What is Visual Theatre? (Please, stop it)

Definitions are a right pain in the hoop. Every year, when I attend manipulate, I work hard to try to explain visual theatre, and fail. My favourite attempt to make the distinction between dance and physical theatre - as part of a conversation that was trying to resolve the problem - is not mine: a practitioner grandly announced that it was simple. "One is abstract," he said, and paused. "The other isn't." 

is this a theatrical space?

Sadly, he didn't tell me which was which. Other intellectual quests for clarity (including 'what is art?') had met with similar failure. So, this year, I am going to go backwards. I'll look at the various performances from manipulate, see what they share, and conclude that visual theatre is simply 'theatre that gets programmed at manipulate'.

Before diving into the maelstrom, a few notes on how awkward definitions can be. 'Mighty Marvin' Carlson, the remarkably busy American academic is usually a good source for quotations, and in his book about Performance (2004), he explores the rise of performance art, mostly in the USA, and ties together some key themes.

On page 110, he notes that performance art features 'an interest in developing the expressive qualities of the body, especially in opposition to logical and discursive thought and speech.'

I'll be damned if this doesn't describe the choreography of Editta Braun, who presented Close Up on the first night of the festival. Her dancers didn't even face the audience, becoming strange creatures of multiple limbs and hunched spines. 

how about this?

He goes on to list a variety of 'body artists' - from Yves Klein and his writhing naked women in paint, to Nitsch and the Aktionists' 'Dionysian rituals'. And if Akhe's Gobo. Digital Glossary lacks Dionysian abandon, I'll happily buy Carlson a pint. In 1975, a panel discussion about performance art added that the space for performance 'is more often like a workspace than a formal theatrical setting'. Again, Gobo's stage looked like an abandoned laboratory, as Russia's answer to The Chuckle Brothers moved between props and scenery for a series of wild routines.

dance - or physical theatre?

It's not that Carlson fails to describe performance art, it's that his descriptions fit elegantly with the aesthetics of manipulate. I'll use his book to suggest that there is some kind of genealogy of visual theatre, even as I am aware that he intended no such comparison. But that a description of one art-form can be so easily applied to another brings me back to the problem of definitions. Where they are supposed to supply boundaries to limit considerations of art, they usually just make it worse...

Editta Braun (Vile thinking... so avoid, eh?)

Previously at Manipulate...

Editta Braun Company presented the first two shows in their trilogy (Luvos and Planet Luvos). Braun's signature choreography stretches the human body into apparently impossible shapes, inverting the expected limitations of movement and conjuring other-worldly creatures and stories.

Meanwhile at The Vile Arts...

I have become obsessed with epistemology. I now think I know what it means: the theory of knowledge. And I think I know what that means too...

I'm imagining a pair of teachers. One of them cannot move, the other cannot speak. They both have a single piece of information to pass onto their student. Because of their limitations, however, they have to find different ways to communicate.

This isn't the whole story, but it suggests one aspect of epistemology. The silent teacher will most likely use some form of physical process to communicate. The immobile teacher will use words. 

Both of methods will communicate the same information, but filter it in different ways. 

Braun's choreography operates in a disruptive manner. The contortions of her dancers don't just challenge the every-day possibilities of movement: they challenge the standard physical presentation of the human body. The climax of Planet Luvos saw the arrival of what one of my students described as penis bum monsters. That really ought to attract an audience.

But this description does not quite grapple with the emotional experience of seeing Luvos. Okay, the trickery and acrobatics are cool, but something else happens. I think it is to do with muscle memory.

There is an epistemology of dance - as Fleur Darkin off Scottish Dance Theatre said in an interview with The List, dance can express feelings in a unique manner. It gets inside the body. Watching dance causes a different reaction to watching a play.

get connected with own feelings, own memories, own phantasies, own ideas - triggered by our performance.


Just let yourself go 

CLOSE UP Dramaturgy: editta braun company

The virtuoso concert pianist AyseDeniz performs hers and Thierry Zaboitzeffs compositions at the grand piano in in her peculiar, idiosyncratic way, inspired by Chopin and Rachmaninoff. 

Four dancers - bodies in concert - enter the stage, creating a physical dialogue with AyseDeniz's performance, thus embodying and externalising the interior sounds and texture of the music. 

Lemur-like creatures, distorted, constricted and oppressed, invade the concert pianist’s perfectly harmonic world. As if even the artificially encapsulated high culture, where the pursuit of perfection often doesn’t leave any room for doubts, could not escape from human thoughts and every day’s worries. 

Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a foreshadow of the desire for free moving appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings. 

Fantastical lemur-like creatures - distorted, constricted and oppressed - invade the concert pianist’s perfect harmonic world, so that even the artificially encapsulated world of high culture, where the pursuit of perfection doesn’t leave any room for doubts, cannot escape from the tension of everyday cares and worries. Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a shadow of the desire for freedom, appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings. 

The five dancers’ moving bodies - sometimes individually, sometimes in pairs, sometimes a seemingly inextricable agglomeration of extremities - constitute and articulate the physicality and motivations of strange, otherworldly creatures. Are they the pianist’s alter egos or dark suppressed aspects of her soul? While she is playing, these beings become her fellow antagonists and collaborators. They are suffused by the dense, mighty live music and then are driven or tortured, hunted or released, by the sounds around them. They resist – and they react. 

What was the inspiration for this performance?
Very simple: I heard the pianist in the frame of a music-festival in Portugal and had images of a dance-piece happing around a grand piano, representing somehow the inner world of the pianist. Creatures enter her bubble, her closed world of classical music and cause some disorder ...

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I work with the composer Thierry Zaboitzeff and the dancers since many years - so I had just to convince AyseDeniz. And she was curious enough to dare the adventure.

How did you become interested in making performance?
I guess, something pushes me since I can stand on my legs, means, since my childhood.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Yes. I always work with improvisation as starting point. But for CLOSE UP we had a special magic experience: After three days only we did an improvisation of 45 minutes, guided by me from outside, and not only the dancers improvised, but also AyseDeniz on themes of Thierry Zaboitzeff. This is very rare for a classical pianist.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
To get connected with own feelings, own memories, own phantasies, own ideas - triggered by our performance.

Are there any other questions that might help me to understand the meaning of dramaturgy for you in your work?
Just let yourself go