When making this work, we had researched crime as an action (the crime itself) and also the outcomes of crime (the conciseness, the police action, the effect on the victim and the perpetrator). The death of Spencer Percival was a crime so relevant to what is happening in modern day politics, a call for a need for change in how the system works.
The crime we researched, the detail however is vague, very little is written about the events surrounding Percival’s death. He was shot in the chest by a disgruntled member of the public for his mistreatment in Russian debtors’ prison, when the British government would not help. That is all there is in written history about the crime, so little written but yet so much for us to uncover.
What was clear for us as artists is we didn’t want this project to become a period drama of the death of Percival but rather a representation of the social political events surrounding his death, events and mistreatment that are mirrored in today’s society. It was for us to find another way to present his story and the work.
We looked to Postdramatic theatre as a way for us to create theatre imagery with the underlying themes that surrounded Percival’s death. We wanted to tell the story of his death, but we wanted to do it in a way that it could also have been anyone’s death, anyone’s anger and anyone’s investigation. We didn’t want to follow any particular narrative plot, but rather to create a piece of performance that existed purely for that fact that it just did, making work that spoke for itself. The images that we would make didn’t have to corelate to one another but rather complement each other in the facilitation of telling the story of Percival non narratively.
‘The adjective ‘postdramatic’ denotes a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama, at a time ‘after’ the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre. What it does not mean is an abstract negation and mere looking away from the tradition of drama. ‘After drama means that it lives on as a structure- however weakened and exhausted- of the normal theatre…’ (Lehmann 2006: 27)
It is this notion of working with images that that are ‘beyond drama’, and beyond narrative that we are striving for, the structure we have begun to develop in the commission is what Lehmann describes as ‘exhausted.’ We are making images that are far removed from traditional narrative storytelling but had always started there in the first instance. They are almost a shell of there beginnings, being pushed and pushed further into new territories. They now resemble crime yes, but can also be reinterpreted as almost anything.
An example of this is the disco dancers; each member of the collaboration was given a task to perform throughout their time on stage. In the case of the disco dancers it was to perform a fully rehearsed version of ‘The Hustle’ at random intervals within any image as we rehearsed. What we soon discovered was an underlying theme becoming apparent in the work, an almost playful attack on the seriousness of the commission. I began to wonder what this meant for the work and soon realised that if we were to work post dramatically then we should embrace anything that stands to negate away from traditional storytelling, to allow ourselves to become lost in the world we were creating.
A company we had been inspired by in the field of post dramatic work were Forced Entertainment, a company whose work focuses on image making theatre and non linear story telling. It was when researching about the companies style of work that I began to find some similarities to ourselves and our ways of working. They write on their work;
The last weeks of rehearsal often see us focused on being able to control and effectively repeat material that was developed during early improvisations. Getting something that perhaps happened by accident the first time to happened again and again convincingly calls for some serious skills. The same final stages of rehearsals also often involve us trying to fix a sequence or structure for the various sections of material we have developed – trying to get the journey of the piece to feel right. There might not be a story but there is always a development across the timeline of a work, a set of tensions that are established, thickened, contradicted and perhaps even resolved. (Forced Entertainment n.d)
It was the notion of working tirelessly over and over with material that had already been created, trying to make sense of the imagery we had made and often accepting it just for what it is (a representational image). There was this link between us and Forced Entertainment that was beginning to become established, we had set out to tell the tale of the death of Percival but had begun to embark on a different tale altogether. We now weren’t concerned with if we had made a historically accurate work but rather we allowed ourselves to be bound up by the aspects of creating a work that is a story within itself. Yes Percival was always at the forefront of the work we were creating but there had been so many images created along the way the work now had shifted and become something different. And we relished that, because we finally had begun to see its limitless opportunities, we could make whatever we wanted as long as we were working within the Postdramatic style.
It was ever clearer that we were becoming more and more involved with a weekly improvisation, each week we would create something new and exciting each bringing new material into the space a new starting point each time and just going along with it if it felt right.
It was important in that moment that we worked with full commitment to our improvisations, we had to say yes to everything to enable us to develop the work.We must then engage in a process of what Improvisational theorist Gary Peters calls Yes’ and NO’s, we must allow ourselves as makers in the moment to say yes, say yes to what ever might aid us to drive the work into the next stage. If we say no then the work stops, and it can not be continued, we have agency as makers to let this happen, but we must always allow the yes’ to come through.
‘…the ‘yesses’ and ‘no’s’ of the works production can indeed be conceived as the operation of choice’. (Peters 2009: 2).
We had to make a conscious decision in the performance making process to say yes to the next stage of development. It didn’t matter if the Chief Contestable was a disco dancing champion if it felt right in the moment than it was necessary for us to develop the work.