Hi Cathy

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Hi Cathy

September – October 2016
Artists: Hester Chillingworth and Cathy Naden

Hi Cathy is a series of emails from Small Spaces Commissioned Artist Hester Chillingworth (GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN) to artist Cathy Naden (Forced Entertainment) about the creation of Chillingworth’s new performance, about childishness in performance and about queerly opening out questions that act on making.

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TO:                Cathy Naden

FROM:           Hester Chillingworth

29/8/2016

 

Hi Cathy,

Thanks so much for agreeing to have the conversation about childishness in performance with me. I’ll tell you were my thoughts are so far with it.

I’ve been thinking about what childishness allows or ‘buys in’ on stage. Immediate things that have come to mind are repeated and glorious failure (without necessarily an accumulative problem around that), inappropriateness, volatile temper/emotions, curiosity, desire to play, permission to be messy and (maybe) rather clumsy aspiration to be serious/ a grown up. Thinking about the theatre work that Forced Entertainment make and some of the work I’ve made with GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN, I’m noting that a lot of the joy of seeing performers behave childishly comes from the audience’s simultaneous awareness that they are actually adults – that they ‘should’ be behaving more maturely – and therefore that the childishness comes from a place of mischief or ‘wrongheadedness’, as I’ve heard you guys call it in rehearsal. I suppose in a way this is not dissimilar to one of the ways in which drag works, as a performance trope – the joy coming from the performer always remaining visible and present in some way, alongside the drag persona.

A doubling.

So we in the audience enjoy the leap, the reach, the audacious stretch between the two (and, as much, the gaps, the failure to ‘complete’ the reach, or perhaps the intentional diversion of the reach into some new territory…e.g. maybe we wonder in the audience, if they’re not trying to be childish or (in drag) a different gender any more, what are they trying to do? And perhaps more importantly, why?). If the implicit question in the air is, why do these adults think this is the best way to get the ‘job’ of this show done, I’m wondering if it’s because being ‘silly’ and perhaps childish, is a less aggressive and (potentially) more humorous excuse for breaking rules and flouting convention, than (for example) occupying a position of hyper-aware and politically-activated stage anarchist? We could say that that level of knowingness necessitates a certain stance of taking oneself seriously, and therefore limits the space for laughing at oneself, and therefore allowing the audience to laugh at you, and so at themselves and so at the world. What do you think about that? Do you agree?

In fact, do you guys at FE think of it as childishness, in what you do? Or is that not in the vocabulary? I’ve noticed that you often get called on to have a petulant moment, an outburst, in the shows. Do you think of childishness for this?

In the piece I’m making for the Small Spaces Commission, SHORTY, I’m finding that a huge amount of the work I’m doing is in trying to smuggle the seriousness, the real show, in under the subterfuge of the childishness. In GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN work, we’ve usually had the double-act of Lucy and Jen at the centre and therefore can use them as counterpoints to each other, if we need an anchor while one of them is off being ‘stupid’. Of course there are many times when they’re both off doing that and then the game is the suggestion that, with no anchor, they’re never going to come back. But of course they do, because in the end it’s the ‘real show’ that we’re trying to deliver. In this solo work I’m finding it a slightly different manoeuvre. What are your thoughts and experiences of this act of smuggling the seriousness in, amongst or via childishness? And do you think this alters when there are more or fewer performers on stage?

Ok, probably enough thoughts and questions to start off with. Look forward to hearing, and thanks again for helping me think this through.

Hx

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REPLY TO:     Hester Chillingworth
FROM:           Cathy Naden

29/8/2016

 

Hi Hester,

Thanks for inviting me to talk to you and for your thoughts so far about childishness in performance.

In [Forced Entertainment (FE)] we use that word but have other names for it too. Naughtiness, mavericks, cheese heading (long story), playfulness, maybe sentimentality even. We like it because it invites people in. It opens up a fluid space between audience and stage. There’s an element of risk – it’s good people might be thinking can they really get away with that!! We can because it’s carefully choreographed stupidity, placing embarrassment and anarchy centre stage.

I like the parallels you describe between childishness and drag in performance- how both modes employ a stretching, as you call it, between the person and the way they present themselves. This gap between the performer and what they look like or what they do has always fascinated FE because it’s a way of placing the audience in an active relationship. They are spectators at something, being made to ask questions, consider, and, of course, laugh as they watch.

An early conversation in FE about children and acting was about how in the school play, the naughty ones or the ones who weren’t very good would end up in the chorus, or playing the scenery. We borrowed this for Showtime. Claire and Terry wore cardboard tree costumes. They were the scenery but they ended up taking over the show. It was very funny and sometimes painful to watch. It was also, if you like, a move to put unofficial and unlikely ‘characters’ in charge and there’s a kind of political act in that- giving a voice to childishness.

Childishness means interesting questions about competence. It’s also the maverick and the marginal: it’s an excuse for mischief making. In the theatre shows (and also in the improvised durationals) there’s often a pull between mucking about and taking things seriously. It’s true I do have a fair share of outbursts in shows. Sometimes it’s petulant, or acting like the one running the show (Bloody Mess comes to mind) but sometimes it’s more about a performance job- or a tactic. After enough silliness, we’ve ‘earned the right’ to be earnest, or hard, or heartfelt or poetic.

The show-within a show- I like how you call it smuggling the serious one/real one on stage under the guise of childishness, it captures the sense of illegality- has a natural dramaturgy in ensembles or double-acts perhaps. Something is happening because there is disagreement and oppositional attitudes on stage. I imagine it’s very different when there is only one. Do you still have to play the conflicts? Is childishness recognisable if it’s not pitched against grown up stuff? What does grown-up theatre look like? If you go off being ‘stupid’ are you also the anchor that pulls you back? Or will you just let yourself go off and never come back? That’s an interesting idea! Speak soon.

Cx

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REPLY TO:    Cathy Naden
FROM:            Hester Chillingworth
3/10/2016
Hi Cathy,
Thanks so much for this.
As I’ve started performing Shorty as a finished piece, I’ve realised that there’s also something about childishness that allows for a sort of opposite of mischief. I don’t know how relevant this will be to FE work… What I’m thinking of is a sort of ludicrous earnestness. I suppose one of the things that can make children pretty heartbreaking AND heartwarming is their unselfconscious earnestness at times. A striving to be grown up, maybe, without being able to see (as clearly as the adults around can) the impossibility of the huge reach they are doing. We see children as small, but I suppose they see themselves as big, or the right size. So they can make proposals/efforts which to us seem too ‘grown up’ for such a miniature person (and therefore sweet, or sad, or funny, or thought provoking), but to them perhaps seem more reasonable.
I suppose there’s aspiration included in that – an aim to emulate the kinds of things that adults say and do. When that line between emulation and genuine inhabitation gets crossed is an interesting question to me – I think one could say that in FE’s work there’s a stripping back of the very notion of a ‘genuine inhabitation’ of being grown-up. The foregrounding of play, nonsense, mischief via adult bodies is maverick in itself because generally adult bodies aren’t given too much space to be in that frame (without there being a suggestion that something is ‘wrong’). I’m thinking of Speak Bitterness now – when I look at images of that piece I always think there’s something of the ‘children wearing their parents’ office clothes’ feel about it. Like you guys are pretending to be responsible adults (whatever that means!) – or a storybook notion of responsible adults. I think whereas when we see kids pretend to be adults, or read adult text for example, we feel the temporariness of their childhood and the loss of our own childhoods, and the weight of their forthcoming adulthoods – when we see FE act childishly or too-purposefully act ‘seriously’ (Speak Bitterness) (perhaps I should say here ‘speak serious text’ as oppose to ‘act seriously’), it’s like looking through the opposite side of the lens… So, we become aware of the non-child in the adult before us – what they’ve ‘lost’ or left behind from childhood. Or perhaps it’s that that ‘loss’ actually becomes present as a kind of ghost – there’s a ghost/trace of the adult’s child with them. I’m thinking now of Forced Entertainment’s That Night Follows Day, in which the cast of 16 children seem to me to always have the trace/ghost of their 16 future adults with them, simply by insisting on their own ‘childness’. It’s that thing, I suppose, where the more you insist on something on stage, the more we begin to hear or see the opposite of that thing…
What I’ve discovered in making Shorty is that although it’s just me performing, there’s always two of me on stage. When I’m ‘being’ Shorty (the child), the adult me is hyper visible/present. This is partly because of the slightly ridiculous costume, which points up its own costume-ness and therefore highlights the real person beneath the costume, and partly maybe just because of the vague stupidity of acting like a child – so the question of ‘why does this adult think this is the thing to be doing?’ is always in the air, keeping the idea of the adult present. Having been in the rehearsal room during a couple of FE shows, I’m thinking about where and when the serious (by which maybe I just mean private) adults exist on stage. I think I see them most in a person at the back, getting a drink, changing a costume, waiting for the next bit, while someone else is centre, taking care of an ‘official’ bit of material. So I suppose from that there’s a kind of idea of the very act of performing being ‘a silly thing to do’, and so seriousness comes outside it (although of course this ‘outside’ is part of the performance itself). Perhaps there’s something here re childishness in contemporary performance, which is about ‘given that we are out here doing this admittedly rather silly thing, how silly can we be, what can we get away with?’. And the more that’s insisted upon, the more serious/less trivial the thing actually becomes.
Maybe.
H.xx
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REPLY TO:     Hester Chillingworth
FROM:           Cathy Naden

13/10/2016
Hi Hester,
Been travelling with FE. We’re in Rome now, performing Complete Works, our Shakespeare project.
Curious performing this piece in the light of our conversation about childishness. Very ‘grown up’ to be tackling Shakespeare after all these years! We seem grown up (serious) at any rate as we sit alone at the table, no costumes, narrate the plays. All very straight-up.
But then of course, the twist is that we are there as performers presenting the plays but the plays themselves are being done by objects. What we are doing when we act out the story of King Lear or The Taming of the Shrew or Hamlet or whatever with our casts of cheese graters, plastic cups, beer bottles, tins of beans, tubes of toothpaste and so on is engaging in make-believe. If we are not exactly earnest, then there is something like genuine inhabitation taking place. Or immersion perhaps. The kind of immersion that children use in imaginative play. That childhood thing of getting lost in a world or a game of your own making.
The task (in part) is to bring inanimate objects to life- to believe that the spindly potato masher is really a cowardly king or that the can of WD40 has really fallen in love with the bottle of bleach. It’s lo-fi puppetry but it’s also a kind of summoning- a childish act of will, if you like. These objects acquire feelings, thoughts, action, agency because I give them these things as part of the (presentational) game.
So I’m thinking about childishness in this kind of context- not so much the way in which children emulate the seriousness of grown-ups, but the seriousness of play itself. It’s a private act and unselfconscious because, for a child, at least, it is only that one thing, a game being played that he or she is totally inside of. I’m wondering then, what it means when we put the private game- bringing objects to life, for example in Complete Works, in front of the audience?
In order to meet the game Do they become more child-like as watchers? Sure it’s not true of every audience member when they come to see Complete Works, but you can sometimes sense a tangible shift in the way they view the objects- that after a certain point the jar of marmalade stops being a jar of marmalade and transforms into Juliet. I think there is this other aspect to theatre, it’s belief in the magical or in wonder that has a connection to childishness. Or to put it another way: theatre can be child-like, it can perhaps transport its audience back to childhood and to imagining.
Belief and disbelief. They’re interesting places to situate an audience.
See you soon!
Cathy x
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