Kinship

This manifesto, written by Lois, appeared in The Only Way Home is Through the Show: The Performance Work of Lois Weaver, edited by Jen Harvie and was adapted from an article called ‘Kinship’ that Lois wrote which was published in the Contemporary Theatre Review.

A kin-ship is a strange little vessel. She is small yet seaworthy and abides by a comforting yet troubling set of codes that determines who gets in and who stays out of the boat. Like most ships, she lists. She lists between a company of kin that can sit down to breakfast with one mother or two fathers and their brood of loved but unrelated ones, and one that holds fast to blood that draws a line at the family table; between a block that parties and a party that blocks; between unruly affinity occupying all streets and the systematised sameness that holds office.

Those of us who work in theatre have our own fleet of kinships. The moment we embark on the Process by sitting down for the first rehearsal or standing in the circle of an early workshop, the habits of family slowly crawl out of the hold and start chatting up the mother, brother, sister, wife, husband, father and, more often than not, the lover in the room. When it works well, we experience all the benefits of family and none of the angst of ancestry. The rehearsal dynamic and the after-show camaraderie can be like a love boat cruise that ends with everyone sharing photos and promising to do this again. When it doesn’t work, we throw on our teenage jumpers patched with rivalry and paranoia and slink into our rooms alone or with our equally sulky best friend and slam the door. However, in all cases there is the moment when we realise that this was not the lifetime family cruise we thought it was going to be, and that none of these people is likely to show up for Christmas dinner, and that we are again, happily or not, adrift.

Collaboration is a crafty racing boat, complex in design, capable of speedy manoeuvres, offering a thrilling ride but most assuredly a more treacherous voyage. We make quick, intuitive decisions about the who and how of working with other artists. We are attracted to the shine of their sharp spiky points or their spirited high gloss, and we convince ourselves that in spite of some rough edges, we will bond. We will become a perfectly compatible, highly creative team. Delighted to have the company, we jump into the creative process full of excitement and head directly into some dangerous, uncharted waters. The storms are inevitable. Sometimes we weather them. In fact, we are glad the rain cleared the air. But once in a while it’s a fatal tempest. Our beautiful streamlined collaboration races straight for the rocks. The project is shipwrecked, the boat irreparable, the cargo badly damaged, if not destroyed, and bodies are scattered all over the island. Stranded with the provision of hindsight, we realise we should not have taken this kinship for granted, we should have agreed on the way to disagree. We should have drawn up a simple contract, a map that pointed to what we hoped to achieve, outlined emergency measures for maintaining our sense of humour, and clearly articulated a procedure for bailing out or staying the course.

Built not for speed but for strength, the Community is a vast freighter. Her sheer size accommodates passengers of all classes: performers, designers, directors, singers, dancers, academics, activists, artists, colleagues, co-workers, participants, spectators, audience, stakeholders, and critics alike. She carries the goods of all kinds: cultural celebration, ethnic identification, geographic and sexual orientation, and aesthetic passions and prejudices. While this kinship is not as prone to dramatic shipwreck, she can be known to sink from the weight of the responsibility of representation. Her passengers can drown in a sea of assumptions of sameness or shared vision, or in the singular notion that this is our one and only community. She is hard working and we depend on her various labours and yet she is not welcome in all ports, often relegated to shipping docks and excluded from the marinas of high culture.

To avoid some of these perils I suggest we rebuild and rechristen. I propose we find a way to salvage the good materials of kinship and recycle them into a more sustainable craft and rechristen her with a term made unpopular by governments and popular by movements for change. Let’s call our kinship a Coalition and build on the strengths of that definition: Coalition - a group of individuals who come together for a specific amount of time to achieve a common goal. Let’s adopt this term for the work of the theatre and state loudly and clearly that we are a kinship of diverse individuals who achieve a closeness without necessary affinity or family resemblance, who come together without ownership and separate without anxiety and who commit ourselves not just to the potential of our extraordinary imaginations but to the careful articulation and fulfilment of our common goals