archive - a question of nothingness

Originally posted: 2nd December, 2012

I’ve seen a fair bit of live performance lately. Thrown myself back into it in the hopes that the deluge will fill some of the gaps in my memory of the practice forged by my brief spell in the wilderness.

In the hopes that I’ll get a grasp on the substance of the thing again. That maybe my perspective has been changed. That perhaps my absence has given me the advantage of a more distant take on it all. That my understanding of the work’s mechanisms has matured.

The jury’s still out on all this, but I’m not questioning the drive for now. In 2013, with The Public Studio, I’m making three new works for stage, editing our short film (Hey, Wasteland.), planning for another film, plus all the blessed filler. Two of these works we’re making from scratch – and the first of these opens at the beginning of March. Suffice it to say, I’ve enrolled in remedial class, summer school, private tuition, and shittons of sitting and staring into space.

So, it has come as both something of a gentle revelation, and a terrifying conundrum to me to observe what I have in the performance work I’ve seen recently, and reflect on what this means for me as I come to making this kind of work again – officially – for the first time in about three years.

Here it is – and drumroll, please because its imperative was something that was drilled into us from day dot at drama school, but that only the very few ever seemed capable to grasp or implement (and I certainly didn’t often number amongst these) – the matter in question of course is this:

It’s really difficult to do nothing.

I think it’s hard for most – even the most experienced of makers to do less – to trust the work – the text, the actors, the design – to just sit there and breathe.

And before you get all up in my face about my having trained at a guzhy new-agey, Zen-like anti-performance school, I want to have the record reflect that a lot of the people who I am observing as struggling with the whole “doing nothing” thing are graduates of said school, too. It’s a tiny town, Melbourne, after all.

Now, I’m not pretending we should all emerge from Hamer Hall every April holding our pieces of paper and chanting to the drone of Tibetan bowls, meditating motionless on St. Kilda Road. And yes – I very much get your point – it could be a matter of taste. To an extent I believe this is true.

One work I’ve seen recently has been lauded broadly across town, and it honestly wasn’t my cup of tea. I can’t fault a lot of its stagecraft, technical proficiency, the skill of many of its engaged artists. To me, the whole thing just didn’t strike a resonant chord of meaning. I like obscure. I dig a bit of incomprehensibility in formalistic structure. I do. But to me, there was just a bit old wall of empathetic inaccessibility in front of the work that I couldn’t for the life of me penetrate. But it was what it was, and was most enjoyed by many, so in this regard its place in the ecosystem is clear. Here is an example of the question of “taste”. Not to mine, but quite well done, nonetheless.

No, what I’m talking about is busy-ness where stillness is all that’s required. And I’m not just talking about stage business, either. I’m talking about an internal busy-ness. The performer’s busy-ness, the sound design’s busy-ness. The set’s busy-ness, the lighting’s busy-ness. The director’s need to explicate where allowing the text to sit and say quiet things in the silence before the next phrase says more than any kind of descriptive gesture could hope to.

I think it’s really very difficult to pull back from our fearful desires to overdo. To try to simplify by complicating. To second guess the audience’s perceived potential ignorance. To feel that perhaps we need to coherently illustrate the depths of just-what-we-mean.

I think I’ve probably cited this before – but a very, very wise friend of mine once said that we “chronically underestimate the intelligence and curiosity of the audience”. This has remained true – to my mind at least – in at least eighty percent of the performances I’ve seen since they said this to me about seven years ago.

In the theatre, I see a lot of strong impulses flying around “to do something”. To be clever. To show that we know what we’re talking about. It’s scary out there – when, in a nutshell, you’re putting yourself on stage (usually more figuratively than literally, but not always). A lot of the time we answer the siren song of fear all too readily. There’s a lot of temptation to roar, to tap dance, to juggle and blow kisses all at once.

And I just don’t think it’s necessary – largely speaking – I don’t think it’s in any way of service to the work possibly ninety-nine percent of the time. In fact, I would go so far as to say the only times where that kind of “yo, yo, yo – look at me, I get it, I know what I’m doing here, and let’s all get in on the joke together” kind of stagecraft is called for, is when the work requires a very wry and intelligently executed kind of self-referentialism. Where we are taking the form and kind of fucking with it, both knowingly and with a great deal of compassion and curiosity. And that’s hard work. You need a lot of very, very skilled and incredibly open-minded collaborators to pull this kind of somersault off.

I could be wrong. I could be very wrong. I’m happy to be proven wrong, and I will write about it voraciously and at length if and when I am. But I think, that it’s kinda why for the most part, I don’t enjoy a lot of theatre.

I think, to a large extent, it’s maybe why a lot of static contemporary conceptual work, and non-theatrical performance does do it for me a great deal more than work I frequently see in actual theatres. It’s a theory.

(Here is where I am missing a formal theoretical education that could describe the phenomenological difference between theatrical performance work and live art or installation – the mercurial key that makes one transformative, and the other a difficult attempt at explicating narrative in a post-everything milieu).

But I’m also wondering whether what I’m actually getting at could be achieved via a few tweaks. By an extra week spent in rehearsals or development just… sitting. Just – making way. Just – and whether you like it or not, I’m going to say it – just… breathing.

So, here’s my thought for the hour: I think that performance needs more nothingness.

What this means for me when I hit the room to start making this fistful of new work, I don’t know. I really don’t. I mean – terrifyingly, this hypothesis leaves me at a sincere loss. (I have been a huge culprit of “stuff-doing” both in my work as a performer and as a maker/director.)

I believe that instead of trying to fill the space of performance with meaning, with emotion, with illustration, with movement, with light, with sound, we should be asking, “What is the very least required here?”

The answer to that question may be a symphony, a chorus-line, amphitheatre and a troupe from Cirque do Soleil, and that’s fine. If it’s the true and honest answer.

But I wonder maybe if our work might benefit – just a tiny bit – from taking more time to ask that question, and allowing the work to answer it. I wonder how live performance might transform if we work with a deep listening to the strange and subtle whispers of restraint.

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[I'm posting a selection of the substantial and/or more popular pieces of writing from my old website. They're a few years old so some of my thinking has of course shifted a little, but I find them interesting to reflect on nonetheless. This is one of the archived posts.]