In Avignon. Part 3

I need to ask you to use your imagination. You see, these scripts are incomplete at the moment. They belong in a comic, or whispered in the darkness late at night.

I want to tell you about a dream that I had about ten years ago. I knew she was my anima, when I woke up. She had black hair, a shy smile and was always a few feet ahead of me.

I don't really believe in an anima. It's the Jungian version of the soul. Men have one, it's always female and God alone knows how this works in an age of intersectionality. 

But I woke up filled with love and loss. I'm starting to imagine that the next third of my life might be reconciliation to that loss. Most people believe in the one, until it goes wrong. Then they stop believing, and get on with it.

Is it possible to believe and believe it is impossible?

Avignon festival feels like Edinburgh Fringe, only the love has not yet disappeared. The fierce competition is absent, as is the comedy. I'm not saying these things are related.

There is a street here named after Artaud. And a bar decorated in zebra stripes on its corner. For obvious reasons, it is the place where I want to drink.

In Avignon. Part 2

Excusez-moi, parlez-vous Anglais?

Wow, is that really you?

Well, I guess that depends on who I am.

Criticulous, it is an honour to have you here. You finally made it.

If it's an honour, yes, it's me. So... I wanted...

Accreditation? That is not a problem for the finest critic in the anglophone world. Some call you a genius. We can't wait until you learn French and can give us some bande-dessine critiques.

Hey, I don't want to forget the great cohort of British critics who keep me on my toes.

L'autres sont chiant!

I guess if you say it, that's true. What do you think of Matt Trueman? 

Your friend, Cyril le Fou. I fear to ask, but is here with us?

He's waiting in the courtyard, checking the dustbins. But I don't think we'll be needing him today.

We'd be delighted if he'd go on a rampage. Right down the Rue de la Republique. Anyway, here's your pass. Off you go, fuck the arse out of that. 

And that's how I became accredited at the Avignon Festival.

Scenes from a Scotch Classroom No. XXXIV

Hands up who's done the reading?

No, well, I would have been foolish to expect anymore than that.

Still, today, it's Aristotle's Poetics, again. Yes, I know, we've been studying for two thousand years now but until we get it right, I'm not moving onto Nietzsche, even if he is more fun, with the BDSM and the breakdown and the syphilis. 

Can anyone tell me what the biggest problem is with The Poetics? No, not it is boring, thank you. What? Hanartia? No, that's pretty clear... it means 'sin', for fuck sake...

Good to see that a bit of swearing can wake up you at the back. 

Yes, it's the irony. A thinker who really retooled philosophy as a practical study, making it not about the abstract search for truth but practical application... has left us with a book that nobody knows what it is for. Best guesses include an answer to Plato's worries about acting, a handbook for dramatists, a theory of literary criticism... but since the bloody thing is clearly unfinished...

Because he says he is going to discuss comedy and define catharsis and he doesn't. I don't know, maybe they lost part two down the back of an Ottoman sofa. 

Or a mad blind monk ate it during a fire. Obviously.

You are lucky this isn't a classics lesson. You ought to see the reading I have to do for this. Nearly every article and book on The Poetics ends up with a long argument about how every other explanation of catharsis is wrong followed by another barely indistinguishable definition. Questions?

Okay, it's pronounced catharsis, not catheter. But the reason it matters is simple. Experiencing theatre, at least if it is any good, involves an emotional response. Catharsis might be a description of that moment. 

I know, it's funny how they use other examples of the word in Aristotle to find out what he means. Purgation, exactly - or having a period.

Stop giggling. The thing is, they never actually describe an experience that might be catharsis in their own lives. 

Okay. Let's remember. Meaning happens at that moment when the audience - or reader, or whatever - connects with the work of art. Bearing that in mind, your homework is to describe a moment when you connected with a piece of theatre.

It's in the exam at the Pearly Fucking Gates, son.

A New Sexual Fantasy (Criticulous said it, okay?)

Last night, before I slipped into my codeine sweetened sleep, I put on a Sargon of Akkad video. You see, there's nothing I like more than masturbating to the voice of a man who sounds like he has kidnapped me, tied me to a chair and is explaining why feminism is wrong while pointing a knife at my throat.

Hey, don't judge me. Everyone has their own way of getting kicks.

Unfortunately, about half an hour into his video, Sargon started shouting at a video he was watching, and woke me from my slumber. And this is when the internet upsets me. The level of discourse around really important topics has become a shouting contest.

Another thing that makes me want to buy a glove made of sandpaper for my special alone time, just so that the pain will distract me, is Brendan O'Neill. Brendan said that he wants to literally eat his computer. He experiences such outrage at what he sees on the internet that he literally wants to devour metal. 

Brendan is not angry because he can look out of his office window and watch a parade of humans, the suffering inflicted by consumerism etched on their bodies. He's not angry because first world feminists aren't doing enough to support women in third world rape cultures. He's not even angry because Sargon woke him up from a post-orgasm snooze. He literally wants to eat a computer because some people found Boaty McBoatface funny. 

From this chuckle-fest, Brendan waxes lyrical on a generation who take nothing seriously. Apparently, these losers are apathetic, apolitical, and challenging them is to be called a kill-joy. 

So, they are not, like, saying stupid shit to get attention. Word up, Brendan: if you want the internet to have more depth, try writing about stuff that has more depth. You do manage to write pieces about, like, real politics, dude. But you have written about Boaty McBoatface, Paul Daniels, The Oscars, Lou Reed and David Bowie. It's fluff, mate. 

And most of your serious articles just rehash that whole 'political correctness gone mad' routine that gives Spectator readers a boner.

Anyway, I'll tell you what would give me a stiffy: a video of Brendan literally eating a computer. He's said this is literally how he feels, so I'll even come round and chainsaw it for him into bite size chunks. And I'll shoot my bolt when he opens his mouth and it has all bits of wire in it. 

Diderot Did Decline Democratic Dramatic Discussion

As it happens, I am off the Happy Pills again. I am experiencing considerable friction within my nervous system. I'd like to apologise to the lovely and patient people who share my workspace at the CCA, and the duty managers who have had to put up with a higher level of distraction than usual from this hairy little bloke in the suit who seems to have lost his keys again.

I am in a real temper today. I was looking on Twitter to find somebody to flame, but the always intriguing @thejennawatt diverted me. Instead, I am going to have a go at Diderot.

The ever growing list of UK theatres where I can't afford to see shows is growing ever longer.

— Jenna Watt (@thejennawatt) April 8, 2016

It's ironic: Watt makes theatre, but she can't afford to see as much as she'd like. My research into the history of theatre allows me to pretend I have a long-dead culprit. When Diderot challenged the status quo of pre-revolutionary France, he advocated a bourgeois theatre. In the following centuries, architects, playwrights, companies and philosophers followed his lead, culminating in that day when Wagner turned off the lights in the auditorium, and forced audiences to make a pilgrimage to see his latest epic cycle. Basically, it got expensive to keep the riff-raff out, the kind of people that used to go to the Globe to have sex with a prostitute, shout at actors and occasionally listen to Shakespeare's poetry.

Of course, it is really Aristotle's fault (he did say that tragedy was for a noble class who had time and money), and a by-product of capitalism - oh, and the replacement of live theatre by the cinema, then television, then the internet, leaving what used to be the top entertainment as an esoteric taste.

Speaking as someone who decided that romantic opera is the pinnacle of live theatre, and is preparing to take his place with the Werthers Original set, I am worried that Jenna Watt has spotted the massive problem with any research into theatre. It has become expensive, exclusive and the means of production have shifted it beyond the financial reach of many people. This removes it from the public sphere what Habermas talks about - no good being part of public debate if only the rich can afford to see it - and the political content of works like Iphigenia in Splott is belied by the price of the ticket. For  rough guide, if the class of characters that a play is about can't get a ticket, it's not serious about them. 

It doesn't solve the problem entirely, but when Scottish Opera are offering bargain tickets to students (do they still do that?), or Buzzcut is pay-what-you-like, maybe the directors of the theatres could, like, offer cheap seats at the last minute, or go out into the street and give away any tickets that are left half an hour before the show? I know that last suggestion would cause problems. 

Anyway, access to culture might not be a human right, but I think it is part of a democratic society. I'll get around to that some day. I've got withdrawal symptoms to enjoy. In the meantime: I try not to forget that there is an economic dimension to Watt's question, and probably a class one, too. That neoliberal mantra about choice is a right load of hot air when that choice depends on how much spare change you've got.

Scottish Opera's Rusalka

Anne Sophie Duprels as Rusalka and Peter Wedd as the prince in Rusalka. Scottish Opera 2016. Credit James Glossop.

There are small matters of production that, as a good critic, I cannot ignore. But just now, I want to capture the moment. Three hours of opera doesn't always seem like an easy choice, and perhaps I had left after Act I, I might have been able to escape the fate that befell me two acts later...

I don't want to believe in romanticism... I mean the music, I mean the ethos that seems so naive and trusting in the power of art and nature and God and humans and... it's just a bourgeois medium, keep reminding yourself, it's just the marriage of Aristotle's ideas of emotional purgation mixed in with good old Diderot's belief that theatre must speak to the dominant class...

Keep reminding yourself... 

But mind blown, barely able to speak... the moment at the end (and yes, she's breaking the fourth wall, and yes, she is talking to me)...

for your fickle passions, may GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL 

I don't want anyone to see me weeping. Keep reminding yourself... but the brokenness, the cynical modern unrequited lover, the critic who sits in the corner of the feast and moans about the excessive serving or the poor arrangement of the garnish on the edge of the plate... 

If I allow it, it will make me believe again, make me believe that the universe permits redemption, that my sinful soul can be released and so and so and so.

Like an atheist who sees a Christian becoming born again, I want to close my eyes, to deny it, to shout out that this is just emotional manipulation. It's the lightning flash of revelation, when the art-object strikes the consciousness of the observer and sparks the fire of art, of meaning, and somewhere, just in this connection, there is purpose and hope. 

Three hours and it builds. More than just when the undead turn and tell me that it is me who has condemned them and yet they are willing to forgive me. All of my sins are laid out in sequence, and the sins that I am ready to perform in the future. And all these sins are jewels of a necklace, threaded around my alienation, which is the original sin.

And for a moment, connection. Her voice pierces me. Everything that I have done is swept away. In the flood of emotion, I reach out to my post-modern theories and find that they crumble beneath my hands. 

Only connect. Only connect.

Untimely Mediatation

Hmm -Art? A good thing? You are kidding, right?

Thanks to some half-baked reading about Diderot and the Quarrel Between the Ancient and the Moderns, I have become suspicious of Art. To continue the ridiculous simile introduced by King Tynan of BDSM, if theatre is my lover, it's like finding out that she has a job in marketing for UKIP.

The QBtAatA revolved around methods to assess art - whether, following Aristotle's guidelines, it was better to imitate classical sources (The Ancients), or strive after contemporary styling. Diderot, editor of the Encyclopedia was a Modern. He won, in the end. His influence on Saint Lessing, who coined the word dramaturgy, and Comrade Brecht, makes Diderot the Man. All that relevant theatre - that's his fault.

However, what the Ancients and Moderns shared was a conviction that theatre had a cultural importance, that the kind of plays that are produced reflect and support the values of society. This ought to be a straight 101 course in the Sociology of Theatre - Marx, for example, identifies the economic base (the political system, more or less) as defining the superstructure (culture and that).

Crites view on ancient and modern dramatist from Department of English

The Ancients did far more than claim Greek Tragedy as the Best Tragedy. They recognised that its order (reduced to Aristotle's Unities) reflected a Universal Order, that respect for tradition discouraged revolutionary thought. Happening just before The Enlightenment  (or, perhaps more accurately, as an early skirmish that kicked the whole thing off).

They were unapologetic about theatre as propaganda: equally, by the time Diderot got around to writing long justifications of his tedious scripts, he realised that a bourgeois theatre, with a new format known latterly as dram, could encourage different ways of thinking. His plays, which have never been satisfactorily integrated into canon, addressed matters like 'the role of the father'. All worthy issue plays owe their genesis to Diderot's dialogues. Plays dealing with wider, existentialist themes could owe as much to Greek Tragedy.

Of course, the two terms of the ruckus have never been that clear: Euripides was dealing with Athenian politics in The Trojan Women, and Beckett's Endgame speaks to cold-war paranoia, yet both are Aristotlean in format. As Diderot was smart enough t notice, theorists make labels after artists make work. Yet The Quarrel did have Racine storming out of the Academie Francaise when Perrault read a paper about how great the modern age is. Lines were drawn. Corneille's Le Cid, for example, was declared naughty by the Acadamie for not following Aristotle in its structure, even if audiences loved it. 

St Valentine Ideas...

It's Valentine's 'weekend', apparently. While I am all for celebrating saint's days - especially if the saint happens to be a Jesuit - I'm not sure that expanding it to a weekend is going to help those of us who are 'exploring celibacy as a valid lifestyle option'. 

But I am sniffing a social media bandwagon. Here's five ways to celebrate...

Get some Cock at the Tron

Since I am already a persona non grata round the east end theatre, thanks to a series of crass headlines, I might as well keep up the vulgarity. Cock is a play about the drama that happens when identity politics collide with desire, or when the fictional idea of 'love' conflicts with lived reality.

There's a guy and his lover, and his other lover, then the lover's dad turns up and Mick Bartlett's script dissects the intersection of the public and the political. Andy Arnold directs with sparse precision. It's an uncomfortable ninety minutes, which might make you a better person.

Consider your desires at Club Noir
It's the world's biggest burlesque club, and the men dress up like me: I was there at New Year, and felt like it was a tribute to critics who like to buy suits and look like a 1950s' detective. 

But don't let that put you off: it's a party that is made by the audience. There are always great acts on stage - which are either excellent entertainment or a challenge to our prurience about sexual performance, depending on how far you want to take the critic theme. This is my concession to people who actually want to have fun this weekend. 

Go to Mass, you bloody pagan
Yep, Valentine is another example of how Christianity has defined our calendar. On Sunday morning, get along to Duns Scotus to celebrate the Eucharist in the presence of the saint's bones.

Long before he was commercially exploited, St Valentine had a feast that replaced the Roman Lupercalia - a holiday for fertility, banishing evil spirits and animal sacrifice antics. He had set up a kind of ancient Gretna Green service, He was also a doctor, so going to mass is a nice way to have a pop at Jeremy Hunt.

Support the Junior Doctors

Now I have mentioned Jeremy Hunt, to the mystification of readers outside the UK, there's a big row going on: a government minister, who has such a bad reputation that his name is now rhyming slang, is trying to impose a new contract on Junior Doctors, who are already tripping balls due to not getting enough sleep. 

Just add C-

Not sure how to show support - petitions are not my thing - but a little bit of Christian love sent out to the doctors would respect St V. Maybe you could dress up as a doctor for Club Noir.

Remember the Involuntary Celibates of Criticism

There are those among us who have given up on romance in order to take a shamanic journey to the heart of performance art. Why not send them some chocolates, or roses, or a card? The CCA on Sauchiehall Street will accept these and pass them on...

There's Fighting in the Streets...

Mark Fisher recently accused me of confusing the romantic and modernist strands of theatre. He is quite right - although I conflate them rather than confuse them, because they are both vessels for the bourgeois theatre that has dominated for the past three hundred years.

After that provocation, here's an assumption to get up your nose.

I am afraid so. Because it is created within that culture, its hidden assumptions are all based on the dominant culture. Words like 'art', 'genius', 'dramaturgy', 'architecture': notions like 'playwright', 'actor',
'theatre' are all defined within a conversation developed by Diderot and the philosophes, and they were all about using art as a weapon against the power of the monarchical state and the church.

Even those performances that think they are presenting protest or an alternative perspective are doomed to remain within the dominant culture. 

Patriarchy, for example, lurks in the margins of feminist theatre. The state infects anarchist theatre. Those who speak of community are adopting a consumerist narrative. To put it another way...

Is Objectivity a Myth? Part one: the meaning of myth

When I was a child, I had a book called Myths and Legends of

Greece. I somehow got the idea that a legend was a story based on historical fact, but that was probably exaggerated in the telling, while a myth was just a big load of bunkum.

I considered Herakles a legend, because it seemed plausible to me that some hunky bloke had stomped about Greece, knacking lion and cleaning up horse shit. But Pegasus was a myth because a horse with wings feels pretty unlikely.

There's something in this, in common usage. Calling Hulk Hogan a legendary figure in wrestling reads well, but calling him a mythical figure... like he doesn't really exist. But he does, and he's even got a sex tape which I'd rather give a miss.

What I didn't consider is how the mythical and the legendary are weaved together: parts of The Twelve Labours of Herakles feed on the bunkum: that business with his dad being Zeus? The snakes in his cradle? 

When I studied Religious Education as part of my teacher training, I came across a new definition of myth. Myth was 'a story with meaning'. For the first time, I claimed I had a methodology, and that was to use an idea until it breaks, then build a new idea with the left-overs and bits of the idea that broke it.

This version of myth makes no claims about the 'truth' of a story,

merely that it has meaning, and that meaning might be found in its use. A myth is a narrative, and so has structure, and it also structures experience.

Hulk Hogan is still a legend, but now there is a myth of Hulk Hogan. It's probably got a moral of some sort - maybe that it's not a good idea to say racist stuff if you are a celebrity.

The difference between my two definition of myth isn't necessarily commonly recognised, and the idea of myth as a bogus story is often how it is used by people who aren't trying to be smart-ass post-modernists. I prefer another word for that kind of story: bullshit. 

But when I say 'myth', don't be insulted. I am saying that it has meaning, but I am making no value judgement about whether it is 'true' or 'false'. Or whether it means anything to me. 

This'll give you a headache, while I think about why I have this definition of myth, and why it matters...

Five Rules Towards A Manifesto for Criticism

While you enjoy that contradiction, let me elaborate. To say 'should' is not just to suggest that there is an ideal, platonic reality, in which the object under consideration exists in a pure, perfected form. It is to insist that this reality is appreciable by the critical eye.

This reality is imaginary. It is a film in the mind of the beholder and, as such, not subject to the friction of existing. 'There is no hair in the lens of the mind's camera. 

The role of the critic is to observe, and comment on the observation, not to speculate on a possible, better performance and offer advice. 

Nor is there an 'audience'. The critic may comment on an audience's response, but cannot explain why that response happened. 

For example: 'the audience laughed' is acceptable. 'The audience found it witty' is not. 

The critic writes of their own experience, not on behalf of anyone else. There are those who agree with my assessments, those who do not. While I like the first group, both opinions are valid and there is no reason to assume that anyone is wrong.

There is nothing wrong with an artist commenting on another artist's work. However, this opinion is not the same as a critical opinion: artists and critics have different subjectivities. 

The artist observes a work and thinks: if I had the same budget and the same intention and the same resources... I would create the work that exists in my head. Refer to rule one for the problems inherent within this approach.

It can be fun to hear what artists think of each other, especially if that opinion is preceded by the words 'this is off the record, right?'

It just happens that their medium is critique, which roves across forms and disguises itself as journalism or reportage. 

See rule three for a dialectic tension.

But, like shit, they have to be done. However, the individual who spends time talking about either subject is unwelcome in polite society, and they are both unlikely to provide an answer in matters of purpose or value.

Editta Braun (Vile thinking... so avoid, eh?)

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.

get connected with own feelings, own memories, own phantasies, own ideas - triggered by our performance.


Just let yourself go 

What is Visual Theatre?

Not long until Manipulate 2016 now, meaning that I am getting all excited. It's a festival of visual theatre, which roughly means 'the kind of theatre that I really really like'. It also means that I make an annual half-baked attempt to explain what is meant by visual art.

This year, I thought I'd get in the visual spirit by making this slap-dash chart featuring loads of stuff that I looked up on Wikipedia.

Apart from dividing the world into two - which is probably border-line racist - there's an incoherent chronology, loads of things missing and plenty of performance that I know absolutely nothing about! However, I think all of these art forms need to be considered when anyone else talks about visual theatre, or I'll accuse them of not knowing their history. 

Epilogue to the Genius Trilogy

That's enough, Genius.

The Critical Surfer

I am Donald Trump.

Those are HIS words, not mine

Why Diderot Matters...

Diederot was one of the Big Shots in the century before France had that bunch of revolutions starting in 1789. You know, the ones that inspired America to kick off the yoke of the UK, have been a template for leftists and ended up with an imperialist expansion across Europe. Using Owen Jones' description of right wing intellectuals in the 1970s (in a period when banging on about neo-liberalism was a minority interest, unlike today), Diderot was an 'outlyer', a thinker who presaged later developments.

Far from being concerned with hermetic analysis of theatre, Diderot's two periods of dramaturgical study were part of a dynamic debate. His Entretiens could be a response to Rosseau's worries about the morality of theatre (he repeated Plato's warnings, more or less, but with less ironic ambiguity), while his Advice to Actors is a comprehensive attempt to set up foundations for the training for performers (a professionalisation of the job, which could be seen as a prototype of 'professional development, as per contemporary buzzwords). 

Diderot's vision of theatre is not disengaged. His manifesto in Entretiens offers an almost naturalistic drama, with the aristocrats booted from their cosy seats on-stage, spectacular scenography replaced by tableaux vivants, dance to be classified and physical theatre (mime) to be integrated into performance. Above all, he made an appeal for a relevant theatre, one that demonstrated bourgeois values.

There are at least three good reasons to bother with Diderot. He apparently influenced Brecht - probably in his insistence on a theatre that was not interested in characters but situations. He provides a logic behind the status of the artist in society (that still exists today) and relates creativity to the burgeoning influence of bourgeois (and capitalist) culture. He also sits at an interesting point for art historians - between classicism and its enthusiasm for tradition and stability, and romanticism and the whole 'genius, entrepreneur, artist' blather. 

So, having been persuaded... some heavy-duty yap about Diderot will be coming soon. Sorry.