Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy

Case Studies from the Field

Philippa Kelly, Philippa Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429817724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Dirección y producción teatrales

Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy offers fresh perspectives on how dramaturgs can support a production beyond rigid disciplinary expectations about what information and ideas are useful and how they should be shared.

The sixteen contributors to this volume offer personal windows into dramaturgy practice, encouraging theater practitioners, students, and general theater-lovers to imagine themselves as dramaturgs newly inspired by the encounters and enquiries that are the juice of contemporary theater. Each case study is written by a dramaturg whose body of work explores important issues of race, cultural equity, and culturally-specific practices within a wide range of conventions, venues, and communities. The contributors demonstrate the unique capacity of their craft to straddle the ravine between stage and stalls, intention and impact.

By unpacking, in the most up-to-date ways, the central question of "Why this play, at this time, for this audience?, " this collection provides valuable insights and dramaturgy tools for scholars and students of Dramaturgy, Directing, and Theater Studies.

Section Three
Who’s “at the table”?

8
Crossing The Line

Jonathan Meth

Crossing The Line was a project of the partnership between Moomsteatern (Malmo, Sweden), Compagnie de l’Oiseau-Mouche (Roubaix, France), and Mind The Gap (Bradford, U.K.), three of Europe’s leading theater companies making professional touring theater with learning-disabled artists. All three companies have been operating for more than thirty years. This was their first collaboration, and it came out of a joint conversation with me at the Accessing the Future of the Field event held by VSA (Very Special Arts) at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, in September 2012. My case study will explore the intercultural diversity of learning-disabled performance dramaturgies in Crossing The Line.

The project, running from October 2014–January 2017, emerged two years after that first conversation. Crossing The Line initially featured learning-disabled artists from each of the three companies spending time at another one of the companies to observe and participate in their theater-making processes, as well as company staff learning about the other companies’ structures, cultural systems, economic models, and strategic audience development activities. All of this culminated in a festival in Roubaix, which included performances by all three companies as well as films and industry debates.

As Project Dramaturg on Crossing The Line, my own role might best be described as curatorial. My presence within the project afforded me an opportunity to witness practices from all three companies and to explore the different cultural systems that had given rise to their work. I was also able to make and cement connections across the collaboration, building outwards to identify and engage with other artistically-led companies that make professional performance work with learning-disabled theater performers.

“While the idea of dramaturgy could imply a tendency towards systematization and management, at its best it implies responsiveness, an awareness of the connections between things and is able to both facilitate and critique them,” offer critics Turner and Behrndt.¹ My dramaturgical involvement began from the project’s inception, as I coordinated the project’s EU funding bid via a process of assemblage. This was constructed around a discourse between partners based on a rolling system of offers and requests. In this chapter I will move back and forth between the opening session of the Crossing The Line project held in Bradford (see Figure 8.1) and the closing festival held in Roubaix nearly two years later. This moving back and forth is a deliberate dramaturgical strategy, as the terrain is as yet neither well-marked nor uncontested. My discussion will include reflections upon the practical theater-making processes I experienced, such as workshops, rehearsals, productions, and the Roubaix Festival, as well as issues pertinent to the wider cultural contexts in which the work was made. I will also draw on theoretical frameworks provided thus far within theater and learning disability and in particular from Matt Hargrave’s Theaters of Learning Disability – Good, Bad or Plain Ugly?² This was the first book to explore the aesthetics of learning-disabled performance – as distinct from a focus on therapy or advocacy – and as project dramaturg it was the key text that accompanied me on my Crossing The Line journey.

Figure 8.1 Left to right, Myriam Baïche, Valérie Waroquier, Thierry Dupont, and Joyce Nga Yu Lee

Source: Photography credit Jonathan Meth

One of the challenges of engagement with work made by learning-disabled artists (which may also include artists who identify as autistic) is the number of paradoxes, or at least unfixed and therefore unstable issues, it throws up. For example, the combining of “disabled” and “diverse” (in this case neurodiverse) as terms for performers who may identify as autistic is akin to the term “D/deaf” as delineating a separation between definitions that acknowledge deafness as a disability and those that assert it rather as a different way of being in the world – one that gives primacy to Sign Language.³ As with the D/deaf model, the autistic self-advocacy movement contests the normative trope via a clear resistance to any medicalized notions of cure.⁴

How then to articulate and navigate these shifting positions? In his chapter on the work of Mind The Gap, Dave Calvert establishes a distinction between performance work made by physically or sensorially disabled performers and those who are learning-disabled:⁵

The political impact of learning-disabled performance is no longer restricted to Graeae’s early observance of disability rights, redressing a power imbalance and educating non-disabled audiences. By exposing performance conventions as limited and frustrating, actors with learning disabilities produce and demand the restless redefinition of theatrical – and by extension social – possibilities.⁶

More recently still, self-advocacy pioneers of neurodiversity, such as Jon Adams of Flow Observatorium, have sought to distinguish the term “disabled” from, for example, “autistic.”

The neurodiversity movement has led to a shift in approach as researchers concede to a growing and increasingly powerful distinctive discourse of autism rights, social justice, and refections on the creative aspects of autism.⁷

Frontiers

There’s a frontier or border you have to cross to work transnationally. Euphemistically, if you’re crossing a line, you’re doing something a bit naughty, a bit forbidden – and if you’re working with learning-disabled artists, you’re frequently doing that in terms of any so-called mainstream aesthetic. “Crossing The Line” as a term gives a nod to shot rhetoric in the film world.⁸ Cinematographic convention suggests that two characters in a scene should maintain the same left/right relationship to one another in the frame. If you want to disrupt the spectator’s understanding of what they’re seeing, then you cross that 180-degree line.

In the socializing area in the Mind The Gap building in Bradford, the TV plays images from the guest companies’ productions so that as they arrive the companies’ participants can see themselves and their colleagues. Mind The Gap (MTG) Resident Director Joyce Nga Yu Lee introduces the opening session in Bradford by stating that in Hong Kong a teacher described theater as a collaborative risk in action. It is in this spirit that she launches the first Crossing The Line workshop. Lee approaches the difficulties of translation with a creative flourish, jumping over the issue of comprehensibility by running the session in Cantonese – among those present, a language that only she understands. This is of course combined with visual clues. The creative challenges of access for learning-disabled artists, as well as those of translation, are immediately connected in our minds. Each requires a practical, dramaturgical strategy. By equalizing all participants’ access with this choice of Cantonese, the session works very effectively.

Lee then deploys Tim Wheeler’s⁹ “Two By Three By Bradford” version of an Augusto Boal game. In pairs, participants begin counting: one, two, three – each partner says one number at a time. Once this has been mastered, the count number one is replaced with a sound. Then count number two is replaced with a physical action. Then count number three is replaced with a sound and a physical action. Then the exercise is rerun with the whole group standing in a circle. The artists engage with permission to be seen, gestures, and moving images. Stories emerge, but their narrative is created in the minds of those watching from the side (the audience).

In the next day’s session, Mind The Gap Guest Director Alan Lyddiard draws on Boal but also on Kantor and his own wealth of experience as theater director and community theater-maker to welcome participants into a workshop that will feed the Contained Development process.¹⁰ “I want to be like somebody else once was” is the opening line of Peter Hand-ke’s Kaspar.¹¹ The play depicts a near-speechless young man destroyed by society’s attempts to impose on him its language and its own “rational” values.¹² In the Bradford rehearsal workshop the line is also deployed in French – “Je veux etre quelqu’un d’autre qui a été.” This sentence is adopted by Lyddiard and becomes an individual and collective rhythmic chant. As a dramaturgical signifier for theater-making, the process deliberately selects and then rejects what is widely understood as a play (text) and repurposes the opening line away from its readily yielded meaning to become a tool for another kind of theater (and meaning)-making: one that might combine sounds or textures of individual and collective Swedish, French, English….

Lyddiard’s slow walking builds layers through physical, simple movement sequencing. Daily morning warm-up exercises are given, as Lyddiard articulates it, “authentically – completely – sincerely” (all slippery words, to use Hargrave’s phrase, in any language). There is rooting/routing the performers to/through the space, each other, and themselves, and live music runs alongside. Jez Colborne (Mind The Gap resident artist) extemporizes on the keyboard. This serves to anchor, steer, and underscore. Individual, personal stories begin to emerge from the participants, with Lyddiard refining what works and what doesn’t. Next, Lyddiard adds technology: screens, microphones, and video cameras. These allow the generation of snippets: slow walking, stories to microphone, the moving of the screen and cables – three things going on at the same time. Starting with the personal stories, the action picks up pace, with the performers developing awareness of others in the space, as yet seemingly in a random order. Lyddiard watches, assesses, then creates further instructions that focus on the newly emerging performance text: timing, refining, picking up the process again. There is room for a different original creative contribution, this time in French, from Compagnie de l’Oiseau-Mouche performer Thierry Dupont. Simply stated emotions work with the material that is generated: the build is iterative, recursive. Lyddiard’s session concludes with the entire sequence run, so everyone has a sense of what has been attempted and accomplished.

Hargrave introduces the notion of dis-precision, which can be understood as a disruption that allows an extra dimension in perspective: “little tear marks in the performance where the audience is able to see the joins created in rehearsal: the blocking that’s been learned through repetition. ‘Seeing the join,’ a continuous deconstruction between the performer and the text …”¹³ Here Hargrave is positing the need for a reconsideration of the actor’s craft, away from a more conventionally understood conservatoire training in relationship to how an audience might engage with such a performance. Lyddiard makes the distinction between “actor” and “performer,” preferring the latter as a term to describe a process of the people onstage self-presenting. With the very personal snippets of performers’ stories created through this process of assemblage, the effect of the final production on the spectators shifts between Brechtian presentation to the post-dramatic. The title “Contained” rather elegantly illustrates the paradox here, as a consistent reading won’t hold.

The Mind The Gap (MTG) Ambassadors, drawn from the company, have been working throughout the four days, welcoming, hosting, explaining, and asking questions of visitors. In their final session, they use MTGTV recording as a tool both for creative engagement with the guests and for developing specific skills to allow for reflection on what has been the participants’ experiences.

What happens to territory if the center is everywhere?

The Mind The Gap decision to combine this opening artist residency with an industry-facing day-long symposium (March 2015) allowed the work to be linked to its cultural context(s): raising questions, providing challenges, and opening up the process and the discourse to the three companies and around eighty industry professionals and academics.

The history of U.K. performance in regard to physically and/or sensorially-disabled artists is not congruent with the history of their learning-disabled counterparts. They may share similar values, but the discourse(s) in the U.K. around the former can tend to occlude the latter. Hargrave identifies learning disability as “an unstable category that stands for a range of complex social processes.” He defines the subject of his book as “theater involving the collaboration of learning-disabled artists, which articulates a process rather than a fixed point.”¹⁴

In the workshop the day before, performer/musician and Mind The Gap resident artist Jez Colborne told me that sirens are “different”: differently powered. Some work with engines; some are powered by air. Each country might choose the one they think most powerful, but they all have varying pitch and tone. (Colborne is something of an expert on sirens, and his fascination with them led to the 2012 Mind The Gap show Irresistible, described as a siren symphony.)

“Perhaps universal history is the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors,” Borges concludes in his 1951 essay/note, “Pas...