A Wallaby, a Dingo and a Wild Pig All Walked On a Stage
Monday 11 January 2010
There was no moon last night, and just before going to bed I took a tin of old and nearly fermented blueberry muffins into the back paddock to leave them for the birds for breakfast. I knew where I was from muscle memory alone. I could see nothing because I had just come from the glare of the computer screen. Between one step and the next I realised that I was not alone. There was a wallaby beside me, fascinated by the smell of the muffins, less so by the smell of me. He hopped gracefully to one side. I jumped ungracefully halfway out of my skin.
He took a few hops forward and waited. I threw a muffin at him out of mischief. I missed, but he hopped a hop anyway. I threw another muffin. He hopped another hop. So it went on until he had circled me nearly all the way, and all the muffins were gone.
This morning, the ground was littered with empty patty-cake papers. He had eaten every muffin, and I wonder now exactly who was being most mischievous with whom.
I’ve had similar moments on stage, when someone either in my cast or in my audience has thrown an unexpected line or comment at me, and left me to keep the show going as though I had been in control all along. I eventually developed this as a festival act. I would invite members of the audience to suggest characters and locations, and from there I would start to tell a story, stopping occasionally to ask someone “what did he say then?” or “what did she see?” It was possible to keep this up at high energy for half an hour or more. The art came not in the improvisation, but in managing the story so that when the end came it was a logical development from the opening. I loved working this way. It has been some years since I last had the opportunity, but if I ever had the chance again, I will develop this as my primary material.
People found it a hugely impressive feat - as people do the feats of theatre-sports teams - but even the best of us are pygmies compared with the great improvisation theatre of the 17th and 18th Centuries. We all have our favourites, but whenever I feel most especially gratified by my own cleverness, I call Francesco Gianni to mind.
Francesco Gianni was the official singer of the victories of Napoleon, for which the Emperor awarded him an annual pension. A master improviser at the end of the last great period of mainstream improvisational literature in Europe, one eyewitness had this to say of his performances: “One had merely to look at him once he was given a subject for improvisation - the way he would gather together his energy, the flush that would come to his face and the fire in his eyes, the wild looks, the ruffled hair, arms impetuously extended and a convulsive movement imparted to the whole body - in order to be convinced that such things were not the ready-made products of art. He was truly in the grips of divine force similar to that which overpowered the pythoness in the scene which Virgil has described for us. He would not sing his verses in the way all the others were accustomed to do; rather, he would declaim with such a breakneck speed that it was sometimes barely possible to follow the sequence of thought."
I would love someone sometime to say such a thing of me. This review is one of the major models for my stage-work, and remains something to which I aspire. It is most especially the wildness, the raw animality that compels me. I have occasionally given performances of The Gospel of Mark and looked at myself from outside (as it were) and seen something that was not me, but that was wild in the way that a dingo is wild or the way that a shaman is wild. This is the real thing, the real danger that attracted me to theatre in the first place.
Norman Cohn, in the preface to Gold Khan, his compilation of Siberian epics, has this to say: “These stories are not fairy tales; they are reflections, magnified perhaps but essentially accurate, of the world in which their creators passed their lives. For their original audiences the magical and demonic world of these legends was the real world. It’s evocation - at night, by flickering firelight, in a solemn and gloomy chant - was a serious spiritual adventure. It was an experiment in the terrible, the forbidden and the dangerous.”
This is the kind of theatre I want. The kind I want to make and the kind I want to see. Allowing for a different tradition of performance - Australian rather than Siberian - it is this that I have done with The Bible, with our heritage, with my improvisations and my own writings (the so-called Post-modern Dreaming). Being Australian, I have added humour into the mix.
This, allowing again for the difference in performance style, is what I think Jesus did when he told the parables. In the contemporary gumbo of evangelical perfervidity and atheistic muddle-headedness that we pass off as an intellectual life we forget that Jesus spent most of his time as a traveling performer. He was often called mad or possessed. The miracles and the doctrines attributed to him were unexceptional for the time - I suspect that it was his performances that earned him his reputation. I think of him now as a dingo/shaman - and because I am an orthodox believer that means that I think that the dingo/shaman is also the true human. So I am with the Siberians - theatre is about going into the dangerous places and trying dangerous spiritual experiments.
When you listen to early field recordings of gospel singers - surely the most dangerous of vocal performances on tape - the noise and clutter in the recording comes as a surprise. The sheer energy - the volume and power of the voice - overwhelms the equipment of the day. Over the years, singers and spoken word artists learned to be tamed by the microphone. Within the same decade as these mad recordings, crooners such as Bing Crosby had redesigned our expectations of the voice. When singers again returned to the style of the old gospel and blues shouters - Mick Jagger, say, or Tina Turner or Axl Rose - the machinery existed to tame the performance on their behalf. The results are thrilling in their own way, but not as thrilling as those first field recordings.
I have been trying to recreate the effect of those recordings - using plein-air as an aesthetic - that does not create distortion and mess on the one hand, or a taming through technology on the other. Nothing will ever replace the sensation of live - just as nothing can replace the sensation of being alive.
I love Gaslight and Charlie’s Aunt and community theatre at its most wacky and at its most earnest - and so does almost everyone else. Few like - let alone love - my style of theatre. But enough do, and it has earned me a living.
I was once charged by a wild pig on a dark night. My meeting with the wallaby was harmless and funny, but that with the pig left me afterwards more alive and more ready to live. There is a moral in there somewhere, but I will leave it to others to make out. I just found some more old muffins.
Noël Christian
homestead:Theatre of Words
http://www.facebook.com/pages/homestead-Theatre-of-Words/195922452014?ref=ts
http://www.myspace.com/homesteadtheatre
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=505844404
He took a few hops forward and waited. I threw a muffin at him out of mischief. I missed, but he hopped a hop anyway. I threw another muffin. He hopped another hop. So it went on until he had circled me nearly all the way, and all the muffins were gone.
This morning, the ground was littered with empty patty-cake papers. He had eaten every muffin, and I wonder now exactly who was being most mischievous with whom.
I’ve had similar moments on stage, when someone either in my cast or in my audience has thrown an unexpected line or comment at me, and left me to keep the show going as though I had been in control all along. I eventually developed this as a festival act. I would invite members of the audience to suggest characters and locations, and from there I would start to tell a story, stopping occasionally to ask someone “what did he say then?” or “what did she see?” It was possible to keep this up at high energy for half an hour or more. The art came not in the improvisation, but in managing the story so that when the end came it was a logical development from the opening. I loved working this way. It has been some years since I last had the opportunity, but if I ever had the chance again, I will develop this as my primary material.
People found it a hugely impressive feat - as people do the feats of theatre-sports teams - but even the best of us are pygmies compared with the great improvisation theatre of the 17th and 18th Centuries. We all have our favourites, but whenever I feel most especially gratified by my own cleverness, I call Francesco Gianni to mind.
Francesco Gianni was the official singer of the victories of Napoleon, for which the Emperor awarded him an annual pension. A master improviser at the end of the last great period of mainstream improvisational literature in Europe, one eyewitness had this to say of his performances: “One had merely to look at him once he was given a subject for improvisation - the way he would gather together his energy, the flush that would come to his face and the fire in his eyes, the wild looks, the ruffled hair, arms impetuously extended and a convulsive movement imparted to the whole body - in order to be convinced that such things were not the ready-made products of art. He was truly in the grips of divine force similar to that which overpowered the pythoness in the scene which Virgil has described for us. He would not sing his verses in the way all the others were accustomed to do; rather, he would declaim with such a breakneck speed that it was sometimes barely possible to follow the sequence of thought."
I would love someone sometime to say such a thing of me. This review is one of the major models for my stage-work, and remains something to which I aspire. It is most especially the wildness, the raw animality that compels me. I have occasionally given performances of The Gospel of Mark and looked at myself from outside (as it were) and seen something that was not me, but that was wild in the way that a dingo is wild or the way that a shaman is wild. This is the real thing, the real danger that attracted me to theatre in the first place.
Norman Cohn, in the preface to Gold Khan, his compilation of Siberian epics, has this to say: “These stories are not fairy tales; they are reflections, magnified perhaps but essentially accurate, of the world in which their creators passed their lives. For their original audiences the magical and demonic world of these legends was the real world. It’s evocation - at night, by flickering firelight, in a solemn and gloomy chant - was a serious spiritual adventure. It was an experiment in the terrible, the forbidden and the dangerous.”
This is the kind of theatre I want. The kind I want to make and the kind I want to see. Allowing for a different tradition of performance - Australian rather than Siberian - it is this that I have done with The Bible, with our heritage, with my improvisations and my own writings (the so-called Post-modern Dreaming). Being Australian, I have added humour into the mix.
This, allowing again for the difference in performance style, is what I think Jesus did when he told the parables. In the contemporary gumbo of evangelical perfervidity and atheistic muddle-headedness that we pass off as an intellectual life we forget that Jesus spent most of his time as a traveling performer. He was often called mad or possessed. The miracles and the doctrines attributed to him were unexceptional for the time - I suspect that it was his performances that earned him his reputation. I think of him now as a dingo/shaman - and because I am an orthodox believer that means that I think that the dingo/shaman is also the true human. So I am with the Siberians - theatre is about going into the dangerous places and trying dangerous spiritual experiments.
When you listen to early field recordings of gospel singers - surely the most dangerous of vocal performances on tape - the noise and clutter in the recording comes as a surprise. The sheer energy - the volume and power of the voice - overwhelms the equipment of the day. Over the years, singers and spoken word artists learned to be tamed by the microphone. Within the same decade as these mad recordings, crooners such as Bing Crosby had redesigned our expectations of the voice. When singers again returned to the style of the old gospel and blues shouters - Mick Jagger, say, or Tina Turner or Axl Rose - the machinery existed to tame the performance on their behalf. The results are thrilling in their own way, but not as thrilling as those first field recordings.
I have been trying to recreate the effect of those recordings - using plein-air as an aesthetic - that does not create distortion and mess on the one hand, or a taming through technology on the other. Nothing will ever replace the sensation of live - just as nothing can replace the sensation of being alive.
I love Gaslight and Charlie’s Aunt and community theatre at its most wacky and at its most earnest - and so does almost everyone else. Few like - let alone love - my style of theatre. But enough do, and it has earned me a living.
I was once charged by a wild pig on a dark night. My meeting with the wallaby was harmless and funny, but that with the pig left me afterwards more alive and more ready to live. There is a moral in there somewhere, but I will leave it to others to make out. I just found some more old muffins.
Noël Christian
homestead:Theatre of Words
http://www.facebook.com/pages/homestead-Theatre-of-Words/195922452014?ref=ts
http://www.myspace.com/homesteadtheatre
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=505844404
More by Noel Christian
- Apples Under the Earth5 Jan 2010
- Earning Wages Just to Put Them in a Bagful of Holes29 Dec 2009
- All There in My Mouth Somewhere25 Dec 2009