Together with actors of the Schauspiel Köln ensemble and dancers of his own company Ballet of Difference, US-choreographer Richard Siegal has created the crossover project ROUGHHOUSE. The title derives from the verb »roughhousing«, another term for play-fighting among children. In fast cuts full of slapstick elements and subtle humour, Siegal stages the encounter between acting and dance as an ambiguous play of signs. Words and bodies whirl across the stage. Convictions are undermined. Truths appear and disappear. Everyone communicates, no one understands. Or more precisely: everyone understands something different. To each and everyone their own truth. But is it likely at all that two individuals understand each other? Or even possible? Is truth still a fixed category of the 21st century? And what would the loss of these categories mean for a society?
Richard Siegal is well known for venturing into unknown territory and trying out new aesthetics. For ROUGHHOUSE, the choreographer has written a theatre text that radically questions language as a tool for conveying meaning. In condensed scenes, actors and dancers keep talking themselves into trouble – whilst still touching on the most pressing discourses of today's media society.


SOMEONE’S GONNA GET HURT«
US-CHOREOGRAPHER RICHARD SIEGAL INTERVIEWED BY DRAMATURGE TOBIAS STAAB

Richard Siegal: My brain has changed over the years. I think I used to be much more left brained. My ability to speak language definitely diminished. There is no doubt about that. I guess it is a training thing ...

Tobias Staab: To talk?

RS: I think, I’ve trained my left brain to not be so dominant any more. The fall- out is that I have troubled expressing myself in words.

TS: But you’ve just written a theatre piece.

RS: Yeah. But it’s absurd and very associative. It’s not rational.

TS: Was ROUGHHOUSE your first piece?

RS: I guess so ... I mean, I have used text a lot before. HOMO LUDENS (2008) for instance was extracted almost exclusively from Don DeLillo.
TS: Is ROUGHHOUSE a result of a lot of text sampling or was most of it directly coming out of you?

RS: Sometimes in writing this text, I was very consciously incorporating the wor- ding of others, but probably about 90% was mine. There is a text text which is straight out of Wikipedia also citing the footnotes. I’ve been wondering if the supertitles also could serve as footnotes.

TS: It sounds pretty stressful to me reading all the footnotes while you are listening to spoken text at the same time ...

RS: There you go ... right-brained.

TS: How was the writing process? Did you have a structure beforehand or would you just allow your right brain to take over?

RS: I was working on the opera project MASS (2018) in Gelsenkirchen and I guess I had a bit of a fever. My three year old daughter Ruby sent me a picture she had drawn. She draws extraordinary things, I think. She really has some kind of a natural gift for color and form. Both of her grandfathers being painters. She sent this picture to me and I was so struck by it, that I started trying to draw in her style ... which felt really good ... I was able to kind of trash the rules and in this spirit I began writing down a list of scenes and then the notes became longer. Then became dialogues. They felt somehow effortless to write.

TS: What about the title, ROUGHHOUSE? There is no term in German which could serve as an adequate translation.

RS: It describes a type of play usually between children or between adults and children in which the fun is in being very aggressive with each other under the condition that nobody gets hurt. So it’s actually for children a really important part of the socialization process. They learn relative power, and how to excercise power responsibly, and to entrust those who have more with your own subordi- nance. Above all they also get to role play.

TS: And how does this relate to the piece?

RS: It has some metaphorical implications for the manner in which we communicate with one another on the society level. But my feelings about it are not resolved. When I look at contemporary politics, what I often see is kind of mobbing and otherising that goes on. I know that these words mean something and have consequences. These words are deeds. In roughhousing as well, people can actually get hurt. In my family as well. We were three kids. We played really hard together. Our parents were always saying, ›stop that, because We know where it’s going. Someone’s gonna get hurt‹. Which was often the case. But we learned to respect the power of each others body and the power of the words we used to play-fight.

TS: Do you feel that nowadays political correctness standards prevent us from having experiences like this?

RS: Personally I want people to feel respected. But as I have very ambiguous feelings about how this admirable desire is being pursued. I guess that's an artistic prerogative. Roughhousing ends up becoming an nexus for all the contradictory directions I feel our society is pulling us in.

TS: There are concrete strategies of undermining these limitations that are given by political correctness. The first one who comes into my mind is Donald Trump who constantly uses language in order to cross the borders of what accepted in society, in order to shift taboos.

RS: That touches a lot of what the language is reflecting in ROUGHHOUSE, but the banners around which people are rallying are often arbitrary in the play. Sometimes there are on the side of political correctness, sometimes there are really not politically correct at all. It’s more about alliances and affiliation, inclusion and exclusion.

TS: Watching ROUGHHOUSE, I understand that communication doesn’t really work.

RS: It’s not productive.

TS: In a weird way, it is productive, because it keeps continuing. But the classical sense of communication in wich information is sent from one individual to the other doesn’t really happen or maybe only by accident.

RS: (laughs) Everyone in this play has a very short attention span. It is difficult for the actors because what they speak is more an association or a word game, a rhyme or alliteration. It is the viral use of language, how sticky language is, how words comes up and then proliferate.

TS: Is it rather a choreographic way of using language?

RS: Yeah. Or it’s some linguistic way of making choreography. Apart from parameters close to music like duration and prosody, it is after all a physical act to talk. It’s the analysis of how we talk, It’s not what we say. It’s how it’s done. It’s about the mechanics. It’s a little bit like looking at the coding of your computer desktop. Not looking at the icons anymore. It’s going beyond the operating system and choosing to look at the the strings of code. And then what lies beneath at the level of the zeros and ones, and beneath all the electronics, beneath that all the chemistry and the beneath that all the atoms, quarks, neutrinos... It’s phenomenal that anybody understands anything ever. It’s a miracle.

TS: What about the communication between you as a director and the actors? It’s the first time that you work with actors and dancers. Was it easy to connect to everyone?

RS: Yeah, it was totally easy. I think, I had good luck with the casting. It’s the right people. There were moments at the beginning when I sensed that some actors wanted to progress faster. They had certain expectations of me as a director. But then I realized that it would but it would take time. This process was interesting.

TS: Could you imagine yourself working as an actor today?

RS: (laughs) Oh yeah, totally. I was a little bit disappointed after I stopped working with Bill Forsythe that nobody picked up on this. But it would have to be the right director. There are times when I would really like to have that. It feels like a counterpoint staying in touch with the performer part in me. I think that it’s important for me to make work to perform myself in coming years.

TS: Including spoken text ...

RS: Yeah.

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