Essences - sample chapter from Minus Theatre: scenes | elements

Essences I wrote in the last section that conventional theatre does not judge inaction, inactions, to be of positive value in the visible work that is set before an audience. But what is conventional theatre? Convention may be understood to be the habits and norms of a society. So that conventional theatre can be understood as theatre that carries and possibly preserves what is habitually and normally assigned to it in the way of its conventions. These conventions are what social and historic norms and habits of thought would have as belonging to theatre or as associated with theatre. (Stengers calls these artiices. They include, for her, the heuristic eicacies of the aleatory and techniques of chance (2015:149).) Theatre is a certain architecture that one does not have to be an architectural historian to know—and this also by general habit of thought and common association—has developed conventionally from the classical European model, of which conventional theatre retains certain features and elements. In some cases, the stage is architecturally demarcated from the auditorium, by, for example, being elevated. In some cases, features and elements are dispensed with, like, for example, the curtain and the ly-tower, or the wings and tabs, the royal boxes and classical perspectivism in scenographic illustration, to be lown in and out on lats and gauzes. 161 Essences Theatre's architectural legacy has led to usages which have become conventional, and conventionally associated, by common understanding, as belonging to plays, shows and performances. Although they rested on discourses that were aesthetic, technical, scientiic, economic and political, these are features and elements that were nondiscursive and tectonic, which have migrated to the discursive—to the conventional discourse of theatre. They are markers of change of scene. The curtain, once a feature and functional element within the proscenium arch is dispensed with and now lights up conveys commencement of action and lights down conventionally communicates completion of dramatic movement. The conventional discourse of theatre includes features like the interval, or intermission, so loved by Badiou, in his “Rhapsody for Theatre”, that he made a plea for its convention to be maintained (2008:209-10). By convention, the interval is the part of the show where the audience understands it may leave the playhouse, arena or performance space. Its own visibility takes over from that of the work in the interval. It does so according to the symmetry understanding inaction on the part of the actors (human or nonhuman) to equal action on its—in promenade, discussion, or the avoidance of discussion, of the work. The exception breaking the convention is where interaction interrupts the audience's conventionally seated inaction and calls for participation of the audience; or where the performance intervenes in the interval, rendering the audience suddenly inactive inasmuch as it attends to the visible work, and insofar as its individual members not attend to themselves, their drinks or their discussions, giving Badiou good reason to make a plea for its maintenance (2008:209-10). 162 Essences The features and elements understood by the conventional discourse to belong to theatre inform the cultural and social expectations of the theatre audience. At the same time, the overall componentry of theatre's belongings is also irreducible to and exceeds the audience's cultural and social expectations. The audience itself is a convention. While new conventions are added or discovered to have migrated to theatrical discourse, it is one that remains nonetheless conventional. If theatre has in some instances succeeded in breaking with a convention like that of the audience, it has not been in order to dispense with it but to draw attention to its essential conventionality. The ilm Theatre without Audience centres on the theatre theorist and practitioner Andrzej Wirth (Streuber, Kocambasi & Mader, 2015). He is rarely out of shot and it is his voice we hear narrating, sometimes against the visual index of a lecture or drama workshop. It is to the latter that the title refers. Wirth is running a workshop for a group of American students in the 1960s. He says in the workshop that a theatre without audience is an idea Brecht had in the 1920s. But it was an idea that was not understood at the time. In Wirth's understanding, a theatre without audience consists in exercises and activities undertaken for those doing them. The audience is not simply not present. It cannot be marked in its presence or absence. Neither is it the case that the exercises and activities are set before and undertaken for noone, nor should we go looking for something or someone to replace the audience. The convention allows for its displacement, which is the ilm's theme: Wirth says, “Displacement is good for you, if you manage to survive it.” (Streuber, Kocambasi & Mader, 2015) Wirth's own displacement, to America from Poland in 1966, was, he says, accidental. 163 Essences Displacement is also a compositional motif in Theatre without Audience (Streuber, Kocambasi & Mader, 2015). The workshop scene, Wirth's statement, scenes from a Brecht Lehrstück (literally teach piece) directed by Wirth which Brecht disowned, a scene with an old Ukrainian man and one with a Japanese dancer are tropes of the ilm, which resonate supported by their diagrammatic repetitions. In this way, the ilm resembles a Minus piece. Each scene is taken up out of its temporal and spatial order, out of its rational order, and disorganised. In Minus this is done by the actors, who take up out of their rational narrative order movements, gestures, expressive details of another's story. Here the space and time of Minus are displaced onto the materiality of ilm. Rather than made whole, the ilm is virtualised through cuts and repetitions and their adjacencies—the fantastic assault of montage is a démontage. Repetitions, in their adjacency, of sheets of action, make rhyme the scenes where Wirth is on a hospital gurney, awaiting and undergoing treatment, and in recovery, with the scenes and repeated details from his American drama workshop, giving them melodic or musical accent and emphasis. What is repeated is held adjacent for turning its aspect, each sequence of shots or sounds, to the other, in a concatenation of postures, across the cut, which does not so much act to separate them, in an action, as conigure them, in inaction, like the part of the machine, ilm, that does not move. The rhyme is suspended, held up by, the ilm's rhythm, its pulse. The sense it anticipates is that a theatre without audience is also an operating theatre, where some therapeutic or medical treatment was, is, or will be, delivered and received. Whether it beneits the patient, will do or has done, who can say? Sometimes would be enough, which conventional medicine can hardly aford. Virtually would be enough, which is among the afordances of theatre, if not quite conventional 164 Essences theatre. Is conventional theatre then a museum for the preservation of discursive and conservation of nondiscursive elements? Does convention dictate that the interval be preserved or the proscenium conserved? These schema are informational inasmuch as they reserve a right, which may be protested for (and against), and conventional inasmuch as that right be upheld (or put down). Do conventions therefore mete out a sort of justice, that is distributed in general, throughout the culture, with cultural institutions, like theatres, as its courts, dispensing a law, ignorance of which is no defence? Is conventional theatre rather not what is conventionally done in or by theatres? In them there is bound to be some contamination, whether artistic, commercial or technological, by innovation and progress. There are bound to be politically corrupt oicials acting at the local level. Is conventional theatre not what is conventionally done in or by theatres but what theatres do not do, which is the same, the done thing and the thing done suiciently long with suiciently broad recognition that it is known to be theatre? Who keeps this knowledge? Who ights for it or weeps over its loss? The keepers of customary knowledge and conventional wisdom are silent on convention. Convention does not receive from them outward and outright avowal but they do not deny it. They do not make positive statements that lay down its law, statements taking the positive form Thou shalt. This is presumably because any avowal would be contested, as would the status of one making it. Reaction would be swift, and the one declaring for convention would be made an exception of, according to convention. Cultural custodians do not ight for convention. They do not even believe in its justice. So knowledge work is the invisible work of a 165 Essences culture, the custodians of which, submitting its conventions to the negative disavowal of Thou shalt not not go against the customs of the land, hold it in custody, without looking at who they have taken prisoner. Knowledge is its own denier, placed visibly in a cordon sanitaire of silence —until it is asked to answer for itself and the authorities are called in. Who says conventional theatre? The obvious answer is those who are not doing it or do not want to be seen as doing it. But it is already not so much a matter of general convention as of particular conventions, because it is harder to fence convention of as a job lot than it is the itemised particularities that must each be named correctly, cited properly, indexed in codices and subcodices, with exceptions clearly stated, for any categorical claim to stick, either for or against. How can Minus Theatre be conventional if its works are performed in multiple languages? How can Minus Theatre be unconventional if it retain conventional demarcation of the actor's and director's roles? Is it not the case that the demarcation implies hierarchy? Does the nomination of director not in itself qualify the role as authoritarian? But is not the conventional view of theatre directors in general as being authoritarian mistaken? What may be taken for authoritarianism on the part of directors by this reactive view, is it not the urge and urgency to punish the breaking of conventions belonging to those who take them seriously? How is a punishment formulated? The punishment is formulated in the statement of the convention against which the infraction has occurred. It is made by the authoritarian director as a statement of fact. The position taken by the authoritarian director is that of one who knows the law and believes in its justice. The strongest type of statement is to exclude the one who, having failed to see, or who, having seen and not recognised it, 166 Essences has broken the law; to exclude him or her from the invisible work as punishment. But, in giving away its identity, this acts to acknowledge the displacement of the fact by the convention. It is to acknowledge the law in its essential conventionality: to mark it and be marked by it (as in Kafka's story In the Penal Colony (2000:189-229), which resounds throughout the discussion of despotism, as the form assumed by ininite debt, in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (2008:231-2)). The one excluded, the exile, is not worthy of the debt owed to convention. Get out of my rehearsal room! Get out of my studio! is exemplary. The weakest type of statement is nonexemplary. Rather the director her- or himself sets the example, and through mounting hysteria, psychotic outbursts, allows his or her paranoia to come to light: she has no control, he has no control, of the conventions of his or her own theatre, in its very invisibility. Screaming one's tits of, or venting, can have the salutary efect of raising the director in the estimation of others as one who really cares. There are other ways, of course, in which the authoritarian director may exercise her judgement, or his. Grotowski's exercises were famously punishing (2002). Robert Wilson's continue to be excruciating to those who do not accept the conventions of his theatre (including mechanical and the slow motion of what Wilson calls the natural time that “helps a sun to set, a cloud to change, a day to dawn” which is the gesture brought, by duration, to its extreme (at Quadri, 1997:12-3)). But the point to be made is the necessary condition of contingency of the conventions as of the director's authority (and putative authoritarianism). The judgements of either are petty. They are small and human, and they are not made to be broken, so much as made. The task of directing theatre is not to follow convention. Neither is it to 167 Essences break with convention. It is to make convention. Where custodial knowledge regards theatrical discourse as a body of achieved facts and statements, a director sees convention (although she or he may be blinded to the fact of convention; although she or he may in exemplary fashion present convention as fact). The custody of rights to conventional claims, however, insists on the nonexceptionality of claims. To take the custody of conventional knowledge of a cultural custodian rests on the rule of one for all. According to this rule, claiming one exception underwrites the body of all, and, thereby, grants legitimacy to the keepers of knowledge, and grants to the prison guards and peace keepers the legitimacy of authority. Not How can Minus Theatre be thought conventional? But How can Minus Theatre think itself the exception unless it break with all convention? Directors who care about convention understand the making of convention as the displacement of facts and statements comprising theatrical discourse. Directors who take the conventions they work within seriously are not in service to them. Directors whose authoritarianism consists in the urge and urgency to punish those who break with convention rather than make convention are not doing so in service to or attendance on the essential conventionality of the artform which they practice. They are serving and attending to the marking of this essential conventionality. Their care is in respect of a visible acknowledgement of the invisible, in the work, which convention serves and on which it attends. Punishment is due those who are merely acquiescent, who do not have the courage to claim with conviction the exception they thereby make of themselves. Those who perform actions, who do not act but make their 168 Essences way by reacting, by making their reaction stand out, those who want to do the right thing, who are better than what they in fact do, who pay lipservice, committing verbally, and those who are ignorant of conventions are tested under the conventions of the invisible work. This is its rigour: to test the resolve of those who say they want to act as well as those who say they cannot perform. The test is not one of the disciplinary knowledge of an essential truth, like that of authenticity or even performativity. It is a test of conventions and of what may be claimed for conventions and declared for in their name. It is of the rights of conventions that the practical discipline is comprised and to which the conventional discourse of theatre is owing. The debt is carried by an unconventional discourse just as much. But the test of acting is to expose reaction, where it is made from the body of knowledge, of aspects of technique and statements of fact, or where the good will of the actor is, with cynicism or with irony, invoked. Here it is as if the debt might be called of before it is incurred (in the case of unconventional discourse) or as if the machine set in motion to mark it (in the case of contravention) might be stopped by lattery before it starts. After White Flower and Textured Passsages I made a commitment for Minus to perform in Auckland's Fringe Festival in February 2015. Conducting workshops in preparation for what became Boneseed was however impossible with a rotating cast of new people and without a suicient number of those who had been in the group at least for the gallery shows. The impossibility was neither due to the reason of having to teach our techniques nor of having actors who might explain and help teach newcomers. The problem was rather in the nature of the knowledge of bodies, of the embodied knowledge of actors and of not having present 169 Essences to act in workshops the acting bodies. The enlistment of actors who had been with Minus for some time and who had this embodied knowledge made Boneseed possible. (Yevgeniya, William and Nell stayed from White Flower; Gabriel came in as a musician for Textured Passages and stayed as an actor; to these were added, for Boneseed, Xiaolian (a friend of Xiaohui, who later returned—whose inluence was therefore felt), Clemente (who saw both previous shows) and Matilda (like Nell, a dancer).) It was not a question of training or having been trained but, it might be said, of being entrained in the conventions we had made. As knowledge, it was not a matter of having learnt but of being marked by it for having undergone something, for having had to undergo something like a ritual or rite of passage, which cannot be agreed to but must be undergone and which cannot but be agreed to but must be undergone. It was a visible diference, like a tattoo or scariication, that made the invisible diference. (These notions, of markings and rituals, led me to make use in Boneseed of Holi dyes from the Indian festival of the same name. Each actor trod barefoot in a bowl of powdered dye before entering the working space of the stage, the path of each one marked a diferent colour, so that it was a bright mess, like a Jackson Pollock, by the end. They marked each other's faces and limbs, as if with paint or blood; and I lit the work to register the brilliantly multicoloured clouds of powder that rose above the action in billows as the dye was thrown in handfuls.) Of course the debt to convention is abstract—and conventional. Theatres are one of the few places you walk around among conventions without their disguises. This is the reason they accept others who bring in new conventions for which allowance can always be made. What is a language but another convention? We can ignore Xhosa and commit to English, or 170 Essences to Mandarin, or Russian, or we can hear it and hear in it a range of possibilities, tonal, musical. But without another who speaks it, apart from René, it is noncommunicative, and breaks with the convention by which the sounds of languages communicate through signiication. It is an unconventional use of language, unless we adopt the convention of the foreigner who hears Xhosa but does not understand it. For every language, even one constituted of conventions of movement, like ballet, like dance, it is entirely conventional and conventionally accepted that there will be those by whom it is not understood. Or until we have made a new convention it is unconventional, because to hear a language as a foreigner is to limit the range of the possibilities, musical, theatrical and linguistic, it introduces. We hear the consonantal clicks of Xhosa as unconventional for a language if our own languages do not have these sounds, or we hear the tonal schema of Mandarin as unconventional for our own languages' not possessing such schema, except arbitrarily, as individual traits or manners of speaking, and not as informational or signiicatory. The convention we make accepts as broad a range of languages and of meanings of and purposes for language as possible. René, issuing a simple command in Xhosa, will be understood; while, describing the details of the scene he sees around him and his actions in it, he will not be. The convention we have adopted, made and maintain in Minus is to ask newcomers to speak in the language that by being the most familiar to them gives them the greatest range of expressive possibility. (René in fact was as comfortable in Ugandan, French and English as he was in Xhosa; so he swapped among and between them, and between the betweens, where he spoke a polyglot, making a new convention for himself.) Customarily, I would ask you, if you were unacquainted with this 171 Essences convention, to double your actions with speech and say what you are doing, until you are habituated to it. Once you are, because it is a matter of listening to others as much as or more than speaking yourself, the range of what you can do increases. For example, at the outset, you will tend to answer a direct question, rather than to listen to the speaker, and, without answering, speak back: the convention is nonsigniication, not, in the conventional sense, to answer sense with sense. The English speakers, like Bill or Matilda, or Gabriel, who adopted the linguistic convention of Minus with alacrity, perhaps because of a vocation for music, I customarily ask to avoid the construction using the present tense plus verb in the participle form for direct action and to prefer subject plus verb constructions: I walk, over—I am walking. The reason for this is the duration the to be present verbal participle introduces into the action: it injects into it verbally a continuous present, which tends to slow down, viscously, transition to subsequent action, as if walking in mud. Bill efectively thematised this linguistic trope in a story he acted out, taking the lead for others to follow and disorganise his actions' narrative principles, about, exactly, mud. He bent down, felt it between thumb and foreinger, brought it to his tongue. He spread some on his face. He waded out into it, slowing down as the mud deepened and grasped his legs. He plunged into it and submerged himself bodily, until his breath gave out. He emerged gasping. He cleared the mud from his eyes, turned and waded back to shore, where, with arms spread and eyes shut, face raised to the sun, he let the mud dry. The question that arose from Mud was what are the principles of narrative organising the action if not properly existential? Other actors who entered then occupied this present 172 Essences tense—a duration ixed, like dried mud, without sequence or passage of past-present-future, without sequel or consequence, as now, now and now. A wonderland of tolerance and freedom where each one is accepted in Minus whatever conventions she has brought from home, or whatever the habits, customs and norms with which fate has encumbered him or entrusted to him, it is not. The conventions are free, and, freely observed, are seen to be conventions. But some struggle to accept them without their masks of force and order; and some do not recognise them without masks at all. The former normally conclude Minus is not right for them— the inner or the outer imperative is missing: no one is telling them what to do and the order is not clear. Many slip away, some to return, like May, whose life story I will touch on in the next section. But the latter's ight, of those who do not see the conventions they walk among, is not of nonacceptance; the ight they have is for the nonacceptance of the necessary contingency of freely given conventions: Jaypal always listened to me when I said listen. I wore the mask of the boss, the authoritarian director, which boss he had been in a former life, worth twenty men. But he did not listen to others. He spoke beautiful melodic Hindi in a ine strong voice, which he modulated into a rumbling rhythmic chant when I asked him to tone it down. When it came to the visible work before an audience, in Marks of Lispector, for Clarice, he took his turn to preen and boom and show of, always with small looks at me for approval, as if this is what all our conventions of individual possibility had been about. He declared for the boss, not for the conventionality of his own exorbitant display, which was invisible to him, and which was indebted to him, rather than being that to which he owed his visibility. After Marks of Lispector, for Clarice, I failed to call him when I reconvened Minus. 173 Essences The theatre is not alone as a place where the true identity of convention is known. But there is an historic convention whereby its launting of conventionality has been regarded as a paradigmatic louting and endangering of such social norms and habits as make up public morality. This is the adventure Deleuze takes philosophy on at the beginning of Diference and Repetition (2004): philosophy goes to the theatre, as it will later, in Cinema 1 and 2 go to the cinema (1997; 2012), where it walks among the unmasked bodies of convention, inding both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche there already and presently occupied, one dancing, the other, the former, in the audience, squirming in his seat (2004:6-12). The unmasked bodies agree to perform and act in a masque called The Image of Philosophy, which is hardly unlike the Public Morality, in that it does not declare for the conventions, dogma, the morals to which, silently, it acquiesces (2004:167). (Like the relationship to Political Correctness of the Left, it is a practice with striking similarity to that familiarly called suspension of disbelief (Žižek at Lain, 2017).) Groups of artists, artistic movements, studios, with students, and educational establishments have shown the same love for convention nude, in various states of undress, as well as—emphatically—formally attired. The theatricality of its dressed-up nature, of its, as Warhol said of himself, profound supericiality, or as Wilde, its natural articiiality, may be ixed with nothing more assertive or subtle than a simple pin, as Eliot suggests (1963:14). CalArts, by the report of Herbert Blau, at inception was such a place (2014:214-8). So was Black Mountain earlier, for Cage, de Kooning, Olson, Einstein, members of the Bauhaus, even earlier such a place, and for its students, Rauschenberg, Cunningham, Noland, Rockburne, Creeley (Byrne, 2017). The Futurists in Italy, the Dadaists in Switzerland, and Modernism in general, provided places where convention was seen, heard, felt, smelt, 174 Essences tasted, embraced, occupied and fetishised—in the return to the fetish of Picasso, Derain, Breton (Lingis, 2011:73)—as nothing less than convention. Artists are, in the main, as taste-makers, more accepting than educators, who have the role chiely of cultural custodians, of the rule of convention, which can never be taken seriously enough as when it is not serious. “An ethical sympathy in/ an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style”, Wilde writes, and—“Even/ things that are true can be proved.” (1952:17) Is not this the rule of the minority, the convention dividing minority from majority? The minority declares for convention as the mark of an identity and as the mark of adherence. It owes its adherence to conventions the majority upholds to secure its peace, to maintain its dominance, the justice of which is asserted in the conventional rule of self-rule of its constituence. In the majority's acquiescence to and palliation of the masking and disguising of force and order by convention, by convention of the normal, customary and habitual, it cedes to minorities the right to discovery of the conventional, to claim the convention for themselves, of the majority's assertion of dominance, to mark its conventional identiications and declare for them. These are the conventions of divisions by race, ethnicity, religious markings, markings of dress, as well as skin colour, gender and sexuality. Is not this the meaning Deleuze and Guattari give to the minoritarian and the reason they attach to it political signiicance (2014:546-7)? Mark Fisher describes the shift from neoconservative to neoliberal attitudes in terms of a deepening of the acquiescence of the majority in its passive reaction to convention (2012). He appreciates, in the introduction of neoliberalism during the New Labour era of Tony Blair's 175 Essences government in the UK, the arrival of a particular convention, of a speciic cultural logic, under which neoliberalism let itself be known, was commonly upheld and continues to be commonly upheld, attributing necessity to convention. It provided to convention the necessity of progress and modernisation—You can't escape the future. Fisher relates in an interview the shift in the oicial line of managers and departmental heads in the education sector, where he was working at the time. He speaks of an increase, unprecedented over his tenure, in the bureaucratic demands and requirements placed on his position, of illing out forms and iling reports about teaching, to the point that his teaching duties looked to be overtaken. When approached, his managers generally agreed that these new demands and requirements of the bureaucracy had no real bearing on teaching. When consulted, they were in sympathy and agreed that there was neither pedagogical basis, nor practical reason, for the added workload. When questioned, sector managers, departmental heads, and their mouthpieces, accepted what was demanded and required by the bureaucracy went beyond the regular reporting and illing in of forms needed to meet newly imposed standards for the measurement of educational outcomes. When confronted, they even allowed that having to report on performance was a type of self-regulation, spying on oneself, in auto- or sousveillance. I know. I don't like it either, they would say—It's just what we've got to do these days. (Fisher, 2012) Neoliberalism, as a general adjustment in social policy and political economy, does not sweep neoconservatism aside—it follows it to the letter, while putting on it a friendly face. Similarly, neither does postmodernism, as a general cultural adjustment, sweep modernism 176 Essences aside. It operates otherwise. Postmodernism resubmits to convention all of culture and, recalling the nonexceptionalism of one for all, cultural and artistic history, including—which is key—itself as a cultural moment. It redraws everything past, from the proscenium to the Happening, including its own operation, into a resonant ield of reference points. But what returns does not return because it is worth it. The past it returns is not returned because it is worthy of returning. It is returned in its essential conventionality. The proscenium resubmitted to convention by postmodernism is a “proscenium.” It is reproduced as the product of, the reproduction of, no other discourse, under no other cultural logic, than those of postmodernity. The Happening has the happening of a postmodern “Happening.” The authenticity, the potential of the past to be quoted, and the performativity, the potential of the past to be performed, are not at issue here. But in redrawing everything past into a resonant ield of reference points that includes its own operation, what is at stake in postmodernism is a resubstantialisation of conventions as concrete reference points. These apparently unwieldy and abstract terms, like neoliberalism, like neoconservatism, like postmodernism, are therefore the best available tools, since they are wholly responsible to convention. Their application is precisely to concretise, to make substantial and ix irmly that which is luid, abstract and unwieldy, which they barely cover up—there is not under them another mask. Resubstantialised, reproduced, given the possibility as such, the past that returns, that is retraced to the letter, that is given a friendly name, like the diminutive of postmodernism Pomo, the past that is made a concrete reference point in an operation itself concrete for taking place— 177 Essences convening—in the present, the present that brings the past and present together under convention, exactly this past is inescapable. It is the future, the future postmodernism, like postcapitalism, is ever after. Its resubmission of all cultural history and cultural histories to convention is axiomatic—the term Deleuze and Guattari apply to capitalism (2008:267f), as it sustains its notion in an operation that goes like clockwork of prevailing in contingency through necessity, breaking down, having to be wound up tight, in which—“capital itself igures as a directly economic instance”, and, we might say with justice, no more no less, the economic convention (271). You can't escape the future if there is nothing more to it than the past, if it is not what it used to be. But you can look at its value. This is not precluded: you can look at the mechanism which gives value—repetition. We are constantly looking in Minus workshops for new conventions, for what is worth repeating. Earlier I said my job as director is to monitor the invisible work and to evaluate movements, tendencies and possibilities (Theatre of an other: The Other-structure and ensemble). This is not quite true. (It is virtually true: not quite, not yet, no longer.) It is true insofar as I have often been in a privileged position, a position privileged by convention, to see; and it is true insofar as I see my task as looking out: for what is worth repeating. But others in the group see as well in the invisible work and repeat in workshops what they see as worth repeating. Xiaohui introduced the idea that what was spoken might bear the relation to the action of a running commentary. She stood apart from the action and from a neutral bodily stance and in a neutral tone gave a narration in Mandarin. Such a narration entered the visible work in the production of Marks of Lispector, for Clarice (November, 2015). Mancio's commentary 178 Essences was in the voice of Clarice Lispector, with whose works in Brazilian Portuguese he is very familiar. In At the Stock Market Meeting (November, 2016), Mancio gave the convention a new twist by standing apart from the action and translating on the ly—English to Portuguese— from a script I had prepared and set in the Old Folks Association Hall where the performance took place as if ofering a commentary on the action, adopting the neutral tones of a commentator. The deinition of work may therefore be extended to include the repetition of convention. Where the workshop is to make new conventions, to make them from what is valued in the invisible work as worth repeating, the rehearsal may be said to repeat them, to consist in the repetition of convention. For Minus, workshops run into rehearsals and rehearsals run into workshops. But always at the outset of a bracket of workshops leading up to a production workshops test conventions we have developed, of the style of what we called theatre of individual life, which I have presented here as theatre of an other, and test the techniques, the methodology, for instance, of attending closely to the acted story of one workshop participant to case the joint, the assessing beforehand by others of what they might steal, and taking it from the story, distribute across the space, and disorganise over the piece's duration. (Members of Minuis and I presented this method at an Applied Theatre conference in Auckland, November 2015, as thief (theatre of imitation, expression & f___ery.) I say methodology of thief because of the degree of its elaboration in the invisible work, where it is called by name, in English, and invoked as a method, and so belongs to the conventional discourse of Minus Theatre. If the work, the labour in elaborating, is the repetition of convention, the 179 Essences workshop is to make new conventions and rehearsal, literally, to rehear them, replay them, work them, what is valued in convention is what animates. It is not what animates convention but what convention animates. Xiaohui's commentary freed up the use of languages. It added whole new aspects to the work, of parody, self-parody and irony, which were able to be communicated, and made possible their communication, outside of any one language: their theatrical communication. It set up an antinarrative to the story, the story told in one's own words, as the formula goes, and made a further exception—always worth repeating—to what is conventionally understood to be communicable in what is conventionally understood to be a language. Its value itself is not exceptional; it is conventional. A theatrical theory of value might therefore take the following formula: What is valued in value is its convention. (It is in this sense that I have referred to a justice of convention. It judges a convention not worth repeating to be without value, minus theatre for Minus Theatre.) To declare for a new convention, to repeat it before an audience, having workshopped to ind it and worked it in rehearsal, is this to do conventional theatre, or theatre at all if the convention is not recognised by the audience to belong to theatre? Aboveall, what is theatre? Is it not the mask valued by convention? Or is it the unmasking of all values in their essential conventionality? These would include among them the value conventionally attributed to art. But it is in its repeatability as art that I think theatre inds value. It is as an artform that it is able to be repeated for being worth repeating. This has been the object of Minus's pursuit, and its escape route. The audience, and her perspective, the audience, and his point of view—the literal I spectate of the Greek word θεάτρου (theatron)—is it not perhaps exactly as an artform that theatre 180 Essences can do without it? Time is the fantastic assassin of conventions (as of values). When we irst looked at what others were taking from the one telling a story and themselves adopting in the way of a gesture, detail of expression, node in the narrative network, or plotpoint in the storyline, I said in a workshop they were arrows to be snatched from the air. Movements are themselves in movement, as are the movements of which the latter is comprised. Action, as has been noted, is time. Time is an arrow, with all the paradoxes the image of an arrow in light, or fallen to ground, or shot at a target, conventionally carries with it, in its light, on its fall, with only estimates to go on for departures and arrivals. One acting a story, moreover, sends out arrows, some intentional signs, some involuntary symptoms, of what is really at stake, or of what is not really at stake, except for the ones watching, listening, with whom, in whom, for whom, whatever it is will always resonate diferently: no matter, the arrow has a target. At whom is it shot? At each one for diferent reasons. You are a musician, it strikes you at your centre of rhythm; a keen observer, it goes to your ingers, which oscillate in a peculiar way; an empath—straight to the heart. What strikes you is an arrow you snatch from the air. Then I came across this story. James Olney, the scholar of biography, tells the story of Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor of life (1998:276-339). I made use of the story, insofar as I remembered it, at a Performance Hui and Symposium, April 2016, held at Araiteuru Marae and St. Margaret's College in Dunedin. I mention the venues, because I had the privilege of conducting a workshop, this time without other members of Minus, to illustrate or represent our techniques (represented in the programme for the event as T.O.I.L.— 181 Essences Theatre of Individual Life), in the wharenui, the main meeting-house of the marae (which is, architecturally, a compound of dwellings, which survives from the precolonial era, when it had a military function as a defensible redoubt, the pa, and which continues to have social, cultural, temporal and sacral functions. The latter are centred on the wharenui, which is intensively occupied by tāonga—ancestral belongings living and present in a time collapsing 3000 years). The wharenui, it turned out, was the perfect place to present techniques of extemporisation, and I connected Minus's approaches to temporality to the metaphysical understandings of time of Māori. With this heuristic in place, a gift of the place, I made recourse to Giacometti's story, as related by Olney, to explain what participants—and all of the conferees participated in the workshop—were to attend to in following the one I asked to lead the group. (Here also I adapted slightly the convention of the leader enacting an emotionally resonant story. I asked that he, Richard Huber, who has entered this writing in relation to Butoh, start to move, and let the movement lead, one movement to the next, to outline rather than to igure something like an emplotment of points. I asked Richard to act through the series of movements like he was laying out the points and phases of a ritual, to do so in such a way as to share, with those present, an alien ritual, for them to engage with it, outlining it as he would do were he inviting others to join in a ritual which is new to them.) After I told the story, I said: I want you to subtract from what Richard is doing, from how he is moving, from his movement, to get to the essence, to what it is which makes him essentially him and no other. It is an impossible task, I know, but try. Take from him what strikes you as essential. For everyone it will be diferent. Subtract from what you have taken, reine it. Try again. 182 Essences If you ind that it is not him but you, stop. Start again. It is worth doing and worth failing at, try. It is worth trying and, like Beckett says, failing better, failing better each time. Copying a movement is a good place to start. It is good to repeat it. But subtract it from time. If you ind, in taking a movement, a gesture or expression, you are copying in real time, this is not inding an essence. To follow what Richard is doing in real time, to imitate his movements in real time, is not to get to what is essential. What it is that makes him him, as what is essential that makes you you, is not found in real time. What is essential in him, the essential in anyone—what is essential in you—can not, essentially, take place in real time. Essences do not belong to real time, but must be subtracted. Giacometti was a famously self-deprecating portraitist. Stravinsky sat for him and records how Giacometti turned away from his work in exasperation and said, It's no good, I can't go on. He did not do this on just one occasion but did it repeatedly, throughout a sitting, and every time Stravinsky sat for him, would break from the work, and protest in a way which seemed exaggerated, It's no good, I can't go on. He laboured over his sculptural subjects as over his portraits. It made the job of being his model one of surpassing diiculty. Only his brother, Diego, had the patience for it. What Giacometti set out to capture was the essence of the individual before him, which made the job of being an artist one of surpassing diiculty as well and one to which Giacometti did not believe himself equal. 183 Essences The story goes that one day Giacometti noticed a friend at some distance on the street. (Olney will have departed from me by now. His main account is found at 1998:280, 288.) What struck him was that he recognised immediately who it was: the distance gave his vision not a single detail to go on and generalised the silhouette in a way that ought to have made the whole igure impossible to know. Yet, despite the broad, almost limitless expanse still separating the sculptor from the approaching igure, he realised that an essence—perhaps no more than the tiniest particle of what made the one he saw that one and no other— had been transmitted to him with distinct clarity. So he worked for ten years (in actuality three (Olney, 1998:288)). For ten years, Giacometti conducted explorations, attempting to reproduce in his studio what he had with such clarity seen while out one day on a Parisian street. At every attempt, as he pulled wads of clay from it, subtracting from it to ind its essence, with mounting terror, he found the sculpture shrinking under his ingers. Each time he tried, it wound up no bigger than a toothpick or a matchstick. All he had to show after a decade of work could be contained in a single matchbox (in actuality six (Olney, 1998:288)): an entire exhibition, in a matchbox. Called upon to exhibit in Switzerland, he travelled with the only one of his attempts he did not consider a failure. It was not a complete failure inasmuch as, having to the smallest extent captured an individual essence, it was life-like, if not life-size. Arriving he was shown the pedestal, monumental, on which he was to mount his work. Whereupon, withdrawing from within his jacket a matchbox and, proceeding to open it, Giacometti produced the sculpture. It was a tiny human igure, between two and three centimetres tall, seen as if 184 Essences approaching over an immense distance. Giacometti discovered that the only way he could get his igures to grow to anything approaching life-size (and then exceeding it) was to make them very thin. 185