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.

1.
The several layers of ambient noise out here on my temporary balcony remind me to note that at least in the one-minute format there is an (admittedly only semi-advertent) nod to John Cage, who remains the best expert we have on everything that hasn’t yet happened, as apparently stuck in the future as most of the rest of live performance is stuck in the past: so I feel like saying first of all that theatre’s future depends partly on its willingness finally to come to terms with and absorb the example of past pioneers. No pudding till you’ve eaten your greens. I think one of the biggest problems my generation of makers has had is that we’ve grown up in the shadow of an earlier generation that’s been a bit embarrassed about the 60s and 70s. A generation that came of age just as post-punk, which was very good at thinking about the future, lost the thread of its own irony, and everything became Club Tropicana, where the drinks were free and the future was even more embarrassing than the past, with the possible exception of modernism which was the most embarrassing thing of all.