This America: A Conversation With John Collins About Elevator Repair Service (Part 2)

by Sara Jane Bailes

1. Waiting for Firefighters: Cab Legs

Sara: What did you say about Cab Legs?

John: Cab Legs — well, talking about things evolving in a completely free associative way,Cab Legs started off as a piece about the fire department. It was going to be, but secretly. All of the characters were going to be fire fighters, although we weren’t going to costume them that way. It was going to be a way of structuring a dance piece; we were going to put these dances together and in between the dances everyone was going to be waiting around for some alarm to go off.

S: So you would have information the audience was intentionally kept unaware of?

J: Yes. Because the other thing we were interested in then was in seeing how little could happen on stage, and having scenes where next to nothing could happen, and that also fitted with this fire department idea. That’s how we would stage the scenes, with them just waiting for the alarm to go off, and we came up with a lot that we like about that.

S: Yes — it’s a great way to frame “nothing”; a state of emergency on hold.

J: But then we decided that after we had done that piece we needed to take all those big gaps, and we were starting to play with people talking to each other under their breath on stage.

S: Was that the first time you had done that — in Cab Legs?

J: It was really the first time we’d done that — it was about the idea of there being nothing going on; it sort of changes what you are looking at and listening to. It starts to put everything under a microscope so that somebody can do something, like turn to someone and mumble something, and there’s nothing else going on so it becomes a focus and that becomes the thing that you watch. We took this whole top layer off just to look at what was left . .

S: . . .the “top layer” being?

J: . . . being theatricality or performance as we conventionally understand it, which is people speaking a little louder then they normally do for the audience to hear; or doing things turned out towards the audience, and gestures being a little larger, and things being dramatic and important and high stakes. We were trying to turn that on its head and put something up on stage like some completely inconsequential moment of people sitting around not doing anything, letting that be informed by the fact that it is framed by the stage. That led to the actors having a relationship to the real space — more accidents and free association. For instance, one thing that happened in Cab Legs — well, we weren’t even calling it “Cab Legs,” we were calling it “Catastrophe.” One of the actors showed up really late, the play was beginning, and it was in the Performing Garage (rehearsal/performing space of New York’s Wooster Group). He was getting into his costume upstairs and this was on the last night of the show. He was running around up there talking to Colleen, who was getting him into his costume; and all of it was coming through the floor during this quiet scene. I was downstairs, tearing my hair out, wanting to strangle him because the quiet, “nothing happening” scene is completely wrecked by the distraction of these footsteps upstairs. Then somebody said to me afterwards “You know, that was really amazing what you did with the ambient sound; the way you used the upstairs.” And I thought “Oh! That’s really interesting.” So that became the inspiration for going into PS122 and having all these scenes take place upstairs in other rooms and outside the performance space, but where you could hear them, and where your senses told you that it was somewhere in a nearby room.

S: Like the people running in and out from the dressing room, hanging around in the corridor and other “off-site” areas at various points?

J: Exactly.

S: So really, it seems, you are playing with the idea of place and performance — real and imagined — where these two collide. You’re moving the place beyond where we think the performance is happening, and us with it, by focusing us on the distraction?

J: Exactly.

S: That seems to relate also to the firefighter idea: that notion of something always happening elsewhere, or about to happen elsewhere, the potentiality of it, so that nothing can happen here but the wait. I’m interested in the firefighting idea and where it came from in the first place. I mean, what particularly attracted you to it?

J: It seemed like an idea we could play with; there’s some kind of theatrical potential to it. Our pieces start off with formal ideas — about what to do on stage. So one thing to do on stage would be to take the idea of the firefighters’ daily routine and translate that into something with dance. James Hannaham had been watching this TV channel which had all these Indian movie musicals on it, and had been insisting that we use this material. So we started looking at these second-hand tapes that were collections of clips from these Indian movies, and picking out dances that we liked, translating them into things that we could do. And then there were the cartoons, which was something I had been interested in for a long time, these old cartoons from the 30s. We decided to make them into dances, and doing the dance work is great because it’s always a good place to start; it’s simple. Well, it’s not always simple — but it’s a straightforward task you can engage in — to translate things. And the things we use almost always come off a video — and we make them into dances. So the piece is all of those things converging. The fire department came up as a way of stringing the dances together that we were working on.

S: That’s intriguing to me; just how visual and verbal the world of the final work becomes, how it grows out of the original, more silent and invisible structures that produce it. Because when I think about seeing that show, my remaining impression of it is to remember it as what I call “the Freudian piece”; something so far away from its original “world.” The mood of it was neurotic — it was a highly-strung and anxious piece of work, built on a strong undercurrent which, for example, Total Fictional Lie wasn’t. Though actually, that’s not true because in all four pieces I’ve seen of ERS’s work, neurosis generates perhaps as a result of the excess of the kinds of play you are talking about. But I think it became a central preoccupation inCab Legs from a spectator’s point of view — the waiting, the absence of place, the potential of something that doesn’t ever happen but might, the “what to do on stage” that is being asked of all of us. The focus is on people being on stage playing with the notion of being watched.

J: Exactly. And it’s real, because it goes straight to what makes the tension in theatre, which is that everybody is there together . . .

S: . . . being watched?

J: . . . being watched. That they could screw up. Things could go wrong, and the audience might or might not know it, which is the great thing about live performance. I mean, if you are making a film and something goes wrong and it gets on film, it ends up being a great thing. But the trouble is that someone has had a chance to see the whole thing privately first and check it out, edit it; and even if they don¹t do anything to it, there’s that chance to make the decision that this is what you, the reader, viewer, audience, is going to see.

S: So what you’re saying is that mistakes never remain in film?

J: Or if they do they remain through a decision making process about whether or not they’re OK. And we do that too. We edit things; and mistakes happen and we like them, don’t like them, and keep them or not. But we do it as a way of keeping the tension alive between what’s planned and unplanned, a way of keeping the thing closely in touch with the possibility that it could all go wrong. Because sometimes it does. Another way of dealing with that tension is to create parts of the shows that aren’t even set; they just follow an outline or the actors have to be up there on their feet to create the details of it on the spot. Cab Legs was an extreme exercise in that because the performers had the lines from a play in their heads but they were never allowed to use them. They could only paraphrase them and give some new version of that thought defined by the lines from a play that we were using and not using.

S: Interesting. So they are always operating through the memory of something else. And that, then, must be also what contributes to that sense of neuroses — the sense that there is something not being said, something repressed informing the behavior on stage. What was the play?

J: It was a Tennessee Williams play. What happened was we did the piece Cab Legs (which was originally called Catastrophe) and we had all these big gaps. So we decided to go in and slip some story in between those dances, and let’s see what happens if we choose an actual play script. We’d never done that before, so that was a challenge for us to actually work with something that was conventional and dramatic. We somewhat arbitrarily chose Summer and Smoke, starting with the idea that we would try to stage that play as a separate project from the dance pieces, knowing that it was going to become a part of it. And as soon as we heard them reading the lines everything sounded so artificial and boring. It was awful! So we started playing with it, and one of the solutions was to make a version of it and not read those lines; to say it in you own words. That became a technique and the whole piece was then done that way.

S: So did it change every night? I remember especially Rinne’s long monologue about a medical condition that then became sexually obsessive and inappropriate. That felt extremely improvised.

J: She has an outline in her head, because it’s a monologue and because nothing else cues off of it — well, a few things do. Scott gets up and leaves at some point, so there had to be parts of it that he could recognize as his cues — but other than that she gets to spin off out of this outline form. She just has to get the ideas down. But with dialogue it doesn’t get to spin off as much because the ideas have to exchange and match up. So the challenge for them was trying every night to think of a new way to say it without changing the idea or the narrative. The narrative was something that started out as the Tennessee Williams play but then worked into something else.

S: Did the characters come from the Tennessee Williams? The doctor, the daughter, the mother who mumbles and ticks, who talks to herself? And that cough? Oh yes, that’s why I remember it as being so Freudian; because the whole piece unfolded like a series of symptoms standing in for something else. It was like watching symptoms blown up to this extraordinary degree, like a series of moments signaling that there is, beneath this surface, something else that we don’t get to see, somewhere else, something behind what’s happening, with this neurotic cough all the time that the young woman tries to hide; and the doctor who she falls in love with. But also, none of them seem to operate in the same world, and so there’s this acting out and covering up between the characters on the stage, all these different collusions and alliances, all of which creates this immensely frustrated sexual tension. Do you see how one can arrive at that reading?

J: Absolutely. And some of that comes from the play text where the character is kind of neurotic. But also it’s blown up by the combination of that and the way we wanted to approach making theater for that piece. In a sense we stay interested in these things — we always want there to be an awareness. That was something we did for the first time in Language Instruction, which was in 1994. It was an idea we got from studying Andy Kaufman.

II. Andy Kaufman Hyperawareness: “The Real Me”

S: I saw that piece when you resurrected it last year at The Flea Theater in Tribeca.

J: Yes — we did Andy Kaufman in 1994. Make sure you get the date down ’94 — we did Andy Kaufman in ’94. [John is insistent on this because of the then recent release of the filmMan in the Moon, about Andy Kaufman, starring Jim Carrey. ERS was there first.] So in Language Instruction we experimented for the first time with one of the actors being hyperaware of the audience; extra sensitized and having direct contact. There’s a scene where Leo (playing Andy) gets really upset and bent out of shape. He seems to stop the whole thing and tries to explain that none of what you were seeing was real. This is the real me. He played it in a way where he almost wasn’t playing it, where he would stop and talk to the audience, but in this tortured way; and so he created this ambiguity which on a good night would make the audience laugh and create a discomfort as to whether this was the actor Leo talking to you or whether or not he was still playing this character. It was always up to him what he would say and he would really push it, and if somebody would laugh he would look at that person and say, “Well I’m not trying to be funny here — that’s more appropriate for other parts of the show.” That really affected me watching it this most recent time, because he would let everything get reallyuncomfortable, not funny, and confusing, and then finally it would break when people would figure out that he was doing something.

S: That’s a line that people like to tread, isn’t it? It’s always exciting as an audience member watching work that plays with that meltdown place, where everything ceases almost, and lodges in that in-between space. Where you don’t know what the performer is doing, or even what it is you think they should be doing. Or what you as a watcher should be doing. Suddenly you don’t know how to respond and you become hyperaware of yourself too.

J: That’s why Andy Kaufman was a real pioneer and that scene where Leo pushed things was kind of our best realized tribute to him, something that got genuinely uncomfortable, with the actor being painfully aware of all these people watching him and uncomfortable and not knowing what to do; and having that seamlessly turn into something really funny and entertaining. That was what Andy Kaufman made a whole career out of, something that spoke to theater, though he was doing it on a completely different scale for television.

S: But it was about the theatricality of performing. So Andy Kaufman was a stand-up comedian?

J: Yes. And I think that everything we used to make that show is going to be represented in that movie in some form or another with Jim Carrey.

S: Oh — it’s Jim Carrey is it?

(Interval) Remembering the ERS Story

S: Before we look at pictures and go to the cafe you have to tell the Elevator Repair Service story. How did you come up with that name?

J: I think my memory is fuzzy as to whether or not the crucial detail of the story applied to me or my first cousin who was there doing it with me. The story goes that the two of us went to . . . well he reminded me sometime recently that I might have had it a little bit wrong. But the story goes that we went to wherever my aunt was working — I think it’s a government office maybe — and there was an old computer. It wasn’t old then, but it was a clunky printer thing with a typewriter keyboard, no monitors. And we did a survey which asks you about your interests — I think it was for adults, and maybe high-school students. So we take this survey and we both answered all these questions about what we were interested in, do you like working with people, or technology, and we gave really honest answers. We weren’t trying to play with it or anything and the results — the career predictions that came out — were pretty hilarious and included Elevator Repair Man.

S: Ah. Well how did it get to Elevator Repair Service then?

J: Well it was — all of the early scheming that I did for having a company and what to call it I did with James Hannaham, spending a lot of time together when we first got to New York in ’91. We had worked together in college, and we thought it was a great joke and that if I ever did have a theater company it would have to correspond to the career prediction of this thing. You know, we would have to make that happen, and so it would have to be an Elevator Repair Service.

S: I see. Fulfilling your own destiny then. Making the prediction come true?

J: Yes, really. But I think it also reflects part of what ERS’ sensibility is, and a lot of what James’s sensibility is, which is this kind of (long pause) . . . audacious absurdity and this joy in things not making sense. That was a lot of what our initial impulse was, to make things that were fun but that were mysterious and seem to know internally what they are all about but on the outside seem insane.

III. Internal logics/New York City

S: Which is pretty much a reflection of how the world is, isn’t it? I mean everyone has their internal logics, but it doesn’t always translate into decodable behaviors. For me as an outsider in this city, it’s a very New York thing. Or at least it’s something really heightened here in New York where I believe you have more monologists on the streets that in any other large, urban city in Europe or Latin and South America for example. Here there are more people turning the conversation in on themselves, maybe because they can’t make sense to any one else. Everywhere has its own particular breed of madness going on, and New York’s is the monologist, the schizophrenic; you see more people walking round with internal logics going off that they really know something about and you don’t, and never will . . .

J: (laugh) That’s right, they don’t make any sense, I mean you can’t explain them but they’re undeniably entertaining and intriguing and they make you want to know. And the wanting to know is a great thing to experience, and not knowing what that person’s background is isn’tunsatisfying; it’s its own reward and that is an ideal for us. A lot of the kinds of things ERS try to do on paper sound like we’re trying to confuse the audience or it seems like inside jokes. It’s a very fine line between what we’re doing and things that sound more hostile. It’s the difference between something being confusing and something being mysterious.

S: By mysterious do you mean unexplained?

J: Yes. The confusing thing and the mysterious thing may give you the same amount of information — but the mysterious thing is intriguing and fun; it makes you interested in it, while the confusing is boring.

S: Then there are things that are simply great to watch or to behold. I’m thinking, for example, about the movement sequences in all of the ERS shows and which you refer to as the dances. Like the aerobics movement that you took from the Chinese geriatric health video we just watched (laugh), and which recurs like a theme throughout Total Fictional Lie. That movement is really mesmerizing to watch, especially watching the way different people take it on. You watch it without tiring of it, which happens in life too. And as you point out, you don’t questions it. There are moments in the day where a mundane or ordinary action catches your eye, someone in a shop performing a repetitive movement or through a hairdresser’s window, and you watch but you don’t need to know anything about how or why they’re doing it. That’s not the way you engage with it. But these things can seem comforting, no?

J: You have a gut reaction, just the thing happening in the moment. And that’s where all our research is focused. It depends on who people have had a chance to observe. Susie brings in all kinds of things from her second grade students. But sometimes they come from gestures and physicality that we’ve seen in movies. They’re not dance at all; they’re not designed to show you the body in the way that dance is designed to. We’re getting dance from a scene from the movie The Last Tycoon where Tony Curtis is walking around just being very nervous and doing things with his hands, and that becomes a dance.

S: What do you call your dances? I’m curious because I worked with the ensemble performance group Goat Island in Chicago this summer, and they too have peculiar and particular movement sequences in their pieces, which they call “impossible” dances.

J: Too bad that name is taken!

S: Yes, it’s a very accurate term, isn’t it? Describing something trying to be something it knows it can’t ever quite be, but which isn’t anything else either; something which has a self-defeating structure or mechanism built into it, and which repeats itself.

J: Yes, and it makes me think of what we’re often looking for in making a dance, the best thing we can find. This is what makes cartoons such a great source of choreography — people or animals in the cartoons…because they are animated, and because of the particular style…we’re doing things you can’t do, that you can’t accurately duplicate. You can only try and fail, and in doing that you find a way of inventing, a choreography; the best attempt at a dance some cartoon character does, and then fail to do it and find out what we’re left with. Failure to achieve the impossible things is a great creative source for us.

S: It’s a philosophy almost I think, in making performance work. Or maybe a poetics.

J: It is, yes; and I’m very disappointed to hear about that name being taken!

S: I loved it when I heard it because it resonated with so much work I’ve seen here and especially in Europe, which creates a particular kind of radical aesthetic that goes against the grain. It’s about the impossibility of doing an action, any action, well or skillfully. But also about the refusal to see “success” as the only way of realizing something. For example, in the work of Forced Entertainment in England, you don’t so much have these movement sequences or contained dances as with your work or Goat Island’s work; movement is less isolated. But there’s a physical vocabulary on stage which is so much about the attempt to do something, and about what you’re left with when it doesn’t come off as expected, or as we’d all hoped for, as you said before. So that images and text are built up out of the remains of something else. It’s very beautiful, watching the ruins of something take over and become the thing itself. Much more haunting that way.

J: I wish I had had a chance to see more of their work because I think we must have so much in common. I wish we could spend a weekend together sometime.

S: Yes — there is a lot in common, but the workexpresses itself differently. What links it is that there’s an internal mechanics — a concern with an internal and maybe inexplicable logic, that doesn’t necessarily correspond with realism or representational realism, I guess, which is very similar; and that’s the same with Goat Island’s work too. I think that…well…all three companies are perfectly happy to practice the unexplained.

Works Cited

Boal, Augusto. 1979. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Said, Edward. 2000. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage.