The most difficult moment is that of the 'plunge' when we commit to an idea without knowing - rationally - why we are doing what we are doing or where it will go. A major part of our work is allowing ourselves not to know, to remain in 'not knowing' until we find - often through intuition - how to move forward. This not knowing can feel desperate at times, as though we are failing, as though this process just won't bear fruit. Even in the most horrible moments of being lost we've always worked on, perhaps only producing fragments of material that hold our faith in place - nothing more. I know when the work is 'plugged in' by the level of playfulness we're able to bring to a moment in performance. By this I mean that the material feels rich enough to stand being 'played' with; it has layers of ambiguity to be explored and we both become engrossed in finding out what we're dealing with. On Saturday we worked with a list of 'confessions' emerging out of our work around The Piano Teacher; the first time we tried them we knew instinctively that there was a game to be had with these but we couldn't quite catch it. Just as we were about to leave it occurred to us that whilst the confessions belonged to one text, the performance they required belonged to a very different text - The Dreamers. On Sunday morning we started by trying out the confessions via the darkly adolescent world of The Dreamers and suddenly they found a new life - the game was on. Mary and I began playing with the length of time we left between each 'confession'; this worked but the silences were not yet 'alive'. We then inserted a moment of imagination in which we indulged in imagining the other performer enacting what they had just 'confessed'. Suddenly the statement were no longer confessions; they were more like provocations to the redrawing of boundaries and possibilities. The text we were using began to float free from its original moorings into the emerging 'world' of our piece. This was a game we wanted to play over and over again, and each time we played it we found out more about what we were doing in that moment and who we were in relation to the text we were speaking. An atmosphere began to settle around what we were doing - we called it 'dirty energy' - the kind of energy you find in a chamber play when the atmosphere is too intense, too intimate, too cloying to be breathed for long without emotional violence occurring. These moments are addictive, when you feel that you're making something happen out of nothing, and that 'something' is also changing you as you produce it; all you have to do is 'take the plunge' and let it happen.
Amanda
www.famousanddivine.org
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The disturbing thing about a confession is that is a double edged sword: on the one hand it liberates the confessor, but on the other, it changes the receiver forever having taken on the weight and baggage of the confession themselves. What if they are a reluctant ear? How does this affect their perception of the confessor? And what does this new found knowledge say about their relationship to one another? Of course, there are many other layers to explore. I love the concept of "dirty energy" which seems to hold similar qualities to that of hysteria: infectious, an uncontrollable force that can be passed from person to person unwittingly, unconsciously. And then there is manipulative hysteria which in the same way resembles a controlled confession - drawing the third ear into a dirty conspiracy of unwanted knowledge. And then what to do with it, or with themselves even, now that they have it? It seems to me that this dirty energy of yours is a potent, dark force, which like a virus, can reproduce, mutate, destroy - not unlike the complexity of the human psyche...? It's the unexplored 7th sense.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful comment - thank you! From early on in the work Mary and I have talked about 'Chamber Pieces' such as 'Sore Throats' by Brenton as being an aesthetic we were eager to explore. In this instance the energy felt as though it was seeping out from a repressed place, resisting shame but knowingly transgressing. The trajectory for such energy can only be further repression, or unspent desire, or emotional violence played out in secrecy - as happens in Brenton's play and in 'The Dreamers'. It seems to me that adolescence produces this energy copiously because the boundaries between transgression and conformity are still shifting, and desire is a magnificent and dangerous muscle to be flexed.
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