VIP LESNING

ON RISK AND INVESTMENT BY TIM ETCHELLS

 

Investment is what happens when the performers before us seem bound up unspeakably with what they are doing – it seems to matter to them, it appears to hurt them or threatens to pleasure them,it seems to touch them, in some quiet and terrible way.  Investment is the  bottom line – without it nothing matters, and we don´t see half enough of it. 

At a recent event I attended someone asked a performer what was going on in a certain part of the piece he´d been in-the performer replied, “I don’t know about that, ask the writer…”  That answer simply shouldn´t beallowed. 

Investment is the line of connection between performer and their text or their task.  When it works it is private, and often on the very edge of words.  Like all the best performance it is before us, but not for us.

This privacy of investment doesn´t make a solipstic work ora brick wall to shut the watchers out. Quite the opposite – investment draws us in.  Something is happening – real and therefore risked –something seems to slip across from the private world to the public one – and the performers are “left open” or “left exposed”.

To be bound up with what you´re doing, to be at risk in it,to be exposed by it.  As performers we recognize but cannot always control these moments – they happen, perhaps, inspite of us.

            Investment is slippery and evasive and it isn´t often found where we´d expect it –personally I have no big regrets about that.  Actors flying into passions, dancers hurling themselves to the ground, performers bravely taking stances on large issues or themes.  All these are the sites for many embarrassments – embarrassments in which the public declamation of a big ideais not properly matched by a private investment.  I ask:  “Are you bound up with this?”  “Or is it the shape of a passion and the noise of a politics?” “Are you at risk in this?”  That´s all I want to know.

            A student I taught in Leicester used to tell stories in my performance classes and they were inane and rambling, and they were of no consequence, and she was at risk in every one of them.  Risk implicates me, I say “I´m bound up with this too”  Politics came off of her stories without a hint of intention.  And there are some people who can simply sit in a space or stand quite still in it and still be at risk.  “Left open”, leaving me open too.  In the complicity of the performers with their task lies our own complicity – we are watching the people before us, not representing something but going through something.  They lay their bodies on the line…and we are transformed – not audience to a spectacle but witnesses to an event.

            Risk and investment in the strangest places, slipping and hiding.  Risk is the thing we are striving for in the performance but not a thing we can look for.  We look for something else and hope (or pray to the gods we don´t believe in) that risk shows up. We know it when we see it. I´m sure of that.  Risk surprises us, always fleeting – we´re slightly out of control.  Investment drives all types of livework – the formal and the content-full, the cabaret and the high cultural –laying waste to all distinctions. I don´t care where we see it, but it´s all too rare and it´s the onlything we should care about.

            Investment links to passion, politics and rage. It slips out in laughter, numbness, silence.  Investment happens when we´re hitting new ground, when we don´t quite know, where we can´t quite say, where we feel compromised,complicit, bound up, without resources to an easy position.  This is not the place for respectable or soap-box certainties – only live issues will do.  Investment wants us naked, with slips, and weaknesses, withthe not-yet and never-to-be certain, with all that´s in process, in flux, withall that isn´t finished, with all that is unclear and therefore NEEDS TO BE WORKED OUT.  Don´t give me anythingless than this.  Don´t give me a truth that’s more fixe, i.e. more of a stupid lie.

            Investment comes when we´re beaten so complex and so personal that we move beyond rhetorics into events.

            Investment forces us to know that performative actions have real consequence beyond theperformance arena.  That when we dothese unreal things in rooms, galleries and theatre spaces the real world willchange.  To me, that´s the greatestambition and the truth of cultural practice-things can change, things can slip,things can move, because they´re pushed(delibaretely) because they´re knocked,by accident.  All that has tohappen is that the direct lines of investment get drawn – between performersand task, between witnesses and performers.

            Thinkingof investment we ask:  when the performance finishes will it matter? Where will it matter?  Will the performer carry this with them tomorrow?  In their sleep? In their psyche?  Does this action, this performance, contain these people ( and me ) in some strange and perhaps unspeakable way?  I ask of each performance: Will I carry this event with me tomorrow?  Will it haunt me?  Will it change you, will it change me,will it change things?

            If not it was a waste of time.