Notes on devising material for HOUSE OF FITZCARRALDO

Questions


Theatre is a forum for culture. Okay, it’s a forum for many things, right? But I’m looking at past patterns in what we’ve done, what we’re gravitated to, what we’re gravitated to to bring into the picture. Why we’ve chosen material like the Marx Brothers, Fitzcarraldo, Napoleon, Chekhov, Henry Fuseli, etc? This is the forum for culture and… reconstruction? Reconstruction vs. deconstruction seems to be the notion of post-postmodernism, or “after postmodernism.” Or not even. Yes, or not.
If we don’t want to think in those terms that is.
I will posit this though: There is viability in reconstruction. Nothing is ever the same when you put it back together again – it’s full of residue (attaching articles) and those are represented in the way a culture or a people behave. We have a responsibility to represent that in our involvement of a contemporary narrative in theatre.

What we are doing with mythology, this has to be explored so that it is something that comes from the group. Why do we use “the familiar” (that is, our own names) in productions? This must be proved or else, I’m not certain I buy it. Or rather, I buy it, but I’m not sure that it will reach its potential until we all recognize the rule and why it does or does not work in the specific instances of the work.
Why enacting mythology is more than just “theatre as hoax.” Or is it just that in essence? Is Frederick Allison a hoax? What about Nikolas Weir? Is this no more than Andy Kaufman theatrics?

Our relationship with the audience is deeply invested in the work from conception – when we work in this fashion (as we are in HOF) then we are enacting this notion of spectator-performance relationship into the work itself. Theory in practice is what we’re after – after all.

The following pages are to act as an entry point to the work. In them I lay out sources we might use, recent influences that respond/react/gravitate to past models and propose ideas and theories that relate to our current practice.

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Means of devising: Taking a structure from culture that is documented in a way that could shine light on new possibilities. With Fitzcarraldo (and the other swirling sources) are we Reassembling from the wreckage to find some meaning in the artifacts? To play artifacts. To play original artifacts – the source of artifact. Are we deconstructing a myth only to build a new one? Is it reconstruction via deconstruction? Or none of these?
By having Nikolas Weir’s involvement we are generating an archive that exists only in the world of our imagination. Our performance, not only our delusions, will be stronger and rooted in the reality of the world. It is a world of generosity – also a world accepting of a little madness too. This engagement gives rise to the possibility that a spectator may not even need to attend our show to be a part of the performance – they may never know how they are performing these new myths out. In this way there is the inclusion of accidental audience (see Schechner reference later) into the performance – an accidental audience who doesn’t even have to show up.
Even the phrase, “Have you heard of Nikolas Weir?” then becomes a performative. And after time, a sort of urban legend. (Re: “Smell my Theater: An Interview with Nikolas Weir)
The performer engages as the role of spectator (see Brecht/Boal molestations) in a way that ignores the role of tradition, for the sake of destroying “the sacred.” We destroy the sacred to make way for the profane – but more so, making room for the open palate of the mind. The feeling that this brings about from the audience (and in relation to the actor as well) can be euphoric, rhythm-changing, and potentially life altering. A willingness to accept one’s imagination for positive change…what that could possibly do? Unified joy. Not over any belief, but in the event of a performance for and with an audience.

We worked with what we called Attaching Articles in Money Buckets.
Attaching Articles = Riffs, commentaries, shoots and ladders of the “reconstructed narrative” = hope?

A narrative that has room – both physical room (the space of the theatre, the space outside) and textual room (rules, attaching articles, lost & founds, etc).

Means of Devising:
1. Interviews with key figures: From Fitzcarraldo, Buran Company, or the collective consciousness (i.e. Doctors Who Only See Other Doctors, Nikolas Weir, etc).
2. What does the hi-jacked story of Fitzcarraldo via Buran mean in a large context? Social/cultural/artistic responsibility. (Responsibility in the same respect that Money Buckets was a call and response to “Financial Crisis”, Great Recession, etc. Does Fitzcarraldo call and respond to, oh, say- the Oil in the Ocean?)
3. Metaphors: Dreams. What do these large metaphors mean? Carrying a ship up and over a mountain. Burial. Discovery. Rediscovery. Uselessness. Useless dreams.
4. Characters, theoretically, are unconscious of narrative – audience constructs narrative. The story, the plot, the happening, the event (whatever wish to call it) is not aware (although, often, as it has been in the past, in a Burancentric narrative, everyone is aware that “this thing is happening.”)
Getting to the place pre-narrative: what happens prior to the narrative that makes the narrative innocent as it occurs. Autobiography is a key to discover this. – Lisa Kron
5. Creation of rules in the construction of narrative.
Rule #1: Do not start the show until someone leaves.
Or
Rule: (from a design perspective) The stage is lit only with practical lights.
The rules dictate the direction of the narrative, what gets used and what gets thrown to the wayside depending on the make up of participants. (Spectators then, even unknowingly, become active. Push the button, the timer goes off, which vibrates the egg, which rolls and lands on the lever which results in an action from the performer on stage. So: Stand up and leave and the show starts. Participants find their equilibrium within the narrative and recognize their pivotal role in the action. It is like the old improv game Psychiatrist.)
6. Myth: How we use myth and history. There is only mythology – history is the attempt to believe that it is really true. Once something is told it only becomes more and more mythologized. Creating new mythologies (i.e. opportunities) for the community of spectators. “Buran was witness to Herzog’s filming!” “Buran at birth of Baby Jesus – That Was No Virgin!”
7. Personalities of the individuals: Pulling character traits from individuals in the group. What do we bring to ourselves as actors? What is inherently special/uncommon/specific to what we bring when we’re on stage? (Sometimes a body on stage is enough to make a performance out of.)

Our retreat week will be spent unpacking many of these notions in the work itself. The “devising schedule” (which you will be receiving shortly) will attempt to address all of these ideas in generating the material for performance.
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Spectators Playing the Game of Theatre

Since we’ll be working with source texts in film, I’d like to use Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema? as a text for us to consider – to at least consider and then throw away. He compares theatre and cinema with great articulation and presents some ideas that may be useful in our working with film as source materials. The ‘problems’ he states, especially in relation to the presence of the actor and the conditions of décor in relation to the spectator, can be taken back to our past work with spectatorship via performance and the problems we face in creating a work that performs before, during and after the event of show. Of particular interest: his criticisms that we have found solvable, or at least approaching them in a solvable manner, in performance – particularly, bridging the individual experience of watching a film in the dark and being a part of the community of “others” at the theater. Some choice quotes (put in context as best as I can):

“Strictly speaking one could make a play out of Madame Bovary or The Brothers Karamazov. But had the plays come first it would be impossible to derive from them the novels as we know them. In other words, when the drama is so much a part of the novel that it cannot be taken from it, reciprocally the novel can only be the result of a process of induction which in the arts means purely and simply a new creation. Compared with the play, the novel is only one of the many possible syntheses derivable from the simple dramatic element” (pg 83).

“There is no such thing as a ‘slice of life’ in the theater. In any case, the mere fact that it is exposed to view on the stage removes it from everyday existence and turns it into something seen as it were in a shop window. It is in a measure part of the natural order but it is profoundly modified by the conditions under which we observe it” (89).

“The camera is at last a spectator and nothing else. It was indeed Cocteau who said that cinema is an event seen through a keyhole. The impression we get here from the keyhole is one of an invasion of privacy, the quasi-obscenity of viewing….the viewpoint of the spectator, the one denominator common to the stage and screen” (93).

“What is specific to theatre is the impossibility of separating off action and actor. Elsewhere the stage welcomes every illusion except that of presence; the actor is there in disguise, with the soul and voice of another, but he is nevertheless there and by the same token space calls out for him and for the solidity of his presence. On the other hand and inversely, the cinema accommodates every form of reality save one – the physical presence of the actor.” From Henri Gouhier’s The Essence of Theater

“The cinema calms the spectator, the theatre excites him. Even when it appeals to the lowest instincts, the theater up to a certain point stands in the way of the creation of a mentality. It stands in the way of any collective representation in the psychological sense, since theater calls for an active individual consciousness where the film requires only a passive adhesion” (pg.98).

“The theater is indeed based on the reciprocal awareness of the presence of the audience and the actor, but only as related to a performance. The theater acts on us by virtue of our participation in a theatrical action across the footlights and as it were under the protection of their censorship. The opposite is true in the cinema. Alone, hidden in the dark room, we watch through half-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the universe. There is nothing to prevent us from indentifying ourselves in the imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world. It is no longer on the phenomenon of the actor as a person physically present that we should concentrate our analysis, but rather on the ensemble of conditions that constitute the theatrical play and deprive the spectator active participation…it is much less a question of actor and presence than of man and his relation to the décor” (102).

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Mission Statement

For our new project we are invested in what anthropologist John MacAloon calls cultural performance, “occasions in which as a culture or society we reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatize our collective myths and history, and present ourselves with alternatives.” In a technological age we tend to forget before we remember. With this ease of information - from applications on mobile “telephones” to Wikipedia - we become so overwhelmed by these constant technological developments that the site of a live body in performance has become an endangered species of expression. Our methodology of performance brings a significant amount of agency to both performer and spectator. Money Buckets!, directly or indirectly (for me, directly, but I knew what I was doing [the matter of 50/50 – the half who get and the half who do not]) confronted the fears of Americans in the midst of a financial crisis with the use of a “lost and found” Marx Brothers screenplay.

We do no choosing. In this cultural exchange we do not call out to any group, any section, any race, any creed, any sex– we call out to everyone. Because we’re all in this together. In this way we are able to incorporate a cross section of spectators who attend our performances and will return again to see the live body in performance. Even with Bournijka the Boxer, a performance piece focusing heavily on Polish immigrants in America and the resulting progeny, it would be appropriate if it were not just a Polish-American audience, but rather an audience of Americans who all come from some place else. This is what engenders a performative, what cultural geographer Catherine Nash writes as “…developing a new theoretical vocabulary of performance and… exploring the imaginative and material geographies of cultural performativity and embodiment.” Each time we work together it is about constructing a new language specific the work itself – the language often comes from the work.

We seek new audiences for a new structure, one that approaches the event of performance as the possibility for inclusion, one that performs before and after entering the venue. Richard Schechner writes about liminal spaces in performance, noting that within this space “for a brief time two groups merge into one dancing circle. During this liminal time/place communitas is possible – that leveling of all differences...then and only then can the exchange take place.” Explore these liminal spaces within the event of performance by creating immediate familiarity within performance between spectator and actor. The over-arching goal of the project is to continue to find specific means to engage the spectator’s role in a variety of modes via the event of performance. What if this exchange to be taking place before the recognized beginning. A familiarity engendered in marketing and mindset – that suspension of disbelief by all participants: beginning with the creators?
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RADIOHOLE:
A contemporary counterpart, Whatever Heaven Allows


They go back and fix botched cues while they're doing something else! They dance, they fall, they get up again. Kourtney Rutherford plays a deer. I have no idea what these people are doing. I had a blast.
– David Johnston, Nytheatre.com


In March 2010 I witnessed New York based performance group Radiohole and their newest piece Whatever Heaven Allows (WHA!?), which was a mash up of the Douglas Sirk film All That Heaven Allows, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s homage to the Sirk film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. This mash up was by far the most exhilarating night I have had in the theatre (at least in recent memory) and it answered a lot of the calls we have been putting out, questions we have been positing in regards to the approach Buran has taken to the relationship between performance events and contemporary audiences. As with past models – Chuck Mee, Augusto Boal, LaMaMa, Complicite, The Anthropologists - written about in “Bringing Back the Spectator” and “Sustained Applause,” I’m interested in finding collectives who seem be investigating works near the same region of language. Radiohole spends a year devising each of their works (not something we’re going to have time to do for HOF) but citing them here is important as we continue to create work and reflect on the work of our contemporary counterparts, as

Growing up around community theatre the phrase was often heard, “The audience is stupid. They don’t know anything.” What I’ve come to appreciate more and more is the notion that the audience knows more, much more than we’ve ever given them credit for. I can assure you that 75% of the audience at the Radiohole show had little to no exposure to any of the source material. Their enjoyment was not dictated on their intellectual understanding of the happening, but rather in the complicity shared with the performers. The most unlikely spectator even, it would seem. A film buff friend of mine, who often finds experimental theatre as masturbatory and indulgent, was elated as his involvement with the production. He knew all the references and was delighted that he was one of the few who had that luxury. So I asked him, “What was it about then?” “Oh,” he said. “That? I have no clue about that.” My other friend, who was sandwiched between us, had no previous exposure to any of the material, and although a little baffled, left with a grin on his face with a radiating enthusiasm.

Radiohole’s confidence, a confidence has been bred during the twelve years they’ve been creating work together, comes across in how they share the material. By taking culture’s high brow and turning it upside (and vice versa), for instance, Douglas Sirk’s symbolism is turned over on itself into a chain-smoking deer, pissing on stage – the final image we’re left with – in this, we trust both Radiohole’s intellect and savvy, but more importantly and their lack of respect, their recklessness, and general theatrical rowdiness. There need be no narrative or explanation, their involvement and participation as creators opens up the possibility for free range. They can go anywhere as long as they know the rules. In their devising, Radiohole is concerned with letting everyone have a voice in the show -not worrying so much about narrative, but rather, making sure that it’s honest and funny. One rule that seems to subsist in all productions is their constant awareness of the theatrical and their audience. Founding member Eric Dyer said to the Brooklyn Rail in 2007, “It’s hard not to be aware of the audience in our space. You sort of have to be. Why pretend they are not there? People in the audience are alive, responding to events, acting and reacting while they experience the work. So are we. We can share that.”

The use of the “familiar”, as we have come to call it with Buran, is used in surprising and illuminating ways in their work as well. The actor is 1) the actor, then, 2) a character or an amalgamation of characters on stage in space in time and, finally, 3). the actor as the actor as the character in space and time commenting directly, or indirectly, on themselves, with one another, and the narrative with the audience. In Money Buckets! we used the Attaching Articles to achieve this. Radiohole delineates in fast movements – all of a sudden there is a karaoke number and then jello shots and then a large sloppy choreographed dance number all churning in their constructed chaotic world. In a scene from Whatever Heaven Allows, actress Maggie Hoffman breaks from the action and steps back, watches Eric Dyer and then turns to the audience saying, “Eric’s depressed because he thinks the show sucks.” She shrugs and jumps back into the manic, PBR-chugging, jello-shot throwing, sweaty adrenaline fueled hour and forty-five minutes that is Whatever Heaven Allows. Near the final moments of the show Hoffman announces, “This is where the drama that Radiohole won't deliver happens.”


What might be explored in devising for House of Fitzcarraldo is to find a means to bring the performer, the character, and the doer onstage. Not only are we constructing a piece (a set to perform on – if only for a brief time), but we are constructing the performance of a performance. Nick Kostner sits on stage in the corner, when there is a light shift he pulls a large lever down to indicate that lighting is going to change.
Perhaps Justin yells at him “LIGHT CHANGE!”
But making the mechanics a part of the action and the performance of mechanics (or broken mechanics) – this too could be a rule.

For what little time we have in the devising, I think the notion of rules might service us very well.

Want to address briefly what Richard Schechner refers to as Accidental audiences vs. integral audiences.

An integral audience: being most of the folks who come to our shows because they know someone in it, they’ve seen our work before or they typically go see theatre as an activity. This includes the theatre community at large – which is what makes up 80%, or more, of an audience: theatre folks going to see theatre (doctors who only see other doctors). What is rarer is the accidental audience, who attends voluntarily. The difference being, as Schechner writes, “…an accidentally audience comes ‘to see the show’ while an integral audience is ‘necessary to accomplish the work of the show.’ ” We have talked long and hard about this accidental audience and our desire to perform work for “non-theatre crowds.” The notion of performance as a means to change rhythms, engender spectatorship from a varying perspective than traditional theatre and bring together new audiences for a narrative structure that includes them.

Here, this might be illuminating, or not:

"…the accidental audience pays closer attention than does an integral audience. This is for four reasons: 1) the accidental audience chooses to attend, has often paid to attend; 2) its members attend as individuals or in small clusters so that large crowd action is unlikely – each spectator or small group is a stranger among strangers; 3) An integral audience often knows what’s going on – and not paying attention to it all is a way of showing off the knowledge. . .4) Sometimes the duration of a performance is so long that it isn’t possible to pay attention throughout. Performances for accidental audiences are designed to fit convenient time-slots; ritual performances allow for audiences to demonstrate their devotion by pilgrimage, duration and/or ordeals." - Schechner

So something like a television broadcast is intended for accidental audiences, even if it does have its integral audience who watches every week. How can a performance be both ritualistic in its treatment of the material and the spectator (inclusive in its exclusivity [that is, the use of the familiar]) and still have room for the accidental audience?

Absolutely rhetorical there, because, certainly, I have some ideas…but I know only as much as the question.

I think the answer to this lies in the construction of the piece.

One more chunk of a quote from Schechner on selective inattention in relation to spectator/performer relationships:

The graded and sometimes relaxed inattention of the performers allows for a subtle infiltration of their everyday lives into the dramatic reality of the performance. Some critics consider this mixture a serious breach of convention. I insist on it for several reasons: it is like the readiness of athletes not only on the sidelines but on the field before a play or a down; it shows the double person of the performer, the “myself” and the “person-of-the-character”; it serves as a bridge between the audience and the performers. Some spectators are disturbed by the “lack of energy” of this kind of performing. But when an engaged action occurs, the energy resources, not having been squandered, can be spent more powerfully. Some spectators find themselves falling into parallel rhythms of focused attention and selective inattention. As their attention “wanders” people begin picking up on events and images that would otherwise escape notice, or be merely blurred side visions: movements of spectators, gestures of performers not at the center of the scene, overall arrangement an dynamics of space. The performance can be contemplated; the spectator can choose to be in or out, moving her attention up and down a sliding scale of involvement. Selective inattention allows patterns of the whole to be visible, patterns that otherwise would be burned out of consciousness by a too intense concentration…through selective inattention spectators co-create the work with the performer. - Richard Schechner, Performance Theory

Burden of Dreams

Val and I watched "Burden of Dreams" last night. We jotted down some notes throughout the screening. Here are a few...

Mick Jagger?!!

"To act in front of a camera gives me physical pleasure." Jose Lewgoy, Brazilian film actor

Rubber trees, they really bleed rubber...can we do that on stage?

Filmmakers suffer death threats from the Peruvian natives

"There's no action, no action. I'm sitting here satisfied!"

Herzog insists on shooting at the "magic hour"

"We'll be stark naked at the end...like skyscrapers." -referencing the continued loss of natives and culture

Natives involved in the film suffer arrow attacks through the throat.
Many film assistants were lost.

"I'm running out of fantasy!" -Herzog

HUGE ARROWS! The natives are playing a game called "arrow catching", aiming them directly at each others' heads. Herzog nabs one as a keepsake. His little son will be excited that it went through a man.

"Gringos will take off your face."

"Everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams."

Yuca plant makes alcohol called, masato, and it is a big food source.

Kinski breaks a native's arrow, "It doesn't matter. They'll make another one."

An engineer tells Herzog that there is a 30% chance of success at getting the boat over the hill, and that it's probable many men will die. Herzog decides to it's a go!

No alcohol + no soccer ball=tension

"Can't escape off this fucking, stinking camp." -Kinski

Peruvian priests advised Herzog to bring in prostitutes for the film crew. Keep them from sleeping with the natives.

"The people here are in misery...the birds are in misery. They screech in pain."-Herzog

"It's a land...if he exists, God created in anger."

"We in comparison...we sound and look like badly pronounced sentences out of a cheap suburban novel."

"It's not that I hate it...I love it..."

"The only difference between me and you is that I can articulate them." Herzog on dreams.

Val and I decide we want to see Adam as Herzog and Justin as Kinski.