Re-staging Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me)

Why do we repeat things - especially when they went well the first time around?

I think it is customary when reviving a show to claim that the show has suddenly become more relevant than ever.  That’s what happens whenever someone re-stages Coriolanus. It’s what happened before Duran Duran did their comeback tour.  As justifications go I’m a bit suspicious of it.  Is there not something more honest in just admitting that for some inexplicable reason you’ve always wanted to stage Coriolanus, or that you’ve spent all your cash on haircuts and cars?  I really need a haircut, and probably an expensive one to hack through the months of neglect, but our decision to re-stage Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me), a show I made in 2015, is definitely not for the money.   

So why am I doing it?  This show requires me to put on a flesh coloured unitard so I really need good reasons.  

Firstly, I need to reclaim the idea of being an artist - an idea I’ve lost grip on these last few months.  For me last year was not a time of creativity, it was a time of panic and creative paralysis.  In Maslow's hierarchy of human needs self-actualisation sits at the top and underneath that is food, and safety.  I felt unsafe and it made me realise what a privileged position I normally occupy in order to have the head space for art.  It is a luxury and one that I took for granted before March 2020.  So I haven’t felt like an artist, I haven’t made anything during this year that I can now reveal proudly to the world.  I can feel myself almost apologising for my indolence, and I don’t want to do that.  Because my desire to apologise comes from the unhealthy idea that we should always be producing.

Which brings me on to my second reason.  In the name of ‘coming back greener’ I am offering not something new but something old, I am up-cycling it, which involves getting rid of the cobwebs on the smoke machine and getting a new costume with a larger waist.  As performers these pieces live in our body, they are all we’ve got and we are constantly being encouraged to move on, to find something new.  It is still easier to get money for a new project than to get money to re-stage an old one.  This makes us believe that there is no interest in doing something again, because no one is interested in watching something again.  But maybe they are, and maybe there is still a handful of the world’s population, or at least the UK’s population (seeing as we’re not really welcome anywhere else anymore) who haven’t seen this piece and might enjoy it.  

I am part of the contemporary dance world - an art form that for some reason put contemporary in its title as if to prove its allegiance to the new and to discourage us from looking back.  The problem with that idea is that prioritising the new over the old is what got us into this mess.  Both the specific mess of the arts world and the general mess of the world world.  Prioritising the new over the old means we don’t recycle and like the tiny Armadillo Girdled Lizard we end up eating our own tails.  It is demonstrably not sustainable.  

So I offer up this old piece, as a reminder to myself of what it is to be an artist and as a contribution to a kinder, greener recovery.