Back in October, after 18 months of development and performance, we found a final shape and form for our piece AS THE FLAMES ROSE WE DANCED TO THE SIRENS, THE SIRENS. Being able to say “this is a finished piece” – and we’ve since performed it 8 times in the same shape, without shifting anything round, which is unusual – feels great, though comes with the understanding, again, that to finish a piece is not to be finished with the ideas and possibilities that you’ve spent so much time bumbling around with, but rather that the finishing itself, the drawing a full stop, has come out of a certain healthy necessity, the fact that things have gone as far as they can within this particularly shape and that it will take a new piece, a new angle and way of thinking, to carry them further. A new mode of transportation to carry that load perhaps. Nothing ever really stops. A joyous relief though to have found a pause with a piece that we’re really happy with and that is successful in the ways that we hoped it would be. Now then in a moment to think about what to do next, a certain liberty mixed with a certain sense of duty and demand. The next thing must be better always because it’s this work that must justify us and which in any case will speak for us and of us whether we like it or not. So on the cusp of that, taking stock a bit: of the fact that THE SIRENS was made – through a combination of choice and happy accident – piece by piece, in public, which has been a first for us and which feels like the way that we want to be working from now on, if we can. Doing stuff in public, the material always raw and never more than half thought through, does something to the work, you find you’re always building on stuff you couldn’t find in the rehearsal room, stuff that comes from the friction and scrutiny of a roomful of strangers and from the survival strategies you have to develop in the face of that. More of that please. And also on the table now the demand to find new ways of working. THE SIRENS has been the culmination of a number of years of finding an approach to stuff, and it feels now like we’ll have to rethink from the ground up to move forward. There’s always a line of course that won’t sever, the old itches you’ll find yourself wanting to scratch again somewhere along the line, but we are for now at least trying to angle our gaze in a different direction, write notes in a different order, no form or logic to it yet but hoping something will come together that will look unfamiliar. Too vague to articulate what all that means. Will keep trying.
Finally, we’ve found ourselves increasingly conscious of, made forcibly conscious of, the nature of what we’re doing as a whole and of where it’s sitting in a wider sense. It’s good I think to be facing the fact that we’re working on the margins of an artform which is, even at it’s most commercial, itself marginal. We’ve been talking and wondering a lot about how, at it’s bluntest, to get an audience, how to weave this work tighter into the social fabric, about what it is in The Theatre that might act as a barrier keeping people out, and whether it’s better to try to get on the other side of that barrier or to take it apart. And we’re not cynical and we are hopeful because we HAVE seen other routes, and places where this stuff can sit and works. We still believe passionately in the theatre as an event and as a social arrangement and contract, but question the invitation and how the door is opened to it. The work is not the problem, but there might be a better invitation, and a better space – both physically and conceptually – for it. The key question for us is how might you shift this work into another place – another building, perhaps, but better another way of being visible and approachable and understood by the public – without the work itself having to change? We’ve got inklings, but more questions than answers. We’ll be taking the first mental babysteps in the next few weeks, and if anything comes maybe unveil something close to home in Jan/Feb. We’ll see.
Anyway, then, for the new thing: there’s a title, which suggests a certain shape for things. We almost always start with the title first, the process being in some sense a journey towards figuring out what the title means, with, in the last two pieces we’ve made anyway, the title eventually getting inserted into the text somewhere key towards the very end of the process, which is either wonderfully clever or wilfully stupid, but in any case feels like it works. Some stuff that might end up somewhere in the piece, tucked up in a corner somewhere, invisible but kind of present: “Surfer Rosa” by Pixies; Godard’s “Le Mepris”; the tiniest possible thing in all the world; George Bataille, “Documents”, “Divine Filth” and “Story Of The Eye”; Something explicitly personal for once; television; the pop music of Brigitte Bardot; or maybe none of that. It’s pretty blank for now. Good.
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Some other stuff we’ve been up to recently: HERE, video from SCRATXE #5 – Bottlefed, Noa Reshef, Sedated By A Brick, Andoni Oporto, Mary Zurbano, Silvia de Yrazu; #6 coming early next year, date soon, if you’d like to come and show something email us at fdfperformance@gmail.com; also, HERE, a little video from a collaborative piece we did in September/October, which might return next year as well; plus, we’re currently in RND #2 for ITZULERA, the first show Factoría de Fuegos are making as like a company. Unai’s directing, there will be there first bit of public stuff on December 18th followed by something big next year. Plus something else big and new Factoría related that we’ll be announcing in the new year. All coming along.
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Aching to have something actually interesting to write here, but head’s full of shows and process. Soon, promise.
