Chapter 15
Composed Theatre – Discussion and Debate: On Terminology, Planning and Intuition, Concepts and Processes, Self-reflexivity and Communication
Edited by Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner
Excerpts from two round-table discussions on Composed Theatre conducted at the Drama Department, University of Exeter (UK) 19 April 2009 and the Music Department, Universität Hildesheim (GER), 17 May 2009
Introduction
The following text contains excerpts of two long discussions each of which concluded a three-day workshop meeting at Exeter and Hildesheim respectively, to which we had invited practitioners and scholars in the field of Composed Theatre to introduce us and each other to their work and their working processes.1 Several of the participants were able to attend both meetings, which created and intensive and ongoing discussion and debate about key aspect and questions in relation to Composed Theatre. In particular the debate centred around five topics: Terminology, Planning vs. Intuition, Concepts and processes, Self-reflexivity, and Communication. The discussions were open to the public and attracted a small specialist audience, some of whom participated in the discussion as well.
The text contains contributions by Cathie Boyd, Director, Artistic Director Cryptic, Glasgow; Paul Edmondson, Performer and Martial Artist, Exeter; Michael Hirsch, Composer/ Director, Berlin; Jörg Laue, Composer/Director, Artistic Director LOSE COMBO, Berlin; Jörg Lensing, Artistic Director Theater der Klänge, Düsseldorf; Roland Quitt, Freelance Dramaturg for Music Theatre, Mannheim; Matthias Rebstock, Professor for Scenic Music (Hildesheim) and artistic director of leitundlause, Berlin; George Rodosthenous, Composer/ Director, Artistic Director Altitude North; David Roesner, Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter; Hannah Silva, Poet and Performer, Plymouth; Nick Till, Professor for Music Theatre at University of Sussex and Artistic Director Post-Operative Productions; Demetris Zavros, Composer/Director, Associate Director Altitude North, Leeds.
On terminology
David Roesner
While being well aware that a single definition of Composed Theatre may neither be possible nor desirable, can we perhaps still talk about your various understandings of this as a process and practice and try to map some areas which the term seems to cover?
George Rodosthenous
It’s obvious that we’ve become comfortable with the term ‘Composed Theatre’. The only clarification I would like to make at least for myself is that, what I understand by Composed Theatre can also be a piece of theatre which is not music theatre, but a piece that is being created with musical structures in mind.
Jörg Laue
I don’t want to criticise that title at all, but I was wondering: when Michael [Hirsch] showed us some compositions everybody tried to find out what composition is in theatre, what theatre is in composition, but I wonder why we can’t just call it a concert? There are all those different aspects but to me it is not important to connect those with terms and to define whether it is theatre in composition, Composed Theatre, theatrical composition or whatever – it’s just not my main concern.
Michael Hirsch
Yes, for me terms are also not important. But of course it’s another point of view for you as scholars – you have to write about it and think about it. I have to make it and for me it is of no importance what my work is going to be called.
Cathie Boyd
That’s fine from an artistic point of view, but what about the people producing you and what about the people presenting you? There’s a huge responsibility for them to describe the work and to think about how to sell that. It’s a massive problem because in music theatre, if that’s what we’re talking about, there is always the question: do you send in theatre critics or do you send in music critics? And there’s a terrible generation in Britain of music critics, who only want to see traditional opera and if you try and do anything contemporary they’ll slander it. But if you bring in a theatre critic, they have no idea of the technical skills of that musician, and I go ballistic. Sorry, but I do think it’s slightly irresponsible of us to say I don’t care what you call my work, because if someone misrepresents you, you would be annoyed artistically.
Michael Hirsch
Well, I agree that I am responsible for it, but when my work is produced somewhere I always describe my work to the people who present me and they can then decide what it is I’m writing. In all the festivals I have to write comments about my work and I am happy to do that, but I’m not interested in having a headline or label for all my works – ‘Hirsch makes Composed Theatre’. That’s not my problem, I think.
Matthias Rebstock
Maybe it is misleading to understand this as question about labelling work. It is not about labelling, it’s about understanding what we do. So if we talk about Composed Theatre I’m much more interested in what we actually mean by that, and whether it is the right term.
If we take ‘theatre’ as a field and then we make the field smaller and say, well, we’re talking about devised theatre, so Shakespeare is out (laughs), it’s already smaller. And then we say, well, we’re not just talking about devised theatre, we’re talking about devising Composed Theatre, presumably that this again would make the field you’re talking about smaller. Now the question is: is this a good way to make the field smaller, does it really have to get more precise, or would it be an alternative to say that we are talking about devising music theatre? Could be. But, as you immediately sense, it would be something very different, because as George has rightly said: Composed Theatre is not necessarily music theatre, you can apply musical thinking on all sorts of theatre, you can apply it to films, you can apply it to going shopping – I don’t know.
So if we stick to the term, we’re not talking about music theatre – it is part of it, but not all music theatre is Composed Theatre – and not all Composed Theatre is music theatre. A straightforward opera performance for me is not necessarily a Composed Theatre piece.
Jörg Lensing
I think Demetris [Zavros] said it very well when he said: It is theatre with musical structures in mind. It’s exactly that. And I agree with this very much, especially with the term ‘Composed Theatre’, because I find it important to make the point that it is something else than, for example, intermedia theatre. Intermedia theatre is one form of Composed Theatre but it’s not the only one.
What also became clear to me in these three days is that there are different notions about Composed Theatre between the British and the Germans. I think we [Germans] are quite clear about what Composed Theatre is, because we have all these references to Kagel and Schnebel.
I think the criterion is, whether the subject of the performance is ‘Gegenstand der Komposition’ – the topic of the composition. If I write music, it is not important for me what the string quartet will look like; they have to perform my music well, but the visual aspect is not the topic of the composition. But the minute I care about the visual aspect and the performance then it becomes the topic of the composition and in that moment the same string quartet becomes Composed Theatre.
David Roesner
But what happens when the Kronos Quartet commissions a piece and then dress in designer clothes and have a bit of a lighting design?
Jörg Lensing
I think that is the mise en scène of music, that’s something else. So if a director is coming who says I take some music and now I stage this music, then he makes something in addition, but it’s not topic of the composition.
David Roesner
And what happens if you look at Heiner Goebbels’ Eraritjaritjaka?2 This piece is based entirely on pre-existing string quartets of the twentieth century, with one exception of a Contrapunctus by Bach. None of them were written with a theatrical performance in mind, but Goebbels takes those existing structures, inserts voices, inserts lighting, inserts film, and the result is something I would definitely call Composed Theatre.
Jörg Lensing
Yes, but that is what we call a meta-composition. So he is a composer and he takes the string quartets as a material for a bigger composition, a meta-composition.
David Roesner
I would like to come back to another term, that of integration or integrated theatre, because one of the recurring criteria of Composed Theatre seems to be that it’s not a phenomenon of addition where two or more elements are added together in one way or another, but that there is an integration forming a much more inseparable connection and synthesis. Cathie: your direction for example emerges so much from the individual score you work with that if you changed the music it would make no sense whatsoever. Or in Heiner Goebbels’ Eraritjaritjaka I mentioned earlier, there is a video sequence in which every movement of the actor and every movement of the camera is composed bar by bar to Ravel’s string quartet. Yes, the music was there before, composed with no theatre piece in mind, but it’s now closely integrated in that sense. It is like the difference between sewing two bits of cloth together – you can still take them apart again, relatively unchanged, or knitting or weaving to threads together, which form a blanket or jumper or something, and if you take them apart they are no longer that, they are in some sense destroyed.
Cathie Boyd
Isn’t that ultimately what we’re talking about: it is about a performance which is layered, but ultimately it’s the musicality which is predominant within it.
Matthias Rebstock
I still think there are two ways that we need to distinguish when trying to define what Composed Theatre could be. One way is to try to look at a performance and decide whether it is Composed Theatre or not. That is a kind of an ontological approach. But what Jörg and George have emphasised strongly is not an ontological approach but a focus on method, on ‘Verfahren’, procedure, and a way of thinking.
Hannah Silva
I just wanted to say something in relation to the notion that composing is a way of thinking about how to organise material. Musical composition provides the clearest code or language for talking about theatre; academically and in rehearsal, the structures, principles, notation systems, modes of thinking compositionally are so well established that they provide the possibility to work compositionally within and outside of those parameters. They allow the composer to compose for the piano, also to compose for prepared piano, a wine glass, light and bodies in time and space.
It’s inherently interdisciplinary but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it involves collaboration with practitioners from other disciplines during the compositional process, but it could also involve collaboration across disciplines within the one composer, also providing room for collaboration within the scores. And when composing music you might work with rhythm over melody, when composing theatre you might emphasise light over dance, but that doesn’t mean that the dance is impeded. When no element of performance is restricted by any other element the composer has a choice, and where that choice exists a field of compositional process exists, otherwise it would be coping rather than composing.
Jörg Lensing
Following this logic you can, of course, compose on paper and never work together. Someone has thought about everything and constructed everything and has the lighting and the dance in his mind when he creates the structure. But the other process is to try it, to find the possibilities how to play this instrument. But that is what I mean with ‘integrated’; it really means to have both together in order to arrive at a result which depends on both. And then you could not take away the lighting and only look at the dance because it is not the whole. The lighting is not illustrating the dance, which is normally the case in conventional theatre. You can rehearse for weeks with the dancers with neon light and then at the last technical rehearsal the lighting designer comes in and adds light for making it emotionally or aesthetically fitting. But in an integrated process or in a composed process you cannot add on or take off the lighting – they are depending on each other.
Paul Edmondson
It seems to me as though the notion of Composed Theatre operates on a continuum as opposed to being in a definite, established position, and that that continuum operates either on a continuum between freedom and restraint – but I don’t know, that may be too restrictive – or between integration and differentiation. Then the question of whether something like Stockhausen’s Trans, which was mentioned earlier, can be considered Composed Theatre may mean placing it at one end of the continuum and the kind of work Jörg does, where everybody’s co-collaborating and involved in the performance space as an instrument, may find itself on a different side of the continuum.
Cathie Boyd
But isn’t the difference that Jörg devises; you work, if I understand it correctly, as a collective, and you try lots of ideas, whereas in the other extreme you go in with a fixed existing score and then look at how you break that down.
Jörg Lensing
But the finalising of the work, even if you work collectively, consists in arriving at a structure, how the piece is finally performed. And this structure, of course, is composed. We may call this structure, Air and Sonata and Rondo and all these things – I really take old forms to organise the improvised material. So for example there is the introduction of the sonata and you determine which material it contains and how long it can be, before you want to move on to the development [Durchführung], which may consist of three dances together with a particular video and a particular music and there are fixed connections and meeting points for the performers in order to use the music in a certain way – that’s composition for me. It’s not that I write down every single moment for every fraction of a second; I give the dancers a certain freedom within the performance to handle the material as they have done it before in the creation process.
What I have learned as a composer is that in the beginning, if I write for violin, I meet a violin player and really talk with him and ask him to show me what he’s able to do. And as a composer you ask: could you do this? Could you also do that? And he may say, yes, normally we don’t do it that way, but I’ll try it, and it sounds nice. Then we discuss how to fix this in notation, so that it would sound again like that later on, or if played by someone else. So whenever I make a solo composition for violin the process would be exactly that. I know the possibilities of the instrument and I know a little bit more about the possibilities that are not conventional, and I have been told how to write it down. And if I take the means of the theatre it’s exactly the same. I am fascinated by what MAX/MSP jitter offers as a tool; for me it’s an instrument full of possibilities. So if I have a good programmer there I would ask him to show me this and that, all that’s possible, and how to fix it. I don’t notate it any more, but I would want him to come up with a patch, which works exactly in a certain way in a certain moment. That is playing this instrument: I am not the player, it is the one who’s programming it, operating it – we call it operator, but in fact he’s an instrumentalist for me, he’s playing Jitter.
It is something that I learnt from Kagel: when I first met him, he said, we have a piece of lighting equipment in the basement, so why don’t you compose something for the lighting equipment – we have eighteen channels. The lighting board was programmable so we could make programmed compositions only for changing lights, for composed light. And Kagel understood it as an instrument: take it, try it and make a composition for light.
And importantly, this is not depending on a process of dramatic narration, it’s more a structure, an abstract structure; composing structural processes in time. It could be dramatic, it could be narrative – but it doesn’t have to be. And I think that is a different approach to what directors and choreographers are taught.
On Planning vs. Intuition
David Roesner
The notion of ‘composing theatre’ may suggest a high level of planning, premeditation and conceptualisation in advance of an actual rehearsal process – does Composed Theatre adhere to this traditional sense of classical musical composition?
Cathie Boyd
I don’t go in fully planned on what I’m doing. I have a sort of idea, but I really work off what I’ve been given, so I’m responding instinctively all the time. It’s constantly what you’re getting. You have to see what performers give you, otherwise you treat them as puppets.
Michael Hirsch
I think it’s both: in the artistic process you are jumping between clear structural ideas and then suddenly you have very irrational feelings about how it could be. The first moment before I start a composition may launch from a very unclear and irrational idea – I don’t know exactly what I want. And then I use the structure to find the way to it. The structure is the means of coming to what is in the first instance a very irrational, very vague imagination, even less than an imagination, only a kind of atmosphere you have in mind. But then you have got the structure as the means to capture it.
Matthias Rebstock
I really think there’s a third thing that comes in when you work with other people. It is not just about you being sometimes structural and logical and sometimes irrational, but if you work with people and you don’t know what’s going to happen with them, what they will bring, what do they think, it is neither irrational nor logical, but a third thing.
Jörg Lensing
For me it is the selection of material that is entirely instinctive: whether you are being inspired by something or deny it, whether I say yes or no, that is a totally instinctive process. But of course I consciously propose something or ask for something and then I get certain responses. For example with musicians: if your musician comes and plays a score he is not offering very much, but if you meet him and you ask him to show you the possibilities he has, what and how he can play, then he is offering something. And then I can instinctively react to that.
Demetris Zavros
I think it’s very different to work and develop with other people rather than composing music for instruments, where you can think about a lot of different things in advance. I tend to overthink before I go into the studio to try things out, especially compositions. And when I get to the point where I actually start writing music, I write specific music because I have a specific action in mind that I want to go with it, and at some points in the music I want to allow some space for what’s going to happen visually, to avoid that the same thing is happening visually and aurally. A lot of times when I go in the studio to work with the actors, dancers or performers who are going to move in the space visually, I find out that there are a lot of things that they cannot do as I first imagined them, and I have to find compromises. And in that compromise and in that difficulty you have to become creative to find other solutions, and then maybe I will go back and change things in the music because I want a certain relationship to continue to exist.
So with regard to the idea of a polyphony of theatrical means, I think for me as a director/ composer it means that I always go back and change the music if something is not working visually. There is a relationship between the different lines in that polyphony. I mean, they are all important in themselves, but somehow they have to come together as they would in any polyphonic piece of music at the end of the day. I think the difficulty is how do you compose visually and aurally at the same time so that these levels complement each other.
Matthias Rebstock
It is interesting that you say you have to make compromises and that that forces you into creativity, because for me it is completely different. I go into rehearsals and I’m really curious what the performers are going to do today. I have no idea at the beginning. There are certain limitations within the rehearsal process, of course, but I would never say it is a compromise; I just get creative with the performers if they can’t do something that I wanted them to do.
I rather probably just have questions or exercises I want to do with them in order to see what’s coming. So the main reason I work with people is really to get ideas I wouldn’t have on my own and to create something none of us could have thought of individually.
Michael Hirsch
Even for me as the ‘old-fashioned composer’ at this table, it is also important for whom I write a piece. I write totally different pieces whether I write for the Stuttgarter Vokalsolisten or for the Maulwerker. And I’m inspired if I know who will play it.
Demetris Zavros
I’m not saying that what I have described is the only way things happen in my process. I do of course allow my performers to create material and I get inspired by what they are doing – I’m not thinking about everything in advance. But the things that I am thinking about in advance don’t always work in the studio and it is a great part of the creative process to find solutions to things that do not necessarily work exactly in the way that we have visualised them initially.
Hannah Silva
I think the idea of compromise is actually quite important when you’re working with several disciplines. I think there are always compromises. That is not to say that the director’s vision is necessarily compromised, but within those different layers there is always compromise and it is through those compromises that a new form emerges. So it’s perhaps through the compromises within different disciplines that you arrive at Composed Theatre, which is something new.
On concepts and processes
Matthias Rebstock
I was wondering if we could take up this point about the concepts of these pieces, because I found it quite interesting that almost all of you have very strong concepts in your work and everybody knows exactly why they are doing what but, as Jörg said very clearly, it’s not important whether the audience understands these concepts in the end. So I would like to talk about the function of these concepts and how important it is for you that parts of the concepts can be understood, can be conceived, can be picked up, or not. I also wonder if working conceptually in this way is actually one of the characteristics of Composed Theatre, maybe because we don’t have the narrative, because there’s something missing which we normally have in theatre, and it might be something to give you a purpose for the working process, a sense that you’re not lost. So it’s important for you in order to work, but perhaps not important for the audience to grasp? On the other hand, I do sometimes have the feeling, that had I known about a concept I might have appreciated the work more.
David Roesner
Can I add that I wonder whether there’s a similarity to ‘actual’ music in the sense that anyone can sit down and listen to a piece of music and appreciate it for what it is without necessarily understanding how it was made, what the conceptual ideas were, how the composer worked, what orchestration is, what counterpoint is, etc. So it works on that sort of surface level and people appreciate it for what it is – they don’t leave concerts necessarily saying “I didn’t understand this piece of music” unless perhaps when it is New Music. But at the same time, of course, musicologists and other people invest a lot of time in doing the analysis of the music, and they look at relations of motifs and themes etc. And sometimes musicologists are very concerned about the process and look into how the third draft of that particular passage that Beethoven did and why he crossed out the first two notes, and so on. But you don’t hear that in the result. So, I wonder whether there is something about music that ‘works’ despite being ignorant about its concept or conception and whether Composed Theatre makes use of that by using musically inspired or derived concepts, or whether there is broader characteristic of the post-modern at play, which is very strong on being conceptual, without necessarily needing to be musical.
Demetris Zavros
Well, I think that a lot of people who have seen my work think that I don’t think about the audience (laughter), whereas I think that I do think about the audience quite a lot (laughter). That leads back to what I was saying earlier: I don’t think of the audience worrying that I’m not giving them enough information about what I mean by this work, but because I don’t want to explain it, because that would limit its meaning to one thing, where I want them to take several meanings out of it, to construct it in their own minds however they want to. I don’t want this to be a cop-out either: I don’t mean to say that I do whatever I want and you get whatever you want out of it. So when it’s not something that relates to one meaning, how do we organise something to open up these pages of meanings so that we can make sure that there are a lot of things that the audience can take out for them. …
Jörg Laue
… maybe by not thinking about the audience?
Demetris Zavros
Well, I think that would be a cop-out, really, simply not thinking about the audience.
David Roesner
Perhaps a notion of ‘coherence’ is useful instead of meaning? Composed Theatre shifts towards different guarantors of coherence I think. And that’s where the strong concepts come into play: you don’t abandon coherence, you don’t abandon the fact that you need to organise relationships and also discriminate and say why something is in the piece and why something is not, or why you like this, but not that? But the sense of coherence comes from a different origin or is argued for from a different position and that’s a musical position. And I think for the audience it’s a similar process, where if I find it coherent at some point in Jörg’s piece to reflect about me spending time in a particular place, about how time passes, about how I react to an environment that invites me to a particular mode of spending time, then I’ve brought in a different kind of coherence than spending three hours trying to find out what is he trying to tell me, what does it all mean?
Jörg Laue
It is for that reason that I said I did not want to tell you about that concept and the way I presented it.
Matthias Rebstock
But the interesting thing is, I mean you spend hours and hours to do these transformations3 …
Jörg Laue
Yes, of course.
Matthias Rebstock
And you say there’s no point for the audience, they don’t need to know, they don’t need to perceive …
Jörg Laue
Why should they be interested in how many hours I spend …?
Matthias Rebstock
No, what interests me is not the audience, but you: why do you do it? Does it help to feel that you know what you’re doing, or why do you spend so much effort on it? I think I do understand why you do it, but I think it might be a characteristic point for this conceptually based theatre. So, why is it so important for you to be so precise in your work?
Jörg Laue
Maybe it’s just me (laughter). No, but …
Roland Quitt
Is it part of the structure that is important for the audience, or could it have been made up in a much simpler way? Would it have changed the experience of the audience if you just had taken much less time in doing this and if you had made it up according to much simpler principles?
Jörg Laue
Could be. But for me to work out such a piece has got to do with those processes and a way of thinking about – about media and technical aspects in the work. And so it’s just my way of doing things.
Matthias Rebstock
So it is not like the idea in homeopathy that even if you take out all of the material, all of the atoms, there is something left; you can’t see it, you can’t prove it, but it helps? In other words, is it not this idea that something of this process, of this precision of all the work you did, will somehow remain in the piece?
Jörg Laue
Yeah, hopefully it does.
Nick Till
I’m trying to think what we mean by saying that it is conceptual, because I mean that’s quite an abstract conceptual process that you put in place, and in which actually, as you say, it is not even revealed. I don’t know whether anything I do is conceptual in that sense of giving myself some kind of conceptual process to work with. I think it may be conceptual, but it’s more specifically engaged with certain problematics. I’m interested in setting myself problem-solving kinds of exercises. Well, yours is a problem-solving thing, too, but mine aren’t so abstract, I suppose, (laughs). I’m just questioning assumptions about certain kinds of relationships or certain understandings of how meaning is constructed, or whatever. So I mean I’m probably always more dealing at a semantic level than a purely conceptual…
David Roesner
… but with your Stuttgart piece4 there’s a clear indication that you were given a setting which was not conceptual but pragmatic, which meant there were certain rules of the game and you did follow them – and this is what the experiment is about: I have two projectors and two microphones, what can I do with that?
Nick Till
Well, you see, I would say we didn’t. I mean, I would make a distinction there, because certainly ‘experimental’ in the Cagean sense means you engage in a very important way of thinking: what if I put that together with that and that together with that and see what happens? That’s an experimental process, you don’t know the outcome and you have no intention to control the outcome, you want to see what will happen if … Whereas in our case, I didn’t say ‘let’s see what happens if?’, or at least we did a little bit of ‘let’s see what happens if?’ but at a certain point we started to decide actually there are other ways we needed to construct the piece. But I suppose there was a conceptual process in terms of here are the givens, and rather than saying ‘let’s see what happens’, saying, okay, what do I find interesting or problematic about this as a set of givens that I can start to question and unpack and so on? So I suppose the conceptual step is the one that says, okay, why am I dissatisfied with the way in which most people use the relationship between the live performer and the screen image without questioning what those relationships are and how can I do something that starts to ask questions about that.
Matthias Rebstock
But I think with Nick’s work it’s important for the piece that you get some idea of the process.
Roland Quitt
I don’t see the process of your work. I mean, I would know that you didn’t work that way, I might think that you could have thought this up on paper, too.
Nick Till
I think that’s true, but I mean the way the piece worked was that to some extent it replicated parts of the process we went through, like when you’re presented with an object which is a sheet of music and someone tries to make sense of it and in that process embarks on a journey. That in effect is what we did, we gave ourselves an object and we tried to make some sense of it in different ways, and that included doing research into what its significance might be, it included starting to think about the relationship of that piece of music to technology and the fact that we were using contemporary technologies. And all of that gets, as it were, thematised in the piece. So to that extent I think although aspects of the process are not in there, in another sense I guess the piece does really quite explicitly thematise its own process of investigation.
David Roesner
It may be helpful with regard to Composed Theatre perhaps not to talk about ‘criteria’ but about ‘tendencies’, for example by saying that the kind of work we are talking about has a tendency to be self-reflexive, without suggesting that is always the case. For example including the discussion about the piece in itself, or Jörg’s performance lecture5 which talks about his work while also exemplifying it: that’s highly self-reflexive, asking: what am I talking about? Why did I start here? Why didn’t I start there? So tendencies is one word that might be useful. The other word I’d like to throw in is renegotiation. I think one common thread through all the pieces is that they, again, in one way or another, renegotiate the relationship between the elements and particularly the musical elements – whatever they are, sounds and structures and actual music etc. – with the other theatrical means of expression. And they engange in certain relationships – whether they’re hierarchical or whether they’re about how music and stage action make meaning together – and they don’t take that for granted, they renegotiate it. So in the process you all think about how you work: “why don’t we start with the music here, why don’t we start with the music and then build the film on that, that would be new, wouldn’t it etc.”. And then your process either carries that thinking through to the performance, where you can see it and where you as an audience become part of that renegotiation and can acknowledge that these are new terms, now conditions. So the performance then carries the terms of those renegotiations to various degrees – some spell it out and sometimes the terms of those renegotiations are more implicit.
Roland Quitt
It came to my mind that the first situation in the arts where process was really put into the foreground was probably Pollock’s action paintings. And when Pollock did his pictures there was this misunderstanding because someone made a film which showed how Pollock was painting whereas Pollock insisted that the pictures are the piece of art and not the performative situation of him dancing on the pictures and going around with all this colour. But, from this, performance art developed. While Jackson Pollock himself said that is is all about the pictures and even if we show the process it is the picture which is the art work, is was still a very, very big influence and somehow created performance art or was part of the creation of performance art. Performance art has become very important within today’s theatre. I mean, to me it seems it has almost overtaken theatre, traditional theatre, in some way. And performance is always process itself.
Nick Till
I mean, there may have been a hidden complex conceptual process in Jörg’s piece – well, there was – but the end result quite clearly didn’t, as it were, give us certain kinds of indications that we needed to understand that to understand the piece, whereas other pieces may be giving you indications that there’s something that you’re not understanding, and that’s when it can be frustrating because you’re aware there is a set of intentions here of understanding something, but you can’t quite piece them together.
On self-reflexivity
David Roesner
Do you feel that Composed Theatre often comes with a sense of self-reflexivity and a kind of meta-discourse, that is, is it particularly frequently about the relationship of music and theatre? To elaborate on this question briefly: Opera, for example, is often about human relationships and emotions, love stories, tragedies etc. whereas in Composed Theatre, it seems to me, the topic often is the relationship between the two media itself, or the act of composing, or the question about what constitutes music, composition, or performance.
Jörg Lensing
I think it’s not necessarily a question about a meta-discourse in the theatre performance itself. I really think it’s more a reflection on questioning the traditional workflow. I find that very important, because the traditional workflow results in certain aesthetics, and if you don’t like these aesthetics you have to question the traditional way of working itself. I think a lot of work, not only Composed Theatre, but also advanced theatre and intermedia theatre, find other models for the workflow, and the result is totally different from what you see in the traditional theatre. In Germany it’s interesting to see, for example, that the Schauspielhäuser (municipal theatres), now begin to import the kinds of workflows for example from the French theatre companies, in order to find something alternative languages to those they have established for a lot of years now since the Second World War. That’s a very interesting process.
On communication
David Roesner
I had one last complex in mind which is about communication. We talked a lot about concepts and we talked a lot about how you conceive your work. What I was wondering is, if you could comment on the communication process in the work. I mean, obviously in very few examples it’s all about one person and there’s kind of an internal communication, but actually all of your performances and projects include other human beings in whatever function – as co-designers, as performers, as co-composers and so on, and I was wondering whether you felt that in this area of Composed Theatre the collaboration and the communication were in any way different. Do they require different languages?
George Rodosthenous
I remember what Heiner Goebbels said two days ago6 about his experiences working with people he knows well: “I don’t have to talk” – I think that is really wonderful if you work with people you don’t need to explain your whole ethos, your whole principles, your whole aesthetics. Instead he can say: we don’t talk.
Matthias Rebstock
I think Nick said something very interesting on this in his lecture7, that because you had all these different people to deal with, you had to write scenarios, and because you had to write these scenarios the whole piece changed, because you had to fix them in a way, which you usually don’t.
Nick Till
To some extent, yes.
Matthias Rebstock
And do you mean writing scenarios in the classical way as instructions, someone coming on stage doing this or that, or what’s the scenario in your case?
Nick Till
Well, the scenario was two things: there was a sort of technical scenario and then there were lengthy verbal descriptions – such as “I want a noise like a train hitting a piano …”.
David Roesner
I think that’s really interesting, because we’ve talked about ways of structuring all the time, many of which were quite abstract, and now you’re saying that the descriptions of the sounds, the abstract objects, are in fact very much a narrative, quite metaphorical, full of images …
Nick Till
Yes, because that was the only way I could communicate to the guy who was doing the sound what sort of things I was wanting.
Roland Quitt
I have just a couple of things that came to my mind out of my work, which is not about working in theatre and that maybe not even have much to do with Composed Theatre. If you want to work together with people you have to find people who you don’t have to explain the basics to any more. I have often experienced this: the more successful people get in theatre the more they tend to surround themselves with a fixed team of people to work with. And if you are Joachim Schlömer and you are invited to come to Mannheim, then Mannheim will have to pay for all these people because otherwise he won’t come. He brings his own lighting designer and all these people with him. And you can experience that when you work with him that there’s some mutual understanding within this group of people and the way that they work with him. It’s just exactly what Heiner Goebbels described.
David Roesner
Thank you. I’m wondering, looking at the time, whether we should come to a close.
Roland Quitt
So, have we changed the world? (laughter).
Matthias Rebstock
The world has changed while we were talking here, we just didn’t notice (laughter).
(Transcription: Susan Lumb)
Note
1. More information on the workshop series can be found at http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/drama/research/projects/composedtheatre/.
2. Premiered in Lausanne, at the Theatre Vidy (2004).
3. See Jörg Laue’s chapter (6) in this book about his process or adaptation and transformation of materials.
4. See Nick Till’s chapter (9) in this book.
5. See Jörg Laue’s chapter (6) in this book.
6. See Heiner Goebbels’ chapter (4) in this book.
7. See Nick Till’s chapter (9) in this book.