Seven days in Villa Salò, uh, probably part 1

Everybody has to have their say about Villa Salò, performance group Signa's marathon of torture and despair, which just last weekend closed its doors in Copenhagen. I wish I could say this is going to be a carefully considered essay on the time I spent there. In actuality, this is a braindump, because I guess I want some thoughts out there and also because I can't seem to do any work before I just put something damned well out. To be honest, I saw and heard and thought enough to warrant the kind of output of text you could use as a doorstop. Be warned. I was there continuously (yes, I slept there, yes it's possible with permission from the Masters, and no, I slept alone in the Hall of Orgies) for the last 4 days of the Circle of Shit, and the last three of the Circle of Blood (the final Circle).

If you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, it was a 24/7 performance installation based on the Pasolini film Salò, set in a very large (and exquisitely decorated) house, featuring 33 or so performers, visited by 5000 members of the public, and running for four alternating weeks between January and March 2010. Five types of Characters lived there: Masters, who did whatever the fuck they wanted, Madams, who were responsible for the house and its staff, Fuckers, who were bodyguards with strap-ons down to their knees, Maids, who, predictably, maided, and Children, who were usually the object of the Masters' doing whatever the fuck they wanted. Guests entered, got a membership card, received an introduction from Madam Vaccari (which she must have performed nearly a thousand times and yet it ultimately failed to prepare anybody for the house, it seems—well, with the exception of the final introduction she gave, but that's for later), and were given a coloured ribbon denoting which of the types of character in the house was their host: black for Masters' guests, red for Madams, blue for Fuckers, yellow for Maids, pink for Children.

You would be amazed at how many people think a ribbon can change your personality, or entitle (read: excuse) you to act in a manner that, well, let's say civilised folk might call assholery. You'd be amazed at an awful lot of things people thought and said and did in Villa Salò, and I'm not talking about the performers. To me, it was the audience that was, after a while, the real horrorshow. Maybe that's because I spent so much time in the Villa that I felt my perspective had more in common with the performers than with the guests. But again, more on that later. In fact, the first thing to do is send you elsewhere to read other stuff, like:

Balancing on the edge of the black hole which I now call by the name of Salò, I wonder about the road that took us this far. Never in my decade of publicly mapping the shadowlands of human despair have I known a gaze like the gaze of Salò, this forsaken house which has grown with solemn brooding amongst the kindergardens, the cafés, the unknowing passers-by of snowy, clean Østerbro. This is not the faraway castle of Marquis de Sade´s libertine protagonists, nor is it Pasolini´s desolate palace of Italian war time fascists. This is here and now, and ”the four friends” invite everyone to enter. This is certainly no S&M party, and no funhouse either. Our Salò is no more a sex show than Pasolini´s Salò is a porn film.
-Signa, 15/1 - 2010

If you read Danish or you know Google translate, you'll find no end of commentary and the odd blog post (including goddess of rum balls and burner of kitchen milk herself, Dukken), and of course it ranges from sources who never set foot in the Villa to peeps who were there even more than me (the aforementioned Dukken).

Not about me. Or, well, fuck, it is.
Ooohkay. To be honest, the hardest thing about writing about Signa is not being an asshole oneself, but if there's one thing the piece taught me is that I am as capable as anyone of laughing at misfortune—no, not misfortune, rape—and of acting (or more like not acting, which let's call it passing) in a way that keeps me in favour of whomever I want to be in favour of, even at the expense, humiliation, or torture of someone else, and possibly the worst thing, that I have a great capacity to lord it over other people, particularly when they're asking stupid questions. This is the thing. I really wouldn't like to make this about me. I am not a better or smarter or more compassionate person than others who were at Villa Salò but I have to keep telling myself that. I catch myself being selfish and superior all the time. Only Merry, glorious kitchen bitch that she was, took me down a notch from time to time. "You know, it's not all about you," she said to shut me up once over peeling an endless amount of carrots.

Oh sure, that doesn't sound like much of an admonition. But if you consider that a few hours before that I'd been in the Magistrate's room with the Magistrate, the Bishop and a few other guests when Merry came in to serve sandwiches and, in blatant trespass of the Masters' own rules, they raped her while I held the tray of sandwiches twenty centimetres away from her face and watched, then yeah, she didn't have to say much. In my defense, what else was I supposed to do? If I said stop, they would say "no" and continue. If I intervened physically, I would be subdued or restrained and, depending on my behaviour, allowed to stay or made to leave, and they would continue. If I left the room, the rape would continue. I know this because I saw it all happen again and again and again over days. In fact, any intervention was likely to prolong the torture. But you know that's not a defense, that "what was I supposed to do, I couldn't do anything" line. It is no defense at all. The point is there isn't a defense. Not for people like us, which is to say, people. Of course I feel horrible about not interrupting, of course I do. Or rather I feel horrible about not having been able to fix it. An interruption would have only made it more interesting, but a solution, a way to MAKE IT STOP, that I cannot forgive myself for not having.

And one should not forgive that. Because perhaps, one may hope, out of the realisation that in fact there is no way to stop people with money and power from doing whatever the fuck they want, that out of that realisation and in stupid defiance of it one might try to change things anyway. I find myself, in the days after the Villa, having a very short fuse as regards complacency. For ages I had accepted that CEOs would do what they liked but that really they were just people and in their situation anyone would act like that. Now I feel like a seventeen-year-old again with an oversized "fuck you I won't do what they told me" gland and no mercy whatsoever for the greedy. And, well, fuck this sounds dumb but. Haven't you ever wanted to feel like you did when you were young and and the world was completely unacceptable? Aren't you sick of the compromises you've made and the ones in others that you have let slide because fuck it, who cares, integrity is for people who don't have decisions to make? It's maybe a side-order to what Signa's intentions were, but I could never pay them back for the gift of uncompromising anger, I don't care if it only lasts a week.

Nothing to see here folks
Oh and by the way, it's theatrical, yes, by which I mean representational. Which means that Merry was never raped, not in a legal sense. That when Tonino nearly made me puke on the first day when I witnessed him being forced to eat shit, he was acting. When Bernadetta was deflowered by seven men, one right after the other, there was no real penetration. When Franchino got electric shocks on his balls, the it looked worse than it actually was. Actually, I'd need to ask Max Pross about that one, because it looked pretty bad. All of the miseries were acted exquisitely. It took me days to figure out what was "real" and what was not, and I'm left with more than a few uncertainties. I still wonder where the blood capsules are hidden, how they made the shit smell so fantastically shitty, where the hell they hid their real genitalia half of the time, or exactly how they managed to soften the whipping and slaps while making them look terrifically painful. Of course there are some marks and bruises. And I'm willing to bet a house on the claim that not a single one of those performers will ever be the same again. I doubt that any of them, however, if they had to choose again, would choose not to do Salò.

But the point is it was acted so fucking well that many guests mistook something representational for the real thing, which honestly says an awful lot about what people think about artists in general and Signa in particular. They're not torturing the performers, people. There's no need to risk STDs and infection and health in general any more than is required for such a show—the piece risks wonking the artists' view of the human race forever and that's quite enough risk already thank you. There is control, there is communication, and there is a fuckload of trust. After many days' observation, it was possible to see when things were whispered, or when the Children were fighting not to crack a smile at sadistic yet often hilarious dialogue outlining what was going to be done to them in the immediate future. I even saw it in the Duke, one of the most fearsome bastards known to man, woman, or child. And so but the next time someone (probably in performance art) tells me that representation is dead and presentation is the only way to make art... well.

And but so the thing is I have pages to write before I sleep, but this is at least a start.

Rehearsing and going insane, not necessarily in that order

First week of actually rehearsing Alice ad infinitum. What's sort of on the menu at the moment is that we've done a year and a half of developing ideas and characters and texts and scenes and situations, none of which are in any way causally related to each other or form any kind of plot, and now it's time to select the lucky winning content and string it together to form something.

It appears we're telling a story, but I mean that in the Lynchiest possible way, as in we're telling a story in a similar kind of way that Inland Empire tells a story. I can't even say if it's close to that or not at this point; it's so loose.

The first day Eki showed up with a 78-page script, which we read through, an activity that made us all giddy because it's not something that usually ends up being part of the process at N&H. The second day we worked a couple of beginning scenes, and that was fairly easy. The third day all hell (okay, small hell) broke loose with at least most of the actors. I wasn't able to get a hold of anything and was, in very good form, blaming the others for not giving me what I needed. Even when I realized that that was what I was doing, it was really hard to curb it.

Sometimes I wonder if, as performers, some of us are almost too attuned to each other. I mean, it's immediately clear to me when either Juha or Akseli are having even a 10% off day, and I know that they know when I'm not having a good day either, often before I'm even aware of it myself. Usually this is part and parcel of a very close working relationship, but it means you share a lot of the negative as well as the positive. Basically, we were doing a scene where everyone was together (not something we'd done before), and the characters were more from the classical Alice in Wonderland universe, including a dreadfully stereotypical Alice stereotyped by yours truly. We were lost and unable to give each other anything to go with. It wasn't pleasant.

But it's gone through that and has come out the other side. It's weird that we didn't really have a linear story or a main character before, and now at least in the first act we have an Alice, and her whole way of being is somewhere between the aforementioned stereotype, blank slate, and whatever else pops into my head. It's been very uncomfortable, actually, standing around trying to feel like I look like an Alice, and automatically my body was reverting to some kind of stiff caricature. Eki mentioned today that my body was way more interesting when I was just standing on stage, before I started "acting," and I realized that that zone of awful discomfort was where I was really supposed to be. This didn't make it any more comfortable at all, it just meant that if I felt kinda awful in a lost and squirmy sort of physical way, I was probably doing something right.

These are the kinds of realizations in acting that make no rational sense, and are probably not interesting to read about unless you're going through it yourself. I know I had teachers in school who tried to encourage us to find the discomfort and work with it, but the funny thing is that usually it's so glaringly strong and obvious that you can't "find" it. You just put on an attitude, feeling significantly better in the comfort department except that you know that what you're doing is completely fake and you somehow can't shake the feeling that it's not helping the piece at all, but don't know what else to do. But not knowing what to do is a very rich source.

I remember reading in Anne Bogart that stereotypes exist for a reason, and that for many actors it's a good thing to run into stereotypes instead of fleeing them, because you'll have to go through it anyway to find a way of doing a character that's actually got your real stamp on it. This worked for me in Kalevala dell'Arte (when we were building the piece, Carlo Boso called my acting "Disney commedia") and I'm inclined to think it could be a necessary phase for something like Alice. Alice is a world of stereotype, archetype, classic heroine herself. She's got more layers put on her than a Black Forest cake.

And the panic comes from the fact that three weeks ago we were happy as Larry to be playing around with perverse rabbits and queens with chainsaws, and all of a sudden there's a "real" Alice, a real Rabbit, Caterpillar, Mad Hatter, and Dormouse. And it's funny how thrown we were by trying to jump in and getting it all wrong, when we should have known that this would fuck us up, but we were still surprised.

This has to be one of the things I keep noticing these days: how I really, really keep getting surprised by things that shouldn't surprise me any more. I wonder if my artistic process is horribly inefficient. Or if that could be a good thing.

So today, here comes another loop - I've started to take on Alice in my own thinking, which is at once really encouraging and a bit sickeningly worrying. You see, Alice is confused at every turn and her identity and reality put into question. I got a direction that I completely misunderstood, and when I finally got on the boat with the others, saying, "But..what do you mean?... Oh! Now I get it," Juha burst out, "That was an Alice reaction." And from there I started to feel that Alice is more like a kind of behaviour, a state of confusion, the activity of constantly negotiating what is real and what is not, and not like any one little girl. But then I noticed I was answering questions directed at me, the actor, as Alice, the character; or as "myself through the filter of Alice the behaviour," and I started all at once to lose the sense of who exactly was answering the question. All of a sudden I didn't know where the thoughts were coming from, or to whom the question was addressed. And right after that, Juha's William S Burroughs line "Madness is confusion of levels of fact...Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels," just about made my brain shiver.

Which is great, because this is what the heart of the project was always about: where does a character end and where does the actor begin? What are the limits of personality? Is psychology infinite?

It's one thing to be in a very physical or technically demanding performance and have to monitor yourself all the time; it's another thing entirely to do something more akin to performance art, where there is no representation or confusion of levels but you can be very attuned to your own emotional state or whatever; it's yet another thing to have the experience where, for perhaps a moment or two, you get the sensation of having merged with a character, or you feel a character start to melt with you, or you momentarily forget what you're doing, or you notice in your real life that you're picking up a character's way of responding to situations. Traditionally that's quite Method. Somehow I have the feeling that it relates more to naturalistic acting than to anything else. But whether or not it makes for a good performance, it is a real experience for the performer. I think most actors who come from a more "physical" school aren't so interested in pinpointing the place where their character separates from their own personality because that's just not terribly relevant, but for any devoted Method actor, this should be a very rich place of study, no? To try to discover what nuances make you tick, in order to make another, created personality tick in a very lively way?

I'm not making a judgement call on which kind of acting is better; obviously, there's a time and place for everything. And Eki's style isn't naturalistic at all; he uses the term "transparent acting," which I kind of have to think about a bit more before expanding on it. But now what I find interesting is that I'm consciously noticing this "melting" as a part of the process. What would happen if you could play with that even more? Consciously? With a great deal of control? Can anyone control that kind of thing? What part of me is Alice, and to what extent is Alice in everybody? To what extent am I in everybody, or everybody in me? Should I, in this performance, constantly be looking for the spot where Alice begins--is that the key to acting this time?

Here speaks Elektra, vol.II

This is one aggressive bitch

Today's fun and games is the second round of workshops for Here speaks Elektra, an upcoming project at Naamio ja Höyhen with myself, Akseli Aittomäki and Juha Sääski on stage; Davide Giovanzana directing, and also including Virpi Byring, Maura Korhonen, and other designers in the mix; we haven't worked with everyone yet. It's an extension of the work we did for Opheliamachine way back in 2005, which means that it's based on ancient Greek chorus and Heiner Müller's Die Hamletmaschine, and this time we've shrunk the chorus and are looking more at the fifth act of HM; which begins with the line "Hier spricht Elektra." We've been focusing on ideas such as humiliation, torture, domination, and all kinds of stuff that makes you feel good at the end of the day.

Here's probably the most disturbing character I've ever met: Juha as Hamlet (as from die Hamletmaschine) who wants to be a woman. We just did some solo and duo work today with Davide, and my Ophelia/Gertrude had a hell of a time dealing with this bastard. Or rather, the disturbance was as much from O/G's inability to fight back as much as any aggression from Hamlet. Hamlet, in HM, wants to be a woman. An interpretation of this could be that he's systematically trying to rid himself of the parts that cause aggression, fighting, evil, and suffering. He ends up wanting to be a machine, with no pain, no thoughts. So we first had a fantastic dance from Juha here, alternating between war-waging, all-fucking movements and the delicate dance of a tragic lady Blanche. It was great; when he was masculine, I saw a man dressed in a woman's clothes. When he played feminine, I saw a woman dressed in a man's body. The clothes, I'm beginning to think, are a terribly important factor in an actor's (a person's?) psychology.

In Hamletmachine, Hamlet rapes his mother in a particularly brutal bunch of lines in the first act; or rather he talks about it but whether or not he actually does it is a matter of direction. He's little more than the embodiment of an uncontrollable violent urge, which is something I understood better after improvising with him today. And to me, Ophelia and Gertrude don't have physical power. It's just not part of my imagination of them. I've also never played a character who really couldn't just punch anybody's lights out (at least in a play where that kind of situation arises), so after improvising and basically having my character mocked and thrown about and mimed-violated, having no idea in my head at all where my supposed maternal/feminine power was supposed to be coming from and whether or not it could possibly hold any currency whatsoever against a Hamlet in this mood, I felt really distressed.

I've often been one of those actors who makes fun of actors who talk about their feelings a lot, but if you're a performer, you do work with them very closely from time to time and you do need to take your emotional responses seriously. You have to be able to step back and realize that you're not psychotic, depressed, angry, or a sex maniac, but your character is, and there is a difference. Sometimes it's easy to confuse your personality with a fantasy you've created. This is why some actors are (famously, almost cliched in a way) nervous wrecks.

The distress I felt comes not from anything that happened to me in the improvisation, but from some kind of weird empathy; the possibility that that situation could exist. Maybe not even for me, but for some woman (or man) somewhere. All the same, we experience emotions as if that thing has happened to us; we don't have any way of separating character-induced emotions from real life emotions, save the faculty to step back and analyse which one is which. The feeling of absolute powerlessness is very, very bad. It's also a very easy starting point for beautiful expression, because you simply cannot do anything, you have no effect on anyone, and the expression comes so easily because it cannot try to do or be anything other than itself. Loaded with powerlessness, a gesture can be wonderful.

What will be nice in the future is to see how Ophelia/Gertrude will turn this around, how the same powerless character will be able to hold all the cards over psycho-Hamlet. I'm not exactly sure how this is going to work, but I'm sure it should happen. She has something Hamlet will never have, and Hamlet wants that something.

There's only Alice ad infinitum

So we've finished day two of workshops for Alice in infiniteland, an Eero-Tapio Vuori directed piece with Teatteri Naamio ja Höyhen, coming up one year from now.

At the moment, there are five bathroom-mirror-sized mirrors dangling from the theatre ceiling, complementing our other collection of reflective surfaces around the lobby, toilets, and dressing rooms at the theatre. We've been, for the last two sessions, experimenting with the idea of performing in a mirror. To a mirror. Performing as though nobody else is there, and then performing exactly the same thing (or similar) to an audience. You know how you're at home brushing your teeth and all of a sudden your eyebrows become interesting and fifteen minutes later you've done an eyebrow opera to nobody but yourself? That's related to this kind of thing.

When these cats did Beyond the Red Room (I just took over lights at some point) I thought it looked easy, what they were doing. It was simply a matter of presence. You switch it on, there it is. After watching it again and again I rather lost a sense of how delicate it was. Yesterday for me trying to be fully in the here and now felt like squeezing a lemon through the eye of a needle. My voice went fake, I censored myself, etc etc. Today I had a much nicer session. This probably sounds all wonky to someone who hasn't tried it or seen it, but if you've tried meditation, you'll have an idea of what it's like. It's vaguely like performing in a meditative state; it's far more active than just sitting and breathing, though. It's more the performative embodiment of the principle of Only This Moment Exists. And as with meditation, there's a profound freedom when you slip into the moment of now. In a way, other training styles like the Lecoq neutral mask also develop a similar faculty in the actor. For now in this project, it's more about gurning in a mirror and really meaning it. If that makes any sense.

Reetta's Alice

These are beginning experiments in transformations--where does a character begin, and where does it end? When do I say I am me, and when am I the character? If ever? Where is the limit, or if there isn't one, what does that say about acting?

I don't really want to ruin the surprise of the process, but I also rather like recording it; we did some work getting into a character with full costume and makeup, and then getting back out into "normality", and then repeating the process with an audience. It's all terribly easy or ridiculously hard depending on how you look at it, but it at least is interesting to watch. With themes like parallel universes, the psychology of an actor, Alice in Wonderland, and sexual perversity, how can you go wrong, really? Or do I need to get out of this place?