Strength Weekly

There is, of course, nothing funnier than a man covered in shit. It’s hilarious. What’s even more hilarious is when the man is first not covered in shit (because nobody wants to be covered in shit) then, because of a failure, he is suddenly covered in it. If he were to walk in covered in it that would be quite funny but not as side-splitting as when he comes in, with all his innocence, his arrogance, his complacency, his sheer deserving of something bad, his cleanliness, the fact that his things are in the right place and then he falls into a hole full of shit or, equally, a load of shit falls on him from out of nowhere. This is real humour.

Most of the people I know say that one of the toughest tasks they ever faced in a long life was learning to control their bodily functions. Before the Law was introduced, life was endlessly forgiving. In fact, the very concept of ‘forgiving’ was inapt. What was to forgive? You could do what you wanted, where you wanted. For a while, this looked likely to be the general setup.
Then a reward system was introduced and you knew something was up because before that they didn’t need to reward you because everything was so dandy in the first place. The purity & danger economy (see here and here (p. 150 et seq)) prevailed, however, and it was only natural that there arose a great nostalgia for the golden days of incontinence. This was a fraught state of affairs insofar as attempts to invoke such a return risked a possibly terminal social exclusion.

The clowns of the Zuni and the Yaqui and other Native American tribes had devised antidotes to such pomp that were a corrective to lifetimes of muscle control. The practice of ‘filth-eating’ by the clowns drew startled responses from the 1930s anthropologists who ‘discovered’ them:
“These masked men teased one another…they simulated eating and drinking the excreta they would pretend to catch from their wooden machete from the body of passing burro or horse or man or woman, even of one kneeling in prayer.” (The Sacred Clowns of the Pueblo and Mayo-Yaqui Indians. Elsie Clews Parsons & Ralph L. Beals. American Anthropologist, Vol 36, No. 4. 1934.)

Another commentator finds that the practices were not merely pantomime:
“The scatalogical practices among some of the clown societies of the Pueblo Indians, particularly the Zuni, are notorious examples of this clownish capacity for pointing to and containing the total human condition. One is initiated into the Zuni Ne’wekwe by a ritual of filth-eating - a strange sort of Eucharist indeed. Mud and excrement are smeared on the body for the clown performance, and parts of the performance may consist of sporting with excreta, smearing and daubing it, or drinking urine and pouring it on one another. Among the Hopi, a group of males known as ’singers’ play about with vulva-shaped sticks during initiation ceremonies, singing taunting and obscene songs to the women and running after them to ‘bless them’ with filth. The women, in turn, being well-prepared, douse the singers with foul water or urine.” (The Spirituality of Comedy: Comic Heroism in a Tragic World. M. Conrad Hyers. 2008)

The clown, with his pants falling down, recycles in the name of pure symmetry:
“Ne’wekwe knowledge not only cures stomach aches but also enables clowns to eat any kind, or amount, of food or garbage, including human excrement, and to engage in outrageous human behaviour without feeling shame.” (The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians. Barbara Tedlock. 1992)

The business of running a tight outfit is onerous. The pants, and the hair, must be let down from time to time. Even under the patched and fraying canvas of the British travelling circus those big-shoed figures at whom the public (quite understandably) rarely laughs any more will enact great rituals of incontinence that reach the parts that the ironic quip cannot reach. In dashes Bonkers closely followed by Skanky and Roderigo. They are carrying ladders, planks, brushes and pots of paint. They are going to decorate something. Up go the ladders, between them go the planks. Skanky goes aloft with the pot and oh no…! Five minutes later they’re covered! What a mess! A veritable shit-storm!

The indispensable voidances passed from the circus as it waned and the variety halls and pantomimes as they gave way to black and white TV where, on Saturday night in the 50s with your Mum and Dad on either side, the diminutive redhead slapstick artiste Charlie Drake (catchphrase: Hello My Darlings! (you had to be there)) would take up employment in a pie, chocolate or, indeed, paint factory and, with complete inevitability, over the course of four or five minutes, move with polished incompetence to a condition of fully glazed muckiness. I wept with glee and, had I not sensed at some obscure level that the viewings were precisely designed to tone rather than relax the muscular clenching without which one cannot step forth into polite society, I would have wet myself.

In the sixth Dash show, ‘Gush’, is the funniest thing you ever saw. A man comes into a room and torrents of blood fall on him from above. Later on a woman takes the lid off a tin up on a high shelf and is covered in blue paint. Then a man is being kicked and beaten fiercely and yellow paint falls down on him. Then a woman tries to stop a man attacking her with a bottle and black paint falls on them both.

Well worth doing, I promise you. Murder to rig, though. The liquids, two litres at a time, were delivered from buckets suspended way up in the grid, where the lights hang. Each bucket was tipped by cords pulled from backstage. If the actors were more than an inch out of position the liquids dropped right beside or behind them without marking them in the least. Such was the volume of screaming, howling, banging and infernal 170 bpm Dutch gabber that the backstage crew couldn’t hear their cues and, until reliable systems were eventually devised, the actors had to shout key words repeatedly (’Yellow!’ was one such cry) in order to get coloured in.

Fittingly, after having become a site for the unabashed display of fluid wastes, three of the figures on stage are garrotted by a psychopath. They let themselves go - what did they expect?

photo from ‘Gush’ by Ed Telling

The eight month Dash Dash Dash project is largely over. I say ‘largely’ in order to acknowledge the distressing impact of a theft which led to the abrupt cancellation of our final show. On the night of Saturday 15th May, one hour before we were to open the third night of The Omnibus (six short shows smoothed into one long one) to a full house at Battersea Arts Centre, the laptop containing our 60 cue soundtrack was stolen from the control booth of the theatre. Other than humming the various pieces of music at appropriate points there was no way we could proceed. I won’t dwell on it, it’s too depressing. We hope to regroup and re-present later in the year.

There is, however, much to be pleased with. The project was premised on my writing and directing a 25 minute show once a month for six months. The shows had no narrative connection to each other but a number of shared themes bound them into an inter-related collection. I was not producing episodes in a serial but elements that, when combined, would display unobtrusive affinities and be more than the sum of their parts.

I was also keen to avoid story-telling and the presentation of fictional characters. Certainly the figures who ended up on stage were different from each other but not by dint of personality traits that would invariably be reflected in their speech and behaviour. They were physically reliable insofar as they didn’t change shape in the course of a scene (something they might have achieved in an animated film) but other than that their periods of consistency were shortlived, like particles forming then disappearing in a cloud chamber. They were not, however, vehicles for random utterance. That’s too easy.

While there are plenty of diagnostic justifications available for formless babbling - madness, brain damage, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, too much crystal meth and so forth - the use of such speech in performance has a very short shelf-life and tests its audience unnecessarily. The Surrealists, for example, tired quite quickly of the pure products of automatic writing and sought ways to tweak the recipe in order to generate a higher strike rate, while those writers taken with the cutup technique (Tzara in the 1920s, Gysin then Burroughs in the late 50s and early 60s) were in the habit, from the start, of winnowing out the nonpoetic dross from the serendipitous gemlines in simple recognition of an inevitable mathematical deadness that would otherwise reliably extinguish the spirit of the whole experiment.

Nevertheless, in one of the short shows (Show 3: ‘The Fastness’), I wanted a scene in which the figures on stage would be seized with a babbling mania of an intensity that defied all logic and continuity.

DAN Hello everybody I’ve succeeded in painting the town red in a very direct and lively manner.
ANN I disagree. It is time for unrelenting and pitiless war.
TOD Who’d like a delicious cuppa? I would. Thank you.
PAT This afternoon I’m going to strip the 444 down and see if we can’t get it to run about a bit.
DAN You could take it down the town. Which is so colourful.
ANN Yes. I’ve got people coming in from all over roundabout these parts in effect.
TOD Which is a monster plus. By Jiminy.
PAT By crikey.
ANN By fuck.
DAN Hoorah to all that.
PAT Right then! Let’s!

I wrote about 40 lines in this manner. While there is certainly a baton being passed at times, for much of the episode the lights are just popping on and off all over the neighbourhood. In order to make the scene work at all the actors had to invest it with enormous and cartoonish manic energy, simply to elevate the material from a condition of disposable random to one in which it could be said that the figures are, at least, sharing a disconcerting and uncontrollable impulsion. On a number of occasions I considered cutting the scene altogether but my gifted and indefatigable actors proved able to pull it out of the bag on a nightly basis.

Pure random utterance has no spirit. On the other hand, the delicacies of the well-written and psychologically substantial character did not interest me. Inconsistent character had to be deployed in such a way that it would act as evidence of a socially pervasive inner disconnection.

DEAN Nina is an interior decorator.
ROY How’s it going?
NINA It’s tremendous.
ROY It must be very satisfying to have an interior.
NINA Are you not of fixed abode, Roy?
ROY I find them labour intensive.
(Show 6: ‘Gush’)

What I hoped to produce, across the whole of Dash Dash Dash, was the speech of figures whose insides had melted. This would not be evidence of the personal psychiatric condition of unfortunate individuals so much as a concentration of responses to an extreme and widely distributed social fragmentation.

photos from ‘Gush’ by Ed Telling

to be continued…

A speech from ‘Sleet’, the fifth Dash Dash Dash show (March 2010)
To get where I am today, Gretchen and Bobbin and Timmy, I turned right at the road and over the hedge and into the field and under the bridge and along the track and down to the dark stream and up to the copse and across to the pools and over the leaves and through the bushes and into the hedges like houses and between all the reeds with edges like knives and up to the trees with black boughs bleeding and the yellowing weeds that were rotting like twigs under logs squeezing the sod like sponges the water came down my wrists and under my jacket with dozens of creatures and spiders and leeches and there were the men with their vans and their string walking the woods with hands in their coats clutching paper and wrappers and clippers and cutters and things for removing the whores and the harlots like Wendy and Charlotte who got away by the skin of their teeth from the creep who sat by the pool his dick in his hand beating the meat saying Girls why are you out in this place as the light drops through the sky and the crows settle down the rabbits retreat to their homes that don’t have windows or curtains or seats by the fire just earth and more earth and some roots and some shit by the door that’s where you belong Ruth and your friend my name isn’t Ruth so fuck off you jerk and we ran to the town down the lane to the house where we turned on the lights and looked through the drapes at the lamp in the street where a dog with three legs and a growth on his neck carried a pizza and pissed on the post while wolfing the slice including the bag then glanced at the house and his eyes both went red and the beams cut through the night and the fog and up on his legs he tore at his chest his coat fell apart like a coat on the road and out from his guts her hair all in flames stepped the girl with white lashes white brows no dots in her eyes no marks on her skin she stepped off the kerb slid past the cars and knocked on my door I’m not in I’m not in she pushed and was through in the blink of an eye she said I’ve come to stay I don’t eat I don’t sleep I said there’s no room she said who needs room she moved fast I felt sick she pushed at my breast slipped in through my chest at which point I acquired all of her charms her light and her dark her brutal disdain and Gretchen and Timmy and Bobbin you’re thinking just what did she get that was worth such a palaver my spirit my soul well to be frank I never had either so there was nothing to lose it’s not like there are insults or upsets or outcries and such like no we’re working together she lives off my fear it gives her resolve it keeps her on tiptoe she just says Why not when you can and Go on what stops you there’s no system no one is watching is there someone above you someone who’s counting or checking fuck that there’s no one there’s nothing it’s all just a story come on over it’s better you do what you want you live where you can you eat what you find you fuck if you want to there are no higher powers or despicable drives it’s just what you are so fuck all the ups and the downs you don’t have to tread like a girl on some eggs that will shatter if you don’t gaze at your shoes like some worm on a log in a wood in the winter no let’s go now you and I not like a nation ether-eyed beneath the table but striding straight to places where the pirates piss the divers decompress the gliders come to roost the motherfuckers do their mothers and me and Angelina can just come and go talking to Michael and to Joe just like citizens well not exactly so more like shadows that you pass but on close inspection they are so hard you cannot put a finger through them and crikey are they there they so much are you wonder was it me that chose to turn away rather than there being little there to see so here I am and this is me she’s in me now she’s hot against my chest or is it desperately cold she makes me grow so fast sometimes I catch her in the glass as she turns away her hair is white her brow is high she can’t go far she needs my warmth she likes to feel my blood run by her as she settles down and down and if at any point I want her out all I have to do is tear myself apart.