A Letter from Helen Cole

(Producer, Arnolfini Live)
Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster Symposium, November 2006.

Dear Uninvited Guests

Hi there. This letter is reaching you very, very late. It is now 13.17 on the morning of your symposium and hopefully the arrival of this letter has left you just enough time to read it amongst yourselves before you begin to read it out loud before an audience. This morning I wasn’t sure if you would be able to trust these words from me. If you are reading them out now, it shouldn’t surprise me, because putting trust in other people’s words is what you do.

So here is my text, written last night and again this morning.
This one’s for you….

Uninvited Guests, it is now Friday 3 November 2006 at 6 pm and you are about to premiere It Is Like It Ought To Be: A Pastoral.  We also are about to present a work by Martin del Amo, a dance artist from Sydney, Australia, a tense, exhausting choreography at 7.30 pm.  Arnolfini has entered that strange hiatus time you will all remember well. The real day has finished and the majority of the venue’s staff have left. The show is about to begin. As night descends, the venue is waiting for the audience to arrive. I like this time, tense though it is. I like sensing Arnolfini charged and changing, shifting on its axis, as its darkest corners take centre stage.

You first walked through Arnolfini’s doors over 8 years ago. Almost a decade of work, it’s hard to fathom! Thinking back, Uninvited Guests were the first artists determinedly from Bristol that I worked with and, over the years you have helped me to force Arnolfini open to a growing performance community.  Even at that early point you were and you remain very important to me.  We have had a symbiotic relationship ever since. 

In those days you were a half-formed company who sent me documentation of a work, the name of which I have almost forgotton. I think its title had the word “site” in there somewhere.  You wandered the stage talking of roadways and alleys, attempting to conjure a real location with text, string and paper. The work was an intrepid failure, but somewhere in there, you had something. It lay in that grainy video, between the earnest text, shakey performances and futile mappings. It lay in the very impossibility of your task. You could not hope to conjure this real location for me. And even if you did, why in fact would I care? I did care however about your doomed attempts and your earnest on-stage struggle. Uninvited Guests, you are still out their struggling and despite myself I am still out their caring. There is something in your firm belief that extraordinary things can happen in a theatre, that words can just hang there, but that they can also get under your skin.

Right now you say you have reached a moment for thinking, that A Pastoral marks a retreat to the woods to take stock. In this process of transition inevitably important questions have come up. You are asking where you have come from and where to go next and in so doing you are articulating the same sense of displacement experienced by many artists at this point of departure. In so doing you are also asserting the importance of Bristol and Arnolfini. I guess if you have to come from somewhere, it might as well be here.

So what is important about this location that brought you together, and Arnolfini as a home and an audience? Perhaps I can help you answer that question by telling you at least what I think. In my view the work of Uninvited Guests has a strong sense of place and belonging. You have made all of your work at Arnolfini and in so doing you have consistently invited us to make direct interventions into the making of each piece. Our voices permeate the work, speaking with you and the voices of others as you travel, lying deep within its memories and stories. We are there in the improbably conjoined rooms of Guest House, in the snatches of half-remembered scenes from favourite films in Film, in the real childhood accidents and deep wounds of Schlock, or the heartfelt declarations of love and loss in Love Letters Straight From the Heart. 

So over the years, you have performed at a distance, all the better to make our words more horrible or beautiful to contemplate. You have confused and plotted, woven our stories with those of anonymous others until we no longer know what is truth or lies. You have played with our emotions, and stolen our memories, whispered back to us our own sordid confessions and dirty secrets whilst at all times retaining a cool detachment.

As you, yourselves say

‘Because we can’t believe in the magic of the fourth wall. Because it always seems rude when I have paid my money to be in the audience and the actor ignores the plain fact that I’m out there.  It makes me want to wave and shout, “hello up there, why aren’t you acknowledging me?”’
 
For the re-opening of Arnolfini in September 05, I invited artists from the local Bristol community to come to a dinner party. The purpose of this event was to mark a re-entrance back into Arnolfini, a space that had been closed for major refurbishment for almost two years. Despite immense alterations in the rest of the building, not much about the theatre had changed. In fact it still looked rather loved and dog-eared. Yet despite this, it felt important to mark our re-emergence and to reclaim this space as our own. The theatre space was cleared of seating, a long table was bedecked with flowers and fairy lights and 24 seats lay waiting for the guests to arrive. Over the course of that evening, as wine and conversation flowed, we closed the gap of the two years of Arnolfini’s closure.  Whilst Tom Marshman took a needle and sewed us together with a long red thread, Paul Clarke read a text that conjured his memories of the numerous performances that had happened on that very spot and from within that small community over the last ten years:

The shattering of a sugar glass bottle as it is thrown with force at a man’s head.
A frightened tango, the woman’s legs shaking as she performs the slowed down dance.
A man hit repeatedly until he coolly asks for it to stop.
A woman using slow fingers to feel her way around the walls followed by a younger, faster ghost of herself.

And although at that particular moment, Paul was far too modest to mention Uninvited Guests, I can tell you that the walls of Arnolfini continue to vibrate with you and all that you have made happen there. You have re-enacted, documented, remembered and dreamed. Your work has explored the concerns of this time, this place and these people. Architecture, film, technology, horror, land and now love. As you say: Talking that cures and talking that harms, doing pleasure and violence with words.

This is the heart and soul of theatre, the contract is already explicit. We give you the stories so you can use them as you see fit. But remember we are playing a game with you too. You haven’t got to our deepest, darkest secrets yet so keep on digging, there is so much more darkness and excess to find.

With very best wishes and respect

Helen Cole
Producer Arnolfini
November 06