Back to skool

Do you ever have dreams where, despite being an adult and well-established in life, you're back at school, sitting at a little desk wearing a cap and shorts, forced to raise your hand to ask to go to the toilet? Well, I seem to be living one of those dreams. There's nothing wrong with my relationship with the student director or cast of 'Attempts On Her Life', but I've started crossing swords with the school staff, getting all antsy, all passive aggressive, all 'Don't you know who I am?' To explain why, I have to tell you a few things about me, my strengths and weaknesses.

I'm a pretty strong, motivated, self-directing sort of person. I work quickly and effectively. I'm good in a crisis, staying calm and quickly regaining control. I'm never depressed, helpless or lost. On the negative side, I get bored very quickly. I can also seem aloof and arrogant. I don't have a good relationship with authority. I dislike being told what to do, and would rather work out my own way of doing things than learn well-established routines. I hate learning fixed parts by rote -- I remember the bassist on the Kreidler tour back in 2000 getting very frustrated with me because I just wouldn't learn the structure of the song we were performing together, 'Mnemorex'. I preferred to change it every night. Which was fun for me, but a bit of a challenge to the rest of the band. I used to annoy my music teachers at school for the same reasons. Instead of learning pieces, I'd rabbit ahead with improvisations. My licks might have been fantastic, but they presented a managerial challenge to the teacher, so instead of an admiring 'Wow!' they tended to provoke an irritable 'Whoa!'

I even used to improvise in the school orchestra! I never learned to read music, so I'd copy the bow positions of the other violinists, but be playing something completely different, something I thought sounded good. I'm amazed that I got away with it for so long; mine certainly wasn't a hippy, 'anything goes' kind of school. Later, at university, I persuaded my tutors to let me write essays about stuff that wasn't on the curriculum. Surprisingly, they agreed, and when I took the standardised exams at the end of the course I vindicated their permissive attitude by getting a first. If I keep interested, I keep motivated, and if I keep motivated, I do my best work. But you don't want to be my tutor or my advisor, really. How can you mark an essay on Rilke when he's not on the English course and you haven't read him yourself?



I haven't really changed much. The deal I've struck with the director of 'Attempts On Her Life' is that I'm improvising during her production. Kaori and I, the musicians (Kaori hasn't arrived yet), will be listening to the cast, listening to each other, and the cast will be listening to us. We'll be creating music in real time. It'll be different every night. Now, obviously there's a contradiction between this and the idea of endless, arduous rehearsals, which would tend to solidify repeatable performances and fix optimal 'moves' into position over time. So it's just as well the rehearsals are turning out not to be like that at all: rather than converging towards the 'one right answer', they seem to be diverging endlessly. Yesterday, for instance, a voice teacher from the college came in, a rather intense woman called Christina. She explained that she wanted to 'suspend the semantics' of the play, then spent several hours taking the actors through some basic physical exercise focused on the voice and the body. First she got the four performers to massage each other, and make primitive grunting sounds in appreciation. Then there were piano-led arpeggio vocalisations. Then everybody had to describe a scene on a subway train in their own language, and the others would have to respond in imitations of that language. Then there were some collective shouting exercises -- it just seemed to get louder and louder -- then each actor was asked to speak about the themes of the play. I'd been told I would be needed during these sessions, but as the hours ground by I found that this wasn't the case at all. Sitting there like a cabbage or a jilted bride, I began to get very bored, to feel that the expressivity of the actors was coming at the expense of my inexpressivity. Well, I suppose that's the risk inherent in all performance. But when the audience is having fun nobody notices the inequalities -- 'some in darkness, some in light', as Brecht put it.

By lunchtime my passive aggression was hanging like a little black lightning cloud over my head. Christina came over to explain what she was doing, and I found myself leveling charges against her techniques. At first I'd liked what she was doing -- I could relate it to Wilhelm Reich, to the idea of helping the actors overcome their 'character armour' and become better embodied. I could even relate it to my very embodied summer, bathing in Japan. But then, I explained, I began to wonder if what was happening wasn't just the replacement of shyness, tension and ambivalence with confidence, disinhibition and certainty. It seemed to be a sort of EST course for the actors, a kind of steroid therapy to build up their charisma and self-regard. Well, they already had quite enough! It reminded me of how privately-educated DramSoc students at my university had used acting as a way to increase their already-high levels of public confidence. Thank God for authors, for all their tension and doubt and fear and objectivity, because without them there would just be this actor therapy happening on theatre stages, and a lot of happy actors and unhappy, bored audiences. Theatre is not staged for the psychological benefit of the performers!

I told Christina that I didn't think it was a good idea to suspend semantics in this case. Crimp is British, and his play is about something I, as a British person, understand rather well: the conflict between a certain kind of pep-talking hype speech (there are parodies of car commercials, gushing publishers and homilies to family life) and much more grim realities (war, terrorism, suicide). British people -- and especially the characters in Crimp's play -- are uptight and conflicted, and it seemed to me more useful that the actors should find that in their performances than some kind of noisy and banal 'confidence'. By the time I started asking Christina what school she was from ('What school? I'm from the Hochschule. Oh, you mean what tradition? Stanislavsky...') I could see that my intense boredom and passive aggression had done its work. I'd made an enemy. I'd questioned the authority of a teacher and questioned her ideology. Even seeing her teaching as ideology, and making her name its tradition, had been an aggressive act on my part, like picking for the loose strand of wool that can begin an unravelling.

My punishment was being marginalised for several more hours in the afternoon. Unable to bear being treated like some kind of musical chauffeur, parked by the mixing desk, I went outside to check my e mail. And of course that was the moment they needed me. Director Gergana, ultra-sympathische, kept trying to include me in the games. 'Do you want to sing?' asked Christina, almost threateningly. 'Do you want to join the actors and sing?' Of course I didn't want to do that. In my bristling bad mood, being told to pretend I was a tree or make bird sounds would have seen me quitting the production on the spot. Finally I was asked to play music for an hour or so, produced some scarily avant screechy drones -- no more nor less than my bile made audible -- and was allowed to go home. I've been given the next two days off. School holidays have come early.