Spalding Gray

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Perpetual Saturdays (1981)

SOURCE: Spalding Gray, "Perpetual Saturdays," in Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1981, pp. 46-9.

[In the essay below, Gray offers his observations on performance and on experimental theater, which he calls "backyard theater. "]

I never could relate to the term "avant-garde." When I see a term like that I automatically want to make my own American translation. I want to translate it into, "The Theatre of the Backyard," or even more American, "backyard theatre."

As a boy, growing up in America, I loved Saturdays. Saturday was my favorite day of the week and my secret ambition was to make every day into Saturday. With this attitude, it took me fifteen years, instead of twelve, to get out of school but I did get out and I did eventually find Elizabeth LeCompte, Richard Schechner, the Performing Garage and the whole group. I found them. They found me. We found each other.

To make a long story (The Drama Review, Autoperformance Issue, T81) short, I found my backyard. I found my perpetual Saturdays.

Other than being a part of the human race, I have never been aware of being a part of any movement. The radical child in me searched for a place to play. I call it "radical" because the pursuit of play in our culture is a radical act. It is also a very political act as everything we do with any kind of full commitment is political. And by "play," I don't mean weekend leisure activity, I mean viewing one's life as a total act of constructive play. The abolition of weekend consciousness. The decline and downfall of Saturdays.

Backyard theatre is an impossible kind of theatre to make without a backyard and the Wooster Group/Performance Group only grew up because it had the Performing Garage as its backyard. Also, the group grew up realizing how fragile a thing real adult "playing" is. We needed a special time and place in which to play and soon realized we had to work to preserve that place and time. So, Saturdays blended into Mondays and the whole thing took off into a really creative balance of work and play.

Liz LeCompte and I first began Sakonnet Point by playing with flashlights. Nothing more, nothing less. If we had any idea of being a part of the "avant-garde" we were not conscious of it. What we were conscious of was that we were inspired by, and wanted to imitate, some of the best American backyard theatre in the world. We saw the groups that Richard mentioned in his article. It was a wonderful experience for Liz and me. Before we came to New York, we never dreamed such things existed or could exist. Seeing it gave us the courage to do our own work. We quickly realized that when you do not make much money for what you do, you better be sure that you're doing what you want to do. In fact, that is the most positive aspect of a lack of funds. It makes you question yourself down to the bone. What is it we want? We kept asking and we made one piece that turned into four. We struck a rich well of personal imagery. We spread seeds. We got fruit but the seeds we spread were not in marked packages and that was all the better because the fruit was such a surprise.

I can't imagine wanting to work if I knew what it was I wanted to make before I made it. I can't imagine stopping a productive process in order to develop a system about a past part of that process in order to teach it. Try to develop a system about American backyards? Try it. Maybe a system about English, French or Dutch back-yards but American?

I don't want to slow down or stop in order to teach and yet I am teaching a course in autobiographic composition at New York University's Experimental Theatre Wing this fall. What I do when I "teach" is to bring in present work/play problems. I take what's on my desk or in my head or body and bring it into class. It's about what's going on for me now. It's not about specific significant knowledge of the past. It's about giving energy and presence to the class with the hope that one student might be lucky enough to find a backyard.

Because theatre is a temporal art, you've got to be there for it. No amount of reading Artaud can tell you what he did. His works are not literature. They are descriptions and scenarios of temporal events. Events that needed to have their being in time. Theatre is about presence = Life = Death. The Wooster Group/Performance Group has played, over the years, to large audiences. People came. People saw. They can't say they didn't. If there is a future for the world there is a future for backyard theatre. There is no more a system to this theatre than there was a system to my Saturdays. They were random and chaotic.

Also, there is hope for passing it all down. It's one that Richard doesn't mention. A few weeks ago I was in a bookstore and a man who worked there came up to me and began to tell me how much he had loved the Wooster Group's production of Nayatt School. His description was so intense and so vivid that he began to turn me on to the piece. He brought tears to my eyes and I wanted not only to be doing it again but I could also see it from his outside view as he told it. It was at this point that I realized that his way of transmitting dramatic knowledge was orally. Like the Irish before the English and Tibetans before the Chinese, he was employing the old oral tradition. I like that. It's a fresh breath in these high tech times and it was there, present with all its human energy and vividness.

For me there is nothing larger than the personal when it is communicated well. The very act of communication takes it into a "larger vein" and brings it back to the community. The personal confessional, stripped of its grand theatrical metaphors, is what matters to me now. I am trying to redefine what is significant for me. I am trying to write and speak from my heart, or as my lines from Walden went in Commune: "I want to speak some-where with out bounds, a man in his waking moment to men in their waking moments." (Of course, I have to, and want to add, "women in their waking moments.") This personal exploration has made me more politically aware because now that I've come to myself as authority I have found that I still feel repressed and because of this feeling of repression I am forced to look further into the outside world for its source.

After ten years of working in that windowless hothouse, art house, backyard of a Performing Garage, I began to wonder what was outside. What about "the people?" I longed to be with them. I longed to do what they did and feel what they felt. I thought the group was an artificial "polis" and I wanted out. And at last, when I did get out, I found myself in another group. It was the downtown community of New York and I looked around for "the people" and instead I saw a group trying to survive in a corrupt world that contained a corrupt country that contained a corrupt "City" that was controlled by the rich and I realized that all of us, not just Robert Wilson, but all of us in the "arts," are pets of the rich. We may be different breeds, some mutts some pedigrees, but we are all pets of the rich.

Often I have the fantasy that my work will lead me back full circle to where I started and I will know the place for the first time. I fantasize that if I am true to art it will be the graceful vehicle which will return me to life. Oh, what longings; I will move to Oregon. I will teach sixth grade. I will fall in love. I will marry. I will have three children and I will not reflect. I will die when I die. It will go on without me and without my endless commentary.

I know it's a fantasy because I know I have lost my innocence. Somewhere along the line, every action became for me a piece of theatre. At first it was a protection against the deep and painful realization that every act is a futile act. Every act is a ridiculous dance on the toothy edge of the jaws of time. Then it became more studied. It became art. It became the crazy guy who waves goodbye just before he goes down into the jaws.

Finally, for me, the whole issue is not about choice. I never felt I had a choice. Theatre has been my affliction and my salvation. I do it because I have to and I can clearly say this need, this affliction, this salvation, is neither declining, nor is it falling.

Author's Note to Swimming to Cambodia (1985)

SOURCE: "Author's Note," in Swimming to Cambodia, Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1985, pp. xv-xviii.

[The following essay prefaced the published version of Swimming to Cambodia. Gray characterizes himself as a "poetic reporter" who, unlike traditional journalists, prefers to "give the facts a chance to settle down until at last they blend, bubble and mix in the swamp of dream, memory and reflection."]

In Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges the author relates, "I remember my father said to me something about memory. He said, 'I thought I could recall my childhood when we first came to Buenos Aires, but now I know that I can't. … Every time I recall something I'm not recalling it really, I'm recalling the last time I recalled it, I'm recalling my last memory of it.'"

Swimming to Cambodia evolved over two years and almost two hundred performances. It was constructed by recalling the first image in my memory of each previous performance, so it evolved almost like a children's "Round Robin" game in which a phrase is whispered around and around a circle until the new phrase is stated aloud and compared with the original. The finished product is a result of a series of organic, creative mistakes—perception itself becoming the editor of the final report.

It is this subconscious way of working, rather than any conscious contrivance or manipulation, that captures my imagination. I am interested in what happens to the so-called facts after they have passed through performance and registered on my memory. Each performance becomes like another person whispering a slightly altered phrase. My job is then to let my intuitive side make choices—and there is never a lack of material, because all human culture is art. It is all a conscious contrivance for the purpose of survival. All I have to do is look at what's around me.

So I like to think of myself as a kind of "poetic reporter," more like an impressionist painter than a photographer. Most reporters get the facts out as quickly as possible—fresh news is the best news. I do just the opposite. I give the facts a chance to settle down until at last they blend, bubble and mix in the swamp of dream, memory and reflection.

It was almost six months after the filming of The Killing Fields that I began my first reports, and more than two years passed before I made my last adjustments. Over that time, Swimming to Cambodia evolved into a very personal work in which I made the experience my own. Life made a theme of itself and finally transformed itself into a work of fiction.

I titled this work Swimming to Cambodia when I realized that to try to imagine what went on in that country during the gruesome period from 1966 to the present would be a task equal to swimming there from New York. Still, in spite of how horrible it seems to allow entire nations to be wiped out, I opted for tolerance, and beneath tolerance, my bottom line, humor. If ever I thought that God could understand American, I would pray and the prayer would go, "Dear God, please, please let us keep our sense of humor." I still understand and love America, precisely for its sense of humor.

When, in Woody Allen's film Stardust Memories, a group of extra-terrestrials lands in his proximity, Woody hopes to get some answers. He asks, "Shouldn't I stop making movies and do something that counts, like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something?" The otherworldly reply: "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes." Humor. The bottom line.

I'm convinced that all meaning is to be found only in reflection. Swimming to Cambodia is an attempt at that kind of reflection.

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