Tenebrism is a lie and complicit failure
Our latest production Tenebrism begins with a lie. The lie is Jeremey & Jayne have a show for you. But there is no show. There never was a show. There was just promise that we were going to make a show. Jayne and Jeremey “rehearsed” everyday. Rehearsing meant, improvising with beer, Jesus, & Joy Division. Some days there was Caravaggio. Some days there was no beer. But everything was taped. And it was watching the tapes where the show made itself clear. It was watching the tapes, often with a beer, Jayne and Jeremey and Lamb Lays with Lion saw what the show was suppose to be. It was with viewing, remembering, and taping that we constructed the show.
But the show is a lie. We never intended “the show” to be seen. Jeremey is lying when he says he has a show for the audience. Instead there is a construct of where the show should be, but Jayne and Jeremey rehearsed how to interrupt that construct. The Tenebrism they were rehearsing, with Jesus, beer, Joy Division and a fog machine, is exactly what wasn’t the show. When Jeremey says “(he) has a wonderful show for you folks,” he’s lying. There is no show. Tenebrism is all a lie.
It is a lie because to us, making the production with Jayne and the rest of Lamb Lays with Lion, Jeremey had forgotten that he was copying Tenebrism’s premise from his work with Forced Entertainment. By the way, Jeremey was very honored to work with the 25+ year old performance company and UK darlings. However, pawning Tenebrism off as an original LLwL performance, after some introspection, is a great big lie. Jeremey stole the initial idea from Spectacular.
Spectacular is the latest production of Forced Entertainment’s that Jeremey had assisted, during a month’s stay in April ’08. It was a mini-vacation/sabbatical at Forced Entertainment’s career-long home of Sheffield. He was truly inspired by the work, and their working methods.
It was at Sheffield that he did most of his research about Tenebrism. He read a great deal about Caravaggio. Watched documentaries about Joy Division. As wells as: Touching the Void, an insightful memoir by Deborah Curtis (wife of Joy Division lead singer, Ian Curtis). He also devoured some post-Jesus Christ-Christianity criticism, by 1st Century Pagan Romans, that Cameron, our Tech-Director had lent him.
However, he is still a big fat liar. And Tenebrism is very much a lie. It is lying that it is something, but it is really something else. You never get to see the “something” it promises. However, we maintain the performance is original, but feels utterly stolen. At times, everything we make feels stolen.
We could say something academically trite here. Quote T.S. Elliot and say great artists steal. Or perhaps, we could mention something about how Shakespeare never wrote an original plot, but stole all his stories from history. That would be relevant. However more apt, would be to quote the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells, who, we believe, it is from, Lamb Lays with Lion thieved:
“It’s like you’re sifting through the culture, sifting through stuff that went before and you’re trying to find something that might still speak, that might be relevant – trying to find forms that you can do something with and create work through them. You’re quoting, you’re breaking up things from the past and trying to do something with them. There’s no authentic voice, there’s no original masterwork arising out of anybody’s soul, it’s all echoes and fragments and mutations of things that went before, and that somehow you inherited.”
-That was from an interview with Peter Billingham, from “At the Sharp End.”
Tim’s quote is a good one. It is an eloquent summation of how we all work; all of us creating modern performance. We completely agree, “there’s no original masterwork,” and it certainly isn’t coming from one individual’s soul. It is all stolen. We’re all lying. Saying things are what they are not.
In Tenebrism, the audience is told they’re going to see a show. They’re told that it is not the show they are meant to get. However, something is askew. Something’s off. “Normally” this would happen, but it is not happening, so today is different. This isn’t what it is meant to be.
This is all told to the audience by the exuberant host-figure, Jeremey. He smiles at the audience revealing he is missing one of his front teeth, and assures everyone that there is indeed a “special show tonight!” Despite his assurances, there is little evidence to what that show might actually be.
On stage there are 2 golden floor lamps (that also serve as the primary/virtually only source of lighting), 2 small amplifiers, with a microphone plugged into one, and an iPod plugged into the other, with a small tv/vcr combo placed in-between the two. Oh, there are also 2 large mirrors in the back that a single DV-camera is focused on, and a Casio keyboard with a bench, for sitting. Plus a hard cover collection of paintings by the Italian renaissance artist, Caravaggio. Oh, and a paint bucket and a crutch, employed as an impromptu microphone stand, because “someone stole our mic-stand.” But otherwise, the space is fairly sparse.
What show could this guy with a missing tooth be talking about? Jeremey smiles his missing-tooth smile, and blinks into the lamps and addresses the audience about the show that is going to happen, but first everyone will be “eased into the beginning with a little music,” that he doesn’t normally play himself, because someone is usually helping him, who is inexplicably absent tonight.
Here is where some of similarities lie with Forced Entertainment. Jeremey comes out alone, and says the show is not in its usual shape. FE’s Spectacular begins with a skeleton coming out onto a completely empty stage, and Rob the skeleton also talks the audience through what is normally performed each night. He describes a band upstage left, and a staircase he normally descends and much, much more. Jeremey, in Tenebrism, begins by hinting that the show is not its usual good form, however, as described above, there is plenty of lo-fi tech crap across the stage, to hint at a show. The crap looks oddly symmetrical. Definitely composed.
However, once Jeremey “plucks out the tune she normally plays,” Jayne arrives, with her cooler of beer and additional accoutrement, and essentially Tenebrism continues on giving you the show they promised.
Yet, it is in Jeremey’s first utterance that, “well, normally…” that already exposes a major chink in the façade of the theatrical performance. The façade basically is Lamb Lays with Lion is producing a performance that will be performed by Jayne and Jeremey. If we continue with this façade, we get our drinks, find our seats and wait for the show to begin. However, the performance begins the moment the audience enters the unfamiliar space and awkwardly wanders through trying to figure out the intentions or “rules” of the performance, i.e. how the night will play itself out.
It is this initial awkward-ness that is essential to establishing a rapport with the audience. The initial unfamiliarity primes the audience’s sensibilities and modes of perceiving for an experience that is definitely not a familiar, nor normative form of passive entertainment.
Before Jeremey speaks, the microphone he uses is defective, which provides an additional chip of doubt in the performance-façade.
By establishing these chinks and fallibilities in the performance of Tenebrism, the failures provide the viewer with a variety of modes to perceive the show:
1.) First of all, the audience can’t help but perceive what is actually in front of them, grubby carpet, dirty lamps, lo-fi equipment. All very amateurish.
2.) Then Secondly, the audience is asked to see the performance as Jayne and Jeremey intend, i.e. the “re-creation” of scenes from popular films “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and “Control,” “The Musical Bit,” and finally “The Educational Bit.”
3.) Thirdly, the audience complicity witnesses the failures of Jayne and Jeremey. They are also subjected to some very bad acting that makes apparent the limitations of Tenebrism as a performance.
4.) Fourthly, there is the meta-view of Jayne, Jeremey, and Lamb Lays with Lion. It is the bird’s eye view of how LLwL is having a laugh, making absurd jokes and absolute falsities about the lives of Jesus Christ and Ian Curtis; forging a false connection between the two iconic figures through our own imaginative story telling.
5.) Finally, Fifthly, we, LLwL, ask the audience to witness the tense sense of complicity to failure; which is one of Tenebrism’s most brilliant achievements.
--And here 5) is really just 3) again, but the idea of complicit failure is so important to Tenebrism it is worth mentioning again. Also, this complicity to failure is also a well tread upon pursuit of Forced Entertainment’s. So again, we lie, and steal.
But suppose for a moment that we are not liars, and look at the exchanges between Jeremey and Jayne. In the face of failure, malfunctioning equipment, completely forgotten or misplaced props for the performance, increasing intoxication of Jayne, and viable tension and abuse between Jayne and Jeremey, in the face of all these emotional elements of the experience-as-performance, there is a disruption. A disruption of “entertainment” when the audience feels complicit to the performance’s failure, as an inexorable “witness.” They’re not watching a show, they are taking part in an event. The failure is the event is the performance.
The audience is in the palm of his hand, when Jeremey picks up the broken microphone, struggles with it (in full knowledge it will not work) attempts to plug it in, speaks into it, ‘testing it,” and with his first words, “you can’t hear me, can you?...” someone in the audience will sometimes reply, “nope.” And once you have that response, that tangible involvement, it is an assurance that they believe in the failure. The audience’s utterance of “nope,” establishes the thin line of “real failure” and “rehearsed events.” Sharing with the audience the awareness of real failure/rehearsed events forges a very real complicity of the audience to the events of the performance. When the audience no longer sits back passively to be entertained, but are listening with a more attuned ear through the failure, then they are ready for Tenebrism.
Everyone is watching for the “fuck up,” or think they’re seeing a “fuck up,” and hopefully will focus-in further and try to see if it is intentional or not.
Perhaps is not tuned-in by failure. Maybe the audience tunes out, which we can understand. Who is not prone look at our watches when we’re confronted with really bad acting? So, in the face of some awfully uncomfortable pauses and painful silences, we understand how an audience would rather “turn off” than have to witness/be involved with the performance’s failure.
However, we hope our audience enjoys Jayne and Jeremey and their “god talons.” We hope the audience, too, can peer down and have a laugh at it all, while Tenebrism goes horribly wrong.
It’s funny, we can never decide if Jayne and Jeremey are laughing because we’re fooling you all, or because you caught them fooling, but we love the joke so much we can’t stop doing the show.
Who cares if we steal from Forced Entertainment, they’ve stolen lots of stuff too. All you have to do is give credit. Cause, in the end, after you steal it, it is never the same coming from you. Thank you T.S. Elliot, Shakespeare, and Tim Etchells.
Finally, one other great thing about Tenebrism is its doses of social commentary. We hope to mature this practice into a regular habit for LLwL. Within our performances, we have the power to continue to do work that continues to broach socio/political subjects that are not easy to digest. For example, after Jayne and Jeremey recreate the scene from Control where Ian Curtis has his first epileptic seizure, and they take him to the emergency room for treatment, Jeremey has a small section of “text” where he describes England’s National Health Service, the NHS. After performing a gratuitously long caricature of a seizure, he seamlessly blends the performance into a monologue about how “they didn’t worry, they had no second-thoughts, and took Ian straight to the Emergency Room, because there, in the UK, they have something called the NHS, which stands for the National Health Service, where any citizen of the United Kingdom is granted the medical attention they require, no matter what, because it is provided by their government…unlike in this country---and so they’re standing in the emergency room….”
It is in such seamless tangents, that Tenebrism can pack socially relevant material, while maintaining the “rules” of the performance as game. A game that only Jeremey and Jayne know how to play.
Copyright - Jeremey Catterton 2008
But the show is a lie. We never intended “the show” to be seen. Jeremey is lying when he says he has a show for the audience. Instead there is a construct of where the show should be, but Jayne and Jeremey rehearsed how to interrupt that construct. The Tenebrism they were rehearsing, with Jesus, beer, Joy Division and a fog machine, is exactly what wasn’t the show. When Jeremey says “(he) has a wonderful show for you folks,” he’s lying. There is no show. Tenebrism is all a lie.
It is a lie because to us, making the production with Jayne and the rest of Lamb Lays with Lion, Jeremey had forgotten that he was copying Tenebrism’s premise from his work with Forced Entertainment. By the way, Jeremey was very honored to work with the 25+ year old performance company and UK darlings. However, pawning Tenebrism off as an original LLwL performance, after some introspection, is a great big lie. Jeremey stole the initial idea from Spectacular.
Spectacular is the latest production of Forced Entertainment’s that Jeremey had assisted, during a month’s stay in April ’08. It was a mini-vacation/sabbatical at Forced Entertainment’s career-long home of Sheffield. He was truly inspired by the work, and their working methods.
It was at Sheffield that he did most of his research about Tenebrism. He read a great deal about Caravaggio. Watched documentaries about Joy Division. As wells as: Touching the Void, an insightful memoir by Deborah Curtis (wife of Joy Division lead singer, Ian Curtis). He also devoured some post-Jesus Christ-Christianity criticism, by 1st Century Pagan Romans, that Cameron, our Tech-Director had lent him.
However, he is still a big fat liar. And Tenebrism is very much a lie. It is lying that it is something, but it is really something else. You never get to see the “something” it promises. However, we maintain the performance is original, but feels utterly stolen. At times, everything we make feels stolen.
We could say something academically trite here. Quote T.S. Elliot and say great artists steal. Or perhaps, we could mention something about how Shakespeare never wrote an original plot, but stole all his stories from history. That would be relevant. However more apt, would be to quote the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells, who, we believe, it is from, Lamb Lays with Lion thieved:
“It’s like you’re sifting through the culture, sifting through stuff that went before and you’re trying to find something that might still speak, that might be relevant – trying to find forms that you can do something with and create work through them. You’re quoting, you’re breaking up things from the past and trying to do something with them. There’s no authentic voice, there’s no original masterwork arising out of anybody’s soul, it’s all echoes and fragments and mutations of things that went before, and that somehow you inherited.”
-That was from an interview with Peter Billingham, from “At the Sharp End.”
Tim’s quote is a good one. It is an eloquent summation of how we all work; all of us creating modern performance. We completely agree, “there’s no original masterwork,” and it certainly isn’t coming from one individual’s soul. It is all stolen. We’re all lying. Saying things are what they are not.
In Tenebrism, the audience is told they’re going to see a show. They’re told that it is not the show they are meant to get. However, something is askew. Something’s off. “Normally” this would happen, but it is not happening, so today is different. This isn’t what it is meant to be.
This is all told to the audience by the exuberant host-figure, Jeremey. He smiles at the audience revealing he is missing one of his front teeth, and assures everyone that there is indeed a “special show tonight!” Despite his assurances, there is little evidence to what that show might actually be.
On stage there are 2 golden floor lamps (that also serve as the primary/virtually only source of lighting), 2 small amplifiers, with a microphone plugged into one, and an iPod plugged into the other, with a small tv/vcr combo placed in-between the two. Oh, there are also 2 large mirrors in the back that a single DV-camera is focused on, and a Casio keyboard with a bench, for sitting. Plus a hard cover collection of paintings by the Italian renaissance artist, Caravaggio. Oh, and a paint bucket and a crutch, employed as an impromptu microphone stand, because “someone stole our mic-stand.” But otherwise, the space is fairly sparse.
What show could this guy with a missing tooth be talking about? Jeremey smiles his missing-tooth smile, and blinks into the lamps and addresses the audience about the show that is going to happen, but first everyone will be “eased into the beginning with a little music,” that he doesn’t normally play himself, because someone is usually helping him, who is inexplicably absent tonight.
Here is where some of similarities lie with Forced Entertainment. Jeremey comes out alone, and says the show is not in its usual shape. FE’s Spectacular begins with a skeleton coming out onto a completely empty stage, and Rob the skeleton also talks the audience through what is normally performed each night. He describes a band upstage left, and a staircase he normally descends and much, much more. Jeremey, in Tenebrism, begins by hinting that the show is not its usual good form, however, as described above, there is plenty of lo-fi tech crap across the stage, to hint at a show. The crap looks oddly symmetrical. Definitely composed.
However, once Jeremey “plucks out the tune she normally plays,” Jayne arrives, with her cooler of beer and additional accoutrement, and essentially Tenebrism continues on giving you the show they promised.
Yet, it is in Jeremey’s first utterance that, “well, normally…” that already exposes a major chink in the façade of the theatrical performance. The façade basically is Lamb Lays with Lion is producing a performance that will be performed by Jayne and Jeremey. If we continue with this façade, we get our drinks, find our seats and wait for the show to begin. However, the performance begins the moment the audience enters the unfamiliar space and awkwardly wanders through trying to figure out the intentions or “rules” of the performance, i.e. how the night will play itself out.
It is this initial awkward-ness that is essential to establishing a rapport with the audience. The initial unfamiliarity primes the audience’s sensibilities and modes of perceiving for an experience that is definitely not a familiar, nor normative form of passive entertainment.
Before Jeremey speaks, the microphone he uses is defective, which provides an additional chip of doubt in the performance-façade.
By establishing these chinks and fallibilities in the performance of Tenebrism, the failures provide the viewer with a variety of modes to perceive the show:
1.) First of all, the audience can’t help but perceive what is actually in front of them, grubby carpet, dirty lamps, lo-fi equipment. All very amateurish.
2.) Then Secondly, the audience is asked to see the performance as Jayne and Jeremey intend, i.e. the “re-creation” of scenes from popular films “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and “Control,” “The Musical Bit,” and finally “The Educational Bit.”
3.) Thirdly, the audience complicity witnesses the failures of Jayne and Jeremey. They are also subjected to some very bad acting that makes apparent the limitations of Tenebrism as a performance.
4.) Fourthly, there is the meta-view of Jayne, Jeremey, and Lamb Lays with Lion. It is the bird’s eye view of how LLwL is having a laugh, making absurd jokes and absolute falsities about the lives of Jesus Christ and Ian Curtis; forging a false connection between the two iconic figures through our own imaginative story telling.
5.) Finally, Fifthly, we, LLwL, ask the audience to witness the tense sense of complicity to failure; which is one of Tenebrism’s most brilliant achievements.
--And here 5) is really just 3) again, but the idea of complicit failure is so important to Tenebrism it is worth mentioning again. Also, this complicity to failure is also a well tread upon pursuit of Forced Entertainment’s. So again, we lie, and steal.
But suppose for a moment that we are not liars, and look at the exchanges between Jeremey and Jayne. In the face of failure, malfunctioning equipment, completely forgotten or misplaced props for the performance, increasing intoxication of Jayne, and viable tension and abuse between Jayne and Jeremey, in the face of all these emotional elements of the experience-as-performance, there is a disruption. A disruption of “entertainment” when the audience feels complicit to the performance’s failure, as an inexorable “witness.” They’re not watching a show, they are taking part in an event. The failure is the event is the performance.
The audience is in the palm of his hand, when Jeremey picks up the broken microphone, struggles with it (in full knowledge it will not work) attempts to plug it in, speaks into it, ‘testing it,” and with his first words, “you can’t hear me, can you?...” someone in the audience will sometimes reply, “nope.” And once you have that response, that tangible involvement, it is an assurance that they believe in the failure. The audience’s utterance of “nope,” establishes the thin line of “real failure” and “rehearsed events.” Sharing with the audience the awareness of real failure/rehearsed events forges a very real complicity of the audience to the events of the performance. When the audience no longer sits back passively to be entertained, but are listening with a more attuned ear through the failure, then they are ready for Tenebrism.
Everyone is watching for the “fuck up,” or think they’re seeing a “fuck up,” and hopefully will focus-in further and try to see if it is intentional or not.
Perhaps is not tuned-in by failure. Maybe the audience tunes out, which we can understand. Who is not prone look at our watches when we’re confronted with really bad acting? So, in the face of some awfully uncomfortable pauses and painful silences, we understand how an audience would rather “turn off” than have to witness/be involved with the performance’s failure.
However, we hope our audience enjoys Jayne and Jeremey and their “god talons.” We hope the audience, too, can peer down and have a laugh at it all, while Tenebrism goes horribly wrong.
It’s funny, we can never decide if Jayne and Jeremey are laughing because we’re fooling you all, or because you caught them fooling, but we love the joke so much we can’t stop doing the show.
Who cares if we steal from Forced Entertainment, they’ve stolen lots of stuff too. All you have to do is give credit. Cause, in the end, after you steal it, it is never the same coming from you. Thank you T.S. Elliot, Shakespeare, and Tim Etchells.
Finally, one other great thing about Tenebrism is its doses of social commentary. We hope to mature this practice into a regular habit for LLwL. Within our performances, we have the power to continue to do work that continues to broach socio/political subjects that are not easy to digest. For example, after Jayne and Jeremey recreate the scene from Control where Ian Curtis has his first epileptic seizure, and they take him to the emergency room for treatment, Jeremey has a small section of “text” where he describes England’s National Health Service, the NHS. After performing a gratuitously long caricature of a seizure, he seamlessly blends the performance into a monologue about how “they didn’t worry, they had no second-thoughts, and took Ian straight to the Emergency Room, because there, in the UK, they have something called the NHS, which stands for the National Health Service, where any citizen of the United Kingdom is granted the medical attention they require, no matter what, because it is provided by their government…unlike in this country---and so they’re standing in the emergency room….”
It is in such seamless tangents, that Tenebrism can pack socially relevant material, while maintaining the “rules” of the performance as game. A game that only Jeremey and Jayne know how to play.
Copyright - Jeremey Catterton 2008
