Lights Out When You Leave
On the strange feeling of leaving a rehearsal room and the blackboards in quantum physics institutions.
There should be a German word for it but there isn’t. That feeling of packing up to leave a place and looking back, one last time, at the empty room. German is full of words for very specific feelings: weltschmerz, meaning the sadness when we realise that we are helpless or zugzwang, that feeling when you know you’ve come to a moment where a decision has to be made.
You’re moving out of a flat. You’ve lived there a while and have had good times, bad times and most things in between. As you pack up, some of the objects you put into boxes spark memories – a vase reminds you of whoever gave it to you; half a pack of paracetamol brings back a particularly vicious hangover after a night out; a bookmark falls out of a novel that you forgot to finish. You spend all day packing and by the late afternoon you have carried the last box down to the overfull car. You go back into the flat just to check you haven’t left anything and as you walk in you’re hit with that strange feeling of seeing a place that once was filled with your stuff now empty. And it brings up a feeling that is somewhere between nostalgia, dread and excitement. It’s a moment that only comes around with change. It’s a kind of shrinking of the present – you’re filled with memories from the nostalgia that comes with packing up a life while also filled with the need to look forward that comes with moving on. In between these two emotional weights the present moment collapses in on itself and you stand in that empty room with the dread filled realisation that no matter how nostalgic we may be we leave behind empty rooms.
It would be good to have a word for it, for that feeling of looking at a now empty room knowing that you are leaving it for the last time on to something new.
In Welsh the word hiraeth gets close to this feeling. Hireath describes the sense of longing and yearning for a place that may not exist anymore. Often in Welsh poetry there is this idea of hiraeth for the lost idyllic Wales. In Breton the word hiraezh describes a similar feeling and is used to mean a longing to return to where one feels at home. In Scottish Gaelic cianalas refers to much the same idea. The word has a connection to the Outer Hebrides and the idea that communities there were so closely formed that to leave was to experience a grief more intense than normal homesickness.
Yet these words don’t quite describe what I mean. They refer to feeling of leaving places (or losing places, as both the Welsh hiraeth and Breton hiraezh connotate the idea that part of what is being yearned for is one’s country before being conquered and having a new language instilled – in Wales’ case by England in 1277 and in Brittany’s case in 1532) but of a grander scale than for the feeling I refer to. These words refer to a feeling that exists in relation to countries rather than personal spaces – they imply a sense of community while I am interested by a feeling that is normally felt in solitude.
I have, for the last few weeks, been assistant director on a play. It has happy experience working with talented artists who I like and respect.
I remember arriving on the first day of rehearsals to the empty room. Rehearsal spaces always look barren. When you first arrive, all they have are some folded tables and chairs. Walking into a rehearsal room for the first time is like looking at a blank page – another thing there should be an elegant German word for but isn’t. But over the course of a rehearsal period the room fills up: pictures are added to walls; tape is laid out on the floor marking the set; set pieces are brought in and temporary walls put up; sometimes lights are moved in. Eventually the room becomes uniquely yours. It becomes the outward manifestation of whatever you are making. Invariably a table is set up with an urn for tea, as the tradition of the tea-break is sacrosanct in theatre making. It begins, after a few days, to feel like home. After all, when making a play you spend whole days in that room, six days a week.
The idea of the room becomes the metaphor for the way a director works. If they are relaxed and easy you might say that they ‘run a nice room’. The room becomes the extension of the director. Stage managers have a lovely turn of phrase which is to say ‘we’re back in the room’ at the end of breaks. Often people have taken their break in the room and thus it seems strange to say ‘we’re back’ in a space we never left. But they understand that the room in the building and the ‘room’ are different things. It is as if at the end of the break the ‘room’ materialises around everyone.
The other thing about rehearsal rooms is they are always stand-ins for another place, itself a stand in for another place. What I mean by this is that in a rehearsal room you simulate the theatre space. You tape onto the floor where the front row of seats and the wings would be. You measure to have the exact right size of playing area as you would in the theatre to accurately time exits, entrances and costume quick changes. The rehearsal room becomes a simulacrum of the theatre. But the theatre too is a stand-in for whatever space you designer has located the play in. The rehearsal room is a stand in for the theatre which itself is the host for the set, the representation of where the play actually takes place. A complex chain of ontological custody.
This complicated relationship between stand-ins, simulacra and representation reminds me of Alejandro Guijarro’s photographic series Momentum. Guijarro photographed half-erased blackboards from quantum physics departments of various universities. The prints are huge C-type’s that are the exact same size as the real blackboards. If it weren’t for the shiny texture that prints like these have and the glass of the frame one would very easily be tricked into thinking they were looking at a blackboard. Quantum physics explores how things can be in two states at once – light can be both a particle and a wave; subatomic particles can have charges that are simultaneously positive and negative (this is a vast oversimplification of the way Gauge Bosons works but indulge me); or most famously, the cat in Schrodinger’s box is both alive and dead. Guijarro takes the mathematics behind these seeming paradoxes, mathematics that already looks closer to abstract expression painting than logical thought to the untrained eye, and captures it while it is half erased. In ghostly chalk the calculations, like the subjects quantum mechanics describe, are simultaneously in existence and not. They are there and gone at the same time. By being the same size as the blackboard Gujarro’s work is a facsimile of a real board, that houses half erased, half visible, calculations for the physics of things which themselves exist and don’t exist at the same time.
In a sense this is what theatre is. It is an art object that at the same time it exists and is already beginning to be erased. Theatre is a medium that is constantly dissolving back to nothing. That’s the excitement of liveness – you watch something that can only exist in the moment you are in. Sure, it’s different every night as Mike Alfreds tells us, but there’s also a joy in knowing that it is impermanent. Unlike other mediums, that when they come to be critiqued they can be reproduced perfectly or rewatched, theatre criticism itself requires more creativity because the art that is being analysed has disappeared. It requires a delicate reconstruction that in and of itself brings in new creative ideas, thoughts and feelings.
That feeling I described at the top of this essay – of looking back at a now empty room – part of what makes looking back at a now empty rehearsal room such a complex emotional experience is that it is when the impermanent nature of theatre is at its most obvious. When I left my most recent rehearsal room, at turned the lights off on a now empty space, I felt feelings of nostalgia, of excitement for moving from rehearsals to the run and a murmuring feeling of joy. For whatever reason, I have chosen to work in a medium that dissolves to nothing, that is only stored as a memory with those who experienced it live. That’s terrifying but also such a joyful thing. Walking out of an empty rehearsal room, a room that was bustling with life and ideas, reminds me that the play isn’t a set of artistic decisions, nor is it what happens on the night, nor is it the marriage of text and performance. Instead, it is something that exists in the air, that has no touchable form. It still exists after the room has been cleared and will still exist after the set has been struck from the theatre. It’s a fragile, ethereal thing – like ghostly mathematics on a chalkboard describing something that simultaneously is and isn’t, that exists and doesn’t.