16.

I had a soundbite for the press interviews that went along with our Signal to Noise production of The Tempest in audiences’ own homes. “I’ve always tried to remember,” I’d confide, “that theatre is an experience you have, not a building you go to.” People liked that. And it’s true that an act of theatre can be undertaken anywhere, at any time, by anyone who wants it. But here we all are, sitting in a theatre that is still called a theatre despite only rarely in the last few years hosting any kind of theatre, let alone any theatre that was content to call itself theatre. The editors of the excellent new Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater lament that theatre changes more slowly than poetry does: but poetry is not the name of a kind of building, and buildings, even now, change more slowly than minds do. Ten years on, and about to start rehearsing a new piece for home performance, I would like, speculatively, to invert my soundbite. What if, while retaining our current plurality of performance spaces, both real and virtual, we said that theatre would in the future be distinguished by dint of its happening in a designated theatre building?

10.

Eleven years ago I started a company called Signal to Noise, which borrowed its name from the idea in cybernetics that wherever information is moving around, it is also changed in transit. It gets scuffed, broken up. The liveness of theatre, especially but not only when it is permitted to be fully itself, means that it has a sure tendency towards this kind of turbulence, quite a low signal to noise ratio. I wanted to make work that was full of noise, full of turbulence, that celebrated (rather than attempting to suppress) the qualities of theatre that make it theatre, that make it unpredictable and ephemeral and resistant to commodification. // After our first show, a wildly turbulent queer sci-fi dance-theatre epic, somebody who saw it said he felt sad to imagine that I might think all the signals were somehow lost, that nothing remained but a kind of chaos and cacophany. But for me the signal that survived was the most important thing. Not because of the thing itself, but because of the thing behind the thing. Communication might fail, but the desire to communicate was always somehow preserved in all the noise.