Collective Project

The final day was a change of process: a collective project involving the whole festival community of 40-50 artists. Most of this post reflects on the use of non-hierarchical consensus decision-making in artistic contexts: for more on what this stuff is about, try Seeds for Change.

The Festival has been organised by a collective working on non-hierarchical consensus principles. Throughout the week, they’ve encouraged us to be part of that process – invited us to meetings, opened decisions. I’m not sure how much this has been taken up by participants, though: the invitation is there, but I haven’t felt hugely empowered or motivated to join in the process, whether through tiredness or having so much to do already, or through something more structural.

Yesterday, however, the group as a whole very much entered the organising process. The collective had planned an ensemble project – the idea was that we’d spend the day in smaller groups devising a series of performances to be given in the town of Arezzo. As the format was explained, a number of concerns started coming from the group about what we were doing: Could we develop a quality performance in time? What was the point of performing in public? Were we parachuting in with a message that didn’t respond to the town itself? What kind of responsibility did we have as artists to show the importance of art, given Italy’s funding crisis?

These questions gradually transitioned into a full collective decision-making process. This is not something we were prepared for, or which many of the group had extensive experience with, which made it challenging, exciting, rewarding, tiring – all of that. I was struck by the willingness of the group to embrace what was happening, even though it was emotionally difficult. The longer the decision-making process went on (about four hours in total), the more willing people were to make it work, and the harder they worked.

A lot of what happened confirmed my faith in consensus, because the more we applied formal consensus strategies, the clearer the process seemed to get for the group. As we creaked into discussion, there was a lot of distress, confusion and frustration, but as we gained trust in each other and our ability to reach a conclusion, things began to feel exhilarating.

We did achieve a consensus: we agreed to try and create not so much a performance but a happening, an exercise we could conduct in the town to explore our responses to it (and to crisis). This, we hoped, would keep the stakes low, make it less a definite communication to the audience and more a way of taking the artistic process to an outside space. Having got this far, the applause we gave ourselves seemed deserved.

What happened next is also very interesting. As we moved into preparation, the group’s lack of consensus experience showed: we reverted to type, relying on the guidance of a clear director, and as a result defaulting to rehearsing a performance rather than preparing an experiment. When concerns were raised about the direction of the work, the pressures of time and the need to perform, plus the presence of clear leaders, prevented fully engaged discussion from taking place. In the end, it reached a point where I personally didn’t feel comfortable performing what we’d created, because I didn’t feel ownership of it and didn’t feel it addressed the concerns we began with.

I didn’t feel too bad about this. I didn’t feel any anger or frustration, really – more guilty that I wasn’t to keep going with the process and had to explain why, which would inevitably hurt feelings a little. Despite doing a lot of consensus work, I’ve never before felt that the group was going in a direction I couldn’t support – I was going to need to stand aside from the decision to take the performance into town. This cost me, emotionally, as it did the other three who felt similarly.

These negative feelings, though, were very much outweighed by a real sense of pride in the group. I was so pleased that we had tried to go through this process, that we had attempted to embrace the collectivity we were aiming for. It’s hardly surprising that I felt the process failed – given a group of 40, with very little consensus experience, was trying to make a piece of art that mattered in just eight hours total, from scratch. It would have been surprising if we succeeded! I was delighted we gave it a shout, and it was one of the most productive artistic failures I’ve ever been part of, as such a learning experience for everyone involved.

The End

We reached the end of the festival. It’s been the most intense festival I’ve ever been part of. My brain hasn’t felt this awake in a long time. I’ve had so many brilliant conversations and debates, done some really good thinking about what my work is and where it’s going. As an artist-led project, the combination of workshops, discussions and performances was particularly valuable, creating a real sense of shared learning, and an excellent format for combining theory and practise into praxis. There have been occasional failures and frustrations, but I’ve mostly been excited by them too. I’m delighted to have been part of it.

Morning Workshop

I spent the morning with Joe Culpepper of Ars Mechanica, looking at the role of magic effects in theatre. I really went along out of dorky fascination with magic, and in memory of the kid who bought terrible magic kits way back when. And that kid was pretty satisfied by the workshop: I learned some cut-and-restored rope effects that were tremendously fun and I hope will stick in my mind.

At the same time, though, there’s a body of theory to chew about what the particular role of magic is. One of my preoccupations in performance theory is the Stanislavski-vs-Brecht dialectic: whether theatre is reminding the audience of its artificiality, or seeking to make them forget that they’re in the theatre at all. Are they suspending disbelief and having critical distance, or are they caught up in illusion and belief? And in any given show, what can a magic effect do? It can have narrative power and spectacular delight, but what does it do to the audience’s experience? When the audience has forgotten they are in a theatre, does the effectiveness of its illusion remind them again? When the audience is knowingly suspending disbelief, does an effective illusion make them believe again, and is that itself a kind of estrangement?

Afternoon Presentations

Jane Lawson talked us through her art project Bioremediation – a combined portrait series and durational piece, in which she painted almost faceless portraits of architects of neoliberalism and then introduced oyster mushrooms to eat away and thus detoxify their images. Bioremediation is a name for the process whereby fungi clean toxins from an environment – in a way, their application to the portraits was a simple metaphor for cleaning up capitalism, but at the same time the portraits served as a food source to produce a viable mushroom crop for the future. Beautiful, beautiful! I thought a little about the role of useful and useless acts in arts-activism: this in a sense was both. The metaphor has no direct productivity – all its results are emotional, psychological, in a way indirect – but at the same time the food of the mushrooms has a more direct, physical effect. But then which is the more effective? Which, if either, changes the world more?

Some of the organising collective, under the name UnRuly Women, presented a first draft of a performance called “Mother Courage Can’t Stand Her Children”. It’s a contemporary version of the Brecht original, in which Mother Courage sells merchandise to profit from the Occupy movement, and her feckless children are gradually persuaded by its ideas. The metaphor works, and the choice of source is a strong way to look at the inter-generational conflict which characterises much of the more psychological discussion of Occupy. Here I thought less about the politics, though, and more about the artistic effect. What does it mean to reframe an established text or myth? When does it work, and when doesn’t it? The thing I thought most regularly was that direct parallels could sometimes be a very shallow aesthetic device, but could sometimes be a hugely productive metaphor (“carrying over”). For example, when this Kattrin banged on the car (cart) roof at the cops’ approach, it served no dramatic function because there was no village to warn, and so to me seemed for shallowly aesthetic; but when this Mother Courage did not push her car manually at the end, but instead leaned against it and lit a cigarette, it meant something very powerful indeed.

Evening Performances

As with yesterday, I’m not blogging the discussions of the performances separately, instead writing up that later discussion through my thoughts on them.

I was first up.  I gave what might have been the strongest performance if This is not a riot, which is good, considering it might be the end of the project. Perhaps me deciding it would be the final performance freed me or made me less anxious – either way, I had a blast. My performance was tighter and more invested. I changed and added some elements – for those who know the show, during “Ultra Violence Pop Quiz” I had the audience answer verbally rather than physically, which made it both more fun and more confrontational, and I added an Epilogue in which all the stuffed animals were given away is talismanic “riot bears” for the audience to take with them to give them strength on future protests, which finally gave the show a strong dramatic, or in this case ritual, ending. Anyhow, I couldn’t be happier to say goodbye to the piece, and this was the perfect context to wish it a fond farewell.

Commentary later gave me three key criticisms which I’ll take with me into further pieces. First, in my discussion of violence, I entirely overlooked gender violence, which I really should have talked about given  the context – gender is a big issue for the politics off riot. It’s important for me to realise that, even as a committed feminist, I can forget about gender dimensions in politics if I’m not careful. Second, I was brought up on my disingenuousness: I keep claiming that I try to give space  for the audience to disagree with my arguments, but I definitely didn’t give enough space in this show – something I’ve already started addressing in Class Act. Third, someone very perceptively spotted  an inconsistency in my dramatic motivation: for most of the show, I’m very clearly trying to open up the audience’s idea of what a riot is, but in the final third my aim is more clearly to train them to deal with one fixed idea of riot. I know how this happened during development, and I know that to prevent this happening again I need to bring trusted, incisive outside eyes in earlier. The depth of that commentary shows that I couldn’t have hoped for a better audience, something I haven’t felt since Buzzcut.

Second was a pair of dance pieces from Joan Gavaler. Both explored the combination of poetry and dance. As a poet, this was fascinating. I wrote yesterday about how dance excites me for its ability to open up contradictions and problematics in its subjects through the freedom of abstraction; these were both interesting in that they took a much more illustrative and representational approach to the texts – more beautiful than challenging. More important, though, was how Joan introduced them: “I’ll come clean,” she said, “My crisis is professional stagnation.” I was very moved by this honesty, and reminded of the many roles a laboratory like this can have: while I was seeking to make an argument for a particular type of performance, and sign off on one edition, she was seeking something more processual, something more about personal discovery.

Finally was a performance by Greek company Angelus Novus of a text loosely translating as Damn You, Sons of Bitches. It was physically and musically beautiful, but of course all Greek to me, so it’s hard to discuss to explicitly political context, though there was much to think about artistically. Most of all, though, without being overly aesthetic, something about a person talking passionately and urgently to you in a language you cannot understand is impossibly tragic, in a way that says something perhaps about the tragedy of all art.

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.