Projects 2010 > Fortnight > Journal
In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote about the notion of ‘adventure’. An adventure, he argued:
Interrupts the customary course of events, but is positively and significantly related to the context which it interrupts. Thus an adventure lets life be felt as a whole, in its breadth and in its strength. Here lies the fascination of an adventure. It removes the conditions and obligations of everyday life. It ventures out into the uncertain. But at the same time it knows that, as an adventure, it is exceptional and thus remains related to the return of the everyday, into which adventure cannot be taken. Thus the adventure is “undergone”, like a test or trial from which one emerges enriched and more mature.
(Gadamer, 2004: 60)
I recently wrote about this notion of adventure in greater detail, and explored what I perceived to be an analogous relationship between the Gadamerian adventure and aesthetic experience. In relation to theatre and performance specifically, I wondered whether or not aesthetic ‘experience’ is something which stands-out from, or seems extra-ordinary to, the experience of a performance in general: a momentary image created by bodies in motion; the light fading on an object; an electric silence.
These past few weeks, that notion has been coming back to me again and again. We’ve been performing our piece Third Person: Bonnie and Clyde (redux) at Soho Theatre, and making best use of our days by developing Fortnight. As we continue to develop the structure of our first week, much of our discussion is gravitated around how we establish and maintain certain rhythms, atmospheres, and waves of feeling over such a protracted period.
In many of our previous performance works, including Third Person, shifts in tempo, composition, clarity and intensity can be finely constructed and tuned so that the ‘adventure’ of aesthetic experience might transport the spectator into contemplative and imaginative reflection at any given moment.
But how do those strategies for making translate into a performance work that lasts for two weeks? And moreover, one which is being intentionally constructed to sit in-and-among the fabric of people’s daily lives. If the Gadamerian idea of adventure has any similarity with aesthetic engagement, then our approach to Fortnight must be one in which its daily interventions define themselves as something more profound than an aesthetics of the everyday.
Indeed, there is perhaps something counterintuitive in thinking about experience as aesthetic qua aesthetic in a performance context that might be more at home with an aesthetics of walking, urban spaces, or the everyday. But there remains something powerful and attractive about the prospect of an experience which ‘removes the conditions and obligations of everyday life’, especially when those experiences paradoxically occur within the structures of daily circumstance.
The problem, then, is this: how can a performance exist within the fabric of the everyday whilst constructing experiences which propose to throw off those shackles? I don’t know if I can give a complete answer here, or indeed if I’m asking the right question in the first place. What I do know is that we’ve started to play with a tactic that seeks to bridge this delicate gap. I’m not going to give too much away, because that’ll spoil all the fun, but my sound academic upbringing compels me to ‘provide an example which will illustrate my point’. With that in mind then, here comes a very slight spoiler.
**SPOILER ALERT**
An early communication compares the city to a working film set, which, in a way, sums up much of what we’re thinking about right now. An SMS message reads:
When you walk do you daydream? Moving through the city is like walking through a film set. You could be in ‘The Birds’ right now: to your left Tippi Hedren is running into her house; on your right, a boom operator stretches his microphone to catch her screams; in front of you the gap between the film set and the real world.
In cinema, after the final edit, the film set is transformed to place of fantasy and imagination, a place where a story is told, or where a climactic event takes place. In the making though, the film set is cluttered with microphones, cameras, lights, and a multitude of bodies that make the ‘magic’ possible. In Fortnight (at least right now), the city and its inhabitants occupy both the final film and the working set, the place of fantasy and labour, at the same time. Through this, the city space itself becomes subtly aestheticised, but in a fragile, paper-thin kind of way. The moments of fantasy, of imaginative speculation are like the ‘adventure’, which ‘knows that, as an adventure, it is exceptional and thus remains related to the return of the everyday’.
Of course, this is just one moment of many, and can’t be taken as indicative of the whole experience. Nevertheless, I think we are starting to uncover a performance which retains the extra-ordinary possibilities of theatrical experience whilst, just like the adventure, ‘is positively and significantly related to the context which it interrupts’.
