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[integer@www.god-emil.dk]

>[Theatre as Suspended Space was presented as a performance lecture at the
>Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, University of Wien, Austria, 21 March 1997. 
>
>The lecture opened with a spoken word piece penned by Sydney writer, David
>Nerlich, entitled, With a Will. Three short films (Puppenhead, David Cox;
>Shift, John Power; Autarky, Kim Bounds) were shown during the course of the
>lecture.]
>
>
>Theatre as Suspended Space
>
>By Andrew Garton (21 March 1997)
>
>___
>
>"The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
>secret of fascination... Yet conditions must be found to give birth to a
>spectacle that can fascinate the mind." Antonin Artaud, 1938.
>
>___Preparation Notes


!n dze schone neue velt = d!esz lo.tekk ultra unzan!tar! rout!nz
!= nezezar! dear. = u!l juzt m9ndfukc u.

= m9ndfukc = dze future. du != ma! kompete.

remembr - m9ndfukc = dze future.
du = m9ndfukd nou. 


fr!endl!.nn







                                          pre.konssept!Øn  
                                                meeTz ver!f1kat!Øn.     



-

Netochka Nezvanova
f3.MASCHIN3NKUNST
@www.eusocial.com
17.hzV.tRL.478
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>The lecture room at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft was rearranged in
>a way that was uncommon for the students. The seats were arranged in a
>semi-circle facing the front of the room (see Fig.1). Students would
>normally be seated behind desks.
>
>Tables were placed on top of each other (see Fig. 2) and the windows were
>covered with heavy cloth which was taped back to prevent any light from
>entering the room. The lights were turned off and the students were then
>allowed to enter.
>
>The idea was to create a space they were unfamiliar with within the room
>they generally take their lectures in. As they entered the room I was
>huddled on the floor, a pair of black buckets outstretched on either side
>of me in my hands. When the students were seated, the door was closed and
>no entry to the room was permitted to late comers until the performance
>component of the lecture was completed.
>
>When the room had settled I leapt up off the floor, and using the buckets
>as a kind of amplifier, performed With a Will, a powerful lyric penned by
>Sydney writer, David Nerlich. Two assistants were on either side of the
>room with torches in each of their hands. These were flashed randomly
>across the room. At least one torch would track my face for the duration of
>the performance (see Fig. 3).
>
>
>Fig. 1 Lecture room rearranged.
>Fig. 2 Tables stacked.
>Fig. 3 Torches used as only light source.
>
>
>
>___1. Introduction
>
>The 1980's introduced a variety of new management techniques to ensure
>success, high productivity and quality work environments and relationships
>between staff and their peers. One such technique, popularised in the
>1990's is the suspension of assumption. It requires of managers to withhold
>their pre-conditioned beliefs when in a dynamic relationship, often a
>one-to-one communication, with another employee. The technique enabled
>management to better understand their staff and to facilitate more
>effectively the day to day operations of the work-place. It created a
>break-down of stereo-typical management structures and offered an
>opportunity for new relationships and systems to be developed and
>re-developed with the employee as collaborator and/or contributor towards
>this process.
>
>Theatre as suspended space offers a similar process. It works towards
>disengaging both audience and performer from traditional forms of theatre
>and its production, towards a spatial poetry,1an exploration of
>environment, gesture, communication and global universality in a world
>quickly closing in on itself. Moreover, it is about reclamation of public
>space, both traditional and emergent environments. Perhaps a rekindling of
>what the author Russell Hoban describes in his novel, Ridley Walker, as
>"first knowledge."
>
>Given that we have access to theatres and the means with which to produce
>live works in countless ways, why a suspended space, why reclaim what [we
>perceive] already exists? 
>
>That which exists, is not for the changing. It is for the maintenance of a
>social order steeped in the absolute denial and prohibition of free
>expression - that which liberates the imagination and a discovery of its
>inert spiritual and creative capabilities.
>
>
>___2. Theatre Commodified
>
>The history of modern society is not short of examples of the co-option by
>the social elite of performance, ritual, theatre and music and the
>prohibition of these activities in public spaces. They did so in order to
>sustain a social order enabling them to gain the economic advantage and
>ensure the populace was cultivated for the machinations of this order.2 As
>early as the Roman Empire the castration of public spectacle via theatre
>was evident. The High Pontiff, Scipio Nasica, had all the theatres in Rome
>reduced to rubble. St Augustine, in The City of the Gods, suggested that
>theatre induced mysterious changes not only in the minds of individuals but
>in the entire nation.3 The Pontiff, wrote St Augustine, "...prohibited the
>theatre to prevent a moral pestilence."
>
>During the Middle Ages the jongleur, both musician (vocalist,
>instrumentalist) and entertainer (story-teller, acrobat, mime, etc.) would
>travel from village to village and perform privately and publicly. The
>jongleurs' income was derived from these performances and their material
>was gathered, assimilated and modified from what they heard, what they saw
>along the way. They ensured that access to music and theatre remained the
>privilege of every social class. They were essential to the social
>circulation of information. The jongleur "...was music and the spectacle of
>the body. He alone created it, carried it with him, and completely
>organised its circulation within society."4
>
>With few exceptions, theatre and music was inseparable from daily life. The
>streets of the feudal world were alive with song, dance, mime... an active
>theatre that engaged the community. It need not be watched. It was to be
>lived.
>
>Up to the fourteenth century, the jongleur's lifestyle became increasingly
>unacceptable; the Church "...accusing [them] of paganism and magical
>practises."5 Satirical songs about current events were banned and jongleurs
>threatened with imprisonment. As early as 1209, the Church announced
>"...that at saints' vigils, there shall not, in the churches, be any
>theatre dances, indecent entertainment, gatherings of singers, or worldly
>songs, such as to incite the souls of the listeners to sin..."6 In 1212, it
>required of priests to "...prohibit, under penalty of excommunication,
>assemblies for dancing and singing from entering churches or cemeteries."7
> 
>Eventually, the Church secularised music, and the courts of the nobles of
>the time distanced music and theatre from the people, buying and/or hiring
>jongleurs, monopolising artistic creativity in its many forms. The
>jongleurs "...became professionals bound to a single master, domestics,
>producers of spectacles exclusively reserved for a minority."8 Theatre
>became a commodity. Along with the other arts, it became an essential tool
>for the spread of capitalism and the maintenance of power and social order.
>The theatre space became the physical manifestation of this separation,
>creating an audience and excluding them from the process of theatre,
>transforming what had been the socialisation of information into a medium
>that would make people essential to the machinations of exchange, essential
>to the spread of capital. The medium is the message, but both the medium
>and the message is a lie.
>
>___3. Make then Forget, make them Believe, and Silence them
>
>Jacques Attali, in Noise, talks of three strategic uses of music by power.
>"...It seems that music is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt to
>make people forget the general violence; in another, it is employed to make
>people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange
>and legitimacy in commercial power; and finally, there is one in which it
>serves to silence, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music,
>and censoring all other human voices."
>
>He goes on to further stress the machinations of three essential zones
>towards a social order, "Make people Forget, make them Believe, Silence
>them. In all three cases music is a tool of power: of ritual power when it
>is a question of making people forget the fear of violence; of
>representative power when it is a question of making them believe in order
>and harmony; and of bureaucratic power when it is a question of silencing
>those who oppose it... When power wants to make people forget, music is
>ritual sacrifice, the scapegoat; when it wants them to believe, music is
>enactment, representation; when it wants to silence them, it is reproduced,
>normalised, repetition."
>
>Theatre provides power with exactly the same formula for the maintenance of
>social order. Music is theatre, theatre is music. The two are synonymous
>and perform the same role, within mainstream society. "The mind believes
>what it sees and does what it believes..." The messengers of capital are
>thorough. Throughout the world it has created, and continues to create, an
>audience for its own message. The young that grow up in this environment
>are quickly consumed and co-opted into the service of capital. They cannot
>rebel against it, against something they have been taught so thoroughly to
>believe they want, need, cannot do without. All that glitters is not gold.
>There is no better example of this than in the phenomenon of Heldenplatz.



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