Preoccupations (for Coney)

I was asked by the brilliant secret agency Coney to offer a few things that have interested and inspired me over the last few years, particularly in relation to the kind of adventurous work they get up to. Here are some of the things I suggested.

Here are a few things that have preoccupied me over the last few years. Things that have shaped the contours of my work and my thinking and that I think might be useful for anyone interested in ideas around adventure and play.

I suppose I think of all these things in the context of Coney because of the way in which they unfold. They all begin with a tiny rupture in seeming normality that is slowly picked away at until it reveals something complicated and messy and beautiful that was lurking there all the time amidst the apparent stability and mundanity of the real. I like the idea that art is not a thing in its own right, but a passageway into looking at what’s already there in a different way; revealing the secrets hidden in plain sight. That is what all of this material is about – secret societies, hidden systems, secret mechanisms – all simply ways of encouraging you to look with real purpose and attentiveness at the strangeness lurking in our own quotidian reality.

I also like all of these things because without exception they present all those mysterious systems and societies and adventures in distinctive, thoughtful and resonant ways. They don’t fall back on cliché and the laboured aesthetics of cod-victoriana or balloon-obsessed whimsy that I think can sometimes predominate in the world of game-making and adventure-setting. They feel like they’re operating within a reality that means something to me, rather than trying to escape to some bourgeois wonderland. It is that crooked way of looking at reality that most excites me in the stories and projects I try to make.

Behindlings – Nicola Barker
This is a book about a group of damaged outsiders following an old man called Doc in the endless pursuit of a quasi-mythical figure responsible for a treasure hunt that no one can really remember the beginning of. Nuff said.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
This is a brilliant, beguiling, post modern book about books and about love. It’s one of the most performative books you’ll ever read and a great example of how to create any work of art that constantly undermines its audience’s expectations.

Raw Notes – Claes Oldenburg
Essays on the blurring of art and life – Allan Kaprow
The Happenings artists of New York in the 1960s created delirious, impenetrable underground performances and playful experiences. We owe them a lot of our DNA and more people should know that.

Hiding the Elephant – Jim Steinmeyer
This is the most beautiful book you’ll ever read about the mechanics of illusion.

London: City of Disappearances – edited by Ian Sinclair
Anyone working in London, and even those who aren’t, should absolutely explore this anthology of tales from a hidden London that was gone before we even knew it was there. It is all about subcultures, myths, secret communities and apocryphal happenings. It also fuses fact and fiction quite beautifully.

D B Cooper
The Taman Shud case
These are real stories of strange things. The first I can’t remember how I found out about, but the second I was introduced to by Chris Thorpe. They speak for themselves about the delirious, discomforting strangeness of the real world. I wish I could make anything as absorbingly disturbing as either of these events.

Adam Curtis’ BBC Blog
Read everything and anything that comes up on Adam Curtis’ blog. He uses the history of television to tell us about ourselves, finding compulsively strange things in forgotten archives. Beautiful insights into our own hidden weirdness.

Ariel

1.
She did not know why she was here
She didn’t even know how she got here
She had been at home looking for something to eat
She must have blacked out
Which is unusual because
She had been feeling fine
She remembers feeling uncomfortable
She was hot and woozy
She was finding it difficult to breathe
People crowded around her
They were all doing their concerned face
They brought water
Lots of water
She was fading in and out
She did not know how much time had passed
She did not how far they had to travel
She woke up
And she was here
2.
It’s hard to say whose idea it was and I would be lying if I told you that everyone was absolutely on board right from the start. To be honest I’d struggle to tell you if at first the suggestion had even been serious or if it was a joke. It might have been a piece of what certain people within the organisation have certainly been heard to describe as ‘blue sky thinking’.

is this meeting every year, around mid July. Not in the offices. Off-site. Pens. Paper. Laptops. DVDs. Every Christmas film you’ve ever seen. A full drinks cabinet. Cigarettes. Illegals. You name it. And we just go at it. Nothing is off limits. Nothing is taboo. Nothing is dismissed and certainly nothing is ever ridiculed. It’s what we call the ‘yes and’ room. By the end of the day the concept is there. It’s never failed.
It’s always somewhat of a heady atmosphere. I think if even if you spoke to everyone who was there you’d get know two stories the same about who came up with it. And even if someone knew absolutely for sure it was them, I very much doubt they’d tell you.

3.
Based on a true story.

4.
She took a long time to start to feel better again
She couldn’t feel comfortable
Everything felt different
She was well looked after
Almost too well looked after
The attention was disconcerting
She smiled
She tried not to worry them
She kept her anxieties to herself
She knew they were doing the best they could for her
She was grateful
She was bored
She stared through the thick glass of the window
And she saw people walking
Thousands of people

5.
Logistically it was of course a nightmare, but when are these things not these days. I remember a time not so long ago when it really was just for the children. A proper Christmas scene with snow and a red and white pole and some stars in the sky. We always had a few simple mechanics, you know the sort of thing, elves mending shoes, wrapping presents, sticking a teddy bear in a sack. We’d have a grotto with some glowing lights and always a silhouette in the window. That was always my input. Remember Jaws, I’d say. Steven Spielberg. It’s not what they can see it’s what they think they can see. Imagination. Well I mean fuck any of that these days. Absolutely fuck it.

And I’m not being an old nostalgic here, I can tell you exactly when it changed. 1995. That was the first year when the decision was made that the money for the display would be allocated not from the store budget but from the national PR budget. I mean that tells you all you need to know, doesn’t it? It’s for the newspapers. It’s all for the newspapers.

6.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?
(Herman Melville)

7.
She stared at the people walking
And the people stared back
She sunk into the oceans of their eyes
She swam in them
And when they cried
As they often did
She felt herself falling
Onto the cold snowy ground

8.
You know, there had been some suggestion, and I’m not proud of this, of putting her in a costume. Can you believe that? I won’t say where that came from. Can you imagine how demeaning, how crass… I mean they would have strung us up from the nearest lamppost. Fortunately reason prevailed on that occasion but I think that’s probably when I first started having serious doubts. Of course it was far too late by that point, hundreds of thousands had already been spent on creating the ‘artificial habitat’ and she was already half way from Tallinn. There was no going back.

Despite all the training and preparation everyone was still a little taken aback when she arrived. It really is, well, you don’t know until you’ve seen it, her, in the flesh, so to speak.

9.
‘Well my trust in you is a dog with a broken leg,
Tendons too torn to beg for you to let me back in.’

10.
She fell in love so many times she lost count
She fell in love and
She kept falling in love
She had never known so much love could exist
She felt sick
She felt her insides all knotted up and flailing like fish hanging in a net
She cried into the salty water
She listened to music from the store and music from the street
At night she watched the busses floating by
People sitting in the harsh light listening to music or checking their phones or just sleeping
She had never been this happy
11.

They say any publicity is good publicity but I don’t think you’ll find a single person at Hamley’s who agrees with that these days. I’m not exactly going ‘off-message’ if I say that it was an unmitigated fucking disaster. Four days is all she lasted. Four days of people crying. Children screaming. Anyone would think they’d never been to a zoo. We were front page of every major daily. The Telegraph of all people neatly summed it up – ‘Is this What Christmas Has Come To?’ Nothing but that and a photograph. And if that’s the Telegraph, you can imagine what PETA and the rest did. Those poor girls on the tills, it’s hardly their fault but some of the things they were called. It’d make you wonder who the monsters are.

Almost immediately the decision was made to send her back, but it took 72 hours to prepare all the equipment. You can’t imagine the costs involved in these things. It was costing us over a ten grand a day to keep the water at the right temperature. Half the year’s profits were wiped out in less than a week. And all because we forgot the golden rule – people don’t want to see everything, they want to think they’ve seen it.

12.
She floated back in familiar water
It was so very quiet

13.
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?

(Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

Dancing with Buildings

[a little piece of writing I did for Eastside Project's Public Evaluation Project, responding to the question 'what makes a good home for art?']

1
We are always dancing with buildings.
When we are very young we haven’t yet learnt the right steps. Watch a child in a gallery or a theatre, trying to keep up, watching how everyone else is dancing, occasionally stumbling, occasionally treading on the building’s toes. Their clumsiness reminds us how well the rest of us have learnt to dance. How instinctively we settle into rhythms, repeat gestures, execute familiar patterns of movement. We drift. We spin. We follow the building’s lead.

2
How are you moving round this gallery?
Are you walking slowly?
Are you hugging the walls?
What are other people doing? Are you doing the same things as they are?

3
I like watching people watching things they are not supposed to in galleries. Half built installations. Abandoned cleaning equipment. Lost bags. It reminds me that a gallery is as much a particular way of looking as it is a particular type of building.
A theatre is also a way of looking. A different way of looking. A theatre is a room we go into to watch things with a certain kind of attentiveness. When John Cage created 4’33 he did so not because he wanted people to listen to four minutes and thirty three second of silence, but because he wanted them to listen to the world with the kind of concentration they normally reserve for art.
A good space for art is a space that, like Cage, is sensitive to the kind of attentiveness that it generates; the way it is inviting people to look.

4
Dancing is great when you know all the right moves. When you don’t it can be agony. You stand awkwardly. Self consciously. You feel every movement of your hand or your leg is being screamed through a microphone in an otherwise silent room. You feel like you don’t belong here.
And anyone can feel like this. Anyone can feel out of sync with a room, unfamiliar with its rhythms and its rules. No one belongs everywhere. Some people don’t feel they belong anywhere.
I know the spaces I like to dance with. I like busyness and noise. I like it when things feel a little dangerous and ever so slightly out of control. I like a sense of adventure. These are the kinds of spaces I want to make art and go and see art. But I am not everyone.

5
I don’t want a single kind of space for art for the same reason I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the Macarena.

6
I suppose what I’m saying is that the ideal space for art is a space that is aware of its hidden laws and its implicit limitations. A space that understands itself and the relationships that people have with it. A space that does not replicate what other good spaces do, but instead find its own rhythm.
A space that offers people a different way of dancing.

Archipelago

How can art flourish?

[A provocation written for Take Art's Open Space on the future for the arts in Somerset, responding to the question 'how can art flourish?']

Hello.
I’ve been asked to offer you a provocation.
So here is a provocation.
Apparently, more money is given each year to Donkey charities than to domestic violence charities.
I’ve been wondering and thought that maybe part of the reason for that is this:
Donkeys don’t speak back.
Donkey’s are uncomplicated.
They just get more or less healthy.

A donkey doesn’t question the underlying causes of the situation it finds itself in.
A donkey doesn’t suggest that there might be more to a problem than money
A donkey doesn’t stand there as an uncomfortable reminder of the inequalities and injustices and violence buried right at the heart of the society that we do our best to live in.
A donkey is a problem happening over there. Not a problem happening here.
A donkey is not something we might have to fix in ourselves.

Whilst we’re on the subject of animals, a few years ago Tracey Emin’s Fourth Plinth proposal was a family of meerkats standing on one end of the plinth.
She said that they were a symbol of hope, because every time something sad or depressing or difficult was on television, it was always followed by a documentary about meerkats.
She did not win the commission.

Who here has heard of the Health Lottery?
The health lottery is a new type of lottery, all the proceeds of which go to local health organisations
It’s an insidious little idea
As superficial and insincere as the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain Awards.
It feeds a basic desire to feel like we’re helping. Like we’re doing good things.
We are being uncomplicatedly good.
You buy your lottery ticket and you know that your pound is going directly to local people who are sick.

Now here’s the provocative bit.
If this is a success we are fucked.
Because the government has found a way to use facile big society populism to harness the resentment and confusion that people feel towards arts funding to channel money away from people and organisations that talk back.

We talk back.
The arts talk back.
We are difficult and complicated.
We don’t always make things seem uncomplicatedly better.
We can’t always have positive deliverable outcomes.
We don’t always appear to add value.
We sometimes tell people not only about the problems over there.
But also the problems back here.
We explore the things we need to fix in ourselves.
That is what art is to me.
It’s a place or an occasion where we come together to look at the world with a different kind of attentiveness.
To imagine and enact a better world for ourselves.

And if its straight shoot out between that and a donkey or a dialysis machine, we are going to lose every time.

So what can we do?
Let’s stop making the wrong arguments.
Let’s stop talking about the arts as value-adders. If we really thought that was the arts’ major contribution to society we’d all be building shopping centres not theatres.
Let’s stop conceding the terms of the argument.
Let’s stop assuming that the most sensible thing we can do is soldier on valiantly, stoically doing the best we can under the circumstances.

This is a moment of profound cultural and political transformation.
2011 will resonate in the same way as 1917 or 1968.
We are reaching the end of something.
We are in the midst of recession.
Climate change is at a tipping point.
There are protests on our own streets
Riots
Revolutions across the middle east
The medias illicit affair with successive governments is falling apart.

Art.
Theatre.
Has an opportunity.
Has a responsibility.
It sounds unhelpful and it’s certainly not going to get you any money from DCMS, but at a time of such crisis, art’s real value is in making things worse.
To speak back government and to speak back to society.
To help unpick the unravelling threads.
To stand alongside the dispossessed and the demonised.
The utopian dreamers and the feral underclass.
To imagine new ways that we might live together.
Better ways.

That is how we flourish. That is how we add value.
Otherwise the Donkeys have it every time.

On Spaces

[First published in the Stage]

I like learning how to use a space. Growing to understand its contours and its dimensions. What it feels like to occupy that space, or be occupied in it.

For four years now I’ve been co-curating Forest Fringe in Edinburgh. Our old church hall is all shabby grandeur, wooden floors and high shadowy ceilings. It has an occasional leak and an acoustic all of its own. In the time we’ve worked in and with that space we’ve come to know it incredibly well. Through successes and failures we’ve learnt how that space colours the performances that happen in it. We’ve learnt to appreciate its little peculiarities.

Most importantly we’ve learnt what kind of show will resonate in that space and what won’t. Most often those the shows that will really glow in that church hall are those that acknowledge its noisy presence. Shows that don’t try to disguise that space or render it invisible through darkness, but begin by acknowledging where it is that we’re all gathered and why. Indeed, this peculiar necessity has for me become one of the most interesting and important things about Forest Fringe. It is a place that people come to gather. A place that celebrates and interrogates how it is that we all choose to gather together to tell stories and think about our relationship to each other and the world.

The act of gathering together, as much as the stories we are told when we are there, has become the most important thing about Forest Fringe and the most successful shows we have had have been those that understand this; that thrive on it. Shows that want us to think about what it means that we are all here in this particular place at this particular time. As such, it would be fair to say that the clumsy architecture of an unconverted church hall and the poor quality of our black out curtains have actually been an absolutely vital part of shaping what Forest Fringe is, what kind of artists it supports and the type of radical and unconventional work that happens there. From the beginning the space has been shaping our politics, in ways that we realised and ways that we didn’t. The best thing that my co-director Debbie and I probably did was allow that to happen.

I always find myself excited by this awkward process of exploration and discovery. I wish it happened more often. We make it too easy on ourselves with purpose built black boxes designed to similar specifications up and down the country. We should demand more awkwardness, I think we’d learn a lot more about the work we make and what’s important about it.

The space that has had me fascinated most recently is actually not a space at all but a context. That of the big rural music or mixed-arts festival. The last two years I, like many others, have been at Latitude presenting new work. I think right at the moment Latitude is one of the most exciting contexts that anyone could be making work in. A delirious in-between space between the city and the country populated by people of all ages with a furious desire to see something really strange. It’s space and its rhythms are so peculiar and fascinating. We could be creating work at Latitude that responds to that environment in radical and imaginative ways. Shows that by the requirement to conform to the awkward dimensions of that festival could teach us something thrilling and important about what it is we do. Yet the majority of theatre at the festival still happens in the one tent that is actually designed to accommodate it – the theatre tent. Part of me really thinks it would be more exciting if we didn’t have that option; if we had to learn the contours of the festival like we’ve learnt the contours of the theatre.

Zilla! (Part 1)

Zilla! (Part 1)
Apiary Studios, Hackney
Created by Andy Field
Performed by Ira Brand and Chris Bailey
Photography by Laura McDermott

Part 2 will be at STK International on Thursday 29 September. For more information and to reserve a place drop by here.

We interrupt your regular programming for a short advertisement…

A Short Talk About Going Round In Circles

I want to begin with a story.

When we get to the story it has already started. Piglet has asked Winnie the Pooh what he is doing and Pooh has told him that he is hunting woozles:

The Woozle, or Woozles plural, seems to be going around a little group of larch trees, so Pooh and Piglet go round the larch trees too, and Piglet tells stories about his Grandfather William, and Pooh wonders if perhaps the Woozle they are following is a Grandfather instead, or maybe two Grandfathers, and if so whether they can keep one of them.

Suddenly, there is a revelation – Pooh stops and points to the ground!

“What?” said Piglet, with a jump. And then, to show that he hadn’t been frightened, he jumped up and down once or twice more in an exercising sort of way.

What Pooh has spotted is that there are now three sets of tracks – they are now following three separate Woozles or Grandfathers! But in fact, Pooh has noticed that the new tracks are different from the old tracks, which means that they could be dealing with two Woozles and a Wizzle, or even two Wizzles and one Woozle. Who can say? They must continue to follow the tracks.

We were asked where theatre is going.
And if innovation was leading the way.
And if so what way?

So this is a very short talk about going round in circles.

According to the Flare Festival website
We are all here to the experience
The Theatre of the Future

Which gives you literally the easiest answer to the question of where theatre is going.

It is going here.
Or not here as such
But a new place that these artists
Or artists like them
Will have led us to
The future
The undiscovered country
They are
Innovators
Pioneers
An avant-garde
Boldly going where no one has gone before
They are following strange footprints
Looking for something uncertain but exciting
Hunting woozles
Or wizzles
Or grandfathers
Or all three

The idea of the pioneer is based on the logic that the future is a place, and not just any place, but a place we haven’t been to yet.

It was the New World
The Wild West
And then when we ran out of world we had Space
The final frontier
And it was full of dozens of new worlds
And then when we grew tired of space we discovered the internet
A much more readily accessible New World
And we all headed off into it
And in no time at all it began to think of itself as a wild west too

Sometimes I worry that theatre, and especially so-called experimental theatre and live art, is far too eager to hitch itself to this particular carousel of progress.
To imagine that the future is a place
That we are going to
A place that no one has been to before
And that consequently we need someone to lead us to
Pioneers
Avant-gardes
Woozle hunters

Do we too unthinkingly re-iterate the rhetoric of Enlightenment progress and a vision of the world in which time is moving ever forward? And in our attempts to keep up, do we perhaps end up re-affirming a brutally capitalist fixation on the insatiable production of new things – new ideas, new material and new innovations.

And when we find a new place. A patch of what we assumed to be undiscovered country. Do we think it belongs to us?
Do we think we can sling a fence around an idea, or a new piece of technology, or a way or working, and assume therefore that it is ours – that anyone else who does something similar is stealing from us?
Or equally, do we see what someone else is doing and assume that we have no right to do the same thing?
To use the same ideas or the same technologies or the same resources.
Do we trudge back to what we have chosen to call a workshop
To do some more of what we have chosen to call R&D
To produce some more new material.
To find our own little piece of the future that we might stick a flag in and call our own.

The problem with all of this, as you probably already know
Is that its based on faulty logic
And some aggressively manufactured ideologies
There was no undiscovered country
We live in a big circle
And the internet is not a frontier
It looks like this.

Even Pooh figured out there were no woozles or grandfathers eventually
And he is by his own admission
A bear of very little brain.

The idea of progress has a violent history
Often written on the bodies of people we choose to forget
And innovation has become little more than a part of the hungry rhetoric of capitalism

We should be thinking before we re-iterate this language, in the way we choose to talk about the things we do as artists?
Indeed, should we perhaps put more thought into how we can resist that logic?
How we might celebrate the fact that we don’t have to abide by it and its understanding of production and ownership?

Because we’re not really going anywhere at all
Time repeats itself
It concertinas together
It reoccurs in elaborate even beautiful patterns
Like a bear’s footprints building up in layers as it circles round a larch tree

I hope the future is about appreciating the delight of going round in circles
Which is not about revivals of “the classics”
Or re-enactments of the “past performances”
Because both of those projects still assume that there is some original that exists over there in the past, with its own fence around it, and that we must ask permission if we want to go back there.
I believe that the past can repeat itself in far more unruly and unlikely ways

I wish we could feel freer to copy each other
To reincorporate and reuse
Create intricate patterns of reoccurrence
A radical and generous ocean of ideas in constant circulation

Like the idea of oratory
Old stories remembered and re-spoken
Or
Old rhythms and choruses and drum loops
Reused, remixed, reincorporated

Or even like an internet meme
An idea or a behaviour or a performance
Repeated beyond the point of absurdity, becoming something else entirely
Building into impossibly dense, incredible, nuanced patterns
A one-note joke becoming slowly with a near-ridiculous global effort a thing of genuine beauty

An exploration of our complicated relationship to each other
Rather than an attempt to get ahead of the crowd.

Zilla Part 2

[a short section from Zilla Part 2 - a duologue for performer and Google Street view, written by me and performed by the brilliant Ira Brand. Enjoy.]

It is Tuesday 24 May
And I wake up for the second time today
It is night
It is dark
I am still on a train
The train has fallen over
And it is on fire
I am covered in dust
Or perhaps ash
Or glass
Or perhaps I’m remarkably unscathed
Any make-up I was wearing remains perfectly intact
Especially around the eyes
A single bead of dried blood has threaded its way down the side of my face
Like house paint spilling from an old tin
My glasses are smashed
If I was wearing any glasses
Otherwise my hair is a mess
Or my dress is torn
I am in the train
Or under the train
Or alongside it
I have been thrown from the train
The train hangs limply off the bridge like a horribly broken ankle
It is concertinaed in the middle like a crushed Pringles tin
It has plowed through a station or a house
Or even a school
The train is in pieces
And the carriages torn open to the radiantly starry sky

I stand up
Slowly
Full of cracks and aches
I place my broken glasses
On my blood tickled face
I brush down unruly hair
I stand impassively
Swaying
Leaning against a tree or
Perhaps the corner of a building
And I look
And the camera
Looks at me looking
And then swings round behind me
And I am looking
A tiny figure
Leaning on a tree
Or the corner of a wall
I stand in the foreground
Silhouetted against all that I am looking at

Mainly I am looking at rubble
Streets of converted Victorian houses collapsed in on themselves
Or crushed
You can see the remains of interior walls
Wallpaper
Antique picture frames and IKEA furniture
Tower blocks sag to one side
Lit only by the fires burning in the occasional window
Reflected in the flood water
Obscured by the falling ash
And the rain
There are cars in trees
There are trees on top of cars
Or boats in trees
Or boats on top of cars
There are lost dogs
And dead dogs
Rats
Probably
Though they are rarely mentioned
There are traces of a fight
Or of a struggle
There are grizzly remains
Or the suggestion of grizzly remains
You can’t see anyone
Only ruins
There are single shoes discarded in the road
In the foreground
On the floor by my feet
A child’s shoe
Or a summer sandal
Or half a flip flop
Chewed
I look up again
It is grand
Epic, you could say
Everything is bruised
Everything is on fire
Everything is underwater
Everything is perfectly appallingly untouched
Even the street lights are working
It’s just that everyone is gone
And it’s all very quiet
Too quiet almost

You can hear the threatening stillness
Everything smells of nights in the city
And there is a definite sense
That more than one poorly-made decision has led us all here
But yet here I am still
Remarkably
Looking at it all
Or trying to imagine it all
The city before me is just one example of what might still be here and what might not
A blanket of ruins and things that will eventually become ruins
And bodies and people that will eventually become bodies
An account of all the disasters we’ve survived thus far