Tag: Grotowski

Grotowski’s Significant Productions

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • theatrical style
  • innovations
  • key collaborations with other artists
  • relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • significant moments in the development of theory and practice

Images of productions can be found at grotowski.net

PC: How long was Grotowski working as a director?

PA: He wasn’t a director in the traditional way that we would understand someone who just produces a repertoire of work. That was a period of fifteen years: from studying in Moscow, then traditional drama school in Kraków and then setting up the Theatre of Thirteen Rows in 1959. He created his very last performance in 1969. It is a very short period of making theatre performances but they astounded the world and completely transformed our understanding of what theatre can do.

PC:  What was the sequence of the most significant productions?

PA: It was The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Akropolis, The Constant Prince and then Apocalypsis cum Figuris.

PC: Was Dr Faustus the only text he worked with?

PA: No, all his other performances were based on classical texts but not just classical as in our canon in Britain, Western Europe or America. They were based on Polish and in one case a Spanish classic. This is something people mistake about him; they think that he was devising and creating these texts, but in fact they were mostly well known and classic Polish dramas. Some of them were fragmentary poetic dramas.

PC: Why was Dr Faustus significant?

PA: In 1962, Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe was reframed as the last supper where the audience are invited to see Faustus in his last hour before he gets taken away by Mephistopheles. Dr Faustus pushed the actors’ work a long way. It launched Grotowski on the world stage because it was the piece that Eugenio Barba saw and took visitors and producers to see at an International Theatre Festival. The actor/spectator relationship in the space was crucial as it was in all his productions. In Dr Faustus the spectators sat at a table with the action happening on this table at chin height, right in front of their faces. Rather than looking at the back of someone’s head, as you would do in a proscenium arch theatre, you were looking at another spectator also experiencing the same things. This very much amplified the experience.

PC: What about Akropolis?

PA: It was made in the same year as Dr Faustus, 1962 and there is the film record of it, even though it is not a very good rendition. It is more of an ensemble piece based on the classic play by Stanisław Wyspiański. This play was originally set in Wawel Cathedral, Kraków, which is the national cathedral where these dead kings and queens lie in state. Grotowski relocated it to Auschwitz. It was a very important production for addressing the Holocaust, being set in Kraków, thirty miles away from Auschwitz itself, just seventeen years after it was liberated. They developed this whole mise-en-scène where the concentration camp was built around and above the spectators during the course of the performance. They were surrounded by the action and at the start of the play they were told, “You are the living and we are the dead.” The spectator was positioned as a witness again.

PC: You touched on The Constant Prince earlier. Why was that a significant production?

PA: The Constant Prince followed in 1965 and is seen as the production where Grotowski’s acting techniques got taken to the highest level. It was Cieślak’s total act as the Constant Prince, this gift of himself: the holy actor. Critics couldn’t articulate their experience easily but they talked about Cieślak’s illumination. The extraordinary nature of what he did comes across even in a grainy film, shot with one camera. It is a bad rendition but the embodied sense of what it might have been like to be a spectator there comes through. For this production, the spectators were positioned above the stage, watching this actor enacting this repetitive ritual of torture, being asked to give in and yet not giving in, delivering this poetic response about why he would not do so, why he is constant. The high position of the spectators meant they are put in this awkward place: if they sit back in their chair they can’t see the action so they have to lean forwards to observe someone’s suffering. They are put into this position of being a willing voyeur in someone else’s suffering.

Full version available here

PC: What about his final production?

PA: Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1969) was his last performance which he carried on presenting until 1979. It stands out for many reasons. It overlapped with the paratheatre phase. People would often come to the performances, stay behind afterwards and talk, then get invited to participate in paratheatre. It was devised, as we’d call it today; they took texts from T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, from The Bible. The production was heading away from theatrical structures. The first version was in costumes, then Grotowski said, “No, wear your daily clothes.” Initially there were benches for the audience, then they removed them. It was performed in an empty room, getting back to that simplicity of just people in a space. The distinction between the spectator and the actor was being blurred. That interaction, that encounter was then extended into paratheatre, where there were no spectators, no observers, just actors.

Up Next:

 

Part 5: Grotowski and Gurawski: Configuring the Space

Part 6: Grotowski Inspired Creativity and Outrage

Part 7: Grotowski’s Work with Text

Part 8: Grotowski’s Communication with Spectators

Part 9: Acting for Grotowski: What is it to be Human?

Part 10: Grotowski Composes Associations: Plastique and Corporal Exercises

Part 11: Grotowski’s Voice Work: Connecting Body and Voice

Part 12: Grotowski’s Context: Sickness, War and Oppression

Part 13: Paratheatre: What is Beyond Theatre?

Part 14: Paratheatre: Finding the Desire to Change

Part 15: Grotowski’s Influence: Barba, Brook and Beyond

FULL INTERVIEW HERE

Grotowski Burning at the Stake After Artaud

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Paul Allain

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Since collaborating with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 he has gone on to write extensively about the theatre. He has published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.

Paul’s films about physical acting for Methuen Drama Bloomsbury will be published at Drama Online in Spring 2018 as Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z.  Draft films are currently available at the Digital Performer website.

email: P.A.Allain@kent.ac.uk


Connections to the IB, GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • artistic intentions
  • innovations
  • methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: What was the relationship between Grotowski’s performance work and Artaud’s ideas?

PA: The relationship with Artaud is explained very clearly in Towards a Poor Theatre in the chapter titled ‘He Wasn’t Entirely Himself’. In this, he says that his engagement with Artaud came later than one might expect. He developed his practice and his ideas of theatre and then discovered the connection and closeness to Artaud’s ideas. He didn’t look at Artaud and think “I could put that into practice.” Artaud has incredible ideas about total theatre: people on revolving chairs, using all the mise-en-scène and including cinema, sound; but it is quite hard to enact. You see the same words, the ‘total’ theatre of Artaud and the ‘total’ act of Grotowski; but they are completely different. Grotowski is about paring away scenography, lighting, sound – of course, the actors are still lit but it’s never decorative, it is totally functional. It’s about getting a really simple mise-en-scène which he adapted for every production to focus on the actor. That’s what is at the core of it for Grotowski: the actor/spectator relationship, whereas Artaud was really about total theatre, in a much more filmic way, the montage of all these elements that would somehow take over the audience.

PC: Would you say there was a closeness in their intensity, even though Artaud’s ideas were never fully realised?

PA: Yes, I think there is a similar interest in rigour. How, through theatre, you can create an impact that changes the spectator. Artaud wanted it to be like the plague where this psychic contamination spreads out from the theatre event and changes society somehow, ‘heart and soul’. Through your nervous response to this extraordinary, frightening, sensational experience you’re changed and society is improved. Grotowski wanted that as well but through very different means. Both Artaud and Grotowski wanted to push limits: how far can you go? It is not about the entertainment industry, it’s not about pleasing the audience. Grotowski is quite critical in his language talking about the Courtesan actor who’s selling themselves for the price of an expensive ticket. The actor should rather be giving themselves to the audience. I think that has connections with Artaud’s view of this actor opening him/herself up. Grotowski cites Artaud’s image of “the actor should be like the martyr burning at the stake, still signalling through the flames.” I always find that a very potent idea; even when you’re burning up, you’re still trying to communicate through the flames as you die, like Joan of Arc. It is a powerful metaphor that captures the rigour, that extremity of what they’re both trying to do. The cruelty that I think Artaud talks about is a cruelty to yourself; Grotowski is interested in the actor penetrating their own existence, in questioning themselves to a deep level: What happens if I go on stage in front of people? Why should I have the privilege of doing that? If I do, how do I get over the desire to entertain; the desire to please; the desire to be successful? Instead you work in a ‘via negativa‘ way, stripped back, not resisting things.

PC: How would you explain via negativa?

PA: It is quite difficult to explain the via negativa but he talks about removing psychophysical blocks, making impulses actions. Stanislavski did acrobatics with his actors and Stanislavski thought, “If you can overcome your fear of doing a leap or a roll, how much easier is it then to overcome a difficult role or a difficult bit of text.” It gets you over that sense of fear and it makes you freer. Grotowski is the same: he is finding that freedom of action, of not hesitating, of turning impulse into action and stopping that self-judgmental voice in the head that’s always saying, “Am I good enough?” Instead, you really commit to something, like the idea of the gift, you give yourself totally: the ‘holy actor’; it’s an act of submission. However, if it’s too vain, if it’s too egotistical, then it becomes an imposition.

Up Next:

Part 4: Grotowski’s Significant Productions

Part 5: Grotowski and Gurawski: Configuring the Space

Part 6: Grotowski Inspired Creativity and Outrage

Part 7: Grotowski’s Work with Text

Part 8: Grotowski’s Communication with Spectators

Part 9: Acting for Grotowski: What is it to be Human?

Part 10: Grotowski Composes Associations: Plastique and Corporal Exercises

Part 11: Grotowski’s Voice Work: Connecting Body and Voice

Part 12: Grotowski’s Context: Sickness, War and Oppression

Part 13: Paratheatre: What is Beyond Theatre?

Part 14: Paratheatre: Finding the Desire to Change

Part 15: Grotowski’s Influence: Barba, Brook and Beyond

FULL INTERVIEW HERE

Essential Videos on Movement

Posted on by Phil

This weeks video resources focus on movement. Here is a selection of video content from around the web. There is the full spectrum here, from abstract dance to more naturalistic theatre. Some are training masterclasses and some are performances. I hope each can serve as an inspiration for your own creativity.

PLEASE NOTE: Not all movement exercises are suitable for everyone and this or any other movement exercise may result in injury. To reduce the risk of injury, never force or strain, use the exercises only as intended and demonstrated, and follow all instructions carefully.

A Eurhythmics introduction and demonstration with Lisa Parker, director of the Dalcroze Eurhythmics program at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA. Lisa discusses Eurhythmics, its goals and benefits through a lesson on measure shape.

In the 1990’s, after the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union, an original source of Biomechanics became known. Nikolai Kustow, the Biomechanics instructor in Meyerhold’s Theater, maintained a “hidden” school and secretly passed on principles and etudes to a new generation of actors. In this video, Russian actor and pedagogue, Gennadi Bogdanov is shown presenting the most important etudes and principles of Biomechanics. In addition to historical film and photodocumentation of Biomechanics, the video also displays recent scenic work from Europe and the USA developed from the basis of Meyerhold’s Biomechanics. In English, 43 mins, colour & Black & white.

Gennadi Bogdanov demonstrates a Biomechanics study created by Meyerhold. Then he applies the work to a study of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot.

The study of Meyerhold’s ‘Throwing the Stone’. This video shows a demonstration of Meyerhold’s study by Ralf Réuker, student of Gennadi Bogdanov, and analyzed by Eugenio Barba. It was taken during a series of lectures organized in 1997 by the Center for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, Wales. During the demonstration Barba sometimes addresses the audience and in Ralph, the student of Biomechanics.

Revolutionary dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman introduces some of her work.

Martha Graham discusses her craft in A Dancer’s World.

Choreographer Merce Cunningham took chances. Over a seven decade career, his explorations reshaped dance into a new kind of art form, deeply influencing visual art, film, and music along the way. Through experimental collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and others, he became the 20th century’s most influential choreographer. In conjunction with the exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common Time, we look at the many sides of Cunningham: dance maker, collaborator, chance-taker, innovator, film producer, and teacher.

In the spring of 1981, during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage sat down to discuss their work and artistic process. As frequent collaborators, Cage and Cunningham pioneered a new framework of performance. Their novel approach allowed for mediums to exist independently, or rather cohabitate, within a performance, thus abandoning the co-dependent model of dance and music. Cage and Cunningham go on to discuss the methodology and motivations behind chance operations, a term used to describe artistic decisions based on unpredictability. Wanting to free himself of his likes and dislikes, Cage describes how Zen Buddhism influenced his work, leading him to use tools of chance. These new methods, adopted by both Cunningham and Cage, overturned a whole foundation of thought around music, movement, and the process of creating art.

Taken from a television special called The Body Speaks, Ryszard Cieslak of Grotowski’s Laboratory briefly speaking and then presenting some exercises in the Plastiques and Corporals with two Danish students.





We all use our body on a daily basis, and yet few of us think about our physicality the way Wayne McGregor does. He demonstrates how a choreographer communicates ideas to an audience, working with two dancers to build phrases of dance, live and unscripted, on the TEDGlobal stage.

Wayne McGregor is well known for his physically testing choreography and ground-breaking collaborations across dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science. In 2000, he and his company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance embarked on a series of projects investigating aspects of creativity in dance with researchers from other fields such as cognitive and social science.

A series of systems developed for choreographers to engage more fully the imaginations of performers tasked with generating new movement material.

Spring Dance 2011 hosted the world premiere of DV8’s newest work Can We Talk About This? The performance deals with freedom of speech, censorship and Islam using real life interviews and archive footage to examine influences on multicultural policies, press freedom and artistic censorship. Australian Lloyd Newson conceived and directed the work and founded DV8 in 1986.

The clip starts at a monologue with hand choreography that is particularly interesting.

Masterclass with Akram Khan including interviews

Follow Akram Khan for a day

Clip from Zero Degrees – ‘zero degrees is the reference point where everything begins…and everything ends’. Akram Khan

zero degrees, Akram Khan Company from Akram Khan Company on Vimeo.

In order to help students and teachers who wish to use Hofesh’s work as a stimulus to perform a solo in the style of a specified practitioner, Hofesh and the company offer this short film resource and accompanying study notes which can be downloaded here: http://hofesh-media.s3-eu-west-1.amaz… In this resource Hofesh shares an extract from his 2010 work Political Mother, which he feels best encapsulates his movement style. This extract is danced by company member Chien-Ming Chang (known to us all as Ming) who was an original cast member of Political Mother.

Maze is an immersive new performance presented by Jasmin Vardimon Company and Turner Contemporary, choreographed by critically-acclaimed director Jasmin Vardimon, in collaboration with Ron Arad and artist Guy Bar-Amotz. This film gives an incredible insight into Jasmin’s creation process for both the structure and the performance. It provides a deeper look at the working methods of her company, and how they’ve been adapted to the unique new environment, and exploring some of the motivations and challenges encountered.

Jasmin Vardimon Company Repertoire

Gecko has fantastic video resources with many of their full shows available here. I have chosen The Time of Your Life that was developed specifically as a piece of filmed theatre. It is a great introduction to their work.

Vanessa Ewan leads this movement direction masterclass, guiding an actor playing Nora from A Doll’s House using techniques to explore physicality and enhance character transformation.

Ever wondered what a Movement Director does? In this short film we hear from Movement Directors Joseph Alford, Kate Flatt, Imogen Knight and Diane Alison-Mitchell explaining their role in a production, the key differences between movement direction and choreography and how movement develops its own theatrical language in performance.

 

Kneehigh’s Influence on British Theatre

Posted on by Phil

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

Posted on by Phil

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

Posted on by Phil

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.

Influential People in Kneehigh’s History

Posted on by Phil

This is the third 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: The way the company is organised and led has changed a few times with Kneehigh. That must have had an interesting effect on their work.

DR: Yes, one of the characteristics of Mike’s leadership of Kneehigh has been that he has been very generous and open with his way of working. So I mentioned Jon Oram from the Theatre in Education world. He developed networks of artists and brought interesting people in, including athletes as well as writers, designers and actors. Emma Rice, for example, was an actress from Nottingham who came into Kneehigh at some point in the 1990s. Then she went to Poland to train with Gardzienice for a year and then returned to Kneehigh again. People were brought in on a project-by-project basis and then they stayed.  Some were home grown and stayed and other theatre people came from elsewhere and then settled in the area.

PC: We’ll talk more fully about Emma Rice’s recent influence but have there been other major influences on Kneehigh?

DR: One of the key collaborators was Bill Mitchell. He was a designer and shared the role of artistic director from the early nineties. He is actually somebody that had been associated with Welfare State International previously and then settled in Cornwall. Welfare State International made big outdoor spectacles so obviously design was important in that respect, they were all about moving scenography really. Kneehigh was working outdoors and that was something that they wanted to develop as a company. I guess design became a very important aspect of the company vocabulary. It became their working trademark. I think you still associate that with the company although Emma Rice has certainly worked with other designers.

PC: Did they have relationships with specific writers as well?

DR: Yes, John Downie is a writer that they worked with on an adaptation of Woyzeck called Cyborg – A Folktale for the Future. Nick Darke is another, he had worked at the National Theatre quite a bit in the eighties. He moved to settle in Cornwall and became associated with the company. Mike always brought in key people who did influence the company’s way of working.

PC: You mentioned that Emma Rice was brought in, how did she begin with Kneehigh?

DR: First of all Emma trained in England at Guildhall. Then she joined Kneehigh as an actor on a project. She has described her spell of working with Gardzienice after this as not dissimilar to Kneehigh (in that they are both rural community-oriented companies), however their training method based on singing as well as Grotowskian emphasis on physicality was very influential on her. She returned to Kneehigh after this and in 1999 she was given The Changeling to direct, a version known as The Itch. But the key moment for her and the company as a whole was The Red Shoes. She directed the show and it sparked off interest from elsewhere. That production was tremendously successful. What’s very interesting about Kneehigh is often they engage in adaptation, markedly so since Emma’s takeover. Since they have adapted novels and famous films although they still continue to return to myths and folktales which have been part of their repertoire from the beginning.

Artaud and the Plague: Body, Breath and Brain

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Artistic intentions
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: If Artaud’s work is so connected to his life and experience how can someone create something Artaudian?

RM: It should definitely be rooted in the body. They can think about how they can use their body, their own experience of their body, to express something. Not necessarily in words. The way that he writes about breath is possibly a good starting point for putting Artaud into practice. In The Theatre and the Plague he is interested in the plague because the two organs that the plague has its effect on are organs that you can consciously manipulate: the brain and the lungs. He says that you can control your thoughts and you can also control your breathing. Playing with those two, particularly the breath, you don’t want to hyper-ventilate, but thinking about using things that you would think of as being bodily functions that are somehow automatic and disrupting them in some way. And doing that with language as well.

PC: Disrupting language?

RM: Using glossolalia, improvising around shouting and making noises. Starting with a sentence and undo it.

PC: Understanding how language emerges and develops in young children may be interesting to look at. Students could reverse that process when working on a text. Finding how the simplest human sounds impact on the body.

RM: Yes and what they can do to a text. The violence that they can do to the text. Rather than the violence they can do to the body. The violence that they can do to the text using their body in some way. It is difficult to say how someone can do something ‘Artaudian’ because as Grotowski writes: the paradox of Artaud is it is impossible to carry out his proposals.

PC: To a certain extent I think all practitioners are difficult to replicate because they are so rooted in a specific context: Grotowski’s work came out of a response to the Polish experience of Nazism, specifically concentration camps. Brecht was responding to the rise of Nazism and life in Germany under Nazism. But these practitioners had work produced and there are detailed records of their productions: photographs and films.

RM: Yes, he didn’t actually do very much, which makes Artaud so difficult. His theatre didn’t really exist. There was Les Cenci but it was a failure. All his theatre projects ended up as a failure. Not only with theatre, he had a film career as an actor then he wanted to make films and that was a disaster. He never actually produced a book: all of his texts are manifestos and notes on things. He never actually produced anything that was complete. Which makes it difficult but, at the same time, a lot of the ideas are accessible.

PC: Did he want it to fail? Was the act of failing in a strange way evidence for his theories. Did he think that representation is impossible therefore it will fail? Like a kind of professional self-harming?

RM: Yes. There are two things going on with Artaud, particularly when you read all his letters to his editors: on the one hand he was absolutely desperate to make money and to live, so publishing texts was a necessity to make a living but at the same time he was absolutely resistant to completion. Yes I think you’re right. Essentially he needed all his work to fail in some way to be able to prove that representation itself was doomed to failure. So there is another paradox: he needed it to fail in order for it to succeed; to show that language and representation is inherently flawed.

PC: You mentioned Artaud’s plague metaphor. Could you explain that metaphor and how it influenced his vision for theatre?

RM: He wrote about how the theatre should be like a plague. The thing he highlighted in the plague was the contagion. It should be this contagious, uncontrollable force that invades the body of the actor rendering all their intellectual capabilities useless: turning them into this pure, affective energy. It is a central metaphor for Artaud. There is a question to the extent to which it is metaphor or to which he really means it. I mean, it is a metaphor but he takes it so far that it seems like he is actually talking about a plague.

PC: Does he propose that the performance should infect the audience then?

RM: It is the sense that there is no escape from it. If you are in the room, you’ll have the plague, you’re going to be infected by this energy, this destructive force. It doesn’t care who you are, you can be anybody and you can still be infected by it. The plague knows no social hierarchy or nationality or language barriers.

PC: How much research did he do about the plague or did he take the simple concept of plague and then run with it?

RM: I’m not sure about his research into the plague. He read The Book of the Dead and he did a lot of research into Ancient Egyptian culture and also into magic, Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah and so on, beyond that I don’t think he did a huge amount of research about anything. He does talk about specific instances: there had been an outbreak of the plague in Marseille but I think it was a pretext for his ideas.

Summary

  • To create ‘Artaudian’ work think about how you can use your body, your own experience of your body, to express something.
  • Artaud makes a connection between the plague and the theatre. Both should effect the brain and lungs.
  • Theatre should be this contagious, uncontrollable force that invades the body of the actor rendering all their intellectual capabilities useless: turning them into this pure, affective energy.
  • Artaudian work is about the violence that you can do to a text using their body in some way.
  • Artaud needed all his work to fail in some way to be able to prove that representation itself was doomed to failure.

Littlewood: Music, Stanislavski and Laban in Performance

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Innovations
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Theatrical style
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: Stanislavski put a lot of emphasis on the idea of tempo/rhythm and again I see that in Littlewood’s work with Eurhythmics. Originally it was a theory for music, was music used in Theatre Workshop rehearsals? And how was it important in productions?

NH: Music became increasingly a part of productions, and songs certainly, when she started collaborating with Lionel Bart in Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. She used a jazz band, famously on A Taste Of Honey stage. I’m not sure about rehearsals, I’m not aware that they did, but I think that they must have done in terms of the movement work that Jean Newlove did. Newlove trained and worked with Laban and then she joined Theatre Workshop and became their principal movement teacher.

PC: Was she scouted because of her interest in Laban?

NH: She wasn’t scouted she turned up, from memory, to one of the workshops they did when they were in Ormesby Hall and she ended up getting together with Ewan MacColl and marrying him. So it was a personal, as well as a professional thing. But she got taken on for her connections with Laban and being able to do the movement training that Littlewood and MacColl were cobbling together themselves up to that point. Now they then had someone who was an expert to do it properly.

PC: Was she influenced by Brecht’s work?

NH: Not so much consciously. They did do a production of Mother Courage. They got the rights to do the British premiere of it, which was a disaster. He only gave the rights if she would perform Mother Courage because she did perform in the early days. She didn’t want to do it and she did a poor job. It was done in Barnstaple in Devon and that was it. So no not consciously, I think she found it quite cold, which I don’t necessarily agree with but she found it as an overly intellectual theatre.

PC: Interesting that that unfortunate perception of Brecht still stands for so many. Can we talk about specific actors? Who was her leading female actress?

NH: Avis Bunnage often took the main roles.

PC: And leading male actors?

NH: Harry H. Corbett, the son from the TV programme Steptoe and Son. He was married to Avis, in the early years they came as a package. Richard Harris started off doing Theatre Workshop stuff as well. Howard Goorney who wrote The Theatre Workshop Story was always in those early pieces and trained as part of the company, I think he was part of the 1930s group and stayed all the way along. Murray Melvin, was Geoff in A Taste Of Honey and he was in Oh What A Lovely War. He is still the archivist at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East now.

PC: How important is improvisation as part of process in Littlewood’s work?

NH: Improvisation was used as a way of trying to make things real in performance. For A Taste of Honey she had Avis Bunnage and Frances Cuka walking around the theatre for hours carrying really heavy suitcases, getting them to improvise arguing with landlords and landladies, getting wet, waiting for buses, you know, arriving places, getting closed doors, moving on. Then they started working on the opening scene when they arrive in the bedsit. So they used improvisation as a way of getting to a truth, a realness on stage. So that was in the preparation for performance.

PC: These long preparatory improvisations to reach a truth, a realness, have parallels with Grotowski and his via negativa approach.

NH: Clive Barker, who was part of Theatre Workshop and wrote the book Theatre Games, talks about her using via negativa as well. Try this, try this. Never try it LIKE this. Try it again, try it again until you find the right moment. He linked that to Grotowski. That doesn’t necessarily suggest that it was a direct influence but it was a similar use of the technique.

PC: Did she feel that she had to strip over-trained actors back for them to be able to perform in her work?

NH: She just wouldn’t take them.

PC: So she knew the type of person that would be able to do it. What were the actors reactions to the continuous training?

NH: They completely bought into it initially. The initial company were an ensemble, they wanted to train and they wanted to work in this different way: they were a merry band of brothers: joining together with a common purpose. I think later on at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East it became quite a shock for actors coming in because she wouldn’t want to do a traditional audition process. Murray Melvin tells a lovely story of coming into audition for her and she said “Do you have your speeches prepared? Yeah. Do you want to do them? No. Let’s not bother then just tell me a story.” For her it was about courage. Another actor tells a story about her throwing a script at them and saying, “Right I want you to read all the parts. What? But I want to read the part… No I want you to read all of them: men women, children old men, young women” And he did and felt ridiculous and probably looked ridiculous but her response was “well if you can do that and you’re prepared to make a fool of yourself then you’d probably be a very good actor.” Another well known story is of Barbara Windsor meeting the cleaner scrubbing the steps of the Theatre Royal: they were chatting, then it turned out the cleaner was Joan Littlewood and she got the job at that moment. There are loads of great stories! Victor Spinetti who was the MC in OH What A Lovely War, she picked him, after he was compering in a strip joint. So she picked people up in strange places. She’s not going to go and pick up someone who’s RADA trained. She was more likely to go and get people from the variety or the clubs. She wanted actors with that curiosity and a willingness to play and take risks. If you weren’t prepared to do some training then what was the point? The spirit of experimentation was important. 

Summary

  • Music was an important part of performance and rehearsals.
  • They got the rights to do the British premiere of Brecht’s Mother Courage but it was a disaster. She found Brecht rather cold and overly intellectual.
  • Improvisation was used as a way of trying to make things real in performance.
  • The initial company were an ensemble, they wanted to train and they wanted to work in this different way.
  • Littlewood made sure she got the actors she wanted by searching strange places and conducting unconventional auditions.