Andrew
Schneider's Youarenowhere is a sex and drugs show: euphoric,
pulse-quickening, a thing of abandonment – not his, he's steely
with self-control, but mine, of any other thought than what strange
new joy is this, now this, now ////. A nerves responding from reflex
not thought show, an eyes resisting the urge to blink show, a
blissful transcendence of all knowing beyond the moment of its
happening. It doesn't yield its pleasures instantly; there is a
tantalising foreplay of strobe-effect action, Schneider flitting
about the stage, body illuminated then plunged into ////////, no
connection between these movements beyond their intended effect:
the accumulative tingle of surprise and excitement. There is a
lecture, of sorts, on quantum physics and perception, but Schneider
speaks not only of but at the speed of a moving train: his words blur
as they hurtle past, clarifying only when they're gone. I have a
vague sense of irritation that all this energy is being expended to
talk of un/likely im/possible love, but then something happens so
unexpected, so astonishing, that all rational thought is consumed in
jangling awe.
I
don't know anything for true about drugs but I've had some sex and
while each time it's basically the same there are nights that linger.
Not all positive: there is the sex of feeling nothing,
or feeling chafed, or torn,
or used. But then there's the sex of feeling drunk when stone-cold
sober, the sex of floating weightless, the sex of ////// /////// and
enchanting strangeness and can this be forever please. Each time is
individual, if not in essence different, and there's no guarantee of
feeling the same thing twice.
Now
here
Sometimes
I think I'm addicted to theatre,
sometimes it's just that I married it.
Each time it's basically the same, and yet... Sometimes I try to feel
the same thing twice, but seeing something a second time changes how
I watch: the quality of attention might be more deliberate or more
yielding, more focused or more forgiving. And inevitably that changes
the feeling.
But
theatre being ephemeral, one shot is usually what I get. And how much
I remember of a work depends on its impact.
The
impact of Robert Lepage's The Far Side of the Moon was seismic. I'm
not sure I'd seen anything like it before: I was barely 26 and had
been watching theatre seriously for less than five years. When I read
Lyn Gardner's review of it from 2001 I'm aware I remember almost
nothing she describes. Only the moment when the window of a washing
machine door became the porthole of a rocket looking towards earth
from space. ///////// //// ////.
What
remains instead is the feeling of astonishment. “The entire evening
is a marvel,” Lyn wrote, “like discovering that the party
conjurer is actually a real magician.” That's what I remember:
shiver after shiver as story and staging shifted and stirred. There
was an esoteric quality to its sequence of wild coincidences and
brain-sparking connections, but also an emotional tenderness. Most of
all there was wonder. All the wonder of the universe, and of
humanity, there on the stage, more vital and real than my own skin,
which might as well have melted away.
I've
seen other Lepage shows since, and mostly felt disappointed, no
matter how adroit they were. Seeing Needles and Opium at the Barbican
in June I felt more hopeful than usual, knowing it's an earlier work,
and more rewarded: staged in a suspended, rotating cube, it had the
flexibility of a gymnast, stretching and somersaulting as it moved
between the story of a heart-broken actor holed up in a Paris hotel
room, the same hotel room once inhabited by Miles Davis and his lover
Juliette Greco; the story of that thwarted love, Juliette ravishing
in period film clips, Miles played by a silent actor, who leans from
the cube as defiant of custom and conventional gravity as the music
he played; and the dry wit and playful texts of Jean Cocteau, spoken
as his body floated among stars. But I never reached full hypnosis,
and I wondered if maybe I've seen too much theatre now, and know too
well of its tricks.
Nowhere
Sorry
if I've said all this before, but every time I choose to go to the
theatre, I'm choosing not to be with my kids:
not to help them with homework or play games or run their bath or
tuck them in for the night.
Generally I'm quite scathing of the concept of family, at least
extended family: if I wouldn't choose a person as my friend, why
devote time to them because of an accident of birth? There's
something in Slavoj Zizek's provocation regarding the violence of
love – a text
Schneider delivers in the early part of Youarenowhere, at speed
again, choppily, constantly interrupted by static – that appeals to
me in this regard. “Love, for me, is an extremely violent act,”
he ruminates. “Love is not 'I love you all.' Love means I pick out
something, and it’s, again, this structure of imbalance.” I'll
happily reject that structure of imbalance when it comes to cousins,
uncles, even // ///////. But I can't inflict that on my children.
Except
by going to the theatre. Each time I go it is a specific rejection of
their longings and demand: sometimes I leave with the seven-year-old
shouting through the door for me to come back. What am I sloughing
off each time I do this? What world or self am I trying to reach?
What oblivion do I seek?
Now
here
I left
Youarenowhere thinking that it was like nothing I'd ever seen before
with the possible exception of two things: The Far Side of the Moon,
and a work-in-progress by Andy Field called, if my email headers can
be trusted (um...), This Show Was Born at the End of the World, which
played at Battersea Arts Centre for two nights in 2010. It started as
a kind of game, a let's pretend we're sitting in a building called
Battersea Arts Centre, and that we're an audience, and let's pretend
the apocalypse has struck, but somewhere in the middle it made a
couple of shifts, one of them physical, bringing two sets of audience
together, the other mental, from (according to my email) “fantastical
to real”. And this is the half I remember and cherish, because it
was unwonted and beguiling, and that other audience was so near so
far, and there was a moment – so simple, but I don't think I'd seen
it before – when they were instructed to hold up their illuminated
mobile phones to shape a new constellation. It flashed in my mind in
the hours after seeing Youarenowhere like the face of a person I once
met on holiday // ////// / //// //// ///, and it struck me again how
bizarre it is, to feel so close to a thing so ephemeral, so
intangible, that lives on only in the mind.
Nowhere
It's
funny, reading back on the email conversation I had with Andy about
that work, because one thing he specifically wanted to avoid in it
was “a cheap bit of sleight of hand”, and in the aftermath of
Youarenowhere, that's all I could think about: sleight of hand,
the magic that Lyn named.
Flash the lights and suddenly there's /// // Schneider; flash the
lights and suddenly he's not talking but dancing
– to Robyn, of all things, Call Your Girlfriend.
Flash the lights and it's as though he's slashed a subtle knife
through the technicolor curtain concealing the parallel universe from
this one; flash the lights and we're teetering at the edge of / /////
////. Every so often when I take the kids to the theatre there'll be
a bit of stage business that they can't get their heads round and
they'll say to me: how did that happen? And my reply is always:
because theatre. It annoys the shit out of them. Youarenowhere was
the first time in a long time that I couldn't get out of my seat at
the end, because I was trying to figure out: how the fuck did he do
that? WHAT JUST HAPPENED? And though to some extent I could work it
out, for the most part the answer that contented my brain was:
because theatre. Theatre made that happen.
Now
here
There's
no technical wizardry in Stacy Makishi's Vesper Time; at least, no
technology beyond the humble projector screen and a pair of plastic
boots. But I got the same buzz of bedazzlement from it as I did from
Youarenowhere, because Makishi is expert in theatre's other wizardry:
the ability to unite people, however temporarily, into an idea of
community. She is stealthy in her movements: in a typical dramatic
arc, she first introduces herself as Hawaiian, and then teaches us a
few phrases from her homeland – aloha, obviously; ai-ya, “I
belong” apparently (apologies to Stacy if I haven't used the same
phonetic spelling) – and later happens to mention, in a
self-deprecating way, how much she likes the Tracey Chapman song FastCar, and eventually persuades us to cast off inhibition and sing
along with her the chorus: “I, I had a feeling that I belonged, I,
I had a feeling I could be someone.” My god the abandonment of that
moment in the room, the joy unleashed by it, the eye-watering
hilarity of realising we'd been tricked, that the “I, I” of
Chapman was the same “ai-ya” of Hawaiian phraseology, that she
was making a point about human connection with equal parts pathos and
bathos, that she had transformed the song into a mantra for lost
souls everywhere, encouraging a sense of belonging by creating one
for us.
I've
been questioning lately this marriage to theatre,
and whether it's time for a period of separation.
I want my commitment to it to be more than addiction, or the quest
for a certain kind of dazzle or buzz; I want to feel there's genuine
purpose in writing about it, while being aware of the
self-centredness of that desire. In another glorious rainbow of
Vesper Time, Makishi talks about her father, who left the family when
she was young, and a figure called (something like) Uncle John, who
for a few years held that place surrogate; and how, as an adult, she
wondered whether she should get in touch with Uncle John and let him
know that she still thinks of him fondly and that he meant a great
deal to her, but decided not to, because he wouldn't remember
insignificant little her. And then it's too late, she hears that he
died, and she realises her mistake: to tell him these things would
have been an act of generosity, a communication not of her own
importance but of his. And it seems to me that this might be the
purpose of this writing: to tell the people who make this work, that
makes me feel so much, torn sometimes, used sometimes, but also drunk
or weightless or enchanted sometimes, tell them that they meant
something to someone, and that matters, they matter.
Nowhere
/////'/
/ /// / want to write, //// / //// ///'/ //// ///. //'/ // // ////
/// other song that appears in Youarenowhere, Ricky Nelson's Lonesome
Town, in particular this ache of a verse:
In
the town of broken dreams
The
streets are filled with regret
Maybe
down in Lonesome Town
I
can learn to forget
And
I want to say something about /////// ///// // //////// ////: the
place I go to forget. /// ////// /// //////: that oblivion I
mentioned before. But it's a disjointed thought, not least in its
relationship with the actual lyrics, too fanciful perfectly to fit.
I've tried to delete it, believe me, but something is resistant.
Maybe it's the memory of the show, an entity in its own right now,
not wanting me to edit but striving to shape itself instead.
[Quick
note of double thanks to Andrew Haydon, for including the Zizek video
in his review of Youarenowhere as I had no idea myself where that
text was from, and for the trick at the end of this review, which
influenced me here.]
Back
when I was reading Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, there
was a passage about the Zapatistas that shone so suggestive a light
on Dead Centre's show Chekhov's First Play that it sparked me into
writing about it (this is a postscript to that text). In a chapter on
revolution, especially the social revolutions that have taken place
in South America over the past few decades, Solnit talks about
carnival and the idea of jubilee, a Biblical notion of social renewal
whereby once every 50 years liberty from work, ownership and
exploitation is proclaimed “throughout all the land” (now that's
a religious tenet I can stand behind). It leads her to celebrating
the Zapatistas, and to a discussion about their literary figurehead,
Subcomandante Marcos. She reports how, in response to journalists'
speculation as to his identity, Marcos wrote:
“Marcos
is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a
Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in
Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in
Germany … a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at
10pm, a celebrant of the zocalo, a campesino without land, an
unemployed worker … and of course a Zapatista in the mountains of
southeastern Mexico.” This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan
'Todos somos Marcos' ('We are all Marcos')...
So
much of Chekhov's First Play is concerned with the possibility of
social revolution: of smashing down hierarchies and all the
structures that (up)hold them, of replacing the cult and the claim of
the individual with the selfless anonymity of the collective. When
the wrecking ball falls, the stage picture shatters with carnival
energy, and at the centre of that chaos is Platonov. Plucked from the
audience, Platonov could be anybody – in the same way that Marcos
could be anybody.
In his
confusion, his hesitant movements, his inability to keep up with the
action, the manifold ways in which he doesn't fit, Platonov radiates
the imposed powerlessness of the outsider, no matter how much the
characters on stage are magnetised by his presence. And again, that
not-fitting makes him one with the ostracised whose identity Marcos
so joyfully adopts, whose presence is a problem to authority, and yet
who can, through persistence, through simply continuing to be,
challenge their surroundings and even change the script. The slogan
that Platonov inspires, the line that every character repeats in
turn, is: “You made me nobody.” Once they've said that, they fall
silent: the final vestige of hierarchy – language – demolished as
surely as the country-house set.
That's
pretty much what I intended to say when writing about Chekhov's First
Play the first time, but it wasn't the only thing, and somehow in the
(general indulgence of the) writing I forgot to say it at all. And I
might have carried on forgetting, except that I'm now reading another
Solnit book, Hope in the Dark, and again there's a bit of writing
about the Zapatistas that reminded me of Dead Centre. There's a
beautiful line, also quoting from Marcos, on facing the future with
bravery and expectation of change: “With our struggle, we are
reading the future which has already been sown yesterday, which is
being cultivated today, and which can only be reaped if one fights,
if, that is, one dreams.”
Solnit
picks up on this because it supports her reasonable and reassuring
thesis that political despair is a drain on human resources; that
while fatigue is understandable, and temporary loss of faith a
natural response to disappointment, the defeatism of long-term
despair is unacceptable: “even an indulgence if you look at the
power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone”.
Despair rejects the slow, patient and repetitive work required to
bring about social change, and replaces it with inactivity and
maudlin doom-mongering. It's necessary, she argues, to believe in
other possibilities; even, quoting F Scott Fitzgerald, “to see
things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise”.
This
argument for an embrace of the unknown is exactly what she
illuminates in Chekhov's First Play. Despair in the play is figured
in the character of the “director”, who seems perky enough at
first, but gradually reveals his self-doubt and crushing sense of
failure. He shoots himself out of proceedings, only to return at the
end, still “tormented, without anything to believe in”, but now
aware of the need for hope: for “courage … to keep on living”.
What might happen in the future he doesn't know: he just has to
continue – and do so reaching outwards. When he speaks his final
word, hello, he's no longer the “director” but a single being
with Platonov, their identities merging just as “todos somos
Marcos”.
Our
relationship with the unknown was a central concern in another work
by Dead Centre, Lippy – but there they undermined their own
proposition, maintaining a sense of visual mystery in the staging
while chipping away at narrative ambiguity in the text. Chekhov's
First Play similarly (but with less self-contradiction) shapes its
dream of the future even as it professes uncertainty: the other
slogan repeated by each character in turn, just before the “You
made me nobody” sequence, is: “Is this mine? I can't imagine
owning anything.” This is the politics of anti-capitalism, of the
Zapatistan maxim quoted by Solnit: “Todo para todos, nada para
nosotros” – “everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves”.
And the word “imagine” is crucial: it suggests not a physical
shift, but a mental one, the same as Solnit advocates in her book.
All the social and political transformations we've witnessed in the
past century and that are yet to come have one thing in common, she
says: “they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to
gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the
possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom
and safety. … To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that
commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.”
Dead
Centre plucked Chekhov's First Play from the past, tore it and
transformed it into a commitment to imaginative hope. No wonder I'm
still thinking about it.
*title
a wave hello to Selina Thompson, who sent me an email at exactly the
moment I needed a voice from home brimming gossip and love and a
knowledge of my other self
It
turns out that a full-scale theatre detox – an entire month of
seeing next to nothing – is simultaneously healthy prep for the
annual Edinburgh fringe binge and a major mistake: within 24 hours of
seeing work again my brain was fizzing from the excess of stimulation
and I couldn't talk only gabble delirium. The thing that stood next
to nothing was Hadestown, a show I've wanted to see for a good five
years, ever since I interviewed Anais Mitchell and added her to my
pantheon of living-by-their-own-truth role-model women. For the not
yet obsessed: Mitchell is a folk singer who created a wonky,
sawdust-strewn rewrite of Orpheus and Eurydice to be performed as a
community opera with her neighbours in semi-rural Vermont; later she
released the songs as an album featuring Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) (be
still my heart); and now she's worked with the Team's director,
Rachel Chavkin, to transform it into an off-Broadway musical. I love
the Hadestown album to distraction. I paid $99 to see the production
at the New York Theater Workshop, more than I've spent on a single
piece of theatre in years. I went girded for disappointment. But oh.
OH.
In an
ideal world I'd have seen this with Vernon singing, or at the very
least Taylor Mac, who joined Chavkin for R&D work on the show.
But it didn't matter that this isn't an ideal world, because
Hadestown is a thing of such perfection that it transcends its
performers: lyrically, musically, but also narratively and
politically. I say this with authority, having witnessed Martin
Carthy sing the role of Hades for a gig performance at Union Chapel
apparently drunk, missing his cues and forgetting the words. And
anyway, Chavkin's performers were pretty much phenomenal. Plus,
Mitchell herself worked with Chavkin (and dramaturg Ken Cerniglia) on
the additional material, and her composer collaborator Michael
Chorney is a vital presence in the theatre band, so hyper-sensitivity
to stage change had its balms.
The
bare bones of the story are this: Hadestown opens with pragmatic
Eurydice grilling her poet-musician boyfriend about how exactly they
might survive if they got married. He spins her a golden yarn about
nature providing, as though they were hunter-gatherers in a time of
Eden; but the fact is, they live in (Depression-era) America, where
“times are hard and getting harder all the time”. When she hears
the lonesome whistle of the underground train to Hadestown blow,
she's lethally tempted: its tycoon despot offers work, money, warmth
and security in place of harsh precarity. Orpheus, recognising that
she's lost her soul (and, it's implied, her body) to capitalist
exploitation, attempts to save her – but Hades, altogether too
cognisant of the weakness of humans, inevitably thwarts them.
That's
the skeleton: what makes Hadestown exquisite are the feathers and
jewels with which Mitchell, Chorney and now Chavkin adorn it. In some
ways that's the wrong metaphor, as attested by Chavkin's rough-hewn
aesthetic: working with designer Rachel Huack, she stripped the
theatre back to a wooden floor, installed a homestead amphitheatre of
mismatched wooden chairs (a smart nod to the pioneers and Puritans of
America's past, and its constitutional commitment to rugged
individualism), and set the action in an open circle overshadowed by
the gnarled branches of a single, wintry tree. The sparseness
brightened the gleam of Mitchell's peripheral characters: bold and
swaggering Persephone (exquisitely played by TEAM regular Amber Grey,
crackling as she twisted her body into jagged origami); the
glittering chorus of Fates, watchful, teasing, never judgemental; and
Hermes, gossamer on record but in Chris Sullivan's performance
stomping and robust, a railroad man with a touch of Charon in his
crepuscular gaze. Like Chorney's orchestration, a tapestry of
American sounds weaving jazz, country and more, Michael Krass's
costumes criss-crossed the decades: 1950s bobby sox and dirndl for
Eurydice, a 1930s embroidered slip for Persephone, patchwork silks
and leathers for the Fates. Everything on stage felt thrown together
yet intimately cohesive, simple in a way that belied its complexity.
For
Orpheus, love is simple, and so is life; he's a sentimental romantic,
but he's also, as Hermes so tenderly puts it, an artist who “sees
the world as it could be, not how it is”. Mitchell and Chavkin are
unsparing in puncturing that romanticism while committing absolutely
to its promise: Hadestown really is hell, overheated, overlit,
over-policed and over-provided, and while Mitchell had plenty of
gated communities to draw on when she conceived the notion of a
workforce committed to constructing the wall that separates its own
wealth from its fear of the poverty and jealous need beyond, that
imagery has all the more bite with Trump's Mexico manifesto (and, on
our side, the appalling Calais action) poisoning the air. Any hint of
a middle-class or left-wing sneer at the “stupid” working classes
(the criticism levied as much at Brexit voters as Trump enthusiasts)
who unthinkingly follow-the-leader is quashed by Mitchell's clear
differentiation between people and structures. People are moulded by
the context that contains them: Hades himself is built by the system
he builds, his humanity and happiness compromised by it. In
Eurydice's shoes, the Fates demand, what might we all do the same?
When Orpheus looks back, Mitchell and Chavkin open the possibility
that it's not an innate emotional weakness at fault but some trick of
structural oppression that ensures even the most strenuous of
opponents will ultimately be crushed. This is what makes Hadestown
emotionally devastating: not the fact that Orpheus loses Eurydice, as
the myth declares he must, but the deeper loss of the collective
human soul to capitalist inequality, from which – no matter how
hard we might try to stride into a different future – there seems
to be no escape.
But
there is. Orpheus is still singing, and dreaming of a better future.
We know this, because Mitchell wrote Hadestown.
Laura
Veirs shares the left-wing politics of Anais Mitchell, and her
earnestness of expression, too; but whereas Mitchell's solo work is
more straightforwardly me-and-my-guitar folk, Veirs' collaborations
with producer Tucker Martine pack the musical references of Hadestown
into erudite pop songs. It took me a while to click with her, but
since 2010's July Flame I've been a devoted fan. We played Warp and
Weft as we drove across Indiana, and it reminded me of listening to
PJ Harvey's Let England Shake while driving through the Cotswolds,
those placid rolling hills suddenly muddied and seething with the
ghosts of dead soldiers, insurrectionists, men. Indiana is basically
flat; I'd guess it's desolate in winter, but it's verdant in early
August, field after field of thriving maize. Veirs' circumspect songs
made that landscape churn with alarm at what America has become and
what it's built on:
How
can it be so cold out here in America
Everybody
is packing heat in America
Training
their barrels on the city streets in America
Every
bad man finds his peace in America
In
America
No
shootings were reported while we were in the country, but I did read
of the Black Lives Matter action shutting down the M4 back home and
glowed with admiration and a sense of possibility. Ever since Theresa
May glided into her premiership that's what I've wanted to do: just
sit in the middle of roads, bringing cities to a standstill. Instead
I sat in our hired car for hour upon hour, contemplating the spray
contraption that looms over so many field, maybe distributing a fine
mist of water but more likely showers of pesticide, noting how many
billboards advertise litigation lawyers, wondering how houses that
don't have garden fences around them can suggest so much hostility
towards the unknown stranger. Laura Veirs sang and her words ploughed
the land, churning to the surface its lack of care.
Later
we played Anna Meredith's Varmints and I thought again that it's my
favourite album released so far this year.
I'm
honestly embarrassed by how much I love the National. Looking at them
in the film of A Lot of Sorrow, installed at the Art Institute of
Chicago, I was overwhelmed again by shame, that these middle-aged
white guys, with their suits and wedding rings and thinning hair, are
so capable of turning me to putty. And yes, I'm ashamed of my
superficiality in judging them by appearance: me, a middle-aged white
woman, with my own wedding ring, constantly reminded by the queer and
feminist art with which I align myself of how essentially straight I
am; ashamed, too, of the craven lingering adolescent desire to be
different, other, strange. My embarrassment at loving the National is
a nugget of a more general shame I feel just being me.
But
maybe the National are embarrassed in a similar way; or rather, my
feeling is that its members, especially Aaron and Bryce Dessner, use
this middle-of-the-road rock behemoth to finance all the different,
other, strange art they want to make. (Thus Orpheus entered
Hadestown, proud even in his submission.) A Lot of Sorrow is a
fascinating intersection of those two impulses: a continuous
performance of the song Sorrow, from their 2010 album High Violet,
over and over, non-stop, for six hours, in a white-walled room in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. I saw at most 16 minutes of it on
film, and not even consecutively, but it was enough to get my pulse
racing at the intricacy of detail: the jitter of exhausted fingers,
the crack of voice, the decision to switch to playing guitar with a
violin bow, the pause to gather resources, the slipped note, the brow
that furrows with effort, the snatched snacks for sustenance. Their
bodies are entirely at the mercy of the song: it plays over them,
through them, and so plays through me; for days after its words spill
out of me unbidden, no matter that they're sunk in cliche.
Those
few stolen minutes in front of it are every night I've huddled in the
dark listening to the same song(s) over and over: listening to Cat
Power so obsessively that the person I was staying with told me I'd
ruined What Would the Community Think? for them forever, listening to
Godspeed as though they could realign the stars, listening to
Interpol's NYC, a song that haunted me this holiday (“got to be
some more change in my life”), listening to that National album I
was reviewing for the Guardian stupefied by how out of sorts it left
me. On all those nights I was alone, but watching A Lot of Sorrow in
Chicago I was with my son – my funny little boy who likes his music
gentle and melancholy, has a penchant for Debussy, and was as
mesmerised by the film as me. I twined my arms around him, grateful
for this lifebuoy of love.
The
friend we stayed with in Chicago is a fascinating combination of
socially Democrat (that's how she votes, too) but economically
Republican (a committed believer in success rewarding hard work,
adherent to the American Dream). She's white Scottish, her husband
black Chicagoan, and their political engagement – both donated to
the Bernie Sanders campaign – gifted plenty of lively conversation
in their house about disappointment in Obama's leadership, lack of
belief in Sanders' revolutionary agenda, and the dire prospects of
the upcoming election. The thing that took me by surprise was their
admission that they get at least half of their political news from
watching the plethora of satirical programmes that screen in the US.
It's not a healthy state of affairs, they said, because what's needed
is cultural balance, a space in which people can actually speak
across the political divide, rather than hurling snark at each other.
But the thing is, I can't remember the last time I engaged with any
news-related programming on the BBC without wanting to punch people
for allowing so much inanity so much airspace. If we're going to ape
American programming, can we at least import the acute with the
vapid.
We
spent an evening watching John Oliver programmes, and one in
particular landed a horrible punch. It's a programme about drones, in
which Oliver shows a clip of a young teenager from Pakistan, talking
about the sky: grey days are good, he says, because that's when his
head feels clear of anxiety. Blue skies, by contrast, fill him with
fear. And people wonder how Muslim children might become
“radicalised”.
Peter
McMaster's blog was my holiday firefly, bringing flashes of natural
wonder to a fortnight of preying architecture and obsidious concrete.
I harbour a deep and quiet love for Peter and his work, and the
attempt at a different way of living, thinking, making art and
opening up to the world represented by Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides
reminds me how much and why. The work takes the form of a two-week
cycle tour, marking in gold leaf upon land's edge a line to which, at
a conservative estimate, it's anticipated water will rise as
human-accelerated climate change affects sea levels. The gold is
ostentatious but the action anything but: it's a humble attempt to
reckon with environmental destruction, a lament for what might soon
not be, a movement towards a different sense of value. It's art made
for no money or purpose other than to notice, to acknowledge, to
witness – not what's before us, but what's unseen.
There's
a beautiful thing Peggy Phelan says in her forward to the Tim
Etchells book Certain Fragments, identifying “the essential nature
of witnessing itself: to continue a conversation that without your
intervention would cease”. Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides continues a
conversation between human and land, one Peter still dominates
(painting rock with gold is “an unsympathetic defacing”), but in
a way that's diametric to the domination humans generally exert,
plundering earth's resources without care. His journey coincided
exactly with mine to the US, a piquant synchronicity: while he
cycled, camped, measured and gilded, I visited the Natural History
museum in Manhattan, Prospect Park zoo and the aquarium in Chicago,
and in each place fretted at the ethics of human-animal relations,
the cruelty required to give children a glimpse of wild nature, and
the extent to which cities diminish and even eliminate opportunity
for children to commune with a greater outdoors.
Peter's
blog posts continue another conversation: with the unseen audience.
When Phelan writes of the witness, she's thinking of course of the
audience, and I value that sentence so much for its suggestiveness
regarding criticism or writing about theatre. To me it presents a set
of open questions: is it enough to be a silent witness? Is
documentation essential if the conversation is to continue? Is it
possible to engage in the conversation as critic/critical
writer/whatever without overbearing? I don't know. But there was a
warmth for me in reading Peter's posts and recognising in the
scenario an echo of when I first met him, at Battersea Arts Centre,
when he was thinking similarly but in a different context about
masculinity, privilege, and solitude, environment and the spiritual
possibilities of a closer connection to nature. There is a longevity
and depth to our conversation, but also a scarcity, privately as well
as professionally: I rarely see him; I've seen much more of his work
than I've written about. And so how might it register if I stopped
being witness, if the conversation ceased? Would it matter?
It was
such an unexpected gift, a few days after I got home from Chicago, to
bump into Peter at Forest Fringe, where he was performing another
variation on the Gold Piece strand, a one-on-one called CommitmentCards. The work is exquisite in its shape and generosity: Peter
begins by offering tea, then asks what you're yet to say no to.
Gently he guides the conversation to an invitation to commit to
something, with him as witness. Work like this galvanises but also
disquiets me: it's so open that it inspires openness, and how much
must the artist then absorb of human anxiety or insecurity as
participants unburden? Megan Vaughan, writing about her interaction
with Commitment Cards, describes Peter as “a reassuring therapist”,
and Peter himself says in his blog post about the evening that he's
“not afraid of the idea of art-work being therapeutic” or “to
embrace the sensation of therapeutic experience”. I worry because
he doesn't have a therapist's training or safety mechanisms; that
these things aren't required for one human to give their ear to
another is a useful and inspiring thing to remember. As Peter says in
the blog: “I was moved by witnessing someone open up for the
benefit of both of us, for the creation of a bigger idea of
self-expression and compassionate communication being allowed to
exist in the world.”
I've
participated in one other Gold Piece with Peter and cherish it
precisely for its compassionate communication, achieved without
speaking at all. Based on the Japanese practice of kintsugi, the root
Gold Piece invites its participant to mend a piece of broken china,
gluing the pieces together then painting the cracks with gold dust.
As I did so, I felt Peter was silently forgiving me for every stupid
or thoughtless or mistaken thing I'd ever done. Kintsugi is a
philosophy as much as a practical art: it values the imperfect,
honours its scars. There's another thing I want to write about it
(especially since my brilliant friend Anna spotted a reference to
kintsugi in Beyonce's Lemonade) so I'll shut up now, but this strand
of Peter's work feels so important to have in the world – not just
in spite of its minimal reach, but because of it.
The
Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is so bizarre: a small-town
museum in everything but pretensions, closer in spirit to those
ramshackle rooms devoted to dolls (Dunster), shells (Margate) or
fishing paraphernalia (Hastings) than the more grandiose cultural
houses that its architecture evokes. I loved it, the more so for
being ridiculous. Highlights: the Elvis display, which I wanted to
bring home to my mum; the drawings by Jimi Hendrix; the absurd
attempt to claim Cleveland as the epicentre of the pop universe; the
fact that the area devoted to the history of hip-hop is only slightly
bigger than the area devoted to outfits worn by Beyonce. Best of all
are the listening booths that people – locals, I'm guessing –
have claimed for karaoke, each one packed with friends singing at the
tops of their voices, not caring for the lack of closed doors. I
didn't buy any memorabilia because I'm going to make it instead: my
own version of a dress worn by Wanda Jackson, with a panel of gold
sequins down the front and red fringing down the sides, something to
fill a dance floor with flames.
There
are things generally known, at least by the people I surround myself
with. It's known, for instance, that humans are humans, regardless of
what country they're from or what colour skin they have. It's known
that humans have affected and accelerated ecological devastation.
It's known that story is vital to human culture and existence. Yuval
Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind repeats these
known things, but places them in a depth of field (as he puts it,
scanning “millennia rather than centuries”) in ways that are
surprising and transformative. I'm prone to hyperbole I know, nothing
I say can be trusted, but I'm only two-fifths through and already I'm
changed by it. Or rather, he's brought to light and forced me to
acknowledge a whole lot of weak thinking in my brain and challenged
it in necessary ways.
It's
an incredibly depressing book, because page after page asserts the
same argument: that it's actually impossible to change the culture in
which we live, because the story of it is too tenacious, too
embedded. In no way is he saying that we are by nature neo-liberal
acolytes of the free market, but that all societies coalesce through
story, and the stories that dominate now have been in place for
thousands of years. This bit in particular is devastating: he's
talking about how difficult it would be to shift inter-subjective
imagined orders (the examples he gives are “the dollar, human
rights and the United States of America”) because to do so would
require “simultaneously chang[ing] the consciousness of billions of
people”, and to do that would require creating “an alternative
imagined order” even more powerful than the one you're attempting
to change. And so, he concludes: “There is no way out of the
imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards
freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard
of a bigger prison.” The book is full of statements like that and
every one stings.
But.
BUT. He's affirmed my belief in feminism as the story with the most
potential to create change. His chapter on the patriarchal structure
is brilliant, because it comes right out and says that its
“universality and stability” is bewildering. He presents all the
key arguments for masculine supremacy and steadfastly exposes them as
arrant nonsense. There's a glorious butter-wouldn't-melt tone to this
writing: a swallowed amusement that no one will admit that the real
reason men dominate over women is that, in general, they are selfish
shitbags who chanced to seize an opportunity for power and never let
go. The feminist story struggles because it is disparate and scratchy
with argument and riddled with its own damaging hierarchies, but
there is hope in its tenacity, its adaptability, its ongoing
refusals, its compassionate communication (such a useful phrase). It
is the story in which I have most faith, and which gives me the most
strength.
He's
also made me feel better about the idea of living in a bubble. If the
imagined order at the macro scale is so impossible to change, why not
collectively imagine a new order on a micro scale and live within
that instead? At some level that's the ultimate in white middle-class
privilege, of course – the same line of argument that builds walls
and gated communities – but I don't, I hope, mean it that way. My
alternative world is populated by makers of story, theatre, art,
music and more, by feminists and activists, by people who don't
retreat from the bigger world but comment on it, rewrite it, work
against it. Each fuelling the other, giving each other purpose and
sustenance, and making life in that bigger system possible.
We
went back, me and my funny little son, to A Lot of Sorrow, because –
and, dozy as I am, I had to go to Chicago to find this out – the
film was also screening in London over the summer, as part of the
Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition at the Barbican. And then I had to go
back a third time, because there were chunks of the exhibition deemed
unsuitable for children (translation: he missed out on seeing a
hilarious film of a dog running round and round a swimming pool as a
woman swam lengths because it was next to a video of a couple having
sex), and because he was tired by the time we reached the Visitors
room and two minutes in there was 58 not enough.
I
realised something, watching A Lot of Sorrow that third time,
laughing as Kjartansson brought out burgers to the band, ribs
crushing and convulsing every time Matt Berninger rumbled the opening
line. There's a National lyric that's key to the whole exhibition,
but it's not from Sorrow, it's from Pink Rabbits, an absolute
humdinger in a song full of them:
You
didn't see me, I was falling apart
I was
a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park
You
didn't see me, I was falling apart
I was
a television version of a person with a broken heart
A
television version of a person with a broken heart. Just writing it
gives me shivers.
Kjartansson
is fascinated by the interface of performance and personal, the
effects of external culture on internal emotions, the ways in which
people make stories which inform human behaviour, the Mobius strip of
mirror and mirrored. In the accompanying text for the multi-video
installation Scenes From Western Culture, he talks about the
pervasiveness of certain atmospheres, certain settings and moods,
wanting to jolt the brain into seeing them and maybe even resisting
them. By using repetition, he invites audiences to look harder, give
better attention: to seek out the difference between the television
version and the person.
But
it's the broken-hearted bit he's particularly incisive with. My son
had zero tolerance for God, in which Kjartansson dresses up as a Rat
Pack crooner and, accompanied by a cruise-liner swing band in a
pink-satin room, warbles the words “sorrow conquers happiness” on
repeat, and to be honest I didn't bother returning: the minute I saw
felt off-kilter compared with the fine balancing act of A Lot of
Sorrow and in particular The Visitors. There's such subtlety to the
permutations of melancholy in both of those: the performers wallow in
it, luxuriate in it, step away from it so easily that one person I
know complained on twitter that he “smelt the faint whiff of
vacuous”, saw only “irony on loop”; but there's also a fine and
solicitous appreciation of how intense and real and consuming
melancholy can be, how weird and jolting it is to feel like shit and
yet sometimes be capable of laughing or noticing beauty, how
excruciating it is to know somewhere deep down that the melancholy
that is so overwhelming might also be something you're performing (a
question Selina – waving hello again – asks of herself in Salt).
Nothing about A Lot of Sorrow, or The Visitors, or Take Me Here by
the Dishwasher felt ironic to me: there's a grain of playfulness in
them, even in Dishwaster a dash of cheerful stupidity (in this one,
Kjartansson has isolated three minutes of a soft-focus Mills &
Boon movie romance, in which a woman in a pink maribou dressing gown
has a tryst in the kitchen with a man in plumber's uniform, and
projects it on a wall while young male musicians loll about the
partially decorated gallery space strumming at guitars and droning
the dialogue from the film on repeat). But the questions these works
ask about how we see or feel or differentiate between the real, the
imagined, the fantasised, the performed, and how our ability to do so
is affected or conditioned by the art, film, theatre, music, TV and
books we consume, are serious and rigorous and give Kjartansson's
work its vitality.
Before
I saw Search Party's Growing Old With You at Forest Fringe, Andy Field texted a warning: “your heart is going to BREAK”. I braced
so strenuously that for most of it I was steel. But then Pete lay
down on a table and Jodie began to cover his body in salt. And that
was it. Snap.
Search
Party are just about my favourite theatre-makers in Britain
(inevitably that's a long list in which everyone is joint first). I
love them for Save Me, the semaphore show, in which they stand at
opposite ends of a public thoroughfare and communicate messages given
by passers-by to each other; with patience and grace and infinite
charm it makes visible the fragility of communication and the ways in
which people speak their truest selves to strangers. I especially
love them for My Son & Heir, the parenting show, in which they
speak so honestly of the strains and anxieties and competitiveness
and compromises and horrible absurdities of bringing up children that
I wept almost non-stop through it. And now I love them for Growing
Old With You, the all-of-our-lives show that they're going to make
new versions of every 10 years. At Forest they performed the first
instalment, and because it's already a few years old, it feels like
an act of nostalgia as much as documentation and assessment. The
scene in which Jodie covers Pete in salt felt, in the moment of
watching, overwhelming in its romance and longing: for youth to be
preserved, for the intensity and joy of falling in love and getting
married to never be lost. But on reflection, its complexity is
unfurling. I see the futility of that attempt to control time, and
also the limitation of it: where's the room for growth or change? I
see Pete lying still on the table like a corpse: that time is already
gone, fleeting as the life of a butterfly, and nothing can ever bring
it back. Above all, I see that while you can't argue with perfect
being, maybe you can't live a full life either.
There's
a great paragraph in a Guardian interview with Jenny Offill from last
year in which she talks about her admiration for visual artists who
“take an everyday thing and somehow make it, by accumulation, into
something much bigger”, and in particular her delight that British
reviewers of the book understood its humour, “all these moments
which are really meant to be kind of a joke about what it’s like to
be depressed”, which tells me she's probably a big fan of
Kjartansson. I'm finding her novel Dept. of Speculation painful to
read, because it's like she's poking needles into my brain. I had to
put it down for two days after this line: “Some women make it look
so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that
no longer fits.” The paragraph in which the narrator, a woman of
“crooked heart”, describes her happiest time as “a time you
were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you,
not even love” made me choke. I feel exposed by it, the more so
because I so desperately wish I were smart and brave and gifted
enough to have written it and it's lacerating to reminded page after
page that I'm not.
The
thing is, I never make room for other kinds of writing in my life,
because I'm always writing about what other people make. Holding up a
mirror to the mirror, an endless loop, shoring fragments of feeling
and experience against my ruins.
