Inspirational Text for the Day #1
Oct. 26th, 2008 01:31 pmWhen I did Ten Nights in a Bar-Room - Romero zombies in Temperance-landscape, a Punk friend said with complement that it was "Punk Rock Theatre."
This is the ideal.
To do in these works (my theatre, what I do, the Gemini CollisionWorks) what I find in the best Punk, the best Garage. What David Thomas of Pere Ubu calls the "Avant-Garage." Burn it all down. Smash what's still standing. Pick up the pieces. Look at them. See how you can put them together in different ways that make you understand better what they were in the first place. Start again. Do better. Destroy things better. Fail better. Rip it up and start again. Be angry. Be joyful. Always be angry with joy.
The thought been done occurring to me that the best rock 'n' roll - the perfecting of it - came in the hands of those American garage rockers of the 60s. That this was what RNR was supposed to be - the line that starts with "Good Rocking Tonight" and "Gee" and "Rocket 88" and "That's Alright Mama" down to a bunch of kids creating greatness in limitations and ignorance. Good rock been done made since then, but not actual rock 'n' roll. Not quite part of the original line. Like film noir - REAL film noir - only existed in USA filmmaking from 1941 to 1958 . . . everything else in the noir "manner" is a conscious imitation of a natural national style that unconsciously just HAPPENED. Maybe that's it then, real RNR only existed in the USA from 1951 to 1968.
The punks came in and reconstituted it, the garage ideal, the RNR ideal, but from an intellectual point-of-view - most of them were college educated or dropouts, or could have gone that path and chose not. Smart people trying to lose their smartness in energy and non-reason and volume. Closer to something basically human underneath. But always aware somewhere that this was indeed Art. Nuggets and The Stooges were the key, the hinge on which it all turned. What was it, transforming Outsider Art into Modernism? Not quite - you can't call something as consciously planned and created as Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" an Outsider work, no - but something like that . . .
This is a point of view, not a prescription for the Work. This does not mean violent and loud and messy always in action. Precise, clean works can be done from this mindset. Even "pretty" ones.
(when I directed my first play, several people described it to me as "exquisite," with one even saying it was like a "perfect little jewel box" - and it didn't entirely sound like praise to me - I was [relatively] young; I overreacted; I made my second production as loud and chaotic and confrontational as I could - it was appropriate for the show, but I know better now - sometimes the Work is just supposed to be a jewel box)
It is all about the place of the individual Work in the context of the larger Scene. It is about Reconstruction, not Deconstruction.
It is a mindset. It is important for all the collaborators to be on the same page. It is about a kind of energy, a kind of awareness. It is about operating the tools we've been given with care and respect and precision in a manner that will destroy those tools. We are using these old forms and filling them with a real human energy while we take them apart.
(I often use the example of Penn & Teller doing the classic Cups and Balls routine, where they do it "properly" and then do it again . . . with clear plastic cups so you can see - supposedly - how the illusion is done - and they do it so skillfully that while you can actually see the trickery, it's more impressive and amazing and moving than seeing it done "right" - THIS is what to aim for)
It can be Matt and Bryan's Penny Dreadful, or Jeff's Babylon Babylon, or Nosedive's The Master of Horror, or Robert & Moira's Lord Oxford, or Michael's Notes from Underground, or Bouffon Glass Menajorie or whatever show I'm trying to do this week - and not all of these were entirely successful, maybe, sure - but they all have that quality of self-awareness, that ability to share with the audience the smile and laugh about how dead these forms we're using are (aren't they? I mean, aren't they?), and then stun them with how real and sad and painful and human we can be in these forms.
This is what we're doing at our best in Indie Theatre, Off-Off-Broadway, whatever you call it. I just call it Theatre, the rest is just a marketing label.
(which is not unimportant - and the Punks were brilliant in their marketing using limitations as strengths - something to look at and think about and write upon in future . . . we now have to try to convince the audience that's out there and only thinks of what we do as a dead museum that it is being reinhabited with new energy and life . . .)
In other words, we're not playing around.
Inspirational Text for the Day #1.
Iggy Pop to Peter Gzowski, CBC, March 11, 1977:
I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll. I don't know Johnny Rotten... but I'm sure, I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did.
You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?
Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?