I suppose the most common question we asked in this process was how can we ‘crip’ the piece? Alongside what have we already learned that we can employ a dramaturgical strategy? 

The idea of composition in post-dramatic theatre ‘de-emphasises text, narrative and fictional characters’ (Roesner, 2012) and seeks to operate in different dramaturgical devices, be they spacial, visual, temporal or musical.  In recent decades, art as a whole seems to operate in a constant form of flux, it becomes difficult to identify what of the old [traditional] can be used with the current. I use the term ‘current’ to equally reflect the notion of  flux, it would be easy to say that the ideologies we branch from as contemporary practitioners are new, but this is not the case, they are simply ‘current’ – changing and evolving and often adapted to suit our own needs and wants. Ultimately this is the simplest way to assess compositional strategies, elements picked and twisted to suit our own wants. This is exactly the process we have undertaken when focussing on the dramatic text as well as our own personal entanglements. 

De/constructing text

The first thing to note here is that we did not set out to enact the whole play, but merely provide a blurred lens which the audience could merely peek through. Ultimately between our own stories and the dramatic text, we wanted to uncover some unity, a ‘creative synthesis’. As I have already touched on in the previous chapters, we wanted to remove David and Paul, whilst at the same time also removing Max and Horst. In turn, this allowed us some freedom in the space to lose engagement with critical thought and to just be. In allowing ourselves more freedom and presenting ourselves with an element of play, we were able to decipher other, what I shall call criptologies. Our first, and most explicit of these [criptologies] was the breaking of the text. Not only in the fact of the matter that we did not present the whole play and only segments, but also in how we methodically broke the essence of the conversation which takes place from page 61-67. In what we referred to simply as ‘the sex scene’ – although potentially a crude reference we felt that by referring to it in an explicit manner we would engage with the scene in an intimate way as opposed to just reading the text without conviction. By referring ahead to the next chapter ‘A picture speaks a thousand words’ you will be able to see the specific breakdown I am referring to. 

In truth, it wasn’t as simple as it seems to decide on structuring the play in the way we did, on how to embody the text as truthfully as we could and without our [real] selves taking the centre stage. Ann Bogart (2015) claims that in order to tell a story successfully in the theatre you need three key abilities ‘One: you need technique. Two: you need passion. And three: you need to have something to say.’ We had already established what we had wanted to say, whilst we were yet to fully understand the second of ‘passion’ we learned quite quickly that both of us have strengths and weaknesses which are harnessed as a technique in the space. This is not to be misconstrued with acting or storytelling technique perse, but more so conceptual techniques we have learned from our past experiences.