Start with the original composition and let theatre be the crime…
When the module began, the Professional Northerners were commissioned to develop and adopt ways of compositional making to adapt a theatre performance as a collective. The commission invited the opportunity to use current and new strategies for performance making. The Professional Northerners brought you ‘Sorry Spencer’. ‘Sorry Spencer’ is a contemporary response to a forgotten true British crime. The performance investigated compositional strategies as an experimental means to bare testimony to a real-life event. Throughout these blog submissions I will unfold the series of events which led to us creating ‘Sorry Spencer’, which was our version of representing crime and punishment, which was the initial commission set for us.
In the early stages of the commission, we had numerous conversations surrounding our understanding of:
- What makes a successful collaboration?
- Where is our expertise’s most important within our group?
- What do we want to achieve from this process?
Beginning with a theme, event or story I am eager to create work that predominantly focuses on an agenda that provokes social reflection. This commission we all agreed was an opportunity to evolve and challenge different territories of writing, playing and performing. We felt that if we were to finish the process for making this piece of work, the only way we would feel a strong sense of achievement would be inviting different styles for making.
“My claim, then, is that the time of creative breakthroughs is highly charged, both affectively and cognitively. Support is needed at this time, more so than at any other time in life since early infancy. The kind of communication that takes place is unique and uniquely important, bearing closer resemblance to the introduction of a new language early in life, than to the routine conversations between individuals who already share the same language.” John-Steiner (2000;123)
This interesting analogy between childhood and adult experiences somewhat relates to the times as a collective we first started making theatre together five years ago, to since then recognise how we have formed our own household styles. My practice is a development from the worlds of my own projected into contemporary versions of a beckettian/pinteresque environment loaded with meaning and feeling but not saturated with cliché. For this commission we decided we wanted to create something based around true crime. This posed as a fascinating choice based on two reasons:
- Aim to have the ability to comprehend the incomprehensible, is that possible?
- Can we use the functionalities of true crime as a framework to make theatre? Is our crime going to be the theatre we make?
Understanding crime and having conversations about true crime proved to be difficult. Trying to position myself in the mind of people who have committed barbaric crimes affected me emotionally. It wasn’t necessarily the crimes which made me uncomfortable, more the fact that before these crimes took place, the criminals had already assessed what they were going to do before taking action. Because I was uncomfortable about this, I catapulted myself into developing ideas around the process of how crime is policed and what the process is for dealing with a crime. I watched fictional and non-fictional police/crime programmes and pondered on the opportunity of recreating images of true crime in a theatre space. The commission was developed through creating a vast number of images. We researched into the history of crimes in Great Britain, the politics behind the crimes and the motive behind the crimes, which lead us to the crime of the murder of Spencer Percival…
SEE CASE FILE #2 FOR THE MURDER OF PERCIVAL AND THE MAKING PROCESS…