These are some videos I found in Youtube where I can see some examples of postdramatic performance:

I really like how the actors based on physicality in this video of Lecoq school in Paris. Even though, I don’t think Caryll churchill’s plays look like this, I think it could be good to try this in a rehearsal, or even suddenly add this style in a scene as a glitch. I think it is interesting how it can be understood it mimics our reality in the way it seems ‘fake’.

I think this is a great extreme example of postdramatic theatre. It’s dark, it shows vulnerability and power relations. It’s a performance directed by Jan Fabre, who I have previously mentioned as an example of postdramatic theatre director.

I think this is a great example of the form a performance can take, it has nothing to do with dramatic forms indeed, and instead it uses sport and technology. Is a great example to see what postdramatic theatre can do now there are no rules that limit theatre.

This video of Forced Entertainment shows bits of their different performances, between which there is a big difference. I found interesting what Tim Etchells says, as they work as an assemble and introduces the company.

There are many directing innovations is this videos which would be good for me to experiment with in my play:

• Use of posters.
• Movement and choreography.
• Sounds resembling computers and other types of machines.
• Placing the actors’ bodies as dolls or puppets.
• Use of sport and similar exercises.
• Singing and slapping the singer: art in contrast to violence.
• Talking to the audience, even giving them instructions.
• Nudism, slapping a naked woman: playing with vulnerability, power structures and violence again.

I’m finding very helpful to remember the workshops we proposed in class basing on A Number, Top Girls and Cloud Nine. Taking some inspiration from here and from the videos of postdramatic performances I watched in Youtube these are the exercises I will propose as a director.

• Meisner based repetition exercises to solidify the text and find what’s behind it. This exercise makes the actors focus on the sound of a word instead of on the meaning of it.
• Meisner based calling on behavior exercise. In this exercise the actors stand in a circle, one would start naming what he/she sees of another actor. Like you are doing this… (smiling, touching your hear, looking nervous), and then that person would have to repeat it saying in first person what the other person said (‘I’m smiling’, ‘I’m touching my hair’). This is repeated until they or another actor does the same naming a´new behavior (‘You got tired of repeating’, ‘It annoyed you he said you look nervous’, etc.). In order for this exercise to work the actors have to be natural and show some behavior, at the same time they let themselves be affected by what they are being told.
• Improvisation exercises departing from each scene, to see how each scene could develop differently and what is what the characters want and mean with their sentences. As James Macdonald says, sometimes with Churchill’s plays we don’t really know what is happening between the characters from the dialogue, so it is very important so see what is the complete situation and conversation.
• Improvisation from objectives. How would the different characters get their objectives if they weren’t be limited by the text?
• Physicality and characterization: explore how each character would move in different circumstances and who he/she would be affected by the different behaviors of the other characters. What’s the relationships and power structure between characters. – this would be a movement exercise with imaginary circumstances done first individually and then in couple, so we could use the relationships as a source of behavior (action and reaction).
• Clown: exaggeration exercise. The characters have to run a couple of scenes without using the text, just exaggerating behavior and using sounds. This helps on focusing on the point we want to make (the essence of each character in each scene).

Looking for information about postdramatic theatre directors I found an article called Tracing Creation: The Director’s Notebook as Genetic Document of the Postdramatic Creative Process (By F. Le Roy, E. Cassiers, T. Crombez and L. Van de Dries).  In this article the authors remark the importance of new media in the creative process of the director, as he/she would use different resources to get inspiration, take notes, visualize his/her ideas and design them. In this way, the creative process for postdramatic theatre has become hybrid. They use two Belgian theatre directors as an example of this: Jan Fabre and Luk Percebal.

Jan Fabre uses drawing as a tool to put into paper what he imagines, this can be for the preparation of a rehearsal, as a way to portray what he thinks during a rehearsal or after the performance, while Luk Percebal uses video; he records rehearsals and shows the records to the rest of the cast when he wants to make a point or change something.

As it is stated in this article, postdramatic theatre doesn’t just develop around the text. As Hans-Thies Lehmann argued ‘one of the main characteristics of the postdramatic performance aesthetic is a shift away from theatre’s logo-centric legacy and towards performance’.

James Macdonald is one of the most brilliant theatre directors nowadays and a very recurrent one for my research and development of my role as a playwright and director. He studied at Oxford University and L’Ecole Internationale Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He is Caryl Churchill’s most trusted director, he has directed many of her plays both in UK and in New York, including A Number, Top Girls, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? and Love And Information.

He has directed some play by Annie Baker too: John in the National Theatre and Circle Mirror Transformation. I found this interesting because she is a playwright I have approached this year and who also has a experimental style. Her theatre is considered ‘slow theatre’ because of the use of silences she does; in a way I consider it femenine (if I can consider a play/playwright to be so) in the way it is delicate, dark and detailed. She works with hipernaturalism or new naturalism.

He was associate and deputy of the Royal Court Theatre, and as such he proposed and defended very challenging productions such as Sarah Kane’s play Blasted. This interest for the ‘difficult’ and new pushed him to work with Churchill. As he says, he likes puzzles and plays he doesn’t know how to do, which sounds perfect for postdramatic theatre experimentation.

He says that for directing Chuchill he often has to think about her plays as if they would be longer, because the lines don’t seem to be finished, what makes him create the continuation of the lines and conversations, so he can visualize them completed.

Macdonald does not only direct new theatre, as he also does traditional plays which have not been very famous, such as William Tenesse’s The Night of the Iguana, which he directed last year in London. I saw this production in Noël Coward theatre and for me it has nothing to do with what I’ve seen from Caryl Churchill and Annie Baker, actually I didn’t enjoy that play at all. I found it unnecessarily dramatic and slow, and the story line didn’t catch my attention.

To follow on, I have done a list of directing choices I James Macdonald did when directing Sam Sephard’s True West.

• Group of good actors, so he would only have to make the right questions while rehearsing.
• Use of a song between scenes.
• Lit frame around the proscenium – visual trick so the audience can’t see the stage crew.
• The two men circle each other at the end of the play – inspired by cinema to do a wide-screen effect.

https://www.roundabouttheatre.org/about/our-blog/a-conversation-with-director-james-macdonald/

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/james-macdonald-on-caryl-churchills-escaped-alone-im-drawn-to-plays-i-dont-know-how-to-do-a6819916.html

For my research I have encountered Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theatre, which I found very useful for the clear explanation he provides about postdramatic theatre in a historical context.

To talk about postdramatic theatre it is essential to understand that this refers to a theatre that doesn’t follow the ‘rules’ of drama anymore. These are the rules that traditionally ensured the logic and form of a play, at the same time they limited it; for example, the classical unities of action, time and place. We can find this rules in Aristoteles’ Poetics and examples of them in Western plays written before 1900. After this time something changed in drama, as Lehmann espouses ‘a crisis of the discourse form of theatre itself occurs’.

At this time theatre entered the age of its experimentation, and as other art practices it hasn’t stop experimenting and evolving. Some of this experimentation involve playing and challenging the concept of audience, text and space; and even decomposing itself. ‘From the decomposition of the whole of a genre into its individual element develop new languages of form’ (Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre). Through decomposition different layers of the whole theatre production came separate: characters and audience, body and language. An through these changes a new range of possibilities opens.

For this module we saw Churchill’s A Number in the Bridge Theatre. In this play we can see some recurrent characteristics of her work, and as we saw the production I can also take some ideas for the direction of my piece.

We can see in A Number that she proposes a disturbing father-son relationship, emphasizing that the father didn’t love his son and got rid of him to make a clone of him afterwards. Churchill exposes the idea of cloning as something scary that threatens identity, as the father in the story made a copy of his son after sending him away and now, 35 years later they have realized there are more clones of him. Actually there are many of them and they all were made illegally.

Churchill responds with this play to the scientific discoveries done at the end of the last century that allowed cloning, as some big mammals were genetically copied at that time, and even if human cloning is illegal she explores what could happen if people were cloned. As always, she takes disturbing family relationships as starting point to send a broader message about our world.

Direction:

• There are only two characters in this play a father and three of his sons, two of whom are clones. Polly Findlay directed Roger Allam as the father and Colin Morgan as the three sons. Thus, one of the actors played multiple characters.
• There was a blackout between the scenes, which lasted for few minutes while the stage was changed.
• The stage was circular and it turned around with every blackout.
• Surprisingly naturalistic stage design.
• Not heavy emotional performance or atmosphere – in contrast with the dramatic and horrible subject of cloning.
• Divided in scenes instead of acts.

In my last post I introduced Caryll Churchill’s play Blue Heart, now I’m going to talk about this author and some characteristics of her plays, as for this module I’m going to write a play following her style and propose ideas for its direction.

With the reading Caryll Churchill by Mary Luckhurst I learnt more about this writer, for example how politically committed she is and that Brechtian techniques can be related to her work. As Brecht, she is making political statements, but in her case through both the content and form of her plays. This commitment in theatre has normally been linked to Copeau and Lecoq method of acting more than to Stanislavki’s method, as they take the actor to a neutral state instead of making him/her focus on his/her own deep personal retrospective through Stanislavski’s method. As Brecht, they focus more in the physicality of the actor and allow him to move from one state to another easily, showing the audience the political point of the story.

Churchill’s work often includes themes like genocide, sexuality, feminism, capitalism, scientific knowledge, patriarchy, international issues and individual’s relationship to the ideologies in power.

As Luckhurst says in her book ‘Many of her plays deploy alienation devices to express ideological oppression and injustice’, this is one of the examples of how her work can be related to Brechtian techniques. She’s also a dystopian writer, so in general she focuses on big issues and their catastrophic consequences creating complex plays with many tragic elements.

She is known to be one of the best British playwrights and recognized for her innovations in form (as we can see with the glitches in Blue Heart).

For this module we are focusing in the play Blue Heart by Caryll Churchill, which we have read and discussed. This play consists of two short plays: Heart’s Desire and Blue Kettle. These are two independent plays with some characteristics in common.

Heart’s Desire is about a family who is waiting for their daughter Suzy to arrive from the airport, as she is coming from Australia to visit her family, but different types of mishaps happen. They play resets all the time, going back to previous scenes and exploring different alternatives of what could happen from that point. In this way, it seems like Suzy is never going to arrive, and when she does, the actors jump to another previous scene so she only appears on stage for few minutes. Churchill based this play in a simple naturalistic scene which is in many ways altered through glitches.

Blue Kettle tells the story of a young man who lies to women pretending to be the son they gave in adoption. He already has a mother, but he seeks to obtain money from these women by lying to them. What is curious about this play is that the words ‘blue’ and ‘kettle’ are used in the dialogue as if they would have another meaning. The characters use these words instead of other nouns, adjectives and verbs that would make sense in the context. By the end it is impossible to guess what the characters may be trying to say. The characters seem to be affected by a ‘language virus’ or by ‘technical failure’.

Both stories have in common that both talk about family relationships and include a glitch.  As Paul and Levy explain the term ‘glitch’ in a play means an alteration in the realistic form of the narration, this in our everyday life can be done with machines or digital tools far from traditional artistic forms. In this way, Churchill’s plays are affected by the influence of these technologies and the use of new media. For her, traditional theatrical forms seem not to be enough to mimic the distorted and corrupted reality we live in.

Churchill plays with the form of the theatre piece rather than with its content, challenging the basis of performance art in a way that resembles the digitization of a live event. Indeed, the two postmodern characteristics the play presents are usual in digital material. Where does this focus on the form come from?

Blue Heart makes us question the digitization of reality, asking the audience ‘Is realism still an art style adequate for our world’? If we live in a totally digitized and distorted era should realism express that too, even if it challenges the classical concept of realism?’.