The Library

Conversations

From January to July 2020, as a follow up to the labs and the symposium, the members of the network recorded a series of conversations around themes that emerged during our activities. These were informal, sometimes with some questions prepared in advance, sometimes just with a couple of words to rekindle what was going on when we were together in 2019. Mostly just three or four people sharing questions, concerns, aspirations and sometimes anger. A lot of them happened during mid 2020’s lockdown, a provocative context for thinking about performances of intimacy, and the cause of huge disruption to the companies and artists involved, so that inevitably becomes a point of interest and speculation too.

1. Intimacy

Martina Seitl, Christer Lundahl
& Bruce Barton

Martina, Christer and Bruce talk about the creation of intimacy for audience participants. Beginning with two questions that had figured in both lab sessions: how to prepare participants, and the degree of control artists aim for in interactions, the conversation encompasses the use of technology and ritual, techniques of guiding, a dramaturg’s role in designing participation and how people with different sensibilities and neurodiversities engage.

Read Transcript 1

2. Immersivity and Intersectionality

Jo Machon, Jadé Maravala
& Silvia Mercuriali

Jadé, Silvia and Jo talk about gender, class and race and the challenges of finding, and claiming a place as a performance maker. The conversation moves from collaborations between men and with women, to escaping what is expected, dealing with leadership, and getting recognition, to the perception of feminisation of roles and of the listening and focus on others required when making participation, and on to the punk aesthetic of early immersive performance, and the potential for Pandemic-safe performance to create need for work to happen away from the usual spaces. It concludes with thoughts about the threat of becoming mainstream, against the need to be recognised and change the shape of cultural decision making.

Read Transcript 2

3. Inclusivity

Jo Machon & Nick Llewellyn

Nick and Jo talk about the lack of support for people with learning disabilities beyond childhood, and support for creative work in particular. They move from AAA as a campaigning theatre and the importance of focusing anger, to the company’s move to immersive practice and working in public space. They discuss the pieces IQ Hear, MADHOUSE re:exit and unReal City, and making work that explores the visceral and the virtual.

Read Transcript 3

4. Inclusivity 2

Dayo Koleyosho, Emma Selwyn,
Jo Machon & Nick Llewellyn

Dayo Koleosho has been with AAA for over 10 years and is a trustee of the company. Among his recent performances with the company are unReal City at Battersea Arts Centre and MADHOUSE re:exit at Shoreditch Town Hall. Emma/Xandri Selwyn has recently created two solo shows, My Hands and Feet are Wiggling and #binariesbegone. Both are graduates of the Access All Areas Performance Making Diploma at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Dayo and Emma join the conversation with Nick and Jo, to talk about unReal City, and character creation, discrimination in performance spaces, virtual reality and escape, one-to-one encounters. They move on to how lockdown interrupted the production and how life has changed, but how social isolation is the norm for manypeople with disabilities. They round off discussing the company’s work across many kinds of performance and their potential to go mainstream, coming back to the matter of taking care of audience participants in participatory practice.

Read Transcript 4

5. Instruction based performance

Jadé Maravala, Silvia Mecuriali
& Jorge Lopes Ramos

Starting from a set of prompts suggested by Gareth, Silvia, Jade and Jorge talk about how they came to first give explicit instructions to their audiences, and how for Silvia came to call this practice Autoteatro. Jadé & Jorge talk about Hotel Medea, and a some early one-on-one performances. They talk about working with sound and tech, whether ‘instruction based theatre’ is a thing, and about whether participant agency is important or not. They share ideas about some practical approaches: playtesting, knowing when a show is finished, preparing audiences to take part, pre-recording instructions, live transmission, and the importance of rhythm. They compare influences – including Italian films, choose your own adventure books and Theatre of the Oppressed.

Read Transcript 5

6. Immersive’s 2nd wave and after

Joe Thorpe, Natalie Scott,
Jo Machon & Adam Alston

Jo, Joe, Natalie and Adam talk about risk in performance and in the business of making performance, in the context of austerity and market saturation. They discuss funding and its impact on creativity, the role of public authorities, and questions of intellectual property. They think about the second wave of immersive performance in relation to the first wave, and what the third wave may be, considering the purity of form in relation to the practicalities of organisational structures. They finish with some thoughts about the pandemic’s impact on artists, and about hope.

Read Transcript 6