At a programme at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co Monaghan designed to encourage non-literary theatre, participants are asked to question every underlying assumption, to discuss ideas about theatre and performance, and to defend their concepts from rigorous criticism. It's no walk in the park, writes PETER CRAWLEY.
RARELY HAS a title been so straightforward, yet so contentious. The tag afforded to Make, a week-long residency in the artist retreat of Annaghmakerrig in Co Monaghan for 15 theatre-makers and three professional facilitators, strikes you more as a command than a noun. Even the lettering has a strange urgency – it isn’t an acronym – and unlike the gentle fricative of the title of Threads, a similar residency organised by the Dublin Fringe a few years ago, this imperative suggests the collaborative initiative by the Dublin Fringe Festival, Project Arts Centre and Theatre Forum is hungry to see results.
Pardon this over-elaborate deconstruction of something so apparently simple.
But that’s what even one day at Make will do to you. The point of this project – referred to by some participants as a “performance art boot camp” – is not necessarily to construct work, but rather to dismantle it; to question every underlying assumption, to discuss ideas about theatre and performance at astonishing length, to defend your concepts from criticism so rigorously constructive it might reduce an ordinary mortal to a gibbering wreck, and to come out of the experience somehow stronger, if not remade.
Gathered together in the music room of the serene Tyrone Guthrie Centre towards the end of an exhaustive (and, by all accounts, exhausting) week, the participants watch as their colleagues present the fruits of their labour. Some simply speak, others offer a partial performance, a number use multimedia and visual aids, and more than one participant passes around children’s toys. The work is certainly diverse, but everything seems to belong to a particular school of performance. Make is specifically designed to encourage non-literary theatre, with an appeal to participants interested in “contemporary performance practice, documentary theatre and post-dramatic theatre”. In short, theatre-makers less keen on Brian Friel than Romeo Castellucci, equally at home in Berlin or Ghent, and more concerned with YouTube than the Poetics.
A neat illustration of the tone and tensions of Make comes early during the presentations, when Julien Fišera, a young Paris-based director given to equal amounts of playfulness and seriousness, has five other participants read aloud from a series of transcribed interviews he has conducted during the week. Responding to two questions – what relationships are developed in the process of devising work and what do we believe in when we say we believe in theatre? – no text is read by it’s original speaker and every hesitation, every “um” and every “ah”, is mercilessly recorded. The effect is both self-reflexive, witty and slightly cruel. These are abstract questions and few people seem fluidly articulate in pedantically recorded speech. But Make is always something between a talk shop and a think tank, one that recognises the importance of expression and eloquence as a means to better understand, and thus better make, new theatre.
“In general there is not enough talking about artistic work,” one of the facilitators, Florian Malzacher, tells me. When the critical discourse shrinks and feedback tends to come from sympathetic quarters, usually after a piece of work has seen the light of day, “where does the discussion happen?” Malzacher, a German dramaturg with an encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary performance and a tendency to dress entirely in black, is one of the few people who knows not only what a professional dramaturg does, but also what uniform one is supposed to wear. At one point I watch him stride by the crystal lake and supple beech trees of Annaghmakerrig to press a DVD of a germane Belgian theatre company’s work into the hand of participant Rachel Chavkin, the director of the New York company Team.
“Florian has been kind enough to share his hard drive,” she explains (he has terabytes of theatre performances archived on his computer and an amazing scope of reference). Malzacher’s fellow mentors, Richard Gregory (the director of the Manchester company Quarantine) and Gerardo Naumann (a director, writer, actor and plainclothes dramaturg) tend to offer pointers to participants. Malzacher demurs. “I don’t interfere with the work,” he said.
It may not count as interference, but in an Irish theatre increasingly fond of “initiatives” such as Theatre Forum’s Next Stage programme, Rough Magic’s Seeds programme and Project Brand New, Make represents something of a dramaturgical intervention. Willie White, artistic director of the Project Arts Centre, explains the workshops as “support for work that is devised or artist-based, because obviously people have the desire to make this work, but not the experience or the methodology”. That’s all well and good, so long as it is not designed to force an agenda.
Richard Gregory, who tends to work with non-professional performers and eschews the appearance of traditional theatre, is alive to both the benefits and drawbacks of outside influence. “Willie and Tania [Banotti of Theatre Forum] and Roise [Goan, of the Dublin Fringe Festival] have deliberately constructed the week with three facilitators who have a predilection for a particular kind of work, which references connection with non-performers, with documentary, with real people and their experience. But there was a danger that it became a sort of dogma or a tyranny.”
I ask several participants whether the effect of Make is to bring their work closer to what it wants to be, or to ask them to try something new – “cutting a diamond or following an orthodoxy” as the endlessly quotable Willie White puts it – and no two responses are the same. The former, says Malzacher. The latter, says Chavkin. Both, says White. And Tania Banotti’s response speaks to a concern: “There’s a risk with somebody younger going down a road they shouldn’t go down, or not engaging with something that’s being suggested in a positive way.”
Such is the allure of the postdramatic, where, according to the theory’s originator, Hans-Thies Lehmann, drama “no longer forms the centre, [and] composition is no longer experienced as an organising quality but as an artificially imposed ‘manufacture’.”
At times during Make, an outsider gets the impression that its participants have become immensely articulate with this “manufacture” – fluent in found text, video clips, visual aids and interminable self-reflection – but have yet to actually find something to say.
One participant speaks so self-critically it seems he has fallen into his own feedback loop and might analyse the piece out of existence. Other ideas are of such Byzantine complexity that they seem destined to live only in the imagination. Like the intense intellectuals of Jonathan Swift’s floating island of Laputa, some have seized on invigorating concepts but hover away from a practical application. Artists more secure in their identity don’t suffer the same problem.
PRISCILLA ROBINSON HAS managed to incorporate almost every piece of advice given to her by every mentor and simply throw them into the amusing clutter of a thrift store aesthetic already minted in her previous works. Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan of Brokentalkers have an easy kinship with these approaches to performance and seem unlikely to leave Annaghmakerrig enormously changed. Chavkin and her collaborator Jessica Almasy, meanwhile, know exactly what they can take or leave. “I imagine that work will begin again on all these pieces when everybody recovers from this,” she tells me, as though a complete immersion in postdramatic theatre can lead directly to a post-traumatic condition.
Nor is this limited to the participants. By the end of an intensive week, Richard Gregory jokes that he might quit theatre to become a bus driver, but he has felt genuinely tested by the challenges and doubts raised during the week. “A good question for the organisers is what happens next,” he says. “Because inspiration is exciting, but it’s not necessarily a comfortable thing.” For their part, the organisers see Make as the first of an annual commitment creating “a space for the generation of new ideas where you become better able to articulate what you want to do and why,” as Goan put it. “It’s really about making a space where you can have a discussion about aesthetics and not about grants,” says White.
Each organiser admits to a certain amount of self-interest. In the absence of strong opportunities for young theatre-makers or new methods of working in this country, experimental theatre could use a shot in the arm, and the most likely platforms for its fruition are the Fringe festival and Project Arts Centre. But if Threads is anything to go by, the dividends from this programme may not have a palpable impact for some time. So long as that occurs naturally.
“The most important thing,” concludes Richard Gregory, “is that you discover your own way. Whatever you borrow or steal or create for your influences and language, the most important thing is to find your own way of doing it and not to become a hostage to fashion.” That is why it is both unsettling and encouraging to listen to the group’s youngest members, Grace Dyas and Una McKevitt, discuss their ideas in the last moments of the project. Dyas, considerably more articulate than Julian Fišera’s verbatim text might have led you to believe, is determined to make a postdramatic, site-specific, verbatim piece about drug addicts, against every worried suasion that she try something pre-postdramatic first. “It’s not my story, so I can’t write a play about it,” she tells them, like a star pupil.
But McKevitt is an example of insouciant resilience, effortlessly imbibing every lesson yet somehow turning the whole week on its head. When her hyper-media presentation on a planned documentary project involving non-performers, with ample room for self-examination, ends, she adds an afterthought. “All these stories are giving me an idea about plot and form,” she says, before announcing something that sounds utterly radical. “I think I’d like to write a play, eventually.”
