Growing pains

Previous to being an A-level drama student, I was blissfully unaware of what the loose term, ‘contemporary performance’, meant. When it came to devising short performances with my classmates at school, I was often lumbered with a handful of rather rowdy fifteen-year-old boys who felt that the sole importance of the drama class was to create ridiculous slap stick comedy routines to rival Fawlty Towers. As a fifteen-year-old girl, taking myself rather seriously and believing I was destined for the road to stardom, I was desperate to know more about the ins and outs, the techniques used by ‘proper actors’, the secrets to nailing that RADA audition.

And then, along came A-level Theatre Studies. The heavier stuff. Artaud. Brecht. Grotowski. Stanislavski: the core four practitioners that my friends and I obsessed over and began to (unoriginally) imitate in every piece of work, trying desperately to prove to our teachers, ‘Look-Sir-I-actually-read-a-bit-about-him-so-now-I’m-an-expert’. But no matter how cleverly we ‘bared the devices’, or how superbly we thought we had extracted pure emotion via ‘the system’, the truth remained that we had no real idea about contemporary theatre practice, or what it really means in relation to theatrical process and development.
It was only at university that I realised how little I actually knew. I discovered that there was more to alienating the audience than simply changing my costume within their view, and that if I wanted to create boundary-breaking work it was slightly more complicated than swearing or getting naked (oh, how my tutors must have wanted to strangle every student whose justification for vulgarity on stage was, ‘But we want to shock the audience!’) I poked and prodded around a little deeper, read and researched a bit more thoroughly and in doing so unearthed a huge interest in Forced Entertainment, in The Wooster Group, in Elevator Repair Service. These were the contemporary theatre groups who blew my mind with their ambitious and radical ideas, forcing me to ask questions that as a teenager seemed irrelevant and somewhat unnecessary to achieving my stage dreams – how can an actor play with his audience? What are the key elements of an ensemble performance? Why would one take snippets of a stranger’s conversation and repeat them onstage for the world to hear?
Now, as a theatre graduate, you may think that I have found the answers to every question that contemporary performance and practice ever threw into my face. I haven’t. I have just come to realise that its ability to encourage so many questions and probes is the very reason that it is so resonant in today’s arts bubble.