April Highlight - “Not a Documentary”

This Month I’m focusing on my 2014 project [MISSING] again, but this is definitely one of those themes you find running throughout my work, so there are some minor spoilers for Telelibrary ahead as well (nothing you wouldn’t find in your first session). So if you’re just jumping on-board with these updates and/or if you haven’t read my previous post about [MISSING], I’d gently suggest you do so. I’d never command it, though; far be it from me to deprive you of your right to confuse yourself.

The topic of today’s post has long been a consideration for me, but I find my relationship has been changing as the political and social ecosystem changes. We are living in an era that provides constant examples of the danger of blurring truth and fiction. As such, I increasingly find it important to repeatedly insist on creating work defined as Fiction, even as that work proceeds almost immediately to feel very real, and even almost function in the “real world.” Still, disclaimer aside, what someone feels during and after my work remains pretty complicated. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with describing a lot of my work as “encounters.” What happens when You, a Certified Real Person™, have a sincere exchange with a fictional character, premise or context? What if anything that results from that encounter becomes True?

~

Not a Documentary; 

Fictional Real Stories

In 2014, I needed a final project to graduate from NYU in Abu Dhabi, and I decided that the most sensible route to writing a play was to jump into a 9-month study on the topic of what it means to miss someone or something. I called the project "[MISSING]," and I began my research with a series of performance actions, structured as an exchange: I picked a number of “public” spaces in Abu Dhabi (“public” is a complicated term in that city, but that is another essay), and offered passersby a trade: I’d give them a phone charged up with international calling credits to call anyone they liked, or would give them supplies to write a letter to anyone in the world, and pay for the postage. In return, they would agree to spend at least 5 minutes in an interview with me about who they wrote to and why.

Over the course of a few months, I collected 23 of these interviews, with the intention of both documenting them in a Web Book and bringing them into the rehearsal room for a new Devised Theater Piece; between seven and 8. As I worked with my cast to read and perform excerpts of these interviews, it became pretty clear to me that I was not interested in dramatizing the people I had met, or the conversations we had shared. I felt that the interviews as primary documents spoke for themselves, and that attempts to “write” the people I met beyond what they themselves had said would be both unsuccessful and disrespectful. Instead, I tried to view these interviews as a database, filled with narrative arcs and themes, phrases, metaphors, cliches, and attempts to name the seemingly unnameable absences that each of us carry every day.

For an example of what it looks like to break one of these interviews “down for parts,” let’s look at a particularly interesting exchange from one of my earliest iterations of the performance action. This is an excerpt from a conversation with a woman named Geeta (full transcript and audio here, if you’re achingly curious):

Yannick: —I mean, what does it feel like for you when you miss someone?

Geeta: (inhale) I don't know it's a blur. I—okay so, I'm going to move next month. And if I do move to New York, it will be the 10th city—9th city in the last 10 years. (inhale) So I'm—and sorry, the 10th city I live in. So I was born in Liberia. I'm an Indian. I was born to Indian parents, who emigrated to India from Erstwhile India, which is currently Pakistan. So—and I was born in Liberia, and I lived there for 8 years, then I lived in India for 10 years, then I lived in Switzerland for 1 year and I lived in (inhale) uh Paris for 2 years and I lived in Singapore for a year, and I lived in Oman for 2 years I lived in London for a year and now in Abu Dhabi in 3 and a half years and I'm going back to Oman or New York. So. If you ask me, I have—that's why I said my mom's my only friend. Because then .. your-your blood relations—or even-even not blood relations, just the closest people in your life, you keep and then everything else is just—filters itself out, weeds itself out, and—i have friends everywhere. And I have a great network of p—friends. But .. it's not an everyday friend. You know? It's just .. so (inhale) so there's no missing .. when you're a traveler yourself, and you're a nomad. You know? There's no missing. You-you miss the sense of self, you miss your own identity.

00:11:09-1

Yannick: What do you mean by that? I think I understand but I don't want to assume, uh/

Geeta: Like a bit of soul-searching, when you don't … (inhale) .. when you leave so much behind, I think you try to find yourself to retain your sanity, or just to find your purpose. … And, and I think you focus more on the future than the past. And missing has to do with the past, and it's—so you're thinking about your destination, and everyone's destination at the end of the day is death. So—is the grave. So. And then, I could go get philosophical, but I don't think that's where we're going. (laughing)

Yannick: I—you are more than welcome, yeah.

Geeta: Yeah? I—well I don't'—I think that when you think of death you don't miss anyone. You know it's like, it doesn't' .. matter. And then you always are reminded of death .. when … when you lose too much. And too often. So missing is when you've had .. when you have a possession, and you have a relationship with that possession. Personal thing. But when you don't have those possessions any more or you lose them too often, you cease to miss them.

00:12:26-5

Yannick:  That's really helpful. And really beautiful, and kind of sad. Um, thank you.

Geeta: Thank you.

“Geeta.” Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Emirates Palace, November 2nd, 2013.

Bartered in exchange for 2 international phone calls (Zanzibar and Ukraine), total cost 2 Dirham 85 Fils

There’s a lot there, but in a funny way, the thing that seemed to resonate over and over with the cast was the litany of cities. So many of us in Abu Dhabi had a similar list, which seemed at times an accomplishment and at times a burden, or even a scar. Going through all the interviews we conducted, we tried to see what it felt like to combine all the various mentions of past places into one “super-litany:”

NO ONE (YET):

So I was—I was with her till—let me get back to my background. I'm an Algerian. I lived in Algeria till I was 5 or 6 years old. // I moved to Berlin. //if I do move to New York, it will be the 10th city—9th city in the last 10 years. //Then we moved to Qatar; my dad's an engineer that works in a gas company—Qatar gas, have you hear about it? // So I'm—and sorry, the 10th city I live in.//  moved to Brazil three years ago// (inhale) I was born in Liberia. I'm an Indian. I was born to Indian parents, who emigrated to India from Erstwhile India, which is currently Pakistan.   I'm half Palestinian half Iraqian, Jordanian citizen, I'm Emirati, half Egyptian. I've lived in Sharjah, I've lived here in Abu Dhabi// I'm Sudanese.// I was born here in Abu Dhabi and I lived in New Zealand for 15 years, I'm a New Zealand citizen as well.// I was born and raised here. I went to London for Uni. // I lived there for 8 years, then I lived in India for 10 years, then I lived in Switzerland for 1 year and I lived in (inhale) uh Paris for 2 years and I lived in Singapore for a year, and I lived in Oman for 2 years I lived in London for a year and now in Abu Dhabi in 3 and a half years and I'm going back to Oman or New York. //So I'm moving back and forth. So I'm going back to Durban for a month and then I'm going back to Berlin for 3 months, then we're both going back to Durban for a month, and then he's coming back, // I would take 3 months and just get a winnebago—do you know what that is? A big sort of house on wheels—and, drive around the country with them, visiting the National Parks// and then I'll be back in Berlin in August. And I'll see him a few times along the way. So it's a little frustrating //

Uh, .. yeah. What was the question again?

Rehearsal notes:, between seven and 8. 2014.

I also asked the cast to sit with the original interviews they felt drawn to, and to start to identify things they connected with, and to remove the things they didn’t, to create new pieces of writing. Often, we did this quite literally.

By amassing samples like this, we started to build a bank of content for telling stories and filling them with details. But what would those stories be? And who would they be about? At the suggestion of my cast, over the course of our rehearsal process, I did the same “letter for an interview” exchange with each performer in the piece, with another actor swapping roles to interview me. We then each took portions of our own interviews and began to splice in pieces of the interviews which felt resonant. The result was a cast of characters with our own names but with lives that were larger, stranger, more tangled and expansive. We became impossible people, full of obvious contradictions and wandering, unresolved histories. As drafts of the script came together, I included a section where the Character of each actor was interviewed, and where the audience could see them remix stories in real time. Here’s an example from one of the later drafts* of that performance script, where we meet Guillaume, who takes pieces of his own story and cuts them with phrases or thoughts from many different interview participants, often within a single sentence:

The light finishes swiveling back  to reveal interview lighting. YANNICK and GUILLAUME are illuminated, ATTILIO and SALBER are in darkness. SANYU is off-stage.

YANNICK: Okay. What is your name?

GUILLAUME: My name is Guillaume, and I'm from Quebec, the French part of Canada.

YANNICK: What do you think Absence is?

GUILLAUME: What's absence? Absence is… My friends, yeah, they're like my grandchildren. They asked me, if I would get a house with them and I said I want to wait , it's this feeling that you know its going to be there forever. But I haven't seen them for nine years and I live in the present. Actually the people I love are with me, in the present. They're good, they're wonderful, generous, but when you have a possession, something tangible, and you lose it too often, you cease to miss it. I've lived in Paris, in Singapore, in Switzerland, in Quebec. So, I guess I don't miss. But they asked me if I would get a house with them. And I said I want to wait,  I said I want to wait until the end, so who knows.

Script Excerpt, ‘between seven and 8.’ Platinum Draft*

My work on the [MISSING] project was my first encounter with collecting and remixing participant responses, and it left me very passionate about both creating archives which I tried to view as data and exploring what happens when I let real stories, bend, break, collide and combine. I feel these two impulses coexist when often I perform the Telelibrary, which has been steadily gathering its own growing archive* of recorded calls. [SIZE database] Some of the functions let you hear other participants’ voices exactly as they occurred; in the User Log book, accessing some comments lets you hear the User in question in the moment the comment was entered. Other expanded features exist as a “catalog,” where you can choose from a number of distinct User Stories, Jokes, and so on, each presented as it was originally shared.

However some Telelibrary functions place excerpts from many voices together, giving a sense that they are responding to each other, or even sharing one collective narrative. I call these “montage” features, and there exist somewhere a little more interpretive on the spectrum of reporting. Additionally, the character of “The System'' will sometimes attempt to answer User questions with excerpts and snippets of previous User recordings, effectively borrowing their voices to communicate something new. The last of these closely mirrors what Guillaume was doing in our performance in 2014, creating a simultaneous experience of the recorded fact, an impressionist expression, and infinite imagined possibilities.  In [MISSING], the effect of that blend of the abstract and the archive helped evoke something about the fractured experience of self while living abroad. In the Telelibrary, it becomes an exploration of how technology does and doesn’t create and own a distinct identity.

In some respects, Theater is limited in its ability to function as a Documentary. But I find that Theater (and especially Interactive Theater) thrive at producing this particular experience of fact-infused-fiction, and I can’t seem to get enough of it. Indeed, my persistence in chasing this effect seems to go a long way to defining my “brand—” what a dear friend has dubbed: “Vague Enough to be Interesting.”

~~

*Why "Platinum?" I find that, when drafting scripts for devised works, I'm often juggling a few different possible shapes or directions for the piece, so even as I move from "draft 1" to "draft 2," it really feels more like "generations" of the piece. As such, I named all my scripts after Pokemon games - this particular script was the 3rd version of the 4th generation, and the one closest to the eventual show draft.