What is possible or impossible to perform
I imagine a rock-star,
a theatre rock-star,
a hooligan theatre rock-star,
standing on stage in the middle of a stadium.
The stadium is packed – the kind of packed where further back the faces become pixels,
Impressionist-painting-dots which you can’t quite make out in the multitude.
The multitude is shouting. You can’t hear them.
They are in kind-of-slow motion, like stock-video-footage of a background stadium crowd
where there is no sound but you know that they are shouting.
It is like – but it is not – Woodstock, or Live-Aid,
where the politics are part of what makes it sexy.
And it is like – but it is not – Beyoncé, or Rage Against the Machine,
where the sexiness brings people to the politics.
The rock-star is singing or saying something,
but you can’t hear them for the shouting
(which you also still can’t hear).
All you can hear is this vast, pulsating, slow-motion silence.
~~~
It feels clichéd to write of silences being loud.
Of silences that shout.
But it seems that I have to. Because I read Joe’s rock-star theatre script and for me, the silences in it scream.
I sit inside them for a while. In the impossible breadth of the tyranny-that-scares-me-most. In my impossible distance from those-who-shape-the-world; in how impossibly everywhere fascism and T-Rexism appear to be.
There is a kind of must-do-something scream that has long sat deep in my chest – not quite where my heart is but near there, towards the back of my ribcage and woven around my breath.
Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it swells.
Sitting in the gaps and silences of imagining a theatre that–
which we do by–
–it squeezes me inside-out.
When I think of changing the world – and how art, how theatre, might do this – the answers are so complex that I still find them to be beyond words.
But I sit for this moment in the audacity of imagining. And it feels gloriously, painfully loud.
~~~
I imagine knowing what to do. And doing it.
I imagine my voice stepping into the silence that follows a T-Rex roar
without waiting to be asked.
I imagine it cutting through the billboard-bustle and ad-banner-scrolling
and next-best-things-you-should-click-on – cutting through, cutting in.
I also imagine it cutting out – making space for other voices from the multitude.
I imagine words falling from my fingertips like rice from a bulging sack
that has finally been slit open.
I imagine theatre as the knife.
~~~
On the other side of the shouting, there are the fascists. The T-Rex tyranny. The king-of-the-island roars that we believe to be real.
Do fascists care about affect? It is a good question. I think they do, and I care about that very much. Fascists are masters of affect, dealing in movements built on blind furies of feeling. I remember reading, in my first year of studying performance, Richard Schechner’s writing on Hitler and the mis-use of theatrical presence (2002: 216); citizens mobilized to unthinkable acts, swept up in the act of un-thinking through feeling. I remember my sense of what theatre is and can be expanding, and feeling chilled by the responsibility. So many different ways for tyranny to show its face.
As a sometimes-theatre-maker this still unsettles me. And I stay wary of using affect as a tool of persuasion for political ends.
But artists deal with affect in myriad ways beyond this. Marianne Van Kerkhoven describes dramaturgy in the contemporary moment as learning how to handle complexity (2009: 11), the antithesis of a simplistic, un-thinking roar. And she writes – more eloquently than I can paraphrase, so I am borrowing her words – of the possibilities this complexity opens up for navigating culture and creating change:
We can throw stones at each other over the wall separating the two gardens, or we can be forced under control to bring down the wall and declare that all the gardens from now on are one single park. But other alternatives are possible. Approaching each other takes a long time. Perhaps we have to grow a hedge or some bushes instead of the wall. Where the wind can pass through, where between the leaves we can have whispering conversations. We can make small doorways in the hedge, openings where the bushes have disappeared because we cross them and wear them down so many times. We have to give time to the talks, so that slowly hesitation and fear can turn into clarity and pleasure. Sometimes it will succeed, and sometimes it will not. Will we get somewhere? We’ll see if we get somewhere.
(Van Kerkhoven, 2009: 10)
Do fascists care about moments of connection that offer the possibility of understanding the world in different ways? I am much less quick to answer.
~~~
The rock-star steps back from the microphone.
I read their lips as they whisper:
‘We have to at least try.’
I shout, silently, mouthing my words in the slow-motion rock-concert crowd, that I agree,
standing tall and raising my cheeks to the wind.
And, with a sudden sense of the absurd, I realise why it is silent.
The stadium is a theatre, and the wind has taken our words.
It it impossible. And perhaps a bit whimsical.
But for today, for this moment, that is the performance, the grand theatrical device:
thoughts whipped from our mouths to the sky, through the smog, through the drizzle,
through the hedges and hedgerows in the fields around the stadium,
to pass through and encounter and tangle-in-complexity and whisper.
Around me, I feel the multitude grow louder.
Through the silence I imagine I can hear them all –
not just those closest to me, not just those similar to me –
everyone in the stadium, right to the farthest speck-like pixels at the back.
When my words return to me, they will have passed so many others on the way.
I imagine sifting through them, finding all that they encountered.
Finding perhaps, (im)possibly, the beginning of a collective shout.
Finding bruises and new shapes and smooth edges.
Finding corners knocked off of the letters.
Finding traces of fallen leaves.
~~~
On my bookshelf, I have the same edition of Theatre of the Oppressed that Joe does. While not nearly so sexy, here is a very-safe-for-work photo of it in a hedge.
Science tells us that T-Rexes did not roar (Riede et al, 2016). We just imagine that they did.
(Of course that has little to do with the sharpness of the their teeth.
But bear with me. It is a metaphor.)
If we come back from the impossible fancy of flying words,
we are still standing in the stadium in silence.
I imagine the roaring of our collective silence
being louder than the dinosaurs.
We have to at least try.
I imagine trying.
I imagine that succeeding is possible.
References:
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Riede, Tobias, Chad M. Eliason, Edward H. Miller, Franz Goller, and Julia A. Clarke.”Coos, booms, and hoots: The evolution of closed‐mouth vocal behavior in birds.” Evolution 70 (2016): 8, pp 1734-1746.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. “‘European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century’ A Constant Movement,” Performance Research. 14: 3 (2009), pp 7-11.
