How Truth … Leaps (Stumbles) Across Stage

How Truth .. . Leaps (Stumbles) Across Stage Richard Foreman The first thing to say is that I believe in the efficacy of false starts. For the past ten years, the work that I do in the theatre has been built upon a structure of repeated false starts in the belief that the gesture, the impulse, which comes to nothing (which doesn't fulfill itself) ... fulfills that other thing which is truthfully operating through me.... Now, the theatre-which is my less-than - enthusiastically -embraced home-in it's relation to the spectator, classically equates truth with the power to convince. Something in the performance (emotion, style, Invention , rhythm: SOMETHING) ...must be what we call convincing-which is to say "masterful." Such mastery ... becomes aesthetic truth. The emotion convinces that it is real emotion; the stylistic cohesiveness convinces that its fabric hides no holes, etc. Even with the evoked interplay of illusion-andfact of modernist theatre, the theatrical production tries to convince of its mastery in that manipulation. Now I believe, of course-or, I find it interesting to operate under the assumption-that that need of the theatre to be effective, to be convincing, to testify to "truth" in such a manner ... is the heart of the unavoidable corruption and vulgarity of theatre. I believe that convincing my audience of anything-ESPECIALLY of the effectiveness or intelligence of myself as an artist, Imprisons and degrades that spectator so convinced. One reason I believe this is because I find myself, in my own work, imprisoned, hypnotized , fooled whenever I do something well, whenever I am (to myself) convincing In my mastery. Because at that point I sense I am, myself, hiding from truth behind the facade of the well built artistic edifice. So my work has been, over the past few years, to document my failure to really live up to the 91 rigors of that Impossible situation where one must show that all mastery Is anti-truth. The truth is ... when any artist makes something-even if It's only an Artaudian cry-that produced thing is an effect of deflection, or distance ...away not from any hypothetical source, of course, but away from that temporary nexus where the always overdetermined strands of cause meet and cross. So whatever I, as artist, make ... Is a fallIng-away-from-the-truth artifact; which-to the necessary extent that I'm not 100 percent strong and honest, I improperly try to re-direct toward that fallen-away-from-truth ... by falling Into the trap of trying to convince you, my audience, of SOMETHING (ANYTHING) about SOME of that object's qualities. I'm claiming, then, that truth ...seeks out art so that it can experience a turn against Itself (or away from Itself) ... and in that departure of truth from itself, and ONLY there ... productivity and proliferation are possible. David Warrilow and Kate Manheim In Foreman's Penguin Touquet And all the while, i-congenitally dishonest like all artists-try to recoup truth by convincing you something about some aspect of my artifact. It doesn't matter what aspect, just some ONE of the many. And that aspect about which I try to be convincing ...Is, clearly, historically later In time than any of the Innumerable overdetermining causes that were at work when the first Impulse toward that artifact began to function. 92 But you might well counter that claim by maintaining that the truth of the artifact ... is its functioning now, in concert with whoever Is perceiving it, In that network of assumed messages back and forth, etc. The Interesting thing Is that In that case-as opposed to an artifact which convinces-i.e., MISREPRESENTS Itself, i.e.-les: we then have an artifact which at least potentially dissolves within the multitude of messages in which It participates . O.K. That's desirable. Yes, I DO think that some sort of dissolving of the art object-which is invariably dishonest in its need to convince, Is desirable. But what seems most Interesting to me is to dissolve the art-work as selfconsciously as possible. Myself, I'd like to build it into the object ... In such a way that my actual...