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.