square white world

- back row (left to right): Arnaldo Baptista, Caetano Veloso (holding portrait of bossa nova & MPB singer, Nara Leão), Rita Lee, Sérgio Dias and Tom Zé
- front row (right to left): Torquato Nelo (lyricist-poet), Gal Costa (born Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos, somewhat resentfully renamed by Caetano Veloso), Gilberto Gil (holding portrait of José Carlos Capinan (songwriter, poet, writer, advertising agent, doctor), Rogério Duprat (composer & arranger, holding a potty, & producer, in-studio-sound-sculptor - in a George Martin sense)

(if you click on the above image it will take you to the production company working on the Os Mutantes documentary, Bread & Circuses, for which the trailer appears at the bottom of this post)

Sérgio Dias of Os Mutantes (the original backing band to the whole Tropicália resistance movement, which comprised him, his brother, Arnaldo Baptista, and Rita Lee) was interviewed for the sleeve notes for Tropicália: é proibido proibir. [Soul Jazz Records, SJR CD 118, 2005] Asked when the dictatorship ended in Brazil, Sérgio answered:

It didn’t end. Who said it ended?

[laughs] This is bullshit. I met with Ted Kennedy in 1984 in the United States. I was playing there. He invited me to go to his boat and we were in Nantucket. And I though, ‘God, if I’m going to be patriotic, it’s now or never.’ So, I told the guy, I said, ‘Listen, you have to do something about Brazil.’

He got so sober immediately and then, this is 1984, he told me about Lula … He knew the name! ‘This guy, the guy who’s out there, Lula, he will never make it.’

They were watching us! And this guy that is there now, Lula, is not the same Lula that, that I used to know - he’s compromised. And what’s the best way of destroying a people? Give them the power, then show the corruption - which is happening now and it’s destroying Brazilian government top to bottom.

It’s ridiculous. So, that’s very bad. We’re in a very bad situation. But it’s good because it is like this, you know: Something is going to come out of it.

to denounce the Big Lie that encased our lives like the thin shell of an egg … As you touched it, the membrane burst, and you suddenly found yourself alone and helpless, at the mercy of a whip wielded by authority. … The Big Lie, like a new placenta, prevented us from both dying and being born. One imprudent gesture and the filmy membrane exploded. You had to hold your breath and check yourself constantly, so that your mouth, choked with lies big and small, did not let out, involuntarily, the breath of air that could have shattered the protective cocoon. In fact, we were constantly wrapping the eggshell in other coverings, one inside another, like a nest of Russian dolls. So, what was this blessed Big Lie? … The membrane of lies had become, for many, a thick protective coating, dense, indestructible, resistant to cracking. … the penal colony of the Big Lie - the prisoners were condemned to compulsory happiness.

I did not puncture that filmy membrane. … I ignored, as well as I could, the shell under which I went about my business. …

- Norman Manea, The Hooligan’s Return, trans. Angela Jianu, pp. 196-197

… the publisher … wrote: “You were an eyewitness, and as a writer you must react.” Publicly decoding his life, writing a personal memoir? Cioran had warned about it: “A cinder bath, a good exercise in self-incineration.” It would be like peeling away one’s skin, layer after layer, in competition with the tell-all confessions of television talk shows or the self-revelations of group therapy.

…

“I am in favour of forced migration,” Ion Antonescu, Marshal of Romania, army commander, and leader of the Romanian state, declared in the summer of 1941. “I do not care whether we shall go down in history as barbarians. The Roman Empire committed many barbaric acts and yet it was the greatest political establishment the world has ever seen.” The noble barbarian [cf. Cioran] did not want to miss the opportunity afforded him of at last eradicating the national pest. “Our nation has not known a more favourable moment in its history. If need be, shoot,” Hitler’s ally declared.

- Ibid., p. 224

Nothing was more important than survival, Mother kept saying … The logic on which my father had built his life was now useless. … He could accept death, but not humiliation. Risking everything, he recoiled in disgust from the grim truth of his present reality. He did not become servile and hypocritical, as was demanded of the slaves; he would not surrender his dignity. His wife didn’t care about such idiocies, but he did. The black market in sentiment, not only in aspirin or bread, that prevailed in the camps, disgusted him, and so did the barbarity of victims determined to save themselves at any cost from the barbarity the oppressors. Monster-executioners breed monster-victims, he used to repeat in his soft but determined voice.

- Ibid, p. 228

“You won’t believe it, but I finally gave in and signed. There was no choice. They also gave me a code name, ‘Alin.’”

The name the policemen had chosen for him was the very pen name their new informant used for the poetry and theatre reviews he published in literary magazines. Let this be a lesson for him; both vocations, poet and informant, after all, probe the mystery in which we all hide.

- Ibid., p. 230

Would Comrade Doctor allow himself to be psychoanalysed by a patient obsessed with the comedy of double roles? Could the poet find the lyric correlative of duplicitous chaos, conducted on the surface by the masked men of power and perpetuated, underground, by the venom of resentment?

The patient’s questions quickly rebounded back to himself, as though he had borrowed the doctor’s mannerisms and was able to read the theme of the psychiatric session with closed eyes: the Initiation after the Initiation. Or should it be called adaptation? And what exactly did the survivor adapt to? A familiar question. Over a decade later, it would also be asked by an American psychiatrist. The answer was familiar, too: The patient adapted to life, as simple as that. Indeed, it is to life that all survivors adapt, whether they are survivors of black, green, or red dictatorships. They do so with that impertinence of normality which is life itself. This was how I summarised my own biography on the eve of exile, an experiment no less educational than the preceding ones.

How can one be a writer if one has no freedom was the dilemma posed by the American psychiatrist, an expert in the psychoses of freedom in the New World. The question would have sounded like a bad joke if uttered by his East European counterpart, but an exchange of expertise between the specialist in the pathology of constraint and the analyst of freedom’s traumas would not have been useless. The psychiatrists of these two very different worlds would have discovered many surprising resemblances alongside the differences.

The freedom of the New Man meant accepting necessity - this was what doctor and patient had learned from the Marxist dialecticians of a party that became less Marxist every day: necessity, hence adaptation; adaptation, hence pragmatism: hence, accepted necessity. Adaptation to life, Doctor, this was the task facing the apprentice in the banality served pedagogically by daily life. Life, that was all. In the East, in the West, in the cosmos.

- Ibid., p. 238

More time has now passed. You have learned the joys and the maladies of liberty. You have accepted the honour of exile. … “The return to the homeland is but a return to the mother’s grave” …

…

You were, you told yourself, in the living present, not in the ever-present past.

- Ibid., p. 247

“The place of our truth is here. We are writers, we have no other solution,” she had said. I was familiar with such banalities. I myself had once been a victim of misery’s pride, it had often fed my despair.

- Ibid., p. 259

“Maybe you should wander around America a bit,” he said. But that advice was followed, thank God, not by a list of places to visit but by another prolonged silence.

“You can’t have better lessons in solitude anywhere else.”

- Ibid., p. 309

The wall behind the bed is cold in the blackness of the night.

- Ibid., 373

“Poetry, the lie detector prone to burst into tears.” The shadows and the clowns take off their masks, their prostheses, leave aside their crutches, and line up into a neat row of phosphorescent letters: “Florin Mugur - Poet - 1932-1991.” I am alive, still alive, for yet another living moment, leaning against the gravestone of Florin Mugur …

- Ibid., p. 377

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art or rather elementary forms of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all bring with them their own disappointments. One grows sated or disillusioned with love. We wake from sleep and whilst we slept, we did not live. The price of drugs is the ruin of the very body they were used to stimulate. But there is no disillusion in art because its illusory nature is clear from the start.

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, pp. 258-259

At this moment I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I feel suddenly tired and decide not to write anymore, not to thing anymore, but to let the fever of saying lull me to sleep whilst, with closed eyes, I gently stroke as I would a cat all the things I might have said.

- Ibid., p. 260

Nothing, nothing, just part of the night and the silence and of whatever emptiness, negativity and inconstancy I share with them, the space that exists between me and me, a thing mislaid by some god…

- Ibid., p. 262

go here for the source of the quote in the title. The virtual in the event of no difference being possible any more between it and the real signifies a totalization of the Image such that you get when code meets its nemesis: and there is a phase-shift; and code and encounter can’t be different any more.

‘Real’ in the event of reality not allowing a difference between the virtual and real world must however belong to the present which was. Or … the virtual world will not allow reality to differ from it at some point in the past.

This amounts to a prohibition on division or on decomplexification (to hold up against the prohibition on multiplication, the unnecessary creation of figures, characters, supernumeraries).

The real world was irreducible to the virtual because it was not after all virtual.

Then there was the law against reduction, pure and simple. And the incentivization of adding dimensions, to n-set.

With the proviso that we never arrived at the particular.

- Arthur Boyd, Figure supporting back legs and Interior with black rabbit, 1973-4

the image is from Arthur Boyd’s ‘caged painter’ series, commenced in 1971 upon his return to Australia after over a decade in England. The year he left Caetano Veloso was recording his own record of exile, ‘A Little More Blue.’

Norman Manea repeats the mantra he learnt from Franz Kafka: in the confrontation between oneself and the world, take the side of the world.

Jorge Luis Borges is a poet of the pathos of time. He writes of Citizen Kane that it links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. [Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weingberger, Viking, New York, 1999, p. 259]

Emptiness, emptiness, says Koheleth, emptiness, all is empty.
…
So I came to hate life, since everything that was done here under the sun was a trouble to me; for all is emptiness and chasing the wind.
…
I considered all the acts of oppression here under the sun; I saw the tears of the oppressed, and I saw that there was no one to comfort them.
…
Woe betide the land when a slave has become its king, and its princes feast in the morning.
…
Whatever has already existed has been given a name, its nature is known, a man cannot contend with what is stronger than he. The more words one uses the greater is the emptiness of it all; and where is the advantage to a man?

and the Koheleth, said to be a sage whose sayings were recorded in the second century BC and collected in Ecclesiastes, also wrote the song which goes … a time to be born and a time to die, and so on.

There is an empty thing found on earth: when the just man gets what is due to the unjust, and the unjust what is due to the just. I maintain that this too is emptiness. So I commend enjoyment, since there is nothing good for a man to do here under the sun but to eat and drink and enjoy himself; this is all that will remain with him to reward his toil throughout the span of life.

… and I bethought myself of all the fury and hatred I had to bring against the world and its illusions and because the door opened a crack I heard the engine pounding, its hammers beating. I wondered if this was the engine, the war-machine with which I was to assail the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze; albeit that its hammers were butterfly wings shamanically grafted onto it and that its beating was only theatrical: the apocalypse is achieved with a backlit gauze on a proscenium arch stage. It is sheer melodrama.

Nothing is more terrifying writes Borges than a labyrinth without a centre.

And if for every step the thread was cut?

Walking into the rehearsal room, possibly with a script in hand, possibly not, flanked by a small group of actors, we are struck - if the room is a familiar one and not itself a complete surprise - by how much is already there, although invisible. The room is not empty. It is not a desert. We do not make work in a vacuum.

Choices stretch out beyond the three or four visible walls. The working area is jam-packed with clichés. So the first task becomes how to clear the room, because the problem confronting us is: where to start.

At the beginning of chapter III of Difference and Repetition, entitled “The Image of Thought,” where the show really gets under way, Gilles Deleuze presents the problem of where to start in philosophy as of the utmost delicacy. Before he gets to it, so as not to make, before the curtain rises on this the opening night, a false start, a false theatre, a false drama, a false movement, he opposes the theatre of representation to the theatre of repetition.

On the latter’s platform, he writes, “we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters - the whole apparatus of repetition as a ‘terrible power’.”[Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Continuum, London, 2004, p. 12]

In the rehearsal room, which is our theatre of repetition, and which we often hope to take beyond and to the stage, to the theatre of resemblance - to the run - we are confronted with just the kinds of clichés Deleuze names. Theatre and philosophy depend on where we choose to start: “for beginning means eliminating all presuppositions.”[ibid., p. 164] These presuppositions constitute the Image of Philosophy as much as the choices we face in the rehearsal room constitute the Image of Theatre.

We will never entirely escape the Image. In fact, both theatre and philosophy prepare, albeit in different senses, its advent. Rehearsal, commonsensically, precedes and is only justified by performance. What Deleuze at first calls the theatre of repetition, though it pass to it by a phase of misosophy, ends up philosophy. What is more, as Deleuze remarks in comments about surfing, posthumously published in the Abécédaire, it ends up on the inside of philosophy, having to be reattached to the outside, and to life, again and again, by the living.

Theatre and philosophy, however, differ all the way through: what is artifice for one is an article of faith for the other, because theatre is pretend. Deleuze’s ‘dynamic lines in space’ are a gestural histrionics; his ‘language before words’ is sheer clowning; ‘gestures before bodies’ becomes shorthand for status onstage; ‘masks’ are worn to dissimulate; ’spectres and phantoms’ appear in the list of dramatis personae as distinct characters; the ‘apparatus’ sounds like the philosophical equivalent of the deux ex machina, the ‘terrible power’ which is achieved with fx and sfx, or smoke and mirrors.

This is where I suggest we start, at the inversion effected on philosophy by theatre, from which two critical prospects immediately arise: metaphoricity and theatricality. By the former is meant the voracity of theatre as metaphor, not only a matter of its discursive frequency, the frequency of its appearance in discourses, and therefore quantifiable, but also a matter of its power, its ‘terrible power’, and therefore qualifiable. By theatricality is meant exactly this quality of theatre-as-metaphor, a distinct metaphoricity.

There are theological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, political, economic, martial and passional theatres. It seems there is a theatre of everything else apart from theatre. Psychoanalysis has used the metaphor of theatre with a compulsiveness bordering on the obsessive to the extent that it has practically metastasized. When it does we see the outcome not as the death of the body but its spectacular recovery, if not as philosophy, then as the thought we tend to call theory, with which theatre shares its etymological roots.

Theatres of war and thought, theatres of engagement and operations, are deadly serious. From within their three walls we hear the sweet bird of truth singing, loud enough that the gods will take notice, having unleashed its payload of explosive. To talk about Paul Virilio’s ‘theatre of thought‘ is to get at the essential Virilio-ness of Virilio, into his very bunker. The play is high stakes; we risk losing everything on a single throw of the dice.

If we are all already squashed into these theatres, as Virilio seems to say, that is, if we are already within the purview of this metaphoricity, then we are here not just to put bums on seats and see the actors get paid; we are not here for the sake of the spectacle but of panic, and terror. The metaphor heightens our experience, makes it immediate, creates the impression we are in danger.

In reality and not hyper-reality, if we run the risk of ultraviolence being used upon our persons, we understand that it remains theatre. Keeping it real, it is at the level of the actor that the danger passes; and that it exists. Even should the theatricality of the moment insist that he avert it with a wave of his chiffon scarf, yet the risk informs the theatrical encounter. The lie here tells the truth.

Theatricality joins, insofar as the theatrical is also artificial, mannered, forced and unnatural, showy, fake, kitsch, camp, ironic, and effeminate, with other logics of inversion. It is an historicising vector of theatre: it contains without ever exhausting the history of artifice; which suggests that it is a logic of sense, in Deleuze a condition of truth and as sensation a condition of creative thought, native to theatre. [Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003]

As for terror, it is general over the countries and on all sides, in full regard of the theatrical conditions which give rise to and sustain it. Terror could be seen as the disease which afflicts the prevailing humour of theatricality; which suggests a clinical prospect: theatre as an artform.

The problem of theatre’s metaphoricity is that it doesn’t save any room for theatre. The problem of theatricality lies in its power to create between what is and what is not a transformative tension, but one too easily coopted by recognition, representation and the recuperation of identity, rather than absolute inversion or transfiguration. Theatre is blocked. It is the art of representation par excellence.

Art is of signal importance in Deleuze’s philosophy because it is in sensation, in the encounter which disrupts the harmony of the faculties, that thought opens into thought. Art gives access onto the real, the virtual and creative ground of being. For these reasons, it is first in Deleuze that we should look for a ‘thought of theatre.’ It is on the ground of a virtual ontology that we may build theatre as an artform.

Although a collection of essays about him might bear the title Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, Deleuze’s writing on theatre amounts to a single extended piece, “Un manifeste de moins.” In this text, Deleuze considers the work of Carmelo Bene, exhorting us to represent nothing, to accede to a minor theatre and a minor consciousness, and to make a decisive transformation.[Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Routledge, USA, 1994. "Un manifeste de moins," translated as "One Manifesto Less," by Alan Orenstein, in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 204-222]

From 1) the critical project of looking at the ‘theatre of thought,’ as metaphor and logic, comes 2) a clinical consideration of the ‘thought of theatre,’ as artform, from which proceeds 3) thinking theatre: the theatre of theatre.

In this third part of the proposed work, we will seek to build a theatre in thought and set forth the conditions for a thinking theatre. While at the same theatre the death of man is playing tonight, and will be back tomorrow, by popular demand, we will open in theatre another.

The crack of theatricality divides chiffon scarf from act of terrorism by bringing them together. It too divides brothel from church and state. The actor, like the whore or the priest and politician, betrays his promise. But he does so rather before he makes it than after. So it is in it and in him that the problem is shown to come into being and it is here where it is most clearly elaborated: in the theatre we might attend to it as a problem of being and not with being, of and not with ontology.

Herbert Blau gets very close to this sense of a theatrical logic being borne out by a virtual ontology when he writes that what gives theatre life is what theatre hides. As both practitioner and cultural theorist, he attends carefully to “the living insignia of theatre, seen unseen, its troubling materialization from whatever it is it is not.” Where Blau returns us to this side of the looking-glass, to follow Deleuze is to continue around the turn in thought, to come to a place we no longer recognise. [Herbert Blau, "Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze," unpublished essay, provided courtesy of the author]

This is the challenge Deleuze presents to thinking, with the object that without too many false starts, but very many rehearsals, we arrive at a theatre of theatre. In the context of New Zealand theatre practice, a theatre without context and a colonial history post- and neo-colonially of diminishing interest, let alone return, the task is to develop a ground on which theatre might justify itself, find its context within itself - the meaning of ‘theatre of theatre’ - and find also within itself the ‘terrible power’ of creation.

there are no names. This is the language that does not belong. + it is the language of my not-belonging.

The current problem would be and I am putting here to start thinking it through: without a clinical practice (the idea of small theatre group called T-Cell might remain but there is no support for it), what would the theoretical, critical practice be? (There might not be any support for this either: I may still have to follow the example of other exiles who want to salvage a modicum of respectability through teaching in their adoptive lands.)

I like this: “there is a raw materialism in Virilio’s reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies.” [Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, City of Transformation: Paul Virilio in Obama's America]

I like it because of the vitality of the sci-fi drama introduced as taking place in a ‘theatre of thought.’ It makes me think the thought that’s involved me these past few months - itself springing from the encounter with theatre - can sustain itself, like an oasis.

Does it shimmer like a mirage? Yes.

At present it does. And N-set feels like a place I cannot recover except in the rehearsal room, except by becoming a group. (By ‘N-set’ I mean here the country whose existence I cannot prove but of whose reality I am convinced, as I am that I live n-exile from it: ‘non-specified enemy territory’ - a zone of risk and immediate context.)

The Krokers use the theatre of thought like a ticket to gain direct access to what is showing: migrations into flesh, granulations of bodies, tattoos, embeddings - into the very meatspace, as if this were a sign of legitimation not only for their presence as lived but also for their histories and private autobiographies. I undertake that this is in the nature of a characterisation of Virilio, in whose thought - and theatre - a naturalism still obtains, in which the natural body is yet valorised. However, that there might be a theatre of thought, really, is exciting.

And I wonder if it will hold still long enough - migrating, granulating, getting tattoos, becoming embedded - for me to approach, flip it onto its back and take a good long look at it as a thought of theatre. In other words, do the Krokers here provide the clinical instance of theatre, the practice to criticise?

I was reading Norman Manea’s A Hooligan’s Return, about the exiled writer’s return to Romania.

His book On Clowns remains my favourite. In fact, I quoted from it extensively in a letter advocating state patronage of the arts to Helen Clark in her first term as Prime Minister, in 1999.

I thought, what is it in my circumstances that leads to this strong connection I feel, this sense of affiliation to the work of writers like Norman Manea? Paul Celan, Gregor von Rezzori … and from my earlier reading life, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Josef Skvorecky, Jan Kott, Czeslaw Milosz … ?

They constitute, I thought, a sort of diaspora of the disenchanted. And exiled. And in some cases, the enforced exiles - the banished.

And I was listening to Caetano Veloso’s 1971 album, A Little More Blue, recorded when he was in exile in London.

It was Thursday night, the 31st of October. I was listening for the first time. It moved me to tears. This is shorthand for saying that it did not play on my emotions in a sentimental or nostalgic way; it moved me before I recognised why.

I’ve asked in posts here recently about whether or not theatre belongs in or to New Zealand. Has its time past, as a properly colonial cultural institution?

I had thought this past was one I had in common with my compatriots. I find increasingly that it’s what excludes me.

Theatre does have a problematic relation with colonialism, from the travelling companies to the demise of the Mercury. I would argue that its break away from colonialism was constitutive of and decisive for the development of both a New Zealand tradition and a professional theatre in New Zealand.

This is not a tautology: the arena in which an idea is contested is often that in which it is most clearly articulated. The idea or problem of New Zealand theatre was colonialism. Theatres struggled with that legacy. A break away from colonial theatre could only ever have been the condition for the development of a New Zealand theatrical tradition.

Part of this struggle was to get theatre recognised as a profession. As an aside, it’s worth noting that one of the ways theatre-workers became professional was by forming unions; the same unions were behind strikes in the early 1980s that were devastating for theatres, as institutions, not just employers.

Contrary to what John Smythe writes in Downstage Upfront: The first 40 years of New Zealand’s longest-running professional theatre, it was the decision to take from but break with the colonial tradition which not only confirmed it as its own thing but was generative of, was the germ from which, New Zealand theatre sprang.

I would also argue that what has been engendered in the vacuum left by the loss of state-sponsored community theatres (as fact or idea - and principle), when it was with the complicity of the profession that they were brought down, is a reactionary amateurism. In its wilful rejection of its parochial and colonial past, this brand of amateurism is more parochial, provincial, colonial than ever. (And less theatrical and more literal.)

…

A certain irony has not escaped you. You are reading this @ Square White World.

Is squareness, whiteness and that these qualities have given rise to something called a ‘world’ here being celebrated? or criticised and contested? satirised and lambasted? or affirmed and held up for emulation?

Do the advertised ‘work pieces by Simon Taylor’ belong to a square white world?

And ultimately is the world from I might claim presently to be in exile square and white or dark and round?

…

… my sense of a lack of belonging is different.

Mammals don’t belong here. True.

Those travellers who came here first can make a stronger claim to belonging than those who came after. True.

English, my mother tongue tastes like coal and brick-dust in my mouth and does not belong in this green ghetto. Even the language does not belong.

But my sense of not belonging is not because I come from somewhere else. I come from this place. It should therefore be this place, my country, which creates in me this feeling. It isn’t.

I’ve been confusing New Zealand, confusing it in my mind with another country. This ‘other’ New Zealand is the one from which I am truly exiled, in exile, N-exile or n-exile.

Now, I don’t even think they share the same name. One is an ‘N-set’ - acronym for “non-specified enemy territory” - which one, I don’t know. But I can make a guess.

I am sure that you, the reader, whoever you are, will doubt the existence of this ‘other’ NZ. You want to say, It’s the past from which you are in exile. You probably want to tell me I’m dressing up a common sentiment in fancy terms.

After all, how has it happened? How have I come to see myself as n-exile? Is it merely that I am nostalgic for my childhood?

I spent some years living in and around theatre companies, companies which were built on the ensemble principle and which therefore were like large supportive families.

Is it these, my formative years, compelling me to try and recapture them in their sense of belonging? And since this is impossible is it this past, a distinct past, which makes me feel unwelcome in the present?

What is the present apart from what has happened? It is what has happened … in its most contracted form: adamantine!

In pursuing my dream of establishing a small theatre group called T-Cell, writing for it and writing from it - scripts in one end - theory out the other - I’ve been fooling myself, not because to realise such a dream is possible or impossible, but because the conditions which would determine whether the dream were realisable, whether possible or impossible, do not obtain.

Lynn put it to me, and I’ve called attention to it several times here since, that theatre is a colonial thing. As we move away from our colonial past, so there’s less popular support to do theatre.

Is it then a colonial past to which I belong and which I perceive myself to be exiled from in a post-colonial present time? Am I hankering after a bit of drawing-room farce? wanting to brush up my Shakespeare - and for everyone to do the same - so we can all be, in Robert David McDonald’s immortal phrase, those poofs what strut around the stage in tights pretending they’re kings and queens?

Or, in consideration for where it sat, formatively, in the history of NZ theatre, am I wanting to rejoin the angry young men who brought decent plumbing to the stage with indecent aplomb?

These phases or periods in theatre can at least be said to belong, to a shared colonial past, doubtless, but one to which we are the legatees, whether we want to be or not.

The fact that I cannot command the support necessary in order to make theatre, which would be the minimal condition I’d set, has to do with where I come from. The dream comes from the same place.

It must be an N-Set, a “non-specified enemy territory,” for the resistances that pertain to its conditions of realisability:

Creative New Zealand will deem ineligible for funding at the outset any project that has an academic outcome as its object;

the academy, in general, will at present not support a theatre-lab type approach - its does not authorise groupuscules;

corporate funding is not readily available for theatre from N-Set, that is, ‘enemy’ theatre (T-Cell was intended to affirm ‘Terror’-cell as much as ‘Theatre’-cell as much as the creative biological cell);

CNZ turned me down for funding (the application sits here on the left-hand margin) - I hid from them that theatre and theory share the same root - although it’s hardly a secret;

as a group activity - or company, or ensemble - what I would be doing would not be about me - or us, or in the service of any fixed identity, whether national or corporate … the ‘who’ has to come after the ‘how’ … which does not inspire confidence in those who we might like to have dipped into their pockets;

as for a popular resistance, a condition of the art form in question is that it is unpopular, even anti-popular: it is like asking the dominant society to play host to its other. This other may be minor … it is also radically critical of its host. It lives to bite the hand … it is a blight.

Before the 1984 revolution of what has come to be called Rogernomics, whether by popular consent or dint of colonialism, there were seven funded professional theatres in NZ. They were called community theatres. I often mention their existence as if they might explain or account for my exile.

I am nostalgic for a time when statecraft understood its indebtedness to stagecraft and when the state, as is now the case, did not ignore an obligation to support the most vulnerable because least rationalisable or enumerable (or accountable) arts institutions, the theatres. Today the state has become the artist, pitiless, self-absorbed and … suicidal.

The time of community theatres has passed … as a way of speaking. But what separates my country, and my exile, is not so simple, not that beautiful. And if is the past, my country, my N-Set, it is a past that has never happened.