Thomas Scullion
In this essay, I align myself with the position taken by Geraldine Harris in her article Repetition, Quoting, Plagiarism and Iterability, in which she proposes that a codified style of postmodern devised performance emerged from the dissemination of the working practices belonging to radical performance companies such as The Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment. These practices were repeatedly presented as ‘models’ of devised performance to theatre students at higher education level in Harris’ workplace, Lancaster University, and she argues that this was happening across the United Kingdom (Harris, 1999:12). I argue that this codification led to what director Pete Brooks denounced as ‘a new orthodoxy’ in an interview with Giannachi and Luckhurst (1999:4), and of what Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells described as a ‘set of formal codes and stylistic options’ (Etchells cited in Heddon and Milling, 2006:217) adopted by students and emerging artists; via which they quote or re-present a postmodern aesthetic without necessarily engaging with or even fully comprehending the philosophical positions that informed postmodern performance in its inception.
Re-approaching the essay question another angle, I will draw a parallel between the above discourse with cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s hauntological analysis of contemporary music. Via Fisher’s analysis of the barriers to progress in music culture, I will explore whether this bears any similarities to the challenges faced within the field of contemporary performance practice. If so, I will investigate whether Fisher’s music-orientated argument holds any solutions for artists in performance contexts, in order to avoid a stultifying future dedicated to repetition and proliferation of an aesthetic form that could be said to be gradually depleting in substantial meaning. Finally, I will propose that there is reason to be optimistic; that contemporary performance practice is not doomed to become stagnant and atrophied by the codification of a style which we might currently describe as ‘postmodern’. In fact, I will argue that by revisiting the ideologies and processes of the original performance companies, rather than simply imitating their formal conventions, the contemporary performance maker can have as vital a role in interrogating culture and meaning-making as they ever had.
Many concepts, categories and definitions cited within this essay are, due their very nature, unstable and ambiguous, it is necessary to set some parameters and outline my own position within the discourse. ‘Postmodern’ is in many ways an unhelpful term to describe a mode of performance. A more detailed definition will be given below but in order to be as clear as possible, when I write about ‘postmodern performance’ I am referring to collaborative devised performance work ranging from the 1970s to the present day, primarily made by companies based in the UK or USA, and whose works and practices are in some manner sympathetic with postmodernist and poststructuralist theory.
Concerning my own position within the discourse presented in this essay, I was a student of (BA) Contemporary Theatre Practice (now titled Contemporary Performance Practice) at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) in Glasgow between 2005-2009. Since then, I have been actively participating within the Glasgow contemporary performance community, and for a brief time was based in Bristol where a comparable community exists, largely made up of graduates from the now defunct Dartington College of Arts. As well as drawing on Harris’ journal article, and Heddon & Milling’s book Devising Performance, some elements of my argument are informed by my direct experience of a contemporary performance education and subsequent immersion in the ‘scene’.
As Heddon and Milling (2006: 203) note in Devising Performance, it is problematic to ascribe the label of postmodernism to any performance practice, as the theories of postmodernism are concerned with the instability, plurality and uncertainty of meaning. Nevertheless, there are certain characteristics which we can use to group performance works together which share a common interest in narrative deconstruction, structural decentralisation and the postdramatic in performance. Two strong examples are the companies The Wooster Group (New York, USA) and Forced Entertainment (Sheffield, UK), notable insofar as their impact on the contemporary performance scene, their longevity, and the prolific dissemination of their working practices within higher education Theatre Studies programmes in the United Kingdom.
Heddon and Milling use The Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment as their primary sources while compiling a list of traits common to what they describe as a postmodern sensibility in devised performance. These kind of performance works tend to be made collaboratively and democratically, with all members of the company contributing to the process of creating and editing the material. There tends to be a single director who takes on a role of guiding the creative process, and will make final decisions on the collation, selection and structuring of material. The performances resist singular narratives, often imposing interruptions to their own attempts to tell stories, or saturating the work with multiple narratives so that the readings of the performance are moving towards an ever-increasing complexity. The performances often self-consciously refer to the conventions of theatre, drawing attention to theatre as a mode of representing reality, and seeking to resist, disrupt or undermine its power as a medium. Poststructuralist theory is firmly embedded into the ideology of the works; The performances are likely to have decentralised structures, that do not seek to fix a dominant idea to the work, before or after it is made. Common descriptions of the devising processes involve ‘accidents’, ‘failures’, ‘disruptions’, ‘fragments’, ‘stealing’, and ‘responses’ (Heddon and Milling, 2006:190-203).
The above characteristics, common to The Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment and other similar companies, were radical and transgressive when they began producing work started through the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 21st Century however, Heddon and Milling argue that a ‘house-style’ of performance had emerged, that repeatedly drew on and referred to the aesthetics and philosophical outlooks of the major performance groups associated with postmodernism (Heddon and Milling, 2006:215-220). In making this argument, the authors draw heavily on a 1999 article by Geraldine Harris titled Repetition, Quoting, Plagiarism and Iterability. Harris was a tutor in theatre studies in Lancaster University at the time of writing. She argues that lecturers in UK higher education are disseminating the practices of companies like Forced Entertainent and the Wooster Group as ‘models’, which are then adopted and recreated by students, and that the accumulative effect of this repeated dissemination, adoption and recreation is that the styles, techniques and devices of the origin companies have become ubiquitous, and potentially generic (Harris, 1999:8). Harris also identifies a deficit, with regard to theatre students’ understanding of poststructuralist or postmodern theory. She comments on a misguided appropriation, without full comprehension of poststructuralist sentiments —for example the Derridean notion that there is ‘nothing outside of the text’ or Barthes’ assertion that the author is dead (Harris, 1999:11).
Harris composes a list of conventions so repeated in contemporary devised performance as to have become tired clichés. As a former student of a contemporary performance undergraduate degree, I admit that I perpetuated the majority of the devices and motifs she cites. I repeated demanding physical routines to the point of exhaustion, I used microphones and analogue television screens, I performed lists of apologies, lists of goodbyes, I appropriated philosophical quotes and scientific facts in order to construct fairly flimsy metaphors. I re-enacted movie scenes ironically, created choreographies of ‘non-dance’, I made palindromic performance scores; I soiled the rehearsal room floors with cola, with milk, with feathers, with wool, with tacky souvenirs, with beetroot and blocks of ice. In defence of myself and indeed of all contemporary performance students, I would point out that in an educational context there is a value in learning through imitation, and as Tim Etchells points out, how else is a young performance maker supposed to start, other than by looking to the work that they admire? (Etchells cited in Heddon and Milling, 2006:218) Even in Harris’ critique she does not appear to be condemning students for exploring the style of their predecessors, but rather is pointing out the accumulative effect of new generations of performance-makers who only understand the surface-level of the work they are making.
As stated in my introduction, I will now explore the research question from a different perspective, relating the above discourse to cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s hauntological examination of contemporary pop music. In September 2014, I attended Off the Page, a symposium on contemporary sound and music held at Arnolfini, Bristol. Fisher, whose presentation Another Grey World: The Secret Sadness of the 21st Century examined what he called a ‘morbid attachment to the 1980s’ in contemporary music. In the Q&A after the talk, I asked Fisher if he perceived a counter-culture against the nihilistic mainstream that he had described. He responded by suggesting that ‘the conditions of cyberspace provide this kind of comfortable ghettoism […]’ (Fisher, 2014) whereby everyone can find their own audience and take up their own space without disturbing the mainstream culture. The impact of the internet is arguably less directly relevant to contemporary performance practice than it is to the music industry. I still perceive however, some parallels between the phenomenon Fisher described and the stylistic codification of devised performance critiqued by Harris.
While the early work of Forced Entertainment and The Wooster Group was radical and subversive, today the codified postmodern ‘style’ is an acceptable form, perhaps even genre, of performance (though it is still relatively niche). It could be argued that the postmodern performance has become estranged from the transgressive philosophical underpinning that spawned it. In her article, Harris offers a more meaningful way to engage with the catalogue of performance’s recent past, and that is to interrogate those work with the same level of rigor that the original companies had when deconstructing modernism’s ‘grand narratives’. Harris isn’t so much condemning the ‘quoting’ of established performance companies, but instead is advocating that her students (and by extension all performance makers) take responsibility for the work they make, and the meanings they convey. If they do choose to create work through a postmodernist lens, then they should use this to critique hegemonic power structures and as an approach to examining society and culture, not as a way to wash their hands of how the work operates in the world (1999:12). Director Pete Brooks expresses a similar view, stating that postmodernism is used as an excuse in order to avoid ‘taking a position’ (cited in Giannachi and Luckhurst, 1999:5)
In Ghosts of my Life, Fisher provides us with an example of rich intertextual engagement with the recent past in a music context, through his description of Reggae Dub, in which he describes the sound engineer as a necromancer, and the process of reworking existing material as a political action, a way of keeping the voices and experiences of ancestors ‘alive’ (Fisher, 2014:132). In his afterword to Breaking The Rules, David Savran makes a similar claim of politicisation regarding The Wooster Group’s own practice of deconstructing and reconstructing existing narratives and even reincorporating the discarded waste from their previous devising processes into new ones, recycling and re-examining the past in a way that created something new. Savran posits that this has always been the case historically in theatre; Radical and revolutionary works did not emerge from attempts to make something entirely new, but instead came from transgressive and aggressive engagement with theatre’s own history (Savran, 1986:220-221).
In his essay Replaying the Tapes of the Twentieth Century: An Interview with Ron Vawter, Tim Etchells relays to the reader—in his own distinctive style of fragmenting and restructuring text – a conversation between himself and Vawter, a founding member of The Wooster Group. Vawter describes art in the twentieth century as a continuous ‘review of the tapes’, (Vawter cited by Etchells, 1999:84) using appropriation and recycling as a way to make sense of the times we live in. Again, we can see echoes of the ideas Mark Fisher discusses in relation to music; the idea that artists are obsessively replaying the tapes of the past in a way that has never been technologically possible before. Vawter’s perception of this is much more optimistic however, and he explicitly states that he doesn’t feel uncomfortable about how much material The Wooster Group appropriate from other sources. In fact, Vawter seems to see it as a moral responsibility to continue to re-examine the recent past. When Etchells asks if there will ever come a time when the review of the metaphorical and literal tapes will be complete, Vawter answers that he is looking forward to that time but he doesn’t think it has arrived yet. He describes the review of the twentieth century almost in terms of bearing witness; that we (he is non-specific about who the ‘we’ refers to) are stuck, frozen by our own social, cultural and political demons of bigotry and brutality and oppressive hegemony (Vawter cited by Etchells, 1999:91). In the face of this stasis, Vawter considers it his responsibility to examine and re-examine, present and re-present the events of the recent past. It has been four decades since The Wooster Group was founded. Ron Vawter has passed away. The majority of the company is made up of a new generation of artists. Yet it is telling perhaps, that from 2015 to the present day, The Wooster Group have been developing The Town Hall Affair, a new performance which deconstructs / reconstructs the documentary film Town Bloody Hall (1979), and the actual event that is portrayed in the film; a debate on women’s liberation that took place in The Town Hall in New York City in 1971. It might be argued then that The Wooster Group still feel a responsibility to continue ‘reviewing the tapes’ of the 20th Century.
In conclusion, I am sympathetic to the position of Harris, Heddon and Milling, and Brooks, when they critique a disconnect between form and ideology in contemporary performance work, the result of which is the proliferation of anemic imitations of the original transgressive performance work of the 70s and 80s, which originally emerged out of a genuine concern with postmodern interpretations of the world they lived in. Not only can we see parallels to Fisher’s critique of contemporary music, we can see similarities in terms of positive ways out of the rut that performance-makers could be argued to be stuck in. A critical engagement with the work of the recent past is necessary, and that relies on a fuller comprehension of the theories which informed that past work. Additionally, in a similar manner to Dub music, young performance-makers should not allow themselves to merely imitate past forms, but instead should aggressively engage with those forms. Through this process, it is possible that something new will be created. Earlier I proposed that The Wooster Group are still doing the work advocated by Ron Vawter and continuing to ‘replay the tapes’ of the 20th Century. The question then for students of performance and by extension early-career performance makers, is whether they should join in, or whether their job is to move on and make something ‘new’. It is ultimately for them to decide. I propose however, that they should make their choices consciously, and take responsibility for them; that they do not blindly follow their ancestors, nor blindly discard them, but instead commit to a rigorous engagement with the historical context they are operating within.
Bibliography
Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge.
Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Hampshire: John Hunt Publishing.
Fisher, M. (2014), Another Grey World: The Secret Sadness of the 21st Century. [online] The WIRE. Available at: https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/in-conversation/off-the-page-2014_mark-fisher_another-grey-world [accessed Saturday 28th April, 2018]
Giannachi, G. and Luckhurst, M. (1999) On Directing: Interviews with Directors, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillian.
Harris, G. (1999) Repetition, Quoting, Plagiarism and Iterability (Europe After the Rain-Again), Studies in Theatre Production, 19 (1), pp. 6-21.
Heddon, D and Milling, J. (2006), Devising Performance: A Critical History, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Savran, D. (1986) Breaking The Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre Communications Group.