MFA Year 1: Crave

In Spring 2025 I created a piece centered around a monologue from Sarah Kane’s Crave. Before coming to Arthaus, my work in theatre was solely about interpreting writers. I didn’t feel confident creating my own piece, and this way of working felt like a comfortable bridge between my past directing style and the new devising methods I was learning.  I interspliced this text with four vignettes I made through varied devising experiments. Kane’s text is a desperate, stream-of-conscious plea to prove one’s love; a simultaneous rejection and consumption of the beloved other. The vignettes served as glimpses into the emotional worlds of each partner. My direction of these was an attempt to mimic the aesthetics of my Active Imagination images. 

For the vignettes I sought a particular primordial, expressionistic style of performance. It is hard for me to define, but when I witness it, I can feel it—the performer’s voice and body forms a pure expression of emotion. My most visceral memory of a performance like this was musician Lingua Ignota at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City. Every centimetre of Ignota’s body was engaged as she keened an earth-shattering song of mourning. I felt the pain directly transfer from her body to mine; it was like an invisible shield that separated our humanities was temporarily shattered. While searching for ways to achieve this performance style, I remembered an interview with Kane in which she asserts that her vision for theatre is similar to Antonin Artaud’s (Robeletto Video). The form of performance Artaud describes in The Theatre and Its Double, one that ‘‘disturbs the senses' repose, frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt’’’ gave words to the visceral audience experience I wanted to achieve (Artaud, 27) .  

Although Artaud left us with inspiring descriptions of what theatre should be, he was not able to fully realize his vision before his death. Jerzy Grotowski in his Toward a Poor Theatre characterizes him thus: 

‘‘Artaud was an extraordinary visionary, but his writings have little methodological meaning because they are not the product of long-term practical investigations. They are an astounding prophecy, not a program.’’ (Grotowski, 1968).

For my vignette performers, I naively wanted to find some definitive Theatre of Cruelty improvisation exercises. Instead, I ended up scouring the internet and racking my brain for past devising activities that could generate the effect I wanted. I then frankensteined them into my own exercises to various degrees of usefulness. Below is a summary of ones I used most frequently: 

• Give them an emotion-rage, joy, etc. Play some sort of repetitive music. Instruct them to use their bodies and voice to poetically depict this emotion (non-literally). Repeat, and as it repeats, let it change.

• Make a ritual based on some emotional concept-mourning, love, joy, etc. You have 10 minutes. (for both of these exercises my provocations were inspired by the Kane monologue.)

• Pick a dream of yours. Let this inspire your movements-at the same time I will be watching, producing writings and drawings based on what I see. We then switch places and I become the mover, they become the writer/drawer.

I was concerned with the potential for these exercises to become emotionally fraught. To combat this, I tried to create a container for each rehearsal with clear boundaries and structure. We found a useful rehearsal rhythm━I came in with a structured exercise, asked the performers to start from a place of improvisation, helped shape things with minor commentary in the moment, and took videos and notes. I then had a few days to process what we did, and could come back with the beginnings of a scene. 

The failures of my piece resulted from a few factors. Firstly, my more classical theatre education, which greatly emphasized ‘‘dedication to the text,’’ limited my thinking. I ended up creating something overly literal; everything became too illustrative of Kane’s words. Although the vignettes were formed in the process, I conceived of the piece’s overarching concept beforehand. This limited the ways a rehearsal process could shape its meaning. Another issue I continually face is that my active imagination work is episodic. Images go from one to the next without much apparent connection. This is not necessarily a problem; I believe this is how most people think and dream. However, how one actually presents this experience in a performance has to be considered. In this one, the scenes were distractingly disjointed.

As far as the performers’ physicality, some of my efforts worked while others didn’t. We were able to build a distinctly expressive world using the body. It was sometimes viscerally effective, but sometimes read as stereotypical or melodramatic in a way that came across as comical. My next two pieces were attempts to solve some of the problems that arose in Crave.