PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Mackenzie: Neil | UK

Epilogue

Epilogue will build, and reflect, on the research agenda of Plane Performance's Re-Placing Texts trilogy - Three Degrees of Frost (2000), SET - on watching Brief Encounter (2002), and round-about (2004) - and thus represents the culmination of a process of theatrical discovery/performance research that has been underway for the last five years. The piece will not require (though will be informed by) knowledge of the previous works.

Epilogue will continue the core project of the Re-Placing Texts trilogy, addressing the co-existence of extant dramatic text and self-conscious, theoretically-informed performance practice. Significantly it will propose a radical strategy for confronting the duality of the theatrical performers' location, enabling them to exist within multiple fictional frames without losing full consciousness of their own act of performance. This strategy will also work to heighten the physical task of performance and intensify the audience's consciousness, and experience, of their own relationship with the bodies of the performers.

Epilogue will also attempt to function as an epilogue to the trilogy, providing within the frame of the performance a further articulation of, and engagement with, some of the concerns of the preceding pieces.

Central to Three Degrees of Frost (2000) based on Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, was a consideration of text and language, as it effectively mined the text for its implicit engagement with conceptions of the two. ‘Fixing’ the text, identifying what is meant by ‘Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard’, was a key problematic, as were questions of translation - of Russian into English, of the ‘authentic’ into the ‘interpreted’, the ‘incomprehensible’ into the ‘transparent’, the ‘historical’ into the ‘contemporary’. In addition, the language of classic theatrical naturalism and the semiotic functioning of all theatre were interrogated, resulting in a deconstruction of the processes of theatrical signification, particularly around the representation of character.

SET - on watching Brief Encounter (2002) extended the project to include the relationship between film and theatre, and their differing conceptions of audience. The piece questioned the status of a live copy of a mediatized ‘authentic’, by ironically attempting to replicate the experience of watching a film, whilst in effect constituting a theatrical deconstruction. Through an increasingly layered process of self-reflection, the live performance resisted any attempt by the audience to look through the signification of the stage to a coherent fictional signified, instead shifting the emphasis onto the slippage inherent with a (theatrical) signifying process and the frustrated desire of the audience for the film.

round-about (2004) deconstructed the musical Carousel and through this attempted to answer a series of questions: How might heightened physical immediacy - through proximity, risk and the physical exertions of the performers - in live performance impact on an essentially escapist dramatic text? Can the processes of staging a dramatic text sustain the intellectual engagement of the audience, regardless of the qualities of the text itself?Can an audience sustain both a critical/political engagement and an emotional engagement with a classic musical? And can the process of character construction be exposed by a performer who, nonetheless, is engaged psychologically with the text?