Iam Nocte Performance Images and Video Excerpt

Laura Bishop, The Oracle

Chris Jackson, Oedipus

Oedipus and Plague

Elastic

Oedipus and Plague

Tiresias summons up the dead

Excerpt from Scene 10: Blind

"Fury in his voice.

Face of fiery passion.

Eyes so fixed they could be coming out of their sockets by themselves.

Wild looks.

Madness.

Groan – terrifying roar.

Thrusts his fingers into his eyes.

Wrenching from their roots he tears his eyes out.

Fingers bent.

Fingers still probing the open holes – nails scratching the open cavities.

Holes  gaped hollow where the eyes had been.

Looks toward the heavens scanning the sky.

Tears away the last remaining shreds"

Iam Nocte Process - Andrew Peek and Chris Jackson

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.

Five Years of Crisis (2006 - 2010)

Then and Now

The human voice has been a topic of investigation for many years. After all these years of investigation, the voice is still an object of mystery. Voice is still a very neglected aspect of theatre not only as a skill base, but as a creative aesthetic.  Physical exploration and experimentation is widely accepted, however, vocal exploration is widely neglected. There are several possible reasons for this. The first is the fact that the voice (and subsequent textual communication) obtains heavy semantic qualities, and any obscuring and distortion of these semantics relies the audience to work harder to decipher the meanings behind the vocal experimentation. Sometimes, audiences and performers tend to rely on intellectual stimulation. This is why audiences often say ‘I wonder what that meant’, or ‘I couldn’t understand what was going on’, or even ‘I didn’t get that’. These are all intellectual responses involving the ego, hence the word ‘I’. In physical theatre, only bodies are expressing feeling, narrative etc. and audiences really do not have to work hard. Once the voice comes into it, they need to activate their ears as well as their eyes. The other second reason for the suppression of vocal exploration is the fact that the voice is connected to our inner psyche. In fact, the word ‘persona’, broken up (per-sona), loosely means ‘of sound’. So, this could mean that our true personalities are expressed through sound. I was interested in this idea of bringing sound to the forefront – but not conventional vocal sound. What would be more fascinating is if performers would treat the voice as an extension of their bodies, part of their physical make-up, and not something separate, or an ‘add on’. 

It all commenced in 2006 when I began to investigate the affects of Butoh dance on the voice and the physical aspects of Butoh and the resultant vocal sound. I started to connect the body and voice in a way that was fairly unconventional, sometimes going against the natural synergy of movement and voice. It began with sound exploration – preverbal expressions of internal images that were sometimes very abstract. There were no boundaries, only freedom to express images drawn from the inner psyche of the performers. There were moments of magic, but there were also moments of pure self-indulgence that veered towards something that resembled therapy or free expressionism. It needed parameters and at least a framework for the actors to freely depict these images within a structured context. Sometimes the performers were encouraged to vocalise after the body had been placed under a certain amount of physical exhaustion, this way, the performers did not have time to think about how they would say the words, or what kind of sound they would express, rather, they would only vocalise what they were feeling at that particular moment. This was my first investigative introduction to what I call vocalisation from a state of ‘Physical Crisis’. 

Two other forms of Crisis was investigated, that being ‘Conceptual Crisis’ and ‘Vocal Crisis’. The notion of revolt against the convention forms of physical and vocal treatment and its relationship to abstract imagery contribute to the overall ‘Conceptual Crisis’. Conventional Western voice practices may be far from the concept of crisis as they focus on the freeing and expression of the natural voice, and the overall relaxation of the body in which the voice is housed. This overall notion is extremely important as relaxation is the key to successful performances, but, I believe that theatre should represent a reality that is far beyond the safe, and sometimes superficial sanctuary that is the conventional, contemporary theatre. The voice in this investigation expressed the inner world of the performer as a result of a physical crisis they encountered through expressing abstract imagery from an arcane energy source, resulting in an extra-daily performance including non-verbal theatre. 

The physical aspects of the method reminded me of the work I had experienced previously such as Bioenergetics, Fitzmaurice voicework and Tadashi Suzuki’s physically rigorous training. For me, as a voice person, I wanted to further explore the vocal affects in terms of actor training. I strongly believe that performance training should be rigorous, not to the point of pushing performers to the absolute extremities of their humanly possible capabilities, but to their own, personal capacity. After all, each person is individual and every performer is on a different physical level. Since then, the body has played an important role in training and performance.  All performances form White Dark (2007) to Iam Nocte (2010), incorporated intense physical applications in training that became evident in the performances. 

This production is, in essence, the pinacle of five years of research and study. It is not the final production; to us, it really is the beginning. There are now plans to codify the training aesthetic and use Iam Nocte as a springboard for further investigations. I can now look at the production and say that we have achieved our interpretation of Conceptual, Vocal and Physical Crisis.

Reflections on Iam Nocte

I was privileged on Thursday 2 December to attend the opening performance of Voice Theatre Lab’s production of Iam Nocte at the Annex theatre space. The performance lasted an hour but what a rich and intense hour it was. From the outset the audience was plunged into a Hieronymus Bosch dreamscape. We compulsively watched, filled with fascination and dread, as Freudian monsters from the Id possessed the stage and our psyches. This was Leah’s ‘bare forked anIaml’, humanity reduced to its primordial longings and terrors.

I had the sense that i was watching a performance that did not readily fit any performance genre. It had elements of boutique theatre. The very choice of venue, the nature of performance space, seating and lighting flagged that we were about to watch a play. Yet the movement often of the ensemble cast felt like dance while the voice-work at times was redolent of operatic performance. Were the costumes and staging more sumptuous this would have been total theatre. Not that the costumes were inappropriate. The black skirted pants resembled the Aikido hakama, evocative and poetically appropriate given the affinities of Voice Theatre Lab’s production values with Butoh dance.

The notion of placing the body in unbalanced positions in order to tense muscles, and consequently tense the voice (produce crisis), works on a number of levels. Yes, as diaphragms become tight as drums, the audience hears breathing become shallow and fast, vocalisation become brief and trail off with the insufficient carriage of air, tremors of muscle become tremors of voice. At a subliminal level we apprehend that all is not well. We are thrown into crisis.

There are additional spin-offs. To move the ensemble in and out of these crisis-inducing postures requires an elaborate choreography. The consequence is that physical performance becomes orchestrated and rhythmic as it moves characters through a range of forms. In brief, it becomes contemporary dance so that at times I felt we watching a Graeme Murphy dance company. Time seems suspended or distorted in a stylized world of stylized movement, a world filled with beautiful horror. The arabesques through a pool of blood brought to mind Lindsay Kemp’s unforgettable performance when he toured Flowers (an stunning adaptation of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers) to Australia back in 1974. At other times I was watching Rodin’s Burghers of Calais come to life in their ordeal.

The choice of drama, based on Seneca’s Oedipus, was inspired. The chorus, the furies, the gods all seemed present. The use of Latin, stylised and filtered through crisis filled the drama space with an air of the portentous and prophetic. The atmosphere had the gravitas of religious invocation, of a dark liturgy. The outpouring of physical energy, the sounds of lamentations, the sounds of terror and of rage, the whimpers of contrition, was to experience tragic catharsis in performance.

The goose-bumps came not only from the sheer theatricality of performance but from a direct visceral response to performance. The vocalizations, some almost non-human or inhuman, were a paralinguistic communication that linked directly to our pre-verbal anIaml receptors. The nouns and verbs of a familiar language were absent but the syntax of utterance remained present. Chomsky proposed a model of language acquisition the posited a pre-wired brain, a brain that has evolved for syntax and symbolism, a dry river-bed waiting for the flow of experience within culture to fill it with a torrent of signifiers and meanings. This production seemed to race down those primitive wirings with a kind of proto-language or Ursprache.

Michael Argyle, in his seminal work on non-verbal communication (NVC) argued that 70% of human communication occurs via the non-verbal channel, of which paralanguage is an important element in establishing and maintaining the interpersonal domain. Interpersonal emotional orientation, familial harmony, tribal bonding, assertion of dominance, inter-group aggression, ecstatic experience – all mediated through paralinguistics as any infant hearing a lullaby or oceanic rival subjected to the haka would know.

This means that erudition and sophisticated enculturation provided a flimsy defence against the emotional impact of the actors interpersonal paralinguistic vocalisations and whose physical proximity exuded an intense sense of their anIaml presence. The cast  became totemic. As theatre, this performance under the sparse illumination of well-placed spotlighting had more in common with firelight corroboree than with the Importance of Being Ernest. The intense and sustained focus of the performers was palpable and provided a subtext that underscored the seriousness of purpose of the work. Their utter immersion, reaching to some place deep within to retrieve inchoate cries, was theatre of veritas. I felt it was kind of performances that Grotowski would recognise as Theatre of Poor:

the "ripening" of the actor which is expressed by a tension towards the extreme, by a complete stripping down, by the laying bare of one's own intimity - all this without the least trace of egotism or self-enjoyment. The actor makes a total gift of himself. This is a technique of the "trance" and of the integration of all the actor's psychic and bodily powers which emerge from the most intIamte layers of his being and his instinct, springing forth in a sort of "trans-lumination."  http://www.scribd.com/doc/20263119/Towards-a-Poor-Theatre-J-Grotowski (p. 16).

Could it be that provoking crisis also provokes trance? Indeed, is physical crisis a form of ‘kinaesthetic driving’ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trance ]? Does a sense of having witnessed a religious rite derive in some part from a mystical aura generated by the actors’ strenuous physical and emotional immersion in their roles? (See http://www.mindpowernews.com/BrainCreatesGod.htm for some discussion of trance induction through kinaesthetic stress, a sense of the numinous, and discussion of neurotheology – though admittedly i’m stretching a long bow now)

I was also struck by similarities of this search for expressive performance modes in drama with my MCA research project where I am exploring expressive mark-making in portrait painting. I too am searching for the authentic emotional communication with a viewer but using the manner of paint marks rather than of the manner of vocalisations. I too hope that the very quality of marks, not simply the cultural signifiers depicted in Iamges, will induce synchronous emotional reactions in viewers so that the trace of human movement over a surface with pigment, the manner of mark-placing, becomes a haptic primordial para-language. I too hope that the emotion with which the marks are put turn is transmitted at a pre-conscious level to any viewer who has ever handled materials and observed the effects of their own handling. Just as Butoh had its post-war roots, in part, in German Expression, like-wise my painting looks to Austrian Successionist Expressionism and contemporary German neo-Expressionism for an artistic orientation in my search for a lexicon of authentic mark-making.

I came away from Iam Nocte feeling i had been in the audience of contemporary Expressionist theatre. I came away feeling both up-lifted and discomforted, engaged and challenged, entertained and drained. Most of all a came away with a great respect for the company, especially the director Robert Lewis, who were extending the boundaries of Australian theatre. This was serious theatre at its best – innovative, daring, profound.

Dr Harry Kent