Programme Notes: Case studies for locating experimental theatre.
Eds. Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine

Contributions by: Lyn Gardner, Tim Etchells, Neil Bartlett, Stella Hall, John McGrath, Alan Rivett, Mark Borkowski, Rose Fenton, Brian Logan, Lucy Neal, Keith Khan, Simon Casson, Louise Jeffreys, Judith Knight, and Toni Racklin.

Live Art Development Agency, 2007, 108 pages, 16 black and white photographs, 12cm x 16.5cm. ISBN: 0954604040.

All the contributors to Programme Notes agree on one thing – now is a great time for independent theatre. Experimental, challenging, investigative and just plain different work has started to creep into our mainstream venues (think Duckie selling out at the Barbican) and attract huge audiences (do we need to mention the Sultan’s Elephant?). This book is a collection of case studies, essays and interviews with some of the people who aided that change, and it’s both a thrilling glimpse of practices that helped usher in the new, and a useful springboard for future strategies.

If there’s a recurring theme, it’s audience development. In fact, Neil Bartlett describes it as the only thing that sets ‘experimental’ theatre apart from its ‘conventional’ counterparts. John E McGrath, Artistic Director of Contact Manchester, reminds us that what we think of as mainstream theatre services its own niche, and its audience is always a minority – be it a well established one. The diverse practices hinted at here, in contrast, see engaging new audiences as integral to their work.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they go about it in the same way. While Keith Khan (co-founder of motiroti) develops work to attract new audiences, Alan Rivett (Artistic Director of Warwick Arts Centre) develops audiences to support the work. McGrath reaches out into his local community, while Stella Hall (currently the Creative Director of the Newcastle Gateshead initiative) builds local traits into the way she produces each event.

These differences in approach naturally reflect the differences between what each practitioner is trying to do (and explain why audience development is the only recurring theme). They also serve as a useful reminder that the term ‘experimental’ should not be prescriptive. Largely seen as a reaction against something, ‘experimental theatre’ becomes dangerous when it builds its own walls. Bartlett describes how he fought hard, in his ten year tenure at the Lyric Hammersmith, not just to break down the barriers surrounding work that called itself ‘conventional’, but also to smash the devices used by ‘experimental’ theatre to barricade itself in.

Happily, Programme Notes does not succumb to the temptation to define its own niche. The histories, policies and strategies outlined here don’t assert a single direction for practitioners of the future, so much as describe an attitude - of collaboration, audience development and accessibility – in which practitioners of the past and present have been able to thrive. ‘That’s all that anyone wanted, after all,’ writes Tim Etchells, the Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, ‘that the door be open and left that way.’

At times, Programme Notes reads like a roll call of the great and the good of the British independent theatre scene. But when its contributors quote and reference each other, they not only demonstrate a working practice of respect and collaboration, but also a relatively small field of support. While it’s tempting for the case-studies to read smoothly, now that their writers are so well established, hindsight hasn’t ironed out how hard it was, or what parts luck and misfortune played along the way. ‘Please note’, Bartlett writes of his achievements at the Lyric, ‘that this took years, was a bloody struggle and caused great trouble at the box office …’

Neither do the histories of past successes stop this being a book that has its sites set very much on the future. There are warning bells – about funding, about latent conservatism, and about the risks inherent in this kind of practice – but this is a forward thinking and hopeful book. It brims with respect for the audience, building to a consensus that given access and choice, people will continue to embrace independent theatre practice. It also respects the diversity of the practices contained under the umbrella terms ‘independent’ or ‘experimental’ and doesn’t patronise its readership by prescribing a one-size-fits-all arts policy. The contributors’ passion and inclusiveness springs from every page, so that although aimed at professionals, this will make a fascinating read for anyone.

Written by Mary Paterson

Programme Notes can be ordered through Unbound:
http://thisisunbound.co.uk/

16th June 2007
Toynbee Hall Court Room

Part of Artsadmin’s Summer Season

While the argument rages about the relative merits of MySpace and Facebook, Chris Goode wants to draw your attention to another internet community. The Hippo World guestbook (http://members.aol.com/HippoPage/intro.htm) is a message board for those who visit the site, which describes itself as ‘devoted to all fans, fanciers, and aficionados of Hippopotamus amphibius’. Like other internet communities, this one attracts users from all walks of life, who discuss a range of subjects sometimes – but not always – connected to hippopotamuses. Goode’s sixty minute performance is a reading of some of these posts, which he recites verbatim.

Chris Goode’s introduction primes us for the narrative arc of the messages. Arranged as if in three acts, with short musical interludes, the opening tone is one of enthusiastic appreciation (“I wish that people could have hippos as pets!”), which moves into conflict (“I hate hippos and I hate you”), and ends with that sure sign of a website’s demise – uncontrolled spam. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the way communities are built, cherished and destroyed as a whole. The ultimate objet trouvee, then, the Hippo World guestbook stands for how societies find and lose their meaning.

Except it’s not quite as simple as that. Obviously, there is no set pattern to the way people communicate, or if there is, it’s not reflected in this site. While Goode’s performance certainly has a beginning and an end, there is little to define the middle of his promised story. Messages from people who are hippo fans sit alongside messages from people who are not hippo fans, and the exchanges occasionally descend into childish conflict (“I hate hippos … They suck! They suck!”), homophobic taunts (“Hippos are gays and all who like hippos are gays and lesbians”) and complete irrelevance. In fact, rather than documenting the rise and fall of a vibrant community, Hippo World guestbook is at its most interesting when it becomes clear how tangential it is to the lives of its contributors. The user called ‘Big Heart Hippo’, for instance, leaves the group with a revealing entry: “I used to check up on the message board frequently, but now I don’t. My parents told me my e-mail might be traced and the bad language was getting on my nerves. Oh well.” It is not the story of the site that becomes interesting, but the hinted at stories of its visitors away from the screen.

Here in the dark of Toynbee Hall’s woodlined Court Room, reading from a lectern under spotlight, however, Chris Goode displaces these tangential posts and treats them like the weighty missives they were never meant to be. He earnestly recites acronyms and spelling mistakes, and adheres to the web convention – as he points out – that capitals means shouting. While Goode has culled messages to fit the sixty minute time frame, he has tried to be representative of the mood as a whole, and reads out the chosen messages in full. If the posts have been transferred in time and place, he would argue, they have not been transferred in authorship. This kind of editing would be condescending, he says – either in the presumption that he could ‘correct’ the posts, or that he should accentuate their eccentricities.

And yet there is definitely something anachronistic about his reading of these messages. For those of us who did not grow up with the internet and texting, it still seems strange that written communication can be this casual. But the – mainly teenage – users of the Hippo World site clearly thought of their messages that way. Perhaps it is this age difference between the people Goode quotes and the people he performs to that makes the humour seem slightly cruel. Lol, gtg and other text speak are easy targets for the well educated, urban folk at Toynbee Hall. There is little danger, either, of us falling into the trap of becoming naturalised to the racist and homophobic undertones of some of the messages. They are written in a language that people over a certain (young) age neither use nor accept, but it is one that any internet user will recognise. Perhaps Hippo World guestbook raises an interesting point about the tolerance for these statements on the net, but it doesn’t foster any link between its audience and the people who wrote the posts. This distance does not threaten to change anyone’s minds.

On the other hand, perhaps Goode’s show is a fitting way to continue the site. The posts’ displacement into this setting works in tandem with their intended irreverence, and not against it. And the downright silliness of Goode’s endeavour is a light hearted match for the way the site sits on the edges of its contributors’ lives.

Despite the undeniable presence of Chris Goode’s own authorship, there is enough that feels communal about Hippo World guestbook to save it from being arch or ironic. Not only does Goode read the messages of an internet community, he also depends on the audience’s communal understanding of this phenomenon for humour and effect. He takes the normally solitary pursuit of surfing the net and drags it into a shared environment, replacing the online community with an embodied one. Whether you feel he does this with affection or, at times, a little too much cruelty, probably depends on your own relationship with the web.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more info on Chris Goode see
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/project.php?id=171

or

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/associate-artist.php?id=32

Helen Paris

One-to-one performance
24 June 2007
Toynbee Studios
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season

Four scenes of longing, and turning to technology for comfort. A beautiful voice, lit up on stage, all of our eyes fixed on her – except I’m standing in her shadow, an empty stage, an empty auditorium. The promise of televisuals, our antics recorded in chrome, our voices everywhere through the air … but of course none of it is free. Someone’s behind the camera, someone’s flipping the switch, someone’s topping you up. The electric heart, whirring on its axis, replaceable with a mechanical watch – and my finger still tingles from touching it directly. The doorframe, the mirror, behind each threshold might be the hope of our longing. And when I at last see your face, it’s a trick of the light, the faint smell of burning but there’s glass between us, and you’ve arrived just to say goodbye.

The idea of the one-to-one performance seems to hold the promise of escaping from the trickery of ordinary theatre, of establishing a real and direct connection between performer and spectator. Helen Paris’s Vena Amoris does the opposite: it immerses the spectator in exactly that theatrical trickery, that vantage from which the mechanism behind the illusion is revealed; and it defers and obscures the direct contact for which it nonetheless yearns. But in this itinerant experience, a complex relationship between the magical and the practical is developed, and the illusory becomes all the more compelling for having its workings exposed.

The piece begins with a call on my mobile phone while I’m waiting outside. It’s Paris, telling me she’s going to stay on the phone with me, and inviting me to enter the theatre. The theatre is empty, with a chair lit up in the middle of the stage. She asks me to sit in the chair. When I do, the house lights go down, the stage lights blind my view of the auditorium, Doris Day starts singing “Make Someone Happy”, and Paris starts talking about the danger of theatre. Not the moral or emotional danger, but the physical danger – the risk of fire from the gaslight of pre-electric theatres, the reservoir of water that used to hang over the stage, invisible to the audience but always at the edge of the actors’ awareness, and the symbol of comfort that is the fire curtain.

Following Paris’s instructions, I am led through the levels of Toynbee Hall, up its stairs, inside a fire cupboard, and at one point into a room actually called the Fire Room. I watch a film which Paris tells me was made by Thomas Edison, while she describes to me – over my mobile phone – Edison’s rival Nikola Tesla’s dream of free wireless energy. Alone in a room with a whirring Van de Graaff generator, I am asked to turn off my phone and then feel the generator’s electric charge with the third finger of my left hand, the finger that Paris tells me the Egyptians believed was connected directly to the heart. A beautiful woman opens a door to reveal her twin on the other side, and at the journey’s end I sit before my own reflection in a dressing room mirror ringed with incandescent bulbs. And in a brief glimpse there is a moment of contact, but with little more than Paris’s shadow.

What am I to make of all this illusion, of this strange odyssey through the stuff of sideshow trickery (the Edison film is a kind of burlesque gag; the Van de Graaff generator is what makes people’s hair stand on end in the funshow)? What is the danger of falling in love with an illusion? Does it hurt anyone to believe that the singer is singing just for me? That the sound of your voice on the phone is the same as being with you? Does it mean any less if my heart is racing just because it’s electric, after all, and there’s an external current running through it?

This piece is a moving and intelligent reflection on these questions, a journey through a world which is helplessly romantic and heartbreakingly earnest. The connections between us are fragile enough (as I found out after my phone gave out briefly); it’s no wonder we fall in love with the technology that connects us, even long after we’re gone.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Helen Paris is co-artistic director of Curious

http://www.placelessness.com/