PhD Title:

Creative facilitation of collaborative devising processes with particular emphasis on the director/choreographer role therein.

1. The Project

1. Context

      This research is situated within a context of contemporary collaborative devised performance processes. Specifically, director-led devising, as opposed to non-directed devising or directed-devising where increasing the agency of those involved in the creation is not a primary aim.

      For the purpose of this research, the term ‘performance’ is used to cover both dance and theatre, and the roles of director and choreographer, (though their differences are explored), are treated as the same, and both are generally covered by the term ‘director’.

The director at the heart of this study is but a cousin of the traditional idea of a director who takes a play from a shelf and ‘uses’ actors to embody his vision and interpretation. The director at the heart of this study has as her goal the creation of a performance authored, signed and owned by all those who made it, though of course still directed by herself. She may or may not have a theme or a starting point of sorts, but it is to her performers that she must turn for the (co)generation and (co)creation of ideas and material.

It is the complexity and slipperiness[1] of this role, the inherent struggles for agency and egality, and my attempts to ease and enrich its journey and efficacy that form the basis of this research project.

And it is against a background of virtual silence that this work is made. What little literature there is out there on the devising process seeks neither to specifically examine the role of director, nor to explore ways of responding to the resultant circumstances of a director who has relinquished their more traditional place in the hierarchy. Similarly, examination of this role and its opportunities have not yet filtered through to academic institutions and this research thus involves the development of appropriate pedagogies. The motivation of this research project is in part a result of personal frustration at the absence of such literature or pedagogy, evidence of which is offered in a completed and extensive literature survey, as well as a survey of all current HE Provision.

1. The Theoretical Backdrop

The theoretical backbone and tools for this research come from 4 main sources: the work of Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Deleuze & Guattari, and Susan Melrose. (A full and ongoing bibliography is available)

Roland Barthes

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Barthes’ work on ‘the death of the author’ embodied and reflected a move away from fixed linear hierarchies and attributive sources, such as writer - director - actor - audience, to mobile networks of meaning and intertexuality. It was no longer possible to follow a direct route to the author/God to find answers. Instead, as Saussure had stated, one had to begin to interpret socially and politically charged ‘communities’ of ‘constituent units’ related to and dependent on each other. No longer representing the one but the many. In theatre terms, this had implications for traditional hierarchies, individual disciplines and the differentiated roles of director, choreographer, actor, dancer, writer, designer etc – giving us instead interdisciplinarity and the blurred notions of ‘performance’ (not dance or theatre or film) and ‘performance makers’ (not dancer, actor or traditional director.) This is the context in which this research project is situated.

Michel de Certeau – ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’

Michel de Certeau, in ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’[2], provides analogies and propositions that prove very useful when discussing the position of the role of director in devised processes. The director has relinquished their expert position in their all-seeing all-knowing ‘ivory tower’, thereby deliberately and joyfully abandoning the comfort and safety of the aerial view and, in doing so, has embarked upon a journey in a ‘ship of fools’. They have publicly denied a position of mastery and embraced the fact that there ‘are no longer truths’. Thus the director is no longer in a position of knowledge (knowledge of a playwright, of what a text means or of a higher (personal) purpose) but has instead placed themselves ‘down below’, ‘in the thick of things’[3] working alongside their co-creators, to discover together what it is they are trying to do or say or explore.

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De Certeau likens these unknowing somatic practices, informed not by expertise but by spontaneous subjective decision-making, to the walking of a wandersmanner, a pedestrian who blindly strolls around a city with no real knowledge of what he is doing or where he is going. There is no map (no method) for him to follow; there was no training that could give him the expertise to make ‘right’ decisions (and of course there is no ‘right’ anyway); there is no aerial view that allows him to understand his context, his progress or his destination. When he turns left he doesn’t know why he turns left. He is simply ‘making-do’. This work explores the opportunities, implications and difficulties of this blind endeavour.

Also provided by de Certeau are useful observations on both ‘ways of operating’ within the rehearsal process, and the complexities and inadequacies of theorising or documenting the practice. Latter stages of the practice element of this research project come as a direct attempt to unearth, understand and mine the ‘silent procedures’ lurking in the ‘overly silent land’ of intuition and private activity that form collaborative devising processes.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus

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Deleuze & Gattari provide us with a way of understanding new or different systems that relate usefully to the system we create when trying to establish a collaborative devising process. ‘Nomadic thought’ enables open, non-hierarchised, multi- directional networks of meaning – that are referred to as rhizomes. Unearthing and understanding the rhizome networks within devising processes is a crucial part of this study.

For Deleuze and Guattari multiplicity is treated as a noun, not as a collective noun used for describing a number of individual elements, but as a noun that describes a new, singular, ‘third’ idea. This is what the collaborative team wants: ‘..to reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I’. The lines, speeds, articulations and movements of communication that take place within this multiplicity form an assemblage. We might say that a collaborative process is an ‘assemblage of desire’. 

Deleuze & Gattari speak also of attempts to map rhizomatic action as a means of constructing the unconscious, and the difficulty and unlikelihood of truly getting at the important notions of simultaneity, reversibility and complexity of such complex processes. The practice elements of this project speak directly to and of this.

In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ questions are also asked about leadership, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and the difficulty of ‘seeing things in the middle’ – all of which relate to how a collaborative, and the director within a collaborative, function. How do we grasp the ungraspable, the intangible, in order to understand what is we are doing?

Susan Melrose – various works including: ‘Choreography, Collisions and Collaborations’[4], ‘Please Please Me…’[5] and ‘‘Constitutive ambiguities’: writing professional or expert performance practices…’,[6]

The work of Susan Melrose has much to contribute to this research project. Key themes include:

v      The rehearsal process and the way in which collaborators consciously engage with each other’s past and their shared present to up-build and generate mutually-transforming product and experience. Melrose refers to this as ‘catalysis’

v      The state of ‘not-knowing’ necessarily embodied by performers and devising directors

v      The motivation of collaboration: According to Melrose, contemporary performance product is characterised by a ‘feeling of dispossession’ – artists are alienated by the capitalist mechanisms that surround them. So they not only create collectives to counter the dispersal of community, but they represent their uncertainty and dispossession in the fragmented, humble and un-knowing nature of their work.

v      The impossibility of ‘true collaboration’

v      Signature, ownership and the ‘contract for erasure’

v      The difficulties of writing about dance and performance process, gridding ‘the space between’

v      The privileged-insider/ witness/ professional spectator position and how work survives

v      The relationship between process and product

v      Notions of intuition, taste, style, pleasure and judgement: Drawing on de Certeau and also Bordieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ she explores decision-making as ‘time and space body-thinking’ or somatic practice, informed by (subjective and not-known) responses to context, class and history. She also however goes on to say that tactical, somatic actions are so elusive as to be, currently, ‘beyond knowledge’. They thus remain idiosyncratic, impenetrable, certainly un-teachable, embodiments of the concept of making-do. Again, this research seeks to unpack, document, use and even teach this.

1. The proposition

The case studies that form a major part of this research project (for details see below) all explore what happens when the traditional post of director – looking down from the ivory tower with map in hand, binoculars at the ready and destination in mind – is abandoned. In Case Study A it is abandoned willingly by a director who chooses to work ‘in the thick of things’, and in Case Study B – there is no director at all, because of the belief that if artists really want to explore each other and each other’s disciplines – then there can’t be a director. Directors would just get in the way – they have their own agenda/ destination that would be imposed on the artists involved.

While exploring and examining the role of director for this project I came to believe that by abandoning this post in its traditional sense, a huge and dangerous gap is created. Those that work within the event are necessarily blinded by their proximity (physical, emotional and intellectual) to the material and each other. The desired uninhibited state of devising brings with it the equally necessary state of not-knowing, and while directors and performers alike are of course involved in their own left brain/right brain balancing act, their own struggle to embody the theory in the practice and the practice in the theory, I wish to argue that the relinquishing of the material to those who ‘cannot know’ – does a disservice to the piece, to its audience and even to the makers themselves.

The gap needs to be filled. But how?

This research project explores two possibilities: the dramaturg and the ‘process writer’.

The role of dramaturg, still a rare ‘indulgence’ in the UK, is common in Europe, Russia and the US, but the definition of what a dramaturg is, or does, remains slippery.

The research project discovers and explores how a dramaturg can, and can not, aid multi-directional devising.

It also discovers, explores and advocates a new role -  that of ‘process writer’.

And it posits the idea that these roles can, and should, be creative and collaborative roles – situated on the outside of the inside. The creative tensions of giving and taking, risk and failure, artistry and practicality, theory and practice can be embodied in these roles just as they are in the performer and director. But these roles DO have an aerial view, a sense of a map (though it may not belong to them) and a shared destination in mind.

This project then explores the role of the director in devising processes, and goes on to suggest the possible inclusion of two other roles – the dramaturg and the process writer.

2. The Case Studies

a) Case Study A: non-participant observation -  Cherkaoui & Myth.

The captain has abandoned his crow’s nest and has a mere memory of his map. Now none of us has a clue where we are going.

In 2007 I was given the opportunity to observe director/choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui direct 8 months of full-time rehearsals for a show co-produced by London’s Sadlers Wells and Antwerp’s De Singel Theatre amongst others. A team of 8 dancers, 5 actors, five musicians, one assistant director, one dramaturg, one production manager, one designer and various members of the support team came together from Belgium, America, Australia, Sweden, Slovakia, France, Italy, Japan and Holland to make what became called ‘Myth’.

Issues arising from this include:

v      directed devising – what it means to mean and what it really means

v      the roles of director and performer  - the opportunities, complexities and difficulties

v      the role of dramaturg in a multi-directional devising environment – and other missed opportunities

v      issues of ownership, authorship, leadership, signature

v      writing process – ways to write about (what you think) you see, and who to let read it

NB: An article reflecting the process of Cherkaoui and his company is to be published later this year in ‘Making Contemporary Theatre’ – edited by Jen Harvie & Andrew Lavender, published by Manchester University Press

b) Case Study B: participant observation – M&DE 2006 & 2007

I was utterly blinded, and couldn’t see a thing, but someone quietly whispered the way

The Music & Dance Exchange Project (M&DE) is an annual project held at Dartington College of Arts (where I previously worked as a Lecturer), hosted by Professor Emilyn Claid & Dr Chris Best. M&DE exists to give professional artists from all over the world the all-too-rare opportunity to privately explore collaborative processes between the disciplines of music and dance, with the additional involvement of theatre, visual and digital arts. In 2006 I was given the job of documenting the project, and I worked again on the project in 2007.

Very quickly, however, my role as non-participant documenter morphed into becoming that of a participant observer. I considered my writing a creative act in itself, and I submitted it to those I wrote about, on a daily basis, as a contribution intended to aid, reflect, explain, enhance and be a part of the collaborative process itself.

What follows is an extract from my writing at the beginning of M&DE 2007, as my discomfort at being the only person in the room not involved in the extended improvisation I was observing led me to exploring and justifying my presence there. It functions well as a description of what I now call ‘the process writer’.

What am I here for?

1.      to provide a record of what happens, lest we forget, as the speeding by of now blurs and tricks our memories

2.      to see what cannot be seen by those who are necessarily blinded by their own busy-ness and closeness to themselves

3.      to grapple with the difficulties of collaboration, but from a distance. From the vantage point of otherness, with the benefit of exclusion and stillness, to understand and try to sense the complexities, possibilities and opportunities of collaboration, and to dare to name them

4.      to explore and welcome the notion of self in documentation and observation

5.      to read what I see – to be an immediate ‘first spectator’ seeing both the process and the product long before it sees itself, with the possibility of dramaturgical response as a collaborative element

6.   to explore how process can survive, as words, after the event

7.      to work at the themes of the day, exploring their embodiment in the real and raw action within the space

8.      and to make all of the above available to anyone who wants to see it – to aid reflection, to offer another (potentially ‘wrong’) perspective on what is happening and what has happened, to encourage reflective dialogue (spoken, written or simply ‘thought’) that can be shared and built as the process goes on

Thus the project of M&DE raises issues surrounding:

v      non-directed devising

v      the collaborative relationship between dance, music, theatre and visual artists

v      the role of and possibilities for the process writer as an equal collaborator in devised processes

c) Case Study C: ….The practical element.

            It is here that we now join this research project. As my third and final case study, I intend to practically explore the roles of the dramaturg and the process writer as creative collaborators in devising processes. Putting into practice everything I have learned from my theoretical research and the previous case studies, I will explore in what ways both process and product can be aided, enriched, enhanced (and documented) by the presence of the dramaturg and process writer.

As yet, I do not have a project in place. I am looking for a project that involves a director/choreographer directing performers in a collaborative process.

I would explore how I can help facilitate the process, aiding the collaboration, and contributing creatively as an ‘equal’ collaborator.

Further details on the requirements, possibilities and research aims of such a project are available, but not included here.

NB: Case Study C will be followed by a Conclusion, Developing Pedagogies and ‘Next Steps’ chapter.

Address

Lou Cope
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8000 Brugge

Belgium

Tel:+32 (0)50 34 75 91

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