A new event has been announced that might appeal to theatre artists and writers in Glasgow. The Arches and Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland are collaborating on a an event they’ve named “Crossing the Lines,” with the clever tag line: “Adventures of a textual nature.” Nice play on words for a small-scale opportunity for would-be theatre directors to have a hand at staging some contemporary play text. The facts first: the event is slated for May 25th at 7.30 at the Arches, who’ll be charging £3.50 for entry (this will include a cup of plonk.) If you’d like to know more about the event than you should contact crossingthelines@hotmail.com (though I contacted them and the reply said they don’t have anything to share yet except to take note of the description of the night as a “sketch” type of performance event.) So, from the Arches page on next month’s “Crossing the Lines”:
A new Scratch-style event from the Arches and Playwrights’ Studio, in which all kinds of artists perform their version of contemporary texts.
Pushing the boundaries of the theatrical experience while firmly focusing on text, this new performance evening sees artists of any genre taking a piece of contemporary playwriting and illuminating it within a live setting, before moving to the bar for audience feedback and discussion.
Whether you’re a performer, director, musician or movement specialist, we’d love you to help celebrate and interrogate the delivery of text. Similar to Scratch nights, these short pieces will be performed to a supportive audience who will offer feedback in the bar afterwards. If you’re interested in getting involved, contact crossingthelines@hotmail.co.uk
Obviously this is totally interesting to someone like me and I hope to take part, but what the hell is a movement specialist? I would think they mean something akin to a dancer or a choreographer or a movement-focused performer and not a physiotherapist whose medical specialization is movement. That’s a vague and silly term and I’m interested to know why dancer or choreographer or performer wasn’t used instead. It brings up a question that plays a big part in the future of contemporary theatre in Scotland – the rigidity of our terminology or the apparently narrow definitions of art forms and associated practitioners. If they invited a “dancer” would they be excluding choreographers or performers with extensive experience or interest in movement and movement-led processes? If they invite a musician are they not excluding sound artists or vocalists? What about performers – is that also actors? And what about directors – are people who direct new plays different from “auteurs” who create performance pieces that they conceive, write, design, perform AND direct? If they create text are they also playwrights or is that the sole domain of people who put characters at the top of the manuscript and hand the project over when the laptop is closed? Or can the auteur be a playwright? Can the playwright also be a visual artist because their script indicates the use of puppetry or the live manipulation of objects, video or dance sequences? If they include any of those theatrical elements are they no longer playwrights but auteurs (and by turn their scripts not play scripts but….performance maps or something obtuse and untenable in published form?)
A rigidity in how theatrical forms are defined and the boundaries of the practitioner’s role have created the need for this kind of “boundary pushing” project. And yes, I think there is the potential for this to be a boundary pushing event and not just pay the usual lip service to a radicalism with which the theatre would like to be associated. It won’t be pushing the boundaries of what is seen at the Arches – the arches hosts production of plays all the times. These are performances where a written text in staged. I’ve done this myself and I’ve seen it done many times. People – you might call them playwrights you might call them something else – they write things down and then they stage it. Sometimes it looks like modern drama (characters, fictive cosmos, dramatic tension based in conflict, physical presence of performers, the pretense of separation between performer and spectator, etc.) and sometimes it looks like visual art embodied (and we call this live art.) Sometimes it looks like a lot of stuff that happens that lands between these performance vocabularies.
It may push the boundaries of the kind of project the Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland is involved in, after all their remit is to encourage, nurture and promote playwrights and playwrighting in Scotland. So supporting an event that is more about directing text than creating text (written text) is a clear step change. I would agree that seeing your work staged, even in an experimental form, is useful to the playwright’s process and in this way there is a clear link between the PSS’ ambitions and “Crossing the Lines.” It is also possible that for too long the writers coming out of PSS funding streams and mentoring sessions have been spurted onto a new playwrighting landscape barren of new play directors. I am a firm believer that this is a particular type of director and it is one that is incredibly important to encouraging new writing being produced. After all, if new plays always seem really shit because they were misdirected then there will be little faith in new plays. Fewer and fewer will get produced and therefore fewer and fewer directors will get experience and expertise as new play directors – making the problem worse. I won’t go on about what I think a new play director is or what artistic qualities they have but I know I don’t see many different names next to “Directed By” (except at the Arches) and I don’t tend to see many new plays produced (new new plays, not the risky ammunition of established playwrights who remake/adapt/speak to/respond to the masterpieces of Ibsen, Lorca, Chekhov and Shakespeare.) So there’s no experience to be had by potentially talented new play directors (little is produced, and its the exclusive role of established directors) so new playwrights either hope to meet the right artistic director or they turn to other forms like radio drama writing, hour-long dramas for Oran Mor or they do like I do and hope my raft of plays will be discovered right before I die and I drown in money and admiration when the Man comes round (that is, Death, not the tax man.) Anyway, because this organization is not a producer it can’t be credited or discredited for supporting only one kind of work or particular artists. I can only say that it seems to me the artists who are creating work at the Arches either don’t have a relationship with PSS or when they become associated with the PSS they produce work distinctly unlike their work at the Arches (or work created in a distinctly conventional writing process.) I will risk my neck and say that I think there is a perception in that organization that playwrighting doesn’t look like the written work that is produced at the Arches. Not all of what I see at the Arches I would term a play, but I would call their creators writers (if there is written text. of course.) So this doesn’t appear to be an opportunity to push the boundary of playwrighting or what we call playwrights. Which sucks because it might open up the resources of that organization to artists at the Arches.
*Just to be clear, though, there aren’t Arches artists. There are artists who need a host for their work and the Arches is open to practitioners who don’t demand money and produce worthwhile, thoughtful and often experimental projects that aren’t automatically appealing to larger theatres with audiences who have expectations antagonistic to failure, which is always the risk of experimental or new work….
Where this could be boundary pushing is letting practitioners produce work they wouldn’t normally touch with a ten foot pole if they had any expectation of an audience. I think there would be real suspicion of an artist proposing to produce Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys” at the Arches. I don’t think it would be included in any one of their programmes. Now, if I had a reputation for interpreting stage plays through fuck up resin puppets, reading the text in full without stopping through a pipe from the back of the audience, while a band of movement specialists reenacted the film version of the piece than my “Pony Pie’s The History Boys” might get a look in. If I proposed that version to the Traverse, though, I’d be ignored. They’d want me to have a much better CV and a normal rendition of Bennett’s play. It is a chance for me to direct some contemporary text for the stage. To get myself on stage in Scotland I’ve had to create work that would appeal to the Arches, performance work that I am passionate about but I have never tried and won’t try to stage one of my traditional dramatic plays there. I can’t get Amanda the playwright produced. I also can’t get a job as a director of new text now because I’m associated with the Arches and performance projects. I have a CV crawling with design credits and writing. I worry I won’t get a chance to show I can direct contemporary text! Now I get one.
But here’s a worry – in bringing it to the Arches and “artists of all persuasions” are they expecting these staged interpretations of new text to be wacko? Yes, different from what you’d get from traditional directors, but isn’t the implication of looking for non-directs and artists associated with the Arches that they hope these texts will be radicalized? Like “Pony Pie’s The History Boys” do I have to put my spin on it? Colour it with my lens? Can’t I just interpret it justly in a way that speaks to me and my collaborators. I think not exactly. I don’t think they’d say that they want me to paste my obtuse, arty shit all over a text just for the sake of it. I don’t think the women behind these organization are stupid nor do I think they are truly narrow-minded about the creative capacities of the artists working for them. However, I think that this programme suggests some interesting things about Scottish theatre : 1. there is a lack of interesting directors of new texts and the establishment suspects they might be lurking in the “ghetto” of experimental performance makers lurking at the Arches (that’s a quote from critic Joyce McMillan!); 2. there is a tension between the perceptions of artists and art forms and the dynamic reality of artists here and their creative capacity and both organizations have a big role in creating, sustaining and eroding those rigid, destructive simplifications of contemporary performance; and 3. there’s still no money to produce anything – every damn thing is a “Scratch” read: no money, lights go on and off *probably, and limited access to space.
And you know what? I hope they include me and I get to play because I want to add one more unwieldy, totally meaningless to anyone outside of Scotland credit to my CV with a night of doing what I do with every project – play with words, movement, sound, objects, space and the body because I might in all my grotesque ghettoization-through experimentation just illuminate the meaning of the playwrights’ words in a new way.
