Devising

Devising is “the art of losing one’s moorings to the familiar, a fruitful loss yielding a kinesthetic and associative form of awareness.” (Magnat 74), what Eugenio Barba calls ‘the dance of thought in action’ (qtd. In Williams Geographies 197) ; Following Anne Bogart devising combines ‘scavenging’ and ‘nesting’ (ibid. 198) of different elements such as space, light, bodies, language, sounds, objects, ideas, energies, images, rhythms etc. Performers in devising contexts are engaged physically, imaginatively, intellectually in composing and translating these elements using various strategies such as editing, layering, distilling, expanding. Devising “requires immersive belief and critical distance, a detailed engagement with part and whole, micro and macro; ...inside/outside, visible/invisible... In order for this work to take place at all, these paradoxes cannot be experienced as mutually exclusive and contradictory binaries.” (ibid. 202) They are rather like Bataille’s ‘good dualities’ (qtd. in Stoekl 268). 

To further illuminate Complicite’s key devising aspects I have consulted the company’s website. Firstly, finding and developing movement sequences through photographs is a generative devising tool because unearthing the dynamics of movement in a static representation excites the imagination and can lead to the development of complex movement sequences:

The aim is not to show what the photograph looks like but to express ... the atmosphere, weight, light, shadow, space and colour. [Photographs] are central to devising because they explore the creation of a physical text. They transpose a frozen image or object into a series of movements which exist in time. They can be a useful way to start talking about dramatic construction in microcosm. In these tiny pieces of movement theatre you can see progression, contrast, variations of rhythm, surprises, transformations of space and even character emerging.

Feldenkrais’s approach is explicitly echoed in the company’s movement work. In a very Feldenkraisean sense altering the body’s posture instantly alters one’s breathing. Altering one’s breathing immediately impacts on one’s emotional state. Tilting one’s head backwards, for example, will affect one’s vocal delivery and attitude. So this is a psychophysical approach where even tiny physical adjustments can help the actors explore the internal topography/landscape of a character in a much more imaginative way than just relying on psychological methods of acting. 

This of course requires extensive playing and experimenting. 

According to the ‘Teacher’s notes’ in the Complicite website: “Part of the pleasure of rehearsals is seeing a room transform from a bare space into a chaotic jumble of costumes, pictures and books. Finally the Company sift out what is needed, mark out the space and gradually a show will emerge”. This rather visual aesthetic requires that rehearsal phases are videoed so that nothing is lost; the company also looks at McBurney’s series of drawings which are often dark, expressive, bleak but they help the company members to see the direction he is taking in terms of a compositional architecture, dynamic and affect. There is a strong group ethos in all of Complicite’s rehearsals, and the company affirms the notion that “the most powerful research is that which can be experienced and explored as a group.”

Furthermore, McBurney’s father was an archaeology professor. Undoubtedly he had a marked influence upon him perceiving theatre-making in terms of choosing a site for an archaeological dig but post-structurally not aiming at unearthing a singular perpetual truth but rather as a vertical repetitive journey ambiguously rerooting and retracing the possible connections of several aggregated found fragments. “The decision of where to dig is based on a hunch: an idea that is informed by the immediate surroundings. When you start digging you will always find something.” Thus play and improvising are prioritized over finding a structure.  Once a story has been ‘found’ then the performers extensively improvise often with 6ft bamboos (reminiscent of Feldenkrais and Brook’s ensemble building approaches) so as to be bold and expansive in their movements. They use their bodies to find and explore both the physical and the emotional spaces of the story. Their characterization work involves not only movement but also various objects. Both are employed to discover how to create different atmospheres, emotions and tensions within their physical storytelling. Devising, therefore, amounts to “learning the language of space and time” anew within its story but using the same finite stock of primary materials such as the body, its movements as well as objects in a situation of controlled chaos.

It is often the exuberant playfulness or tragi-farcical physical virtuosity of this company’s performing bodies and the lightness of touch that serves as a vehicle for exploring serious existential and sociopolitical material within Complicite’s writerly narratives of mortality.