Fierce Press Gang catches up with the US based performance artist Ron Athey just an hour before the audience enters TROVE, Birmingham’s old science museum to watch his ‘Automatic Writing’. This involves a group of sixteen writers (including myself) being put under light hypnosis, laid down on an enormous piece of paper, read excerpts from Athey’s memoirs ‘Gifts of the Spirit’, and then told to ‘start writing’ for an entire hour whilst scrutinised by the audience. The performance focuses on the notion of channelling the self through freedom of self- expression.
Hannah Elsy: How has the Automatic Writing developed from the previous performances you have done into this one? What’s new for Fierce 2012?
Ron Athey: It is really important that the sixteen writers are a fresh group, and that they are new to the experience of hypnosis. It is important to me and the vocalists that the writers are unfamiliar with the text they are fed, so that we have fresh reactions and a new range of emotions.
H: We (the group of writers) have all bonded really well. Is this common from your past experiences of leading ‘Automatic Writing’ groups?
R: I think that the performance hinges on their trust, because it is an immersive experience. Rehearsals have lasted a few long days, and you guys (the writers) have just left your normal lives to come into the zone. The sense of unification and feeling as if you become one voice the paper is really important. I think we found the collective unconscious at the end of the final rehearsal yesterday. The pathos was incredible.
H: Do you ever personally read what people write?
R: Of course, it’s interesting to find that there are similar parallels and themes within people’s lives. Everyone has their own take on the topics at hand- they are real person thoughts, multiplied by sixteen! On average, around five writers will articulate experiences which have very little to do with mine at all. I find that super- interesting, as I see it as a way of bridging out of myself into something larger.
H: In rehearsals, I once started writing something which wasn’t related to your experiences at all, and felt slightly guilty! Is that okay?
R: It’s perfectly okay! The point of the writing to encapsulate the broad range of human experience stimulated from each of the topics.
H: Where did the idea of ‘Automatic Writing’ come from?
R: It comes from my background, the American spiritualist church, and the idea of channelling the dead through letters. When I read up on it, I found that this movement had spread to theUKand similar ideas had become part of the surrealist art movement. The theme within surrealism of ‘automatism’ struck me: automatic drawing, automatic painting, automatic writing, images from dreams…
H: Are you influenced by ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, such as that of James Joyce?
R: Certainly. I think at the heart of stream of consciousness writing is the idea that something is unleashed which is not mathematical, not logical and has no structure. I’m trying to let go of my memoir, but I don’t have a year to sit down and re-write my childhood story. By taking it and giving it to a collective unconscious, I am distanced from it. That’s why the individual’s story is so important, because it depersonalises it from my own.
H: Do you look for certain types of people when you are choosing your writers?
R: We read through a lot of applications. Any individual who applies in the first place has the desire to unleash something inside them, so that criterion fulfils itself! They don’t have to be interested in art, surrealism, ritual or mental exploration. They need to want to construct a phenomenon. That’s what I’m asking myself now- can we construct a phenomenon here tonight? Can we become ecstatic? Can we become very ecstatic? Can we become cataleptic? What will this add up to? These questions and experiments excite me. What can we elevate tonight in this space?
H: How do you feel about the performance tonight? Are you nervous?
R: I’m excited! I just wish we were starting at eight, as we’re all ready and people are getting jittery. We could have run through it fifteen more times, but I think that would have been a bad idea because yesterday we pushed it to the edge. It’s going to be even more intense tonight with the public present. I didn’t want to run through again and again like a play because it would become stale. You (the writers) would become too familiar with the topics and the text, so that there would be no real surprises left and no sense of immediacy. It’s really important that you write something tonight that you really mean.
H: This is quite a departure from your past work, which has tended to be all about you and your own body.
R: This is company work focused on the collective, indeed very different from my work in the late 90’s. This work is all about bending parameters, taking the experience and making it your own. My earlier work was all about me and my own experiences, and was far less collaborative.
H: Do you prefer the individual or the collective?
R: This is more like an installation to me. A living, breathing, mental, psychic installation! There’s so much more to it.
H: Thank you.
R: Thank you.