81 spectacle and keep an ever-moving audience entertained, while the true power and mystery remains embedded in the box, with this dynamic of regulated exposure striking a brilliant resonance in Bakhtin’s (1984) concept of grotesque realism, in which the body is understood not as complete or idealised, but as “never finished, never completed”, continually shaped through “sweat, dirt, and labour” (Bakhtin, 1984:317). As our impetus became an idea, I wondered if there would be a way of bringing forth a critique of stratification to an unstratified audience, without simplifying our creation into moral instruction. Peter Brook states, “If the theatre seems to need a certain crude element, this must be accepted as part of its natural soil” (Brook 1996:28); using this stimulus, we began to explore the rough and grotesque as active tools of disturbance. As “Thing 3”, I ran through the department building wearing only a trenchcoat I’d found on the floor a week prior and my work boots, my body deliberately exposed to misreading, discomfort, and interruption. One passerby shouted, “What kind of sex play is this?”, to which I shouted back without missing a beat or breaking character, “Your mother’s”, cementing Thing 3 as a conduit for misunderstanding and ridicule, absorbing audience discomfort through shock and grotesquery. Richard Schechner’s idea that performance consists of “actions that are not-for-the-first time” (Schechner 2002:22), situates these repeated interruptions and confrontations as ritualised labour rather than improvisational chaos, as some lecturers began to keep an eye out for the “hallway streaker”. My movement through the building was great practice for sustaining attention, dispersing crowds, and resetting the conditions for viewing which is essential to the running of a successful show, aligning with Bakhtin’s claim that carnival privileges “degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” (Bakhtin 1984:19). I believe I encapsulated the nature of Brook’s “Rough Theatre” in these runs, with every part of the character designed to be comic and expendable, hyperbolising the mad tasks of classed labour that allows grand spectacle to happen. Bakhtin states: “The original system of images symbolized the working people, continuing to conquer life and food through struggle and labor and to absorb only that part of the world that has been conquered and mastered” (Bakhtin 1984:282), a sentiment I came to understand as I became thankful for the warmth of shelter and hot food, both of which I would be intentionally deprived of during rehearsal, causing the highs of my protection and the lows of my exposure to cause irrational swings in behaviour which became yet another characteristic of subservient Thing 3. Schechner extends this understanding by arguing that performance “marks identities, bends time, reshapes and adorns bodies” (Schechner 2002:22), and in this case my body was reshaped through fatigue, cold, and repeated confrontation. This tension between exposure and protection is heightened by the way popular performance is typically managed by authority. Bakhtin observes that carnival is permitted only so long as it remains temporary, noting that it “does not
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