Structuring Content: a play mid-progress at the British School of Beijing
This post originally appeared on the Lane’s List in January 2015.
This week I worked with seventeen different theatre companies across two days on a university course. Invited to act as an available dramaturg to each of the final year student groups producing work in April, all of them decided to opt in to this additional extra to their creative process.
This was particularly heartening considering at the introductory session I ran in December, some of them thought dramaturgy as a concept didn’t apply to them because they weren’t writing plays.
Focus on content and structure? PAH. That’s for all you writerly-types, isn’t it? Now put on this mask, get in this cupboard and dance with that actor who’s pretending to be Satan before I post-modernise the bejeesus out of you.
When I’m joining any professional company or writer mid-process, I find it essential to try and position myself in relation to:
(a) where they are practically in their process
(b) where they are in their emotional relationship towards the work itself and towards the process
(c) how they (i.e. all company members if it’s not just one writer) each articulate the process and the intended work in their own unique way
I have a list of twelve questions that they prep for me, and they’re asked to submit them without conferring – particularly important with companies where you may be stumbling in the making of the work simply because one person thinks you’re all making a piece about traffic light control operators and another person thinks you’re making a piece about terrorism.
There were two questions that seemed to divide most companies. One was ‘what would you consider the question being asked at the heart of your piece?’ and the other was ‘what are you asking your audience to do?’. It was around these questions that the most productive conversations ended up happening.
The first one revealed the hidden layers in the work and the potential for multiple points of view, and discussions over what exactly was driving the structure of the work; the second one was interesting simply for watching companies slowly reconcile themselves with the fact that just because they weren’t making a piece of interactive theatre, it didn’t mean that their audience was going to be totally passive. They hadn’t quite remembered that audiences complete the work with their imaginations, and they’re the most useful tool in the theatre-maker’s box.
Above all though – aside from one or two companies – the most common conversation was around content. Nearly all of them were being led by structure, aesthetic, form and experiment and then trying to find the content that might fit it: or, having found the content, not really having thought about:
(a) writing it all out so that they had control of it or
(b) how they would invite an audience in to find it as fascinating as they did.
We talked a lot about routes and pathways and what the offers and invitations for the audience were – the ones that could be embedded within the dramaturgy of the performance and allow us to share the territory of the work, rather than the company simply assuming we’d be interested in it because they were. We talked a lot about taking responsibility for the ideas they’d started to create: really scrutinising their narrative and structural worlds for consistency and connectivity with everything else.
One company, besotted with the cinematic immersive Punchdrunk-style of theatre, were using a well-known classic text as their narrative structure. They knew which bits they wanted to use and why they were structured across nine different rooms in the space. They knew a lot about how they wanted their audience to feel, and they were also slightly blindsided by the assumption that free choice for an audience within an interactive world was necessarily, like, the most exciting thing ever. More about that in a sec.
When I asked them why they were doing this particular text now, for a 2015 audience – and why their particular understanding of it and how they wanted an audience to engage with it was best-suited to this form of walkabout theatre – they went silent.
They hadn’t thought about that, and they hadn’t really thought about the audience beyond the pragmatics of the presentational style and the seductive lure of not making ‘conventional theatre’. Why this? Why now? How was their interpretation of it as human beings – not just drama students – being communicated?
This was a common trait: people making work that was not like something (usually especially not like that thing where audiences watch actors on a stage – you know, a play), without really knowing what their material was in and of itself or why an audience would be interested.
Difference was being courted as the content.
If we don’t make a play, we therefore must be being interesting…?
Nope.
When I scratched away at the surface gesture of theatrical form and style with these companies, what was revealed beneath was often insecurity: engaging an audience with a conventional drama wasn’t being avoided because it was boring, but because it was deemed too difficult.
One company had extended their cast from 2 to 6 characters (for a 45-minute play) not for any other reason than they thought (a) an audience would get bored just watching two people on stage for that amount of time and (b) it was therefore too difficult to engage us – more characters meant to them more business and more stuff going on.
What emerged was that out of most of the forms on offer in the broad church of theatre, in terms of engaging an audience writing a conventional play was still deemed one of the most difficult. The amount of film and video that was being flung at otherwise tightly-constructed theatrical worlds, simply so that an audience would find it ‘more interesting’ was staggering.
Of course putting an audience physically and aurally inside a fictional world (a la Punchdrunk) is difficult to make (design, production, health and safety, logistics) but it was being perceived as the easiest way to feel like an audience would be engaging with the work and not getting bored.
They’re in it now, so… they’re engaged, right? Don’t worry about content. They’re running around. They’re not in seats and it’s therefore all terribly engaging.
So, no, I don’t agree with that logic for a start – but for them it seemed to be the quick-fix solution to a play: that thing where you have to get the audience member in the back corner of row Z to imaginatively occupy a story being played out by characters on a stage sixty feet away.
Whoah. That sounds like hard work to get right. We’ll ‘immerse’ them instead.
But you know what: either way, you have to have detailed control of your content.
Obviously they’re all learning – they’re not professionals and I know for a fact I didn’t consider much of this stuff when I was making work at university – but for that reason I felt really glad that somebody was having that conversation with them: not one that terra-formed their (brilliantly diverse and often inspiring) work into stories and plays, but got them to think about the relationship between the expression of human experience and how an audience is invited to share, witness and/or engage with it in a live performance forum.
That probably sounds like academic twaddle to some of you, but it’s a definition that allows the dramaturgy of playwriting, and the questions that come with it, to work across all forms of theatre.
Human experience. The audience. Something live. That is arguably why we’re always there in the dark (or yes, outside in the light or on the street) – that’s at the core of the contract we expect to have formed with us as an audience.
Whatever you’re making, at some point in the process you need to take control of your content and look at in relation to yourself and your audience. After that, you need to consider how form and structure and style can bring us into that world you care so deeply about.
And if you don’t care deeply about it, make something else.
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