Two workshops in Exeter and Hamburg

Marking roughly the half-way point in my time on this project, I am excited to leave the 'writer's den' for a workshop, in which I try to both summarize some of my findings so far, but also, and perhaps more importantly, try to translate them into a few exercises and experiments, which I hope to be of interest to today's theatre practitioners.

Here is brief description of the workshop which I will give in Exeter and Hamburg in March and April - the basic concept will be the same for both, but context and working language (English/German) will vary.
 

In this workshop will explore the notion of ‘musicality’ and its significance and potential for processes of theatre making. Using notions of music as models, metaphors or actual principles of practice in the theatre has a long tradition. It has been discussed by a variety of directors, actors, stage designers and playwrights ranging from Goethe to Beckett, Meyerhold to Artaud, Appia to Wilson all of which put forward musicality as a strategy for writing, directing and performing, but with quite different theatrical aims and results.

We will initially discuss some of the key themes and concepts of this interdisciplinary notion of musicality and will then conduct a number of small exercises, which aim to be leaping off points for any future experiments with musicality you may wish to incorporate into your theatre making processes.

I will give this workshop first as part of the Exeter Performers Playground, hosted by Theatre Devon and the Drama Department, University of Exeter, on Wed, 28 March, 6-9pm, Exeter University Drama Department, Thornlea, TS1.
Exeter Performers' Playground is "a new initiative in Exeter, aiming to provide workshop and training opportunities for Devon-based performance makers. We run regular sessions for skills sharing, experimenting and play, and explore a variety of performance techniques.  We aim to support a growing network of performance-makers in the region, and create an informal space for both exercising our performance skills, and sharing and testing ideas."
Then I will engage with the next generation of young directors as part of the festival "Körber Studio Junge Regie", which showcases final year productions from the major drama schools / conservatories in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands and Denmark.

See also: http://exeter.academia.edu/Roesner/Talks#d72592

I will comment on how it all went, soon!

Two New Books

In the recent two years I have kept quite busy with two editing projects, which have now both been published, which I am very excited about. While they are clearly distinct from each other and from the monograph I am currently writing, there are of course overlaps and possible dialogues between all three.
On a pragmatic level these (temporal) overlaps – finishing two books simultaneously, while trying to start a third – have sometimes been tiring. Different layouts and referencing rules had to applied and kept separate and deadlines happened to coincide more and more.
But in the end for me the resonances between the different projects have been quite stimulating and I hope that they find an interested and critical readership.

The first book,
Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, edited by Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner (Newcastle 2011) came out at the end of last year and started from a conference at Central School of Speech and Drama in April 2009 conceived by Ross Brown. Lynne Kendrick (also from CSSD) and I then were entrusted with developing a book concept on the basis of this new term, theatre noise, and collected and commissioned eighteen chapters for the now finished volume. This is what it says on the cover:

This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance.
‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book – by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.


And Nicholas Till, Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at Sussex University, very kindly commented: “‘Are we currently discovering sound?’ asks Patrice Pavis in the Preface to this book. And reading the essays in the book is indeed to make a voyage of discovery into aspects of theatrical experience and practice hitherto unaccountably muffled from our attention. The whole book offers rich proof of the rewards of the ‘acoustic turn’ in contemporary theory.”

___________________________

The second book came out of an AHRC network project, conducted by Matthias Rebstock, Professor for 'scenic music' at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, and me. It is an attempt to map a field we called 'Composed Theatre' by looking at it historically, analytically, as discourse and as a creative process, involving composers, directors, and scholars. The book combines, unites and confronts those different voices:

Composed Theatre. Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, edited by Matthias Rebstock und David Roesner (Bristol 2012). This book gives extensive coverage of a growing field of theatre, which is characterized by applying musical and compositional approaches to the creation of theatrical performances. The contributions to this book seek to establish and closely investigate this field, ranging from focused reports by seminal artists and in-depth portraits of their working methods to academic essays contextualizing the aesthetics, practices and processes in questions.
This book looks at Composed Theatre in a unique way by focusing on the creative process, as it is not primarily the aesthetics or the audiences that characterize the field, but the compositional thinking at play in its creation. Since Composed Theatre is often highly self-reflexive, the authors also explore how it is calling into question fundamental certainties about musical composition, dramaturgy and music-theatrical production. 

Comments on either book are welcome!

Quote of the day

Meyerhold's view on directing is very much at the core of what I seek to explore in my book, it seems:
"If you asked me today where the difficulty lies in the art of the director, I would say: 'It lies in the fact that he needs to contain the in-containable'. The challenge of the art of directing is that the director needs to be a musician most of all. He in particular has to deal with on of the most difficult aspects of the art of music, he develops the scenic movements always contrapuntally. That is a very difficult matter. […] If you'd ask me: 'Which core course in a faculty of a future theatre-university, which core course should form part of its curriculum?' – I would say: 'Naturally music'. If a director isn't a musician, then he isn't capable of developing a real production. Because a real production (I don't mean the opera, the theatre of the music-drama and the musical comedy –, I even mean such dramatic theatre, where the whole performance proceeds without any musical accompaniment) can only be devised by a musician as a director."

Workshop in Norway

I have just returned from giving a workshop for Master students at the Universitetet i Agder: Institutt for visuelle og sceniske fag within a module on Interdisciplinarity. Through theoretical debate and practical exercises we explored a range of interplays between music, performance, and visual art, taking inspiration from practitioners ranging from Adolphe Appia, Vassily Kandinsky, John Cage to Heiner Goebbels, Carola Bauckholt or Robert Wilson.

It was particularly interesting to work with students whose background was largely not in theatre, not music (with a few exceptions), but in visual art and photography. This allowed us to question and compare notions of "composition", "rhythm" or "score" between different art forms and attempt translations and transformations between the disciplines. Almost as a by-product, we also stumbled upon questions of acting and not-acting and the theatricality of executing musical instructions in a theatrical environment.

One notion that we kept returning to was that of the 'frame' within which we place an artistic practice and how influential this frame (as a mindset, a training background, an institutional set of parameters, or as a predisposition of the spectator/audience) is for how we 'read' interdisciplinary art.

Workshop in Berlin II

The two week-workshop I just gave together with singer and actor Christina M. Lagao as part of the 'Herbstcamp' of the Deutsches Theater was an interesting challenge; requiring me to frame my research into musicality in (the) theatre in a pedagogical context for a heterogeneous group of Berlin students between 13 and 25 years old. There were two key premises to the workshop (based on the overall theme "What do we need?" for al 6 workshops that ran parallel and were later presented together to an audience of about 250 at the Deutsches Theater on Sunday,16th October: on the one hand it was about reclaiming music as a common language which we all speak and which is not subject to record deals, talent shows, managers, producers or powerful PA systems. On the other hand, it was also about exploring the theatrical in making music; experimenting with ways of performing our multiple and multifaceted relationships with music.
All of our participants were asked to name one song they would take with them to a desert island (the eponymous BBC radio show had inspired us). This selection of songs – from inspirational to fun, from suited for dancing to chilling, from topical to mainstream – formed a basis, a rough material that we transformed into live music.
There was also a strong sense of what Christopher Small calls "musicking" there to guide our devising process: the ways in which we engage with music and participate in its creation and meaning making when we hum along to our ipods, dance in all sorts of ways to it, create it with nervously drumming fingers on our suitcases, zips, velcro flaps etc.
The desert island theme and the essentialist question "What do we need?" had suggested travelling as a theme for the overall 25-minute performance, which concluded our workshop: armed only with a suitcase and few travel items and carry-on instruments (two guitars and a clarinet) our group created a promenade performance through some of the transitional spaces a theatre offers: the front steps, they foyers and the bar; all of which invite only a fleeting presence.
The performance explored various moments of musicking and of different functions music has for us - individually and as a group, integrating and excluding others, and as a means to what Tia DeNora calls “musically composed identities” (2000, 68). When used for example as a stimulant or relaxant, a motivational or pace-making device music even becomes, again according to DeNora a “prosthetic technology of the body” (2000, 102).

The musicality of this workshop and presentation, I would argue, manifested itself in using music as a primary material for devising a theatrical performance, but also as a key focus for the individual acting and the group interaction on stage; we worked extensively on rhythm, timbre and on sensitising ourselves to layered structures: a collective 'music' of small actions, sounds and gestures, where the importance was on recognising how much or how little everyone has to contribute to a simultaneity of 10 performances, which are meant to create an interesting and varied musico-theatrical texture. Anecdotally, this also became manifest, when after carefully shaping and crafting little scenes or numbers we only introduced a small story that gave our performers more concrete situations and motivation on the last day of the workshop: much work on theatre starts with this: narrative, characters, situations, conflicts. We worked much more abstractly on musical scenarios and loosely draped a few narrative hints around these scenarios at the end. This changed, we believed, the focus and experience for the performers quite significantly and hopefully added a new leaf to their accumulating experiences on the stage.

You can see a video-podcast of the Herbstcamp as a whole here.

Workshop in Berlin

I have just arrived in Berlin where I am giving a workshop on music and theatre which in many ways is an application of my research in this direction. With the group of 11 young people between the ages of 13 and 25, we will explore how to create a performance, and the sense of musicality, with as little means as possible. The overarching idea of this two-week workshop festival, which unites six different groups working independently towards the question "What do we really need?", is about essentials. A very fitting topic, it seems, in times of austerity, cuts and an overall revaluation of what the individual and the society value and consider indispensable.
You can find more information about the project here: http://www.deutschestheater.de/junges_dt/herbstcamp/

Progress

Slowly, a structure for the book is emerging and a number of key themes. It looks like my focus will be on the period from 1870 until today and the obvious place to start an investigation is the work and writings of Adolphe Appia. Until now, I have mostly written on relatively uncharted territories: contemporary theatre, current theatre practitioners and practices – it is both exciting and challenging to tackle this more historical and relatively well-trodden material, hoping to provide a new and original angle to it.
I am very interested in Appia's strong reliance and reference to the "score" as the central artistic and aesthetic driver and control mechanism. His continued references to Schopenhauer's notion of the "inner life" (inneres Weses), however, which music helps to express, I find less accessible - any thoughts welcome!