Cathy Turner Centre for Research Into Expanded Dramaturgies, University of Winchester, UK

Writing Space: The First Project

Cathy Turner Centre for Research into Expanded Dramaturgies, University of Winchester, UK

'How do I talk about the weekend and everything we experienced without betraying it? I’m afraid I can’t even begin' (Makishi 2008:1)

The following report on the project, its dialogues and its outcomes must be to some extent subjective, despite my recourse to video recordings of most of the events. It is not the kind of project that is well represented by purely factual, objective analysis, though this does play its part. I hope not to misrepresent the conversations too much in my desire to record something of their flavour and content. Because of the possibility of mis-representation, I have refrained from attributing comments except in referring to the leader of each one hour session, where it didn't seem to make sense to insist on anonymity. Students are quoted with their consent.

Introducing the Project

I began to talk about Writing Space at some point in 2006. I was then working on a book entitledDramaturgy and Performance (published by Palgrave in 2008), with my colleague, Synne Behrndt. One of the book's chapters focused on dramaturgical work with writers and had brought me once again into contact with the world of literary management and development dramaturgy in the UK. In this book we observe:

'[The] interest in the dramaturg is increasingly opening up debates about the many and various ways of working with new writing and other new work...Recently, there seems a growing interest in considering and questioning the established structures of writer development, asking whether it might be possible to imagine alternatives that could produce different kinds of work and nurture different qualities in new writing...[Recent projects] raise the question of whether the UK dramaturg's work might in future become more diverse, and more inclusive...' (2008:133 and 144)

Partly as a result of these observations, and particularly inspired by Claire MacDonald's project, The Space Between Words (thespacebetweenwords.org), I wanted to set up a project to explore a possible model or structure that might answer the desire to create an inclusive environment and that might nurture theatre and performance writing across an expanded field. My own experience as a writer, first a playwright and later a site-specific live artist with Wrights & Sites (mis-guide.com), also informed the ideas that were beginning to take shape. This experience also included my years as an AHRC research fellow at Exeter University (2000-2002), where I researched writing processes within devised theatre and performance writing.

I wanted to set up a project that would be likely to provoke writers towards formal experimentation and into engagement with others from different art-forms, or from different kinds of performance and theatre writing.In May 2007, I was interviewed by young researcher Elizabeth McBain, towards her MA dissertation. In this interview, I raised the following questions around writer development in the theatre:

Do we have to think in terms of workshopping, commissioning? Do we have to always think in those theatre structures that have been established? Do we have to think in terms of the mentor working with the writer or the expert working with the writer? Maybe there are much more fluid structures that we can have, less industry related and perhaps more playful...[perhaps] you could use higher education as a place where you could create room for writers to dialogue with each other (MacBain, 2007: Appendix 2, p.68)

Gradually a very simple shape emerged (a simplicity partly reflecting my desire to keep the project manageable and to build experience gradually). Over the course of a weekend, a group of writers from very different performance backgrounds would share ideas around a conceptual theme, that of 'narrative'. They would subsequently produce a short performance text, which would be simply staged by students on the Dramaturgy module. We would then discuss the texts and the project.

I discussed and refined the project with others, both in academic contexts and with writers. Firstly, through the first meeting of The Space Between Words in Aberystwyth in 2007. A little later, in a paper given, with Synne Behrndt, as part of Exeter University's dramaturgy series. And again, in July 2007, at Leeds University's conference, 'Performing Literatures'. I also discussed the project with MacDonald and with Sarah Dickenson from Writernet, both of whom became project mentors.

I applied to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a 'practice-led and applied research grant' (maximum £20,000 fec) to support the project and was successful in gaining £13,000.

These were my initial research questions, as outlined in the grant application:

What kinds of dialogue and work may be generated by taking a ‘radically inclusive’ approach (MacDonald, 2007) in curating dialogues between diverse writers and artists? What are the advantages of this approach? What are the potential pitfalls and difficulties?
How might one work non-hierarchically with writers (taking inspiration from initiatives such as Phelim McDermott’s ‘Devoted and Disgruntled’ discussions), rather than as expert ‘mentor’ or critic?
Might it be productive for conceptual and formal questions to drive a new writing initiative, rather than to arise from it? Is there a need to create more opportunities and stimuli for conceptual discussion and work among writers?
What can the university context offer as a space for developing new or ‘expanded’ dramaturgies? How might we begin to construct frameworks and partnerships to facilitate innovative new writing?

These questions will be returned to in considering the project after its completion.

Project Description

Participants

Emma Bennett: An artist and performance maker. Since 2005, she has worked with Lucy Cran and Bill Leslie as These Horses. She is currently studying for an MA Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts.

Sarah Dickenson: For the past nine years, she has workedas a dramaturg, often with the writers’ organisation, writernet. She recently began to focus on her own writing, with work on The Commotion Time, with writing partner Joanna Ingham.

Claire MacDonald: Her research interests lie at the intersection of writing, performance and visual art. She currently combines commissions as a writer with teaching, research and curatorial work. She is a Research Fellow at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design and Director of the International Centre for Fine Art Research, University of the Arts London.

Stacy Makishi: Hawaii-born, she works in a variety of media including live art, site-specific installations, film, new writing and physical theatre. Her works are known for their risky and amusing interrogations of contemporary culture, identity and politics.

Michael Pinchbeck: A writer, live artist and lecturer based in Nottingham. He is currently a Dramaturg with Anglo-Belgian company Reckless Sleepers.

Tanya Ronder: Has written versions or adaptations of Peribanez by Lope de Vegas, Young Vic Theatre and Company B in Sydney, Australia; Blood Wedding by Lorca, Almeida Theatre; Macbett by Eugene Ionesco, the RSC; Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre, Young Vic Theatre, and others.

Cathy Turner: An academic and a performance maker. A core member of Wrights & Sites, a group of artists whose work is concerned with our relationship to place and space.

Steve Waters: A playwright whose work includes World Music, The Unthinkable (Sheffield Crucible, Donmar Warehouse) and his forthcoming play Fast Labour (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Hampstead April-June). He also writes more collaboratively. He runs the MPhil(B) in Playwriting Studies at the University of Birmingham

The list demonstrates that the group's writing practices range between plays, adaptations, live art and devised or physical theatre. In terms of their own arts practice, writers variously label themselves 'artist', 'performance maker', 'writer', 'live artist' or 'playwright' or use no label at all. The majority of thesewriters are engaged in dramaturgical work or lecturing or both. What the list doesn't show so clearly is how many are also involved in performing, or how many write for contexts apart from or beyond performance. Many also have experience in fields other than those with which they most closely identify at the moment (myself included).

Materials sent prior to meeting:

These materials, apart from providing information on the project, were intended to stimulate ideas around narrative, which was to be the central theme of our discussions.

'About Writing Space'

Biographies

Timetable

Details of accommodation and directions

'Narrative Revealed in Surrealist Experiment', slightly adapted fromSalvador Dali, (1932), 'The Object Revealed in Surrealist Experiment' trans. David Gasgoyne, found in Lucy R. Lippard (1970), Surrealists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp.87-97.

Calvino, Italo (1996), 'Quickness', from 6 Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh, London: Vintage, pp.31-54.

Kellman, Julia (1995), 'Harvey Shows the Way: Narrative in Children's Art', Art Education Vol. 48, No. 2, 'Artful Conversations', March, pp.18-22.

Lehmann, Hans Thies (2006), 'Narrations', extract from Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London: Routledge, pp.109-10.

Levy, Deborah (2006), 'Narrative - The New Black', in Hotel Methusaleh: A Document, ed. Andrew Quick, Imitating the Dog: Lancaster, pp.7-8.

Ondaatje, Michael (2003), 'Just Below the Surface', extract fromThe Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, London: Bloomsbury, pp.295-307.

Smith, Murray, (2001), 'Parallel Lines', in American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Jim Hillier, first edition, London: British Film Institute, pp.155-161.

A children's picture book - these were different in each pack.

The first weekend

Over the course of this weekend, each writer led a one hour session - workshop, presentation, discussion or demonstration - around the subject of narrative.

Session 1: Cathy Turner

Cathy told the group she was to give a performance demonstration and asked that each person observe where their focus was taken to as they witnessed it. She then led the group on a tour of the campus, reading out the texts of e-mails at intervals. On returning to the seminar room, she raised the question of whether the narratives of site, text and audience were in conflict, or whether the written text might be made more porous. The ensuing discussion (while raising the question as to whether 'how to' questions are necessarily the most useful) suggested that performance is inevitably more porous than it might seem to the writer. 'It's up to me to find those moments...you have to let it go...I wonder if you are worrying about what you can't control?' Approaches to these concerns, or 'magic tools', could be found across a spectrum of arts practices. We also discussed the e-mail as a form, both evocative and a pleasingly simple format. 'Do documentary resources sit more easily than fiction [in this context]?'

Session 2: Michael Pinchbeck

Michael reversed Cathy's initial question, 'is narrative a problem?' to ask, 'is problem a narrative?' His presentation, which took in 10 figures as diverse as Geri Halliwell, Roland Barthes, David Lynch and Joseph Beuys, touched on many related ideas, such as the 'live dramaturgy' of his blog for Reckless Sleeper's The Pilots; the 'writerly' performance or text (Beuys: 'art should pass over you like a cloud: a problem that wants to be solved, but not straight away'); narrative implicit in detailed itemisation of objects or journey (enjoying 'the repetition of unecessary detail' and quoting Perec's injunction to 'question your teaspoons'); the staging of failure; narrative created 'through a visual description of what is left behind', as in Ilya Kabakov's The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment and the deliberate confusion of reality and fiction, the live and the recorded, the scripted and unscripted - quoting The Pilots: 'we're a bit lost - where are we?' In many, if not all, these instances, 'it is up to us to make connections, to solve the puzzle - but not straight away.'

Session 3: Tanya Ronder

Tanya began by clarifying that most of her writing work had concerned adaptation. Now confronted with the task of writing without 'a pre-existing structure', and without working in collaboration with actors, she asked, 'How do you make situation and circumstance grow into narrative? How do you cook up dialogue? How do you find the physical level of story-telling sitting at a desk?' Another question was offered, 'Not how, but why do you have to work in isolation? But then, in another sense, why not? Can't the spectrum of writing encompass hugely different approaches?' 'In a way, all theatre work is a response to pre-existing material...would it be interesting for your process to push [adaptation] as far as you possibly could push it, so it was not so much adaptation but response?' It was acknowledged that the relationship between adaptation and original work is porous, but there was also the suggestion, 'it is an enormous job and it is the job...go away, write about it, worry about it, give it to some people, find out about it, go away, write it, worry about it...' Another commented that in her own process, 'it's death to know what will happen: I'm inspired by your block!'

Session 4: Sarah Dickenson

Sarah began by raising the question of what a 'public theatre' might be and how theatre might relate to its community. As a focus for the discussion she showed some video extracts of The Hoxton Story, a production by The Red Room, performed in various Hoxton locations. She then related this to her concerns in writing a play for a Cornish community - 'how do I locate myself as a maker in that community?' The discussion explored the political tensions around modes of representation and yet their potential for opening up dialogue. Are we too afraid of representation? On the other hand, how might the narrative somehow be created by the members of the community themselves? The group discussed Christo's work, where people become involved in the 'wrapping' of Central Park, for example. The narrative is not given in the process of making something, but emerges in what people make of that process and image. What is the least thing the artist might do to allow people to tell the story? The group discussed the principle of ikebana, in which there is 'always that place that is empty'. There might be a generosity in telling the story but leaving something out.

Session 5: Claire MacDonald

Claire's session took the form of a workshop in which we each listed 'three dates; three spaces; three phrases (beginning 'I...' 'You...' 'He/She...' ); three gestures; three colours; three smells'. Then, in a form of 'art recipe', six people sat in a line and in random order, we spoke a date, then gave a space, phrase, gesture, colour or smell. Claire suggested that this exercise was one she used as a way of working with groups to show that you can create sophisticated things very easily. Also, in workshopping plays, one can find that to interrupt one's work formally can be very helpful. The group discussed dialogue as offer and response (or both) and the idea of what is 'prompted' in various ways within and through a process and work. Then there was a discussion of the 'space' of a text. Claire asked, 'What might happen on the edge of the play or with one foot in the play? Where is the edge of that conversation? What is in the centre?'

Session 6: Emma Bennett

Emma began with a 'performance demonstration' in which she performed a text she had written, but only gestured to its original staging. She then discussed her process in making the text and her original disappointment that audience members had responded strongly to its perceived underlying narrative. She gave three explanations of her process to clarify this. Firstly she explained that she was working with ideas influenced by language poetry, specifically Caroline Bergvall's 'More Pets', in which 'it's like a system of words that seems to give birth to things.' 'I used it as a kind of machine to generate narrative', without having intended to describe a pre-existing story. When the performance generated an emotional response, she wondered whether she had fallen back on an apparent presentation of fragmented or interrupted language as evidence of personal trauma. The discussion examined this sense of disappointment, from varying perspectives. To what extent were the formal, conceptual elements incompatible with the experience of narrative, or were the two inevitably interwoven? Is there any problem with the fact that the choice of words isn't entirely arbitrary? There might be 'magic tools to escape the traps identity places upon us - form does that', but perhaps there is not a problem with communicating one's own sensibility through language. Are there issues of gender and ethnicity around the perception of work and the reception of its formal elements? Emma ended the session by showing a personal photograph which hinted at a possible origin for aspects of the piece.

Session 7: Steve Waters

As he spoke, Steve showed us the opening scenes of Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, so that his words and the film's images infiltrated one another. He spoke about his experience of Bergman and admiration for the 'rigour' of Bergman's 'chamber cinema', in which he remains faithful to location, actors, themes and time frame in a strangely theatrical cinematography. He commented on the 'tug of ritual away from narrative' in Bergman's work and the way that 'the making of the film' becomes 'an act of ritual'. Rigour 'is about acknowledging scarcity, limit, constraint and thriving on it'. This is 'linked to that much abused idea - of truth, not theological truth, but felt truth.' He quoted Bergman's account of an autobiographical episode that clarified the ending of the film, the 'codification of a rule I've always followed and was to follow from then on: irrespective of everything, you will hold your communion...if there is no other God than your hopeless search, it is important to that God too.' If 'we are the theatre', on a foggy island where god is absent, film and theatre seem linked to the practice of rigour or ritual that feels necessary, committed to its own truth, whether it is witnessed or not.