Hello - Thanks for sailing with me to "who knows where "as I navigate the possibilities of The PaperBoats.
If you’re new to this, please check out provocation number one, two and three to get a picture of the journey so far.
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Wow - what a month it has been! We call it "Mad March" in Adelaide - encompassing the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the Adelaide Fringe and WOMADelaide!
Seeing astounding performances beckons us to venture more bravely into the possibilities of our own art-making.
The Adelaide Festival of Arts rarely fails to leave me gobsmacked by something. 2016 was no exception.
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Romeo Castellucci’s Go Down Moses was a revelation. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life!
It’s aural and visual imagery is burned in my brain and will remain there forever.
I am still making connections, associations and discovering new meaning, weeks after seeing it. It was a profound, deeply moving, disturbing and beautifully satisfying performance experience.
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Pina Bausch’s, Nelkin blew me away completely!
Having seen bits of it on video across the years and still images of it in design books, it was like connecting with a long, lost relative.
It was such a joyful and intensely visceral experience to see it live!
Some of the people I have been working with over the last 8 years or so have links to Pina Bausch.
Roz Hervey was a dancer/maker in Meryl Tankard’s company and Meryl was a dancer/maker with Pina Bausch - so Roz is familiar with the devising processes of making image-theatre works in the this style.
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Geoff Cobham's Lighting and Set Design in Force Majeure's "Already Elsewhere"
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With Geoff Cobham (designer extra-ordinaire) and Kate Champion, Roz worked as a co-artistic director of Force Majeure, creating some wonderful work in the same realm.
Much of what I’ve learned of physical-visual theatre and its devising has been sporned by my association with Geoff, Roz and others from the image-theatre and dance worlds.
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Retrospective Making
These image-theatre works are created in what I call a retrospective performance-making process.
The director prepares a framework to work within and invites a team of performance-makers to create performance content by asking them to respond to provocations.
(e.g. using a roll of receipt paper, create 6 images of isolation)
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The performance content accumulates over time and all outcomes are video-ed.
85% of this content ends up on the "cutting floor" ... but there are usually some gems amongst the useable 15%.
It’s a tricky process because it requires directors to let go of their need to be in control, for a significant period during the development of the work, while performers play openly and accumulate content.
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Over time, by association and happy accident, the content and form of the work begins to emerge retrospectively through the creation of performance segments.
The way these segments are dramaturgically configured to make the final piece is also a retrospective process.
If you can hold onto your nerve, the result can be theatre that is richly poetic and surprising.
It is impossible to pre-conceive these performance outcomes in the way a scripted-treatment can be.
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Patch Theatre's - Me and My Shadow
directed by Dave Brown, Geoff Cobham and Roz Hervey
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I’ve led this kind of theatre-making processes in the creation of 4 image-theatre works over the last eight years - Emily Loves to Bounce, Me and My Shadow, Theo and the Lion and The Moon’s a Balloon, all with Patch Theatre Company.
I still feel very much a novice in this world but I love it and want to keep playing with like-minded associates to see what new life we can bring to it.
Retrospective making is not the only way to devise theatre but it is definitely the way to create works that give physical expression to the inner landscapes of human feelings and experiences in distinctively theatrical ways.
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Tanztheater Wuttertal
Pina Bausch
In the "Nelkin" program, there is an extract by Norbert Servos, that elegantly and concisely describes the artistic vision and passion-centre of Pina Bausch’s work. Here’s a stripped back version of it.
Pina Bausch made a universal need the subject of her work - the need for love, for intimacy for emotional security.
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In consistently renewed poetic excursions, she investigated what brings us closer to fulfilling our need for love and what distances us from it.
Here is a world of theatre that does not seek to teach and does not claim to know better. Bausch’s work creates experiences; exhilarating and sorrowful, gentle and confrontational, often comic or absurd too.
It creates driven, moving images of inner landscapes, exploring the precise state of human feelings which never give up the hope that the longing for love will one day be met.
Alongside hope, there’s a close engagement with things every member of the audience knows and has experienced both personally and physically.
Norbert Servos
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There is much in this description that resonates with me and my own performance-making aspirations and so I used it as inspiration to prompt an expression of what theatre means to me, at this stage in my creative life.
What key ideas and essences motivate my excursions?
This is what I came up with. It’s a personal artistic statement expressed as an “our” because I never see myself without artistic associates and partners in these endeavours.
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photograph: Sam Oster, Silvertrace - Roz Hervey & child playing with shadows.
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Dave’s Artistic Statement
Our work seeks to discover the image of the child in ourselves and ourselves in the child.
Believing that the essence of our humanity is cradled and expressed in creative play, we playfully investigate our innate human need to “make meaning” and our associated longing for connection, love, understanding and fulfilment.
In theatrical excursions that make no claims to "knowing”, our poetic, image-theatre performances for children (and the child in all of us), gives deep visceral and physical expression to human experience, through association and metaphor.
We look to the childhood world of wide-eyed wonder and play to discover the heart-beat of all we need to know.
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My Pina Bausch and Romeo Castellucci experiences of the past month have consolidated my personal resolve to deepen my understanding of retrospective image-theatre making.
I will undertake a retrospective process in the first stage of the Tutu Shows PROJECT documenting and and sharing the process along the way.
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The PaperBoats is not a theatre company. We have enough of those already!
The PaperBoats is a partnership platform through which performance-makers create content, develop networks and foster relationships that support and fund the sharing of our work with audiences.
Our journey is about partnership, sharing, collaboration, co-operation, good-will, community, children and of course, performance-making.
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... we'll look at The Tutu Shows PROJECT and how it was conceived.
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This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory group.
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