Odyssey Rock Opera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqGwjpEJXsY&feature=c4-overview&list=UU9PyP9Db-QucglfowJmtQlg

VIRGIL: Seeing a naked body of any age we remember our own ...

The body through devising

A central component, the heart as it were of this grammar, is not just the text but crucially the body as story-showing vehicle. Feelings are explored linguistically but also kinetically through the structure of the body which provides the cohesion/coherence of the meanings thus produced. It is a non-mimetic, perception-mediated meaning; Complicite’s actors use their bodies to tell stories that necessitate the audience’s imaginative agency and ‘complicity’. Agency in this context infers a heightened experience of reality defined by Grotowski (1993) as “the consciousness which is not linked to language (the machine for thinking), but to Presence” (125). A presence that involves not merely watching the show but rather actively and inferentially engaging with it, thus being invited to live through it and being enlivened and stimulated by the imaginative stage processes. “[I]n the theatre the audience completes the steps of creation” (Brook 156) by the cognitive inference as outlined above, and in Complicite’s theatre the audience is certainly in the realm of McBurney’s “politics of imagination” (Tushingham 22-3) often through an abstract narrative created by movement and corporeal shapes and interrelationships. 

This emphasis on the body, the lowest common denominator, is in tune with Complicite’s foundations in physical theatre: the body as a collective mnemonic, as explored in Mnemonic. Helen Freshwater (2001) states that Mnemonic “addresses the problematic question of how we depict the action of memory ... [in] its complexity and instability, and asks us how we can move beyond individual reminiscence to explore the conflicted region of our collective past.” (212). Following Freshwater, the work distinguishes procedural memory (i.e. skill-learning through practice and repetition) from episodic memory (retrieving past moments), or semantic memory “which regulates the network of association forming our general knowledge of the world.” (216) McBurney performs the roles of both the iceman and Virgil, thus linking past and present. A chair is transformed into the form of a corpse. What humanizes the original image of a corpse is its nakedness:

VIRGIL: Seeing a naked body of any age we remember our own ... 

(Mnemonic 71-2)

Freshwater continues: “The ethical questions raised by memory’s indeterminacy are set against the conviction that we are bound together by a shared ancestry; we are all related, however distantly.” (218) The body here “serves as a possible counterbalance to continuing prejudices which fuel divisive distortions of the past.” (218) We are plunged fast and fluidly in and out of micro-narratives interlinking and colliding with one another reflecting the complex interrelationships, dynamics and instabilities of memory. There is no final narrative closure, but rather a “deliberate aporia” (214) which resists resolution.  “Did you know that, biochemically, memory and imagination are the same?” asks McBurney in ‘The Big Interview’ (23/1/2009) with Christina Patterson. According to Campos, Mnemonic and A Disappearing Number “use science as a narrative tool to explore our relation to time and mortality” (326) in Complicite’s “tireless search for connections” (ibid). Complicite thus connects theatre and laboratory as spaces of observation using “scientific theory as a structuring metaphor as well as a theme.” (327) 

A key element in all of Complicite’s shows is movement, not only thematically in terms of displacement and exile, but also musically in the body language of the actors and in the aesthetics of each show which, Campos suggests, elaborates: “a multilayered piece in which different languages coexist producing effects of resonance and dissonance. [...]  These gaps between different layers of the performance text [...] produce a space in which the audience must provide the necessary links.” (322-3) 

Campos goes on to state Complicite’s affinities with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s (2006) notion of the postdramatic. However, while postdramatic theatre does not rely on a central plot and does not possess “a narrative fabulating description of the world by means of mimesis” (qtd. in Campos 333), Complicite employs wonderfully strong story-telling, that is “neither conventionally dramatic nor entirely postdramatic  [combined with] the multilingualism of the stage.” (Campos 333)

This stage plurality is the product of the company’s postmodern devising roots. As Magnat (2005) suggests: “Unlike the transgressive devised theatre of the 60s, postmodern devised theatre does not claim to position itself outside dominant cultural formations.” (74) Instead it offers what Auslander (1997) calls “strategies of counter-hegemonic resistance by exposing processes of cultural control and emphasizing the traces of non-hegemonic discourses within the dominant.” (61)