Plot Studies (2): Landscape Theater

Overview

Landscape Theater is the name of the genre of play that Gertrude Stein wrote, as well as the name for the lineage that follows from her. Usually excluded from the concept of the dramatic because it does not overtly tell stories, it tends to be braided into histories of the multi-media avant-garde associated with the 60’s happenings and experimental theater, performance, and some branches of poetry less concerned with the lyric. Stein described her plays as “landscapes” in her essay/lecture “Plays,” which she gave on tour in America in 1934, 20, twenty years after she’d begun to write plays. In that essay she describes:

a) the desire for the experience of theater to be entirely in the present moment, and her frustration with traditional theater for giving her a “syncopated” experience either ahead of or behind the action;

b) her project of writing what she knows without telling what happened, that is, embracing a phenomenological, affective, experiential knowledge (we might also call it somatic or intuitive) and avoiding an objective, facts and causal chains-oriented knowledge;

c) her early plays as attempts to tell what happened without saying what happened;

d) the form of playwriting broken open for her by the experience of being in a striking landscape (in Spain, where she wrote Four Saints in Three Acts) and the perception that a landscape is a state of relation between things that are there, and no stories are necessary to convey the landscape.

It moves but it also stays. It’s a quivering, buzzing still life.

So as she gives it to us, a landscape play’s project is to write the being of the landscape through the feeling of being in relation to it, as well as the relation of everything in the landscape to every other thing.

Plot relevance

On Movement

To bring this to the question of plot, one path is just to embrace the first and oldest sense of the word “plot” which is that of a garden plot. So the plot of a landscape play in this sense is to move around the patch of earth or matter at hand and to render it. (And for Stein, to render it by rendering its internal relations including to her as the writer/viewer,)

Another way to think about plot in the sense of authorial design through which meaning is made, is that the movement through the writing is one of moving between the elements of the landscape, led by the desire to render things in relation to each other. Stein’s movement is a rhythmic, recursive, pulsation, but that’s her signature. There’s no reason to borrow her rhythms in order to borrow the idea of composition as moving through a landscape.

Another way to think about landscape theater’s plots in the sense of the possibilities for movement or sequence that landscape thinking offers, is to use a thickly rendered landscape to discover who and what might appear, traverse, or influence the landscape or place of a story. I think of this as useful on different scales, one as an opening into writing a proliferation of microstories that are contained in this landscape (or alternately, defining a landscape as an aggregate of microstories and telling those stories without need to subsume them as master plot and sub plots); two, as a way to enrich storytelling with a larger eye for who and what might enter into the narrative.

On Satisfactions

Stein wasn’t interested in moving through a story toward a crisis or resolution, but she was interested in arriving places that were satisfying. (In the essay she explores the experience of “completion” vs. “relief” from tension; she wants completion—although there’s no reason why there can’t be many completions scattered over the landscape; it’s not all driving toward a single moment as with traditional crisis-oriented drama.) In a completion, Stein says, there’s a new knowledge of relation, what she calls a new proportion. I think what’s important to take away is the idea that there is a movement toward good feeling. The knowing she was after was registered through pleasure, enjoyment. A key element of this is that the satisfaction she was after was not something that could be distilled and summarized and retained in memory. Think of it more like hearing a beautiful passage of music or eating something exquisite that perfectly balances the taste that preceded it. In Landscape Theater in Stein’s sense, there is no message, no take-away, no moral, no commentary. There is experience of something, being in the presence of something. And that experience is good if it offers these pools and peaks and glides of satisfaction.

On Time

One of the things most appealing to me about thinking in landscape is the way it shifts my attention to how time works in a landscape. The presence of the past in the present, the directions toward the future. The possibility of the timeline of the piece of writing, from its compositional start to finish, as having no necessary relation to chronological time. The invitation to move swiftly between points in time without elaborating the transitions. The possibility of everything that belongs to the landscape being there at once, like a big part of ghosts of past and present and all the possible worlds.

Two notes:

Landscape writing can have a 1:1 relationship to an actual or fictional landscape. But it can also be a way of thinking about the aggregation of different images brought into relation in a piece of writing, a non-actual landscape given a spatial container in your imagination.

I think that much of what we call “performance text” or “nonlinear” theater writing has some freedom of compositional movement (plot as authorial design) that relates to Stein’s ideas of landscape, even though they also tend to use an event structure as an anchor. Look at plays by Mac Wellman, earlier Suzan-Lori Parks (like The America Play), or Kristen Kosmas for examples.

What to do about it

To me, reading or studying as an artist is a project of gaining permissions, freedoms, prompts or experiments from the material read.

What permissions for proceeding through a piece of writing does landscape theater offer that you might want to take up?

What experiments does Stein’s example propose?

Plot Studies: What is Plot?

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

Psychogeography

After Burrows

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?