At
6.07am on Friday 24 June, I was woken up by the words: “Oh fuck,
Leave have won.”
At
8.55pm on Friday 24 June, I walked into the black-box theatre at the
New Diorama for Coyote, a “semi-improvised mixtape” telling the
“story so far” of Ponyboy Curtis.
I'm
always on tenterhooks, seeing Ponyboy, but this time the stakes were
impossibly high. I went to them in need of reassurance, consolation
and hope. I went knowing that Andre Ponyboy, Portuguese and in London
on a student visa, was already feeling that his future in the UK was
threatened, and wanting to give him a hug to say: we'll fight to make
this OK. I needed Ponyboy and Chris to make everything OK. I needed
them to process the day or at least bear its weight; to recognise the
terror and anger lodged in people's stomachs, articulate it, expunge
it, transform it. I knew such expectations were unfair, but
everything about the day was unfair: I needed them to rebalance it.
For
most of Coyote, they did. And yet this performance – my fifth encounter with the group – suggested some limitations of Ponyboy as
a project that either hadn't struck me before or that I'd brushed off
unexamined. Ponyboy, like all Chris' work, is a haven for me, a
refuge of idealism; but on a day when all ideals were shattered, the
walls of its asylum became visible. That Coyote survived its setting
at all, without crumpling into irrelevance, is testament to the
conviction with which the group shape a queer, anti-capitalist,
romantic space that diametrically opposes the demonising and
exploitative politics espoused by, among others, the frontline of
Leave campaigners. But something about the hard truth of the day, the
ugliness of the divide slashed through the country, made romance
insufficient.
Attention
Coyote
began, as always, with naked bodies walking silently and carefully,
tuning in to each other's frequencies. As a line of the introductory
text said, on such a day, “what could they do but pay even closer
attention to each other?”
I've
always cherished those opening minutes of Ponyboy shows, not just for
the attention each body gives to the other, the scanning and scoping,
the pausing and reflecting, the communication of openness and
vulnerability through pores and downy hair, but for the transition it
allows me to make, slowing me down, encouraging me to listen not just
with ears but eyes and even my own skin. More and more I recognise
that the attention of those minutes is vital: the invite of it, the
kindness, the alertness of the listening; and that it shouldn't be
focused solely on those with whom we sympathise, but extended to
those with whom we disagree. The referendum, scarred by the death of
Jo Cox, demonstrated the extent to which civic and cultural
attention, whether to racism or the crushing effects of austerity or
the too-many communities demoralised by ongoing lack of opportunity,
has lapsed or was always lacking.
And
yet, in Coyote, the attention of those minutes felt wrong. In
following pre-set patterns and established behaviours, in speaking of
itself generally rather than the specific moment, it seemed languid,
luxurious, indulgent. Not a solution, but part of the problem.
Violence
[I've
been trying to write about this show in a single, coherent, linear
essay, but it's just not happening. There's something pleasing about
that, how strenuously Ponyboy resist normativity in narrative, and
any response requires me to do the same.]
I'd
seen Ponyboy play with violence in FCKSYSTMS, wrestling and
grappling, laughing as they overpowered each other. In Coyote they
stopped playing and shit got real. Of course it did. Maybe it felt
that way because, as well as the exposure of the time, Ponyboy were
contending with exposure of the space. When they've performed to a
general public before, it's been at the Yard, where the audience are
contained in rake seating and the demarcated playing space has lots
of air around it. I've seen them in more intimate settings, but there
it's just been just me or a small invited audience. This was
different. Even with the seats pushed back, the theatre at the New
Diorama is small and overheated; even with the audience crammed
against the walls, the playing space is cramped. It's marked out by white tape, a thin line separating internal from an amophous external in which Ponyboys can be off instead of on - only here, the outside
was almost eradicated. The tension of having no release or relief
poured into the play-violence of Coyote and made it savage, while
proximity made it more perilous.
[As a sidenote: it's funny how we as audience stay in our places when watching Ponyboy, honouring the divide of that thin white line, even when almost sitting on it. On the recommendation of Simon Bowes, my Ponyboy sparring partner, I recently read an essay by John Berger on the "theatre of indifference", a social and cultural phenomenon whose "precondition is the failure of democracy", and results from "the inevitable divergence of personal fantasies when isolated from any effective social action". In his email mentioning it, Simon wondered whether "the experience of performing or of watching a performance is a way of divesting ourselves of real participation in politics by creating a simulation of it". Watching Ponyboy, do we really create the queer sexual revolution, or only fantasise about it? But I'm jumping ahead of myself.]
All
they were doing, of course, was inhabiting an age-old model of
masculinity, fearlessness as a mask for fear, aggression exaggerated
to extinguish any other emotion. The more they fought, the more their
sweating bodies cried: see? See this? This is what it's like out
there. This is the violence you live with and ignore, day after day.
Look at it. Look at it.
And now help us get rid of it.
The
smell in the room changes when they fight. It becomes heavier,
muggier; I know it's absurd but I always think it's the musk of
testosterone. If only the tropes of masculinity attached to it could
be washed off as easily as sweat.
The visitor
There's
always been a visitor in Ponyboy shows. In At the Yard, it was a different
person every night, reading out a letter they'd written, to men or
boys, specific or generalised, real or imagined. In FCKSYSTMS it was
a teenage white boy (Stan Smith): a totem of ultimate privilege, but
one growing into a knowledge that this advantage is becoming
necessarily precarious. Coyote's visitor looked back to Ponyboy's
very first R&D in December 2014: to Chris' obsession with Nova,
“someone from another village”, who appears in Peter Handke's
play The Long Way Round to galvanise those around her with firebrand
“words of resistance”. [Writing this, I think of
what it means to be a fan, to have rare access to the object of
obsession, to collect and collate facts, incidents, obscurities; b-sides, flexi-discs, bootleg live recordings. The
mixtape analogy is perfect.]
During that R&D week Nova was played
variously by the Ponyboys themselves, by Tilda Swinton in a
swimming-with-dolphins recording set to electronic music I found
offensive in its attempt at aura-manipulating psychedelic
expansiveness, and by playwright Jo Clifford, who divested herself of
jumper and bra to perform semi-naked and regal. In
Coyote, she's played by Annie Siddons, who keeps all her clothes on
and stays sat behind a desk, but loses no impact for it. I look up to
Annie anyway, but those words combined with her strength of being set
my pulse racing. It's a speech directed to a group of villagers,
ignored and made-to-feel-inferior; a speech hymning nature, art,
faith and revolution, and above all the promise of humanity committed
to working with love. She is cosmic in scope – the line “a cry to
the gods is form and form reveals the arcade in space” is exquisite
– but also molecular, drawing attention to the “yellow-in-yellow
amid yellow blossoms”. In total, the speech lasts a good 20
minutes; Chris slashed it in half, and I couldn't be sure what made
the cut, but scanning my photocopy now my eyes catch on so many lines
that speak to our tumultuous moment:
Nature can neither be a refuge nor an escape. It provides a model and a measure; but the measure must be taken each day anew.Who says that failure is inevitable? Don't listen to the gasps of the dying: they lie.Time is the vibration that helps you through the accursed century, and it is also the luminous tent of survival.Nowhere in our human history is a consolation that holds water. The cries of horror will go on for ever.Only love can enable you to see things as they are. You alone, my beloved, are real. Loving you, I awaken to myself.
Somewhere
in the back of my mind, Nova's words were counteracted by a
conversation I remembered having with Selina Thompson, a few days
after the Orlando shootings, in which she briefly flashed with fury at
the way the lives of queer and trans people of colour were as usual
being erased, not just by the violence of one man wielding a gun, but by the use being made of their deaths to boost arguments for gun control and other white-liberal preoccupations. The
white-gay-male-led campaign #loveiswinning in particular made her bristle: love, she fumed, isn't
winning for black people. I also remembered Chris and Jonny Liron talking in the R&D
rehearsal room about an uncomfortable prickle of right-wing fervour
they apprehended in Nova's words, something – worryingly – I
never felt I noticed. I might have missed it again in Coyote but for
the music Chris used to underscore Annie's voice: a gentle, celestial
twinkling that grew imperceptibly menacing with a sly change of key.
The
visitor is a necessary figure in the Ponyboy space, which might
otherwise feel hermetically secluded, as solipsistic as a teenage
diary. And Nova is my favourite of all those I've encountered so far.
It saddens me to say this – because I want not to be conditioned by
heteronormative gender thinking, I want my brain to be less binary –
but I know it's because she's a woman, unexceptional yet
unconventional, speaking boldly, not to any gender but to everybody.
It makes me happy, in a simplistic way, that the Ponyboys stop
everything and sit, like acolytes, like children, while she holds
forth. It makes me happier still, in a way that supports a recent
insinuation that I'm as bad as Angela Leadsom and deserve a similar
massacring, that it's Annie, a mother to teenagers, someone whose CV includes the career break taken when those children were
small, whose current show is about her struggle to live in suburbia,
who commands the room for this moment and illuminates a path that
might save us. It's not that her words are uncomplicatedly hopeful –
if anything, Nova says, “Hope is the wrong heartbeat.” It's her
embrace of the difficulty that lies ahead that makes me cleave to her
so.
Howl
When
the Ponyboys howled in At the Yard, what they emitted was the sound
of desperate hearts: a carmine sound aching with animal longing and
thwarted desire, a yearning that might never end. There was
looped projected film of a boy running and stumbling to throw himself
into the arms of another, and on the stage there was running,
stumbling, pounding and wanting, and falling to knees to emit that
howl, head tipped back as though pleading with the moon.
When
they howled in Coyote, what they emitted was the sound of desperate
fury: disappointment, terror and rage. Maybe it was the proximity
again, but I don't think so: the escalation of intensity was
devastating. There were three in total, ending with Andre, whose howl
was a severed artery, spraying blood.
Transgression
You
know what I said about Hakim Bey when writing about FCKSYSTMS? Forget
it. Or rather: if the text of Wild Children shot an arrow over my
head in that show, here it hit solid and true. Not even the word
ontological could faze me: because how perfect is the phrase “natural
ontological anarchists, angels of chaos”? Bey's vision is of
children as “savage runaways or minor guerrillas” locking gaze
with “artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics”, creating together
a “means of triumphant escape” through “delirious and obsessive
play”.
Play in the quotidian sense, the play of my children, with lego and
teddies, or football and sticks, is something I struggle with: it
never feels to me a route to triumphant escape but tighter bondage.
For all its imagination and make-believe scope, I'm yet to accept its
invitation, or find a way through it, to shape for myself a different
role. But when I'm with Ponyboy Curtis, I'm able to shed that. I realise this
will contradict what I've said above about Annie Siddons (to be
honest, almost everything I've written this year is sloppy with contradiction), but words like that allow me to forget I'm a
mother, they entice me to contemplate radical play: the play of
breaking rules and testing boundaries and doing all the things a mother says you never should. I've done a bit more reading about Bey
since then and this blog in particular left me furtive and breathless. We
are conditioned from birth to behave as we do: I know this because
I've been mindlessly conditioning my own children. Ponyboy are the
vanguard of a full-scale rethinking.
Smashing
down proprieties around sex is one of their methods: instead of equal
marriage, that solid cornerstone of capitalism, they offer the
fluidity of polyamorism; instead of monogamy, the gifting body,
generous with its pleasures and on display. The fashion-show parading
of different masculine types is a long-standing Ponyboy trope that
has never held much meaning for me, straight-laced as I am, and in Coyote I see it as another dip into
irrelevance and indulgence: a moment in which the “semi-improvised”
is overtaken by the “mixtape”, to the detriment of the whole.
But the sex is of a different magnitude entirely. It is untrammelled,
almost rapacious: body piles upon body, limbs so entwined they might
be conjoined; tongues travel greedily from mouth to nipple to
hardened cock; and because the room is so small, sometimes those
bodies are only just beyond reach. But perhaps the most electrifying
thing about it, on this day of all days, is the extent to which this
vision of male lust defies the narrow-minded prejudice of Farage and
his cronies. What emanates from those bodies, in their tantalising
almost-fucking, is an emphatic and joyful fuck you.
Im/possible dreams
I've
been pretty positive so far, right? As I left Coyote, that's how I
was feeling: becalmed, held, relieved. In the New Diorama cafe I had
three separate conversations with four of the Ponyboys that reassured
me further. Nick and Griffyn gave me news about Paul, whose absence was a sadness if not quite a surprise (on the last day of FCKSYSTMS he wrote on twitter: “the thing imitating itself
– performance of sincerity/committment seems to preclude
understanding of the artist as critical or suspicious – might be
because we think of critical/ironic 'distance' - and i'm interested
in proximity – & also probs as a relatively young artist people
are reluctant to point out weakness or horror in the thing i have
committed to – + when one name dominates a work, & is publicly
seen to promote a politics, there's an assumption that everyone in
the work agrees?” So I'd guessed he was ready to leave). Andre admitted that he'd spent the day in fear
of being attacked every time he opened his mouth, but we agreed that
his howling had dislodged something, unchoked us. Craig, brilliantly,
said that he'd had exactly the same problem with the opening section
as me (arguably, it misfired through a lack of conviction). But then
I had a conversation with another audience-member, and
performance-maker, Ira Brand. It's niggled at me ever since.
“Could
women do this?” Ira wondered aloud. She's spent the past year
playing (in a wild children way) with gender presentation, and now
has as tangible a male identity as she has female, so I don't think she meant this in a straightforwardly cis- or white-feminist way. I talked meagrely of the experiment of CG&Co's Riot Act, a room of
feminist expression crossing gender and sexuality, and Ira listened
patiently before kindly pointing out I'd missed the point. She was
thinking about the gaze, how it distorts female bodies/polices female
sexuality, and how women using their bodies as tools for revolution
would be received.
It's
not often I feel I have a direct effect on CG&Co's movements, but
the roots of Riot Act lie partly in something I wrote about the
Ponyboy R&D, confessing that I'd find a room of naked women far
more erotic than I do naked men. Whatever Riot Act achieved (and it
was a difficult room, so ideas on that are mixed), it didn't do
nakedness: there was a song about the injustice of men being able to
walk the streets topless, and a comic strip about it too, but no
undressed breasts hanging loose. The most triumphant expression of
gaze-defying female presentation was Emma Frankland finally wearing
the skirt she'd bought as a teenager, two decades before her
transition.
Ira's
comment made me re-see Ponyboy: for all its queerness, for all its
transgression, it's the expression of a group of white males. They
might be questioning their own privilege, but that they're able to
gather at all is concomitant with that privilege. Even if they point
to a queer romantic polymorphous future, arguably they do so for
themselves first and everyone else second. I accept that I come at
this through some problematically circumscribed thinking about binary
gender, not to mention invisible exercise of privileges of my own.
But still. On this awful day of turmoil, the promise of Ponyboy
carried only so far.
[I love this song. Chris chose it as the closing of Coyote, and might have used it in another Ponyboy soundtrack, too. It hits a note of sincerity with such precision that its blandness, or sentimentality, is rendered inaudible. There is so much I don't write about when I write about Ponyboy, in particular the collage of materials Chris grafts to the group, the storytelling he does from his seat off-stage. Like Chris, I end with this song because it points forward. The youth are changing, changing. I don't know where Ponyboy Curtis will go next.]