised in the ebb and flow of its audiences. A theatre which feels too safe is in danger of complacency and inaction, but how extreme does a theatre need to be in order to endanger? The theatre’s danger is rhetorical, and contained, but can only be revealed as such after it has presented new challenges to the relations between society and art, safety and danger. Then I started to wonder how daring an act of programming this actually was; rather than proposing a new kind of theatre, it engages constantly with one familiar to its audience. By the end of the piece, however, daring seemed redundant: but it is necessary, certainly.

In contrast, the populist credentials of Inherit the Wind and A New World assert themselves in opposition to Crouch’s artful, formal, offering. They are theatre neutralized of all rhetorical effect, solemnly reenacting a more conservative past in which a radical idea has been met with ridicule, paying mere lipservice to the importance of freedom of speech, doing little more than pour scorn on those whose beliefs have long been ‘disproved’. The former, staged at a theatre which seems intent on convincing its audiences that nothing has changed since it was the National Theatre.

The conviction with which ideas such as the evolution of species were said to be dangerous was greatly undermined by an unquestioning confidence in the effectiveness of traditional theatre. A New World, set in the generic past of smudge-faced street urchins, rehearses the unfailing radicalism of its subject, Thomas Paine, but its most eloquent gesture is towards the failure of its author to renew his radicalism to respond to the challenges of twenty-first century life. The mantra show don’t tell, a favourite of the drama class, reminds us that in theatre form and content must be commensurate, something it seems only ‘experimental’ theatre-makers are able to realise.

Superlatives aside, theatre that is a safe place is ethically dangerous. Whilst we don’t want our handbags to be stolen it is ethically imperative that, in the theatre, our values most worth defending are subjected to the greatest challenges.

Suspended in darkness: The Author / Tim Crouch

2009-10-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

The attempt is towards a constellation where every idea is a path to and from all others: where the statements made by Crouch’s play move as dynamic moments.

It is unfashionable to talk about suspension of disbelief: most discerning contemporary audience members, as well as practitioners and writers, cloak it in irony. Tim Crouch’s The Author, upstairs in the Jerwood Studio at the Royal Court, named itself a story of ‘hope’ and ‘exploitation’, exploring modern actors’ over-eagerness to please. Yet it revealed that the powers engendering such self-abasement rest in darkness: the blackened auditorium, the back corners of the mind, a quiet flotation tank outside the city.

The crowd sat bisected, facing itself on two raked sets of seats with a tiny platform between; all were prodded and engaged by four actors sat amongst them – Crouch included, playing a capitalised version of himself. It reflected a state which has been crystallised in modern theatre audiences: no longer suspension of disbelief, simply suspension. A lulled complicity, silent disconnect.

“Don’t you love this?” pipes up the over-eager Theatre Goer, gesturing to the lights, the crowd, the promenade, “aaaalll this?” One by one, the audience meet the Theatre Goer, the Author, the Actor, the Actress; the characters began to weave a story, detailing the process of one of “Tim Crouch”’s plays, a violent exploration of an abusive and incestuous relationship in a war-torn Balkan country.

We got all the trappings we were told to expect: some musical interludes; a display of lights, the unravelling of a crisis. The key: this illusion of intervention, as performers and audience acted under what they assumed were each other’s instruction, pretending to mix, but in reality divided.

Crouch’s project seemed an angry attempt to transgress the two suspended spheres, between viewers and viewed. The piece wanted to be an invitation to fill in the gaps created by the curtain-up switch-off that occurs as audience cross the threshold of the theatre; but equally as actors ‘find their process’ to perform. It achieved an ellipsis, a deformed version of the circle of trust.

So; the audience regards itself, waiting, examining: looking for an author-ity figure to get us going. We are half-aligned to with the writer-character, the inflated ‘Author’, as a collective body designed to ask for more and more: like the exaggerated scribe, the audience becomes implicated in a series of actions where the violence, the sexual abuse off-stage as well as on, is the result of our demands on those we ask to perform for us. “Is this ok?” “Are you alright?” “Shall I go on?” We usually concur.

But - actors are not the only individuals who perform. The suspension, that crucial gap between the audiences is nothing but a reflection of the critical crack between manufacture and consumption the factory and the foodhall.

Through the skewed author-audience alliance, we notice that the processes of obtaining information, of dissecting and discerning the behaviour of others, are variations on the same axis: the audience demand from the performance; the writer-director demands from the actors in rehearsal; the actors demand from “real life” in order to feed the chain of production.

When Crouch’s author-figure begins to re-enact a hot-seating rehearsal with his female lead, who has been on a earnest researching field trip and has interviewed a fourteen year old girl sexually abused by her father (“just like my character!”), he invites us to join in the questioning.

Nobody joins; but nobody stops him either. The silence licenses his probing. Karen, through Actress, through the actor, is allowed to emerge through the parameters set in place by the demands of the Author and the space of the studio. Crouch assumes that the audience wants to know, desires this ‘slice of life’: yet he also constructs the piece to make us want to know. We know that the ‘Actress’ is not the actor; we know that the ‘Actress’ is not Karen, the teenager: yet are we not still using each and every one of these figures, real and imaginary? Do we need the actors to comfort us as much as they need us to comfort them?

The onus is once more on the audience. And the message is: this is what you do to us. However this argument comes full circle: the audience does not stop the actor, but the actor does not stop him or herself. The ‘Author’ does not – dare we assume, cannot? – stop himself casually sexually violating the baby of his lead actress; the lead Actor cannot stop himself from lashing out in violence at the autograph-hunting Theatre Goer on the final night of performance.

Where are the provisions for containing, understanding, expressing such violence and violations? What are the conventions which should be used – or abused – in order to do this? How can we bare to watch ourselves?

At times I am unsure whether the piece asks these questions through its own development: arguably not; The Author does not think with its audience, rather it presents a statement of fact, an angry accusation which is realised slowly across the 75 minutes, as we listen to Crouch’s final speech in the dark.

That idea, ellipsis, again. The kind of ellipsis that speaks also to the shape of other Royal Court favourites, notably Sarah Kane, who do not fracture the tradition of British theatre, but briefly pull it out-of-joint. That is, I cannot think of any work of the Royal Court darlings or any others, however violent in its grammar, which demands the audience play a new role. Instead, each play interrogates, and questions, the convention which seems to allow audiences to arrive with their silent part down pat.

In The Author, at the moment of the hot-seating, when we are asked to question (and in some performances there have been audience questions), there is almost a new axis found, we are almost pulled out of our regular suspension in this dark box, but we are returned, unchanged to the regular orbit, still enveloped in ‘the safest place in the world’.

This hang up on cycles, completion, statements is perhaps more to do with a theoretical hang-up than a reaction to Crouch. Theatre here seems unwilling to hitch its bandwagon to the anti-circular notions of performance enacted through Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Foucault’s reading thereof. But a residual thought - what happened to Karen? Do we even care? The brief intrusion of her, a made-up ‘authentic’ person used to bring the Author’s Play/Crouch’s play “alive”, is symptom of an epidemic. As Mamet says, theatre too is real life, people live in it: yet does this mean that the only way to tell the abuse of others by abusing a few more?

authors

2009-10-16T00:32:00.000-07:00

this is a hello, from us to there

welcome to repetitive strain

we will try to talk about theatre