The Dublin International Theatre Symposium, now cruising into its second year in Trinity's Samuel Beckett Centre, is a significant - if seemingly off-beat - six-day gathering of European theatremakers (see panel). The visiting companies, from seven European countries, have vastly different social and political backgrounds, yet all share a bent towards imagistic, physical theatre, and some have connections with deaf theatre, and various gestural and signing languages. Although the Sam Beckett Centre and Chrissie Poulter's developmental Artslab company provide full and tacit support, the initiative is mainly that of one of Ireland's more unusual independent companies, Pan Pan, and its directors Gavin Quinn and Aedin Cosgrove.
I talked to Quinn at his Sandymount home last week, where he was "getting his head together" after re-rehearsing his new work, Peepshow, for its Irish premiere (see panel), and before the week-long haul of the symposium would begin. The tall 28year-old director talked affably and rapidly, constantly rolling his hands around in the air in front of him, and shifting in the seat with a kind of wired-up physicality which operates to a nervy internal beat of its own. How fluent is his signing now? "Pretty good. I can communicate OK, except that sometimes watching deaf people going zippetyzippety, it can be a lot easier to sign than it is to read." His involvement with deaf actors began when, as a student, he did a workshop with a deaf school in Cabra. "I was struck by how, physically, the deaf body was different because of the way the person is signing all the time. Like the specialised training of a dancer, there was a physical grammar there, and a quality - in the sense that most deaf children grow up in hearing families, so they spend their life getting attention phyically."
Pan Pan itself itself is vocalese for the sign-language term for the vibration of footsteps, by which the company's core members Charlie Kelly and Mark McCaffery, both of whom are deaf, can pick up a cue from another actor approaching them from behind. In all of Pan Pan's work over the past six years, signing is incorporated into a flow of movement and spoken language.
"It's so much a part of the work now, I almost can't see it, and I have to think about how to describe the role it plays," says Gavin Quinn. "It's so much a part of the physical and textual language, and what is and isn't translated between the deaf and hearing actors. It's a bit like the real theatre you see when you're walking down the street."
If Pan Pan seems to be partly rooted in the deaf community - a permanent fixture of the company's calendar is its annual twoweek workshop with deaf teenagers (in association with NAYD), culminating in a performance - the company's own material always had its own macabretinged aesthetic, with improvised routines often exploring power and aspects of cruelty between the characters. The shows, often sepulchrally lit, indeterminately tap into some darker veins of the modernist European stage - from the Dostoyevskian miasma of Martin, Assassin Of His Wife (scripted by the graphic novelist Stephen Walsh); the Strindberg variation of Mademoiselle Flic Flac In The Red Room; even A Bronze Twist Of Your Serpent Muscles, a tormented two-hander which won the Fringe Festival award in 1995, thanks in no small part to the bludgeoning nihilism of the Dublin band The Idiots, who accompanied the performance live.
"Our basic ground rule is to make theatre without fear, and simply to make innovative interesting theatre that isn't like anything else, even though our shows grow out of each other," says Quinn. "The ideology of the performance is about collaborating. If we are all connecting properly, it gives the chance for other voices to emerge besides that of the director, which gives the actor an invested responsibility, rather than one specific role to interpret in line with other actors and the way you are being directed."
As a director it is his job to impose a certain coherence, but what is he trying to communicate, say, with Peepshow? He finds it difficult to verbalise, staring for a moment at a point on the wall. "Well, I suppose it's about real human feelings and impulses, a certain place of a person living in the world today. Like when a person opens up and begins to talk to someone who misinterprets them; maybe they become a little paranoid, and they begin to fear meeting another person. And it's about longings for love and human relations, the way that people escape their own personalities and each other."
And what improvisational techniques does the company use? "Actually, they're very simple. I try to get the actor to become autodidactic, to be able to work out their own personal movement, to develop a group dynamic by listening to and responding to each other and making decisions. There are basic techniques for improving your onstage presence, but also in general by making things physical rather than communicating them on a psychological basis. It's about making actors more athletic and action-orientated. Some exercises we make up, others we pick up along the way."
Interestingly, he lists Meyerhold and Piscator as major influences, but shies away from specifics. "We would go about things in an eclectic way, aiming at bringing about a movement which is appropriate to the performer - so there would be no one style, at the moment, I'm trying to be informed by nothing, and to forget everything I have ever read or learnt. All these techniques and influences, I think, are only useful if you can hide them."
This year, like last, the visiting companies include some of an expanding web of contacts which Pan Pan set up by playing at Impact 1993 in Derry, the Brouhaha festival in Liverpool and, more recently, international festivals in Krakow, Marseilles, Brest (where Pan Pan premiered Tailor's Requiem as part of L'Imaginaire Irlandais), Klagenfurt in Austria; the big Scandinavian showcase, Theatre Days in Stockholm; or the big roving performance installation, Citta Invisibile, run by Teatro Potlach in Italy, where Pan Pan came across their arresting core performer, Patrizia Barbagallo.
"By taking our work to all sorts of different places, we get the strength to deal with different audience and reactions, and develop a stamina and an energy level and an experienced coolness and toughness onstage - all those instincts. It also takes you outside your own narrow culture, of playing to people that you know, or a limited audience, it brings you into the hardcore fact of performing a show to a bunch of total strangers. It's all about diversification, getting out into Europe, exposing yourself to other work and getting your own work seen. It's certainly better than, say, just applying to the Arts Council, putting all your eggs in one basket, and then getting disappointed and maybe doing nothing."
Peepshow, for example, has already played abroad, including nine performances outdoors - in Liverpool, on a beach near Gdansk, and in a mediaeval castle in Olsztyn, also in Poland. "That was a midnight show, and we played to 600 paying customers. I tell you, that did wonders for our morale."
Certainly actors flex their muscles and minds at the symposium's workshops - but, as a director, does Gavin Quinn cull ideas from them? "Not directly, but you get a practical look at different approaches to breaking down inhibitions and working up rhythms within a workshop. Each company has its unique way of working, and let's face it, you rarely get to see other directors work."
Surely the symposium is an enormous workload on a creative company? "Yes, our hours are getting longer and our days are getting shorter. We're working all the time, because activity is the main thing. At this stage in our lives, it's what going to make it happen for us. And the symposium is a great lift: the freedom to observe and take part in workshops, get feedback from audiences, and meeting other companies working with deaf actors - because sometimes you can feel like you're working in total isolation."
