Qui est-il ?

Who is it that is addressing you? Since it is not an author, a narrator, or a deus ex machina, it is an I that is both part of the spectacle and part of the audience, an I that, a bit like you, undergoes its own incessant violent reinscription within the arithmetical machinery. An I that functioning as a pure passageway for operations of substitution is not some singular and irreplaceable existence, some subject or life. But only rather moves between life and death, between reality and fiction. An I that is a mere function or phantom.

Jacques Derrida, Dessimination

What's Going On Here

My purpose here is to keep track of my interest. To explore various performance techniques and to write about how I'm adapting and implementing them in my own work. I'm currently developing two plays - each representative of a two particular processes I use. I devise work collectively and I write plays hunkered down alone. This site will serve as my notebook. I'll post quotes and eventually explain how things that appear here fall together in my head and in the studio.

Current List of Interests (this is kind of a global/greatest hits sort of thingie)

1. Failure
2. Emotion
   
3. Time
   
4. Space
5. Audience
6. Criticism
   

Ghostlight Recommends

THE DEVIL ON ALL SIDES
(LE DIABLE EN PARTAGE)
presented by FoolsFURY Theater Company
in collaboration with Alliance Française of San Francisco

May 4 – June 11
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 pm, Sundays at 7 pm
Traveling Jewish Theatre @ 470 Florida Street
$15 - $30, $12 for students, seniors, and TBA members.
Tickets & Information: 1/800-838-3006 or online here.

Reviews here and here.

That Is The Question

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

In reading and writing, you may either be, without doubt, attached to what you are saying, or you may not. Attached in the sense of being connected to it. Supposing you know exactly what you say and you continue to say it. Supposing instead you have decided not to continue to say what you say and you neither do nor do not continue to say it. Does it or does it not make any difference to you whether you do continue to say it. That is what you have to know in order to know which way you may or may not do it, might or might not do it, can or cannot do it. In short which way you come or do not come to say what you say. Certainly in some way you say what you say. But how. And what does it do, not to you, but what does it do. That is the question. Shakespeare's plays were written. The sonnets too were written. Anything anybody writes has been written. Anything anybody reads has been written. But if anything that anybody writes is written why is it that anybody writing writes and if anybody writing writes, in whom is the writing that is written written. That is the question. This brings me to the question of audience of an audience. What is an audience. Everybody listen. That is not an audience because will everybody listen. Is it an audience because will anybody listen. When you are writing who hears what you are writing. That is the question.

Gertrude Stein, Writings and Lectures 1909 - 1945

Premiere of Ubu Roi 1896

The premiere, the following evening, was a different matter indeed. In attendance were "all the leading in the worlds of politics, journalism and letters". Grémier once again spoke the opening 'Merdre!' ('Shite'). The audience immediately burst out with a roar. Grémier was "unable to get a word in edgewise for the next fifteen minutes" (Lennon, 49). It was the first time that someone had spoken such a word on the modern stage. Gémier tried to silence the audience by blowing a tramway horn (Beaumont, 100). Many people left the theatre. A fight broke out in the orchestra pit, while Jarry's supporters yelled, "You wouldn't have understood Shakespeare or Wagner either!" (Lennon, 48). Others shouted, "Can't you see that the author is taking us for a bunch of damned fools?" (Beaumont, 100). When Grémier had finally gotten slight control of the audience, he spoke the second word―another 'Merdre!'. Needless to say, the audience started to howl once more. They shouted at the stage and at each other. When things quieted down again, the play proceeded as planned. Smaller outbursts continued throughout the performance. In the days that followed, the violent battle for and against Ubu Roi would move on into the Parisian press.

Read more here. Full text of Ubu Roi here.

La Règle du jeu 1939

Jean Renoir

What pushed me to make The Rules of the Game was an ambition to treat a subject which would allow me to use the exterior forms of a French comedy of the eighteen century. I was also a little bit influenced by Musset, but my ambition was to find again a certain elegance, a certain grace, a certain rhythm which is typical of the eighteenth century, French or English. And that’s the way I made the picture. During it, as always, I discovered that my problem was my old problem: what would happen to a stranger who wants to belong to a milieu which is not his. And, of course, the problem of how the poacher is going to be admitted to the servant milieu. I discovered this only afterwards, but I thought that’s not bad, the picture will certainly please. I was sure the public would like it – it was a light picture, parties are not big problems, and the big problems were so well hidden that the audience wouldn’t be hurt in their feelings. Well, I was very wrong. Starting with the first show it was a kind of riot in the theatre. I even saw one gentleman who was trying to light a newspaper to set fire to the theatre and prevent them from showing such a piece of trash. And I came to the conclusion that the film was at least a very controversial one. That hurt me very deeply – I was so surprised. I didn’t shoot The Rules of the Game with the idea of being a revolutionary. It was a big surprise and a bad one.

Read more here and here.

Two Improv Everywhere Performances

No Pants 2k6


Look Up More


More here and here.

Simon McBurney

Over the time that I have been working with Complicité what happens in the rehearsal room has changed enormously, yet certain elements are always present. The constant fooling around; the immense amount of chaos; pleasure as well as a kind of turbulent forward momentum. Nothing is off limits apart from not turning up... It is often extremely unstructured, though paradoxically quite disciplined. The room is crammed full of stuff; on the walls pictures, text, photographs, videos, objects, clothes and paper everywhere… But this is by no means a consistent picture. Often we reach a moment when there must be nothing in the room at all. It has to be bare, empty and uncluttered. So when rehearsing a piece I do not have a method, no single approach. Ultimately the material dictates each rehearsal.

People often ask where we begin. We always begin with a text. But that text can take many forms - I mean it can equally well be a visual text, a text of action, a musical one as well as the more conventional one involving plot and characters. Theatre, says Aristotle, is an act and an action. Action is also a text. As is the space, the light, music, the sound of footsteps, silence and immobility. All should be as articulate and evocative as each other.

I have often heard people say that as a company we are fascinated by action and image. But that is only because what people DO must be as clear as what they SAY. I do not mean that what they do must copy language. But just as poetry is central in much of the theatrical cannon, so what people DO can also be couched in its own poetic transformation. In The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol we were encountered the problem of the representation of the protagonists, Jean and Lucie, making love in a barn. All our solutions were either embarrassing or clichéd, until under the pressure of the final weeks we suddenly seized the planks we were holding to represent the barn they were in, and started to fling them around the rehearsal room. The wall came apart and planks flew across the stage and we found the dynamic of love making transposed into the explosion of the space and the movement of the objects.

This is an example plucked at random from years of graft. Most of the time such moments of revelation or discovery are rare. And there are more weeks of despair than seconds of elation. In such moments I long to be told what to do. Or to disappear down the corridor and play with the curtains or dive into the makeup box, and let someone else decide for me. A piece of theatre is, ultimately, in the hands of those who are performing it. The actors. It is they not the director who must have the whole piece in their every gesture, hearing the meaning in each word. And to do that I think, as an actor, you have to feel that you possess the piece. And to possess the piece you have to be part of its creation. Involved intimately in the process of its making.

Ghost Light Recommends

It's the last weekend to catch these two fine productions.

The Faith Project
May 11 – 20 at 8pm/May 21 at 2pm
The Studio Theatre
Robert & Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
Davis, CA

$8 for students and $12 for the general admission
Purchase tickets at http://www.mondaviarts.org or call 530/754-2787toll free at 866/754-ARTS.

A multi-disciplinary theatre piece that follows one fictional congregation as they struggle to find answers from an elusive God and a conflicted country. The production draws on the multi-ethnic ensemble’s personal stories and research into various faith practices, and incorporates audio-taped interviews with clergy, scholars, and people on the street.

Written & directed by Susannah Martin
Choreograhpy by Kristin Heavey
Music composed & directed by Dave Malloy
Written & performed by Jennifer Arnoth, Samantha Blanchard, Christopher Maikish, Karen Marek, Ashanti Newton, Michael Ortiz, Karuna Tanahashi, Natasha Tavakoli, Carolyn Thomas, & Rosa Threlfall

Landslide

An evening length site-specific work
presented by Company Chaddick

Fridays & Saturdays May 5, 6, 12, 13, 19 and 20, 2006
2 performances each night
8PM & 9:30PM
Tickets/$20 general admission
ArtsSFest Arts Pass accepted
Reservations/(415) 435-7569

Danzhaus
1275 Connecticut Street (at Cesar Chavez)
Directions to Danzhaus

Deborah Slater Dance Theater's
Hotel of Memories
More Furniture Dances

May 18 - June 3, 2006 | Thursday, Friday, Saturday 8:00pm
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA
For reservations and information call (415) 435-7552
Tickets available online at http://artofthematter.org through Paypal

Fellow Travelers Performance Group presents "WOMEN ON THE EDGE," an evening of works by some of the Bay Area's finest women choreographers including Cynthia Adams, Chris Black, Joan Bruemmer, Michelle Spencer Ellsworth, Monique Jenkinson, and Sara Kraft.

May 11 - May 20
Thur/Fri/Sat 8pm
Tickets $12- 20 and are available at the door.
Reservations: 510-848-8605

Exit Theatre
156 Eddy Street
San Francisco

Robert Edmond Jones

What do I want? What do I really want you to do? I will tell you. I want you not to believe anything you have grown up to believe. That the theater is a petty, clever, slick, cheap place. I want you to put an end to this sterile idea. I want you to realize that the life of the theater can be larger and more vital than anything you have ever known. I want you to realize that you have been misled by watching the starved, warped output of the Broadway theater, until you have taken it for granted that the theater is something less than the terrible, wonderful, flaming thing it is. I want you to know that your life in the theater can be full, can be rich, can be drunken with beauty and power; and that elation can be your daily life, your daily bread. I want you to get a sense of responsibility towards the theater. I want you to move out of the shallows into the deep current. I want you to acknowledge the fundamental mystery of the theater. I want you to learn that observation is not a substitute for insight; that ingenuity is not a substitute for imagination; that cleverness is not a substitute for culture. I want you to realize that we are beginning to see that America and Americans are not in the least like what we thought they were. And I want you to create in the theater out of this new awareness of ourselves and our country. I want you to realize how deficient we are in a sense of reality, and how we try to compensate for this deficiency in all sorts of dazzling and futile ways. I want you to learn how the reactions of an audience differ from the reactions of every audience member. I want to repeat that. I want you to learn how the reactions of an audience differ from the reactions of every individual in the audience. I want you to know that audiences have capacities for feeling that no dramatist has ever touched. I want you to learn the height of perception - the contagious excitement - out of which all great work for the theater is created. I want you to learn to see life dynamically - to see it in motion, to see it in action. I want you to learn to respond to the livingness that is on each floating instant of time. To become aware, and always more aware, of that livingness until at last you can know what Plato calls, "the madness of those possessed by the Muses." More than anything else, I want you to be true to your dreams of theater. Now at your time of life, is when you acquire them. Never go back on them. Never! Be true to your dreams. Be true to your love. Be true to your love. - Robert Edmond Jones