(more Kurt Vonnegut)

ontological graffiti

On a wall in a toilet of a Prenzlauer Berg cafe:

To be is to do (Sartre)
To do is to be (Camus)
Do be do be do (Sinatra)

Which after a little search I find out is a misquote of Kurt Vonnegut - who had Socrates as the first quote, Sartre as the second (Ol' Blue Eyes is right however). Maybe the scrawler was unpicking the subtleties of existentialism at the time. . .anyway Vonnegut is really interesting when thinking about dystopias because although his books are generally fairly pessimistic about humanity (that's a broad generalisation) he's also clear on the failure of any system to fully describe its subjects. He's far more interested in fakery, lies and absurdity and also even the creative potential opened up by the impossible demands of bureaucracy. One writer on Vonnegut describes his worlds less as dystopian (in terms of nightmarishly realised utopias) and more akin to the multiplicity of heterotopias. A heterotopia is Foucault's idea of 'another space':

"places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there." (Foucault 1967)

The worlds/states/spaces which are enacted through the negotiation with the audience have the quality of representation or a kind of reality but the insistence on the function of the gaze, and the eye of the camera doubles the space with the mixed, joint experience that Foucault assigns to the mirror. . .

some notes day 3 to 6

Realising that although we could decide that the idea of the sensory fix should be central to develop the content of the scenes, we still have very different interests in how that can be achieved, we decided to each focus on one element of the sensory fix idea.
Dona to develop a format that sets up a sensory fix for the performer, Gabi to create situations that give a sensory fix to an audience member (see score of 26th July). Both formats involve two different levels of involvement/interactivity which the audience member decides either before they go in, or when they are inside. Initially it was three - just observing as one option – but we decided that all scenes should encompass this anyway. The scenes in which an audience member receives the fix can be observed by another audience member. How we manage to avoid this being uncomfortable for the spectator (just changing terminology for the hell of it) that is more involved seems to be dependent on the set up of the scene and the way we give them information. Central to this is also the role of the usher that lets people into the performance room.

Two other thoughts (of many) that came up in conversation with martin throughout the last two days in terms of coherence:

The way in which the performers change between watching and doing, performing and being audience. This can be looked at in every scene.
Physical obstacles/objects that are brought into the space by the audience can add up, inform and change what we do/are able to do in the scenes.

Lenny & Keith (text)

scene from ‘strange days’

‘I want you to know what we are talking about here. This is not like TV only better, this is life. This is a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex.
You’re there, you’re doing it. You’re seeing it, you’re hearing it. You’re feeling it.
It’s whatever you want, whoever you want to be…
It’s about the stuff you can’t have right, the forbidden fruit. Like running into a liquor store, with a 357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenalin pumping through your venes…

Yeah I can make it happen, I can get you anything anything it’s true you just have to talk to me you have to trust me you have to trust me.

I am your priest. I am your shrink. I am your main connection to the switchboard of souls. I am the magic man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious. You say it, you think it, you can have it. You want a girl? You want two girls? I mean I don’t know what your thing is, what you are curious about. Want a guy? Want to BE a girl?

Before we talk about money I want you to try it. I’ve got a deck with me right here, step into my office…

some thoughts on spectatorship

"You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see." (Lacan)

I've been thinking about our conversations concerning the responsibility we have towards an audience and how we me negotiate the contract established between performer and viewer. I've been meaning to read Jacques Ranciere's "The Emancipated Spectator" (a lecture he delivered in Frankfurt in 2004) for a while and now seems the perfect occasion.

In thinking through the roles of an audience he starts from two commonly held conceptions:
"The first one is that theatre in general is a bad thing, that is the stage of illusion and passivity which has to be dismissed in favour of what it forbids: knowledge and action: the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion has been drawn long ago by Plato: the theatre is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The “action “of theatre is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision which looks at shadows. Theatre is the transmission of the ignorance which makes people ill through the medium of ignorance which is optical illusion. ..The most usual conclusion runs as follows: theatre involves spectatorship and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore we need a new theatre, a theatre without spectatorship. We need a theatre where the optical relation- implied in the word theatron - is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama. Drama means action. The theatre is a place where an action is actually performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theatre must be predicated on that acting power. Theatre has to be brought back to its true essence which is the contrary of what is usually known as theatre. What has to be pursued is a theatre without spectators, a theatre where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers."

I think that certainly the second concept has surfaced in some of our discussions. . . I'm off now to watch some of the states Donna and Gabi have been working through but will post later.

Gabis score 26th July

score for scene phrase/table –

Sensory fix for one audience member

Setup with props:
One chair stage right facing front
One table stage left by the wall
Two portable headphones hung up at the back wall

Audience instruction: please enter and sit on the chair. When the door opens, you will be asked to leave again. There are two sets of headphones on the wall. One of them gives information, one gives options/instructions of interaction. If you want to, choose one of them only.

Situation: before audience walks in, the three performers are in the headlock (dead end conflict situation). This is projected into the watching room. As the door opens and the audience member interrupts, they break out of this and go to their starting positions for the scene:

Dona: against stage right wall, behind chair, waiting

Gabi: against stage right wall, in front of chair, waiting

As audience sits on the chair, light changes, performers walk slowly towards person on chair, then past to start phrase.

Focus: observing audience but not aggressive, as if they are entering our territory as a superior species, there is an atmosphere between the two performers that suggests competition and a post-conflict situation. However they remain in unison until the phrase break into slide and rest (&look).

Option 1: they pick up the headphone with information. They get the text from strange days, it develops, gets more intense and persistent.

Our phrase expands to be bigger than the room, ignoring the walls as a stopping point

Option 2: they are being asked to substitute a missing performer. They need to go to the table, and drag it to the other side of the room, through the performers. The noise it makes is the sound needed for this scene.

We find a way for this sound to influence the sequence (maybe stop and go, or cues such as a long drag means something, a few short ones mean another thing)

Sensory Fix

We have been speaking a lot about the notion of a sensory fix, coming out of Strange Days, and I did a quick search for essays around this idea. There's a really engaging article 'Merge Invisible Layers' by John Beckmann at www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=112 - I'm going to read through it to see if it has resonance with what we've spoken about. I know that we are not literally exploring virtual reality but I like his challenge to the boundaries between the visceral/virtual and the cyborg poetics mixed with techno-control.