Sunday May 19, 2024 | Research / David Roesner |
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Background
Hybrid narratives The idea was to create an effect similar to those of the avant-garde Russian filmmaker Kuleschov’s montage experiments – to create narrative through the sheer juxtaposition of non-related images. In our case the juxtaposition was temporal as well as spatial, and used music as the medium that “charged” the image of performers fixed in rather expressionless postures with narrative meaning. The interplay and the synthesis transformed the frozen figures into characters such as “the lost lover”, “the secret agent”, “the heroic doctor”, etc. Track work In my practice, I was curious to find out how different media, sign systems and modes of expression on stage interrelate for the audience, whether they are kept separate or merely run parallel. A sound, an image, a scene might be produced concomitantly with no immediate connection within the realms of the diegetic. I found it most effective and interesting, however, when there were occasional formal or semantic links or “hooks” that would indicate a possible transfer and interplay of meaning between two or three elements of the scene. A link I used frequently was letting seemingly unrelated events on stage coincide (or collide) rhythmically (-> musicalization). Here are a few examples: were projected on a semi-transparent screen behind him. Simultaneously, and punctuating the actor’s speech, you would see the other actors appear in neutral black-and-white outfits behind the screen, a reminder of the full costume they were wearing at the photo-shoot (a necklace, a feather boa, a handbag). The text, the projections and the appearance of the actors were not interrelated or integrated by an external narrative or internal psychology: they were three theatrical “comments” on the issues of Cocteau’s text: illusion, disillusion, impersonation and projection. The only structure that organized these “tracks” was the rhythm of the text that was coordinated with the appearance of the slides and the actors. In other productions, track-work also meant the dissociation of body and voice, of text and action. In Phoenissae, based on Euripides’ play, we created a Prologue derived from Iocaste’s opening monologue and an Epilogue using the messenger’s account of the battle over Theben. In both cases we not only distributed a single character’s text among a group of people, a second choir in addition to choir of the Phoenician girls, but also disconnected their speech from what they were doing: While taking turns presenting the text, the group in the first case staged tableaux that related to ancient temple reliefs or vase-paintings depicting joy, war and grief and in the second case, the Epilogue, the choir was sculpturing the bodies of three messengers, who, stuck in their individual poses recounted the outcome of the battle. The disruption of an identity between a speaker and his/her speech as well as the psychological disconnection between the visual score and the audible text generated an estrangement which we found helpful when dealing with Euripides’ text: We could create images of violence and grief, both through the dramatic text and the corporal text, without illustrating or motivating one through the other. Performing Theory [frauen.mov]. See also: [manuscript] In a different project, Homesongs, we collected writing, songs and visual material that reflected on the notion of “Heimat”, and presented this material with an international group of performers from Dartington (UK), Utrecht (NL) and Hildesheim (D). Included in this performance, which was also site-specific (as it was devised in an indoor tennis-court), was a hybrid sports match comprised of elements of tennis, volleyball, football and even bits of martial arts, which was in essence a competition about definitions of “Heimat”. The players launched a series of psychological, sociological, religious, geographical, poetic and aphoristic definitions at each other, and by embodying these concepts in a sports game represented one of the main contemporary battlefields and metaphors for “Heimat”: sport. Transparency/Self-Reflexivity The entire structure of Frauen im Anzug, for example was based on slow but steady transformations of all performers in a dressing room setting, passing through a series of stages relevant to the given text and its implications. From relative neutrality (in white bathrobes) the female performers revealed male suits underneath those bathrobes and then changed into a series of female clichés; the vamp, the school-girl, the “Lolita”, the spinster, the Barbie-doll, etc. In “Masque du jour”, we were interested in the transformations of performers on stage when taking on and off a great variety of masks. We were focusing not on mask performance but on the performativity of masking and unmasking while embracing a wide range of "masks", including the changes that faces undergo when lit in a specific way, or stuffed with vegetables. (masken.mov). In the end the performers all turned towards the audience, holding a photograph of themselves in front of their faces. The photograph's eyes were initially covered with a black bar and the performers wore white masks, so it took three layers of masks to expose them. When all performers finally displayed their "real" faces, one of them, who had applied a transparent face-mask, peeled this off as well. Getting closer and closer to facial skin, the dropping of those layers of mask ultimately questioned what a mask and face are. Musicalization We rhythmized movement and language in many pieces (see: the_ancients.mov; masken.mov), we orchestrated language by dispersing a text within a choir of speakers who took turns, overlapped, spoke in unison, spoke in canons and blended their voices and timbres. We often included live music in the performances (Phoenissae [phoenissae_choir.mov], Frauen im Anzug [barbie_girl.mov], Barbette [barbette_orchestra.mov]) and theatricalized the music-making by all sorts of deviations from conventional instrumental practice: e.g. instruments would be played by more than one player would be used as props (weight lifting a snare drum) or costumes (one actress appeared as a strange reptilian animal in Barbette, wearing an accordion on her back as a shell). We used scores to organize certain scenes (like the beginning of Barbette after the Prologue [barbette_orchestra.mov] because it helped organize the interplay of text, action, sound, etc. In Masken (masken.mov) we edited a soundtrack after initial improvisations with different masks and music and trusted in the musical coherence of the soundtrack (its timing, oscillation between atmospheric and energetic moments, introducing different rhythms and orchestrations [piano, orchestra, electronic etc.]). In Phoenissae we took the monologues, dialogues and choirs of Euripides' play and put them to music: partly by singing the words in heterophonies based on scales that resembled ancient scales (wir_sind_aus_phoenizien.m4a), partly by embedding the language in an agon of sound and movement, (agon.mov), partly by using an instrumental accompaniment which highlighted the musical qualities of the spoken language (thebens_ursprung.m4a). The implications of the different forms of musicalization were manifold: the audience became detached from this formalized narrative and at the same time emotionalized by the eeriness and quaint beauty of the music; the performer’s presence was heightened not by their attempts to embody a character, but to precisely execute a complex score of theatrical and musical events. And, although formally mediated, the sound of the – mostly untrained – voices of German and Russian origin and timbre also generated a certain appealing authenticity. Non-psychological acting / Formalization to slightly exaggerated types (changing_room1.mov, changing_room2.mov) – the performers presented the text, rather then representing it. (vogueing.mov, changing_room3.mov). The performers created a mobile choir ensemble that executed an explicit or implicit score of text and actions, rather than identifying with whatever hints of characters emerge within the narrative context of the performance. One of the techniques we used to interrupt processes of character identification – for the performer as well as for the audience – was to disassociate the speech act from the physical action (see Track Work, and prologue.mov, the_ancients.mov, epilogue.mov). For further discussion, see also the manuscript of my presentation “Performing Theory and its Evaluation as Research”, held at PARIP 2005, University of Leeds, 1st of July 2005, Bretton Hall Campus. [see manuscript]
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