Among the producers today of Beckett’s plays and writing, Gare St Lazare (GSL) has honed intersections between disciplines and ‘categories’ of medium – performance, art, sound, choreography and more - to cohere a multi-disciplinarity of form that renders Beckett’s work extraordinarily tangible and open. GSL has worked on ‘How It Is’ (HII) for over 10 years, one of Samuel Beckett’s most enigmatic and linguistically stunning works, a narrative without punctuation marks, that blends form and content to create a language artform of intensely visceral and visual effect.
While HII is live in front of a live audience, it is not Performance Art per se, a form which tends to refer to artists who make their work using their own body in the moment rather than respond to another’s script. Nevertheless GSL’s production succeeds in imparting to the work a sense of actioning the here and now, of creating images in their moment of doing and of conveying through the protagonist the notion of the self as site. This unfolding by doing further choreographs its reception by the audience. In addition, not only does GSL’s staging straddle multiple art forms, it also includes the audience as intrinsic to the event.
To see this work produced and performed in a gallery / exhibition context rather than a theatre structure, is evidence of GSL’s unique capacity to convey the power of Beckett’s transferability across media. They have evolved forms of working that have distilled the ‘structural play’ (in Brian O’Doherty’s words) of Beckett’s intention.
Beckett’s interest in art and film, his interest in evoking detritus and dust and the notion of things broken and decaying, have reciprocal potency for numerous artists throughout the 20th and 21st century. Beckett may himself have observed Man Ray’s Dust Breeding (1920), a photograph of dust gathering on Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’. Mud is the medium to which we return: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ and in which the protagonist drags himself in the darkness with a sack of tins and a tin-opener. Mud here may also imply paint and the idea of painting in motion, using the body as a paint brush.
Beckett was particularly absorbed by the fluctuating images in the paintings of Bram Van Velde and of Jack B. Yeats, in which the viewer finds it impossible to stabilise a position in relation to pictorial space. Seeming to exist between figuration and abstraction, what one sees in the painting keeps changing – the crisis in the subject-object relation which characterises all of Beckett’s writing. Beckett reduces his character’s location, movement and sound, paring backing and binding all to an impotence that undoes itself, at times comically so.
Working with artist Michael Craig Martin as design consultant for the staging at Palazzo Diedo has resulted in a new component to the production of HII: a magenta tableau upon which the protagonist becomes the ‘enunciation’ of living language and visual form all in one.
HII, like all art, reveals the grain of its making, its labours, thoughts, practices, ideas and stories over time - the ultimate achievement of GSL in this production. Beckett’s art is shown to contain marginalised or silenced experiences that never fall out of time and point to the need today to provide outlets and support for voices and visions still struggling for expression.