(Re)Making a Better World: A Conversation with Charles Campbell

jay orffCollaboration is central to your work, and not just with performers and those expressly working on the production. For Skewed Visions, that engagement also seems to include, for example, interacting with the home in which a play is staged, or with a transportation system, or with the texts incorporated into a play. How far does your sense of collaboration go and why is this important?

charles campbell“Collaboration” is a scary word. Sometimes it means everybody talks at the same time, and no one is happy, and each person thinks, everyone else should just shut up and listen to me. At best, collaboration is a kind of open and receptive practice that accommodates the world outside without merely replicating it. It is a conversation, a dialog, an interaction in which everybody involved listens and talks coherently, but not only with people. Maybe that’s why I like collaborating with objects and spaces: They’re such good listeners, and so eloquent. And it’s been a useful term for my way of working, because my work always involves an encounter with something different — different people, different places, different things, different ideas – and then creating an experience in which this encounter can be manifested as an experience in time and space.

At the same time, “collaboration” has such relentlessly positive connotations: [the way most people use the term] doesn’t convey the misery that collaboration so often entails. It –- along with “compromise” and “love” –- is a word that often elides its complications, instead suggesting a bunch of Disney caricatures whistling their way into what, in real life, would be a miserable dank, dirty and dangerous pit, a situation that would have most of us clamoring for immediate reform if we didn’t benefit so clearly from the labor. 

joWould it be possible for a Skewed Visions piece to take place anywhere else other than the particular location where it had been created and staged? For instance, what would happen to The Car (a performance which takes place in a real moving car on actual city streets) if you were driving around rural North Dakota rather than on Twin Cities streets, for instance?

ccWe’ve thought a lot about whether we can tour our site-specific work. The answer is both yes and no — of course. The more stable the experience I am trying to facilitate is, the less sense it makes to move that piece from one site to another. However, Skewed Visions recently took parts of The Car to Bowling Green, Ohio, and we discovered in very practical terms what happens [when we shift the location]. Bowling Green is a very different kind of community than the Twin Cities, and we were not able, in the time we had, to adjust the piece the way we would need to in order to take best advantage of those differences. On the other hand, the experience was still a very positive one for us and for our necessarily rather small audiences.

The truth is that space is not empty, and it is not neutral. A given space always has its own structures and movements and history. It is always alien: We never belong. In making work, I am, in part, intending to draw attention to the space by interacting with it, by making new ways in which the site can be experienced – the ways it is seen, noticed. And my making is not empty or neutral either. I come with my own prejudices and capabilities, my own history. In other words, the contact between my work and the spaces in which it takes place is an encounter between the Self and the Other. The encounter that is my and Gulgun’s and Sean’s work is a tension between these irreconcilable realities of difference. And these encounters change both the space and us, and our work. They’re a true conversation in that there are always misunderstandings, conflicts, tensions, points of intersection and agreement; and in that conversation — between us, the space and the work we make there — much of what is “said” is left unheard, because we were chewing at the time and really needed to pee. Taking a performance elsewhere always means, for Skewed Visions, the confrontation with a new relationship, a new encounter with a different Other that will leave both of us changed.

joYou say you’re “pretty sure” what you do is theater. Where does the doubt come from?

ccI guess it depends on who you ask. I’ve been told I don’t do theater. I tell myself, at different times, I’m doing different things: dance, installation, object-theater, Interstitial Cross Media Platform Dingleberry Time Enhancement… What the hell is theater? I don’t know. Who cares, really?

But doubt comes from everywhere. I’m so insecure it’s a wonder my limbs don’t fall off; I’d put Descartes to shame. But there is also a positive side to doubt, and I don’t just mean skepticism. The uncertainty about whether something is working, whether an idea is good, whether what you want is possible to achieve — it’s sort of like an open door at the edge of a cliff. Without doubt the door is closed and – sure, you’ll never fall off a cliff, but – my god — you’ll never fall off a cliff. You’ll miss out on a sense of risk, a sense of danger, a sense of movement.

But my goal is not to redefine terms. My goal is to manifest the engagement of my thinking in the world. I imagine just like everyone else: Why do we go to work, fall in love, take out the garbage, work for justice, enjoy our friends, relish our enemies, write, read, talk? We are taking part in the world, inserting our little phrase in the greater conversation, thinking our paths across the wider human landscape.

joYou mentioned to me earlier that traditional stagecraft usually works to create a unified vision, but that you aim to create a multi-vocal, multifaceted production. How do you think this difference in approach impacts an audience member’s experience of a Skewed Visions show?

ccWho the hell cares about the audience? Okay, that’s clearly meant to be provocative. But there is a truth here that goes beyond a stereotype of self-absorbed artist and the unknowable nature of every audience. To responsibly, ethically, and meaningfully encounter an audience – or even just another person in the street – you have to in some way step back, burrow in backwards, get yourself out of the way: listen intently. You have to care.

But I think that model of stagecraft is based on an understanding of theater as a text: that a play is to be visually understood by the audience, as if reading a book. They watch and decode the images and words they see and hear, often translating metaphors and symbols into personally relevant objects of knowledge. Conventionally, the playwright has a vision that is combined with the vision of a director, several designers, actors, musicians, et al., and the goal is often to streamline and clarify this vision into coherency. But at least since Einstein, when relativity reared its disruptive head, it has become possible to imagine other ways of seeing the world, of experiencing art. The audience can be the observer, but they can also be the experimenter, the object, the experiment, etc. When you begin to think about the experience of performance in this way, so many more things become possible for both the artists and the audience. It is very exciting. And it is very hard to go back to seeing theater as just a good way to tell a good story.

Also, I find stories inherently suspect in that I find troubling what so many people admire about them: their ability to organize experience in a coherent and satisfying way. This ability to organize and cohere that which is chaotic and overwhelming is, by definition, subject to the whims and caprices of Power: the Authority of the Teller. So to talk about the audience, in one sense, is to make a distinction that really is mostly relevant only to a prior way of thinking about the performative act. When you come to a Skewed Visions performance, you are taking responsibility for your own experience. We will not tell you what you should hear. We will not show you what you are doing wrong. We are enacting our encounter with the world, and you must decide for yourself what you will get out of it. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, as long as it was deep. (Yeah.)

joYou have also organized several non-performance events under the Skewed Visions brand –- Screen, How Dare You! Workshops, and more –- in which you bring together a group of people to interact and discuss a film or art show or performance. In a way, these are alternate theater events, one-time collaborations between people who respond to a particular cultural artifact and then disperse, hopefully changed slightly.

ccYes, these things can be thought of as theater events, and I think, by now, it’s clear that the way we think about things is, for me, a fundamental issue to tackle. The intent behind these is… sort of like trying to recreate New York’s old Cedar Street Tavern, but without all the testosterone and vitriol -– we want to create places where interested people can come together over interesting things and exchange thoughts, incubate their respective babies. We all talk about a movie or a show after we’ve seen it, but this conversation is usually in the parking lot or in bed or, if we’re lucky, in a bar or café over buttered toast and milk. And often the level of conversation – especially in organized post-show discussions elsewhere – doesn’t get much sharper than a butter knife. Screen and How Dare You! are meant to be the grain of sand that these conversations can accrete around in this oyster that is the local community.

And it is interesting to think about these as alternate theater events because, in a way, it takes the performance out of theater, and leaves you with this empty space — but it’s a space which is also like theater, because of its delicate ephemerality, its openness, its temporal punctuation, and the possibility to extend itself through memory and association into a wider place in the culture. So, while I do hope that people come together for these things and are changed by them, I don’t think that’s much to ask. People can be changed by anything: bad news, a toothache, eating old fish. And I won’t romanticize coming together either; I find crowds highly dangerous. But in the end I am fascinated by cultural artifacts and hope to be one myself someday.

joIs fear more powerful than hope?

ccI just finished reading this book by Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, and it makes the case for fear as a historically prevalent philosophical, cultural and political tool in a wide variety of modes. I’d love to read one called Hope: The History of a Political Idea, but I don’t think it would be as thick. Fear can be so effective in so many ways: politically, aesthetically, culturally. There is more to our contemporary fascination with horror movies and zombies than cheap thrills. After seeing Shaun of the Dead in 2004, I realized there must be a connection between zombie movies and American military adventures, but someone else will have to write that dissertation.

On the other hand, I don’t think hope is the opposite of fear; they are never in competition with only each other. Hope often struggles against boredom and desperation as much as fear. Fear is often defeated as much by humor and distraction as by love or hope.

Maybe there is a life-affirming answer to this question, but I don’t have it. On the other hand, I don’t have a depressing, artists-always-wear-black, existential-crisis answer either. This is the kind of question that I would need to answer with a performance piece because it’s more than I can handle with words.