For thirty years, between photograph and video, and beyond, I have been involved in devising performances that are not primarily reliant upon the exposition of dramatic literature, upon the staging of plays. In a succession of companies - RAT Theatre, Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, Brith Gof, Pearson/Brookes - I have helped create works of theatre which have been described variously as 'physical', 'experimental', 'devised', 'site-specific', 'time-based art', forms and genres which are now commonly grouped together as 'performance'. These have often been uneasy with text, occasionally non-verbal, communally composed, dependent variously upon the physical and vocal capacities of performers, the articulation of dramatic material through compositional procedures of structuring and ordering, and the elaboration of scenic and technical devices of manifestation. And if they have survived, it is as the anecdotes and analects of shared experiences and as collective memories within an oral culture.
From the outset, mine was a work of synthesis, a drawing together of impressions, influences and fragments of technique. I well remember trying to emulate the contortions of Ryszard Cieslak in the photographs in Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre (1969) on the mouldy carpet of our student flat. We were influenced by the work of American groups such as the Living Theatre (Rostagno with Beck and Malina 1970; Biner 1972), the Open Theater (Pasolli 1970; Chaikin 1972) and Richard Schechner's Performance Group (Waldman 1972), by the first generation of British fringe companies including Freehold, the People Show and the Pip Simmons Group (Time Out 1971; Hammond 1973) and by peer groups in the universities of York and Keele. All offered alternatives to conventional practice and seemed to align theatre with the aspirations of the radical politics and the burgeoning youth culture of that period. We were also taken with the work of Erving Goffman and the rearticulation of some of his sociological notions of 'front' and 'region', themselves drawn from theatrical models (Goffman 1971a). The influence of R.D. Laing's psychoanalytical work (1965, 1971) now seems less easy to admit. Haltingly we began to make theatre; on some impulse we worked silently. We concocted a training regime from the exercises of the Royal Canadian Air Force training manual, from Viola Spolin's Improvisations for the Theater (1983), and from what we gleaned from those visiting directors who were beginning to use workshop practice as part of their rehearsal procedure. And thus we created Odyssey. Upon graduation, I left archaeology for a life in theatre.
For an equal amount of time I've been trying to find useful ways of understanding and describing what is, or was, going on in performance. And this has always been a political project to justify and authenticate pursuits which have none of the seemliness or common sense of presenting plays in playhouses, pursuits which are easily ignored as invisible or dismissed as ephemeral, illiterate, not serious and ultimately disposable by a critical discourse and by an academy which has favoured the literary analysis of the dramatic text.
Only in recent years has performance been recognised as a subject worthy of scholarly investigation. And whilst any record of such performance might help fuel an academic industry hungry for course innovation, it must surely also legitimise lives lived, careers" spent, in the creation of such transitory occurrences.
MP