Output details

Flow (winged crocodile) / The trains

Directed theatre performance

The research involved the direction of the experimental poetic play, ‘Flow (Winged Crocodile) / The Trains’, by Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010). Templeton was invited to direct the work by the author. The research addressed:

1. the dramaturgical and conceptual processes needed to bring a work of challenging linguistic innovation into a truly theatrical form as an embodied form of new knowledge;

2. ways in which a shifting subject might be represented by the separate bodies of discrete performers.

Templeton worked with three members of her company, ‘The Relationship’, in a development period in April 2010, examining both the text of Scalapino’s play and her methods of presenting this on the page. The writing is characterised by innovative use of punctuation, spacing on the page, and textual formats. The research attempted a staging of the page, finding equivalents in the body, the voice, space and time. Development workshops involved close readings and discussions of the text, in particular to identify layers of subjectivity and to consider how to physicalise these layers.

The research process culminated in a performance at Poets’ House, New York, in June 2010, with commissioned music, projections, and choreography. Subsequent productions were in December 2010 at Dixon Place, New York with redesigned use of space, and ODC San Francisco. Live audiences at the various venues totalled approximately 3000, with an online audience of several thousand more. As a result of these productions Scalapino’s estate has established an international prize with an annual budget of $40,000, the ‘Leslie Award for Innovative Women Playwrights’, of which Templeton is executive director. The prize was launched in March 2013. In its first year the prize attracted almost 400 applications internationally and culminated in a reading of the winning play in October 2013 in New York at the New Ohio Theatre.