Pan Pan Theatre Company

Noelia Ruiz

Introduction

When Pan Pan Theatre was formed, in 1991, the theatrical landscape in Ireland was primarily dominated by the Western form par excellence: the dramatic text. Apart from Operating Theatre, created as a contemporary music-theatre company in 1980 by Olwen Fouéré and Roger Doyle, the experimental performance scene had little representation on Irish soil.

Ireland had produced many outstanding playwrights, but outside the dramatic frame there were very few companies devising original work. And even then, the general inclination was towards physical theatre in its different forms, as it was the case of the works of Tom Mac Intyre in the eighties, Sligo’s Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, formed in 1991, and companies such as Barabbas or Loose Canon created later in the nineties. But there were no precedents in Irish theatre of a company led by conceptual art.

According to Gavin Quinn, co-founder and co-artistic director of Pan Pan, there was a reason why this type of work had not been prolific in the country. “Well, there was never an avant-garde in Ireland because we were quite small, we weren’t industrialised, we missed industrialisation and therefore the slow development of the economy, and the slow development of other aspects of society led to conservatism and parochialism. So our path was quite different than other European countries and all the great Irish artist tended to do it by exile, sort of create in exile.”

The initial drive behind the company was the desire to create theatre more in tune with continental European aesthetics. “We started Pan Pan because we weren’t really interested in any theatre that was being made in Dublin at the time. We were just interested in starting a company that would make theatre like the French model of theatre art, as opposed to the craft of making theatre, which was prevalent at the time. So the company started to explore those ideas of a more European aesthetic and the simple idea of theatre being conceptual, and very much a medium where you could use the kind of visual arts principles of line, form, colour. And that was the reason why it began.”

Apart from the avant-garde, Quinn acknowledges specific inspiration from the Cartel, a group created in 1927 by Parisian directors Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Gaston Baty and Georges Pitoëf with the aim of renovating the theatre scene, particularly reacting against commercial theatre and what they called “théâtre de boulevard”. “There was this idea of conceptual theatre, of theatre being free, theatre being whatever it needs to be, theatre being idiosyncratic and very much an art form as against just a craft, because the complication of theatre has always been this need to sell tickets and its success is seen through the number of audience that go and see it.”

Indeed, making this type of work in Ireland in the early nineties was courageous and hardly box-office oriented. For Quinn, though, it is the responsibility of theatre makers to create work outside established parameters: “Generally speaking the people who make theatre are probably more conservative than the audience – it’s not the other way around, as people would necessarily think. If it isn’t there to look at – if the environment is not there – it is very hard for [audiences] to appreciate.”

Quinn might have a point. Since the designer Aedín Cosgrove and Quinn founded the company, as graduates from Trinity College Dublin, they have created 23 theatre and performance pieces, toured their work worldwide, and received multiple national and international awards.

The symbiosis between director and designer produced an experimental theatre company without precedent in Ireland, and it has been precisely this lack of precedent that has freed them to establish their own.

Pan Pan’s experimental drive insists on a constant evolution and the company’s projects vary immensely in form, content and approach. Thus, some of their shows are adaptations of – or, more accurately, “responses” to – classical dramatic texts such as Macbeth (which they interpreted as MAC-BETH 7 (2004) or Hamlet (staged as The Rehearsal. Playing the Dane in 2010); or to canonical material like the myth of Oedipus (Oedipus Loves You, 2006) co-written by Simon Doyle and Gavin Quinn, which initially was conceived as a collection of songs with sound designer Jimmy Eadie.

Other works are original shows created in collaboration with different artists, such as One: Healing with Theatre, which started as a photographic project, evolved into a documentary film and finally became a performance/installation piece. These have been hallmarks of a company that seeks new challenges, taking risks in a constant investigation of theatre and possible languages of performance. It is how Pan Pan has developed its own signature.

From Negative Act to Pan Pan International Theatre Symposium

Pan Pan’s fascination with the avant-garde was conspicuous from their first production, Negative Act, written and directed by Gavin Quinn, which was premiered in the Lombard Street Studio Theatre (now Green On Red Galleries) and performed later that year in Lyon International Student Festival, France. It was inspired by The Futurist Synthetic Theatre manifesto by F. T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli and Bruno Colla (1915), an idiosyncratic manifesto that urged succinctness in time, word and action; broke with Aristotelian unities and most other theatrical conventions; and stressed the reality-blurring qualities of theatricality.

The search for theatricality – its essential quality that makes it different to any other art form – had started during late nineteenth century modernism, when Adolphe Appia developed his ideas on scenography, space and the human body, but more specifically in the use of lighting. Along with Edward Gordon Craig, they were very influential in the next generation of theatre makers who explored similar concepts, understanding the stage as a sensual exploration, aiming to create an atmosphere through action, words, line, colour and rhythm⁷¹². Craig’s idea of the Über-Marionette, or the ideal actor, highlighted the actor’s presence as the ‘producer of theatricality and the channel through which it passes’⁷¹³ to the audience.

Negative Act, says Quinn, “was a very abstract notion of four characters, in which one kept writing away from the other three. The title comes from the notion of doing nothing, the idea of nothingness, so the play itself was about nothing. Just using time onstage and being very much about building a language from nothing.”

The avant-garde influence was also present in their next two productions, The Crystal Spider, written by French pioneer of anti-realistic drama Madame Rachilde in 1892, and The Man with Two Kisses, based on the play by the Polish avant-garde playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun, written in 1922.

Both productions would further define Pan Pan’s trajectory. Witkiewicz, came from a visual arts background, and his main aim was to create thematic abstractions onstage by dismissing conventional form. His dissertation An Introduction to the Theory of Pure Form in the Theater is a testimony of the avant-garde rebellion against psychological realism. In general, Witkiewicz plays seem to distil an unreasonable logic with the aim of creating a distance from any concrete association with reality. These traits would also go on to become a feature of Pan Pan’s aesthetics, not only in terms of form, but also thematically and with regards to acting style. For Quin:

These two performances were looking pretty much at the early twentieth century experimental writing, especially writing for the theatre that was linked to literary movements and visual arts movements, symbolism and, I suppose, expressionism. Symbolist drama is essentially about creating a unique atmosphere, which isn’t necessarily surreal or real, and very much about connecting time, obviously theatre being classically a time-based art. We also focused a lot on talking to an audience directly, not in a Brechtian way but just actually communicating to an audience, to that moment when they wish to watch.

Their next play, Martin Assassin of his Wife. A Deaf Opera for Theatre, premiered in Project Arts Centre in 1994 and went to The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. It was the first of a few collaborations with other writers. That same year Pan Pan created A Bronze Twist of Your Serpent Muscles for the Brouhaha International Arts Festival in Liverpool, which was awarded Best Overall Production in the first Dublin Theatre Fringe Festival, and was also presented in Imaginaire Irlandais Festival, La Friche de Belle Mai, Marseille, France. It was described as “A study of decay, madness, erotic perversion and complex psychopathic personalities told through mime, dance and music.”⁷¹⁴

Thematically there was already a pattern growing in which the darkest and most solitary places of the mind and its consequent social and personal dysfunctions are manifested in chimerical environments. This would become one of Pan Pan’s thematic traits, as well as the use of live music on stage, which in this particular piece was played by the band The Idiots.

In only three years Pan Pan had created a name for themselves, and packed houses reflected a thirst for such innovative theatre pieces. The company not only defied dramatic form, but any labelling. Their shows were more identifiable by an eerie visual language in which images were constantly altered, at times frantically, along with the estrangement of silence. Their next show, Tailors Requiem, 1996, premiered at the L’Imaginaire Irlandais Festival France in 1996, and was subsequenty presented in Project Arts Centre, the Dublin International Theatre Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Spectrum Festival Austria and Riksteatren Festival Stockholm, Sweden.

Touring around continental Europe not only had an influence on their own practice, it also encouraged Quinn and Cosgrove to bring their new discoveries home, and, in 1997 they produced and directed The Pan Pan International Theatre Symposium, which took place initially biennially and then annually until 2003. It was driven by a will to show contemporary groundbreaking work that didn’t reach Irish stages. Quin notes:

We just decided we’d make an idealistic festival, since we started off as an idealistic company,” says Quinn, “so we brought five or six companies for the whole week where they could perform, watch other performances, and attend workshops and other kinds of engagements, having engaged discussions about theatre, and ask the question which Brecht said every generation has to ask, the question of what theatre is. Then it developed into a much bigger festival until finally we produced something like eight performances from all kinds of companies from around the world. We combined old companies and new companies, so we would have actors from Theatre du Soleil and Big Art Group from New York, La Carnicería from Madrid, or Última Vez from Belgium. This combination of old and new was interesting. And then we would try to mix the Irish companies in with all that, sometimes commissioning them to make new work, sometimes interacting with the international companies. It became a very interesting, sort of well-attended, very rich week. It became so big, though, that we decided we’d better park it because it’s good when something is very successful just to end it. Our plan is perhaps in some way in the future to sort of re-ignite it again. It’s very interesting for theatre artists to create festivals, as against them all being created by large institutions or, let’s say, producers.

The type of work showed during the symposia was mostly in line with contemporary European theatre aesthetics as developed since the seventies, which have been recently labelled as Postdramatic Theatre by Hans Thies Lehmann⁷¹⁵. Lehmann understands postdramatic as a theatre that ‘is confronted with the questions of possibilities beyond drama’. The term is closely related to the postmodern stance. In the arts this stance is manifested in certain traits like collage, montage, parody, irony, juxtaposition, self-reflexivity, and the overlay of popular culture and high cultural references, which is often manifested in a mix of styles, and a reflection on intertextuality. Any modernist master narrative or teleologism is nullified, together with any certainties, and a new relativism and cynicism permeates the postmodern standpoint. In theatre and performance the abandonment of traditional dramatic structure is an analogy to the rejections of those master narratives in favour of disjointed ones. Many of these characteristics are very palpable in postdramatic work, along with a focus on audience experience versus passive observation, highlighting the liveness of performance: the unique and unrepeatable encounter between audience and performers.

This type of work would have an impact on the evolution of Pan Pan’s aesthetics. For instance, in the early 2000s there was a proliferation of technology as theatrical medium, especially the use of live video and projections, which was prominent in much of the work shown in their last Symposium. The use of technology reinforced disjointed and simultaneous actions onstage, pointing at interrupted but concurrent narratives. The performance mode defied the idea of “character” in favour of the performer’s presence and unaffected delivery, leaving no room for any dramatic artifice.

In Pan Pan’s MAC-BETH 7, which premiered in Project Arts Centre in 2004, these traits are conspicuous, and some of them would recursively appear in future productions. Live projections took place on TV screens aligned in a column, featuring different pages of the script–some of those covered in worms–which were manipulated live by highlighting some of the lines, scribbling, or covering them with dead flowers. Onstage and background actions were also projected simultaneously, along with other images related to the central topic of greed and the seven deadly sins.

The set design allowed for a multiplicity of meanings, complementing the fragmented performance text, in which a Leaving Certificate analysis of the play was included, representing the Macbeth known to the majority of an Irish audience through the secondary school State examination. This intertextual and self-referential device would also become a feature in Pan Pan’s work. To reinforce the point, the set had the air of a classroom, with school desks at both sides of the stage and with the actors dressing as secondary school students with a playground seesaw in centre stage supporting the point. Upstage, a long booth made of fibreglass, subverted the idea of privacy, perhaps pointing at the tenets of reality TV in which the personal is made public.

The seven performers alternated between roles, this being signified by change of costume and scenic action. The exception was an eight-year-old girl who played Hecate, the queen of witches. The use of a variety of styles included opera, which served to deliver some of the most heightened moments in the play, adding to the disengaged performance mode that since MAC-BETH 7 has become a trademark of Pan Pan, and which was probably influenced by Quinn’s direction of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in 2002, which was nominated for Best Opera Production in The Irish Times Theatre Awards.

MAC-BETH 7 was very well received in Ireland and abroad, marking a highpoint in the trajectory of Pan Pan and consolidating their aesthetics as a company.

Pan Pan’s aesthetics: performance style, scenography and themes.

Although Pan Pan is in constant evolution and their projects vary immensely in form, content, and approach, they are all driven by the two basic principles of audience experience and a manifest conception of a specific atmosphere. This is achieved by their mise-en-scène and performance/acting mode. Like Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players, Pan Pan has developed a unique style in terms of the quality Quinn seeks in actors, and in this sense it has been compared by Ben Brantley in The New York Times to Lars von Triers: “a largely affectless acting style that recalls the Dogme school of film”.⁷¹⁶

“Well, it’s very particular,” Quinn says of Pan Pan’s acting style. “I have worked with actors for a long time and you are looking at what’s interesting. For some actors it’s their personality. For others it’s the personality plus the way they act. For others is just developing a notion. Acting evolves and it becomes more contemporary, trying to get reality into acting, which is not about being naturalistic or about being symbolic or about classic acting, it’s getting liveness into acting and releasing something from the performer. So it’s really a mixture of the idea of presence, and the idea of personality and the idea of theatre in itself: how people can objectify and get outside themselves. I think it’s also about making them want to be on stage, not just pretending to be onstage or lying when they are on stage or hiding the fact that they are onstage. There is really no one-way of describing it. Some of the actors think that it is just that I don’t want them to act, but that’s not true, because they are acting anyway.”

Many contemporary theatre makers use the word “task” to describe how actions onstage should be addressed with a spontaneity that seeks the quality of improvisation or unpredictability to achieve realness as opposed to rehearsed repetition. Quinn’s approach draws from the idea of task but he takes a step further in demanding from the actors a connection with the audience, bringing the spectators into the world of the play. This is done through direct address and by treating the spectator as an accomplice by means of exchanged glances, for example, encouraging them to decide what the performers are actually thinking. Thus, dialogues get filtered through the audience, through the acknowledgement that it is their perception that ultimately gives meaning to the situation at hand.

This dramaturgical strategy is explained by Lehmann as turning “the level of the real explicitly into a ‘co-player’”, with the aim of producing a certain ‘indecidability’ between reality and fiction.⁷¹⁷ For Lehmann, “the aesthetic distance of the spectator is a phenomenon of dramatic theatre; in the new forms of theatre that are closer to performance this distance is structurally shaken”.⁷¹⁸

“We’ve always focused on the audience,” says Quinn, “how we can be clear to an audience, how we can establish and re-establish that contact, and how we can have this really good atmosphere between the audience and this interesting exchange of energy. It’s all about completion, to be completed by the audience.” Lehmann categorises this approach as “the production of situations for the self-interrogation, self-exploration, self-awareness of all participants. (…) a reversion of the artistic act towards the viewers takes place.”⁷¹⁹

The visual style of Pan Pan seems to subscribe to postdramatic aesthetics as well. The underlying concept is the design of a world, not according to symmetrical structuring and logic but rather to a metonymic use of space: “we can call a scenic space metonymic if it is not primarily defined as symbolically standing in for another fictive world but is instead highlighted as part and continuation of the real theatre space.”⁷²⁰

This spatial dramaturgy is possible by the combination of scenography and performing practice, which work symbiotically and become – like the audience- a co-player. This was specifically played with in The Rehearsal. Playing the Dane where from the very beginning the division between audience and performers is rescinded. To start with, a rehearsed reading of the text takes place, and a member of the audience is asked at random to read one of the characters. Next, the audience is confronted with an audition for the character of Hamlet – which is a reflection on all the possible Hamlets scholarly research and theatre productions have portrayed – with Quinn and his team onstage auditioning the possible candidates (there are three). The actors not only performed as if it was a real audition, but also talked about their real relationship with the play and the main character, stereotypically one of the most coveted parts by male actors. Subsequently, the spectators were asked to cast the Hamlet that would play the part for the rest of the show, by making them walk onstage and stand next to the actor they preferred. The boundaries between real and fictional spaces where blurred and the audience was made responsible—or at least self-aware—of their choices, feeling perhaps the sense of success or failure actors go through when they get or do not get a part.

Most of Pan Pan’s productions achieve a similar effect by acknowledging the place the audience and performers inhabit: a performance space. To emphasise this, the visual dramaturgy is often purposely flawed, allowing for the lack of concealment on stage in which the actors change costumes, manipulate lighting–as in The Crumb Trail were overhead projectors were used—or other devices–such as smoke machines in The Rehearsal. Playing the Dane—openly exposing the theatrical tricks, or ‘the triumph of theatricality over illusionism’⁷²¹. This is further enhanced by the use of elements such as props that are sometimes random, other times semiotic and, like an ideogram, express the idea of something without referring to it directly. Similarly to MAC-BETH 7, in The Rehearsal. Playing the Dane Victorian ruffs and candles were sufficient to suggest an epoch, co-existing with oversized metallic bins, along with a parodic wink to the double meaning of “Dane” by having an actual Great Dane dog onstage, which also appeared on the productions publicity images.

In Oedipus Loves You, The Crumb Trail and The Rehearsal. Playing the Dane, the stage ends up cluttered with all sorts of objects, perhaps symbolising the remains of the troubled minds that they represent. At the same time, this juxtaposition and density of signs forces the audience to choose what piece of information to pay attention to. This “retreat of synthesis”⁷²² emulates the ways of contemporary life in which the overabundance of information and stimuli – especially through media – renders the perceived world utterly impossible to assimilate as a whole, forcing a “parcelling of perception”⁷²³.

If an impression of disparity prevails in Pan Pan’s work, this is intentional, not because it is in line with contemporary approaches to theatre aesthetics, but because it reflects our apprehension of a world addled by superabundant information. Furthermore, these strategies are always embedded in the subject matter at hand, in their tendency to explore the obscure sides of human beings.

Oedipus Loves You transposed the Theban family trilogy to contemporary suburbia, portraying a peculiar dysfunctional family in which Tiresias, the blind prophet, is the family counsellor. The set created by Andrew Clancy resembled that of MAC-BETH 7, with a large booth made of fibreglass upstage, divided in three sections representing the kitchen, Jocasta and Oedipus’ room and Antigone’s. It combined the parody of a family home with the feeling of a mental institution in which the booth compartments resembled both small secure cells and isolation booths in a recording studio. Downstage we found a semi-yard, semi-living room with a barbeque, an inflatable pool, armchairs, musical instruments, microphones and other random objects. The chaos of the psyche and its multiplicity were reinforced by two screens above the set, one of them used by Quinn who stood in a sort of DJ cabin next to the sound operator, mocking the scenic action with little figurines while giving instructions to the actors either through messages written and projected on the screen, or through the headphones the actors wore intermittently. This Deux ex machina strategy connects clearly to the idea of fate in Greek mythology, while the text establishes links between myth, psychoanalysis and the impossibility of understanding either the human psyche or life’s contingency. Ultimately, it is made clear by Pan Pan’s reflection that Jocasta’s death and Oedipus’s blindness relate to a metaphorical state of the soul before the complexities of existence, in a world that is becoming more and more subdued by the values of mediated popular culture.

The Crumb Trail dealt again with the topic of dysfunctional families, reflecting on the cynicism of detachment brought by media in our lives. It developed and premiered in the Hebbel Theater in Berlin in the summer of 2008. It was conceived as an installation/performance piece exploring the isolation of floundering for survival in a mediated world in which we try to fulfil our identities. Thus, Hansel and Gretel find themselves lost in a dark forest of media that encompasses projections, live video feed, live You Tube clips and seedy Internet chat rooms. The suggestion of incest through a sex chat room subtly made a comment on child pornography and abuse over the Internet, with a reflection again on those solitary and darker places of the mind. Furthermore, and for anyone living in Ireland, it is hard not to establish a connection to recent State cases against the Catholic Church for child abuse.

The use of lighting through overhead projectors enhanced this idea of dark shadows in human nature. The use of media technology was finely tuned in the dramaturgy being to an extent its central theme. At the same time, the exploration of disconnectedness from reality that virtual worlds create in our lives, played along with the apparently disconnected sequences the script is divided into, and with the scenic action, in which the characters seem unable to communicate to each other in the same space: the family home.

Despite its comic and parodic elements, the piece’s dominant tone was poignant and violent. As Quinn recognizes, “It was a dark piece. It’s about people being alone in their rooms and that particular consciousness reaching out, but actually I think the whole piece is about being lost and asking the philosophical question, can anyone be lost in today’s world where you can find anyone in maps, or through GPS? And the other notion: as we are becoming more connected are we becoming less connected? So we are looking at the philosophical heartstrings and the philosophical idea of how we place ourselves and that gave it a very dark atmosphere.”

Another usual device of Pan Pan is self-reference, for instance when The Crumb Trail was showed in Project Arts Centre in the very first scene one actor read a review from The New York Times (where it had been staged in PS 122 before coming to Dublin). In their staging of Hamlet, the performance opens with a scholar onstage lecturing on the interpretations of the text, similarly to MAC-BETH 7. In this sense, Pan Pan also often plays literally with intertextuality, weaving texts from different sources such as The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex by Sigmund Freud in Oedipus Loves You, or Beckett’s Endgame in The Rehearsal Playing the Dane, and the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia in The Crumb Trail.

Finally, another of Pan Pan’s traits is their use of time, which is closely related to their performing style, turning real time into an object of experience. In The Crumb Trail, Oedipus Loves You and The Rehearsal. Playing the Dane, the mise-en-scène defies fictional time frames by presenting a continuity of action onstage. Even entrances and exits, which are rare in Pan Pan’s work, are not used traditionally to demark a change in action, space or time. For Quinn the use of the fourth dimension relates both to performance style and dramaturgical choices. In terms of acting, the actors are in charge of their own use of time during the performance, according to their own sense of the specific moment. They are not exactly improvising, but reacting to the energy produced by the random encounter between an audience and themselves within the context of the performance event. On the other hand, Quinn also finds that time opens “dramaturgical doors to different dimensions. (…) it means that you can suddenly switch, you can move, you can flow past into the next idea without having to build all the building blocks along the way.”

In their productions this might give a sense of disconnectedness between actions, interruptions that might take place by means of the performers suddenly playing live music onstage (another Pan Pan feature) as in Oedipus Loves You and The Crumb Trail; or a radical change in pace.

Finally, time in Pan Pan has an extra layer. Their performances are in constant flux from inception to the opening throughout touring, playing with the idea of time and liveness by making them co-players of the dramaturgy. Performances not only change from night to night given the nature of the way they work, but from context to context as they tour, in a sort of theatrical plasticity.

Pan Pan since its inception has always interrogated the nature of theatre, evolving through fearless experimentation, finding their own stamp within the contemporary milieu of performance aesthetics. One of their greatest achievements is perhaps the ability to be in tune with trends but still have their own trademark and create performance experiences that are very different in form and approach.

This type of work has at times been difficult to digest in Ireland. For Quinn their reception in their home country “comes and goes. For some performances we’ve given people feel they don’t understand the meaning, because there is an obsession with meaning – as if everything was so straightforward. So in some performances people think that it is too strange or too difficult. Most of the performances we’ve given have been reasonably popular in one sense. Oedipus Loves You was popular although it was probably more popular abroad than it was in Ireland.”

The radio play All That Fall by Samuel Beckett (Project Arts Centre, Dublin, August 2011) is a testimony to that. It had the unmistakable mark of a Pan Pan show by creating a very specific atmosphere achieved by the combination of the superb set and lighting design by Cosgrove, and the precise audio performance and editing by Quinn. The bare space was covered with a kids-design carpet on which rocking chairs where placed in scattered patterns, reminiscent of the idea of decay. On them the audience found black cushions with the printing of a skull, an obvious reference to death. From the ceiling hung hundreds of light bulbs in a similarly dispersed way. Where we would normally see upstage, light beams formed a square and their illumination responded to the aural experience, moving with the wind, or emulating the shape of an oncoming train. The lead character’s steps matched the rhythm of the rocking chairs, and most of the sound effects were made by the same actors especially those of animals.

All these elements blended to create a shared experience with an atmosphere that gave a sense of rift through multiple spaces and times, real and unreal.

Extract From: No More Drama, edited by Willie White and Peter Crawley (2011)

Cross Reference: Fishamble, Blue Raincoat, Charabanc

See Also: Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice, eds. Charlotte McIvor and Siobhán O’Gorman, 2015