Two anecdotes from Ralf. One – he is waiting for a train to take him from the airport to the city. Three benches outside the airport station – two facing the sun. An airhostess sits on one. He sits on the other turning away from her so as not to intrude. Two others stand talking to each other but looking over each other’s shoulder at the same time. The airhostess leaves, Ralf relaxes on his bench… Two – a family of Belgian tourists walking by the sea in Aberystwyth, the castle in the background. A man detaches himself from them and walks forward faster, turns, slows down, moves backwards and lifts his camera to get the rest of the party into view. Vaguely conscious of this, the others drop their pace of advance automatically to help create the picture, but still conversing, still enjoying the view … Anecdotes of everyday human behaviour, so fascinating in their little details, in their mundane-ness, in their trueness, as it were. Was it possible to make absorbing theatre like this, using elements of the everyday? Also, was it possible to sift through these elements through a sort of Darwinian process of natural selection, seeing what remained, what modified, what disappeared over time?
These were the two thrusts of the three-day Lab. We were all sent out to collect ‘found’ objects and scraps of text, anything that caught our eye. We ended up with branch of a pine tree, a tea strainer, a serving of fish and chips, paper cups, three velvet cushions and God alone knows what else! Plus random bits of text. In four groups we selected objects and a piece of text and created – in a very short space of time – a little sequence which could be copied and repeated. So very, very simple. Each group was observed, people switched and took on roles as they remembered them being performed. Memory is a fickle thing: in this first replication itself changes were apparent. We complicated the process more, collapsed two sequences into one so now we had two ‘new’ sequences made up of ‘surviving’ elements of the old. Reached that vital point that every director reaches: where to go from here? Carry on in this vein? Go against it? Inject it with something external to force a different response? We changed around the space, collapsed all the sequences into one – first performed by the four women, then copied by the four men, then combined: the women going forward and then in reverse, the men going in reverse and then forwards. Once again, modifications crept in. A slideshow of 4 images introduced to contextualise the repeated sequences: a Japanese social event, a crime scene investigation, a fashion photograph, a disaster area. How did this impact the ‘meaning’ of the ‘performance’?By now, having repeated this sequence again and again and again … it was literally part of our being. Little relationships began to develop and explored as we went through the motions again and again. Little hints of personal intimate stories within the superstructure. And the structure itself became a support system, something to return to, something to inspire, something that instigated.
And then Ralf asked for something precious to each of us: a memory, an object, a text, a song. So arrived a stopwatch, a hummed tune, an impromptu conversation… and wove their way into the structure. This marked the shift from natural to intentional selection. What seemed to work, what didn’t fit? And then Ralf asked for an element which had not survived from the initial sequences to be brought back – a piece of text which began: ‘I know what waiting is. I do.’ That became the frame, and the whole condensed 8 minute long distillate performance out of a total of 47 minutes of evolution sequences (no, Ralf has not completely given up his love affair with precise timing!) became the seed of something true, something moving, something compellingly watchable. And the seed of a possible process of creative work.
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