Slow Dramaturgy: Renegotiating Politics and Staging the Everyday

Abstract

An art that blurred the boundaries between art and performance expanded conventional notions of the 'work' to posit 'action' as an explicit problem for consideration.1Over the last decade, scholars and artists have often argued for art's reengagement with the everyday world.2 This has become evident in art's intensifying new explorations of actual bodies and places - what Adrian Heathfield notes is a shift to the haptic and immediate uncanny experience of art. Moreover, in a global trend mat Carol Martin calls 'the dramaturgy of the real', the first decade of the new century has seen contemporary theatre and performance, in forms such as documentary theatre, address in a variety of ways political and social conditions in the world through staging everyday realities. This interest in the aesthetic and political potential of the everyday - also seen in experimental performance, live art, community theatre, hybrid performance and dance - contrasts with a prevailing interest in exploring the political-cultural domination of virtual realities in performance in the 1990s, as seen in groups like Not Yet It's Difficult (NYID's 1990s work, Australia) and dumb type (Japan).5Rather man focusing on a return to the real as global category,6 we argue here for the evolution of the slow and particular - terminology we take from the slow food phenomenon and apply to fresh contexts for dramaturgy as observed in a range of recent performances. The performances discussed are Spectacular (2008), from British company Forced Entertainment; Five Days in March (2004), by Japanese company Chelfitsch; and two Australian works, NYID's apoliticaldance (2006) and Holiday (2007-08) from Ranters Theatre. While all use widely different forms and are located in specific cultural and political domains of production and reception, they are explored here as casting light on an emergent dramaturgical frame that we are calling 'slow dramaturgy'. As we show, slow dramaturgy shares with Martin's writing an interest in real experiences, but whereas that work tends to explore me theme in relation to documentary theatre, testimony and narration - not to mention an interest in truth and fiction - our theme engages with an apparent new aesthetic sensibility of slow time.In suggesting this idea we acknowledge and depart from several established critical perspectives. Evident in recent research into contemporary performance are debates over a rethinking of theatre and experience, specifically conceptions of affect and phenomenology; theatre's relationship to audience; and, as a consequence, new methods of debating socio-political contexts for art. Jill Dolan, particularly, points to the important utopie potential which she finds in the experience of viewing contemporary live performance.8 According to Dolan, 'audiences form temporary communities, sites of public discourse that, along with the intense experiences of Utopian performatives, can model new investments in and interactions with variously constituted public spheres'.9 A similar perspective is explored in Jacques Ranciere's The Emancipated Spectator. 'Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting'.10 In proposing an idea of the audience as a 'community of narrators and translators', ' Ranciere asks for a more contemplative dimension to theatre that is liberating.Moreover, verbatim and documentary theatre - forms that aim to document real world events and stage transcripts of eyewitness accounts and official reports - have experienced a revival in theatres around die world.12 As Anderson and Wilkinson suggest, the renewed interest in documentary forms is partly a reaction to a perceived lack of diversity in the media and the increasing encroachment of tabloid formats on me reporting of current affairs and politics. In contrast, 'verbatim theatre provides a platform for diverse, auuientic voices, unheard in popular media'.13 Further, while documentary dieatre explores stories from a specific time, place and community, often using their unique vernacular, the processes of globalisation also mean that diese local languages and stories are more easily transported to theatres around the world. …

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