Between You and Us: A Story of Uninvited Guests

Paul Clarke (Uninvited Guests / Dartington College of Arts)
Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster Symposium, November 2006.

So, here we are, eight years on from our first show together, Guest House, in 1998. It’s been a long-lasting relationship, longer than many love-relationships and friendships. So, as a group of artist-friends, at what feels like a turning point in our work, this is an opportunity for us to reflect back on past performances and look forward to ongoing collaborations and what the future might hold. We want to share this moment of reflection with you, the audiences who have collaborated with us over the last eight years.

I’m going to contextualise It Is Like It Ought To Be (2006) by speaking about the trajectory that’s brought us to making this show. You’ve seen our pastoral, or will tonight, so we won’t describe it or discuss it in detail now. Still, we’d like you to keep this curative retreat from our contemporary age, from capitalism’s urban utopia (founded on accumulating new technologies) in mind, as we speak of the other events we’ve made. There are writings around this piece by David Williams and us in the programme.
 
Uninvited Guests formed in 1998 in Bristol, UK. Since then, the company have worked in various contexts and constellations, focusing mainly on theatre, but also producing durational performance, digital media and installation. Our first touring theatre show, Guest House, was re-staged in CD-ROM format, as an interactive, virtual tour and shown as an installation.

Our works for studio theatres, galleries and multimedia have explored relationships between real and on-screen, live and mediated spaces; encounters between visceral and virtual materials. Drawing on documentary interviews, we’ve spoken others’ words as though our own, borrowing both your declarations of love and traumatic memories, mixing them with fictional desires and schlock-horror violence. In doing so we’ve measured the distance between ourselves and others’ experiences and asked you, our audiences, to do the same. Each new project is part of an ongoing attempt to represent contemporary reality, in which virtual interactions, TV, or film are as much part of our real experience as intimate encounters with friends and lovers. Up to this point, technology has formed an integral aspect of our work, however the company's technique has been characterised by a “hands on” approach that makes visible the tools of representation and combines high-tech with low-tech means. It Is Like It Ought to Be marks a turn away from the urban towards the countryside, towards celebratory and participatory events and critical nostalgia.

Film (2000-01)



Susan Sontag, in an essay on theatre and film, contrasts the two by saying that ‘theatre is never a “medium”’ in the sense that ‘one can make a movie “of” a play but not a play “of” a movie.’ (quoted in Phillip Auslander, 1999). Uninvited Guests’ second show Film turned this around, reversing the conventional "order of things" to create a live collage of moments sourced from the movies.

Uninvited Guests imagined the end of cinema - a time when films have been lost, the prints degraded, or burned. In a series of interviews in cinemas, you were asked to recall scenes from movies. All the material for Film was drawn from these interviews: the descriptions were the source for performance and the soundtrack was composed by sampling the interviewees' speech and background sounds on these recordings. The theatre became an underground and illicit "film club", as we used performance and technology to try to piece the movies back together from your fading memories.

We started from the premise that the movies you have watched, and the stories you tell of them, are as much part of your identity and how you define yourself as so-called real events. In Film, Uninvited Guests could not move or speak a word without stealing from iconic scenes. Our performance personas lived out their lives through the movies, desperate to fulfil their desires for film sex and violence. Unable to transcend themselves and the theatre, the performers revealed their real bodies as vulnerable and pathetic: there was pathos in their attempts to reproduce idealised movie maleness and stereotypical femininity, to become filmic.

If we acknowledge that identity is performed in contemporary culture how do we assess the quality of our performances? Do we measure our performances in different "real" contexts against those of actors on-screen? Do we measure up? Are our everyday actions preceded by movie simulations, which we ape in order to appear more authentic, or more-than real?

Offline (2001-2003)



Whereas we had integrated technology into our previous shows, Guest House and Film, Offline used only microphones and 60s-70s guitar amps, referencing a pre-web era. At the same time, the work continued to be about mediated communication and performing ourselves through new technologies. Offline was researched by wandering the web as electronic flâneurs, browsing sites like digital dandies and gathering what stood out to us. Material found online was presented in an offline, distinctly low-tech performance. With no Internet access or computers on-stage, we explored what happens when texts written-to-be-read on the web are spoken live, face-to-face with an audience. Similarly, the soundtrack consisted of remixed samples from low quality midi files found online. These were transferred from their digital domain and played-back on analogue tape recorders.

Whilst browsing we were drawn to the ways you use the web as a site for confessing, for making your most private lives public; your loves, your loneliness, your fetishistic desires and sexual misdemeanours. In Offline we spoke others’ personal revelations - “truths“ too intimate for friends, let alone strangers scattered remotely across the globe.

The confessional mode promises a revealing of truth, but online you frequently “lie” about your identities. As in theatre, you take pleasure in performing yourselves differently, “as if” another gender, sexuality or age. Often there's no way of differentiating reality from fantasy. Do we care about authenticity, or an avatar’s “real” identity whilst chatting with them on the web?

In Offline we described ourselves as female, then male, despite our physical bodies being present. We shifted personality live and unplugged, identifying ourselves differently, from homo to hetero to bisexual, from moment to moment. Using a hypertext structure, we mirrored the complexity of online performance - in which someone might have multiple chatroom windows open simultaneously, chatting as a different identity in each.

Has the WWW abolished the secure authenticity of face-to-face communication, or is a new sense of closeness and community produced, screen-to-screen, an effect of the real? Might an online representation of self (your avatar in Second Life), have a closer resemblance to your internal sense of self, be truer-to-life, than your “everyday” appearance? What makes us believe that someone/something is real online/offline? Might online modes of communication - anonymous, disembodied, gender-ambiguous exchanges  - be carried through into “real life” situations? And what happens in the theatre, when intimately personal text, that has been displaced onto the web (that is placeless, everywhere and nowhere) is embodied again by particular performers and spoken here-and-now, to you, an audience in a particular city?

A six-hour version of Offline,commissioned for Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time festival of live art (2003), was the first of a strand of more intimate durational works: you joined us, in our homely yet placeless space, and we got up-close and personal in our delivery.

Live Chat (2002 & 2005)



Live Chat developed Offline’s initial concepts through an interactive event, that took place simultaneously on and offline. This was a durational intervention into two types of social space: real and virtual. In both spaces (internet chatroom and bar) people chat, exchange ideas and flirt. In a real bar, dialogue from chatrooms, written-to-be-read on the web, was spoken by performers, who talked to each other face-to-face. Video and audio from the bar was projected in an internet café, where you could join in the online chat, via computers, and hear your text spoken.

Live Chat linked the real social space of a bar into the virtual architecture of the web, which, though everywhere and nowhere, is mainly focused in the U.S. The artwork was a network, its contents authored by knowing and unknowing participants. Live Chat questioned the truth and directness of conversation, both on and offline, and generated a playful dialogue between these differing sites.

Like a mediated game of Chinese Whispers, Live Chat extended the time lag and amplified the noise in the channels, highlighting the delay and mistranslation that occur in all communications. The performers acted as mediums, nodes in the network, through whom others’ words passed. As text-to-speech translators, they produced as many glitches as software translating speech-to-text. People dispersed globally, between remote places, chatted in real-time in virtual rooms, their words attributed to anonymous IDs. In Live Chat two performers brought their words together, and shifted in Age, Sex, Location, whilst located in the same physical space, a public bar.

Schlock (2004 - 5)



In Schlock your audio-visual experience was literally mediated by a transparent polycarbonate wall, which also protected you from the spray of fake blood. Schlock actualised and objectified the fourth wall, making visible the screen onto which audiences project.

Duncan Speakman produced a live soundtrack, using custom-built software to sample and process internal noises from the performers’ bodies. Sensors taped to our bodies enabled us to effect each others’ voices through physical contact, and to pitch-shift our sampled heartbeats to impossible rates.

Schlock collided the real with the really fake. Personal experiences of bodily trauma - injuries, accidents and illnesses - encountered the erotics of TV hospital dramas and horror-flicks. This piece was about fearful moments in our relationships with our own and others’ bodies, both real and on-screen representations.

Schlock was a personal and cultural traumatology in which emotional shocks – that mark you – might have their origin in real life, TV, film or computer gaming. Schlock was a live archive of experiences of body horror - from the personal and apparently authentic, to the extreme kitsch of Dario Argento movies or video nasties, like I Spit On Your Grave.

In order to comprehend events that seem qualitatively the most actual we tend to distance ourselves, or liken them to the spectacle of film. Schlock considered the way in which our experiences of media frame even the most seemingly sublime, real events. Schlock presented and critiqued this phenomenon,examining the repetition of violence, both fictional and actual, across TV, movie and computer screens and what JG Ballard calls the “death of affect”. These repeated representations might constitute curative attempts to integrate such events into our cultural psyche, or produce their own traumatic effects.

Schlock pushed at the limits of aesthetic taste, to question the ethics of the pleasure we take in both documentary reports and movies that fetishise violence. We performed fake suffering for you, atoning for the cultural commodification of pain, the visual pleasures taken collectively in images of accidents and violence. Schlock asked, “What is it in horror that holds us? What makes us want to look at accidents as we drive-by?” Out of our bloody atonement and a litany of horrors we pulled through. We repeatedly summoned unspeakable acts to appear, and were cleansed by the event’s excesses, delivering you and ourselves into some fake and fleeting redemption.

Perhaps surprisingly, the starting points for our current show, It Is Like It Ought To Be: A Pastoral (2006), emerged out of our contemporary Grand Guignol, Schlock. British pastoral horror movies, like The Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, were key sources in this recent process.

Aftermath (2006)

Uninvited Guests’ work is often de-centred and transformed between a number of media and disciplines. Schlock began as a touring theatre work, before being transformed into a radio piece, which was broadcast on Resonance FM, then a durational performance, Aftermath. This six-hour event provided the inspiration for a photographic collaboration with Manuel Vason, which will be published and/or exhibited later in 2007.

For Aftermath we were trained by a TV make-up artist to lovingly fabricate bloody cuts on each other’s bodies. We showed care for one another through the tender making-up of beautiful wounds, signs of violent events, that had gone before. Clothing was cut away, not to tend to a wound, but to create a fake cut and apply the blood that would have run from it. Over six hours these fake gashes multiplied and proliferated across our skin. Over time the bodies of the performers became surfaces scored by real and on-screen violence, that had happened or was yet to happen; both a living memorial and a warning of what might be to come. In Aftermath, tenderness produced cruel effects, and made-up cuts carried the memory of their careful execution. Like before, in the durational version of Offline, you were in the room with us. You shared in the intimate eroticism of this event, getting up-close-and-personal, feeling the breath of the performers and smelling the sweet smell of fake blood and ketchup. Here you confronted your own voyeurism, your desire both to look and to look away.

Making-up wounds was an action that enabled us to “stand-in” for people to whom such violence had really happened, but also brought us closer to perpetrating the acts recalled. These representations let us, and our audience, measure the distance between ourselves and others’ more extreme lived-experiences, so frequently seen in the media, yet so far from our cosseted everyday lives. Personal and cultural memories of accidents and violence passed through the performers and were projected onto each other’s skin, as though we channelled them there, like mediums. We cast each other and you, the onlookers, into these traumatic incidents, doing violence to each other with soft brushes, palette knives, wax and wound gel.

Duncan explored the performers as acoustic instruments, building tense anticipation from noises sampled live from within their bodies. Speakers positioned around the walls offered our “guests” an immersive acoustic experience, like being inside the performers’ body cavities. This both produced visceral affects and the intimacy of filmic close-ups, or audio focus-pulls.

The wounds began to migrate from the performers onto the surfaces of the room. Hence skin was connected with walls and bodily marks were dispersed across the architecture, exteriorising both internal sounds and traces of embodied shock or trauma.

Finally we offered to apply cuts to your skin, as gifts or artists’ multiples, to carry with you out into the bar and into the real city beyond. Likewise you were invited to hold a stethoscope to your body, to contribute the rustles and murmurs of your blood-flow to the live score. Amplifying the body’s internal, inaudible noises, they were pulled into the foreground, turning the inside of the performers and audiences’ bodies out, for others to hear.

Love Letters Straight From Your Heart (2006 – 7)

This new work - currently in development - is an intimate participatory event, which can be placed somewhere between the theatre works and our durational pieces.

In Love Letters we attempt to express the inexpressible, to speak of love without irony, through oft repeated words, so hard to say for the first time. We ask whether we can ever say, “I love you”, without referring to all the rom-coms and slushy songs.

Somewhere between a wedding reception and a live radio show, we take requests and dedicate songs to others’ lovers. We make your romantic declarations our own; say them like we mean them, as though we’ve felt all the greatest loves and losses in the world. The show is a celebratory reception in which the audience are invited to become each others’ witnesses and to bring to the table their own dedications of songs, to lost loves and current lovers.
 
This time Uninvited Guests are mediums channelling love, meeting points through whom your intimate expressions pass.

We cast ourselves, and you, into the stories of song lyrics. Amorous gifts of love songs are proffered from performers to audience. Words meant to be spoken one-to-one are witnessed publicly and words that were meant to be read (written for your eyes only) are given voice.

‘Without you we wouldn't be complete. So, please [insert name] we are asking you to spend the rest of your life with us; all we can give you is love. We love you, with all our hearts’ (from a downloadable love letter template, sourced online).

It Is Like It Ought to Be: A Pastoral (2006)

So to the show you saw last night, or will see this evening, which marks a retreat from urban concerns and our technological age. Like Love Letters, its interest is in inventing a temporary community, but it’s rather more Romantic, with a capital “R”.

‘We love you just for being there’ (from Offline).
Paul Clarke (for Uninvited Guests)

Reference
Auslander, Phillip (1999) 'Live Performance in a Mediatized Culture', in  Liveness. London: Routledge.