Stephen Bottoms

Putting the Document into Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective?

Verbatim drama, the current trend in British documentary theatre, capitalizes on the presumed authenticity of the voices represented and on the unmediated theatricalization of the truths they ostensibly reveal. The works of Moiss Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project present an alternative, appropriating avantgarde theatre techniques and acknowledging the presence of the artist in shaping the representation of the realities depicted.

Authorizing the audience: The conceptual drama of Tim Crouch

British conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin first exhibited his installation piece An Oak Tree in 1973. Attached to a gallery wall via metal brackets is a glass, bathroom shelf, in the middle of which stands a glass tumbler, about two-thirds filled with water. Mounted on the wall beside this exhibit is a printed ‘Q and A’ dialogue, in which ‘A’ (implicitly the artist) explains that ‘What I’ve done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water ... The colour, weight, feel, size ... I didn’t change its appearance. But it’s not a glass of water, it’s an oak tree’ (Crouch 2005: 7). Art historian Tony Godfrey argues that this ‘clean, simple and elegant installation’ highlighted the way that conceptual art – a recognized field of practice since around 1967 – had ‘developed a history – a tradition, even’ (Godfrey 1998: 248). The drily ironic claim to have transformed a glass of water into an oak tree played on the alleged ability of the artist, working within the white-walled gallery’s ‘perceptual fields of force’, to transform the prosaic into the profound: ‘Things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus upon them. Indeed the object frequently becomes the medium through which these ideas are manifested and proffered for discussion’ (O’Doherty 1999: 14). One review of An Oak Tree also pointed up the specifically theatrical nature of its juxtaposition of material objects and scripted dialogue: ‘Craig-Martin has spent all bravado of invention on his sparsely decorated stage set. Similar originality in the dialogue is all but missing’ (Godfrey 1998: 248). Thirty-two years later, British actor-playwright Tim Crouch premiered An Oak Tree, a play directly inspired by Craig-Martin’s work. As if picking up the critical dialogue, Crouch demonstrated that the theatre space – together with the performance of written dialogue spoken within it – had transformational possibilities potentially exceeding those of the gallery. In the play, a grieving father deals with the loss of his teenage daughter in a traffic accident by claiming to have turned the substance of a tree (located roadside at the accident site) into that of his daughter. ‘It’s not a tree anymore,’ he insists to his distraught wife, Dawn: ‘I’ve changed it into Claire.’ Dawn will have none of it: ‘Our girl is dead, love, she’s dead ... That is a tree, I am your wife, this is your daughter [indicating Claire’s sister, Marcy], that is a road. This is what matters. This. This is what we have to deal with. This’ (Crouch 2005: 57). Yet Dawn’s passionate insistence on this material reality is somewhat undermined by the fact that her lines are performed by Crouch himself, standing there in the garb of the stage hypnotist character that he plays through most of the piece: the tree s/he gestures at is a piano stool, the road a bare stage floor, and the daughter a plasticseated chair that Crouch holds cradled under his arm. The Father, moreover, is played by a second actor (male or female) who has neither seen nor Authorizing the Audience The conceptual drama of Tim Crouch

In Defense of the String Quartet: An Open Letter to Richard Schechner

First of all, may I say what a genuine honor and a privilege it is to have been asked to contribute to this volume – initially commissioned to celebrate your 75th birthday (Happy Birthday!) – and thus to this latest reconsideration of the performance studies paradigm that you were so instrumental in establishing. I must admit, though, to a degree of apprehension about the editors’ invitation, since I’ve little doubt that it has come about largely because of an essay I wrote a few years back, which was widely interpreted as an attack on you. Actually my concerns in that piece, “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid,”1 were somewhat broader and less personal than many assumed, but as I have discovered, we all love a good intradisciplinary spat. Since the editors of this volume – and perhaps you yourself – would probably be disappointed if I didn’t continue to play the role of minor irritant, I will try to oblige. But if, in what follows, my tone seems a little combative, please understand that this is intended not as hostility, but as homage: this letter is intended in a spirit of playful, polemical provocation similar to that which you yourself have frequently employed. Again, moreover, my real target is somewhat broader than may initially be apparent. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the so-called “broad spectrum approach” to performance studies downplays to a counter-productive, and even destructive, degree the text-based drama paradigm on which academic theatre studies was founded. If that sounds a little retrograde of me, I hope to persuade you otherwise by the end of this letter.

Introduction: Tim Crouch, The Author, and the Audience – A Forum

If there’s one play at Edinburgh this year that keeps rattling around in the brain days after you’ve seen it, if there’s one play that conversations keep turning back to in bars and queues, it’s The Author, Tim Crouch’s play that turns its attention to the role of the spectator in art and life. Disturbing both in its form and content, it had a deliberately unobtrusive run at the Royal Court in September 2009 [. . .] It’s in the festival atmosphere of Edinburgh, though, where theatregoers are thrown together, that the conversation about the play is really growing.

Timeless Cruelty: Performing the Stanford Prison Experiment

In the early years of this twenty-first century, discourse on contemporary art has often been preoccupied with two distinct but overlapping genres of performance. The first, popularized most notably by Marina Abramović in interventions such as Seven Easy Pieces (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2005), involves the revisiting and re-presentation of historical works of performance art – particularly body art works from the 1970s. For Abramović, ‘performance only has sense when you perform; otherwise it’s dead’ (Jones and Heathfield 2012: 556), and so she has developed a set of principles for the ethical representation of past works, thereby converting their ephemerality into a kind of permanent ‘liveness’. Yet re-performance also effects a radical shift in the meaning of such works: within the supposedly neutral container of the gallery, they speak no longer to the specific, temporal contexts for which they were devised, but to their own canonicity as ‘timeless’ works of art. Indeed, the tendency to present these reconstructions over durational periods that are often considerably longer than was the case with the documented originals has suggested just such a shift of emphasis. As the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) noted in its exhibition literature for Abramović’s The Artist is Present (2010), the daily re-presentations of her earlier pieces lasted all the way from opening to closing time in order ‘to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works’ (cited in Shalson 2012: 98). Of course the irony is that those works being presented by performers other than Abramović herself had to be ‘authenticated’ by documentation demonstrating when and where she had first performed them. This lingering whiff of time-specificity has, however, been largely eradicated by the other key, emergent live art genre of recent years, sometimes referred to as ‘constructed situations’, or in Claire Bishop’s designation ‘delegated performance’ (2012: 219ff.). In gallery-based works by Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Tanya Bruguera and others, the artist’s own physical presence, actual or documented, is no longer a factor: instead, anonymous performers are hired to execute particular tasks, often related to their own social background or skills base, but can be replaced at any time (or in any subsequent iteration of the work) by similarly anonymous figures. This enables galleries to purchase the rights to such performance works in perpetuity, just as they might buy a painting. Sehgal has gone so far as to license galleries purchasing his work to re-present them after his own death via the use of approved mediators, who can ensure that performers behave as the piece requires (Richards 2012: 76). Both re-performance and delegated performance, then, can be read as manifestations of an emergent ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999), whereby live, inter-subjective experiences are rendered as ‘timeless’, reproducible commodities – their meanings controlled and contained by authorially approved discourses. Yet as Amelia Jones notes in my epigraph, bodily acts are never entirely containable, precisely Timeless Cruelty Performing the Stanford Prison Experiment

A Conversation about Dialogue (SymposiumVoices)

This document, transcribed and edited from audio recordings, attempts to capture some of the discussion held during the one-day symposium, ‘The Author and the Audience’, that took place at theUniversity of Leedss Workshop Theatre on 6 November 2010. The debate circulates around the question of the extent to which audience response is solicited and/or welcomed by Tim Crouchs play The Author, and the responsibility of its performers in relationship to vocal feedback.

Editorial: Performing Literatures

This edition of Performance Research, and most of its individual contents, arise directly from a conference of the same name – Performing Literatures – which I co-ordinated at the University of Leeds between 29 June and 1 July 2007. It will be helpful, by way of contextualization, to quote from the Call for Papers which initially attracted the attention of the contributors (or at least, those not directly invited), and indeed of this journal’s editor, Richard Gough, who proposed this edition:

Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the "Howl" Generation ed. by Deborah R. Geis (review)

Who, or what, was “Beat”? That’s the underlying, perhaps ultimately unresolvable question at the heart of Deborah Geis’s expansive, eye-opening collection of essays. It’s a measure, perhaps, of this volume’s refreshing inclusivity that its most compelling single description of Beat style appears in a quotation not from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, or William S. Burroughs but from Diane di Prima, recognizing in the poetry of John Wieners “many of the effects that I was also at work on: the street language flowing so smoothly it seemed effortless, the almost-cliché shining and made new. A taut nervy lyricism that fooled you – it looked so easy” (264). The fact that di Prima and Wieners were also playwrights, and among the early contributors to New York’s emerging (and distinctly street-level) off-off-Broadway movement at the turn of the 1960s, is indicative of the border territory between literature and theatre that this volume seeks to scope out. Geis has assembled no less than twenty-four essays (two of them her own) ranging over a wide variety of artists and topics. Among these are quite a few that are not really about “drama” per se: as her subtitle indicates, the spirit of inclusivity extends across a broad spectrum of “performance,” with essays analysing everything from poetry readings (notably Ginsberg’s first performance of Howl in San Francisco in 1955) to Burroughs’s notoriously misjudged “William Tell act” – the 1952 incident in which he shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer. (William Nesbitt’s excellent essay on this vaudeville routine gone wrong presents it, also, as a traumatic event repeatedly re-rehearsed across Burroughs’s subsequent oeuvre.) Even so, there’s an irony in the fact that, in considering performance and performativity more broadly alongside playwriting, this volume occasionally veers into a weird anti-theatricality. Indeed, the very first essay, Tim Hunt’s “Mediation and Immediacy: The I and You of Jack Kerouac’s Theatre of Voice,” argues that the improvisatory performativity of Kerouac’s writing could not translate effectively to the stage (in his only play, Beat Generation), because there is a lack of “immediacy” about actors sticking to a script. An effective translation across media, Hunt suggests, would require “the incorporation of ensemble improvisation” (20) – that is, actors spontaneously making up their own words. This notion, echoed by others in this volume, suggests a very limited understanding of the actor’s craft. It is also implicitly contradicted in the next essay, on performances of Ginsberg’s poetry by other speakers. When we revocalize poems Reviews

STP: some time passed

Abstract This short reflection, written for the 25th anniversary edition of STP, looks back on the author’s experiences of changing emphases in university-based theatre practice since the 1990s.

The Emancipated Shakespeare: or, What You Will

This chapter reflects on the continuing prevalence of Shakespeare’s drama in the twenty-first century, and queries some of the assumptions behind the dominant staging approaches to Shakespeare in Anglophone cultures, as epitomized the UK’s Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. Noting the integral relationship between our attitudes to Shakespeare and the ways in which his plays are taught in education contexts, the chapter draws on Jacques Ranciere’s essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ and the earlier work that informs it, ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’, in order ask how the question of learning relates to contemporary Shakespearean staging approaches. Using Julius Caesar as a linking text, the chapter examines Tim Crouch’s I, Cinna (The Poet) (2012) and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies (2008) to argue for an ‘emancipated’ approach to working with Shakespeare in the twenty-first century.