Introducing Minus Theatre 2025, by way of Alejandro Zambra, Not to Read

Alejandro Zambra is writing in 2011, this about Animales domésticos, a book by Alejandra Costamagna. Titled "This is Like a Story by Alejandra Costamagna," it is collected in his Not to Read, Fitzcarraldo editions, 2018, a kind of "literary autobiography" says his translator, Megan McDowell—a "'How to Read,' that comes before the 'How to Write.'" A book, then, after my own heart, a positive antinomianism, to call a 'How to Read' Not to Read, in Spanish, No Leer, which, although first published in Spanish, in its English edition contains new essays, McDowell says, "short and pointed."

On Costamagna, whom Zambra refers to by her first name, her—as is not said so often today—Christian name, as if he knows her, he writes: "she respects her readers enormously. –

I think it's necessary to emphasize that. Alejandra respects readers and in that distinguishes herself from that crowd of writers who publish novels already underlined, with words in bold and italics, since they are afraid that readers won't understand and so they accentuate and posture and yell.

"That fear, the fear of ending up talking to yourself" – he writes, a buzzing sound as I typed the quote above, a wasp with a long curved abdomen striped yellow and black: would I add that detail were I talking to myself? I let it out the window and as I did so I touched it with my hand, lucky it didn't bite. ..."is understandable—it's a whisper that's impossible to separate from the profession." And then,

But a person who writes must be willing to talk to herself, because a writer is one who tries to say something that hasn't been said, something that is probably difficult or even impossible to say.

It's not so much this characterisation of the writer that interests me but the fear of talking to oneself, and overcoming it. Or not. My last weblog, the change to this one something about which Gareth asks me in this post, and this, that follows it, I was able to see who read my posts and where they came from, with outsidelight I can't. I see only the subscribers, not many, and I see their engagement. An odd thing to put a figure on. (It makes me think of the engagement surveys I'm supposed to do at work, the impulse that comes from them not to engage.) So here there is a good chance I am talking to myself.

Easy to be self-conscious. How did we overcome that with Minus? (I am starting workshops at and in collaboration with Ellen Melville Centre on Monday.) More to the point, however, that we did distinguish ourselves in our performances from those afraid they won't be understood, who accentuate and posture and yell. Some call it theatricality and it is also called exaggeration or making a character bigger, the necessity felt when on the stage to accentuate and posture and yell, out of fear.

The fear in this case is not talking to oneself but of a wholly different kind. Is it that I will be lost? And if we were going to accentuate that we would accentuate the I.

The fear on-stage is not that you are talking to yourself—and I think it carries over into rehearsal. It comes from the vulnerability felt that you will not please—the audience, the director, any outside eye, but also yourself: you will let yourself down. And it bounces between these points. Only a kind word, a hint, yes, this is right, can still the fear.

In Minus the suggestion has always been present that we are doing it for ourselves so that the performances were secondary—at least, the pleasure in performance came more from the group interaction than it originated in the audience, who often could not understand. They could not understand in more ways than one: the fact that from 2013's White Flower on we had established each member of the group would use their own first language, so the audience who did not speak Brazilian Portuguese would not understand, or Chinese, Khoisan, Korean, Russian, English, all of which were at one point represented on stage at once.

They did not understand the stories, the threads guiding the patterns of exchanges between performers. They could not follow them. Most importantly, the audience did not understand why, leading not to understand in the strongest sense of not supporting and even disliking the kind of theatre we were doing.

The Minuses were more or less oblivious to this. You might say they were used to talking, playing, to themselves. And if we did get one or two who decided the best course was to accentuate and posture and yell, the group showed its displeasure. If they did not stop being so big on stage they usually found Minus was not the place for them and left.

In performance the group had subtle ways of undermining, cutting down to size the big egos, which didn't always work because it wasn't always understood this was what was going on. Again, I think it comes back to this word, understand. Its strongest sense is being like the floor, like gravity, like the actor's body, standing up on its own. And clearly standing up in the movement and duration of the group.

This was one critique brought by Justin Clemens examining the work as research. The anthropic prevails, the upright homo erectus, as a stopping point for any possible becoming. The only becoming possible, becoming upright and standing: why was there not more horizontality?

It's an interesting question, particularly in view of the languages, of the babel. Anthropocentricity. I don't believe I ever claimed we were engaging in nonhuman becomings, of the kind that Deleuze and Guattari praise in A Thousand Plateaus. I was more worried the work would not stand up on its own. Which is something Deleuze and Guattari talk about the work of art doing in What is Philosophy?

Edward Scheer said in his examiner's report Artaud had at least held onto some sort of kernel, of sense or theatrical truth, whereas that I, with Minus, had reduced it to degree zero. I took this as a kind of compliment. The examiners, including the third, Peter Pál Pelbart, saw only one production, one performance, Visit Me Genius; they had only the report, the exegesis to rely on to appreciate how we had got to degree zero. Then, it wasn't really this.

Paul Barrett, a great actor and family friend—his Diaghilev in Robert David MacDonald's Chinchilla superb—attended VMG. Having just come from a touring season of a Roger Hall, he said the Minus show was the perfect antidote as simply an exploration of emotional connection, of which, in the national treasure of comedy theatre's show, there was none. So, this read. It got through. It got through because he was open to it.

Another production: Textured Passages, performed in an art gallery, with an exhibition of the same name. I did not talk to her, but on report Julie Ferguson, who was there, said, watching the show, she found her entire body tensing up, her hands clenched into fists. Noticing the effect the performance was having on her, she said to herself, Well this is no good. And consciously having relaxed herself, she enjoyed the show.

How and what it communicates has always been a little mysterious. And we haven't as a group been concerned with it—with either pleasing or displeasing our audience. Unless we've had someone with that fear, an illustration of underlining their actions, using the stage to do so. It would be someone the group made fun of, who, in their vulnerability was afraid they would be lost.

Which makes it sound cruel. It wasn't. Or, it was as cruel to that actor, that member of the group, as it was to the audience and to any member of the audience, perhaps, also experiencing in their vulnerability the fear they were lost.

Lost in languages they didn't understand. Lost in stories they didn't get. Lost not knowing what we were doing it for. And—perhaps feeling made fun of, because the Minuses were having fun, and, perhaps at their expense. (Not that the tickets were expensive!)

Here I am talking to myself, not knowing whether I'm writing or conveying anything of the slightest interest to you; but not playing. Yet not entirely serious. Three ethical considerations marked the early development of Minus and its methods and form of theatre: sensitivity, with an emphasis on physical senses, particularly the sense of one's own body in relation to others' in space; generosity—the giving of time in one's attention to others; clarity. Clarity relates to clarity of gesture, the clarity of the world, which, according to Esa Kirkkopelto, an actor never thinks in a smaller gesture than, from a paper called “An Actor Never Thinks with Elements Smaller Than a World." (I checked the reference to be sure, in Minus Theatre: Scenes | Elements, p. 27.)

A bit more about the making fun; and this is something which might have been implicit in Justin Clemens's comment about the cliché of the vertical orientation of the human body: it's easy. The performer hasn't suffered the slightest rigour, of discipline, as in Grotowski's extensive physical training, or Hijikata's butoh or Artaud's breathing. As I said, the examiners did not see what Declan Donnellan calls the invisible work leading up to VMG or previous productions, to mark a difference or development, but then, is that what we were and are going to be, when workshops recommence after an hiatus of eight years, really up to?

Minus could only be serious, a serious practice, worthy of academic examination, if it thought. This is the sense I drew from Kirkkopelto's "An Actor Never Thinks with Elements Smaller than a World," how an actor and how a theatre thinks. What had prompted me I explore in What is A Practice? and in the 'biography of shock.' I had thought it sufficient simply to repeat ideas from a philosophical and theoretical context in the practice, to plug them in and see what worked, however I was led by the shock of being asked actually what I did in my practice, what it was we were doing that was doing the thinking and the research, whether—this was the risk—it was worthy of academic examination or not.

In other words, the practice had to evolve on its own—to use a theoretical term, it had to individuate, to become a, a practice, not the generic, my practice is in theatre. A practice in theatre being what we do. And, what we do being to think. To think for itself.

When I put it like that it doesn't sound fun, neither however is it a theatre of cruelty or a dance of darkness. Minus from a key moment, a moment that was primary but not a principle, not a theoretical insertion, description or philosophical concept, made sense to the people doing it. Perhaps in fact there were several but the one I am thinking of was that when language became a gesture of the body—and everybody in the workshop then saw it happen.

I recalled my theatre background around the idea that we prefer now actors to be connected to the depths of their bodies. We prefer that their actions are not the superficial or symbolic ones—strange, when I write that how Robert Wilson, who died this week, comes to mind.

His work made a virtue of being highly symbolic but in a dream-like way. The beautiful Mannerism of dreams, not that imposed by theatrical convention where to make a certain gesture is for it to mean a certain thing. To mean everything and nothing at once, but in Kirkkopelto's sense as well to make a world. Wilson's worlds were and are vast and timeless images.

We prefer in general for the voice to be natural and a trained voice resonates in the body which it comes from. It has depth. Maria's, an actress in Minus at the time of White Flower, 2013, second language English was very good. Her Korean first language had this quality of conveying in a way her English didn't something that was absolutely unique to her. I asked her to speak in Korean and a moment or so later I asked the group to use their first languages, at that time Russian, Chinese and English—and something else, that goes to what I am saying, dance.

Now this was seriously funny, a group of people who, except for those who spoke the same language, didn't understand what each of the others was saying. The realisation strikes me now, I don't know if I knew or said it then, that no one in the group actually spoke the same language as any other. This is because what is usually concealed about using language came to be heard: it is a voice. And the movements of a dancer no less, the slightest one an element no smaller than a world. A world. An individual world.

This group process of discovery came from a generic even clichéed, of insisting on sound and movement being grounded in the body, directorial gesture. It produced an individual practice. Minus what then? Minus the mastery that is presupposed of a generic even clichéed discipline in theatre.

Was it as easy as saying to the group, just be yourselves? A dancer dances. A musician makes music. An actor acts—that's where the formula goes awry: inverted commas are presupposed of the acts. An actor doesn't act, they "act." Or they act. They act. Or they ACT!

I think I have said to myself all that I want to for the time being. If you did happen to listen I hope you heard something here. I hope it sparked your interest and that you are in Freyberg Place tomorrow at 3pm so that we can find out what, beyond the theatre of elements, which is where VMG got to in 2017, suggested just as much by Kirkkopelto's 'with elements smaller than a world' (and the negative, never, with smaller is also in the Minus), as by Alphonso Lingis.

He gives the example of a supermarket queue. You are in a country where you don't speak the language, waiting. The person in front of you turns around, realising you are foreign here, they jointly see that you are not a foreign object but a human being. You share the same need for a ground to stand on, for the gravity to hold you to it, the air to breathe, the fluids that flow in your veins, and the means to keep them flowing that you have in your shopping basket. And in this realisation you both spontaneously burst out laughing.