learning when to say yes

July 15th, 2008 • improvisation, theatre

One of the rules drilled into me when I was first learning to improvise was near-unconditional acceptance: build scenes by saying yes, early and often. Like many other improvisers I’ve worked with, I’ve spent time working out when to ignore that advice. It’s not bad advice, per se, so much as conditional advice.

Reading Paul Clements’ account of Mike Leigh’s use of improvisation, I found this little gem:

There are circumstances when, as a theatre game, it might be useful to run an improvisation where the actors have to accept whatever information they’re given in the interests of developing their spontaneity or acceptance but where an improvisation is an investigation of content [...] it will kill it stone dead.¹

There’s a distinction here between improvisation as instantaneous, disposable live performance, and improvisation as a medium for developing theatre; in Leigh’s rehearsal-room work, blind acceptance runs contrary to the process of actors creating individual characters with personal (and private) biographies and motivations.

So while in short-form or live improvisation, saying “yes” can be way of rapidly building content; in rehearsal or in the devising process, relentlessly saying “yes” can interfere with the exploration of that content.

There’s obviously the possibility of mixing and matching such those priorities - moving in live short form, for example, from establishing a scene (generating content) to building a narrative through reincorporation (exploring content).

The snappy capsule lesson here, then, is that the strategies we use to improvise should recognise what kind of outcome is desired (with the rejoinder that we should perhaps be sceptical of any claim to basic, infallible rules for improvising).

After the jump, Clements’ quick summary of Leigh’s process, which wields improvisation in the pursuit of realism. Read more »

1. The Improvised Play: The World of Mike Leigh, Paul Clements, Methuen. p.48 [↩]

the prisoner’s dilemma (zombie variant)

July 11th, 2008 • research, social gaming, theatre

A few weeks back, I idly suggested a group game based on an attack of zombies, spreading through twitter - joking that it would be a variant on an old Stanislavski exercise. Today those neurons bashed back together and I went looking for the source: an exercise in An Actor Prepares exploring imagination and improvised action.

Here’s the Director on the potential drama of a closed door:

“But suppose this in this apartment of Maria’s, there used to live a man who became violently insane. They took him away to a psychopathic ward. If he escaped from there, and were behind that door, what would you do?”

Once the question was put in that form our whole inner aim, as the Director described it, was altered. We no longer thought about how to extend our actvitity, or worried about its external form. [...] Our eyes began to measure the distance to the door, and to look for safe approaches to it. They examined the surroundings for directions for escape, in case the madman should break through the door. [...] In the end I found myself under a table, with a heavy bronze ash-receiver in my hand.

The job was not ended. The door was now closed, but not locked. There was no key. Therefore the safest thing we could do was to barricade it with sofas, tables and chairs, and then call up the hospital and arrange to have them take the necessary steps to regain the custody of the madman.¹

It’s a strangely genteel approach to threat beyond the door: relatively few horror stories involve merely arranging that someone “take the necessary steps to regain the custody of the madman.” Manners aside, the point of the exercise - or so the Director informs us - is that all action in the theatre must have an inner justification or motive.

It’s also interesting, though, that the imagined threat of the madman triggers a co-operative group response. Do some kinds of motive always summon communal action? The idea that common threats might trigger common responses isn’t exactly unusual - it’s pretty much the basis for any nation which has an armed forces. You could read World Without Oil’s negative thinking as a communal response to the communal threat of an oil shock.

So I’m thinking about the ways in which game designers can wrangle group behaviour, and produce activity based in the formation of groups. Some examples are rather less emergent and rather more heavily structured than others.

For example, the developers of Left 4 Dead - a new zombie survival video game - have been pretty clear about how the experience has been designed to demand team work: survival is only possible with friends watching your back. Accordingly, players who join a group game and play selfishly soon end up dead; the mechanic of the game acts as a kind of social filter to weed out players who want to ruin everyone else’s fun. So it’s not that the game merely rewards cooperation, but that it actively punishes individuals who fail to work with the group. It’ll be interesting to see how that individual penalty balances against the group penalty - how long can you succeed in four-player game with only three willing players?

Is this kind of social logic another variant of the prisoner’s dilemma?

1. An Actor Prepares, Konstain Stanislavski, trans. Elizabeth
   Reynolds Hapgood. Taylor and Francis 1989. p48. [↩]

not gone, not forgotten

June 19th, 2008 • teaching, theatre

I think have to disagree with Lyn Gardner’s assessment that post-’68 political and radical theatre is undocumented and in danger of being forgotten - not least because the majority of companies she references (Red Ladder, Joint Stock, Monstrous Regiment, Inter-Action and Welfare State) turned up on the course I taught at Glasgow University last semester.

I’ll admit that some of the playtexts concerned are hard to find (as my students will attest) and that the pool of scholarship isn’t as deep as that surrounding other periods of theatre, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into an amnesia amongst theatre practitioners or scholars.

Where to start? Lizbeth Goodman’s formidable Contemporary Feminist Theatres (alongside her series of interviews with women in contemporary British theatre) are both invaluable and gladly still available. You could read John Fox’s Eyes on Stalks, an account of his work as artistic director of Welfare State International.

More recently, there’s Max Stafford-Clark’s Taking Stock, a collection of nine production casebooks which brings together Stafford-Clark’s contemporary diaries with interviews of cast members. Baz Kershaw (currently teaching at Warwick University) has published several books on radical performance from the period - pick up The Politics of Performance or The Radical Performance if you can.

Archives of an increasing number of theatre companies - including Welfare State, the Half Moon Company and Gay Sweatshop - are now accessible, many through institutions within the greater London area.

There is, though, still need for projects like Unfinished Histories. Even with the sources suggested above, the experience of teaching a course on such companies has shown that there’s no danger of a surplus of available material. Oral histories in particular may present an especially valuable opportunity to explore and record the personal relationships between ideology and theatre practice in the period.

But in danger of being forgotten? Not quite yet.

the view from the audience?

June 2nd, 2008 • teaching, theatre

Depressing commentary of the day:

The number of people now applying for a place on a three-year acting degree course has reached unprecedented levels. And yet, according to Geoff Colman, the head of acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama, thanks to audition-based TV shows, finding quality students has never been so difficult.

“This year, we received more than 4,000 applications for a place on our degree course,” Colman says, “and that figure is going up every year. But we’re finding that fewer and fewer of those applicants will have ever set foot in a theatre…”

Ouch.

I’m thinking that this can be read in a few different ways: applicants who don’t see theatre as any kind of route for a career in acting, applicants who don’t have any performance experience but like the idea of acting, or applicants whose experience of drama is solely from watching TV or film. Or a combination of all three.

Still, it raises an interesting question: just how important is the experience of watching live theatre as an audience member to the education of a performer?

reviews and theatre as live event

May 26th, 2008 • theatre

Andrew Haydon at the Guardian theatre blog raises some interesting questions about the purpose of theatre reviews - drawing a tentative distinction between reviews which judge whether a performance is a success or failure, and reviews which offer a kind of non-partisan analysis.

You could argue that Haydon is talking about almost entirely different modes of writing - produced over different time-scales, subjected to different editorial processes and intended for different audiences for different purposes. We could see two separate genres, one for a mass audience with an explicit and open implication that the review will impact ticket sales, one for a more specific, academic audience with the implication that the review will place the performance in a critical landscape.

However, like all good and seemingly tidy binary systems, the real problems emerge with reviews that don’t fall neatly into either category: neither 3 out of 5, or footnoted to the hilt. In fact, that kind of oppositional thinking is a mistake: there’s no reason why reviews can’t offer an aesthetic judgement and place that judgement in some kind of critical landscape. The question isn’t whether a synthesis is possible, but what it might look like. Read more »

death of the company

May 13th, 2008 • production process, research, theatre

Ploughing through a final draft of a journal paper, I hit this quote from Barry Wellman in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs:

Although people often view the world in terms of groups, they function in networks. In networked societies, boundaries are permeable, interactions are diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive.

It’s an extremely appealing way to think about collaborative and collective performance, from traditional-looking models for theatre companies right through to more avant-garde, ad-hoc gatherings. In fact, it could help us describe the journey between the two modes. How?

Well, it might allow us to think more clearly about the function of theatre companies - and question company formation as a natural early step of creating theatre. I’ve heard a number of credible, pragmatic arguments why company formation is a good idea, not least of which is work creation for writers and directors.

But these and even the strongest arguments for company formation - a shared,specific artistic or political vision - seems to describe the priority of networked relationships. In other words, you’re not in a company for the sake of having a company, you’re in a company for the kinds of relationships and interactions that the company makes possible.

The question then becomes whether those kind of relationships are accessible in different ways - ways which don’t unthinkingly reproduce hierarchies of financial control and liability, hierarchies of artistic legitimacy and commitment. A theatre company - with a board, an artistic director and core of performers - isn’t the only place through which a network of creative relationships can be generated and sustained.