Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness. Anne Carson

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)

ship to shore, dir. Daniel Passes, London Film School

performing in the dance chorus and Eurycleia in Odyssey rock opera by Khamsina

movement-voice-mutuality

Through an osmosis of Grotowski’s ‘via negativa’ (Schechner and Wolford  239) and Gardzienice’s (Allain 1997, Staniewski and Hodge 2004) performance lexicon we constructed a score exploring the movement-voice-mutuality depending on breathing emanating from the solar plexus. 

Espousing the theatre-as-exploration model I pitched to Vickie and Kayleigh a question close to my heart: ‘is homecoming possible?’ Through an aleatory free-associative process we began to investigate our memories and whatever flickered through them; the root of the piece was based on our experiences and feelings. Accompanying this primary ‘text’ was Euripides’ ‘Women of Troy’ and ‘Ithaca’, by Dimitris Dimitriadis, a contemporary Greek playwright, which we adapted adding our own spin; also real stories of Sudanese refugees on the BBC’s website. Without at first knowing how this material would fit in, using our bodies as a 3-D metaphor of self-remembering and ‘homecoming’ (Steinman 13), we started connecting these threads up; originally in a hodgepodge way ‘smelling’ our way into the piece integrating movement, song, rhythm. 

We prepared a composition using discursive consciousness but aimed to enact it in Shaner’s ‘pre-reflective awareness’ (48) with no anticipation or over-determination of meaning avoiding any sentimentality (Zarrilli 197). In an equidistant triangular configuration offstage we started from Copeau’s ‘motionlessness’ (Rudlin 46) i.e. in an energized alert readiness. We then moved onstage in the space of our kinespheres using Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms to release the body in order to find the voice through the layering of movement based on a cognizance of its parts. Each explored one rhythm for a stretch of time punctuated by a sound at which we all stopped awaiting that moment of deep listening to each other to spring us back into action with no extemporized dialogue. The primary task was to tell the story of our individual struggle in exile through motivating our movement devoid of unnecessary stylization. 

Breathing through movement without a psychological foundation facilitated our body-voice empathy so introducing speaking to further dymamize our physicality seemed a valid choice in our middle part. Improvised in terms of spatial and time sequential relationships our material included a locomotor change: cross-legged on the floor I started to speak the Ithaca extract soon to be joined by Vicky and Kayleigh, the echoing of our voices enabling us to create a corporality of our homecoming yearning. This litany of polyphonic repetition was accompanied by slight torso movement, our heads turning to look at each other as if to arrive at an interconnectedness/recognition through the subtle vibratory qualities of our voice. Embedding a Greek folk song sung by me broke this repetitive incantation off. Vicky joined in a drone while Kayleigh flew off into a solo of phrases evocative of home. This became the bridge for our final section where our movement material included us advancing in a phalanx uttering our chosen phrases. The main loci of activity were the feet keeping the syncopated tempo on the ground leading us to sing our text in unison. To conclude we see-sawed our pelvis-led bodies delivering our final line with the movement receding backwards as if in its fading divesting closure on our homecoming quest.

If Devising is an ensemble - often mnemonic - process of theatre made physically through ‘assembling, editing, and reshaping individuals’ contradictory experiences of the world’ (Oddey 1), then it is a process I wish to build upon; achieving an active cohesion through what was an episodic piece seems worth exploring further; as is finding the way into thought viscerally through the organic flow of physically-led speech/song, tapping into impulses, expanding our soft focus and movement vocabularies. This is the start in the journey of a creative ecology based on my experience of movement and voice as discovering in an orectic, kinaesthetically felt encounter prior to exegetical consciousness. 

The bodybrain finds through the hinc et nunc of 360-degree embodied praxis the life of the action and its psychophysiological impact; the lead is given to ad hoc intuition, consensus and bricolage rather that a priori aesthetic postulates; the meaning arriving not illustratively, through the physical responsiveness and the listening required to receive impulses via non-verbal channels of communication.

Indeed where we stayed awake trusting and in tune to a mutual pulse, there was an instantly shared feeling of smooth symbiosis. When that connection failed, the piece could no longer sustain its fluidity/clarity. 

If we were to do it again we would need to invest more rehearsing time in clarifying our found movement and in deepening our self- and shared awareness. Establishing a sustained relationship and momentum through orchestrating our voices and keeping the rhythm with our feet proved a real challenge. Sheer performing perseverance saw us through the awkwardness but staying connected and vulnerable with an innocently embodied presence behind which is that ever blazing ‘flame’ (Zarrilli 197) would be a perpetual quest rather than a finality for every future piece.

References

Allain, Paul. Gardzienice: Polish theatre in Transaltion, Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997.

Oddey, Alison. Devising Theatre, London: Routledge, 2006.

Rudlin, John. Jacques Copeau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Schechner, R and Wolford, L. The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge, 1997.

Shaner, David Edward. The Bodymind Experience in Japanese Buddhism, Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1985.

Staniewski, W. and Hodge, A. Hidden territories; The Theatre of Gardzienice, London

and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Steinman, Louise. The Knowing Body, Boston and London: Shambhala, 1986.

Zarrilli, P.  Acting (Re)considered , London: Routledge, 1997.