Monday May 06, 2024 | Research / David Roesner |
|
David Roesner Performing Theory and its Evaluation as Research 1. Introduction I would like to present to you a series of performance-as-research-projects, which were all connected to the University of Hildesheim, Germany, where I have been teaching for the past three years. I am speaking to you as well as a member of staff, but also as the creative supervisor/director of these projects. Two words about Hildesheim: In Germany artistic and academic learning and teaching are generally clearly and institutionally separated (at least in the humanities/fine arts areas). Hildesheim is one of the few places in theatre and performance arts, where research and practice are strongly interlinked. I’m referring to two projects on Gender performance, one on a programmatic text by Goethe (Women’s parts played by men in the Roman theatre), that focussed on cross gender performance, the other on an essay by Jean Cocteau (Le numeró Barbette, with an additional literary text collage of Woolf’s Orlando, Balzac’s Sarrasine, Plato’s Symposion) about androgyny or the „third sex“. 2. Research issues: In how far were all these projects research projects and not "just" theatre projects designed to make academic life a little more eventful and sensual. What research questions were behind the projects, what resources were dwelled on and evaluated? Goethe suggests this connection by saying:
Cocteau comes to similar conclusions while watching the high-wire artist Vander Clyde, who performed his act dressed as a woman, and was according to Cocteau "an extraordinary lecture in theatre craftsmanship".2
This leads me to the second general research issue, that we addressed particularly in ABC and Buffet of Masks: Theatrical means of expression and their interaction / interdependency / inter-relatedness. How do e.g. music and theatre, object and character, light and movement interact, how can they be semantically connected or disconnected, rhythmically juxtaposed, visually intertwined? This often leads us to laboratory situations as in the ABC performance, where we developed miniature scenes for one theatrical term for each letter. Auftritt (entrance), Bewegung (movement), Choir etc. In this scene we wanted to investigate how a particular piece of music, “charges” an almost immobile tableau of performers with emotion and/or narration. Light served here as a rhythmical shift of focus, an deliberate means of hiding and revealing, which granted a direct connection of a new musical clip with a new set of performers, that arranged themselves in the dark. The experiment showed that most members of the audience did suppose certain story lines behind the given grouping, they identified broken hearted lovers, cool secret agents, mourning emergency teams, depending on how fixed the semantic connotations for a certain music already were and how suggestive the tableau was. The second line of research was a rhythmical question: how long does a musical atmosphere and a theatrical image need to sink in, to communicate with the audience, when does it need some time to develop, when do you need to take it away quickly, so that it does not become too obvious, and how much contrast and continuity are required. Obviously we did not extract a golden rule, a formula from this experiment, but the students developed an awareness for timing and gained insight on how you can tell stories on stage with no acting and language involved. 3. Research techniques This example also raises the question of the techniques that I have theatrically used and employed in these research areas. I will not develop the most obvious techniques, that any theatre production makes use of in one sense or another: intensive text analysis and improvisations on terms, association or situations given by the subject at hand. What might be particular though are three procedures that all the productions more or less had in common: there was always a sense of the experimental nature of the project, seeing the stage as a testing site, the performer as a guinea pig and using dramaturgical decisions for a certain setting analogous to the decisions a scientist makes when defining the parameters for a test. Within this setting one of the recurrent ideas was to use the research texts themselves as objects and material of the theatrical events. How can you perform an essay by Goethe, a philosophical treatment by Plato or brief definitions of theatre terms like “presence”, “alienation”, or “focus”? In the next example, I would like to show you, we decided to perform Goethe’s text as a score of voices and movements in a clearly formalized manner. The ingredients for the experiment we agreed on were: unifying costumes, a unified movement, with individual variations, and spreading the text amongst all 12 performers ignoring questions of “character”. The text’s subject is serialized, the means of expression: posture, attitude, voice and movement have become mere parameters, features, quotations that can be put on and off like costumes. What I would also like to exemplify with this excerpt is, that I would consider process and product of our projects being self-interrogative and self-reflective, and I should specify, how this is achieved. Ideally the performances reflect both: a given subject, text or theory and the theatrical means of presenting them. In the case of Goethe’s cross dressers, we invented a performance, that focused on taking up poses that represent gender clichés and getting rid of them again. The overall structure of the 30-minute performance is given by the performers’ changing from bathrobes to male suits, to individual female outfits. All changes are onstage and are displayed in various intermediate stages. The processual and performative nature of gender, as investigated in the writings of Judith Butler, hence became a central semantic and structural element of the performance. Form and MusicalityAs a result all of our productions had in common that they made extensive use of form as a sensual and reflective element and “translation”. In the example you have just seen, the highly formalized movements of the “row” served as a rhythmical and spacial translation for Goethe’s text, that dealt with the absence of women in the theatre and the virtues he saw in this. The text, as used in the performance, says: “The ancients, at least in the best periods for art and morality, did not permit women on stage. Their plays were organized in such a way that either women could be more or less dispensed with, or else female roles were played by an actor who had prepared himself especially for them.“ 3 The very formal solution for this scene gave us the opportunity to introduce some of the central issues of the performance without having to invent a naturalistic situation, which might have reduced the range of allusions to only a few. By splitting the text on 12 individuals, all women, we gave it a dialogue quality, opposed by the uniformity of costume and movement. The movement sequence playfully alleges to gender related situations such as the catwalk or the military drill. You may also see aggressive approaches vs. subservient retreats, you can see and hear cliché-imitations of male and female walking and voices (two means of expression, we found most revealing when in doubt about someone’s sex.) You may see the aspect of preparation as mentioned by Goethe (the scene actually developed out of a movement exercise!) and you can see the interplay between repetition and uniformity and variation and individuality.
|
you could see scary masks, disguises, masks as political statements, as wellness procedures and comical deformations of the human face. But most of all you could see processes of masking and unmasking
and were invited to reflect on the question, which of many mask layers that the performers wear, is actually their private and individual face. Can you distinguish clearly between authentic face and mask, or is, as Nietzsche claimed, our face our most undistinguishable mask?4
3. Forms of DiscourseFinally I’d like to briefly comment on the forms of discourse that in addition to the discursive nature of the performance serve as research instrument for documentation, evaluation, reflection and dissemination. Despite this being a major interest of this conference, I have to concede that– methodologically speaking – this is the least developed aspect in our project activities in Hildesheim. Still, there is of course discourse and it materializes in various forms.
During the rehearsal process research is characterised and fuelled by the fact that there are always several groups working simultaneously on individual projects that are linked by a common general subject. Phoenissae was one of 14 groups dealing with ancient Greek drama and myths and contemporary, intermedial ways of performance. The Goethe project was part of 5 projects that were all staging central essays on theatre theory from around 1800 (Goethe, Lessing, Diderot, Schiller) juxtaposed with more contemporary texts by Butler, Artaud, Einar Schleef, Peter Handke and others.
Between the different groups there is a lively exchange in form of presentations, seminar discussions and rehearsal visits, where intellectual insights on the given materials and theatrical concepts are discussed, questioned and specified.
Within the project groups various forms of notations circulate: diaries, protocols, scores and storyboards are forms of documentation as well as material for future rehearsals. We never got round though to systematize these means and really investigate their significance, certainly an aera that suggests itself for further preoccupation.
Written evidence for an outside observer consists in programmes, papers, thesises and presentations that students and/or staff write. Programmes contain programmatic notes, photographs and scraps from the production process. After the period of performances students write 10 to 20 pages for credits, designed similar to their academic papers: the papers follow a certain research question that may be performance analytical (focussing on dramaturgical coherence, means of physical expression or use of theatrical space e.g.) or process analytical (asking e.g. how a particular rehearsal method manifested in the performance or what criteria were used to follow up or dismiss certain ideas.)
And staff members have given presentations (like this one) or edited books (Gromes, H./Kurzenberger, H. (eds.). Theatertheorie szenisch. Reflexion eines Theaterprojekts. Hildesheim 2000.)
A more unique approach consisted in photographic documentations and re-stagings that emerged from the photography section of our arts department during the project on theatre theory around 1800. Approx. 30 students accompanied the rehearsal process of the individual groups, trying three things:
documenting the performance,
[see: Frauen im Anzug/Photographs]
• capturing stages and atmospheres during rehearsals
• and staging photo series that were inspired by the particular texts and performance issues.
(all pictures taken by Uta Birkenberg, Svea-Lena Kutschke, Georg Werner and Regina Blank)
In these last photographs, the performers were made to take up typical poses from the performance, but change location (from stage to lawn) and posture (from vertical to horizontal). This is quite an alienation effect, I think, that makes us rethink our conventionalized way of seeing the vamp, the drag queen, the Lolita or the teenage girl.
The pictures were exhibited and some of them found their way into this book that again compiles various writings that reflect the nature and strategies of photographing theatrically staged images and also staging images and tableaux for photographic use only.
In this project things become quite confusing academically, but intellectually stimulation, because so many shifts in perspective and media are involved: A practice (photography) interrogates practice (performance in Hildesheim) that interrogates research (on Goethe and gender performance) that interrogates sources (Goethe/Butler/etc.) that interrogate practice (Roman theatre/performativity of gender).
I hope I could give you an impression on a particular kind of practice that is certainly closely connected to academic research and supplied a stimulating vehicle for intellectual and aesthetic challenges in a research and teaching environment. It also transgresses academic limitations by being sometimes more allusive, trans-disciplinary and playful than academia would allow and indulges in the privilege of asking more questions than it can possibly give answers to. By closing this presentation I’m doing the same and thank you for your attention!
Notes
2. Goethe, J. W. (1993 [1788]) „Women's Parts Played by Men in the Roman Theatre, translated by Isa Ragusa. in: Lesley Ferris (ed.) Crossing the stage: controversies on cross-dressing. London/New York, Routledge: 47-50, p. 49.
The University of Exeter, Department of Drama, Thornlea, New North Road, Exeter EX4 4LA NOTE FOR NETSCAPE 4 users: This website has been produced to be standards compliant. If you can read this message, you may be viewing the site using an older browser. Whilst all the content in this site will be accessible to you, some of the presentational aspects may not. To see this site as it is intended , you should consider using a modern browser. See the Web Standards Project for more details |