Refusal, Frustration, Desire
The notion of story telling is an essential part of theatre and 30 Bird’s new development had in effect gone against that very idea. The collection of paragraphs that constituted the textual element of a production did not add up to a play. If you read them as a unit, they would not make any sense. And yet the setting for the presentation of this non-story telling form was still the same. There was a stage, a set, the audience sitting in a separate space and the performance – including the performers – taking place on the stage. People came to the theatre expecting to see something that sits comfortably within the theatrical form, only to be pleasantly surprised or (sometimes bitterly) disappointed. This paradox created an interesting situation, which is comparable to the psychoanalytic set up as defined by Jacques Lacan.
In psychoanalysis, it is generally assumed that a patient suffering from particular symptoms seeks help from an analyst in the hope that the analyst, through his supposed knowledge, helps him get rid of the symptoms. Lacan describes the position of the analyst as the “subject-supposed-to-know.” In the eyes of the patient, the analyst will somehow provide the cure, the way out, the solution to ending the constant repetition of their symptoms. The patient enters the analytic situation with a demand. However, in Lacan’s practice, this demand has to be left unanswered. For one thing the knowledge attributed to the analyst by the patient is an imaginary one. More importantly, the patient’s desire to get rid of their symptoms is misplaced: it reflects the assumption of a state of mind where there are no contradictions, no knots, no problems, no unanswered questions, no unmanageable forces. For Lacan, on the contrary, the symptom needs to be embraced. (Explain this: symptoms and signs, tchange of positionre the signs of the symptom, path of moving forward) There is no way out, no cure and the position that the patient would eventually achieve through psychoanalysis is not one of satisfaction or knowledge, but rather one of giving up knowledge, or more precisely, giving up the need for knowledge. Once the patient reaches this position, he can begin to act, to take a step forward. This step forward is often taken in the dark, not through a knowledge of where they are going, but rather through a desire to go somewhere. In a way, one could argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis assists an individual’s slow journey towards ignorance which in turn leads to a shift from the passive position of wanting to be provided with an answer/cure to an active position of venturing forward.
Jacques Ranciere puts the concept of ignorance in a more pedagogical context.
“{This} is the very logic of the pedagogical relationship: The role assigned to the school master in that relationship is to abolish the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus. His lessons and the exercises he sets aim gradually to reduce the gulf separating them. Unfortunately he can only reduce the distance on condition that he constantly re-creates it. To replace ignorance by knowledge, he must always be one step ahead, install a new form of ignorance between the pupil and himself.”
Of course the argument here is not that theatre is about pedagogical explanation. However, I would argue that the dependence of theatre on storytelling, and in turn, its requirement for the audience to understand and therefore follow the story, encourages the artist to act like Ranciere’s school master. In other words the artist has to employ means and techniques to make sure that the audience understands what the artist is trying to do. Like the school master, the theatre artist too has to “reduce the distance between his knowledge and the knowledge of the ignoramus”.
30 Bird’s new phase kicked off with the production of Majnoun, which contained a series of unrelated paragraphs, brought together in rehearsals to create a theatrical production. The piece was inspired by the introduction of Western Modernism into Iran in the 20th century, through architectural, financial and social changes. All the changes were imposed from above, with disregard for any of the customs or mechanisms that had been in place for centuries.
What stood out during the creation of this production was the absence of knowledge on the part of the artists about whether the audience will get it – there was no assumption that the art had to be created in a way that would be accessible to the audience. Since every norm of theatre making based on story telling had been thrown out of the window, there emerged in its place a sense of discomfort, an irritating persistence of not knowing what the outcome would be. In a way, the artists in creating Majnoun became “ignoramuses” in Ranciere’s sense:
“In pedagogical logic, the ignoramus is not simply one who does not know what the schoolmaster knows. She is the one who does not know what she does not know or how to know it.”
As soon as the assumption of a distance between two sets of knowledge (master’s knowledge, ignoramus’s knowledge or artist’s knowledge, audience’s knowledge) disappears, the artist looses any sense of “how to know”. This subjective position of “not knowing how to know” informed the creation of Majnoun.
Immediately within this way of working, there was a further shift away from the role of the actor/performer in the definition of performance. Insatead, the notion of space acquired more significance. For Majnoun, I took our designer Lelsie Travers to Iran to look at the architecture of Tehran, walking around the city without any maps, witnessing the chaotic layers of architectural styles and history in the fabric of the city. The walk around the city and the examination of modernism in Iran in this way became an essential source for the creation of space in Majnoun. The set was the focus of the performance. Everything else, the performers, the action etc… was there to support the visual space created by the set.
At one point during rehearsals, there was an interesting conflict about the use of space between the dramatrurge, John Wright and me as the director. John argued that if the set is left without any performers, it falls flat, it has no function. For me, on the other hand, the presence of the set as a space in itself was engaging and interesting, to the point that the performers sometimes got in the way. In the aimless walks in Tehran, both Leslie and I came across many spaces which were being or had been used by people in their everyday lives. The performativity of the everyday life and also the left-over vestiges of their presence , gave those spaces a certain vivacity which went beyond conventional dramatics. By looking at the space/location one was both watching a performance (without performers) whilst at the same time being performed by the space.
