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.

Workshop in Exeter

Yesterday I gave the workshop I announced earlier in this blog (post from 16 Feb) as part of Theatre Devon's Exeter Performers Playground initiative. Eleven practitioners from a range of background joined in as we explored the musicality of movement, voice and ... well ... apples.
It was really stimulating (and challenging!) to try to summarize some of the discoveries I have made at my desk over the past 8-9 months and to make them productive for practical exploration and experiment.

A few things struck me in particular during this session:
In one experiment I asked one performer to execute a simple task (no acting!), peeling and eating an apple on stage. We then repeated the exercise but I added a simple 'drone' from a synthesizer, a kind of 'non-music' that I had hope would be relatively unexpressive, but would somehow alter our perception: sharpeing our ears for the acoustic aspect of this mundane performance, letting us hear the peeling, cutting, biting and chewing embedded in sound and thus more 'musical'. The opposite was the case. The participants agreed that the had paid much more attention to the soundscape of the exercise when there was silence. The 'drone' for them introduced a well-worn film-music trope: a foreboding, attention seeking narrative device, that took their attention away from the here and now (or: hear and now!) of the little scene and instead into narrative speculation about what was going to happen.

A second exercise worked more in the way that I had hoped: I asked two pairs of performers to perform the same task (apples, again!), but asked them to use the specific quality of a piece of music I played while they were doing the scene - neither illustrating or fictionalising the music's presence, but merely trying to translate its qualities (rhythm, melodic shapes, timbre, mood etc.) into how the ate their apples.
What was interesting to me was that the two performers in each case translated the music quite differently, responding less in a planning, premeditated way, but letting the music affect their breathing, heart-beat, posture etc. and work its way from the outside in, evoking emotion. Inevitably, however, as a audience, we began to fantasise about the characters' psyche, motivation and relationship.

What this also means, as some of the participants commented at the end, is that musicality does not mean a specific aesthetic, a particular aesthetic, but a shift of attention (for the practitioner, the audience or both), which can lead to very different things: abstraction, defamiliarisation, but equally, enhancing presence, narrative or characterisation.
As it happened, I had just come out of a fascinating talk that Tim Crouch gave immediately before my workshop, in which he strongly (and very convincingly) made a case for leaving a gap between actor and character, so that the audience actually has some space for imagination, speculation, engagement and not be confronted with a hermetically sealed figuration of a character and its situation. Musicality, it occurred to me again, can be one way of opening up this gap, of providing an irritation, a shift, a little grain of sand in an oyster. And as we know, that's how pearls are made!

It also became clearer to me than before, that I was pursuing a non-normative, non-prescriptive notion of musicality in the theatre: a musicality that is contextual, individual and opens up pathways rather than dictating a specific route.

Eraritjaritjaka and the Intermediality of Heiner Goebbels’ Music Theatre

Yesterday, I gave a talk as part of the "Frontiers +" Symposium: 'Music as Theatre, Theatre as Music' which this year features and celebrates the internationally acclaimed composer and director Heiner Goebbels. For anyone familiar with his work, the connection to why I should mention him in a blog on "the musicality of theatre" is evident. His work is strongly influenced by the idea that as a director he works like a composer, and as a composer, he works like a director, an idea he explores in more detail in the book on Composed Theatre I recently co-edited. My talk concentrated on the complex interaction of music and theatre and their perception focusing in particular on the dissolution of clearly definable borders between these art forms and their media using Heiner Goebbels’ experimental music-theatre production Eraritjaritjaka (2004) as a case study. The methodological considerations that precede the analysis are based on notions of intermediality and extend the idea of an intermedial relation that “consists in one medium representing another” (Schröter) into three types of relations, which I label metaphorically “Suchbild” (picture puzzle), “Kippfigur” (reversing ambiguous figures) and the “Schwellenphänomen” (liminal phenomenon). In my argument these notions are used to distinguish different forms of cohesion or fusion between music and the theatrical in relation to process and performance. Goebbels’ production consciously challenges and blurs boundaries of clearly distinguishable media, distinguishable genres and distinguishable performance modes. This talk is an excerpt from a chapter, in which I also look at similar intermedial movements in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. The chapter will be published later this year as: „Dancing in the Twilight – On the Borders of Music and Theatre”, in: Risi, Clemens; Karatonis, Pamela; Symonds, Dominic (eds.): The Legacy of Opera. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2012.