Utopia , livre ebook

Intellect Books Ltd - Claire MacDonald

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

79 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In a room in the middle of nowhere, a man and a woman dream up spectacular worlds: a decaying city, a lush and crumbling garden, a train journey across a drowned landscape. Darkly humorous, absurd and surreal, these are plays for a theatre in which time and space, character and setting are as uncertain as the maps this man and this woman draw. A co-founder of the legendary 1980s performance theatre company Impact Theatre Co-op, Claire MacDonald composed Utopia, a sequence of commissioned playtexts, between 1987 and 2008. This edition brings together both the plays and the story of how the plays came to be made and written. With a compelling introduction by the author, and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Deirdre Heddon, and Lenora Champagne, this book provides a range of historical and critical materials that put the plays in the context of MacDonald’s career as writer and collaborator, and show how visual practices and poetics, theories of real and imagined space, and new approaches to language itself have profoundly shaped the development of performance writing in the UK.

Written Worlds - Claire MacDonald

Part One

You Did Not Know Who You Were - Tim Etchells

An Imitation of Life

Storm from Paradise

Part Two

Correspondences - Deirdre Heddon

Correspondence

The Writer in the Room: A Conversation - Lenora Champagne and Claire MacDonald

Sujets

Théâtre

Law

Cultural Studies

General

General officer

Theatre

Droit et juridique

Performing Arts

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	06 janvier 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783204632
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Playtext
Series editor: Patrick Duggan
Series ISSN: 1754-0933
Electronic ISSN: 1754-0941
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Production manager: Amy Rollason
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Cover Image: Jerry Killick and Stefanie Mueller in Correspondence .
Courtesy of Victor Albrow.
Storms from Paradise first published in Deborah Levy (ed.), Walks on Water , London: Methuen, 1992. Reproduced with permission of the author.
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-462-5
ePDF: 978-1-78320-463-2
ePUB: 978-1-78320-464-9
Printed and bound by 4edge, UK
To my fellow travellers
Contents
Acknowledgements
Written Worlds Claire MacDonald
Part One
You Did Not Know Who You Were Tim Etchells
An Imitation of Life
Storm from Paradise
Part Two
Correspondences Deirdre Heddon
Correspondence
The Writer in the Room: A Conversation Lenora Champagne and Claire MacDonald
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable – now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.
Fredric Nietzsche, ‘Of the Use and Abuse of History’
Acknowledgements
The plays in this book are texts for a postdramatic theatre; that is, they offer possibilities for performance and they suggest lines of travel, but they are neither final nor finite. They require, at the very least, the animating eye of the reader to complete them; at most, the productive imagination of performers, makers and critics who can speak them and speak to them, unpick them, extend them and remake them. They will always be complete but unfinished.
They began their journeys in the rooms where I wrote them, sometimes alone and, more often, in the company of others without whose presence I could not have had the pleasure of making worlds from these words. They were written in two distinct phases of my life, in my thirties and my fifties, and, in each, I have worked with gifted collaborators. Above all and for everything, I would like to thank the two directors with whom I worked so closely, Pete Brooks on An Imitation of Life and Storm from Paradise , and Patrick Morris on Correspondence . The performers who worked on these pieces each contributed to the making process. I wrote An Imitation of Life for Jan Pearson and Tony Guilfoyle. They, and Richard Hawley, who also performed in the first two plays when they were reproduced as Utopia , are amongst the most remarkable actors with whom I have worked. Correspondence was developed from a shorter piece with performers Kate Spiro and Darren Strange, and continued in collaboration with theatre-maker Rachel Aspinwall. I would like to thank Dr Claire Hind, of York St. John University, for facilitating the residency in 2005 that enabled the development of the work, and the artist and writer Nathan Walker, then a final year student at York St. John, for his contribution to the project. Stefanie Mueller, Cathy Naden and Jerry Killick performed in the version of the play published here. I would like to thank all of them, and especially Stefanie and Rachel, who supported the process of this work as well as its production as theatre- makers in every sense. I would like to thank Simon Vincenzi, who designed An Imitation of Life and Storm from Paradise , and Stefanie Mueller for her design for Correspondence. Graeme Miller created the original score for An Imitation of Life and Jocelyn Pook wrote original songs for Storm from Paradise for Melanie Pappenheim, from material written and found during the process of writing. Composer Andrew Lovett brought a lightness and sensitivity to Correspondence that is imprinted in my memory as threading between the lines of the text. Nigel Edwards lit Correspondence so that light and shadow became a third character. Hugo Glendinning’s and Victor Albrow’s eloquent photographs are reproduced here. Andrew Quick, Tim Etchells and Deborah Levy have each written about these plays, and Deborah commissioned Storm from Paradise for her volume of new theatre texts for Methuen in 1992, Walks on Water . I am grateful for the support of Arts Council England, the Bush Theatre, Menagerie Theatre and The Judith Wilson Fund, which, under the guiding direction of Peter Holland, provided me with the space and impetus to write through its Fellowship programme. I would also like to thank Benedict Andrews, who directed Storm from Paradise in Australia; Deirdre Heddon and Lenora Champagne for their conversations and contributions; and Roberta Mock, who commissioned this book for Intellect. Tim Etchells has been a witness and respondent throughout much of my working life, providing a crucial thread of connection that leads me back to the space and place in which I became a performance-maker, in the company of Heather Ackroyd, Pete Brooks, Nikki Cooper, Richard Hawley, Tyrone Huggins, Graeme Miller and Steve Shill, who, as Impact Theatre Co-operative, provided me with both conviviality and challenge—essential nourishment for creative travelling. Lastly, Zoë and Bill, I thank you both for sustenance beyond measure.
Written Worlds
Claire MacDonald
I came of age at a utopian moment, turning 21 in 1975 amid feminist activism and dreams of revolutionary transformation. It was a time defined by strong communitarian politics, new aesthetics and a heady tribalism grounded in the conviction that we who saw ourselves as standing outside the mainstream could control our own destiny. Yet it was also a moment of loss, inflected by the memory of one world war and the possibility of another, and characterized on city streets across the United Kingdom in clashes between right and left that focused on Britishness, history and identity.
The first phase of my theatre-making was fired in that crucible. The company I co-founded in Leeds responded to the temper of the times by exploring new artistic languages for the stage. Impact Theatre Co-operative began working in 1978 with an adaptation of Anna Kavan’s hallucinatory novel Ice , and continued for eight years making collaborative work with performers, composers and visual artists.
Impact was not making new plays but experimenting with the potential of theatrical form, rethinking the conventional relationship of character, scenario, narrative, time and space, shaping a genre that became known as performance theatre. Performance theatre played with persona, narrative, speaking position, sound and visual imagery as systems within a practice of performance-making that explored what writer/director Tim Etchells later called a ‘zone of possibility’, reflecting ‘an outside world in motion’, a ‘blurring of territories’ (Etchells 1996: 108).
In retrospect, that form of theatre has now become more widely identified as ‘postdramatic’, a form of theatre not based in the authority of the text, but which works instead to create scenographic and dramaturgical structures from multiple elements. Impact’s work was made in exactly this way, using fractured and broken narratives, enacted in highly realized visual and physical environments. Always composed as a complete spoken/visual/musical score, the work was an exercise in theatrical world-making, taking from postmodern fiction the idea that the task of artistic practice is to create impossible worlds and see what might happen in them. Within the company I contributed text as a performer/collaborator; proposing found, written and improvised language as theatrical material, along with visual imagery, music and performance. Impact’s work ended in 1985 after the production of its most widely seen and influential work, The Carrier Frequency , a collaboration with the novelist Russell Hoban, but its informing influence on my own life and ideas continued.
The three linked texts published here are collected under a single title, Utopia , to signify their connection to one another, and the fact that they all deal in some way with ideas about imaginary places and spaces, one of which is of course the theatre itself. Produced over a 20-year period, the first two in the late 1980s and the last in the new century, the three texts are grounded in theatre as a space in which imaginative geographies are assembled and dismantled, and they continue that earlier exploration of dramatic form, albeit from a very different perspective. I think of them as dialogues, conversations and, importantly to me, as essays. They draw on traditions of writing speaking, or writing voice, which blur boundaries between real and imaginary. They speak about processes of making; they propose alternative realties; they stage absurd conflicts. They also sit within a tradition often used in film and playwriting, the tradition of the closed room, aware of, perhaps haunted by, what is outside, but somehow closed to it. They are, perhaps, best described as plays for a postdramatic theatre. Plays in which role and persona, speaking position and the question of what it means to perform, have already been undermined. Plays for a mutilated world.
The intention of this essay is to introduce and explore the context in which these three plays were written and produced. It is, in effect, an act of creative ‘re-membering’, a discursive staging of