I saw this for the first and last time in on an old V.H.S tape in a modern studies class at school.

Never seen anything like it in my life.

Came to mind in relation to thinking of auditions, as I had learned something from it and was deploying that learning.

Before watching the clip, recalling the performance, Judy Dench in particular, serve and austere nature of the costume, the emotional atmospherics being conjured  with, hit with an emotional almost physical feeling, never felt before, or I am now remembering in altered form.

Novel emotional disturbance.

A feeling of evil (rather over dramatic). Deep unease, sense of whatever it is, it is this that is transforming the couple, they are oblivious to its presence, or at home with it.

Could not quite get it into words or replicated it after it had gone, bitterness. Like the way you gulp and try to cleanse you’re throat with saliva when tasting something disgusting.

Tried that, not quite and it seemed I was perhaps more influenced by the text here than the performance.

Only watched that clip, retrospectively, emotional experience triggered by memory , but the sibilance of her voice, is that what I am recalling?

To what degree is the emotional experience I had communicable? Am I experiencing the effect of a 30 year old virus; to what extent has it mutated?

Emotion with a strong physical hit suggests a movement trigger as that’s how my memory seems to work.

As started to look at early literacy. It comes to mind. Although I suppose what comes to mind really is language, its origin and its progresses.

Description here is crude the relationships not necessarily so other than they are all in working memory at the moment.

Communicable/ transmittable nature.

Above all the novelty.

A new emotional experience.

Potential of theater, to transform, to alter our experience.

In this moment what more could we desire than to be other than where we are?

Create this space anywhere and here anything is possible.

Genesis P-Orridge, founding member of cult experimental bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, has died.

The musician and artist, who had been battling leukaemia for two-and-a-half years, was 70.

With Throbbing Gristle, Genesis helped pioneer the genre of industrial music. In later life, they became a “body evolutionist”, proposing a new gender that was beyond male and female.

The death was confirmed by Genesis’s daughters, Genesse and Caresse.

In a statement, they said their father “dropped he/r body early this morning, Saturday March 14th 2020”.

“S/he will be laid to rest with he/r other half, Jaqueline ‘Lady Jaye’ Breyer who left us in 2007, where they will be re-united.”

They concluded the post by thanking people for their “love and support and for respecting our privacy as we are grieving”.

Born Neil Megson in Manchester, Genesis P-Orridge’s career began in Hull in 1969 with the radical art outfit COUM Transmissions.

Alongside then-partner Cosey Fanni Tutti, the group played an abrasive brand of industrial rock, often combined with sexually-explicit live shows.

Their 1976 exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, titled Prostitution, scandalised the art world, and prompted Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to denounce the group as “the wreckers of civilization”.

Reference

B.B.C. News

Note

Did I like Genesis P. Orridge. Certainly not. Shared similar musical taste been in the same space at gigs, you want to be standing at the other end of the room.

Throbbing Gristle, one of the most influential bands of the late 20th century. Again like is not a word that comes to mind, thought provoking.

Don’t know if it still there, you tube video of Psychic t.v, beach boys good vibrations, video of 1960’s surfer, think some occult imagery over-imposed at one point.

I can’t tell the difference between it and the original but it is utterly transformed, dark and sinister presence, madness within the beating heart.

Bringing an inflection and aspect of the creation of the music and the wider enviroment in which it was formed.

Disturbing and unpleasant.  Life and its true to life.

Deeply unpleasant and disturbing.

Presented with an emotional experience, not thought of or associated with the song before.

Confronted with elements of its creation and the frailty and humanity of its creators.

I dislike Genisis P. Oridge intensely. Its not what I want to hear.

What makes the ideas he is expressing work as an art form.

Steven Berkoff, start of the video he states something along the lines of ‘I can express myself’ further variants of the theme then deployed. Not looked at the video again, could not really focus on anything further.

Seems a perfectly obvious thing to say. I would not think to do so. Seemed utterly alien. Why?

Also not sure why I find it interesting.  Other curiosity, I never read or watch anything related to description or discussion here.

Be a vast literature on ‘expression’ and the role of the arts. I can predict that, no desire to read it.

My first crude response was I can observer myself, or understand I am not myself.

I glanced at educational background of the speaker, ” L Ecole Inertnationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq’ alongside Webber Douglas school of Dramatic art.

Serious range of skills, those trained in Lecoq’s methods have a physical control and understanding of the body, which is mind boggling.

Not sure if its a direct Lecoq method but I learned it from a student of the school. Mask work, the face is kept neutral free of expression as all expression comes through the body.

Expression, in a highly controlled form, learned from experiment and observation.

Still lost with the myself part.

No idea.

No wish to express myself, a desire to alter things including myself.

Words fail and like the dead need to be brought back to life. When I am speaking, clearly I have a role to play here, to learn and to express what I have learned from the experience.

I don’t see that as a form of self- expression as it requires collective confirmation. Photography for me is a form of self- expression but I do not view my own photographs as a form of artistic expression.

Creative expression but the feedback here is very different and I do not pay the same attention to the processes in the way I would if I was having to produce art in dramatic form. I don’t give it much thought.

Not interested in what works or does not work for an audience. I think photography is an art form, I don’t view what I am doing as an attempt at art at any level really, as I do what I like and use stuff I hate ( or more properly aesthetically displeasing)  but find interesting.

I take photographs, I enjoy taking photographs, I am not a photographer. If I wanted to produce visual art I would paint or print but I don’t have the time or space required to do so.

All consuming processes for me, I like detail, it takes time and full absorption in what I am doing.

First time I was ever asked to write the blurb for a theatrical program, along with three other cast members, the observation I got from the feed back was rather amusing.

Angry director, demanded a re-write from all four cast members. Two issues, three were going on for a war and peace type full length book biography.

On the other hand, could I expand on, Born in Paisley, likes painting.

It seemed amusing at the time but it is rather revealing, I found the exercise extraordinarily difficult.

I found getting past the factual detail of my birth, rather hard, should I include painting? I like it but I am of course not very good at it.

If I was asked to write a war and peace treatment of my negative traits, this would pose no issue, I am perfectly at home here.

Born in Paisley, likes painting, prone to bouts of depression.

Its not a strong sell.

I can at least at times find it amusing. leads to a stark comic difference between things.

Going to drop the biography and drama, useful as a writing exercise but its blowing me well away from what I should be doing as I am noting a few things I find rather interesting in one case and interesting but distracting in a couple of others.

Note them before moving on, one is easy to deal with the others so context dependent, may make no sense.

Also not sure why I find one aspect interesting.

Get it out of the way. Audition.

No particular consistence between posts.

Serious difficult thing. In this case an Audition of Drama collage, make or break moment.

I had already worked in rep for a year, actors are generally generous teachers and their is one basic piece of advice you get with audition, you have to start acting the second you reach to turn the door knob to enter the room, you are being judged from the entrance you make.

Standing staring at the door knob, no idea what to expect, in full fight or flight mode. One thing I do expect, one to three people present, they will be at the other end of the room.

Open the door. Side entrance, I have to turn round very long room, raised dais or platform in the center, clear what that is for, then the terror.

Eight people, all sitting at desks at the far end of the room, second I walk into the room I look at them, they all look at me then instantly all heads are down and they all start taking notes.

Horrifying, I know I have an issue with one of the pieces I have to perform. I don’t have the emotional maturity to give the required depth.

Taken the risk because I can use it to create an atmosphere, which should if it works transform the space.

My sense of the space in this moment is far removed from what I need to do, one of those moments where you realize that it may have been a good idea to have packed a spare set of underwear.

You wonder what they are writing. ” The subject gives the impression of not having remembered to pack a spare pair of pants.”

They would have appeared to have got about half a page down by the time I have walked the five meters to the dias to begin.

 

Biography, genre I have little time for. Aside from the blog, don’t discuss my early educational experience in the theater. Features here as its where many of my later university academic interests came from, I also like to resolve and understand why what worked in drama proved to be such an issue with the style of education at university.

Retrospectively years later, see the same utter lack of self- confidence, yet I can stand and function in an intensely problematic enviroment with no real issues.

High levels of anxiety and lack of confidence are the norm with dyslexia, how I can function in this environment, something of a mystery.

If I look at what got me to this first audition, lack of self-confidence seems farcical.

Or I could turn it round and suggest its not a fear of failure its a fear of successes. Looking back I can see little chance I was going to fail and every chance I was going to be successful.

No reason to suspect I did not know that then.

That involves a back story, this is really my second audition, Central school of Drama in London. First one had involved a figure no less formidable and in many ways more so, but it was much more relaxing, more at home and the interview technique was classic old school gestapo (staring into a very bright stage light while under interrogation), so far more relaxing than this.

First question

“If I was going to corrupt you how would A go about it?”

Note

Reconstructing my, Steven Berkoff’s doppleganger moment, audition, I am 18, tradition here is one  classical monologue  Shakespeare, Moliere etc, one modern.

Macbeth in this case, 18 and well aware of the issue I have, don’t have the emotional maturity needed to make perfect sense, I can do something with it but this is the area of serious weakness.

First word spoken directly after. I think I am literally collapsing into the chair when its being spoken. I know immediately I have been rumbled, no way you can hide here.

Going to be the last coherent thought I have for the next 10 fifteen minutes. The production above should have provided me two answers, this one and a more generic one later.

But, words on paper do not express the ball of highly controlled nervous energy sitting in front of me, sheer power and force of voice and body.

Jaw dropping, like being hit by a truck. Impressive, bewildering and utterly terrifying.

Erroneous or vulgar use for nominative (such as it is me) is attested from c. 1500. The dative is preserved in obsolete meseems, methinks and expressions such as sing me a song (“dative of interest”). Reflexively, “myself, for myself, to myself” from late Old English. The expression me too indicating the speaker shares another person’s experience or opinion, or that the speaker wants the same as another is getting, is attested by 1745. In the 1880s it was a derisive nickname of U.S. politician Thomas C. Platt of New York, implying that he was a mere echo and puppet of fellow U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling, and in mid-20c. it often was a derogatory term, especially in U.S. politics (me-too-ism).

The political “me-too-ism,” abjectly displayed by the “conservatives” of today toward their brazenly socialistic adversaries, is only the result and the feeble reflection of the ethical “me-too-ism” displayed by the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the alleged champions of reason, toward the Witch Doctors of morality. [Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 1961]

Reference

Online Etymological Dictionary

 

My excursion into Berkoff (which raises an issue with long term memory here) etc, that produced this mornings standard anxious chatter.

Last night it was a bit more reserved, interjected when I deployed the term ” social discomfort.”

Why not just deploy Bill Miller directly rather than deal with this? Bill Miller is an American legal scholar who also specializes in early medieval Iceland ( section of his work here relates to violence/ honour culture). He wrote rather interesting book on Humiliation and social discomfort. Which is were I plucked the term from.

Rather interesting section on the way violence becomes an “alluring subject” for academics. I can’t say dramatic name dropping has an appeal as I can see the relationship, generalize out  in an area of social and cultural issues that are rather problematic in learning systems, whose mission statements stand in stark contrast to its social practices and working habits.

No real reason to the post on Steven Berkoff or Steven Berkoff’s doppleganger, unnecessary and not particularly intresting.

I think I will on the grounds

This citation appeared blow the video of Berrkoff discussing acting

‘It all sounds so ponderous and self-important. It’s why I avoid talking about the way I work.’

May have given the false impression relating one with the other. Not the case. Or I suppose it is the case but an issue for anyone here.

I agree with the observation, its not limited to drama, discussion is not always avoidable, high degree of discomfort you just have to live with.

As soon as its on paper any idea is going to be read in any number of ways and not always with charity.

That’s really how it should be. Things change and the power of stupid is perhaps one we over- estimate at times.