A Reader’s supplement to David Mamet’s ‘True and False’
(The Bold italics are my response)
To the Actor:
P3: I studied acting in various schools, and could understand little of what was being said. … I knew that the goal was to bring …..an immediacy to the performance….but none of us understood, nor did practice reveal…how the school’s exercises were to bring that about. It seems that you are saying you were uncomfortable in this practice, inferring that you were ‘lost’ inside the confusion of the exercises. This means it wasn’t you that lacked clarity, focus and structure, but the exercises themselves that lacked clarity, focus and structure.
P4: …..the life of the academy, the graduate school, the studio…. are as removed from the life of the actor as aerobics are from boxing. Could the analogy be made here that the academy etc. is much like going to the bar for a drink after football practice – a social ancillary that softens the physical bumps and psychological lumps but, by being distractive, is of no real purpose to the development of an actor.
Some Thoughts:
P5: As actors, we spend most of our time nauseated, confused, guilty. We are lost and ashamed of it; confused because we don’t what to do and we have too much information, none of which can be acted upon (because information is not knowledge); and guilty because we feel we are not doing our job well enough… The good we do seems to be through chance: if only that agent would notice me, etc, etc.
The answer to this comes in two parts.
1. It is because the whole scene is based on chance, both short and long term, that things will fall into place if I get a good break. It’s much like buying a lottery ticket and hoping I’ll win the lottery- somebody will, but its improbable that it’ll be me. In effect I’m a victim hoping that someone or something will come along and rescue me. To take control over my situation (as much as one can), the question becomes: what am I doing to minimize the effects of chance. Essentially all actors are in competition with their peers, and there is a lot of competition out there, and increasing all the time. If I’m doing the same things as my peers the chances are the same things will happen to me. Therefore, how am I preparing myself culturally, aesthetically and politically for all the challenges I will face? And it requires a lot more than just positive thinking- it requires implementation.
2. The existential confusion of most actors occurs because they are almost totally unprepared for the rigours of performance. While a lot of attention is paid to ‘creative’ approaches, almost no effort is expended on how these should be supported against the pressures a performance places on an actor, the instinctive “in the moment’ responses, that are expected can only be fostered by the acquisition of undeniable skills and the confidence that goes with it. In any other discipline, it is acquired through training. Using music and sport as examples: in both of these it would be inconceivable to enter the affray without deep and continuous training. The most important elements of training are: repetition, routines, formats and tools. And since most acting approaches teach actors to be terrified of all four as being stultifying and uncreative, they are automatically prevented from being prepared. Of course it doesn’t dawn on the acting teachers that athletes and musicians are creative precisely because of their ‘uncreative’ routines. But that would be against their tenet of the sanctity of Actor Confusion, wouldn’t it?
P6: The Stanislavsky ‘method’, and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense. It is more an approach than a method. It looks at the creative aspects of acting without addressing how to methodically and practically gain the necessary skills.
Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people’s performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. Actors used to be shamanistic – they used to summon up and confront the audience with its own shadows. Modern technology has flattened out real life experiences, and with it, expectations. Real shamans used to froth at the mouth, working themselves up, to not pretend to be the character, but in fact become the thing itself. The modern actor, much weaker in spirit, has devolved into performing the illusion of doing so. A surreptitious tear, a cracking voice are the civilized theatre’s versions of such transformations.( This is a paraphrasing of a section from Martin Buzzacott’s: ’ The Death of the Actor’
Ancestor Worship:
P9: The actor is onstage to communicate the play to the audience. Can we expand this statement to read: the actor is onstage to engage with the play in visceral, prismatic terms to ‘real’-ise the play, that is, to take the words off the page and give them sculptural density so that they can be felt or experienced by the audience in a way much more powerful than just heard or read.
P10: Eisenstein wrote that the true power of film came from the synthesis in the mind of the viewer of shot A and shot B. Shot A: a judge clearing his throat. Shot B: a woman raising her head from a desk – the audience creates the idea: ‘hearing the verdict’. Talking more in terms of the unconscious or instinctive, could one say that the audience creates their own ‘experience’ of hearing the verdict.
Similarly, it is the juxtaposition in the mind of the audience between the spoken word of the author and the simple directed-but-uninflected action of the actor which creates the ineluctable idea of character in the mind of the audience. The character also needs to be sited within an aesthetic landscape provided by the designer/director. This places the character in visual and thematic relief, the coding of which adds nuance and depth to complete a picture initiated by the text.
P11: The actor on the stage, looking to create a ‘state’ in himself, can think only one of two things:
1. I have not reached the required state yet….. or
2. I have reached the required state, how proficient I am! At which point the mind, ever jealous of its prerogatives, will reduce the actor to (1). Neither of which are (in the moment), and that is because his ego is dominating his experiences, his feelings. All performers have and need Ego, for it is the Ego that strives for self discovery (the search that drives all artists). But, paradoxically, it is the Ego that also stands in the way of self-discovery, and an actor needs to corral his Ego, in order to progress….. Easy to say……much harder to do…….
P13: On the stage it is the progress of the outward-directed actor, who behaves with no regard to his personal state, but with all regard to the responses to his antagonists, which thrills the viewers. Except to say that as well, the actor must be aware and react to the effect the others are having on him, as the viewers are primarily identifying with his feelings.
P14: Similarly, on stage, the Great Actor, capable of bringing herself to tears, may extort our admiration for her ‘accomplishment’, but she will never leave us stronger. One of Tadashi Suzuki’s well known observations are the comments he made following a viewing of a Broadway production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. He observed that at the close of the play the three sisters were able to cry on cue. He then noticed that the audience were impressed by the skill but noted that, rather than saying to themselves ‘how impressive it is that they can cry on cue’ the audience themselves should have been crying in reaction to what was happening on stage….. They were impressed but not moved.
P15:…..but I suggest that they, the accomplished actors, young, vital, talented and hearty, succeed at the Actor’s Studio and elsewhere, in spite of their training. Quite so! A good point can be made that they are ‘instinctive’ genii, which begs the question, can their abilities and exploits be approximated by some form of training - are there structured exercises that can take the ‘non-genius actor’ to a similar zone.
A generation that would like to stay in school:
P19: The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and direct. If one goes further and posits that the audience is a witness and in extension a vicarious participant, one can expand this to say that a performance in the presence of an audience will teach you these things.
The skill of acting is like the skill of sport, which is a physical event. And we can, by extension, look to sports for the examples of training that enable equivalent instinctive response.
P20: The Method School would teach the actor to prepare a moment……it is impossible to prepare an instinctive moment. It is possible (and necessary) to prepare for an instinctive moment.
P21: If the actor had simply opened his mouth on cue and spoken (even though he felt uncertain) the audience would have been treated to the truth of the moment…….he would be truly instinctual which means he would be truly himself in the moment. This is extremely difficult and begs the question what exercises can be structured to give him the confidence to be instinctual.
P22: …..It is beside the point to have the actor ‘undergo’ the supposed trials of the character upon the stage. The actor has his own trials to undergo and they are right in front of him they don’t have to be super-added - they exist. His challenge is not to recapitulate, to pretend. To pretend is to impose one’s ego( I want) on a given situation. An actor has to undergo experiences but cannot do this convincingly if he is pretending. Another way of saying it is that, if his will prescribes or dictates the experiences, they are immediately contaminated and he cannot intuitively undergo them.
Scholarship:
P23: Polite Western society has long confounded scholarship with art. In truth scholarship is critiquing the people who do art.
That is the mis-judgement of the method: the notion that one can determine the effect one wants to have on the audience, and then study and supply said effect…. Preoccupation with effect is preoccupation with the self. For, if an actor works in that way, it is prescriptive, imposing one’s will, by force of ego, on the action and the audience. This may impress the spectator with its machinations, but will not ‘move’ them. The audience will only be ‘moved’ by witnessing actors being affected by experiences. This, the actor can only achieve instinctively, by reacting intuitively and honestly to a real emotional and psychological experience.
Find your Mark:
P28: … and then, rather than pretending, we can discover whether or not we are courageous. Acting, at its most exciting occurs when it is a self discovery, both for the audience and the actor. The audience is having its own self discovery by witnessing the self discovery of the actor. Brando was non-pareil at this. You felt, watching him, that you were witnessing him do whatever he was doing….. For the very first time! The camera allowed you to be there, to witness its inception!!!!
P30: The magic phrases (arc of the character) and procedures (subtextual analysis) are incantations to lessen the terror of going out there naked. But that’s how the actor goes out there, like it or not. These incantations are attempts to ward off nerves by pretending they do not exist. This of course backfires because it is a double deception. It's easy to say things like: "dont be nervous". This is deceitful authority, because it pretends to solve the problem, but merely turns it back on the actor. The real solution would lie in:" What do you give the actor to fill that void?"
P31: Actors like to attribute their feelings as it gives them the illusion of control over them. They are trying to wish away the unexpected…..Very good! I assume you are proposing that the actor has to think these deceptive thoughts to compensate for an awful void that exists because the actor cannot feel ‘in the moment’.
So wisdom consists in this: do not attribute feelings, act on them before attributing them, before negotiating with them…. This is another way of encouraging the actor to act instinctively before the ego distorts the experience.
P32: ….giving oneself up to the play…I would instead say here ’giving oneself up to the performance’ because the play exists as an extant document, but the performance of the play exists only on stage. The audience can go and buy the play (as a book) any time- they can only ‘buy’ the performance in the fleeting moment while they are witnessing it.
I’m on the corner:
P34: To say of it:” I’ll try” is to excuse oneself in advance. Its like saying “I’m on a diet”, which really means: “I am REFUSING to change my eating habits!”
Business is business:
P41: I’ve heard of young actors, feeling constrained, speak of ‘stepping out’. They want to invent, to mold, to elaborate, to influence, etc…. to be in effect, anything but themselves. Right On! These actors want to dominate the role, to impose their egos on the role, rather than have their ‘self’ experience the role.
It takes great strength of character- which is formed over time and in frightening times…..Time and adversity. It was Proust who said: “There is no knowledge without pain”
P42: To serve in the real theatre, one needs to be able to please the audience and the audience only. I rather suggest that you please the entire performance, which includes the actors, director, writer and audience. They are all stakeholders at their different levels, with different expectations, but linked inside a common event.
Auditions:
P44: Producers are not interested in discovering the new. They want the old- and if they cannot have it they want its facsimile. Too true! If you want to be successful commercially, you take something very old and make it appear new by adding some slight superficial changes.
P47: As a member of an audience, I will tell you, it is an insult to come backstage and say to a performer ”You were great tonight”, only to be told: ”No, I was terrible ! You should have seen me last week!” The audience comes for their own experience, which is not the same, but is predicated on the actor’s – to disagree with the compliments is to repudiate the experience.
P48: I have watched long runs over the years…. Generally the “I’m garbage” and the “I’m brilliant” were the same. The actor, by definition, is inside the performance, and so cannot judge it objectively (he cannot know precisely what the audience is getting). The audience is a witness and vicarious participant, so as well, cannot judge objectively – they only know what they feel about it. The only person capable of any objectivity, and hence is the authority of last resort, is the director.
The purpose of the performance is to communicate the play to the audience. The purpose of the performance is to give the ‘voice’ of the play a ‘body’. Until it is performed live, a play is really a book - a series of words and literary images, figments of the author’s imagination. As a book it is a form of private communication. Once performed, it becomes a public event, a communal experience, where the audience bonds through sharing a ritual.
Such an idea of a ritual implies physical actions that have meanings that can be felt as transformational (two that come to mind are Uplifting and Thought-provoking). For something to be perceived as uplifting, the movements and gestures of the actors must add sense and weight. This sense and weight add a mythic quality to the words, making them appear larger than life, affecting the audience much more powerfully than if they had come out of a daily or domestic body language.
P50: I knew a man who went to Hollywood and languished jobless for a period of years. He came back and lamented “I would have been alright if they had only explained the rules”. But who are ‘they’ and what are the rules? There is no ‘they’ and there are no rules. In fact you have to make your own rules by making your own culture. Your own culture means that you must invent and invoke your own standards. This would determine that your culture is intrinsic- it belongs to you. Most theatre culture is extrinsic- it is governed by rules imposed from the outside. In my country (Australia) this takes generally either of two forms:
Your politic aligns itself with government arts policy, or,
You have established a certain clientele, who are happy to keep coming in the door if you keep delivering the same aesthetic.
Both of these are extrinsic forces acting upon you and make you susceptible: If political fashions change, you’re left high and dry. If you change the product, the punters may melt away.
Paint by numbers:
P52: The only reason to rehearse is to learn to perform the play…..It is not to ‘investigate the life of the character’. There is no character. There are just lines on a page. Any character on stage is mythic or mythical- they are not real. They are a combination of
The writer’s imagination,
the actor’s portrayal,
the director’s attitude, and
the audience’s apprehension.
Even if the character is based on somebody real (eg Julius Caesar), the actor cannot pretend to be Julius- he cannot play Julius. He can only ’play’ aspects of himself that identify or align with Julius.
P53: The use to which a gambler puts his or her money is: ’time at the tables’. And the use to which an acting student puts his or her time, money and faith is ‘time at the school’. It is an end in itself. Fascinating insight! Perhaps that is why actors, once they have left school, feel no need to train or to hone their craft. They have done their time.
P54: The paint by numbers mechanical actor judges himself and the performance constantly, and by a pre-ordained checklist, as if acting were rally driving and the actor rated by how accurately he hit each checkpoint.This can also be termed the ‘Bag of Tricks’ acting technique, where the actor spends the performance dropping off bits of ‘business’ which keeps the audience laughing or crying, because it “Usually works!”.
P55: Actors must be trained to speak well, easily, and distinctly, to move well and decisively, to stand relaxedly, to observe and act upon the simple, mechanical actions called for by the text. This may be true for a standard play, such as the old sepia standards, where the production recycles Macbeth in different period costume and décor (What! Mussolini’s Italy this time! ) Get Olivier’s film of same and direct traffic accordingly. Because these are competent re-enactments, they only require blocking.
But, what about a transformational piece of theatre such as Tadeusz Kantor’s: ‘Le Classe Morte’. Works such as LCM stand above standard fare just as John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever, stands above pop. Works such as SFF or LCM, make you forget you are watching theatre or listening to pop music- they have shamanically taken you to another place. They redefine the possibilities of the form, they open up new possibilities, revealing new aspects of the audience to itself, that they didn’t know were even there. Such theatre is not born of the 4 week ‘blocking’ process.
Work:
P55: “Good-day” on or offstage, can be an invitation, a dismissal, an apology, a rebuke. Its meaning will come from the intention of the speaker to the spoken to. Similarly, onstage, a line’s ‘meaning’ to the audience, is conveyed by the actor’s intention. This ‘intention’ has more than one component. One can assume that the most important would be the emotional or psychological attitude employed by the actor in the way he would deliver the dialogue. However, research has shown that verbal communication between people can be broken down into:
Words: 10%,
The Sounds of the Words: 30%,
Body Language accompanying the words: a whopping 60%!
This is a truly staggering ratio and one that belies the importance that we generally place on the spoken text. It would imply that the recipient of verbal communication unconsciously augments and corroborates the words by ‘reading’ the way that the body is ‘speaking’.
The statistic also explains the situation where the audience, having ‘read’ the anacrusis (the preparation before an action, eg the uplifting of the hand before the strike) has ‘heard’ the speech even before it has been delivered. They’re already on the beach waiting for you to get there. This fixation concerning the words, their meaning and importance, has ignored the simple fact that if the actor’s body language or action is not congruent with his voice, then the audience will not believe the actor despite his best intentions.
P56: The work on the text, finally, shields the actor both from anxiety about his performance and from the necessity of paying attention to his colleagues while on stage. Could one also expand that to:
Paying attention to the audience,
Paying attention to the set and props, and finally ( and even more holistically)
paying attention to the performance as an experience.
P59: The Fourth Wall: There is not a wall between the actor and the audience. Such would defeat the very purpose of theatre, which is communication and communion. The idea of the fourth wall is a construction of someone afraid of the audience. The actor before the curtain….may have feelings of self-doubt, fear or panic. The erection of the 4th wall is the negative ‘in denial’ response to those feelings of self doubt and panic. For the very act of performing to a public is a challenge to one’s sense of self. The audience is there to gain knowledge from the play, the performance and the actor. Because the actor is their main point of contact, they place a great demand on his psyche- you could say that they are sucking his energy away. This is stage fright pure and simple. As an actor, every time that I face the audience’s energy, I am confronted with the shock: “I don’t know who I am anymore”. With training and experience that feeling goes away, but I do feel it initially, especially on the first night. Once I realized it for what it was, the issue simply became: How to acquire enough sense of myself ( what I would call self-definition) to withstand the existential shock and protect the ‘psyche’ from diminuition.
Oral Interpretation:
P62: You have to learn the lines, look at the script simply to find a simple action for each scene, and go out there and do your best to accomplish that action, and while you do, simply open your mouth and let the words come out however they will - as if they were gibberish - if you will. That is a noteworthy proposal, but surely a big demand to ask somebody brought up on a standard acting approach? It is as if you thrust a guitar into a neophyte’s hands and then say: “Just improvise, even though you can’t play any music, don’t know any scales, arpeggios, etc” Everybody would understand the absurdity of such a situation within a musical context. Why is it that such a demand is so accepted in the acting world? Surely the question is…..How do we structure a training system that encompasses exercises and routines that foster such abilities. These exist in music and sport. Why not transpose them?
For to you, the actor, it is not the words which carry the meaning - it is the actions. Once again, 10% words/30% sounds/60% body language.
P63: The best service an actor can do is to accept the words as is, and speak them as simply and clearly in an attempt to get what you want from the other actor. Again, this is a very easy thing to ask, but much harder to deliver. As one of the great physical theatre teachers Etienne Decroux once demonstrated; He indicated a movement pattern and commented with: Easy to see! Easy to say! Easy to do badly! However in the following line you perhaps unwittingly provide the answer:
If you learn the lines by rote, as if they were a phone book……This is exactly how athletes and musicians train. Football players do routines that are formatted with highly defined time and spatial strictures. Inside these strictures they perform their drills by rote, repetition upon repetition, and they do this so that in the ‘moment’ of the game, they can react instinctively to any situation that may arise. If they had to resort to any sort of reasoned process regarding a situation within the game proper ( how do I get myself in the right position to kick the ball?), they would immediately have lost the moment( and the ball!).
For some strange reason (probably aversion to hard work) actors think:
“It’ll be alright on the night!” Even though nothing they do remotely prepares them for the night. Actually most actors amplify the problem by avoiding training because it is uncreative, avowing: “It’ll kill the moment, etc”.
We do not embellish the things we care deeply about. Oh so true! Jacques Copeau, the grandfather of what has become gesture based theatre, once commented: “To be sincere, you have to move slowly”. On first reading it comes across as too simplistic but on reflection it is most acute and it is a re-phrasing of your sentence.
Most actors need to embellish, to fill the void so to speak because they care more about themselves than anything else. I am reminded of watching a documentary about a well known film actor traipsing across the Siberian wastes by motorbike. At one stage they were being carried on a truck when the driver saw a bear cross the track ahead. They stopped the truck, gave chase, killed and skinned the bear before resuming. This offended said moviestar superbigtime, even though:
The bearskin was probably worth a year’s income to the driver,
It happens all the time, and
His reaction won’t change anything.
What it did show was that his reaction; what it meant to him, was more important than the thing he was reacting against. Of course an artist’s powerful feelings are important drivers for his expression, and indeed it may be that the need to express powerful beliefs is what defines an artist most of all. But the canvas for this outburst should in this case be the stage or film, not self important posturing in the midst of some muddy Siberian track.
… but the audience isn’t looking for a person with a ‘good idea’ about the script. They are looking for a person who can act- who can bring to the script something they couldn’t have learned or imagined from reading it in a library. They are looking to be ‘moved’. This is to take them on a journey- on their own journey of self- discovery.
Helping the Play:
P64: All of acting, all parts, all seemingly emotion-laden scenes are capable of and must be reduced to simple physical actions calling neither for belief nor emotional preparation. The 10.30.60 principle.
Most plays are better read than performed. Why? Because, in truth, most actors on stage are only reading the play! So when they are sitting down reading they are more honest than when they are pretending to do more.
Most productions are just speaking books because most directors are only interested in the dialectic between the script and themselves. (How often have you seen a director look at the script when they perceive a problem - they should be looking at the stage! The problem is on the deck!)
Why are these interactions so less moving when staged by actors? Because the actors have no ‘body’ knowledge, power or poetry! They can add nothing to the words. At a reading it is no distraction because their bodies are silent and not exposed. But in most cases, as they begin to walk around their bodies become a distraction that obscures and fragments the audience’s appreciation of the language- their bodies become an obstruction to the audience’s experiencing the play.
P66: What is required is not the intellect to ‘help the play’ but the wisdom to refrain. Indeed! The intellectual, the ‘I’ is an impediment!
Acceptance:
P67: As if acting were not an art or a skill, but only the ability to self-induce a delusional state. Without a thorough and systematic training acting is definitely NOT an art or a skill.
But is this true of music? Does the musician devote his energies to forgetting that what is in front of him is a piano, and does the dancer strive to forget that she is dancing and endeavour to believe that what she is doing is walking? NO! Because the musician/ dancer always needs to know the notes/steps they are playing/dancing. That is in its deepest essence, them knowing themselves in the playing. Otherwise they would be as ‘lost’ as most actors are.
It would follow that if the actor had a similar ’physical score’ he would then have the confidence to feel himself inside (occupy) his speech and actions. And since the playwright cannot or does not provide the Physical score ( except for Beckett, whose plays are stripped back to be purely physical scores) then it is left to the director. He /she is the equivalent of the conductor/choreographer, the provider of the aesthetic landscape that frames and presents the text.
It would follow from this that the actor should have a physical training score comparable with the music scale and the ballet barre.
P68: The dancer does not endeavour to create in himself or in the audience the feelings the choreography might invoke: he just performs the steps the most truthful way he knows how. Not quite true. The dancer as well as doing the steps, must occupy the dance, must be on a journey inside the dance. The crucial thing is that these two aspects must go beyond co-existence, they must feed off each other, nurture one another by combining together. One must not dominate to the detriment of the other.
P69: To act means to perform an action, to do something. If acting is actions, should not the actor’s ‘script’ be his actions, and the actions be a score as structured as in music. And is it possible to create a language vocabulary of gesture that corresponds to steps/notes? By this I do not mean an alphabet of gesture such as developed by Le Coq or Meyerhold. Their mimetic gestural vocabulary manifests as an extreme form of stylised theatre, by creating sequences of movement that corral disparate actor’s bodies into coherent patterns. This is because, unlike dancers, who are selected by a very clear process of muscular and skeletal determinism, actors are an amalgam of various forces and skills. Once again, much like the members of a football team.
Dancer training is concerned with distilling skills to create a unity of style. Actor training, like football training, should focus instead to create a sense of team work and commonality of purpose through physical exercises. This, would, of course, incorporate skills development, but by evolving a vocabulary that is user friendly. By user friendly I mean a training vocabulary that is available to anybody regardless of age, sex, history, experience, or facility.
This type of training requires exercises that are simple and repetitive, building up a ‘library’ of experiences or physical memories. The actor can then draw on these vocal and movement memories instinctively, much the same as a football player uses his training exercises as a memory bank, from which he instinctively draws on the skills necessary for the game.
P70 Let us learn acceptance. This is one of the greatest tools an actor can have……Because the capacity to accept derives from the will and the will is the source of character. Too true! Too many so-called acting methods prevent the actor from accepting himself by encouraging him to pretend to be something other than what he is. Unless you can face yourself and accept who you are, there will be no moving forward.
Rehearsal Process:
P72: What should happen in the rehearsal process? Two things:
1.The play should be ‘blocked’.
2. The actors should become acquainted with the actions they are going to perform.
Both one and two mean that the play should be structured so that the actors know where they are, and what they are doing at any given time and where they are doing it in the space. Whose responsibility is that? The director’s! Since the actor cannot (can a violin write its own structure in a quartet?).
The director must supply the aesthetic landscape for the actor, much the same as a conductor does for an orchestra.
What is an action? An action is an attempt to achieve a goal. Let me say it even more simply: an action is an attempt to achieve a goal. Obviously, then, the chosen goal must be accomplishable. Here is a simple test: anything less capable of being accomplished than “open the window” is not and cant be an action. However, if an action such as O.T.W is to accompany poetic words (and after all, theatre is about poetry), should not the action be poetic in order to amplify and frame the words? If it is not a poetic action, will it not demean or weaken the impact of the words?
P73: You’ve heard directors and teachers by the gross tell you :”Come to grips with your self”, “Regain your self esteem”, “Use the space”, and myriad other pretty phrases which they, and you, were surprised to find difficult to accomplish. They are not difficult. They are impossible! And they are impossible because they are only admonitions, They contain no practical suggestions. And why no practical suggestions? Because, in the main the teacher/director doesn’t know any more than the actor, and has to resort to unhelpful prevarications such as above. For that is the only way this type of director/teacher can maintain his authority- by shifting the goal posts rather than providing real information.
This is what makes a person with an objective alive: they have to take the attention off them selves and put it on someone they want something from. This is why somebody on stage really doing something is more compelling than somebody pretending to do something- Their ego has been refused attention and losing interest, it metaphorically wanders off, leaving the body simply to get on with the job.
The Play and the Scene:
P76: The boxer has to fight one round at a time; the fight will unfold as it is going to. Not quite true. Ali beat Foreman in the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ by using a deliberate strategy of tiring him out over several rounds. In acting as well there is a long term action (the journey) and a short term action (the moment). A true performance is a compound of both, coexisting and interacting, and neither dominant to the detriment of the other.
Emotions:
P78: The addition of an ‘emotion’ to a situation which does not organically create it is a lie. I think you said either in this book or elsewhere that one cannot project emotion-emotion is something that happens to you. A rather brilliant observation! If the actor cannot project emotion at the audience, but only feel it, then it follows that the audience has to witness, feel or participate in the actor’s emotion, and by doing so, feel their own emotion. It is not, nor cannot be the same emotion, but the audience needs to be in the presence of the actor’s transformational emotion to feel their own. The actor is the shaman that reveals the audience’s psyche to itself, without the audience being aware of it.
P80: Emotional memory and sense memory are paint - by- numbers. Emotional memory is fake because only the emotions you feel in the moment are real. The exhuming of them may create something attractive, but it is still fake.
Acting is a physical art. It is close to the study of singing and dancing. Yes, but only if it has a comparable structure. Most theatre has no temporal or spatial structure and that is why the actors, production , director and audience are psychically lost.
Action:
P82: In a well written and performed play, everything tends towards the punch line. That punch line, for the actor, is the objective. If we learn to think solely in terms of the objective, all concerns of belief, feeling, emotion, characterization, substitution, become irrelevant. But surely a great and lasting work has several levels of perception, layers of meaning that allow the various spectators to extract their own personal ‘stories’. It was Proust who said that “everybody reads themselves into what they are reading. In a classic Commedia piece good and bad characters can be countenanced more subtly as clowns of innocence and experience. And we all know that the historical attraction for many men is the opportunity of seeing pretty girls with not many clothes on.
Guilt:
P86: None of us is free of self-doubt and none of us is free of guilt. A guilt based educational system, which is to say most acting training, survives through the support of adherents who were guilty before they signed up, who came to classes and failed (how could they do otherwise, as the training was nonsense), and were informed that their feelings of shame- which they had brought in with them- were due to their failure in class, and could be alleviated if and only if the student worked harder and ‘believed’ more. Under this way of learning there is no way out as the actor’s guilt is folded back inside himself, rather than allowed to give expression. However, guilt can also be an important driver for gaining knowledge. Guilt is a natural emotion, a subconscious cry for self-betterment. It is self imposed psychic pain. Marcel the Proust also said: “There is no knowledge without pain”. It is easy to understand that there can be no physical knowledge without physical pain- all athletes would know this implicitly. But acting involves psychic and physical growth, and if you transposed the shifts, can there be psychic growth through physical discomfort? Can one develop a training that combines the two, while still ensuring that there is minimal collateral damage?
P87: Faced with nonsensical, impossible directions(“Feel the music with your arms and legs”). Not as nonsensical as you might think! Elite athhletes, musicians and dancers would find no idiocy in that sort of directive. And your description ‘nonsensical’ is also inversely ironic as such directions are designed to increase the actor’s sensitivity beyond the linear and obvious. And the idea is to go beyond quotidian patterns in preparation for non-quotidian theatre. The issue would be the context of the direction: is it just another bland admonishment with no practical backup? In most cases the answer would be yes. I’ve heard that Brando and Dean, et al would commiserate about their time with Strasberg and what a pain in the arse it was to ‘be a teapot’. I’m not surprised because it is ridiculous to pretend to ‘be a teapot’ and experiences such as this convinced Brando that acting was stupid childish games. But if such suggestions were couched in contexts that were both poetic and structured, then the actor wouldn’t feel that he was pretending. He would actually be feeling, following an unconscious train of thought, that would have a similar creative, inspirational effect as listening to his dreams.
Nobody with a happy childhood ever went into show business. Not necessarily true, but it is true to say that actors seek redemption through performance- their soul’s tonic through self discovery in front of an audience.
The audience, just like you, came to have it; anomie, anxiety, guilt, uncertainty and disconnectedness dealt with. Your responsibility is this: deal with your own. Very true! The audience, by walking into the theatre, admits to a contract whereby they will, by witnessing you as a shaman deal with your own issues, come to a greater acceptance of their own issues-its called psychic healing and has always been the true purpose of theatre for millennia.
Your fear, your self doubt, your vast confusion( you are facing an ancient mystery-drama-of course you’re confused) do not mar you. At the risk of nicety, they are you. Most actor preparation posits that you should not ‘be nervous’! This to ask them to deny their human frailty, rather than to accept it.
P92: In rejecting a situation based on guilt (I can do more, do better, etc.), in beginning with a frank avowal(I am confused, uncertain, etc.), and proceeding honestly from one step to the next, you put yourself in the same position as the written character and can begin to bring to the stage the truth of the moment. I think what you have stated as an ambit claim is a very good starting point, but as it stands, it is only an admonition until the actor is provided with a highly defined aesthetic landscape (AKA a coherent training process) where he can progress through all these issues.
Concentration:
P95: The more a person’s concentration is outward, the more naturally interesting that person becomes. By outward I assume you mean that he is attuning himself to receive outside information to a greater extent than he is expressing information. So, what that means is that he is in a heightened state of feeling, and one can push the sense further so that in extension he should also be feeling the effect it is having on him.
The person with attention directed outward becomes various and provocative. The person endeavouring to be various and provocative is stolid and unmoving. Annoying because of self-importance or because you can see and hear their psyche creaking and groaning in distress?
We’ve all seen the ‘vivacious’ person at a party. What could be a bigger bore? Its not your responsibility to do things in an interesting manner. The issue here is: ‘interesting manner’. Could you not say: to be interesting you have to be doing interesting things. Not pretending to do up you shoelaces-actually do them up, and the greater the degree of difficulty- the more interesting. And the more and different interesting things you are doing, the more compelling you become. Tadashi Suzuki once said: “True intensity on stage is borne of doing many things at once!”
P96: The teenager who wants the car; the child who wants to stay up the extra half hour……These individuals have no problem concentrating. Elect something to do which is physical and fun to do, and concentration ceases to be an issue. I would supplant the word fun with ‘challenging but rewarding’ as fun is the enemy of art.
Here is a bit of heresy. Our theatre is clogged with plays about Important Issues; Playwrights and Directors harangue with right thinking views on many topics of the day. But these are, finally, harangues, they aren’t drama and they aren’t fun to do. The audience and the actor nod in acquiescence, and go to their seats or onstage happy to be a right thinking individual, but it is a corruption of the theatrical exchange. Great art ( to which we should all be aspiring regardless of success) transcends time and circumstance by contending with the deep moral and spiritual issue of mortality.
Talent:
P100: A common sign in a boxing gym: BOXERS ARE ORDINARY MEN WITH EXTRAORDINARY DETERMINATION. I would rather be able to consider myself in that way than to consider myself one of the ‘talented’; and –if I may-I think you would, too. If talent, as you so rightly say, is so deceptive, then what can you have in your work process to stop its highs and lows corrupting you. You could argue, that like the other vicissitudes facing you as an actor, you need tools to stop the misleading highs and lows of success- intentions are a good start, but one needs a format in which to see out those intentions.
Habit:
P102: Put things in their proper place. Rehearsal is the time for work. Home is the time for reflection. The stage is the time for action. Compartmentalise and cultivate that habit and you’ll find your performances incline to take on the tinge of action…. Be generous to others. Everyone tries to do their best….Yearning to correct or amend the something in someone else will make you petty. Cultivate the habit of only having aversion for those things you can avoid (those things in your self) and only desiring those things you can give yourself. Improve your self. Wonderful sentiments but they only flag an attitude or approach. To take that approach further, it has to be subsumed into a procedural doctrine. The most successful aesthetic movements inaugurated processes that corral and amplified those sentiments. What is incumbent on us as living in the oughties, is to find our own versions of these processes, using as templates those ideologues that have gone before, and reconfiguring them to suit contemporary sensibilities and idioms.
P103: Singing, voice, dance, juggling, tap, magic, tumbling. Practice in them will perfectly define for you the difference between possession and non-possession of a skill. As well, see them as not separate and immiscible, but excavate them for their consanguinity-their underlying technical connections. Then assimilate them and transpose their attributes. For, if they are techniques, they are transposable- if not you are racking up un-connectible styles.
The Designated Hitter:
P106: Truly great performances cause us to question, to pause, to ponder, to re-examine. They do not conduce to the immediate ejaculation: “Bravo!” Because the modern ‘Bravo’, especially when associated with a lot of hollering and whooping, is really a celebration of the self- importance of the audience: “I’m Soo cool, cos I can dig you that much!”Whoo..whoo!
….And so the Great Actor is seldom a very good actor. We praise his or her performances as we would praise our own possessions if we could do so with impunity. That is the gift of the Great Actor, and the reason he is so well rewarded- he allows us to act vainly and call it appreciation. It is an example of our cultural insecurity. The praise means: “He’s mine I’ve got one, too!”! The Great Actor, like the modern popster (and some try to be both!), has been eaten by celebrity, and the only way they can get their ‘selves’ back is to act badly. Britney’s Bad Behaviour, and the’ Leave Britney Alone’ utube cult shows that, true to the end, she’s a canny business woman, using her psychic problems as a marketing tool.
Performance and Character:
P110: They came to see a play, not your reasoned ‘emotional’ schematic of what your idea of a character might feel like in circumstances outlined by the play. Surely they came to see a performance of a play- they can see (read) the play anytime, these days on the net, and don’t even have to go to a bookshop.
If you decide to be an actor, stick to your decision. The folks you meet in supposed positions of authority- critics, teachers, casting directors- will in the main be your intellectual and moral inferiors. They will lack your imagination, which is why they became bureaucrats rather than artists; and they will lack your fortitude, having elected institutional support over a life of self reliance. Essentially, they lack your intent-your deep moral imperative.
P111: An actor should never look inward. He or she must keep the eyes open to see what the other actor is doing moment to moment, and to call it by its name and act accordingly. Its not possible to look outward all the time, just as it is not possible to old one’s breath forever. To look outward all the time is as fixed a position as looking inward. Perhaps it is better to look at outward/ inward in terms of balance. The energies coming into the body must be balanced by the energies going out, whether you are thinking in terms of projection or reception.
P112: A word about teachers. Most of them are charlatans. Too true! Most of them don’t know any more than their students and that’s because they never studied or worked with any one who knew more than they did- a perpetual vicious circle of incompetence.
Few of the exercises I have seen, teach anything other than gullibility. Most teachers, because they don’t know more, have no moral authority and so have to resort to prevarication and obfuscation, maintaining their emotional /psychological command over their charge by increasing the gullibility factor.
The Villain and the Hero:
P114 The audience will accept anything they are not given a reason to disbelieve. A young woman across the room at a party is pointed out to us as being worth $500 million. We now begin to look at her differently, even though she has done nothing. A characteristic was ascribed to her, and we accepted it. Another way of putting it is to say that she has been framed a certain way, set against a landscape, so we will then ‘read’ her in a certain way.
You don’t have to portray the hero or the villain. That’s been done for you by the script. Or: the director’s interpretation of the script.
Acting ‘As if”:
P116: Its like playing lacrosse. In order to play lacrosse you have to know the rules. The purpose of the rules is to make the game more enjoyable- you don’t have to prepare or put your self in a lacrosse state of mind. Not altogether true. The rules are to make it more functional. If there are no rules, it becomes impossible to judge situations of disorder and dispute, i.e. to make it as fair as possible. This ultimately makes it more satisfying.
In none of these do we have to ‘remember’ how we are supposed to feel. We simply remind ourselves what we are about to do, and we are suffused with the desire to do it: we jump immediately and happily into the midst of the game………. We can make our speech to the tyrant time after time, and indeed we do, sometimes improving it, sometimes simply repeating it for the joy it affords us. This perfectly describes the ideal instinctive state, which is very special and the aim of every actor. It occurs at least once in any rehearsal situation, and it would seem that repeating it, or more properly, regaining it is the primary focus of the following rehearsals and performances. A la recherche l’instinct perdu! The most practical way seems to be to repeat it so often that it becomes instinctive again. Ablation back to the zero point due to repetition seems the best praxis.
What do we say of the actor who would wish it all away….. and substitute some shoddy counterfeit of emotion. We say that such a one is great, that he is a Great Actor, and that we have never seen such technique. What does this talk of technique mean? It means that we were so starved of anything enjoyable that we were reduced to enjoying our own ability to appreciate. We were impressed, but not moved.
What would the word technique mean if it were applied to a chef or a lover? It would mean that their actions were cold and empty, that finally, we’re disappointed by them. This is precisely what it means when applied to a stage performance. To use the word technique in its most perjorative sense, like this, is to affirm that the aim of art is to sublimate technique so that the audience’s rational perceptions of time and space have been refracted- they have been transported to a dreamscape, where the usual conscious judgements are suspended. If they become aware of technique or worse still, start to say:“ I didn’t understand it”, then they have dropped out of that magic zone and are back in ‘I wonder if I turned the oven off?’ everyday life- surely what theatre is NOT about.
Most actors are terrified of their jobs. Not some, but most. They don’t know what to do and it makes them crazed. They feel like frauds. That is because they are generally lost psyches in a bland, ill-defined landscape. They don’t know where they stand in terms of space and time and therefore have to fill the void with ‘ busy’ness’, so that they don’t feel empty. This means that they are not learning, discovering new psychic spaces. Instead, they have to trawl through their bag of tricks, their old habits, and put them on display as something new and exciting. They don’t ‘know’ themselves in that false and empty environment, and that’s why they feel deep down they are frauds.
Now of course they can never ‘know’ themselves fully- that’s an impossibility. But they can, when placed in a highly defined aesthetic, be on a journey of self-discovery, and that is a very exciting thing to witness.
They once Walked among Us:
P121: Now, the great (acting teachers) are safely dead and cannot be quizzed, but we might safely assume that they brought something of passion and courage to their work. And real knowledge, because they were there when it was invented. If you go back to the originals, they were made by the experience as much as it made them.
P122: As we move further down the chain, both the students and the teachers are attracted not to the new, but to the approved. The analogy can here be made with photo-copying, where each subsequent copy progressively loses definition. So to in acting: as each generation of actors and teachers becomes further removed from the discovery/invention, the result becomes blander and more diffuse.
Thank you David, and Happy Trails !
Friday, October 17, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The Controvski over Grotowski
The Controvsky over Grotowski.
This is a short transgressive appreciation of Jerzy Grotowski (The Grot), written as a response to recent time spent with the Grotowski Institute (GI) in Wroclaw and Brzezinka. This document is as transgressive as the Grot was, reflecting his dialectic of apotheosis and derision - probably the coolest tool he contrived.
My time there with his legacy amounted to three weeks, during which I had the opportunity to see several dvds of his productions as well as a few more home movies. Later we observed a top of the line 10 day workshop run by the director of the Institute, Grzegorz Ziolkowski. Grzegorz is a Grot Swot, and if I am not mistaken these ateliers are designed to spread the Grot’s hip and penetrating dramaturgy world wide.
The GI is devoted to sponsoring the research into the various aspects of the man’s work as well as support gigs by some small companies that have taken up the traces of his legacy. At the moment these small groups are Teatr Zar based in Wroclaw and Maisterne Pisne, based in Lvov, Ukraine. The GI is not to be confused with The Grot’s designated heir, Thomas Richards, who is to be found holed up in Pontedera, Italy working on arcane actions. The GI does support him, although the relationship is somewhat testy as Richards is very preciously trying to keep the ‘museum’ virgo intacta. There are also other groups beetling away in Europe and the USA claiming that they are The Way of The Truth of The Grot, and word of mouth indicates that they are equally pretentious about their take on his legacy. And whenever they show some sort of result from their hermetic endeavours, it turns out to be underwhelming - the emperor has no undies!.
I have read about The Grot and recently had this concentrated period with his legacy, which doesn’t necessarily qualify me for critiquing the game plan, but I am going to, notwithstanding, because:
1) I bring to the commentary box extensive acquaintance with Tadashi Suzuki, who is in many ways, an eastern equivalent. Time with Suzuki has given me a cluey reference point with which to judge the work of The Grot.
2) My other knowledge point is that I have considerable ken of the major dance techniques and their cultural history. I have used this knowhow to dissect and articulate many of the aspects of Suzuki’s work and now gives me the ammo with which to judge the veracity of The Grot’s systems and their applications.
Grot’s history can be separated into two main periods: early hipster Blues Brothers when he did his true theatre productions and the Beardy Wierdy hippy days when he divorced his company, morphed into a 70’s tree-changer and became mired in esoteric post theatrical mumbo jumbo.
The second period is usually broken into another 3 sub phases, but its more pertinent to see them as a continuous drift further off with the fairies in the forest. But later on I will mention aspects of the first of these sub-phases, Para-Theatre, to show how inane you become if you believe your own PR and take yourself too seriously in the silly seventies.
The second and third phases became more progressively private and are called The Theatre of Sources and Active Culture, even more pretentious titles, whose putative claims are shredded once you see the pics, which look ever so earnest.
I might add at this point that I have earnt the leisure to lampoon this era, as I myself was doing similarly stupid stunts in Adelaide, Australia in the early Seventies – bounding around in brightly coloured but illfitting untitards to ‘Earth’ music.
I know from whence I laugheth, because I know to whence it goeth - nowhere!
Blues Bro Grot. Where's the hat?
The Theatre period:
It was very interesting being in Wroclaw checking out the vids because the stuff that broke him internationally still looks really wicked, even on a crappy old video. The show in question is The Constant Prince, and one can easily see that the dramaturgy and the acting would have been a revelation.
It would have been the first time in a long while that the West saw a show that wasn’t another re-enactment in a faux-real set by a disparate bunch of luvvies who preciously emote.
The Big Diffs that Grot and his band brought were:
a. Mise-en-scene…he set the show in a cell with the audience watching down from over a ledge.
b. Rather than do the whole play with all its padding, he extracted the themes he wanted to engage, and even added other dialogue which could add nuances of meaning.
c. The band was a real team that had ‘trained’ and built their skills together as a pre-rehearsal process even before the show’s development started.
d. The performances had a moral imperative - the actors were working their rings off - they were ‘sacrificing’ themselves to the act.
e. The actors’ movements and voices weren’t neat and bourgeoise - putting on an act with sham tears and gags. These actors really went for the doctor – gung ho, every show, every night.
f. The main man (Ryczard Cieslak) was a St Sebastian figure, a sacrificial lamb whose inner transformation made men weep.
Crucial Factors:
From seeing the videos, reading the lines, and then reading in between the lines the separate factors that pulled it all together were:
1. He got the nod to put a small company together in a tiny little theatre in a dirty, dreary, regional mining town (Opole) in a commie country. Being tiny meant that nobody cared too much. Being a country posting off the radar meant that the sexy actors weren’t interested, and a more committed artistically ambitious bunch were attracted. Being a dirty and dreary dump meant that life outside was so awful, that staying inside and rehearsing was a no-brainer. Being a communist country meant that everybody was getting paid as much as any other Pole prole, and you didn’t have to make a profit. But you did have to know how to talk the Comradespeak and surf your way round the deadly shoals of the scary politics in the right way at the right time- which could be really tricky.
2. Poland, although communistic, was and is, a VERY religious country, and The Grot is an extension of this, being imbued with a densely spiritual attitude by his mom from a very young age. Later he read too much of his own gospel and tipped over the edge and morphed into an empty messiah.
3. Poland has a very classy theatre history dating from the mid 19th C with lots of cleva fellas all down the line. There was even a hip theatre ensemble called Reduta in the 20s/30s that provided a template and prefigured the Lab.
4. He had a keen spiritual assistant in displaced Italian, Eugenio Barba (EB), a self confessed wide–eye who put the Grot on the international map. Without Barba’s preaching and bus driving, Grot would have remained unknown in the west, let alone hit the bigtime. There is a crucial episode in the saga that concerns Barba borrowing a mate’s bus and hijacking an international conference in Warsaw by snatching a bunch of influential delegates, and zooming them off to a distant unsanctioned Grot show. They were gobsmacked by the demo and instant world fame followed pretty damn fast. . He was the internationally mobile proselytizer- John the Baptist to Grot’s JC.
Bringing up the name of our Lord also conjures up this telling anecdote told to us by Stephen Champion, an Aussie mate who went to work fulltime with Zibignew Zyncutis(ZZ) in the mid 80’s. (Zyncutis was one of the original merry band who tried to keep the flame alive after the Grot left the building.) Some little time after Stephen joined Zyncutis (in 1987?), ZZ carked in a car prang (some say suicidally-more of which later!) sinking the plan.
ZZ’s tale goes something like this: Apparently, one day at work, the Grot asks the band: Should I tell the world outside that I am Jesus Christ?” The band as one, looked at their toes, shuffled their feet, ummed and arred, before suggesting that…. It was…er...maybe…. not….. such a good idea!
It may have been a gag, but surely a tad predictive in the light of what happened later.
5. JG had a cluey Dramaturg, Ludwig Flaszen, and a handy designer Jerzy Guralsky. Flaschen actually got the Grot the job and acted as a devil’s advocate, pressing buttons and prodding weak spots with sardonic wit. One could probably describe Flaschen as the Brainiac behind Grotowski’s soul. Guralsky was very quiet and very useful, especially in the early days, and he may have been the guy who thought up the ‘setting’ smarts.
6. Being soviet style there was tight censorship, but only at the dress rehearsal, so they were free to muck around and do whatever they liked, until the big day. Grot maintained this was KEY. That’s not to say that life was easy! The whole game could be tricky and scary, though not as bad as Uncle Joe Stalin, who could end the chat with a bullet or a billet in the gulag. You had to be mighty quick on your feet and learn to pick the new shifts depending on which way the current political wind was blowing.
7. Grot’s elder brother became a Nuclear Physicist (his mum did well to produce two such bright sparks on her ownsome- Dad joined the free Polish army, and after the war refused to come back while Poland was Commie! ) and that may have given him clues re. theatre as labwork- it also maybe the reason he was so shtumm in the anti-commie riots – big bro may have been delicately placed, working on an A- bomb for the Russkies.
8. If you see footage of Cieslak going through his training schtick, or Thomas Richards and the Pontedera crew, the boys are all bounding around in their extra skinny speedos – the gals in all-over unitards…. Hullo Sailor!.... What does that say that nobody wants to talk about? That Grot was a homoxual, although apparently the non practicing sort? And, if one checks out Cieslak’s lap-lap as St Sebastian/JC in the Constant Prince, the sense of homo-erotica starts to stick out like the proverbial dog’s …. Now its fairly certain Grot never did the dirty deed with anybody of either sex, which means that the unconsummated energy morphed into transgressive spiritual éclat (something similar happened with Hitchcock whose unrequited voyeuristic impulses made ice-cold babes like Grace Kelly super sexy).
9. Apparently the place was freezing and they were pretty much starving all the time. In all the pics they sure are skinny! This along with all the other trials and tribs of surviving in post-war East Euro Marxism, meant that it was a hard life. This instilled in them huge chunks of Moral Fibre, which in turn gave them discipline and focus. The theatre space became a refuge where Grotowski could anneal all these factors into a rare delicate aesthetic.
After the international success of the ‘Prince’, Grot took another 3 or 4 years to put his final show together. It is a masterpiece and after two false starts, emerged as Apocalypsis Cum Figuris. A very good title for what was effectively an illustrated 5th gospel. To make this work it is recorded that he changed his working process. Prior to this his interdiction was one of relentless interpenetration – he was right there, inside the work with them, much like George Martin, the 5th Beatle. For ACF it morphed into an entirely passive response of saying a series of dos and donts’. He would sit in a corner saying one of four things: “I don’t understand / I understand / I believe / I don’t believe”. This gnomic attitude of stony monosyllabic reticence made the actors work very hard at convincing him, and at one stage he didn’t even step inside the theatre for 2 whole months! This drove the actors spare and eventually they dragged him back in and made him face his job description.
My sense is that after The Constant Prince, he felt under a lot of pressure to come up with something better; hence the blue funk. It was worth the wait though, because ACF toured the world very successfully for the next 11 years. It cemented his reputation and is such a key piece that even now it is the last word on western theatre as spiritual metamorphosis.
It is classic like Oedipus or Noh Theatre, because everything has been ablated or reduced to its essence, with minimal props, setting, lighting and dialogue.
Key Theatre Legacies:
Thus endeth his theatrical period. The key legacies from The Grot’s theatre work as far as I can figure would be:
1. Return of theatre to its original intent of spiritual event.
2. Let’s have a real setting e.g. an asylum, not just two thirds of half of a piss poor copy,
3. Actors who say what they mean and mean what they say and have the bodies to match it,
4. Writers are not infallible or sacred like the pope and that there’s going to be some dross that’s worth dropping off and replacing with other texts more apposite. And it is this other information that can reveal deeper insights inside the original.
5. Transgressive acts: An early critic, one Kudlinski, who had watched JG’s work on the up and up, pinned it down in 1961 as a dialectic of ‘apotheosis and derision’. JG turned these words into a manifesto, engineering a killer tool to shunt and shock the play (and by extension the audience) into abruptly facing itself.
6. Grot stressed an approach that he called at one stage bodymemory. This indicated searching for cultural templates that exist in the body as a result of archaic or archetypical forces that continue to resonate inside a society or culture. The companies I have seen recently in Wroclaw, if their shows are guide, have used this legacy as a valuable kick off. Zar and Pisne chant ancient religious songs for inspiration. One night in Brzezinka it was brought home to me when I was present at a compelling discursive chat by Jaroslav Fret, the artistic director of Teatr Zar. From what he said, it seemed that he used ‘mythic hymns’ as a metaphysical search engine for finding new unconscious data.
7. Lots of more street-wise directors than Grot have done a David Bowie to Grot’s Iggy Pop. They have seen the commercial potential and made big names for themselves by dividing it by five, hiring some sexy ethnic types who speak LOTE (Languages Other Than English), dredging up a politically correct multicultural myth then watching the critical acclaim accumulate.
8. He left behind old fashioned concepts such as ‘Character Development’, as belonging to an earlier era of neo-realism. It would seem that he felt such shibboleths merely continued a culture, rather than engaging it anew. 
Grot and Barba eyeing off fumbling ferals.
Grot the Commune Leader:
Now, if those are his legacies, he’s done excellent well! So far so good, but what’s the next step?
After getting Apocalypsis on, and letting the guys do it by themselves (A Bad Sign! Never leave the kids home alone!) Grot went for a couple of wanderings, one back to India, where he’d been before and which had been inspirational in the past. And another across the USA on Route 66 straight to the heart of trendy Californian Counterculture. He went away a hipster and came back a hippie. Prior to this he had dressed in black suit and tie, white shirt, sunnies after dark, and liked to have himself filmed looking sharp, shaded and inscrutable. Now he shuffles back into town vegan skinny, scraggly hair and beard, denim and sandals, carrying an off the shoulder fag bag. It was such an image shift that when he touched down in Bogota for a theatre conference in Colombia, many truly took him for a fake.
He dropped a bombshell by stating publicly that he would no longer make any shows and would devote himself to performance ‘research’. Not only would this have been a huge shock for the arty world which wanted more of the same, thank you very much, but imagine the plight of the actors who had committed themselves to the Grot, lock, stock and barrel? Now he was divorcing the very actors that made him as much as he made them, and leaving them to fend for themselves, scratching around for meaning like orphans in mourning - Bummer!!!! Some tagged along for a while with the Grot through his hippy workshops, while a few topped themselves when they realized that future play was to be wide and shallow, not deep as before.
Cieslak following the Grot to the end.
The team captain, Cieslak slowly drank and smoked himself to death. The USA Grot Swot, Richard Schechner, recounts a dolorous tale of chatting to him as they watched the 9,500( Yesssssss! 9,500!) gullible ferals cavorting ineffectually in the grass outside Wroclaw in the peak Paratheatre event of 1975.
In response to a ‘What are you going to do next?’ type query, Cieslak turned his lugubrious brown eyes to Schechner and said something along the lines of “I hitched myself to the Grot for better or for worse”. …..What remained unspoken was: “ It’s a lot worse, but I can’t back out now”
The Grot’s dissing of his actors was a callous act, feyly disguised as a ‘need to be free’. It was monumentally self- serving, and typically emblematic of the indulgent seventies. Many people felt then they had the right to break free from their responsibilities, and do their own ‘thing’. Imagine creating some of the most magnificent actors the world has ever seen….. Then make them fart around with the tattooed and toothless. Deceptively cruel to the true believers, sacrificing them like that to the altar of his own myth. No wonder his Karma never recovered! It’s much less cruel to do what the other hard cases of the theatre do - make it so that your actors leave you – their decision! It sounds more brutal but it means that they take a part of you with them. When you leave them, conversely you steal part of them away with you.
Why the big existential shift? My take is that he was so freaked out by the success of Apocalypsis, that it was such a killer testament that he could never surpass. Better to take his wand and go walkabout in the wilderness. There’s nothing like fading to black on a big note to make people feel they are missing you already. When he divorced the lab, they lost themselves and that implacable act made him into a myth.
That was Grot theatre: now Grot the Guru, Space Cadet:
Of course the results, like most events in the 70s, were pretty dire and about as interesting as watching your sandals for six hours.
A few salient observations concerning Paratheatre:
1. The beaded, bearded pacifist commune-itis was very much a world wide epidemic in the early 70s. Australia had its versions too, and as I said before, I was at some of them! Temporary university arts festivals became live in communes where anti-establishment, anti-commerce, anti-nuclear family became the buzz and disaffected youth went to Nimbin to go feral and grow their own in ‘non-structured’ symbiosis with the earth. Smoking dried banana skins became shooting smack… Goodbye paradise….Hello squalor….The Grot got sucked in too!
2. This philosophy of every body being equal and ‘no hierarchy or elitism’ meant that you had Eagles dancing with Chickens.
Highly tuned and skilled artists such as Cieslak were forced to share space with unco bozos. Is this not like tennis great Roger Federer playing doubles with partially talented wannabes? This is neither interesting, explorative or fair- its just plain dumb! And…. who wants to watch it? The real reason for making the experts such as Cieslak, Flaszen et al. move to the back of the line with the plebs was to make sure The Grot reigned supreme and alone at the top of the pole. More than a touch of Orwell here: “Everybody’s equal, but I’m more equal”. Hippie communes like this tend to throw up the same dictators as Communism.
3. Here is a quote from one Kolankiewicz dude about the Grot’s paratheatre work in 74/75: ‘I stand face to face with a tree. It is strong - I can climb it, support myself delicately on its branches. On its crown, a strong wind blows us both, on the tree and myself. With my whole body I feel the movements of branches, the circulation of fluids. I hear the inner murmurs. I nestle into the trees…..’ Oh, Pu-llease!!!!
Such self-important gibberish you ever heard…..! Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a tree hugger myself, but I don’t think such tree deals are of intergalactic import. The wind, I hate to tell him, blows on all of us. Lots of ordinary guys and gals do it with out making it into an opera- its called ‘going camping’.
4. More from Kolanks….. ‘On some nights, we go, several of us, to the woods. We walk without any light. – I feel the quiet breath of the trees. We gather by the thick of the woods opening to receive us. The forest plunged into darkness lives in a different way than in daytime…..’ Oh! Really!! How Illuminating! Such tragic wishful symbiosis is made the more ludicrous when one realizes that other animals are silent and at one with the forest only because they are trying to Kill and Eat other furry little animals.
5. For guys that wanted to be so at one with the air and the trees, they were keen…one could say… industrial strength smokers!!!
6. It peaked in 1975 with a giant be-in, where 9500 hopeful believers lobbed up from 26 countries, to undergo all sorts of workshops called very caringly, Beehives. It became a giant show bag of the shallow soul, where the Roller-Coaster was replaced by Group Therapy, Meditation and Massage. Lots of luminaries like Peter Brook and J. L. Barrault turned up for the love-in, adding serious clout, climbing on board and making suitably clucky noises. But they found that unlike Grot’s theatre phase, this time there wasn’t much to purloin.
Journalists were allowed to be at the seminars but were excluded from the workshops. This was done nominally so as they couldn’t contaminate proceedings by being judgmental but, in reality, so that they couldn’t witness the waffledust.
The outcome of this self-important extravaganza had the long term impact of a burp in Bermuda! It disappeared down the sink with all the other 70’s twaddle.
A few years of this and he was canny enough to figure this was going nowhere fast, and what’s worse, outsiders could see too easily that there were no underpants on the emperor. Thinks: “To maintain Guru status the smart move is to say I’m going further and deeper than any man has done before, shrink the numbers, and close the doors, so the un-converted can’t make harsh, uncaring judgements. You have to be a paid up member of the club that won’t let you in unless you’re a true believer. By pulling this stunt, the Grot can keep top spot because no-one knows enough to say, ‘Hold the phone, Tyrone!’
So, in the last 19 years of his life, as he spun further out into deeper space, he had to become more precious and private. I can hear some say, maybe it has value; and some fellow space cadets will even buy the notion, but surely the analogy would be a tennis player who never plays a game but practices sooooo well. Here he is, banging a ball against a wall every day, but is never tested, and never witnessed being tested. Surely he isn’t a tennis player until his ‘special talent’ is measured as to how it affects other tennis players (try playing a game) and the crowd?
Holes in the system :
1. There is a culture of denial surrounding Grot theatre’s ‘spirituality’. This is more than wrong, it’s double denial - his theatre was more than spiritual; it was downright religious, both in what they talked about and the way they did it. Both ‘Apocalypsis’ and ‘Prince’ were modern morality plays and if you interchange Cieslak for Jesus in both you’re on the right track. But in the 60s, as now, the idea of God was submarxian heresy, and you couldn’t say you were religious in anything approaching a Christian sense– that would have been the kiss of death. So you had to rewrap the goodies, and brand them under Hindu or Zen.
2. The spectacular irony was that the shows were a revelation precisely because they were religion repackaged! This was religious theatre for the ‘devout agnostic’. It says so much about the climate of that time and which continues through to the present day. Under sub Marxian academia mention of things religious is still an unacceptable heterodoxy.
3. Grot wasn’t really connected with his training. He was a brainiac, not a bodiac. Grotwork is not a training but a combo of spiritual interdiction and supersmart reductive dramaturgy. That it is an approach and not a training becomes obvious when you check out the video footage of Cieslak trying to teach the schtick to a couple of eager beaver Scandos. If anything it should really be called Cieslak Warm-up Style. As you watch the Scandos loping about behind Cieslak, it also becomes apparent that he’s not a teacher- he cant pass his skills on. He was instinctively too good at it to consciously know what he was doing.
4. Due to the fact that there is no real methodology to hand down, the boys from Pontedera (Workcentre, Italy) and Akron (USA) have got nowhere to go. Grot has sold them a dramaturgical approach packaged as a method and if he’s not there to run it, the results get precious and pedestrian. I don’t know much about the Akronites, though people who’ve seen it, say their recent work is very ‘how’s your father’. But, the pics of the Pontedera boys in their jockettes look like a trio of part time male models doing a 60’s Lester Horton dance class.
The acid test is that if they actually performed and were any good, we would have heard it through the grapevine. Instead, if you ask anybody who has seen them in the flesh, you get the shuffling of feet and mumbles….er…. well…. actually…. It’s sort of interesting….
If that ain’t damning with faint praise, what is?
The best test for any great theatre is the truckie’s test. If you can get a bunch of truck drivers to watch your stuff, what’s their reaction to be? If they say: ‘Bunch of wankers!’ Then it’s all in your head, thespie-nerd! If they say: ‘Shi-i-it, that’s intense! Weird stuff, man, but they sure work hard.’ Then you know it’s a happening thang.
As I wind up, I’d like to comment on aspects of The Grot’s deep interest in archaic or primitive customs as tools in his Theatre of Sources phase. One of them was his long term infatuation with Haitian Voodoo.
Part of his ‘Let’s be caring in private’ scheme is the desire to get back to nature and to hanker for an arcadian past where everybody lives a simple honest life, inside a perpetual ‘nice’ climate. While this is laudable in a notional sense, remember that people who actually live like that have pretty dracky lives and mostly die of some dreadful disease that the west has eradicated by inventing medicines that are only possible because they have been tested on nice furry animals that we should be kind to. Ergo, the locals are keen to get out of there Pretty Damn Quick!
Such a desire of return to nature is quite possible in our wealthy, comfortable western society for only one reason - we can afford to have such atavistic wishes because we don’t have to live with them! People who have to scratch out a living in such societies are desperate to get a picket fence with a two car garage and air-con, asap!
Witness Haiti where the transformational and transgressive voodoo comes from. While Voodoo is a good map of the other side of the soul, remember this is a country that’s totally dysfunctional, giving rise to the psychedelic barbarism of the Papa and Baby Doc’s. Here is a place where you’ll see kids eating bits of dogs on the street - an arcadian paradise - NOT. And Voodoo is a very big part of the whole culture, and a big part of what’s holding them back.
Effete softies such as the Grot, love playing games like Voodoo, because it allows them the thrilling frisson of dangerous liaisons, as long as they don’t have to do the long term wade through the daily squalor. So, after a few days with the Voodoo Queen, sitting on the dirt in Haiti looking dutiful, Grot takes them back to his place, which is like - really nice. But of course now that the culture has been uprooted it must be treated much more preciously, because it only thrives in a dump,etc. Hence, the sacred attitude, the admonitions: the songs must be sung a certain way, they must not be sung without the Queen Bee, they must not be sung outside the space, they must not be copied…Oooh! That’s a no-no! Only sung truthfully with full sincerity from the heart, etc. etc.
The spectacular irony is that back home the ‘sacred’ ceremony is a mad woman’s breakfast of clattering pans, garish plastic tablecloths, chooks scratching in the dirt and wailing kids wiping the flies off their snot…. neither Sacred nor Profane – a Rabble!
This becomes crystal when one buys a CD of true Voodoo music. Its …like … boring. It’s much more exciting to listen to music inspired by Voodoo, e.g. Miles Davis or Perez Prado, whose Voodoo Suite is a lot more dangerous and transgressive.
And check this out! After all these admonishments about purity, eventually the Voodoo Queen decamped, not back home to the shit and squalor, but to a nice civilized spot like the south of France. For her Voodoo was a handy little ticket to the good life! And guess what, the boys in speedos still sing the ‘sacred’ songs long after the pure, original, genuine, sincere source has bolted! Sheeeet!!!!!
Guys like Jung talk very much of the western mind’s unconscious desire to go to darker places because:
1. We have largely eradicated them due to our technological competency and,
2. Western post- modern and feminist thought imposes the judgement that ‘dark’ is Male and Bad.
This has created a culture of denial surrounding ‘dark’ in our society and ‘dark’ is only acceptable when it is on the other side of the techno- fence - as long as the ‘other side’ is nominally more ‘caring’ and closer to ‘mother earth’.
The dark ideas that inhabit more primitive and static cultures, are dark ideas precisely because they come from, and exist in, dark spaces, i.e. places where the lights don’t work - places where there is not enough technology to control the environment.
It also worth a reminder that the cultures that foster such ‘dark’ undercurrents as their spiritual drivers also have very strict views of the male/female divide. This is of course anathema for softies within a western context, but psychotically, when transposed to the other side of the fence, quite acceptable in more ‘multi-cultural’ cultures.
Of course Modern Art has long benefited from daemonic influences such as Voodoo, viz Picasso and his Afro masks. But let’s get a little perspective on this! It may be interesting and informative but it’s not too sacred. After all, theatre is not life - it is a refraction of life. Theatre may be hyper serious, but its also artifice.
Its deep, but its also play- DEEP PLAY.
Final scores:
From where I stand in the commentary box, if I had to give marks to Citizen Grot for all he’s done:
The Theatre of Productions: 9 out of 10, top of the class and an Elephant stamp.
For Para-Theatre, Theatre of Sources, Art as Vehicle, At work with The Grot on Physical Actions: 1.5............a snowball’s chance in summer.
I welcome any discussion.....
Friday, June 1, 2007
Make It New
Australia Council Make-it-new discussion paper/response
1
What should be the role of a national funding body?
Answer:
It could be said that Australian theatre has generally since the heady days of the 70’s fallen into a slough of despond as a result of ingesting too much postmodernism (POMO). We now seem to have theatre which has its feet in one of two distinct camps.
Re-enactment theatre: the flagships rolling out William S. in semi-modern dress,
Macbeth as Goebbels or Noel Coward’s Private Lives (again) gamely trying to keep their Grey Gonads who are terrified by shows such Shopping and Talking about Fxxxing. In truth it’s v. expensive amateur theatre, amplified. Same aesthetic aims, just bigger sets. Modern design in the flagships has become so powerful that the sets have become very good at eating the actors and the director. Another measure of good RT is its ability to trundle out a few TV soapie celebs.
On the other side of the divide is Un-Theatre: after a sustained quest to break with ‘old’ shibboleths, there’s not a lot left:
a) no structure which the audience can follow,
b) no landscape for transformation,
c) no legibility wherein the audience can find it self,
d) no content - just earnestly photo-copied hypotheses
In truth RT is retro-active and caters for the petit-bourgeois who like to see their culture as specimens safely suspended in formaldehyde - no messing with the formula, please! Its retro-active culture is dependant on keeping the fading demographic stumbling through the door.
Un-Theatre is essentially reactive, not so much standing for anything, but defined as standing against as many things as possible. Its culture is dependant on political credibility that is it has to be au courant with whatever is the current ‘appropriate’ thinking position.
Re-enactment theatre is best left to the Majors (and the amateurs!) who have the dough to survive for a few more years until another Nugent report while Un –Theatre is very precariously balanced on the edge of the fashion-chasm.
Both of them are beholden to extrinsic cultural forces- they have no real intrinsic culture.
The point I’m making here is that the good stuff lies between these two - Hard work and there’s not much out there either, but this is the Theatre Board’s true purview and I suggest that it concentrates its resources on those groups that have a strong internal culture - that is: a bunch of fellaheen who believe in something strong enough that they can survive a few years before they come to the Ozco. The TB’s first question could be: ‘What is their intrinsic culture which we can augment, rather than prop up?’
2
On what basis should the Theatre Board enter into long term funding agreements with organisations?
Answer: The only two questions to be asked are:
What is the intrinsic culture? Was it self sustaining BEFORE us? Is it self sustaining WITHOUT us? and,
Do these jokers really believe in something or are they just pumping out the right art-speak?
3
Do we need a greater variety of structures and mechanisms for the artists to realise their work, and if so what would they look like?
Answer:
· Not so much new structures as reframe the issues away from the defensive position of ‘what’s happened to the 70’s when everything seemed so positive, Gough was in charge and Nugget pulled the strings?’ Well, Gough’s gone mate won’t be back and Paul’s joined him. Bin Laden killed those post modern paradigms and a lot of arty types just haven’t figured it out yet. This is a new world and like it or not you have to face it, oh, and by the way…. Kevin won’t return it either!
I’m not for a moment suggesting rationalising the arts - that would be succumbing to a simplistic view of the modern world. I am saying you have to run parallel to it - you certainly cannot run against it. That re-active, rancorous approach died with the Berlin Wall and Glasnost.
This implies a de-politicising (actually a dis-Marxing) of the artistic process and a resumption of the classical position of art as a spirito/psychic arena - not easy given the residue of Post Modernism.
4 What would be the effect of the TB investing more of its resources in producers?
Answer:
· This would be breeding up a new class of middle managers. This is what accountants do when freaking out about the bottom line: “Get some bodies (who speak our lingo) between us and the shop floor, just in case!” Another negative defensive position!
5
Should the TB devolve more decision making to those more directly connected to the work being made, and if so, who would they be?
Answer:
· Is this code for…..‘Should we create another level of management?’
6.
What would be the effect of the TB focussing less of its funding on the creation of new work and more on creating opportunities for existing work to have a longer life?
Answer:
· This is an excellent idea as it would mean moving from a hospice approach propping up things up only to see them cark, to one of parallel investing i.e. The TB’s financial investment parallels the aesthetic investment of the artist/company.
7
Should nurturing these practices (such as innovation) become a particular or even exclusive role of the TB?
Answer:
· The true question is: should the TB fund temporary mirages? The idea that something new springs into existence parthenogenetically without reference to any forebears is absurd and actually is the POMO equivalent of Biblical Creationism.
It is only in retrospect that something is found to be innovative. The Beatles admitted that at the time of their greatest creativity they were ‘only making songs’. Of course what they were doing was filtering history and place, digesting and then expressing their re-configuration. Artistic progress has always been about re-configuration. Van Gogh was re-configuring Japanese wood blocks, Francis Bacon was re-configuring abattoirs and Muybridge.
Re-configuration also means that it is not about the girl or guy, but what they’ve done AND who they’ve done it with.
Maybe the way forward is to avoid the whole idea of chasing after situations that seem sexy because of their bauble-like ‘new-dity’ and instead look for integrated lineage where several experiences can be flowcharted into what might become progressive outcomes.
8
How can we support fruitful relationships between the majors and those artists and companies who rely on TB support?
Answer:
· The job of the Majors in this situation is to behave like clever multi-nationals and occasionally poach the up-and-comings from the s2m’s and suck ‘em into the big time.
· Witness STC’s collaring of Benedict Andrews by Robin N. If this is done properly the s2m concerned falls to bits and you have the added advantage that the guy is no longer outside the tent pissing on it - he’s inside. Olivier did the same thing with Tynan. What this means is that the majors are the big bogeymen and an artist should only consider joining them when he wants to bail out of the frontline back into the arthritic endgame. I think it’s not the TB’s position to encourage this!
Email makeitnew@ozco.gov.au
The Grand Nabob
twotadjerzysociety
1
What should be the role of a national funding body?
Answer:
It could be said that Australian theatre has generally since the heady days of the 70’s fallen into a slough of despond as a result of ingesting too much postmodernism (POMO). We now seem to have theatre which has its feet in one of two distinct camps.
Re-enactment theatre: the flagships rolling out William S. in semi-modern dress,
Macbeth as Goebbels or Noel Coward’s Private Lives (again) gamely trying to keep their Grey Gonads who are terrified by shows such Shopping and Talking about Fxxxing. In truth it’s v. expensive amateur theatre, amplified. Same aesthetic aims, just bigger sets. Modern design in the flagships has become so powerful that the sets have become very good at eating the actors and the director. Another measure of good RT is its ability to trundle out a few TV soapie celebs.
On the other side of the divide is Un-Theatre: after a sustained quest to break with ‘old’ shibboleths, there’s not a lot left:
a) no structure which the audience can follow,
b) no landscape for transformation,
c) no legibility wherein the audience can find it self,
d) no content - just earnestly photo-copied hypotheses
In truth RT is retro-active and caters for the petit-bourgeois who like to see their culture as specimens safely suspended in formaldehyde - no messing with the formula, please! Its retro-active culture is dependant on keeping the fading demographic stumbling through the door.
Un-Theatre is essentially reactive, not so much standing for anything, but defined as standing against as many things as possible. Its culture is dependant on political credibility that is it has to be au courant with whatever is the current ‘appropriate’ thinking position.
Re-enactment theatre is best left to the Majors (and the amateurs!) who have the dough to survive for a few more years until another Nugent report while Un –Theatre is very precariously balanced on the edge of the fashion-chasm.
Both of them are beholden to extrinsic cultural forces- they have no real intrinsic culture.
The point I’m making here is that the good stuff lies between these two - Hard work and there’s not much out there either, but this is the Theatre Board’s true purview and I suggest that it concentrates its resources on those groups that have a strong internal culture - that is: a bunch of fellaheen who believe in something strong enough that they can survive a few years before they come to the Ozco. The TB’s first question could be: ‘What is their intrinsic culture which we can augment, rather than prop up?’
2
On what basis should the Theatre Board enter into long term funding agreements with organisations?
Answer: The only two questions to be asked are:
What is the intrinsic culture? Was it self sustaining BEFORE us? Is it self sustaining WITHOUT us? and,
Do these jokers really believe in something or are they just pumping out the right art-speak?
3
Do we need a greater variety of structures and mechanisms for the artists to realise their work, and if so what would they look like?
Answer:
· Not so much new structures as reframe the issues away from the defensive position of ‘what’s happened to the 70’s when everything seemed so positive, Gough was in charge and Nugget pulled the strings?’ Well, Gough’s gone mate won’t be back and Paul’s joined him. Bin Laden killed those post modern paradigms and a lot of arty types just haven’t figured it out yet. This is a new world and like it or not you have to face it, oh, and by the way…. Kevin won’t return it either!
I’m not for a moment suggesting rationalising the arts - that would be succumbing to a simplistic view of the modern world. I am saying you have to run parallel to it - you certainly cannot run against it. That re-active, rancorous approach died with the Berlin Wall and Glasnost.
This implies a de-politicising (actually a dis-Marxing) of the artistic process and a resumption of the classical position of art as a spirito/psychic arena - not easy given the residue of Post Modernism.
4 What would be the effect of the TB investing more of its resources in producers?
Answer:
· This would be breeding up a new class of middle managers. This is what accountants do when freaking out about the bottom line: “Get some bodies (who speak our lingo) between us and the shop floor, just in case!” Another negative defensive position!
5
Should the TB devolve more decision making to those more directly connected to the work being made, and if so, who would they be?
Answer:
· Is this code for…..‘Should we create another level of management?’
6.
What would be the effect of the TB focussing less of its funding on the creation of new work and more on creating opportunities for existing work to have a longer life?
Answer:
· This is an excellent idea as it would mean moving from a hospice approach propping up things up only to see them cark, to one of parallel investing i.e. The TB’s financial investment parallels the aesthetic investment of the artist/company.
7
Should nurturing these practices (such as innovation) become a particular or even exclusive role of the TB?
Answer:
· The true question is: should the TB fund temporary mirages? The idea that something new springs into existence parthenogenetically without reference to any forebears is absurd and actually is the POMO equivalent of Biblical Creationism.
It is only in retrospect that something is found to be innovative. The Beatles admitted that at the time of their greatest creativity they were ‘only making songs’. Of course what they were doing was filtering history and place, digesting and then expressing their re-configuration. Artistic progress has always been about re-configuration. Van Gogh was re-configuring Japanese wood blocks, Francis Bacon was re-configuring abattoirs and Muybridge.
Re-configuration also means that it is not about the girl or guy, but what they’ve done AND who they’ve done it with.
Maybe the way forward is to avoid the whole idea of chasing after situations that seem sexy because of their bauble-like ‘new-dity’ and instead look for integrated lineage where several experiences can be flowcharted into what might become progressive outcomes.
8
How can we support fruitful relationships between the majors and those artists and companies who rely on TB support?
Answer:
· The job of the Majors in this situation is to behave like clever multi-nationals and occasionally poach the up-and-comings from the s2m’s and suck ‘em into the big time.
· Witness STC’s collaring of Benedict Andrews by Robin N. If this is done properly the s2m concerned falls to bits and you have the added advantage that the guy is no longer outside the tent pissing on it - he’s inside. Olivier did the same thing with Tynan. What this means is that the majors are the big bogeymen and an artist should only consider joining them when he wants to bail out of the frontline back into the arthritic endgame. I think it’s not the TB’s position to encourage this!
Email makeitnew@ozco.gov.au
The Grand Nabob
twotadjerzysociety
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