Theatre and Everyday Life

An Ethics of Performance

Alan Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134914586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Alan Read asserts that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, but a divide between the written and the unwritten. In this revealing book, he sets out to retrieve the theatre of spontaneity and tactics, which grows out of the experience of everyday life. It is a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealised empty space of avant garde performance.

Read examines the relationship between an ethics of performance, a politics of place and a poetics of the urban environment. His book is a persuasive demand for a critical theory of theatre which is as mentally supple as theatre is physically versatile.

Part I

PRACTICE CRITICISM QUOTIDIAN

1
LAY THEATRE

The theatre I am going to describe in this chapter took place between 1978 and 1991. I write about it because it has a shape that might be recognisable and provides a model of analysis. Transforming an activity of life into a model is only useful when it elucidates theatre in practice. There seems little justification in removing theatre from the places where it occurs simply to establish its existence, like taking from the wild the example of a species you know is rare but cannot resist putting on show in a state of captivity. This operation of separation is central to any academic pursuit of reality, and it is one which often ignores the partial procedures of analysis and in the process loses sight of the complexity of the object under scrutiny. No palaeontologist would remove a fossil without recording its relation to other fossils in the strata, no archaeologist an artefact, and no anthropologist would record a marriage ceremony without mention of the habitation and the terrain. Recognition of a context does not however guarantee that the conditions of identification will persist for very long. The fossil and artefact might appear in a museum, the fieldnotes in a library. This transition from one milieu to another is the precondition for one culture taking note of another. Objects which are removed in this way are reclassified in generic types with their own consistency but separated from the circumstances in which they took their place. Because theatre leaves such confusing traces—the remaining artefacts are not the thing itself but its detritus: architecture, costume, props, prompt-books, photographs, ephemeral and critical writing—it has been to date mainly a question of categorising everything but the theatre itself. In the last chapter of this book I will undertake some of these operations myself and am not averse to them if they have any meaning for theatre now. But here a contemporary theatre presents, through its proximity, an opportunity to ascertain different objects of study which are worth recording for future thought.

The theatre I want to write about was based in a converted Victorian grain warehouse on the River Thames. From there work was undertaken in local estates, on the street, in schools, neighbourhood centres, in factories and city farms, on the river and in halls and buildings designed for theatrical purposes. I joined this work after it had begun, and left eight years later with it continuing in diverse ways. Participants lived in local authority housing within walking distance of this base, and the relationship between local living and theatre making was considered central to the project. The fact that this was a project, a means as well as an end, is important. The process of ‘making theatre’ was not thought to be immutable but an imaginative arrangement to be negotiated with people and places. This aspect of the work does not differ from other theatres, reaching back to the first Elizabethan age—a set of socially licensed operations with remarkably permeable boundaries. There are many instances of theatre’s willingness to remain within these limits of definition through self-regulation and there are now, as I have described, many others which have redefined these limits by seeking to transgress them. In this sense the term theatre describes a variety of operations including those conventionally associated with theatre and those which might seem less so. The plurality of these operations were more important than the assertion of a proper name for the project which in its singularity would have concealed the nature of the work. The time spent in this location was an opportunity to establish, individually and collectively, what the practice of theatre could be. This involved understanding the relations between theatre practice and neighbourhood, questioning received wisdom and formal education, and conducting a critical examination of theatre and the practices of everyday life.

Those who engaged with this work were on a daily basis being tested in unconventional ways; each person was expected to conduct themselves as a thinking artist with sensitivity and scepticism to the context in which they found themselves. Having worked in the area for some years it was impossible to take seriously a purely theoretical objective of describing the community as ‘working class’ (sociologically incorrect), ‘white’ (racially unobservant), ‘cockney’ (topically inaccurate), and even the simplest geographical description of the area was difficult enough. There were very few people within it who would commit themselves to defining where one district ended and another began. It was not theory that was a problem, or what it took to understand practices through thinking and writing, but the shifting and plural nature of theatre activity in a location. This jeopardised the project in that it simply took longer to quantify, if not to see, results which were occurring—and the time of supervision is rarely the time of the everyday. The time of authority excises the casual time that everyday practices punctuate, the lacunae and pauses, the breathing spaces in which local relations are played out. But this was a symptom of the work which derived from a complex relationship between a community of hosts and guests, not a rationale for evading criticism.

Supporting a theatre in such an area for thirteen years eventually gave way to closure. Keeping a theatre open is more or less difficult.¹ Closing a theatre is a provocation to say something else. Where there is interruption in what has been a continuity, questions are asked as to how and why such a situation could have arisen. For ‘being there’ becomes pattern and habit and is the point at which everyday life begins to incorporate a theatre into itself as though it were somehow natural and given. But this habitual world threatens the fragility of a theatre which demands recognitions and favours that few can afford. There was always something there, but the remains of theatre are less coherent than buildings suggest, and it is these fragments which are testament to what happened and why a theatre rarely sinks without trace. That a building remains, means little in a time when the combustibility of theatre has been so reduced. Like other transformations in the neighbourhood a theatre can become a cinema, a bingo hall and a carpet warehouse within a generation.

For those involved in the project at its closure this was a confusing time, attempting to interpret and act upon fissures between an institution and a neighbourhood which felt itself teased and disappointed in equal measure. The terms of the engagement were never explicit and more was always promised than could be delivered. In and around everything that was argued about, theatre continued to be made with countless different groups and individuals. These included: young people in and out of school, both in the classroom and on local housing estates; older people between sixty and ninety years from the area who met independently in theatre groups or as part of the social life of a neighbourhood centre; young adults with learning difficulties and older adults with physical disabilities; people who were isolated within the neighbourhood for a variety of reasons, be it single mothers, people without housing, or those who were unemployed; social groups who met in certain pubs or through local clubs for sports and computing; other interest groups consolidated through common interest in music, dancing or politics. The term ‘community theatre’ generally used to describe work with groups other than those of a professional status misses the complex relations between the actuality of such people’s lives and the theatre they make. To begin with, the term community is now redolent with implications of ‘ministry’, or social engineering, and useless when applied to the multiplicity of voices discussed here. Further it underestimates the very forceful role many of these people held within the local neighbourhood. It was they who commanded cultural capital in the local currency of exchange: stories, blahs, advice, tricks, cons, jokes, songs, physical shows of strength or sleights of hand.

Those who had a vested interest in the workings of the project began to make demands upon it which questioned the status of theatre within a set of everyday operations. At one meeting it was decided by people in the neighbourhood that the production budget would be better spent on washing machines to allow those who had children in the area to participate in theatre while the washing was going round. A dilapidated theatre was to become a beautiful launderette, an equation which had considerable logic but little sympathy from those whose own idea of a theatre was in need of resourcing. The theatre van was run into the ground, along with the local mechanic who cared for it, transporting equipment from hither to thither while forays began to take place from the area back to the country to remind the institution that financed the project that it was healthy, belligerent and seeking the independence it warranted. The government of the enterprise became more fulfilling and problematic. Increasingly the demand was made that if the project was ‘of the neighbourhood it should be finally answerable to the people of that locality. The presence of people from outside this domain was resisted in ways which reproduced relations of exclusion that the project had been established to counteract in the first place. Despite such local difficulty it was apparent that the kinds of model for participation and control that this theatre initiated were ones that an institution would be wary of, and indeed there came a point where the institutional expectations were reimposed to obviate the necessity for such subtle and time-consuming structures. It was here that the official view of highly complex realities demanded not a tactical response to real needs but a limitation of damage in an apparently uncontrolled context.

The quietude which followed this period in the final years of the project was deafening. The building was emptied of all but the most persistent groups by a series of decisions, perhaps long overdue and after the event, to clarify the relationship between certain groups using the theatre and the institutionally sanctioned pedagogic aims of the project. Denied a base, the groups who perceived themselves to be no longer welcome in the building, or were told they were not welcome, simply regrouped elsewhere claiming the title of the project as their own, a strategy which all but brought lawyers in to wrest it back. Here theatre deterritorialised and proliferated in diverse ways linking back to the moment before the ‘arrival’ of a theatre when stories were played out in and around everyday life and common places: under the arches of a tower block, in tenants’ association halls, between parked cars. Given that naming had been such a problem for so long it was wholly appropriate that in its most critical phase of friction, a neighbourhood and an institution should argue about who owned a title.

The title was Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, an unassuming name that nevertheless combined some significant features for those who made claims to it. First it was of Rotherhithe, a specific geographical community in south-east London which stimulated an unusual degree of loyalty from its population. Perhaps because of its apparent isolation from the rest of the city (it was contained by a sharp meander in the river), by its pride in neighbourliness and tradition of work in the docks, all of these features were to some degree threatened by demographic change wrought by urban development. This was perceived for better or worse as one of the last strongholds of mutual solidarity that had long since characterised the East End of London. Second it was a theatre: not an unusual feature of the area, there had stood till relatively recently a grand Hippodrome on the corner of the local park, but now with the exception of the civic hall or church meeting rooms an unusually large single space where people could meet, make theatre and make a mess. Third it was a workshop, or ‘the workshop’ as it was referred to throughout—linking the traditional workings of a wharf to the newer languages of cultural process as distinct from product.

These anecdotes might seem inconsequential, but reviewing the unwritten depends on them. For all anecdotes establish a peculiar relationship between theory and practice and relate event and context in ways not immediately ascertainable from more distanced ‘objective’ voices. It was anyway these everyday occurrences that held most interest for the project at its most creative and difficult times and to write about the work as though it were always thought through in classified and distinct categories would be quite erroneous. That is not to say it was not continually being considered, simply that those involved knew that thinking theatre was not the facile operation of other disciplines applied to the activity, it was the activity of theatre making itself throwing light on those disciplines and the everyday lives they claimed to describe. In this sense theatre became its own way of seeing—a shift which would not have surprised many theorists who from the fields of sociology, psychology and anthropology had long valued the symbolic, theatrical and performative qualities of everyday life and its cultural operations.² There was understandably the expectation that participants should grasp the alternative models to their own practice, that they should be able to compare and contrast approaches to making theatre in neighbourhoods, near and far, conceptually similar and different, and that they should continually critically address their work. But the development of community arts had been no preparation for the complex and shifting relations on a day to day basis that living and working in the same neighbourhood threw up. It was this lack which distanced the project from the language and prescription which the conjoining of the words ‘community’ and ‘arts’ implied. Where these words were considered too general to describe something as distinct as theatre practices and their relation to the everyday lives of people in places, replacing them with alternatives such as ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘celebration’ no more accurately described the activity. Nevertheless, left with the split between this group of practices and other theatre forms it seemed critical to define a social space which could accommodate the practices that occurred without irrevocably divorcing them from their contexts.

Central to this social space was the inhabited space, the living places of those involved, the flat on a local estate bringing each participant into direct contact with the locality and its people. These estates included some in close proximity to the river—Swan Buildings and Adams Gardens— but others further afield such as Silwood and Abbeyfield Road with problems of dereliction associated by some with local authority ineptitude and by others with deep poverty. A senior administrator visited, from the distance of the institution which funded the project, to see why it was this accommodation should cause, on such a continual basis, so many seemingly intractable problems—there had been bath floodings from above, frozen pipes and waterfalls in the thaw, radiator collapses, breakins, lock-outs, squattings and evictions. That this was the life of those dependent on a metropolitan council with mounting debts and a backlog of repairs seemed irrelevant. The administrator arrived at the theatre around the time that a local hospital for women in south London was closing. This was a controversial decision and typically was being resisted by those in the project who often became involved in the most overt political manifestations of power in the area. There were posters at the theatre announcing the closure and appeals for help, and there had been performances in support of the cause. The administrator saw one of these posters on which was depicted a substantial if dilapidated building and suggested that the hospital when empty might make a suitable dormitory for the participants in the project, thus relieving the ‘complication’ of council houses. The suggestion was met with the incredulity that involvement in different worlds brings and reconfirmed the need for participants in the project to stay living where they were with all the attendant problems that would entail.

Beneath this story is the implication that the very nature of the project lay in the location of its participants within a neighbourhood, dispersed within a geographical area in proximity to a working base. The journey that each person made to and from that base and other centres in the area became a daily mapping of the locality and its theatre possibilities. These daily journeys were at their shortest undertaken for a year, at their longest throughout the thirteen years the project ran. The story also emphasises the relations between the locality and other adjacent areas where political imperatives connected the interests of one group with another. Shopping, health care, swimming and recreation, hair cutting and laundry, all happened in the locality where the newcomer lived alongside those with whom they hoped to work (or wished to avoid). The excision of ‘students’ from the neighbourhood through accommodation, cut out and separated, has been a conscious architectural and social movement of the campus institutions and one which is particularly deleterious to an education in theatre. It parallels the removal of objects of study from their context to conditions thought most suitable to their comfortable perusal. For those involved in this project there were other more subtle ways of avoidance and negotiation if they wished to remain aloof from the lives of those with whom they lived. This was of course a two-way process for both the neighbourhood and the newcomer. These tactics and ruses were in different people developed to different degrees and some estates would conduct them in quite different ways to others.

In one, a woman who was well known to the project and instrumental in its history watched over and assisted the arrival and departure of each newcomer as though they were her family coming and going. In another, a man would proposition them on a regular basis as though reputation did not travel. In another, children would daily arrive on their doorstep expecting the flat to be a play space for them, a haven from school, which for one year it was and by the following it was not. None of these encounters amounts to an immutable law of relations between a theatre and a neighbourhood but each displayed a certain logic which is definable. Care, desire and utility played their part in sustaining interest between individuals whose motives for being in the same place might have been coincidental but in the end were expressed through a relationship to theatre.

Let me briefly take a concrete example of a process which already sounds too abstract. I was working in a local factory. An elderly woman was working next to me. She knew I was ‘not for real’, that I had another place to go to after clocking-off, even if she referred to it somewhat dismissively as ‘that draughty warehouse’. She was one of a group of women invited back by the factory, annually after retirement, to work part-time when schedules were heavy. Mary was working on the ‘extruder’, a machine which excreted a small but violently coloured amount of icing onto the top of passing biscuits. She bent my ear with her stories, along with the other woman who worked in this part of the plant. Her task was to check the biscuits as they went by on the conveyor to ensure any imperfections were segregated and disposed of. Occasionally, and without warning, the extruder would disgorge a rogue emission (either a rainbow combination of colours, or an abnormally large quantity of mixture). When either happened Mary would grab the offending article and with a lightness of touch belying arthriti...