Morning Workshop

I spent the morning workshop with one of the Masters students, exploring partnering with objects in movement. It’s been far too long since I did a movement workshop. I spent a good amount of time in them while training in directing, and found them vital and liberating. But my theatre is led by the verbal and intellectual impulses, and that can lead me to forget the body. That’s a disease of British theatre. Because of course body is where the rest is grounded, and I’m always physically present in my shows, and understanding your movement can provide you security and strength for all the rest, and all these skills need refreshing. Especially when I’m doing so much talking and thinking here, I’m glad this workshop came at the moment it did – refreshing, enlivening, calming, grounding.

Morning Discussion

We chewed over the shows from yesterday again. The discussion of Ars Mechanica’s piece focussed on the stand-out formal feature, which was its live use of contemporary communications technologies. Everyone found this exciting and conflicting – on the one hand, it showed us and asked us to be part of something very real about modern life; on the other, it’s aesthetically messy, and difficult, and problematic. I really embrace this latter aspect – if the theatre is strong, I’m excited by what aesthetic failure means, what it tells us, how we live it. I keep returning to a phrase from Darren O’Donnell: “The innocent gestures of the spontaneous will always tell us complex and politically-charged things about this present moment.”

I and another of the British delegates, Jane, asked a sort of standing question for every show: “How does it challenge the dominant power structures, and if not then why not?” Because I’m always thinking about power and hegemony, I was surprised at how difficult or problematic people  find this question – but then we do all approach art and politics in different ways. Scott McGehee suggested that one of its key roles is to “reframe reality” – show us a different way of seeing things. He had I had an extended metaphor of tools through quotes and epigrams. “The point is not to represent reality, but to resignify it.” “Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.” “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” I’m excited by artistic hammers – I keep returning to the idea that they may not be subtle, but they can certainly be complex. We reached a resolution by agreeing that we could have all sorts of tools in our toolbox, hammers included.

On the Rose Parade, a lot of the discussion focussed on the relationship between the performers and the subjects. In documentary or verbatim theatre, how do you represent your subjects faithfully? How do you do them justice? Are you speaking for them or about them? What is your editorial role? How is this role different in theatre than in journalism? Because so much of my own work is historical or didactic, much of this applies to me: How do I say that I’m telling a historical story accurately, but loaded with my own ideas and prejudices?

We also spoke of the specific ideas of telling women’s stories, and how to make these about survival and not about victimhood – or, more specifically, how to present them as stories of living and continuation rather than of being defined by the moment of victimhood. This is important anti-patriarchal work; I’m also still chewing over intersectionality, the specific relationship to capitalism here.

Afternoon Presentations

First in the afternoon were two films from Serbian filmmaker Vojin Vasovic. Both were essentially about the role of individual power and creativity in an alienated society – though with a delicious bleak humour. Dashak, based on a Pirandello story, was about a man who discovers or comes to believe he can kill people with a puff of air. The story is great, all about power and responsibility and why we come to do violence (and many other things); I was also excited by the oblique, almost anti-dramatic editing, which continually reframed action or cut away to strange phenomenological moments – while always being more humorous than elusive. The second, an animated short called 5 Minutes Each, was a simple fable: a queue of ;people, each of who had a communication medium for a head (newspaper, radio, TV), waits  to enter a mysterious door with artistic materials from a vending machine. On entering, they plummet to their inevitable death, all the while making art (painting, writing) depicting their fall. Then they die. I don’t think I need to comment, except to say it was hilarious.

Second up was Chloe Whiting Stevenson, who gave a graceful solo butoh performance exploring human responses to conflict, searching for the specific sadnesses and joys of violence and defense against violence. The whole had a sort of mythic narrative – birth and return, change and growth through time – and this led me to think about the relationship of myth to rebellion. So many of our myths reinforce standard paradigms of power, but there are ways of telling and retelling them that can reframe archetypes in an empowering, rebellious way. How does are ability to do so change as our work becomes more mythically abstract?

Evening Performances

The Raving Jaynes do comedy improv dance theatre, which is certainly a new form to me, if not entirely new to the world. It’s always exciting to discover a totally new way of doing performance, and the clash here between improvised dance and comedy improv games is aesthetically very productive. I was interested in the way the necessary abstraction of dance juxtaposed with the concrete, narrative humour of improv – though of course spontaneity, response to the present moment, is core to both. The results are necessarily unstable and uncertain, but because the form is new and various, reliably exciting.

Metatesta gave a highly skilled piece of dance theatre responding to The Unbearable Lightness of  Being. It was explicitly framed as exploring Eternal Return – but more specifically and presently, as with the book, looking at weight and lightness in living, and at jealousy and violence in human relationships – all well-suited to the dance form. The dance itself was spectacular and beautiful, with many exhilarating moments. This is very much responding to crisis by exploring the human condition, the condition of living, as has been much of the festival. This is good for me, because it’s very much not what I do – but it’s still what I’m allied to.

Tut’Zanni do contemporary Commedia dell’Arte, which was a great way to end the night. They combined three different types of mask theatre, which was very daring, but paid off – very good to see. Their show portrayed a theatre company struggling to put on a show, its opening ever interrupted by a profiteering manager and by their own egomanias. This was all played for laughs, but as with all comedy there are solid political ideas at play. Mostly, for once, I was able to turn off that part of my brain, though, and just enjoy a well-paced, ever-surprising Commedia show.

Open Sourcing Theatre

I kicked off the day with running a workshop in the idea of open sourcing theatre. This is something I’ve been working on for a while – for the last four years or so I’ve been running my theatre projects under the rubric of “Open Source Theatre”, as a fluid collective of people and ideas interested in applying some of the ideas of the open source software movement to the performing arts. That might sound like a bit of a stretch, and we’ve certainly taken the metaphor for a walk. The brief manifesto I’ve been able to write is oblique and suggestive rather than prescriptive. So this workshop was a facilitated open space discussion designed to talk through the idea, the metaphor, to open up the idea of open source to wider discussion. I was interested in engaging a bunch of smart, radical theatre-makers in what I’m thinking about and seeing where it went.

I was, first of all, taken aback by the level of engagement and interest. This is an idea I’ve been living with for quite a while, so to see that a bunch of other folk were excited by it too was really gratifying. The open space discussion explored a huge range of questions, including:

• How can we make performance spaces feel safe for audiences to participate?
• What are the relationships of improv and street theatre to open source theatre?
• Can we apply open source ideas to classical theatre?
• What’s the role of contemporary communications techs, like Twitter, to the theatre space, and to the open source theatre space?
• Whenever you open something up to participation, you open it up to risk, to manipulation, to misuse. How do we manage this?
• How do you produce strong aesthetics through open sourcing? How do you combine so many threads into one through-line?
• In what ways are our modern theatres not open? What are the barriers to participation?

The two hours of discussion never reached definite conclusions, and weren’t really meant to: instead, we mapped out the territory of what open source might be. When I introduced the workshop I spoke of the things I’ve played with so far, and how they’re each a partial approach to open source: interactivity in the theatre space, democratic devising processes, extensive documentation, theatre that extends beyond the theatre space, a conscious effort to perform in accessible and open contexts. By the end of the discussion, I’d reached the conclusion that “open source theatre” is more a family of techniques designed to increase empowerment and participation in theatre, rather than, as I’d once thoughts, a specific  manifesto of production. In any case, my thinking was revitalised by opening it up, by open sourcing it in a way, to this group of makers. I’m burning to write a new OST text.

Morning Discussion

The morning discussions explore the territory of the previous evening – I really appreciate this format, allowing for reflection and a settling of ideas before chewing them over. Today we got stuck into the ideas of Simone Senzacqua’s and Lisa Peschel’s talks.

Alongside being inspired by Teatro Valle, many of us had economic questions. When everything is free, how do artists get paid? For me, this is a question of survival in a neoliberal society: I want to be part of free, communal spaces, but I am also subject to the laws of a neoliberal country, and have to find a way to survive. I see spaces like Teatro Valle as laboratories, imaginaria, places where we can envision and practise other ways of being together – but until we all live in those spaces, we have to find ways to survive, to compromise.

The question of why taxes should pay for art came up. This, of course, is a big public debate in the UK right now. In many ways I’m tired of rehearsing it, but at the same time I’m recognising that the arts community has totally failed to make as strong a case as it needs to. I’ve spoken a little on Twitter about why I think that endless economic impact studies are the wrong route – we can talk as much as we like about how the arts make more revenue in VAT than is spent on funding them, but still people aren’t convinced. They’re also never convinced by the romantic Great Art argument. And while we make these failed arguments, people will continue to see public  funding of the arts as a failed community relationship, because conservative economists want us to think of tax as a process of exchange rather than of redistribution. The best writing I’ve seen on this is this study on public messaging, which encourages us to think of art as creating ripple effects throughout a community, of being something made by, of, for, and belonging to a wide community. This is something I can talk about at great length – I love making art and experiencing art, but I also think it’s vital that art is actively opening itself to wider communities if it is to survive and to be valued.

Lisa Peschel’s talk explored the idea that art is a tool of survival, that in times of crisis people have a burning need for art. Several folk asked the question: why is it that so much of our population doesn’t feel that burning need for art? This is a question that I actually emphatically disagree with, and it relies I think on a false argument. Maybe it’s because I grew up somewhere where folk music is such a huge part of our culture, but I think it’s wider than that. There’s a reason that hip hop is now one of the most popular art forms in the world, and it certainly goes beyond mere entertainment and spectacle. I think that most people do burn for art, but that self-defining artists don’t always do a great job of meeting that need. Someone in the group said that it’s maybe less of a question of bringing more people into theatres, and more a question of theatre learning how to meet more people. There’s a risk here of being patronising, of “taking theatre to the people” – I think it’s more about learning what theatre “the people” already have, and being part of that.

Afternoon Presentations

As a way of getting into the experience of the art from Terezin (see yesterday’s blog), Lisa Peschel organised a public reading of her new translation of Georg Kafka’a Death of Orpheus, an extraordinary play written in the ghetto / transit camp. It’s part Greek tragedy, part symbolist drama – a retelling of the Greek myth as a difficult and beautiful exploration of the purpose an ends of art. It’s in no way explicitly political, but it is all about art as a means of survival. Georg Kafka’s own story is terrifying and illuminating: he had the camp job of typing up transport lists, and when he had to type his own mother’s name for transport to Auschwitz, he  chose to go with her.. She in all likelihood died as soon as she arrived there; he much later. His act of writing thus carries great meaning.

In the play, Orpheus’s band of shepherds beg him to begin singing his poetry again, to bring them beauty and to bring fertility back to their land. He refuses, unable to conceive of art in the face of great suffering and the loss of Eurydice. Hermes arrives with an alternative offer: a new, black-wrapped lyre that will bring death and finality. Orpheus accepts the new poetry, and plays the lyre, bringing on a Dionysian ritual that sees him torn apart by maenads. It’s an extraordinary way to tell the myth, so clearly within a context where art is bound up with life and death. It gave us a very real artistic context for our conversations.

The second afternoon presentation was from Andrea Moon, an ambassador for the Frequent Flyers Productions, a group offering low-flying trapeze / aerial dance workshops to at-risk or in crisis youth. She spoke very movingly about the empowering effect that the programme has had on individuals. That by introducing a controlled moment of crisis – asking the young people to fly, and giving them strategies to do so – they offered the participants an experience that gave them a way to deal with the daily crisis of their lives. This is a kind of artistic practise as social work that I’m very much in favour of. At the same time, I found myself thinking about political questions: When we do this kind of work, what is it’s political context? When we’re talking about journeys of self-fulfilment, are we also addressing the socio-economic context which oppresses and represses us? How does work with the individual relate to work with society?

Evening Shows

First of the night was Ars Mechanica’s Show and Tell Alexander Bell, a post-dramatic physical performance looking at the history of communications technologies. It had beautiful moments of movement and some very funny texts; while I found it hard to understand the through-line of thought and action, I found many elements to enjoy and appreciate. Most exciting to me was the use of mobile phone texting during the performance – many audience members were communicating directly with an on-stage character, and the whole show was punctuated by regular text message alert noises. This was wonderful! Occasionally the noise would be hilariously appropriately timed, but it was even better when it was aesthetically inappropriate: a regular reminder of the role of communications in our lives now, of the artificiality of the theatre space, the illicit nature of texting, and plenty more. More of this, please.

Second was The Body Project’s The Rose Parade. This was verbatim theatre, performing women’s stories of survival – survival of oppression, rape, genocide, injury, illness, and life itself. The performance was polished and affecting, with all that you’d want from good dramatic theatre – a valuable performance. At the same time, I was thinking a lot about the political questions of the form: again, what does it mean to present stories of personal overcoming and fulfilment within a wider political context? (Is this a very American thing to do?) What is the role of verbatim theatre as opposed to documentary? What does it mean to heighten, dramatise and aestheticise these stories, instead of plainly presenting them? What is the power relationship there, and what does it mean?

More on these questions tomorrow, when we’ll be discussing both performances as a group.

Where I am

I’m spending the week at the CrisisArt Festival, run out of the Academia Dell Arte, based in Arezzo, Tuscany. The main reason is that I’m here to give a performance of This is not a riot, but the Festival is a whole series of workshops, performances, discussions and symposia – it’s a week-long laboratory, with around 50 theatre-makers, experimenting with how art can respond to and be involved in crisis. I’m going to be blogging each day from the festival, partly as an informal part of the documentation process (my trip is Creative Scotland funded), and partly because I think some of the ideas that come out of the week might be well worth writing down.

The first thing, though, is just a wee bit of gloating. Right now I’m sitting outside a beautiful modern Italian villa, right in the middle of the stunning Tuscany hills, overlooking the town and duomo, and it’s 32 degrees. I’ve escaped from the wettest British June on record to luxurious heat and stunning beauty. Better still, I’m spending the week in great company, talking about the things I care about most in the world. Quite apart from the gorgeous surrounds, to be able to take the time out from the daily struggle of finding work and doing work and reporting work, and spend it in reflection and experimentation – I want too say that it’s a luxury, but actually, in the arts, it’s an all-too-rare necessity. I’m glad to be able to be funded to be here, to be able to relax into the experience, to really make the very most of it.

Orientations

Day one was mostly introductions and orientations, setting up the frame for the week. The festival is about artistic response to crisis – the starting assumption, the premise from which we begin, is that the world is in a time of profound crisis. Economic, social, environmental, psychological, political, and a whole lot more besides. The school’s director, Scott McGehee, posited that a “crisis” is by definition the point where body chooses between recovery and death – I’m not entirely sure how much I want to go along with that metaphor (it’s both a little too apocalyptic and a little too futurist for my sceptical stance), but I am glad to be working in an artistic space where we all accept the reality of neoliberalism’s destructive empire, where we accept that we’re in a period of profound change, and where we all think art, in some way, has to take part in that. Just accepting that from the outset makes it so much easier to begin the real work.

As part of the orientation, the organising collective explained a little of their own process. This is the second year of the festival; in the first, in ran along the lines of the standard model, with a festival director, defined roles, and a hierarchical decision-making process. This year, inspired by the response of horizontalist movements to the crisis, and the liberatory power of such processes, they decided to run the festival on a non-hierarchical consensus decision-making model. I’m delighted! These ideas have long been part of my own artistic and political practise, and I’m firmly committed to the principle that they’re required in order to make our artistic processes liberatory, run counter to hegemonic power. The art of crisis not only has to be liberatory in form and content, but also context.

Symposium

The main event of the evening was a symposium with three speakers offering different perspectives on what crisis art can be. Scott McGehee jumped straight in to heavy philosophy and aesthetic theory, which kept me excited – I’m always happy to head into that territory. He covered more ground than I can summarise here, all, interestingly, from a very Romantic perspective. He sees art as emerging from a particular phenomenological moment, from immediate lived experience, and he sees that as a freeing alternative to an Enlightenment rationalism and a Postmodern alienation. This is not a common view to encounter any more! – at least not in theoretical circles. But as I listened, I was interested in how much those thoughts chime and clash with the ordinary experience of art – the Romantic ideal is still a big part of popular discourse, and art’s bodily spontaneity is still a big part of people’s attraction to it. But at the same time, I’m more interested in art as part of daily life, as something intrinsic to any healthy community, as an ordinary part of everybody’s existence, and I think Romantic ideals risk rarifying art and making it a separate, specialised condition – a division of power and labour I’m not willing to accept. This trend of thinking also leads to separating art from politics, so that art ends up speaking to politics, speaking to the political condition, but not being a direct, active part of it. All of my work is about art engaging directly with politics – not subordinate to a political programme, in McGehee’s terms, but inseparable from political practise as such. Art subordinated to any other ends, an art of utility, has a tendency to be oppressive and to be bad art (think Soviet realism). But art as praxis is some of our finest (think the Living Theatre). That’s where I want to be.

Our second speaker was Simona Senzacqua, speaking from the occupied Teatro Valle in Rome. A year ago, in protest against a paralysed, under-resourced theatre community, a group of artists and activists occupied a theatre building due for privatisation – they reclaimed a community resource on the verge of being sold off. They’ve since run it as a free and open access arts space – anyone can come and take part in any arts project there, as audience or maker, for free. It’s been hugely successful, with much popular and celebrity support – after a year of operations, they’ve still avoided eviction threats, and they’ve gained a lot of respect. This was a hugely inspiring story to hear – and also bitter-sweet, because as part of the Forest collective I’ve been at the sharp end of Edinburgh’s decline in independent art spaces, and am part of the struggle to bring free and open space back. Her talk spoke to my frustration at trying to make this happen through sanctioned channels, and reminded me that it is possible, if artists are frustrated and determined enough, and if we continue to be ignored, to just take and open the resources we need.

Our last speaker was Dr Lisa Peschel, who studies the role of the arts in Terezin, a WWII nazi-run ghetto and transit camp. It’s famous for being the “show camp” visited by the IRC, who were given a sanitised cultural tour in an effort to  cover up the extermination policies; it’s also where an important propaganda film about the ghettos and camps was made, justifying Nazi policy. Peschel’s research is about how cultural activity extended far beyond a simple Nazi cover up, and was actually a crucial part of daily life at the camp, in which many thousands participated. She argues that the cultural activity was both a tool for survival and a form of resistance – that far from being a salve or a distraction from rebellion, it was a huge part of what enabled people to survive under such extreme oppression. She draws a gentle, careful analogy to the role of art in crisis anyway: that it can always be a means of resistance and a tool for survival.

Next

The next three days will take the same form: a morning of workshops run by participants, a midday discussion about the previous evening’s events, an afternoon siesta / preparation period, and performances in the evening. The surrounds are beautiful and the warmth relaxing, but this sounds like it’s going to be a gloriously intense period of work and thought. I’m excited.