This is like looking at the email you sent last night when you were drunk, except it was two years ago.

If the mountain will not come to Muhammad…

I started this blog because I was desperate. I was in Canada for family reasons. I was trying to make something work that just would not work. That is all over. Having only Skype and Christmas and birthday presents to connect me with my children isn’t the disaster I thought it would be. I am in Belgium, as I have been for the last year and a half. Life is still tough, but it’s not a dead end any more. Albeit in the slowest of trickles, I am starting to do create my own performance work again. In other words this blog is obsolete.

I would delete it right now were it not for the fact that someone has added some informative comments about Ian Hinchliffe under one of the posts. I can’t remember whether my real name can be connected with this blog. I shall google it shortly. If it can, then I may need to delete this anyway because it probably won’t help me when a potential employer looks me up. This is called freedom of expression and it something we learn to live with.

Quizoola

Here is my reason for blogging about performance and Vancouver:

I have been utterly frustrated in Canada. My performance practice has been dead in the water more or less since I got off the plane five years ago. I thought it was just something to do with me (which, to be fair, it has been to a considerable extent), but I have heard from a few other people recently that I am not alone. There is something fundamentally lacking here. Because there is nothing to support the kind of work I need to do, it is up to me to communicate what it is that is lacking if this is ever going to change.

And here is my reason (valid or not) for a month of blogging nothing:

At the moment I don’t want to change it any more. I have tried to make a go of it here in my own ham fisted way and I have failed. I am burnt out. I haven’t even seen a performance that has inspired me in the last five years, let alone found any social space in which it would be possible to make one. I want to go back to Europe, to be inspired by something, to do something, to have a meaningful conversation in a real pub. If I did not have a family with ties to Canada I would have no hesitation in leaving. In fact I am about to take a long trip home. Maybe I shall stay there and make a go of it with family in tow. Maybe a change of heart shall bring me back. We’ll see.

For the moment there is just irony, which is as old as Western theatre. Eironeia was the discrepancy between how the eiron—the wily buffoon of Greek comedy—appeared to other characters and the more insightful persona he revealed in asides to the audience. Representation itself is inherently ironic because the audience-as-God knows what the fictional entities do not and the actors know what the audience does not. It’s a problem of power relations that is inherent to theatre, but more about that another time perhaps. The irony now is that in everything I have tried to do invoving experimental performance and Canada the gods have chosen to play strange games I don’t understand. A few hours or a few days ago I would have called their irony bitter. But that, now I think of it, is only because we live in a pathologically scientistic age in which uncertainty is an abomination to be exterminated at all costs. For someone who truly values live performance such an attitude is perverse.

For instance here is an irony we can enjoy together. After five years in the theatre vacuum I decide to leave this country. Just as I am about go I discover that, for the first time since I arrived here (with, to the best of my knowledge, the single possible exception of a show at last year’s Vancouver Fringe about the origin of rectangles—which those gods decided I should miss), some truly interesting theatre is about to hit this city. That I will not see it is not a such a tragedy in itself because I have seen some of it before. But I am sad that I will not be able to share the experience with you. Still, because you will most likely be here during the PuSh Festival you may well be able to attend Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola which, more than it is a show, is a window into a process of several years duration. Then you may also be able to see Eddie Ladd’s Scarface, which is worth doing because it is the kind of thing that happens slowly on the fringes of Europe, because it is what physical theatre utterly fails to be, because her body becomes a violent and bilingual movie, and because Welsh is a kind of Spanish.

Just as I have for so long been at a loss to explain the kinds of work I have encountered in Europe that no one has seen here, if you attend the performances I have mentioned, then, even though I have seen the before, you will know them in a way I probably never will. This is because I experienced them in Wales where dark stone houses huddle together for comfort, where sport is solemn and where bilingual means more than a bit of token French on your cornflakes. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to experience these works in a city that is superficial, product-oriented and rootless. For this I envy you. What’s more, if my strange gods decide to piss on me once again and, against my better judgement, I find myself returning to Vancouver brimming with some dark optimism, you can try to tell me what those performances were like.

I won’t understand of course because I won’t have been there. With any luck you will become exasperated with my stubborn ignorance. If so you will share the exasperation, the impossibility of communication, that is behind this blog. Stay with that feeling, that exasperation, that impossibility of communication, and you will be at the very heart of performance. It is everything that melodrama and Hollywood and Michael Flatley try to hide. It is the only thing that can save us from London Drugs or Starbucks. Do we understand each other?

Radical Theatre

Do you ever feel lonely?
Of course I do.
Then think of Billy
He’s lonely too.
Lives in a city:
population one.

– Ivor Cutler

There is no truly radical theatre in Western Canada. Period. Or at least that’s how it feels. What exceptions there may be are pretty well hidden, perhaps disguised as community theatre.

In a society supersaturated with narrative and image then only a theatre that is prepared to renounce the production of narrative and image (even though it will inevitably fail) can be called radical.

The production of image that refuses narrative is radical. Baudrillard believes this possible through photography, but not in sequential works, such as his own past photographic exhibitions, or such as performance. In truth an image, sequential or not, can never repel narrative entirely. Not even the most concrete singularities of performance art can do this.

A performance that is, before anything else, a social event might be radical. Such a performance is, as it happens, also the oldest. But with the experience of millennia of divided labour and of lies upon lies between then and now, it cannot be recovered as was. That is wishful thinking for the yuppie shamans and the crystal meth hippies.

Herbert Blau defined theatre as a “practice that is a failure of practice”, but the minor failures we have come to tolerate in the name of “experimental theatre” are nothing on the kind of total failure of theatre that is needed. In Norway, Baktruppen fail magnificently, but here the “radicals” successfully pursue their minor careers and pick up their funding cheques.

The annual Parade of Lost Souls at Vancouver’s Grandview Park also fails magnificently, but somehow it also fails to be theatre. That is not a fault. It is what it is. Why it fails to be theatre I’m not quite sure because I’m not sure what theatre is, but whatever it is it is something we cannot do without.

How far can you fail at theatre while still being theatre? When does it become carnival? When does it become performance art? I can only answer for myself. For me, theatre is what it is because of the process that underlies it. For me the process can only be one of collaboration, of interaction, and it is therefore a process that is itself performed. Or maybe it’s just a label and a kind of audience, but whatever it is it still addresses the social urge that drove people to Shakespeare’s Globe (before they closed the roof and turned the lights out).

Because theatre, as I feel it, can only be created when more than one person is involved, it cannot happen unless there is a community of more than one person. This journal is addressed, most of all, to that unrealised community.