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Writer's pictureJOE WOODWARD

image from Stefan Keller

We all seek equilibrium in our lives. The artist however seeks to disrupt that equilibrium.

Even the funny guy who tells stupid jokes to fascist audiences in community halls in order to survive and actually live, knows that to keep going, they need to produce moments that effect un-censored laughter and response.


So if theatre is to remain relevant for any culture and not simply amplify the affirmation of dominant cultural ideologies of the Left and of the Right, then it needs to master the ability to break the equilibrium of dominant and authoritarian thought that threatens each individual who participates in and adheres to a presence in theatre presentation. We need to acknowledge that many in our audience might well be comfortable in a Mussolini inspired rally. Do we admonish them for this? I suggest not! But our work needs to be capable of escaping from the equilibrium of gravitation towards conservative and even fascist values.


So wipe that smirk of your face

You will most probably disagree with much of what I present here.


Jesus is quoted as saying:


“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matthew 10:34-36).


The statement is a truth about how any shaking of equilibrium will cause disruption to one's personal life; any breaking of the unseen flow of "how things are" is going to bring crises to personal relationships and one's own ease of existing. Let's face it; "peace" is not necessarily equilibrium. Once an equilibrium is reached there may well be a kind of false peace; a peace where there are smiles all round disguising the reality of submission, abuse and even enslavement.


Art and the Seeking of One's Own Death

Is it so outlandish to suggest that the only goal of an artist and a creator is to seek the avenue of one's own death; the obliteration of self both on a physical and a spiritual level? This is the ultimate shaking and obliteration of any equilibrium. In disrupting of the equilibrium is one really advancing the march towards mortality and the disappearing of self into the nothingness of time? And if we think this is simply a semantic trick of wordplay, then consider the narcissistic Dorian Gray who demands reality be put on hold as reality becomes a fake image; one's own reality is but the image one creates of oneself and presents to others? While all the time the real self decays in a cupboard of one's own anxiety and never-acknowledged decrepitude!


The young brilliant artist who has been sold lies that they can be whatever they choose and their masters are never challenged ... consider the neurosis of such a person! Consider the logical syllogism of such an existence where fantasy and illusion are given academic credence that only hastens the drift into the institutional control that is the ultimate prison for such crimes. Consider how YOU contribute to this enforced destruction of such brilliance and such potential while adhering to the cultural Narcissism that is the dominant cartoon picture of the age! Consider all this and then decide if death actually exists or if there is some alternative name and some semantic game that can supplant the finality that is such necessity! The ultimate insanity would be to scream aloud that Death is simply a passing faze and that it was socially constructed to support the dominant ideology of the age!


But the artist, if indeed there is still such a figure, will challenge the semantics of ideological death and be prepared for the burning of the flesh and the arrow to the heart and the shaming by the multitudes who throw rotten fruit at the head in the stocks in some equivalent of the medieval shaming or the cultural revolutionaries who pandar to the dictates of the little red booklets ... such artists will challenge semantics of smiling crocodile sincerities who claim with all sincerity their love of humanity and proclaim their victim-hoods as shields and advance weapons to quell any claims of reason and rationality.


The Devils

The smiling persuaders of contemporary life and their political effectiveness has never been more accurately portrayed in film than in Ken Russel's "The Devils". Click on the link if you haven't seen it. A most flawed character with insight and an ability to learn and revise wasted years yet who has an ability to rise above the sanctimonious certainty of agenderists using their persuasive muscle to achieve their political and social aims is depicted with such succinct clarity that will make you shiver.


The depiction of the smiling passive-aggressive activist for the dominant political / religious hegemony is so disturbing and cynical. Yet the movie is about the past while being prophetic of the future.


I hear a ten year old girl proclaim this week that she hates all white American males; said as a matter of fact because she sees "whiteness as evil", yet she is a white Australian child. Where does this notion come from? The Devils use whatever it takes to encourage racist wars of mutual destruction.


Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Demons" portrays irrational and idealistic forces "portrayed in their ordinary human weakness, drawn into the world of destructive ideas through vanity, naïveté, idealism, and the susceptibility of youth ..." (WIKIPEDIA accessed 23 Feb 2023) The more conservative leaning former radical Dostoevsky sees the possibility of rational discussion actually being a neurotic tool for irrational action.


1971 University Of Queensland Students' Union Meeting

The Springboks Rugby Union team was coming to Brisbane. The Anti-Apartheid action was organized to protest. I was newly elected as an Education Rep on the University of Queensland students' union. I was also a Rugby Union referee and was scheduled to referee a curtain raiser to the Australia vs The Springboks test. Prior to a meeting of the Students' Union, I remember being in the Uni Refec and a number of radical students had returned from the Regatta Hotel where a demonstration had ended up. Someone in the room shouted that Dan O'Neill, a prominent and radical English lecturer at the University had been arrested. Some clown in the audience, obviously misreading the significance of such a statement, made a joke of the announcement. To his horror, a number of student shouted him down and surrounded him as if to beat the crap out of him ... luckily this did not happen. But the potential violence in the moment was very evident.


In that week a number of students painted their faces black supposedly in solidarity with black Africans. This wasn't seen as insulting. In fact they were sincerely trying to show solidarity with the oppressed South African population who were true victims of racism and horrific laws that made them less than second-class citizens of their own country. Thirty years later all of these students would decry and denounce "black face" under any circumstances. People would be surprised to learn of exactly who these students were as some become quite famous in later years.


The equilibrium of Queensland society was being disrupted by symbolic actions of activists donning theatrical and symbolic demonstrations counter to the dominant ideological tentacles of the time. Growing from this time was a radical theatre movement in Brisbane that saw places like La Boite Theatre and the university's output in The Popular Theatre Troupe. Janet Mahoney, later well known as Janet Fielding who played Tegan in Dr Who, had earlier donned the black face in demonstrations against Apartheid and then became active with Errol O'Neill and Richard Fotheringham in the Popular Theatre Troupe as it toured the UK. Theatre in the 1970s was a potent weapon against fascist tendencies in Queensland society and politics. This wasn't simply because of the content of its offering. That was generally fairly conservative. But it spawned a generation of activists who were willing to step outside of the acceptable compliancy within the social contract of citizen and state.


Theatre and a Death Wish

It is easy to be radical and even hostile to your society, community and family when you are part of a scene or part of a dominant artistic and social movement. But this begs the question of what if you are not? What if your perceptions, observations, inane or innate and very core understandings challenge the peer-sanctioned viewpoints that you might generally support but which cause severe and major questioning and doubts? Chances are you will be a gutless arse and surrender. Chances are you will sacrifice your feelings and considerations in order to achieve sanctioning rather than suffer crucifixion on the altar of correctness according the gospels of the anointed!


So we come back to theatre, art and death! The charlatan artist will appeal to the coterie of sanctioned artistic work that might well be antagonistic to the dominant hegemonies of a time. But this very sanctioning is the problem. The non-charlatan artist is likely to probe the sanctioned art and sanctioned position of even one's own social and political stances. And ultimately this requires a commitment to Death!


Joe Woodward 23 Feb 2023



See also:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoKKhaxLXw8 a student movie directed by Joe Woodward made on a zero budget


















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Writer's pictureJOE WOODWARD

The incredible abstraction of being ...

I always loved the title of Milan Kundera's novel "The Incredible Lightness of Being". I love the book and enjoyed the movie. The beautiful thing about it was that I never understood what the writer was trying to say and what the movie was really about. On the surface it was about very petty people living slavishly very petty lives ... and I hated them. Yet it was more!


Yet the title stayed with me.


That connection between self and literature or self and art is a very personal relationship. Personal! Yet the only connection that is worth anything in the universe! The love one shares is at best ephemeral like the relationship between the audience and the actors in a live performance. It dies at the moment of its creation. The sex that drives the human race to propagate its species is simply part of the necessary drive that moves individuals to fuck, rape, devour each other and eat the psyche of one and other to the point of genocide.


The Russian theatre guru "Stanislavski" has been coopted as an American to legitimize its cultural hegemony through film and cinematic style. The heroes of the 1950s, a decade of sanctification of American domination throughout the known universe, have been banded on to the skin of theatre practitioners ever since. The American aesthetic of theatre arts has never questioned the iconic reverence towards Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Marlon Brando et al. However, very talented people does not equal a system of signifiers. American playwriting, American films and American acting techniques do not summarize the potential for living representations in art.


Stanislavski might have provided the basic theoretical platform for film acting. But the most significant element of Stanislavski' was his doubts about his work as exemplified in Meyerhold's influence through the later moments in his life. The horrible intrusions into the Russian Stanislavski that were seen in American appropriations of his work have permeated into the Australian theatre scene. The glib referencing of Stanislavski in theatre is obscene. Stalin had Meyerhold murdered. Stanislavski might well have been also killed but died meantime. But now the mediocre minds of Stanislavski followers have created a messianic style attachment to their hero.


So in our highly programmed and technological age is it possible to create paradigms for performance that don't simply signify and promote the dominant paradigms of our proclivities as citizens within communities and extended families?

While film makers like Peter Greenaway certainly challenge the predominant world views, it is difficult to see where creative talents have challenged the strait jackets of cultural and agenda-based creative outputs in cinema and theatre.


If per chance you want to do this: ie. challenge the cultural domination of arts and artistic practice, then Antonin Artaud is a valuable starting point as is Shakespeare's fool (in King Lear) OR Thersites in "Troilus and Cressida. Both these "fools" work as oppositional figures drawing attention to the absurdities of the powers that be around them. Artaud's defiance of socialist and communist masters through his break with the Surrealist movement epitomizes the individual's "fool" contrasting his own generalized attachment to the cultural milieu of his time. It was a source of much condemnation and accusations of individualism; Artaud was probably closer to forms of anarcho-syndicalism than socialism of the 1920s; although I am sure Artaud would scream at me for suggesting such a thought!


But the artist isn't the one responsible for making the social contract; the structuring of resources and the shaping of society. So the artist doesn't need the whole picture. The artist makes a poor politician. The artist does need to be constantly dissatisfied with the way things are; the only balance one can achieve is in the struggle to SEE and to shape that perception in a form that can be communicated. Such form and such shape may very often be antagonistic and critical. The actor takes a text or an idea for a text and gives physical shape to a sculpture in a space; a sculpture that might well be interacting with other sculptures ... if not, then with an audience. The designer, director, writer assist in the construction of realities that give vent to the actor's potential to shape and jolt the known cultural and social perceptions.


The actor cannot be afraid of liminality; that ambiguous in-between state that exists between stages of development; even between the actor and the act or the self and the character or the performance and the audience ... etc. And this is where Antonin Artaud is significant. The total theatre concept blasts through separations and demarcations whilst acknowledging all of them. Surrealism acknowledges the very specific and subjective nature of all reality; dreams influencing reality and the subjective craving for personal significance within an absurd and insignificant world. Yet it also takes on the pain of real suffering as a result of this absurdity and the lies that contribute to static structures of control that bend human spirit to mediocre wills and base perceptions. As art it uses the liminal state of the actor and act to try and upset the equilibrium of oppression and authoritarian controls ... No wonder much of the offering is quite dark in delivery; why its main enemy might well be the US affirming world of Disney and Nero's "Bread and circuses"!


Joe Woodward

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You are tired of seeing English and American Affirmations through their theatre offerings and their Australian surrogates? Want to experience something refreshing ... and yes, this isn't acting training for untalented or the talented ... it's liminal experience ... perhaps linked to some of Antonin Artaud's thinking ... but will take place on Fri 10 February at 8.00pm. I won't tell you WHERE until you let me know you are interested in this Shadow House PITS offering ... Only can take a handful of participants ... so if you are keen on the idea of liminal performance and perhaps surrealism ... just email shadowhousepitswrite at joew@shadowhousepitswrite.com


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Writer's pictureJOE WOODWARD

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay with homage to Jimmie Durham who created the sculpture

Anybody out there? Anybody?

Anybody want to create something that breaks through the belief matrix?


I wonder if people actually realize just how much their thinking is being predetermined? The parroting of key phrases and sentiments on social media has such obvious patterns that one wonders if there is really any possibility anymore of art that goes beyond identity? agenda? the straitjacket of one's DNA and cultural fixations? Is it possible? Does one have to be a psycho like JOKER in order to escape the fixations and repetitive articulating of current fads in order to think or say something? I mean anything! Just saying! I mean, have you noticed how much the terms "gratitude" and "thankful" have appeared on the social media platforms in the past year or so? Let's be clear, there is nothing wrong with being grateful and being thankful ... But really! It's nauseating to see the extent to which isolated souls are competing to express their thankfulness ... and stating it loud on social media! Why state it to the world. Why not just be it! Quietly and perhaps on a one to one ... Instead of convincing oneself through overuse and constant repetition that one has to be grateful in order to be sane and exist! Why can't everyone just get over their neurosis and move on ... ??? Grateful or otherwise! But this isn't just about one's petty social media statements, patterns or even need to feel somehow connected by expressing apparent feelings and discoveries that simply must be shared with the world. It goes much deeper and we can see on a serious note how we are generally fooled by the semantics of propaganda and hype. As we might like to believe our thoughts, responses and feelings result from our own free will, we might sometime stop and actually think through our own basis for beliefs, reactions and decisions. Perhaps we will see the nonsense of any suggestion that we are free from the social, cultural and political straitjackets that have us enthralled.


Is Art all just Neurosis and Agenda?


Caitlin Johnston writes very persuasively on the topic of the control of free will and perception. It is certainly challenging writing and one is always tempted to double down with a "oh yes ... BUT" reaction.

She writes:

"The clearer you are on the false narratives about the world, the more effective you are at helping others see them. The clearer you are on the false narratives about yourself, the happier and more effective you become." (Awakening From The Narrative Matrix, 30 Dec 2022)


Now there might appear to be elements of Utopian thinking in aspects of her writing. The adage that "politics is the art of the possible" would no doubt be thrown up as a defense against her attack. Johnston equates The Matrix film and its central thesis as an analogy for what is happening in our world; the lack of reality and the continuous false narratives that co-opt our attention and thought patterns: thus our very lives and existence!


We see children in schools who have high levels of perception being diagnosed with a disorder because of their apparent symptoms that suggest some maladjustment. Some are drugged over to dull their perceptions and dull their physical departure from what Educationists and the Medical profession has labelled as 'normal'. But even after treatment, many still will not fit.


So the question is: where does the disorder lie? Is it with the child? Or is it with culture and society? The context or "matrix" through which one has to navigate an existence! Perhaps we might consider looking at the Artaud quandary to see where neurosis and agenda might collide and depart.


The Artaud Quandary


No doubt, much of Artaud's writing and creative responses to the world were influenced greatly by his mental states and pathological treatments both self-inflicted and thrust upon him. However, history and the arts have not dismissed Artaud's work as a rant or as deluded thinking. Quite the opposite! Artaud gained a tremendous respect for much of his contribution to the body of artistic and cultural knowledge that has influenced artistic work for much of the last century.


One very significant element of all his insights and arguments is that of "seeing". As with Plato, Artaud recognized that our experienced reality is forged by forces beyond our control. All views we hold and all our experiences of culture, society and relationships are shaped by convergencies of multiple facets over which we are constrained from actually understanding or even a cultivated awareness to any significant degree.


His view of theatre then is one that seeks shocks and contrived experiences to break through these blinding forces that prevent the seeing and experiencing of reality beyond the socially constructed abstractions that are forced by agendas, media, social relations, one's very genes and the mental states that generated by such abstractions.


His views were counter to the prevailing Surrealist connections with the Communist Party of the time and he was subsequently expelled from the movement. Unlike Brecht, Artaud saw the world more through a microcosmic lens. While both Artaud and Brecht recognized the necessity to consider the epic context through which individual action took place, Artaud postured that it was absurd to think that any rational discourse from within this context would have any benefit in being able to reveal truths or suggest different paradigms for seeing anything. Semantics and intellect were captive to the restrictive contexts of agendas and cultural precepts. So Brecht's use of "alienation" might go some distance towards theatre art as a revealing mechanism; but it would simply be coopted for use as a promotion for an idea or belief system. Artaud was more concerned with blasting and obliterating the very notion of belief ... let alone a belief system.


In "To Believe is to Kill" I propagated an argument that suggested it is the very nature and definition of "belief" as a phenomenon that results in the most extreme and destructive acts that human kind can inflict on one-and-other. No matter how benign, even altruistic, the belief might be, the result will ultimately end in a kind of carnage at some point. Is there any religion or belief system that has not fallen foul in various degrees to this infliction? I would be interested to hear of it.


The contradictory writing of George Orwell is pertinent on this point:

"Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." (George Orwell, "The Road to Wigan Pier")


So is there anybody out there?


Anybody Out There?


So dear friends and others who might stumble upon this essay; is there anybody out there who still thinks art can be separated from identity? from political and social agendas? from narcissistic introspection? from Disney? from defining Belief Systems of religion, political ideology and social theories?


If you ARE interested in following through, I would be keen to talk up a project or two that might just create something of Artaud's shocks to challenge culture and the straitjacket of thinking.


Sounds a bit pretentious? Maybe? But surely nothing as pretentious as the social media pontificating we see every hour!


Anyone out there who might be interesting in high level performances that feature CONTENT with STYLE and that can be produced on near zero budgets (with some judicious and clever planning) and that might have some effect with audiences?


Get in touch: joew@shadowhousepitswrite.com

Joe Woodward



SUBSCRIBE TO SHADOW HOUSE PITS Write


See also previous relevant articles:



Have a look at the DTC movie:


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... and note what happens at the very end ...

















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