Devising Galapagos: Day 1

Today I started devising, working with the text and many ideas that surround the play. It made me realise how difficult it is to work alone, not having the dynamic of a group to work through problems with. The majority of the work I did involved the placement of sound within and around various objects to give a sense of sound admitting from them. This worked quite successfully but I feel that the strength of such placement is within the number of tape machines used, having two or three admitting a similar sound, placed around the room in different objects creates a multiple and eerie presence. I liked working with the crude technology of cassette tapes as they are surprising loud and have a disturbing inevitability as once they begin they can't be easily skipped. They are much more tactile then digital formats and will be central to how the work progresses.

Reading through a lot of the text I had written it became clear that a lot of it has become inappropriate due to the reduced time I can work with the actors. I also realised how many different voices that existed within it, some quite arrogant and unfounded. As a result I have chosen just several sections to expand upon.

Anti-Humanistic Bugs

Over the last month I have been moving between the British Library and my bug infested attic room (it over looks a very bug filled river) trying to define my research question and formulate an argument... and I think I am getting there.

My research question has moved away from focusing on my own practice and has become a piece of independent critical writing. I have had difficultly in trying to pare it down because of this shift in focus, but it is now based around the the essay that originally initiated my interest in 'object theatre': Henryk Jurkowski's Towards a Theatre of Objects. In the essay Jurkowski alludes to a 'third genre' of theatre that (in 1988) was potentially emerging between puppet and actors theatre, (essentially an 'object theatre'). My thesis picks up from this, asserting that this third genre has not fully yet emerged and makes a claim that anti-humanism might point to how it could be achieved. It is a way of theoretically playing out the ideas I hope to apply in practice and actually discern an argument bridging the gap between anti-humanism and puppet/object theatre.

I realised the connection emerging as Jurkowski argued that the puppet had shifted from its sacred ritualistic roots to a secularist object in the hands of the actor. There are infinite permutations within this shift but at the secularist extreme the actor as 'creator' is placed at the centre of the actor/puppet relationship as total controller. Philosophically, this could be interpreted as the playing out of a humanist ontology. The 'third genre' through anti-humanism is therefore questioning how an understanding of an anti-humanist discourse could be applied to 'level the field' between the actor and the puppet, re-instating the theatrical (and perhaps the fetish/shamanistic) roots of the puppet - forcing the presence of the human body to become a equal (or sometimes lesser - or greater) exponent to the object of the puppet. This will allow for an increased tension between the puppet/object and the performer and ultimately an objectification of the actor.

I would regard Kantor's theatre as being the closest to actually realising a similar relationship between object and performer (it could be argued that his theatre has a strongly anti-humanistic approach combined with an almost religiously pro-humanitarian intent)

I am looking forward to trying to let this theory transcend my practice - if indeed it is possible. It is one thing theorising, and another to apply. Back to the bugs....