#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.