Alan Read

Architecturally speaking : practices of art, architecture, and the everyday

Introduction. Orienting. Locating. Moving. Revealing. Conceiving. Constructing. Showing. Changing. Prospecting. Responding.

In the Ruins of the University

My title is a conflation of two sources that would appear to mark two ends of a cycle between promise and petrification. The first a bowdlerization of Bill Readings’, now two decade-old work, The University in Ruins published after his untimely death. The second the title of a course taught by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in 1954-1955. By reaching back towards Merleau-Pontys exploration of meaning, how meaning in instituted, how it is transformed, how sense is ‘deposited’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it in beings and institutions, and importantly how innovation can arise in such relations, I would wish to historicise a moment of threat to any such expectation of innovation, any hope that institutions might be expected to institute anything. Bill Readings’ eloquent work chimes with that accord for a ‘threatened field’, it echoes for me and in me, still, in its insights for the University today: “We have to recognise that the University is a ruined institution, while thinking what it means to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia.” There is, as Claude Lefort explained when considering Merleau-Pontys course, but equally might have been channeling Bill Readings’ principle theme: ‘[ … ] no call to the future which does not imply a decline of the past.” In this essay I would like to put Merleau-Pontys lecture within a University, and Bill readings’ book about a University into play with each other to understand something about my own institutional history, working alongside the theatre makers Forster & Heighes, at Dartington College of Arts, at Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, at the London International Festival of Theatre, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, at Roehampton University, and at Kings College London. Institutions where nothing need happen, but something, apparently, did.

The Ceramic Age: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of Performance Studies

It is with the term theatre, and even the stage, in Age. I hope that’s clear as a time line. When I was mind that I want to ask some questions about the interviewed for my first professorship a decade current reach of performance studies. This short ago, I was asked by an eminent theatre historian, essay is my first attempt at putting together with a raised eyebrow, whether my approach to some materials I have been working on over the historical study in my monograph Theatre and last half-year since completing a manuscript Everyday Life was not more on the side of piracy with a sub-title that runs: The Last Human than custom in our field deems responsible Venue. If that was, as it implies, an exploration of behaviour. I am afraid that, as Johnny Depp says last things, possible endings, extinctions and in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, problems of appearance, then this material is I see the necessary caution in plundering and more to do with first things, what the Romanian pillaging time-frames less as a rule and more as a writer E. M. Cioran once called The Trouble With guideline to inform a critical practice now. Being Born. Performatics is the midwife to this So where was I yesterday? Back at the Institute generative instinct in an affirmative moment of Contemporary Arts for the first time since when it is less a question of seeking the troubled directing the talks programme there in the subjects of enquiry than of re-associating the 1990s. Hermione, my younger daughter, now 8 relations of their intensity. years old, was booked into what was described as One thing that both projects share is the a ‘drawing workshop’. I took this to be a salve to centrality of my children to my witnessing of the local Westminster Council that the ICA did performances and other theatre acts, the serious outreach work and took the chance to centrality of an attempt to rethink kinship, sign up, along with other middle-class parents, to beyond family, as a way of figuring that elusive some cheap crayons and paper subsidized by the move from intimacy to engagement, from the central-London dispossessed. I also knew there proximity of associations, which ethics describes would be a copy of Nicolas Bourriaud’s celebrated quite well, to the duty of responsibility to others work Relational Aesthetics in the bookshop further afield, beyond one’s own, whose dynamics (there were several) and, having heard it politics once claimed to represent. referenced over the last year at almost every So I will start close to home, yesterday, in the performance and visual arts event I have contemporary Stone Age, propose a 40,000-year participated in, decided it was my chance to read jump to the first Stone Age, then come back it and quote it to ensure the systematic topicality towards today via the Ceramic Age of my title and of this contribution to an edition on make some simple observations about a stage performatics. that, despite all performance claims to the When we arrived, and we were briefed by the contrary, has somehow remained in the Stone ICA staff, it became apparent that this

Acknowledging the Imperative of Performance in the Infancy of Theatre

A child of 4 years who happens to be my daughter walks from somewhere off to somewhere on and accustoms herself to being watched. This acclimatization has already begun between the off and the on and first manifests itself in her eyes. They are averted from the habitual assimilation of childhood that links foreground and distance, a visual dexterity that can give the youthful that magical air of insouciance just beyond and out of reach of the adult in a zone of myriad pleasures and fears. Florence looks at her hands. She studies their peculiar asymmetry, tracing the junction between life-lines. This means of telling the future, her potential subjectivity, is yet to be qualified by any sense of what that future might be beyond this moment which brings with it the imperative of performance. This is her first theatre and the life-line is about to multiply, proliferate, deterritorialize. This is occurring at the very moment she has the strongest desire to reside, to return behind the doors from whence she came. There have been countless becomings-animal, a veritable menagerie; but the expanded field in which these occurred gives way now to a field of expansion, a theatrical place. This field is Alan Read

No Hiding Place

If you really want to be smarter, reading can be one of the lots ways to evoke and realize. Many people who like reading will have more knowledge and experiences. Reading can be a way to gain information from economics, politics, science, fiction, literature, religion, and many others. As one of the part of book categories, no hiding place always becomes the most wanted book. Many people are absolutely searching for this book. It means that many love to read this kind of book.

Child & Co: In the Company of Your Own Making

Child & Co explores Arjun Appadurai’s call for ‘research as a human right’ (2013) in the context of a radically inclusive invitation to expand the academic, intellectual and creative campus towards young people of all ages. The article considers the potential of child-led research encouraging what Appadurai would call a politics of possibility, rather than a politics of probability, that is the financialised state common to a capital-intensive context that reduces the child to the object of research and commercial exploitation. The material examples of children’s potential labour as researchers includes those sites that most threaten their existence, in adulterised arenas such as air pollution and road safety. In these contexts Child & Co troubles the very idea of research, its possible forms and contents, rather gesturing towards a future of ‘hope’ after Munoz (2009); a forensic faith in futurity as a social and material fact that counters the critique of ‘reproductive futurism’ well known and oft returned to without question in Edelman (2004). By the end of Child & Co the author has picked up the guitar that he has not played since his own ‘youth’, outsourcing a public lecture contract to those under eighteen who are present, distributing the fee for that work at living wage levels, while serenading those present with a song he has not sung for years. Build Your Own Keynote, which follows Child & Co, picks up where that song dies away and as such is considered to be at once chorus to, and critique of, all that has gone before.

We the Divided: Partitions of Performance in the Ceramic State

The common association between theater and community is here inverted to explore the relationship between theatrical practice and immunity, or “affects of adjustment” between spectator and event. Drawing upon Roberto Esposito’s figuring of relations between community and immunity, on Jacques Ranciere’s propositions of the “emancipated spectator” and the part of those who have no part,” and Gerald Raunig’s conception of “Division” from his work on the Dividuum (2016), this essay examines a sequence of case studies central to the author’s own practiced experiences: Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop in the 1980s, Transhumance in the 1990s, and the Performance Biennial Athens in 2016. The dynamic here is to track an increasing scepticism about the social claims made for theater and ways of discussing performance that do not surrender to pseudo action in the absence of political commitment and change. The essay concludes amongst the Greek Attic Kraters of the 5th century BCE, curated from the Liverpool Museums at Tate Liverpool, contesting that the “ceramic state” continues at the interface between the continual promise of immersion and material histories of exclusion from the scene.

The Emaciated Spectator and the Witness of the Powerless

In a recent book entitled Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement I proposed some sternly expressed, yet comically touched, empirical enquiries into what I called ‘a science of appearance’. The book was intended as a reminder that claims for the special status of theatre as a pre-eminently social, communitarian act, have long been exaggerated as a convenient means to defer, yet again, some more pressing questions as to why there is ‘never enough immersion’, ‘never enough equality’, however welcoming the theatre act in its expanded form now seems to be.1 Why, to put it too bluntly, the theatre always, by definition, fails in its political aspirations at the same time as perpetuating, refashioning and ornamenting the social imaginary. Or, as a student put it to me the other day, combining my problem and my potential of theatre much more poignantly than I could achieve, how they feel shamed by their incapacity to relate to the participatory invitation of the work of certain, quite distinct yet avowedly ‘interactive’ theatre companies with anything but ‘suspicion’, despite the performers’ generous offers of inclusivity. Just for the record, if it does not seem too indiscreet a revelation, the companies they felt shamed by included: Punchdrunk and Shunt Theatre Cooperative (UK), Fuerza Bruta (Argentina), Rimini Protokol (Germany) and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies. This was not an impoverished repertoire by any standard of contemporary European theatre-going.

Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research

Traces of History: Jonathan Burrows’ Rethinking of the Choreographic Past Daniela Perazzo Domm The work of the British contemporary choreographer Jonathan Burrows is characterized by a questioning attitude towards conventional approaches to making dance. This often involves a rethinking of the traces left by his eclectic training. From his 1980s pieces through to his latest trilogy created and performed with the composer Matteo Fargion (Both Sitting Duet, The Quiet Dance and Speaking Dance, 2002-06), his choreography develops a dialogue with the contexts and texts that have informed his background, from ballet to folk dance, from minimalist art forms to conceptual performance. Through references to his creative past, Burrows’ choreographic language raises questions regarding his aesthetic and theoretical positioning in relation to the complex dialogue with history articulated by contemporary artistic practices. Through an analysis of the last two duets of Burrows’ trilogy, the author reflects on the ways in which his dances rethink their own history. She suggests that this relationship is embodied, respectively, by an almost literal walking over past routes (The Quiet Dance) and by an opening to unexpected encounters with choreographic antecedents (Speaking Dance). Through this discursive practice, references are woven into two idiosyncratic compositions, whose formal qualities are inextricable from the narratives they create. By making history explicit, these two works open themselves up to an innovative form of communication with the spectators, allowing them to see beyond the ‘story’ and its tellers and into the audience’s own imaginative world. Unsettling Representation: Monuments, Theatre, and Relational Space Theron Schmidt This article explores the ways in which theatrical techniques might intervene in the representational operations of monuments. As illustrated by the controversy surrounding nearly every aspect of the memorial to the destroyed World Trade Center, monumentality implies a finality of meaning and an unavailability of monumental spaces to open and fluctuating meanings. Henri Lefebvre’s Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 20(3), 2010, 389–391 Contemporary Theatre Review ISSN 1048-6801 print/ISSN 1477-2264 online 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2010.488829 distinction between ‘representations of space’ and ‘representational space’ suggests a method for unsettling or rewriting these meanings, which Joanne Tompkins develops as an analytical tool in her consideration of contemporary Australian theatre. However, Tinderbox Theatre Company’s production of convictions in a decommissioned courthouse in Belfast demonstrates that theatrical representations may have the effect of displacing previous spatial practices, but they also have their own authorizing norms and associated codes of meaning and behaviour. Using Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘relational space’ to augment Lefebvre’s categories, a set of criteria can be articulated for counter-monumental theatre that is attentive to the politics of openness and closure. And While London Burns, a downloadable audio tour of the financial centre of London produced by John Jordan and PLATFORM, is used as an example of a theatrical event which creates relational spaces that intervene within the normative mechanisms both of corporate organization of urban space and of dramatic narrative. Concluding by co-opting Wren’s Monument, And While London Burns asks its participants to rethink identity in spatial terms, and the author argues that this spatial awareness in turn necessitates an awareness of relationality which is relevant to both theatre and politics. An Uncanny Site/Side: On Exposure, Dark Space, and Structures of Fear in the Context of Performance Maya Nanitchkova Öztürk This article approaches the site as a corporeal component of theatrical praxis. It seeks to acknowledge that a subtle dimension of space, the ‘bodily’ and unmediated, can trigger an experiential mode, infused with feelings, and bearing on the ontological. From this perspective, the site is conceived as an artefact not only because it constructs the presentation of the theatrical work, and assists the unfolding of a multi-dimensional performative event, but also because, as space that is formalized, qualified and effective, it performs as a dynamic constituent of experience. This article proposes to substantiate such capacities of the site by way of a dramatization of the effects of space, through fear. This offers the opportunity to grasp, within the spatial economy of theatre, certain less-explored operations of space as discrete phenomena that recur, and configure a relatively autonomous layer of experience for all participants involved. These phenomena render audiences productive, invigorated through fear, and engaged in the performance. Social Dynamics in African Puppetry Marie Kruger The use of puppets in some sub-Saharan countries is often related to the transmission and persistence of social structures. Public rituals, masquerades such as the Gelede of the Yoruba and the performances of the Kamalen ton of the Bamana serve the need to maintain social stability, but they can also act as agents to modify and adapt culture through performance. The capacity of performance to modify social practices is also reflected in the use of puppets in theatre for development and social change. These applications of puppetry illustrate the almost constant tension between the normative, rationalization and the imagination. The various manifestations of puppetry discussed in this article can, however, be traced to the same desire and driving force – namely, people’s need and aspiration to continuously reinforce their world in order both to survive and to function effectively. 390

The Obtuse Angle: On Gentle Gradients Between Literature and Performance

I will begin at the beginning of Western dramatic literature, with Oedipus Rex, and mark a half-way stage in this essay with the apotheosis of Western lyric verse, the work of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, who gave us the classic hits Staying Alive and Night Fever. So from Sophocles to the Bee Gees, via a mountain. In the second part of this essay I will come down from the mountain and try to propose some practical consequences of what I am saying for performance research closer to home (presuming that the majority of the readership of Performance Research are currently occupying lowlands rather than highlands, a presumption that of course should not go unremarked in the age of rising tides).