Tag Archives: Theatre

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abjection — night 2

A shorter night by one hour. Last week I found four hours almost too long, so decided for only three this week. I was scrabbling to get out the door on time, so next week shall return (on a proper dance floor even) for another four hours.

I’d mentioned to Daniel that I was going to have to find a crash mat to remember how to do all the boot camp stuff from ADT. He wrote back, “honey, crash mats for bootcamp is not so necessary if you don’t have them heres some handys.”, followed by a list of things I can’t really do. So I tried to do some of it tonight.

Mainly I have a feeling that the section I am working on, while being improvised, has a highly coherent structure and progression, and while certain things I have a feeling will happen equally might not happen, the two nights of rehearsals have resulted in some fairly consistent ideas. So I spent some time remembering physically how to roll on the floor, how to slide, how to keep low and move.

After boot camp, I spent a bit of time doing some of the Emio Greco technique I could remember from the Double Skin/Double Mind workshops, thinking about this pushing myself to exhaustion and having a very specific movement dynamic that comes from the flicking and shaking of limbs.

Last week was a bit of exuberance; the unknown as I’d seen it behind my eyes becoming real. This week … well not to repeat myself for one, was more methodical. A good half an hour altogether spent analysing at first very slowly, and then with all the assistance of gravity, what happens when I release from a high relevé, stretching up with tension, dropping to a squat, one let turned in, the inside edge of my foot, shin and knee on the floor, the other standing flat on my foot, bum to heel. And from that, what is the action of undropping? If I can go down so fast with gravity, how can I go up just as fast?

It feels like — and is — years since I did this stuff, but even then, never on my own.

This dropping/undropping, some large flicks of elbow and arm, and something incoherently black metal are small things that seem to be coalescing in this section — which for the moment is all I’m working on. The other parts are churning around me, though they don’t feel so critical to solve just yet. As with last week, I videoed it all, and shall have to find some time to cut things out and find in the unaware instances the pieces that are this piece.

Music was again Gorgoroth — this week I had Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam. I also tried some Burzum and various things Attila Csihar, Tormentor, Mayhem … also Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture (which Daniel will remember). It’s something in the music certainly, but something more in the voice. Gaahl and Attila both have this, as well as a visual terror.

I’m not sure if this section will have music though. To have loud black metal blasting from a set of room-filling speakers, or even Tannhäuser, gives an unavoidable colour to the movement and work. Yet in silence it reads as inscrutable, opaque — that thing I hate most in contemporary dance, where the audience is supposed to believe something really important is going on. I’d sooner kill this part than have it become such a worthless thing as that.

Now to wait another week until I do this again. It’s not enough. I’m thinking about it every day, and the curious thing is I have no idea where or when it might get performed.

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abjection — night 1

Usually I say, “[name of work] — day 1“, but it’s reasonably fitting for abjection to say, “night 1“, being a somewhat dark piece. After a little work on some ideas in Madrid, and much, much thinking, reading, researching, going over a couple of years now, whatever this piece is, it’s coalesced into something recognisable in my head. Would that I would simply extract the film from behind my eyes, and use that to learn the whole work. instead …

I am rehearsing in Theaterhaus Mitte, in an old school by Märkisches Museum. Which is to say, I’m rehearsing in a classroom. It is night, so the windows make adequate mirrors when I need, and my laptop records my two-three minute bursts of exuberance (then I sit down for a while). I am rehearsing there because it is cheap. I can afford an evening rehearsal for the cost of lunch. I also somehow like the place. It has a feeling I don’t feel alien from. It’s small though, but of the moment it will suffice.

The musical accompaniment was Gorgoroth’s Antichrist. I find Gaahl very attractive at the moment, aesthetically as well as visually (yes, he didn’t join till after Antichrist, and only on Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam does he write the music and lyrics, but … I only had Antichrist yesterday), and the tinniness of black metal, sounding like it was playing on a transistor radio suited the ambience.

I’d been wanting to work on the movement parts of abjection in a studio first. Mainly because the other parts I can rehearse elsewhere initially, and the dancing needs both some room to avoid walls as well as the mentality that comes from being in a studio. I’ve taken to videoing myself for each improvisation (managing to get through most of Antichrist in 2 1/2 hours), trying out different ideas, but altogether very much on one path.

There is a definite — and far more apparent than I expected — black metal attitude to it, or maybe to say if some choreographers use jazz or disco as their motivation and the movement of those genres comes across in the performance, then I’ve done the same with meiner Lieblingsmusik. What was also blaringly obvious is that for me to do what I am going to have to, to make this scene function (and the whole piece), I’ll have to spend some intense rehearsal time working out the mechanics of particular movements; training like boot camp at ADT. The thought of what I’m embarking on — and I was stiff and sore this morning, dragging myself to ballet — is like facing a mountain. I mean so literally. When one is close to a behemoth, it becomes self-evident that endurance and a fair number of bruises shall constitute the immediate future.

I spent the last hour working on the text from Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, which at the moment, along with a Cantonese Opera demon and a cleaver, constitutes the beginning of the work. I’m conflicted with Kristeva. I am deeply suspicious of any philosopher who seriously entertains psychoanalysis as a legitimate field, firstly because it simply is incoherent with regard to scientific understanding of the mind and secondly because my introduction to philosophy was Deleuze and Guattari. Further, her extremely uncritical involvement with China during the cultural revolution should legitimately be a stain on her reputation equal to any collaborationist.

I’m not sure how I would postulate a Deleuzian regard of the idea of abjection, or whether it’s especially necessary. I’m concerned with a particular horror of one’s self’s corporeality, one that is also perhaps a little unreflective, inchoate, and in this, the part of Powers of Horror in Chapter 1, Neither Subject nor Object, has this.

For the moment, I’m rehearsing once a week. Nor much, perhaps additional fooling around on my own, getting things together. I have no idea when it will fall into a proper rehearsal period, even less get performed — particular things such as a large octopus (deceased), are likely to require significant organisation (and refrigerating). Nonetheless, it’s very nice to be making something again.

frances contemplating abjection frances contemplating abjection
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pre-rehearsals

Having taken some time to get this far, I spent the last couple of days extracting a couple of year’s of notes from my old abjection notebook and transplanting them into a new one. Some original ideas now seem embarrassing. Others it’s surprising how little they changed, springing fully-formed to life, and merely refining themselves over time.

I sat in a café yesterday before ballet, reading Howard Barker’s Death, the One and the Art of Theatre. At times the bias of the author is plain; the faint discrimination of which he speaks, I try to read it by changing words, to eradicate this irritation, yet quickly the meaning entangles itself into incomprehension, and I see the only option would be to rewrite these parts entirely.

Still, I come across a description of photography that once more causes a scene to spring fully-formed to life. It feels as if it is one of the remaining missing scenes now accounted for. Difficult to say. It is though comprehensively different from anything else in the work, and so without having been there so early, reading and making notes, there is no way it would have otherwise occurred to me.

For the moment then, this leaves one last unidentified scene. Some possibilities exist for it amidst the ideas which have the feeling of failed seeds, but equally, all of them feel somewhat arrangements of convenience; used because none better exist.

It’s new for me to make a work thus. Normally I do have notes and ideas, and dim visions of what they might amount to, but for abjection, I’ve been working on it and thinking over it for so long, it’s coalesced in my thoughts into a nearly complete work. As for what the effects being in a studio and rehearsing might have on it, that I will begin to find out next week.

Yes, finally coerced myself into rehearsals.

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Daniel Schlusser — Ophelia

In the graben between late night and early morning, while scrabbling small amendments for something of Daniel Schlusser’s I hope I’ll be announcing around Monday, I received an email from him. How two months has passed without my awareness …

Early August, I was rising at an hour that was both refreshing and bleary, to rehearse with him and others via Skype to the opposite end of the world. They in Melbourne, me here in Berlin, teaching rope bondage, suspension, shibari, through a small portal I felt I could quite possibly slide through if I approached it right.

After these mornings, I would find myself alone with the convenient ring hanging from the ceiling, making demonstration videos, messing with my ideas and trying to convey them to Lily, wondering if any sense could be made; if this way of trying to make performance had any substance to it.

The video I found this morning … ah, what to say? Daniel is a theatre director I like very much, and I’m very happy to be working with him on Ophelia doesn’t live here anymore. The video is beautiful.

Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 1 Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 1

Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 2 Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 2

Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 3 Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 3

Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 4 Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 4

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Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Unusual for me to go from one project directly to another, let alone three in a row, but this weekend is only a slight pause. I’ve been talking with Daniel Schlusser since 2009 or so, and even spent some time last year while I was in Vienna working with Hans Van den Broeck — and have just spent half an hour across two hemispheres on Skype for his new project, Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Daniel’s one of my favourite theatre directors, so it’s a many-thrilled thing to be working with him, also to be working more in theatre (I seem to be slipping far beyond dance these days). Lily Paskas is also involved, and we shall be spending the next week with ropes, Shibari, Bondage, Ophelia, Gertrude …

The week-long rehearsal is also somewhat of an unknown as they are in Melbourne and I am in Brussels / will be in Berlin; hence Skype. It seems unproblematic to do it this way, though it is also an unknown—other things to consider, as well as a need for adaption to be able to work together.

I shall try and write a little here over the week also, maybe some photos too.

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A day in Gent

A short pause for two days before the next project begins. Gala and I have been working together and in each other’s pockets for two weeks, but haven’t had much time to spend together doing not very much. Somewhere in the past week, the idea of Gent came up, and in keeping with my weekend trips to nearby cities, we jumped on a train early afternoon.

The last and only time I’ve been to Gent was when Dasniya and I missed the last train from Brugge, and found ourselves at 1am or so sitting in Gent-Sint-Pieters, one of the more pretty train stations I’ve passed through. It turns out the entire city is quite intent on showing up that edifice. Our first destinations, once arrived, were a pair of bookshops. It turns out the English bookshop is nothing on Saint George’s, and the other one, despite a multilingual website was firmly Flemish.

Naturally, we decided to find a café to drink hot chocolate, eat chocolate croissants and so on, and so took a tram all the way to the end of the line, missing whatever it was we were looking for. This is though a rather good way to see and feel what a city is, and Gent, somewhat like Amsterdam is small and with little of attraction beyond its inner confines.

What is in this region though is delightful. Spires and and turrets stab at the vault above; symmetry occurs only enough to be folded into and out of , as a leitmotif around which other ideas flourish. Churches, yes, of which there are many, but castles, warehouses, dwellings and theatres all take part in this. The rooflines also show the beginnings of what is possibly best expressed in Amsterdam, and like that city the canals break across streets, winding the city together.

We walked for some time, feeling for the vague direction of a theater and nearby café Gala had once visited. Around 19h, down a street along a low rise, she saw this: Kunstencentrum Vooruit. This is a beautiful theatre, arched windows filled with red drapes leading ever higher until overtaken by turrets and other accumulations, one continuing upwards in unrepeating differentiations on each floor until arriving at a small, steep, windowed roof. Another opening outwards to a curved balcony high above, just large enough for a single person, sprung out into the void above the street. I could surely live in that.

The café was closed, but across the road. Oh really worth coming to Gent for. A small pub/café, some tables outside, but inside is the place to sit. We stayed only a pair of hours, but amused ourselves very much. Amidst the old signs for beer and seeing machines, dark woodwork, all scuffed and worn, statues of jesus, saints, apostles were to be found. And amidst all that also, we threaded together a quite debauched story of the real purpose of this bar. Perhaps to say, ‘Dikmaker’, ‘Slijterei’, ‘Krak Pils’, ‘Slagroom’, and other such words were too much of a temptation for our soiled minds to resist (especially when aforementioned jesus was greeting with open arms and beatific expression the deliverer of said Krak Pils).

The eetcafe is  ‘t Gebed zonder Eind, which is not so hard to find, and the owner told us of a similar one in Brussels, which we intend to move on to next.

gent – across bridge gent – across bridge

gent – barges on the canals gent – barges on the canals

gent – kunstencentrum vooruit gent – kunstencentrum vooruit

gent – chair in 't gebed zonder eind gent – chair in ‘t gebed zonder eind

gent – 'tt gebed zonder eind gent – ‘t gebed zonder eind

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process/unprocess week 2 day 1

I am humming.

Gala stands over me. She is reading the Aftersong from Beyond Good and Evil. We look at a couple of translations and the German text. He is quite unfriendly.

I am humming still. Most of today was spent humming. Or when I couldn’t make enough volume, then, “Da Daaaa Da Daaaa LaLaLaLa—La La-La Laaa”. Yes, Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture.

We are not playing this scene for comedy.

There is quite a bit of (for us) potential comedy in all that we are doing, but this scene we both feel has a gravity to it, no matter how much our desire to play it for laughs of the schadenfreude type seek to overwhelm it.

Earlier, we worked on the other scene that has quite some text in it. This time, Wittgenstein. He talks about hands a lot. Coming back on the train from Amsterdam (much fun! much sleeping!), I read over On Certainty. He has a tendency in this text to pose questions as though someone was speaking, a rhetorical device. When the encumbrances around these spoken sentences are removed, one finds what is left is a strange but logical conversation. (For brevity in the performance, I removed the excess “I have a hand”s, as it lent a certain monomania to the proceedings.)

This week we are in another studio. Big? Yes! Places to hang? Also yes! Unfortunately the wall we have to jump off and I get to bounce off is decidedly concrete. Nonetheless, it should add an element of torment to our fun.

Here is the text. Perhaps to say that what I am referring to as a hand, which Gala is doubtful of, is not the hand you might expect.

Gala: I don’t know if there’s a hand here.

Frances: Look closer. I know it is so. There is a hand there.

Gala: She knows that there’s a hand there.

Frances: I’m incapable of being wrong about this: that is a hand. I know that here is a hand for it’s my hand that I’m looking at. What right have I not to doubt the existence of my hands?

Gala: How do you know?

Frances: Here is my hand. I know where you touched my hand. I know, I am not just surmising, that I am seeing a hand.

Gala: Have you got two hands?

Frances: I know that I have two hands. That I have two hands is an irreversible belief. I could not accept any experience as proof to the contrary.

Gala: And what is a hand?

Frances: Well, this, for example.

Gala: I don’t know if this is a hand.

Frances: I know that it means now for me. At least that I shall act with a certainty that knows no doubt, in accordance with my belief. I know that that’s a hand.

Gala: Is that really a hand? I doubt whether that is really a hand.

Frances: I know that this is my hand.

Gala: Are you sure? Do you know it is?

Frances: How do I know? I know that that’s a hand. I have two hands. This is a hand, not… This thing that looks like a hand isn’t just a superb imitation – it really is a hand. I know the position of my hands with my eyes closed.

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TWO SHOWS: Nearby Buffalo and memory/such mich

From Anuschka von Oppen, who will be in Berlin shortly for a piece I (think I) saw some of in Brussels late last year and thought it was rather good.

Nearby Buffalo & memory /such mich

Nearby Buffalo

ein Tanzstück von Annuschka Von Oppen

Annuschka von Oppen untersucht in ihrem Tanzsolo “Nearby Buffalo” die Verbindung zwischen Bewusstsein und Unterbewusstsein. Der Körper wird erforscht, als hätte er keinen Namen, keine Erinnerung, als schwebe er wie ein Geist.

“Ich wache auf, in einem Garten, oder vielleicht ist es ein Feld, ich bin mir nicht sicher. Ich höre nur das Zirpen der Grillen und ich habe das Gefühl, dass ich hineingezogen werde in einen unermesslichen Raum, als sei dies der Anfang der Zeit.” AvO

Konzept / Tanz: Anuschka Von Oppen
Komposition: Jason Sweeney
Sounddesign: Eric Faes and Anuschka Von Oppen
Coproduktion: Pianofabriek Kunstenwerkplaats
unterstützt von: company SOIT
Residenzen: Pianofabriek, Bains Connective and the Norwegian Theatre Academy- Ostwald University

memory /such mich

ein Tanzstück von Katja Scholz / die elektroschuhe

Erinnere dich.
Es war hier. Du hast sie gesehen, oder deine Phantasie täuscht dich.
Bilder tauchen auf und verschwinden wieder.
Sie sind zu zweit, selbst wenn du sie nicht findest.
Ihre Farben verblassen.
Ist es nur ein Spiel? Ihr werdet verlieren, wenn Ihr Euch nicht erinnert.

Konzept / Tanz : Katja Scholz / die elektroschuhe
Sounddesign: Katja Scholz

nearby buffalo & memory/such mich

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stuttgart calixto bieito parsifal (+ andrew)

It seems the nature of seeing a performance in another city also involves lengthy missed trains on the return for Dasniya and I. Departing a minute before our arrival (or probably while we were stumbling around Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof looking for the line to Berlin), we decided to jump on one to Frankfurt on the next line over. Opting not to get off at Frankfurt Flughafen, instead waiting 11 minutes to arrive in Frankfurt itself, those minutes passed until we landed in Bonn.

S-Bahn to Köln, another quick change and on to Berlin via Hannover and other interesting places. Only an hour late arriving but the last three nights had been short on sleep, so I proceeded to do just that.

Calixto Bieito is new to me. Andrew Richards told me about him in Brussels and thought I’d love his style of mayhem, and with Andrew being Parsifal in both productions, taking a cheap-ish train to a city I’d never been in for a night of Wagner seemed like a good idea.

Firstly to say that while I made comparisons between the Castellucci and Bieito versions while watching and after, there is also a gulf between them which makes some a matter of aesthetic preference. Nonetheless, even though the two directors are quite distant from each other in both intellectual and aesthetic concerns (as meta-analysis in the role of director as well as in artistic choices within Parsifal), they seem to me to share a commonality I’ll try and elucidate.

The music then. (And the theatre.) I thought the orchestra was smaller than at La Monnaie, though also heard different that it was larger. Stuck in the right crook of the gods for the first act (a not-good location both for acoustics as well as line of sight due to the staging construction), it all felt a little distant. Acts two and three though — we spied a couple of seats, stalls second row far left, empty! (Turns out these were probably the ones reserved for us anyway). A brilliant location, close enough to feel the warmth of the flamethrower!

I can’t compare the conductor here favourably with Hartmut Haenchen. It’s a matter of intensity. Haenchen has spent years immersed in Wagner, his understanding of subtleties is acute, from the phrasing of consonants to the speed in different sections; the build at the beginning of act 2 for example. The audience thought Manfred Honeck did a fine job, but for me I feel a little spoiled after Haenchen.

Two moments underlined this. The first being the shout of the knights at the end of act 3. Heanchen (ok he also had 200 extras adding weight), timed it a little later, just before a melodic change, and also the shout was more of a roar, like the ocean, it had a pronounced, shivering emotion, yet not one specific emotion, somehow this gave a resolution that the roaring in Stuttgart seemed artificial in comparison.

And the ending, “Höchsten Heiles Wunder! Erlösung dem Erlöser!”, the harmonics, this is an earth-shattering moment, it should bring one to tears with its beauty, its finality. But it was lost. Perhaps in part because the knights were all dead, but this still left the female chorus, yet all of this felt truncated and unclear, all the way to the last notes, which sounded unsure and lacking in certainty.

Flamethrowers! I’d seen this in the trailer for Die Singende Stadt and thought, who the fuck would put a flamethrower on stage? and how did he get away with it? Especially with Klingsor wielding it like a two-handed battleaxe. And dirt and grime and mess and blood. And testicles. (I thought they were fake, some kind of horrific goiter swimming in blood, as most of the cast were afflicted with ruinous weeping sores on face and head, but it turns out not.) And smoke too.

It’s not until the end of the third act, where Parsifal, now returned as the redeemer, leads the grail ceremony (which is preceded by slaughtering Titural in an iron bathtub with an axe passed around to each knight for a hack or two), and heals Amfortas’ wound by shoving the spear through his ribs, that the sarcasm and blasphemy of Calixto is made unavoidably clear.

This brings up the question of how Calixto engages with Wagner. Visually, he follows the dramatic path and action of the libretto closely, and in one respect there is nothing especially radical about the staging. There is a grail, a spear, the ceremony in the third act, all as Wagner had written. That they are a gang of LSD-fueled apocalypticarians and Parsifal might have more in common Frank from the Wasp Factory, nonetheless doesn’t alter this.

Under this perhaps, lies Calixto’s engagement with Wagner proper, he of the erotic, almost orgiastic on one side, and the one seeking redemption in a chaste religion on the other. Whereas Roméo regarded Wagner from a specifically intellectual perspective here, engaging with Neitzsche, Calixto seems to do similar but almost loutishly mocking him.

As with Roméo, he celebrates the music, but also as with Roméo is not uncritical of whence it springs.Not bothering with obvious philosophical references, he simply piles religious icons one on top of another, pointing to the confusion within the libretto (and in Wagner by adding his bust to the idols hanging from Parsifal’s gown). It was in the third act this mockery became clear, and perhaps if I’d seen the whole work with this in mind from the beginning, I’d think of it differently.

As it was, until the final act, I found at times an incessant busyness, a lack of pause to think upon what was taking place. Whereas Roméo used the profile of Neitzsche and the snake to pass the first act’s overture, before plunging us into darkness, from which emerged a single source of light, Calixto had the desolate highway overpass seething with action even before the first note.

It’s admittedly a difference of aesthetics, and perhaps if I’d seen only this version I wouldn’t be saying this, but even so, I felt the need for a pause at times from this, which didn’t come. And while Roméo’s performers struggled with doing nothing, and the sloughing off of performance artifice this entails, Calixto’s seemed to at times be unaware that performing chaos and mayhem doesn’t always mean chaos and mayhem. Dasniya here remarked that having dancers involved would have helped in providing a corporeal attitude that wasn’t simply one of performing-anarchy.

Which may sound like I didn’t enjoy it all, or thought it was weak. Not So! I feel very fortunate to have seen two exceptional productions in as many months, either of them alone would have given me an inspiration for theatre I’ve been missing. I think it also would have been a remarkable work to have been involved in, one of those where you come away feeling this is what theatre should be.

And to finish with Andrew. From the asceticism of Roméo to Calixto’s bacchanalia, he really belongs in such theatre as this (even when performing the most miraculous undressing in which he reveals absolutely … nothing!). Besides a voice which can drive a nail into the gods, he is believable — all the more terrifying when his face is awash with a mad smile.

parsifal andrew richards parsifal andrew richards