Simon Murray

Arts for what, for where, for whom? Fragmentary reflections on Dartington College of Arts, 1961–2010

In the summer of 2010 Dartington College of Arts (DCA) closed after almost 50 years on the Dartington Hall Estate in rural Devon, following a passionately contested merger with University College Falmouth in Cornwall in 2008. This essay – an unfinished and open-ended collection of reflections and fragments – maps out some of the key tropes, principles and practices of this remarkable and renowned project. Charting a singular path between the liberal humanities of the university sector and the vocational training of the conservatoires, DCA explored models of learning through practice in theatre, music, performance writing, choreography and contemporary visual arts.

The Ruin in Question

An inquisitorial encounter with the ruin in built form, this essay is arranged according to a series of questions-and-answers. The ruin in question was once St. Peters Seminary, theological college of the Roman Catholic Church and icon of post-war Scottish Modernist architecture. Set within a landscaped estate of parkland and woodland, luxuriantly overgrown since abandonment, the entire site is a crucible for ruinous thought and responsive action. The essay rewrites the ruin according to its past, present and possible future, offering sense-impressions of what is to be found in its midst, and the kinds of experimental performance that it invites. A meta-question shadows this Q-and-A exercise: to what extent does the particularity of St. Peters present condition speak for the ruined building as a contemporary cultural motif?

Editorial Issue 2.2

This issue marks the end of year two for Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT) and signals both a sense of pleasure with what has been achieved by our authors, editorial and production colleagues since our launch in the spring of 2009, and an awareness of aspirations and tasks still fully to be realized. From now we move to three annual issues, the second of which will always have a specialist focus or inflection. To mark London’s hosting of the Olympic Games and following a very successful call for contributions to the Sport and Performance Training issue of 2012, guest editor, Mark Evans, has selected a provocative and stimulating collection of propositions whose writers are currently working to an autumn deadline. These writings span various continents and engage with tantalisingly diverse subjects from Parkour, boxing and football (the ‘beautiful game’) through to the welfare of child athletes and ballet dancers, performance art and extreme sports and the interdisciplinary nature of Olympic effort. In 2013 our specialist issue will be titled Michael Chekhov in the C21st – New Perspectives, New Sources, New Contexts and will be jointly produced by guest editors, Franc Chamberlain and Andrey Kirillov. We welcome ideas and suggestions for future specialist issues and to embark on such a conversation please contact the TDPT editors, Simon Murray and Jonathan Pitches. In our last editorial we noted with considerable alarm a developing climate of hostility from Britain’s coalition Government towards research and pedagogies within the Arts and Humanities. Since then little has happened to make us feel less concerned about such policies and their financial and cultural impact on the provision of theatre, dance and performance training. Of course, these threats are not peculiar to the UK, but represent a complex series of shifts in dominant political thinking about the purpose and nature of higher education, the role of arts practice within it, how it should be funded and for whom it should be made available. It might seem that a journal whose preoccupation with an activity called ‘training’ should feel comfortably at ease in these instrumental and market driven times, but this would be fundamentally to misunderstand how TDPT imagines the practices of training and indeed how training is multiply practiced across the world. As every piece of writing we have so far carried in TDPT suggests, ‘training’ to make and practice art is never singularly about the acquisition of skill or technique. No matter what the professed and grand lineage of any particular training regime, or experience, it is always – cannot help but be – an imaginative, fluid and open-ended series of negotiations around processes and outcomes whose parameters are never fully known, always, in part at least, to be re-invented and discovered afresh. At the centre of these political and economic pressures lies the remorseless drive for enhanced productivity and it is this dynamic which poses the greatest threat to the quality of training experiences within theatre, dance and Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Vol. 2(2), 2011, 135–137

Dear Jacques … Lecoq in the twenty-first century

This essay considers Jacques Lecoqs influence almost 20 years after his death. Arguing that Lecoqs pedagogy is largely as relevant today as it was when he was still alive, the author speculates whether Lecoq would have welcomed developments in the use of digital technology within live performance. The essay proposes that much of Lecoqs teaching with its emphasis on play, complicite, invention, imagination and the creative actor remains relevant to contemporary developments in site-specific, immersive and postdramatic theatre. The essay is constructed in the form of a posthumous letter to Jacques Lecoq.

Contemporary Collaborations and Cautionary Tales

This chapter draws upon a keynote presentation given at the second Symposium on Collaboration at Middlesex University in May 2013. What propelled the direction of this paper, and as I began to research its contents, was a growing and rather uneasy sense that the passionate and poetic panegyric I imagined offering in praise of collaboration—based on thirty years engagement with devised theatre practices—was not good enough. Collaboration both as principle and practice became more complex, nuanced and (sometimes) murky the more I read around the subject. Consequently, as I constructed the paper, my intention—rather than complacently (re)state the obvious attractions of collaboration—became instead, and remains now, an opportunity to reflect critically and quizzically on the various practices of collaboration within and beyond the fields of cultural production and in theatre, dance, and performance in particular.

Embracing Lightness: Dispositions, Corporealities and Metaphors in Contemporary Theatre and Performance

This essay reflects on how lightness is invoked and engaged not only within theatre and performance, but also - and significantly – in the wider landscape of contemporary arts’ practices (dance, literature and visual art). The account reviews how particular theatre practitioners and pedagogues extol or deprecate the conditions of lightness, and how these attributes are used both metaphorically and practically by performance makers to engender the qualities they are seeking in their practice. The essay begins by framing and contextualizing selected performance practices and pedagogies through the lens’ of writing (W.G. Sebald and children’s literature) and of contemporary visual art (Wolfgang Tillmans and Tacita Dean). I contend that from other arts practices we may identify generative examples of how lightness is claimed or ascribed in similar circumstances to those examined later in the work of Jacques Lecoq, Philippe Gaulier, Monika Pagneux, Lone Twin and Complicite. The essay will particularly consider how lightness is sought as a dispositional and performative virtue in theatre making, training and rehearsal and what qualities the achievement of lightness might suggest and embody. Taking Italo Calvino’s essay on lightness in ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ as a provocation, I explore how lightness as a metaphorical code slides across different aspects of performance from physicality and movement to the elusive qualities of complicite and interaction between actors and with their audiences. Whilst weight can suggest - not always helpfully - the potential ‘deadliness’ and bankruptcy of theatre, lightness seems to propose that theatre (and other arts’ practices) thrive when they possess an agility and nimbleness of touch, posing questions rather than imposing answers.