Reflective Practitioner-the rape text

I chose not to take the material I had chosen (two different autobiographical memories of a sexual encounter and a memory of a suicide attempt) and play it out as a naturalistic scene by making a dramatic text of the events but instead to find a way of not fixing the significance and knowledge of the events but instead keeping them open for the audience to locate themselves within the text and make of it what they could and invariably would. I also decided that I would not write the text for a single voice, I wanted to write words for performers to use, rather than myself. I wanted to over lay the three different memories, blurring the edges into each other so that their significance would become more oblique and less clear. In doing so I wanted to merge the three different stories so that meaning and sense becomes subjective and not at all prescriptive. This way I would make room for the audience to make something of the stories rather than a simple passing of information from my experience and conscious to theirs. By colliding the three memories I hoped to make them work for their supper; I didn’t want my memories to satisfy, I wanted them to stimulate.

I had a clear sense of what I wanted to achieve, however getting to that point was less clear. I started by writing down a first person, factual account of the memories as a starting point, almost like a list, it was a very factual format just outlining the series of actions and reactions. I used this as the starting point for my writing; it served as a brainstorm of sorts. Once I had the basic description of events as accurately as I could, bearing in mind the fallibility of memory, I realised that I needed to find:

A way in which to approach the text that was not simply a narration manifest through the device of naturalistic dialogue.
A way in which the text would be performative and not just literary but without being dramatic.
A way in which to expose the process of the devices that I was employing in penning a text for performance.

I found that in writing for performance, it is difficult, if not impossible to move away from dialogue, so I decided to explore and problematise the dramatic conventions of monologue and dialogue in a way that would expose them as, fixing and limiting conventions, at the same time as they come into being as such. I decided to use rhetoric for the monologue text and naturalistic speech patterns for the dialogue between the three performers. I used the two conventions of theatrical story telling in a self reflexive manner, dropping in and out of them at points in order to draw attention to them as conventions, while applying them.

Instead of using monologue to describe the characters feelings in the moment of the action, in order to illuminate the plot further, (as there are no designated characters just performers inhabiting the text), I used monologue to describe an event that happened to a character (it is not clear even with the use of first person whether the character is fictional or real) in the past. The monologue describes the ‘personas’ feelings at a point in the past, of the character that she may or may not be playing, until we realise that she is simply telling a story, as we are told by the other two voices. However, again it is unclear as to the origins or truthfulness of the first story because the voices keep shifting from story to story and dropping in and out of roles and it becomes evident that it may even just be a game. We recognise the monologue as a plot-driving device, until this is revealed for what it is and problematised by the change from first person to third person and the lack of insight or progression achieved by employing the convention. It drops in and out of naturalistic dialogue but resists being read as conversational or naturalism for several reasons:

The use of repetition.
The use of third person.
The lack of psychological development.
The resistance to fixed character assignment.

The use of repetition works as a device in that, it stops growth or development of plot or narrative into an accumulation of knowledge about either the performers as characters and as to the meaning being conveyed through the plot; it avoids communicating an essential truth. Instead this device offers up possibilities of readings and a multitude of truths. The use of third person works in a very similar way; we recognise narration as a convention of story telling, however the subject and object of the narration is unclear and remains so throughout, the narration does not build and lead to insight or enlightenment as one would normally expect. The text does not allow a fixed notion of character or any fixed psychological profile which the audience can identify; instead they swap lines and roles, continually disrupting any character that they may have built. Dropping in and out of performance personas, the text resists traditional dramatic presence being sustained without creating an awareness of it as a theatrical signifier. In this way the text exposes the facets of its creation and being as it becomes present to the audience. This is similar to Richard Foreman’s early work:

‘[H]e adopted the strategy of ‘crossing out’, of wrong footing or displacing the very elements which would appear to move the ‘play’ or performance towards coherence-signs of character, emotion, narrative.’[1]

I made an attempt to ensure that I gave no stage directions or hints as to action throughout the text, all of the images, action and drama, is contained within the language; essentially nothing actually happens during the text. The pace is driven by rhythm and I was very particular and careful as to my use of punctuation. I wanted to create presence and pace through rhythm, the text is not driven by plot or narrative but moreso by the structure and form of the text. I did apply rules to myself as I was writing the dialogue and these are what brings the text into being; it does not develop, it does not accumulate to a climax, in a sense, but drives on; not toward something but it simply keeps moving and each time it seems to be fixable and readable it drops out of those rules and follows another set.
[1] Nick Kaye, Art into Theatre: Interviews and documents, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Pg. 10