Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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The Limits of Access: The Messy Temporalities of Hope and the Negotiation of Place
No full textOne widely accepted narrative in Singapore concerns access and reads thus: education is the main vehicle for upward income mobility. Students are sorted into Normal and Express programmes through the Primary School Leaving Examinations at 12 years of age. Academic overachievement is the socially validated norm. Rising incidents of youth suicide and depression in recent years have been attributed to academic stress. I explore the messy temporalities of hope and propose that hope is created when imaginations of the future are not constrained by the parameters of access
Shakespeare’s Professional Guilt: Acting, Monstrosity and the Devil
No full textIn recent years, neuroscientific studies into cerebral activity during performance have thrown up fascinating results across a number of very different artistic styles, from Noh to naturalism. Pretty much regardless of the style or medium, electrical activity in performers’ brains is concentrated in the same places: areas of the brain related to sense of self; visualisation; motor function; and empathy.
In his famous speech about acting, Hamlet is using EM language to describe precisely this process. To “force the soul” means to change the sense of self. “Conceit” – visualisation – is the “working” part: the effort made to envisage how the changed self changes the appearance of the extrinsic world. From this “working” springs observable physical change; and its cause is the imaginative empathetic association made with the character – “for nothing. For Hecuba!”.
But what’s “monstrous” about it?
‘Monstrous’, like most words Shakespeare chooses so carefully, is an interesting word. It ultimately derives from Latin monere, meaning ‘to warn’; a monster is something ominous. Shakespeare likes the word and uses it and its associated forms liberally: monstrous appears 64 times in 28 of his 38 plays, and monster 87 times in 27 plays. It’s never really morally neutral except as an occasional expression of scale (“most monstrous size”). The vast majority of Shakespeare’s uses of the word have clear moral connotation: to be ‘monstrous’ is to be associated either actually or rhetorically with the abstract and inchoate forces of evil, if one were to think in classically-educated EM terms; if one were to think in terms of the prevailing religious dogma of Shakespeare’s society, to be ‘monstrous’ is to be engaged willingly or unwillingly in the Devil’s work.
Of course, in Shakespeare’s day, there were a lot of people, especially religious Puritans, who did genuinely believe that acting was the work of the Devil. They did so, no doubt, in part because of an intrinsic and subconscious resistance to certain forms of art or thought, just as some naturally small-minded people do today. But they also believed it in specific intellectual terms. The Ten Commandments instruct us not to bear false witness, not to lie. When an actor assumes the person of someone they are not, they are lying. Therefore acting is the work of the Devil. Monstrous.
If one looks to the primordial roots of performance – which might be perceived better through non-Western cultures – there is a strong connection between notions of possession and acting, which has been extensively described in anthropological terms. In some cultures ideas of ‘possession,’ in the sense of being under external control, have been associated with positive notions of moral elevation. But in the Manichaean intellectual landscape of EM society, possession was also the work of the Devil. Monstrous.
Contemporary psychology tells us much more nuanced things about truth, subjectivity, and our capacity to believe things conditionally than were available to most EM thinkers. While some in modern Western society may be upset by some of the things that can be said in narrative drama, few are disturbed by the idea of acting per se. Yet in Shakespeare’s day, even actors had to ask themselves that question, is it not monstrous?, since many in society fervently believed it was. The moral uncertainty that is part of every considered life in the context of its own environment led Shakespeare to consider extensively the idea of monstrousness. One might say now that Shakespeare had a subconscious anxiety about his work, which he worked through in part by making conscious and considered the moral implications of his craft. It was a mindset foisted upon him by his cultural moment. In legal terms actors were rogues and vagabonds, but in religious terms they were corrupters of mankind.
This paper discusses how Shakespeare’s understanding of his own craft as an actor and theatre-maker relates to his ideas about monstrosity and the devilish, and how we might perceive and understand this cognitive dissonance in his writing
Loaded
No full textGravity shapes us. From birth to death, what bodies can do is bound by what they weigh. Things fall, softly or heavily, constantly or all at once. Some things are too heavy to carry, or to lift. Some things carry us.
Loaded combines an evocative original soundscape with texts ranging from ancient literature to modern science. Its eight performers use planks, sandbags as well as each other to explore how bodies and structures learn to bear loads – or fall apart. Violent, lyrical and funny, Loaded is a startling new show about the mechanics of weight and what happens when we face the limits of our strength.
The production developed as part of the BA Acting Collaborative and Devised Theatre curriculum at Royal Central which pioneers new approaches to actor-training and theatre-making. Working for the first time on a dance-theatre show, graduates from the BA Hons in Acting CDT and BA Hons in Theatre Practice programmes collaborate with established, award-winning artists, Neil Bettles, Vicki Manderson and Colin Grenfell (https://shining.lighting/).
Artist residencies at Ormiston Academy Trust (Jan-Oct 2017), The Place Theatre, London (Sept 2017) and The Old Rep Theatre, Birmingham (Oct 2017) are followed by four performances at The Old Rep from 5-6 October 2017. Loaded will tour nationally in Autumn 2018, beginning at The Place Theatre
Disappearing Acts: On Analysing Creative Practice in Spain
No full textThis paper deals with modes of seeing and ways of working in contemporary Spanish theatre. It explores the methodologies of talking with actors about the preparation and enactment of a role, of observing rehearsals and discussing the setting up of the sequence of actions that makes up the theatrical performance, and how these interactive collaborations with theatre and film artists can assist in a mapping out of ‘other’ or largely undocumented working practices. Indeed, furthering the dissemination of these methodologies — through published interviews, editorial work, and the programming of film seasons, and other public engagement events, and production reviews, — has allowed it to be tested, assessed, and modified elsewhere. It draws on a few select examples — conversations with Nuria Espert on her own practice over the past 60 years; observational work watching the production process of stage directors Calixto Bieito and Lluís Pasqual as each constructs a stage world with their creative and technical team during the rehearsal process; and in the final section of the paper, an extended consideration of my collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar for BAFTA, the British Film Institute and Ambassadors Theatre Group. My discussion is framed around broader methodological questions I have drawn on in archival research conducted on the actresses María Guerrero and Margarita Xirgu. Through this framing mechanism, I hope to show how an engagement with practices of enactment has shaped the historical narratives I have constructed on creative practice in Spain through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, and the ways in which a direct engagement with those who make culture in Spain can assist in understanding how that culture is constructed and consumed
Willful Distraction: Katie Mitchell, Auteurism and the Canon
No full textThis lecture/essay uses Sara Ahmed's conception of 'willfulness' to consider the repeated accusations, levelled by critics against director Katie Mitchell, of 'auteurism' and productions whose effect is 'distracting'. It argues, via a close analysis of Mitchell's productions of three canonical works for the stage - Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Strindberg's Miss Julie, that Mitchell's project is deliberately and productively to distract from the political agenda that underpins these works' canonical status. In these stagings, Mitchell distracts - that is, draws attention away, both literally and figuratively - from narratives that sustain patriarchal and class oppression, in order to expose and counteract their interlocking functions. The essay concludes with a consideration, by contrast, of Mitchell's tacit acceptance of the hegemonic position of whiteness in the contemporary European theatre, and argues for a similar project to distract from its political agenda