Frantic Assembly

Mark Evans, Mark Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429670527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theatergeschichte & -kritik

Frantic Assembly have had a powerful and continuing influence on the popularisation of devising practices in contemporary theatre-making. Their work blends brave and bold physical theatre with exciting new writing, and they have collaborated with some of the leading theatre-makers in the UK. The company's impact reaches throughout the world, particularly through their extensive workshop and education programmes, as well as their individual and collective impact as movement directors on landmark, internationally successful productions such as Black Watch and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

This volume reveals the background to, and work of, a major influence on twentieth and twenty-first century performance. Frantic Assembly is the first book to combine:

• 
  
  

• an overview of the history of the company since its foundation in 1994

• 
  
  

• an analysis of the key ideas underpinning the company's work

• 
  
  

• a critical commentary on two key productions – Hymns by Chris O'Connell (1999) and Stockholm by Bryony Lavery (2007)

• 
  
  

• a detailed description of a Frantic Assembly workshop, offering an introduction to how the company works.

As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

1
BIOGRAPHICAL AND ARTISTIC CONTEXT

A ‘Frantic Method’?

INTRODUCTION

It is rare for living theatre practitioners to have had such a perceptible influence over such a range of performance work, and to have established such a foothold in the curricula of a nation’s schools. But the look and feel of Frantic Assembly’s theatre and their methods of making work have so entered the British theatrical mainstream that it is easy to neglect the impact of their breakthrough productions as observed by early commentators. Aleks Sierz’s review of the company’s 1999 production Hymns sums up the sense of novelty and innovation they generated at that time: ‘Imagine a theatre of the future’, he begins. It’s a theatre of ‘pounding techno music’, ‘partly dance, partly movement, partly spoken word. No attempt at naturalism, very heavy soundtrack, monumental lighting’ (Sierz 1999). Moreover, it is attended by an audience mostly ‘under 30, dressed in hip urbanwear’ (ibid.). And not only the product or its audience but the process, too, is marked out as innovative: Hymns was the result of what, at the time, Sierz claimed was ‘an unusually collaborative method of theatre-making’ (ibid.).

Frantic’s success has been driven in part by a long-standing focus on education, accessibility and outreach, fuelled by the founding directors’ own professional development through a form of self-curated apprenticeship rather than any formalised training. It also reflects the way that their work has long been closely attuned to the cultural zeitgeist: the company has always paid close attention to their ‘branding’. Not only has the marketing of each successive production been carefully crafted, but the company’s artistic leadership has also progressed by constant reflection, canny planning, selected collaborations and dialectical refinement of their methods in response to shifting perceptions of their work.

This book is somewhat unusual for the Performance Practitioners series, as it is an account of a company rather than a single practitioner. But focusing on the company as a whole is apposite to the collaborative working methods of the company’s founding partnership, Scott Graham, Steven Hoggett and Vicki Middleton, around whom a constellation of co-creators – variously described as a ‘gang’, a ‘family’ or, indeed, an ‘Assembly’ – have for a long time cohered to create a powerful, recognisable and internationally renowned style.

The story of Frantic Assembly is thus one of collaboration, of the long-term evolution of a working ‘Method’ through a series of pragmatic steps, and of sometimes deliberately obscured influences from the world of theatre, dance, and dance theatre. While the company’s founders acknowledge a range of mentors and inspirations, their emphasis on broadening access to performance for new audiences means that they avoid overt references to the worlds of dance, physical theatre and live art. Also, equally unusually for this series, we are dealing with an active practice whose practitioners are still current – presenting a particular set of challenges in tracking work that is still developing. Through interviews with key directors, choreographers, performers and writers, this chapter will trace the company’s curation of specific personal collaborations and the impact of various working relationships in assembling the look and feel of Frantic’s productions and process.

BEGINNINGS: THE 1990S

Scott Graham (1971–) and Steven Hoggett (1971–) first met at Swansea University in around 1991, where both were studying English Literature and involved in the university’s drama society. The origins of the company lie in the Swansea University Drama Society’s 1991 production of Christopher Hampton’s Savages. The show had been created under the direction of Volcano Theatre’s co-founders Paul Davies and Fern Smith; Hoggett performed in the production during its run at the university, while Graham was in the audience. Graham describes the experience as a theatrical awakening: ‘a moment for me where I suddenly became really awakened to theatre and its possibilities’ (in Steiger 2006: 317). The pair teamed up and took Savages to the Edinburgh Fringe under the name Frantic Theatre, given that ‘Swansea University Drama Society Players didn’t quite match the ambition’ they had for the production (Frantic Assembly 2007).

Buoyed by the experience of this production, Graham and Hoggett agreed to continue working together as ‘Frantic Theatre Company’ the following year with a production of As Is, a 1985 play by American playwright William M. Hoffman. This they saw as ‘a test to see whether the Volcano connection was a fluke, whether we were popular by definition of being little baby Volcanoes’ (Hoggett 2019). As they reached the end of their degrees, Graham and Hoggett were invited by Davies and Smith to take part in Volcano’s 1994 production Manifesto, which was to prove a nexus for several crucial meetings and influences, and formed the inspiration for the foundation of Frantic Theatre Company in a professional capacity:

It was just an adoration, a blind adoration of Volcano. Because they were exciting, because they were our inspiration, and because they’d, practically, chosen us and nurtured us – we owed it to them. And they were just exciting, exotic people as well.

(Graham 2011a)

Frantic Theatre Company was officially formed in 1994 by Graham, Hoggett and fellow Swansea student Vicki Middleton (née Coles), who organised, administrated and marketed the company. By early 1996, owing to a clash with another ‘Frantic Theatre Company’, they became Frantic Assembly.

Vicki Middleton (1972–) is an arts manager, theatre producer and co-founder of Frantic Assembly. Like Graham and Hoggett, she was a student at Swansea University, and worked closely with her co-founders from Frantic’s formation until 2004. Middleton played a crucial role in building Frantic’s profile, and she was responsible for all company administration, sourcing funding, publicising the work, and liaising with venues to develop a strong touring circuit for the company. She left Frantic in 2004, when she moved to Australia. There she became General Manager of the physical theatre company Legs on the Wall, and then of Company B (Belvoir Theatre) in Sydney. In 2008, she established her own freelance arts consultancy, Middleton Arts. Throughout most of her time as part of Frantic she was Vicki Coles, but for consistency we will refer to her by her current surname.

Figure 1.1 Scott Graham, Steven Hoggett and Vicki Middleton on tour in Cairo in the late 1990s.

Source: Photo courtesy of Scott Graham.

VOLCANO THEATRE – A COLLISION OF INFLUENCES

Frantic would not have come about without the inspiration, influence and mentorship of Volcano Theatre. Two of Volcano’s co-founders, Paul Davies and Fern Smith – like Graham, Hoggett and Middleton – had met as students at Swansea University. They formed Volcano in 1987, driven by their attraction to a ‘heightened performance experience’ through ‘heightened language and heightened situations’ (Davies in Evans 2001: 136). Through Volcano, Graham and Hoggett were made aware of a wide range of physical performance work and devising practice, particularly the intense physicality of the Eurocrash movement and DV8, whose Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988) was a major influence on Davies and Smith. Having seen that show, Volcano had invited Nigel Charnock, a performer and key early member of DV8, to provide workshops, and later direct, for them (working with them on, for example, L.O.V.E. and Manifesto).

Eurocrash emerged in the late 1980s as an extremely physical form of modern dance. The name is evocative both of its (continental) European roots, and of its often violent treatment of the bodies on stage. Belgian choreographers Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (1960–) and Wim Vandekeybus (1963–) were prominent in the movement. Vandekeybus’ company Ultima Vez (founded 1985) produced works such as What The Body Does Not Remember (1987), in which dancers partnered in high-impact contact work and threw weighty concrete bricks through the air to each other. This emergent style was not solely European, with Édouard Lock’s Montreal-based company La La La Human Steps (1980–2015) touring a number of bruisingly physical performances around the world. Mark Murphy’s UK-based company V-TOL (1991–2001) built on these influences, incorporating projection, text and ambitious design into their choreographic work. As critic Judith Mackrell wrote, ‘Eurocrash turned dance into a battleground of risk, danger and reflex. It was exhilaratingly and alarmingly physical, but it also possessed the expressive range of people exchanging nonstop torrents of abuse’ (Mackrell 1993).

DV8 Physical Theatre company was founded in London in 1986 by dancer and choreographer Lloyd Newson with Michelle Richecoeur and Nigel Charnock. The company’s work is strongly driven by Newson’s engagement with contemporary political and social issues. It draws on athletic physicality and choreography derived from natural gesture and contact improvisation to explore the politics of the body, particularly the male body in its performance of masculine and queer identities. Latterly, the works have also used verbatim text drawing on interview material. Newson has collaborated with a range of performers who have themselves gone on to successful choreographic careers, such as Wendy Houstoun, Steve Kirkham and Liam Steel. Key DV8 productions include Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988), Strange Fish (1992), Enter Achilles (1995) and To Be Straight With You (2008). In 2016, DV8’s thirtieth anniversary year, Newson announced that he was taking time out from the company; since then no new work has been produced by DV8.

In the 1990s, Volcano’s primary modus operandi could be characterised as an ultra-political, movement-driven approach which aimed to ‘disturb and sometimes destroy the classics (ancient and modern)’ (Davies 1997: 165) through radical deconstruction and recontextualisation of often well-known works of theatre and literature. Volcano’s shows in the early 1990s involved large quantities of direct address and declamation rather than dramatic action, and an intense choreographic style influenced by Eurocrash. The company’s visceral movement vocabulary amounted, in one reviewer’s estimation, to an embodiment of ‘the aesthetic of sweat that has arisen from contemporary club culture’ (Shut-tleworth 1994).

Volcano’s stated purpose was to forge explicit links between physical and political engagement, through ‘the authenticity of the body’ (Davies 2003). In this way, they aimed at both theatrical and social change. As Gareth Somers (2013) argues, the company embodied a post-punk spirit in their energetic anti-technique and appeal to the authenticity of their political and physical identities.

Graham and Hoggett repeatedly cite their first encounters with Volcano as having had the desired effect, disrupting their conceptions of what theatre could and should be. Where their previous experience of theatre had been ‘talcum powder headed Chekhov and vanity projects’, Volcano were ‘alternative and sexy’ (Graham and Hoggett 2009: 1). Hoggett recalls watching Medea: Sex War at Taliesin Arts Centre in 1991 as his ‘lightbulb’ moment: ‘I thought they seemed impossibly good’ (Hoggett 2019). However, what really sparked his enthusiasm was the opportunity to participate in a Volcano workshop at the university. Being impossibly good on stage risks preserving some impenetrable division between receptive audience and virtuoso performer. Volcano sought instead to share their approaches and energies through the workshops they offered, and Hoggett found it empowering, as a young student performer, to have these experienced theatre-makers ‘telling you that you were as good as you imagined you could be’ (Hoggett 2019).

Though Volcano’s work was revelatory for Graham and Hoggett, its political and literary roots were not as central to its appeal as the influences the company took from outside conventional dance, theatre and high culture. Volcano’s productions drew on cabaret, pop music and film soundtracks, which Davies and Smith gleefully juxtaposed with more highbrow reference points. Likewise, Graham and Hoggett have been voracious and enthusiastic in their appropriation of pop culture influences. One other point of overlap between Volcano and Frantic’s early productions may be noted in terms of the status of the writer in the work. Volcano demarcated their theatrical territory with a firmly declared rejection of British theatre’s historical focus on the writer. A programme note from around the time Graham and Hoggett first encountered Volcano sets out the company’s stall:

Volcano stands for the elimination of ‘sloth and stale achievement’ on the British stage. We have chosen to reject both the use of the script and work of ‘The Dramatist’. Instead, through the manipulation of unconventional texts we hope to arrive at a theatre which is a true synthesis of language and physical dynamism.

(V programme 1990, in Somers 2013: 47)

This brief manifesto points to the risk of overstating the ‘anti-textual’ nature of physical theatre. Attempts by critics and academics to generate some form of delineation or definition of this impossibly diffuse set of practices seem, through their looseness, doomed to instantiate the very ‘distrust of words’ (Heddon and Milling 2006: 6) which some see evidenced in the practices. Volcano by no means rejected ‘text’; their shows were dense with quotation from radical feminist works, poetry and political writings. The object of their ideological ire was, rather, the conventional trappings of dramatic form as perpetuated by production processes in which the script of ‘The Dramatist’ is transmitted via the production of ‘The Director’. Like that of DV8, Pina Bausch, and the choreographers of Eurocrash, Volcano’s work was energetic, performer-centric, episodic and thematically arranged, rather than rooted in a dramatic arc or guided by the writer’s ‘voice’.

Pina Bausch (1940–2009) was a German dancer and choreographer whose approach to physicality has had a lasting effect on modern dance and movement work. She led the Tanztheater Wuppertal from 1973 until her death in 2009. There she developed a performance vocabulary from natural gesture and performers’ own biographical material in an intensely collaborative creative mode. Notable works include The Rite of Spring (1975), The Seven Deadly Sins (1976), Bluebeard (1977), Cafe Müller (1978) and Kontakthof (1978). Characteristically in her work, performers are challenged to emotional and physical extremes, set against striking expressionist design and eclectic use of music, sound, text and lighting. The popularisation of the term Tanztheater (dance theatre) by Bausch and her teacher Kurt Jooss reflected the growth of this new, hybrid stage form (see Climenhaga 2018: 18–21).

Though there is no direct lineage, the influence of Bausch’s Tanztheater can be seen indirectly on Volcano’s work, as well as on that of other UK dance and theatre companies of the 1980s and 1990s, including DV8 and Frantic. This impact ‘is seen not always in new physicality, but in the developmental process and use of dance-construction principles to interweave theatrical images’ (Climenhaga 2018: 39). Volcano amalgamated and adapted a collage of such working methods, stylistic concerns and performance philosophies. The earliest of Frantic’s professionally performed pieces bear the firm imprint of the approaches learned under Volcano’s tutelage, especially in the relationships of the rehearsal room, the role of the writer and of text, the aesthetics of sweat, and the performers’ at times confrontational relationship with the audience.

SWAN...