The Gathering: A Lifegame Question for You
Photo: Pendulum Phelim McDermott
Next week Phelim, I, and the children, are going on holiday. We will be gathering as we go - keeping an eye out for the kind of shells and stones that always come back, in the bottom of bags, from a family holiday, and keeping an eye out for Improbable clues, as part of our treasure hunt for a home.
We booked it last minute and decided where to go in a suitably improbable way. When we began wondering where our creative home might be, we swung a pendulum over a map of the UK. We drew a line across the axis it swung along. Then we moved position, swung it again, drew another line. The point where the lines crossed created an ‘X’. So, in true treasure hunt style, we decided to head for the ‘X’ on our hols.
We are actually traveling near Manchester, where Phelim grew up, but it is not an area to which he feels a strong connection. Here’s the truth of the matter: the reason we have to decide on our destination with the swing of a pendulum, the reason for needing to conduct this whole quest in the first place, is that neither Phelim, Lee, nor I, feel drawn to any place in particular.
I have never felt in deep relationship with a place. This is strange because my parents never moved. Coming, as they did, from childhoods in which they were both uprooted in traumatic ways- due to illness, war, death - they wanted to provide us with the stability they never had. When they bought the family home in 1963, in a little village outside Oxford, they knew that was it - they were not budging. And yet, fifty-five years later, I was amused to find out my mother had not once walked through University Parks, in Oxford. My parents’ relationship was never to the land - it was to books, to thought, to a scholastic practice, not to the specific landscape where the river Ray meets the river Cherwell, and the Cherwell flows on into the Thames.
I see this in Improbable too - thus far, the deep enduring relationship that we have is to a creative practice, not a place. There are many places, many venues, through which we have passed, from Camden People’s Theatre to the Sydney Opera House, from York Hall in Bethnal Green to the Met in New York, but the constant, committed relationship has been to the stuff we have done, not where we have done it.
I look on with some interest, some envy, at other artists whose work has been defined by and rooted in a landscape, a locality - Alan Garner, David Almond, Knee-High - and I wonder what that is like, if I, if we, could ever have this? This sense of belonging, this committed love, not only for something - a set of practices - but for somewhere.
I remember worrying as a child about love, about whether it was real, or only the stuff of stories, a happy-ever-after fantasy. My mother reassured me: yes, she said, lasting love is possible but there isn’t necessarily only one person with whom you can have it. Not one Mrs/ Ms/ Mr, non-binary Right, (she didn’t list all those pronoun options - this was 1979) and also, she said, you have to work at it. In other words, the fantastical bit is the idea that if you can just track down the single, right person in the world, then the happy-ever-after will follow without effort - but the love part, my mother said, could be real enough. Sound advice, and my parents had a good marriage. Now my father is dead and my mother is 80, and will be coming with us where ever we go, but her advice comes back to me as I think about our quest to love a place. There is not one right place for us to find, and once we get there, wherever it is, we are going to have to work at it. I think we are ready to do that work. We are ready to stop, to commit, ‘till death do us part.’ Because - let’s face it - that’s one way to put the question: where do we want to die?
It sounds like a question that could come up in Lifegame. Lifegame, for those of you who don’t know, is a core Improbable show, one of those shows that has helped shape our practice. It is a show initially invented by Keith Johnstone, author of Impro. In it, on one side of the stage an interviewer asks a guest a series of questions: ‘Where did you grow up? What was home like? What is your earliest memory?’ On the other side of the stage is a team of improvisers who transform the guest’s answers into scenes. The audience watches the scenes, and watches the guest, watching the scenes. It can be hilarious and heart-breaking and can go from one to the other in a split second. It is good theatre. In fact, Johnstone once said of Lifegame, “If theatre didn’t exist, this would be a good place to start.”
Phelim had a vision this week of that quote carved up high on the beam of our new space-to-be. It seems right. We know we do not want to run a venue, nothing with that amount of paraphernalia. What we are dreaming of is something simpler, emptier. The kind of space inside which you might invent theatre, if it didn’t exist. I notice there is a pattern emerging, of beginnings, of endings. Where could we go to invent theatre from scratch? Where could we begin again? Where could we die? These are the questions we are holding.
And as we hold these opposites, one thing becomes clear. ‘Where?’ is not really the main question. Or rather obsessing about where is definitely not the right answer, just as worrying about Ms/ Mr/ Trans Right is not the best way to find a partner. The clues or answers we have been sent so far that feel most resonant are often the ones in which, rather than answering ‘where,’ people have instead shared with us their dreams or disappointments, their own love stories. In the end, it may not really matter where we move. I think, underneath ‘where should we go?’, like streams under the land, are more urgent questions about our collective relationship to place, to earth, to life. I think more important than where we end up, is the process of us applying our practice - this thing to which we do have a long relationship - to the question of place.
One core element of our practice is collaboration, ensemble work, holding space for collective dreaming. So, as part of this, right now I want to turn the question around. Don’t tell us where we should go. Instead tell us where you would go. As if you were our Lifegame guest, if you want, please answer these questions:
Where do you love?
Where do you feel you belong?
Where do you want to die?
Post your answers below this blog, or send them to office@improbable.co.uk - And thank you for being a part of all that we are gathering.
