Impossible to work

For the last two saturdays I participated in a workshop taught by the members of Lucky Pierre at Links Hall. It was a good workshop, filled with a very diverse crowd. Well, as diverse of a crowd as one might expect to find in a performance workshop. It was a great experience. Primarily because I laughed a lot on both saturdays. I learned things too. Since the workshop happened in two parts, I’m going to discuss it in two separate posts.

The first saturday began with a structured freewriting exercise. This was interesting in that we were all given photographs and instructed to write various things about them (primarily related to what is going on in the image, what was happening before and what was happening after) and then watched the snippet of a film about Patty Hearst and the SLA whence came all the images. The first viewing was without sound, then without picture, and finally with sound and picture. During these viewing we made lists of things we had noticed according to 5 separate categories (including Time, Text, Movement).

There was much passing about of paper, much uninformed selection of pieces of text. And from that, we wrote the things we had selected on cards, drew a picture and then went to think up a one minute performance based around what was on our cards.

I really liked this exercise. Partially because I like being forced to make something up with very little time and with seemingly nonsensical information to go on. I think of this as a controlled method to arrive at something like Breton¹ was aiming for. Not exactly automatisme psychique pur, but it’s in the same ballpark.
If this post has already made you hit your limit for talking about thinkgs like surrealist creative practices, stop reading now. You will miss out on self-flagellation and an imaginary man.

So we all went off and put together 1 minute performances. One included an imaginary and vaguely Samoan man (which will be important later. For the time being ask yourself, as the people in the workshop were, if you’d rather be friends with a technically proficient organist who appears vaguely Samoan or a real live white boy who can only play the organ so well but is very charismatic and inspired in his playing, or something like that).

After we all did our performances, the cards were mixed together and we were put into groups of two or three (I was in the group of three). and told to take our pieces and make a 1 minute piece of out of them. Here’s the run down on the individual performances in my group:

• A woman is being pulled violently by herself, throwing herself on the ground and then bringing herself to sit at a table and stumble over a few words a la newscaster.
• Another consisted of a woman crawling around the floor in a large circle repeating the words “bad news, burning” (I think).
• Mine was based around a piece of text given to me about driving around taking photographs of houses, trying to catch someone peeking out, the movement in a shot in the movie, the word Riviera, and panhandling to get on a bus. Movement was in an L-shaped repeating pattern along a diagonal with a simple repeated text.

My only gripe about my group is that we spent too much time talking, deliberating, looking for intersections in our individual performances. This was good in that it helped me to see what we were all doing better, but it took away nearly all of our time to rehearse. On the other hand, it was good to have no idea what I was doing. But I wasn’t happy with our product. We recycled my text and coupled it with “bad news” to link up with the newscasterishness of the other performance. This seemed like a good idea when talking, but did not work at all in practice. It seemed overthought to me while we were doing it, and was noted as not so good in feedback. There were so many other performances that were good too, but I can’t really remember them well enough to recount them. I remember there were a fair number of more tradtional impromptu scenes than I had expected. They made the more abstract/nonsensical/arty stuff seem all the more abstract, nonsensical and arty by contrast.
All that done we took the end of our time to sing. I’m pretty sure nobody in the room thought of him or herself as a singer, which was, I believe, the point. We were handed sheet music with a not so easy (but no so hard) to hum tune and then had to sing it as a group. It was hard, it was uncomfortable and most importantly, it was going to come back. Not this exact piece, but rest assured, we were all forced to sing again later.

1. I think that surrealist approaches are very fruitful, even if I think Breton and his group failed in their mission because of their lack of readability as literature and refinement (past the stage of automatism). Don’t get me wrong, I would never dream of calling the work of  Péret or many (if any) other members of the group unrefined. On the contrary, the biggest problem I have with Breton’s group is their desire to create a Revolution through art that often demands a sturdy foundation in theory (at least Breton’s own theories) to really understand (particularly true in the case of the literary works). How proletarian is that? Michaux put the smack down on the surrealist group (for a different reason I beleve) in a short essay from his early days, but that is for another post.  [back]