{"word_count": 4244, "character_count": 26449}
What is it that determines creative agency in a performance-making process? Or, where is authorship situated? These are not quite analogous questions. They address the same concern, that is, the creative act, but from different points of view, informed perhaps by different principles. Both deal with an activity, however, while the latter hints at quite distinct and pro-active author/s, the former involves less clearly defined re-active agents, implying a more “passive” activity, a potentiality.These concerns arose after years of attempts to formalise a doubt about the presupposed contradiction between text on one side, and improvisation and devising on the other; the bias, in these attempts, lay in my wish to safeguard the lone practice of writing for performance – and the life of the author – while allowing that writing to remain a material for the collective performance-making practice of an ensemble, rather than its mastercopy.It might be a question of aesthetics of performance, or it might not be, but my interest in the theatre has always been associated with a fascination towards the art of the actor. Not considering myself one, to be able to work directly with actors is what makes theatre-making interesting to me. For this reason, writing performance texts seemed like a good excuse allowing me at best to be present in the process of rehearsal. At the same time, besides an initial lack of confidence motivating my refusal to direct, directing did not seem to fit the idea of collaboration I had in mind, which was to work alongside an ensemble of actors, almost as a performer myself, actively involved in, and relying on the process of making performance, that is, as part of a collective practice of scenic composition. Performance as process seemed more appropriate an idea than that of performance as final product, which a directorial approach perhaps most commonly entails. It meant to be surprised by new scenic material unexpectedly emerging rather than to achieve or recognise pre-imagined material as it eventually materialises onstage. Hence, I began to investigate writing practices that allow the development of texts that could be worked on collaboratively and collectively with an ensemble of actors; texts whose logic does not, in other words, predetermine the logic of their performance. It soon became clear that the issues at stake were at least two: what characteristics should a text feature to allow that to happen, and what should be the approach towards those texts, alternative to a directorial one. This paper mostly deals with the first problem, outlining the first phase of a practice-as-research study titled Pre/texts for an Emerging Dramaturgy - Reconceiving Models of Authorship in Text-based Performance, run at the drama department of Liverpool John Moores University.The study started by recognising formal features in contemporary texts for the stage that allow, or even require, additional creative interventions, or supplementing actions, on the part of the production team, in order to fill in the gaps left open by – or in – the text. These features have been identified as “openness”, “theatricality” and “performativity” and will be discussed in relation to a sample text in the second half of this essay. The practical investigations informed by these theorisations intervene in playwriting processes founded on the principle of transcendence as predetermination of meaning for representation; they explore ways of developing a dramaturgical practice that induces immanence instead.If in pure immanence all meaning should emerge freely within a system – say in a fully spontaneous collective performance, or in certain ways of life – and in pure transcendence all meaning be organised from without – for example by an author or a god – this practice as research explores whether and how a theatre-making methodology based on a pre-existing, single-authored text, can still achieve high degrees of immanence in performance. That is, it experiments with ways of writing for performance that can stimulate spontaneity in performance. Spontaneity is therefore considered as the means towards immanent processes of performance self-organisation, specifically in relation to the compositional work of the actor on a pre-written text. There is a link in my view, between spontaneity and creative agency in this context. Creative agency refers to the affordances, the possibilities released (by the text) for an actor to maintain in order to create something new out of the given circumstances (of the text). Spontaneity similarly refers to the capacity to react to the moment and in the moment of the occurrence of an event, prioritizing impulse over reflection; as it will be argued later exploring the notion of performativity, the generative aspect of spontaneity springs from the impulsive side of creativity, bringing into play what is not yet given (at least to consciousness).Once again, this research is instigated by an interest in text on the one hand, and collaborative processes of making performance on the other. Underlying these interests is the idea that the terms “script” and “improvisation” are not necessarily in contradiction with one another. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines “improvisation” as «something that is improvised, in particular a piece of music, drama, etc. created spontaneously or without preparation».1 For the purposes of this research I will retain the “created spontaneously” part of the definition and respectfully discard the rest (“or without preparation”). In order to give ground to this dismissal, here is a quote from the late director Jerzy Grotowski on the subject of spontaneity and improvisation: «[…] I want to advise you never in performance to seek for spontaneity without a score. In the exercises it is a different thing altogether. During a performance no real spontaneity is possible without a score. It would only be an imitation since you would destroy your spontaneity by chaos».2 What I am trying to get to is the idea that improvisation does require preparation, not necessarily on the outcomes of a performance, but on the materials adopted in the process of making it (text included). In the context of this study therefore, improvisation is considered as that creative process through which the actor originates new non-textual material using the text as a score, in other words, as a detailed yet open enough framework of vocal actions within which to improvise. The way in which the actor can improvise around the text is by reacting spontaneously to it and the circumstances around its performance, which include the fellow actors’ reactions, the scenography, and the audience. This methodology entails the work of an ensemble whose members constantly work off each other and the given material circumstances. In this way, text becomes purely a material to work off from, or react to.To use spontaneity in this sense also allows the bypassing of representation, which can be considered as a kind of search for a pre-existing identity or meaning that one wishes to identify with in retrospection or forethought. A quest activity of this kind involves in fact a primarily reflective mode of dealing with the occurring events, a mode that actively engages the intellect through reflective memory, often causing a delay or a premature haste in the decisive reaction. The danger with representation is to fail to attend to the present moment, either because one takes time to re-elaborate the past or because one preconceives the moment, preparing too much for it. It could be said that representation corresponds with the linguistic tenses of simple past and future: it speaks in the modes of “I was” and “I will be”, which invoke other distinct dimensions, and imply a sort of reflective distance from the present. Spontaneity on the other hand, speaks more in the present perfect of “I have been” or in the future perfect of “I will have been”, producing a sense of continuous affect, of self in process, of becoming. This approach to presence is the mark of my readings of Gilles Deleuze, who suggested that «a scar is the sign not of a past wound but of the present fact of having been wounded».3 My research’s focus on spontaneity is an attempt to be faithful to this condition of continuous present. Thus, the study proposes that we can perhaps move away from the idea of re-presenting a text, that is, from the idea that by having a pre-authored text all performers and directors can do is to look for the most truthful interpretation and staging of it. This move can be made by simply opening up to a more spontaneous way of reacting to the pre-written material, one that still engages memory and intellect – the actors still need to remember the lines – but somewhat more passively, e.g. without preinterpretation, and through an enhanced sensibility towards the effects of the text on the performer in the moment of utterance and reception, allowing more impulsive and imaginative reactions. In this way, one can freely draw differences from repetition, and repetition is no longer synonymous with representation. This experimental methodology then is in the service of a kind of theatre that might be called immanent. A theatre that assertively creates the circumstances of its existence in the moment and place of manifestation, instead of listlessly identify with supposed realities existing elsewhere.Immanent theatre is a term I have borrowed from Dr Laura Cull and her Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance. Published in 2012, this critical collection of case studies focuses primarily on practices of directing and devising, without considering practices of writing for performance as such. In the conclusion of her study however, Dr Cull calls for more research on the subject of immanence: «What remains for us to do now is to go and experiment with what else might provoke this ethical feeling today in our particular contexts».4 In the contexts of playwriting and scenic writing practices, my research hopes to contribute by exploring how texts can be composed and approached with the aim of provoking immanent performance. In an important essay from 2004 titled Beyond Drama: Writing for Post dramatic Theatre, Małgorzata Sugiera had already introduced the principle of “immanent theatricality” to qualify contemporary texts for the stage, which is worth quoting at length:[…] when the language of drama breaks free from its formerly primary function of representing the speech of the stage characters, then it becomes the proper substance of a text for theatre. It no longer represents logically organized stories, but rather attempts to stimulate particular perceptual and cognitive processes. Instead of recognizing oneself in the Others, which is becoming more and more difficult in a disintegrating and alienating world, the spectators themselves turn into the characters of their own acts of perception, consciousness and truth recognition. Nowadays, the basic structural principle of texts written for theatre increasingly often turns out to be their immanent theatricality, which is, however, no longer understood as a reflection upon theatre as a domain of artistic activity or as an extensive metaphor of human life, but rather as a means of inducing the audience to watch themselves as subjects which perceive, acquire knowledge and partly create the objects of their cognition.5Going back to my own practice-as-research, on the one hand I wonder whether there’s a certain way of writing that facilitates spontaneity and immanence in performance, and on the other, I wonder whether that’s enough, or whether it’s rather a question of ways of approaching the text in the transition to performance, that is, in the ways of performing a text. So the research looks at both, that is, at a theatre-making methodology involving writing for performance and “dramaturgy”, where “dramaturgy” is concerned with the facilitation of collaborative ways of making performance based on text (alternative to a directorial – perhaps more transcendental – approach). The aim is to allow the structure and significance of the performance to emerge from the collective work of the performers on a pre-written text, or score. The text is regarded as a pretext - for spontaneity, textual material useful for improvisation. The way to approach texts of this kind is the focus of the current phase of the research, and will be treated more in detail in a later essay; however, it might be useful to include here another relevant quotation from Grotowski who, discussing his approach to improvisation in the same interview cited above, notably added: «During the exercises the score consists of fixed details and I would advise you […] to improvise only within this framework of details».6 So I took his advice, and considered the text itself as a score, replacing the physical actions, which were the fixed details Grotowski iniatilly worked with, with phonetic actions, that is, lines of speech. Within this framework provided by a sequence of speech acts, the actors can improvise through gesture, movement and intonation, generating different performance material and meanings.To be a pretext for improvisation, the score should therefore incorporate potential for action without indicating intent. That is, it should be mostly undetermined in terms of meaning and staging requirements, creating an ambiguous yet coherent sequence of events, and adopting a mix of theatrical devices and language experimentation in order to defamiliarise and inspire at the same time, providing the actors with different performing choices, and requiring them and the audience to fill in the gaps. It is in these gaps, in the undecided mise-en-scène, in the unclear meaning, that new life may manifest and representation recede.7As a result of the investigations so far, “openness”, “theatricality” and “performativity” are the three main characteristics of a performance text that have been identified as able to endanger authorship and engender immanence. These critical investigations looked at texts and performances based on texts by authors such as Carmelo Bene, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Steven Berkoff, Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, Jon Fosse, Ewald Palmetshofer, Gertrude Stein, Roland Shimmelpfennig, and many others. These artists have all very different aesthetics of course, but from each of them I could identify at least some of the devices useful to a theatre of immanence, which were “authoritatively” grouped in the three blurred and overlapping characteristics, or principles, previously mentioned. I then attempted to apply these devices to my own writing practice.What follows is an example extract from a work-in-progress piece that I shall use as a case study to better outline these principles.This text involves three performers always onstage, a man and two women; the lines are not allocated, so the choice of who’s speaking which line is ideally made on the spot; the actors are required to learn all the lines. Dashes indicate potential change of speaker. The punctuation within each line has no fixed interpretation. [This section appears half way through the play]She sits. Takes a book from her bag. It’s a French book.She’s beautiful… she’s… just unique. And elegant. I bet she’s French. She’s oh look not too tall not at all and yes, look, I knew it! No doubt about it! - glancing at the book on her lap. And those legs, ah those smooth shifty legs. A model! Might be, and that face, no… that’s too rude… visage, ce visage! Buried underneath those capricious stylish hair… shading that brow thou brow thou cheeks thou lips where shall I… there’s a seat there and there and there’s one here… not too brash… could have- sat there… but you know… still makes sense… I’m not looking for… yet if it comes…. not many seats available not so many anyway… I’m not desperate… I’m reading a book… That’s when with the corner of my eyes I sense the corner of her eyes the gentle movement of her hand long thin fingers through her hair… disclose her profile... the sweet spike of her nose falling softly… the shaded groove the upper border of her lip... what would I do what would I to climb up there… I give up! Oh yet if I were a minuscule… an invisible… mouth… a spy... there’s a secret… I need to whisper… not to her ear no… oh I’m in pain! In short: her profile: a revelOh look it’s a play.She glances at the book on his lapIt’s Racine But could be anything. Yet that has an effect.Talk to her! No! Come on! I’m shy! You’re a shame! She’ll just laugh at me! I don’t want to hear you complain anymore! loser! you deserve it! peeping tom! Shame on you! And she might be thinking perhaps she’s thinking:Lift up your head come on look at me.I could try with a smile.I smileShe’s smiledWhat are you reading?He shows her the book he’s reading:Do you know itYesAre you French? YesAre you an actor?Oh no. I just I like… Are you a man of the theatre? A writer? Ehm Yes actually kind of You look like one Ehm I’m sorry… it’s my stop He stands upGets off Shakes his head Stands motionless Stares at the train that’s leaving the platform -Then stares at another -And anotherIt wasn’t even the thought of his girlfriend that stopped him.The first identified principle of “openness” refers to the degree of autonomy in the interpretation and usage of the text by a reader, which in this case will be the cast and creatives in rehearsal.8 One of the devices adopted to maintain openness in this text is the disuse of stage directions, or their embedding within the lines of speech, which in turn are not allocated to any one character. Because the performers are requested to master the whole text, as if it were a single piece of narrative, it is harder for them to predetermine intention and characterisation. In performance, this may imply a narrative mode9 of delivery overlapping with the more conventional mimetic mode of the theatre. Furthermore, the shifts between narration, internal commentary and direct or reported speech are not clearly demarcated, with the result that the performer seems to be running after thoughts by voicing them out. Also, the lines’ syntax is broken, and there’s a strange punctuation. Finally, there is a certain ambiguity around the context of the scene, its location, the actual events happening, and most of all, the subjects of the drama’s relationships to the speakers. All these are areas that may need further clarification/interpretation in performance; they call for the performers’ own creative choices, which may be the result of both reflection and impulse.Yet, the notion of an open text might not be sufficient to investigate immanence because an ambiguous or undetermined text can still be blocked during rehearsals, therefore becoming pre-determined in view of the performance. Hence, I prefer terms such as “open or emerging dramaturgy” to refer to the ongoing process of making performance, which includes the actual performance event as well, in front of an audience. Indeed this event implies the interpretative choices of both the actors and the audience; the extent to which these are allowed to affect each other will eventually determine the overall (yet singly perceived) performance’s dramaturgy. Performance then becomes the occasion of a self-differentiating encounter between actors and audiences, where cognitive, kinetic, emotional – in one word – creative exchanges connect the stage with the auditorium.10“Theatricality” and “performativity” are the other two characteristics that in my view can allow the performance of a text to remain open to new emerging dramaturgies. They are coherently ambiguous terms, just as an open text is, and strictly related to each other, just as the terms theatre and performance are.“Theatricality” refers to the capacity of a text to exploit the liveliness and materiality of the performance situation, where each object, sound or being is – for the simple fact of being on stage – a sign subject to interpretation, and replacement by another. Theatrical signs in fact, may not have a coded meaning, or may be used in a way that dissociates them from the meanings conventionally attributed to them. But theatricality also refers to a certain awareness performers and audiences have of this process of reality construction and of themselves actively involved in it, as if what’s presented onstage were not the fictional world as such, but the collective activity of creating and perceiving it – which takes us back to Sugiera’s reference to “immanent theatricality” previously quoted.So how is theatricality embedded within the example? The mix of stream-of-consciousness and narration allows performance to open the fictional reality referred by the text to somewhat include the here and now of the performance event, therefore the audience as well (whether it being directly addressed or not); at the same time though, the actor can still engage with the fictional reality in first person, instead on referring to it in a purely narrative mode. Situations are imagined and perceived by both the performers and the audience: performance becomes again the site of an acknowledged narrative act, rather than the unfolding of a narrative within framing conventions suspending disbelief. Just like in storytelling, the material context of the scene is evoked through performance and physicality, without the need for a realistic setting.Finally and perhaps most importantly, “performativity” refers to the capacity of a text to suggest supplementing creative actions - physical or intellectual - to actors and spectators, as interactions potentially deviating from aprioristic linguistic conditions. It is the power of a text - or of a sign in general - to act. It refers to its capacity to do rather than mean. So how does a text do? On the one hand, Austen and speech-act theorists believed that words can do, bring about acts or facts, other than merely ascertain or describe them – provided that there’s a pre-existing stable identity speaking, and intending to have an intention (that is, intending to do something specific with that speech). It’s the classic: “I pronounce you man and wife”, said by the priest in front of the weds-to-be, possibly by the altar inside a church. But in my experience I have found that sometimes the pure reporting or description of an event or situation on stage, besides its supposed parasitic or etiolating state, can be just as performative as its actual enacted speech, performed by the adequate speaker/character. In this respect, taking the cue from Derrida’s critique of Austen’s theory, J. Hillis Miller writes: «the performative is seen as a response made to a demand made on me by the wholly other, a response that, far from depending on preexisting rules or laws, on a preexisting ego, I, or self, or on pre-existing circumstances or “context,” creates the self, the context, and new rules or laws».11 Which I take to mean an impulsive and spontaneous reaction to speech. Some kind of affirmative and generous yet sovereign response.Jacques Derrida considers iterability as the fundamental feature of performativity: that is, the capacity of a speech act to do, create and perform in whatever context, with whatever intention and through whatever subject it is uttered. So that the reality is necessarily created in the reaction to the speech act, and is no longer represented by it. This also brings into play the physicality of words in the voice - their sound, rhythm, pitch etc. - and through the voice, their affective power on the bodies of both the speaker-actor and the listener- audience and other actors on stage. It’s as if the semantic process of making meaning were subjected to a prior process of apprehension through the senses. In other words, when the object of cognition, the text in this case, is not entirely recognisable in the fleeting moment of perception, which is the moment of reading or recollecting the text, it can only be sensed.Hence the aim of a performative text is to enable the performer to react to the sensations that the speaking of the text would trigger in him. These triggers are embedded in the text’s collapsing syntax, in the use of repetition and stuttering, in the long lines without punctuation, in the unclear relationships between speaker and the literal speech-act (the undefined context of utterance), and the ambiguous and shifting modes of discourse (shifting, for example, between narration, reported speech, free indirect discourse, internal commentary and direct address). These linguistic experimentations aim at obstructing the attempts to rationally preconceive or illustrate the words or the intention of each line. They may also produce physical effects on the performer voicing the text, such as, for example, a sense of struggle to keep up with the pace of the mental events, the breathing etc. These devices require the performer to make impulsive choices about the mode of delivery of each line, eventually affecting both characterisation and the scene’s dramaturgy.To conclude, if we consider immanent performance as a self-organised and spontaneously-created living reality, then its text’s:“openness” contributes to it by allowing the initial creative engagement of the actors as collective authors of the performance material inspired by the ambiguities in the text;“theatricality” contributes by exploiting the materiality of the stage and the liveliness of the performance situation, both acknowledged as such or permitted to be acknowledged as such by a text that does not call for the representation of another dramatic situation;“performativity” contributes whenever the text instigates the performer’s imagination to produce a supplementing creative action, which could be a physical gesture and/or a certain mode of delivery of the line. These creative actions, resulting from improvised reactions to the text and the circumstances around its performance, contribute to the definition of new fictional words and realities, conjure up unacquainted beings, invisible objects and unpredicted emotional states.The creation of the performance’s context and dramaturgy in the moment of performance, that is, through the mere repetition of the text without premeditation, is what may allow text-based theatre to bypass representation and approach immanence.