The PROCESS and INTENTIONS behind NAIVE DANCE MASTERCLASS
Since I am a Senior Lecturer, the 'Research Excellence Framework' gives me added incentive to write about creative practice as research process, hence the lengthy text below.
I see Naïve Dance Master Class as an expression of my on-going love/hate relationship with ‘experimental’ performance, which began during my undergraduate degree in ‘Creative Arts’ (‘88 – ‘91). Here I was introduced to the performance work of such companies as Forced Entertainment, The Wooster Group, and Desperate Optimists alongside more ‘Live Art’ based installations and happenings. Much of this work was characterized by the collaging together of fragments of material into performance/events eschewing a unity of style or structure, lacking narrative closure, and being highly self-referential. Whilst the practitioners often struck me as impressively self-confident, articulate and generally pretty cool, I often found the work to be tedious, confusing and uninspiring. By contrast, some popular cultural forms of the time, such as Talking Heads, David Lynch, The Simpsons, Eddie Izzard, and (even) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, occurred to me as more emotionally enlivening and intellectually stimulating expressions of the Post Modern mind-set. However, since I was introduced to this performance work as ‘important’ and of a style that I ought to emulate, it felt as if I was faced with the choice of concluding that I was either intellectually and/or aesthetically deficient in some way, or that the work and its supporters were pretentious and/or misdirected, and I was on the wrong course. But I stayed, and over the three years absorbed the influence of Avant Garde traditions, especially the early Modernist experiments of Dada and Futurist performance, and left with a distinctive practice in absurdist/comic performance art and a first class degree.
After graduation, however, being fairly reclusive and temperamentally disinclined to networking or self-promotion, my attempts at forging a career as an artist in the fine art arena made little headway. Needing to earn a living, I eventually drifting into a career as a puppeteer working for a company in Scotland. Between 1994 and 2001 I also set up and hosted a late night event at the Edinburgh Fringe called ‘The Bongo Club Cabaret’. My aim was to present the widest variety of performance forms on each bill, to create an event with broad, inclusive appeal for a wide-ranging audience, which subverted distinctions between art and entertainment. During one such evening, for example, an American comedian was followed by the Manchester youth big band and then the Japanese Butoh artist, Katsura Kan. His performance was extremely well received by a late night audience of revelers who might not otherwise have attended such a form., and a desire to make accessible the experimental and 'exotic' has remained a key concern in my practice (and teaching). By making accessible I simply mean to present such work as another option, not to frame it as inherently important or superior.
Working in the popular performance forms of puppetry and cabaret also felt like an honest living, and I developed the kinds of craft skills in making and performing I felt were distinctly missing during my degree. However, hoping to kick-start my own practice, in 1998 I returned to full-time study to undertake an MA in Performance Studies. Here I became more deeply influenced by the related theories of semiotics, discourse and deconstruction, and acquired a clearer understanding of how the ‘multi-stylistic’ style of contemporary performance reflected a sympathy with Lyotard’s famous ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and a post-colonial worldview consisting of multiple, discontinuous, and often contradictory, perspectives. Whilst the theories appealed to me, especially the deconstruction of cultural hierarchy, the performance work as practiced within academic institutions often failed to attract a wider audience – and seemed to continue functioning as high art conspicuously consumed as cultural capital. This view was informed by my encounters with the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, Thorstein Veblen and John Carey, and I also began to connect these ideas with my long-standing interest in evolutionary science, especially related to the function of of cultural consumption as a means of status differentiation. Soon after completing my MA I began teaching as a visiting lecturer in devised theatre, and shortly after I joined the street theatre clown show the ‘Incredible Bull Circus’, which I performed over 200 times including appearances throughout the UK, Ireland, and continental Europe, and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Since 2008 my ambitions have shifted towards applying the skills I have acquired in these popular theatre forms to the creation of my own work, led by my artistic vision, fully expressive of my pre-occupations, yet accessible to a broad range of people. These ambitions, influences, experiences and concerns form the basis of ‘Naïve Dance Master Class’, a post-structuralist zen clown show.
For much of my 20’s I felt anxious, socially awkward, and lacking a sense of direction or purpose; and I had developed a writing practice of deeply introspective critical reflection and my performance practice involved trying to find means to represent these philosophical ideas. Shortly after my move to Edinburgh I came to the conclusion that this style of writing, through which I had hoped to think my way out my unhappy state, was actually contributing to and prolonging it. In an attempt to cure myself of the habit I began a practice of ‘non-sense’ writing, in which I would set myself the goal of writing several pages of words that did not make sense, but whose composition was directed by my aesthetic of the absurd. I found this practice highly enjoyable and effective, and since that time I have aimed to pursue processes that distinctly add to the quality of my life. My encounters with postmodern theories of language and representation during my MA studies also provided some theoretical underpinning to the futility of seeking philosophical ‘closure’, and this had the empowering effect of validating my inclinations towards playful, humorous and irrational modes of creativity, which also chimed with my longstanding attraction towards Zen and meditation practices. In this sense I became more interested in ontological questions of how to ‘be’ than epistemological questions of how (and what) to ‘know’ – and I became more interested in developing creative processes and products that were affective – enlivening, inspiring and enjoyable – rather than neatly representational of conceptual schemes and logically justifiable. In other words, I stopped seeing it as necessary (or even possible) that I should fully know what my creative work was ‘about’, but to develop ways for me to be with an audience that provided them with the best experience. During my own degree there was often talk of ‘challenging’ the audience, to ‘shake them out of their complacency’ - but this always seems a very condescending attitude to take. Whilst I am motivated to find forms of authentic self-expression, I am also committed to creating resolutely ‘entertaining’ experiences that are engaging for a diverse audience. I aim to make the work ‘multi-layered’ in the sense that there are different means to maintain engagement: through the ideas expressed; the physical and verbal comedy; the plot dynamic; and the audio and visual aesthetics. Having witnessed so much performance work that left me feeling confused, annoyed and disappointed – my primary aim has been to make work which people are actually pleased that they went to see, using all the tools at my disposal, and then to see where I can take it from there.
CREATIVE PROCESS
As indicated above, this show has arrived at its current form through a cumulative process of additions and alterations made between each presentation, with a major (and final!) resolution of these happening in 2011. These changes were made partly in response to post-show feedback, partly to ‘work-in’ effective elements of improvisation, and party as new possibilities for extending the piece occurred to me during writing and rehearsal. The show has generally simply grown longer, with the earliest sections of the show being the oldest.
As with most of work since 2004, rather than beginning with clear intentions as to the final meaning / affects of the piece, my creative process involved selecting a range of disparate elements – texts, costumes, choreographic routines - exploring the signifying and affective potential of different combinations of these, and working to incorporate them into a coherent narrative. I have found that this process generates clear creative problems to solve and effective parameters to work within. This sets the process up as a game to be played in which I imagine there there exists a fully formed show to be discovered in the material. It also steers me away from my tendency to descend into my own clichéd and well-worn conceptual routines, but instead guides me to search for the curious and fascinating.
My starting points for this were: a police uniform, a text I had written about determinism, and the idea of ‘naïve dance’ as an art form. This idea occurred to me after witnessing a contemporary dance performance that seemed to be so laden with avant-gardist clichés as almost to be a parody of itself. The main part of the performance took place in the Pavilion theatre, but it begin in the public domain of Pavilion gardens, and here it was witnessed not only by the smartly dressed, middle-aged, middle-class crowd who had tickets to see it, but also a gang of seemingly quite drunk ‘working class’ teenagers who encircled the two performers and danced along in mock imitation of their jerky movements whilst laughing loudly. Since these youngsters had as much right to dance about in the gardens as anyone else, and since they weren’t actually being verbally or physically abusive, there seemed to be no option but for the performers to continue performing and the crowd to continue to watching, and this went on for 15 minutes or so until the performance entered the theatre. This scene fascinated and inspired me, and seemed to be real-life expression of the social commentary expressed in Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, in that the teenagers were really saying ‘but what they’re doing is ridiculous’. However, unlike in Anderson’s tale, where the Emperor really is not wearing clothes, it seemed to me that this dance was neither ridiculous nor interesting – since these are subjective experiences. But the expression of certain aesthetic preferences and ‘readings’ of art have the ability to confer status on an individual, and so cultural production and consumption SEEMS motivated by at least two desires:
a) to create positive emotional experience: e.g. laughter, inspiration, catharsis, insight, communitas, aesthetic pleasure
b) to enhance the social status and self-esteem of the producer/consumer of the work.
Naïve Dance Master Class generally became my exploration and expression of the inter-relation between these motives. It may be that one recognises that the consumption of certain cultural products signals a skill or aptitude (discernment) that raises status, but that one does not actually find any ‘enjoyment’ in consuming these - in which case one becomes incentivised to learn to appreciate these forms. I had a friend who had been a police officer and his stories gave me the idea of subverting the notion that art and artists are necessarily always beneficial for the society around them, or that they are free from status anxiety. From this came the idea of a dancer who realizes his art is making people more deeply comprehend their own inadequacies, and so “seeking a lifestyle more useful to society”, he becomes a police officer. This moment always induces a good amount of laughter – I think this is partly because it is a sudden and surprising subversion of the notion that artists are good and the police are bad (who would you rather not see go on strike?) Added to this is the incongruous situation in that the character is clearly pretentious and condescending in his mannerisms, but appears to be attempting something truly noble. Put another way, he wants to not be an asshole, but hasn’t realised quite how much of an asshole he is – which immediately sounds like me, and points to another perception I had about the role and function of a clown persona: it incorporate parodies of aspects of the performer’s personality. In ‘The Incredible Bull Circus’ I recognize my clown persona ‘Juan’ expresses my childlike/submissive inclination, whilst in Naïve dance Masterclass I am clearly connecting with (or channeling) my own sense of superiority and desire for status. In this sense the art of clowning seems inherently deconstructive of pretensions in that it works by revealing the games people play with others and themselves to defend some sense of identity connected with status.
Whilst it began with this clear attitude of mockery, the show developed into an examination of my own sense self-consciousness and search for authenticity. Whilst performing my parody of the contemporary dancers movements for a friend I became surprisingly absorbed in the activity and carried on long after they had left. Similar to my non-sense writing, there seemed to be ways of doing this that seemed ‘right’, in some sense inspired – strange, funny and engaging – and other sections that were not, and this seems connected to my state of consciousness, or attitude. I tried ‘dancing’ in this way to different types of music and I found that it had the potential not only to have a comic affect, but also to be emotionally cathartic and engaging such that the line between parody and ‘taking it seriously’ became blurred. This brought to mind my experiences of self-consciousness on occasions of public dancing – at discos, clubs and parties - and my envy and admiration for those people who seemed able to truly become ‘abandoned’ in the activity, whilst I protected myself from ridicule by ‘spoofing’. For this reason in the publicity copy I described the show as ‘a parody hoping to overcome itself’, in which through the dancing I am aiming to pass through my attitude of parody and emerge into something actually aesthetically engaging - to really be practicing ‘naïve dance’. This desire is reflected during the show in the lines:
“When a child of four dances at a disco, they are perfection to me. So easily and utterly possessed, so blissfully ignorant of themselves. But how can I dance like a child of four when I am a Man of 43 – who ceaselessly looks down upon himself, watches on and listens in as he laughs, worries, lies, makes excuses, pulls faces and hopes for the best”
Determinism
I have long been pre-occupied with the theme of determinism – many of diary entries during my 20’s express alarm over my apparently feeble ‘strength of will’, and I suspect my interest in theories of evolution grew out of a desire to understand my internal psychological machinery. During the improvised parodying of contemporary dance, however, and in clowning generally, there is certainly a correlation between absence of ‘willfulness’ and effective performance. Those occasions when I achieve the deepest sense of ‘flow’ during performance always seem to involve a giving of myself over to spontaneity, in which I witness my self unfold. Similarly, my experience of flow in the art of puppetry entails the unusual sensation of watching the puppet perform, such that I am forget that I am controlling it and come to imagine it as alive and self-animated. The performance (in my mind) has come to be about my hope to similarly lose sight of myself during the dancing in this show and on dance-floors in my social life. The script extract above is delivered ‘by’ a puppet version of myself, though also clearly by me operating and looking down upon it. Similarly throughout the performance there are ideas to ‘get’ and many of these occur in the form of visual and verbal puns that relate to philosophical ideas.
COMEDIC REGISTER
Almost all of my performance work has involved a strong vein of comedy; it is created with the aim of inducing laughter and I partly judge its effectiveness based on the degree to which it achieves that aim. However, I am deeply interested in how this ‘comedic register’ of communication provides particular modes of understanding, or apprehension, which are not available through other means[3]. When my character says ‘So, that was flesh’, this has always provoked a particular kind of laughter that builds, like the sound of gong, as more people ‘get’ the idea that these words create; the sudden twist into a new interpretation of what they have witnessed. To someone who hasn’t seen the show I could explain the joke, and they may ‘get it’ conceptually but they are far less likely to experience the embodied physical-emotional ‘eruption’ because this is context dependent. I have a similar feeling as a write-up this reflection on the show; hopefully most of what I write would be already understood by someone who has seen the show, and cannot really be fully understood by anyone who hasn’t. Whilst one might have a conceptual understanding of the ideas, to get the full experiential affect, you had to be there. Hence my concern that writing about the art practice entails a simplification and often an invention – perhaps similar to Susan Sontag perception that the act of interpretation is a ‘revenge of the intellect’ upon art.
It is also the case that I didn’t come up with the joke through reflective, logico-deductive analysis; I was ‘clowning’ around in playful state during rehearsal and the words popped out my mouth, and made everyone laugh – not exactly a systematic process of enquiry, unless, perhaps, one develops a systematic ways of generating the conditions in which such intuitive inventions are most likely to occur. This is a typical process for clown shows in which improvisation in a relaxed and playful state, often using structured games, generates the performance material – and this seems also typical of postmodern devising processes, again being more exploratory rather than pursing the defined aim of solving a problem more specific than ‘How can I make a show that at least some people like – for which there is a market – and provides me with income, affection, pleasure and esteem?’
ABSURD ELEMENTS and NARRATIVE
For much of the show I am attempting to play with the audience expectations, and keep them engaged by continually shifting the ways in which they interpret or categorize the material they are witnessing. At the beginning of the show I introduce myself by own name, ‘Matt Rudkin’, and begin to tell a (false) story of my history. Through the naturalistic manner in which I perform this persona, I am attempting set up an initial state of uncertainty within the audience as to the degree to which they should take me ‘for real’ [4]. Gradually the show becomes more absurd and it is clear that in that sense I am not being ‘serious’, but hopefully it later becomes clear, given the nature of the text, that I really do have a serious intention to express my pre-occupations. The narrative follows a clear line of cause and effect, but has some surprising and often absurd departures. Midway through the show the live, full-size the hula-hoopist character appears, apparently interrupting the actual show in the ‘here-and-now’. She tells that she is pregnant with Tony’s child but wishes to get back together with Matt the dancer, and from this point the style of the show shifts from naturalism to physical theatre, and then a puppet version of the main performer re-continues the storytelling mode, interrupted by the hula-dancer going into labour and giving birth to a small rabbit – which makes a kind of sense since it is the son of Tony/Rabbit. All of this second section is then revealed to have been part of the final dance of ‘flesh’… and the performance concluded by me thanking the audience for watching and giving them some tips on how to avoid self-consciousness whilst dancing at discos. In this way the audience is continually surprised by new interpretations of what they are witnessing, which whilst absurd, do follow a ‘workable’ logic. This sudden realisation provokes a lot of laughter, but the piece also clearly interested in engaging the audience with philosophical ideas – though mixes the comic and the ‘serious’ in the style of delivery:
“Imagine, a free spirit, Imagine you had no head or body, you were an invisible entity adrift in space. - you cannot kick or pick up or hold, be held, picked up or kicked - but you can move through any substance. And as you move through air you taste the experience of being air. You seep through liquid and see how it feels to be liquid. You drift through solid matter, creep through vegetation, then slip into flesh. Suddenly you are bombarded by previously un-encountered sensations, you feel the weight of limbs hanging in their sockets, the flavor of saliva, the temptation to peep and the faint need to pee. You have stumbled into the mind of a primate! You are eavesdropping on the most fascinating conversations you have ever heard. And you become so enthralled, so absorbed in what you observe, the traffic of this mind as it passes through your own, that you may forget which is which and who is whom. And it may seem like you are influencing the behaviour of this being, this being you imagine yourself to be, but the fact remains, you are merely an attentive observer, witnessing its consciousness. Why? Why do you need to be here?”
In Summary
The performance incorporates fictional biography, parody of the branding of contemporary dance and discourse on the nature of volition in an investigation of the role of egoistic desire within the aspirations of the avant-garde artist/performer. It is a parody hoping to transcend its comedic effects and invoke an aesthetic appreciation of the play of flow in the performer; to achieve the sublime by way of the ‘ridiculous’ attempt to dance like a child of four by a man of forty-three. As such it becomes a genuine attempt to demonstrate my practice of ‘Naïve dance’; the state of expressive abandon achievable by untrained individuals in a wide variety of social situations. Through my own ritual delivery of the text in the early part of the show, I attempt to achieve a similar state of liberation before the audience in the performance situation. The show employs the popular theatrical forms puppetry, narrative and clowning to subvert the prevalent supposition that ‘entertainment’ and ‘art’ are incompatible forms of cultural production, with the proposition that the comedic register is a legitimate mode of research within creative practice that facilities particular communicative possibilities. Its synthesis of populist cultural forms with fine art aesthetics seeks to subvert of the modernist (mis)appropriation of the construct of progress within evolutionary processes, and question the value and function of originality in cultural production. By framing the performance as entertainment, both through the forms it employs and the marketing style, I have sought to attract a diverse audience to a show that is simultaneously provocative, inspiring and enjoyable – and an authentic and distinctive expression of my particular perceptions.
Some Related Research Questions:
1. How can I develop a creative process that draws on my particular skills and knowledge to produce a live theatre show that attracts diverse audience fosters communitas and provokes discussion between them?
2. For such an audience, how can I express my perceptions of cultural hierarchy, self-consciousness including my doubts and suspicions of my motives, in a way that is entertaining and provides the basis of a ‘good night out’?
3. Can I legitimately call this a ‘Post-structurlist Zen Clown show’ and will that attract interest?
4. Towards this end, how do I develop an enjoyable and exhilarating creative process that embraces and incorporates the rational and the absurd, the comedic and the sincere, the intuitive and the conceptual, and produces work that I like?
5. How does humour subvert social constructs? / In what ways does the comedic register facilitate a unique apprehension of experience?
6. How can I use narrative devices to structure these ideas and maintain the audiences engagement?
7. How can I develop a clown persona that draws upon and reflects aspect of my personality, enabling me to ‘be’ with people in new and affective ways?
[1] This is one reason why I am particularly motivated in my teaching to provide vocational skills and encourage students to consider career paths midway through the course.
[2] In this I am influenced by views of art from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. For example in ‘The Art Instinct’ Dennis Dutton suggests that certain features of artistic practice have been consistent throughout human history because they accord with a fixed human nature. Whilst a liking for novelty is one of these, the efforts to ‘break away’ from these prone to be unsuccessful.
[3] The same is true of the spoken rather than written word, which adds all the nuances of vocal tone and inflection; and then the live encounter which also incorporates the visual elements of gesture and facial expression. The film and television work of Chris Morris provides an example of a mode of social commentary and philosophical outlook that provides a particular mode of ‘apprehension’. Ricky Gervias and Stephen Merchant’s ‘The Office’ similarly seems to provide a means of ‘apprehending’ of social relations – as does ‘Black Mirror’.
Since I am a Senior Lecturer, the 'Research Excellence Framework' gives me added incentive to write about creative practice as research process, hence the lengthy text below.
I see Naïve Dance Master Class as an expression of my on-going love/hate relationship with ‘experimental’ performance, which began during my undergraduate degree in ‘Creative Arts’ (‘88 – ‘91). Here I was introduced to the performance work of such companies as Forced Entertainment, The Wooster Group, and Desperate Optimists alongside more ‘Live Art’ based installations and happenings. Much of this work was characterized by the collaging together of fragments of material into performance/events eschewing a unity of style or structure, lacking narrative closure, and being highly self-referential. Whilst the practitioners often struck me as impressively self-confident, articulate and generally pretty cool, I often found the work to be tedious, confusing and uninspiring. By contrast, some popular cultural forms of the time, such as Talking Heads, David Lynch, The Simpsons, Eddie Izzard, and (even) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, occurred to me as more emotionally enlivening and intellectually stimulating expressions of the Post Modern mind-set. However, since I was introduced to this performance work as ‘important’ and of a style that I ought to emulate, it felt as if I was faced with the choice of concluding that I was either intellectually and/or aesthetically deficient in some way, or that the work and its supporters were pretentious and/or misdirected, and I was on the wrong course. But I stayed, and over the three years absorbed the influence of Avant Garde traditions, especially the early Modernist experiments of Dada and Futurist performance, and left with a distinctive practice in absurdist/comic performance art and a first class degree.
After graduation, however, being fairly reclusive and temperamentally disinclined to networking or self-promotion, my attempts at forging a career as an artist in the fine art arena made little headway. Needing to earn a living, I eventually drifting into a career as a puppeteer working for a company in Scotland. Between 1994 and 2001 I also set up and hosted a late night event at the Edinburgh Fringe called ‘The Bongo Club Cabaret’. My aim was to present the widest variety of performance forms on each bill, to create an event with broad, inclusive appeal for a wide-ranging audience, which subverted distinctions between art and entertainment. During one such evening, for example, an American comedian was followed by the Manchester youth big band and then the Japanese Butoh artist, Katsura Kan. His performance was extremely well received by a late night audience of revelers who might not otherwise have attended such a form., and a desire to make accessible the experimental and 'exotic' has remained a key concern in my practice (and teaching). By making accessible I simply mean to present such work as another option, not to frame it as inherently important or superior.
Working in the popular performance forms of puppetry and cabaret also felt like an honest living, and I developed the kinds of craft skills in making and performing I felt were distinctly missing during my degree. However, hoping to kick-start my own practice, in 1998 I returned to full-time study to undertake an MA in Performance Studies. Here I became more deeply influenced by the related theories of semiotics, discourse and deconstruction, and acquired a clearer understanding of how the ‘multi-stylistic’ style of contemporary performance reflected a sympathy with Lyotard’s famous ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and a post-colonial worldview consisting of multiple, discontinuous, and often contradictory, perspectives. Whilst the theories appealed to me, especially the deconstruction of cultural hierarchy, the performance work as practiced within academic institutions often failed to attract a wider audience – and seemed to continue functioning as high art conspicuously consumed as cultural capital. This view was informed by my encounters with the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, Thorstein Veblen and John Carey, and I also began to connect these ideas with my long-standing interest in evolutionary science, especially related to the function of of cultural consumption as a means of status differentiation. Soon after completing my MA I began teaching as a visiting lecturer in devised theatre, and shortly after I joined the street theatre clown show the ‘Incredible Bull Circus’, which I performed over 200 times including appearances throughout the UK, Ireland, and continental Europe, and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Since 2008 my ambitions have shifted towards applying the skills I have acquired in these popular theatre forms to the creation of my own work, led by my artistic vision, fully expressive of my pre-occupations, yet accessible to a broad range of people. These ambitions, influences, experiences and concerns form the basis of ‘Naïve Dance Master Class’, a post-structuralist zen clown show.
For much of my 20’s I felt anxious, socially awkward, and lacking a sense of direction or purpose; and I had developed a writing practice of deeply introspective critical reflection and my performance practice involved trying to find means to represent these philosophical ideas. Shortly after my move to Edinburgh I came to the conclusion that this style of writing, through which I had hoped to think my way out my unhappy state, was actually contributing to and prolonging it. In an attempt to cure myself of the habit I began a practice of ‘non-sense’ writing, in which I would set myself the goal of writing several pages of words that did not make sense, but whose composition was directed by my aesthetic of the absurd. I found this practice highly enjoyable and effective, and since that time I have aimed to pursue processes that distinctly add to the quality of my life. My encounters with postmodern theories of language and representation during my MA studies also provided some theoretical underpinning to the futility of seeking philosophical ‘closure’, and this had the empowering effect of validating my inclinations towards playful, humorous and irrational modes of creativity, which also chimed with my longstanding attraction towards Zen and meditation practices. In this sense I became more interested in ontological questions of how to ‘be’ than epistemological questions of how (and what) to ‘know’ – and I became more interested in developing creative processes and products that were affective – enlivening, inspiring and enjoyable – rather than neatly representational of conceptual schemes and logically justifiable. In other words, I stopped seeing it as necessary (or even possible) that I should fully know what my creative work was ‘about’, but to develop ways for me to be with an audience that provided them with the best experience. During my own degree there was often talk of ‘challenging’ the audience, to ‘shake them out of their complacency’ - but this always seems a very condescending attitude to take. Whilst I am motivated to find forms of authentic self-expression, I am also committed to creating resolutely ‘entertaining’ experiences that are engaging for a diverse audience. I aim to make the work ‘multi-layered’ in the sense that there are different means to maintain engagement: through the ideas expressed; the physical and verbal comedy; the plot dynamic; and the audio and visual aesthetics. Having witnessed so much performance work that left me feeling confused, annoyed and disappointed – my primary aim has been to make work which people are actually pleased that they went to see, using all the tools at my disposal, and then to see where I can take it from there.
CREATIVE PROCESS
As indicated above, this show has arrived at its current form through a cumulative process of additions and alterations made between each presentation, with a major (and final!) resolution of these happening in 2011. These changes were made partly in response to post-show feedback, partly to ‘work-in’ effective elements of improvisation, and party as new possibilities for extending the piece occurred to me during writing and rehearsal. The show has generally simply grown longer, with the earliest sections of the show being the oldest.
As with most of work since 2004, rather than beginning with clear intentions as to the final meaning / affects of the piece, my creative process involved selecting a range of disparate elements – texts, costumes, choreographic routines - exploring the signifying and affective potential of different combinations of these, and working to incorporate them into a coherent narrative. I have found that this process generates clear creative problems to solve and effective parameters to work within. This sets the process up as a game to be played in which I imagine there there exists a fully formed show to be discovered in the material. It also steers me away from my tendency to descend into my own clichéd and well-worn conceptual routines, but instead guides me to search for the curious and fascinating.
My starting points for this were: a police uniform, a text I had written about determinism, and the idea of ‘naïve dance’ as an art form. This idea occurred to me after witnessing a contemporary dance performance that seemed to be so laden with avant-gardist clichés as almost to be a parody of itself. The main part of the performance took place in the Pavilion theatre, but it begin in the public domain of Pavilion gardens, and here it was witnessed not only by the smartly dressed, middle-aged, middle-class crowd who had tickets to see it, but also a gang of seemingly quite drunk ‘working class’ teenagers who encircled the two performers and danced along in mock imitation of their jerky movements whilst laughing loudly. Since these youngsters had as much right to dance about in the gardens as anyone else, and since they weren’t actually being verbally or physically abusive, there seemed to be no option but for the performers to continue performing and the crowd to continue to watching, and this went on for 15 minutes or so until the performance entered the theatre. This scene fascinated and inspired me, and seemed to be real-life expression of the social commentary expressed in Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, in that the teenagers were really saying ‘but what they’re doing is ridiculous’. However, unlike in Anderson’s tale, where the Emperor really is not wearing clothes, it seemed to me that this dance was neither ridiculous nor interesting – since these are subjective experiences. But the expression of certain aesthetic preferences and ‘readings’ of art have the ability to confer status on an individual, and so cultural production and consumption SEEMS motivated by at least two desires:
a) to create positive emotional experience: e.g. laughter, inspiration, catharsis, insight, communitas, aesthetic pleasure
b) to enhance the social status and self-esteem of the producer/consumer of the work.
Naïve Dance Master Class generally became my exploration and expression of the inter-relation between these motives. It may be that one recognises that the consumption of certain cultural products signals a skill or aptitude (discernment) that raises status, but that one does not actually find any ‘enjoyment’ in consuming these - in which case one becomes incentivised to learn to appreciate these forms. I had a friend who had been a police officer and his stories gave me the idea of subverting the notion that art and artists are necessarily always beneficial for the society around them, or that they are free from status anxiety. From this came the idea of a dancer who realizes his art is making people more deeply comprehend their own inadequacies, and so “seeking a lifestyle more useful to society”, he becomes a police officer. This moment always induces a good amount of laughter – I think this is partly because it is a sudden and surprising subversion of the notion that artists are good and the police are bad (who would you rather not see go on strike?) Added to this is the incongruous situation in that the character is clearly pretentious and condescending in his mannerisms, but appears to be attempting something truly noble. Put another way, he wants to not be an asshole, but hasn’t realised quite how much of an asshole he is – which immediately sounds like me, and points to another perception I had about the role and function of a clown persona: it incorporate parodies of aspects of the performer’s personality. In ‘The Incredible Bull Circus’ I recognize my clown persona ‘Juan’ expresses my childlike/submissive inclination, whilst in Naïve dance Masterclass I am clearly connecting with (or channeling) my own sense of superiority and desire for status. In this sense the art of clowning seems inherently deconstructive of pretensions in that it works by revealing the games people play with others and themselves to defend some sense of identity connected with status.
Whilst it began with this clear attitude of mockery, the show developed into an examination of my own sense self-consciousness and search for authenticity. Whilst performing my parody of the contemporary dancers movements for a friend I became surprisingly absorbed in the activity and carried on long after they had left. Similar to my non-sense writing, there seemed to be ways of doing this that seemed ‘right’, in some sense inspired – strange, funny and engaging – and other sections that were not, and this seems connected to my state of consciousness, or attitude. I tried ‘dancing’ in this way to different types of music and I found that it had the potential not only to have a comic affect, but also to be emotionally cathartic and engaging such that the line between parody and ‘taking it seriously’ became blurred. This brought to mind my experiences of self-consciousness on occasions of public dancing – at discos, clubs and parties - and my envy and admiration for those people who seemed able to truly become ‘abandoned’ in the activity, whilst I protected myself from ridicule by ‘spoofing’. For this reason in the publicity copy I described the show as ‘a parody hoping to overcome itself’, in which through the dancing I am aiming to pass through my attitude of parody and emerge into something actually aesthetically engaging - to really be practicing ‘naïve dance’. This desire is reflected during the show in the lines:
“When a child of four dances at a disco, they are perfection to me. So easily and utterly possessed, so blissfully ignorant of themselves. But how can I dance like a child of four when I am a Man of 43 – who ceaselessly looks down upon himself, watches on and listens in as he laughs, worries, lies, makes excuses, pulls faces and hopes for the best”
Determinism
I have long been pre-occupied with the theme of determinism – many of diary entries during my 20’s express alarm over my apparently feeble ‘strength of will’, and I suspect my interest in theories of evolution grew out of a desire to understand my internal psychological machinery. During the improvised parodying of contemporary dance, however, and in clowning generally, there is certainly a correlation between absence of ‘willfulness’ and effective performance. Those occasions when I achieve the deepest sense of ‘flow’ during performance always seem to involve a giving of myself over to spontaneity, in which I witness my self unfold. Similarly, my experience of flow in the art of puppetry entails the unusual sensation of watching the puppet perform, such that I am forget that I am controlling it and come to imagine it as alive and self-animated. The performance (in my mind) has come to be about my hope to similarly lose sight of myself during the dancing in this show and on dance-floors in my social life. The script extract above is delivered ‘by’ a puppet version of myself, though also clearly by me operating and looking down upon it. Similarly throughout the performance there are ideas to ‘get’ and many of these occur in the form of visual and verbal puns that relate to philosophical ideas.
COMEDIC REGISTER
Almost all of my performance work has involved a strong vein of comedy; it is created with the aim of inducing laughter and I partly judge its effectiveness based on the degree to which it achieves that aim. However, I am deeply interested in how this ‘comedic register’ of communication provides particular modes of understanding, or apprehension, which are not available through other means[3]. When my character says ‘So, that was flesh’, this has always provoked a particular kind of laughter that builds, like the sound of gong, as more people ‘get’ the idea that these words create; the sudden twist into a new interpretation of what they have witnessed. To someone who hasn’t seen the show I could explain the joke, and they may ‘get it’ conceptually but they are far less likely to experience the embodied physical-emotional ‘eruption’ because this is context dependent. I have a similar feeling as a write-up this reflection on the show; hopefully most of what I write would be already understood by someone who has seen the show, and cannot really be fully understood by anyone who hasn’t. Whilst one might have a conceptual understanding of the ideas, to get the full experiential affect, you had to be there. Hence my concern that writing about the art practice entails a simplification and often an invention – perhaps similar to Susan Sontag perception that the act of interpretation is a ‘revenge of the intellect’ upon art.
It is also the case that I didn’t come up with the joke through reflective, logico-deductive analysis; I was ‘clowning’ around in playful state during rehearsal and the words popped out my mouth, and made everyone laugh – not exactly a systematic process of enquiry, unless, perhaps, one develops a systematic ways of generating the conditions in which such intuitive inventions are most likely to occur. This is a typical process for clown shows in which improvisation in a relaxed and playful state, often using structured games, generates the performance material – and this seems also typical of postmodern devising processes, again being more exploratory rather than pursing the defined aim of solving a problem more specific than ‘How can I make a show that at least some people like – for which there is a market – and provides me with income, affection, pleasure and esteem?’
ABSURD ELEMENTS and NARRATIVE
For much of the show I am attempting to play with the audience expectations, and keep them engaged by continually shifting the ways in which they interpret or categorize the material they are witnessing. At the beginning of the show I introduce myself by own name, ‘Matt Rudkin’, and begin to tell a (false) story of my history. Through the naturalistic manner in which I perform this persona, I am attempting set up an initial state of uncertainty within the audience as to the degree to which they should take me ‘for real’ [4]. Gradually the show becomes more absurd and it is clear that in that sense I am not being ‘serious’, but hopefully it later becomes clear, given the nature of the text, that I really do have a serious intention to express my pre-occupations. The narrative follows a clear line of cause and effect, but has some surprising and often absurd departures. Midway through the show the live, full-size the hula-hoopist character appears, apparently interrupting the actual show in the ‘here-and-now’. She tells that she is pregnant with Tony’s child but wishes to get back together with Matt the dancer, and from this point the style of the show shifts from naturalism to physical theatre, and then a puppet version of the main performer re-continues the storytelling mode, interrupted by the hula-dancer going into labour and giving birth to a small rabbit – which makes a kind of sense since it is the son of Tony/Rabbit. All of this second section is then revealed to have been part of the final dance of ‘flesh’… and the performance concluded by me thanking the audience for watching and giving them some tips on how to avoid self-consciousness whilst dancing at discos. In this way the audience is continually surprised by new interpretations of what they are witnessing, which whilst absurd, do follow a ‘workable’ logic. This sudden realisation provokes a lot of laughter, but the piece also clearly interested in engaging the audience with philosophical ideas – though mixes the comic and the ‘serious’ in the style of delivery:
“Imagine, a free spirit, Imagine you had no head or body, you were an invisible entity adrift in space. - you cannot kick or pick up or hold, be held, picked up or kicked - but you can move through any substance. And as you move through air you taste the experience of being air. You seep through liquid and see how it feels to be liquid. You drift through solid matter, creep through vegetation, then slip into flesh. Suddenly you are bombarded by previously un-encountered sensations, you feel the weight of limbs hanging in their sockets, the flavor of saliva, the temptation to peep and the faint need to pee. You have stumbled into the mind of a primate! You are eavesdropping on the most fascinating conversations you have ever heard. And you become so enthralled, so absorbed in what you observe, the traffic of this mind as it passes through your own, that you may forget which is which and who is whom. And it may seem like you are influencing the behaviour of this being, this being you imagine yourself to be, but the fact remains, you are merely an attentive observer, witnessing its consciousness. Why? Why do you need to be here?”
In Summary
The performance incorporates fictional biography, parody of the branding of contemporary dance and discourse on the nature of volition in an investigation of the role of egoistic desire within the aspirations of the avant-garde artist/performer. It is a parody hoping to transcend its comedic effects and invoke an aesthetic appreciation of the play of flow in the performer; to achieve the sublime by way of the ‘ridiculous’ attempt to dance like a child of four by a man of forty-three. As such it becomes a genuine attempt to demonstrate my practice of ‘Naïve dance’; the state of expressive abandon achievable by untrained individuals in a wide variety of social situations. Through my own ritual delivery of the text in the early part of the show, I attempt to achieve a similar state of liberation before the audience in the performance situation. The show employs the popular theatrical forms puppetry, narrative and clowning to subvert the prevalent supposition that ‘entertainment’ and ‘art’ are incompatible forms of cultural production, with the proposition that the comedic register is a legitimate mode of research within creative practice that facilities particular communicative possibilities. Its synthesis of populist cultural forms with fine art aesthetics seeks to subvert of the modernist (mis)appropriation of the construct of progress within evolutionary processes, and question the value and function of originality in cultural production. By framing the performance as entertainment, both through the forms it employs and the marketing style, I have sought to attract a diverse audience to a show that is simultaneously provocative, inspiring and enjoyable – and an authentic and distinctive expression of my particular perceptions.
Some Related Research Questions:
1. How can I develop a creative process that draws on my particular skills and knowledge to produce a live theatre show that attracts diverse audience fosters communitas and provokes discussion between them?
2. For such an audience, how can I express my perceptions of cultural hierarchy, self-consciousness including my doubts and suspicions of my motives, in a way that is entertaining and provides the basis of a ‘good night out’?
3. Can I legitimately call this a ‘Post-structurlist Zen Clown show’ and will that attract interest?
4. Towards this end, how do I develop an enjoyable and exhilarating creative process that embraces and incorporates the rational and the absurd, the comedic and the sincere, the intuitive and the conceptual, and produces work that I like?
5. How does humour subvert social constructs? / In what ways does the comedic register facilitate a unique apprehension of experience?
6. How can I use narrative devices to structure these ideas and maintain the audiences engagement?
7. How can I develop a clown persona that draws upon and reflects aspect of my personality, enabling me to ‘be’ with people in new and affective ways?
[1] This is one reason why I am particularly motivated in my teaching to provide vocational skills and encourage students to consider career paths midway through the course.
[2] In this I am influenced by views of art from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. For example in ‘The Art Instinct’ Dennis Dutton suggests that certain features of artistic practice have been consistent throughout human history because they accord with a fixed human nature. Whilst a liking for novelty is one of these, the efforts to ‘break away’ from these prone to be unsuccessful.
[3] The same is true of the spoken rather than written word, which adds all the nuances of vocal tone and inflection; and then the live encounter which also incorporates the visual elements of gesture and facial expression. The film and television work of Chris Morris provides an example of a mode of social commentary and philosophical outlook that provides a particular mode of ‘apprehension’. Ricky Gervias and Stephen Merchant’s ‘The Office’ similarly seems to provide a means of ‘apprehending’ of social relations – as does ‘Black Mirror’.