The company’s ten-year story has not been without difficulty or probing from its critics, but as Shunt prepares to leave behind the much-loved Vaults, closing the door on that Carrollian hole at London Bridge station, I caught up with artist, academic and Shunt lighting designer, Mischa Twitchin, to take stock of Shunt’s achievements, to talk Money, and to ask what the future may hold.

Interview contents / Quick Reference 

Please note: in editing the interview transcript and dividing it up into ‘bite-size’ sections, I made several alterations to the chronological order of the original discussion. Any incongruencies in the text are therefore my doing. All photographs used in this article belong to Shunt and must not be reused without prior permission.

1. Origins     (↑ top)

(Two SHUNT Cabaret flyers from September 1999)

Andrew: How did Shunt begin?

Mischa: Shunt is a collective of ten artists – we met on a one-year postgraduate course at Central School of Speech and Drama ten years ago. That course then was about fostering companies. You worked in different groups throughout the year and then the last term was given over for each company to make a show. The task we set ourselves was to explore medieval representations of torture. On the whole, the company for that project was self-selecting and before the course was over we had agreed to rent a space to continue working together. So, being a member of Shunt in the first few years meant paying £50 a month cash to rent a railway arch in Bethnal Green!

We made The Ballad of Bobby Francois there and Dance Bear Dance, and we also did bi-monthly cabarets. Dance Bear Dance came at the end of a five-year period by which time we’d taken over the arch next door and the performance explored the relation between these two, parallel spaces. As it turned out, it had some big theatrical coups in it. It also happened to coincide with the change of Artistic Director at the National Theatre (NT). Part of Nicholas Hytner’s new strategy was to open up what counted as “theatre” for his audience at the NT.

Several people from the NT saw that show, including then Nick Starr and Nick Hytner. After five years, we were looking to move – having exhausted the arch spaces – and they invited us to do something in one of the non-theatre spaces on the Southbank. We thought what could we possibly do there? But all credit to them, they acknowledged that, and when we found this space [Shunt Vaults] Nick Starr hosted the negotiations with Railtrack in his office. It took about a year to get into this space. They also supported us with a couple of fundraising evenings – obviously, we had no money – and, then, crucially the tickets for our first show here, Tropicana, were sold through their box office, so there could be credit card bookings in advance.

However, that also meant, in contrast to our experience in Bethnal Green, that we opened the show with 200 people outside – which rather pre-empted our usual practice of working on the show with an audience in previews. We had this whole choreographed beginning, for example, and it was obvious on the first night that it wasn’t going to work. It took a couple of months of really learning what it meant to have an audience in this space for that show to come to fruition.

The tie-in with the NT also meant we were committed to a press night, which we’d never had before. So, there was one evening with a raft of critics who’d never seen any of our previous work and had no particular interest in our way of working. Indeed, why should they? They were waiting for the show to start, with no real sense that they might already be part of it when they came in. So, the main press record is not so good for Tropicana – but then it ran for nine months! In a way, that scenario had changed a bit by the time of Amato Saltone, and it helped open the door for work off-site associated with the NT.

2. Money     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Money)

Andrew: Shunt is launching a new show in September 2009 in a new space close to the Shunt Lounge at London Bridge. It’s your first show since Amato Saltone in 2006. What’s the basic premise behind Money?

Mischa: Conversations started over a year ago about what might be the material or the starting point for a new show. We have used a common text source – not necessarily literary – as a point of departure before. With The Ballad of Bobby Francois, our first show, it was a book called Alive; and then the handbook of rules for lawn tennis for The Tennis Show; or for Dance Bear Dance there was material around the Gun Powder Plot. It’s about coming to an agreement around a shared source that’s accessible through that reading. That’s not to say that the book is the source of the work; it’s just one element together with the people and the space. Then the key question will always be what is the journey of the audience that we’re constructing with these elements?

The conversations started before Easter last year, so before Northern Rock, but after the Enron scandal. One topic in discussion was the hubris of the financial world. Then for other reasons too, we were reading various novels by Émile Zola.

Andrew: Why Zola?

Mischa: One strand of conversation at a certain point was “why not take a novel?” Thérèse Raquin seems to be used every other year! So, there was a sort of curiosity about that. Then, of course, any individual Zola novel is part of a bigger cycle, so different people were reading different books to comment on in meetings.

Andrew: Were any of these books connected to the company’s prior discussion of the global financial situation?

Mischa: Well, as the crisis unfolded then people were reading about it. A couple of us had already read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, for instance. There were other books too. Lizzie [Lizzie Clachan] brought in a book from around the 1880s I think, a sort of an encyclopedia of the future, illustrating the technology of one hundred years’ later (so, in our time) as imagined by people in 1880. Then, I think, David [David Rosenberg] came across Zola’s novel Money (L’Argent), which has in its background Zola’s diagnosis of the corruption of the Second Empire. This, of course, chimed with our own times. Indeed, it’s interesting that the preface to the English translation, which was made around 1900, references specific financial events at that time, suggesting to readers how interesting it would be for them to read Zola’s account of similar events forty years earlier. So, you don’t need to be a Marxist necessarily to recognize cyclical, structural crises within capitalism.

We kind of settled on Money as a common source in a similar way that we had settled on the works of Cornell Woolrich for Amato Saltone. And also there’s a slight theme from Zola’s La Bête Humaine, with the image of a train that’s out of control.

3. Space     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event The Tennis Show)

Andrew: Money is being performed in a new space, an old tobacco warehouse not far from the Shunt Vaults. I’m interested in the relationship, if there is one, between the genesis of Money and the new space; whether there’s any element of site-specificity to it, and whether artistically the space has been a source of renewal for Shunt as a company.

Mischa: We’ve been in two spaces over the past ten years: Arch 12a in Bethnal Green and the Shunt Vaults, here at London Bridge. Essentially the company has always been committed to having a space of its own.

To the degree that it’s possible, then, we have control over access to it. Like the company name, ‘Shunt’, the space doesn’t already say “theatre”. It means that the invitation to an audience can be part of the work, part of the dramaturgy, part of the scenography. The actual entrance to the space can be materially reinvented for any particular show.

One of the things that the ten members of the Collective could agree on artistically was that, even if any individual had an interest in working in theatres, there was a shared commitment to working in our own space. For the public – distinct from the critics, perhaps – the work needn’t then be prejudged in terms of “a night out at the theatre”.

Of course, there will always be those associations, particularly for Tropicana because it was marketed through the NT. But, nevertheless, having our own space meant that it was possible to build a whole journey for an audience coming out of the tube station. The first quarter of the space of that show was wholly constructed, complete with a lift! So, in that sense it’s not site-specific – we make a fictional world for the audience. In the case of Money, we’ve built a vast machine.

So, there’s a relation to a space that has atmosphere, but which is, in a sense, neutral in theatrical terms – such as a railway arch. It can be more or less atmospheric, which already gives you something, but we’re not making a show about railway arches. We’ve not made a show at the Vaults about the construction of the railway in London. We’ve made fictional worlds for an audience that nevertheless are, of course, informed by, and produced in relation to, the space that we are in.

We’ve been at the Vaults for over five years and obviously at some point we will have to leave here. We’ve had three stays of execution and we’re here now until November [2009]. The idea was to set up the new show in its own space, and there was this warehouse just round the corner. It’s an empty shell, totally uninteresting as a building, but now there’s an extraordinary machine inside it. It’s great when people ask what it used to be before!

4. The Gaze     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Amato Saltone)

Andrew: I’d like to talk about the ‘gaze’ as a leitmotif in Shunt’s work.

Mischa: I suppose that was largely thematized in Amato Saltone.

Andrew: Yes, in Amato Saltone, but also in The Tennis Show, where you have that wonderful moment between female and male audiences who see each other on two sides of a tennis court, after having spent most of the performance in gender separation.

Mischa: Yes, in the Bargehouse. There were two points of access to the space, which already suggested the possibility of separating the audience. Then there were the rules of lawn tennis. Many games have this separation between men and women. So, you had this play with the men’s game and the women’s game. The same sort of social structure exists in dancing. So, the idea of the point of meeting was to have the two audiences facing each other across the tennis court, and once the lines of the court had all disappeared – down a hole that was there in the floor! – we had this voice-over invitation, using everyone’s names thanks to the tickets, with some schmaltzy music: “Would x like to dance with y?” Although it only actually happened once, I think.

With Amato Saltone, it was one of the initial ideas: trying to construct a scene in which the same thing could be seen by two different audiences. That was the initial idea and then the Cornell Woolrich theme was something that emerged out of other strands of our reading. As it happens, he is the author of Rear Window, which follows precisely this structure. Besides that, there is also an interest amongst most people within the company to have at least some moment in which there’s a common experience for the whole audience to share the image of something together.

Another key visual moment was in Dance Bear Dance, this point where the parallel audiences were revealed to each other. It was interesting the way in which audiences went through the process of asking whether it was a mirror or another set of performers, before acknowledging that they were part of a show that included them, in this image of the other audience. That was quite a theatrical coup, as it turned out.

5. Audience Participation     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Dance Bear Dance)

Andrew: In terms of the two productions at Shunt Vaults, Tropicana and Amato Saltone, I’m curious about the extent of ‘freedom’ that you give the audience to roam, search and explore the space. Sometimes there is a given set of parameters whereby in Amato Saltone, for example, the audience was given names, keys and a party invitation message; or more loosely in the case of Tropicana, where upon exiting the lift you were able to explore the space before a narrative sequence unfolded in the operating theatre and encroached on that sense of liberty. From my perspective as an audience member, the effect this sense of freedom has is one of participation, of straddling the line between actor and spectator, and that’s exciting and exhilarating. However, more often than not in Shunt’s work, I find that sense of freedom gives way, as the shows evolve, to a more traditional, proscenium-type configuration in which the lines are more clearly defined. Could you talk about the notions of freedom and participation?

Mischa: I suspect that this “freedom” is rather spurious. It’s the way you describe the experience, but the part of the experience that you’re calling “freedom” is no less conventionalized and constructed than the part of the experience that you’re calling traditional. There are a whole set of accidents that compose these possibilities as well as the decisions, of course; but, as I said before, one of the main interests of the company is to consider the journey of the audience. The work includes “an audience”, distinct from a group of people wandering randomly. How they are included is our responsibility; we are making an experience for an audience, in an environment that we are constructing. It’s not a Happening, it’s a rehearsed show and even if it’s not apparent to anybody – even ourselves sometimes! – there is a narrative structure.

The audience doesn’t have “a role” other than that of being an audience. There’s absolutely no role-play – the audience is not invited to perform.

Andrew: Even when a telephone rings and doesn’t stop until an audience member plucks up the courage to answer it?

Mischa: It’s a contrivance. There are moments in which there’s the invitation to the audience to act in the situation, but the production isn’t putting the responsibility of the performance onto anybody doing it. But it makes a difference, of course – and that’s the fun of it. It’s exciting and interesting to keep open the sense of possibility in the present moment, but the key thing is to keep open the sense that something can be imagined, which doesn’t mean you’re going to have to do it or take on a role.

So, what is the place of an audience? How to make coming to see a particular show already part of the experience of that show? With Amato Saltone, the first week it was people coming into a surprise birthday party, but that wasn’t going anywhere; so, by the end of the first month it was people going into a swingers party, in which we were giving people the fiction of an identity, with a name and a key. Curiously, that was something that appealed to a lot of people, but all it actually meant was that you had a secret name. You didn’t have to do anything, but it made your imaginary relation to being in that environment more active. After all, it was an environment that consisted of the other people that you were with. In that sense, it wasn’t a case of: “I’m watching a swingers party over there on stage, which they’re representing for me”; rather, “I understand that I am part of a swingers party, although I know that I’m not – but that is the story of what I’m doing here, and so where’s that going to take me?”

6. The Collective     (↑ top)

(The 10 members of the SHUNT Collective)

Andrew: What is the organizational basis of the Shunt Collective?

Mischa: There’s no need for rose-tinted glasses, sometimes it’s fraught and difficult, but there’s an ethos. With the last two shows and, of course, the Lounge, a team of people has gravitated to the space – some really fantastic souls. There is a wider sense of individual work that is equally part of a larger project.

That spirit of collaboration is something special; it’s about the quality of the particular person, not simply their extraordinary skills, but their own ethos. Professionalism is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient. You can’t institutionalize individuals’ sense of commitment to their own work within a situation like that.

7. Cabarets     (↑ top)

(Flyer for a SHUNT Cabaret event)

Andrew: Could you talk about the significance of Shunt cabarets in the development of the company’s work and how they fed into the creation of the Shunt Lounge?

Mischa: We did two big shows in our Bethnal Green space: The Ballad of Bobby Francois and Dance Bear Dance and we also had a bi-monthly cabaret – on a Sunday. The only condition for performing in the cabaret was that nothing could last more than ten minutes, but otherwise you could do anything you liked.

It was important in the sense that you were participating in collective projects, which were things you wouldn’t necessarily have envisaged by yourself – with the excitement of realizing something that you couldn’t do or imagine by yourself, as the creative possibility of the group. And connected to that, the cabarets provided us with the circumstance in which people could individually show to other members of the company the different kinds of work that they wanted to experiment with. I think that’s important.

With Dance Bear Dance, we did a week of cabarets trying out ideas; a series of individual responses to a particular theme that fed into the production. And certainly, individual shows have developed from things that people have tried out in various forms in cabarets for themselves.

The Lounge was in some ways a continuation of this. It is a space in which people can come in and experiment with something. It’s been a unique thing in the London theatre scene.

8. Shunt Lounge     (↑ top)

(A short musical documentary by Susanne Dietz about the Shunt Lounge)

Andrew: To what extent, both artistically and commercially, has the Lounge Project been a success?

Mischa: The Lounge has been a huge success. It has been going for three years and the number of artists who have been able to experience for themselves what their idea could be in relation to an audience is remarkable. The key thing is that we provide the space, the technical support and a diverse audience coming in and experiencing the work. If you perform here it needn’t be to a coterie audience or just your friends.

There are over 2000 people a week in here – so, in relation to other things the Arts Council support it’s an extraordinary benefit, particularly when considering the phenomenal level of work produced, consistently, forty-eight weeks a year.

It’s spectacular here every week, but not necessarily a spectacle. It’s not advertised, there are no reviews, you pay to come into the space – a fiver on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and a tenner on Fridays and Saturdays – and then you have access to everything for free. So, whether it’s Stationhouse Opera trying something out, or an opportunity to tattoo bananas, there’s no prior judgment. That’s important where artists are experimenting with an idea. Their work is part of a whole evening that includes a lot of other work, installations, maybe a band, the bar, and so on. Each week – or fortnight – is curated by a different Shunt artist, supported by Andrea [Andrea Salazar] and her team, and it will be different in its dynamic, depending on all the work that’s being shown then.

9. Working Process     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Sightings)

Andrew: In the case of the collective, you don’t take on hierarchical roles so how do you actually go about creating a piece? What’s the Shunt working process, particularly given that your productions seem to be in continual evolution?

Mischa: The work is always in development with the audience. There are always company members watching the show, and then for the performers, as often as not, proximity to the audience is like ours in this interview now. If any particular moment is rubbish, you know it. Why would you want to do it again tomorrow? Of course, there are periods at which it’s exhausting and it takes a lot more effort to initiate bigger changes. But with Amato Saltone, for example, we changed the end in the last week of the run.

So, once there’s a sort of agreement on a common topic, there are basically a lot of improvisations and then proposals for other exercises, games, other things to explore, get sedimented out those. People also have responsibilities then in order to realise the structure of a production. So, there is a director, there is a designer, there is a lighting designer, a sound designer, and there are performers. But the work is a collective realisation. It’s not that any one of those roles has simply instrumentalized the others to realize a particular artistic vision that could otherwise have been achieved by just employing other people to do the work. What has been produced is the work of this particular group of people – both the Shunt members and our collaborators, the Shunt Associate Artists. In a sense, even if for any one person, they don’t feel they particularly “own” very much of it, it’s owned by the collective.

The tag line of “designed, directed and performed by Shunt” doesn’t necessarily refer to just the ten of us, it includes other associate artists like Nigel [Nigel Barrett], Tom [Tom Lyall] and Simon [Simon Kane], or people who have regularly worked with us like Steve [Steve Royle] with the lighting and George [George Tomlinson] with the whole scenic production – people who are also part of creating the work. So, there’s Shunt in so far as it’s the name of the collective of ten people, and then it’s the name of the event, which involves a much larger group of people.

10. Archives & Documentation     (↑ top)

(Image taken from the SHUNT website archives)

Andrew: You mentioned earlier the idea of documenting the Lounge. If that project were to go ahead, whom would the documentation be for and what form would it take?

Mischa: There are various bits of documentation. There are two films on Youtube, with links from the website, one by Inigo [Inigo Alcaniz], who has taken photographs at the Lounge for a long time, and the other by Susa [Susanne Dietz], a video artist who is one of the Shunt “family”. She has done the video work in all the shows and also has an archive of material that goes back to the early cabarets in Bethnal Green. I think she has plans to work with that material.

The problem with a lot of the shows is that they were lit for the eyes, in the actual space – not as a picture to be looked at separately. So, there’s a lot that is too dark for the camera. For me, lighting is about the contrast between light and dark. In “professional theatre”, there’ll be a photo shoot for the press and nobody could care less. It’s just a case of “put all the lights on”, and that’s fine, of course, because it’s just some random press photo. Also, with most of our shows there hasn’t necessarily been one point of view. What would it be to film a show like Tropicana? There’s the autopsy scene, of course, but apart from that it would be fairly difficult, since the first half of the show was about the spatial distribution of the audience – in darkness! Nonetheless, there is video material, but there isn’t really any narrative documentation.

I am interested to gather stories though – I’ve set up a little postcard link on the website with Nahum [Nahum Mantra], to try to elicit testimony as to what the Lounge means to people – anecdotes, memories, things that will otherwise be unrecorded but which concern the real experience of being here. Not just for the audience but also for the amazing people working here and their contribution each week.

So, who would it be for? Well, in the first instance it would be a sort of present for all those people, to be able to say retrospectively: “Oh, that’s what I was doing!” But it would also be an historical testimony.

Like the Lounge itself, perhaps the documentation could encourage and support the development of confidence for somebody to explore ideas and a practice in relation to an audience – if that’s what they’re concerned with. Wouldn’t that be great?!

11. The Future     (↑ top)

Andrew: What direction will the company take over the next five years?

Mischa: There’ll be the new show in September and then by sometime early next year – we trust – there’ll be a new space for the Lounge. Those two things mark a big change for the company.

Andrew: Why do you have to leave the Shunt Vaults?

Mischa: Because London Bridge station is being redeveloped. There are issues to do with access and the structure of the viaduct. I don’t know what the long term plans are for this space, but it’s part of the development of the station. But even if this space becomes sanitized and turned into a series of Starbucks, there will be a number of people who pass through to the station and think: “Oh, isn’t this the place where I saw people snogging dogs?”; “Isn’t this the place where there were two people sitting in hoops for six hours?”; “Isn’t this the place that had that strange concertina box that extended the whole length of it?”

The point is there’s the company with the wider group and its organization. Before moving here, the company was essentially the ten members. Since being here the company has grown as an organization. There needs to be another way in which the collective can develop with the shows and the Lounge – something new needs to be explored in relation to all of that experience. Let’s just hope that in another five years’ time we will still have an audience!

Conceived and created by Whit MacLaughlin and his award winning Philadelphia-based company, New Paradise Laboratories, Fatebook is a meditation on fate or destiny as seen through the lens of digital communication. The online strand of the project was launched in July this year and follows the lives of 13 characters as they interact with audience members across multiple social media networks. Their stories evolve – with directorial input from MacLaughlin – through a new media narrative of Twitter and Facebook updates, YouTube videos and photos on Flickr; documenting scenes from their everyday lives in Philadelphia.

Each of these 13 online odysseys is heading for offline collision at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in September later this summer. The real space performance is set to bring even more digitalia to bear. A myriad of screens, projectors and live video feeds will transform the space into an epic mediatised environment in which the borders between digital and analogue, live and recorded, fact and fiction merge in a “momentous night—the Fatebook party—where time stops, computers crash…and nobody can say what’s real.”

After an in-depth Skype exchange with MacLaughlin it became clear that here was an experiment at the bleeding edge of digital performance, evolving in sync with developments in social media. I wanted to find out more about the artistic and logistical challenges involved in creating performance online, to extend my ongoing exploration of performance work crossing the digital-analogue divide and to take stock (in a performative context) of terms in frequent but awkward circulation on the Web. Terms such as real (real time, real space, real life), physical (physical space, physical world), space (cyberspace, real space), and the fact/fiction binary.

Andrew Eglinton: Where did the idea for Fatebook originate from?

Whit MacLaughlin: Around two years ago I was observing the effect of social media on young people. There seemed to be an encroaching difference in the way the imagination worked in this space. I was also hoping to participate in the front line of experiential investigations into the way ‘cyberspace’ and ‘real space’ interact in the imagination. What is the nature of the interactions we experience in both spaces? Where does this experience reside in the individual? I became interested in devising a piece that made use of the style or nature of the experience in both media.

I also watched people having sex in a public online space and was interested in how sexual function was stimulated by almost pure, prefrontal, ‘real time’ stimulation, as opposed to the long-standing tradition of literary pornography.

Around about the same time, I saw a performance of a ‘movie’ at the Ars Electronica conference in Linz, Austria. The piece wasn’t terribly interesting, but one great moment happened that set off an alarm in me; the piece was broadcast through a variety of media, but one of the actors suddenly walked through the space we were inhabiting, and I was struck by the way that I responded so differently to the actor in cyber expressions as opposed to real expressions. I liked the smash up and that was the genesis of Fatebook.

I felt that many of the online films and ’shows’ had not really translated the medium away from film and TV into the new zone. They still seemed cinematic. So I was interested in investigating the possibility of narrative that was interactive; both inside the medium, and then across platforms, so to speak.

Andrew: You mention a perceived difference in the way the imagination works in online spaces, what sort of difference(s)? Have you been able to pinpoint anything in particular?

Whit: Well, it’s conjecture and unscientific at this point, but I was struck by how powerful and immediate text scrolling across a computer screen could be. I began to think about teenagers and how ‘personal’ their conversations are in texting and IMing. I felt that the overall tenor of online ‘conversation’ was really close to the atmosphere of pillow talk. Whispering into someone else’s ear. Short phrases. Immediate and almost telepathic. Not couched in metaphor. Not carefully articulated. Even with young adults, it was bedroom to bedroom.

Andrew: I want to pick up on your experience of watching people having sex in a public online space and interacting with viewers via text chat. What aspect(s) or characteristic(s) of that real time environment did you find stimulating?

Whit: It was the sense of something unfolding in the ‘present’ that was an exhibitionistic expression of intimacy. There were also no physical inhibitions, and this is linked to the phenomenon of physical safety and emotional vulnerability in cyberspace. It’s a paradigm that I find very interesting. Young people are especially vulnerable to emotional cruelty online. Not being wary of it and not understanding the intense ‘publicness’ of action in cyberspace.

Andrew: So these fragments, these influences and ideas formed the basis for a devised performance project. What was the first practical step towards realising Fatebook and when did it take place?

Whit: I approached a large theatre company in the US that I have worked with before as a commissioning organization. They are into creating experimental work for young audiences, which I initially thought was a prime audience for the piece, and we agreed to proceed. So we embarked on a year and a half series of workshops with a cast of teenagers.

I started to envision a piece that involved real time online interactions that would bring physical life directly up against cyberspace life; a narrative form that would simply highlight the properties of each. People are so passionate about their online hangouts, and I just wanted to see what would happen.

So I interviewed a number of young adults, put together a cast and started to work on the shape of the experience. The project was going to have a technological component. We dreamed big at the time — we were into developing a kind of real time networked approach to the unfolding of the piece.

It soon became clear that there would need to be two shows: an online show that would proceed for a certain amount of time before a real space show took place; and the real space show would interact with the cyberspace one – hopefully in a seamless manner.

Then, just as we were going into production mode, the economic crisis hit, and the project was axed. So I had to come up with alternative ways to structure and execute the piece that I could manage within my own resources.

Andrew: You say you “just wanted to see what would happen”. Did you pitch that as a project outcome in your brief to the commissioning organization? In other words, was it made explicit from the outset that this work would be wholly experimental? That there were perhaps few precedents at the time?

Whit: Yes. Everyone was marginally comfortable with that. We had also hired a consulting firm to help us figure out the web experience, because not much existed by way of templates. There were going to be aspects of the piece that were very challenging to any organization of any size. Paradigm shifts that I saw happening before our very eyes that most theatre organizations aren’t nimble enough to put into action.

Andrew: Such as?

Whit: Well, marketing for example. Who is it in a theatre organization that tells the story? I began to see that in cyberspace, the employees of an arts organization – the production team, the administration, the artistic leadership, the artists etc. – are the prime communication agents.

Theatre is still used to creating a product, a thing, a production, and then hiring marketers, who shape the ’story’ of the thing and try to sell it to the public. In cyberspace, the artistic director, for instance, has direct access to the people who form the ‘audience’ for the piece. But artistic personnel are notoriously fastidious about talking directly to the public. It’s a status drop or something. They think of their work as the primary focus of their relationship to an audience. But in cyberspace, that relationship is begging to be up-ended.

I saw an opportunity to build a community, where the marketing of the piece was indistinguishable from its content. So I began to say things like “its marketing is its content” which some people found disturbing; as if that couldn’t be the content of a theatre piece. Our partner organization found this aspect particularly challenging.

Andrew: So by virtue of its existence in cyberspace, the company was marketing the production at the same time that it was creating the story and characters for the piece?

Whit: I tend to describe the creative process of this piece as writing a novel on the fly that you are shooting at the same time as a film, that you are broadcasting as soon as you have the dailies, and rehearsing after you take the curtain up!

Andrew: Nice. As you mentioned earlier, there’s also a ‘physical world’ component to Fatebook, the show that will take place in September as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Have you resorted back to ‘traditional’ marketing roles and structures for that?

Whit: We do have plans to undertake traditional marketing techniques at the same time as we carry out the online component. There have been ramifications to that. I am now writing grant applications with slightly grandiose claims about reducing the normal ratios of production to marketing costs. People are very hopeful about the efficacy of communication in cyberspace, but they are also increasingly wary of slight changes in the atmosphere of online communication and it’s almost a totally commercial zone.

Andrew: Is there an absence of morality in virtual space? A relinquishing of responsibility?

Whit: I think that personal responsibility as a concept is in flux because of the interaction of fact and fiction in cyberspace. For instance, people have been entrapped for interacting sexually with under aged youth by policemen posing as youth. It’s difficult to tell where the crime really is. It seems to be an Orwellian sort of thought crime. And people have told me about relationships they’ve had with someone they’ve never met or seen online. They wonder if they are having an affair. I say, “do you have ’sex’?” They say, “well, yes, I guess”. And I say “you’re having an affair”. There’s just so much room for manoeuvring.

Andrew: I’m interested in this notion of blurring fact and fiction online, particularly in relation to building characters that inhabit social media space (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr etc.). Could you describe the character development process and your online relationship with the actors as the director?

Whit: I should point out that the 13 actors working on Fatebook have never all been together in the same room at the same time – until this coming Monday when we start work on the real space show. The actors have devised characters whole cloth out of their own lives. So much of the content for this show is autobiographical. I have been steering the development of character – as co-author – remotely. Facebook and Twitter have been our rehearsal space so far. We created parameters, and identities – in collaboration – and then started interacting in these spaces in a variety of ways.

Andrew: Could you give an example of a parameter?

Whit: I watched and commented individually as I was devising ways of guiding the actors into the situations I envisioned. I wanted certain characters to be ’supernatural’ for example, but I didn’t tell them, I didn’t want them to ‘hit the nail on the head’ so to speak. So I guided them towards certain things by inference. Soon, one character, for instance, was devising a ‘revirginization’ procedure. Eventually, I took almost five months of online interactions and then started compiling, editing, and rewriting.

Ame Montoya - responding to the theme 'Passing Out'. Photo © Matt Saunders

Andrew: I want to pick up on the term ‘real time’. We’ve used it several times now. It’s a term I associate with ‘real time Web’, often used to suggest a demarcation between a static text-based era of the Internet and the current (instantaneous) global communication platform that it has become. What does ‘real time’ mean in the context of Fatebook?

Whit: To me, it means I can communicate with you without making an appointment. We don’t need to get our bodies anywhere and we just pick up where we left off, whenever we want. It’s realer than real time. I’m not sure whether that describes the actuality of real time online, or perhaps more the experience of it.

Andrew: On the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival website Fatebook is described thus: “The action plays out within a labyrinth of screens displaying the shifting cityscapes and intimate spaces in which the characters live. Twelve projectors and live video feeds blur the line between the digital environment and the physical one.” What are the tensions in shifting between digital and physical interfaces in this performance? What does the physical dimension bring to the performance?

Whit: Well, that’s the point, I think. There will be such an immersion in illusion that I’m not sure the participant will necessarily know what is live and what is canned. The environments well be established then mutated. Characters will be communicating across the room, in ways that it will not be clear how much is live. There will also be live green-screened broadcasting. The whole milieu of the performance is illusion. Then there will be a complete meltdown of the piece that will plunk us all into real space and we’ll suddenly see and feel the unmediated room and hear unmediated sound.

Andrew: What do you hope will emerge at that moment of real space recognition?

Whit: I don’t know. I actually think that presence in real space is the holy grail of experience, and proximity against the odds is the miracle. So, I’m not sure what cyber proximity is going to do with the traditional structures of meaning and what cyber availability is going to do to our physical metaphors. I feel like I just want, at this point, to highlight the differences and make them really salient.

Andrew: Thank you very much for your time and insight into the workings of Fatebook.

Focused and choreographed, the young performers highlight some of the ironies and contradictions in grown-up speech:

‘You speak a foreign language so we don’t understand.
You tell us to shut up.
We promise to be as good as gold.
You tell us it’s all going to be ok’.

The children play from a line facing the audience and follow trajectories that change according to the content of their speeches; sometimes addressing us in front of climbing frames, or from the top of a stack of chairs, other times left alone in the line, confrontational, direct and composed. Their delivery is rhythmical, in unison, and this creates a controlled environment in which individual and collective voices are clear.

When they refuse to speak into the microphone. When they carefully place their hands in their pockets. When they break into play. When they silently observe the audience, allowing for thought, emotion and reaction. Their words become a metaphor of the game of adulthood in this choreographed staging, where the lines on the floor of the gymnasium, as well as the shapes that the children form intersect and at times counteract. The children speak in a manner that would usually be beyond their means; we see them stand silent of their own accord, obey someone else’s rules, yet still maintain power and conviction. They work impressively well together, breathe together and manage to own a seventy-minute show.

Hierarchies of knowledge are removed in this performance and there is tension in the way the children stand, the things they say and the space they say them in. However, the relationship between text and physicality is not always explored to the fullest extent, and as much as the performance seeks for a balanced interrogation of language, it stops itself from going further by the limitations of its own controlled environment.

There is a noticeable power shift that occurs between the adults in the audience and the children performing onstage. This manifests itself through progression of text from the general to the specific, from humorous to confrontational, but also through the action onstage. At times, the audience is allowed to be part of the dialogue while at others it is faced with un-childlike youths, rigid, direct, and impersonal. The delineation between the two offers an infinite number of possibilities for the performance to probe its own structure. That was the challenge that Tim Etchells took on, and one that was met with a thought provoking, focused and complex performance.

This video takes a behind the scenes look at an exciting east London site specific performance project, based on the musical legacy of renowned and unsung composer/musician Robert Jacob. Jacob was known amongst peers as “The Rain Emperor” for his infatuation with the character of rain; and this production, directed by his daughter, Judy Jacob, brings together multiple artists from across a range of styles and practices to create an original and immersive performance experience at the Village Underground in Shoreditch, London.

The Rain Emperor will be on from the 26-28th February 2009. For more information and to book tickets see The Rain Emperor website.

In search of a new theatre

Portrait of Meyerhold.

In the early 1900s Meyerhold was still involved with symbolist drama but had begun to experiment with specific elements of the stage; improvising with the proscenium and playing with light. In his production of Alexander Blok’s The Fairground Booth in 1906, he put some of his new techniques to test. The simple but archaic theatre included elements of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, traditional Japanese theatre and characteristics of the old theatres of Spain and England. The most significant development was Meyerhold’s use of a theatre within the theatre, demonstrating the potential of a deliberate display of theatrical illusion. The scenery was non-realistic and sets were raised and lowered in full view of the audience. The Fairground Booth enabled Meyerhold to explore a form which challenged the theatrical conventions from inside the dominant symbolist framework of the day.

The beginnings of Biomechanics

The production of Mikhail Lermontov’s play Masquerade marked a significant step in the development of Meyerhold’s ideas. The decor of the production by Alexander Golovin was designed as an emotional codex which would reflect and in many cases set the mood or atmosphere of the play as it progressed through its various stages. The colours of the curtains and backdrops were designed to lead the viewer from one stage of the production to another so that it became an intricate part of the actors’ performances on stage – highlighting and emphasising their emotional content and psychology. The rising and falling of curtains was not simply a device for opening and closing an act, their graphic input became part of the dramatic process and helped develop the action of the play itself.

The curtains in Masquerade.

To use a musical analogy, the curtains were meant to play the role of an overture with additional orchestral interludes. This was the beginning of breaking up the hierarchy in Russian text-based theatre. Here the abstract graphic element of set design began to play a more equal role in the production as a whole and with this the first seeds were sown of a new acting technique which Meyerhold would name ‘Biomechanics’.

The influence of Constructivist design

Meyerhold’s production of The Magnanimous Cuckold became his boldest experiment in this process. Meyerhold was already developing the acting technique of Biomechanics, a series of exercises to develop and release the emotional potential of the actor through movement. He enlisted Lubov Popova to design a set for the performance. The result was a machine-like moving structure with platforms and whirling wheels against a plain curtain backdrop. The actors’ performances formed a dynamic, pulsating spectacle, moving in unison and integrated with the rhythmic movement of Popova’s constructivist structure. The result was an organic unity on stage between actor and set.

The Man Who Was Thursday Set Drawing.

This production sparked a trend in collaborations with constructivist artists to design theatre sets. The most well known was Alexander Tairov’s production of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday designed by the artist Alexander Vesin. He built a structure with lifts and moving walkways which, it would seem, befitted Chesterton’s literary creation. However the set itself was a disappointment. In many cases it appeared clumsy and actors found it difficult to perform within Vesin’s labyrinth-like and reputedly cumbersome design. Part of the reason why Vesin’s design did not succeed as intended is because the implications of Meyerhold’s innovations had not been entirely understood. The structure was abstract and constructivist in character, but it was also a fairly concrete object and in some sense representational and functional. It was a space in which actors could interact with each other and a world which bore resemblances to emerging forms of the time. In some sense a return to naturalism, albeit of a contemporary or constructivist/urban/industrialist character.

Popova’s Machine

Popova’s machine was completely different in character. It was machine-like but far from the common structures of the day. In present day terms we might refer to it as an installation. It was abstract, it blurred meaning, and had no function other than to be an object in the production. This suited Meyerhold’s desire for the crossing and re-crossing of the borders between tragedy and comedy, pathos and farce and hence embodied his experimentation with theatrical form.

Popova's Machine in production.

The blurring and crossing of borders can be found in Japanese artistic and theatrical forms; as can the emptiness of the stage which like a monotone Japanese landscape painting depends on what is taken out, giving the audience a chance to use their own imagination to fill the void. In this sense, while wanting to stimulate and lead an audience, Meyerhold did not want to control their emotions.

Popova's Machine poster.

Meyerhold’s interest in Japan

To further understand these developments in Russian theatre, it’s important to note Meyerhold’s interest in the traditional performing arts of Japan, particularly Kabuki and Noh. One of the principal characteristics of Noh, and a paradox in a theatre of masks, is that the theatrical process is “unmasked” in full view of the audience. Stage technology is revealed and incorporated into the “work of art”, so that the process becomes an important medium for preserving and relaying information about the play.

Scene from a Noh theatre production of Okina Hōnō.

This appealed to Meyerhold who proceeded to turn his theatre inside out, rejecting the play as an art form wholly based on text. The theatre that Meyerhold wanted demanded a new type of actor with a new style of acting, and Kabuki with its emphasis on dance and physical movement served Meyerhold’s purposes well. The rhythm of dance was important to the futurists and avant-garde artists because through rhythm a new life could be presented and a new type of person would embody this rhythm for a new future era where movement speed and dynamism were optimum. Biomechanics with its visual/graphic potential was meant to be a living synthesis of this transformation.

A ‘return’ to classical drama?

By the time Meyerhold put on his version of The Government Inspector it was heralded by the authorities as Meyerhold’s return to classical drama. Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment (Narkompros) had earlier criticised Meyerhold’s experiments but welcomed Meyerhold’s return to traditional theatre. However, looking at the photographs and designs of this production the innovations which Meyerhold had pioneered were still apparent. Meyerhold had not abandoned his experiments and they continued to inform his work as much as before. As he himself commented, “Just because we are not rushing about the stage waving red flags does not mean that theatre is not revolutionary”.

Mannequins in the making.

Moreover the revolutionary quality of the production was borne out with Meyerhold borrowing techniques from cinema. In some scenes, several events take place simultaneously and the action spills over from one side of the stage into the other in a torrent of movement uncharacteristic of earlier classical productions. Meyerhold went even further. In the final scene where actors are required to freeze in still poses to dramatise the ossified and static nature of the world portrayed in the production, Meyerhold substituted the actors with specially designed mannequins.

Mannequins in Meyerhold's production of The Government Inspector.

The graphic quality is unmistakable with echoes from Bunraku (puppet theatre of Japan) puppets and the dramatic poses or mie of Kabuki actors. Meyerhold’s vision was bold and radical in its strong integration of the graphic component into the production and emphasises his ability to transcend the boundaries of theatrical form. In this case, instead of real people playing the role of frozen mannequins, real mannequins played the role of people. Whatever Meyerhold’s intention, watching rows of lifelike figures gaze into the auditorium, transformed like idols from an another era, must have made for an eerie climax.

Andrew: I’d like to start by asking about Rotozaza’s background. Where did you meet and what were the contexts you came from when you started out?

Silvia: Well we met in Aosta in Italy during a workshop organised by an ex-student of the Lecoq school in Paris. Anthony went to Lecoq from 95-97 and I was doing a similar course in a school called the Arsenale in Milan. In 1999, Ant came to Milan and we did our first show together Due; we did our second show, Next, the year after in Paris and then I moved to London and we started full-time.

Ant: Since that workshop in 98′, we’ve been doing pretty much all the work together; with a few exceptions: Silvia’s done some work with Shunt for example, Romcom is something I did alone with a writer called Glen Neath. In the first four years, we did about 14 or 15 shows. Some of them were one-offs and they were quite varied too, including public interventions, large scale happenings and installations. The largest project we did was in Abney Cemetery in Stoke Newington and that was a collaboration with over 60 artists. It was also our first commission, so for the first four or five years we weren’t really earning money through our work, we were trying not to spend too much on the projects and I guess we got quite good at doing things for very little.

Alexandre Archenoult and Silvia Meruriali in Next, Paris 2000. Photo by Gaelle Bona.

Some of those shows, like Grace and Next for example, were really important in terms of creating particular worlds that we’ve often gone back to. In Grace there were two girls on stage rehearsing a show, then after a while you realise that there’s actually only one person on stage, that they’re two halves of the same person; one of them is pretty much the director and the other’s the actor. So we got into this idea of portraying the two sides of the self; one person thinks hard about what to say and do and the other person does the best they can and gets on with it.

Silvia: And then what happens when someone’s watching all this? What does it change if there is someone there watching who can tell you what they think?

Ant: That was something that figured in the later work with guest performers, and unrehearsed guests. Being watched in Grace for example, meant that the audience was pretty much an invisible presence: you’re there watching but it’s like spying on the process, which is something that changed a lot later on but that we also came back to as well. The idea of being watched was explored by a sort of interruption in the show. We were in the Lion and Unicorn theatre, above this pub, with a lot of dodgy Irish drinkers in the bar downstairs. The door leads onto the stage and so during the show, there was quite a hermetic feel to the room, like a sort of bubble, but then the door opened and a man appeared holding a pint glass and clearly he had come up from downstairs. He said “sorry I thought the toilet was here” and one of the girls replied “no it’s downstairs”. He went away but then came back later and asked if he could watch and they say “yes, ok, sit down there”. So the audience thinks there’s some nutter in the room and eventually he starts chipping in with some advice.

Silvia: He had a red light that he used to ‘comment’ on the action. Turning on the red light meant it was good.

Andrew: So was this a planned interruption?

Ant: Yes, he was an actor.

Zhana Ivanova and Silvia Mercuriali in Grace 2001. Photo by Thomas Peter.

Andrew: What sort of training was involved for the actor to achieve a ‘credible’ interruption?

Ant: well this particular actor was a very good actor, generally I think it’s a matter of being convincing in quite a traditional way. There was never a moment where we decided that the audience was going to click. One night they’d get it early on and another night they’d get it very late.

We often have these moments in shows, like in Doublethink, when all the lights go out and we pretend that there’s been an explosion in the lighting box: the two operators are scurrying around and eventually they come on stage and just keep the thing going by whispering instructions into the guest performers’ ears. It then slowly becomes clear that they’re actually fictional characters.

Silvia: It’s the idea that they’re trying to put some sort of doubt in the audience as to whether it’s real or not, trying to keep them on the edge, not knowing how much of it is rehearsed. It’s fascinating when the real world comes in. But to what degree can you make it come in realistically?

Ant: In terms of getting that right, it’s a delicate thing; we talk about it a lot, just down to even how much you flick a switch to make it seem like they’re panicking, a bit too much and it it’s obviously staged, less then it’s as if they don’t care enough. It’s the sort of thing that audiences are very good at immediately tapping into. But in terms of mimicking reality, it’s an interesting thing because at the same time you’ve got people who are not acting at all on stage, who are literally being themselves and just responding to instructions.

Silvia: It’s quite a delicate balance.

Ant: When there’s a rehearsed side to the show, like in Doublethink, it’s a case of slipping ourselves in between the fiction of the scene and the structure of the show and the allegory that slowly starts to rise from a situation which is not at all fictional.

Lucy Foster, Silvia Mercuriali and Finlay Robertson in Doublethink. Photo by Chiara Contrino.

Andrew: From what you’ve already said about the diversity of work in Rotozaza’s early years, exploring different forms and concepts and then moving gradually towards work with guest performers and this sense of ‘performing the real’, has the pursuit of ‘reality’ now become a recurrent part of the process in your work or not necessarily?

Ant: I don’t know if it’s necessarily about ‘performing the real’, to be honest it’s more a question of representation and playing with the line between just being in the room, just being in the present and then yes structuring something whereby an atmosphere or an allegory starts to appear.

Silvia: What we try to do is definitely not naturalistic. It’s not about trying to recreate reality, it’s about always making sure that we are here in this moment and in this room and then we can explore all kinds of worlds and weird situations, because we know that the audience and the actors are there and the unrehearsed guests are real and that they really don’t know what will happen next.

Ant: It’s really about having a sense of an event, that it’s happening now, which for us we keep coming back to as the reason why we’re doing work in the live realm at all. You know, because there needs to be a reason, and I feel that a lot of theatre practitioners quite often lose track of why it is they’re not doing film or TV or media that is inherently dependant on some sort of recorded format. Our starting point is always to think of a new way of creating a sense in the room that this is unique to the live realm, that there is a point of need for me [the audience] having travelled to see this, and then working from there.

Andrew: Where does the name Rotozaza come from?

Ant: I’ve always loved the work of John Tinguely, the Swiss sculptor. He made three pieces called Rotozaza 1, 2 and 3. One of them was a big machine that threw balls, it was popular with children, you sort of threw balls at it and it regurgitated them and threw them back out. It was quite a scary sort of machine as well, you could see all the nuts and bolts. The second one was a huge installation that was made for a world peace conference in Sweden and it was a machine that took plates from one end of the room to the other, and at the other end was a big frying pan that smashed the plates, and then Tinguely turned that into a performance, using the sculpture as a site. There was an opera going on at the same time that dealt with the chaos of modern life, it was inherently a cross-genre, multi-disciplinary world that he created with a lot of structures and energies. I also just liked the word.

Jean Tinguely's Heureka in Zürich-Seefeld (Zürichhorn).

Andrew: You were talking earlier about Doublethink and Romcom, how did the ‘guest performer’ strand of your work come about?

Ant: The starting point for all the guest performer work was a piece that I did with a friend of mine called Sam Britton. He’s an electronic musician and a composer. We were invited to do a piece for a festival in Paris, I didn’t really know what I was going to do but I knew a friend of mine was going to be there called Henri and I just had this idea of him on stage pottering around and dealing with stuff. I didn’t think too much about it to begin with but then I thought he’s never going to agree to rehearse a show with me; he won’t want to assume the responsibility of being a performer, because he’s not like that at all, he’s never been on stage and he’s not at all extrovert. On the other hand he has the ability to just speak into a microphone, for example, and yet remain within his own world. So all these things led to the thought that if we create a list of instructions for him and that he agrees to do as well as he can and he trusts that we’re not going to ask him to do anything embarrassing, it could work. I think he understood very well what we had in mind and, bravely, he said yes.

The voice for this piece was pre-recorded and we worked with Gad Sabba, someone we’ve gone back to quite a lot subsequently. There’s a very particular quality to his voice, somewhat ambivalent: sometimes he can seem very harsh and sometimes very vulnerable. In the performance, the voice is quite cut up and you forget that it’s pre-recorded until you’re suddenly reminded by certain glitches.

The show was a revelation for us, and because we had three nights we thought we can’t just do it with Henri three times in a row so I asked two other people who I knew to do it and it was fascinating. Since then it’s been essential for us to choose the guest performers, because it’s not something everyone can do.

Andrew: Why is that?

Ant: It’s different for different shows. For Romcom and Doublethink it requires people who are at ease with their own personalities and who are not going to stress out about being on stage or try too hard, try to entertain or be funny.

Silvia: Happy to be watched without panicking or without wanting to cover up what they are, that’s the most important thing.

Andrew: Even though these people are receiving instructions and they don’t need to rehearse anything in this pre-made structure, do you still require them to retain a degree of ‘actor control’?

Silvia: They don’t need to be actors at all, just people that are comfortable with themselves, because that’s mainly what we want to show in the performance is themselves; how different people with different personalities and ways of doing things can change and enrich the show. The instructions, if you read them on paper, are nothing special, so what is interesting is watching people cope with the instructions and performing them live.

Ant: And there’s always the unknown things that happen. Take Henri for example, there’s a moment where he’s up the top of a ladder in the spotlight and there’s a deafening noise all around him, then suddenly there’s dramatic music and he walks down the ladder towards a cradle that’s descended with the sound of a baby crying and he’s told to unwrap it. He unwraps this bundle and it’s a watermelon and at that point a knife flies in behind him on stage and he’s told to cut it to bits, but in that show he didn’t see the knife and figured that he must have a knife on him somewhere because we were constantly asking him to take things out of his pockets. So he started searching through his pockets and he found all this stuff like a gun which he used later on, but he couldn’t find anything to cut with, so he picked up the watermelon and first took off the label, which was very Henri, and he raised it above his head and let it drop on the floor and it split into two perfect halves. Given the same situation, another person may well have panicked.

Andrew: In terms of writing these pieces, how important is it to leave space for things to happen?

Ant: Very important.

Andrew: What is an instruction in the Rotozaza context and particularly in your performance Five in the Morning? In that show the audience is able to hear instructions being given out loud to three performers on stage in a kind of deserted ‘water-world’ theme park.

Silvia: In Five in the Morning, which is very different from the other guest performance shows, the voices are the performers’ own voices which you find out as the show goes on. So the instructions are internal, giving yourself instructions in a situation where you’re having to decide what to do on the spot, but that’s a very different kind of instruction than Doublethink for example where it’s not about the voice being the other half of the self, but is clearly someone else. It’s like some sort of empty outsider who’s making decisions, a sort of brain out there that is doing an experiment on the guests.

Five in the Morning. Photo by Enrico Neves.

Ant: In Doublethink, there are two operators pushing the buttons, there’s a male operator and a female operator, there’s a male guest performer and a female guest and they pair up and slowly you start to understand that they never normally talk to each other, but here they’re forced to communicate because of a crisis. It’s like Five in the Morning in that it’s a very awkward relationship but one which can also produce some beautiful results in certain situations.

Silvia: It’s true that the voice as psychological entity is quite a recurrent theme in our work. Even in Ooff which is probably our least conceptual show, the voices that give instructions to the two guest performers are the voices coming from the minds of the other rehearsed characters that are on stage with them.

Ant: Ooff is a piece with two guest performers and Silvia as a character called ‘Mini Lavette’ who’s a sort of sport-obsessed girl in crazy, sporty clothes. There’s a grid on the floor, A, B, C, D – 1, 2, 3, 4 and two speakers. The two guest performers are inside the grid, moving from square to square, one listening to one speaker and the other listening to the other. The speakers are speaking together, so the whole thing is pretty chaotic and occasionally they’ll say copy Mini, and Mini Lavette is running around doing various exercises and then demonstrating a movement that they have to immediately learn and remember to recreate whenever they hear a certain sound cue, so they’re learning things at the same time as running around boxing and stretching. The whole piece is very brightly lit and exercise-video-like. Then it changes state and becomes a night time scene where the guest performers suddenly gain a lot of power and generally the situation turns around and Mini finds herself slightly bullied by these two people and the idea is that they are products of her imagination or dreams. We were interested in the idea that when you dream, you can become a victim of your own creation.

Matt Rudkin with Silvia Meruriali in OOFF. Photo by Chiara Contrino.

Silvia: You can also be a victim of the instructions you give yourself in various situations in real life. So that’s like in Grace, which is probably why we often go back to that show because there’s two people being the same person in a conflicting relationship. The same thing goes for the voices and the guests performers; it’s what you tell yourself and how you perform it. In real life you always have to negotiate between what you tell yourself and what you actually manage to do in the end.

Ant: And the whole negotiation is between extremes of violence and intimacy a lot of the time, and that again is something we discovered in Grace.

Andrew: It’s interesting, sitting on the outside listening to these descriptions of your performances and going back to the name Rotozaza, the Tinguely installations you mentioned, the machines, the switchboards in Doublethink, people dislocated from one another, instructions from voices, whether internal or external, this reminds me of certain German expressionist work that portrays the insides of society as mechanical, powered by lost individuals with a sense of alienation from one’s work, oneself and others.

Ant: I don’t think the performances are expressionistic in form, but there may be a parallel in that we’re very interested in media and in the way that our predicaments in life are dominated by the media. This expresses itself in the shows through focus on process; seeing the nuts and bolts of what is going on is really important and generally things get taken apart until you can see through them.

Also in terms of the actual performance mechanism of interpreting impulse, the agency comes from the instruction. So in a sense this may answer your question about what an instruction is. Perhaps an instruction is agency for action, which may be obvious… We talk about agency but we also talk about agents on stage and super agents, who tell them what to do.

Andrew: What would be an example of a super agent?

Silvia: Maybe the closest thing to a super agent we’ve had was in Doublethink with a voice that is neither me or Neil, it’s something pre-recorded that we’ve been given, and we’re just operating it. A super agent is the one who controls the whole thing.

Ant: In Doublethink you have this screen with two people either side of it, with the voice giving instructions to both of them, so it’s like a homogeneous agency, like a common denominator. In a similar sense, Five in the Morning was a shared space but turned out to be a psychological construct; obviously at a certain point there’s going to be a crisis in that, it’s not sustainable, it’s something that we naturally gravitate towards in ourselves. We tell ourselves things that we feel other people are being told and yet at a certain point we have to come back to the things that we can only really tell ourselves, and so that’s where the two operators split and come on stage and deal with things separately. That was a super agent, and beneath them when the electricity runs then the agents have to take over and do it themselves.

When I think of the word ‘picture’ I see old paintings in a front room, wooden frames and glass casing. Each picture tells a story through a composition of strokes: a boat at sea in heavy weather, an ambler passing by a rusty barn etc, there is a sense of stasis, a frozen world in ‘tableau’ form. I also think of photographs, a more mechanical medium that produces similar effects. Pictures never change, the subjects never move, but upon each viewing the eye may pick out a different detail, determine a different outcome to the story. Elements of mood, light, and time of day alter the viewer’s perception. Forced Entertainment’s The World in Pictures is a living picture gallery, a loud, playful and visual history of human evolution set across multiple frames; framed by the performance space at Riverside Studios, by the notion of time in performance, by the physical elements of set, costume and body for example. Objects on a tv screen, words spoken through microphones, painted in the air, choreographed and danced.

This juxtapositon of framing devices was an affont on common notions of perception. The very idea of distilling thousands of years of human evolution into a two hour performance is itself a critique of the writing and presentation of history. Historical discourses settle all too often for approximation over complex detail, meaning that misrepresentation and revisionism in history books is rife. Forced Entertainment brings the lunacy of history into focus and asks us to pay attention to how stories are framed.

In this sense the play opens with an ‘exercise’ – a case in point that becomes a leitmotiv for the rest of the piece. A lone character called Gerry walks on stage and tells the audience a story. Using words and imagination, he addresses the audience directly, intimately, incites us to translate his words into pictures in our minds so that we become the owners of (his)story. We were invited to imagine ourselves on the edge of a high-rise building looking down at the street below. We were asked to remember what happened on our way to the theatre, the places we passed through, the people we saw in the tube.

This opening sequence hinges on the matter of perception, but it also provokes the audience into questioning the extent and reach of a theatre event. Where does the frame begin and end with the picture in theatre? Is it on stage? Does it carry over into life outisde the theatre as Gerry suggests?

In somewhat of a coincidence, on my way to the Riverside Studios that evening, I felt an impulse to write. I was sitting on a tube train between King’s Cross and Hammersmith and nothing much was happening, so I took out my notebook and began writing thoughts in a stream of consciousness fashion. I decided to include that stream of writing here verbatim as an illustration of extending the frame of theatre beyond the walls of the auditorium, beyond the set time of the play and to illustrate one person’s perception of the world:

Headphone drone, the white-boned groan of an average English clone in a westbound tube on a light, bright Saturday night. Nothing more to share than baffled, wrinkled stares, hacking and clawing away at beauty – now decayed – nothing but the hour, the potent ticking power of revolutions in time, Earth revolving, spinning, moaning. Was time invented in the mind?

Everything to look at, nothing of interest. In every nook and cranny, detritus and grime, the shadow is in the crime, sounds of cries, internal sighs, killing culture, mass-murder in fields of ether and the last vein of pain begins to wane and filters through the body’s drains, except your stare, your twitching eye, thick black mascara, button nose and pink lips, wry smile – you dare to stare at me and then with opened mouth, comes this riotous, raucous laughter.

The roar of nothing more, nothing more to abhor, above this arid earth I soar, eagle without claws, gliding over warm, swirling storms, released from earth pores, canyons of open musical score and rampant sprawling animal runs, tracks of feet, traps of meat, lines of speed, spirit, thrill, love. Love is the mind melting thoughts that pertain to all that violates its social name, shame, fame, defamed, maimed and reclaimed, onwards, onwards, this train is heading onwards for collision with the night.

An example of a recent fictional representation of the cyborg is the lead character in Mamoru Oshii’s 2004 animation film ‘Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2’. The story revolves around the cyborg detective Batou as he tries to unravel the reasons behind a murderous robot revolt in the year 2032. The storyline is similar to that of the famous 1950 science fiction novel, iRobot by Issac Asimov, though Asimov kept the cyborg or the union of machine and human organism in the background. Innocence questions the relationship between man and machine and speculates on a society where the position of the machine has been elevated to human equal and has become the much represented 1980’s disaster scenario of the dominant, malevolant, dictator machine.

Mamoru Ishii's Ghost in the Shell 2 - Innocence. 2004

Though there is a clear distinction to be made between cyborg (cybernetic organism, part machine, part human) and humanoid robot (fully automated mechanical robot designed in human form), most fictional representations blur the distinction and posit the cyborg and humanoid robot as the ‘other’, and thus suppress both forms to a lower rank. Taming the machine was partly the subject of Asimov’s three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second law.

This is a long-standing view that can be traced back to at least mid-17th century Cartesian thought with Descartes argument in Meditations that he considered animals to be simply machines or automata; and that hat kept human beings above the level of automata was an ‘immaterial soul’. Almost a century later in 1748 and the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de la Mettrie wrote a book called Man a Machine in which he declared that man was no different to any other automata. This early materialist view caused him to flee to Holland in retreat from persecution by the Roman Catholic church.

According to Bruce Mazlish in his essay ‘The man-machine and artificial intelligence’ the notion of automata during the enlightenment period was equivocal in the sense that it provoked fear but also the promise of creative ‘Promethean’ force. The tension between these two aspects of the automaton at play is best illustrated in Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein. Later on I’ll move on to a brief discussion of Donna Haraway’s influence on the contemporary academic understanding of the cyborg, but suffice to point out here that both Shelley’s monster and Haraway’s cyborg are products of technology and science, and of culture and social reality; they both transgress and put into question the idea of eugenics in terms of body measurements and classifications, and they raise issues of gender and reproduction.

Cyborg as human enhancement

The term ‘cyborg’ was created by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in a paper submitted to NASA in 1960 titled “Drugs, Space and Cybernetics’ in which they referred to their conception of an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments. Their concept was the outcome of thinking about the need for an intimate relationship between human and machine as the new frontier of space exploration was racing ahead, fuelled by US and Soviet Cold War political rivalry.

In the essay, Clynes and Kine wrote: “The task of adapting man’s body to any environment he may choose will be made easier by increased knowledge of homeostatic functioning, the cybernetic aspects of which are just beginning to be understood and investigated. In the past, evolution brought about the altering of bodily functions to suit different environments. Starting as of now, it will be possible to achieve this to some degree without alteration of heredity by suitable biochemical, physiological, and electronic modifications of man’s existing modus vivendi…” The degree to which body alteration and enhancement has progressed since the 1960’s is perhaps best illustrated through recent applications of body enhancement such as the example of Matthew Nagle. From complete paralysis of his limbs, Nagle was able to “open e-mail, play a computer game, and pinch a prosthetic hand’s fingers” thanks to a sensor implanted in Nagle’s brain.

Claudia Mitchell, first US resident to receive a bionic arm.

The application of physiological modifications does not stop at life-enhancements for people with severe limb disabilities, it extends to the ethically questionable field of military strategy and advanced weapon systems. In order for the body to remain integral to militray operation it must adapt accordingly with vanguard technology. A similar argument could be made for all human beings living in increasingly technological environments, where the technology often surpasses human ability in terms of speed, transmission, communication, movement, memory etc. This is the territory of performance artist and researcher Stelarc.

Cyborg as military enhancement

In a book called Cyborg Worlds, published in 1989, Chris Hables Gray wrote a chapter titled ‘The Cyborg Soldier: the US military and the post-modern warrior’, in which he argued that the soldier is “(re)constructed and (re)programmed to fit integrally into weapon systems. The basic currency of war, the human body, is the site of these modifications, whether it is the ‘wetware’ (the mind and hormones), the ‘software’ (habits, skills, disciplines) or the ‘hardware’ (the physical body). To overcome the limitations of yesterday’s soldier, as well as the limitations of automation as such, the military is moving towards a more subtle man/machine integration: a cybernetic organism (‘cyborg’) model of the soldier, that combines machine-like endurance with a redefined human intellect to the overall weapons system.”

In her 1991 Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway refers to modern war as a “cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget.”

Echoing this today, in 2006 on the US army website you can read about ‘FCS’ or Future Combat Systems which is the immersion of the “soldier in an environment that is fully aware and fully integrated in an interactive computerized network system in which information is being relayed instantaneously. The soldier does not co-exist with the technology but becomes part of that technology itself, an integrated unit of action alongside war machinery, robotic devices and other military equipment.”

BigDog US military combat robot.

“FCS is about the 21st Century Soldier. Lessons learned in Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Global War on Terrorism have shown that a joint, combined arms, network centric force has the ability to both rapidly defeat an enemy in battle and act as a key element in follow-on peacekeeping efforts. The core of the FCS-equipped UA – is a highly integrated structure of 18 manned and unmanned air and ground maneuver sustainment systems, bound together by a distributed network and supporting the soldier, acting as a unified combat force in the Joint environment. The network uses a Battle Command architecture that integrates networked communications, network operations, sensors, battle command system, training, and MUM reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities to enable situational understanding and operations at a level of synchronization not achievable in current network centric operations.” (BG(P) Charles A. Cartwright and Dennis A. Muilenburg)

Cyborg as metaphor

Donna Haraway is one of the leading academic thinkers in the field of the ‘posthuman body‘, she is a professor of feminist theory and technoscience at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In 1991, in her seminal work Simians, Cyborgs, and Women she wrote the Cyborg Manifesto, subtitled ‘Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. In the manifesto, she uses the image of the cyborg as a metaphor of high-tech culture that breaks the old dualisms of Western thinking like the Cartesian division of mind and body, or the notion of the Self and the Other, male and female, reality and appearance, and truth and illusion.

These are notions that Stelarc breaks down through his performance practice, though arguably the dichotomy of male and female is still upheld with stelarc’s exploration of the cyborg through his constant reference to ‘the body’ which is his body in performance, often completely naked revealing his male genitalia, and thus ‘the body’ becomes a male construct in Stelarc’s world.

Haraway argues that we are no longer able to think of ourselves in these dualisms and she pushes the argument further by saying that we no longer able to think of ourselves as biological entities. Instead, we have become ‘cyborgs’ which she defines as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”.

Cyborg as performance – Stelarc

Stelarc is an Australian-based artist, currently doing research at Brunel University in the UK. He has been doing performances since 1968 and has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA at events related to new music, dance festivals and experimental theatre. In his performances he has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet to explore what he calls “alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body”. Some examples of this are his performance with a third hand, a virtual arm, a virtual body and a stomach sculpture. He has acoustically and visually probed the body- having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon, approximately two metres of internal space. He has done twenty-five body suspensions with metal shark hook insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations, including some in remote locations.

As I mentioned before when Stelarc talks about his body he refers to it as ‘the body’ by which he is referring to the “cerebral, phenomenological, aware, and operational entity immersed in the world…when this body speaks as I, it does so realizing that in the context of “I go to London” or “I make art”, the letter I designates only “this body goes to London”, “this body makes art.” It’s a huge metaphysical leap to imagine that I refers to an inner essence, self, or soul. (in Stelarc, The Monograph, chapter 7 “Animating bodies, mobilizing technologies”).

Evolution (Writing 1 word simultaneously with 3 hands) Maki Gallery, Tokyo 1982. Photo Keisuke Oki

The high suspensions, especially the one in Copenhagen from a crane, above the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen – 28th June, 1985, are a way of “experiencing the downforce of 1g gravitational pull”. The stomach sculpture also figures in the realm of the intimate, inner-body space.

Stelarc’s notion of the body is reminiscent of the idea that Artaud often referred to, “the body without organs”. In The stomach sculpture Stelarc says “The technology invades and functions within the body not as a prosthetic replacement, but as an aesthetic adornment. One no longer looks at art, nor performs as art, but contains art. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or a soul, but simply for a sculpture.”

The Body without organs is a chastised body. In his radio play of 1947, To Be Done with the Judgement of God, Antonin Artaud proposed a kind of “Dionysian castration”:

By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic
reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.

(in Artaud, Selected Writings, pp 570 -571)

Stelarc’s view on the hollow body or the body without organs is that a hollow body would be a better host for all the technological components needed to put inside it. In past evolutionary development a change of locomotion could be argued as the significant event (shift to bipedal liberating hands as manipulators), future development would be prompted by a change that was only skin deep. This hollow body would be literally a body without organs a body that need not be organ-ized. (Stelarc in The Monograph)

Stretched Skin - Third Hand. Yokohama Art Gallery, Yokohama - 29 May, 1988. Photo by Simon Hunter

The other site for Stelarc’s body is one that attempts to be in a way ‘universal’, it is the body as ‘obsolete’. This is found in Stelarc’s virtual and prosthetic works such as the third hand, the virtual arm and the exoskeleton. All these performances, though localizing specific areas of research, all point towards the idea of the body as cyborg, and the human body as obsolete. According to John Appleby it is an attempt at showing his idea of a way forward to a post-human condition, a shift away from the standard evolutionary system and the way for leaving the solar system”. Though Appleby is skeptical towards Stelarc’s claim and argues that it is not as radical as it is may initially appear. The ideas “constitute a straight forwardly teleological narrative and, as such, partake of the humanist discourses arising out of the cartesian dualism that he claims to repudiate.” Appleby compares Stelarc’s ideas to the concept of cyborgian development first proposed by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline. (From Chapter 6 of the Cyborg Experiments)

One thing which strikes me as being clear from looking at Stelarc’s performances is that they cannot demonstrate in practical terms the obsolescence of the body, they can only suggest it. Stelarc’s body, no matter what condition it is put in is still subject to the same physionomical laws as everyone else. He relies on his organs to function and operates with a distinction of body and mind. But it is the possibility to rethink the ways in which our bodies interact with our environment, especially through interfaces such as the Internet, and how we receive and process information and use it to inform ourselves in space that is key to his work.