Don’t Mr Müller’s words about “a state surrounded by ghosts” begin to ring a little louder these days?
There is no such thing as a perfect show. But there is so clearly such a thing as a really bad show. A Dead Show.
Why is that? What’s the difference?
Let’s leave, for the moment, the usual suspects: the talent of the performers, the relevance of the subject matter, the quality of the oversight, and whether there is a functioning toilet or not. Any of these can be really excellent and it still is possible to come away feeling like we’ve been dragged through the muck at the bottom of the shower drain.
The question I want to approach might be most interestingly researched in practice. Because I think that the difference between a really bad show and a show that is not really bad does not entirely reside either in the subjective experience of the audience member or in the efficient talent of the artists. I think the integral aspect of quality grows out what might be called community. By this I do not mean (necessarily) a shared ethnicity, economic status, political principles, or geographic proximity. When a group of us work in proximity to each other, or at any rate come together to engage in developing work, we are doing something both prosaic and fundamentally vital:
First, we are educating ourselves, both as artists and as audiences. We are researching, not only our tastes and preferences, not only sharing effective artistic practices and techniques, not only gleaning social behaviors and mores that can lead to increased knowledge, but we are researching the art in question. And this research is the life of the form. We are investigating the forms, the disciplines, the practices, in a very active and participatory way. We are, in fact, joining our practices (as audiences, artists, critics, technicians, etc) into a living art form.
When this happens there is no Discipline that we are practicing. There is no Form they we are fulfilling. We are not, for example, doing Theater or Dance. We are building, inhabiting and tearing down the discipline and form from the inside out. We are making theater or dance. We are making art.
This is in a sense so simple, but so rarely seen. I am not talking about making a single piece, or even a series, or an oeuvre. I am talking about working on the form or discipline itself. I am talking about those periods of time when community means more than checking a box, more than putting ourselves in arbitrary categories, more even than getting together with people you like and doing some good work. I am talking about an ongoing, elaborating, process of developing something larger than ones own work — developing possibilities, opening a space for the movement of thought.
Because that is what it requires: thinking — whether you think with your body, your brain, your voice, paper and ink, or something completely different. Making work that is more than a reliable-but-Dead product requires this kind of metaphorical space. And that, my friends, is for me why there is no such thing as a perfect show, but so clearly such a thing as a really bad show.
What is happening in this town right now is the sad and frightful erosion of places where these kinds of artistic thought can take place. Fortunately, there is at least one hallowed spot where this type of thing happens and which can serve as a model for others of its kind. I speak, of course, of that Little Rectangle of Great Love “9×22: A Dance Lab” as hosted by Ms Laurie Van Wieren.
Here it is, Woyzeck fans, my little etude at 9×22 this July.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that arts organizations are collapsing around us. Living through the early days of the 21st century we cannot hope to survive on the stale leavings of the 19th that for so long have done service as the meat and potatoes of contemporary culture.
I am writing this on the something-somethingth anniversary of something happening, the details of which I can’t be bothered to recall. In fact, I don’t have to. As much as anything in our breathing world, what are known widely as the “events” of “nine eleven” have become so encrusted with layers of despair, anger, violence, corruption, manipulation, marketing, ignorance, despair and despair that the there there of memory is there no longer. The hard impenetrable crust that has solidified into three digits is self-presented to me already, the mechanism of automatic recall hardwired into my colonized brain. Memory resides elsewhere.
We all know how to gather information on strangers and friends with the click of a button in a world where the latest verbs are company names. Already television and radio’s moribund convulsions become the choreography of the self-consumption of the new blog iEstablishment. Freshness, novelty, and vitality — life itself — have long ago become tactics of this relentless process that sucks the flesh from reality and leaves dry electronic husks animated only by our habits into a pathetic semblance of motion.
“We will never forget” is the most effective eraser, “Freedom” the heaviest chain, and “God” the surest path to impiety. Why should “Art” survive as currency? Counterfeit representations are no longer an academic marker of illusion and artifice, they are the trademarked blood circulating in the body of contemporary society. None of this is news. None of this is remarkable. Grab a shovel.
Of course, in other words, theater is dead. It followed hard upon that of the deity and Jesse James, in 1882, the same year as the birth of James Joyce, the Standard Oil Trust, and the Chinese Exclusion Act.
But what will anyone do about it? Should anything be done? Cripes, let’s not ask that question. Only since it’s cropped up do I offer an answer: only what is being done, but that in a spirit both open and attentive. There is no panacea, no À bout de souffle, no Marinetti, no Lenin, no Alexander Fleming, etc. I have utmost confidence in Newtonian physics. I also have great faith in Einstein’s discoveries. I further believe in string theory, dark matter, and mollycoddling the underdog. What’s that got to do with hen’s teeth? These are ways of observing this place with a view to making our own local efforts effective. They are at times supportive of each other, at times contradictory (particularly the one about the underdog). But they are not reality — at least not in the way we usually use that term. Life is what happens while we try to figure out what it is. Art is not too far off from that.
One point is: revolutions and manifestos are now — if they weren’t always — merely crowbars of the Vampire State. But we need to enact the promise of those parts of our experience that evade those blood-sucking teeth. We need to find those machines that in their puddles of grease and clanking chains offer us the vitality of breathing experience, the gasp of fresh air, and the awareness of our dying pulse in its ephemeral inadequacy while they knock the glossy finish off the wall of servers in the funky downtown high rise.
“Fail again, fail better,” is once again a useful reply — but this isn’t a contest. This isn’t a success or failure equation. It’s always been inextricably both. Or to put in another way, it’s still the same never-ending struggle to get into the room, out of the box, through the woods, under the bridge, across the river, out of sight, out of mind…the race against inevitable encroaching death, not with a hope to surpass it (there’s success for ya!), outlast it, or outwit it. (C’mon: you die.) But up here and in the underworld we’re in the same place: we’re all dying as we speak, each breath keeps us just a step ahead of the dark footsteps of the Footman. The machine I’m talking about is made of parts of our own demise: grab the despair by the horns and hold on.
Do we need to search for this delicate monster of the underworld as we go? Do we need the antidote to the poison of the insidious media state of mind? Do we need a meth lab for the soul?
At the very least, these allusions to the underbelly of reality from the very beginning might suggest in the minds of those open and generous enough to submit a potential model for organization that allows the necessary movement with the least ballast. The bunch of us, in our isolated cells, working like the Dogs of Art we are, as a part of something without a center.
Yes, we will give up fame, money, recognition and comfort — but since when has respectable art ever achieved any of these? (Okay, apart from Jasper Johns.) And for once and all we should say goodbye to the sense we have of ourselves as creators, as authors, as interpreters and makers. We must also say goodbye to the idea of validation and authority — at least as far as these can be seen from inside the invisible wall. As outsiders, we will only be seen from close up and at certain moments when the light we shine smacks the glazed pupils of the heavy-lidded as they reach down to recharge their portable substitute brain devices. What we gain in return is a vital flexibility and accompanying impact disproportional to our “size.”
Whether economic or artistic or political, the forces seemingly arrayed against us can be used to our own advantage because they are part of us. Taking a cue from loose independent networks of small scale we must be as self-determining and reckless as possible. The old zero sum model of growth or death can be abandoned for a more complex system of multiple machines that are thrown together for short term advantage and abandoned as they wear out their welcome. Take what we find and exhaust it, then re-tool it to more immediate use, and tie it together with old bike inner tubes.
The truth is that we have always done this, those of us with our noncommercial obsessions and paranoias. In the meantime, we feel we ought to survive and be compensated for our effort and our works, if not for the mere fact of our survival. (And — just to be plain — I believe we should be. We live in an Arts Economy and “attention must be paid.” Although art versus death is an equally reasonable proposition.) But we cannot lose sight of the fact that what we do is not an entrepreneurial business model. We do what children do and parents have done for centuries with little compensation — not because we do not deserve it, but because it is life, it is breathing, it is only and above all What We Do - we live. Not in order to live, not to get a life…nothing that makes us special — we keep swimming.
Once we abandon the false hopes of permanence, uniqueness, adversity and authority held before us so that we can help feed the Beast, we can continue to do what we do while shaping the consciousness and practices of a hostile environment, taking our short term gains and pressing for the long haul.
Open and attentive participation presupposes active, engaged, and skillful behavior. There is no substitute for education, experience and imagination. Effortful thought is required. Brain power: cheap, powerful, dangerous, and tricky to handle. And not one of us is up to the task, least of all those who rant on blogs rather than spending the time more gainfully employed elsewhere.
Although nothing is certain, these are a couple shots of the space where this wound of Woyzeck could happen if all goes well.
photo Tim Heitman
photo Tim Heitman
photo Willis Bowman
photo Megan Mayer
photo Megan Mayer
More to come, both in pictures and about the production.
Thass french, means “9×22, one more time!” more or less.
Ran across this. Well, I was looking for it. Matt Peiken does a video blurb on Laurie van Wieren’s 9×22: A Dance Lab.
I was there doing “A Bottle of Unleaded” the video of which I will post up here soonish.
Mr Heiner Müller gave a little speech in 1985 in accepting a prize that was later published as THE WOUND WOYZECK. In it he says:
1. Woyzeck still is shaving his Captain, eating the prescribed peas, torturing Marie with the torpor of his love, the play’s population has become a state, surrounded by ghosts.
This is the kernel of how I see the production. Look: a list. An enumeration of the play’s characteristics. And “a state, surrounded by ghosts.”
Woyzeck is pretty much a conglomeration of fragments and uncertainties. Every production must decide how to deal with this material. This decision, in this case so near the surface and apparently an indispensable preliminary, is of course one that must be made (consciously or not) about all productions of every play. This is the most interesting aspect of Woyzeck to me.
My order will not be the point — I don’t think I can speak satisfactorily through a play anymore, if I ever could. The ordering will be the point: the act of ordering. Which, happily enough, is also reflected in the play itself I think in different ways.
Some of that last post suggests that our organization is a model of perfection and that if only the rest of the world would catch up, we’d all get along just fine.
Well, I may be stupid but I’m not blind.
There are some serious issues I know we have, and although I won’t air dirty laundry here, I will say that we have plans to become more actively engaged and more responsive to more of the world. Our history of site-specific and site-based work has its foundations in a responsive relationship to space, geography, topography, objects, etc. And it is specifically the negotiability of this relationship that activates and gets activated by performance and, when successful, produces opportunities for meaningful experiences, both public and individual.
I think because we have often been looked upon (when we manage to attract the eyes of others) as eccentrics or isolated one-time wonders, we have paid careful attention to this relationship and tried to nurture it, aid it, and shelter it from the harsh winds of the Midwest urban tundra. But regardless of whether Minnesota Nice is a front, a fake or a feeling, for crying out loud there’s just No Money and there never has been and likely, never will be. Not in this country.
“The food stinks!” he screams to the waiter. “And such small portions too!”
So to extend this idea of responsiveness that we rely on with site to other aspects of our existence is a natural and not impossible movement.
And not the grass, right.
We’re talking money.
And although everyone knows the difficulties of arts orgs, of art orgs in a recession (of anyone at all, really, at this here and now…) perhaps some details of our situation might shed light on the peculiarities of a broader picture.
A small, arts-driven, “experimental,” and site-specific group like ours faces an uphill battle in the best of times. We have a very small infrastructure because we make original work for particular locations. This means:
So the question becomes: must we change the work in order to survive? Do we need to create a maintenance bureaucracy in order to prove that we are serious? Do we need to conform to existing models in order to continue to exist?
My contention is that growth does not equate to survival (in any context, but particularly in our own). That drive toward growth always reminds me of cancer, and I’m not fond of thinking of art as an all-consuming wasting disease.
Consequently we must convince (not just audiences and funders) but ourselves and the entire ecosystem into which we have placed ourselves that not only are we not a vast black consuming cancerous hole, not only do we have a right to exist as we are, but that our existence is a viable model for a vibrant and flourishing member of a larger community.
In short, I believe our situation is parallel to the situation of the arts in general within the larger world (at least in this capitalist, puritanical, Spectacular portion of it).
We have never wanted to exist simply to exist. Never believed that we could turn enough profit to maintain our skewed visions. We knew going into this that when you claim the margins of difference for yourself you will be marginalized. Our path was always a rocky one. But I do think we hoped that our presence, and our commitment to making life interesting for ourselves and as many others as we could reach, was not only a viable and laudable one, but one that would alter the make-up of the ecosystem enough to make continued existence not only possible but necessary.
And so in our disillusionment we tighten our belts and walk head first into the inferno.
If you saw it, let us know what you thought.
Online review by Lightsey Darst was thoughtful and called it ecphrastic. (Look it up. You’re already online, google is just a click away.) The local paper’s Graydon Royce said that it was a disappointment and that my piece (I went “off the rails”) was “a tiresome exercise of technical tricks and meaningless meanderings — a brazen invitation to nod off or check your e-mails.”
Naturally I disagree. I thought my part was a beautiful, if flawed, piece with great work by all involved. We made a Johns-like work and I think it worked like a gray Johns painting — that was the site-specific point, after all.
In any case, attendance was low. Which of course was disappointing for us, but also raised some questions which may get addressed in public in another post.
Plans are underway to continue this work, but in the meantime we forge ahead with other new work in new spaces. We are looking at a new version of Woyzeck at an old military base on the river, an interactive espionage-love story in the skyway system, and an realization of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz dawning across the breadth of the city.
