DAN SPIELMAN, interviewed by Alison Croggon.
Born in 1978, Dan has been performing in theatre, film and tv for five
years. He is a founding member of the Melbourne based Keene/Taylor
Theatre Project, a collaboration between two award winning theatre
artists, playwright Daniel Keene and director Ariette Taylor, and has
appeared in HOMELAND, UNTITLED MONOLOGUE, CUSTODY, BENEATH HEAVEN, THE
NINTH MOON, DOG and MYSTERIES. The KTTP has produced 12 seasons of new
work and 4 public readings since September 1997. He is currently working
directly with Daniel Keene on a project POSSESSED. He has
worked for the Sydney Theatre Company, in Martin McDonagh's THE CRIPPLE
OF INISHMAAN, and as part of their Blueprints Program in Martin Crimp's
ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE. His tv credits include WILDSIDE, RAW FM and
FARSCAPE. His short story EPILOGUE was published in the literary arts
magazine MASTHEAD. WHERE is the first poem Dan has had published. He is
currently working on translations of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud.
AC: How did you come to write WHERE?
DS: It's more like WHERE came to me while I was writing (very gradually)
AC: I remember that part of its genesis was listening to Horspiel,
literally "ear playS", by the German radio artist and composer Klaus
Buhlert. What was it about Horspiel which attracted you?
DS: WHERE was asserting itself in ways that I found difficult to
understand and work on, visual directions were hard to incorporate
effectively, and its shape changed incessantly. I have been drawn to
radio plays for ages, most memorably the work of Klaus Buhlert ,
including VANISHING POINTS, a piece by Daniel Keene and also a wonderful
piece called EVERYTHING'S COMING OUT OF THE DARK, in the main a
composition of parts of Beckett's novels. The way he composed the music
was what got me: he took the 'formula' described in the stone-sucking
sequence in MOLLOY, wrapped stones in scales written on paper, (13 of
them) and asked his musicians to follow that formula, picking up the
stones and improvising on the scales - Another thing I loved listening
to was Derek Jacobi reading the Iliad translated by Robert Fagles.
Needless to say, hearing it felt 'right'. Somehow the 'imagined silence'
of reading poetry and of hearing it 'matched' when I thought about what
WHERE might become.
AC: Do you think you've written a Horspiel or a poem? What's the
difference?
DS: I think I've written a poem, but I hope to record a heap of fools
saying and doing it.
AC: You are currently saying that you aim to translate the entire poetic
corpus of Arthur Rimbaud. Why are you attracted to Rimbaud?
DS: Yes. I keep finding new reasons the more I work with his poems, at
first it was that I felt myself longing to express his poems as often as
I could. All of it so I can express his learning.
AC: What are you learning from that?
DS: How to translate his poems.
AC: What do you hope to learn?
DS: How to do the rest of them.
AC: Has your involvement in performance influenced your work in poetry?
Or vice versa?
DS: Yes. Yes.
AC: What do you think poetry might learn from theatre?
DS: Its story.
AC: What do you mean by "story"?
DS: I mean its human and ongoing and unstoppable place.
AC: And what might theatre from poetry?
DS: Its language.
AC: What are the links?
DS: I don't know how to say that.
AC: What are the differences? One inhabits literal space, one is a space
inside the head, but are there similarities in the act of reading of a
poem and the act of attending a play?
DS: There can be similarities between the two but I can only read poems
occasionally and I only occasionally see a play.
AC: The acts of writing a poem and performing a play?
DS: Kenneth Rowell was a stage designer and painter and in his
retrospective exhibition catalogue called 'Double Act' he spoke about
feeling in control of one medium and having to work at the other. This
didn't deter him from pursuing both. My first instinct is to say no, the
imaginary place I find myself in when a poem works, and the state I must
find in order to play (again) on stage are very different. On the other
hand, I am certain I must do both?
AC: What does language do in the theatre?
DS: It feels at times like it stands between the audience and the
performer, taunting both.
AC: Is orality important in poetry?
DS: I think the voices of poets I have read, if allowed through the
poems, provide a resistance and a buoyancy to the intense focus of the
object. I mean the part of my imagination that hears, loves the voiced,
and is lazy if ignored or bypassed. I believe a lot of what I feel, I
hear for proof.
AC: Is the actor an I?
DS: For me a performance is. For me the actor is pretend.
AC: What's the difference, then, between "acting" and "performing"?
DS: Acting is the art, performing is the game. The performance is the
art at work. The actor is still pretend.
AC: What happens to the self in a performance?
DS: Something drastic when the lights go up, and something ritualistic to
get to when they go down.
AC: Is this applicable to a self in a lyric poem?
DS: Sometimes the voice of a poem betrays an event that lead to a place
that was explored before the poem's attack, I can't shake the feeling,
though, that the fight was in some way won. I am often moved by poetry.
(Every day). I go to the theatre in anticipation of the fight being lost.
And occasionally I am profoundly moved.
AC: Who is the you an I addresses?
DS: People.
AC: In theatre physical presence is inescapable: is perhaps a poem a
mnemonic shadow of physical presence?
DS: The physical event of theatre is suggestive immediately, some people
can't or won't find these suggestions inside, that happens later. The
"later" of a poem is a different thing, it's more literally "again" and
the two forms are in tradition, and witnesses see, touch, hear and
imagine themselves in relation...
AC: What is that fracture that happens when language is written and read?
DS: It's someone else.
AC: How does that feed back into an idea of physical presence on stage?
DS: It should be someone.
AC: Do you think that most theatre has forgotten poetry? Is this why it's
"deadly"?
DS: Yes. Yes.
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