These brilliant chant-leaders inspired my full-throated responses outside the Old Bailey today, demonstrating for true justice for the Filton 25. I have to say this chanting at demonstrations has become a new sort of poetry, and these young people led us into chanting encouragement for those arrested in a truly wonderful way. The chants are important, because those facing years of imprisonment can hear us. It matters.
The Theatre of Mistakes
by Robb Creese (Sept 1979)
More than five years ago, a group of young English artists formed a workshop in London under the direction of Anthony Howell. This group, eventually to be known as the Theatre of Mistakes, uses improvisational exercises-strictly controlled by formal structure-to develop performances.
Howell concedes that he was influenced in particular by an exercise of the Living Theatre, used in Paradise Now, in which one person performed an action and another copied it. The interaction was far more interesting to Howell than anything the traditional theatre could offer. And he also felt that this exercise was more significant than the “histrionics” of the Living Theatre because it implied a new means of working in a group to create performance art.
For the next two years, such concepts as repetition of each other’s actions were used as the basis for exercises for the group, and performances were built from chosen exercises.
The Theatre of Mistakes’ first major performance was Preparation and Displace• ment, constructed for the Cambridge Poetry Festival in England, 1975. The Street, a work of sixty performers done environmentally on a street in Kentish Town, London, was performed in July 1975. This was followed by Ascent of the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, 1976, and Scenes at a Table: Homage to Pietro Longhi (Serpentine Gallery) in 1977. A Waterfall, a 48-day presentation, was done at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1977. And Going-which has toured Scotland, Paris, Belgrade, Bristol and Pittsburgh-was most recently seen at the Theatre for the New City in New York in late 1978. The group plans to perform works in America, Australia, Europe, and England in the next two years.
A conceptual approach to performance art has been important to the Theatre of Mistakes. Space, time, and movement are the themes that come out of the exercises. Rarely have nonconceptual ideals infiltrated the performances of the group. Rather than telling stories or stating themes, their work presents ideas. For example, a performance might be constructed from actors copying each other’s walks, speaking very quickly, using a round performance space-“rules” determined before work began.
The basic units of performance, the exercises developed in their first two years of working together, were catalogued by Anthony Howell and another member of the company, Fiona Templeton. In Elements of Performance Art, a few hundred copies of which were published for use by the company, simple “building blocks” are listed with suggestions about how they may be constructed into performances.
For example, the booklet suggests ways that people can relate to physical space: horizontally, vertically; moving fast, moving slowly. Improvisations are constructed when a group chooses which exercises are allowed in the improvisation. The rules are set up before the performance.
Elements of Performance Art is a reduction of improvisation rules to their simplest for·m. The rules of the exercises are extremely.varied. Before any workshop or performance there are many options open to the group.
A section called “Body Speed and Travelling Speed” sets down two continua: Slow
Fixed Spot— Travelling
Fast
Four rules can be constructed:
Two possible solutions to the problem of staying on a fixed spot in space are offered:
And the guide book offers two further bits of advice:
Elements of Performance Art offers exercises for body positions as well. In an exercise called “Angles/Curves,” which was useful especially in Homage to Pietro Longhi, Howell and Templeton suggest to performers:
OR
They add, “Equal angles or curves may be two-dimensional-parallel or symmetrical limbs viewed from one sightline-or three dimensional-in any direction from any sightline.”
Another exercise that is often used in the work is called “Horizontal and Vertical Exercise,” in which any number of performers choose between two options:
A performer is instucted to do only 1 (i.e., use only horizontal positions), or only 2 (i.e., use only vertical positions), or to alternate between the two (quickly switching from vertical to horizontal), or to use several positions from 1 and from 2, (using several horizontal positions then several vertical).
The body positions are set in space with two further choices:
Two other suggestions are made for the exercise:
This canon of possibilities covers use of body, sounds, time and space, equipment, and “manifestation,” or approaches to performance. The catalog of choices has been used to generate thousands of exercises and variations. All of the performances of the Theatre of Mistakes have been based on work with such exercises. But they have been extremely varied in their presentation and in their content.
The Theatre of Mistakes suggests measurements of time and space within a performance be measured in terms of the performance itself. For example, yards can be measured as performers’ strides and feet by their steps; minutes are replaced by the time perod one can hold one’s breath; seconds are measured by counting beats or speaking metrical lines. “A company of artists,” Howell and Templeton write, “may perform below an oak tree, in the shade cast by that oak tree, for as long as it takes for one of them to climb up to the top of that oak tree.”
The use of the measurements of time within the performance itself has led the Theatre of Mistakes to develop the use of performers “as metronomes.” “A performance may last the time it takes for one performer to move along a set route,” they say, “each turn that the performer makes may constitute the end of one act and the beginning of another.” In such works as Table Piece, Homage to Pietro Longhi and Going, and act was defined as the period of time it took one performer-the metronome-to walk the sides of the square performance space.
• • •
The Theatre of Mistakes does not feel any compulsion to act. The “drama” of their performance comes from each performer’s efforts at “extending” his or her own behavior by using exercises. The plays are “about” their real lives dealing with the exercises during any given performance for as long as it lasts. Their goal is action, not acting as if.
“Amplification of the present” demands that actions not be preconceived but spontaneous; yet they must stay within established rules, such as time, space, number of performances, number of exercises, etc. For example, a rule might be made that men would have to walk backwards whenever a woman was speaking. Or a scene would end as soon as an actress finished counting backwards from one thousand, or performers could only speak in French if a passerby happened to be wearing red.
One of the most important exercises became “being someone else.” “Let one performer attempt to repeat the behavior of another,” one reads in Elements of Performance Art. This is “an attempt ‘to be each other,’ rather than acting and pretending to enact a character.” The activity of building performances by repeating actions set down by an “instigator” (the term used by the group to describe the person who introduces new material to a performance), became a central concept for most of the Theatre of Mistakes’ presentations.
The Theatre of Mistakes worked at first with very simple actions that could easily be imitated. As they became more adroit at copying one another’s actions, they used increasingly complicated behavior. Chains of actions became longer, and there even entered into the exercises the possibility for sabotage of the other performers (i.e., a performer would initiate extremely complicated actions, for example, singing a high note for 35 seconds, and the other actors would not be able to repeat the action), and the probability that there would be “mistakes” (not being able to sing the note, for example)-hence, the Theatre of Mistakes.
Mistake-making became an integral part of the performances. Various signals were developed for use after mistakes were made. The signals would both alert a performer to his error and lend drama to the performance. One of the common signals that a mistake was made was a swoon. If a sequence of actions became impossible, a performer would simply cry out and fall lifeless to the floor. In Homage to Pietro Longhi, for example, a malevolent instigator set down actions that were to be performed on tiptoe. Many a “swoon” resulted after twenty minutes when other performers could not keep up the rigorous demands of the instigator.
Signals were developed to let performers correct mistakes made by others. In Going, someone who detected an error in structure would cry out, “Hold it!”, at which point all performers froze; the critical performer would physically carry their frozen bodies to their correct positions. Then they would shout “Okay!” to signal the others to continue the performance.
Form is strictly adhered to (the form is the sum total of rules of time, space,
words, etc. established before the performance), without regard to the effect on the audience. The structure is more important than communication of themes to the audience. Although narrative is never preplanned, if it should flow from the exercises, the Theatre of Mistakes will let it develop (so long as all performance rules are maintained). For example, in The Street a rule was made that if a passerby walked in a particular direction on the street, everyone would swoon and fall to the street. Many Londoners felt there was a “theme” of violence, which was not planned but left in the performance nonethelesss.
An early work of the Theatre of Mistakes, The Street concentrated on simple structures for performance by many people in the London neighborhood where Anthony Howell lived in July of 1975. They worked on the performance for six months.
The Street was a chain of exercises performed outdoors. There was no theme, except perhaps time, space and flow patterns. The only “contents” of the performance were the comings and goings of Ascham Street itself. There was no story or plot to The Street. It was an improvisatory performance that used only elements found in the neighborhood. No extraneous information was allowed to enter the performance: it was “about” the street. For example, the actions performed were such things as sweeping, carrying groceries, watering flowers, and other things that would be seen on a typical day in London.
The sixty performers were free to improvise but only when it was their turn. A very complicated chart was constructed by Howell so that each performer knew when he or she would enter the performance. The actions, which at first were very simple (long-held freezes, many repetitions, etc.), became increasingly complex because the “ordinary people” became more and more skillful.
All of the words that were used in the piece were spoken on the street during the first ten minutes of the performance. Performers placed in windows along the street wrote down what they heard: neighborhood banter, questions about the performance, compliments and pleasantries, obscenities when an angry neighbor yelled out his window one day. Then the writers of the text structured the words into fourteen-line sonnets, canons, and other verse forms. Thus the first ten minutes of the play were used to gather words and gestures and the rest to recreate them in new forms: the people of the neighborhood acted as initiators of actions that were copied by the company. All of the performances were different because different words were overheard each day.
Rules set down before the performance gave it structure. For example, performers always walked on the left side of the street. Some performers acted only in the street and others stayed in windows along the side. The performance was limited to one full block of the street, so neighbors and passersby would be involved unwittingly in the performance. As the group worked out their actions and gestures, people would shout at them or come up and interrupt to see what was happening; they would walk through the street and thus were sometimes part of the performances.
The Waterfall was performed over a forty-eight day period at the Annual Exhibition of the Hayward Gallery in London in 1977. The action was to raise water from a bucket on the ground to another empty, elevated bucket, one cup at a time. Each performer used two cups to transfer the water upward, each pouring his or her water into another performer’s cup simultaneously with the others. The performance ended as all the water was poured carefully into the bucket left on the qround.
Each day the piece became more complex by adding performers, increasing the height of the set, and expanding the verse that was used. The performance also grew longer each day it was performed. It took about thirty minutes to fill the top bucket with water on the forty-eighth day.
Scenes at a Table: Homage to Pietro Longhi, a piece begun in the summer of 1975, was a series of improvised actions and words. Performers took turns inventing actions (which included gestures and words). Each performance was therefore different.
In each act, the instigator (i.e., the actor who improvised actions for the others to copy) performed what the group calls “Primary Scenes.” The audience would never know what to expect, since there was no restriction whatsoever on what actions actors could initiate. Then other performers, one at a time, would copy the instigator’s actions.
The audience felt as if a fugue were playing. In other words, after Performer One had created action A, he would invent action 8. Meanwhile, Performer Two would join the scene, recreating action A. Then three actors would be involved, then four. One performer always moved around the outside boundaries of the square performance space. He or she, a different performer in each act, would usually stare at the actions being performed by the others. This person was the Metronome, who controlled the length of the scene. He or she would indicate when the scene was over by reaching the starting place on the square. This function, however, was unclear to the audience. The Metronome seemed to be a strange spectator moving about the space.
Since actors were not limited in what they improvised, they used exaggerated postures and gestures, which changed from performance to performance. There were many awkward positions that were obviously very difficult to mimic, postures that were off balance or done on tiptoe, for example. In some performances, there were numerous costume changes, involving many hats, coats, gloves, and other articles of clothing. Each performer would execute exactly the same complicated sequence of costume changes as the others.
No consideration was taken of whether the audience could see all of the actors at any given moment. Many times the spectators would not be able to see all the performers because they would stand in front of each other. There was, however, a strong feeling of three-dimensions in the work. A viewer had a sense of performers being close by, far away, and in between. The feeling of depth created was reminiscent of Pietro Longhi’s paintings.
The way in which the performance was constructed was extremely complex. (There was a strong clash between rigid structure and improvisation). A diagram is very helpful:
Performers:
The horizontal blocks represent the five performers, the vertical blocks represent scenes 1 to 6. A, B & C = actions & words
ONE ACT
To imitate other actor’s actions, the performers needed moments when they were not doing anything, “spaces” during which they could stand still and watch segments they would have to imitate. That is why watching is included in the diagram.
“A”, “B”, and “C” indicate actions and words. The five performers in turn
improvise new actions and dialog for the drama. Thus, the audience sees what might be called a rehearsal process.
In Scene 1, Performer One improvises a series of words and/or actions. These are called “A”. Performers Two, Three and Four watch carefully, for they must repeat
“A”. Performer Five is the “metronome”: he or she walks around the performance space to control the length of the scene.
Scene 2. Performer Two recreates” A” as One did it. One improvises or instigates “B” (words and actions). Three and Four watch. Five is still the metronome.
Scene 3. Three and Four enter the scene. One improvises “C” (words and actions). Two must freeze to watch One’s actions. Three repeats “A”. Four repeats “B”. Five is still the metronome.
Scene 4. One becomes the metronome. Two repeats “C”. Three repeats “B”. Four freezes to watch Two doing “C”. Five does “A”, which he or she has watched while being the metronome.
Scene 5. Two does “additive songs” while Three freezes and Four repeats “C”. Five repeats “B”. (No one does “A”.)
Scene 6. Two continues additive songs. Three and Four begin additive songs. Five repeats “C”.
This diagram represents one act. For the next four acts, the performers changed their starting positions onstage (and on the diagram).
The same diagram is pertinent for The Table, a piece performed about the same time, and for Going. The three works are thought of by the group as a trilogy.
In Homage to Pietro Longhi, a scene has taken place, in effect, among three characters played by five people. One can never know who is playi_ng whom, for everyone “plays” at being everyone else. Hence, the structure has superceded the individual performers and the individual characters.
In developing Homage to Pietro Longhi, the Theatre of Mistakes used the Angles/Curves exercise of Howell and Templeton’s book. Performers used angular postures inspired by the 18th-Century paintings of Pietro Longhi, who is known for creating many variations of a single posture in many different paintings. He has been the inspiration for much of the work done by the Theatre of Mistakes. He is especially useful also because many of his paintings are studies of people seated around tables and he often painted Goldoni’s commedia dell’Arte characters, capturing the postures of the actors of the day.
Going was a direct response to Homage to Pietro Longhi. The group decided to create an idealized performance that would use the same structures but which was fully rehearsed and choreographed to minute details. Even some “mistakes” would be performed intentionally-showing what happened when the structures broke down. The Time Diagram for Homage to Pietro Longhi also applies to Going; the basic structure is the same, with performers adding scenes and “copying” each other in the same way.
Like Homage to Pietro Longhi, Going is played on square marked out on the floor. The setting is very simple: two chairs and a table. A cigarette packet and a book of matches lie on the table. Above each corner of the square hangs a light fixture with an on/off cord dangling from it. These are the only illumination for the performance, and only one of the lights is on in each act.
As successive lights are used, progressing clockwise, the table and chairs are turned to face them, so that the relationship between the furniture-one chair behind the table and one to its right-and the illuminated corner of the square remains the same. The blocking of actors relates to the furniture rather than to the audience. Thus the setting and the performers orient successively toward a different
corner of the square in each act; Act 5 faces in the same direction as Act 1-toward the single audience section if a proscenium arrangement is used.
The text of Going contains three characters. This is the complete dialog:
I do think I’d better be going now because I… Oh, don’t be so silly.
Really, I must go.
Tell her she ought to stay. Ahem.
I do have to go now. You don’t have to go. Are you sure?
She doesn’t have to go, does she? ‘Fraid so.
I can’t stand it.
Tell me, does she have to go? I just think it’s better to.
Why do you have to go? If you must, you must. Good bye.
Bye.
Really.
I can’t stand it either. That’s why I have to go.
Do you think I ought to stay? Are you just afraid to tell me? Oh don’t be so silly.
However, these lines and the movements and gestures that relate to them are never given in t!”le “correct” order. Various elements are instigated-presented by one actor for copying by others-at different points in the hour-long performance. Bits of dialog and action are added, and therefore repeated, as the performance progresses. The gestures are simple and few: waves, leaning on the table, turning to say goodbye, covering the mouth for·an aside, and so on. Often actors remain motionless, frozen in position.
While some phrases and gestures are repeated from the beginning, the lines “I do think I’d better be going now because I…”, “Really, I must go”, “Tell her she ought to stay”, “Are you sure?”, “If you must, you must”, and “Goodbye” are not heard for the first time until halfway through Going; “Ahem”, “I have to go now”, “Fraid so”, “I just think it’s better to”, “Bye”, and the last five lines of the text are heard for the first time in the last scene. Going feels like a puzzle, all the pieces of which are not immediately apparent. The actions seem to make sense but they are out of order, repeated many times, put together in strange ways. If the puzzle is to be solved, the solution lies in the mind of the spectator.
Robb Creese is a New York writer/director who is currently producing the first program ever designed exclusively for videodisc. His piece on Anthroposophical Performance appeared in T78. •
TROPICAL TOPIC
x
The fan is the centre of my universe.
I ask, Does cold air fall?
I am baking from the feet up.
Amid giant retorts
The God of Heat experiments.
x
This weather’s great
If you’re cold-blooded,
Soaking it up. Remember mud?
Mud, glorious mud.
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
x
Cooling towers sound so good.
Why can’t we go live in one?
There we could still be active,
Even radioactive.
At least we’d be out of the sun.
x
TRISTEZA
x
That pensive spell, the sadness that you see
In Gauguin’s women, for instance, sitting quietly,
A faraway look in their eyes, as if deep
In melancholy thought – it’s not: it’s the heat,
And the way the heat comes back, that brooding gaze,
Abstracted, prompting such words as ‘lointain’,
Yet there is something sad about heat – it wells up at noon,
Prompting you to choose the shaded side of the avenue
And placing a value on sombra rather than sol.
The Romans knew that ghosts appear at midday
In the haze as it wobbles up from the ground,
And as for Brazil it is under that spell
Brewed by the tropics, inducing a trance
Moved by the minor key of the Bossa Nova.
x
A draft recording of the short opera I wrote the libretto for – with music by Robert Stuckey.
There are five songs, one for each singer. Each has its own melody which nevertheless dovetails with each of the other melodies. Each song is written to be sung from the first line to the last or from the last line to the first. All possible configurations of solo, duet, trio, quartet and quintet are explored by the libretto.
Anthony Howell (Writer): A few years ago, Alessandro Cortello introduced me to the colossal church at Aquileia with its stunning early Christian mosaics. Only a few houses remain in what was once a city second only to Rome. Willows and cypresses adorn the countryside. The walls of the great church are lined with images of martyrs from Nero’s holocaust. Its tower scrapes the blue Italian sky. I became fascinated by the mosaic and by the patterns of the knots that appeared on the floor at intervals, often separating one image from another. Some of these knots were two-stranded, sometimes four-stranded. I imagined these as walking patterns, and envisaged 5 singers, one acting as a metronome as the others traced the knot-patterns, each pursuing a melody of their own, accompanied only by the occasional sound of a bell and the smell of incense – a tower, a knot, a willow, a cypress, a martyr – drama as landscape: a fusion of opera and performance art. I conceived the piece as similar to a medieval mystery play – created with contemporary means, perhaps to be performed in churches such as the Round Chapel in Bow, and at Aquileia itself. It has proved too complicated for the singers to perform this knot-walking as well as sing the complex libretto, so we now envisage this as a concert performance with an audio-visual accompaniment.
Robert Stuckey (Composer): Rather unusually for music in the 21st century there are no sharps or flats, only white notes. Yet each white note has a unique position and creates a unique scale when it becomes the viewpoint from which the others notes are heard. Each of the five characters from a different note creates a scale that resonates with its mood, a mode for a mood. The five characters are thus in competition with each other creating a distinctive grammar of harmony: who will win? A cappella means without accompaniment, no orchestra, no piano, and the singers must fend for themselves: only the tolling of the Cypress’ bell is sometimes heard.
Alessandro Cortello (Tenor): To me, a classical-trained opera singer accustomed to deal with music written by long-gone composers, this new work represents the uncommon chance to see an artwork coming to life under my eyes. The opportunity of working so close to the creators and taking an active part in the genesis of a new composition is priceless. The poet and the composer took an original approach to the traditional idea of ‘opera’ and its characters, combining it with the polyphonic Renaissance madrigal, the ancient ‘modes’ and the modern concept of performance art, in a fascinating distillation of different traditions and different classical vocal styles. Moreover, I am very pleased to see how the town of Aquileia, a place so dear to me just a few miles from my birthplace, can still inspire artists’ work as it did in its multi-millennial history.
Thanks to Dilys Bidewell for sending me this link to Soviet statues now submerged
The monuments sit in 12-15 meters of water, around 100 meters off the coast of Cape Tarkhankut.
The last image was painted during a camping trip to Yugoslavia when I was thirteen.
See also ANGER.
Click the small magnifying glass in the top right-hand corner and type in ANGER for more.
A thousand and a thousand more again,
These little waves roll in along the shore,
And constantly appear and disappear
While mothers tear their useless hair.
Calling, calling one more time:
Each vanishment abruptly noticed
With a sick chill, either when
A pater familias heads for a car-park too soon
Or when Akela stoops to examine
A traction belt too long at the steam fair.
Awful to end up so far ahead of the others
At the Pitch ’n’ Putt, only to discover
Your chums have already abandoned the game;
Worse to be left behind at the toboggan run.
x
And so one calls and calls in vain
Where knee-high marram hides a kink in a track
Up through the dunes where the wartime
Pill-box daubed with obscene requests
Pronounces them bludgeoned or,
No, not yet, they must turn up,
Blistered merely by the Wild Parsnip,
At the Lifeguard Service Point, not under sand –
And then the odd one, the simply forgotten,
Missing, but not missed, ekes out an existence
Trawling for bottles on deserted beaches.
*
An early poem of mine, first published in the TLS. Peter Pan is of course the archetype of the lost child, and I am reading J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” which, though published later, must surely have preceded the West End popular play featuring Wendy, Captain Hook and Neverland. This earlier version is a surreal masterpiece, tragic, and hauntingly written, and with the strangest of all Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to accompany the writing. I plan to write an essay on it soon.
We are witnessing a phenomenon: a process that magnifies space.
Whatever enters its zone will enlarge – as did Alice
After she ate that very small cake, on which the words
“EAT ME” were marked in currants. However, in this case,
There’s nothing to drink that could make things diminish. Everything
Simply gets bigger. A midge becomes a mammoth. A spat an open war.
A minor irritation an upset that threatens your life.
An underage girl an ogre’s wife. You walk into it
x
And there is just no way of getting out of it: the exits
Are too small. Worst of all, that which has grown
Continues to grow: malign as a cancer – and certain to end
In a big cloud that will radiate annihilation soon.
So what’s to be done? Well, nothing. So far as the situation
Is concerned. Though, like Voltaire, you can tend your own garden,
In your imagination – a garden where the flowers shrink,
And the blown rose grows ever so pink
x
And becomes a bud, then less than that, and age is reversed
So Armageddon never actually gets reached.
Of course this is all a figment. We must prepare for the worst,
But what’s to prepare, Amigo? Our defences have been breached.
x
I am currently offering mentoring in Writing (prose and poetry), Art, Time-Based Studies (including film, video and installation), Performance Art and Art History.
Contact: open gmail and then send a message via editorial@greysuiteditions.co.uk –
This mentoring can be at The Room – https://the-room.org.uk/ or online via WhatsApp –
There is the possibility of showing performances at The Room – but an extra charge of £15 an hour will be applied for hire of the space.
My fee will be negotiable, depending on the needs of the person requiring feedback. That is, if you want me to crit your poem I will do it for less than I will charge for reading your novel.
Tango Tuition is also offered.
Fees may be waived in exchange for gardening services or transport help.
For more details see General Enquiries on the Room website contact page.
Biographical information here
*
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It started out as such a nice day
But then a cloud crept up and the day grew overcast.
Your spirit clouded over too. But ‘nowhen’, we don’t say.
Perhaps we should. It’s best to hit upon a process
Rather than a plot. It’s not a matter of cause and effect.
Nowhere – the space that time forgot.
x
It’s the elephant in the room leaving no room
For us others. Objects lost in dreams get stored there for eternity.
But why make such a fuss out of not being able to locate it?
Some wade in until they are out of their depth.
Others are just dropped into the deep to flail about.
Maybe they flail in a landward direction. Then again, maybe not.
x
As for nowhere, many poems get there
Lickety-split, without a clue to its meaning.
Plato hated poets and devised philosophy
To counter Homer’s lies. He would be appalled, I’m sure,
By today’s cos-play homilies tarted up as verse
Whose freedom’s a curse contaminated by some petty simile.
x
I don’t feel that this poem’s getting anywhere.
It is not a painting of night, not a cloud above a wood.
Not a woman looking back at the sunken boat of her virginity.
It can accumulate line after line,
But is it any closer to being understood?
It should have been written by John Ashbery.
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