After working as a musician in the post-punk period and studying Philosophy Peader moved towards performance in the early

1990s underground warehouse Party scene of London, curating seminal performance club, Salon DeBug. Since training with Robert Lepage in 1995 Peader has specialised in devised work, winning the inaugural Young Vic Award in 1998 and forming Mkultra Performance in 2000. In the past nine years Peader has worked in the UK, Greece and Italy directing 20 pieces ranging from one-on-one performance installations to large-scale durational work. Again and again, his work returns to questions of the real and the reproduced, the structuring of social architectures and the creation of intimate encounters. Peader has taught at Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford College, Aberystwyth University and Exeter University. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Performance at Turin Art Academy, Italy.

What does a door mean?

Thats as silly a question as asking Is a piano hungry?

Piano Piece for David Tudor No 1 1960 by La Monte Young. Score as follows: A grand piano is onstage. The pianist opens the lid of the piano. The pianist brings on stage a bale of hay and a bucket of water. The pianist waits until either the Piano has eaten and drunk its full or it becomes clear that the Piano is neither hungry nor thirsty.

One more time: What does a door mean?

Thats as silly a question as asking, What is devising?

A door does not mean anything because like Searles Chinese Box, a door lacks intentionality, it doesnt intend one thing. Devising does not mean anything in this sense - it has no singular methodology.

Devising does not label a unitary practice just as text-theatre does not label a singularity. There are Stanislavskian approaches, Brechtian approaches, Artaudian, Meyerholdian. Theatre in any form is multiple, evasive, duplicitous, double.

The label devising conceived as a unitary practice attempts to pin performance to the dissection desk. And like the term that quickly attempted to superseded it in the UK, Live Art, the term Devising essentially serves a funding imperative. It is a category for the ministry, for the programmer, a category to contain and coral the work, to tame it. As Jerome Bell said recently in London, Thankfully in continental Europe we dont have the problem of live art. I dont live in a Ghetto. My work goes on at the Opera House in Paris as well as Nantiers Contemporary Art Centre. My work is dance, it sits in a bigger frame.

If we want to evade the structures of power then perhaps we might reject devising as the name a unitary practice and re-appropriate it as an inclination, an orientation that leads us away from certain things and towards others.

Orientation One: Away from representation and towards live presentation which admits the here and nowness of you and I in the theatre space.

Orientation Two: Away from the Drama and towards the theatrical. In his book Postdramatic Theatre Hans Thies Lehmann maps the diverse histories and practices that constitute a histography of devising. Lehmann argues that historically the western theatre has placed the representation of action/plot at its heart and that therefore theatre was subordinated to the primacy of the text, the drama. He identifies a strand of work that begins to appear in the late C20 as bringing a new paradigm for the theatre into being, a Postdramatic theatre. This theatre does not reject the text but it does refuse to be subordinated by it, the text is simply one element amongst many.

This theatre Lehmann talks of - the work of Cage, of Abromovich, of The Wooster Group, of Needcompany, of Hotel pro Forma, of Elevator Repair Service this work reclaims theatre as embodied presence, as landscape, as music, as situation and encounter. Crucially, the Postdramatic does not propose a radical break with the past as the term Devising sometimes seems to but rather a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond dramawithout being an abstract negation or a mere looking away fromtradition.

Orientation Three: Away from high culture and towards a radical position. We should be aware of both the courage and the impossibility of this ambition.

Devised work is no longer a marginal practice as it was when I began to make work in the 1990s. Devised work now appears on West End and Broadway stages, on the stages of National theatres. It has become, as Schechener observed, an institutional avant-garde. More troubling still for this attempted orientation towards a radical position is the Situationist analysis of rehabilitation within the Society of the Spectacle even the most radical gesture is more and more rapidly assimilated by the culture machine. In 1977 The Pistols God Save the Queen is banned by national Radio in the UK, now you find it on compilations like Now thats what I call Punk Music Vol. 21 and postcards of mohicaned punks are bought as souvenirs of London along with postcards of the guards at Buckingham Palace standing outside the doors of power.

What does a door mean?

It means coming and going. Beginnings and endings. This side and that side. Secrets. Restricted Areas. It means possibilities and change. It meansyou can go wherever you want.

This text comes from the performance Restricted Area which I and my collaborators created in the upstairs rooms at Bios in 2004. STORY General description of restricted area here & point about collaborative creation

And the collaborators including Vassilis actually and I think it was the first time you had come across the idea of devising as such. And you know that was the odd thing about coming to work in Greece in 2002. I had been making work in the UK for six years. I had come up through making performances and installations as part of the London Warehouse party scene to curating an ongoing performance club to finding myself being invited into the establishment and being commissioned by the Young Vic to make work and I had just accepted the term Devised performance or Live Art as a label for what I did. It was only when I came here and started to do press interviews and speak with performers that I began to question the term. You see no one I talked to could tell me what the Greek for devising was. The term was not in general use.

I want to be very clear that I am not taking a foundational position here. I know very well that there was Greek work that clearly fell under the rubric of devised work or performance art, Jannis Kounellis and Michael Mamarinos comes to mind. What I am trying to get at here is the intractability of a term. The strangeness of seeing a Greek text with these two English words sticking out like antlers devised theatre. What really bothered me was the act of colonialism involved in labeling the work I was making here with F2 as Devised. I was bothered about categorizing work that I would simply not have made in a British context, work which was only possible in Greece with that group of Greek performers with this very restricted Anglo Australian term, Devising.

But you know here we are 7 years later and we have a festival of Devised Performance in Athens, which is great. And I am not rejecting the term. Indeed, we used it in relation to the nine shows we made here between 2002 and 2007 with F2 and have continued to use it for the three shows we have made here as Mkultra this year. However, I do want to problematise the term, to worry it a bit. To get away from the idea that the devised is somehow youth related or necessarily radical. When I started making work the Devised was not a body of knowledge, it was not something you could learn, you picked up clues, saw shows in little rooms with tiny audiences, it was something you got together with a group of people in a dodgy rehearsal room and tried to find a way of doing. Now the Devised is something you can do a BA or an MA or a PhD on. The Devised is an institution with clear tropes and trajectories. As the composer Ligeti said, I am in prison. One wall is the avant-garde and one wall is the past. To hell with both camps.

And yet, and yet, despite all this there is something in the radical in very DNA of the Devised that keeps it pushing at the boundaries, keeps it questing and questioning.

A question then.

What does a Door mean?

A door is an opportunity, a chance, a challenge.

The text I read earlier from Secret Location was not written by a playwright and then imposed on a performer. It arose out of life and necessity and the being in the world of the performer who spoke that text in the show. It arose because I would always see her hanging around doors during the rehearsal process; because she spoke to me one evening in a bar about feeling trapped, locked in, on the wrong side of the door and because we had a practical problem until that moment we had carefully structured the audience experience through Restricted Area dividing and re-dividing them in small groups, leading these groups to different rooms in different sequences so that each person had a unique experience of the piece but about two thirds of the way through we wanted to let go of this authoritative authoring and allow the audience to select what they saw, let them construct their own montage - so this text and opening all the doors in the apartment let us do this. A necessity, a practical problem to be solved. This text arose because it, the work needed it.

The doors are open but I still wonder what does a door mean? It means the work can begin. As Jan Lawers put it In order to start work you must close the door, you must set limits even if they are arbitrary. When everything is possible nothing happens. In other words, devising pushes us into confrontation with the world through a specific reaching out, a grasping (Badiou), not through the logos but through the soma, not with the generality

of the world but through its specific materiality, because we must deal with something, we must deal with each other.

So, for me, it always begins with a resistance. A concrete object which demands something of us and allows certain things to us. A door, for example. This is how we create.

What does a door let us do? What does a door need us to do?

Those are the questions that might be useful to the devisor and which get to the core of devisings multitudinal practices

Devising engages in a grasping of being in the world through embodied practices of creation in order to shape an experience for an audience during which they grasp their own being in the world

How do we grasp a being in the world? We find a part of the world to work with, say a door, and we see what is possible. What will it let me do? (Leave, knock, open, look in, stand in door, enter)

And, again for me, the grasping of being in the world always moves through three regions. Three modes of grasping the material that will be the work.

First, the Real We engage in real activities in relation to the object. I do not pretend it is locked if it is not. The work is about what is in the world and not how I would like the world to be.

Second, the Rehearsed - We engage in social practices in relation to the object it is rude not to knock before entering. These social practices are what Schechner has called restored behaviour or what Diane Massy has picked out as social architecture. The work is about the way society constructs the world and our being in the world.

Third, the Reproduced. We engage in the re-enacting of historical moments in relation to the object. These moments may come from the performers own biography, the stolen biographies of others or the cultutesphere. It is crucial that I am aware of the provisionality of my re-enactment in relation to its previous iterations. Perhaps I open the door and smile and say, Take care, before leaving, re-enacting the end of a relationship I had 10 years ago or perhaps a woman walks in through the door and I say Of all the gin joints in all the world you had to walk into mine, echoing Bogart in Casablanca. The work is about the way we always already project pasts and futures into the world in this present moment of being in the world.

These are the things a door lets me do. It lets me make strips of performance material. But now I must approach this material rigorously. I must structure

it, evaluate it. What does a door need me to do? Not what do I want to do but what does it, the work need?

The moment where this principle became clear for me was working on a piece called In Close Relation in 1998

STORY

What is at stake here is a simultaneous shaping of content and form as the jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler put it spontaneous composition. Ayler steps outside of the dichotomies of European Music and Black music to establish a hybrid hetrotopia. He refuses the binary logic of the logos as we might if we stepped away from the devised theatre/text theatre divide.

The other crucial move that Martin makes in that moment of asking what it needs is to open the door for an active audience. He gives us just enough through the combination of his and Hartleys actions and the sign to allow us, as witnesses, to create the moment of performance and in doing so triggers our own personal and unique set of associations, to gasp our own being in the world.

Peter Brook looks for the theatre to produce a moment of communitas in a world where wider communities are fast passing away. I do not believe that this romantic notion is possible. I look towards Meyerholds disrupted

audience not an upset audience but one in which a multitude of responses play out in relation to the structured performative moment, one in which meaning does not pass from the stage to the audience but rather one which allows meaning to be generated by the individuals in the audience.

In his recent book Connections Alain Badiou recasts philosophy as a set of pincers a tool for grasping. The job of philosophy is the grasping of truths not the Truth but the truths active within certain regions such as politics or science. It is a sifting through of thought, a position of perspective. Devising too is a tool for grasping. The grasping of experience not a singularly conceived experience but a situation in which encounter can occur between me and you, between you and the world you pass through as an object of the narratives of power that always masquerade as natural facts and an encounter between you and the others that also watch but bring there own positions histories and associations. Devising offers a site, a situation where we can navigate the narratives of power as subject rather than object, a position of perspective.

Devising engages in a grasping of being in the world through embodied practices of creation in order to shape an experience for an audience during which they grasp their own being in the world

And the being of others in the world

The door is open. A door is an opportunity, a chance, a challenge, an opening onto the world because we must deal with something, we must deal with each other.

For me the real question is

What does a door mean, to you and to you and to you and to you and

Thank you.

Peader Kirk 29/05/2009