theatre

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I'm going through a period recently where I feel a bit like I'll never fit in with the theatre culture in which I exist.  Where you feel like your value system and priorities are completely out of whack with everyone else's.  Because if you all hate that show - and I think it's brilliant - or vice versa, then isn't it fair to think that we're off on a difficult foot?  

I feel it's important to mark those moments.  To remember when you feel differently.  And to lay the beacon for anyone who might feel similarly.

There is a tweet today that made me feel this acutely:

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216 likes!  less than 12 hours!

Liked and retweeted and replied to by many friends and people I respect.

I mean, there is pretentiousness here - and, without knowing who it is - I can imagine the voice and it being pretty irritating.

But - gulp - I dunno if there's anything wrong with the content of what's spoken here.

Lemme explain.

Luke (who I've briefly met once or twice, who has always been very nice, and who I believe to be a very fine playwright) says that he didn't understand a show and - probably from generosity and curiosity - asked the director what the idea and vision was behind it.  To me, this implies that a show needs to be able to be explained in order to be any good.  The ask for the idea feels suspiciously close to 'message theory', in which an audience's job is to decode whatever signs are put in front of them in order to read the show's message.  Spectating becomes exclusively an intellectual, rather than visceral, exercise.  The clearest way this has been described to me is that the experience of watching The Wizard of Oz (the film) is so much more than 'There's no place like home'.  It's for this reason why I'm suspicious of that mainstay of contemporary British directing education - describe the production in one sentence, and organise all scenic elements around that single sentence.  

But, there's more, why wouldn't an audience want to 'read their own truth'?  Again I dunno if I'd put it like that, but why would you want to explain everything to an audience?  They're always going to be active audience members regardless of what you put in front of them, so why wouldn't you want them to make leaps in logic, to imagine speculative connections, to allow it to resonate in their lives in their own way, and then to have a lively debate about their experience afterwards?  Sebastian Nübling - one of my biggest influences - often says that things are too "Hollywood" when they are spelt out too clearly.  Have a bit of a faith in the audience.

The tweet's imagined utopian theatre experience is a room of people, having an encounter with a performance with an idea (a vision, not visions!), and for some people to get that idea and for some people to not get that idea.  That all feels literary, intellectual, like a university seminar, and it isn't for me.

I dunno what the show was.  A show that creates the experience of 'I don't understand this' in its audience is often doing something wrong (often, conversely, by creating a tension in the audience that there is a message that they are not getting - rather than allowing them to relax into the experience).  

And I have nothing invested in making Luke or anyone else change their mind.  I don't think that I'm right - I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that there are people who think differently about theatre to me.

But the universalisation of that one experience into a set of aesthetic guidelines - liked by 216 people and joked with loads of gifs - makes me feel like I'm having a completely different conversation to a massive section of my peers & the theatre audience.  

And that's pretty effin' lonely.

DAS ERBE dir. Ersan Mondtag, stage. Rainer Casper, costume. Teresa Vergho, light. Rainer Casper

DAS ERBE
dir. Ersan Mondtag, stage. Rainer Casper, costume. Teresa Vergho, light. Rainer Casper

Questions

Last Saturday afternoon, I visited 'Hoochie Koochie' – an exhibition of dance performance choreographed by Trajal Harrell. It was a fascinating way to experience the breadth of work made by an artist who makes live performance – seeing all of these works, from across Harrell's output, performed in the same space (often simultaneously).

Browsing through the catalogue afterwards, I was drawn to how Harrell's practice is guided by questions. As Leilia Hasham says in the catalogue, Harrell's series of performances, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, is led by the question, “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the ball scene in Harlem had gone downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at the Judson Church?” In imagining and exploring the potential answers to this question, Harrell created several works over a period of years.

Trajal Harrell

Trajal Harrell

New York theatre company The TEAM also talk about their work in terms of questions. Artistic director Rachel Chavkin wrote that “The creation of Mission Drift began unofficially in May 2008 with the question 'What defines American capitalism specifically, versus capitalism as it took shape anywhere else in the world?” (I had lunch with Rachel 18 months or so ago in which she informally suggested that its her job as director to set a new project's question, and allowing the members of the company to explore this question).

Mission Drift by The TEAM

Mission Drift by The TEAM

I have, countless times, heard artists talk about what their work is saying, or have people ask me what I want a piece of work to say – as if the meaning of the work could be reduced to a single statement. I have always felt uncomfortable about this because it feels reductive. It feels like it'll make work that is just illustrating and proving a single statement for the duration. A question, on the other hand, is open and unpredictable; it can allow for many different answers. Those answers might even contradict one another.

The way that Harrell talks about the questions in his work feels liberating. Talking about the Twenty Looks... series, he says “Once I had the question for the series, I had to put myself imaginatively in that possibility, and yet problematize my own position within that procedure.” In asking something as clear as a single question, he sees the ethical limitations of his ability to answer. Engaging with such clarity allows the work to accumulate new and different layers.

The question only needs to be simple. I remember attending a lecture about Andy Warhol's television work by American media academic Lynn Spigel. I remember her introduction clearly; the introducing speaker said that Make Room for TV, Spigel's mega-important study of television, was defined by the simplicity and clarity of its question: how did all families come to keep their TV in the corner of their living room?

Caen Amour by Trajal Harrell

Caen Amour by Trajal Harrell

Harrell's work becomes so fascinating and complex because he asks simple, albeit imaginative, questions about history and about society. On his piece Caen Amour, he says “I started researching the hoochie koochie and looking at its potential relationship to butoh in terms of formal practices, both from an imaginary and a realistic point of view”. No-one else is putting hoochie koochie and butoh together; the question itself is simple yet specific and unique, and it offers endless answers.

None of this is especially revolutionary to academics, artists or writers accustomed to devising work from scratch. Yet, as a director, I often work with plays or texts that already exist and, all too often, my question is “How do I stage this play?”* I don't kid myself that I'm so unique and fascinating, in the context of the history of theatre, that my answer to this question (asked hundreds of times before) is going to be significant in and of itself. You're just going to be repeating something that somebody else has done before. Instead, I need to ask questions of these plays or ask questions that encounter plays and texts in their answers.

What question are you asking in your work? And, when you encounter someone else's work, what question do they appear to be asking?

* There's a caveat to be had here about directing plays, especially new plays, in which the writer has already asked important questions.  Too many questions spoil the broth, or something cleverer.

Place

“You may not ever really see them all [the details], but you've got to feel that they're there, somehow, to feel that it's a real place, a real world.” - David Lynch

In a meeting this past month, I said I wanted to make work that is rooted in place. Performances that reflect a community. At the time it felt like a woolly statement, but I've thought a lot more about it.

On these long trains back and forth to work with my Connections companies (one in Rotherham, one in Bideford – these places are not near one another), I have been watching Twin Peaks for the very first time. One of the most immediately remarkable things is Twin Peaks' topography: there's the mill in the middle of town, the diner with the great cherry pie further and, if you cross the river, there's One Eyed Jacks. David Lynch says that, “Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood”, and he creates that very efficiently.

One Eyed Jacks in TWIN PEAKS

One Eyed Jacks in TWIN PEAKS

Two of my favourite TV shows of recent years – Joe Swanberg's Easy and David Simon's The Wire – are rooted in real cities (Chicago & Baltimore respectively). Easy captures Chicago's culture in its craft beer, its local art and the parallel stories that reflect the city's different neighbourhoods & communities. Joe Swanberg said “I didn't want the show to be locked into a worldview of what I think is good-looking. I wanted it to be much more all-encompassing, in terms of what Chicago actually looks like.”, and so there was a process of scouting & discovering the parts he didn't already know.

The title card for one episode of EASY by Chicago artist Don't Fret (who is also fictionalised in the episode as an artist who designs labels for an illegal home brewing operation)

The title card for one episode of EASY by Chicago artist Don't Fret (who is also fictionalised in the episode as an artist who designs labels for an illegal home brewing operation)

As is well-documented David Simon worked as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, and the practice of careful listening he developed in this profession is crucial to The Wire's aesthetic. Scriptwriter Dennis Lehane said “When you hear the really authentic street poetry in the dialogue, that’s David, or Ed Burns. Anything that’s literally 2006 or 2007 African-American ghetto dialogue—that’s them.”

One of my favourite scenes from THE WIRE

These last two examples helped me think about how we can create place in a theatre, as opposed to taking a camera out on to the streets. Part is in the writing, like with David Simon's listening, in which you can discover that every place has its own poetry. And part could be in collaboration with local artists – as a nomad director, I want to look to local art, local musicians, and consider how these influences can integrate with the performance.

And then we come, finally but crucially, to actors. I want to work with local actors and local participants, and encourage them to be themselves rather than imitate something else. I've currently sworn off using faux accents in shows (my main note from Sebastian Nübling after he saw punkplay was that he genuinely couldn't understand why the company were imitating Americans) and, working with an international ensemble for Cuckoo's Nest..., this bore fascinating results.

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Frank Castorf

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Frank Castorf

About Frank Castorf's work, Joachim Fiebach said “Castorf lets the actors speak and act largely as in 'normal life'. They show their own personality as individuals on the stage, often out of the role. As performers, they comment on what they play and / or on important sociopolitical and cultural topics, sometimes on themselves as performers.” I would suggest that a lot of performers feel that they have to, perhaps from training, aspire to an 'ideal' of an actor (which probably translates to middle-class RP). To me, I want actors to speak & move as they would outside the theatre – to bring the outside to the inside. They grapple a text on to their own terms, and the performance is the product of that wrestling match.

That's what I meant in the meeting.

Castorf

(all quotations are by castorf and are my own translations, put together from my understanding of german sentence structure, liberal use of dict.cc and google translate, and a lot of ‘i think i know what he means’.  take with a massive grain of salt.) 

 

(Siegfried, dir. Castorf, des. Aleksandar Denić, light. Rainer Casper)

I have been studying the work of German-born director Frank Castorf over the past month.  Last November, Abigail, Cécile and I went to see his production of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ at the Volksbühne.  It went on for around six and a half hours and finished somewhere close to 1am; the whole theatre became the set (projected into the main space by two roaming camera crews), and the actors, with complete disregard for health and safety, climbed all over the space, shouted and screamed at each other with incredible pace, and clambered through the audience all seated on super comfy beanbags.  A six-and-a-half-hour Dostoevsky adaptation sounds dry af but it was sexy, hilarious, ridiculous and violent.

“In the theatre, before the dog begins to bite, all possible victims are warned ‘Caution, I’ll bite!’  When it begins, everyone is safe for a long time.  I no longer find this to be truthful; there can be no comedy and no sadness under these circumstances because everything that happens on the stage has been calculated.” (Castorf)

(Die Brüder Karamasow, dir. Castorf, des. Bert Neumann, light. Lothar Baumgarte)

Two things stick out from this study which characterise, for me, how Castorf sees the world.  

The first is a focus on politics and history – especially world politics and the relationship between a social mainstream & people who live outside that mainstream.  Reading his interviews often feel like reading something published by Verso Books; there was as much, if not more, in his interviews about reunification Germany, the Balkans, the relationship between the West and Africa, than there was about art and theatre.  He speaks with a cutting, bitter edge.  This is a primary food for his work:

“The movement of history, which is in part the history of class struggle, revolution and violent transformation, seems to be lost. This is part of our own complacency; we do not communicate processes which take place all over the world. We exclude, for example, Africa, so that we do not have to communicate with it anymore. You can see how a whole continent can be forgotten, because nobody can get to grips with it in medical, humanitarian, military or economic terms. It is placed outside of our communication system. The fact that we have not yet broken off contact with Belgrade or Iraq means that we have not yet given up hope there, that perhaps it is still possible to teach people the use of fork and knife.”  

Obvs this isn’t a unique characteristic, but to hear about politics - beyond the most up-to-date hot-take 'political’ discourse – with an outward-looking focus out of the mouth of a theatre director is inspiring.

(Faust, dir. Castorf, des. Aleksandar Denić, light. Lothar Baumgarte)

The other, related aspect that stuck out for me is Castorf’s focus on destruction : this is particularly acute in his relationship with the classic source material with which he works.  A text is stripped for scenes and situations – like individual tracks on a record – and are put together in a new formation.  

“Too much literature tries to model the world’s compehensibility and controllability. For me, there is something ridiculous about explaining things. Clarity is crushing. Because it’s a lie. That is why I am suspicious of traditional narrative structures… Therefore I very quickly pick up a screwdriver and saw. But we do not stop at the destruction.  Something is put back together again, something is built up; it is related to the old but it is a new construction. Suddenly, a completely different, negating and irrational state is created.”

A classic text is stripped for parts, and placed into a new dramaturgy alongside contemporary music, theoretical texts, text from other plays, and improvised dialogue between performers (talking either as themselves or as their characters).  There are in-jokes that run between the ensemble from performance to performance (apparently there was a cycle of shows in which actors would prepare a meal from scratch on stage, and they’re still making jokes about it).

I love all of this because I feel that it re-organises what an audience receive from an evening at the theatre.  It’s not a self-contained drama – comparable in the way it thinks of itself to a narrative drama movie – but more like a cabaret, with storytelling, song and other types of performance.  It’s self-awareness also locates it as a performance by this particular company of people based at this particular theatre in this particular city.  The fact that these shows are only presented a couple of times a month, and that they are so long, help to create the feeling of an 'event’. 

Now – try explaining this to even the most forward-thinking theatres and arts organisations in Britain.  'A classic’ sets off an inexorable train of associations - ideas of historical dress, lots of large-scale static images, long speeches that the audience sort-of follow.  And 'a new version of..’ sets off another train of associations - similar to the above but with swearing, maybe some actors in a glass box.  It turns a whole load of people off (those who specialise in new writing or devised new work), and it leads a whole other set of people (those who produce well-made new versions of classics) to expect something different.

There’s not a lot of room for a show to be a production of a classic text, but to have a jagged, elliptical and contemporary performance dramaturgy.  Peter Boenisch wrote somewhere that the presence of a devising process does not guarantee a forward-thinking dramaturgy in performance.  Yet it’s much, much more difficult to receive funding for a show that does not produce a ‘new piece of writing’ - you’ve just gotta call it something else.  

Castorf, for me, exemplifies the possibility of making contemporary work from old text: all his recent work is based on 19th century novels or Ibsen plays, but the shows’ radical dramaturgy of excess and carnage feels like the most contemporary theatre I’ve thought about in ages.   

(Baumeister Solness, dir. Castorf, des. Bert Neumann, light. Lothar Baumgarte)