You don’t prepare a creation, you prepare yourself for creation

In a creative process, the decisive work is not first of all work on the object being made, but on the people who make it. By way of the countertenor Alfred Deller and the Chinese thought of non-action, I argue that this preparation of the self is what makes connection possible, and that this connection is what makes something a creation, on stage as much as in cultural action.

What Deller refused to rehearse

Alfred Deller brought the countertenor voice back into favour in the middle of the twentieth century, in a repertoire, early and Baroque English music, of which he was the reference performer. His contemporaries were puzzled by the way he prepared his concerts. He avoided daily vocal exercises, he distrusted rehearsal, and he preferred the spontaneity of the moment when he sang before an audience. To anyone looking from inside the musical world, with its preparation protocols, its hours of vocalising, its score analysis, this attitude could pass for the affectation of a great performer or for carelessness. I believe it was something else, a sound intuition about what truly gets prepared before one sings.

What this attitude brings to light, and what most theatre training frameworks do not take in, is that the time of preparing a creation is not in the first place a time of work on the object. It is a time of work on oneself, not in the sense of personal development, but in the sense of making oneself available. Becoming available to what is going to happen, able to receive it and let it take shape.

Common thinking about creation is organised around doing, and theatre is no exception. One rehearses, one does exercises, one improvises, one adjusts, and each of these operations is assessed by what it changes in the object being made, is the scene sharper, the acting more precise, the staging more coherent. This logic has its effectiveness, it makes it possible to build something solid, repeatable, assessable, and it answers the expectations of funders, programmers and partners who need a deliverable object on a fixed date. It also meets a limit that everyone has felt in the rehearsal room, a moment when everything has been worked on and yet something is missing, that no further amount of doing can fill.

What is missing then belongs to another kind of work, one that also takes energy without belonging to doing. Preparing oneself to do rather than organising what one is going to do. Tracing a direction rather than fixing an intention. Building within oneself the conditions for something to be born, without deciding in advance what it will be.

The paradox of voluntary action in Graziani

The sinologist Romain Graziani, in L’usage du vide (2019), studies the way classical Chinese thought conceived the intelligence of action, and in particular non-action, that power which is exercised without constraining itself. He describes there what he calls states that resist the will, states that slip away as soon as one tries to produce them deliberately. Sleep is the simplest example, wanting to fall asleep pushes sleep away, and it returns once one stops pursuing it. Graziani shows that artistic creation belongs to the same family of experiences, and that the state of availability which makes it possible cannot be commanded, it is prepared through a long conditioning of the self that must not be aimed at for its own sake, on pain of freezing into a mechanical procedure.

This seems to me to describe accurately what happens when an actor stops interpreting a role and begins to inhabit it, or when a director stops controlling every parameter and becomes present to what the situation produces. Doing is not replaced there by nothing, but by an active availability, a ground one prepares without prescribing what will grow on it.

Preparing a ground without expecting a particular harvest

Every artist knows a paradox from the inside, one cannot decide to let go, because the intention to let go is still an intention and produces the opposite effect. One creates the conditions for something to settle, and then one sees.

This paradox is worked through the distinction between intention and direction. An intention states what one wants to produce. A direction designates the ground on which one places oneself, the state one chooses to be in, the questions one brings along, and leaves open what will come of it. The phrase I use to sum this up is heard better than it is explained, preparing a ground without expecting a particular harvest. If one designates no fertile ground, nothing grows. If one designates a ground but demands to know what will grow on it before committing to it, nothing grows either. Creation stands in that gap.

When the energy moves to the side of connection

What makes something theatre, and what makes something a creation, depends to a large extent on connection, and this part becomes central in the age of cultural rights. What cultural rights bring to the foreground is an aesthetics of relation, and a relation requires that one be ready to live it. One could call this improvisation, but it is creation in the plainest sense, the capacity to bring something living into being with what and whom is there.

This preparation is what separates two evenings that look alike. A performance can unfold behind a fourth wall so thick that one watches it from afar, without feeling concerned by it. Another, in the same staging arrangement, draws us in, and we feel part of what is taking place. The difference does not lie in the subject or in the quality of execution, it lies in a deep energy and in the way it circulates between stage and house. I have looked elsewhere into what makes this presence, which is not a quality of the actor but a property of the relation between stage and house (Presence or execution). This presence is not obtained on the evening itself, it is prepared beforehand, and it is that preparation I am speaking of here.

This same energy is at work when an artist stands on a stage and when they are in relation with people within a cultural action. In both cases, it is a matter of making oneself available to another one does not master, and of bringing something into being with them. This is why I hold that an artist is as much in creation in a workshop or an encounter as on a stage. This shifts the boundary usually drawn between the work and cultural mediation, and it gives one more argument on the question of what makes something theatre, theatre is where a presence is prepared and a connection is lived, whatever the place.

This morning of rehearsal, what state am I in?

Carried over to theatre, this preparation leads to thinking about rehearsal time differently, not as the gradual construction of an object, but as the gradual preparation of those who create. The two are not exclusive, the object is built as well. But the question that moves to the foreground changes, this morning of rehearsal, what state am I in, what state are the actors in, what opens us and what closes us.

Many rehearsal practices already include this, the start-of-day exercises, the work on physical availability, the moments of sharing. But they are often treated as a warm-up before the real work. What I propose is to recognise that the real work is there. The object that results will be different, more alive, less predictable, perhaps less perfect in the sense of an executed score, and more present in the sense of an encounter. This way of preparing meets the one I describe when I compare preparing a performance to preparing a meal (Preparing a performance the way one prepares a meal).

One does not prepare a creation, one prepares oneself for creation. This shift engages another way of working, and with it another idea of what one is trying to bring into being.