Process
The following texts are from two core company members, Andrew Peek and Chris Jackson. In my opinion, they would be the best ones to detail the training experience. The training has developed considerably throughout the last five years from didactic style, to a more collaborative approach. In 2010, I believe we had a good balance of both. Two considerable developments this year have been the adoption of some of Ozfrank Theatre’s Frank Suzuki Performance Knowhow (derived first hand from the Suzuki Actor Training Method) (although Artistic Director John Nobbs, who has been training with Suzuki for nearly two decades, has been active in reviewing and commenting on some of Voice Theatre Lab’s productions and training aesthetics over the past three years), and the use of original Tasmanian music in the training, that being music by The Chirdwainers. The latter inspired the production Alchemy (2010).
Andrew Peek
My first impression from rehearsals was that preparation for this show was highly experimental and that here was a director who welcomed and encouraged his actors’ ideas and suggestions as part of the process. When I joined VTL four years ago prior to a production of Doctor Faustus, we spent a lot of time exploring and developing techniques from a variety of sources, including Butoh and imaging exercises, to create a kind of palette we could draw on as we began rehearsing the production. I found the initial work was exciting and liberating in its own right. As we began to build characters and scenes in the play, I got a clearer understanding of how Rob was drawing on preparatory sessions to create a novel and idiosyncratic interpretation of Marlowe’s Renaissance text. Instead of approaching characters in a conventional way, examining motivation and broader psychological traits for instance, Rob started from the ground up. Doctor Faustus was one of the first great plays in modern English theatre and contains allegorical and other non-realistic elements from an earlier era. So it was appropriate to make a fresh start in preparing VTL’s production. Still, it was a radical process.
What remained just as important as experiment, however, was the fact that Rob never lost sight of the original text and never compromised the integrity of his adaptation of it. This is equally true of Iam Nocte, a production based on Seneca’s re-telling of Sophocles’ drama, Oedipus Rex. The choice of this text is interesting in a variety of ways. It seems likely, for instance, that Seneca’s play was written to be read, rather than performed on stage, as is the case in the VTL production. There is greater emphasis on ritual - blood sacrifice, communion with the dead, prophecy - in Seneca’s play than we find in Sophocles’. The process of transmission is also remarkable: from mythic sources Sophocles drew on for his play, through Seneca’s recasting in Latin, to Rob’s mix of original Latin with his own and other translations into English and the final realisation on stage.
One of the most famous recent production of Seneca’s play was by Peter Brook for the National Theatre in London in 1969. Brook was using a new translation of the text by Ted Hughes. This was heady territory for VTL to move into. Its director is not someone to be intimidated, though. With his own conception of the text firmly in mind, rehearsal has always meant beginning from the beginning, that’s to say a half a dozen actors, exercises that are always under development and the scene in hand. It has been a privilege to see how this led to Iam Nocte in its final form. Or maybe I should say present form, since Rob’s work is always on the move, looking for new ways to take projects further still.
Chris Jackson
This time around Oedipus, and indeed the Voice Theatre Lab process, seemed a little different. We were exploring Oedipus’ story in a new form “Iam Nocte”. In all honesty it seemed to be easier this time around. What was missing? It was the “body in crisis” and “pushing your body to the limit” factor. This wasn’t through laziness or a lack of physical capability it was a shift in creative energy.This appeared to be a new Voice Theatre Lab that was a mixture between physical theatre and voice theatre lab practices, which opened new doors of creativity but the change in mode also closed some of the doors of physical challenge. This was addressed in the final stages of
rehearsal.
A few more of the “body in crisis” techniques were added to texture the show as well as some instances of verbal cross section combining pre-verbal and post verbal treatments. This was the challenge in “Iam Nocte”, trying to find new ways and means of implementing the physio-vocal exercises to inform the show as the process of including physical theatre seemed to have left little room. We have struck a delicate balance and walked a fine line in this show, however there is a lot more peripheral work in “Iam Nocte”, the Chorus is doing a lot more image work and this is more prominent creating a mystical terrain to engage with as a performer and audience member alike. This brought up a new issue. When is it too much? This made being a performer more intellectual than in previous VTL shows as you needed to know when to pull back into neutral in order to let the magic of the vocal landscape created by the ensemble work. All in all “Iam Nocte” is an improvement on it’s predecessor “The Oedipus Project” and has done what all good art does for artists and audiences and tests the fences of it’s form stretching the ideas to new and more
interesting levels.
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