“…What was needed was something like an anti-joke, some phrase or story or situation or whatever that would make people cry. It would have to be something anybody could tell, something where anybody could call together their friends or family or whoever and say “hey, I heard a good one today…”, and then tell it, with everybody in earshot by the punch line crying together, uncontrollably, tearing hair and pounding furniture etc etc. Something sure to work, something that would remind us for certain that we were not so so far away from whoever was left outside in the street. We tried one about a sinking ship, and one with talking animals. We tried one that required a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, that wasn’t quite logical with the laws of time and space. We tried one about and Englishman, a Basque and a Madrilleño. We tried every combination of people and places that we could find in what books and photos we still had left from the outside world. But in the end we had to admit that we didn’t ever know whether to laugh or cry, that we couldn’t really tell the different in any case. That we could no longer really tell one sound from the other.”

We did an interview with DIAGONAL a couple of months ago where we ended up talking about the possibility that THE SIRENS might be “a bit like stand-up comedy, except instead of trying to make people laugh we’re trying to make them cry”. It’s an idea more poetic than literal, but I like the way in which it suggests a function for the work. Creates a new space for it, presents it as a choice.

“What are you going to do tonight?”

“We’re going to go see something sad…”

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 18^th 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.

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Just back this week from doing the Festival OFF in Avignon, where we saw a bunch of stuff, some good, some bad, and a couple of excellent shows: the first, “Riz au Lait”, by Riverbed Theatre from Taiwan, was dreamy and unsettling with some astonishing images; the second, “Riflessi”, directed by Regina Brunoni and performed by Antonio Corsi, both from Italy, was even better, a double portrait of Antonio and of his mother, by turns both tender and abrasive. Our own …SIRENS performances went well, small audiences but more people came each night and the show grew as iara discovered new things in the work, so happy with that. The festival itself is a bit of a monster (in Europe, only Edinburgh is bigger I think), the size of it all favouring only the loudest and most accessible work, but still, a good atmosphere down there despite the heat, and the medieval quarter where the festival takes place is beautiful. We’re now in August taking a month off to look at some new ideas and then we’ll be back in September with more …SIRENS, more …DANCING, and a new site specific show called BESTIARIO URBANO that we’re making in Vitoria-Gasteiz in collaboration with 3 other local companies, and which is looking to be something special. You can see stuff about all of that via HERE

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I discovered this thing below the other day that I wrote a while back, I don’t know when. Was written for fun really, but is sort of accurate. It’s a list of all of the things that we use to make shows with – a sort of basic ingredients. Something of the form of that is also meaningful – not meaning like we’re ever actually thinking too consciously in these terms, in this structure, not so blunt as that, but there is something in our approach that is about taking from a small vocabulary of possible things to do and making different combinations of those things, running through all the variations to see what sticks, what’s interesting, what works. And I think that there is something incredibly liberating in approaching stuff in such basic simple terms. Of course I’d be lying if I said it really was this simple, but it’s nice to pretend. Sometimes I see writing this kind of stuff as just about eliminating ideas in order to move on to better stuff, like once it’s written down it’s gone, you can leave it behind and think about something different. Anyway, the list looks like this:

BASIC INGREDIENTS

Stand

Lie Down

Talk (improvised)

Talk (pre-prepared)

Laugh

Cry

Energetic Movement (good)

Energetic Movement (crap)

Do Nothing

Turn Light Off

Turn Light On

Play Music

Play Video

Play Pre-recorded Text

Use Non-Spoken Text (eg. write)

NOTE: Individual piece may include other specific ingredients, eg. …THE SIRENS also has “Get Drunk”

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Haven’t been writing much for a long time on account of something of a creative burnout – 6 months of making stuff near enough constantly has about used up all of our ideas for everything. It’s an unexpectedly physical sensation. All good though: following performances in Spain and Portugal …THE SIRENS is about finished now – just a little bit of soundtrack stuff to finish up – and ready for 5 nights at Avignon Festival OFF in a couple of weeks time. It has been a struggle and it has gone some unexpected places, but we’re very happy with where it has ended up. We’ll be taking some time off in August to recuperate and, once back in shape, work on some new stuff, then we’ll be back in the Autumn for some more shows – we’ve got stuff set in Madrid and back home in Vitoria-Gasteiz, hopefully more on the way. Meanwhile, hoping to get it together enough to finish up one or two things I’ve been writing for this thing here. More soon then, fingers crossed…

I would like to propose the following arguments, which are not I suspect original but which I hope bare repeating: that Fellini understands everything to be important, and that every moment and detail of the world both as it is and, crucially, as it is lived, matters. In Fellini’s films there is a solidity to things and to people. Within 8½, as in all of Fellini’s films, there are no extras: every person who appears on screen is complete. As in Shakespeare, all characters exist. Within his long, long tracking shots of crowds, everyone is present: we watch and sense that though their appearances may be momentary, each person continues to live unwatched outside the frame. Fellini’s cinema, a thing within the world, is a gesture towards this world that is uncontainable, perfect, complete. As Guido’s film is unfinished, so in a sense is Fellini’s – it cannot be finished, because the laws of space and time prevent Fellini’s camera from capturing all that there is and will ever be.

If 8½ is a film that struggles to contain all of the world, Le Meprís is a film made in order for there to be a world. It’s purpose is to create, cinematically, a subjective reality of image, moment, sensation, which is in fact the only conceivable and viable reality, and as such is erected almost as a barricade again all the nothing that lies outside the edge of the frame. For Godard, reality is inadequate; there is not enough of it. There may not be any of it at all.

To elaborate: Guido cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy because Fellini makes the two equally real; for Fellini, one mans reality is a reality equal to the reality. Memory, particularly, is ever present, in active dialogue with the now. All that is and was becomes recurrent, eternal, verifiable. When you look away from the thing it remains there nonetheless. Godard on the other hand presents the real as a sort of Schrödinger’s cat: only really there for as long as you look at it, and defined moment by moment by a particular gaze and manner of looking, by who looks, and by why they are looking. The real is neither within nor without the individual, but negotiated constantly between people, and is therefore nowhere. The world does not exist beyond the sensations and exchanges through which it is experienced. A moment that has passed does not exist in the present if the present has no relation to it, and if that relationship is not shared, agreed upon. When Camille stops loving Paul it negates both the past existence of that love and Paul’s present continuing love. It is possible to love and then not to love; once the love is gone it is as if it never existed. It is significant that the film is structured around omissions, most particularly the act of Camille’s first betrayal, which we do not see but which is (or at least, would seem to be) confirmed by later events. The crisis of the film is not this act itself, but the failure later to negotiate this act and its implications. The act itself is therefore irrelevant to, and absent from, the world. It is absent from the film because it does not, in a sense, happen. Having neither weight nor meaning beyond that which is imposed – with this imposition, formed of mutual misunderstanding, failure, constituting the only true act and reality of the film – it is nothing, not just unreality but non-reality (not reality’s absence but it’s opposite). Camille’s death is similarly omitted – she is alive, and then she is dead. The specifics of the event hardly matter. The only reality is in the two states that are themselves transitory. Through omission, the gaze is turned on us, watching: all we see is all that there is. This is our responsibility and the role we must play.

Both films contain films-within-films. Borges (in “When Fiction Lives In Fiction”) remarks of the play within Hamlet:

“…that the stolid, heavy-handed style of this minor play makes the overall drama that includes it appear, by contrast, more lifelike. I would add that it’s essential aim is the opposite: to make reality appear unreal to us” (Borges attributes the former observation to De Quincey)

Guido’s film – unfinished and, with it’s half-built spaceship set, absurd – reminds us of cinemas failings and inadequacies, undermining 8½ itself and re-asserting the primacy of the external world of the spectator (and of Fellini, and of us all). The film within Le Meprís, frightening and oblique, directed by Fritz Lang (stepping out of reality to play himself), blurs into Le Meprís itself, which we see being filmed over the opening credits. That the film-within-the-film may itself somehow also be the film itself, may be Le Meprís, suggest that the film that it is within is the world out here, where we are. Our world is more real than 8½, but it may be less real than Le Meprís.

Fellini’s cinema presents and acknowledges itself as a small part of a whole, whose edges blur out into that whole; Godard’s cinema is itself the only whole, and is surrounded by vacuum. Fellini we watch in order to understand better that which is outside of it; Godard we watch because there is nothing else that we can do. The latter fact would be nihilistic if the film itself wasn’t so achingly gorgeous. Both films make problematic our relationship with the real and the unreal, and present us with our own inability to differentiate between the two. Fellini balances this fearful ambiguity with the assertion that there is a world out there, a reality that is constant and, occasionally, tangible; Godard negates this. Fellini’s film has a sadness to it but also a joy and a hopefulness; Godard’s film is monstrous.

Some similarities should be noted: both films are impeccably cast and scored; neither film resorts to recognisable tricks, nor particularly resembles any other film; both are almost incomparably beautiful.

We conceive sometimes of the work as consisting of – or perhaps, acting in service of – a series of arrivals: moments wherein significance or feeling (which are in some way the same thing) emerges in a manner that is at once surprising, experienced as appearing ‘from the ether’, yet which feels (if the work is successful) also somehow as being inevitable, called for and demanded by that which has come before. A successful arrival in this sense then perhaps best described as an unexpected event that which, once it has occurred, is felt to be the only thing that could have happened. (A note: it may be interesting to approach all art and spectatorship with this idea in mind, although the conclusions may not be accurate). An arrival demands a journey, so here are two routes that could be travelled down:

The first route starts with an image; the journey consists of an accumulation or layering on of additional elements – text, music, action, further images – on top of or in proximity to this original and unchanging image until it becomes transformed, fractures, or is revealed for what it ‘always was’. This is the route that we know most well, having explored its some of its possibilities and limits in two projects (NOTHING LEFT TO THE IMAGINATION and, more recently, WHY THEY ARE DANCING, AND WHO THEY ARE DANCING FOR) and in a general sense in most of the work we’ve made. As I’ve written before, the original image need not itself be interesting, since it’s significance emerges from what is put in relation to it.

The second route, which I suspect may be more complex, ends with an image; the journey consists of a movement towards and anticipation of this image whose arrival will constitute a resolution of this journey. The most flawless (and startling) example I’ve come across of this journey is in Georges Bataille’s “Story Of The Eye”, wherein every word prepares the reader (unwitting) for the arrival of an images that contains and explodes all the has come before it. The effect is extraordinary and almost overwhelming. This journey we have not yet attempted to travel. I would love to find out how it works.

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Have not been writing much of late, mostly on account of a heady 5 days spent last week at Festival ACT in Bilbao. So much good work and I’d love to have the time to write about it all, but for now: Bárbara Bañuelos made an uneasy community of us all through the simplest means; and El Conde De Torrefiel did some beautiful and disquieting stuff with images and projected text; and Trace Theatre have created that rare and precious thing, a performance that is utterly and ceaselessly pleasurable. Great stuff also from Giulio D’anna, Javier Vaquero, Ron Amit & Mor Shani, and too many more to list. We had a wonderfully warm and generous audience for our own AS THE FLAMES ROSE WE DANCED TO THE SIRENS, THE SIRENS, for which we won our first award (for best direction) and got a very nice review in GARA. Already looking forward to next year.

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Following all that, just spent the last couple of days travelling to and from Barcelona, to visit some spaces and to see again Laboratorium Teatro’s version of Heiner Müller’s Quartett. Still as forceful and seductive as a nightmare, truly a performance at the end of it’s tether, with maybe my favourite ending I’ve ever seen. Lovely seeing them again, and they’re moving to Barcelona full time later this year so hoping to see a lot more of them.

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Now preparing for our next Noche Scratxe Gaua in Vitoria-Gasteiz this coming Saturday night; we’ll be showing the first tiny bit of our new project, alongside performances by Sylvia Rimat, Ramón Churruca, Ricardo Gaston Sanchez, Trío Eléctrico, Javier Seco and Mary Zurbano – an exciting and varied line-up indeed. Will let you know how it all comes out…

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And then leaving that thought very much unfinished and more or less unclear whatever way you look at it and moving onto a second thought which is sort of related though not really but it happened next (to me) anyway, the thought being this: Is it possible to think of one thing only? As in for the duration of a moment think of only this one thing. And thinking here about things like reading and watching stuff and about the way in which you become absorbed in that, and how absolutely you can ever be absorbed in that. Like a word of an image or a sound entering you not so much like a virus – ie. within but separate from you, in relation to you, and therefore reflectable – not so much like that as like a knife, total, stabbed in, that knife becoming in that moment more you than you yourself are, a foreign body which through it’s action, consequences, meaning, is closer to your consciousness than your own body is. Whereas, generally, spectatorship ends up full of so many other little things: thinking about “am I liking this”, thinking “am I hungry”, thinking “none of that makes any sense”, thinking “this chair is uncomfortable”, thinking “and what happens next” and so forth. Also, more constructively, all the memories and associations and personal stuff that can be triggered by the work and go spinning off any which way. Also all the other almost unconscious things happening which could be considered thoughts (or more ‘awareness’s’, if you like), things happening with like equilibrium, and a thing which I think is called spacio-something awareness, that sense of where all the parts of your body are in relation to the other parts, a whole trickle of thoughts which, unfortunately, cannot be turned off (unfortunate, of course, only within this context. In the grand scheme of things: fortunate). Plus also maybe you have a taste in your mouth. And so I’m wondering: can we conceive of a thought that destroys all other thoughts? I think Satre talks about the way an emotion can “take you in its grip” (solely and absolutely) or some such thing (can’t remember exactly, have lost the book, so there goes that for now). I suppose maybe pain might be absolute, like that? Difficult to speculate. And so arriving now, at last, end of the battered line (a line still pretty much incomplete, a work in progress, like the line between Sidcup and Charing Cross, 2003-2006 and maybe still now, rail-replacement bus every weekend) but arriving nonetheless at the glorious question: can we conceive of the artwork that is one absolute thought, experienced by everyone the same, simultaneously, which destroys all other thoughts, and which, for as long us it lasts, will truly seize us?

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FOOTNOTE: Interesting also to entertain the idea of the artwork which can destroy even equilibrium, spacio-something awareness etc, whose mere exposure leaves it’s spectator writhing fleshily on the floor of the auditorium.

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Meanwhile, back in the real world, we’re working now on editing down our excessively titled AS THE FLAMES ROSE WE DANCED TO THE SIRENS, THE SIRENS for Festival ACT in Bilbao on June 2^nd (we’ve got to get 30 minutes off the runtime, daunting but coming along) –you can see a little bit of us talking about that show HERE – as well as gathering together the first ideas and taking the first baby steps towards both the new project we’re starting now (and will be showing a few minutes of HERE on June 12th) and a big collaborative project that will likely be happening in September. Also bracing for the bus ride down to Murcia tomorrow to see Forced Entertainment and to meet up with the great Artur Rodriguez, who we haven’t seen in an age. All well then, hope you are too.

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Still on the subject of cinema, I saw THIS trailer the other day which is pretty much the best trailer I’ve ever seen I think, almost a short film in itself (has anybody seen a trailer better? If so I’d love to see it). Can’t find the damn film itself anywhere though…

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ONE INTERESTING THING WAS: the fact that so few people felt able to make eye contact; like, before they came to sit and watch, when milling around or watching other stuff in nearby spaces, glancing over, they would be happy to look, smile, laugh, but as soon as they were sitting in front of us and listening there was something different. Perhaps something to do with the text and music; perhaps something in the arrangement, like by sitting there they were entered into the playing space itself, exposed suddenly; perhaps even something in the way in which the arrangement – one sitting, watching, the other dancing – referenced other similar (and more illicit) arrangements, some sort of embarrassment or awkwardness by association. In any case, there became something interesting in this, like with no contact it became a performance of two people sharing a separation, both differently alone, isolated but sort of in reference to each other perhaps, in reference to each others aloneness. Something nice in that distant closeness.

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ANOTHER PERHAPS RELATED INTERESTING THING: was the impossibility, whilst performing, of knowing how the spectator was understanding what you were doing – with the text they heard a 13 minute loop that contradicts itself throughout you could never know what it was that they were seeing in you at any particular moment. I love this as an idea and possibility. Good moments of people laughing at I don’t know what  (and I don’t even remember there being anything particularly funny in the text), and a couple of moments of people crying, for reasons that nobody will ever know, not even us there with them. Something precious in that perhaps, and something that will belong only ever to that particular person who saw or understood that thing in that moment that nobody else will ever see.

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ONE GOOD MOMENT WAS: late on in, I’m about half an hour into my second shift (meaning we’re about 3 and a half hours into the performance) there’s a moment where another performance has spilled out into our space, right next to us, and I’m there still dancing but now watching also out of the corner of my eye this other performance (I figure I’m allowed that), and then my audience is now sometimes twisting in her chair to watch some of this other performance too but still listening to our audio, which would probably have worked somehow, and the lights are strobing and then I’m listening to LCD Soundsystem and that line comes and is: “we can’t have parties like in Spain where they go all night…”, and I think (tired and a bit delirious by this point) “That’s what I’M doing! I AM at a party in Spain that looks like it will go all night!”. And it’s a pretty blunt and stupid thought but the moment is still good.

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ANOTHER MOMENT WAS: a period of about 20 minutes wherein iara, already well into her second hour up there, is making desperate gestures to me that she’s ready to stop and swap over but watching I’m mistaking all that for just some interesting dancing, some new moves, so I’m leaving her up there all this time still going, me leaving to see other stuff, coming back and watching more dancing which is actually all this frantic gesturing. Some concerned spectators are coming up to me and asking if surely she’s had enough now but me laughing I’m saying no, she just keeps going, she doesn’t want to stop. Finally the penny drops.

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AND ANYWAY: here is a little bit of video from the show; the sound and text are taken from the track which the audience hear through the headphones:

Exercise One:

Go, alone (the alone is important), at around 4 in the afternoon, to a bar, and drink 2-4 glasses of red wine in quickish succession. Try to occupy your mind with something as you do so (not too taxing; good activities would be reading, or looking at stuff on the internet). Once an hour or so has passed jump up and go outside, again alone, somewhere where it’s sunny and bright, and suddenly, just like that, HEAVEN is a real existent thing, right there in front of and inside and all around you, touchable, eternal, for as long as it lasts. You can have an ice cream if you like.

Exercise Two:

LATER THAT DAY (like, an hour later at most): attempt to engage is some kind of meaningful activity, or better still, go to work (better if it’s a job you actually care about), or even better still, attempt to engage in meaningful conversation with somebody to whom you want to appear serious (better and better still, in a second language), and once more, just like that, you will find that HELL is also a real thing, right there, that can happen to real people in the real world in real time, at any time.

That’s it. Enjoy.