Q: I am a theatre artist. How should I tackle Global Warming?
A: Let's start with the following idea. People hate global warming b/c it involves telling them to stop doing stuff. Stop consuming, stop travelling, stopusing disposable cups, stop having fun.
Fuck that.
So if you make a work about global warming (by which I mean "on the issue of global warming") you will be faced with two options, either getting it "right", and forecasting a slow slide into impending disaster of our own creation (or more likely going halfway towards this point, b/c it's scary), or getting it "wrong", and clouding this idea or suggesting it is false, like Richard Bean did with The Heretic.
Q: Um, bad choices.
What are some other choices?
A: Well, of course, we could bury it in an allegory like the modernists did. But does that really work any more? Ionesco's Rhinosceros? Durrenmatt's The Visit? What text even these classics, can carry the tragedy of a political gridlock and national self-interest upheld by years of individualism and carefree consumption? What has adequate irony? Hamlet? ...Wicked?
No, I put it to you that it cannot be done. So we must take the other option, we must make a work that is not "about" global warming at all.
Let me for a moment re-examine the declaration from that great political mastermind Karl Rove, as relayed to journalist Ron Suskind:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Ah, so it's the ACTION that creates the reality, according to Rove. All this discussion, as lovely and peaceful as it may be does not displace the power of action to create reality.
So as Hamlet says:
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action
Thus it is not words themselves but the happy co-existence of word and action which generate impact.
Q: But how do I put action into a subject that, surely it must be engaged with, but it seems so... dialogue heavy?
A: Perhaps the solution doesn't look like theatre at all. Or perhaps it is a matter of not "What is it to be about?", for that question is solved with the idea that anything which is not about global warming is irrelevant (or worse - a lie), but instead those other questions that make up the theatre which are seldom addressed... and here they are:
how
where
using what materials
using how much
when
why not something else
at what cost?
how can you justify that??
shouldn't you just give up?
wouldn't that money have been better off spent in schools, hospitals, or on more police on the streets?
And I put it to you that this should be our New Theatre. It will be tremendously unpopular. But it will acheieve something.
Q: Thank you. I'm sure it will be a wild ride.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Fight with travellers (about Slow Travel)
About a month ago I had a fight with some people on a forum about my idea to travel overland instead of flying.
Click here to read it. (quite long)
I started the conversation with some gusto, but that was soon lost because they forced me to look up statistics endlessly in order to support the idea that flying was bad for the environment. I broke free of these shakles in comment #89, where I shake off the heavy blanket of rationality for the bliss of poetry. The conversation then descends somewhat into a three-way talk about idelogy.
Click here to read it. (quite long)
I started the conversation with some gusto, but that was soon lost because they forced me to look up statistics endlessly in order to support the idea that flying was bad for the environment. I broke free of these shakles in comment #89, where I shake off the heavy blanket of rationality for the bliss of poetry. The conversation then descends somewhat into a three-way talk about idelogy.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Possible program note (together with possible title)
People Spoke
A silent play about freedom of speech
This play will travel to the following countries:
Australia-Indonesia-Malaysia-
JUSTIFICATION:
Theatre is a great unifier. We see theatre and we come together. Sharing space, time, event. The moment of theatre is a sublime moment between human beings in a room. Often this truth is awkwardly avoided, but it is the source of theatre’s political power.
Theatre is also oppressive. We go to the theatre and we cannot talk, we are forced to sit and listen and watch, our only means of resistence is laughter, or an early exit.
But oppression, as I hope to show, is also a great unifier.
In a first world country like Australia, the country where I am a citizen my passport says, we think of ourselves as privileged. We live our existence freely we think. But Australians are not privelaged. We are oppressed. We are not different from other people.
Your boss is oppressed. Your teacher is oppressed. Your wife is oppressed. Your dog is oppressed. Your political representative is oppressed. Your ____ is oppressed.
People everywhere are trapped in a prison from which there is No Exit.
This thought spurred the theatre I present today, together with the knowledge that the countries I mention above cannot understand each other except through certain tools, like mime, music or ‘story’ (whatever the fuck story means). They also will not understand any cultural reference, or specific local references. But how much of theatre is based on this? On “exclusivity”? On making us feel validated for our choices?
So I approached this play with the idea that I would attempt to make moments which illustrate the individual in oppressed state, without the use of any language or cultural referent. Sort of like what Le Page was trying to do with Lipsynch. A universal play could be viewed with equal power by people in Bangladesh and Indonesia, for example, and that would therefore link them.
Each individual who views this play is part of it b/c your reflections and discussions will shape others and we can have a good convo. I come from a starting point of impending failure so you don’t have to feel like your perception is wrong b/c mine is more wrong.
So. What do you think?
Thx,
Rp.
Monday, August 20, 2012
From Julian Ass.
from Julian Assange on the balcony of the Equadorian embassy
""There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response"
""There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response"
Saturday, August 18, 2012
In fact, the Americans are also oppressed
I have been thinking about this question "what is oppression" for some time now in an applied way, so it is time to make some statements about it as I think this will make up the bulk of the work.
My starting point, a bold claim I will work back from, is the following: we are all oppressed. The statement is controversial because it is in many ways against the trend of Australian and indeed all societies with wealth, which think of themselves as at liberty. However, this is not a truth, as we inherently know. It is a convenient lie. We believe we are free because to believe otherwise is to dissent, and therefore not to share in the wealth.
To those with wealth, the oppressed are likely to feature as citizens of a nation state with a recognizably branded dictator (Iran, former Iraq, North Korea), countries with a social or cultural system that violates European-American concepts of human rights (China), or poor countries (India).
But one day I sat down and I looked at those people in my own life who I found oppressive, and I made an active attempt to try to understand them, and I came up with the following statement:
oppressive action is caused by oppression
What it means is that the individual makes an oppressive action because they themselves are the victim of some kind of oppression. This exists in both psychological accounts of domestic violence or behavioural malfunction. Like much psychology, it's an insight rather than exact science. But this does not reduce its power as a premise because:
understanding the oppressive conditions of the oppressor allows for a humanist moment
Likewise our disconnection to citizens of countries we feel are oppressed is caused by our inability to think of ourselves as oppressed. It is also how we fall back on common ideas of citizens of counties rather than conduction our own investigations or admitting we don't know.
This is the cause of many horrible things in the world, but especially, I think, it is the central cause of war. Just as an oppressive regeime is used to justify military action, likewise the inability to recognise the conditions of our own oppression is a direct cause of inhuman action towards others.
how does this play out in the theatre?
"We are all oppressed" locates all persons as sharing in this 'victim' status as a means of collectively overcoming this oppression, and places the primary task of the artist as an educator of the operations of power. The intent is not to patronise or to sentimentalise but to encourage good humanist action among all people with myriad claims to status, wealth or activeness. Narrative itself being an oppressive force which provides false understanding and validation, I prefer to think of the creation of moments which reveal the failure of the individual's power, in an ordinary setting.
This is not about being "natural", as we commonly say in the theatre, it is hyper-constructed to reveal the operations of power making slaves of all people.
My starting point, a bold claim I will work back from, is the following: we are all oppressed. The statement is controversial because it is in many ways against the trend of Australian and indeed all societies with wealth, which think of themselves as at liberty. However, this is not a truth, as we inherently know. It is a convenient lie. We believe we are free because to believe otherwise is to dissent, and therefore not to share in the wealth.
To those with wealth, the oppressed are likely to feature as citizens of a nation state with a recognizably branded dictator (Iran, former Iraq, North Korea), countries with a social or cultural system that violates European-American concepts of human rights (China), or poor countries (India).
But one day I sat down and I looked at those people in my own life who I found oppressive, and I made an active attempt to try to understand them, and I came up with the following statement:
oppressive action is caused by oppression
What it means is that the individual makes an oppressive action because they themselves are the victim of some kind of oppression. This exists in both psychological accounts of domestic violence or behavioural malfunction. Like much psychology, it's an insight rather than exact science. But this does not reduce its power as a premise because:
understanding the oppressive conditions of the oppressor allows for a humanist moment
Likewise our disconnection to citizens of countries we feel are oppressed is caused by our inability to think of ourselves as oppressed. It is also how we fall back on common ideas of citizens of counties rather than conduction our own investigations or admitting we don't know.
This is the cause of many horrible things in the world, but especially, I think, it is the central cause of war. Just as an oppressive regeime is used to justify military action, likewise the inability to recognise the conditions of our own oppression is a direct cause of inhuman action towards others.
how does this play out in the theatre?
"We are all oppressed" locates all persons as sharing in this 'victim' status as a means of collectively overcoming this oppression, and places the primary task of the artist as an educator of the operations of power. The intent is not to patronise or to sentimentalise but to encourage good humanist action among all people with myriad claims to status, wealth or activeness. Narrative itself being an oppressive force which provides false understanding and validation, I prefer to think of the creation of moments which reveal the failure of the individual's power, in an ordinary setting.
This is not about being "natural", as we commonly say in the theatre, it is hyper-constructed to reveal the operations of power making slaves of all people.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Go into the other
I said in the last post that we need to make something comprehensible for a whole bunch of different people with completely different ideas about stuff.
Let's think through the first problem that arises when the question is asked: "How do we make theatre that is 4 every1?"
B/c theatre is only for a few people, usually they are of a certain category which gets defined by the theatre and the world it exists in. This is how it works, it divides people up and then talks only to certain people and excludes the other people. The tools for this division are usually:
1) Language (includes all form of language, including gesture, sceneography, cultural reference, technology)
2) Physical location
3) Price
Physical location is solved b/c I am going to everywhere to perform the show.
Price is solved because I perform for free or for small fee or in exchange for conveniently given niceties which are no skin off anyone's nose like a place to sleep or a little food or transport.
So there is just this third one of Language which is potentially unsolvable. Because although every theatre thing which is good has transcended language somehow, I have never seen a really "pure" bit of theatre which did not rely at least a little bit on exclusion of the "other". I don't think it exists, even though it has been a project for theatre for a long time.
I don't want to exclude the "other" I want to go to the other place and let's make theatre there, let's make theatre about it.
So it seems the first and maybe only real problem of this theatre can be summarised in the following:
"How do we make theatre that leaps over language?
A few possible solutions arise. The most obvious one is this:
1) We can be limited to language that's universally understood, like certain English words, or phisical gestures, or abstract forms like music or images, Jung or would call them "archetypes".
But there are a couple of other interesting options.
2) We attempt a performance without language
3) We can build a new language together with each audience
4) We can "not perform" (or "un-perform" or "refuse to perform")
5) We can make something that is incomprehensible to everyone
This runs against the usual authorship thing that's done by theatremakers which is:
"I am the master"
"Here is my show. It's great"
"Now I will teach you"
And in some ways this is the an attack on that colonial idea.
Let's think through the first problem that arises when the question is asked: "How do we make theatre that is 4 every1?"
B/c theatre is only for a few people, usually they are of a certain category which gets defined by the theatre and the world it exists in. This is how it works, it divides people up and then talks only to certain people and excludes the other people. The tools for this division are usually:
1) Language (includes all form of language, including gesture, sceneography, cultural reference, technology)
2) Physical location
3) Price
Physical location is solved b/c I am going to everywhere to perform the show.
Price is solved because I perform for free or for small fee or in exchange for conveniently given niceties which are no skin off anyone's nose like a place to sleep or a little food or transport.
So there is just this third one of Language which is potentially unsolvable. Because although every theatre thing which is good has transcended language somehow, I have never seen a really "pure" bit of theatre which did not rely at least a little bit on exclusion of the "other". I don't think it exists, even though it has been a project for theatre for a long time.
I don't want to exclude the "other" I want to go to the other place and let's make theatre there, let's make theatre about it.
So it seems the first and maybe only real problem of this theatre can be summarised in the following:
"How do we make theatre that leaps over language?
A few possible solutions arise. The most obvious one is this:
1) We can be limited to language that's universally understood, like certain English words, or phisical gestures, or abstract forms like music or images, Jung or would call them "archetypes".
But there are a couple of other interesting options.
2) We attempt a performance without language
3) We can build a new language together with each audience
4) We can "not perform" (or "un-perform" or "refuse to perform")
5) We can make something that is incomprehensible to everyone
This runs against the usual authorship thing that's done by theatremakers which is:
"I am the master"
"Here is my show. It's great"
"Now I will teach you"
And in some ways this is the an attack on that colonial idea.
Two lists, one is of countries and the other is of universals
First post is a statement of intent.
Opportunity is to create a theatre show for the following countries:
1. Australia
2. Indonesia
3. Singapore
4. Malaysia
5. Thailand
6. Myanmar
7. India
8. Pakistan
9. Iran
10. Turkey
11. "Europe"
Piece of theatre must be conprehensible to cultures above and be about something which concerns them all equally.
Examples:
1. Climate Change
2. Oppression (in various forms e.g from government, from system, from the boss, from culture, from violence, from being in the position of "oppressor" which is also being oppressed)
3. The Future
4. "Ingen-ology" (a combination of technology and ingenuity, including both technological progress and its interaction with human forms of ingenuity like improvisation)
5. Humanism, opportunities for human connection and learning.
Opportunity is to create a theatre show for the following countries:
1. Australia
2. Indonesia
3. Singapore
4. Malaysia
5. Thailand
6. Myanmar
7. India
8. Pakistan
9. Iran
10. Turkey
11. "Europe"
Piece of theatre must be conprehensible to cultures above and be about something which concerns them all equally.
Examples:
1. Climate Change
2. Oppression (in various forms e.g from government, from system, from the boss, from culture, from violence, from being in the position of "oppressor" which is also being oppressed)
3. The Future
4. "Ingen-ology" (a combination of technology and ingenuity, including both technological progress and its interaction with human forms of ingenuity like improvisation)
5. Humanism, opportunities for human connection and learning.
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