This week I watched Tim Crouch’s TEDx talk on The Art of
Autosuggestion. If ever you’re feeling
bored, just watch some TEDx talks. You’ll
feel much smarter and, more importantly, more productive for your time.
Tim’s always been an influence on me as a writer and performer,
ever since I saw his ground-breaking show The
Author back in Edinburgh Fringe many years ago, and I love his magical I, Shakespeare plays.
In the video (which you can watch below) Tim talks about Emile
Coure and how “our actions spring not from our will, but from our imagination.” If we can control our subconscious, we can change
the way we perceive the world which means we change the world. Not only essential for mental health, but
also for theatre-making.
A theatre company that highly influence me is Third Angel, who
have various styles and use various technologies. But they always acknowledge the presence of
the audience in some way. Alex Kelly beings
their show 600 People with a list of
welcomes, with appropriate responses. I
recently say Mobile by PaperBirds
which not only acknowledged the audience, but welcomed them into the mobile home
space, and thus the story. Though I
often struggle with immersive theatre where I am meant to specifically play a
role, I do enjoy theatre where the audience are recognised.
This is entirely the spoken word and performance poetry form. A performer faces an audience, often dictated
by the performance space and microphone.
Sometimes the audience are cast, sometimes they are encouraged to
interact more, sometimes the poem is not addressed to them but nevertheless it’s
hard to ignore a group of people sat. In
theatre terms, there are no 4th walls. There aren’t even 3 normal ones.
So this means any story, location or character presented in the
poem exists solely in the audiences minds.
Unless props are used, which rarely are, the audience rely on the words
and the poet’s hypnotic delivery.
“Let the imagination in” Tim says.
The subconscious re-writes what we’re shown. Or indeed, told. We don’t need to believe Hamlet exists in front
of us, we just need to place an autosuggestion within our subconscious. When Hannah Davies tells her story of finding
all manner of objects in her son’s pockets we don’t need to actually see
them. That would ruin the magic, and the
power, of our own imaginations. All she
needs to do is implant the suggestion of the gun-shaped twig and the bubblegum
wrapper. We shape the twig. We taste the gum.
Theatre sometimes does everything for the audience. It lays out the world on a plate. But when I first read Lord of The Rings, I
had no reference point for a map. I had
to construct it myself. When George R.
R. Martin was writing his Song of Ice & Fire series, there was no map. Book-lovers pieced it together. Now my wall has a huge map of Westeros and
Essos, but at one point that world existed only in the heads. Maybe this is why I get grumpy about how
quickly characters in the show can seemingly teleport from place-to-place.
In my show, Whatever Happened
To Vandal Raptor?, I did question:
Why not just cast the show with 4 actors, rather than multi-role
them? Was this my nervousness around
working with others? My ego at not
letting others say my words and my story?
I wanted to implant the suggestion of these characters. They are as tangible as you want them to be. They appear through me, but moulded and
formed by the receivers: the audience.
The 4 characters in many ways represent 4 different aspects of not
only post-punk life but parts of me. Enthusiastic
but stretched, tired and cynical, confident but rudderless, hypocritical and spineless. And in this spectrum, the audience are
invited to find parts of themselves, either on one end in the raging passionate
Hog character or the timid, but still present, Bert. The idea of these characters exists, and
those ideas are made real inside the audience’s minds.
“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone” – Marcel Duchamp
quoted by Tim in his talk.
“Think when we
talk of horses, that you see them”- the prologue of Henry V
See not a punk, but think of a punk.
No comments:
Post a Comment