What a Cheek!

“Let’s watch”: the ‘O’, the beginning of everything, and the open mouth of sound (as it was described before) is starting. Yes, ‘O’ is for orifice, the original inspiration, then the loud report and vibrating buttocks that gets everything going.

It is a hoot!

We put up one hand. Yes, it was us, we say – using our wind to blow away the thick layer of dust which lies upon the piles and bundles of our coloured and aging skin. What a way this is to start 2014! Then with our other hand we idly trace our index ‘pointer’ finger across the surfaces. Yes, it was us, we repeat with a smile upon our faces.
(NOTE: The smile has no meaning – “Never apologise! Never Explain!” aka Jonny Depp et al).

Oops!

So without a moment’s guilt I admit that the naming of The Curator Challenge is already in need of correction (the whacky title I gave for my Wordstall 2014 annual folder, and quoting Kafka for goodness sake last week – Ha! Ha!). Yes, it is about the archive, but that is not all, and, although there are the daily personal tasks of playback, and the not to be neglected practice of maintaining our (re)collections, it is at least half also about performance: did we let off and make a good sound?

So better name the folder The Conductor Challenge. Or The Curator/Conductor Challenge even – What pompous cheek! I fart at ye.

Practice and Performance. I happen to be just back from Reading and a first Core Training weekend in Playback Theatre in which these two words also figured large; we form an ‘O’ at the start of everything, there being a containing ritual dimension as well as an art to it; we tell our stories – real stories, the stories of our lives; a ‘Conductor’ is chosen to be the key ritual figure between teller, citizen actors and audience -“Let’s watch” he/she always says when everything is ready; we then see our stories played back to us – sometimes a word, a feeling or a contradictory pair of feelings, sometimes a longer moment or episodes, and then sometimes the whole story; there is also always a third dimension to the work, the social and moral, because everything being played is set in ethical context, as we ask who is the work for.

Who is the work for – Is it for me? Is it for us?

For instance, who is the Wordstall practice and performance for? We also remembered to ask this question of each other at our first meeting of 2014 in Exeter a week ago, or a question akin to it. Exploring our practice and performance we came up with a list of four languages, which we use here for our storytelling, and will continue to do so depending on the context:
1. language of psychoanalysis (safe methods for finding words for all our misery)
2. language of field signs and track markers (triangulations using our differences, when we are lost – (say) in ‘mitteleuropa’)
3. language of faith (humble ways when we deeply don’t know)
4. bare-faced cheek (“Never apologise! Never Explain!”)

And I propose, bare-faced cheek trumps them all – that is the practice and performance of the comic field (if you don’t know, clever dick!)

I’ve also begun reading Rabelais , the 2006 translation by M A Screech, in order to help my practice. Screech tells us ( ‘Homage to Rabelais‘ LRB Archive, Vol. 6 No. 17 · 20 September 1984, pages 11-13) that Rabelais, the fifteenth century priest, physician, healer, clever dick, used high/low and kind/cruel laughter to explore every aspect of life, and to take us where we would otherwise refuse to go; to reach and expose every level of human hell, poverty, war, violence and cruelty; to reach the extremes of illness, terminal cancer and the worst places of dying -even to the foot of the Cross (ie the most extreme place for Christians to go) and beyond; to reach even paeodophilia and rape.

The Rabelaisian proposition of Ethics is thus: that cheek is the best weapon in the world we have against men’s cruelty and violence; and that cheek is the best personal tool to lift each of us out of the realm of human misery and suffering.

Meanwhile I read that celebrity singer Morrisey is in trouble again. “I see no difference between eating animals and paedophilia” he has announced on his fansite a few days ago.

What a cheek (and… only perhaps… he is just a little lost in his own self-importance and could do with a dose of languages 1. 2. and 3. above), I love it!


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