Residency In Cambridge Pt. I: Doing

One Doing






We set rail on a crusty Monday morning, a Luna, a Liron and an Orte in toe, clasping backsacks.
We depart with the Luna at Shadwell who, the night before, had lulled us to the harmonic tones celestial of glossolalic incantations, after le Liron played us out to a Town Bloody Hall.
Evenmore the night before, they did condecent to join me in the Little Angel where disembodying puppen won amok with amateurisms. But the impotent ring being that we played with our shadows.

So above is the record of this playing with light in the studio
we kept for the week, all ourself, and we put a whiten sheet up with string and brick.



'One Doing' from the Gertrude Stein through the Kaossssss Pap.
Rilke's Elegy IV found its splace. Happy coindents like 'quivering before heart's curtain' and 'enter first dancer...no...', 'glowing behind every shape'...now was not a compliment to sentimental puppentry but a critiquical invest into both pome and form....And no to mention where ay maun put Hugh McDiarmid to rights with the dulcets ofNaplammo Death. Still, undistilled, I run out with Nothingman by Pearl Jam - from the 6months previous exerjive when Lironi did bop his Edmund hips to the trip of Macreedy, gossard, ament, camron and vedder.




I wanted shadows and this being an OBJECTSPERFORMINGTEXTS residence, his tropical body became the obbjet, but who could keep him from being a toy? we pull down the shadow curtain he being touching from behind 'OH FOE PA!! DO NOT SO MUCH AS BRAKE THE RULER BY TOUCHING THE ILLUSION, YOU'LL BURN!'
so touching the mask.



But how not to do doing? Do nothing? what is doing nothing?
Not standing neutral for only, as that is clearly doing something.
In the end, did we get it? eyes moving, legs hesitating, breathing breath-ing.





Light on a body, one that was once a model for Egon Schiele, is affecting but statuesquing.
Once we tried to balance on bricks but then it became a spectaculule of virtubotic endurance.
Who has not quivered in front of the curtain of your heart, before an audience and the light.


A Doing


Chooseday and Wegsday morning up out for Cauis continental 8aim into studio for 10aim and warming up we doing 'Doings.' Below is one doing of a doing.

Rilke's Duino Elegy IV

Here is an example of cutting at its finest. I wanted to translate this important poem (important for puppeteers at least), and use some of it in the final scene of 'Stomunculus the Homunculus'. So in rehearsal we cut it down to about three stanzas, keeping in the 'relevant' bits about Angels and Puppets and corridors between world and toy. But after we tried it, with all this talk of Angel and Puppet and the cycle of transformation, it became quite clear that we were starting to bombard our audience with 'interpretation'! So in the end we cut the whole thing.
But it was a worthwhile attempt at trying to use Rilke on stage, if it was only to become a hamfisted one.

Below is my translation of the poem. Not the entire thing, and I take a few liberties with words, such as using 'dummy' for 'spielteug'.

Duino Elegy IV

O living trees, when is your winter?

We are not in tune with the migrating bird.

Overslept and overtaken

we drag ourselves up into the wind

and drop onto an icy pond.

Birth and death weld in our minds.

And the lion power-prowls majestic,

alien to the meak.

But we, as our minds fix on one thing,

feel the tug of another thing. Combat

is our neighbour. Lovers always tresspass

on eachother’s space – despite the promise

of a sprawling hunting-ground called Home.

We don’t know the actual contours of our feelings,

Only what crafts them from the outside.

Who has not quivered before the curtain in his heart?

As it opens onto a parting scene, the familiar

garden swaying softly then…enter, the first dancer.

No, not him! Enough of this. However light

His moves; beneath this mask is a man who

scuttles into his home through the kitchen.

I won’t tolerate these half-filled masks.

I want the Puppet. The puppet is full. I will

bear its bulge, its wires, its wooden face.

Here. I wait.

Even if the lamps go out and a voice from the dark

Says to me: “That’s all” – even when the stage

Drifts emptiness in a grey draft towards me, even if

my silent ancestors do not sit with me, nor women neither,

or the squinting boy with brown eyes.

I’ll still sit here. You can always watch.

Is it too much to ask

to sit before a puppet stage and stare

so intently, that, to realign my sight

an angel is forced to ignite these stuffed actors

to life?

Angel and Puppet. At last, a true theatre.

Where the things we divide by being here

Come together. Then, from our lives

Will arise the entire cycle of transformation.

Above and beyond us

The angel plays.

The dying

Must know that all we do is a lie, where everything

Is forbidden to be itself –

O, hours of childhood,

When more than the past glowed behind every shape,

And what was formed before us, was not the future.

We felt our bodies grow and already yearned to be

Bigger, half for the sake of those with nothing more

Than their bigness. But even then, we were in love,

When playing alone, with things that endure. We stood

In the corridor between World and Dummy,

In a space which, from the first beginning,

Had been established as a pure event.

Who displays a child as he is? Who moulds

His death out of clay, or leaves it on the shore

For the water…Murderers are easy to understand.

But this? That death, the entirety of death, before

Their life has even begun, can be

Embraced so gently, without the fear of being,

Is inexpressible.

Ursonate @ Shunt, 13th February 2010

On the 12th and 13th of February I performed 'Ursonate' at the Shunt Vaults.
On the first night (Friday) I had to go it alone as my compatriots were busy looking for or doing actual jobs. The audience received it rapturously (most likely because it was performed in the Reading Room right next to the new bar set up in the corridor). It was the first time I've had an audience whoop and cheer during a reading. I felt a bit like John Coltrane.

The following evening it was Dummy Company's time to shine and Shaun and Sophie took centre-table with various objects and puppets. This time we did the whole sonata and, having only just improvised it an hour before, the final movement went down a treat as we debuted our new 'Golemming' puppets (new for Stomunculus the Homunculus).



A Golemming

The final presto sounds a bit like techno music, so I decided to throw a little Golemming party complete with party poppers, shaving foam and a little glitter ball. Aside from the laughter, the audience were the complete opposite to the night before, as they focussed intently on the puppets.

Here is an audio recording of the Saturday 13th performance:

URSONATE@SHUNT (13th Feb, 2010)

or

files.me.com/shaunmay/aq5zf2.mp3

Some Nice Words

Here is an appraisal of Dummies (thus far) from Kelina Gotman of KCL on its debut at RADA earlier in the year. Maybe this will give people an idea as to what I might be doing with this thing:

Dummies is easily one of the best works of theatre I saw all year [2009]. It is raw, open, messy, polyvocal, poetic, and completely insane, unravelling before our eyes (and ears) all the indecipherable codes and speech patterns that transpire from the City to our kitchen sinks, and the operating table to the lecture hall. It repurposes banana peels and garbles machinic language, to produce a frightfully lucid depiction of the madness of corporate cultures, work life, and play, in an act of creativity that recalls Joyce, Artaud, Carroll, and the grand traditions of bunraku puppetry. Not quite clown, and not quite performance art, it occupies a space between high and low art, folk and the avant-garde, slipping between worlds faster than it can pause to mop up the mess that was left in the scene before. Truly delightful.

Ursonate at the Camden Head (15th Nov 2009)

Kurt Schwitters

As the wheat made their excuses and left after a long night of new theatre, the chaff remained, much to my delight, and experienced the first (and hopefully not the last) performance of Dummy Company's 'Ursonata: 1st movement'.
It had been a long evening at Short Fuse and I had previously performed in a friend's piece called 'Death of the Author' which, being a piece of straight-forward comedy, had left me feeling quite dejected (despite the audience's warm reception, it reaffirmed why I never even tried joining Footlights). Plus, to top-off the unnecessary pre-performance drama meter, my poor mother had made an oddyssey driving through north london trying to find the Camden Head, which, according to Google was in Angel rather than Camden. All this just to bring me an amp which (don't tell her if you see her) WE DIDN'T USE! She was so tired and stressed that she didnt even stay for the night's entertainment. I was duly punished by lugging the useless device all the way back to Beckton. (Although an amp makes a good seat on a crowded train).

With all this behind me we finally took the space to perform the opening of the Sonata (it would have been too cruel to do the whole thing, and we havent finished devising it all yet). For those who don't know, 'Ursonate' is a half-hour long sonata for voice by Dada/Merz artist, Kurt Schwitters. More a piece of dadaist sound poetry in the heritage of Hugo Ball and shamanistic chant, it requires a lot of tongue blasting and jaw bombadeering. Here's a recording of Schwitters doing it himself: (ignore the cow, lovely as it is)
In anxious preparation I had been downing a glass of water every 10 minutes and my visits to the toilet were getting tedious, also, my throat, rather than feeling limber and cool was feeling chappy and thick so I started drinking a pint of beer which solved all my problems. (I might start performing with a beer all the time now...here my troubles begin).

So anyway, I wanted this to be a practise for my voice and for Shaun and Sophie to do more puppetry. The piece opens with a mini-play with my two 'Little Dog' marionettes. The audience, quite predictably, were taken in by them and thought it quite cute. My worry was that the main performance to follow would render the marionette show meaningless but because it was taking such an informal, un-theatrical form, they seemed to flow quite neatly.
Then we began the 10mins of 'Ursonata'. To my surprise I hardly tripped over anything in my reading and it's definitely the most intense delivery I think I've ever given to anything. The one thing that I did falter over, quite intriguingly, was when I thought I saw an 'r' instead of an 'f', during a long passage which constantly repeats the phrase 'fummsbowotaazaa...'. I thought I saw 'rummsbowo...' and pronounced it. Even though I practically know it by heart, it is evident that my performance was still a 'reading' rather than a memorised delivery.
The object manipulation from Shaun and Sophie, according to the audience, was very engaging. Wish I'd videoed it all, it feels pointless describing it all in detail.

The long and short: we will do the WHOLE sonata as an object/voice piece. And even more so, as I have been dwelling on the idea for a while, we could bracket the sonata with puppet interpretations of some of Schwitters Merz Fairy Tales which have recently been published by Princeton Press. Hope someone else hasn't or doesn't get there first, although what do I care?

Stomunculus Underground (Fragment#?)

Stomunculus blinks voicelessly amongst the crowd.

They march past his trunk and smash his stump.

One follows the other with plugs stuffed in each mouth.

Stomuncles’ oracle is the only unplugged orafice in the tube –

Non-electric unlead mistriggered to his tongue.

Shots of molecular phlegm squeal into Stomucles’ mouth, as a voice tells him to:

Mind the placental jelly that often makes surfaces slipp

ery during inclement residue.

There, across the narrow bars that flicker sparks and come and go into two giant holes, golden screens flash gleams of excrescent beauty; and when their silicone tongues lick a golem’s earhole, the golem drops its jaw, lets fall its plug and dives open mawed towards the glimmering sublime, as its bulk shatters across the spitting tracks.

Stomookoo feels his ribs shuttering within the capsulated stream, pressed by golems blindly sculpting him with paper. Beneath his forming feet heats the beat of something roaring near away. His open mouth lets in the onrushing course of wind as it shafts down his throat.

The golemmings squeeze in clumps on the platform edge, clustered together with their feet on words saying

MIND THE TRAP

A little pickaninny notices Stomoral’s gaping O and, under the deluzean that it is a tunnel, puts her little head inside. Barely noticing the little feet kicking from his mouth, Stomuckle stands obedient with the golems on the platform.

By now the beats that beat beneath are rippling through their cortices and the wind storms from the gaping cavity. Paper rustles and golems clench their clusters while the yearning scream erupts from the hole.

GLUTTED OF THIS

Way back in January Jeremy Hardingham and I made a film around Faustus. It's called Glutted of this and if you go to http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/glutted-of-this you can watch it in full and read about its genesis and consequent exegesis from Raphael Lyne who gave it an insightful interpretation.

A picture of JH thinking about what it means to watch film