Stage Craft

Edward Thomasson, Escape Routes, 2015, left to right: Zoe Hunter, Carole Street

and Patrick Seymour; performance documentation, Indian YMCA, London

Courtesy the artist and Southard Reid, London;

photograph: Lewis Ronald

Theater_frieze177.indd 112 01/02/2016 14:22

Matthew McleanMatthew Mcleans，作家、编辑，位于英国伦敦。

先介绍背景：我给frieze编辑写了一封邮件，投稿了一篇展评并提出一个疑问：“艺术家戏剧：是新的艺术家小说么?”

我只是半开玩笑啦，就举最近的几个例子吧：2015年3月，Ulla von Brandenberg的第一部戏《沉山举谷》（Sink Down Mountain, Rise up Valley）在布鲁塞尔的Kaai剧院表演艺术节首演（随后又于今年1月在格拉斯哥的The Common Guild画廊重演）；5月份，Edward Thomasson的音乐剧《逃生路径》（Escape Routes, 2015）在伦敦的印度基督教青年会学生宿舍（Indian YMCA）上演；6月，伦敦/柏林的Villa Design Group团体（直译为“别墅设计团”）在巴塞尔上演《一夏之憩》（A Summer’s Rest）；7月，Douglas Gordon的第一部作品《森林的脖子》（Neck of the Woods, Charlotte Rampling参演）在曼切斯特国际艺术节上演，褒贬不一，还招致一些吓人的头条。（“艺术家Douglas Gordon用斧头猛砍曼切斯特剧院后收到罚单”。）到了9月份，两周之内伦敦就有两台首演，一是Jesse Darling对索福克里斯的经典《安提戈涅》的重新演绎《NTGNE》（2015，音译仍为 “安提戈涅”），二是Paulina Olowska的《母亲：一部包含两幕及尾声的难看剧》（The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue）在泰特首演，内容基于一部1924年的波兰戏剧。为这一年拉上完美序幕是12月份Erika Vogt在纽约第六届行为艺术双年展（Performa 15）首演的《艺术家剧场计划》（Artists Theatre Program, 2015），以及在伦敦的Camden艺术中心举办的Rose English展览的开幕演出。Rose English的表演实践持续挖掘剧场、音乐厅，乃至马戏团的语汇。

当然了，相对于那些以戏剧为创作形式的艺术家，还有千千万万的艺术家并没有这样做；但当你发掘新趋势时，它们就浮现了。就在我给frieze发邮件的那一周，惠特尼美术馆推出了为时一周的“新剧场”演出，利用的正是Renzo Piano操刀设计的新馆以及新馆里的170座剧场。由美国人Calla Henkel与Max Pitegoff运营的柏林公司“新剧场”曾经在空置商店内运营，上演了众多低音、低调又亲密的作品，却鲜有文献记录。2014年，frieze d/e编辑Pablo Larios曾写过一篇文章名为《网络疲劳》，把聚光灯打在这艘冒险出航的戏剧之筏上；他尤其着力描写的是Henkel与Pitegoff有关“邀请那些完全没有任何戏剧背景的艺术家和作家来创作并演出的决定，作为‘一种自我颠覆的更新模式’”。

据我理解，这种“自我颠覆”一方面蕴含着去技术化的潜力以及发展新技术的挑战， 就像尝试干石挂墙或者喉音唱法一样，但又采取了足够有渗透性，能够兼顾内行和外 行的做法。正如Olowska的《母亲：……》一戏中一名角色所宣称的：“当一名业余爱好者，有时——只是有时，意味着比当一名专业人员更多。”诚如苏珊·桑塔格在《戏剧与电影》（1969）里讲过的：舞台，有别于电影院，“只允许导演以最松散的方式行使他的形式与审美责任。”这句话还指向了“自我颠覆”的另一方面：因为需要外请演员及公司，戏剧通过社会化的，主体间性式地组织一场演出而避免了导演高度个人化的控制。正是这种群体特质，被惠特尼美术馆称为Henkel与Pitegoff的“群体戏剧伦理”。

有着倍感亲切的第一人称叙述，（伦敦）西区旋律和刻意平淡的布景，Thomasson的 《逃生路径》似乎吸收的是另一种群体戏剧传统，让我想起我曾在乡村表演厅里看过 的业余演出。在主题上，《逃生路径》处理的也是社会群体的问题：三个无名志愿者在一个临时中心寻找一名失踪中年男子。他们试图把失踪对象的行踪拼其来，猜测其动机并试图建立起一段有关他的生活的合理叙事。在说话与歌唱之间转换，角色们不时陷入一段段内心独白的演唱中——关于他们的希望与无聊与性瘾，以及他们如何应对。在一个高潮时刻，他们的歌声不断盖过对方——大家的故事融为一体，成为首尾相接的环。在孤独中有群体：一种在看似最普遍的事物里的唯一性，或者说私人性。让人惊讶的 是Von Brandenberg的新戏和Rose English的新作《迷失音乐》（2015）同样采取了和声 唱法，Janice Kerbel获得透纳奖提名的《德格》（Doug, 2014）也采取了类似的方式， 让9位声乐表演者来模拟古典的阁楼合唱，用音乐叙事交代主人公的多重不幸。

《逃生叙事》的第一句台词：“人人都要逃/我们每天都在规划逃生路径/有些只需几分钟，有些好几天/人人都有办法。”这种语言是如此直接、简单、亲密、平实，虽然是大白话听起来也有点老套。而这也许正反映了戏剧艺术对艺术家的吸引力——他们回应欲望的方式主要不是探索、质疑、模糊、取笑、参与、激发或反思，而仅仅是通过说出来，表明一个观点。“在戏里你能畅所欲言，”一位伦敦艺术家在得知我正在写这篇文章时如此说。这股文学性的转向或许可以追溯到更早：假如说艺术家戏剧是新的艺术家小说，那么难道艺术家小说就不是新的艺术家诗歌么？早在2011年，在frieze第139期里，Dieter Roelestraete就说过“在历史上，文字从来没有如此轻易地走进过艺术”。

Roelstraete发现“书籍艺术所散发出来的不合时宜和荒废的气息”对于视觉艺术家来说有着“强烈吸引力”。这和Darling, Olowska以及Villa Design Group全都以历史上的戏剧作为他们的原材料异曲同工。Villa的《一夏之憩》受1930年代纽约的“团体戏剧”（Group Theatre）启发。作为有左翼倾向的斯坦尼斯拉夫斯基体系倡导者，“团体戏剧”推崇纯粹的合作，不要明星，也无需机构支持，他们的合作者包括进军好莱坞之前的Frances Farmer，还有Elia Kazan和Clifford Odets。要讲清楚“团体”受挫的理想与《一夏之憩》的剧本——杂糅了阿拉伯移民、纺织巨头、龙虾宴和假孕情节——之间的关联，我们需要一位更熟悉Odets作品以及美国半遮半掩的戏剧史的作家。只是有一点很清楚，Villa的优雅、有设计感的舞台布景——高大、白皙，长得像Josef Hoffmann的长椅和吧台被一片有棱线的有机玻璃幕布包围——是理解Roelstraete的围绕文学史形成的关于“关怀的艺术cult”理念的其中一条路径，以及苏珊·桑塔格在1969年预测的，将会出现一种“接近绘画状态的”戏剧——该预测也很符合Vogt剧的形象或者Joëlle Tuerlinckx的作品《就它了！》（+自由3分钟）（2014），在该剧中视觉元素的呈现与重组成为最主要的“舞台行动”。

并不是近期所有艺术家戏剧都具有这种造型倾向。在《NTGNE》（2015）中，Darling对于索福克里斯悲剧的重新演绎，是受蛇形画廊的“公园之夜”系列活动委托创作的。该剧在户外临时场地（由Selgas Cano设计）一片漆黑的环境中上演，只有路过的汽车车灯能略微点亮。在索福克里斯的叙述中，俄狄浦斯放弃了底比斯皇位而选择让位之后，他的两个儿子厄忒俄克勒斯和波吕涅刻斯拔刀相向自相残杀。而新的统治者克瑞翁独尊厄忒俄克勒斯，污蔑波吕涅刻斯为篡位者，令其死后不得依礼俗下葬。而他们的孤儿妹妹，安提戈涅，认为有必要为波吕涅刻斯服丧，尽管这违背了当时的律法并威胁到她自己的性命。

不像原作那样深植于安提戈涅无法和解的政治与伦理悖论，Darling的演绎——于去年 9月11日上演，恰是纽约遭恐怖袭击后的第14个年头——紧抓住角色认为必须为哥哥服 丧的这一致命认识。穿插在观众中的表演者发出一连串脱节的，口语化的集体诵唱， 伴随着提前录制好的电影版CNN新闻告示，充斥着美式口音和让人麻木的标题（“底比斯新闻：您唯一正当真实的消息来源”），《NTGNE》中的底比斯被一阵突如其来的悲伤击中，哀伤像传染病一样蔓延直到它变成一场抗议行动。

非妻非母非女，索福克里斯笔下的安提戈涅决定自己要与死者亲近。“我是一种奇怪的，新的‘中间’（in-between）物种，”她在Anne Carson2015年的译本中说到。让观众在地上与陌生人并排而卧，Darling的作品指向了她自己的“中间性”：公共空间的亲密性。

从失去父兄到无所不在的母系社会，Olowska的《母亲：一部包含两幕及尾声的难看剧》在泰特当代馆的一个专门献给“诗歌与梦境”的主题展厅内举行。在墙上挂着八幅画作，按照时间顺序依次是马蒂斯的《葛丽塔·摩尔》（1908），西德尼·诺兰的泥色系杰作《澳洲内陆》（1950），它们有着奇怪的共同点，一种内部战争的氛围，画家间的世界语。所以看到毕加索的《穿睡裙的女孩》（1923）和梅雷迪斯·法拉姆顿礼貌的、装饰艺术范儿的肖像画和梅罗·格瓦拉的相对晦涩又不安的作品摆在一起会感到新奇。其策展方式是对展览空间的一种驯化，也是一种价值调整，以微妙的手段反思艺术、设计、传记和生活方式的关系。

一部情节离奇，气质躁郁的悲喜剧，《母亲》简直不靠谱，围绕一位徒有其名的母亲 （瘾君子、皮条客、患强迫症的编织者）与她有抱负和创造力而爱玩女人的儿子之间 相爱相杀的故事展开。David Gant反串的母亲角色是一位格外悲伤的幽灵；身披的古典长袍直戳到他猛禽般的下颌，他看起来就像一位年老的杰克·斯密斯刚刚赶场乌珀塔尔舞团参演皮娜·鲍什的《穆勒咖啡》。反串儿子的女演员Valerie Cutko优雅地拖着她好像患关节炎的罗圈腿，和她的“额的神”（Cor-blimy）东伦敦音加在一起，总能让我想起已故的艾米·怀恩豪斯（Amy Winehouse）。

最能形容《母亲》的句子可能再一次出自桑塔格之口，她在《论去剧场，及其它》（1964）中写道Rosalyn Drexler在纽约贾德逊纪念教堂上演的《家庭电影》，“对于面具的彻底漫画式运用，有关角色的陈词滥调[…]漂亮人儿在舞台上走来走去，斜靠在各种场景中。” 桑塔格承认，《家庭电影》在“严格意义上不是一部戏”；而更像是一个剧场事件，一场一锤子买卖，欢乐而又漫不经心，充满了对“剧场”和“戏剧”的 不敬。

是什么让桑塔格如此不寻常的预言了Olowska慷慨而瞩目的高雅文化闹剧呢？近期大量的艺术家戏剧是否既是当下的创新同时又是怀旧呢？我真的很想再想深一点，不过听 到了一阵铃声。女士与先生们，请回到您的座位上…..

STEPHEN SQUIBBStephen Squibb工作在美国纽约。他是柴棚集体戏剧公司（Woodshed Collective theatre company）的创始人。他的著作《下一城：从美国大城市出发》（City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis）由Keith Gessen编辑，由n+1和FSG出版社在2015年出版。

在坏人分类学中，似乎邪恶算计的艺术家是与邪恶算计的科学家平起平坐的。“我是世上第一个全功能杀人艺术家，”尼科尔森（Jack Nicholson）饰演的小丑在《蝙蝠侠》里说道，“有人死掉就是我的艺术。”我们刚刚看着他的犯罪团伙毁掉了一整座博物馆的绘画和雕塑，还剩下一张培根时，小丑说，“我还有点喜欢这张鲍勃，”就在他的长刀划破画布的前一刻。

或者想想Neil Labute在《事物的形状》（The Shape of Things, 2001）中邪恶的艺术学生Evelyn，Sheila Callaghan的剧《路毙机密》（Roadkill Confidential, 2010）中邪恶的意外艺术家Trevor，或者Ed Harris的邪恶艺术家幕后首脑，再加上《楚门的世界》（1998）中的黑色贝雷帽就完整了。或者Mikhail Baryshnikov扮演的Aleksandr Petrovsky，《欲望都市》最后一季（2004）中Carrie约会的俄罗斯艺术家。当他承认死亡并不像困扰她那样困扰他时，她就甩掉他跟了一个金融师。今天，任何时候如果一部戏想要在舞台或银幕上表现人性中吓人、抽象、异化的一面，艺术家总能得到角色。

显然这种反感是相互的：经常，当一个艺术家或艺评家抨击那些虚假的，哗众取宠的，骗人的把戏或者作秀的时候，只要给这激怒他的现象贴上“做戏”的标签就足够了。批评家迈克尔·弗雷德（Michael Fried）一生的事业就是靠误读布莱希特（Bertolt Brecht）来攻击各种艺术品的“戏剧性”。“视觉艺术一直以来把戏剧性当做一个稻草人，来支撑自己对于真实性和现实效果的坚持——存在与行动而不仅仅是再现。”Claire Bishop在2011年的《布鲁克林轨道》（The Brooklyn Rail）中写道。而frieze最近发表了Lynne Till-man捍卫剧场的文章“为时代而戏剧”（第175期）。她的论证很有见地：她是被好的剧本和台词所打动：

一部戏是由台词构成的，同时也是剧烈地身体性的，真实的肉体在空间之中，而观众必须认真看，努力听。一部戏中思想永远是前置的。一句台词引起下一句台词，以及行动的发生[…]一些人无法接受看到人物出现在舞台上，这种虚构性困扰他们，他们无法悬置怀疑。

戏剧的困难在于戏里想象的因果关系是通过舞台和台词实现的：它要求怀疑的悬置（suspension of disbelief）。它要求我们打断原有的生活秩序而投入到另一种秩序当中，而这种想法对于有些人来说是可疑的。Tillman的研究对象是剧作家Annie Baker，其代表作是《圆镜蜕变》（Circle Mirror Transformation, 2009），该剧把背景完全设为表演课，这种选择等于狡黠地承认了Tillman所形容的那种抵抗（即有些观众的怀疑）尽管它也规避了它。我们看到和听到的一切都是事出有因的，都符合该剧作为一系列表演练习这一大框架。角色就是演员，尽管是业余的，他们真的是在做着表演训练。这就省却了我们需要去想象演员们说的话是真的从而让情节合理化的需求。这对那些自命为行为艺术的艺术也是一样的，和视觉艺术一样，它所萌生的语境既无剧本，也没有额外附加的台词，所以也无需一个舞台去标志一种与周遭环境不一样的因果关系或时间顺序的开端。

然而，戏剧与行为艺术看起来经常是殊途同归。在《第五级》（LevelFive, 2001）中，艺术家Brody Condon 在洛杉矶韩默美术馆上演了一场“大群意识培训”（Large Group Awareness Training, 简称LGAT）。LGAT是一门自我实现课程，因1970年代的埃哈德研讨培训（Erhard Seminars Training）而名噪一时。Condon找来合作的是现场角色扮演演员，来扮演自我实现的角色。和《圆镜蜕变》一样，《第五级》也包含了群体表演训练，只是在这里角色的转变主要在于获得自我，而非逃离自我。和Baker的戏不一样的是，《第五级》没有剧本，也从不重复，尽管一种内在的重复甚至构成了整个事件的核心。Condon受Ann Hamilton的作品影响——把750，000个美分首尾相接地放在蜂蜜里（《匮乏与过剩》，privation and excesses, 1989）；把6350公里长的蓝色工作服展平 （《靛蓝》，indigo blue, 1991）——他形容这一作品为“进行着重复动作的动态雕塑，每一次都有轻微变化，都在雕塑装置的环境中。”

关键的是这种环境从来不化身舞台；它们并不标志着一种因果链条被打断或者变化的时间观。行为艺术在这方面努力做到无需自证，而后台和剧本要做的恰恰相反。Sarah Kane 1998年的剧本《被清洗的》（Cleansed）的最后几分钟表现的是一名拷问者温柔地吮吸一名脱衣舞娘的乳头。而在这之前，有人一口气吃了一整盒巧克力。Kane选择的都是那些无法伪装的行为——你如何假装在吮吸别人的乳头？——为了刺穿怀疑的悬置，把真假问题置换成强弱问题。换句话说，她在剧场里容纳了行为艺术。

艺术家David Levine则在相反的方向上实施了与之类似的操作，把戏剧放在他自己的行为艺术中。在作品《画廊将在夏天搬家》（The Gallery Will Be Relocating Over the Summer, 2008）中，他雇演员扮演艺术家，让他们进行艺术创作，然后在画廊中展出作品。他让观众从街对面隔着玻璃观看演员们假装艺术家参加开幕式。在《鲍恩剧院或农民剧院》（Bauerntheater or Farmers’ Theater, 2007）中，他让一名演员以农民的姿态每天连续劳作8小时。这种艺术和劳作之间微妙的边界让人想起马克·吐温小说《汤姆·索亚历险记》（1876）中“光荣的粉刷匠”被罚刷栅栏的章节。索亚以一种仿佛无上光荣的姿态来刷栅栏，最终他的朋友们竟然要付钱给他来分享这种“特权”。只要有观众，曾经在舞台之外的劳作就可以变成艺术：观众在场的意义是模糊的，对于技艺或痛苦的展示来说又是常见的。假如说索亚是把受苦变成了技艺的展示，那么行为艺术所做的恰恰相反：它在人们期待看见技艺的地方所展示的，即便不总是苦难本身，也是跟苦难一样具有普世性的东西。行为艺术把去技术化变成一门技术，一种“精神跳房子”（mental hopscotch），为的是去掉真实性标签，而不落入或触碰到那条隐形的边界。

我们甚至可以把这种类似的欲望追溯到宗教改革。宗教改革表现出一种对于即时的、 透明的，并且往往是户外的传道方式的偏好，以取代天主教弥撒那种腐朽的，比喻修 辞的晦涩。阿兰·巴丢（Alain Badiou）在2008年的论文《戏剧狂想曲》中，认为有必要以下列文字区分出他所爱的戏剧：

坏的戏剧是弥撒的后裔，充斥着一成不变的主角，先天的划分，重复和伪造的事件。那是人们大口吞噬处子，吞噬衰老的歇斯底里者，嚎叫的悲剧演员，哀悼艺术大师，颤抖的爱人，诗歌青年的地方，就像人在牧师的掩护下吞噬上帝而不被追究一样，人的性情被处理后陈列，以廉价的方式获救赎。而真正的戏剧是把每一次再现，每一个角色行动变成一种普遍的踌躇，从而在没有任何前提的情况下检验差异（differences）的真实性[…]有一些反形象（noximages），经过合理的组合，辅以精确的感知，能清晰地呈现那个瞬间。

这种把戏剧区分为好与坏的做法往往伴随着一种逃离图像或词语或二者的愿望。“一切真实的感觉都是在现实中无法转译的，” 安托南·阿尔托（Antonin Artaud）在《戏剧及其分身》（1938）中写道，“去表达它就意味着背叛它[…]这不是压抑口头语言的问题，而是赋予词语在梦中出现时同等的重要性。”因此有了以行为去对抗语言的想法，就是贝克特（Samuel Beckett）所说的没有词语的行为，在它被体制化为行为艺术之前早已存在。而正是出于对语言能够脱离其紧密语境之能力的怀疑在更广泛的意义上把行为艺术从戏剧中分离出来。前者，以及二十世纪晚期的其他人都相信，“任何一种描述中都包含了某种陷阱”，引述艺术家Gary Hill。这是对战后政治经济远离劳动生产问题而转向价值与再现问题这一重大转折的合理回应，该转变反映在工业政策被金融政策替代的过程中。视觉艺术在历史上与权力的亲亵使得它对于此种转变尤为敏感。而戏剧则乐观多了。

我最近就很不幸地忘记了（艺术与戏剧的）这种区别，我邀请一些艺术圈的朋友去看我戏剧公司的最新出品“帝国旅行社”（Empire Travel Agency, 2015），一个每场只需要四听众的小打小闹，在曼哈顿的金融街满大街找一种神秘的药物。我的朋友们都很礼貌但他们并不舒服。尽管如此，他们还是在表演结束后和演员们喝了一杯。有关演员，其中一个秘密是，他们在生活中其实比在舞台上更情绪化，更爱表演。他们不是在装，而仅仅是集中能量，降低音量。我对于当天晚上最深的记忆是有一个评论家需费劲地跟上一个青年喜剧演员的节奏。她在不同的角色间转换，以无情的速度穿梭在讽刺与严肃之间，像一条鱼一样在词语与形象之间游走。后来，我的批评家朋友短信我：“那女演员真他妈逗，”然后又说：“好戏，我的朋友。”我姑且把这视作一种进步吧。

舞台—艺术何为艺术家戏剧？它与一般的表演艺术有什么不同？

追踪最近涌现的众多艺术家剧场创作，Matthew McLean

和Stephen Squibb探讨视觉艺术与舞台之间的复杂关联。

Edward Thomasson, 《逃生路径》, 2015, 从左至右：Zoe Hunter, Carole Street及 Patrick Seymour; 表演记录，印度基督教青年会学生宿舍（Indian YMCA）, 伦敦

图片惠允 ，艺术家及Southard Reid画廊，伦敦 ，摄影：Lewis Ronald

Paulina Olowska 《母亲：一部包含两幕及尾声的难看剧》（基于Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz 1924年的同名戏剧）

图片惠允艺术家；摄影：Andrew Dunklry/泰特摄影 ，2015， 表演记录在泰特现代美术馆，伦敦

Shelia Callaghan ，《路毙机密》，2010 ，Michael Drysdale饰演政府探员， 导演：Michael Dean，表演记录从2015年在英皇十字剧场，悉尼

图片惠允英皇十字剧场及“谎言、谎言及宣传”出品公司；摄影：Emily Elise

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the new ruler, Creon, honours Eteocles but frames Polynices as an usurper, decreeing that he shall not be honoured with burial rites on pain of death. Their orphaned sister, Antigone, feels obliged to honour Polynices, in defiance of the law and her own survival.

Rooted less in the mutually irresolvable political and ethical demands of Antigone’s position, Darling’s interpretation – performed on 11 September, 14 years after the terrorist attacks in New York – instead seizes on the character’s fatal recognition of the impera-tive to mourn. As conveyed by a disjointed, spoken-word track, chants shouted en masse by performers among the crowd, and pre-recorded news bulletins in the movie-version-of-CNN-mould, replete with American accents and mind-numbing taglines (‘Thebes News: Your Only Legitimate Truth Source’), the Thebes of NTGNE is struck by an outbreak of grief, lamentation spreading like infection until it becomes a kind of protest movement.

Not wife nor mother nor daughter, Sophocles’s Antigone decides her kinship is with the dead. ‘I’m a strange new kind of in-between thing,’ she says in Anne Carson’s 2015 translation. With the audience lying on the pavilion floor side-by-side with strangers, Darling’s piece gestured towards its own kind of in-between thing: a public space made intimate.

From lost fathers and brothers to all-too- present matriarchs, Olowska’s The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue was staged within Tate Modern’s collection hang, in a room dedicated to ‘Poetry and Dream’. Along the walls hung eight paintings, ranging chronologically from Henri Matisse’s Portrait of Greta Moll (1908) to Sidney Nolan’s clay-hued wonder, Inland Australia (1950), which, in their odd shared qualities, presented a kind of interwar, painterly Esperanto. It was weird and refreshing to see Pablo Picasso’s Seated Woman in a Chemise (1923) alongside the polite, art deco portraits of Meredith Frampton and the relatively obscure but subtly unsettling work of Meraud Guevara. The display was also a domestication of the gallery,

an adjustment of values implicitly questioning the relation between art, design, biography and lifestyle.

An improbable, manic-depressive melodrama pivoting on the ambivalent dynamic between the titular mother (drug addict, pimp, compulsive knitter) and her aspirant, creative, womanizing son, the plot of The Mother was almost beside the point. David Gant as the mother was an extraordinarily lugubrious appa-rition; swathed in classical drapes up to his raptor-like jowls, he looked like an ageing Jack Smith who’d joined the Tanztheater Wuppertal for a production of Pina Bausch’s Café Muller (1978). Valerie Cutko, as the son, moved with an arthritic, bow-legged grace that, in tandem with her ‘cor-blimey’ accent, put me in mind of none other than the late Amy Winehouse.

The best words to describe The Mother may again come courtesy of Sontag, who in ‘On Going to Theater, etc.’ (1964), wrote of the ‘wholly comic use of the mask, the cliché of character […] charming people coming and going, reclining in various tableaux’ in Home Movies – a Rosalyn Drexler-penned musical performed at New York’s Judson Memorial Church. Home Movies was not, Sontag admitted, ‘strictly a play’; rather, it was a theatrical event ‘of a use-and-throwaway kind – spoofs, joyous and insouciant, full of irreverence for “the theater” and “the play”’.

What does it mean for Sontag to so uncannily pre-empt Olowska’s generous but discerning brand of high-cultural burlesque? Is this spate of artists’ plays simultaneously ‘now’ and innovative yet also nostalgic? I would think more about it, but I hear a bell. Ladies and gentlemen, please resume your seats ...

Roelstraete identified the ‘whiff of anachronism and obsolescence that surrounds the art of the book’ as a ‘potent attractor’ for visual artists. It’s not irrelevant that the works mentioned here by Darling, Olowska and the Villa Design Group all take histor-ical dramas as their source material. Villa’s A Summer’s Rest was inspired by the 1930s New York collective the Group Theater. Left-leaning advocates of the Stanislavski method, the Group Theater aspired to pure collaboration, without stars and without institutional support, working with Frances Farmer before Hollywood, as well as Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets. It would take a writer with a better command of the work of Odets and the half-hidden histories of the American stage to explicate the links between the Group’s thwarted ideal and the script of A Summer’s Rest – a mélange of expatriate Arabs, textile magnates, lobster dinners and phantom pregnancies. But what is clear is that Villa’s elegant, design-conscious mise en scène – tall, white, Josef Hoffmann-ish stools and bar table surrounded by a field of ribbed Perspex screens – is one way to understand both Roelstraete’s notion of an ‘artistic cult of care’ evolving around literary history, as well as Sontag’s prediction, back in 1969, of an emerging theatre ‘which approaches the condition of painting’ – a phrase that could equally well caption images of Vogt’s play, or Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s «THAT’S IT!» (+ 3 free minutes) (2014), in which the display and re-arrangement of visual material constitutes the main ‘action’.

Not all recent artists’ plays have shared this tendency towards the tableaux. NTGNE (2015), Darling’s version of Sophocles’s tragedy commissioned for the Serpentine Galleries’ ‘Park Nights’ series, was performed in virtual darkness in a temporary outdoor pavilion (designed by SelgasCano), lit only by the lights of passing cars. In Sophocles’s telling, after Oedipus renounces his throne of Thebes in favour of his sons, Eteocles and Polynices, the brothers take to the sword and kill each other;

1Paulina Olowska

The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue (based on the eponymous

play by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1924), 2015, performance documentation at

Tate Modern, London

2Ulla von Brandenburg

Sink Down Mountain, Rise Up Valley, 2015, performance documentation

at Kaaitheater Performatik festival, Brussels

Courtesy 1 the artist; photograph: Andrew Dunklry/

Kaaitheater Performatik festival, Brussels;

photograph: Robin Zenner

Plays answer the artist’s desire to simply speak, to make a point: ‘A play lets you say everything.’

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S T E P H E N S Q U I B B

Stephen Squibb is based in New York, USA, and is a founding member of Woodshed Collective theatre company. His book City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, edited with Keith Gessen, was published by n+1 and FSG in 2015.

In the taxonomy of villains, it seems that the calculating and malevolent artist is up there with the calculating and malevolent scientist. ‘I am the world’s first fully functioning hom-icidal artist,’ said Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman (1989). ‘I make art until somebody dies.’ We have just watched his gang destroy a museum’s worth of painting and sculpture, saving only a Francis Bacon. ‘I kinda like this one Bob,’ the Joker says, stopping his lieuten-ant’s knife just before it touches the canvas.

Or consider the evil art student Evelyn in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things (2001). Or evil accident-artist Trevor in Sheila Callaghan’s play Roadkill Confidential (2010). Or Ed Harris’s evil artist-mastermind, complete with black beret, in The Truman Show (1998). Or Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Aleksandr Petrovsky, the Russian artist Carrie dates in the last season of Sex and the City (2004). When he admits that death doesn’t disturb him as it does her, she leaves him for a financier. Today, whenever a drama wants to put the frightening, abstract, alien side of humanity on stage or screen, it is often an artist who gets the part.

Apparently the feeling is mutual: frequently, when an artist or an art critic attacks the fake, the grasping, the deceitful or the slow, it is enough to label the offending phenomenon ‘theatre’. Critic Michael Fried made a career out of misreading Bertolt Brecht in order to attack the ‘theatricality’ of various artworks. ‘Visual art has long drawn upon theatricality as a straw man to bolster its own insistence on authenticity and the reality effect – on being and doing rather than merely representing,’ Claire

Bishop wrote in The Brooklyn Rail in 2011. And frieze itself recently featured Lynne Tillman defending theatre in her article ‘Play for Time’ (issue 175). Her argument is illumi-nating: she’s compelled by good writing and hearing people speak it:

A play is words, also intensely physical, with actual bodies in space, and a viewer must watch and listen hard. A play fore-grounds thinking. Words cause other words to come and actions happen […] Some can’t accept looking at people on a proscenium stage, the artificiality bothers them and they can’t suspend disbelief.

The difficulty with theatre lies in this imaginary causality that is enabled by the proscenium and realized in language: it requires the suspension of disbelief. It asks that we interrupt the sequence of life we came in with and invest in another, and this desire to do so is suspicious to some. Tillman’s subject is the playwright Annie Baker, best known for Circle Mirror Transformation (2009), a play set entirely in an acting class, a choice that slyly acknowledges the resist-ance Tillman describes even as it evades it. Everything we see and hear is causally justi-fied and consistent within the frame of the play as a series of performance exercises. The characters are actors, albeit amateur ones, who are working, quite literally, on their performance art. This absolves us of the need to imagine that the words we are hearing mean what they claim to in order for the sequence being presented before us to make sense. This is also true of self-identified performance art, which, like the visual art whose context it emerged from, has no script, no additional or supplementary language, and so doesn’t require a proscenium to signify the beginning of a different causal or temporal sequence from the one that surrounds it.

Still, it often seems as though theatre and performance art were heading in the same direction from different starting

points. For LevelFive (2001), the artist Brody Condon restaged a Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. LGAT was the kind of self-actualization seminar made famous by Erhard Seminars Training (EST) in the 1970s, and Condon worked with live-action role players, who came to self-actualize in char-acter. As with Circle Mirror Transformation, LevelFive consists of a communal acting exercise, only here the transformation aims at achieving the self, rather than escaping it. Unlike Baker’s play, LevelFive has no script and never repeats itself, even if repetition is internally present, even constitutive, of the overall course of the event. Condon was influ-enced by Ann Hamilton whose work – laying 750,000 pennies, end to end, in honey (priva-tion and excesses, 1989); smoothing 6,350 kilos of blue work clothing (indigo blue, 1991) – he has described as ‘kinetic sculpture enacting a repetitive motion that changed slightly with each variation, all within sculptural installation environments’.

It is crucial that these environments never become proscenia; they do not signify an interruption in a causal sequence or a shift in temporality. Art performance strives to be self-evident in this respect, which is what a backstage and a script are designed to defeat. One of the last moments of Sarah Kane’s 1998 play, Cleansed, involves a torturer gently sucking on the nipple of an exotic dancer. Earlier, someone eats an entire box of choco-lates one at a time. Kane used behaviours that can never really be acted – how can you fake sucking on someone’s nipple? – to puncture the suspension of disbelief, and to replace the question of veracity with one of intensity. In other words, she included performance in her theatre.

The artist David Levine has executed a similar operation in reverse, placing theatre in the middle of his performance. For The Gallery Will Be Relocating Over the Summer (2008), he hired actors to play living artists, had them make art in character, and then showed that work in a gallery. His audi-ence watched the actors play the artists at the opening party from across the street, through the windows of the gallery. In Bauerntheater or Farmers’ Theater (2007), he directed an actor to farm in the style of his character, in character, for eight hours a day. This deli-cate line between art and labour recalls ‘The Glorious Whitewasher’, an episode in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Sentenced to paint a fence as punishment, Sawyer acts as though it is the highest honour until, eventually, his friends begin paying him to share the privilege. What was labour off stage can become art when people arrive to watch: the presence of an audience is ambiguous and common both to demonstra-tions of skill and of suffering. If Sawyer turns the latter into the former, performance art seeks the reverse: demonstrating, if not always suffering per se, then certainly capacities no less universal, in places where skill would be expected. Performance has made a skill of de-skilling, a mental hopscotch designed to move the marker of authenticity without falling over or touching the line. 1

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Annie Baker《圆镜蜕变》，2009 ，左至右：Deirdre O’Connell, Tracee Chimo和 Peter Friedman ，导演：Sam Gold; 表演记录在“剧作家天地”剧场，纽约

图片惠允“剧作家天地”剧场；摄影：Joan Marcus

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We can locate a similar desire as least as far back as the Protestant Reformation, which manifested a preference for the imme-diate, transparent and often out-of-doors performance called preaching in place of the decadent, figurative obscurity of the Catholic Mass. Alain Badiou, in his 2008 essay ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre’, feels the need to distinguish his beloved along these lines:

Bad theatre is a descendant of the Mass, with its established and substantial roles, its natural differences, its repetitions, its falsified event. It is where one gobbles up the virgin, the ageing hysteric, the tragic actor with the loud voice, the virtuoso of lamentations, the shivering beloved, the poetic young man, just as one eats, in the guise of the host, God. One comes away from this with one’s dispositions taken care of and put on display. One obtains salvation on the cheap. Genuine Theatre turns every representation, every actor’s gesture, into a generic vacilla-tion so as to put differences to the test without any supporting base […] there are noximages only sensible combinations whose perception, if it is sustained with exactitude, clarifies the moment.

This doubling of theatre into a good kind and a bad often accompanies a desire to be free from images, words or both. ‘All true feeling is in reality untranslatable,’ Antonin Artaud wrote in The Theater and Its Double (1938). ‘To express it is to betray it […] It is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams.’ Hence the idea of a performance against language, an act without words, as Samuel Beckett would put it, long before such a practice was institutionalized as performance art. And it is this suspicion of language’s ability to depart from its immediate context that separates performance art from theatre more generally. The former believes, along with the rest of the late 20th century, that ‘there is something of every description that can only be a trap’, to quote the artist Gary Hill. This is an under-standable response to a larger shift in the postwar political economy away from prob-lems of labour and production and towards problems of value and representation, a shift reflected in the substitution of mone-tary policy for industrial policy. Visual art’s historic proximity to power makes it partic-ularly sensitive to such transformations. The theatre is more sanguine about them.

Theatre asks that we interrupt the sequence of life we came in with and invest in another, and this desire is suspicious to some.

I recently forgot this distinction to my peril when I invited some art-world friends to my theatre company’s latest show, Empire Travel Agency (2015), a romp that took an audience of four people, for each performance, all over Manhattan’s finan-cial district in search of a mythical drug. My friends were polite but uncomfortable. Still, they stayed for drinks with the cast afterwards. One of the secrets about actors is that they are actually more emotional and performative in life than they are on stage. They aren’t faking anything, merely focusing energy and turning down the volume. My lasting memory of the evening was a critic trying to keep up with a young comedian. Flying between characters, drop-ping in and out of sarcasm and seriousness with unrelenting speed, she swam through words and images as quick as a fish. Later, my critic-friend texted me: ‘That actress is so hilariously an actress,’ and then: ‘Great show man.’ I’ll take that as progress.

1Annie Baker

Circle Mirror Transformation, 2009, left to right: Deirdre O’Connell,

Tracee Chimo and Peter Friedman, directed by Sam Gold; performance documentation

at Playwrights Horizons, New York

2Shelia Callaghan

Roadkill Confidential, 2010, Michael Drysdale as the Government

Agent, directed by Michael Dean, performance documentation from 2015 at

Kings Cross Theatre, Sydney

Courtesy 1 Playwrights Horizons; photograph:

and Lies, Lies and Propaganda productions;

photograph: Emily Elise

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Ulla von Brandenburg《沉山举谷》表演记录在Kaai剧院表演艺术节，布鲁塞尔图片惠允艺术家及Kaai剧院表演艺术节，布鲁塞尔 ， 摄影：Robin Zenner

First published in: frieze,

issue 177, March 2016

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MATTHEW MCLEAN

Matthew McLean is a writer and editor based in London, UK.

To set the scene: I type an email to a frieze editor, pitching a review and posing a question, ‘Artists’ plays: the new artists’ novels?’

I am only half-joking. To name a few recent endeavours: March 2015 saw the debut of Ulla von Brandenberg’s first play, Sink Down Mountain, Rise Up Valley, at the Kaaitheater Perfomatik festival in Brussels (it was re-staged at The Common Guild, Glasgow, this January); in May, Edward Thomasson’s musical Escape Routes (2015) was performed at the Indian YMCA in London; in June, the London/Berlin-based Villa Design Group staged A Summer’s Rest (Je T’aime Mont Blanc) (2015) in Basel; in July, the mixed recep-tion given to Douglas Gordon’s first play, Neck of the Woods (starring Charlotte Rampling), at the Manchester International Festival, led to some alarming headlines. (‘Artist Douglas Gordon faces repair bill after axe attack on Manchester theatre.’) Come September, in the space of two weeks, London witnessed the premiere of Jesse Darling’s reinterpre-tation of Sophocles’s Antigone (c.441 BCE) at the Serpentine Galleries (NTGNE, 2015) and Paulina Olowska’s The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue, based on a 1924 Polish dramatic work and performed at Tate Modern. The year was rounded off with the premiere of Erika Vogt’s Artists Theater Program (2015) for Performa 15 in New York and, in December, the opening of an exhibition by Rose English – whose performance practice has continually mined the vernaculars of the theatre, the music hall and even the circus – at London’s Camden Arts Centre.

Of course, for every artist making a play there are many thousands who are not;

but, sometimes, when you start looking for trends, they start to appear. The week I sent that email to frieze, the Whitney Museum announced a week’s run of plays by the New Theater, utilizing both the new Renzo Piano-designed building’s gallery spaces and its 170-seat theatre. A Berlin-based enterprise helmed by Americans Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, for the last two years the New Theater has operated in an empty shop, producing lo-fi, low-key, intimate plays, regularly eschewing documentation. In 2014, frieze d/e editor Pablo Larios wrote an article, titled ‘Network Fatigue’, which shed light on this raft of theatrical ventures: particularly illuminating is his des cription of Henkel and Pitegoff’s ‘decision to ask artists and writers – none of whom has a background in theatre – to construct and act in plays’ as ‘a refreshing mode of ego-subversion’.

Part of this ‘ego-subversion’, to my mind, is the potential for an unlearning of skills or a challenge to develop fresh ones – like attempting dry-stone walling, or throat singing, but in a form sufficiently porous and accepting to reward the newcomer as well as the expert. As one character in Olowska’s The Mother … declares: ‘It means more to be a dilettante sometimes – sometimes, I say – than to be a specialist.’ Indeed, Susan Sontag argued in ‘Theatre and Film’ (1969) that theatre, unlike cinema, ‘allows only the loosest approx-imation to the sort of formal concern and to this degree of aesthetic responsibility on the part of the director.’ The quote points to the other part of ‘ego-subversion’: in requiring a cast and company, theatre deflects individual control through the social, inter-subjective nature of devising a performance. It’s the community part, in other words, of what the Whitney calls Henkel and Pitegoff’s ‘ethos of community theatre’.

With its cosily direct address, West End melodies and intentionally bland set, Thomasson’s Escape Routes seemed to draw on another distinct tradition of community

theatre, reminding me of amateur dramatics productions I have seen in rural village halls. Thematically, too, Escape Routes dealt with the social group: taking place in a temporary centre staffed by three nameless volunteers who are working to find a missing, middle-aged man. These characters try to piece together the missing subject’s movements, speculate on his motivations and attempt to establish an account of his life that makes sense. Switching between speaking and singing, each character lapses, at times, into sung interior monologue – about their own hopes or boredom or sex addiction, and how they cope with it. At one climactic point, they all sing over one another – their stories merging and looping into one another. There is a sort of commu-nity in aloneness: a singularity, or privacy, even in what is most common. It’s striking that Von Brandenberg’s play and English’s new work, Lost in Music (2015), also make use of ensemble singing, as does Janice Kerbel’s Turner-nominated DOUG (2014), whose nine vocal performers hark back to the classical Attic chorus in providing sung narration of the protagonist’s multiple misfortunes.

The first lines of Escape Routes are: ‘We all run away/we plan escape routes every day/Some take minutes, and some take days/We all have our ways.’ It’s language so direct, simple, intimate and unassuming that it strikes the ear as almost trite, for all its truth. And this, perhaps, suggests another source of the appeal of plays to artists – that they answer the desire not to explore, question, blur, tease, engage, activate or reflect upon, but simply to speak, make a point. ‘A play lets you say every-thing,’ remarks a London artist when I mention that I’m writing this piece. The course of this literary turn might, consequently, be traced back further: if artists’ plays are the new artists’ novels, aren’t artists’ novels themselves the new artists’ poetry? Back in 2011, in frieze issue 139, Dieter Roelestraete argued that ‘never before, it seems, have words come more easily to art’.

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Theater_frieze177.indd 114 01/02/2016 14:22

What is an artist’s play and how does it differ from performance art?

Following a spate of recent productions, Matthew McLean and Stephen Squibb

consider the complex relationship between gallery and stage

Theater_frieze177.indd 113 01/02/2016 14:22