My Space Revisited

 

I think this was called the "Arena Space". Everything was much lower-res back in 2007.

 

 The zip's stuck on my jacket, so if I'm leaving the flat, which I very seldom do, I have to climb into it like a hazmat suit, which seems apt. Today was World Theatre Day, and because there's no theatre, and because this is what I was listening to when I went to the shops for salt, and because the Shunt Lounge was such a big, useful focus for this blog when it started over on myspace in 2007, I'm posting a conversation Gemma Brockis had with Chris Goode about the Lounge in 2018 long after it had closed, (and just as we were working on restaging 2003's Invitation to a Beheading). Chris' retrospective take on the place provides a nice sequel to this post. I know he wasn't fond of the word "spaces", and he still might not be, preferring "places", and this rebellion against Peter Brook's idea of theatre as an "empty space" played a large part in the conversations we all used to have. I'm reminded of them these days when I talk to Helen Czerski about science presentation. She's a practical physicist - more specifcally a bubble physicist - and hates the aesthetic of the lab, as well as the word "discovery". Similarly, M. John Harrison posted recently in the comments on his blog that he hates "ideas". I love sticklers. And I hope Chris gets entirely better immediately. 

"But there's now so many ways in which that space is overlaid. Even when we were there in 2010, six years after Tropicana, the technicians would be referring to the 'Autopsy Space'... even though they were at school when we were doing that show, which had the autopsy in that space, and there's absolutely nothing in that space to suggest it was the 'Autopsy Space'... One space was called the 'Act Two Space', even though Act One, and Three, Four and Five fell away before we even opened the show... The cumulative effect of all of these references, all of which were theatrical, basically, and ephemeral..."

 

It was even more low-res in 2005.

 Make space. Make room. I've just realised the words"space" and "room" are entirely synonymous. If we can have rooms then, I guess we can have spaces. But yes, neither's ever entirely empty.