Research Process

I wanted to do one more experiment for my final project that attempted to solve some of my past pieces’ contradictions. My failures in April left me in a place of searching—I spent two years where most of my projects involved working with either no hierarchy, or as a solo performer. I needed to find other directors whose work excited me and interrogate their processes. In May through lots of online research and conversations with friends and mentors, I created a list for myself. The most fruitful of those were Lars Øyno, Briony O’Callaghan, and Romeo Castellucci. I used this research phase as an opportunity for absorption and synthesis. I wasn’t sure how I would apply it, but I first just needed to gather.

What interested me about Lars Øyno was his work with actor physicality. In videos of his productions, this ‘‘penetrating’’ feeling I was seeking from performers came through. Øyno’s actors moved with an unmistakably passionate and primal quality. We started an email correspondence where I inquired about his practice. He told me that his company Grusomhetens Teater (theatre of cruelty in Norwegian) uses Jerzy Grotowski’s aesthetics and acting techniques as practical applications of Artaud’s vision for theatre. (Cite) Although I did not fully agree with him on the visual/aesthetic front, it gave me a lot of insight into working with performers. 

My project was due in October, and obviously this was not enough time to learn the entire Grotowski method. However, my conversation with Øyno did drive me to read Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. In my final project, I used one or two exercises from this book to experiment with physicality, but I am mainly saving this for a later piece. It was too much to try at once. What I did find immediately useful were his writings on technique and form. He asserts that they are necessary to contain an intuitive experience: On Page ?? of Poor Theatre he writes: 

 “We believe that a personal process which is not supported and expressed by a formal articulation and disciplined structuring of the role is not a release and will collapse in shapelessness. We find that artificial composition not only does not limit the spiritual but actually leads to it.’’

I found this very relevant to the challenges I faced in April. I wanted so badly to work from a place of  “pure’’ intuition that the process and interpersonal relationships collapsed. I ended up imposing too much form on the micro of each rehearsal, but the macro of the entire process was chaotic and emotionally fraught. He goes on to say: 

“The more we become absorbed in what is hidden inside us, in the excess, in the exposure, in the self-penetration, the more rigid must be the external discipline; that is to say the form, the artificiality, the ideogram, the sign. Here lies the whole principle of expressiveness.’’

Through Grotowski I started to see how my more classical theatre background and intuitive creative practices could work symbiotically. 

Another useful discussion in this book centered around the director/actor relationship. I was still uncertain what role I wanted each of us to play in a more devised, intuitive process. I wanted to be the driver of the vision, but also wanted a fruitful creative exchange between myself and the performers. Grotowski offers insights into the mechanics of this exchange: 

 “His growth is attended by observation, astonishment,

and desire to help; my growth is projected onto him, or, rather, is

found in him─and our common growth becomes revelation. This

is not instruction of a pupil but utter opening to another person,

in which the phenomenon of  ‘shared or double birth’ becomes

possible.’’

In my September piece, I strove for this type of reciprocity. We had our own specific roles and responsibilities, but they had to distinctly inform and influence each other. I wanted the collaboration to be a back-and-forth that broke down the barriers between us and caused collective growth. 

Another director I reached out to was Briony O’Callaghan. Her company Created a Monster “explores personal hells…the relationship between mental illness and creativity.’’ (cite her website). Because of the distress some of my actors experienced in my previous process, I was looking for answers on how a process can provide safety to work with personal, emotional subject matter. She very graciously offered to have a conversation with me over zoom. Her insights were enlightening into how I wanted to move forward:

“You can’t help but use what you’ve got─the body and the mind. You can’t divorce the two things, However, in the varying points of having a practice or a craft and the very act of doing a masked performance─the point is not to protect the performer─it protects the performer in the sense of what is art─in this sense, for the context of this piece (Put this piece), or making work with mental health issues as a theme─it is not about you, it’s about the work that we make; the mask creates a distance or a boundary that is really useful.’’

These insights echoed a conversation I had with my mentor Michelle after the April project, and complement Grotowski’s assertions about craft. Mask and technique act as conduits, a way to access the emotion and expose ourselves without actually exposing ourselves. It is about the piece and the piece is about us. 

Briony attended the Lecoq School in Paris. This gave us a useful shared vocabulary.  When I asked her to go more in-depth about her rehearsal techniques, she emphasized the need for play:  

“There are so many exercises and games you can use─the most important thing is whatever it is, it’s about being playful, and finding the play in the serious, being seriously playful, rather than playfully serious.’’ 

I realized this basic idea─the first thing we learn at Arthaus.Berlin, the thing that is emphasized over and over again to us, had gotten lost in my rehearsal process due to this desire to access these deep,dark places within myself. My piece inspired by Dionysos had to contain both his violence and his joy. 

From Øryno, Grotowski, and O’Callaghan, I received great insight into rehearsal processes and collaboration with actors. However, I was still searching for a starting point, an overarching creative concept to contain the rehearsals. I needed a reference, something that gave me the stability of working with a script, and a “mask’’ between the performers and me, but also something that allowed space for intuition and creative association. In my two years at Arthaus, my work had become increasingly oriented around image. I knew that image would play a very important role, but how to use it? One of my professors, Paul Boudraitas suggested looking into visual-artist-turned director Romeo Castellucci. In Castellucci’s work, I was drawn to this  tension I saw between classical form and intuitive content. 

I watched various productions and also found interviews with him about process. In his interview with asöldkfj  in Theatre and Adeptation, he describes a practice similar to my Active Imagination, but with a potential way to connect these seemingly disparate scenes: 

 “(I have) a notebook that mostly assembles things: it’s notes, sensations,

feelings and images that I put together day after day. It’s feelings

and suggestions that I receive from reality. At a certain point

when there’s an accumulation of these images and feelings and

suggestions, it’s about tracing lines, about tracing a constellation

between all of these various elements. These lines, these traces,

constitute the primitive version, the primitive form of what

may happen later, and at this point, I meet a title.’’

My impression from watching Inferno, the first in his trilogy based on The Divine Comedy, was that he took the bare bones of Dante’s story and found ways to associate it with his intuitive image constellations. The result is a series of image-oriented scenes that could feel random, but because of this container and connection, they seem to be revealing something unconscious and archetypal beneath the story. 

I found evidence to support my theory in his interview with aölsdkjf about his work with The Divine Comedy:

“I started by figuring out from a geometric

point of view the fundamental movements of each part. I tried

to understand also what the main substances at play are in The

Divine Comedy and the fundamental substance of it is theology,

and that opens another river.’’

The key that unlocked how I could achieve this structure was his description of fabula: 

“Another thing that’s fundamental to me is the idea of fabula, the Latin idea of

fabula, of what happens, the bare bones of a plot, actions.’’