Nowhere
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.]
No comments:
Post a Comment