#billyiswriting

‘Collaboration makes you wonder what your identity really is.’ (Storey  & Joubert in Littleton & Miell; 2004 P.49

In reflection of the Live Event, I couldn’t help but feel slightly deflated. Over the process we had worked hard to put barriers in place to help us defend the risk in audience participation. The beauty and the difficulty of audience interactivity is that you will never know what kind of audience you will have. Of course you can try and control it through context, but you cannot control individual audience members and it is this which makes audience participation so risky but exciting. We had a small and intimate audience on the day; they were a good audience who complied with the rules. However they were a clever audience who seemed to work out the order of the performance by the 2nd round (2/3). This was interesting but something we weren't prepared for as when we had practised with smaller sample audiences, they had always managed to get to the third round. In reflection of the process, there are parts of me that wish we had integrated audience participation more frequently. We did regularly have sample audiences, however to really understand and develop audience management, it would have been more practical to invite audiences in more often. In reflection to my own personal learning, I have found working with audiences an interesting and insightful experiment. I feel I have grown as a practitioner and feel more confident in building and creating actor/audience relationships in my own work.

In regards to the collaboration, I found this particular collaboration one of the most enjoyable and insightful projects I have ever been involved in. The strength and belief we had in each other’s skills allowed us to work to our full potential in order to create a strong interactive piece of Theatre. Although I say I felt slightly deflated after the live event, I can confirm that I did enjoy performing the piece and working with the audience. The deflation purely came from my own disappointment in the piece not going to plan, but of course this is the risk! I felt like the process was almost experimental in its form, it wasn't necessarily about the performance being a polished and great piece of theatre. I felt like it was more important focusing ourselves on the details in order to make the piece successful. Although there were moments in the Live Event that didn’t work as we had planned, does not mean the piece was unsuccessful. 

in this process i have learnt three things;

1. How to engage and build a performer/audience relationship not only in performance but in the process too. This naturally boils down to the performer and the collective, and the atmosphere which they to create, this can be controlled. For example; if the collective/ performers are nervous, so will the audience. if the collective are confident, then the audience will have confidence in you to trust the participation. 

2. That it is okay not to take on ALL roles in a collective, instead to nourish and nurture your own strengths. The importance of trust when collaboration is vital.

3. Technology does not exist in performance to sabotage or disrupt, technology can be used to enhance your practice, as well as create stunning theatrical images. 

‘Sometimes the leader has no official recognition; sometimes the leadership rotates from one member to another; often the leader is also a performer.’ (Shank in Schneider & Cody;2002 P.235) 

In the earlier stages of the process the question of ‘director?’ had been approached several times. I never enter a process with the desire to be the director however I tend to fall into this role quite often. In fact other practitioners I work with tend to give me this title rather than myself. When collaborating with Simon, Jess and Yanzhe, I found there was an equal weighting between each role. The lack of hierarchy allowed us to learn from each other in order to progress. Being the natural leader I am, I found more than often that I would take on a directorial position; however I would never claim that this was my position in the group. I would however, say that at some point we all played the role of director. We consciously made an effort to play with the concept of ‘no-director’, similarly to that of Gob Squads working relationship. To clarify - the perception of ‘no-director’ is that, the role of director isn’t defined by a singular member in the group. Instead the role is shared throughout; this is dependent on circumstance or skill set. When working in a complementary collective a shared role is a natural occurrence, whereas working in a more hierarchal format such as traditional theatre, you will find this is not the case. The actual term ‘director’ is only familiar to me outside of an Avant Garde setting. To elaborate on what I wrote previously about never choosing to be the director, I suppose what I’m trying to illuminate here is that the term director doesn’t really come in to my day to day practice. At points within the process I found there wasn’t just four practitioners sharing the role of director, but also a fifth element too. Working with technology became restrictive; there were points within our process where we weren’t able to develop certain acts until certain parts were in place. It was almost as though the technology took on a directorial status within our process, especially in the later stages. Certain moments of the piece were compromised due to the technology disturbing the work. I fell into the role of director during the earlier stages of creation; I have had previous experiences of working with smaller ensembles. Therefore I was able to recycle and develop workshops to suit the style of the collaborative. The first workshop I lead was a development on an exercise we did with Avra Sidiropoulous. For Avra’s workshop we were individually asked to bring one scene from Macbeth to the session, to begin with we were asked to imagine what the scene would look like. Imagine miniscule details such as: what it smelled like, or what we could hear, things which seemed out of our reach to create in a theatrical space. I found this particularly interesting, as what Avra was asking us to do was think limitlessly, and then we would have to reign ourselves back in. As a director, I believe it isn’t our job to recreate, it is our job to represent, it’s not what can we hear, but what we can’t and it all belongs to the atmosphere we aim to create.

Within my version of the workshop, I asked all my fellow collaborators to sit in separate places within the space, with a pen and paper. We sat in silence, and then slowly we went through each act imagining what each act would do, if we had the power to do anything we wanted. Individually we wrote our ideas down, and once we had gone through each act we met back together in the centre of the space. From here we individually pitched the ideas we had during the task. It was interesting at this point to see how our practices already blended. Although there were definitely four very different versions of Macbeth being described, there were also moments of similarity developing. It was these moments of what Goat Island would describe as ‘collisions’ where our piece began to construct.

  ‘And I have and you have looked at the same thing and seen something different and now through your reflection I see it again and note a third thing: A collision and the collision interests me more than what you brought in and yet I don’t understand the collision. But it gives me ideas. And construction begins.’ [Goat Island; 2000 P.26]

We constructed together as a collective our version of Macbeth, and as the process progressed we picked out the strongest images and moments to create ‘Billy is Writing’

Within our entire process of collaboration we had ultimately fallen into unofficial “assigned” roles. Referring back to Gob Squad’s method of collaboration, being that they do not assign roles to individuals and that they all take part in the directorial role for example. I believe that this approach towards collaboration is successful.  However I found that in the process of Billy is Writing we stuck to our most comfortable roles but with the knowledge that we were allowed to shift our role boundaries to then return back to them with a different perspective to move on with the collaboration process.  

As practitioners we temporarily explored other roles that we were not comfortable with at the beginning of the process. For example we had all taken part in a directing workshop with Avra Sidiropoulou, facilitating us with the text of Macbeth and how with direction the text can be interpreted on stage differently. While going through this workshop I felt hesitant about being classed as the role of the “director”, but when we were devising material in the space together I was more than happy to take on directing characteristics. I feel that as performers we were able to explore each other’s main practices temporarily taking ownership of something we were originally hesitant about at the beginning of the process.  But when it came to devising material I naturally embodied a directorial role to help my fellow collaborators demonstrate the levels of intimacy and proximity within act five, The Battle.

However, for this mode of shifting from “unassigned roles” to work as well as it did, I believe that there needs to be a level of fluidity and kindness amongst collaborators so that they are all able to share each other’s ideas, perspectives and opinions.  The dynamic of the group felt ultimately rhizomatic that if any of us wished to step forward and produce ideas or take initiative and guide the group, their actions would not be seen as “greater” or “lesser” than anybody else who would be more familiar with whatever role.

My overall experience of this collaboration has been enjoyable and it has been a pleasure to work with my fellow collaborators. As a practitioner I will take from this experience the ability to take risks about exploring boundaries for the result of making theatrical material. For instance being in a directorial-like position  initially took me out of my comfort zone but with a purpose to progress and move forward within the collaboration collectively and individually. From this past experience directing was something I was unable to achieve because I felt that this was out of the characteristics of my natural role of writing. Mark Jeffreys, member of Goat Island comments:

“Through receiving, one can attach many different levels, how to be influenced, to take on others’ thoughts as presents and reinterpret into your mind and body. Once the digestion of the gift has been articulated in oneself then we begin to understand the nature and the power of sharing. Taking forward the information given. This idea of ownership becomes a wider participation, and one of interaction and creativity with others.  (Jeffreys, 2000 : 107)

‘The important thing I find about collaboration is the necessity to be mutually vulnerable and there can be no high arguments of who is more important than the other. Whether you are the instigator of the project or not, there has to be a levelling of personality that goes on. There has to be an authentic acceptance of this fact, because you both decide to be equal in it. Then you have each other to the edge of what you individually thought you were capable of.’ (Storey & Joubert in Littleton & Miell; 2004 P.47)

Working in a collective with such a wide and versatile range of skills proved itself to be influential; we were able to learn from each other in order to develop our own practices. Within the collective we each assigned ourselves roles; my role was ‘writer’. In my own practice I enjoy and excel at putting together scripts and scores, these work as backbones to support and carry the process. Within my individual process I tend to write the score prematurely and through moments of improvisation and technical enhancements, I add and build.  

We decided to begin working with Macbeth after partaking in a directing workshop with Avra Sidiropoulou. We found Macbeth to be a neutral piece of text, it’s social and popular position in the entertainment industry meant that we were all familiar with the play to some extent. It also meant there would definitely be an angle from which we’d all be able to approach. The other writer within the process was Jess, as writers we have two very different writing styles. Within this project I found myself recycling the themes from Macbeth to produce the narrative, whereas Jess worked on rewriting moments of monologues and texts from the script of Macbeth.

‘collaborators’ identities can remain distinct over the course of the collaboration, contributing their particular strengths and taking the lead at different stages, as tends to occur in complementary collaborations; one writer might be stronger in action and the other in emotional insights’ (Meill and Littleton; 2004 P.14) 

1: Thunder

2: Lightning

3: And in rain 

1: Tonight we speak truth

2: Or tonight we speak feign

3: Thee beings become one 

1: Tonight it shall be 

2: To unravel the foretold prophecy

3: Binding, finding, untying of three separate parts

1: A test of feminity, divinity and masculinity.

2: To be wagered by this holy trinity.

3: The creature of many names

1: Fear and bane 

2: Upon the place upon the plane

3: The place blood and Earth lay beneath

1: Fair to be foul and foul to be fair

Gareth White describes and introduces the idea of audience participation as ‘One of the most misconceived, unproductive and excruciating of the avant-garde’s blind alleys, or otherwise as evidence of the childish crassness of popular performance’ (White;2013 P.1) and at the beginning of this process I couldn’t agree more. From my experience of watching Theatre; the thought of audience participation used to make me recoil in fear. However at this point in my career it must also be considered that the only audience participation I had really experienced was that from my peers in a university context. I’d consider myself a naturally confident performer, so it may seem strange for me to have an opinion on audience participation as strong as this. As a performer and as an audience member I feel comfortable and confident when I know my role, the slippage between viewer and producer only makes me feel self-conscious and to be honest quite awkward.

My individual work tends to sit in the field of autobiography where I choose and allow the audience to be passive, I ask nothing of them other than to sit and engage with the performance. Already at the early stages of the process, collaboration was already having an effect on my individual practice, I was being asked to comprise a stationary element of my practice.

Early in the process I was quite defensive, asking negative questions such as ‘Why would I want to put an audience through participation?’ However after discussions with my peers and the module director I began to warm to the idea. A pivotal moment of mind changing happened, when as a collective we visited London to see the performance ‘A House Repeated’ by Seth Kriebel and Zoe Bouras at Battersea Art Centre ( 2015). For me the performance began to change my perceptions, it was a simplistic piece of participatory theatre. Although that dull sense of awkwardness was present whilst watching the piece, Bouras and Kriebel seemed to create a sense of unity with the audience.  Although there was a natural sense of hierarchy and it was obvious the two performers were in complete control, it didn't feel so separate. They explained on entrance the role in which the audience would play this confidence and assurance allowed me to relax and understand my role as an audience member. Assurance and audience management is key when making a piece of participatory theatre. I believe that if the performers lack confidence in the role of the audience, then in turn there’s a risk of the audience also being unsure hence creating a situation that could potentially sabotage the performance.

The role of the audience in the live event of ‘Billy is Writing’ has the potential for them to become co-authors and co-performers as they interact with, and shape the performance. I wouldn't go as far as to say the audience define the work instead through their interaction, they play with the material and shape the end product (in so far as the live event can be considered an end product).  As performers and creators it is our responsibility to translate this. As writer it was my task to sit and actually establish the rules of the game. I sat with Simon and discussed the programme* he had written, to begin we made a list of actions that were integral for the piece to work.  We tried and tested these rules out with a small audience, the feedback was good and they explained that the rules were clear. However something that really affected this was the way in which we delivered the rules. By scripting these rules, the delivery became rigid and lacked the relaxed atmosphere that we craved to create. Taking feedback from peers and lecturers into account, it was suggested that we actually used the rules as guide rather than a script. The idea of this made me feel nervous; the risk of performing the rules unscripted meant that there was a chance we would miss an essential element out.  

Dorothy Miell and Karen Littleton discuss how risk-taking is a major part of collaboration, they claim ‘Risk- taking is an inherent part of creative work although: ‘a mutual relationship of trust’ is recognised as being ‘key when collaborating creatively’ (Miell, Littleton; 2004 P.46). The ‘mutual relationship of trust’ has been and continues to be a strong element of our working practice. Moments of dissatisfaction have been sparse as, as collaborators, our bond of trust is incredibly strong. Working in a supportive collaboration such as this has made the idea of risk-taking a lot easier to deal with. As an individual artist this has allowed my practice to progress and gain confidence in the notion of interactivity within performance. I hope the level of trust we have as a collaborative transcends into our relationship with the audience, so that we can create a strong and comfortable environment for the live event to be a success.

‘By spreading the risk, [collaboration] encourages you to take more chances’ (John-Steiner; 2000, P.19)