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Dear Stephen,
We’ve agreed to reflect on our work together thus far with a special emphasis on how Goat Island might have influenced the work we make. It feels lucky, presumptuous and precocious for us to be here to address this topic, and in many ways I don’t feel capable of the task. But this is a question we get a lot and so I appreciate the opportunity to access the archive and try to better work it out for ourselves.
We chose to do this in the form of personal letters. We’ve decided to write three letters each, one by way of introduction, one reflecting on Goat Island, and one on our work together. Letters are an important aspect of the making process we discovered together, so we here use that aspect of our process to make this ponderance of what our work is right now, and what of that work we can trace to Goat Island. It’s important to say that we have other strong influences, some shared with Goat Island, some not. I could go on about that, but we don’t have the time. It is true that our relationship with the folks in Goat Island has been very important. For the language we used to start working together, for ideas about how work is made which emphasize the journey. They provided the inspiration to start and then to go on, and that’s what I’d like to try and talk about.
The first thing to say about Goat Island is that they are good to their community. I have run around in various parts of their community, and am always impressed at the stories of support and kindness the group is often credited with. For us, it was Bryan, Karen, Mark, Lin and Matthew that came to the first ever Cupola Bobber work-in-progress, and they sat with us for more than an hour talking about it when it was done. They have created opportunities for us, counseled us, and most importantly, made us work harder by being present a neighborhood away working harder than that. CJ, their company manager for many years and Karen’s husband, has been an amazingly tireless resource and champion for us, somehow providing just the right advice at just the right time and always encouraging and pushing us. This is a community we feel warm in, that we’ve been able to rely on, and one to which we hope to continue to contribute our support, energy, and work.
And this part of this letter is titled: With my arms I don’t think I could touch the sky. (1)
In the Goat Island writing called
Letter To a Young Practitioner (2), Karen said; get a pen that flows well, invent seven ways to exit your chair, Bryan talked about the integrity of making together, Mark told us he is still preparing, and Matthew pointed out that their attempt is likely a failure of help, but that it is still of value. And then Lin said: “I did it by pooling my energy with others so that together we had enough usable heat to make a performance. But then, I saw the work of Pina Bausch, Tadeuz Kantor, and Tadashi Suzuki. I needed to work harder, much harder. These artists did not stop where I stopped. They kept moving. And they ran so far that the distance covered in their performances, caught me up and overtook me. The only way I could make work of this distance was by taking time.”
I saw them read their
Letter To a Young Practitioner in the early summer of 1999 at school. I had just seen one of their performances for the first time, The Sea & Poison. They were reading their Letter as part of a promotional event at school, to introduce the first school-sponsored Goat Island Summer School in Chicago. I was in Lin’s class. I was signed up for Mark’s class. I was bowled over by
The Sea & Poison. I thought it would be a good thing to go to.
Sometime around when we graduated, I asked Lin how we should go about continuing. She said she wasn’t sure how we were going to do it, but that we had to keep working and we had to stay in Chicago to do that work. She said it was going to be really hard and that we should focus on sustainability, but she didn’t know how we were going to do that. She said: make work, and solve the problems as they come up. Don’t make up problems that might come up, and try to solve them before they do. She said: just start. It seemed a revelation that there isn’t a path for these things, a set of things that once done assure success. The most honest work comes from work, and not from planning. That possibility comes to hard work, not to plans.
But in 1999 we hadn’t started together yet, and with
The Sea & Poison on my mind, I listened to
Letter to A Young Practitioner. I was young, and I had just started thinking of myself as a practitioner. Suddenly it felt like they were talking to me. They were talking to me about how it’s hard, and you’ll fail, but you’ll get to follow yourself where you want to go, if you work hard and take the time. And that seemed exciting, but more importantly, that seemed possible. That seemed like something I could do. I had seen them do it, and they made great work. Work that was hard and fun and new and rewarding. And they were telling me I could do it too. And I believed them.
In 2000, here at Bristol University for Goat Island’s Summer School, we decided to make our thesis piece together over the following year. I think we actually had that conversation just outside this building. Sometime before the thesis show, we decided we needed a name. Suddenly, only focused on working, we had a group. We graduated and got a couple jobs a piece and started meeting at least twice a week in our new heatless Chicago studio. We sort of made enough money at our jobs to get what we needed for our shows, so we focused on working. We had started, and we were discovering our group by being it, and when we got stuck we had coffee with Lin, or Matthew, or CJ, or Mark, or Karen. We went to see shows. We wanted to be a part of the community that we felt had made this space to start our group in.
Asked how Goat Island influenced us, I’d say they showed us that we could decide how we worked and what to expect of ourselves. That we could invent a group, not simply form a group. They helped us believe we could start, but importantly, didn’t presume to know what starting would be for us, but allowed themselves as an example of something that was working for them. A little confidence, a little ingenuity, and with the freedom of only setting our sites on taking the time to finish work, we figured that out for ourselves. Very American, I know, but hey—we’re Americans dude.
Tyler
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Dear Tyler,
I am having a hard time positioning myself to start this task. How exactly do we begin to chart a course through the ways that Goat Island has influenced the work that we make together? Some of the difficulty that I am having stems from the fact that it is hard for me to talk solely about the way the performance work Goat Island has made has inspired us without talking about the inspiration we have gotten from the way they work as a collaborative group, and the way that they teach. So, I think I will talk about it all in a somewhat fragmented, choppy manner.
I wrote the beginning of what follows in response to your introductory letter, which has now been edited. Although what you wrote has been cut, I have chosen to keep my response in its entirety.
I too will start with this conceit: I’m going to discover these letters by writing them. I apologize if at times I do go on. Long ago I was told not to write with a slow pen, but to get one that is broken. A pen that takes five times over to write a word, loses letters; soon you are rehearsing the shape of a word, of the alphabet. Soon—like watching a Goat Island performance—you are learning a language. If I have learned anything from them it is to look to these moments of error for inspiration, for my education. And if I go on, it is because my broken pen has led me to something that has made me want to go on, something that I would not have found otherwise. I have often thought of the performance that we make as broken in some way, and I have found inspiration in this thought, and in this one:
Work slowly (3)
This is what I remember taking away with me when I listened to Goat Island deliver their Letter to a Young Practitioner, during our school years at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. When I heard these words and thought about them, I thought to myself, yes, I want to work slowly too. I want to live with a piece of work for a couple of years and see how it changes as I change, how it changes me as I change it. To take time and find a way that I feel comfortable with, to make work, a way that was specific to. This, to me, seemed like a good idea, here at the beginning, where I too was starting to feel comfortable saying out loud, around other people, that I was an artist, while every one around me seemed to be working quickly to create a body of work for the sake of creating a body of work. Where everything around me including the city and its blinking lights was suggesting I should move faster. But here, among all of the noise, in a classroom in the early evening, was a voice saying SLOW DOWN, focus on a sustainable practice, one that builds on itself slowly over a long period of time.
Lin Hixson said:
“I moved to Chicago and found collaborators who were not in a hurry. I rested in each moment with the process and the moments accumulated. It was almost mundane. Mundane in the sense of a plodding ordinariness, a daily step taking of one and half to two years, to make a work.” (4)
I say:
I moved to Chicago and found a collaborator who was not in a hurry. Who wanted to make work in the way that one makes rock candy. By creating a supersaturated environment filled with ideas, some good and some horrible, and sitting with them like one sits in a chair staring at the ceiling, dreaming. Over time, the ideas and the dreams crystallize and attach themselves to a thread in time, and we discover a performance. I found a collaborator who wanted to make work that was a representation of a coming together of two people with different ideas; who was interested in finding some way of making work he could not find on his own.
I’ve been thinking about why we chose the beginning of the title for these letters. I think we used the word “community” in the title because it seemed necessary when talking about Goat Island, to in some way reference community, and the exchange that happens within that community. Goat Island seems to have formed a special community around them, one that is local and international. Being in the UK, on and off for the past year, and talking to people has been an eye-opening experience. It has showed me the number of people that Goat Island has touched in some way, and who probably have already said what I will say in these letters.
I think we also chose to use the word ”community” to in some way recognize the fact that we are a part of a community of many artists or groups of artists—one in which ideas are exchanged and support is given. Although, we won’t necessarily mention the others, and our letters that we will present are tuned toward Goat Island, an important part of that community that has influenced us, we are very aware of the others, and we are grateful to know them.
To begin:
Tyler, when I think about it, I think that you and I have a common set of starting points with Goat Island. We both sat in the gym in Wellington Avenue Church and experienced our first Goat Island piece,
The Sea and Poison, in the spring of 1999, and we both attended the Goat Island Summer School in Bristol during the summer of 2000. Maybe we take our common ground as a starting point for our conversation dealing with how Goat Island has influenced our work, and our process.
See you,
Stephen
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Stephen,
My first encounter with a Goat Island performance blew my socks off. I don’t doubt that this blowing of my socks off would have happened regardless of which Goat Island performance I watched, but I happened to see
The Sea & Poison. I was 20 years old. I was in a gym on Wellington Avenue in Chicago, in a neighborhood I had not yet been to in a city I’d lived in for two years.
I remember glee at the frog man and then the opening volley between Karen and Mark/Bryan. Dark, funny, confident, confusing. Not confusing like; “I’m not sure they know what they’re doing,” but confusing like; “I’m not sure why this doesn’t feel frustrating but instead feels enthralling and somehow as it should be but as it never would have seemed to me and oh-my-god I’m not sure I’ll be able to explain this later.” Then they jumped for 20 minutes.
They had me at hello because it was the craziest, boldest, and most alarming beginning I had ever seen. There are innumerable people taking their pants off for other people all over the world this very minute. Show me one other person with plastic frogs hidden in his armpits. And if you can, I know a guy with frogs hidden in his armpits who when you watch him and his friends for a couple hours, they will have you reconsidering the magnitude of our polluting of the environment, the real human cost of war weapons 2.0, the intimate and slow and ominousness of what we put in and around ourselves, and the slow way our bodies wick up what we put down. That’s what I saw. I did not always know what was going on but I was watching and it was happing and I left different, and had to take the time to sort out the feelings. This performance required something of me I have not been asked to give before. I had to watch it. It did not pander. The logic was there and it was teaching me and showing me at the same time, and it was necessarily below the surface. I would have to go looking for it, and it was going to be worth it.
I was tingling with an anticipation I had not felt before because I could not predict with any accuracy what was to happen at all. I was going to have to watch it, and closely. This was something totally new to me, and I could feel the rigor in the words and see the time in the bodies.
Do you love it?
It’s our child isn’t it?
Does that mean you can’t love it?
It’s hard enough to love a frog. But, when it turns out to be your own son.
Do you mean that you would not want to call it George Jr.?
But, we’ve already called our other frog that.
Perhaps we could call the other one George Sr.
But I am George Sr.
Well, perhaps if you hid in the attic, so that no one needed to call you anything, there would be no problem with calling the other two George?
Yes, if no one talked to me, what need have I for a name?
Yes, no one will talk to you for the rest of your life, and when you die we will put father of frogs on your tombstone.
The thing is, this beginning made me trust them, trust that they were going to unwind something in front of me, and that their commitment to it was honest and heavy . . . Theirs was a commitment I had not encountered before. And it made me want to double mine. It made me want to be involved in their performance in some new way I’d not been involved before, and there was space for me. A lot of it was up to me, but their commitment and their confidence, their precision, made me meet them there. And it was worth it. And it was a new way for me to think about performance. It was somewhere I was comfortable starting. The jumping in
The Sea & Poison was the same at the beginning as at the end, but it was different too, different in the way that makes me close my eyes and try to etch the moment in my memory. It was not too short, and that speaks volumes. And the text was not always clear, but it was always complete. It functions like a dance, like a well-placed object, not like a reductive describing.
Now something about objects. There is rarely an object in a Goat Island show I anticipate seeing in a Goat Island show. There is rarely a space treated as decisively as a Goat Island performance space. Watch the videos and note the respect for the white taped line. Watch
The Lastmaker, and watch Matthew’s entrances. Watch his exits. I saw
The Lastmaker twice, and after the first time I had this vague memory of a precise dance of entrances, and this is something that I can’t express enough admiration for … the detail even in the periphery and how that informs the performance as a whole and my approach to it as a viewer. The second time I watched for it, and it was perfect. This is a space that is visually undefined except for some lines on the floor, but through its performers actions, through the stuff that comes to populate that space, we learn it and what we learn is full of precision and fidelity. More full of audience connection than the specificity a traditional set renders,it acknowledges the performance takes place in the viewer’s body, with the viewer’s input. The purpose is in their bodies, the time is in their bodies, but over the course of a performance it fills the space too. In the objects. Yellow and camping and expeditionary for
Poison, implying an apocalypse, implying living outside or in inclement environments. Rough places that are rough on stuff. Their performances have never led me somewhere to find dead end, or to flatten out my experience by telling me what I should see. The worlds they make, full of thought and challenge, are always detailed and complete, but only because I watched it—live. This makes me trust them, respect them, and shows me the amazing distance they travel in their performances, and makes me want to strive to contribute work of equal worth, of equal distance.
Now, something about how they are as a group. After they presented
The Sea & Poison again a year and a half later in 2000, again at the gym in Chicago, a few of us had volunteered to help them put the basketball hoop back up on the wall. Something like this one (image of basketball hoop). I didn’t really know what this meant when I signed up, but after the performance, a very sweaty Bryan came out with a few wrenches and a drill and pointed to this massive metal structure that had to go back onto the wall, 10 feet off the ground. And we had a couple ladders and a few bodies. He had a really good system, and it didn’t take more than a half hour … but as I walked away I couldn’t help but think about control and commitment, and to really respect how they did what they had to do to make and show their work the way they felt most comfortable showing it. And the way they wanted their work was rarely the easiest way, but it was always the most honest, smart, and complete way. They showed it in Chicago because that’s where they live, and even though they didn’t have money backing the presentation, and even though they couldn’t hire a crew, they still did it, and Bryan jumped with the rest of them at the beginning and at the end and danced like a maniac throughout, then immediately after came out with a smile on his face to put a basketball hoop back on the wall and he didn’t seem as if he wanted to be anywhere else. And this tireless, fearless, powerfulness is inspiring. And this commitment to community is inspiring. They seem to say: If we want to do our show and there are no other opportunities, we’ve always got our studio. And in there, it looks good. In there, the floor squeaks just right when they do the jumping that makes me smile so big. Their independent focus on the work is a catalyst in a way you cannot say about most work.
I’m not sure where to stop, so I’ll stop right here.
Tyler
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Tyler,
I’m going to try to hit some of the elements in Goat Island's work that I feel had an impact on me when I first sat down in the Wellington Avenue Church in the spring of 1999 to see my first Goat Island piece,
The Sea and Poison. Prior to seeing this work I had no idea what kind of work the group made, or what they were about.
I remember, sitting in the gym, and not really knowing what to expect. I had not viewed any documentation of their work, not even a photograph. What I knew, I knew by word of mouth, or a brief mention in the classroom. At first I remember being taken in by the place. We were there, in a gymnasium to see a performance. It was a bit of a relief for me; I had always felt a sense of uneasiness in the theatre, and I had been interested in groups that like to make work on their own terms for some time. This interest started with my early following of the Washington D.C. punk scene, revolving around the local label Dischord, and a band called Fugazi. In them, I discovered possibility, a national network of kids, finding a way to play music across the country—in basements, and small clubs. They had made a decision to find their own way of doing things outside of the normal pathways that had been set up. This was inspiring; this was hopeful. There was an earnestness and a sense of intimacy to the way they were doing things. I remember feeling these same feelings that day sitting in my chair watching Goat Island, and it started with the gymnasium.
Some say that the place where punk became less punk was when it was decided it needed to be loud, because then it required the equipment to make the music loud, which in turn increased the transportation and staging requirements. If the tool selection had been different maybe there would have been greater potential for movement. But, what I want to say is that on first sight, looking at the work of Goat Island, I could see a direction that punk music could have taken. In their work there seemed to be a choice to work simply, with low-tech means. I found there to be a commitment to making work that also found meaning in the way it had been made and presented.
I have often walked about after Goat Island performances and tried to piece them together in my head. There is a creative act in that. I think this is some of what we talk about when we talk about the performance that takes place inside the audience. I think that this is one of the things that struck me most about the work when I first saw it. That it seemed to be more about creating a series of resonances, than about creating a piece where the audience is led to “get it.” That it considered and had confidence in the audience’s intelligence, and worked towards audience participation in the event taking place in the room. The work encouraged the viewers to be active, to consciously partake in the act of creative looking.
As we sat on the couch yesterday watching some Goat Island documentation, you said, “I want to talk about why their work looks so different from other groups work that work in the same way.” In response to that I said something about many voices held together by a considered structure. Is this one of the reasons why the work is so complex? The fact that it contains many voices not just one? It seems at times when I am watching their work that I have to pick and choose what I am watching or what I am hearing. I have to play the role of the editor for myself. If I sit down again to watch, I will see a different performance by the way that I watch. To some extent this is true for any live event—we choose what we look at, what we see, at least most of the time. In Goat Island this process that the audience goes through is fore-grounded due in part to the special arrangement, the way that they choose to frame or un-frame the performance, and the working toward a work in which all of the performers’ voices are heard. This to me is an important part of the work, this constantly working toward finding a way to make a work together, this quality seems to reside in all of the work that I have seen by Goat Island. There are formal, structural, and conceptual concerns, but much of the complexity that I feel is in their work I identify as stemming from the simple fact that there have been, since the group’s inception, at least four people working together whose ideas are represented in the work. Because of this quality, the performance becomes more of a conversation then a telling.
In hindsight what interested me most about the beginning dance in the performance
The Sea and Poison is that it was at the beginning of the performance. That what it is was doing to the performers, while they were performing it, was essentially tiring them out. I liked thinking of this as a kind of preparation--a wearing out of the performers for the rest of the performance as they moved through a series of sequences that had a kind of delirium about them. The kind of delirium that came to those marathon dancers in the 1930’s in a quiet room, trying to stay standing, it’s 2 AM, one is sleeping in the other’s arms, the other is gently swaying back and forth so that what they are doing is considered dancing by the judge, and so they do not get disqualified. Here, maybe the performers weren’t pretending to be tired, or delirious, maybe they just were because of the 20-minute jumping dance that they just performed.
The performance moves from the mechanical to the organic, and to a combination of the two…from the precise time-keeping of the dance into the time of dreaming, or in this case, of nightmare. And as it goes on, we the audience drift in and out of it, reinforcing what is taking place before us. This shift for me, starts with the planting of the seed on top of a man’s bald head. Another man sits down beside him and starts to write. Moving to a man in a bar, to two people slow dancing in the bar, taking turns at the mic, then another man starts dancing with a table. The table becomes entwined with his body. I remember at the time I watched this sequence unfold I was getting really into the films of Andrei Tarkovsy, I liked his use of slow-moving meditative images, and his idea that in his films he was trying to slow the viewer down, to produce slow thought. I found another example of this sense of pacing, in this live sequence, starting with the seed, and it stayed in my head.
That’s all for now,
Stephen
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Dear Stephen,
Stephen—you and I have written a lot of letters to each other since we started working together in 2000. We started writing them the summer of 2003, as a way of generating a visiting artist response to the performances of the participants of Goat Island’s Chicago summer school that year. Since then, this has become an important way for us to find a way to increase the fidelity and completeness of what we talk about as we work. The letter functions as an assignment in a way: say what you want to say with as much clarity as you can muster but don’t worry if your effort fails; hope that it does. If you think you don’t have anything to say, make yourself start and you’ll find that you probably do. Our work together is an ongoing conversation. And as Karen described Goat Island’s work, I think our performances are a still-frame within a longer dialogue.
But, this may be misleading. I think we spend as much time sitting in our studio in silence as we do talking. Our meetings and rehearsals may well be more silence than talking. In fact, my favorite place to be is sitting in front of a space we have defined as the space in which we will perform in our studio, and looking at it with you and trying to picture what will happen in the performance and what that will look like. Sitting there and imagining how you’ll move, what I’ll do … all the stuff we’ve talked about and how that fullness can be activated for an audience in the least amount of activity. The rigor of throwing out almost everything we think of. Being able to love something I can see in my head, and trying to convince you of it. When it’s right, I don’t have to try very hard. Together, we are a better stand-in for an audience.
Here are a few things I hope people see in our work that may remind them of Goat Island: things that are funny, odd and surprising things that suddenly speak volumes. A different world—enough like this one that we may draw conclusions that are true to both and may not have been clear before.
I think our work is different than Goat Island’s because when we are sitting in silence working on a performance, that silence is often broken by something starting with, “wouldn’t it be funny if we …” I think our work tries harder to entertain in a traditional sense, winking to keep the audience with us, and Goat Island is more confident in the work’s complexity … less worried than we are about getting people to come along with them. I think you can call this trait of ours a number of things. It could be pandering, it could be lack of fearlessness, it could be generous, I don’t know. But it’s different I think. Also, what two people on stage together are is a fundamentally different problem than the different set of problems three, four or five people on stage get you. I think we have to own what we are together onstage constantly, whereas Goat Island is able to go to the extra tools in the shed and put them to work in more varied ways. Maybe this is why the work we make winks more? Finally, I think we have decided to do as much as we can ourselves, which is a subtle difference, and one that is inspired by and in Goat Island’s work too, but is still somehow a difference because with us it is structurally absurd. We are only two and we try to do the lights, sound, performing, and stage management and do it from the playing area. More installation, less theater. I like it as a limitation, as another problem we get to solve. And often we solve it with string, or glue, or rope, or deciding something isn’t essential. Maybe it’s only a quirk for the audience, but it’s a decision and I think it’s become part of our work. I remember the story of the one-leg stools from
When Will the September Roses Bloom. The stools lost and Bryan builds some quickly with one leg. And then those are the perfect stools. Odd ways of doing strange things; but not completely enigmatic.Because of a slow process the content wicks up through the material too. With us, a question we always struggle with is, how can we operate the sound cues in the performance, how can we operate the lights? We never totally succeed, but I think our goal is to be the force that makes the performance happen— all of it. Short circuit flat illusion, in favor of obviously participatory viewer-based illusion. And I like the struggle of solving that problem as we stage ideas. In fact, just in the last month we have been going back and forth about whether we should try and build a wonky table or ask someone to build us a wonky table. In the end we decided to build our own wonky table. I think we each enjoy what happens when you try to do something yourself. There are so many ideas that happen when your hands are dirty. There is something different about deciding on a vague goal or feeling for a thing and then setting out to accomplish it with your hands without having to be able to articulate it with words first. And the result is unique to the process. Just today in Warwick, we again saw house technicians looking at the cardboard we haul around and shaking their heads. But it’s our cardboard. It’s the cardboard we built four different ways over two years in our studio in Chicago, where the floor squeaks just right when we jump on it. And it’s cardboard that I can most confidently say can’t be any other way in our performance.
When starting work, and when working, I think in some ways we are always looking for a moment in which we can try to simulate a pause and in that paused moment find there a complex web of our relations to the world, and how the world fills us with thought and emotion. To find something sublime in looking at the world, and then perform what’s going on inside us at that instant, but more slowly. An hour’s programmed resonance of what may be a second’s worth of feeling suddenly full.
I wrote you this passage in a letter of August 10, 2004. I was responding to a short remembrance you wrote of jumping into water from a bridge. “I particularly like the conflict in your fish suit. Is this wrong? Immediately doubting an experience (its validity, reality, moral or ethical ramifications) is something I find myself doing quite alot. I even kind of think I don't allow myself to experience things, just to experience my inner debate about them concerning the above points.“ Maybe this is something we see in an audience that we try to short circuit in our performances, in order to set them free in whatever world we have made for them to learn and ponder. In the show we’re performing at the Arnolfini tomorrow, you spend a great deal of it laying on my back. You laying on my back is hard for me and it makes me sweat and shake, and struggle to get through. Afterward, when talking to folks who watched it happen, we often get to hear folks talk about how hard it was for them to watch, how involved they got. I’m not sure I fully grasp how it works, but when we do this sort of thing we usually talk about this endurance as a way to dramatize the minutiae we want to get into the performance space. We do something the audience can concern themselves with in a visceral way so that they hear the text but don’t spend much time, at first, trying to figure out what we’re talking about. They get so bound up in the drops of sweat coming off my nose and hitting the cardboard floor with a really satisfying sound, they don’t get as frustrated about the list as they otherwise would. This, and the dance, wears us out and helps me deal with my natural inclination to try and entertain or act.It helps us be a little more like ourselves. But this endurance is importantly, a soft endurance, one that doesn’t implicate the audience, but instead seems to elicit sympathy for me in opposition to your weight and world of the performance that keeps you on top of me. They know that things must go on, and they learn the rules so they know what’s necessary. And they can’t see the end. But, it feels like we’re in it together. And we wink at the audience through acknowledging jokes about it, we send them some relief in attempts at small humor, we let them know that this is the performance, and I’m not dying I’m just working hard, and their impatience with it is okay, and they can trust us.
In
Petitmal, when we ran on the treadmills for a half hour shouting text, the jokes in there weren’t funny so it was a long slog. It was worth it, but it was harder for the audience and felt more like masochism. At the end of that show, alot of people would ask us what possessed us to do such a thing. In
The Man Who Pictured Space, people are more likely to look at me and nod slowly and say something like, “you must be exhausted.” I think there’s an important difference in those two reactions.
I think our work also uses the classic comedy format, unknowing characters that comically have the world happen to them as they try to go about their simple missions. I think this is our natural inclination because we like the possibilities in it, and the camaraderie I hope it establishes with the audience. In this way, even if the overall feel of a performance isn’t funny or happy, it’s a journey we went on together rather than more dramatically formal “putting on.”
Well, I don’t know if I made anything clear, but I did manage to go on for awhile.
Thanks,
Tyler
______
Tyler,
As I understand it, the work that we make together usually starts with conversation. We sit down in a room, maybe our studio maybe at the bar. Maybe it’s not in a room maybe it’s walking across Morecambe Bay. Maybe it starts from talking about what were interested in at the moment, a book we read, an adventure we took, or a memory. But when we start a piece we make every effort to start it together. From there we usually start writing each other letters about what we were talking about during our conversations, which gives us the time to articulate the things that we couldn’t articulate while talking. I think that this starting method has worked well for us because we give a good effort at communicating our thoughts, our visions. I have often said that when we start a performance I feel as if I have to learn how to make a performance all over again. It is as if I have to learn a new language. At times this can be scary and when you multiply the minds, I think the potential for uncertainty or a feeling of being lost becomes more likely. This is why our commitment to communication is so important; to attempt to fully understand each other, and make something in common each time we start to a work together.
While away at summer school in Bristol, I remember wanting to read more that Goat Island had written. I remember going to an Internet café and looking to see if I could find anything the group had written online. This was probably at a time before the group had an online presence, or before my surfing skills were up to snuff, but I was able to find two things: a group biography, and a bit of writing by Lin Hixson. This find has stuck with me, and it is something that I have often returned to when thinking about the kind of work that we make.
Puppet Show #1
“When I was nine, I received a puppet theatre for Christmas. It was too big for my bedroom so it ended up in my brother’s room. Consequently, he began to perform puppet shows for me by hiding behind the yellow castle with its red and blue Bavarian patterns.
Three hinged panels formed the castle theatre. The main stage was an open-air rectangle cut into the center panel and framed by scarlet curtains. In height it was just the size of my brother’s head if you included his neck. In width, he could fit two hands with his fingers spread. The two side panels adjusted to provide his secret chamber. Of course the task was never to see the hand or head of my brother, but only the adventures of the king or queen or the lion and the mouse. The beginning of his plays usually went well; the king and queen danced; the lion bit the mouse’s head. But soon my brother’s foot would creep out off to the side, looming larger than the full figure of the queen. The top of his head would appear bobbing visibly with the king as he waltzed. Sometimes the sleeve of his shirt became the bottom of the mouse’s body. And then, finally, when tired, he’d sit up, his big head taking up the whole rectangle and becoming the Godzilla backdrop to the lives of these smaller beings.
I grew to love these breakdowns; these scenes filled with the tension of his imminent arrival. How long would the fantastic world of miniature people and animals last before they were disrupted by my brothers head? When would the lion become the lion sleeve, or the queen become the queen ear.” (5)
I think this is one of the things that we do. We create images (I use the word “image” and not “scene” or something else because I like the implication of not only what is presented before an audience, but also the mental image, the image that forms inside the audience, over time) that break down, either through our exhaustion and inability to perform a task, or the natural breakdown of the materials that we choose to use, the collision of real and imaginary worlds, neither complete, and maybe this is what I am trying to get at when I say that our performances are broken in some way. A man stands out of proportion to a tiny mountainous landscape, filled with mock trees, he is amongst them towering over them. I have often thought that this is one of the ways that we get the audience to engage with the work, to suggest to them that this will require their participation in the imagining. To get an audience to feel like a part of the event that is taking place in the room, as opposed to standing outside of something looking in. These living, changing images ask the active audience to fill in the spaces, perhaps with their own imagining, or with silence, or something else. In this breaking down, we create a world of worlds with its own logic.
We set up performance environments that change and are fragile—at times unpredictable—and this affects us as our positions in them change. Sometimes I hit the ceiling and the cardboard bricks fall out too early, and now we’re dancing among a bunch of bricks. Some would say that something went wrong, but it seems to me that this is something we use to create tension. There is always the sense that something may not work, or may fail. Sometimes something doesn’t work, and the performance changes, but it’s made to do that. We set up physically demanding tasks, as in
The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment where I spend most of the time on your back and as it goes on, the task of keeping me on your back becomes harder and you start to move slower. There is something really happening to you there, and this effort that you put forth is something that brings an audience in.They are there with you. I’m crouched on a tower that’s too tall, my head hits the ceiling, soon my muscles start to weaken and my legs begin to shake, and it affects the way I’m speaking to you. We set up environments that slowly move through a series of transformations, like in
The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment where we try to slowly bring the universe into our cardboard room or in the piece that we are working now where we stand stationary as the landscape of tarps changes around us.
When I look at the documentation of the work that we have selected to show today, I see an ongoing conversation. I see a recycling and fine-tuning of ideas. I imagine that this will go on this way for some time. Just as I could go on here, now, as I have more to say, and I’ll say it, just at another time.
Stephen
References
(1) Goat Island,
School Book 2, Chicago, 2001
(2)
Ibid., p.101
(3) Goat Island,
School Book 2, Chicago 2001
(4)
ibid.
(5) Lin Hixson,
Small Acts Of Repair
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Community Exchange: Cupola Bobber Discuss Their Work While Looking at Goat Island's Archive
Lecture Room, Dept of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, University of Bristol
Thursday 13 November 5.15pm / Free
Cupola Bobber will curate a selection of extracts from Goat Island works that resonate with, or have influenced their performance practice. Stephen Fiehn and Tyler Myers will show related clips from their own collaborative work and speak around formal relationships, similarities or divergences of interest. This will provide an opportunity to discuss ways in which performance practices or knowledges are passed-on, and transformed, through intergenerational exchange. This Department of Drama Research Event takes place the day before Chicago's Cupola Bobber perform,
The Man Who Pictured Space from his Apartment, at Arnolfini.
Further details here.
