Last post from London...at least for a while

Movers arrived, albeit 7 hours late, and I did final packing for the plane.  The lateness of movers finally pushed me over the edge and I thought I was going to break down completely but did not.  Thanks to friends who stuck around and showed up in and between the saga, especially Cath and Sal.  I am very lucky in the friendship department.  Not so much with the movers, who had misspelled my name on the labels, etc.  My confidence is at an all time low with them, but I had no choice at this stage but to hope they would rectify everything and the stuff will make it eventually to NYC.  It's nerve-wracking.

Said goodbye to more dear people in my life and just feel like I will never stop crying.  Also said goodbye to Bill, my husband from whom I am separated and that was about as much fun as I'm sure you can imagine it was.

Weirdly enough today, another rabbit appeared, this one a white albino rabbit to compliment the black one.  Others witnessed it, thank God/dess or I too would doubt my sanity.  While I freaked out all day, they placidly munched grass and plants in the back garden.

So, the boxes are out of my hands - all 53 of them - and now I am off to bed.  Up early to fly to NYC via Iceland (!)  Good night and please wish me safe passage and I wish you many blessings.

Packed and waiting for movers

I'm basically packed, movers show up tomorrow morning.  I am mortified because they insist on packing the stuff so everything is in hectic piles rather than neat little boxes.

Today heard the rabbit but saw three large black crows, which are powerful and strange creatures when close.

Packed and arranged things all day long, going through bits of paper covering many years of my life and running into two sets of wedding photos.  I feel like a semi-tragic sit-com consequently...or just kind of pathetic.

On the other hand, I've plowed through and basically ready for the movers.  Wish I had someone here with me but forgot to ask people until yesterday and most folks are busy on a Thursday morning, which makes sense.

Hoping I can sleep now.  After all was basically done, I sat on my bed and cried and cried.  Again.

Leaving is hard, it doesn't matter where you're leaving to...and so many goodbyes, and to having a back garden and crows when meditating and the NHS and lots of good friends.  I will have amazing friends in NYC, too, people I felt horrendous leaving 8 years ago.  So it's not just a tale of loss and woe by any means, but still there is loss, too.

Wish me luck with the movers, these kinds of things pretty much terrify me.  Really scary stuff doesn't but things like: movers in my house messing with my stuff truly freaks me the fuck out.

OK, to bed now in hopes of sleep...

packing induced radio silence

I have so much packing to do right now, and even worse, not packing, to do I don't think I will be writing much here for a few days.

The movers have to pack the stuff, which is making it harder as I can't throw things in boxes and have scads of loose papers.

Filled four huge garbage bags with clothes tonight - will give to charity shops.

Finally finished most all paperwork today, but that took the day, so in barely controlled panic about the remaining organizing.  I also can't figure out what clothes to pack or ship, etc...

The house looks like a bomb went off and no nice packed boxes in a corner to give me a sense of anything happening except chaos and piles of things...plus can't figure out how the stuff, when packed will even fit in my new place long enough to figure out what should go in storage.  Hoping I can somehow mark boxes as they are packed, but not sure it will be that logical.

Anyway, you can see why my writing this for three days in a row could get tedious.  I'm exhausted now so off to bed.

Hard to believe that for about 3/4 of the day I felt calm and like things were going smoothly.  As promised in previous post, I will always find something to worry about, and this post does not disappoint.

To bed...

Moving and saying goodbye

It's about paperwork, throwing out paper, saying goodbye to people I love and crying a lot, finding home for some beloved furniture I cannot bring with me...and throwing out yet more paper.

Did I mention the paper involved?

There's a lot of paper.  Just threw out 5 bags full in about 1/2 hour.

From now to Thursday morning, it's a straight shot of packing and taking some short breaks to meet with good friends.  And a few more pieces of paper and phone calls.

The syllabus is done, the paper is given, some personal commitments have been fulfilled and now I just have to hope: wired money makes it from one bank to the other, the person subletting me his studio does not spontaneously combust, that the movers show up and aren't some weird online fraud with people who answer the phones (unlikely, but my fears no no end right now), that my plane makes it to Iceland and then to NYC without any major issues...like the vast majority of planes do...

That I can actually sleep sometimes rather than just Fucking Freak Out about...whatever...because here's the sad truth.  What I'm worrying about is 99% of the time a total red herring.  I know this because when whatever the thing I was worrying about is resolved, Voila as if my magic: something Else to worry about.

The rabbit is still here, just by the way - that is comforting.

My landlords are happy for any furniture to stay, which is great, so if friends want some things OK, if not, no worries.  That is good.

Now, it's time to chill out as I did some pretty intense personal work today after having a Lovely going away party the night before hosted by my amazing friends Bib and Alison.  Was heartbreaking saying goodbye to some people and I envied in advance Bib's huge house (which she shares with many others), as I will be moving into a very Small studio.  But it's right next to a park!

I have another lovely friend in NYC who booked a car for me from Newark to her house the night I arrive, which is great.  I am threading the needle between the need to budget and the need to make it through this thing without my back out.  As my stuff may take 5-10 weeks to follow me, I need to bring enough stuff to last.  So that means extra bags...

OK, so enough babbling...I forgot to post yesterday so just wanted to check in.  Thanks for reading and be well...

Final day of conference

Took a yoga class this morning, so missed early sessions of conference, but was there to hear a last paper and be part of a final discussion.  It had a good international feeling, and so feel glad to have participated in it.

Then saw some friends and came back home to begin working on the syllabus for the class I will be teaching soon at CUNY.

My heart was pounding cartoon like last night, and I realized that was because I drank too damn much coffee.  Today cut back and feeling better.  Also, yoga was good to remind me that breathing is possible and a good thing.

Oh, also wired money to NYC and that was weirdly stressful.  everything has a sense of unreality to it and I find myself wondering: will the movers show up?  will the money make it to NYC?  will my sublet be there?  will I ever finish packing?

Etc.

But I feel relatively peaceful in this moment, so instead of continuing to rehearse my fears will give myself a moment to feel the calm sense of having gotten a lot done, knowing the rest will get done and all is well.  Even if I do freak out anyway.

Can't summarize conference now, but will hopefully write about it later.

Now to some peaceful time with myself after a day of relentless socializing.

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. ]

conference...

no words from me, but I heard lots today at Postdramatic Theatre as/or Political Theatre Conference...finishing paper tonight, before that saying goodbye to more people.

In case you want to know the fun times we have in academic conferences, here's the abstract for my paper (and now you can understand after a day of such things, why I would be tired...and I haven't even given my paper yet...):

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.  I will discuss how engaging with the way the gears of the machine are constructed, even more so than the visible parts of the machine, can be a political act. 

I will 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.

An example given will be Apocryphal Theatre's use of '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.

good-night!