One thing after another: The list as theatrical form

Theron Schmidt, “One Thing after Another: The List as Theatrical Form,” in Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling: The Work of Forced Entertainment, ed. Adrian Heathfield (Leipzig: Spector, 2023), 259–62. accepted author final draft version Every year it’s the same thing. There’s a new batch of theatre students, many of them drawn here out of a belief that each of them (already!) has something deep inside them that they need to share, and that if they can do it with enough sincerity and conviction, or if they can inhabit a character with enough authenticity and depth, then this expression of their individuality will make the world a better place. Some of them may well be right about this. But that’s not what I ask them to do. Instead, I say, we’re going to make theatre, yes—but let’s make a theatre without make-believe situations, without what you think are realistic dialogue and scenarios, without plot and character development, without crafted motivations and psychological depth, and, above all, without self-expression. Typical response: a line of blank faces. If none of these things, then where do we start? Well, I suggest, we could make a list. We could, for example, start by reading headlines of disasters. We could start with a list of confessions. We could start by travelling to arbitrary locations around the country and telling each other what we found there. We could start with a man in a shabby skeleton costume explaining all the reasons that the show used to be better than it was. We could start with someone wearing a handwritten sign with the word ‘LIAR’. We could start with two dishevelled clowns squabbling over the arrangement of the chairs. We could start with a pair of costume racks and a pack of short character descriptions scrawled on cardboard signs. We could start with a deck of hundreds of questions and ask them of each other all night long until we’re no longer sure what we’re saying. We could start by welcoming the audience while wearing fixed smiles on our faces, or with a cartoonish bomb taped to our chest, or simply by describing scene after scene of possible beginnings of an imagined show. This is a list of opening moments in the work of Forced Entertainment. 1 A list like this starts to sketch some of the expanded possibilities for the kinds of propositions that the theatreevent can offer. There is a sense of liberation and possibility in such a catalogue, and it’s that sense that I hope to evoke in setting this task for those new students when I go on to ask them to make their own lists of imagined opening moments—and am rewarded with a wild compendium of proposals for pitch-black rooms, sudden congregations of non-human animals, various configurations of one-to-one confrontations between performers and audience members, and so on. That we are able to imagine such a range of possibilities is testament to the contribution made by companies such as Forced Entertainment in stretching and probing what can count as ‘theatre’ and what kinds of experiences it can accommodate. But the list offers something more. In addition to its individual elements, the form of the list itself offers a way of reorienting one’s relationship to theatrical form, and points to an alternative to the model of theatre based on self-expression and depth of meaning. Indeed, my cursory list above already highlights a recursive tendency in Forced Entertainment’s work, in which lengthy sections of their performances, and even entire pieces, are themselves structured like lists, with sequences of propositions that work iteratively through a category or idea for an extended duration. In First Night (2001), for example, Terry O’Connor lists everything she wants us to ‘try not to think about’ or to ‘forget about’ while we are in the theatre tonight, a list that over twenty minutes evokes traffic accidents, illness, personal embarrassment, and ultimately ‘everything you’ve ever read’ and ‘everything that’s ever been written’ and ‘everything that’s ever been invented or made’; or two-thirds of the way into Bloody Mess (2004), Davis Freeman and Jerry Killick, both naked except for a flimsy cardboard star each is holding in front of him, take turns suggesting a series of hypothetical ‘beautiful silences’ that they want to summon—the feeling when a baby that has been crying all night finally stops to the moment, for example, or the moment when a family member’s life support system has been turned off—but the accumulating list of possible silences displaces the possibility of such a silence ever being realized in the theatre; or there’s the entirety of Tomorrow’s Parties (2011), in which two performers propose hundreds of different possible futures for humanity—a world without nations, or where we are all criminals, or where food is pumped into our houses in pipes, or where everything is pretty much the same as it is now. What is it that is so compelling about the structure of the list? What does it enable? As a mode of organizing text and action, the list provides an alternative to the narrative or scenario-based dialogue that characterizes ‘drama’. 2 A list reveals rather than conceals its formal aspects, foregrounding processes of composition, selection, and assembly. As a compositional strategy, the list is in the same family as chance operations, automatic writing, found text, cut-up, and other forms of ‘conceptual writing’ that deliberately subvert the intentionality of the autonomous, authorial voice. 3 Its register is that of the mundane minutiae of everyday life, possibly giving a glimpse of systems that are bigger and smaller than the individual: the shopping list, the police blotter, the shipping forecast, the online feed.4 It is episodic rather than narrative, presentational rather than representational, paratactic rather than linear. It is characterized by repetition and regeneration, either through the explicit structure of anaphora, returning to the same set of words (‘try not to think about . . .’), or following an implicit organizing principle or pattern. It’s a closed circuit, an autopoietic loop, setting up its own rules and conditions and then fulfilling them, in an act of performative self-realization.5 The list doesn’t mean anything.6 It is what it is. It is what it is a list of. And the list is also what it leaves out; it is always partial, always incomplete, its final fulfilment always an impossible task that only gets further out of reach the longer the list goes on.7 In this way, the list is not only a self-producing mechanism but also generates an affective field of desire and deferred satisfaction, leaving us wanting more. 8 In the tension between the seemingly prescriptive nature of the structure and the actually infinite ways of playing within it, space opens for improvisation and deviation, for doubling-back and folding-in, for testing the limits of the rules. 9 Recalling the process of making the list in First Night, O’Connor writes: ‘The list starts as a loose attempt to cover “everything” and then Tim arrives to whisper again, “just bad stuff” and eventually the text finds a freedom and a form in that constraint.’ 10 Themes and sub-themes emerge; patterns manifest and dissipate; there are beats and rhythms and eddies of thought. Rather than the classic ‘Yes, and . . .’ rule of improvisation, building to a satisfying conclusion, we have the anti-rule of ‘Yes, or . . .’, leading to endless digression: ‘Yes, that’s beautiful . . .’, Killick and Freeman take turns replying to the other during the list of silences in Bloody Mess. ‘Or, let’s have the kind of silence that . . . .’ The failure to complete the list is a productive failure, generating branching outcomes and unfolding possibilities.11 ‘How long can this go on?’, we might catch ourselves thinking, as the two performers seem not to notice that they are naked, but we do, and maybe there’s a pleasure of recognition in our shared frailty, our fallibility, in this unfinished moment. And in the end, this mutual face-off between performers and audience is what is at the heart of almost every Forced Entertainment show. The dramaturgy of the list is one of accumulation and exhaustion, in which our attention to any one element is impossible to sustain. Instead, what endures is the presence of the actors in front of us, their act of performing, their durational entertainment; even as they exhaust the form they are operating within, they persist. 12 Indeed, even the line-up of performers facing the audience, that recurring feature of Forced Entertainment’s work, is like the list in visual form—a dramaturgy of pure frontality, of the flatly presentational, of the literal theatricality of the work being done: here we are, saying these things. 13 Stripping away story and character and scenario and everything else those theatre students have in mind when they come into the classroom, what’s left is a flat ontology, nothing backstage or hidden from view, no people or things standing in for other people or things, just one thing after the other, one thing next to the other. 14 This, and also this—not the part in relation to the whole, nor the whole as the sum of the parts, but each part in relation to each part.15 This, or what about this?—each new proposition revising what came before and what is still to come. This, and then this—like life itself. Like a list of their works. Like the list is their life— Jessica in the Room of Lights, Nighthawks, The Set Up . . . One thing after another— . . . Showtime, Frozen Palaces, Pleasure . . . Over and over— . . . The Thrill of It All, The Last Adventures, The Coming Storm . . . For thirty-seven years— . . . The Notebook, Real Magic, Out of Order . . . And still going—. Notes 1 Works referenced are Pleasure (1997), Speak Bitterness (1994), The Travels (2002), Spectacular (2008), Hidden J (1994), Bloody Mess (2004), Emmanuelle Enchanted (1992) (and also 12 am: Awake & Looking Down [1993]), Quizoola! (1996), First Night (2001), Showtime (1996), and Dirty Work (1998). 2 The list plays a central role in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s idea of ‘postdramatic theatre’—not as a specific element that he singles out but rather as an organizing principle for the entire book, which returns again and again to lists of shows, qualities, and tendencies. For example, ‘Postdramatic theatre demonstrates the following characteristic traits: parataxis, simultaneity, play with the density of signs, musicalization, visual dramaturgy, physicality, irruption of the real, situation/event.’ Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, ed. and trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (1999; London: Routledge, 2006), 86. 3 ‘Our emphasis is on work that does not seek to express unique, coherent, or consistent individual psychologies and that, moreover, refuses familiar strategies of authorial control in favor of automatism, reticence, obliquity, and modes of noninterference.’ Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (eds.), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2011), xliii–xliv. 4 This taxonomic impulse is perhaps best illustrated by one of Tim Etchells’ pieces outside of Forced Entertainment, the encyclopaedic series of one-sentence definitions in the virtuosic monologue Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First, written for Jim Fletcher: ‘A table has four legs. A prison cell has four corners. A window is an opening in the wall of a room built by people who want to see outside . . .’, and so on, for an hour. Other list-based works by Etchells include the video work 100 People (2007), an accumulation of characters conveyed only by a series of brief descriptions in white text on a black screen; his recurring interest in taxonomies and footnotes, in works such as ‘In the Silences: A Text with Very Many Digressions and Forty-Three Footnotes Concerning the Process of Making Performance’, Performance Research, 17/1 (2012), 33–37; or the tabloid-style posters advertising dystopian contests and sensationalist spectacles which he published online every day for the entirety of 2011, collected in the publication Vacuum Days (UK: Storythings, 2012). 5 ‘While all other kinds of machine produce something different from themselves, autopoietic systems are simultaneously producers and products, circular systems that survive by self-generation.’ Marvin Carlson, introduction to Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2008), 7. 6 ‘Writing as doing displaces writing as meaning.’ Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’ (1995), in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds.), The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 73–103, here: 75. 7 ‘Nothing seems simpler than making a list, but in fact it’s much more complicated than it seems: you always leave something out, you’re tempted to write etc., but the whole point of an inventory is not to write etc.’ Georges Perec, ‘Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk’ (1976), in Thoughts of Sorts, trans. David Bellos (Jaffrey, NH: Verba Mundi, 2009), 11– 16, here: 14. 8 ‘Repetition’s force is the force of desire for more.’ Eirini Kartsaki, Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 7. 9 ‘How can I break this? What kind of fun can I have with the rules of this game, this form? Or how can I modify, expose, weaken or otherwise intervene so that it can do something that I might really need it to do?’ Tim Etchells, ‘Step Off The Stage’, in Daniel Brine (ed.), The Live Art Almanac (London: Live Art Development Agency, 2008), 7–16, here: 11–12. 10 Terry O’Connor in Tim Etchells, While You Are With Us Here Tonight (London: Live Art Development Agency, 2013), note 4. 11 ‘Failure works. Which is to say that although ostensibly it signals the breakdown of an aspiration or an agreed demand, breakdown indexes an alternative route or way of doing or making.’ Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (London: Routledge, 2011), 2. 12 ‘Theatre’s mimetic practices themselves become the stuff of endurance.’ Lara Shalson, ‘On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22/1 (2012), 106– 19, here: 113. 13 This serial theatricality can also be seen in the work of Forced Entertainment’s contemporaries, such as Jérôme Bel’s literalization of song titles in The Show Must Go On (2002); Lone Twin’s catalogue of heroic deaths in Daniel Hit By A Train (2008); Eva MeyerKeller’s systematic demonstration of modes of killing inflicted on cherries in Death Is Certain (2002); Ivana Müller’s durational tableau vivant in While We Were Holding It Together (2006); or the spoken renunciation from the theatre of every material and conceptual entity in Mette Edvardsen’s No Title (2014). 14 ‘Flat ontology argues that all entities are on equal ontological footing and that no entity, whether artificial or natural, symbolic or physical, possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects.’ Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 246. 15 ‘The example stands neither in the relation of part to whole, or of whole to part, but rather of part to part.’ Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 69a, discussed in Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is a Paradigm?’, in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 9–32.