In life, I am a stickler for rules. I have always struggled to break curfews, miss deadlines, lie to figures of authority, walk on the grass or commit adultery - primarily on account of never having married. I cannot stand the possibility of my being late for anything that matters. At the merest chance of stepping over a line of some sort, apologies tumble out of my mouth and I sweat volumes that could close the M25. Perhaps, as with many of my character traits, it has to do with being 5’6”. Perhaps, I just believe rules are there for a reason. Perhaps, I just leave the breaking of them down to others.
When it comes to performance, however, I turn anarchist, or, at least, the equivalent of a smoker lurking behind the bike-shed.
Just over a week ago, I went along to the BAC to catch Mind Out, the latest performance/theatre piece by Station House Opera. Mind Out attempts to break the connection between body and mind, whereby each performer’s actions must conform to the instructions of another’s mind: “You pour the milk”; “You stir the tea”; “You want to ask a question but think better of it.” Lyn Gardner described the result as “akin to watching a group of marionettes trying to exert their free will”. For me, the opposite was true – the performers seemed human in form but not in essence, devoid of free will and control. I was reminded of the emptiness of those children that underwent the intercision process in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, separated from their daemons and utterly broken.
Over the hour and a half of Mind Out my interest almost entirely waned. Where I began pricked with interest and tickled by the apparent irrational and counter-intuitive dislocation of action and motivation, I found the overall event tiresome, draining and tedious. For me, Mind Out was crippled by its use of the rules it set itself. Put simply the game was one person commanding, another obliged to carry out that command. However, since the ‘game’ is not actually played out in the moment, the performance resembles an improv exercise set in stone by virtue of being scripted. A minor quibble is that the chain of command becomes murky. At first, it follows an obvious circle – A commands B, B commands C, etc – but this soon shifts wordlessly, such that any rule seems to disintegrate.
My main problem, however, is that for the majority of the time Mind Out plays by the rule rather than with the rule. In doing so, it becomes somewhat monotone; a limited sphere of possibility whereby peaks and troughs barely register on the Richter Scale. It is little more than a series of actions, often knowingly comic in themselves, performed by stick-men and women. Only rarely does the rule set actually cause challenges or twist itself in knots. The deconstructed making of a cup of tea, shared and split between five performers proves difficult and, as such interesting. When Julian Maynard Smith commands an absent performer around the space, the same rules allow for distortion and, crucially, difference.
In sport, rules exist to set boundaries. They exist to be played by in order that the game is fair, that both sides are on the same pitch and page, that all is equal. However, it is worth noticing that the papers pick up on the rules breaks – the dives, the dissent and the disputes. As much as moments of brilliance within the rules, sport’s drama rests in its human and ethical controversies. Theatre, given that its concern rests with aesthetics as well as ethics, need not concern itself with equality. It can and, indeed, ought to tip the balance and break the rules. Theatre must rely on opposition, on the drama of struggle and the spark of solution, by foul means or fair. It is in the rule-breaks or clever reinterpretation of the rules that theatre can vary its rhythm. Moreover, given that its rules are self-created and self-imposed, theatre can be totally free to break those rules. A piece owns its own rule system and can do with it what it will.
Returning, then, to Mind Out – I needed to see ambiguous commands that left interpretation down to the performer. I needed to see commands that could not be followed. I needed to see a series of commands that got in the way of each other, clashing and conflicting – the one preventing the fulfillment of the other. I needed to see performers commanded into dangerous situations, whereby dissent and refusal was the only possible reaction. I needed to see rebellion and risk, break downs and break ups, military coups and constitutional reform.
Not just four people eating the same biscuit between them.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton
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