An interview recorded by Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye 24 May 2006, edited by Nick Kaye
Nick Kaye: A lot of different issues came up in the workshop, but I wanted to begin by asking you how these themes of audience presence and interaction are reflected in your own work?
Fiona Templeton: The issue of relationships with the audience has been part of my work for a long time. I have done a lot of one-on-one work and, particularly, the transition from You - The City (1988) to my last specifically interactive piece – for the L’Ile project (2003) - was that I was commissioned to make something for a larger number of people. For a one-on-one show, such as You – The City, there is an economic factor for the producers, but also for me - I mean, just how, logistically, do you keep the one-on-one and have more people see it without the actors working day and night? So I made the L’Ile project in the form of a transition from one-on-one to many, so the relationships gradually built - and by the end there were a couple of hundred people who were all audience, with some volunteers and eight actors, but everybody was pretty much a participant. In the piece I am working on now – the MeDead (2005-) – I have been interested in everybody beginning together, which is a much more difficult way to evoke a symbiotic relationship between audience and performer. Recently, I have been doing quite a lot of these workshops - it’s all good information on what expectations people come with, what works, what doesn’t - and how gradual a process it is and what information they need. If there’s too much content too soon, then it’s very clearly a them-and-us situation. If there’s too little content for too long, it’s boring. So, the question is how to make it about the audience, like we were doing today, but still be able to insert the content.
Greg Archinega in You - The City.
Photo: Zoe Beloff.
Courtesy: Fiona Templeton.
Nick Kaye: One of the things this seems connected to for me is the moment in which there is a simultaneity of multiple and distinct roles: being an audience that becomes aware of being a performer; being outside, in the stream of everyday, but seeing that being captured in the frame of performance. It seemed to me that today’s workshop was very much about that overlaying. Is that something that you aim at or are specifically interested in?
Fiona Templeton: Yes. In You - the City that crystallises in the meeting between two performers, two audiences, two clients - one of whom thinks the other one is a performer, which, then, makes the other into a performer. In the L’Ile project it worked a little differently because each time the units grew from, say, one to two, and people met within a scene, it wasn’t just about the encounter. You - the City was a very self-referential piece - it was all about you, about the encounter itself, whereas the L’Ile project was about staging the dreams of the people of Lille – with the idea that the audience then experienced them the way that the dreamer had experienced them. So people would enter into what was clearly a theatrical scene, but as the scenes became bigger no one quite knew who was a performer in the dream and who was another dreamer. One way of orchestrating that was that people came into the dreams at different stages, so the dreams became episodic. I was interested in how in dreams you at one moment see somebody or something happening, and then the next moment you are that person looking back at who you have just been - or seeing the same scene from a different angle. It’s playing with those shifts of subjectivity, leading up to - when those people got to know each other - a situation with more people there, and so on.
I am always interested, actually, in all my work, in the moment where things are set up, but when I don’t know what’s going to happen. For me, that’s sort of the equivalent of the Aristotelian climax - where it goes out of my hands. Then again, I’ve got to take it back. In the MeDead it works a little differently, because it begins from, in a way, a little like today’s workshop, where nothing is necessarily known at the beginning and it just gradually becomes clearer and clearer. It would have been nice to do the same thing as we did today without the darkness, so that people would have known a little - it would have been more of a transition. But, this workshop is all shorthand. In the MeDead it’s like a creation myth. There isn’t even a show at the beginning. Then gradually there’s a performance of people, and everything becomes more and more specific and shifts from interactivity until it separates out more and more, and eventually becomes the proscenium and ends up in a film.
Nick Kaye: In relation to You –the City you have also talked about working with cinematic conceits – in moving the scenes from intimate spaces to the streets, for example.
Fiona Templeton: It was like creating an experience for somebody as if they were in a film. That was one idea behind it. It was the idea that you could switch from close up to long shot to a level of reality - because it was so completely site specific. And not just site specific, but without the feeling of other people watching - it was just your experience. And that the reality - even when you were saying to me (before this workshop), what do you want in this studio? I felt, well, I just want to see what’s there because that’s sort of what I want. In something like You - the City, which is also site- specific, I couldn’t have imagined what I wanted. It was always better than I could have imagined.
Nick Kaye: There seems to be a very close link between this attention to site and an overlaying of these roles and positions. I wonder if you think of those things as being indelibly intertwined?
Fiona Templeton: I could give a long and complicated answer to that. I think a lot of my work plays on the edges between real and artificial, so today both groups spent some time in the so-called ‘real world’ and, you know, the so-called ‘artificial world’ and - also – the audience-performers could be construed as real people watching artificial people. That’s a sort of very conventional sense of what theatre is. I am interested in blowing both of those boundaries so that by the end it is the so-called ‘artificial’ people who are may be more like ‘real’ people, except when they choose to be artificial - whatever that means. That’s a sort of a flippant description of it, but yes. And, also, when I was saying in the workshop to Sarah (Goldingay) - we were talking about looking at the hand and the light on the hand - in that particular moment I am interested in how framing something which is real makes it artificial, but also that framing something artificial can make it seem real.
Gabriella Giannachi: What do you mean by artificial?
Fiona Templeton: Well, that’s why the answer is complicated. I think that when I am using the terms ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ I am talking about false conventions, not talking about things that I necessarily believe in. But it’s a useful kind of spectrum of notions to apply to things when you are thinking about the theatre, because the theatre has for so long been about artifice. It’s not really a nature-culture question – it’s a question of whether you can take it that far. Then, yes, in some ways you use the same things to frame the cultural with the natural and, you know, frame the cultural and make it seem natural and frame the natural and make it seem cultural.
Nick Kaye: I’m very interested in this idea that framing the artificial makes it seem real.
Fiona Templeton: Well, I suppose what I mean - thinking about framing one thing in You the City, where I talk about framing to the performers a lot. And often you think about framing as something you do when you observe, but I talked to them about framing as something that they had to do to themselves. For example, when they were, in fact, saying a script, they had to present it in such a way that it seemed natural – yes, as acting, which was to do with the way in which they set up their relationship with the other person. There could be a line in the script - this is a very banal example – ‘you are a step ahead’. It’s meant to be talking about, sort of, ‘you are canny’ - but the performer could, for example, stop, let the person keep walking and then say the line: ‘you are a step ahead’. Which might be literalising it, but the person would have enacted the literal, which, by themselves, for the performance, has somehow framed their own piece of script by framing the action of the audience, if that makes sense. Both are working at the same time.
Nick Kaye: How might this relate to the performance of presence?
Fiona Templeton: For me, that moment where instead of just saying something you let it happen, you let it physicalise not just in the performer’s body, but in the relationship, that’s completely about presence. The audience is suddenly pulled into realizing - yes, you are right, you know, it’s in this moment - I did, even if I don’t think I did, do that - which makes the audience as present as the performer. When I was using the word transaction before about the relationship between performer and audience, I think that the performer/audience transaction can function on pure presence. I am actually very happy to watch shows that are nothing but attention to the moment - whatever that is – but, as I said right at the beginning of the workshop, attention for me is what creates presence - and that’s what’s evoked in audience transaction. I also felt there were a couple of quite interesting points in the sessions today. For example, there was a session where people were just looking at the window. And I was less interested in the fictional conversation they were having than, in a way, the fact that they were so clearly in this room, in this place, looking out of that window - and their attention made them present, their attention to whatever was out of the window made them present, made them very present. Then there were some moments earlier where people - for example, when there was just a sliver of the person to be seen from behind the curtain – they weren’t doing very much, but the fact that they were happy to be doing what they were doing rather than joining in something else made them feel present. It wasn’t self-absorbed, it was – ‘I am performing and this is part of the performance in this room’. And you were very aware of that. Sometimes when I am with performers I talk about presence and concentration, but in a way that’s only one side of it. Concentration is the attention of the performer, but I think concentration on behalf of the performer evokes concentration on the part of the audience.
Nick Kaye: Is that always something that you think generally -
Fiona Templeton: I think there are skills that can make more presence. Also I don’t think they are even that complicated. I think there’s a rhetoric around notions of presence which I am very suspicious of, because they sound like they are really about calling performance a tacit skill, which I think is essentialist and I don’t go for it. That is not to say some people aren’t better at it than others, but they are good at those skills. I think there are specific ways to achieve them and that it’s different in performance, necessarily, than in real life. But I think, again, that in real life it’s about attention. One reason that it can be achieved in performance is that whatever is happening is happening, it begins then and ends then, and that’s the only time that is going to happen, which is a framing again. That may be the case in real life, too, because real life seems to extend in both directions. And I think that the framing of a present creates the presence to some extent.
Nick Kaye: In what you were saying earlier, it sounds as if one of the examples from the point of view of somebody who was watching - or is the audience - is to discover themselves to have been already acting out in a frame of some kind, which in some senses they were unaware of, but which nevertheless they are acting out.
Fiona Templeton: Yes, one way is to bring them into realising that it is a shared presence, and not just one that they are following. Not one that belongs to somebody else. Someone else’s presence is only part of what presence is about. I often think that to some extent presence is necessarily communicative - which is why I say it is contingent on attention. Not just communicative in the sense that it communicates, but communicative like a communicative disease in that it can’t help but communicate. This is not to say that it could be undiscovered or ignored, but that is its nature. One reason that interests me is that, for example, in the book, You - the City (Templeton 1990) I talk about ‘a meaning’. But it isn’t something that you can necessarily have, a discrete unit of meaning. The performances that were going on next door in the workshop today were much more about discrete experiences. But you can have experiences that are, sort of, promiscuous, in the sense that what they come into touch with changes them - or they are open to them. And, for me, meaning really works like that. I mean, there are sort of disguises of discrete meaning, but most meaning really opens up in that way. I think that presence operates in that way, like meaning does. When I say ‘promiscuous’ I mean it will change. It’s sort of alive, obviously. That’s one way of thinking about it: not that it’s discrete, but that it’s communicative.
Nick Kaye: I thought going outside and coming back into the studio and thinking about how to reconstruct or recapture that experience structurally was a very interesting process in the workshop. There seemed to be an element of documentation to it, at least as we were approaching it, even though the outcome didn’t necessarily look like the original event it in some way drew on.
Fiona Templeton: I wasn’t necessarily looking for the documentary aspect of it. I wasn’t even necessarily interested in what people had actually experienced, so much as how they realised and processed their observing experience. Some people constructed their re-creations that way. Then some people constructed them more theatrically rather than as documentary. I am not sure if people experienced them like that, really. I think the person who said he felt like a camera experienced it like that, but I am not sure that he had us re-experience it as a camera. I sensed there were a number of different ways that people experienced the observation. The sense of what they had to do with the event, or, in particular, the things that people wanted of reality in order to observe it, like the desire for ‘the event’ – (the fact that) they would get bored if events didn’t happen. That wasn’t something that everybody felt, but that was one of the structuring experiences. And other people making lists of reality in order to be compelled to observe it. There are all kinds of different ways of framing, I think.
Gabriella Giannachi: What I was trying to say is that when I went into the other room – where the other half of the group was working - I felt that it was my duty to observe them.
Fiona Templeton: I think the transition into that room from observing, which they fulfilled actually in quite a diverse way, to enacting was a bit of a leap - whereas your group came at things from the other way round. You did a lot of – “what are the relationships between performer and audience?” And then there was this moment of going out and, you know, experiencing being audience. Your leap was, in a way, to take away the performance aspect, but it wasn’t quite as big a leap as they made into performance.
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