These conversations took place in response to an invitation from Kaleider in Exeter to take part in their Kallisions Artist Development programme. As a total technology and digital theatre novice (and long-time cynic), I wanted to learn more about this world that forms a large part of many writers’ work, so set up a few conversations to try and find out more.
Before joining Falmouth University in 2010 as Associate Professor of Performance Writing, Jerome was Director of Writing and Senior Lecturer in Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. As well as making digital text (his Penitmento was short-listed for the 2012 New Media Writing Prize), he has published children’s books, literary concept books, artist’s books and translations. He has made performances in Vienna, Paris, New York, Budapest and Bregenz and at the Barbican in London, among other places. He is also a partner of Bristol-based Part Exchange Co’s interdisciplinary R&D project The Engine House.
What was your route towards setting up the MA Performance Writing that ran at the Arnolfini?
When Dartington College of Arts was merged with – or rather by – Falmouth, one of the first things they did was axe the MAs. We used to run a matrix of MAs, where students would explore a set of shared interests through their own particular disciplines, and I think they saw three people on the MA in music, three on the one in writing and so on, and saw them as financially unsustainable. So when the MA in Performance Writing went, I came to the Arnolfini and spoke to a former colleague in charge of research and development here.
I was particularly interested in running an off-campus MA, one that was based in the city, and particularly one that was based in an arts and performance venue. There were already lots of connections between the Arnolfini and Dartington. But I was also interested in exploring the city as campus, and that part of the MA was that students would come here expected to develop a relationships with various organisations – Bristol Old Vic, Tobacco Factory, wherever – to support their practice, depending on what it was. Part of the ask was to say – go out, find a venue, find your partners.
That’s similar to the dramaturgy strand of the MA I took at Goldsmiths in 2001-2, where you were expected to take the initiative, find partners, people to shadow and document: to think about where you were situating your practice in the broader marketplace.
To my mind it makes lots of sense. We ran it for two years, but then it got axed so I’m not running it at the moment.
So what was the gap you felt that MA was filling in terms of the national landscape of writer training? Was it something to bridge particular art forms?
This approach to writing as part of a broader arts practice was pioneered at Dartington, out of a necessity – particularly when theatre moved away from the script, and looked towards the body and devising. The question then was ‘where is writing in this process?’. The approach was part of answering that question. It was also part of what was seen as a changed landscape, particularly in terms of disseminating written work – what was available to a writer in terms of technologies was different.
The idea was to create a degree that was catered towards the idea of writing in an expanded field: so rather than just the page as the place where writing ends up, it was then a question of ‘okay, where else can writing end up?’ In the art gallery, on the side of a building, on the body, as a subtitle running under a video, part of a spoken presentation…? So we opened up lots of other possibilities in terms of where writing could end up performatively.
It was based on the idea that language itself is performative – it’s an event, not an object – which is where it separated itself out from a more English Literature theory perspective – we approached it much more as linguistics rather than semantics. The digital was also coming in – this was sort of 1994, when it was first set up as a BA – so it was kind of a response to a changing landscape for writing, but also performance bleeding into politics, gender studies, anthropology: performance as a way of theorising cultural explorations: when we perform text, is it actually performing us, that kind of thing. It appealed to a very specific type of student – it was an interrogation rather than a specific training. We weren’t saying ‘we know how to write and this is how you do it’ – it was about ‘how are you going to respond to a particular brief with writing?’ So the making of work – engagement with practice – was the way of investigating certain ideas.
And was it integrated with other degree strands?
Yes absolutely, very much – and really led to more hybridised writing practice, where you could be investigating both the live and the digital experience in a performance where you were delivering a piece of text along with projection and recorded sound and dance…not just a question of discrete practices, but a question of how practices can interact with each other.
Why is it important for writers and for theatre to move their practical conversations into digital performance? Is there a political necessity behind it?
It’s a really good question. To my mind – I would pick up on the political and the cultural. You can’t get away from it: there is a sense that the digital is so pervasive that it’s difficult to imagine now what is not digital art on some kind of level. Or art where the digital has no place whatsoever. Even if you have a word processor to write a script, that kind of thing. But in this relationship between writing and performance, if you look at language as profoundly performative, the digital is a mode where performativity is written into the whole process: from the hardware through the software and the coding to the interface to the end-user or reader/writer/performer.
You’re getting into a sort of meta-language too, where code is interacting – speaking its language to algorithms and internal processors within the hardware and so on. At the moment a lot of people think about digital performance as what happens at this end – performers acting against a projection, that kind of thing – but actually you can talk about the performance of the machine too, or the operator or technologist.
They have quite an original take on this, which is around things like robustness and speed and reliability, all those kinds of elements of performance. You can talk to a coder or programmer about the performativity of code, and then that feeds into performances… like live coding: where the writer creates live coding as a sort of pre-text… Alex Cross, Geoff Dyer, they’ve been working in that area where you have a performer and somebody doing live coding – the relationships between the interface and the user are then performative, as well as the human performer in the space… so what is meant by digital performance is not simply the performance of the body, the actor, but what is occurring throughout the digital.
Is that a question you’re interested in exploring through practice? Should we be seeing more performance that allows us to witness that ‘inner’ performativity of digital elements and so on – rather than it being hidden?
To give a full account of the digital, I think you need to understand what other writings and what other performances are going on at the same time as the performance that’s being presented as public event.
Do you find that the vocabulary you’re using there – how the machinist talks about their role for example – do you find that language comes into talking about live performance?
Absolutely. You can’t get away from it, that’s what it does. The operator makes the machine perform. It’s a different sort of performance, different elements involved…for example, the way in which the performance here [on stage] might impact on the interface [the coder] – the hardware on the live… I mean, a lot of this work is situated around temporality too – time, and how things evolve – there are pieces of digital literature which were written using certain programmes on certain machines ten years ago: you run them now at a much faster speed and it’s got a completely different pacing and meaning to it. It’s a bit like when Shakespeare was doing his plays, it might take three and a half hours in the seventeenth century, but now we can do it in two! It does come back to aesthetics, the tension between the technology and its application, not just the live bodies in space.
I had a conversation with Kara Reilly about this too [appearing next week] and her interest is analogue performance – she actually described herself as a ‘historical materialist’ and that really appealed to me, this idea of the object, using a record player, that there’s something about that tactile…technology being an object…that is interesting.
There was an article recently on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Touch about the machines that compute publications into talking books: they’re updating the technology but some of the print format won’t be compatible. This whole swathe of literature suddenly becomes inaccessible to a particular community – now that feels like a dramatic narrative: a shift and a change where the human user is profoundly affected by the progress of the digital machinery. That movement away from analogue, or into a more advanced digital programming, has a tangible human impact.
From my point of view I don’t think you can talk about the digital without talking about the analogue. It’s not only performative, the digital, it’s also always embodied in some form. So one of the big questions here is where is the body? And there is always a body there, whether that body is the body of the programmer doing live coding, or the interfacing beyond it – I don’t see a distinction because they are so woven into one another. I’m certainly not prescriptive about this stuff either though – in its relation to both writing and performance – but the tensions around it, the aesthetics of frustration, are as interesting to me as the nature of the literary.
What kind of work are you making at the moment?
I’ll show you the thing I’m working on at the moment. This is kind of early days… this is a piece I’ve been working on with a drummer. This is a digitally treated drum kit, and basically what it does between particular drums is generate spoken word text. The drums can be programmed in sequences.
And we made a text around the nature of tattoos – I was interested in this idea of writing ‘off the skin’ – off the skin of the drum. The word tattoo in English, its meanings: one is from a Polynesian meaning, which refers to the body…the other is a military tattoo, which comes from tap-toe, a corruption of the Dutch phrase ‘doe den tap toe’ which means ‘turn off the taps’. It was beaten out by drummers in garrison towns as a curfew, telling the publicans to stop selling alcohol to the soldiers because they were needed back in barracks. So this phrase formed the first sequence of text.
There was then a section with a number of phrases from a text by James Leach, who was an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea, where the drum is thought of as a man – it has a voice, it is decorated and given features, and is given to a boy when he becomes an adult: a rite of passage. It dies with him as well and is part of the funeral rites. The third section is bits of text from Russian criminal tattoos, which are literally written on the skin. So: on the skin, off the skin… and the drum as the voice. So this is sort of testing out the concept…
The interesting thing for me here is that language literally has to be beaten out of this device: there’s a very masculine perfomativity about this piece. And in fact, a kind of violence about it, so there’s an interesting relationship between language and gender. From the drummer Adam’s point of view, it’s completely reorganised his relationship with the drum, because he’s so used to using it in a certain way. It was no longer an instrument for music but a writing instrument: and he’s become both reader and writer as well – in a rather improvised way. The language emerges in a totally spontaneous way depending on what he’s hearing come back at him.
Wow. That is serious live writing!
He was interested in certain moments too… when he was playing more vigorously the drum itself drowned out the text – but then there were other moments where he played more quietly and allowed the text to appear. By the final sequence though, we move from this monosyllabic repetition of doo den tap toe to whole sentences triggered by a drum beat. So he can now cut the voice off halfway by starting a new drum beat, and interrupt and edit in the moment.
How did audiences respond to watching this excerpt? Because there’s obviously a lot of theoretical context and performance concept arranging the dramaturgy of the piece, but audiences just get the moment of encounter, the live experience. What did they make of it?
This went down very well. There was quite an interesting gender response – a lot of women came up and were very intrigued by it: they recognised the masculine performance in it, they understood the premise of violence and language – it would be interesting to see a female drummer do it actually – but the dynamics can be varied too: hit the drum softly, it’s soft text, harder it’s louder – but what people enjoyed was the way in which the drummer could at one point be the maker and producer of text but next be an instrumentalist, and then an oppressor and editor of language. Those variables were very rich.
But essentially what was it the audience felt they had seen?
It was only about six minutes, but… it was very well-received. People were intrigued by it. They wanted to know how it worked, and I gave them a little introduction at the beginning about where the text had come from, so they witnessed the coherency of its genesis before it was deconstructed in the performance: it wasn’t just a Dadaist type performance – and then they could make the links between the phrases in the different sections. They also picked up that we moved through mono-syllables to words then phrases across the three sections – so they picked up on the dynamic and structure. But part of the appeal is just watching somebody drum. He’s a rock drummer and was very interested in being able to improvise, because he basically just keeps time playing rock. The text is embedded in a performative instrumental context, but embodied by the performer – and that’s always exciting to watch. One person asked me ‘what about having a performer there’ and I said ‘you’ve got a performer there’, which revealed something to me about people’s assumptions regarding what performance or theatre is. This is not the only sort of text that will work well with the drumming, but it’s a good place to start.
What is key for me is that the text itself becomes a way of investigating what the technology can do: technology is not a kind of novelty of function, it’s about saying ‘okay, what kinds of texts work well in this particular context’ and for me that’s absolutely key to this concept of performance writing: it’s about exploring the context and then investigating what kinds of texts work well within it.
And that example’s a good place for us to finish. Thanks Jerome.