I am a human. Playing an actor. Who is playing a character. Who is aware that he is an actor. Playing a character. If this isn’t making sense, allow me to explain.
As a company, we draw influences from many companies which aid our process for making work is Forced Entertainment (see, I said we’d return to them.) We look for their way of making and how this process is evident in the performance. One such example of this is my character: The Disco Dancer who moonlights as a politician. These two titles may appear as completely opposite to one another but that is part of its charm. It sets a tone for the world of the performance. A world created out of imagination, rooted in reality. Many of the images I was in involved me acting as Spencer and so by having me dressed in a blue velvet jumpsuit, reminiscent of 70s disco, created separation between myself and the image. And in turn, the audience and the image. The suit allowed us as a company to explore and respond to the crime whilst maintaining a degree of separation to the material. It strengthens the notion that we are responding to and not re-performing the crime. We will always fail to re-create the crime, the costume gives us a license to fail. Moreover, by having us as self-aware actors we are able to create images and fragments of material which expose our process and give emotional distance to the material – similar to Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt. This allows for both lightly comical moments and moments which are far more serious in tone. An example of such a moment was the final image. John Billingham (Josh) being interrogated by ‘Chief Inspector, in the murder of’ (Ash). Supporting this image, was myself disco dancing to the side of this image. The image starts off with a light tone but takes a sinister tone as the image evolves. Josh’ shouting of ‘Sorry!’ ramps to explosive levels whilst I quip ‘I’m dancing on his grave’ as he is taken off to be executed. The costume, combined with the character it created unearthed much dramatic potential with the piece. Almost a way of us responding to Spencer is our own unique style.
The notion of actors playing characters was further explored in each characters interrogation. These fragments were devised as a result of our research into the art of interrogation by officers to suspected criminals. We transposed existing questions and changed the names to fit our characters. This technique is shared by Forced Entertainment as Tim Etchells recounts the time a collaborator read this passage from Gross’ Criminal investigation:
Piecing together torn paper.
Simple as this work may appear yet it none the less prevents numerous difficulties, and is often very awkwardly carried out. An investigator often receives numerous torn pieces of paper of small size, the content of which, once pieced together is of the upmost importance….
And so the reconstruction of a narrative from clues, the reconstruction of an event from its objects, the reconstruction of a text from its fragmentary scenes were framed as the objects of our work.
(Etchells, 1993: 73)
With this notion serving as a framework, we had ample opportunity to explore ways to expose our process to the audience. A way we achieved this was having Josh (John) re-deliver his lines in certain styles.
Chief Inspector, in the murder of’ (Ash): ‘Josh that was great but could you deliver this with a more pinteresque style of expression?’
This allowed us to play with the material in an interesting unique way. It allowed us to re-contextualise the crime, not only within its place in history, but within new performative contexts. What if we were to re-create the crime in the style of Samuel Beckett? The style of Pina Bausch? Or we performed it in a true naturalistic style? ‘Within these fields, a range of devising processes evolved in relation to specific and continually changing cultural contexts, intimately connected to their moment of production’ (Heddon, Milling, 2006: 2). This could be another example of infinite/finite theatre. The way that the fragment of was performed was finite, existing in its own ecology. The potential questions are infinite – waiting to be explored in future universes. It appears as if, in this context, I am operating from The Panopticon of my own practice – seeing and theorising about its future and its potential. It is these questions which help me reflect on the process and in turn my practice. The effect of exposing our process to the audience is it allows the performance and ourselves as performers to become self-aware of the material. Safe in this knowledge, the distance is given for us to truly respond to the material.
To conclude, the frameworks put in place allowed ourselves as a collaborative to feel confident in approaching the material. It gave us freedom to create images we wanted to create and made them appropriate to contexts. As the process evolved, it could be fair to say the making of the show became the show itself. That by flashing the dramaturgy to the audience, a show was born out of this act.