Reflective Practitioner: Siren Song Re-Visited

I have spent the last week or so, looking back over the previous experiments and doing some reading. I wanted to share my initial re-development ideas with you, as well as some of the reading.

Brainstorm

-an endless part with games…a structure that keeps repeating itself.
-Her part? Her wedding reception? Her funeral?
-childhood games that we are familiar with
-Party hats, food and drink-a social occasion.

Some Reading and Reflection

Shallow Play

I think that Turner’s notion of shallow play is going to be a key concept tthat needs to inform the dramaturgy of the durational performance. ‘Shallow Play’, is entered into willingly and self-consciously, its relationship with leisure and entertainment allow the possibility for contemplation and the conditions for greater risks to be taken because of the seemingly consequence free position. ‘Shallow play’, presents situations outside of received or expected behaviours, often cultural or societal rules are suspended in the space, time and duration of the play situation. This suspension of cultural and societal norms generates the possibility for new insights and understandings to be forged but without serious consequence in life praxis for the participants. ‘Shallow Play’ situations give permission for its participants to imagine and create alternatives and possibilities outside of the accepted cultural and societal norms. Games, rules and tasks within the context of both of the final performance experiments present such an opportunity for the audience to engage in ‘shallow play’.

Performative Inspiration.

Some of the practitioners associated with the neo-avant-garde performance of the 1960’s began to develop strategies that evoked shallow play but often for the performers rather than the audience; however, I think that those practices are well worth considering in light of developing a participative dramaturgy.

The Living Theatre

The application of acts as a performative strategy means that the company employed a non-acting approach to performance presence; they undertook an activity until it was exhausted. This performative undertaking of acts, avoids the possibility of replication and imitation; each performance is governed by a map of activity or task-based set of instructions that are carried out for ‘real’ each time it is mounted. The acts are committed not represented, imitated or presented under any pretence. As Schechner and Beck both consider:

SCHECHNER: The other part of the relentlessness of your work is how you follow the logic of an action to the end, wherever the end may be and however long it may take. In other words, not to make aesthetic decisions. BECK: Real time is what we're concerned with. Really experiencing it. You make the authentic decision. You meditate as long as you feel capable of meditating.
SCHECHNER: What is beautiful about Antigone is that it had the feeling of being truly yours. I could see somebody else doing Frankenstein, given the scenario. But Antigone no longer seemed to be a play; it was already a ritual, an experience, an event or something other than a play, if "play" is understood as an aesthetic situation. This was a real situation, Antigone, a situation in which everyone was committed. In Antigone you were showing yourselves in a profound and good way, while in Frank-enstein you were just doing something. Maybe I'm confusing the words.
BECK: What you're saying is accurate.
(Malina, Beck et al. 1969:38)


This approach to performance privileges experience and has the potential, to create a context in which new primary experiences can be made.

Fluxus and Happenings

Fluxus was not oppositional in the sense of Dada but was an opting out from art and its discourse:

but if we bypass “art” and take nature as a model or point of departure, we may be able to devise a different kind of art by first putting together a molecule out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life.
(Hendricks 2003:5)

It refused to participate within the institutions and cultural practices that have traditionally been recognised by art and instead initiated direct intervention within culture itself, unmediated by art.

I was really taken with a particular example of Fluxus practice that I read about, which I wanted to share with you.

The mode of fluxkits/fluxboxes became a dominant feature in fluxus practice and has survived due to their object based nature better than some of the more ephemeral fluxus interventions such as the food events. Two examples of fluxkit/fulxboxes that Higgins draws attention to as being typical of the form are Orifice Box and Finger box. Orifice box, by Larry Miller, consists of a plastic box made up of little compartments, each one contains a different object; a variety of plugs, statuettes and even a condom-all of which are contextualised by the suggestion implicit in the title of the box. When engaging with the box, the audience can touch each item and consider its possibilities, they have to directly engage with the objects and in this way the objects are transformed into being performative; they do not function until they become actioned by the audiences interaction with them. The interaction does not have to be the act of insertion but simply by handling and considering the items within this context, they open up possible new primary experiences.


Kaprow’s Happenings can be understood as planned or spontaneous acts; acts that unfold within the fabric of life praxis and the every day rather than in designated art spaces or venues. Kaprow developed happenings into an open ended form, rejecting the precise theatrical scripting of his early work, so that they had no literary dimension and no formal dialectical structure. Kaprow has remained insistent that Happenings should not have a direct point or message, the audience are not addressed and ‘nothing is won, told or provoked’. Despite the clearly performative nature of Happenings, Kaprow stripped the form bare of many of the characteristics that could have designated them as theatre but through the employment of the everyday utilised a particular theatricality. In the most striking and successful Happenings it is impossible to distinguish between the traditional boundaries and distinctions, particularly when the unfold within existing habitats, landscapes and environments that already exist as part of day to day experience, as they do in Calling:

In the city, people stand at street corners and wait. For each of them: A car pulls up, someone calls out a name, the person gets in, they drive off. During the trip, the person is wrapped in aluminum foil. The car is parked at a meter somewhere, is left there, locked; the silver person sitting motionless in the back seat.

Someone unlocks the car, drives off. The foil is removed from the per-son; he or she is wrapped in cloth or tied into a laundry bag. The car stops, the person is dumped at a public garage and the car goes away.

At the garage, a waiting auto starts up, the person is picked up from the concrete pavement, is hauled into the car, is taken to the information booth at Grand Central Station. The person is propped up against it and left.

The person calls out names, and hears the others brought there also call. They call out for some time. Then they work loose from their wrappings and leave the train station.

They telephone certain numbers. The phone rings and rings. Finally, it is answered, a name is asked for, and immediately the other end clicks off.

In the woods, the persons call out names and hear hidden answers.

Here and there, they come upon people dangling upside down from ropes. They rip the people's clothes off and go away.

The naked figures call to each other in the woods for a long time until they are tired. Silence.
(Kaprow 1965:203-204)

The Happenings themselves become a part of the landscape and might be understood to participate in the construction and experience of those environments themselves. In Calling, we can see that there is no delineation between performers and audience and no contingency for dealing with passersby; the instructions produce conditions which unfold in real time, real places and with real people. There is no pretence and no staging, just acts and activities carried out.

I also forgot to mention that I have been accepted to write a book review for an online journal Platform. I found out on the day of the Camden performance and so it just kind of got forgot amid all the other excitement. I will not be able to share that with you though until it has been published.