A very kind review

It has been a while since my last post, but I have now received a review for the "Musicality in Theatre" book, which not only "gets" the book completely, but is also very kind, so here it is:

Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making. By David Roesner. pp. xiiiþ305. Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera. (Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, Vt., 2014. £70. ISBN 978-1- 4094-6101-2.)

Ever since ‘the idea of absolute music’ (Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago, 1991)) became the ideology of absolute music in the early nineteenth century, the other arts have one by one turned to music as a model for their own procedures. In this book David Roesner cites a passage by the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist from as early as 1811 that already presents the analogy between writing and music as an aspiration. From the later nineteenth century a succession of writers, starting with Mallarme and followed by names as varied as Strindberg, Joyce, Eliot, Stein, Huxley, Pinget, Leiris, Beckett, Tardieu, and Thomas Bernhard adopted music directly as a model for writing, not only poetry, but also novels and drama. These writers were primarily seeking modes of writing capable of conveying the complexity of consciousness. But they also found in music (as they understood its newly bestowed powers of abstraction and idealization) a powerful argument for the autonomy of art freed from dependence upon the representation of the material world, or, indeed, from instrumental ends such as morality. In time, painters would follow suit, artists such as Whistler, Kandinsky, and Klee finding in music analogies for their own quest for the painting of mood and atmosphere, or for more formal concerns. And inevitably modernist theatre-makers found their way to music too as a way of escaping the imperious tyranny of the real, perhaps even more pressing in theatre. This is the first book to chart the history of the musicalization of theatre comprehensively in relation to writers, directors, scenographers, and performers, and it does so with great clarity and authority.

The association of theatre with music was perhaps inevitable since, like music, theatre is an art of performance and therefore in many ways it is a form that is closer to music than painting or the novel can ever be. Moreover, theatre has historically always been entwined with music. In most non-Western theatrical forms music is an essential element, and it is only in the relatively short history of modern Western theatre and music that these two arts have separated. And of course, even Western theatre has its own distinctive form of musical theatre in opera. But although this book appears in Ashgate’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series, Roesner makes clear from the start that it is not a book about opera, music theatre, or musicals, all of which, of course, may be described as musicalized forms of theatre (as, indeed, can much dance, which is not mentioned). But Roesner’s interest is in forms of theatre that borrow from music as analogy or metaphor rather than directly incorporating music, although, of course, theatre-makers with a keen musical ear are also likely to understand the subtle role that music itself can play in theatrical performance. Hence his use of the word ‘musicality’ rather than music, and the terms in his subtitle: music as ‘model, method and metaphor’ in theatre-making.

In his introduction Roesner makes clear that he is not assuming a normative definition of either music or musicality but rather that he is interested in what he describes as the ‘dispositif ’ of music and musicality, a term that is borrowed from Foucault to describe a network of ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ (p. 10) that sustain both ideological formations and social practices. To pursue a musicalized theatrical practice is to subscribe to a whole set of beliefs about the particular efficacy of music: its sociality, its relation to the body, cognition, subjectivity, etc. And inevitably, different theatre artists will employ different aspects of musicality (e.g. rhythm, melody, counterpoint, timbre, etc.) depending upon their particular aesthetic or ideological interests. The aesthetic and ideological reasons for the Swiss theatre artist Adolph Appia to advocate a musicalized approach to theatre based on the Schopenhauerian principle of music as the expression of the inner essence of things are very different from those of the contemporary Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek, for whom ‘music makes one strange’ (p. 128). This form of Brechtian Verfremdung gives the musicality of the writing of both Jelinek and her compatriot Thomas Bernhard a particular edge in their deep knowledge and love of the Austro-German musical tradition and in their savage scorn for its cosy bourgeois domestication (the theme of Jelinek’s novel The Piano Teacher, made into a film by Michael Haneke, although the novel is even more remorseless than the film, shocking though that is).

Roesner’s book begins, as it must, with an excellent chapter on Appia as perhaps the founding figure of musicalized theatre, although, of course, Nietzsche had paved the way with his concept of Greek tragedy as a form that arose from the Dionysian spirit of music. Appia’s approach to theatre was founded in Schopenhauer and in his intense love of Wagner, along with his justified disappointment in Wagner’s own oddly literal approach to staging his works. Appia rightly discerned that the symbolism of Wagner’s dramas was at odds with the Romantic-realist forms of scenography espoused by Wagner himself, and developed an approach to scenography that was essentially abstract, seeking to convey through space, light, and image the inner meaning of the drama, expressed in the music, rather than simply its outward form of representation. Although much of Appia’s career was inspired by Wagnerian drama, in his work at the Dresden garden suburb of Hellerau with Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, founder of Eurythmics, a method of expressing music through movement, Appia extended his method to create forms of dramatic expression in which all of the parameters could be musicalized above all the performer’s body.

Roesner’s longest chapter on one artist is dedicated to the work of the Russian director Vsevelod Meyerhold, one of the most important innovators in twentieth-century theatre, and unlike Appia, who had limited opportunities to put his ideas into practice, primarily a practitioner. Meyerhold’s approach was an aspect of what his contemporary (and rival) Alexander Tairov described as ‘the re-theatricalisation’ (p. 94) of theatre, an acknowledgement of the fictive artifice of theatre that drew on Meyerhold’s love of popular theatrical forms such as commedia dell’arte and its Russian derivatives. Music also played a crucial role in Meyerhold’s quest for forms of theatre that escaped the realism of his mentor Stanislavski, although as Roesner mentions, Stanislavski’s own later method also placed great emphasis upon the use of tempo and rhythm as means of externalizing inner states of being. The importance of Meyerhold for Roesner’s understanding of the role of musicality in theatre lies in the fact that for Meyerhold music was both means and end. As a means it was a means to theatricality, to a foregrounding of form rather than to the signification of reality. Like early silent movie comics, who used music on set to animate their physical performance, Meyerhold used music in rehearsal as a means of animating his actors and encouraging them to find non-naturalistic forms of expression. As an end music gave energy and form to performance.

Tairov complained that Meyerhold’s method led to theatre as ‘empty form’ (p. 97), and of course Meyerhold himself was explicit (in his theory of ‘biomechanics’) about his concept of the performer as a kind of machine whose body should be like an instrument that could be played with the precision of a musical instrument. His directorial style, like that of an orchestral conductor, demanded similar precision from his performers. But he also drew from commedia a love of improvisation that draws on different skills, in particular the ability to adapt fixed routines to various dramatic situations, and to play variations on conventional forms. Most of the European theatre writers and directors discussed in this book draw on notions of music from the Western classical tradition, which privileges form and structure, but it is known that Meyerhold was interested in jazz, which is a musical genre that makes extensive use of improvisation. One of the most original chapters in the book is on American theatre practitioners who have, perhaps inevitably, drawn directly upon the dynamics of jazz in their work. The writer Sam Shepard, whose plays incorporate many aspects of American popular culture, draws upon elements of jazz such as call and response in the construction of dialogue, and upon the notion of riffing on a set of changes. In the 1980s Shepard teamed up with the director Joseph Chaikin, who at the Open Theatre in New York had developed a theatrical laboratory for experimental theatre in which he drew upon the concept of ‘jamming’ as a method for developing a particular kind of improvisatory performer responsiveness. But again, Roesner wisely avoids offering a normative explanation of jazz practices, considering jazz instead as a set of social as much as musical practices, and recognizing that for artists like Shepard and Chaikin jazz represents a form of social critique as well as aesthetic expression.

All the directors discussed in this book recognized that musicalized forms of theatre demand specific actor skills and dedicated as much of their energy to actor training, and theorization of such training, as to production. This is no less important for performers who have to respond to writers such as Samuel Beckett and Elfriede Jelinek, who require a very particular kind of quasi-musical precision, Beckett was notorious for beating out the tempo that he wanted actors to adopt when performing his work, and was described as behaving like an orchestral conductor in his management of rehearsals. In a chapter on ‘the musicality of playwriting’ Roesner discusses writers as varied not only as Beckett and Jelinek, but as Heiner Müller, Caryl Churchill, and Martin Crimp, all of whom explore different aspects of the musicality dispositif in their work (it is noteworthy, perhaps contrary to the expectation that left-wing writers should engage with social reality in their plays, that it is often left-wing writers such as Müller, Churchill, and Jelinek who have more consistently explored musicality, a recognition that there is a politics of form as well as of content).

In his last chapter Roesner demonstrates the way in which the musicality dispositif has pervaded a wide range of recent and current theatre practices, in particular in Britain and Germany, the countries Roesner knows best. Across the cases he looks at, the specific use of musicality varies greatly. The American director Robert Wilson, for instance, puts his theatre pieces together with the precision of a composer notating a score, whereas in the work of the German director Michael Thalheimer the musicality of the dramatic text is found through the process of analysis in rehearsal, with the aim of producing a piece of work with the emotional impact of ‘a good pop-song’ (p. 236). The British theatre company Filter also references popular music in its work, but employs a less controlled method of production; sometimes their performances seem more like a staged rock concert than a piece of theatre. Their aesthetic credo ‘can we do it sonically?’ (p. 242) leads to some fundamentally new ways of thinking about theatre, and the extensive and eclectic range of such practices demonstrates that music has opened many doors to theatrical innovation, and will continue to do so as both music and theatre continue to evolve. Indeed, Roesner makes even more important claims for the function of musicality in theatre, suggesting that it engages with the ways in which different aspects of musicality and musicking (to adopt Christopher Small’s famous neologism) shape human identity as ‘an omnipresent foundation of our lives’ (p. 263). By implication, a theatre without musicality is in some respects an impoverished theatre. This is an important claim, and should ensure that this book will secure a lasting place not only as a stimulating counter-history of twentieth-century theatre, but also as provocation to rethink the ontology of theatre itself, and the meaning of musicality.

NICHOLAS TILL

University of Sussex

doi:10.1093/ml/gcv024

© The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Finally!

Research Event: Music and the Dramatic Text, University of Kent, European Theatre Research Network

The European Theatre Research Network at the University of Kent is delighted to invite you to the following research event:

"Music and the Dramatic Text"

(convened by Dr David Roesner and Dr Montserrat Roser i Puig)

University of Kent, Grimond Building, Aphra Studio
Monday 19th May at 2pm

Programme:
The afternoon will start with three presentations by Dr Catherine Laws (University of York, Music) Dr Montserrat Roser i Puig (University of Kent, Modern Languages, Hispanic Studies) and Dr David Roesner (University of Kent, Drama) will explore the impact of music on a range of European dramatists, their playwrighting and the musicality of their theatre-making. Music here serves as a topic, an intertextual presence, a range of structural models and an attunement to the sonic qualities of language or the rhythm of gestures.

The presentations will be followed by a student 'work-in-progress' production based on the Catalan author Joan Brossa's music-theatrical miniatures "Accions Musicals" (1966-1978). These have been translated especially for this event by Dr Montserrat Roser i Puig from Catalan into English and will be performed for the first time in the UK.

The performance will be followed by a panel discussion with all speakers, the directors and the audience.

The event is funded by the School of Arts, University of Kent and Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH) and attendance is free.

My talk can be viewed here: 

Not long now....

In the past few weeks and months I have been busy with the final editing, proofing and indexing stage of the forthcoming book. It is now going to the printing unit very soon and will be available in July – not your typical summer read, but perhaps still worth looking at?

Here is the announcement in Ashgate's online catalogue.

Voilà!

For the Francophone of you, this very recent publication may be of interest:

Didier Plassard (ed.), Mises en scène d'Allemagne(s) (Paris: CNRS, 2014).

It contains chapters on theatre practitioners such as Peter Stein, Thomas Ostermeier, Klaus Grüber, Christoph Marthaler, Claus Peymann, Peter Zadek, Frank Castorf, Einar Schleef, Rene Pollesch and Rimini Protokoll.

My chapter on Christoph Marthaler in this collection offers an in-depth analysis of his 1999 production "Die Spezialisten" (Hamburger Schauspielhaus) and investigates how musical form is used as a core dramaturgical and narrative device.

Another quick plug

For those interested in Matthias Rebstock and my co-edited book Composed Theatre. Aesthetics. Practices. Processes but found it a bit too pricey to add to their personal bookshelf, you may be interested to know that it is now out as a paperback (£29.95) and as an ebook on most platforms starting as low as £4.19 (Kobo) to £9.99 (ibook) or £13.99 (kindle).

The Legacy of Opera – hot off the press

A chapter I wrote a while ago is now finally 'out there': it appears in the new volume:

The Legacy of Opera – Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance (edited by Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis)
In my chapter Dancing in the Twilight – On the Borders of Music and the Scenic I investigate the complex interaction of music and theatre, musical and theatrical performance and perception and particularly the dissolution of clearly definable borders between them on the basis of two different practices: a meta-musical-theatre film (Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark), and an experimental music-theatre production by composer-director Heiner Goebbels: Eraritjaritjaka. The methodological considerations that precede these investigations are based on Jens Schröter's notion of transformational intermediality and expand the idea of an intermedial relation that "consists in one medium representing another” into three types of relations, which I label with the metaphors “Suchbild” (picture puzzle), the “Kippfigur” (tilting phenomenon) and the “Schwellenphänomen” (liminal phenomenon). In my argument these notions are used to classify and distinguish different forms of cohesion or fusion between music and theatre in performance. I focus on productions which challenge or blur boundaries of clearly distinguishable media, genres and/or performance modes. They also question fixed dispositions with respect to both production process and perception and draw their particular appeal from this ambiguity.

More details on the book:
Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY 2013. 269 pp. (Themes in Theatre 7)
ISBN: 978-90-420-3691-8 Paper
ISBN: 978-94-012-0950-2 E-Book

ISBN: 978-90-420-3692-5 Textbook

Online book series info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?SerieId=TT

The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance is the first volume in a series of books compiled by the Music Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. The series explores the widening of the meaning of the term “music theatre” to reflect new ways of thinking about this creative practice beyond the genres circumscribed by discourses of theatre studies and musicology. Specifically it interrogates the experience of music theatre and its performance energies for contemporary audiences who engage with the emergence of new expressive idioms, new performative paradigms, new technologies and new ways of thinking. The Legacy of Opera considers some of the ways in which opera’s influence has informed our understanding of and approach to the musical stage, from the multiple perspectives of the ideological, historical, corporeal and artistic. With contributions from international scholars in music theatre, its chapters explore both canonic and experimental examples of music theatre, spanning a period from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of illustrations
• Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis: Empty houses, booming voices
• Bianca Michaels: Is this still opera? Media operas as productive provocations
• Nicholas Till: A new glimmer of light: Opera, metaphysics and mimesis
• Sarah Nancy: The singing body in the Tragédie Lyrique of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France: Voice, theatre, speech, pleasure
• Clemens Risi: Performing affect in seventeenth-century opera: Process, reception, transgression
• Magnus Tessing Schneider: The Violettas of Patti, Muzio and Callas: Style, interpretation and the question of legacy
• Pamela Karantonis: The tenor in decline? Narratives of nostalgia and the performativity of the operatic tenor
• Michael Eigtved: The Threepenny Opera: Performativity and the Brechtian presence between music and theatre
• Jeongwon Joe: The acousmêtre on stage and screen: The power of the bodiless voice
• David Roesner: Dancing in the twilight: On the borders of music and the scenic
• Pieter Verstraete: Turkish post-migrant “opera” in Europe: A socio-historical perspective on aurality
• Dominic Symonds: “Powerful spirit”: Notes on some practice as research
• Abstracts
• Notes on contributors
• Bibliography
• Index 

I hope the book will enjoy many critical readers!

Here is where we meet...

I have recently had the fortune to work more closely together with Pablo Pakula, who organised the 'Lifting the Curtain' events at the Marlowe Theatre (see previous blog entry), is a colleague at University of Kent, Drama and also Co-Founder of Accidental Collective together with Daisy Orton. Their current project is an exciting devised piece on the basis of John Berger's evocative book Here is where we meet.
I am delighted that after a number of conversations I am now involved in creating the music/soundscape for this piece together with Jenna Wild. Doing some hands on work, thinking music-dramaturgically alongside a developing piece, helping to solve issues of pace, transitions, mood, rhythm etc. is something I always find very exciting and working practically is an itch I don't always find the time to scratch amidst the demands of a busy academic schedule.
I am thus looking forward to the next few weeks: if you are in the area of Canterbury, don't miss the show: it is at the Marlowe Theatre, June 18-22.

You can also follow Accidental Collective on Twitter: @accidentalc

Workshop at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

I had a lovely time today giving a workshop at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. This was part of a three day festival of talks, demonstrations, workshops and other activities of drama colleagues at the University of Kent seeking to make some of what we do accessible, interesting and relevant to a wider audience: Lifting the Curtain was the fitting title.

My workshop was entitled
Music as Performance – Theatre with Instruments
and the abstract read as follows:
This workshop will explore the potential that instruments can have on stage, and the act of ‘musicking’ as a mode of performance. Music can be theatrical and theatre can have musicality. Mainstream theatre productions like Sweeney Todd and avantgarde artists like John Cage, Laurie Anderson, or Heiner Goebbels, have all set precedents for this kind of work. We will engage in improvisations, exploring new playing techniques, placement in space and use of light to unleash theatrical expressiveness and narrative from musical instruments. Please bring your instrument(s), if you have any (you don’t have to be particularly good on them!) or come along without one. No experience required.

About 20 participants took part, some students, some theatre practitioners, opera singers, teachers, composers. We set out to undertake a range of experiments and improvisations, isolating very small basic aspects of musical and instrumental performance on the theatre stage. What make an instrument a theatrical object? What gestures or encounters with other bodies on stage change a musicians performance? How? Into what?
I was keen not to provide recipes or quick tricks on "how to...", but to get us all see and hear more acutely, notice small differences and think more about the interdependence of instrument and performer, space, light, movement etc. and the narrative, atmospheric, visual, sonic etc. potential they unfold.

There were already some good comments on twitter (#curtainupkent) - more comments and suggestions welcome!

(Photos (c) Matt Wilson)

A 12min video documentation filmed by Käroli Grenman and edited by Peter John-Morton (many thanks!)

Peer review

The peer review system, which many publishers, including my prospective publisher Ashgate, use to ensure and increase the quality of their publications, is in many ways an excellent process. When it comes to your own manuscript, you do await the anonymous peer reviewer's comments with quite a bit of anxiety. This is likely to be the most critical reader you book will get, they are usually a respected expert in your field, and their verdict can create a lot of extra work or even cause a publisher to withdraw from a project.
So it was with great relief when I read the first sentence of the peer review for "Musicality in Theatre" which I had submitted in January:
"I very much enjoyed reading the manuscript, and think it will be an excellent publication"
Phew.
He or she then goes on to make a range of quite detailed suggestions for improving the manuscript, all of which I can understand and find helpful and constructive.
So now I am looking forward to rewriting certain chapters with this fresh and critical perspective in mind and hope to resubmit soon.   

A Review for Composed Theatre

A colleague very kindly forwarded Jackie Smart's review of Composed Theatre by Matthias Rebstock and me to me today. The review is hot off the press and appears in the latest issue of Theatre Research International (Volume 38 / Issue 01 / March 2013, pp 74 -75).

Jackie Smart writes:

"This book investigates a field of performance that operates between music and theatre, examining ways in which compositional principles drawn from music have been applied to theatrical performance, and theatrical thinking has influenced musical composition. It arises from two symposia organized by the editors at Exeter and Hildesheim universities which brought together academics and practitioners, and this starting point is reflected in the composition of the book through the way it brings together a diverse range of voices and perspectives, appropriately conveying the sense of scholars and artists engaged in ongoing debate about a developing form.

[…] The practitioners represented in Part Two constitute an impressive list, including Heiner Goebbels, Michael Hirsch, Jörg Laue, George Rodosthenous and Nicholas Till. Their engaging accounts illuminate the theoretical arguments of Part One and extend the book’s relevance and interest to anyone concerned with the messy, fascinating processes of collaborative creation. The ‘portraits’ of practitioners in Part Three bring into focus the key role of the performer as a creative contributor and highlight the presence of the personal within composed theatre, from the ‘biographical origins’ of Ruedi Häusermann’s inspiration to Daniel Ott’s interest in working with the personalities of his musicians. Part Four contains an intriguing selection of excerpts of discussions from the symposia and a concluding discourse analysis by Roesner in which he draws out and interrogates key principles and themes of this fascinating form of theatre-making. It is a style of performance of which I have had little direct experience but the book made me want to hear and see more."

Always great to read that someone enjoyed the book, found it engaging and useful – made my day!

Submission!

Last week I summoned my courage and gathered all the 'this will have to be good enough' attitude I could muster have made the final arrangements for submitting the manuscript to the publisher, Ashgate.
I am always amazed how time-consuming the final nitty-gritty layout, proofreading and harmonising is, but at some point even this minute and slightly numbing process is done, and it was time to let go. Not an easy process: one could of course continue working on a manuscript for ever, as there will always be a bit of new information, another reference, a new insight, another typo. So taking a conscious decision to stop fiddling is important.
Still, it is not quite the 'drumroll'-moment, the big finale with glitter and fanfare one secretly envisages throughout the process of writing, given that there will now be a relatively lengthy process of peer reviews, amendments, copy-editing, proofreading, chasing final publication rights for illustrations etc. etc. But despite all this, there is no denying that this project has reached an important milestone, and although I felt having to print all 474 pages was a bit unusual in our digital age, the sheer physical weight of the envelope I sent off brought this home to me quite nicely.

A Wordle 'summary'

I have recently discovered Wordle, which take any amount of text and creates a field of words that seem to be significant, ranking them by size and arranging them in a word cloud.
Based on my current draft, which is now almost 114.000 words, this is how wordle summarizes my forthcoming book:

Making some Noise...

As I have found the theoretical paths between Sound/Noise and Performance and Musicality to cross frequently, here are two quick links to recent events:

First, I just attended „Sound and Performance” – the 11th Congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft (German Society for Theatre Studies) which was held from 4 to 7 October 2012 by the Institute for Music-Theatre Studies (Prof. Ernst, Prof. Mungen) at the University of Bayreuth and gave a keynote entitled: " Mind the Gap! ‘Noise’ in the performative production of sound ".

Second, Lynne Kendrick's and my book "Theatre Noise" (CSP) has just been reviewed very positively by Sarah Mauksch at http://www.theaterforschung.de/rezension.php4?ID=1571. Theaterforschung.de is the main German online hub for theatre scholarship, equivalent perhaps to SCUDD in the UK.

Here is a short excerpt with my translation:
"18 Beiträge liegen hier gesammelt vor, die sich kaleidoskopisch mit den unterschiedlichsten Blickpunkten um die Schlagworte „sound“/„noise“, „theatre“/„performance“ anordnen. Dass diesen so vielfach entgegnet werden kann, zeigt wie zwingend eine profunde Auseinandersetzung mit dem  Verhältnis der Begriffe gefordert war (und ist?). Dieser Band liefert dazu einen detaillierten Einblick in den Status quo der Forschung und den Anwendungsbereich des Theaters, das gleichzeitig Untersuchungsgegenstand ist. Meiner Meinung nach ist die Verknüpfung von Beiträgen aus der Wissenschaft sowie praxisorientierter Handhabe für Fragestellungen dieser Art äußerst sinnvoll. […]
Alles in allem spiegelt dieses Buch die Dringlichkeit zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem Themengebiet wider und den Herausgebern gelingt es, erste intelligente Schlüsse aus der Fülle an Informationen zu ziehen. Aus diesem Grund ist die Lektüre uneingeschränkt empfehlenswert."

"18 chapters are assembled here which are structured around the keywords „sound“/„noise“, „theatre“/„performance“  caleidoscopically from a wide range of viewpoints. That these keywords can be approached in such a variety of ways, demonstrates how timely a profound exploration with the relationship between these terms was (and is?). This volume provides a detailled insight into the status quo of the research and practice of a theatre that is at the same time its topic. In my opinion, the combination of academic contributions with reflections from a practice-oriented background is very sensible for this interrogation. […] All in all this book reflects the urgency of an exploration of this topic and the editors succeed in drawing first intelligent conclusions from the wealth of informations. Therefore reading this book is recommended without reservations."

I won't argue with that!

Speaking at TaPRA

I will be speaking about musicality in theatre today at the TaPRA conference at the University of Kent, where I have just moved two days ago. I am excited to discuss my work in the context of the working group for Performer Training in the 20th and 21st Century, which is not necessarily my 'natural' habitat, but since a lot of the discourse on musicality is intimately connected with questions of actor and performer training, it will be interesting to get feedback from this background.
I am also looking forward to hear Mario Frendo's paper, who also talks about musicality as dramaturgy: there are a lot of shared interest between our papers (e.g. musicality as emergence of rhythmical structures or melodic associations, as he describes it) but also areas where we approach the notion quite differently, which will make for a productive discussion, I am sure.
In the meantime, the book has progressed significantly and I am in the final stages of finishing the first complete draft and get it ready for proof-reading and further editing.

Pastures new

From the beginning of Sept I will start a new job as Senior Lecturer at the Department of Drama and Theatre of the University of Kent. While I will miss my excellent and wonderful colleagues at Exeter Drama, I am also very excited to re-contextualize my work in a new environment and be inspired by the new surroundings and people.

More interviews

In my attempt to tackle 'musicality' in contemporary theatre, which appears to be a particularly eclectic field, I have tried to identify a range of practitioners and practices that might make for some interesting case studies for this final chapter. I have had along conversation with Jörg Gollasch about his work with German director and incoming Intendantin of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Karin Beier (see previous blog entry). After that Gareth Fry, sound deisgner for Katie Mitchell, Complicite and others very kindly spoke to me about Mitchell's multimedia works and the role of sound and music in these. I was also intrigued by Filter's work with music and sound in their anarchic and highly entertaining adaptations, such as Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night. Director Sean Holmes kindly spoke with me about this work. And finally I was able to talk to German director Michael Thalheimer, who has developed a unique style of adapting classical text into condensed scores of gestures, words and music with the signature stage design by Olaf Altman and compositions by Bert Wrede. Thalheimer famously said that theatre should be like a good pop song and we had an interesting conversation about what that might mean.
So now all I have do is to write that final chapter.... if only the sun hadn't decided to finally grace the South West with its long-awaited presence...

Interviews

As my book project, which I have written chronologically so far, starting somewhere around 1870, is now approaching contemporary theatre, I am beginning to talk about artists who are actually alive. So I have started to make contact with some of them and have been able to conduct three interviews so far, worth two theatre directors and one theatre musician.
This is quite an interesting process: it always strikes me how different artists conceptualise and reflect on their work to the way I would describe it. It is quite a useful challenge to step out of one's own discourse and jargon and to try to truly understand and embrace the differences in emphasis and vocabulary provided by the artists themselves.
First of the three artists and productions I encountered was Matthieu Leloup, who directed the company Bred in the Bone in 2006 based on a text by T.S. Eliot - an intricate interweaving of live music with a clearly improvised flair of jazz and klezmer and actors who performed their texts, gestures and movement not to music but as music.
Then I talked to director Thorsten Lensing, who continues to baffle audiences in Germany with highly original productions ranging from adaptations of novels or poetry (again T.S. Eliot, actually!) and classics like King Lear or The Cherry Orchard. I wanted to talk to him specifically about a production from 2009, Der Lauf zum Meer, based on a text by William Carlos Williams.
Again, it was the particularly intricate and tight interweaving of three improvising live musicians with three actors, interspersing their lines like jazz soloists into the musical texture that struck me at the time and that I was curious to find out more about with regard to the process of development. More about in my chapter in the book.
Finally, I just had the chance to see one of the final performances of the impressive production Das Werk. Der Bus. Der Sturz by Elfriede Jelinek, directed by Karin Beier. I spoke to the composer of the production, Jörg Gollasch – his music features three live musicians (cello, percussion) almost throughout the piece, as well as long breathtaking section of through-composed speech rhythms for large male choir. Again, I was intrigued to find out quite how interrelated the musical and theatrical development of the production were, how indispensable composing and directing proved to be for each other in this process.
I am looking forward to going throw theses conversations again now and to try to make sense of them the context of my particular discourse hopefully without falling into the trap of "simply making them fit", but allowing the occasional difference I mentioned above to shine though.

"Theater als Musik" now available as iBook

For a while now my first monograph from 2003, Theater als Musik (Theatre as music), has been out of print, but I still got the odd request from students and colleagues who are interested in having a look at it. I have uploaded the PDF files to the research repository of the University of Exeter (and they are still there), but since the book makes frequent use of video clips and sound samples, and provides musical transcripts etc., I always thought that a kind of ebook / hypertext would be a better solution.




So after quite a bit of tweaking (and updating the text here and there), you can now download it in this new iBook format! And it's free! So do have a look, and perhaps leave a review or comment.


You can search for it through your iBook app or through iTunes. Here is a link.

I'm afraid, however, it is still all in German...


In many ways, it is the predecessor to the book I'm currently writing: it focuses on contemporary directors Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef and – probably best known of the three – Robert Wilson, and looks at their productions from a musical point of view, whereas in my current project, I go back in history and consider working and creation processes more strongly than the resulting performances. Anyway, I hope the digital version will be useful.

Workshop in Hamburg

For the past four days I have been watching two shows a night from the next generation of directors from most German speaking conservatories which teach directing, as well as some international additions from Denmark and the Netherlands. As different as the productions are, in their subjects, working methods, acting styles and directorial signatures, a strong use of music is almost ubiquitous.
In my workshop during the Körber Studio Junge Regie, however, I tried to emphasise a notion of musicality which has little to do with how much music was used in a production.
I sought at first to map the field briefly, trying to tease out some of the core aspects of musicality (how it may provide a different perspective on the materiality of theatre, a disposition to 'attunement' of the sense to rhythm, timbre, sound qualities, formal relationships etc. of theatrical events, a different working process and, perhaps, as a result, a different aesthetics.
One interesting interjection by a participant gave me food for thought in particular: he would sometimes warn actors "now you are just singing!" when they started loosing the actual sense of what they were saying. It hadn't really occurred to me that the strategy used by the likes of Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Robert Wilson etc etc. to de-sematise language order to increase our appreciation for its sonic and rhythmic qualities could of course, in different contexts, backfire and become an escape, a formal ornamentation of language stripping it of its actual meaning.
It does emphasise the point that there isn't one single recipe of musicality that always 'works', but that different contexts, aesthetics, individuals and materials require different kinds of musicality.
Another interesting conversation (amongst many!) was about, whether my book would also include the perspective of the audience. Surely it wouldn't be enough to talk about intentions, strategies, process and manifestos; I would also need to investigate how musicality was received, how it might depend on personal factors and preferences, even the position of audience members in the auditorium etc. All this is true and would desirable, but it is for many reasons more than I can possibly cover at the moment, even if I had a time machine and could fly back to 1920s Russia, for example, to interview Meyerhold's audiences.

What I found really rewarding about the workshop and some of the brief talks and reactions I had with and from participants was the impression, that some of this was actually genuinely useful for them. I am the last person to say the research always has to immediately demonstrate it use and impact - a lot of the greatest inventions came out of pure and uncalculating curiosity - but I do believe that ideally theory, experiment, and creative practice engage in a cyclical interplay in which one challenges and enriches the other.