Cooking up a new dish with old ingredients

In his comprehensive study of pop and rock's apparent obsession with the past Retromania, Simon Reynolds sketches the present of music that is obsessed with its heritage. Aside from the inevitable problems faced by a music that is based on youth and innovation as it matures, Reynolds identifies the internet as enabling a massive archiving of previous trends and encouraging the mix and mash approach of much contemporary music. 

Theatre and performance, however, has always had a less ambiguous relationship with the past - the idea of classic rock might be a problem, and an immensely tedious cataloguing of worthy white male music, but classic theatre is far more easily assimilated into the performance process. The prevalence of Shakespeare, even Greek tragedy, or Chekov in the listings reveals that theatre's past remains part of its vitality.

With the Traverse looking back on fifty years of "new writing" by

selecting fifty contemporary playwrights and Sell A Door touring an adaptation of Orwell's 1984, artists still use the past as a foundation for experimentation. The longer time scales of theatre's history allow a company like Rapture to revive The Sash - originally written in 1973 - and point to its continued relevance, and when David Greig wanted to explore that most pressing modern anxiety, Scottish national identity, he went back to Macbeth. Theatre itself may be seen as old fashioned - certainly, both cinema and television are more immediate - but this allows it to consider the present in a wider context. 

For director Michael Emans, The Sash is as important today as it was at the time of its premiere. The story of a father and son, torn apart by the values that once brought them together - and dealing with the still intense sectarian divide in Glasgow - The Sash is sometimes mistaken for a relic of an early age. "The issues are still key today," says Emans. He regrets that  "it has been sucked into the void that is inhabited by plays like Still a Bigot that take a more politically incorrect view of these things." For while many of the plays that focus on Glasgow's religious conflicts go for the laughs and are conservative in their reading of the city's culture, The Sash is far more personal.

"It is set in 1973 at the height of the troubles in Ireland," Emans admits.  "1972 had been one of the most violent periods in Ireland: when Hector MacMillan wrote it it was immediate and raw, and that power comes across. But it is also about a family, and the Orange Order is still prolific and a lot of people are part of it."

 "It has a lot of emotional and political clout: how the family unit can be destroyed by destroyed by belief," Emans explains. Insisting that it is "a neglected contemporary classic," he points out that "it could be about any father and son who are driven apart because of entrenched beliefs - whether they are religious beliefs or not."

Emans' case for The Sash implicitly invokes the power of theatre to tell both a specific story - this one revolves around a father's traditional faith in the Orange Order against his son's more progressive - and erotic - desires - and examine its underlying metaphysics. Emans is resisting the temptation to update the script.

"It is still very glasgow," he admits. "The action is still set in the early 1970s, before punk rock and rave exposed intergenerational conflict more clearly but he is delighted that the nature of the dramatic conflict is universal. "You can connect to the politics or the intellectual idea of the play. It's a real ride of a play and we are very excited about it."

"It questions how you reconcile a tradition with the aspirations of your children," he continues. "That obsession where people hold onto things because it gives them a sense of belief and consequently alienates other people. If you are stuck you can loose the thing that you want to nurture, that you are prepared to forego a relationship with your family. " While Reynolds ponders the problems of pop's increasing obsession with the past, bemoaning, amongst other things, how the museums of rock'n'roll give more space to the 1960s and 1970s than to what is happening now, Emans has recognised that the past isn't as distant or different as it might appear.

Meanwhile, Gob Squad are bringing a different reading of past glory to the stage: Kitchen restages Andy Warhol's film as a live performance. But this version is a very long way away from the kind of reverential musical that transforms Priscilla Queen of the Desert into a star vehicle for Jason Donovan. In the spirit of Warhol's movie, there's plenty of improvisation, waiting and questioning. 

Homing in on an earlier decade than The Sash, and a more radical location in New York, Kitchen does poke at some of the same questions, mostly around the theme of change. Undoubtedly, a revolution was happening in Warhol's Factory, but its nature is not yet clear. Gob Squad have a crack at discussing those issues that are still in ferment today (feminism is a major concern for the actors in 1965 and 2013). 

Unlike The Sash, however, it has the anxiety of being hip and trying to work out what it means to be ahead of the pack. 

Kitchen takes Warhol more as a foundation than a fundamental text, and plays hard and fast with the original film, even adding in elements from his other movies and boasting "modern haircuts." There's a clear acknowledgement that this is a reinterpretation. If the 1960s produced much of the most exciting music in pop, there are broader cultural changes of the same period which are still being felt today. The rise in hipster fashions reflect Warhol's influence on art culture, and the performed amorality of Warhol himself (he remained a devout Catholic benrath his apparently superficial persona) echoes in the dry superficiality of much contemporary art - which itself might be a game or front.

The contrast between the two pieces elegantly emphasises the complexity of theatre's history. Gob Squad are themselves an avant-garde company, in the sense of using a more informal process of creation than the script, yet they find themselves casting glances back to an earlier period for clues. Warhol's films are perhaps most dated by those things, like not learning lines, that made it so now in 1965. The Sash maintains its philosophical energy through the old school techniques of script and direction.

Both The Sash and Kitchen might come under the theatre banner, and has some overlap in themes, but they are as different in genre as The Velvet Underground and Wylie: if theatre is more comfortable with its own past than popular music, it has a similar diversity of style, which is sometimes obscured by the conformity of critical approaches. In the example of the Traverse's Fifty emerging playwrights, or the various performances that visit Summerhall (from zomble infestation immersive, scientific theatre to French clown tales of Russian writers), it's possible to imagine a variety of voices that specialise as much as the independent music charts. 

But for Emans there is something that connects all great theatre. "I am interested in plays that can transform people - that an audience come out of it thinking different things -  it's almost therapeutic," he says.  "The name of my company,  Rapture means a heightened state of awareness. Spectacle  is wonderful but if the substance can move people that is more wonderful." And above all, Kitchen and The Sash are connected by their willingness to provoke both questions and this intense experience.



The Sash On tour across Scotland until June 
Gob Squad's Kitchen The Arches 3 May, 7,30pm 

Looking Back for the Future (Originally published in The Skinny)

Cooking up a new dish with old ingredients

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 16 MAY 2013

In his comprehensive study of pop and rock's apparent obsession with the past Retromania, Simon Reynolds sketches the present of music that is obsessed with its heritage. Aside from the inevitable problems faced by a music that is based on youth and innovation as it matures, Reynolds identifies the internet as enabling a massive archiving of previous trends and encouraging the mix and mash approach of much contemporary music. Theatre and performance, however, has always had a less ambiguous relationship with the past - the idea of classic rock might be a problem, and an immensely tedious cataloging of worthy white male music, but classic theatre is far more easily assimilated into the performance process. The prevalence of Shakespeare, even Greek tragedy, or Chekov in the listings reveals that theatre's past remains part of its vitality.

With the Traverse looking back on fifty years of "new writing" by selecting fifty contemporary playwrights and Sell A Door touring an adaptation of Orwell's 1984, artists still use the past as a foundation for experimentation. The longer time scales of theatre's history allow a company like Rapture to revive The Sash - originally written in 1973 - and point to its continued relevance, and when David Greig wanted to explore that most pressing modern anxiety, Scottish national identity, he went back to Macbeth. Theatre itself may be seen as old fashioned - certainly, both cinema and television are more immediate - but this allows it to consider the present in a wider context. 

For director Michael Emans, The Sash is as important today as it was at the time of its premiere. The story of a father and son, torn apart by the values that once brought them together - and dealing with the still intense sectarian divide in Glasgow - The Sash is sometimes mistaken for a relic of an early age. "The issues are still key today," says Emans. He regrets that  "it has been sucked into the void that is inhabitaed by plays like Still a Bigot that takea more politically uncorrect view of these things." For while many of the plays that focus on Glasgow's religious conflicts go for the laughs and are conservative in their reading of the city's culture, The Sash is far more personal.

"It is set in 1973 at the height of the troubles in Ireland," Emans admits.  "1972 had been one of the most violent periods in Ireland: when Hector MacMillan wrote it it was immediate and raw, and that power comes across. But it is also about a family, and the Orange Order is still prolific and a lot of people are part of it."

 "It has a lot of emotional and political clout: how the family unit can be destroyed by destroyed by belief," Emans explains. Insisting that it is "a neglected contemporary classic," he points out that "it could be about any father and son who are driven apart because of etrenched beliefs - whether they are religious beliefs or not."

Emans' case for The Sash implicitly invokes the power of theatre to tell both a specific story - this one revolves around a father's traditional faith in the Orange Order against his son's more progressive - and erotic - desires - and examine its underlying metaphysics. Emans is resisting the temptation to update the script - "It is still very glasgow," he admits. "The action is still set in the early 1970s, before punk rock and rave exposed intergenerational conflict more clearly but he is delighted that the nature of the dramatic conflict is universal. "You can connect to the politics or the intellectual idea of the play. It's a real ride of a play and we are very excited about it."

"It questions how you reconcile a tradition with the aspirations of your children," he continues. "That obsession where people hold onto things because it gives them a sense of belief and consequently alienates other people. If you are stuck you can loose the thing that you want to nurture, that you are prepared to forego a relationship with your family. " While Reynolds ponders the problems of pop's increasing obsession with the past, bemoaning, amongst other things, how the museums of rock'n'roll give more space to the 1960s and 1970s than to what is happening now, Emans has recognised that the past isn't as distant or different as it might appear.

Meanwhile, Gob Squad are bringing a different reading of past glory to the stage: Kitchen restages Andy Warhol's film as a live performance. But this version is a very long way away from the kind of reverential musical that transforms Priscilla Queen of the Desert into a star vehicle for Jason Donovan. In the spirit of Warhol's movie, there's plenty of improvisation, waiting and questioning.

Homing in on an earlier decade than The Sash, and a more radical location in New York, Kitchen does poke at some of the same questions, mostly around the theme of change. Undoubtedly, a revolution was happening in Warhol's Factory, but its nature is not yet clear. Gob Squad have a crack at discussing those issues that are still in ferment today (feminism is a major concern for the actors in 1965 and 2013). Unlike The Sash, however, it has the anxiety of being hip and trying to work out what it means to be ahead of the pack.

 

Kitchen takes Warhol more as foundation than a fundamental text, and plays hard and fast with the original film, even adding in elements from his other movies and boasting "modern haircuts." There's a clear acknowledgement that this is a reinterpretation. If the 1960s produced much of the most exciting music in pop, there are broader cultural changes of the same period which are still being felt today. The rise in hipster fashions reflect Warhol's influence on art culture, and the performed amorality of Warhol himself (he remained a devout Catholic benrath his apparently superficial persona) echoes in the dry superficiality of much contemporary art - which itself might be a game or front.

The contrast between the two pieces elegantly emphasises the complexity of theatre's history. Gob Squad are themselves an avant-garde company, in the sense of using a more informal process of creation than the script, yet they find themselves casting glances back to an earlier period for clues. Warhol's films are perhaps most dated by those things, like not learning lines, that made it so now in 1965. The Sash maintains its philosophical energy through the old school techniques of script and direction.

Both The Sash and Kitchen might come under the theatre banner, and has some overlap in themes, but they are as different in genre as The Velvet Underground and Wiley: if theatre is more comfortable with its own past than popular music, it has a similar diversity of style, which is sometimes obscured by the conformity of critical approaches. In the example of the Traverse's Fifty emerging playwrights, or the various performances that visit Summerhall (from zomble infestation immersive, scientific theatre to French clown tales of Russian writers), it's possible to imagine a variety of voices that specialise as much as the independent music charts. 

But for Emans there is something that connects all great theatre. "I am interested in plays that can transform people - that an audience come out of it thinking different things - it's almost therapeutic," he says. "The name of my company, Rapture means a heightened state of awareness. Spectacle is wonderful but if the substance can move people that is more wonderful." And above all, Kitchen and The Sash are connected by their willingness to provoke both questions and this intense experience.

Symposium Alert!

It is, in fact, quite possible that I have only ever read two books on popular music: Retromania and Words and Music. I only got about half way through the second one (I found Paul Morley too discursive, too confident in his reading of pop history) but I did download a mixtape by Strictly Kev that pretty much does what Morley wanted to do, only you can dance to bits of it.

Nevertheless, I am mildly excited by the 'The Future' Symposium that is going to happen in the CCA. It's connected to the current exhibition Tomorrow Never Knows, which has a look at the sort of nostalgia and recycling that Retromania and Words identify as the main process of modern music. They've got the two authors, Morley and Reynolds (and a bunch of other people to join in) up for a day to chat about the future. Here's the release...

Symposium: Sat 22 June, 10am – 5pm. £8

Writers and cultural commentators Simon Reynolds and Paul Morley join an array of artists and critics for screenings and discussions around the wider topic of ‘the future’. The full-day event accompanies the current exhibition Tomorrow Never Knows: Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza, in association with Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards, now on at CCA Glasgow.

There is an expression – one that has rapidly lapsed into cliché - that ‘the future is not what it used to be’. And, indeed, many of the cultural phenomena that are increasingly touted as the waves or the faces of tomorrow often seem to have a well-worn, familiar ring – as exemplified by the recent pre-eminence of ‘retro’, and a corresponding nostalgia for ‘futures lost’. 

That's pretty much the theme of Retromania: Reynolds is a bit sad about it, even as he enjoys some of the music that is coming out of the obsession with the past. I realise that my own relative boredom with popular music commences around the time Reynolds noticed its backwards drift - maybe there's a point when the critic simply gets old enough to remember the first time a certain sound came around. 

While all this may indicate that popular culture may be experiencing a terminal phase, going through the long-drawn-out encores of its own ‘end of history’, there are also contrasting signs that futurity itself might be staging a bit of a comeback; maybe coming round again as a predictable, or overdue, cultural reflex, but maybe also as a symptom of a tangible change in the air. If this were to be the case; what are the cultural and technological forces that are giving it shape, and what are the creative impulses that might give it new impetus?

Artists and critics Olia Lialina, James Bridle and other contributors join in the discussion. Lunch and refreshments will be provided and are included in the ticket price.

Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards
Tomorrow Never KnowsEd Atkins & Naheed Raza
Sat 8 June - Sat 20 July 2013 
A collaborative exhibition presented by Jerwood Visual Arts and Film and Video Umbrella, London, in association with CCA.

It's NotStalgia....

Simon Reynolds’ Retromania has become my bedtime reading for the past month.  In accord with his analysis of pop music’s preoccupation with the past, it brought it long after it had been remaindered. Reynolds worries that rock’n’roll, and its electronic music relatives, has become trapped in the recycling of the past. Adding in the occasional jeremiad against the instant availability of everything on the Internet, and shot through with the intellectual snobbery that every critic owns, Reynolds sees either a mainstream culture crippled by precedents, and an underground wallowing in nostalgia.

Reynolds doesn’t point out that fear is most likely at the root. The present hasn’t been looking dandy for a few years now. The so-called nostalgia that he detects in The Aphex Twin isn’t a retro-futurism but a melancholy that expects the grand adventure of science fiction to have the same qualities as the drab now.

And so, I shall pick, almost at random, some Fringe presentations that give voice to the horror that is today.

The Project (Zoo) is ‘centred on a dystopian theatre company.’ Frankly, if I had planned to make my point, I couldn’t have flicked onto a better entry. It’s a play about a miserable play. Sure, they get onto some questioning of the spectator: inspiration through discomfort all round, then.

On the same page, there’s Positive (Paradise in the Kirkhouse). Yes, it says it is comedy, it says it is heart-warming. But the positive does refer to HIV, and it’s still too soon to make this a complete chuckle-fest. I am sure the triumph of the human spirit will feature – but it will be compromised by the ‘heaviest baggage of all.’

Desdemona, The Story of a Handkerchief appears twice (Sweet Grassmarket and theSpace). I think I know how this one is going to end, regardless of the two productions roaring 20s update and ‘capricious, lustful woman’ respectively. A woman is going to get suffocated for suspected adultery – even if she’d done it, choking on a pillow is a harsh punishment. Just because it’s Shakespeare, doesn’t mean it’s a laugh riot.

The Bloody Ballad (Assembly Roxy) speaks for itself. The live band are called The Missin’ Fingers. It claims to be ‘a whole lotta fun’ but it is merely a mark of our pessimistic age that slasher movie chic can be reinvested into musical theatre.

Racing to the end, and hoping that it isn’t too noticeable that I have picked stuff at random and pretended they have continuity, I bring you Ten out of Ten (Assembly Hall). It claims to be a comic peak into triumphs and disasters. In the same press release, there’s a quote that names it ‘Death of a Salesman for the 21^st Century.’ Either that’s a critic who doesn’t know his Millers, or the comedy has got a wee bit of an edge.

I didn’t even have to look for the plays that call themselves absurdist. Mind you, thinking about them, I notice that only Desdemona looks backwards for inspiration. Take that, Simon Reynolds: who needs the past to feel uncomfortable. The present works just fine.

The Past is Haunting Me Like Marxist Language

There is a spectre that haunts the contemporary arts. It whispers dark mockery in the ear of the conceptualist, hobbles the choreographer and detunes the melodies of the composer. Anxiety of influence isn’t merely the late night panic attack striking down the critic as he tries to say something original about yet another rendition of Macbeth. It grows in a straight line from 1913’s Rite of Spring, which both heralded the arrival of the contemporary age and offended a conservative public, through to Andy Warhol and the 1960s, when it became the popular and froze a generation into a series of strategies that replaced genuine experimentation.

The failure of originality has become a strategy in itself. The current celebrations and reflections on The Rite’s anniversary only underline how this moment in the arts’ history has become a symbol of potential and a headstone for experimentation. Rob Drummond’s Riot of Spring was a sideways look at the way in which Stravinsky’s music has become part of the establishment – the music is now protected by copyright to such an extent that even displaying the score on stage is illegal. Meanwhile, Gob Squad’s Kitchen simultaneously praises the potential of Warhol’s cinema and mourns the loss of the innocent spirit that allowed such bold experiments.

Post-modernism, still a vital interpretative philosophy doesn’t help. The emphasis on a diversity of opinions and its distrust of sincerity can encourage artists towards trivial positions – any grand narrative is fundamentally dishonest. Taylor Mac, as part of his recent show at The Arches, observed that self-consciousness has destroyed the unashamed intensity that drove much of the pop music before the 1990s: the irony that permits the most absurd lyric to be readmitted to the musical cannon also cripples the modern song-writer. The continued distaste for U2 is as much about their brazen sincerity as the predictable sound of their latest album.

Simon Reynolds pokes around in the contemporary confusion in his book Retromania, but the problems he detects are not limited to music. Indeed, although he takes up the story implied in the name of indie-dance also-rans Pop Will Eat Itself, pop music is the art least damaged by the trend towards recycling of ideas.

Even in its early years, rock’n’roll was all about reworking older ideas, and the cult of the artist maintains at least the aura of originality. Drummond, in an interview before his Riot, talks about the impossibility of creating something genuinely new. Like many theatre-makers, he is interested in experimentation. Yet he is honest enough to recognise that he is caught within a tradition, and that “the new” is usually a mere variation on a theme.

Gob Squad are even more explicit in Kitchen. Basing their performance on a series of Warhol’s films – including the one about the blow job, Kitchen itself and his series of screen tests – they are simultaneously sentimental about the freedoms of the 1960s and ambivalent about its social and aesthetic impact. While their Kitchen takes on a diverse range of themes, including the battles between youth and experience, audience and artists, it seems to mourn the last moment in which true experimentation was possible.

The signs of an artistic culture in crisis, a crisis that can only come about when there is a sense that everything has been done, are manifold. Last year, every other production at the Fringe seemed to be a version of Macbeth. Never mind that some versions – Song of the Goat’s polyphonic spree, David Greig’s imaginative sequel Dunsinane – added new readings. A proliferation of Shakespeare hints at a theatre tied up with the past and lacking confidence in the present, or even the recent past. It’s more miserable in that Macbeth has elements that are utterly irrelevant to contemporary life – the plot is driven by a concern about regal hereditary, a matter of interest to Prince Charles but not leaders of terrorist cells.

Then there are the works-in-progress. Again, this isn’t a question of individual pieces relative quality: far too much work is being offered in a tentative, incomplete state. That critics have taken to treating works-in-progress as completed is problematic: there have been five star reviews of shows that are being presented with actors still reading from the script. Combine this with the pieces that explicitly take other works as their guiding idea, and theatre isn’t just eating itself, it’s becoming a middle class version of Two Girls, One Cup.

And the festival is becoming the unit of artistic presentation: plays are clustered together, hiding from individual exposure. All of these strategies are valid, intriguing, and there are good performances in the mix. But taken together, they suggest a certain aesthetic cowardice.

It’s worth saying that no individual work of art – especially those that get mentioned here – is necessarily an act of cowardice in itself. And the strategies being used by the artists don’t imply a capitulation of either ambition or seriousness. Rather, there are trends in art that reflect a cultural malaise. It’s bold to attempt any analysis of this malaise, but sitting through five or six plays that use reproduction of past songs to make a political point tends to lead to grand statements. And if the problem is a lack of ambition, perhaps it is time for a critic to make a ridiculous and large theory, the better to be shot down by artists making work that argues with the contention that “art is being hamstrung by its own self-conscious awareness of the past.”

END OF PART ONE