The Idle Mind: Matt Shepherd’s Hour-Long Vow of Silence
Matt Shepherd is the leading man and creative mind behind the Kingston Fringe Festival’s upcoming show, Let Us Sit In Goddamn Silence for One Hour. This past Friday I got to speak with him concerning the show’s origins, intentions, and lingering questions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why Fringe? This feels like the kind of show you can only see at a fringe festival; did the idea for this show come about independently of Fringe, or was Fringe the inspiration for a show like this?
A bit of both I’d say, actually. I haven’t really been involved in theatre other than as an occasional audience member since high school, and I’m in my fifties. I think partly it’s because Fringe creates an easy venue to do theatre. It’s literally just a lottery system. I didn’t have to know anyone who runs the theatre, I didn’t have to run through any networks, I didn’t have to submit a script to someone and see if they’d stage it. Fringe is a great way to accelerate anyone’s theatre ideas outside of the normal channels. It’s a way of getting around a lot of the conventional obstacles to getting into what’s considered a theatre space to do what is considered theatre.
Initially, the idea was that I came out of a Toronto Fringe show last year saying to my partner, “I think I would have rather sat in goddamn silence for an hour.” And that kind of stuck with me in the back of my head, and when Fringe opened up this year, I thought, what the hell. It’s a nominal cost to submit an idea, I’ll never get drawn, I’ll do it just to say I submitted it. Then lo and behold it did get drawn and now, here we are. Fringe gives you a very low risk environment to throw a weird idea at the wall, and then let fate decide if it’s something you’re going to have to follow up on.
This is a very temporal piece, the kind that makes you very aware of time.
Absolutely, none more than me. You see, I’ve tried it now. After the first time talking to the Fringe showrunners I needed to see if I was capable of doing this. And I am. I went downstairs earlier this week, sat on a dining room chair and did nothing at all for an hour. Except I wound up doing things like counting the holes in my microwave. All sorts of things to occupy my mind.
As I was doing it I was thinking about how I’d never done this before. I don’t think most have. Deliberately doing nothing and not watching anything and not listening to anything… it’s weird, it’s not a very normal thing to do. So I think it’s going to be very interesting for me to do with other people, I think it’s going to be very interesting for people to try it.
What were your intentions behind staging this piece?
In the beginning, I submitted it as kind of a joke without having thought about it too much. And then it got drawn, and I was like, “well, fuck.” So I intended to withdraw my application because it was just a joke, but I took a couple days to think about it, and during those couple days I was like, “actually, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here.” People can approach it whatever way they want, but the more I thought about the “why’s” about it, there were four things that broke down in my head.
One was that it’s a really interesting experiment on what is theatre. What is happening in a theatre space if the person onstage is doing the exact same thing as every audience member? I am not contributing anything more than anyone else in the audience. They’re bringing exactly the same stuff that I am, so who’s performing? Can you say this is a performance? Is everyone performing? I don’t even know. This is just this weird definitional space that I can’t figure out for myself: what is theatre when nothing’s happening at all?
The second thing is the idea of it being just a break for people. What if this is just an excuse? You’re busy, I’m busy, parents got kids to take care of, students got books to read, people got jobs they gotta do—how often does someone give you permission to do nothing at all? Guilt free, blame free, this is an absolute gold-plated invitation to do nothing for an hour.
Third thing is, it’s a challenge. Can you do it? I wasn’t sure. I tried a couple times before and made it to 25 minutes before I invented reasons to go do something. I am not convinced that people who come to this will be capable of it. I will not be surprised if in at least a couple performances there are walkouts.
The fourth thing and the one that resonated the most with me over time is that this is kind of rebellious. We live in a world where our worth is entirely measured in productivity. You can’t escape the idea of “how are you getting more out of your day, how are you doing more, how are you achieving more, how are you optimizing your time, how are you optimizing everything?” You’re ping ponging in life between systems that are algorithmically designed to engage you and keep you engaged. So doing fuck-all for an hour is the antithesis of both the productivity element and the engagement element.
The entire performance seems more speculative than spectacular. Do you have an end goal for this? Is it for yourself, is it for the audience?
It’s more of a question than a statement. I don’t have a strong end goal for myself. Part of it is that to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever done it, so I want to see what happens if someone does it. If by late August I feel that it was fantastic, and I wanna see if I can do this at other Fringes in the future, that’s great. But really it’s just “do it to do it.” Do the thing that I don’t think anyone’s ever done before and see what happens with it. I’m genuinely curious as to what’s going to happen during the show, and I’m genuinely curious about talking to people after the show and seeing what they’re experience of the whole thing was.
Matt Shepherd is a Kingston based creative, and a man of many hats. Visit the website accompanying this show here. If you make art or know people who do, another one of Shepherd’s pile of projects is the world’s smallest continuously operating art gallery – he is also co-organizing a film festival for September with a friend of his, Attack of the $5 Film Festival, which you can learn more about here.
