----
1.
On the Great Joy of the Stars
JUNE
On the axis of Noon, the mouth of a grotto opens and startles you like a blue buttercup: inside, the meticulous progress of the planets can be watched. Nothing is as simple, grand, calm, and serene as this sight, nothing else releases so much happiness. A phonograph record that turns, but without anything mechanical. Chinese music. Up in Tibet, the sturdy gong of contemplation. In some rock crystals you see the ring of Venus like the neck of a black giraffe, speckled Jupiter, the jungle of Mars, Earth, inalterable as platinum.
In these meadows, breathing is a wild horse.
-- from Blaise Cendrars (trans. Esther Allen), ‘The Eubage; or, At the Antipodes of Unity’ (1917)
2.
Derren Brown: Phone Booth (from Trick of the Mind, 2004)
3.
![]()
Jean-Michel Basquiat,‘Jawbone of an Ass’. Screenprint. 1982. 41.5” x 60”.
4.
‘Myspace’, a short film by Julie Angel for Parkour Generations
5.
Theatre spaces playlist:
[01] Charlemagne Palestine,‘Sine Tone Study’ (1967)
[02] Christopher Knowles
[04] Luciano Berio, extract from: Sinfonia (1968-69): III – In ruhig fliessender Bewegung. New Swingle Singers; Orchestre National de France, cond. Pierre Boulez
[05] Furious Pig, ‘I Don’t Like Your Face’ (1980)
[06] Scott Walker,‘The Cockfighter’, from Tilt (1995)
[07] Derek Bailey,‘Explanation and Thanks’ (excerpt), from Carpal Tunnel (2005)
[08] Peter Bellamy,‘Conversation With Death’
[09] Morton Feldman,‘Durations V’ (1961)
[10] J.H. Prynne reads ‘Cocaine’ by John Wieners (from the QUID CD-R Low Bleb Score)
6.
Gary Hill, Viewer (1996)
7.
![]()
Will McBride,‘Uli Hager in Frankfurt, first session, 1982’. Gelatine silver print. 30cm x 40cm.
8.
Ariston tv ad, 1987 (after Zbigniew Rybczynski’s‘Tango’)
9.
(a)
. . . Newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant, Marco Polo could express himself only by drawing objects from his baggage – drums, salt fish, necklaces of wart hogs’ teeth – and pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl.
The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armorer’s shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.
But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.
-- from Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver), Invisible Cities (1974)
(b)
David Moss,‘Language Linkage’ (extract)
10.
Extract from Foi (2003)
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (ch.), Les Ballets D. de la B.,& Capella Flamenca
11.
![]()
Maggie O’Sullivan,‘chain crate ilate’ (from murmur: tasks of mourning, 1999-2004)
12.
New Order, ‘True Faith’ (1987), dir. Philippe Decouflé
13.
(a)
![]()
Grow Island
(b)
GONZALO:
Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, [...]
And were the king on't, what would I do?
I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty; [...]
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
-- from William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610), Act II Scene 1
(c)
If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if
Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut
and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly
in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
[Read the rest.]
-- Gertrude Stein, extract from ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (1923)
(d)
I'm going to tell you a story you've never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. It takes place on the night June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murder of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night because I know the facts better than anyone. I know the players. I've seen the evidence. I've heard the theories. And, of course, I've read all the stories: That I did it. That I did it but I don't know I did it. That I can no longer tell fact from fiction. That I wake up in the middle of the night, consumed by guilt, screaming.
-- opening paragraph of O.J. Simpson, If I Did It (2007)
14.
Extract from Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1977)
15.
![]()
Jannis Kounellis, Untitled. 1967. Partial installation view.
16.
‘The Dogbowl’: pool skating sequence from Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacey Peralta, 2001)
17.
“At 00.00hrs on January 1st 2005 an automated beacon began broadcasting on the web at http://www.automatedbeacon.net
The beacon continuously relays selected live web searches as they are being made around the world, presenting them back in series and at regular intervals.
The beacon has been instigated to act as a silent witness: a feedback loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves to ourselves in real-time.
A physical display system is also being developed for installation in public spaces, galleries &c.”
Automated Beacon
18.
Jesse in a photosession with Brad Posey (from Hot Sessions #17, 2006)
19.
...You are before the field, although it seldom happens that your attention is drawn to the field before you have noticed an event within it. Usually the event draws your attention to the field, and, almost instantaneously, your own awareness of the field then gives a special significance to the event.
The first event – since every event is part of a process – invariably leads to other, or, more precisely, invariably leads you to observe others in the field. The first event may be almost anything, provided that it is not in itself overdramatic.
If you saw a man cry out and fall down, the implications of the event would immediately break the self-sufficiency of the field. You would run into it from the outside. You would try to take him out of it. Even if no physical action is demanded, any over-dramatic event will have the same disadvantage.
If you saw a tree being struck by lightning, the dramatic force of the event would inevitably led you to interpret it in terms which at that moment would seem larger than the field before you. So, the first event should not be over-dramatic but otherwise it can be almost anything:
Two horses grazing.
A dog running in narrowing circles.
An old woman looking for mushrooms.
A hawk hovering above.
Finches chasing each other from bush to bush.
Chickens pottering.
Two men talking.
A flock of sheep moving exceedingly slowly from one corner to the centre.
A voice calling.
A child walking.
The first event leads you to notice further events which may be consequences of the first, or which may be entirely unconnected with it except that they take place in the same field. Often the first event which fixes your attention is more obvious than the subsequent ones. Having noticed the dog, you notice a butterfly. Having noticed the horses, you hear a woodpecker and then see it fly across a corner of the field. You watch a child walking and when he has left the field deserted and eventless, you notice a cat jump down into it from the top of a wall.
By this time you are within the experience. Yet saying this implies narrative time and the essence of the experience is that it takes place outside such time. The experience does not enter into the narrative of your life – that narrative which, at one level or another of your consciousness, you are continually retelling and developing to yourself. On the contrary, this narrative is interrupted. The visible extension of the field in space displaces awareness of your own lived time. By what precise mechanism does it do this?
You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events. You have defined the events you have seen primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by relating them to the event of the field, which at the same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events which are taking place within it.
You may complain that I have now suddenly changed my use of the word ‘event’. At first I referred to the field as a space awaiting events; now I refer to it as an event in itself. But this inconsistency parallels exactly the apparently illogical nature of the experience. Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognisable as your own.
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.
-- from John Berger,‘Field’, in About Looking (1980); reprinted in Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (2001)
20.
Extract from Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)
21.
![]()
For years I have been nervous around the language of ‘theatre spaces’.
Most theatre makers casually use the word ‘space’ to refer to the place in which their work is rehearsed and presented –- so a venue might have a reputation as “a nice space” or “a difficult space”. For the venerated British director Peter Brook, the fundamental platform for theatrical work is nothing more than an “empty space”. I never really questioned this usage until, in an interdisciplinary workshop I was leading several years ago, the poet Keston Sutherland acutely reminded me that “people don’t live in spaces, they live in places”. At the time I assumed he was overreacting to a little terminological dissonance; but quite quickly I came to realise that he was actually disclosing and identifying a set of highly ideologically inflected assumptions with which most theatre-makers are readily complicit. My practice, and my understanding of the commitments underlying it, have been substantially reformed by this perceptual jolt. I now find myself wanting strenuously to oppose Brook’s idea that any ‘space’ or place that might be temporarily occupied by an act of theatre can possibly be ‘empty’: and the wilful suppression of cultural and political specificity that such a blithe erasure seems to require strikes me increasingly as, at best, a pretty dubious transcendence fantasy.
For that reason, I have tended to be cautious around the idea of ‘space’, and to want to think more about using theatre to create places in which people can live; places that are fit for living in; places in which makers and audiences can experience themselves living together. But recently, I begin to find the ideas of ‘place’ and ‘space’ creating a more productive dialectical tension. To borrow a phrase from Roy Fisher, theatre’s what I think with, and the more time I spend examining the intricate relations of social and aesthetic form, the more I have recourse to a purely conceptual language of space and spaciousness, as part of a search for new models – both adaptable realities and speculative fictions – for the complex of relationships that theatre might contain and produce.
To some extent, the consequences of that ‘spacious’ mode of thinking can be seen in the above post. Of these twenty ‘spaces’, only one – the extract from Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s extraordinary Foi – is being described within a designated theatre; but all of them suggest to me something of how meaning (and usable sensation) is created within the acts and instances of theatre at its fullest. The characteristics and values of multiplicity, intimacy, strangeness, dissonance, public presence, self-consciousness, alterity, subjunctivity, queerness, radicalism and – above all – the civic import of attentiveness run through these twenty spaces and create numerous partial or provisional ‘theatres’, all of which are gradually shaping and attracting the tendencies of my own work.
As part of this enquiry, I’ve very recently started a research project at Rose Bruford College in London, where I’ve contributed some teaching to a module in postmodern practice in the past couple of years. The focus of the project is on the virtual or (to borrow from Žižek) ‘inexistent’ spaces that have developed online and in digital territories in recent years, many of which have of course given rise to new structural paradigms for creative and interactive exchange. Though a physical / offline realization of these paradigms may seem impossible or at best redundant, my particular interest in this project is in nonetheless trying to make new model theatre spaces – or, rather, places – that harness the dynamics of these inexistent territories to bring about new species of theatricality.
The reason why I’m writing about this here, and why I wanted to throw open these different partial models for response and discussion, is that at the end of last year, as I started to sketch an outline for this research project, I wrote to Dennis to ask if he was OK with me using this blog as my principal test-case. For the eighteen months that I’ve been around here, first as a lurker and over the past year as a contributor, I’ve been fascinated and inspired by the blog, both in terms of its incredibly rich content and the indicative strength of its dissidence (and the often highly performative ways in which that dissidence is expressed), and also of its structural and cybernetic features – especially its (somewhat) organic development into a multi-authored creative system which has already given rise to countless new friendships and working collaborations both on- and offline. To put it very simply, I’d like theatre more if it behaved more like this blog, and I wanted to spend some of the next few months, at least, thinking about how that might be possible. Anyway, with characteristic generosity, Dennis agreed, and unless this weekend results in a blizzard of negative reaction from the community here, that’s what’s going to happen.
The ultimate intention – though this obviously depends on a whole bunch of factors which are at present way out of my control – is to create a midscale theatre “adaptation” of this blog. (Adaptation is in scare quotes there because the next year is all about figuring out what ‘adaptation’ might actually mean in this case.)
I want to reassure everybody right from the start that I’m not talking about turning this community into a soap opera in which particular posters become characters and their conversations become staged dialogues. (That could be cute, and maybe someone should do it, but it won’t be me.) I do very much want the input, both creative and advisory, of anyone here who wants to be a part of the development of the work, but absolutely nothing from the past, present or future of the blog is going to end up being even obliquely reflected in whatever gets made without the direct consent of whoever generated it. And anyway, that’s all for some way down the line. For the first few months, at least, it’s all about experiments in structure and form.
The first, tentative output from the project will be at a symposium at the college in a couple of months. In the meantime, and presumably for the duration of the project, there will, inevitably, be a separate blog, which both the community here and the groups of artists and students working with me will be able to access and participate in. I’ll post details when all that’s set up, obviously, and I’d suggest that discussion around the project happens mostly in that separate forum, so that normal service is not disrupted here in any way.
I’m really interested to know everybody’s thoughts: both on the project and on the 20 theatre spaces above. (If anybody wants to write backchannel, feel free to email me.) And I’ll obviously report back in the next few weeks as the project blog starts up. TIA, y’all.
Chris x
----
*
p.s. Hey. The great British theater maker and d.l. Chris Goode made this amazing post for the blog back in 2008, and it's still an awesome monster. Hence, its rebirth. You're in for a treat today, everybody. Take full advantage please. Thanks!
1.
On the Great Joy of the Stars
JUNE
On the axis of Noon, the mouth of a grotto opens and startles you like a blue buttercup: inside, the meticulous progress of the planets can be watched. Nothing is as simple, grand, calm, and serene as this sight, nothing else releases so much happiness. A phonograph record that turns, but without anything mechanical. Chinese music. Up in Tibet, the sturdy gong of contemplation. In some rock crystals you see the ring of Venus like the neck of a black giraffe, speckled Jupiter, the jungle of Mars, Earth, inalterable as platinum.
In these meadows, breathing is a wild horse.
-- from Blaise Cendrars (trans. Esther Allen), ‘The Eubage; or, At the Antipodes of Unity’ (1917)
2.
Derren Brown: Phone Booth (from Trick of the Mind, 2004)
3.
Jean-Michel Basquiat,‘Jawbone of an Ass’. Screenprint. 1982. 41.5” x 60”.
4.
‘Myspace’, a short film by Julie Angel for Parkour Generations
5.
Theatre spaces playlist:
[01] Charlemagne Palestine,‘Sine Tone Study’ (1967)
[02] Christopher Knowles
[04] Luciano Berio, extract from: Sinfonia (1968-69): III – In ruhig fliessender Bewegung. New Swingle Singers; Orchestre National de France, cond. Pierre Boulez
[05] Furious Pig, ‘I Don’t Like Your Face’ (1980)
[06] Scott Walker,‘The Cockfighter’, from Tilt (1995)
[07] Derek Bailey,‘Explanation and Thanks’ (excerpt), from Carpal Tunnel (2005)
[08] Peter Bellamy,‘Conversation With Death’
[09] Morton Feldman,‘Durations V’ (1961)
[10] J.H. Prynne reads ‘Cocaine’ by John Wieners (from the QUID CD-R Low Bleb Score)
6.
Gary Hill, Viewer (1996)
7.
Will McBride,‘Uli Hager in Frankfurt, first session, 1982’. Gelatine silver print. 30cm x 40cm.
8.
Ariston tv ad, 1987 (after Zbigniew Rybczynski’s‘Tango’)
9.
(a)
. . . Newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant, Marco Polo could express himself only by drawing objects from his baggage – drums, salt fish, necklaces of wart hogs’ teeth – and pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl.
The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armorer’s shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.
But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.
-- from Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver), Invisible Cities (1974)
(b)
David Moss,‘Language Linkage’ (extract)
10.
Extract from Foi (2003)
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (ch.), Les Ballets D. de la B.,& Capella Flamenca
11.
Maggie O’Sullivan,‘chain crate ilate’ (from murmur: tasks of mourning, 1999-2004)
12.
New Order, ‘True Faith’ (1987), dir. Philippe Decouflé
13.
(a)
Grow Island
(b)
GONZALO:
Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, [...]
And were the king on't, what would I do?
I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty; [...]
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
-- from William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610), Act II Scene 1
(c)
If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if
Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut
and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly
in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
[Read the rest.]
-- Gertrude Stein, extract from ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (1923)
(d)
I'm going to tell you a story you've never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. It takes place on the night June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murder of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night because I know the facts better than anyone. I know the players. I've seen the evidence. I've heard the theories. And, of course, I've read all the stories: That I did it. That I did it but I don't know I did it. That I can no longer tell fact from fiction. That I wake up in the middle of the night, consumed by guilt, screaming.
-- opening paragraph of O.J. Simpson, If I Did It (2007)
14.
Extract from Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1977)
15.
Jannis Kounellis, Untitled. 1967. Partial installation view.
16.
‘The Dogbowl’: pool skating sequence from Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacey Peralta, 2001)
17.
“At 00.00hrs on January 1st 2005 an automated beacon began broadcasting on the web at http://www.automatedbeacon.net
The beacon continuously relays selected live web searches as they are being made around the world, presenting them back in series and at regular intervals.
The beacon has been instigated to act as a silent witness: a feedback loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves to ourselves in real-time.
A physical display system is also being developed for installation in public spaces, galleries &c.”
Automated Beacon
18.
Jesse in a photosession with Brad Posey (from Hot Sessions #17, 2006)
19.
...You are before the field, although it seldom happens that your attention is drawn to the field before you have noticed an event within it. Usually the event draws your attention to the field, and, almost instantaneously, your own awareness of the field then gives a special significance to the event.
The first event – since every event is part of a process – invariably leads to other, or, more precisely, invariably leads you to observe others in the field. The first event may be almost anything, provided that it is not in itself overdramatic.
If you saw a man cry out and fall down, the implications of the event would immediately break the self-sufficiency of the field. You would run into it from the outside. You would try to take him out of it. Even if no physical action is demanded, any over-dramatic event will have the same disadvantage.
If you saw a tree being struck by lightning, the dramatic force of the event would inevitably led you to interpret it in terms which at that moment would seem larger than the field before you. So, the first event should not be over-dramatic but otherwise it can be almost anything:
Two horses grazing.
A dog running in narrowing circles.
An old woman looking for mushrooms.
A hawk hovering above.
Finches chasing each other from bush to bush.
Chickens pottering.
Two men talking.
A flock of sheep moving exceedingly slowly from one corner to the centre.
A voice calling.
A child walking.
The first event leads you to notice further events which may be consequences of the first, or which may be entirely unconnected with it except that they take place in the same field. Often the first event which fixes your attention is more obvious than the subsequent ones. Having noticed the dog, you notice a butterfly. Having noticed the horses, you hear a woodpecker and then see it fly across a corner of the field. You watch a child walking and when he has left the field deserted and eventless, you notice a cat jump down into it from the top of a wall.
By this time you are within the experience. Yet saying this implies narrative time and the essence of the experience is that it takes place outside such time. The experience does not enter into the narrative of your life – that narrative which, at one level or another of your consciousness, you are continually retelling and developing to yourself. On the contrary, this narrative is interrupted. The visible extension of the field in space displaces awareness of your own lived time. By what precise mechanism does it do this?
You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events. You have defined the events you have seen primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by relating them to the event of the field, which at the same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events which are taking place within it.
You may complain that I have now suddenly changed my use of the word ‘event’. At first I referred to the field as a space awaiting events; now I refer to it as an event in itself. But this inconsistency parallels exactly the apparently illogical nature of the experience. Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognisable as your own.
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.
-- from John Berger,‘Field’, in About Looking (1980); reprinted in Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (2001)
20.
Extract from Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)
21.
For years I have been nervous around the language of ‘theatre spaces’.
Most theatre makers casually use the word ‘space’ to refer to the place in which their work is rehearsed and presented –- so a venue might have a reputation as “a nice space” or “a difficult space”. For the venerated British director Peter Brook, the fundamental platform for theatrical work is nothing more than an “empty space”. I never really questioned this usage until, in an interdisciplinary workshop I was leading several years ago, the poet Keston Sutherland acutely reminded me that “people don’t live in spaces, they live in places”. At the time I assumed he was overreacting to a little terminological dissonance; but quite quickly I came to realise that he was actually disclosing and identifying a set of highly ideologically inflected assumptions with which most theatre-makers are readily complicit. My practice, and my understanding of the commitments underlying it, have been substantially reformed by this perceptual jolt. I now find myself wanting strenuously to oppose Brook’s idea that any ‘space’ or place that might be temporarily occupied by an act of theatre can possibly be ‘empty’: and the wilful suppression of cultural and political specificity that such a blithe erasure seems to require strikes me increasingly as, at best, a pretty dubious transcendence fantasy.
For that reason, I have tended to be cautious around the idea of ‘space’, and to want to think more about using theatre to create places in which people can live; places that are fit for living in; places in which makers and audiences can experience themselves living together. But recently, I begin to find the ideas of ‘place’ and ‘space’ creating a more productive dialectical tension. To borrow a phrase from Roy Fisher, theatre’s what I think with, and the more time I spend examining the intricate relations of social and aesthetic form, the more I have recourse to a purely conceptual language of space and spaciousness, as part of a search for new models – both adaptable realities and speculative fictions – for the complex of relationships that theatre might contain and produce.
To some extent, the consequences of that ‘spacious’ mode of thinking can be seen in the above post. Of these twenty ‘spaces’, only one – the extract from Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s extraordinary Foi – is being described within a designated theatre; but all of them suggest to me something of how meaning (and usable sensation) is created within the acts and instances of theatre at its fullest. The characteristics and values of multiplicity, intimacy, strangeness, dissonance, public presence, self-consciousness, alterity, subjunctivity, queerness, radicalism and – above all – the civic import of attentiveness run through these twenty spaces and create numerous partial or provisional ‘theatres’, all of which are gradually shaping and attracting the tendencies of my own work.
As part of this enquiry, I’ve very recently started a research project at Rose Bruford College in London, where I’ve contributed some teaching to a module in postmodern practice in the past couple of years. The focus of the project is on the virtual or (to borrow from Žižek) ‘inexistent’ spaces that have developed online and in digital territories in recent years, many of which have of course given rise to new structural paradigms for creative and interactive exchange. Though a physical / offline realization of these paradigms may seem impossible or at best redundant, my particular interest in this project is in nonetheless trying to make new model theatre spaces – or, rather, places – that harness the dynamics of these inexistent territories to bring about new species of theatricality.
The reason why I’m writing about this here, and why I wanted to throw open these different partial models for response and discussion, is that at the end of last year, as I started to sketch an outline for this research project, I wrote to Dennis to ask if he was OK with me using this blog as my principal test-case. For the eighteen months that I’ve been around here, first as a lurker and over the past year as a contributor, I’ve been fascinated and inspired by the blog, both in terms of its incredibly rich content and the indicative strength of its dissidence (and the often highly performative ways in which that dissidence is expressed), and also of its structural and cybernetic features – especially its (somewhat) organic development into a multi-authored creative system which has already given rise to countless new friendships and working collaborations both on- and offline. To put it very simply, I’d like theatre more if it behaved more like this blog, and I wanted to spend some of the next few months, at least, thinking about how that might be possible. Anyway, with characteristic generosity, Dennis agreed, and unless this weekend results in a blizzard of negative reaction from the community here, that’s what’s going to happen.
The ultimate intention – though this obviously depends on a whole bunch of factors which are at present way out of my control – is to create a midscale theatre “adaptation” of this blog. (Adaptation is in scare quotes there because the next year is all about figuring out what ‘adaptation’ might actually mean in this case.)
I want to reassure everybody right from the start that I’m not talking about turning this community into a soap opera in which particular posters become characters and their conversations become staged dialogues. (That could be cute, and maybe someone should do it, but it won’t be me.) I do very much want the input, both creative and advisory, of anyone here who wants to be a part of the development of the work, but absolutely nothing from the past, present or future of the blog is going to end up being even obliquely reflected in whatever gets made without the direct consent of whoever generated it. And anyway, that’s all for some way down the line. For the first few months, at least, it’s all about experiments in structure and form.
The first, tentative output from the project will be at a symposium at the college in a couple of months. In the meantime, and presumably for the duration of the project, there will, inevitably, be a separate blog, which both the community here and the groups of artists and students working with me will be able to access and participate in. I’ll post details when all that’s set up, obviously, and I’d suggest that discussion around the project happens mostly in that separate forum, so that normal service is not disrupted here in any way.
I’m really interested to know everybody’s thoughts: both on the project and on the 20 theatre spaces above. (If anybody wants to write backchannel, feel free to email me.) And I’ll obviously report back in the next few weeks as the project blog starts up. TIA, y’all.
Chris x
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p.s. Hey. The great British theater maker and d.l. Chris Goode made this amazing post for the blog back in 2008, and it's still an awesome monster. Hence, its rebirth. You're in for a treat today, everybody. Take full advantage please. Thanks!