Officially I am here to speak about dramaturgy and will do so in a voice that lends itself to such a task, here, sat at the desk, perhaps with some quotations and examples, making statements or constructing theories. Unofficially though I might well slip or break the ranks I establish...
As if all discourse were a matter of surfaces. A surface being a code, an agreement, a formal instruction expressing expectations about what will be said or otherwise expressed here and how. And as if our dramaturgy might be the controlled and deliberate setting up and then cracking of these surfaces, the slow and/or rapid breaking of these agreements, the dynamic play between what is legally, officially said here, and that which is not meant to be said, that which is denied in the situation, that which is too much or too little for the context, that which is illegal, literally ‘obscene’,
As if now, having said this much of my lecture I might say without further warning, that at the airport this morning I was suddenly and unaccountably extremely tired of all this travel and that I would have paid good money then and there for the flight to be cancelled which would have provided an excuse that I could not be here now to speak about dramaturgy. Or as if I might say now that I scrolled thru the texts in my phone as I sat there at the airport, looking for something and that by accident I read what X wrote me as she sat in a café on such and such a street in such and such a city and that I was suddenly thinking of her…
I've been writing for a performance lecture as part of a big Post-Modern Dramatrugy Conference in Frankfurt on Saturday:
I know that I often talk about mistakes in performance (or in text), about errors, and about the liveness and dynamic force (of rupture) that comes from those things.. but watching the kids pantomime late last year I was suddenly aware of how controlled the work I've done, alone and with Forced Entertainment is, always, in fact - how very stage-managed and on top of the game we like to be. That first night of the pantomime was a huge rolling exhibition of distraction, nervous ticks, absent-mindedness, costume-tangles, nose-picking, disputes about cues, miss-timing and generally ill-advised stage behaviour. I’m sure it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary as a performance involving 38 kids goes but it was pretty complex.
My favourite scene was the one where the whole of the Royal family, the court, Aladdin, Widow Twankey and a motely crue of hangers on, servants and townspeople were supposedly frozen into statues by a spell from the genie, as instructed by the evil Abanazer. The sight of 38 kids on the stage, 36 of them attempting to be perfectly still was pretty captivating, mainly because so few of them could get close to it. Almost everywhere you looked there was wavering and blinking, fidgeting, cramping or just a good-natured lack of concentration. The kids performing were so very very there in it though, so revealed, so visible in everything they did, intentional or not, that it was impossible not to love this scene, for all its failure as an illusion of magically induced stillness.
I guess the big difference (between the kids as performers and ourselves) is that if we ever did such a thing as this 'frozen scene' in rehearsal/improvisation for a theatre performance we’d very likely spend the next six weeks studying the tape of it, notating and plotting the timeline, trying to understand its dramaturgy, isolating key or feature moments, comparing one improvised version to another and another and another, cherry picking good bits. This done we'd probably end up trying to fix some things, or simply letting them settle as such things do inevitably by dint of repetition, so that in the end the scene's broad shape could be more-or-less reproduced (a scene with a structure, a piece of time that unfolds with a particular direction, a piece of time with a particular weight that can be used as point or counterpoint in a larger dramaturgy) even though the scene's detail would stay live, playable, endlessly contingent in the way that performance always is.
In early research and rehearsals with Forced Entertainment. The collective talking, fooling and digging around for clues, trying to get a scent or catch a hold of something we want to pursue. This part is always hard hard (hard hard) work, and in some way (perhaps an optical illusion) always seems to feel harder than ever before. Ratio right now must be something like 5 hours talking to one hour of practical work. In the studio we are circling and looping and blundering around in the same territory though so something seems to be happening, unable to get a clear position but slowly certain landmarks become clear as they come into view repeatedly thru the fog and the mud. Seems strange that a process so utterly unforgiving (florescent light/no daylight, relentless pulling apart of ideas, diet of coffee and water, room is concrete) can also have me crying with laughter some days. And sometimes, when you really expect nothing, people make the smartest moves in improvisation and suddenly the whole conversation is turned on its head.
When dancer and choreographer Wendy Houstoun first worked with us on Bloody Mess she wrote this piece describing “… a sense of waiting for some silence to fall over the group – of waiting for everyone to give up trying to make it better.” After this kind of silence is generally when something can happen.
Kate McIntosh, whose Loose Promise rehearsal I wrote about recently here, mailed me an image from the studio.
I had some really interesting back and forth in email with Julie Tolentino, who sent more thoughts about her work, and the text I wrote about her 24 hour dance performance A True Story About Two People, recently here and here. Here's a part of what she wrote:
"what captured me... was that you discussed the 'leaving'. after the premiere of this work in NY, this was the most memorable and poignant experiences, as well as the most visceral and palpable. if there was any sensation that was heightened, it was as if i could feel the start of the departure between me and my [dance] partner - ages it seemed, before the partner would actually leave. or if i didn't feel it, i was acutely aware of the palpable 'exiting trail' - the moment [of] the last separation of physical touch. i was shocked every time at the depth of sensation, the pliable withdrawing, the real sense of loss. also the manoever. what was slipping away in the form of composure and decision-making. also, it was as if i was a butt of my own joke, unplanned and unexpected.... i think i was surprised at the continued, still surprising density of those experiences in the berlin presentation."
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