Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.
"The presence of the actor upon the stage is unremarkable: they are the expected. The emphasis on quality of performance, the celebrity achieved by certain of their number, the identification of a performer with a particular interpretation of a familiar role: all of these merely obscure the fundamental predictability of the very presence of a person who, ultimately, is pretending to be someone else. Against this stands a holy dualism, a Moon Goddess and Horned God who preside over the carnival. Their presence is disruptive. They stand in opposition to each other, representing different energies and different cosmologies, yet their end is the same. They expose the pretense of the theatre, simultaneously revealing the dramaturgy and connecting the events of the play to immediate, physical reality. In the person of the stripper, performance and identity are conflated: the plethora of enthographical studies which willingly ask the stripper about her sexual habits follow the same ignorant pattern as the moralists who confuse the performance of sexual desire with a deviant character. Meanwhile, the clown shatters the epic grandeur of the play, jumping between ignorance and meta-knowledge (they were the first to break the fourth wall), exposing the theatrical, attacking the haughty and reflecting the audience's gaze back upon them. In their diverse ways - the clown exposing the artificiality of the events on stage, and the stripper's muddling of authenticity and dramaturgy - the double divine undermines the pretensions of performance. It becomes, in their hands, either painfully immediate or ridiculous. It is no accident that both laughter and desire are possible to fake, but difficult to prevent. This is recognised even in the burlesque, in which the unfortunately gendered division of labour matched strippers and comedians paid ritual respect to bi-theism." The Fifth Epistle of Criticulous to the Reviewers (1845)
Never let it be said that I can let things go. After the generous response to my article in which I bemoaned my inability to enjoy populist theatre, I've come up with more self-indulgent and pompous thoughts. Can we blame media structures? It was probably inevitable that I would blame other critics for my failures - I suggested that reviewing was becoming a synopsis with adjectives, with a lack of detailed argument. To be fair, this isn't all criticism, and it is not just print criticism that does this. I ripped off a piece by Catherine Love last week, and it had plenty of detail, historical knowledge and sharp analysis. While I am sympathetic to the idea that the minimal space given to theatre criticism in newspapers can encourage 'potted reviews' (and that the pressure of on-line immediacy discourages expansive writing (TL;DR)), it does not necessarily mean that reviews are always cursory. I generalised from a specific instance because I have a vague idea that reviews are getting briefer. So, the structures of the media are a factor, but not the whole story. What is regarded as acceptable as a review might be, though.
This might have been an attempt to address the moaning about critics and their role which kicked off after that Stage article. Who the hell are you to judge? I admit that I have been guilty of lazy reviewing. If I wanted to, I could present a list of 'bad practices' taken from my own work. So, yeah, I'm a hypocrite. However, I do suffer from regular and painful abscesses, which can be regarded as a punishment. It's no excuse, but feel free to relish the thought of Mr Academic Big Shot here whining like a baby. What's wrong with populism?
Nothing. Please don't apologise for liking something just because I don't find Diderot's theories in it. Part of my conflict comes from the disjuncture between my opinion and the majority response. I'm working out how to recognise that difference without surrendering my opinions or being patronising. I could point to my long and tedious history of criticism, and mention that I have very... distinctive tastes. For those who follow criticism, that's a bonus. For those who don't, who surf onto my opinions, I'm a guy with a stick up his ass (see previous point). No, what's wrong with populism? It permits weak productions to get away with shoddy theatricality. I approve Our Ladies for not over-sexualising the young women (the costumes never went Britney, for example). But I also worry that the presentation of working class lives - and frankly, given that the play ends with one girl still in conflict over her sexual desire and another pregnant, pretty difficult lives - for entertainment is problematic. I'll wind myself into a knot here. I struggle with political theatre, and the self-awareness of Our Ladies' heroines is admirable... but I couldn't help but think: this is a play about young women who are being fucked over by an economic system that limits their options and aspiration. Yet, at the end, they sing some Bob Marley and every little thing's gonna be alright. These particular anxieties - theatre as valve for frustrations, the working class as a vaudeville routine - applies to serious agit-prop, too. And, like my relationship to 27 and Iphigenia in Splott, it is unresolved. Unlike populist theatre, I'm uneasy.
Oh sing, goddess, sing, and please tell me how Aristotle and Plato had such a terrible row About the status of drama and tragedy's role, And the relation of acting to the political whole. I'll send you, oh Vile to the library's nook And seek out the magic of Wiles' short book. He discussed Theatre and Citizenship: His chapter on Athens will reward a trip. I think that I've found it, on page one and forty. Plato explains that theatre's well naughty. Tragedy's blasphemy, Plato's contending It upsets the order he spent ages inventing. On page forty two, Wiles gets down to brass tacks. Read the quotation, which Vile unpacks... Plato defines tragedy as essentially the representation of a fine and virtuous life, and pictures himself as a dramaturg who will realise in the political constitution which he has devised a more authentic mimesis of the good life than any itinerant poet could provide. So, tragedy shows the best way to live But why go to theatre when Plato will give A much better pattern in the state he's invented A poet's poetics are a version demented. When Plato talks tragedy, he's talking of the song Certain types of music are morally wrong Tooting on the aulos is banned in The Republic Because it offers ecstasy to the general public. But he has a problem with the stories that they tell (the gods having a time of it, giving people hell). If poets want to stay in Plato's ideal city They need to stop showing good men being shitty. Wiles isn't always clear on page number forty three Suggesting Plato did not like cult of celebrity. It's not so much he did not like the old dramatic art But worried that the crowd were swayed by an actor's slightest fart. But what if we ignore Plato? He doesn't like democracy, he doesn't like the vote. That's because Athens made Socrates scape-goat For the chaos of the period after Sparta kicked their ass. The basis of his objections are the kind of thing they cause In democracy and tyranny, alike, theatre breaks the laws Actors can be paid for, and thus the rich can use The magic of the drama to put across their views.
Although I am not completely convinced by site-specific performance - it is supposed to offer a new way for audiences to relate to a performance, but I've not seen many audience members behave as if they were anything other than passive receivers of theatrical experience - William McEvoy argues that 'the visible and the linguistic operate in dialectical tension with one another'. I think they do that in any situation where words and images go together, but okay. In his contribution to Theatre as Voyeurism, he postulates that the audience member is made 'voyeur, writer and critic'. Again, no different to any other form of theatre, or comic book, if I want to keep that analogy going. His entire introduction seems to be claiming a special status for site-specific theatre where none exists. The spectator observes outwardly and inwardly? The desire for meaning is exposed? Subjectivity is evoked... hold on... That might have something. Continue, please, Mr McEvoy.
Previously at Manipulate... Editta Braun Company presented the first two shows in their trilogy (Luvos and Planet Luvos). Braun's signature choreography stretches the human body into apparently impossible shapes, inverting the expected limitations of movement and conjuring other-worldly creatures and stories. Meanwhile at The Vile Arts... I have become obsessed with epistemology. I now think I know what it means: the theory of knowledge. And I think I know what that means too... I'm imagining a pair of teachers. One of them cannot move, the other cannot speak. They both have a single piece of information to pass onto their student. Because of their limitations, however, they have to find different ways to communicate.
This isn't the whole story, but it suggests one aspect of epistemology. The silent teacher will most likely use some form of physical process to communicate. The immobile teacher will use words. Both of methods will communicate the same information, but filter it in different ways. Braun's choreography operates in a disruptive manner. The contortions of her dancers don't just challenge the every-day possibilities of movement: they challenge the standard physical presentation of the human body. The climax of Planet Luvos saw the arrival of what one of my students described as penis bum monsters. That really ought to attract an audience. But this description does not quite grapple with the emotional experience of seeing Luvos. Okay, the trickery and acrobatics are cool, but something else happens. I think it is to do with muscle memory. There is an epistemology of dance - as Fleur Darkin off Scottish Dance Theatre said in an interview with The List, dance can express feelings in a unique manner. It gets inside the body. Watching dance causes a different reaction to watching a play.
I'm not that interested in a cull of actors, or emotions, in theatre: Craig only recognises the passionate qualities of the human, and forgets about the ability to, like, contemplate... or that emotion can communicate, too. But his idea that there used to be this amazing marionette somewhere in India, and some women ripped off its routine, and invented theatre as a commercial proposition, does offer something intriguing. There is something special about a puppet or a doll. I always compare it to that time Johnny Woo did a striptease while dressed up as a gorilla. As he dropped his clothes, Woo did a little dance that usually involved him slipping on a banana skin, and looking up at the audience, as if hurt by their reaction. Despite the complete lack of change in the gorilla mask expression, each time Woo looked at the crowd, the expression seemed to be saying something different.
It's the same with puppets - well, the ones with faces. I was watching a very long video about bunraku - the fashionable Japanese form that controls the puppet with sticks. The expression on the face never changes - everything is done with the arms and the legs and the torso - but the emotional range is huge. Is it the absence of emotion on the face that allows the audience to impose meaning onto the blank face? Craig hoped that 'acting' would be rejected by future generations, and replaced with 'symbolic movements'. Lecoq came along and developed that kind of approach. Kantor based his theatre of death manifesto on Craig's thoughts.
So Craig says, in his Uber-marionette, that actors are a degenerate version of really impressive ancient automated statues. I'm not sure about that, or his criticism that humans, being all emotional, make 'useless' material for art, but I like his idea that massive puppets are the next step in performance. Craig was writing around a century ago, so he gets to look cool in sepia prints and mutton-chops, and, since he was before Dada, performance art and Beckett, his meditations on theatre are focused on the naturalism of the late Victorian period. He's against emotional outbursts ('art is the exact antithesis of pandemonium'), has essentialist views on human nature that I wouldn't dare ('the whole nature of man tends towards freedom'), but he influenced that Polish fellow Kantor and suggests an escape route from the romantic ideal of art. So I am listening...
Great art is not timeless, says HDF Kitto in Greek Tragedy (pg 101), unless we take the trouble to understand its idiom.
Kitto's study of Athenian tragic drama was written in 1939 (and updated into the 1960s), and had the luxury of not being troubled by post-modernism, intersectionality or contemporary semiotics. While he has the virtue of sticking close to the texts, he doesn't always build his arguments on attributions or footnotes, making his philosophy of theatre more personal and, incidentally, readable. When he does mention other academics, it is usually to debunk their theories or, when it comes to Aristotle and The Poetics, to weaken their dogmatic grip on analysis. When he addresses the problems of presenting Aeschylus or Sophocles to a 'contemporary' audience (and this is not the same contemporary audience in 2016), he stresses that any script was written within a specific historical moment, and the author would make assumptions about what issues and ideas were shared and important. Kitto exposes the tension within the idea of a canon - a selection of artworks that are 'for the ages'. Outside of their idiom, or context, any artwork flounders and miscommunicates. He expounds with some confidence on Shakespeare's culture (a shared appreciation of medieval understandings of monarchy and religion), and is able to elaborate on the classical culture that frames Euripides and the gang.
Is not my body beautiful? She said, slipping from her dress. Many things are beautiful: it’s just what we like the best.
Does not my revelation inspire you to adore me? I honour the upright, he replied. You’re distracting, a debauchery.
Your denial of attraction suggests God just got it wrong In creating skin so fair and my limbs so comely long. I feel only pity for your sorry pretty vice: You are just mistaking bad things for the nice.
Do I practice without reason, a science imperfect? Your metaphysic’s already clear: it’s just cause and effect.
You resist this sacred moment, you cling to social codes... A good man when unhappy still knows the happy road.
You are talking like a Stoic, but you were born an Epicure. Attachment is no virtue, but virtue is its cure.
Be passive in your enjoyment, sit back and relax.Happiness is the final goal of every human’s acts.
I have a bit of bother with this whole ‘suspension of disbelief’ malarkey. I know Coleridge
came up with it, and he wasn’t adverse to a bit of puff. Suggests his
relationship to reality was probably tangential. But I’ve seen a few plays, like
that Forced Entertainmentone when I was right off my chump, and I didn’t
feel the need to scream that there was a real gorilla on the stage. It was that
sexy bird in a monkey suit. I knew that.
Mind you, I still reckon that Bloody Mess was the
closest I’ve ever come to feeling the dramatic illusion old Diderot bangs on
about. The way that they had these characters
doing their own thing, ignoring
each other pretty much, just trying to tell their own story – and the way that
this overlapped so that each personal story reflected on the others – this series
of unconnected episodes that somehow connected to each other.
Yeah, that’s the
closest I’ve seen to real life on stage. Plus no-one knew whether they were a
tragedy or a comedy: couple of clowns trying to split up, only they couldn’t; a
sexy lady talking dirty in that gorilla clobber; two dirty long-hairs
pretending they were romantic heroes.
That time Forced Entertainment was good – unlike their
follow-up, which tried the same trick only explaining history and failed – that
was text-book dramatic illusion. See, they kept piling it on, scene after
scene. The sort who wanted to pass away, the geezer doing his impersonations of
various bombs, the clown trying to tell a story about the universe… the end of
the Universe, as it happens, which suggests that they might have had a bit of a
destructive theme going on.
The emotions got higher and higher, until the whole
thing was a bloody mess. Just what it says on the tin – and there was no way
reason was able to cope with the amount of information they were chucking at
the audience. The constant interruptions, the bickering, bloke getting his nads
out at one point… it was so much that reason was proper overwhelmed. And so,
yeah, I might never have forgotten that it was a play – they were quick to chat
straight at the audience – but I was right in and about it.
Diderot was never much cop at fiction: his novel gets
distracted by big ideas and
wanders off to explore them. One thing, which
Lessing sampled in his Hamburger Cook-Book, was this thing, where a bloke is
told about this intrigue – which is really a play – then gets taken to the theatre
to see it. The punch-line is, even though the bloke’s been told the intrigue is
all real, as soon as he sees the play, in a theatre (natch), he’s like: oh
right, it’s a play.
Now I mention this because Diderot is explaining why plays
can never have suspension of disbelief. In his time, they had the knobs sitting
on the stage and all, so you got these gawkers right up in the action. Diderot
did mention that he wanted the impediments to realism out of the way, but this
problem – of explaining the dramatic illusion through reason (it’s supposed to
be a thing of emotional overload, so quite why he thinks he’ll manage that is
another point) – is made a lot more difficult when the play as a play is being
made clear by all the stage business and the way that the actors speak their
words.
Suspension of disbelief? Skin us up another one, Coleridge,
eh?
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.
