Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Leeds Beckett University
Villa
This research uses performance to investigate the relationship between the ‘play text’ as both literature and as live performance, with specific focus on direct audience participation and linguistic play.
Principal research question: How can the language and textual devices of the ‘play text’ be appropriated and manipulated in live performance, to produce new strategies for performance making?
This solo performance tonally and structurally resonates with Russian literature (for example Chekhov and Bulgakov) and makes use of playful, pseudo-philosophical vocal wordplay. Three members of the audience are invited/lured into the performance space and are subtly manipulated throughout so that they assume and represent figures within the unfolding narrative. The performance moves between direct readings of the ‘play text’ to digressive interjections from the performer, alongside constructed/invited moments of spontaneous participation from the three audience-performers. These structural and aesthetic devices were developed to seduce the audience with rhetoric and perlocution and deconstruct both literary and dramatic narratives and conventions. Through a live performance context, this work problematises and explores the use and authority of the ‘play text’ and the role of audience-performer in performance.
This practice-led research resulted in multiple performances at national venues including; Greenroom, Manchester 2008, Axis Arts Centre, Crewe 2008, University of Hull, Scarborough 2009, Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster 2009, and The Workshop Theatre, Gallery & Studio Theatre, and Seven Arts Centre, all in Leeds 2009-2010 – and in International contexts; Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Romania 2010, Gateshead International Festival of Theatre, 2011, and Flare International Festival of New Theatre, Manchester 2011.
