Seven thoughts on classification and the countryside triggered by Uninvited Guests’ It is Like It Ought to Be: A Pastoral Matthew Fenton (Nuffield Theatre) 1. In her Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon (1971), a lady of some fashion and at the height metropolitan sophistication in 10th century Japan, is clear about matters of taste as they relate to beasts: Oxen should have very small foreheads with white hair; their underbellies, the ends of their legs, and the tips of their tails should also be white. The drive to classify is at the heart of any modern understanding of the countryside, manifested in the twin metropolitan endeavors of science and art: the classifying of flora and fauna (from Linnaeus onwards into the five ranks of class, order, genus, species, and variety); and the imaginative works of Goethe, Constable, Shelley and the Romantic poets. Did the Industrial Revolution manufacture the countryside and our nostalgia for it? Did clouds exist before 1802, when Luke Howard presented his On the Modification of Clouds, classifying them as cirrus, nimbus, cumulonimbus, and thus enabling their scientific and aesthetic study? Nostalgia, of course, is as old as the hills; but nostalgia is not the same thing as the countryside. Is it nostalgia that links Poussin’s vision of pious shepherds in Et In Arcadia Ego, the “tree-hugging” anti-motorway protest movement of the 1990s, and our eco-activists? Is it really all just about the little white bunnies? Or, as Uninvited Guests’ current piece hints, is there an emerging politics here? Is there something more than experience of Dartington College and a Goat Island Summer School which links companies like Uninvited Guests, Deer Park and Lone Twin, and why do their practices sit so starkly against the urban horror-shows of so many theatre makers in the 1990s? 2. The landscape in which I cut my programming teeth was made up of works by Fecund Theatre, Frantic Assembly, Third Angel, Mark Ravenhill and Irvine Welsh. Works which, while popular with audiences in their representations of the sexual and amphetamine-fuelled mores of young urbanites, seemed at the time to bear little or no relation to my experience or understanding of city life. In the current milieu, there may be the odd incident of extreme apple-bobbing, but there are few examples of coke-fuelled anal rape. Rather we see a desire to create some kind of gentleness, a shared moment in the metropolitan madness, a hand held out to an audience, a call to “walk with me, walk with me”. Is there here a reaction to a sensed absence of community, to immediate and throw-away international travel, to the homogenisation of all cities everywhere (Helen Paris writes of her not-really-shock at the Starbucks in China’s forbidden City – surely, if something should be forbidden, she wonders), to the constant drip-feed of rolling news, the just huge and complicated bigness of international politics; in short to globalisation? And, in our theatrical backwater, perhaps also to the over-tech of much theatre made in the last 15 years? Where once a projector, a laptop and some contact improvisation set to a club soundtrack put you at the “bleeding edge”, now most school plays feature movement sequences against some pretty natty digital back-projections of late-night drives through unnamed cities. 3. But the countryside. The countryside has always been an urban concern. Until there was the town, the city, there wasn’t its other. While our cities were becoming recognisably urban, alongside the serious mechanisation of agriculture, the idea of the countryside was being culturally displaced by outdoor pursuits and landscape tourism. The currency that Lancaster retains in its closeness to the Lakes, derives precisely from this imaginative and aesthetic refiguring of the English landscape. That supreme thinker-classifier of the everyday, Georges Perec, having pondered in his Species of Spaces (1997) the bedroom, the apartment, the building, the street, the neighbourhood and the town, has only this to say of the countryside: I don’t have a lot to say about the country: the country doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion. For most people of my kind, the country is the decorative space surrounding their second home, bordering a part of the motorways they take on Friday evenings when they go there, and a few metres of which they will pass through, if they have the courage, on Sunday afternoons, before regaining the town, where, throughout the whole of the rest of the week, they will be hymning the return to nature. The nearest decent woodland to the Nuffield Theatre, Grizedale Forest, was the site of Deer Park’s recent performance walking project, a meditation on the unheimlich and how to make a home of the forest. Much of Grizedale is overrun with mountain bikers and at its heart is the massive activity centre “Go Ape” – a sort of fake woodland of walkways and death-slides referencing more the Ewok village of Endor than the English pastoral tradition. Although you might say that George Lucas was working in the Arcadian tradition, but that’s hyper-reality for you. 4. Some modern references to Et In Arcadia Ego (with acknowledgement to Wikipedia)
5. Sickened by America’s burgeoning industrialisation, Henry Thoreau’s self-sufficiency-drive to the woods beside Walden pond in 1845, the first and best-documented of the down-shifters, is defined almost entirely by its relation to the town, with the economy he strives to avoid. His painstaking detailing of all the savings and expenses involved in country dwelling is a model of the very commercialism he is trying to escape. Rice $1.73 1/2 6. A list of Insects The bell insect and the pine cricket; the grasshopper and the common cricket; the butterfly and the shrimp insect, the mayfly and the firefly. I feel very sorry for the basket worm. 7. After Nature The German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-1746) was aboard Bering’s second expedition to find an eastern passage to North America via the Arctic Ocean. Steller was the first European to record many species of plant and animal. Following a shipwreck, which results in Bering’s death, the crew wait for spring and gradually starve. Steller records the world around him: the northern fur seal, the sea otter, the sea lion, the sea cow, the eider and the spectacled cormorant. In the spring the remaining crew construct a vessel and return to safety. Ignoring his recall to St Petersburg, Steller spent the next two years exploring the Kamchatka peninsula. Some animals and plants named after Georg Steller: During what remained of the summer Throughout the winter Manuscripts written at the end of his life, References |