On Returning

We’ve returned from the Israel/Palestine tour: four cities, five performances, nearly 200 audience members, almost £150 raised, and a great deal of intense, exciting and worthwhile performance interactions.

It’s been an exceptional month. In one sense, time goes incredibly fast; it seems strange that as little as two weeks ago we didn’t really know what we were going to be performing. When the creative work is carrying you along, you don’t notice time passing. In another sense, time has been stretched out, because the work is so packed, the moments so full. And when you’re working on a tight schedule, you have to make those moments count. There’s a similar feeling in our performances: they’re only 90 minutes, and, while we’re pretty confident the audiences don’t get bored, it feels simultaneously that so much time cannot possibly have passed and that the moments have been incredibly full. That’s the kind of performance we’re aiming for, at least.

It’s at this point that two things happen, as a director: taking stock and finding space. When a project concludes, something which has taken up every waking moment for weeks, so that even when you’re not working on it you’re thinking about it, there is an enormous space inside you that needs filling up. You try and have lie-ins. You catch up on Twitter and books. You trawl the artsjobs listings. Or, if you’re me, you start compiling performance reports, trying to capture the magic, relive it. This taking stock is a part of my process as a director and human, and part of the whole OST concept: documentation as open source theatrical process. But it helps be cope with the absence, too.

The great thing is, it’s not the end. We began this project not knowing where we’d reach, what performances we’d actually be giving in those five cities, and leaving the future open. But we think this project has been a success, and our time together has been extraordinarily productive, and so we want to take it further. This is always a risky set of feelings: the desire not to let go of a project which has run its course can be crippling. But for this one, there’s a sense of work left on done — we think it deserves development, expansion and wider audiences. We think it has mileage. We don’t want to make the same thing happen again: we want to take it further.

So on that note, I’ll finish this post on this too-infrequent blog (the desire to document every moment is strong, but time is so short!), because there’s a lot of work to be done. Planning. Sketching. Finding venues, funding, dates. Dreaming.

One Down / Politics of Political Theatre

One show down. Last night’s debut of Israel/Palestine went, I felt, very well. With interactive theatre — with any theatre, really, but especially with theatre that relies on audience response at its heart — it never really comes alive until you get an audience in the same room as the performers. And we had a good-sized audience, basically a full house (although numbers are fluid), and a very responsive one. We’d had a chance to test our ideas at our scratch, but this was the real test — what happens when we try with 50 people what we’ve never tried with more than 8? Will they move where we want them? Will they feel what we hope? Will they ask what we’d like? Will they do what we really, really want, which is to react in entirely unexpected ways? And will we be able to respond fluidly, with improvisation, to genuinely take their input into account?

Mostly, it all worked smoothly. A hitch here and there, but nothing major, and each risk we took seemed to pay off. The actors kept the pace rocketing along, and the audience took that desired trajectory from enjoyable participation to serious reflection. But what, really, is the measure of success?

It’s whether or not the audiences felt genuinely informed, empowered and moved. There are three aims I have with this piece: to get some basic information about the crisis across, to encourage people to think about and be involved with the crisis in a genuine way, and to bear witness to death, atrocity and sorrow. So if people tell me afterwards that they want to find out more, or if they cry, or if they engage the performers in an argument about politics, then that’s a success. And they did.

As I left the performance space, I found people having a fascinating argument about the purposes and problems of political theatre. Should it try and get a particular message across? What’s the difference between art and propaganda? What’s the difference between coercion and the emotional manipulation common to all art? Are heartstring-tugging and thought-provoking in opposition? What should theatre do, in politics?

Dan Rebellato asked the same thing in a Guardian article called “Can political theatre change the world?” Like George Hunka in his blog, I rather wonder if he’s not asking the wrong question. I really don’t see my theatre, this piece of theatre, as a major actor in large-scale public discourse and action. And I’m sceptical of whether any theatre could be; as Rebellato admits, theatre plays to small audiences from a restricted range of social backgrounds. I also suspect that the majority of theatre, which only allows freedom in the sphere of thought, and not in movement and suggestion, is restricted in what it can do with audiences: impart new information, at a pinch, and maybe provoke a new thought or two, but certainly not empower, and certainly not involve in genuine debate. So I don’t see how theatre could change the world.

What I do think political theatre can do is be an active participant in the world it finds itself in. That might sound a bit abstract, so I’ll try and explain: in this show, we bring a few dozen people into a room with seven performers, and spend 90 minutes exploring a major political crisis with them. We use our own names, we never pretend that the audience isn’t there, that the performers aren’t performers, and that the space isn’t what it is, even if we occasionally ask the audience to use their imaginations to be transported elsewhere. We are in the room with the audience, and we’re asking the audience to be in the room with us. That means that they’re in the crisis with us, and throughout the performance we’re directly asking them to be involved. We are asking them to act within that world, and so within the politics of the crisis in general. We are working to find a way to use theatre to speak with this small group of people, in this small room, and to act with them. Together, we are changing that world. It’s a sort of “Think Global, Act Local”, I suppose, however problematic that statement is.

So this is an idea for a kind of theatre, a kind of performance technology, which we hope can be spread and used widely. As the manifesto we wrote under What is OST? says, we think that everyone should make theatre. The politics of our political theatre is small-scale, viral, local, interconnected, variable. It’s not big story changing the world, it’s about being together with our communities, working with them, understanding the local performance space. That’s a world I can be part of, not to change from the outside, but to develop, together.

And it all comes together

The work gets more intense. As performance dates — the ultimate arbiter of process, the fixed points around which our work revolves — approach, everything feels more serious, more real somehow, and all the work is done under a very real sense of pressure.

We’ve been ahead of the game and pretty on schedule, which is unusual for devised and experimental work, which often has to be radically changed and revised right up until performance. But by the end of last week we had a solid concept of how we wanted our show to run, and by yesterday we had a full run planned. This period of rehearsal is a combination of magic and grind; half incredible moments were things just fit together through coincidence and serendipity and pure fairy dust, half slog and practise and wearying niggling and interminable decision-making discussions. There can be satisfaction in polishing and refining, but it can also be dreadfully tedious; the great dangers at this stage are boredom and exhaustion. For a Director, you’ve got to find ways of helping the actors stay motivated, keep excited about the finished product, and keep their energy levels up, rather than overworking, or getting impatient and distracted. The problem with that is, this is also the point where you’re under most stress; in a small company, where the director has to manage a lot of the production work, you’re pursuing advertising and getting information from venues and organising rooms and designing posters when all you really want to do is keep on creating with actors. So tensions run high. We’ve been doing remarkably well with this. Some judicious shorter days, a party or two, the occasional pep-talk: it can all go a long way. Long-distance runners talk about breaking through the wall, seeing the point of exhaustion, the moment where you might give up, and then breaking through that: that’s where we’re at — we’re facing down the home stretch.

We ran a scratch preview on Wednesday night. With the show near-completed, it’s useful to get some feedback on what we’ve done; when you’re experimenting, it’s good to know what works and what doesn’t, in order to have the best possible final show. (Although with this show, I expect we might be altering it every night.) We had around eight or nine friends and colleagues along to take a look, to interact with us and tell us what they thought. Partly, it was useful just to see how our interactions worked with an audience, but they also gave us a good sense of what we still needed to work on. This is always a little risky, though: you get a lot of notes, and sometimes one individual can say something that throws you, when really they’re the only one who’d ever think that. From a director’s perspective, you’ve got to allow your actors to take good advice on board, while also trying to manage their fears and protect them from getting fixated on one element. It’s a delicate balance; one that’s much easier when the company’s built up a cohesive, co-operative and open working practise. We’re doing OK.

Then there’s the decision-making. What gets changed, axed, recast? How can you fix things without offending anyone, and what do you do when people disagree about what’s right? And if you’re a director trying to run an open, co-operative company, should you be making final decisions? How do you arbitrate? Do you pursue consensus decision-making, or majority, or are you just asking for input before making the call? How do you decide how you decide? To be honest, for myself, in this production, I’m already trying early experiments with so many things that I’m not quite ready to relinquish all control just yet — but I do think it would’ve been a lot better if we’d had a conversation about decision-making much earlier on. As it is, we use a hotch-potch process, and I step in more often than I’d like.

So there we are! Dress rehearsal tomorrow, and then we unleash the show on a week of performances in four venues. It’s tremendously exciting. I hope there’s time to blog from the road.

Taking Sides and Coming to Terms

Israel/Palestine, of necessity, entails dealing with some very difficult material. As a company we’re dealing daily with appalling death tolls, appalling suffering, and seemingly interminable warfare; at the same time, we’re wrestling with the political hot potato, the crucible of world politics, possibly the most complex and over-determined debate in the contemporary world. How are we coping?

How we deal with death and suffering — how we come to terms with it — is, strangely, perhaps the easier question to answer: we make art about it.  This is what artists do, daily; we use performance as a coping mechanism, as a catharsis, as an expression of how we’re feeling. In the context of Israel/Palestine, we’re working an act of mourning into the piece — a performance which both expresses out feelings and serves as a remembrance of the many dead, a serious recognition of why the issues matter.

And, though it may seem callous, we play games. If we’ve been working on particularly difficult material, we’ll bring ourselves back by playing a silly game, by finding something to laugh about. And it isn’t callous, really: we have to find reasons to keep living and working, we have to remind ourselves why life matters and so why death matters. We need to do the same thing with the audience: as we move to the stage where we’re putting the show together, we have to balance the serious with the energetic, the appalling with the comic, in a sensitive way that keeps our audience’s attention and enables them, too, to cope with and appreciate the material.

How we deal with the sheer difficulty of the arguments is another question. The first answer is that we’ve adopted a policy of not taking sides but showing sides. Each of us has their own opinion, but we each take responsibility for portraying multiple perspectives throughout the piece. “Neutrality”, as a correspondent pointed out to me recently, is not neutral, and so we’re not aiming for a “balanced” argument; instead, we’re making all the arguments we can, and allowing the audience to choose, if they so wish.

And this is the second way we’re approaching this difficulty: by making this piece, ultimately, about the audience. We want to make it clear at every point that we’re not making a coherent argument, that we don’t believe everything we say (there is a difference between performance and reality) — and the best way of doing that is directly asking the audience to interpret the work independently. And the best way of doing that is to simply ask the audience what they think. I believe fervently in this: as part of a performance, as a form of theatre in itself, having a direct conversation with the audience. We plot this, and we manage this, but we insist on it as well.

We’ve taken on something huge. And it often seems absurd that we, 8 Europeans from however diverse backgrounds, think we have something worthwhile to contribute. But we hope that, in some way, we do. That we can help people come to terms — and, if not take sides, then certainly begin to understand them.

What have we been doing?

What have we been doing?

We’ve completed the first week of rehearsals. That’s over a third of the way through our progress to performance! (Many weeks of occasional planning precede rehearsal, and we’ve got three full-time weeks together to develop the show.) Part of the purpose of this site, this company, is to try and convey in hypertextual form our experiences of making theatre: to describe what we’re doing, explain what we can, mystifyingly demystify the black box of theatre production.

<<But an interesting thing happens to me, personally, when I’m in the rehearsal studio: spending so many hours exploring corporeal performance and being with others, interacting intimately, physically, mentally, emotionally, places me firmly in my body, my flesh, erodes my interest in the electronic and digital — in short, keeps me away from my internet lives. Whether it’s due to innate psychic needs or not, there is an opposition between the digitial and the corporeal, and, while we are all cyborgs, the more fleshly I get the less I seem to need to extend my body along wires and screens. Still: communication.>>

This first week has been marked “exploration”. At this point, we have little idea what our show will be, apart from a desire to be interactive and a fairly specific subject. Will there be scenes or sections? Will there be narrative or words? What is its tone? What is its content? What is its form? We don’t know. And for now we’re deliberately avoiding the questions, to prevent possible answers from guiding our investigations too firmly. We want to be, as far as possible, exploring unknown territory and discovering what lies there. Everything we do at this stage is an experiment aiming for unknown and indeterminate results. We’re doing, doing, doing, without trying, without judging too firmly. We’re building an intuitive sketchbook, drawing with our eyes closed, or asleep.

That’s the theory: the practise is pretty specific. We play games and devise performances. I will divide the actors into groups and assign them tasks: using this line, or this scene, or this news article, or this propaganda video, or this movement, or this image — create a performance. Usually I’ll give them about half an hour. That forces uninhibited creativity: they just have to grab the first idea that floats past and runs with it. This produces an astonishing diversity of mini-performances, and helps to widen our performance vocabulary. Each new scene gives us new ideas to work with; each changes the way the audience sits, or stands, or might interact. Some are representative, some narrative, some silent, some obscure, some hilarious. All or none of them may appear in the final production (if indeed there is a “final”).

Sometimes I have a specific concept I want to try out (or one of the actors does), and then I or another will conduct a performance. A musical conductor is an appropriate analogy here, although there is no score except that which emerges organically in the mind. So, for example, I might start three actors reading from a speech, and instruct the four others to echo any words or lines they feel moved to, in multiple languages. Then I might ask one of the speakers to increase or decrease in volume. Then I ask one actor to move between all the speakers fluidly, gracefully, extending her body to express her thoughts. Then I ask two other actors to perform a cycle of movements we’ve previously rehearsed. Soon there a musical, textual and physical performance emerges: one which is about a few concrete ideas, which has a tone, which has a form. We stop, and then we talk about what it was like to be in, what it was like to watch.

Talking, observation and feedback are important to us. After most exercises we will ask what worked, what didn’t, what was most interesting. Without a video camera (the most important piece of equipment for many devising companies), this is our record, along with our unreliable memories. We will come back to these discussions and arguments later as source material.

Another way of responding is a lengthy and extremely taxing exercise we use to reflect from time to time. On Friday, we finished with it; I call it a “free-form improvisation”, though really it is highly guided. The actors begin in zero position, or what is usually called “neutral” (I dispute the concept of neutrality, though that’s an argument for another time). To enter the space they breathe in and out, deeply, twice. Then I ask them to let their minds wander through everything we’ve done, and said, and seen. Beginning with either word or movement, I ask them to express what they are moved to express. it may take up to 5 minutes, but eventually someone will say a word, or stamp, or stretch, or cry out. The momentum builds as the group responds to itself, its thoughts, the room, the atmosphere. A performance happens; it is like a dream.

Only it is almost not a performance. It is something else instead, or as well. They are no longer playing characters or ideas. They are themselves, although the subconsciously-driven approach means that they perform intuitive aspects of their selves, rather than a rationally overseen complete persona. They are being in the room, in a heightened, hyper-aware sort of way. Every action and word carries the same weight it would if it were a performance, but has the motivation of being. This is not a performance which points to something outside of itself: it is itself, we are being in the room. (Me, too. Voyeurism is participation.) Sometimes it is boring for a few minutes. It is often heartwrenching. Yesterday, the actors wrenched themselves; I watched them struggling and suffering to come to terms with the very difficult situation and material we are working with. I found it extraordinary.

Where will it all go? What are we going to perform for you, our audiences? What will you perform with us? Starting Monday, we’ll begin to transition into the next stage, which is to analyse what we’ve done and make decisions about what we want to do next. We will begin to assemble, or  grow, a complete performance. Some of it might be difficult. Some of it might be funny. We don’t know. We’ll see.