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LACK OF FINANCIAL NOUS
In the past I’ve relied on a producer, manager or collaborative partner. Not that I don’t know how to hold purse-strings, I can spend and be thrifty, but as for putting the money in the purse: I can hold down money; I lack the muscle for bringing in money.
I lack it to the point that money actually crosses to the other side of the street at my approach; to the point that money conspires against me and that it leads me to suspect fate is involved. The problem with this line of reasoning is that if fate is colluding with money, then I can do nothing about it. Except, with the Stoics, perfect my amor fati to become worthy of a fatal wound in my business proposal. This would also include setting my worth at whatever WINZ will hand out. Is it to be $36.21 per week?
The error in the previous post lay in not lending sufficient weight to the betrayal of a fragile, because barely renewed, optimism, to the feeling of a tropic despondence in the face of money’s flight, which latter removes any hope I may have kindled for the enterprise, a theatre group called T-Cell, makes, it could be said, the idea, the venture a bad object. So that, as the Liverpudlian band Clinic sing, “I want this out, not in me…” (“Distortions” on their first album Internal Wrangler, 2000).
Then I would be in the very theatre of terror I’ve discussed in earlier posts. Money’s conspiracy with fate gives me a terror of theatre; I’ve only, ingenuously, been translating this into a ‘theatre of terror’ to hide this fact. Clinic, in the same beautiful song, sing, asking that they be remade, …”free of distortions”…
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My business venture relies on the sadistic rage I feel against theatre, the tit I sucked on: I want to destroy it. Me and theatre, we are locked in a feedback loop, which vicedicts the first law of thermodynamics. My energy, my passion, my love for… displaced from anal and urethral sadism; I’m a monster just like theatre is monster mama. And I’ve monstrous energy, passion, and so on, for a task with which I’m always already engaged, at risk and risking.
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Of course fate and money conspire against me: I’ve nothing positive to offer. Therefore my personal terror/theatre bears significantly on my position, director & writer, not performer/actor & manager/director, as is more common, as is more economic, more feasible.
To delegate first to a bunch or group of actors is to retain that slight but important, critical, I guess, distance between myself and the organum, theatre, I desire to destroy (albeit that I rely on it and seek constantly its approval in terms of remuneration for my psychological investment (and woundedness)). To delegate second to a partner who has financial nous makes the management suddenly top heavy but is a way to bait money: my sacrifice in propitiation of the financial markets; I dangle a virgin producer in front of me, to front for me and intercede on my behalf, with the gods, the dragons – who fill purses.
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I don’t perform, won’t, in the theatre I make and want to make (destroying) but they are to be my words, my pieces (note my preference for this term over ‘plays’), my works ( note, again, and think: workings, inners) the actors and actresses say, howl, cry, intone, whisper, mumble, sing, by which their characters on stage live, and die. Every word in the actor’s mouth is a challenge, thrown in the face of theatre, for the sake of the audience and therefore, spectacle.
The distinction is important: the audience will be challenged by the spectacle of theatre itself being challenged. I would make bold enough to say that this is what it means to regard theatre as an art-form.
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It follows that it is neither a physical theatre I’m positing, nor an intellectual or academic theatre, nor an épatant theatre, an audience-insulting theatre, nor is it an audience-patronising theatre, definitely a theatrical theatre, but the desired mood, the mood one would want to experience in the audience is more reflective than defensive or degraded. I owe Dorothea Olkowski’s work for this, and much else here, for this notion of representation’s degrading effects:
the public is given stale models of resemblance, identity, analogy, and opposition; the public is given representations of violent acts, representations of vicious acts, representations of sexual acts, representations of courageous acts, representations of virtuous acts, actualizations that by definition exclude the possibility of what Deleuze has called humour. And so people … act out or represent to themselves degraded copies of these acts. …
– Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, op. cit. pp. 187-8
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Dorothea Olkowski is helpful even in the context of a SWOT, since another idea catches my eye here: humour. There is indeed humour in the ‘theatre of terror,’ an unconscionable comedy.
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