The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader

Teresa Brayshaw, Anna Fenemore, Noel Witts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000011883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader combines extracts from over 70 international practitioners, companies, collectives and makers from the fields of Dance, Theatre, Music, Live and Performance Art, and Activism to form an essential sourcebook for students, researchers and practitioners.

This is the follow-on text from The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, which has been the key introductory text to all kinds of performance for over 20 years since it was first published in 1996. Contributions from new and emerging practitioners are placed alongside those of long-established individual artists and companies, representing the work of this century's leading practitioners through the voices of over 140 individuals. The contributors in this volume reflect the diverse and eclectic culture of practices that now make up the expanded field of performance, and their stories, reflections and working processes collectively offer a snapshot of contemporary artistic concerns. Many of the pieces have been specially commissioned for this edition and comprise a range of written forms – scholarly, academic, creative, interviews, diary entries, autobiographical, polemical and visual.

Ideal for university students and instructors, this volume's structure and global span invites readers to compare and cross-reference significant approaches outside of the constraints and simplifications of genre, encouraging cross-disciplinary understandings. For those who engage with new, live and innovative approaches to performance and the interplay of radical ideas, The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader is invaluable.

Chapter 1

Action Hero

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? GEMMA AND JAMES AND ACTION HERO

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Gemma, James and Action Hero

Action Hero is a collaboration. We’ve been engaged in this creative collaboration since 2005, and, on the whole, neither of us works with anybody else. We met in 1999 when we were 18 years old, and there’s a peculiar intimacy to having known each other as adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, knowing that the person each of us was back then is long gone, and that the people we are now have been shaped by each other. As our lives have grown, our artistic collaboration has grown.

Action Hero exists somewhere in the space between us. It’s separate from us, but we share it. If we imagine Action Hero like a Venn diagram, the area in which Gemma and James overlap is the area in which the work is made. We’ve spent more than 4000 days in a collaborative process, tens of thousands of hours together in the rehearsal room, hundreds of car journeys, plane journeys, bus journeys, get-ins and get-outs. Slowly, over a very long time, we have made an extraordinary commitment to each other; to put all our creative attention into something shared.

We don’t present our work under our own names, Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse. Instead we work under an assumed name that we share. We’re a couple as well as work colleagues, but we’ve been a couple for longer, so perhaps giving our collaboration a name is a way of protecting that. When we are together alone we are Gemma and James, but when we are together on stage we are Action Hero.

-2-
Who are you being?

Our work isn’t autobiographical, and we don’t tell stories about our relationship, but there is often a frisson when we perform, and afterwards audience members will ask us if we are a couple. They sense there is something between us and they want to know about it. They look at the performance and they want to see our relationship inside it. They want to see Gemma and James. Sometimes we let them, sometimes we play games that hint at it, or we pretend we have a relationship that’s not at all like the one we have in real life.

During Frontman, there’s a section where we’re locked in a battle to control the performance area. We’re trying to undermine each other, to delegitimise what the other is doing on the stage. The piece functions a bit like a controlled demolition, and at this point things really start to unravel. An Elvis track is playing and we get into a fight, a physical fight, and we’re really going for it. We wrestle each other to the ground, and fall off the stage together. We wrestle on the floor in the audience until the fight burns itself out. The intimacy of the way we handle each other and the abandon with which we commit to the fight seems to tell a different story to the one being told in Frontman. For a moment, the audience glimpse something else. They see a couple play-fighting instead of the two personas they’ve been watching for the last 40 minutes. Maybe they see two artists engaged wholeheartedly in a lifelong practice together. The real-life relationship between us seeps through the fabric of the show and we allow it, letting it sit there in the room, drawing attention to the real space we’re all occupying together, to real time passing, to how real life is always sitting in parallel with the fictionalised space of the performance. This moment of contradiction compels the audience to question the relationship between these two bodies, and ask what is real and what is performed.

In Hoke’s Bluff; Gemma does a very slow cheerleading dance for James. We stand very close together, the lights close in and the audience watch us looking at each other. Where the audience have been watching ‘Connie’ and ‘Tyler, the two very lightly drawn ‘protaganists’ in the piece, they suddenly see something more truthful: Gemma and James. Of course it’s also true that there is already a great deal of slippage in Hoke’s Bluff insofar as who is ‘being’ who; we both perform multiple ‘characters’ in the piece, and these are worn very loosely. This mode of performance creates a lot of space for Gemma and James to be present too, and there’s a lot of movement between these states during the piece. The slow dance though, stands out; time slows down, a different type of texture is felt and this moment of genuine tenderness and, perhaps, desire, reminds the audience that the stories of love and hope Hoke’s Bluff is concerned with move us because they speak to us about very fundamental facets of being present – of being human or being human beings – that is our capacity to love others and be loved in return. And although this might sound sentimental or clichéd, particularly in a contemporary performance culture where irony and distance is the predominant tone, it is in this unapologetically openhearted territory where Hoke’s Bluff deliberately makes its home; perhaps because an openhearted relationship is the place from which our collaboration stems. Despite the fact that the bulk of our work to date is not explicitly concerned with staging sentimental or romantic notions of the human experience, we can say with certainty that the processes by which we work are rooted in a loving relationship.

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Ethics

We’re often asked, as artists presenting work in festivals or writing applications to funders, to describe our work and our collaboration in short hand, to sum it up in a few punchy sentences. This leads us to try to draw thematic links between the works we’ve made, but beyond a sense we have that there are certain things we’re repeatedly compelled by, or some areas of interest we’re both interested in, it’s not theme or form or even medium that links our projects or defines our practice. It could better be described as an ethics. Our practice contains an imprint of the way in which we wish to live our lives and the way we wish to be in the world. In contrast to a defined moral code, this ethics is social, ever-evolving and dialogic. We ask ourselves and our audiences a series of questions about the world. The work we make is a response to particular civil/social ethics of being, doing, working and acting in the world.

In his commentary of Slap Talk, Professor Carl Lavery says that “Gemma and James open up the possibility of living differently” (Lavery in Action Hero, 2015). Not in the sense that the work provides any kind of blueprint or instructions for living, but in the way we approach the task. All of our work uses structures, tasks and languages borrowed from late capitalist neo-liberal structures of feeling, but in approaching them re-purposes them, re-frames them, exhausts them or subverts them via alternative modes of (re)presentation. Together, we look again. Together we face it: as artists, as a couple and with our audience. Our process and practice has been shaped by how we are as people, how we are as a couple, sharing space in the world.

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Collaboration as a dialogic process

Our collaborative process can confuse people. We often get asked “but who directs your work?” or “so, which one of you wrote this?” But instead of individually making claim to a decision to pursue that idea instead of that one, or insisting on being named as the author of a particular section of text, or making public whose vision was being realised, we decide to give that credit to each other, to share the load. We have tried to resist the culture that says ‘put your name on it’, even though that might make more sense professionally. To be seen as a named creative individual feeds more helpfully into the notion of a career path where one’s own personal trajectory trumps the work one might be making. So perhaps Action Hero is bad for the careers of the individual artists, Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse, but Action Hero is a labour of love in the most real sense.

Another common question: “Isn’t it difficult to spend that much time together?” But we collaborate because we love each other, and because we want to spend time together and because we believe that what we can create together is more interesting than what we can create on our own. Part of being in love is sharing everything you have with your partner and committing to a process that values that commitment. Every idea we have is gifted to the collaboration, and so to each other.

But even the premise that one of us must ultimately be responsible for an idea (or piece of writing or directorial decision) is in itself a fallacy. It assumes a way of working that makes no sense to us, because that single authorial voice just isn’t something we’re interested in. The notion of a (male) solo genius whose powerful vision is realised via a pre-determined working structure feels like a relic from another era. We believe in dialogic processes, that the best ideas come from collaboration, and that that is hard, and not always straightforward, but that it is more human. The act of collaboration can feel very radical in an individualistic culture.

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Ideas in dialogue

The dialogic nature of our collaboration is paralleled by the dialogic nature of our work. Ideas and images are in perpetual conversation in Action Hero’s performances; they occupy space together and through that sharing of territory, they communicate with each other. We’ve never been interested in creating singular meanings, and the work we’ve created together often resists easy classification. What the work is’about’ can never be easily verbalised; the work might take a certain form or use a particular aesthetic (a stunt show for Watch Me Fall, a teen sports movie for Hoke’s Bluff; an imaginary western for A Western) but that structure is simply a vehicle for a wider conversation.

In Hoke’s Bluff we tell an underdog story as if we’re playing a game of basketball (or American football or ice hockey or baseball, it’s never clear which) not because we are especially concerned with those things in and of themselves, and not because we’re interested in telling stories, but because the otherwise banal content and storytelling as a concept both speak to a wider series of interests, obsessions and questions we have around nostalgia, cultural hegemony, sentimentality, hope and melancholy. Hoke’s Bluff doesn’t ever adopt a moral position on its characters or narrative because that is not the point. The point is to create a forum or an arena for the exploration of these ideas and feelings. We aimed to create an experience that is about sensations as much as critical analysis of the content and aesthetic. During the process, we became obsessed with the feeling of the material, and how an understanding of a cultural phenomenon might be better reached through a bodily experience than through an intellectual deconstruction of it, and that the experience of feeling your way through an artwork might be a more legitimate way of understanding something than a distanced critical reading of it. Interestingly though, we used a deconstructed narrative to achieve that, and somehow through unpacking and stripping back the content, its emotional heart was revealed all the more strongly. Perhaps, we thought, we should take sentimentality more seriously.

In Slap Talk, we place ideas and texts in literal dialogue with each other, both practically in the performance, which takes the form of a six-hour long argument to camera, but also conceptually in the way that the conflict is structured. Slap Talk deals with violence in language and language as violence, but never seeks to stake out a moral position in relation to that text. Perhaps because there’s a sense in which it is impossible for two people to occupy an identical moral standpoint, and to attempt to do so would always be an act of imposition on either James or Gemma. As such, we were not seeking to stand beside the work and say “this is what we think”, or to create a performance essay that argues its point. Instead, Slap Talk uses its structure to create an arena for the interplay of ideas, and the process of meaning making falls to the viewer. As we resist a singular authorial voice in our collaborative process, we resist it in the work itself. That’s not to say that all ideas/images/performers/personas/texts presented in an Action Hero work will have equal value or that the presentation of texts (using that word in the broadest sense) next to one another implies a democracy of representation. The audience will always bring their own cultural baggage to the performance, and so the way they read these texts (and our gendered bodies) will be reflective of their own position and context. Our job is to try to collaborate with that, too; to use the way we place images and ideas on the stage to work with, and in relation to, what the audience might bring to their own reading of the work. Although there will always be some free association in how our pieces as a whole (as cultural texts themselves) will be interpreted, it is exciting for us to try to anticipate that, to try to work with or against the expectations and ways of seeing that an audience will bring with them.

Of course we can never expect to be able to construct an ‘audience proof’ piece of work, one that demands a singular interpretation, and neither would we want to. We want to work with plurality and multiplicity, we want to work with images and text that have multiple cultural meanings because the spaces in between those things are such a rich seam in terms of how we make meaning from the world we live in. The interconnectedness of cultural texts is totally central to Action Hero’s understanding of what it is to make performance, and this rhizomatic approach, for us, reflects our understanding and experience of what it is to be alive. That means a world where there is complexity, contradiction, ambiguity and multiplicity, where things only exist and have meaning in re...