Reflective Practitioner: Imagination

Today’s session really highlighted the importance of the performer’s investment and creativity in this process. It highlighted the issue of performer training and showed a real need to address this in our HE and professional institutions. This was an issue that was raised and addresses at the conference I attended last year at Huddersfield University on the Postdramatic. I have made attempts to find literature on the subject but so far I have not been hugely successful. I will keep looking though. I took at look at the literature that was available about devising.

Today’s session really boiled down to an absence of Etchell’s notion of ‘play’ and ‘investment’ that I mentioned in previous entries; although I am familiar with his writing on the subject I need to find practical ways of achieving this level of play and investment from my performers, something that Etchell’s does not offer up. Only Oddey’s book, Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook,[i] has any practical solutions for undertaking such a task. Although, Oddey’s text is also now a little dated and does not enter into discussion about the performer as cipher.

I need to consider ways in which I can facilitate the performers and inspire them to want to play and invest in the themes that we are addressing; as well as find games, tasks and activities that give them the opportunity to invest. Maybe it does all come down to the people who are involved with the project and thus what they can or are willing to bring to it. My performers and I have not been brought together out of a common ground or mutual interest in the project; I had to persuade people to take part, which is not an ideal starting point for a devising project. Forced Entertainment are so successful because of the people that make up the ensemble and what it is that they bring to create that dynamic- how they play and what they invest. They have relationships that have been developed over 20 years. I just hope that Nikki, Debbie and Richard can find the need to play and confidence to invest in the work that we are doing-they need to develop relationships and working dynamic-it is not something that I can give them but something that has to be found and discovered. Most of all they have to be willing to enter into that journey without reservation or hesitation-they have to be brave-I just hope they can be. I know what we need to do and I am now going to have to work hard to find out how I can facilitate them in getting there.

Etchell’s talks about what brought Forced Entertainment together in the first place:
‘We were a group of friends who somehow convinced ourselves that we would be able to make some things together. At the beginning, we were still students, and, in various combinations, we worked together and began to make things. Then, once we finished our studies, we started the company properly. But more than anything, at that point it was an idea or an inclination that we could perhaps make something together.’ (New Art: 2006)
In the case of Siren Song, I was convinced that I could make something and have tried to persuade undergraduate students that they could make something with me. It was a difficult task and although I do have performers I am still concerned that too much arm twisting was involved and because of that perhaps not all involved are as committed or invested in the project as I am.
‘How does that work in a group? Your inclination is not necessarily the inclination of other members of the group.
The group is a very curious thing, because on the one hand it’s got lots of inclinations, since there are lots of people, and lots of people are constantly pulling and pushing the company in different directions. On one hand that means that there’s lots of potential, on the other hand it means that there are lots of things that get proposed get kind of shouted down or stopped. But what also happens, which is the positive side of that, is that anything proposed by one person is endlessly modified and augmented and added to and taken away from by other people in creative ways - as well as not so creative ways (laughs) - but basically, for us there is a sense that somehow what you can achieve together in that process is deeper and richer than what you could achieve on your own if you had simply followed one of those desires or inclinations.’ (New Art: 2006)
I would like to think that we will be able to find such a fluid and dynamic way of working and it suggests that no matter what I bring to the table and attempt to facilitate, things will only happen when all of the performers are as invested and involved with the process as I am.
http://new-art.blogspot.com/2006/07/interview-with-tim-etchells-from.html accessed on 02/11/06
[i] Alison Oddey. Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, (London: Routledge, 1994).