Bertrand Lesca is a theatre maker from France. After studying at Warwick University, he went on to assist Peter Brook and Declan Donnellan on several international tours. Bertrand currently works with Nasi Voutsas (Bert and Nasi) with whom he co-created the trilogy EUROHOUSE, PALMYRA and ONE.
The Game
Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas in Palmyra. Photo by Alex Brenner
PC: How do you go about communicating your approach to theatre to young people during your week-long workshops?
BL: I think we work with young people in a slightly different way. We’re not necessarily interested in the politics as much – not because we don’t trust that they’ll understand it – instead we want to give them a sense of what performance can be. We work towards getting them to a place where they no longer ‘perform’. It takes a little bit of time for them to understand that. We try to make them say things as they would say it, so that we get to see them as people on stage without them putting on a role. It takes a little while, but once they get it, they really feel empowered because they can just be themselves and say things as they would to their friends and that’s acceptable on the stage. By the end of the week, when they’ve made a show, we hope that they can be the best of themselves by just doing what they always do, talking like they always talk. It’s just a case of them understanding what the situation is and what the game is. Once they understand what the game is, we don’t care what sort of script they’re following, as long as they’re in tune with their partners, with the audience, the situation and the game. We try and teach them that making theatre has to start from them: who they are and what they think.
Bertrand Lesca is a theatre maker from France. After studying at Warwick University, he went on to assist Peter Brook and Declan Donnellan on several international tours. Bertrand currently works with Nasi Voutsas (Bert and Nasi) with whom he co-created the trilogy EUROHOUSE, PALMYRA and ONE.
The Exhausted Bodies
Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas in Palmyra. Photo by Alex Brenner
PC: Why is dance
important in your work?
BL: I think it’s about endurance, it’s about enduring bodies on stage, this sense of seeing bodies being strained and really pushed to the limit. We connect to this idea of what could be political. We really like when the audience feels our exhaustion because when they see exhausted bodies on stage it brings it into the room, here and now. They see actors genuinely getting exhausted, there’s something real that happens. For example, in Eurohouse, Nasi dances to Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac and he keeps asking throughout the show for this song to be played and I keep refusing. He puts it on several times, but I keep stopping it until, eventually, he starts doing the dance and I allow it. It’s just a very free thing that happens for maybe two and a half minutes and he really goes for it: he bangs his feet against the floor and shouts. It’s something really quite big and impressive but also captures the absolute desolation and desperate nature of what we saw in Greece. Dance was the best way that we could express that feeling.
What we’d seen in Greece was so sad and desperate, but at the same time there was this thing that they keep going and they keep fighting and they keep protesting, for us, that was best represented by Nasi having a proper celebratory dance where he gets exhausted. But then I start taking over again, stopping the music and asking him to do it again, to the point where he gets exhausted even more and it shifts the dynamic.
PC: Why is it
important for the audience to see your exhaustion?
BL: It generates empathy.
So, we’re deliberately trying not to be too good at dancing. We want it to be a
bit silly or ridiculous and that creates an empathy. If we mastered it to the
point where it seemed effortless there wouldn’t be that empathy. So, for us, it’s
important that the spectators get to see the effort. The audience could very
easily feel distant from the piece if they didn’t see the error or the failure.
PC: How do you
manipulate and control time and space towards the end of the process?
BL: It’s very hard to describe, I think it comes down to timing: comic timing. Every time we do it in front of an audience should feel like it’s the first time. The moments when we stop or if we don’t say anything, creates a climate of uncertainty and this uncertainty really helps to draw the audience in: What’s happening? Why is this person not saying anything? Why are they stopping? Is there a problem?
There’s a moment when people are laughing and then it stops. At that point onwards we work towards ensuring people don’t laugh because we want people to be horrified by what’s happening. For example, in Palmyra, there’s this scene where Nasi’s doing a dance with a hammer towards me, swinging it at me. People find it a little bit funny as he does it faster and harder, and then they stop finding it funny and it becomes quite a violent thing. People are confronted with the reality of the situation when it stops being funny. We’re saying that it’s more than just a funny image, this violence that you see is actually very real.
Bertrand Lesca is a theatre maker from France. After studying at Warwick University, he went on to assist Peter Brook and Declan Donnellan on several international tours. Bertrand currently works with Nasi Voutsas (Bert and Nasi) with whom he co-created the trilogy EUROHOUSE, PALMYRA and ONE.
The Danger
Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas in Palmyra. Photo by Alex Brenner
PC: How do you
find the balance between a tight structure and the freedom of participation and
improvisation?
BL: I think you have to think of it like there’s a start point and an end point, but what happens in between those two things has to feel free, both for the audience and for us as actors. We love when the situation gets out of hand, so we search for the danger of pure improvisation, but we always have those end points. If it just stays within the realm of improvisation it’ll descend into something random, but we have end points because we need to move on to another thing that we want to get the audience to think about. That is something that Declan Donnellan talks about in The Actor and the Target and I really agree with this. I really agree with the way he talks about acting in general.
PC: How do you
construct the tasks or games when developing the work?
BL: What’s actually in the rooms we’re in is really important for us. We have a little scan of the space we’re going to be in, not even thinking about it we just have a look at what’s happening in the room and what the objects are in the room. What could happen with those two chairs or that ladder? Each object is like a little gift that we’re going to start using in an improvisation somehow. The objects in the room help us build the allegory or the metaphor that we’re going to be exploring. It’s important that it should feel like things from the theatre. For example, we like to go to a theatre and ask them what kind of brooms they have so that it looks as if we’ve really just picked these things up from the wings. We play with this aesthetic of found objects within a theatre, so it feels in real time and within the room.
Bertrand Lesca is a theatre maker from France. After studying at Warwick University, he went on to assist Peter Brook and Declan Donnellan on several international tours. Bertrand currently works with Nasi Voutsas (Bert and Nasi) with whom he co-created the trilogy EUROHOUSE, PALMYRA and ONE.
The Breaking Point
Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas in Palmyra. Photo by Alex Brenner
PC: What’s so
important about that collision between comedy and violence?
BL: I think it’s a double-edged thing for the audience: people take a bit of pleasure watching but also find it very violent and uncomfortable. Seeing someone on stage being humiliated in real time feels very interesting because the audience is complicit. The audience are always having to assess their position as a spectator, or as a witness to someone humiliating someone else. There’s something a little bit masochistic about it too, in the same way that when you watch something incredibly violent on a laptop, you don’t want to see it, but at the same time you do want to see it. We want to explore the limit of what an audience can witness, as well as exploring our own limits with each other. We love seeing how far we can go with each other. It’s that classic comedy thing of taking pleasure from seeing someone fall down and hurt themselves. People find it funny up to a point and we’re interested in how long we can make it funny and playing on that moment it doesn’t become funny anymore. That’s because it’s about real stuff that’s happening outside the theatre. We like the audience to get lost in it, so they don’t always see the metaphor, but then we catch them at that breaking point, so they go, “Oh fuck, this is what it’s about!” Suddenly it hits them in a different way.
PC: How do you
‘write’ the audience in that constant triangle so that those breaking points
hit?
BL: Part of the
creative process is to invite a lot of people to come and see it so that we can
understand the piece, because until people start coming in, it’s impossible to
know what the role of the audience is going to be. For example, for both Palmyra and One which is the last part of the trilogy, we only had a sense of
the full dramaturgy of the piece once people are in the audience. We don’t
really know exactly what we’re going to do when we invite people in, but we
have a sense of it. We do a long improvisation with anchors of things that
we’ve done in the past that we can launch for each other so that we know where
we’re going, it might work, it might not. Then we invite another set of people
to come in and we’ll improvise again until eventually we start to understand
the piece through what is happening with the audience. The piece is completely
rewritten once the audience comes in. Before that we try out games and we talk
about it a lot. We have a sense of where we’re going but we only really start
writing the piece when we have an audience.
PC: The triangle
dynamic was very stark in Palmyra when
both you and Nasi simultaneously address the audience about the hammer. Can you describe that and say why you create those
moments where the audience can’t have an answer, or you specifically pull them
between two things?
BL: So, there’s the first moment where we address the audience; I stop the show and I say, “I need to stop.” I make comments about how crazy he is and ask if anyone thought about the hammer going into my face. Then I say, “I tell you what we’re going to do, we’re going to give this [the hammer] to someone in the audience, someone I can trust.” There’s a little bit of a fun interaction and then we move on to the next section of the play. Eventually, Nasi starts asking for the hammer back and I say, “Don’t give him the hammer, take it outside.” Then we’re playing this conflict of me saying to the person, “Don’t give him the hammer.” And him saying, “Give me the hammer.” It changes according to who has the hammer and what that person says. Sometimes the person takes it out immediately, sometimes that person doesn’t want to take it out, or they keep it, or they even give it to Nasi. There are all these options and so the audience really does have a choice but then there is always this final moment, which is that I have a bigger hammer. No matter what that person decides to do, I will always win. Maybe that’s your sense of us not giving the audience a choice, because we always land on that same moment. We worked hard to see how we could really give out the choice to the audience because it should feel difficult for the person who has the hammer; it should feel difficult for the whole audience around them as well. That conflict happening in the audience is really important: What do we do? Who do we trust? Who’s to be trusted the most? Is it better to take the hammer out so that it’s safe or is it better to keep it? Sometimes it creates a big debate amongst people in the audience about what they should do. That choice is real.
PC: Why is it
important for the audience to be an active witness rather than a passive witness?
BL: I think the point we’re trying to make is that we’re witness to this politics that is happening up to a point, but we’re also completely involved in that problem. For example, they watch the Middle East conflict from afar and that’s what they do in the show. Our conflict happens between two people and they watch from afar, but then we start interacting with the audience and then they’re like, “Oh shit, I thought I was just watching, they want me to actually answer? They want me to think about my role in this?” I think that’s really important for us, to say that we’re not just spectators, we’re not just witnesses, we’re also involved in that problem. We hear about these stories, Greece, Palmyra and the Middle East and we quickly feel desensitized, “That’s happening far away.” Or, “I’ve seen this over and over again, I don’t know what to think about this anymore.” We want people to actually consider what they think about it.
Bertrand Lesca is a theatre maker from France. After studying at Warwick University, he went on to assist Peter Brook and Declan Donnellan on several international tours. Bertrand currently works with Nasi Voutsas (Bert and Nasi) with whom he co-created the trilogy EUROHOUSE, PALMYRA and ONE.
The Frame
Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas in Palmyra. Photo by Alex Brenner
PC: Your work
seems to fit into a long tradition of comedy double acts, was that a conscious
decision?
BL: No, it was
more about understanding the dynamic between us two. We quite quickly found,
whilst improvising, that I was oppressing Nasi and he was just the victim of this
horrible person that I was playing. We always found it very amusing and very
funny. We had no sense that this was what we wanted to do, it just kind of started to happen. Then we saw the film of Bloody Mess by Forced Entertainment which had a comedy routine that was happening between two people where one clown wants to put a line of chairs to the front of the stage and another clown wants to put the chairs to the back. It starts with just one man starting to place them and then the other one moving them and then the way that it builds was really amazing. There was something almost political about it but again not naming anything political: just two people on stage wanting different things. We were really interested in what you could read into that if you give that scene a title. If you frame it for the audience, you start seeing the scene differently.
Tim Etchells on the first moments of Bloody Mess by Forced Entertainment
I think that idea of framing something is quite key to our work. Something clicked, as well, when looking at Cy Twombly’s paintings. Even though his art is very abstract and hard to decipher, there’s always a title which comes to support the viewers understanding of what it’s about. We always try and give our work a very clear title, a very clear frame so that we can take the audience on a journey.
The Song of the Border-Guard by Cy Twombly 1952 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P77550
PC: What’s the
first thing that you do when developing a piece?
BL: We get into the room and we just start talking about this thing. Then at some point we need to stop talking and start making something. We then try and leave all the information that we’ve gathered together outside and we start playing. Usually there’s just the two of us, so we start playing games and running long improvisations that carry on for anything up to an hour and a half. After that we make notes of things that we’ve found during the improvisation and what connected to the ideas that we’ve talked about. But we have to find the game and what the game is. So, if you have a man on the ladder and you have a man who’s not on the ladder, what’s the game? How can you play with that? We take a long time to work out what games work with the particular political context that we’re exploring. At the end of the day, it needs to be something that we can play, that we can act with. If it gets too complicated we usually leave it to one side.
PC: Are those
connections always clear?
BL: We try to make them clear but sometimes there’s a sense that the meaning of it even escapes us, we don’t really know why it works but we think it works. For example, in Palmyra there’s this moment when I start shaving Nasi’s beard with the microphone, there’s something so violent about this but also very playful, but the meaning of it didn’t come through the first time, we were just playing. It came up again and it was very clear for us that it was about how people perceive the beard of a Muslim person and the act of shaving it, it’s offensive from a religious point of view but also a really quite aggressive thing to do. That all started off as a game; something completely unconscious that we did in rehearsals which came back again and made complete sense with what the show also needed to say.
Bertrand Lesca is a theatre maker from France. After studying at Warwick University, he went on to assist Peter Brook and Declan Donnellan on several international tours. Bertrand currently works with Nasi Voutsas (Bert and Nasi) with whom he co-created the trilogy EUROHOUSE, PALMYRA and ONE.
The Constant Triangle
Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas in Palmyra. Photo by Alex Brenner
PC: What is
theatre?
BL: We’re interested in the idea that everything that you see is happening in the room at the same time – with the audience. We imagine a constant triangle between the audience, Nasi and myself that keeps looping. The constant awareness that we’re in a room with an audience feeds our work. Whatever we do always relates to this one single idea.
PC: How does
politics fit in with your work?
BL: I think the
politics comes from what people know before entering the room. We give them a
hint, which is usually the title and sometimes the blurb. That’s what people
should know before entering the room. Once they enter the room, we do things
that are supposed to create associations in the spectator’s mind. I think we’re
always very careful not to mention anything political in the room – we leave it
to the audience to fill in the gaps and to create these associations. Of course,
we go into the politics when we make the work: we research and debate. It’s very
clear, for us, what we’re trying to create with each image, but I think people
watching will think about a lot of things – sometimes that completely escapes
us but that’s okay. Everything we do on stage is very open to interpretation. For
example, some people will see the work and only see it as a reflection on a
relationship, or they will think about conflict, or they will think about what
we really want to talk about, which is a specific political conflict, but we don’t
force it. We never say, “This is what you should think!”
PC: Why is it important for your form of political theatre to leave space for the audience and to be open to interpretation?
BL: We knew that
we wanted it to be political when we started working together, but we felt
uneasy when we thought about political theatre because, for us, it was this
idea of preaching to the converted – we really wanted to avoid that. So, we
started looking at another way of making political theatre which wouldn’t be
that.
PC: How did you
develop that approach?
BL: We started making Eurohouse with interviews we had done in Greece, almost like a verbatim piece. Then we invited someone from Greece to see it and she was like “Yeah, that’s okay.” Then we showed her us two on stage with me humiliating Nasi and making him do stuff that he didn’t want to do, and she said, “I can connect with this and the feeling that it leaves me with, this sense of humiliation, is exactly what this is all about.” This made us think that we can work through the politics through a feeling, through people having an emotional connection with the political subject that we’re trying to explore, rather than an intellectual understanding of what’s going on. A lot of our work is to do with trying to create an understanding through an emotional connection with what’s happening in the room, with what’s happening between us both or with what’s happening between us and the audience. We’re always really trying to work through the feeling of what that particular political context is doing to people.
Balinese performances are difficult to categorize because of its dynamic and heterogeneous nature. The varying forms run the gamut from holy ritual to secular buffoonery, with no strict definitions delineating one from another. But there is an underlying unity. Running through them all is the implicit acknowledgement of a profound affinity between the spiritual and mundane worlds. Even the most outrageous popular melodramas contain elements of the divine temple dramas from which they were derived. And even the most sacred rituals possess elements of crowd-pleasing theatricality. This thread that links the ridiculous to the sublime is at the core of Balinese theatre.
The dance/drama which best reflects this special relationship be- tween Balinese clowns and gods is the masked spectacle called Topeng. Performed regularly as part of village temple festivals, Topeng is a vortex of intersecting artistic energies. Music, dance, mime, and song are used to provide a dramatic forum for the mingling of history, religion, and topical events. Topeng achieves this complex synthesis by blending solemn ritual and carnival merriment into accessible popular entertainment.
Topeng dancers are expected to study voice, dance, acting, song, and mime. Because Topeng involves sensitive interplay between performers and musicians, most dancers learn how to play all the instruments in the gamelan orchestra which accompanies Topeng. These skills are usually handed down from generation to generation on a one-to-one basis. Older performers select pupils as young as six years old as apprentices.
Once a high level of technical proficiency has been achieved in these various art forms, the Topeng dancer turns his attention to his other responsibilities as a temple performer. He is expected to study ancient religious and historic texts inscribed on palm leaf manuscripts called “lontars.” Familiarity with these writings allows him to weave relevant quotes and moral teachings into his improvised dialogues. Combining his knowledge of religious and historical tradition with a consciously cultivated awareness of topical village problems, a good Topeng performer improvises dramatic situations that speak directly to the audience in terms of their historic and spiritual past.
We are going to continue to mine the internet for brilliant videos on the topic of devising. This week we are going to focus on The Builders Association.
The Builders Association, an award-winning intermedia performance company founded in 1994, develops its work in extended collaborations with artists and designers, working through performance, video, architecture, sound, and text to integrate live performance with other media. Its work is not only cross-media but cross-genre — fiction and nonfiction, unorthodox retellings of classic tales and multimedia stagings of contemporary events. This book offers a generously illustrated history and critical appraisal of The Builders Association, written by Shannon Jackson, a leading theater scholar, and Marianne Weems, the founder and artistic director of the company.
Andy Lavender’s chapter in Making Contemporary Theatre edited by Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender offers insight into The Builders Association’s rehearsal processes.
CONTINUOUS CITY is a meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our “networked selves” occupy multiple locations. From Shanghai to Los Angeles, Toronto to Mexico City, CONTINUOUS CITY tells the story of a traveling father and his daughter at home tethered and transformed by speed, hypermodernity, and failing cell phones. The characters they interact with pursue their own transnational business, from an internet mogul exploiting networking across the developing world to a nanny who blogs humorous stories about the people and places within her universe. (Read her blog here.)
These excerpts from CONTINUOUS CITY were shot during a performance at BAM in 2008. They show scenes that reflect the production’s themes of disconnect and distance that can be created by the same technology we use to remain connected. In the first scene, performer Rizwan Mirza negotiates his relationship with an online date who threatens to become real. In the second, a traveling father (Harry Sinclair) talks remotely with his daughter (Olivia Timothee). The excerpt also highlights the use of the multiple screens that were employed as part of this production. Austin Switser, who will be designing video for ROAD TRIP, was the assistant on this production.
Conceived and created by The Builders Association & dbox.
SUPER VISION explores the changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society, where personal electronic information is constantly collected and distributed. The data files collected on us circulate like extra bodies, and these “data bodies” carry stains that are harder to clean than mud or sin; from birth certificates to bad credit, every moment of activity contributes to the construction of one’s own data body.
In this scene recorded during a performance at BAM, an international traveler (Rizwan Mirza) attempts to cross the border into the US. As he is questioned by a border control agent (Joseph Silovsky) his medical data is progressively revealed and superimposed over his physical body. At a time when people were just becoming aware of internet privacy issues, Super Vision explored the increasing ways in which our personal information might be collected and distributed.
Also recorded at BAM, in this scene a father (David Pence) is in the process of manipulating aspects of his young son’s identity (Owen Pence). This scene also illustrates the way the Builders use recorded images and video that intersect and interact with the live performer on stage.
Adapted from Susan Sontag’s early journals by performer Moe Angelos, SONTAG: REBORN traces Sontag’s private life from the age of 14 to her emergence as a world-renowned author and activist. The young Sontag wrestles with her emerging sexuality and precocious intelligence, fraught with doubt and insecurity yet driven by her willfulness, ambition and voracious curiosity. The refuge of her diary became integral to her development as a writer, Sontag says herself, “In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could in person. I create myself.”
Directed by Marianne Weems and using The Builders Association’s signature synthesis of poetic video and sound, this tightly-crafted story of self-discovery and sexual identity is both exuberant and intimate, exploring the private life, loves and idiosyncrasies of the iconic intellectual.
This excerpt from REBORN is included as another example of the immersive use of video and the interaction between live performance and recorded. Younger Sontag is portrayed by performer Moe Angelos on the stage as the same performer recorded on video as older Susan reacts and responds to her early journal writings.
Using John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath as a narrative backbone, HOUSE / DIVIDED (formerly ROAD TRIP) tells contemporary tales of foreclosure, following economic refugees and migrants from two different American eras. Steinbeck’s Joad family moves along the great Dust Bowl migration, while a contemporary house rooted to its site — yet connected to a web of global finance and investment – becomes a container for stories from the current, evolving crisis. HOUSE / DIVIDED explores the changing meaning of home, homelessness, and place both in the present moment and in the broader context of the American mythos.
This excerpt from the beginning of the piece establishes the construct used to move between the two worlds. It also highlights the different ways that media is used to tell the story, from the construction of the house itself to interviews with people affected by and involved in the crisis.
ELEMENTS OF OZ draws on one of the richest examples of escapist American entertainment, The Wizard of Oz. We revel in the multiplicity of interpretations of this iconic example of popular culture, and examine how tens of thousands of people across the country (and across the globe) have made Oz their own. Through the use of YouTube tributes, a re-contextualization of the film, and the incorporation of new technologies, ELEMENTS OF OZ celebrates and deconstructs this incredibly rich cultural artifact.
This week we take a look at a range of ‘devising’ theatre companies. We have used the companies featured in The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers edited by Duška Radosavljević and Devising in Process edited by Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart. This can be a visual accompaniment to these fantastic books.
In this interview Grzegorz Bral director of Song of the Goat Theatre and LSPAP talks about London School of Performing Arts Practices, Brave festival, coordination technique and his approach to theatre and performing arts.
Performed by Kristen Bailey, Drew Friedman, Adriano Shaplin, Mary Tuomanen, Stephanie Viola
Set by Caitlin Lainoff / Lights by Maria Shaplin / Costumes by Katherine Fritz / Sound by Adriano Shaplin
Performed at Incubator Arts Project, May 2012, NYC
“Delicately hilarious…a clear-eyed ethnography of our own species at a specific developmental stage…the ensemble seems exquisitely tuned to a difficult chord of poignancy and awkwardness.” –Time Out
Performed by Drew Friedman, McKenna Kerrigan, Jeb Kreager, Mary McCool, Paul Schnabel, Adriano Shaplin, Stephanie Viola
Lights Maria Shaplin / Costumes Rosemarie McKelvey / Sound Whit MacLaughlin / Projection Design Jorge Cousineau / Production Stage Manager Emily Rea / Executive Producer: New Paradise Laboratories
Freedom Club was made possible with the support of Princeton University, Drexel University, the Off-Center for Dramatic Arts, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Epic theatre…possessing a unique, violent, and total language, at once written, spoken, and played.” –CultureBot
“In Freedom Club the darker underpinnings of human liberty are considered with a grim cackle.” –The New York Times
“A daring mashup by two experimental companies (Philadelphia’s New Paradise Laboratories and New York’s the Riot Group) and two eras (1865 and 2015), “Freedom Club” indicts fanatical radicalism in America. Aptly self-described as “a hallucination on national themes,” the satire vividly skewers self-aggrandizing extremists from John Wilkes Booth to a feminist collective that spawns another presidential assassin.” -Variety
A short documentary about The Neo-Futurists and their long running late night show Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. Contains clips from the show and interviews with, Jay Torrence, Heather Riordan, Caitlin Stainken, Greg Allen and others. The Neo-Futurist are a Chicago based theater company who produce the longest running show in Chicago, T.M.L.M.T.B.G.B. (30 plays in 60 minutes) , as well as a full season of original primetime shows.
Tom Nicholas caught Ontroerend Goed’s £¥€$ (or Lies) at the Drum Theatre this week ahead of its transfer to Summerhall and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This interactive piece by the Belgian provocateurs sees the theatre transformed into a casino and audiences into freewheeling free market capitalists. Here’s Tom’s performance analysis of the show.
Tom is an exciting theatre vlogger putting out interesting new videos every week discussing theatre and playwriting from the perspective of an aspirant and (some might say) emerging playwright, theatre maker and academic. Support this fantastic tool with a subscription.
Julian Maynard Smith is the founder and artistic director of Station House Opera. Founded in 1978, Station House Opera creates solo and group performance work as well as sculpture and installation. Dissolved is the company’s first new work since the city scale site specific project Dominoes in 2009 and follows earlier intercontinental performances developed as far back as 2004. Their distinctive engagement with audiences crosses new boundaries with an installation and performance that uses live video streaming to dissolve spaces in London and Berlin, bringing people from both cities into dynamic connection.
This is Theatre O’s vision statement. Rather than just have something written down on a piece of paper, they thought it would better to reflect how they approach work by making something a little more visual. They worked with animator and long term collaborator, Paddy Molloy, who made a stop frame animation of the creation and destruction of a drawing he made based on our previous work.
Third Angel have always worked with rules when making shows, and they’ve always enjoyed the creativity that those restrictions give us – as well as enjoying the moment when you realise that the rules need to be broken. Popcorn is a performance for both camera and live audience reflecting on rules, time, making stuff, shared language, shared history and friendship. Performed and filmed on location at The Holt cafe and art-space, Sheffield.
