» essays guerrilla semiotics

Oct 11 2010

blog, essays, journalism, multiculturalism, women

Swimming pools, Muslims, and the burqini in Dandenong

Very interesting opinion piece by Julie Szego in the weekend’s The Age on a women-only Ramadan event at the Dandenong pool, at which all women aged 10 or up must be covered from knees to neck if they are to attend. The comments are a predictable mix of people saying “Try and ask for a similar concession in a Muslim country”, “THIS IS A WAR”, “Why aren’t they assimilating?”, “Islam is the only religion that wants to take over the world” on the one hand, and “it’s an issue of equity”, “some of these women are isolated” and “so, according to your argument, I should be able to turn up to my daughter’s wedding in the nude” on the other. The article, however, does try to analyse the issues: women’s rights, the requirements of public pools to serve whatever community they have living around them, issues of equity, and tolerance. It’s up online, for anyone to read.

It is, however, interesting to read the discussion if, like me, you come from a slightly different angle: I have spent years trying to find a proper sauna and swimming pool in Melbourne, ie one that doesn’t require a neck-to-thigh cover for women. All the therapeutic benefits of sauna are cancelled out by sports swimwear, especially of the full-torso female type, and it is not just beyond unpleasant to sit in 90 degrees covered in lycra, it is also stressful on the body, and potentially dangerous. I could frame it as a discrimination problem: if men can get away with tiny speedos, why aren’t women allowed in topless? But I think it is more probably a prudishness problem (see, for example, the case of a Brisbane sauna-as-art). It all gets much worse when I raise the question of mixed-sex sauna: the immediate, automatic answer this seems to provoke is ‘EWW’, or ‘why would you want people other than your boyfriend to see you naked’?

+++

Compare and contrast.

Now, two things. First, it must be clear by now that I really cannot see Australia as the land of freedom to show one’s body as one likes. The whole argument of Western secular liberalism which celebrates the body, or even of some Aussie tradition of baring flesh, is simply not correct. There is a reasonable amount of Puritan disavowal of the body going on, or of sexualising all nudity at all times. As the Finnish artists themselves remarked, “there are cultural differences” between Finland and Australia. And, you know, it would be impossible to argue that this prudishness is not in any way connected to religion. The subject of nudity in the Australian society is so touchy that it’s ridiculously hard to even raise it in polite conversation without everyone getting red in the face and starting to crack jokes about paedophiles. (Which is, frankly, ridiculous. As is the oft-made remark about not exposing children to adult nudity. Children, especially toddlers and very young kids, could not care less.) Compare Australia to Scandinavian countries, to Germany, even France or Italy or Croatia, all places in which such scandalous behaviour as topless sunbathing (and swimming) and mixed-sex nude saunas, happens without much drama.

Second, I am always struck by the disingenuousness of packing together “liberal Western values”, “Enlightenment principles”, “feminism” and “women’s dress rules”. Call me bitter, but it is the same as coupling Capitalism with the struggle for workers’ rights; or, not very correct. Sure, there is a geo-historical link, but to say that one of the essentially Western (as opposed to Eastern, Muslim, or less-developed) projects has been equality of sexes is a gross overstatement, conveniently forgetting the fact that the universal suffrage, equal rights, and women’s lib were fights. As Tony Myers writes in the book I’m currently reading:

The [Enlightenment principle of] cogito [ergo sum] is the basis of the centred subject, or, as it is more commonly known, the ‘individual’. The consequences for this model of subjectivity are compelling. For example, until recently, it was generally accepted (by men at least) that only men were masters of themselves. Women, on the other hand, were supposed to be subject to passions and feelings which they could not properly control. That is to say, women were not centred subjects but decentred subjects. They were, therefore, not ‘proper’ individuals and were treated accordingly as second-class citizens, subject to the rule of the masterful men. In fact, the mastery of women formed part of the larger project to dominate the natural world itself (of which women were held to be a part). The results of this project, which is sometimes referred to as the Enlightenment Project, can be witnessed in the devastation wreaked upon the environment. If it seems a little harsh to rebuke a philosophical model with the destruction of the planet, it is perhaps worth remembering that only a subjectivity which thinks it answers exclusively to itself would risk the destruction of nature and not expect to be held accountable for it.

Or, as a great man of Enlightenment said:

Since dependance is a state natural to women, girls feel themselves made to obey; they have, or should have, little freedom… Destined to obey a being as imperfect as man, a woman should learn to suffer – even to suffer injustice – at an early age, and to bear the wrongs of her husband without complaint. You will never reduce boys to the same point; their inner sense of justice rises up and rebels against such injustice, which nature never intended them to tolerate.

(Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, IV: 710-11)

But, the point to make here is that Enlightenment did mark the beginning of a quest for knowledge in which nothing was sacred, nothing was beyond questioning. In particular, tradition. If there is any way in which feminism was Rousseau’s baby, it was in the call to question everything. This is why the ultimate paradox of defending the bikini because of our “recognised tradition of secular freedom” is deeply absurd: if there is anything contrary to the spirit of secular inquiry, it is upholding or banning practices based on how well they fit in with our “tradition”.

+++

I am a little dispirited by the argumentation of both sides in this debate.

On the one hand, I don’t think there is anything particularly logical or reasonable in demanding that women cover from neck to knee in a swimming pool, just like I don’t think there is anything reasonable in having to wear clothes to a sauna. I agree with Szego, it seems to me important to remember that there is a principle at stake here, a principle of the female body not being automatically sexual, not being automatically shameful, and not being required to cover (or bare). Muslim misogyny is misogyny alright. David Gilmore writes, in a sweeping comparative analysis:

Muslim misogyny is really not so much an attack on women as it is a flight from woman “as the source of uncontrollable desires in the male self”. Islamic misogyny, like all others, is a flight from inner conflict over women; misogyny is the psychic consequence to male ambivalance and turmoil. The reification of this struggle that occurs in Islam is similar perhaps to what occurs in Christianity, Hinduim, and Buddhism, except perhaps for the added biographical ingredient of the Prophet’s apotheosis of sexual anxiety into lithurgy. One may say that St Paul and St Augustine played similar roles in forming Christian theology.

(David D. Gilmore, Misogyny: the Male Malady, p.217)

But this treatment of women does correspond to the same sentiments, fears and neuroses in the Australian culture, however secular it may be on paper. There is a corresponding prudishness on the Australian side, that all the talk about “Western liberal values” and “secular principles” cannot hide. In fact, what complicates the debate to such a large degree is precisely the way in which Australian commentators seem themselves unsure of whether there is or isn’t a principle at stake, or whether we are simply debating degrees of exhibitionism. Szego:

The Brimbank spokeswoman explained that [the swimming pools required that the] ”participants should be dressed appropriately, as is expected of a centre used by children and families”.

It seems to me that, until someone remembers what that principle may be, commentators can go hoarse talking about how the burqini “run[s] counter to the West’s more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom” (Szego). In practice, we are bound to get all confused about who is allowed to see how much skin on whom before we all have to blush and go “ooh”.

Aug 13 2010

2 Comments

classics, essays, LITERATURE, Malthouse, Marion Potts, reviews, sex, theatre, women

Review: Desire, psychoanalysis, and Sappho… in 9 fragments

First on the general qualities of this work. Sappho… in 9 fragments premiered the Stork Hotel in 2007, before getting picked up by the Malthouse, tidied up and restaged by Marion Potts, the incoming AD thereof. A monodrama, written, conceived and performed by the fierce Jane Montgomery Griffiths, a Classics scholar in her own right. It’s not so much a voicing of Sappho, nor a dissection of her work, as it is a performance with the missing poet at its centre. How much do we know with certainty about this highly esteemed poet from Lesbos? Very little, as no reliable historical accounts of her life have survived, and her work in fragments only. Sappho is a sealed safe, but Griffiths gives voice to her nonetheless: her loves, her rage and indignance at various interpretations (always by men), be they pictorial or textual. In her hands, theatre performance becomes an act of reading, thinking, imagining.

Jane Marion Griffiths. Photo credits: Jeff Busby.

Second on its high quality. Sappho… in 9 fragments is first-class theatre, and if there is a show this year that should be seen by a wide audience as a demonstration of what moneyed theatre should do, then this is the one. It is made out of good ideas, of smart solutions. Naked, skin-headed Griffiths emerges from a glass tank filled with ambrosia, which slowly leaks throughout the performance, creating a honey-coloured pond on the floor until all that remains from the glorious poet is a tray of meat. Anna Cordingley and Paul Jackson’s set and lighting design marries absolute minimalism of means with a thorough clarity of signification: it is a high achievement of a design sensibility particular to Australian theatre. Griffiths’s words – combining an original narrative, literary scholarship, historical observations and free translations of Sappho – build a text that is intelligent, witty, full-bodied and highly dramatic. Her physical presence is extraordinary, bringing to life a stage creature that is soft and hard, strong and sensitive, sometimes raging and sometimes completely paralysed.

Third on its aesthetic lineage. Sappho… is a classic work of high post-modernism. Sappho is an author singularly bereft of a voice, and Griffiths’s scholarly dramaturgy revels in weaving and slashing through approaches and interpretations, less and more facetious misreadings. There is no unified Sappho at the end of the show, but this is not a tragedy. Rather, Sappho becomes a mirror to the world. She remains a ghost (angry, desiring, doubting, polite), and despite the stage presence of one undressed woman, her presence is immaterial, her agency only in bringing forth the multiple fragments out of which she is constructed. I have not often seen works of this kind on Melbourne stages, and I suspect it’s because they require deep familiarity with a subject, which can only be attained with time. Our theatre-makers are notoriously young, and dramaturgs, the one profession usually engaged in deep research, are not a frequent presence in our theatre companies.

Fourth on its philosophical lineage, and those interested in a pure review can stop reading now. Sappho… (just like post-modernism itself) echoes many of the psychoanalytical ideas about desire, but also, interestingly, about women. Of all the twentieth-century ideas about women, this may be the most consistently expressed one: woman as a lacuna, as a set of poses to be adopted, roles to be played. The female as the second sex: made, not autochtonous. The woman as the seen, not the seer; the spoken-of, not the speaker. As the object of desire, an empty vessel, to be filled at will. The language, the symbolic order, interprets women rather than letting them speak. Hence the importance of stylisation in the definition of femininity: fashion, make-up, hair, bodily poses. Without them, what is a woman? Is there some sort of primordial femininity behind the dyes and the paints and the frills, just waiting to come out – as some feminists have claimed (the moderate ones)? Or is there no woman to speak of until one becomes one, as other feminists (Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler among the most well-known) have argued? As the object of desire, as the first and foremost object of desire, a woman cannot have a voice, does not exist but as an empty vessel. (This idea is very nicely expressed in Christopher Nolan’s film The Inception, in which Leonardo Di Caprio explains the logic of dreams to Ellen Page, the designer of dreams: “If you create something secure [like a bank vault] the mind automatically fills it with something it wants to protect.” Is the feeling of being loved, but not seen, not immediately recognisable to the reader? For being desired as a projection of the other person’s desires? As a safe for their most intimate thoughts and feelings, but not their own?)

At this point psychoanalysis splinters between being helpful to feminism, and being supremely unhelpful. On the one hand, it is asserted that all seeing is masculine, that all desire is male; women artists explore this status as objects of desire, knowingly. On the other, is this not a consolidation of an ontology which may be universal, but is not necessarily unavoidable? When Germaine Greer bemoans female artists as self-indulgent and even, paradoxically, auto-objectifying, what underlines her critique is the sense that not much is to be gained by insisting on the gender split between those who desire, and those who are desired; that the line is not carved in stone. The interpretative dilemma is real: on the one hand, women are still afflicted by illnesses in which the body acts out what the language (the symbolic) cannot express: hysteria once, anorexia today. On the other hand, there are more varities of female life today than when Freud was compiling his discoveries.

Sappho is a perfect woman as case study: revered, admired, analysed, voiceless. A perfect empty vessel, and precisely for that reason an excellent appearance of a secret, a hole in the centre of the symbolic order (quot Zizek). What interests me in Griffiths’s work is the way the speaking subject is primarily the object of desire, and rarely its owner. When she speaks as Sappho, she is the voice of someone whose subjectivity has undergone torturous interpretative transformation: she is a multitude of analyses, not a voice. When she speaks as Atthis, a young woman object of Sappho’s poems, in a contemporary incarnation as young admirer of a successful actress, her attraction is overwhelmingly the reflection of the actress’s attraction to her. The dramatic resolution of the quandary of Sappho in a self-conscious, awkward character of a young woman desired and then abandoned seems to me the weakest dramaturgical aspect of the work. After an exploration of the missing female subjectivity, we return exactly where we started: to the woman as object of desire. It is as if the entire twentieth century has taught us only to embrace this desire, not to master it for ourselves. In this sense, Sappho… in 9 fragments strikes me as conservative, and unsatisfactory.

I can broadly agree with Greer: there must be something beyond the acceptance of woman as the eternal object, beyond pole dancing, lipstick feminism, Sex and the City. The most striking comment on this came to me from the unlikely source: Judith Butler. Despite her reputation as the philosopher that negates femininity, she often returns to this simple idea that desire is empowering, transformative. In one interview, Butler criticised the notion of political lesbianism:

“I always hated this saying that feminism is the theory and lesbianism must be the practice. It desexualizes lesbians. I became a lesbian at the age of fourteen. And I didn’t know anything about politics. I became a lesbian as I wanted somebody very deeply. “

I remember the effect this statement had on me when I first read it: a woman speaking simply about ‘wanting someone’ was so unlike anything I had heard women say. So much of the feminist project seems to have become about fending off desire, through initiatives against sexual harassment, objectification, pornography, and so forth. Sappho… may be just that: a fending off. What a strange conclusion from a work about a poet who wrote about love herself, who wrote about desire long before women became the ‘hole at the centre of the symbolic order’. (But was it before? Here is that problem with classics: one is never sure. I may be committing just such intellectual violence.) I wished for more, or for something else. Perhaps I wanted to see 9 fragments of Judith Butler.

Sappho…in 9 fragments, written and performed by Jane Montgomery Griffiths. Staging by Marion Potts, set and costumes by Anna Cordingley, lighting design by Paul Jackson, composition and sound design Darrin Verghagen. Malthouse Theatre. Runs until August 21.

Jun 07 2010

Changing the Face of Australian Theatre

Changing The Face Of Australian Theatre

By Jana Perkovic

Mainstream theatre companies aren’t working hard enough to engage with the diversity of contemporary Australia, writes Jana Perkovic

If any one issue has troubled Australian theatre of late, it has been that of diversity.

In a country that prides itself on egalitarian inclusivity, why do we see so few non-white faces on stage and behind the scenes? Why are there so few women directors? Why is our theatre by and about white, Anglo-Celtic men?

These questions routinely meet a series of standard answers. Indigenous theatre is thriving. Our arts centres bring in the Chinese Ballet and Greek rebetika. There are women aplenty in community theatre.

But by and large, these are exceptions to the rule.

The Sydney Theatre Company’s 2010 program promises to bring over entire productions from the US and the UK — but does not stage a single contemporary text of non-English origin. What does this imply about the state of our cultural diversity? A self-proclaimed “Australian Shakespeare” company, Bell Shakespeare, casts almost exclusively white actors. What does this say about what Australians should look like? To be fair, Bell Shakespeare’s 2010 season will feature Leah Purcell in King Lear — but here again is the danger of accepting the exception to the rule as a proof of revolution.

Mainstream theatre is nation-defining territory, and Australia’s mainstream theatres have been very good at excluding — together with any home-grown, “experimental” performance — any face, voice or attitude that strays from a very narrow understanding of what Australia is. If art provides a way to collectively imagine our world by telling stories about who we are, how we came to be this way and where we are heading, then onstage, “our” stories are still stories of mateship in the bush and middle-class white suburbia, the range of “our” characters reduced to the semi-articulate Aussie bloke (with the occasional girlfriend or wog neighbour thrown in). Think of the sugarcane cutters in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Don in Don’s Party and the Removalists, and the emotionally constipated Anglo families of Tom Holloway.

This tendency leaves a lot of people out of work. The scandal of the year arose over the lack of women directing main stage theatre and culminated with Melbourne University demanding that the Melbourne Theatre Company employ an equal opportunity officer.

Yet theatres aren’t your average workplaces and equal opportunity in art can be difficult to defend. Neil Armfield’s defence of the all-male directing season at Belvoir St Theatre? Predictable: they were chosen on merit only. Few self-respecting artists would attempt to argue that the arts ought not be a meritocracy, and talent, alas, has always been very unfairly distributed. What if our best directors really are all men?

The problem is more complex, aesthetically and historically. The worst thing we have inherited from British theatre is an extremely narrow view of what theatre should be — amplified, without a doubt, by a colonial fear of not getting it right. British and American theatre traditions, visually fairly dumb, have been clinging to naturalism — a 19th century style characterised by literal representation of realistic events on stage — and for many critics this remains the only right way to “do” theatre, even though the best contemporary Australian performance has outgrown this aesthetic.

In 2007, Lee Lewis opened the can of worms that is the lack of racial diversity in Australian theatre, advocating cross-racial casting of classics. If we assume that the actor transforms on stage, she asked, why do we only allow this power to the white actor? If blackface is a theatrical cliché, why should there be a problem with a black actor playing Hamlet?

In the uproar that followed, many missed the subtler side of her argument: diverse casting has fared much better in those forms of theatre that embrace metaphor more openly. In this she counted opera and ballet but also contemporary non-Anglo theatre. The directors who have most consistently challenged whiteness on Australian main stages have been Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky (who cast Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in his King Lear for Bell Shakespeare) both of whose work betrays a suspiciously “continental” aesthetic. Their takes on Brechtian non-naturalism has consistently troubled our critics.

The best performances of 2009, in my opinion, were Cate Blanchett and Pamela Rabe as Richard II and III in Andrews’s vast, extraordinary The War of the Roses. The production shone a brilliant new light on a well-known text and revealed the interpretive range of these familiar actresses. The two women did not play men — not for a second were these drag performances — but embodied privilege and greed for power respectively. It was the boldest, finest, interpretation of Shakespeare Australia had seen in a long time.

As British critic Andrew Haydon has argued, the issue is not just about casting non-white, non-thin or non-male protagonists. Theatre creates meaning as much from the non-verbal signs it puts on stage as it does from the script. It does not need to be set around the block last Tuesday in order to be relevant to our lives.

On the theatre margins, companies like Back to Back, Rawcus and Restless — which work with people with physical and intellectual disabilities — play an important political role. Seeing these performers on stage, we become aware of the incredible beauty of bodies we normally consider unsightly. Such performances challenge our perception of who Australians may be, and what stories they may have to tell.

Yet aesthetically, their work is equally important. Back to Back is considered to be one of the finest theatre groups in this country — and this is doubtlessly a result of their innovative work methods. Their Food Court — an almost-wordless performance about bullying set to the music of The Necks — was among the most acclaimed theatre shows of 2008.

Because big theatres and big critics shun such experiments, they effectively nurture audiences who cannot read stage metaphor. Yet metaphor is not some avant-garde pretence but the basic building block of theatre.

Unlike film and television, which capture the world as it appears, theatre imaginatively creates its own reality. In this world, dying heroines find breath for entire arias, girls in white tutus play snowflakes and swans, and one woman’s existential despair is communicated by her burial waist-deep in earth. If we insist on theatre that amounts to live television in a classy setting, we betray our ignorance of the artform itself. Cordelia, after all, would have premiered as a man in a corset.

As long as we see the problem as one of loud minorities demanding political correctness, we fail to see that most of us, in fact, are excluded. After all, even though “arts arts” are patronised mainly by the white and the wealthy, it is the women, city dwellers and Australians of non-English-speaking background that research has identified as most appreciative of the arts. The same study shows that the elusive protagonist of Australian drama — country male, Australian-born of Australian-born parents — is the least likely demographic to think of arts as important in his life.

Lally Katz, who came to Australia from New Jersey with her parents when she was eight, writes plays immersed in whimsical surrealism. That she is not considered to be one of the most important Australian playwrights is a disgrace and it may be due to her gender, but it is certainly also related to her aesthetic. Yes, her Ern Malley mourns the fact that he doesn’t really exist, and her Canberra becomes an island with a volcano. Are these plays less Australian for their deviation from the suburban script?

As long as we keep thinking of Australian theatre as a narrow stream of tales about mateship and the outback, we restrict its capacity to help us imagine a shared present, let alone articulate an alternative future. For whatever reason, we are afraid to play.

Affirmative action is a good thing in principle, but the goal should not be simply to hire new hands to do old work. What we want, ultimately, is a greater range of perspectives and styles. We want new, imaginative universes in our stories so that we can understand better what this country is all about. We need diversity because we want innovation and excellence, not despite of it. We do our theatre no great service by protecting it from the best artists we have. Armed with an outdated and unimaginative idea of what theatre may represent, Australia, our main stage, remains as dull as dish water.

Originally published on 8 January 2010, on NewMatilda.com.

Jun 07 2010

Show Ponies for a Young Nation

Show Ponies For A Young Nation

By Jana Perkovic

There’s a thriving, internationally recognised performance scene in Australia — but it’s barely reflected in the programming of major arts companies, writes Jana Perkovic

Beneath the surface of Australian cities bubbles an undercurrent of performance. Artists — both young and old, trained and untrained — are creating small interventions of chaos and beauty, much of which draws on specific local traditions of vernacular theatre: travelling circus, pub music, guerrilla performance, mixed-media cabaret.

It’s easy to dismiss these forms as niche pursuits; and they are, indeed, an ecosystem of small communities. When this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival organised a perplexingly dull launch for McSweeney’s, one of the world’s most innovative young literary journals, it was the Suitcase Royale, a local performance collective, who saved the event with an electrifying gig/stand-up/performance.

If our literature has forgotten joie de vivre, and our cinema is proclaimed “recovered” on the basis of seven good films a year, then theatre certainly ought to be recognised as one thing Australia consistently does well.

Overseas, reviewers rave about Acrobat, Back to Back, Panther and Chunky Move: circus, physical theatre, interactive performance companies producing cutting-edge work in their select fields. They don’t pay so much attention to the companies that swallow the lion’s share of our arts funding: our state theatres.

With the honourable exception of Melbourne’s Malthouse, our major performing arts companies have persistently avoided this undercurrent, opting for programming that lacks flair. Even allowing that 2009 was a panicky year for the mainstream — the Global Financial Crisis bit into both ticket sales and corporate sponsorship — the year’s programs were altogether business-as-usual. Fifty years after Merce Cunningham choreographed to chance music and Beckett put nothingness itself on stage, our theatres still offer a bewilderingly old-fashioned mix of European classics, last year’s Broadway and West End successes, and a smattering of local plays with music (the latter to be distinguished from musical theatre by virtue of being unfunny).

Scavenging through Australia’s main stage offerings in 2003, German journalist Anke Schaefer noted that “every expectation of a German audience of 100 years ago would have been well served by these productions.” The problem is not just that our mainstream theatre is overwhelmingly male-dominated and almost completely white. And it’s not that staging a play written in 1960 is still considered adventurous — it is the abyss between what the bulk of “performing artists” in this country are doing and the work showcased on the well-funded stages.

To be fair, there have been some improvements over the past few years. The Lawler Studio is a not-yet-properly-funded baby stage for the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) with a small, but promising season, and the Sydney Theatre Company’s maturing Next Stage program brought in Perth wunderkind Matthew Lutton — and will present the abovementioned Suitcase Royale in 2010. But for every innovation that reaches a big audience, there is a scathing critical attack from the likes of Peter Craven that we need better-made plays, not avant-garde tinkering.

Craven typifies the deep conservative current in our theatre commentariat. While aficionados have organised themselves in the blogosphere, forming a reliable network of guerrilla arts reportage, the mainstream patron is limited to the opinions of the mainstream press, which consistently criticises any departure from pleasant digestive after-dinner theatrical fare.

The understanding that permeates theatre criticism, funding policies, festival curatorship, even the design of performing arts venues, is that theatre is an expensive toy to show off to our international visitors. It helps prove that here, at the arse end of the world, we have a functioning high culture. Arguably, we build “world-class” arts centres, fund show-pony opera and invest in international arts festivals because we fear being mistaken for a subcultural backwater. A national ballet ensemble — like a broadcasting network, a flag, an army and a giant ferris wheel — is a sign of a serious nation.

Hence the currency of theatre as an impossibly highbrow endeavour, something that excludes large swathes of the population who claim not to attend for the pricey “elitism” of arts events. Yet, when we leave the realm of the ethereal and the literary, of The Nutcracker and King Lear, it is often hard to distinguish performing arts from fairgrounds and other dubious entertainments.

Our mainstream arts funding reflects this confusion. Theatre is sometimes a flagship investment, and sometimes a failing commercial sector in need of subsidy. If we give it money, it better demonstrates its market relevance. Most of our state festivals were set up as tourism initiatives, providing world-class this and gold star that — but they are also judged on the extent to which they animate the city.

State companies are thus in a double bind: they ought to stage excellent interpretations of classics, but they also need to keep their subscriber base with populist programming. The media and the funding bodies do not question populism. Here the Peter Cravens, Andrew Bolts and Paul Keatings of the nation join voices to demand in unison that we fund some quality orchestras before sponsoring avant-garde wank.

So, while Opera Australia can cross-fund its season with My Fair Lady without reprimand, Kristy Edmunds’s edgy curatorship of Melbourne Festival was viciously attacked as — you guessed it — “elitist”: insular, pretentious, niche. But young audiences responded and artists found her choices inspiring.

This year, under Brett Sheehy’s artistic direction, the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) broke box office records — mainly due to the sell-out performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra — and gleaned glowing praise for restoring mainstream common sense to the program. Yet the local theatre community has criticised it as too white, too European, too predictable, focusing on big-ticket events at the expense of smaller, braver shows, and — yes — “elitist”. In this equation, elites, like hell, are always other people.

It is a scavenger hunt for audiences. Where the audience preferences lie is not so clear. The MTC may have the largest subscriber base in the country but it is rapidly aging. Programming for the middle-class, middle-suburb punter may rely on unwise mathematics: audiences are not developed through insistence on a 19th-century understanding of highbrow. For all its success at the box office, often I felt off attending MIAF 09 performances surrounded by an audience thrice my age.

Melbourne Fringe featured no Philharmonic and managed to break its box office record in 2009 — despite the GFC — showing how robust specialised audience loyalty can be. TINA and Imperial Panda, independent arts festivals in NSW, have also done well, as has the inaugural Dance Massive, dedicated exclusively to contemporary dance. Perhaps mainstream programming should acknowledge these “passionate communities” and “creative laboratories” that make up the solid core of the arts audience: they, after all, nurture its most vibrant new developments. Even fans of well-made plays, we should recognise, are increasingly becoming a niche.

Rather than trying to stretch nation-making dinosaurs over an increasingly diverse nation, we should focus on nurturing smaller, specialised festivals, and recognise that our cultural excellence may lie not in opera but in grungy circus. Our current funding model is completely unsuitable for this task. Audiences will not develop through programming that blends the safest aspects of all our arts into a soup that, in attempting to please everyone, pleases no one. What we should do, instead, is encourage the continuing exploration of the many vibrant art forms thriving under the radar: they count as culture. And statehood? Aren’t we too old to worry about that?

Originally published on 31 December 2009, on NewMatilda.com

May 09 2010

3 Comments

Barrie Kosky, Benedict Andrews, Bertolt Brecht, essays, Jerome Bel, Michael Kantor, performance, Samuel Beckett, theatre, theory

QUERY: what kinds of theatre experiences have you had?

Andrew Haydon’s last post, on what may be Nicholas Hytner’s ultimate right-wing play, has made me think about the kinds of experience one can viably have in the theatre (or outside the theatre, geographically speaking, but in a performance). This because Haydon’s post is concerned, on the outer edges, with the dangers of enjoying a play that has no moral core, or one that is dubious at best.

It’s that old Brechtian problem, on the one hand – followed through by the phalanx of post-Brechtians, who more often than not misunderstood Brecht’s original query. How does one make political theatre (which is to say, theatre that makes people do things)? Or, what happens with our social conscience once we’re in there, and what once we’re out? And what about the unintended results? What if the moral of the story grates against the audience’s sensibility? What if it insults them with simplicity, or offends with a controversial surface hiding a complexity?

These questions are as old as art itself – Aristotle is already asking and answering them. But theatre has been changing recently, moving into another kind of audience experience, and the question of effect is coming up again, with new material to work with.

I started off, fresh from reading about Castellucci’s Dante trilogy and Jan Fabre, by trying to taxonomize, in the simplest terms, the kinds of effect that theatre can have on me.

1) There is, of course, the simple enjoyment of a text – which to me is by far the simplest of them all. It’s the pleasure of being read to, in many ways, the pleasure of radio and of listening to certain kinds of pop/folk/rock music. A lull punctuated with moments of strong empathy (or humour, or aesthetic enjoyment of a well-made phrase). This is a very common effect of much theatre that strives towards literary qualities: this is how I experience a great deal of Beckett (especially late, wordy) this way, but also most monologues, Anita Hegh’s Yellow Wallpaper, performances by Humphrey Bower, the garden-variety radio play, or Abbey Theatre’s beautiful Terminus. (Not all wordy plays work their magic successfully, of course: these are the shiny examples.)

What bothers me here is that, first, the ‘being read to’ aspect of this enjoyment is fairly serious – I often find myself in a state of light hypnosis, and the soporific effect means that afterwards I often can’t tell whether I thoroughly enjoyed the experience or was bored to sleep (indeed, as much as I enjoyed Terminus I can no longer recall the first thing about it). The second problem is that, although so much theatre seems to have this outcome in mind, it is in no way specific to theatre and, were it its only raison d’etre, we would have discarded the form long ago. The third is that there is no moral aspect to it: it is a sensuous pleasure, as tactile as having a bath. Yellow Wallpaper may have had a feminist point of some sort – but all I remember is the pleasure of listening to Anita Hegh crone herself into madness.

2) Perhaps now is the time to do away with those audience experiences I think of as unsuccessful.
2a) is the technical, critical experience of someone who either makes or judges a lot of the same, who looks at the execution, the skill, whether any new ideas are brought in, whether they are developed well, what the shortcomings are, where the dramaturgy could be tightened, what useful solutions could be appropriated. This is a thankless and joyless way of experiencing a work of art, and the reason why so many artists hate theatre, music producers cannot listen to music recreationally, and literary editors watch sit-coms in their spare time.

2b) on the other hand would be the detached experience of a narrative artefact, which I relate to drawing-room plays (particularly the ‘relevant’, ‘current’ and British kind). I am pretty sure these days, particularly in Anglophone countries, students are taught in school to read literature this way, and it scares me shitless. It means watching a play with the kind of focus one usually applies to reading a newspaper: the story narrated represents, in a condensed form, some kind of real occurrence (therefore can be more or less accurate), the journalist can bring in a more of less pronounced bias (which can therefore be detected as either broadly liberal or conservative – for those are the options available to journalists), and the article is phrased in such a way as to offer a conclusion, a moral or a solution to the problem (which can be translated into this or that effect in the real world, with which we can agree or disagree, based on our own personal ethics). Finally, depending on the prominence of the article (where in the paper, what paper), the article can have an effect on the public opinion (which can therefore be assessed as beneficial or dangerous for the society).

The problem with this reading is, simply, that art is not journalism, and that the criteria of accuracy, bias or political effect do not apply. Or, they do to the extent to which any theatrical work also has an informational role in our lives. But this approach forgets every other reason why we experience art: fun, pleasure, catharsis, hearing stories, and turns it all into sheer learning. So what happens with a sci-fi or fantasy story, or a musical with only the faintest relationship to reality? It must become a guilty pleasure, I suppose. Which may be the other side of the 2b) coin.

3)Theatre as the movies (or dinner & theatre). The lower-brow form of the above, and about as common, depending on a cinematic theatre production (for example, an upbeat four-hander involving one adultery, one misplaced diamond necklace, one murder and a number of witty remarks); the default form of enjoyment aimed at by Brecht’s kitchen theatre and everything serious people don’t like. Also: musicals and most stand-up comedy. For two or so hours we are thoroughly diverted from our lives, distracted from being aware of our relationships, our shortcomings and limitations, our bodies. An exercise in transcendence common to all good stories. When it’s over, it is over – the only way to recreate the experience is to find another, equally good story. The same won’t do. Except in the case of circus, in which the adrenaline rushes back and forth just the same each time.

4)Then there is that form of high empathy, ending in shall-we-say catharsis (but it doesn’t need to: Brechtian theatre has managed to wrestle the audience without it). It happens with cinema as well, but not as strongly – so much so, that I wonder if it doesn’t deserve a separate category. This is one of the strongest emotions art can provoke, very specific to theatre as an artform, and certainly one of biggest reasons why I go to the theatre. It’s quite distinct from just any empathy with just any human story, in which (as Salinger and Kundera have both noted) one is crying in the stalls deeply moved by being deeply moved by such a deeply moving human story, and therefore assured of their own depth and sensibility (all the better if the weeper can personally relate). It is that intense, heavy and complicated tangle of emotions which can be perceived as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, but are mainly just complicated. I have found Brecht-informed theatre to be particularly good at producing this effect: Brecht’s own Mother Courage, Kantor’s last production of Happy Days, Andrews’s War of the Roses or Sasha Waltz’s Medea have all had that effect on me. I suspect it’s what Alison Croggon referred to as ‘grief’ in regards to Barrie Kosky’s Women of Troy. In cinema, Lars von Trier achieves the same effect (and von Trier owes a lot to Brecht). Quite apart from our usual misunderstanding of Brecht as cold and unemotional, I would say that he was among the first to understand the theatrical power of pushing the audience through a quick succession of highly diverging emotional states, until a moral and affective disorientation of sorts if achieved: very rich and language-less at the same time.

It is the point where theatre most closely resembles ritual. It is collective, for one thing: the sheer emotional assault on each spectator means that your individuality cannot be contained, your sense of self capitulates and spread over the surrounding seats. The other thing is that it cannot be verbalised easily. It often results in rapturous applause, and yet audience members cannot talk about it later. It makes one think, though. Its effect lags – like one of those very deeply affecting dreams. It is possibly the strongest effect that ‘traditional’ theatre can have, but I have also found it in Tanztheater, and in a lot of postdramatic theatre. I also suppose this effect can be to some extent induced, as in horror films and theatre, or by incorporating obscene or abject elements.

5)Theatre as text. Postmodern theatre, highly referential, can consciously work to create that detachment that critics and practitioners often feel. The smarter such theatre is, the more pleasure an audience member can get from reading it as a series of references to other works, other concepts, to ideas. It provokes an intellectual, rather than emotional engagement. Performance essays, conceptual dance, and anything with a stronger formalistic bent can work this way. Rather than gushing with feeling, in these works one reads the stage like a visual essay, and one leaves feeling smarter, fuller, more conscious of the world. Works that strive for this effect can let signs be signs – such as in Wooster Group or Elevator Repair Service, in which a cup of coffee is primarily ‘a cup of coffee’. Like any pomo art, it depends enormously on the general education of each audience member – some Castellucci works, for example, are nearly meaningless without the right frame of reference.

6)Games or experience. There is a transformative quality to a lot of contemporary performance that is based around the audience: not merely interactive, but working on the audience. The stage itself can be completely empty, the effect entirely performed on the audience’s bodies. Bettybooke’s brilliant en route and numerous other audio tours, site-specific this or that, durational theatre, being blindfolded, having a one-on-one performance in a hotel room, children’s theatre, and even works of Jerome Bel, a wide gamut of contemporary theatre seems particularly interested in being an experience, the way climbing up the Eiffel Tower or bungee-jumping, a walking tour of Melbourne or a gig is an experience. Much children’s theatre is so too. And whatever insights you are supposed to glean through the experience (about yourself, about the world, whether you’re meant to come to terms with your prejudices or feel liberated, lengthen your attention span or genuinely experience boredom, or just play – as in Panther’s Playground), the constellation of signs, or the depth of your emotions is secondary to the experience of having had an experience – it is the only kind of theatre that can lay a legitimate claim to changing its audience. It seems to me unwise to even differentiate between a 15-minute thing in a booth or an 8-hour durational event: what happens in both situations is that, unlike in the ones above, one is made acutely aware of oneself – your body, your voice, your entire life – and of the situation one is in – the theatre, the seats, the building, the city. At its best, the effect is deeply empowering and somehow wisening. I have sat through 3-hour explorations of boredom which resulted in an almost religious ectasy. I have climbed laneway walls in Melbourne wearing headphones, feeling that the entire city was mine. I have done and said things with complete strangers that felt absolutely natural – and yet, of course, my entire life was transformed by doing so.

Is there anything that I’m missing? Even excluding all those half-experiences, in which nothing satisfactory happens, is there anything missing from this list? I have excluded happenings, for example, because I’m not entirely sure whether there was a political aspect to them that would separate them from being just an ‘experience’. I haven’t overtly included visual theatre in any category, because I’m not sure there is a particular kind of experience associated with it. I suspect there is a lull of imagery as well.

I am interested in this because we so often seem to discuss the moral, emotional etc effects of theatre (or any art, for that matter), yet it seems to me we have not fully figured out how theatre (or any art) actually affects us. In particular, some of you may know that I’m very interested in pornography. Well, pornography is often subject to ludicrous statements on its effect on people all the time, and often equally ludicrous defences (I happen to think pornography is experiential, rather than semiotic or a work of non-fiction). I first ran into this knowledge gap when trying to define the experience of consuming pornographic artefacts, which I thought was much less reflexive, or self-reflexive, than literature would have it, and much more interesting.

It also crops up in political theatre, for example. What does it mean for theatre to be political? Is it supposed to rally the masses, or just toe the liberal party line? What is a right-wing play? When should the masses rally? At the opening night, or three years later? Is Doll’s House a political play? And then obscenity. What is offensive in theatre? How does it offend? Who does it offend?

The other is that the same theatrical work can be a complete success or a failure, depending on what interpretive frame we’re applying. A 7-hour performance installation can have zero semiotic content and wasteful dramaturgy, provoke no emotion, and yet be a magnificent experience. One man’s unengaging play can be another’s brilliant essay into the techniques of staging. There are ways of seeing, I’m sure, that need to be learned before we can properly understand certain works.

I am hoping to get a few additions to my categories. So this is an open call. Your help would be most appreciated.

Sep 23 2009

8 Comments

essays, formal inquiry, performance, politics, reviews

RW: Attract/Repel

The more I wanted to write this review quickly, the more I wanted it out and about, succint, streamlined and brilliant, the more I was tripping over my own inarticulation. The enthusiasm I had for writing seemed to derive from not knowing what it was I had to say, nor how. Why such caution before a very positive review? Because the praise I had to offer for Attract/Repel came from an unusual place; because of an avoidance of reviewing the previous show by Melbourne Town Players. Because the material does not easily lend itself to a watertight argument that can neatly encapsulate all that it does as a show. Finally because this review immediately follows a fascinating, if at times painful dialogue that grew out of a condemnatory critique of En Trance, a show that made artistic and dramaturgical choices that failed precisely where A/R succeeds.

If the foyer chatter on the opening night was anything to go by, we were in a minefield of opinions, impossible to exhaust in a 1,000-word review, no matter how well-chosen the thousand. I was midway through my annual contemplation of multiculturalism, having just found the perfect interlocutor. That, about 100 hours into the discussion, I discovered the interlocutor was more precisely the sensei, having written the text which seminally, famously, taught me all my thoughts on multiculturalism back in 2006, did not help. I was arguing with my spiritual uncle, if not exactly father, it turned out, and he was more than happy to keep challenging my hasty (but oh so quotable!) conclusions.

Terry Yeboah and Fanny Hanusin. Photography by Naomi Wong.

“Seeing a work that deals with topics I’ve spent solid three years thinking about”, I complained to Neandellus soon after, “makes it harder, not easier to write about. I have too many half-formed, unquotable thoughts.”

“Make your sensei write it”, was his suggestion. If only! Sensei (whom we’ll call ‘Ian’) declared he knew nothing about theatre, and was happy with correcting me. So I started:

Amidst the uneven, but fulsome praise for Attract/Repel circulating the foyer on opening night, it was apparent that this show’s merit arises in its slipping almost un-noticed across a series of borders that themselves are rarely ever acknowledged as such.

But ‘Ian’ was already slapping me on the wrist: “What you mean to add is: Borders which some have named the borders of whiteness, with quiet encroachments of the real into everyday fantasies of white supremacy in multicultural Australia.”

He continued: “The truths enacted through the show operated on an inversion of the assumptions presumed normal to a functional society, a logic more dependent on the potential for misunderstanding, misrecognition and mistaken identity.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” I nodded hastily, and continued:

It is quite different from The Melbourne Town Players’ previous work in not being veiled, stripping away most of the veneer of artiness, leaving the art instead. Yet A/R has been shaped with a clear eye and a strong dramaturgical hand into an exquisitely crafted work, building a rich spectrum of thought and feeling out of associative nuances. It takes courage and maturity to recognise the theatre in four people on chairs talking about their personal experience, and it was, indeed, beautifully crafted theatre.

Four performers, fluorescent tubes, and a wall painted blackboard-black. A/R is beautifully ordinary, threateningly postdramatic perhaps, as the actors ask and answer personal questions, tell funny stories (and tales about racial stereotyping, from the butt-end of essentialising assumptions, tend to be hysterically funny), find dead ends to arguments, change direction, change key, but ultimately, and intentionally go nowhere in particular. Where was the dramatic development?, complained one person whom Ming-Zhu Hii would have, in the days of Mink Tails, labelled identifiably white. I looked at ‘Ian’ for answers, and he obliged:

“The lack of a progressive movement to a climactic denouement is one of the show’s great strengths, instead presenting a series of plateaux oscillating between affective highs and lows – disgust and desire, anger and joy, sufficient to illustrate the tenor of its thesis. It was true to the subject matter. There is no resolution to the problem – you go from feeling elated because you’re accepted, to crashing down because of some racist remark; you solve a problem, you find another. Attract, Repel.”

Fanny Hanusin. Photography by Naomi Wong.

Relieved, I could go on:

How to talk about A/R, which can be read as a very successful moment in the Australian political theatre, without getting factional? It is a beautiful work, but its strengths and innovations really shine when looked at as political theatre – and the political discourse now needed to be employed would likely be alienating.

There is a strong nod to Jerome Bel’s Pichet Klunchun and I – far more so than to circus acts like an oak tree: the staged conversation is personal and unforced, improvised-looking rather than scripted for theatrical friction. While A/R does not quite reach the same magnitude of light-handed yet devastating effect, there is no shame in not being Jerome Bel. There are moments in the show of similar gentle, but enormous, destabilisation of effect. Right after a reasonably heavy story of racial discrimination, Terry Yeboah starts talking about his white girlfriend, and unexpectingly breaks out saying, She’s here tonight! Hi, baby!, and she responds! The effect of turning our heads back into the audience, seeing someone normal, socialised, unremarkable, in the place of a villain, belies interpretation.

It could have so easily gone wrong many times; the politics of the effect are more noteworthy than the politics of the representation that occurred. By definition, political theatre tries to ‘make things happen’, as Caryl Churchill once said; in Michael Patterson’s book Strategies of Political Theatre, British playwrights overwhelmingly defined political theatre as theatre that has an impact on the audience, that affects them beyond the doors of the theatre building. In other words, whether what is staged is four children playing, or racial tension, is not the deciding factor in whether a theatre piece is political or not.

By keeping the performers as performers, and the audience as audience, A/R renounces the very role of theatre as a heightened state of exception that, by definition, confirms the rule. In order to build resonance in a string of moments, anecdotes and effects that are inherently unremarkable; it strips away the entire frame of ritual, purification, deeper meaning and condensation that has been hanging over textual theatre like an Aristotelian hangover, and that political theatre in particular doesn’t know how to do without.

Yet it is not all just pussyfooting detail. The interventions are real, but subtle. From the moment she draws a CHINK SCALE on the wall, rather than spitting on its implicit racism, Jing-Xuan Chan and the others proceed to explicate the variety of positions they may occupy depending on the situation. We are immediately in very interesting territory. Here, rather than mere victims of incipient racism, is an illustration of strategic essentialism.

‘Ian’ nudged me sternly: “I don’t think you understand what strategic essentialism is. In this case, it was used as a tool in the hands of skilled players on the field of identity politics, as elaborated in the discussion post-En Trance, with the provocation as much in language and speech-acts themselves.

“Like Fear of a Brown Planet?” I wondered. The the political intervention of the humorous, very light-hearted A/R, a gritty show with a smiling face, is in the performative act of saying what are to some, unsayable things – again. There is here a more serious question whether the ultimate effect isn’t lost on those audience members who found the language simply failing to align with their truth; is the alignment noticeable, recognisable when it happens? Notice the ‘again’: it is the iteration that matters, that sets down a possibility of a pattern, and that gets recognised. Without going deeper into a discussion that can get bogged along the lines of you don’t understand; it has never happened to you, which may be as correct as it is unlikely to make one any friends, it is hard to finish this point.

‘Ian’ pondered: “One of the chief problems we have experienced coming here was the deeply normative tolerance prescribed by Australian multiculturalism. Just like the whiteness of the true Australian skin: always invisible to itself, denied, yet something for all to comply with, more or less, by degrees, for acceptance to accrue.”

I jumped in: “The mind-numbingly idiotic language…”

“I think you’ll find you mean ‘mind-numbingly essentialist’…” ‘Ian’ sighed.

Alright. The mind-numbingly essentialist language, according to which Australia was diverse because of the many cuisines on offer, the maintenance of cultural identities by the shimmying of traditional dances on Federation Square once a year, was taken extremely seriously, elevated into a sort of magical language for getting by in life. To anyone aware of how much more complicated cultural pluralism is on the ground, this was the equivalent of one infant’s babytalk imposed on all the kids in the kindergarten as the right language for that age. But here it was, an invisible, white language, neatly split into politically correct nonsense on the one hand, and bureaucratic proscription (“if you don’t like it here”, “we choose who comes to this country…”) on the other. All the messy rest, heretically non-compliant with our Platonically ideal multiculture, exeunt.

Georgina Naidu, Terry Yeboah and Jing-xuan Chan. Photography by Naomi Wong.

This is why there was sheer thrill in A/R when acronyms FOB and ABC were discussed, points marked on the CHINK SCALE and nuances of being called ‘nigger’ dissected. It was both a reclamation and exposure (again!) of ground that was true, existing, and all but invisible.

“All well and right,” Neandellus popped his head through the window. “But is there any formal innovation there? Is it good theatre?”

“It’s very good political theatre…” I stumbled and looked at my sensei for argumentation. He was trying to make a bed for himself under the table, and looked frankly disappointed with me:

“Performative politics – i.e. the politics are iteratively done rather than represented. Butler makes a distinction between performance and performativity. Its important not to conflate them. The formal innovation is in lack of denouement.”

“Performativity and performance. One that accrues and one that’s mimetic, right?” I was testing my argumentative powers.

“Yes”, allowed my spiritual uncle. “Sort of. It will do. Mimesis is out of fashion. Accrual is in. But the plateaux bit is important. No orgasmic endings. Just more and more plateaux and deferral of climax.”

There was nowhere for the conversation to go after that. We politely retreated, happy to know we had just seen a great show.

Guerrilla Semiotics would like to thank Ian Woodcock for his generous support during the realisation of this project.

Attract/Repel. With a cast including Jing-Xuan Chan, Fanny Hanusin, Georgina Naidu, and Terry Yeboah. Music by experimental jazz guitarist Yusuke Akai. Sound design by Russell Goldsmith. Lighting design (inspired by Dan Flavin) by Damien McLean, with lighting concept support by Rachel Burke. Concept and direction by Ming-Zhu Hii. Producers: Nicholas Coghlan and Shalini Nair. Development Supported by Full Tilt Creative Development. The Store Room, 17 September-10 October 2009

May 22 2009

6 Comments

Caryl Churchill, essays, ethics, LITERATURE, performance, script, violence

Seven Jewish Children (1?)

Melbourne has had its reading of Seven Jewish Children, its donation bucket and panel afterwards, and yet I am a little surprised that no follow-up discussion has appeared, not even among the bloggers. I imagine it has something to do with the supreme lack of time we all seem to profess at the moment. I certainly have many better things I could be doing. However, I wanted to leave a short note, even if only to signpost: was there.

Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children is a very beautiful, if tiny, piece of writing, and the biggest failure of the event was quite possibly to use it as a pretext for the panel. I am not sure I would classify it as a political piece, simply. To my reading eye, Children is a text about ethics, community, and conscience, not politics. To those who haven’t read it, it is structured into seven short scenes, in which an unnumbered group of people, with unassigned lines, argue about how to explain seven unnamed moments of recent Israeli history (hiding from the Nazi, the Holocaust – and bear with me when I say ‘Israeli’, I will explain later – moving to Israel, the settlements, the Six Day’s War, the second Intifada, and the most recent attack on Gaza; the references are clear, but left unstated), to an unnamed child, which Churchill stipulates must be absent from the stage. The recurring phrases are: tell her that… – don’t tell her that… – don’t frighten her – don’t tell her THAT.

It is a chilling text to read when, like me, you’ve grown up listening to adults arguing over your head about what you should, and shouldn’t know. Perhaps it is this experience that makes me see Seven Jewish Children as a generous, sympathetic play where many people seem to see blatant anti-Semitism. I asked many questions when I was little, and I remember these conversations exploding into entire family arguments over my little head: tell her this!, tell her that!, don’t tell her that, that’s not true!, and the recurring phrase (one that Churchill leaves out): she is old enough to know. I was old enough to know all sorts of things about how evil the enemy was, how evil the neighbours were, how rotten the state, the continent, the world was. It was a little fight between my parents, and my parents and the world. Parents demarcate their world, their worldviews, their values, through their children, their children signpost a success, an influence. Thus we have vegetarian children, Christian children, Steiner-school children, children who play the violin at the age of three, and children old enough to parrot their parents’ political views.

Just like at my kitchen table, in Seven Jewish Children adults, through parenting advice, are discussing their political views with one another. Yet they are also mounting pressure and breaking down, and this is where Churchill’s extreme rhetorics (David Jays) should not be taken as a condemnation of some cold-blooded, exterminating Zionism or other. The inward-looking worldview of the parent is, here, struggling against the pressure from the disjointed, illogical, terrifying and shameful exterior that cannot be kept outside. As much as, in the face of a terrible world, we would all rather turn Amish than have to teach our children the rules of survival, inwardness cannot be kept forever. (A couple of very interesting films and plays have, since 9/11, focused on this problem of the intruding exterior: most notably The History of Violence and Cache but also, say, Mercury Fur.) The warm, vanilla-scented interior of the community needs to be opened up to the messy, violent exterior that we are responsible for and that contradicts our very values. It is a struggle to keep something complicated simple, for a child, and to protect them without lying, to her but mainly to oneself. And the breaking points happen: one can no longer speak truth because the truth is too unpleasant, or because lies don’t make sense anymore, or because the exterior has gone out of hand. Tell her we kill far more of them is a terrible thing to say, but I’ve heard adults say it over children’s heads, all good people who don’t kill other people, who give small change to the homeless, who hate conflict most of the time; but who are, in that moment, voicing a worldview which exists as legitimately as brotherhood and unity, in their world. They do kill far more of them, or they wish they do, it’s said often enough, she will learn the phrase sooner or later. Parenting becomes an impossible game that needs to be played nonetheless.

So Churchill’s playlet notates the progression of failing rhetoric in the face of a terrible situation; hardly a thing to call anti-Semitic. Yet it is precisely her insistence on making the play political that creates the problems. The text itself is poetic, ambiguous: keeping it free of performance rights, thus encouraging readings and staging worldwide, asking for donations to be made for Gaza and so on, are the external devices that made it into a political play, and it is, I think, a strategic mistake for Churchill. It makes us read a fundamentally literary text in terms of its political use-value, and a number of problems emerge: suddenly every literary gesture needs to stand for either condemnation or justification. To read the text politically ultimately diminishes its value as a work of art, without adding much. But there is a point to make here, too.

More than one person has felt that labeling the children Jewish signposts the dilemma of an entire religious/ethnic group, rather than a nation. It is possible to argue that the Holocaust is a Jewish, not an Israeli tragedy, that it was important to be correct. However, the inclusion of the Holocaust, if anything, tilts the political position (if there is one) of the play towards justifying one kind of violence with another (you see?, strategic mistake). This is exactly the same as the liberal-European position that justifies Islamic terrorism on the grounds of the colonial injustices suffered, or – why not? – Palestinian bombings with the state of Gaza. Yet behind every single nation-state there is the trauma of the preceding displacement: behind the nation-making violence of Yugoslavia was the trauma of the semi-colonial bloodshed of the world wars, just like behind the unification of Germany may be the Thirty Years’ War. Moreover, as Zizek points out, there is a foundational violence at the beginning of every nation: there were people living in just about every land before those currently living there arrived. Israel’s peculiarity is that its own foundational violence, the displacement of Palestinians, is too historically close to be conveniently forgotten. The problematic of the play is so universal that it could be transposed to every single country in the world, as long as it was willing to travel into the history: Seven American Children, starting with religious prosecution in Europe and ending with the genocide of the Native Americans; Seven French Children, in which the revolutionary terror spills over into the Napoleonic wars; Seven Australian Children, and so on. It is a universal story of a dishonest history lesson: and who hasn’t ever had one?

The problem with reading the play politically is that all this needs to be taken into account (and more, and more…). If this historical linearity between foundational violence is taken on into the future, if the arbitrary line between distant and recent history is not drawn (the violent and unfair gesture with which we relegate our past crimes to the past, refuse our victims the right to be historically wronged, and pretend nothing has happened), then the past keeps returning as a terrible justification of whatever our present crimes may be.

+++

However, using this play as a pretext for a discussion on Gaza creates a set of problems much bigger than anything enumerated so far.

I am hoping to be able to continue this. However, I am enormously busy at the moment…

May 21 2009

4 Comments

brief notes, essays, formal inquiry

Pretentiousness

Merriam-Webster defines pretention as an aspiration or intention that may not reach fulfillment. What we call pretentious in day-to-day life, is often a person’s attempt at something bigger than the person is capable of achieving. The gap between the intent and execution is a visible, laughable failure.

(Fail again. Fail better.)

A child learning to walk is pretentious whenever she falls. Talking in a language one doesn’t speak well is pretentious. Saying “explicate” when one only knows the meaning of “explain” is pretentious, too. Volunteering for a job one has never done before is pretentious. April Wheeler is pretentious, and so is Synecdoche, NY.

What this equation doesn’t account for is that the path to success goes through failure. That pretention is a sign of hard work. (Let’s refer from calling it ambition. Ambition often takes the easy route.) The tragedy of April Wheeler is not, as has been implied, that she and her husband had no talents, but that they didn’t strive to develop what talent they had. To assume that our gifts are finite, and fully formed at birth, is to be blind in the face of reality: dyslexic writers, hoarse singers, women who divorce at 50, Eugene Ionesco, Rosalie Gascoigne. To admire talent that’s “fully formed”, and to condemn “pretentiousness”, goes hand in hand. To cut tall poppies is to look at the result without looking at the path, to fail to appreciate the work, to fail to appreciate the courage of working harder than necessary, of searching beyond what one knows, to look at art (person, country, act) as a thing, not as a part of a process.

Perfect, beautiful objects are everywhere: our world is littered with remaints of the past, achievements of history. We could import the past and make it anew until our ears are red, and we would be surrounded with beauty, just like we can surround ourselves with modern Provincian furniture in modern Georgian houses. There is no pretention there: there is only blissful refusal to work, to seek, to fail. (Even the aesthetic failure of the nouveaux riches is a path, a process, a failure that gets better with time. The refusal of a modern Georgian should not be confused with the learning stumble of the owner.)

In the theatre, the pretention of the hopeful theatre-goer (to be enlightened, to be inculturated, to feel and learn and think) will clash with the pretention of the hopeful theatre-maker (to shatter the form, to break the rules, to shock). Two types of courage clash, and there is nothing phillistine about that. Not until we condemn pretention.

What remains, in some strange magic-realist world, is the seasoned performer, on stage for the seasoned spectator, in an intimate duet only they know the rules for. Some sort of love. Safe, blind and aloof.

Apr 30 2009

6 Comments

atmospheric, Black Lung, classics, criticism, essays, Hayloft Project, reviews, theatre, violence

3xSisters and independent theatre (a polemic)

3xSisters is an extraordinary production, and possibly the best thing I’ve seen the independent theatre do in Australia yet. Examining Chekhov’s classical play with the confidence that comes with serious effort, large amount of talent, and big budget – as usual with Hayloft Project – it does what independent theatre should do: it insists that we know only that we don’t know anything.

Directorially divided between the founder of Hayloft and the darling of theatre neocons, Simon Stone, Black Lung’s Mark Winter, and Benedict Hardie, Sisters are pushed through not one, but three very different interpretative sieves. The parts were assigned by pulling bits of paper out of a hat, and created in isolation from one another: it would have meant something else (equally valid, perhaps more interesting) had the order been different, but the current composition, with its rather serendipitous symmetry, poses a number of big questions.

Stone opens the show with a clean, emotionally intact presentation: in a waiting room, under a row of clocks showing time from Tokyo to Berlin, the characters in evening clothes argue, break into tantrums, leave and confess secrets over the microphone. This is classical Stone, an elegant and accessible overview of the emotional content of the play that respects both the text, the characters and the audience, even as it amplifies the melodrama and ripples the textual surface.

But thus created high-strung dinner-party is broken as Hardie interrupts what is now revealed as a rehearsal. Actors are back on stage in tracksuits and wielding script photocopies. After Stone’s reduction of the text, Hardie’s prolonged reading of a scene suddenly exposes Chekhov’s beautiful, worshipped words as something both flinty and muggy and not necessarily working on stage, a mixture of chat and small-town philosophising that dies under actorly enunciation. If the scenes build up emotional intensity, they do it against the words, against the flat rehearsal reproduction, sloppily overtheatricalized, butchered by overzealous reverence. It also restores some humour, regularly overlooked in Chekhov. In a moment of absolute beauty, Vershinin delivers an intense monologue, after which the director announces that “now he can move”, and Angus Grant politely takes a few steps across the stage.

In what’s directorially the most accomplished part, the play is then amped up into Mark Winter’s mass-mediatized pastiche of pop references. Police drama, family stories of the American South, and teen tragedy are all smartly built as logical consequences of Chekhov’s provincial malaise. Told from the perspective of Solyony, the mentally destabilized soldier of the original text, it digs out not so much the 19th-century Russian violence simmering behind the genteel Prozorov walls, but the utterly strange evolution of mainstream entertainment since drawing-room drama. The pathetic Natasha, lower-class bride quietly caricaturized on the margin turns into the Oedipal Southern woman O’Neill or Williams will find; the naive Irina into the crippled child-woman of suburban slacker genre (local Dogs in Space comes to mind), but also the semi-retarted sister of all those 90s teens having sex and drugs on film (there must be a name for that fad by now); the quiet existential despair of the Prozorov sisters escalates into the 1970s urban nihilism, until ultimately it resolves itself (or rather knots itself into suffocation) in the decadent upper-class boredom as exemplified by Brett Easton Ellis: a carnivalesque party in which sorrow is smothered by meaningless sex and violence. Within Winter’s uncompromising dramaturgy, a contemporary theatrical impulse to make a classic relevant by giving audience titillation, is explored to the extreme that, despite the ironic humour, still hits the mark.

Directorially, the whole is bigger than the parts. While gorgeousness abounds, each director plays with an amount of trite moments (those buckets of blood are by now a convention teetering into cliché, and all those misguided microphones), effectively shorthanding his aesthetic. It is in the sheer accumulation that this production finds its magic, in the discourse created between the directors. Hayloft has made a name for itself as mainstage-by-other-means. Black Lung, on the other hand, is wall-to-wall orchestrated chaos (their last show, Avast II, in particular, was a consistent/beautiful jumble of pop culture). To attempt, seriously, to merge such different work into a single piece, with balls and budget, is an act of enormous courage.

It is not Chekhov, Hayloft makes it clear, but a discussion among types of contemporary theatre and the audience. It is a bitch of a production: it argues and plays devil’s advocate in a way that is perfectly, spot-on un-Australian. It is theatre as an unresolved creative argument. From the elegant to the grunge end of the independent theatre in Melbourne, visiting restrained deconstruction on the way, it is a merciless inquiry into what-the-fuck we go to the theatre for when we go to the theatre in Melbourne. Pitching completely incompatible ways of tackling the sisters one against another, the three directors raise different questions and offer differing answers, resulting in a wonderful clamour that enlightens as much as it admits its own limitations. Each part implicitly criticizes, ridicules the others, each fails on the terms of the other two, yet each succeeds in a different way and, finally, each makes demands on the audience to justify its expectations, demands and assumptions. Rather than a clean, safe ‘experiment’ that we are so often told we see (an oak tree or the nudge-nudge-wink-wink deconstruction of No Success Like Failure), which surprises no one and discovers nothing new, because it is conducted with scientific safety, not creative recklessness, 3xSisters explodes into an unruly, unexpected synergy that goes beyond the force of any individual part.

As audience, we are repeated seduced by each honey-mouthed approach: we find emotion, laugh at our own bourgeois need for catharsis through language, enjoy the ironic gore. Yet once we have been convinced to swap sides and condemn bourgeois entertainment and the worship of language, after the inerval the production takes us back, through Hardie’s third, then Stone’s fourth act, first into a text that still resounds sweet, despite deconstruction, despite our awareness of our own jejune worship, and finally into an emotional response we disagree with, but cannot quite help. We are cooed into agreeing and disagreeing with so many opposing arguments, that the play finishes with the audience shell-shocked by its own, until now unacknowledged, sensibilities. Precisely by giving us everything we could possibly want in the theatre, the incoherence of this gluttony (how can we want both dinner-party neurosis and a splatterfest?) confronts the audience with its own, now estranged, needs.

+++

For as long as the mainstream theatre in this city remains dinner theatre, independent theatre will keep being asked to assume the role of the mainstream. Since there is no big stage to see time-preserved Beckett on, we need to see it at La Mama. Since MTC will not do a clear Sarah Kane, it must happen at Red Stitch. And since a good Chekhov is nowhere to be seen, Simon Stone must make it. Even worse, since good solid mainstream needs to exist externally before we feel safe enough to plunge into experiment, shock, questions, we continue to confuse consistency of shape and colour, or some form perfected thirty years ago, with ‘beauty’ and ‘lyricism’. The paradox is that it becomes more acceptable to believe in the autodidact genius (Simon Stone’s treatment being the finest example), and praise well-done, elegantly repeated work, as extraordinary etc, than allow that artists need to experiment, fail, risk and grow.

Hence I take offense at reviews such as Cameron Woodhead’s in The Age. I would not take issue with the formal pedancy of calling a montage “dog’s breakfast”, were it grounded in something more than this unacknowledged, self-evident stance that theatre is to be beautiful, as in coherent, as in simple and elegant, as in well-made. As broad as this desire sounds, it excludes uncertainty, inner conflict, clashes of colour and worldview. Provocative work is praised, yes, but only if wall-to-wall grunge, only if it clearly marks the edges of its offensiveness by never crossing unexpected thresholds, by never mixing its own provocation with anything we genuinely hold dear, or with, say, emotional impact. In other words, beautiful comes to mean something we can sink into like a comfy chair, something consistent, something safe. It becomes a question of style, rather than content. The beauty of 3xSisters is a difficult, emotionally complex beauty that has more to do with the inner life of the audience that the colour coordination of stage business.

It was Jerome Bel who, a few years ago, stated in this city that theatre must be allowed to try things, that the path to success goes through failure. To attempt a production that cannot possibly succeed on the terms of the local well-made play (either preppy or grunge) strikes me as an enormously courageous act, something genuinely important for the Melbourne theatre scene, and something to be applauded even if it failed in its own terms – and this production certainly doesn’t. This is why young theatre artists are here: to create, not repeat models that were perfected around 1975. The moment they are asked to replace the state theatre companies, just because we don’t have a healthy mainstream theatre sector, they are effectively asked to act older and more experienced than they are, and create the sort of work that can best be done, and should be done, within well-funded institutions. No one becomes a respected interpreter of Chekhov at the age of 20-something. Not even in Australia, no. It takes decades of asking questions from oneself and the audience, of trying and failing and all that Beckettian stuff, until one genuinely knows how to reduce their experience into a simple, elegant masterpiece. 3xSisters is not here to be inspiring and revered: but it does bring the entire independent theatre around a table, starting a genuine discussion, one to which we don’t the answer yet. Rather than being about Chekhov, it is about theatre, which strikes me as an equally noble pursuit.

To conclude: to ask for an illuminating interpretation of Chekhov from recently graduated students – particularly when the company announces they are not doing that – is misguided and unconstructive, but to accuse a montage of inconsistency, I am sorry, Mr Woodhead, is dumb. There are other things in art as important as colour-coordination and lyricism. There is more than one way of making theatre, and asking very difficult questions is the one that offers the highest return. Mr Woodhead, let the independents be independent. Must they really constantly be asked do the MTC’s job?

3xSisters. Direction: Benedict Hardie, Simon Stone, Mark Winter. Cast: Gareth Davies, Angus Grant, Thomas Henning, Joshua Hewitt, Shelly Lauman, Eryn Jean Norvill, Anne-Louise Sarks, Katherine Tonkin and Tom Wren. Set Design: Claude Marcos. Lighting Design: Danny Pettingill. Producer: Carl Nilsson-Polias. April 24 – May 10 at the Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne.

Apr 18 2009

11 Comments

criticism, essays, ethics, theatre

Among the backpatters and backstabbers

Giulia Merlo’s recent article for Spark Online – a read I recommend to everybody – has made me think about a certain problem with the Australian culture of theatre criticism. While wondering why Giulia, a relative outsider to the theatre practice, regularly outwrites most local reviewers, whether it has to do with her living in an intellectually bolder culture, her Italian education, or simply immense writing talent, the challenges we face, on our island, have become a little clearer.

Let me explain. For better or worse, the only educated commentary on the theatre in Australia comes from those directly involved, in some capacity, in the sector. Professional theatre theorists being exceedingly rare (what are their employment options, after all?), and our media coverage laughable, the only educated theatre audience in our country is the theatre sector itself. What commentary we have is largely penned by current, former or future theatre practitioners. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it is often pointed out that a good critic should have some practical experience if they are to assess the success or failure. It also creates, in the best possible world, an environment of constructive, informed, and in-depth criticism. It is only a good thing that, unlike the UK blogoscope, Australian web-landscape is not dotted with prospective newspaper reviewers. As much as I enjoy reading, say, the West End Whingers, this kind of witty, catty, user-oriented coverage doesn’t provide a great starting point for any discussion.

However. Lately, while trying to expand our field of theatre commentary, I been noticing a peculiar problem. The moment a good theatre reviewer looks like they may turn into a great theatre reviewer, more often than not they seem to stop, give up. The fear cited is always the same: they are worried about the public-ness of their writing. It hurts their networking (networking hereby defined as the applied art of convincing as many people of one’s loveliness with the smallest expenditure of time and energy as possible). Colleagues may dislike them.

While some of them don pseudonyms, more often than not the result is a vague sort of semi-assesment, neither positive nor negative, descriptive rather than analytical, something akin to written networking, the equivalent of the afterparty small-talk. What I notice a lot is a certain refutation of criticism as effort, as practice. Instead, theatre practitioners focus on making performance. This is the part of the equation they choose to take seriously.

I have had a lot of sympathy for this position – after all, theatre business is not quite one in which milk rains and honey flows abundant – for the need to cultivate ties. However, faced with the sad fact that the best criticism currently published in Australia seems to be coming from a woman in London, who does not, to my knowledge, have any formal education in theatre as a discipline, it has become a troubling position to sustain.

Is it really possible to be serious about your own practice, and completely give up, strip of credibility, the critical side? Is it really possible for theatre to work as a system, if everyone makes, but nobody assesses with any credibility? Are we not shooting ourselves in the foot? If theatre artists, one after another, give up the task of genuine feedback, if the duty of criticism is not taken seriously at all, how can anyone expect to receive serious feedback for their own, ostensibly serious theatre practice? The system, as I see it, collapses. At a certain point, quality is simply not rewarded anymore.

This has to be the reason behind so many ills currently facing this world (which I love and care for). In the absence of seriously enforced aesthetic and intellectual standards, everyone is a great artist. And it sometimes seems so, doesn’t it? The only problem, ostensibly, is that there is not enough money for everyone. How to distribute what money there is, however, becomes another set of problems. Without this feedback loop, every assessment is looked upon with doubt. (And I’m sure everyone has had, heard or overhead one of those conversations in which who-got-how-much is discussed with great bitterness.)

It would be wonderful, and easy and friend-winning, to assume that, just because people are so honey-mouthed about each other’s work, this is a nurturing, supportive theatre culture, but the truth is far from it. Of the countries I have lived in – and here is another case in which the Australian mythical national character lets reality down – I do believe Australia is an exceptional case of a society of backstabbers. Even the vilest people I have met seem unable to do harm in one’s face, and prefer a thin semblance of in-yer-face civility to cover their machinations behind. Alison Croggon’s blog commentary, all too often a playground for anonymous bile, testifies to that. Not that nobody disagrees, of course. There is no place, in a certain sense, where people are more thoroughly disillusioned about the intrinsic worth of human beings than among the theatre folk. It all strikes me as generally rather unhealthy.

To qualify, I do think the situation is similar in many other sectors. Education is certainly an activity in which frank criticism has become a faux pas. A friend of mine, who teaches creative writing, has noted that any attempt at genuine workshopping results in his students complaining upwards that he is “making them doubt their ability as writers.” On the other hand, both arts journalism and arts administration are, in some broad sense, career-based activities, in which the results are not measured in the quality of the art they support. Real improvement, aesthetic and intellectual, seems to be not much of a common goal.

It all ties in with another problem, often expressed in more professionally-differentiated theatre places, of whether critics should befriend artists. In Australia, I imagine, one has no choice. One would need to be tremendously unpopular (as either) to avoid doing so. Yet I don’t think that reviewing the work of friends or acquaintances is quite the problem some people make it out to be. If the purpose of the review is to assign stars, elegantly massacre a production for readers’ pleasure, show off eloquence rather than insight, perhaps. However, if the purpose of the review is to explain, engage, work with the performance, being aware of the existence, in flesh and blood, of the person under scrutiny makes one only more aware of one’s accountability. Keeping in mind that there is a person behind the work, one becomes more cautious about making unfounded statements. To return to the quandary faced by bright young theatre things, I don’t think pseudonyms solve the problem. Putting a name under a review is still the best way we have of avoiding unsanctionable viciousness, backstabbing.

On the other hand, as anyone involved in a creative practice can attest, constructive criticism is an act of extreme generosity. To receive honest, informed and in-depth feedback is invaluable if one is to grow as a practitioner of absolutely anything – and it often requires knowledge of the person, the artform, the conditions of production. It is a more incestuous relationship than our image of the ideal critic allows. Last summer in Vienna, at ImPulsTanz’s program for educating young dance critics, I spoke to a couple of people from Serbian dance organizations about their selection process (in the program, dance companies nominated critics – the young Belgian was quite surprised, having been chosen by Ultima Vez although he reviewed their work negatively). Dalija Acin, from TKH (Teorija Koja Hoda), told me how appreciative they were of the chance to send young people to ImPulsTanz, “to educate our cadre.” Critics were not seen as the enemy, or as a superfluous part of the sector, but a necessary link between an artform and an audience, both an arbiter of taste and an interpreter. As pointed in a comment to Chris Wilkinson on The Guardian Stage blog, it was Lessing’s involvement in professional theatre that resulted in the creation of the important Hamburg Dramaturgy. Douglas McLennan, similarly, wonders wonders why arts organizations don’t have residents critics. These are unusual models, yet what they have in common is the understanding that objective criticism benefits the artist and the form.

Finally, the state of affairs in which everything is great, and everyone wonderful, lets the audience down in a very serious way. The readers stop paying attention to unreliable information. Australian film criticism has the same problem: if, as Paul Martin has pointed out, we praise mediocre local films as very good, than there is no way to set an excellent film apart. (When I moved to Melbourne, and Helen Thompson was reviewing for The Age, I stopped going to the theatre after the first few productions she praised were absolutely terrible. I have a number of educated friends who love theatre, but don’t go for the same reason.)

A big hurdle, however, is this tradition of backpatting in the light, and backstabbing in the dark. And since we are raising a generation completely unaware of what constructive criticism even looks like, I am not sure that the things are going to get any better. Against all statistical odds, the future may be uniformly wonderful.

guerrilla semiotics

About

Links

Filed under essays …