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Composing Theatre on a Diagonal: Metaxi ALogon, a Music-centric Performance.

Brief Description

The book is partly the result of an AHRC funded workshop series that took place in Britain and Germany to which Zavros was invited as an academic/practitioner to share his working processes in the creation of his music-theatre performances. The book includes contributions by some of the key representatives in the emerging field of ‘composed theatre’ including Heiner Goebbels, Michael Hirsch, Jorg Laue, Nicholas Till and others. The book combines aspects of theory and practice (and their relationship) as several of the contributors work creatively or academically internationally.

Research Rationale

This chapter develops Zavros’ previous work on Music-centric music-theatre and places his research within the context of the newly coined term ‘Composed Theatre’. It is a continuation of the ideas explored in the article ‘Flooding the concrète: Clastoclysm and the notion of the ‘continuum’ as a conceptual and musical basis for a postdramatic music-theatre performance’ where the ‘continuum’ is hinted to reveal the sign as ‘a process of becoming’. In this chapter this idea is extended in the discussion of issues involved in the creation of a rhizomatic performance through approaching music as a ‘becoming’ (as this notion appears in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux/A Thousand Plateaus and primarily in Plateaus 10 and 11: ‘1730:Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’ and ‘1837: Of the Refrain’.

Strategies Undertaken

The Chapter explores the process of creating a composed theatre performance (Metaxi ALogon) drawing heavily on the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The notion of music-centric (as an alternative to the logo-centric) is reconceptualised through the idea of the ‘rhizomatic’. This is then used to create alternative readings of myths and a new way of adopting them for performance (both in the creation of a ‘Performance Score’ and the actual theatrical event).