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INSTED@Amsterdam Fringe Festival 2008

In September 2008 three INSTED members were scheduled to play their shows during the Amsterdam Fringe Festival. Oystein Ulsberg Brager (NO/UK) and Philip Thorne (DE/UK) and their company Imploding Fictions were supposed to have their new show Now you see it, now you don’t premiere at the festival, but due to an injury the show was unfortunately cancelled. David Overend (UK) and his group Liars performed their show Demises.

In collaboration with these directors INSTED initiated the INSTED@ Amsterdam Fringe project: a letter exchange between the young directors and the Fringe audience. Oystein and David started writing e-mails to eachother about the preparations for their performances during the summer of 2008. Philip also digitally exchanged thoughts with Sanja Mitrovic, also a young director who was at the time rehearsing a new performance for the BITEF festival in Belgrade. In the letters the young directors discuss their way of working and the starting points for their new shows. They also speak about the doubts and hesitations that come up during the rehearsal process. Together they come to interesting ideas and insights to fundamental questions.

These letter, that give a unique insight in the rehearsal process and the experiences of the young directors, were available in a booklet for the Fringe audience in theatres in Amsterdam. Directly after each performance INSTED hosted a discussion with the audience, in which we also tried to get an audience member to write a new letter to the directors. The whole idea of getting the audience involved in the letter exchange unfortunately didn’t work out that well, but we did end up with interesting discussions and a marvellous account of the train of thoughts of these young directors.

Below you’ll find some extracts of the letters and the complete letter we asked David to write to his Fringe audience.

A year ago, just after graduating, we were asked to make a short 15 minute scratch piece for a little London theatre. We were very interested in Tommy Cooper. (...) We talked a lot about comedy and death and laughter and magic and facades and showmanship and failure and confetti. We talked about seeing and not seeing, what would happen if you messed up the chronology of build up and punch-line. We talked about the cycle of a joke from initial laughter to running gag to becoming a deadly bore to finding its way back into some kind of warped humour. (It is the latter we wanted to create.)

It turned out to be a success and we both felt that at some suitable point in the future it might be interesting to develop these 15 minutes into something more substantial.

So when the Fringe Festival asked us whether we had anything in the pipeline we could show in Amsterdam the answer was an instant: “Yep. We have this thing about clowns and failure and”... and so Oystein and I are sitting in a rehearsal room saying Let's start. Start what exactly? A rehearsal process. For a piece called 'Now you see it, now you don't'. I don't yet know much more about it. Only that I will be performing in it. It's still all beginnings and no riverbed in sight. I love beginnings. And I find them deeply terrifying. 

Beginnings are difficult, but inspiring, too, as they are open ended. You never know where you might find yourself at the end. The logic of these words - "beginning" and "end" - implies some sort of linear relationship between them. Everything that begins has to meet its end. But I think the journey between the two is impossible to predict, so "end" always remains an abstract possibility, and for most part you don't know which particular end is yours to meet.    

Last summer, while staying in Belgrade, I found myself thinking how I would like to make a performance about the certain historical phenomenon - the idea of "bad guys" of history, an entire nation perceived as criminal or devious because of the things which were perpetrated in their name. This is what happened to both Serbian and German people in their recent histories. My aim was to hopefully outline a narrative in which a "child-like game" would end up in a sort of "no-escape game". (...) And, again, the beginnings. The best is when they just happen.

P.S. I was wondering, could you tell me, as an ex-magician, how would you set up a no-escape situation in the theatre?

I like what you say about the sequential logic of so called beginnings and ends. It reminds me of Godard's quote 'every film must have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.'

I'm half German. A couple of years back some politician exclaimed that he was 'proud to be German', which triggered a bit of a furore. It started what was called the 'Patriotismus Debatte', and for a couple of weeks the question was raised in politics and the media, whether it was ok to be proud to be German. (...)At times the English national conscience can be quite bloated and full of itself. People find it ok for example for Tony Blair to say: 'England is the best country in the world. We know it, and secretly, everybody else knows it too' (quote from his last election campaign). Transfer that quote to Germany and it'd sound pretty sinister! I think by working its way through a trauma Germany has found a much more humble, self-reflective national identity. I wish there'd be more reflection and less self-grandeur in England.

...You asked me how a magician would create a 'No escape situation' in a theatre... Well... For himself? Or for the audience? There have of course been several acts based on creating an impossible escape situation for the performer (from which he's miraculously supposed to free himself). This is actually a genre in magic, it's called 'Escapology.' (...)I assume you are asking a magician to set up a no escape situation for the audience though... Hmmm... Excluding any trick which includes borrowing wads of money I do not yet have an answer...

I didn’t know you were German. I enjoyed reading your opinion about the situation in England. Sometimes I miss that sort of directness – it’s not about taking the sides, it’s about taking the responsibilities. Escapism is also a way of not facing up to things, of running away, not being ready to self–reflect.

Times and again it seems to me like I became fully aware of my nationality only after I started living abroad. With the recent arrest of Radovan Karadzic, I was again put in the position to “be an ambassador of my country”. Funny position that, not the one you chose for yourself of your own free will, and yet everybody expects an opinion.

I think you got the point there in the letter. I’m indeed not nostalgic about certain periods, about some mythical “golden years”, and I’m not trying to re–create history. I’m more interested in the idea of times when the distinctions between bad and good seemed obvious, allowing us to play (to be) heroes. (...) It’s nice when these categories get subverted in cartoons or films, and we can still laugh about it all. But it’s a different story when “being truly good” and “being truly bad” becomes the reality.

I performed an unintentional feat of slapstick attempting to carry a heavy amplifier down the stairs to our rehearsal basement. I slipped up on the top of the stairway (it had just been raining) and landed down the bottom. The upshot of it is that I have a fractured leg and we have had to suspend rehearsals and cancel the show in Amsterdam! 

Before our rehearsals got prematurely interrupted we'd been working on a dramaturgy of sudden reversals. The show was to be constructed as a playful overturning of expectations and assumed conditions. (...) Our show was to balance dangerously on this fictive and illusory artifice which is always close to giving away the reality it is concealing.

There is something ruefully funny about creating a show about failure and failing. Deliberately flirting with risk and reality, and then being made aware of fucking reality in another way. Creating a slippery landscape of tricks and fiction and then physically slipping up.

The first and perhaps most obvious thing is that I don't know you. I am about to write something maybe intelligent, maybe in depth - or maybe not, as the case may be - and maybe revealing; of my work processes, thought processes, ideas, opinions and mistakes, to a person of whom I have absolutely no idea who they are.

Lying is much easier, because it is not determined by your emotional state. A lie can be rehearsed and reproduced, fixed, saved and constant. Honesty is bound to be inconstant, fluctuating and new, because it is a thing of the moment.

In art I wonder whether the worst lying happens in theatre and live performance? (...) In this theatre performers are hidden by their characters and the stage is hidden by the setting. Isn't this is a pretty big lie to tell?

You asked me to tell you about myself. Well I'm not going to. Because I think the reason I'm a director and not a performer is that I don't, or won't, or can't, consciously put myself into my work. (...) I think that on a stage (and these letters are a kind of stage), I would rather stay hidden and let the performers, or the words, stand alone. Does that make sense?

As theatremakers we are faced with a rather complex dilemma: Whatever we claim to be or not to be, we are lying. We are liars per se. Everything we exclaim from the realm of the stage is rendered a lie by the context in which it is spoken. And so, when we admit to lie this becomes a lie. And therefore, our lies are true.

Doesn't the space, the red velvet or the black painted walls, the arrangement of chairs, the piece of paper in your pocket with “Ticket” printed on it, make up the material to tell us this is all a lie? (...) There is nothing that puts me in the right frame of mind to be lied to as the plush, shimmering waves of crimson drapery.

I still maintain that the worst lying happens in the theatre. Because the entire mechanism - the comfortable seats, the carefully designed set, the coherence of the characters and the setting - all serve one purpose: to transport the audience into an illusory time and place, as the privileged observers of other peoples' lives.

I wonder if clowns are the ultimate theatrical performers - make-up, a ridiculous outfit and a repertoire of jokes and tricks. (...) Starting with the theatrical illusion strikes me as an excellent way to get under the skin of what the modern condition is really about.

With Liars I'm exploring something else: how little theatrical illusion we can get away with. (...) I have a feeling my work is going to move out of the theatre building before long.

Philip and I often say that we make sushi-theatre. When faced with the argument “Why do you make something difficult that I don’t understand, why don’t you make something easy that everyone understands?”, we tend to reply: Do you demand that all sushi restaurants stop making sushi and start serving McDonald burgers instead?”

The artwork is not art directly because of its relation to society (or any other context it might find itself in), the object (material or immaterial) always becomes art in relation to its context only indirectly: It is made into an artwork through being interpreted as and viewed as art. (...) In other words: In the darkness of the night, when the tourists and school classes have gone home and the night watchman has left the moonlit hallways for a moment; there is no art left in the gallery. 

Currently I assume that the readers, my potential audience, are intelligent, knowledgeable and linguistically masterful. A simple flyer-text, wouldn’t it assume a lack of intelligence with the reader? Shouldn’t the text reflect the performance as accurately as possible, to ensure that people know what they are attending, and that you reach the right audience for your show? My mum disagreed. (...)My dad, who thinks like a businessman, agreed with my female relatives and talked to me at length about the market; about how advertising should have a simple message, be striking, hit home, etc. etc.

I HATE writing these things (flyer-texts – LB). They're at once meaningless - bearing little or no relation to the actual work, and presenting a selective, reductive and basic version of a performance that has taken months or years to develop - and at the same time absolutely crucial to the success of the show. A misplaced word or a clumsy repetition might just be the thing that dissuades a potential audience member. As you say, without an audience there isn't any art.

I think that when I make work I don't start with the audience in mind other than striving to make work that I would like to see. (...) The show I'm bringing to Amsterdam marks the start of a new direction in my work - away from playwriting and acting towards spontaneous creation and acknowledging the illusions of performance. (...) This is a natural evolution for me, and I think that if everyone makes art that genuinely emerges from and builds on previous work then that integrity will always be felt by an audience. We just need to get them through the door first.

You said in your last email that the first thing a theatremaker needs to do is get the audience through the door. And I whole-heartedly agreed with that. For a while. But only untill I discovered that there is another thing which preceeds that. A rather important thing. VERY important, actually. Essential, one might say. The first and most important thing, I discovered, is turning up yourself. There must be an artist and an artwork before there is any real point in talking about attracting an audience...

We thought there would be an artwork. There still is the idea of an artwork. And there is an artist of course, there are even two. Or, at least there is the idea of two artists. But even if the idea, and the psychological reality and the historic reality and the future promise of these two artists and their following corpus of existing previous and imagined future artworks exist, in this moment there is an unexpected lack of "artist" in the equation. (...)

It's the definition of tragicomic. Tragic, because we've been forced to cancel our project and the trip to Amsterdam. Comic, because he was wearing clown make up when it happened. Yes, I'm not kidding.

To start up the short discussion INSTED hosted after each show, we asked David to write a letter once again, only this time to the audience. After every show and discussion David changed his letter, or added to it. This is a compilation of his three letters.

INSTED asked me to write you a letter so this is it. I haven’t been here before. I don’t know any of you. So I have little idea about who I’m writing to but I’ll give it a go.

I wanted to make a show that had performers instead of actors, improvisation instead of a script, and an empty stage instead of an elaborate stage set. I’m a bit bored with tradtitional theatre these days and I don’t often engage with it very much.

I wanted to make a show that acknowledged the lies that theatre normally tells.

So my work has lately been characterised by four ‘rules’ that I have made for myself. Much like a kind of ‘dogma manifesto’ for the theatre:

1.         A distrust of theatrical trickery.

2.         A prioritisation of present text, rather than text that has been written down before hand.

3.         Performers, not actors.

4.         Real time, real space experiences.

(And, added after the second performance and discussion:)

5.         Rules are made to be broken.

I try to make theatre that I think I’ll like. I have to be honest, 90% of the plays I see leave me cold and feeling like theatre is shit. I’m not saying we are revolutionising theatre with this performance, but I’m pleased with how it has turned out, and I’m confident that we’re pushing the boundaries of what theatre can and should be. I hope you agree.

Most theatre reinforces a strict separation between the audience and the performance space. This show brings you closer to us, on the stage. So everything is in the same time and space (the act of improvising that is, of telling stories). But there is still a division line between you and us and as of yet that hasn’t been crossed. What do you make of that?

Last night we were asked what would happen if an audience member got up on stage and joined in. I decided that the reason that wouldn’t work is that the performers on stage have worked out the show together, learned how to work as an improvisation team. That’s a history, a process we have gone through as a company, and the audience are here to hopefully enjoy and engage with that. But as the audience you don’t share that history.

This is all I wanted to say for now. See you again I hope. If you really liked Demises why not come back – it’s a different show every night!

P.S. 1 (first day) Amsterdam is great, I can’t believe I’ve never been here before! 

P.S. 2 (second day) I love this city more and more every day. Thanks Amsterdam, you’re great!

P.S. 3 (third and last day) Amsterdam is now officially my favourite city. Nobody should ever go to the zoo unless they have eaten lots of mushrooms!