Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Aberystwyth University
Make Believe/Impossible Things Before Breakfast : Quarantine co-production with Contact Theatre, Manchester (Supported by the Arts Council England) The researcher’s design work questions how we separate the 'real' from the 'made up' in a theatre by utilising a meta-theatrical frame to illuminate the ordinary and mundane, provoking an examination of notional “realities”: in this case those from which our beliefs/attitudes are formed.
Quarantine co-production with Contact Theatre, Manchester then National Tour 2009 – 2010. Supported by Arts Council England. Research questions: What is involved when we decide to believe? How do we decide what is true? How do we separate the 'real' from the 'made up' in a theatre? Significant features of process, and reflection: As with all my Quarantine work, a meta-theatrical frame illuminates the ordinary and mundane, provoking an examination of notional “realities”: in this case those from which our beliefs/attitudes are formed. The ambition is to create a guided process of dismantling or revealing, in which the conventional frames of understanding (physical and psychological) that shape theatrical perception are renegotiated; and which is then discarded as the divide between the auditorium and the stage is breached in moments involving the meeting of a stranger, the debate of an idea, a moment of intimacy and personal sharing. In examining the nature of belief itself, the scenographic enquiry foregrounded questions - and the slipperiness - of definition in graphic terms, using theatrical conventions of pretence and artifice as a frame for investigating broader questions. The space was composed and constructed flexibly in highly conventional theatre modes so as to both signal and construct acts of pretence whilst simultaneously confounding certain expectations invoked by the space, in order to explore the gap and/ or visually suggest the [acting/non-acting] continuum that exists in theatre between the reality of the performer and the invented person they are pretending to be; to make more material or overt the construction that happens in the mind.
