PHIL COLLINS (PC)
The theatrical language of Forced Entertainment is an idiosyncratic proposition, distinct from the vocabulary established by the Wooster Group but sharing a similar committed, obsessive impulse to speak to the development of a visual grammar by working and reworking sets, staging elements, and ideas over time and in space. Both collectives also have a similar, familiar framework in which the director and performers are constituted as being part of a group. Given that you’re artistic director, writer, and occasional performer with Forced Entertainment, what do the factors of time, space, and a core group of performers and contributors bring to the conjuring of a body of work?
TIM ETCHELLS (TE)
I do think you see and feel the cumulative presence of the group in the work. Certainly that’s my experience watching the Woosters—the shared narrative of the performers, their familiarity with each other, the common vocabulary and understandings that have built up over years and years. At a certain level that set of intangibles—social bond, collective history—is what one’s party to when seeing their work: life lived and shared as a kind of material force in the event. The reference would be to bands or groups of musicians or to the old idea of the ensemble, the traveling troupe, whose stage-time together is ghosted by more pragmatic shared times of rehearsal, touring and involvement in logistics—daily life. Not to romanticize those things, but the double presence, the layered presence of different realities—theatrical and quotidian—is as important in the political operation of the group’s work as it is with ours at FE. It’s not for nothing, perhaps, that one of the Wooster’s most well-known and most extraordinary performers, Ron Vawter, first took the stage at the Performing Garage, in pre-Wooster days, at the invitation of Richard Shechner, simply to sit at a table and work on the finances whilst a production took place around him.
The way that the Wooster Group has developed a visual grammar from project to project—especially through working and reworking sets and material elements—is something I can relate to, too. The Woosters were the first people I observed in such an explicit and candid process of repetition and transformation—that a certain set structure or device would come back through several pieces, sometimes reconfigured, always recontextualized. For me that always seems sculptural, especially with the pieces that reused and reinvented staging elements such that LSD (1984), Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony (1988), BRACE UP!, and Emperor Jones (1993/2006) were all, I think, based on rotations and redeployments of the same design elements. I wanted to ask you if the explicitness of this process, the coming back to the same territory and reworking or the repetition and reworking of spatial configuration, is something you think has a wider impact, in terms of your practice or that other artists? Or more broadly still, what might that process speak to in contemporary culture?
PC
Some choices come down to an economy of means, of course. All artists know that the material conditions—and limitations—create the possibilities. But TWG has been like prophets, maybe, in that they were able to forge a world from downtown New York which could then extend and puncture the cultural spheres of other places like Glasgow, London, or Amsterdam, the cities to which I travelled in my student days specifically to see their work. It felt like they’d brought this hermetic milieu to us, and drew us, effortlessly, unwillingly, into it. To speak their tongues. Their relentless—and I use this in the sense of its insistence—reworking of staging elements had a profoundly somatic, oneiric effect. Like in a dream when we step into the same place but differently or, as the late, great John Peel used to say about the Fall, “Always different. Always the same.” The sets become an extension of these concentrated theatrical moments but also indices telescoped back in time. Chekhov becomes O’Casey becomes Flaubert becomes Miller, and thus the obsessional nature of investigation and the larger objective at play—to unravel and rework the twentieth century—presses like nightmares from all sides. Of course, in dance
My gut memories, and they are almost dream memories, of seeing TWG pieces is an experience of being broken down by a sledgehammer in a hall of mirrors and put back together by a tripped-out repair man, all within the concentrated space of a couple of hours of a theater time. Part of that is an effective sleight of hand: a dynamic regrouping of texts and voices, an apparent and exquisite chaos, and an obviously sincere love of genre, of stage craft or embarrassment, an acrobatic speed of delivery, or, better still, a counter-pointed rhythm of staging (some of the movement work is hypnotically, outrageously slow). These tectonic shifts in tone and texture and throwaway East Coast casual asides, the overload of signs and symbols, the scale of the scenography and technical aspects, and dramaturgy pathways born out of improvisation and accident—they all point towards radically new ways of describing how we might perceive reality and ascribe meaning to it through theater. I suppose what I’m asking is how you think that such a shift in the apparent dissonance of these theatrical codes spoke of and to the worlds outside the theater? Because I think this relates directly to FE and your work in terms of very real political implications of such an approach in the way that invites us to create meaning as an audience.
TE
Well, I think the Wooster Group has been very explicit in observing and investigating the intertextual nature of our reality. I’m thinking about the way that so many of those pieces are processes of seeing one cultural object by means of another or of layering different systems or technologies for looking and understanding. There’s an element of critique in that, of course: using one thing to get leverage on another. But also I think there’s a political understanding of the archive (or the canon) and the need to readdress it as well as, more broadly, an understanding, really deep in the body, of the work of the layered and mediatized nature of contemporary reality. There’s also an understanding that ways of looking, rhetorics, aesthetic, or narrative codes and so on are themselves already political systems, not invisible or neutral forms of attention or description.
Their work makes the journey between the era of channel-hopping (modernist collage from the sofa) to the era of the autotune remix and the network—the crash smash and jump-cut aesthetic of the earlier pieces (especially perhaps L.S.D Just The High Points) shifts to a more subtle language in which texts, textures, and even identities haunt, infect, and pass through each other—the merged and mixed image and voices of Richard Burton and Scott Shepherd in Hamlet or of Kate Valk and Jill Johnston in Town Hall Affair. I think there’s a very deep understanding there of how we live at this point—always in triangulation and echo with some trace of what’s gone before (narratively, visually, acoustically).
When I interviewed Ron Vawter in the late ’90s, he spoke about 20th-century art as “this kind of recycling, this kind of review, this wholesale review of the tapes,” adding:
Fortunately we have film and video so we can look over and over at the record and make a careful examination of what it actually was that we were doing in these times. I don’t feel any guilt or weirdness [for that]. What we tend to do, in the Wooster Group, and in my own work, is to appropriate from several different sources at the same time. That way we can juggle all these separate things until the weights are familiar and then a new kind of theatre text is created between these different places.
It’s not hard to feel the connection there between the Wooster Group’s work and all kinds of investigations on the archive and documents that have been so much a part of artistic and political life, especially contemporary art; the fascination with the document and with the political act of investigation and reconstruction seems especially prescient in their work.
There was a very long time, through the ’80s and ’90s, for example, and following Michael Fried, where theater and theatricality (as well as performance) were pretty much pariah words in the context of visual art. And now it feels like the tide has more than turned and everyone is apparently a performance maker! It’s like the communist countries that had no religion, and then suddenly the system fell apart and it turned out that everyone had been a Catholic all along. Can you speak a little about the shift that has taken place around performance? What do you think it means about contemporary art and society? And what place do long-standing performance makers like Wooster Group have in this return of interest to the form?
PC
The story of performance art in the ’90s is really one of an institutional land-grab, which sounds theatrical (why not?) but in essence happens through the mechanisms of government funding, or a lack thereof. In Britain, what in the ’80s was an under-funded but fertile live art scene—organized around a number of small venues, festivals, polytechnic courses, and drama departments up and down the country—got gleefully and in one fell swoop wiped out by cuts during the recession. A bankrupt Saatchi dumps his erstwhile collection and begins buying up students’ work, largely from one college, where he can create a confection of a media enterprise around what is essentially a market-driven return to the object. As the final kick to the kidneys, once the land is cleared, the major institutions announce a cynical return to performance by installing one or two key figures to represent it as the symbolic token. The rest, in terms of genealogies and legacies of a decimated landscape, is, as they say, history.
For the last decade, performance and dance, more rarely theater, have felt ubiquitous in museums and biennials, which come recently endowed with one or another form of performance programming. This resurrected interest in these contexts corresponds to the imperative of the spectacle and instant gratification endemic of the age and, of course, to liveness as a guarantee of a kind of authentic experience. Often, though, there is an underlying economic logic that turns live art into a marketable commodity providing yet another revenue stream for the institution, as well as a convenient solution to the outreach, engagement, and educational agendas of the corporate mono-culture which defines so much of today’s art world, even when it positions itself as “alternative” or “critical.”
Looking back at the wilderness years, it feels like both FE and TWG had a clarity of vision and a sense of how integral and important your bodies of work were, organizing shows into trilogies or restaging so that it was possible to follow a through line in the production and development of work. In some ways I see this cross-fertilization between a North American influence in the early FE works and, likewise, a certain strand of European aesthetic in the sentiments and strategies of the staging at TWG. All those elongated, dramatic lines and indigestible political/visual statements remind me yet again of the stage as hosting, like you mentioned, something closer to rock bands or pop stars, not only because of the core body of performers appearing repeatedly, but also, for instance, seeing Jean Paul Goude’s sets for Grace Jones for the first time or Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party or an episode of The Tube, where you have Michael Clark with a funeral veil and a dildo, as your mum brings your tea in (or did I imagine this?).
Can you speak a little bit about the ecology of the times and what these influences, beyond the collectives themselves, might have been? What was circulating in terms of visual art, music, literature, film, all of which are at the heart of both bodies of work?
TE
I think for me the key thing is the realization that performance and performativity, rehearsal and repetition are everywhere in the culture. We all have our own version of that realization, I guess—as individuals, as artists—but it also plays out differently in different contexts internationally and in the frame of different art forms. So the kinds of things you’re referring to above—from music culture, from the TV of the time—were important. There were artists focused on exploring the performance in politics or on trying to understand politics by way of performance. There was a fascination with the panel debate format or the game show or the interview or with the format of reconstruction from video tape evidence—formal strategies that the Woosters pioneered and which we also came to, by our own routes. The way the Woosters used collage in a lot of those mid-period works—especially LSD, St. Anthony, and Dr. Faustus—seemed to offer a way of thinking of theater performance outside of the naturalistic/psychological continuum that it was (and to some extent remains) trapped in. Burroughs wrote that “writing” was 50 years behind painting, of course. I think theater was probably 50 years behind writing! So there’s always work to do, thinking about how the shifting reality we inhabited can be captured or addressed.
My main cultural reference point when starting to make theater was punk, I guess, or new wave, at least in that that DIY, lo-fi approach seemed to open limitless possibilities, all inherent in the idea of “just doing it”: just setting out to describe and speak into the reality you inhabit with whatever means you happen to have immediately at your disposal and regardless of skill. Time has shifted that a bit, of course—doing decades of work in one field tends to leave you with some skills! But the sense of picking up objects, cultural or otherwise—play texts, musical instruments, books, recorded comedy routines—and just making something with and from them makes a lot of sense to me. The directness and the urgency of Routes 1 & 9 (1981) or the earlier pieces, the boldness of Liz LeCompte picking up the canon and doing it. (I remember reading an interview with her, describing an idea of doing the Great American Plays—Our Town, The Crucible, The Hairy Ape—like high school, working through the cultural baggage.)
Going back to skills for a moment, while I like the idea of the performers accumulating skills over time—getting to be really good at what they are doing—I also know that I’m always drawn to creating performance situations and modes which present a challenge to those skills or create a kind of tension around them. I sense a similar thing with the Woosters, where many of the productions seem at one level to be built on rules or conceits that are almost designed to make the whole thing almost impossible, like the kind of tasks they often seem to be engaged with: performing one text while copying the intonation of another, while at the same time doing movement copied from another source! I think that idea of the performer as a space in which irreconcilable impulses or realities are in a state of present play and flux is really important. There’s a connection to choreographer Meg Stuart there for me too: you see the same accumulation and layering of one source material and another, and the dancers becoming a kind of hybrid or “in between” of the sources.
You can think of all this as a trope, of course—a more or less stylistic thing—but it’s actually an attempt to think differently about what a human being is, psychologically, socially, politically. That, for me, is the significance of the work.
It’s also important to me that while the work is personal: we’re present “as ourselves” in the Forced Entertainment pieces, and the Wooster Group performers are always hugely present in/under/through theirs. To me it’s also work beyond or outside the realm of the anecdotic autobiographical that characterizes so much confessional popular and performance culture. They’re chasing different, more structural, systemic concerns—the individual, yes, but only in relation to larger power structures, frames and narratives.
PC
When I watch LSD again, or The Hairy Ape or Rumstick Road, I’m forcefully reminded how radical and unsettling, apparently frivolous and yet jaw-droppingly committed, these pieces are to the choices and conceits around which they’re built. The volume and velocity of language as verbiage, text, and its delivery as howling atonal un-authority, and structure and gesture as the carrier of meaning in the almost unintelligible, violent melody of The Crucible or Eugene O’Neill’s works. The virtuosity which rests on an axis of pursuing an auspicious meeting between Timothy Leary, the well-made play, and the Salem witch trials. Or the long and confrontational project of addressing systemic and structural racism in American society and the canon of American literature by placing it, in inscrutable, adversarial and still highly contested form, at the center of a number of productions like Route 1 & 9, LSD, and The Hairy Ape.
These often hallucination-like, acutely conceived and executed theatrical spaces seem to be able to access the friction, anxiety, and confusion about what consciousness is. In this sense, they are dedicated, radical gestures that purposefully take the bomb disposal unit to rewire the canon and place at center stage the manifest contradictions and disavowals, the casual ignorance as well as the pleasures and lyricism of their source material. Like with the FE work, with TWG I leave the theater to find that the show continues, in the streets and at the bus stop and on the ride home. The act of a collective body, individuated by the freedom to fail as an audience, to lose ourselves and find ourselves again—not in a position of mastery, of righteous understanding, but one engaged in onslaught and revelation—is the unthreading of the self which, rather than confirming what we already knew, leads to recognizing the melancholy and agony of the strictures which these texts, and our own reality, lie within. I still remember coming out of the theater, unable quite to begin to speak again, after Emanuelle Enchanted, or BRACE UP!, The Hairy Ape, or 200% and Bloody Thirsty, or LSD, or House/Lights, and how these works both astonished and undid me and, without a doubt, made me want to become an artist. That, I think, is the radical index of these works, that the propositions made within them, without a manifesto, propel also towards action. And if by day art and theater are kept apart like bad influences to sit in separate classrooms, then I’m grateful for the dark spaces of the night.
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.
)
)