I used to be in a band. We were called My Friend Fred (in hindsight, I think that the name may have been inspired by an idea I had for a ska band oriented around the concept of mental illness: a concept that was [probably rightly] rejected in all but its name by the rest of the band). Again, looking back, we didn't sound all that pleasant: my thinking at the time was dominated by the concurrent thoughts of wanting to reject musical competency and wanting people to like us (a destructive combination). Yet, I'll tell you what, performing in that band was fun. A lot of fun. Performing was a shot of adrenaline (adrenaline that did little for my control and precision as a guitar player).
The arguing in the car on the way to gigs was less fun. I am sad to say that being in this band probably weakened my friendships with two individuals - both of whom, at the beginning, were very good friends but neither of whom I talk to much these days (it should be said that this is equally accountable to the fact that we all live in different cities now and, in one case, different countries - we're hardly the three people in a seaside town who all listened to Less Than Jake but couldn't figure out how to integrate horns into a punk rock band). Again, in retrospect, I can see or at least suspect that these arguments were to a significant degree sparked by my serious-ness about the whole endeavour. Particularly when it came to booking gigs - I wanted to play 'good' shows, supporting 'good' bands, and wanted to look 'good'. If we had stayed together for more than about 9 months (or was it longer? I can't remember), I would have been the one who pushed for 'getting signed' - you know, the bad guy in Wayne's World or something similar. This is in spite of the fact that one of the best gigs we ever did was in a working-men's club in Folkestone, as a joint birthday party, with just our friends (videos from this performance keep popping up on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure there's none of our performance - mostly those of my brother, in his makeshift one-night-only band, called The Dukes of Hazzard, singing Pennnywise). We probably would have had as much fun, had an-as-good-if-not-better experience, just playing shows like this. I couldn't understand that at the time: I wanted us to jump into the deep end, to be a 'proper' band, a 'professional' band.
THE DUKES (PART.2) "BRO HYMN"
Uploaded by STEADY-EDDY123. - Discover more animal videos.
(To my mind, there's never not a time to re-visit the moment when my brother was lead singer of a band for a night - the fact that he doesn't turn up in this video until 1:30 in, faffing about with a bubble gun, makes it all the more brilliant).
I have been reminded of this notion of being a 'proper' or a 'professional' band today. I was definitely taken with this idea, close-to-obsessed with taking this band in that direction. This was motivated by school yard competitiveness: there were three or four different bands of around my age, all of whom would boast of supporting this-band or that-band (regardless of whether they were or they weren't), or of touring that country or that country. When I would go to punk rock gigs, you could praise a support band by saying that "they sound like a professional band". The idea of sounding like a professional band, behaving like a professional band, working like a professional band was an extremely seductive one to teenagers interested in music. If you were being offered more gigs, with more famous bands, from more established promoters, being complimented by more established record labels, then you must be travelling in the right direction. Or, at least, that's how the logic went.
(Incidentally, one person from one of these school-yard bands was actually signed to a major record label and was pushed as a heart-throb for underage girls. Looking now, I see that his website hasn't been updated since 2008, suggesting that he has indeed been dropped by his label. His old website serves as a virtual index of the ruthless of the music industry - that thing that we all wanted, in one way or another, to buy into; that thing that I annoyed or hurt the feelings of two friends pushing for.)
Recently, I've been interested in how this idea of 'professionalism' or 'proper-ism' in art is used as a template to dictate what a 'real' band, what a 'real' filmmaker, what a 'real' theatre-maker looks like. It was an idea that appeared on my academic radar when researching and writing about the film 'Tape', and the use of digital video technology in cinema. The technology was (and is) relatively inexpensive. When these cameras first flooded onto the market, there was an explosion of rhetoric in independent film circles about how filmmaking was finally democratised. Typically, this rhetoric would observe that filmmakers were no longer constrained by the price of cameras and other equipment, and how digital technology offered them access to cheap filming and editing equipment that was of professional quality. This rhetoric found concrete examples in the work of the Dogme95 movement - particularly the success of Thomas Vinterberg's Festen at the Cannes Film Festival - and then, in American form with The Blair Witch Project. These films had cost relatively little, yet they were proper films!
And there's never not a time to think about Festen.
Yet there was no denying that the digital video image had a particular texture and quality. The compression of the light captured in front of the camera into bits and bytes gave the image a blocky quality, a sharpness that stood in stark contrast to the warm edges of film stock. No-one was mistaking digital video images for what was previously accepted as the way that films looked. For filmmaking to become truly democratised, what was needed was a re-conceptualisation of what a 'proper' or 'professional' film looked like. Otherwise, films made with digital video would continue to be seen as aberrations from the norm - they would be amateur, either by necessity or by choice. A stylistic choice that had to be resolved within the overall aesthetic of the work. We can see here the tyranny of the professional: a set of production values that a text must meet to be treated as 'proper' by audiences. And these production values are prohibitively expensive: in order to make a film, you need to have money.
Yet, if enough filmmakers chose to make films with DV technology, it is entirely possible that this shift, this re-conceptualisation of what is 'professional', could be enacted. Perhaps there was a moment when professional production values could have been re-defined to the point that filmmaking could have become truly democratised (I tended to think that this was a fallacy when I was writing my thesis, although I am now warming to the idea that it could have been possible). Instead, Hollywood moved to re-define what a digital video film looked like: it successfully shifted the digital video film from the inexpensive to the extremely expensive. That re-definition was called Cloverfield.
Cloverfield - a mega-bucks monster movie produced by J.J Abrams, the man who brought you TV's Lost - pretended to be a DV movie. It embraced the shaky-cam aesthetics that had come to be associated with the DV technology. It used timecodes - added during post-production, evident to anyone who has ever actually used a DV camera for home video purposes - to foreground its 'amateurishness'. However, within this context of DV-ness, it created a big monster. And lots of explosions. But mostly, a big fucking monster. Now, this is outside of the remit of anyone making a film on a budget low enough to necessitate the use of a DV camera. Oh, and it also used a HD camera - not the DV camera that it tried so hard to represent, the DV camera that lent an air of authenticity to the monster movie genre - so it didn't have to deal with the image texture of the true DV camera. This film created a new standard of what a DV film looked like, it re-affirmed that 'proper' production values were expensive business, and it therefore quashed the democratisation of film (something that was probably pretty much done anyway). Of course there's nothing stopping you from making a movie with a DV camera - there's a lot of budgets that necessitate it - but Cloverfield had ensured that, without a truckload of cash, you were going to fall short of the production values of what is proper and professional in cinema.
Yet, if enough filmmakers chose to make films with DV technology, it is entirely possible that this shift, this re-conceptualisation of what is 'professional', could be enacted. Perhaps there was a moment when professional production values could have been re-defined to the point that filmmaking could have become truly democratised (I tended to think that this was a fallacy when I was writing my thesis, although I am now warming to the idea that it could have been possible). Instead, Hollywood moved to re-define what a digital video film looked like: it successfully shifted the digital video film from the inexpensive to the extremely expensive. That re-definition was called Cloverfield.
Cloverfield - a mega-bucks monster movie produced by J.J Abrams, the man who brought you TV's Lost - pretended to be a DV movie. It embraced the shaky-cam aesthetics that had come to be associated with the DV technology. It used timecodes - added during post-production, evident to anyone who has ever actually used a DV camera for home video purposes - to foreground its 'amateurishness'. However, within this context of DV-ness, it created a big monster. And lots of explosions. But mostly, a big fucking monster. Now, this is outside of the remit of anyone making a film on a budget low enough to necessitate the use of a DV camera. Oh, and it also used a HD camera - not the DV camera that it tried so hard to represent, the DV camera that lent an air of authenticity to the monster movie genre - so it didn't have to deal with the image texture of the true DV camera. This film created a new standard of what a DV film looked like, it re-affirmed that 'proper' production values were expensive business, and it therefore quashed the democratisation of film (something that was probably pretty much done anyway). Of course there's nothing stopping you from making a movie with a DV camera - there's a lot of budgets that necessitate it - but Cloverfield had ensured that, without a truckload of cash, you were going to fall short of the production values of what is proper and professional in cinema.
Cloverfield - mmm, low budget.
I was reminded of this part of my thesis, and my obsession with the professional in my short-lived bout of musical performances, this past weekend at Improbable's Devoted & Disgruntled 6. D&D6 (as it is known) is a open-space meeting for anyone who cares about theatre - an opportunity to raise and discuss an issue that you care about with generous like-minded folk. People often talk about the inspiring and galvanising qualities of D&D, but I found it a far bumpier ride than this would suggest. My experience fluctuated between hearing amazing ideas that spoke to questions I had had about theatre, meeting exciting people with analogous frustrations and interests to mine, and feeling like I was banging my head against a brick wall. I think that if the experience had been exclusively positive then it would have been a cause for concern: life is a series of fluctuations between, on the one hand, an excitement that is felt in your body and can only be expressed by jumping into the air and, on the other, a despair that makes you feel that you are too thick to communicate with anybody because just no-one seems to understand you. And, as facilitator Phelim McDermott pointed out, D&D is nothing but a reflection or echo of real life. The principles that are set out for the open space, he says, are just what happens in life, and it would be a sign of subjective distortion if the only thing I experienced for two-and-a-half days amongst my fellow human beings was ecstacy.
When the dust has settled, though, the experience was overwhelmingly a positive one: I didn't call a further action session on the Monday morning just because, as I articulated to new friend Julia who seemed to be experiencing the same blurriness as I that particular morn, I felt like my action had been taken in meeting the people I had met and fully intending to carry those relationships forward in future work. Any further steps to action would have been quickly and badly thought-through, I felt. So much needed time to be digested and to take something even remotely resembling actual physical form. We were, after all, dreaming nothing less than a complete upheaval of the conditions under which theatre in constructed, produced, exhibited and received.
And this begins to steer me back around to the tyranny of production values and what constitutes 'professional' theatre. In a stimulating panel on Saturday afternoon about whether 'theatre supports the systems and class structures that have failed us', there was significant agreement that theatre institutions as they stand - in their working practices, their staff entry requirements, even perhaps in the nature of the work that they produce - renew conventional, class-bound, self-destructive, unsustainable forms of society: you know, the capitalist system. This was a conclusion arrived at in at least three panels that I attended: as well as this one more generally about 'politics', it was also persuasively argued in a panel about patriarchal blocks and one about climate change. There was a lot of agreement that the ways that we produce, the ways that we perform and the ways that we watch theatre need to be re-thought to create a more inclusive, a more sustainable, and a more challenging mode of theatre. Yet, we always seemed to get stuck when imagining what this mode would look like - making it all to easy to retreat from this bold conclusion.
It was suggested that performing in living rooms could be one route forward: something that has antecedents at least in the early days of Red Ladder Theatre Company, and Wallace Shawn's monologue The Fever. This suggestion was mitigated by a young producer, who responded that yes, it sounds like a good idea, but you'd still need a lot of money for props, for costumes, for set, for lights and so forth. And this struck me as the tyranny of production values in the context of theatre: just like in cinema, you need a certain type of (expensive) camera to make a 'professional' film, we are in many cases (at least, I know that I have thought this and probably still do to some extent) of the opinion that we need these technical, expensive things to make a 'professional' piece of theatre. If we don't have a set, or costumes, or props, or lights, or composed & recorded sound, or famous actors, or comfortable seats etc, then we somehow aren't thought of, or don't think of ourselves, as making a proper piece of theatre. I think that some of the least appealing theatre that I see is work, often on the fringe, that is in thrall to these production values, that directs itself in the direction of these production values, but clearly does not have the money to meet them. It makes half-hearted attempts at meeting these standards, and falls visibly short of the mark, rather than making a virtue of the lack of money. (The work is not necessarily bad because of this characteristic, but it is often a reliable index of a set of aesthetic ambitions, work practices, etc).
But, maybe a lack of money could be a conscious choice. Given the choice between spending a lot of money on costumes, set, props, and technical gadgetry, and spending nothing at all on these things, we can choose to spend nothing at all because it could make for better work. This would be something of a re-conceptualisation of what proper theatre looks like - if enough people did it, or something similar. We would break the tyranny of production values by shifting assumptions and expectations. We cause a shift in the definition of what good work is. When I think about it, most of what is thought of as aesthetically radical, 'directors theatre' (yuck), today in this country relies heavily on a bold use of lights, sound, set etc etc etc. There is less focus upon the potentially bold use of performers, when in fact some of the most radical theatre-directors could just be directing performers in really interesting ways.
I'm sure that a lot of people have already realised this (didn't Peter Brook write a book about it? What? In 1968? Yeah. Before the Internet? Well done Tom.) but personally I have perhaps been too in thrall to the tyranny of production values, so it's worth thinking about and articulating. Perhaps some other people have found themselves in the same web. In the same way that I wanted our band to sound like a proper band, I have wanted to make theatre that looks like proper theatre. And what constitutes the notion of 'proper' or 'professional' (I have used the terms vaguely and loosely throughout - would never pass an academic board) is defined by the big institutions, those with the money who have a vested interest to keeping the production value bar high, otherwise just anyone could make theatre, couldn't they? And we can't have that. No, can't have that at all. This makes the obvious worth re-stating though: to create this inclusive and accessible circuit of theatre and performance that we are dreaming - one that asks more from its audience than just their money, one that allows its artists to survive without being defined and dominated by the capitalist system - we need to name and to subvert the tyranny of production values.
And that can only be done in our work.
When the dust has settled, though, the experience was overwhelmingly a positive one: I didn't call a further action session on the Monday morning just because, as I articulated to new friend Julia who seemed to be experiencing the same blurriness as I that particular morn, I felt like my action had been taken in meeting the people I had met and fully intending to carry those relationships forward in future work. Any further steps to action would have been quickly and badly thought-through, I felt. So much needed time to be digested and to take something even remotely resembling actual physical form. We were, after all, dreaming nothing less than a complete upheaval of the conditions under which theatre in constructed, produced, exhibited and received.
And this begins to steer me back around to the tyranny of production values and what constitutes 'professional' theatre. In a stimulating panel on Saturday afternoon about whether 'theatre supports the systems and class structures that have failed us', there was significant agreement that theatre institutions as they stand - in their working practices, their staff entry requirements, even perhaps in the nature of the work that they produce - renew conventional, class-bound, self-destructive, unsustainable forms of society: you know, the capitalist system. This was a conclusion arrived at in at least three panels that I attended: as well as this one more generally about 'politics', it was also persuasively argued in a panel about patriarchal blocks and one about climate change. There was a lot of agreement that the ways that we produce, the ways that we perform and the ways that we watch theatre need to be re-thought to create a more inclusive, a more sustainable, and a more challenging mode of theatre. Yet, we always seemed to get stuck when imagining what this mode would look like - making it all to easy to retreat from this bold conclusion.
It was suggested that performing in living rooms could be one route forward: something that has antecedents at least in the early days of Red Ladder Theatre Company, and Wallace Shawn's monologue The Fever. This suggestion was mitigated by a young producer, who responded that yes, it sounds like a good idea, but you'd still need a lot of money for props, for costumes, for set, for lights and so forth. And this struck me as the tyranny of production values in the context of theatre: just like in cinema, you need a certain type of (expensive) camera to make a 'professional' film, we are in many cases (at least, I know that I have thought this and probably still do to some extent) of the opinion that we need these technical, expensive things to make a 'professional' piece of theatre. If we don't have a set, or costumes, or props, or lights, or composed & recorded sound, or famous actors, or comfortable seats etc, then we somehow aren't thought of, or don't think of ourselves, as making a proper piece of theatre. I think that some of the least appealing theatre that I see is work, often on the fringe, that is in thrall to these production values, that directs itself in the direction of these production values, but clearly does not have the money to meet them. It makes half-hearted attempts at meeting these standards, and falls visibly short of the mark, rather than making a virtue of the lack of money. (The work is not necessarily bad because of this characteristic, but it is often a reliable index of a set of aesthetic ambitions, work practices, etc).
But, maybe a lack of money could be a conscious choice. Given the choice between spending a lot of money on costumes, set, props, and technical gadgetry, and spending nothing at all on these things, we can choose to spend nothing at all because it could make for better work. This would be something of a re-conceptualisation of what proper theatre looks like - if enough people did it, or something similar. We would break the tyranny of production values by shifting assumptions and expectations. We cause a shift in the definition of what good work is. When I think about it, most of what is thought of as aesthetically radical, 'directors theatre' (yuck), today in this country relies heavily on a bold use of lights, sound, set etc etc etc. There is less focus upon the potentially bold use of performers, when in fact some of the most radical theatre-directors could just be directing performers in really interesting ways.
I'm sure that a lot of people have already realised this (didn't Peter Brook write a book about it? What? In 1968? Yeah. Before the Internet? Well done Tom.) but personally I have perhaps been too in thrall to the tyranny of production values, so it's worth thinking about and articulating. Perhaps some other people have found themselves in the same web. In the same way that I wanted our band to sound like a proper band, I have wanted to make theatre that looks like proper theatre. And what constitutes the notion of 'proper' or 'professional' (I have used the terms vaguely and loosely throughout - would never pass an academic board) is defined by the big institutions, those with the money who have a vested interest to keeping the production value bar high, otherwise just anyone could make theatre, couldn't they? And we can't have that. No, can't have that at all. This makes the obvious worth re-stating though: to create this inclusive and accessible circuit of theatre and performance that we are dreaming - one that asks more from its audience than just their money, one that allows its artists to survive without being defined and dominated by the capitalist system - we need to name and to subvert the tyranny of production values.
And that can only be done in our work.
