Resort

Strength Weekly goes to a hot place for a bit until September.

After a few days we have arranged to leave the hot place by the seaside and go inland to somewhere we have not visited before. Images of this place are available and I have studied them. They depict a small town surrounded by mountains. Further detail is not available. This, then, is the ideal condition for hands-free visualisation wherein the traveller imagines where he will be staying based on the sum of his life experiences and brochures that he may have savoured.

It is fairly clear that the town has a street stretching away from me and rising slightly towards the horizon. There is a surprising number of cafes, many of which are staffed by young people in dreadlocks. At the far end of the street one can see purple cloths on which Tarot cards have been placed by oxblood-skinned New Age internationalists. I see one or two people that I last came across in Ibiza in 1963. The town is Swiss, however, and snow lies prettily on the roofs of the houses that face the camera.

I am enjoying myself in this place and will report back when it has been tested against the place to which we will drive shortly.

A further elaboration of the exercise involves the attempt to recall the details of the anticipated destination once it can no longer be anticipated, due to one’s arrival in its material equivalent.

19.07.2008

Becoming Trinity

In the newspaper it says ‘Three charged with Kercher killing’. The headline refers, of course, to the three suspects whose odd accounts of their activities at the time of British student Meredith Kercher’s death will shortly be assessed by an Italian judge, who may require them to stand trial. For legal reasons, I expect, the ‘Three’ cannot be referred to as the ‘Kercher Three’ as such an explicit linking would be considered prejudicial to their case. Without this formulation, however, the headline is quite obscure, given that the case has been out of the papers for several months. One might ask, on reading it, “Three who?” Three people, probably. Just any old people? Ones that we haven’t yet heard of? Obviously not – the word ‘Kercher’ reminds us – those of us that remember the name – that the case was, before last Christmas, quite notorious.

The headline is unsatisfactory. It would have been better had it been composed thus: ‘”Three” charged with Kercher killing’. This would serve to suggest that the Three are not just any three but a special three. It could, however, create confusion, insofar as it might cast doubt on the exact numbers of suspects involved. As if a policeman had said “We think three were involved but it might have been four.” The policeman’s lack of certainty would then have been mocked by the use of the quotation marks. This possibility muddies the field.

The point is, the Three have acquired distinctiveness, unlike the three that haven’t (the ones we haven’t heard about yet). This Three are on the point of acquiring an aura but they haven’t got it yet. If they are found guilty they will certainly get it. If acquitted they may also get it, but for a shorter time.

The aura isn’t the one that saints have, wherein a dinner plate worn behind the head signifies estimable goodness. It’s ‘aura’ in a neutral sense – a distinctiveness that, one imagines, might crackle or hum about them were we to meet them.

The headline hums though, in another way. It lacks any indication that its subjects may be special. But it does have the word ‘killing’ in it, and this focuses the attention. This attention is not repaid, it simply enables one to note that something is missing. It’s the aura that is missing, but that’s appropriate because the Three have yet to acquire the aura.

We are witnessing the period before something that may be about to take off takes off. The period is both empty and pregnant.

The headline is part of a mythopoeic process – it’s a stage in the making of a myth. It doesn’t refer to the mythic qualities of the three accused but it presents a point on the path towards a canonisation that is possibly imminent.

You could say that any killing already follows mythic shapes, but this is contemporary mythmaking, the sort that gives rise to the auras of Sir Alan Sugar, Steven Hawking and Celine Dion. These specialnesses can be confused with charisma, though, and must therefore be regarded as aspects of mythmaking lite.

A few weeks ago in Geneva CERN announced the imminent switch-on of its latest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which may lead to the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson, the hypothetical particle that endows massless elementary particles with mass. The Kercher headline marks the path of the myth boson, one that hovers in the vicinity of certain categories of event – in this case a newspaper headline that lacks mass – and may combine with an event to give it a sheen that could become a glow that might become a radiance. This has little to do with the outcome of a court case, it’s a process looking for an object.

07.2008

I Can Ape

Doesn’t time fly, readers? It seems only a year ago that I posted from the Orange Prize. That’s because it was a year ago. The introductory speeches were panicstrickenly gabbled, almost as if a broadcast media person had said to Kate Mosse “Just get through it, poppet. People know roughly what has to be said so just hurtle it. Nobody cares.” Rose Tremain got the big one so justice was done. Then back to the Taittinger. Expensive enough but starts to pall after glass five. The canapés at the do are stacked dinkily on plinths on curious little constructions comprising four clear plastic rectangles, the size of what we used to call ‘LP covers’, held apart by small inverted shot glasses placed at each corner. Yeah? The finger foods are placed on each level and you have to slip your hand between the levels to get one.

Well, I spotted a lone finger item on level three of a nearby stack and decided to get it. The item (something to do with salmon on a dot of toast) was placed to the far side of the level and, evidently, had proved too inaccessible to bother with. Unabashed, I extended my arm towards the plastic tower. Within millimetres of sliding my hand in, palm downwards, I realised that the sleeve of my jacket would catch the LP cover and dislodge it, Jenga style. It became clear to me that I must turn my hand over and go in upside down, palm upwards. Any reader who has reached for a canapé in this way will know the problem. I extended my index and second fingers, in a V shape, and pushed them at the toast dot. Soon I had trapped it and could withdraw my hand. Around me beautiful women milled, probably talking of chapters and plots. As my hand broke free I realised that the canapé was the right way up but my hand wasn’t. How could I get it into my mouth without inverting it and thereby tipping the smoked morsel onto the Queen Elizabeth Hall carpetting? (My other hand was holding the Taittinger, obviously.)

I decided to twist my wrist round towards my mouth rather than rotate it around its axis. This is an unusual movement, rarely called for in the average day. The canapé, however, was not held by the tips of my fingers but by their sides, down in the V, for safety.

Imagine my surprise when, as the dot drew nearer to my outstretched mouth, I stuck my fingers up my nose. Well, I said to myself, at least the hand is stabilised thereby. I extended my tongue, as if an okapi, and tried to pull the dainty delicacy in. After a few moments of ungainly manoeuvring I had the bastard. Quite pleasant, if not as amusing to the mouth as the one with yellow paste and bits of grass sticking out.

12.06.2008

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Flightsome

On the other hand, walking back along the crowded Embankment from the Globe Theatre towards Waterloo, minded to check out the giant can art on the walls of the Tate Modern, we entered a sudden density of people, heard roars and screams and saw men flying though the air. The Nissan Qashqai Challenge is in full swing. Mountain bikers launch themselves from a tower down a steep ramp, clear an abyss, hit another down slope, sandbank, take off, hurtle high to the next sandbank, clear the ground again and, in mid-air, either i. do 360s in the horizontal plane ii. do 360s in the vertical plane or iii. let go of the bike entirely apart from one hand on the handlebar then remount in order, just in time, to hit the steep slope that marks the terminus of the Challenge run. The fourth possibility involves crashing out and rolling about with one’s bike in the abyss.

Gripping stuff. Rather more so than the spectacle of neo-medievalists being sunny (see previous post). The celebration outside the Tate is concerned with contemporary issues of panic, abandonment, recklessness, the difficulty of feeling mortal, the allure of danger and its pal death. Young male athletes enact a popular concern with bodies that are light – they can fly; tough – they can smash cartoonly into walls and resurrect; disposable – death loses its sting as the wider world unravels.

02.06.2008

Hooray

quotes in this post are taken from company websites

Feels like ages since I last dissed Shakespeare. As ardent readers of this journal may have noticed, I have no time for the fellow and consider him directly responsible for the complacently novelistic condition of much British mainstream theatre. (Yes, I know it doesn’t follow but it does when you hear my argument about it which I can’t be bothered to rehearse here because it’ll slow me up.)

Nevertheless, we took our girls to his theatre the other day, to see Footsbarn do ‘A Shakespeare Party’.

It’s not uninteresting going into the Globe because you succumb to the feeling that ‘this is how it was’ quite readily and find yourself studying the joinery with an uncharacteristic intentness. I was also surprised to find myself wondering about Elizabethan Health & Safety sensibilities (fairly rudimentary) and the extent to which the architects of Globe II had to accommodate the current mildly hystericised concern about such matters.

There is, I’m sure, an easily obtained illustrated booklet that would lay my curiosity to rest. Stout modern handrails are in evidence.

And it’s nice sitting up in the Upper Gallery, despite the price. Not only does the tiered globularity enable good views of the stage but you can study all the other tiers and the groundlings (a fiver) at your leisure. At first I rather sweetly thought that this emblematised some sort of olden days egalitarianism but then I corrected myself: wherever you sit (or stand) you can see who can afford what and assess precisely how much better or worse their view is than yours. You know where you are. In our seats, in fact, the view of the audience was excellent and that of the stage okay. I didn’t mind this.

Then the show started. But first some context (from The Guardian article by Lyn Gardner here): ‘It is a quarter of a century since Footsbarn was resident in the UK, but its name has passed into theatrical legend as a once-great British company that we somehow allowed to get away. Now based in a farmhouse in the Auvergne region of France, where its members dream of founding a theatre school, the company grew out of a meeting between student actors Oliver Foot and John Paul Cook at Goddard College in the US, a college with a strong tradition in radical theatre, at the end of the 1960s. Back in Foot’s native Cornwall in 1971, the pair set up Footsbarn (taking its name from the barn owned by Foot’s family, where the company initially lived and worked) and travelled around the south-west, setting up a tent on Cornish cliffs and Somerset village greens, and putting on theatre for local people.’

‘The company’s aesthetic was make-and-do; a magpie approach using found materials and alighting on anything its members admired in the work of theatre-makers from Grotowski to Brook. Its pick-and-mix bag of styles appealed to new audiences. In the words of company member Paddy Hayter, who joined Footsbarn soon after it started and never left, bringing up his children on the road: “We share a performance with the audience, rather than perform it for them.”

When (the Globe Theatre’s artistic director Dominic) Dromgoole caught a performance of Hamlet in Somerset in the late 1970s, the audience were so enjoying the grave-digger scene played by clowns that it went on for more than 20 minutes. Dromgoole remarked on this to a company member. “This is nothing,” he replied. “You should have been here last night. It lasted an hour, and the audience still didn’t want it to stop.”‘

There are a number of British alternative performance companies who have made their bases either in the countryside or small towns. Forkbeard Fantasy, for example, have been based in the depths of Devon since 1974 and appear entirely indifferent to urban allure. Welfare State International, founded in 1968, settled for much of their performing life in Cumbria, while I.O.U Theatre, which broke away from Welfare State in 1976, are based in Halifax in West Yorkshire.

With the exception of Forkbeard Fantasy, whose work has a fevered, zany quality that sets it apart from the others, the groups produce work that, in the words of John Fox and Sue Gill, founders of Welfare State, situates them in the ‘celebratory arts movement’. Fox and Gill devised ‘fire festivals, lantern parades, rites of passage, community carnivals and site-specific theatre’.

In 2003, I.O.U, who often work with ‘giant mechanical props’, presented ‘Tattoo’ in which ‘A fuming army of petrol driven insects are in erratic pursuit of a monstrous mechanical egg factory. Venting gooey foam along the way, this towering structure ambles through the audience attempting to keep its precious crop from the clutches of the marauding swarm.’

The work of both groups is often spectacular in scale and in detail, features bizarre structures, grotesque costumes, masks and make-up and presents audiences with work that, at its best, is startling, intensely imagistic and, importantly, demonstrates that ‘celebration’ need not be civic or even especially wholesome.

The celebratory qualities of Footsbarn involve ‘transcending the barrier of language with its unique blend of visual theatre, music and magic.’ The company focuses on the work of Shakespeare and Moliere and has performed much of its work in its own circus big tops. ‘A Shakespeare Party’ features highlights from, among others, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Romeo & Juliet’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, strung together in a loose but festive manner. The festive manner consistently grates and exemplifies some of the fundamental flaws in what could be called the ‘sunny side’ of the celebratory arts movement.

It would be naive to assume that when playing happy characters on stage, actors themselves are happy. We are also familiar with the assumption that Cheerful Charlie Chuckles, the widely admired comic entertainer, is himself a fount of irrepressible joy around the house. We know, in fact, that Charlie is often a morose sot who comes to life on stage and does a good job. The problem with ‘sunny side celebration’, as profiled above, is that we are expected to believe that, unlike those who merely perform jollity, sunny side celebrants are actually jolly and, when they lay aside their ribbons, bladders, confetti and amusing bottoms at the end of a hard day’s capering, continue to celebrate, possibly in a slightly lower key, the very fact of being alive.

The idea that there is something to celebrate, above and beyond weddings, betrothals, comings of age etc holds, unlike the bladder, little water. I recall being told, almost on a daily basis, throughout the 60s, that there was a level of consciousness, within us all, akin to bliss. While I have no problem with the idea that we are all potential ecstatics – trainspotters, for example, have mastered the acquisition of this unnecessarily occulted condition – we should not confuse ecstasy with bliss. Ecstasy is a satisfying state based on the elimination of diverting stimuli by absorption into a single, fixating stimulus, as avid television watchers have discovered. Bliss seems to be, according to its fans, a state that is simply there, if only you could get to it. Whether it’s out there or in there is a matter of resistible debate.

So to get into bliss what you have to do is strip away all the layers of shit that prevent you getting into it. It’s not an unattractive idea. The trouble is it can’t be done. It’s possible that certain strong drugs or ritual privations might momentarily reveal glimpses of something very bright and extremely cheerful but this is a minority practice requiring a dedicated lifestyle. Most people seek out diversions that work okay for them. If it works it’s a psychological achievement, not a mythological transformation. It tends not to last, which is a bummer.

Sunny side celebrants are fundamentally irritating because their colourful jollifying suggests a permanently open line to that which is celebratable. When these people take off their wigs they’re still clowns! When they brush their teeth they’re celebrating the rhythms and sensuality of the operation! Even when they’re not happy they are happy!

The sunny siders move through the masses of the morose purporting to engage them in ways which will facilitate the casting-off of time-based sorrow. Gazing around the audience from my perch in the Upper Gallery of the Globe I thought I could see a simultaneous engagedness and quizzicality on many faces. A common expression involved a fixed smile that would indicate enjoyment were it more mobile and an anxious tension around the eyes suggesting the difficulty associated with the need to withstand the torrential effusiveness. I’m not suggesting that the audience members were uptight bastards incapable of having a good time, far from it. It’s just tricky, not to say burdensome, regressing yourself to the nursery level that might enable you to identify with the jollity.

When, after capering through the groundling audience playing olden days musical instruments, members of the cast present an enactment of the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ playlet from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the Footsbarn aesthetic reaches its limits. The excerpt is presented as broad slapstick with yokel vocals and much clown-based bottomwork. At one point a bumpkin sticks a sword up another bumpkin’s arse, pulls it out then sniffs it disgustedly. I thought this wasn’t too bad – clowning, after all, derives great energy from re-presenting highlights from toilet training and, in the classic spilt paint/thrown water set-pieces of the family circus, ventilates the tensions implicit in the lifelong maintenance of a suite of highly trained sphincter muscles (see here).

The problem is that if Elizabethan humour was relatively coarse and Footsbarn wish to make, so to speak, a stab at it, then they have to accommodate their audience’s disaffection with its lack of sophistication. Again, I’m not suggesting that sophisticates don’t laugh at toilet humour but that they like their toilet humour presented within a contemporary aesthetic rather than framed by the paradoxically wholesome didactic project of ‘taking a journey into Shakespeare’s world’. In brief: Shakespeare’s humour has been shit for a long time and nothing can be done about it. About the only recourse left to a director is to entrust the comedic episodes to exceptionally skilled comic actors who might compensate for the obsolete text and its mirthless situations by the application of inordinate amounts of energy.

There are a number of very assured comic actors in the Footsbarn ensemble but the company is, nevertheless, caught between two stools (cheeky!): the tendency to modernise runs up against the fact that the ‘comic’ (and proto-celebratory) texts are intractable and insufferable while the heritage industry invitation to the ‘Late Medieval World’ theme park, if it features ‘authenticity’ achieved by the minimising of sophistication, risks alienating most adults and many children.

The jollity at the Globe was reminiscent of the mania of disc-jockeys. The late and lamented John Peel – himself an exemplar of non-sunny side genial moroseness – used to tell the tale of his employment, at the beginning of his career, by a Dallas radio station whose management requested that, while on air, he speak ‘with a laugh in his voice’. Peel’s anecdote, aired more than once on Radio 1, would culminate with a pleasing demonstration of this jollified vocalisation.

His colleagues were largely not sensible of the possibility that Peel’s critique applied very much to themselves and their crazed cheeriness. Radio DJ celebratory speaking styles suggest nothing so much as panic and anxiety, given that it is not possible to locate the celebratable on a 24 hour basis.

Sunny siders, despite their justifiable antipathy to straight show business culture, are purveyors, ultimately, of depression. Celebratory art, when disconnected from august occasions, generates and – can one say this unglibly? – celebrates depression. Only the depressed would wish to display their mania vocationally. Their witnesses are drawn into unwilling reciprocation: the injunction to be up is a downer.

28.05.2008