Indicator Species 001
I’ve been thinking about criticism.
I’m emerging from a period of being very jaded and drained when thinking about theatre and cultural criticism and in an act of optimism I’ve decided to write a newsletter. Welcome. I am thinking in public. I will think my way into connections between the things I have been reading and listening to and I will list the texts below. I’d also love for some of you to reply to this email. I’ll try to be brief.
I have been thinking about Greater Manchester Tenants Union, whom I am a member of. Can’t get the Union out my head nor off my tongue. I spoke to someone recently who described the dismal conditions of flats they have rented in the past, the indifference of their succession of landlords to disrepair, vermin. It’s a familiar story to me; I’ve lived it, I work in solidarity with others who have lived it. They go on to tell me they’re living in the nicest flat they’ve ever had, no complaints any more.
When I recommend they join the Union they tell me that their troubles are behind them. but they could join in solidarity, join while they are safe, support others who are struggling now! They don’t want to talk about it. The conversation moves on. My first reaction is pessimism, miserable! miserable that these people cannot be reached! but then I reflect that I should not be abandoning comrades because they are difficult to recruit. I allow the interaction to trouble me and sit in my mind. I reflect that the deliberate neglect of landlords takes us to places of fear, of anxiety. They have the power to take our home from us and, sooner even than that, our sense of safety. This effect, not wanting to revisit that place, wanting to remain in our places of safety, is part of the point. It is in landlords’ interest to traumatise us. They separate us by encouraging us to silo ourselves.
This is me soliciting for you to send me recommendations. Have you read anything about this programmed-in cruelty? I’ve read a lot about the political and economic mechanics of gentrification and landlordism, but what about the psychic element? Who’s writing about the landlord in our heads?
Years ago I read John Yorke’s Into the Woods. The thing which has stuck with me most from that read is his point about the fractal and self-similar nature of stories. Briefly, the arc of a story can be thought of as made up of the smaller, separate arcs of each of its acts. Those acts are made up of the smaller arcs of their scenes. Each scene is made from the small arcs which are its beats. The sentences of each beat have their arcs, too. On the micro level, the journey from the beginning of a sentence to its end is the same shape as the journey from the start to the end of the story.
In her endnote to Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi writes that children ‘are precariously situated between ownership and mercy. The nuclear family turns children into property’. There is a way in which children are our model for the other. When we interact with them, we know they are still-forming, that we can play some part in shaping the person they are becoming. The way we treat an uncooperative child is how we treat a person with less agency than us. Olufemi also says, ‘children are queer negation, everything we are not’ – when we meet with that not-ness, it is the easy path to assume we cannot ford it. who knows what children are thinking? Making space to understand is of course the more valuable.
I’ve been back in rehearsal rooms recently, making plays. The rehearsal room is where we decide the rules of the world, as is the Union. Leading a rehearsal process at the moment, I am tasked with creating a community for myself and the company which models the community we will create with our audience. I am trying to bring curiosity, playfulness, collaboration. When we occupy the room as gracious collaborators, we occupy the stage as gracious collaborators, and we occupy the world as the same. In her book, ‘Theatre-Making’, Duška Radosavljević studies theatre works which ‘bestow on their audience freedom and responsibility […] in the interest of authoring a shared future together.’ When I go into the rehearsal room I ask myself every time, what questions do I have? What world are we trying to make?
I’m deeply inspired by abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s description of ‘life in rehearsal’:
Another way that I have tried to give some very open-ended definition to abolition is to call it “life in rehearsal.” So life in rehearsal, I hope, invokes in a listener or reader some sense or sensibility of how interpersonal abolition must be. That there is so much doing involved in making ourselves free, and most importantly, radical dependency: that it’s not something an individual can do for themself or can embody as one person.
Theatre is a microcosm, the rehearsal room is the tiny arc, the smallest expression of the audience-performer interaction we are modelling. That interaction is one between people, the temporary community we create in the theatre is created with our neighbours. We’re rehearsing the people we want to be, the community we want to create. We are stretching our capacity for empathy, practising the skill of relying on others.
My antidote, at present, is in these places where we imagine the world, we rehearse the world, we make the world we want to live in.
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Join Greater Manchester Tenants Union. Or LRU; Living Rent; CATU – yknow, find one where you live.
Bibliography
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, on On Being with Krista Tippett – Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Where life is precious, life is precious.”
Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise
Lola Olufemi, Why Barbara Walker’s Black Subjects Deserve More Than Just ‘Visibility’
Duška Radosavljević, Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them