WHEEL ME OUT

Participants let go in one of Vahid's workshops

Goossun Art-illery’s Artistic Director Vahid began his theatre career in Iran and has since studied with several masters of Western and Oriental theatre including Eugenio Barba, Augusto Boal and Akira Matsui. Here he talks about the unique training workshops he’s conducted with performers in London, Copenhagen and Toronto.

Interview by Sue Balint

In recent years you’ve shifted your focus from creating performances to training. How much of this is process for you and how much is product? Both. The process is a product in itself and vise versa. For me the only difference is whether you want to present what you are doing to outsiders or if you’re doing something which is not specifically for presentation. Otherwise both things are the same for me. One thing is certain: the work can always be improved and so can one’s skills.

That said, it was not a shift from making performances to training as you put it. The reason for not having produced any performances in recent years was that I did not want to make a performance under just any condition. I work in a certain way and the circumstances I was in were not suitable for producing a performance in the way I wanted.

How would you describe what you do in the workshops? What I do is ‘theatre’, for lack of a better word. It’s very difficult to explain what it is exactly since I am not interested in theatre as enactment or show business. Theatre for me is not about putting on performances; it’s a lifestyle. You do something because you have to, you can’t help yourself. Sometimes you have a chance to put it on stage and make it public, sometimes you don’t. It doesn’t change the intention. [British Director] Edward Gordon Craig says, “they perhaps asked why you wanted to go on the stage, and you could give no reasonable answer because you wanted to do that which no reasonable answer could explain; in other words, you wanted to fly.”

There you have your answer. It’s in-concrete and ambiguous but so is the theatre; basically you want to fly but you’re unable to. Hence ‘theatre’ for me is ultimately an endeavour to make something impossible, possible: a rebellion against our inability and our human limitation.

There is a strong ancestral link with the workshops and [Russian actor, director] Stanislavski, Edward Gordon Craig, [Polish director] Grotowski, [Denmark’s] Odin Theatre and thus a relation to ‘theatre’.

But what does ‘theatre’ mean to these reformists? For me, what connects these theatre-makers are two things: the technical research of craft and their vision.

But if you were to be concrete? I would say what I do is diagnose what is blocking our imagination to turn obstacles into possibilities. All this is done within the context of the performer’s craftsmanship in an organised performance situation. That is as concrete as it can get.

And it might not resonate with everyone. Sure! It might not. However there is a very good criteria for whether it works or not and that is the second day of the workshop - if the participants show up on the second day and want to continue, that’s good enough for me. It shows that they are willing to push forward and challenge themselves.

Tell me about the importance of body memory in your work. You’ve heard me say many times “let your body memorise it” or “let your body remember.” What we call memory is a complex process of remembering and forgetting. Memories are not forgotten so much as pushed back; they are kept in our body. As Grotowski says the body has no memory, the body is the memory.

Training is partially a way to access the subconscious through the conscious, creating and memorising multiple tensions in the body that invoke forgotten memories, associations, emotions etc. This makes sense like déjà vu does. There’s ‘that thing’ which is invoked which might not make sense rationally, but we recognise it as a ‘memory’. We take it for what it is.

Your relationship with each of the performers feels quite reciprocal. A teacher could stay very much on the outside. Watching you work, it doesn’t feel like that. You are certainly right. And that’s why I don’t like the word teacher. Teacher means transmitter. It’s normally someone who has already acquired a box of knowledge and is now giving out pieces to people, like from a box of chocolates. That’s not what I do. I prefer the Italian word, formatore [trainer]. It’s, as you said, learning in a reciprocal way. So you learn some new ways, devices, tools to learn more. That’s basically what happens here and that’s why it’s a never-ending process. The deeper the performers explore their imagination, the more they’re going to trigger my imagination on a deeper level as well - it all evolves. The more skill they get, the more focused and concentrated they become, the more challenging it gets for me because I have to catch up with them and open up my own imagination.

You create a very specific environment in the training room. It’s intentionally separate from the outside world. Theatre to me is the opposite of the social life. The choice of a different way of life, a different way of connecting with each other requires a different setting. And that’s why upon entering the training room we have to change the way we walk, the way we behave, the way we talk to one another. The behaviour of each individual entering the space should indicate that it is special, not just like anywhere else. In order to do what you see here, you have to organise your life somewhat differently. Every second is new and that needs an absolute presence and awareness, a receptivity and openness to things happening around you if you want to be creative.

There’s a lovely sort of freedom in that. Yes. Theatre is the path to freedom. In order to start anything creative one ought to become organic. Much of what we do here is in order to render that organicity, which means going back to the child, back to the animal. The conventions of social life are based either on fear or need, which are conservative by default and hence limiting. In order to become creative, we have to go to the opposite, somehow go back and restore those things that have been suppressed and then try to build from there.

Basically what we do here is try to deconstruct social behaviour; daily behaviour. To do that we cut it to pieces. That might be ultimately what art is. Decroux, the mime master, said that art is “decomposition of the natural and re-composition of the ideal.” It’s like demolishing a house and building anew a building with the bricks taken from under the debris. WMO

More about Vahid and Goossun Art-illery

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