The Post-dramatic: Playwrighting, Scripting, and Devising.
Finally inspiration at last!
Forced Entertainment: 12am: Awake & Looking Down.
This unconventional post-dramatic performance, sees the audience immersed in a setting where there is arguably no linear story taking place and, instead rather as a spectator you are left with like many post-dramatic texts the freedom to make your own narrative. In many ways, Forced Entertainment’s 12am: Awake and Looking Down (1993) is something of a theatrical revelation that allows the spectator to assume complete control over what they are shown and perceive. The simple cardboard ascetic is somewhat humbling and allows a deeper meaningful connection away from the lights and spectacle of traditional bourgeois theater scene. In many ways, post-dramatic theatre, could be argued to be aimed at the intellectual who derives a deeper meaningful connection from a text that is not restricted by narrative or a fixed point in time. Time itself is a factor also as with most Forced Entertainment productions, the spectator is not confined to a fixed time and is free to stay as little or, as long as they desire with performances lasting anywhere from a few minutes to several hours at a time. This performance utilizes “five silent performers endlessly reinvent their identities using stacks of cardboard signs with which they name themselves, and a store of jumble-sale clothing (coats, dresses, suits, anoraks, trousers, pyjamas) from which they dress and re-dress. This catalogue of names range from LOST LISA and VALENTINA TERESHKOVA to ELVIS PRESLEY (THE DEAD SINGER) and THE MAN WHO WENT TOO FAR” (Forced Entertainment, 2016).
A still taken during performance.
This act of rebirth or reenactment could be interesting to explore in performance. I also enjoy the notion that in many post-dramatic texts characters is somehow second-hand and, instead the freedom of allocating this role is left to the reader, examples of this being Attempts on Her Life (1997). I feel also, post-dramatic texts usually draw on the mediatized culture and society around them. This idea of society is exemplified on stage within 12am: Awake and Looking Down, the reliance on the spectator drawing a relationship with the printed words on the cardboard with simple statements like, ‘A SCHOLAR OF THE OCCULT’, ‘A RICH MAN’ etc. I also feel the repeated motions on stage for example of a man running over and, over again on the spot clearly really going nowhere, adds to the surrealness of the events taking place on stage.
“12 am… is a physical and visual performance that explores the relation between object and label, image and text. 12 am… also functions as a kind of narrative kaleidoscope as the named figures, in different combinations, share space beneath the backdrop of electric stars. The piece plays on the growing exhaustion and inventiveness of its performers as they create new stories or juxtapositions between characters” (Forced Entertainement, 2016).
The aspect of ‘theatrical ghosting could be an interesting concept on which to develop with added elements that utilize theatrical teachings that are relevant to presenting a scholarly topic through performance.
Works Cited.
Forced Entertainemnt (2016) 12AM: AWAKE & LOOKING DOWN. Sheffield: Forced Entertainment. Available from http://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/12am-awake-looking-down/
Forced Entertainment (2014) 12am: Awake & Looking Down (clip) Essen, 2014. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljsUnsNcSjk [Accsesed 29 October 2016].