Devising 2 Logbook 2: The Wooster Group

The Wooster Group


Artistic Director: Elizabeth LeCompote 


Introduction

We have been looking at the Wooster Group and the devices they use to devise a piece of theatre using things such as theme, discourse, media etc. The different materials that they use rarely go together, but usually have some relation to the on stage action.

House/Lights

We viewed their performance ‘House/Lights’ which starred Kate Valk as the traditional narrator in the piece. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the piece and felt a bit lost at times but her character especially interested me. She was the picture of the perfect black and white movie star and at times she appeared as if she was part of the media. Ben Brantley from the New York Times wrote.

“And in the evening's master of ceremonies, the magnificent Kate Valk, we have a creature of astonishing artificiality, a tin-voiced 1930's-style beauty with marcelled hair and bee-stung lips who might be a digitally manufactured composite of movie stars. She's the ultimate screen siren, happiest in two dimensions.”

Ben Brantley (1999)

Even though her character was part of the madness she made me feel as an audience member like she could be trusted. She created an anchorage point for the audience to come back too.

Kate Valk in House/Lights (1999)

The Cherry Orchard & Classwork

“You don’t have to worry about meaning it’s all here it’s like this space is an extension of our lives”.

Page 51 Breaking the Rules:  The Wooster Group David Swan (1986)

What this quote is explaining is that we as actors and devisers may look at a space and say what can we add to realistically portray what we mean? We had a tendency to do this when working on the Cherry Orchard.

The Cherry Orchard

We have been working with The Cherry Orchard to create a piece in the style of the Wooster Group. What we have been doing so far has all been about creating a piece that looks good instead of just going with something. We were going to add a horror discourse to our piece, but we realised we were being too literal. We were just finding clips that were scary but we weren’t looking at the relationship to the cherry orchard. In this case we were taking the some of the devices of the Wooster group, but not really working in the style of Wooster group.

We started again with our plans for the project and really tried to go back to the tasks and get too the root of the Wooster group. We really had to focus on not getting a good mark but on getting to the bottom of their techniques. Once we did this I think we produced performance that with more polishing could have been really good.

I found working with the techniques of the Wooster group really hard as I found it difficult to understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. So I decided to do some research into their other projects to understand them further.

Route 1&9

Because I struggled to grasp what the Wooster Group was and what they were trying to do I decided to look into one piece that not only intrigued me but offended me at the first glance. With its bold images of caricatures of afro Caribbean people acting in stereotypical ways at first, I thought this was hugely racist something in league with ‘Gollywog’ toys. But after further research into the production it was apparent that it was rather a display of the stereotypes.

The images deemed as racist from 'Route 1 and 9' (1981)

In The Wooster Group and Its Traditions it says:

“At the time the group knew that the black face Pigmeat Markham sequence was objectively racist, but they believed it simultaneously assumed a confrontational stance towards the audience’s racism as well as their own, that it was an attack on self-congratulatory liberalism (Vawter, qtd. In Savran, 1988: 14)”.

Johan Callens (2004)

This explains that the Wooster Group was challenging the views of the audiences and themselves on what they think is racist and what isn’t. They were looking at how Afro- Caribbean people were viewed in that time, social and political culture and making people face what was happening, basically saying what no one else would say.

I think one of the reasons the show was jumped on and why their funding was dropped was that the culture wasn’t ready to face up to themselves and their own views. It made them uncomfortable to have to think about and so they condemned the company for simply stating and displaying the performance.

Conclusion

So In conclusion The Wooster Group is a company that is challenging the views of Performance and Theatre, with their techniques for devising. They may not be a company I would follow for devising purposes but I can respect them for the inventive work they do and the pieces they create.

Bibliography

SAVRAN, D. (1986) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. (P 51) United States, Theatre Communications Group Inc.

BRANTLEY, B. (1991) THEATER REVIEW; A Case For Cubism And Deals With Devils. New York Times, 3/2/1991, pg1. Available from: http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=980DE0DB1338F930A35751C0A96F958260 [28/12/2011].

CALLENS, J. (2004) The Wooster Group and Its Traditions. (P 165) Brussels, Peter Lang

Devising 2 Logbook 1: Forced Entertainment

Acting or Non-Acting

One of the first things we looked at when we started the Devising 2 Module was Michael Kirby’s Scale of Acting. It starts right at the bottom of the scale at Non-Acting which is basically every day movement with no heightened emotion almost a blank canvas. We looked at the idea that anything can be a performance. Someone walking down the street can be a performance. All you need is for someone to watch that person and then you have a performance, or at the top of the scale at Complex Acting, where the actor is actively seeking to become that character and to put across a really realistic performance.

We also looked at the matrix of a performance and how this relates to acting and non-acting. The Matrix is the performance and everything around it. When someone is Non-Acting they are on the outside of the matrix and the play and someone when is complex acting they are right in the centre of the play.

Michael Kirby's Acting/Not-Acting Continuum

I found this art of Non-Acting really hard because I was stuck in the conventional way of if I’m on stage I need to be acting. Because of this I found myself constantly fighting for the limelight or the chance to act because I felt uncomfortable just sitting there doing nothing. I also had a problem with blocking out my fellow cast members all because I felt uncomfortable not doing anything.

Forced Entertainment 

Next in the module we started looking at forced entertainment and the devising techniques they use to create a performance. At this point I had viewed two of their performances, Bloody Mess and The thrill of it all, and my opinion of them was low. I found them annoying, pointless, and I didn't call what they were doing on stage acting. After coming to the end of the module I have realised that what they create is innovative, clever and ground breaking. This is because they convey an issue to you and you don't even realise they are doing it because you spend so much time hating them and praying it will end.

We first looked at how they generate the material that they use for a performance and then seeing what techniques they use that work best for us. We looked at how they start with a structure and then they look at how they can tear the structure down and start playing with it. Play is one of their biggest techniques they take the material and run with it and change it and see where they can go. They record what they do so that they can watch it back and see what worked well and not so well.

“The work we make is definitely a group creation, made through a combination of free-play improvisation and discussions”

Forced Entertainment Information Pack (PG.4)

 We did something similar to this near the beginning of the module. We were given a script ‘Emmanuel enchanted’ as the structure and we were told that we had to come up with a performance using this stimulus. The group I was in created quite a chaotic piece as this is what we thought was the right thing to do. It was really like playing. Our only downfall in this was that we ended up almost completely ignoring the structure and ended up making something that was loud and chaotic but in the end made no actual sense and it had nothing for an audience to grasp onto.

Forced Entertainment are interested in failure and a lot of their performances are failing around them and they spend the whole performance trying to put it back together again. We showed this in our final performance, we had created a party space and we were desperately trying to show we were having fun. We had this juxtaposed against some dark scenes of a story of an attacking/murder and a very uncomfortable game of ‘Put your hand up if’. We also had a strong focus on the end and we kept trying to build up the end as if it was the most amazing thing.

I think our performance worked well, especially in the juxtaposition sections. The only thing that I think let us down was the fact that the ending wasn’t clear enough and it had nothing to do with what we were saying it was going to be. If I was to develop this piece further I think that I would spend some more time developing some of the stories especially the ‘Put your hand up if’ game. I felt that this could have been darker and had it been we would have produced a much more effective.

Now that this section of the module is over I leave with a more detailed and fresher outlook of Forced Entertainment and although I won’t be rushing out to watch a performance I now respect them for the sheer brilliance they create. 

Bibliography 

KIRBY, M. (1972) Michael Kirby's Acting/Non-Acting Continuum [Diagram]. In: The Drama Review (1972). New York, TDR, Vol.16, No.1, (pp 3-15)

Entertainment, Forced. (2011) Forced Entertainment Information Pack (pp.4-5)

 Forced Entertainment. (2008). Forced Entertainment: Making Performance [online video]. Available from: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/page/3010/How-we-work  [Accessed 21/11/11]