100 by Stark Theatre
Select a single memory to epitomise you…
All others will be erased…
You have one hour to decide.
In 2013, Stark Theatre staged 100 at The Mackintosh Church, Glasgow. Directed by Iain McAleese, 100 was written by Petterle, Monaghan and Heimann who were influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marques and the literary style of Magical Realism . The outcome was a theme of life and death; of characters controlled by their pasts submitting to the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history.
Integrating choreography throughout, 100 was Stark Theatre’s most ambitious production. Conventionally structured, 100 remained postmodern in outlook: a conceit mimetically contemplating the defining characteristics of theatre as art seized in the present, bound by the past, and driven towards the future. For the performance, the choice of the Mackintosh Church had been a deliberate one: hitherto no theatre had been staged there lending the location a sense of transience, heightened by the awareness that the building, once a church, was in the process of slowly mutating into a museum, creating the ethereal ambience one associates with purgatory. This performance-as-event belongs to the space and makes the space perform as much as it makes the actor perform. Stark Theatre’s performance established a proper relationship with The Mackintosh’s Church, newly adding to its ordering system (church and theatre). The transitioning architectonic dramaturgy seemed to perfectly mirror the otherwordly journey of the characters within the play.
A glance upon entry of the performance area and the spectator was reassured upon sight of a familiar layout - a stage facing an audience. As they take their seats and take a second look, the spectator becomes aware that things are not as they may first seem: the props are in front of the raised stage. The raised stage is empty. The audience are plunged into darkness before a low stage-light throws up the area immediately in front of them. An actor, previously unseen, tentatively emerges from the audience, at all times feeling his way along the wall. As he enters the performance area, Laban movement is used to convey spatial confines (later used to present spatial relations between the performers and the audience). These movements are by turn tentative, slow, orthogonal, animalistic and monotonic. It is a dance movement representing different aspects of his body and that of all bodies as they adjust to the claustrophobic performance space - a dance which the spectator does not want to partake. The actor settles into repose, protruding his head into the audience front row staring for an unspecified time. The stillness in the room is complete.
A second actor from the audience walks purposefully on. Her movements are stricken with restriction. Unaware she is not alone her considered steps are intuitively shadowed by the first actor. Her sudden stillness conveys a dreaded realisation. She turns and, as if by a repelling force, both actors simultaneously jump back. A third actor runs onto the stage shouting unsettling the first actor who swiftly retraces his initial movements as he counts. It’s not clear what is being counted. Up to this point, the dramaturgy of body language has been used to hurl invective at a now disconcerted audience. This tension is relieved when a fourth actor, The Guide, emerges and reassures the audience with the dialectical qualities of dramaturgy to create a spiralling motion between fiction and reality (not perceived as an illusion). That reassurance is momentary.
The Guide is an authoritative figure. The audience realise that it is through her that they will establish some sort of narrative. However, it soon becomes clear she is unreliable. The Guide is an alienating character by turns grandiloquent, humorous, wise, sarcastic, domineering, empathetic, cynical and fearful. These traits are accompanied by a freedom of movement quite unlike that of the other characters. Her mode of speech forever changes. Her assertoric proposition is mistrusted and taken to be an evaluative judgement due in large part to her unpredictable behaviour and impenetrable façade. It is at this point that the Guide chooses to address the audience, explaining the rules of release, just when they have invested least trust in her. The Guide nevertheless captures the spectator’s imagination: they must choose one memory. Upon selection all others will be deleted. In that moment, the audience realise that this is about love and loss. The person least trusted in the room has tapped into the spectator’s greatest vulnerability at a time of maximum alienation. “Welcome to death” she intones to the audience much too close for comfort. Just then there is a flash of light to signify a successful memory selection event. Everything on-stage flattens. As our eyes adjust, the characters are transparently a mirror-image of the audience as types: the career person, the ethnic minority, the artist, the hopeless dreamer – a global village. That flash has connected the audience with the hapless characters onstage. The Guide encourages everyone to choose quickly as the next group will soon be here. To whom is she addressing? Not a moment too soon, we realise three things: The Guide is not a deity but a Manichean figure; this ethereal space is some sort of purgatory, and those numbers represent time…“13, 14, 15”…ontithelogical time; alternately compressed and stretched.
A number of dramaturgies are deployed to both collectivise and individualise audience members, covering dynamics, narrative and the evocative. The first of these addresses dynamisms, the rhythms, and the physical actions of the actors for spectator sensorial stimulation. This is demonstrated in 100 by the use of Laban movement and aural evocation combined with the converging ‘from-here-to-there’ and the ‘from-now-to-then’ movements to create, for example, the presence of a forest (rather than mere representation). The narrative dramaturgy intertwines the events which introduce the spectator to the performance meaning. This is generally facilitated by The Guide through her remonstrations with the other characters. In this capacity, The Guide, although not a ‘Brechtian Narrator’, seems to share that quality of respect for the resiliency of the human condition.
The remaining dramaturgy, the evocative, is the realisation of an intimate resonance within the spectator. The characters evoke our pity and our fear – neither wholly virtuous nor wholly vicious – as each learns both of their death and the circumstances leading to it: illness, suicide, accident. 100 plays with verisimilitude. The reification of the self through self-contemplation initially results in false truths due to self-editing which has eliminated the essence of the experience in favour of an unwitting superficial outcome. The Guide mocks and admonishes the characters for their conceits whilst increasingly failing to contain her agitation as she encourages acquaintance with their subconscious. This leads to the transformation of energised subjectivity into personalised objectivity. One by one, each character painfully confronts their unedited memory. In one scene, a polyglossia effect is used to create ‘the other’ as industrial ropes are menacingly tied around the character in distress - a hyponotic moment using Laban – whilst the remaining performers count in German, French, and Italian. It is a visual effect which breaks with audience expectation. It adds depth, conveys loneliness, and heightens the moment of death. In a different scene, The Guide uses mellifluous dramaturgy to play with religiosity. Delivering advice as hymn is humorous but it feels like an act of sacrilege. A sudden flash indicates a truthful memory. As their eyes readjust, one of their number has disappeared. Her memory will live on forever with her in it. Until this point, the dramaturgical relationship between The Guide and the remaining characters has maintained equilibrium, a linearity of sorts between the stress of one party and the strain of the other, like Hooke’s law. However, the characters now realise that the system The Guide has described does work. The relationship has now entered a ‘new regime’; there’s no going back. As the tension increases (“51, 52, 53”), those remaining are still no clearer in their understanding of who exactly The Guide is but fear of the unknown now means that the spectator sides with her.
The staging of the play offers a separate reality in order to suppress it. Throughout the duration of the performance lies a raised empty stage. As it progresses, the stage starts to feel oppressive. The spectator is confronted with absence: these characters cannot exist on two different planes. And if looking on from the outside, the audience exist on the raised stage; they are confronted by how forlorn it looks now - simultaneously a simulacrum of society and that which is left behind. This dispositif is based on a set of equivalences and oppositions: seeing and passivity, externality and separation, collective and individual, image and living reality, activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation. The evocative dramaturgy, therefore, is that of guilt and redemption.
As the end of the performance approaches, the spectator experiences catharsis as they watch ‘Alex’, alone on the stage with The Guide, fail to select a memory within the allotted time. Consumed by the present, ‘Alex’ fails to identify a meaningful past and secure his future. The more the audience and The Guide will him to succeed, the more condemned he becomes. This is literally true for ‘Alex’: the past is an empty stage and the future is unseen behind an all-consuming present (“The more man contemplates, the less he is” 13 ). The numbers ratchet up “88, 89, 90…CHOOSE!” implores The Guide as much to the spectator as to ‘Alex’. The dread of the approaching unknown consumes all within the room. It’s in their memory-less heads. And then the revelation: The Guide is a homo-sacer; ‘Alex’ of a previous cohort. “98, 99…time’s up” the title of the play is never uttered. Finally, the last piece of dramaturgy plays out: circular dramaturgy. The Guide walks through the audience. She has been expecting you.
1. Petterle, D., Monaghan, N., Heimann, C., (2003), 100, London. Nick Hern Books.
2. Stanier, P., (2001), Re:Location. The Use of Space in Contemporary British Experimental Theatre. Body, Space & Technology. [Online]. (1:2). Available from: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol0102/papers.html [Accessed: 08/12/15].
3. Lehmann, H., T., Primavesi, P., (2009), Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds, Performance Research. (14:3). pp3-6.
4. Cash, S., (2013), The Shape of Space: Laban Movement Analysis as a Methodology for Dance Dramaturgy. Canadian Theatre Review. Volume 155. pp29-32.
5. Allern, T.H. ., (2008), A comparative analysis of the relationship between dramaturgy and epistemology in the praxis of Gavin Bolton and Dorothy Heathcote. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. (13:3). pp321-335.
6. Delgado, M., Heritage, P., (1996), Peter Brook, In Contact With The Gods. Manchester & New York, Manchester University Press.
7. Davie, M., (1992), The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle’s Poetics. St. Augustine's Press. p3.
8. Fabian, J., (1990), Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing, Critical Inquiry. (16:4). pp. 753-772.
9. Arfara, K., (2010), Aspects of the New Dramaturgy of the Spectator, Performance Research. (14:3). pp112-118.
10. Lessing, G., E., (1962), Hamburg Dramaturgy. New York. Dover Publications.
11. Heyman, J., (2008), Elements of Stress Analysis. USA. Cambridge University Press.
12. Williams, D., Allsopp, R., (2006) T-Z Theatre of the Void, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts. (11:3). pp127-145.
13. Rancière, J, (2009), The Emancipated Spectator. London. Verso.
100 was performed 27th, 28th June 2013 at Mackintosh Church, Glasgow before going on tour in October 2013.