Speculation: exploring a new performance space… Euripides‘ Andromeda?
Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”. All the modalities sing a part in the chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Titus Andronicus, a staged reading of William Shakespeare tragedy at San Francisco’s Sutro Baths.
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head
William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, 2.3
“You’re afraid of the audience, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but it’s not stagefright. It’s that I’m there as the geek. They like to watch me eat my shit. But it pays the light bill and takes me to the racetrack. I don’t have any excuses about why I do it.”
Charles Bukowski, Women
Nathalie Brilliant performance piece
Holy Hole in SFAI’s Diego Rivera Gallery
This feeling of power, it’s happiness to sit in a cottage by the Danube among six women who think I’m semi-idiot, and to know that in Paris, the headquarters of intelligence, 500 people are sitting dead-quiet in the auditorium and are foolish enough to expose their brains to my powers of suggestion. Some revolt! But many will go away with my spores in their gray matter. They will go home pregnant with the seed of my soul, and they will breed my brood.
August Strindberg, letter of July 14, 1894
Speculation: how we work backstage at San Francisco’s Old Mint putting together a site specific theater production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony at Old Mint with Derek Phillips and Tonyanna Borkovi.
Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others – priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior – hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized “hero of our time” – and of all time.
Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Cast of The Balcony: cast photos of the Collected Works site specific production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony at The Old Mint
A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar
during every moment that he is conducting a service.
It is exactly the same way that a true artist
should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater.
An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.
Konstantin Stanislavisky
Last week
i spent some time with this gentleman outside the Old Mint
He’s a jazz musician
played with some of the greats up and down California
taught at Foothill and De Anza college
the bottom fell out for him in 2008
he sold his horn in 2011
but he’s not stopping
he’s always teaching
he’s putting a band together
he feels the turn coming
for me
this phenomenon
remains the principal element in my work
traditional theatre
especially in the U.S.
that conventional theatre
framed by the proscenium
has aged to become analogous
to the performance of opera or the symphony…
arcane performances addressed
to elitist and uncurious audiences
performances of popular culture
are rarely subversive
relying on rigid and overused conventions
framing the freedom of performance
within the containing liminality
of allowed suspension of the rules
it is true
dramatic texts are univocal and repressive
but my goal
my hope in removing the theatrical walls
creating site specific paratheatrical performancesbThe term “paratheatre” was coined by the late Polish theatre director, Jerzy Grotowski, to address a highly dynamic and visceral approach to performance that aimed to erase traditional divisions between spectators and performers. Paratheatre was also executed outdoors in the forests of Poland as non-performance events. After 1975, Grotowski withdrew from theatre entirely as a public performance medium to redirect his focus towards non-performance oriented group dynamics that developed through various stages: Paratheatre (1969-78), Theatre of Sources (1976-1982), Objective Drama (1983-86), and Art as Vehicle (1986-present). Grotowski’s work continues today at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy.
complicate the chosen text
and establish sites of material energy
of course
simply taking the “performance” outside the theater
does not make this happen
performers must find new techniques
designers new aesthetic models
and the audience…
References
yet i find
these collisions
produce some of the most
significant and meaningful mediations
opening doors to potentialities
unimagined prior
my private or self-contained vision
when made public
through conversation with collaborators
soemtimes through photographs
taken during the communal rehearsal process
shared and displayed either overtly or indirectly
this vision of mine
opens itself up
sometimes willingly
sometimes unwillingly
to an extensive series of challenges
complicated negotiations
internal and external
as it encounters both the imagination
and the bodily presence of collaborating visions
my subjective vision
in this process
constantly evolves
as the virtual performance of my imagination
is re-shaped by others material work
enveloped by the idiosyncrasies of environment
framed an unframed by a sites nature
all of which
produce a new virtuality that
in turn
is re-shaped in the day by day process
of an evolving aesthetic project
this is the inevitable dynamic
between plan and implementation
mental image and physical embodiment
execution of a determined scheme and the surprise
accommodation of the accidental
this is a relationship
between a perceived failure and a recuperation with change
these challenges and subsequent revisions in plan
occur even in aesthetic projects
like painting
that involve only a single person
in collective/collaborative work
these mediations of an “original” vision or imaginative plan
increase in both number and intensity
this process may be perceived as one
complicated by the relationship between conscious motive
and the operation of a collective unconscious
where
the sudden discovery of a structure
a paradigm
a cluster of images in a particular relationship
appear to be the display of an organizational scheme
that the collaborative process of work
brings to the surface
these surprise revelations
of unplanned relationships occur all the time
how one interprets them
depends upon your conception of the imagination
the performance space as a form of consciousness
be it San Francisco’s Old Mint
the Emeryville mudflats
becomes a manifestation
a 3d model of consciousness
stimulating a consistent conceptual play
that prevents the work
from being merely an imitation of behavior
it isn’t particularly useful to tell an actor
that he or she is
“performing a specific,
albeit complex,
image within a larger image of consciousness”
it is useful,
to view the presence of a human figure
not as a discrete image
but as a mediation–
as an image that a consciousness has already processed
not as the raw material of sense perception
I recognize
I have not control
nor no idea how a spectator will process that image
but the degree to which I can shape that image
as a processed or mediated image
this emphases
provides a unique stimulus for the spectator
In this way of working
the performance
unfolding in space
but most importantly AS space
operates much like a vision or dream
capturing consciousness
holding it within its borders
constituting itself as images
that shape the spectator’s consciousness
for the moment of performance
each spectator negotiates
his or her own relationship to that vision
but, if I consider that the work provides
a series of visual and acoustic images
stimulating the individual spectator
the process is rather
self-consciously phenomenlogical
Rehearsing absurd ideas with Jean Genet’s The Balcony in the courtyard of San Francisco’s Old Mint… (Ryan Tacata, Nathalie Brilliant, and Kellen Hoxworth)
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Speculation during a Balcony rehearsal. Ryan Tacata as Carmen during a rehearsal for Jean Genet’s The Balcony at the Old Mint.
Theatre is a process of vital divergence from everyday life: it does not simply reflect the everyday but as with the simplest pedestrian dance diversifies its habitual patterns and opens its place of occurrence to the imagination.
Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, 1993
I recognize my need
or maybe it’s just a desire…
to construct an idea of an author
but this project seems
hypothetical
transitive
complicit in the dynamics of ideology
I can easily identify
the irreconcilable differences among
Coleridge’s Shakespeare
Bradley’s Shakespeare
Wilson Knight’s Shakespeare
Arthur Harbage’s Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare
or Sartre’s Genet
Bernard Frechtman’s Genet
Edmund White’s Genet
I understand each of these Shakespeares
each of these Genets
is inextricably implicated
in one of a series of present moments
in which an aesthetic premise
provided the method of authorial construction
even the collision of the unconscious
Derrida’s chance
and the predetermination of codified systems
constitutes a model of author
in its image of that aspect of the psyche
that is either most free
(of rational control)
or most bound
(to the accidents of unconscious determination)
coming into contact
with the externally given structures of language
my reluctance
to leave the post-structural game of displacing the subject
is Derrida’s fault
Derridean instability
offers an attractive model
in my thinking about the rehearsal process
as I prepare for a future performance
I enjoy
(as well as fear)
the instability of the process
where I can offer or accept
almost any interpretative act
as a possibility for a moment
what is least pleasurable for me
is that moment
where I trade that instability
for the relative permanence of a fixed point of interpretation
that moment
at which I begin the process of constructing a performance
defining the parameters of a site
limiting the play
the freedom of the actors
and myself
at this point
as artists
we cease playing
initiating a series of repetitions
in order to write the selected rhythms
tempos
movements
and inflections
into the space, the actors and the musicians
that I
as director
think most satisfactory
this is the moment when I am most self-conscious
about inscribing “myself” into the performance
through imposing limits on others
appropriating the work to my own purposes
and foregrounding myself as an authority
this discomfort
occasioned by my knowledge
of the arbitrariness of interpretation as an activity
often provokes me
to de-stabilize the performance structurally
foregrounding
for a spectator
the idea of the event as a performance
just a “take” on the text
not a definitive “reading” of the text
on the other hand
I am equally discomfited
by the inability of an audience
a colleague
a friend
a mentor
to recognize the
“validity”
“timeliness”
“perceptiveness”
“originality”
even “veracity”
of my “take”
I am like Malvolio’s perception of the “boy” Cesario
within “standing water, between boy and man”
caught at that moment between a changing tide
I apprehend the possibility
of a reconstitution of the subject
yet I wear my sense of myself and the playwright
as reconstituted subjects
somewhat in the way
the boy actor In the original productions of this play a male actor played Viola: a female character who disguises herself as a man wears the male clothes provided to Viola
as I dress myself in the related concepts of an authorial
and an interpretating subject
I am putting on a costume
with which I am naturally familiar
in my non-theoretical/academic
modes of speaking and thinking
these are the clothes I wear off-stage
yet
to fulfill the game of the performance
I must not wear these clothes with an apparent ease and naturalness
but rather inhabit the garments as though they belonged to the opposite
the sexual other
and yet
within the game itself
I find alignments between role and self
that make the “alien” quality of the stage costume
seem precisely that
unnatural
an arbitrary and temporary disguise
not the familiar dress that the irony of the convention calls for
I find a third sex
an androgyny that makes either role, Viola or Cesario
seem to be a construct formed for the relational structure
that the conventions of comedy demand
somewhere in the movement between Viola and Cesario
that moment in between childhood and adulthood
I’ve lost my confidence in what that maturity may be
if it will be more authentic
than the ambiguous role this performance elicits
Briana Dickinson: Dance With Rapture…
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation
Wanderlust: The Coming Storm off the San Mateo coast…
They sicken of the calm who know the storm.
Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: Poems
Rocinante: Sailing the storm outside the Golden Gate Bridge.
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
The Schooner Alma (San Francisco Maritime National Park) on her way to Kirby Cove.
Sailing on San Francisco Maritime’s Schooner Alma.
My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word “progress.” At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-“Where are we to steer?”-by saying, “We are being carried somewhere.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Franconia Performance Salon #12 had showings by by the Brilliant sisters (Nathalie and Breille), Richie Rhombus, Green Tooth Girl,Angrette McCloskey, Niki Ulehla, and Jamie Lyons.
Franconia Performance Salon #12
The idea behind the Franconia Performance Salon is to share sketches or segments of works in progress; drink some wine, and talk about the work. Don’t come expecting a “show” but rather a piece of something in process that you can respond to with feedback.
A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.
Molière