This post ends by soliciting your help. So if you want you can just skip to the final section and see what that’s all about.
Hello! My name’s Chris Goode, I make theatre, and this is the second worst photograph of me that’s ever been taken.
According to the small print, it’s April 15th, 2008 and I’m about to decapitate Dennis. We’re at the London Dungeon, where they encourage this sort of thing. We’ve queued for an hour to get in and I’m not sure I’m going to have any fun here so I slightly want to decapitate Dennis for real which is probably why my smile looks so desperate.
This is my third and final day of hanging out in London with Dennis and it’s been awesome. He’s being astonishingly gracious given the circumstances. The idea was that he’d come over to London to talk about a project I was developing, to adapt this blog into some kind of theatre/performance thing. The project is being supported by a drama school who have invited Dennis and me to go and talk at a symposium they’re having. Only the people who invited us are not the people who are curating the symposium, and the inviting people forgot to tell the symposium people, or something. So we find out just a few days before Dennis is coming over that there’s no symposium slot after all. Amazingly, he says he’ll come anyway, and so when he gets here we talk a tiny bit about the project and I introduce him to some of the artists I know who might work on it with me, but mostly we just hang out, go to art shows, the London Dungeon thing happens, there’s dinner with a bunch of blog regulars (I get freaked out for some reason and amscray). Dennis posted some pics from the trip here. Look how young and hopeful we all are.
A few weeks earlier, I’ve done a guest post on the blog, nominally about the idea of ‘theatre space’, though it’s mostly a way of introducing the performance project to the blog’s then-readers. (It got a re-run a couple of months ago, which was nice; all the audio files have gone missing but other than that it’s pretty intact, and I still feel close to it.) I’m quite nervous because it feels like a weird thing to do, for one person to want to make such a strong creative intervention in relation to a place that’s so collective in nature. But no one objects, and in fact of course a lot of people are warm and encouraging, as is Dennis; and then we have those days together in London, and it feels like we’re off and running. Except that, post-symposium, relations with the drama school get very weird, and given that they’re the only source of financial support at this stage, within another few weeks it’s obvious that the project is dead in the water. (Or so it seems, dot dot dot.)
Maybe I should try and explain something about where that project came from in the first place.
* * *
By the time of Dennis’s London trip and the phantom symposium, I’d been reading the blog regularly – and kind of fanatically I guess – for about eighteen months, though the first few months I was in silent mode. Right from the start, the blog began to re-shape some of my thinking about theatre and what I wanted it to do.
The photos in this section are all taken from the only production to date of a play I wrote in 2007, called Speed Death of the Radiant Child. (I did a day about Speed Death here, which I’d totally forgotten about until now.) I think back to this as a period where what I was looking for from theatre really started to become clearer to me. Speed Death was I guess a first step, a reactive one – a sense of wanting to trash all the things that I felt were constraining me. It was like a convergence of negative aversions – to the literary traditions of British theatre, its bourgeois tastefulness and lugubrious ironies – and positive energies – admitting the energies of punk and late modernism and queer culture that I’d been too cautious about up until then. It was a play about a self-harming teenage girl and the consultant psychiatrist to whom she has been referred; but all of that narrative was completely tangled up with much more oblique stuff about Windscale (Britain’s worst ever nuclear accident) and the death of River Phoenix and stuff like that. There was lots of intense music and semi-gratuitous nudity and a haunted photocopier and a lot of people loved it but even they mostly didn’t know what to make of it. I suppose the important thing was that it told me how much I really fucking needed to rip stuff up and start again.
I had been bugged for a long time by the feeling that, though I had totally dedicated my life to theatre, there were lots of times when even the best work around felt less exciting to me than the experimental scenes in music and poetry, or contemporary visual arts practice, or even (and perhaps especially) the best porn. I hardly ever felt as deeply engaged, as moved, as extended, as empathetic, as alive at the theatre as I did watching good porn – or even bad porn, sometimes. And I was increasingly frustrated that film-makers were increasingly figuring out how to just get on and use real sex and sort of ignore, or overleap, the barriers that conventionally (slash legally) stopped them doing so; in the space of just a few years there had been Pola X and Ken Park and 9 Songs and Destricted and Shortbus– not all of which are great movies but they’re all interesting and worthwhile attempts to do something relatively radical. And then of course there was Bruce LaBruce’s twin-track approach, making arthouse and hardcore versions of the same films. It was a terrific provocation, one I lost sleep over for months on end. When so much of what I wanted out of theatre was a candid integrity around the liveness and realness of bodies and intimacy and the potential political valency of desire, it seemed like yet another generation of makers – my own, this time – was falling short.
And of course this blog was making me braver. Helping me to understand how literature and visual art and music and porn might speak – eloquently, cogently – to each other, about each other, extending each other’s languages, overflowing into each other’s territories.
And then of course the other thing that this blog was throwing down as a challenge was its degree of interactivity. Particularly at that time, when almost any post would attract dozens of comments, there was something fascinating about the de facto community that had formed here: with Dennis as its focal point but by no means its leader or author or parent. We talked to each other a lot, simultaneously strangers and intimate friends, arguing like family sometimes, collaborating as artists, conspiring like activists; weird pseudonymous performances took place ‘backstage’, there were in-fights and irruptions, subroutines of tension or flirting or melodrama. Often it was totally exhilarating; sometimes it could get very troubling.
All of these things still seem to happen here (I’m often not around for weeks at a time now, so I might not have a complete picture), and I guess in harking nostalgically back to 2007/08, what I’m responding to is not some spurious golden era but simply a period where this blog was still discovering – as maybe it still is – what it could be, who the people here could be to each other, what social life here was going to look like. And this, for me, is a set of theatrical questions. Just earlier today my friend Maddy Costa, who’s the critical writer in residence with my company, reminded me of this quote from the academic Helen Freshwater: “Our sense of the proper, or ideal relationship between theatre and its audiences can illuminate our hopes for other models of social interaction.” That’s exactly the sense I was feeling (or, at any rate, feeling clearly) for the first time in 2007, and this blog totally crystallized those feelings. As someone whose politics are on the anarchist left, I sometimes feel starved for visible working models of reconfigured social space. But this was always one. It’s striking even today how self-regulating and largely troll-free this community has been over the years. No one in charge, but everyone setting the tone together for a peaceable – but productively frictional – mode of attachment.
I felt like this was a question that was getting thrown up in all sorts of online spaces a few years ago. These really interesting emergent communities that were occuping a virtual space of congregation or resistance, that could only exist in their distinctive shapes because they were virtual: but what could real world gatherings and social forms take from them? What could be learned and translated across?
So, I guess those were the questions that were increasingly motivating my work as 2007 drew on. What could theatre learn from DC’s? – about sexual dissidence; about dialogue with other cultural ideas and the spirit of the ‘Varioso’; and about the holding-open of anarchic creative and collaborative meeting-space?
And that’s why I wanted to adapt the blog for live performance – whatever the fuck that might have meant at the time! But, as I’ve said, although we got tantalisingly close to making it happen, in the end it just wasn’t a good match for the financial support of an educational establishment with its own innate neo-liberal agenda and institutional inertia.
And so I got on with making other things instead that developed similar ideas. Here are a few examples.
* * *
Hey Mathew (2008)
In June 2007 I started work on a piece called An Apparently Closed Room, for a solo male performer (my longterm collaborator and friend Theron Schmidt). The title came from a chapter in Growing Up Absurd, the queer anarchist sociologist Paul Goodman’s brilliant investigation of what was at that time called ‘juvenile delinquency’: very briefly, it captured the idea that young men growing up in capitalist society were so mesmerised by the apparatus of capitalism – even those who were opposed to it still defined themselves in relation to it – that none of them realised that the door to the room they were trapped in was ajar: that they could just walk away from it all.
Trailer for ‘Paul Goodman Changed My Life’
Something that interested me very much in relation to Goodman’s ‘apparently closed room’ was the choreographer and educationalist Rudolf Laban’s concept of the kinesphere. If you imagine the furthest your body can reach from whatever its position is right now as you read these words – how far you can stretch your arms or legs, the reach of your head, and so on – that imaginary sphere or cube (however you draw it) is your kinesphere: and so as you move, your kinesphere moves with you.
But I read an interesting essay about the great contemporary choreographer William Forsythe and the idea that his dancers are in a sense trying to hurl themselves out of their own kinesphere, or break it or collapse it. In a sense what this essay describes is impossible – the kinesphere always travels with you – but the attempt it describes is not impossible and I’ve always loved the quality of movement that seems to connote or demand.
Extract from William Forsythe, ‘One Flat Thing Reproduced’
So An Apparently Closed Room was an attempt to take the young male body that Goodman was philosophically concerned with (and erotically fixated on) and test its limits in relation to the various kinds of ‘rooms’ that it was in – in terms of locale and compass but also ideology, identity, sexuality. The privileging of the body as the locus of the performance generally meant a default nakedness – I had already come to understand that clothing was not an extension of the body but an ideological expression of the place the body found itself in – but the use of clothing, partial or complete, to create provisional identities which we came to call ‘personas’. These personas tended to be erotically volatile to various degrees and the intimacies they traced and permitted in their offer to an audience gaze were often deeply affecting.
Perhaps inevitably, the trajectories of these eroticized enquiries – the desire (on my part at least) always to be throwing the body beyond normative ‘kinespheres’ of movement and self-presentation – led towards really challenging territories, and in April 2008, just a few days after the optimistic high of Dennis’s London trip, Theron and I came to a place where we found we couldn’t go any further. Once again it felt like my urge to push (as safely as possible) past the safety barriers was – understandably, of course – unsustainable when it came to working with other people, whether institutions or individual collaborators: and I was desperately disappointed to feel that I had to abandon yet another project because, essentially, I was trying to go ‘too far’ – when I felt that going ‘too far’ was the only destination worth pursuing if one wanted to engage seriously with the possibility of political change with a queer / anarchist impetus behind it. It wasn’t that there was a particular goal or some kind of terminal apotheosis of transgression that I was working towards; it was just that I was acutely interested in the moment where the obstruction – the wall of fear, the retreat of desire – was encountered, and in asking what the political or personal nature of that obstacle might be?
Thankfully, having abandoned all hope of proceeding with this work, I remembered seeing a young actor called Jonny Liron on the fringe at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007. He was in a play – Daniel Austin’s Apollo/Dionysus– which required him to be naked throughout, and to occupy (as Dionysus) a mode of intense erotic charisma. In this interesting, frustrating show, I had thought his performance was absolutely stunning. And so I got in touch and asked him what he was up to; we started talking, exchanging emails, swapping ideas – it was very tumultuously exciting to be getting to know him, and fairly quickly he moved to London, and we began an indescribably close friendship and collaborative relationship that lasted for five years, and changed my life utterly and irreversibly – and it started with the aborted project, An Apparently Closed Room.
Picking up sort of where I’d left off with Theron, but bringing two other collaborators into the mix – movement director Jamie Wood and lighting designer Cis O’Boyle, I was suddenly able to pursue my ideas pretty much wherever they might lead: if anything, Jonny was so eager that often he was ahead of me in terms of his intrepid engagement with the erotic threads of the work. I’d done some work with Theron using pornography as a jumping-off point for the development of personas and movement styles; with Jonny, this became critically refined. In particular we were interested in what were then commonly called ‘self-pics’ – selfies, now – and the ways in which the self-created photos of young men that we worked with seemed to reflect something new about the kinesphere – the camera held at arm’s length, often at a weird angle to get the whole body in, or at least the genitals, or whatever the subject was aiming for. This was another ‘closed room’ to play with – how far from the body can the body get? Of course the mirror, often, became the solution, the prosthesis, which we picked up on quickly by handing Jonny a video camera and inviting him to video himself.
By the time it met an audience, the piece was called Hey Mathew– named after Paul Goodman’s son Mathew, who died (at around Jonny’s age) in a climbing accident; this gave the piece an emotional resonance which went way beyond the somewhat theoretical concerns that had initially framed it. The audience watched as Jonny – naked by default, but stepping into and out of different sets of clothes – occupied different personas: both the ‘type’ personas we had discovered in our work, nicknamed things like Cardigan Kid or Hoodie Boy or Bootboy, and the specifically imitative personas we had used as stimulus – Joe Dallessandro in Flesh, say, or the models in photographs by Greg Gorman, Ed Templeton, Steven Klein...
Opening scene from ‘Flesh’ (dir. Paul Morrissey, 1968)
Greg Knudson by Greg Gorman
As Jonny moved around the room, a video screen became the ‘mirror’ that allowed him to have an ‘other’ body to enact his moving self-pics – undressing in a hotel bedroom, sketching in a rehearsal studio, hanging out and drinking with friends, masturbating to orgasm in his own bed. I, meanwhile, was present, if marginal, offering a sort of commentary on what the audience was seeing and how they might or might not frame it for themselves. There was writing and artwork by other people, including a poem of Dennis’s (“James Kelly” from He Cried), some specially written poetry by Thomas Moore (d.l. Thomas Moronic) and a drawing by Kier Cooke Sandvik which became the icon of our show – this place, in other words, was looming large.
In particular I always think of Dennis’s work and of that time in my relationship with this blog in relation to an almost standalone piece of video we used in the show – it was conceived as a sort of visual postcard sent by Mathew after his death to his father, introducing him to all the hot boys in the afterlife, all of whom seem somehow remote or unreachable; I made this collage sequence out of expositional passages in porn movies – boys in indeterminate topographical spaces, alone or in pairs or groups, in slightly slow motion. I then wrote Mathew’s kind of woozy narration and sent it to my friend David Chapman to record (on what turned out, kind of marvellously, to be really crappy sound equipment). I still really like how this sequence works, in or out of the show.
‘Afterlife’ from Hey Mathew (2008)
Trying just to ignore the barriers around making work this emotionally open – almost brutally so – and sexually explicit was not wholly successful, though the piece itself was (to my mind) both successful and, in its small way, significant. The venue where we showed the work first was a bit freaked out by it – by the unusually strong sexual content but even more so by an accident that happened in one of the first performances that injured Jonny pretty nastily. (We ended up in A&E; Jonny, of course, was the only one who was relaxed about that whole thing. But look, you can see here how bloody it got...)
Moreover, Cis was deeply uncomfortable about some aspects of the project, to the extent that my working relationship with her was basically destroyed. (I learned a lot from that; a big part of my practice now is about really vigilantly making sure everyone in the room is OK, or at least talking about it – and being heard – if they’re not.) For some audiences it was all just too much. But I feel fiercely proud of what we did in Hey Mathew– not least because it was the start of an extended period of collaboration with Jonny that has meant more to me than I could ever really say.
Open House (2011)
The challenge – posed not least by DC’s – to think more dynamically about the ways in which spaces for collaboration and dialogue can be held open, has had a number of (for me) interesting outputs in my work. One of the most direct was Open House, which I first made with my company in 2011.
The format is very simple. I take a bunch of actors / makers – five or six of them – into an empty room, early on a Monday morning. We’ll be there from 9am to 9pm every day of that week. At the point that we first meet there, we have almost nothing – I’ve just asked everyone to bring some piece of stimulus to start a conversation. By the Friday evening, we’ll have a complete show, for an audience to watch.
So that’s part of it – getting from basically nothing to something (albeit something that’s still pretty basic) in the space of a week. But the other part of it is perhaps more exciting. The door to the room will be – literally as well as metaphorically – open the whole time, and anyone who wants to can come in to the room and be with us. What that ‘with’ means is very much up to them. They can come and hang out, watch us working; they can bring us ideas, report back on what they’re seeing, ask us questions, give us provocations; or they can join in, become full collaborators in the making of the piece. They can put their heads round the door for two minutes, and then go away again; or they can come in early on the Monday morning and stay all week. It’s totally up to them.
The first time we did this, as part of the inaugural Transform festival at West Yorkshire Playhouse, I put in the marketing copy, almost as a joke – “Who knows – you could even end up performing in the final show!” But in fact, that’s exactly what happened – the performing team of five that we took in had swollen to sixteen by the time we finished making the show.
Admittedly, it was a raggedy-ass thing we made, an on-the-fly collation of bits and pieces; there was an Open House theme song that everybody got to sing, there was a collectively-made dance that anyone could learn and join in with (including the audience). In a way I missed the level of refinement that I’d usually want to bring to that sort of material. But the trade-off was massively worth it: something really magical happened in simply inviting in anyone who wanted to be there, and not turning anyone away. We had everyone from undergraduate students to retired seniors in the room, telling stories, dancing together, singing along, all together inside one cheerfully anarchic process governed first and foremost by a politics of hospitality.
We’ve done Open House a couple more times since 2011, and each time, different challenges come through. I think in time it will become less a thing we do in its own right (though I hope we can continue to do that too), and more a way in which we habitually work on anything we try and do as a company – for example, that in, say, the second week of a rehearsal process, we’ll run in ‘Open House’ mode, and anyone who wants to will be able to be part of that conversation and that making activity. The decisive thing for me is that whenever we don’t work in ‘Open House’ now, I partly miss it.
GOD/HEAD (2012)
The story behind GOD/HEAD is a simple, if somewhat curious, one. On the morning of Thursday 21st April 2011, coming home from the supermarket, I was literally stopped in my tracks by an extremely strong sense of the presence of God – in whom I have never believed. Although the sensation passed quite quickly, for a while my whole life was incredibly disoriented – my complacent atheism was not so much challenged as kicked in the fucking head. Before long, though, I had started to make connections between my ‘God’ moment and my experience, in my teens and twenties, of paranoid delusions. So I went to talk to a neuroscientist at the University of Bradford, who was able to explain away my revelation in terms of neurochemicals. But at the time, I didn’t find that that soothed or resolved the experience I’d had. I didn’t want to stop thinking about it, or talking about it, just because there was a scientific narrative that seemed to make sense of it. There was still something exciting about the idea of God and the way it connected in my head with two entwined strands of thought in my work – one about the failure of language and what lies sensationally beyond the possibility of articulation in words; and one about sadomasochism, and the transcendental experience of sub-space.
And so I made a show about the experience, called GOD/HEAD. It told and re-told the story of my ‘God’ moment several times, each time hoping to shine a different light on it; it told the narrative of my dialogue with the neuroscientist, and what came out of that; and also I threaded through it a sort of fictional strand about a queer teenage boy with a fixation on the King James Bible and the concept of kenosis, which I won’t get into here but is a super-interesting bit of extreme theology for anyone who, like me, can’t easily separate God out from S&M.
If you want to know more about this project, I did a substantial interview about it with Dave Pickering for his podcast Getting Better Acquainted:
I’m mentioning the show in this context because it was the first time that I’d managed to thread together in one piece an autobiographical story element (my experience), a documentary element (the neuroscience stuff), and a fictional element (the teenage boy). And – without giving too much away – the possibility of playing further with those three species of things rubbing up against each other feels like it might be a very exciting part of what happens next. (Now read on...)
I Understand and I Wish to Continue (2012)
Readers of DC’s will recognize this phrase – the consent button that this blog acquired in (I think) early 2012, due to certain unnamed self-appointed patrol guards finding the content ‘objectionable’. This change happened during a period where I was thinking a lot – without ever getting anywhere, really – about the idea of consent, particularly in relation to a performance or other live event. I got really weirded out by the premises of consent and the way in which you really can’t know what you’re consenting to until it’s happening. Quite often my shows have to have warning notices attached to them, in marketing copy or pinned up in the foyer before you go in to the performance space – most usually because of what they call ‘nudity’ (or sometimes, excitingly, ‘full-frontal nudity’). In a sense I don’t mind audiences being forewarned – I have absolutely zero interest in ever shocking or genuinely upsetting anyone, even if I find their sensibilities kind of lame or whatever – but I hate the crudeness of this disclaiming technology – as if all ‘nudity’ were the same, all ‘strong language’ identical, all ‘sexual content’ equal. Partly I object to this because it completely ignores the extent to which the presence of any particular audience changes the tone and temperature of the encounter in which they are participants.
Actors and performers, likewise, are obliged to ‘consent’ – or at least to engage with the idea of consenting – to situations that actually cannot be fully predicted or controlled, and in which the idea of themselves as ‘consenting’ is obscured or suspended in deference to an authority located elsewhere – in a director (like me), or in an audience, or in a venue, or whatever.
In a way the question of consent has always been a vexed one in my work with Jonny Liron, which, after Hey Mathew, continued as an experimental partnership under the duo name Action one19. Some people were always bothered by their reading of the power relationship between myself and Jonny, who was (a) fourteen years younger than me, and sometimes (b) dependent on me for paid work, and also not insignificantly (c) self-identified as heterosexual. How in that situation, people wondered, could he meaningfully consent to, for example, getting naked if I asked him to, or being filmed jerking off, or to different degrees of sexual contact between us? Of course I understood the tenor of their concerns but I think even now Jonny would agree that this was a desperately rudimentary reading of an actually incredibly complex matrix of power relations, in which it seemed to us the only feasible strategy was one of constant dialogue, of trying to be as transparent as possible about what was going on, and the context in which it was all happening.
Mostly Action one19 was just the two of us but in the spring of 2012, we made a piece with the participation of another performer, a brilliant actor called Sean Hart. The invitation to make something came from Marc Hulson, a.k.a. Tender Prey hereabouts, who was curating a short season of performance for the Five Years gallery in nearby Hackney. Our contribution was devised as a diptych: on the Saturday, visitors to the gallery would hear a text I’d written called ‘Proposal In Anticipation’ being read, prerecorded and played back at very low volume.
And then on the Sunday, a performance unfolded over the course of three hours, in which the two actors, Jonny and Sean, were each given a score containing one hundred possible tasks, ranging from the very ‘low risk’ to the very ‘high risk’ – these categories of course being incredibly subjective and kind of useless and that being one of the things I was interested in: but examples of ‘low risk’ would be “Take off your shoes” or “Make a paper bird”, and examples of the highest ‘high risk’ instructions were performance art staples such as cutting yourself, exposing your asshole, giving the other actor a blowjob, that sort of thing. Having completed an action they’d then have a choice of moving to a task that was (approximately) less risky or more risky; if they chose not to consent to an instruction, they’d have to start over with the easiest task and begin the process again.
Like any durational performance it was a thing that was sporadically very interesting, and sometimes less so; that’s the nature of the thing and not a problem that needs solving. A couple of d.l.’s were on hand and said they liked it a lot; Jonny, on the other hand, was frustrated by the structure and didn’t have a good time. I was glad we tried it. At any rate, it was an interesting step towards re-engaging with the blog as a source of theatrical inspiration.
The Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Belladonna (2012)
One of the last public performances that Jonny and I did as Action one19 – we never did all that many – was an hour-long piece at the Situation Room, Jonny’s live/work studio in Tottenham, north London. We developed it over a long period of rehearsal and sketching; in the end, the set-up was simple: a performing space in the studio was marked out with tealights, and that space was occupied by Jonny, while I sat just outside, at the perimeter, reading texts – mostly by making live, improvisatory decisions, pulling fragments out of larger resources or playing games with whatever textual apparatus was to hand.
The material was in some ways quite simple, though as usual that meant it was also full of ambiguities and reverberant absences. Essentially the piece was structured around a kind of fantasy encounter between two cultural figures that had been important to Jonny in navigating our work – the porn star Belladonna and the UFC champion Jon ‘Bones’ Jones: but I guess those figures will only have come across obliquely, if at all, to an audience. Otherwise: Jonny, naked, prowled and made sounds like a lion; there was a dance learned from a video of Michael Clark and performed by Jonny using a ‘persona’ we’d been working with, who wore a blue polo shirt and (sometimes) trainers but nothing else; I guess maybe my favourite part was right at the end, where Jonny swept all of the tealights up into a cluster, pouring the molten wax from a couple of them onto my forearm, and then all the clothes and objects and props and texts that had been used during the piece were thrown onto the ‘bonfire’ of tealights – at which point all the other lights in the room were extinguished and in pitch black we watched first the fire and then, after it was extinguished, what seemed like thousands of hot embers dancing in the smoky room.
The centre piece of The Infancy Gospel..., though, was a fairly intense 20- or 25-minute sequence in which all the texts I was reading were taken from a deck of a hundred or so of our favourites from the ‘slaves’ posts here over the years. Partly Jonny was improvising personas and images in relation to whatever I picked out – and over the preceding weeks we’d worked a lot with these posts, treating them as voices in search of provisional embodiment; but also he was moving towards a culminatory sequence in which, as the blue shirt persona, he masturbated until he came – something that, despite all the work we’d done in which masturbation and other sex acts were part of the fundamental performance vocabulary, Jonny had never done before in a live performance. In its radical intimacy it felt pretty meaningful for us, and, I think, for many of the people who were present with it; but there’s no doubt it was also (brilliantly) complicated by the layering-over of the ‘slaves’ texts (and also the awesome slowed-down Justin Bieber track we used to soundscore the whole sequence – I think pretty much everyone in the world has heard it by now but here it is if you haven’t).
U Smile (800% slower) – originally by Shamantis
I still think – as I had thought going into The Infancy Gospel– there’s still a whole full-length (or even heavily durational) piece to be made out of the massive amount of ‘slaves’ material on the blog. It’s like a giant performance score already, without any further adaptation necessary.
We did a revised version of the piece – retitled The Infancy Gospel of the Kevins Clash (in which Belladonna and Jon Jones were sort of obliterated by two faint iterations of the then-newsworthy Kevin Clash) – the following month; and then, apart from an incredibly marginal show-and-tell during a CG&Co residency at the Bike Shed theatre in Exeter, that was it. It’s not for me to ventriloquize his testimony but I think it’s fair to say Jonny quite rapidly became disenchanted in our work, sceptical about its efficacy, dubious about its political narratives, and sort of fucked off with everything; and sadly, because our work and our lives together were always so entangled, that quite sudden crash pretty much took our friendship with it. He seems to have really different priorities now, or maybe they’re the same priorities but there’s just no place for me in them any more. I mean, it’s cool, people change, circumstances change. I was very lucky to get to work with such a talented and courageous person for as long as he could stand it. And, well, you know, everyone’s on their journey, most of them seeking their own happiness above all, and that’s OK. I mean I’m incredibly sad about what’s happened to us. I’m heartbroken, to be honest. But I guess maybe it makes room for something else, sooner or later. And I’m really proud of what we did, and of the vast amount of stuff we made together, which continues to exist in an archive of many hundreds of hours of video and thousands of still images, as well as a lot of collaborative writing. I think it is a profound, if largely secret, body of work. That, at least, persists.
But now look where we are in the story. It’s late 2012, I’ve been making a whole lot of work about sexual dissidence, and social formation, and speculative autobiography, and the ethics of consent – and despite the abortive DC’s project, this blog has underscored a lot of that work. And then in February 2013 I get invited to go to the University of Warwick and spend some time thinking about the future.
THIS IS ‘THIS IS TOMORROW’
Warwick Arts Centre occupies an unusual position in the British arts ecology as a highly-regarded public-facing venue situated on a university campus – specifically, the University of Warwick. It would be true to say that channels of communication and cross-fertilization between the University and the Arts Centre are not always wholly abuzz, and ‘This is Tomorrow’, which was first run in 2012, is an attempt to address that slight disconnect. Each year a small bunch of artists from across a range of disciplines are invited to WAC to spend a week meeting academics from different faculties and representing a diverse array of specialisms.
In 2013’s This is Tomorrow, I was lucky enough to be part of the artistic cohort, along with (L to R): musician Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner); theatre maker Alecky Blythe; theatre critic Matt Trueman; choreographer Charlotte Vincent; and live artist Michelle Browne. We spent an exhausting but exhilarating five days meeting and talking with dozens of academics from the faculties of Physics, Manufacturing, Economics, Sociology, Politics and International Studies, and Mathematics. We talked about making computers out of fish, about the design task of imagining what electric cars should sound like, about how economists are trying to account for anger in decision-making processes, about fusion energy and Cold War espionage and advanced topology and sex work. It was stimulating, frustrating, enthralling, inspiring. (You can read Matt Trueman’s brilliant accounts of the whole week here.)
Partly it’s all just one big speed date – we’re there partly to try and meet an academic with whom we might be able to forge a productively special relationship, someone whose research interests make our creative ears prick up and our hearts beat faster. For me – just as I’ve started to give up on ever meeting anyone who’ll fit the bill – it’s Dr Cath Lambert, whose interest is partly focused on how people use space in pedagogical systems. We get taken to a ‘flexible learning space’ she’s had a hand in developing. It’s a classroom that has to be rebuilt from scratch each time it’s used, so that the students can determine for themselves what kinds of spatial and connective relationships best suit the work they’re trying to get done in the session that’s just beginning. Talking us through the ideas behind this room, Cath talks about ‘queer space’, and this pings hard for me, not just in relation to Sara Ahmed’s book Queer Phenomenology which has been very important for me in recent years (especially working on Hey Mathew), but also in relation to this blog.
Long story (finally) short: in the weeks after This Is Tomorrow, I revisit the DC’s project, thaw it out, write some of it down, send it to the guys at WAC; they like the idea and ask what I’d need to make a fresh start with it and with them. I say I’d like to take a group of five theatre and performance makers to Warwick for a week, show them the blog and some of Dennis’s other work, begin a conversation with them and see what happens.
And that’s what I’m doing this coming week. And that’s why I need your help.
But first...
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(SC)AVENGERS (SC)ASSEMBLE
I asked each of the five participants to submit a photo and some words by way of introduction, so you could meet them, start to make imaginary relationships with them, decide who’s your favourite, etc., just like they’re some avant garde boyband or something. And this is what they wanted to say:
Greg Wohead
I’m Greg. I self-identify as a writer and performer. Things I make often end up as shows in theatres. I’ve just taken a Myers-Briggs personality test. It was the second time I’ve taken one. The first was in 2001 when I took one which determined roommate pairings for the college I attended in Texas. I ended up with a roommate only interested in talking about football. It wasn’t a good match.
Both times I took the test, I have received the result of INTJ: Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging. So I guess my personality has not changed in 13 years. I have copied and pasted the description below from 16personalities.com, but first I deleted the things I didn’t like.
“The INTJ personality type is one of the rarest and most interesting types. INTJ personalities radiate self-confidence, relying on their huge archive of knowledge spanning many different topics and areas. Unsurprisingly, this personality type can be labeled as the most independent of all types. INTJs are very decisive, original, and insightful. An INTJ will likely immediately and permanently lose respect for anyone who does not have enough talent or simply does not see the point. They are natural leaders and excellent strategists, but they willingly give way to others vying for a leadership position, usually people with Extraverted (E) personality types. However, such action can be deceptive and maybe even calculated. An INTJ will retreat into the shadows, maintaining their grip on the most important decisions, and as soon as the leader fails and there is a need to take the steering wheel, the INTJ will not hesitate to act, maybe even while staying in the background. INTJs dislike rules and artificial limitations; everything should be questionable and open to reevaluation.”
[DC’s readers might be likely to be interested in Greg’s current solo piece: The Ted Bundy Project, which has dates in London and Edinburgh coming up very soon.]
James Oakley
Hi there, I’m James. A solo artist studying at Chichester University and in the final stages of my masters. I love creating semi-auto biographical performances, dabble in spoken word as well as installation work which questions social, political taboos; and exploits my own failures (and successes) in the subject. However I’m still discovering myself as an artist so I enjoy experimenting with different modes of performance as I have not yet established a set form.
I draw my inspiration from current social media and find myself spending a decent portion of my time online, due to it being the perfect place to discover new and interesting people, stories and places and I let this reflect in the work I make.
I have chosen to attach my Facebook profile picture alongside this, due to it being the first image that anybody will be greeted with if they wanted to add me as a friend online. (I’ll let you come up with your own story as why I’m dressed up as a baseball fury).
Jennifer Tang
Nick Finegan
Hello. My name is Nicholas Victor Finegan. I have blonde hair that smells of mustard. And pale skin and blue eyes. So people often ask if I'm Swedish, but I'm not Swedish. People also ask if I'm German, but I'm not German. I think there is something that feels a bit dangerous about that question because everyone knows the dark reason behind their asking it. I mean whether they're consciously thinking 'hmm maybe you're German because Hitler loved people with blonde hair and blue eyes'– whether they’re consciously thinking that, they know/I know/we all know, that that's why they're asking it. And there's something a bit scary about that. Because when someone goes to make small talk over the throb of a nightclub sound system they don't normally intend to invoke the shadow of Nazi war crimes. But when they say 'oh you must be German with a face like that/with hair like that/with eyes like that', somewhere they know, and somewhere I know they know, and somewhere they know I know they know that that's what's going on. (It’s just they’re clutching a redbull and vodka and the throb of a nightclub sound-system is shaking their cranium in that satisfying way that reminds us that once upon a time we were swimming around in a big warm womb so they’re not really acknowledging that that’s what’s going on).
But people don't really think about that too much. They don't think about how the creases of history fold along lines that stretch way further than politics and society and all the big stuff like that. They don't think about how something that Hitler did back in the 1940s could actually shape some sweaty man's chat up line in a basement bar in Bethnal Green in 2014. But it did and it does and it's funny and scary to think about it really... I mean I just thought about it now and found it sort of scary. It's sort of like the butterfly effect but in reverse you know. Instead of micro to macro... macro to micro. Instead of the delicate little butterfly flapping it's painted silk wings and buffeting a grain of wheat off the top of a blade of straw that then gets whipped up through the air and dances into the ether where it spins and spins and creates a little vortex of cold air which an unsuspecting pigeon then flies past and swings it's feathered arms through to generate a mini tornado somewhere above Milwaukee which then twists and pirouettes under a brooding moody rain cloud, dragging specks of rain into its swirling, whirling tornadoey hips and yeah – on it goes until hurricane McBain has ravaged the lives of thousands and President Obama is wading through watery Milwaukee backstreets looking resilient and distressed and titillated all at once. And the little butterfly (who funnily enough was actually called McBain himself) is just fluttering about through warm buttery bars of golden sunlight in a field a few states over. Totally unaware of the havoc he has wreaked with those delicate painted wings of his. Yeah so what I meant was that this guy chatting me up by saying I look German, saying I look like some German boy from Germany or some place like that, this guy using that as a chat up line but not being consciously aware of the horrific heritage his chat up line is born out of - it’s somehow a bit like the butterfly effect in reverse. Like instead of some small insignificant thing sending out tiny vibrations that shake the tectonic plates of the future and give birth to some big and important event, the big important event is actually felt in the sweaty man’s insignificant mouth as he tries to find out why I have blond hair and blue eyes.
My eyes are itchy now. Night night. Love you. Xxx
Tim Jeeves
This was supposed to be a rather earnest extract from a rather earnest introductory e-mail, written to Chris in 2003 or 2004, that led to a voicemail, a phone call, a meeting, a friendship and possibly one of the shortest internships in history. Sadly, that rather earnest e-mail is lost to a time in which writing wasn’t always archived so, instead, we have the 69 words you've just read.
...Oh, and this:
...is me, a couple of weeks ago, in a rehearsal room in Oxford on my 41st birthday. Thanks to Malcolm for the photo.
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And now the really important bit...
WE NEED YOU SO BAD
Quite how DC’s becomes a live performance work, I / we don’t know (yet). I know I want it to be part documentary, part riff, part fiction, and part interactive system. And I know I want those things to be about each other and to bleed into each other.
But this week is not about making the show, but about creating the conceptual space in which to start imagining making the show. It’s about people responding to the blog, and responding to each other’s responses; it’s about seeing how this place translates into liveable images, shareable movement, variably intelligible text, hospitable structures for relationships and speculative intimacies. We’re going to watch movies and listen to songs and read poetry and talk about stuff and challenge each other to think hard and work bravely in refracting DC’s the blog until it starts to become DC’s the theatre piece.
We want the room to be as porous as possible, as responsive as it can be to the live blog and the on-going conversations here; also as representative as possible of the blog’s story-s0-far, its narrative across the eight years of its existence, its changing face and shifting moods.
So we’re asking you to talk to us. You as in whoever’s reading this. People who are presently engaged with the blog, as visible commenters / contributors, or as silent readers / lurkers. People who only just got here, people who’ve been around for a while, people who have been with it since the start. People who used to be active here but aren’t any more.
We want to ask you to tell us about your relationship with this blog.
Tell us anything that comes to mind, but here are some questions that might be useful prompts:
Why do you come here? What do you think you get out of it?
What’s your favourite thing that ever happened here? A favourite post, or conversation, or event, or series of events? (Choose a whole bunch if you like.)
What haven’t you liked about this place? Has anything made you uncomfortable? Anxious? Hostile, even?
If you used to come here / comment here more than you do now, what’s changed?
If you’re here pretty much every day, how would you characterise the place of DC’s in your daily life?
If you’re a silent reader, why do you choose to be silent?
Has this place had any impact on your offline / IRL life? Has anything good happened as a result of coming here? Have you made real-world friends? Collaborators? etc.
Have you learned anything from DC’s? Has it changed you? Has its impact on you been negative in any way do you think?
This list of questions totally isn’t exhaustive – tell us anything you want to, whether a few words or an extended reflection. Send images if you like.
And of course if you want to feed anything else into our week in the rehearsal room, you can send it to the same place.
Email us at: dcs AT chrisgoodeonline DOT com
(Or, as far as I’m concerned anyway, you’re welcome to leave comments etc. actually on the blog.)
Hopefully we’ll be able to come back in a while and tell you what happened during our week together.
Thank you for reading all this (if you did), and thanks in advance for your contributions. I think we’re going to have a really exciting week.
Chris Goode / CG&Co performance photo credits: SPEED DEATH: Manuel Harlan; HEY MATHEW: Simon Warner; GOD/HEAD: Ed Collier; I UNDERSTAND...: Esther Planas; INFANCY GOSPEL: Chris Goode
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p.s. Hey. So, this amazing thing starts happening today. I really hope that everyone reading these words, whether you're a commenter of any frequency or a person who prefers to visit this place in silence, will consider participating in Chris Goode's DC's theater adaptation and/or related live space invention in some way, maybe by answering the questions near the bottom of the post either here in the comments arena -- you can be critical of the blog if you want; I won't be offended -- or by email at the designated address, or maybe by using the comments arena as place to appear, be, play, interact, or whatever seems right over the course of this coming week. Here's Chris Goode's request in his own words: 'It would be great if the invitation to feed in to the project over the next few days could reach the eyes of people who don't post here any more but did at one time. Like there are loads of people who I think I'd still be in touch with via Facebook, except I'm not on Facebook. So please everyone pass the message on.' This project is beyond a dream come true for this place and for me, and, yeah, it would be seriously awesome if you would participate and feed Chris's real life d.l.s in whatever way you like and can. Thank you! ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul! So happy to have a real world copy of 'Left Hand'. It looks gorgeous, and even the plastic sleeve is so suave. Is the World Cup about to erupt? Did France make the cut? Is that question as embarrassingly naive as it feels? Anyway, Paris is about to get very noisy in that particular way then, okay. ** David Ehrenstein, There is! ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Does a space being beautiful and light-filled negate its cavelike status? I guess it does. It's weird how the mind can turn anything into anything like the Phantom of the Opera or something. Are you de-caved? Any interesting out-and-about planned for this weekend? ** HyeMin Kim, Hi. Thanks! Whoa, and about my work, thanks so much! I hardly ever think about my own work in terms of its content. That part seems to use my conscious efforts as a way-station. Other than my having quite a dent/scar running across the top of my head. I think the axe left me mostly alone longterm. Although I was an 'A' student until that happened, and then school grades began boring me, so maybe I got rewired a little. ** Kier, Hi, Kier! I think a sigil is a secret code. I don't know. A very secret code maybe? I hope they don't catch that rabbit. I mean, I don't know the circumstances, obviously, or the damage the rabbit is causing, but, you know, rabbits seem like they should be a prize or something in theory. My yesterday was a relatively quiet one. I got to actually work on my novel at length-ish for the first time in a while, which was really nice. It was suddenly very warm and even kind of hot in a pleasant way here. I walked around. It was cool. I hope your weekend lets you do all kinds of great things! ** Heliotrope, Ooh, cyphers. I'm going to do a cyphers post. Yum. Thank you. Is that live Quicksilver album a newly released thing? Is it pre-Dino Valenti? If it is, I'm going to get it. Oh, right, you have a roommate. What is he ... or she (?) ... I think you said it was a he ... like? I think there've been times when I wasn't busy. Well, I've always been writing something, but this current busyness is a kind of madness, a great madness, mind you. Aw, thank you, Mark. You're so incredibly great and the best. Friends from Germany? Wait, I think I know about them in some vague fashion or you've talked about them or something? I love you too, man. ** Brendan, Hey! 'Bioshock', yeah, that's a big one. I think that's one of the many, many games that I imagine contains too much fighting for a wuss and fumble-fingers like me. The poor Dodgers, sorry, I can't help it. Well you absolutely should come to Paris! What would you do here?!? You would be in Paris exploring its myriad and almost endless wonders, what do you think? Paris itself is the game plan. Nothing specific yet re: plans for LA in October. Originally, Gisele was going to shoot the film that Zac and I are writing for her in LA this Halloween because the film is about an LA spooky house, but, like seemingly all film projects except Zac's and mine (knock on wood), it's been delayed to next year. I can't imagine not being in LA for LA for Halloween stuff. It's beyond comprehension. But I don't know when yet. Yay about the art plan! Excellent! ** Torn porter, Hi, T! Ah, oh well, best laid plans re: 'SR'. You'll live. It was fun, but whatev'. Ratty is here! Yeah, I think Sunday sometime will work. I'll know more tonight. Let's text or something and make a plan. ** Chris Goode, Chris! The man of the current and many forthcoming hours! Thank you about the codes post. There is an eroticism there, isn't that weird? Or ... why would it be weird? But it is, maybe. 'Two Cabins' is or at least was until very recently on youtube along with a treasure trove of his films in the James Benning semi-secret youtube channel. If you can't find it and need directions, let me know. 'All Hail the New Puritans' is an excellent choice! One of the performers in Zac's and my film bears a strong resemblance to the young Michael Clarke. He says people often tell him that, facially, he looks sort of like a blend of MC and Eddie Furlong. Yeah, the Fales stuff is infuriating. I could go on and on about the bullshit and cowardice and dishonesty behind what happened, but it would be a bad idea. There was this traveling exhibition of the George Miles Cycle portion of my archive that was in Amsterdam and Basel. It included the 'Gone' scrapbook, which apparently had been through the first, less brutal round of Fales' defacement by then. I think the guy who published 'Gone', i.e. the awesome visual and music artist Martin Bladh, saw it in Amsterdam. I think that's what spurred his idea to do a ltd. ed. facsimile book of it. He asked me if I would let him do that in an edition of 100. I wasn't sure, but I asked the opinion of people I trust, and they all said I should let him do it, and I have this irrational thing about destiny/fate and so on, so I said okay. Oh, it feels pretty weird, yeah. It felt weird originally to have it in my archive, and the book version feels super weird 'cos, obviously, I never thought anyone but me would ever see it, and it was made as a very private conversation between me and my imagination. And I'm not the person who made it anymore. And I wasn't very much of a writer back then, and my study of the material was very, very early on and naive, and my attempts therein to write and make sense of the material are embarrassing and simplistic to me now. And etc. But there is something cathartic in a weird way that I don't fully understand about having that book out in the world too. I don't know. Anyway, the weekend, the post! Yes, I forefronted your request at the top of the p.s. And I'll make some kind of short, hopefully clear invitation and lure on Facebook. And I'm very, very curious to see what happens. The blog is not as heavily, tightly. actively community-like at the moment, not to say it's not a community, but it's not the intense community it was in the Antonio era, for instance. So, I'm very curious to see what happens and who shows up and ... well, everything. It's really exciting. I think starting on Monday when the post itself goes into the archive, I'll post the questions you ask and some of their surroundings in a box in the blog's upper right corner for the week, if that makes sense? Thank you a zillion, Chris! Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi. I don't know 'The Americans'. Huh. No, I haven't done a numbers station post, and that's such a good idea, thanks! Oh, yeah, there was never a time when the majority of self-identified gay guys read Genet and watched Jack Smith films and etc., but it was possible at one time to hold that illusion. For me, at least. But then I've lived in Paris for, what, 8 years now, and I still think most French people think like Rimbaud, ha ha. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Oh, cool, another plus re: seeing Loop tonight. Hm. The reunion thing is generally gross maybe. I.e., my indecision about seeing Slowdive, although I never saw them back then, so that's a reason to go. Chrome just played here. When I saw the handbill for that concert, I was, like, what?!? Glad I didn't go. Wow, you saw some great stuff. I wish the upcoming Paris Pitchfork Festival line-up was better this year. But maybe it'll get better. Bon weekend, man. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Uh, there's no direct link between that post and my novel other than the general thing of my interests going into everything in some way. I'm very happy to talk about your novel whenever you like, either here or by Skype or ... It would be a total pleasure. Oh, yes, I read that Stacey D'Erasmo put her piece about 'My Mark' in her book. I'm very happy about that. That piece was the first time my work was written about thoughtfully and seriously, I think. It was a really big deal for me. Have a great weekend, Jeff! ** Misanthrope, Your loss, man. The secret encoded message was awesome and life changing, ha ha. The Roy Rogers fast food chain still exists?!? You could blow me over with a feather. Nice dumb jokes. Dumb jokes are a potentially sublime form, don't you know? Of course you do. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Difficulty is just one way to do it. You shouldn't feel inadequate. I don't think there's a hierarchy where difficult is at the top and 'Harry Potter' is down low. It's just taste and need, and they aren't fascist. Shit, that's a long book you've written there. ** Okay. Please get into the spirit of Chris Goode's idea, entreaty, project, etc. and start letting loose, you guys. This is a killer great opportunity for us, I think. See you on Monday.