Am I dreaming?...

Rotten fruit and summer

I.

Two days ago, I got back from yet another trip. The last seven years, I have been more or less just based in one place, and since I left Vienna, I’ve been jet set. I am joking that I’m making up for travel I didn’t do, but if that’s the case, I’m overcompensating.

I feel exhausted, and now that I have finally got my room in Battersea, I have no wish to leave terra firma right now. But rehearsals were calling in Vienna, as well as my bookshelf, still there, which I need to shift over bit by bit, or figure out some other way of getting my precious library to London.

My room in Battersea is Spartan. I have the bare minimum of stuff right now, and I’m very happy with that.

When I got to Vienna, it turned out that rehearsals were sparser than I thought. Clémentine was booked to do a class at ImpulsTanz, and Heide wanted to tag along and watch. I spent some of the time in the studio with them and some outside drinking lemonade and absorbing the vibes of the festival.

Since being back in London, I’ve realised that I am not drawn to try and “get myself out there” in dance settings and that my roots in theatre are calling me very strongly. Bouncing back out of London into ImpulsTanz, I felt a great confusion. Flashbacks of my switch in my first year at Dartington College of Arts from my undergrad Theatre degree to Choreography appeared, not so much as memories, but as repeated perceptions. “Dance”, as I keep on saying, as a subculture rather than as an artistic outcome, felt strange and alien to me last week.

In the workshop Clémentine was taking part in, the choreographer introduced the rationale for the material. Without wanting to sound cynical, he basically found an idea for something that would look cool and that would generate unusual movement material. Without needing more than that, he got his (well-funded) dance company to make a piece based on this idea.

I tried to explain my new feelings of dislocation to Clémentine.

“When you do theatre, you’re asking questions like: ‘What does this 2450-year-old play from the Mediterranean about infanticide have to say to us today? How can we stage it so that its freshness and relevance speak across the ages?’ Even if you’re doing contemporary, devised or postdramatic work, you’re still working from this kind of base.”

As I explained this, I realised that the aesthetic level—the look and feel of the work—is usually a later consideration. Dance, on the other hand, can content itself to stay on the surface in a way you wouldn’t get away with in theatre, though obviously many dance-makers pursue something beyond that.

I got into dance because I wanted to explore a space that allowed for something emergent and where I didn’t have to care about the rational level of things, where the bodily logic was enough to justify my actions as a performer. And now I feel that, in doing that, I threw out a lot of baby with the bathwater.

You are hopefully more intelligent than I am in allowing different things to coexist, and see that my one-or-the-otherism is and was unnecessary. However, it is hard to avoid is that no matter what you think, if you make performance, which is inherently collaborative, you always operate within an artistic subculture that may or may not be sympathetic to your own views.

II.

All that said, I allow myself the relief of reorienting artistically, back to my theatre roots.

My daughter, now ten years old, who was born on the same day as me and who has been dragged by me to many rehearsals, classes, and shows, has for a long time declared that her wish in life is to be a singer, dancer, actress, model, taiji teacher and nail beautician! Slowly she’s chipped away at this list, shortening it to just singer, dancer and actress and now just actress.

This change has happened coincidentally, as far as I can tell, and simultaneously to my own reorientation. To celebrate and support us both, my dad bought tickets for us to go together to The Bridge Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Nicholas Hytner.

When I was about seventeen, my dream was to become the next Hytner and direct plays on the Olivier Stage in the National Theatre. It was Heide’s first Shakespeare ever, and my first, as far as I remember, since she was born.

I love Shakespeare and the older I get, the more I appreciate how layered and rich his plays are, how speaking it implies a dynamicism to your embodiment, an aliveness that you simply can’t avoid. Dream probably is one of the most overperformed plays, the one where the am-dram clichés can be most disastrous, but Hytner, in my opinion, nails it. It’s decadent without being indulgent and hedonistic. It’s celebratory without being self-congratulatory. You feel a sense of communitas emerge out of the 2 hours and 40 minutes with complete strangers.

The Bridge is an ideal stage for contemporary Elizabethan vibes. You go in and the feeling is entering a nightclub, but not too over-the-top. The audience felt more like revellers than high-society opera goers. Since Heide was too young to be a groundling, we were seated in the galleries.

As we waited for the show to begin, and the audience started filling the floor, Heide asked, “Papa, why are there so many people just standing around on the floor?”

I explained the basics of Elizabethan theatre to her — how the nobility funded it, but that most of the theatre-goers were ordinary people and that going to a play was similarly priced to an evening out in the pub. You had to please your wealthy patrons enough to get paid, but if you failed to engage the public, you would get rotten fruit and vegetables thrown at you.

“Rotten vegetables?” she said, “That’s horrible! Why were they allowed to do that?!”

I realised that I didn’t find it horrible. Something in me found it natural and right. Modern audiences might hurl rotten heckles if they don’t like what they do, but it’s symbolically identical.

The contract between the artists and the audience is a living one when there’s rotten fruit in someone’s satchel. You have to engage that audience’s spontaneous interest, rather than appealing to their deliberate (by which I mean, forced) engagement. The polite clap reveals nothing — are the audience clapping because they enjoyed it or simply endured it?

I ended up on a rant to her:

“We should bring that back. So many people who aren’t ‘from the arts,’ whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, say they don’t get contemporary performance. Well, it’s not their fault. It’s ours! We conceal our work. We make it out of vanity. They should hurl their fruit at us once more, and we should up our bloody game and make work that matters to people.”

III.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare takes a lot of artistic license. It’s supposed to be set in and around Athens, yet many of the references are clearly not for a Hellenic audience. He takes something loosely Greek and transports it to the psyche of contemporary (in his time) Londoners. He doesn’t conceal it, and we know it. He’s open about his intentions — to speak to the actual people who come to the show.

Let’s avoid the mouldy cabbages.

And in taking this license so openly, he gives us license to do the same with his scripts. And in doing so, he reminds us of our jobs as makers of performance. We draw on the past to make something in the present. We transport and translate something into the now, into the lifespace of the real people whom we will confront with our work.

As Nita Little says, presence is always a disturbance. So we disturb our audience. “If we offend, it is with our goodwill.”

And, without wanting to go into a moan about the life I left, I feel a deep relief to be back in London. The bar is impossibly high in this field, which I have made my professional home for the whole of my adulthood. I know almost no one anymore. I have little idea how I will break into it here, after my years away.

But I realise that, perhaps more than anywhere in the world, I am in a place where theatre is a living art form, an art form which cares more about speaking to real people than about preserving classical glory days.