P&T v1.0: some prelimary reflections

I: Intro

As part of Open Source Theatre’s process, we produce semi-serious “perfomance reports” (like this), describing what we did and how it went. Given that we’re doing two days of scratch performances, we thought it might be useful to provide some interim insight into what we’ve been up to — useful both for enticing next week’s audiences, and for us in making sure the project keeps developing.

II: Statistical report

Performers: 5 (1 market trader, 1 security guard, 1 debt counsellor, 1 automated gypsy confessional, 1 auctioneer/welcome desk)
Performance time: 80m, plus audience discussion
Audience figures: 43 audience members, 30 of whom we would rate as “deep” participants, 13 as “casual” participants
Number of laughs: 63 (approx.), of varying length and quality
Number of interesting conversations: 74 (approx.), of varying length and quality
Number of thoughts provoked: Indeterminate
Number of property/service exchanges: 24 (approx.)
Quantity of feedback: Two 30m post show discussions
Cash earned: £37.42 offset of show expenses.

III: How we got here

PROPERTY & THEFT began in March 2011, when Harry (director) and Emma (designer) conceived the basic idea of “STEAL THIS PLAY“, an interactive performance/installation exploring ideas of property. Some of the basic ideas were explored at Glue’s Scratch Interact event at the Soho Theatre. Harry has since been creating short interactive performances on other aspect of capitalistlife — theatrical doodles in preparation for some wider project.

This scratch version of the project began when Harry got in touch with Stefanie of This Collection, who was producing a series of community art collaborations with Tollcross’s Adult Learning Project, centring around a collection of 100 poems about Edinburgh. Harry became interested in what would happen if the ideas he and Emma had developed were installed in a context of poems about the city: a collision of the investigation of capitalism, the late capitalist urban landscape, and poetic collaboration.

Performers were recruited through an open callout and workshop: Harry was looking for people who were interested in the ideas of the project and had some facility with improvisation. The performances were developed through one or two rehearsals a week throughout February: these were very relaxed, focussed on developing improvisational skills and finding interesting interactions to share with the audiences. the idea was not to develop rigid ideas or a firm script, but to find a few characters who could react spontaneously to an audience situation with a few patterns of behaviour.

The design of the project is drawn from the image of Edinburgh drawn from the This Collection poems: shabby-genteel, occupied by an uncertain and aggressive capitalism, defined by class and cultural divisions, both tragic and absurd. While the performances aren’t drawn from characters in the poems, they’re occupying a space that’s defined by the poems (which are also present as a prominent installation, opposed to advertising slogans and images of the urban landscape).

Everything came together in a two-day sprint on 10th-11th March: Emma came up from London and, assisted by Luciana (another new recruit) and Harry, created more or less the entire material design from scratch. We built the performance space in a massively effective two hour get-in, installed the performers in their locations — and opened the door!

IV: Things that go auctioned

Lessons in:
crying (endlessly)
smiling (full-heartedly)
identifying weirdness
wobbling ones finger like it’s broken
rapidly raising ones eyebrows up and down
making piccalilli
lying professionally
brewing beer
seed-bombing
Welsh
the basics of the prostate

And also:
really big hugs
a personalised limerick (subject of choice, 5 custom words (max 22 custom syllables))

These came at such costs as:
50p
a big cake
a lesson in Excel spreadsheets
a breakfast of tea and porridge
stolen DVDs
&c.

V: What the audience was like

We were delighted with the audience — not just its ideal size, but its responsiveness. By now, Harry has a good sense of how people respond to open, improvised, interactive performance, but it is always stressful preparing for the unexpected. But, as hoped for, the majority of audience members relaxed into the show fairly quickly, and offered their own unique ideas and actions — the joy of interactive theatre is that it is led by the audience, and they provide the most interesting material. Olivia (a performer) said that in every interaction she enjoyed seeing that moment where, after being initially guarded, a participated decided to simply “go with it” and enjoy the interaction, performing themselves, offering of themselves, discovering what’s possible.

The second performance saw a change in audience demographic (due to the business of the community centre), with greater diversity of age and culture. There were also fewer students and theatre practitioners. This produced a qualitativelty different type of audience: their engagement was more natural and less performative, but also more guarded and uncertain (they didn’t “play along” as much, but when they did offer themselves it was really themselves). There was also more flow in and out of the performance, with less commitment to staying all the way through, which produced a different (and perhaps more productive) feel to the performance. This perfomance was more unexpected, more fruitful, more in line with our collaborative and diverse ambitions for the project.

We found that audiences were generally laid-back, easygoing, and full of laughhter and surprise. This is delightful: we are trying to experiment with form, to be genuinely innovative and strange, but also to be  down-to-earth aand unpretentious. We think we’re getting there.

VI: How the performers felt

Very few of the team had had much experience in this type of theatre (it’s not widely available!) So there was understandably some nervousness about how they would be. Harry’s directorial approach to this issue was to encourage the performers to be relaxed, avoid rigid scripts, and enjoy whatever got thrown at them, while always having a few back-up things to do in tricky situations. Roleplaying difficult audience members with each other also helped, as did giving the audience membrs the encouragement to be relaxed and enjoy themselves on their entrance (audiences always want to know what the “interaction contract” is).

All of the performers were pleasantly surprised both by how responsive the audiences were and by how easy they themselves found it to improvise. The performers were able to enjoy themselves and what the audiences offered — they were able to experiment and explore within performance, and never got bored or trapped in a performance rut. Interactive theatre offered us a different and newly exciting experience of performance

VII: Some pictures

An audience member discovered Rita, the Automated Gypsy Confessional.

The welcome desk and auctioneer.

Macy hawks her gear.

Rita turns on for the audience.

The impromptu unqualified debt counsellor listens supportively.

Participants must perform for their products.

Show security conducts a search.

All picturess (c) Ollie Benton; please contact opesourcetheatrecompany@googlemail.com for permissions.

VIII: What we want to get better at

We learned that the piece needed more rhythm and cohesiveness: it is, currently, six separate performance interactions linked by theme and space. BUt purely by accident elements began to bind the performanes together, they cross-pollinated, events began to take place in and so define the performance space. We want to plan and develop these set-pieces: punctuate the interactions with moments of surprise, excitement, sadness, laughter that span the space. The trick will be developing this and manipulating the audience into these situations without making the piece too much of a “show”, and so undermining the interactivity.

The design and production team had to work very quickly and under pressure, and this means that elements of the design were cobbled together or settled for, rather than everything being consciously chosen and designed. There was in this a fruitful relationship with the space – we had to both aggressively occupy it and receptively adapt to it – but it was also more stressful and less artistically ideal. What we need here is more time and more defined roles — both of which can be improved by better funding.

We want to get better at adapting to the communication needs of different audience members. There was a moment of sheer delight when Spanish-speaking audience members, otherwise struggling with the interactvity of the piece, encountered the automated confessional, who also happened to speak Spanish. We were spontaneously able to cross linguistic boundaries! But how much of our show is culturally specific, or ghettoised, and how much are we able to give it broader reach and accessibility? How do we learn to be more responsive?

Of course there are also small things we can get better at: each performer is constantly getting feedback and revising what they do, and experimenting as well. For us, interactivity stretches beyond the performance space: it’s also in the way we invite discussion and feedback, and write about it all now.

Overall, we were genuinely, honestly surprised at how well things came together, and at how strong the performance was. And that’s just left us with an appetite to keep developing the project, to make it beter and better.

Some Thoughts: Girl X and Count Me In (Traverse)

I

Two moments which are more potent as metaphors than as the relatively simple events they were:

At one point in “Count Me In“, the performer forgot his lines. This could happen to anyone at any time. He dealt with it smoothly, amusingly and professionally, and once he’d been given a prompt, he said, “Oh yes, this is your bit! This is the bit where I ask and you need to say something. That’s why I forgot it.”

At the beginning of “Girl X“, the performer and his chorus introduced themselves to each other, and then the performer turned to the audience and said “What’s your name?” Of course, nobody spoke — but after the seconds of silence I was about to, until he joked “Fine! Don’t talk to me then.” There was no further solicitation throughout the entire show, until the final moments when the entire cast turned to face us directly: a physical, rather than verbal challenge.

II

“Count Me In“, written and performed by Gary McNair, is a short critique of the vagaries of the UK’s current system of democratic representation. It is humorously presented, informatively clear, and very direct. Throughout the piece the audience is given points at which their opinion is asked, or deliberately not asked: we are asked to vote by electronic device on various questions, we are asked to make decisions as small “constituencies” (including the very real decision of which charity a real £10 should go to, we are enlisted as confederates in a pre-written “debate” in which every opinion is read off a card, and towards the end it is suggested we stop voting and offer direct opinions.

There are many successes, although the show was in a fairly raw and scratchy state. The piece communicates its purpose very well, encouraging through humour a very casual and collaborative atmosphere in the room — it felt more like a presentation or school workshop than a theatre piece. I learned a few things, as I’m sure many did. Several monologues moved me, as a politically engaged person. The jokes were god.

In addition, to an extent the form successfully communicated the content. McNair didn’t just tell us or show us what the problems with our voting systems are: he had us enact the rituals of these systems ourselves. This process was often satirical, which was quite  an achievement. And the decision at the end to put down our voting devices and, as he put it, “talk about it”, was genuinely moving. Then moment had meaning: it wasn’t an exercise or a joke, but something which was actually happening.

But then, for me, the show failed. McNair said we would “talk about it”, but actually he showed us three fairly frivolous alternatives to our current voting systems, and asked us for sound-bite opinions on them. Then he asked if we had any other suggestions, and heard two. At no point was there cross-talk: he asked a question, and individuals responded to him, and not the group. This was not a discussion, but just a few token sound-bites. McNair concluded with a fairly bog standard inspirational monologue, saying that he didn’t have any answers yet, but that he had now resolved to commit more deeply to politics. The end.

To someone involved in radical politics, what should have happened at this stage is obvious, and the alternative to voting is obvious. McNair should have relinquished control of the space, and begun to facilitate a genuine, collaborative, free-flowing discussion with the audience about alternatives to voting, and should have helped us decide to achieve them together, preferably through a consensus process. And this, of course, would have enacted one of the very alternatives that could be suggested, just as we had enacted (not acted, but enacted) the problems themselves.

This didn’t happen because the show remained trapped in the paradigm of hierarchical politics, and of hierarchical theatre: it saw politics as people giving opinions and decisions being made by some majority, rather than as the process of groups of people working together to reach collaborative decisions; it saw theatre as one group of people (the artists) communicating their ideas to another group of people (the audience). While the audience was asked to contribute to this piece, they were given no real agency within it. There were interactions, but no deep interactivity. For me, the show built to this point that was full of potential, and then squandered it. McNair forgot his lines at the point when he had to ask the audience a question.

III

Gary if you’re reading this, I have a question: Have you ever been to a consensus decision-making meeting at an activist event? My guess, from your show, is that you haven’t. And my hunch is that if you went to one it would give you huge and important things to think about with your piece. It is a genuinely different way of doing politics. And I’d really like to see what you’d do with that, because, well, you are very good.

IV

An exercise on the difference between theatre and ritual:

1. Find a friend, and exchange objects with them. You can give them anything, and it’s OK, you’ll be giving them back in a moment. Go on, exchange something. Done that? OK, stage one complete. You can give each other your things back now.

2. Now actually give something to each other. A gift. You won’t be getting this back. Give them something you want them to have, and which you don’t mind giving away. Do it now. Done.

The first stage is theatre, and the second is ritual.

V

Andy Field, in conversation, last week: “Yeah, I guess theatre isn’t always the most interesting or worthwhile thing for a group of people to do in any given space.”

VI

“Girl X”, from the National Theatre of Scotland, was directed by Pol Heyvaert, and instigated, performed with chorus by, and written in collaboration by Robert Softley (bit of a mouthful describing in a sentence what was clearly an intensely collaborative process nonetheless led by a couple of individuals). It is a staging of debates about a disability rights case: a girl with extremely severe and paralysing cerebral palsy, whose parents wish to give her a hysterectomy and hormone treatment in order to keep her permanently childlike and thus improve her quality of life. (It’s much more complicated than that, as we are shown. Go and see.)

The play is passionate and wide-ranging, covering acres of political ground, looking at the ways in which disability rights intersect with all the major political issues: the authority of state and family, the role of society, the morality of plastic surgery, economics, political correctness, feminism… I could spend a long time excitedly talking about how intellectually, politically and emotionally fascinating all this was, and attempting to negotiate some of the territory myself. But that’s not actually what most interested me.

(This is commentary, not a review, but the reviewer in me can’t help but take the opportunity to say that the set is weirdly huge and dominating, and totally unnecessary, contributing little to the piece, and it pains me to think of how much it cost.)

What most interested me was what was going on with the form. It is staged as an debate between Robert Softley and a chorus of citizens, sometimes in the language of interpersonal argument, and sometimes in the language of debates on internet forums. It’s thus a version of a very old form of Greek play, using just chorus and interlocutor, and examining ethical and political problems through personal experience. But the debates are, while driven by a strong narrative and emotional arc, roving and unresolved: no conclusion is ever really reached. So the play is not just about the subject of the debate, but about the idea of public debate itself. It doesn’t just depict a debate: it IS a debate, presented in such a way as to make its debate-ness all the more obvious. And when the debate using the language of written posts on internet forums, well, the disjoint between text and reality is nothing less than good old Verfremdungseffekt, pointing out again the debateness of what is going on. (Need I point out how commonly chorus and interlocutor appear in Brecht?) This is an exemplary piece of dialectical theatre.

But it is consciously not dialogical. The debate is being presented for the audience, and the audience does not get to take part, except mentally. Given that the play discusses the morality of public debate in itself, and that the denial of voices within public debate is pointed out, this shutting out of the audience, performed (consciously or not) by Softley as a joke at the beginning of the show, itself makes a point. At the climax of the show the whole cast faces us in challenge, their physicality: “Do you have an opinion? And can you speak it? Should you speak it? Really, should you?”

VII

Softley, if you don’t know, has cerebral palsy himself. One of the questions of the show is to what extent people without disabilities are really informed or otherwise empowered enough to offer such strong opinions on disability rights. Sometimes people just need to shut up and listen, and stop needing to perform their own consciousness and needs.

VIII

It’s partly funny and partly obvious how I get much more annoyed by shows that try to be interactive and don’t go the full hog than by shows which never pretend to be interactive in the first place, despite the fact that I truly and deeply believe that interactive theatre is the most important and politically essential form of contemporary theatre.