Mission Paradox is rolling out a bunch of big questions. Out of appreciation of that kind of thing, I’m going to try and answer Adam’s questions. I will probably fall behind.
First question (abridged): Why would someone want to work with you? (Whole thing here)
Community events for and by professionals. Singing at the Christmas Concert
A while ago, I was thinking a lot about the community theatre leanings of my work with Small Wooden Shoe
(“Community theatre for and by professionals”)
We had done the first Christmas Concert and were working on reading of Life of Galileo, and I was loving the relationship with the people doing these projects and the audiences who were coming.
And they were also among my favourite art events of the year.
I started saying, “We have to have ideas so good people will work on them for free. And then we’ll work to find the money to pay the people.”
This formulation does a bunch of things for me.
It puts a lot of pressure on me to have good ideas.
Or to work with collaborators to make my medium ideas into great ones.
This pressure is a good thing. I think it will pay off in the show we finally make.
And it certainly pays off in the commitment and investment of the people I work with.
We also have to treat people well,
We have to work in a way that moves towards the parts of their work they love
That gets them excited.
Because the idea isn’t just the final production
The idea (the one so good) is usually about the process too. About how we work.
People shouldn’t work for free (or at all) on something because the final show is so good, but the process is hell.
(This does goes on and maybe even has a tradition in the theatre, but it’s a tradition I don’t have much time for.)
Of course there are bad days, there are fights and phases of a process that slog along and nobody can remember why they agreed to this. But the generosity of the idea and the ways of working are what gets us through those days.
So I hope we’re offering the chance to work on good ideas in interesting ways,
Offering a chance to beat back the alienation and cynicism that can set in the professional art world.
Offering a chance to make a good idea great by doing what you love to do.
A question that’s been poking at me for a while now.
that I need (and maybe I’m not alone) a way to make performances quickly and outside of the structures laid down by the current status quo. To be clear: the status quo, to me (now, here) includes most “working artists” – since we are deeply invested in and reliant on the current structures.
There are so many systemic changes required on all levels and I believe firmly in a governments role in funding the arts – but I suspect it is up to us, as artist/makers to find a better way.
I don’t know what it is but here are some thoughts
- it’s cheap. cheap to make, cheap to see.
- it’s fast. get’s made quickly, or at least is able to respond to the speed of life. (there is another kind of desperately needed work that is not at all about speed, but that’s a different post)
- it’s funny.
- it has songs.
- it is in relation to the publics that we are a part of. to the stories and imaginations that make it up.
- soft professional liberalism won’t help.
While I am cynical and and a little burnt by the big puppet / public spectacle world – I still have curiosity. Especially around Welfare State International. This is a great bit (the whole article is worth it too…)
We joined to make playful art outside the ghetto. Not to work three years ahead in a goal-orientated corporate institution where matched funding and value-added output tick boxes destroy imaginative excess. The art business puts jobs before vocations. Overintensive risk management, child protection, alarm systems, licensing, family-friendly badges and employment laws invade with a suffocating culture of smug inertia.
Beyond the excitement and buzz factor, what’s the value of doing this project so fast?
Magazines don’t have money to pay anyone anymore. A lot of people are expected to invest a lot of time to get published but then don’t get paid very much for their efforts. This was a way for us to get super-talented writers and only ask for a morning of their time. And it was a sort of question in our heads: do you have a higher probability of getting great creative work from people because we made it fun and not burdensome? There was a “let’s make it happen” attitude that I think was really appealing.
These days (or maybe in the days just passing) there is a desire for truth and/or authenticity that gets worked out in verbatimtheatre (also dance) – at the same time as these claims there’s backlash when we find out someone was lying and historical accuracy seems important. David Hare has written a nice piece at the Guardian about some of these things.
What than to do with Galileo? The correspondence between historical truth (such as we know it) and Brechts’ play is spotty. The timeline is off, the relationship with his daughter is misrepresented – as is his relationship with the Catholic faith and the terms of his imprisonment.
As opposed to a bio-play, Galileo is a parable based on a historic character. It can’t let the history get in way of the intent. What the play wants is different. And I support this. The authenticity claims of verbatim ring false for me and adherence to historical facts doesn’t map on to the value of a work.
But is there any responsibility to tell the audience this?
Attending a play entitled Life of Galileo, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that what happens in the play also happened to the historical figure.
I don’t want to apologize or even imply the play is weakened by its inaccuracies (since it’s strengthened,) but there is a part of me that worries for the reputation of Virginia.
it puts into my mind a bigger question: is there a difference between writing to an audience, writing for an audience and writing about an audience, particularly if you’re engaged in anything at all activist in your work? And should there be only one audience? Shouldn’t a work be able to reach more than one group, provide more than one kind of entertainment?
…
Not every audience needs every message, or needs it in the same way.
He’s referencing some very useful Scott Walters posts
—
The other night I was at a theatre festival that at the end of the night had a band play. And while I had enjoyed my night before the band, watching the band I started to think about who needed who. (As opposed to who made who – also a great question)
In the first few moments of the performance, it became clear to me that I needed the band. I needed the way the singer sung and the keyboards got played. I didn’t know, before they started, that I needed them – I knew some friends liked them – but I didn’t know I needed them.
And I had a feeling that they didn’t need me as much as I needed them. And that that was as it should be.
I was, in that moment, sick of being needed by the shows I see, by the performances of those shows. [This all sounds terrible, I know that - but I need to track out this feeling.] That I had needs (dammit) that I didn’t even know, and what I really needed was for some performance to come out and meet those needs.
Maybe the devastating scarcity (funding, audience, fame, lunch-money) and desperate need for self-expression/exhibitionism to ward off alienation results in shows in which the creator “needs to say something” “needs to express” him or her self.
I want to be in shows in which something needs to be said – not for the well-being of the maker (though that will always be part of it) but also, and most importantly, for a need that is outside the maker. For a need in the public – who are sitting in the audience – who include me.
There is a crazy ego in these statements – I get that. But no one decides to – willingly, often – step out and speak in public without a fair dose of ego.
And I need to be clear that I want avoid patronizing and talking down. Because nobody needs that. So any real consideration of the needs of others removes patronizing – removes any desire to prove superiority – removes all non-consensual power games. Because nobody needs those things. Really.
And so, rather than an ego that is about exposure or dominance, the play of needs might be about consideration and kindness (when sometimes a splash of cold water to the face is the kindest act – this isn’t about only soothing or not saying hard things)
This is all fine to say – but what does it look like?
A certain confidence. A certain care and craft.
Some leadership and vision.
Self-reflection and observation of the world around us.
Because I don’t think my needs, honestly examined, are so unique or special that others won’t share them.
But this will lead to some bold, scary moments.
For everyone involved.
I’ve wandered and rambled from the original posts, but still think the wanderings are related – the need to have a great conversation with the local grocer is a very similar to the need theatre fulfills for me. Good ideas, good will, good time.
Whenever my theatre has failed it’s been by forgetting what I actually need from the theatre. Both as an audience and a maker.
It’s watching this small fraction of inspired improvisations (maybe 3% would be more accurate) that reminds me how lucky I am to work with performers who can do this – this very strange combination of tuning and turning, doing and waiting, acting and not acting, pretending, playing, inventing, insisting, listening and taking chances. It might be an odd thing for a sometime writer like me to say, but watching this kind of rehearsal, when the group is on a roll, and being lucky enough to nudge it into shape a bit, reconfirms so many of my doubts about the singularity of authorship that many plays demand. I really do prefer the making by doing, the group effort, its multiple directions and endless live negotiations. Even the cold of the bunker, and the ever-present threat of an eight-hour circular discussion, can’t keep me away.
In their 1984 documentary Being & Doing, visual artist Stuart Brisley and experimental film-maker Ken McMullen use the term of their title to describe a shared zone of folk ritual and performance art. For them, being and doing is a way to think about performance – not as pretending or fiction – but simply as the execution of tasks, somehow banal and magical, in real space and time.
Second – While this thing of task has been central for my thinking about performance for a while now. Recently I have been thinking a lot about pretending and fiction. Especially about Science Fiction and Fantasy and how those genres are related to what I do.
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This is a space for commenting, thinking and writing informed by and related, mostly, to the work of Small Wooden Shoe, and our world. Written, mostly, by Jacob Zimmer.
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