Shunt’s Amato Saltone (part 1)

I have been following the work of the Shunt Collective since 2000 and in that time I’ve watched the company’s work grow from strength to strength. In this two-part article, I will be taking a look back at their performance Amato Saltone that I saw in November 2005 and February 2006, and opening a discussion on issues of space and light as transformational tools, the narrative structure in environmental, participatory theatre, and the subversion of the spectator’s gaze.

Amato Saltone is an ‘environmental’ piece that begins with a long walk down a dark tunnel into the heart of the vaults at London Bridge. The following paragraph is a personal evocation of the tunnel experience intended as a point of reference for the discussion.

Just outside London Bridge tube station is a door in a red brick wall. Beside the door sits a ticket collector. She hands me a ticket and a key and I ask, “Is there anything I should know?” She looks at me for a moment then shakes her head. I pass over the threshold into three-quarter darkness. The hubbub behind recedes to a small background din and my senses begin tuning into the new surroundings. I move further along the tunnel, past a second set of doors with a small sign warning not to climb on ladders; there are no ladders, but by the time I realize this I have already been sucked into the performance. I stand in silent apprehension, breathing in the damp air, getting used to the smell of mold from the carpet beneath my feet. I am faced with a choice: do I try opening the doors to my right, disused and half-buried in the shadows, or do I brave the walk towards that wisp of light in the distance? Am I even allowed to go that far? Shouldn’t a member of staff have intercepted me by now? Nobody comes, so I head towards the light. It’s easier than I anticipate. The light gets brighter and reveals a gate, beyond which is a type of bar. The gate is locked. So I observe the people at the bar. Perhaps they are the performers, perhaps the show has already begun and I was too late to get in. Then I remember the key. It fits, of course. I pass through gate and lock it again behind me.

i. Darkness as disorientation – disorientation as evocation

That an inconspicuous door should turn out to be a ‘magical portal’ between two worlds, is symbolic of the territory one is entering with Shunt. Transformation is essential to the workings of the Shunt environment (1), and it operates first and foremost with the transformation of the spectator into ‘spect-actor’ (2). In the tunnel scene this is achieved through the use of darkness and its inherent ability to disorientate. In his poem, “The Raven”, Edgar Allan Poe writes: “Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; […]” (Poe, pp70) By correlation with the Shunt performance, not only is the audience member plunged into a completely new environment from whence he/she came, offering a sensorial shift (3) , but he/she also experiences a parallel (and connected) psychological shift through the absence of rules. In other terms, the audience member is given a degree (bound by the physical limits of the theatre artifice) of physical/psychological freedom to explore the space at will, and by doing so, the sense of logic and control that is present in a ‘conventional’ theatre scenario,

entrance > foyer > box office > auditorium > seated in darkness

is removed leaving him/her to create a personal/individual structure and narrative for the performance. In the result is the potential for every audience member to experience a very different performance. Though this sense of freedom becomes more controlled as the performance unfolds, the basic notion of ‘choice’ is still kept intact when the audience is split up and invited to explore different places. However, in the final scene of the show, where the audience is ushered into fixed seated, that sense of freedom is removed and we return to the ‘conventional’ schema of theatre. To what extent would an audience be willing to create their own performance structure if none was offered to them? (Note. This was partly the aim of the recent large-scale site-specfic performance Faust by Punch Drunk at 21 Wapping Lane, I’ll be attending the show next week and will post a response to it here.)

ii. Darkness as illusion – illusion as reality

In Artaud’s writing on the Taoist principles of fullness and emptiness as applied to his ‘theatre of cruelty’ he raises the following question: “What could prevent me believing in the illusion of theatre since I believe in the illusion of reality?” (Artaud, pp101) The equivocal sense of reality expressed in this citation is another one of the fundamental pillars that Shunt’s environmental theatre relies on, and as before it is achieved through the manipulation of darkness. If we leave Artaud’s philosophical interpretation of reality aside for the moment and focus on the issue of reality and illusion in the Shunt environment, there are several issues to contend with. On one hand there is a clear distinction to be made between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ world, as marked by the passage through the door at the beginning. The outside appears more real than the inside, because prior to entering we have mentally predisposed ourselves for a theatre show and thus we are aware that to a greater or lesser extent this will involve a degree of illusion. On the other hand, once fully immersed in the ‘inside’ world there is another distinction to be made between the reality of the environment, the fact that it is a historic underground building whose original purpose was not designed for theatre and thus it bears none of the architectural signs of the ‘conventional theatre’ (billboards, foyer, ticket office, cloakroom, auditorium etc), and the illusory side of the environment such as the gates, the bar and everything that the Shunt collective constructed for the show. Where darkness comes into play is in its ability to blur the lines between the reality and illusion of the space, so that the real may seem illusory and the illusory may seem real.

Though this is the same phenomenon found in the ‘conventional’ theatre space, Shunt’s departure from convention is in allowing its audience to interact with the environment, to ‘feel’ the boundaries for themselves, literally to touch the set and touch the ‘real’ walls and structures etc. However, in that moment of being able to touch the set, to pick up a box of ‘Sugar Puffs’ for example, what is happening is a concretization of illusion, a transformation of the illusory into the real. This desire to touch is the same as the experience at the end of a ‘conventional’ theatre show, in which there is a clear physical/spatial distinction between stage and auditorium, audience and performers, yet upon on leaving the space there is the desire to walk on stage and explore the world in which we have just suspended our disbelief. In the Shunt performance, the end result is somewhat different in the sense that upon leaving the theatre, the distinction that was in place at the beginning, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ worlds, is blurred so that London Bridge station becomes a gigantic performance space (albeit momentarily), and thus Artaud’s ‘illusion of reality’ becomes a possibility.

Read part two of this article »

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Footnotes

(1) – The use of ‘Environment’ and ‘Environmental’ in this article pertains to the experiential/sensorial/atmospheric rather than the ecological.

(2) – spect-actor: This is not a reference to the ‘spect-actors’ in Boal’s ‘forum theatre’, rather I intend to use the term here to refer to a type of audience that for the most part is asked to ‘spectate’ or observe the company’s actors, but on certain occasions, that are engineered and accounted for within the structure and timing of the performance, is also prompted to ‘act’ or participate.

(3) – It is important to note that this sensorial transformation is not necessarily a pleasant experience for all audience members, especially if one is subject to darkness- related phobias. This is an element of planning/devising that Shunt either overlooked or deemed detrimental to the result of the show.

References

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, Trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder, 1977)

Poe, Edgar Allan, Poems: 1827-1849, ed. James Havoc. (London: Creation Press, 1989)