Welcome to my blog..


"We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When I started this blog in 2011, I was in a time of transition in my life between many identities - that of Artistic Director of a company (Apocryphal Theatre) to independent writer/director/artist/teacher and also between family identity, as I discover a new family that my grandfather's name change at the request of his boss in WWII hid from view - a huge Hungarian-Slovak contingent I met in 2011. Please note in light of this the irony of the name of my recently-disbanded theatre company. This particular transition probably began in the one month period (Dec. 9, 2009-Jan. 7, 2010) in which I received a PhD, my 20 year old cat died on my father's birthday and then my father, who I barely knew, died too. I was with him when he died and nothing has been the same since. This blog is tracing the more conscious elements of this journey and attempt to fill in the blanks. I'm also writing a book about my grandmothers that features too. I'd be delighted if you joined me. (Please note if you are joining mid-route, that I assume knowledge of earlier posts in later posts, so it may be better to start at the beginning for the all singing, all dancing fun-fair ride.) In October 2011, I moved back NYC after living in London for 8 years and separated from my now ex-husband, which means unless you want your life upended entirely don't start a blog called Somewhere in Transition. In November 2011, I adopted a rescue cat named Ugo. He is lovely. As of January 2012, I began teaching an acting class at Hunter College, which is where one of my grandmothers received a scholarship to study acting, but her parents would not let her go. All things come round…I began to think it may be time to stop thinking of my life in transition when in June 2012 my stepfather Tom suddenly died. Now back in the U.S. for a bit, I notice, too, my writing is more overtly political, no longer concerned about being an expat opining about a country not my own. I moved to my own apartment in August 2012 and am a very happy resident of Inwood on the top tip of Manhattan where the skunks and the egrets roam in the last old growth forest on the island.

I am now transitioning into being married again with a new surname (Barclay-Morton). John is transitioning from Canada to NYC and as of June 2014 has a green card. So transition continues, but now from sad to happy, from loss to love...from a sense of alienation to a sense of being at home in the world.

As of September 2013 I started teaching writing as an adjunct professor at Fordham University, which I have discovered I love with an almost irrational passion. While was blessed for the opportunity, after four years of being an adjunct, the lack of pay combined with heavy work load stopped working, so have transferred this teaching passion to private workshops in NYC and working with writers one on one, which I adore. I will die a happy person if I never have to grade an assignment ever again. As of 2018, I also started leading writing retreats to my beloved Orkney Islands. If you ever want two weeks that will restore your soul and give you time and space to write, get in touch. I am leading two retreats this year in July and September.

I worked full time on the book thanks to a successful crowd-funding campaign in May 2014 and completed it at two residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Wisdom House in summer 2015. I have done some revisions and am shopping it around to agents and publishers now, along with a new book recently completed.

I now work full-time as a freelance writer, writing workshop leader, coach, editor and writing retreat leader. Contact me if you are interested in any of these services.

Not sure when transition ends, if it ever does. As the saying goes, the only difference between a sad ending and a happy ending is where you stop rolling the film.

For professional information, publications, etc., go to my linked in profile and website for Barclay Morton Editorial & Design. My Twitter account is @wilhelminapitfa. You can find me on Facebook under my full name Julia Lee Barclay-Morton. More about my grandmothers' book: The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick & Jani

In 2017, I launched a website Our Grandmothers, Our Selves, which has stories about many people's grandmothers. Please check it out. You can also contact me through that site.

In May, I directed my newest play, On the edge of/a cure, and have finally updated my publications list, which now includes an award-winning chapbook of my short-story White shoe lady, which you can find on the sidebar. I also have become a certified yoga instructor in the Kripalu lineage. What a year!

And FINALLY, I have created a website, which I hope you will visit, The Unadapted Ones. I will keep this blog site up, since it is a record of over 8 years of my life, but will eventually be blogging more at the website, so if you want to know what I am up to with my writing, teaching, retreats and so on, the site is the place to check (and to subscribe for updates). After eight years I realized, no, I'm never turning into One Thing. So The Unadapted Ones embraces the multiplicity that comprises whomever I am, which seems to always be shifting. That may in fact be reality for everyone, but will speak for myself here. So, do visit there and thanks for coming here, too. Glad to meet you on the journey...

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Postdramatic Theatre and the Psychic Backstage

Have been at conference for over 12 hours and am fried.  Paper and presentation went well, as did a lot of other people's - very interesting, very international group of people.  High quality, low pretension, excellent combination.

A friend and member of Apocryphal told me today "You're you again."  I know what he means.  It's been a long fucking time.  A really long time.

In case you are interested in postdramatic theater and political theater, here's part of my paper.  The citations are all screwed up because I cadged most of it from PhD thesis, so if you are really interested, get in touch with the British Library and they can get you a copy of the whole thing...The writing in this blog, but also the paper below is subject to copyright and I ask you do not replicate it anywhere without my permission.


Postdramatic Theatre and the Psychic Backstage (excerpts)– Julia Lee Barclay © 2011

Who were Brecht and Artaud before they became 'Brecht' and 'Artaud' and can this kind of question lead to a new type of politically engaged theatre?  Whilst more overtly political theatre, in the epic tradition, concerns itself with how power operates in the realm of what can be seen and understood in a rational, materialist form, the postdramatic theatre, in the way it operates in my own and other theatre companies identified by Lehmann, opens a door into the psychic backstage of thought, experience and pre-existing social structures.  What I propose to show in this presentation is how engaging with the way the gears of the machine are constructed, even more so than the visible parts of the machine itself, can be a political act.   

I propose a politically and philosophically-engaged theatrical practice that tessellates the Brechtian and Artaudian traditions, wherein the undermining of the meaning-making machinery with its implicit questioning of universalizing language structures does not have to be done only by an appeal to bodily experience, but can engage that meaning-making machinery itself.

My first encounter with the tension between the Brechtian and Artaudian line of influence was directing Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade (1965).  The conceit of this play is that the Marquis de Sade is directing a play about the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, which he has written for the inmates of Charenton, where he himself is incarcerated, in Napoleonic France. When I directed this play in 1986 at university, I wrote a thesis about the challenge of remaining true to the Artaudian undercurrent represented by Sade and the mental institution and the Brechtian analysis implied by the alienation techniques, such as signage for each scene, interventions into the ‘action’ and the lines given to Marat (Barclay 1986). Whilst Weiss later in life chose a Marxist interpretation of his text and resisted Brooke’s more Artaudian staging, the play itself does not fall on either side of the line easily. The uneasy tension set up between Brecht and Artaud (which arguably echo the tension between Marx and Nietzsche) continue to pervade my work.
           
The first show I directed at university was The Serpent, written by Jean-Claude van Itallie, and created by Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater.  One of Chaikin’s goals for this production is relevant to the way in which the dual influence of Artaud and Brecht can be successfully tessellated:

         I think the theater could erase and repudiate the icons. It could do this by making them visible, by showing people they are the face of a body, and by showing the body of which they are the face.
                                                            (Chaikin 1984: 96)

The Serpent was called a ceremony by The Open Theater and works with the mythologies/icons of Judeo-Christian religion as they related in the 1960s to current political crises, especially the eternal sense in the US of losing its innocence, as it related to the Garden of Eden story.
           
My practical research (in labs in NYC and London with Apocryphal) into unearthing the “reality grid of right-now” relates to Chaikin’s strategy of repudiation of the icons by “making them visible.” The desire to show people that “they are the face of a body” relates directly to Artaud’s desire that theatre connect the audience to forces larger than themselves, whereas “by showing the body of which they are the face” relates directly to Brecht’s desire that we see clearly that of which we are a part and therefore help sustain and create. This then links back to Artaud’s concern that:

...rarely does the debate rise to a social level or do we question our social or ethical system. Out theatre never goes so far as to ask itself whether by chance this social or ethical system is iniquitous or not.
(1981: 30-31)

The cut-up method offers another strategy for getting outside of the strangle-hold of what Burroughs refers to as the “Word Virus” (Burroughs 1986: 47) and can make manifest the linguistic mechanisms of reality-creation. Burroughs says in an interview after talking about how when on the street we are always seeing in cut-ups, signs, newspapers, overheard conversations, sounds, visual material:

Either-or thinking is just not accurate thinking. That’s not the way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one the great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement towards breaking this down.
(Burroughs & Gysin 1982: 5-6)

Burroughs’ cut-up methods perhaps answer a call Artaud makes for theatrical language:

To make metaphysics out of spoken language is to make language convey what it does not normally convey. That is to use it in a new, exceptional and unusual way, to give it its full, physical shock potential, to split it up and distribute it actively in space, to treat inflexions in a completely tangible manner and restore their shattering power and really to manifest something; to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one might also say alimentary, sources, against its origins as a hunted beast, and finally to consider language in the form of Incantation.
(Artaud 1981: 35 emphasis mine)

Like Burroughs, Artaud sees the need to use language in alternative ways to save language from “its origins as a hunted beast.”

...

Another example of a way to tessellate Brecht and Artaud is the use of what I refer to as  'the grid', which is engaged to activate language, gesture, objects and the performance space itself in a way that owes a debt to the lineage of Artaud, Cage, Burroughs/Gysin and Foreman but for the purposes of engaging such overtly political 'grids' as gender, class, religion and race, in a way that owes a debt to the Brecht, Beck/Malina, Chaikin and Gómez-Peña traditions.  In my work in NYC and with Apocryphal in London, the cutting-up technique happens into live performance wherein written and spoken text, as well as gestures, sounds, space and objects are “split up and distribute[d]...actively in space.”

I will now ask for a few volunteers to demonstrate one way in which this can work (did levels of address workshop, then….

Implicit in this work is the idea of the witness, each player – as you just saw – is witnessing their own actions as well as acting.  This relates the grid, which is arguably a more Artaudian concept, with the eyewitness of Brecht, in which he gives instructions for the actor to report an event as a witness to that event.  Theron and I will now attempt to demonstrate this with a brief reading from Apocryphal’s final production, Besides, you lose your soul or the History of Western Civilization.  The text was inspired by the last line of interview with an FBI guy who said torturing people was a bad idea because you get bad information and ‘Besides you lose your soul’ and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s observation in a talk at Central that the individual soul was a Western construct.

....
[You can get a copy of Besides, you lose your soul...by clicking on title in publications list on blog. ]




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