Stagecraft in London
Stagecraft in London
I readily admit I approached “The World as a Stage,” Tate Modern’s massive survey of contemporary art’s new-found (or rediscovered) interest in “the relationship between visual art and theatre,” as the Tate brochure puts it, with more than a bit of trepidation. Granted, trepidation is my natural state, in any art-watching situation, but in this particular case, my own career triggers were cocked, loaded and set to go off with the caress of a hair.
In a part of my life wholly divorced from my work as an art writer, I write plays. Plays presented on stages, by actors, with lights and costumes and music and, occasionally, some decent seating for the audience. I do not claim to be a master theatre artist, but I’ve been around, behind and way in the back of a lot of theatres in my time. Many of my friends are actors, fellow playwrights and directors. I love the theatre, as the old cliché goes, by which I mean that nothing about theatre, theatre production or the business of stagecraft holds any glamorous mystery for me. At some point, it always boils down to indifferent reviews, a listless Tuesday-night performance to a half-full house and resigned drinks after the show.
Furthermore, my first reaction to the show’s core proposition was reflexive and, to my embarrassment, simple: isn’t all art inherently theatrical? Isn’t the act of presentation itself, if not literally derived from the basic principles of theatre, from showmanship (and no small bit of showbiz), always cousin, no matter the format, to the framing devices of the stage? These questions are a polite way of saying that I initially approached “The World as a Stage” wondering what was the ultimate point of investigating such an obvious connection. It struck me as the curatorial equivalent of bringing snow to the Arctic.
Of course, no two snowflakes are the same, and “The World as a Stage” proved to be a delightfully upfront sort of show—a show about art and theatre that was unafraid of being literal in its choices and interpretations. Anyone worrying (ok, I was worried) they were in for an abstracted, at-many-removes treatment of this vast topic, an incomprehensible set of indirect connections and academicized half-gestures, was instantly cheered by the presence of a large amphitheatre, a video that looked like a human puppet show fuelled by hallucinogens, a long corridor lit by floormounted pot lights, a beautiful multicoloured stage curtain and a spinning hall of mirrors that could have been poached from a glitzy Vegas auto show. Bugs Bunny’s frequent adversary Yosemite Sam, who once famously declared that he’d paid “to see the high divin’ act, and I’m-a gonna see the high divin’ act!,” would have popped off his pistols in glee. The marquee promised us theatre, and theatre—with all its messiness and audacity, tap dancing and emoting, bright, pretty lights and flat pancake makeup—we got.
When asked what prompted the show, and such a literal interpretation of that slippery term “theatricality” (the exhibition catalogue’s foreword, by Tate Modern’s director, Vicente Todoli, claims that “The World as a Stage” is “Challenging the negative associations made between the notion of ‘theatricality’ and the realm of visual art in recent decades…”), its co-curator Jessica Morgan replied:
I am not sure I would agree that in fact theatricality has become “a dirty word in contemporary practice” [Morgan quotes back my question]. In opposition to the stance of Clement Greenberg’s desire for autonomous objects there has been a continuous shift in the last decades towards a practice that embraces this type of inclusivity. However, perhaps you mean rather theatricality of a more spectacular sort— and the critique for instance of festival art? The latter I do not see as part of the concern of the exhibition, although an engagement with performativity is certainly a focus.
And how. Several of the most memorable works in the Tate’s exhibition—the Polish artist Cezary Bodzianowski’s hilarious, Chaplinesque videos and the American artist Catherine Sullivan’s strange, surrealist film—were obvious attempts to elicit guffaws and bemused giggles.
Bodzianowski’s video Luna (2005) shows the artist tumbling inside a giant spinning tube, the kind found in playgrounds and designed to flip children over and over. Standing inside the rotating tube while sporting an in-line skate on one hand and another on one foot, Bodzianowski attempts to stand, flails about, lands smack on his face, gets up and tries again. The clownish futility is hard not to love, and, come to think of it, stands as a rather concise summation of the pitfalls of performance art, a discipline known (again, a cliché) for poorly-thought-out acts of self-presentation.
In a less dramatic but no less funny video, Bodzianowski explores the interiors and exteriors of London’s famed Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, methodically measuring the inconsequential spaces between its stucco-sealed beams. This mindless busywork goes on for hours as Bodzianowski, dressed like Columbo in a wrinkled raincoat, takes careful note of, for instance, the space between two horizontal beams running along the rarely seen backside of the theatre, or the distance between the floor of a basement hallway and the wainscotting. Tellingly, the artist never takes us inside the theatre, to the famed stage, where all the action takes place, but lingers around the world landmark’s decidedly unfamous, bland substructure. If this is not a comment on the mundane mechanics of theatre production (see my world-weary description of same above), and, perhaps, the decline into banality of Britain’s onceimperial culture, I’ll eat Bodzianowski’s raincoat (which I’m sure he would videotape).
Catherine Sullivan’s film The Chittendens: The Resuscitation
of Uplifting (also from 2005) is a difficult and at times intentionally
annoying work, and I loved it. Set in an old, misused
hotel, the film moves in circles from room to room, following
actors who repeat and reconfigure sets of choreographic patterns,
most of them resembling epileptic fits, while reciting gibberish.
Dressed like extras from a very bad Gilbert and Sullivan
production, or perhaps a 1970s porn film, the actors shriek,
howl, roll around, jump up and down, shake like possessed
religious fanatics and otherwise thoroughly irritate the viewer.
Clearly referencing the anti-theatre of the Dadaists and the “rule plays” of Hillar Liitoja and Paul Bettis, Sullivan presents a kind of greatest hits of the gestures and strategies employed by experimental theatre over the last 50 years. Watching fellow museum visitors approach this film, then walk away from it holding their stunned heads, was pure joy.
Less bombastic but no less resonant were three works that utilized the essential props, architecture and mechanics of stagecraft to create sites wherein the viewer’s presence determines the nature of the performance—turning the watcher into a potential watched.
Vancouver’s Geoffrey Farmer, an artist whose work I have frequently found to be more a short sketch than a full three-act play, dropped his wisecracking tone long enough to put together the wonderful Hunchback Kit—a box containing all you might need to stage a DIY basement production of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Farmer also provided a “hunchback machine,” a massive wooden wheel-and-pulley device set on a tall, upright pole, on which one might practise one’s bell-ringing technique.
As one of the most interpreted novels ever written (I can think of at least four film versions off the top of my head, not to mention the musicals), Notre-Dame de Paris is a perfect source text for an exploration of theatre’s long history of adapting literary products into stage presentations. Indeed, within Farmer’s kit itself the tools for a limitless number of possible adaptations await: a serious “faithful adaptation,” as the theatre trade likes to call quality productions, or a quick, hyper-referential pantomime, a parody (the Halloween Quasimodo mask would come in handy for that) or a dance work, or even a Cirque du Soleil–style high-wire act (the kit also contains all the ropes and bindings needed to swing from the rafters).
With Hunchback Kit, Farmer has put his obvious cleverness (and clever obviousness) to solid use, and made a work that is as multi-layered as the novel that inspired it. Could the curatorbeloved brat finally be growing up?
Two much quieter, less obviously playful installations (though both works provided plenty of opportunities for play) stripped the theatre experience to its bare bones, and in doing so asked us to consider our roles as spectators.
The American artist Rita McBride’s massive temporary wooden amphitheatre Arena (1997) dominated an entire wing of the gallery like a silent, benevolent giant. Viewers were invited to sit on its lower benches, and from that perch stare at, well, nothing. Although some works were near the amphitheatre, there was no obvious focal point directly in front of the seating. This negation of the traditional ritual of theatregoing—sit down, look forward, see a show—was disorienting and yet strangely comforting. It is rather nice, one discovered, to not always have something to pay attention to.
Despite the fact that the sculpture loomed over the viewer like a birdcage for pterodactyls, the beautifully varnished blond wood and the gentle arc of the half-circle made the work more akin to an elevated Zen garden than the Colosseum, the circle of death it so bluntly referenced. The theatre, McBride tells us, need not be a place of discomfort, of spectator anxiety. It can be appreciated, when viewed purely as an architectural form, as a space unto itself.
Similarly, the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster reversed the associations of another core device in theatrical presentation, the floor-mounted pot light. As the viewer entered a short hallway painted a deep blue, a series of soft lights, triggered by the motion of feet on the ground, twinkled on and off at ground level, casting long, soporific shadows on the opposite wall.
The obvious conclusion is that the viewer is being made into the star of the show every time he or she enters the hallway, but I suspect something deeper was at play here. Gonzalez-Foerster seeks to make the notion of being, literally, “in the spotlight” less menacing, less of a trap. Because the viewer activates the spotlight effect simply by passing through the hallway, the feeling generated is less one of sudden capture than of casual revelation. This meditative take on the many, and largely negative, realities of our new-found culture of invasion—wherein at any time any one of us can be put “under the lamp” via cellphone cameras, YouTube and ever-present surveillance cameras (a threat particular to Londoners, the most watched people in Europe)—was a brilliant reversal, and thus negation, of contemporary anxieties over personal privacy.
And nothing exposed these anxieties and their enormous commercial
power (because we are all, like it or not, also buyers of
invasive spectacles) better than the Polish artist Pawel Althamer’s
Film—a short film and accompanying performance set in a busy
London market and starring a handful of unknown actors and
Britain’s favourite bad boy, Jude Law.
I am not certain I understood the whole intention of Althamer’s multi-layered project, apart from the fact that it was clearly an examination of celebrity culture, or, to be more precise, the manufacture of same. Althamer’s films seem to be saying that the second one participates in a filmed work, whether one is a butcher or an Academy Award–nominated actor, one is a star.
To prove this point, or some point connected to the new reality of instant celebrity (see the YouTube paranoia mentioned above), Althamer attempted to re-enact his short, Jude Law–starring film live, in the same crowded market in which it was originally filmed. The result was pure chaos.
Hundreds of gawkers lined the narrow alleys between the stalls, jockeying for a good Law-spotting spot alongside tabloid photographers and the Tate’s own documenters. There were no cordons and no barricades, and the forklift drivers seemed less than amused by the unyielding crowds. When Law finally arrived and attempted to re-enact the simple shopping transactions he performed in the film, the mob rushed toward him, some of its members screaming like teenage girls at a pop concert.
Hundreds of cameras, most of them built into cellphones, appeared out of nowhere, and Law was relentlessly shutterbugged as he walked approximately 25 feet across an alley and into a fish shop—where he performed the apparently spectacular feat of buying a piece of fish, shaking the monger’s hand and allowing himself to be escorted back to a waiting car by a press of bodyguards and minders. The whole non-performance took perhaps two minutes, but generated volumes of photographic material, all likely posted, within hours, on international photo- and videosharing sites.
In that brief and frantic exchange of power between a horde of unknowns and a world superstar, every aspect of our surveillance- obsessed culture crystallized. We are all celebrity-watchers, and we all have the power to take back the gaze. Technology and celebrity culture are now in a standoff—and nothing breaks the long-gone fourth wall of theatrical tradition, the pretend game that we are merely watchers who agree to our passivity, like a wellcharged cellphone camera. No wonder the cinema industry is obsessed with piracy. Everyone is a pirate, and our weapons become cheaper and more accessible each day.
As Jessica Morgan puts it,
I think the actual event was unlike anything we could have predicted. It was never clear who would come and perhaps there was a certain amount of naïveté on our part in not expecting the hordes of fans who appeared. However, it turned out to be the quintessential London film opening in a city obsessed with celebrity so perhaps it was, ultimately, an accurate “real time movie” for the city of London.
How fascinating that one of the world’s most-watched cities has, in half a generation, bred a culture wholly unashamed of its own prying eyes.
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