CLIVE MENDUS (Complicité/e)

16|12|20

It’s difficult to make effective comment on the actual experience of the Complicite workshop with Clive as a whole, as being isolated at home for the second half really puts a dampener on the involvement possible. For most of the Zoom classes, we (at our apartment at least) treated it almost like a podcast that we would listen to while keeping occupied with solitaire or other menial tasks. We would engage in the physical warmups and other exercises that we could, and conversation was always engaging, but otherwise it was just us observing the workshop from the outside. In saying all this, there is still a number of things to take away from the time we had, at whatever capacity.

Firstly, on a philosophical level regarding the work with Clive and the understanding of us as students. This seems to keep coming up in every workshop now, but once again there’s a sense that the work isn’t necessarily as valuable because it’s not as clear how it is challenging us or our overall understandings of ourselves as artists. This is true, to an extent – I would agree that the workshop didn’t actively attempt to overhaul our thinking in any significant way – but, I think this perspective really limits the value that Clive brought to us regarding things like the neutral mask, mime, and those simple exercises and tasks. It’s like a gym for yourself as a performer, and I think these skills keep being overlooked. The philosophy of the work, through Lecoq, of being as flexible a performer as possible, who can find a neutrality when needed and intense characterisation when demanded, is so overwhelmingly significant. I’ve been finding for myself over the last year of guest artists, that having the flexibility to engage in whatever you’re doing is necessary for growth and expansion. I see with some of the more experienced members of the class that they resist or cannot let themselves engage fully in something since they’re so ingrained in their usual way of working/thinking. This is not altogether a bad thing – like I’ve written and thought on before, knowing your “greatest hits” and understanding your strengths and interests as an artist is so important, but so is being able to adapt to any situation. This is also something I see at the core of this course’s function – to be as adaptable and flexible an artist as you can, to have a wide range of skills and scope for making and performing when we leave. Maybe I’m just ranting a little, but I know that this philosophy was drilled into me in my undergraduate degree, and boy am I thankful it was.

More specifically to Complicite: it is so utterly obvious how much of an influence their way of making and performing work has had on my early theatre education. In high-school, this sort of work is exactly what we would be encouraged to explore, and even in my undergraduate degree you would see a majority of graduation pieces that were rife with elements of Complicite’s performance style. The quick changes on stage, the flexible settings, imaginative storytelling etc. 

For me, some of the biggest influences I noticed for myself were the ideas of playing games with the audience, and the structural composition nature of the making. 

Playing games with the audience has been a big one for me – not that I think I have actually ever been very explicit about playing games per se (except for one show, DAD), but more that it has influenced my strong awareness of the audience and their experience. I’ve spoken at length about the performer-audience relationship in the past, but I think I can now see why this is so at the core of how I think about performance making. It’s clear from even just the exercises we did with Clive, that this relationship is also at the heart of their process. It’s similar to Suzuki training in a way, where you are constantly imagining the invisible audience. Everything has to do with them, and what you’re presenting to them, even when in the studio making. So, now I see this fundamental similarity, I also realise my two most present influences in my undergrad were a Suzuki teacher, and a Lecoq graduate. Go figure. 

Secondly, this very structural way of creating the work: through the breaking down of a text into moments, deciding which moments tell the story the best and are most necessary, and then compositing them into a sequence. Looking at many Complicite shows, this is very clearly the method used. It leads to a very segmented style of storytelling, but then this is where the stage magic (or the “theatre is a box full of tricks”) comes into play. The tight transitions, the flowing narrative, and the special effects all transform what would otherwise probably be a dry montage of moments, into a sleek rollercoaster of storytelling. Once again, I think this is where my emphasis on staging comes from. Especially with the short process we went into on the last day with Clive, where we staged The Gale, the steps can be seen clearly: first, finding the text and breaking it into the moments that are essential to conveying the narrative. Secondly, creating a staging for each of those moments, that uses minimal set and emphasises imagination. Thirdly, accentuating these imaginative choices with special effects and stitching each moment together smoothly. What you end up with is this flowing composition of moments that all convey a specific narrative. 

This process is very comfortable for me, and in some ways, I try to push beyond it to see what else is possible, but there is something very useful in finding the essential in a work and focussing on staging that. I am also interested how this can work in a situation where you have no base text to work off – not just because you have to generate something, but also because it is malleable. With a set text, you can always go back to it and let it make the choices for you, but with self-made material you don’t really have that as the material can be changed. 

For STREAM at least, I am still planning to be quite structural about the work. I was actually quite relieved speaking to Alissa, as she encouraged this highly structural way of looking at the piece – almost like a film editing timeline, where you see each element and moment and how they overlay with everything else. Sometimes I think I can get overwhelmed thinking that making performance work needs to be this ephemeral, artsy process. It’s comforting to know I can always return to the structure. So, for STREAM, it’s a matter of finding what all these moments are that we want to explore, discovering how we can stage them, and then linking them all together. For now.

5|12|20

I am writing this just an hour or so after finding out we’re (almost) all going to be self-isolating for the next week – the irony being that I likely won’t be able to be in the same room as Clive for the rest of the time he’s here. I believe we’ll be trying to work over Zoom, but as with anything physical, this is going to be a very poor substitute for the work we’ve been doing.

There’s been a myriad of useful information coming through the classes the last few days, largely to do with form and performance ability, rather than any real sense of making work. A couple of us have had conversations about this, and it’s almost as if the work is like “performance gym”. We’re just flexing our movement skill muscles, rather than learning any specific way to work or move. The neutral mask is a prime example of this. It’s a tool built for finding the simplicity and efficiency of movement. To be very honest, it becomes so remarkably evident watching everyone do the neutral mask how different our bodies and natural manners of moving are. Like Clive said, this isn’t a bad thing, and we shouldn’t try to think we have to completely neutralise ourselves, but just have to ability to be simple when needed. It makes me think of the concept of the “pre-expressive” body. This idea (that Fran seemed to take from Noh and Suzuki) of the body losing its daily image, but before taking on a figure or any character.

There was also the few moments we had to analyse each other’s ways of walking or the positions we froze in. These opportunities were for us to discuss what we were seeing literally, and also the implications they gave us. Almost like a parallel to the process of ‘signs’: you see a literal, physical image, and then your personal subjectivity finds the signifiers. For example, you see an open hand – and this literal physical image signifies friendship, or openness. 

The significant proposition of Clive’s following this, is how important it is to all be on the same page when it comes to collaborating, and what you’re seeing. Go figure, but again, another useful gem to keep in mind for making work with others (like, 30 for instance).

2|12|20

I’m so into the process of STREAM, that it’s near impossible to not be relating everything we’re exploring with Clive into that realm of creation. Many of my ‘side’ notes in my book have the word STREAM written beside them in big letters, as a “gentle” reminder that this may be important for that process. Looking back at them now, I’m not so sure how integral they are, but at least they can give some guidance in that process.

For example - and I’m not sure if Clive said this or I extrapolated on something he said – I’ve written “nothing can go ‘wrong’, whatever happens is part of it.”

I think I maybe picked up on this because we’re working through Suzuki as a training method in STREAM, and this triggered a concept that Fran always put on us when working in that discipline – discipline having a double meaning here. It’s that discipline to stay within the performance regardless of what happens, as if everything is how it is meant to be.

I think this works on a few levels. Firstly, the discipline of the situation: it teaches literal discipline as a performer to not break the focus or the performativity. Although, I acknowledge that this is also a stylistic decision. Many performances work specifically because the performer is reacting to the things that ‘go wrong’. While typing this, I do also realise that you can react to things that go awry without ‘breaking’ the performance, though this is a more nuanced ability than the more Suzuki-esque performance focus.

Secondly, just mentally shifting the gears to understand that whatever happens is meant to be a part of the performance actually becomes quite useful in engaging with the work. Instead of thinking that there are train tracks that you are meant to stick to, and any deference from these tracks is incorrect or unhelpful, you understand that there are many tracks that branch off and bring you back to the main tracks. To be less analogous, you are not “performing” like a puppet on strings, but you are actively completing a task or ‘function’ (as Mart would say), and however it is completed is however it gets completed in this performance.

This is a rambling, but it has clarified some looser concepts in my head into a more defined understanding, which is nice. I’ll be for sure encouraging this attitude to my dancers in STREAM, especially the younger ensemble.