What The Matter Is

The behaviour extracted from everyday living and restored in the choreography of Pina Bausch is minute and particular. A gesture as slight as the twitch of a fingertip becomes a brittle motif available to repeat schematically yet barely stylized if at all. The result of these intimate acquisitions from ordinary life is a dance eerily close to familiar and natural movement, like the ghost of a day. And in return the acquisition bears back on the original movements, landing them now in a fleeting but reenacted instance of life. The more delicately choreography borrows from life, the more intimately life enters the stage. It causes that brief instance of life to be staged, even if the staging is retrospective. I am protective of the life these dances ape, though they ape it with such tact it wants forgiving.

The movements acquired from life are restored through spectacularly able bodies: bodies more bodily alive than ordinary life could make them. The dancing bodies have been prepared for their craft through decades of specialized training, and when they reenact these unremarkable physical episodes the episodes become remarkable, stretching beyond the bare, unstudied movements that began them. The risk of this stretch is that the original movements are left behind altogether in favour of their stylized forms, and the expression fails to take. But we have to keep separate the mastery of the body achieved by these dancers and the expression of their form. If the expression takes, it is because it secures present reality on the stage – a reality secured despite the exceptional physical form of the dancer. The dance takes when the dancers are accomplished enough to overcome their training altogether, and are able on stage to immediately and directly behave.

In theatre and dance we understand an approximate distinction between on and off. The off-states of practice, workshop and rehearsal are generally distinct from the on-state of performance, which happens on a stage, before an audience, with something at stake if things go wrong (though the distinction is readily strained, by Squat on Twenty-third Street for instance). There is a necessary imbalance between the accomplishment of an original form and the accomplishment of its expression in art. We discipline our joints to tread nimbly with tremendous force. We learn to write dialogue by copying down the conversations we fluently overhear in public. We learn to draw by forgiving the pencil its line and the paper its thinness.

Last weekend I found myself on stage failing to recite a passage from an acting book – not the one in my last post but another one (copied below). I’d been trying to learn it by heart all week and realized just in time that I’d never manage. So I brought the text on stage with me and managed to incorporate into my reading a few stealthy glances in its direction, and got a few laughs doing it. Later on a friend in the audience told me he thought it was all on purpose.

I enjoyed the spontaneity and (honesty?) of it: imposing a restriction upon the performance, and attending to whatever the restriction draws out. In this case, the restriction was a genuinely bad memory. Not quite by coincidence, the text I was failing to remember describes the need to exert a genuine and immediate presence on stage, rather than a cleanly premeditated performance. The blurring of performance and immediacy comes up again and again (oh Kaprow shhh).

This reading was for Maintenant Slovakia at the RichMix, London – videos of the readings are online here. I read two texts I’d written last year, with the quasi-memorized acting excerpt in between them. To introduce some of the themes of the excerpt I prefaced it with a more spontaneous piece describing the clothes I was wearing. I’d had to learn this text by heart too – it had to sound genuinely spontaneous – but I had much more success with this one because I’d written it myself and it was fairly straightforward.

Here’s the description of the dress followed by the text on acting.

I SHOULD POINT OUT THAT THIS IS MY NORMAL DRESS FOR READING OUT POEMS. IT HAS THIS FUNNELED NECK WHICH IS GOOD FOR PROJECTING [indicates direction upwards from neckline]. AND IT’S MADE OF THIS THICK GREY FELT, SO NONE OF THE LINES SHOW WHEN I’M READING. BUT WHEN I TAKE IT OFF I CAN SEE ALL THE LINES HAVE BEEN COLLECTING IN THE LINING, BECAUSE IT’S MADE OF SILK AND IT CREASES EASILY. IT HAS THIS ENORMOUS POCKET AT THE FRONT. I ALWAYS HAVE TO BE CAREFUL NOT TO REST MY HANDS IN IT WHEN I’M STANDING UP [demonstrates] BECAUSE IT’S TOO LOW AND IT DOESN’T LOOK CASUAL. YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO TRY AND ACT NATURAL.

I’M READING A BOOK AT THE MOMENT ABOUT ACTING. IT’S CALLED No Acting Please. ON PAGE 24 [holds up right hand as though reading from a book] IT SAYS:

The actor who premeditates his behavior [forgets words and looks at notes concealed in other hand. Continues to forget and check words throughout] short-circuits the process anywhere along the line. He is so intent on executing his plan of how the scene should go that the stimulus may not even reach him. Or the stimulus may reach him but he’s so committed to his intellectual concepts that he is unaffected by the stimulus. If he’s busy simulating an effect, how can he be truly affected? Or he is affected by something that happens on stage – his partner pats his cheek that night for the first time, but he doesn’t allow himself to respond because he’s imposing the behavior he feels should be there in the scene. He short-circuits the natural process of life, because he does not include his response to the pat on the cheek. If his responses are exclusive and premeditated, how can he respond with what he really feels? Instead of going with the organic response, his expression becomes prostituted by what he thinks the character should do or say. In this way, one denial sets up a chain reaction of denials until the lack of reality is epidemic.

BUT IT’S A GOOD POCKET ANYWAY, BECAUSE IT’S LARGE ENOUGH TO HOLD THIN BOOKS. [Takes thin book from pocket and reads.]

…

I’m now developing these texts (and clothes) towards new work for The Other Room next month.

The grey felt dress is in the picture.

From C. Stanislawski. 1937. An Actor Prepares (trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood). Reading: Methuen Drama. 2006: p.7.

“Today we had a second rehearsal on stage. I arrived early, and decided to prepare myself right on the stage, which today was quite different from yesterday. Work was humming, as properties and scenery were being placed. It would have been useless, amid all this chaos, to try and find the quiet in which I was accustomed to get into my role at home. First of all it was necessary to adjust myself to my new surroundings. I went out to the front of the stage and stared into the awful hole beyond the footlights, trying to become accustomed to it, and to free myself from its pull; but the more I tried not to notice the place the more I thought about it. Just then a workman who was going by dropped a package of nails. I started to pick them up. As I did this I had a very pleasant sensation of feeling quite at home on the big stage. But the nails were soon picked up, and again I became oppressed by the size of the place.”

This video is partly to celebrate my new felt tips (such good felt tips, and so new) and partly to establish possible camera angles for my live art residency at the Chisenhale Gallery this month.

Next week I’m at a primary school working with thirty eleven-year-olds to write, rehearse, film and soundtrack a video responding to the current Chisenhale exhibition, Janice Kerbel’s KILL THE WORKERS!. Her installation is a play for stage lights; ours will be a play for pens.

I’ve enjoyed how clearly the ideas in the exhibition can be related to my ongoing work. Commissions sometimes risk skewing my work away from the concerns that feel most pressing at the time, but in this case there’s a very close match (GOOD WORK Laura Wilson). Looking at this video alongside the typed video in the preceding post, I can see they share a concern with the immediacy of the page, and the attempt to keep the page simultaneous with the acts of writing and reading. In each case the result is a bit frantic. You can’t keep writing, reading and page lined up with one another: grip hold of one and the others slip.

In other news, I’ve been trying to fix a video camera to my pen nib but I haven’t yet found one small enough. I know they must exist.

I made this the other day, thinking about alternative approaches to reading texts out loud. The short text is a self-contained story I’d just finished (perhaps story is too strong a word) and I’m thinking of presenting it along with the Third Word Bird sequence for a reading in July. This video – or something like it – would appear without any sound, though it’s quite good trying to read it out loud off the screen. You run out of breath and the video wins.