Creating Solo Performance

Sean Bruno, Luke Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317911807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts du spectacle

Creating Solo Performance is an innovative toolbox of exercises and challenges focused on providing you – the performer – with engaging and inspiring ways to explore and develop your idea both on the page and in the performance space.

The creation of a solo show may be the most rewarding, liberating and stressful challenge you will take on in your career. This book acts as your silent collaborator as you develop your performance, by helpfully arranging exercises under the following headings:

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• Beginnings

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• Creating character

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• Generating material

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• Using your performance space

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• Technology

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• Endings

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• Collaboration

Exercises can be explored in sequence, at random or according to your specific needs and interests as a performer. By enabling you to create a bespoke formula that best applies to your specific subject, area of interest, style and discipline, this book will become an indispensable resource as you produce your solo show.

1 Introduction to contemporary solo performance

In 1600, Will Kemp began a performance that took him from London to Norwich. The performance would become so famous that its name would enter the language. Kemp danced the distance between the two cities and his dance became known by the time it took to complete: The Nine Days’ Wonder. Kemp was the clown in The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company of actors for whom Shakespeare wrote his plays. Kemp was an important member of the company, one of five actor-shareholders; he played Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Peter in Romeo and Juliet, and may well have played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice. But by 1599 Shakespeare was beginning to write more sophisticated comic roles than the ones he had previously written, and Kemp had disappeared from the company to be replaced by a new comic actor, Robert Armin. We do not know why he left, but in 1600 Kemp, perhaps the most famous clown in England, had to find new things to do to reach an audience and earn some money. So it was that he devised his own spectacular one-person show. He danced a Morris Dance or jig from London back to his home town of Norwich, a distance of 114 miles. It took him nine days spread over four weeks.

My setting forward was somewhat before seaven in the morning, my Taberer stroke up merrily, and as fast as kinde peoples thronging together would give me leave, thorow London I leapt: By the way many good olde people and divers others of yonger yeeres, of meere kindness, gave me bowd sixpences and grotes, blessing me with their harty prayers and God-speedes. It resteth now that in a word I shew, what profit I have made by my Morrice: true it is I put out some money to have threefold gaine at my returne, some that lave me, regard my paines, respect their promise, have sent home the treble worth, some other at the first sight have paide me, if I come to seek thee, others I cannot see, nor wil willingly be found, and these are the greater number.

Today we would describe such an event as a durational performance. David Blaine’s work often falls into this category, as does that of Marina Abramović. Blaine’s Above the Below was made in London in 2003; it took place at Potter’s Fields, the other side of the river Thames from Kemp’s starting point in the City of London. Blaine was sealed inside a transparent glass box measuring 3 feet by 7 feet by 7 feet, suspended 30 feet in the air. Spectators below could watch every moment and the box had a webcam installed so that he could be watched across the world. Through the 44-day wonder, Blaine went without any food or nutrients, ‘surviving only on water and the energy given to him by his supporters visiting the site’.

During a retrospective of her work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010, Marina Abramovié, self-described ‘grandmother of performance art’, performed The Artist Is Present, a work more wonderful in its length than either Kemp or Blaine endured. In her 736½ hour static, silent piece, Abramovié sat immobile in the museum’s atrium, while spectators queued to take turns sitting opposite her.

The personal or creative impetus behind such demanding works can be as varied as they can be behind any solo performance: earning money, self-publicity, artistic impulse or settling a bet, as was the case with Kemp.

In 1983, actor Chris Harris recreated Kemp’s Jig as a solo stage show, which he has been touring, along with many other solo shows, ever since. Harris’s Kemp’s Jig is one of an important strain of solo performance that takes a historical character as its basis. The actor takes on the role of a real person, often one familiar to the audience. One of the most successful of recent times was Roy Dotrice’s 1967 embodiment of Kemp’s near contemporary John Aubrey. Aubrey wrote a series of gossipy essays on the lives of his contemporaries, some of whom he had known, others he had just heard about. His published collection was called, as was Dotrice’s one-man show, Brief Lives. It was scripted and directed by Patrick Garland and had an elaborate set creating the world of Aubrey’s study with a fourth wall through which Dotrice talked to his audience. The play was two-and–a-half hours long and even during the interval Dotrice did not leave the stage but pretended to doze off. The performance became central to Dotrice’s career and while he has done many other things it has been constantly revived, most recently more than forty years after the first performance.

While this book is primarily aimed at the performer who wants to do everything for themselves – conceive, write, devise, direct, perform – it would be unfair to ignore the long history of solo shows scripted by a writer specifically for the solo performer, from Chekhov to Beckett and Alan Bennett, and we will refer to some of these along the way. One such is Hancock’s Last Half Hour by Heathcote Williams, written to describe the last minutes of the life of the comedian Tony Hancock leading up to his suicide in an Australian hotel room. It was written for the actor Henry Woolf who gave the first performances in London’s The Almost Free Theatre, as part of a season of lunch-time shows, but the play has been performed by many other actors since. David Benson has also used the lives of comedians as the basis for creating some of his many one-man shows but Think No Evil Of Us: My Life With Kenneth Williams is as much a semi-autobiography of Benson as it is an uncanny impersonation of Williams himself.

Of course the life you perform can be your own. And there are plenty of celebrities, or those trading on previous celebrity, treading the boards with their own personal An Evening With … . One, maybe the first, such show was An Evening With Quentin Crisp. Crisp’s show came out of a necessity to earn money and a ready audience fascinated to meet the real man behind the1975 television film of his autobiography The Naked Civil Servant. The first half of the evening was a monologue from Crisp telling of his life and thoughts; the second half was a question and answer session with his audience.

Both American David Leddick and British Betty Bourne made solo stage shows about Crisp after his death. Leddick with Quentin and I – a ‘mini-musical’, and Bourne with Resident Alien, by Tim Fountain, which was an adaptation of the second volume of Crisp’s autobiography. Ten years after appearing as Crisp, Bourne, a celebrated drag queen and founder of Bloolips, performed a solo show about his own career, A Life in Three Acts.

Lois Weaver subverted the whole genre of the An Evening With performance when she created Tammy WhyNot and her show What Tammy Needs to Know, a ‘trailer trash crash course on art, Tupperware and new math conducted by country western singer turned lesbian performance artist, Tammy WhyNot’.

As well as being a playwright, Heathcote Williams was an actor and poet. He made solo performances from his poems, most notably his epic Whale Nation written as an ecological cri de coeur to awaken people’s awareness of the plight of the whale at the hands of humans. A performance may have a social or political imperative like Williams’ Whale Nation, may take a traditional literary form like Dario Fo’s monologues Female Parts written for his wife Franca Rame, or be completely novel in form and content like Annie Sprinkle’s Post Porn Modernist and Post-Post Porn Modernist in which Sprinkle invited audience members to view her cervix as both a radical political and artistic action.

Biographical shows, though often literary in origin, can be vehicles to show off the performance skills of the actor. With Benson and Dotrice, the skill is in a particular kind of acting that is close to mimicry. John Sessions’ The Life of Napoleon took the mimicry to a dazzling extreme where he impersonated a huge number of characters switching with extraordinary dexterity from moment to moment. He followed it with a show that was simultaneously a stage performance and a television programme. John Sessions was filmed at the Donmar Warehouse in London, with Sessions performing in front of a live audience who were invited to nominate a person, a location and two objects from a selection given them by the actor, around which Sessions would improvise a surreal performance for the next half hour. So successful was the format that two further one-man shows, John Sessions’ Tall Tales and John Sessions’ Likely Stories, followed.

Performance dexterity can itself be a reason to make a show. Kemp had his dancing skills to demonstrate and was able to make a nine-day performance out of them that drew vast audiences. Areas of performance skill that can themselves be the central point of a solo performance can include acting itself, as with John Gielgud’s Seven Ages of Man, fan dancing with the work of Miss Indigo Blue, the mime of Marcel Marceau, the magic of David Berglas, the bubble dance of Julie Atlas Muz (and before her Sally Rand), or the singer/piano skills of James Hodgson. For an audience it is about admiring the skill of the performer. For the performer, it can be a challenge to construct a show that is more than a collection of short acts, maybe an overarching narrative of a structure determined by pace and tone, or alternatively a short solo show that can sit within an evening of other solo works, a common opportunity offered to the solo performer.

Steven Berkoff is both a writer and an actor, so it is no surprise that he has written one-man shows for himself. Describing his style as, ‘poetic, expressionistic, certainly not naturalistic’, Berkoff has this to say about theatre and the making of solo performance:

Theater matters because it’s the last actual live form of human communication between people whereby you can express the most fundamental thoughts, ideas, emotions that exist in society and do it instantaneously and it has a direct contact with people. Directing yourself is very interesting because you’re not really directing yourself. The audience becomes the director. When you get in front of the audience their response their attitudes, their laughter, their silence, will tell you, will teach you. A one man show is like a love affair with an audience. It’s a very private thing. I had the idea that in order to do a play, in order to perform, I didn’t want to wait until I had gathered a whole group of actors together with the attendant costs, with all the logistics of forming a company and casting and going to agents. And dealing with the temperaments of 8, 9 or 10 actors. I thought I want to act like a pianist, a pianist can go on with an orchestra, they can go on by themselves, but it’s not quite so common with actors but I think there is a very unique communication you have with a one man show; also you can delve into things, you can express yourself, you can really explore areas you’ve never thought of even exploring before because you have no other actors to deal with, to communicate with, so it gives you even greater scope.

Another starting point may be the material of which the performance is made, perhaps poems or songs; your own or someone else’s. John Gielgud’s Shakespeare anthology Ages of Man falls into this category as well as being a celebration or demonstration of his acting skills; as does Roy Hutchins’ Heathcoat Williams’ anthology, Zanzibar Cats; David Benson’s Noel Coward anthology, David Benson sings Noel Coward; and Linda Marlowe’s, Berkoff’s Women. Josie Lawrence directed Marlowe’s show and the solo performer often calls in outside expertise in bringing their work to the stage. In staging his The Man with the Absurdly Large Penis at London’s Young Vic, Rob Young called in Simon Vincenzi to design and direct. We will look at possibilities of collaboration and feedback for your solo show in the final chapter. For now, this is about going it alone.

1.1 How to use this book

I wouldn’t do a one-woman show. It would be death for me. I would not know who to get ready for. I suppose it’s the support, and what appeals to me is the fact there’s a group of people … so there’s author, director, cast, audience and it’s something to do with that process of telling that story that I love … but I don’t want to ...