What I've Been Up To

Happy Christmas! I can't believe it's only been three months (give or take) since I moved to London - in some ways it feels like two weeks, in others like I've been here for years. I STILL have not managed to get a handle on consistent Internet service, which I cling to as my excuse for not blogging as I'd promised. It is definitely the reason I haven't posted pictures. THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE. I'm moving in a week and a half, to a place that is bigger, safer, and closer to school than the room I've got now. AND THERE WILL BE INTERNET ACCESS THAT IS RELIABLE AND SECURE. The end.

So what have I actually been doing? Well. That's a good question. I'm not doing what I thought I'd be doing, that's for sure - I'm doing what I never imagined I would, in large part because I'd never even heard of it before. Lemme esplain.

How many of you have heard the term "devised theatre"? If any of you raised your hands, you're further ahead than I was when I arrived (especially since I started a week late, after getting here two weeks early, but that's been covered). I found out fairly quickly that Central is known for its "experimental" theatre program, but it took me a while to figure out what that meant. My program (Advanced Theatre Practice) at this particular school is concerned with "devising" theatre, or basically coming up with a show from scratch. No script, no story, nothing - the theatre "makers" in my group are learning how to generate ideas and materials and collect fragments that could be developed into a piece of theatre of some kind. It's really just as vague as it sounds. My group of 30+ split into three "clusters" at the beginning of the term: Performance Practices (movement studies, basically), Scenography (staging, tech, and design) and Composition (directing and dramaturgy). We met with these smaller groups two mornings a week, and then with everyone the remaining mornings and afternoons. I've been working in my Composition Cluster (10 of us) for the last two+ months doing writing exercises to generate text, creating physicalizations of ideas and feelings, and building short performances that are then combined with others' to develop new, longer pieces.

The afternoons have been taken up with Practitioner Studies - artists from theatre companies (all experimental, generally devised - yes, people evidently pay to watch this kind of thing) have been coming in to work with us in two-week blocks to introduce us to their methods of creating and overseeing us as we generate performances. These sessions have been successful to widely varying degrees. We've worked on "immersive" theatre, where the audience becomes an involved part of the show; "site-specific" theatre, in which the performances are based on and generated from the locations; "telematic" theatre, or "theatre from a distance" which involves technology and major elements of the performance happening somewhere other than where the audience is (and which, as a session, was a major disaster - thanks to the presenter - and probably should not be counted as a real theatrical genre, even though we managed to create some very interesting work). It's been a huge mixed bag. On the whole, though, my group is pretty great and we've usually managed to find something new and learn something valuable in every unit.

The best has been my Composition Cluster. No one is teaching me anything about dramaturgy in the way I'd hoped to learn about it (what's been done, how does a dramaturg function in Europe and elsewhere, etc..) but I am learning how to create a show, how to discover new material and generate ideas and explore things in very different kinds of ways, how to structure and assemble the bits that come up. I'll have to teach myself how to be a "traditional" dramaturg, but this program is showing me how to work with other creative people. One of the best things we did in my cluster was a two-day series in which our cluster-leader (sounds a little sci-fi - she was the teacher, or lecturer, but those really aren't accurate descriptions) had to be gone and left us project instructions to follow on our own. We each got an envelope with very specific directions, and had to make decisions about what and how to follow them. The cool part was that no one seriously considered at any point leaving or totally overthrowing the instructions, and in the end we had a completely brilliant, fascinating "play" session where we improvised a group piece using everyone's sounds, text, gestures, sequences and the new ideas that came out of all the things we had made that day. SO great.

My favorite piece of work with the large group was actually the last - we had all created final presentations to be "assessed" (graded, essentially) for our cluster work, and for the last week of the term our group leader (head of our program) assigned us to split into smaller groups, come up with common themes or "enthusiasms" from our various work over the term, and devise a piece based on those ideas. Our group talked over our presentations and put together a list of common ideas and things we liked, and then developed a lovely piece in which we each had a ball of red yarn ("wool", if you're British, but it really was just regular yarn) which represented our separate journeys. We took the yarn and rolled it and tossed it and strung it all around the room - and not coincidentally, around all the other members of our course. We liked the physicalization of the idea that all the individual work we had done this term was connected to all the other people in the course, that theatre and our journeys were linking us all together in a great web. We used Perpetuum Mobile by the Penguin Café Orchestra as the soundtrack for our movement - as the music wound down we all came back to the center of our web and began tying ourselves into it, weaving and twisting the string all around the six in the group. Then we finished with lines from a poem about string theory, delighting the geeks in the room (myself included, as I'm the one who came up with string theory - via Einstein - as a source for our piece). The whole thing was joyful and playful - it could have been oppressive and scary, really, but we knew we wanted it to be happy and fun and inclusive, and it was. This is the piece that I would be most interested in continuing and expanding, and maybe we will at some point.

Over the break I'll be packing and working on various projects - we have a paper due based on what we learned this term, and I need to get set up for next term and our work in a Research Group. We have three in my group - we’re going to be researching how to develop a performance through the interaction of specific roles: Director, Dramaturg, and Performer, so I'll be spending the next few weeks reading like crazy and determining what my work as a Dramaturg actually IS. I'm planning to interview working dramaturgs over the next term (and maybe see if I can talk someone into a residency or internship), and it kind of feels like I'll be doing a self-generated BA in Dramaturgy along with the MA in Advanced Theatre Practice. Also, it will be nice to have a little time for sight-seeing - I've seen 14 shows since I've been here, and only been to the Albert and Victoria Museum for a few hours. The most sight-seeing I've done was on a "research walk" - a marvelous field trip our cluster took that consisted of walking around London's South Bank for three hours, stopping to write occasionally about what we were seeing. It was AWESOME, and we didn't even go in anywhere! (I do have pictures of that.)

I really should have more "Welcome to London" posts up soon - I'm planning a Globe tour and a sunset London Eye excursion ASAP. Now if the snow would just melt so that the trains will run so that I can actually get to all these places…

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In other news, flapjack (not pancakes, but a chewy oat-y bar cookie - like a really buttery granola bar) is delicious. Cadbury Fingers cookies are my new favorite treat. The English are not nearly as interested in ice cream as Americans - I've never seen more than four flavors of Ben & Jerry's or Haagen Daas in any one place, and never any other than those four flavors anywhere else. People don't actually drink tea nearly as much as you'd think (coffee, fizzy drinks, etc…, instead). Street markets are everywhere. I still haven't tried fish 'n chips. Brits love to hear Americans trying to sound British, generally so they can laugh at their accents. I've been "love"d and "darling"ed more times than I can count, by men and women alike. Everyone drinks, all the time - alcohol aisles take up a fifth of any grocery store, and they are fascinated by the fact that I don't. Almost none of the Brits I've talked to (and I'm at a drama school) can do a credible American accent (neiner, neiner). My favorite quote from the term comes from one of my course-mates: "Now that I'm talking, I'd like to say something." My next-favorite quote comes from one of our favorite lecturers, in Cultural Landscapes: "You are all vile, horrible people." (You had to be there.) I am 98% certain that I do, indeed, need a PhD, so another project for the break will be coming up with a research proposal and finding the right school. I'm thinking about going to Italy for my birthday, and yes - I am smirking at all of you because I can actually do it.

More to come!