Author: HJ Giles

Interactive Theatre: Why, How, &c.

Politics, Rambles, Theatre

I say I specialise in interactive theatre. That means a whole range of stuff, but at the core of it it means I get excited when audiences get up on the stage. I think there’s something genuinely revolutionary about it. I ended up doing interactive theatre largely because of my involvement in contemporary social movements, and in the end I couldn’t help applying the same radical analysis to theatre that I was applying to politics. If I was demanding that politics be participatory, non-hierarchical, ecological, how could I not demand the same of theatre? If I thought that the answers to capitalism lay in creating autonomous spaces, how could I not want to create them in theatre buildings? Arguments by analogy have never been particular sound, but they can take us some interesting places. Still, I’ve found it hard to make the full rational argument for the theatre that I make. Instead, I wave lyrically in its direction. When trying to write a manifesto I came up with:

Open Source Theatre is the idea that anyone can make theatre.
Open Source Theatre is the idea that everyone should make theatre.
Open Source Theatre takes audiences seriously. We make theatre with them.
Open Source Theatre thinks that everyone who participates in making theatre, including “audiences”, should feel empowered.
Open Source Theatre says that the theatre space is a personal space.
Open Source Theatre says that the revolutionary space is a theatre space.
Open Source Theatre wonders if the technologies of our immensely privileged Information-based societies might be able to make the above statements true.

I’ve been reading Darren O’Donnell’s “Social Acupuncture“, a messy but stimulating book about theatre and politics. (You can get a full .pdf from Mammalian Diving Reflex here.) Bits of it got my back up, bits of it I found tiresome, but big chunks had me punching the air. Yes! I’d say. That’s what I meant! That’s how I feel! O’Donnell has an exciting clarity of style, and a real knack for linking the socioeconomic to the psychological. The book’s like a theatrical “Anti-Oedipus“, but much less obscure. And this post is really just an excuse to post a couple of those light-filled passages.

Here’s him diagnosing the artistic problem:

The classical canon and traditional approaches to representation still hold the theatrical imagination captive. Most theatre still hasn’t managed to dispense with coherent, pithy and supposedly interesting characters whose lives occur incident by incident. Presenting false possibilities of selfknowing – even among nominally postmodern dramatists – still dominates: characters’ lives are summed up, they understand their various shortcomings and blind spots, and they’re offered some sort of redemption, whether or not they choose to take it. And if they don’t, then, at the very least, the audience is offered that possibility. Representational work – work that derives its meaning from the portrayal of other people in other places doing other things – still dominates, imposing its inherent limitations around the construction of transparent subjectivities and the illusory possibility of an objective position from which observation can occur. It also brings along its tyrannical emphasis on narrative; it’s a dramaturgical cliché that the fundamental component of theatre is story and storytelling.

While stories may be one way to get the job done, they’re not the only way; stories are simply one tool among many. What theatre is really about – like any other form – is generating affect, and that’s it. Feelings. And, if things go well, quickly following feelings will be thoughts. Stories certainly can do this, but they’re not the only thing to do it, and they’re no longer always the best way to do it. Yet representational narrative continues to dominate, keeping the experience sheltered from the possibility of a direct encounter between audience and artist, between bodies in the same room at the same time.

But he’s equally clear in his diagnosis of the difficulties with the participatory solution. Folk who’ve been to my shows will know that they’re in parts messy and awkward. I put considerable effort into making informal spaces full of possibility, in creating dramatic moments which one night will carry us all away and which the next will putter out entirely. I’ve previously put this down to experimental risk. But maybe it’s inherent to the form:

The innocent gestures of the spontaneous will always tell us complex and politically charged things about this very moment, giving theatre artists the opportunity to find rigorous ways to generate and frame it. That’s the challenge, with theatre’s addiction to a very particular understanding of a rigidly rehearsed virtuosity standing in its way. It’s easy with film and tv – you just edit out the dull shit, focusing on the telling spontaneous moments. This is not so easy when the interactions are live, and particularly so if they involve audience interaction. There will always be annoying fumbles and distractions, and a final product that doesn’t have the same concision that editing allows.

The path to a rigorous participatory theatre is fraught with dorkiness, earnestness, amateurism, social work and therapy. It’s a minefield. And no one can be blamed for feeling squeamish or repulsed by the notion. We like our work rehearsed and we like it well rehearsed, like a nice charbroiled steak from Denny’s. The question for the theatre artist anxious to break with debilitating habits of the past is how to create thoughtful, rigorous work while allowing for the unknown, the unexpected and the awkward – how to find meaning in qualities other than virtuosity and razzle-dazzle.

That argument is the artistic and psychosocial rationale for the theatre I’m trying to make. You’ll need to read the rest of the book – or go to one of his projects? or, better still, one of mine? – to talk more about how that ties into the political. But, briefly:

Representation and narrative will always be comfortable and tyrannical. No matter how deconstructed, the artist will always be telling you a neat story about how the world is. If that story is political, they will always be presenting a platform, making an argument, raising awareness? – representational theatre can’t help but be so liberal. The most radical thing a politician can do is get down from the podium and invite a bunch of other people to speak. The most radical thing a theatre-maker can do is as the audience to invade the stage space and make their own contributions from it. This will always be aesthetically uncertain and awkward. Anything aesthetically fixed and polished can only communicate a message: to have a conversation, you have to disrupt the aesthetic calm you’ve created. And that will lead to far greater artistic magic.

Voices

Personal, Poetry, Rambles

It seems like there’s no greater compliment you can give a young poet than to say “You’ve really found your voice”. When reading new work, we’re often looking for a certain authenticity of tone, some quality of confidence in the way of speaking. In spoken word, we draw a lot on hip-hop’s emphasis on realness (and for hip-hop’s own discourse on this, just compare K-Rino to Childish Gambino, maybe rock some Das Racist), such that we’re always looking to take someone out for pretension, for middle class white boys rhyming ghetto, and we praise it when someone talks with their own special tongue.

In the past year or so, as a poet and performer, I began to feel comfortable with my voice. That’s taken a long time. Regularly MCing nights has been a big part of it — you can’t spent 3 hours hosting a couple of nights a month and be a massive persona, you have to be at least a version of yourself. The more I perform, fairly obviously, the more I’ve had confidence in my own identity as a performer. And that’s been difficult for me, for a few reasons. When I began performing, I was rapping in a voice very much not my own — my middle class accent had no flow, my Insular Scots undertones weren’t tough enough. And, like every poet, I began by copying the way other people wrote. But, at bottom, it’s because I grew up on a tiny Scottish island but with English parents, which means:

In Orkney, I’m English;
In England, Scottish;
In Scotland, Orcadian.

That’s a line from Visa Wedding, a sequence of poems I’m working on about identity and Scottishness. It’s the most personal material I’ve ever written. I grew up with a voice that didn’t quite fit, and wherever I go that’s the same, in different ways.  My English background marks me out in Orkney; Orkney’s Scandinavian inflection seems weird to folk in Edinburgh; in England,  nobody has a clue where I’m from unless I ham up the Scottishness. (In Orkney, by the way, we say that folk “chant” when they tone down their accent or make it more English to talk with outsiders on the phone.) Strange, then, that in my poetry I think I’m getting comfortable with my voice when in truth I really don’t have one.

This beautiful article on Obama, written by Zadie Smith in 2009, covers some of the same territory. She talks of her difficulty in coming to terms with her voices, the way she moved between Willesden and Cambridge, and eventually lost her London voice for posher tones. she rightly points out how we many-voiced suffer from the way “Voice adaptation is still the original British sin”. And the she moves on to talking about how the many-voiced and the mixed race seem to be born in a Dream City “where the unified singular self is an illusion”. I’d already been finding myself in her essay, and then she gave me goosebumps:

It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

Anyone who’ve ever worked with me on project will know how, for all my performativity and ego, I live for the we. I  go out of my way to run collective projects and find ways of being part of a WEness, of presenting myself as one part of a collective conscious. Sure, a chunk of that is due to being bullied and socially excluded in childhood, but Zadie Smith has made me wonder whether bigger part might come from the way

this slippery many-coloured tongue
snaps at identity as though it were
an insect morsel lathered with
the sweet-and-sour of BELONG.

Something else has been happening in my life, too. For nearly four years now I’ve lived and loved with an American. (An American, I should say, who feels more culturally comfortable in the UK than the US). I’ve come to understand my own identity in relation to hers, and to her country. Spending time with her family is great for me, because to them I’m simply from the much-fetishised Scotland. And, to avoid being too unfair, they’re my fetishised South. Bands played country music at the dances in Orkney; I fell in love with blues and country aged 18. I love Waffle House. In the South, I gain another voice.

Whan I was an undergrad I had a folk and blues band. We appropriated mercilessly from every culture we could. I sang delta blues. The Aberdeenshire banjo player liked English folk. The Bavarian bazouki-man liked Irish rebel music (his own folk culture being terribly tainted by fascist appropriation). There was a djembe. Once, we played on the radio, and the interviewer asked why we sang what we did. I said that in a way we played the traditional music of other people’s homes because none of us had comfortable homes of our own. I didn’t realise how true that was until my mother listened in and said how moving it was to hear me say it.

So, back to poetry. What does this mean for my apparently new-found voice? It means that, just as I’m starting to feel comfortable with it, I’m beginning to question whether it’s all I’ve got. I’m experimenting more again. I’ve just completed a first pass at a new piece written in Scots, a language I barely feel I’ve a right to, explaining it’s:

Acause incomer will aywis be a clarty wird,
acause this tongue I gabber wi will niver be the real Mackay, I sing.
Acause fer aw that wur aw Jock Tamson’s etcetera, are we tho? Eh?

I’m kind of scared to start experimenting with tongues and forms again, just as I was settling down. I’m worried that editors will look down on it. Experimenting is good for exploring and strengthening poetry, but, especially in mainstream publishing, it seems like it’s seen as a means to an end, as a way of achieving your authentic, settled voice. I’m assembling the skeleton of a first chapbook collection to start sending round, and need to find ways of making it coherent that aren’t about consistent voice. Because, if I’m being true to myself, I don’t have one. For me, singing, performing, writing is all about constructing my identities as I go. In that Scots poem, Brave, I explain it as clearly as I can:

I sing o a Scotland whit’ll chant hits hairt oot dounstairs o the Royal Oak,
whit’ll pouk hits timmer clarsach hairtstrangs,
whit like glamour will sing hits hairt intae existence,
whit haps sang aroon hits bluidy nieve hairt,
whit sings.

Why We Perform Words

Poetry, Rambles

I went to see Peter Arnott’s scratch of Talent Night in the Fly Room (which was an open-hearted blast, by the way, and I’m really looking forward to the finished thing), and something he said at the beginning struck me:

Working with actors is like doing it in laboratory conditions — it tests writing in a real-world way. People say “That’s not funny” and you say . . . “You’re right. It isn’t.”

That’s pretty much how I feel about performing poetry. Performing a poem to an audience is an essential part of the creative process for me. How can I know the words are right until the audience has reacted to them? Why on earth would I trade this for the trickle of response from readers when a piece is publishd? Why would I ask for critical commentary from trusted readers and not from trusted listeners? Why would you?

And if you don’t think your poem is auditory, why do you use alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme? Why do your poems have shape? Do you really not sound them at least in your mind? Do you not roll the words around your mouth? So why don’t you perform them? It will test them in a real-world way.