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"That’s Who I’d Be, If I Could Sing”: Reflections on a Verbatim Project with Mothers of Sexually Abused Children
No full textSecrets and Lies: Testimony, Ethics and the “Act of Faith”
No full textMany ex-service personnel recently returned from deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. Yet there is very little NHS or MoD support for these individuals who often end up disaffected or criminalised. I wanted to construct a performance project that could respond to this situation and tell this ‘untold’ story of combat. However, I have encountered a hitch. A military psychiatrist explained that many ex-service personnel fabricate stories about their experiences of war. This, he suggested, is often a mean of coming to terms with the difficulty of readjustment following deployment.
Veracity and authenticity are synonymous to our conception of testimony. The testimonial subject who speaks of his experiences but also lies, throws up many challenging questions both in regard to the philosophical truth claims of testimony and to the ‘messy, pesky, risky business’ of developing a research methodology and a practice that can ethically negotiate this possibility.
By drawing on Derrida’s writing on testimony (1998) I explore this ethical dilemma and suggest that by conceiving testimony as a paradoxical discourse we recognise its capacity to engage simultaneously with both truth and fiction. If we conceive testimony not as a ‘descriptive’ or ‘narrative’ process but rather as ‘an act’ of faith does it then become possible to distinguish between testimony that is put forward seriously ‘in good faith’ and a ‘fiction of testimony’ that ‘lies’ or ‘pretends to tell the truth’ ( Derrida 1998)? And can this ultimately enable us to negotiate an ethics of practice that can respond to these challenges
Heidegger's Generative Thesis
No full textFor William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can 'generate' the appropriate sequence of world-time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the 'derivative' status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world-time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is to succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane 'tasks', the contents of 'world time' nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into 'world time' the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling off. I argue, instead, that 'world time' nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite 'irrational' but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or 'iterative' I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the 'existential' level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling off of the world-time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time
Breathing the Verse
No full textCentral to the curriculum of the training actor is the breath and the way in which it produces artistry. In the first part of this chapter I examine the significance of breath in relation to interpretive work on verse language, and the growing psychological awareness of the individual. In the second part, I examine a training process that fosters a deeper relationship between the individual , their breath and verse text
Connoisseurs
No full textA short film that premiered at the Rain Dance Festival 2009.
CAST:
James Frost, Laurie Hagen, George Lenz, Stacey Roc
Barcelona: Earth, Puppets and Embodiment
No full textThe puppeteer-painter Joan Baixas has been a pioneering force within Catalan theatre since the late 1960's, and his work is emblematic of the Catalans' ongoing attempt to to understand both their past and their current identity. This chapter will examine the work of Joan Baixas and related Catalan artists in response to the themes suggested by the title of this book: performance and cultural memory, and embodiment. Puppet theatre has played a significant role within the development of Catalan theatre since the last days of the Franco regime, and Baixas has been one of the main players in establishing Barcelona as a site of theatre memory and conscious re-negotiation
“Berlin … Your Dance Partner Is Death”
No full textDance and death combined in post-WWI Germany to complicate the material authority they were seen to share. Using nascent modern dance techniques to exploit the expressive capacities of the dancing body, choreographers turned to dances of death to portray the increasingly difficult conditions of humanity. The logistics of performing these spectacles of the real are investigated through three choreographer/performers of the Weimar Republic: Kurt Jooss, Valeska Gert, and Anita Berber
The On Theatre Project: Social and Political Theatre and the Notion of the 'Theatre Essay', with On Theatre's Mick Gordon
No full textOn Theatre was set up in 2004 by award-winning artistic director Mick Gordon to explore the fundamental preoccupations of modern life through bold experimental theatre. Much of the company’s work takes the form of a ‘theatre essay’, a theatrical presentation taking a universal theme or contemporary subject and proceeding to debate, dramatise and present it on stage. To date they have explored big philosophical themes thorough their explanatorily-titled plays: On Death, On Love, On Ego, On Religion, On Emotion, On Memory, On Identity, On Truth, On Evolution
Interdisciplinarity and Embodied Knowledge: Towards an Active Aesthetic Using Integrative Performance Practice
No full textCurrent discourses in performance theory cast interdisciplinarity into a dilemma that errs in the direction of excluding practice as meaningful. This chapter argues for the possibility of an 'active aesthetic': recognising that meaning happens in the act of performance rather than in the text or in the construction of intertextual relationships. The work of Experience Vocal Dance Company, and the challenges that the company faces in creating original material within a new genre of Vocal Dance, are used to illuminate this 'active aesthetic' and highlight the issues posed by moving beyond current notions of disciplinarily