We are very pleased to confirm that the keynote speaker at the symposium will be Professor Anatoly Smeliansky, President of The Moscow Art Theatre School, and Honorary Patron of The Stanislavski Centre. His opening address will be followed by the Stanislavski Centre/Routledge Annual Lecture for 2016,“Быть гибким”/“Be Flexible”: Stanislavski’s and Knebel’s Legacy for Today’s Actors, delivered by Professor Sharon Carnicke, University of Southern California.

Speakers at this weekend event will include (subject to availability), Professor Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds), Professor Sergei Tcherkasski (St Petersburg State Academy), Dr Jan Hancil (AMU, Prague), Dr Rose Whyman (University of Birmingham) and Professor Andrei Malaev-Babel (Florida State University).

This event is sponsored by Routledge/Taylor & Francis and presented in partnership with The University of California Riverside.

To register your interest in attending or presenting at this event, please visit our webpage:

https://www.bruford.ac.uk/research/the-s-word-stanislavski-and-the-future-of-acting/

The S Word: Stanislavski and the future of Acting.

The symposium will take place between 18th and 20th March 2016, and the annual lecture will be given on Friday 18th at 19.00. Full details of the symposium, including booking arrangements will be published in September.

The 2016 lecture will be given by Professor Sharon Carnicke, Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages at the University of Southern California.

“Быть гибким”/“Be Flexible”: Stanislavski’s and Knebel’s Legacy for Today’s Actors

When traveling to the Soviet Union, my Russian teachers always advised me to “быть гибкой”—be flexible, roll with the punches, be ready for anything. This advice now strikes me as especially valuable for today’s actors as they cope with the dizzying rate of change in the conditions under which they work. Rapid innovations in the technologies that frame performances; new styles and modes of dramaturgy; seismic shifts in the ways that local actors ply their trade in the now global world—all these developments prove only that transition is a steady state. By looking to the past, actors can paradoxically face the future by turning good advice into concrete practices. The rehearsal technique that Konstantin Stanislavsky first initiated in secret during the worst years of Stalinism and that Maria Knebel then promoted during the Cold War provides twenty-first century actors with exactly the kind of adaptability they need. While neither Stanislavski nor Knebel could have imagined the linguistic soundscape of today’s actors, full of words like “teleprompters”, “CGI”, “selfies”, “mocap”, “4-D”, “webisodes”, “post-human drama”, etc., they have nonetheless left a strong legacy of dramaturgical principles and a system of improvisational etudes that allow actors the agility to work with new technologies, in new dramatic modes, and for new audiences. Drawing upon my research, especially with regard to cinematic performance capture, and my ongoing artistic practice with actors in the US and abroad, I will examine how Stanislavski’s and Knebel’s legacy trains actors to deal with change.

Sharon Marie Carnicke is Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the USC School of Dramatic Arts, and a founding fellow of USC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching. Fluent in Russian, she is the internationally-acclaimed author of Stanislavsky in Focus (now in its second edition), which lays bare the significant ways in which the American Method and the Stanislavsky System of actor training differ from each other. Reviews call her book essential reading for actors, directors and theatre scholars alike.

She publishes widely in the fields of acting on stage and film, Russian theatre, dance, and performance in the town festivals of Puerto Rico. Among her other publications are The Theatrical Instinct (about the avant-garde director Nikolai Evreinov), Reframing Screen Performance (with Cynthia Baron), her nationally-produced translations of Chekhov’s plays in 4 Plays and 3 Jokes (including the Kennedy Center award-winning translation of The Seagull), and Checking out Chekhov.

Her articles on film take readers beyond star studies to the actual work of actors, such as Jack Nicholson, John Wayne, Andy Serkis as Gollum and Elizabeth Taylor. Carnicke has worked professionally as an actor, director, dancer and master teacher of Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis. She regularly collaborates with the National Institute for Dramatic Arts (Australia) and the National Academy of Arts (Norway). Her speaking and teaching engagements have included: the Moscow Art Theatre (Russia), the Sorbonne and CNRS in Paris, the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan, the University of Helsinki (Finland) and the Institute for Theatre Research (Tampere, Finland). Her mission is to bring Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis to the 21st century professional actor. To this end, she has already adapted it for Cinematic Performance Capture Technology through a joint project with USC’s engineering school and funded by the National Science Foundation.

We are very pleased to announce that Professor Malaev Babel has joined the Advisory Board of the Centre. Acknowledged as a major authority on the work of the actor and director Yevgeny Vakhtangov, who joined Stanislavski’s company in 1911, and later ran his own studio, Professor Malaev Babel’s major publications include the two leading books on Vakhtangov’s work.

Andrei Malaev-Babel is the Head of Acting and an Associate Professor of Theatre at the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training in Sarasota, Florida. Mr. Malaev-Babel has served on the faculty of The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is a member of the international faculty and on the board of MICHA, the Michael Chekhov Association in New York City. Since 1997, Mr. Malaev-Babel has served as the Producing Artistic Director for the Stanislavsky Theater Studio (STS), an award-winning company and conservatory in Washington, DC. For STS, he co-adapted, directed and/ or played leading roles in productions such as Goethe’s Faust, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor, Brian Friel’s Fathers and Sons, Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. In 2000 he was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award as an Outstanding Director for the STS production of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Under Mr. Malaev-Babel’s artistic direction, the company received five Helen Hayes Award nominations and won two consecutive Helen Hayes Awards. His productions were presented at The Kennedy Center and The National Theater in Washington, DC, where he also appeared as a performer.

Mr. Malaev-Babel’s reputation as one of the leading experts on the Stanislavsky/ Vakhtangov/Michael Chekhov theater techniques, brought him special engagements and commissions from institutions such as The Smithsonian Institution, The World Bank, The Keenan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Russian Embassy in the US. He is working nationally and internationally, conducting workshops, presenting and performing for conferences, festivals and theater programs, including St. Petersburg Theater Academy (St. Petersburg, Russia), Volkov Theater Institute (Yaroslavl, Russia), The University of Windsor (Canada), Stanford University, Actors Movement Studio (New York, NY) and The Arena Stage Theater (Washington, DC), Young Vic Theatre (London, UK), Michael Chekhov Studio London (UK).

In July of 2001, Mr. Malaev-Babel’s one-man show Babel: How It Was Done In Odessa was presented by the United Nations in Moscow in support of the Red Ribbon AIDS Russia and CIS – Entertainment stars against AIDS campaign. The same year it was performed in Odessa, Ukraine at the Odessa Philharmonic and at the First International Literary Festival. Mr. Malaev-Babel’s production of My Mocking Happiness, based on Anton Chekhov’s original correspondence, opened the program of the 8th International Volkov Theater Festival in Yaroslavl, Russia in October of 2007. He is the author of the Guide to the Psychological Gesture Technique published in the 2003 Routledge edition of Michael Chekhov’s seminal book, To the Actor. Mr. Malaev- Babel’s groundbreaking volume of Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s heritage, The Vakhtangov Sourcebook, came out from Routledge in March of 2011. His Yevgeny Vakhtangov, the first English-language monograph on the Russian theatrical innovator, came out from Routledge in September of 2012.

Andrei Malaev-Babel is a graduate of the renowned Vakhtangov Theater Institute in Moscow, Russia. He trained and worked under Alexandra Remizova, co-founder of the Vakhtangov Theater, Stanislavsky’s student and Vakhtangov’s protégé.

On Monday 18th May, as part of our series of events exploring the role of the drector in 21st century theatre, The Stanislavski Centre welcomed Professor Vladimir Mirodan, Research Leader ,Drama and Performance at Drama Centre, London, and Chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain Trust, who gave a presentation under the title, Who Actually Behaves Like That? – A Reply to an Actor’s Question.

“Current acting orthodoxy values immediacy and spontaneity above most other histrionic virtues. To this is allied the popular cult of the mesmerising effect of personality, considered in recent books such as Joseph Roach’s It and Jane Goodall’s Stage Presence. The corollary is a flight from character as an entity distinct from the actor – character is defined exclusively as ‘passion-in-action’. This approach, the talk will argue, (mis)directs the concept of character away from social and psychological categories and in so doing is blind to the interpretative value of considering characters not only as individuals but also as representing a group. The talk will argue that a fully embodied character transcends questions of individual behaviour and motivation and acknowledges the ‘typical’ dimensions of character (Lakoff’s and Johnson’s ‘prototypes’). The paper therefore argues for an alternative (and older) understanding of character creation which is essentially mimetic and for an approach to acting that foregrounds a psychophysical transformative process.

At the same time, recent discourse has brought back into view long-abandoned (in drama criticism if not in the practice of theatre) Bradleyan approaches to character analysis based on inference and essentialism (e.g. Yu and Shurgot, eds., 2012); while applications to acting of principles derived from cognitive science have sought most helpfully to unify the two approaches of ‘character’ and ‘personality’ acting (Kemp, 2012).

The presentation therefore asks why this ageless debate refuses to go away and seeks answers beyond transient aesthetic fashion. At least one such answer, the paper argues, might be found in looking at the function of acting through an ethological perspective, within the context of recently-delineated frameworks derived from Deception Theory and Machiavellian Intelligence. Observed through this prism, a transformative process moves the act of theatre away from the naturalistic presentation of ‘behaviour’ and (back) towards an explicit, ‘designed’ theatricality in which acting is overtly ‘deceptive’, an aspect of the exercise and growth of social intelligence.”

Professor Vladimir Mirodan trained on the Directors’ Course at Drama Centre London, and has directed over 50 productions in this country as well as internationally. He holds an MA and a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. His PhD thesis was concerned with The Laban-Malmgren System of Character Analysis, the core subject around which all courses at the Drama Centre evolved. He has taught and directed in most leading drama schools in the UK and was, in turn, Director of the School of Performance at Rose Bruford College, Vice-Principal and Director of Drama at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and Principal of Drama Centre London from 2001-2011. He served for many years as Vice Chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain; on the Drama Committee of the Scottish Arts Council and on the Board of the Citizens’ Theatre. From 2000 to October 2006, he was Chairman of the Conference of Drama Schools and a Deputy Chair of the National Council for Drama Training.

The Stanislavski Centre is very pleased to announce an important new development for our Contemporary Directions project.

This unique project, which explores the changing role of the director in 21^st century theatre will be re-launched this Summer with the first of a series of new events – the distinguished British director, Mike Alfreds talking about his career (5th May, full details to follow).

Our new partner in the project is The Directors Guild Trust, part of the Director’s Guild of Great Britain, with whom we will be working on developing a range of exciting new events in 2015/16.

For further details about the DGGB, please visit their website at: http://www.dggb.org.

FROM STANISLAVSKI TO TODAY: A GENEALOGY OF ANALYSIS THROUGH ACTION, 1935-2015.  

Professor David Chambers

Professor of Directing, Yale School of Drama

The Rose Theatre, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance

Wednesday 15th April 19.00-20:30

This lecture, accompanied by archival photos, films and videos will trace the lineage of Analysis Through Action from Stanislavski’s last investigations in his Opera-Dramatic Studio down to the most influential Russian directors today.  As epochs of Russian theatre-making moved forward, this methodology evolved generation to generation, director to director. It begins with Stanislavski, is carried forward by his protégé Maria Knebel, emerges in full during the Thaw (Efros, Tostonogov et al), comes down to the Glasnost generation (Dodin, Ginkas et al), and is very much alive today in the thrilling works of avant-gardists Anatoli Vasiliev, Dmitri Krymov, and Yuri Butusov.  The elasticity and tensility of this mode of text analysis and rehearsing via études (channeled improvisations) is too little known in the English speaking world, and virtually unheard of in the profession.  Professor Chambers has been teaching and practicing this living process for five years at The Yale School of Drama; he will speak first-hand to the creative excitement, collaborative creation, and contemporary theatrical potential of Analysis Through Action.

David Chambers is a director, writer, and producer of theatre, opera, film, and television. His stage work has been seen on and off Broadway, at major regional theatres around the U.S., and theatres in Europe. He has staged numerous U.S. premieres of American, Canadian, British, and European plays and original translations at theatres such as Broadway’s ANTA, Circle in the Square, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, the Goodman Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and the Manhattan Theatre Club (of which he was an early co-founder). He has also directed half the Shakespeare canon and the major plays of Molière, as well as numerous other classical and modern plays. He has enjoyed long-term artistic relationships with South Coast Repertory in California where he was an Artistic Associate, Washington DC’s famed Arena Stage, where he served as Associate Producing Director and later as Producer, and the Yale Repertory Theatre as a resident director. In opera he has directed in venues including PS 122, the New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas, Bard Summerscape, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and The Prague National Theatre. Chambers is a Professor of Directing at Yale School of Drama; since 1987 he has taught everything from Shakespeare in performance for actors and directors to intensive text analysis of Chekhov to devised contemporary theatre. In addition, he founded The Meyerhold Project, a co-venture between Yale School of Drama and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts. This project, which spanned several years, ultimately created an independent production about revolutionary director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1926 landmark staging of Gogol’s Inspector General. The performance, complete with biomechanics, digital media, and internet rehearsing was presented in Russia, Holland, and the US. Continuing his pursuit of practical Russian theatre techniques Chambers is currently writing a book for London’s Routledge Press about Analysis Through Action, a directing and acting technique barely known in the west which is based on the last experiments of Stanislavksi and generationally revised up to today’s leading Russian avant-garde directors. In film he worked closely with producer/director Robert DeNiro on The Good Shepherd starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, and was the Producing Director of Shakespeare Now, a project of The Documentary Group in New York and LA. He has written book and lyrics for musicals, librettos for operas, and translation/adaptations of plays by Ibsen and Molière.

In September 2015, Professor Chambers will begin a term as Visiting Professor at Harvard University.

This FREE event is sponsored by Routledge

For further information, please contact Dr Paul Fryer, Head of The Stanislavski Centre (paul.fryer@bruford.ac.uk)

Monday 9th February Room C118  18:30-20:00

Anita Dobson is an award winning TV, Film and Theatre actor whose career spans more than 40 years. After training at The Webber Douglas Academy she worked in regional theatre including 17 months with the Glasgow Citizen’s company

Most famous for playing the role of Angie Watts in the BBC1 soap opera, EastEnders, (1986-1988), Anita has since appeared in countless theatre productions, including Calendar Girls, Hello Dolly, Vagina Monologues, and  Hamlet.  In 2003, Anita was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for her performance in Bryony Lavery’s Frozen at the National Theatre.

TV credits include The Bill, Casualty, Holby City, Red Dwarf, Split Ends, Dangerfield, Sunburn, Hotel Babylon  and The Last Detective, and she competed in the 2011 season of Strictly Come Dancing.

In August 1986 she reached No. 4 in the UK Singles Chart with “Anyone Can Fall in Love,” a song based on the theme music of EastEnders (written by Simon May). She has also released several other singles and albums with minor chart success.

Anita is married to Queen’s legendary guitarist Brian May.

This event is FREE

Seating is limited, so please contact me if you want to attend.

paul.fryer@bruford.ac.uk

Introduction

This paper contains reflections on two research projects documented by Rose Bruford College’s Theatre for Young Audiences Centre in 2011, its inaugural year. It is informed by my own experience as Chair of the centre and my role in developing the curricula for our new MA in Theatre for Young Audiences and the TYA[1] modules recently added to our undergraduate Acting and Actor Musicianship programmes[2]. Full accounts of the projects can be found on the TYA Centre website; for the purposes of this paper, here is a brief outline of each of them:

1. Acting Like Children: a three-day event, which examined the notion of portraying children and young people in work made for young audiences. Led by Jonathan Lloyd, Artistic Director of Polka Theatre ,  Jude Merrill, Artistic Producer of Bristol based company Travelling Light and Kevin Dyer and Nina Hajiyianni of Ellesmere Port based theatre company Action Transport Theatre. It took place at Rose Bruford College on 16^th April, The Egg in Bath on 12^th May and at Birmingham Rep on 21^st June 2011. The events were attended by individuals and companies within the sector who wanted to explore and consolidate their practice and included contributions from leading directors, actors, theatre makers and writers working in the field.

2. Acting For Children: an ongoing research project led by the TYA Centre, which aims to identify the specific skills required by actors wishing to work in the TYA sector. The methodology employed involves documenting practical workshops by leading practitioners in the field. The event is disseminated through the TYA Centre, through the active engagement of participants and through the development of the curricula on our undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The first of these events, took place on 13^th, 14^th and 15^th April 2011 and focussed on the work of David Wood, Tall Stories and Oily Cart.

Adult as Child

In exploring how adult actors portray children and young people in TYA productions, we inevitably intersect the broader issue of acting for children: do young audiences demand particular skills or approaches to theatre making and performance; and if so, how should the process of making theatre and the training of theatre makers respond to this?

In the UK at present there is very little in the way of specialist training. Theatre practitioners working in the field have frequently fallen into this type of work, developing their practice as they go. Critical engagement with the sector is also patchy; with the exception of Lyn Gardner of The Guardian, very few British theatre critics regularly attend or write about anything, but the large-scale commercial work, for children and young people. Organisations such as ASSITEJ and TYA-UK[3] have certainly helped to promote the notion of specialism, but again children’s theatre in the UK remains a polarised world, containing some of the most interesting and progressive work in the theatre sector and many pockets of bad practice.

One of the things that prompted the Acting Like Children event, was the very centrality of child characters in work made for young people and the bad practice often associated with their realisation. This was reflected by Action Transport’s Kevin Dyer during the opening session: “Why is it” he asked “that right at the very heart of our craft are bad performances and isn’t it time we sorted it out?”[4] . There are of course, he acknowledged, examples of good work, but too often the portrayal of children and young people on stage is problematic. Sally Cookson[5] cites an example of things that typically go wrong, when, as a recent acting graduate, she played a 12 year old in a professional theatre piece. Keen to manage a convincing transformation she worked hard to realise the age of the character, only to receive this devastating review from Nicholas de Jongh:

‘Sally Cookson hops around the stage like a bunny rabbit and has surely been given elocution lessons from Bonny Langford’ [6]

Bonny Langford as the sickeningly precocious Violet Elizabeth Bott in the 1976 television adaptation of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories for London Weekend Television.

This over reliance on outer characteristics was frequently cited during the event, as a defining quality of bad work, perhaps best summed up in this extract from Kevin Dyer and Nina Hajiyianni’s response, which included a list of things best avoided by the actor:

‘Don’t fidget and do externalities. Don’t do clichés and stereotypes like twizzling one leg or putting sellotape on your glasses or sucking your thumb or twisting your hair round your finger – unless you need to do comic stereotype…  some degree of physicality – a physical ‘freedom’ – is accepted and often welcomed by audiences. Especially with younger children, their tics and physical patterning can be very extreme. If these are imitated they can be ridiculous. Maybe this is because the adult actor is twice or three times as large as the original, so the gesturing can seem over-large and absurd. We know that some of the physicality of children is extreme but to just copy it and ‘play it back’ is not helpful.’[7]

De Jongh’s review and indeed this advice to the actor, points to another problem associated with the playing of children by adults, that relates to adult perceptions of childhood. The freedom, physical and otherwise, displayed by children is often something that as adults we look back on with a degree of whimsy; it is something we may feel we have lost or indeed something from which we wish to escape, either way there is the danger that we romanticise or seek to protect and prolong the childhood of our audience, wittingly or otherwise. All the Acting Like Children sessions included an exercise which focused on the adult’s memory of childhood: we were asked to describe ourselves as children, to play with children’s toys, to look at pictures.

In this clip we see the group at the Polka session talking about photographs from their own childhoods. This act of memory, the juxtapositioning of adult and child, had a tangible effect on the group. The camera was at an unsympathetic angle, but I hope it is possible to get a sense of the atmosphere and feeling generated by the exercise:

Polka Child Exercise from RBCTYA on Vimeo.

Tales of Father Christmas and ill-fitting earmuffs generate audible ‘aahhs’ from the group. There was a sense of nostalgia; this dual presence of adult and child was potent. This must, almost certainly, be different for a child. A five year old, for example, may have very little sense of themselves as ‘child’. They are simply themselves. When watching an adult playing a child, they may well be happy to engage in the ‘suspension of disbelief’; an act not a million miles away from the sort of transformation they engage in and observe during fantasy play. For them, however, as with an adult audience the actor is still always present. As Bert O. States reminds us:

‘The inevitable starting point of any discussion of the actor’s presence on the stage is the fact that we see him as both character and performer.”[8]

For the adult audience and indeed for the older child or young person, this act of complicite is part of the contract of the theatre event itself. We take our seat in the auditorium and we live through the play together. Actors signify and live out characters; set and costume provide codified and sensual context.  To that extent we are in it together. This idea is complicated in TYA, however, as performance contexts can vary so dramatically. Work for the very young, for example, which may or may not take place in a theatre, cannot rely on the same notional contract. Aesthetic distance, which is widely regarded to be something that develops between the ages of 3 and 6, cannot be guaranteed. For the very young audience the liveness of the theatre event is a much more immediate and visceral experience. It is not just happening in front of them, but to them. In this sense the theatre event itself is a participatory experience.

The relationship between adulthood and childhood is certainly at the heart of this enquiry. Can adult theatre makers adequately reflect the concerns or perspectives of a child audience; indeed is this even something we should be attempting? There is plenty of evidence that suggests that in the UK at least we have a poor record of engaging in the experience of the child. UNICEF research has as recently as 2007 concluded that children in the UK fair worst, of the twenty-one most developed economies, when it comes to well-being, a fact that they link to the affect of a consumerist adult-focused culture.[9] It would seem important, at least within the UK, for our theatre to represent and reflect what David Harradine describes as an element of our society, that along with the elderly, is ‘culturally invisible’[10]. This is certainly the intention of Tony Graham. For him the very definition of TYA is related to its ability to reflect the child’s perspective.[11]

The endeavour for the adult maker, then is complicated; the involvement of children in the development process is a common feature of much of the most highly regarded work in the sector and yet this process of involvement is clearly mitigated by the adult maker; similarly children or young people are often performers in this type of work, but again this is commonly shaped or interpreted by adult writers, directors, funders or facilitators. On the other hand, we cannot simply hand over the theatre making process to children and young people. As Shifra Schonmann reminds us, children can be engaged by even the most kitsch of aesthetics.[12] The TYA sector has frequently defined itself in relation to the so- called adult theatre, often in reaction to assumptions about being second best. For the sake of quality, therefore, it is necessary for adult taste and skill to be central to the process of making quality work for children and young people. In this sense adult and child are inextricably linked by the act of making work for young audiences. The process of an adult actor playing a child, therefore, perhaps offers us a useful starting point to begin an exploration of this complex relationship.

Blue Remembered Hills

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

from “A Shropshire Lad”
by A.E.Housman

As the Shropshire Lad longs for ‘lost content’, so he actively reconstructs the landscape of childhood. This idea is at the centre of Dennis Potter’s television play inspired by the poem. Blue Remembered Hills[13] is relevant not only as an illustration of how childhood as a construct is shaped by culture, society and our own perceptions of past and present; but also as an example of adult actors portraying children.

In the following clip from the opening scene, we see Colin Welland as Willie. The shot reflects the act of recall: a distant figure, that we recognise as a child, runs towards the camera, playing with a large stick, only as he gets closer do we see him as both adult and child.

As the scene progresses he meets Peter, played by Michael Elphick. Both actors use physicality to signal their child-ness.  Welland engages in child-like play, waves sticks, wipes his mouth. Elphick also: his gait slightly uncontrolled and off balance, his movements playful and at times erratic. Both of them lighten their vocal tone and are dressed as children of the 1940s, shorts and dirty knees to boot. In this sense they suggest child; but more than this: they suggest adult as child. The actors fully invest in the drives and actions of the characters. Inner life is engaged and emotionally connected, but there is a gestus[14] at work here. We are not meant to forget that these actors are adults, indeed the dramaturgy of the piece relies on the dialogue between actor and character. In this sense this is very much a piece for adults. Peter Bradshaw, writing about the 2008 rescreening perhaps encapsulates this most poignantly:

‘When an adult truly remembers what it was like to be a child, with an adult’s perspective, there is something forbidden and almost transgressive about it.  That is what, I think, Potter is getting at when he casts adults as children. It was not a stunt: it was a representation of the act of memory’[15]

This is not the intention when we present child characters for young audiences. Here we wish to engage and resonate. We seek to reflect, represent and honour their perspective.

In this scene from Lenny the Boy Who Wanted to be a Train[16] we again see an adult actor (Craig Edwards) playing a child. Here, however, the transformation is almost entirely internalised. The psychological actions, motivation and text belong to the child, but the adult physicality remains; although the intention is that it is forgotten. Paradoxically there is no attempt to disguise the adult, although in the staged version there were some nods in that direction: a satchel and pullover.

To a certain extent the work of transformation is done by the play. There is the presence of a narrator, the voice of an adult Lenny perhaps, that provides context. There is the visual signal provided by the struggle to mount the table; so clearly the action of someone small in stature. Nonetheless there is a sense of respect for the character as child. The performance somehow, honours the importance of the child perspective, where Potter points out its childishness.

That is not to say that Potter’s children are not complex or to be taken seriously. Far from it; part of the power of Blue Remembered Hills is its shocking portrayal of cruelty and pain; hinted at in our clip, when Willie is held down by Peter, who then spits in his face. Welland’s character cries. The camera lingers. Somehow the juxtaposition of adult and child asks us to think again about this act of petty bullying. We may dismiss the readiness of children to cry, particularly if they are boys, but here we are reminded that the tears are nonetheless real and the event no less traumatic.

In contrast it can be difficult to represent negative elements of child behaviour in TYA work. A badly behaved teenage character, may be a stereotype informed by an adult perspective, influenced by the UK’s obsession with demonising adolescence; it may, however, simply be a badly behaved teenage character.

David Harradine in his keynote speech for the Polka section of Acting Like Children, talked about the notion of identification, which he linked to the propensity of child characters in work for young audiences:

‘As adult theatre goers, we also choose to watch things which show us radically different ways of living and being, theatre is also valuable because it allows us to access experiences and identities that are profoundly different from our own.  At the risk of being provocative, I wonder then why it is that so much theatre for children focuses on children:  on child characters.’

If we accept that TYA is defined by its reflection of the child perspective, then it would follow that much of the work contains child characters; as Jude Merrill commented: ‘we do not find it odd that adult theatre contains predominantly adult characters’[17]. Why then do we so rarely see children performing these roles? One answer is of course because of practical constraints, relating to employment law and simple technical acumen. Children playing children, also comes with a different set of aesthetic baggage, which perhaps reveals more about the relationship between adult and child.

During the Polka element of Acting Like Children Johnathan Lloyd talked about the experience of watching Suzanne Osten’s production of her play The Girl, the Mother and the Rubbish[18], during which a real 8 year old is substituted for the adult actor playing Ti, the girl at the centre of the story. It is at a point in the narrative when an intervention from a social worker has resulted in her being removed from her mother’s care. The audience were stilled by this sudden inclusion of a real child, he recalls; ‘It was truly shocking’. For him the audience was, at that moment, faced with the reality of this experience from a child’s perspective. For him the ‘safety’ offered by adults playing children, is often a ‘useful barrier’ that may at times facilitates the portrayal of themes that may otherwise be problematic.

He then went on to discuss Whose Afraid of the Bogeyman[19] by Mike Kenny. Here school children, under the direction of their teachers, played adults confronted by the horror of a missing child. Again the distance offered by this convention enables the audience to see the character’s actions from a new perspective

Polka 5 from RBCTYA on Vimeo.

It is often the case, however, that even apparently adult characters in TYA work, contain something of the child perspective. In this clip of Catherine Wheel’s[20] current production White, for example, we see two characters undertaking what we assume to be adult tasks; they have jobs, one is clearly in charge of the other and to that extent there is a sense of hierarchy, one is also visibly older than the other. Both, however, one could argue are child-like, the younger, played by Andy Manley, particularly so.

The performances would seem to conform to the rubric argued in the Acting Like Children response paper. There is no overt physical signaling, although the characters are playful. Psychological actions are played with integrity and conviction. The motivations might be child-like, but they are pursued with seriousness. It is not in our clip, but later in the show Andy’s character thinks that one of the eggs in his care is dead. The stakes for his character are high and he plays this with a delicate human truth, no different in approach to that of actors in an adult play. He is both honoring and eliciting the audience’s attachment to these objects, using techniques common to psychological realist work for adults. There is still, however, for the adult audience members a form of gestus at play here. These adult actor/characters are caring about eggs in an imagined, if allegorical, world. They care in the way that our children might care about these eggs; perhaps in the way we once cared about such things when we were children. The message, all be it unfairly trite when expressed in this context, is clear: would prejudice exist if we remained as open and consciously caring as children can be? For the adult audience, therefore, the presence of adult actor, as child is a central part of its power. In a different way, the same may also be true for the very young in the audience.  The world they are invited to enter is both adult-like and child-like. The characters perform adult tasks in a child-like context. They care about things in the way that children might and experience as adults the same moral and emotional dilemmas that children do. The fact that they are adults representing children is in this sense important. The adult actor is opening up a dialogue between the adult world and the child’s perception of that world. And to a certain extent between adult and child. Certainly watching this show with your own children, as I have done, creates a tangible bond, made possible by our joint meeting in this place that contains both adult and child, but has none of the hierarchical dimensions that inform that relationship in the real world.

White reminds us that TYA, particularly for the younger audience, is an experience shared with adults. Be they parents, teachers, carers or extended family, the work, whilst focused on the young audience member, is also an adult creation, shared with other adults. This poses a number of well documented dilemmas relating to the adult as gate-keeper: it is they who chose the play; who pay for the tickets; the net result being that the adult perspective governs areas of the artistic endeavour, particularly with regard to the perceived suitability of material. The representation of adult characters in TYA must also, therefore, be subject to the duality explored in our examples relating to child characters.

As part of my work with undergraduates at Rose Bruford College, I have been responsible for creating shows that tour to local schools. In a recent production, Story Drum[21] I was confronted with, what I imagine can be a common problem. The student playing Dora, the apprentice storyteller, had, developed during the rehearsal process, a warm, rather animated character, who was the main conduit between the audience and the world of the play. Rehearsals had included development sessions in schools and the piece, in common with a lot of this type of work, had elements of participation and direct address. The audience was predominantly school children, aged 5 to 7, but there were, of course, teachers present at every performance. As the children filed into the hall, Dora would welcome them. Often the first people to come in would be the teachers. Only in this meeting with another adult could I see just how grotesque the character had become. In engaging with the teacher Dora seemed patronising, over enthusiastic, anodyne and two-dimensional. The children, by contrast, seemed to find her engaging, sympathetic and inspiring. I was reminded of Swedish company, Theater Pero’s[22] production of Aston’s Stones, which I saw at the ASSITEJ congress in Copenhagen.

Aston’s Father, Aston and his mother, from Teater Pero’s production Aston’s Stones

Here a cast of three mature adult performers played both Aston, a young boy with a fondness for collecting stones, and his two parents. As the audience entered the space, we were met by Baura L Magnusdottir, in costume, as Aston’s mother. Like Dora she was warm and welcoming, but there was an adult complexity still at play, a sense of both actor and character. She greeted child and adult alike, just as one might be greeted by an older mother at a birthday party. This may seem an unfair comparison to make: Magnusdottir is, after all, a skilled and experienced actor, working under a highly regarded and experienced director; the actress playing Dora was still in training and working within the context of a student production. For me, however, it illustrated a broader issue to do with the adult relationship to children and young people. Too often the desire to protect, to nurture and to engage particularly a younger child (the 5 – 9 year old audience), translates into an overemphasis of the lighter, comedic or fun; benign yet banal. In attempting to reflect the child perspective, we had in fact, tapped into another adult frame of perception.

Talking about his production of Brilliant[23] David Harradine made the following observation about the adult perception of child characters:

‘In the devising of Brilliant, as with all our work, we brought a load of stuff together and simply played.  We played with light, we played with music, we played with elements of design and with fragments of narrative, we played with space, we played with movement.

Laura Cubitt, the performer who created Brilliant with us, is a genius at play.  Fearless, foolish, expressive, sensitive, and above all playful – all in all the perfect performer – Laura is a tall woman in her early thirties.  Throughout the devising process, we never, once, talked about her playing a child.  I spoke to Laura as an adult, and she played and improvised as an adult.  The emotions she expressed were an adult’s, the body she moves is clearly an adult’s.  So we were surprised when we started to read reviews of the show:

‘Brilliant follows a child preparing for bed and sinking into the dark, mysterious world of night and the imagination.   “I can see the universe and the universe can see me,” says Laura Cubitt’s child in a show that becomes a series of mirrored reflections bouncing back off each other.’ – Lyn Gardner’s review for The Guardian

‘As a young girl settles down for the night, the curtains open behind her into her imagination’ – Nuala Calvi’s review for The Stage

‘The main character…captures a child’s spirit with delicacy and delight.’ – Online review

This final quote, I think, starts to move us towards the heart of things: she “captures a child’s spirit”.  This is not about acting like a child; nor about becoming a child, as though through some regressive kind of method acting:  the heart of things is something to do with being like a child.  Not acting childish, but being childlike; not pretending to be a child, but remaining an adult who discovers a child’s spirit of openness and play.’[24]

For Harradine, it is openness and a sense of play that are the defining child characteristics. It both signifies child for the adult and, as Harradine went on to say, enables children in the audience to recognise the character as one of their own. Play, as a theme, was also reflected in the response paper, which detailed a number of the techniques used by directors and actors when working on child characters:

‘Play as children – using any object – over extended periods (the leCoq training method)
Use physical play to be children from birth to teenage years – pay special attention to the use of the spine
Play with the development of language – both sounds and words – from birth to adulthood’[25]

As Harradine intimates play is both a child behaviour and a common tool used in actor training and rehearsal by adult theatre makers. Let us then look at the role of play in our discussion.

Playtime

Vivian Gussin Paley’s work and writings about child’s play have had an enormous impact on theatre makers. Many of the methods she has developed for working with pre-school children have a theatre-making dimension. For her and many others, fantasy play is a crucial element of child development. In A Child’s Work: the importance of fantasy play, she writes about the need to preserve play as part of the early school experience:

‘It is in the development of their themes and characters and plots that children explain their thinking and enable us to wonder who we might become as their teachers. If fantasy play provides the nourishing habitat for the growth of cognitive, narrative and social connectivity in young children, then it is surely the staging area for our common enterprise: an early school experience that best represents the natural development of young children.’[26]

For Paley, close and objective scrutiny of young children at play offers a means of understanding, whilst the act of play itself is developmental for the child. Play as part of the rehearsal process or as a training methodology has similar qualities. Through play and playfulness actors often find release, developing connections that might otherwise have eluded them. Their directors and teachers in turn may observe this process, learning new things about both performer and the characters or scenarios they are exploring. As Harradine suggests when we present characters at play, children may well recognise and empathise with their behaviour. In this sense it is a signifier of child-ness; it is, after all, a child-like quality.  Does it, however, enable a reflection of the child perspective?

Whilst Paley might remind us of the serious intent behind children’s play, it is the lightness and free-flowing enjoyment that is both its predominant characteristic and its mode of operation as a tool for release in the rehearsal room. Sally Cookson’s workshop, part of the Travelling Light contribution to Acting Like Children, was an example of this in action. Her stated ambition was to promote the following qualities, which she regards as necessary when working on TYA projects:

1. Openness – both to other actors and to audience
2. Playfulness – a sense of joy and pleasure
3. Complicite – togetherness created through play

In order to achieve these qualities she asked participants to engage in a playful exercise. Her frequent instruction to the group was to find joy in the work. As a result the group found a flow and freedom that was clearly helpful in realising her aims.

Jo Bellolli[27] reminds us, on the other hand, that playfulness is only one aspect of child behaviour:

‘There’s always room for a lightness of touch and we want that variety of experience for the child audience, as we seek it for adults. But I do think that children generally are very serious. They can be really funny and have a good sense of humor, but there is generally a sense of seriousness. There’s a serious attention paid to doing things right and following the law or stepping away from those rules. It’s a serious business.’

Indeed there is a growing body of research documenting a new and worrying social trend in our young: the demise of play[28]; brought about by a range of factors including the growth in popularity of computer gaming and a reduction in opportunities for play (the result of longer working hours for parents, meaning children are often in child care situations where play is not encouraged, and the reluctance of parents to allow children to play freely in open spaces). For future child audiences, it would seem, watching adult actors at play may be their only opportunity to engage in the activity, all be it vicariously.

Adult play is different from child play. Much like Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills it is an act of memory. Adults engage in child-like play in order to free themselves from the constraints of adult patterns of behaviour and thought. As a means of representing the child perspective it is as susceptible to projection, as our own memories of being children. That is not to say that play cannot be useful in the development of work for children. As Paley suggests, it is often through engaging with and observing children playing that we learn about how that child experiences and processes the world around them. But we must listen. Not just to the child, but to ourselves. To our own adult desires to re-frame, protect, prolong or project childhood onto our children.

In conclusion

It would seem, therefore, that a crucial element of any TYA endeavour is to find a means of facilitating and honoring the child perspective. This certainly poses a problem for those of us involved in training actors. The performance skills required by this sector are multifarious, are we also to add the roles of facilitator, teacher or child psychiatrist to the list of requirements? It is certainly true that a number of very successful practitioners in the field have been or have become very good teachers and facilitators. But is this a necessary skill?

Tim Webb’s[29] contribution to our Acting For Children event offers us a reminder of just how appropriate the artist is for this task:

In order to engage his audience, he has to engage with them. As with all theatre processes Oily Cart’s creative journey is one of assimilation. In adult theatre this process may be limited to playwright or text, actor, director, designer and the other members of the making team, but in TYA it extends to an active engagement with the audience, in the case of Oily Cart both in the development and performance of their work. A well-trained artist should be equipped to synthesise a range of stimuli into a single event or artifact. To that extent the child perspective is simply another stimulus to be considered. Angela Michaels, Associate Director of London’s Half Moon Theatre, talking about Exchange For Change[30], says:

‘As artist all you can do is bring yourself to the process’[31]

This may seem an unsatisfactory conclusion, but for better or worse, it is perhaps the best we can and should hope for. Whether acting like, with or for children we need to be mindful of how we include and reflect their perspective, for it is still the adult theatre maker who is at the centre of the endeavour. A theatre for children, it seems, is also an adult theatre. But the artistic and cultural flow has to be upstream. If we are to counter the torrential downpour of predominantly adult centred cultural output, that is turning our children into nothing more than consumers, then we have to continue to engage in practices that enable their world-view to be heard and shared. We need a children’s theatre, for it is there that we, adult and child alike, can meet each other and begin a dialogue about how we shape this world we share.

Performer: Kalamandalam Vijayakumar. Photo: Garry Laybourn.

This historical project, kindly supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund [London], was instigated by Kathakali make up and costume specialist, Kalamandalam Barbara Vijayakumar.

The project aims to explore what the costumes of KATHAKALI, the classical dance drama of Kerala South West India, tell us about life in 17th century Kerala [when Kathakali emerged from the temple arts] and how they changed over the centuries.

The project will provide an opportunity to:

• Examine how the clothes that people of Kerala wore in everyday life compared to the elaborate costumes that they created to express their spiritual beliefs.
• Study how the traditional dress of Kerala can identify gender, religion, job & age.
• Explore a time when Kathakali was supported by the kings, the priests and temples had great power within the community and highly skilled craftsmen devoted hours to creating images that were to represent the great Hindu gods.
• Trace the historical journey that these costumes made from prosperity to decline. Kathakali was saved from extinction in the 20th century by the great poet Vallathol Narayana Menon with the foundation of the Kerala Kalamandalam.

The project will consist of:
A series of workshops in the Kathakali costumes, the symbolic meaning of the colours, conservation, the characters that they represent, how the characters move and relate to others in the Kathakali plays.
At Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance (Room LH002)

Thursday 27th and Friday 28th October (times to be confirmed).

Research to reveal:

• How Kathakali actor, Kalamandalam Vijayakumar, brought Kathakali and the original costumes from his native Kerala to the UK.
• What traditions the people of Kerala brought with them as they migrated to the Redbridge area and what they had to leave behind.
• An exhibition of Kathakali costumes, and the result of the research, will be displayed at Redbridge Museum as a celebration of the people of Kerala. Young people will be encouraged to appreciate that the clothes they are wearing today will one day be history and illustrate that “WE ARE WHAT WE WEAR”.

This is a unique experience to explore a fascinating element of Kerala culture, and also to take part in a major research project.

Participation in the workshops is free, but numbers are strictly limited and subject to availability.

Please note that participants will be expected to attend both workshop days.

For RSVP and further enquiries, please contact Dr. Paul Fryer at: paul.fryer@bruford.ac.uk

Parody is a literary genre that always means so much more than it says.

I’d like to start by talking about one example of parody, a book by Christopher Douglas and Nigel Planer called I An Actor (written under the pseudonym of Nicholas Craig), which is a work of fiction, a satire on British theatre today. Here, the author says he has been called everything from the “Blowtorch of the Barbican” (xiv) to the “Uncrowned Vesuvius of the English Classical Stage”, and mentions one role he had in which he found himself “wading through a sea of sea of syringes and crème fraiche” in a play called Fist F***ing which was staged — and you get no prizes for guessing this — at the Royal Court theatre in London in 1994. “I still have a burning need,” says Nicholas Craig, “to perform, to communicate and to immerse myself in all the roiling, squalid splendour of life — quite literally in the case of the notorious kitchenette scene from Fist F***ing” (xv).

I mention this book not because it’s an especially acute piece of satire, but rather to underline the fact that the explosion of in-yer-face creativity in 1990s British theatre was not only noticed by news journalists and cultural commentators, but has also become an object of parody. And when something becomes the target of jokes, you can be sure it’s attained the dizzy heights of cultural significance.

My second example is a parody of a Sarah Kane play, called Crushed, which was penned by Irish playwright Chris Lee at some time in early days of the new millennium, and which I heard him perform, to hilarious effect, at a theatre conference (Junge Hunde festival, Kanonhallen theatre) in Copenhagen in May 2004. He kindly let me have the text of this scintillatingly brief piece, and I’ve been using it is an introduction to many talks that I’ve given all over Europe. The simple fact that such a parody is possible suggests two things: that we all recognise an writer’s individual voice and that we all have some sense of what contemporary theatre is. Or do we?

I would like to use the remainder of this talk to explore the question of what contemporary theatre is, and I’d like now to quote from a play that is very different from any that Sarah Kane wrote. I’m referring to Alan Bennett’s award-winning piece, The History Boys (National, 2004). As you all know, The History Boys is about a guy called Irwin, who is a history teacher trying to get a class of teenage boys through their Oxbridge exams by encouraging them to make imaginative and original interpretations of history. At one point, he argues that they should distance themselves from the present:

He says, “Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past and one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be” (74).

This raises the intriguing question of whether it is ever possible to fully grasp the contemporary: if it is true that “there is no period so remote as the recent past”, how can we shift our focus and bring this remote era into clearer view?

One way of doing this, I would argue, is to reformulate the question. Instead of trying to immediately understand the contemporary, perhaps the best way is to ask: what is new writing?

What is new writing?

In Britain, the idea of new writing has an immensely powerful presence in theatre: everywhere you go, you are introduced to “new writers”, everywhere you go, you can watch plays that are examples of “new writing”, everywhere there are now “new writing festivals”. In fact, there is an absolute deluge of the new.

But what is “new writing”? Firstly, it’s a very British idea — in the United Sates of America, very few have ever heard of “new writing”; in Europe, it’s only sporadically glimpsed. In these countries, there are old plays and new plays, but “new writing” has little status and no history. It’s a very British phenomenon. So what is it?
A definition of new writing requires at least three elements at least (they are):

1 ) History. New writing is plays written in the Great Tradition of new writing which started at the Royal Court in 1956 with Look Back in Anger, and whose historic antecedents were the Harley Granville Barker and JE Vedrenne seasons, three of which were at the Court Theatre in 1904-07. That’s the historical frame. Here the idea of “new” gradually became synonymous with “original” and therefore “good”. The idea of novelty, of not having been seen before became a real cultural virtue (Chambers, 132). And, at the Royal Court during the 1960s, “new” came to mean a significant, meaningful text that had immediacy and relevance. In short, new writing became synonymous with contemporary theatre.

2 ) Writers. New writing is plays written by writers who see the role of the playwright as being central to the creation of theatrical meaning. Often, these new writers are young, usually in their twenties, and indeed British theatre has been no more successful than any other in escaping the cult of youth. Sarah Kane, for example, was 23 when her debut, Blasted, was first put on. New writing usually means the early work of young writers, but their age is less important than the fact that they are making their debut. At the 1999 London New Play Festival, for example, 10 out of 12 of the “new writers” were over 40 years of age. And that didn’t matter — they were all new writers. In terms of cultural kudos and value, an author is praised for the distinctive originality of their individual voice: most New Writing is written in a style that playwright Tim Fountain characterises as the “singular original voice”, with “a very particular vision, well expressed” (23).

3 ) Institutions. New writing is plays written for specialist state-subsidised new writing theatres that are more interested in art than in commerce. Starting with George Devine’s regime at the Royal Court, new writing has usually been seen as having been created in opposition to commercial theatre. Devine’s war cry of “the right to fail”, and the necessity of experiment, was its foundation myth, and state funding its economic sine qua non. They didn’t have to depend on the commercial market to succeed — and many modern classics, such as John Arden’s early work, were originally flops. Today, New writing is an industry with its own specialised theatres: the Royal Court, Bush, Hampstead and Soho theatres in London are joined by a couple of institutions outside the metropolis, the Traverse in Edinburgh and Live Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (Of course, other key players include the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, plus regional reps, off-West End houses such as the Almeida and a handful of significant fringe venues such as Theatre 503.)

If this definition of new writing gives a historical, economic and social background to this British theatrical tradition, and shows how important a cultural presence it has had (from the Angry Young Man phenomenon of the 1950s to the scandals around in-yer-face theatre during the 1990s), it nevertheless sidesteps the far more interesting point — the question of aesthetics: what does a piece of “new writing” look like? In what style is it written? And what subjects does it tackle?

Contemporary style

Contemporary theatre is plays written in a contemporary style. If you consider Chris Lee’s Sarah Kane parody, it’s quite clear that the linguistic style of the piece is instantly recognisable as being the voice of today. New writing in the 1990s transformed the language of British theatre, making it more direct, raw and explicit. Influenced no doubt by other media, theatre also became more telegraphic, more conversational, and less literary, in its prose. It not only introduced a new dramatic vocabulary, it also pushed theatre into being more aggressively aimed at making audiences feel and respond.
When, in a famous scene from Blasted, Sarah Kane used the word “cunt” eleven times in a row (59), she was not only smashing a feminist taboo, but she was simultaneously asserting both a view of masculine psychology and a sense of the power of contemporary strong words.

But a sense of contemporary style is not just a matter of rude words and short exchanges of dialogue. A feeling of nowness can also be conveyed by ideas and a sensibility. When in Shopping and Fucking, Mark Ravenhill has Robbie say: “I think we all need stories, we make up stories so that we can get by” (66), this simple statement not only recalls the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, but also echoes American novelist Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, first published five years before Ravenhill’s play was staged. In this book, Claire says, “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them” (Quoted by Rebellato, xiv). Echoes such as these help make the language and ideas of these plays contemporary in style, in feeling.

But there are dangers in being too contemporary. You could call it the curse of the now. And the easiest way of making sure that your play will date very quickly is to fill it with contemporary references. For instance, when in Patrick Marber’s Closer, Alice borrows Dan’s mobile telephone, the text reads, “She pulls out the aerial with her teeth” (Marber 1999: 10). Very soon, of course, the typical mobile phone no longer needed an aerial. So, in the 2004 edition of Marber’s play, this stage direction was cut. Within five years, it was already out-of-date (See Saunders, 8). Old.

Contemporary issues

Contemporary theatre is plays about contemporary issues. Talking about the Sarah Kane parody, you could argue that it encapsulates the current problem of youth violence and suggests the whole question of nuclear power and humanity’s self-destructive urges.

Certainly a real play by Sarah Kane, such as Blasted, is about contemporary issues such sexual abuse, the crisis of masculinity and genocidal war. Since 9/11, of course, the most important contemporary issue has been the War on Terror — and Berlin director Thomas Ostermeier’s current Schaubühne Theatre version of Blasted (Zerbombt in German) had references to the Iraq War.

In some cases, even naturalism can be visionary. I remember the press night of Leo Butler’s Redundant (2001) at the Royal Court. Okay, this play was a classic dirty realist play set on a council estate, a familiar howl of rage. But it did also have a visionary moment: at one point, the old granny turns on the rest of the cast and harangues them,
“Someone should bomb this bloody country. That’d wake us up a bit. Saddam Hussein or someone. IRA, bleedin’ whatsisface? Bin Laden. He could do it. Drop a few tons of anthrax. Teach us what it really means to suffer.” (78)

On the press night, the line mentioning Bin Laden was cut — well, you can understand why: the date was September 12, 2001. The day after 9/11. But the speech does show how writers can uncannily connect with global events when they let their imaginations off the leash.

Likewise, some of the most thought-provoking plays about the War on Terror are not the lurid satires that preach to the already converted, but reworkings of ancient Greek tragedies. For example, Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender (2004), a free adaptation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, says more about the spirit of the age than most recent heavy-handed caricatures of Blair and Bush.

In Cruel and Tender, Crimp talks about a very contemporary issue, the fear of terror. If you asked a lesser playwright about for an image of a terrorist threat, they would suggest a banal image, perhaps of a young man with a dark complexion and a rucksack getting onto the London Underground system. Crimp takes a much more imaginative leap:

He says: “Every streak of vapour in a cold sky/is a threat/ every child with no shoes/wandering up to a checkpoint [is a threat] […] and even the lamp on the bedside table/even the coiled filament inside the lamp/ is a threat.” (58)
I particularly like that last image: the bedside lamp is the witness of all our most intimate activities, and by using it, Crimp shows how terror has penetrated to the heart of Western consciousness. Also, like all great art, such images change the way you see everyday life. After hearing this passage, there’s a sense that a light bulb, this most domestic of articles, is actually a threat – a bomb waiting to explode.

Contemporary provocations

Contemporary theatre is plays that challenge or provoke their audiences. In the Sarah Kane parody, for instance, there is something inherently challenging and disturbing in its aggression and its determination to rub the faces of the audience in the shit. Clearly there are some contemporary plays, most obviously those of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, whose language, stage imagery and central ideas are inherently challenging.

But some ideas are also more subtly challenging and provocative. Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, for example, is about consumerism and individualism, about drug addiction and the value of money, about alienated sex and abuse. But the most excitingly contemporary aspect of Ravenhill’s work is arguably not the references to technological gadgets such as the internet or to people such as Bill Gates that litter his work. More profoundly, Ravenhill’s plays suggest a sensibility (by which I mean a complex of feelings and ideas) that simply wouldn’t have been possible in, say, the 1980s. A good example of this is Scene Eleven of Some Explicit Polaroids (1999). In this scene, Nick the old leftie and Jonathan the new entrepreneur discuss their nostalgia for Cold War days.

Jonathan says, “Nostalgia’s a tricky bitch […] I think we both miss the struggle” (311, 310). At moments like this, the great British tradition of the state-of-the-nation play meets the contemporary reality of a globalised economy and nostalgia seems to sum up a distinctly contemporary sense of drift, uncertainty and confusion. Politically, few would have been able to write like this before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

But there’s another way in which Ravenhill’s work is contemporary. I’m referring, of course, to the theme of absent fathers in his plays. Not only are parental good fathers absent in plays such as Shopping and Fucking, Faust Is Dead and Handbag, but their place has been taken by bad or abusive fathers, such as Brian the brutal drug dealer, Alain the anarchistic philosopher and the uncaring men in Handbag (Rebellato, xiii-xiv). Of course, missing father figures are not by themselves a sign of contemporaneity, after all, isn’t Hamlet a play with a missing good father and an abusive father substitute? What makes the missing father so contemporary in Ravenhill’s plays is the way he is symbolic of a missing paternalistic state. In the post-Thatcher era, not only have individual fathers gone AWOL, but the paternal Welfare State no longer looks after its citizens. This makes Ravenhill’s absent fathers not only a theme that reeks of contemporaneity, but also a metaphorically rich political statement.

Contemporary form

Contemporary theatre is plays which challenge theatrical form. If you remember the Sarah Kane parody, you could argue that the way it departs from the form of the traditional well-made play is a direct index of its contemporaneity. With this in mind, perhaps an even better definition of contemporary theatre is one that lets go of the content of the plays and looks instead at its form. Maybe the truly contemporary play is one that decisively challenges the old forms of drama, and expresses its nowness through its experimental attitude to structure. In other words, Waiting for Godot rather than Look Back in Anger; or, if you prefer, The Entertainer rather than Epitaph for George Dillon.

Elyse Dodgson, the head of the International Department at the Royal Court, once told me: “We look for work that is original, hard-hitting, provocative and contemporary, but we never talk about its form – that’s up to the individual writers. We positively discourage history plays or adaptations.”

Obviously, we can all think of the outstanding works that experiment with form, from Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000) to Ravenhill’s Pool (No Water) (2006), and from Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997) to anything by Caryl Churchill. But why should we think of this as especially contemporary? Isn’t it just a kind of aesthetic nostalgia for the great days of theatrical modernism, when — as Martin Crimp once said satirically in Attempts on Her Life — “exemplifying the dictum form follows function” (212). Maybe, but I think there’s another reason why experiment with structure is so exciting and so contemporary. Because whenever a writer experiments with form they challenge the prevailing (in Britain) aesthetic of naturalism and by doing so they proclaim to the audience that what they are watching is not real life but theatre. When this happens, the writer is drawing attention to the fact that theatre is a kind of fiction.

Why is this important? Well, I always think that fiction has certain powers and characteristics that real life does not have. Fiction, for example, is a place of dream, of imagination and of magic. It is a place where the social conflicts of the real world, which often stubbornly defy solution, can be resolved in an imaginary world. So, in Blasted, Sarah Kane creates an irreconcilable conflict between Ian and Cate, a man and a woman, then in the end she magically resolves the tensions between them. In Shopping and Fucking, Mark Ravenhill ends up by turning a piece of gritty realism into an urban fairy tale: the drug dealer gives the young people their money back. Imagine that happening in the everyday world. Magical. In Attempts on Her Life, Martin Crimp does the impossible: he dramatises absence; he creates an absent woman who can be one woman and all women, both at the same time : that’s the power of fiction.

Finally, one of the other ways in which a fiction announces its contemporaneity is by splitting the critics and the audience. And the above examples all did that. When there is conflict, there is discussion; where there is division, there is the contemporary. In the end, perhaps the most contemporary plays are those which do two things: they both call attention to, and at the same time question, their own contemporaneity.

As Martin Crimp says, satirically, in Attempts on Her Life: “It’s theatre — that’s right — for a world in which theatre itself has died.” (254)

An earlier version of this article was originally presented as a paper at the International Seminar of Senior Critics (‘Dramaturgical and Scenographic Fictions: Convergences/ Confrontations’), Almada Theatre Festival, Lisbon, Portugal, 7 July 2007.

Bibliography

Bennett, Alan, The History Boys (London: Faber, 2004).

Butler, Leo, Redundant (London: Methuen, 2001).

Chambers, Colin, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution (London: Routledge, 2004).

Craig, Nicholas, I An Actor (London: Methuen, 2001).

Crimp, Martin, Plays Two: No One Sees the Video; The Misanthrope; Attempts on Her Life; The Country (London: Faber, 2005).

Fountain, Tim, So You Want To Be a Playwright? (London: Nick Hern, 2007).

Kane, Sarah, Complete Plays: Blasted; Phaedra’s Love; Cleansed; Crave; 4.48 Psychosis; Skin (London: Methuen, 2001).

Lee, Chris, Crushed [parody of a Sarah Kane play], typescript, c. 2004.

Marber, Patrick, Closer (London: Methuen, 1999).

Marber, Patrick, Plays One: Closer; Dealer’s Choice; After Miss Julie (London: Methuen, 2004).

Ravenhill, Mark, Plays One: Shopping and Fucking; Faust Is Dead; Handbag; Some Explicit Polaroids (London: Methuen, 2001).

Rebellato, Dan, ‘Introduction’, to Mark Ravenhill, Plays One: Shopping and Fucking; Faust Is Dead; Handbag; Some Explicit Polaroids, (London: Methuen, 2001): ix-xx.

Saunders, Graham, Patrick Marber’s Closer, (London: Continuum, 2008).

The company was led by Kalamandalam Gopi, former Principal of the Kerala Kalamandalam and considered to be the finest actor of the older generation, particularly of heroic paccha roles. Company Directors, Kalamandalam Vijayakumar and Kalamandalam Barbara Vijayakumar, and the College dedicated the performance to David Bolland in honour of his lifetime work in support of Kathakali and the artists of Kerala, South India.

The performance also marked a debt of gratitude to David Bolland for the generous gift of his extensive film and video collection to the College. His Collection covers material dating from the 1950s and represents the finest record in existence of the major performers of the second half of the twentieth century. The transfer of the major parts of the collection to DVD has recently been completed by former Vice-Principal, Anthony Hozier, for general viewing in the College’s Library.

In a brief ceremony in the Library during the afternoon – with live music and a heartfelt speech by Barbara Vijayakumar – Kalamandalam Gopi and the company formally handed over the archive on behalf of David Bolland to two students who will represent the interest of future generations in the art of Kathakali. The events of the day provided a great opportunity to bring together the Company, the College and old friends from India to celebrate the major contribution of David Bolland to Kathakali.

Photo Credits

• Top Left, from the left: Nelliode Namboodiri, David Bolland, Kalamandalam Gopi, Kalamandalam Barbara Vijayakumar.
• Top middle, from the left: Anthony Hozier, Nelliode Namboodiri, David Bolland, Kalamandalam Gopi, Kalamandalam Vijayakumar, Kalamandalam Haridas, Kalamandalam Barbara Vijayakumar.
• Top Right, from the left: David Bolland, Kalamandalam Gopi.
• Bottom Left: Kalamandalamn Unnithan & Kalamandalam Vijayakumar. Photo courtesy of Kala Chethena Theatre Company.
• Bottom Middle: Kalamandalam Gopi & Kalamandalam Vijayakumar. Photo courtesy of Kala Chethena Theatre Company.
• Bottom Right:Kalamandalam Gopi. Photo courtesy of Kala Chethena Theatre Company.

“The Kala Chethena Kathakali Theatre Company is one of the world’s foremost Indian dance companies. Credited with developing Kathakali in the UK via its hugely successful tours, the Company now returns to celebrate its 21st anniversary with a tour of Kathakali: the classical dance – drama from South India.”

From the Kathakali National Tour Programme Notes

(Kalamandalam Viyaykumar)

To reserve tickets:
Telephone: 030 8308 2616
Email: boxoffice@bruford.ac.uk
Book online: boxoffice@bruford.ac.uk

Ticket Price: £ 7
Concession Price: £ 5 ( Senior Citizens, Job Seekers, Students, Under 18s, Equity Members )

For further information on the Tour and the history of the company, visit www.kathakali.net.

This is an extended version of a speech given by Chris Baldwin to The European Cultural Foundation at the University of Leiden in November 2006 (Meeting Title: Artistic Explorations in Cultural Memory)

2005 marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Part of Don Quijote, a work hailed by the philosopher Michel Foucault as the first modern work of literature. Foucault claims that Cervantes discovered that the relation between words and things is, in many respects, arbitrary. With this discovery Cervantes ushered in the modern age (1). A revolutionary document of its own age, Don Quijote confronts us with the complex history of multicultural Spain with its Moorish, Jewish, and Christian cultures. But it is not just the commemorative reprints of the Cervantes novel or the thousands of commemorative theatre productions which has offered contemporary Spanish citizens an opportunity in recent years to re-examine notions of cultural and historical identity.

During the twenty five years of restored democracy Spain has seen a huge increase in the level of cultural participation and cultural activity. Much of this has reflected a need for Spaniards to find social contexts in which to re-examine notions of their own identity or, to be more precise, identities, as Spain is in many respects a far more federal state than Germany. The popular interest in recent and ancient history, folklore, eating and wine culture, attendance of festivals, theatre, music concerts and museums, or the learning of the country’s various languages in formal and informal educational contexts are just a few examples. One could also cite the public funding of archaeology and the development of the thousands of heritage sites into tourist attractions and “interpretation centres” as being not just reflections of an increasingly sophisticated definition of internal tourism but also an indication of the increase in the self esteem of Spain´s seventeen Autonomous Communities (2).

For a country which experienced such brutal repression and significant delays in development throughout most of the 20th Century the speed and ferocity of both economic and cultural development can be somewhat difficult comprehend for a significant sector of the population. All the more important therefore that cultural facilities and more importantly policies are developed and managed in a spirit of openness and honesty. Cultural participation and the use of cultural activities (such as theatre, participatory arts programmes, museum going, popular fiestas – indeed almost any cultural pastime which attracts public funding of one form or another) are opportunities for communities to explore their past, build common understandings about a shared heritage and even rehearse methods of working together in problem management contexts. In other words cultural policy as a metaphor for and parallel to transparent and democratic governance (3).

But cultural and economic development is not evenly spread across the country. Again, due to the power devolved to the Autonomous Communities, some are economically powerful and have public and private sectors which can be compared to the richest European regions, whilst others have sectors more akin to the poorer regions of Greece or Portugal. While in some Autonomous Communities rural areas and schools have access to sophisticated networks of public theatres and touring cultural products others receive only sporadic, less strategic offerings (4).

Across Spain this cultural boom, while unevenly spread, has nevertheless led to opportunities for new interpretations of the past to emerge. Young people, especially those born after 1975, seem less fearful in the way they re-examine the complexity of their origins and identities than older generations. However such a change has been far from a gentle one. Spanish politics are often characterised by visceral and deep rooted confrontations regarding the relationship of the Autonomous Communities to central government, the centrality of Castilian Spanish in relation to the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Valancian languages, changes in the definition of family, abortion and Gay and Human Rights. And there is also Basque and radical Islamic terrorism to contend with. Perhaps unlike other European states there seems to remain a significant difference between the political Right and Left agendas, at least on the social if not so clearly evident on an economic front. And on many occasions the implementation of cultural policy, in particular the development of heritage sites, theatre and cultural projects have reflected political agendas and aspirations, especially in the context of the emerging identities being promoted at Autonomous Community level.

Since the mid 1990´s, this traditionally homogeneous country has become an open-door laboratory on immigration. Spain has absorbed more than 3 million foreigners from places as diverse as Romania, Morocco, and South America. More than 11% of the country’s 44 million residents are now foreign-born, one of the highest proportions in Europe. Spain is Europe’s best-performing major economy, with growth averaging 3.1% over the past five years. Since 2002, the country has created half the new jobs in the euro zone. Unemployment has plummeted from more than 20% in the 1990s to 8.6%. The government attributes this performance to immigration (5).

Immigrants have been on the whole welcomed in Spain and are, without doubt, weaving vitality into Spanish society. In Madrid, Barcelona and Zaragoza Ecuadoran bakeries, Polish mini-markets, Moroccan furniture shops, and the inevitable €1 stores called Los Chinos, because they are usually owned by Chinese, can be found in abundance. But outside the major cities the picture changes. In the villages immigrants are often highly visable but often less able to take root in the communities as a result of living on fixed term contracts and moving on to new jobs at short notice. The notion of multicultural education, or the acknowledement at curriculum level of various cultures and languages within the school communities, is still a more or less a foreign concept.

In summary, Spain is one of the most socially dynamic countries in Europe. Huge growth in the economy, mass immigration, a still recent history of oppression and denial of the right to develop cultural and democratic competencies has meant that the country is still highly susceptible to economic shocks and political manipulation. The three areas in particular where this seems to manifest itself is in the delicate position in which many immigrants find themselves, environmental degradation caused by massive water shortages, building development in sensitive areas often involving political corruption and the way in which cultural participation is often a pawn in the hands of local political agendas rather than being a means by which participatory cultural competencies can be extended.

Cultural Identity, Heritage and Cultural Participation

There is a place in the far south east of La Rioja, Spain called Contrebia Leucade. In this dry mountainous desert, stripped of the forests which would have covered the landscape a thousand years ago this archaeological site, dating back to 1000 BC, can be seen perched upon its mountain. Its main interest for archaeologists today is the fact that this walled city was a Celtiberian settlement, later attacked by Romans and eventually Romanised. The final centuries of Imperial occupation, the 4th and 5th AC, was a period of political and social decadence. But after the disappearance of the Roman order the city was transformed again, and from the 7th century a new period of intense economic, urban and cultural activity continued for a further two hundred years or so during which a significant Visigoth and later Muslim presence can be identified. Thus Contrebia Leucade, the city literally cut into the white rock of the mountain, can be seen by modern inhabitants of the region as an cultural and historical emblem for the Iberian Peninsula as a whole; a palimpsest marked by waves of immigration and a shifting, edgy need to continually reassess notions of identity.

How to combine archaeology with theatre has been one of Spirals´ major lines of enquiry over the last three years. The Company is has built a reputation for actively managing projects across Spain which bring together museum services, archaeologists, artists and theatre practitioners with those responsible for regional rejuvenation and tourism.

However some 70 kilometres south of Contrebia Leucade is another important archaeological site. The city of Numancia is famous for the way its Celtiberian population resisted Roman attack for many months until its inevitable collapse. From the 19th Century onwards, and particularly through the Franco period, Numancia was a potent nationalist symbol. Its ability to reinforce notions of Spanish-ness and resistance to invasion was used by the Franco regime to legitimise and justify their hold over the country for forty years in the light of the perceived threat from Communism and other anti Catholic or regionalist tendencies.

Two archaeological sites. Two interpretations. Two interpretations of what it is to belong.

At the centre of the equation between people, cultural memory and land is an investigation into both time and space. Where cultural interventions occur, in particular where theatre, music and dance actively combine with heritage, history or archaeology, it seems to be that the underlying reason for doing such work is usually associated with the struggle to define local and contemporary identities. If underpinning notions of Romantic nationalism is usually a cultural attachment to land then it can be expected that archaeological sites are often seen as disputed terrains. They are also opportunities in which the complexity of identity and history can be pleasurably explored rather than simplified into a more recognisable Romantic nationalist rubric.

From the cultural historical to the cultural mythological

While identity and understandings of history are being played out within heritage and archaeological contexts it is far more common to see similar debates being expressed in the form of popular fiesta across the whole of Spain. It is not unusual to encounter local fiestas lasting between a few days to a week long, involving significant alteration of both public, official and private timetables, the closure of buildings, schools and shops, and the involvement of major sections of the community in communal celebrations. In many cases such events involve paying homage to a local Saint, rituals with animals (bull running and fighting), grand eating and drinking opportunities or even re-enactments of famous moments in the history or “myth-story” of the village.

Recently a village in Valencia, Bocairent, was reported in the national newspaper El Pais (6) as having decided to abandon its ancient custom of packing the head of a dummy representing Mohammed with fireworks after seeing the angry response by Muslims to a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoons of him. Bocairent’s mayor, Antonio Valdes, said blowing up the Mohammed dummy was offensive. It was reported later that while the village may not have blown up the wood-and-cardboard Mohammed dummy it still threw it off a castle wall at the fiesta’s climax in the following February.

Hundreds of villages and tens of thousands of villagers all over Spain hold annual festivals to commemorate the “Reconquista,” the reconquest of Spain by Christians from the Moors, which was completed in 1492 after more than 700 years of Muslim rule in much of the country. In many respects the notion of the re-conquest of Spain is at the centre of the struggle over the definition of Spanish identity. A country or place can only be re-conquered if its previous identity was similar. In the case of Spain the peninsula before the Moorish invasion was a series of countries or areas inhabited by tribes. The Catholic monarchs expulsion of the Moors led to the unification of Spain in 1492. Less a re-conquest than a forced unification (7). However to this day the myth that the Catholic monarchs re-conquered Spain is used in national political discourse.

As such these “re-conquest festivals” represent a potent part of a popular and participative culture which serves a multiplicity of functions. Firstly they act as an opportunity for the communities to come together in elaborate ceremonies often the result of months of preparations. This is in much the same way as one might see carnival in London’s Notting Hill or in Rio Janeiro in Brazil. But these ever increasingly popular and expensive (and increasingly publicly funded) processions and accompanying events also act as a means by which the notion of “the other” can take fancy dress form even in the increasingly absurd context in which Spanish Muslim communities watch these events from the sidelines. Almost exclusively these events promote a sense of identity based on the similar Numancian myth of needing to defeat the outsider; in these cases not Romans but an even more potent folk enemy, the Muslim (8).

It might be one thing were these cultural and participative events to take place as community expressions of folklore or hyper tourist events. But their potency for promoting images of cultural identity are not lost on some national politicians who on occasion add to the myth building by using metaphors and nationalistic illusions directly taken from the same seed bed of the reconquest.

Referring to the Moorish conquest of much of the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth to the 15th century, the former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar said: “It is interesting to note that while a lot of people in the world are asking the Pope to apologise for his speech, I have never heard a Muslim say sorry for having conquered Spain and occupying it for eight centuries (9).”

The Herald Tribune went on to quote Aznar as saying, “We must face up to an Islam that is ambitious, that is radical and that influences the Muslim world, a fundamentalist Islam that we must confront because we don’t have any choice. We are constantly under attack and we must defend ourselves…I support Ferdinand and Isabella,” in reference to the medieval Catholic monarchs who drove the Moors out of Spain in 1492.

Participation and Cultural Policy

In general term this paper has argued that the increase in cultural participation in Spain over the period since the emergence of democracy has led to the increase of culture as a means by which to investigate notions of identity. Some examples seem to reinforce nationalist “myth-stories” while others seem to place emphasis on using cultural participation as a means by which the complexity of identity can be explored in a way which enables citizens to become more agile and able in the way they define their contradictions.

But what criteria can we apply to the area of participatory culture to explain, defend and develop their worth to a community ever sceptical of public investment in culture? According to the Canadian, Catherine Murray , there seems to be three different paradigms vying for dominance.

The 1990´s interest with social cohesion has now been supplanted by a social and cultural capital approach to policy – perhaps reflecting the unfettered dominance of market led terminology since the late 1980´s. In this analysis attempts are made to identify which cognitive, cultural or interpretative skills convert into more mobile social capital. How can skills developed as a result of cultural participation projects be transferred into others including democratic and civic participation contexts or even the workplace?

There is also a cultural diversity approach, given weight by UNESCO. Bennett argues that within this paradigm, there are four main overlaying principles:

The first consists of the entitlement to equal opportunities to participate in the full range of activities that constitute the field of culture in the society in question. The second consists in the entitlement of all members of society to be provided with the cultural means of functioning effectively within that society without being required to change their cultural allegiances, affiliations or identities. The third consists in the obligation of governments and other authorities to nurture the source of diversity through imaginative mechanisms, arrived at through consultation, for sustaining and developing the different cultures that are active within the populations…The fourth concerns the obligation for the promotion of diversity to aim at establishing ongoing interactions between different cultures, rather than their development as separated enclaves”.

The final approach, and one finding more difficulty emerging, yet in my view the most useful, is the cultural rights-based approach.

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets out the right to participate in the cultural life of the community as a cultural right. According to Murray the right to participate in has a range of meanings:

• Expressive – implying that people have a basic right to tell stories in their own language
or to practice everyday life in different ways, to create and disseminate their work in the
language of their choice (UNESCO: UDCD Article 1).

• Normative – referring to the civil values of treatment with respect, tolerance, or
establishing the security of being, that is the right to live in freedom from fear of arbitrary
cultural genocide ( UNESCO UDCD, Preamble)

• Instrumental – compelling the state to provide the informational tools, education, or
capacity to function as cultural citizens in a manner that fully respects their cultural
identity. Conversely, the State may guarantee access to cultural resources to all regardless
of income or geographic location.

• Procedural – including grounds for protection of minorities an ethical imperative,
inseparable from respect for human dignity. It implies a commitment to human rights and
fundamental freedoms, in particular the rights of persons belonging to minorities and
those of indigenous peoples.

• Deliberative – that is, setting out the principles of recognition of cultural status,
representation in cultural decision making, or control over cultural self-determination.

Theatre practitioners, historians and archaeologists generate meaning and pleasure or fear and rigidity in the way they handle definitions of cultural memory. These powerful combinations have not gone unnoticed by politicians of both the modernist and romantic tendencies. Increasingly European politicians and policy makers see the “useful” role artists and historians can make in sharing these meanings with a wider public, especially when the public is paying for the work in the first place. In many respects theatre practitioners, historians and archaeologists are locked together in an interpretative nexus – responsible for the generation of material and knowledge and for the transmission of this knowledge in a way which can be complicating, truthful, useful and enjoyable or manipulative and nationalistic. But unless a transparent cultural policy framework underpins the way cultural interventions are designed and implemented they remain highly susceptible to either simplified market forces or even more explicitly anti democratic tendencies.

© January 2008 – Chris Baldwin

Endnotes

1. The Death of Man (p74) by Canguilhem G. in Gutting G The Cambridge Companion to Foucault 2005

2. For statistical information relating to culture in Spain visit http://www.mcu.es/culturabase

3. Francois Matarasso´s papers examine this area in various contexts. http://homepage.mac.com/matarasso/FileSharing15.html

4. This observation is based on personal experience and discussions with cultural policy makers and practitioners across Spain. Also visit http://www.mcu.es/culturabase

5. Carol Matlack How Spain Thrives on Immigration Business Week May 9 2007

6. Sep 26, 2006

7. Juan Lalaguna A Travellers History of Spain 1990

8. Max Harris, in his book Aztecs, Moors and Christians in Mexico and Spain,(2000) importantly stresses the subversive elements in popular fiesta. While his argument is important and valid I wish to emphasis the role these re-enactment festivals help define the territory in which contemporary debates about romantic nationalism take place

9. Jose Maria Aznar was defending Pope Benedict XVI’s comments about Islam, saying that the pontiff had no need to apologise and asking why Muslims never did. 22nd Sep 2006 Herald Tribune

10. Cultural Participation: Toward a Cultural Policy Paradigm (Nov 2003) Canadian Cultural Research Network