Ternary Patterns for Insomnia @ Tramway

I don't actually believe that applying the Bateson/Goffman parameters for play is an effective way to review an event. For that matter, I don't believe that Bateson's observations of otters at the zoo were of play in the first place. I think he was watching an educational process (the otters teaching other otters to fight, or at least rehearsing it -and with a pedagogical process that human teachers could well learn from).

But I am trying to get to grips with Goffman's idea of the frame (which I think is the way in which context is recognised by a performance). So buckle up, it's round two!

A great deal of repetitiveness occurs.

Throughout Ternary Patterns for Insomnia, certain musical forms are repeated throughout the Goldberg Variations (an arrangement for string ensemble provides the soundtrack to the dances). And there are repetitions of movements, some props are re-used, including a big tube and some rope. 

However, I can't accept this as a frame for play, performance or pedagogy. It might have been different in Bateson's day, but life is pretty repetitious these days...


When more than one participant is to be involved, all must be freely willing to play...

Again, I struggle with this... it needs so much clarification. I'm dumping it, calling bullshit. This is no help at all.

Frequent role switching occurs during play, resulting in a mixing up of the dominance order found among the players...

I'm cheating by ignoring a detail, but this does free me up to comment on Ternary. At various points in the production - notably during the Aria, the musicians dance about, taking on a new - and pretty often clearly unfamiliar role. There is even a dance solo by a viola player.

In that instance, a dominance order is broken. It's a relatively subtle order, but the viola tends to hold a supporting  position in an ensemble (not only and always, mind). But then there is another break, of the musician usually being defined by their instrument.

Throughout the evening, there is plenty of cavorting by the musicians - perhaps the dancers could have had a crack on the violins at some point. The contrast between the physicality of the dancers and musicians is very evident.

The play seems to be independent of any external needs of the participants, often continuing longer than would the actual behaviour it is patterned after.

Yeah, this is thin stuff now. Time for bed.  
  

In Cahoots as Play...

Goffman liked to look at everyday life like it was a big show. He read a book by Bateson which described otters at the zoo having a laugh. From this, Goffman describes a number of qualities that describe 'play'. It is the way that Bateson knew that the otters he was watching weren't getting nasty, but actually having a bit of fun.


The playful act is so performed that its ordinary function is not realized. The stronger and more competent participant restrains himself (sic) to be a match for the weaker and less competent.

Already, the conference is identified as a site not of play but aiming towards its ordinary function. However, Goffman's description of the power relationship here (apart from re-enforcing an already present hierarchy) does describe a possible teaching scenario: the 'stronger' participant being the teacher, the weaker being the student.

The stronger participants at In Cahoots - that is, those selected by the organisers as experts and given time to address the audience - have their power emphasised by the format. For example, Nele Hertling's conclusion talk (a fairly predictable selection of platitudes about the advantages of collaboration) was given authority not by the content of her speech but the situation. She was at the front of the room, she had a microphone. The audience was seated in a theatre space, facing her.

There is an exaggeration of the expansiveness of some acts.

Anyone who has been lucky enough to see Brian Blessed do Shakespeare knows that this certainly describes theatre: equally, the choreography of a stripper expands suggestive movement, drawing attention to the erotic potential of the body. Perhaps the panel format, such as in the conclusion talk or Errollyn Wallen's keynote speech, is an expansion of the act of conversation.

Wallen's keynote, which excerpted from her various work (including the spectacular opening ceremony of the UK Paralympics), was an expanded description of her process. Equally, some of the performances - for example the Ensemble Thing's You Can't Get There From Here expanded the process of performance.

(In You Can't Get There..., the ensemble played a selection of pieces that had been composed through the collaboration of several composers. Before each piece, a recorded version of an early draft of the collaboration was played, highlighting the process, and possibly exaggerating the expansiveness of composition to reveal how the process operated.)

The sequence of activity that serves as a pattern is neither followed faithfully nor completed fully, but is subject to starting and stopping,to redoing, to discontinuation... to mixing with sequences from other routines.

The Bateson/Goffman model, once again, does not appear to completely fit the conference format. It does describe a process that is optimised for learning, however. It's pretty clear that Bateman, when he was watching otters, could have equally defined their activity as education. 

In Cahoots was clearly well-structured, jumping from lectures to workshops to performances, offering a variety of experiences. Although this implies discontinuity, and plenty of starting and stopping, the overall structure integrated the event into a whole. 

For example, the workshop on Dance and Music was complemented by an evening performance of Sandglass, a collaboration between choreographer Lucy Boyes and musician Thomas Butler. The interaction between the soundscape and the performers went beyond choreographing to the music, with the dancers making some of the sounds on stage. 
  

What does ‘Glasgow’ mean?

The question poses two immediate and difficult questions: what is meant by Glasgow, and performance, in this context. Discussions about performance - its boundaries and the application of its critical theories - have been complicated since Richard Schechner applied the logic of  Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) to theatre studies, the ideal of a ‘broad and inclusive’ study has encouraged the reading of all walks of life as forms of performance. And while Glasgow can be found on maps and in encyclopedia, its geographical limits are hardly fixed - in 1996, the Conservative government dismantled the existing Strathclyde Region and, through restructuring, reduced the size of the city and the population by 50 000. The 2001 census revealed that the population of Glasgow had nearly halved since 1938, and areas served by the city’s public transport system, such as Rutherglen, are no longer part of Glasgow but have become self-governing.

There is also the Glasgow of the imagination: the violent streets conjured in the novel No Mean City, or Tom McGrath’s play The Hard Man. It has provided the landscape for films: from the apocalyptic World War Z, the social realism of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen or Carla’s Song, to the horrific science fiction of Under The Skin. This Glasgow is associated with brutality and exercises a fierce hold on the public perception of the city: the actor Brian Cox recently noting that ‘the humour in Glasgow is darker, because it's much more gloomy, there's a perpetual misery there.’

This is more than an abstract problem of definition, since similar problems emerge in the discussion of national theatre identities and history. Nadine Holdsworth, in Theatre and Nation (2010) observes that a tension exists between ‘ethnic nationalism’ - based on bloodlines - and ‘civic nationalism’ - a matter of shared laws and customs. While the latter form allows anybody within the nation’s boundaries, theoretically, to be included as a citizen, ethnic nationalism can insist on a far purer population. Applied at the level of the city, this can resolve into the problematic division between ‘true Glaswegians’ (born in the city) and incomers (arriving for economic or educational reasons). In Scotland, the relationship between the two sets is partially explored in the provocative essay Settlers and Colonists by Alasdair Gray (Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence 2012), which condemned English professionals who migrated north of the border for short term career gains.

Rather than attempting to fit the existing ideals about Glasgow into these existing descriptions, a working definition of Glasgow - tentative and open to expansion or contraction - can be developed, based around the network of important sites for performance. This will be a geographical framework that relates artists to their places of work or education.

However, this still leaves the problem of performance. 

I put words in the mouth of Red Bastard.... his looks, my words

Credit_Andy_Phillipson