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DRAMATURGY AS A SEARCH FOR FORM & MEANINGS
"DRAMATURGY IN THEATRE AND IN CHILDREN'S DRAMATIC PLAYING"
Lecture at the Glitterbird-seminar in Oslo 25. of June 2004.
Faith Gabrielle Guss is dr. art and Associate Professor at the Faculty for Early Childhood Education at the Oslo University College
The perspective I wish to give today has to do with: The relationship between playing and artistic process. I am seeking to formulate something about playing that all children and all artists undoubtably know in their bones.
When I have experimented with making theatre for children and experienced their reception, I have posed a question to myself whose answers have continually raised new questions. Here is the original question: What kind of knowledge about children can be useful for theatre artists who wish to spark meaningful aesthetic interaction with young audiences? This question led me to study children´s dramatic playing - their pretend play - for several years. I wished to understand the aesthetic dimension in dramatic playing, and ended up studying, among other things, the children´s spontaneous dramaturgy. By play dramaturgy I mean: How the children compose and express their imaginations in symbolic and dramatic forms. For example: What form-languages they use and how they weight them in relationship with each other, as well as: What structuring conventions they use to and how they use them.
Background
I spent several months observing and filming the dramatic playing of a group of kindergarten children. My way, or method, for understanding their dramaturgy was to compare it to contemporary theatre production. In particular, I studied the production processes in two, cutting edge performance-theatre groups: Forced Entertainment from England and Wooster Group from New York.
The main point of my paper is that the production process in these two performance theatre groups resembles to a great extent children´s inventive fantasy playing. I will soon describe an example of two children´s playing. Because of the resemblance, what I have to say may be useful for artists who produce theatre for young children.
Devised performance theatre
In performance theatre groups, the production process is commonly referred to as a devising process. The practice of devising theatre is a willed divergence from traditional theatre practices - artistically, culturally and politically. I will name ways in which they diverge. In the aspects that I name, please listen for aspects that might also characterize children´s dramatic playing.
1. The devising artists come from differing art forms. Their ways of collaborating abolish the hierarchies that exist in traditional theatre, especially in regard to the primacy of the written word and the director´s overriding concept for production prior to the rehearsal process.
2. The performers are quite often not traditionally trained actors. What the performer does is referred to as "non-acting". This means that he/she is not enacting a psychological character but, rather, action fragments of temporary identities which are being tried on.
3. From a given starting impulse, the devising process is explorative of both form and meaning. The performance text is devised by the whole group. Even though the starting impulse may be an existing (dramatic) text, it could just as well be an abstract idea, a tendency in society, etc.. The artists’ personal affinities influence to a great extent the workshop process. Many groups call their performances “works in progress” because, for them, the process is the product and the process continues into meetings with audiences over time.
4. All the artistic means in a performance can be given equal expressive weight, for instance: the performer’s body movement and voice, words, sound/music, elements of visual design, and lighting.
5. In the process of playing freely with established theatre conventions and with audience expectations of traditional conventions, the devisers invent new conventions that destabilize audience expectations.
6. The performance does not try to communicate one truth about reality, as in classical (i.e. Aristotelian) and modern (i.e. Brecht) dramaturgies. Rather, it can present the several perspectives that have emerged during the artists’ explorative workshop process. The performance of the differing perspectives can communicate ambiguities that have arisen for the artists´ in the production process.
7. The playful, experimental workshop process and its means of production are often visible in the product.
Play-drama
I will repeat that: to some extent these aspects resemble aspects in children´s performances in their inventive fantasy play. The major difference is that artists can eventually stand outside their process, evaluate its forms, and refine the expression in chosen ways - in keeping with their artistic and cultural values.
During my study of dramatic playing, I came to regard children´s collective dramatic playing as: A spontaneous drama performance, a performance that the children play both for their own inner eye and for each other. The players are performer-spectators. In both of these functions they can be moved by their own and each other’s formal and thematic content, and they interact in relation with these. This aspect resembles to a great extent the workshop process in devised theatre. What I hope to show is that, in their play-drama, children play with both forms and meanings. While playing they explore, interpret and express ad hoc what lies in their imaginations and what arises during their performance. The ways they do this give good models for curious devising artists.
Before presenting the play-drama example I will first discuss a couple of useful concepts.
Genres of dramatic playing:
There are two basic genres of dramatic playing. The first is what I call (reproductive) social-realistic playing, the second is (inventive) fantasy playing. Often children combine the two. In social-realistic play, children imitate and reproduce what they have already experienced. This kind of playing is constricted by the children´s desire to perform the objectively real pre-text that they have stored in their sensory memories. In theatre forms this form is related to realism and naturalism. On the other hand, when children embark upon the unknown territory of inventive fantasy play, they begin to interrogate and to transform what they have experienced. They can invent and live in alternative worlds as long as they keep the play in motion. They can turn the normative order on its head with perspectives that express their own positions, rather than inherited positions.
The older the children are, and the more playing experience they have, the more advanced are their form-languages, their structuring conventions and their expressive skills. Much of the pleasure and fun of playing probably derives from their being able to successfully establish symbolic role-figures, symbolic space and props, and symbolic time - in ways that feel credible and "true" for them and their co-performers. What makes a child a prized co-performer is also the ability to create dramatic structures that keep the playing in movement. This brings me to another concept:
Playing:
Children play and artists play. I wish to problematize the way we ordinarily think about what play is – by calling it playing. This verbal form suggests an active performer. We ordinarily think about play as an activity children engage in before they are old enough to know better. But the scientific fact is that they come to know better by playing. So, rather than think about what play is, I like to think about how playing is. How is playing? Here is an analogy from the game of ball: If two children are playing with a rubber ball, the ball is the material that is being played. We say "the ball is in play". That is to say: The ball´s movement is the play.
Furthermore, the ball´s movement cannot be pre-determined, so the element of chance plays a large role. The children are in play along with the ball´s movement: They play along with and place their trust in chance (co-incidence). They take the given risks. Therefore, we can say that playing has to do with abandoning oneself to the ball´s back-and-forth chance movement, to follow it, to stay with it, and to respond to the impulses that its movements call for: Run after it here and there, catch it, throw it back to the other player. The players become entirely engrossed in the movement. The players are in the movement, rather than controlling it.
Removed from the analogy of the game of ball, the arts philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer defines play as: The continual back-and-forth movement between two poles, in which neither of the poles represents a goal where the movement should come to rest. Players abandon themselves to the back-and-forth movement of playing and are moved by it. The play movement plays the players. Playing is staying with the back-and-forth movement between impulses, whether it occurs in physical action or in mental action. Children play, with no other goal than to enjoy the abandonment to the impulses that – unexpectedly - arise, are sent out, and are received. Here lies the excitement and fun.
Gadamer´s definition of play is relevant for understanding all creative processes. It can be particularly useful when we deliberate about possibilities for devising performances for young children, because their whole way of being in the world, and discovering the world, is related to sensory playing. We should definitely think of theatre for children as an artistic and aesthetic playing ground. As audience members, children also enter into a mental and emotional playing state, in an aesthetic interplay with the performance.
Now we are ready for my example of children´s play-drama dramaturgy. Because I am speaking at a conference about art for children under 3, I need to briefly preface the example: The performers of this play-drama are very old: Tessa is 3 years and 8 months and Hilde, aged 5 years and 1 month. Children under three, compared to children well over three, do not have the wide range of life experience and play experience, and have not yet developed the powers of reflection and command of form-languages. However, the nature of the playing and the qualities the children bring to their playing are similar, no matter what age. After the description, I will summarize the qualities that I find there.
Play-drama dramaturgy and the search for meanings
In a large room full of light, Tessa and Hilde are quietly playing. They are mothers who take care of their babies. Tessa goes over to the bookshelf to find a book to read for her baby. She finds Little Red Riding Hood. On the cover is a watercolour of The Wolf, with an oversized head and gaping jaw. The picture provides an aesthetic impulse that sets Tessa´s imagination in play, leading to a drama that lasts for 40 minutes. Tessa, book in hand, stalks over to Hilde and announces: Capture the wolf, we shall! The Mothers are transformed to Wolf-slayers. A non-linear drama begins in which the wolf is captured, punished and dies in many variations.
Aesthetic structure
I will focus on the first part of the drama here.
Tessa and Hilde shoot at the imagined wolf with L-formed wooden blocks. They wound him. Tessa imprisons him in a square of large rectangular pillows. She then initiates a wolf-torture that Hilde joins: As Wolf-slayers, they stand on a ladder-chair and hop repeatedly on the imagined wolf, onto a mattress one meter from the chair. The movement is circular: from the chair to the mattress and back to the chair.
They taunt The Wolf.
They hop on him.
The Wolf is dead, they say, but they continue to hop.
Now he is really dead, they say, but they continue to hop.
Now he is really, really dead, they say, but they continue to hop.
They transform a common hopping game into a symbolic vehicle for wolf-slaying.
And we can call the circular form of the movement an aesthetic structure: stand up, hop down, circle back to the chair. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It has a rhythm and a tempo that they vary and which they become sensorily immersed in.
Furthermore, within Tessa´s hopping structure, she performs two role-figures: When she stands on the chair she performs the Wolf-slayer. She taunts The Wolf, then hops and lands on the mattress/the wolf. When she has landed on the mattress, she rolls over on her back and performs The Wolf´s howling response. Then she stands up and goes back to the chair, where she once again performs the Wolf-slayer.
Meta-fictional action
After many minutes of hopping, the girls begin to sweat, they take off their sweat shirts, they laugh a great deal. Tessa says how much she hates The Wolf. These are meta-fictional actions and comments. If this were a devising process toward theatre for children, we could retain such material as part of the product. In doing so, we create two layers of action: the "real" playing context and personal perspectives of the performers; and the fiction of the wolf-slaying. Child audiences would most likely recognize these two layers from their own playing conventions and accept them.
Intertextualization
Intermittently, in the space on the way back to the chair, Tessa moves the action from her invented struggle with The Wolf to the world of the fairy tales The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats and The Three Little Pigs. Thus she creates a third layer of action. This mental movement, from narrative structure to narrative structure, is made possible because Tessa, physically, performs a third role, that of a narrator.
Using the Narrator-voice to frame the episode, she mimes and uses sound effects to perform her version of what happens when The Wolf knocks at the door of the seven little goats´ house. For example, as Narrator, she says: And someone knocks at the door. Then she performs the action of that Someone (The Wolf), by knocking on the floor and saying: Knock, knock. This fairy tale fragment ends when the three little pigs arrive and rescue the goats. The Narrator says: And they cut off the wolf´s arms and legs. Tessa´s solution to killing The Wolf once and for all, across the fairy tales, is: Unite and conquer.
By intertextualizing bits of narrative from the fairy tales, she not only creates a third fictive layer, she creates a new and temporary perspective on The Wolf: He can be overcome. In addition, she creates a new perspective on herself, as heroine and plot-transformer.
The Wolf is now dead, we have been told. But no, Tessa returns to her slaying ritual, in which he is very much alive again. Several times, she repeats this pattern of moving back and forth between her hopping drama and the drama in the fairy tale fragments.
Meanings
What meanings is Tessa performing? In her performance The Wolf dies in each episode, but is alive and howling again in the next episode. Her main impression seems to be that the same wolf dies in the one fairy tale, but returns again in the next. She is enacting a composite image of an indestructible and ever-present Wolf-threat. She seems to perform a search for the meanings of "The Wolf" as a mythical figure - an exploration of what actually happens to him across the three fairy tales. How is he? Does he die? Does he resurrect? In both parts of the drama, she also performs an exploration of what dying means - in regard to both The Wolf´s death and the Wolf-slayers´ deaths. How is dying? Is it like sleeping? Can we wake up after we die?
Tessa´s structuring convention
The dramaturgical structure that Tessa constructs makes it possible for her to question the meanings of the fairy tales as well as to transform them. What could we call this convention? Tessa´s teacher has previously used the solo theatre convention of dramatic monolog to enact another fairy tale. Tessa adopts it and adapts it. In a dramatic monolog the solo actor takes a Narrator-role which both frames the dramatic situation(s) and comments upon it/them underway, in a meta-fictional layer. Tessa´s use of the Narrator position allows her to follow the play of her imagination, shifting rapidly from place to place, from situation to situation, from role-figure to role-figure. She finds this structuring convention so aesthetically engaging that she expands and expands it.
In the convention of dramatic monolog, the Narrator-role stands outside the fictional action, contextualizes the dramatic situation and comments upon it. From this position, the performer can move out into the fiction and back to home base. Within the fiction, the performer can move back and forth between the enactment of, and perspectives on, many fictive roles and situations. Tessa is not yet four years old, but she is juggling several roles and several dramatic situations and commenting upon them. Her transformation of the monolog-structure makes it possible for her to deconstruct the fairy tales and to glue them together again in a new way.
We can describe Tessa´s performance as a multi-voiced and ambiguous seeking process. Her consciousness lies on the threshold of the consciousnesses of several fairy-tale consciousnesses, and is in a continual dialog with them. On this dialogic threshold, she comes to no definitive meanings, no synthesis, nor final truth. There are only temporary truths. The wolf is finally buried, but he is still howling.
How could we summarize the nature of the girls´ playing and the qualities they bring to it?
- In fantasy playing, the only pre-planned starting point is thematic. "Now we were mothers to these babies". Otherwise, the meaning content and the form content arise and are developed associatively, in the playing movement.
- The performers are fully present with all their senses and being, which means that they are receptive to the chance happenings that occur, and they follow these impulses.
- We can call these qualities presence, immediacy and spontaneity.
- Tessa´s expressive forms arise as a necessity for actualizing what lies in her imagination. She has experienced the dramatic convention she is playing with, but she adapts it and transforms it in order to fulfil the desire to express her imagination.
- We could call play-drama dramaturgy "a dramaturgy of the imagination".
- My last summarizing point has to do with children´s multiple form languages, which I will expand upon below:
Children´s dramatic form-languages
In play-drama the players perform not only role-figures. They also perform, and rapidly shift among, all the positions that we find in theatre arts production: The positions of dramatist, dramaturg, director, actor, narrator, choreographer/dancer, composer/musician, scenographer, costume designer, light designer, sound designer, props person, stagehand, and spectator. In play-drama all these positions and their creative actions are visible as part of the children’s production. These are both dramatic actions and production actions, and they develop in concert. Whereas in traditional theatre the production actions are largely hidden from the audience, in performance theatre the production actions are often visible to the spectator, as part of the performance aesthetic. This would be an appropriate aesthetic choice when playing for child audiences, who would most likely recognize the convention from their own playing experience and feel at home with it.
The perspectivizing logic of the imagination
As a conclusion, I will pose a few questions that arise from my answers. They all have to do with how we can be on the side of children and their need to seek meaning, at the same time as we are on the side of the best artistic quality. They also raise questions about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Each question could be formulated less pointedly, but together they hopefully create a discussion field that is worth entering.
Does theatre for children have to be structured according to adult rational logic, with a linear narrative storyline?
Or could we, rather, perform the same kind of searching ambiguity that children perform for themselves, with the logic of the imagination?
If so, how could this be done? What kinds of structuring conventions could we invent in order to present differing perspectives on the same core dramatic action, as Tessa has done, without confusing the children?
How could we actively involve the audience in an open aesthetic inter-play, in regard to the differing perspectives? And how could we do this without relinquishing the artistic form
and the aesthetic that we wish to realize?
How can we avoid the post-modern tendency to shrink from the construction of meaning – which may not suit communication with children?
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