some thoughts on practice as research
Hi, I’m new to this forum and quite interested in what’s being discussed. I just completed what in the UK is referred to as a ‘practice as research’ PhD, meaning that a percentage of the PhD is judged based on practical work, which is in some way integrated with the thinking/writing in the written thesis. Mine was called Apocryphal Theatre: practicing philosophies and discussed an idea that I am still fleshing out, namely that some theatre can be considered an act of philosophy. I stuck with post WWII artists and their relation to post-structuralist philosophy primarily, using John Cage’s 4′33″ as a seminal act of philosophy wherein the spectator turns into an active witness and sound becomes music. Deleuze and Guattari catch up with him many years later in A Thousand Plateaus.
Apocryphal Theatre has evolved out of on-going research labs begun in 2004 in London, which in turn evolved out of labs I directed in NYC from 1998-2001 (one lab and one longer workshop/lab). In the process of these labs certain concepts turned into concrete exercise and vice-versa. The terminology and tools discovered were also in the thesis, and the practical component were our two most recent shows which came out of work in the lab and non-linear stage texts that I wrote and the players memorized, but without lines assigned, so their response to the text was similar in some ways to musicians’ responses to one another and a melody in a jazz improvisation.
Below is the mission statement for our theatre (long form version given the nature of this forum), which came out of my first lab and then has been refined since working with Apocryphal. Any comments, questions or dialogue about this work and its relationship to philosophy or theatre’s relationship thereto is welcomed. And, if anyone is in or passing through London, you are welcome to visit our always-open lab…
Apocryphal Theatre’s artistic vision/desire/hope is to:
Undermine the reality-grid of right now: meaning that which we say “that’s the way it is” about – either publicly or privately.
Regarding: class/money, race/ethnicity, gender/sex, religion/God, realpolitik/politics, nationalism/patriotism, war/peace, sacred/secular…etc.
Through: the creation of theatrical work that challenges these assumptions by, first, owning them as our own (not pawning it off on an “other” which somehow creates a world in which we live as victims), exploring the depths of our own assumptions/investments and investigating our own “desiring machines” (concept from Gilles Deleuze/ Felix Guattari). The Deleuze/Guattari theory is that we all, to some extent carry within us fascistic investments (meaning investments in a state of “being”) and revolutionary investments (meaning investments in the process of “becoming”). Their desire was to enact a kind of radical psychology wherein our fascistic investments could be examined, owned and somehow uprooted to bring about a social investment in something other than “being” – i.e., a static, repressive environment which rewards conformity and a certain kind of subservience to an other-centered order of things as they are. Their vision has to do with a more revolutionary social body – one in which the process of becoming itself is integral to living, and there is no need to impose a hegemonic force onto other living creatures (examples of this now and in the past: capital, Christianity and other Evangelical/missionary religions, slavery, women as property, man’s dominion over/destruction of nature, psychology, “the Big Bang”, etc.) This is an incredible reduction of everything they said, but serves as a useful starting point for the goals of our theatrical experiments.
How: by creating theatrical pieces that uproot the static nature of language, gesture, character, etc. in such a way as to bring about this process of becoming: first in our own bodies/souls/minds as players/writers/designers/choreographers/directors and thence into the bodies/minds/souls of the audience.
Why: to make visible the construction of the language with which we create the world we perceive; to allow us a moment in the gap between the understood and the unknown, to listen for the voices which have not yet formed, not yet been heard but still call to us in an undefined language which is perhaps no less real or pressing for being as yet unwritten.
If you’d like to see more about our company, you can visit: www.flyingoutofsequence.org
The Theatre Group “Dzieci” in NYC (which is listed in the links on the right side of this page) has been working on a version of Macbeth in which, I believe, the entire company memorized the entire text. I’ve never heard them talk about it as a “jazz” version, but it is a really interesting idea: using text as nonlinear rather than linear structure.
I am in Puerto Rico right now at the annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research. My working group is focused on “performance as research” and I’m really looking forward to discussing how practice / performance as research can be brought into US academia. The situation is very different from in the UK, with many more obstacles in the way but also, I think, some possibilities for useful innovation…