Contemporary Dramaturgy

in

Theatre For Young People:

The Conceptual Shape of Displacement and Installation

Kris Bronwyn Plummer

Bachelor of Arts (Hons)

Diploma of Education (Secondary)

Master of Education (Creative Arts)

Queensland University of Technology

Creative Industries

Performance Studies

August 2009

Submitted in full requirement for the award of

IF49 Doctor of Philosophy

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank the following people

whose support has enabled me to

complete this study.

Principal Supervisor and mentor: Dr Brad Haseman

TJ Eckleberg and staff at Shopfront Theatre, Sydney

Kristo Šagor and staff at Schnawwl Theatre, Mannheim

Henning Fangauf and staff at KJTZ, Frankfurt-am-Main

Associate Supervisor: Dr Sandra Gattenhof

CI Research: Jenny Mayes, Ellen Thompson,

Leanne Blazely, Tahlia Rose.

Special thanks to:

Jan Plummer, Sharon Edgley,

Ron Dalgleish, Benjamin Knapton.

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Prologue: The Drop of Water

Why, then, do I work in a way which may bring me distress, cause me unease or wound me or my companions?

In order to create a work that lives and stands alone, that belongs to me, in which I recognize myself, yet which does not need my presence to go on existing in the senses, the memory, and the actions of others.

In order to give the spectators something to remember even after they have forgotten it.

Because I long for the bare and essential action: the drop of water that makes the jar run over.

Eugenio Barba

‘The Deep Order Called Turbulence: The Three Faces of Dramaturgy.’

The Drama Review , 44 (4): 56-66.

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Table of Contents

Keywords ...... 8 Abstract...... 9 List of Abbreviations ...... 10 Glossary of Terms...... 11 Statement of Original Authorship...... 12 Chapter One: Introduction ...... 13 1. Orientation ...... 13 2. Background and Rationale...... 15 3. Scoping the Inquiry...... 16 4. Research Questions...... 17 5. Structure of the Thesis ...... 17 6. Significance of the Study...... 19 Chapter Two: Literature Review ...... 20 A. Contemporary Theatre For Young People...... 20 1. Introduction: Theatre for and Theatre by Young People ...... 20 2. Australian Theatre for Young People ...... 22 a. Terrain and Traditions...... 22 b. The Transition to Contemporary Performance ...... 24 c. The Transition to Contemporary Arts Centres...... 26 3. German Kinder - und Jugendtheater...... 28 a. Terrain and Traditions...... 28 b. An Opening of the Repertory...... 31 c. The Development of ‘Junges Theater’ and Collaborative Process ...... 32 d. An Opening of the Ensemble...... 35 e. The Development of Interdisciplinarity...... 36 f. Development of Multimedia Innovation ...... 38 4. Conclusion ...... 39 B. Dramaturgy...... 42 1. What is Dramaturgy? ...... 42 a. What of the drama -turgy?...... 42 b. Where are the Drama–turg -ies?...... 44 2. Who is the Dramaturg? ...... 51 a. The Historical Legacy...... 51 b. Current Practice: Intercultural Perspectives...... 52 3. Dramaturgies : An Australian, Practice-Led Appraisal ...... 53 a. The Dramaturg as Facilitator: Four Interpretive Spheres ...... 55 b. The Dramaturg as Articulator, Curator and Questioner...... 57 c. The Dramaturg as Advocate and Interventionist ...... 58 d. The Dramaturg as Midwife between Practice and Theory ...... 59 4. Conclusion ...... 59 C. Contemporary Performance: a Postdramatic Terrain ...... 61 1. Reaching Towards a New Milennium ...... 61

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a. The Real and the Represented...... 61 b. The Performance as Text...... 62 c. The Dramaturgy of Process...... 62 d. The Valorization of the Theatrical...... 63 2. Postdramatic Theatre ...... 64 a. Post–the-dramatic ...... 64 b. Articulating the Theatre/Performance Aesthetics...... 65 3. Deconstructing the Dramatic: Postdramatic Gestures ...... 66 a. Hypernaturalism: When Signs overtake Characters ...... 67 b. Irruption of the Real: Unplugging the Artifice ...... 70 c. The A-Thetic: A Refusal to Resolve...... 71 4. Conclusion ...... 73 5. Addressing the Gap in the Literature...... 75 Chapter Three: Research Methodology, Design and Implementation .....76 1. Introduction: Statement on Qualitative Research ...... 76 2. Interpretive Paradigm: Constructivism...... 77 3. Methodology...... 78 2. Research Strategies ...... 79 a. Grounded Theory...... 79 b. The Reflective Practitioner ...... 81 c. Case Studies...... 81 5. Ethical Considerations ...... 82 6. Research Design...... 84 a. Data Collection in the Field: Case Study One ...... 85 b. Data Collection in the Field: Case Study Two...... 87 c. Data Analysis...... 90 8. Conclusion ...... 92 Chapter Four: The Research Lens - Practitioner Case Studies...... 93 1. Introduction...... 93 2. TJ Eckleberg (Australia)...... 93 a. The Context: Shopfront Theatre for Young People, Sydney ...... 95 b. Eckleberg’s Approach ...... 97 c. Previous Productions ...... 98 3. The Fieldwork: POP UP! 2006...... 99 4. Enter the Dramaturg/Researcher...... 101 5. Kristo Šagor (Germany)...... 101 a. The Context: Schnawwl Theater, Mannheim...... 103 b. Šagor’s Approach ...... 104 c. Previous Productions ...... 105 6. Introduction to the Fieldwork: FSK-16 , Ja and Frankenstein ...... 106 a. FSK-16 : A Play for Youth of Sixteen Years and Over ...... 106 b. Ja : A play for Children Eight Years and Over ...... 107 c. Frankenstein : A Multimedia Performance for the Mainstage ...... 108 7. Enter the Researcher/Dramaturg...... 109 8. Conclusion ...... 109 Chapter Five: Artist Case Study One: TJ Eckleberg (Australia)...... 111 1. The Dramaturg and Director: Building a Shared Language ...... 111 2. The Dramaturgy of Displacement?...... 112 3. Displacement in the Creative Development of POP UP! ...... 113

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a. Jabberwocky ...... 114 b. Contemporary Stories ...... 118 c. A Pop Up! Book...... 121 4. The Interactive Process of Displacement...... 128 a. The Emerging Weave of the Actions...... 129 b. The Emerging Language of Displacement ...... 131 5. The Dramaturg and the Audience: Developing ‘the Audience’s Eye’ ...... 134 6. The Dramaturgy of Installation?...... 135 7. Installation within the Production Period of POP UP! ...... 136 a. The Audience Quest...... 137 b. Jabberwocky ...... 141 c. Contemporary Stories ...... 145 d. Pop Ups...... 147 8. The Emerging Aesthetics of Installation...... 151 a. Storytelling within the Installation...... 151 b. The Emerging Language of Installation ...... 154 9. The Dramaturgy of the Spectator...... 155 a. Characters and Roles...... 156 b. Space...... 157 c. Time...... 159 10. The Performance as Text ...... 160 Chapter Six: Artist Case Study Two: Kristo Šagor (Germany) ...... 163 1. The Dramaturg and Playwright/Director: Approaching the Text...... 163 2. The Dramaturgy of Displacement...... 164 3. Dramaturgy of the Text: Displacement in FSK-16 and Ja ...... 166 a. The Premise and Setting: Transitory Zones...... 166 b. The Characters: Unstable Identities...... 167 c. The Action: Destabilizing The Frames ...... 172 d. The Language: Un-tethered Wordplay and Inversion ...... 180 4. Conclusion: Framing versus Purposeful Displacement ...... 187 5. The Dramaturgy of Installation...... 189 6. Dramaturgy in Performance: Installation in FSK-16 & Ja...... 189 a. Stage Design in FSK-16: Projecting Cinematic Violence ...... 189 b. Stage design in Ja: Projecting the Spiritual ...... 192 c. Multimedia Design in Ja: Installing the landscape ...... 194 d. Multimedia Design in FSK-16: Installing ‘Speech Islands’...... 196 7. Conclusion ...... 199 8. Frankenstein : A Multi-Mediated Performance Text ...... 202 a. Narrative Strands: The Doctor as Multi-Mediated ‘Weave’...... 203 b. Displacement in the Structural Frames...... 205 c. Installing Different Media: Intersection on the Stage...... 214 9. Conclusion ...... 217 Chapter 7: Conclusions and Implications...... 219 1. Conclusion: Research Question One ...... 219 2. The Conceptual Shape of Displacement and Installation ...... 219 3. Conclusion: Research Question Two...... 225 4. Displacement and Installation in Postdramatic Theatre’s conceptual framework ...... 225 5. Implications...... 233

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Appendix...... 236 1. Informed Consent Package ...... 236 2. Guideline Questions: Contextual Interviews in Germany 2007 ...... 240 3. Image and Graphics Release Form: 2006 ...... 241 Digital Appendices: List of Contents ...... 242 1. On DVD 1: POP UP! Performance...... 242 2. On DVD 2: Digital Appendices...... 242 References...... 243

A Note on Illustrations

Throughout the body of this thesis a number of printed photographic images are embedded. Higher resolution versions of each of these images may be viewed (in their contextual order of appearance) in the Digital Appendices, in the Folders Case Study One and Case Study Two.

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Keywords

The following is a list of key words that appear within the thesis or are associated with the thesis topic. These words have been listed for cataloguing purposes.

Key words that apply to this study are:

Theatre for Young People Kinder- und Jugendtheater Theatre for Young Audiences Dramaturgy Dramaturg Postdramatic Theatre Millennial Theatre Junges Theater Junge Oper Displacement Installation Shopfront Theatre for Young People Schnawwl Theater, National Theater, Mannheim Staatstheater Oldenburg

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Abstract

This thesis investigates Theatre for Young People (TYP) as a site of performance innovation. The inquiry is focused on contemporary dramaturgy and its fieldwork aims to identify new dramaturgical principles operating in the creation and presentation of TYP. The research then seeks to assess how these new principles contribute to Postdramatic Theatre theory.

This research inquiry springs from an imperative based in practice: Young people under 25 years have a literacy based on online hypertextual experiences which take the reader outside the frames of a dramatic narrative and beyond principles such as linearity, dramatic unity, teleology and resolution. As a dramaturg and educator I wanted to understand the new ways that young people engage in cultural products, to identify and utilize the new principles of dramaturgy that are now in evidence.

My research examines how two playwright/directors approach their work and the new principles that can be identified in their dramaturgy. The fieldwork is scoped into two case studies: the first on TJ Eckleberg working in Australian Theatre for Young People and the second on Kristo Šagor working in German Children’s and Young People’s Theatre (KJT).

These case studies address both types of production dramaturgy - the dramaturgy emergent through process in devised performance making, and that emergent in a performance based on a written playscript. On Case Study One the researcher, as participant observer, worked as production dramaturg on a large scale, site specific performance, observing the dramaturgy in process of its director and chief devisor. On Case Study Two the researcher, as observer and analyst, undertook a performance analysis of three playscripts and productions by a contemporary German playwright and director.

Utilizing participant observation, reflective practice and grounded analysis the case studies have identified two new principles animating the dramaturgy of these TYP practitioners, namely ‘displacement’ and ‘installation.’ Taking practice into theory, the thesis concludes by demonstrating how displacement and installation contribute to Postdramatic Theatre’s “arsenal of expressive gestures which serve as theatre’s response to changed social communication under the conditions of generalized communication technologies” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.23).

This research makes an original contribution to knowledge by evidencing that the principles of Postdramatic Theory lie within the practice of contemporary Theatre for Young People. It also contributes valuable research to a specialized, often overlooked terrain, namely Dramaturgy in Theatre for Young People, presented here with a contemporary, international and intercultural perspective.

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List of Abbreviations

ASSITEJ – Association International du Theatre pour L´Enfance et la Jeunesse (trans. International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People) KJT – Kinder- und Jugendtheater (trans. Children and Youth Theatre) KJTZ – Kinder und Jugendtheaterzentrum (trans.The Children and Youth Theatre Centre) TYP – Theatre for Young People T.Y.A – Theatre for Young Audiences T.I.E – Theatre In Education YPAA – Young People and the Arts Australia

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Glossary of Terms

What is ASSITEJ?

Formed under the auspices of UNESCO in 1965, ASSITEJ is the International Association for Theatre for Children and Young People. ASSITEJ has created a world network of interested parties to this field of practice across artists, producers, companies, educators, theorists and cultural policy makers. ASSITEJ now has national centres established in more than seventy countries and its constitution aims to create an ongoing, pluralist, non-nationalist forum for discussion and promotion of children’s and young peoples’ theatre (ASSITEJ , 2008, p.8).

What is YPAA?

Young People and the Arts Australia is the Australian professional association representing and promoting organizations and artists whose work focuses on children and young people in the arts. As the national peak body representing arts for, with and by young people, YPAA provides a crucial link between members in the arts sector, the wider community and government (2008, p.3). YPAA is the advocacy body for a range of employees in the distinct subsectors of Australian Theatre for Young People in Australia. These are: Youth Collaborative Arts Companies (these are theatres where youth perform), Theatre for Young Audiences Companies (theatres where adults perform for youth), Youth and Education departments of larger theatre companies, Service Organizations and Festivals.

What is the KJTZ?

The Kinder-und Jugendtheaterzentrum in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (abbreviated here as KJTZ) is The Children’s and Young People’s Theatre Centre in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was founded in 1989 by ASSITEJ Bundesrepublik Deutschland e.V. and the Federal Ministry for Young People. The Centre is active both nationally and internationally in developing and promoting theatre for young audiences. KJTZ engage in aesthetic research on form in Kinder- und Jugendtheater, running numerous workshops, symposia and forums each year, the most notable being the Frankfurt Autorenforum (playwrights forum) held in December and Augenblick Mal! a biennial festival of exemplary works in Children’s Theatre and Young Peoples Theatre. The centre also awards a prestigious National Prize for playwriting, in both Children’s theatre and Youth categories. The KJTZ office in Frankfurt- am-Main holds a library and resource centre on all plays in the repertory in German KJT and the international archives of World ASSITEJ (2008a).

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Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution.

To the best of my knowledge and belief the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signed: ______

Date: ______

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Chapter One: Introduction

1. Orientation

This thesis investigates contemporary Theatre for Young People as a site of performance innovation; it explores how two contemporary writer/directors create work for today’s young people. Through two case studies, one in Australian Theatre for Young People (TYP) and the other in German Children’s and Young People’s Theatre (KJT) the investigation achieves an international and intercultural perspective.

The inquiry is focused on contemporary dramaturgy and it seeks to identify new dramaturgical principles evident in the creation and presentation of theatre/performance for young people. The case studies address both types of production dramaturgy - the dramaturgy emergent through a devised performance process, as well as that emerging from the ‘page to stage’ process - a production based on a written playscript.

Writers and directors working in the sector of TYP are strongly committed to creating engaging work for today’s young people, their audience being predominantly 3-25 years old. This research inquiry investigates how two professional TYP practitioners have developed a contemporary dramaturgy in response to this context.

The perceived challenge for performance practitioners is to encourage young audience members to attend live performance in a social context where virtual reality experiences- online games, role-plays and chat - provide an interactive performative environment delivered in the home or on wireless technology. Susan Greenfield describes twenty first century young people as “people of the screen” who lack the traditional frames and limitations of the “people of the book” (2003, p.165). Young people under 25 years have a literacy based on online hypertextual experiences which feature multi-linear and open ended narratives. This environment takes the reader outside the frames of a drama tic narrative and beyond principles such as linearity, unity, teleology and resolution. In fact in a hypertextual narrative the reader’s choice broadens as they progress across numerous texts rather than along a single story arc (Snyder, I., 1998, pp.16-19). New reader expectations of the way the narrative unfolds and their participation within it now occur, for “the actual condition of hypertext is that of a permanent state of arrival” (Giannichi, G., 2004, p.17).

Janet Murray (1997) points out that a twenty first century reader (of any age) experiences online reading as a performative interface. Their online experience is characterized by a high

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level interactivity and immersion, but also a sense of control or customization of the experience (1997, p.71). Giannichi goes fur ther asserting that hypertextuality transforms “the traditional world of text into a world of action” by insisting that the reader acts upon it. This enables them to “exist in the real and virtual world/art work simultaneously and multiply their position” it also allows the viewer "to move towards the completion of the work” (Giannichi, G., 2004, p.13). In essence, through daily internet usage and a PC dominated school/work environment, an intergenerational mix of audience members have experienced a “paradigm shift” in the ways they are able to engage with culture (Haseman, B., 2000).

The dramaturg’s role and the principles of dramaturgy have shifted to respond to this audience, however it is not only structures from technology that challenge the conception of a drama - turgy. Working on devised performance making, rather than on a scripted text, the contemporary dramaturg may find themself outside the organizing principles of drama. As early as 1996, David ER George suggested that the systems of contemporary performance required a new dramaturgical approach, and it follows, an articulation of a new epistemology. He asserts that: “Performance today looms as a possible philosophical paradigm, a radical alternative to the modernist text paradigm” (p.18).

This research inquiry springs then from an imperative based in practice; the contemporary drama -turg, especially one working in Theatre for Young People, needs to identify and name new principles of (her) practice. These have inevitably emerged from a ‘techno/socio- cultural’ paradigm that has moved beyond the dramatic model. As one contemporary Australian dramaturg notes:

The contemporary theatre environment is structurally complex, intermediated, fragmented, culturally rich and information-rich. …This has created the need for creative specialists who keep track of the complicated flow of ideas, technologies and forms associated with such work (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.287).

Through grounded analysis this research seeks the new principles that are animating the dramaturgy of practitioners in contemporary TYP. It then tests whether these principles can be regarded as ‘postdramatic.’

In Postdramatic Theatre (1999, 2006) Hans-Thies Lehmann identifies in theatrical and dramaturgical terms, a new set of aesthetic and poetic principles. He demonstrates where these have emerged in the international terrain of theatre/performance practice over the last

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twenty years. Postdramatic Theory accepts that contemporary dramaturgy is inextricably linked to the technologisation of cultural consumption:

The formal languages developed since the historical avant-gardes have become an arsenal of expressive gestures, which in Postdramatic Theatre serve as theatre’s response to changed social communication under the conditions of generalized communication technologies. (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.23)

The concept of the postdramatic is thus relevant to any inquiry focused on theatre making with twenty first century young people as audience members and participants. However Postdramatic Theory has a larger relevance to an inquiry into contemporary dramaturgy. In Postdramatic Theatre Lehmann articulates a post-drama dramaturgy with examples from all areas of current practice: in contemporary performance, in the restaging of classical and twentieth century texts and also in the premiere works of new playwrights.

This research seeks to contribute to the postdramatic ‘arsenal of expressive gestures’ from an inquiry researched ‘from the ground’ up - through dramaturgy in process and through performance analysis of works created for contemporary TYP.

2. Background and Rationale

I view this doctoral inquiry as a practice-based investigation. It has arisen out of my creative practice as a dramaturg, director and educator and its methodology engages with the working methods of the dramaturg in practice:

Practice based research places practice at the centre of the research but its findings provided insights about practice even if they are discovered through the practice. The creative practice itself is not normally an examinable component of the thesis even if the creative process may be a major part or the methodology. A documentation of the practice becomes part of the thesis but not the practice itself. (Stock, C., 2007)

I identify as a director/facilitator working with young people in collaborative performance and as a dramaturg working with emerging playwrights. I also engage in practice as a secondary drama/dance educator; teaching students the fundamentals of dramatic form, stagecraft, theatre history and contemporary performance. In each of these creative contexts I have developed methodologies to effectively facilitate scripted works, group devised theatre, movement improvisation and dance performance.

However after ten years as an educator, I began to observe changes in students’ reading of texts and their terms of engagement in the theatrical experience. On one occasion, while employed as a dramaturgical consultant to a Higher School Certificate (HSC) English

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Extension class, I was dumbfounded. Students demonstrated a new perception of narrative. The top HSC English Video Projects communicated through layers of visual imagery and intertextual references, the narratives lacked teleology, the characters’ lacked dimensionality, there was often no resolution and the Year 12 students were keen to watch it repeatedly in order to piece together the narrative puzzle.

I noticed that these works by young people had been animated by new structural and aesthetic principles that challenged my traditional methodology which was founded upon the dramatic form and the Elements of Drama (Haseman, B. and O'Toole, J., 1986). I asked myself: If the elements of drama are the old organizing principles, then what are the new organizing principles? I wanted to take on this new type of reader and to understand the new ways that young people engage in cultural products. I then questioned how professionals working in the field of contemporary TYP now structured their work and if such new principles could be identified in their dramaturgy.

My ongoing commitment to empowering young people through performance making has motivated this doctoral study. Through this research into the work of contemporary writer/directors I seek new tools to create work for twenty first century young people.

3. Scoping the Inquiry

The fieldwork is scoped around two practitioner based case studies in contrasting TYP sites. In 2006 I took up the role of dramaturg/observer on a large scale site-specific contemporary performance titled POPUP! This work was created and performed at Sydney’s Shopfront Theatre for Young People and was directed by TJ Eckleberg, who is also the theatre’s Artistic Director and CEO. In 2007 I undertook dramaturgical analysis, interviews and auditing of three German KJT productions written by playwright/director Kristo Šagor.

In the first Case Study the viewpoint is from the embedded dramaturg focused on the creative process. In the second case study I present a dramaturgical analysis of the creative products – the script and the performance. The research questions below thus apply to the building dramaturgy that occurs in the creative development process as well as to the dramaturgy that drives the performance.

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4. Research Questions

What are the new and emerging dramaturgical principles evident in the creation and presentation of contemporary Theatre/Performance for Young People?

How might these new principles of dramaturgy demonstrate a Postdramatic Theatre emerging from contemporary Theatre/Performance for Young People?

5. Structure of the Thesis

The Literature Review demonstrates my exploration of the research terrain in three key areas: Theatre for Young People, Dramaturgy and Postdramatic Theatre. The Literature Review in structure moves from the sector context of this inquiry (TYP) to an investigation of dramaturgy in practice and then to theory, Postdramatic theory.

In Theatre for Young People the nomenclature that delineates Australian TYP practice from German KJT practice is explained, framed by the traditions which shaped both sectors. The contemporary trends in TYP in each of these countries are examined in detail to demonstrate that both practitioners work is created within an evolving techno-cultural terrain.

My focus in the Dramaturgy section is to clarify the contemporary practice of the dramaturg. Theorists, dramaturgs and key events are surveyed, all of which seek to articulate new systems and principles of practice in dramaturgy for contemporary performance.

Postdramatic Theatre is then assessed as a new theoretical system to articulate contemporary dramaturgy, a dramaturgy that works beyond the dramatic paradigm allowing for contemporary aesthetic and poetic impulses that challenge representation, signification and resolution.

The Methodology Chapter describes the inductive approach to qualitative research undertaken in this study and an interpretative paradigm founded in Constructivism. My chosen Research Strategies are detailed: Grounded Theory, Reflective Practice and Case Study. Each of these strategies “enact an emic and idiographic approach to enquiry” (Charmaz, K., 2000, p.158) and thus also reflect the interpretative practice of the dramaturg.

The Methodology Chapter also addresses the data collection process and the interpretative models developed for data analysis. This chapter clearly accounts for the structural organizers

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used in Chapters 5 and 6 to report each case and to analyse the findings. Here the thesis again manifests the dramaturg’s stance by demonstrating an engagement in both practice and analysis simultaneously.

Chapter Four, titled ‘The Research Lens: Practitioner Case Studies,’ narrows down the international terrain of TYP (surveyed broadly in the Literature Review) into two specific examples. It describes the two practitioners chosen, their theatres and previous relevant productions. The chapter also introduces the texts that form the case work in each country. This chapter allows a parallel structure to develop by which the reader should note the vastly different traditions of practice in Germany and Australia. There are also interesting commonalities that emerge; for example the fact that both of these practitioners have created innovative work their countries most long standing Theatres for Young People.

Chapter Five presents the fieldwork and findings from Case Study One: the devised process undertaken by TJ Eckleberg as director of POP UP! The chapter narrates the emerging dramaturgy of the work from my position as dramaturg/researcher embedded in the project. From the grounded research data I identify two new dramaturgical principles that underpin TJ Eckleberg’s creative process and those that were evident in the dramaturgy of the POPUP! performance.

Chapter Six presents the fieldwork and findings from Case Study Two: a dramaturgical analysis of three play texts by Kristo Šagor and an account of these three texts realized in production, two of which were directed by the playwright. The discussion focuses firstly on the written texts and then on the texts in performance. I delineate the dramaturgical features latent on the page and how those elements were enhanced in production. My analysis of these script based works, testing the principles uncovered from the ground in Case Study One, evidences similar tendencies in Šagor’s writing and directing. His intentions are corroborated by interviews with European practitioners with whom he has worked.

Chapter Seven contains the conclusions and implications of the study. The original research questions are each addressed. Initially the conclusions from the two case studies are evaluated to create a conceptual shape for the two new dramaturgical principles evidenced in both terrains. Finally, to address the second research question, I analyse how these new principles align with Postdramatic Theory and achieve Postdramatic effects in practice. I thereby propose that these terms be included as new techniques in Postdramatic Theory (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006). Finally I assess the implications of my research for a range of future practitioners.

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6. Significance of the Study

This research inquiry is significant in its field for the following reasons:

Case Study One provides a detailed account of a large scale, site specific process undertaken in a well established TYP in Sydney. The scale of this project is worthy of documentation as is the unique creative methodology through which its director, TJ Eckleberg shaped a range of diverse elements. The research is a measure of the evolution of TYP in Australia since the foundation of this sector in the 1970s.

Case Study Two and the Literature Review provide a rare English language analysis of contemporary Theatre for Children and Young People in Germany (KJT) and offer a close analysis of the plays/productions of contemporary playwright, Kristo Šagor. Šagor is a multi award winning playwright, acknowledged for his innovative portrayal of contemporary German young people. These plays in production demonstrate the evolution of Kinder- und Jugendtheater from its emancipatory and fairytale based origins in the 1900s.

The study is groundbreaking because it evidences that the theoretical principles of Postdramatic Theory lie within the practice of TYP. The TYP sector demands the most up to date, accessible content and responsivity to a defined audience thus the relevancy claims of Postdramatic Theory are here measured within cultural products that are designed to speak of today’s society for today’s audiences.

The research also identifies innovative practitioners in the TYP field at an international level and with a specific focus on their dramaturgy. Globally writers and directors in TYP are reshaping the principles of their practice to align with a transforming audience context. The research demonstrates that TYP is a highly responsive theatre sector that makes a valid contribution to both dramaturgical practice and performance theory.

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Chapter Two: Literature Review A. Contemporary Theatre For Young People

1. Introduction: Theatre for and Theatre by Young People

This research joins other Australian studies that have identified Theatre For Young People (TYP) as a performing arts sector demonstrating innovation in its creative processes and products (Gattenhof, S., 2004; Hunter, M., 1999). This research furthers their claims; it asserts that TYP is a site in which new principles in dramaturgy may be identified and theorized.

It is important to clearly delineate the nomenclature in this field of practice. At the International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network (ITYARN) forum (Adelaide, May 2008) participants referred to this sector as TYA - ‘Theatre for Young Audiences’ (Van de Water, M., 2008) and this appears to be a current umbrella term. However, ASSITEJ, the international world network, names their sector officially as the ‘International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People’ - Association International du Theatre pour L´Enfance et la Jeunesse (ASSITEJ , 2008).

The age ranges of TYP audiences and participants also are defined differently across world practice. In Australia they range between 5 to 25 years, though some theatres target specifically for 16-26 years (2005, p.7). In Germany practice is divided into Children’s Theatre, for 3-12 year olds and Theatre for Youth, those 12-18 and beyond (KJTZ, 2008b). Recent research in Germany, Italy and Sweden is now focused on Theatre for Infants of 2 to 6 years old (Florschuetz, M. and Koelling, B., 2008).

In many countries Theatre for Young People is based in a singular performance practice in which adults perform professionally for young audiences. In Germany this practice is known as Kinder- und Jugendtheater (KJT 1), in English Theatre for Children and Youth. Across Germany there are 152 subsidized municipal theatres the majority of which contain a professional KJT department (Fangauf, H. and Schumacher, K., 2008, p.24). These are repertory companies supported by federal, state and local authorities and provide daytime performances for school and community groups plus an evening subscriber program. In the 2001-2 German theatre season (September 01- July 02) nearly one thousand different KJT

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productions were mounted, reaching an audience of around 2.3 million over seventeen thousand performances (Kirschner, J., 2005, p.1).

As these statistics suggest the municipal KJT Theatre is the dominant form for TYP in Germany and is highly developed, earning it the status of ‘fourth department’ in the municipal company, alongside spoken (adult) theatre, music theatre and ballet (Taube, G., 2008, p.4). Thus German KJT, while part of an international field of Theatre for Young People, forms a nationally distinctive practice with a completely different lineage to Australian TYP.

In Australia the term ‘Theatre for Young People’ remains an ‘umbrella’ term for a diverse range of activities. The national peak body representing arts for, with and by young people, ‘Young People and the Arts Australia’ (YPAA) identifies four contexts in which Australian performances for young people are produced: - Theatre for Young Audiences Companies - Youth Collaborative Arts Companies - Youth/Education wings in mainstage companies (eg. Queensland Theatre Company) - Service Organizations and Festivals. (ASSITEJ Australia, 2008)

Each of these sectors developed in the 1970s out of a range of social, community and performance initiatives. These traditions are outlined succinctly by Maryanne Hunter and Geoffrey Milne in ‘Young People and Performance in Australia and New Zealand’ (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.5). Hunter and Milne reinforce that two key traditions of practice are still in play. In ‘Theatre For Young People’ listed above as ‘Theatre for Young Audience Companies’ adults perform as part of professional ensembles, presenting in the main scripted works for audiences of children and young people. In ‘Theatre for (and by) Young People’ listed above as ‘Youth Collaborative Arts Companies’ youth participate in both devised and scripted processes process and in the performance product. These are those performances staged traditionally by Youth Theatres, however Hunter and Milne now choose to name this sector: ‘Youth Theatre /Performance’ (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.6).

In this research project TYP in Australia is investigated via this second model: Case Study One is sited in a Youth Theatre/Performance context on a project undertaken with youth as performers and devisers in a theatre by and for young people. In contrast Case Study Two uses the first model: KJT is adult created, scripted and performed Theatre by adults for Young People.

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In contrast to being the ‘fourth department’ in Germany, TYP in Australia is still regarded by the performing arts industry as a secondary activity, marginalized simply because it identifies as a non-adult sector (Gattenhof, S., 2007). However this sector is thriving with good patronage and audience engagement. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that arts activities are proportionately more significant to the quality of life of Australians in the 15-24 years old age range. In 2000 this demographic recorded the highest rate of arts participation at approx 67.5% (ASSITEJ Australia, 2008).

The TYP sector, operating largely outside the commercial pressures of box office and wages for performers, can afford to innovate and is rewarded by doing so - by the new audiences it attracts regularly and by the funding bodies who support innovation and community cultural development. When one compares the Australia Council (Theatre Board’s) list of triennial grantees from 2006 to 2009 TYP organizations are in evidence as a growing prescence (Theatre Board 2006/7: Recipients , 2007; Theatre Board: Key Organisation Funding from 2009 , 2008). Moreover TYP’s are increasingly regarded by the Australia Council as Key Organizations who are measured on criteria of innovation and initiative. Under the Australia Council’s Make It New! Guidelines for the period 2009 eleven TYP companies were recognized as both ‘Artistic Explorers’ and ‘Artistic Hubs’(Theatre Board: Key Organisation Funding from 2009 , 2008).

2. Australian Theatre for Young People a. Terrain and Traditions

The first research case study in this thesis is situated in the Australian TYP sector of ‘Theatre for and by Young People.’ It has formerly been labeled simply as ‘Youth Theatre’ because it is specific to this sector that youth create and perform themselves.

Founded in the late 1970s, under the influence of British Community Theatre, Australian Youth Theatres such as Shopfront Theatre, PACT, Australian Theatre for Young People and St Martins Youth Theatre, enabled young people from 8-25 years to participate, not only as audience but as co-creators in devised theatre making, or as actors in textual interpretation. For many suburban teenagers these local youth venues offered collaborative experiences in theatrical skills workshops, devising and creating full scale public productions. Again, influenced by the era of community arts engagement in which they were established, many of

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these theatres were named Community Youth Theatres, their ethos being to empower local youth to tell their own stories and create their own forms of work. 2

The other Australian TYP sector, Theatre for Young People began to grow in the same era influenced by another emergent British practice - Theatre In Education or TIE (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005; Mack, T., 2008). Key TIE companies containing adult professionals performing educative content, were formed as a branch of the state theatre companies, for example, Magpie in South Australia and Salamanca in Tasmania (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.3).

Mack asserts that the educational and developmental goals of TIE actually influenced the performance style across all Australian TYP sectors, creating a house style. He describes this as an “issues based theatre that combined agitprop, Brecht’s Lehrst őcke, Documentary Theatre, The Living Newspaper and the British Alternative Theatre movement” (2008, p.88). While this theatrical style no longer dominates cotemporary Australian Youth Theatre/Performance, Milne and Hunter claim that professional TYP artists maintain a continued “strong focus on using young people’s own stories to develop narrative” (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.5).

Despite marked changes in both Youth Theatre and in Theatre for Young People since the 1980s, a continuing philosophy of empowerment still motivates the professional artists who choose to work in this field:

Performance for Young People generally - and genuinely - deals with hope. A hope premised on the belief that children and young people are resilient and positive forces for change when respected as active decision-makers and cultural participants. (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.5)

Artists working in Australian TYP have always sought issues forms and styles that will be relevant to their youth audience. Hunter and Milne thus characterize contemporary Australian TYP as “a broad field of performance practice that engages directly with its audience and with young peoples’ contemporary cultures and experiences” (2005, p.6). Over the last ten years Australian TYP has demonstrated two key transitions to assure this ongoing, direct engagement.

2 My experience as a ‘Shopfront Theatre kid’ in 1980s Sydney was grounded in the philosophy of empowerment within a devising schema called ‘playbuilding’ (Bray, E. 1991) This model, and its embedded ethos, has fundamentally influenced my practice as a director, educator and dramaturg.

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b. The Transition to Contemporary Performance

With the new label ‘Youth Theatre/Performance’ Hunter and Milne (2005) flag the key transformation that Australian Youth Theatres have made since the mid 1990s, from theatrical production houses presenting devised or scripted plays, to interdisciplinary hubs creating works of contemporary performance. Hunter and Milne, as editors of a TYP focused journal issue (Australasian Drama Studies 2005: 47), reveal that contemporary Youth Theatre/Performance is unique, eclectic and innovative, containing “mixed genres” and individualistic choices in “performance modalities” that are “as diverse and changing as the values and concerns of the young people themselves” (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.8).

In 2004 Sandra Gattenhof completed an ‘artistic audit’ of 39 Australian Youth Performance works, informed by multiple interviews with key practitioners. Her doctoral research identifies three new performance categories common to the emergent genre of Australian Youth Theatre/Performance, namely: - Performativity: a new approach to sourcing and engaging with texts, often from everyday, localised sources. - Convergence: the use of converging technologies and a concentration on interdisciplinarity. - Openness of Form: a determination to keep the piece open to the viewer’s resolution. (Gattenhof, S., 2004, p.230)

Gattenhof’s study records numerous youth performance works in which the above features interact with and upon each other. She notes that in almost half of all the performances the technologies of reproduction had been incorporated into the work to underpin these features (Gattenhof, S., 2004, p.7). Gattenhof views these new features and the use of technology as the means by which TYP performance is becoming ‘deterritorialised’ in content and form, through its innovative hybridity “across art forms, across cultures, across live and mediated forms within a performance work, and between divisions of audience and performer” (Gattenhof, S., 2004, p. 2). Performance making by and for Australian young people is projecting beyond the local, beyond the TYP sector into a global platform of practice.

A characteristic feature of Australian Contemporary Youth Theatre/Performance has become the incorporation of young people’s “preferred cultural practices” as onstage communicants (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.5). TYP performances are less likely to display theatrical skills but instead communicate through populist “everyday performativities”

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(Gattenhof, S., 2007, p.6). These performativities have included dirt biking, DJing, rollerblading, or krump dance, each blended in with other performance and theatrical skills. Rosemary Myers, former Artistic Director of Arena Theatre used motocross in one project. In it she discovered a new aesthetic realm via “the richness of the whole terrain of extreme sport [in] both its theatricality and the interesting form and content relationships it offered” (Myers, R., 2005, p.29). Dramaturg Maryanne Hunter describes young people’s performative interaction with these non-arts specific media as a feature of their “grounded aesthetic” (Hunter, M., 1999, p.18). Both of these practitioners here suggest that the incorporation of everyday skills, tools and aesthetics open the creative process to a new dramaturgy: Myers describes this as accessing “a [new] range of dialogues that effectively become our processes and our projects” (2005, p.29).

For TYP professionals technology is one new form of dialogue through which a performance piece can communicate effectively and demonstrate artistic relevance to its youth audience. Hunter lists reading online technology as part of “young peoples everyday cultural ‘performance’: be it skateboarding, cyber culture, dance parties or video” (2001, p.72). But beyond this literal level, in using technical hardware and projection, contemporary TYP engages with technology as a paradigm, as model of structure and form, in order to build a dramaturgy that is relevant to young people. Gattenhof asserts that “to communicate content young people initiate the use of these cultural forms as they are the most prevalent forms of communication in society” (2004, p.132).

Gattenhof’s research evidences that in TYP the use of technology to produce mediated texts has given rise to multi-narrative structures (2004, p. 171) which may provide a greater inclusion of viewpoints and stories and thereby reflect the “multiple voices” of participants (pp.115-116). This suggests that technology is utilized as a new technique to further TYP’s traditional goals of empowerment, expressed previously through the dramaturgical structures of issues-based theatre.

At a more concrete level the use of technology has allowed youth to participate directly in the dramaturgy of process. In Outlookers (2003) Arena Theatre used online portals through which their youth audience made suggestions for character development, soundtrack and plot lines (Mack, T., 2008). The company used technology to source youth audience members who then participated in the dramaturgy “to make sure we are telling it appropriately and that it is interesting” (Myers in Mack, T., 2008, p.87). In this example online technologies definitely, in Gattenhof’s words, ‘deterritorialised’ the project because they allowed youth participation to extend beyond a geographically localized context.

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In Subcon Warrior 2 (2008) by Physical Theatre Company Zen Zen Zo, the youth audience joined professional performers within a technology framed fiction: they traversed the Judith Wright Centre enrolled as four Warrior groups searching for the way out of an online game now corrupted by the programmer. Here technology, as a fictional scaffold, created new relationships in the work that physically involved and engaged the audience A key turning point came when the audience’s knowledge of the terrain of an online game made them realise they were going to be asked to shoot the last warrior in order to allow their own final escape. The tension of playing reality against the fictional world was so extreme that some audience were tempted to call out “Murderer!” as one of their own aimed the gun.

Both examples above illustrate how TYP uses technology literally and metaphorically to extend the frames of their work beyond the performance and towards the audience, allowing them responsibility for an open-ended outcome. Contemporary Australian TYP is a performance field in which clearly demonstrates how the “technologies of reproduction..the relationship between the live and mediated forms, the visceral and the virtual, is embedded in content and how that content is communicated to an audience” (Gattenhof, S., 2004, p.132).

The literature surveyed on Australian TYP suggests that increasingly performances from this sector demonstrate innovative and unique dramaturgical principles that challenge the dramatic paradigm. “To ignore what is taking place in the making of performance for and by young people is to ignore the new possibilities in meaning-making and theatrical form” (Gattenhof, S., 2004, p.9).

Hunter and Milne admit that there is a diversity and a shifting in areas of culturally specific relevance contained in the forms, styles and thematics used across the terrain of Young People’s performance. It is this diversity that makes TYP a difficult sector to aesthetically assess as a whole:

Young people’s performance in Australia operates with its own changing matrix of value systems that intersect with connect to and inform other fields of practice allowing for unique experiences of performance and performance making. (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.9)

c. The Transition to Contemporary Arts Centres

In addition to actual performance making, professional artists in the Australian TYP sector are transforming their working infrastructure in order to “more broadly engage in motifs of

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contemporary social and technological life” (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.8). Thus, thirty years out from their founding, many Australian ‘Youth Theatres’ have now been rebranded as ‘Contemporary Youth Arts Centres’ and are equipped as multi-arts creative hubs. La Boite Youth Theatre in Brisbane, for example is now Backbone Youth Arts, while Shopfront Theatre for Young People in Sydney is “a Contemporary Arts Centre for under 25s’(Shopfront: Create Yourself! , 2008)

The philosophical emphasis in these venues is still one of access and initiation by youth and they still offer the traditional “professionally facilitated youth theatre performance” (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.7). However now these venues also provide multimedia tools for artmaking. In doing so they demonstrate to young people that interdisciplinarity characterizes the contemporary performance making process.

In fact Contemporary Youth Arts Centres are less concerned with training and more with access; both Gattenhof (2004) and Hunter (1999) identify that youth theatres have lost their educational and developmental focus. Youth are attracted, not so much to learn the fundamentals of traditional theatre making, but because these venues endow them as emerging artists and offer them a range of cultural technologies. Hunter (1999) labels this conceptual shift, begun in the 1990s, as a journey in philosophy from “developmentalism to difference” (Hunter, M., 1999, Abstract). Other artists such as Mack (2008) account for this shift as an inevitable by product of the development of comprehensive school Drama curricula in the 1990s; since then young people have been able to gain a school based grounding in the theatrical conventions

From the perspective of the professional artists their role has changed from one of explicitly teaching theatre skills to a methodology that allows them to harness the ‘everyday performativities’ and communication channels the youth bring with them. In contemporary TYP new texts, new languages for and of performance, are being sought out from each participant group. Rosemary Myers describes this imperative from the practitioner’s viewpoint:

How can we engage in the forms of cultural expression that young people do participate in and allow them to inform the development of performance languages? (Myers, R., 2005, p.29)

Professional artists employed to facilitate workshops in Youth Theatre/Performance are these days emerging from a range of broad artistic fields. They are personalities who are able to “demonstrate an acknowledgement of the complex cultural and social practices which young

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people participate in and manipulate” (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.8). These practitioners bring with them training in structural and aesthetic skills that may lie outside the theatrical and dramatic tradition. They bring a new experience of dramaturgy and of creative process which is shaping the genre of Youth Theatre/Performance.

At the same time Mack claims that Australian TYP is a site of innovation that is attracting “top theatre artists” who are “strongly linked to contemporary performance art and avant- garde theatre” (2008, p.90). In contrast to being marginalized the sector is now being acknowledged by the adult theatre sector, as is the fact that its innovative performances are appealing to audiences of all ages. Arena Theatre (a Theatre for Young People) for example has been included as part of the Adelaide and Melbourne Festivals while PACT Theatre (a Sydney Youth theatre) performed as part of the 2008 Brisbane Festival: Under the Radar.

In the twenty first century professionals working in Australian TYP come from a variety of non theatre specific backgrounds and facilitate performances with young people that are characterized by new performativities, interdisciplinarity, an engagement with technology and with technology as form. These directors, writers and dramaturgs work in TYP theatres that have been re-branded as Contemporary Youth Arts Centres where their practice moves away from the marginalizing labels of Community Arts and Youth Theatre. Their work is increasingly acknowledged as innovative by funding bodies and the adult theatre sector and it draws in an intergenerational pool of audience members.

3. German Kinder - und Jugendtheater

a. Terrain and Traditions

The status of Theatre for Young People in Germany is vastly different to that in Australia; TYP in Germany is a mainstream artform and a commercial industry. It is based on professional companies of adults in permanent ensembles who perform a season of scripted plays in a repertory season, thus it is a model of ‘Theatre for Young People.’

German TYP is dominated by the repertoire of Kinder - und Jugendtheaters (KJT) based within municipal, government funded theatres of each city 3. Outside these subsidized theatres, more than fifty independent KJT companies operate in smaller towns and regional centres. These companies also employ professional adult artists and they have gained a reputation for

3 Municipal KJT are funded up to 95% by their state (as Staatstheaters) and/or their city (as Stadttheater) and with much smaller federal support (5%) through the Federal Ministry for Families, Senior Citizens, Women and Young People (KJTZ 2008a)

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works of challenging social critique. However these companies operate largely on a commercial basis and respond to locally funded initiatives. Sixty per cent of their performances are in hired venues and their ability to innovate fluctuates with economic upturns and downturns (Kirschner, J., 2005, p.2).

Participation by young people in theatre making in a Theatre by and for Young People does occur in Germany. In summer it is common for municipal KJT theatres to host a ‘Youth Week’ in which young people participate in performance workshops. In a more ongoing way youth both create and perform theatre in Youth Clubs. These are seldom found within theatres but more so in community venues. The target group at Youth Clubs is 14-25 year olds and in 2005 it was estimated that these clubs numbered over seventy (DanDroste, G., 2005, p.3).

Despite these numbers distinctions between the TYP sectors in Germany are maintained because of the Youth Clubs’ amateur status and their developmental goals:

Between professional Children’s and Youth Theatre on the one hand, and amateur and school theatre on the other, there are almost no conceptual points of contact, even though many professional children’s and youth theatres organize school weeks and Youth Clubs do exist. (Taube, G., 2005, p.2)

Taube admits that aesthetic discussions in KJT have traditionally equated “professional” personnel as a prerequisite in creating any “artistically valuable” product (Taube, G., 2008, p.5). It is significant that the Federal Association of Theatre Pedagogues continue to oversee the developmental aspects of these Youth Clubs (Israel, A., 2005). Yet it is important to assert that Youth Clubs continue to provide an experimental training ground for emerging artists.

However the professional adult ensemble with subscriber base remains the national model for KJT practice, a model dominated by municipal subsidized theatres. The second case study in this research project investigates contemporary works developed in this particular context – in municipal KJT.4

Henning Fangauf believes that there are two key features that underpin the traditions of KJT theatre in Germany and make it a unique model in TYP. These are its reliance on a repertoire/canon of published playscripts and its basis in professional ensembles with each theatre having actors permanently “at its disposal” (Fangauf, H., 2005, pp.1-2). These facets

4 This model of Theatre for Young People is also the focus of the work of the KJTZ, The Kinder- und Jugendtheaterzentrum in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (The Children’s and Young People’s Theatre Centre in the Federal Republic of Germany) and the festivals, competitions, conferences, readings and symposia they schedule each year (refer to Glossary of Terms).

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have emerged from the historical stages over which German Theatre for Young People developed.

While the municipal theatre companies have operated for many centuries, their KJT departments were mainly founded (in West Germany) during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Fangauf, H. and Schumacher, K., 2008). In the era Pre World War Two (WW2) children’s theatre in Germany was limited to a small list of Christmas themed shows. In Postwar West Germany a larger, yet still traditional and conservative, repertoire of fairy tale adaptations and classics were regularly staged. It was only in the late 1960s that a numerous independent theatres were founded, generating a new demand for plays specifically written for children and youth. In the 1970s KJT style was guided by the emancipatory ethos of West Berlin’s Grips Theater who believed that “theatre should make social reality transparent and activate the audience’s imagination” (Taube, G., 2005, p.1).

In contrast in the East German state (GDR) discrete Theatres for Young People had already been founded post WW2 as a part of state cultural education. Playwrights worked under commission to a number of KJT theatres in the major cities and they built up a repertory of classical and contemporary material guided by Soviet literature and government social policy. Thus, despite all its other failings, the GDR regime gave TYP front row status alongside adult theatre and mainstage arts. As a result by 1989 the GDR had generated a number of significant playwrights, contributed over 200 plays to the repertoire and supported multiple KJT companies (Fangauf, H., 2005, p.2).

The status of the playwright as repertory driver in KJT emerges from this history. Fangauf (2005, p.2) positions the playwright’s status in the GDR clearly - whether writing for children or adults playwrights were recognized as creators of a national literature. Over the 1980s the collaborative model of having playwrights in-house declined in both German nations and writers began to take an autonomous role separated from the theatre companies (Fangauf, H., 2005, p.2). These days, “In Germany dramatists still remain solo players who find their workplace more at their own desks than in the theatres” (Fangauf, H., 2005, p.3). Despite some commissions and script workshops this feature of the KJT field is still fundamental: the repertory system in Germany is fuelled by the publishing and circulation of playscripts. German KJT playwrights are now represented by over twenty different Verlag, these are their publishers who in Germany also act as writer’s agents (Fangauf, H., 2005, p.3).

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The TYP movement in Germany thus developed on a repertory ‘page to stage’ model, emerging with a strong literary ethos rather than with the Community Arts ethos that propelled the growth of British and Australian TYP/TIE over the same period:

Since the foundation of the Children’s and Young People’s Theatre Centre, promoting playwrights has been at the heart of its work. This involvement in supporting authors and their work is based on the fact that the artistic quality in children’s and young people’s theatre corresponds closely to the quality of its dramatic literature. (KJTZ, 2008a)

However in the twenty first century, and at a point twenty years after German reunification, the KJT sector is demonstrating a more diverse approach to theatrical process and styles. Contemporary practice challenges the traditional perception of German KJT as based on “Grimm and Grips” - meaning they are either fairytales in adaptation or gritty, 1970s socio- political works. Through recent literature, and in internationally showcased performances, German KJT practitioners are presenting “a more differentiated picture of a successful, strong and unmistakable theatre form” (Taube, G., 2005, p.1).

While KJT practitioners uphold the ethos “to achieve a profile as a socially relevant theatre and as a socially recognized art” (Taube 2008, p.5) at the same time they are demonstrating broader international influences and a new generation approach to theatre making. Influential is the fact that Germany and its young people are now part of a pan European cultural network; KJT practice is now opened to European playtexts and artistic collaborations.

Jurgen Kirschner (2005) notes that the TYP terrain across Germany is emerging as one of diversity. The contextual review of literature and KJT productions undertaken during this doctoral research has identified five areas in which this diversity is increasingly manifested. b. An Opening of the Repertory

A growing cross fertilization of scripts from other countries are diversifying the styles and genres seen in German KJT (Schönfelder, C. and Peters, N., 2008, pp.9-10). Dramaturgs Christian Schönfelder and Nina Peters describe works performed in translation, originating from Sweden and the Netherlands, as bringing in a more “poetic/lyrical” approach to issues.

In contrast they characterise the typical German KJT play as a strongly layered, social realist narrative offering a complex social commentary (2008, p.9). Most of the plays are character based; Schönfelder and Peters assert that in KJT it is through the microcosm of the particular characters that issues of broader society and social change/challenge are highlighted. These

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features evidence KJT’s emancipatory 1970s traditions and its basis in the unfolding of a dramatic narrative or ‘Erzahlungsform.’

In a key example of the ‘poetic/lyrical’ approach Schönfelder and Peters cite King A (a contemporary retelling of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere) written by Inez Derksen and presented at the 2007 Augenblick Mal Festival by Junges Ensemble, Stuttgart. They claim this piece demonstrates key traits of Dutch “narrative theatre” in which the play is presented “straight out to the audience” with a “blurring of the transitions between the actors and their characters” (Schönfelder, C. and Peters, N., 2008, p.9).

However, while this description certainly describes the first third of this piece this play increasingly reverts to an adapted narration of the Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot love triangle. Perhaps this work is a good example of the stylistic tensions being worked through by contemporary KJT writers and companies as they articulate across the European canon rather than within a national style?

At the same festival, another work in translation from the Dutch (“Wir Alle Fuer Immer Zusammen” by Guus Kuijer) illustrated powerfully how a Europe wide repertoire has enriched the German KJT landscape. This work uses poetry and direct address to project the perceptions of a 12 year old girl who must negotiate blended families, absent fathers, intercultural difference and rural/urban transition. These are themes that are socially relevant for pre-teens across Europe and even beyond. Kuijer’s work has been awarded in both the Netherlands and Germany. It demonstrates how a clearly ‘deterritorialised’ TYP thematic and direct performance style asserts Germany’s new cultural ethos as an EU state:

We face the cultural policy challenges of globalization and develop innovative concepts for a world made more human through mutual understanding, where cultural diversity is seen as an asset (Goethe-Institut, Australien 2008).

c. The Development of ‘Junges Theater’ and Collaborative Process

A generation of new artists has emerged from KJT in the last decade to engage with this ethos. Their approach to play production, playwriting and acting styles has created a discernable new performance style within the municipal KJT model. This new style is encapsulated by the term Junges Theater (Young Theatre).

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Klaus Schumacher (director, artistic director and playwright) sees this new term embodying the social ‘zeitgeist’ (the spirit of the times) but more significantly a new approach to the theatre making process by today’s generation of TYP practitioners:

To my mind the concept of a Junges Theater contains a whole package of different connotations with a variety of meanings: a young environment, young characters, a young audience, young artists, an ambitious search for new forms, an appetite for innovation and high measure of vitality. (Fangauf, H. and Schumacher, K., 2008, p.24)

Schumacher, as founding director of the Junges Schauspielhaus Hamburg, has already produced edgy works that are driven by such impulses. Sagt Lila showcased at Augenblick Mal in 2007 demonstrates this ‘junges’ style through its striking, sometimes extreme vocal dynamics, heightened emotionality, rapid pacing, direct address and visceral embodiment. In addition the work incorporated the ‘everyday performativity’ of BMX bike riding.

Projecting this style and its social dynamic, a number of municipal KJT companies have rebranded themselves as ‘Junges Theaters,’ for example the Junges Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Junges Ensemble Stuttgart and Junges Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf. Here, in direct contrast to TYP in Australia who have shied away from the term ‘youth’ as a marginalizing label, German KJT are embracing the word. In Germany’s national chronology the words ‘young’ and ‘youth’ have nothing but a positive connotation. Director of the National Centre for KJT, Gerd Taube points out that “The word ‘young’ contains associations with radicalness, rebellion, nonconformity and dynamism” (2008, p.5).

Taube sees Junges Theater as a continuation of the emancipatory tenets of 1970s KJT with its emphasis on “a person’s social and individual responsibility for society, and human coexistence” (Taube, G., 2008, p.5). Taube claims that the directors of Junges Theater continue, like their predecessors, to see their work as an “act of resistance” through projecting protagonists who are alternate to social conventions and “texts which portray the world on many different levels, rather than in simplified terms” (Taube, G., 2005, p.2). But he admits that Junges Theater now pursues these issues in a new way via contemporary “narrative and expressive forms” (including technology) that reflect today’s youth culture and the media.

Die Odyssee by Ad de Bont, (Junges Schauspielhaus, Hamburg) demonstrates these principles and includes a multi-linear narrative and a collaborative production process that characterise Junges Theater. This is a new version of the Odyssey that combines the traditional epic in hexameter, with time shifts to two contemporary stories set in Morocco and Argentina. On

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Die Odyssee director Schumacher and playwright de Bont used a more open script development process, creating an innovative form:

Each story is about families struggling against fate, the odds, and persecution and the stories were developed from group work on the company member’s own family stories. The performance lasts for three hours and traverses the theatre building, firstly performed in the Malersaal, then in the upper foyer, then in the studio upstairs. (Schumacher, K., 2007)

Schumacher’s work with de Bont also manifests his belief that Junges Theater has emerged as a direct response to an identifiable new wave of ‘Junge Dramatik’ (Young Dramatists) whose thematics and structures encapsulate the intergenerational spirit of the times. He names playwrights such as Kristo Šagor and Laura de Weck, as “the young generation of authors who produce plays in a contemporary fashion that attract both young people and adults alike” (Fangauf, H. and Schumacher, K., 2008, p.25).

Schumacher’s artistic policy at the Junges Schauspielhaus has been to foster rehearsal room collaborative processes by bringing such ‘junges’ practitioners together (Schumacher, K., 2007). He has employed ‘writers as directors’ Kristo Sagor and ‘writers as actors’ Laura de Weck and Konradin Kunze. This has created an innovative brand of KJT ensemble in which the strictly delineated roles of a page to stage production are blurred. Schumacher’s process is open to allow these multitalented artists to cross fertilize each other.

Junges Theater demonstrates that innovation in TYP is not just about working with Generation Y: Schumacher is in his forties and some of the artists are in their thirties. Moreover this director has been using such workshopping processes for some years. In 2003 he led character based improvisations at MOKS Theater Bremen to assist playwright Šagor’s development of FSK-16 . Schumacher’s methodology exemplifies a second wave of KJT practitioners. These professional artists emerged in the 1990s and significantly diversified the artistic practices in municipal KJT.5 Dramaturgs Schönfelder and Peters testify to this development and to new generative processes:

Peters: There is a growing trend for companies to develop their own plays… Schönfelder: We approach a theme together and dig it out in research work, discussions and improvisations, each from his or her own particular point of view … quite often such collective authorship lead to plays which can be taken over independently by other companies, thereby finding a place in the repertoire of plays

5 Klaus Schumacher’s innovative work as a KJT director was recognised in 2009 by the adult theatre branch of the German industry when he was appointed to lead the young director’s workshop at the national German theatre festival- the Berlin Theatertreffen. This fact supports Tony Mack’s observation that innovative practitioners and practices in TYP are now being acknowledged by the mainstage.

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for Children’s and Young Peoples Theatre. (Schönfelder, C. and Peters, N., 2008, p.11)

From an Australian TYP viewpoint this outline of the devising process is nothing new - but here, in the KJT ‘page to stage’ tradition it counts as a marked innovation.

d. An Opening of the Ensemble

In addition to a new interplay between artists in KJT there appears to be more opportunity for amateurs (youth participants) and professional actors to work together. Taube (2008), Israel (2005) and Kirschner (2005) reveal a softening in the traditional delineations in KJT in the last decade:

The strongly protected boundary line separating the young from professional performers is diminishing. At present, the trend of young people performing side by side with professionals or becoming actors themselves in professional theatre groups is growing. (Israel, A., 2005, p.1)

There have been a number of productions, including those derived from Europe-wide collaboration, in which young amateur performers are on stage with professionals. In addition notable adult companies are using amateurs or are blurring the lines between professionals and amateurs onstage (Taube, G., 2005). The most well known, German based, example of such a group being Rimini Protokoll with Das Kapital and Bombay Calling (Mustroph, T., 2008).

Acknowledging the work of the local Youth Clubs in nurturing emerging artists, a handful of professional KJT have established more ongoing theatre schools. These include Theaterschule am MOKS Theater Bremen and Junges Nationaltheater, Mannheim (Taube, G., 2005) However this inclusivity also requires a recognition of the Youth Clubs developmental goals and process based ethos.

While productions that involve amateurs will not necessarily have an effect on the style of professional KJT, the use of young people with adult actors onstage will most definitely change its aesthetics. A key feature of KJT is its aesthetic of ‘magic realism,’ created by the fact that adults (of up to 45 years) are manifestly presenting characters as young as 5 years old. The audience viewing a KJT play, no matter how gritty and realistic, or how youthful the cast look, must suspend disbelief and agree to this fiction on these terms. Sinje Kuhn describes this as the “double asymmetry” of KJT; for her, not only are the performers in control of the narrative and therefore of higher authority than the spectators, in KJT “this

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inequality is also strengthened by the generational gap between the stage and audience” (Kuhn, S., 2008, p.28). e. The Development of Interdisciplinarity

As in Australian TYP, KJT professionals are using interdisciplinary collaboration to engage young audiences and to reinvigorate the classics in their repertoire. In 2005 judging the Augenblick Mal! Festival entries, Geesche Wartemann noted:

A new star on the horizon of German Children’s theatre are perhaps the productions which follow an interdisciplinary extension and either seek a connection with the visual arts or with dance. (Marquart, A., 2005)

Directors Markus Kosuch and Andrea Gronemeyer create interdisciplinary Music Theatre. However rather than simply providing a type of musical or opera for young people, both directors make it clear that Music Theatre is about a new approach to form and narrative, in which:

… stories and situations are recounted, not by means of the spoken word, but via music, songs, images and scenic processes. Music Theatre is perceived by young people through all channels and in their own way … the spectators themselves decide what level of the story they want to follow (music, text, scene, set etc) and let themselves be affected by. (Kosuch, M. and Gronemeyer, A., 2008, p.12)

Both practitioners have founded Junge Oper (young opera companies) but reject the implication that a youth opera should engage in handing down the classical repertoire to tomorrow’s adult subscriber. These practitioners see children and youth as today’s audience and see their job as to create what is applicable to them now. Gronemeyer is forthright in this regard - upgrade the libretto she argues, and tell children stories that are “seriously concerned with their questions about life and the world, and which derive from their own experience of the world” (Kosuch, M. and Gronemeyer, A., 2008, p.13). To achieve this, in form as well as content, her Music Theatre takes a multi-sensory approach to text, rather than adopting a single linear narrative:

Do we have to maintain the classical form of opera at all, or shouldn’t our work be more concerned with extending the genre in a productive crossover between speech, dance, materials and instruments? (Kosuch, M. and Gronemeyer, A., 2008, p.14)

Gronemeyer’s 2007 production of Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood), reversioned by George Aperghis and co-directed by Matthias Rebstock, clearly demonstrates such new

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dramaturgical impulses. This piece requires two clarinets (including a bass), soprano and baritone saxophones, a violin and two pianos. The performers are six young music students from the University of the Arts in Berlin who ‘speak’ through a variety of instruments and repeat fragments of dialogue in five different languages: Bulgarian, Spanish, German, English and Hebrew.

Every section of the well known story is repeated in different ways, using instruments as voices, using movement, using props and bodies or by using lyrics shared across the performers. Instruments indicate the different voices of the characters. A key innovation in KJT Music Theatre is in giving the ‘music as text’ a new status:

If we want to free theatre music from the status of an emotional lubricant to that of a dramatic protagonist we should concentrate our efforts on the unusual: on surprises that encourage the audience to listen more closely and that enlarge the spectrum of potentials in music and sound. (Kosuch, M. and Gronemeyer, A., 2008, p.14)

At a post show discussion teenage audience members revealed that, despite their lack of enthusiasm about being taken to see Little Red Riding Hood, they found piece surprising, interesting and entertaining. They reported that it did not matter that sections of the narrative were so often repeated because it was always done in different ways (Plummer, K., 2007).

The enthusiastic responses of this young German audience reminded me of the obvious enjoyment I had witnessed in the Higher School Certificate English class four years previously. Both groups had demonstrated an engagement in works where roles and identities were shifted across the performers and where a looping, repetitive and unresolved narrative was all that was offered.

A final point to note about interdisciplinary work in the context of Germany’s municipal theatres; KJT practitioners such as Gronemeyer and Kosuch are initiating opportunities for ensemble performers to collaborate outside their traditionally separated departments in the municipal company. This has provided a challenge to infrastructure and organization, sometimes resulting in the employment of freelance and non ensemble members. Freelancers are also entering municipal companies on a project basis especially if they can demonstrate unique skill sets, for example in both movement and operatic singing. Thus, while interdisciplinarity can lead to valuable artistic innovation in KJT, it also is beginning to diversify the permanent ensemble model on which a KJT repertory company relies.

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f. Development of Multimedia Innovation

It should not be surprising to learn that securely funded German TYP companies regularly access innovative stage and multimedia technology to present their repertoire. Andrea Gronemeyer, (Artistic Director of Schnawwl Theater and Junges Oper Mannheim) views the use of technology as a pragmatic tool:

Technology is merely an enlargement of the possibilities of our artistic language. Some people think that we have to do this because this is the language that young people understand but the fact is that it is in our art - it is now just a part of our toolkit and its part of our theatrical tradition to use everything we can. (Gronemeyer, A., 2005)

At Schnawwl Theater, technological innovation has now become part of the theatre tradition. As one of Germany’s most highly acclaimed KJT theatres, Schnawwl regularly accesses the technology of the new media department in its parent company, the National Theater Mannheim. This department is responsible for the integration of digital, visual, lighting and sound technology onstage:

My technicians are artists; they use 4 up to 7 soundtracks mixed live with the action (not pre-recorded) so that the sound can be varied with the actors. These new possibilities are created because we have the new technical tools. We have computer animated images. We have new live tools also like highly specialised theatre lights so that in every department we are accessing new tools. (Gronemeyer, A., 2005)

In the last five years, via an increasing collaboration with the new media department, Schnawwl has trialed digital projection as feature, not only of the stage design but as part of the character and symbolic unfolding of the play (Gronemeyer, A., 2005). This is demonstrated clearly in Schnawwl’s 2005 production of Hasse Karlson 6 a theatrical adaptation from a Swedish novel by Henning Mankel.

In Hasse Karlsson Schnawwl use a large digital screen on which 3D images, created using the MAYA program, are projected. However in this production technology is clearly scoped. The artistic team made very conscious decisions about balancing the projected images with the live elements so that the images would only change in the scene breaks, not while actors were performing onstage (Reisner, M., 2005a). In fact, no images of characters appear on the screen at all. The human embodiment of the journey remains live and technical elements are vital in crystallizing the narrative viewpoint of the protagonist. The images that appear on the MAYA screen are projections in the memory of Hasse, and rather than providing cinematic

6 Der Gewissenlose Moerder Hasse Karlsson enthüllt die entsetzliche Wahrheit, wie die Frau über der Eisenbahnbrücke zu Tode gekommen ist. (The unscrupulous murder: Hasse Karlsson reveals the dreadful truth, about how the woman was brought to her death up on the railway bridge.)

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mise en scene, they contain symbolic, character evocations. Gronemeyer see technology as a tool to facilitate a unique language in each work:

Yes we do everything - the play makes the decision. What means fit the story? So technology is merely an enlargement of the possibilities of our artistic language. (Gronemeyer, A., 2005)

Schnawwl’s use of technology in its repertoire demonstrates the very rigorous approach that KJT practitioners take to create work responsive to a specific audience and age group. It also illustrates how their ongoing access to high end technological tools allows them to develop a unique dramaturgy in which technology facilitates the integrity of the work.

4. Conclusion

Trends in TYP in Australia and in Germany demonstrate that contemporary Theatre for Young People is a sector of performance where innovative approaches in process and in performance are driven by a forward looking and articulate cohort of practitioners. This group form a ‘second wave’ or Next Generation of specialist artists in this field. They have succeeding the Baby Boomers who founded the TYP movement in both countries in the 1970s to 1980s. In contrast to this foundation generation who focused on developmental, educative and emancipatory goals, the ethos of contemporary TYP practitioners is to create engaging and high quality art.

The 2006/7 ASSITEJ yearbook is titled ‘Next Generation’(Schneider, W. and Mack, T., 2008) and documents worldwide changes in infrastructure and practice in response to this marked generational change. A number of World ASSITEJ and national initiatives have occurred in the last few years to address the issue of generation shift and to seek an intergenerational dialogue “in truth we need all our generations to be represented to have healthy theatrical environment” (Schneider, W. and Mack, T., 2008: Preface, p. 13). The TYP sector also acknowledges that the idea of ‘Next Generation’ is more than just about the age of the practitioner, but encompasses important, socially driven changes that affect all facets of their practice and all ages of practitioner. “What are the impulses for the process of producing, for the development of stories, for the aesthetic style of the theatre art?” asks the current World ASSITEJ President (Schneider, W., 2008, p.19).

Thus while traditions of practice and infrastructure still vary from country to country, current literature reveals a number of converging trends in TYP common to German KJT and Australian TYP.

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What strongly unites TYP practitioners in both Australia and Germany is their commitment to design performances that ‘speak to’ their audience and increasingly ‘speak with’ their audience, in languages and in communicative forms with which they are they are familiar. This leads to unique works of interdisciplinarity, created either by incorporating ‘everyday texts’ used by young people (such as motocross bikes) or by combining artistic forms in new and refreshing ways (eg. Junge Oper ). Practitioners are developing new processes to integrate these texts, by understanding how each source ‘speaks’ performatively, how the ‘everyday’ can be incorporated as an artistic medium.

Interdisciplinarity in TYP performance is now pursued by professional artists and youth participants who bring a wide range of performance and non-performance skills sets. As a result the label ‘Youth Theatre’ is no longer accurate to describe the output from Australian TYP companies because their venues are now hubs for a range of artistic processes including music and sound design, digital media and visual arts. Thus some Australian ‘Youth Theatres’ and ‘Theatres for Young People’ have rebranded themselves as ‘Contemporary Arts Centres.’

In Germany, the strict theatrical page to stage model is under challenge as a number of municipal ensembles encourage a more collective, interdisciplinary approach where multiskilled performers cross-fertilize their ideas. A new brand of performance, called Junges Theater often results. This encapsulates the fast paced, often raw dynamics and impulses of a renewed ‘young’ Europe. So, unlike Australia, where the term ‘Youth Theatre’ can marginalize the work, in twenty first century Germany ‘Junges Theater’ denotes the innovative, radical, and exhilarating.

Such innovations in the field of German KJT challenge the two traditional platforms of this field, namely the playscript based repertory and the permanently contracted ensemble of discipline specific performers. In 2005 Jürgen Kirschner argued that the innovative work of independent companies and the emergent artists in the Youth Clubs deserved more financial and policy recognition in a ‘diverse’ KJT landscape. By 2008 however innovation is now even obvious within the most traditional, municipal companies:

Autonomous areas have flourished in [this] protected framework, involving independent ensembles that have made great steps forward in artistic matters and developed their own individual repertoire. (Kosuch, M. and Gronemeyer, A., 2008, p.15)

New styles, processes and repertoire also challenge the knowledge base and the practical skills of the municipal KJT dramaturg. Acknowledging this Gerd Taube, Director of the National KJT Centre (KJTZ) sent a ‘wake up’ message to KJT company dramaturgs in 2008,

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claiming they need to “get a grip on the world, even beyond their personal horizons.” He stressed that: “It is one thing to be acquainted with the current plays and quite another to be acquainted with the world of children and young people” (Taube, G., 2008, p.5).

Calls for artistic relevance have always been part of the TYP tradition. In response these days TYP performances in both Australia and Germany are increasingly presented using multi- mediated technologies; the live elements in combination with the virtual. However the overriding rationale for doing so differs between the two countries: in Australia audio-visual, digital technologies are often used because they are perceived as part of the language and literacy of today’s youth. Practitioners (and funding bodies) see technology as a youth ‘currency’, as stimulating audience appeal and engagement. Whereas in Germany, subsidized municipal KJT has (we might say) the luxury to claim that high level, visual, sound and lighting technology are now simply their ‘tools of trade.’ In many cases these are tools the company has at its disposal. In both countries the use of technology onstage evidences an acceptance that it is a key communicant in the twenty first century; that audiences can ‘read’ it, and can process convergent virtual, screen-based and live texts in a performance.

In the 2005 Australasian Drama Studies Association journal, dedicated to TYP, the editors acknowledge the role that the TYP sector now plays in challenging not only social but also cultural and performance traditions. In no sense should this sector be regarded as secondary, but rather a barometer of the times and fundamental for studies of performance innovation:

The best of our youth theatres are regularly making productions which not only present issues of interest to young people today: they also problematise them in ways that challenge preconceptions about youth and the kind of theatre young people are able to make. (Hunter, M. A. and Milne, G., 2005, p.8)

New principles are animating the creative practice of professional artists, their youth participants and the audiences they seek to engage. Overall Gattenhof asserts: “the sector is undergoing a re-evaluation of what constitutes text and how meaning is ascribed to a text” (2007, p.6). The next section of the Literature Review demonstrates that TYP’s inquiry into the text is an area of shared concern with contemporary practitioners working in the sectors of (adult) theatre, in performance and in dramaturgy.

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B. Dramaturgy

1. What is Dramaturgy?

This section of the Literature Review problematises the word ‘dramaturgy’ in the context of contemporary performance making. By examining the roots of the word itself, and the key platforms of poetics and aesthetics through which the dramaturgy is channeled, the relevance of a drama -turgy in contemporary, non-dramatic, non-playscript based performance is demonstrated. Today’s dramaturg, particularly one in TYP, must also develop a new definition of ‘text’ because the written script may be non existent or be only one text amongst many. As the production examples in the first section of this chapter have illustrated contemporary dramaturgy involves practitioners building meaning across multiple texts and allowing everyday sources from outside the theatrical domain to speak in unique ways.

My discussion of ‘dramaturgy’ utilizes the term in a range of senses. Dramaturgy describes not only the process of crafting a work, in building effective meaning making units, but also the dramaturgy in the performance, how the piece ‘drives’ via its unique dynamics, its effective and affective patterning. The dramaturg is the person whose focus remains unwaveringly on these patterns, whether they are emerging from the playwright’s embedded structures in the written script, from the director’s staging choices or through the improvisational methods of a devising team.

The literature focuses on theorists who articulate the contemporary production dramaturg’s process and practitioners who attempt to describe how the dramaturgy latent within process emerges from the rehearsal room floor. As a practice-based researcher I sought in the literature an effective approach to my analysis of process (on Case Study One) and in my role as performance analyst (on Case Study Two). In each case how does a new, more open dramaturgy emerge ‘as a matter of course’ (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.283) from the devising methodology, scriptwriting and directorial choices of two writer/directors?

a. What of the drama -turgy?

To explain the phenomena of ‘dramaturgy’ theorists often interrogate the etymology of the term itself. Bart Cardullo (1995, p.3) breaks the term into the Ancient Greek of “action/ doing” ( drame ) and the process of “working upon” ( urgy ). Thus the word dramaturgy itself means ‘working upon the actions’. This embeds a practical process, a crafting that requires some force, skill and effort. In understanding this it seems commonsense that a ‘playwright’

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is not a playwrite, because s/he is a craftsperson engaged in a ‘wroughting’ process, like a shipwright or wheelwright.

Luckhurst’s historical survey Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (2006) details classical and modern theorists who concur with this practical image of dramaturgy (pp.5-8). A number delineate dramaturgy specifically as the structuring of formal elements, the structural composition of action into a cohesive work. The term ‘dramaturg’ has in some eras been synonymous with the term ‘dramatist.’ For the dramaturg is also a wrighter, in the sense that s/he has responsibilities for building the actions, creating the text for performance.

Director Eugenio Barba (2000) expands on the practical sense of ‘urgy’ as a ‘working upon.’ In his experience the ‘wroughting’ of a performance is a visceral attempt to balance, align and realign elemental forces (chaos and order, the organic and inorganic) in a process demanding both “meticulousness and storm.” Barba describes his dramaturgical process almost as hard labour, involving “extracting the difficult from the difficult “with “moments of suffering, illumination, disorientation and reorientation” (2000, pp.57-60).

Again through etymology, Barba provides an expansive concept of ‘the text’ on which the dramaturg’s efforts are focused:

The word text, before referring to a written or spoken, printed or manuscript text, meant a ‘weaving together. In this sense there is no performance without ‘text’. That which concerns the text (the weave) of the performance can be defined as dramaturgy- that is drama-ergon work, ‘the work of the actions’ in the performance. The way in which the actions work is the plot. (1985, p.75)

The ‘text as weave’ creates a three dimensional image that allows for today’s visual, sonic, kinesthetic and multimediated texts. Barba’s point is that the dramaturgy may work through plotted ‘actions’ but they need not be written down, linear or dialogic. Instead they may be ‘woven’ on multiple planes:

Actions are all the relationships, all the interactions … Actions are what work directly on the audience’s attention, on their understanding, their emotiveness, their synaesthesia. (Barba, E., 1985, p.75)

In fact Barba concieves ‘actions’ as whole performative episodes; all kinds of ‘evolving’ elements and interactions, including the musical score, the props, the rhythmics, create the “actions at work” (1985, p.75). In a performance the text may consist of actions of dramaturgy that are not primarily based what the actors do and say. Moreover while contemporary dramaturgy certainly involves the crafting of text this should never be presumed as a written manuscript.

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By thinking of these derivations we can remind ourselves that ‘drama’ simply means ‘action.’ The basis of a good performance is in building generative actions, reactions and interactions regardless of strictures in form, genre and style. Barba has here offered a serviceable definition for ‘text’, ‘action’ and ‘dramaturgy’ in the diverse terrain of contemporary performance.

The above theorists see the dramaturg, whether on a scripted work or a devised performance, as engaged in ‘working upon’ the text, weaving its actions and structure; “the dramaturg is almost always concerned with structures, either of the material contained in the artwork itself or in the setting up of the processes that allow the work to grow,” notes Australian practitioner Melanie Beddie (2005, p.4).

Beddie’s quote implies that dramaturgy involves more than just an attention to composition - that it also specifies an articulation of process. UK theorists Turner and Behrndt agree: “The word ‘dramaturging’ ‘shaping the dramaturgy’ or ‘dramaturgical work’ may all imply an engagement with the actual practical process of structuring the work, combined with the reflective analysis that accompanies such a process” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.3).

It is through the linkage of composition and articulation that dramaturgy reveals itself as a praxis : the dramaturgy emerges in the art work from both practical crafting and reflection in action. This validates the relational and interpersonal skills of the dramaturg as a vital part of a dramaturgy built through process.

b. Where are the Drama-turg -ies?

So is dramaturgy the selection, construction and framing by one or more persons? Or is it the action - in the sense of the ‘work of the drama’…? In other words is dramaturgy something people do or is it the result of what they do? (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.3)

As early as Aristotle two dramaturgical fields were identified, one in “the written text” and another in “the way they have been represented” (Barba, E., 1985, p.75). However it is important to acknowledge and examine a number of dramaturgical fields in order to identify where new dramaturgical principles may arise.

Dramaturgy In Process

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Luckhurst expands on Aristotle’s two fields and where they operate in a ‘page to stage’ production process. For her the first type of dramaturgy is found in the “internal structures of the play text” and the “arrangement of formal elements by the playwright ” such as plot, narrative, character, time and action. The second, she feels is more about the “interpretation of the text” by those in a director role. The dramaturgy here refers to “external elements related to staging” including the artistic concept and politics but in addition “the calculated manipulation of audience response” (2006, pp.10-11). In this model we see the dramaturgy and the dramaturg moving in a linear trajectory, from a relational focus on the writer to one with the director. As a result, in the ‘page to stage’ process, the dramaturg is often labeled as a ‘script doctor .’

In contrast Turner and Behrndt describe the dramaturgical trajectory in a devised process as a hermeneutic progression in which “form and content may be shaped and generated simultaneously, the deviser searches for structural parameters while at the same time creating new material” (2008, p.170). The relationship between the director and the dramaturg here is crucial and symbiotic. As the director tries to “articulate the shape of the thing being sought, the dramaturg’s concern for how and why ideas might connect into a structure could prove crucial to the devising process” (2008, p.171). Barba points out that the ‘weave of texts’ that emerges in the performance text will inevitably reflect this symbiotic relationship:

It is not always possible to distinguish between what in the dramaturgy of a performance may be called ‘direction’ and what may be called the ‘writing’ of the author. This distinction is clear only in theatre, which seeks to be the interpretation of a written text. (Barba, E., 1985, p.75)

Barba believes that performances derived from devised process demonstrate a textual ‘density’ in their weave of actions. He credits this as arising from a contributive dramaturgy by the whole artistic team. Despite their freedom to work in their own skill areas they will demonstrate an “obligation to follow a common path” and to discover relationships. “This search for coherent relationships is already a search for a narrative plot, a coherent dramaturgy” (Barba, E., 2000, p.59). This drive is embedded in the performance in the unique language they have created. This type of performance is based, not on a written text, but on “the authority of a unifying principle which characterizes every aspect of the dramaturgies of process” (Barba, E., 2000, p.61).

Clearly then drama-turgy needs to be understood more as an ongoing process, as a ‘working upon’ in all its phases, not only in the writing of the play, the ‘script doctoring’ in rehearsal, but also in the performance product - here the ‘working upon’ includes the audience.

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A final point: Luckhurst admits that a dramaturgy may extend beyond one production for “this interpretative act encompasses the creation of a performance aesthetic and as such can underpin a theoretical framework for any number of plays” (Luckhurst, M., 2006, p.11). This point is significant in this study: Luckhurst reminds us that a director may have an ongoing dramaturgy and thus features of his/her ‘weave’ can be evidenced across projects rather than within just one. In this doctoral research the ongoing dramaturgy of two wrighter /directors is examined, examined as both a methodology of practice as well as a characteristic textual ‘weave’ working through and across their performances.

Dramaturgy in the Performance

Eugenio Barba (1985) suggests that to analyse the weave of text in a performance one must examine the plot, the ‘actions at work.’ Barba indicates how the ‘weave’ of dramaturgy, the plotting, differs from a text based drama/theatre to a performance work.

In his experience a Concatenation pole dominates in theatre plotted on a written text and “realized through the development of actions in time by means of a concatenation of causes and effects” (Barba, E., 1985, p.76). The linear operation of the base text will dominate the structure of the performance and the elements of simultaneity (interweaving in the moment) will become‘ornamental’, or background. Here Barba approaches the idea of mise en scene; for in scripted theatre and drama we view the staging and design elements to a degree as ‘ornaments,’as they serve to frame and support the plotted dialogic action.

In contrast in contemporary performance Barba sees the dominance of the pole of Simultenaeity creating a dramaturgical density based within the moment . This is demonstrated by “the weaving together of many dramatic actions, each one endowed with its own simple meaning and the assembling of them by means of a single unity of time” (Barba, E., 1985, p.77). Barba admits that simultenaeity contains a self-conscious performativity whereby the audience is much more aware of “living through an experience” (1985, p.77). Simultaneous meaning is created “by a multiplicity of facets whose three dimensional presence, so to speak, makes it live in the present tense of a life of its own” (p.77).

Barba’s analysis of actions plotted via concatenation and simultenaeity draws attention to the underlying principles through which artworks communicate and engage – through both their poetic and aesthetic domains. The dramaturg needs to maintain a forward looking awareness of ‘plotting’ in both domains in order to create an affective and effective trajectory for the audience. Manfred Bierwisch identifies the poetic domain generally as:

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The actual objects of poetics are the particular regularities that occur in literary texts and that determine the specific effects of poetry; in the final analysis - the human ability to produce poetic structures and understand their effect - that is something that one might call poetic competence. (Bierwisch, M., 1970, pp.98-99)

These regularities, plotted by the dramaturg and identified through the ‘poetic competence’ of the audience member, constitute a coherent signification system in the work. For Aristotle this system is founded on verbal text, visual text and musical text. These constitute the “means and manner” of illusion while plot, character and issues are the objects represented through these means via structural regularities in “combination and accumulation” (Mamet, D., 1995, pp.106-107). For Barba these combinations and accumulations are embodied by the term concatenation.

In contrast an ‘aesthetic competence,’ (Abbs, P., 1987, p.53) while also a cognition, is less based on identifying regularity and pattern, but instead involves an immersion in simultaneous, sensory and physical perceptions and in registering affective responses:

It engages powerful sensations It involves feeling It brings a heightened sense of significance It cannot be communicated adequately in words. It leaves one with a desire to share it. (Abbs, P., 1994, p.54)

Aesthetic experiences involve simultenaeity and may be overwhelming, however they “can therefore provide learning of the highest order- not through the application of intellect but through the engaged sensibility” (Abbs, P., 1987, p.55). Like the poetic impulse, Peter Abbs credits the affective aesthetic response as the way a personal, symbolic signification system cannot help but develop in an audience member’s mind, for “the creation and amplification of symbols is a primary need and primitive endowment” (Abbs, P., 1989, p.8). Echoing Barba’s image of the ‘weave’ Abbs describes the aesthetic field as a complex ‘web’ of energy that includes art processes, media, artists, objects, contexts and audiences (Abbs, P., 1987, p.55).

In both the aesthetic and poetic domains of the performance the traces of process are thus embodied and they also contribute to the unique language and signification system of the created product. Like the dramaturg’s process, the dramaturgy in the work itself operates through the dynamics of structure and articulation, utilizing both poetic and aesthetic domains and achieving concatenation and simultenaiety.

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The Dramaturgy of the Spectator

What of the dramaturgy which is created out of the performance? The dramaturgy which continues as an impulse towards structure, coherence and relevance but that is now undertaken by the audience as participants in the work?

Eugenio Barba describes the dramaturgy of the spectator and their active participation in a performance as a transformative act. He names this “the dramaturgy of changing states” because it occurs when “the entirety of what we show manages to evoke something different” (Barba, E., 2000, p.59) in the audience. Changing states can involve powerful “perceptible effects” and “a spring from one state of consciousness to another” (p.60). It “captures hidden significances” to create an individualized meaning for each spectator. Barba notes that the performance dramaturgy, must retain an openness to each audience member’s interpretative acts because these have the power to transform the piece totally.

How does the production dramaturg prepare for that and embed the seeds of these “hidden significances”? How can the dramaturg - very often regarded as the person who speaks for coherence and principles of structure - subvert their unifying impulse, an impulse to tie-up any loose ends? Should the contemporary dramaturg, working outside the unities of the dramatic tradition, instead speak up on behalf of openness and the gaps? Should she allow some slippage, if you like?

Barba suggests that gaps and slippage need to be accepted and that the work often drives through a confusion (in the sense of con-fusion) as much as through a coherence:

If we have been able to work at different levels of organization of the performance, then each of these has a life and function of its own. When put together, however, they do not make for harmony but confusion. (Barba, E., 2000, p.65)

Barba reassures the dramaturg that this confusion imbricates a number of forces and leads to the ideal density in the performance: “The profusion and confusion of material and trends is the only way to arrive at the bare and essential action” (2000, p.61). Barba suggests that the dramaturg work upon and through a density of forces in the production process, to facilitate a density in the performance. During the performance the audience needs to work upon a simultaneity that is dense, and thereby transformative. In fact, like the dramaturg, they must perceptually “extract the difficult from the difficult” (2000, p.60).

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It appears then that dramaturgy, like many creative processes, is characterized by contradiction and dialectic – in this case the drive to coherence and the simultaneous desire to allow gaps. The dramaturg must accept this as part of her creative discipline for very often:

Artistic discipline is a way of refusal … a continual exercise in revolt, above all against oneself, against one's own ideas, one's own resolutions and plans. (Barba, E., 2000, p.56)

Australian dramaturg Peter Eckersall sees this sense of refusal as vital in performance making and the way in which openness is created in the text. He relishes “dramaturgy as a process of being undecided and, by virtue of the fact of creative indecision, of being in a relational state of intercession” (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.284).

Rather than seeing dramaturgy as a ‘refusal’ dramaturg Julian Meyrick (2006) views dramaturgy as a capitalization on opportunities provided by the text. Even in working with a written script Meyrick directs the dramaturg towards the openings, the gaps embedded in any text, naming them as ‘silences.’ Instead of enhancing the unities he views dramaturgical intervention as a working upon these silences:

The space, the gap, the structural silence that surrounds a play text, allows it its infinitely variable place in the world of practical performance, i.e. it allows it to be endlessly reinterpreted under particular performance conditions. (Meyrick, J., 2006, p.272)

During creative development the silences allow for the staging and theatrical realization of the work but in performance the “structural silence is filled by an audiences’ understanding.” Meyrick asserts that, all along, we need to keep in mind that the dramaturg’s role is to direct the decisions towards the audience: “Dramaturgical development is as much about managing the spectator’s understanding of a play text as is the play text itself (2006, p.276).” He encourages the dramaturg to see the text as “a device for turning information into experience” (2006, p.272), the audiences experience. For this reason some companies now describe their production dramaturg as an “outside eye” (Murphy, C., 2005). They view the dramaturg as someone who comes in to bring a fresh perspective, one that anticipates the audience’s first and only experience of the action:

We could argue that a dramaturg represents the audience within a rehearsal process, able to identify the potential gap between what is intended and what is likely to be received, and to give the artists a perspective on what they are creating. (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.156)

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The term ‘outside eye’ could thus be extended to ‘audience’s eye’ to acknowledge the common goals of the dramaturg and the dramaturgy across script based and devised processes. Regardless of whether a ‘script doctor’ or ‘audience’s eye’ the dramaturg should demonstrate a forward focus on the audience, asking questions such as:

How does the audience convert what it sees and hears into what it knows? At what point in the sequence of events of any one particular staging does the audience’s knowledge of what they have seen and heard start to play an active part in what they will see and hear next? (Meyrick, J., 2006, p.275)

If successful the dramaturgy in performance will drive the work towards, what Meyrick describes as an overall “tipping point” and what Barba might claim as a transformation: “a moment when exposition is complete and the drama takes on a forward-referring energy” (Meyrick, J., 2006, pp.275-276). This appears to be an area of plotting which the dramaturg and director need to plan, whether in scripted theatre or in devised performance. The dramaturg as ‘audience’s eye’ needs to attend to the audience trajectory:

As a performance unfolds the audience see and hear more. Seeing and hearing more, they understand more. At a certain point they understand more than they are seeing and hearing. At another point they understand enough to guess what they will see and hear next. (Meyrick, J., 2006, p.276)

To achieve this dramaturgical development needs to allow for and create silences, experiential gaps and slippage through which the audience can penetrate and ‘work upon’ the material themselves.

In a devised performance Barba claims that both an openness and an ability to direct the audience’s attention can be achieved as a direct embodiment of process. When the dramaturg focuses in the development process on the specific qualities of the ‘actions at work’ the performance will demonstrate a unique weaving of concatenation and simultaneity. Like Meyrick who identifies a ‘tipping point’ in the script, Barba claims a crucial point in the dramaturgy of process is reached when “It is as though the work no longer belongs to us but starts to speak with its own autonomous voice and language, which we have to decipher.” (Barba, E., 2000, p. 64).

Thus both Meyrick and Barba assert the vital role of the dramaturg in any artistic process in articulating and building the unique language of the ‘weave.’ However it appears that contemporary dramaturgy often demonstrates an impulse towards slippage rather than towards unity: “Dramaturgy commingles intimacy and alterity; the work of dramaturgs is between these states in the same moment” (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.295). This dynamic

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characterizes the dramaturg’s shifting relational role and her reflective, forward projected stance towards the material as ‘audience’s eye.’ Theorists also evidence that the unique weave that characterizes the building dramaturgy of process is directly reflected in the weave of the performance. The contemporary dramaturg works upon silences and gaps in the dramaturgy of the text and the dramaturgy of the performance in order to achieve an openness, an openness to the transformative dramaturgy of the spectator.

2. Who is the Dramaturg?

This practice-based inquiry has been researched across the spectrum of the contemporary dramaturg’s role; from contract work as production dramaturg on an interdisciplinary, devised project in Australia to interviews with permanent company dramaturgs working in the German ‘page to stage’ repertory.

In preparing for these case studies contemporary literature that accounts for the emergence and evolution of the dramaturg’s role is surveyed. The literature aligns the dramaturg’s role with the craft of dramaturgy; the dramaturg is needed to address structure and articulation in all conceptions of text, written visual and performative. The literature affirms the dramaturg’s ongoing contested status in English speaking theatres but also their evolution from a literary role toward a more practical position.

The final section examines the outcomes from three Australian research symposia into dramaturgy in 2002-2004 in which current practitioners articulate the dramaturg’s contemporary roles. a. The Historical Legacy

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is the first person who identified himself as a dramaturg. In 1767 he was employed ‘in house’ at the Hamburg National Theatre to give good press notice about each production but instead wrote to stimulate critical dialogue in theatre theory, history aesthetics and acting technique. Lessing’s activities point to the variety of roles that the dramaturg continues to play in the theatre process from critic to historian to interventionist.

Lessing is “the first exemplar of the dramaturg as someone who develops ideas and concepts from a position within the theatre company” (2008, p.23). He established the relational dimension of the dramaturg’s role, sitting between the theatre company, the critics and the audience and breaching the dividing line between theatre theory and practice. From the theatre artists’ point of view Lessing became an antagonist; “the man of letters who rashly

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interferes in the business of theatre” (Schechter, J., 1975, p.34). This attitude towards the dramaturg is still in evidence today:

In the English speaking West the history of dramaturgy exposes persistent struggles over the control of creative territories and profound cultural resistances to the idea that playmaking processes, dramatic literature and repertoire can be objects of intellectual enquiry; it also highlights a deep rooted suspicion of working models that insist on a dynamic relationship between critical reflection and artistic practice. (Luckhurst, M., 2006, p.2)

It is the intermediary and relational role of the dramaturg and the lack of a distinct department, that puts the dramaturg in a contested position. Recent Australian initiatives have made significant gains in overcoming these prejudices. Here practice-led events have endowed dramaturgy as reflective intervention and have also allowed practitioners to enquire theoretically into dramaturgy. b. Current Practice: Intercultural Perspectives

The role of the dramaturg still varies widely from continent to continent. Luckhurst (2006, p.5) and Turner and Behrndt (2008) still attest to a ‘contested ambiguity’ in the dramaturg’s role in the UK and USA. Like Australian researcher Gough (1991), they maintain that it is erroneous to try to delimit the terms Literary Manager (common in English speaking world) and Dramaturg ( the European model). It is instead more useful to examine the span of necessary functions that these figures undertake, namely “a line of cohering concerns that begin with play selection and end with a critique of a play’s effect on audiences” (Luckhurst, M., 2006, p.12).

In each German theatre, the dramaturgs form a vital lynchpin in the company. Permanent company dramaturgs advise their Artistic Director on programming and contribute to creating the season’s repertory. They work with commissioned writers on adaptations to suit their theatre’s audience demographic. In production the dramaturg becomes an ‘in-room- consultant’, liaising between the (outside hired) director and the Artistic Director of the theatre. In fact the German company dramaturg acts as an intermediary and bridge builder between all individuals within a project (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, pp.160-161).

In contrast in British theatres a company dramaturg is usually titled the ‘Literary Manager’ or ‘Artistic Associate.’ The role chiefly involves script reading and assessment, repertoire advice and programming and advising the Artistic Director. The majority of this role is literary: they compile a protocol or case book of materials about a play or production, they write notes for the program and create education kits (Luckhurst, M., 2006). However recent scholarship

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attests that UK dramaturgs are now finding work in devised performance, particularly through Pan-European funded projects where “engagement with European practice has brought them into contact with the “dramaturg-as-curator” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.11).

In Australia the dramaturg became a publicly acknowledged figure as a direct result of May- Brit Ackerholt's work at Sydney Theatre Company from the late 1980s. Ackerholt promoted the role of the company dramaturg as a literary adviser, script assessor, translator and adaptor of classic texts and as a theatre advocate. Since then dramaturgs have played a recognized facilitator role in most major Australian theatre companies, supported by playwriting networks such as Playlab and Playwriting Australia and “dominant practices in the state theatre company sector have strengthened the model of the dramaturg as literary specialist” (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.286).

However Eckersall is one dramaturg who challenges this statement as the single, received history of dramaturgy in Australia. He and others form a cohort of production dramaturgs who have emerged from the sectors of Community and Alternative Theatre. From the 1980s onwards dramaturgical advisors such as Bruce Keller with the Sydney Front, Tom Burvill with Sidetrack Theatre and Kim Spinks with Death Defying Theatre built and articulated a dramaturgy on the ground, within collaborative ensembles.

Such dramaturgs have never really identified their role as a ‘script doctor’ or ‘literary manager’ (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.1). Instead Kim Spinks describes developing his skills in the “temporal and spatial dramaturgies” of devised, collaborative processes (Spinks, K., 1999, p.14). Yet even when devised Spinks identifies his discrete role as dramaturg as giving a practical attention to structure “learning the rudiments of how to construct a performance in real time, real space, with real live bodies” (Spinks, K., 1999, p.14). Yet, despite this practical legacy, researcher Louise Gough (1991) found that the most accepted role for the Australian dramaturg was still as a script development facilitator “supporting and nurturing new writers” (1991, p.62). In contrast the role of production dramaturg, directly involved in the rehearsal room, remained a contested area. In fact it wasn’t until ten years later that the roles and contribution of the Australian production dramaturg were fully documented and recognized.

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3. Dramaturgies : An Australian, Practice-Led Appraisal

A key source in this research are the documents generated by three Australian symposia from 2002-2004 formally titled ‘The Dramaturgies Project’ and known later as Dramaturgies (Eckersall, P., 2006) . These events were instigated by three Melbourne based dramaturg/ academics: Melanie Beddie, Peter Eckersall and Paul Monaghan who saw them operating as “a research and development laboratory…to explore, reflect on and give rise to dramaturgical practice and as a basis for making innovative performance in Australian theatre” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.1).

The catalyst for Dramaturgies was a perceived need to benchmark the dramaturg’s work in an evolving landscape where the written text had relinquished its central position and where “the importance of non literary dramaturgical activities in the production process itself has been increasingly recognized” (p.1). Dramaturgies began with a working definition of contemporary dramaturgy that removed the word text completely and evoked the writings of Eugenio Barba, describing dramaturgy as: “a confluence of literary, spatial, kinesthetic and technical practices, worked and woven in the matrix of aesthetic and ideological forces” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.1).

Dramaturgies drew in a broad range of theatre and performance based practitioners including directors and designers as well as artists from other disciplines. The symposia allowed them to explore what they understood to be dramaturgy and their dramaturgy in practice (2005, p.1). The writings and documentation generated by Dramaturgies creates a detailed articulation of the Australian dramaturg’s accepted position within the performance making process in the early twenty first century. As a dramaturg, engaged in a reappraisal of my practice through this research, the process, findings and ongoing reflection from Dramaturgies demands a detailed examination.

While Gough’s 1991 dissertation surveyed Australian dramaturgical functions based in the main on scripted dramaturgy, by 2004 Dramaturgies strongly asserts the value of the Australian dramaturg as facilitator in a performance making process. We need to visualize the dramaturg on the rehearsal room floor facilitating an emergent ‘script in action’ (Spinks, K., 1999). The collective of artists involved in Dramaturgies delineated numerous role descriptors in the relational praxis of the Australian production dramaturg. These include: facilitator, articulator, curator, questioner, advocate, interventionist and even midwife!

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a. The Dramaturg as Facilitator: Four Interpretive Spheres

Dramaturgies identified four interpretive spheres across and within which the production dramaturg must act as facilitator. These are the areas through which the dramaturgy is “worked and woven” (p.1) and include the thematic, the aesthetic, the social and the historical. Dramaturgies organizers integrated these four spheres as a scaffold for practical exercises, enabling practitioners to “make connections between what had been discussed in our forums and the future development of dramaturgical practice” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.2,7).

Interestingly the identification of these four spheres aligns directly with the traditions of production dramaturgy advocated by Brecht and taught practically within his Berliner Ensemble:

Dramaturgy in Brecht’s sense comprises the entire conceptual preparation of a production from its inception to its realization. Accordingly it is the task of dramaturgy to clarify the political and historical, as well as the aesthetic and formal aspects of a play. (Volker Canaris in Luckhurst, M., 2006, pp.9-10)

In examining these four spheres an expansive image of the production dramaturg’s facilitation in performance making starts to emerge.

Thematic exploration: As was evidenced in the TYP section dramaturgs work through thematic content embedded in interdisciplinary, non-theatrical sources or through texts of intercultural and popular culture usage. Dramaturgs should be up to date in all these dimensions of ‘texts’ and in contemporary cultural discourse, reflecting Gerd Taube’s point that the TYP dramaturg cannot just rely on the classical canon (2005). Moreover the “poly cultural and information rich” environment that technology layers into the work, requires a dramaturgy that is open to a new poetics, often manifest as a “complicated flow of ideas, technologies and form” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.1).

Aesthetic media in production: Areas once regarded as mise en scene are now endowed as text. The dramaturg should consider the simultaneous aesthetic signification of a working space, light, motion, text and sound together, plus the unique ‘everyday’ sources that are now performative onstage. In the third symposium Dramaturgies #3 participants engaged with the theme of ‘Hope and Dread’ through a range of dimensions, including the intellectual spatial, sonic and personal (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.7).

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The Social dimension: Dramaturgies describes “dramaturgical practice as a process ineluctably inside of and responding to the social world” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.7). This area can both be recognized as the interpersonal sphere within a process and the cultural context, the broader social discourses surrounding it. The performance as a text “not only is the creative combination of theatrical elements, but also expresses an attitude or belief system about the context surrounding theatre's production and reception” (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.284). Paul Monaghan argues that dramaturgy brings out the individuals, the companies and the texts cultural, political and historical contexts (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.3). The dramaturg is responsible for socio-politically contextualizing the work through questioning and working upon it. This aspect is part of the dramaturg’s tradition; it was Brecht who first brought the dramaturg directly into the rehearsal room in order to achieve “a practice informed by a political discourse” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.149).

A Historical perspective: The dramaturg’s practice also works here on a number of levels “highlighting histories and memories of theatre practice as integral aspects of the dramaturgical craft” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.7). The dramaturg’s role references the‘wisdom of the tribe’ so to speak on theatrical conventions and on the working processes and history of the team. Peter Eckersall sees the dramaturg’s presence itself as “opening spaces for reflection and debate” especially as s/he “is often called upon to act as a contextual presence in the rehearsal and development process and keep alive the memory of alternatives in the pressure cooker environment of production” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.1). Dramaturgs are responsible for asserting the relevancy in the work, with a view to the target audience. This requires that dramaturg’s respond to the new “ways we see and read the world … challenging or augmenting the perceptions that we have previously held” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.6).

Working together, the four spheres illustrate the dramaturgy in operation as “a confluence of literary, spatial, kinesthetic and technical practices” as per the organizer’s definition (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.1). Dramaturg ies was thus titled in plural in order to create awareness of the numerous latent dramaturgies operating simultaneously in each department “to include a consideration of playwriting, direction, devising, design (sound, light, space), curatorial work and programming, and company/artistic directorship” (p.1). By inviting a cross section of arts workers to participate in these events Dramaturgies validated Barba’s notion that all of the artistic team participate in a drive for coherence, a dramaturgy in process.

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b. The Dramaturg as Articulator, Curator and Questioner

The four spheres of interpretation demonstrate how de-limited the production dramaturg’s role may become. Melanie Beddie challenges those who seek to limit the dramaturgical role; she sees the breadth of practical ‘facilitation’ as akin to curating. Here the dramaturg does more than respond, they also can initiate and create:

If the dramaturg continues to be brought in as kind of script or project doctor then their roles will remain one of merely serving existing ideas. It is only when dramaturgy is integrated into the early stages of the development of new work that the contribution of the dramaturg can be fully realized. (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.4)

For Beddie this curating, as early as possible involves a willingness to “support and service other people’s ideas” and the ability to bring a “broad artistic and cultural view to the work” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.4). In this sense the dramaturg retains a view across all departments: direction and acting, design, lighting and sound.

The value of the dramaturg in devised process as a curator, ‘memory’ device or ‘map maker’ is undisputable. Very often the dramaturg’s logbook acts as a guide back to original ideas, key moments or images that later, on reflection, demonstrate their relevance. Tracking the process in this way can reveal the ‘superstructure’ of the work as well as the patterns that are emerging through its key moments with some dramaturgs still choosing to name this pattern as a “logic” or as finding a “line through the material” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008pp.177-179).

Numerous practitioners suggest that the discrete skills of the dramaturg go beyond theatrecraft (a thematic, aesthetic or historical response) and into the relational dimension, suggested in the social sphere above. The dramaturg’s key relational task is to facilitate “an environment within which the other artists can be creative” (Brown, L. I., 2008, p.161). Their expertise should be in activating others to engage in a “practical dramaturgy”, an ongoing awareness of the “shaping of performance” on the floor (Spinks 1999, p.14).

Lenora Inez Brown, working in TYP in the USA, views the dominant function of the production dramaturg as a questioner: she “navigates the responses and forges connections between those ideas and the observations” (2008, p.164) to assist the team to build a conceptual framework. For Australian Julian Meyrick this is the defining function of dramaturgy: “a process of exhaustive questioning that applies equally to the intellectual, emotional and surface dimensions of a play text” (2006, p.270). Questioning and articulation

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appears to be the basis of the dramaturg’s drive at all stages; firstly to facilitate a unifying language amongst the team and then to facilitate an “architecture” for the work using the practical material built from this language (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.178). The dramaturg thus not only facilitates the internal conceptual build of the work but also facilitates, in the social sphere “working and collaborative structures” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.164) which open up the ideas and relationships during the process..

These theorist/practitioner perspectives strongly echo my own belief in the dramaturg’s relational skills. In my experience the second level of questions are asked as a response to the emerging work on the floor, to encourage and identify shifts in the conceptual framework which has moved forward as a result of practical exploration. In so many ways the dramaturg becomes a mediator and a ‘bridge-builder.’ Turner and Behrndt admit that “While the director may be preoccupied with other things the dramaturg comes into contact with most people on the production process and is often in a good position to take the temperature” (2008, p.161). c. The Dramaturg as Advocate and Interventionist

Dramaturgies organizers contend that the production dramaturg goes far beyond observation; they claim that the dramaturg makes a systemic intervention in performance making. Peter Eckersall believes that dramaturgs themselves are advocates for the need to reflect on practice from within practice (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.2). Dramaturgy is about opening spaces for reflection and debate; in fact the presence of a dramaturg justifies a ‘time out’ for discussion which is often overlooked:

By inviting the dramaturg into the rehearsal, the companies or director welcome a more formalized engagement with dramaturgical discussion, analysis and reflection. (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.169)

The dramaturg’s role as a critical interventionist is one that speaks directly from the origins of dramaturgy in Enlightenment Germany. Luckhurst describes the ideals behind Lessing’s appointment:

It was an attempt to teach those in the industry how to become informed critics. It was an experiment that saw in theatre a potential for broad cultural reform. Most importantly it was a venture which insisted that theory and practice are not separate disciplines but rather inform one another constantly and that vital, progressive theatre making must make room for maximium cross-fertilization. (Luckhurst, M., 2006, p.29)

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Lessing’s writings in the eighteenth century fulfilled the same goals that Dramaturgies organizers in Australia hope to achieve. Both sought to demonstrate the need for a critical dramaturgy as an intervention that facilitates innovative, socially responsive performances. d. The Dramaturg as Midwife between Practice and Theory

Melanie Beddie claims that ultimately the dramaturg plays a “midwife’ role between theory and practice”, in order to “bring performance ideas into a concrete form and to allow contemplation and evaluation of process and product” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.4). Dramaturgies organizers modeled this midwife role in their three symposia over a two year period.

In practice , Dramaturgies allowed industry artists to ‘benchmark’ their experiences as a dramaturg or in dramaturgy itself. Practitioners affirmed, via practical activities, that dramaturgy has the ability to question and challenge; that the presence of a dramaturg is a healthy, critical and cultural intervention . The result? A broad range of participants were empowered to understand how their discrete skills contribute to the ‘dramaturgy in process.’

In theory , Dramaturgies organizers were able to successfully embed recent theoretical discourse into dramaturgy into the structure of their symposia. The dramaturg’s role as midwife is evidenced in the events themselves: “We see our work in developing these forums for dramaturgical research as an aspect of our work as dramaturges” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.1).

4. Conclusion

Contemporary dramaturgs, theatre practitioners and theorists all seem to agree that while the role of the dramaturg will differ on each project, in general the terms ‘dramaturg’ and ‘dramaturgy’ indicate an attention to composition, structure and to an articulation of both.

Their experience indicates how the dramaturg plays an intermediary role, acting in a fluid and context-responsive capacity to promote both open ended and decisive discussion on the conceptual and practical crafting of the work. The dramaturg’s attention to structure is also realized through her relational skills; in promoting connectivity between other creative artists she models reflection-in-practice and she initiates collaborative working structures that facilitate this.

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The dramaturgy in process is a verb that describes the enactment of the above role, and an analytic process, when ‘working upon’ the creative material via questioning and conceptual articulation. Such production dramaturgy involves making interventions that reengage the thematic, social, aesthetic and historical dimensions within/around the project.

Dramaturgy is also manifest in performance when the work drives poetically and realizes key moments aesthetically, speaking coherently on its own terms and with an openness to allow each spectator’s own perceptive framework to also ‘work upon’ the creative material.

As Dramaturgies demonstrated, dramaturgs as ‘theorists in practice’ feel compelled to articulate methodologies for working on contemporary performance, moving their practice forward from the traditions of drama and theatre:

The complex inter- and cross-disciplinary Dramaturgies that have emerged in the twentieth century have also led to an emphasis on the live performance and the performance text, as opposed to the written play. Both the ‘open’ text and devised work demand that we consider the composition of the performance as whole. This shift towards an equal consideration of every element within the theatrical event has led to new attempts to define ‘dramaturgy.’ (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.30)

Director Eugenio Barba appears to sum up the essence of a contemporary performance dramaturgy by noting that the poetics, the ‘plotting’ is based, not on a ‘cause and effect’ sequence of events, but in the richness of the moment and building a complicit awareness of its richness, a sense of ‘being present to it’ across performer and audience (1985, p.77). Contemporary aesthete Nicholas Bourriard however asserts that today the dynamics go beyond ‘being present to the moment’ and involve aesthetically perceiving yourself within the frame. He notes that “One is not in front of an object anymore but included in the process of construction” (Simpson, B., 2001, p.2).

This assertion, and the examples of TYP practice described previously, suggest that new principles in contemporary dramaturgy will be those that allow an audience directly into the dramaturgy, giving them an authoritative interactivity through both aesthetic and poetic engagement. It appears that the twenty first century dramaturg will increasingly be focused on the transformative, open ended dramaturgy of the spectator. Given this it may be more appropriate to view the contemporary dramaturg more as the ‘audience’s eye’ than as the ‘script doctor.’ The final section of the Literature Review will examine the new aesthetic and poetic techniques of Postdramatic Theatre as suggested areas on which the ‘audience’s eye’ should focus.

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C. Contemporary Performance: a Postdramatic Terrain

1. Reaching Towards a New Milennium

As the previous section demonstrated, contemporary dramaturgs work in an artistic terrain of intervention that takes them beyond the traditional role descriptions of ‘script doctor’ and ‘literary manager.’ As articulators of practice, dramaturgs are now keen to express a new epistemology, one applicable to the terrain of contemporary performance.

In this section Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006) is examined as well as a “Millennial Theatre” proposed by Turner and Behrndt (2008). Through both labels these theorists describe the aesthetic and poetic flow-on effects from a ‘shift’ in dramaturgy away from the written text and towards a terrain with the performance-as-text. These theories are thus important to evaluate in my preparation for the two case studies: In what domains do performance analysts see new dramaturgical principles emerging and how are these new principles being described?

Both Millennial Theatre and Postdramatic Theatre are appealing to the practice-based researcher/dramaturg because they discuss such issues as a matter of theatre poetics and aesthetics. These theorists respond to the epistemological imperative within the artform; they redefine key terms in theatre practice and acknowledge the validity of old terms in new contexts. For example both reject the idea that contemporary theatre/performance has turned its back on mimetic representation, proposing instead that it problematises the principle itself. Turner and Behrndt evidence four overall drives in what they term Millennial Theatre. 7 Through these they assert that this is still Theatre, albeit a theatre engaged in challenging its key twentieth century premises.

a. The Real and the Represented

Millennial Theatre interrogates the mechanisms of representation. Turner and Berndt address broadly the effects of this challenge, firstly to the idea of re- presented narrative. They evidence that these days the “storytelling mode” is as much the

7 This term is (by 2009) already a time constrained label, but through it these analysts acknowledge practice occurring over a period from the early 1990’s onwards. Millennial Theatre and Postdramatic Theatre increasingly align in revealing the same impulses and for this reason I gradually subsume the term Millennial under the title Postdramatic. In this inquiry the term Postdramatic is most useful as it evokes an overall drive in dramaturgy beyond the dramatic, twentieth century, modernist paradigm.

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theme as the actual story (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.188). Structurally this may be achieved by the deliberate “abstraction of formal elements” of the story and subverting them through their installation or “referencing in other contexts” (pp.188-190). This is often achieved via “shifts in register” at all levels, most noticeably when performers slide from persona into character and reverse. Such shifts draw further attention to the gaps between the real world and the work’s attempt to frame a fiction within it. b. The Performance as Text

Most of the features in Millennial Theatre are an attempt to focus the audience on the process of performance itself as the main narrative. It is in this feature that Millennial (and Postdramatic) dramaturgy asserts its development beyond late twentieth century postmodernism and the realms of Performance Art, or Alternative Theatre. For in contemporary dramaturgy such features are not a demonstration that meaning is impossible to fix but involve a self-reflexive “exploration of how meaning is (and has been) made” (p.189). Australian dramaturg Peter Eckersall extends on this key idea:

We should not be trying to keep alive the collapse of representation in the avant- garde notion of performance as ecstatic chaos, rather to remind ourselves that theatrical representation is dramaturgically gestic; our process is about structural critique, not structural disorganization. (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.284)

Dramaturgically gestic ? In contemporary work often the ‘work of the actions’ point themselves out to the viewer and self-consciously draw attention to their crafting, pointing to both the unities and to the silences. They draw attention to the dramaturgical process itself highlighting that which operates through the viewer’s presence in the present, shared moment. There is a new level of poetic interactivity: “a new attention to the relationship between the story teller and the listener, a relationship that presupposes some level of interaction and critique as well as a shared imaginative engagement” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.203). It is the individualized experience of performance that is acknowledged as the prime text. c. The Dramaturgy of Process

The aesthetic effect created in these works is often a demonstration of the struggle to compose the work itself. Thus we watch performers and characters who attempt to enact composition of the text, through “failed acts and revised acts, multiple versions of acts.” These moments do not develop into certainties or unities but engender an environment of doubt and mutability based on a “multiplication of possibilities” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, pp.191-193).

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However the moments which break down the artifice of the represented narrative do not disturb the audience but instead provoke more engagement: “by revealing the mechanisms of the performance, they invite the audience’s imaginative complicity” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, pp.190-191). The dramatic idea that illusion must be maintained for the purpose of ‘suspension of disbelief’ appears to have lost its fundamental status, yet at the same time, theatricality appears still to be celebrated. d. The Valorization of the Theatrical

The works that Turner and Behrndt cite as evidence of Millennial Theatre create a performative challenge between the real and the represented. They remove the written text as the central structural and content driver of the work and instead concern themselves with the theatricality of the moment. They direct the audience to question and to ‘work upon’ the authority of the visual and verbal texts by drawing attention to their struggle, composition and fragility. However this is often still a lesson about narrative and storytelling. Turner and Behrndt, amongst other theorists, now seek ways to describe the re-manifestation of dramatic elements in contemporary Theatre/Performance:

Yet as the new century begins we seem to be seeing a strategic re entry of narrative, textuality, and even of representational strategies, existing perhaps paradoxically, alongside an increased awareness, even valorization of theatrical prescence. (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.188)

As a dramaturg working with ‘performance as text’ how do we articulate the theatrical and dramatic elements that are emerging in new ways and for new goals?

In summary, the contemporary theatre environment is structurally complex, intermediated, fragmented, culturally rich and information-rich. The rise of performance dramaturgy that is associated with work of these kinds has corresponded to a rising performativity and metatheatricality, relating broadly to what Hans-Thies Lehmann has identified as Postdramatic Theatre (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.287).

Following Eckersall’s direction I now undertake a more detailed exploration of Postdramatic Theatre (2006) to delineate the techniques by which an open ended, performance-as-text, working to undermine representation and to assert its own ‘dramaturgy of process’ can also evidence a renewed application of the theatrical.

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2. Postdramatic Theatre

At the end of the twentieth century German dramaturg/theorist Hans -Thies Lehmann proposed that the new genre for contemporary theatre/performance be labeled as ‘Postdramatisches Theater’ (1999).’The term itself implies a relevance to the post-modern, but also a forward movement from the dramatic as a Modernist paradigm, which prescribes the unities of time, place and dialogically based action.

From a point seven years into this century Karen Jürs-Munby, English translator of Postdramatic Theatre (2006) describes Lehmann’s goals to find a new language for theatre forms, a system to “consider the new theatre aesthetics in terms of space, time and body” and to “explore theatre’s changing relationship to the media constellation of the twentieth century, in particular the historical shift out of a textual culture and into a mediatised image and sound culture”(Jürs-Munby, K., 2006, p.1) She and Lehmann site Postdramatic Theatre in a chronology in “relation to dramatic theory and theatre history including resonances and divergences from historical theatre and the avant-garde (Jürs-Munby, K., 2006, p.1).” The key questions of a 2006 Symposium demonstrate how theorists regard the postdramatic as an inquiry into the evolution of contemporary dramaturgy:

How has the traditional relationship of theatre to drama been deconstructed and reconfigured in contemporary theatre practice? What new forms of theatre have developed 'beyond drama'? How have the 'media society' and the emergence of new technologies transformed theatre? What are the features of postdramatic new writing for performance? (Beyond Drama: Postdramatic Theatre Symposium, Huddersfield University , February 2006) a. Post-the-dramatic

Lehmann describes the ‘postdramatic’ as “a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama at a time after the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.21). He is anxious to point out that this is not a wholesale rejection of the dramatic but a recontextualisation, as part of the journey forward from postmodern deconstruction:

… through its very form dramatic theatre proclaims wholeness as the model of the real. Dramatic theatre ends when these elements are no longer the regulating principle but merely one possible variant of the theatrical art. (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.11-12)

Furthermore he asserts the postdramatic is an expressive response to the rapidly evolving socio-technological network of late twentieth century society:

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The ‘postdramatic’ is an arsenal of expressive gestures, which in Postdramatic Theatre serve as theatre’s response to changed social communication under the conditions of generalized communication technologies. (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.23)

Note here that Lehmann uses the term theatre; as in Millennial Theatre, Postdramatic Theatre ‘valorises the theatrical’. Lehmann reasserts the non-representative traditions of the theatre that lie outside (before and beyond) modern drama and realism: “Postdramatic Theatre allows, retroactively, some of the non-dramatic aspects of the theatre of the past to stand out more clearly” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.14).

For dramaturgs, Lehmann offers a resuscitation of theatrical terminology and a separate context for the term ‘Theatre’ discrete from (modernist) ‘Drama.’ Lehmann notes that too often, “despite all radical transformations of theatre, the concept of drama has survived as the latent normative idea of theatre” (2006, p.33). Jürs Munby draws out Lehmann’s idea: she prefers to define Postdramatic Theatre as one engaged in an ongoing deconstruction of the relationship between theatre and drama (2006, p.3). For her postdramatic works are those “that continue to entertain relationships with drama and are in many ways an analysis and anamnesis of drama” (Jürs-Munby, K., 2006, p.2).

For all these reasons Postdramatic Theatre has been identified as a crucial theoretical platform in this inquiry, consisting as it does of a practice based exploration of new principles and terminologies in contemporary dramaturgy. b. Articulating the Theatre/Performance Aesthetics

Lehmann provides a detailed account of performances observed over the last 25 years seeking to evidence new language systems: “new theatre lacks the categories or terminology to define or describe in positive terms what defines theatre theoretically and what makes it truly contemporary” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.7,9).

Postdramatic theorists assert that a critical feature of performance in this time frame has been its interrogation of representation. Consequently new aesthetic and poetic features onstage had to develop:

What changes when the theatrical 'here and now' no longer keeps up the pretence of creating an illusory 'there and then? What changes once the events taking place onstage no longer represent reality while presentation (understood as presence) ousts traditional representation, turning into an interactive act of creation with pre-planned and active participation of the audience? (Sugiera, M., 2004, p.25)

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Many of Lehmann’s detailed examples come from non-text based performance groups for example Robert Wilson, Tadeuz Kantor, Forced Entertainment and The Sydney Front.8 However Lehmann also examines the written script asking: What are the features of postdramatic playtexts and how does a contemporary production of a traditional dramatic text operate when staged with a postdramatic aesthetic? Lehmann thus allows a space for contemporary playwriting and classical theatre (given innovative staging) within the canon of Contemporary Performance.9

Postdramatic Theatre involves an application of post-modern and poststructuralist discourse to contemporary theatre and performance. However Lehmann takes a more specific focus addressing Postdramatic Theatre specifically as a “concrete problem of theatre aesthetics” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.9). Marcus Wessendorf claims that it is in this specific focus, by his ‘keeping it in the theatre’ so to speak, that Lehmann’s theory gains its credence: “Lehmann regards performativity, not rootedness in a dramatic text as the major constituent of theatre” (Wessendorf, M., 2003, p.2). With the written text removed as the foundation stone of analysis or process, Lehmann sees the dramaturgy of our age as not based on a textual analysis but fundamentally concerned with the aesthetics of operative theatrical elements, a ‘theat-turgy ’ if you like. Lehmann’s text provides “positive analytic categories for a description of the new theatre aesthetics - space, time, body, text and media” (Jürs-Munby, K., 2006, pp.1-2)

Lehmann’s postdramatic theory seeks to create a serviceable analytic framework for the dramaturg in which contemporary theatre, contemporary drama (in innovative staging) and diverse manifestations of contemporary performance can all be seen in relationship with each other and expressive of a twenty first century cultural paradigm.

3. Deconstructing the Dramatic: Postdramatic Gestures

Postdramatic performances eschew clear coordinates of narrative and character and require therefore considerable efforts on the part of the spectator. (2004, p.1)

Postdramatic techniques realign the textual poetics in two areas: as a structural scaffold across the work and as a creative framework within each meaning making sequence, thus both in terms of Barba’s concatenation and simultaneity.

8 Margaret Hamilton’s PhD research (2005) provides an additional Australian contextualisation of postdramatic practice in the work of The Sydney Front and Open City 9 David Barnett’s (2005) article on Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen provides a detailed analysis of postdramatic principles embedded both in Frayn’s crafting of the play as well as his thematic preoccupations.

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Within both of these areas Lehmann claims a liberation for theatre and the theatrical from the dramatic paradigm, crying “freedom from subjection to hierarchy, freedom from demand for coherence” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.83). However Sugiera identifies an aesthetic tension here in trying to unravel theatre from the ‘tried and true’ tools of illusion created to suspend audience disbelief:

Increasingly the contemporary theatre refuses to reproduce imitatively, or, … to present real life experiences on a proscenium stage, while retaining unshakeable confidence in the magical illusion and the reliability of the mechanisms of projection and identification. (Sugiera, M., 2004, p.20)

Wessendorf (2003) provides a succinct outline of three techniques in Lehmann’s postdramatic theory through which these tensions are manifested and overtly problematised: Hypernaturalism, The Irruption of the Real and The A-thetic. Examining each technique reveals its effect in further postdramatic deconstruction, an unravelling of the dramatic elements and their reassertion on new terms. a. Hypernaturalism: When Signs overtake Characters

Lehmann states unequivocally “The dehierarchization of theatrical means is a universal principle of postdramatic theatre” (2006, p.86), for with the retreat of the written text from prominence the valency of the other theatrical signs becomes more pronounced.

A ‘Hypernaturalism’ may now occur when the traditional elements of stage naturalism reappear, not as mise en scene, framing character and dialogue, but in order to ‘de-realise’ the frame. Onstage we see the foregrounding of the mundane and the pedestrian - elements of design, setting, even character may become ‘charged’ with an importance but yet fail to demonstrate an immediate relevance. Even though these elements are hypernaturalised, they are disarmed of any real meaning, hence “de-realised” (Wessendorf, M., 2003 , p.4).

In articulating this concept Lehmann has extended on Baudrillard’s conception of ‘hyperreality’ by putting it into theatrical terms.10 Baudrillard argues that through the dominance of consumer culture and media of duplication:

the traditional hierarchy of original and copy is inverted and signs … come to exist before the things they refer to. Reality becomes a second-order reality in the process,

10 Baudrillard proposes that a model that simulates a reality - a simulacra - nowadays often actually becomes that reality, actually a hyperreality. For example a map is a model of a country but precedes actual experience of that country, thus for many the map becomes the hyperreality of that country (Auslander, P. 2008).

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a universe of signs that only point to each other, cut off from any external referents. (Wessendorf, M., 2003, p.3)

Onstage Lehmann describes a multiplicity of theatrical signs in contemporary works that can capture attention, even a striking physicality, a certain style of gesture or any emphasis. His description of a density of signs aligns with Barba’s image of simultaneity in the aesthetic weave of ‘actions at work.’ However often these signs are untethered to a referent; “making sense” but operating without a “fixed conceptual identity” (2006, p.82). Peter Abbs might here identify the relationship between this new approach to theatrical signification and the audience’s contemporary experience of a dense, iconic, yet untethered ‘aesthetic field’:

… the symbolic environment is, by and large, structured by this flexible inclusive hypertext, in which many people surf each day. The virtuality of this text is in fact a fundamental dimension of reality, providing the symbols and icons from which we think and thus exist (Castells, M., 2000, p.417).

For Lehmann hypernaturalism is a socially demonstrable poetic device, providing a non dramatic frame for the audience thus today “an authentic manner by which theatre could testify to life cannot come about through imposing an artistic macro structure that constructs coherence” (Lehmann 2006, p.83). In postdramatic works “synthesis is cancelled. It is explicitly combated” (p.82). In its place is a Hypernaturalism and onstage “an abundance of simultaneous signs” now re-presents the aesthetic and poetic density of the twenty first century audience member’s everyday experience. TYP Director Rosemary Myers relishes the hypernaturalistic capacity and the demand for simultenaeity and density coming from her youth audience:

… The very fast reading skills of young people and their capacity to read across form and their fluid ability to deconstruct and reconstruct … are great for inspiring the creation of interdisciplinary, fast moving work. (Myers, R., 2005, p. 31)

In addition to a hyperreal conception of signs, images and symbols Lehmann gives examples of hypernatural moments that also may occur when “a non referential, media produced, heightened resemblance” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.117) is brought into the work. Citing a range of (predominantly) German productions and playwrights he describes moments where a “phantastic vision can break forth without commentary or interpretation. Trivial, utopian images of desire of great intensity” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.118). These often appropriate televisual forms, for example the sitcom, pop culture and the movie musical and they affect a leap into the absurd, even to grotesque comedy.

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Formerly such hypernaturalistic sequences have been used to effect empathy and comic relief, but today Lehmann describes them effecting “an astonishing de-pathisation and ironic sarcastic distance (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.118).” He sees this as a by product of media- saturated culture in which the appropriation of tried and true aesthetic models is the usual recourse: “all emotions that drama was able to show must now pass through the ‘irony filter’ of a film and media aesthetic” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.118).11

One of the common strategies of Postdramatic Theatre is its “reliance on metonymic rather than metaphoric representation” (Balme, C., 2004, p.1) This statement succinctly describes the shift away from character as the chief tethering point for the aesthetic signification system in a work. Through hypernaturalism objects themselves become ‘charged’ as communicants; “circulating signs, codes and gestures and phrases” precede character and protrude beyond their realist functionality “pointing instead to [their] own material presence onstage.” (Wessendorf, M., 2003, p.3)

Character as Text Bearer

As the above discussion of hypernaturalism describes, Postdramatic Theatre directly challenges the centrality of the dramatic character; his/her dialogue and actions are removed from their position at the top of the dramatic hierarchy of importance and the theatre’s aesthetic and poetic structures are no longer set in orbit around them. In addition Postdramatic Theatre, in script form as well as in production, may remove the character’s authority over the spoken text and bring their ownership of its supertext and its subtext into question.

To put it bluntly “Postdramatic Theatre proposes the text bearer ( Textträger ) as a replacement for the dramatic character. The text bearer has no other responsibility than to deliver text; that is, not to interpret” (Barnett, D., 2008, p.18).12 Turner and Behrndt note that often the ambiguity and inarticulacy of the script will not allow a character enough integrity to progress the piece, only to bring body and voice to the words. The audience observes the character’s increasing emasculation as they “enter into these problems of articulation without resolving them” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.193).

11 In the field of TYP however Gattenhof discovered that the use of mediatised images and forms are a more pragmatic, positive and engaging device as young people automatically “adopt, adapt and twist pre-existing texts to make new texts” (Gattenhof, S., 2004, p.129)

12 Note that the identification of character as ‘text bearer’ (textträger) is credited by Barnett (2005 p.141) to Gerda Poschmann (1997) in Der Nicht Mehr Dramatische Theater , Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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In many cases the words that characters utter are recieved as externalised ‘text’ rather than psychologically released dialogue. “All that is ever delivered is a quotation; it is never suggested that the speaker is the originator” (Barnett, D., 2008, p.20). This process, separating the spoken words from the character, undermining his/her authority and ownership, inevitably undermines audience identification with the protagonist. Here Postdramatic Theatre achieves “a redefinition of the performer’s function in terms of being and materiality rather than appearance and mimetic interpretation” (Balme, C., 2004, p.1). b. Irruption of the Real: Unplugging the Artifice

Turner and Behrndt identify a common trait in Millennial Theatre as the thematisation of the struggle to construct and sustain the art work itself. The moments when the poetic drivers break down or when shifts in register occur that suspend or ‘unplug’ the artifice, Lehmann terms the ‘Irruption of the Real’:

Consistently punctured and obstructed by frequent pauses and interruptions…. The stage action comes to a halt for a few seconds and we are compelled to look at the actors who no longer seem to participate in the make-believe world of the play, but also don't seem to be fully their private selves. (Wessendorf, M., 2003, p.6)

Turner and Behrndt refer to these moments as ‘Getting the Now into the text’ (2008, p.190) and claim they create “an increased awareness, even valorization of theatrical presence” by drawing attention to gaps and silences in the text and inviting the audience to work on them (2008, p.188). In this way the Irruption of the Real becomes an object of the theatrical design itself: the main point of the irruption is not “the assertion of the real as such but the unsettling that occurs” in the audience because of their increasing and “undeniable” questions (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.101).

This irruption ( and why is it not an eruption? ) may initially appear to be a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, however Lehmann’s irruption appears to be banal rather than impertinently contradictory (as Brecht would have had it). The real simply appears … and there is no specific referent in mind other than that the real world outside which has forcibly imposed itself upon the construct of onstage time.

Turner and Behrndt link this technique to the 1990’s trend towards Verbatim Theatre in which the themes, characters and action pretend to be nothing other than artifacts from the real. In the TYP context of this inquiry it may also be useful to think of an aesthetic irruption created by ‘everyday performativities’ (Gattenhof, S.,2004, p.30). In Arena Theatre’s Play Dirty and in Junges Schauspielhaus, Hamburg’s Sagt Lila (described on p.25 and p. 33)

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Irruptions may have been effected when BMX and motocross bikes pirouetted across the stage - utilitarian objects now asserting their unique performativity.

Irruption of the Real is a technique that works to undermine the audience’s focus on the onstage world and it seeks to develop the audience’s perception of themselves participating cognitively in the experience. Postdramatic Theatre works on developing “a perception that undergoes - at its own risk - ‘the come and go’ between the perception of structure and of the sensorial real” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.103). This is again achieved by a dramaturgy that refuses both poetic and aesthetic synthesis, one “that fixes [on] partial structures rather than whole patterns” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.83). c. The A-Thetic: A Refusal to Resolve

Barnett (2008) points out that in Postdramatic Theatre, unlike Brecht’s Epic Theatre, there is no clear socio-political framework through which the audience are required to make a dialectic decision. Twenty first century performers, as “postdramatic text bearers, open up the site of text construction to unrestricted speculation … [their] words are pointing but in no particular direction” (Barnett, D., 2008, p.19).The use of pauses, the switches in perspective, the density of signs, the ambiguity - all these lead beyond theatre semiotics towards a new poetic system “focusing on the figurations of self-canceling of meaning” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.82).

Lehmann evidences a landscape of works that problematise and/or refuse to take authority for themselves and thereby Postdramatic Theatre “articulates, through the mode of its semiosis, an implicit thesis concerning perception” (p.82). Postdramatic Theatre operates by a refusal to take sides, or even to specify the sides and thus a refusal to resolve any dialogic problem. This is another flow-on effect from the work’s foundational refusal to create an ordered onstage world, driven teleologically and centred on character and dialogue.

Lehmann describes self-canceling features as ‘anti-significant’. He challenges Kristeva’s notion of the ‘thetic’ 13 naming them as ‘a-thetic’ in their in-disposition to assert or take a position towards the material they present. In fact they direct the audience’s attention to the ways that language operates as a political and propositional construct and create an awareness in them of their own subjective acts of interpretation. Lehmann believes that Postdramatic Theatre operates against the autocratic politics of representational drama. Postdramatic

13 “Julia Kristeva defines the term as the positing structure in the signifying process that is the basis not only for any kind of linguistic proposition, identification and judgment but also, finally, for the formation of subjectivity.” (Wessendorf, 2004, p.8)

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theorists claim that contemporary theatre can thus again become “the privileged art form to subvert established modes of signification and to create an opening for new, polyvalent cultural meanings” (Wessendorf, M., 2003, p.8).

In articulating the ‘a-thetic’ Lehmann reinforces that the theatrical work-in-process becomes itself a theme, for, during the performance a-thetic techniques draw the audiences’ attention self-consciously to the issues of authorship, control and dramaturgy.

Nowadays the basic structural principle of texts written for the theatre increasingly often turns out to be their immanent theatricality, which is, however, no longer understood as reflection upon theatre as a domain of artistic activity or as an extensive metaphor of human life, but rather as a means of inducing the audience to watch themselves as subjects which perceive, acquire knowledge and partly create the objects of their cognition (Sugiera, M., 2004, p.26).

We can view a-thetic techniques as a reassertion of the postmodern refusal of the text to position itself as an authority. Instead it ‘shifts’ this responsibility to the spectator. ‘A-thetic’ techniques are best understood as those which reflect the self-reflexive politics of an open, unresolved work. By their simple refusal to posit they coerce the audience into taking responsibility for ‘point of view.’

Postponing Meaning Making within the Audience

Drama operates through an aesthetic and poetic system designed to achieve mimesis, recognition and identification. However in Postdramatic Theatre the “sense data always refers to answers that are sensed as possible but not (yet) graspable; what one sees and hears remains in a state of potentiality, its appropriation postponed” (2006, p.99). How does an audience filter the information presented through the postdramatic’s partial structures, its refusal to posit and refusal to allow synthesis – overall a dramaturgy that resists coherency in structure and in articulation?

Instead of being directed by a strong dramatic focus, Lehmann describes the audience as maintaining an ‘evenly hovering attention’ (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) over the poetic and aesthetic field of multiple, simultaneous signs, images and texts (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.87). The spectator needs to assay everything, even in recognizing the trivial as the possibly significant, and must, at all costs “postpone the production of meaning.” This perceptual process, this shift in cultural reading by the audience clearly reflects the hypertextual reading dynamic of an internet surfer:

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Here everything depends on not understanding immediately. Rather ones perception has to remain open for connections, correspondences and clues at completely unexpected moments, perhaps casting what was said in a completely new light. (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.87)

The tiniest piece of text on the computer interface may look trivial but may actually be a ‘hot key’ that, when opened links to a huge new world of associated information. As Gabriella Giannichi (2004, p.17) points out the internet reader perceives a world of constant arrivals- destabilizing the aesthetic and poetic ‘weave.’ This ‘hovering perception’ to which Lehmann refers, is ultimately a conception of both the aesthetics of the Open Work (Eco, U., 1979) and the poetics of a hypertext literate society.

By 2004 Sandra Gattenhof had also identified ‘Openness of Form’ and a postponement of resolution as key characteristics of Theatre for Young People. Her examples of narrative ‘fragmentation’ and works that genuinely desire to ‘unsettle’ the audience (pp. 120-130) concur with Lehmann’s description of Postdramatic Theatre’s ‘partial dramaturgy’ and its a-thetic impulses.

4. Conclusion

Both Postdramatic and Millennial Theatre identify the key dramaturgical principles of the ‘performance as text’- these undermine fundamental dramatic constructions of the author and the narrative. Postdramatic/Millennial Theatre does not represent a fictional world but is preoccupied with the problems of its own construction; these works contain poetic and aesthetic traits that create a self-conscious dramaturgy. These works also refuse to drive towards a closed resolution, they reject teleology and instead demonstrate features which move the narrative (if any) into a more open position. The audience find themselves increasingly implicated in the work and compelled to take responsibility for any resolution:

The very object of the theatrical mimesis has changed. Now it is above all the cognitive processes of human consciousness and unconsciousness. (Sugiera, M., 2004, p.26)

Postdramatic Theatre operates through the key techniques of hypernaturalism, irruptions of the real and the a-thetic and these create ‘anti-positing’, ‘anti-signification’ and ‘anti- identification’ effects. These all create effects that challenge the goals of modernist Drama:

Instead of recognizing oneself in the Others … the spectators themselves turn into the characters of their own acts of perception, consciousness and truth recognition or Wahrnehmung . (Sugiera, M., 2004, p.26)

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The way these elements operate is unpacked by Lehmann and other postdramatic theorists in clear terms of theatre aesthetics. Reversioned dramatic elements now challenge the audience member to reposition themselves within the work, providing a dense simultaneity of signs “in the midst of an inexhaustible network of relationships” (Eco, U., 1979, p.55). They now create multiple frames and foci and enable the spectator-as-dramaturg to observe and concatenate, to “use as many dimensions as he possibly can at the same time and thus dynamise, multiply and extend to the utmost degree his perceptual faculties” (Eco, U., 1979, p.55).

This focus on the aesthetics in operation, and Lehmann’s concern to ground the theory in a historical framework of praxis, means that ‘Postdramatic Theatre’ is an important text for the contemporary dramaturg to consider. Working across contemporary practice, from script development with a playwright, to facilitation on devised, interdisciplinary and/or multi- mediated performance, the production dramaturg needs to ground each work in the canon. Lehmann’s key goal is to provide a new operative language, a system that can contextualize contemporary work within a larger chronology of theatre history.

Lehmann’s approach is both systematic and panoramic. As ER George advocates, he demonstrates a broad phenomenological approach to develop a ‘postdramatic’ epistemology (1996, p.18). Examples come from a wide range of practice and contexts and other postdramatic theorists have broadened these perspectives. Lehmann creates an inclusive, reinvigorated, definition for contemporary theatre, separate to drama and broadly defined as “a multi- or intermedially deconstructive artistic practice of the momentary event” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.83).

The relevance and validity of Postdramatic Theatre is demonstrated by its alignment, in both aesthetic and poetic terms, with the contemporary operative systems of its audience, namely the post-modern, post-structural, hypertext literate consumer. Today’s spectator, especially today’s young people are active dramaturgs, they “become active witnesses who reflect upon their meaning making, who tolerate gaps and are willing to suspend the assignment of meaning” (Jürs-Munby, K., 2006, p.6). Previous research and performance audits from contemporary Theatre for Young People indicate that this sector already manifests postdramatic techniques in the way it seeks to engage with and present relevant images and texts from contemporary society.

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In addition, if through its key dramaturgical principles, the audience becomes a subject and the goal of the work, then it is probable that through Postdramatic Theatre the evolution of the role of the dramaturg from ‘script doctor’ to ‘audience’s eye’ can be fully realized.

5. Addressing the Gap in the Literature

This literature review contributes to only a small pool of documentation that specifically foregrounds the dramaturg working in contemporary Theatre for Young People. As its structure denotes, the majority of the literature deals with dramaturgy and Theatre for Young People as separate areas. Yet this chapter, and the doctoral fieldwork that follows, demonstrates that TYP is growing in stature internationally, through a more globalized network of practitioners who seek to achieve aesthetic and technological innovation onstage. The available literature, my fieldwork and findings, should further demonstrate that their work is worthy of a body of ongoing dramaturgical analysis.

This study is, to the best of my knowledge the first that applies Postdramatic analysis to works produced in Theatre for Young People and that takes a cross-national platform in doing so. The first Case Study provides a unique account of the emergent dramaturgy and artistic methodology developed by TJ Eckleberg through a devised, multi-mediated, site specific process in a contemporary Australian Youth Theatre/Arts Centre. The second Case Study provides the first English analysis of the work of Kristo Šagor, a multi award winning German KJT playwright and director. As the Literature Review demonstrates my research undertaken in Germany has exposed (in English) innovative German directors and theatre companies who are breaking new ground in TYP through multimedia production, interdisciplinary forms and challenging performance styles.

In the following Chapter I account for my development of a research design that could effectively record the dramaturgy within these two separate cultural contexts and manifested through two production models - devised performance and ‘page to stage’ theatre production.

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Chapter Three: Research Methodology, Design and Implementation

1. Introduction: Statement on Qualitative Research

Qualitative research methods permit the description of phenomena and events in an attempt to understand and explain them. Such descriptions are used to seek principles and explanations that generalize. (Krathwohl, D. R., 1997, p.311)

This research investigation into TYP and KJT bears all the hallmarks of the qualitative research method identified by Krathwohl. The research methodology, in design and implementation of the project is founded on these precepts:

Qualitative methods are inductive: they let the problem emerge from the data or remain open to [new] interpretations of the problem..The data are accounts of careful observations, including detailed descriptions of context, verbatim records of conversation, analyses of documents and records. (Krathwohl, D. R., 1997, p.311)

Applying qualitative research to artistic process is a layered task. The process itself is a type of research or investigation. The final writing of the exegesis requires its own descriptive model to demonstrate validity through its form, a form which itself evokes the nature of the creative inquiry (Eisner, E. W., 2003, p.6). In theatrical terms, the qualitative thesis has to demonstrate a dramaturgy. It should take a creative shape that reflects the unique research site and the process. It follows that the qualitative researcher needs to approach their site with a creative palette of strategies.

The interpretive paradigm I identify as most appropriate to my study is that of Constructivism. This paradigm reflects the nature of my personal enquiry into knowledge to date and it is also appropriate to the creative process of performance making.

The fieldwork undertaken demonstrates the epistemology of an interpretive social enquiry in which meaning making activities in a local and case-based context constitute what is to be known. I have taken a participatory approach in my case studies, researching and writing as a reflective practitioner. Both cases are investigated through the perspective of a dramaturg and using a range of data collection tools that a dramaturg utilizes in her creative practice.

In Case Study One my observations ‘on the ground’ become raw data in a Grounded Analysis. In Case Study Two raw data from three German playscripts and their performances are analysed dramaturgically. This direct performance analysis is informed by a triangulation

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of other context based strategies, including practitioner interviews and discussion, the collection of performance ephemera and performance audits in German KJT.

2. Interpretive Paradigm: Constructivism

My experiences to date, both professional and personal, have led to my belief that knowledge is framed and communicated through context. Social, historical, political and cultural contexts form “a backdrop of shared understandings, practices, language etc” and these create “a conceptual framework in which the world is described and explained” (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.197). I thus identify with the tenets of Constructivism, an interpretative paradigm that asserts that ‘knowing’ is not a passive but an active force:

Constructivism means that human beings do not find or discover knowledge so much as construct or make it. We invent concepts, models and schemes to make sense of experience and we continually test and modify these constructions in the light of new experience. (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.197)

Constructivism reacts against a simplistic view of representational ontology- that knowledge and meaning is simply a concrete entity separate from the researcher. The nature of reality is instead relative; there are multiple realities and they can be localized and specifically constructed. The individualized context itself, in action, is a form of knowledge.

Similarly language is not a universal referent. It is not a means to gain knowledge or to order an absolute reality, rather a form used to disclose specific worlds to others. A constructivist researcher recognizes that such knowledge is often revealed through specific language, arising through and within context. This language may be value-laden and contain personal ideology therefore knowledge claims need to be framed by a detailed contextualization of their subjects and terrain (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.192).

The constructivist paradigm evokes a clear image of my professional ethos as a performing arts educator and my preferred practice in the rehearsal room, as a director of devised performance and as a dramaturg. Epistemologically, dramaturg/educator/researchers like myself value transactionally acquired data, data emerging from the activities of individuals and groups: These activities themselves are of central interest …because it is the meaning making/sense making/attributional activities that shape action. (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.167)

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It naturally follows that my epistemology in this study is interpretivist- I assert that human social actions are inherently meaningful; they form a valid frame for inquiry and the range of meanings within each action/context must be grasped. All these factors must be considered as ways of learning.

In terms of methodology I have chosen those research strategies generally associated with the constructivist paradigm, those that involve a range of participatory action strategies. These “enact an emic and idiographic approach to enquiry [i.e local and case based]” (Charmaz, K., 2000, p.158). Given the world view emergent from my practice, it is unsurprising that Case Study became the research strategy by which I chose to scope my investigation.

3. Methodology

Any performance process is collaborative and theatre is one of the most inter-subjective in its artistic process. It is necessary for a researcher to accept and to enhance these conditions and choose an appropriate methodology that builds theory while taking into account the specific context. The principles of Grounded Theory have been researched for this inquiry and the methodology of Grounded Analysis enacted. Practice-based research data emerged which was then used to inform further inquiry. This process enacts a methodological cycle “that, in the doing transform[s] the very theory and aims that guide it” (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.191).

My chosen stance in the inquiry was as Reflective Practitioner, based on Schwandt’s assertion that “to capture the inter-subjective meanings the enquirer may have to, as methodological requirement, participate in the life worlds of others” (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.193). This research position ideally achieves a thick description of the depth, color, texture and layers of the research subject:

The unusual can be understood in the context of the routine. By considering how observed practices fit into a range of like and unlike activities, the researcher can obtain some perspective on the more uncharacteristic examples. (Deacon, D., 1999, p.261)

In order to best capture the lived context, as dramaturg and as a researcher, I have taken a bricoleur approach, using a range of strategies in tandem. These allowed me to ‘mine’ each case with a multi-faceted perspective and to achieve an overview of each site in its broader terrain (Schwandt, T., 1997, p.20). These strategies also effect an alterity in my positioning- from the grounded and participative (in Case Study One) to the observational and reflective (in Case Study Two). In a pragmatic sense I needed to go into the fieldwork with an open,

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adaptable strategy given the variance in research access I would be allowed in Case One (Australia) compared to Case Two (Germany).

In the section ‘Research Design’ I begin by reporting on the decisions made to assist data collection in the field and later examine those taken to create models for data analysis. I have kept in mind Schwandt’s dictum that the methods of reporting are organized in a way that retains the integrity of each case study so that: “ … even in their form they capture the life world of the emerging project ” (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.192).

2. Research Strategies

In undertaking the fieldwork I utilized a range of research strategies: I realized later how their epistemologies aligned perfectly with the role of the dramaturg, especially when recalling Beddie’s statement that “The dramaturg plays a ‘midwife’ role between theory and practice” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.4). a. Grounded Theory

Grounded Theory as a method of social inquiry is appropriate to this project given that it is generally based in interviewing and can be implemented onsite with a co-strategy of Participant Observation. In the first case study this involved observing and participating in a holistic performance process in collaboration with a large artistic team. Both in my practice as a dramaturg and in my research methods I sought to validate the epistemology that it is from co-created actions that the prime data or knowledge emerges.

Essentially Grounded Theory is a methodology for qualitative research which emphasizes an approach ‘from the ground up.’ This perspective challenges the usual chain of academic research in its progress for:

… it is truly driven by the observation of the phenomenon under study, with inductivism taking the primary role and deductive inferences following on from this. (Bartlett, D. and Payne, S., 1997, p.46)

This process contrasts with positivist methods of qualitative research which proscribe that a researcher brings a theory or strong hypothesis into the field of study derived after a survey of the literature. She then uses the data she/he collects to test, prove or disprove the theory.

Grounded Theory’s detailed instructions on coding data enable the researcher to approach an observational project, particularly in a creative worksite, with more confidence in their ability

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to capture a wealth of detail. The theory’s emphasis on inductive logic and constant reflexivity also mirrors the dramaturg’s interrogative stance:

Observation produces a continuous stream of data which is at one and the same time a body of findings and a renewed set of hypotheses. (Deacon, D., 1999, p.259)

Grounded Theory’s most explicated element is its detailed methodology for processing large varieties and amounts of data. Via induction the researcher identifies emergent Key Categories which “build middle range theoretical frameworks that explain the collected data” (Charmaz, K., 2000, p.509). However the methodological steps should not be seen as strictly linear, they may be simultaneous or cyclic, reflecting back to a preceding step (Strauss, A. and Corbin, J., 1990; Bartlett, D. and Payne, S., 1997).

While the original pioneers of Grounded Theory advocated pursuing their methodology from A-Z, (Strauss, A. and Corbin, J., 1990) other academics have proposed using Grounded Analysis. Here the precepts are utilized as one of a number of post-positive strategies, whilst retaining Grounded Theory’s coding techniques (Courtney, R., 1997; Charmaz, K., 2000). I chose the more open Grounded Analysis as a data collection and analysis strategy to apply to the performance making process.

Grounded Analysis mirrors the relational stance of the dramaturg in the fact that its methods build a three-dimensional view of experiences through accepting different respondents’ voices within the research (Charmaz, K., 2000, p.510). It also validates aesthetics within qualitative research because Grounded Analysis insists on a creative respondent able to ‘make the leap’ in building units of data into concepts and then into related categories (Strauss, A. and Corbin, J., 1990, p. 31). In the same way the dramaturg is required to take leaps across the conceptual aesthetic, social and historical spheres in order to “extract the difficult from the difficult” (Barba, E., 2000, p.60). In a sense the dramaturg’s inductive practice is form of Grounded Analysis.

I chose Grounded Analysis because it allowed me to be totally open to the conditions of a performance making process where I would be working with creative personnel I did not know. In addition I noted that Grounded Analysis has had success with studies of young people as it has the capacity to deal with surprising and contradictory information and assimilate it into new specific theory (Deacon, D., 1999, p.261).

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b. The Reflective Practitioner

By using my practice as a dramaturg, teacher/facilitator, director and researcher to collect and analyse materials I anticipated a dialectic process would characterize my inquiry. Donald Schön has identified this dialectic as one of simultaneous ‘reflection-in-action’ and ‘reflection–on-action.’ He affirms that this is the process of applying “an alternate epistemology of practice in which the knowledge inherent in practice is to be understood as ‘artful doing’”(Smith, M., K, 2001, p.10).

‘Reflection in-action and on-action’ depends on a thorough grounding in the terrain of inquiry. To interpret individual parts the “inquirer must grasp the whole (the complex of intentions beliefs and desires of the text, institutional context, practice form of life, language game etc)” (Schwandt, T., 2000, p.193). In the same way, each moment of a performance should comment upon the work itself and reflect the nature of the process that went into creating it.

The dramaturg’s role has always been that of a Participant Observer and a Reflective Practitioner, someone sited in the middle ground between theory and practice. The dramaturg educates the cast in the ‘traditions’ of the work including its chronology and cultural frames. However the dramaturg must also demonstrate a mastery of the unique language and aesthetic through which this work, as a stand alone entity, will communicate.

The dramaturg is there to engage in ‘reflection-in-action and reflection–on-action’ (Smith, M., K, 2001, p.10). A dramaturg asks a lot of questions of the artistic team: s/he interrogates the emerging ‘world’ and ‘language’ of the work, and thereby embodies Grady’s principle of reflective praxis: “theory is a practice and good practice is theorized” (Grady, S., 1996, p.63). c. Case Studies

Case studies need accurate description and subjective, yet disciplined, interpretation; a respect and a curiosity for culturally different perceptions of phenomena and empathic representation of local settings - all blending within a constructivist epistemology. (Stake, R. E., 2000, p.444)

Stake, the foremost theorist in this field, describes a Case Study as both a process and a product of inquiry in which any tendency on the researcher’s part to generalize must be balanced with the particularities of the case itself. Conversely Stake asserts that the researcher

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must have a selective instinct because: “Not everything about the case needs to be understood” (2000, p.439). Stake also warns against the tendency to compare and contrast cases because comparative description minimizes the value of 'thick' description: “The more the object of the study is a specific, unique bounded system the greater the usefulness” (2000, p.436).

This inquiry seeks to balance my intrinsic, ongoing interest in each site with the limitations of a doctoral study. It is useful at this point to state these limitations as scoping statements. For example it is not useful to compare the German context with the Australian to generate generalized theory as the two traditions of Theatre for Young People are too diverse and have developed over too long a period. In addition the study is not ethnographically focused on the cultures of young people or the role of Theatre for Young People in those cultures. Instead the project remains a dramaturgically focused investigation of two practitioners, their process and its outcomes, with the contextual factors informing these. While some similarities and comparisons are inevitable in terms of understanding each context more clearly, Stake perceptively states: “conclusions about the differences between any two cases are less to be trusted than conclusions about one” (Stake, R. E., 2000, p.444).

Theatre theorists support Stake’s precepts in their description of dramaturgic analysis. Patrice Pavis asserts that dramaturgical analysis recognizes that each work (case) will speak idiosyncratically and “synthetically” with its own unique compositional logic (Pavis in Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.33). Director Eugenio Barba concurs:

Many of the solutions that make an impression on the spectator and help to determine the significance of a performance seem to be suggested by fortuitousness. But what we call "fortuitousness" is a complex order in which several forces act simultaneously, a system of relationships that cannot be explored at a single glance. (Barba, E., 2000, p.59)

This quote demonstrates how complex I anticipated the ‘ground’ of each case study might become.

5. Ethical Considerations

The University Research Human Ethics Research Committee (UHREC) has approved full ethical status of this research with the project’s reference number being QUT 3595H- Low Risk Level 1 (Humans). To the best of my knowledge the research proceeded in the manner approved by this committee. My conduct as sole researcher followed university policy, the National Statement on Conduct in Research Involving Humans and other relevant government

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legislation. As the research unfolded no perceived or actual conflicts of interest with any funding body or commercial activity developed.

Each interviewee was approached prior to interview and asked to read and sign an Informed Consent Package (refer to Appendix) which provided a clear description of the project and the expected benefits of the research. In addition it contained a statement on the perceived risks in relation to confidentiality and the fact that participation was voluntary. Participants could choose to discontinue participation in the project at any time without comment or penalty. I also outlined the procedure for both formal and informal interviews in which participants could authorize my interview transcripts were accurate.

Performers and crew on the POP UP! project were asked to sign an image and graphics release specific to QUT and this research project (refer to Appendix) . I took time to brief the youth performers specifically on the consent involved in my university research and the likely contexts in which their images might be shown. As many of the performers were under eighteen written permission was also acquired from their parents/caregivers.

The Shopfront Theatre youth participants represented an area of ethics in which I took particular care – they were not formally interviewed and as individuals did not comprise the primary research material. The research did not require any excess participation beyond their normal theatrical activities in acting, performing and devising. The material in the research contains no sensitive information about the young people and the only personal information is that which they had already shared publicly in the POP UP! performance.

The perceived risks for the adult interviewees in this project largely related to confidentiality. By sharing their perceptions of fellow practitioners and contemporary work in the field of performance, they may have exposed a personal bias that might not be shared by others. I acknowledged this risk and I have used quotes and commentary from the interviewees only within a framework of Project Analysis and Reflection on Methodology. The interviewees are highly regarded public figures in TYP and I believe that this research maintains their integrity in commenting on its current practices.

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6. Research Design

This doctoral inquiry has been scoped into two practitioner based Case Studies. These were undertaken through the research stances of dramaturg/researcher and researcher/dramaturg respectively: - The first case study in 2006 was within Australian Theatre for Young People (TYP) and focused on TJ Eckleberg, director on a devised performance work titled POP UP! This production was mounted by Shopfront Theatre for Young People in Sydney. - The second case study was undertaken in 2007 within German Children’s and Young People’s Theatre (KJT) and focused on playwright and director Kristo Šagor. Three of his works from 2004-2007 were analysed, FSK-16 , Ja and Frankenstein, in both playscript form and in full theatrical production .

Data collection methods were determined by the contextual factors in each location including my access to the site.

The Australian Case Study took place in a familiar performance site for me; Shopfront Theatre was my old youth theatre and I had spent ten years there as teenager working on group devised performances. I knew that Shopfront in 2006 would be a different site with new ways of working, with new practitioners and with young people from a different century. I wanted to understand how TJ Eckleberg’s process had developed in response to this terrain. Although we had not worked together previously Eckleberg was keen to use me as a dramaturg on the project, given my experience on the site and my interest his original concept.

The German Case Study arose more from ‘happenstance.’ I had no real experience of Kinder- und Jugendtheater until I won a two month language scholarship to Germany which allowed me exposure to the theatres and plays. The national centre for KJT (KJTZ) directed me to Mannheim to see works by innovative director Andrea Gronemeyer. Gronemeyer reintroduced me to the work of playwright Kristo Šagor (who I had coincidentally met at Interplay in 2001). In 2005 I read Šagor’s key works. In his concerns as a playwright, his dramaturgical mannerisms and the staged versions I realized I had an appropriate research subject for this inquiry.

My level of access in Case Study Two was completely different from Case One. I approached the theatre context in Germany from an outsider’s perspective, and with a consciousness that my access on site in Germany would be limited. The scripts became very important sources in

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the study, the ‘ground’ from which I worked upwards. In addition Šagor was very accessible for discussion, online and by telephone. My later research trip to Germany in 2007 thus needed to focus on contextualizing his work through interviews with his colleagues, undertaking performance audits, collecting archival material and ephemera from the theatres and from his publisher/agent. a. Data Collection in the Field: Case Study One

In preparing to ‘go to ground’ on Case Study One I asked myself: - as dramaturg ‘What exactly do you see taking on as the ‘dramaturg’ in this project?’ - and as researcher ‘What structures for the Shopfront Case Study now need to be put into place?’ Grounded Theory maintains that the researcher resist imposing too much theory onto the ‘fertile ground.’ At this point I allowed myself only a small excursion into theory in order to create a Delimitation Statement.14 It established ground rules for me as Reflective Practitioner, the balance I would strike between dramaturgy and observation.

The Delimitation Statement

I created a ‘delimitation statement’ in which I anticipated the types of observable phenomena, how they would manifest and the nature of my response towards them (refer to Digital Appendix/Case Study One). These phenomena would involve four areas of engagement framed on the four spheres of the dramaturg’s practice identified by Dramaturgies: Thematic/Conceptual, Aesthetic Media in process, Social, and Historical (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005, p.7). I projected the questions and tasks that might arise from each sphere. In addition to these frames I set some firmer ground rules and healthy limitations on my role to ensure it was focused on dramaturgical, rather than directorial aspects:

Accept that I cannot be there when all decisions are made but I am there (online) as someone who can hear concepts restated, clarified. Avoid Directing: ask dramaturgical questions rather than directorial questions to assist the process. (Plummer, K., 2006)

14 The research methodology of Grounded Theory required that I undertake only a cursory review of literature before entering the field (cf. page 79 references to Deacon 1999 and Bartlett and Payne 1997). Thus Chapter Two was researched much later in this inquiry. For the same reason the fieldwork in Chapters Five and Six is analysed on its own terms - the case allowed to speak for itself as Stake advocates. The fieldwork is thus aligned with theory later in Chapter Seven: Conclusions.

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A Thick Data Filter

I realized I needed to create a serviceable, portable logbook that could gather as much data as possible, while still enabling my creative participation as dramaturg.

Building from the delimitations statement I devised a daily logbook in tabular form (refer to Digital Appendix/Case Study One). Again this was structurally framed around the four spheres Dramaturgies symposia had identified, namely thematic, aesthetic, social and historical. I used these four areas to direct my notetaking in rehearsals, completing a single double sided A3 sized template per day (Plummer, K., 2006b).

The four spheres became a very basic coding division in my daily logbook that allowed me to record the conceptual ideas and thematic development. It also provided space to note also inseparable contextual factors (ie. the project’s social and historical frames) which also contributed to the unique language of the work.

This daily logbook and the delimitations statement were useful references in the rehearsal room; they guided the extent of my participation and also assisted me to identify the nature of responses required. I could ask myself: Am I being asked to give thematic feedback or an aesthetic assessment and how are the two related?

Researcher, Writer and Archivist

Over the whole production I began collecting and archiving a huge range of written as well as verbally transcribed documents. These spoke together and across the complex web of understandings that formed the textual weave of this production.

Some of the data collected were: director’s concept maps, designer sketches, draft publicity blurbs, logos, fact sheets, emails, newspaper articles, a photo archive from rehearsals, notes from crew meetings, song lyrics created from the Outreach program. I also wrote a list of all the written tasks I was undertaking and the activities in which I participated as dramaturg (refer to Digital Appendix/Case Study One/Data Collection Methods).

My writing included: the daily logs, analysis and feedback questions arising from logs to Eckleberg, also to my university supervisor, meeting records, scene descriptions and online research notes.

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My tasks as dramaturg, which fed into the research included: observation of rehearsals and discussions, moving from one space to another, contributing to crew meetings, making photographic record of devising process, making diagrammatic continuity notes, editing script, dialogue coaching and German language coaching.

A Turning Point

My choice of a context responsive data collection strategy was vindicated in the first few weeks of fieldwork. My expectations of the youth participation in the conceptual arc of the project were not realized; this project was conceptually more director driven than I had anticipated. But my data gathering strategies were open enough to accommodate this - it was only my relational behaviors and questions that needed to be modified.

My role on POP UP! would develop as ‘dramaturg as director’s sounding board’ and the case would become a dramaturgical study of the director’s practical methodology. My original focus on Shopfront Theatre shifted to a focus on the creative practitioner, director TJ Eckleberg. This was not a research crisis but a breakthrough because I was then able to rescope the German Case Study from the broader topic of Schnawwl Theater to concisely focus on playwright Kristo Šagor. b. Data Collection in the Field: Case Study Two

The Research Strategies implemented during Case Study Two have been more traditional and ethnographic, reflecting my position outside the German industry and my limited access to Šagor in an actual production process. In Case Study Two I analyse this writer/director’s practice by using collated and triangulated data from a range of sources including: DVD records of full performances and multimedia segments, reviews, press releases, media profiles, technical cue sheets, interview transcripts and conference notes. Creating an archive of data around a performance project also is part of the dramaturg’s role.

Interviews: A Key Data Collection Method

Thomas R. Lindolf notes that interviews generally occur as “conversations with a purpose” amongst peers but can become, in participative contexts “a kind of talk” amongst people who have gotten to know and trust each other (1995, p.164). The diversity from one case study to another in this project meant that a range of interview styles became necessary. The model of structured interview with predetermined questions and restricted participation by the

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interviewee (Fontana, A. and Frey, J. H., 2000, p.650) characterized only the initial interviews with the key practitioners. These were undertaken to establish whether they fitted the emerging lines in the research inquiry. However as Fontana and Frey assert, a more “informal interviewing in the field” became the most fruitful strategy, as is common in inquiries that utilize Participant Observation (2000, p.652).

As the case studies progressed the interviews with key parties became less structured, initiated in response to a single question or situation and they built together towards larger points. With these practitioners I found that I, as interviewer retained some power as the initiator (Lindolf, T. R., 1995, p.164). However as the discussion continued it often unearthed material beneficial to both parties. I saw practitioners responding to my ‘peer’ role as dramaturg as much as to that of researcher; the respondents were interested in hearing my responses to their work and others. In both Cases I noted that these qualitative interviews became part of a dramaturgical methodology because my intervention, even with more peripheral subjects, had “created a platform for [a two way] reflection in practice” (Beddie, M., Eckersall, P. and Monaghan, P., 2005).

Exploring the Terrain

A contextual survey on KJT in general was undertaken from December 2004 to February 2005, which involved preliminary interviews with Schnawwl director Andrea Gronemeyer, representatives from the KJTZ and the Goethe Institute. I attended the Frankfurt Autorenforum (Playwright’s Forum) where numerous writers and emerging writer’s works were read. In addition I wrote performance audits on seven works I had seen across Germany. This data demonstrated the depth of resources that could be ‘mined’ in German KJT. It also identified Schnawwl Theater as a KJT in which an incisive use of technology onstage had become integral to the dramaturgy of the performance.

Textual Analysis and Translation

By the end of 2006 I had scoped Case Study Two around three of playwright Kristo Šagor’s most recent works, each of which had used multimedia in their performance and were accessed through my contacts at Schnawwl. These texts offered an opportunity to analyse separately Šagor’s dramaturgy ‘on the page’ as writer and his dramaturgy manifest ‘on the stage’ through direction.

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Šagor’s written play scripts were my point of entry and became the ‘ground’ (so to speak) in this Case Study. I initially translated FSK-16 in full but I realized that in order to maintain the rhythm of the plays it was better not to translate all three.15 By constantly referring to the German version I was better able to ‘read’ the unique world in each. The process opened my eyes to many of the key issues that face the dramaturg as translator. These include the degree of direct translation required for research purposes versus the degree of adaptation necessary for a particular audience context.

Šagor in Performance

I returned to Germany from April to May 2007 to engage directly with Šagor and his collaborators and to see his works in production. I also viewed and audited fifteen KJT works showcased at the Augenblick Mal! festival in Berlin. I saw several performances in Mannheim, observing post performance discussions between cast and audience groups. Basically I immersed myself in Kinder- und Jugendtheater!

I collected direct data on Šagor from viewing performances of Ja and Frankenstein and through two DVD viewings of FSK-16 . I then undertook interviews with key personnel: Andrea Gronemeyer (director of Ja and dramaturg on FSK-16) Johanna Wall (dramaturg on Frankenstein), Klaus Schumacher (director of the premiere production of FSK-16 ) and Stephan Rabl (a recent producer of both FSK-16 and Threesome without Simone).

These practitioners provided a very precise picture of Šagor’s work, his working relationships, the industry and audience context for each of these productions. This data would triangulate information provided by Šagor himself via telephone interview. The interviewees also offered detailed accounts of their company context, venues and repertoire.

At both Schnawwl Theater Mannheim and at the Staatstheater Oldenburg I was allowed to sift through the season’s archive and to photocopy any information related to Šagor or the relevant production. This included reviews and writer profiles for each of the three key productions. In addition Šagor’s agent in Berlin, Kiepenhauer Medien allowed me to visit and to photocopy sections of their archive. This information enabled me to gain a picture of Šagor’s artistic trajectory from an emerging artist to an acknowledged/successful playwright.

15 FSK-16 in my working translation is provided in the Digital Appendix/Case Study Two with the three plays in German. Full synopses in English are also provided for Ja and Frankenstein.

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Over two days in Hamburg I was able to observe Šagor directing rehearsal and validate my interviewees’ comments. Shorter live interviews with Šagor were undertaken in Hamburg (Šagor, K., 2007b) and in Berlin (Šagor, K., 2007a). c. Data Analysis

Chapters Five and Six present the Findings from fieldwork undertaken on the ground. In addition to recording the data, the lived world and specific peculiarities of a case study, I needed to present the Key Categories that emerged from the Grounded Analysis. Each of these chapters thus reflects the world of practices in the field (as a dramaturg) and at the same time the analytic processing of the theory-building researcher. However the outcome from each case study needed a form that could be expressed concisely in one thesis chapter.

The writing process evolved through different stages I describe as Models. These can be viewed as analytic cycles organized around theoretical and practical scaffolds. In writing up the fieldwork I again undertook a dramaturg’s analytic stance, shifting between different interpersonal, thematic and aesthetic models to assist creating ‘the bigger picture.’

Case Study One

An Organizer for Writing

Armed with a swathe of raw data from Case Study One I needed to begin processing it. A paradox emerged: the thesis required a teleological structure but also needed to ‘capture’ a shifting holistic process. Even in the ‘write up’ stage the tension between the dramaturgy of the project and the structural requirements of the findings-as-research arose.

I began with dated material from the daily logbooks so an obvious answer was to use a chronological organizer. In Chapter 5 the emerging Key Categories are narrated through the periods of production. The three sections are: The Creative Development Period, the Production Period and the Performance.

Time periods as Organizers also allowed a picture of the emerging work POP UP! to be narrated. I decided to retain this structure across whole chapter to analyse how each of the Key Categories was manifested, initially in Eckleberg’s choice of sources and original concept, later in his methodology in devising and finally in the dramaturgy of the performance.

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Emergent Data Categories and Chapter Sections

In studying my reflective prose from each day’s rehearsal it became apparent that Eckleberg was animating the original sources in the work through two dynamic impulses, displacement and installation. These were creating a unique form of poetic ‘weave’ and aesthetic language in POP UP!

Although I saw the poetic of Displacement evidenced across the whole process, it had most clearly emerged in Eckleberg’s work during the Creative Development Period. My account of the Creative Development Period thus tracks a ‘Dramaturgy of Displacement.’

During the process the team referred to a period of time in the schedule as ‘the Installation.’ This idea of ‘installation’ emerged as an aesthetic impulse and the ‘Dramaturgy of Installation’ is analysed in the second Production Period in Chapter Five.

In the Performance run of POP UP! the Dramaturgy of Displacement and the Dramaturgy of Installation operate together through the ‘work of the actions’ (Barba, E., 1985) to create a unique dramaturgy of performance, one that activated the audience.

Case Study Two

In both collecting and analyzing the data on Kristo Šagor the organization seemed more straightforward. Perhaps this is because the ‘page to stage’ production process is linear, as is script reading and also the structure of a written thesis.

Barba: Two Dramaturgies

Eugenio Barba’s writings on the performance text created a structural scaffold for data analysis in the second case study. Barba states that there are effectively two dramaturgies and Aristotle explained this when he first delineated between “the written text and the way it was represented” (Barba, E., 1985, p.75).

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On this case study I accessed two Dramaturgies in each of the three works - the written text and the text in performance. In Chapter 6 the plays Ja and FSK-16 are analysed in tandem because they are both plays of the ‘page to stage’ model, written by Šagor under the same features of process and both produced by Schnawwl Theater, Mannheim. They are first analysed as written texts for performance and then as texts in full production onstage.

Applying the Key Categories

The categories emerging from the Australian Case Study were directly applied here as analytic tools. The new principles of displacement and installation had emerged as an effective approach by Eckleberg to the conditions of devised process in TYP. But were they also appropriate descriptors for the thematics, aesthetics and dynamics of Šagor’s ‘page to stage’ dramaturgy for young audiences? Had both artists, through creating work for young people in extremely different contexts arrived at the same dramaturgical principles, in order to appeal to the ‘zeitgeist’ of their audience?

The discussion of Ja and FSK-16 is divided into two sections: one on displacement and one on installation . However the analysis of Frankenstein has been dealt with separately for a number of reasons, contextual and dramaturgical. Frankenstein represents a change in context for Šagor’s practice – this is a mainstage production in a regional location and an adaptation from an existing novel. More important is the fact that Šagor had co- written the work with a film director. From its inception Šagor’s written text had embedded the dramaturgy of installation because the written script ‘wove’ intertextually across three media platforms: film, video and the stage.

8. Conclusion

In both Case Studies I believe that my research strategies were enacted with unobtrusive and effective results because the data emerged from activities based around the dramaturg’s natural practice. The dramaturg is a researcher/observer, writer and a creative interventionist. Dramaturg Heather Uprichard admits it is common for a dramaturg to write and hypothesise, to create an “extensive record of the process, often a hybrid between rehearsal journal, research archive documentation, dramaturgical analysis and creative reflection” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.176).

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Chapter Four: The Research Lens - Practitioner Case Studies

1. Introduction

Director TJ Eckleberg (Australia) and playwright/ director Kristo Šagor (Germany) come from two diverse TYP landscapes and traditions of practice, nonetheless both demonstrate an artistic process that is driven by creating work for audiences from 5 to 25 years. Eckleberg uses a devising process in a community based Youth Theatre/Performance company, while Šagor is a published playwright and increasingly a director. He works through the ‘page to stage’ model in municipal KJT theatres across Germany.

Aged 41 and 33 respectively, neither Eckleberg nor Šagor are ‘young people’ or what we might class as ‘emerging artists.’ Their creative practice demonstrates an intergenerational response to the needs of young audiences and also a desire to reflect onstage the new socio- cultural frames that surround us. They embody the ‘Next Generation’ drive for innovation and relevance internationally in contemporary TYP. Both Eckleberg and Šagor have developed new methodologies of process and utilize a range of media, including the digital. Interestingly both come from diverse backgrounds: TJ Eckleberg still sees himself foremost as a musician, Kristo Šagor also composes music and has maintained an ongoing contribution to journalism and politics. These practitioners thus demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of creative artists who are increasingly attracted to work in the TYP sector. 16

This chapter functions as a ‘lens’ in that it draws the research terrain into a narrower focus onto the two selected practitioners and performance texts. It begins by introducing their working context and motivations. It also provides a description of the most important of Šagor and Eckleberg’s previous works, illustrating why these practitioners emerged as research subjects. Finally this chapter introduces the performance works that comprise the research fieldwork providing contextual facts and thematic summaries.

2. TJ Eckleberg (Australia)

TJ Eckleberg has been Artistic Director and CEO of the Shopfront Theatre for Young People, Sydney since 2003. His employment background includes experiences as a secondary drama educator and creative work as a record producer, musician and soul singer. Eckleberg sees his transition to theatre directing inspired by a combination of eclectic adventures.

16 Refer to both artists Curriculum Vitae in the Digital Appendix

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In 1999, after exposure to the renowned British Community and Street Theatre group Welfare State International, Eckleberg created two large-scale site specific performances with boys at Birrong Boys High School (Eckleberg, T., 2008b).

The performance used massive puppets, fireworks and hip hop to connect these pretty uncooperative young guys and explore violence. It was a pretty transformative experience. (Piening, S., 2007)

However it was through his involvement in “industrial vaudeville” performances at fringe venues in Sydney that he “became increasingly interested in the possibilities of theatre and the limits of performance, asking ‘How can we combine seemingly different elements to produce unexpected results? ” (Piening, S., 2007)

Yet after more than five years directing performances at Shopfront Eckleberg still claims he essentially sees himself as a musician, producer and singer: “I'm just lucky that so many of the skills are the same” (Piening, S., 2007).

The two previous quotes characterize Eckleberg’s creative practice; the major productions he has mounted at Shopfront Theatre require him to combine the roles of theatre director, youth arts mentor, business manager and multimedia creative facilitator. Social and contextual change in the youth arts landscape is reflected here in the work history, creative roles and skills required of a TYP professional.

On each project Eckleberg allows the participants (from a range of local community groups) to share their story. In 2003 Eckleberg directed Coda with residents of the Juvenile Justice system; in 2004 he worked with the local Islander community on Waddya Call Me? In Angels in the Architecture (2005) Eckleberg oversaw construction of an aerial urban ghetto, integrating Shopfront performers with other youth in the community who had physical and mental disabilities.

Eckleberg’s ethos demonstrates a continuation of the traditions of TYP, the tenets of empowerment that have always motivated professional artists to work in and for this sector:

My continuing interest is to question: what is a performer and a performance when it’s not about people trained in technical excellence? What are these performers/participants rights to be to representation through theatre, even though they are not trained and may not be able to be trained? Shopfront’s basis in devising has always been open to such challenges and to honor their responses. (Eckleberg, T., 2005a)

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All Eckleberg’s Shopfront projects have involved the building of a physical, immersive environment within which diverse performative elements are sited. To achieve interdisciplinarity and spatial immersion Eckleberg has brought in specialist practitioners from a range of disciplines. Artists who have shared their skills with Shopfront’s youth performers include: ERth, (large scale image makers and puppeters), Legs On the Wall (physical and aerial artists), krump and hip/hop dance tutors, multimedia and sound designers, local composers, rap artists and DJ’s.

a. The Context: Shopfront Theatre for Young People, Sydney

Shopfront is a contemporary arts centre – a cultural network and production co- operative where all young people, regardless of background or ability can create themselves. At its multi-arts facility in south eastern metropolitan Sydney, and on- line in the virtual world, Shopfront reaches and responds to young people at their point of need and interest. It’s a one stop creative haven where under 25’s make engaging new work and meaningful connections. (Shopfront: Create Yourself! , 2008)

Shopfront Theatre, Sydney. Image © K. Plummer 2006

Founded in 1976, Shopfront Theatre is one of Australia’s oldest Theatres for Young People. It runs workshops in devised performance for young people aged 8-25 years and youth outreach programs that engage targeted community groups and ‘youth at risk.’ It also provides specialized theatre skills training. Performance/presentation is the outcome of most

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workshops and the theatre has an extensive record in national and overseas performance exchanges. The stimulus for performance devising at Shopfront has always been the contemporary issues that face the young people of the area. The theatre collaborates frequently with other community agencies (including two local councils) to co-articulate these issues and its project funding relies on initiating such community cultural development activities.

For over thirty years Shopfront’s artistic vision has been built on the philosophy of youth empowerment and community engagement. These goals have traditionally been articulated through participant involvement in ‘playbuilding’ workshops; a collaborative devising process leading to public performance:

Shopfront’s reputation and success demonstrates the power and quality available to ordinary young people through playbuilding. Most importantly Shopfront has given its young people, through playbuilding, a strong theatrical voice that is constantly entertaining and thought provoking. (Bray, E., 1991, p.2)

However the contemporary face of Shopfront has rapidly altered as it continues to respond to artistic and technological trends. During his term as Artistic Director TJ Eckleberg, has taken the initiative to steer this change.

In 2006 the theatre was re-branded as ‘Shopfront - a contemporary arts centre’(Shopfront: Create Yourself! , 2008) in order to reflect the broad range of practices that the facility now offers. These include: a recording studio, visual arts installation spaces, editing suites, desktop graphics, lighting and sound studios, dance and physical theatre spaces. Eckleberg admits that the title changed had a deeper significance:

The title ‘Theatre for Young People’ does not have a lot of coinage today. For our participants the word ‘theatre’ is often associated with their experiences in Higher School Certificate Drama or with school and it evokes the quasi-modernist classical traditions - an experience that's often limited to learning lines, performing a script and getting praised for it. The kids who come here are not so connected with a ‘theatre literacy’ - they do not go and see it. (Eckleberg, T., 2008a)

The name change was also necessary to ‘brand’ the complex and to continue to attract a participant group over 16 years as a senior ensemble. In Eckleberg’s experience:

Young people seem to be suspicious of being referred to as 'young people' - particularly as they get into their late teens to early twenties … Perhaps they feel this is an easy way to marginalize their experiences. We've focused on the work and its range in our title rather than labeling the participants. (Eckleberg, T., 2008a)

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Eckleberg created Artslab in 2007 to build participation of the older youth and to ensure a range of arts activity in the complex. Artslab is a year long internship program for 18-25 year olds in which they access the arts complex under a part time creative fellowship, producing a work-in-progress and a final creative piece. They also assist the professional team on major productions and in mentoring Shopfront’s younger participants. The 2007 and 2008 Artslab cohorts have used Shopfront’s resources to produce works demonstrating the range of ‘contemporary arts’ practice: cabaret singing, film and installation art, multimedia/physical theatre, pure physical theatre, performance art and ritual.

Led by Eckleberg, Shopfront as a ‘contemporary arts centre’ has effected the transition from devised youth theatre facility to contemporary performance hub. In December 2007 Shopfront, along with only ten other companies, was granted Key Producer status by the Australia Council in recognition of its ongoing innovative work. This title grants six years of continuous federal funding to the company under the Community Partnerships Programme. More than a recognition of innovative practice it provides the company with the financial stability to further its artistic development and community engagement (Muir, J., 2007).

Shopfront is thus worthy site for this research, demonstrating innovation and investigation into new forms and processes in the TYP landscape. “Devising is still our core activity but we take multidisciplinary approach now - that includes theatre but is not limited to it” (Eckleberg, T., 2008a). Evidence of this interdisciplinarity is found in the three previous productions at Shopfront conceptualized and directed by TJ Eckleberg. All of these were large scale works incorporating multimedia in design, performance and process. b. Eckleberg’s Approach

Eckleberg himself describes his creative process as an “immersive, organic and sometimes accidental approach to theatre and performance” (Eckleberg, T., 2008b). Certainly his devising approach is distinctive and it is reflected directly in the aesthetic environment that his audience navigate in the performance product.

Eckleberg’s ongoing creative drive or core impulse is his desire to articulate the issues of the human and the post human in the contemporary social construct and the questions that youth face in self-identity within it. He sees the use of multi-media as an intrinsic part of the contemporary creative process, of any inquiry within our technology-framed society:

Using contemporary form seems like a more natural and self-evident way to continue to access the perspective and views of contemporary audiences and participants.

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Particularly in a culture and context in which film, television and now the internet are the most pervasive means of cultural exchange. (Eckleberg, T., 2008a)

Eckleberg’s ongoing development of multi-mediated performance in Shopfront’s major productions is another tool by which the youth theatre continues to reach out to its community, increasing the breadth of participants and new audience members. The works also reach into the youth community via their utilization of “everyday performativities” (Gattenhof, S., 2007, p.6) incorporating, amongst other skills hip hop dance and graffiti art.

Each production has extended beyond the frame of a simple live theatrical event. To achieve this Eckleberg is not afraid to physically ‘work upon’ the whole textual weave from small to large scale; projecting community groups as video excerpts within a live performance, live webcasting, radio feeds, large scale installation, on site projection in public space. This approach to scale and location often results in the audience being immersed in the performance landscape, installed into the event as part of its unique “grounded aesthetic” (Hunter, M., 1999, p.18). c. Previous Productions

Coda (2003)

This performance was developed from young people’s perceptions that we are living in a surveillance society that operates by generating paranoia and complicity. The process involved initial workshops and showings with young people in two juvenile justice centres, then workshops with Shopfront participants aged 16-25 who collaborated with a video artist and designer.

The theatre at Shopfront was completely covered with white cloth to create a restrictive white box effect upon the audience. They entered through a transparent room with video monitors inside and during the work could only see transparently the action/sounds within that room. Central to the performance were head mounted, infrared cameras and fifteen live camera feeds. These provided footage that appeared on a five by ten metre backdrop screen. Authority characters interviewed their subjects in an ‘interrogation frame’ (also mounted with live cameras) and attempted to erase the individual data that constituted their memories (Annual Report , 2003, p.7).

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Whaddya Call Me? (2004)

An interactive theatre/radio performance, centred on the issues of young people in public space. Whaddya call me? asked where young people should hang out, who has right to public space and what to do you do when you’re called something you’re not. (Annual Report , 2004, p.8)

In this site specific work the audience were corralled by a huge moveable projection screen into a dark, urban alleyway. The performance consisted of Islander youth dancers, actors, musicians and singers, puppetry and live graffiti artists. The audience danced and interacted with the performers and participated in a community radio vox pop during the work.

Angels in the Architecture (2005)

This project involved a cast of 25 performers, comprising Shopfront ensemble members and intellectually and physically handicapped participants from four Disability Service Centres. The theatre building was again completely reconfigured with sets built around all four walls to over two metres high. Performers were flown across the space and transported on a movable platform across a sea of audience members. Part of the vision was to enable disabled participants to perform while liberated from the ground. They also created their own audio soundscape and were re-imaged on numerous projection screens.

3. The Fieldwork: POP UP! 2006

Eckelberg originally conceived POP UP! as:

A site-specific interactive pop-up book that combines two epic myths, contemporary styling and an interactive multi-media format to explore issues of control and self- determination in the lives of a diverse group of young people. (Eckleberg, T., 2005c)

By its August 2006 premiere POPUP! had evolved into a huge hybrid performance featuring a youth ensemble who performed in a range of spaces and manipulated audience proxemics across the theatre complex. The building was completely installed into the production and the final performance traversed the site with an audience limited to only sixty each night. During the performance the audience were constantly moving: from a grassed area 300 metres from the theatre, across the main road, then into the house and rehearsal spaces through three different entryways, then out into the courtyard and finally seated in the large theatre space at the rear. The piece was left openended, it was ‘concluded’ in a way by the audience participating in a ‘krump’dance party.

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Logistically the POP UP! project involved thirteen performers from the Shopfront Ensemble, from 17 to 21 years of age plus workshop participants from Two Outreach groups: the St George Area Mental Health facilities and the indigenous residents of the Kirinari Hostel. The project also involved hip hop workshops at the Youth Zone drop in centre, using the musical skills of local rap composers. Apart from devising the project allowed youth participants the opportunity to skill themselves over four months in aerial training, krump dance, puppetry and manipulation of large scale images. 17

An artistic team and crew of over twelve people worked on the performance. These included the director Eckleberg and assistant director, specialist image makers, puppetry designers and animateurs from ERth, an aerial artist, a multimedia and projection artist, a krump and hip hop dance choreographer, and of course a dramaturg. This artistic team first met in December 2005, then in February and April 2006 to begin planning for the show. We began by expanding upon Eckleberg’s conceptual frames for the piece and suggesting ideas from our discrete skills areas that would embody these concepts.

Training for the project’s performers began in the April school holidays; five of the Core Ensemble, plus the director, participated in a two week trip to the Ausdance National Youth Dance festival in Horsham, Victoria. Here they participated in workshops in contact improvisation acro-balance, fire twirling, contemporary dance hip hop and capoeira. This event was followed by a week long intensive in Natimuk with YSpace, specialists in aerial theatre, rockclimbing and dance. Here performers were encouraged to test their physical limits via risk taking challenges (Annual Report , 2006). This journey was more than a group bonding exercise; it achieved the creation of a core performance group with a skills base in dance and aerial techniques plus a deeper understanding of the physical parameters that the POP UP! project would entail. The POPUP! cast were going to be required to train physically for four months and develop their own hip hop and krump dance sequences.

Wednesday night devising workshops with a senior ensemble of youth performers began in late April 2006. On weekdays Outreach groups participated in two separate workshops with the assistant director. Three ‘Weekend Intensives’ in late May and June provided the opportunity for these groups to come together. During July the project was installed as a site- specific work into the building. From the July school holidays onwards the production was

17 POP UP! was an innovative project simply in terms of foregrounding krump dance style. The youth audience were keen to explore krumping at close quarters during the performance, at the after party and in the public workshops offered during POPUP ’s development.

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rehearsing both days on the weekend and Wednesday nights. The piece was presented in mid August over a two week run from Wednesday to Saturday nights.

Eckleberg’s process and the resulting performance was an achievement on the larger scale. POP UP! contained all the aesthetic skills and elements described above: krump dance, small and large scale puppetry, movement, aerial work, plus an audience and cast traveling around the whole theatre complex.

4. Enter the Dramaturg/Researcher

The conceptual frames TJ Eckleberg had presented in his 2005 funding proposal attracted me to the POP UP! Project. I was interested in his starting point. This was a re-examination of the classic, yet open ended texts of Jabberwocky and the Pied Piper in order to create a contemporary, choose-your-own-adventure narrative (Eckleberg, T., 2005c). In addition Eckleberg saw the audience as participants, who would, through the performance be given an opportunity to ‘play out’ the difficult decisions and the turning points of youth:

At what point are young people really responsible for their own decisions, and at what point can they truly say their life is of their own choosing? (Eckleberg, T., 2005a)

I offered myself as a dramaturg and researcher on the project in order to understand how Eckleberg’s devising process would integrate the cast’s responses, his own thematic goals, the various aesthetic tools brought by the team and his goal to ensure that the piece remain unresolved and open to the audience’s active participation.

5. Kristo Šagor (Germany)

Aged 33, Kristo Šagor is now one of Germany’s most awarded KJT playwrights and his plays are constantly in production. Šagor has written for most of the leading KJT companies in Germany and he has won numerous awards including the Halle Thalia Theater Dramatists Prize and the Audience Award at the Heidelberg Playmarket. In 2005 he won the prestigious Frankfurt Writers Forum Prize for Kinder- und Jugendtheater. Šagor’s plays include: Dreier Ohne Simone (1999), Durstige Vögel (2000), Fremdeln (2001), Unbeleckt (2002), Federn Lassen (2003), FSK-16 (2003), Trüffelschweine (2004), Tell (2005), Ja (2006) and Frankenstein (2007) (Šagor, K., 2008a).

Šagor trained in theatre, literature and linguistics at Berlin’s Free University and then spent year at Trinity College, Dublin. From 2002 to 2004 he was playwright in residence at the

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Bremer Theater, an important position where he was able to collaborate with the highly regarded MOKS ensemble, then led by director/writer Klaus Schumacher. In Bremen he created three premiere works Fremdeln , FSK-16 and Trüffelschweine .

Šagor was a German playwright delegate at the Interplay Europe festival in 2000 and in 2001 at World Interplay (the Biennial International Young Playwrights Festival). He returned to World Interplay in 2005 as tutor and dramaturg.

In recent years Šagor has gained much experience in directing, both his own works and classic adaptations. In 2005 his production of his own work FSK-16 ( at Schnawwl Theater) was selected for presentation at the Augenblick Mal! festival in Berlin as part of its best practice showcase of two years KJT repertoire.

Kristo Šagor is a playwright/director who seeks innovation in both his writing and directing choices. Šagor usually explores contemporary characters in edgy, high stakes situations, involving questions of identity and sexuality: “the stories are authentic and there are a variety of psychological situations here” (Rabl, S., 2007). Not surprisingly Šagor is listed as one of several writers who are propelling the new performance dynamic of Junges Theater within the KJT repertoire (Fangauf, H. and Schumacher, K., 2008, p.25).

“Šagor’s work has a very contemporary voice and his works do not patronize a youth audience” asserts Stephan Rabl, Director of Dschungel Theater, Vienna having programmed two of Šagor’s works back to back in 2007. “Both these works [‘ Threesome without Simone’ and ‘FSK-16’] have been popular because they are on the issues that concern young audiences: fears, identity, sexuality, homosexuality.” Rabl particularly appreciates Šagor’s perceptivity in portraying teenage males: “In Threesome without Simone the boys have very different personalities and he shows these vulnerabilities very clearly” (Rabl, S., 2007).

Šagor repeatedly uses the motif of projected and re-projected identity in his plays, fascinated with this as a fundamental construction for contemporary youth.

For me the whole thing about invention is very much about our time: for example Madonna. Her strategy is to invent a new self for every new CD. All the young crowd consume this as: who am I, who should I be? Plus there’s the TV shows… like they search for the best pop singer etc in each country- its all about ‘invent yourself’… not who you are.(Šagor, K., 2008b)

He then uses innovative tools of projection and contemporary technology to stage these works, specifically for a technology educated subscriber audience of young people.

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a. The Context: Schnawwl Theater, Mannheim

My decision to incorporate a case study from Germany was based on the idea of examining dramaturgy in a TYP context that was not constrained by the funding issues that limit Australian practice. In Germany, through the municipal system, KJT performances regularly utilize high level theatre technology as part of their everyday tools of stage production.

Originally Schnawwl Theater was the chosen research subject - because it has been awarded at a national level for its performance quality. In addition Schnawwl had developed their own principles for integrating the dramaturgies of the stage and the screen. They regularly combine live performers and sets with created projections via film, video and using MAYA, a three dimensional image creation program (Reisner, M., 2005a; Reisner, M., 2004; Reisner, M., 2005b). Interestingly the National Theater, Mannheim is one of the oldest municipal theatres in Germany and was the base for one of the founders of dramaturgy Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Thus, like Shopfront Theatre in Australia, the Schnawwl Theater in Mannheim can be identified as a traditional theatre site that now is pursuing innovative tools to engage contemporary audiences.

Schnawwl Theater, Mannheim. Image © K. Plummer 2007

Schnawwl Theater remains as important a frame in my analysis of Kristo Šagor as Shopfront Theatre does for TJ Eckleberg. Šagor’s ongoing involvement with Schnawwl allowed him full exposure to the process of integrating multimedia technology into the staging of his plays and

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to embed this in his writing. The National Theater and Schnawwl produced three Šagor works in the period 2003- 2007 and offered him a range of experiences beyond these working in repeated collaboration with the acting ensemble, the multimedia department and its director, Marc Reisner. By late 2006 the collaborative platform at Schnawwl had propelled Šagor into new opportunities, namely mainstage writing and directing. b. Šagor’s Approach

Kristo Šagor’s practice, moving across the roles of playwright to director, became important for this study because it brought up the question of a dramaturgy which ‘sits’ between the writers and director’s role. The Case Study offered the opportunity to examine how Šagor ‘wrought’ his characteristic dramaturgy across both roles, as writer and director on two of the three chosen works.

The case study is also scoped around works in which the KJT ‘page to stage process’ has been opened to collaborative creation. In writing both plays ( Ja and FSK-16) Šagor participated in a devising period with the original cast and director of around ten days in total. Improvisations were led by the director but allowed for Šagor’s input on the floor. He then submitted a treatment to the company for discussion and by the time full rehearsals began he had delivered the playscript in its final draft (Šagor, K., 2008c).

As a director Šagor is valued for his collaborative, team building approach: “I like Kristo because he has a really open process with the actors and the company. He’s always open to discussion” (Schumacher, K., 2007). Johanna Wall, dramaturg at the Staatstheater Oldenburg, admits this openness is absolutely necessary given the exhaustive scale of the projects Šagor conceives. “We got a great commitment to the project from everyone involved. Kristo is very open and nice to people and is able to achieve that” (Wall, J., 2007).

As both a writer and director Šagor ‘works’ the audience thoroughly over his premise, the situation, and characters. Klaus Schumacher employed Šagor as both writer in residence (at MOKS in Bremen) and in 2007 as director on a classic, The Confusion of the Pupil Törless by Werther: The play [ Törless ] is about trying on that aspect of identity, plus testing out your power over others and also torture. These are themes that Kristo is also interested in exploring in his own writing… The play is about the thinking world and about a character who tries to do a lot of thinking to clarify his world, and I see that in Kristo’s nature. (Schumacher, K., 2007)

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Šagor asks the audience not only to think about characters and themes but also draws attention to the structural frames of the work through which he has allowed them to perceive it. Šagor’s interrogation of the frames has been enhanced through the opportunities he has been given to work with audio visual installation in technology equipped companies such as Schnawwl.

Before examining the three Šagor plays that comprise the fieldwork in this Case Study it is valuable to describe two key plays/productions that characterize Šagor’s concerns and the development of his practice from writer to director. c. Previous Productions

Threesome without Simone (1999)

Threesome without Simone was written while Šagor was a Youth Club member and this work led to his professional breakthrough as a playwright (Wall, J., 2008). Threesome without Simone remains Šagor’s most internationally recognized work and this play has had a number of English productions. The ‘Threesome’ in question are three boys waiting outside the school principal’s office to be questioned about the sexual assault of fellow student, Simone on a school trip. All three had a questionable association with Simone. Each character exits for the interview and the other two ‘work upon’ each other in an emotional powerplay. From these triangular interactions the audience tries to piece together the truth about the assault, Simone’s character and each of their personal claims upon her.18

Tell (2005)

Tell originated from a concept by Marc Reisner and was a one off production by National Theater Mannheim to celebrate the 200 year anniversary of Schiller’s birth. Tell (a pun on Schiller’s famous hero) was performed at a cinema in Mannheim and featured film sequences created by co-director Marc Reisner. Reisner, Šagor and dramaturg, Andrea Gronemeyer had married these continuously with the live action:

Basically two people live in a kind of second life - in a Virtual world- and the main character uses a joystick to control all his (virtual) body movements. He can’t really move or walk. The conflict is that he is seeking to live the real life but there is

18 An English translation of Threesome without Simone (‘Dreier Ohne Simone’) is available from the Goethe Institute’s online theatre library, via their website. http://www.goethe.de/kue/the/bib/bib/deindex.htm (accessed 23/01/08)

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actually none to go to. We see this second life through the film sections. (Gronemeyer, A., 2007)

Both of these works resemble in their thematics and staging, features in the three Case Study works. The similarity between Threesome without Simone and Šagor’s later play FSK-16 is the exploration of a tightly woven psychological dynamic between three manipulative characters. The production of Frankenstein in Oldenburg in 2007 came about as a result of the response to Tell , a multimedia event that relied on stage and screen co-narration, and the first collaboration on that scale by Šagor and Reisner.

6. Introduction to the Fieldwork: FSK-16 , Ja and Frankenstein

Three key works of Kristo Šagor comprise the fieldwork in the German Case Study, both as playscripts and in production.

1. The February 2004 production of FSK-16 at Schnawwl Theatre, Mannheim. 2. The April 2006 premiere production of Ja , again at Schnawwl Theater. 3. The April 2007 premiere production of Frankenstein at the Staatstheater, Oldenburg.

a. FSK-16 : A Play for Youth of Sixteen Years and Over

The premiere 2003 production of FSK-16 was devised and workshopped by the MOKS Ensemble, Bremen and directed by Klaus Schumacher. In February 2004 it was restaged by Schnawwl Theater and directed by Kristo Šagor himself. This production was invited to take part in the biennial showcase at the Augenblick Mal! festival in May 2005.

By 2005 FSK-16 was in production at other KJT companies in Germany (in Mainz, Osnabruck and Ulm). It has since gone into repertoire at several other KJT in Switzerland and Austria. FSK-16 can be regarded as currently Šagor’s most popular work, along with his original hit Threesome Without Simone (1999).

The following plot summary of FSK-16 (translated by myself) comes from the 2007 production at Dschungeltheater, Vienna. I credit this production’s director, Volker Schmidt as the author:

As usual Stipe, a young Croatian boy, slouches into his seat for the late screening at his local cinema. But the film does not come on -because tonight two fifteen year old girls in the audience want to make ‘Something Big’ finally happen in their lives. The German-Turkish Figen finds her family really ‘uncool,’ Kirsten feels the same about her asocial home life. In both girls an aggressive mixture of life - lust and fear is

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urgently seeking an outlet. And then they both hit upon the ideal project: to force a young man to tears. Stipe is a good choice/object for them - he finds himself unsuspectingly enrolled in their game. He is then ‘put through the hoops’ via direct seduction and feminine cunning, provocation and rejection in turns. Finally Stipe is brought to his weakest point – when a suppressed war trauma is propelled to the surface. Then both girls discover that nobody can come away unscarred when you play such ‘all out’ emotional mind games. A thrilling triangular tale is told here, embedded in youth language patterns and the vernacular, using wordplay and creating surprising twists (Schmidt, V., 2007).

b. Ja : A play for Children Eight Years and Over

‘Ja ’ was written in early 2006 and premiered at Schnawwl Theatre in Mannheim. The work arose from an initiative by publisher Verlag der Autoren in Frankfurt am Main. They asked six KJT theatres to commission a playwright to create a new work on the themes of God, faith and belief. The resulting scripts were published in the Verlag’s regular series ‘ Spielplatz .’ The productions were also presented at a short festival in Berlin.

Schnawwl’s Artistic Director Andrea Gronemeyer commissioned Kristo Šagor to write a broadly ecumenical story that could engage children and adults from a range of cultural backgrounds, bringing into discussion the meaning of life and the big question of Faith. (Gronemeyer, A., 2007) In the summer of 2005 the Schnawwl Ensemble, Gronemeyer and Šagor improvised for two weeks:

We used a fairly free improvisation process. The cast were given some obstacles and this lead to a few characters coming up. The character of Elias (the astronaut) for example came out of the improvisation period. But other roles were developed in the script later. (Gronemeyer, A., 2007)

Šagor developed the full playtext of Ja from these workshops. The outcoming work ‘ Ja ’ then ran in the Schnawwl repertoire for over a year. In December 2005 Ja was awarded the German Children’s Theatre Prize by the Frankfurt Writers Foundation.

I have translated the plot summary below from the 2006/7 season programme on the Schnawwl Theater website, crediting the dramaturg, Stefanie Jerg here as author:

Lily has run away from home and sits in a train traveling to the (North Sea holiday) island of Amrum. In her luggage she has packed a cherry stone and her secret mission: shortly before her grandfathers death she promised him she would plant a cherry stone on Amrum for him. Why? - she does not know. The same way she has no idea why her grandfather had to die. He promised her that the journey would help

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her to understand it all. Of course the journey to Amrum is a long one and on her way Lily gets to know quite a few of the other passengers, who have their own big questions about Faith. And none of them seem to provide a satisfying answer to her burning question: Where does your soul go to, when you die? And what answers are contained in the first train carriage? Where everyone claims all will be clarified. What does this have to do with the mysterious Raphael, the conductor with noble plans, or with Sid Maus, the ice cream seller with lower motives. And what did Grandpa mean when he farewelled her, saying God has no hand other than your own? (Jerg, S., 2006)

c. Frankenstein : A Multimedia Performance for the Mainstage

This 2007 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel was co-written by Marc Reisner and Kristo Šagor and performed on the adult mainstage at the Staatstheater Oldenburg using multiple media: video, film and live action. Essentially the film and TV sections were directed by Reisner, the overall production and live direction by Šagor. Dramaturg Johanna Wall traces the origins of the production concept:

The idea for Frankenstein came from Marc Reisner but he’s a film director and producer. He wrote the story but then encouraged us to hire Kristo Šagor to write and direct it for us for the stage. Kristo then totally rewrote the play. (Wall, J., 2007)

The piece was produced on the mainstage by the Staatstheater Oldenburg, a regional company (state funded) in a fairly conservative semi-rural area. The Staatstheater’s decision to undertake such an expensive, multimedia premiere was based on their need, as a regional theatre to appeal to an audience of all ages. As this company only premieres three new works each year this project was an important event:

Yes, of course this production of Frankenstein is a risk for us especially playing it in the big house [i.e. the mainstage – a huge opera sized proscenium arch theatre] . But it’s the right text to play there - there is a great tension between the traditional building, the classic story and the use of the new media in the staging. (Wall, J., 2007)

Frankenstein is ‘plotted’ by the linkages the audience make across three media. These piece together the secret history of the doctor’s research, his family context and immediate events. The concept of the work was to investigate into Doctor Frankenstein, a contemporary scientist/celebrity:

Doctor Frankenstein has won the Nobel Prize for medicine because he has freed the human race from the HIV/AIDS virus. But this discovery was only a by product - he continued the secret research that had become his life’s work. Frankenstein was experimenting to clone a human being. Via different media, the text plays upon several time frames.

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Live on the stage we see the present; the Frankenstein family are broken apart by a court case. They then react to the discovery of The Doctor’s secret research and, finally are each hunted down by his loveless Monster. The performance actually begins on a video screen. We are shown a news report- The Doctor’s youngest son was found murdered a year previously and their nanny has just been convicted to life imprisonment. The famous Frankenstein family however insist upon her innocence and will appeal the verdict.

On video images of the family in happier times are interspersed with this live action. They appear on talk shows when The Doctor and his wife were proud of his Nobel Prize achievement. However there are also family shots that appear to have been taken by a secret camera, through the bushes at their house. They are like a stalker home video. And the only character who appears with a Handycam onstage is the Monster.

Filmed segments become more significant informing upon the live journey’s outcomes. These are set chronologically a year later, at the end of The Doctor’s worldwide hunt for the Monster. This search ends in the ice of the Antarctic where the nearly dead Doctor is rescued by a scientific research team. He is dragged into their base station and there ‘confesses,’ releases his whole sorry story to the research leader, Dr Solberg. (Šagor, K., 2006c)

7. Enter the Researcher/Dramaturg

I first met Kristo Šagor when tutoring at World Interplay in Townsville, QLD in 2001. His play Threesome without Simone was already a European success story and although he had brought that to the festival he had already moved on to other writing.

All extracts from Šagor’s plays in the body of this exegesis are from my own English translations. A full translation of the whole script of FSK-16 is provided in the Appendix (Plummer, K., 2006c). I view this translation process as a facet of my practice-based research as was the three months spent as dramaturg onsite at Shopfront Theatre, Sydney for Case Study One.

8. Conclusion

Both Eckleberg and Šagor are classified as successful artists in the field of Young People’s Theatre and each has a solid track record of commended productions. Both have been able to develop their practice through theatres of long standing tradition. These companies, Shopfront Theatre in Sydney and Schnawwl Theater in Mannheim, are now recognized as sites for performance innovation, to a large degree through their support and development of these artists’ works.

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Dramaturgically what unites Eckleberg and Šagor is their process. Explicitly, both demonstrate an initiative to integrate multimedia in the concept, creation and production of their works. By this I do not just refer to audio visual elements but a re-conception of the theatre aesthetics incorporating a complex weave of performance tools: in Eckleberg’s case this includes physical theatre, circus, urban and street music/dance and architecture, and in Šagor’s a range of media tools and digital mise en scene.

Implictly both Šagor and Eckleberg go beyond the staging: their conceptual frames, in one work after another, problematise youth culture in the digital age and drive one source against each other to work through these issues. Their dramaturgy more often than not seeks to destabilize any scaffolds it has created and draw the audience’s attention to the construction of the work rather than its tidy resolution. Both artists resist providing a neat unified dramatic structure. From my early research on these two artists it became apparent that both see a unified dramatic as no longer one of the ‘rules of engagement’ for an audience of twenty first century young people.

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Chapter Five: Artist Case Study One: TJ Eckleberg (Australia)

1. The Dramaturg and Director: Building a Shared Language

For this first Case Study I adopted the research stance of Participant Observer. I took up the dual roles of production dramaturg and postgraduate researcher on POP UP! a large scale devised performance work, conceived and directed by Shopfront Theatre for Young People’s Artistic Director and CEO, TJ Eckleberg. POP UP! was in production for nine months and as the dramaturg my creative practice involved over three months on site. Telephone and email consultations with director TJ Eckleberg occurred for over a year.

In this chapter I present my observations on Eckleberg’s personal devising methodology and how this was reflected in the latent dramaturgy of POP UP! 19 As outlined in the methodology chapter, I entered this fieldwork with a framework for gathering thick data ‘from the ground up.’ This was based around the four spheres of the dramaturg’s practice and was recorded via daily logbook entries. Quotes from this logbook appear throughout this chapter in the format (Plummer, K., 2006a, date). Quotes from the POPUP! performance are also included with reference to unit numbers (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit number). These units of action appear in a scripted version of the performance compiled by assistant director, Kate Clugston.

Before working on this project I had no experience of TJ Eckleberg’s directing methodology or devising process. As Eckleberg was initiator of the concept, recruiter and director of a large creative team, Artistic Director and CEO of the whole theatre arts complex, I knew that his creative concept and drive would be essential to the dramaturgy of the work. Three of the creative team were new to his process and four had worked on previous Shopfront projects with him. Given his previous experience with the team my first goal was to negotiate an effective dramaturg - director relationship.

I saw my role as a dramaturg in a contemporary devised TYP project, as a very practical one ‘forging’, ‘weaving’ and ‘working upon’ raw materials. Initially I would assist in ‘wrighting,’ assisting the team to create a conceptual ‘weave’ from the original source texts and devised material. This largely involved questioning the team using the unique language derived from the source materials. I could strengthen this ‘weave’ by always using this shared language on the floor with cast and the team.

19 Refer to POP UP! Flyer image in digital appendix © Shopfront Theatre 2006

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I would also question how each of the team were realizing the conceptual ‘world’ through the aesthetics/media of their own departments: design, puppetry, krump dance movement, dialogue, monologue etc. During the creative development my attention to devising with specific aesthetic media would be important; how were these experiments and skills articulating the shared language of POP UP! ? My questions might challenge individual team member’s perspectives because, as the dramaturg I would question on behalf of the larger directorial concept, rather than represent the ideas of a single department. Given such a large artistic team, I anticipated that this project would reinforce that the dramaturg’s interpersonal role is as much a part of her work as her thematic, conceptual and aesthetic responses.

During the project Eckleberg and I evolved a practical methodology for our director dramaturg relationship, essentially one that allowed us to filter and process ongoing ideas and outcomes from the devising workshops. Eckleberg’s artistic intentions emerge in an instinctive process with the participants. I learnt quickly that it was vital to simply record his actions practically on the floor and ask questions at a later time and place. My relationships with other members of the creative team and the cast were positioned under my key relationship with the director. By the end of the Creative Development Period I had affirmed the centrality of the director as artistic overseer of all departments and the dramaturg as his sounding board in this process.

2. The Dramaturgy of Displacement?

In writing up my findings on POPUP! I have structured the experience according to the time periods of the production process. These periods are: Creative Development, Production and Performance. 20 Each period is illustrated with concise examples and these organizers allow an emerging picture to unfold of a devised process that built into a contemporary performance.

Two Key Categories emerged from my grounded analysis on POPUP! and these also direct the structure of this chapter. The Creative Development period is analysed under the emerging Key Category of ‘displacement’ and the second Production Period is analysed under the Key Category ‘installation.’ Finally the analysis of the Performance itself uses both categories to evidence an integrated ‘work of the actions.’

As the creative process is a holistic one it is not surprising to note that these categories are not sealed and discrete; displacement for example is a principle that I see driving across the

20 Refer to Chapter Three: Data Analysis, Case Study One, An Organizer for Writing (pp.85-91).Here the process through which the Key Categories emerging from grounded analysis in the field were then organized into the narrative structure for this Chapter.

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project as a whole. Over all my research on this Case Study has led me to use the term ‘displacement’ as a category of analysis to describe the unique dramaturgical weave in devising, producing and performing POP UP!

Displacement is defined in Physics as the displacing in space of one mass by another, creating a sense of shifting to one side: “a change in position expressed in both distance and direction” (Macquarie Dictionary Online ). The act of displacement is a shifting movement, creating disequilibrium from a status quo. The state of ‘being displaced’ is static – but with a consciousness of the shift to a new point of reference. Thus displacement creates varying degrees of disequilibrium but also a sense of re-assessment and point of view, a sense of looking back.

As a participant observer on POPUP! I came to see Eckleberg’s methodology of process characterized by actions of displacement. His intention was to create disequilibrium and instability via constantly realigning and shifting different sources, images and signifiers. The structuring of the piece was also based around a displacing impulse, characterized by a shifting of stories to other sites and media, by a repetition and restatement that would relentlessly challenge audience point of view. I saw Eckleberg’s impulse to displace as a dramaturgical principle that challenged the process of dramatic aggregation. His key comment after the initial Scene-by-Scene (or run-through) clarified what I had been observing:

Some of my concerns with this Scene-by-Scene is to keep the performance poetic rather than literal. Already during the walkthrough some of the young peeps were trying to reconcile all of the factors... and I must admit I feel that tendency too. I guess there needs to be some non-literal signifiers really early on. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 22 June)

The following analysis of the Creative Development Period reveals the scale of displacement as it emerged in the POP UP! project. It worked across all intertextual ‘weaves’, across a devised process with thirteen youth performers, within two community Outreach groups, upon a large theatre complex as site and channeled through the creative practice of the 12 person artistic team.

3. Displacement in the Creative Development of POP UP!

This section focuses on each of the conceptual starting points on POP UP! , how each was introduced and worked upon to create a text, or as Barba defines it, the ‘weave.’ This phase of production began with a number of conceptual meetings in which these starting points were interrogated for thematic links and aesthetic/design ideas. The team aimed to develop a shared

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conceptual language for this project but also to share key information on their particular practice and previous, related work.

Eckleberg conceived the POP UP! concept from three key starting points:

1. The Jabberwocky Poem: by Lewis Carroll, an open-ended, quest narrative.

2. Contemporary Stories: shared by the youth participants of parent/child relationships.

3. A Pop Up book: a site-specific work on the Shopfront complex, facilitated by the artistic team. (Eckleberg, T., 2005c)

Each of these starting points contains a sense of unstable, displacing and shifting territory. The Creative Development Period was characterized by devising strategies by which Eckleberg highlighted these instabilities; it was the junctures in our emerging ‘weave’ that he sought to emphasize. a. Jabberwocky

The first source material was a written text - the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll (1872). Although it appears to be a simple quest narrative, this poem destabilizes the reader in a number of ways:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The Jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch! (Carroll, L., 1872)

Firstly Carroll invents a shifting, blurry terminology, on the edge of the English language, so that the reader can create a real and a sensory world simultaneously. Although the terms initially appear very foreign we discover we can all approximate what a ‘brillig’ evening is and a ‘frumious’ creature.

Secondly the themes of the poem challenge the order of society; A boy is warned by his parent not to explore the world because of its inherent dangers – actually the parent’s projection of dangers. The child goes ahead, defying his parent and searches for the Beast. Is

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it real or the imagined sum of his fears, we ask? He overcomes fear, slays the beast and returns triumphant.

Finally, although the poem is a quest, Carroll avoids a resolution. The first stanza is simply repeated, implying a return to the beginning and an open-ended outcome. The result of the quest is simply a return to the original status quo: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves….” This ending poses more uncertainties than answers and we may ask: How stable is the status quo here in the ‘borogroves’? Is anyone really liberated in the end? In this way the poem stubbornly resists closure.

From our early concept meetings Eckleberg had made it clear to me that he saw Jabberwocky as a key catalyst for the project:

Eckleberg is interested in the clearly delineated phases of the narrative, the stages of the heroic quest and in using them as a guideline for improvisations. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 12 December 05)

In the first weekend workshop Eckleberg asked me to teach a cast member the German version of the poem. In this version, Carroll’s ‘English’, already unstable, was shifted further ‘off- centre’ and the cast found it even more evocative:

Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; Und aller-mümsige Burggoven Die mohmen Räth' ausgraben (Stanza One, Der Jammerwoch , 1995)

Eckleberg quickly decided that two performances of this poem could appear in POP UP! The first poem in English would be performed in the Prologue as a kind of warning to the audience of the landscape to come. The reversioning in German could appear in the final moments of the work. By this means Eckleberg created a cyclic return in the performance similar to that in the poem.

I began to glimpse Eckleberg’s poetic intentions for the work: Through presenting an obscure open ended poem to the audience, then re-iterating it later in an even more displaced form, POP UP! like Jabberwocky would be cyclic and unresolved. I began to suspect that the performance, like the poem, would involve a dramaturgical landscape of shifting, blurry terminology.

Jabberwocky is clearly a text that embodies the principles of displacement. In leading a cast reading of the poem, Eckleberg emphasized a child’s ‘coming of age’ ie. a turning point

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when you when you decide to step out on your own, perhaps defying your parents instructions. Eckleberg began devising by asking Outreach participants and the Shopfront ensemble of performers to use any part of the Jabberwocky narrative and any of its language to devise a contemporary story about critical moments they felt were turning points between themselves and their parents.

Eckleberg selected three of these Jabberwocky appropriated stories for further development and each was a ‘coming of age’ tale: a young man asks his parents if he can get a job and leave home, a boy tells his father he is leaving to fight a Jabberwock, teenage girls enact a repeated vocal ritual preparing for their school formal.

The cast were keen to engage in Carroll’s slippery terminology and to define what the different words meant to each other. E.g. tulgy, bandersnatch, frumious, snicker snack and vorpal. They took the initiative that Eckleberg had provided, shifting the language confidently, to blur it within their contemporary vernacular and context. In the school formal scene, titled ‘Snicker Snack’ it assumed a teen Jargon; “You’re so frumious - go Bandersnatch yourself!” “Seeya! Snicker Snack – they kiss passionately .” In a scene later titled the ‘Tum Tum Tree’ the cast chose to embellish Carroll’s words with a thick Texan (George Bush) accent:

Boy: I’m sick of living a life in fear Dad! I’m goin to git … the Jabberwok. Dad: No son- you’re not ready, you’re not ready for the heat, you’re not ready for those claws son, those claws that catch. Boy: You’re wrong Dad. Dad: You’re not ready for those Jaws son, those Jaws that bite Boy: You’re wrong Dad - I am ready. (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 4)

In each scene the vocabulary of Carroll’s poem was displaced and shifted far from its original context. To add to this the scenes collectively further destabilized the landscape because they were not visually linked- they only evoked each other through their intertextual use of bizarre Jabberwocky-isms. Blurred terminology, repeated signifiers in strange contexts - even through these early scene generations the unique language of the work was revealing itself, generated through Eckleberg’s displacing impulses.21

21 In fact in the performance weeks we had to acknowledge that, far from being a classic, most of our inter-age audience had never heard Carroll’s Jabberwocky before. It was merely through poetics, repetition and looking back on previous scenes, that the audience began to share the terminology. For them the poem was always part of our unique performative language.

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Eckleberg then began to use the Jabberwocky to poetically ‘weave’ the form of the piece. He was very interested in modeling how the structure of the poem summarized the stages of a classic quest – which he named as status quo, warning, the quest begins, pause and reflection, confrontation, triumphal return, status quo - these labels would provide a structural scaffold for the developing work. As dramaturg, I questioned whether this would create a stable frame for the other more destabilizing elements I was witnessing.

Eckleberg started to map the emerging piece in terms of both its aesthetic experiments and its poetic form. He covered the walls of the meeting room with A4 cards; each recorded a sequence, image, ideas, experiment or video footage created during the workshops. At the same time a whiteboard placed each whole devised sequence under a scenic title and an order loosely based on the stanzas of Jabberwocky . In this way sequences became scenic units, named as a stage of a quest and identified by a key phrase from the poem:

Kev presents Jabberwocky as a Warning: ‘ Beware the Jabberwock, my son ’: Elise presents her story as a Pause-Reflect: ‘ So rested he..stood awhile in thought’ Sam presents his story as the Quest Begins: ‘He took his vorpal sword in hand’ The Jabberwock appears as Confrontation: ‘One, two, and through and through’

Carroll’s language had quickly become the source for the unique, shared language of process that Barba and others describe. For example any moment evoking a Heroic Return was talked of as ‘galumphing back’, any period of Pause and Reflection was ‘uffish thought.’ Eckleberg used these terms openly in rehearsals to direct mood and intention, for example “this is the galumphing back kind of feeling.” The term ‘Jabberwock’ was used by cast and crew throughout the project, as a metaphor for fears of all kinds. He had displaced Carroll’s terms from his poem and created a new, equally unstable territory for them to serve us on POPUP!.

Eckleberg used the themes, language and structure of Jabberwocky as tools to inspire the devising process and in each of these experiments he fixed on the unstable elements. The Jabberwocky language evoked a bizarre, non-literal world which inspired youth participants when they retold their own tales. His early choice to further blur the poem’s language and meaning by replaying it in German indicated an overall drive to destabilize the action as it progressed rather than to clarify it. The cyclical nature of the poem created a shifting, non- linear and unresolved journey and Eckleberg sought to model the project structurally on just such a quest. Within a few weeks of fieldwork I realized that POP UP! would speak via its own ‘brillig’ poetic: repetition, overlapping signifiers and shifting points of reference.

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b. Contemporary Stories

The second starting point for the POP UP! project was the cast’s own devised texts, these were stories recounting turning points in their relationship with their parents. Through these stories Eckleberg sought to explore issues such as parental control, power sharing, roles and transition. These would anchor POP UP! with a contemporary thematic; one focused on the shifting negotiations between parents and children as they proceed through adolescence into adulthood.

At the concept meetings I sought Eckleberg’s clear articulation of how the contemporary stories related to the Jabberwocky text and vice versa: How would the poem and quest framework link the young people with projections of their own experience? Eckleberg ‘read’ both sources as projecting critical moments of rupture in the relationship between parent and child as the child breaks out of the stable relationship and begins an independent quest. The devising process would ask youth participants from all groups to share their own stories of such ruptures, moments where they actively displaced themselves from the family unit.

The artistic team reasoned that it would be harder for younger participants to ‘look back’ at the critical moments, moments we ‘oldies’ could now identify as epiphanies. Eckleberg agreed but asserted that “just the naming of the story can give you some agency” (Plummer, K., 2006a, 3 April). As I have already described, Eckleberg had ‘named’ each stanza in the Jabberwocky poem. In a Brechtian sense he would use ‘naming’ to assist the cast to establish a critical distance from their experience; a position from which they could play, filter and reframe the interactions in their story.

Eckleberg and assistant director Kate Clugston began devising by asking Shopfront performers to recreate a turning point in their relationship with their parents: “When did you first make decision that was clearly your own? When did you feel an intense sense of responsibility? (Plummer, K., 2006a, 15 May)” Each performer started to shape place, relationships and action into a succinct monologue with selected gestures:

Eric: On a road trip up the coast my mother stopped the car at the Bora Ring outside Kempsey. She sat all us kids down and gave us each a handful of earth. She sifted the earth from one hand to the other and told us “This is your Mother - love, respect, responsibility.”(Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 5)

Eckleberg worked extensively with each performer to build and refine these stories into solo scenes. Each performer was encouraged to identify and build the story towards the key

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moment of rupture, created in words and in a key gesture. Eric focused on the gesture of sifting as a distilled image of his story. It re-ignited the central issue, the moment of recognition between child and parent. The gesture itself sufficed to ‘name the story’ as Eckleberg had described.

Eric: Key Gesture of sifting in his story. Image © K. Plummer 2006

I observed Eckleberg utilizing displacement in the thematic content of the story and in the process of developing it. The performance would involve a retelling of each personal story, with the performative elements each had added creating a ‘naming’, a displacing frame. As I understood it, like the oft repeated tale of the Jabberwock, these youths were now looking back at their story from a displaced position, a contemporary, more stable point of view (Plummer, K., 2006a, 1st June). 22

22 At the same time the Outreach Groups, working with assistant director Clugston, were also workshopping their stories and shifting them into other media to create a less confronting frame. The Mental Health participants developed evocative image poems about Leaving Home. These were videoed and presented as a “Pause and Reflect” unit at a point around halfway through POPUP! Kirinari indigenous participants, working with a local composer, wrote up their stories about the challenges, responsibilities and goals they had faced as rap songs: “Gonna get it, Gonna Gonna get it, its mine!” These were embedded as soundtrack for POPUP!’s hip hop and krump dance sequences.

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Eckleberg then decided that the performer’s stories were to be performed in a sequence of three as the audience began their quest through the building. Combined, and working in contrast with each other, these stories would create a mosaic of relational junctures and disjunctures – the audience experiencing a shifting landscape of relationships. Eckleberg named this section of the piece ‘the Quest Begins.’

As he had done with the Jabberwocky language, Eckleberg then appropriated the visual language from each cast member’s story. He shifted each of their key gestures it into a unison movement sequence, named as the ‘collective gestures:’

Elise: Shaking her fists (“I didn’t mean it.”) Sam: Pointing out the window (“You don’t have that option!”) Eric: Sifting earth from one hand into another (“This is your Mother - love, respect, responsibility”) (Clugston, K., 2006, Units 5 and 6)

Eckleberg decided to present the ‘collective gesture’ sequence in the Prologue: the gestures would be performed silently while the ‘Hero’ figure narrates the Jabberwocky poem, warning the audience of the quest to come.

The Prologue - Hero and Collective Gesture sequence. Image © K. Plummer 2006

This was an obvious destabilization in the structural progression because Eckleberg had placed the gestural sequence before the audience had witnessed any of the solo stories which

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each gesture signified. The ‘collective gesture’ sequence would act poetically as a forward hyperlink - towards their appearance embedded in context twenty minutes later. At one point I noted him describing these gestures as ‘hyperreal’, and here performed earlier as collective gesture sequence, they certainly were signifiers removed from their mise en scene. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 27th May).

This formed a key moment for me as Participant Observer - I really began to take note of how and where elements from each scene were being displaced. I realized that the ‘collective gesture sequence’ demonstrated the ‘work of the actions’ in POP UP! They embodied the thematic of the contemporary stories as ‘moments of rupture’ inspired by the Jabberwocky source. The ‘collective gestures’ indicated how Eckleberg had aesthetically ‘worked the weave’ from the source texts into performative signifiers. He had then poetically installed them as a structural unit, however one displaced from its original contextual frame. c. A Pop Up! Book

The third starting point for this project was Eckleberg’s intention to create a site specific ‘pop up book.’ The source ‘text’ here was the architecture of the site. The Shopfront Theatre complex comprises a two bedroom Victorian house, two shops, two courtyards and a large theatre building at the rear. Eckleberg had contracted an artistic team who could assist the cast to achieve a site-specific goal on this scale: a multimedia artist, a krump movement artist, an aerial artist, plus two designers from Erth.23

My research as dramaturg revealed that a pop up book or ‘pop up’ was fundamentally a surprising change in the dimensions of a text - this changed the physical relationship between the text and the reader. Pop up books also have interactive elements: paper levers, revolves. These animate each page at the readers own initiative (Plummer, K., 2006a, 6th March).

The initial team meetings were focused on how the term ‘Popup’ could be physically manifested on the site. Gradually the ‘Popup Principle’ emerged to link the physical features of the site to the idea of telling stories, the Jabberwocky and the contemporary sources. In our performance the ‘pop up book’ would speak via performers physically ‘popping up’ or ‘dropping down’ on the building (trained by the aerial artist). Also bodies might be ‘poppin out’ (as in hip hop and break dancing). In this piece they would actually be ‘Krump’ dancing -

23 Erth are leading innovators of Australian physical and visual theatre. Combining a developed visual aesthetic with performance, Erth use giant puppets, stilts, original music, inflatables and aerial flying rigging to create numerous fantastic productions (Eckleberg, T.2005b).

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where the scale of movements goes far beyond simple body pop (participants to be trained by the movement artist). Characters, images and stories would destabilize a scene by ‘popping up’ from the past. Basically the team could train the cast to achieve ‘pop ups’ through manipulation of scale and space, also in relation to varying the performers’ size and the audience proxemics (Plummer, K., 2006a, 19th February). Our ‘pop up’ principle was an aesthetic involving shifting ground and perspective, to create disequilibrium and displacement.

Engaging with the Pop Up Aesthetic. Image © K. Plummer 2006

The team collectively made a key decision at this point: the audience would traverse the building in divided groups. In this way we would have the audience also ‘popping up’ in the piece, when one group are seen by others (Plummer, K., 2006a, 19th February). Each audience member would then have a different structural frame for their experience and this could open the work to re-viewing.

In these concept meetings I observed the team committing to Eckleberg’s sense of dynamics. The piece he had named POP UP! would be framed around physically displacing the performers, their stories and the audience. I was keen to understand how the media and performance skills in the assembled team would achieve this aesthetically and I noted these experiments in my daily journal as ‘aesthetic media in process.’

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Pop Ups Within the Body

The first ‘popups’ were created by working within the casts’ own bodies. The movement artist, Natalia Ladyko trained the cast in hiphop and krump dance asking each cast member to develop their own signature krump vocabulary. Eckleberg then asked Ladyko and the cast to incorporate their ‘collective gestures’ into their krump sequence. The collective gestures, (aka. the cast’s embodied stories) were thus shifted into whole body movement. I noted eagerly that the aesthetics of krump, had hyper-extended the gestures to an extreme scale:

Krumping creates a disturbing dynamic- the audience focus on the intensity of the performers, their concentration and the extreme scale of the body movements (at their limit) being demonstrated. It is discomforting. It draws attention to the struggle….. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 10 June)

The Krump Battle Scene. Image © M. Myers 2006

The collective gestures were thrown off their equilibrium and now ‘popped up’ as physical ruptures. By incorporating the collective gestures into the movement vocabulary each krump move also became a displaced reenactment of moments of fear, challenge, struggle and triumph.

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Animated Pop Ups: Small and Large Scale

At the same time Erth were training the cast to animate figures on both the small and large scale. The cast reversioned their contemporary Jabberwock stories onto an assortment of small Two Dollar Shop toys and these scenes blurred contemporary youth language with Jabberwocky jargon. Eckleberg allowed the cast to choose toys at random, each character bore no visual cue to the story’s content or to each other. For example: a boy approaches his father to ask permission to move out of home – however he is a bath toy and his father a plastic cowboy attached to a horse on wheels! Eckleberg did not control or limit the range of images. Toy soldiers were used in combination with Lego figures. These all in turn, but unsystematically, represented parents, children, schoolgirls and Jabberwocks. A number of random puppets (or really ‘avatars’) had further destabilized the text of the story; I noted that the varying scale of the figures and their random appearance both were working to undermine any coherent mise en scene.

Random toys used as puppets in Jabberwocky appropriated stories Image © K. Plummer 2006

Beijing Olympic Mascots for example were particularly random and were used across a number of scenes. These are cheap rubber bath toys: fluorescent teddy bear bodies with the enigmatic face paint of a Chinese dancer. They appear cute on a small scale but malevolent on the larger one, for example when projected onto a wall. These Mascots were used as a range of characters, not only as Jabberwocks. Like many other visual signifiers in POP UP! I realized that their repeated, yet shifting identities were going to create a shared, but fuzzy

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aesthetic and a refusal to allow the audience to ‘read’ consistently. This was a dramaturgical refusal to resolve within each scene (in simultenaeity) and across the work (in concatenation).

In fact, like the Jabberwocky language these dissonant figures became part of our shared language. As devising progressed I realized their randomness had actually gained a resonance. A playful mixture of images created a hybrid scenography that reflected the motif of ‘childhood ruptured’ and the bizarre world of Carroll’s ‘borogroves.’

Erth’s skills in animation were also utilized in creating larger scale ‘pop ups’; They began to train the cast to animate human sized puppets and huge inflatables. At this point the team and the cast were confronted with larger decisions in the dramaturgy of the work, specifically our choice in the visual manifestations of the protagonist and the antagonist: the Child (as a Questor/Hero) and the Jabberwock (as a Monster/Alien).

Eckleberg was conscious that the first appearance of the Monster was a key to audience engagement in the work; he believed we needed to create a real monster and really confront the audience with it. Carroll describes this as a moment of rupture, when each Child/Hero is confronted with a threat that must be faced:

And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! (Carroll, L., 1872)

In our shared language we had identified the Jabberwock as a metaphor for people’s fears and challenges, so to design a monster we spent many hours discussing what was actually scary. After trials in the theatre with a number of Erth’s stock ‘soft’ware of beasts we realized the space was too open, too large. The action was shifted to a smaller internal courtyard.

However after experimentation with a number of inflatables, and a heated debate, we reached a consensus; we could create two vastly different images of the actual monster because thematically we aimed to show the audience that our monsters, beasts and fears are shape shifted in many forms over our lifetime and we need to build a resilience to take them on.

So our Jabberwock would appear on a huge scale, contrasting with the smaller scale toys, but with a shifting and unpredictable identity. Firstly it would appear as a large black arachnid, then later as a huge mottled lizard with three satanic baby heads! Rather than relying on the Jabberwock’s actual appearance we would use the ‘popup’ principle and the dynamics of

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displacement: altering the images, varying the space, shifting the beast’s proximity to the cast and audience. All these factors would become the vital elements in scaling the fear, tension and surprise.

First rehearsal with proposed Jabberwock and AV artist recording. Image © K. Plummer 2006

I saw this outcome as a decision to continually displace the audience’s identification with a key ‘character.’ The decisions made about the manifestation of the Jabberwock had only underlined the trend towards shifting imagery across all scales in the action. At this point I saw that collectively the artistic team had wrestled with, but finally accepted Eckleberg’s poetics of the constantly displaced signifier. We had spent an afternoon resisting our dramatic urge to create unity on such a fundamental image (Plummer, K., 2006a, 5th July).

Pop ups on Site: Integrating the Architecture

The first ‘Confrontation’ with the Jabberwock was a large ensemble sequence Eckleberg chose to workshop early. Here he would ‘weave’ different aesthetic media: inflatable images, aerial work and hip hop/krump, with site specific architecture to create a scene of a rupture in which space and identity were all to be destabilized. The scene also revealed how Eckleberg planned to incorporate the audience into the ‘weave of the actions’ using the ‘popup principle.’

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The internal courtyard would be invaded by the cast, in role as mutant bugs, performing two separate movement sequences. The audience would never be certain they could pin the cast’s identity. Dressed in skeletal latex bodysuits they repel the audience: moving in a dislocating shifting sequence, a ‘melted down’ hip hop routine, and repeatedly swarm over each other: they are the infant spawn of the monster, kids who have been mutated by exposure to this alien. But at the same time they seem human and try to appeal to the audience with short, whimsical tales of their early childhood:

Kirsten: After dinner I used to play ‘the washing up show’ like I was on TV- to make it more fun! (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 8)

Devising involved planning how to suddenly fill the space with a huge inflatable monster, half redback spider, half lizard, emerging suddenly from around a corner. It would take up two thirds of the area and force the cast to reposition under and around it. The cast would also have to plan for an audience of sixty who were as keen to get away from the monster as they were!

For the audience this landscape would be malevolent and uncertain: when one kid ‘pops down’ suddenly from the roof, surprising the audience yet again- the monster suddenly swallows it! This scene, which became called ‘the Bandersnatch,’ would be immediate and confronting, largely because the audiences’ spatial sense of safe territory would be constantly shifting.

The ongoing process to shape this scene provided a very clear manifestation of weaving the ‘aesthetic media in process’ (Plummer, K., 2006a). In fact it demonstrated that in POPUP! these elements would not be seamlessly combined but that their individual elements would create a sense of disjunction and destabilization.

The devised work created during this period had manifested the Popup Principle in many ways. Many of the experiments with aesthetic media were about shifting identities as well as proximity and scale.

A Pop up Identity

As we moved closer to production dramaturgical discussions focused on the identity of the Child/Hero/Quester. This Hero needed to appear as recognizably ‘one of us:’ but his bigger role was to show the transition from ordinary kid to superhuman Jabberwock slayer.

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The Hero would be initially performed by Kev who recites Carroll’s poem in the first scene as the official ‘Warning’ to the audience. He then reappears moments later as himself, sharing a story about a childhood challenge to cross the road “look left, look right.” However when the Hero reappears for the final confrontation with the Jabberwock he (like the Jabberwock) is reversioned as a life sized puppet.

The Hero reappears as a puppet for the final confrontation Image © M. Myers 2006

It is this displaced figure that confronts and defeats the Jabberwock. Both characters in the climactic struggle would be shifted onto animated avatars and the actual battle is shared across five of the cast as puppeteers: two animating the Hero and three animating the Jabberwock. Eckleberg’s final battle scene would thus embody the idea of both displaced storytelling and ‘Pop up’ animation, yet was still framed by the scaffold of Jabberwocky:

One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. (Carroll, L., 1872)

4. The Interactive Process of Displacement

A key moment in the Creative Development Period occurred when the cast initiated ‘displacement’ as part of their improvisation process. The ensemble were given human sized

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puppets created by Erth and Eckleberg encouraged them to animate them: “You need to just keep seeing what the puppet can do” (Plummer, K., 2006a, 10 June)

For over three months the cast had learnt that they needed to ‘shift the language’ onto each new aesthetic media they were offered. Three puppeteers quickly worked out how to give their puppet a krump dance vocabulary by it copying a human krumper in front of them. The puppet then taught the dancer a few moves and, via an extended process of remediation, they evolved together a proto-human krump vocabulary. I realized I was watching a process I would now certainly label ‘displacement’ and its recurrent outcome - a blurred terminology. The fact that struck me at the time was that the youth participants absolutely understood the nature of the ‘shared aesthetic language’ created by the mixed performativities of the various tools offered to them in the process. They then took it further - and puppeteers actually started to manipulate the limbs of the human. Eckleberg recorded this moment in the performance. In the final battle sequence; the Hero (as life sized puppet) engages the last remaining mutant bug in a krump battle - trying to copy and out perform each other’s moves.

On the same day the small scale Jabberwocky puppet scenes were installed onto sites across the building. The cast were then directed to reshape their scenes in response to the architecture of the new location. I noted that shared languages of each of the source texts had been aesthetically activated and were actively ‘worked upon’ each other, not only by team, but also by the cast:

Today an interactivity was achieved between the krumping and the space- the puppetry and the space and… finally between the krumping and the puppetry. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 10 June)

a. The Emerging Weave of the Actions

Led by Eckleberg’s devising methodology, the artistic team and the cast had begun to create a unique language for POP UP! The poetics of the piece were being realized, even though up to this point Eckleberg had structured only three key scenes in detail: the Prologue, the first Confrontation scene and the Epilogue.

The journal extract below demonstrates my understanding of Eckleberg’s dramaturgy in the Prologue and Epilogue. These two key scenes would parallel each other and would refer, backwards and forwards to key elements in the body of the piece. The subheadings indicate

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how I saw the scenes demonstrating performatively the features of our process: the strands from the source texts woven into the final product:

Journal Entry. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 5 July)

Prologue - Status Quo: ‘twas brillig…’ Architecture of site: Audience assemble in tree corridor along railway line aka. ‘Brillig Avenue’ Contemporary stories of parents/children: The cast are standing along it doing their collective gestures. Pop-up: Kev (as Hero) jumps up from the end of the Brillig Avenue tree corridor, We see Kev because he is illuminated suddenly by a follow spot/torch. Kev does some twisted krum p moves on the spot, he looks tortured- then he starts running full belt towards the audience. Scale manipulation: He runs a lot on the spot to create an ‘eternal running’ effect. The Quest: He reaches the audience and krumps some more then breathlessly, but slowly, tells them the Warning (i.e. the quest of the Jabberwocky in English). As he begins his tale the other cast turn and walk slowly towards the building. After he finishes he leads the audience down the avenue to begin their quest. Manipulation of identity: Kev, now dressed in cast robe tells the first story: crossing the road. The audience participate in the story by crossing the road with him.

Epilogue - a return to the status quo: ‘twas Brillig…’ the same but different. Manipulation of identity: Rescale and reversion of the live into puppetry; During the battle scene or Final Confrontation in the Quest, Kev disappears behind the scrim momentarily and the krumping puppet Hero replaces him. It does battle with the Jabberwocky heads then it retreats through the scrim holding the slain Jabberwocky head aloft. Rescale/ remediate: Kev immediately reappears in its place, holding a box. Quest/ storytelling reversioning: Kev begins to retell the Jabberwocky poem with the same actions as in Brillig Avenue but this time in German. Reversioned storytelling: The cast interject his story with theirs ‘that’s like the time when….” They had to pick the exact moments in the Jammerwoch narrative to trigger a memory of a time of resolution or community with their parents. Eg. We’re all going to my formal tonite I am really excited! Its been a really bad day but now I am home- and mums made me a mad fruit salad!’ Rescaling: The cast each come forward and bring a miniature image of themselves –in costume.. While they tell their story they line these up on a miniature version of the Brillig Avenue from the Prologue. Resolution: None- the cast invite the audience to participate in a krump dance party???/.

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Epilogue: the cast reversioned in miniature form Image © M. Myers 2006

In devising the Prologue scene I noted that Eckleberg had established a clear early link between the Jabberwocky (language, story and structure) and the contemporary stories of the cast. The creation of the ‘collective gestures’ was symbolic of Eckleberg’s methodology of displacing the elements of a story. His choices in installing them at various points in the work further demonstrated his impulse to displace a traditional narrative structure and to engage shifting audience viewpoints.

Observing this scene in rehearsals was my first real clarity in understanding how Eckleberg would combine the poetics of Jabberwocky , the thematic of contemporary stories, with the aesthetic tools of movement and architecture of the site. I had learnt a lot about trusting Eckleberg’s instinctive process. Not long after this I was able to assist him to plan the Epilogue - final scene, as the Prologue’s blurred restatement.

b. The Emerging Language of Displacement

As the Prologue and Epilogue testify the scenes that Eckleberg had advanced in the Creative Development period demonstrated a simultaneous and interactive discourse between the source texts and the aesthetic media used. However Eckleberg’s ‘weaving’ insisted on

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shifting, it was a dramaturgy of displacement rather than a drive to aggregate, integrate and create unities.

In identifying displacement as the term that embodied Eckleberg’s approach, I realized that as early as the April 2005 Funding Proposal Eckleberg had conceived a dynamic for POPUP! in such terms:

The event would not feature a re-telling or staging of these stories but a new narrative that collided them into one another and then into the personal accounts of the participants and their relationships to form a new, contemporary epic. (Eckleberg, T., 2005b)

The first evidence of ‘collision’ came in the conceptual stages via his choice of the starting points. These texts all thematised unstable states and transition and Eckleberg had a clear reading of how they were to be imbricated:

TJ stated that he sees in the poem a blurring of the real and imagined world, In the same way there is always a blurring; shifting lines of demarcation and negotiation in the relationships between parents and kids as they grow up. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 22 February)

As the artistic team sought to define in their own terms his conceptual language, they discussed sources that created a dynamic of rupture or displacement. In April 2006: The team discussed the Shopfront building and the new physical theatre/urban crazes of Yamakase and Parkour, which someone claimed meant ‘the art of displacement.’ In both these urban movement schools participants jump across buildings, in controlled but gravity challenging moves. They embody a restless desire to extend human limits in an ecstatic or religious “leap of faith.” (Warne-Smith, D., 2008) In the same way we would be referencing urban krump dance. To me this new dance technique was an externalised version, on the body, of breaking boundaries (Plummer, K., 2006a, 3 April).

What emerged concretely from the concept meetings was how the term ‘pop up’ would became the visual metaphor for a repetitive, shifting, unstable, and surprising world. Also that the Jabberwocky poem would became a loose structural scaffold to approach choices and an order on the site. In these meetings it also became clear to me that Eckleberg would hold onto his original clear image of the key conceptual frames of the work. His intention was that the issues arising were to be presented as unresolved and unresolvable:

TJ: My aim is to infuse the methodology of the process with the product. This is part of an ongoing process we have developed - from the past working methodologies. The [repeated use of this] artistic team also allows for the development of a philosophy in approach … an evolution. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 3 April)

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The methodology of the process (displacement) would also characterise the dramaturgy in the performance and Eckleberg did not intend to present a performance piece of ‘easy answers.’

Observing the structure of the workshops and his drive to construct the Prologue and Epilogue I noted that Eckleberg’s use of ‘storytelling’ was an intrinsic part of his poetics of process. Eckleberg sought to validate the experience of the youth participants using the traditions of storytelling: “In the naming of a moment of epiphany the person declares ownership of it.” (Plummer, K., 2006a, 3 April). He directed performers to develop clarity in the shape of their story and how they chose to present it in order to recreate the moment of epiphany, in response to a new fear or challenge.

In POP UP! stories are constantly repeated and reversioned, the pattern also working as a poetic device. Eckleberg used displaced key elements of each key story in other media, initially as hyperrealised ‘collective gestures.’ He later brought these elements back as part of each performer’s krump dialogue, so that, in their final confrontation with the Jabberwock, each performer could draw on a unique, embodied language of experience. Through displaced stories Eckleberg allowed the ‘work of the actions’ to operate across the scenes as well as within them.

If storytelling became fundamental to the poetic and thematic weave on POP UP! then I believe that displacements of the body, scale and space on the site became fundamental to this work’s developing aesthetic weave. Like the Jabberwocky poem we were working towards a physically destabilized landscape, characterised by ‘pop ups’ in scale, in displaced bodies and in shifting imagery. The on-site design was to be used to create moments that were unexpected and surprising in which actor- audience proxemics were never in equilibrium. Displacement, expressed aesthetically through the ‘pop up’ principle was fundamental to visually and spatially ‘weaving’ the actions.

In POP UP! Displacement figures as an operating principle in any thing that pops up, changing our spatial relationship to the material with its change of size and intrusion into our plane. The principle of displacement became part of the poetic in POPUP because it was the methodology of the devising process. This methodology was based on integrating stories and ‘popups’; telling stories in order to reframe our identity and creating a physical landscape of shifts, surprises and renegotiations.

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5. The Dramaturg and the Audience: Developing ‘the Audience’s Eye’

In the previous section I analysed how a dramaturgy of Displacement characterized Eckleberg’s conceptual and devising methodology through the Creative Development of POP UP! I now propose that a ‘dramaturgy of installation’ became his guiding principle during the Production Period, that is the latter rehearsals and production ‘week’ of the project. 24 In this phase the dramaturgy involved integrating the performative elements previously created, considering the site specifics and beginning to account for the moving audience in each scene.

Throughout the Creative Development Period I saw my dramaturgical role essentially as that of a ‘conceptual sounding board’- someone whose responses promoted the ‘shared language’ of our concept. My role in the Production phase was more diversified: Eckleberg and I had gained confidence in our working relationship, there was more devised material to be refined and the demands of the physical and design installation on the site were increasing. I was now also involved in a range of activities. One on one, I worked with the cast on the clarity of their language/story arc in the solo scenes. I particularly drilled Kev in his German and English presentation of the Jabberwocky poem. As each scene began to be rehearsed on site I found myself initiating team discussion regarding the placement, role and reactions of the audience.

In this period dramaturg and director discussions often concerned ‘threading’ across the work; reasons for repetition, areas of coherence and incoherence, both intended and unintended. Basically we worked on the ‘tracking’ of the language and images. From the outset Eckleberg and I had discussed a dramaturgy that was interactive: we wanted to create links for the audience but allow for slippage and gaps, the audiences’ own active participation during the performance (Plummer, K., 2006a, 13th December 2005). I now wanted to observe, during the visual and structural installation, how tightly Eckleberg would seek to ‘weave’ and how much slippage he would allow.

During production I increasingly began to see myself in the role of ‘audience’s eye’ (Murphy, C., 2005). In some instances my cautions about the audience’s reactions were challenged by others in the creative team who were seeking to further their aesthetic ideas. However I believed that since a large facet of the POPUP! concept was to activate the audience, they now needed to be ‘cast’ into the production and safely ‘accounted for’ as part of the rehearsal process: in effect there would be sixty extra players in each scene.

24 As the scale of the ‘bump-in’ or onsite installation becomes clear the reader will understand that the production ‘week’ actually lasted more than a month.

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6. The Dramaturgy of Installation?

Throughout the project director TJ Eckleberg had referred to a phase in the process called ‘the install.’ I understood this as a construction period; a set design ‘bump in’ to occur during the two week July school holidays. To install something in my mind meant to bring it in and put into position, hook it up and turn it on. Like the term displacement the term installation is both a verb, an action and a resultant state of being; “the act of installing” and the “fact of being installed” (Macquarie Dictionary Online ). There is a consciousness also of looking back, to what was previously on that site and what has been added, and to what effect. Because a large number of the audience would be very familiar with the architectural spaces at Shopfront, this sense of retrospective would certainly occur as part of the performance.

By their use of the terms ‘install’ and ‘installation’ to describe the site-specific design, I anticipated the team would go beyond the theatrical frame and that they conceived the piece as a multi-arts experience, using a range of visual and spatial features. The term ‘installation’ itself implies a direct link between the art work and the context; an installation does move beyond the frame, it is “a type of sculpture which is site-specific and aims to acknowledge the context of the work in space and time” (Wikipedia/Wiktionary, 2007). One reference takes this definition one step further, suggesting that an installation aims to “to modify the way we experience a particular space, through the use of sculptural materials and other media” (Wikipedia/Wiktionary, 2007). I saw both definitions as applicable here, given the range of media we were combining and our intention to create a ‘pop up’ environment around the audience.

However once something is installed there is the sense that it is ‘fixed’ into place. As I described it - ‘hooked up and turned on.’ The machinery is stabilized, ready to work and a stasis, a settling down or equilibrium has been created. Moving into the Production Period I wondered whether the installation of POP UP! in visual design and in structural mapping, would create stability and anchorage. Would it generate further tension or dissipate the displacing dynamics of the ‘work of the actions’ to date?

In POPUP!’s Production Period the ‘install’ became a dramaturgical as well as a design process. This involved enrolling and reinscribing the whole theatre complex into the work. The scale of this venture meant that ‘the term ‘install’ or ‘installation’ subsumed the term ‘rehearsal’ at times. Practical questions of construction in visual design and in site specific action had to be solved and their elements installed. But live rehearsals were also based on an ‘installation’ principle: full scale scenes were refined structurally as much in response to

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architecture as aesthetics. The cast ‘installed’ their stories into and onto the architecture of the complex and, with Eckleberg’s help, each cast member then ‘mapped’ a logistic journey over the performance, across the scenic locations and sites in which they would ‘pop up.’

Eckleberg, as CEO of the whole complex and producer of the work, was overseer of all the construction needed to underpin the installation: re-concreting, installing new entryways, holes in the roof, ventilation issues, security changes, disabling plumbing in the bathroom etc. At the same time he needed to finalize key scenes and allow the youth performers plenty of time to rehearse with the final design products. Issues on the delivery time of puppets and costumes caused tension in the team during this period.

During Installation the challenges of scale on this project all took their effect: scale of the site, scale of the planned artistic concepts for each ‘room’, the number of voices in the artistic team, the extra production crew now brought into the vision - all these needed to be managed. I saw all the artistic, social and contextual factors above as part of Eckleberg’s ‘dramaturgy of installation’ and was keen to note how this phase of the process would manifest dramaturgically.

7. Installation within the Production Period of POP UP!

This phase of production began with the initial run through or Scene by Scene in late June and the publication of the publicity materials. The design installation was scheduled for the two week school holidays in July, because it involved lengthy rehearsals with the cast ‘in location’. Performances would begin around six weeks after the holiday break.

In the Production Period each of the original strands in the project, now embodied in a number of devised scenes or sequences, were physically installed on locations in the Shopfront site. The installation process drew more attention to the displaced elements in the weave and led us to dramaturgical choices to create unity or allow slippage, thus the poetics of displacement were still in operation. I also noted that at this point the physical installations brought identity shifts in the work into a sharper focus and these shifts were increasingly directed towards the audience. In fact Eckleberg had conceived another contemporary ‘quest’ narrative to achieve this; a new narrative strand would actually ‘install’ the moving audience into the work.

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Thus before I examine the manifestation of the Jabberwocky , contemporary Stories and POP UP! principle as part of Eckleberg’s ‘dramaturgy of installation’, I need to assess this newly introduced element of the weave, the audience quest.

a. The Audience Quest

Eckleberg forged the ‘audience quest’ to unite the established features in the POP UP! landscape but also to generate the audience’s poetic imperative in the work. The audience would be traversing the building during the performance; they were to be moving though a landscape and challenged by various elements that, ‘popped up.’ A number of contemporary, personal stories would be told by individual cast members and storytelling would be a repeated motif, but why did the audience need to hear these stories? There would be a Monster/beast/Jabberwock at large in the Shopfront complex, but what was it in relation to the performers and why would the audience enter and travel towards it? What were the stakes? What was the overall intention or imperative? We needed to have a conceptual purpose for the audience to physically undertake the journey, a ‘meta-narrative’ to impel them from one scene to another.

An Unstable Invitation

I first evidenced Eckleberg’s new narrative through the draft publicity materials. The flyer caption read:

A fierce alien creature/ an outbreak of a strange disease/and an unknown number of civilian youths are missing. In a disused research facility in Carlton, there are answers…/ but there are some places in the univers’ (sic) you can’t go alone. (Popup! Flyer/Poster , 2006)

The physical installation on site was going to endow the complex as a ‘disused research facility’ and the Jabberwock was to be identified as an ‘alien creature.’ The audience were on a quest to find and disable a mysterious, malevolent presence. Eckleberg explained this quest succinctly: “This is my attempt to militarize the images more. I want more sense of ‘kitting up’ of the spectators, and to boost the alien aesthetic” (Plummer, K., 2006a, 20 June). In fact the new quest represented a consolidation of Erth’s original designs for the Jabberwock and these had always strongly referenced the Alien movies and their designer HR Giger.

However no alien or military imagery appeared on the flyer, instead the publicity images were dominated by the other facets of our ‘weave’ colliding together in an image of rupture. The flyer images directly appropriate the ‘Rize’ DVD (LaChappelle, D., 2005) with two of the

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cast krumping backwards, silhouetted in a bright white light. 25 Each of the flyer headlines asks the audience to participate, enticing them by promising that in the building ‘there are answers.’ Each uses the language from our conceptual sources:

GET CRUNK (this is krump jargon for ‘show us your moves’) PUSH THE BUTTON (this is the Popup principle - the audience were to take action) BEWARE THE JABBERWOCK (a reference to the poem: to face a danger, to schallenge your fears) (Plummer, K., 2006a, 3rd July)

Unstable Personas

Eckleberg now created ‘Marshal’ characters to propel this alien narrative. These were four performers dressed as military and medical authorities, whose appearance alone endowed the complex as a ‘disused research facility.’ The Marshals quickly scripted a Warning scene which would be fundamental in cranking up the tension, the perceived threat and the dangers within the building. Eckleberg positioned the Marshals on the front lawn, blocking audience entry into the building. The four performers were directed to use projected commands and a relentlessly barking tone, in fact they never stopped issuing orders:

Scott: Ladies and gentlemen, gather round, we have some important information for you! Please be aware of anything that may POP UP! (Clugston, K 2006, Unit 3)

In rehearsing these scenes Eckleberg refined the dialogue very precisely because the tone was so important in generating audience imperative. At this point the audience were to feel enrolled in the mission, they must rescue trapped youths from a rampant beast roaming the facility. At a later point the Marshals would insist on the direct participation of the audience, commanding them to “Push the buttons now!”

However the Marshals were also installed as de facto stage managers to assist the audience to physically enter the work. Marshals separate the audience into three groups and they present Occupational Health and Safety procedures for the audience’s transit through the complex:

Dani: There are orders you will need to follow: One, Keep together, Two, Stay alert, Three Follow orders! (Unit 3)

However despite having installed these Marshals as a fixed security for the audience, Eckleberg could not help but tilt them off balance. At each appearance the Marshals’ authority is destabilized by the site/the beast/the POPUP world and the Military and Industrial Complex itself: one barks “We know very little about the alien” while the other interjects,

25 Refer to the POPUP! 2006 flyer image provided in the Digital Appendix.

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reassuringly “We know nothing, we know nothing.” When they next appear inside the complex, they again warn the audience that the alien presence is “at close proximity” and is “converging on this point.” But when one of them admits “I feel sick” he is hastily wheeled away.

Marshals Giving Orders- Inner Courtyard Scene Image © M. Myers 2006

Eckleberg further complicated these roles by allowing two of the performers to narrate their childhood solo stories from within the Marshal persona. Scott is called to hospital when his father is poisoned: “Show me the Poison!” he demands. Dani is in hospital and her parents take action to save her life in defiance of medical advice. So are these Marshals the controllers of the research facility or actually trapped kids?

As dramaturg, questioning for coherence, the shifting identity of the Marshals was one that I felt required more visual clarification (Plummer, K., 2006a, 4th August). Two of these characters were clearly soldiers but the other two were ambiguous. One appeared as a ‘controller’ of the bug spawn, the other later on a hospital table. Eckleberg decided that both performers needed more specific costuming as medical scientists in the ‘disused research facility.’

Despite this I felt the audience could never really be certain of the Marshals intentions - were they guardians or prison guards? They were the most clearly ‘costumed’ characters in the work but kept shifting their actions and loyalties: barking orders, then sharing secrets, warning us of the alien, helping the alien sort through its spawn, and finally leading us

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directly into the Jabberwocky ’s lair. Although they created a strong framework for audience entry into the ‘fiction’ they remained unstable identities. In fact they drew attention to the interplay between the installation and the dramaturgy of displacement. In their incomplete authority they embodied the instability of the site (‘we know nothing’) and they in turn became its victims. Overall these personas appeared to demonstrate a ‘slippage’ at character level, an ‘un-resolution’ that Eckleberg intended to leave in the weave.

In fact by leaving the Marshals as shifting identities Eckleberg used them as an effective tool to propel the audience into action. In the first confrontation scene for example, despite warning us that ‘everything is fine’, our Marshals begin to morph into bugs - sinking to the floor. The Beast is approaching, they are not invincible, and we, the audience, are now left to face it.

Building Audience Initiation

My feedback from the first full run through of the piece in late July drew attention to sharpening the new strand in the work, namely the audience’s quest and their physical cues:

How do we get the audience moving under their own initiative? – How are we triggering them? How do we make them take the initiative at the end of each scene to leave the space – we create the triggers but they initiate the action. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 19th July)

I believed that we needed to ‘beef up’ the military theme, to focus the quest imperative even more and Eckleberg agreed. The Marshals’ scenes were refined to be even more insistent and Eckleberg decided to extend the imperative tone into the solo stories that followed. He added military style locators to introduce each of them:

Elise (shouts) Latitude: 33 Degrees South Longitude: 151 Degrees East Location: Bardwell Park Time: 0300 hrs Operation: Pajama Escape I’ m outside on my verandah trapped between the fly screen and the fridge… (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 6)

The Jabberwocky style ‘naming’ of the cast’s solo stories as ‘the Quest Begins’ was thus reinforced. These military introductions also created a uniformity across the solo scenes; audience could overhear other groups begin their journey the same way, namely “Latitude, Longitude” This installed the mission and the alien quest firmly in the audience’s mind.

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The installation of the alien narrative and its later reinforcement was a fundamental development in the dramaturgy of POP UP! It created a contemporary focus for the Quest, enrolled the audience, generated imperative and a tension which dynamised the piece. However within this strand Eckleberg had also embedded uncertainty and destabilized signifiers. The Marshals were shifty personas, the site was undefined and so also was the image of the alien. The quest, dependent on the group dynamics of each audience, would itself become a shifting installation. To install the quest any more firmly we needed to refine scene transitions to manipulate the audience’s movements and impel them to initiate. b. Jabberwocky

As described in ‘the dramaturgy of displacement’ the Jabberwocky poem had been a key source for devising; contemporary scenes had been created using its themes and language. Its metaphorical ‘wordscape’ had become part of POPUP’s unique, hybrid vernacular. Eckleberg now chose the sites on which the Jabberwocky toy stories would be installed. The locations were unpredictable and thereby led to further ‘popup’ surprises for the audience. More important was the fact that the staging would force the audience to position themselves within the frame of the action. The AV artist designed a multimedia environment that would surround the audience but also continued to destabilize them by asking them to take active choices. It would be an immersive but a customized environment similar to the way Janet Murray (1997) had described the computer interface.

Installing the scenes

The first Jabberwocky inspired scene (aka.‘The Tum Tum Tree’) was installed under a tree next to Shopfront’s front veranda. A red capped Lego boy argues with his father, a one-armed Texan soldier. He is determined to fight the Jabberwock. The scene was now installed onto a rescaled miniature version of the Shopfront house and veranda, positioned on the front steps of the life sized location. The animated action was small scale and intimately staged, however it would be simultaneously magnified via a live-feed camera onto a huge side wall of the main building. The audience, sitting and standing to one side, would then have to move in order to choose between two versions of the story- the miniature live version or that grossly enlarged via projection. As described previously the figures of the toy puppets, the soldier and the Beijing mascots, created a changeable mood depending on their scale. Like the Marshals these eclectic images could be ‘read’ in a number of ways.

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The second Jabberwocky inspired story, (the ‘Snicker Snack’) scene, was also installed outside the building; the puppets would appear on a tree branch in the rear courtyard:

Snicker Snack Scene. Image © K. Plummer 2006

V/O: ‘Twas brillig in the school yard and the slithy girls were discussing the formal.’ (Three small Beijing bath toys appear illuminated on a tree branch) B: Guess What? C: What? B: Blue Boy asked me to the formal! C: No way! That’s frabjous! Caloo Callay. (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 11)

The live animation of Beijing Mascots would be rescaled via live video feed onto numerous, small and large TV monitors, installed on a circular trolley in the centre of the courtyard. Their prerecorded, looped dialogue was to be loudly projected across the space. The audience again would need to move around the courtyard, positioned within two versions of the scene simultaneously.

The Wild West Jabberwocky scene (Leaving Home) created by the Mental Health Outreach Group was to be shown inside the building, again on a bank of video monitors. Here Eckleberg’s methodology of displaced storytelling was most clearly linked to installation. The

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story had been filmed on the day it was created. Eckleberg’s devising methodology of displacement here used for reasons of emotional safety as well as artistic experimentation:

TJ: We used the aesthetics here to assist A__ to tell his story - he could project it into the toy and distance himself from it.

TJ: Do you have a story about your parents when you left home. A: Yeah. TJ: Can you use these puppets to tell me the story?

So he is telling me the story because he needs to and we video it. And it’s used in the performance. (Eckleberg, T., 2007, 27 February)

The inclusion of this story in the middle of the performance would refer directly to the solo stories that preceded it and would project forward to those to come. In addition Outreach participants within the audience would experience the feeling of ‘looking back on the process’ through the product. I noted here that, both through displacement and installation, the creative process had directly been embodied in the performance as Eckleberg had earlier claimed.

Installing the Structure

During Creative Development Eckleberg had begun to plan the structure of POP UP! by naming the Quest stages in Jabberwocky and then matching them to the emerging devised scenes. He identified the key lines in each stanza of the poem that conveyed its poetic ‘Intention’ (eg. to Warn: “beware the Jabberwock my son.”) The devised scenes were then also matched to these lines.

All the scenes were now rehearsed to further convey their Jabberwock ic intentionality. This intentionality was sometimes explicit, for example the strong militaristic barking of the Marshals as ‘Warning.’ Or it was only implicit, for example the solo scenes and stories about turning points in childhood as part of the ‘Quest Begins’ (‘He took his vorpal sword in hand.’) By using these labels as titles for the scenes Eckleberg was also directing the cast in the way that they should performatively ‘work upon’ the audience. When Eckleberg installed these scenes onto the architecture of the complex the specific aesthetic features of each site now added to the staging, mood and the poetic intention that he had designated. For example:

In the avenue of trees

Status Quo/Orientation: the audience assemble

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Warning: the Jabberwocky poem is told while the cast perform the collective gestures linked to their own quest story. Quest Begins: We follow the hero through the tree avenue towards the complex.

On the front lawn

Warning: by the Marshals, Quest begins: Audience are divided into questing groups then follow the cast

Into the building

Quest begins: three separate groups witness three stories, in three locations.

And so on - Pause Reflect, Confrontation, Heroic Return, Status Quo .

(Eckleberg, T., 2006)

The scene in the rear courtyard which had been labeled Pause and Reflect (‘so rested he by the Tum Tum Tree and stood a while in thought’) provides a characteristic example of how the rehearsals progressed through shifts in the installation process. In the refining of this scene I observed how Eckleberg responded when site specifics and trial audience behaviors affected the casts’ ability to project the poetic intentions of the scene.

The scene was a reflection on childhood, here playground games would be played in groups of two or three, the cast directly interacting with small audience groups. The element that linked all these games was that they contained advice parents give their kids, warnings of the kind: “Beware the Jabberwock my son/Beware the Jubjub bird and shun/ The frumious Bandersnatch.” But in this case, these were updated to advice like: “Always wash your hands before you eat” (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 10).

Ideally we planned that the audience would emerged into the courtyard then be surrounded by the cast who asked them to participate in these games. However in latter rehearsals we found that the trial audience would not move fully out into the courtyard but stuck close to their entry door. The cast could not infiltrate them. I watched as Eckleberg responded to the site and to the audience. He added a movement sequence, one appropriate to reinforce the ‘Pause and Reflect’ intentionality. As the audience emerged the cast would be hunched together on the far side of the space, under another Tum Tum tree. They repeat the collective gesture sequence from the Prologue and whisper. When all the audience have gathered closer to them the cast then spread out, looking at the sky: “Are we there yet Mum?” By drawing the audience into the space the cast were then able to engulf them in the playground routine, switching their personas to an entirely different dynamic and mood.

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In observing this directorial change it became clear that Eckleberg was not seeking to dramaturgically impose the Jabberwocky poem as a direct scaffold in the work. Devising had generated a range of scenes and plethora of stories; repetition, overlapping and shifts within the Quest poetic would result. In fact Eckleberg’s choices in sequencing the scenes and installing them on the complex did not aim to create a building tension, an aggregating mood for the audience but instead often jolting, contradictory states. The architecture of each space was used to enhance a sense of disequilibrium and displacement - as was the overall structure. The whirlwind playground scene above had been preceded by solo poems about transition on small TV monitors. Following this scene came ‘Snicker Snack’ where the intimate scale of the puppets would create another shift from the running, interactive playground action that had immediately preceded it.

The final structure of POPUP! would repeat and shift the stages of the poem through various re-versions. POP UP! ended up containing two Confrontations with Jabberwock style beasts and multiple moments of Pause and Reflection. I observed that Eckleberg had created a structure that could be identified with Jabberwocky but had blurred it and he described this impulse in his dramaturgy as “sublimating the archetype” (Plummer, K., 2006a, 1st June). In the production period he made choices in onsite installation that assisted this sublimation.

c. Contemporary Stories

Eckleberg encouraged each cast member to work themselves on installing and shaping their solo scenes. This installation process forced them to reshape the story in response to the architecture of their site:

Eckleberg: “Use the shapes and surfaces of space - they may resemble the place in your story or the emotions evoked by it.” (Plummer, K., 2006a, 28 May)

He insisted they maintain a precise structural frame for the story. Each was to begin with a precise locator for the audience, for example “I’m at The Doctor’s surgery sitting in the patient’s chair.” It was then to move into the action and clarifications, then add more backstory: “I was really really sick” (Unit 5).

During the installation the cast often worked on their scene alone: the movements, the shifting of the action and mood were refined continuously because this story formed their core performance unit:

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Eckleberg: You need to work out the shifts in the story, to expand onto and to frame that key moment - so that the audience gets it - knows that moment is really the key to meaning … plus the way you use space is also reinforcing that key moment. (Plummer, K., 2006a, 11 June)

In working through these scenes dramaturgically at such an intense level the cast learnt how to shift a personal story into a performative ‘weave of actions’ and to create a ‘shape of themselves,’a persona to unite the past and the present. In POPUP! Eckleberg sought to present multiple identities to the audience held side by side: child, young adult, marshal and bug.

An important part of each performer’s work on the scene was to develop strategies to attract the audience’s attention, to move and position them safely and to encourage them to move on to the next story. The cast had to tell their story but also engage the audience in an active participatory dynamic. For example:

Ashton recruits and gathers audience on the driveway side of the porch.

Latitude: 33 degrees South Longitude: 151 degrees East Location: Picnic Point Operation: SMOKIN

Now I will be between this point here and this point here- the best place to see would be on the driveway. Now I am at the front of my veranda dining room setting here and my mum sitting there just having a smoke. We usually talk about random stuff like ‘How was your day? Anything exciting happen? (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 5)

Watching Eckleberg giving feedback to each performer on their solo scene I noted again the emphasis he was placing on the repetitive ‘poetic of storytelling.’ Each of the three audience groups would participate in three story scenes one after the other. Yet while the arc of each story contained a dramatic world none of the imagery here would link them to each other or to the Jabberwock/Alien. For Eckleberg their meaning as a unit was based on the intentionality of ‘the Quest begins’ and the poetic of storytelling itself. Only the gestures were taken further and through them Eckleberg installed the idea of ‘moments of rupture’ at other points across the performance.

Sam’s solo scene provides an example of how the personal story was extended via the architecture to the audience and how a dramaturgy of installation, shifted onto the audience was realized. After hearing Ashton’s more laconic story (above) Sam sharply calls Audience Group 1 to follow him along the verandah and into the corridor of the house. He pauses at the

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end near the entrance to the bathroom. The audience are now funneled into a small crowded space, some may hear the story more than see Sam:

Latitude: 33 Degrees South Longitude: 151 Degrees East Location: Mortdale Time: 1800 hours Operation: Biro Locator. (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 6)

Sam’s story is a sudden and surprising confrontation. In response to a trivial question (Have you seen my Biro?) Sam’s father explodes with anger, bringing up a range of queries about his son’s future. Sam leads the audience in single file into a tiny bathroom, cramped by a TV monitor and industrial wiring. He moves into the corner of the room and straps himself into the installation. He is physically installing himself into the story and then suspended and trapped by it. There is a moment of silence. The audience feel confined and uncertain. Sam suddenly shouts at them and points aggressively to some small stairs in the wall. Reenacting his father’s final dismissive words he bellows: “Face it, you have no other option!”

The site has trapped the audience in a moment of rupture and they have to resolve the situation in order to move the work forward. They climb out the bathroom window and escape. In this story the audience were installed but given no fixed position: they were asked to listen but also to climb out and onwards. All the other audience members watch this group ‘pop out’ from out the window. Sam’s story was a very effective moment through which Eckleberg installed the audience in the work and shifted their expectations of their role.

d. Pop Ups

The Production Period was clearly dominated by physically installing a new ‘pop up’ environment across the whole Shopfront complex. The designers, AV artist and volunteers worked for six weeks to build this environment. In addition a design workshop team created the numerous costumes and puppets including the puppet Hero, the miniature set for the Tum Tum Tree scene and the three heads of the Jabberwock. Tension mounted as the installation overtook rehearsals and because Eckleberg needed these completed design products to refine the action with the cast.

In the theatre itself four cast members were to emerge from hanging chrysalid pods. The whole ceiling was covered by the rib cage of the (inflatable) beast and this was linked to the three huge Jabberwock heads (to be animated by the cast). The beast’s torso would slowly deflate over the scene as each bug and Jabberwock head was defeated in battle by the Hero.

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Bugs emerge from their pods. Image © M. Myers 2006

The installation involved clearing and removal of almost all the internal furniture in the building: rehearsal rooms, design spaces, the costume store. As Director, CEO and Artistic Director, Eckleberg now had to oversee this schedule and in addition manage the new crew members brought in for the run: a production manager, a stage manager and assistants and technical operators. Five separate lighting and sound desks were installed in various locations in the building to operate the progressive performance. Setting these up and rehearsing their personnel into the flow of the piece was another facet of the installation.

The AV artist established more than ten audio visual sites in the building, most of which created spatial ‘pop ups’ that would shift audience focal points and reframe their perceptions of space, architecture and action (Plummer, K., 2006a, 19 July: AV installation).

Bacon and Eckleberg planned a complex live and AV sequence for the inner courtyard scene: Warning and Confrontation (Plummer, K., 2006a, 4th August). This demanded coordinating sound, lights, cast, two screens and the trial audience (5-6 crew and onsite helpers). I have previously detailed the action in this scene (pp.126-127) so here I will focus only on the details of the AV and its planned way of activating the audience.

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The audience are in the central courtyard of the building, the beast is approaching and the Marshals are being mutated in front of them. A suspended screen (on the audiences left side) projects a live feed ‘security camera’ image of ‘bugs’crawling towards the audience. The audience shift to the right to better see the image. But these bugs then pop up live from behind and under them.

Eckleberg’s version of a ‘pop up’ here involved creating a multi dimensional focus so that the audience are constantly being shifted into the centre of the action. The audience disperses to allow the bugs through but only a short time later they are forced off this claimed space. Suddenly, the whole area is invaded by a giant inflatable Bandersnatch, clogging up all the remaining room and the audience sightlines. Finally a cast member ‘pops down’ from the ceiling above them and is chewed up by this beast as it towers over the cringing audience.

The Inflatable Bandersnatch menaces the bug spawn Image © M. Myers 2006

The install phase involved a detailed rehearsal and planning of this scene. As dramaturg I asked the team to all ‘enrol as audience’ so we could account for them in the blocking. Audience safety and perceived levels of discomfort were part of the action but were my major concern as ‘audience eye.’ In discussions between the director, designer and myself we realized that further design decisions in the scene needed to be contained because audience proxemics and uncertainty had been taken as far as they could go (Plummer, K., 2006a, 8th July).

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AV triggers were then planned to exit the audience from the fiction: the cast had disappeared but the audience had no idea what came next, and the scene had destabilized any sense of where the next action might come from. By raising the screen, switching on video monitors in an adjoining space and opening the doors beyond them, the audience were offered an exit out of the space.

Other planned AV installations would also create shifting perspectives on the cast’s solo stories. Projection and live feed were used to create displaced images of the cast, reinforcing the destabilizing content of the stories themselves. For example: Elise presents the final solo story to the whole reunited audience who disgorge from three passageways into the central courtyard. She is pinned in a barred window frame, like an insect. A tiny camera hangs from roof, framing only her face:

Latitude: 33 degrees south. Longitude: 151 degrees east. Location: Bardwell Park. Time: 030 hours. Operation: PJ escape.

I’m outside on my veranda, trapped between the fly screen and the fridge - I didn’t mean it. I’m trying to convince my mother. I didn’t mean it - you must hate me. Unbearable. I ran. I ran away in my pyjamas and ugg boots. Aggression. My body fed off the motion. I didn’t mean it. On the spur of the moment you can do awful things. I hear my mother calling on the street - we embrace. Connection. You must hate me. I didn’t mean it. Desperation. How do you describe something you don’t understand yourself? (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 6)

However one audience group have already seen extracts of her story. As they walk along the house corridor they glance into a small room through a barred door. A small monitor is suspended in the doorway and this shows an extreme close up of Elise’s face, telling her story of disconnection. On closer examination through the doorframe they can see Elise’s body from behind, pinned against the outer window frame. She is telling her story to another group of visible audience members, who now become part of the performance for this first group.

Elise’s story demonstrates how Eckleberg and Bacon conceived AV installation in tandem with site specific architecture. Here they created audience awareness of the multiple journeys and identities operating simultaneously at this point in the performance.

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August: Elise’s solo story Image © K. Plummer 2006

During the Production Period Bacon and Eckleberg added to the dramaturgy by conceiving and installing digital technology that would achieve physical displacements in the audience, and force them to make choices. The audio visual elements were installed to work effectively with the design and architecture of the site. Through this combination the audience experienced constantly new configurations, a constantly fluctuating sense of the fourth wall and fluctuating expectations on their level of individual participation. Not only were they moving through the building but they were being asked to engage with performers and design elements that had been installed in shifting, unpredictable ways in each location.

8. The Emerging Aesthetics of Installation a. Storytelling within the Installation

For Eckleberg the Installation was a logistical and architectural ‘major work’ with infrastructure and design issues dominating rehearsals. In fact ‘Installation’ also referred to the process by which scenes were refined on site and developed further within their newly

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installed environment. In planning the performance Eckleberg had to consider the running logistics and ‘map’ each cast members contribution.

The journal extract given as a key example below illustrates how Eckleberg continued devising during the Installation - to include more of the cast’s responses and to cover structural and logistic gaps. This account of scene building illustrates how the methodology of the process (displaced storytelling) and the dynamics of the installation (the architecture, the site specifics) were combined.

“I was in a Cool White Fog” Image © M. Myers 2006

Dani’s scene (Cool White Fog) demonstrates how the new alien narrative was combined with the other strands of the ‘weave.’ During the performance she and Jared engaged the audience both as Marshal figures and as themselves, here sharing her story. The story was included as a Warning before the final battle scene and created a sense of ‘looking back’ to the stories of the other performers presented over thirty minutes previously during ‘The Quest Begins.’

By the performance week this scene ‘The Cool White Fog’ had been fully installed as a Popup environment. The theatre foyer was transformed into a weird hospital operating room; the front-of-house bench became an operating table, the three fridges were filled with hanging MRI scans and their shelves with black dolls legs. A Monitor bank along the side wall was installed with a web of silver conduit and operating button panels. Each monitor had more MRI scans on illuminated display. The ceiling (heavens) was obscured by white parachute silk, clouds and spiderwebs.

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Logbook: Creating Dani’s scene - Cool White Fog (Plummer, K., 2006a, 4 July)

1. Structure TJ talking with Scott (designer) and KP in the dining room- looking at the mapping of the show. TJ: We need to have a transition scene between the courtyard ‘snicker snack’ Tumtum tree and the pods because all the cast have to run around the building and re-dress. Also the two scenes need a medium scaled scene between them. Also I still do not know what Dani’s doing in the theatre. 2. Aesthetic TJ: Dani had the design idea to use her MRI scans…. and she is always going on about her story, Scott: Maybe we could use the fridges in the foyer to backlight the MRI scans as she tells her story about her stroke? With Dry ice- smoky. 3. Devising TJ then got Dani into the room and ran this by her- then prompted her to tell a story about what her parents did when she was sick. She told us: 4. Storytelling: Dani: It was like i was in cool white fog. I was in hospital, hooked up to a NG Kangaroo. The stroke sent mixed signals to my body so that my muscles were working against each other, literally tearing my leg apart – it broke my leg! The nurse said to my parents to bend my toes back but they disagreed with that idea. I could not speak- I was screaming but was hearing myself scream. I wanted them to stop arguing and help me. My parents sent the nurse away and began to rub my leg from the foot to the hip. They did it for probably 15 minutes but it could have been an hour. Anyway it helped. Somehow they knew what was best 5. Concept: Then we talked about the strongest images in the scene and the nature of the conflict and Dani’s feelings. The fact that the MRI fridges could be opened as a POPUP, that the medical look would tie in with the disused research facility. The other tier were strong images of the parents responding to the sick child - the hour of crisis. The dismissal of the health professionals. The torture of ripping apart.

My Dramaturgical questions : What is the overall message – that parents can intuit what is best, that the audience needs to love their disease, that there are scary stories to be told, that parents are with you for all the crisis moments. Dramaturgically how does this scene ‘gear the audience up’ for battle?- this is its intention? (note to self: these are dramatic questions - you are still looking to build meaning from one scene to another - we aren’t doing this)

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b. The Emerging Language of Installation

TJ Eckleberg had conceived that the ‘install’ in the Production Period would involve marrying the two archetypal narratives (the Jabberwocky poem and the contemporary stories) to the architecture of the Shopfront site. The quest stages of Jabberwocky would guide the order of scenes. The structure of the poem, its key sentences, intentions and its language would provide a basic scaffold as the expanded ‘weave’ of devised actions were installed onto the Shopfront site. The site specific design installations themselves would then be created around the concept of a ‘pop up’ landscape.

The new Alien narrative strand was our dramaturgical driver in this period. Creating clarity in the visual and verbal cues for this Alien Quest became an important for the dramaturg because this was the narrative that installed the audience, generating ongoing tension and the dynamics of the journey. The aesthetics of the alien quest created more opportunities for disequilibrium and displacement. In particular I noted that the way Eckleberg maintained ambiguity in directing the Marshal characters; this demonstrated his impulse to sustain a partial dramaturgy - one of shifting, rather than fixed identities.

Eckleberg’s new ‘narrative’ strand would roughly parallel the structure of the Jabberwocky but would also shift any tendency for it to become the sole dramatic impulse. Through observing how Eckleberg installed various scenes on site I realized the piece would not so much mirror the Jabberwock in form but in its displaced aesthetic and poetic language. As the examples in this section evidence, the installed performance was going to traverse a blurred pathway and increasingly present images, figures and identities that were dual, uncertain and unresolved. In addition the structural repetitions in his construction meant that the audience would experience the ‘poetic of storytelling’ repeatedly during the performance.

By this stage of the process the aesthetics and poetics of POP UP! had become manifest. In form the piece would not build into a single dramatic arc – the ‘narratives’ presented would be multifarious, multilayered and oblique. The work would reference a number of mingled, displaced sources and the poetic would be characterized by repetition and hyperrealised elements, dislodged from their context.

The dramaturgy of the performance, ‘the work of the actions’ had emerged from Eckleberg’s methodology on the floor. His impulse towards displacement had been clearly telegraphed from the outset. He later pointed out: “We never set out to provide them with a narrative’- look at the poster!” (2007).

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9. The Dramaturgy of the Spectator

While Case Study One sets out to focus on the dramaturgy of process, rather than present a performance analysis (as in Case Study Two) I believe it is now appropriate to present findings from the performance run of POPUP! These snapshots are taken from the point of view of the dramaturg in order to demonstrate how Eckleberg’s methodology, based on the principles of displacement and installation, resulted in a performance weave characterized by both these principles as poetic and aesthetic drivers. Thus Eckleberg’s methodology of process was directly reflected in the dramaturgy of this performance- the way the piece was woven by the viewers.

Six months after the performance I asked Eckleberg what he saw as the unique characteristic of his process on POP UP! :

I think there was more space for the intimate stories. I mean they actually dictated….You say to Erik ‘tell me a story’, ‘find a place on the building and tell me a story about your mum’. So he finds a place on the sidewalk and tells me a story about the Bora ring. And in terms of developing action I say to him; ‘What have we got that is the closest to that here?’ There’s a tiny square of dirt in the concrete. He picks up the dirt, hands it to me and says ‘This is my mother.’ That’s method (as much as I know of it) to get him to tell me in an engaging fashion. And that story is the performance. (Eckleberg, T., 2007)

Repeated stories, shifting story elements - constantly coming back to storytelling as a mode of processing the past in the present, this was all fundamental in Eckleberg’s generation of devised material on POPUP! and this means of ‘weaving’ then became ‘the work of the actions’ in performance. I see ‘displaced storytelling’ as the key to the poetics of POP UP! that is, how the actions were ‘worked upon’ each other and the way they moved the work dynamically.

In addition the findings from POPUP! in performance illustrate how, through the principles of displacement and installation, Eckleberg achieved an open dramaturgy projected outwards towards the audience, one that required their active physical negotiation of the material:

I want to cement those disjunctions that keep the audience engaged. How do I do that as director … I don’t say ‘relax its all here’ … around me … but I displace it - I keep the audience trying to connect. Stop them dismissing it. (Eckleberg, T., 2007)

In this type of ‘working upon’ a number of the traditional features of drama -turgy were blurred, undercut, subverted and displaced. In each area my analysis of the performance run of POP UP! inevitably leads back to the audience, the way they participated in the ‘work of

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the actions’, the place they took in the poetics of ‘displaced storytelling,’ and how they became part of the aesthetic of POPUP! a. Characters and Roles

During the performance the cast shifted from persona to role to character- they appeared as infants, children and questioning adolescents. At other points they appeared enmasse as mutant bugs or military and medical authority figures. Through constantly displacing and blurring their role and physical relationship Eckleberg sought to engage the audience and extend the frames of the piece:

We presented two images so that the audience could keep reconfiguring the narrative.. and sometimes that was overtly stated. So we had the Marshal (Scott) ask them: ‘At this point it is important to ask- when did you last see your children? When did you last speak with your parents?’(Eckleberg, T., 2007)

The example to which Eckleberg refers occurs in the Inner Courtyard scene Unit 7: Marshals (Second) Warning. Here Scott appears dressed as the Sergeant /Marshal; his role is to again advise and warn the audience of the approach of the Alien. However at the same time he breaks into his own solo story- about facing his fears once when his Dad got poisoned and rushed to hospital. The personal story and the visual context create an incongruity, a friction against each other: Is this a Marshal or one of the kids the audience may ask? The scene extract below demonstrates the number of references at play simultaneously:

(As audience start to enter inner courtyard Scott speaks directly to them, whilst ambient music is playing) Scott: Ladies and gentlemen & it is important for us to know – when was the last time you saw your children? … It is also important that you know not to push the red buttons!

(Scott continues giving instructions until they are all in, then begins his story)

Scott: I was sitting in the hospital … there was a vase of red roses. (All marshals do gesture of Pulling up the leg, exclaiming “AAArghh”) Scott: Can I see the poison? (All marshals repeat this)

Scott: Directive One Dani: We do have some more information … Alien presence … they know for our location. Don’t panic. Everything is just fine. Scott: Directive Two … (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 7)

The challenge for the audience was to adapt to the cast’s changing personas and the direct relationships in which they were asked to participate. A cast member noted at one point that there was no real dialogue in the whole piece, that all the lines were presented ‘face out,’

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direct to the audience. The cast worked the actions directly onto the audience, playing out the intentionality of the Jabberwocky quest Eckleberg had set up. ‘Dialogue’ with the audience ranged from the authoritative (the Marshalls) to the intimate (moments shared between a smaller group in the story scenes).

Dani’s story, ‘Cool White Fog’ became as a scene in which we could assess the degree of audience participation - an indication of their final acceptance and understanding of the shifting relationships, in space, proxemics, images, moods and identities. Dani needed the audience to help her tell her story. In the final solo story the audience were installed fully into the scene because they performed the key gesture of rubbing the leg. In this story it was a lifesaving action:

Unit 12: Cool White Fog:

Dani, dressed as a medical officer invites the audience to enter the theatre foyer - now a space aged operating theatre covered with silver conduit, MRI scans and refrigerators full of black doll’s legs! Dani positions the audience in the centre around an operating table, she stands at the edge of the space and hands out doll’s legs to numerous audience members.

Dani: I was in a cool white fog. I was on my back in a hospital bed. I was hooked up to an NG Kangaroo … Jared: (on hospital bed) I was in a cool white fog. Dani: There was pain. There was screaming … Jared: I was in a cool white fog. (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 12)

As her story unfolds she insists audience members rub their doll’s leg, because by doing this same action, her parents saved her legs and probably her life. It was surprising how earnestly audience members of all ages complied in performing this task with Dani and Jared. Here were two strangely costumed personas, a weird installation (part science lab, control room and theatre) and the audience in the centre listening intently and rubbing doll’s legs! This was a transformative moment in POP UP! ’s dramaturgy, a moment which reframed the audience in the centre of the space and as active participants in the fiction.

b. Space

Eckleberg’s flyer had enticed the audience, promising that ‘in the building - there are answers.’(Popup! Flyer/Poster , 2006). However this implied that the work would require the audience to actively ask questions. Many of their questions were direct responses to the ongoing displacement of scale and proxemics. In our ‘popup’ landscape the audience needed to create their own narration:

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Having to work out where to look means sharing the experience more with your fellow theatre goers - you have to ask them ‘Where's this happening?’ ‘Where's the screen. (Rawlings, S., 2006)

Many of the ‘pop up’ moments involved negotiating sudden, surprising and sometimes frightening, appearances. They displaced the spatial arrangement and proxemics often with a grand change of scale and timing. Enrolled in the work as questors, seeking battle with an Alien, the audience learnt quickly that their response to the architecture of the work was part of the dynamic and tension, the narrative of the performance:

We felt least safe when the performance threatened to include us onstage. Sometimes we were close. Sometimes we were distant. The roaming forced us to make eye contact and perhaps even talk to the audience members around us. We were a community congregating- mingling with our fellow aliens. (Murphy, T., 2006)

Traveling in three divided groups the audience were required to squeeze into small blackened corridors, walk past installed performers, avoid certain areas, and re-negotiate the space and their position in every scene. They were given choices of viewpoints in the outdoor scenes and had to actively move around to view the content:

The nature of jostling for space among the moving audience, especially when behind others in long hallways with actors only at one end or behind tall people in front of TV screens. I found it uncomfortable and frustrating. (Rawlings, S., 2006)

Inner Courtyard Scene illustrating proxemics. Image © M. Myers 2006

The uncertainty and the struggle were part of the quest: to relive, to renegotiate stories, memories and identity on the journey to adulthood. The anecdote below illustrates how

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Eckleberg used the simultenaiety of constantly displaced images and events to force each audience member to take up the challenge, to take some authority in constructing the narrative ‘weave’ themselves:

When Eric came through the roof? – Well up till then all the stories hade been jumbled, Rob was alienated by the show but then this Aboriginal kid appeared through the roof, saying he used to love listening to Michael Jackson- but before he could get that out he was swallowed by a huge inflatable monster. Rob was really surprised by that image - it got his attention. At that point he realized he needed to pay really close attention, to listen to these stories or he would miss something really important. (Eckleberg, T., 2007)

The audience could not avoid becoming involved at some point: crouching down to sift sand at the bora ring, climbing through a window, pushing a red button. In the playground advice scene the audience were directly questioned and co-opted into the children’s games. Jared and Sam walked up to individuals and shook their hand: “Hi how are you?” Sam offered but then Jared quickly interjected: “Don’t talk to him - he’s shit!”

However in the larger scaled sequences, especially in the Final Battle, the audience took a more of a traditional role, observing staged action and krump dance sequences. Eckleberg chose to stage the battle scene in the theatre but with the audience (finally) sitting down on the normal rostra seating. The blocking of this scene as a ‘krump off’ challenge between the cast members was revised totally, quite late in the production. Eckleberg wanted all the choreography to be spatially refocused around the audience. As a result the cast krumped in quite close proximity to the audience who were seated under the huge, suspended, but slowly deflating, torso of the Jabberwock beast itself. c. Time

The audience’s participation as a moving body meant that time became an audience controlled variable in POP UP! We could never really account for the exact time it would take each separate audience group to traverse the stories and installations, this was fluid and unpredictable from one performance to another (Plummer, K., 2006a). Similarly site specific aspects affected the time duration and tempo of the work. For example, depending on the size of the audience and the evening’s traffic, it could take minutes for Kev to find a safe moment to lead the audience across the road. He often had to repeat and extend upon his solo story: “I think I can cross … I think I can cross.”

It was inevitable that the site would affect the work, especially given that the first thirty minutes took place on the street outside the complex. The 7.38 freight train to Wollongong,

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for example, often featured in the first Jabberwocky recitation, blazing down from the embankment with its own ‘eyes aflame.’ Numerous cars passing the theatre slowed down to watch or honk their horns, commuters walking home stopped to watch the scenes from their front lawns.

These audience-determined displacements in tempo and duration were enhanced by ‘tricks of time’ Eckleberg had built into the performance. For example, in the Prologue Kev runs down a corridor of performers, who repeat the ritualistic ‘collective gesture’ sequence. He appears to be running hard but it seems to take forever for him to get there, and then suddenly he is front of the audience. In fact he mimes the run on the spot for a long time, his visual efforts contrasted by the slow motion repetitions of the rest of the cast flanking him .

Eckleberg also used contrasts and displacements to play with timing within the larger ensemble scenes. In the First Confrontation the Marshals morph slowly to the floor as the bugs crawl laboriously forward, the spawn writhe slowly on their backs but ‘wind up’ into a speedy krump routine. In the Final Battle it takes minutes for the bugs to emerge from their chrysalid pods, however once they begin battle they are high speed krumpers.

10. The Performance as Text

The final scene, the ‘Krump Battle’ was where Eckleberg brought all the ‘texts’ together on a large scale. In its final manifestation the Jabberwock Alien combined the thematics of the whole piece: its three serpent like heads revealed demented infant faces, thus the Hero must fight three tortured images of childhood. The Hero himself, in a remediated image as a life sized krumping puppet defeats the cast (now mutant bugs) one by one in a krump dance challenge.

In fact the whole battle is presented by proto humans - it is only once the Jabberwock is defeated that the cast reappear in their own personas, costumed as they first appeared in their solo stories: “He left it dead & with its head he went galumphing back” The Krumping puppet hero retreats backwards carrying a Jabberwocky Head. Kev appears. He opens a diorama - a small avenue of trees- and places it on the floor. He starts to recite Jabberwocky in German. At points in the story actors come forward in their original costumes and tell an anecdote of moments of shared achievement with their parents. They each place a minature cut out image of themself on the diorama. (Clugston, K., 2006, Unit 14)

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The Battle: puppet Hero versus puppet Jabberwock Image © M. Myers 2006

The piece was not resolved dramatically. The audience was invited to participate in the finale with a krump dance party erupting from the casts’ initial bows. The performance sought to end in the same manner as it began – with soft edges. The audience had assembled in a ‘no mans land’ 300 metres from the theatre to begin the show where they were given colored wristbands and an informal briefing by the director. They finished the show standing around on the stage watching and participating, krumping with the cast and crew. There had been no interval. There were now no post show refreshments. The audience were there as participants rather than entertainees.

In POP UP! a poetic dynamised by displacement achieved temporal, physical and spatial shifts. These generated tension because they insistently projected the action onto the audience. The performance achieved an installed aesthetic; the imagery of the Ja bberwock, the aliens, the scale of the inflatable images, the bizarre mix of miniature puppets and a grossly enlarged ‘popup’ landscape worked upon and against each other in our weave. Eckleberg ensured that if any image repeatedly ‘popped up’ it always appeared in a new frame, with altered proxemics and scale. Rather than blending or aggregating to build a dramatic-aesthetic unity, here images collided and interrogated each other. Scaling and rescaling stories and images characterized Eckleberg’s performance weave:

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The intertwining of those small stories with the overall story, the arc, the mythology of the Jabberwock and the Alien amongst and within us, threatening us. I really like that there was a small unraveling of intimate moments surrounded by the colossal: a huger perception of what was actually going on. At times I am not sure how effective it was but it wasn’t a simple narrative thriller. (Eckleberg, T., 2007)

Eckleberg had structured the work to marry repeated storytelling with ongoing contrasts in space scale, tempo and duration. This constant dynamic ‘up and down shifting’ became the ‘performance as text.’ Jabberwocky provided the arching ‘narrative as form’ of the piece, not despite being, but because it is open ended. It may have led the audience to some expectation of plot but actually only provided a ‘leaping off point’ for the work’s contemporary concern, namely parent child Relationships. In the same way Eckleberg’s later installation of the audience quest had pragmatic foundings; it was a useful means of aesthetically integrating Erth’s design resources and their fascination with the cinema design of Geiger (from the Alien movies).

For the audience the main coherent thread in the dramaturgy of POPUP! was the fact that they were physically engaged in a quest to get through the building, and if they were in doubt, military terminology kept cuing them on this. Eckleberg’s directorial decisions relentlessly positioned the audience in different and changing relationships to the performance space and the performing bodies. My observations of Eckleberg in process demonstrated that dramaturgically the fiction of the quest was not really important to him as a narrative but as the impetus for the audience to move, a challenge to traditional audience behaviors.

Eckleberg’s dramaturgy of process clearly did not create and build aesthetic or dramatic unities with each successive scene. Tension was not created through a concatenation, a building of content from one scene to the next but through the audience’s participation in the logistical architecture, their unexpected, surprising, changes of scale and positioning, also through their own dramaturgy ‘working within and upon’ the ‘pop up’ principle.

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Chapter Six: Artist Case Study Two: Kristo Šagor (Germany)

1. The Dramaturg and Playwright/Director: Approaching the Text

The second Artist Case Study on German playwright/director Kristo Šagor (2007) provides a dramaturgical analysis of three playscripts and of performances of these scripts in production. The plays in question are FSK-16 (2004), Ja (2006a) and Frankenstein ( 2007). All these works were written or co-written by Kristo Šagor, two of the analysed productions were also directed by him. In this Case Study I have taken a more traditional stance as a researcher and performance analyst.

Unlike Case Study One, which was framed around a devised performance text with and for young people, these texts were written for a professional subscriber theatre and for performance by adult professionals in a repertory company. In this Case Study I have thus not helped to ‘weave’ the text but I have responded to the woven texts created, both as written scripts for performance and as texts in performance. As Louise Gough (1991) discovered textual analysis, script assessment and ‘script doctoring’ are the most widely accepted domains in the dramaturg’s work. In this Australian research enquiry dramaturgical analysis is applied to texts written in German for Kinder- und Jugendtheater (KJT). The research process has by necessity led to translation. One play ( FSK-16 ) has been given a full working translation the others have been translated only in the extracts given as examples. 26

The research method on this Case Study was less rigidly applied than that on the first project. Grounded Analysis proscribes a strict sequence of procedures whereas time (and financial) constraints involved in researching in Germany dictated a data gathering process I would best describe as a rapid triangulation of traditional methods that maximized efficacy. The data gathering sequence varied for each work in this study: FSK-16 and Ja were read in German prior to viewing them in production, whereas Frankenstein was initially viewed in performance. After this the script, both the written text, the filmed text and Handycam sequences were then analysed.

In applying an organizing model to write up this second fieldwork I chose to represent the two fields of dramaturgy that Barba traces back as early as Aristotle, namely the dramaturgy of the written text and the dramaturgy of the production. The written text can be seen as a

26 My full English translation of FSK-16 is provided in the Digital Appendix. I regard this as a working translation but not a production ready script. Full text (German) copies of each play are also to be found here, as well as my detailed structural synopses of the three plays in English.

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matrix, one that Barba argues is used to record ‘actions’ predominantly through the dialogue, the evidence of what the characters spoke. Whereas the ‘dramaturgy of performance’, he asserts, reflects the ‘actions as episodes’ and action here includes changes in sound, light noise, space, timing, the dynamic patterns and the staging conventions created (Barba, E., 1985, p.75).

The three productions of playwright/director Kristo Šagor analysed in this Case Study manifest this practitioner’s development from writer to writer/director and traverse the two dramaturgies of written text and installed production.

The writing process for the original scripts of FSK-16 and Ja involved an improvisation and creative development period with the acting ensemble and directors. The genesis of Frankenstein however was developed by Marc Reisner as a three stream multimedia version, incorporating TV, film and live action. The script was later written and co-directed by Šagor.

In directing FSK-16 and Frankenstein and in his participation in the production process on Ja , Šagor’s dramaturgy and his concerns as a writer have been furthered in the decisions he has developed from ‘page to stage.’ These decisions often involve using installed technology as a strand in the ‘weave of performance.’

The chapter is broken into three sections. In Sections One and Two an analysis of FSK-16 and Ja has been combined, firstly as written text (playscript) and secondly as text in performance. The structure here evokes the ‘page to stage’ chronology of scripts into production on two works produced in the same context- that is at Schnawwl Theater, Mannheim. Section Three provides a discrete analysis of Frankenstein - from the outset this ‘script’ was conceived as a three strand multi-mediated narrative, the written script embedding the installed media products. Frankenstein was produced in a different context - for a mainstage audience at the Staatstheater Oldenburg.

2. The Dramaturgy of Displacement

This chapter contains a detailed analysis of each of Šagor’s works with the aim to identify common impulses in his dramaturgy. The Key Categories uncovered in Case Study one, namely displacement and installation, have revealed themselves as appropriate descriptors for the poetic and aesthetic effects wrought by Šagor on the page and on the stage.

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I begin by identifying a ‘dramaturgy of displacement’; I believe it is a fundamental trait in playwright/director Kristo Šagor’s work. Across these three key works ( FSK-16, Ja, and Frankenstein) I examine displacement, again as a destabilizing intention, a desire to generate and sustain audience disequilibrium. In Šagor’s playwriting and his directorial choices displacement creeps into challenge the strong dramatic structural scaffolds he establishes in each onstage ‘world’. He writes action that fosters audience uncertainty, rather than that which creates aggregating unities in character, time and place. Šagor’s plays ‘zigzag’ towards an open ended outcome rather than a narrowing resolution, in both the action and in the development of character.

In this chapter I identify Šagor’s scripted ‘dramaturgy of displacement’ manifest in transitory settings, destabilized character types, language shifts and in the actual premise or thematic in each play. Then in analyzing FSK-16 and Ja in their ‘dramaturgy of performance,’ I identify displacement in terms of the set design, position of the audience and the multimedia choices Šagor installed as director, his choices in ‘weaving’ the aesthetic media.

Across the three works this playwright’s ongoing concerns and world view emerge clearly. Šagor repeatedly interrogates the contemporary human; on the intrapersonal level he sees us as self-conscious shape shifters, constantly reconfiguring our identity. Šagor manifests this through his unstable characters. On the interpersonal level he sees us as occupied with asserting, then reconfiguring our power over others. ‘Power plays’ are Šagor’s main onstage actions. Šagor’s dramaturgy problematises and experiments with these themes as dynamics; his poetic and aesthetic impulses, on paper and onstage, are those of subversion, re-projection and restatement.

The script and production of FSK-16 provides the most compelling example of this landscape and this work is a platform to understanding Šagor’s dramaturgy in both its thematic and aesthetic spheres. FSK-16 is currently one of Šagor’s most popular works and in constant production across German speaking Europe. I will be referring to the second production of this play, one that Šagor himself directed, where he installed stage design and multimedia technology to capitalize on the displacing impulses in his written script.27

27 The quotes from FSK-16 refer to my English translation (Plummer, K.2006c) while quotes from Ja (Šagor , K. 2006a) and Frankenstein (Reisner, M and K.Šagor 2007) come from the German drafts of these two plays. Quotes from each play refer to page numbers in the scripts provided in the Digital Appendix.

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3. Dramaturgy of the Text: Displacement in FSK-16 and Ja a. The Premise and Setting: Transitory Zones

Šagor claims that his work is either set in transit zones or lounge rooms (Šagor, K., 2008b). In his original hit play Threesome without Simone it was a school corridor. Directing the adapted classic Törless (by Robert Musil) in 2007, he chose to set the boy’s school conflict in the boarding house bathroom. In FSK-16- 16 and Ja the transitory kinetics of the setting contribute to the sense of displacement, and the developing disequilibrium Šagor seeks.

FSK-16

As always Stipe, a young Croatian boy, slouches into his seat for the late screening at his local cinema. But the film does not come on - because tonight two fifteen year old girls in the audience want to make ‘Something Big’ finally happen in their lives. … And then they both hit upon the ideal project: to force a young man to tears. (Schmidt, V., 2007)

Ja

Lilly has run away from home and sits in a train traveling to the North Sea island of Amrum. In her luggage she has packed a cherry stone and her secret mission: shortly before her grandfather’s death she promised him she would plant a cherry stone on Amrum for him- He promised her that the journey would help her to understand it all. (Jerg, S., 2006)

Corridors, bathrooms, cinemas and trains: These are all technically public spaces however in Šagor’s works they become an uncertain, insecure space for the edgy enactment of private business.

FSK-16 is set in a cinema auditorium. This appears to be a private place due to the time (late at night) but the space is disturbed at regular intervals during frightening blackouts – in which the seats are torn up by a mysterious Other. This is someone violent and at one point the girls claim it is their brother, but the audience suspect it to be one of the onstage characters.

Ja is set on a high speed intercity train, a very familiar space for most Germans, however the themes explored on board are far from mundane commuter life: they include death, faith, belief spirituality and the soul. To reflect this the landscapes outside become increasingly surreal and internalized. The stage set is a wraparound carriage like a revolving restaurant. The thematic of the play telegraphed through the set; your journey keeps revolving back the starting point until you recognize that ‘God has no hand other than your own.’

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In both plays these settings provide opportunities to eavesdrop on the main action: in Ja two conductors observe almost all of Lilly’s interactions within each carriage and pass public judgment on them. In FSK-16 the girls take turns to seduce the boy while the other watches. Šagor uses ‘eavesdroppers’ to create an internal frame through which the audience views more objectively the planned actions onstage. They often realize they are watching characters who consciously use power to manipulate others.

Šagor uses the setting as a leitmotif in his work. The analysis below explains how he not only ties the characters to the setting but also to embedded patterns of action - these become the structural frames. However once he establishes these ‘dramatic’ frames Šagor then displaces them from within. When his explicitly patterned scaffolds are subverted by the internal action of each scene displacement and disequilibrium occurs. This poetic becomes a focus for the audience and the means by which the work progresses on its own unique terms. b. The Characters: Unstable Identities

FSK-16 : the Marginalized

Figen: Next year I have to decide if I want to be German or Turk. I can only have one passport. Stipe: Yes, I know. My brother-in-law adopted me, so I got a German passport. Figen: Your brother-in-law? Whats your name again-Stippen? Stipe: Stipe. Its Croatian. But my sister, Andrijana got married here, so I am allowed to stay. Figen: In Turkey we get called "deutschlaender"- like those shitty sausages. Is it like that in Croatia? Stipe: Well, earlier they called us ‘Jugo Swabians.’ (p.9)

In writing FSK-16 Šagor’s initial concern was to explore displaced characters and ethnic identity (Šagor, K., 2008b). The play’s original director Klaus Schumacher recalls Šagor’s starting point:

The first idea was that three cultures meet… then the girls’ game came into it: to make a boy cry. The issue of identity is a strong through line - how do we describe ourselves to others and how do we appear to them? ‘Do I look like a Turk she is always asking? Young people are always trying to fabricate images of themselves. (Schumacher, K., 2007)

Šagor has purposely created characters who represent the non-dominant culture in contemporary Germany. Stipe is a Croatian war refugee and Figen is a German Turk constantly being questioned about her racial identity. Kirsten appears to be typically German

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however she is from Dresden, so is actually from the old East which is still regarded as ‘second state’ Germany:

Kirsten: They’re looking for us, for sure. We’ve been gone from Ottendorf Okrilla for a few weeks already Stipe: Ottendorf which? Kirsten: The hole from which we come. No one knows the name so I just usually say Dresden. That’s close enough. (p.16)

The investigation of identity, through self projection and powerplay is the overriding leitmotif of FSK-16 , linking character, action and structure. However rather than drawing these ideas together Šagor drives them against each other. Questions of character and identity are the first obvious destabilizations for the audience:

Stipe: So how do you know each other? You and... Figen: Kirsten, her name is Kirsten. Stipe: How do you know each other then, you and Kirsten? Figen: A school trip. Stipe: Oh, You’re not from here? Figen: Deeeer! (obviously) Stipe: So from where? Figen: Dresden. Can’t you hear my dialect? Stipe: Um, no. Figen: You look older than 15. Stipe: I know, everyone says that. (p.9)

One set of facts rapidly displaces the previous and each scene contains conversations in which Stipe (and the audience) try to ‘secure’ the facts: Who are these girls and how do they know each other? How old are they? Why are they here in the cinema?

Figen: We‘re sisters. Stipe: But I thought you were Turkish? Figen: Do I look Turkish? Stipe: Maybe.. Figen: Do I sound Turkish? Stipe: I don’t know. Figen: Come on, lets get out of here. Kirsten: What if he’s still outside? Stipe: And your name is…? Figen: I am called Franziska. Stipe: OK, so why are you two in the same class? You’re not twins or anything... Figen: Karin got repeated in third class. Kirsten: Shut up! Stipe: Karin? Figen: She hates people knowing, but its true. (p.14)

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In FSK-16 Šagor constantly reinvents the central character relationships, “Kirsten is inventing characters of the sisters and later a lesbian couple- they are all strategies to find out who she is” (Šagor, K., 2008b). Initially Stipe struggles to keep up with the girls but we later realize this is his first clue to the ‘game’ being played upon him. As the play progresses the audience’s character focus shifts; we ask more questions about Stipe than the girls, identifying him more as the protagonist.

Ja: the Archetypal

The central character in Ja, 8 year old Lilly is a concrete enough anchor for this play. She has a realistic costume, a goal, luggage. She has a genuine desire to find people who can assist her to get to Amrum and back in time for her Grandfather’s funeral. In each scene she seeks guidance to answer the key question he has left with her: Where does the soul go to when you die?

However the other characters Lilly encounters in each train carriage become increasingly figurative and metaphorical. These are characters with displaced and unstable identities and here Šagor uses social misfits as archetypal guides. Director of the Schnawwl production, Andrea Gronemeyer (2007) comments:

The characters are challenging for the young audience because they come from a broad range of references: Mars and Martians then Raphael and Sid, then the group of characters who each represent a search or longing, a hole in their lives. They think that the first carriage has the answers to all these questions. They need to learn that the idea with Faith is that we cannot actually ever see God but only know Him through our Faith and through his manifestations in the world. And through our own actions – ‘God has no hand other than your own.’

The first scene begins with Elias, 35. He is on his way to a fitness examination to be an astronaut - this gets a laugh from the audience as we can all see he is far too old. Elias’s Faith that they will accept him is based on the belief that: “They will take me straight away when they see how much I know. I have read all the books about astronomy that they had in our library” (p.7)

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Ja: Lilly and Elias. Image © Karola Prutek 2006

Eva Marie Wiesengrund enters the next carriage. She carries several shopping bags and rummages constantly amongst them, checking piles of paper receipts. Amongst all the debris of consumerism Eva Marie has lost her memory and identity. She now relies on Luck and other people’s goodwill. She proffers a receipt to Lilly:

EMarie: Can you tell me what I bought? Lilly: A bed for 180E, then a table and four chairs for 370E then a deck chair 20E and here it say kitchen benches 2849 E .. And you can’t remember buying them? (p.15)

As the scenes progress the characters who appear in each carriage seem increasingly blinkered and dependent on external support. They often fail to understand they are on a journey. Many are confounded by the fact that different landscapes (life) are passing them by and have a genuine fear of being alone. In the third carriage a family enter: grandmother Jana and grandson, Janus. They fight over domestic rights; his grandmother has repainted his room white. They insist they are outside the courtroom and mistake Lilly for the judge. She hands down her verdict with: “Ok so, my Grandad wouldn’t, no hadn’t, no - wouldn’t have, repainted my room without asking me, ‘bye” (p.25).

For them life is all about Justice: arguing your case over and over and they become increasingly childish: Jana starts crying and Janus has an ungrateful tantrum . The pair (like the mythological Janus) represent the two faces of a journey, a transition between two states and the ground between youth and adulthood. They are also the two binary forces of yes and no ( Ja - na, Ja - nus)

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Lilly tries to persuade Janus he does not need to get off the train with Jana (at Sydney station) but he says he will be alone if he doesn’t. In contrast Lilly has no such fear. In trying to help Janus, Lilly remembers “My Opa said - be your own miracle (p.31).”

Three Martians enter the next carriage. They live by the rules of the group. In this sense the scene could be seen as a commentary on gang culture or cults or even on organized religion. Each repeats the phrasing of the other:

Zurp: I know but he always does what is forbidden - this dumbo . Gurk: As I said, he always asks what’s forbidden and that’s why he’s definitely a dumbo. Zurp: He is always a dumbo because perhaps he simply is a dumbo! (p. 33)

These figures are so tied up in their habits, language and rules they cannot function and here Šagor uses circular comic routines repeated ad nauseam. However in this Martian universe all of Lilly’s questions seem to be forbidden. When she poses the key question, “Where does the soul go when someone dies?” they respond with:

Gurk: As I said, its a forbidden question Zurp: You’re not ever supposed to know Bert: We must ask in the first carriage. (p. 38)

Bert is reluctant to get off the train- but he is attached to the others. He asks Lily straight out: “Can you really get to your goal alone?” he then begs Lilly find out what is in the first carriage: “Write me a postcard when you have found it out- to Bert on Mars” he insists (p.39).

Ja : the Martians. Image © Karola Prutek 2006

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It is possible that all these characters could be read as images of the Ages of Man: Elias demonstrates infantile enthusiasm while Eva Marie a old age dementia, Janus has a childhood dependence on his home and the Martians are adolescents immersed in peer group culture. What is certain is that the audience increasingly recognize these characters as no more than guides in Lily’s spiritual education. But each successive character, in each successive carriage seems less able to assist her. Each is blinded by their own perception of the Spirit manifest in external things:

Elias: But what is the point - he’s not going to be buried there after all? Lily (angry) I know that! - he meant that I would understand it when I was on the way. My Opa said ‘when someone is taking a journey, they are someone with a good story to tell.’ (pp.8,9)

The audience, by registering the repeated entry of each character, recognizes the quest tradition; each new character is merely a symbol for the choices humans make in the search for universal meaning in existence. They believe in Faith (career), Luck (materialism), Justice (family) and Humour (the group rules). Moreover the train represents an imaginative landscape, a spiritual rather than a realistic journey. c. The Action: Destabilizing The Frames

As stated previously Šagor uses the setting and premise of his works to create a number of structural frames:

His works are rarely divided into individual Acts and Scenes - instead they are held together by the number of cigarettes in a packet ( Thirsty Birds ) or by the FSK-16 declination (the age classifications in the cinema). Coincidentally in the last case (FSK-16 ) this develops and a classical five act structure (0, 6, 12, 16,18) results. (Hackel, A., 2005)

However, while both FSK-16 and Ja scenes appear to create a five act structure, the action is not dramatic leading to a narrow resolution, but open. Šagor consistently works to undermine the dramatic arc, to displace, rather than to aggregate certainties of character, time, space, action and mise en scene .

Setting as structure in FSK-16 : a cinematic motif

In the title of this play Šagor declares his structural mapping: FSK-16 refers to the Cinema Classifications system in Germany; the title in Australia would be MA15 +. Each scene in this play is labeled with an age category and has a movie title appropriate to this. Thus the play

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begins with ‘FSK-0: Christmas with Ernie and Bert’, then accelerates by the end to ‘FSK-18: Baise Moi’

At the end of each scene the audience are warned by one of the characters to ‘get out’ of the theatre before the next scene if they are under 6, 12, under 16 or 18. The audience can expect that each successive scene will increase in violence and sexual references. In addition Šagor has his characters acknowledge openly to the audience that they are participating in a series of violent ‘cinematic’ events, an escalating conflict or a turn of the screw.

Moreover, FSK-16 is set in a cinema and the audience are positioned as the screen; facing a row of seats on which the actors perform. In this way setting and staging imply the issues of projection, identity and image which this play seeks to interrogate.

In using the FSK structure Kristo Šagor appears to set up a sturdy scaffold for unfolding dramatic action within a concise setting and limited character interaction. However each of these frames are rapidly displaced, even subverted. The contrast between the structural certainties at the beginning and end of each scene and the destabilizing elements within each becomes the means by which FSK-16’s characters enact manipulative violence and powerplay upon the audience.

Setting as Structure in Ja : the Journey towards the First Carriage

Early in Ja Lilly is instructed by the train’s bizarre conductor Raphael: “When you really want the answer you have to get to the first carriage. Or you can get off the train. It’s up to you to decide, but - as you’ll quickly realize - they are two very different paths” (p.11).

Each scene in Ja has a repeated structure: in each carriage Lilly meets a new character whom she questions about the spirit and afterlife: Where does the soul go to when someone dies? Each character decides to get off at the end of each scene, having reached their ideal destination: Paris, Sydney etc. Lilly must decide whether to accompany them and whether their spiritual search is the right one. Her alternative is to continue onboard, to move up the train towards the first carriage. She watches each ‘carriage character’ outside on the platform and makes her decision, aided by the influence of the train staff: the kindly conductor Raphael and the malevolent Sid Maus.

The explicit structure of Ja, namely the journey through the carriages towards the first carriage, implies a teleology. We expect Lilly will narrow down her search based on getting

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clearer answers from each of her co-passengers. Ultimately the audience expects ‘the answer’ will be manifest in the first carriage:

Lily: What do you think, where does the soul go to when someone dies? Elias: Into outer space of course. L: In that case you will get there, eventually.. E: So you don’t believe I can achieve that in my lifetime L: Do you believe it?

Elias sinks.

E: You want to go to Amrum? You’re on the wrong train. (p. 10)

But Šagor refuses to make the answer progressively clearer. Eva Marie’s answer reflects the ‘happy go lucky’ agnostic - the soul might go to Norway- she knows very little about Norway but would like to go there. In the fourth scene Janus simply replies “no one knows that” and later the Martians will not even allow her to ask the question.

Each character believes the train is heading in a different direction, Munich, Paris, Sydney etc and in each progressive scene the train’s timetable appears more and more arbitrary, varied at will by Raphael and Sid. As early as the end of scene one Lilly has doubts and tries to get out at Paris but Raphael actually blocks her way. “We greet the boarding guests at the Frankfurt station and wish you a great journey to Hamburg Dammtor and etc bla,bla, bla” he quickly adds to his next announcement so that train is again heading north towards Amrum (p.12). In response, Lilly picks up her bags and heads into the next carriage.

In addition to the carriage characters becoming less realistic (the three Martians for example), the play actually becomes less rigid within each scene; the audience more and more aware that Lily is only on a figurative journey. As I analyse later the imagery used in the landscapes outside assist this, as does the breakdown in language. However it is the manipulative interactions by Raphael and Sid that are the key means by which Šagor displaces any realistic frame.Through the conductors he demonstrates to the young audience that they are on an expansive, spiritual quest.

Character Frames: Spiritual Guides in Ja

In Carriage One of Ja it is clearly suggested that neither Raphael or Sid Maus are actual conductors and by default, this is not a real train:

Raphael steps into the carriage silently and moves slowly past the two (Lilly and Elias). Lilly is surprised as he is suddenly next to her. She tries to show him her tickets.

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Elias begins to rummage in his bag.

Lilly: Do you always sneak around like that?

Raphael looks in his travel plan.

Raphael: Man can never determine the really important moments in his life. Elias: What?

Raphael moves away.

Lilly: Hey! Don’t you want to inspect our tickets?

Raphael looks in his travel plan.

Raphael: Every thing has its time.

Raphael immediately disappears to the right. (p. 9)

Ja: Lilly and Raphael. Image © Karola Prutek 2006

Director Gronemeyer claims that she and the cast always regarded the characters of Raphael and Sid Maus as ‘gatekeepers.’ One audience member at the post show discussion saw them not so much as characters but as angels, good and bad - Raphael and Lucifer (Plummer, K., 2007).

The clues they had put together include the fact that we often see Raphael and Sid watching Lilly from behind the seats or from the glass screened foyer and both use the loudspeaker announcements to manipulate the train itinerary. Each announcement is designed to get the carriage character off the train and force Lilly to decide whether to continue. Raphael creates these announcements to help Lilly, whereas Sid unlocks Raphael’s loudspeaker and disguises

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his voice (as Raphael’s) to give false announcements. For example in Carriage 4 the train cannot go to her destination “due to the reason of today’s reasonless reasonlessness (p 40.)” Earlier Sid tries directly to tempt Lilly off the train:

Sid: Don’t you think she (Eva Marie) needs your help out there?’

Sid looks invitingly towards Lilly. Lilly sees him clearly for the first time. (p. 21)

Lilly: I have to go on. Sid: There are only crazies up there. The further you go forward the crazier they are. I would rather get off. And I wouldn’t go into the first carriage under any circumstances. (p.23)

Increasingly the audience witness Sid and Raphael actively participate in Lilly’s journey. Both take on disguises later in the scenes, they play other characters to help her make a decision; Raphael plays the questioning Martian, Bert: “Isn’t it harder on your own?” Sid plays Janus, the ungrateful grandson. At the end of Carriage 3 Raphael observes Sid getting out of his disguise as Janus:

Raphael: You know I can get rid of you anytime I want Sid: Yes but then you’d get really bored with yourself.

Raphael laughs.

S: You’re making it too easy for her. R: How long has it been since someone has made it to the first carriage? S: I bet you she doesn’t make it R: I never bet. You know that. S: Coward! (p. 32)

At this point the metaphorical nature of Lilly’s journey and the superstructure of Ja is identifiable. Raphael’s status as the more powerful, heavenly angel is made clear and their role as spiritual guides on a metaphorical journey is established for the audience.

Character Frames: The ‘Constellation of Three’ in FSK-16

In FSK-16 the FSK title of the play refers to the initials of each of the characters’ names - Figen, Stipe, and Kirsten. The title reinforces the main premise of the action: two girls have staked out a deserted cinema to fulfill a bet, daring each other to make a boy cry. Two females against one male in a competition to seduce and manipulate him to ‘bring him down.’

The title reflects that Šagor has mapped the action in FSK-16 around a character triangle. This is a power constellation that fascinates him:

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Three is the most dramatic number there is. Three always means: two against one, a power constellation. The third is there as an object. But also the second, who from the outset is in on the agreement and so it is able to achieve majority rule, thus the second also becomes an object of the power game. (Šagor interviewed by Schnitzler, S., 2004)

FSK-16 : Stipe versus Figen and Kirsten. Image © Nina Urban 2004

The action of the play is consistently patterned around this ‘constellation of three.’ It becomes an explicit dramatic device, beginning with Stipe’s entry observed by the two girls. In Scene One Stipe exits to find the projectionist and we see the two girls confiding. Here Figen takes the role of the reluctantly complicit ‘second object’:

FSK-0: Christmas with Ernie and Bert Figen: But does it have to be today? Kirsten: Oh, Stop shitting yourself. Figen: I told you from the start - I don’t think I can do it,. Kirsten: We have an arrangement. Figen: Yes. Kirsten: Okay? Figen: Yes. Kirsten: We’ll see it through? Figen: Yes, we’ll see it through. (p. 5)

The audience become aware of the workings of this structural constellation: Each character takes a turn to leave and the two left ‘play upon’ each other; Kirsten goes to the bathroom,

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Figen begins to seduce Stipe, Kirsten returns and the two begin to ‘turn the screws’ emotionally upon him:

FSK-6: The Phantom Menace

Stipe: Are we going together? Kirsten: (announcing her presence) Isn’t this really cute?

Stipe winces. Figen acts as if she is whispering with Kirsten. But it is so loud that Stipe can hear everything.

Figen: He thinks my breasts are ugly. Kirsten: Are you kidding? Figen: He doesn’t want to touch me. I’ve got a new boyfriend, who thinks my breasts are ugly. Kirsten: So now you’re a couple? This is great. Figen: He’s never had a girlfriend, isn’t that wimpy. (pp.11-12.)

In FSK-12: Final Fantasy it is Kirsten’s turn to seduce Stipe. We watch Figen eavesdropping in the same way Kirsten witnessed Figen’s seduction. They are in a cinema and each of the girls is creating a performance, a role play in seduction, for the other’s benefit. The audiences’ awareness of this and of Stipe’s vulnerability is one of the ways that FSK becomes violently fascinating:

FSK-16 : Figen seduces Stipe. Image © Nina Urban 2004

Stipe: Humans are ignorant apes. Kirsten: Do you find me an ignorant ape? Stipe: No. Kirsten: You have beautiful brown eyes. Stipe: No one has ever said that. Kirsten: Is Figen’s mouth warm or cold? Stipe: What? Kirsten: You kissed her. I saw. Stipe: Really. (p. 17)

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Structural Frames: ‘Speech Islands’ in FSK-16

The structural development of Ja is based on an obvious progression through the train’s carriages from the rear to the front. Each carriage is named for the spiritual lesson that the carriage character embodies: Faith, Luck Justice and Humour. These patterns in Šagor’s dramaturgy have been analysed previously.

The structure in FSK-16 directs that each scene is a ‘movie’ of a higher FSK rating. Šagor’s structural ‘full stop’ at the end of each scene takes the form of a character monologue. These monologues are increasingly concerned with violence but are only spoken by Kirsten and Figen. Stipe tries to speak twice but it appears that he cannot get any words out. Šagor labels these monologues in the script as ‘Speech Islands’ ( Sprachinseln ). Each contains events and images that appear to inform upon character:

Kirsten: Do you have a pet? Did you ever have one? With a pet you can practice. Practice how you have to handle people. The mistakes you make with pets shouldn’t ever be repeated. (p. 13.)

We will witness Kirsten enacting power over others in the same cruel and sadistic manner she has experimented with on her pets.

Figen’s Speech Islands largely concern her relationship with Kirsten. This frames our understanding of her decision to participate in the bet, and more than this her underlying belief as to how all relationships operate:

Figen: Look around you, on the street, everyone has scars. Look here. I got cut here on barbed wire, about a year ago when I climbed a fence with Kirsten. If lightning strikes Kirsten dead tomorrow, I’ll just run my finger over my scar and know she was there. Every scar has a story. Do you have a scar? Will you tell me its story? Someone without scars has no story.

FSK- 6. Now … everyone under six years old must leave the room. Everyone under six … Now … leave! (pp.5-6)

Šagor’s naming of these monologues as speech islands may appear to be a matter of semantics, but these are ‘islands’ rather than monologues with a dramatic intention to create a coherent backstory. They really are ‘islands’- they are watery and unsettling. Their content

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lies in circumstances from the past but they do not erupt from the character as a psychological response to immediate live action and they do not directly refer to the onstage events.

Through some of the images in these ‘islands’ the audience may create symbolic links to the live action. In Figen’s first monologue we are introduced to the issue that everyone scars each other and it is these marks we carry that define us. We understand that the relationships we see here will be violent acts; they are scarifying and we fear for Stipe at these girls’ hands. But while the speech islands contain symbolic information, its significance in direct relation to characters is deferred or ‘held over’ for a much longer period. For example the image of the scars takes three quarters of the piece to become clear and then with more relevance to Stipe’s journey than to Figen’s. d. The Language: Un-tethered Wordplay and Inversion

Psychological inversions are part of Šagor’s appeal to youth audiences:

He reverses the stereotype images: in FSK-16 we have a boy who has a fear of sex and an interest in psychology. And it is the girls who actively try to seduce the boy. (Rabl, S., 2007)

Sagor achieves character inversion and displacement through his attention to detail in shifting the language. Šagor reveals language as a transferable commodity; his characters use language but sometimes it traps them. Language is imprecise when it should not be and also source of instant community at the best times. Šagor projects characters who are often subject to their language, rather than those who can demonstrate language as a tool under their control.

Ja : Word Play

In Ja Lilly is an earnest character who is keen to use precisely defined language. She often has to correct (adult) others:

Elias: Where are you traveling to? Lilly: Towards Amrum. Elias: He lived in Amrum? Lilly: On Amrum. Amrum is an island. (p.5)

Lilly and Elias use humorous language games to respond to Raphael’s enigmatic responses.

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Raphael: Everything has its time. Elias: What’s his problem? Lilly: He’s somehow creepy Elias: No only crazy - beknackt (p.9)

A rhyming banter between the two begins: Gelackt, zerhackt, verpackt, pudelnacht. In the same way the Martians use their ‘dumbo’ language to engage in a sense of community and Jana and Janus take comfort in their constant argumentation.

Each scene in Ja is of course framed by the train’s itinerary and the visual languages of the landscapes outside- more on this is discussed in the next chapter section. But both these languages are undercut as realistic frames for the action from as early as the first scene. The stage directions instruct at Paris Station:

Elias gets off the train. The national anthem of France is heard. Elias wanders disoriented amongst a pile of traditionally dressed French … . Lilly takes her things and moves towards the door …

Raphael: We greet arriving guests at Frankfurt am Main station and wish you a good journey to Hamburg Dammtor. This train will stop in Kassel, Gottingen, Hannover, and so on and so on. Etcera etcera blabla blabla vla bla bloeblooooooooep. Hallelujah it’s a funny day! (p.12)

Lilly’s journey is one to realize how the spiritual is manifest in the everyday, for that’s ‘where the soul goes.’ Increasingly Šagor draws the audience’s attention to language to establish a connection between objects in reality, shared human experience and the spiritual.

A key moment occurs in Carriage Two when Lilly and Eva Marie begin to eat the cherries from her grandfather’s garden, slowly savoring each one. The cherry eating is performed like a ritual, suggestive of the Eucharist. Eva Marie spits a stone gently into Lilly’s hand:

Eva Marie: That one was perfect. Lilly: Perfect? Eva Marie: Yes (Ja) (p.16)

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Ja: Lilly and Eva-Marie. Image © Karola Prutek 2006

Eva Marie chooses the best and Lilly trusts her choice: she saves this stone. This is the cherry to plant in her Grandad’s memory. Lilly is rapidly growing in her spiritual awareness and openness to others. Not long after she remembers “My Grandfather said God has no hand other than your own.” Šagor’s play holds lessons for young people on the power of human integrity as well as matters spiritual.

Lilly is able to achieve such clarity again in language and intention only by the second last carriage, the carriage before the important first. Here a Blind Man is already sitting in the aisle blocking her path. He is a non specific character, dressed in plain trousers and shirt and he knows her name without her telling him. Is he God?

In the previous scenes, even with Raphael and Sid, language has led to convolution, misunderstanding and circularity. With the Blind Man the language of shared experience seems to crystallize. This carriage is simply titled: Ja.

Lilly: What is it like to be blind? BM: What is it to see? (p.41)

Lilly: Who are you, I mean, where are we now? BM: Is that so important - where we are? Lilly: It is important to be where you want to be. BM: And it’s important to want to be where you are. Lilly: That’s true. (pp.41-42)

Through another Communion, this time expressed as a language ritual, Lilly and the Blind Man assess the journey so far. They link the embodied experience with spirituality; thus from each carriage Lilly has learnt that “God has no hand other than your own.” The Blind Man

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begins by smelling the perfume and shaving cream Lilly has brought to remind her of her parents:

BM: That smells good. That smells like … Both: Love

Silence.

Lilly: And how does love taste? BM: Love tastes. Like a basket of fruit. Each fruit tastes better than the other. The more you eat the fuller the basket … how does Faith taste? (pp.43-44)

The Blind Man asks Lilly to describe the taste of each carriage – Faith, Luck, Justice, Humour:

BM: How does humour taste? Like chocolate perhaps? Lilly: Ja

Silence.

Lilly: And cherries?

The Blind Man laughs.

BM: Yes. Cherries (p.44)

Raphael and Sid are observing all this. At this point Sid hits Raphael, urging him to announce the arrival in Amrum. Raphael responds by simply giving Sid the precious microphone: Sid, in a complete role reversal, must acknowledge Lilly’s spiritual victory:

Sid: Next stop: Amrum. After a short stop this train will travel further to. To …

Raphael shrugs his shoulders. (p.44)

FSK-16: Inversion

In FSK-16 language has a far less playful purpose, here repeated wordplay becomes the means of violently scarring each other. In FSK-18: Baise-Moi the girls’ relish using elements of each others seduction to finally bring Stipe to his knees. Stipe has previously labeled each of them: Kirsten is “a rosy cheeked girl” (energetic sporty, lusty) and Figen is a “girl in boys gear” (a mysterious femininity hidden under unisex clothing). But he is unable to cope if girls touch him - due to a childhood war trauma and a previous sexual encounter he names as “the charred fingers:”

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FSK- 18: Baise-Moi

Kirsten: Did you understand the ‘charred fingers’ thing? Figen: No.

They turn again to Stipe.

Kirsten: You’ll have to explain to her the ‘charred fingers thing’. Actually to me too - I don’t get it either,.

Stipe cannot release a single word.

Figen: What is wrong with you? Kirsten: He’s got exactly the same expressionless face as Nico. Figen: What’s wrong with you, all of a sudden?

Kirsten: Nico gets that vacant look even when he’s hitting me. Can you imagine that? Someone who just looks vacant when he hits you.

Figen: No I really want to know - What’s suddenly the matter with you?

Kirsten hits Stipe.

Kirsten: ‘Girls with rosy cheeks’? Say it again - thanks. Go on, say thanks. Figen: He’s saying nothing at all.

Stipe becomes more and more stiff and more expressionless. (pp. 26-27)

The image of the ‘charred’ or ‘charcoaled finger’ is never fully explained and in many ways Stipe’s silence is the most powerful inversion in this play. In Scene One he appears as a loquacious wordsmith, playing with imagery and identity to create the most affective response. Šagor uses language as another way of demonstrating how young people ‘try on’ other identities, Stipe in particular often brings in old fashioned words and “phrases that sound like a sad, middle aged man who is trying to be funny”(Šagor, K., 2008b). Initially Stipe seems the older of the three characters, the most analytic, mature beyond his years and, ironically, the most aware of social manipulation:

FSK-0 Christmas with Ernie and Bert

Stipe: Has it struck you that every year they claim to produce ‘the most successful film of all time’? Every year? That’s the ‘marketing machine’ talking. They want us to follow every instruction, to really suck us in. The statistics are obviously rigged. Kirsten: Clearly. Stipe: Don’t you think about this stuff? Kirsten: I think about other stuff. Stipe: (very- emphatic pseudo professor)? For incest? Kirsten: (even more professorial) Did you say ‘incest’? Stipe: Yes, why? (p.2)

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Stipe’s verbal integrity is destabilized in each progressive scene. He is verbally and physically emasculated and his language reveals his scars. He attempts to share through the speech islands a number of times and fails:

FSK-12 Final Fantasy

She strokes its face. He enjoys that. She strokes his chest, he moves. She strokes his belly, he repels her.

Stipe: Don’t touch, please. Kirsten: What? Stipe: Like this but without touching, ok. Kirsten: Why? Stipe: Otherwise that moment comes. Kirsten: Which moment? Stipe: The charcoal. Kirsten: Charcoal? Stipe: Yes. Kirsten: Explain. Stipe: No Kirsten: You started it, you explain. Stipe: Thomas and I were at a party. Thomas is my best friend. He chatted up someone and things got pretty loose with her pretty quickly. They went into the bathroom and locked it from the inside. She had come to the party with a friend, and we were laughing about the two of them. So we just started it up as well. She took my hand and led me into the garden. She took off my clothes, just like I’d always imagined it. She touched me and her fingers felt charred again, but only for a moment. (pp.18-19.)

In fact this ‘charred finger’ is also an image of the accusations Stipe points at himself. Stipe blames himself for not saving his sister from rape by soldiers during the Balkans War and he has been traumatized ever since by all female sexual response situations. Ironically the girl’s game in FSK-16 brings him out of this trauma; his ‘silent scream’ is released through crying and wailing:

He lets himself be driven and misled until there is nothing left of him except his hurt. That is when he first begins to feel himself again. Lying on the floor he experiences a clarity in his feelings and gains the strength to stand up and leave, to follow his ideals. (Rabl, S., 2005)

Šagor shifts language, register and imagery from one character to another to indicate the turning points in the girls’ game. “The girls are evil and they manipulate others but at the end the language changes and they use a higher language” (Šagor, K., 2007a). However in the final scene FSK-18: Baise-Moi it is unclear whether the girls have actually achieved what they set out to. Stipe has certainly cried but he is not defeated as a result. Nor is he in their power.

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FSK-16 : Baise-Moi. Image © Nina Urban 2004

Šagor hints that Stipe may have been aware much earlier on of the game in which he was enrolled. Kirsten and the audience continue to question this. Certainly Šagor destabilizes the power within the ‘constellation of three’ at this point and the language reveals this before the action:

Kirsten: We had a bet. Figen: But she has won. . Stipe: It seems quite easy to make a boy cry then. Kirsten: Well, with a stranger its more difficult. So, which of us two played the Tart and which was your Sister? Stipe: Its not as simple as that. Kirsten: Yes. It is. Who is who? Stipe: You just want to hear me say that you are the Tart? Kirsten: Maybe. Stipe: The tart doesn’t matter much. Kirsten: Look I admitted that I find you attractive, but that doesn’t mean I am going to be nice to you. (pp. 30-31)

As Stipe leaves Figen wants to go with him - the power bond between the two girls has been torn apart. The premise of the play, the girls stated objective is ‘to make a boy cry.’ And while this event has occurred the outcome and onward journey is just as unclear, for both the

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characters and the audience. Structurally the piece refuses to create a clear resolution. It is largely through language that Šagor leaves the character outcomes unresolved:

Kirsten: He cried, and that’s the main thing. Figen: Really? Kirsten: Sure, plus some cool things also happened. For example, I found the lesbian idea totally cool. Figen: ‘Totally cool.’ Kirsten: Yes. What’s up with you? Figen: You know nothing at all about me. You have no idea what I am. Kirsten: Figen. Figen: He found out more about me in a few minutes than you have in all the months since you ran away here. Kirsten: What did he find out about you? Figen: He is a prince on a white horse. A real prince. Like in those kiddy fairytales. One with a golden crown, a fertile kingdom, a rich neverending smile. And you let him ride away. You let him ride away, one like that - ,just let him ride away.

Kirsten: What is your problem?

Figen cries. Kirsten is totally at a loss. (pp.31-32)

The extract above indicates how Šagor uses imagery and language in a displaced sense to convey characters who have been untethered from their goals rather than able to drive them through. From Figen’s lips the imagery of the prince: “One with a golden crown, a fertile kingdom, richly with a neverending smile” seems alien. It is the poetic impulse of Stipe but displaced from his own body. It recalls Stipe’s impulses to crystallize images of “a girl in boys clothes, “the girl with rosy cheeks” and the “charred fingers.”

While they attempt to shape the language as part of their projected identity language seems a phenomenon that goes beyond each character; they are each displaced from it and retain only momentary flashes of control. The decisions Šagor made as director of FSK-16 (elaborated on in the next section) further diminished the control, certainty and ownership of language and imagery by each character.

4. Conclusion: Framing versus Purposeful Displacement

Šagor’s themes and concerns in both FSK-16 and Ja are large, mature and challenging to a youth audience. His dramaturgy involves a constant destabilization of the ‘given circumstances’ and a repeated insistence on undercutting reality to force the audience to observe and calculate more than empathise.

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As a playwright Šagor is fascinated with both creating and displacing dramatic frames. Šagor’s scripted dramaturgy is very much about creating structural displacement instead of aggregating mise en scene. He pits unity and pattern against characters who thrive on living outside social frameworks. He places them in transitory settings that challenge the boundaries of private and public space.

Each work progresses by the audience learning Šagor’s structural patterns and watching for the variations in each scene. They observe how he works within the terrain, using the setting, the language, characters and action to undermine the structure. They learn that the possibility of achieving simple answers in each scene or a simplistic resolution by the play’s end is not likely. In both plays the audience are left to revisit a number of possible resolutions.

In FSK-16 Šagor ends almost every scene with a reminder of the cinematic frame: a barked announcement, an imperative “those under 6, 12, 16,18 ‘get out now!” A blackout follows and increasingly we learn that each of these blackouts are sites of noisy, violent physical damage by an unseen force. When the lights are raised we see that another character’s cinema seat has been torn apart, scarred by someone. This event signals that this work is operating outside its own frames; the audience become less, rather than more certain about who is perpetrating this violence - the girls, their unseen brother or maybe Stipe himself?

The audience realizes that each FSK-16 scene is a re-version of the same movie which will undermine and displace the facts from the previous. The audience are watching endless re- projections of a range of histories as the girls, and increasingly Stipe, choose to project them.

In Ja Šagor encourages an even younger audience to examine spirituality. He demonstrates via a widening discussion, rather than a narrowing teleology that that spirituality is the looking rather than the finding. The only clear thing that Šagor’s displaced ‘carriage characters’ demonstrate to Lilly is that questions about the soul and afterlife require a unique and uncertain search for each individual. Ultimately it’s not about reaching an objective (Carriage One) but a subjective - the experience is the answer. A life lived with integrity in each moment creates a sense of the immortal, a beauty, a certainty within each soul.

Eva Marie: Perfekt? Lilly: Ja. (p. 16)

In the next section I analyze how elements of specifically individualized screen technology were used in Ja to clearly communicate this premise, especially in the final images of the play. In both Ja and FSK-16 productions, Schnawwl’s in-house new media department were

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able to create ‘texts in performance’ that furthered Šagor’s characteristic dramaturgy of displacement and of displaced characters.

5. The Dramaturgy of Installation

Young people are always trying to fabricate images of themselves. (Schumacher, K., 2007)

The issue of identify and self projection is a constant, reiterated thematic in Kristo Šagor’s playwriting: it certainly reflects the key intention in the script of FSK-16 , while projection of spirituality through identity and action is the key motif in Ja.

The previous section analyses how Šagor purposely displaces dramatic elements such as setting, character, language and action in order to interrogate these themes. In this section of the Case Study I analyse how these intentions have been furthered in the stage production of these two works through the addition of set and costume design but more importantly via the installation of multimedia. The analysis will evidence that a ‘dramaturgy of installation’ characterized the performance ‘weave’ of both texts at Schnawwl Theater, Mannheim .

In the premiere production of Ja the director, Andrea Gronemeyer extended upon Šagor’s stage directions. Šagor himself directed the second production of FSK-16 utilizing multimedia to significantly enhance his script.

6. Dramaturgy in Performance: Installation in FSK-16 & Ja a. Stage Design in FSK-16 : Projecting Cinematic Violence

In FSK-16 Šagor shows young people in identity flux, role playing, trying on new relationship and power constellations. The action is always dangerous because it crosses the boundaries. These concerns in the script were effectively realized through Šagor’s choices as director decisions examined below:

FSK - 0 Christmas with Ernie and Bert

Evening in a cinema. Kirsten sits, in her jacket, in the middle row- right in the middle, excited in vague way, but she takes care not to let it show. Nothing happens. Stipe comes in, sits down in the last row- in the middle, naturally, competently. Kirsten looks around at him, grins to herself, suppresses the grin. Nothing happens. Figen comes in, uncertainly, seems to be the first time in this space. She sits down

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Right at the front, on the outer edge. Kirsten observes both, grins to herself, suppresses it. Figen registers, but passes over Kirsten’s look. Nothing happens. (p.1)

FSK-16 is set in a cinema auditorium. The setting of the play embodies Šagor’s concern with self projection because cinema is the realm of the consciously selected and projected image. It provides a visual metaphor for these Generation Y characters as ‘people of the screen’ (Greenfield, S., 2003). In his production Šagor animated the stage set so that it became a moving projection of the cinematic world and of the power relationships in his ‘constellation of three.’

Šagor uses the set to enhance the written text’s commentary on violence: verbal and physical, the perpetrators, the victims and the complicit bystanders. Šagor installed only one row of cinema seats on the stage. Initially these faced the same way as the audience but were later turned around to face the audience, to confront and gradually to project towards them. Šagor’s intention was to reverse the spatial dynamic between the audience and the stage, to destabilize the status quo from the outset. The audience’s eyes are focused on the action in an auditorium and they themselves sit as ‘eavesdroppers’ looking through the cinema screen.

FSK-16 : Image © Nina Urban 2004

A cinema should not really be a transit zone but Šagor’s is. The space is violated between each scene during frightening blackouts. In the darkness the set is noisily attacked, scarred by a violent, mysterious Other. One seat after another emerges from a blackout, torn and brutalized, first Kirsten’s, then Figen’s. The seats themselves take the punishment, and their slashed up presence becomes the new set for the next scene, the set for the movie of a higher violence rating. Šagor uses the set as evidence of the interpersonal violence in which the audience complicity participate. It is possible to ‘read’ the scarred set as a visible

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manifestation of Stipe’s trauma (a cry in the dark, so to speak), however Šagor never makes it perfectly clear as to who has damaged the set:

The more that the stage is opened, the more Stipe is allowed to show his inner world. He is not as cool and collected as he thinks his environment expects him to be. He is not clear about his feelings towards the girls. He lets himself be pulled into the game of seduction and provocation. He wants closeness and doesn’t know how he can live it. He plays but doesn’t know the rules. (Rabl, S., 2005)

Šagor also specifies a blackout for the ultimate moment in FSK-16 , the assault on Stipe. This increases the violence in film noir style. Because we hear Stipe wailing in the dark but we remain unclear of the chief perpetrator. The girls have brought along a Polaroid camera - they want images, evidence that they have ‘made something happen.’ The script suggests that Kirsten acts and Figen takes the photos but in production Šagor reveals this evidence is unreliable; the only light comes from the camera flashes:

Figen disappears past him.The light goes out. Movement is heard. Stipe begins to cry uncontrollably - howling. Movement …

Kirsten: Charred fingers?

There are flashes of light. Figen takes photos of Kirsten and Stipe with a Polaroid.

Stipe: She was walking along the country road with me.Like we always did over there in Šibenik. Going home on foot. She told me not to be afraid of the shots. They were far enough away. Kirsten: Who is she? Stipe: Then three soldiers appeared. Ours, not the others. They were really drunk. They probably got drunk because of their fear. They started shouting at her – really vulgar stuff. They acted like I wasn’t there. I was too little, only six. Andrijana tried to join in- she tried to joke along with them. She talked dirty as well. She said words I’d never heard from her. Kirsten: Who is she? Figen: His sister. (pp 28-29)

In the blackout between each scene the row of seats moves incrementally from extreme downstage, slowly up, towards the back wall. The animation of the set creates a menacing disequilibrium with the audience/actor proxemics engaged in a shifting trajectory. The actors move gradually away from the audience – in the earlier scenes we can get them all ‘into one shot’ visually at times, but then the seats and the expanding stage area creates a divided space, enough space for eavesdropping for example. In the final scenes actors are disparately positioned, facing away from each other in their own zones and distanced as if in separate shots. This blocking magnifies Šagor’s thematic:

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The ambivalence of the girls’ world, as they play with the limits of closeness and distance is impressive in FSK-16’s script, in its performance and in the overall production. Just as a movie screen appears close at the beginning and far away at the end, so are the girls. Their dreams are further away. What seemed like a clear picture at the beginning is in the end far from what they had wanted. (Rabl, S., 2005)

At the end of the final scene, Stipe gets off the floor and leaves, released. Figen unexpectedly also exits, still questing. Kirsten is alone on the seat row. The severely torn up row of seats suddenly activate and begin to move menacingly downstage towards the audience, increasing with a sense of projected momentum. At the last moment the blackout obscures them. The set contributes to Šagor’s scenic patterning (FSK-0 to FSK-18) and the increasing upshifts in violence. The mise en scene has taken on a role as powerful as the characters. The next movie title may well be ‘FSK-21: Its coming to get you!’

b. Stage design in Ja : Projecting the Spiritual

Ja was one of six plays commissioned by a German publishing house to thematise “issues of spirituality, death and different beliefs” (Gronemeyer, A., 2007). As early as ‘Carriage 1: Faith’ the audience is engaged in existential questions:

Elias: Have you ever been in the mountains? When you stand far above, 3900 m high, the mountains are vast- the air is cold and clear- then you are nothing more than dwarf. And when you start to think about it- that the earth turns the whole time around the sun, with you on it turns around the sun, and the moon turns itself around the earth and the sun is shooting through the universe then you get the feeling suddenly of flying. You’re not just a dwarf you’re only a bit of cat shit. It must feel like that in outer space, and a thousand times better. Do you know that feeling?

Lilly: I’m not sure, I had something similar once when i was collecting stones on the beach. You look at a stone and think- that is really beautiful and then another, no that ones more beautiful and then another more beautiful. And the worst thing is - you can’t stop - each one more beautiful than the last. As if you could never find one that like that again. What sense does that make - that they are all so beautiful and that you cannot ever hope to see all of them in one lifetime? My Opa had a lot of knowledge of stones but that’s all gone now. (Lilly realizes she’s talked herself into a fury) Yes, that’s how it is with collecting stones. (p.6 )

The set installed in Schnawwl’s production of Ja creates a very realistic frame to contrast the work’s spiritual themes. It is a full reproduction of a German intercity train, but with a 180 degree circling row of seats. An aisle and two sliding glass doors (at upstage right and left) indicate exits off the train and passages into the forward and rear carriages. The carriage has

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an LED display with its number and this changes at the beginning of each scene as Lilly enters a new carriage through the stage right doors.

However as the play progresses, the reality of the characters and the external landscapes - seen through the windows undermines realism. The set is circular and the plays ultimate message is likewise. Lilly is traveling within rather than towards self-knowledge because “God has no hand other than your own.” Director, Gronemeyer enhanced this idea through both costuming and blocking:

You could also see the structure of the play as Lily moving through different stages of grief – I tried to show that in directing the actor’s movements and through the costume design. She begins the play very covered up - in the black clothes and the hooded top - and her body language is very hunched and enclosed but in each scene she shows more of her body (including a pink t-shirt) and a range of emotions and movements. Later there is much more movement from Lily and even laughter. (2007)

Carriage characters are costumed to embody their metaphorical roles as spiritual guides, rather than as realistic characters. Grandmother and grandson, Jana and Janus are the two (argumentative) sides of the same coin, almost a yin and yang. As such Jana wears a white women’s suit with a black trimming, readable as JaJaJaJa. Janus wears a sharp black suit with white cuffs, reading NoNoNoNo. The Martians are outrageous punks with all the conformity that entails: Tartan suits, piercings, pink mowhawks, sunglasses. These costumes are comical in effect and contrast with Lilly’s sombre outfits.

Ja : Lilly and the Blind Man. Image © Karola Prutek 2006

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Of course the Blind Man is the character with the clearest vision and “We didn’t costume him too specifically- we wanted him to appeal to everyone” (Gronemeyer, A., 2007). He sits on the floor (is he actually a passenger?) in natural cottons, with a leather bag and palm leaf hat and he asks Lilly “Do you know what is happening on the trains going in the other direction?” There are many people on the same quest at the same time just as there are many more and more beautiful mountains, pebbles and cherry stones. She asks him “Where does the soul go?” And he encourages her to answer it herself:

Lilly: Perhaps it goes to a place in which it wants to be.

BM: That sounds good. (p. 43)

These design elements work together with an ongoing multimedia installation which is projected through the train’s windows - in the final moments onstage and on screen the audience witness the answer to Lilly’s search for the spirit.

c. Multimedia Design in Ja : Installing the landscape

Although it is not specifically called for in the script, Ja used constant screen projection, installed as the train carriage window, throughout its one hour and twenty minute performance.

Marc Reisner (multimedia director at the National Theater and Schnawwl) reports that this was director Gronemeyer’s request - to create the whole train journey across Germany. “For the film industry such a lavish work is a daily occurrence but for a theatre company this scale of undertaking is bound up with large logistical problems” (Reisner, M., 2005b, p.20). The multimedia sequences created under Reisner’s direction ended up being detailed artistic constructions, specifically tailored to the dramaturgical requirements of the play. The screen images used in performance extend upon the script’s spiritual thematic rather than supporting the onstage realism of the live set. The screen images peel away the layers of the realistic world; to reveal the spiritual dimension in the everyday.

Ja begins with a film Prologue projected right across a downstage scrim and the audience see the high speed Intercity train seamlessly carve across postcard German landscapes. With a driving musical score this sequence evokes a German Railways (DB) advertising trailer. The downstage scrim suddenly opens and at the same moment we hear audio of the train pulling up at a station. Then the live set, a fully recreated DB carriage, is revealed.

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Although the jingoistic musical score is repeated between scenes, increasingly the screen images projected in Ja are those infused with a spiritual, internal landscape, and this is the real terrain of this play. The technical department did not create filmed geography, instead they created a unique landscape to further Šagor’s dramaturgy and symbolism 28 . For Reisner this process was one to install the key journey of Ja:

The landscapes through the window should reflect the inner mood of Lilly. For this reason they were designed to suit the dramaturgy and created as artistic compositions using a palette of media platforms. The landscapes were firstly grey and stamped by industry and became, during the course of the journey, always lighter, more natural and more friendly. The station in Mannheim is a blank concrete wall and the one on Amrum is all nature. (Reisner, M., 2005b, p.21)

As it travels the train windows project each carriage character’s spirituality, their ideals of paradise, or just their own delusions. In Carriage 3 Lilly tries to convince Jana and Janus they are on a train, rather than in a courtroom. She instructs them to look out the window. However they see more than she expects:

Janus: Mama, look here there’s water and ships!

Lilly looks out the window but cannot believe her eyes.

Lilly: We’re traveling over the ocean … O man o man! Islands and palms. And I believe that’s a coral reef. (pp. 26-27)

Here Reisner’s onscreen images showed Jana and Janus diving amongst the coral and floating disembodied in a space-like trance. Such images reinforce that Lilly is encountering characters who are focused on external images of paradise. They measure the spiritual as a holiday destination, for example Eva-Marie’s only answer to “Where does the soul go? Is “To Norway perhaps? I’ve never been there but I’d like to go” (p.16).

The multimedia images created for each station became a key way that the onscreen media would further Šagor’s intentions in the script. Lilly and the audience observe each character alight onto a platform crowded with jingoistic stereotypes. In Sydney we see hopping kangaroos and didgeridoo players in Paris: we see Frenchmen in berets and with accordions. Šagor’s stage directions advise that the national anthem or jingoistic music of that destination is playing: he wants the audience hear the music that these characters think encapsulates Norway, Australia etc.

28 In twelve weeks, using a small rehearsal room as film studio, Reisner’s team created numerous fifteen minute landscape sequences. These were then layered so that ‘one landscape extract crossed seamlessly into another.’ Reisner, M.2005b Images were animated differently in the fore, middle and hinterground, and generated by mixed media process: digital images via Photoshop, three dimensional images using MAYA animation technology.

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In these station sequences each alighting character appears passive and disoriented in a two dimensionalized, cartoon ‘paradise.’ The screen communicates to the audience the false, idealized realities that these soul searchers still cling to - soulless tourist brochure images. Onscreen design focuses on a hyperrealised pastiche of commercial images.

Thus rather than using these station sequences to extend the action into another location, Reisner’s visual design ensured that they actually re-project the audiences attention back into the train carriage. The audience realizes the stations are not to be read as realistic locations and by implication the train might also not be read as ‘real’. In these moments the production achieves a united aesthetic through the live and the virtual. Instead of the often perceived conflict for audience focus, between a moving screen image and the live action, here both have been carefully constructed and installed as ‘woven’ text, with and upon each other. The screen installation is thus a fundamental means by which Lilly’s ‘journey’ is re-perceived by the young audience as symbolic. As one audience member commented: “I see the first carriage as Lilly herself. She has got self-understanding along the way” (Plummer, K., 2007).

This message builds overall across the duration of the play via the carefully designed onscreen imagery. As we approach Amrum the landscapes become less cluttered, more open, with sky, fields and sea. There are no shots of German beachside holiday makers here, instead just one surreal cherry tree fights the wind. When Lilly finally alights from the train on Amrum Island, her head appears immediately on screen in a half body shot. Behind her appear avenues of luminous pink cherry trees in bloom. Lilly is not looking around the island - but into the camera, she’s looking across the stage at the audience, because we are still there in the train carriage. She smiles encouragingly, happy and confident.

This last onscreen scene displaces any closed resolution we might have expected from the promise of ‘an answer in the first carriage.’ Šagor’s point is that Lilly has learnt how the answer is ‘in your own hands.’ Lilly’s gaze invites the audience to continue their journey - or at least it implies that each of the audience need to question what kind of a journey they are going on. d. Multimedia Design in FSK-16 : Installing ‘Speech Islands’

The key development Kristo Šagor made as director of the second production of FSK-16 was his installation of projected film sequences at the end of each scene. Marc Reisner,

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multimedia director of the company supervised the design, creation and installation of these screen media units.

In FSK-16 projection was put in for dramaturgical reasons. The play refers to four Speech Islands and these are stapled onto the actual plot and narrate something of each character’s relationship to violence… Kristo Šagor decided that it was appropriate to show the speech islands on a movie screen, so that they were framed around by the setting in a cinema auditorium. (Reisner, M., 2004)

As discussed previously these Speech Islands contain disturbing images of past violence (scarring) in which Kirsten and Figen have been involved. Stipe is given two Speech Islands but struggles to release the words. His inability to speak is the effect of his violent experiences, it is the manifestation of his scars.

Šagor’s choice to install the Speech Islands and the FSK warnings on film underpins his thematic and structural motifs in FSK-16 . This work is a commentary on media culture and cinematic violence, and a demonstration of its flow-on effects- in obsessive identity projection and role playing by contemporary youth. Even in the script the stage directions indicate each actor ‘jumps into the screen’ to present their speech and in the first production the director clearly separated these units from the main action of the play (Šagor, K., 2008b).

The decisions made by Reisner and Šagor in constructing these sequences illustrate a more developed ‘dramaturgy of installation’ in which the aesthetic features of the screen (a text) were matched effectively with the dramaturgy of the script (as text) and in the live performance (as text). Reisner made a key decision in choosing film as media and found he needed to create a unique aesthetic to solve a dramaturgical tension. The extracts needed to be on film because they represented past events and were screened in a cinema setting. However it was also important dramaturgically that the audience know these three characters have constructed their testimonies themselves. But “how many teenagers have access to a film camera?” Reisner points out. The solution was a creative and dramaturgically appropriate one:

We decided to try to turn film more into the direction of video, without however, throwing away the elements that label a film as medium. So we had to settle somewhere between the two aesthetics. (2004, p.18) 29

29 Reisner chose low contrast, grainy Super 16 film stock, used often on ‘made for TV’ movies and a hand held camera, without tripod, to create a permanently wobbly effect. In addition the cameraman framed the shots unprofessionally so that characters got cut off at some points.

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Reisner and Šagor’s collaborative dramaturgy on the filmed ‘Speech Islands’ achieves a disturbing sense of displacement in cinematography quite in addition to the actual content of the dialogue. Each character appears in a lonely location at night, transient spaces, emptied of human community and warmth. Figen stands behind an empty Doner Kebab kiosk. Kirsten swims alone in a darkened bathing hall. Stipe sits, struggling to speak in a brightly illuminated tram, passing through empty streets at night. The flavour of each character was enhanced by colour toning: Figen’s scenes were a warm red, Stipe’s tram was in a cold green and Kirsten’s swimming baths were a secretive blue. Šagor’s intention was always to unsettle: “It’s also about making the audience uncertain of the time period on the screen. At the end I made it uncertain as to who was taking the shots” (Šagor, K., 2006b):

The actors referred to the fictional cameraman in their performance so that they often spoke directly to him. Also the audience was addressed by them glancing to the camera, a technique that’s usually avoided but used here so that the presence of the camera is directly revealed. (Reisner, M., 2004, p.18)

The effect of this is to show characters who are self conscious. They are aware of the ‘docudrama’ and their star role on it. Kirsten, in particular, appears smug and superior. She projects all her actions out to an audience.

Šagor’s choices in the live staging of each Speech Island further destabilized the material. Each filmed sequence was projected from two sources, onto the ‘screen island’ which is a moveable scrim (Šagor, K., 2008c). The live character then stood in front of the projected image, between it and the audience, repeating and ridiculing their screen persona and the words in their monologue.

In the image below we see Kirsten ridiculing her projected persona on screen. Live characters here destabilize two other tightly constructed textual projections of their identity - the visual installation and the original scripted ‘Speech Island.’ Director Šagor ensures that none of these simultaneously operating texts can triangulate to achieve a solid construct of identity. The audience are still forced to question what in all this information is the truth. In their attempt to construct a narrative the audience must continuously question which facts are relevant and which are false leads.

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FSK-16 : Kirsten’s Speech Island © Nina Urban 2004

Over the course of FSK-16 Šagor seeks to repeatedly shapeshift any accumulating factual backstory the audience can aggregate. Not only as writer but also via direction, Šagor furthers his intentions to displace character; to project uncertainty and disequilibrium. Via multimedia and blocking Šagor here achieves a multiple rupturing of the three texts. To my mind this is a well documented example of Phillip Auslander’s tenet that the combination of the live and the virtual creates Virtual Theatre because “the live itself incorporates the mediatised both technologically and epistemologically” (Auslander, P., 1999, p.39).

7. Conclusion

So far this chapter has revealed across two written texts ( FSK-16 and Ja) and in these two texts in performance, the key features of Kristo Šagor’s ‘dramaturgy of displacement’ and the ways that this dramaturgical impulse is furthered via use of screen installation in production.

As a writer, Šagor sets up the strict frames for the action. In FSK-16 this is the repeated FSK- 0, to FSK-18 movie structure, plus the character frame of the ‘constellation of three’ and the ‘speech islands’. These mini lectures on each character’s experiences of violence act as ‘time- outs’ shifts before the piece escalates into the next higher rated scene. In Ja the journey towards the first carriage, the repeated entry of the lost spirits/ carriage characters and the guidance of the Angel conductors lead each scene to the point where Lilly asks: “Where does the soul go?’ At the end of each scene she must decide whether to get off or to progress up the train.

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However in both works Šagor plays within each scene to displace and disturb his frames. He draws the audience’s attention to the construction of the work and uses characters to comment on the framing of identity as a construct. He undermines the realism proving, by constantly displacing his characters and action, that reality and mise en scene can be reversioned, reprojected and manipulated.

Šagor creates theatrical experiences that are open-ended and reviewable: the structural frames do not concatenate or accumulate narrative, they betray the audiences trust because the action destabilizes any narrowing resolution. The audience can actually reread the works, from Stipe’s viewpoint and even from Raphael and Sid’s. At the end of FSK-16 the only thing we are really sure of is that ‘something big has happened.’ In Ja the two conductors reveal that Lilly’s is only one journey amongst many: “How many of them have made it to the first carriage?” In the final moments of this work the onscreen face of Lilly expectantly waits, looking out into the audience, urging them to undertake the journey.

Šagor’s characters are unlimited works-in-progress and their operations within the frames of the action seem explicit and self-conscious. They ‘construct’ themselves along the way - in this public space. Empathy is not a tool that Šagor wants the audience to use:

Outwardly visibly differentiated from one another, the figures confound each other within themselves, because they all share no concern from whom they get something, but only about the fact that they finally get it: Love, Respect, Satisfaction or Punishment (Hackel, A., 2005).

In FSK-16 Šagor includes the audience in the ‘girl’s game’ however he destroys our ability to understand its real motivation. The monologues are not heartwarming, empathic insights but are Speech Islands - dangerous icebergs by which we become suspicious of each of them. Stipe’s inability to speak to the audience is also a betrayal, a dead end when we need him to share and identify as our protagonist.

The figures in Ja are similarly driven in this play by specific spiritual goals, however delusional. They are unique non-naturalistic, symbolic constructions, merely signposts in Lilly’s journey.

The refusal to tie language consistently to character, to give it a life of its own is another demonstration of Šagor’s dramaturgy of displacement. Šagor patterns language across characters, it is not unique to an individual but a commodity and a game; it is also questionable and untrustworthy. The figures in FSK-16 use ‘speech islands.’ These are exotic

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and isolated refuges. They refer to past times but are not stable, tethering points or dramatic backstory but instead cause ruptures in the landscape. Language displacements in Šagor’s written texts have only been enhanced in the live action and screen texts created for these productions.

In production Šagor and director Gronemeyer used the sets as projections; they magnify the empty, transitory and damaged nature of the characters. It is the chairs in FSK-16 that are physically scarred. The audience hear this disembodied violence in the dark - the violent possibilities are played out in their heads. The train in Ja is a very real onstage construction but the action of the play is a forum for the intangible. The train is a life journey, a spiritual quest, but one that is circuitous, always coming back to the journey itself.

In two productions at Schnawwl Theater multimedia installation has been thoughtfully created to extend on Šagor’s written dramaturgy. In Ja the screen has not been used as a cinematic device to support the reality of the train carriage but to displace and undermine it. The screen is used to project inner landscapes and desires, idealized as destinations. The images onscreen project a hollow and unfulfilling landscape for each of the carriage characters Lilly encounters.

Installed screen media here is a tool in opening the work, furthering its ‘displacement as dramaturgy’- rather than tightening the mise en scene and underpinning character. This effect was most clearly articulated in the creation and presentation of the ‘Speech Islands’ in Šagor’s FSK-16 production. The already unstable texts in each filmed Speech Island are here destabilized by the live actor’s voice and behavior. The whole content mixes events from the distant past, near past and the present and this undermines the integrity of each layer of Šagor’s text.

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8. Frankenstein : A Multi-Mediated Performance Text

The final work analysed in Case Study Two is the 2007 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which Kristo Šagor co-wrote and directed with Marc Reisner. This was a multimedia mainstage performance at the Staatstheater Oldenburg , presented in a huge proscenium arch venue. Although this text was not specifically created for KJT Theatre Frankenstein is still valid in the frames of this study for a number of reasons. This work represents an emerging field in Šagor’s practice as a writer/director. Firstly it was Šagor and Reisner’s second partnership on a mainstage multimedia performance, evidencing Mack’s assertion that innovation and innovators in TYP are getting noticed and taken up by the adult mainstage. In addition it demonstrates that both the writer/directors and producers felt that a multimediated adaptation of a classic would be accessible to the audience of a regional company. Staatstheater Oldenburg needs a balanced repertoire and to regularly create work appealing to all age groups including, but not limited to, the under 25’s (Wall, J., 2007). Finally Šagor’s adaptation of the written narrative of Frankenstein is focused around his ongoing concerns as (a predominantly) KJT writer. Through Frankenstein he continues to explore images of the re-mediated human, the interplay with public versus private identity, power playing and role playing and the search for personal truth and integrity.

In discussing Frankenstein I have not separated an analysis of the dramaturgy of the script from an analysis of the stage. From the outset this adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel planned three media strands as narrative form:

The idea for Frankenstein came from Marc Reisner but he’s a film director and producer. He wrote the story but then encouraged us to hire Kristo Šagor to write and direct it for us for the stage. Kristo then totally rewrote the play. (Wall, J., 2007)

Reisner had set out the premise and the way that three multimedia, focusing on different time frames, could dimensionalize a contemporary rendition of Doctor Frankenstein, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who has discovered the cure for AIDS. Šagor’s rewritten script developed upon this scaffold; as playwright Šagor weaved the three streams together using imagery, language and paralleled actions (Šagor, K., 2008b).

The final draft examined here (Reisner, M. and Šagor, K., 2007) contains excisions made during the production process. It reveals the practical issues of installation, when the dramaturgies of each media are combined and installed onstage together- the live action and design, the video and the film sections.

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a. Narrative Strands: The Doctor as Multi-Mediated ‘Weave’

Šagor’s script concentrates on the tension and duality in the character of the Doctor here presented as a contemporary public figure, a celebrity scientist. 30 Šagor’s focus is to expose the tensions in the Doctor between his public versus private personality (scientist versus father/husband). Reisner and Šagor use the three media, and their time shifts, to further this thematic:

Doctor Frankenstein has won the Nobel Prize for medicine because he has freed the human race from the HIV/AIDS virus. But this discovery was only a by product - he continued the secret research that had become his life’s work. Frankenstein was experimenting to clone a human being. Via different media, the text plays upon several time frames … Live on the stage we see the present; the Frankenstein family are broken apart by a court case. They then react to the discovery of Doctor Frankenstein’s secret research and, finally are each hunted down by his loveless Monster. The performance actually begins on a video screen. We are shown a news report Doctor Frankenstein’s youngest son was found murdered a year previously and their nanny has just been sentenced for the murder. However the famous Frankenstein family insist upon her innocence and will appeal the verdict. (Šagor, K., 2006c)

The Live text onstage is set mainly in the family’s lounge room and concerns the Doctor in the present, at home amongst a somewhat dysfunctional family who feel neglected and sidelined by his work. It begins on the night after the court delivers its verdict.

The Video text shows flashbacks and these include clips of the Doctor as public persona on TV chat shows etc but also some home movies. These are textbook images of his ‘happy’ family, but some sequences appear to have been filmed by a hidden observer.

The Filmed text throws the narrative forwards into the future, showing the dying doctor narrating his life story to another scientist in an Antarctic Research Station. This ‘Ancient Mariner’ style recount is used to probe the Doctor’s ethics as a scientist. His listener, Dr Solberg is challenged by what the Doctor tells about the creation of the Monster and also by his request that he hunt down and destroy the Monster, who is still at large.

The central premise in the Šagor/Reisner adaptation is its focus on the scientist’s impulses and the intergenerational legacy of his genetic experiment. Thus Šagor opens each live scene with the Doctor meditating on Musil’s doctrine:

30 Doctor Frankenstein will hereafter be referred to as the Doctor, because using the term Frankenstein often confuses readers with the Monster.

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Scene 10

Doctor: Musil wrote, if there is sense of reality, it must also lead to a sense of possibility … My sense of possibility floods me with conceivable junctions, including the exotic, the tangential … Everything is conceivable. And the Totality of this power is overwhelming. If everything is equally probable, everything is equally insignificant … On a cliff, exposed on both sides, Two rifles are pointed … I need a weapon. (pp.15-16)

In creating his Monster the Doctor has brought the Possible into the Real, by conceiving it cognitively and by ‘fathering’ it biologically. Šagor presents the embodied Monster onstage as the Doctor’s creative leap to unite these principles and his juxtaposed selves, to satisfy his creative urge as a scientist and his drives as a family man. Again Šagor’s work concerns projected and re-projected identity, here the private persona versus the self-conscious public construct.

It is noteworthy that in Šagor’s version there are no flashbacks to the laboratory showing the Doctor creating the Monster, although some evidence of these numbered scenes remains on the page. The ‘story of creating the Monster’ is here just one facet of the Doctor’s layered character. This idea grows on the audience because through the Monster’s later actions it reveals shared patterns in language and behavior with the Doctor and his son. This allows the audience to read the Monster as a ‘next generation’ version of the Doctor.

As director, Šagor’s original intention was to use the multiple media, including live music, to show the Doctor as a Master of Ceremonies of the whole performance: “We had hoped to have live orchestra and I wanted the sense that Dr. Frankenstein was conducting his own death” (Šagor, K., 2007a). Here the Doctor would have tried to re-project himself publicly and outside the frame of the work, in a similar manner to the youths in FSK-16 presenting their Speech Islands. This impulse remains evident in the staged production even though the live orchestra and conductor elements were cut. The work’s contextual frame had to suffice: an audience attending a contemporary multimedia performance staged in a huge neo-classical proscenium arch auditorium creates a grand narrative frame in itself.

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b. Displacement in the Structural Frames

Displaced Action: Patterning across the media

Through imagery, language and repetition Šagor develops bound plot cycles that propel the work. Again he uses pattern and repetition to establish audience expectation of tightly knit dramatic frames, but ends up drawing audience attention to the shifts and internal displacements. Each plot cycle begins with Dr Frankenstein at home, musing on the co- existant impulses of ‘the Real and the Possible.’ This suggests that the scene cycle that follows can be construed as further ‘windmills’ of his orchestrating mind, presented for us as a self-projected performance.

The Doctor (seated) with Henri and Elisabeth. Image © Hans Jörg Michel 2007

Each structural cycle contains four scenes and three media. The pattern becomes obvious within the first forty minutes of the work (after three cycles: Scenes 4-9, 10-14 and 15-19). To illustrate this a short summary of scenes 4-9 is provided followed by a description of their extension in scenes 10-14. These structural cycles are used by Šagor to chart a multi-media layered narrative.

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Scene 4 - Live: Frankenstein family lounge room. The Doctor (in monologue) muses over the fact that his sense of the possible may have tipped over from his sense of reality. Henri enters with a new brand of 6 pack beers ‘they taste bitter’ The Doctor blames himself for Justine’s murder – he wouldn’t visit her in jail ‘I cannot stand the sense of lost powers.’ The existence of the Monster begins to be revealed to the onstage others (we already know) F: Can it be that Willy had to die to pay for my guilt? He ponders. The Doctor begins to reveal to Henri that his AIDS discovery was a by product- that a search for something greater had dominated his work. H: What were you searching for? There is no reply. Scene 5 - Filmic Introduction: Housing Commission Tower Block. Scene 6 -Live interior of flats: The Sarcophagus of the Old. We see the Monster for the first time as he sneaks into apartments, searching for food. Those who get in his way are strangled. An old lady watching TV meets this fate. Scene 7- Video: The Frankenstein family, with Justine, Willy and their dog are enjoying a meal together. The filming is done by a hand held video and is wobbly. The audience question - who is filming them? –it appears they are unaware of the camera. Is it surveillance or a stalker-or the murderer? The action is in the past- before the child was murdered. Scene 8 - cut Scene 9 - Film: Byrd station, Antarctic. The Doctor is in bed, he appears to be making a recovery. He pats their base dog- reveals that his family had a dog before their son’s death but later gave him away. (So we know the Antarctic action happens after the live action.) The Team leader, Dr Solberg tells the Doctor he has recognized him and will listen to his story.

In the next cycle - Scenes 10-14:

In the Loungeroom , the Doctor muses more on the release of possibilities and he tells Henri (drinking bitter beer) he needs a weapon. The existence of the Monster continues to be ‘on the brink of being revealed’ to the onstage characters. Up in the Tower Block , the Monster is discovered by a female apartment dweller. ‘It’ carries a Handycam. The audience anticipate the Monster’s existence will be made public and the Doctor will have to confess it is his creation. On film at Byrd station the Doctor asks if the team have found ‘it’? He reveals he has a ‘monstrous’ story to tell them. He begins. On Video unsteady hand held footage follows of the Frankenstein family playing football- the younger son and nanny are present. The audience can now link these historical shots to the Monster’s Handycam – we know he has been ‘stalking’ the family. We suspect he murdered the Doctor’s youngest son.

Variations in these cycles appear to occur when cuts were made during production. According to the dramaturg, Johanna Wall these were needed to create pace and dynamise the performance ‘weave’, to allow the three media to more clearly ‘intersect:’

The main problem was that there were too many subplots in the combinations of the film and the TV and so both needed simplifying. Marc was cutting the film at night and Kristo and I were working the script also … (Wall, J., 2007)

Šagor’s fascination with scaffolding led him to also inscribe an internal pattern; each scene of Frankenstein contains a repeated set of actions and events and the lounge room scenes develop a very predictable structure. But, as in FSK-16 and Ja, it is in the variation to these patterns, and here, in the cross filtration of information across three media, by which the audience actually ‘plot’ the work. As the reference to the dog suggests above, it also became

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important for Šagor to introduce clues about the time shifts between each media. This is because the audience are also working backwards, asking: Who really killed the Doctor’s son? And what was he really working on secretly in his lab?

Displaced Language: Self - Conscious Routines

Šagor projects, rather than develops, characters in Frankenstein via repeated patterns of language and verbal routines. These occur within each scene and inform upon the structural ‘action cycles.’ These are features consistent with his dramaturgy in FSK-16 and Ja.

The Doctor’s different selves (scientist/lover/father) are played out in repeated linguistic relationships. These appear more and more as duets creating explicit ‘units of action’ but units that bracket, that limit three dimensional character development. In a Brechtian sense the audience examine characters as responsive to stimuli rather than psychologically driven. Of course the key character under examination here is the Doctor himself.

The language and character routines are most clearly demonstrated in the live lounge room scenes. Initially bizarre and jolting for the audience, the Doctor’s ‘love-duet’ with his partner Elizabeth is a superb example. Suddenly the two characters begin a routine, they create a private world in the transit zone of the lounge room:

Elisabeth takes up a new posture. Frankenstein takes up a new posture. Elisabeth: The house has white curtains and they sway in the breeze and remind me of you- because you loved the breeze so much. I have learnt to embroider and am embroidering a braid. Into the braid I stitch our love vows. And a gardener(female) gardens for me.

Dr: The house has white curtains. They sway in the breeze. You have learnt to embroider and embroider a braid. And a young male gardener gardens for you. You have a relationship with him.

Elisabeth: The house has white curtains and they sway in the breeze. They remind me of you- because you loved the breeze so much. I have learnt to embroider and am embroidering a braid with our love vows. I have a young male gardener and we have a relationship. But he cannot satisfy me. It makes me sadder and sadder.

Dr: The house has white curtains. Sway in the breeze. Embroider a braid. Your young gardener makes you sad, because he’s better than me.

Elisabeth: The house has white curtains. They sway in the breeze. They remind me of you. I embroider a braid … Henri enters. Both change their posture. (pp. 6-7)

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The duet has become the most acceptable frame for the couple to express their emotions and it is repeated four times during the performance. Each enactment uses imagery that ‘narrates’ later shifts in their relationship while the internal chronology of the image remains obscure. Like the Speech Islands in FSK-16, the images here refer to emotions and experiences that are disembodied ‘islands’ displaced from the immediate circumstances.This ‘duet’ for instance is a bizarre fantasy, not about their life together but her life after he is gone:

Elizabeth: The house stands at the sea. In the autumn it is so windy that the old window shops rattle. The gardener is away, but the pain remains; alone again, without you. I read everything by Robert Musil, because I can then think of you. That was two weeks after. Viktor had already been her lover for fourteen days.

Elizabeth: The house at the sea. Autumn. Pain. Musil. Jerky sleep. I dream how we promenaded together at the coast. In the background the window shutters are rattling. They applaud us. I am bowing. And wake up. (pp.23, 24)

The Doctor and Elisabeth embroider each other’s sentences for the pure poetic impulse but this does not assist the audience to ‘narrate’ the action any further. As the stage directions indicate Šagor writes these duets as a structural rupture, a displacement that leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions.

In Frankenstein the language routines draw the audience to the form of the piece rather than the content. Language seems to be a rehearsed and transferable commodity. In fact Šagor uses language patterns as a means of drawing the three media together, to telegraph, at a supertextual level, that the action may all be a single, increasingly blurry projection of the Doctor’s memory.

A clear example of this is the ‘beer routine’ between the Doctor and his lawyer, Henri. We see this routine re- enacted five times during the performance. Henri enters the lounge room with a six pack of beer. Henri announces the brand of beer he has chosen, usually grizzling about the limited choice of brand available. He has already sunk a few; the six pack is half empty. He opens one for The Doctor and hands it to him. He swigs his own. He comments; ‘it always tastes so bitter.’ They then engage in a short banter about different brews but the Doctor never even takes a sip. In Scene Four this becomes a poetic duet when new action is added, a rhythmic dialogue that could almost be operatic. Each of the doctor’s sentences begin insistently:

Dr: You will rescue her. You find out who the judge is. Dr: You will rescue her. Find out who the friends of his wife are.

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Finally Henri participates. He begins his own dialogue with ‘I will rescue her’ (pp.12-13) However in the next ‘beer routine’ (in scene Ten) the Doctor varies his repeated refrain.

Dr: You will rescue me… Dr: I need a weapon. You will rescue me.…. Dr: I’m scared. You will rescue me. (p.16)

These patterns of language clearly serve to objectify and foreground the character’s drives, as Hackel (2005) noted. The diminution of individual psychology in favour of form is increased when parts of this language routine are installed into the texts from another media. In Scene Thirty Seven (on film at Byrd Station) two of the scientists are drinking beers and one comments:

Berglund: Hm, too bitter. Dr Solberg: You always say it tastes too bitter. (p.58)

These comments thus are not part of a developing psychological realism in this work but Šagor’s desire to collide the social frames in the play; to install the fabric of one section within another. 31 Through these linguistic patterns Šagor demonstrates that the Doctor’s projected worlds (the live, the video and the film) and his public and private personas have lost their integrity.

Displaced Characters

Šagor presents the Doctor’s two sons, Ernest and the Monster, as an extension of their father’s personal vision; they represent the genetic legacy of his scientific and biological drives. Their behavior and language are increasingly endowed with their father’s and, as the Doctor’s health declines, they increasingly appear as his avatars. This message is conveyed to the audience through Šagor’s repetition of key interactions and his transferal of language patterns from the Doctor to his sons. This suggests on a thematic level that the Doctor’s creative vision will extend beyond his death, that his scientific and genetic legacy will live on.

Šagor also begins to shape these characters using the language and tools of media. This brings Shelley’s original text, a critique of Victorian social mores, into the contemporary age. Through the Monster’s education in the wider world and Ernest’s earnest social activism,

31 The flyer image from POPUP! is brought to mind here, with its image of the rupturing krump torso and its three strand byline. Refer to Chapter 5.7a.

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Šagor again presents a media-saturated society which young people manipulate to construct and reshape their identity.

Ernest

Ernest (the Doctor’s elder son) increasingly becomes a caricatured projection of the Doctor himself. It is Ernest who ‘stands in’ for the Doctor in ideological and physical combat with the Monster in the classic final showdown.

From the outset Ernest is cast as the junior version of the Doctor. He enters the first scene proceeded by his shoes and clothes, flung in anger across the space, crying out: “Fuck, fuck fuck, such a fuck up!” The Doctor enters only minutes later, crying out: “Idiots, these idiots, damned idiots!” He flings his shoes and jacket across the stage (pp.3-5).

Ernest is constantly “trying to provoke his father; to get a reaction from a distant parent” (Šagor, K., 2007a). At one point he interrupts Henri and the Doctor with a bizarre strip tease. He peels off layers and layers of t-shirts, each with a distinctive logo. The sequence involves a crazy mixture of signifiers: a brand name, a protest symbol, a political party. He is going to a demonstration “Against people like us. Conformists” He rages at his father’s contradictory personas: at home the Doctor would complain about a war in Azerbaijan, then go on a talk show and deny it.

Both Ernest and the Monster have the same grievance: both complain they have lost their father to his scientific obsessions. The Monster complains that he has never been shown fatherly love instead the Doctor has only ever treated him as an experiment, gone awry:

Monster: Feelingless Father, Heartless Creator…. Monster: You created me with feelings, only in order to kick me around like a football- for all the human fear and disgust in the world (p. 51).

In a final confrontation the Doctor’s two sons, Ernest (representing the Real) and the Monster (representing the Possible) fight physically and mentally. This scene begins with Ernest in a philosophical monologue very similar to that of the Doctor’s, however Ernest’s mental trajectory is broken. Ernest has no feelings left for his father:

Ernest: If something breaks down, it gets broken and functions no longer … Logo, no, stop. Some things can be repaired, okay. But others not at all … They are breakdowns and broken.Finished, end. And which is worst? To be allowed to fall or to be dropped? And does it feel differently to be dropped? (p. 54)

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When the battle between these ‘brothers’ commences it is a projection of the Doctor’s own conflicted will and identity and the weapons are, true to Šagor’s style, the language. Ernest begins by verbally torturing the Monster:

Ernest: I’ll take some photos for posterity … they’ll appeal to the perverts- it’s the ‘The thing from the laboratory. The Beastie from the test tube. The mass murderer from page one’. Show me your festering pustules, show me your ulcers. Come, take your clothes off, I want to see your scarred body as well. (p 57)

In the previous scene with the Doctor, the Monster described himself as a football. In the first half of this scene the Monster prefaces all its sentences with football commentary learnt, we presume, from the television. Each German phrase of two to three repeated syllables creates a machine gun ‘staccato’:

Monster: Bad foul - I came in order to kill you. Monster: Beautiful pass - I am your brother. Monster: Fast play - well, your half brother. Monster: Weak shot - I am human. Monster: Long ball - he hides himself from me. Monster: Beautifully seen - you are hiding from me. Monster: Your uncle also tried in vain to hide from me - wrong throw in. Monster: I extinguished it - beautiful goal. Monster: Dead, like your nutty mother - dangerous situation. (pp. 54-57)

The football jargon is then shared between the brothers. Ernest uses it to torture the Monster, actually labeling him as the ball. This is language displaced from its context; a hyperreal vernacular moving across both characters and embedding media jargon. To add to this Šagor installs visual imagery here that directly comments on multimedia culture, he implies that we learn violence and torture via media images:

Ernest begins to pull at the clothes of the Monster, strikes it, pulls at its clothes, strikes it. The Monster is perfectly helpless. Ernest begins to kick the Monster. The Monster cries.

Ernest: They shoot, they shoot, shoot for the goal! Come on, show me your ass – open up right to the red. I want a photo of your cock. The thing from the laboratory is still a virgin. The Beastie from the test tube is unfucked. I’ll make a God-damned porno star out of you! (p.57)

Ernest appears naked from the waist up with military insignia drawn on his chest. He stands over the cowering, prostrate Monster, forcing him into demeaning postures and taking camera images of him, Abu Grahb style. Now the Monster represents the twenty first century, mediatised Other.

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The Monster

Šagor and Reisner’s adaptation is more focused on the creator than the creation. However the Monster, in appearance and actions, is of course a key figure in the work- and a projection of the Doctor himself. The Monster represents the world of ‘the Possible’ unleashed into the world of ‘the Real’. As the Monster increases his dominance onstage and on video, we see the Doctor’s family unit, his Real world, diminish. In the second half of the work the Frankenstein family are wandering the world, separated from each other and haunted by the Monster.

Šagor constructs the Monster as a projection of media society. The Monster is costumed as a ‘teenage hoodlum’- clothed in track pants and a black hoodie, which covers his scarred face. The Monster has educated himself, acquiring a TV vernacular and he archives human social interaction on an almost prosthetic Handycam. He is reluctant to speak but when he does so relies upon set TV dialogue; a mixture of game shows, advertisements and soap operas:

Monster: “I tried it out! And what can I say - I was amazed! It really does help!” Monster: You created me. But you haven’t treated me the way a son should be treated. “No Ron, you cannot be serious!” (p.39)

This mixture of direct response and media babble is later added to by the Monster’s mixed metaphors learnt in his limited life experience. His experiences in the real world are matched with his observations and content from his ‘stalker videos’ of the Frankenstein family.

While the Monster uses media-speak to communicate he also uses media to construct a virtual family. The video sequences across the whole performance can be construed as those recorded by the Monster to document/share the life of his celebrity family; from news reports, and talk show interview to daily family life. The Monster has filmed the Frankenstein’s eating meals, on picnics and playing football together. The audience question how much the Monster has seen and filmed, how far did he infiltrate the family unnoticed? What boundary has he blurred here between the Doctor’s public and private life? When the Monster finally tracks down and confronts Elisabeth and Frankenstein in a hotel, he uses the language from a previous private scene between Ernest and Elisabeth:

Elizabeth: Why does he call you ‘father’? Monster: (to Elisabeth) You puppet! Elizabeth: How does he know that? Dr: He has been watching us. He has filmed us.

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Monster: “These special deals are offered without liability.” (p.50)

Elizabeth and the Monster: Image © Hans Jörg Michel 2007

In Shelley’s novel the Monster’s interactions with the general public were dwelt upon, but Šagor’s social commentary is focused on the ‘scientist celebrity’ and the scientist’s family unit 32 . In this frame his Monster can be read more as another projection of the Doctor’s intellect and his exotic flights of possibility. By actually creating the Monster this part of the Doctor’s intellect has ‘lost the plot’ and ‘got loose. ’ The further the monster runs amok the faster we see this family unit breaking down. The multidimensional Monster is like the doctor’s family; both were neglected by the Doctor and both are now untethered.

The Monster’s main goal is to be acknowledged by its Father/Creator and become part of the family. However as he begins speaking (Scene 29) the language breakdown he uses is symbiotic with the whole Frankenstein family breakdown. This breakdown begins at the point in the performance where the shocking facts of the Doctor’s research are revealed; in Šagor and Reisner’s version the Doctor created the Monster using IVF, by ‘mating’ his own sperm with their nanny, Justine’s ovum.

Questions of ethics, a moral vacuum and betrayal split the family. In the last half of the performance characters struggle to maintain their linguistic integrity and the structural

32 The characters outside the family with whom the Monster interacts are cartoonish and limited in action. In the script they have an extended role but were significantly cut down in the installation process, refocusing the work on The Doctor and his family’s journey.

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routines Šagor has set up for the action; Ernest’s t-shirts, the weirder and weirder love duets and the repeated beer routine. As the following analysis of the stage design makes clear Šagor seeks to unravel the performance text as weave; he shows that the fabric that stitches the Doctor together is fraying. c. Installing Different Media: Intersection on the Stage

The previous analysis examines how Kristo Šagor writes with multimedia to continue his ‘dramaturgy of displacement’ projecting the destabilized and disjunctive vision of the Doctor. This section focuses on the ‘dramaturgy of installation’ in the Frankenstein production; the way the aesthetic languages of each media were combined in the actual performance

As he did in Ja and FSK-16, Marc Reisner, the screen media director of Frankenstein took a precise and thorough approach to the design and composition of film and video sequences. Meanwhile, as stage director Šagor pursued their overall dramaturgical goal - to convince the audience that the piece is a self-construction by the Doctor - his own ‘This Is Your Life’ program in a sense. The set, based on a central scrim, literally appears to be a hand stitched fabric skin. In Šagor and Reisner’s version of Frankenstein the audience will make ‘stitches’ across three media to construct the Doctor: ‘Contemporary Scientist-as-Monster.’

Frankenstein : Scientist as Monster. Image © Hans Jörg Michel 2007

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Video

Again Technical Director Marc Reisner designed film sequences and video footage which drew attention to their own form and each self-consciously showcases stereotypical features of its genre. In this sense Reisner’s dramaturgy works in tandem with Šagor’s impulses, both want the audience to ‘read’ for form, structure and pattern.

The video segments are constructed calculatedly as ‘home video’ and show humorous occurrences in family life. Played without sound, these videos appear to be shot by an unsteady amateur hand - the Monster’s we later assume. However Reisner’s choices in style and content keep this reading more open. The audience is not sure which shots have been made by the family and selected by the Doctor to represent memories of happy times and togetherness. Other shots have been taken ‘through the bushes’, maybe by a stalker or paparazzi and communicate that the Doctor’s private life has been violated.

The Handycam we see in the Monster’s hand suggests he has collated a huge video dossier on the Doctor’s family, both to ‘learn’ about family and to ‘burn’ with rejection at its own exclusion from that family. Video segments are designed to gradually reveal the Monster’s efforts to stalk the family, confirmed when he repeats dialogue from scenes he must have secretly recorded. Šagor projects the whole ‘home video’ sequence from the Monster’s archive as an Epilogue to the performance, describing it as ‘a poesie album.’ Ernest and Justine watch this together. The only new footage played are final images of the younger son which suggest that the Monster was his murderer.

Thus the video, communicating in the majority via the aesthetic of ‘home video’, speaks the language and the evidence of Family and this is an important weave in the ‘fabric’ of the Doctor’s testimony. Video is used to communicate wistful memories of his past because in Šagor’s version the Doctor’s family unit, and not broader society, are presented as the foregrounded victims of the scientific vision.

Film

The design of the film sequences communicate the Doctor’s identity as Scientist. He chooses to confess the secrets of his life directly to his scientific colleagues. On the film screen, we see the scientific life - a ‘family’ of scientists in the confines of a Polar Research Station. In the playscript there are squabbles and infighting amongst the team but many of these details were cut down in the installation process in order to focus on the Doctor’s life narrative.

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Through repeated film sequences the Doctor, lying on his (probable) death bed, hands over his story (aka.his creative legacy) to the next generation of scientists, here represented by Dr Solberg. However Solberg struggles ethically and morally with the Doctor’s life work.

Dr Solberg: You liberated humanity from AIDS then infected it with another epidemic … I can understand your impetus. We are scientists. But your methods are inexcusable. (pp. 47-48)

Hinting perhaps at the self-aggrandizement of the Doctor as ‘celebrity scientist’, the film sequences are self-consciously sentimental in style. The ‘Ancient Mariner’ tale - told from the deathbed to the morbidly fascinated listener - is an overextended device here that can seem laboured. But purposefully so? Reisner has created a ‘made for TV movie.’ The actor playing Dr Solberg is a famous middle aged German soap star whose inscrutable look reminds one of Inspector Morse. The scenes are overlaid with a syrupy, poignant soundtrack that is so obvious it seems comic. In fact this soundtrack is the symphony ‘written’ by the Doctor to ‘orchestrate’ his own death. 33

Stage Design

In contrast to the traditional gothic images of the laboratory and the wild open lands through which the Monster roamed in Shelly’s original, the Šagor/Reisner adaptation of Frankenstein is set basically from the control centre of the Doctor’s family life - the lounge room.

The three piece lounge in the Frankenstein’s very comfortable upper middle class home is set centre stage. Its realistic anchorage there begins to contrast to the distress and loss of control in the family’s behavior as the ‘Monster story’ is unleashed. From the Doctor’s lounge chair his musings on the Real and the Possible are gradually surrounded by a sea of confusion.

The other large live set is a towering shoe box of tiny apartment rooms into which the actors squeeze comically, barely able to stand upright. Here the Monster appears, stealing food and shelter from unsuspecting inhabitants. Like the interior images from the Antarctic station these locations outside the doctor’s domain are small, confined visions.

Frankenstein’s real world (the family lounge room) is set in front of the body of his creation. A huge beige scrim masks the deep upstage area. Beige, with primitive zig-zagging hand

33 As previously stated this music was to be presented via the live accompaniment of the Oldenburg Staatsorchester. Early in production this live performance was cut. Sebastien Katzler’s compositions were performed by the Orchestra but were eventually only used as the film soundtrack. Šagor, K. 2008b

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stitching it presents Frankenstein’s laboratory work, that is, the stitched together flesh. This ‘skin’ becomes the screen for the film and video images and thus presents the combined fabric of Doctor Frankenstein’s life and work. During the performance the stitching on this backdrop begins to fall apart, as does Frankenstein ’s family as the Monster widens its exploration of the human world.

As the image below indicates, when this ‘skin’ begins to fall away the video images of the family and the filmed Antarctic confessions are more blurred and broken by gaps of blackness where patches of the empty upstage area are now seen. This reflects the breakdown in the Doctor’s world and is supported by the breakdown of the patterns in Šagor’s script. Finally the ‘skin’ is torn completely and drops away. The Monster carries the prostrate Doctor upstage into ‘the void.’ Snow falls, linking the live action with the Antarctic setting in the film.

Frankenstein : the Final Confrontation. Image © Hans Jörg Michel 2007

9. Conclusion

My analysis of Frankenstein again demonstrates the key dramaturgical features of Šagor’s writing; a dramaturgy of displacement furthered in this case via an embedded and ongoing multi-mediated installation. His dramaturgical weave here is framed around contextual choices: in radically adapting a classic text, in presenting it on a classical era proscenium arch stage and in adding a contemporary production concept, namely to write using three media as co-narrative strands (live action, video sequences and film footage).

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The analysis details how Šagor ‘wove’ within distinct scene cycles across the three media; as in FSK-16 and Ja he developed characteristic internal patterns within each staged scene. The audiences attention is again drawn to these patterns, it is the patterns and the variations to them that the meaning of the play can be read. In Frankenstein this meaning is basically the breakdown of the family unit, as remembered through Doctor Frankenstein’s life; a jigsaw of three time frames is shown across three media that are also texturally breaking down.

Šagor and Reisner’s Frankenstein is a work that drives my analysis back to a discussion of the dramaturg’s process and approach - where I began at the beginning of Chapter Five in the Australian Case Study. My research in Germany exposed the specific practical issues experienced by dramaturgs working with multimedia text on productions such as Frankenstein , Ja , and FSK-16 and before that on Tell and Hasse Karlsson.. All reiterate that the ‘dramaturgy of installation’ involves not only the scripted, filmed, videoed and rehearsed scenes but the decisions made in production to compose or ‘weave’ with and upon them.34

Both Case Studies expose a ‘dramaturgy of installation’ as an aesthetic but also a physical process, recalling the labours in ‘wrighting’ that are part of the theatre as craft. The aesthetic and dramaturgical compromises that emerge from the ‘Installation’ become part of the actual performance – they are embedded in the ‘performance as text. ’ In Case Study One Director TJ Eckleberg described this as how “our methodologies of process become the methodologies of performance” (Plummer, K., 2006a, 3 April).

34 Reisner’s previously quoted articles (2004, 2005) concern the design and installation of framed multimedia segments in FSK- 16 and Ja , however the logistic ramifications of a continuously multi-mediated narrative such as Frankenstein create even more issues of scale.

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Chapter 7: Conclusions and Implications

This research commenced as a personal response to noticeable changes in the conception of narrative and structure in theatre /performance making by young people with whom I was working. I felt that these changes challenged my traditional tools and skills as a drama turg,; tools such as the elements of drama, the principles of stagecraft and conventions of the theatre. The inquiry concludes by readdressing my original research questions.

1. Conclusion: Research Question One

Question: What are the new and emerging dramaturgical principles evident in the creation and presentation of contemporary Theatre/Performance for Young People?

Conclusion: This study has demonstrated, through fieldwork undertaken in two separate international contexts, that two new dramaturgical principles are evident in the creation and presentation of contemporary TYP. These principles are Displacement and Installation.

2. The Conceptual Shape of Displacement and Installation

Essentially the content of Chapters Five and Six demonstrate the unfolding of displacement and installation evidenced in key works of the two writer/directors. In Chapter Five I sourced the terms displacement and installation from a scientific and a visual arts etymology. It is now important to examine the broad conceptual features of both displacement and installation as impulses, techniques and principles in the epistemology of Performance. ER George claims that such articulations “stake a claim for performance as itself a philosophical system in its own right” (1996, p.18).

As an articulate dramaturg and researcher I now accept George’s challenge. This chapter seeks to position displacement and installation as part of a research field that “attempt[s] to identify how the elements of performance form an internal system, constructing a unique reality and providing a unique form of existence” (1996, p.18). a. Displacement and Installation are dramaturgical impulses that are non dramatic

Writer/directors TJ Eckleberg and Kristo Šagor express their non-dramatic intentions through a thematic preoccupation and a practical methodology that is guided by displacement and

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installation. In their performance products displacement and installation challenge the dramatic paradigm through both their poetic and aesthetic operations:

I want to cement those disjunctions that keep the audience engaged. How do I do that as director…I don’t say ‘relax its all here’..around me.. but I displace it – I keep the audience trying to connect. Stop them dismissing it. (Eckleberg, T., 2007)

In Eckleberg’s experience displacement works because it creates non-dramatic effects; his audience are engaged because, and not despite the fact that, the work refuses to provide unities, synthesis and coherence. They are also engaged because the work insists on their proactive involvement - even in so far as resolving it! Working with Eckleberg as production dramaturg I had to modify my drama-based approach to structure, aesthetics and signification. I noted Eckleberg was actively destabilizing the language, imagery and action, shifting it across the material and out of context, colliding it with other incongruent strands in his weave.

While Eckleberg’s process still foregrounded ‘storytelling’ his intention was not to build a dramatic narrative but to repeat the poetics of storytelling in a range of displaced contexts. Moreover Eckleberg chose to ‘work upon’ stories that would thematise displacement, these were ruptures and shifts in young peoples’ relationships with their parents. On the floor displacement involved ‘copy and pasting’ key material from the stories from its scenic context, then Eckleberg would install it forwards and backwards in the structure and place it as signifiers in other units of action. The poetic dynamics of ‘revisited storytelling’ became the meta-narrative in POPUP! and the ‘collective gestures’ taken from the stories were repeated throughout the work to signify this.

Eckleberg’s approach to devising was based on aesthetic displacement. The loose, inconsistent approach to signification he took in during Creative Development was maintained for the performance; here a variety of eclectic images challenged any dramaturgy founded on coherence. In each successive scene the Hero and the Jabberwock appeared in a new likeness, forcing the audience to displace character identification and expectations based on their previous manifestation. The aesthetics of installation, like the aesthetics of displacement, asked the audience to constantly re-negotiate the terrain as they progressed through each site or sequence.

The POPUP! flyer visually illustrates the dynamics of displacement; this is a forceful agitation of different impulses against each other, a ‘forging’ of the texts, more so than a dramaturgical ‘weaving’ into a unified whole. Eckleberg methodically developed actions of

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both displacement and installation in order to provide no easy answers for the audience. Instead (as the above quote suggests) Eckleberg used displacement and installation to enroll them as active participants in an open-ended work. This was evidenced in his announcement that an audience participative, krump party would ‘conclude’ POPUP!

Like Eckleberg, Kristo Šagor’s writing and direction demonstrates an intention to displace dramatic principles such as unity, aggregation and resolution. Šagor’s ‘dramaturgy of displacement’ is initially manifest in his focus on marginalized characters and his repeated use of transitory settings. Šagor’s language expressed within displacing patterns of action, shifts across character, space and time. Through displacement, language becomes a supertext that draws attention to form, rather than a subtext that works dramatically tied to the character.

In Šagor’s work displacement is overt and subversive, undermining even sturdy dramatic frameworks for action and clear character objectives: In Ja Lilly travels to Amrum on a mission and in each scene, in each progressive carriage, she asks each new character for assistance. However within this apparently realist frame, Šagor’s manages to destabilize the onstage world so that the answers Lilly seeks do not become more graspable. In FSK-16 Šagor displaces all the basic facts about the three characters established in each previous scene; as in POPUP! displacement here insists that the audience mentally ‘start over’ again.

Installation of digital media enhances such subversions. In the onscreen sequences in each of these plays Šagor exposes the audience to new perspectives on his characters. These are not dramatic ‘twists’ but fundamental underminings that challenge the credibility of character as a narrative tethering point.

Installation also activates the audience within the material, asking them to make narrative choices and presenting an unresolved ‘world’ of multiple realities. Each of Šagor’s works expands as it unfolds, towards an unresolved, open ending that sometimes even surprises his characters. The contemporary audience are thus empowered to create a resolution - if there is one.

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b. Displacement and Installation are dramaturgical techniques that take into account the audience’s understanding of technology as a poetic model as well as an aesthetic medium

Displacement and Installation are techniques which utilize the audience members’ own dramaturgical proficiency in technology modeled structures. Displacement and installation are a means by which contemporary performance makers, especially those in the TYP sector, seek accessible ways for the audience to engage with the work. For, as the authors of Dramaturgy in Performance assert, technology has become paradigmatic and is part of our ‘reading’ culture in both literal and figurative senses:

The impact of interactive media on theatre performance is also immeasurable, reflected in structures and processes even where a direct engagement with such media is not self evident. (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.202)

Figuratively, Šagor repeatedly explores socially displaced characters who use installed technology as a type of prosthetic to ‘fix’ and project their identity. Kirsten and Figen need Polaroids as proof ‘something big has happened’ and they use a Handycam to ‘confess,’ in their Speech Islands. The Monster learns to speak through the televisual vernacular and creates a ‘family’ life from the footage he has taken with his Handycam.

More literally installation, manifest as cutting edge stage technology, adds further dimensionality to Šagor’s thematic. In three productions complex onscreen compositions are installed that do not attempt cinematographic mise en scene. Instead they extend upon Šagor’s poetic displacements within the script; supporting his compulsion for subversion within form. In Ja the screen as train window, is the means by which the audience begin metaphorically reading Lilly’s journey as a universal quest, one that each audience member must also undertake. In FSK-16, in addition to onscreen elements, a hydraulic moving set plays upon the idea of cinema and projection at a number of levels. Here a number of aesthetic media are installed in combination to demonstrate Šagor’s clinical thematic; an assertion that the contemporary human is increasingly self-aware and skilled in using technology to project alternating, multiple images of their identity. In Frankenstein Šagor projects contrasting images of the Doctor’s family and his public persona on a screen that resembles the Monster’s stitched together skin. Installation and displacement here are activated in the audience through the poetic and aesthetic shifts in register they make between the three installed media: live action, film, and video. The dynamics of displacement here involve the audience trying to ‘piece together’ a narrative while at the same time Šagor is unraveling visual and aesthetic

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unities and displacing language and action from character. In all areas, the ‘skin’ of this work, the layers separating the Doctor’s domains, literally unravel, then fall away.

In the POPUP! performance displacement and installation achieve a similarly open, multilayered poetic. Eckleberg’s decision to displace the key gesture from each performer’s solo story, to develop it into an abstract visual and sonic sequence and to shift this sequence forward in the overall structure, demonstrated a hypertextual dramaturgical impulse. A signifying sequence with ‘hot links’ had been embedded across the performance, through both forwards and backwards installation.

At a literal level the POP UP! process demonstrated how the medium of digital technology could be incorporated into all facets of devising to achieve participatory as well as artistic goals. The AV artist recorded almost every workshop outcome and Eckleberg used video to frame and displace the contribution of sensitive Outreach participants. In performance numerous audio visual installations, as well as live video feeds, contributed to the audiences’ physical installation within the site. Again installation here appears to be redrawing the dramatic frame, assertively ‘panning outwards’ extending an immersive performative environment in which the audience are centred and encouraged to participate. c. Displacement and Installation embody the contemporary terrain of TYP; they are principles that demonstrate the dramaturgical nexus between process and product

For Eckleberg Displacement and Installation embody the processes of divergence and convergence that characterize the phases of a community based TYP project. They also support the ‘grounded aesthetics’ in TYP whereby a unique combination of everyday skills and resources can be manifested as performative. For Šagor Displacement and Installation are terms which dynamise the poetics of contemporary young people: the shifts in identity, a sense of flux, a globally projected self image and a constant disequilibrium: life in a transit zone, in a landscape of “constant arrivals” (Giannichi, G., 2004, p.17).

As an Australian TYP director Eckleberg needs an inclusive methodology, responsive to participants who bring with them a diverse range of theatrical and non-theatrical experiences. In essence the way TJ Eckleberg ‘works upon’ the original concept, the nature of his creative development process, is directed by a general need to remain open, and responsive for as long as possible.

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On POPUP! Eckleberg needed to articulate three separate youth groups; he used strategies of displacement and installation because they allowed numerous voices to be represented in the work. Displacements in the Creative Development Period were created by the non-arrival of Outreach participants which necessitated re-planning by the artistic team. To engage a wider pool of participants Eckleberg had Erth ran stilt-walking workshops and the AV artist recorded them; Outreach poems were developed into rap songs and installed as soundtrack; the movement director offered hip hop and krump workshops. To a larger degree displacement and installation can be seen as a pragmatic methodology Eckleberg has developed to work within a relatively unstable creative terrain.

Displacement and installation are also the practical means by which Eckleberg offers youth performers ‘a new range of dialogues’ (Myers, R., 2005, p.29) on each project. On POPUP! youth participants learnt krump and hip hop dance, puppetry, large scale animation and aerial skills. Youth members of the crew operated multiple live video feeds, AV installations and sound environments as the piece traversed the building. Displacement and installation also opened Eckleberg’s ‘weave’ to the offers from a large artistic team. In both instances the dramaturgy of displacement and of installation can be seen as a methodology of process that Eckleberg has found effective in creating interdisciplinary performance within a contemporary youth arts context.

Displacement and Installation underpin Šagor’s ongoing concerns as a contemporary playwright, namely to interrogate the human animal, especially the young person. Šagor views young people as shapeshifters; they use technology to become holders of multiple identities, on and offline. Displacement and installation assist him to project young people in transit and in identity flux. On an interpersonal level Šagor sees young people as occupied with installing images of themselves to reconfigure their power over others, thus ‘power plays’ dominate Šagor’s shifting relations onstage.

In three key works Šagor demonstrates that displacement and installation are appropriate thematic, structural and aesthetic principles to project the dynamics of contemporary German young people - restless navigants of a complex, intra-national, socio-technological milieu. These are the same qualities that have identified Šagor as a contributor to the emergent genre of Junges Theater.

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3. Conclusion: Research Question Two

My research seeks to understand how a new dramaturgical principles, evidenced within the TYP sector contribute to contemporary Postdramatic Theatre. Hans-Thies Lehmann first proposed a ‘Postdramatic Theatre’ in 1999 after an extensive phenomenological audit of adult performance works over fifteen years. In essence “Postdramatic performances usually eschew clear coordinates of narrative and character and require considerable effort on the part of the spectator” (Balme, C., 2004, p.1).

It seems to make sense that a theatre of and for contemporary young people, using a dramaturgy that references contemporary performativities and embeds the aesthetics and poetics of contemporary technology, should align with a post-dramatic theory that “explore[s] theatre's changing relationship to the media constellation of the twentieth century and the shift from text to mediatised culture”(Jürs-Munby, K., 2006, p.1).

Question: How might these new principles of dramaturgy demonstrate a Postdramatic Theatre emerging from contemporary Theatre For Young People?

Conclusion: Displacement and Installation are two new principles of dramaturgy that align with Postdramatic Theatre’s “arsenal of expressive gestures” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.23). Displacement and Installation evidence contemporary Theatre for Young People’s contribution to Postdramatic Theatre Theory.

4. Displacement and Installation in Postdramatic Theatre’s conceptual framework

The following analysis evidences that postdramatic effects and aims are achieved by Šagor and Eckleberg through their utilization of Displacement and Installation I have limited the analysis to only two or three obvious examples in each section. However numerous small and larger points can be drawn between the two Case Studies and ‘the panorama of the postdramatic’ that Lehmann and associated theorists propose. The evidence below should be suffice to recommend that displacement and installation are principles that should be included in Postdramatic Theory in future. In essence this is because displacement and installation are dramaturgical principles which achieve three key postdramatic effects: anti-signification, anti- representation and anti-resolution.

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a. Anti-signification

Both Eckleberg and Šagor’s works create an ongoing tension between the real and the represented. They exist in a shifting territory of anti-signification that refuses to establish a consistent “there and then” or even a stable sense of the “here and now” (Sugiera, M., 2004, p.25). Both artists achieve this by following impulses to displace and destabilize and by installing other media or new signifiers, forcing the audience to play a constant game of ‘catch up’ on the key information.

Anti-signification is most obviously achieved via “shifts in register” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, pp.188-190) that displace representative frameworks such as character, relationships and mise en scene. In addition the visual and verbal signifiers in each story are destabilized. The audience is “disoriented” (Barba 2000 p.60) within this material and is thus drawn towards reading the “meaning in the telling”, towards an awareness of the actions/structures of storytelling rather than the contents of any specific story itself (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.188). In POP UP! the audience could not stabilize character or location, particularly in the Jabberwocky Toy Stories but they were able to register, through constant repetition, that this work was about storytelling and these were stories capturing moments of ‘growing up.’

Anti-signification was achieved by Eckleberg’s installation of incongruent pedestrian images, namely the Two Dollar Shop Toys: cowboys, soldiers and Beijing Olympic Mascots. These figures bore no relationship to the stories in which they appeared and were perfect examples of the hypernatural referent: installed to break down mise en scene, to burst out and “de- realise” the story being told (Wessendorf, M., 2003, p.4). The Beijing Mascots could not be read as a consistent, small scale signifier for the Jabberwock: sometimes they were beasts but another time they were school girls. They operated without a “fixed conceptual identity (2006, p.82)” and their own appearance became more resonant than the hazy referent, demonstrating the hyperreal hierarchy of sign over object As Barba notes, in Performance objects and props may achieve a higher status than in drama and “are also actions, transforming themselves, acquiring different meanings and different emotive colorations” (1985, p.75).

Eckleberg also created anti-signifying ‘shifts in register’ through constantly displacing the personas of the live performers so that the audience had to reassess them in each scene. The audience experienced the young performers most directly when they appeared in their own

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persona (cloaked, explorative and childlike), but later they became Marshal authority figures (barking imperatives) and performing ‘characters’ (the krump dancing, bug spawn). Thus through both the live performers and the mediated figures Eckleberg insisted on installing unstable signifiers.

At a narrative level, Eckleberg’s sustained efforts in constantly displacing one image of the key protagonists (the Hero and the Jabberwock) and installing another, often via a different media, allowed the audience to build their own individualized sense of the Jabberwock as a personal metaphor for their own deeper fears. In this sense, the actions of displacement and installation assert that “one has to grant [postdramatic] theatre signs the possibility that they can work precisely through the retreat of signification (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.82).”

The platform scenes installed into Ja are examples of postdramatic hypernatural moments, “trivial, utopian images of desire that appropriate the pedestrian, hypermediatised and clichéd” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.117). Each presents one carriage character’s ideation of an earthly Paradise but they are composed of two dimensional, commercial images of tourist destinations. These images ‘de-realise’ the onstage narrative and this assists the young audience to read the whole story at a metaphorical level. To enhance this Šagor carefully plots clues in the actions of the conductors around each platform sequence. These actions project them more and more clearly as an Angel and a Devil and the train as a metaphorical quest.

In FSK-16 the Speech Islands (installed as filmed monologues) also achieve a de-realisation as units of representation. Šagor makes certain of this by having the live characters verbally undermine their own dialogue and their attempts to use technology to construct a fiction. Each character displaces the filmed mise en scene to confuse the signification and it is clearly up to the audience to make a decision on who and what to believe. The Speech Islands in action demonstrate a multi-level use of displacement and in doing so a key trait in Postdramatic Theatre, where often the players themselves ‘gnaw’ on the tension between reality and artifice. Through active choices in the filming and the staging of the Speech Islands Šagor and Reisner show these characters “foregrounding their own construction and the process of negotiation with the material ” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.190).

Very obvious examples of hyperrealism and the hypernatural moment (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, pp.117-118) are manifested in Frankenstein . Šagor and Reisner have composed each of the media to overplay their genre and signature aesthetics and this aggravates the shifts in register, as the text zigzags across three text types. The filmed elements, set in Antarctic use syrupy orchestration and soap opera realism while the Monster’s video sequences are

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relentlessly ‘home video’ in composition. These features draw the audience’s attention to form as much as content. Clearly they are not to trust these sequences as objective representations, instead their attention is drawn to these media as calculated Identity- Constructors.

However it is in the staged action that Šagor installs a repeated, hypernatural unit of action. When the Doctor and Elisabeth are alone they switch register into a poetic fantasy dialogue, a Hollywood movie Love duet. As Lehmann (2006, p.188) and Wessendorf (2003, p.15) describe, the use of outlandish stylistic appropriations from other genres can create a “phantastic break out” scene for postdramatic effect, showing characters who need to resort to mediatised forms to express their deeper feelings. Lehmann is critical however of the use of media appropriated forms in such hypernatural moments. He believes they create a “coldness”, a “de-pathisation”, and an “ironic sarcastic distance” (2006, p.118). Yet the example of the Love duet demonstrates how hypernatural scenes can be upbeat and energizing, allowing the performer to express Postdramatic Theatre’s “meta-theatricality” (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.287)

In POP UP! the collective gesture sequence became a clear example of an installed hyperreal sign that achieves a theatric, rather than a dramatic effect. The way the key gestures were repeatedly worked upon by Eckleberg and the cast demonstrates both Lehmann, Turner and Behrndt’s observation that Postdramatic Theatre is reinvigorating pre-dramatic traditions such as ritual and ceremony: for clearly here “key actions of the story were also ritualized, having been abstracted into choreographic and textual figures” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.189). The collective gestures and the extreme physicality of the krump dance vocabulary that each performer created also demonstrates Lehmann’s contention that in contemporary theatre the body is increasingly “absolutised” and may “appropriate other discourses. Eckleberg’s process allowed each of the cast to project a body whose “prescence manifests itself as the site of an inscription of collective history”(Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.97)

b. Anti-identification

Both Eckleberg and Šagor’s works demonstrate a postdramatic ‘dramaturgy of process’ whereby the audiences’ attention is drawn to the struggle of the artwork to compose. Often the performance completely breaks down in moments termed The Irruption of the Real . When they are faced with moments where the world of the performance ‘gasps for life,’ the audiences’ sense of their own perceptibility, operating on the work is heightened. Units

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installed as Irruptions ‘unplug the artifice of the work’ and displace key tethering points; they contribute to the broader anti-identification impulses working in postdramatic texts.

Like the Love Duet in Frankenstein the ‘t- shirt parade’ by Ernest appears at first to be another sequence of hypernatural performativity. In the middle of a scene Ernest enters and, right across downstage centre, begins a flamboyant and bizarre striptease directed at the audience. He tears off layer after layer of t- shirts, showing us that each has a brand name or logo. Ernest is literally taking off his costume. The other characters onstage make no comment or reaction - do they see this? Is this part of the scene or not? Such audience questions indicate that this sequence operates more as an Irruption of the Real , simply because it creates such audience uncertainty. Here it appears that the character (or is it the actor?) breaks the scenic frame to pose comment on the onstage world.

We might ‘read’ this sequence as Ernest’s earnest attempt to gain attention from his father or as a statement by Šagor on the manipulation of consumers. But Ernest’s t-shirt parade is ‘stands out’ and it is offered as a theatrical, but not as a dramatic gesture. What is most important is that this tantrum or ‘show off act’ leaves the character onstage but displaced from the scene and the audience similarly so. They lack key directions to character and how to integrate this unit into the scene. Here the audience’s “undeniable” questions are foregrounded but their meaning making remains “hovering” and “postponed” (Lehmann, H.- T., 2006, pp.101,87). It is only much later in the work, when the Doctor is disabled and, when Ernest in his place confronts the Monster, that Šagor’s language shifts prompt the audience to ‘read’ a subtext on the social construction of identity through mediatised culture.

In FSK-16 Šagor again allows an Irruption of the Real to extend the action of the work into the audience’s arena. At the end of each Speech Island, the speaker (as character or as actor?) directly orders younger members out of the cinema. The performers (or the characters?) acknowledge they are sharing the space with the audience and regularly offer them the choice to leave. This suggests that by staying in the room the audience somehow become complicit in the escalating violence that follows.

The destruction of the set during the blackouts thus approaches an irruption. It comes after a direct warning message and in a scene change (blackout). In addition the audience never get an explicit answer as to who committed these acts and why. The girls work out a way to explain the violence, a different way each scene but the audience remain uncertain; they do not trust anything these girls say and the boy refuses to speak to them directly. Is this violence

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Šagor’s Irruption of the Real –is it his way of projecting upon the audience a collective responsibility for acts of scarring social violence?

In FSK-16 Šagor exposes the audience to displaced violence; in the dark, outside a scenic frame and in close proximity to them. Increasing uncertainty and heightened perceptibility is their natural response. In these moments the audience develop what Lehmann describes as an aesthetic perception based on “come and go” “switching, not between form and content” but between the “perception of structure and of the sensorially real” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.103). Whether he intends these moments as real or contained within the fiction, Šagor certainly uses these irruptions to displace any audience member’s identification or empathy with these characters.

In POP UP! moments in which the artifice of the performance retreats, or in which the real was allowed to displace the identifiable frames of the work were ongoing and obvious. The site specific nature of the performance meant that real elements installed themselves in numerous scenes; these included the noise and lights of freight trains, the honking of car horns, the number of cars we waited for before Kev would allow us to cross the road. POP UP! clearly demonstrates an Irruption of the Real via its spatial dramaturgy, for here “the traces of a chronological narrative are subordinate to the architectural and experiential narrative of the audience’s movement through space” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.196). The division of the audience into three groups also facilitated Irruptions: at several points the audience could observe other audience members installed in the performance- particularly when they saw one group climbing out a window!

However the moments of transition between sequences were the most important points in which the audience could identify that their ‘hovering uncertainty’ was part of the text. Even though Eckleberg and the team devised subtle clues to direct the audience where to move, the dynamics of each group in each performance created an important part of the work itself. Here the struggle to understand what was required of them meant that the audience themselves created Irruptions: “The roaming forced us to make eye contact and perhaps even talk to the audience members around us” (Murphy, T., 2006). As the Jabberwock (as personal metaphor) had hinted, the real poetic in POP UP! was the audience’s own enrolment and identification in the work. Thus the audience’s “transindividual points of contact” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.83) became part of the unique poetics of each performance.

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c. Anti-resolution

Both Šagor’s and Eckleberg’s works demonstrate a refusal to resolve. Instead of narrowing towards a point of dramatic resolution, these works operate ‘ a-thetic ally’ to displace any clear positions as they progress. In Eckleberg and Šagor’s works the displacing impulse and the aesthetic density of signs created through installation, disable the audience’s ability to aggregate information to a point where they can establish a clear point of view, or a point from which to view. The ultimate goal here is to project any resolution outwards towards the audience and well beyond the partial structures offered in the performance text.

In Šagor’s work an a-thetic de-positioning is achieved by displacing language as the key tool of the character. In drama characters use language to achieve actions in pursuit of an objective. Here language is removed from them as their positing instrument and becomes a structural unit that operates outside and beyond any character’s control. Numerous examples of language play and reassignment are provided in Chapter Six, from Stipe and the carriage characters to the Doctor and his sons. Šagor’s relentlessly repeated language patterns assert these characters growing lack of control of their identity and of their goals in the action. The disintegration of the Doctor’s world is demonstrated through displaced language; his philosophical musings are taken over by his son Ernest , even the linguistic routine of ‘whinging about beer’ which is repeated numerous times by the Doctor and Henri is later installed into a scene with the Antarctic scientists. Increasingly Šagor’s characters become postdramatic textträger (text bearers) - only able to bring body and voice to the words, to “enter into the problems of articulation without resolving them” (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.193).

In all three works Šagor demonstrates a postdramatic use of repetition, not for dramatic reinforcement but to subvert and undermine. Lehmann asserts that, like hyperrerealized signification, repetition is escalated to the extent that it savages form – so that the act of repetition becomes the subject rather than the repeated content. In Šagor’s work, in his relentlessly reinstalled patterns, the audience member eventually “experiences [repetitions] as meaningless and redundant, as a seemingly unending, unsynthesizable, uncontrolled and uncontrollable course of events” (2006, pp.156-7). Thus through what appears to be moribund repetition, the form of the work - again not the content - operates as “dramaturgically gestic” (Eckersall, P., 2006, p.284). In Frankenstein these language patterns gesticulate towards Šagor’s meta-narrative, his conception that each performance is the reworking of the Doctor’s grand operatic, self-narrative. Postdramatic repetition is also valid when considering the meta-

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narrative of ‘storytelling’ towards which Eckleberg gestured, by repeatedly reinstalling storytelling units on his POPUP! audience.

In POP UP! the postdramatic principle of the a- thetic was effected through Eckleberg’s installed spatial dramaturgy. Through keeping the audience physically mobilized (displaced) and by constantly installing them within the frame of the action Eckleberg ensured that the audience could not get a bird’s eye point of view. At one point Eckleberg even acknowledged that displacement and installation involve dramatic ‘refusals’ (Eckersall, P., 2006): “As director I don’t say ‘relax its all here’ … around me … but I displace it – I keep the audience trying to connect.” (Eckleberg, T., 2007).

Within each scene Eckleberg forced the audience to make choices within an installation that offered multiple points of view. As one audience member commented, there was the sense that there was so much going on it would taker repeated viewings to take it in. In addition to an aesthetic that imbricated numerous narrative influences, Eckleberg had divided the audience into three separate groups who each experienced different versions. All of these devices created “a unique narrative order which allows each audience member a dramaturgical role (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.195).”

The key refinements to the dramaturgy in the rehearsal period on POPUP! were focused on shaping dialogue. It was at this point that the youth performers noted that no dialogue ‘character to character’ was spoken. Heidi Taylor (in Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p.197) contends that direct address is a noteworthy trait in site specific works because they operate via a spatial dramaturgy in which the actor audience relationship is central to meaning making. When character to character dialogue is used it sets up a frame which excludes the audience and it allows them a fourth wall, privileged observer’s view. Dialogue in POP UP! was however all directed outwards, meaning that the audience were unable to effect a ‘thetic,’ a point of view. Throughout POP UP! Eckleberg ensured that audience remained installed in:

… an authorial struggle to make sense of the world …and emphasizing this struggle as taking place in the present rather than as something that precedes the performance. (Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. K., 2008, p. 192)

d. Conclusion

In Postdramatic Theatre Lehmann identifies theatrical techniques that in contemporary theatre and performance achieve anti-signification, anti-identification and anti-resolution. The actions of ‘displacement’ and ‘installation’ by the two writer/directors in this inquiry have

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been taken to pursue these same goals. Through examples evidenced in the fieldwork the aesthetic and poetic effects created in POP UP! Ja , FSK-16 and Frankenstein are demonstrated to be identifiably postdramatic; they align with key postdramatic techniques and performance examples described by Lehmann and other analysts. This research ultimately contends that displacement and installation are two more in the ‘arsenal’ of Postdramatic Theatre’s ‘expressive gestures.’ They operate through both the dramaturgy of process and in the dramaturgy of performance for young people and are here evidenced in both scripted and devised productions in two separate international contexts.

5. Implications

This study has important implications for practitioners. The fieldwork presented in Chapters Five and Six validate my original hypothesis that new dramaturgical principles are emerging from contemporary Theatre for Young People. Across the terrain of TYP, from devised theatre with young people to professional repertory theatres for young people, new approaches to process, narrative and signification are being developed. These form a pragmatic response by writers and directors to a new audience who demonstrate new expectations and capabilities in those same key areas; in narrative form, in their interdisciplinary skills and in their visual and technological literacies. Šagor and Eckleberg’s work demonstrates that contemporary Theatre/Performance for Young People is not only engaging its audience in innovative ways but is also able to contribute to new platforms in performance theory.

At the same time this study demonstrates how both practitioners’ work furthers the traditional TYP goals of relevance, accessibility and engagement. Displacement and Installation achieve these goals by allowing a number of voices to speak through numerous media and in unique aesthetic and poetic combinations. Displacement is demonstrated as an expressive thematic and a performance dynamic that reflects the experience of twenty first century young people. In combination, installation and displacement allow TYP practitioners to position their youth audience members in an engaging physical and cognitive relationship to the performance, one that evokes for them the immersive environment of the virtual interface.

This study is significant for theatre theorists and educators. It asserts TYP’s role in studies of performance innovation and evidences its contribution to Postdramatic Theory. It proposes new terminologies that come from practice and those that will advance further analysis of ‘texts for performance’ into the twenty first century. These theatrical texts will manifest as

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new playwriting, texts from devised theatre, texts of interdisciplinary and multi-mediated performance.

This study contributes to the development of new practical terminologies for dramaturgical process. While new terms may be sourced from other fields it records in context their unique theatrical redefinition. It validates that dramaturgs working in Theatre for Young People are in an ideal position to identify the epistemologies of Performance, expressed through process and in production. The study also reaffirms the important role for dramaturgs as articulators and interventionists who create space for others to ‘reflect in and upon action’ during performance making. It should assist other dramaturgs who seek to reappraise their approach, tools of analysis and their spheres of practice.

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Epilogue: a drop of water

(A Thank You note from POP UP!)

A wonderful mentor and friend. With us from the start. You are in so many of my memories – helping, watching, listening, talking – you did all the little friendly things and calmed so many strong situations … Love. Take care. God bless. Elise

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Appendix

1. Informed Consent Package

Consent Information Package for Interviewees

Title Of Research:

Contemporary Dramaturgy in Theatre For Young People: Two International Perspectives

Name of Researcher: Kris Plummer Ph.D candidate, QUT Queensland University of Technology Performance Studies, Creative Industries Research Centre The Doctoria Park Rd Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059 AUSTRALIA

Contact Phone: 61+7+3138 5567 mob/handi: 0407701068 E-mail: [email protected]

Supervisors - QUT Assoc. Prof. Dr. Brad Haseman - b.haseman @qut.edu.au Dr. Sandra Gattenhof - [email protected]

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Description of the Research Project

This project explores the narrative in contemporary performance making in Theatre For Young People in two contexts: Australia and Germany. The interviews are designed to collect primary data from industry professionals specifically trained or experienced in performance making within Theatre for Young People, Kinder- und Jugendtheater, multimedia performance and ideally the intersection of all three areas.

The data collected will provide specific details on current European and Australian practice in devising theatre, specifically that using technology by and for a new theatre generation. These interviews will form part of a wider literature review in the field and inform future Creative Practice to be undertaken by the researcher.

The research is being conducted as part of doctoral Ph.D studies in the Creative Industries Research Centre and School of Performance Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove, QLD, Australia.

Expected Benefits The aim of the project is to come to an awareness of the effect of hypertextuality and interactivity on narrative form in Playmaking/writing. How is the ‘technology paradigm’ (which is educating young people to be hypertext literate) and the increasing use of technology in performance actually driving new narrative models? How are the audience being re-positioned as active, even interactive ‘percipients’ in the performance?

The research question challenges Creative Practice in the Performing Arts industry, future studies of Performance, education and the dramaturgy for young playwrights. The information collected through these interviews will fill gaps that have emerged in available literature of the area under investigation.

Risks The perceived risk in this project relates to confidentiality. By sharing perceptions of fellow practitioners and contemporary work in the field of performance, you may expose personal bias that may not be shared by others working in the field. This is acknowledged and steps have been built into the interviewing phase and analysis phase to reduce and / or remove it.

Confidentiality and Voluntary Participation Your participation is voluntary. You may choose to discontinue participation in the project at any time without comment or penalty. Your identity will be revealed in the process of interview and through quotation in the literature review. Your views and understandings will be used solely to shed light on this area of research. This information will not be used to assess individuals or make judgements on any individual, performance work, company or organisation.

For formal interviews: An audio recording will take place and will be retained after a transcript of the interview has taken place. This audio recording will not be used for instructional use or public broadcast and will not be made available for public archiving. It is possible to participate in the project without an audio recording of the interview being taken. It is also possibly to complete the interview through e-mail correspondence.

For informal interviews ; a similar process will be undertaken to that outlined below however it is anticipated that the material will form contextual notes and descriptive reporting on past and current projects or organisational structures rather than take the form of direct quotes in the research.

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The process of gathering information through interview will take this form: 1. Conduct interview 2. Transcription of interview by researcher 3. Copies of transcription will be delivered back to you for changes and then you will be required to sign the transcript to validate it as an accurate record to the interview.

On receiving the transcript of the interview, you have the right to delete or change your comments as well as names of individuals or companies mentioned in the interview to maintain confidentiality.

Information taken from the interview will then form a part of the literature review chapter of the written exegesis or thesis. If any subsequent publication arises or is pursued, it is understood that you, as the interviewee, maintain the intellectual property and you will be given opportunity to modify information included in the publication.

Questions and Further Information If you have any questions regarding the nature of this project, please contact me on 61+7+3864 5567 or 0407 701 068 or by email: [email protected] . Should any concerns arise regarding the content or purposes of this study, my supervisors, listed below, may be contacted. Assoc. Prof. Dr Brad Haseman: [email protected] , 61+7+3138 3730 Dr. Sandra Gattenhof: [email protected] 61+7+3138 3596

The proposal has gone through the normal course of ethical clearance through QUT. Your participation is voluntary.

Concerns and Comments If you have any concerns regarding the nature of this project or about the ethical conduct of the project please contact the QUT University Research Ethics Officer, Wendy Heffernan on 61+7+3138 2340, [email protected]

Feedback As a participant, you will not receive any feedback on research findings or on the outcome of the project. You may however, access the literature review chapter of the thesis prior to submission by contacting me directly or through my supervisor.

Kris Plummer [email protected] .

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LETTER OF CONSENT (For participants over the age of 18)

Title Of Research: Contemporary Dramaturgy in Theatre For Young People Two International Perspectives

Name of Researcher: Kris Plummer, Ph.D Drama- Performance Studies, QUT Creative Industries, L209 The Doctoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059 Australia Contact Phone: +61407701068 E-mail: [email protected]

Academic Supervisors - QUT Assoc. Prof. Dr. Brad Haseman - b.haseman @qut.edu.au Dr. Sandra Gattenhof - [email protected]

Statement of Consent By signing below, you are indicating that you:

• Have read and understood the information sheet about this project;

• Have had any questions answered to your satisfaction;

• Understand that if you have any additional question you can contact research team;

• Understand that you are free to withdraw at anytime, without comment or penalty;

Understand that you can contact the research team; if you have any questions about the project, or the secretary of the University Human Research Ethics Officer on 61+7+ 3i38 2340 or [email protected] if you have any concerns about the ethical conduct of the project; and

• Agree to participate in the project.

Name (please print): ______

Signature: ______

Date: ____ / ____/ ______

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2. Guideline Questions: Contextual Interviews in Germany 2007

Context Briefly outline the structure of your company and its philosophy. How does your practice sit within the established organizations for ‘theater for children and young people’ in Germany? As a director/dramaturg do you have a set process or model that you apply when devising a performance? Briefly outline it. Process Narrative: your usual starting point is? … singular multiple, texts When using multi texts how do you come to the narrative principle- the structural frame? …. Who is involved in a devising process, and what role do the participants play in decision making about the performance narrative? What role do you see technology playing in the construction of your work? (In the pre-production phase, in rehearsals and in the final performance) Where does the impetus to use technology come from? (the participants inc the design team, the contemporary industry trends around you, perceived consumer/audience demands) What advantages and disadvantages have you observed in utilizing technology in the devising process. Mention any particular case studies that may be appropriate. Performance In a multi- media performance, utilizing both live and mediated content, what do you perceive is: * the ‘new aesthetic’- communicative language and * new narratology- redefined forms that can be created. Relating an example from your work may illustrate this most clearly. Audience How do these new forms ‘speak’ appropriately to your audience context ? Young people, the future of Germany, German performance practice. Comments about the scale of the work.

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3. Image and Graphics Release Form: 2006

Teaching & Learning Support Services Graphics & Photography IMAGE RELEASE FORM Ms Kris Plummer: PhD Research Case Study on – ‘POP UP! Shopfront Theatre NSW

Name …………………………………………………………………………….……

Address …………………………………………………………………………..…

…………………………PC ………………Phone No. .…………………………….

I, ……………………………………………………., agree that QUT and/or any agency acting on QUT’s behalf, shall have the right to photograph me, (still or moving) and/or to record my voice and/or performance by any present or future means. QUT and their successors and assigns shall own all results and proceeds of my services, including the copyright in same and as such owner shall have the right;

a. to include them in any advertising & publicity b. to reproduce them by any present or future means c. to exhibit and perform them on radio and television and in, or by any other present or future media, for profit or otherwise, and for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

I agree to make no claims against QUT and their successors and assigns for any payment by way of a fee for appearing in promotional material or advertisements.

Signed

……………………………………………………………….Date…………………. on behalf of Queensland University of Technology

Signed

……………………………………………………………….Date…………………. (Parent or guardian to sign if under 18 years of age)

Kris Plummer student no: n5124336, [email protected] , ph; 0407701068 Queensland University of Technology, research CRICOS no 00213J

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Digital Appendices: List of Contents

1. On DVD 1: POP UP! Performance- Best viewed with POP UP! Synopsis

2. On DVD 2: a. A copy of this thesis in PDF form b. Digital Appendices

(F = folder, D = word document, P = pdf) x indicates items present for examination purposes in 2009 but removed from the published version of Appendices in 2010

D: Informed Consent Package: K Plummer 2007 D: Image and Graphics Release Form: 2006

Folder: Case Study One

D: Photo Images from Chapter Five in color P: TJ Eckleberg: Curriculum Vitae F: TJ Eckleberg Interviews x

D: POP UP! Synopsis D: Poem: Jabberwocky (English) D: Poem: Der Jammerwoch (German) P: Popup Flyer: Image F: POP UP! Images © Michael Myers 2006

F: Popup Daily Logs and templates x D: Statement on Data Collection Methods x D: The Delimitation Statement x D: C Murphy Interview (PACT) 15th March 2005 x

Folder: Case Study Two

D: Photo Images from Chapter Six in color D: Kristo Šagor: Curriculum Vitae F: Interviews with and about Kristo Šagor x

F: Šagor’s plays: in German (all three), in translation ( FSK-16 ) and in English synopsis ( Ja and Frankenstein )

F: Frankenstein Photos © Hans Jorg Michel 2007 F: Ja Photos © Karola Prutek 2006 F: FSK-16 Photos © Nina Urban 2004

D: ‘Intersecting Dramaturgies’ Article x

242

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