MIAF 2006: past the point of return
By convention, the 17-day Melbourne International Arts Festival unfolds in three discrete waves, weekend after weekend after weekend. With a breather between each wave. Kristy Edmunds’ 2006 festival, however, is more like a vast ice-breaker ploughing steadily through the centre of the city. On sixteen of the festival’s seventeen days, a new show opens or there is a one-off event.
Seasons are typically very short, such is the way of the world when large touring ensembles or complex productions are involved, but it’s almost possible to see everything this year... and a few are trying! (I had a head start, seeing Mantalk in its Fringe incarnation and Now That Communism is Dead at its B-Sharp debut in Sydney last month.)
A scene from I La Galigo photograph by Russel Wong
Paradoxically, my “run of luck” turned -- dramatically for the better -- exactly one week into the Festival, when the second wave would, traditionally, have kicked in.
Just when I was starting to worry that it might be my problem that nothing was pushing my aesthetic buttons, the tide turned. Works by Robert Wilson, Sekou Sundiata, William Yang, Lucy Guerin in a bit over 48 hours. Simple and complex, wordy and wordless, poetry and dance...
I La Galigo advances Wilson’s quest to create a piece of total theatre. It might even be the culmination of that quest. The individual parts -- music, singing, movement, set and lighting design, the text and performance text, even the priestly blessing and supervision of the show -- are so perfectly harmonised so as to seem indivisible.
It’s not uncommon in Wilson’s oeuvre for one element to pick up the slack when another loses its way. (When the music is brutal and stodgy at the start of Act II of Einstein on the Beach, for example, the choreography is glorious. When the direction is feeble, in the next scene of that act, the music is inspirational. And so on.) Here, though, it’s less about quality and more about energy. When our attention starts to flag, thrilling percussion kicks in and makes us sit up and pay attention anew.
When the performance in the vast State Theatre begins to feel distant and two dimensional, vertical gold filaments are lowered at the rear of the stage -- maybe fifty of them -- and more widely spaced filaments are lowered at the apron of the stage -- ten of them -- lending an extraordinary sense of depth and drawing us in, once more, to the action.
The placement of the Bissu Priest (who initiates and drives the story) mid-way between stage and audience is a device Wilson has used before; also in Einstein on the Beach. (The Einstein character sat in exactly the same spot, playing the violin, facing the audience... both participant and witness.)
Coppong Daeng Rannu, centre, as the Goddess of Rice
In his notes for I La Galigo, Wilson writes: “Often people ask me what my theatre is about: usually I say I do not know. My work is, in most cases, formal. It is not interpretative. To me interpretation is not the responsibility of the director the author or the performer: interpretation is for the public.”
As I write in my review of the show for Herald Sun, from most theatre directors -- the ones who have far too many ideas or far too few -- that would be a cop-out. You know: if you don’t get the show, it’s your fault. You’re not trying hard enough.
Wilson shapes the material, paces and phrases it. He creates the space in which we can imagine. Puts a frame around it. And he invites us to imagine.
Instead if dissipating into a void, the energy is contained and builds. Meaning evolves. Accretes. We feel secure enough -- brave enough -- to read meaning from and into the gestures and images and sounds of an alien, ancient culture.
When the daughter of the ruler of The Under World and the son of the ruler of The Upper World meet in I La Galigo’s epilogue, we watch her gestures -- horizontal sweeps of her hand, palm flat -- and his -- vertical sweeps like a wave of greeting -- slowly entwining and merging in a complex, sensual and incredibly evocative resolution to an unfamiliar tonic. That’s quite some achivement, Mister Wilson.
Seasons are typically very short, such is the way of the world when large touring ensembles or complex productions are involved, but it’s almost possible to see everything this year... and a few are trying! (I had a head start, seeing Mantalk in its Fringe incarnation and Now That Communism is Dead at its B-Sharp debut in Sydney last month.)
A scene from I La Galigo photograph by Russel Wong
Paradoxically, my “run of luck” turned -- dramatically for the better -- exactly one week into the Festival, when the second wave would, traditionally, have kicked in.
Just when I was starting to worry that it might be my problem that nothing was pushing my aesthetic buttons, the tide turned. Works by Robert Wilson, Sekou Sundiata, William Yang, Lucy Guerin in a bit over 48 hours. Simple and complex, wordy and wordless, poetry and dance...
I La Galigo advances Wilson’s quest to create a piece of total theatre. It might even be the culmination of that quest. The individual parts -- music, singing, movement, set and lighting design, the text and performance text, even the priestly blessing and supervision of the show -- are so perfectly harmonised so as to seem indivisible. It’s not uncommon in Wilson’s oeuvre for one element to pick up the slack when another loses its way. (When the music is brutal and stodgy at the start of Act II of Einstein on the Beach, for example, the choreography is glorious. When the direction is feeble, in the next scene of that act, the music is inspirational. And so on.) Here, though, it’s less about quality and more about energy. When our attention starts to flag, thrilling percussion kicks in and makes us sit up and pay attention anew.
When the performance in the vast State Theatre begins to feel distant and two dimensional, vertical gold filaments are lowered at the rear of the stage -- maybe fifty of them -- and more widely spaced filaments are lowered at the apron of the stage -- ten of them -- lending an extraordinary sense of depth and drawing us in, once more, to the action.
The placement of the Bissu Priest (who initiates and drives the story) mid-way between stage and audience is a device Wilson has used before; also in Einstein on the Beach. (The Einstein character sat in exactly the same spot, playing the violin, facing the audience... both participant and witness.)
Coppong Daeng Rannu, centre, as the Goddess of Rice
In his notes for I La Galigo, Wilson writes: “Often people ask me what my theatre is about: usually I say I do not know. My work is, in most cases, formal. It is not interpretative. To me interpretation is not the responsibility of the director the author or the performer: interpretation is for the public.”
As I write in my review of the show for Herald Sun, from most theatre directors -- the ones who have far too many ideas or far too few -- that would be a cop-out. You know: if you don’t get the show, it’s your fault. You’re not trying hard enough.
Wilson shapes the material, paces and phrases it. He creates the space in which we can imagine. Puts a frame around it. And he invites us to imagine.
Instead if dissipating into a void, the energy is contained and builds. Meaning evolves. Accretes. We feel secure enough -- brave enough -- to read meaning from and into the gestures and images and sounds of an alien, ancient culture.
When the daughter of the ruler of The Under World and the son of the ruler of The Upper World meet in I La Galigo’s epilogue, we watch her gestures -- horizontal sweeps of her hand, palm flat -- and his -- vertical sweeps like a wave of greeting -- slowly entwining and merging in a complex, sensual and incredibly evocative resolution to an unfamiliar tonic. That’s quite some achivement, Mister Wilson.
Labels: Kristy Edmunds, Lucy Guerin, Melbourne, Melbourne Festival, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Sekou Sundiata, William Yang
posted by Chris Boyd at 4:28 AM
12 Comments:
“interpretation is not the responsibilithy (sic) of the director the author or the performer: interpretation is for the public.”
apparently means for some lesser directors:
"if you don’t get the show, it’s your fault. You’re not trying hard enough."
Chris, I have to pick you up on this one!
The difference between these statements is so vast that I don't know where to begin.
If anything, Wilson was stating a fact, not offering an opinion. Sure, there is a touch of the rhetorical in there, but that it always a useful technique for provoking discussion.
I know of many directors who make work with the knowledge of the former and would never resort to saying or thinking the latter. I can think of one or two that might try the line you suggest, but they are in the minority, and they are wankers and are not taken very seriously by anyone except the occasional journalist and a smattering of people in the audience.
The assumption that the former can be substituted for the latter is oe of the big problems faced by artists who want their work to be taken seriously, without wanting to express an interpretation outside of the work itself. To offer such an expression is a hopeless task, and of dubious merit. Why is the director's intention of any greater value than that of any audience member, beyond being a filter through which one might read the work?
The lack of understanding of this point (in Australia, at the least) was driven home to me when the Wooster Group brought their magnificent production of The Hairy Ape to Melbourne and a way-out-of-his depth ABC radio journalist simply did not believe Elizabeth LeCompte when she said she didn't make the show to convey a predetermined message. He pressed her many times before giving up, much to the relief of me and probably almost every other artist in the room.
Chris Kohn
I'm with Chris K here. I'd say that the director (or any other artist's) responsibility is to a formal shaping. Interpretation of meaning is absolutely in the minds of the audience. Unless you're talking about art as a message stick, which is a very dull way of thinking about it; and a way of thinking, moreover, which totally sidesteps what is most interesting about art itself.
The work which probably best expresses this line of thought is Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, in which she argues for an erotics of aesthetic that talks about the form of the work itself, rather than placing rigid grids of pre-ordained meaning over it and thus obscuring the thing itself.
What, you both think we're supposed to take that Robert Wilson quotation merely as a statement of fact?! Talk about stating the bleeding obvious!!
I couldn't separate that remark from his very modest statements about providing "a frame" for the material. He does so much more than that, if he admits/knows it or not.
But I think we're arguing on the same side, here, Chris, Alison. Perhaps I telescope my arguments too much (20 years of writing to word limits does take its toll). Of course we make our own interpretations -- make meaning -- from what we see. Where we can!
The straw men I am huffing and puffing at are those that offer discrete atoms (what Danny Ep called visual non sequiturs) in a chaotic and unglossable mess. (And, god no, I'm not talking about Bloody Mess. There was merely a bit of madness in their method... which I loved.)
Where there is no obvious formal investment. Where the modules are created in blind isolation, presented as counterpoint with the heavy lifting left for the audience: join the dots for yourselves.
When it's that arbitrary, I can't be bothered. I'd rather entertain myself with inkblots.
A couple of points. Wilson has a buck each way if you ask me. Maybe thirty years back (?) he made shows that -- cutely -- denied meaning but reserved the right to be meaningful. I think he is past that.
Back to a much earlier point, if a show/actor/whatever has a through line of some kind, audiences/viewers sense it, and trust the world that has been conjured up in front of them. Like poetry, the meaning "invested" will almost certainly be read differently by each viewer/reader. But, sure as hell, we pick it that there is something invested.
Of course Hairy Ape didn't have a message to deliver. But, it had a motivation. Chris?
Even when one is not looking for what Sontag calls 'meanings' in art, even when one is 'merely' appraising and enjoying and indulging in the surface of the thing/event/whatever, we're acutely aware of what impels the art. Well, I am. (Call me old fashioned... but I'm not lookin' for "message sticks"!)
And, Chris, I'll fix the filthy typo. Ta.
I think we are largely on the same side here. For example, I agree with your notion of "investment". It was my lack of feeling that there was anything clearly "invested" in Dumb Type's Voyage that left me feeling like I had nothing to be invested with in the show. In other words, it seemed wishy washy and I was consequently bored.
However, to keep the debate going, I will say this - I do not think that Wilson has ever made a show (or claimed to make a show) that
'denied meaning' - but if you have an example or a claim from Wilson on this matter, I would be very interested to hear it. I think his early works display a surplus of "meaning" if anything - they "mean" like crazy. But what they mean to each audience member or to the broader theatre-going community - now that's where it gets interesting. Perhaps "deferred" might be a more appropriate way of looking at it than "denied"? But, again, I am certainly open to being persuaded otherwise.
On another note, Elizabeth LeCompte said that they did The Hairy Ape because it was the next play in the O'Neill anthology after the play they had just completed. I suppose that is some sort of motivation.
But, more to the point, I think LeCompte was arguing that whatever her motivation to make that show in the way that she made it, she considered it either not at all important to the reading of the work, or, perhaps more likely, not something she could reliably articulate.
I don't think that this applies equally to all work, however. Sometimes the context of "motivation", as articulated by the artist who created it, is central to a thorough understanding of the work. Hmmm.
I have to admit, when I read Wilson's "usually I say I do not know" I had a similar reaction, Chris (B) - though the 'usually' does intrigue me. My gut reaction is to think "of course a director interprets a work!". The thinking of our time, though, is surely that said interpretation is just one of many possible meaning-makings, and a director who attempts to impose those Sontag-ian 'grids' too rigorously risks alienating their audience.
Art is about internal contradiction, however, isn't it? Forces which play against one another competing to share the same interpretative space? I don't think anyone who has commented so far would be a huge fan of polemics in the theatre.
But yeah, I'm sort of over directors who create works calculated to deny interpretaion, as opposed to those who throw up a dazzling constellation of possible meanings to inspire their audiences.
I like Descartes' notion of wonder, as the first of the passions: 'first' as it's the 'spur to inquiry', the 'I don't get this' that sets the mind in motion (versus astonishment, from the Fr. etonnement (literally, to turn to stone) which suggests an experience that causes imaginative paralysis).
The Theatre of Wonder, that's what I'm into. This year, Volcano fit the bill superbly, thanks Chris, and during the festival the Castellucci was the closest I've had to a perfect fit. Far from perfect, really. I think that's what's missing in 2006.
The one thing I am still confused about is the idea of "directors who create works calculated to deny interpretation" or "deny meaning". Who are they? I can think of shows that have offered little to interpret, or appreciate, or to get lost in, or shows that reveal or express little about the world we live in, but I doubt that any of these are the result of calculated efforts. More likely the result of a failure to give expression to an idea. (And this can be the case whether the director is one who makes claims or offers about the interpretation of the work or not).
This is a common argument in contemporary poetry, where poets like JH Prynne are accused of wilful obscurity, of denying meaning. Well, Prynne is a deeply challenging poet, and in many ways refuses an easy interpretation, for complex and in fact political reasons to do with a refusal to commodify the work, and to question the idea that something might be "translated" into some easily parsed meaning. Still, I find his work compelling, and there are meanings to be made there, and not solely by the reader.
Prynne is at one end of the spectrum, but it's a common plaint often levelled against poets who are actually quite easy to get, if you just read them. However, people are trained at school to look for a certain kind of meaning in poetry - "what is the poet trying to say?". People are trained to decode poetry, instead of experiencing it as something in which "meaning" occurs at several levels - cerebral, sure, and also (and maybe, in my mind anyway, firstly) intuitive and emotional and sensual, something that is evoked by the sensual and material aspects of the language. Often - and this can be true of my work - the sonic and carnal aspects of language are foregrounded above semantic considerations.
Often poetry wants to resist such easy making of meaning because it's a foreclosing of experience, a falsification that seems dishonest (as opposed to the "honest" artifice of a poem). That doesn't mean that a poet is refusing meaning, or deliberately trying to be difficult: any decent poem is that poet's attempt to enact a reality in language. But this can be experienced as a wilful refusal by readers who have been trained to expect something which can be parsed into an easily communicable "meaning" (what the poem is "about").
To get back to theatre - not only directors say they don't know why they do things. Playwrights too have been known to answer that way (Mrozek, Ionesco, Keene). It's not a cop out. It's a refusal to participate in the fiction that the writer has a privileged relationship to his/her work and is able to tell other people what it "means", a denial of authorial intention, which is - if the work is any good - beyond the writer's conscious deliberation. The writer can't read his/her own work (v interesting chapter in Blanchot's The Space of Literature which talks about this, and I totally agree with him). Certainly, with my own work, I can read it and make judgments about the formal choices I have made, but what I cannot know is the affect of those choices. What, in fact, they can mean to anyone else, which is literally beyond me.
I suppose I'm thinking of works which make their focus the instability or unreliability of meaning; ie they're *about* this very issue. Not things that fail to adequately present anything substantial, but which deliberately abstain from presenting anything at all, beyond a kind of self-referential navel-gazing. I can't say anything with any confidence, so I'll say something about how I can't say anything with any confidence. The whole pomo deal, you know.
Done well, this can be great, of course, but it's really been done to death (a long time ago, too). I did see an atrocious Canadian show at the last Next Wave fest which I deliberately deleted from my memory banks for this reason, and I came out boiling.
I guess it's not "if you don’t get the show, it’s your fault." It's "if you get the show, you're wrong."
Well, there's post modernism, postmodernism, and postmodernity, in all their pluralities, because none of them is one thing; and then what is said about postmodernism, and they're all quite different things. Sometimes it's quite hard to sort out which is which, especially as only architects seem very sure what pomo is in the first place.
I like works which assume an instability of meaning. But I'm just having trouble thinking of works that are simply about that...Chris K's comment about "wankers" at the top might cover that?
Forgive my tardiness, I am planning to respond in more detail at the first opportunity.
In the meantime... I recall some Douglas Horton productions in the early 90s which really pushed my buttons. Like Lacuna. It was a seductive and semiotically rich production which, apparently, invited close attention and analysis. Yet it fell to bits at the slightest of glances. Now, this might have been a bit of the old pomo sleight of hand, but it didn't present enough of a challenge to be satisfying as a maze-like puzzle.
It was a mishmash of Machiavellianism, ancient mythology and sexual politics played out as a chess match, a recreation of the 1977 title bout between Korchnoi and Spassky. The set was dominated by two huge chess timers which, inexplicably, ran simultaneously rather than taking turns.
One of the Kings was Orpheus (a bizarre combo of Hirohito and Churchill) the other was Minerva. (!! Yep, Horton gave the "dread warrior maiden" a sex-change!)
The metaphors dangled and the references -- each and every one -- were dead-end. I single this production out as Horton had a co-writing credit with David Chesworth.
Now, I hasten to add that Horton did some great productions before Lacuna (his Fall of the House of Usher for example) and quite a few since... I adored Improvement: Don Left Linda. But, on the whole, there was a pattern of "meaning-denial" (!)) in his work.
I would like to ask you, Chris, how different it is directing a Katz play like the infinitely complex Mystery of the Volcano versus one where you have co-writing credit, namely Black Swan of Trespass... Clearly, you have to understand the text before you can create (?) a comprehensible (?) performance text, no?
More soon.
P.S. Born Dancin', I'm a Defence Commander kinda guy, rather than 'Galaga'! (You needed to be able to touch-type to play the f*cker!)
I do not think that Wilson has ever made a show (or claimed to make a show) that 'denied meaning'... I think his early works display a surplus of "meaning" if anything - they "mean" like crazy. [my emphasis]
I love that line, CK.
Perhaps, in fairness to Wilson, I should say that he doesn't feel compelled to find meaning where it isn't. Let me stick to Einstein on the Beach, it's the work I know best. (And I mean Phil Glass's composition rather than the whole text which, if memory serves me, Wilson had a co-writing credit on... hmm... So, let's not let RW off the hook too soon!)
The operatic medium is both subject (and object?) of EotB. The score, dramatic and scenic structure and subject matter are inextricably linked. The four-act opera is made up of nine scenes, three for each visual theme: train, trial and field with space machine. This structure coincides with the primary musical theme which combines out-of-phase rhythmic patterns in which a treble phrase is repeated three times for every four repetitions of the bass phrase. (With me so far?!) The second theme is a sine-waving arithmetic progression in which the bass line inverts and reflects the treble line. In the minimalist tradition, these modal fragments are repeated and varied.
The libretto uses numbers and the solfège syllables: do re mi &c. The first sung line is: "1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8." The libretto articulates the rhythm and pitch of the music. In short, the opera is a giant algebraic formula. And that's really about as close as the text gets to the figure of Einstein!
Having said all that, I'm now wondering if it's even reasonable to distinguish between text and performance text in such a highly collaborative work.
What do you think? Am I swingin' off the birches here? (Feeling the ground pretty close to my feet!) (And the pillow not close enough to my head.)
Is this meaning denial? Or art expressing merely of itself?
I have been meaning to respond, but caught up in festival-land.
I never feel the need to understand a text in order to direct it. If I read a script and feel that I understand it, I don't feel compelled to direct it. I have to feel that there is something there to discover, I have to feel that "investment" we were talking about, but I don't need to understand anything. Black Swan wasn't a text until we started rehearsing - we only had the Malley poems and letters. We spent hours unpacking the poems in order to discover what was hidden inside them, but the play-text itself evolved out of an organic process which was about setting up certain exercises in the rehearsal space and finding moments that felt alive or somehow reflective of a feeling or idea. Not that we ever had to talk about what that feeling or idea might be. I always end up using the word "rhythm", because when it comes down to it, time is the basic building block - that is what we have to work with. I don't think I have ever disliked a show with a strong sense of rhythm, nor have I liked any show where the rhythm was unclear. So we try to get the rhythm right and put it out there and hope that there is something there for people. There are other motivations there, of course, but they are for the audience to unpack.
Volcano - I will have to go into this later, perhaps over a beer? But it was indeed a very different experience than Black Swan!
Your question about Wilson: "Is this meaning denial? Or art expressing merely of itself?" There is a big discussion in this one. One that I think is at the heart of the media's current criticism of Kristy Edmunds' programming. What I have loved about the Melbourne Festival under Edmunds and Archer is that much of the work is "experimental", it doesn't take for granted anything about the moment of live performance. It is work that, in order to presume the ability to express, questions the mechanisms of expression. Mostly this is a layer in the work, which informs other ideas within the work (think of Lone Twin, Richard Maxwell, Forced Entertainment, Robert Wilson, Back to Back, Castellucci). Many of these artists do not necessarily set out to do anything "new", they just set out to explore something that is burning within them, and then find themselves in a structure (a room, an audience, some people on a stage) and can't help but be curious and find compelled to get to the heart of the strangeness of this situation of "liveness" as a necessary part of doing anything more. In their explorations, they often find something "new" or "unfamiliar" and when you are presented with this as an audience member, the "form" mediates your reception of the work because of this unfamiliarity. So most work that I find interesting is engaged with the idea of performance and yes, on one level, it is art about art. But not only about art. I haven't seen it, but I am guessing that Einstein on the Beach was not really about Einstein, but it was about more than numbers and art.
I am probably just saying things you already know, and haven't answered any of your questions, and beggared a few more.
So I will call for back-up: You absolutely must see Jerome Bel's show. I can't rave about it enough. The work addressed these questions in such a concise, simple and beautiful way. I should have written nothing here, pointed you in that direction and said "what he says."
See you around the festival in its final days...
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