I have this idea, which came to me through a combination of things, but I’ve been listening and clocking these experiences for a while. I visited Twitter recently and OhEuropa! were after research leads for performance interviews. Followers stepped up with ideas. Some tweeters even dropped their own projects, like Benjamin Rostance here...
I discovered resources and artworks, mainly video pieces of theatre and performance art. Researching further, verbatim theatre or documentary theatre. This genre draws on original dialogue verbatim and put this into a theatre context.
What is verbatim theatre?
Here are a few words from Alecky Blythe. And also an introduction from the National Theatre
The genre's heavily explored at the moment but still relatively new. Source material can come from doing conversations, phone calls, vox pops and using eyewitness or oral accounts from history. what I love about this idea, is that it’s a creative solution to the problem I’ve been having. Theatre is amazing. That I’ve never explored before, is astounding. It's a way into writing, it’s a way to reach an audience and be part of that inevitable theatre revival. The idea of using theatre, putting these words into other peoples mouths reminds me of fantastic musicals, such as Hamilton, shows like That's Life! by journalist Esther Rantzen. Even Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag
David Byrne Interview
Stop Making Sense... "It's like 60 minutes on acid"
Monkey Bars
Chris Goode putting the words of children into the bodies of adults.
Gillian Wearing
The short video projection 2 into 1 (1997) features a mother and her two sons, one generation lip-synching the dubbed words of the other. It is hypnotically disturbing to watch a pair of 10-year-old twins take turns speaking their mother's exasperated love for them. "I think Lawrence is absolutely adorable, he's gorgeous, I love every inch of him," Lawrence says, in a slightly raspy woman's voice. "But he's got a terrible temper." Halfhearted affirmations of self-esteem also figure in the mother's monologue, along with deep fatigue, all sounding precociously sympathetic--if not a touch demonic--coming from her children's lips. Equally unnerving is the mother's mimed recitation, heard in the soft, clear voices of clever preadolescent boys, of her sons' accounts of her. We hear their criticism of her driving ("too slow") and clothes ("she doesn't dress too well"), and their complaint that she goes out to clubs too much (slightly disheveled and obviously anxious, she looks like she could use the break). For their part, the boys, baby-faced and natty but incipiently loutish, are hardly ingratiating. A dazzlingly deft expression of the complex pushes and pulls in the mother-son relationship, 2 into 1 is an even more concise articulation of the triangulated relationship between artist, subject and viewer. Treating emotional truth as if it were the coin under the three fast-shuffled cups of a sidewalk con artist, this video pictures the circulation of meaning as a kind of vaudeville act, fast, funny and a little cruel.
Responding to an advertisement in Time Out magazine, a series of participants took up Wearing's offer to make their confessions on camera. This work was inspired by 'fly-on-the-wall' documentaries and confessional TV chat shows, but it also evokes the religious ritual of confession and its modern secular equivalent, psychoanalysis. Wearing raises questions about the motives behind confession. Disguised, her participants are free to tell the truth about things to which they would never admit in daily life. At the same time, they can invent flamboyant lies without being caught out.
Pram Talks | All Things Considered
I love the production quality and insight into their process that this overview provides. "Pram Talks in as interactive one-on-one audio performance for two parents, devised and produced by All Things Considered Theatre. It takes participants on an audio journey through the experience of pregnancy, delivery and new parenthood." For more information about the project, see their website here.
Quizoola | Forced Entertainment
Pals Lisa and Rachael are creating a show a decade after they created their first piece together.
They had no ideas, so they asked the public in for theirs. What story should they tell? What characters should they play? When they saw Lisa in a wheelchair and Rachael not, what the public said was mixed. They made a show about it. It was called No Idea.
Now people say the world has changed for the better. There's more D/disabled people in the mainstream media, Lisa landed a big part on TV and D/disabled mates are getting regular auditions – happy days. So what's on the cards?
"Still No Idea is the whole story (so far): the British public, the professional writers, the TV execs. Part verbatim theatre, part improv, part comedy sketch show, this is a raucous and mischievous exposé of good intentions gone bad and how sometimes no matter how hard we try, we still have absolutely no idea."
No Great Society (2007) - Full Performance
Observen cómo el cansancio derrota al pensamiento
Worthy mentions
Person Spec. by Forest Sounds
http://forestsounds.org/person-specification/
Going down the route of verbatim theatre will require a lot of extra work. To cast actors, select stories, time for them to come forward. Black actors, gay actors, D/disabled actors going for a casting process, transcribing the interviews .
I fully intend to still create a film with these interviews, so it will be a fantastic resource for the actors. It will also have more in common with shows like Staged, but I really love that I’ve drawn on for this project.
Confirmation - Chris Thorpe
Brexit party politics labour piece of work examining child has put in the words of children and adults role reversal like a face swap but a voice swap.
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