Output details

Love Letters Straight from Your Heart

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Clarke directed this devised performance. The project explored strategies for interaction both before and during a performance event, developing a structure, which could be populated by content produced by members of each audience. Participants email song requests and submit written dedications in advance, which are edited and organised dramaturgically to form a unique script for each show. The form of Love Letters, which resembles a wedding reception or a wake, as well as a radio dedication show, also tests the distinction between theatre and social ceremonies.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. What strategies and structures can facilitate shared authorship and collaborative agency with audiences, particularly in relation to scripting a personalised theatre event?

2. Can a performance generate the interactions, investment and emotional affects produced at social ceremonies, and a temporary sense of community?

3. What is the relationship between personal intimacy and performance, or its theatrical representation?

4. What are the effects of performing conventionally private material publicly, particularly with respect to the personal and intimate relationships of those present?

APPROACHES AND CONTEXT

Love Letters pushes the aesthetics, strategies and tactics of participatory performance, especially in terms of making public in the event what is usually kept private. This takes place within the context of the public performance of personal intimacies on social media sites, where family, friendship and sexual relationships are part of the public domain and an individual’s social identity. Love Letters contributes to current questioning of the boundaries between theatre and other forms of scripted or constructed social event. Discursive and practical research explored the performativity of romantic love or friendship, and the role of songs in cultural and personal memory or identity.

DISSEMINATION

Toured to key national venues and festivals, village halls and day care centres for older people. Video documentation. [See portfolio for details.]