Acts of Dramaturgy

Description

A case study of one specific substantial three-part project inspired by the work of William Shakespeare. Three interconnected performances that interrogate roles in the theatre-making process, along with essays that contextualize the themes and approaches of the work, serve as provocations for the acts of dramaturgy the work entailed, juxtapose new writing and performance writing, and problematize the notion of playtexts.

Taking as their starting point a stage direction or a moment in the narrative that is not the main focus, the playtexts recontextualize, deconstruct and disorientate the classic text within a landscape that is more polarized, free from the text and inherently and explicitly aware of its own theatricality. The work negotiates the ever-shifting relationship between the text and its performance, the performers and their audience, whilst acknowledging that Shakespeare often employed a play-within-a-play as a device, what we now call a meta-theatrical mode of representation.

The three playtexts are The Beginning, an interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Middle, a deconstruction of Hamlet, and The End, triggered by a stage direction from The Winter’s Tale. Shown together as The Trilogy, each play asks the audience to enter a world where a performance can be a rehearsal, text can be both script and set … and they are always aware of where the fire exits are. The playtexts are presented with essays from a range of contributors that reflect on their poetics, themes and concerns in relation to dramaturgy. 

Brings together scholarship and creative work, places them in dialogue with each other and does so from a wide range of perspectives: from those involved in the process, those in the margins of that process and those encountering the works without having been part of that process. The particular strengths of this challenging but accessible book are in the ways it places these perspectives in conversation with and through dramaturgy, and contributes a dialogue about making and reflecting text and performance. 

A rich and thought-provoking text that has the potential to move the dialogue on dramaturgy forward both among practitioners and academics. It is a fresh, intellectually invigorating read; the change of perspective and the playful structure that brings a recognisable five-act dramatic structure and academic elaboration together keeps readers focused and guides them through the book. Very conscious of its own unorthodox format – a combination of script and reflection, by a variety of voices – which is certainly part of the freshness of the book and part of its appeal. 

Primary readership will be among practitioners, academics and researchers in the field of dramaturgy, teaching, devising, writing for performance and non-linear narrative; performance students making or reflecting on their own devised performance work; postgraduate students who are engaged in making practice as research. 

Also of relevance and interest to makers and scholars of theatre and performance, alongside those interested in creative critical writing; to those interested in how we make, and reflect on, theatre and performance; those interested in contemporary dramaturgy and embedded criticism; and those studying theatre and performance, and interdisciplinary practice research.

Act One: Shedding

1. The Prologue: So Here We Are at the Beginning – Nicki Hobday


2. The Foreword: The Time When Anything Could Happen – Maddy Costa


3. The Prelude: The (Play)text Is the Set – Catherine Love

Act Two: Picking

4. On Weaving: Acts of (Auto)dramaturgy – Michael Pinchbeck


5. The Table Is Set… – Andy Smith


6. The Playtext of The Beginning (2012) – Michael Pinchbeck

Act Three: Raveling

7. The Interval – Michael Pinchbeck and Tony Pinchbeck


8. ‘Something In Between’: Liminality, Ageing and The Middle – Mick Mangan


9. The Playtext of The Middle (2013) – Michael Pinchbeck

Act Four: Battening

10. Bear Necessity: The Means to The End – James Hudson


11. And in The End… – Dani Abulhawa


12. The Playtext of The End (2011) – Michael Pinchbeck

Act Five: Taking up

13. The Sum of Its Parts: Memories of The Trilogy from an Inside/Outside Eye – Ollie Smith


14. Endings Are Not Always Completed with a Full Stop – Rhiannon Jones


15. The Epilogue: It’s Time to Call It a Day – Michael Pinchbeck

Sujets

• Shakespeare
• Literary Criticism
• Theater
• Performing Arts
• EDUCATION
• Theatre
• The Trilogy
• Pinchbeck
• Live Art
• Intertextuality
• Narrative
• Dramaturgy
• Performance art
• General officer
• Writer
• The Middle
• Art
• General
• The Beginning
• William Shakespeare
• Practice
• Stage
• The End
• Drama
• Performance
• OpenOffice.org Writer

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 12 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789382969
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Acts of Dramaturgy

Acts of Dramaturgy
The Shakespeare Trilogy
Michael Pinchbeck
First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Tony Pinchbeck in Malta, 1967. Photograph by John Atkinson.
Copy editor: Newgen
Production manager: Jessica Lovett
Typesetting: Newgen
Frontispiece: Nicki Hobday, Ollie Smith and Michael Pinchbeck in Cambridge. Publicity image for The Beginning . Photograph by Julian Hughes.
Print ISBN 9781789382945
ePDF ISBN 9781789382952
ePUB ISBN 9781789382969
Print and bound by Severn Press.
To find out about all our publications, please visit
www.intellectbooks.com.
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: No Performance Is Left Unwoven
Michael Pinchbeck
Part 1: Shedding
1. The Prologue: So Here We Are at the Beginning
Nicki Hobday
2. The Foreword: The Time When Anything Could Happen
Maddy Costa
3. The Prelude: The (Play)text Is The Set
Catherine Love
Part 2: Picking
4. On Weaving: Acts of (Auto)dramaturgy
Michael Pinchbeck
5. The Table Is Set…
Andy Smith
6. The Beginning
Michael Pinchbeck
Part 3: Raveling
7. The Interval
Michael Pinchbeck and Tony Pinchbeck
8. ‘Something In Between’: Liminality, Ageing and The Middle
Michael Mangan
9. The Middle
Michael Pinchbeck
Part 4: Battening
10. Bear Necessity: The Means to The End
James Hudson
11. And in The End …
Dani Abulhawa
12. The End
Michael Pinchbeck
Part 5: Taking up
13. The Sum of Its Parts: Memories of The Trilogy from an Inside/Outside Eye
Ollie Smith
14. Endings Are Not Always Completed with a Full Stop
Rhiannon Jones
The Epilogue: It’s Time to Call It a Day
Michael Pinchbeck
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
This publication is dedicated to everyone who has supported my academic and theatre work over the last decade. Thanks to all the venues that commissioned, developed, produced or presented The Trilogy (2014) including SICK!, Brighton Dome, BAC, Chelsea Theatre and CPT (London), Curve Theatre (Leicester), Leeds Met Studio Theatre, The Junction (Cambridge), Nottingham Lakeside Arts (Nottingham), Nottingham Playhouse and NEAT 2016 (Nottingham), hÅb arts (Manchester), Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, Loughborough University Arts Centre, New Art Exchange (Nottingham), Primary (Nottingham), Hatch (Nottingham), World Event Young Artists (Nottingham), Word of Warning (Manchester), Performing House (York), Axis Arts Centre (Crewe), Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), 100 Grad Festival (Berlin), Théâtre 140 (Brussels), Studiobühne Köln (Cologne) and Societaetstheater (Dresden).
Thanks to the devisers/performers involved in the different stages of the project including Nicki Hobday, Ollie Smith, Tony Pinchbeck and Anneke van de Stege, the technical coordinator of The Trilogy . Thanks to all the artists who invited me to be their dramaturg including Hetain Patel, Chloe Dechery, Reckless Sleepers, Gabriele Reuter, Henrietta Hale, Chris. Dugrenier, Tom Marshman, Jack Britton, 2 Magpies, 30 Bird and Strange Names Collective and Hetain Patel, Mole Wetherell and Claire Summerfield for being my outside eyes. Thanks to everyone who let me interview them for the blog, too numerous to name, where appropriate they have been credited here: www.outsideeyeproject.wordpress.com .
Thanks to Neal Swettenham and Mick Mangan at Loughborough University who supervised my Ph.D. on which this publication is based. Thanks to colleagues at the University of Lincoln who have helped me along the way, especially Dominic Symonds and Karen Savage for their continued support and Jacqueline Bolton, James Hudson, Siobhan O’Gorman and Andrew Westerside. Thanks to colleagues at the Manchester School of Theatre at Manchester Metropolitan University especially Neil Mackenzie who programmed the work at Axis Arts Centre (Crewe). Thanks to Arts Council England for funding the development of the work and the British Council for selecting it for the Edinburgh Showcase and supporting its international tour.
The Trilogy (2014) was last performed at Nottingham Playhouse in June 2016 and I have kept my promise never to perform again. I would like to thank the artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse, Giles Croft, for his support of my work. My visits to theatres and universities in Brussels, Cologne, Dresden, Pristina, Riga, Sarajevo and San Jose informed the research and I am grateful for the funding that has allowed these visits from the British Council, Arts Council England, Santander and the University of Lincoln.
Finally, thanks to the contributors for reflecting on The Trilogy : Dani Abulhawa, Maddy Costa, Nicki Hobday, James Hudson, Rhiannon Jones, Catherine Love, Michael Mangan, Tony Pinchbeck, Andy Smith and Ollie Smith. Special thanks to Rhiannon Jones for helping me find a dot dot dot not a full stop and for her continued support of my work and my life.
This is what it is. It is neither the beginning nor the end, but it is a snapshot of a moment in time. Like my Dad, standing blindfolded on the end of a diving board in Malta in 1967, on the front cover of this book. There is an old Russian proverb, if you go out to your porch, look at the sky and jump to the stars, you will just land in the mud. This publication sits somewhere between knowing and not knowing, jumping and landing, the stars and the mud.
Introduction: No Performance Is Left Unwoven
Michael Pinchbeck
Concept
This publication is a critical frame for a body of devised work that has toured extensively nationally and internationally – The Trilogy (2014). The three performances, The Beginning ( 2012 ), The Middle ( 2013 ) and The End ( 2011 ) explore the role of the dramaturg. The title, Acts of Dramaturgy: The Shakespeare Trilogy , is taken from The Process of Dramaturgy: A Handbook, which, as the authors describe in its foreword, is aimed at those who commit ‘acts of dramaturgy’ (Chemers et al 2010 : ix).
This publication seeks to frame the play texts for The Trilogy (2014) alongside a series of reflexive essays and provocations on contemporary dramaturgy. The essays contextualize the themes and approaches of the work, serve as provocations for the Acts of Dramaturgy the work entailed, challenge new models of practice-as-research and problematize the very notion of playtexts themselves. It is intended as a critical companion to a body of work that toured for six years and which stimulates a debate about dramaturgy – what Claire MacDonald describes as a ‘term in flux, a not-yet-settled word’ (MacDonald 2010 : 94).
The notion of weaving informed the dramaturgical process for Acts of Dramaturgy , allowing me to cut across dual linearities of time and space, and it informs the structure of the publication. I use the terminology of weaving as chapter headings to narrate the content and guide readers through the devising process, for example Shedding, Picking, Raveling, Battening, Taking up etc. I apply each of these terms to a stage in the theatre-making process to create a narrative of the dramaturgy and the way in which the performances were composed. This metaphor, stemming from Barba’s definition of text as ‘a weaving together’ (Barba 1985: 76) and Barthes’ notion of intertextuality, allows for in-depth analysis of the practice viewed through a creative lens. To quote Maddy Costa, author of the Foreword, writing about her work with Chris Goode: ‘Our words weave reflection and critique into a multifaceted response to the show’ (Costa 2016 : 205).
Context
My early understanding of the role of dramaturg was shaped by working with Metro-Boulot-Dodo in 1999, taking part in Writing Space in 2008, then my work with Reckless Sleepers (2008) and my role as a lecturer at different universities. The Writing Space project, instigated by Cathy Turner, aimed ‘… to test a structure that would engage diverse writers in an inclusive, non-hierarchical conceptual dialogue, leading to the production of a series of short, experimental texts’ (Turner 2009 : 217). Turner argued that a ‘greater awareness or interest in the collaborative and dialogic element within theatre and performance writing practices could lead to a transformation of dramaturgical strategies among and between writers and other artists’ (Turner 2009 : 217). This was a landmark project as it shaped my thinking around the relationship between writing and dramaturgy in my own practice. The experience went on to inform my work on The Trilogy (2014) and inspire me to start the doctoral study that became this book.
All my work since has been an ongoing investigation into practice-as-research as a dramaturgical process. The Trilogy also encouraged me to re-contextualize my performance work within an academic context. I realize that much of what I do as a lecturer now is actually dramaturgical, although it is often not called that, for example outside eye-ing rehearsals, reading scripts, offering feedback and feed-forward (Brown 2007). I see the relationship between dramaturgy in pedagogy in most modules I teach and as such aim for this publication to be of use for both theatre-makers and theatre-scholars, those teaching it and those studying it.
In ‘Dramaturgy without a dramaturge’ ( 2010 ), Adrian Heathfield argues that a performance’s inherent dramatu