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‘LOOK ON STRANGER, I’M ONLY MAKING LOVE’ (A LYRIC ESSAY FOR PONYBOY CURTIS AND THEIR FCKSYSTMS)

The majority of this text was composed immediately after a performance of FCKSYSTMS at The Yard on 02/06/16. It was then edited over a number of months. It was included in tread lightly, a zine collated by Maddy Costa to accompany the groups performance vs. at the Yard in June 2017. This text is the introduction to a longer, theoretical essay entitled ‘We Have Not Resolved Our Differences.’ It remains incomplete, but will hopefully emerge in the future, either in ‘complete’ form or within other writings. This text is simply an attempt to capture what it’s like to be in Ponyboy’s audience.

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“Queer times require even queerer modalities of thought, analysis, creativity, and expression” - Jasbir K. Puar

Stalwart adolescents baring themselves, illuminated by other people’s eyes. This magnetism of their and our meeting; mere eye contact, reciprocal gazes; recognition and negotiation – meeting and parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns – so pliable, agreeable – and “can we talk about a network of cruisers rather than occasional and seemingly isolated, if not accidental, encounters?” – constellations, a nervous system entwined, legs tangled in rope, a happy accident, laughter, taunting, pulling, leaving – “the fragility and transience of actual living things” – a sensorium of fickly migrating pleasures – “the heat of them in the chill of the cavern” – bodies, embraced through odours, emanating – frothed into the wild semblance of life – running at walls, reaching beyond, climbing the balustrades; falling into some deathless swoon of an embrace, a dance made of our trips and falls; these, our artefacts, our relics; remembrance in the fall, of man’s first disobedience, humiliation and humility, the all too human; at once natural and monumental – blown like a feather – held on hard discs, transposed to anywhere, now here: your arm reaches outside the frame, outside the lens’ field of capture, out here into this room, your body continuing to stretch beyond without you; a detached and living appendage fused with another, aligned briefly, a life extended, historicity, rubs the features, the movements out and into smooth, sinuous folds, mashes, melds, and recomposes substances; a life woven and made of state bureaucracy, of stress induced gestures, of catwalks, precarization, teetering on edges, together – we are nothing, I said and fell – the body, rendered fluid by desire – “internal organs spurning allocation to a single place and function but circulating in a hedonistic flux” – the body, a tool for sensibility and connection with others, sensibility that does not simply exist, that needs to be nurtured; essential to our capacity to live with one another, to our capacity for empathy, the body of the work, as doing, as done before; the imbrication of memory and present, encompassing the lived – strands of lives reached out in time and place – and the living; Ace Merrill and a Ponyboy infused, rolling, slippery identities, untidy – “too big to be kept clean” – no regulated or organised wholeness, only the brief flash of a whole, fleeting – hold it forever – “single bodies reaching towards other bodies to make a larger body” – already entangled material – “the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future” – the body – only lightly covered with buttoned cloth – “is morphological space facing down closure, in motion, inhabiting transitions, on complicated journeys through pain into the plays of beauty” writes cris cheek and I read more than a month after this endless activity has ended, drawn backwards, reminded, to edit, to add, to remain somehow and have it carried by other means, with me in the streets with my own fleeting glances – “What does it mean when two men look at each other in the streets of the modern city?” – as I slowly glide or rush through and with bodies – “we are all ballet dancers now” – as I am changed and moved and made different – I am made and remade continually – and yet, stayed somewhere, amidst the mobile pleasure zones, stayed, stilled, returned, looking again at “the rubbery elasticity of the dancing body, liquidizing its limbs and curvaceously grooving”, looking and being seen, looking and being met, looking and being met with a look of coolness and calmness and distance that says: “look on stranger, I’m only making love” . . .

Sources

- Jasbir K. Puar, Queer Times, Queer Assemblages

http://www.jasbirpuar.com/assets/Queer-Times-Queer-Assemblages.pdf

- Jasbir K. Puar

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/puar/en

- Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” in: Signs. Journal of Women and Society, 2003, No. 3

- Emma Dowling, “What a Way to Make a Living”

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4906/what-a-way-to-make-a-living

- Maddy Costa, ‘Other Hospitalities: Reflections on Chris Goode’s Ensemble Ponyboy Curtis’

http://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2015/25-4/

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Penguin Modern Classics, 1964) 

- Kenneth Goldsmith, Capital (London: Verso, 2015) 

- Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014) 

- John Milton, Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991) 

- Chris Goode, The Forest and the Field, Changing theatre in a changing world (London: Oberon Books, 2015)

- Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie, trans. by Bruce Benderson  (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013

- Margrit Shildrick, “Prosthetic Performativity: Deleuzian Connections and Queer Corporealities”, in: Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Ed.): Deleuze and Queer Theory, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 115–33.

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ANOTHER SHORT ORGANUM FOR THE THEATRE

This short text was created as a response to the question ‘What IS theatre? What can it do?’ It was composed, upon request, so that the author might present research on behalf of Queen Mary University of London at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research in April 2017. It was supposed to be a ‘manifesto’. It sort of is. My intention is to develop the piece into a series or perhaps a longer text. Consider this a beginning.

Theatre consists in this: a procession of bodies, infused with hopes, mangled by, transfigured in or escaping mechanistic processes, but, under the conditions of Western industrial or post-industrial modernity, what we most often mean when we talk of ‘the theatre’ is a ‘theatre in which one group of people spend their leisure time sitting in the dark to watch others spend their working time under lights pretending to be other people.’[1] Theatre is the ‘things’ that absorb our focus – the plays, shows and pieces – the products that are the expected consummation of our working relationships. It’s the products that we choose for others to see: the ‘commodities which give relations among people the appearance of relations among things.’[2] It’s a face-to-face encounter met with demands for satisfaction. It’s people as a resource to be cultivated and managed. It’s the structures and built forms erected to sustain ‘theatre’ as something inseparable from what we’ve come to understand as the ‘culture industry’; a collection of expectations, disciplines, and subjectivities specific to our present historical moment. It’s also, both within and in spite of such strictures, the maker of lasting and temporary communities, not the false communities some imagine our auditoria to be, but those who meet in rooms to negotiate a shared space, who speak to each other, listen, argue, play Grandmothers footsteps, experiment and play as in play, dance to David Bowie and arrange Harry Potter readings. It’s foolishness and sometimes just noise. It’s people doing their best. It’s not enough. More than anything, it’s rehearsal, what is hidden and everyone ‘unseen’. It’s the people flocking to cities to serve you your food and make you your coffee. It’s spending most of your time wishing away hours and not doing what you want. This is how it collectivises: through precarity and that being made a surplus; theatre as a collection of the radically alienated, as deeply determined by the logic of the market. Some people want to measure it; they’ve spent the money that could enable artists enabling themselves to quantify it. Theatre is contributing to the governments’ growth agenda.[3] It still has an excellent sales record, prospects, and customers are growing in number[4]. Major brands recognise the opportunities that now exist through partnerships in the cultural sector[5]. When theatre ‘works’ and is ‘great’ it is characterised by a smoothness and harmony – a space of no resistance and no obstacles[6] – and for these reasons, among many others, it is too often white, male, ‘able-bodied’ and heteronormative[7]. Theatre is my friends’ depression and something fled. It is my own lack of fulfillment and dissatisfaction; it is ‘uncomfortable, compromised, boring, conventional, bourgeois, overpriced and unsatisfactory most of the time.’[8] Theatre is a burden today; something weighty and a thing for which I persevere. It’s my service sector job. The entire reason I’m in London. Strangers on Hungerford Bridge. This later than necessary night. Broken relationships. Obsession. Toil. The rooms that were hostile and challenging and tiresome and loud. It’s the positivity I can’t find today. This tunnel to abstraction. Burrowing into uncharted territory. An answer to a question. It’s not that easy to get on with and that’s perhaps what I think people should know. Searching for an end. That’s what tiredness does to you. Won’t be found. Oh well. People love a cut to black in the theatre, it’s a spectacle after all, so there you go. End.

Notes

[1] Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 6.

[2] Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review, I, 1981, pp.66–95.

[3] ‘Arts Council England Corporate Plan 2015-18’, Arts Council England, 2016 < http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Corporate-Plan_2015-18_Arts-Council-England.pdf> [accessed 7 November 2016].

[4] William Rees-Mogg, ‘A Great British Success Story’ Arts Council England Brochure, 1986

[5] Showcase, in Matthew Hemley, ‘National Theatre to Host UK’s First Arts Sponsorship Conference | News’, The Stage, 2016 <https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2016/national-theatre-to-host-uks-first-arts-sponsorship-conference/> [accessed 7 November 2016].

[6] Henri Lefebvre, ‘Space: Social Product and Use Value’, in State, Space, World: Selected Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp.185-195, p.192

[7] Sara Ahmed, ‘Feminism and Fragility’, Feministkilljoys, 26 January 2016 <https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/01/26/feminism-and-fragility/> [accessed 7 November 2016].

[8] Ridout, p.3

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THE SINCERITY EFFECT: AN AUDIENCE WALK OUT DURING ‘THIS IS HOW WE DIE’ BY CHRISTOPHER BRETT BAILEY

We’re nearing the end. Or at least we’re a considerable way into the journey. We’ve passed the point where the head has come off in his hands. The little Jesus has finished masturbating. It’s been established that Ziggy Stardust is a seminal album. They’ve got in the car. They’re driving. “deeper into the desert.” They’re driving. And the thoughts about vaginas and cowardice and assholes are tumbling out as “the desert became dirt, became gravel, became an endless strip.” They’re driving. “and I contemplated America.” They still seem to be driving. “we are dying, we are dying, we are dead.” They are driving “under satellite and sedation.” The words and thoughts keep coming “they leave my lips and explode like bricks.” The words “mean nothing, mean air, mean i had an impulse” and the words “i thought it’d feel better” and more from “this tongue” which “is a weapon” the tongue “our savage tongues” the words “we spray our enemies’ blood all up these fucking walls” the savage tongues and the words “we reclaim our future” the words “and we pronounce this language dead” and “the blurred lines” and “and and and” . . .

 At some point, around this time, amidst the words “your fear is normal, it is a product of our times” or perhaps “it’s a lack of imagination” I notice a man to my right descending the stairs of our raked seating in the BAC Council Chamber, bag in hand, awkwardly moving to the foot of the stage where he has to pass directly in front of Chris to find the exit. When the man reaches the bottom of the stairs the words stop. Chris stops speaking. He has to stop. Throughout the performance Chris has taken moments to acknowledge the presence of the audience. When he took his first sip of water he scanned the audience looking directly into our eyes. When someone sneezed he said “bless you.” When one member of the audience found something particularly amusing he looked towards them and gave them a nod as if to say “yeah, that was good right?” We are present with him. He is present with us. There is no pretending that we are not here. He doesn’t pretend to not see the man and carry on, he stops, the man walks straight for the exit, as he’s walking away Chris leans into the microphone and says “buh-bye” and then “have a nice life.” The man is gone. We all laugh and smile and shuffle a bit in our seats. Chris attempts to compose himself whilst making a few comments about the man’s departure, including (with only a slight tinge of irony) that “we were just getting to the serious part.” He searches the sheet in front of him for the point where he’d stopped, finds it, he attempts to start again “your fear is normal, it is a product of our times…” After a short time he stops again. He smiles and runs his hand through his hair and then he says to us, the audience, “doesn’t it seem fake now?” He poses the question “doesn’t this sound false?” It’s one of those moments in theatre where you’re immediately staggered by a sort of honesty to which you’re seldom treated, also relieved because of its necessity in that moment and at that time because the answer to the question from Chris is yes. I could sense the strangeness of the words now, their grandiosity exemplified by the relaxed simplicity with which Chris had dealt with the man walking out. Suddenly, the illusion is broken, the momentary interruption, a trauma, when “Reality entered the room”* both in the form of ‘the real’ man and ‘the real’ unscripted, unplanned reaction of Chris, at a point of symbolic significance, when the heightened, poetic, deluge of language is clearly now dealing with something closer to us, closer to the actual world outside these walls, had caused a destabilising effect. It seemed to be that because we’d been met with something of the actual world the feeling or sense or even form of Chris’s ‘manufactured’ words had changed or lost something of their power. Chris says “he could not have chosen a worse place to walk out.” Both he and us can’t help but smile and laugh at the situation. Chris dumbfounded by the timing of this impromptu event. He then picks out various themes or images from the page and continues “something about communication – something about human experience, acceleration”, all spoken in a derisory tone. His words, his language, have suddenly shifted right in front of him, they now seem fake and false, but it is Chris’s acknowledgement of this feeling, this sense of falsity that is significant. In this act he reveals not only something about the mechanisms or conventions under which art functions, but also something that we may have all implicitly expected, but that we weren’t necessarily ever supposed to actually see: the meaning of these words to Chris and their expected or hoped for resonance with us.

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 I’m reminded of another similar situation in the very same building, the very same room, the same Council Chamber at BAC on the 19/11/13 during a performance of Tomorrow’s Parties by Forced Entertainment. Tomorrow’s Parties is a “performance that imagines a multitude of hypothetical futures.” Two members of the company stand on a crate, beneath coloured fairground lights, and together they explore what the future might bring. During that evenings performance Cathy Naden hypothesised that in the future we’ll build ourselves a completely virtual world, she said: “people will spend more and more time in that virtual world. And the real world will be abandoned.” Throughout the performance I’d been at times distracted by a young girl a couple of rows in front of me. I’d been distracted by the glare of her phone which she’d had in her hand since the performance began. When Cathy spoke of a “virtual world” my gaze was immediately drawn to the girl with her phone. As Cathy was speaking the girl didn’t flinch. She didn’t hear the words. She was never even there. She had abandoned our world and was immersed in the virtual. In an instant the imaginary was actualised already in the here and now, the future conjectured in the symbolic order of performance was already part of our present reality, it could already be perceived, inscribed in the action (or inaction) of someone present in the room (in body) but also somewhere else (in mind): both everywhere and nowhere in particular. There was a sudden convergence, a collision of worlds, something that was unplanned and unique to that performance, something outside the realm of what was meant to be happening in that room, a room of people imagining possible futures together, but something that also exemplified what was taking place in the here and now of that performance. It was an invasion, the intrusion of reality: the future was present. It lent the ideas of that evening, the words, the symbols, the company, the performance, a further, deeper significance, a weight as idea was realised in image before me. I was Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ as Benjamin saw him, but momentarily able to look forward, my face turned toward the future, yet still presented with the catastrophe.

 This is like that. This event with Chris and the man walking out, or more importantly his acknowledgement of what that event has done to the veracity of his words, at this moment, in this performance, shares something with that. It has done something that will irrevocably change the rest of my experience of that evening.

 Boris Groys in his essay ‘Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility’ suggests that in our mediatised age “we are waiting for a moment of sincerity, a moment in which the designed surface cracks open to offer a view of its inside.” It’s this “crack” and a “view of [the] inside” that Chris offers us with his reaction to his words seeming loss of authenticity. Baudrillard,  in relation to televised media, describes a similar occurrence when he says “that’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us.” In this instance, emptiness or inauthenticity is what Chris thinks we see, and in part this is true, but it’s not only what is present, what’s also “squinting out at us” is his sincere desire to share something with us and his disappointment at its supposed failure; his sudden inability to communicate with us. “This is modern art’s main deficit: the modern artwork has no ‘inner’ value of its own, no merit beyond what public taste bestows upon it” (Groys). Something that we often forget from our removed position as spectator is the significance of the act of creation to the Other who opens, intimately, generously, their mind and confers their thoughts on us (the subject), this is what Levinas professed when he wrote about our “responsibility never contracted, inscribed in the face of an Other.” We bear witness to the personal investment of Chris, to his hopes for what this moment might mean both to him and correspondingly to us, the people he’s sharing these words and ideas with, in a space we share in common. We inadvertently, accidentally have experienced the creation of “the sincerity effect that provokes trust in the spectator’s soul” (Groys).

 -

 Chris eventually continues after saying something along the lines of “well I’ll carry on, I’m sorry if it sounds fake or whatever.” He starts once again to read the words from the paper in front of him. “it’s a lack of imagination. we cannot picture the future because we cannot imagine living through, surviving, the present.” They’re still too much, too grand; they’re starkly lit and naked now. “the future is a car crash or an orgasm.” They no longer wash over me. I’m not lost in them or transported to a car in a desert on an endless strip. “nostalgia is comforting.” They stand up, strange, ugly, and loud. “more and more communication, more and more information.” I see them differently. I see them at a distance. “as the world shrinks to the size of an iphone.” I hear them as a plea, as endeavour, as anger, and as noise. “a car revving at top speed.” I see them as toil and sweat. I really see them now. They’re inelegant. “the orgasm happening.” They’re desperate. “maybe there’s miles and miles of open road ahead of us.” They allow me to gaze upon them in their myriad forms: defiant and dejected, considered and rash, true and false. They’re none of these things and everything else. “too nervous for grace.” These words from someone right in front of me. “bare naked.” It all appears as an affront to Barthes ‘death of the author’ “greased in the name of charisma” and yet its ultimate realisation. “an almost human stare.” I see Chris. “passing through the bowels of the building now.” I see him and his investment in these words. “out in front of this crowd.” He is what Chris Goode talks about when he says a naked actor is “the most powerful person in the room because they’ve got nothing left to hide.” The author is present. “a thousand eyes stare back.” Chris is here. “dead or alive.” He is the origin of these words, and yet he is aware, and has made us aware of our necessary engagement, our mutual presence with him, and our equal importance in the creation of this performance “forced to eat it” because of our ability to imbue and invest his words with meaning, to believe in their importance, to find them consequential. “actual fucking peanuts.” We are positioned as co-authors “baying to watch you bleed” everyone in the room “something other than a crowd” an “emancipated community of narrators and translators” (Ranciere). “in the form of tears.” Because it’s not the particular meaning that is relevant “tonight the tongue’s a weapon”, there is no single “theological” meaning  (“the message of the Author-God”) “tonight it is a whip” even as what has took place reinforces what might be considered the meaning of the whole: “you and i, holding each other” the emptiness of words “we apologize” their inadequacy, words that “mean nothing, mean air, mean i had an impulse” whilst also attesting to their possibility “everywhere you look”, their majesty “and meaningless pain” to the relationships and connections they can cultivate between us, “new ideas being born” pointing with floodlights to our reliance on one another “we lick our loved ones until they are clean” as the floodlights in the theatre continue to rise on our faces “we spray our enemies’ blood all up these fucking walls” and I can see the silhouetted figures of others around me, present with me in this room, all of us together, as the lights fade on Chris “and we pronounce this language dead.” . . .

 *Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Grey p.50

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‘The gift system has already taken hold among consumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize their chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly what, is not clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance are the participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training the culture industry has given these recipients of gifts, in order to organize them into its own forced battalions.’

- Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception) p.161