Last night @HannahNicklin tweeted: “Fuck, amazing gig. Amazing. Realised that everything I love about DIY punk scene is very similar to the best parts of the theatre community.”
To which I replied: “Cross-artform, cross-genre, cross-continent - small scale, culturally distinctive, alternative producers of experience.”
By which I think I meant: I agree that perhaps we can see some correspondence in the DIY spirit across both the ‘theatrical underground’ and the ‘musical underground’.
No one really talks about a ‘theatrical underground’, partly perhaps because the artform is too small and closely-knit to justify such a tectonic definition. Come to think of it, no one really talks about a ‘musical underground’ any more either, under the weight of the mainstream’s lost certainties and taboos, postmodernism and a diffuse digital ecosystem.
But despite all this lack of talk, it might be possible, even instructive, to erect/resurrect a notion of theatrical and musical undergrounds, and maybe even have them mean something.
You can’t see either. They are not single entities, not unified or even connected, but rather a shared structural-marginal place. They often work in productive tension with their dominant institutions, at once resisting and coming into their orbit. They work at the level of refusal. They modify and adapt small performance spaces. They are engaged with experimental processes, or screwing with existing processes. They often produce ‘difficult’ or extreme work. They typically lack infrastructure, then fetishise that lack. There is a notion of newness and avant-gardism, however attenuated. They alter, reverse, progress, and mess. They deconstruct the spectacle, by default as much as design. They consider themselves authentic. They produce dislocations, futures, new cultural spaces, oddities, chance meetings, hauntopossiblities, archaeologies, alternatives.
Which I think just about holds water, and if so, then Exeunt is absolutely about championing these ideas and artists. However. Underground, smallscale, DIY, call it what you will - I won’t immediately be rushing to put all my critical eggs into this basket.
Around the mid-2000s music criticism underwent a set of internal debates entitled rockism vs. poptimism (the latter a Simon Reynolds coinage) in which key critics sought to move crit away from rock and towards an acceptance of pop. The argument, as it might very roughly pertain here, ran something like this: rockist values stress a certain (white, booshwah) authenticity, art, small scale, avant-gardism. Mainstream work is blanketly devalued by the rockist because it is fake or inauthentic, it is popular with the masses, it does not have progressive intentions. Ultimately, or so the poptimist argument went, rockism could not find terms other than it’s own (white, booshwah, Frankfurtian) through which to understand the value of work. It was cut-off from ordinary enjoyment.
In contrast Poptimism argued for a qualified relativism. In true pomo style it allowed itself to love the big, the vulgar, the trashy, even to, in some ways, love the machine. It asked that pop be taken on its own terms and merits, that it might be partially seen through the eyes of its audiences. Underpinning all this, the claim that genuinely good work existed in mainstream pop, if only critics would care to look.
Obviously this maps onto theatre only very very roughly; however I’m intrigued as to how poptimism might be conceived of in regard to our own glossy mainstream. How we might as critics come to the overground and it’s audiences, not with blanket pre-conceptions of McMusicals but with a mind to honestly examining their meanings, perhaps their subversions, their mometary extremities, their artistic strengths. Conversely, if we think small, we might always be thinking ‘white middle-class and educated’. Small can often mean reaction, it can mean lack of ambition. I fear for a theatre that smells like a hipster vegan cafe, as much as for one that smells like a boutique organic perfumery. We should check our privilege. Hoping a black person turns up to your mixed-media animated collage about fairies is not a viable way to consider your audience. Popularity matters. Audience reach and numbers matter. Theatre should not be an elite sport.
If every small theatre company behaved like Crass there would be a real problem of bad art and ghettoisation - as if, in the grand scheme of things, theatre didn’t have those problems enough already.
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EDIT
Andrew Haydon has anticipated some of the thrust here, tweeting in response:
“Or: totally ignored by most people, making no impression on anything and culturally stagnant?”
Which is a tad harsh on smallscale DIY theatre, not that I’d disagree with the first two clauses. Although it would be absolutely true of punk, which by now is so far decomposed it doesn’t smell at all (although a read of Griel Marcus’ Lipstick Traces will forever kid you its the most resonant thing ever to have happened in history) but which absolutely cannot be said of ‘underground music’ which (however you define might it) enjoys a rooted and constantly fertile place in the cultural soil, and ought to be the envy of theatre pretty much worldwide (which sounds like a curious notion, that theatre might be able to possibly envy music, but one I think i’ll try and expand upon in a further blog).
