An Invitation to Play
Quizoola! is an invitation to play a game of questions asked and answers given ... by Tim Etchells.Like any game it needs to be played live. To play the game (which is also called a performance) use the text which is 2000 questions printed on sheets of paper.
Two players in dirty work clothes and smeared clown-make-up sit six hours in a room inside a circle of lights, taking turns to choose questions and to make up answers. Questions can be asked in any order (at random or by choice). Questions can be repeated – to get a better answer, to get the same answer, or for any other reason. New questions are made-up or follow-up questions may also be asked. The text is simply a catalogue of possibilities, a list of suggestions. Answers can be true or false, long or short, playful or serious. Lies and mistakes can tell as much about a person as ‘true’ answers. A boring answer might be better sometimes than a supposedly interesting one.
Quizoola! is not interested in true truth, but perhaps in versions of it.
Quizoola! makes one essential demand - PLAY THE GAME.
You can prepare for Quizoola! in the same way as for a football match - by training, by understanding the rules, by discussing tactics and strategies, by feeling good with your team. But you can’t rehearse a football match. Because a proper game has to be played, not performed. Or prepare for Quizoola! as one might for a jazz performance – by knowing some tunes, by having a curiosity or feeling for your fellow musicians, by having strategies formed together over years of playing together or apart. But not by rehearsing because improvised jazz must be played live in the moment, according to the feeling of what happens in this room now. A feeling between players and players, and between players and the public. What does it feel like in the room? Where to take it next?
Quizoola! is about the need for knowledge, certainty and definition through language. It is about the questionings of lovers, interrogators, quizmasters, children, philosophers and others – how all these questionings are at the same time different and at the same time the same. It is about the people in the room and what happens between them. It is about the relationship between people and the facts of our lives – history, botany, ontology, language, sex, death, the universe, cities, money – the whole of it. About what is known, thought or felt and how it can be shared. About the nature of language and how it can, or cannot, describe or define or deal with the truth of our lives.
When we see performers making live decisions we get to see them revealed, we get to see them ‘truthfully’ in some way that is at the very edges and the very heart of theatre. In Quizoola! we see them without the defenses of a role, a narrative, a character. Slipping between strategies and possibilities, jumping between versions of themselves, with only the opportunity of a game, a set of rules and a desire to be in this room now and to meet some people. The game needs players not actors. Less than that doesn’t interest us at all.
© Tim Etchells, 2002
