At the heart of creation, we begin a with a ‘formless hunch’ (Brooks), that ‘Eureka!’ moment at which something clicks and it all comes together. However, it is presumptuous to say that, as artists, we [always] know what we are setting out to achieve, and certainly with the production of Bent, we initially had minimal ideas beyond being required to put on a show. This is why, when looking reflectively at myself as a practitioner I prefer the ideology that ‘an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored’. In this belief, I began to look deeper into notions of the self’ which led me on to look at Moustakas and his book Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, and Applications.

A definition of ‘heuristic’ is ‘enabling a person to discover or learn something new about themselves’. Currently, I am on a journey of constantly uncovering new knowledge about myself and find myself surrounded with question after question, for example, how does my disability hinder or strengthen my practice? or, in the same light, how does my disability hinder or strengthen my being. In following a Heuristic approach to research and the production I found that much like Moustakas I challenged understandings of concerns [disability] with the Holocaust as a two-fold context. By this, I simply imply that the Holocaust was both a tool for understanding the context of the platy itself, but also, through Sherman’s exploration of the treatment of homosexuals, it acted as a contextual framework in which we would shape our own interpretation.

The process of creation itself developed a series of questions, which opened us to look at our desired impact.  In working around a heuristic approach we wanted to create an experience for the audience that was governed by ‘availability, accessibility, and applicability.’ This implication looked at our relationship to the audience. Being a largely significant part of the piece, we had decided we wanted to create an intimate immersive experience which engaged the audience rather than keeping them at an arm’s length and innately passive in their experience. The focus of the audience is one which is widely researched and equally, widely scrutinised. White (2013), for example, suggests ‘There are few things in the theatre that are more despised than audience participation. […] the use of audience participation makes people embarrassed, not only for themselves but for the theatre-makers who choose to inflict it on their audience’. However, as an artist, I cannot express an agreement with this statement. Our intention for the audience was to create a semi-interactive experience which brought them into the world, as much as it did separate them. It is clear that an audience is incremental to the success of a theatrical piece of work. BUT, they are not the sole focus, and incidentally, were not the first focus of the piece. 

Identifying with the focus of inquiry 
(Sultan, 2018)

Our initial question centered itself around how we could manipulate the production without twisting or undoing the initial concept. Firstly adopting the ‘inverted perspective’ (Moustakas) and working with the idea of taking the surrounding from Dachau to the centre of York, a similar ground of mass murder of Jewish individuals, [and also the personal setting for both of us as performers] seemed appropriate. The intent behind this was to pertain a sense of familiarity for the audience, to immerse them in the surroundings. We felt, as artists, that by breaking the play in this way, we would create a semi-detached approach to the text, removing our own entities as the frame and replacing it with the location. 

Tutorials provided a useful setting for exploration of the self in relation to the dramatic text. In session one, we began by exploring ourselves, accessing the ‘storyteller’ within. As a pair, we began to unpack our own stories and attempt in assembling the relevance to the play. Moustakas refers to this as ‘Self-dialogue’ in which we [..] enter into dialogue with the phenomenon, allowing the phenomenon to speak to one’s own experience’ (Moustakas) with the ‘phenomenon’ in this process being disability/queerness. Furthermore, in his book, Moustakas also creates the sensation that entering into internal dialogue is the first step, self-discovery, awareness, and understanding encapsulate the very beginning of the heuristic model. By continually engaging in conversation and delving deeper we begin to develop a formal understanding of the problem/concern. The process is guided entirely by the ‘conception that knowledge grows directly out of human experience’ (p.17). 

This, however, is only one part. Ultimately our actions, our research, our desire to create the performance comes from our own tacit knowledge. That being said, it is always difficult to assess how we know something, how something becomes embedded in our lives. Potentially the most asked question in one person’s lifetime is why, demonstrating a lack of understanding – or is it? To ask why we know something, particularly in reference to the self, comes simply from a learned experience, which inevitably becomes a tacit one. How soon follows and leads on to becoming a passive experience of engagement with said knowledge. Before something becomes whole, before we can honestly say we truly understand something we must break down the questions to the simplest questions, those which we are given from a very early age – who, what, where, why, when and how. Such knowledge cannot be put into words and traditional research methods do not include tacit knowledge, but that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t make use of it. 

It was from this that David was asked the question ‘when did you know you were gay?’ In truth, David addressed that he formally knew in his teenage years and that preceding this, there was an air of denial. The information could not be relayed as a surmountable case of cause and effect but rather something innate and in a pre-existence. It was this piece of information that signaled our Eureka! moment. We found that in David’s tacit understanding of his sexuality and I also had a personal discovery, an ‘inkling’ that there was something within me that I couldn’t quite understand, my own disability. Intuition was the staple for the discovery of my own Multiple Sclerosis, linking patterns and forming associations which ultimately led to investigation and diagnosis. Both discoveries each felt as though they required some form of acceptance and that the labels of queer and disabled were, in actual fact something more, something more than ‘crip’ when working together we treated such labels as ‘other’.

This is not to say we treated our labels with disrespect, but by removing the positivity of ‘crip/queer crip’ we began to form a self-evaluative approach of understanding to our dramatic counterparts. Using Max and Horst as an extension of ourselves, or alternatively, using ourselves as extensions of Max and Horst. In reality, there is often a sense of unease when referring to characters as extensions. In post-dramatic theatre we often sway from ‘character’ in order to create a truthfulness which lies beyond the practices of Stanislavski; as I stated in my previous blog Collaborations, we ‘produce works which create an effect than to remain true to the source material’ (Murtough, 2018; 2). As we have found in Bent, using ourselves/characters and interchangeable extensions provided a stronger and more relatable performance.