School of Performing Arts - Theses
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ItemPulse: a physical approach to staging text( 2008)This exegesis articulates the evolution of an improvisational training and rehearsal methodology called Pulse and discusses the outcomes of a practice-based research project where Pulse was applied to the screenplay of Yes by Sally Potter. Pulse is an approach to performance creation, where an ensemble of performers trains to kinaesthetically embed and integrate a selection of performance and compositional principles enabling them to improvise together. This research involved working with a trained ensemble to explore how Pulse could be used to create spatial and visual imagery that would illuminate a narrative text; to create physical theatre based on the spoken word. I used the language of a screenplay for the generative material, as it was not written for the stage. A visceral, physical and aural landscape therefore would have to be created so an audience could experience the different worlds of the narrative outside its realistic, filmic context. The Pulse process demands that the actor thinks with the body and does not work from the mind. This allows for surprising meetings on the rehearsal floor as the body of the actor responds to suggestions of lust, desire, power and conflict implicit in a narrative. I found that the restrained emotional landscape of unspoken feelings in Sally Potter’s film text emerged through action creating a physicalisation of deep undercurrents. The character’s emotional inner world was revealed through physical metaphor. The performer was able to create a score of non-behavioural physical imagery which when staged could run parallel to the spoken word. Where the original medium may have relegated the importance of the body, the Pulse physical translation process prioritised the body in the live experience. The actor’s body painted the space through direct physical experience and memory. The body was content, image and witness. As a consequence our adapted, staged version told a different story to that of the film. This research involved instigating and tracking the investigation and this exegesis describes and analyses the form that emerged.
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ItemRe-imagining Kassandra( 2014)This exegesis examines possibilities of re-thinking current approaches to the relationship between the practices of writing and directing within the field of Australian performance-making. The basis of this research project is the bringing to bear of directorial practice on the practice of developing new work as a playwright. In this case, that practice involves a re-examination of the role of text generation in a contemporary theatrical framework, in which the primacy of the text in the determination of both process and reception can no longer be assumed. From this re-examination, the question of the relationship between writing and directing is posed in terms of their potential for mutual - and perhaps productive - resistance to one another’s habitual practices. This project’s research into directorial practice involves the conception of a playscript - as spoken language and as a blueprint for action - which is placed in a tense and subversive relationship with both visual composition and the performative apparatus. It includes an account and analysis of the creation of an original 100-minute performance work, Kassandra, from script to production. The work investigates placing the mythographic titular figure in a problematised and self-reflexive relationship with the performance event. The concept of ‘productive resistance’ between the practices of writing and directing for performance is theorised in the first section, and thence reflexively investigated through practice, in order to to demonstrate how the re-investigation of received models of praxis at each phase of development might be best arranged and conducted so as to create a ‘productive resistance’ between text and performance.