Staging the documentary

Critical Stages #22, 2020

DOCUMENTARY THEATRE What is all about? If we accept the idea that illusion in all its manifestations is what makes reality, is there any kind of performative expression that can exist outside or beyond illusion? When the lights go out and the events that have inspired a documentary performance enter history's archive, what's left for coming generations? When one deals with a slippery term like this, no answer is inclusive enough to exclude all other answers. My talk with Martha Bouziouri, a talented artist who deeply believes in the power of documentary theatre to reach the "real" by penetrating, defamiliarizing the surface and the given semantics of signs. In the latest issue of Critical Stages (#22), the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC)

2006

Documentary filmmakers 11 engage directly in the study of the phenomena of life that surrounds us. We hold the ability to show and elucidate life as it is, considerably higher than the occasionally diverting droll games that people call theatre, cinema etc." (Vertov, 1984, p. 47). The ability to 'show and elucidate life as it is' is a controversial claim that the majority of academic documentary discussion is concerned with. I intend to add to this discussion through an exploration of performance and its pertinence to the ability of documentary to represent reality truthfully. The reception of documentary is significantly influenced by this claim and expectation of a truthful representation of the world. As O'Shaughnessy has noted, 11 documentary's special pleasures lie in its reality content, the spectacle and voyeurism involved in watching something that we know really happened" (1997, p.86). While the audience is satisfied that the film is, as it reports...

Over the last few decades, documentary theatre has experienced a boom in popularity with the commercial and critical success of works such as Anna Deveare Smith's 'Twilight: Los Angeles' (1994), Tectonic Theatre's 'The Laramie Project' (2001) and docudramas by David Hare such as 'Stuff Happens' (2004) and 'The Permanent Way' (2005). Recent works span everything from natural disaster survival stories, to the staging of dramatized versions of inquests to well as the examination of family violence in New Zealand in Hilary Halba's and Stuart Young's 'Hush' (2009 - present). Whether this documentary boom will follow the cycle of its economic counterpart and result in a bust can only be seen with the benefit of time. Rather, this paper focuses on the nature of representation in documentary theatre, in particular its relationship to the real. It is argued that the complexities involved in, and approaches to, representing the real in performance, place documentary theatre along a series of spectra. Documentary theatre does echo economic patterns in that at least two 2 polarised extremes of the form would seem to exist. As the terminology of a spectrum implies though, these opposing strategies exist more as a range of shifting, uncertain attempts to reconcile competing tensions, rather than as a sinusoidally oscillating pair of opposites. Attempts to avoid manipulating and aestheticizing the source material can result in strangely muted presentations that strip the drama from theatrical representation, placing it at one end of this spectrum. Other attempts to creatively shape and reconfigure testimony and context, can result in a heightened aestheticization and sensationalism. This theoretically pushes the performances to a "boom" out of tune or out of synchronicity with thesource material and to the other end of a perceived fiction-reality spectrum. This paper will examine some of the practices and ideas that inform the choices practitioners make in representing the "real" in performance and examine the aesthetic and ethical ethical impact these choices can have on the resulting performances.

Critique d'art, 2014

This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames. Questions addressed will include: How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic - imagine and perform themselves politically? Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa? In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible? How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique? How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames? How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’? How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds? In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique. Featuring: Joe Kelleher, author of Theatre & Politics (2009) and (forthcoming) The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images. Georgina Born (Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford) Jen Harvie, Professor of theatre and performance, QMUL Selma Dimitrijevic (Artistic Director, Greyscale) The Voice Project (Sian Croose and Jon Baker, of Neutrinos fame) Lena Simic, performance artist and founder of the Free University of Liverpool and the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home METIS/World Factory Lucy Ellison, artist (Grounded, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill) Rafael Schacter on Independent Public Art, BA Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL Khadija Caroll, artist, Humboldt Foundation fellow, author Art in the Time of Colony New Art Club (Tom Roden and Peter Shenton) Helen Stratford, performance architect Eirini Kartsaki Vita Peacock, anthropologist and ERSC Postdoctoral Fellow on anti-austerity activism and the rise of ‘spectacular dissent’, UCL Rachel Beckles-Willson, Professor of Music, RHUL Once again a series of roundtables and performances throughout the day will be brought together in a summing up discussion at the Cambridge Junction, in a conference ‘dinner’ staged by live artists Hunt and Darton. Conveners Clare Foster (Classics, University of Cambridge) Floris Schuiling (Music, University of Cambridge) Zoe Svendsen (English, University of Cambridge) Jonas Tinius (Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

In this chapter I first compare the notion of the viewer as I encountered her and him in my work, both in the multimedia project Scattering of the Fragile Cherry Blossoms, when she takes up a participatory position, as in my single-screen documentaries where she is a prefigured viewer. Afterwards, I will broaden the scope by discussing the position of the viewer in what we could call instances of expanded documentary. In the tradition of expanded cinema (Youngblood 1970) documentary filmmakers are currently augmenting the medial possibilities beyond the classical single screen tradition. Their presentation mode shifts from a cinema space to an exhibition space. Especially a ‘new’ position of the viewer seems to be explored through such expanded instances. Kutlug Ataman and Eija-Liisa Ahtila are two important artists who investigate the implications of expanded documentaries for the spectator in different ways. By looking into the position of the viewer as exemplified in their work, I wish to explore the more performative and embodied aspects of a visual arts spectatorship. As Mieke Bal argues, the ‘primary task of exhibitions is to encourage visitors to stop, suspend action, let affect invade us and then quietly in temporary respite, think’ (Bal 2011). In embodied spectatorship, meaning is being created in a physical sense (in time and in space) so as to escape ‘the urgent passage of linear time, or what Barthes referred to as the 'continuous voracity' of the filmic image’ (Catherine Fowler 2004).

ojsprdap.vm.ku.edu

In our town we like to know the facts about everybody." Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town "I have no interest in prying into a town's unravelings." Steven Belber in the Tectonic Theatre Project's The Laramie Project

2023

For this symposium, which follows from his practice-based PhD research, choreographer Arkadi Zaides invited various practitioners and scholars to reflect collectively on the notion of “documentary choreography”. By looking at concrete case studies and by proposing various theoretical lenses, the participants will explore the strategies used by artists when combining embodied and documentary practices. Through different formats, they will consider the potentiality of such blending not only to challenge the boundaries of contemporary dance and documentary theater, but also to engage critically with social and political issues.

Anthropology Today, 2009

This Master's Thesis published by The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in the spring of 2011, accompanies Malick's thesis curatorial project of the same title, that features performances and documentary installations of artists; Brody Condon, Shana Moulton, and the collective, Yemenwed. Their work, and others discussed in this thesis deal both in their subject matter and their modes of operandi with those reitereative trends that arise when attempting to locate and exteriorize the entangled web of social structures and media outlets that comprise our technologized contemporary condition. Making sense is not the primary objective of these artists, yet through each of their own variations on performance, they glean connections, parallels and intrinsic relationships between the secrets, the subtleties and the shifts of social and mediatized life. When considering looking the practices of these artists in juxtaposition to one another, this thesis parses the forging of a new, less body-space-time-centric direction in performance art that is as exciting as it is precarious.