PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Clarke: Paul | UK

‘The Horror, The Horror’:

Uninvited Guests’ Schlock as Cultural Traumatology

Paul Clarke

Director of Uninvited Guests

Lecturer in Theatre at Dartington College of Arts

See http://www.uninvited-guests.net/schlock/default.htm for a video trailer of Schlock.

Practical Propositions

This 40-minute presentation will use close viewing of video documentation to speak around and about Uninvited Guests’ current touring performance as practical research. ‘The Horror, The Horror’ follows a paper given at the PARIP 2003 conference, ’An Experiential Approach to Theory From Within Practice’, which put an argument for performance itself as research; for knowledge being disseminated experientially in and through performing and spectating practices. Rather than offering a meta-discursive paper that problematises the traditional opposition between theoretical and somatic ways of knowing, I will consider the discursive arguments articulated practically through Schlock.It is hoped that this case study will blur the distinction between the ‘theory of performance’ and the ‘performance of theory’ (Melrose), and between the critically reflexive processes of professional arts practice and academic Practice as Research.

As with previous works by Uninvited Guests, this performance project began with documentary interviews that formed the empirical research. The interviewees’ responses and related critical-theoretical readings were explored experientially by thinking-through-performance and somatic praxes. Research has been focused around two questions:

• What are the affects of reproducing traumatic effects, whether as visual representations or documentary descriptions?
• What is the relationship between real experiences of violence and the visceral pleasures of schlock horror movies?

Voicing Others’ Troubling Words

In Schlock the performers speak as mediums, through whom a litany of horrors pass and are voiced. In a form of linguistic sadomasochism, subject and object become confused, active and passive, male and female roles are exchanged.

The performers are ‘meeting point[s]’, nodes in a network of appropriated ‘language that flows into and flows out of’ (Tim Etchells) them. Through the channels of the performers’ voices, collisions and confusions take place between descriptions of B-movie horror and real events, spoken verbatim. The paper will discuss the implication and ethical positioning that take place both for the performers and audience, as such words pass between them, are given voice and heard.

A Cultural Traumatology

Schlock projects past cultural trauma onto the performers’ bodies: the exteriorisation of an internal world, comprised of real and televisual memories of violence and horror. The repeated rehearsals of different attitudes to violence, attempts to show the unrepresentable, producing a visual and imaginative pleasure mixed with pain.

These restagings of personally or culturally traumatic events both ward away ‘traumatic significance’ and affect, and open the temporary community of performers and spectators up to it. Uninvited Guests attempt to ‘return traumatic encounters with the real’ to the present, like victims of (communal, cultural) shock, ‘who in recurrent nightmares prepare for disasters/violent events that have already come’ (Hal Foster).

Discursive Practice

This case study will generate meta-discursive and epistemological questions around the validity of arts practice itself as research, and touring theatre as an experiential mode of disseminating knowledges. Uninvited Guests’ field of practice is located predominantly within live art and theatre, but involves interdisciplinary collaboration with a sound artist and reflects critically through performance on film and television, particularly drawing on visual material from, and writings on, the horror genre.

Funding and Dissemination

Schlock was co-commissioned by Leeds Met University Studio Theatre and Hull Time Based Arts and supported by Dartington College of Arts. Arts Council England South West funded the production and tour. Schlock toured to 11 UK venues and played for 22 nights during Autumn 2004 and Spring 2005.