Unwitnessed memories, uncharted territories
In response to Simone Aughterlony's Bare Back Lying
Brussels, January 30th, 2006
Dear Simone,
Do you remember the first time we met? It must have been in Zurich in November 2001 when I came to see Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods’ ALIBI, but I don’t recall our actual meeting – if it happened at all. During the following months I have seen ALIBI another four times in different cities, behaving as a modest yet highly enthusiastic fan – up to the extent that you performers started joking about “that one guy in the audience with his glasses”, as I heard afterwards. Somehow this experience of watching and performing must have forged a connection between us, as if the performance not only mediated a temporary alliance of performer and spectator, but elicited a series of other complicities as well, which were yet to be unveiled.
What must have been our second (or was it our first?) meeting I do remember rather clearly. In the summer of 2002 we were both at the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna, you teaching and performing Disfigure Study, I performing writerly comments right after the shows in a programme called Afterwords. The audience was walking out of the theatre, I was getting ready to start writing on my laptop, connected with a projection screen in the lobby next doors. As you had seen the show as well, you came up to me and kissed me to say hello. I reacted surprised and confused – because it was only the first time we actually met while you acted as if we knew one another since a long time? Because I was unnerved in my concentration? Because I was in fact performing without you realising it? It must have been an awkward moment, a vivid yet unwitnessed memory. As that moment slipped out of the performance (both the one on stage and the one of daily life), it got entangled in a misty zone that resists clear framing, a forever uncharted territory. And truly genuine in its awkwardness – today I’m still not sure if we actually shared that feeling? In that sense, it was an altogether different experience than us re-enacting together with some friends Gilbert and George’s 1972 video performance Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk on a terrace at the Danube…
When I saw Bare Back Lying this anecdote came back to me, as both the confession of unwitnessed memories and the slippery zone in between artistic media are at stake in your performance to (paradoxically) track down the uncharted territory of the real on stage – perhaps ‘true’, ‘genuine’ or ‘sincere’ are the better terms here. Unwitnessed memories, uncharted territories. The employed media are not quite right, the metaphors used slightly out of place; you find yourself performing bareback, exposed to the failure of make believe in front of an audience, joyously flirting with the edge of losing face. Unexpected exposure, shared awkwardness. The issues remind me of a few films I’m obsessed with since a while, so I took the opportunity to view them over again with all this in mind.
Although fairly unknown, Play it again, Sam (1972) is a remarkable Woody Allen film, initially written as a play and later adapted for the screen. A divorced film critic (performed by Allen himself) tries to get over his depression and date women again with the help of a friendly couple and through phantasmal dialogue with Humphrey Bogart, who feeds him the ‘right’ lines during his conquests. Watching movies (or also advertisement) to rehearse for real life is today an altogether familiar topos; the blunt recycling of romantic Hollywood clichés via the figure of gentleman-macho Bogart not always convincing in what is obviously meant as a parody of Casablanca. What makes Play it again, Sam both particular and peculiar to me is its leap from theatre to film, which stays to some extent unresolved and thereby leaves remarkable traces.
Even for a comedy, Woody Allen’s writing is particularly odd and rambling; moreover it’s theatrical in the sense that some of the writing in Bare Back Lying toys with metaphors that are slightly out of place. Allen’s character is neurotic all the way, protecting himself with a panoply of allegedly ‘normal’ yet ill-fitting self-descriptions that remove him even more from proper social functioning. Similarly, you keep addressing each other with unfit, unflattering and coarse expressions up to embarrassment, not so much due to their content but to the exposure they entail: the exaggerated characterisations don’t stick, so that you performers find yourselves on the spot, as performer and eventually also as a person. Sustaining awkwardness makes the performer’s sincerity surface, and also his or her vulnerability.
How to share this awkwardness with an audience? Does it maybe lead to ‘genuine spectatorship’? Although duration and sustenance can provoke uneasiness in an audience, isn’t the spectator’s role in the theatre clear and comfortable after all? It looks like the ‘in-between-talk’ is a productive way to release confusion in the audience and hence work with that energy. The hierarchies falter, and at least for a moment the dramaturgical safety net seems out of view, which changes perspectives and charges also me as a spectator with a different urgency. Here is another issue: isn’t ‘urgency’ perhaps what our concepts of sincerity thrive upon? It grounds the shared complicity of performer and spectator, maybe even reaches beyond the representational frame of the theatre.
In Play it again, Sam, Allen also explores the relation between awkward behaviour and witnessing. Interestingly, he succeeds in translating the ‘slightly out of place’-feeling of the lines into his physicality as well, which appears as slapstick in the wrong frame. When his friends organise a blind date and come to pick him up at his place, he is literally all over the place. Armed with “a good impression”, sprayed with “Canoe aftershave, Lavoris, Mennen spray deodorant and baby powder”, and oscillating between nervosity and a large dose of relaxation pills he moves about clumsily and frenetically, overthrowing furniture, scratching a record and so on while trying to keep his composure in the presence of his visitors. Afterwards his friends comment that he was trying too hard: “As soon as she came over he went into his act” – theatre persists indeed on several levels. When they go out for dinner in a Chinese restaurant shortly after, things get out of hand when Allen demonstrates the choreography of how to eat a bowl of rice “authentically” with a pair of chopsticks – which is too odd to describe. Transposed to the public area, the presence of other people witnessing the scene and one another pushes embarrassment to a different level – sincere spectatorship through shared awkwardness? Or is the urgency, not to say the ‘reality’ of it, unbearable once outside the closed environment of the living room or the representational frame of the theatre?
To jump from Woody Allen to Federico Fellini and John Cassavetes seems a bit weird at first, but the three films I’m busy with are connected in several ways. An artist (a critic, a theatre director and an actress, to be precise) suffers a depression, which manifests itself in failure on both personal and professional levels. These characters are all three looking for solace by retreating in their own mental world – populated by fantasies and ideals but also clouded by memory –, which collides with their social surroundings and with the artistic frame they’re working in. These people are not able to communicate or share what is most real or urgent to them – nobody believes them, nobody wants to believe them. I sense that they get in the end over it by embracing failure and a process-based artistic approach to develop concepts of sincerity, and thereby renegotiate hard distinctions between truth and illusion. All this seems to connect a mournful energy with a critique of the influential modern, Cartesian illusion that we’re all locked in our own minds, lonely towards one another’s reality and therefore inevitably lost in dishonest communication. (The film scene in the car in Bare Back Lying suddenly comes to my mind: isn’t the car nowadays the ultimate symbol for the safety and sealed nature of our private space – easy to appropriate the world, but sometimes hard to share?) Now, welcome to shared awkwardness and other artistic concepts of sincerity soaked with failure’s urgency!
Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) is one of the first movies that reflects upon the process of film making, and this in relation to productional pressure, stress and failure. Director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) suffers at once a director’s block and a midlife crisis, whereby the failures of art and life stand in a metaphorical relation. This allows Fellini to probe notions of truth and lie that are in the end perhaps irreconcilable – unless in a grotesque circus dance that concludes the film. In a resort Anselmi welcomes the producers and complete film crew but hasn’t any clear conceptions of the script yet. While everyone keeps bothering and pressuring him for information or a favour, Anselmi retreats into a mental world. Traumatic childhood recollections that still define his problematic relation to women and sexuality, his dead parents, a banquet with all the women in his life… Otto e mezzo is intercut with Anselmi’s memories and projections, a phantasmal realm – are we witnessing not only Anselmi’s mental wanderings but also the actual film that was never realised?
As long as Anselmi’s figments have the status of unwitnessed memories they are most real – at least to him. Once transformed into the charted territory of film, mediated by the gaze of the camera and viewers, they are clearly a cinematographic illusion. Maybe this issue keeps Anselmi from realising his movie: how can he ever maintain the sincerity of his thoughts and traumatic memories on the screen? Earlier, Guido has invited his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée) to visit him in the resort and she comes over but doesn’t engage in a dialogue with her husband, since she “doesn’t want to hear his lies all the time” – identifying him at once with his adulterous adventures. Whatever his thoughts and excuses are, she doesn’t want to hear them – whereupon Guido’s mental world stays again unspoken: first in a professional and now in an intimate context.
Can film mediate unspoken, even unspeakable realities and negotiate them beyond truth and lie for a witness, and moreover stay genuine towards both life and art? In a crucial scene we can witness an interesting transformation. The crew gathers to view screen tests, a revelatory moment in which Luisa decides to leave Guido. As if she finds proof in this viewing of rushes that Guido’s world, his life and thoughts, are but a lie to her. For her as a witness, the film is all but an illusion – it’s real, unbearably close to her life. But that’s not the truth seen from Guido’s perspective, which actually never makes it to a (finished) film – although the complexity of Otto e mezzo itself brilliantly proposes a cinematographic answer to this question and at once suspends it. Fellini renegotiates deep conflicts through film, Anselmi doesn’t. Interestingly, reconciliation happens in the grotesque group dance at the end of Otto e mezzo: the insertion of an ambiguous theatrical concept within the film allows what film itself can’t attain to.
The ambivalence of theatre is a different one than that of film. And the one artistic medium also functions as an observational tool that provides alternative perspectives on both the other medium and the subject matter. Similar thoughts can be developed for the inclusion of two films sequences in Bare Back Lying, although the direction is a different one: what does film bring to a theatre context? Film seems to create the possibility to trace unwitnessed moments, probe unnoticed fictions of the private and share mental worlds in an unmediated way. Film thrives on these ‘un’-prefixes and supports yet another illusion we like to cherish: that of a direct, unmediated access to life, which in reality seems to be so hard, if not impossible. Moreover, in the movie theatre we can indulge in these powerful illusions in a private manner, and that is different than in the theatre: in there the audience are co-present, they form a group of individuals in a semi-public ritual. From memories and desires to scripted dialogues, from the car and the hotel room through film into the theatre: isn’t that also where life happens, fully aware of the illusions that make it possible?
Moving and complex is John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977), which provides a backstage view upon the creation process of a theatre play to portray the actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) while she is running into a deep identity crisis. The film kicks off with a car accident in front of the theatre right after the show, whereby a girl of seventeen is killed. It triggers Myrtle Gordon’s emotional crisis that will persist on stage as well. She entertains a dialogue with the girl’s ghost, or rather with a projection of herself when she was still seventeen and unaffected by age. Performing the aging Virginia in Sarah Goode’s play The second woman (this time a concrete example of theatre within film) drives her mad: she can’t identify with the character, doesn’t want to admit that it talks about her own life as well. While Gordon is able in real life to shape her world after her fantasy and volition, keeping up her composure to meet her fans’ expectations, she collides with her persona on stage. The malleable self-image that would allow her to function in various contexts but that she seems to lack in real life, she eventually attains to on stage. Not by simply delivering her lines (as playwright Sarah Goode would like it to be), but by appropriating and altering her role night after night – thereby driving the whole crew mad. That she “gets her kicks out of acting”, that “performing is her life and all there is”, as Gordon says at one point, is at once her strength and her tragedy. “I have lost the reality of the reality… I’m not myself.”
The closing scene of the play is a duo with actor and Gordon’s ex-lover Maurice Adams (John Cassavetes) and the site where Virginia/Myrtle fights her demons in front of a witnessing audience. One evening she resolves her issue with the scene stating on stage: “You’re a wonderful actor Maurice. We must never forget, this is only a play!” It’s only fiction, it’s a lie – but oh so real, as the claim allows Myrtle to protect her illusions in life. How real metaphors are: they cut through flesh, they are an inextricable part of our lives. Myrtle’s character truly and really affects her state of being, the persona doesn’t exhaust the person but rather unleashes and reveals the idiosyncrasies of the latter. In Opening night this ‘metaphoric realism’ reinforces moreover the ‘traumatic realism’ Gordon suffers off stage since the death of the girl – at one point she has to destroy the figment that haunts and threatens her. When confronted with Myrtle Gordon’s complex emotional life, you understand why she refuses on stage to identify with a few generic lines that claim to convey a certain truth about aging.
The blunt essentialising of altogether blurry and hard to grasp emotions is what Cassavetes’ cinema resists (as Ray Carney observed) – and which finds a symbol in Myrtle’s poetics as an actress. Both Cassavetes and Myrtle Gordon linger on the surface, on the complex, fragmented and distorted outside of people, faces, gestures and events. In film and on stage they embrace confusion, they make the conflict between person and persona overt, look for the reality of its symptoms and side-effects. In theatre the witnessing audience pushes this phenomenon in the realm of urgency, a quality Cassavetes searches for in film as well. Myrtle’s propensity or urge to reformulate her text and gestures every night in order to cope with the banality of a deeper truth, is maybe not unlike some of the longer speeches in Bare Back Lying, especially “I am leaving”. There will never be enough words to get under the surface, and yet this state of being stuck in a muddle of words is as real and truly genuine – it’s life that permeates the theatre. Or take the scattered dialogue of the in-between-talk, where the clumsy appropriation of truisms about the mediatised and global life of artists slides from the fake slickness of images into the sincere superficiality of life.
On the actual New York opening night Myrtle resolves, or better suspends the closing duo with Maurice in a different way. Improvising beyond the lines, Myrtle seeks to exhaust both her fellow actor and his character, driving Maurice to a point of inconvenient exposure and vulnerability on stage – including a weird choreography of (non-)collaboration. Cassavetes underscores it by shooting the entire scene in real time for about ten minutes – common on stage, but rather unusual in film. Observing the audience in the film, they don’t seem bored or annoyed by the clumsiness on stage – they receive it as a comedy and probably they’re also touched by the genuine presence and acting of the performers. The awkwardness is always already shared in life, it’s the stage that transforms it into a caring complicity.
Dear Simone, I’m drifting, not sure if my ramblings still circle around Bare Back Lying – my thoughts do, but is there a way around them appearing awkward when exposed in writing?
Sincerely yours,
Jeroen