Month: October 2016

The drama of the Post-Dramatic drama and the theater it creates.

Lauren Bethany Elouise Watson /

Before today, I must admit that my understanding of the post dramatic, although I considered to be basic, was severely flawed.
Every day is a school day I guess.
 If not flawed, then ridiculously limited.

 

Forced Entertainment

They’ve kind of changed everything really.
(Keidan in Nationaltheatret Oslo, 2016)

 

 

This is what I thought I knew to be post-dramatic theatre.

Wooster Group and Forced entertainment are typically post-dramatic theatre companies, creating co-authored texts lacking in definitive characters, a typical linear narrative or a coherent plot. Described as ‘unique’, Forced Entertainment’s performances have varied throughout their colourful history.

From personal and intimate two-handers, to more spectacle pieces and even having dabbled with children’s theatre, Forced Entertainment has proven itself time and time again at being at the forefront of British theatre. Seemingly creating boundaries just to see them crash around them, Forced Entertainment’s work is relevant, reflective and although not to everyone’s taste, it does make their audience think. By its very nature, Post-Dramatic theatre demands a reaction; whether that manifests itself in tedium at watching not much happen at all, to disgust or joy. These reactions, created through interpreting meaning in the performance presented to you, are forged through fragments of signs and images rather than a spoon fed, easily identifiable plot. As Lois Keidan states in the above video, they have “changed what a theatre space can become, what the experience of theatre is [and] what kind of stories are being told” (Nationaltheatret Oslo, 2016).

Their name alone is testament to their character and overall ideology as a group. The work that Forced Entertainment creates feels exactly like that. Forced entertainment. Its not necessarily easy, or even pleasurable to watch, but as an audience member (perhaps this only applies to those who are aware of what they are letting themselves in for by attending such performances) you have made a conscious choice to invest and attempt to find meaning in the “fragmented narratives” (Tomlin, 2009, 57) of such companies.

Tim Etchell’s work I would argue is “especially dependent on the release of active energies of imagination” (Lehmann, 2006, 16). Placing the audience in new territories with not much grounding, but relying on them to make that leap of faith into the (often) unknown.

 

 

12AM: Awake & Looking Down

The words presented to us on battered cardboard pieces naming and labelling the people presented, implying their situation and possible ‘self’, create (however short) a narrative in each individual audience member. The social conditions by which we conform or allude to change this narrative, which leaves each ‘situation’ created on stage with multiple meanings derived from an arguably simple process.

For example, an actress in the company puts on a dress, lies on the floor and holds up a sign which states “miss everybody loves her”. For me, this actress looked exposed. She looked vulnerable. And the scene created screamed ‘rape culture’.

The narrative created in this moment hit me and I couldn’t look away. These key moments of “the theatre performance turns the behaviour onstage and in the auditorium into a joint text” (Lehmann, 2006, 17). The colliding of image and text struck a chord with me, extending this narrative past the stage. Although this piece was performed in 2014, watching in 2016 perhaps made it all the more relevant.

With recent headlines screaming about consent, rape and attitudes surrounding such topics, this moment, for me, reached past the confines of the stage and made a much bigger and resounding statement. Of course, not everyone watching this performance would have this reaction.

But that specific narrative was created for me, by me, by watching words and actions presented to me.

Then the moment was over.

the goal I think is to open a conversation with audiences, to try to find way to contact audiences to talk about the experience that we have now, the issues and the questions, and the experiences that we think are important
(Etchells in Nationaltheatret Oslo, 2016)

 

The actuality of post dramatic theatre has been around for decades, but the term to describe it and help us better explain and understand the processes that create such work was defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and it is here where my knowledge stopped. I, like Lehmann aligned “dramatic with text-based practice and post-dramatic with non-text based” (Tomlin, p. 57), but the post dramatic covers much more than this arguably small dichotomy of theatre. Playwrights such as Martin Crimp and Tim Crouch are prime examples of this.

Characters are created and morphed before our eyes, our expected roll as an audience member called into question and the worlds we are invited into vary, with the authored truths not necessarily certain or created at all.

It is because of these unauthored truths that  Crimp’s The City (2008) fascinated me. So far removed from performative pieces by Forced Entertainment, and although similarities to Sarah Kane’s work as far as content, The City has a recognisable narrative through a printed, authored and edited text. It is interesting to note however that although this text was created by Crimp, he essentially disowns his writing.

No, not the writing. The content idea world of the writing.

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‘BLANK’.

 

This begs the question, why? Why author a world and leave it empty? It is interesting to note that this is in the script. The first page of the play. So we, as readers of such text are aware of his decision to make us aware that what we are about to read has no set time, place or even world.

To an extent.

It is set in London – because of Clair’s language. But the specific place and world of Clair? When it is set? Their narrative is being created by Clair because of Crimp. A story within a story. Crimp himself “doesn’t know the truth about the world” (Tomlin, 2009, 62) he has created. For all we know, seeing as Clair is the author of this world, can she be trusted? She may have just written London as a place that people can recognise. Place themselves in. Using London as an image so her creations and us, her audience, can derive meaning from. Ultimately, “The City is created by characters who only believe they are real and who continue to act as if they are real even after Clair has revealed her diary in which they are created” (Tomlin, 2009, 62-63).

Crimp has created “a world that is positioned as neither real nor fictitious (which would require a real author beyond the fiction) but self-constructing and self-deconstructing at the same time.” (Tomlin, 2009, 63).

This very much reflects (even if this was not the intention) my earlier point about the work of Forced Entertainment – creating a world only to have it tore down for the inside, but a character he authored and giving her the power to do the same.

 

The postmodern which Liz Tomlin speaks, one which contains narrative, text has reignited my love for the subject. And Crimp too (credit where credit is due).

After 1000 words, at least half of which are me simply trying to convey my excitement and reignited passion into an understandable and coherent form, I think the Postdramatic has ran with my “active energies of imagination” (Lehmann, 2006, 16).

 

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References

Crimp, M(2008) The City, London: Faber and Faber Limited.
Lehmann, H (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jurs-Munby, London and New York: Routledge.
Nationaltheatret Oslo (2016) The winner of The International Ibsen Award 2016: Forced Entertainment, Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJGm8hDhCdo [accessed 28 October 2016].
Tomlin, L (2009) ‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’. Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic-text, Performance Research. 14 (1) 55-64.

Forget me not…

Lauren Bethany Elouise Watson /

When you were younger did you ever try to walk back over your steps? Walking on top of your past foot prints? I did, and found wet feet straight from the bath or sodden shoes from jumping in an inviting looking puddle were best.

 

Try as we might, we can never mimic those steps exactly. Which is ironic really, seeing as we are walking over the past on a constant basis. Our future is built from the past. It effects, influences and shapes where we are going, but we can never reclaim it or re-enact it truthfully. We live in liveness. Constantly disappearing, ending and restarting as the earth turns. Blink and you’ve created a memory. The moment is over, living on only in recreations in our minds. Or re-told through stories.

 

All of our future actions are haunted by our past. I don’t just mean ‘our past’ here in a purely personal sense. It goes much further than a singular person. Its our cultural collective past, our language, spiritual and religious ideologies… These day to day hauntings are arguably best culminated in the theatre. Although “the physical theatre […] is not surprisingly among the most haunted of human cultural structures” (Carlson, 2003, 2), the ghosting surpasses the physical spaces which it inhabits and passes onto the actors, the performance, and even the words within that.

Perhaps taking it one step further than Carlson, as he states, “the dramatic text seems particularly […] haunted by its predecessors” (2003, 8) – when we hear a word or a statement we often re-create a past moment, recall a song or a line from a play. We are haunted not only by performance but by everyday language (perhaps because of performance).
An example;
Whenever I hear the word shadow, or indeed even think of the word, my mind transports itself back to my second year of University and our performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Puck’s famous closing speech.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend.

Even now I can type this from memory. And this is where the ghost live. Ghosting excites our memory, because after all, that is where it is created and roused.

 

A photo posted by Lauren (@laurenbethanyelouise) on

 

Events; historical, fiction, imaginary, bizarre and fact are created and re-created on stages every day. They bring the dead back to life and have them parade for us, murder villains and innocents alike. But, when the curtain goes down (not always a physical curtain, but this gives the most visual representation) those characters killed, revived or indeed created stop.

The actors leave them there.

Titania doesn’t have a twenty-minute power nap before the third show of the day and Jack The Ripper doesn’t leave the stage doors and head home to his family. Their ghosts remain in the space, waiting to be picked up, shaken off and re-worn. Perhaps even re-dressed if the occasion calls for it. The theatre is so haunted because it is live. It’s disappearing before our eyes as we watch it, ghostlike in performance. Every subsequent performance will be haunted by its previous as the live-ness of the performance before can not be replicated exactly. A slight hand gesture different, or a hesitation . The audience is also different on each performance, and it is important to acknowledge that.

The performance is not just received by an audience, but it is created and edited by them too.

 

 

 

I want you to close your eyes and think of;

 

Hamlet.

Sherlock.

James Bond.

Professor Snape.

Mr Darcy.

 

Who did you think of?

 

I am conscious of the fact I didn’t ask for a description of what the character looks like.

These characters are now haunted.

 

Hamlet – David Tennant.

Sherlock – Benedict Cumberbatch.

James Bond – Daniel Craig.

Mr Darcy – Colin Firth.

 

The actors are haunted too. When watching Star Trek, I couldn’t help but compare, comment on and relate Benedict’s performance to that in Sherlock. For me, he is Sherlock Holmes. We “recall situations when the memory of an actor seen in a previous role or roles remained in the mind to haunt a subsequent performance” (Carlson, 2003, 10). Although amazing how this happens (the mind is a wonderful thing), it is also full of frustrations!

 

This ghosting is unavoidable. We make the unrelatable relateable by reaching for something that we have previously seen or experienced to give to context. To make it make sense. It almost feels as though our memories are jumping up and down saying “it’s this! I know! They’re the person from that thing! You know… the thing! Pick me! I know!”.

Like a slightly over excitable child our memories fill in blanks, or projects what we know onto what we’re seeing. This is both a helping hand and a hindrance. Experiencing moments almost second-hand, through a filter of preconceived ideas and previous performances, can alter our perception of what we’re spectating. We’re a culmination of our history and our language, a creation of biases, so when watching a performance, can we truly receive it how it was intended to be received?

“the spectators’ knowledge of the artistic language, which they bring into the theatre, contributes to their understanding and their judgement”
(Postlewait, 2009, 19)

 

The most interesting and terrifying notion of ghosting for me lies beyond the theatre. It creates it though; the characters, the worlds, the voices and the scripts.

The alphabet.

“every new work may also be seen as a new assemblage of material from old works”
(Carlson, 2003, 4)

Every word ever spoken (in the English language) is just a re-hash and re-ordering of the same 26 letters.

 

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y and Z.

 

Everything I’ve written and rewritten, every sentence I’ve spoken aloud because it doesn’t read just right, is haunted. And that, my dear reader, is phenomenal.

 

 

References

Carlson, Marvin (2003) The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, University of Michigan Library: University of Michigan Press.
Postlewait, Thomas (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Just Give Me A Reason Definition…

Lauren Bethany Elouise Watson /

As in the maybe not so famous words of P!nk, “just give me a reason, just a little bit’s enough” (P!nk, 2013). Replace ‘reason’ with ‘definition’ and this is my plea when it comes to understanding the term that is ‘dramaturgy’.

When frantically discussing this term with my peers before we were expected to contribute coherent and intelligent ideas in a new and exciting academic forum to all of us, it became apparent that although the term encompassed a whole range of skills, ideals and expectations, the actual deployment of dramaturgy (and therefore the Dramaturg) varied massively dependent on what/where/who needed it. I quickly realised that my want of a solid and concise explanation of the term was never going to come to fruition. Yes, if you read a job description of a Dramaturg there will be an explanation of the role which is a required, but this does not cover the term as a whole, and although this is perhaps the most exciting aspect of the job, it is almost the most infuriating for scholars and academics such as myself.
Or it could just be me.
In this somewhat rambling opening blog post I will be exploring these terms. So, stick with me. You may even learn something.

While reading, and essentially discovering the term dramaturgy for the first time, Andrea Bozic’s description was the most visual of other writers, and therefore this gave me a better grounding to find my own pathway through the other articles and book chapters I later discovered. Bozic describes it as

a red thread that runs through the process and the performance and to which everyone can relate. A good dramaturg for my process is someone who manages never to lose sight of this red thread.
(Bozic, 2009,  12)

Although this continuation of ideas through a performance, an entire theatre’s season or even a playwright’s repertoire seems like a vital and unquestionable piece of theatre, I had never associated this with a specific name before. I always presumed it was the playwright’s or director’s responsibility. However, I am not alone in my ignorance here. Lee Anderson has openly agreed, saying that “the UK have struggled to pin down a precise definition for the dramaturgy” (2015, 15); compared to European theatre companies (notably those in Germany), English theatre makers seem to be deterred by the idea of hiring a Dramaturg to assist on their productions. This in itself seems bizarre to me. They are there to be used as “the freedom of theatrical experimentation and risk” (Lehmann and Primavesi, 2009, 4). They don’t want to take ownership of a new play, or to override the director on a crucial acting choice, they are there to ask questions. To provide social and political insight – not only for the benefit of the spectators, but also the actors/directors/playwrights themselves. In a way they then become the spectators too. They are learning from the Dramaturg’s ability to “place a production in the framework of a social and political context” (Lehmann and Primavesi, 2009, 5) and by doing so “raise the political consciousness of the production team” (ibid). Once this has been achieved, everyone involved within the production can create work “without patronizing the audience” (Lehmann and Primavesi, 2009, 6). This can only be seen as positive, surely?

 

References

Anderson, L (2009)
Bozic, A (2009), “On Dramaturgy—Statement” Performance Research 14 (3) , p. 1 2
P!nk (2013) Just Give Me A Reason . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpQFFLBMEPI [accessed 3 October 2016].
Lehmann, H and Primavesi, P (2009) Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds, Performance Research, 14 (3) 3-6.