Love theatre, love liveness, right? Well, yeah, I guess, but so often liveness isn’t really that at all. Lyn Gardner has her mantra about being able to see, to all intents and purposes, the same show on any night of the week, indeed, at any point in its run. Chris Goode has his cat test, which measures genuine liveness according to the ability to accommodate the unexpected entrance of a cat into the very fabric of an event. Me, I prattle on about Liveness 2.0.
Alright, I know it’s a dumbass phrase, nicked wholesale from a digitised vocabulary that really wants to talk about user-generated content, but I like it anyway. Besides, it connects: interactive theatre – truly interactive theatre, as opposed to some X Factor mock-up like Scissor Happy (a shoddy 1997 West End whodunit with audience voting on the culprit and so triggering one of several alternate endings) – would definitely fit, but theatre needn’t be interactive to do so. It need only reinvent itself anew each night, to step onstage without knowing how tonight is going to pan out.
When I was working with Present Attempt, we used to call it ‘live-devising,’ and it owes a real debt to the durational, rule-based performances of Forced Entertainment: shows like Quizoola, 12am: Awake and Looking Down and And on the Thousandth Night. Chris Goode’s Sisters, though I didn’t see it, sounds very similar. As does Cadavre Exquis – a game of theatrical consequences – coming up this week at Sadler’s Wells. Greyscale’s Me and Mr C, brought to the Fringe as part of Northern Stage’s programme, had some of its spirit, albeit stemming out of the specific tradition of improv comedy.
Liveness 2.0 thrives on rules, tasks and games, all played out or negotiated live and for real in the moment, so that every show finds its own route.
Judging by their first two shows, Head of a Woman are right up my street. They’re a young company, newly graduated from Central’s MAATP course, and came recommended by my old course leader Nick Wood.
Grey Matters: A Play for Six Brains
Six anonymous bodies, paper bags over their heads, run through a series of movements: jogging on the spot, stretching, beating the floor with clenched fists. They are faceless, but also blind to one another; even if they were capable of facial expressions, no one would be able to even attempt to read them. They are bodies, almost avatars dragged out of The Sims and onto a stage.
Together, the six performers remove the bags and place them, evenly-spaced, nice and neatly (Head of a Woman clearly abhor mess and broken patterns) on the stage, looking down into the bags at their feet; into, it becomes clear in due course, their own heads. Then the performers jumble themselves, until each is behind someone else’s bag/head, peering down.
“If I had the brain of X…” says one. It turns out to be a game – and a brilliant game at that – whereby A reveals things about B in that second sub-clause. By way of a very simple and mundane example: “If I had the brain of X, I’d know what it feels to be a man.”
Now, according to the programme notes, all this is to interrogate the possibility of empathy, of getting inside other people’s heads, of seeing through someone else’s eyes. That’s certainly in there, sure it is; it’s in the constant presence of the word I in those statements: ‘If I had the brain of X, I’d remember…” Would having the brain of X be enough to make you X or would that I, the speaker’s, still remain in tact somehow? Regardless, each statement is a projection, an act of imagining that cannot but be anchored in guesswork and approximation.
However, for me, the game functioned first and foremost as a self-contained entity. Essentially, the company have already made up their minds that without direct experience of something we can’t fully comprehend it; the game itself doesn’t actually test the theory, it sets out its preconceptions again and again. No bother though; the game is plenty enough in itself and, in its playing, another element of interaction emerges.
For starters, no one has control over the way they are portrayed onstage. They cannot chose how they come across, because someone else always determines precisely what information – be it a characteristic or piece of personal history – is revealed to the audience. Nor, since the rules don’t allow right of reply, can we be sure whether all of the information fed to us is entirely true. They reveal abortions and track marks, as well as using the game to snipe at one another’s particular habits: self-regard, for instance, or ditziness.
What’s brilliant is the way that these traits reveal themselves in the way each plays the game. While it takes a moment to cotton on to who is actually who, eventually all sorts of information is attached to these six individuals. Some fair, some likely not. Then, however, the statements affect the way the game is played; retaliation, always indirect due to the form’s constraints, creeps in. Sometimes, they gang up on one another; sometimes they defend each other. The rotations of formation, so that performers swap bags/heads to look inside, shuffles the whole, but they also smartly turn the game outwards, bringing the house lights us to guess at our thought processes. There’s also a neatly perfomative quality within, such that “If I were X, I’d be thinking Y” triggers X to think Y or, at least, to think of thinking Y.
Grey Matters... is about manipulation and control of others, more than its about empathy and understanding. Those are rather the first steps towards manipulation, for we cannot control that which we don’t partly understand. It’s very telling that the game is most watchable at its nastiest and most barbed, because empathy here is not an end in and of its self, but a means to another, more cutthroat and, arguably, human end.
Curriculae Vitae
The second piece, Curricula Vitae, fares less well without ever losing interest. It starts with a choral introduction that begins broken and incomplete, before gradually filling in the gaps to reveal itself fully. Each performer has their set of words from a collective text and only when the whole cast is present, do we get the full text. What we eventually learn is that this is a piece concerned with patterns that emerge out of tasks, much as the words just spoken did.
We also discover that the piece will consist of four tasks – though I could only really see three myself – completed by six people. Incidentally, there are also 656 words, 48 songs, 12 minutes of silence and 2 points during which the stage will be empty. This list of apparatus betrays a certain scientific approach, a very head-on approach to experiment, which isn’t, as I’ll explain in due course, entirely satisfying.
The first, entitled ‘To Sing,’ sees the six form a semi-circle and sing a list of countries’ names, turning round, seemingly arbitrarily, to sing. Sometimes one person sings the list. Elsewhere all of them do, just about harmonising. They all turn on England, America and Belgium, all but one on Disneyland. Given their ethnicities and accents – all six are different nationalities – you start to suspect that each is singing just those countries that they’ve visited.
Second, ‘To Dance,’ is more obscure. In fact, it’s impenetrable. A series of pop song snippets play, about seven seconds each, and the six cast members perform a series of dance moves. Early on, for a long while, one woman stands in the Saturday Night Fever pose and no-one else moves. Eventually, a man turns around. Towards the end, there are flashes of synchronicity. Different performers repeat movements seen earlier. You try to lock down a pattern, but it’s just not apparent.
Afterwards, overhearing someone outside, I discovered that the songs all hit number one in the UK on consecutive years. Each movement related to a specific country. It makes sense – particularly given what comes next – but there’s no real way of unlocking the code, especially since the piece never entirely nods to an overlap.
Finally, most clearly, ‘To Walk.’ On the floor are dotted, in six different colours, a series of marks in LX tape. 1965 appears projected on the back wall. Again, the first woman enters, finds a cross - purple, I think – and stands still. The years tick by metronomically. In 1977, the second man enters and stands to her right. Given I know he’s Canadian and she Icelandic after Grey Matters…, the spatial relationship clicks; both are standing in the countries of their birth. The markers make up an incomplete map of the world. As the years continue, all six appear and flutter around on family holidays and gap years, move overseas or stay resolutely still. It’s rather ticklishly ridiculous to watch, but also rather charming. (Perhaps at this point its possible to make sense of the second task, given that one and three so directly relate. As it does with introduction and individual tasks, the overall pattern reveals itself only after a tipping point of information.)
What you get is a portrait of travel over almost half a century. Movement increases, until it becomes a constant flow. It’s impossible not to think of the fuel being burned. I’m reminded of something said during Rimini Protokol’s 100% London, about a single flight producing as much pollution as a year’s car use. One member of the group, tiptoeing around the Carribean on a jolly, seems over-indulgent. Yet, at the same time, there’s also something sad about the repeated trip from Canada to America and back, never straying beyond the Atlantic section of the stage. It conveys a lack of experience, of worldliness. There’s also something moving about their final travels together: from the UK, to Belgium, to Scotland, to Iceland. Finally, we get the statistics; that the average company member, aged 30.3 years, has visited 23.3 countries, travelling some 19,000 air miles and crossing 123 time zones over 280 days in transit. Woah, you think, but this isn’t a condemnation or even a confession; it’s just a report, a curricula.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but miss the humanity of Grey Matters. In the end, Curricula Vitae reduces its performers to nodes, LEDs that switch on and off to convey data and, so, form patterns. The tasks, such as they are, are not really tasks so much as choreography; they can be failed, true, but to no particular effect beyond mess and simple error. Ultimately, I couldn’t shake the feeling that performance is more than a set of programming codes.
Photograph property of Head of a Woman
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