In the Silences: A text with very many digressions and forty-three footnotes concerning the process of making performance

Abstract

Drawing on his experience as a director and writer with the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment Tim Etchells considers the processes at work in devising performance. Etchells account is self-conscioucsly a performance in and of itself - exposing the contingencies of it's own making, revealing it's own errors and strategies, footnoting its progress with digressions, mixing anecdote with more objective or analytic material. Dividing the work into distinct but overlapping stages Etchells specifically discusses the role of improvisation, the role of group-discussion and negotiation and the importance of sequencing, structuring and framing material. Etchells touches on his on-going photographic collaboration with Hugo Glendinning “Empty Stages” as well as on the creation of Forced Entertainment performances Bloody Mess, The World in Pictures, Dirty Work (amongst others).

Notes

¹ The ones I am thinking about specifically are during discussions in rehearsals for a new show in the early to middle part of 2005 – but there have been many such silences on similar occasions in the last twenty years.

² I'm reminded of living, years ago, on City Road, and the view of the high-rises by Park Hill that we had from there. At night there would always be this slow rhythm of the lights going out in the flats, until only a few blank curtained windows remained with light coming from inside, and I would always try to imagine what was happening in those last few rooms with the lights on, the windows like a blank screen for the projection of your own private movie.

³ In point of fact, during these first concentrated talks about the new project, all we have placed in the empty space of the ‘stage’ is a pile of props and equipment belonging to the previous work (Bloody Mess) – a faintly organized heap of old chairs, sound gear and boxes of costumes. There is apparently no other place to store this stuff right now, and inevitably – given that this pile is what we are looking at so often when we glance to the performance space – there are soon some discussions about an imaginary show that might start with just such a pile of stuff in the corner (or the centre) of the stage. It seems that whatever gets left in the studio, whether by accident or design, is in serious peril of being included in the work. Indeed I remember that once (during rehearsals for Showtime or Disco Relax), Richard [Lowdon] told me that he was moving the tall steel ladder that had been left in the centre of the performance area: ‘taking it away before I decide that I want it for the show.’

⁴ I'm reminded also of the photographs that Hugo (Glendinning) and I began to make in 2003 showing empty stages in pubs, clubs, conference centres and amateur theatres. I love the way that these pictures invite one to imagine the kinds of performances that might have taken place on the stages they show. I love the large raised empty stage from The People's Palace, before which just one-half an auditorium of chairs is arranged, the rest stacked together in ragged piles near the edge of the frame, and the stage from the Polish Club down the road from my house with its drooping Happy Christmas banner and piles of cardboard boxes, and the stage from The Landsdown Club, all shimmering red streamers and bright florescent light.

⁵ Including Robin Arthur, Terry O'Connor, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Bruno Roubicek, Jerry Killick, Davis Freeman, John Rowley and Wendy Houstoun.

⁶ We've very often laughed at ourselves for rehearsing in windowless rooms, especially since most rehearsals happen in the summer. Dancers get mirrors at least and visual artists get rooms with some natural light. But it seems that it's often left to the performance-makers (and maybe musicians) to work in spaces so very cut off from daylight and the world.

⁷ Which is most of the time.

⁸ In fact since Emanuelle Enchanted in 1992.

⁹ Especially on shows in which we got very, very stuck (which is most of them) but especially on Hidden J and Dirty Work, where we got very, very stuck for longer and more seriously than usual.

¹⁰ When dancer and choreographer Wendy Houstoun first worked with us on Bloody Mess, she described ‘a sense of waiting for some silence to fall over the group – of waiting for everyone to give up trying to make it better’.

¹¹ From Club of No Regrets in 1993.

¹² Or at least create ‘something to think about’ – an action or a physical fact/event, a change in the space that refocuses attention.

¹³ I am still talking about the rehearsal room where we are having the discussions about the new performance in the middle of 2005.

¹⁴ Me included – I am not trying to portray a situation in which I am the one trying to organize things and the other people are messing about. I admit here in this footnote that I am quite severely prone to distraction, and at times I am probably more of a nuisance than anyone else.

¹⁵ Each of which has appeared in several performances over the years.

¹⁶ Which of these would depend on which show is being rehearsed and when. The means used to play the music has shifted around, the changes moving in and out of phase with the technological developments. We were playing cassette tapes in the era of DAT and then headed further backwards to vinyl in the era of CDs. When mp3s were a possibility, an iPod quickly became instrument of choice, allowing a lot of tracks at ones fingertips to fill all those moments of improv that perhaps do not want to be silences.

¹⁷ For obvious reasons.

¹⁸ And the silences in them.

¹⁹ I will note the types of discussion in reverse order of difficulty, i.e., easier or more enjoyable discussions at the top of the list and more difficult and less enjoyable discussions at the bottom.

²⁰ When I started work on this part of the text, at first I wrote that there would be three types of discussion – but a small amount of writing and concentrating on the topic has soon produced additional ones. Even now (in the evening of Saturday, 13 August 2005) I think there may very well be other types of discussion, but I am trying not to be distracted by the unavoidable limit and inevitable inaccuracy of what I can write here (or anywhere else). Language can do no more than make an attempt to map a process, a set of relationships and the unfolding interactions of creative work over time. More than that is not possible. We have to accept our failure, or we may not even begin.

²¹ This discussion also incorporates talk concerning What is this bit about? and How does it work? / How does it really work? and What I really like about / really don't like about it? (i.e., attempts to define it, to define its essential aspects etc.).

²² In fact although it can become torturous, this kind of discussion is sometimes very enjoyable.

²³ I am probably avoiding using the word ‘audience’ here because of doubts about the ease with which it ascribes and accepts collectivity to the act of watching. It is theatre that generally uses the a-word, whereas fine art performance prefers ‘viewer(s)’, or I might studiously use a phrase like ‘the people who are watching’. For me audience is at best a question – a possibility, perhaps a desirable possibility, perhaps not. We can talk about each performance (or theatre) event as requiring (or engendering) the formation of a temporary community – a fragile, even tenuous social grouping that emerges only in a process of unfolding and continual negotiation between all those present, on and off stage.

²⁴ Like the previous type of discussion, this one can also be pretty enjoyable and often needs a thick marker pen and some big sheets of paper for writing out structures. The backs of posters for other shows are OK to use as writing paper, or plain wallpaper or, if you really want to look professional a big A2 flip-chart can be used. Mostly we just use the posters or the wallpaper, but once we were staying in a hotel – during the final stages of the rehearsals for a performance Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me? in 2000 – and we had a meeting in their conference room and used the flip chart and marker pens provided, although this made everyone feel a bit weird like we were part of a corporation or something. On the paper you can make lists of the scenes/ sections/blocks of material and orders/sequences so that everyone is clear about what possible sequence is being discussed or proposed. Often over the course of a rehearsal process, the walls of our studio will become encrusted with old versions of these lists which can lead to confusions during run-throughs as people scan the walls with their eyes looking for today's running order.

²⁵ Most often this happens when you have tried to use the material that you do have as a source from which to extrapolate, but this process has led to nothing and so an attempt to temporarily ‘forget’ the existing material in order to move forward by another route.

²⁶ Where _________ is the idea that other person suggested, and where ‘blah blah blah’ are your reasons for doubting that the idea is viable.

²⁷ We have proved (more or less ‘mathematically’) several times that theatre is not possible. On some other occasions we have announced (to ourselves, since no one else is following the discussion in the kind of detail that we have to) that theatre is ‘not possible today, although it may be possible tomorrow’.

²⁸ ‘I don't see any method at all, sir’ (Willard [Martin Sheen] to Kurtz [Marlon Brando] in Apocalypse Now, when asked if he sees method in Kurtz's madness).

²⁹ This is related to the (slightly debatable) notion that two or three bad ideas can combine to make a good one but related also to the firm belief that half-completed things (provisional ideas, sketches) as opposed to master-plans allow better points of access and engagement for others in the work, much as half-finished buildings (construction and demolition sites) are among the best places for kids to play – something needs to be added: they are spaces in process, spaces not yet dragged into orthodoxy and sealed. They are also, in a certain sense perhaps, empty stages, spaces of potential, like those I mentioned already and which Hugo and I began photographing in 2003.

³⁰ You enter a whirlpool of ‘thinking’ and rationality, which is completely stifling and self-perpetuating. [William] Burroughs was probably right about language and its self-replicating ambitions.

³¹ Except possibly all-nude conga dancing or scenes from Shakespeare.

³² The gladiators: ‘We who are about to die salute you.’

³⁴ I'm putting these types of improvisation in the same kind of order as the six types of discussion – easy ones at the top here, getting more difficult as we go down.

³⁵ I mean this ‘you’ collectively – as in ‘the group has some idea of something that it wants to see or try’, rather than the ‘you’ implying some authorial director-type person.

³⁶ Always bearing in mind that any sense of what is going on from the outside is going to be quite different than that of anyone who is inside it.

³⁷ I have obviously failed to classify six kinds of improvisation. It is gone midnight on Sunday, 14 August 2005 – the night before the deadline for this article – and it seems unlikely (given all the other stuff I have to check, add and clear up in what I have already written) that I will get round to extending this part. Again, I am trying not to be distracted by the unavoidable limits and inaccuracies of what I can write here (or anywhere else), consoling myself with the idea that we have to accept our failures in advance or we may not even begin. The lack of the final two types of improvisation in the list here reminds me of the cartoon about the guy who is following a lesson on sword-swallowing on TV and you can see him with the sword all the way down his throat and he has his head right back and just the handle sticking out of his mouth and he looks uncomfortable and the guy on the TV is saying, ‘Next week we deal with Part 2 of our course – How to get the sword out again.’

³³ Perhaps six would be a good number to propose so that there will be six kinds of discussions and six kinds of improvisations.

³⁸ I am thinking of the great Japanese writer and list-maker from the eleventh century, Sei Shonagan, whose extraordinary Pillow Book includes a list of things that make the heart beat faster.

³⁹ The ones I am thinking about specifically are in the discussions and rehearsals for the new show in the early to middle part of 2005 – but there have been many such silences on similar occasions in the past twenty years.

⁴⁰ Or possibly some other kind that is not yet classified.

⁴¹ And at the end of texts.

⁴² There is a long list of ‘kinds of silence’ in the performance we made called Pleasure (1998) and another, longer list of silences in the more recent work Bloody Mess (2004).

⁴³ Wendy again on working with Forced Entertainment: ‘Something tender and hard at the same time – like being battered by butterflies.’