Uninvited Guests: Stumbling Upon The OriginSimon Jones (Bristol University / Bodies in Flight) For me, the question why theatre persists in a digital age is central to Uninvited Guests’ work. As with all good performance companies, it seems to me they address this fundamental concern – why do people still bother with performance? Although, again as with many others, they constantly return to the linked questions of the digital and mediatisation, I think it is their engagement with what I call the flesh that puts them at the forefront of theatre making today: more precisely, the way they explore and explicate the profound encounter of flesh and text. What Michel Serres (1995), in describing Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, called ‘the apparition facing the incarnation.’ (111) Inasmuch as it is already animal, human and angelic, flesh is the language of the divine. (185) A great deal of theatre, including some experimental work, is fearful of the tremendous potential of this encounter and apologizes or masks its force at work. What I admire about Uninvited Guests is their courage in exploring what they have happened upon, following through on the logic of their own method so that it achieves an integrity, sometimes, I think, in spite of their stated intentions. What I also like about them is that they come at this encounter from the opposite direction to my own practice with Bodies in Flight: they start with textuality rather than corporeality. Maybe there are two stories enfolded into this method: the well trodden one of textuality’s malign tendencies, as I wrote in a programme note we experience in Offline, of the word unbecoming flesh – a rigorous disentangling of text from the human, a withdrawing of everything that might make up a subject from the stage, occasioned by a great scepticism about meaning, the yawning gulf between the agent-author and the script, prised scarily open by the inhumanity of technology, so much so that the event, literally the coming out of, of speaking – the enunciative act itself reveals this gap for all to hear. And: a second story of uninvited and uninviting flesh that cannot speak in its own defence, cannot express its own innocence, but will force itself upon the stage in Schlock, however sceptically regarded by text, will come beforehand with text lamely coming on after, this untamed other amongst Uninvited Guests, who does without self-regard and embarrasses the one who is self-reflexively constructed out of soundbytes. So, the One of textuality is able to look upon itself, literally to theorize, to regard itself from a distance, even within the confines of the stage, this tiny dream-platform, able to compare itself with other ones, indeed all the rhetorical things. This story is in three moods: first the gerund to name; second the continuous present to compare; third the subjunctive to suppose. It is the story of all words and texts: they begin with assertion, labelling the world and thus drawing our attention to a certain constitution of that world. Then they sort the things they have named into ones and others, the fairest and the demons. Finally, fearful of the incompleteness of the world they have made, they dream of others as heaven or hells. And all this wording produces a profound disengagement or disentangling from embodiedness: to the impossible point where the one can say “I am not the one”. Offline’s appropriation of other subjects’ intimate (as in close and proper) soundbytes (themselves issued into and grabbed from the void of the world wide web) speaks of this profound disassociation and thence distrust of the (one) subject who speaks and the (other) subject who acts. In the second story, running alongside the first, what is supposed to be the cleft, that is – the cut that joins and the join that cuts, between these two persons – the actor and the orator – is passion. However, this Other acts first and feels later, and then last of all is unwillingly subjected to thought: and it is only at that ultimate point that this Other is forced into subjecthood, becomes a person. Before the forensic application of text, this laying to of the mind, flesh acts unbecomingly. So, in this second story of the merciless abandonment of the comfort of narrative and the embarrassing return of the unspeakable, I feel that Uninvited Guests’ work rehearses a kind of Fall. Prelapsarian flesh behaves wantonly, erotically, innocently and blissfully in a delirium of performance; and only then is subjected to the work of text in the terrible interrogation of theatre, deadening in that it can only have one outcome – the stifling and stilling of action in the arraignment of passion. In this general process or method, we can see a very formal, even traditional re-presentation of the Cartesian subject: an inchoate, a priori Other of flesh, that feels other because it cannot speak in its own defence; and an articulate, a posteriori One of text, that sounds like it is one of us because it can speak its own name. Hence, in the realm of text, we think we always already know where we are going to end up. Despite flesh coming before language, text will already have come after action. For Uninvited Guests, this sequencing is non-reversible: text must always follow flesh; and the gerund of the before and after is the playing through of the sequence: it is the space-time event of the shows themselves. Incarnation is always already followed by inscription, since classically the fall of flesh into textuality has already happened: we are born astride that grave or in that prison-house of language. But what makes this predictable narrative closure so dynamic in Uninvited Guests’ work is the unruliness of flesh. In the performing of Schlock, a struggle ensues, again classical in its protagonists and the ground of its engagement, between the theatre of text and the performance of flesh. The joy of performing, of giving life to passion, even in the form of horrors, is almost immediately distanced by the questioning subject of the orator. And yet, during the brief time of the expressing – this interim, we forget that the agent is a person: they become a performer, a giver of shape to, a through-shaper. Briefly we return to innocent abandonment of self – an un-selfing. We do this even though some of us may have seen the tomato-ketchup turn done before many years ago in the 1980s, first by Forced Entertainment, then by Pete Brooks, then Bodies in Flight. Despite this, indeed in the doing of it, because of this, we feel it as if for the first time, precisely because we abandon self in engaging with the performing of the action and its passions. As phenomenologists have remarked, when we pretend to cry, the body actually does cry and this, in its turn, evokes the re-membering, were we sensitive enough to them, of all the passions that have caused us to cry in the past. So, in performance training, or even dare I say, in practice-as-research, the return to old turns, such as ketchup for blood, spaghetti for guts, glycerine for tears, is not a failure of imagination, or worse – proof that a particular practice of performance is artistically bankrupt: it acknowledges that that stuff of performance that emerges out of the flesh and is given shape by it, our feelings and the life and truth of them, can only be found in that which has been done before and thence felt before and so can be felt again right here and now: which is the only space-time when-where they can be accessed, expressed and lived: the performance-event itself. What it proves is that the better half of performance, that which will not finally surrender to the mind, though it does suffer the mind’s torments, always exceeds the mind’s capacity to make of the world a text and of experience a story and of life an account. However, once the action is done and the agent stands aside from what they have done, they become an orator and we become auditors. Uninvited Guests put us at that distance where a kind of collective shame re-places all our individual, idiosyncratic and libidinal investments in the action as it happens. As auditors of theatre, in the action of stepping aside in order to reflect upon what has been done, we are suddenly re-turned to subjecthood, indeed, subjected to subjecthood by the alienating force of text as it comments on the scene: as it words the action, and hence masks the appearance of flesh. And incidentally, it is actually not necessary for the actor to say anything: their silent gaze out to us speaks volumes. For this reason, storytelling has always been a characteristic of Uninvited Guests: they are working within the realm of stories: both Offline and Schlock are part of a series of investigations of genres: their scope and inhibitions, their closures and fissures. So much so that their programme note to Schlock declares that we think and feel through stories, that is, generically. Each Uninvited Guests show re-enacts the Fall within a specific generic frame: from the innocence of flesh to the experience of text. We may know well how each story ends, in the despair that knowledge brings, outside the garden, of ‘thinking too precisely on the event’, that ends up (as with Hamlet) in stopping us acting, stilling us, or rather, imprisoning us in the iterative loop of textuality, the reductio ad absurdum of the signifier’s self-referentiality – or the forgetting of flesh in stories, in a manner similar to Baudrillard’s description of the first Gulf war as ‘the war that has already happened.’ And yet: we can delight in the performing: how we get to where we know we are going. Indeed, in the doing, we can forget the end, in effect forget the forgetting of text since we are outside it: we can resist the inaction of text and its moribund inclinations. Maybe that is what performance does for us today in this mediatised, consumer-driven reality: it constantly rehearses this primary encounter between incarnation and inscription. The immediacy of flesh, literally its being without a medium, forces us to experience at our bodily and perceptual limits; whereas text’s stories help us make sense of that experience. Performance does this by taking us back to that garden gate where we last experienced that encounter: at this liminal and impossible point after the fall from innocence, but before the breach with the divine. In this sense, performance becomes a certain-to-fail attempt to repair that breach, that is, to rehearse our origins. So, we discover along with Uninvited Guests, in a manner that echoes David Williams’ description of their latest work – It Is Like It Ought To Be A Pastoral – as a ‘practice of hope’, that what matters in performance is not novelty, but as-if-for-the-first-time-ness. Hence the re-use of old material, in yet another attempt to repair this breach with our origins. Between the actions of any given attempt – the show – and the texts of its unravelling, as if a potential between two fields is charged up and then discharged into the host of the audience-spectators as they scatter from the performance-gathering back into their everyday lives, there a mood happens that accesses the origins of the encounter between incarnation and inscription. It demonstrates that performance, in spite of theory, does what it ought not to do, what in theory it is unable to do: it presences origins. And this is why we go back to performance again and again, why, indeed, we now turn movies into theatre: since in returning us to this encounter, it returns us to the inaugural event of the human, the origin of the species, when the word was made flesh and the flesh tried to live with the word. So, in the move from Offline to Schlock, what Uninvited Guests have done, I would suggest, paradoxically both because of and despite their own efforts rigorously derived from theory, is stumble upon their better natures as theatre-makers and re-turn to the pleasures of performing. Because of and despite the generic framing that threatens to close everything up in the done deal of narrative, as if reading actual everyday events through the conventions of the horror movie; because of and despite the stepping aside from every action and appearing to disown it, derived from Derrida, as obligatory in contemporary devised work as the “obligatory exposition scene” was in 19th-century Naturalism; because of and despite these two after-thoughts that so want to predetermine the event, performance happens in the flesh fleeing this inscription, just going through the motions for a moment, in its wordless bliss and our conspiratorial delight as spectators in this play, before the inevitable return to text. And as we know from both Schlock and our own childhoods, playing at dying is endless fun, since it does exactly what performance does so well: it rehearses living by drawing up (phenomenologically speaking) from the deepest reaches of our embodied selves (that is, this sump of a collective species inheritance before the individual and its subjectivities) our pre-selves, and throwing them furthest into the void of possibility (discursively speaking). So, I would conclude that Uninvited Guests make performance despite themselves as all good performers must. Two kinds of rigour are constantly in an evolutionary race, which eventually their practice overcomes their theory: the deadening negative of textual closure is usurped in the event, in the doing, the performing, the giving shape to, by the simply only positive of play, of projecting part-selves inconsequentially, of throwing forth what we cannot escape – our bodies and their pasts – into what we cannot avoid – all the future maybes. In our critical activity, not only pursued in universities but also in the everyday, we tend to forget time. Indeed, in its ability to appear to be able to rewind and reverse events, to reconsider and re-order them, to re-member them, criticism’s main job, as an offshoot of writing, is to protect us from time: to fool us into thinking we can forget time and avoid its irreversible dynamic and hence death, that is, our own deaths. Furthermore, the logic of metaphors of disappearance or erasure or the event’s evanescence and ephemerality has encouraged performance-makers and critics to talk our art down, to belittle it, and write of its minor and marginal qualities in a commodified, mass-media global culture. As makers and critics, we must resist this logic. Performance forces us back into time and thence life: it re-minds us of time by repeatedly re-membering our inheritance and our potentiality. In this sense, and as Derrida (1978) identified, it is the ‘only art of life’ – a pure energetics, an only positive in a negatively inclined world. Neither a book nor a work, but an energy, and in this sense it is the only art of life. (247) Uninvited Guests rehearse this fundamental play: in Schlock, we enjoy living in playing at dying; and despite the generic and textual consolations that it’s all only a game which we can disown, cleverly or cynically, we know it’s for real: because we are living it and they have so carefully and courageously led us back to the garden to peer over the gate at paradise. References |