#7 A play about the community by the community

'Anna' was performed on the 27th July 2016. It was the latest production of Kempston Community Theatre, the community theatre company I have been facilitating and directing for the last three years. It was quite a different project from previous performances in the sense that it originated in an exploration of community issues that the members of the group felt a resonance with.

The play was created from an initial feeling and image about a specific issue affecting the local community. It was subsequently developed into a narrative and aesthetically refined for a stage performance. The play remained largely unscripted to retain an element of spontaneity. The actors improvised within a pre-defined structure

The play was devised by the group through discussions and experiential theatre work. The group identified strongly with the issue and some of the members made links with their own personal experience. The play was not devised as a faithful rendering of a lived experience but rather offered a platform for reflection and action on issues affecting the community.

'Anna' is about the impact of austerity measures on the lives of the most vulnerable people and the increased sense of precarity and insecurity in our society.

'Anna' tells the story of an ordinary woman whose emotional health deteriorates following the breakdown of a relationship and who finds herself at risk of loosing financial support resulting from government policies to cut welfare benefits. The play exposes her own sense of vulnerability and offers a reflection on the way we live with one another as a society.

The play was an invitation for the audience to reflect on a situation that affects thousands of people in the local community and in Britain. The play exploited what seems the vocation of community theatre. To be by the community, about the community and for the community.

#6 The public square

I am currently devising a public intervention performance whose aim is to be a platform for spontaneous and non-rehearsed dialogue between members of the community.

I am looking at ways in which the performance space can act as a public space which holds possibilities for embodied encounters with others and potentialities for transformative individual and collective direct experiences.

I have named this The Public Square. It is a non-scripted intervention whose shape and content will be defined by what the public will bring into it and what will emerge in the moment out of random conversations between strangers. It is a non-theatre event in the sense that it doesn't adhere to traditional theatre conventions but rather views performance as a unique space of encounter and dialogue.

At a historic time where relations with others are impregnated with suspicion, fear and hostility, and where digital media have drastically altered the way we communicate with one another, this intervention aims at restoring a cultural and social space of sharing at the heart of our communities. It offers an artistic response to the increasing atomisation of social life that has resulted in a sense of loss of our ability to recognise and engage with others.

#5 The blind spot

The blind spot is a location on the optic disk in the eye that is characterised by having no photoreceptor cells and therefore insensitive to light and visual stimuli. In other words, a tiny part of the human eye is not receptive to the visual information that is normally transmitted to the optic nerve and the brain.

This black spot makes us theoretically partially blind and yet does not prevent us from seeing perfectly well. This is an extraordinary phenomenon that despite its presence does not reduce the visual field and our ability to see through the eye.

I often refer to this as a metaphor to explain how we can relate to the demons of emotional hurt.

As human beings, we are exposed to emotions that can sometimes result in actions and thoughts that we may find very difficult to consciously make sense of. These emotions are experienced with various degrees of distress and pain that, at their most extreme, can feel like absorbing the entirety of our own self and our ability to contemplate anything beyond it. This feels like as if our entire field of vision was obstructed and as if the blind spot had grown so big that our entire ability to 'see' was compromised.

The blind spot is only a tiny part of the eye. The remarkable complexity of the organ cannot be reduced to the singularity of one of its parts. Equally, the part of us that suffers and carries emotional hurt remains a part amongst the many other parts that make us who we are and what we have become as a person amid other persons.

It is possible for what may feel overwhelming to recede, and for our field of vision to slowly open again. With time, the blind spot of emotional hurt can be reduced to the point of not preventing us from 'seeing'. It remains a part of our apparatus of existence, and the awareness of its presence reminds us of our own vulnerability. But, like for the blind spot in the eye, its plain presence does not compromise the entirety of our visual field.    

#4 When personal trauma intertwines with collective trauma

A client came to see me one week saying that she was upset that as she was waiting in the reception area for her appointment nobody had been observing the minute of silence for the victims of the Paris attacks on the 13^th November 2015.

She did not know that I had myself been sitting in silence before greeting her.

She said that it felt important to talk about what happened and how it had left her with a sense of fear and powerlessness. She said that people talked factually about what happened but that the opportunities to share how it affects us emotionally were scarce.

She said that as she listened to the news over the weekend she had felt an urge to reach out and to hug her children and grandchildren. I did not tell her that I had felt the same urge towards my son.

 

She was in the process of working through some of her past trauma that resulted from assaults, abuse and attacks on her own person. I thought to myself that the bodies of innocent people had also been assaulted and attacked by the terrorists and their murderous acts.

She was in a process of reconnecting with parts of herself that for a long time she had disconnected from because of the intolerable pain and hurt. She came with a picture of herself as a young child that she was particularly fond of. The child was smiling and this might have been the last time she smiled before being caught up in dread and incomprehensible situations. 

 

She decided to take care of that child who had been living in fear and had been powerless to do anything about the situation she had been put in. She had been talking for some time about making use of a box where things could be laid to rest. She had a box at home and I suggested she could bring it with her.

She placed the box on the table. It was finely decorated with delicate drawings. She wondered how best to use it. She felt that she wanted to place in it the picture of the innocent and vulnerable child. She wrapped a small piece of fabric around the picture as if she was tucking in the child. She gave her a kiss and said ‘I love you’.

As we both looked at the box, we noticed a small word repeatedly printed on the different sides. That word was ‘Paris’. We smiled. Her personal story became intertwined with a collective tragedy.

We stayed in silence for a minute. This time we shared the moment.

#3 Community theatre in context

The great German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1948 in a seminal essay entitled 'A Short Organum for the Theatre':

'We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself'

Brecht viewed theatre as something very much embedded in its time. He advocated for a theatre that claims its responsibility to reflect and explore the tensions, contradictions and conflicts of the particular historical moment in which it takes place. He also recognised that theatre is a very dynamic event that socially engages with the lived reality of people at different positions within the social hierarchy. But Brecht also insisted on the transformative potential of theatre that does not solely engage with the world but works towards changing it by developing individual and collective critical reflective capacity.  

Does Brecht's statement relate in any way to community theatre in how we understand it or could understand it?

The answer I believe is yes because as obvious as it might sound community theatre should be committed to the community in which it operates.

This commitment is about ensuring access, diversity and openness to the whole of the community to make community theatre a celebratory moment of encounter, sharing and creativity.

But this commitment is also about exploring and engaging with what feels like important issues to that community. It is about considering what matters and offering a space whereby emotions, thoughts and desires can be safely explored, transformed into a creative moment and shared with the rest of the community. This makes community theatre not solely a place of creative freedom and play, but also a place of social significance that supports debates and democratic vitality within the community.

#2 The naked performer

Maybe the time has come to document some of the work that we do as part of the community theatre I direct.

Over the years I have learned that the most important skills as an improvisation performer is the ability to attune to what one experiences physically and to become completely available to others and to what might emerge in an improvised scene.

This means a stripping of layers of learned behaviours and automated physiological responses in the interest of playful engagement with others and the creation of riveting, spellbinding and unique spontaneous dramas. The performers learn to become comfortable with their own nakedness of not knowing and to indulge in the sheer pleasures of playing with the unexpected.

In rehearsal tonight, we looked at the creation of short improvisation scenes generated through the activation of physical impulses and the knowledge that a performer can draw from an embodied experience in order for these scenes to develop in substance and rhythm.  

As an illustration, I devised the following exercise:

1. a group of 3 to 4 performers come on stage one by one and adopt a physical position that should not have any intentional meaning. They gradually complete a freeze frame where they are in relation to one another and achieve some sort of connectedness.

2. one of the performers will have been given a totally random line that he/she will deliver once the freeze-frame has been completed

3. the other performers respond to the line by paying particular attention to the way that line makes them feel physically in the position that they initially adopted. A short improvisation develops from there. The possible discrepancy between what may unfold and the initial position of the performers in the sculpt is not something to swiftly correct or level, but on the contrary something to 'stay with' for the sake of the exercise.  

4. the general idea is not to guess what might be happening in the scene and to respond accordingly, but to tune into the physical self and follow the impulsive embodied knowledge that the given and arbitrary line will have triggered. This is an exercise that attempts to bypass our pervasive cognitive faculties and to reconnect with what our body can teach us. This is a process of constant adjustment and attunement to oneself and others. It can result in wonderful and most unexpected scenes.

We did this exercise with the view of working on improvised scenes that will help develop the group's next devising project.