This could continue ad infinitum so will be brief!

I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog and your perspectives on the Crossing the Lines event (which I’m just sorry I couldn’t be at – it sounds, by many mouths, like a really interesting event).

I think audiences are constantly doing their “own making” – the form of this engagement differs of course, but I believe that by being in the audience and synthesising all the elements of a production together, a theatre audience is always doing this work. Needless to say, it’s great to have artists engaged in many different ways of doing this, and of pushing the boundaries of what that means, which is why this event sounds great.

I wonder if, in a way, it’s a red herring to set up the text and the director in opposition to one another (the ‘using’ versus ‘being used’), as I feel in a good partnership they are working positively together.

I would also say that how much the work serves a contract, vs. how much freedom and creative conversations are afforded, depends very much on both the ethos of a venue and the individual creative team, and that it’s not always apparent from outside any individual creative process what the risks were and where they were taken.

With a bit of luck I’ll get along to the next event and get a chance to have a proper chat with you about your work. In the meantime, hope all goes well!

Louise
@wearemagpie

Thank you for reading the blog and especially for responding to these thoughts. It’s always a worthwhile conversation, particularly with a professional in the sector. I will try to remember to email you personally when I find out the date of the next “Crossing the Lines.”

With regard to the first point, about the relationship between the written text and the performance text…I suggested that the visual and physical elements do not always engage the text or serve the text. By not engaging the text I might describe the first performance from Tuesday’s “Crossing the Lines.” “Peepshow” by Isabel Wright was the play from which the text was taken. Here, however, the text was projected onto the backwall – it was not spoken, it was not referred to verbally, the performers did not point to the text or mime what was happening as indicated in the text. The two were only related in that the projected text from the play was made to look like silent film placards while the performers were dressed as though they were in a silent film. But their actions, the storyline (as such as it was) was not based on or related to the text in any conceivable way. Whatever connections did exist were purely of the audience’s own making. The idea for this staging was not prompted by the text, that is, this obvious disconnect between the written and performance scripts is not a theme or question present in the play.

This idea that a performance text might not serve a text is exemplified by Paul Henry’s piece, a staging of the very sparse short play “What Do We Do Next” from Kieran Lynn. Although I thought this an excellent presentation/interpretation of Lynn’s text Henry was the first to say it was his concern with ‘the void,’ and questions of mortality that drove the staging. The text was placed into this context instead of the text inspiring the context.

You’ve rightly pointed out that even an opposition to a text is engagement and I have seen this exemplified at “Crossing the Lines” and elsewhere. In many ways this serves the text by heightening the degree to which the audience must listen to hear it despite the noise of what they see keeping that from being a straightforward task. But certainly what is emerging from these events is that the participating artists are taking this as an opportunity to use text to their own ends, instead of using their ends to serve the text.

I believe that a director can put the performance text in a dialogue with the written text or the two can happen at once as monologues – I saw that on Tuesday but worryingly I see that on main stages where the director hasn’t been able to illuminate the text and so dressed it up in a corresponding set. Does that make sense?

Right, the next set of questions gets me really excited!

I didn’t mean that by virtue of being at The Arches, which is on the periphery of normative practice that I don’t serve anyone. There is certainly an audience. An intelligent, hungry and dynamic one, in my experience. However, what I meant was that I don’t serve anyone when I make work. It happens to be experimental. It happens to be what you might find on the fringe. It speaks in languages found across performance disciplines. But it is not created in the service of anyone or anything other than my own….pathos.

I hope you’re right that there are directors who work successfully across the divides that seemingly separate Arches audiences from more mainstream audiences (this isn’t even accounting for commercial audiences!) In fact, I’d like to be one of them. But I should think that what I do in each venue is particular to the venue – that is, with the exception of the Arches which has never stipulated the nature of my work. Largely that is because it doens’t fund the artists involved – though some do get funding and residencies and these are also examples of the Arches breaking the mould in the kind of work they support. BUT by and large they can ask only so much when the exchange is a money-less one. However, at a more mainstream theatre there is cash at stake and so the exchange is a promise of return. There is a contract and the work is made to serve that contract.

This does not always result in an artistic compromise or sacrifice. Frequently the work is dynamic, interesting, and does not suffer for its accessibility of by fulfilling the remit the producing house has laid out for it. But I don’t think it is as risky, or as free to be risky, as work produced at the Arches.

There are exceptions, of course. The NTS’s recent Knives In Hens was a risk, big time and for my money it paid off. Not because it was perfect and stayed true to Harrower’s play despite it’s continental flavour, but because it was risky. And in being risky it didn’t seem to be serving anyone but the impulses, interests and ambitions of the artists themselves.

Let me know your thoughts on this. I am always open to critique. My hypocrisies are abounding. But the relationship that artists at my level have to the establishment is fraught with questions. And I always enjoy bashing them out. Yes, I aspire to advance, but never abandon the freedom risk affords.

Best,
Amanda

I’m sad that I missed the event (again!)

I found a couple of your statements really interesting, so hope you don’t mind me opening a bit of conversation about them.

“the performance text (the physical, visual elements) are not always related to and certainly do not always serve the literary text”
Are not all the elements suggested by engagement with the literary text to some degree? Even if it is just to oppose the obvious interpretation, say? If not, where do they come from?

“we are not being asked to be theatre directors like you might find at the Traverse or the Citizens. We are directors who belong to the Arches, to the Fringe. We will serve no one because….we don’t have to”
I’m not sure that I would agree that you are not serving anyone because you are working in a venue which has an emphasis on experimental work. You said, for example, that you ‘belong’ at the arches and at the fringe. How about the audience at that venue: do you not feel as a theatre practitioner that you, by creating work that is staged at that venue, serve them? I know a number of directors who successfully work across these divides: are they serving only themselves when they work at the arches, and only something or someone else if they work at the Citz, or is it a matter of working in venues and spaces which are appropriate to a particular audience?

Interested to hear what you think, so drop me a comment back here or via email if better!

Bye for now,
Louise
@wearemagpie