Amy Clare Tasker, 13 January 2016

WHERE THIS SESSION CAME FROM

Amy and Verity called two separate sessions and then combined them…

Verity is creating a physical piece as part of the third year of her degree in Theatre

Design and wanted to find out about young companies making exciting work.

Amy is a director/maker developing a verbatim piece incorporating movement and

original music. (www.amyclaretasker.com/hyphenated) She was keen to speak to

others about dynamic ways to present verbatim material, while respecting the work of

traditional verbatim theatre makers (which can be very static.)

THANK YOU TO GAVIN, JOSEPH, NICO, SUSIE, PIA, and TINA FOR JOINING US.

REFERENCES & RESOURCES

book: Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre

book: The Choreographer's Handbook (Jonathan Burrows)

PRACTITIONERS

Frantic Assembly

Complicite

DV8 (physical and verbatim) - John, Can We Talk About This?, Dead Dreams of

Monochrome Men

Alecky Blythe - London Road (verbatim musical film), Little Revolution, The Girlfriend

Experience

Akram Khan, London-born Bangladeshi director - Zero Degrees

Dan Canham, Still House

Ultima Vez

Anna Deveare Smith - Fires in the Mirror, many others

Gecko @EdFringe

Big Mouth - verbatim piece with political speeches

Parkinsons Master Class on Sky Arts - with Akram Khan

Fuerza Bluta

Political Mother @ Brixton Academy

Clod Ensemble

Luke Thomas (couldn't remember the name of the company)

Paper Birds @ Ed Fringe

Simon McBernie - the Encounter, Tell Them That I'm Young & Beautiful,

The Master & The Margarita

The Faction @ New Diorama Theatre

Camden People's Theatre

Chelfish - Japanese playwright/company with opposite movement - 5 Days In March

Robert Wilson - Einstein & The Electric Beach

Teatr Zar (Poland)

Double Edge Theatre (Boston)

Kneehigh

Nostalgia (film) by Andre Tarkovsky

Nicolas Kent (Tricycle)

Aleeky Blythe

Chris Goode

Guy Bar-Amotz @Jasmine Vardimon Company

OBSERVATIONS

formula of major successful devising companies being copied by younger companies -

derivative work

Lack of SPACE as a barrier to young companies finding their own

methods and voices

Is is possible to define the genre of “physical theatre?” Isn't all theatre physical?

Process: blocking out movement/images/tableaux before writing the script

Tools: wider array of expressive tools - movement tells a story just as much as text

(sometimes a different/opposite/complementary story or subtext)

Multisensory tools - food onstage/ “smell design”

“Object theatre” led by design/physical environment

Physical theatre makers often work closely with designers from an early stage - light,

space, objects

Physical theatre shows can travel very easily - a reduced language barrier

English theatre can be a lot of “talking heads” - actors losing the connection between

mouth and body, so that when textual meaning is lost, all meaning is lost.

Balance between visual/physical and textual information. Is there a threshold over

which we cannot absorb any more information?

Difficulty of making a living doing physical theatre. Too “niche.”

DRAMATURGY IN PHYSICAL THEATRE

Gavin is doing a PhD on dramaturgical practices in dance theatre

Invaluable to have dramaturgy in physical/devising projects different points of view of

the director and dramaturg - valuable to separate these roles.

Dramaturg as “the first audience member” giving feedback without knowledge of

rehearsal conversations/shorthand of creative team

Dance dramaturgy different from literary dramaturgy?

Finding the rules of what the structure can be - rather than guiding the piece into

Aristotelian ideals or “the well made play”

INFLUENCE VS ISOLATION

Japanese practice of isolating oneself for 6 months or a year, in order to find individual

voice (Pia, what was the word you used to describe this?)

Artist/company retreats - working in the woods or off on a farm, not seeing other work

distance vs isolation - solo reflection, objectivity, singularity of vision sometimes

requires quiet alone time.

Is this practice at odds with the collective experience of theatre going and theatre

making? Do we lose the connection with the audience?

SCALE & SUCCESS

How does scaling up the profile/scope of the company affect the work?

Funding, recognition, expectations? Some discussion of companies whose early work

was incredible and subsequent productions lacked the same spark.

Tags:

physical theatre, designer, director, DIRECTOR, verbatim theatre, dramaturg,

Designer, Director

Comments: 1

Nico Pimpare, 25 January 2016

My friend Luke's company is called “Snippet Theatre Company”.