School of Performing Arts - Theses
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ItemThe breath of empty space: looking for the remnants of God in the ('postmodern') cultural landscape of the secular West in the twenty-first century( 2014)The intention behind this research is to conduct a dramaturgical excavation of a specifically curated sample of the medieval English Mystery plays in order to analyse their thematic currency in a contemporary, secular context. This ‘excavation’ is conducted through an original, evolving and dynamic dramaturgical process that I here name ‘re-visioning’, in which the source material – stripped of its historical, cultural and religious context of origin – is re-made using the frame of contemporary (postdramatic) theatre. In their original form, the Mystery plays were a spectacular and comprehensive profession of the Christian (Catholic) faith. I contend that traces of this faith remain embedded into the foundational thinking of contemporary Western liberal democracy and thus that, while the outward dramaturgical shapes of these plays might easily be dismissed as irrelevant, fanciful and naïve in a contemporary context, their inner structures and thematics are intricately and dynamically linked to moral, political and social assumptions which underpin contemporary Western society. The thesis is realised through a combination of theoretical research and theatre practice and is weighted as 55% written dissertation and 45% creative development. The task of the creative development phase was twofold. First, to act as a laboratory in which experiments emanating from the research of scale, duration, image, physicality and performance style could be manipulated and refined; and, second, as a site for a three-dimensional exploration of the potential of stripping, replacing and re-sequencing classical and contemporary dramaturgical constructs. The written dissertation focuses on an analysis of the principles of postdramatic theatre, the ideological/aesthetic aspects of the source material, its cultural and historical context, and the subsequent dismantling of that context with particular reference to Nietzsche and Foucault. It develops a series of dramaturgical principles informed by Nietzschean and Foucauldian perspectives and then examines the outcome of the application of those principles with specific reference to the practice. The application of the theoretical research to the practice resulted in a series of public showings at the School of Performing Arts, VCA (October 2013). The outcome of those showings, in combination with the reflection and the research, led to the conclusion that the ‘dramatic paradigm’ and the Christian paradigm are linked though a common desire for order and pre-determination, qualities thoroughly destabilised by postdramatic practice and the general paradigm of postmodernism.