Читать книгу [boxhead] - Darren O'Donnell - Страница 4

I’m most proud of the fact that [boxhead] wasn’t my idea; the theatrical challenge of a show entirely about a guy with a box on his head was something that came from director Chris Abraham and actor Paul Fauteux. As far as Chris remembers it, they were working on Peter Handke’s Kaspar, and dealing with language and reason as a kind of prison, game or box for the character. They approached me to work with them on a new project because Chris was curious to see how I would respond to the very actorly Paul. I’m always cranky about representational theatre, so trying to throw stuff that would irritate Paul became a primary motivation for me. I’m proud of all of this because it was the first large-scale collaboration on my part, the first time I had taken someone’s constraints, run with them and come up with something better than any of us could have generated alone.

But back to irritating Paul. At the time, he was my idea of the worst sort of actor: National Theatre School trained, with a need to understand every line, a desire for every word to make sense; he insisted on comprehending what he was saying at every point, as if this were, somehow, the standard human condition. Which was a problem for me, since I had no clear idea of what the hell the show was about and was defiantly proud of that fact.

Chris was little help in this matter, searching as he always seems to be for a one-to-one relation between the things that happen in the show and a subconscious rationale that was completely clear, clean and transparent to consciousness. You know, what directors are supposed to do. I thought it was too Freudian an approach, excavating the text for the ‘real’ explanation behind the bizarre things that were happening. I wanted to create a show that would remain outside the grasp of rational thought, that questioned the boxheadedness of this acutely rational approach to life and hovered just outside of the audience’s understanding. It seemed to me, however, that to attempt this while still completely understanding the show myself was impossible. If I could rationally comprehend the show, then, chances were, the audience could too. So the three of us scrapped a lot, while still having a respectful fun; in the end, this collaborative tension between us produced what has become my most successful play.

Collaboration is a tricky business. One of its exciting paradoxes is that one’s success in a collaborative endeavour is often inversely proportional to the assertion of your own agenda –or, to put it the other way around, it’s directly proportional to your ability to put your agenda on hold and incorporate others’ desires and insights. But there are a lot of personal-issue pitfalls that can interfere with this seemingly easy task:

1 The narcissism of small differences, Freud’s term for that tendency to dislike those who most remind you of yourself. The only way through this, it seems to me, is a sort of spiritual acceptance that things are the way they are: your current collaborators are the only collaborators you could possibility be working with since they are, in fact, staring at you from across the table.

2 Rejecting an idea because it’s not yours. That’s a famous one. The better the idea, the more comprehensive the rejection.

3 The inability to tell someone that his or her idea sucks. This is a basic skill that needs to be mastered, and really good collaborations develop techniques for this. In my previous company, Pow Pow Unbound, we used to have a little song about how stupid the person was.

4 The inability to propose an idea you know is bad. Bad ideas often contain the seeds of good ideas, so it’s best to blurt them out and enjoy the ridicule.

5 Thin skin.

6 The tendency to enjoy compliments over criticism.

7 Fear of failure. An obvious one, but no less obvious should be the fact that an easy way to raise your success rate is to raise your failure rate. Fail often: take more risks and make more mistakes–eventually you’re bound to succeed at something. It’s a statistical fact.

As I’ve mentioned, the initial idea for [boxhead] came from Chris and Paul, but another key individual was actor/playwright Alex Poch-Goldin, who gave me a challenging bit of pre-emptive criticism when he poked at me about my anti-racism polemic, White Mice, asking which ‘issue’ I was going to tackle next. This was at the height of Issue Mania, when it was tough to find art that wasn’t engaged with one prefabricated issue or another. White Mice certainly was an issue play, but one that I felt came honestly and had nothing to do with opportunism. Fuck you, Alex, I thought, and I resolved to make sure not only that the next show would not be an issue play, but that I would make an issue of it by writing the stupidest thing I could manage. Without Alex’s collaborative participation, [boxhead] might have ended up being a show about, say, living with the disability of a box on your head. Luckily, Alex intervened, and we ended up with a show that climaxed with a fading god tricking a cloned geneticist into showing his penis to the audience so that the god can siphon off some of the audience’s riveted attention in order to live longer.

Which brings me to that particular moment in the show. I believe it’s fully rationalized and a logically necessary part of the story, but, in the interest of full disclosure, it began as simply a desire to demonstrate how weak we are when a naked penis is in the room – few people are able to drag their eyes off this slightly stinky tag of flesh. This, it seemed to me, was just another manifestation of humanity’s (or a particular humanity’s) boxheadedness. The magnetic-like attraction of a naked cock might have something to do with cultural phallocentrism or something else, but, whatever it is, it certainly is a sociocultural construction and a really funny one. I’m a bit of an exhibitionist, as any of my friends can tell you – not because it gives me any sexual charge, but because the whole prohibition against public nudity – our natural state – is so funny and puritanical that it requires constant ridicule.

Anywayyyyy. Collaboration. Theatre is often quite an atomized affair, with various elements of a play being designed in isolation and without the participation of others. This leads to some funny situations. We see fully designed costumes that the actors have to accept with little input, sets that are completed before actors take their first step, and whole conceptual themes that are imposed long before first rehearsal. This lack of faith in the collaborative process is driven by expediency, as time is at a premium and anything that can be nailed down and quantified is, and as soon as possible. A classic scenario is the moment following the first read-through, when the director turns to the stage manager and asks how long the show ran. Stopwatches often direct shows, with the core of the creative team unable to trust their feeling on the pace of the show. If it feels slow, it IS slow – a stopwatch will not be able to change that feeling, no matter what information it provides. It’s common for the stopwatch to take over the role of the director and it can end up dictating adjustments to pace based entirely on some notion of the ideal time the show should occupy. It’s faithlessness that drives this, a boxheaded disavowal of our intuitions and a dependence on a tired scientific rationalism that is capable of telling us very specific things – the show ran fifteen seconds faster than yesterday – but things that are empty of any real meaning. It also leads to other neuroticisms, like the fetish for arriving on time. Adopting the attitude that collaborators will arrive always at the correct time – whether they’re late or not – has meant that the time spent waiting for them (when a traditional approach might be to get all freaked out about their lack of respect) provides time to get to know each other, shoot the shit and stumble upon ideas that might not have manifested had the offending collaborator arrived punctually.

With [boxhead], an atypical collaborative relationship is necessary between the actors and the stage manager as they coordinate the complicated interplay of the different voices. Each actor plays two characters: the doctor and the doctor’s narrator. Very often there is a complicated choreography of button-pushing on the vocal effects technology. Stephen Souter, the late, great stage manager, was the first person to tackle the task. He stuck a colour-coded circle beside each and every line in the script and on each button of the effects box and would carefully follow along, making hundreds of precisely timed switches. In that draft of the script, each actor played three characters, so at times there were six vocal settings. He, and subsequently Beth Kates, had to be completely on the ball, remaining as focused as the actors, the three of them working this tight choreography to create the illusion that there are multiple characters in constant conflict. This choreography is a very delicate thing that also happens to be travelling at an intense clip; as actor Adam Lazarus points out, ‘There’s somewhat of an unforgiving focus demanded – one missed word, a pause, a reorder, an extended breath, throws the show out of sync for ten minutes.’

The entire experience for the performer is something that materializes some of the themes of the show. I wanted to create something that went beyond merely representing a post-rational state and actually forced the performer into a state where they had to abandon their rational mind and fully accept the groove of the show. The split of consciousness required by acting can be an amazing thing to watch – an actor can sometimes appear to be fully engaged in a complicated discussion or choreography while in her head she might be assembling tomorrow’s grocery list. But, inspired by the writings of E. J. Gold, who was, in turn, inspired by G. I. Gurdjieff, I wanted to create an experience for the actor that would be so overwhelming that it would be impossible to concentrate on anything else, so that the constant obsessive yammering in my head that provides the soundtrack to my life would stop and I could simply plug into the machine of the show and tune out of life. Gold and Gurdjieff both have techniques and exercises to overload the conscious mind, in order to let intuition run the human biological machine, as Gold calls it. Actors are often told not to overthink, to simply get in there and do. That’s easy to say. [boxhead] was designed to make this happen by giving the actor as much to deal with as possible: complicated text, multiple characters and a detailed and complex physicality that is often at odds with what is being spoken, as the actor’s voice has to portray one character while his body portrays another.

Paul Fauteux, the original boxhead: ‘[boxhead] is a very unique performance experience. It is not acting in the traditional sense. It is a concentration exercise. The exercise is created by the layers of disorientation which must be focused through while performing: the box on the head, through which we can see only dimly when it is tilted down and only the inside of the box when we are looking up; having to reach very precise locations onstage in the blackouts while we can barely see; the rhythmic, very imaginative, often non-linear language; the precise physicality; the fact that our voices are treated so we hear our own voices in the box and another voice going out to the audience simultaneously; the abrupt switches from one character to another – all these layers of focus create a trance-like zone of hyper-concentration which is extremely satisfying because it moves the actors’ imaginations past the intellectual into the subconscious and throws them directly into the immediate.’

Adam Lazarus: ‘The box is heavy, hot, humid; you hear voices, you can’t see. It’s like having a box on your head.’

The set was initially designed by Cand Cod – an anagram of the first initials of Darren O’Donnell, Chris Abraham and then-producer of the show Naomi Campbell. The great thing about working with a couple of people who have little experience in a given medium – in this case, set design – is that we didn’t have very much attachment to our identities as set designers, yielding a relaxed productivity, where small suggestions, large concepts and final touches would just bubble to the surface as we hung out and got the show made. It was the same when Naomi and I worked on White Mice – just casual conversations between two people who have worked with sets all their lives but who don’t know anything about designing them. This loose amateurism yielded a great design that was totally organic and relaxed. Small collaborations created simply to get things done can often make big differences. David Kinsman, the publicist at Theatre Passe Muraille, did a final and lasting tweak on the title when he encased it in square brackets. So great and so obvious, but no one but David saw it.

Chris brought on Romano De Nillo, the percussionist who created the sound score, which turned out to be a massively important element in the show. It was great to watch them work: Chris would describe feelings for accents, stings and scoring and Romano would toss stuff back. It’s as close as I’ve ever seen to a couple of artists hanging out, like they were just a couple of guys jamming in some basement, but while in the pressure cooker of a brief rehearsal period. This relationship owed a lot to Romano’s ridiculous relaxedness (he’s an Italian Newfie) and Chris’s brilliance at leading large groups of collaborators, tapping and making room for people’s strengths. There weren’t supposed to be any songs in the production – the first staging had maybe two. But this element worked so well that with each subsequent incarnation we’ve added a couple of numbers, always tweaking the satire so it remains current.

One of the collaborators I’ve always been keen to engage is the audience, looking for ways to rigorously include them in a way that isn’t mortifying, embarrassing or dorky. The solution for [boxhead] was small but decisive: it would be the audience’s responsibility to provide the key to the doctors’ dilemma by pulling the rope that drops their compatibility results, revealing why they have been unable to conceive a baby. This moment is a second-rate rip-off of Brooks’ and Verdecchia’s Noam Chomsky Lectures, where they leave the responsibility for the show’s final cue to the audience, who must call for a blackout, an onus we experience as analogous to the more general responsibility Daniel and Guillermo are laying on us throughout the show. Back in the day, that moment blew my mind: rigorous audience participation that perfectly expressed the themes of the show. In [boxhead], the realworld stakes are decidedly lower, but for the four characters onstage, it’s a crucial moment that has yielded either an incredibly nervous tension in the room or audience members leaping over one another to pull the rope. It’s a small but important moment of audience collaboration; as I’ve argued elsewhere,¹ the active presence of the audience is pretty much the only positive factor that distinguishes theatre from film, video and television.

One of the problems at work in the way theatre artists usually think about collaboration is the conception of a theatre production as an organic totality. New York–based Mexican-born philosopher Manuel DeLanda points out that organic totalities are closed systems in which relations of interiority create a situation where component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to the whole: ‘A part detached from such a whole ceases to be what it is, since being this particular part is one of the constitutive properties. A whole in which the component parts are self-subsistent and their relations as external to each other does not posses an organic unity.’² A theatre production is an organic totality, with the component parts not possessing any meaning if they’re detached from the other parts. The actor cannot meaningfully speak those lines in any other context, the costume designs remain on the drawing board if they’re not realized in the production, and a given sound montage is only valuable when it’s in relation to the particular line and actions of a particular actor playing a particular part. There is a paradox of an atomized dependence in traditional theatre that forecloses fluid, flexible and autonomous collaboration.

These insights have been driven by my time spent working with various visual artists, particularly the Instant Coffee collective. When I worked with Jinhan Koh, Jennifer Papararo, Jon Sasaki, Cecilia Berkovic, Kate Monro and Emily Hogg, there were no clearly defined roles; there were simply a bunch of skills, aesthetics and experiments that everybody was involved in before, during and after any involvement with Instant Coffee. As much as we created work together, our individual work did not become meaningless if detached from Instant Coffee; it would just attract some other meaning. DeLanda cites Gilles Deleuze’s theory of assemblages to account for these kinds of relations of exteriority, where ‘part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different.’³

This notion frees up the collaborators and leads to flexible, surprising results. Instant Coffee projects like, for example, Jon’s BassBed, the subwoofer that also functioned as a bed, or Cecilia’s Afghan blanket sculptures or even, for that matter, the listserv that Kate Monro maintains announcing other people’s work, can all function easily on their own but, taken together as an assemblage, created a very flexible and dynamic collaborative environment and produced unexpected artistic products. My incorporation into the collective occurred because they liked my spin-the-bottle performance, swallowed it whole without diminishing any of my autonomy and seamlessly incorporated it into a series of their events, which became, for a moment, our events.

It’s difficult to imagine applying this model to theatre, with its strict adherence to prefabricated scripts, hierarchical chains of command and narrowly defined roles, but the model offers insights that could pull us through to new and more contemporary and socially meaningful currents. Some Canadian artists seem to be experimenting with aspects of this approach, but a very clear example is Europe’s Rimini Protocol. They often work with experts from a variety of other fields, building shows with these people, who collaborate as writers and performers. The individuals involved in their shows are not actors who, without lines to speak, become out-of-work actors, but are instead model-train enthusiasts, Indian call-centre workers, female road construction workers – all of whom, when they are not in the show, retain their identity, continuing to do what they did all along. These are exciting ideas and theatre needs to incorporate them; the traditional well-made play process is so clearly and rapidly becoming an antiquated approach, unable to respond to contemporary social realities, while this model offers a way to incorporate current artistic developments: relational aesthetics, participation and civic engagement.

The final collaborative relationship, and a constant bane to the poor theatre practitioner, is that between the artist and the critic. There’s something about the proximity of theatre – it’s always a local experience – that often generates vitriolic bitchiness on the part of the critic. This is a symptom of narcissism of small differences. And maybe Canada, being, essentially, a small town masquerading as a country, generates a small-town criticism born simply of the embarrassment of being Canadian: not quite Europe, with all its state-subsidized culture, and not quite America, with its abundant private capital generating plenty of cultural innovation. No, we’re Canada – middling state funding and a capitalist class no more interested in Canadian culture than is the beaver that is our symbol.

There are two schools of thought on the whole critic question: read’em vs. avoid’em. Many artists proudly assert their independence from the critical voice by claiming not to read them. But although criticism doesn’t make it to my reading list when the subject is other people’s work, when the show being reviewed is mine, I wake up at four in the morning to obsessively check the internet and then fire back a response while in as raw a state as possible. It’s fun! Many people caution against this, claiming that kind of behaviour gives the critics too much power. But responding in a raw state is exactly what is demanded from a productive relationship. A frantic and anguished response is an honest one – why bother to take time to chill out and deal with things in a more level-headed way? When challenged by a collaborator in a rehearsal, working through the discomfort is the only way to go. Here too! And, like I said, it’s fun. A raw, honest and even rude attack can generate a fruitful and productive antagonism.

Truthfully, it’s been my experience that critics are rarely wrong in many of their specific criticisms; rather, they fail to consider wider contexts, other aspects or personal taste. This is no more apparent than when they’re trying to deal with a silly show. And if you can say one thing about [boxhead], it’s that it’s a fucking ridiculous show – thanks, again, to Alex Poch-Goldin. It’s also confusing and thematically all over the map – my efforts to keep the meaning of the show beyond my grasp managed to hit the target.

I’ll let critical collaborator Meg Walker, who reviewed the show for www.plankmagazine.com, explain, in a better way than I have never been able to, what the show is all about: ‘Clearly, we humans are earnest in our desire for meaning, but also a bit silly in how far we’ll take our explorations… [boxhead] lays out what’s become a throughline to much of O’Donnell’s work: if different divisions of “we” just talk to each other, we might actually like each other.’

Yeah, right, that’s what I was trying to say. Thanks, Meg!

Darren O’Donnell