Once our workshops were completed and our dramaturgical framework was in place it was time to start generating material. Expanding upon our learning from Rachel Biscoe, we felt that music was a starting point as a way to create material, through the lens of The Death of a Salesman. Our task was to bring in a piece of music and discuss our initial reaction to it. How it made us feel and what story felt present. As three artists our musical tastes were successfully diverse: classic rock, psychedelic rock and neo-folk were all introduced into our rehearsal room as the songs Moonage Daydream, Days of our lives and Holocene echoed. Our task was to then respond to the sounds. Our responses ranged from original text we had written; text from the play or choreography to the sound. The wide range of responses allowed for diverse elements to be added into fragments, giving our process a seemingly three-dimensional quality. This collaboration between the songs, my response as an artist and the collaborative response between the three of us gives new quality to the work. The more we explored, the more we discovered about the music and its relationship to the play. A complication I often find with music in performance is the lyrics often contain their own narrative, which in a performance, prescribes this to a listening audience. However random they may seem: ‘I’m an alligator, I’m a momma poppa coming for you’ (Bowie, 1972). We took the dramaturgical decision to remove the lyrics and respond to the instrumentals instead. Upon reflection, I believe this was a wise decision. It allowed us, as a collaborative, to collaborate with the artist when responding to their work, whilst responding to Miller’s play. The constant flow of collaboration allowed the weaving or narrative to happen organically and unearthed a more pragmatic approach to the work.
Once this exploration was completed, we started to relate it to the play. Starting with the character of Willy Loman. We wanted to make the play resonate with a more contemporary audience and attempted to portray Willy as a refugee. To achieve this, I walked downstage, carrying multiple suitcases – signalling a journey. Considering the sensitivity of the material and subject matter we took a post-dramatic way of showing this. A narrator character placed a microphone to my mouth and I uttered ‘My character has been on a journey and he has reached his destination.’ Although this may appear simplistic it allowed us to show our thinking without being overt with our intentions. By casting a narrator character, it allows us to strengthen the post-dramatic, forced entertainment style framework and exposes a collaborative element to the audience. Almost inviting them to view our collaborative process and, in turn, allow them to collaborate with us by viewing. The fragment concluded with myself and Ashley mirroring each other tying ties and shaking hands. In our opinion, both images conjure images of quintessential masculinity. By the narrator allowing us to introduce our characters it shows the audience how as performers we are collaborating with Miller’s fictional characters to create the fragment. I was both James and Willy in these moments, I am merely inviting the audience to speculate who I was and both answers are correct and valid. The fragment ends with my character placing his suitcases at Ashely’s feet, opening the final one to create a circle of leaves at our feet. It was our intention for this fragment to show a father/son relationship, which is pivotal to the play and Is something we find important as men today in our lives. This fragment allowed us to achieve both, without creating an overt narrative for the audience.
The next element of exploration focused on Willy’s two sons: Biff and Happy. The collaborative elements stem from their collaboration as characters with themselves, their family and the audience. This fragment involved Josh and Ash sitting opposite one another trying to apologise. We framed by playing a game of ‘heads up’. By placing a name on their forehead and having them ask questions to the other performer in order to guess who they are. This invited the audience into the collaboration by creating dramatic irony, allowing them in on the joke so to speak. This was repeated three times and on the final time the names were replaced with insults from the play. This connected the fragment back to the source material and ensured we stayed within the framework. The framework of The Death of a Salesmen and the post-dramatic framework we devised, and performed in. The fragment concluded with a repeated image of two performers embracing. As the image built, suitcases used in the first fragment were placed between them – causing the embraces to become more difficult and challenging for the performers. Although it was our intention to create and image showing the brothers difficultly to reconcile with their emotions, caused by their father, we did not wish to make this clear. Instead, by creating an ambiguous image allows an audience to create their own narrative and swim in a sea of ambiguity. The metonity, the vagueness allows collaboration to occur between performer and audience. If it was prescribed and obvious there would be no collaboration. Only a lecture about The Death of a Salesman. Although, the idea of repeating images is not a new idea within my practice, both solo and collaboratively. It is only when the idea of ambiguity, within the narrative is introduced that elements of performer/audience collaboration can be unearthed.
For the final fragment and the final image of the piece, we wanted to tackle the death of Willy Loman from the perspective of his wife, Linda. Dealing with such an emotionally raw subject matter would demand sensitivity when creating the material. To achieve this, we had Ashley play the narrator character and ‘direct’ myself and Josh as the performers to create the image of the funeral. This approach was heavily inspired by the Forced Entertainment show Real Magic: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1BcuWrlL8o)
This approach of exposing the creative methods, and therefore, our collaboration allowed us to negotiate the sensitivity of the subject and also strengthen our dramaturgical framework. We performed the text from the requiem of the play in a verbatim style. This showed Miller’s words being performed in the style of Forced Entertainment, performed by the collaboration of three performers. This showed the audience the chain of collaboration present in our process and its bleeding into the performance. Furthermore, the requiem took place in the leaves we created in the first fragment, thus, tying our performance together. Although our work aimed not to be narrative centric, it is still important to have a loose structure for an audience to follow and, thus, welcome them to collaborate with us on.
Bowie, D. (1972) Moonage Daydream. RCA.