Beginning Middle Ending

When I started Beginning Middle End I was thinking about what the bear in The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare would have done when it left the stage. When we performed the piece I don’t leave the stage at all. The theatre in a city in a country very far away from home didn’t have any wings. So there was nowhere to exit pursued by a bear. I was going round in circles.

We premiered the show last night and one of the most interesting comments made by an audience member was that we were always present in each others’ worlds. I thought we would be marked by absence; absence from each others’ processes; absence from the rehearsal space; absence of time. We worked apart for more time than we worked together and I was concerned there would be gaps in our logic as a result. As Jochem Naafs put it in his introduction to the performance http://www.playfulperformance.nl;

The question is what it means to have such a structure for both the making process and the performance you’ll see tonight. Next to collaboration and autonomy this structure also provided content. What is beginning? What is ending? What is it like to be in the middle? And how do a beginning, a middle and an end relate and interact? In the end this last question is perhaps the question I was thinking of as a problem in the beginning while reading the proposal. Now I would rather see it as a challenging idea to work from rather then a question that needs to be answered.

It is the longest I have stood still onstage. It is the longest I have stood still in my underwear. It is the longest I have stood still. I was not doing anything. I was not the focus. I was not the centre of attention until the end. When I started Beginning Middle End I was thinking about what the bear in The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare would have done when it left the stage. Now we have left the stage it resonates in different ways for me. I am no longer very far away from home, but instead very far away from the theatre where I was standing naked in front of a room full of strangers.

Working with other artists, I have learned how to express myself and respond to feedback I was not used to receiving in new ways. Sometimes it was, as Adrian Heathfield describes post-event writing, a beautiful catastrophe of misunderstanding. We wrote letters to each other in our own languages, in our own handwriting. As Mole Wetherell says, the thing with letters is, by the time they arrive the whole world has changed around you.

This process will continue to shape my practice beyond the end. We said in our proposal we wanted to find a way to enter each other’s practices and exit our own. It may be too early to tell if we succeeded but already my work has been informed by wearing, as Andrea says, someone else’s glasses.

Michael Pinchbeck 2009