Session One: Cocteau’s Microscope and the Logic of Dada

I must admit, I approached our initial meeting this year with great excitement but also a little trepidation. You see we’ve had a bit of an enrollment boom, to put it mildly. Last year we had 16 in the workshop, this year 30 people applied. Very exciting, to be sure, but a bit of a different beast with twice as many participants. It is also a group made primarily of newcomers, our enrollment has now stabilized at 24 (some people had to withdraw because their schedules didn’t really allow for it) and only 4 of those are returning participants, so there was a heightened sense of the unknown about meeting the group for the first time. On that first day the teaching staff and myself arrived about 45 minutes early and the participants began arriving a mere 15 minutes after that and they all slowly filtered in over the half hour before the session was scheduled to begin. What was evident immediately was the excitement. Many of them had applied in the last two weeks of April and had been anticipating this for a long time. Facebook had been abuzz with comments counting down the days until we got to start from the past participants, most of whom announced as soon as they arrived that they had been waiting all year for this. Everyone was excited to be starting and you could feel it in the air. You couldn’t ask for a better atmosphere to begin our work in!

The red ball game was a little chaotic with 31 people playing it, but we started to get the hang of it and to get to know everyone’s names. After the chaos of red ball I was delightfully surprised by the amount of focus they brought to our first round of movement exercises. Good things are on the horizon for a group that can so quickly bring their considerable energy into such powerful focus! We will go far.

After some moving and shaping we sat down so I could tell them all more about what we are all about to do together, the process of the workshop, and the atmosphere of respect we would all need to uphold in order to do this work together. I am not sure I have ever been listened to so intently by a group of people. They were really soaking it all in, another auspicious sign for the prospects of our work this summer.

In the readings we looked at Jean Cocteau’s Wedding on the Eiffel Tower and a couple of Dada pieces. No easing into the weird for us, no we’re jumping right in to the deep end of theatrical experimentations.

“I am attempting to substitute a “poetry of the theater” for “poetry in the theater.” Poetry in the theater is a delicate lace, impossible to see at any distance. Poetry of the theater should be a coarse lace, a lace of ropes, a ship at sea. Les Mariés can have the frightening appearance of a drop of poetry seen under a microscope. The scenes are linked like the words of a poem.”
– Jean Cocteau, introduction to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (tr. M. Benedikt)

Cocteau’s microscope is aimed at the mundane, the everyday, he wants to rejuvenate the commonplace by “bringing it out of the veiling mists” to be displayed in such a way that it amazes us. So, we get cameras that release ostriches when the photographer asks the party to look at the birdy, we get telegrams whose instructions cannot be followed because the have been shot dead by a hunter, we get a boy who massacres his family in pursuit of macaroons, a family who returns to life only to be menaced by the mirage of a tiger which has chased the general from the sands of Africa, and in the end, an art dealer and his client who discuss the purchase of this painting of a day at the Eiffel Tower done by God. Cocteau takes the everyday we have grown complacent with and points out just how weird it is by taking it at truly face value, exaggerating that truth to its truthiest ends and presenting it using dance, pantomime, music, and acrobatics. The action is narrated by two human gramophones on the edges of the stage who have been instructed to satisfy only the text, not themselves, so speak in a relentless bark of declamatory statements. At this early phase of his career Cocteau is interested in bringing joy into the theater, but admits that with that joy of the rejuvenation of the everyday comes terror of revalation well.

The discussion of our second reading began with Laura’s rather droll matter of fact description of the extreme violence of WWI. If the traditional logic of the moral system and ideals had led us to a place where such violence seemed justified then perhaps it was time to abandon that logic and embrace nonlogic. In this new world of nonlogic logic anything and everything can be presented as art, and the Dadaists presented the results of this philosophy on stage with simultaneity, poems created by chance practices, and NOISE. No seemingly coherent or profound thought was allowed to stand unchallenged by equal nonsense. Laura’s plan for reading “The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrene Fire Extinguisher” seemed quite ambitious for the first day of the workshop, but they handled it beautifully. We all lined up facing each other for what she described to us a rap battle, the script readers vs the noise makers – who were to use what they heard the script readers read as their noise. Things didn’t get quite as raucous as they might have, but for this being only the first day there were certainly some extremely interesting things being attempted and some truly exciting experimentation going on.

Mr Shriekshriek:
there is no humanity there are the
lamplighters and the dogs
dzin aha dzin aha bobobo tyao
cahiii hii hii
ayboom
yeya yeyo

Mr. Blueblue:
Incontestably

-“The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher” by Tristan Tzara (Tr. R. Wilson)

After the readings we returned to some physical and vocal experimentation with the mover sounder game and the tumult of so many movers and sounders filled my heart with joy as I observed the group’s somewhat timid in some cases, but certainly fruitful experimentations. Everyone certainly ended the 10 minutes about twice as bold and half as self-conscious about trying things out as they had been at the beginning and that’s what’s beautiful to see. Then we did a little starting and stopping, no rules to this game except that you have to move together or be still together.

Turns out this group was better at this as a whole than they were in pairs. Their energy seemed to feed each other’s focus making them one giant intense focus monster as a whole group. That’s right, from day one this group’s intensity seems most focused when they work together as a whole. Our lace of ropes will be razor sharp, our ship at sea, ferocious.