Category Archives: Stratford Festival Laboratory

Towards a Trans Canon: Reflections on Emma Frankland’s Workshop at The Stratford Festival, 2019

By Madeleine Krusto

Oyez, oyez, if any maid

Whom leering Cupid has betrayed

To frowns of spite, to eyes of scorn,

And would in madness now see torn

The boy in pieces…

John Lyly, Galathea, 4.2.1-4

We are dressed as Diana’s nymphs standing in a circle surrounding Cupid, who sits crouched on the floor in front of us. One nymph rips Cupid’s bow and arrow from their hands. Another unclips Cupid’s wings. We move closer. Diana places a bright red copy of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare on Cupid’s back. The pages are open towards us, barely touched, and in pristine condition.

For a moment I stop. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. This was definitely not in my Galathea text. I know how the scene is supposed to play out: the nymphs are instructed by Diana to punish Cupid for influencing them in acting out. But I don’t know how we are supposed to actually go about performing this with a heavy copy of Shakespeare’s work in the middle of us.

One of the nymphs reaches down and rips a page from the RSC collection. Then another. What follows next is a visceral scene: each performer takes a turn tearing a page from the book. We all forget about that initial hesitation. I look down at my hands and there are crumpled pages between them. I don’t even look at what play I just ripped the text from, because it doesn’t matter. I throw pages on the ground, I step on them, I tear more from the book and begin ripping the individual pages into pieces. I want the pages to be unrecognizable. With our nails, we are ripping Shakespeare’s work out of the centre of the archive.

This moment, which took place at the Stratford Festival’s 2019 Theatre Laboratory, was part of the weeklong workshop “Towards a Trans Canon” led by visiting artist Emma Frankland.  I first met Emma in September of 2018 when she was one of the invited artists for the “Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond” conference at the Stratford Festival and McMaster University. Invited by Emma to come back to the Lab to attend this day of her “Towards a Trans Canon” workshop, I had the opportunity to participate in a Performance as Research exploration of the trans performance canon and its relationship to the early modern canon (with Shakespeare at the centre).

As Emma noted throughout the day, there is no complete works of a trans canon archived in a single book, the way there is for the Shakespeare canon. We were being given permission to rip pages from the complete works of Shakespeare both to decentre his name and to make space for the trans canon. The PaR work led by Emma at the Stratford Festival Theatre Lab offered a site for contributing to such a canon through finding queer life within texts such as Galathea, written by Shakespeare’s immediate predecessor, John Lyly. Although an archived canon of trans work does not exist so neatly as Shakespeare’s collection, then, Emma’s workshop suggests that an ongoing repertoire of trans performance (both in early modern and contemporary performance) is what makes up the trans canon.

Accompanying Emma was a group of trans, 2 spirit, and non-binary identifying artists from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I soon understood how important it was for Emma to have brought the invited artists with her into the space. Rather than relying on Emma as the only voice in the room speaking about trans lives as though her story represented every trans narrative, the workshop featured multiple voices speaking to their own lives, their own stories, and their own narratives. It did not become the job of one single trans person to speak on behalf of all trans lives as a universal narrative for the cisgender folk present in the room.

For most of the day we worked through selected scenes from Lyly’s Galathea. In the morning, all participants explored the text together through music, dance, and non-verbal scenework, under Emma’s direction. After lunch, the artists split into groups and worked through specific scenes, text in hand.

I was given the opportunity to observe one of the small groups workshopping – and I was drawn again, as I had been when Emma presented this scene last year with “Engendering the Stage,” to one of the scenes near the beginning of the play, where Philida’s father tells her she must hide in the woods dressed as a boy.

It was an extremely exciting experience to watch two artists work with this scene from Galathea imagining the character of Philida as gender-fluid. At the same time, though, I felt that I suddenly changed from a participant in the PaR work to a spectator at a performance. Although I was still participating in the PaR scholarship, the space of the scenework had shifted toward becoming more of a performance space.

As a cisgender woman invited into this space, a workshop series on the trans canon, it felt important to take up as little space as possible while also not sitting on the sidelines and simply watching the PaR work as if I was situating myself as an expert on transgender lives. When I was a performing participant, such as performing a nymph and ripping the pages from that RSC collection, I was still taking up space in some ways, but also sharing the space with the artists in the room. Together we were unified and working toward something. Being in such an intimate space, it completely changes the dynamic when I am invited to participate, but choose not to. If I am situated on the outside, it feels as though everyone else is performing for my own benefit. When others sit and watch the exploration process that comes with PaR, scenework and discussions between participants become performative for the others watching, whether it be other artists, scholars, or members of the public.

The most rewarding aspects of the 2019 “Towards a Trans Canon” workshop, for me, were the moments of active engagement — where everyone was free to explore, discover and create. We warmed up together, we dressed in costume together, we ripped the pages of Shakespeare together. I am an emerging artist, and a young student just beginning her MA degree and grappling with imposter syndrome. I am still learning where I belong, whether it is in the community practicing my art, in academia, or both. For this day at Emma’s workshop, I did not feel any of these insecurities. Yes, it was incredibly intimidating to be a participant alongside professional artists, but as soon as this initial fear faded away, I was just another participant in the space. It did not matter that I was a young student, a new artist, someone still learning. I was there simply to explore and create with peers.

So there we were together, as participants, ripping the pages of Shakespeare’s complete works. Even though this was a performance, it was a performance for ourselves, for the purpose of exploration; and this was so vitally important to the work and why PaR was being done. Despite the performative element that PaR suggests in its name, this research is intimate work that requires participatory roles from each person in the space. It is an active space. To sit on the sidelines and watch PaR in action is to take more than you are giving to the work.

This research is a constant cycle of placing yourself into the participation, exploration, and discovery. Perhaps the first step to breaking down barriers between participants is acknowledging that this learning happens together. You are allowed to rip the pages too.

Futures for Practice, Performance, and Research: A Conversation

Our last post offered reflections upon a week of practice-as-research work at Stratford Festival Laboratory.  This piece follows the same style, of collaging responses and thoughts about the project and its week of work last September [2018], meditating upon potential uses, problems, and future applications with such work. These are issues the project continues to discuss; on 17 March 2018, for example, Melinda Gough will lead a roundtable at the Renaissance Society of America that picks up on some of the issues addressed here.

***

MAC TEST: I would love to adapt this sort of thing for my own work—in the classroom, and bring it to whatever conference I might be invited to: “let’s do this!” And I do bring—where I work at Boise State—I’ve brought actors in for week-long workshops putting on plays, and things like that, and now after this experience I feel I can say “hey, let’s do this workshop” and make it research-based. … I think the most amazing thing has been the circle group and people speaking their mind—“checking in,” as Gein identified it. That’s probably been the most impactful moment. It’s been useful as a scholar to hear the actors speak from their point of view; it’s very different to how we speak as scholars. With PaR you have the actors and the scholars together in that same place, speaking about the same issues, but from different perspectives.

ZOE HUDSON AND STEVE PURCELL. We very much valued the opportunity to observe and participate in this workshop.  We were struck by the levels of trust and openness that the week had established between the participants, and the commitment that everyone involved brought to the work.  Participants were thinking and working very deeply, rigorously examining both the texts and their own instincts and interpretations.  The week had also fostered a mutually respectful dialogue between academics and practitioners.  […] We would have been interested to hear a bit more about these rehearsal room shorthands and methods of communication; participants alluded to “Oops, ouch” and “checking in and checking out,” and we wondered whether it might be useful to produce a written summary of these sorts of guidelines which could be circulated to participants in future workshops.  The main insight for us was that it is vital in projects like this that academic participants are seen, and see themselves, as part of the ensemble; it is equally important that the practitioners involved are respected as thinkers and researchers in their own rights and not merely as hired hands putting the academics’ ideas into practice.  This was something […] that could be profitably disseminated to a wider audience.

ELLEN WELCH. I think the really helpful thing [about] thinking with performance is that performance I find very future oriented… One of the things Keira [Loughran] said very early in our session is that if a particular performance fails that’s okay because you learn things to bring to the next one; I think that’s a really helpful way for academics to think about our work too.  I think there’s always this pressure to have a conclusion, at a really basic level, a conclusion to whatever essay or book that you’re writing, and those are the parts that are hardest for me to write, because it feels like closing down—it is a closing down. But that’s always the goal of the genres that we write in, to get to that conclusion. And I wonder if there’s a way we can think about our work more in this future-oriented way in which the ending is an opening towards other things, that you could try at another point in time. So it feels more processual, and less that I’m producing a product. 

NATASHA KORDA. [Responding to Ellen] That’s really helpful. I also think about performance as future-oriented, and as a means of connecting history to the future in the present, which can sometimes involve what we loosely call archives.  But how you construct your archive is itself performative, because you’re always doing it in the present moment: archives are not static things, they’re constantly being made and remade.  There’s something really hopeful—sometimes not, sometimes destructive—but at least there’s the possibilityof something hopeful, in that remaking of the present, which is really exciting, I think.
[…]
It’s not the case that people in the past were simply more repressive or patriarchal or racist than in the present. We still have all those things now, they took different forms in the past.  That’s a real challenge in our present moment, both in performance and in teaching texts about sexuality and gender in the early modern period—there’s a lot of violence in these texts, violence that we often want to avoid in order to focus on the more hopeful aspects of the text. But it’s equally important–and powerful in performance–to connect the violence of the past to the present, to make its ongoing presence felt. I think, it’s better to think carefully about how to do that than simply to say that we shouldn’t perform these texts because they’re violent and they’re misogynist. There’s a lot of violence and misogyny in texts that are written now, in the present, and that are part of our performance culture, so I think it’s all a question of howyou stage them.

COLE ALVIS. One of the things I’ve come to learn… come to know, is that there were trans and non-binary people in Shakespeare and pre-Shakespeare times. And this notion that wherever we are right now is the pinnacle of where we’ve been trying to get is not true—or [because of] the way Canada talks about itself on the world’s stage it is likely to only see stereotypical versions of Indigenous peoples. The “status quo” does not represent everyone—and does not for the past either. And just because I didn’t learn about these worldviews in school, it doesn’t mean that they weren’t there.

PAMELA ALLEN BROWN. This idea of the “art” of playing is something I’ve been thinking about in my scholarship, but it’s great to hear people calling themselves “artist”—it’s a different word to “player” or “actor”, and I think words do matter, obviously, to us, so… […] That’s one thing that’s struck me. Also the division between scholars or academics or whatever we’re called and the players or actors is not really bridged. I take the point that what they [actors] think they’re here for is different from what we think we’re here for… but that can be a creative friction, and I think it has been. I just think we’re here for a very different reason than they are here… Frankly I’d love to call myself an artist too! The PaR model itself makes me envy actors who can justify doing that, and forces us as scholars to be modest and take a back seat. Not sure that’s entirely good in an increasingly anti-intellectual world, however. And while I learned and felt a ton more than at other conferences, I did get the message that working scholars should learn from actors working, but vice versa, not so much.  Among other points, the impact of the Renaissance diva, a woman artist, got lost in the shuffle, ironically enough… How might the group improve actor/scholar interplay in the future?

Emma Frankland and Daren Herbert workshopping The Roaring Girl

ERIN JULIAN. When the question was raised about what we’re trying to do here, I felt a little bit uncomfortable at the fact that the actors seemed to have this idea that they’re doing something for us… and I would like to think more about how we might do things for them. And one of the things we might do is give them tools for doing this work that they’re often trying to do now—trying to explore these questions about gender, trying to explore these questions about race, on a contemporary stage. That can be risky work. So I was just noticing that there were a few moments where the actors were asking ‘what are we doing for you?’—I’d like to see us thinking about what we’re doing for them…

ELIZABETH CRUZ PETERSEN. [I found it really valuable] to have artists like [Gein Wong and Emma Frankland] come and work with us through physical exercises that prepare us to collaborate with the actors, [including] exercises on gender awareness and on embodiment so we can get a sense of what the actors go through, as far as training and warming up before a performance. This is especially important to me since my scholarly work focuses on somaesthetics, which is all about the unified body and mind, its complete embodiment.

CLARE McMANUS. One of the really clear results of this [workshop] is that this work pushes us to articulate our methodologies and to do that responsibly. That is [something] that is shared with other disciplines, editorial disciplines: you know [in] editing, for instance, very clearly, [that] you have to tell the reader what your methodology is. And so this morning we did a call-in/check-in to make sure everybody actually understood where we were all coming from. And actors’ voices around the table have really pushed us to really articulate why it is that we are here. And I think that fundamentally is very, very important. And so one of the direct results of this is sending us back to our methodologies and making sure that we have a clear and appropriate articulation of whatever that may be.

ROBERTA BARKER. One thing that hit me yesterday was what must have been the huge contrast between Richard Burbage and [the actor who] we think [was] his apprentice, Richard Robinson (who I was working on), when they possibly created the roles of Amintor and Aspatia [in The Maid’s Tragedy]—what that working process was between a master actor and his apprentice (who perhaps was 13 or 14 years old), and how Keira [Loughran], as contemporary director, and Marcus [Nance], and Logan [Brideau], as contemporary master actor and 14-year old emerging actor—the process through which the three of them were working on the scene we were working on; what’s shared there and what’s not shared there. And what’s uncomfortable for us that was completely cool in 1611—and perhaps what was uncomfortable in 1611 that we’re totally cool with today. So I think the way that that encounter—that’s not always a comfortable encounter between the early modern text and this history of performance, that we’re trying in some way to recover and figure out (because we don’t have all these documents and all this evidence that we have from later centuries); the relationship between that history and that journey of discovery that a lot of us are on as scholars, and the journey that one goes on with actors with these texts: the way they rub up against each other can be so […] productive.

Reflections on Practice, Performance, and Research: A Conversation

During our week last September working at the Stratford Festival Laboratory with academics, actors, theatremakers, editors, and directors, we had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the nature of practice-as-research, or performance-as-research, as a mode of scholarly enquiry [see our blog summaries here].  We also had the chance to contemplate what it means to bring experts not only from different disciplines but also from different practices into the same room.  Through the course of the week, we spoke with many of the participants about this experience. The excerpted observations, insights, and snippets of this post are drawn from transcribed interviews about bringing scholarship and professional performance together.  In short, we’re asking: What’s it like having a more balanced room of academics and actors, in the context of a process with no final product to work towards?  Please feel free to keep the conversation going in the comments… The next post will build on the comments here, sharing participants’ thoughts on ways forward— possible futures for this form of work, its methodologies and discoveries, in teaching, in theatre practice, and in scholarship.

***

EDWARD “MAC” TEST. I knew that we were going to be able to work with actors and see them actually perform a translation that I’ve written—a translation of a play [La monja alférez, or The Lieutenant Nun]. […]  But that said, it was exciting and unnerving for me to come here and do this kind of work, because I’ve never done it before. I’m not a playwright—it’s the first time I’ve done that. So I came in anxious, nervous, and excited—all of those emotions swirling together.  There’s something with scholarship—and of course with theatre—we tend to stick to the text; and while we enjoy going to performances, we don’t usually writethe play, which is what I’ve done; we don’t usually direct anything—and I’ve watched that happen and interacted as a sort-of-director, so that’s all new to me. And it’s going to inform the way I do my scholarship, the way I look at the play, and the language—I’m going to be thinking forever of these actors saying those words and moving around and the deliberations around what appears on a stage. It’s all been very magical.

COLE ALVIS. Having academics in the room is new. I’ve come through Stratford to do the Indigenous Directors Lab on two occasions, so a “laboratory” setting that’s outside of—or perhaps in relation to—the season, but distinct and specifically about exploration… and that’s a real gift to get to be part of this, because my practice tends to be in new work—or new-er work—where it’s easier to place myself and my communities at the centre of that experience.  You don’t often see Indigenous and culturally diverse leadership within the Stratford Festival, but in these Labs, there’s opportunity for that. And then to see how the classical form can shift, when there isn’t the parameters of bums in seats and all of the expectations of what the “Stratford Festival” generally does.  To me, these Labs are forward looking—about where Stratford might be able to go, to include worldviews and lived experiences of the people that make up… this place.

ELIZABETH CRUZ-PETERSEN: I loved working with professional actors and the entire process of making scenes come to life. I came to this workshop with the hope of gaining a better understanding of the difficulty (or not) of staging swordplay scenes and the unique attributes women contribute in the swordfights and dances. However, I wonder, how much the actors understood our goals as scholars in this process. And we of theirs? At times, it felt as if this workshop was for our benefit only. The actors were like tools for us (“I’d like to see you do this” and “can that happen”). Even when I asked, “what do you think of this?” I wonder if they were thinking… “Well, what do you want me to think of this?” What stake did they have in this process? Keira [Loughran] or was it Emma [Frankland] mentioned that there was no production—there’s no end, there’s no investment in it; which makes sense to ask what is the actor’s investment in this? Did they find our contribution useful in enhancing their skills as actors?

ERIN JULIAN. PaR is supposed to be bringing people with different backgrounds and training together, as we both know a lot about this broad subject of theatre, and we both have things we can learn from each other, and we should be training knowledge. And we are embarked on the same project, though […] we don’t have the same language to talk about it yet. I would love to see that division be bridged, as I feel like through this process and through the work I’ve also been doing here [at the Stratford Festival, shadowing Comedy of Errors] it’s changed my whole way of thinking about theatre and what we’re doing, what we’re studying… A question came up this morning—a very heated question—about “why are we doing this? why are we trying to excavate these plays, what are we looking for—are we trying to redeem them?”—and I think these conversations around how our history and the present and future speaking to each other […] is work I have seen here and seen through other work we’ve been doing with Keira [Loughran]…

PAMELA ALLEN BROWN. I was really glad to see the actors with the professional fight captain [Wayne Best], with the way he taught them; it was really fulfilling for me (because I talk about skill so much in my [forthcoming] book) to see his skill and presence and showing by doing—and he really knew how to teach… As he did it, you can imagine how skills might be transferred, and sense […] the effect on the actors. What I noticed is they imitated so much better than mere mortals like me, starting with putting on the sword. Because I assumed wrongly (because I’m not in that world) that if you were doing Shakespeare at all you would know how to wear and use a sword, but they don’t, actually, because a lot of people—particularly women but also men—have never used one or had a role where it depends on one… A lot of people had never put one on. So as they’re total newbies to it, and they’re acquiring this skill slowly and following along, it was wonderful to see the awakening stirred by this weapon [. . .].  This power—which is phallic power, a masculine symbol of power—was taken on by the women and the men too, and each one individually yet with gendered inflections which were not predictable, so that it upsets our whole idea of what’s masculine and what’s feminine—that whole exercise taught me more than tons of words… [Wayne Best] was, to me, so fascinating to watch, when I would move from looking at him to somebody else, they were trying to strike their own sort of control and give some sense of “I know exactly how to use this sword,” and that seemed close to what the divas [of the commedia dell’arte] would do – they’d start off with a few skills acquired as street entertainers or courtesans from low-status families, and in a short time, they could create an entire persona where they coolly use swords, they can wear a mask and be Pantalone, or they can be a great grand lady, they can be a queen. So this confidence and this sense of coming off as poised and cool[as Wayne put it]… there’s something about the coolness (and everybody knows what that means, but it’s something that you need to get in your body) that’s basic to acting and the readiness it demands.  Skill can only go so far, however.  Charisma and imagination are rare in anyone, but the actor who has “It” (as Joseph Roach puts it) can do (almost) no wrong. I was talking to Denise [Oucharek; playing Guzman in The Lieutenant Nun] and she was telling me about she’s always trying to go beyond labels, including gender ones; her career has included a solo act in the persona of a famous singer-comedienne, and a wide variety of plays and roles—hearing that, after seeing her work, is a rare experience.  When you’re a drama scholar trying to think about the first actresses and their roles, evidence shapes your work but your mental theatre, the people you put on it, affects your choices and arguments… So it’s a thrill when you see Denise starring in the Lieutenant Nun and think without any doubt “you’d be a great Duchess of Malfi,” or “I’d love to see your Roaring Girl,” […] because her determined disruption of gender and her embodiment of masculine virtú are so diva-like and so unlike most interpreters who take on these roles today. 


CLARE MCMANUS: I’ve been looking to work in a different way and bring different skills to this training and kinds of expertise in collaboration. Certainly working with Emma Frankland on The Roaring Girl, and watching the other actors respond to what Emma has been suggesting, has been really exciting, in terms of thinking about the complexity of present-day casting. That’s the thing that is really coming up. And one of the really pressing things today was what the use of history is and the use of pastness and our relationship to it. And that seems to be something that’s really pointedly at issue with PaR. And I think in ways that can be dodged a little bit in other disciplines, but you can’t dodge it when you’re dealing with embodied performance and embodied voices—and voices and bodies that want to resist what’s written in the text. So there’ve been some quite uncomfortable moments, and moments where it feels a little bit like you’re asking the actor to sacrifice something, to say something that is unpalatable to them, and then the reality of their experience brings home how terrible the text is, in some ways.  But that sounds more pessimistic than it actually is. I feel more optimistic about this, because I feel like one of the things, just one of the things that’s starting to happen, is this sense of drawing lines and drawing points of resistance against texts where they need to be resisted, where they need to be spoken back to.

LUCY MUNRO: For this workshop, the casting is really, really interesting, and really stimulating for me all sorts of questions, because we have an adult man [Marcus Nance] playing Amintor [in The Maid’s Tragedy], we have a 14-year-old boy playing Evadne [Logan Brideau], and then the actor playing Aspatia [Cole Alvis], who is nonbinary and whose pronouns are “they,” and Cole […] has been incredibly interesting and articulate on that question of what is Aspatia’s gender identity. And so yesterday when we were working with them on the scene, we were actually referring to Aspatia as “they”—and trying to think about what does it mean if Aspatia is a nonbinary characteras well as being played by somebody who uses “they.” So that was really interesting. But the casting of Logan, a 14-year-old boy, as Evadne also does really interesting and strange things with the scene, because it becomes about age as well as being about gender. And one of the things that we talked about is that the fact that the in the play, Aspatia and Amintor were betrothed (which can be as binding as an actual marriage) and then that was derailed by the King insisting that Amintor marry his mistress Evadne. So you have this arranged marriage between Amintor and Evadne. [. . .] And there’s all sorts of interesting power dynamics [. . .] when Evadne comes on (unfortunately we don’t have any stage blood) but comes on with a knife in a white night gown, and says “joy to Amintor, for the King is dead” …

ROBERTA BARKER: Something that’s really interesting for me being involved with this project is that I’ve done quite a bit of performance-as-research before but it’s been almost completely—well in this situation of actors and academics working together—it’s been almost completely working on nineteenth-century theatre. And that’s so deeply different because we have so much. You know if you start out in seventeenth-century theatre and then you go into nineteenth-century theatre it seems like this incredible bonanza of visual images, stage directions, reviews, comments—like you literally know what actors originally did—like where they dropped their hat. So you’re able to say, “Show me exactly what it looks like if you do it how the reviewer describes this whole scene,” which we don’t have for early modern plays.  A huge interest that I’ve always had as far back as beginning to write about the relationship between early modern drama and contemporary performers is this sense that for contemporary performers, especially in terms of gender, performing early modern plays is very complicated and in many cases very uncomfortable. And in some ways there can be a lot of productivity and meaning in embracing the discomfort and exploring the discomfort and seeing what comes out of it. And I think that’s one of the things that’s been really powerful for me, in being in the room and working with the actors, and also with the discussions—is that sense of, as Lucy was just talking about, the complications, the discomforts, the questions, and also these huge possibilities that come in when you bring a body, you bring a lived experience into a role. That’s very different from these early performers that Lucy and I are interested in (discussing the boys who first played roles like Aspatia and Evadne).  Their lives, their training, their assumptions, and how they even worked on the roles are so radically different from what we’re doing in this room.

ELLEN WELCH.  I didn’t quite know what to expect, and I guess if I had assumptions, it that there was going to be a lot of detailed work with scenes; so I guess what surprised me was the amount of talking and sharing and meta-level discussions that have gone on. And all that is really useful, and it’s made me think about the process of being a researcher in a different way to the way I expected to interrogate my own process and experience… 

NATASHA KORDA. I think this [Lab] has been really focussed on process, in a way that has been transformative for me. I am going to bring away from this experience techniques and exercises, and different ways of thinking about teaching, research, and many other things—including how we present our research. I think we’ve been given a lot of tools, and maybe a way to go forward into the future with them would be to try to have a conversation about, what do we academics do with those tools now? How do we really use them in a way that will lead to something new, such as different forms of knowledge production?

In Conversation with Keira Loughran

We had the chance to speak with Stratford Festival’s Associate Producer Keira Loughran, who organises the Festival’s Forum and Laboratory—a chance to develop new plays and “to experiment with diverse approaches to staging the classics.”  Keira reflected with us on our week at the Laboratory, where we were exploring gender and representation in early modern European plays. Here, we discuss Canadian theatre, casting, expanding the canon of “classical” texts, and the process and potential involved in combining academia and theatre practice. 

Stratford Festival Laboratory Engendering the Stage Performers on the last day

Callan Davies: What practical next steps do you see coming out of our Engendering the Stage workshop?

Keira Loughran: The really obvious one is that I’m really interested in the canon of early modern English plays that are putting these questions out there, and hearing them read, getting a chance to speak to them, giving them to artists who maybe have these questions around gender identity closer to their own experience, and more connected to our community of gender non-binary and trans people, to see if they should be included in our season. They should be part of an accessible canon to us. And that goes too for the Spanish Golden age and everybody’s various expertise with classical work.  There is nothing that is stopping us from reading [Spanish Golden age plays] in English now—in languages we can understand—and having them in consideration for future productions, as much as the Shakespearean canon currently is.

It’s also really good to know about the scholarship going on [across the world]—to know about the Before Shakespeare project, for instance.  Because we’re a national institution with international impact and scope, so those kinds of partnerships and making use of combining resources is always useful. I feel like Melinda and Peter put together an amazing group of scholars.  And our Artistic Director [Antoni Cimolino] goes to London all the time, and has connections and contacts there, and now we have more.

In terms of scholars and artists coming together, it’s something I definitely continue to be curious about and it’s something that has been growing at the Lab. It’s something that’s happened in the past with Shakespeare scholars, but it’s good to meet new people.  And it’s also good to see how they respond to being in the room, in the process in that way—but I’ve got to say it’s been really positive, overall, that connection.  But it just has to get practised a bit more, so the actors are more comfortable. […] We’re always looking to be able to diversify our canon more… in terms of what we work on, what we consider to be the classical canon.

You need partnerships for people to bring things forward and bring things to your attention, and you also need to be having an eye on who can lead those projects—whether it’s an artist or whether it’s a scholar or whether there’s a synergy between two that can support a production and give it the passion that it needs.  So this week has been great for all of that, for making those connections and giving us some time together.

This week we’ve been collaborating on four plays in the workshops (The Roaring Girl, The Maid’s Tragedy, The Lieutenant Nun, Love’s Cure) by combining scholarly research and performer creativity.  Sharing the room with academics, performers, directors, and theatremakers has allowed us to bring together historical context and artistic invention.  How have you found this method of working in the Lab?

I really enjoy it—particularly for the classical texts, the texts that have specialist scholars working on them.  It’s been interesting [this week] for two reasons.  One is the expertise that academics bring to the room.  [. . .] For me it’s partly been finding out about these plays. I’ve been in the office for ten years now [as Stratford Festival management], and I’ve been in the institution for fifteen years—that’s my Shakespeare knowledge.  I know who Beaumont and Fletcher are, I know they collaborated with Shakespeare on some plays…

So to have the chance to see even the excerpts of some of these plays [that we were working with in our workshop in the Lab] is fascinating, because I was a bit more aware of the complexity of the English stage in the Elizabethan period. I’m really curious about the assumptions that we make versus the time to actually consider what was happening—which is what these scholars have spent a lot of their time doing.  So I’ve found that exciting as a way to understand these texts and make them more fluid, interpretable, or adaptable to our age and time.

How have you found the focus in the workshops on process rather than product, and on the experience of sharing that creative process with academic researchers?

As an artist and particularly as a director, I question sometimes how art works or how theatre works in our contemporary experience. [. . .] For me, and in my experience here [in Stratford], which is a privileged place (where people sort of like culture, generally!) the more you can share an artistic process—like all art—the more it impacts people’s work and lives in ways that they don’t expect and might not even be able to articulate.  When the only thing that people see is a product in a theatre [. . .] I feel that’s very limited: it’s not mining the potential of what art can do.  And so opening up process [ie in rehearsal, through documentation and sharing] for me is a really exciting thing.

But it requires a lot of trust and vulnerability on behalf of performers, and it also takes a certain mentality for scholars to bring to the room, to create the space with us.  But I think it can be really powerful, and that’s what I’ve felt our workshops so far to be—and that’s great.  And I hope, and what I’m curious about, is then how did it impact, what are the unforeseeable impacts of academics being more included in our artistic process?  How does that then impact the scholars’ work within their research, or within their editing of dramatic texts, or within the essays they might write. How will their process change because they’ve had the chance to work with us?

Are these questions relevant outside of the Festival to the wider industry?

I believe there is a gap, in Canada at least, between theatre training institutions and universities and practicing theatre companies (one that perhaps doesn’t exist in the States so much, because those scholars are attached to professional companies, whereas in Canada they’re not)… Because of some of the amazing scholars I’ve met, I keep looking for more opportunity to open up process and allow non-artists, or non-professional artists in the room—and seeing how it all lands.

Something you said earlier in the week really struck me.  You wondered whether there’s room for a shift in practice in the way that scholarship and the arts—in this case theatre—can work together…

I think that’s true, and you have to be really clear about it.  For Comedy [of Errors, Stratford Festival, Apr-Nov. 2018, dir. Keira Loughran], it was my first time doing a Shakespeare at Stratford, so I had these resources of scholarship and doing Shakespeare at my fingertips, which was fantastic.  So I did two things: I had a scholar look at my edits [on the text], and I had a couple of scholars to bounce my ideas off of, to call me on it if there were anything that was really missing.  And one of the things that I found was exciting was that some of the scholars brought me information that was helpful, and allowed a more fluid interpretation.  Their enthusiasm also reinforced that my vision was sound, on an intellectual level. What was also exciting was that my interpretation opened up new possibilities for them in the text; one of the scholars remarked, “Oh, I hadn’t read it like that before!”, so you can discover a text anew. When you have a scholar who’s open-minded like that, that’s an exciting opportunity.

I always say that theatre can transform, and if a scholar can go through that process with the expertise they have, then there’s a degree of authenticity or merit that gives you confidence.

Involving Erin Julian and Kim Solga in my practice—largely in an observing role, although they were the scholars I got to bounce ideas off—that was a bit of a test: how does their presence in the room affect rehearsal.  And it was good! They ended up generating an article, which I read to the cast on opening night—because it took me back to the first day of rehearsal. [The article] showed: letting them [the academics] see you made an impact. So, let this audience see you, so it will make an impact [on them].

So, yes, I think it can affect dramatic practice.  And I think it’s good for it.  I also think it’s good for actors to be more flexible in being in front of an audience… There’s a huge tradition of the privacy and safety of a closed rehearsal hall. And there are absolutely reasons for that. But you also want to see how far you can push or make more common what a safe room is, or what an artistic space is, whether you’re an artist or not. More people who know how to hold that space will be a good thing.

As part of the questions of gender and casting that we’ve been exploring this week, we’ve been thinking a lot about actors bringing themselves to the characters they’re performing.  Is this something you see potential in taking forward, coming out of our workshop?

I feel like, in Canada, within a theatre practice context, it’s absolutely necessary if you’re trying to diversify or include more people in the work.  I still don’t know how I, as a third-generation, Chinese woman, in Canada, can exist in an Elizabethan context.  There were probably Chinese people; I might even be able to find a Chinese person in court somewhere, maybe, but it’s so obscure that if you’re only looking at it from a historical perspective, it’s hard.  […] I think there’s a privilege within the social construct of those plays, when they were written—particularly because racialisation was used as a dramatic device, of othering.  I acted in all sorts of stuff for a long time, but as I get older and as I get more experienced (and the younger generation is coming to it sooner than I did), if you cannot see yourself, if you can’t feel confident just looking the way you look standing on that stage, then… [. . .] As a director, I feel I get the best work from actors when they can see and find themselves in the work.

Then they can also learn from scholarship of history in ways that are useful: in terms of language, in terms of contexts of language, like what certain things would have meant at the time, in terms of what certain relationships would have meant at the time, so that they can understand that and make a choice in relationship to that.  But the other thing is, I feel like if the actors don’t understand the story on a personal level—like how it impacts them as characters and people—then the story won’t be compelling to a modern audience, and then you’re making museum theatre.  And I also think there’s things that make you feel like you’re seeing museum theatre that aren’t necessarily helpful (like, period costume?), and I worry about reinforcing tropes in that way.

So it’s a balance of welcoming the scholarship but finding artistic, creative ways to subvert them [the texts] often, and remind people that we’re in a theatre in 2018, in this country, with these people, telling a story for this audience, for these reasons, and I think to do that… you have to acknowledge who you are, and where you are, and allow that to be in the space.

And history and scholarship can give licence to personal and contemporary readings of the text—without them feeling like modern impositions or ahistorical rereadings…

In The Maid’s Tragedy (because I was working on this scene), we tried to make space for our actors to look the way they look in these roles, which made us go: “well, what if we did change the text, what if we did change the play and cast it in this way…? What is the narrative, how can it be changed?” But if these are some of the question of the time, historically—these plays are being written at the same time as The Roaring Girl, and these questions of gender are coming up… Trans people have been around in all cultures from time immemorial… And so if those ideas were present to the writers of those plays, to the actors who animated them, then those people who exist in our society now should be part of telling them again. Which is this “nothing about us without us” catchphrase around inclusivity and inclusion.

And it’s been really interesting too for me this week—I’ve got a lot of these ideas in my head and they’re close to my heart artistically. But the way Emma [Frankland] leads something is going to be different to the way I lead something, because I’m cisgendered and she’s not.  And that’s good.  That creates diverse practice.  [. . . ] An ethical way of practicing that is more based in an acknowledgement of an ensemble of artists coming together is a shift in practice that I’d like to see—and one I think this work demands.

On documentation and dissemination of “process”:

I know why the actors feel the pressure that they feel… We’re all anxious about dissemination of image and dissemination of work that’s not really finished, and what’s professional and what’s not professional.  Those are bigger questions that we have to tackle together: what’s process…?  There’s massive overhauls that have to happen to fully open all of this up.

On Canadian Theatre Agreement (CTA):

The Canadian Theatre Agreement (CTA), which is the standard agreement between all theatres in English Canada and actors, is culturally bias—if I want to be provocative I argue it’s racist—because it assumes a three-and-a-half-week rehearsal process on a script that exists, that has a maximum two-and-a-half hour running time. You can’t do it otherwise.  All of the funding supports that process. If you need something that takes a longer process, you can’t get the funding for it, and if you can’t get the funding for it, you can’t do the work, and if you can’t do the work then nothing changes.  So the more you can get universities and places that fund research stretched out to cross boundaries of industries—scholars to actors—then there is a potential pooling of resources, and then maybe you can actually lobby for more flexible rules around these ideas, because people understand them differently in practice.  So that’s a form of practice that could change: it’s possible to change it, but it is big!

 

SF Day 5: Going forward

This post is going to be a very brief coda to the week’s blog thoughts (Day 1; Day 2; Day 3; Day 4), not least because the emphasis of the week has been about ways forward and absence of final products… So here’s more research-in-process…

On Saturday, reunited with the Company actors, we workshopped scenes in different ways and tried new avenues: switching performers for roles (for instance, Moll and Laxton); moving between an aggressive Clara crying “ran-tan-tan,” to a Clara hampered by a large dress fuming about her vestments…

Oh, I shall no more see those golden days, these clothes will never fadge with me: a O’ this filthy vardingale, this hip hap: brother why are women’s haunches only limited,  confined, hooped in, as it were with these same scurvy vardingales? (EMED)

… to working multiple ways of Evadne, Aspatia, and Amintor moving on stage (for instance, how does physical aggression and reactive horror work between an adult and a younger, teenage actor?).

The group working on The Lieutenant Nun explained how important it can be to return to ground zero on a scene, dialling back from extremes of character portrayal (including in gendered terms) towards a nuanced middle ground.  Their observations about how to negotiate subtlety when working over a period of several days with these characters raises the issue of “types” in the period’s drama (not between extremes of 1 and 10, as they put it, but in the “human middle”).  How might performers find within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European dramatic characters a more three-dimensional, rounded, and embodied persona—one that allows them to bring their own lived experience into the role—even when the text contains cues for broad or stereotypical extremes?

We finished the day thinking about what we can take forward from the week in future PaR work and its dissemination and wider impacts on the theatre industry in and beyond Stratford and Canada.  These are huge topics that will be the subject of future bulletins from this project, on this site and elsewhere.

We’ll also have coming up video footage, interviews with scholars and actors, and some further material on gender and performance in workshop in the coming days, as well as content arising from Monday’s events at McMaster (24 September 2018)…

Callan

SF Day 4: Licence, Paddling, Equity

Day 4 was a slightly different day for Engendering the Stage at Stratford Festival Laboratory.  Unfortunately, due to unavoidable scheduling, the company actors were not with us on Friday, and so we had a series of talks, shows, and chances for conversation with the remaining participants of the workshops.  This meant not only a tour de force about the power, in multiple senses, of early modern theatre from Emma Frankland on her Galatea project but the chance to reflect and learn about ways to move forward—in the academy and in the arts—on and beyond “diversity.”  Central to this week’s experience for many of us has been learning about how we can all use different forms of privilege and power to discover more about,  work with, and make central the indigenous identities and experiences whose land these buildings occupy.  Today’s conversations provided an opportunity to reflect hard on what action on intersectionality might look like in all our various practices.

What is the duty of care for an artist?

Emma spoke brilliantly about her Galatea project, working on John Lyly’s play with a trans and non-binary, BAME, and British Sign Language cast (see some documentation and discussion of this work here).

We were lucky to see a scene being workshopped in action with the wonderful Denise Oucharek stepping in cold to explore how the exchange between Phyllida and their father could be played in multiple different ways as part of a trans experience or framework, without reading against the text.

Emma’s work is a flagship model for how texts like Galatea do not need “queering” or “transing”—they don’t require the imposition of a modern framework or analysis onto the play—its queerness and transness are already there.

What would you be curious to see?

Between shows and readings, we had a brief chance to discuss—unfortunately without the presence of the company actors—the model of PaR we’re working with and developing ways in which PaR might be sharpened to work for all invested parties in the future.

Roberta Barker and others stressed that PaR cannot (and is not here) being used to generate answers about the past and answer: this is how things were, this is how it was.  Rather, they open up more questions and more avenues of possibility.  In a similar vein, Lucy Munro importantly reminded us of the randomness that is at the heart of many moments of discovery and learning in PaR.  Whatever structure we’re working with, it’s often serendipity that leads to the most productive and exciting outcomes.  We can also look to surrounding relevant bodies of research, and Melinda Gough noted the usefulness of Participatory Action Research (a different PAR) in thinking about how research can be put into reciprocal exchange with different constituencies and communities.

We thought about how the stakes involved in PaR can sometimes shift in favour of academic questions and texts; can we find a way to work that does not privilege the academic impetus, without undermining the importance of what academic historical research brings to the theatrical process (both in and beyond performance-as-research)?  It’s also important to recognise the individual working practice of each performer; it can be unhelpful, for instance, to say “do what you want” to an actor trained (as most of us in other industries also are) to work under certain parameters and with certain forms or frames of direction.  Returning again to the question central to Day 3, we need to think “what are we here for, what are we doing?”.  This is a question that needs to be asked of everybody involved in a given PaR process.  On top of all this, I wonder if licence is a useful term for this discussion: to give and be given licence is central.  PaR at its best can enable performers to work within a wider set of parameters, skills, tools, and references informed by historical scholarship,and it gives researchers licence to imagine possibilities for the past and generate further questions about what may have been and what may be.

It’s worth reiterating, continually, that the process of this week is the beginning of a long journey in which all stakeholders are discovering new ways of working and new ways of collaborating.  This may be generating question upon question, and fostering doubts, but it’s about discovering together a future enriched by all our forms of skill and expertise. This week has been inspiring in pointing to so many ways that such work can be taken forward.

Don’t apologise for your privilege, make it your superpower.

Our conversation on Friday finished by thinking about the most urgent issues at stake in this work.  Many of us are used to the language of “diversity,” but Cole Alvis pointed us towards a more productive vocabulary, in which diversity is important in describing a representative plurality in a given room or show, but in which equity is the goal: a structural change, to ensure indigenous, non-white, LGBTQ power and people in institutions themselves, at leadership levels, across the board.

This might not be something achievable through a few weeks of PaR workshops, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not within everybody’s power to work towards this goal by thinking harder and doing more in our own spheres to create institutions that go some way towards this.

We’ve all got to learn to love the paddling

 It’s important to end this week by having in mind that the work we’re interested in doing goes far beyond the walls of the studio we’ve been working in. In Emma Frankland’s surfing analogy, it may feel most rewarding to be riding the wave, but that’s just 5% of the sport: we need to learn to love the paddling.

 

Callan.

 

SF Day 3: Scenework, Walking, and Sharing

Our third day was a mixture of exploratory discussion and play—in its various forms.  I feel it’s important to reiterate the way that the workshops have been structured so as to enable time and energy for open conversation.  We’ve been beginning (and ending) with “check-ins,” which give everybody space to articulate their thoughts and share what’s on their mind.  Gein Wong has led these processes and their modelling of the practice has helped create a room in which openness and warmth have felt like default views.  This method has been instrumental in creating an open and protected space that enables generosity and allows for vulnerability for everybody in the room, while keeping us all in constant dialogue.  Our opening check-ins then move into open, fluid discussions about the research at hand, the scholarship underpinning and responding to the performance workshops, and the impetus for the afternoon’s work.

This way of “working” might seem like an addendum or “warm-up” to the performance workshopping, but as almost everybody has remarked, it’s in fact integral to the explorative nature of the play that “practice-as-research/PaR” or workshopping generally is about: this is the process; this is the learning.  Here’s a call for more spaces, more default personal and work environments, that are able to bring together personal state of mind, openness, and dialogue as the fundamental basis for what we do and how we do it.

What is it that we’re doing here?

In discussing the prompts for today’s workshopping, discussion moved onto some of the important and often unaddressed questions about work with classical texts.  Do we need to recover plays entrenched with misogyny, homophobia, and racism?  How much should we resist and rewrite or even discard texts that do not work for us today?  These are crucial questions that extend to the whole period Jamie Milay’s call to bury Shakespeare on Day 1.  As some participants observed, these texts and the structures they come out of also contain many of the complexities and oppressions still at work today; our world is also entrenched with misogyny, homophobia, and racism, and thinking about the nuances within the plays we’re looking at this week are also ways of negotiating the present.

The past’s not dead. It’s not even past.

Moreover, as Emma Frankland articulated (better than I can paraphrase here) these texts also offer histories that are often marginalised or erased—trans histories, racial histories, LGBTQ histories, more.  The work we’re doing in these workshops thinks about how these histories can be discovered or represented in combination with contemporary experience—negotiating, in other words, the way texts-in-performance necessarily bring together past and present.  For instance, we thought about what it might mean to have queer or genderqueer characters explicitly assert their identity within a text.  But we also talked about what it means when these individuals in plays are framed as figures of comedic fun.  This sense of tone is crucial to questions of representation.  Pamela Allen Brown pointed out that humour itself can be a powerful form of agency and is not necessarily a sense of ridicule.  Finding a line between pathos and jest is an important ongoing question for exploring the complex identities of these dramatic characters.

I am Aspatia yet.

Thinking further about these ideas of identity and respect for the characters in these texts, Roberta Barker observed how powerful the line “I am Aspatia yet” in The Maid’s Tragedy can be when viewed—as that group has been exploring—from a genderqueer perspective.  The Maid’s Tragedy group has been thinking about the possible gender non-comforming identity of Aspatia, and Roberta noted that the workshopping and the performance research of the actor exploring Aspatia presents a character who has throughout the play had to respond to other people’s manipulation of their selfhood (has Aspatia been gaslit throughout the play?); here, they assert their sense, as Roberta put it, of “I understand who I am”: I am Aspatia yet.

I’d print it in text-letters.

Another thing that came up around the table in the morning was discussion of editing and translating practices.  As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, Edward “Mac” Test is working on an ongoing translation of The Lieutenant Nun and so his edited scene, excitingly, remains in flux in the room (*live editing klaxon*).  Natasha Korda is also in the midst of editing Twelfth Night.  These plays contain both cross-dressing and trans characters and both deal with the complexity of gender identity.

When will we have a trans edition of an early modern play?  

Discussion arose, springing out of questions of feminine/masculine first-person endings in Romance languages such as Spanish, about how to manage gender-identifying speech in translation, as well as how editing texts more broadly can take account of genderqueerness.  As Natasha pointedly observed, there is some history and scholarship on feminist editing practices but almost nothing on trans editing theory.  One important part of this process is to bring trans voices and expertise into the process of editing.  This particular question of editing points more broadly to how scholarship can develop more inclusive methodologies, and beyond collaborative process these issues are yet another example of why a more diverse academy—including trans editors—is urgent and important.

Let this strange thing walk, stand, or sit…
(RG 1.1.254)

When we got onto our feet, we were led in another movement workshop by Peter Cockett.  This involved thinking about descriptions of gendered gait in early modern England, while also being attuned to the fact that such descriptions—as gleaned from plays, conduct manuals, and various other print descriptions—are open and in no way witnesses to early modern walking.  At the same time, we were led to think about different styles of walking: walking on toes or walking on heels.  Natasha Korda explained how shoe technology shifted very quickly in the early modern period and in the period around the late sixteenth century, the time in which the heel became a new standard part of a shoe.  The development of the heel shifted the way that people walked, from walking on toes (with flat-soled, “sock”-style shoes of the medieval period) to walking on heels in more robust shoes…

Rijksmuseum (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/BK-NM-5580-B)

Medieval Design (http://www.medievaldesign.com/eng-prodotti.asp?form_chiave=24)

We thought about how we moved around the space, on toes, holding carriage smoothly (again channelling the likes of Castiglione’s Courtier and its advice on decorum).  That’s astonishing when considering the chopines that crop up, for instance, in The Lieutenant Nun: as Mac put it, imagine walking in these!:

Chopines (these are platform-style heel shoes that come up in several of the plays in these workshop): https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/04/15/chopines-renaissance-platform-shoes-popularly-worn-in-venice-by-both-courtesans-and-patrician-women/

Chopines (these are platform-style heel shoes that come up in several of the plays in these workshop): https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/these-chopines-werent-made-for-walking/

We were also encouraged, as per Clare McManus’s reminder, to be mindful of the fact that there were not strictly gendered ways of walking, comportment, or carriage—particularly when we look at the period’s history not through Castiglione’s court life but through vast and varied performance histories.  These include, for instance, female tightrope walkers and tumblers who do not necessarily wear restrictive clothing that forces a particular gait or a particular way of holding oneself.

Our walking exercise thereby opened up ways of shifting between decorums and between movements that are multigendered.  We went into a catwalk-style “walk-off” in a circle, bringing in two different characters from the plays and asking them to walk at and alongside each other: how do relationships work when viewed through carriage and walk?  This was an astonishing exercise in physical ingenuity and play with power.  Cole Alvis playing (or “walking”) a darting and slinking Aspatia moving around a stately and solid Amintor (Marcus Nance) was a virtuoso double-act in movement that showed how power inheres in both strong, direct, upright stance and gait as well as in shorter-stride, winding, indirect movement.  This extends, too, to technologies involved in walking—not only the shoe but the sword, which can be held as Amintor showed forcefully at one’s side with a hand, or offered like Aspatia in snaking movements to one’s counterpart in a display of comic self-sacrifice that tellingly held equal theatrical force…

These exercises therefore begged the question: what other ways might there be for thinking about character identity beyond verbal articulation?  How can an actor find ways of performing an identity—including working with gestures and walks that are a part of our own way of being in the world—without presenting as an entirely different (and sometimes problematic) identity that might on the surface seem part of characters from classical texts?  How can we find ways to bring oneself into performance while also playing to, with, and against the various historical modes of decorum that helped produce a playtext?  In suggesting that there are multiple decorums available to early modern performers and thinking about how they might translate to performance skills today, this aspect of our workshop struck me as just one particularly powerful example of how theatre history and performance can combine to offer a wealth of performance techniques that are at once true to contemporary subjectivities and in dialogue with historical experience.

We finished the day by exploring our scenes further and offering the opportunity for sharing.  It feels important to end this post by underscoring the centrality of process, of ongoing development and experimentation, to these workshops.  It is in discovering and testing that we can find possibilities for future practice and glimpses of both scholarly and performance insights.  Acknowledging the disjunction of finishing a blog for Engendering the Stage with… Shakespeare: the play‘s the thing…

 

Callan Davies

SF Day 2: Movement and Costume

For our second day, we’ve been putting our scenes for Love’s CureThe Lieutenant NunThe Roaring Girl, and Maid’s Tragedy on their feet, beginning with movement in and around space that goes beyond thinking in masculine/feminine binaries and moving towards not only the embodied experienced of characters but their apparel-ed experience…

After checking in, we moved into movement exercises led by Keira Loughran, making sure we were all present in our bodies, aware of our physical place within the room.

Light/Heavy; Direct/Indirect; Sustained/Sudden

Peter Cockett then led us into some of Laban’s movement exercises (Laban Movement), which in this case moved between three different binaries of movement, sometimes in combination: moving light or moving heavy, moving direct or moving indirect, moving sustained or moving sudden.  Peter used Laban’s method to introduce us to a vocabulary and series of movements not articulated by masculine/feminine binaries.  The language of Laban can thereby provide alternatives to describing and/or embodying  character without reference to gendered assumptions or ascriptions—are they going to walk directly in this moment, might their body language be sustained or sudden, and so forth?

This exercise also brought different characters out in each of us, making us conscious of our presence, gait, and posture and aware of the different forms of abstract, presentational, or naturalistic movement we might inhabit.  As different combinations were issued, we were all forced to think about our momentum, the space we take up, and our negotiation of other human bodies.

There’s way more to a “text” than a text.

After working on this movement, we moved into thinking further about the week’s scenes in respective groups.  As groups worked closer with the text, in readiness to thinking about embodying characters, discussions arose about how to negotiate one’s own identity within a text that offers many possible identities for a given character, while also restricting others.  How do twenty-first century individuals approach historically-estranged characters? Are there modern subjectivities already inherent in these texts?

These discussions were particularly acute in moments where the characters themselves are dealing with questions of personal identity, the ways they are read by others and how they might pass as one or another gender, and at moments of identity assertion.  What might it mean for a cisgender woman to play Guzman in The Lieutenant Nun—a character (based on the real-life Catalina de Erauso) who was born as a woman but who spends most of their life dressing, and largely identifying, as a man?

What agency can be found in Moll’s fluidity in The Roaring Girl: she is a title character who can move between gendered identities.  But what is her relationship with her body—and so with the body of the actor playing Moll?  Would that actor cast themselves in this role, and if so, why, and if not, why?

The Maid’s Tragedy too offers possibilities to think about the identity of a (female identified) character like Aspatia, who in the final scenes of the play dresses as a man and confronts her former lover.  Can we find in Aspatia a gender nonconforming identity?  Performers variously remarked how valuable it is to be able to take one’s own identity into a classical part—whether it’s an implicit or explicit part of the play, or not. In working flexibly, for instance, with the pronouns assigned to a character, performers can find moments based on lived experience that can shift ways of thinking about the play; at the same time, it also offers a way to work in perhaps more productive ways with what’s on the page.

Black is thy colour now…

These questions are also pertinent with regard to race. For instance, the language of blackness in Renaissance plays, as the work of Kim Hall and others has taught us, is always fraught with racial politics and, often, an articulation of deep-seated structures of racism and white supremacy. How do we navigate racially charged lines in performance and particularly in process/rehearsal work such as these workshops?  Such lines read and are received differently depending on who they’re spoken by and to whom they’re spoken.  These textual difficulties have no easy answers, but they prompt urgent questions.

These texts are not historically performed things.

These thorny issues raise the subject of “adaptation”—a focus in our closing conversation.  But do changing the pronouns in a text, for example, constitute an adaptation (or, for that matter, leaving them but playing within and against them)?  As Emma Frankland reminded us, early modern texts are notoriously unstable beasts: they are not theatrically sanctified products and they are by nature adaptable.  Why don’t we think of ourselves as players any more, Emma asked, and what have we lost in that shift to “actor”?  In feeling free to play—in a whole host of ways—with text, we are doubtless recovering some of the very theatre history that is at issue in our explorations this week.  For Edward “Mac” Test, who is currently translating The Lieutenant Nun to English from Spanish, these questions of adaptation and play are particularly pertinent, as he has the licence to amend words, phrases, and registers—partly in response to theatrical developments in the workshop.  What might be gained and what might be lost, for instance, in ignoring the gendered word endings in addresses during a scene of dialogue?  In translation, the relationship between playtext, adaptation, and play is always at issue.

Something popped in my head putting on the costume: the weight of clothes, the layers, having the sword or weapon

As actors gradually found their way into costumes, energy levels soared and the scenes began to stretch across further space, scenes overlapping.  Noticeably—as someone moving between groups all afternoon—I was struck (almost literally) by the amount of costumes and clothes flying around the room.  After hours of considering how individuals are variously gendered in different ways, it was curious to see scenes in which garments were shrugged off, tossed away, and launched across the floor in acts of identity assertion.

In The Lieutenant Nun, for instance, Guzman repeatedly refuses to trade man’s apparel with a dress; there was consequently something powerful in seeing a refusal to let the body be defined only by clothing, and Guzman’s flying dresses marked one (very funny) instance of self-identity.  Groups at this stage took to running their scene silently—with actions but no words.  The tussle of movement between Guzman and Sebastian, who was attempting to persuade Guzman into a dress, resembled something of the swordplay or duelling explored in Day 1; a series of parallel lines, stares, thrusts, and retractions.  Running silently also pointed to how powerful gesture, presence, and stance can be beyond the words of the text: something particularly crucial with the servant character in The Lieutenant Nun, who has little to say but is a significant presence in the scene: carrying, as the text explains, the dresses designed for Guzman but also going beyond in moments of physical comedy and intervention to frame and choreograph the scene.

The group working with The Roaring Girl played with the complexity and fluidity of the relationship between gender and costume.   Moll shifts between man, woman, and other gendered and non-gendered possibilities throughout the play.  Might this allow for a range of subjectivities and a variety of embodied experiences? The group remarked how Emma, playing Moll, went through three different gaits in almost as many lines, in the process of removing and replacing a hat, shedding a cloak, drawing a sword.

In turn, the group played with the possibilities of playing gendered clothing “badly” or, perhaps more accurately, against decorum.

The cowardly Laxton (trembling in fear of Moll) could pull his sword’s sheath up over his waist (think Simon Cowell trousers) and struggle to draw his sword (doing so only on a tiptoe stretch) and to sheath it (cue fumbling and puzzlement).

Do you immediately adopt what you’re wearing, or are you fighting it?

The group exploring Love’s Cure were also playing with these questions of clothing, convention, and pistol-and-rapier etiquette.  In this play, the female-born character of Clara was raised as a man and grew up as Lucio—even fighting in wars against the Dutch; her brother—the real Lucio—was raised at home as a girl by his mother.  In the scene explored in the workshops, the siblings are back at home together and under pressure to conform to social convention regarding birth sex and presentation.  The group experimented with what it might be like for Clara to perform martial acts in a dress.

They also experimented with swapping clothes: putting Clara in the man’s clothes and Lucio in the woman’s clothes, and vice versa, to experience the effect of switching apparel and to gauge how donning new or foreign clothes might affect one’s presence in the room and the scene.  These questions also speak to some of the discussions going on in the morning about how “agency” might not necessarily be forms of aggression but, as Ellen Welch observed, could inhere in self-comportment, -composure, decorum.  As Clare McManus notes, there are multiple decorums for bodies in early modern performance, and plays encode different forms of skill and performance that require different bodily comportments.  Can we discover that multiplicity—and with it that agency—in contemporary performance?

Actors observed the different levels of comfort and discomfort attendant on these switches, and in particular how wearing these clothes accords with experiences in their personal life of particular ways of dressing: for instance, it might feel more familiar to be in a larger dress, but feel more empowering and enabling to be wearing doublet with a sword.  Equally, for Clara, the dress and its hidden pistol and swordholder shows how feats of athleticism and martial prowess transcend ostensibly gendered costume.

Liz Cruz Petersen and Pam Allen Brown pointed to how these moments of performance chimed with other developments in the workshop and in the research underpinning it.  The instances variously discussed above where characters can dominate a scene through body language alone point to agency beyond verbal performance.  Equally, agency inheres in moments where verbal sparring like that between Sebastian and Guzman about correct clothing etiquette can move into physical exchanges mirroring duelling.

You’ve gotta make the scene sing.

Moll, too, along with the cocky servant Trapdoor, are able to move between audience address and repartee with each other: physically and verbally.  In these scenes, characters resemble early modern entertainers, able to command respect and attention and generate humour and in turn channel some of the authority of their performing forebears in early modern Europe.

Might we see in these moments contemporary analogues of that broader picture of performance history so well mapped out, for instance, by Clare McManus in her work for the conference on professional female tumblers working in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England?  Are these instances where both verbal and nonverbal physical performance (and its interaction with costume) offer a wider and more empowering complement of skills for actors looking to embody classical characters?

 

Callan Davies

 

SF Day 1: Introductions, Swordplay, and Scenes

We’re here at the end of our first day at the Stratford Festival Laboratory having worked through a variety of questions, possibilities, and avenues—and set up plenty more for the coming week.  This post provides a short reflection on our discussions and provides some background to the Stratford Festival Laboratory, as well as a brief summary of our opening  workshop activities.

Looking at the past tells us about how the future can be.

We began with introductions to the room and an outline of the rationale for this week’s conference and our time at the Stratford Lab.  Engendering the Stage is interested in thinking about diverse casting practices across classical drama—as informed by both historical practice and contemporary performance practice.  Peter Cockett and Melinda Gough laid some background to the intersections between professional performers and academic research that will form the crux of our week here.

Fundamentally these explorations are speculative.  Theatre history can sometimes risk giving the impression that scholarship generates evidence, evidence means facts, and facts = This is How Things Were in the Past.  Yet recent approaches have sought to underscore how academic understanding of the theatrical past, while necessarily foregrounding questions of evidence, is always necessarily speculative.  In seeking to erase the division between performance practices, rehearsal, and scholarship, these workshops are one site in which we can model a shared exploration of text, performance, and history: we’re all imagining the past.

In turn, as we settled into the room, our opening conversations about “Practice as Research” opened up a variety of approaches and prompted some queries about what performers in the room, working with pre-selected scenes, might be aiming to do: are we looking to imagine what decisions might have been made in performance historically? Do we want to see what the text would have looked like on a Renaissance stage? Or are we playing less reverently with texts, prioritising contemporary performance, or thinking about what works best for us here today?  Perhaps it’s really about the combination of all of that?  Certainly, many emphasised how thinking about historical practices can help inform the present and help to shape the future; something that came up repeatedly is how the period’s performance and casting practices show the past to be far less conservative than many of today’s popular assumptions about the “Renaissance stage” (and thereby less conservative than many practices in twenty-first century classical theatre).  By rediscovering elements of past performance and workshopping them, it’s possible we can (re)introduce myriad possibilities for constructive, healthy approaches to gender in performance—and rather than being innovations, those approaches are rooted in a long line of theatrical and cultural histories.

For the haudenosaunee on whose land Stratford, Ontario sits, there were 12 to 15 genders.

Our conversations and introductions made clear that these workshops are invested in a two-way, collaborative exchange between everybody in the room: their forms of expertise, their backgrounds, their identities. We’re joined by academics, actors, and actor-academics. We’re thinking about trans identity and female identity; about race and spirituality; about intersectionality.  Dramaturge Gein Wong’s warm-up led us through contemplations about our place in the room, our relationship with the world, and they helped bring to mind the complex histories of Indigenous, knowledge, colonialism, and healing attendant on the very land on which we’re sat.  I was particularly grateful for the optimism that characterised this warm-up: Gein spoke of a burgeoning Indigenous Renaissance occurring in and beyond Canada (celebrating, for instance, Jeremy Dutcher’s recent award of the Polaris prize); in the political climate of 2018, this sense of artistic momentum towards more diverse-positive futures are invaluable and urgent.

If the Laboratory were like a hospital, it would be a teaching hospital.

We’re lucky to be joined by Keira Loughran, the Associate Producer who runs the Lab and whose collaboration has made this week possible, and by our Stage Manager for the week, Renate Hanson.

Keira explained the history of Stratford Festival’s Laboratory and how it aligns with many of the aims of a project such as Engendering the Stage. It started out, at the suggestion of Festival director Antoni Cimolino and under Keira’s guidance, through attempts to diversify the canon of classical drama and to change ways of working in rehearsal and towards production.  Working with the Festival’s repertory actors on small scenes, topics, or themes relevant to classical drama, they provide the chance to workshop and experiment.  In particular, in the early years of the Lab, three central questions emerged: what is it like to be a woman in a classically-motivated company? What is it like to be a diverse actor in a classically-motivated company? What is it like to preserve one’s mental health in a classically-motivated company?

The Lab, in essence, provides the space for artists to be artists and to give time to the voices of performers—to allow questions and experiments in process.

Process not product.

As is central to the Lab, workshops are about process, rehearsal, and experimentation without working towards a final product or production.

This year’s various Lab sessions are designed to think further about how this way of working can be made more central to the Festival as a whole and indeed to the wider Canadian and international theatre industries.   For me, Keira’s descriptions of the Lab, the Festival’s amazing work to date, and their ambitions for its future emphasised how closely current concerns in the theatre industry are aligned with current questions of theatre history: whose history is theatre history?  What identities do the texts and practices of the past represent or offer?  How can different methodologies, working practices, and collaborations help recover erased or forgotten voices, or rediscover historic forms of power or agency—dramatic or extradramatic?

By way of reference to her own directorial experiences working on the Festival’s production of Comedy of Errors this year (about which there’s a dedicated panel dedicated on Monday’s events at McMaster), Keira noted that this year’s Lab fits in with wider trends towards bringing scholarly expertise into rehearsal rooms and closing the gap between performance and scholarship.

She puts off her cloak and draws her sword (The Roaring Girl, 3.1.65.1)

After these discussions, actors and performers drew their swords.  After all, all of the scenes being workshopped at the Lab involve elements of swordplay.

The Company’s Fight Captain Wayne Best led a masterclass on how to move with swords, how to draw, how to cut and thrust, to parry, to stand en garde.

The fighting workshop drew attention to how the tiniest details of gesture and movement have major significance—for other actors in a scene as well as for audiences.

When two armed actors move towards one another in a stage space, when do they decide to stop, draw, or simply move more cautiously? If one of them moves with a hand on their sword, is that a sign of martial confidence that may stop you in your tracks earlier? The trails of sheathed swords out of the back of an actor’s body affects the spaces you move through and the way you sit down; in turn, the movement of the draw and the placement of the feet—particularly the grounding of the body for balance and quick movement—call for continual readiness.  The ripeness is all.

It affects your whole character, whether you’re good or bad at it.

Pamela Brown mentioned that the presence of so many swords in a large space prompted the question: how would you feel in the middle of so many armed male characters without a sword?  Might this be an aspect of stagework that informs the verbal sparring characteristic of innamorata types from Italian commedia (in turn so influential on English and other European performance traditions)—one that affects stance and physical stature?

Numerous other intriguing questions came out of this brief exercise in swordplay that will no doubt resound and mutate throughout the week.  Wayne Best pointed (literally) to the close relationship between twenty-first-century health and safety concerns for an actor and the principles of self-defence: at the end of the day, you don’t want to get hurt.  These fights are in many ways a combination of historical imagination and material/bodily practicality: the same combination faced by Renaissance actors.  I also wondered how such swordplay might work in much smaller spaces or stages.  And what difference would Renaissance clothing make (for instance, an historically male-dressed character trailing a sword has to manage a turning circle, but so does a character in a wide skirt)?  Might such movements translate to other forms of dramatic exchange, and so might typically unarmed characters be influenced in other ways by the dramaturgy of stage fighting?

This fight workshop raised questions about the relationship between body, stance, gesture, and performance that will be central to questions across the week.  As one actor remarked, it crucially affects your physicality and offers an opportunity physically to embody power: they noted that the experience of workshopping these actions in 2018 provides opportunities for an element of powerful or aggressive physicality not normally afforded “traditional” female roles.

Let Shakespeare die.

Before we moved onto a first read-through of our various scenes for the week, Jamie Milay—a multimedia performance artist—treated us to a blistering provocation about Shakespeare, imploring: let him die. Milay urged us to admit, to allow, to provide voices beyond Shakespeare: genderqueer characters and playwrights from the past, contemporary trans voices, postcolonial perspectives, more.  Casting, cross-casting, and “all-female” productions are not enough.


Their poem raised questions about what exactly we’re doing in this room.  What about the wider forms of representation that might be occasioned by laying Shakespeare to rest and by admitting a much wider range of voices, parts, and pasts?

The day finished with read throughs of our different scenes for the week.

Here, we’re working from scratch and thinking about the basics of what’s going on in a scene: how it might work, what it might look like, what might specific things mean?  It’s a chance to build up and out from exchanges between acting practice, scholarship, history, print, and performance.  Indeed, this part of the afternoon’s work cues the beginning of an in-finite research and rehearsal process raising ideas about character and voice that will doubtless echo, develop, reshape over the next few days…

 

Callan Davies