Kneehigh’s Influence on British Theatre

This is the final part in a series of interviews about the history of Kneehigh with Dr Duška Radosavljevic. The interviews provide an introduction to the company and an academic’s outside eye on Kneehigh as a devising ensemble.

Do use the Kneehigh Cookbook and their Vimeo site for more free online digital resources from the company. In addition there is a fifteen minute audio clip of Emma Rice ‘On Directing’ that I believe captures the spirit of how Kneehigh currently work.

Dr Duška Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy.

Duška has worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble, an education practitioner at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a dramaturg, she has worked with various local, national and international theatre artists and organisations including New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs’ Network, National Student Drama Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Circomedia. In 2015 she was the dramaturg on Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Almeida. Between 1998 and 2010, Duška was a member of The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel of judges at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has written hundreds of theatre and dance reviews for the Stage Newspaper. She also writes for Exeunt.

Duška’s academic publications include award-winning Theatre-Making (Palgrave 2013), The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (Bloomsbury Methuen 2016) as well as many chapters in various collections including one on Kneehigh in Liz Tomlin’s British Theatre Companies: 1995-2014 (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015).

PC: You mentioned the collaboration with Northern Stage — what similarities do you see in the two companies’ work?

DR: I think that Northern Stage and Kneehigh collaborated because they were both ensemble companies from geographically marginalised places. Both served their own communities firstly but both had international ambitions. Northern Stage were based in Newcastle and, under the leadership of Alan Lyddiard, they were very much immersed in their local context. Alan’s ambition was to have all these Geordie artists that he brought together into an ensemble working shoulder to shoulder with internationally renowned artists. So he brought into Newcastle Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, Lev Dodin and Calixto Bielto in order to facilitate those sorts of exchanges. Northern Stage as an ensemble from Newcastle wanted to define themselves in relation to the rest of Europe rather than to London. Meanwhile Kneehigh has built an international reputation by touring, not only in Europe but in the Americas too. Neil Murray, who was a designer and Associate Director at Northern Stage, continued working with Emma Rice after the co-production of Pandora’s Box. He was nominated for an Olivier for his design of Brief Encounter. And as a director himself, he has spoken of being influenced by Emma’s methods of working with actors.

PC: Would you be able to pinpoint any specific company that Kneehigh has influenced?

DR: Stylistically you could talk perhaps about some other companies being influenced by Kneehigh or being freed up to experiment by Kneehigh’s successes in merging genres, reanimating certain traditions for the 21st century or reinventing the musical, for example. You could make connections between Kneehigh and the whole gig theatre trends that we are witnessing now.

PC: Your main area of research is ensemble theatre, what have you learnt from researching Kneehigh’s ensemble work?

DR: I guess the whole idea of ensemble research that I have engaged in culminated for me by concluding that often the desire to work in the ensemble is motivated by essentially wanting to create communities. Bringing artists together in the ensemble but also making the audience part of the ensemble. That is a distinctive feature of theatre as an art. That is one of the unique selling points of theatre. Theatre actually engages the audience in a live event. That’s where I think Kneehigh really capitalise on the potential of theatre. Kneehigh’s work is often driven by a desire to engage an audience in some sort of temporary community or some sort of shared experience.

Kneehigh’s Irreverence: Subverting the Mainstream

This is the fifth in a series of interviews about the history of Kneehigh with Dr Duška Radosavljevic. The interviews provide an introduction to the company and an academic’s outside eye on Kneehigh as a devising ensemble.

Do use the Kneehigh Cookbook and their Vimeo site for more free online digital resources from the company. In addition there is a fifteen minute audio clip of Emma Rice ‘On Directing’ that I believe captures the spirit of how Kneehigh currently work.

Dr Duška Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy.

Duška has worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble, an education practitioner at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a dramaturg, she has worked with various local, national and international theatre artists and organisations including New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs’ Network, National Student Drama Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Circomedia. In 2015 she was the dramaturg on Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Almeida. Between 1998 and 2010, Duška was a member of The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel of judges at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has written hundreds of theatre and dance reviews for the Stage Newspaper. She also writes for Exeunt.

Duška’s academic publications include award-winning Theatre-Making (Palgrave 2013), The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (Bloomsbury Methuen 2016) as well as many chapters in various collections including one on Kneehigh in Liz Tomlin’s British Theatre Companies: 1995-2014 (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015).

PC: You mentioned that Kneehigh’s early work was influenced by the quite radical alternative theatre scene. Do you think their work still has this quality?

DR: People question whether Kneehigh’s work is inherently conservative or inherently radical or whether it is political at all. This is because when work at some point becomes commercial it therefore becomes part of the mainstream even if it had started off as being radical. It loses the initial impact, it loses political weight. But actually my argument in relation to Kneehigh has been to highlight the importance of the political underpinnings of the work: Kneehigh’s work has in fact never been overtly political, the political values were contained in the inherent subversiveness – the ‘naughtiness’ – that has always run through the work. Even when they became more of a structured company they always retained this irreverence and subversiveness in the way that worked. This is obviously the way they were when they went to Stratford and presented Shakespeare on their own terms. They weren’t trying to conform or respect the local traditions. It was about doing it the way they had always done things. Being faithful to their own emotional memory. Having those qualities run through the work, their political drives remind me of the kind of work that Dario Fo has done: very populist but very political, though maybe a bit more overtly political than Kneehigh’s work.

PC: Is what they do still subversive even though they have gone into the West End and the RSC and the National?

DR: Yes. They have got to all these pinnacles of British theatre but on their own terms. They make sure that the experience of the piece becomes the dominant experience of the audience within this time and space. There was a big political change in 1989 and what we consider to be political theatre up until then changed. We had to reconsider the mainstream, think about what is radical in performance: what actually engages the audience fully? People talk about ‘immersive’ theatre as if it’s a new thing but actually there were companies and artists who were motivated by that desire in the 1980s and 1990s. You can see the legacy of that in Brief Encounter at the Haymarket cinema. It was essentially a site-specific piece because it was done in the place where the film was originally screened. The set designer was Neil Murray but in this case every aspect of the experience was designed: there were rose petals in the toilets, thick carpets and ushers and usherettes with pillbox hats around the auditorium before the show and in the interval who stepped on and off the stage to assume other characters. The use of actors in the interval of Brief Encounter draws the attention away from what is customarily done in the British playhouses: the consumption of ice cream. I think this might point to their roots in creating outdoor events when they had to take into account all aspects of the audience experience. Outdoor events are so much less containable because the audience could be a lot more anarchic: doing unexpected things. If you have to make an effort to contain the audience within the storytelling experience, as part of the actual framework of the piece itself, then somehow you are more likely to control the audience. So in this case you could argue Brief Encounter was an immersive experience as a result of the evident consideration of all the aspects of the event’s design to the minutest detail.

Kneehigh’s Instinctive Style: Storytelling and Adaptation

This is the fourth in a series of interviews about the history of Kneehigh with Dr Duška Radosavljevic. The interviews provide an introduction to the company and an academic’s outside eye on Kneehigh as a devising ensemble.

Do use the Kneehigh Cookbook and their Vimeo site for more free online digital resources from the company. In addition there is a fifteen minute audio clip of Emma Rice ‘On Directing’ that I believe captures the spirit of how Kneehigh currently work.

Dr Duška Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy.

Duška has worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble, an education practitioner at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a dramaturg, she has worked with various local, national and international theatre artists and organisations including New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs’ Network, National Student Drama Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Circomedia. In 2015 she was the dramaturg on Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Almeida. Between 1998 and 2010, Duška was a member of The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel of judges at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has written hundreds of theatre and dance reviews for the Stage Newspaper. She also writes for Exeunt.

Duška’s academic publications include award-winning Theatre-Making (Palgrave 2013), The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (Bloomsbury Methuen 2016) as well as many chapters in various collections including one on Kneehigh in Liz Tomlin’s British Theatre Companies: 1995-2014 (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015).

PC: Have you been able to pin down what is distinctive about Kneehigh’s style?

DR: I frequently use the phrase ‘company vocabulary’ and I often do specifically in relation to Kneehigh. There can be such a thing as an idiom of a particular director. When a company discovers that something works, they internalise it. I think there is this sense that they use puppetry a lot. Jon Oram’s Tregagle – A Cornish Faust in 1985 was important, as it introduced live music and mask into the company’s vocabulary. Music is now part of the fabric of their work. Songs are a way of engaging the audience, another way of telling a story. When the style is internalised, it is about what you reach for when you’re trying to say something. Their way of conveying something becomes instinctive.

PC: Is there a distinctive creative process that Kneehigh’s uses?

DR: Yes. Kneehigh will often talk about their primary motivation being telling the story rather than the speaking of the pre-written lines. The text doesn’t come first, the story comes first. The rehearsal methodology that Emma has described has four phases. The first phase is about ensemble-building through running, singing and games. Then the actual creative process starts with building the foundations of ‘why?’ Why is this particular story being told? What are the themes they respond to as an ensemble? Work on the character comes next and all the actors explore all characters. When actors are brought together for a particular project it is not known which member of the cast plays which character at the outset. That is something that is decided later on in the process. Casts are assembled on the basis of other criteria that might be important for a particular project. Finally, characters are placed in particular situations and that is when scenes which will form the piece begin to emerge.

PC: If Kneehigh are working with different actors all the time, is there a sense of continually training? Is training done separately to projects?

DR: Training is always part of developing a piece of work. They don’t do training for the purpose of training. Training is always part of the rehearsal process in some way. It is about developing a shared ethos of working together: moving towards a shared goal. It’s the kind of ethos that is concerned with theatre-making as an activity. Emma has talked about her work with musicians. She talks about singing being important as a binding agent for building an ensemble.  When people sing together they have the sense of something being built between them. There is a more layered understanding of what theatre-making entails; it is not just about putting your text on the stage. The actors’ presence is equally as important as the playwright’s text.

PC: Why do you think Kneehigh have had such success? What is it that appeals to their audiences?

DR: Very often when people go to see adaptations they know the story already. They are not going in order to follow the plot or to find out what will happen. They go in order to appreciate the way in which the stories are told. Therefore, the story has to be told in some sort of innovative way. That is why they deploy the whole armoury that they have at their disposal. But another aspect of adaptation, one that Beatrix Hesse has written about (From Screen to Stage: The Case of The 39 Steps, 2009) is how people go to adaptations wanting to be part of a community, in the same way that much of the fan culture works. This raises questions of authenticity and the question of whether it is right to interfere with the original. Emma Rice has tackled it in a way that I find distinctive and particularly satisfying. Rather than being faithful to the original, she has explained that she is actually driven by a desire to be faithful to her own emotional memory of it.

PC: One of Kneehigh’s recent successes was Brief Encounter. What was distinctive about that production?

DR: They originally made Brief Encounter for the Haymarket cinema because the Haymarket cinema was where the film was first shown. Then there was a touring version of that show made with a different cast – they were a different kind of actor that could easily step into an already made part. However, somehow there is still a sense that this wasn’t a carbon copy of something that’s been done already. Thought went into how to make those new actors fit in with this work. It was made with inspiration, based on the original London production.

PC: You could say that film is another part of the Kneehigh vocabulary. How did they use film in Brief Encounter?

DR: Emma Rice’s most innovative use of film was probably in Brief Encounter. Obviously because it was a film to begin with, so she was making it explicit that this was an adaptation of a film. She had characters stepping out of the screen and into the screen because the screen was made out of material that was in fact just threads that were stuck together – really elastic so you could go through the screen. This created a different level of meaning because suddenly the screen was not just a screen, it became this portal into the inner world of the character.

PC: Are there other good examples of their use of film?

DR: Film was used in their adaptation of A Matter of Life and Death with the intention of bringing the audience to the here and now. Film footage of the Southbank was projected on the stage. It was the equivalent to a moment in the film when the characters go to a camera obscura. It was a clever moment of reflexivity. Kneehigh have often used film in the dramaturgical sense rather than just filling in the gaps.

Artaud’s Ideas Today: Cinema and Dance

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Artistic intentions
  • Innovations
  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: Is there any other source of material that people could look as work inspired by Artaud?

RM: I think where his ideas about theatre are being used a lot more is in cinema now. These films that seek to appeal to the body in various different ways.

PC: What examples are there of his theatre ideas being used in cinema?

RM: Gaspar Noé and Claire Denis. There is a book written by Martine Beugnet called Cinema and Sensation. She also writes about Artaud. A lot of the films that have been labelled ‘New French Extremism’; I think that is a term that has been invented by an English journalist. There are these films in France that are very much about bodily change: transformation and the limits of the body being threatened. In film theory, there is renewed interest in describing the personal experience (phenomenology) of watching a film where your individual subjectivity is being challenged or disrupted in some sought of way.

PC: I like the films of Michael Haneke. I don’t know if there is a connection, his films seems to use verfremdung, but that is a kind of disruption. I suppose Brecht was disrupting how content was perceived whereas Artaud and to a certain extent Haneke emphasize the disruption of experience. In that moment of watching your senses are disrupted, life is disrupted, it is unavoidable. The images of violence and bodies particularly seem to recur in Haneke’s films.

RM: Also the way that Haneke explores time: the temporality of spectatorship. The physical effect that the audience experiences is actually to do with waiting and waiting and you are really made to experience that feeling of time.

PC: An example of that is in Caché (Hidden) where the father kills himself in the kitchen, it happens so suddenly compared to more mainstream, ‘Hollywood’ editing. It just happens and you are left with the image of the dead body. You are left with it for a long time.

RM: And Funny Games. You don’t actually see any of the violence but it is made worse because you are just waiting. Also Seventh Continent where the whole family decide to commit suicide and at the end they are all dying and it takes ages and ages and ages and there is a pop video on TV.

PC: Time is absolutely key. I think that is something else for students to focus on in their practical explorations influenced by Artaud: time.

RM: And also the focus on gesture in this kind of cinema as well. The way that theatre is really influencing cinema now is through this question of gesture. The way in which people are looking at gesture as a philosophical concept in the cinema, which is something that comes from the theatre.

PC: Do you mean gesture as an act of moving the body: the hands?

RM: Yes in a very, very simple kind of way. Particularly these kind of films that I see as being ‘Artaudian’. They draw attention to bodily gestures that would be ignored in cinema normally. Unexpected movements that don’t really have anything to do with the narrative, moments where the body is brought into relief through its movement rather than its position in the narrative.

PC: When did Artaud develop his ideas about cinema?

RM: Well Artaud went in the opposite direction to most people: he started with the cinema and then went back into the theatre. In most of his work, he’ll start with a particular medium then he’ll get annoyed with it and abandon it. He started with cinema and then he got really frustrated with it. He decided that theatre was potentially much more revolutionary than cinema. He felt he could actually do more with theatre than you could with cinema. Eisenstein, for example, went from theatre to cinema.

PC: Are there any other contemporary examples of work that challenges the idea of representation and focuses on the body? Not necessarily explicitly connected with Artaud. But is there any work out there that has got your attention because it explores the disruption of representation and language?

RM: I find the films of Chantal Akerman really interesting. Her work uses gesture both in terms of the gestures of filming: the way that something is filmed; and the way the body appears on the screen. There is also an experimental filmmaker who made a whole series of films about the Tarahumaras. So that is an obvious Artaud connection.

PC: Do you see much of Artaud’s influence in dance? Everything we have discussed about time, the body and ritual seems to be central to the work of Pina Bausch and Hofesh Schechter.

RM: Yes and people like Merce Cunningham. For very different reasons Yvonne Rainer: she is all about language. She is about a lot of things Artaud is not about. The Theatre and its Double was a huge influence on Black Mountain College where John Cage, Nancy Spero and Merce Cunningham were. Lucy Bradnock is working on the mistranslation of Artaud in the 1950s at Black Mountain College and how that created the 1960s vision of Artaud in America which was then exported elsewhere – she wrote an article called ‘White Noise at Black Mountain’

Summary

  • Artaud’s ideas about theatre are being used a lot more is in cinema now.
  • The physical effect that the audience experiences is actually to do with waiting and waiting and you are really made to experience that feeling of time.
  • Filmmakers are looking at gesture as a philosophical concept in cinema, which is something that comes from the theatre.
  • Artaud started in cinema but he decided that theatre was potentially much more revolutionary.
  • The Theatre and its Double was a huge influence on Black Mountain College where John Cage, Nancy Spero and Merce Cunningham were.