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Hotel Two Rooms; the practice of adaptation, projection and play in performance

Hotel Two Rooms was invited as a performance at the International conference: Cultures of Translation, Adaptation of Film and Performance. The research produced a complex play routes model illustrated in the published article: Hotel Two Rooms; The Practice of Adaptation, Projection and Play in Performance (2010).

The project proposed the initial research question ‘How can notions of dark and deep play be used to construct performance material?’ And the subsidiary question ‘How does shifting the contract for participants in an intimate performance inform the principal research question?’ These questions were interrogated through a series of rules based upon Roger Caillois’ (2001) game categories and the results were unpacked using phenomenological approaches to data collection and interpretation based upon Lanigan’s (1988) model of capta, reduction and interpretation, refined by Ladly (2007). Notions of projection (from psychological, artistic, playful positions) and adaptation (mainly exploring transposition as a subjunctive experience) were established to compose material and collect data using Denscombe’s (1998) ‘face to face’ survey about the attitudes and experiences of each player in the hotel room.

The research revealed varying attitudes of play from participants’ drawing upon their behavioural responses to intimate performance. Some of the results included: participants willingly confessing their hidden desires; participants proposing submissive roles for themselves and performing to an imagined priest or father figure; participants enthusiastically offering to play dead and subsequently revealing their experience of catharsis.

The practice-based enquiry is drawn into conceptual discussion in the journal article which braids adaptation studies with play and psychoanalysis to name a strategy for making entitled ‘conceptual adaptation’. This term opens up the incongruous combination of forms when playing through a host of Julie Sanders’ adaptation terms, particularly version, echo, travesty and pastiche. Such terms formed the basis on which to construct the writing of performance proposals (contracts) for players but also as a way to analyse the types of play offered during the performance.