A Method for Community Performance
Matter of Britain was to be performed by the village of Mayfield in East Sussex. Until this project, I had made observational documentaries, mostly out of my embarrassment for anything performative. That embarrassment was an anxiety about being simultaneously exposed and inauthentic. It would surely be inauthentic, therefore, to work on a project in which performance was necessary, in which the director’s natural disposition shied away from anything performative, and in which every performer would be what is termed ‘non-professional’ and might be as embarrassed and self-conscious as I was about performing.
And yet, the project was authentic to me because of the community involved - it was a community I was born into. The project would also be authentic, according to the Italian Neorealists, because untrained performers render the real. The untrained performer is idiosyncratic and particular before the camera, and is not weighted down by the modes of conventional acting. Instinctively, however, I felt that the performer’s authentic self could only emerge if the performer felt at ease, if any self-consciousness was eradicated. Establishing, therefore, a method in which the community could perform unself-consciously was essential.
The search for a performance method began with two filmmakers known for working with non-professional performers: Robert Bresson and Albert Serra. Serra uses multiple cameras, long lenses, and hours of digital footage to find un-composed and unself-conscious acts. Performers are both habitualised to the presence of the camera due to its constant and multiple presence, and they forget the camera due to the distance generated by the long lenses. Serra, additionally, is fond of filming people eating, walking and sleeping. These actions or inactions push aside conscious performances, either by rendering the performer oblivious or by distracting them with habitual actions. The work of Bresson is similarly corporeal and automatic - it is embedded within action (famously his interest in hands) and repetition (saying lines until they are only sounds). The self-conscious is removed as the conscious is removed.
However, because the methods of Bresson and Serra remained so conceptual and so conscious to me, it proved difficult to enact their processes; I had not discovered their methods in action or through repetition, and so when I borrowed them, I encountered that feeling of inauthenticity. An alternative route, one that made lived-sense, had to be uncovered. That ensuing search was long. For the sake of brevity I will cut to the chase.
On Christmas day, 2021, I went to mass at a Dominican Priory. Fifteen monks stood in choir. Monks do this at least twice a day - it is practised to the point of habit. They sing together, combining beautiful and tone-deaf voices. At times, one will emerge from the group and read a passage, or sing a solo. But solo is not the right word, because of its associations with performance. The mass is not a performance, despite its many performative aspects: the lighting, the proscenium which divides choir from nave, the costumes. Costume too is not the right word. It too is habit. And the habit covers the individual both physically through cloth and metaphysically through custom. When a monk steps forward to read, habit like a mask, hides their individuality.
Until that day, I had never thought clearly or precisely about the aesthetics of a religious rite. As a lapsed Catholic, I had relegated my experience in church to the past, and not just to my past but to the past of Western art. But equally as a lapsed Catholic, the rite of that Christmas mass made lived sense to me. I had spent years as an altar server and as a member of a congregation; the mass is native to me, it is practised in my body in a way that the films of Serra and Bresson can never be. So by the time I left the Dominican priory, I knew that this rite of mass was the template for our community performance. In many ways, such a decision should not be surprising. The rite of mass, founded on community involvement, has developed over two thousand years. The early forays into drama in this country (Mystery plays) came from that tradition. The method of community performance in Matter of Britain, therefore, is not exceptional or novel.
There is a space - importantly an everyday space, rigged with very basic lighting - the more everyday the better. This is why Catholic churches in England are so special. They are mostly modern, and the presence of the modern moment - the reading light on the lectern, poorly integrated speakers, humming infrared heating panels - makes clear that there is no demand for a perfect rendering of the liturgy. Rendering is sufficient.
There are costumes, but not to convince us of the authenticity of a character or a historical moment, rather to indicate a function. Once again, costume is not the right word. It is habit: a demarker of rite that does not demand acting but actions. And it is custom, connecting the individual to the many individuals across time who have conducted the same service, the same actions. At times the everyday will pierce through the habit, such as when an altar server wears trainers, clearly visible, beneath their cassocks. They walk emphatically in our world while elevated to a type and to a very limited set of functions: bringing the chalice and paten to the altar, washing the hands of the priest, ringing the bell at the consecration.
There is a text, and the words of that text exist prior to the reader’s existence. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The speaker of those words should not inhabit them, should not make those words their own - that would be erroneous. The reader is only, and importantly, an amanuensis, a conduit, a mouthpiece. In theatre or film, a performer must find motivation and psychological significance. In church, a reader of the Gospel is there only to give voice to the words. There is no demand to express emotion or to perform.
Finally, there is the community. On Good Friday, a congregant narrates the agony, capture, scourging, trial and crucifixion of Christ. Other congregants speak for Peter and Pilate. The remainder of the congregation speaks for the crowd that demands the release of Barabas and the death of Christ. The words of Christ are spoken by the priest. Often tired by the Paschal Triduum, often near retirement, the Priest has said these words many times over, over many years, and he has slipped into an unnatural cadence. The congregation, who are not an audience because they are bound to respond, respond in a collective murmur that is often asynchronous, with areas of the church leading by a fraction, and others a little behind. All these voices are sufficient voices not selected for their quality but for their presence, which in their imperfectness renders human the mysteries that are enacted.
For this is the central paradox at the heart of the rite of mass: the rite is disinterested in the individual, and yet from that disinterest emerges a plenitude of personality. ‘Religion’ and ‘ligament’ share the same Latin root of religare or ligare, which means ‘to bind’. This binding is not imprisoning. The binding of ligaments, which connects muscle to bone, gives movement by limiting movement. The bondage of rite similarly limits an individual’s self expression, and by so doing articulates their personality more clearly than if they were asked to be themselves. Through rite, the self-conscious, the performative, the feigning and the disingenuous disappears and we are left not with actors, performers or non-professionals but with persons.
This method was applied to the making of Matter of Britain, not always religiously, not always successfully. But for those involved who had a long history of amateur dramatics, the method, or rite, helped strip away the accretion of cliched gesture. For those that had never performed, and who did so reluctantly, the simplification of performance to the level of rite - the rejection of the need to successfully render emotion and psychology - reassured them. There was no requirement to inhabit the character they enacted, nor was there a demand for them to be themselves - they were reading someone else’s words after all. And because there was no need to express their self, self-consciousness disappeared and their self emerged in the timbre of their voice, the lines on their face, the way they stood, the way they walked.