Notes From the Rehearsal Room: [crops]
Fishing onto concrete; Dali and Koudelka; and making a machine that translates dance. Trying to trace a path through the strange process of devising a piece of dance-theatre.
As a theatre director, every so often, you get a moment of lucidity where you think, ‘this is what I’m actually doing for my career?’. A few weeks ago, I had one of those moments.
It was in my rehearsal room while devising a new piece. In front of me, four actors were imagining they were fishermen trying to catch fish on an ocean made of concrete. Each would mime casting their rods and then howl with frustration at their mad situation. They all ended up huddled in a corner chanting, ‘there are no fish … there are no fish’. I wrote in my notebook, ‘this is my job?’.
To explain how I found myself in this surreal situation I’ll need to explain the process of how we made a piece called [crops]. On our way we will pass this moment. Maybe this will become a new series on here – Notes From the Rehearsal Room – where I trace how certain projects morphed and developed.
[crops] is a piece of devised dance-theatre made by Allie-Rae Treharne, Ben Boulton-Jones, Greta Abbey, Corey Fraser and me. In [crops], a performer watches the audience. They look for movement and when they find something interesting - a twitch or a fidget – they walk up to a dancer and begin to teach them an amplified version of that movement. That dancer repeats the movement searching for a ‘perfect’ version of it, while the performer goes back to scavenging the audience for their movements.
Another performer sits and watches this dancer. They describe the movements with a mixture of matter-of-fact instructions and more metaphorical ones: ‘you lift your right leg’; ‘your knees bends’; ‘you turn to look upward’; ‘you think of God’; ‘you point your foot’; ‘you wonder if this is what joy feels like’. The descriptions are completely improvised and sustained. Behind this person a second dancer follows the instructions. They cannot look at the other dancer. They dance only based on what is being said.
What is created is this factory-like chain where movements, harvested from the audience, are translated and transferred through the performers. The two dancers find themselves in this strange duet where they are doing similar things but never exactly the same. No matter how good the ‘describer’ is, they can never get the second dancer to perfectly match the first. Some meaning is lost in each new translation along the chain. The audience sees two dancers and two ‘live-choreographers’ passing movement down the line.
All this takes place to the sound of a metronome that beats at a slightly different tempo after each beat. It’s a very unsettling sound; the technique is adapted from a method used by the CIA in the leaked Enhanced Interrogation Methods documents. The conscious mind reads it as regular, but the body doesn’t experience this. This dissonance is what generates an unnatural level fidgeting and unease in the audience.
Eventually the ‘describer’ is no longer describing what has just happened but what will happen. ‘You sense a body leave the space’ … and one does, the ‘scavenger’ leaves the room. ‘You feel it might be time to leave so you do, you leave’ … now the first dancer leaves. Who the ‘you’ is in these descriptions becomes increasingly unclear as the system collapses. ‘You see an empty chair so you sit in it’ … the ‘describer’ leaves and we are left with the final dancer, no longer in the system, improvising freely for the first time. They dance and finally come to sit in the chair as the lights fade around them.
The words and how this sequence plays out are different in every performance. Sometimes it happens abruptly and sometimes we feel it being built towards slowly. Sometimes it feels like a liberation and other times like entrapment.
So how did we get to this? It began with the idea that we wanted to make theatre set in some kind of purgatory or ‘non-space’ (see my previous post on Marc Augé). The feeling being that there was something interesting about spaces where the rules and logic don’t make sense.
One early references we discussed was an incredible description in Anne de Marcken’s book It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. The book is about someone walking through an afterlife that looks eerily similar to small-town suburban America. At some point in the novel the main character’s head falls off and so she mounts it to a stick and keeps walking. The novel is told from this perspective, with her body walking slightly beside ‘her’[1]. At the end of the novel there is this very moving description of how she plants her head in the sand of a beach and watches her own body walk away from her and into the ocean.
I am two places at once. I am walking in the direction I am seeing myself walk.
I look smaller and smaller.
I feel wider and wider. […]
I am an uncertain speck against the shifting horizon and I keep going.
As you can see, we began with this very unspecific desire to make a performance set in a world where the rules are different to those of our own or in a place that felt ‘purgatorial’. On the first day of rehearsals, to see what that might actually look and feel like, we went to the Tate Modern. Many of the artworks we saw on this trip became regular references in the rehearsal room; useful representations of abstract ideas that we could use as landmarks in our discussions.
One of these, for instance, was Linear Construction in Space No. 2, by the Russian constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo.
Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus was another of these ‘visual landmarks’.
As was Josef Koudelka’s series made in Ireland, specifically these fishermen on a beach.
When we returned to our rehearsal room I asked the performers to improvise a scene where one of them was an unfazable travel agent and the others asked for as mad, surreal or purgatorial a location as possible. One of the performers asked, ‘can I please have a ticket to a world where everyone is a fisherman, but the ocean is made out of concrete, and no one has ever caught a fish’. And so, we did what anyone would do – we improvised the scene. It’s at this point I have my ‘is this my job’ moment.
For the first few days [crops] (although it got its name last[2]) developed like this: we would improvise what might happen in strange worlds inspired by what we saw in the Tate. We kept things we found interesting and scrapped things we found boring. I was lucky to be working with four colleagues who had the generosity to continually experiment and to make offers.
During one of these improvisations, we decided to experiment with how it would feel if two of the performers accepted and understood the rules of the world and two didn’t. We thought that this could generate dramatic tension between those two groups. Instead, it allowed us to stumble on the outline of what [crops] would come to be. It started as an exercise that I expected to be useful to the performers, but which wouldn’t be interesting to watch from the outside. One of the performers had been improvising with movement that mimicked what their character was feeling. It was loosely based on some of the feelings in the Koudelka photograph. I asked another performer to describe what they were seeing and for a third to follow the descriptions. The initial idea was that what ‘survived’ this translation would be the movements that felt most important.
It was strangely beautiful to watch. It felt far more like the bones of a performance than just an exercise. At the beginning of this rehearsal period the hope was we would stumble onto an idea we found moving and worth showing to an audience – this felt like that. We took lunch and stewed on it for an hour. When we came back, we decided to try and turn this into something.
Slowly, this turned into [crops]. Once we had the idea it became a process of finding out what it was and making it clearer and clearer until it felt like a cohesive performance. We realised we were making something that felt a lot like dance. We reached out to a friend, a dancer and choreographer, for her advice: ‘trust the simplicity’, she told us. That was hard. The temptation is to overcomplicate something, to try and artificially inject it with meaning or to set in stone too many things until it loses all its spontaneity and becomes brittle. I hope we found the right balance. I hope we managed to do that deceptively hard thing of making something simple.
That’s how I ended up in a room with four fishermen casting their rods onto a concrete ocean and that’s how [crops] ended up being made. Devising theatre is a process of trusting that something good can come from strange places. In [crops], I can see shades of symmetry borrowed from the Dali and something tonally scraped from the Koudelka but a lot of it comes from the imaginations of my colleagues, from their daydreams and their impulses in improvisation. I’ve tried to trace a way through how [crops] was devised but the reality is that it’s impossible to look back and a devising process and to draw an accurate map. I can’t really tell you where [crops] came from because a process like this isn’t logical but emotional. The ideas come from somewhere strange and far off that blurs the moment you try and look back at it.
The risk was that we would waste a rehearsal period, that an idea wouldn’t appear. That seems to me a risk worth taking. Making theatre and dance is a strange job. It’s a joy that I get to make weird things like this; a privilege that people might want to come and see them. In projects like this that moment of lucidity – the ‘is this my job’ moment – is bound to happen, but I can’t imagine doing anything else.
Did we make something worthy of an audience’s time? I don’t know. It’s not my place to answer that. The four performers and I who made [crops] have started a company, Square Brackets, and [crops] will be staged again soon along with new work. Come along; you be the judge.
[crops] was devised and performed by: Allie-Rae Treharne as the ‘harvester’; Corey Fraser as the first dancer; Ben Boulton-Jones as the ‘describer’ and Greta Abbey as the second dancer. I’m grateful for all those who helped make [crops] happen.
[1] This raises the question of whether the body, the head, both, or something else is ‘her’. For me ‘her’ feels like the head but I note that I can’t quite explain why.
[2] The name came from a joke that modern dance companies like to title things with square brackets.
V interesting. But I don't think there's any suggestion that those gentlemen photographed by Josef Koudelka were fishermen – unless you meant it metaphorically somehow. They certainly aren't seen on a beach. They're on top of a mountain called Croagh Patrick and (it's a famous site of pilgrimage) no doubt performed various acts of faith on the way up.