Katherine Francesca Joyce Unscripted Interventions: the Challenge Tangled Feet Pose to England's Theatre Culture. Phd (Practice
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Katherine Francesca Joyce Unscripted Interventions: The challenge Tangled Feet pose to England's theatre culture. PhD (practice-based) Drama and Theatre Royal Holloway University Declaration of Authorship I , Katherine Joyce, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 1 Abstract My thesis has at its heart an interrogation into the practice I have co-created with Tangled Feet, a physical ensemble who use processes of improvisation and devising, and who make work which includes apertures for audience influence, often outside of traditional theatre spaces. I construct an argument that this practice, which foregrounds the body and its potential for kinaesthetic affectivity, and which privileges liveness over leaving a legacy, poses challenges for mainstream theatre historiographies and critical mechanisms which often fail to adequately include the embodied presence of the artist and spectator in the analysis. I use other theorists to explore how a 'text-centricity' evident in British culture which arguably shores up existing power dynamics also propagates reductive binaries that ignore the body's capacity to theorise. I highlight how elements of performance such as kinaesthetic affectivity are often neglected or de-prioritised in the written text, and address this through modelling close analysis of my own and others' performance work with due focus on these elements. In socially-engaged practice like Tangled Feet's, the ways that audiences interact with the work, particularly in public spaces, are of fundamental importance to the political context of the performance. With particular reference to Arts Council England's policies concerning the broadening definition of 'theatre' in the last decade, and attendant focus on 'accessibility’, I examine the alternative value system that funding structures create around this type of practice. By bringing into dialogue different theorists and disciplines, including a neuroscientific view of embodied cognition and my own detailed practice observations, my thesis signals what some of the potentials of physical performance might be if we can release it from textual expectations, and how it can challenge conventions, social relationships and political structures. 2 Table of Contents Katherine Francesca Joyce...................................................................................................................1 Abstract.................................................................................................................................................2 Introduction..........................................................................................................................................5 Thesis outline:..................................................................................................................................8 The practice element of this thesis: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Inflation and One Million. ..12 Chapter 1: Ignoring the body: the problems of textual and literary strategies for physical practice..14 Introduction....................................................................................................................................14 A literary theatre culture................................................................................................................16 Authorship theory and the psychodynamics of writing.................................................................19 Looking backwards: the shadow of literary theory on English theatre.........................................22 Whose Performance Is It Anyway?...............................................................................................25 State of the Nation.........................................................................................................................27 Billington misses the point with Kane...........................................................................................28 What if we consider it dance?........................................................................................................31 Some difficulties of dance scholarship: 'the body is dispossessed of its own capacity for mindful action' ............................................................................................................................................32 Dance interacting with literature....................................................................................................35 Dance is like a language? The problems of stretching literary terms to re-conceive dance..........38 The potential of the body: thinking, discussing, theorising...........................................................40 Including the spectator's body ......................................................................................................43 Kinaesthetic effect as an element of the work...............................................................................44 A way forward? ............................................................................................................................46 Conclusion: ...................................................................................................................................48 Chapter 2: Engaging with our audiences: Liveness, liminality and frames of value in this 'New Landscape'..........................................................................................................................................52 Introduction:...................................................................................................................................52 The Value of Public Engagement: 'Great Art for Everyone'.........................................................57 'Not for people like me': pervasive misconceptions about the barriers to arts engagement..........59 Theatre for 'Other People': Outdoor Arts bucks the trend. ...........................................................62 The Experience of Communality...................................................................................................64 Public subsidy: £100,000...............................................................................................................66 The difficulties of quantifying public engagement. ......................................................................68 Considering the impact of 'liveness' in a cultural economy...........................................................71 Improvising History.......................................................................................................................75 David George and uncertainty, Writing and 'fixedness', resolution of paradox ...........................78 A dispersal of meaning making; an embodied audience...............................................................79 Conclusion: What's the prognosis for an 'Age of Performance' celebrating uncertainty, paradox and ambiguity?...............................................................................................................................82 Chapter 3: Kinaesthetic strategies: The political influence of the body.............................................87 Introduction....................................................................................................................................87 Embodied minds: our bodies are thinking.....................................................................................93 Indiscrete bodies: our bodies leach information............................................................................96 The body at risk: analysis of three works ...................................................................................102 Get down you will fall.................................................................................................................106 Mindlessness, oppression and resistance.....................................................................................114 Working through a thesis kinaesthetically: Use of kinaesthetic affectivity in Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother...........................................................................................................................114 Show the workings of the body:..................................................................................................117 3 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................121 Chapter 4: Deploying embodied strategies in socially-engaged practice – Inflation and One Million ..........................................................................................................................................................124 Introduction: ................................................................................................................................124 Liminality and the indicative: not representing but doing...........................................................124 Prior to language: using physical metaphor to explore and reveal social/political structures.....126 Inflation: The unstable body as metaphor for the global financial system. .....................................131 Context, commissioning and creation process.............................................................................131 Physical metaphor: