[This interview was conducted by email, one question at a time, between 29th January 2002 and 10th February 2002
 

LU: Can you tell me when, roughly, and where you first came across Alaric Sumner; and what you remember of him from then?

JH: The name had been there, somewhere, in connection with words worth ^[1}, I suspect; perhaps also his involvement in London International Festival of Theatre, though I hadn't seen his Voices ^[2] piece. Then we were starting the Performance Writing Degree at Dartington. I think we were probably just under way, with Caroline Bergvall already in post. Alaric was doing an MA at Leeds and we were looking to fill a post - either someone who brought to writing a visual practice or someone for whom writing was inseparable from performance. Alaric was one of many who responded - more good people than we could see. I wrote to him saying that we really did want to keep in touch. And we did. He came to Dartington in the next academic year to do a day session with students on typography. That's when I actually met him, though it was brief. The following year he joined the staff.

From that occasion what do I remember of him? Later contact gets in the way. He was intense about the workshop - wanted to do it well, wanted to talk about sustained contact, including the possibility of showing work. Serious, fully engaged in the occasion. I expected that from a visit. I came to learn later that this was standard.

LU: In 1996, he presented two quite different performance pieces at Dartington. One was a short play for 2 characters called Conversation in Colour, with music by Michael Finnissy. That was in May 1996. And, before that, during the Performance Writing Symposium, there was error studies and Portraits (for dancer, voices and tape) with Shallal Dance Co. That was in April 1996.

Did you see either or both of them and, if you did, I would be interested in anything you have to say, descriptive, reactive, evaluative?

JH: Yes, I was there for both of them. They were some time ago now and I didn't make notes so my memory is all I have. As you say, the error studies and Portraits was part of the first Performance Writing Symposium, a rich occasion with all sorts of other things going on, so it is particularly vulnerable to memory distortion.

The performance took place in a largish studio theatre, audience in raked seats looking down. I found it an awkward piece, brave but unresolved in all sorts of ways - structurally, between performance styles, even within the spoken text. I think Alaric wanted all that awkwardness. I never spoke with him about it so I don't know for sure.

If I remember rightly, Alaric read from a music stand setting up expectations somewhere between a poetry reading and someone delivering a non-singing part in a music event. I remember too - and this might be quite wrong and there is a text to go back to and check - that this piece featured something that I think is there too in later pieces, like his collaboration with Joe Hyde - a mix of the programmatic (almost polemical) with formalist concerns. I experienced this as a mode clash. It was the first time I had witnessed Alaric performing and I wondered if he knew how much came in with his very carefully articulated and projected - almost declamatory - voice style. For me, this brought in 'social noise' that felt at odds with the text at times; in other words it didn't seem to have been composed in. I once did discuss this element with Alaric. He seemed happy with it and talked about his 'training' at acting school.

The piece was one of many illustrations of his generosity as a collaborator: his willingness to open himself to the work and performance styles of others.

When Conversation in Colour was performed at Dartington, it was in a very small gallery space, using the rectangular room sideways on, with at most a row or two of audience. There were two performers facing the audience, reading rather than 'acting', and the taped sound of Finnissy's music. I liked - and like - the piece very much. The performance was - and had to be - tight, setting up relentless repetitions and modulations around recognisable procedural rules which kept attention very much within the frame and set up an anticipation of closure, if I remember it aright, through both pattern recognition and its narrative equivalent.

LU: It seems to me that you remember very well - not that I was there! I am intrigued by you saying "one of many illustrations of his generosity as a collaborator: his willingness to open himself to the work and performance styles of others.". May I ask you for other such examples?

JH: In the last few years of his life, to my knowledge, he involved himself in at least four collaborations. I am sure there were more. There were the ones with musicians: Nekyia with Jo Hyde, which was worked on in several versions and manifestations, of course; at least two - I think more - with John Levack Drever; and work towards a setting for live performance of voice and piano of  Waves on Porthmeor Beach with Edward Cowie. In this case the written text pre-dated the collaboration by some time. There was a performance at the first Anderson Festival in Buckfastleigh in October 1999.

I never talked at any length with him about the process of collaboration with musicians but I suspect that it was different in each case. Jo and John both use the studio as an instrument. The performance of the Waves on Porthmeor Beach had no prepared or electronically processed sound. Another piece, Plans for the new architecture: Speakable Rooms was collaborative also in the sense that he both worked with others on it and collaged in other voices and found pieces, in some cases, I think, with the full knowledge of the collaborators and some not.

The collaboration I had particularly in mind behind the comment that you quote was a piece involving live performance and video, which again I saw at Dartington, probably in 1999. Again, all the usual disclaimers about memory, and I don't remember the name of it. It was shown in a darkened studio, without much room for an audience - small, packed space. There was a prepared video and sound-track. Alaric's text and voice were on this. He did not perform live. The video image was of the performer who was also performing live in front of it, dressed I think as in the projected image of himself behind him. It wasn't a back projection so his body - especially white shirt or naked chest - intercepted the image, capturing it and doubling him, as so often voices are doubled in Alaric's recorded pieces. This very device brings the topic of narcissism into play, and the way it was used all the more so. It wasn't clear to me the extent to which this narcissism was its topic as against its medium; nor was it clear where Alaric, as a third party, as it were, was in all this.

This was one of the many things we were going to talk about. Alaric and I were always going to talk about things and he was going to arrange the time when we did so. This was partly because an aspect of our relationship was formalised in relation to his PhD. I know that Brigid Mc Leer talked with him in some detail about that piece.

LU: I think the piece you refer to is The Unspeakable Rooms... I think I expressed myself poorly in that it was the generosity I was after. Picking up on your words - "his willingness to open himself to the work and performance styles of others" - is a good example of his generosity (and whomever one asks about Alaric speaks of his generosity): he wrote the text and gave it over to Rory to do with as he wanted. That's a considerable degree of trust.

You've spoken of him and your relationship to him as a doctoral student. May I ask you about that?

I'm thinking of what Alaric could do with a "simple idea" - the apparent jump which turned out to be an unexpected connection, that sense that he might just have seen / read / heard everything I had and a bit more, material to which he could refer at ease...

So, what was it like working with him on his researches?

JH: You did not express yourself poorly. I understood you. I answered poorly. You catch exactly the generosity of Alaric in giving permission, in not holding on to authorship, and in many of his collaborations I am sure this quality was rewarding. In my view this could also lead to difficulties in the work. The piece with Rory was, I thought, an example and I'd need to go back to it to articulate the quite strong feelings it aroused. I know that others - and I remember reading an account by you - liked the piece very much. For my part, I am caught between admiration for Alaric for being willing to let go his own grip on the work and a remaining frustration even after his death about what this could lead to. I feel very unclear about this. I am pretty sure that it was fine with him that it happened, that that was part of the generosity, that he sought working conditions where a collaboration would elicit from work writing of a kind he had never anticipated.

As for working with him on his research, in many ways this hadn't quite started. His main supervisor was Edward Cowie and Alaric had a clear sense of a division of labour between Edward and me. My turn was to come when he had reached a certain point in his theoretical enquiry. There was something of an avoidance about it. He loved spontaneous discussion as you know and could get very excited and excitable, moving between the excitedly playful and the intense and passionate pushing of a line in the pleasures of disputation. In contrast, with me at least, he seemed wary of the prepared and structured discussion that the research relationship needs to have as well. There were topics that we booked to talk about - he was to arrange the time when ready - and they just never happened.

I regretted this at the time and regret it all the more now. The range of what he had done, read and seen was very particular - I agree with you about the range of reference and not just the ease of allusion but also enthusiasm. He was one of those - I can think of other writers who have put their own curriculum together out of the sheer drive of their need and curiosity - who took things in driven by both pleasure and the need to know, that what he read or saw might actually propose some answers. I can remember a conversation with him - before I had read it - about Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. As a result, I read that book as soon as I could.

One topic - and this links with my remarks about The Unspeakable Rooms - was the obvious one: his conception of performance and quite how he saw one sense of performance - making time-based work for audiences - with that other (as in Butler) where performance is also culturally performative. This would have been a running topic and we hadn't really started!

LU: Of course, he was at Dartington to teach as well as study; and I remember the apparent devotion with which he approached his work, telling students to attend readings and workshops in London, to interview us. I remember, too, the number of students who made the 100 mile journey to be at his funeral - and the absence of sound and movement at the interment - and the number who came to the AS event. Putting those together, I think he may have been an extraordinary teacher. Can you say anything about that?

JH: The people who know most about his teaching are those he taught, of course. And I saw much less of his teaching first hand than did other colleagues on the Performance Writing degree at Dartington. If you talked to past students I think you would find your word 'extraordinary' confirmed!

The generosity we have talked about in relation to his collaborations applied equally to his teaching. He belonged to that generous category of practitioners who 'teach' anyway whether or not they are called teachers, just because they are so passionately committed to what they do. The generosity came through in his readiness to give attention and time and to take seriously what was being said and done in teaching sessions. To him, taking things seriously meant arguing vociferously if you didn't agree - perhaps even using shock tactics. I gather that Alaric really did shock some students early on. And this could be a matter of style or content or both. For someone interested as he was in ways that writing and performance could productively transgress it isn't surprising that his teaching itself was a performance which from time to time transgressed.

By the time of his death my sense is that most students had come very much to appreciate his approach, particularly those whose work connected in any evident way with his. When he first started, some were, I think, thrown by him. He was the least institutionalised, serious and intelligent person I have known. This never remotely took the form of a refusal of the institution by the already institutionalised. Dartington many not be a typical institution but it's still an institution, with expectations of role and behaviour coming from every direction. I think this was bewildering to Alaric at first, especially when it came from students whose own formative times had been so different from his.

I expect he quite enjoyed some of the riskiness that went with all of this. (My e-mail spell-check suggested that I might mean 'friskiness' rather than riskiness. I very nearly did; he certainly could be intellectually frisky in the classroom. This could be fun for those sufficiently confident in what was going on but unsettling for those who either felt got at or who were not sure what was going on). I've seen him become very excitedly involved within a session in ways that rattled those students who expected a tutor to be the provider of calm and secure boundaries.

After a year or two he seemed to find a place in his relationships with students where he could provide the stimulus and responsiveness without all of those unsettling effects. He didn't lose them all, of course, and nor by then would many of the students have wanted him to, because by then they had learnt what he had to give and what they needed to do to benefit from it.

The examples in your question feel very right. He knew what was going on and wanted students to be in touch with it all. He'd make it happen.

Even though he was in his late forties, he was still relatively new to teaching. He was getting better all the time.

LU: Well, thank you for that; and thank you for all of that. I have asked all my questions, but if there is something that I might have tapped which I have not tapped, do say. Ask yourself a question!

JH: I have no other obvious prompts at this point though things might come to me. And I am always happy to respond to follow-up questions.

I do hope my replies have been of some use. If it has been uncomfortable for me to do it is because I had in a sense been biding my time with Alaric, waiting for easier, more spontaneous exchanges about his own work, teaching and research for which - and this is just my impression - he didn't yet feel ready. I always speculated that this had something to do with his negotiation with institutions and my institutional role at Dartington. But that is just speculation.
 

Footnotes
1) words worth was a magazine founded and edited by Alaric Sumner.

2) Voices (for 9), directed by Roxana Silbert, was presented at Royal Court Theatre Upstairs as part of Barclays New Stages in May 1994