Notes from a lecture given by James to students at Exeter University on October 25th 2004.
Hello
I'm James Yarker, director of Stan's Cafe, which is a theatre company.
I've got some questions to ask you. They're not trick questions, no one's going to grass anyone up.
Hands up if you started your Theatre Studies BA not actually liking
theatre very much?
Hands up if, at the start of your degree, you thought theatre was rather more fun to act in than to watch.
Hands up, if you thought film superior to theatre.
Hands up, if you started your degree without a Theatre Studies A level: without an
English A level.
Hands up if, aside from school plays, your sole experience of theatre prior to Exeter was Basil Brush in Panto, two
Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas, Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat and a clutch of arse numbing nights at the back of
the top of the back of some theatre in Stratford being 'Improved' by Shakespeare [1].
That was me
and some of it may well have been you. To be honest it's doubtful that,
nowadays, I would not be allowed to be you; I was you way back in
the mists of 1987 when me being you was probably fairly common.
It sounds like madness, a career advisor's worst
nightmare, but here I am being me, being the director of Stan's Cafe (which is a theatre company),
so maybe someone knew what they
were doing back then; if so it certainly wasn't me. Anyway, the point is, until I saw Julian
Maynard-Smith sawing a wardrobe in half on
stage in Station House Opera's great production Cuckoo I had no idea
theatre could be fantastic. Through this and them and
then others [2], I saw that theatre didn't have to be plodding stories,
or people just talking, or actors showing
off. Now theatre didn't have to be full of coincidences with everything tied up neatly
in the end. Until then I thought theatre was either
trivial or alien and either way pointless. In a series of blinding moments I saw that
theatre could be complicated and playful, moving and
provocative and surprising, challenging, ambiguous and genuinely hilarious. Somewhere
in this big bang time the eventual formation of
Stan's Cafe became inevitable.
OK, at this point there are a series of options for how to proceed, after thirteen years the
time of the show-by-show, 'and then we did this' talk are over, it would take us days.
I thought it may be fun to use a small number of projects to illustrate a few key points.
They are practical thoughts as they are aimed to help you think about making great theatre,
rather than writing excellent essays. Maybe it is important to start from first principles;
as I can't imagine any of you will have already heard of Stan's Cafe.
Next up: We do what we want to do. We believe it's liberating being a theatre
company. It's a mongrel form already, so why not cross-fertilize it some more. Why
restrict yourselves? If you have a good idea it should
be pursued, no matter what the media. You arrived to Love List, a track from our CD Pieces for the Radio: Volume 1.
The text is a 'found object', who can work out where it was
found? [4]
A flip side of 'doing what you want to do' entails being open about what you think you
might want to do. We were asked to make a piece for the Birmingham Wolverhampton Metro Line. My initial reaction was that we don't
want to do 'that kind of thing'. But the commissioners were insistent so we spent a morning riding the Metro analysing what 'that kind of
thing' was and why we didn't want to do it. The answer turned out to be that we didn't want us
pretend to be people we weren't close up
and outside (outside a strong fictional frame), the worst thing of all
would be to have to talk to the public as if we weren't us. The solution
was simple, let's see if you can come up with a similar or better answer.
The result was Space Station, three astronauts waiting
patiently for two days on a brand new station Earth North
Central, for a connecting service to the moon and planets.
On 18th November the latest Stan's Cafe project that 'proper'
theatre companies shouldn't do comes on line. www.hohoho.org.uk a website celebrating,
reviewing and promoting domestic festive light displays round Birmingham and The Black Country.
Check it out.
It's probably time to turn to what Stan's Cafe does inside the theatre, as this is both
where we have our origins and remains, in sentiment if
not in action, at the heart what we are.
I find it difficult to see patterns in what we do when we're doing it, but as time passes
gaining perspective becomes easier. Possibly because of the political climate of the early nineties,
possibly because be were young and still
trying to workout who we were and what we may end up doing,
early shows seemed to be big on issues of personal identity.
Memoirs of An Amnesiac was a very early show.
Graeme, who I founded the company with, and his mate Rick had talked about doing a
show about the highly influential, highly eccentric French composer Erik Satie
for years. Graeme would act; Rick would play the piano and now I would direct.
I wasn't comfortable with Graeme pretending to be Erik Satie, but I was happy
for Graeme to play Eric Smith, a lonely Satie obsessive who would, in turn,
occasionally pretend to be Erik Satie. The layering of this device opened the
show up so it could be more playful, it could take on ideas about obsession, biography,
loneliness and identity (of course), as well as Erik Satie.
Now the Estonian composer Arvo Part moved from composing
'percussion section pushed down stairs modernism', to achingly beautiful settings of
religious texts for voice and strings, I can't see any
connection between the two, but maybe musicologists can. It seems an artist's DNA
is fixed and readable in everything they do. Certainly
Memoirs of an Amnesiac had loads of what were to be come Stan's Cafe
traits: a lose hold on narrative; a belief in the
power of words; a belief in a theatre way beyond words [5] ;
an unabashed make 'em laugh make 'em cry belief
in moving people; and an interest in exploring the formal possibilities of theatre.
Memoirs of an Amnesiac was
followed up by two more conspicuously identity themed shows,
one about the nature of responsibility, kingship, marriage and sacrifice
(Canute The King ); the other inspired by notions
of artificial intelligence (Bingo in the House of Babel).
I would briefly like to return to this notion of
exploring the formal possibilities of theatre. This seems like an entirely trivial point
now, but I was rocked back on my heels by the notion
that a thing has form as well as content. For some reason I had a really tough time
getting my head round the idea that a form might
exist, waiting for content to fill it, like a balloon
waiting to be pumped with helium, or air, or water, or
farts. I'm not sure that's a great
example. Maybe better to say a pantomime, the formal structure is there,
including the interval in which to flog kids ice-creams, we're just
waiting for the appropriate fairytale to fill that pantomime form out
with content. An even earlier Stan show, Perry Como's Christmas Cracker looked at
what would happen if you tried to use
the content of a Nativity Play to fill the form of a Pantomime (maybe
you should complete the diptych and make a Nativity Play with Jack
and the Beanstalk as it's content). I'll probably get into terrible
trouble for simplifying the whole Form and Content thing in such a
dangerous way, but you get the idea.
Stan's Cafe sometimes starts with a formal idea and tries to find the appropriate content
to fill (or stretch) it; maybe Space Station is a good example of this. On other occasions,
such as with Memoirs of an Amnesiac, we start
with an idea for content and must look for the optimal form in which to present
it. As you will have gathered by now this may involve
developing new forms of theatre, or we may not find the answer within
theatre at all. Usually shows are formed from many ideas
coalescing, fragments of content, staging ideas, formal interests and often
responses to the previous show (the last one was dialogue
heavy, let's make the next one silent).
In 1996 I was reading Tom Wolf's The Right Stuff and thinking about
Apollo missions. I was interested in ideas of gravity and orbit, how people are
attracted to and circle around each other, I was thinking
about the difference between being very close and touching, I was thinking of a steel
mesh floor with festoon light bulbs underneath it. I
was thinking of a show where performers whisper on radio-mics and can be heard above
a roaring soundtrack. We were looking to
make a show that was unitary rather than episodic. We were interested in a show
that would be quite, after the stresses of making Voodoo City and Graeme leaving Stan's Cafe I
wanted to make a two-hander.
Much of our early rehearsing tends to involve my setting improvisation tasks or
games for the performers and them creating more or less inspired
material out of it and us editing and re-improvising and structuring and
writing from this. For Ocean
of Storms I had set up a game where Amanda and Sarah sat opposite each other each
with a big pile of cards in front of them, each
card carried an idea for a character, they were to speak to each other as if
on the telephone (I was interested that with the telephone the
person you are speaking to is far away, but their mouth is also very close
to your ear). This rather pedestrian improvisation was plodding
along in an uninspired way until somehow possibly around a coffee break,
the cards seemed to go out of sequence and conversations
started cropping up between people who were not expected to talk to each
other. Those conversations were fun, funny and sometimes
touching, but more powerful were the moments when the performers were grappling
to make sense of who they were and what their
relation was to the other speaker. This slippage between voices and characters
was the breakthrough we had been looking for.
The show based on interlocking texts, initially with half telephone conversations
meshing and drifting apart, creating new narratives in
their different combinations, and later with the introduction of an astronaut
and her mission controller. All of these voices a channelled
through the two performers who act as kind of satellite angels searching for a
small girl lost in the city trying to find her way home.
This manufactured change discovery became the start of a new phase of Stan's Cafe work.
Interlocking texts, ambiguous slippages in narratives, multiple narrative combining
and building to make a larger narrative. As always leaving space for audiences to think creatively and watch actively.
In Be Proud Of Me you will see a new twist on our
exploration of narrative slippage. Here the slippage is in time and space rather than between
multiple incomplete narrative strands. There is a single story, but it is radically cut up,
rearranged and re-imagined as the central character's cracks under the stress of a traumatic
event.
For Be Proud Of Me we gave ourselves to fairly serious formal constraints, the show
would be backed
by 160 slide projections and the text would be drawn exclusively from tourist phrase books.
We had to learn the rules of how both slides
and the books work. It was as if both had their own languages, whose grammar and
vocabulary we had to learn. The slide language
turned out to be restrained, sombre and dreamlike. The phrase books were either
hilariously mad, bland or tortuously metaphoric.
Having spent time learning both these languages we then had to try and get them
to work with each other. The slides pulled the phrase
books into their narcotic dream world, exiling most of the good gags.
The process has been tortuous simple things like bring
furniture on an off became difficult. To give the piece some colour and pace we
had to develop a logic in which certain conversations are
excused the phrasebook rule. All the time the narrative idea that had helped
start the process was been twisted and pulled and reframed
to serve the show's emerging agenda.
It's probably best not to tell you too much more about Be Proud Of Me,
so that you can experience it with some degree of autonomy. If you have any questions about
it afterwards maybe you should e-mail those questions in via the website's feedback page
I hope you enjoy the show.
NOTES
1. Of course the tone of this paragraph is harsh. I am in fact indebted to
thoughtful parents and a rather excellent Aunt for these generous trips.
2. Name check: Insomnaic &
Pete Brooks, Johann Kresnick & The Visual Stage of the Catholic University of Lublin & Forced Entertainment's 200% and Bloody
Thirsty & videos of Pina Bausch, LaLaLa Human Steps and a two part Arena documentary on Robert Wilson that blew everything wide
and breathtakingly open.
3. Pedants amongst those already anal enough to revisit this text on
www.stanscafe.co.uk may, with nasal whines, sneer what about The Carrier Frequency.
Well done them, high 2.1s all
round. In 1999 we spent two weeks recreating this seminal Impact Theatre / Russell Hoban
show from video. It's a fair cop, we just
wanted to see what this show may have really been like. The Carrier Frequency
4. If you know roughly what I mean by Found Object, but don't know the art reference check the godfather
Marcel Duchamp.
5. DO NOT use the nauseating and meaningless phrase 'Total Theatre' in
connection with Stan's Cafe, it So Totally Sucks [sic].