Exploring our flawed memory
THEATRE and live performance are often described as the art of the present. These productions are ephemeral, with the experience of watching them starting to fade as soon as the curtain falls. Like weathered rock particles, all that physically remains of this experience afterwards is detritus in the form of costumes, props, stage skid marks, and the (often flawed) recollection of the experience in the memories of the audience.
A plastic bag, a small fan, a couple of gym mats, a heap of chairs, and several rolls of red wool. These are some of the fragments featured in Alan Parker’s Detritus, a production described as an imaginative and playful engagement with the intangibility of live performance.
“You can’t archive a live performance. There is no physical copy as is the case with a book or a movie. The experience is once-off,” says Parker, who was able to create the piece through a Theatre Arts Admin Collective Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary.
“The show is about watching and feeling. It’s about the struggle to capture, keep, remember and ultimately share the intangible.”
Detritus consists of a series of physical performance/dance-based scenes, each depicting an attempt to engage with and describe a particular physical object. This is done by the performers in an attempt to recreate the feeling/essence they had while watching it in the past.
At the start of rehearsals, Parker asked all three, Richard Antrobus, Indalo Stofile and Madele Vermaak, to recall a production they’d seen that left an impression on them. Together they try to isolate and define each experience.
“The brain only remembers small parts of a show, or an emotion it may have evoked. We wanted to discover ways in which the body, voice and each show’s remaining ‘artefacts’ can combine in moving, playful and effective ways.
“We didn’t simply want to recreate each show’s description, we wanted to find its centre.”
After going through the archives of their minds, Parker’s cast picked productions they saw at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown last year. These are Cécile Briand’s Afternoon of a Foehn (in which a series of fans is used to make plastic shopping bags appear to be dancing in mid-air), Nicola Elliott’s Fragile (inspired by Belgian acrobat-illusionist Claudio Stellato’s L’Autre, the show also featured Elliott’s mother knitting on stage), and Tebogo Munyai’s Right Inside (a production that depicted a domestic violence scene within a makeshift shack, allowing viewers to look in on the crime from the outside via peep holes).
“It was interesting to see which aspects performance my actors remembered. For instance, Madele Vermaak (who chose Fragile) recalled the physical effect the show had on her body. It was an interesting choice of production, because one of its most powerful scenes involved a performer trying to lie on top of a branch, before proceeding to completely destroy it. Because there was no actual debris left over, Detritus sees Vermaak trying to climb on top of that branch without the actual branch.”
Designed by Standard Bank AHA! award-winning performance artist and choreographer Gavin Krastin ( Rough Musick, Land Mine), one of the show’s unexpected highlights sees the Methodist Church Hall’s backstage area briefly exposed, revealing a smorgasbord of real-life props, furniture, and other junk gathered over the years.
“Because Krastin is a performer himself, he understands the complex relationship between the visual image and the body of work. There is an interesting juxtaposition between what the picture looks like, and what the performers are doing within that picture.”
In this way, Parker explains, the work has space and opportunity to “come alive and speak”. Props aren’t cleared after serving their purpose, and by the end of the show the final piece of detritus added to the rest of the items scattered across the stage are the performers themselves.
“There is something incredibly beautiful about the immediacy of live performance. Even though this ephemeral experience can live on in the viewer’s memory, this process always seems to happen one step slower.
“This notion is echoed in the show’s opening scenes when Vermaak greets the audience with: “Hi there. Thank you for coming to watch the show. But I’m afraid you’ve already missed it.”