The Ghost

In the upcoming performance of SunDogs we will be using a special effect, which we worked on and tested out on Friday. This optical illusion is created by projecting a video of a moving body into the mist of a hazer, creating a ghostly figure. This will be the first thing the audience will see when they enter into the space. I am very happy with how this worked. I particularly love that the image only comes onto focus from one angle and otherwise it just appears to be a beautiful light show. I'm really interested to see how the audience react to it.

Sun Dogs Poster Design

Reflections on Ambient Noise

Political theatre has a long tradition of utilising pedagogical performance models to communicate the intent of the theatre-maker. Over the past year, I have battled to establish the place of pedagogy in my own performance work.

From the outset I have agreed with David Hare that;

“The problem with the political theatre-maker is that... the drama is fashioned above all to be accessible. No member of the enormous audience would be able to mistake the authors purpose or meaning. The demands of what you want to achieve politically are hard sometimes to reconcile with what you can actually achieve artistically” (Hare, 2005; 22).

Having read Jacques Ranciere’s influential lecture, The Emancipated Spectator , I became further confused as to the rightful place of pedagogy within a piece of political theatre. It appeared to me that Ranciere was advocating some sort of theatre without intent. I understood that Ranciere believed that for a person to gain from spectatorship they must be free to make a personal interpretation of the work and thus a theatre maker should allow space for the interpretation of the audience member to vary greatly from the message intended by the author.

This reading of Ranciere’s theories unearthed a lot of questions for me and challenged even the basic definition of political theatre from which I had been working. Political theatre is often defined by its intention. The political theatre maker differs from any other on the grounds that she intends to induce societal change with her art. Thus, if political theatre could not contain intent then I could no longer define what political theatre actually was.

I feel that my input to our group performance, Ambient Noise, evidenced my confusion around these theoretical questions. But on a positive note, I believe that in making the performance, I have come some way to finding the answers to my queries.

Due to my reluctance to evidence a political intent in Ambient Noise, I effectively said very little with the performance. I was intentionally trying to make theatre without intention. I provided a large volume of visual information, letting the audience members interpret it as they wished.

I am glad that I tested this mode of performance in Ambient Noise, but I now believe that this model of theatre-making is not the way forward for my practice. For a piece of theatre to open up a dialogue with an audience it must make some sort of statement. A dialogue must have two sides; if it does not, then there can be no communication.

In a book I am currently reading called Metapolitics by Alain Badiou I have found another argument why a theatre-maker must take a position with her work. Although the author’s criticisms are directed at political philosophers, his commentary can be extended to cover political theatre-makers also. He believes that a claim to political neutrality is a spurious one which is most often used as a fig leaf to allege ideological immunity. For Badiou, philosophers [and by extension political theatre-makers] are no more immune to political decision making than anyone else.

Returning to Ranciere’s text, I think I have found a new reading of his paradigm; one that allows room for intent while still providing space for audience interpretation.

Perhaps there is a light at the end of this tunnel...

Review of Dream Play

Last Wednesday I attended a performance that was based on Strindberg’s Dream Play.
The scenic design of the piece was minimal and symmetrical and was very visually pleasing. There was a single red door at the back of the stage which was surrounded by large hanging jigsaw pieces, upon which a projection was cast. The door remained lit throughout the performance, but was never opened.
In retrospect, I find this emphasis on the door to be a little confusing, and I wonder now whether or not this lighting element was a wise design choice. For a great deal of the performance the actors were only partially lit, so the audience’s attention was repeatedly drawn to the door. Not being familiar with the original play, the symbolism of the door was unclear to me. I think this ambiguity was further compounded by the structure of the script, were all the characters of the original play were divided among two actors.
Perhaps the projections could have been a little more descriptive in order to aid the audience in understanding the performance as a whole. Having said this, for me the most successful element of the performance was the projections, and I would have liked them to cover more of the jigsaw pieces (since I know that this was the original design plan). I also liked the costumes in general, although I felt that Agnes’ boots were a little clunky.
Overall, the piece provided some very visually interesting moments; however, I left the theatre somewhat confused, and the meaning of the performance evades me still... perhaps I should go to the library and read the play...

Images From SunDogs Rehearsals

Things are going smoothly with SunDogs and everyone is getting along nicely...

A Response to Phase Lapse

Last Wednesday I attended Phase Lapse, a 20minute devised performance inspired by the traditional Korean poem Gong Mu Do Ha Ga. The element that most appealed to me about the performance was the sheer simplicity of the design concept. The room was entirely bare apart from a number of candles, a hanging cloth, a bowl of water and a live body. The work had a certain confidence about it; by this I mean that every aspect seemed considered and thought through. Nothing was rushed. Everything was paced and the performer held the audience in moments of beautiful stillness; using her body to capture and recreate the ebb and flow of tranquil waters.

I will say, however, that I felt the piece might have benefited from a little more action and that there were moments which could have been exploited to engage the audience a little bit more. Water is not always tranquil; it is sometimes violent and unpredictable. It erodes and weathers. Waves crash and break. Perhaps the stillness of the performance could have also broken at moments to allow for waves of climax to crash and then recede.

When the performer extinguished the last candle, for example, was a moment in which the dramatic potential was not capitalised on. I understood the candles to represent the light of life, and although the performer paid great attention to the extinguishing of the first light, the last four where put into the bowl of water and extinguished together. I felt as though even a simple pause, before the last light was quenched, might have added pathos to the moment.

For me, one of the most successful elements of Phase Lapse was the costume design, which transformed from black into white during the course of the performance. Although I know that the use of the colour white was intended to represent death here, I still read it as a signifier of matrimony. I say this not in criticism, but rather as a compliment. The group aimed to explore the mixing of cultures and this contradiction made me consider my own cultural perspective and how it can limit the way I view and understand things.

However, I think that my misreading of the colour white, as a signifier for matrimony, was unintentionally reinforced by the group’s choice of music for the final moments of the piece, which was a electronic track featuring the sound of church bells (Scaling by µ-Ziq, from the album Royal Astronomy). Another reason that I found it a little jarring to hear this piece of music is that it is already known to me and is in my music collection. Although it is a great track that I really like, because I know it, it coloured the performance for me and I think this is best avoided if possible. Apart from that, the sound design was very nicely mixed. I particularly liked that no one voice dominated over the others. Instead the overlapping voices sounded like the babbling of a brook.

Overall Phase Lapse was a very tight show, which was well conceived and executed with precision and assurance. Congratulations to all involved.