Dark Clown

THE COMEDY OF TERRORS - Dark Clown and Enforced Performance

Observations on Dark Clown from the practical research work of Director Writer Performer Peta Lily

Based on a talk presented at the LAUGHTER AND TRANSGRESSION SYMPOSIUM at Bath Spa University on the 13^th May 2011

What does she mean, Dark Clown? What does she mean Enforced Performance? All will be revealed.

Firstly ‘normal clown’.

Historically there have been many kinds of clown, but today most people know and study the Le Coq/Gaulier theatre clown who wears or doesn’t wear the small red mask.

This clown is not exclusively so, but tends towards the innocent and the naive. It has no past and next to no memory. As in –

Wow what a nice shiny red button!  bzzt crang ow! (shake of head) double take

Say, what a nice shiny red button! bzzt crang ow! (shake of head)

Gosh look at that nice shiny red button. I wonder what it does?......

bzzt crang ow! (shake of head)

And we laugh        

and we say ‘look at that idiot, she’s so stupid!’

Dark Clown provokes a different quality of laughter.

Dark Clown is where the audience laugh

but at the same time they ask themselves,

‘should I really be laughing at this?!’

It’s a laughter with a different feeling in your chest and your gut.

A laughter that at its height, makes you squirm

and can include the red cheeks of shame and projectile tears.

After a while researching the Dark Clown I began to think how strange it is - that when the Red Nose Clown trips and falls it gives us pleasure. We want him to trip and fall again, and trip and fall again, for our pleasure, until we are bored….and then we want

another clown

to trip and fall   or do something else for our pleasure.

And we feel totally okay about this. (1)

But with the Dark Clown, when the audience laughs

they feel implicated.

To explain my use of the term: Dark Clown. It was a phrase I plucked out of the air to make a distinction from the regular clown work I was teaching. (2)

Inspirations for the Dark Clown?

Back in the early 1980’s I went to the ICA in London one night to see a production of Pip Simmon’s ‘An Die Musik’ (the title comes from a beautiful German Lieder by Shubert). The piece was set in a prison camp, where the prisoners - musicians and entertainers - are being forced to perform for their captors.

But what really was unforgettable was one scene: a man very tall and gangly with a shaved head came forward danced strenuously, desperately looking right at us while simultaneously hitting himself on the head with a metal tea tray. He was singing Hava Nigila, dancing grotesquely and hitting himself on the head repeatedly. It was hilarious and awful, at the same time.

I started to add a session on Dark Clown to my Clown workshops. People seemed intrigued and excited by it. We explored extremity. I would ask the performer: could you make us afraid, could you make us afraid that you might hurt yourself, kill yourself, eat yourself?

I also explored a kind of cynical clown who has the attitude of contempt, where the performer says or thinks: ‘I knew you’d like that. I knew you’d laugh at that. Is that all it takes?’

And I also explored the idea of existential horror - the horror of being alive. Body Horror - the horror of having body parts.

‘Hand! I have a.. Hand! Why?! Hands?!’

Another source of inspiration was Lumiere & Son’s show Circus Lumiere. In one scene,

a big clown uses an electric cattle prod to administer shocks

to a small clown – to make us laugh.

The more we laugh the more they feel compelled

to give and take the shocks. And to turn the dial higher.

In the workshops I became more and more compelled by the idea

of the dark clown having to make the audience laugh…

or else….

so I began to add in the scenario of a torture camp:

imagine - people are back there being tortured

and then a bell rings they are

thrust out onto a brightly lit stage to perform for their captors.

This has become for me the most compelling application or flavour of the Dark Clown work I’ve been researching - the scenario of Enforced Performance.

This was something real that happened in the concentration camps.

Enforced acts of humiliation and confession no doubt happened in Argentinean torture prisons & other places.

Human-trafficked prostitutes have to pretend to be happy or other things for their captors and clients

and memorably, we saw the staged photo stunts as forcibly performed by the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

Now this is different because it’s elective, but not so long ago, I glimpsed on television a show called ‘So You Think You Can Dance’.

They showed tight close-ups of people being struck off the show. The humiliation, anger and desolation on their faces was being offered up to us

as entertainment….

So I want to say here that in both workshops and performance

I always set up the Dark Clown work very carefully. (3)

The intention is not to ridicule suffering or those enduring suffering, but

to offer the watcher the experience of laughing - and feeling troubled by that laughter.

Technique

The game of tension and release is one of the main components that underpins laughter. As is the game of contrast and surprise.

And another key factor in Comedy is the concept of truth plus pain.

In the red nose clown the game of tension and release has a bouncy flavour. He will scare and delight the audience with his clumsy attempts to ride a wobbly unicycle.

In Red Nose clown training, the teacher will threaten to send off a clown. ‘You’re appalling. Get off!’ The threat of being sent off is aimed to inject more energy into their performance….

Plus it gives them also the opportunity to acknowledge their failure, show us their feelings…

‘We love the clown most when he or she is in deepest in the shit’… (4)

we enjoy seeing their humanity at that moment.

The Red Nose Clown in these moments sells its silliness, its disappointment, its bossiness, its enthusiasm.

Dark Clown sells its pain, its humiliation and its anguish.

In Dark Clown the stakes need to be high. People in workshops often find it hard to get the right degree of intensity - so I invented the shooting gallery exercise. (5)

First I teach a repetitive stamping dance that is slightly difficult to perform. The clowns must perform it together in perfect alignment. It’s a machine to create accidents and mistakes. If someone makes a mistake or is insufficiently invested in the situation (that they are performing under fear of pain and punishment), I ask the workshop participants who are seated, ‘if you had to shoot someone in this lineup who would you shoot?’

Now it’s an amazing (and slightly chilling) thing how quickly people get into this. ‘James is smiling, he’s not taking it seriously. Shoot James.’  ‘Alison looks bolshy. Shoot her in the leg. Shoot her in the knee!’ ‘Shoot the person next to her.’

A useful clowning principle is: ‘If they laughed once, they should laugh again’ (Philippe Gaulier). It’s the Clown’s job to create laughter for the audience. So, if the audience laugh when her arm goes funny, then it’s the performer’s job to produce the same exact sound/shape/rhythm to allow them to laugh again. Then a third time for the rule of three etc.

To accelerate the laughter (snowball it), we might even have to shoot her in the arm again. Or in the other arm.

And the performer must create a believable verisimilitude of pain and distress.

There is an important distinction to be made between Dark Clown and the Grotesque.

The Dark Clown performer must be open to showing the cost – delivering to the audience eyes containing a believable verisimilitude of horror, distress, pain, shame, guilt, humiliation or combinations thereof. It is this which keeps the audience implicated, keeps them on the hook. If the performer is somehow taking the pain lightly, or enjoying the shock effect they are having, if we are not seeing the ‘cost’ to them of performing some painful or humiliating action – then there may be a shock laugh but it will not be the troubled laughter this work aims at. The grotesque, I have found, may impact the audience, but falls short of implicating them.

The Red Nose Clown is like Wile E Coyote – run them over by a steam roller, they pop right back up…

The Dark Clown doesn’t re-inflate after a wounding – they get hurt, they suffer, they bleed and they die.

Red Nose is there for the audience, Dark Clown is there because of the audience.

Red Nose Clown is desperately trying to stay onstage.   

Dark Clown is desperately trying to stay alive.    

Like the Red Nose Clown the Dark Clown does live vividly in the moment - but in a different way

she is hyper alert because punishment or pain can come in anyway at any moment for any reason

and for no reason.

Dark Clown must face horrific uncertainty and impossible choices – psychological torture as well as physical and emotional – think of all the myriad moments when people sold out their relatives and neighbours under torture or under threat of torture – we, as the audience of Dark Clown, get to see that. In the case of the stamping dance - do I hop over or around or on my neighbour in the lineup who has fallen to the floor. Do I try to sing better than my fellow prisoner? Must I continue to dance while that person sobs?

All this – done correctly - creates laughter….

Part of this laughter comes from shock and absurdity

& the rest comes from a skillful and well-judged use of rhythm and breath…. People who play Dark Clown must finesse their ability to

play the game of tension and release

because the audience get tired more easily due to the quality of the laughter

and because the context is harsh.

Moments of silliness (and softer rhythms/textures) must be strategically interspersed to relax the audience.

The Dark Clown performer must also be able to access acting skills (specifically, the skills of concentration and imagination):

they must scream or cry in a way that is convincing of pain and terror

but which is also

so strategically rhythmic and musical that it provokes laughter.

(At the symposium in Bath there was a moment of audience participation here – call and response laughter, then sobbing, using rhythm and breath.)

The importance of rhythm.

Now, here’s a thing. You can create laughter over and above content - through rhythm and breath.

A good stand-up will say that you have to get your audience into the habit of laughter. For example: ‘Anyone in from Cardiff?’ ‘Yes’.

Call and response. I speak and you make a sound, ok? That’s how we’ll proceed.

But you see most people don’t know this. People will usually assume they laugh because of content

and this is where the ability to implicate comes in –

When you – or I - find that we have laughed at something shocking,

we question ourselves    (those of us who are sane)

and we get to confront our own humanity.

I suggest that The Dark Clown is useful, because it provides an opportunity for audiences and performers to engage with some of the dark absurdities and obscenities of this world, when drama and sentiment can fall short of touching us.

Because - the Holocaust, Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, these are horrors of such magnitude and incomprehensibility that we are

in danger of numbing out even as we try to contemplate them.

Watching that character singing Hava Nigila – doing anything he could to survive, I could both see and squirm at

the ghastly subtraction of his dignity.

And simultaneously

release the pent up energy of my own guilt through this vigorous form of laughter…..which at a physiological level shares something with the act of sobbing.

In Practice/Performance

In the year 2000 I was asked to create a production in the style of Dark Clown – I created a piece in Hong Kong called HAMLET OR DIE – prisoners in a torture regime are compelled to perform Hamlet for their captors.

I am going to give now a very abbreviated picture of the show

(which includes something of the set up

required for an Enforced Performance piece).

I am going to do this against the clock…

The audience, on their way into the auditorium, must walk past a small cell-like room where the controller is sitting on the loo smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper.

Inside the theatre blacks are stripped out. (The walls of the theatre in Hong Kong were white ceramic tiles - the building used to be a dairy).

Over the exit sign a large NO was scrawled and ‘barbed wire’ looped round the door. It’s important that there seems to be no escape. On the stage left wall, a large almost cartoon-like switch to deliver electric shocks.

A guard in Wellington boots holds a long piece of rubber tubing as truncheon.

When the audience is seated, the controller enters across the stage, up the central aisle and takes his place at a desk specially installed in the audience. He leans fwd and taps on the microphone and he says ‘bring on the clowns.’

The stage has a trap door which is opened. Screams emit. The guard beats the floor with his truncheon. Figures emerge onstage.

We witness a ‘warm –up’ consisting of punishing and pointless ‘races’.

At a certain point: a drum roll and a small red velvet drape drops….

An announcement :

For your edification, the sad story of Hamlet - the prince who thought too much.

Don't think too much.      

It can only end badly.    

Panic ensues

incomprehension at the obscenity of this exercise

random acts of physical and mental cruelty are inflicted on the poor prisoners

who all throughout are aware of the heartlessness of the audience who continue watching everything that’s happening to them.

While the actor invested with the role of Hamlet is being beaten behind the little red drape for his resistance  boof ahh   boof ahh   boof ahh!

the Controller takes a moment to come down onto the stage. He sings a cheesy sentimental pop song and gets someone in the audience to sing along into the mike. We applaud the volunteer, the controller takes a bow….

then

turns back towards the damaged and shivering prisoners and says ‘See, that’s what the people want, they want to be entertained!’

A Dark Clown show needs to be as funny as it is horrific. I planned the next moment to provoke a gasp of shock, but found the call and response habit was so well-installed that it elicited a burst of laughter.

The beaten Hamlet crawls onstage in agony to join the scene where Ophelia is returning her letters.

The stage-manager prisoner has had to step in for an irrevocably traumatised young Ophelia…

The prisoner playing Polonius sticks his head out from his ‘hiding’ place and angrily prompts Hamlet: ‘answer her, you have a speech here!’

The female stage manager kneels with the text over the supine Hamlet…

She strains to hear his response… their faces are close,

the moment is quite tender…

And Hamlet, with difficulty, raises his head –

And coughs blood up onto her face…

And

the audience

laughs.

The Controller pats the mic

Act 4 Scene 7. Number 338, bring the bucket!

Ophelia. Drowns.

But Ophelia drowns by accident!      (says the translator, prisoner number 338, looking frantically through the book, finger on the page)

Controller: This is theatre, nothing happens by accident. Drown the girl.

338, horrified:  I can’t.

Number 338, do you want to take the role?

The guard pushes 338’s head in the bucket. Holds it there.

(Pause. She emerges gasping.)

338: ‘No, I do not wish to take the role…’

‘Act 5 Scene 2. The queen drinks poison.’

The guard grabs Number 269 and a bottle of toilet duck.

‘NO NO! Let me dance for you.

Let me do it! I’ll drown the girl.’

The controller returns to the stage:

‘So, how would YOU have it end? Who would you have poisoned, stabbed, drowned?

Think about it....                    points at head

but don’t think too much…’  wags finger

If tragedy offers us pity and fear to heal and cleanse the emotions, perhaps Dark Clown brings horror, shame and shock - to fully encompass the pain of watching, unharmed, the suffering of others.

© PETA LiLY May 2011 with revisions and elaborations 17 February 2013

(1) The Red Nose Clown performer must fall so skilfully that no concern of injury enters the audience’s mind. If a clown is dealt a blow, or traps his/her finger, then they must rub the spot or shake the hand. The Red Nose Clown must have an inner predisposition to optimism and recovery and in each moment an opportunity to be ‘born’ again. Comedy is regenerative. Life goes on, unstoppably. It is also useful for the Clown to value the audience’s experience over their own – what I mean by that is - that their sadness or hurt must be delivered to the audience while it’s fresh (because it’s the clown’s job to show its humanity), but the performer clown must be prepared to jettison that emotion when the audience needs something else. The Clown is like a healthy child who drops their ice cream, cries, sees a donkey and is all laughter even as the teardrops sit fat upon their lashes. The Clown needs to be an expert at natural emotional release.

(2) Someone mentioned to me when I was preparing this talk in 2011, that Dark Clown is a term already in use with regard to Samuel Beckett’s characters. I am not a skilled academic researcher but so far, I can find no reference to that – if you know about other important usages of Dark Clown, then please do let me know. Many expect Dark Clown to be Scary Clown, Halloween Clown. There is also what I would call Bad Clown (as in ‘Bad Santa’) – I have not seen them live but the fascinating Australian Clowns Blotto and Whacko seem to be to be well-described this way. (One day I’d like to explore this style of clowning more). Other practitioners may teach or perform other things under the title of Dark Clown. That’s fine. I just want to point out that when I refer to the term here in this paper, I specifically refer to the body or practical research I have been involved in since the 1980’s.  

(3) In a workshop, I always give a short talk that includes the inspirations for the work, the aims of the work and instructions on what to do in the case of someone becoming upset during the process. I explain upset may occur because a) performers sometimes become upset when shifting into certain emotional territory they have not yet exercised b) something personal might come up – which is pretty much the same as (a) and c) the material is dark – step one is to imaginatively understand the stakes of a life or death scenario sufficiently so that it can be played believably and skillfully. At this point in the process it may happen that there is no laughter – not until the performer adds to this the skills of openness, audience awareness, and laughter creation and control via rhythm, texture, inflection, vocal range, energy management and musicality.

A participant recently said, during a class ‘But it’s just horror!’ I replied: ‘Yes, horror, but with the skillful application of rhythm (and use of the ‘rules’ of repetition, contrast and suspension) so as to cause the kind of laughter where the audience laughs and at the same times questions themselves for laughing. That’s the aim.’

(4) Philippe Gaulier, Clown and theatre skills Master, said this, or something like it. In fact, I think he may have put it like this: ‘We love the clown the most when (s)he has a shit in the pants.’

(5) Please note that this is an exercise not a lazzi.  And it’s not how the audience is encouraged or intended to respond in a performance situation.

The seated students participate verbally in the decision-making in the interests of understanding the unpredictable and terrifying nature of the ‘world’. The aim of the exercise is to raise the stakes for the performer so they can release into the emotional spectrum of the Dark Clown.

A talk I gave at the Institute for Arts and Therapy in Education

IATE talk 12^th November

Personal pain and process – transforming life through theatre works

It’s exciting to be talking to you at this event today. I have found great value in various forms of therapeutic practice at different points over the years. And in equal and possibly even greater measure, I have found my theatre practice to be a powerful and rewarding way to both embrace and transform issues.

A bit of context about me: I am a performer and theatre maker.

I also work as a director and I teach: drama, physical theatre skills, clowning and comedy both in Drama Schools and on open courses.

Although I began acting in the 1970’s in my country of birth, Australia. England however, is my home and I have been making theatre works here since 1980, firstly as a founding member of a small-scale fringe touring company and since 1983 as a solo artist. I have also collaborated with other artists and companies but most people who know me probably know me for either my teaching or my solo work.

Physical theatre was my field originally – some the early pieces were wordless or almost wordless. But I’d say, more often, I write and use text and meld it with movement and song into a whole.

I have always mined my own life to some degree for my theatre creations. Either directly or indirectly.

I have been asked to focus today on work that relates to childhood issues, but firstly I’d like to give a bit of context on my larger and more current approach to making work by referring to my most recent series of solo shows, which were autobiographical, based on real life issues. 3 shows created between 1999 and 2010. Right now I am working on a fourth, a piece largely composed of performed poetry.

The style they all roughly share is a kind of confessional story-telling mixed with swiftly sketched scenes plus some philosophical musings in direct address to the audience and including some music and some song. As a flavour, most people describe the work as a mixture of moving, thought provoking and funny.

These recent works have had for me a definite transformatory power. Getting my problem, my issue, getting the painful history into a format that contains emotion, finds new meaning and is also is redeemed by comedy has proved very effective for me.

Humour provides and requires a shift in perspective  – and used well, that has a tremendously healing function.

My 1999 show TOPLESS, (got to have a good title… Topless was a ‘baring of the breast’, a ‘getting things off my chest’), it spoke about a series of painful events that happened over a 2 year period – divorce, heartbreak, a bout with breast cancer, illness and death of a parent and more. With all that as content, I felt the show had to be funny, so any ‘poor-me-ness’ had to be self-deprecating, any drama-queenishness owned up to. The grief was not sentimentalised but allowed to sit with its own human quality in the midst of it all, while the absurd details of the medical procedures and a painful romance were cartoonified.

So much so, that when I look back at those events now, it is the vivid, colourful version complete with a soundtrack of lounge songs that I recall. And I call that a result.

The most gratifying thing about not just TOPLESS, but MIDRIFF and INVOCATION is that my audiences, male and female alike always surprise me by seeing themselves in them. I’ll come out to the bar after the show to find people talking to one another and then to me about issues in their own lives….

Despite which, each time I make an autobiographical work, I wake in the middle of the night worrying

a/  do I really want to tell people these things about myself?

and

b/ will this be of interest to anyone?

Time and again I re-establish my belief that the specific leads into the universal…

And that telling one’s own story does have a value for others,

And that saying the truth as you see it, never turns out to being quite as scary as you think.

In these 3 autobiographical shows, naturally, some other people’s lives and stories intersect with my own. I’ve made a point of contacting people to make sure that they feel comfortable with what I put in my scripts about them.

In MIDRIFF I was not able to consult a friend because she had died. Tragically and disturbingly. Here is an excerpt from my 2002 show MIDRIFF:

‘Whenever I tell this story

I feel like the ancient mariner –

But it’s the kind of story my friend would have told herself

Am I immoral to put in the show…?

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I

- to vampirise other people’s lives like this

I am indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck that I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?’

It’s always a relief to say bad things about yourself before someone else does.

As I was preparing for this talk today I realised that I will be talking about my family. In my earlier pieces I didn’t automatically ask their permission as I assumed my parents, still living in Australia, wouldn’t be seeing the work. As it turns out they eventually did see a couple of the pieces. My father came and saw Topless and he said : ‘You didn’t mention me.’

Just going back to that little extract from Midriff – you’ll see that I leaned on the story of Hamlet.

Which brings me to a brief talk about Process…in case that’s of interest to you…

The starting point for my pieces are usually something that I can’t understand or something that disturbs me.

Anything can provoke or trigger a piece: a recurrent dream, a newspaper article, a world event (CND protests Hiroshima Mon Amour 1984, Chernobyl – Frightened of Nothing 1986), some glitch in my current life, like a bout with breast cancer…

The starting impulse feels like a push, like a compulsion it’s like I have no choice about it

Then there’s gathering of material

Mining internally, keeping an eye out for synchronicities, what Arnold Mindell calls ‘flirts’ in the environment, researching…

Often I write a poem as a first capturing of the impulse, the lump ‘subject’ or seeming subject matter

Often there’s a song that I become fixated with listening to …

which usually never makes it into the realised production

Then there’s just continuing to write, read, research and improvising in the rehearsal room

Occasionally there may be drawing involved

There is collaboration with designers, if I can afford them and directors, who bring their own richness and judgement to the mix

Then there’s finding the myth

In other words

A piece has got to have a good ending, the audience has to go out happy or satisfied….or at least with in an interesting question.

There’s no getting round beginning middle and end

In that way dramaturgy assists the cathartic process: unless the piece feels complete, there will no be closure.

I have always been a ‘structure emerging out of content’ person….

So at a certain point in the process, looking for a model existing story or myth can be useful

With TOPLESS I thought, I know I want to say this stuff, but how is it going to end? What can I lean on here – is this the Book of Job, can I comically refer to Dante’s 7 layers of Hell? I just kept writing, allowing it to unfold. I eventually found out in the end that it was a struggle with identity.

What I thought was a recurring joke was in fact the nub of the piece.

My conscious or logical mind would never have found that.

So, childhood issues takes me to my early work.

My first solo piece was a physical theatre piece was called Red Heart, after the hot desert centre of Australia. An attempt to come to terms with growing up in suburban Australia – the claustrophobic, apathetic, sanitised mundaneity of it all in stark contrast to the wild interior.

In Australia, the huge proportion of the population cluster along its paved over, bill boarded, well-watered rim. Whereas the original population, the aborigines, had sung and danced and worshipped and cared for and communed with every single inch of the land including the desert with its, to many eyes invisible, rich plant and animal life.

I played the landscape and the wildlife. I also portrayed my child and adolescent self and my parents. I think at the time I was just intending to paint a portrait, to point up this absurd contrast, to show these quirky things…

but in the context of this talk, in a way the piece kind of hints at a family life that was a bit of a desert – sunny enough but arid and desolate and isolated, with this no-go land at the centre of it.

One of the issues at the ‘heart’ of our family dynamic was my father’s nervous illness which my mother only ever mentioned to me in private and which was never given a name other than ‘nerves’ or ‘nervous anxiety’, and which was never to be mentioned in front of my Father. So, though I felt it wasn’t a secret because it had been told to me, there was a constraint, a message there to stick to the safe territory, the allowable, the acceptable, the reduced options zone.

And of course I spent many years obeying this and then rebelling against it.

It strikes me now that the safe inhabited extremity and the mysterious interior is also a rather good metaphor for both the therapeutic and the artistic.

For me, emotional well-being consists of acceptance and understanding of all the shadow selves – all the aspects of the self. As an artist one has to be prepared to engage with and honour whatever arises. If you are playing a dark character you cannot judge them. It you are looking at a subject you have to uncover the unexpected aspects, not just show the obvious.

While my childhood was less than blissful (and I know that is the same for many), my father’s childhood, as much as I know about it, was pretty tough. In his adult life he remained hampered by unresolved feelings, as far as my untrained eye can see…..Dad was like many people of his generation – fearful of his inner workings. He preferred, as much as he liked anything, the material world. And he preferred, as we all can do at times, to point feelings outward to blame, intimidation and anger - rather than face the uncharted territory on the inside.

In performance, Red Heart provided for me a mix of feelings, a touch of transgressive guilt but also some satisfaction – as if I were able to ask the audience: ‘Look, what do you make if this, is it normal?’ I had always been gratified when things were admitted to in novels or diaries, the true hidden, the un-conventional story revealed. So perhaps what I said might be of use to someone else? Also I felt a subtle power in showing my own version of events, becoming the describer not the described.

I started to look back over my body of work with this talk in mind, I realised I had pretty much forgotten a piece called ‘Dogs I Have Been’ from about 1990.

This short piece – 16 short poems performed with a slide show with pictures of the family pets - was performed in the Lyric Studio in London as well as touring the UK. ‘Dogs I Have Been’ directly uses my childhood memories.

I think I was in therapy at this time, and examining my early life.

The first family dog I knew was my father’s fox terrier, already one of two dogs with the same name. He was grief stricken when this second dog died. My mother used to joke that my father loved in a strict hierarchy his ‘guns (no time to tell you about the guns here, another time)…guns, car, dog, kids and wife, in that order’. Perhaps you can see why I write about my folks, they were quite entertaining. Now I would have put myself at the bottom of that list. ….brother , sister.

Perhaps that was Dad’s special knack, making everyone feel equally undervalued.

My father would declaim loudly and often ‘The more I see of humans, the more I like dogs.’ He would also say: ‘The name’s Ted – short for bars-ted.’

My father was in fact illegitimate, back in the day when that really wasn’t much fun.

It was only towards the very end of his life that dad told me once that his birth father - I don’t really think of him as my grandfather as I never met him - had had a fox terrier and so Dad got himself one. No wonder he loved that dog so much.

Now I know there is no normal. But at some point in life I began to notice a dissonance between how popular culture presented family life, and how my actual family life was….

Also – due to a number of events in childhood that I won’t bore you with here – I had a bundle of issues that I heartily wished to be rid of. I sensed a dissonance between how I wanted to be and how I was.

I was disturbed at the time at the way I often presented myself as over-compensatory, over-eager. I had a ‘good girl’ demeanour, a ‘like-me’ ‘like-me’ puppyish way of operating, that also cut out in moments of stress to raw feelings that I felt guilty for having.

Read DOGS

I, II, IV, VIII, XI

When I found them and read them through, I was surprised how uncomfortable it was to revisit those feelings. These little poems I still find quite sharp and raw – more of a pouring-out rather than the alchemised healing that I have come to appreciate from my more recent work.

And I remember now that I always felt uncomfortable reading them.

I made a piece called Wendy Darling for which I won a Fringe First in 1988 – a conscious childhood issue was not the seed impulse for the show. But later I could see how informed it was by my childhood and family themes.

Wendy Darling was born from recurrent dreams of flying. My early collaborator, director Rex Doyle said, you should use Peter Pan.

I had recently returned from Australia and had brought with me this old vinyl record which was a recording from an old stage show. I have a memory of I think, the one time the whole family grouped round the record player listening together – quite poignant in itself.

My brother had told me at an early age: ‘Girls can’t do anything.’ And of course I simultaneously believed and reacted against it.

In young adult life I was always banging against the glass ceiling of my imagination trying to invent inspiring female characters. Which was hard because I was had been brought up timid, to obey and keep myself safe. And of course that had not always worked out.

I originally wanted to update the story. Empower the character of Wendy. I imagined a piece where Wendy grew up and become an intrepid woman traveller in the 1930’s. I wanted her to hike to Tibet and learn the art of levitation. I imagined her having a daughter who was living now and a fan of yoga and meditation and there could be these flashbacks… but as you can hear this was going nowhere – sloppy split narrative and no plot. Drama requires conflict and adversity.

And anyway once I began re-reading J M Barrie’s story and reading about his life, and listening to the record, I realised how much I loved the darkness of the Never Land, the savagery of the Lost Boys who shoot Wendy on sight, the grudge-ridden Captain Hook and Wendy’s unrequited love for Peter. I couldn’t better J M Barrie.

(‘Mr Darling’ had a dark fascination in childhood, before I could consciously see that he had the same kind of melodramatic panics that my father had. And also I suddenly see the loveable Nana the dog nurse, having an office that put her in charge, one level above the children. )

Wendy Darling starts with a grown up Wendy come back to revisit the abandoned childhood nursery…we imagined, as for the real-life boys that Michael and John were based on, that they were killed in the Great War.

So Wendy arrives alone. As she prepares to spend the night there she unpacks a pine chest and the whole Never Land comes spilling out. She plays Peter and re-enacts her unsatisfactory relationship with him. At one moment, he says ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’.

My big brother died in 1984. The grief process was difficult because although I adored my older brother, throughout my childhood he pretty much seemed to hold me in contempt and there wasn’t much happy togetherness. He was much wilder than me, we had very little in common.

It took me years to realise I was grieving both for a brother and for a relationship that had never been.

And that I had been left like Wendy at the end of my piece looking out the window, vainly wishing for an impossible past and for one more glimpse of the boy for whom she had been too boring.

Here’s another excerpt from MIDRIFF with its Hamlet theme:

‘I’ve always felt for Ophelia at the beginning of the play –

Hamlet Act one, Scene three, her brother Laertes:

My necessaries are embarked. Fullstop. Farewell.

Oh! so Ophelia’s brother was buggering off all the time as well!

Age of 15 I wrote a poem about the back of my brother’s head

End of the hippy era, he and his long hair were always headed off

To Indonesia, Darwin, somewhere

Maybe my love of Hamlet is an act of revenge against a brother who never paid me enough attention

I adored him but we had absolutely nothing in common

My brother was the bad boy and I was the good girl

He escaped sooner but I escaped further.’

Adaptations have been rewarding for me. I made a piece called The Wooden Boy based on Pinocchio for a company called Gambolling Guizers, two male performers. Although at moments leaning on the Disney version, I concentrated on the darker Collodi original where Pinocchio is an unruly wood sprite, and had the performers appear onstage as wood sprites who then unfold the tale. In response to another of my father’s maxim’s ‘children should be seen and not heard’ – by which he meant they should be not just silent but preferably inactive, I had Pinocchio drowned at the end, with one sprite as the grief-stricken Gepetto cradling the boy turned back into a stiff lifeless puppet while the other woodsprite says slyly from the side: ‘Am I real boy now, daddy?’

These acts of revenge worry me slightly…..

It’s been hard writing this – I’ve come up against something that troubled me for so many years – really there’s not so much that I have suffered. A bit of me is afraid you’ll think poorly of me for making so much of nothing. Where I stand now - I thank my mother and father for the life and the privileges they gave me.

And I certainly thank my father for the wealth of material he has given me.

I thought at this point of writing a list of all my childhood issues,

but

I don’t want to overly expose myself

and I don’t wish to sound complaining either.

Suffice to say that at moments in my childhood I was disappointed in the amount of support and respect I received.

Inside the grown up me there were questions about abuse of power and then of course there were and are in the world very real issues of equality and double standards regarding women that were quite live for me.

The Porter’s Daughter – a play I wrote, was initiated by my wanting to deal with the problem of ambition. Why wasn’t I further long in my career? Why were women more likely to subsume themselves to men’s careers than vice versa. Why didn’t I have enough ambition?

Rex recommended I look at Lady Macbeth. Another adaptation, another re-writing of an old story.

For Lady Mac – I showed the moment that happens off stage in Shakespeare’s play. How and exactly when does she go mad?

‘I longed to be a soldier, but no one humoured me.

They threw the dress over my head like a sack and trussed me up inside it.

‘You are to meet your husband,’ they said, ‘He is a great man of action, a great soldier.’

That night I dreamt

I was the warrior standing beneath the banners on the battlefield.

I had his spirit, his strength, his body and his aim.

My voice rang out above the beating of the flags and I saw horses, men and cannon follow my intent.’

I re-read the play – the first Shakespeare play I had studied, and on re-reading was very taken with the imagery of the shifting wheel, everyone moving up a level….

Still looking for the antidote to weak or victimised female protagonists. I wanted to take someone who was abused but have her functioning and undamaged. I focused on the lowliest character in the castle and gave him someone lower than him. I invented a daughter for the Porter.

I also wanted to explore an uneventful life, and un-driven life - as I was quite a passive person. Also wanted to illuminate if I could, the theme of a woman’s worth.

In TPD, the woman gets to move away from the incestuous and violent relationship with her father (I hasten to add this was not directly modelled on me and my father) and moves up through the ranks to become the queen’s hand maiden and finally the lover of the king.

When the word is out that the English are arriving, the Porter come to the upper part of the castle to find her, ‘You belong with me,’ he says, ‘can you not understand, there’ll be a siege! You’ll never survive.’

And she replies: ‘How do you know? I have stood the whole of my life in siege.’

In my play the witches are a cross between Mother Courage and the Three Stooges. They have come north to take advantage of this moment in time and now they are headed south again, with quite a lot of booty from the castle.

I made the Porter both a bully and a weak man…and in this scene he tries unsuccessfully to pull upon the witches pity.

But he’s been violent and abusive to one of them previously and that is not forgotten. They force him to push their cart out of the bog.

He accidentally discovers that they are leaving with the gold.

They and they insult and mock him.

He is afraid – ‘what kind of grandmothers are you?’

They do a mock beheading and impaling and a mock knighting and just when he thinks he’s free, they kill him anyway.

The woman remains alone in the castle with the dead queen’s body and she gives a speech challenging the coming men to see value not in money or in glory but in the richness of feminine nature. The way her father had been blind to it.

So as I look back one could identify in my work a common theme or re-writing the past.

I copied Wendy Darling from VHS to DVD last night and noticed – I play almost single character in the Barrie’s book and play. Escaping my childhood role of useless girl and good girl to become the whole story: from the heartless Pan and the jealous Tinkerbell to Pirate Smee the unassuming, indispensible second-in-command, the loving yet elusive Mother and the disturbed and brooding Hook.

In translating my real life issues into theatre works I guess I have time and time and again been attempting to form a new story, if not the optimal one, then I have attempted a different one.

The work

is never done…..

keep making work

Of course, the best resolution is to move forward. The new show, CHASTITY BELT is coming along nicely.

talk about disappearing

I was invited to talk at IATE, an arts therapy organisation I gave a talk called Personal Pain and Process – Transforming Life through Theatre Works yesterday. 

The event organiser asked if I would like to show a video of my work. I have been very busy teaching and writing a new show and it was just the day before that I got into the cupboard and pulled out a copy of my 1988 piece Wendy Darling. The last time I'd gone to the bother of swapping over the plugs round the back of my TV to watch it, it was sometime ago.
back then the image had the colour and textures of the original show - cool blues and rosy amber tones....I pushed the boxy old VHS into the machine and horror, now there is just a moving image in grainy dark grey tones. I was so pleased I had done it.
It's hideously expensive to transfer - most places charge £25 for up to 2 hours.
I have never really enjoyed watching myself back on tape and I started this blog with the theme of disappearance, but I was in a more resigned place then, than where I am now. 
This blog began as an impulse to leave some kind of mark  - and not so much in my own name, but in a tiny stupid way, in order to counteract the under-represented achievements of women in general over the centuries.

A colleague told me that you can now buy VHS to DVD machines relatively cheaply.

I was teaching the other day and, once again my students have searched for me online and found on youtube not my groundbreaking, genre blasting physical theatre work but something someone I don't even know has posted up (a song that was produced in a way that nullifies the intention I had when writing its lyrics - something I was too young, stupid and too unassertive at the time to avoid). 

Hm so the thought now flashes up - am I now intent on posting up the transferred work (the stuff that isn't completely degraded to shadowy invisibility already). My skin shivers. Staying hidden seems preferable still...but the idea of it disappearing altogether is kinda chilling....
if only VHS technology had been designed to last.

three women in edinburgh

Three Women went to Edinburgh, thanks to Tessa's planning and resourcefulness. We drove up there in her green Volkswagen which we had pasted over with our show posters. We bought, dyed and wore (constantly) pink boilersuits (over the now sewn-to-the-skin uni-tards), and performed at the WildCat venue - at the now the original Pleasance site - now a plethora of venues in itself, then just one big dusty hall. We shared the stage with National Theatre of Brent's show Zulu (with the feverish comic genius of the sadly late Julian Hough), and on another year their show about the Bible with the exquisite Jim Broadbent as a touchingly innocent Virgin Mary.

Quite a venerable wooden floor it was, with no dance lino. Claudia had a bit of floor work and we spent minutes after each show helping her pull the splinter out of her leotard. 
Food was mainly curious Scottish bread rolls that seemed to have a high cellulose content and mostly filled with ham or corned meat. For our vegetarian Claudia, a simple cheese filling was a rare find. On Sundays nothing was open, except for the high streets. The little corner shops were closed. 
Thank God for Hendersons and the pizza restaurants.
We would sign on for the cabaret spots at the Fringe Club. Does this still happen?
Performers performing to other performers to advertise their shows.
We'd drag ourselves and our props to a huge hall near the university. I loved watching the other acts and would go up and introduce myself to the people or groups I liked. I first met my future husband doing his set in the Fringe Club, though we weren't to properly meet till a year later.
We did two Edinburghs. One with High Heels and another with a show called Follies Berserk. I remember that show we used our funding to create a portable set and used it to upgrade the visuals in our show in terms of props and costumes.
We were still mining the seam of things relevant to women. I had seen the Follies Bergere in Paris and that was what the show was based on.

a bunch of accidents

Randomly, my boyfriend's parents suggested we join them in a trip to Europe. We felt a holiday was out of the question, but if we gave up our rented flat and sold our cars and loaned out our fridge...we could go for a year to get experience in the form of courses or performing experience.

We hatched a plan to travel Europe (the second time, for me), then go to Italy to do a course in Italian in Perugia, then settle in London and see what might happen.

Before getting to Italy, we made an appointment with an agent that my boyfriend's family had put us in touch with. He recommended that if we wanted to work in theatre, then we better get started straight away.

Perugia never happened.

I remember being counseled by this same man to dye my eyebrows and to learn how to speak RP. I remember being affronted at the first part of the advice and never really getting how to choose a good headshot. I made a number of terrible mistakes with my Spotlight shots. The idea of one photo being a single descriptor somehow horrified me. 

I did take lessons in RP with a woman somewhere in Chelsea. She had me working on a speech that had this sentence in it - 'We shall have champagne, buckets and buckets of it.' I was annoyed that it had to be buckits. This is England. It's spelt 'buck-ets'. She taught me to say pockits as well and of course dahnce, not dance with a short a. I worked at it and spoke it. One day I asked someone 'is that a plahstic hahnd bahg?' 
There was an Australian guy in London who had been in 'Precious Moments' in Brisbane, who had had a job in the tv series Tenko. He spoke very poshly. It mentioned Ayckbourne to me and I kept saying pardon. I thought he was saying 'egg warmers'. 'I'm probably a bit too plummy now. ' he said, in a voice that sounded made out of sherry.

One day on the Kings Road, I ran in to a woman called Pauline Walsh who had been in the cast of Captain Midnight and who had been touring with Hull Truck for a number of years. She said somehow a lot of loud singing had been required and it had ruined her voice. She said, 'You're interested in Mime, aren't you?' and I said 'Am I?'

I guess she'd seen Act Without Words or heard about me being in it.

First thing I did was a weekend workshop with this man Desmond Jones. I learned how to articulate my body. You can make a movement head chest or chest head. I had a small but profound epiphany when I remembered a moment in the La Boite production of Tales From The Vienna Woods. If I turned to the other character 'in a certain kind of way' it felt right, and if I missed that, then I felt disappointed, that I had lacked creating something in that scene. I realized that turning to him chest, head carried the more special, more emotional sensation I preferred. This, I felt, was useful and important information. This was the the first whisper of how body and movement and meaning might intersect in a way that interested and excited me.

We learned to walk on the spot in two different ways, we learned how to pick up a suitcase, a glass, a heavy glass, how to throw a glass away. Desmond would say fascinating things like 'Time replaces space and weight'. And cheesy thing like 'out to lunge, back in ten minutes' We learned how to appear to be riding a bicycle. Agony. I could hardly walk. I was working harder physically than I had ever done before in my life. My boyfriend booked for us to go the the famous Ronnie Scotts. As is usual in Jazz world, the main act (Georgie Fame) started incredibly late. Delighted though I was to be at such a landmark venue, my eyes were closing. And my legs, even seated, were very, very sore.

Desmond championed a small booklet called The Canadian Airforce Exercises. I took this up with gusto. Every day I followed the programme. I started working myself to medium, then maximum fitness for my age, then over the years, I started to increase to the peak for younger and younger ages. Lisa Lyons the female body builder had been photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. I longed for gender-stereotype-defying biceps like hers.

I joined the regular evening classes. I loved the camaraderie of the after course drinks at The World's End Pub as much as I lamented the impossibility of getting a nice cold glass of white wine, or nice cold gin and tonic, or nice cold anything. I met a woman, New Zealand by birth, called Tessa Schneideman and a lovely young man called Robert Clayton.

Concurrent with these new studies, I auditioned for and got a job with a company called Mouth And Trousers. The show was The Death of Harlequin, and that was my first performance at Jacksons Lane. I also played Madame for the same company in The Maids in the York and Albany Pub Theatre at the top of Parkway in Camden. One performance I accidentally laughed too soon resulting in the other actresses having to rush the plot to the interval. Humiliation and shame. 

Desmond decided to start a school. Tessa, Rob, Zena Dilke, William Dashwood, Claudia Prietzel, Denise Stoklos, Linda Coggin, Franki Anderson,  Rachel someone, a punky Australian girl, a Dutch boy called Elijah and a chap called Jon something and I were among the first class of the 3 month school. I was living in Marylebone and would walk there everyday along past Baker street and Madame Tussauds to the then BTA British Theatre Association in Fitzroy Square. there was a theatre space. We the class would stand on the stage area, if I remember rightly looking down at Desmond on the auditorium bit. I would do my Edgeware Road walk doing my finger isolations for the finger ripple exercise and practicing doing the Decroux-ian hand shapes - palette, trident, coquille, salamander, margueritte. Then learning how to do the sequence in canon, each hand doing a different shape on each beat.

A boy at school one day said to me, 'I feel sorry for you. You seem to be very ambitious and it will be hard for you as a girl to get anywhere.' This was not really news. My brother had already told me that 'Girls can't do anything' but there was a women's movement going on somewhere and perhaps that would change the rules at some point. Or at least I thought I might have a bit of a go at making a slight fuss about the state of things. The main thing I felt was slightly pleased that this chap felt I was ambitious. I have largely held the impression that I am a lazy, ignorant coward without anything resembling a plan.

Desmond held a 'graduation' showing. I did a solo 'A la Carte' a woman dining in a restaurant, moving from nervy constraint to voracious indulgent to cannibalism of her waiter ( well, a biting of his arm in the typical mime sketch finish 'freeze blackout'). There was to be a printed programme and and I felt, well, if this is the start of public performances in this country , I better start as I intend to carry on and I changed my name from my unpronounceable, unspell-able surname to a name from my mother's side of the family.

I was invited at some point to join Desmond's troup. Desmond had his own performing troupe called Silents. Silents included Tim Dry, Mollie Guilfoyle, Barbie Wilde, Ian Cameron, Robert (?) and another chap called Dennis. And now me. I was incorporated into the group piece and I think I even got to perform my solo piece. We performed at the London International Mime Festival at the Battersa Arts Centre (now BAC).

Tessa asked me and Denise of we'd like to keep on working at Mime. I said yes and we would meet in my basement flat in Marylebone. One day I said (rather grandly) that I didn't want to carry on just doing this unless we were working toward something, like a show. Tessa took the ball immediately and booked the York and Albany. We graduated to rehearsing in her home in Brixton. Tessa had been a fine artist and we rehearsed in the top room, once her studio. She was a very good painter. She exhibited at exhibitions in the RA and the ICA. She said she gave it up for mime because it was less lonely. She was 10 years older than me. Denise Stoklos was a Brazilian girl who went on to make many solo shows and star in a Brazilian soap opera for many years.

As a group, Three Women, we decided we didn't want to do 'mimey mime'. Why is it interesting to open a window or pick up a suitcase that's not there. And I suddenly realised that there was this irritating phrase 'everyman', which your classic mime, Marcel Marceau was meant to represent. 

We thought 'what would everywoman be like?' and did a piece about putting on makeup and clothes and feeling disappointed and then trapped by the result - the silent scream was a classic mime cliche and I am ashamed that we used it here. We did sketches on rape, on feeding a difficult child and on eating disorder. 

In Mouthpiece, we stood and sucked each other's thumbs, we made a fat lady with two of us hidden under a black lycra dress and Tessa constructed a giant cherry topped bun that swallowed one of us. Yes, we were wild renegade mimes, with props, sound effects, sometimes words and music! And we work hideous black uni-tards. All the time.

Tessa was highly imaginative and suggested we create a piece that showed just our feet. We worked from instinct as much as anything else. I realised that I had learned a lot from years of watching Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons. Efforts and dynamics and beats and visible emotions. Causality - action and reaction. Footnote showed a host of fleeting encounters or passages of different characters: barefeet trying to strike up some kind of intimacy, air kissing fancy shoe wearing women, a mother with a train of shoes dragging behind her like a ball and chain (*Claudia's puppetry training inspired this prop idea), a flasher and a skipping little girl who foils him with a kick.

We made an abstract work inspired by Theatre du Mouvement after we had studied with them. 
Brabarella was not a take on Barbarella but the story of Cinderella told in lingerie. Separate from their made-for function, bras are incredibly interesting and versatile obects. Cindy's ball gown was cascading tiers of B cups and if you've never seen a strapless bra be first a mouse's ears and then a moment later horse's blinkers then you have not lived.

The closing piece was called Circus. Housewives (aprons over yes, black uni-tards) perform an entire circus using household implements. an eggbeater became a unicycle. A dustpan brush for the bearded lady, brooms for a stilt walking act, saucepan lids as cymbals for a hoover-hose snake charmer. tea-strainer goggles, oven 'riding' gloves and a shower cap for daredevil motorcyclist with a jaffle iron as the handle bar of the bike. An old hair dryer hood and hose for the elephant. A magic sword act with panda teddy, colander and skewers. And a disappearing  act that used a sheet, a peg and an audience member (once it was the then very famous musician Joe Jackson). It was clowning before we learned how to clown.

...to think I wonder what happened to my serious acting career.

Later Desmond created an advanced School in Shepherds Bush where we shared the hall with a dog training class (not at the same time, luckily). Our leg warmers (yes, the 70's, the first time round) would get rather furry. 

Theatre du Movement came to the UK and we studied with them in a beautiful church hall in Belsize Park one glorious spring. Their work was amazingly expressive, dynamic and heir anatomical knowledge was brilliant. Desmond was great at inspiring us and getting us creating right from the go-get (there were advanced students of Theatre du Mouvement with superior technique to us who were contemplating  years more training before setting foot on stage).

Theatre du Movement mixed Yves Marc's sporting training with Claire Heggen's dance training. They incorporated african dance, animality, isolation work, impulses that travelled through space and intersected with martial arts (kicks, falls, pushes and presses) and exquisite articulation through isolation (at last that Martha Graham contraction with an emotional or narrative possibility!) and shifting flow. We studied undulation. We worked with voice and breath. Desmond's class instructions were, in my memory, based around 'yes', 'no', 'that's it so-and-so (usually a male student)', and more tension! Desmond was keen that mime not show up to be 'effete'. There was a lot of debate on what mime was or wasn't allowed to be. Mime is an amazing skill but in the wrong hands it can be mannered and tedious.

One day in search of 'clay man', I ignored Desmond's cry for 'more tension' (I had knee problems that tension was not helping) and I used a Theatre du Mouvement undulation. 'That's it Peta!' Des exclaimed. I feel disloyal writing this as teachers should always be honoured. But when the student finds more knowledge and freedom elsewhere, they have to go.

Although my Australian accent was for the most part modified, it seemed to me that most of the acting jobs were for people with wonderful regional accents. And the plays I saw were so soaked in class. Would I ever know how to convincingly play a gritty girl from Birmingham, I asked myself. (I can see now how timidity, laziness and unconscious arrogance have held me back). It seemed to me that British theatre was still largely about location location location and concurrently social station, social station, social station. I had no context here. So mime was a gift for me.  I would never have got started in theatre making in this country if not for the opportunity that Desmond and Tessa (and the random meeting with Pauline Walsh) gave me - the ability to create work from nothing. Work that could also tour to Europe without translation.

* The three women who originally rehearsed in Tessa's top room were Tessa, me and Denise. Denise is a fabulously talented woman. There was a difference of opinion around how much rehearsal we felt we should do. Denise preferred a more improvisatory approach to things. Tessa had taken advice with someone in the business and was told that it might be best to get a clear coherence in the company before we did our very first run. It was a hard choice for us and not pleasant for Denise. Tessa suggested asking Claudia Prietzel to become our third woman. Together we had a better work rhythm. Robert Clayton became our technician. We were to work and tour together for three amazing years.

I had arrived in England to maybe take a year out and get some extra experience in Theatre. Once Three women was touring I was able to give up my waitressing job. I was earning a living doing what I loved. What a privilege.