A Performance Cosmology

Testimony from the Future, Evidence of the Past

Judie Christie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134973002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Exploring thirty years of work by The Centre for Performance Research (CPR), A Performance Cosmology explores the future challenges of performance and theatre through a diverse and fascinating series of interviews, testimonies and perspectives from leading international theatre practitioners and academics.

Contributors include: Philip Auslander, Rustom Bharucha, Tim Etchells, Jane Goodall, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jon Mckenzie, Claire MacDonald, Susan Melrose, Alphonso Lingis, Richard Schechner, Rebecca Schneider, Edward Scheer, and Freddie Rokem.

A Performance Cosmology is structured as a travelogue through a matrix of strategic, imaginary, interdisciplinary field stations. This innovative framework enables readings which disrupt linearity and afford different forms of thematic engagement. The resulting volume opens entirely new vistas on the old, new, and as yet unimagined, worlds of performance.

1. Intimate Conversations

Ways of working with the Centre for Performance Research

JUDIE CHRISTIE

On Ways of Working: A View from the Bridge

To see a world in a grain of sand, –
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, –
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence¹

My veteran status as Chief Helmswoman on Mothership CPR affords me a particular and long view of its inside workings (as well as of its many thousands of visitors and territories visited over the years). And so, by way of introduction to this section on Ways of Working, I here offer a view from the bridge in the form of a few background notes as context to the ship's current course from There, to Here-and-Now, and onto Where? (But consider yourself duly warned that, having now foolishly alighted on the Point of No Return in the Realm of Abject Allusion, Mixed Metaphor, Atrocious Alliteration and Irritating Italics, I, at least, am stuck here for multum in parvo testing.)

Note 1 The Mission Statement

The primary mission of this ship of fools is to pan and sift through the shifting sands of theatre and performance, to dig to uncover origins and roots, to extend boundaries, perception and possibilities, seeking out the affective and the effective (the grain of sand in the oyster) of whatever complexion, shape and form and wherever it may be found. Critical to mission planning therefore (as well as writing funding applications) is an understanding of the difference between ‘affect’ and effect’ (but we will always muddle aims and objectives as a matter of syllogistic principle).

Note 2 Destination

Well, certainly, a journey to Ithaca as indicated in the previous pages. And, maybe, a return to one of our favourite places to visit across time, the ever-beguiling Sea of Serendipity whose rip-tides and currents subside into gentle ripples lapping onto as yet unimagined distant shores. But wormhole engineering is not yet sufficiently advanced to make for an easy ride through dark matter towards the Isles of Enchantment and there is the increasingly present danger of the gravitational pull of Planet Pessimism with its Sloughs of Doubt and Despond and Mires of Miserabilists.

Note 3 The Craft

Built circa 1974, the design of the craft was quite revolutionary for its time, and now, whilst not standard, is not so unusual. Designed for reconnoitre to and between Points of Not-Knowing and Not-knowing-Even-More rather than as a flagship, and with carrying capacity for working passengers only, the ship is not a large model of its kind. Whilst retaining a certain metamorphic capability, it is unfortunately too large now to camouflage itself completely effectively for undercover work. Its accumulating cargoes of institutionalization also mean it cannot travel quite as lightly as it once could. The crew is small and burn-out is a constant risk (fortunately, on-board disputes are not frequent and tensions can usually be resolved into ‘discourse’ by a timely injection of chocolate).

Whilst having a fairly complex system of allied instruments, the ship's main engines are the twin motivators of theatre and performance; these are fuelled by curiosity and oiled by obstinacy, and for full speed both need to be firing together. They can run as single engines for a while if required, particularly for testing and maintenance reasons, but there is no back-up motor as the Drama Distributor Cable was scuttled along with the bathwater during one of the periodic Semantic Scourges by the Arrogance of Youth (under the rallying cry of ‘illiterate on purpose’).

The concavo-convex lens at the helm of the ship can be focused by means of a crank handle that usually takes two or more people to operate and manoeuvre, a team effort that is also required for the unwieldy steering mechanism. In fact, whilst having a certain dependence on technology – even though the projector is always breaking down and the profile lanterns have seen better days - most of the on-board systems and instruments are likewise manual and rudimentary, the preferred mode being analogue, biotic, anti-teleological and sometimes old-fashionably dialectical. This is especially true of the communications system that is in constant need of updating, with the demystifiers on permanent overdrive to unclog the build-up of too-many-words-and- not-enough-physical-practice and filter them through the Whispering Gallery to Charlatans’ Corner up on the bridge.

The on-board galley and mess is unusually large and well equipped for a vessel of its kind, and is dominated by a state-of-the-art oven for baking pies in the sky. Visitors can search in vain for the sleeping quarters (which can never be found when they are needed) and are also often caught short by The Dreaming sign on the ship's only lavatory.

Because of the burdensome weight of its contents, for reasons of ballast The Attic is located deep in the hold and is kept hermetically sealed lest the thousands of stored meme-seeds – used for expeditionary barter as well as bound for the rose garden – germinate and rampage.

Casting an eye on the graphics of the ship's exterior livery – ‘C.P.R.’ – one might fancifully, if so taken, speculate that the curve of the ‘C’ is figuratively suggestive of ‘continuum’, ‘confluence’ and ‘concentricity’, where the rupture in circularity in the ‘C’ opens towards the central ‘P’ of ‘possibility’, ‘potential’ and ‘polarity’, reining in the remaining ‘R’ of ‘return’, ‘remember’ and ‘recover’. Also barely discernable on the livery are the traces of the recently scrubbed-out numbers ‘30+10’, which did not add up to 40, but enumerated in years the current course of CPR and its ten years at New Base Camp in Aberystwyth.

Note 4 The Crew

The original crew had little formal training relevant to the required tasks, drawn together more by a sense of adventure and exploratory zeal than professional calling. As the craft contained no instruction manual, muster roll or manifest of expeditions, resourcefulness, resilience and outright bravado became valued attributes.

Little formal distinction in roles and responsibilities was discernible in these early years and whilst not proclaiming or espousing a co-operative structure, a sense of ensemble emerged and ‘group’ decisions determined routes, destinations and navigational courses. And despite an ever-increasing definition of roles and distribution of responsibilities (encrusted by age and institutional maturity), to this day this ethos of working as one, mucking in (and out) and ‘all hands on deck’ has remained. Lacking conventional professional skills and a manual (The Book of Manual, as it was to become known – still under construction) necessitated extreme autodidacticism, inventiveness, acquisitiveness and a voracious appetite to learn.

Hosting another ship's crew was not only an act of generosity and companionship but more often a blatant attempt at piracy - to ‘discover’ how they operated and functioned, to extrapolate and ‘borrow’ good models of practice. Pedagogical encounters, especially those (curiously dubbed ‘workshops’) held in the Public Domain, became a way of securing ‘in-house’ training and an opportunity for self-development as much as an ‘Educational Programme For Others’. Learning though doing, learning through trial and error, learning how to fail and how to fail better have been sustained strategies for practice-based knowledge, akin to walking the boards for the thespian, or walking the plank for the sea-farer. A suspension of disbelief for this crew was not so much a contract of imagination between spectator and event, more a modus operandi.

Lunging and lurking on the outer peripheries of the performance cosmology, often perplexed by and uncertain of the interdisciplinary explorations and a million miles from Broadway and the West End, the crew would occasionally lose confidence and, in a crisis of volition with a longing for a return to the familiar and an urge to give up, courage would soon be restored with the old joke ‘What? And give up show business?’

Mutinies have been seldom but are not beyond possibility. Dramas in funding, the constant need of ‘Grant Maintenance and Repair’ and better financial prospects elsewhere have often been the reason for departures. Schismogenesis – where things develop by splitting apart – as one performance cosmologist has advanced elsewhere², has been the mode by which fissures and differences within CPR have been resolved, giving rise to numerous other enterprises and projects.

Some crews, against all odds, retain youthful vitality, some implode, some atrophy and petrify, and some disband. Whereas the end for this crew is not yet in sight, nor envisioned, and a further thirty years’ work could possibly be realized, the more likely conclusion (piracy, capture, sequestration and insolvency set aside) is apoptosis, where the cells of an organism mutually agree to commit suicide, down tools, scuttle the ship. But endings should not be evoked in this beginning and schismogenesis is likely to continue and creatively evolve, so long as over-production and a tendency to hyperactivity does not cause burn-out.

Some time in the mid-eighties, ‘less is more’ was adopted as a guiding principle in reaction to a period of excessive output. For a while it functioned like a mantra, but sadly, the ‘less is’ section of the phrase snapped off, got lost and forgotten, leaving the crew with the single refrain ‘more’, as if a chorus of urchins in the musical Oliver!

‘Less is more’ has recently been rediscovered, re- constituted and revived. The crew's ambition now is to boldly go and seek those endeavours that radiate a synergistic dimension, where any one exploration fires on all cylinders, combining: cultural co-operation, collaboration and exchange; practical training, education and research; performance, production and promotion; documentation and publishing; information and resource.

Note 5 Ship's Log

Whilst empiricism has been much vaunted in remarks above, I nevertheless, in conclusion, offer the following cosmology travel tips and advice extracted from the log-book of Mothership CPR to any new theatre company thinking of touring:

… Thereby Madness lies in Safe Haven

… Brain Storm is not part of The Settlement of Knowledge but like Llare...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Plotting a Course, or Impossible Beginnings
• 1 Intimate Conversations: Ways of working with the Centre for Performance Research
• 2 Testimony from the Future: Field Station dispatches and soundings Towards Tomorrow
• 3 Evidence of the Past: For the record, and with the benefit of hindsight
• Notes on Contributors