DOCUMENTING THE MAKING PROCESS 
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 
by 
John Freeman 
Department of Performing Arts, Brunel University 
April 2001 
ABSTRACT 
This thesis documents the construction of a performance project, At Last Sight, which 
was made with a group of undergraduates at University College Chester. The leader of 
that project is the same person as the writer of this thesis; this locates the act of writing as 
something embedded within the process of performance making. 
The writing forms an address to the unreliability of objective observational analysis. It 
does so through a resistance to those attempts at impartiality and detachment that might 
usually be expected in an academic investigation. In this case partiality and involvement 
are more than central to the investigative process, they form the very structure of enquiry. 
The body of this work was written at the same time as At Last Sight was being 
constructed, and the ideas encountered herein possess many of the rhythms of 
performance making. 
Space is both somewhere performance is made and an integral aspect of the made work. 
In a similar way the following chapters amount to more than the site where work has 
been recorded. In tracing the footprints that led to At Last Sight the thesis reveals itself as 
an element of that which is being traced. Where At Last Sight revealed the performers as 
the to-be-watched and also as the watchers, the study functions as the to-be-read and also 
as the reading. In this way the documentation becomes the documented. 
This notion of integration between the subject and its study runs through the thesis. 
Approaching performance analysis as something `other' creates a gap between it and its 
subject that can deny the best attempts to bring the two together. Approached in a less 
compartmentalised way the analysis is allowed to form an indivisible correspondence 
with the analysed. When the division between the act and the analysis is dissolved the 
documentation is able to exist as both fixed object and time-based event. Something of 
the fluidity of process is acknowledged and articulated in each of the sections presented. 
Contents: 
Preface p. i 
Introduction p. 1 
Chapter One p, 42 
Chapter Two p. 85 
Chapter Three p. 154 
Chapter Four p. 194 
Chapter Five p. 245 
Conclusion p. 303 
Postscript p. 350 
Bibliography p. 366 
Appendices p. 3 74 
Appendix 1: Outline of Practical Research Project p. 375 
Appendix 2: Alternative Production Outlines p. 378 
Appendix 3: Correspondence with Liege Festival Management p. 383 
Appendix 4: Scale Drawings of Rehearsal and Performance Spaces p. 387 
Appendix 5: Sample Correspondence between Student and Supervisor p. 397 
Appendix 6: `Original' Text of At Last Sight p. 404 
Appendix 7: Illustrations of Cast p. 428 
Appendix 8: Revised Versions of At Last Sight p. 439 
Appendix 9: Essays from Participating Students p. 462 
Acknowledgements 
Dr Susan Broadhurst was my second supervisor and she and Professor Mike Pearson 
examined the thesis. They each offered apposite and much appreciated advice. Thanks go 
to them, and also to Dr John Aplin. 
Colleagues past and present have contributed much to the ideas that inform this thesis. In 
particular, thanks go to John Stephens, Valerie Kosh and Allan Owens. 
Special mention needs to be made of the students whose full commitment to the project 
of At Last Sight turned the process of research into a pleasure: 
Liz Hague 
Andrew Proudfoot 
Chris Roberts 
Glenn Robertson 
Sarah Robertson 
Laurent Ruggeri 
Anke Sauthof 
Sarah Skelton 
Ultimately, this thesis could not have been written without the support, guidance, 
knowledge and encouragement of my supervisor Barry Edwards. His influence runs 
through every page of the work. 
What qualities exist in the thesis stem from Barry Edwards' supervision, whilst any 
failings that remain are mine alone. 
PREFACE 
12-10-00 
This thesis began as an investigation of certain processes involved in the creation 
of a performance project. Notwithstanding the fact that the project in question was 
being `constructed' by myself, it was my intention that the investigation be largely 
dispassionate 
... that the making would lead to reflection, but that the activity of 
reflecting would not impact on the ways the work was made. This was the 
discipline I sought to impose. In practice, the making process proved resistant to 
the divisiveness of this discipline. It became impossible to achieve. Furthermore, as 
the project progressed, it was revealed as antithetical to the nature of making 
work. ' 
Where writing about performance is often at some remove from the performance it 
critiques, this investigation is engaged with its subject at an immediate level, and 
this has emerged as the most telling aspect of the thesis. Performance is an event as 
well as an object ... 
in order to investigate `process' without resorting to 
calcification, the writing needs to foreground its own eventness. The thesis 
questions the extent to which the documentation of practice can be effective when 
the documentation and the documented are practised at one and the same time 
The body of this thesis was written at the same time as the practical project it 
investigates, At Last Sight, was being made. The accompanying time-lines as sub- 
headings reveal the dates on which each section was written. At Last Sight was a 
performance project which I directed with a group of final year undergraduates 
over the course of an academic year. 
14-10-00 
The immediacy of doing/writing brought with it a specific challenge ... the 
challenge was not only to question the extent to which one can read one's own 
work, but to investigate the possibilities of making that reading in a perpetual 
present. The claim to originality of the thesis rests on the rigour and detail of the 
painstaking documentation of a performance construction. No similar studies exist. 
The thesis, therefore, is an investigation of a particular type of documentation. 
Crucially, the thesis is not about the theory of documentation. It is about a method 
of documentation which is part of the practice of making performance. The thesis 
stands as an exploration of this way of investigating process. It is not writing about 
experimental practice, it is writing as experimental practice. In this way, what will 
emerge is an attempt at investigative writing as both research activity and as 
research. Whilst the idea of practice as research has become relatively well 
established, the writing up of this is not conceptually agreed at present. The 
example to follow makes a contribution to this field. 
18-10-00 
The present is a given of live performance. Whatever we see is happening in the 
here and now, regardless of any fictional `period' within which the work may be 
set. 2 This concentration on the present can be the benchmark by which the quality 
of any given performer is generally determined. 
3 For the purposes of academic 
enquiry, however, the present is often delayed. Academic enquiry is generally 
thought of as comprising reflection, re-evaluation and consideration. In this way an 
idea can be tested and contextualised within a framework of ongoing research. This 
thesis sets out to question this implicit methodology. It asks: `What happens if I do 
not work in this way? T 'What happens if the investigation I make is not tempered 
by time? ' As such, the thesis is the exploration of a different method of selection. 
This thesis repositions the temporal relationship between reflection, revision and 
practice. It has been the intention that the writing would investigate as concurrent a 
documentation of the practice as was possible. This does not mean that the thesis is 
being presented as the creation of a prototype for future practitioners ... as though 
a student of performance in the years to come would seek to recreate At Last Sight 
(or something like it) from this record. That is not the intention. The thesis is 
submitted as a prototype for the documentation of one's own practice: as an 
example of a way of reading practice from within, rather than as an exemplar of a 
particular way of making work. It is not about abstracting documentation to 
something universal, although my own personal practice shares a number of 
approaches, which might be regarded, as 'common). 
It is important that the thesis is recognised as an exploration of a process of making 
performance work, not the process. 
22-10-00 
The making of performance is a process plagued with doubt. The work that this 
thesis is concerned with was made at the end of a century and a millennium, at a 
time of change, both natural and forced. The thesis is at times something of an 
argument against itself, inasmuch as it is seeking to articulate that which remains 
steadfastly inarticulate in any form other than the performative. Where the 
performance events that were parts of At Last Sight resisted closure - to the point 
where an absence of fixity was as integral to the performers' tasks as it was to the 
denial of any overt message or meaning - written words are not only suggestive of 
finality, they are final. This creates a contradiction that the thesis wrestles with 
throughout. 
As a strategy for dealing with this, I have attempted to acknowledge the 
implication of my own writing in the processes that I recount, 
4 and also to draw the 
attention of the reader to the overt incompatibility of the ephemeral and the fixed. 
That the documentation of the processes of performance making is as vexed an area 
as it currently is gives testament to the difficulty of recording time-based work in a 
space-based medium. It is for this reason that the writing was made subject to 
many of the durational demands and limitations as was the making. What emerges 
is a written work that recognises the linear limitations of writing as something at 
odds with the experience of performance, at the same time as 
it seeks to utilise this 
very linearity through a merging of making and writing. The thesis 
is concerned 
with a way of documenting and with that which is being 
documented. It is 
questioning the possibilities, through the chapters of the thesis, of reflecting on 
reflection. 
IV 
23-10-00 
During the period in which the thesis was written my preoccupations were with the 
challenges of making work, alongside an attendant and in-depth articulation. ' That 
these preoccupations speak at once of self and of self-awareness creates an alliance 
with the self-reflectivity of postmodernism. 6 1 can identify certain elements of 
postmodern practice that have been integral to my own making processes. 7 These 
are articulated as and when they occur within the timescale of the writing and the 
practice: without pre-empting the narrative of the thesis, I can describe them as 
1: a foregrounding of intertextuality 
2: an interest in shifting performative identities 
3- experimentation with the narcissism of autobiography 
4: the revelation rather than concealment of process 
5: an absence of closure 
6: the exposure of artifice 
7: an investigation of spectator/performer relationships8 
2-11-00 
The thesis is primarily concerned with a new model for writing about performance 
making, rather than ways of making new performance. The inclusion here of these 
`making' elements should not dissuade the reader from a concentration in the thesis 
on the investigation of a means of documentation. 
At all times the research is investigating what happens when the reflective act of 
writing occurs at as close a time as possible to the performance making. 
9 Where 
this results in sudden shifts in emphases and/or approach the reader 
is asked to 
consider these as traces of a process that was always as creative as 
it was 
V 
analytical. The time-line will reveal those occasions when the periods between 
rehearsal and written reflection are stretched, as well as those when the time 
between is very short. This is part of the investigative process. At Last Sight was 
not a `full-time' project and this thesis was written in the spaces that opened up 
between full-time teaching posts at University College Chester and De Montfort 
University. 
In most cases it is not practical to look at every object or question, and this case has 
been no different- The investigator has to work with samples and the usefulness of 
the findings will depend largely on the extent to which that sample is held to be 
representative. The process of making performance is not formulaic and events that 
may be of importance with the value of hindsight may not have been investigated 
fully at source. Where these omissions occur (and informed readers will draw their 
own conclusions) they stand as proof of the representative nature of the study. 
What was written about was regarded as significant at the time, and time was 
always the most pressing agent of determination. Fieldwork involves observing and 
asking questions. With this project, those questions have been asked of the self. 
The thesis then stands as an aspect of self-presentation. After Goffman, we can say 
that this consists of the self's effort to convey a particular image of itself, or 
information about itself, to other people. 1° If the self-presentation developed in this 
thesis seems to be based as much on the self-presenter's own standards as on those 
of the readers then it is in keeping with Schlenker's belief that self-presentation 
is 
l 
the result of a trade-off between favourability and plausibility. 
" 
Wt 
5-11-00 
Thinking about the self is not universally regarded as a plausible activity. A blow 
to self-knowledge came from Nisbett and Wilson, who contended that people are 
not able to know and report on much that happens inside their own minds. People, 
they argue, may know their attitudes and opinions, but they are incapable of 
knowing how they arrived at these. Furthermore, if they think about their attitudes 
for too long, especially in endeavouring to assess the reasons for these to have 
occurred, they can end up in nowhere but confusion. 12 This thesis seeks to 
challenge this idea. 
A research report tells the story of how a researcher investigated a particular area. 
Thus, a research report has a linear, narrative structure with a beginning, middle 
and an end. When joined together in this way information becomes easier to 
comprehend and recall ... 
in this way a research report, a thesis, tells a story. 13 
Describing a thesis as a story is not just a convenient metaphor. Theses are stories. 
Stories that consist of two components: a telling of what happened, and an 
explanation as to why it happened in the ways that it did. This thesis is a story. It 
begins with the construction of a written text for performance, and it explains the 
reasoning behind key decisions and the impact they had on that construction. 
Subsequent chapters document the process of making, leading to a 'final I 
performance in Chester, in May 1999. A further performance of At Last Sight took 
place at FESTUPIC, a festival of performance in Compiegne, France, but this fell 
beyond the intentional timescale of the thesis. 14 Because, for the bulk of the thesis, 
vii 
the investigation is in between post and pre rehearsal the thoughts are a blend of 
reflection and projection- The thesis asks what happens when one tries to write 
about performance making in this type of 'present'. A present that makes the 
writing a part of the performance. 
If At Last Sight was an act of mimesis, inasmuch as it consisted of actions seen in 
performance, then this thesis is an act of diegesis, telling the reader things they did 
not - indeed, could not - see for themselves. In one way At Last Sight was not a 
culturally significant production. " It was seen by perhaps 1,500 people ... 
large 
for a curriculum-driven and student-cast project, but small in comparison to 
touring, professional product. 16 The work was never reviewed. No dramatic text 
has been published. The thesis in this way gives permanence to an otherwise 
ephemeral (and almost invisible) event. This is a consequence of the thesis, not an 
objective. 
Just as `a successful piece of research doesn't conclusively settle an issue', 
'7 so this 
thesis does not attempt to provide answers for all researcher/practitioners for all 
time. The thesis serves An important archival function, documenting a particular 
type of research, it is also hopes to serve as a stimulus. It can excite other 
researchers to join the investigation of a particular issue, or to apply new methods 
to the study of performance making. 
v»l 
6-11-00 
The reader will note that the personal pronoun `I' is used throughout the thesis, and 
that, rather than emphasising the subject above the investigator, I am locating the 
investigator's developing understanding of the subject as a central aspect. This is 
not entered into through any ignorance of the (usual) fact that `the writer's style 
should convey the impression of impartiality and detachment rather than personal 
involvement', '8 so much as it is through a recognition that within this thesis the 
`Va iter's personal involvement is at the core of the study. This is a research 
decision. It is a means of asking whether the `I' provides a useful perspective on 
the making process. 
The use of `I' carries with it a certain authority. As though the writer's own words 
and beliefs create a kind of truth. And the idea of `truth', with its obverse `lies', 
permeates much of the thesis. Joanna Frueh has written in Erotic Faculties of 
`followers who have turned the fascinating and useful writings of father figures of 
speech into cant and canon. ' 19 Frueh goes further to say that `Cant demeans the 
reality of personal experience. '20 My own approach reveals a developing drift 
towards a faith in this `reality', even at those times when the vocabulary of choice 
seems set most firmly against it. Whilst I am aware of the dangers of being seen to 
disregard that which I also embrace, I am obliged to record that which happened ... 
even when its occurrence ran counter to my expectations. Truth is a contingent 
category, with no reliability and no absolutes, and yet the truth of my experience 
appears to deny relativism on my own part. This means that whilst any claim to 
ix 
offer a definite interpretation of events that were witnessed is doomed to failure, an 
event that was experienced internally can be held to be true, if only to s/he who 
experiences. The thesis addresses whether it is appropriate to ask questions about 
`truth' in an investigation of performance. 
Where the performance of At Last Sight is a masquerade of sorts, the writing of this 
thesis is an attempt to deal with the truth as I saw it. Sometimes this is prosaic: I 
will not, for example, be saying that five people were at a rehearsal when four were 
present. 21 At other times, during the reading of events, my engagement will be 
more complex. For the most part, we can substitute the word `truth' fo 
`significance', inasmuch as imbuing an occurrence with significance is less 
problematic than regarding that same occurrence as `true' and incontestable. 
Truth and reality are subject to certain plasticity, and postmodern practice strives to 
reveal something of this ambiguity in presentation. Truths, like theories, do not 
always stand the test of time. It is within this spirit of temporary reliability that the 
reader is asked to engage with this report. 
7-11-00 
In this way the thesis is a record of `a' truth and not `the' truth. As At Last Sight 
was open to a series of interpretations so too is this thesis. It is a characteristic of 
language that webs of meaning are generated and that any and all texts are 
necessarily self-contradictory. This thesis is no different. It is, in Wittgenstein's 
terms, 22 a language game, inasmuch as it is a work, which, in seeking to capture the 
X 
language of the performance-making process, is handicapped `because the attempt 
to do so itself constitutes a (further) language game. -)23 The writing thus deals in the 
persuasive, the provisional and the contingent, and it does so as a means of stating, 
a position. The position remains as mine and it is tempered throughout by its own 
deliberate self-referentiality. 
To paraphrase Keats' distrust of literature with a palpable design on us, I can say 
that this thesis does not seek to convert or influence the views of the reader. It is an 
investigation, presented as the documentation of my experience as a maker of 
performance. It explores the extent to which the divide between the observer and 
the observed dissolves. In this, it is a troublesome work, for when an artwork is 
also an object of theoretical discourse the worlds of rational objectivity collapse in 
on those of the subjective and the intuitional. 
What follows then is at once a reflection on process and process itself It became 
evident during the writing that distinctions between making the work and writing 
about it were dissolving to the point where one bled into the other without 
deliberation. In this way, the thesis has emerged as being as much a part of At Last 
Sight as were any of its performances. At Last Sight does not exist through this 
writing so much as it exists in the writing. Similarly, the writing/making does not 
record an experience ... 
it was an experience in itself As writer/maker I have not 
been involved in the thesis so much as being inside it ... and 
it is the analysis of 
this `insidedness' that gives the thesis both its immediacy and its wider relevance 
Xi 
to performance-makers who seek to document the processes leading to the 
performances they make. 
Giannachi and Luckhurst begin their 1999 text On Directing with a recognition 
that a reason for `the scarcity of material on directors and directing practices in 
Britain must be the absence here of both oral and written traditions in the 
articulation of process. '24 Their introduction continues with the statement that `It 
is extremely difficult for anyone to theorize the creative processes pertaining to a 
particular performance. ' 25 Despite being written before the publication of On 
Directing the chapters of this thesis can be read as a response to its authors' 
opening remarks. 
10-11-00 
What are the implications of calling a thesis a performative act: a record of process 
and also process per se ... the 
documentation of performance making and also 
performance making as documentation? Is it the case that the importance of the 
thesis lies not in its relationship to the referent that was `the process observed' as in 
the duality of its existence? What happens when the thesis is not akin to Plato's 
shadows on the cave wall, anymore than At Last Sight might be regarded as the 
object/event that threw them there? When thesis and performance, the investigation 
and the investigated, are offered as parts of the same process? 
This thesis forms an address to these questions. 
xii 
' My findings here are not dissimilar to Judith Butler's experiences of research towards the publication 
of Bodies that Matter (Butler, J. Routledge, 1993). Butler attempted to `consider the materiality of the body only to find that the thought of materiality invariably moved (her) into other domains'. p. ix 2 This is also the case with cinema. However, the distinction with live performance is that the 'here and 
now' is shared by spectators and performers. 
3 Elizabeth LeCompte regards presence as the area of her work with the Wooster Group that is of 
prime importance. In an interview with Nick Kaye, she states that `the constant battle for me as a 
director is find ways that an actor can be always present, always alive, always thinking this is the first 
and last moment that she's there'. In The Twentieth Century Performance Reader. Huxley, M& Witts, 
N (eds. ) Routledge, London & New York, 1996. p. 232 
4I borrow here from the terminology Nick Kaye uses to describe Salman Rushdie's writing in Shame. 
Kaye, N Postmodernism and Performance. Macmillan, London, 1994. p. 10 
5 The thesis was `written' over a three-year period, which breaks down into three relatively even 
sections. The period 1997-98 involves a study of the processes of creating a written text for 
performance; 1998-99 deals with how that text is worked through in rehearsal through to performance. 
1999-2000 was a period of reflecting on the process. 
6 It is important at this point to articulate my understanding of the term `postmodern', as it relates to ., It Last Sight and also to the practice of this thesis. In part, I am using the term postmodernism because of 
its very ubiquity: as there is no single `postmodernism', so there exists no one emanating theory. What 
we are able to say, as a summary of Barrett and Philips (Barrett & Philips, Destabilising Theory, 1992) 
is that a feature of postmodernism is a desire to reveal the ideological bias contained in the production 
of knowledge, and that this act of exposure seeks to focus attention on the perspectives from which 
work is created. This will be a feature of both the creation of At Last Sight and this thesis. In this way 
any and all notions of neutrality will be called into question. As Michele Barrett (1992) tells us `To 
address specific truths ... 
is to discover not the controlling modernism of a fully integrated theory of 
knowledge, but precisely the reverse - an incommensurability of knowledge that provokes interesting 
reflection. ' (p. 116) 
In addition to provoking Barrett's interesting reflection, this thesis forms an invitation to the reader to 
consider those perspectives embodied in the creation of performance that would normally remain 
hidden, perhaps even from the creating self. In attempting this articulation of the ways in which this 
performance will be created from and through `self, it is appropriate to acknowledge the stance which 
is motivating my own research ... to expose my own authorial 
bias. The approach which allows for 
such a declaration of bias owes its allegiance to no single disciplinary stance. It is, therefore, more able 
to accommodate the complexity of such a self-reflective concept as the performance maker reading 
`his' own work. 
Inasmuch as the thesis will be attempting to construct a language that enacts liberation rather than 
being content to describe a liberal process, the narrative of the thesis is likely, in Zygmunt Bauman's 
terms, to `go around in circles, rather than developing in a straight line. Some topics (will) return later, 
to be looked upon once again in the light of what we have discussed in the meantime. This is how all 
effort of understanding works. Each step in understanding makes a return to previous stages necessary 
... the process may never end; 
but much may be gained in its course. ' (Bauman, Z. Thinkzking 
Sociologically. Blackwell, Oxford, 1990. P. 19. ) As Bauman regards this as a postmodern position, so 
too is this the broad area within which this thesis will function. 
This is not intended to deny the influence of other theoretical perspectives: post-structuralism and 
phenomenology, for example. Neither is it asking to be read as an uncritical embrace of all that 
postmodernism might stand for. Ultimately, it is in the sense of postmodernism as a radical 
eclecticism, built on juxtapositions of conflicting discourses that it is being used here. 
' My own `understanding' of postmodernism, as it relates to performance, is determined by the specific 
set of circumstances in which the work I see, read about and discuss takes place. In this, I am writing 
All 
from a particular late twentieth century academic perspective, which is at all times, and for better or 
worse, identifiably British. Furthermore, as a maker of performance, as well as a teacher and writer of 
it, postmodernism is something I am responding to as both artist and critic. 
$ These seven `headings' cover the areas I am interested in at the time of writing. They are not offered 
here as the most important aspects of postmodernism', so much as indications of address. 
9 `Same time' here refers to `Same time scale', inasmuch as the writing about rehearsals occurred in 
the midst of that rehearsal period. As a project that took place over the course of an academic year. 
there were periods when the writing happened several days after the rehearsal it describes, during 
vacation periods, for example, when the student-group were unavailable. Clarity is provided by the 
dating of passages of writing. 
10 Goffman, E The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, New York, 1959 
11 Schlenker, B. R. Impression Management: The self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal 
relations. Brooks/Cole, Monterey, CA, 1980. P. 41 
2 Nisbett, R., & Wilson, T. D. "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental 
Processes" Psychological Review, 84,1977. pp. 231-259 
13 Parsons, C. J. Theses and Project Work, Heinneman, London, 1978. pp. 21-27 
'' It is also the case that At Last Sight is continuing. Not as a performance project of that name, but as 
an idea that is informing the work I am currently engaged in. This aspect of influence is something that 
is addressed within this thesis ... 
indeed, it is central to it. 
15 Cultural significance is difficult to determine, and I use it here in the sense of the work's low 
cultural visibility. At Last Sight was never performed at a non-university venue ... the 
festivals it 
played at were university festivals, making the spaces `university venues' at the times they were Jr- 7 
performed in. Few people beyond Chester, Liege and Compiegne would have heard about the w ork. 
However, Chris Roberts, a performer in At Last Sight, is now pursuing research to PhD, and I have no 
doubts that his interest in resistant performance (his topic) was fuelled in part by his participation in. -It 
Last Sight. Liz Hague is now a full-time performer with an established company and Sarah Robertson 
is a professional drama animateur. The overall cultural significance of At Last Sight is impossible to 
predict with accuracy. 
16 This is not to suggest that every small-scale, touring project plays to more than 1,500 people. It was 
not the size of the audience(s) that is particularly relevant in the case of At Last Sight, so much as the 
status of the work as `Student'. 
t' Cohen, J. "A Review of Research and Theory" Psychological Bulletin, 88. pp. 82-108 
18 Parsons, C. J. 1978. p. 56 
19 Frueh, J Erotic Faculties. University of California Press, Los Angeles and London, 1996. p. 44 
20 ibid p. 45 
21 I refer here to `truth' in the terms suggested by Lee Nichol in On Creativity 
(Bohm, D. Routledge, 
London & New York, 1998). Nichol suggests that "A critical question arises: How can we know 
if our 
... views are true or 
false? Given that it is folly to presume that the content of any worldview ... 
is "the 
truth" 
... 
truth in content relies on observable correspondence: (such as) "It is true that the sun 
has 
arisen every day for the past week. " (p. xix). 
I am asserting certain truths in content, and will not be inventing data. 
22 Lechte, J Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. Routledge, 1994. p. 247 
23 ibid 
24 Giannachi, G and Luckhurst, M On Directing: Interviews with Directors. Faber 
& Faber Ltd, 
London, 1999. p. xv 
25 ibid pp. xv-xvi 
XIV 
Introduction 
5-9-97 
As an introduction to this thesis I will declare three areas of address. The first of 
these is a synopsis of the area to be investigated, the what of the thesis. The second 
comprises the how, the ways in which the subject will be treated, the methods of 
analysis to be undertaken. The third element is the why. Why this researcher at this 
time and in this way is seeking to explore this unknown. The `unknown' in this 
case is the creation of a new work of performance. The introduction functions as a 
pre-text to this, and also as a `text' in itself, as an integral element of the thesis it 
seeks to set up. As such, the space given over to these opening remarks may well 
be as great as that which is afforded to later chapters. It is hoped that this is read, 
as it is intended, as a positive and necessary means of preparation for the 
argument(s) which will develop over subsequent pages. 
The introduction is not designed to create an inflexible pattern for either the 
writing or the reading of the work, so much as to alert the reader to the. 
complexities of the problem to be addressed, as well as to those of the writer in 
tackling the task. To provoke an opening up of possibilities rather than to prescribe 
the course the thesis will follow. Accordingly, the thesis is not intended as the 
articulation of categorisation, of the labelling of work as either `realist' or `real', 
`modern' or `postmodern' ... although 
these terms, the stuff of seemingly endless 
critical debate, will feature large and often as the paper unfolds. The thesis will not 
demonstrate a concern, in the final analysis, with arriving at any resolution as to 
what performance work is, so much as how work (a specific performance-project 
made alongside and as part of this thesis) is constructed. The area of investigation 
is thus broadly defined as the making process: `The Making Process. 
16-9-97 
Contemporary thought, both philosophical and scientific, has come to regard 
human behaviour as being implicitly subject to the impact of a number of factors: 
behaviour is determined and, theoretically, a causal rationale, an explanation, can 
be posited for any and all activity entered into by human beings. ' It follows then 
that artistic creation can be subject to a similar process of thorough investigation, 
locating the `creator' within an appropriate structure defined by an alliance (always 
present) of the personal, the public and the private. This is not to deny entirely the 
romantic-sounding notion of intuition so much as to recognise that creative activity 
is no less a product of a series of determinants than of that which one might 
describe as `everyday behaviour' .2 
An argument could be made that certain actions, such as reflexes, are not the result 
of choice and, thus, are not subject to the same level of determination. However, 
even in those instances where artists deliberately locate themselves in positions of 
indeterminacy their own reliance on chance is indicative of choice. John Cage's 
early work on the I Ching is an example, ' as is Stelarc's internet `performance', 
wherein his electronically agitated body was choreographed, quite literally, by any 
interested parties who made the decision to key in the relevant co-ordinates on 
their own computers. 4 Marina Abramovic's performance project where she was 
kept `safe' from snakes by a wall of rapidly melting ice is another noted example. ' 
Performances where fatigue is part of the fabric of the presentation, seen in the 
1980's work of British companies Station House Opera and Impact Theatre Co- 
operative, are no less dependent on the training and the intention of the artists 
involved as any form of practice. 6 Reflexive responses are honed, determined in a 
multiplicity of ways that separate the performer, or the performative state, from the 
differently determined spectator. Guy Claxton, Professor of Psychology at the 
I niversity of Bristol, speaks of reflexivity as something akin to intuition 
We say we responded `intuitively' when a response occurred faster 
than thought ... there 
is some evidence that such lightning reactions 
draw on ... subliminal sources of information. 
7 
Artists are `free' to make work, therefore, not as a result of being divorced from 
the structures that determine human behaviour, but precisely because they choose, 
to enter into a world where they are able to make performative that choice given to 
each of us through biography and society. " As such, performance practice emerges 
as the outcome (a much less problematic term than `product') of an always specific 
and individual response to a great body of determinants. The artist operates 
through choice, and the choices available are no more or less determined than the 
impetus and ability to work through the choices made. 
20-9-97 
Caveats abound. It does not negate the claims made only four paragraphs ago to 
state that the problem is always the what is as much as the how made. For there is 
a genuine need to define the potential area of work, not least in a piece of research, 
a research-outcome, which might realistically expect to be of certain interest to the 
non (theatre) specialist. To those whose interest is `creation' rather than that which 
remains from the process itself. Indeed, whether a clear end to the creative 
`process' emerges is something which the process of study, a process borne out 
through these traces of ink, will wrestle with throughout. I am attempting to 
engage with the what of performance as a necessary set of rules or conventions for 
the what of the thesis. 
The following paragraphs are offered here as a cartography of views, in order that 
a shared understanding exists between the `I' of the writer and the eye of the 
reader. As such, and despite the intrinsic contention of late twentieth century 
positions on the constituent elements of performance, 9 these views are submitted as 
p eparation of the ground rather than as a persuasive tract; as an indication of this 
author's intent rather than a statement of authoritative 'fact'. Providing, it is 
hoped, both a sense of history - unashamedly, a subjectively manufactured history 
of this writer's own performative determinants - and a point of departure. 
This is not an apology. The personally experienced might be regarded as the micro 
to the macro of more generic phenomena. This thesis is not concerned with 
discovering rules for all performance, so much as providing a case study of one 
performance, and of charting key decisions in its development. 
It needs to be said at this early stage that the terms `Theatre' and `Performance', 
no less than `Theatre' and `Installation' are at times regarded as factions that are 
competing one against the other. The mainstream in denial of the marginal, the 
time-reliance of a directed series of events against the seeming elasticity of images 
located in space. 10 The predictability of the `Old Guard' set against the progressiv? 
spontaneity and irreverence of the 'New'. In setting out the argument thus, my 
own prejudices are exposed by a choice of words that immediately prioritise 
newness over age ... whether this prejudice 
is sustained, compromised or eroded by 
4 
the following research is one which, at the time of writing, remains distant and 
unknown. What is known is that this `introduction' is possessed of a comparable 
complexity to that which might be seen to exist in the researched area itself The 
introduction also needs to establish what it is that constitutes the `I' of the 
researcher. 
Is the `I' specific: specifically male, married (twice), with children (two), 
occidental, of my age? Or does the `I' strive for the `one' of assumed objectivity? 
If the `I' is to be recognised and prioritised, does this validity deny that which 
might be valuable to the `other' reader: female, single, no children, oriental, older? 
What is the researcher's agenda? If that which is subject to study has already 
formed part of the researcher's own experiences, to what extent does the past 
prejudice the present examination? To this end, we need to know whether this 
prejudice (for prejudice there surely is) is accidental and inevitable or deliberate 
and contrived. As the facilitator of a practical project as part of this process, am I 
regarding myself as a researcher/practitioner or as a practitioner whose work is 
then made subject to a written evaluation? In making a piece of work which, at 
least in part, is being created for the process of its own analysis, to what extent is 
the (my) inclination towards the theoretically interesting rather than in the direction 
of the theatrically efficacious? With such an overtly stated example of practice-as- 
research as is offered here, the informed reader will generally expect theoretical 
positionings to emerge from the practice. Indeed, one could say that this is the aim 
of the thesis per se, and, to a large extent, that will be the pattern here. However, 
as a full-time lecturer in Drama and Theatre, the world of theory could also be seen 
i 
(and not least by myself) to be driving the practice itself 11 The past is a pre-text for 
the present, in much the same way as the present is a pre-text for the yet-to-be. 
The fact that this thesis is concerned with the theoretical explanation of a practical 
activity might suggest that theory follows practice. The relationship is not this 
straightforward. The two cannot be isolated in a way that locates one before the 
other. This project is practical, this thesis theoretical; but the project and the thesis 
are being made at the same time. This means that theoretical positionings entered 
into on the page will inevitably impact on the ways that the practical work is made. 
Theory is not post practice and the research entered into for this thesis will not be 
fo1lowing behind as some sort of adjunct to the performance it seeks to explain. 
The practical work is being constructed in the here and now, and it is being 
constructed by the same person who is constructing the thesis. At its most 
interesting and/or complex moments the thesis and the practice might be 
constructed in the same way. 
Every researcher, regardless of the field, has to work with the knowledge of 
personal bias; some of this is genuinely unconscious, whilst the remainder is 
constructively self-imposed. I am confident that a reading of this thesis will reveal 
evidence of both types. The art of scholastic research - or the researcher's 
scholarly art - is not so much an attempt to factor out the biases, for this would 
effectively remove the passionately inquisitive `I' of the research. Rather, the most 
potentially useful strategy, and one I intend to adopt, is the development of a 
stance which, whilst solid enough to last the distance, is not so rigid as to resist the 
push of clearly oppositional fact. 
6 
22-9-97 
As a piece of work intended to articulate the processes through which any findings 
are arrived at, as work which is concerned with a continuing process of scholarly 
investigation, the writer (this writer) has a duty to the reader to include all relevant 
material. To expose the footprints that lead to this place. So, the writing details the 
investigative process. But what is being investigated? How open and uncluttered is 
the contract between your eye and mine? 
The form of this thesis becomes inseparable from its content. The words used are 
embedded in the processes, both practical and theoretical, that are producing them. 
As much as the thesis is about the ways of making At Last Sight it is as concerned 
with the ways of recording in words that process of making. All writing can be 
regarded as autobiographical, inasmuch as all writers will bring something of an 
autobiographical self to their work. 12 This phenomenon will differ in degree from 
one writer to another, but authorial presence, shaped by personal history and 
intent, will remain. To the same extent that the autobiography of At Last Sight will 
be made explicit in the thesis, the thesis itself will foreground the identity of the 
writer. 13 In this way the thesis is a document of the discoursal self. It is a 
representation of (my) self through discourse. 
What will emerge as a feature of this thesis will be a concentration on the writer as 
well as on the writing. This will not create a denial of academicism. I still feel that 
scholarly writing is predominantly about thinking something, seeing what other 
people think about the thing you are thinking, thinking about their thoughts in 
relation to your own, and then writing what it is that you think. However, this does 
7 
not mean that this thesis will develop according to a sequence that is either 
`logical' or 'linear. To write sequentially according to an approved outline 
undermines the idea of writing as a thinking process, as something responsive, 
personal and intuitive. Linearity and sequential logic amount to a belief that the 
words on the page are (no more than) the traces of thoughts already gone. The fact 
that I am choosing in this introduction to make use of the pronoun `I' can be read 
therefore as a statement of intent. The fact that I am choosing in the thesis to 
record thoughts (almost) as and when they happen is another. 
We can develop Clark and Ivanic's ideas of `writer identity' 14 into the following 
ýýýü Lration 
S 
The Discoursal Self 
My representation of 
myself 
The Autobiographical Self 
My Life History. 
The Self as Author 
My sense of `authoriity' and 
`presence' within the text. 
-i` Identity as Writer 
This illustration is intended to reveal the importance, within this thesis, of a focus 
on the writer as well as the writing. The term `text', therefore, stands for the text 
of the thesis as well as the written text of At Last Sight. 
The employment of the personal, evidenced in this work, is not intended to 
fifnction at the expense of a wider, more generic publication of knowledge. The 
relationship is one of collusion rather than collision, with the necessary critical 
discourse being at once contained within and exercised through the product itself. 
The art-product, the art-event, made as an integral component of this study is 
unlikely to be so made as to demonstrate its origins to a wider readership than that 
9 
which might be assumed from a theatre-specific group. In much the same way, 
conceptual practice per se is unlikely, on its own, to disseminate the specifics of 
any advancements made. Research which leads in intended ways towards advanced 
understanding(s) is given credence by its inclusion into new, or newly articulated, 
ways of working: the process is thus intrinsically developmental and progressive. 
As art influences art, rather than being hermetically sealed and untouchable, so 
research influences research. This work is determined by readings, writings, 
thoughts and actions which were themselves determined by their own creators' 
histories and influences. 
This remains the case even when these same thoughts and actions are not 
`n»hlished'. Influence is pervasive, and it does not follow that it is the permanently 
enshrined that affects us most strongly. Snatches of half-remembered conversations 
may sow the seeds for a lifetime of work, long after heavyweight texts are gone 
and forgotten. 
The ways of making the specific performance in this research-process are 
individual and at times perhaps idiosyncratic, but this is not to deny the fact (we 
know that it is as certain as that) that a number of works previously seen, and at 
times participated in, have had a major influence in the creation of the very `ways' 
that make this art my own. That art influenced this art. To those practitioners 
responsible (and it would be an invidious act to separate some from the group) I 
offer my appreciation in both the permanence of print and the ephemerality of 
performance. 
Works of performance seen and drawn upon will not feature in the bibliography 
included at the close of this thesis. The influence is more subliminal than that which 
might occur when a published text offers those moments of clarity and insight 
familiar to students of all disciplines. Separating the purposive from the incidental 
is always a vexed issue in terms of one's attitudes and reactions to art; images that 
take root in the darkness of the theatre space might not bear fruit until long after 
the initial image is 'forgotten'. In this way, resonance outlasts reference and the 
citation of sources becomes either all encompassing or selectively exclusive. 
In order for academically oriented ideas to be considered as either insightful or 
s? anifcant, certain criteria will usually apply. A framework exists through which 
peer-assessment is able to operate according to its own established patterns of 
procedure. In this way, thoughts about performance, for example, are exposed to 
critical reflection from experts within the fields of Drama, Theatre, Live Art and 
Academia. During this process of review by one's peers findings will be tested and 
an assessment of their critical value will be established. Central to this review is the 
notion of building on the past; of locating the new within a context of the currently 
accepted. Theoretical positionings which do not satisfy this criterion will encounter 
inevitable difficulties in terms of acceptance. The footprints are traced to their 
starting point, a place where overlaps are recognised as a type of a priori 
qualification, as a probing into the future from the 
knowledge of the past. 
As work created for presentation at major international 
festivals of staff-directed, 
student-cast performance, the `performance' of 
At Last Sight is intrinsically 
connected to - it is, in fact, 
designed for -the rigours of this peer-review. 
27-9-97 
It will be useful at this point to offer a formally drafted outline for the performance 
project. This outline, or proposal, has been created in order to contextualise the 
words contained in this and subsequent sections of the thesis, and also to provide a 
fixed point of departure for a project which will inevitably deviate from this illusion 
of certainty. In form, this outline draws upon and develops of Fred McVittie's 
model as published in relation to his work on the performance, The Bureau of 
eternal Affairs, presented at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1997.15 The 
project-outline for At Last Sight is located as Appendix 1. 
Directors direct: it is a statement of fact. Shakespeare (mentioned once now and 
henceforth lain to rest) offered us text in the guise of two hours' traffic of the 
stage. And yet text is no more traffic, in the sense we understand it, than a director 
of performance is a white-gloved and be-whistled police officer, a keeper of order 
and shape, a guardian against the rough and the unruly, against the errant and the 
untoward. Text is not traffic. Text is texture, feeling, tone and colour. The Greeks 
had a word for it, lexis, or diction; the language of the play. The blueprint for 
performance. One of the seeming cores of this thesis is located at those points 
where language, the text for At Last Sight, is created. At the site where 
imagination and cognitive thought combine in the formulation of material for 
presentation, for performance. Where the measurable and quantifiable world of 
`reality' and the cavernous potential of the conscious and still subconscious 
imaginings are coalesced into a third `created' world of manipulated art; where 
aesthetic perception is married to an informed (though as yet, and of definition, 
unformed) state of creative thought. 
12 
Some words may be required here on the making of text. Or at least on the making 
of this text. The creation of performative and performable text is an act of 
metaphor. Emotional connections are sought through the selection and ordering of 
words in such ways that `information' (in the broadest possible use of the term and 
including mood, for example, as much as meaning) has the potential to be 
transmitted to spectators in ways which are recognisable and resonant beyond the 
sum of their constituent and purely linguistic parts. For the purposes of this study, 
and also, this writer suspects, as a general principle, text is considered to be at its 
most `valuable' at those times when it functions, or when it can be made to 
function, as a thing much greater than the representational and descriptive 
arrangement of `meaningful' words in a coherent and accessible way. What this 
allows, or suggests, to the director of the given text (and this applies no less when 
the `director' is also the `writer') is a variety of ideas that are not comfortably or 
effectively communicated through other, less imagistically provocative, means. 
A radical, postmodern or in any way deconstructionist approach to the analysis and 
direction of text (for such, again, exists at or very near to the dual core of this 
paper) is most often associated with practitioners who work against the reductive 
and insulating methods of naturalism. This is not to say that no attention 
is paid to 
psychology psychology might be most adequately 
described, in these 
introductory paragraphs, as that which drives the 'play': the part-hidden, part- 
revealed rationale for why things happen. It is important that we recognise 
this at 
an early stage and that we do not allow psychology to 
be appropriated and 
subsequently `owned' by naturalism. 
13 
Reinterpreting or deconstructing the writer's view (if such a thing could ever be 
identified) is in and of itself more likely to lead to an opening up of the world of the 
play to a series of reinterpretations by the audience than to closing it down to one 
shared(? ) world view. Indeed, subsequent pages of this introduction will explicitly 
challenge the very notion of a universally coherent world-view. In so doing, a 
context for the specific project upon which much of the evidence for this thesis 
hangs will be provided and made clear. 
When directors question rather than prioritise and publicise the playwright's 
choices, they are not attempting to uncover and articulate the `truth' that in its own 
turn would lead to the `correct' production, making of directing a search for the 
Holy Grail of authorial significance. The Russian word zamissel refers to `the sense 
of the whole', the thought or central premise that, in the case of theatre, hinds 
together all elements of a play. Some, perhaps even most, directors seek to 
discover the zamissel in the writer's words and in the social history of the play, 
others seek to find it in their own approaches. For some, like Peter Brook, the, 
director's job is to find the meaning and make it meaningful; for others, like Robert 
Wilson, `meaning' is always open, left for the individual members of the audience 
to discover. One approach works towards and embraces mono-interpretation, one, 
works against it. 
Science has taught us that perception is not absolute; it is always relative to the 
perceiver's notions; with naturalism, the director's perception is fixed and offered 
to us in that state. Quantum Theory, with its argument that reality 
is not fixed and 
14 
'A 
logical but disjointed and in a state of perpetual change, takes us one step further 
away from naturalism and realism than this . 
16 Quantum theory suggests that when 
we move into the realm of unconscious thought, we are, in fact, participating in the 
creation of reality, we make a leap (a `quantum jump') from the known into the 
unknown. When directors engage in processes akin to quantum jumping, they are 
no longer recreating the playwrights' worlds, they are actively creating new 
worlds. The `fixing' of reality (the once only? ) into realism (the repeatable! ) is, 
perhaps theatre's truest absurdity and the furthest away from that very `truth' it 
seeks to portray. 
If the methodology of science can offer only the most approximate description of 
reality, alongside a generally held understanding that `reality', such as we 
understand the term at all, is created by our own personal, prejudicial and learned 
observations, then how can realism lay claim to the `real' within its name? If our 
senses are not to be trusted to give a total and authoritative view of reality, then 
how can directors of naturalism maintain such a faith in their own, overtly 
unchallengable views of the world? If that which we comprehend as the `real' is 
only ever in the here and now of the perceiver; if that which has been experienced 
ceases to be real and becomes memory, whilst that which is to come (the word, the 
sentence, the breath after this) is no less ephemeral than imagination, then the 
unreal world must always be greater in substance than the real. '7 The fact of 
theatre's intrinsic incompleteness augurs against any directorially imposed fixity. 
Furthermore, the false attempts to complete, or square, the circle of art (of any art, 
but for our purposes, `performance') can only ever (ultimately) serve to exclude 
15 
the viewer from the equally intrinsic participation in the elusive and idiosyncratic 
creation of meaning. 
Within the permanent, perpetual present performance offers itself to us as a motif 
of the referential past and the resonant future: of the `as was' via the `as if 
towards the always elusive `to be". An endless present, which, in its time- 
basedness, keeps pace with the viewer, moving from moment to moment with a 
shared synchronicity. Theatre convention, regardless of any shockingly 
unconventional origins it may possess, deals with the past and the future more 
strongly than the present. In this fashion, that which we know by experience fuels a 
capacity to imagine that which will probably follow, living through performance in 
a semi-comatose state of nostalgia and prediction, fused into a knowing sense of 
departure and arrival. Even the rather peremptorily disabused notion of text as 
traffic, serves here only to take the members of its audience down routes so familiar 
as to pass in a blur. In opting for the text to take us somewhere, to deliver us unto 
some climactic grand finale, we have to miss the moments, more swift than 
?? limbed perception, wherein the text, like the bodies, like the light and shade of all 
we see, is always already and always only forever in the here and in the now. 
Even within the immediacy of performance the words used are generally rooted in 
either the past or the present. In a performance text one is more likely to say `I am 
going for a walk' or `I went for a walk' than `I am walking'. It may be the case 
that to speak of an action whilst it is being carried out is to engage in no more than 
tautology or contradiction. The speaker is either walking, in which case the words 
only describe what the spectator is already seeing, or the speaker 
is not walking, in 
16 
which case the words are a type of blind. The text of At Last Sight, both in terms 
of language and action, will attempt to locate itself in the present of performance 
even as its referent is the part-remembered past. 
5-10-97 
Criticisms of progressive performance, and this term is used here to describe those 
practices which attempt, in a variety of ways, to subvert and/or constructively 
redeploy the traditions of the Euro-American playhouse, " might be said to stem 
fro an articulated tension between cultural conservation and popular culture. 
Between the `high' art of the permanent text and the `low' here and nowness of the 
performance activity. Cultural conservationists will feel, instinctively, that there are 
clear and hierarchical demarcations between the `well-made play' and those traces 
of text left over from performance. This is in much the same way that theatre itself 
will generally be afforded a higher and more worthy place than work which comes 
under the umbrella-heading of `live art'. That there is some sort of naturally arrived 
at league table of aesthetic experience and activity. 
Rather than offering a celebration of the diverse range of aesthetic approaches 
found in contemporary performance, (mainstream) critics seek to actively 
discourage the inclusion, in any recognised locus, of any form of practice which 
contradicts the(ir) traditional notion of 'theatre'. Willis (1990) argues eloquently 
and persuasively as to the dangers of such an exclusive and endemic view, writing 
that calcification occurs as a consequence of 
... the complete 
dissociation of art from living contexts. 
This is where the merely formal features of art can 
become the guarantee of its `aesthetic', rather than its 
relevance and relation to real life processes and concerns: 
installed in the antiseptic stillness of the museum. 
19 
17 
Post-structuralism has taken us some stages nearer to an understanding of the 
workings of mainstream sensibilities, if not quite providing society (and art) with a 
key towards its emphatic taking apart. 20 Post-structuralism grew from a formalised 
empathy with the series of alternative and/or minority groups that emerged during 
the 1960s. The `progressive' ethos of this period provided a platform, albeit a 
fragmented and fleeting one, for these groups' voices; voices which still, despite 
the impact of post-structuralism, continue to be marginalised in terms of politics 
and power. What post-structuralist approaches have allowed is the at least quasi- 
legitimisation and acceptability of a challenge to the white, middle class, 
heterosexist cultural politics, a politics that implicitly and explicitly enforces the 
strong and further disenfranchises the weak. 21 Versions of the world from lesbians, 
gays, diverse cultural and ethnic groupings, alongside a number of increasingly 
post-colonialist perspectives, have combined to transform `traditional' ideas as to 
that which has hitherto been presented as either `natural' or `normal' within our 
society. 22 This transformation has been wrought through a foregrounding of the 
ideologies at the core of specific representations (and of ideology itself at the core 
of representation). This has been aligned to an understanding that the notion that 
all people(s) wish to belong to a `perfect' western (Euro-American) society of 
phallocentric heterocentricism is a constructed and destructive myth of Dead White 
Males, kept in a state of simmering potency by the live white ones. 
Notwithstanding the impact of post-structuralism, critics continue to (feel able to) 
speak as if notions of commonly held views of performance, and of the values there 
found, are possessed of a currency which exists without any attendant reference as 
18 
to precisely who the(se) `values' relate to, of who those who sit, not in judgement 
so much as approval, happen to be. 2' When we speak, for example, of aesthetics, 
of whose aesthetic `standards' do we speak? Is it the case that `definitions' (even 
the word seems sloppy, full of leakage and loopholes) which seek to exclude the 
plethora of live-arts based activities from the world of `theatre' are in any way 
`natural', or is theatre beginning to broaden its scope in the light of 
postmodernism's literal post-modernism? 
As a method of analysing culture, post-structuralism attempts a destabilisation of 
our notions of natural, as opposed to `non-natural', behaviour; to jolt the receiver 
with a clear reminder that one's view of the world is only ever one's own. For 
some this is less a reminder than an unheeded (rather than unheard) wake-up call. 
Our perception of events is determined by a myriad of conscious and unconscious 
experiences, expectations, moods, gender, age, education, politics, desires, 
fantasies et al as well as, at its most immediately obvious, the location from which 
we perceive. As such, notions of `audience', as if such were a single entity of like- 
minded, like-experiencing and like-responsive automatons, have lost much if not all 
of their critical appeal. 24 
The spectator is always an active participant in the art's construction, which is not 
to -suggest that the consumption of art emerges organically alongside its creation, 
but that the subsequent reception by a viewer complements, if not quite completes 
the process. This recognition of the spectator's constructive role has emerged 
from 
a variety of sources, being as central to certain key ideas of post-modernity as 
it 
was to Marx, who wrote that 
19 
Consumption produces production ... 
because a product 
becomes a real product only by being consumed. For 
example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the 
act of being worn; a house where no-one lives is in 
fact not a real house; thus the product, unlike a mere natural 
object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only 
through consumption. Only by decomposing the 
product does consumption give the product the finishing 25 touch. 
10-10-97 
Marx was arguing from his own historically recognisable perspective, a perspective 
wherein one might say that `existence' is being used as a metaphor for 'usefulness'. 
In this way, the garment achieves its purpose rather than its identity through the act 
of being worn. Many well-documented examples of performance contradict Marx's 
views on consumption at the same time as, in the very act of their publication, they 
achieve something of their own usefulness through dissemination. In 1988 Ulay 
and Abramovic walked along the length of The Great Wall of China, Abramovic 
departing from the eastern end at Shan Hai Guan and Ulay walking from the west 
at Jai Yu Guan. The walk was witnessed and filmed for a fraction of the way but 
was nevertheless primarily `unseen' by all but the walker's own perception of her 
or his walking self. Undoubtedly, the public `knowledge' of that activity, whether 
by personal information from the artists themselves or via subsequent reportage in 
video, photograph, essayed analysis or anecdote, can be said to complement the 
activity, for such was at least part of the purpose of the walk. However, to take the 
line proposed by Marx that the walk only `became' a walk by dint of its 
consumption is to take us back to the schoolchild's favoured debate about the 
existence or otherwise of the unheard tree crashing to the forest floor. Performance 
is performance without an additional witness (despite the protestations of much- 
20 
cited luminaries such as Augusto Boal)26 because the performance is always 
witnessed already by the self. 
To a large extent, we are allowed the luxury of locating the spectatorial within the 
perthrm tive because of the work of Grotowski. Grotowski moved from a strong 
insistence in his early work on the relationship between spectator and performer 
towards an acknowledgement that the performer/spectator is now internalised 
within the single body of the performer. Grotowski's trials have provided a 
significant encouragement to those currently engaged in thinking about this central 
aspect of theatre and his legacy needs to be noted here. 27 
Spectatorship can never be taken for granted and even relatively recent 
generalisations, such as those put forward by the influential writer, director and 
founder of the 7: 84 Theatre Company, John McGrath, have been exposed as 
anachronistic, intrinsically patronising and even pernicious mistruths. His chapter 
on `Mediating Contemporary Reality' in A Good Night Out, itself the transcript of 
lectures given at Cambridge University, goes as far as suggesting the `tastes ... of 
working class audiences. According to McGrath "Working -class audiences like 
laughs"; "Working-class audiences like music in shows, live and lively, popular, 
tuneful and well-played"; "working-class audiences can also love sentimentality .. 
they like clear, worked-for results". 28 This desire for an homogeneous audience, 
twitching in conditioned response like Stelarc's electronically manipulated body, 
flies in the face of any and all notions of individuality, offering in its stead a vision 
of a Big Brother art of formulaic matter. Audiences are sophisticated 
because we 
live in a sophisticated time and the idea (the ideology) of an absorbent mass 
21 
(re)constructing messages transmitted in the fashion of hypodermic art is a 
fundamentally incorrect reading of what actually occurs. 29 This could be regarded 
as anomalous to my own argument, in as much as the denying of one perspective 
(the other) in favour of another (my own) seems to be restrictive. But what is 
meant to be communicated here is that positions that favour homogeneity are 
closing work down whereas the ones that deny it are not. 
11-10-97 
Cultural codes are not only more complex than at any time in the past, they are 
also much more eclectic. The working-class audience of McGrath's thesis do not 
read the same literature, eat the same food or watch the same television as each 
other any more than `they' think, feel or behave in a uniform way. The members of 
an audience are not one mass, a like-minded and slavish whole, and the fact that 
each of them, each of us, is of the genus homo-sapien does not mean that we are 
not also, intrinsically sui generis. 
If we accept that any reading of any culturally manufactured product, of any art, is 
an act of interpretation, then we are also recognising that the `meaning' of the 
work is interpreted, and, as such, that all meaning is interpretative and personal . 
311 
Every art product can be consumed in a multiplicity of ways and the ways in which 
this art is interpreted are subject to innumerable variations of perspective. Meaning 
can no longer be discussed without referring to the question of who reads the 
work, of where, of when, of how. In this sense, notions of cultural reception, of 
aesthetics that are inseparable from the vagaries of reading are central to all aspects 
of this thesis. 
22 
We are led here to the question of whether a `correct' reading of a text (written, 
visual or performative) can ever be said to exist. The sentiments expressed in 
earlier paragraphs would suggest that the notion of `right' or `wrong' readings is 
one that has been exposed as false by the rigors of hermeneutic study. This has not 
always been, and is not always, the case. Gadamer argues a position of moderate 
relativism, wherein understanding is always one's own. In this way, interpretation 
is neither `good' nor `bad', it simply `is'. Prejudice becomes a positive force, to the 
point where Gadamer can claim that 
Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, 
so that they invariably distort the truth. In fact, 
the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, 
in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial 
directedness of our whole ability to experience. ' 1 
Prejudices, or `preconceptions', shape the way we start to view, and any 
s bsequent rationalisation is conditioned by this first response. The circle is thus 
interactive and anticipatory in nature, with the viewer, the spectator, approaching 
the object, the performance, with the inevitability of projecting certain meanings 
onto and into the work. This happens in a variety of ways: the theatre space (or the 
space(s) designated for the theatre) attended; the price of admission; the dress- 
code required; the previous work of either the creative personnel involved or the 
`theatre' itself; any reviews encountered; one's previous and/or abiding 
predilection towards certain types of work. 32 Gadamer uses the term `satisfactory 
understanding' to describe the end-result of this relationship between that which is 
seen and the one who sees; referring to a mediation between the author and the 
reader which nevertheless stops some way short of licensing an infinity of 
meanings. To Gadamer's mind, the intention of the author plays a considerable part 
ýý 
in this construction of the satisfactory response, and it is expected that a similar 
philosophical approach will permeate the creation of the `text' (written, visual and 
performative) of At Last , 
Sight. 
Gadamer has his adversaries, notably E. D. Hirsch Jr., who prefers to speak of 
`valid' and `invalid' interpretations. For Hirsch, the job of scholarship is to 
somehow arrive at the author's own intended meaning. 33 In this way, the `correct' 
meaning of, for example, Shaw's Major Barbara or Robert Wilson's Einstein on 
the Beach would always lie within their own `authorial' intention, rather than 
relating to it, in the Gadamerian sense. Where Gadamer embraces subjectivity, 
Hirsch favours the assumed objectivity of meaning arrived at through archival 
evidence and literary, rather than dramatic, excavation. 34 The text is thus a puzzle 
for the scholar to solve, with, presumably, the prize of meaning as the ultimate goal 
a goal which is only ever attainable by the scholar. Both Gadamer's and Hirsch's 
positions are exposed and subsequently attacked by the theorist and lexicologist 
Roland Barthes. 35 For Barthes the author's voice is banished entirely from the 
equation of meaning, thus 
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing 
a single `theological' meaning (the `message' of the 
Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which 
a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and 
clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from 
innumerable centres of culture .... 
Once the Author is 
removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite 
futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on 
that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close 
the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, 
the latter then allotting itself the important task of 
discovering the Author beneath the work: when the 
Author has been found, the text is `explained' - 
victory to the critic. ,6 
24 
Barthes' approach is not being followed in the creation of the performed work that 
will be (that already is? ) At Last Sight. This is not because At Last Sight will tread 
too radical a line for Barthes. It is because I am aware that in the creation of 
material for an audience, and as a result of my own determinants, I will 
undoubtedly make choices which have as their intention a preferred response. 
Tonal and spatial decisions in the directing of the work will endeavour, however 
obliquely, to result in certain moods and feelings in those who spectate. An 
appraisal of how this specific text is (being) constructed will follow this 
introduction in Chapter One; it is salient at this point to relate my own approaches 
to certain philosophical structures under discussion. It follows that the 
performance will still exist for any spectator who interprets the work in a different 
manner to that which this author intends and that her or his response is, by my own 
liberal definition, a valid one. The ideology of the creator cannot be expressed in 
the work of art; instead, a process of mediation occurs which amounts to a 
dialogue between the reader and the read. 37 
18-10-97 
It is at this point that the critic, or the scholar, comes face to face with the creator, 
or the artist: the maker of the work which is to be simultaneously exposed to 
analysis from that same maker. The relationship is a Janusian one in as much as 
artistic decisions are not made in the same way that critical responses are formed. 
Critically, I am with Barthes, creatively, I am with Gadamer, albeit with decidedly 
Barthean leanings. The result is a seeing two ways, with perhaps too little visibility 
in either direction: the critic is taking the work apart before it is made, in much the 
same way as the creator is inordinately conscious of the criticism to which the 
25 
work will inevitably be exposed. Indeed, the work is being created for critical 
analysis and, to a large extent, it is being created through analysis. 
This is no mere exercise in linguistic chicanery: the problem is real and pervasive. 
As a scholar, my role is to go beyond the satisfaction of interpretation. It goes with 
the territory of teaching in the university sector that I am expected to take my own 
responses, and the responses of my students, more deeply than a surface reading 
would ,, ]low. To move into an explanation, an analysis, as to why we interpret 
work in the ways that we do. To articulate the theoretical positionings which result 
in our 'feelings'. Whereas the practice I create may be able to exist, and to do so 
comfortably, within a situation which allows the aesthetic ideas contained therein 
to remain unexplained, my twin role as a lecturer and researcher leads me into a 
seeking out of identifiable traits, alongside the subsequent dissection, of that which 
might be termed the nature of contemporary performance. 
19-10-97 
There is more at stake here than a surface understanding of semiotics, an ability to 
rationalise, both in a directorial and analytical fashion the signification of signs. The 
realisation that interpretation is always already an act of re-creation stems from the 
polysemic nature of performance. The codes on which performances are built are 
complex and, semiotics notwithstanding, the ways in which these codes are 
deciphered are never absolute. 38 That which Esslin chooses to regard as the 
exemplification of an `incorrect' reading is embraced by other `schools' of practice 
as an exemplar of a post-semiotic world of polysemia. Italian art critics coined the 
term inesspressionismo to describe that art which, through the creation of 
moments of loaded ambiguity, aspires to a state whereby it means whatever the 
2( 
viewer chooses it to mean. For those of us who regard the Derridaen idea that 
things may not mean what their creator intended as an eminently acceptable 
philosophical positioning, inesspressionismo, or inexpressionism, can still seem like 
a leap into an excess of liberality. In reality, inexpressionism differs very little from 
the, negotiated readings inherent in all forms of communication, with the perceiver 
incorporating `intended' and `accidental' responses to any given subject. As 
indeterminate works, performances cannot but leave spaces that the spectator will 
fill in in the process of spectating; the spectator, therefore, fixes that meaning in the 
process of spectatorship. That the work means something else to other spectators, 
as it will to the creator and any participants, is to be embraced. 
Inexpressionism fails as a philosophical as well as a critical phenomenon, 
ultimately, because of the impossibility of creating an entirely `open' text: 
indications always exist, whether they are recognised as such or not. If the text is 
never open then it follows that subjectivity is always compromised by indications. 
Performance work in general, and At Last Sight is no exception to this rule, draw- 
on the preconceptions of a spectator (and it is important here that we do not fall 
into the trap of losing the individuality contained in `a' to the neutrality of `the'). 
There is no ideal or idealised watcher and the work must not be made to fit into the 
lowest common denominator of seeking to be all things to all people. A spectator 
is guided by the structure of the performance, which suggests that the range of 
interpretations, although infinite in the subtlety of their variations, is chiefly 
situated within the artist's version of events. 
39 Meanings are suggested, although 
not demanded, by the rigidity or otherwise of the codes 
in operation, and these 
27 
codes will, for the most part, be manipulated by the artist, by the creator of the 
work. 
Within the construction of the written text for At last Sight (which may figure large 
or not at all in the production per se) recognition is given to the fact that `texts', in 
whatever fashion we choose to utilise the term, will always contain, and 
subsequently convey `meanings' or indications which lie beyond the conscious 
intentions of the author. 
When writing text, for performance or otherwise, there is an awareness that what 
One is doing is on one level controlled and on another surprising, almost 
accidental. 4° Writing, therefore, involves sensitivity to correspondences and 
resonance even when words have been arrived at without conscious thought. This 
is not the same thing as automatic writing, made famous by the surrealists and also 
by Freud. 4' Whereas automatic writing denies the possibility of editorial 
interference, creative writing per se involves a recognition that the act of writing is 
itself in part a process of discovery, and that new ideas may stem from writing as 
much as writing functions as the articulation of ideas. There is no fixed sequence in 
the process of writing, and all that is written is not planned. Indeed, one can write 
in order to find out what it is that one thinks. 
At the time, in the very action, of its being constructed the text will combine a 
number of potentially contradictory indications, or signifiers, and these will 
inevitably result in an equally diverse set of responses. My own intentions as writer 
of this text are still important to the intended meaning, or overall tone, of At Last 
28 
Sight. Notwithstanding the fact that I am writing the words with an awareness of 
the impossibility of conveying all, and only all, that I intend. In this sense, the work 
is intended to function with rather than against the ideas of polyphony and 
polysemia, inasmuch as it is my intention that the text that emerges will contain 
within it a recognition of the ambiguity of word, voice, gesture, pace and duration. 
As the text is not yet formed, I should, perhaps, be referring here to the `I' of the 
writer rather than the `it' of the yet to be. 
On one level, this would appear to be the proving of an already accepted point: if 
texts are intrinsically polysemic there might be little point in making polysemia 
itself a stated aim. However, in my role here as both documenter of practice and 
practitioner it seems illogical to attempt to make practice which is dispossessed of 
a theoretical grounding. Indeed, the practice is predetermined to be invested with 
an underpinning of theory by dint of the conditions of its being made. To try to 
divorce the `why' of analysis from the `how' of creation is impossible to me, at this 
time, in these circumstances. So, I have located myself in a situation wherein I am 
aware (of my own belief) that the notion of an author as a free creator of direct and 
incontestable communication has ceased to operate with any validity. The concept 
of authorial dominance, of a literal authority, has been subject to searching 
examination by contemporary critical approaches, to the extent where, perhaps, the 
most an author is able to do is to make the first suggestions as to the ways in which 
the work will be perceived. 42 As director as well as creator of the text that will 
constitute At Last Sight, this `authority' is doubled in proportion to the difficulties 
inherent in an avowed avoidance of an attempt to `persuade' . 
29 
The ways in which this balance will be sought (if not always achieved) will form 
the basis of Chapter Two. Chapter Two will constitute an analysis of the practical 
decisions involved in the crafting of performance with a group of students, from 
October, 1998 to March, 1999, where At Last Sight will be presented in Liege, 
Belgium as part of an annually held International Festival of University Theatre, 
This is a feature of the approach I will be bringing to the research. Whereas the 
pace at which I write Chapter One, as with this introduction, is relatively 
measured, the pace of Chapter Two's construction will be determined by the 
development of rehearsals. This is an intentional feature of the research 
methodology being developed. 
28-10-97 
A feature of writing about making at one and the same time that the making is 
taking place, is that linearity or progression is sacrificed to the immediacy of 
rehearsals occurring in the midst of reflection. Whether this means that the words 
of the thesis will be playing `Catch Up' with the activities of practical creation, or 
vice versa, is something that only experience will reveal. Even now, it is easy to 
foresee situations where I will be struggling for the words to describe and explain 
an element of rehearsal that has already been removed and replaced by another. 
The reader will observe from this that it is not my intention to attempt a separation 
of `theory' from 'practice'. That they are indivisible is one of the beliefs that 
provide fuel for this project. If this results in a not quite coherent experience 
for 
subsequent readers, all I can say is that the experience of reading the thesis may be 
more. reflective of the experience of making At Last Sight than a more 
compartmentalised approach could have achieved. 
;0 
The process of writing this thesis, like the process of creating At Last Sight, will 
draw more heavily on divergent approaches to thinking than to the convergent. 
This will not be a thesis where the conclusion is the more knowing twin to the 
introduction. It is not an attempt to find out if a particular theory holds true, so 
Much as it is an attempt at recording and making sense of what it is that takes 
place, as it is taking place. In order to be consistent any processes of revision will 
be visible and transparent. If this thesis were to be written by hand rather than 
typed then the reader would encounter a series of crossings out, each of which 
would leave the displaced words legible. Mistakes and blind alleys are the stuff of 
rehearsal: the stuff of creating practical performance. Just as mistakes are valuable 
stages of that process, so are they valuable stages of this. To this end, I will not be 
deleting sections of this thesis if and when those sections no longer `ring true'. If 
something happens in rehearsal that seems important at the time then it will be 
included and commented upon. 
Processes vary from person to person. So do practices. The term `practice' as it 
appears in this thesis will refer to more than the practice of a physical act. It will be 
used to describe the choices made in the putting together of this project. In 
recognising that a practice is also always a choice I am identifying my own 
approach as one among a myriad of possibilities. One practice selected from 
immeasurable practices. We can say that in the context of originality the word 
`practice' relates to the idea of protypicality ... where one engages 
in a practice 
that will subsequently serve as a model for others. But practice also relates to 
employment of existing practices. Ways of making work are shaped by work seen, 
just as one's own practice is informed by the practices of others. Practice 
happens, 
31 
and because it does it cannot stay fixed. Practice then becomes process and vice 
versa. The terms will overlap and fold in each other as the thesis develops ... 
in the 
same way that the documentation and the construction of At Last Sight will come 
together to forme one project. 
11-11-97 
As with `practice' and the increasingly unstable concept of `the audience', ideas of 
`the natural' have been exposed as a series of constructions. The sense and 
meaning of words such as `aesthetics', `art' and `theatre' have been recognised as 
culturally and ideologically manufactured. Accordingly, there are no definitions of 
theatre that exists without an ideological baggage. 43 Recognising theatre criticism 
this sense gives us more information as to the ideology of the individual critic 
than it does the provision of an objective (sic) perspective on performance. 
Ideology is always prevented, excluded, from the notion of `outside' and nothing 
experienced can ever be `new'. Attempts at removing ideology from any given 
equation are futile in the extreme ... all that can 
be done is to recognise the 
prejudice that comes with experience and to acknowledge the exclusivity and bias 
of one's view. If we choose to examine closely that which we `recognise' as 
theatre, we will see that there are few if any common properties in the form; those 
which appear to be common are only strands of similarity. Theories of what it is 
that defines `Theatre' are generally made up of doomed attempts to conceive of as 
quantifiable and closed that which, in essence, is demanding, always, of an 
openness of approach- In 1956, at the same time as John Osborne and The Royal 
Court were initiating `redefinitions' of British notions of theatre, Morris Weitz was 
arguing a persuasive case against closure 
Aesthetic theory - all of it - is wrong in principle in 
32 
thinking that a correct theory and definition of art is 
possible ..... 
What I am arguing then, is that the very 
expansive, adventurous character of art, its 
ever-present changes and novel creations, make it 
logically impossible to ensure any set of defining 
properties. 44 
Attempts to shift notions of Euro-American performance away from the 
vainglorious belief that this state somehow sanctifies the premise of an essential 
`known' have been posited by Grotowski, Mnouchkine, LeCompte, Schechner, 
Barba, Wilson and even, in his post-Jungian days, Peter Brook. 45 Each of these 
practitioners (and they are representative of a much larger group) have moved 
towards forms of performance and performance-related research which have 
denied both the omnipotence of the literary text and the seeming supremacy of the 
white males' gaze. Schechner writes that we should 
... situate theatre where 
it belongs; among performance 
genres, not literature. The text, where it exists, is 
understood as a key to action, not its replacement. Where 
there is no text, action is treated directly. 4' 
Experimentation in performance, or even deviation from `normal procedure', has 
led to a less than complimentary press, from within as well as beyond academe, as 
Susan Bennett, describing the origins of performance theory, points out 
Performance theorists responded to mainstream North 
American theorists who berated the devaluation or 
even total rejection of text by performance artists. 
Traditional theorists saw this as the final straw in the 
alienation of audiences, sending them to the `culturally 
inferior' entertainments of cinema and television. 47 
12-11-97 
ý^ ,ý 
Dramatic literature has an in-built potential for permanence, which is denied by the 
ephemerality of performance; this makes the study and analysis of work that is 
`performative' rather than `literary' in origin and impulse an uneasy academic 
discipline. 48 As we have already seen, cultural conservationism continues to uphold 
ýýn et that there is an indisputable line that divides the `High Art' of (their) 
classical, scripted theatre from the `Low Art' practices of the seemingly 
undisciplined and, sacrilegiously, `unskilled' matter of (our) contemporary 
pet? ormance. 49 I am aware here that the use of the inclusive `our' seeks to 
inculcate in the reader a certain shared perspective, shared, at least, with the 
perspective of the writer. I am aware also that in acting thus I am contradicting the 
ideas of sui generis mentioned earlier. Ultimately, the safety of simply deleting the 
word is sacrificed here in the hope that the reader's eye will recognise it as a desire 
towards openness, both of location and response. We know, after all, that the 
"terms of high art are currently categories of exclusion more than inclusion". 50 
Terms which, rather than celebrating the rich aesthetic diversity that is a feature of 
our age, encourage us towards an exclusion of any forms of performance which do 
not conform to these conceptions. Faced with this recent history, the makers of 
progressive performance, alongside their band of articulate apologists, have begun 
to develop theoretical positions ... partly as an 
inevitable consequence of current 
developments and partly as a defence, as a shoring-up against attack. My own 
predilections, in terms of practice and analysis, contextualised in the body-proper 
of this thesis and also in the At Last Sight to be, are towards postmodernism. 
51 
13-11-97 
It is important to remember that other forms of progression exist, and that the 
postmodern approach posited here is only one of a number of ways 
in to current 
34 
work. The non-mimetic performance traditions of African, Asian and Oriental 
forms, for example, have had a radical impact on the ways work is made in the 
West. 52 The exposure to the alternative philosophies aligned to these traditions has 
resulted in an increased questioning of the dominance of European and North 
American beliefs, from Aristotle through to Stanislavski. More and more, we are 
seeing an inclination within performance theory towards the hybridity of 
anthropological and aesthetic interests. With a desire to cross over from the 
borders of theatre (which, as we have seen are untenable inventions) into other 
genres of performance: into ritual, ceremony and play. Brooks McNamara makes 
the point, albeit less forcefully than Weitz, that 
Performance is no longer easy to define or locate: the 
concept and structure has spread all over the place. It 
is ethnic and inter cultural, historical and ahistorical, 
aesthetic and ritual, sociological and political. 
Performance is a mode of behaviour, an approach to 
experience; it is play, sports, aesthetics, popular 
entertainment, experimental theatre and more. 53 
The key question in theatre is not `what is happening on stage? ' so much as `what 
is happening to me? ' Not `what the butler saw' or even `what the butler is seeing 
or might see next' but `what can I see? ' For the `I' of the reader is inseparable 
from the `eye' of the viewer and, just as the eye is never fully fixed, but always 
flickers, always shifts, so the reading `I' is in motion from moment to moment, 
moving at pace with, but never fully in line with, the writing performed and made 
`real' as we watch. In this way, art no more imitates life than life could be said to 
imitate art ... apparent, and even 
artfully designed similarities are at once both more 
and less than they may seem 
Jý 
Directors who engage their imaginations towards the creation of new forms and 
approaches are not so much decrying the real as denying the false. Usually, the 
production's theatrical images are the result of the director's researched and 
relativistic perceptions about the play. 54 About a concern with the nature of the 
play's narrative, characters, ideas and atmosphere; at other times the production 
tells us more about the director than the directed, more, perhaps, about 
performance than that which is being performed. The first is primarily 
interpretative, the second creative. In all cases, whether the production serves the 
text or the text serves the production, what is necessary is an ability to select and 
creatively manipulate the diverse elements of performance: (usually) movement, 
duration, speech, pace, rhythms and design (all of which are contained in a working 
understanding Of semiotics). 55 An aesthetic literacy aids the director in her/his 
choice of images and/or motifs that have the greatest potential for communicating 
at the requisite level that which the director deems fruitful. To this end, the 
creation of moments of loaded ambiguity might be more taxing to the director (and 
ultimately more satisfying to the audience) than the directing-by-numbers of 
Chekhovian mythos after the style (the school) of Stanislavski, or Brechtian 
dianoia according to the principles laid down in the Short Organum. 
16-11-97 
Heiner Muller claimed, famously, that to `use' Brecht without challenging him was 
to betray him. 56 Brecht himself argued against the very canonisation of technique 
that has been used to calcify his own once-innovatory practice. It is worth quoting 
Brecht at some length on this point. His essay of 1938, entitled The Popular and 
the Realistic, contains the following still timely warnings 
The concept of realism ... 
is an old concept which has been 
36 
much used by many men and for many purposes, and before 
it can be applied we must spring-clean it too .... 
For time 
flows on ... 
Methods wear out, stimuli fail. New problems 
loom up and demand new techniques. Reality alters; to 
represent it the means of representation must alter too .... What was popular yesterday is no longer so today, for the 
people of yesterday were not the people as it is today. 
Anybody who is not bound by formal prejudices knows 
that there are many ways of suppressing truth and many 
ways of stating it ... great experiments 
in the theatre ... involved the exploding of conventional forms .... 
One cannot 
decide if a work is realist or not by finding out whether it 
resembles existing, reputedly realist works .... 
The 
intelligibility of a work is not ensured exclusively by its being 
written in exactly the same way as other works which people 
have understood. These other works were not invariably 
written just like the works before them. 57 
The work that will be At Last Sight will amount to the `exploding of conventional 
forms'. Of conventional ideas as well as conventional practice. The work will bring 
with it more than a `spring-cleaning' of commonly accepted readings of realism. It 
will investigate notions of `the real', and of how that `real' can survive and 
function within the artifice of a theatre presentation, for these are ideas which have 
driven the project to this point and will continue so to do. Ideas are faced here with 
the additional `complication' of having to deal with and work through whatever 
personal realities the performers will bring to the performance. This is one aspect 
of the practice of this thesis. Nothing is assumed and all ideas are to be tested in 
performance. Ultimately, this striving for `real experience', born of one world, 
made in another and combining to create yet another in the third and public stage., 
will underpin the entire project. 
20-11-97 
At this juncture, it is my job, in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense, to 
ensure that a healthy distance is kept between sentiment and sentimentality, 
1? 
between the two-facedness of the actor (the aptly named hypokriie of classical 
tradition) and my own desire to tell some kind of `truth' . 
58 
We are dealing now, as ever, with duration and space, with location, with image, 
sound and form... with people. These are the givens of performance and it is to the 
creation of performance that this thesis now moves. If this chapter-length 
introduction has served its purpose, it has prepared the ground for a study of one 
way of making work; a `way' which is personal, but which is also attempting to 
locate itself within a recognisably theoretical and aesthetic frame of reference. In 
the final analysis, perhaps, the most effective way of discussing the making of 
performance is to focus, as this thesis intends to do, on a performance which is 
being constructed at the same time as its construction is being made subject to 
study. For to do otherwise would result in the alteration of that investigation to an 
examination of the previously `made', to a view of performance as a thing already 
done and complete ... to an object, rather 
than the event we know it to be. 
Whether the relationship in one body of the creator and the critic will prove more 
fnuitfihl than frustrating remains to be seen, making the analytical aspects of the 
thesis as much of a genuine leap into the darkness of the yet-to-be as those 
elements that will remain indubitably performative. 
38 
Cage, J Silence. Western University Press, Middletown, Conn., 1967. pp. 46-47 2 It is useful here to refer to the late British artist Francis Bacon. Bacon was insistent, throughout 
his life, that his paintings were entirely intuitive; that he never drew. A consequence of this was 
that his art was seen as stemming from an almost mystical and, centrally, an immediate 
relationship between the artist, the paint and the canvas. The relatively recent `discovery' (the 
provenance of which has been challenged in some quarters) by the artist's friend and companion 
Barry Joule of a vast array of sketched-over and otherwise manipulated photographs, (known as 
the `Joule Archive') alongside a series of associated and developmental drawings, gives lie to 
(t)his claim, suggesting as it does that Bacon was both a dissembler of truth and a systematic 
assembler of ideas. The scope of this thesis is not wide enough to accommodate any in-depth 
analysis of the work of non-performance-based artists; however, Bacon's desire for his art, and 
the `creation' of that art, to be seen as somehow less `determined' than that of his peers is worthy 
of note; it suggests something of the tendency of artists' disinclination to engage in, or even 
admit to, an analytical engagement with the mechanics of their work. See Francis Bacon. 
Sinclair, A, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1993. 
3 See Conversing with Cage, compiled by Richard Kostelanestz and published by Omnibus Press, 
1989. Cage speaks at some length about chance; on page 17 we read the following: "Most people 
who believe that I'm interested in chance don't realize that I use chance as a discipline. They 
think I use it --- I don't know --- as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist 
in choosing what questions to ask. " 
4 Stelarc's performance of `Split Bodies: Voltage In/Voltage Out' is discussed in Total Theatre, 
Volume 8, Number 2,1996 in an article by John Daniel entitled `Invaded Bodies'. 
5 Information on the work of Marina Abramovic can be found in Performance Research, Volume 
1, Number 2,1996 in articles and interviews by Chrissie Iles and Lynn MacRitchie; in 
Performance Art Into the 90s, Art & Design, Volume 9/10,1994, London; and in 
Ulay/Abramovic: Performances 1976-1988, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1997. 
6 The work of both Station House Opera and Impact Theatre Co-operative is chronicled in the 
journal, Performance, London. This journal has ceased publication; however, back-issues can be 
obtained by contacting David Hughes at Live Art Magazine, PO Box 501, Nottingham, NG3 5LT, 
England. 
Claxton, G. Investigating Human Intuition: Knowing Without Knowing Why, in `The 
Psychologist'. Volume 11, Number 5, May, 1998. p. 219. 
8 Bohm, D Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. Harper & Row, New York, 1958. p. 96 
9 Carlson, M Performance. Routledge, London & New York, 1996. On page 5 of his introduction, 
Carlson states that `performance is an essentially contested concept'. 
'o See Carlson (1996) and Counsell, C Signs of Performance, Routledge, London & New York, 
1996 for discussions of varying theatre forms and their terminologies. 
" Since 1985, I have lectured in Drama, Theatre and Performance at Crewe + Alsager College, 
Edge Hill, Liverpool Polytechnic and University College Chester, as well as running workshops, 
giving conference papers and creating performances at a number of institutions outside Britain. 
12 See Clark, R and Ivanic, R The Politics of Writing. Routledge, London & New York, 1997 for 
a discussion of the ways in which the self is always made present in one's writing. 
13 Foreman, R Plays and Manifestos. (ed. Kate Davy) New York University Press, New York, 
1976. p. 192: `All creative work should be about the author trying to CREATE his subject and 
structure in a way that is necessarily about the person who represents that subject matter .... 
If the 
artist is involved in the artwork not only as maker but also its subject, it becomes the study of one 
who sees himself seeing himself. ' 
14 Clark & Ivanic (1997) pp. 135-160. 
15 A report of McVittie's work on The Bureau of Internal Affairs can be found 
in Performance 
Practice, Volume 3,1997. 
16 Stapp, H The Tao of Physics. Boulder Press, Colorado, 1975. p. 136 
17 Bridgman, P Reflections of a Physicist. Philosophical Library, New York, 1950. p. 108 
18 Progressive performance might be further defined in its adversarial relationship to cultural 
conservationist notions wherein practice is rooted firmly in those traditions of preservation rather 
39 
than challenge; where the literary text is always more central, more important, than the act of 
performance itself. 
19 Willis, P. Common Culture. Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK, 1994. p. 3. 20 Post-structuralism is generally held to have arrived in the USA in 1966 at Johns Hopkins 
University, Baltimore, with the participation of Barthes, Derrida and Lacan at the Languages of 
Criticism and the Sciences of Man conference. A detailed study of the differences, and points of 
overlap, between post-structuralism and postmodernism can be found in Madan Sarup's Post- 
Structuralism and Postmodernism, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. For the purposes of this thesis, 
post-structuralism is regarded as a critical tool for unlocking aspects of the world we live in, 
whilst that world itself is fundamentally postmodern. In this way, post-structuralism can be 
identified as that which has an emphasis on the workings of power; it functions as an 
interrogation of the power-bases of discourse and also as an interrogation of the power bases that 
support these discourses. 
Every decision is also something of a loss. In choosing to stress `postmodernism' as a critical 
term I am in danger of conflating postmodern and post-structural ideas into something that bleeds 
in all directions. This is a deliberate choice. Just as the postmodern condition involves the 
rejection of fixed conceptions so the postmodern condition itself cannot remain fixed. 
21 Voices for Change (1993) ed. Lawrence; specifically, Neelands, J. `The Starry Messenger', 
which contains a thorough analysis of post-structuralism within a context of drama pedagogy. 
22 Post-Colonialism is defined by Mark Fortier as that which offers a "challenge (to) the canon of 
western art, a challenge which takes myriad forms, from out-right rejection to reappropriation 
and reformulation. " (Theory/Theatre. Mark Fortier, Routledge, 1997. p. 131). According to 
Fortier, post-colonialism is an attempt "to describe the contemporary situation and its culture ... 
by focusing on the effects of the western imperialism which has dominated the world since the 
sixteenth century. " (ibid p. 130). 
23 I am referring here to theatre critics such as Michael Billington and Benedict Nightingale in 
mainstream newspapers such as The Guardian and the Times, whose reviews of performances are 
dominant in British culture. 
24 Freeman, J `The Location and Theory of Looking' in Journal of Dramatic Theory and 
Criticism. Spring, 1998. 
25 Marx, K and Engels, Frederick, On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress. Published in 
translation, 1976. 
26 Boat, A, in The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. London, 
Routledge, 1995, argues that theatre demands two people, a passion and a platform. 
27 See particularly Kumiega, J. The Theatre of Grotowski. Methuen, London, 1985. 
28 A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form. Methuen, London, 1981. pp. 
36-60. 
29 See Bennett, S Theatre Audiences. Routledge, London & New York, 1992. 
30 `By interpretation I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, 
certain `rules' of interpretation. ' Sontag, S Against Interpretation. Anchor, New York, 1988. p. 5 
31 Gadamer, H. G. Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976). London, University of California Press. p. 
9. 
32 See Beckerman, B Theatre Audiences. Routledge, London & New York, 1993. 
33 See the section on Hirsch in Bateman, A Philosophy of Art. Routledge, London & New York, 
1997. 
34 Hirsch's views on interpretation can be found in Validity in Interpretation, 1967. London: 
Yale 
University Press; and The Aims of Interpretation, 1976. London: University of Chicago Press. 
35 See Image, Music, Text. Roland Barthes. Fontana press, London, 1977, particularly the chapter 
entitled The Death of the Author, pp. 142-148. 
36 ibid pp. 46-147. 
37 See Bauman, Z Intimations of Postmodernity. Routledge, London, 1992. 
38 See Esslin, M Fields of Drama. Methuen, London, 1992 and Eco, U `Between Author and 
Text' in Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Collini, S (ed. ) Cambridge University 
Press, 
Cambridge, 1992. 
39 Bennett, S (1992) 
40 Clark & Ivanic (1997) pp. 165-173 
40 
41 Notwithstanding its legacy of visual art, surrealism began with experiments in writing as a 
means of pursuing `pure psychic automatism' in its art. See Breton, A Manifestos of Surrealism. 
(Huntington, J trans. ) Penguin Press, London, 1987. 
42 See Barthes (1977). 
43 See Carlson, M (1996) pp. 8-16 
44 Weitz, M, in Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, ed. Joseph 
Margolis, revised edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. p. 122. 
45 See The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader. Huxley & Witts, Routledge, 1996 and 
Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. Drain, R, Routledge, 1995. Each of these texts 
provides the reader with an overview of performance that locates the work of these named 
practitioners in an ongoing context of development. 
46 Schechner, R. Performance Theory Routledge, London. 1988. p. 28. 
47 Bennett, S (1992) p. 28. 
48 See Clark & Ivanic (1997) for a discussion of the ways in which the permanence of printed 
words brings with it the implication of authority, and how this, in its own turn, is celebrated in 
conventional approaches to academic study. 
49 See David Hornbrook, notably Education in Drama, Falmer Press, Brighton, England, 1991, 
and `Can we do ours Miss? ' in Drama and Theatre Teacher. Volume 4, Number 3,1992. 
so Common Culture, Paul Willis. Open University Press, Milton Keynes, England, 1990. p. 173. 
51 Whilst Philip Auslander is able to cite Andy Grundberg's declaration that `postmodernism is 
dead' in his introduction to Presence and Resistance (University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 
1994. p. 1) I am not yet ready to throw in the towel on postmodern performance as the still-vital 
performance mode of our time. A number of texts are contained in the bibliography to this thesis 
that will provide the reader with an overview of postmodern performance. Of these Birringer 
(1991), Kaye (1994), Wheale (1995) and Auslander (1994) are perhaps the most informative. 
52 See Schechner, Turner and Barba. 
53 McNamara, B, in From Ritual to Theatre; The Human Seriousness of Play. Victor Turner. PAJ 
Publications, New York, 1992. 
54 See Morrissey, H Directing. Methuen, London, 1988. 
ss See Esslin (1992) and Eco (1992). 
56 Muller, H Germania. Rathbone, London, 1990. p. 37 
57 Brecht, B, from The Popular and the Realistic (1938, reprinted in Brecht on Theatre ed. and 
trans. John Willet, New York: Hill and Wang, and London: Eyre Methuen, 1964), pp. 108-110, 
111,112. 
58 By `truth', I mean here something similar to the reading offered by Peter Barry: ` when we 
claim that something is true we are not measuring it against some external absolute standard, 
but 
by internal rules and criteria which operate only within that designated sphere .... 
These have a 
restricted applicability, just like the rules which govern moves in a game. ' Barry, P Beginning 
Theory. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995. p. 92. Like Barry, I am dealing here with 
an idea of truth which is true within its sphere. 
41 
Chapter One 
4-1-98 
To the Reader 
It is here a book of good faith, reader. It warns you, right 
from the outset, that I here envisaged no end other than a 
domestic and private one. Here I in no way considered 
your interests, nor did I look to my own glory. Such a 
project lies beyond my powers. I have destined my book 
to serve as a certain comfort to my parents and friends: 
having lost me (which, indeed, they soon will) they will 
find here not a trace of my condition or humors, and thus 
will cherish more wholeheartedly and vividly the knowledge 
that they have had of me. Had it been a matter of seeking 
the world's favor, I would have adorned myself better, 
just as I would have presented myself in a more studied 
manner. I wish to be seen here in all of my simplicity, 
quite natural and ordinary, without effort nor artifice: for 
it is myself that I paint. Insofar as respect for the public 
will allow, my flaws will be readily legible here as will be 
my artless shape. For had I found myself amidst those 
nations that are said yet to live under the gentle freedom 
of the first laws of nature, I assure you that I would more 
than gladly have painted myself here in my entirety, and 
completely naked at that. Thus, dear reader, I am myself 
the subject of my book. ' 
This chapter will analyse the creation of a written text, At Last Sight. This text is 
being constructed in advance of meeting and commencing collaborative practical 
work with a group of Year 3 undergraduates on the Drama, Dance and Theatre 
Studies pathway at University College Chester. At this stage, it is impossible to 
predict with any accuracy the size or personnel of this group. Following election of 
a triple-module in Research and Production for Performance, students from this 
cohort are able to choose between a number of projects proposed by members of 
academic staff in the department. Year 2 students are able to `join' these project 
groups, but only as a single-module assessment commencing in April 1999. Year 3 
42 
students work in their groups from the start of October through until performance 
at the university in May. Owing to the fact of my intention to `preview' At Last 
Sight at a theatre festival in Liege as early as March 1999, it is unlikely that this 
particular project will involve students other than those in Year 3. The invitation to 
Liege also means that there will be a shorter period of rehearsal than other projects 
at Chester will be afforded, and this, in part, has lead me to the decision to create a 
written text in advance of the commencement of the rehearsal period. 
And yet this is only part of the story. The text is also being created as a means of 
suggesting something of both content and form in order to channel my own 
processes of thought into the project at an advanced date; of providing a focus for 
creative planning. Whether this will make the rehearsal period more of an 
experience of interpretation rather than devising is something which, I suspect, will 
develop into a process much more vague and elastic than this polarisation would 
suggest. Why At Last Sight? The title itself provides a play on words that interests 
me, being suggestive, as it is, of a final act of seeing and also of the processes of 
vision arriving after some delay. Both aspects seem to be in accord with my 
intention to create a piece of work which is, broadly speaking, nostalgic in content 
and visual in form. I want the work, or let me say at this stage that I feel the work, 
to be elegiac in tone; to deal with loss. There are reasons, which are becoming 
increasingly apparent to me, as to why this should be so. Although, as a divorced 
and subsequently remarried man, it may be the case that certain members of an 
audience who know something of my own personal background (which will be true 
to varying degrees in both Liege and Chester)2 might make the assumption 
(my 
own philosophical positioning as outlined in the introduction 
denies the prefix 
4? 
`mistaken' here) that this loss relates directly to feelings for my ex-wife. In fact, as 
later sections of this chapter will seek to establish, these feelings are centred on the 
absence of my two children, both of whom reside with my ex-wife in the former 
marital home, rather than with any absence of a 'partner'. ' 
I am not entirely unaware of in how bizarre a fashion these opening paragraphs 
may read, particularly in the context of a scholarly probing towards a transferable 
advancement of knowledge. Ominous hints of a confessional tone, of a desperate 
striving for an unqualifiedly cathartic experience for the artist, may, if you will 
pardon the bastardised metaphor, set alarm bells ringing in the ears of the reader, 
and rightly so perhaps. But I would not wish the simplicity of the language used 
here to detract from the contribution these sentiments can offer to the sense of the 
overall thesis. A feature of this thesis will be the way in which notions Of 
participatory performance research will be developed. Because the researcher is, in 
this case, also the researched it is important that the reader is made aware of this 
factor. 
The importance of this relationship cannot be overstated. It provides a key to the 
ways in which research methodologies will be implemented and it creates a context 
within which subsequent conclusions can be located. 
16-1-98 
There is an issue of catharsis at work here, and it is, at least in part, made up of a 
concern for my own notions, flawed and imprecise though they be, of a sense of 
(or a hoping for) a form of redemption through art. As a teacher of and also a 
maker of performance, it follows that this is the type of art through which 1 Will 
44 
pursue this aim. Although the specificities of performance, in terms of its 
relationship to `other' forms, make performance an often less than ideal platform 
for the working out of one's own personal demons. ' 
19-1-98 
The material of drama is mediated in ways that other arts do not have to contend 
with. Music can be played and preserved according to its composer's wishes ... 
s/he may even play the instruments required; an artist can leave marks on a canvas 
that remain as those marks regardless of the shifting perspective of the viewer. 
With performance, however - and this is one reason why so much of that which has 
come to be known as live art is non-collaborative to the point of self-obsession - 
the work is mediated through the performer. The `creator' or the instigator of that 
work is rarely seen within the performative frame. There are a number of noted 
examples which challenge this general principle. Of these, the late Polish theatre 
director, artist and designer Tadeusz Kantor is one of the most highly regarded. 
Kantor `controlled' the performances of his work by the simple and engagingly 
effective device of positioning himself on stage for the duration of the work, 
haranguing the audience as well as the actors whenever he felt so inclined. 
' 
Without anticipating at this stage any similar methods of locating myself within the 
presentation of the performed product, I am attempting to locate the work as `my 
own' (my own sense of `truth'? ) rather than as something which might be seen to 
`belong' to the group of performers. This remains the case despite the fact that 
these same students will doubtless play a large part in the offering of suggestions 
and the making of decisions, which are themselves a recognisable part of the 
fabric 
of even the most dictatorial of rehearsal processes. 
6 
45 
At Last Sight is a project which will attempt to deal with the aestheticisation of 
memory. This memory (or these memories) will be `real' (at least in origin) on the 
part of the writer/performers/creators involved in the initial stages, and/or with the 
memories of those who will eventually assume their own actively interpretative role 
as spectators of the work. The text will demonstrate an interest with the issues of 
narratology, with evidence of both narrative and narration. It might be useful to 
refer here to the text, inasmuch as it has been constructed up to this point, as being 
informed by a process of meta-narratology, of narrative which functions within an 
active and visible state of change. 7 The way that narrative is treated within the text 
is therefore a complex one, and the relationship between that which can be 
recognised as contributing more or less directly to the narrative per se and the 
disembodied extracts of material that exist elsewhere in the work is consistently 
shifting. At Last Sight does contain an allusion to meaning, and yet the structures 
through which stories are told are subverted too often for a through-line to emerge 
with any clarity. `Real' time and `acted' time are as likely to be alternated without 
expressed intention in much the same way that the text itself will drop in and out of 
different European languages. In a similar fashion, memory and fiction, experience 
and invention, vie for the position of prime potency. 
27-1-98 
There is a distinction to be made here, which relates to the process of memory 
itself and also to its twin, `remembering'; it is a distinction, suggested 
initially by 
Freud, between remembrance, memoire involontaire, to use Freud's term, and 
memory, or memoire volontaire. 
8 Whilst memory serves to put the past into some 
semblance of chronological order, absorbing that which 
is being remembered into a 
deliberate continuum, which locates the distant past at one end and the present at 
46 
the other, remembrance destroys the separation of past and present. In other 
words, at those moments when images from the past are set off or triggered by 
sensations which are being experienced in the present, remembrance manages to 
fuse the past with the present. In this way the linear continuity that is generally 
seen, via. memory, to exist between past and present is taken apart, deconstructed. 
Linear time is no longer then accepted as a given of tradition so much as its 
destruction becomes an accepted fact. Time that was lost may in this way no 
longer seem to be so, for through remembrance that past is not made subject to an 
act of revival but one of renewal. A consequence of this is that the notion of 
theatrical tradition is exposed to scrutiny. 
That which is commonly known as `breaking with tradition', however, is not really 
what is happening here. Performance consists of a series of broadly recognisable 
conventions, and conventions are the stuff of tradition. Inasmuch as progressive 
practitioners seek to free themselves and their work from the shackles of tradition - 
as convention as the dread conventional - those practitioners do so 
by locating 
their own approaches within the world of other, similarly minded artists. Thus, one 
set of traditions is exchanged for another. What this means 
is that radical 
developments, original productions, are rare. 
9 The progressive practitioner is 
engaged in a dialogue not with the past so much as with 
her or his own 
interpretations of the past, alongside that of a host of other practitioners. 
What 
happens is that the `fixed' sequence of the past is challenged; indeed, the very 
id-tea 
that the glories of the past can be preserved in new work 
by the inculcation in any 
one member of an audience of memory as reverence 
is attacked by progressive 
performance practice. 
10 
47 
Talk of the past leads to talk of linearity, of a narrativised understanding of time, 
which, in its own turn, and despite best intentions to the contrary, threatens to 
translate the fleeting present into a point of stability, of closure. If a type of 
contradiction is beginning to emerge in the idea of At Last Sight between that 
which might be regarded as an interrogation of performative form and a 
romanticised and quasi-factual use of content, then so be it. Subsequent paragraphs 
will seek to explore the reasons behind the text's seeming obsession with time and 
with loss. For the moment all that can be said is that the content and the form are 
not so easily separated out as may at first have appeared. The doing is inextricably 
bound up with the to be done and that which appears as antithetical is an inevitable 
consequence of making work to exist initially in a literary form, which will then be 
presented as part of a live performance. 
Ideas of the past, in whatever ways that `past' is treated, are only ever accessible 
through acts of detailed and deliberate excavation; it has become a feature of our 
time and of our art that narration itself has been replaced to a large extent by 
quotation. " Within this spirit, extracts of other writers' published words are freely 
into the text of At Last Sight, creating a text which I have no hesitation in t 
in regarding as my own. 12 Recent performance practices, let us say recent 
postmodern performance practices in particular, have been characterised by their 
inclusion of quotations from the past; 
13 furthermore, this `past' has tended to be 
treated with a relative dispassion, with a sense of a curious and always 
(oh so) cool 
detachment. Accordingly, the past seems to be taken further away from the present 
through the form of its revisitation than the sometimes-scant years between the 
48 
particular past and our specific present would suggest. Stripped of its 
authenticating powers, of its authority, the past has become the stuff of 
fragmentation, quotation and collage. We know this as the very stuff of 
postmodernism, of a blatant end to the foundations of history; what it also heralds 
isa potential end to the notion of story itself. The new tradition is therefore an 
intensely self-conscious one, relating to the shifting present rather than the fixed 
past. Stripped of its role as an agent of authenticity, narrative has emerged as a 
system of coerced delusion. It reads to us now as a system which, in favouring the 
bogus there and then above the actual here and now seeks to submerge the truth 
of experience beneath the intrinsic falsity of empathetic absorption. 
This does not mean that At Last Sight, any more than the flimsiest postmodern 
performance itself, is simply a question of citation as art. For unless the past is 
brought into the present through a process of metaphorical imagination, through 
imaginings which remove both past and present from within notions of linearity, 
allowing their common or salient features to emerge, then there can be no sense of 
renewal. This is the central challenge to At Last Sight, both in terms of text and 
performance. The postmodern `values' to which I am drawn seek 
less to `renew' 
the past than to parody it. In so doing, a mockery is made of the 
idea that the act 
of quotation is more of an `honest and truthful' process, by 
dint of its status as a 
presumably untampered with reality, than that which 
is being presented in a 
narrativised and hence fictional way. At a time when the past can no 
longer be fully 
believed in, perhaps the only authenticity available to postmodernism 
is that 
fragments of that past are able to speak to the present 
in the form of quotation, of 
inverted commas around everything. 
The resultant degree zero flattens everything 
49 
out to the level of art as ironic disenchantment, which is neither the tone nor the 
tenor required for At Last Sight. In fact, we know that nothing that is framed by art 
can ever speak for itself, and that an absence of mediation is impossible within the 
intrinsically and knowingly mediated form that is public performance. 
Art that seeks to renew the past needs to somehow put that past into a type of 
order: to engage in an act of discrimination. The act of citation, almost by its very 
nature, denies that activity of discriminatory ordering, replacing an ordering of the 
past with an uncritical acceptance of the present as a framework within which any 
number of interest-arousing soundbites from our cultural past can be chaotically 
placed. Thus, music from the cartoon characters Tom and Any is as likely to be 
utilised as snippets of dialogue from Gone with the Wind and Adolf Hitler's 
speeches. All can be relocated alongside each other in the name of a polysemia 
which is (all too) often no more than a blasphemous reincarnation of Duchamp's 
notion of `found objects'. 14 This cannot really fail to mislead us into a belief that 
the past is an easy state for performance to acquire. Furthermore, in making the 
selections from this endless back-catalogue on the basis of immediate interest 
rather than any potential for metaphorical value, selective eclecticism is sacrificed 
to pluralism, to the new lowest denominator of a performative `anything goes' . 
29-1-98 
It is for this reason that the text of At Last Sight is being constructed within a 
framework that includes realism as well as postmodernism. This seems, at face 
value, to present the work with an insurmountable contradiction. 
For realism is 
50 
postmodernism's fiercest opponent and vice versa. 15 However, it is my intention in 
this project to use a type of realism in order to expand on the structures and the 
composition of earlier, more traditional notions of realism, in the same way that 
postmodernism feeds off itself with a voracious appetite. 
Whether this `appetite' is self-defining or self-defeating is a moot point; what 
matters is that At Last Sight, like all work, will look backwards and forwards at 
one and the same time. In seeking to escape the recent past of modernism, 
contemporary performance tends to utilise a self-conscious method of playing off 
its past inheritance, its golden traditions, against its current desire for the topical. 
Indeed, within the extended framework of the knowing work and the knowing 
audience, the play of past and present actually creates the topicality. This does not 
amount to a value judgement on the work of others, for judgements based- on 
categorisation have no real place in the pages of this thesis. Ironic postmodernism 
is as capable of creating an efficacious theatrical form as any other working 
practice. All that is being attempted in these paragraphs is a bringing to the, 
reader's attention of some of the reasons why postmodernism will inform At Last 
Sight, without that same text conforming to any fixed notions of postmodernism. 
'c' 
There is a point to bear in mind here about issues of innovation - about Brecht's 
`exploding of conventional forms' - because a contradiction exists between the 
modernists' commitment to finding new ways of articulating new 
ideas and the 
postmodernists' comfortable and incessant pillaging of the innovations of the past. 
51 
Even at their most highly subversive, postmodernists feel able to draw upon past 
forms and past traditions, using a process of re-framing rather than re-invention. " 
What this means is that a view exists within the elasticity of postmodern 
approaches to performance that the subversion of theatre form cannot be entered 
into without utilising in some ways the very forms which are being placed under 
attack. In this fashion, it follows, inasmuch as an interest in postmodernism is 
informing the work, that At Last Sight will not be less concerned with form than a 
more overtly modernist piece might be as it will reveal a concern with form in a 
slightly different way. A characteristic of the written text and of the subsequent 
performance will be a quasi-theoretical type of self-consciousness relating to the 
particularities of the modernist practice that it is seeking to displace. 
4-2-98 
The danger (or at least one of the dangers) in this approach is that what has come 
to be regarded as crucial to postmodernism is an ironic distancing. A sophisticated 
and elitist understanding, which, in its refusal to engage fully with the form, may 
result in a corresponding lack of engagement from a spectator. How to engage 
spectators, without providing those elements of denouement, characterisation and 
climax that have become the staples of drama is a challenge that At Last Sight will 
have to rise to. Failure to do so will (within my own sense of what the piece will 
be) amount to an inadequacy. Theory may be driving the project, at least to a 
degree, but it is performance, within the context of a festival of theatre, that the 
project is being driven towards. The responsibility of providing the students 
involved with the work with at least something of the presentational satisfactions 
they are seeking is as real as the responsibility to make the work 
demanding of 
ýý 
their faculties of intellect, creativity and emotion. As such, issues of sharing are 
central to At Last Sight. 
This is not about a dilution of my own creative and intellectual ownership of the 
work. It is a recognition that the nature of performance is collaborative and that 
the imperative to create a positive situation for the participating students is strong. 
My own role here as student and teacher is no less complex than my role as maker 
of the work and reader of that which is made. The situation is of my choosing. It is 
not a question of compromise, nor is it a matter of reneging on my directorial 
responsibilities. I am working within a set of circumstances, each of which I was 
aware of before commencing work on this project. 
There are dangers, and the one that threatens me most directly, is that of 
acader cism, of a gnawing sense of sterility. This can occur when forms which 
have been stripped of the commitments and beliefs that fostered them continue to 
be used. Postmodern performance is naturally responsive to the availability and 
accessibility of the past of modernism, and, in the way that it attempts to divide 
that past from this present it runs the risk, in my hands certainly, of indicating little 
more than a particular type of adherence to a moribund form. In this way, 
postmodern tendencies are repeated rather than developed and the work wallows 
in its sense of a partially concealed homage to other work seen. 
18 This is linked in 
some ways to the issue of sentimentality. By `sentimentality' I refer here to the 
prompting of familiar responses to equally familiar stimuli; to the risk of evoking 
responses which are less about the creation of fresh challenges than they are, or 
become, a series of nostalgic references to previously experienced and only slightly 
5- 
re-packaged sensations. This can be seen as one of the defining features of 
reactionary art, which is not the intention of the work made as part of this 
investigation into the documentation of a particular practice. What needs to be 
avoided is a surrendering of the impulse to make new work to the familiarity of 
received notions of `acceptable' or `appropriate' performance. 
The irony here is that the desire to create new work which stands outside of and at 
a distance to any invidious comparisons with mainstream theatre, and which aims 
instead to be measured in accordance with its own `situatedness' within a localised 
and transient sense of that own newness, can only ever fail. It does so because, 
ultimately, all performance, like all art, is judged on the same scale. It competes for 
our interest and for our approval and in so doing the theatre past to which the bulk 
of those who make and see new work in the West are all conditioned by and to, 
sets standards that performance art can subvert but never fully escape. 
A difference between `new' work and `old' then may not be so much a question of 
those formal qualities of style which we all have come to recognise as 
`postmodern', so much as a feature which resides in the ways in which memory is 
treated. As a feature rather than a rule, progressive performance indicates a refusal 
to rely on memory, and in so doing it identifies itself as being 
in vigorous 
opposition to the repetition of comfortably established forms. When quotation 
is 
offered as remembrance we are simply substituting repetition 
for parody. That 
which memory is unable to renew, quotation cannot fully revive, the act(ivity) of 
remembrance is more reliant on metaphor than the 
installation of quotation within 
performance (to the point where we are now 
becoming accustomed to seeing 
54 
subsequent quotation marks placed around the first quotation marks) will generally 
allow. 
18-2-98 
If the past is/was a lie then the present can be regarded in some ways as a cure - as 
the antidote of honesty or the therapy of recognition - and this `cure' is made 
manifest in the fashion of self-narration. This leaves us with two ways of dealing 
with that narration. We can either collapse away the distinctions between narrative 
and meta-narrative, writing ourselves into the wider world and exposing the act of 
writing as we do so. Or we can elevate the fragmented and partial narratives of our 
own lives to a point whereby those lives are presented as things of considerable 
imnortance. 19 Whichever option we choose, it is clear that the idea of narrative 
itself has not disappeared. The text of At Last Sight is comprised of a blending of 
the first option with the second. It is a feature of our age that lives are being 
increasingly lived in ways which seek to make the present little more than an 
endless number of narratives to be told in the future of the past. Derrida has 
identified this feature as `archive fever''20 as a sense of writing a future story out of 
current deeds. What this results in is a type of mimesis in reverse, a condition 
wherein our lives begin to imitate the stories we read and see rather than the vice 
versa of stories which attempt to relate to our lives. 21 
We can take this further and suggest that this leads us into a new definition of 
interpolation. One that not merely engages with the process of locating the viewer 
into and within the narrative being played out on the stage, through a type of 
identification based on the specificities of cultural targeting rather than the 
`mankind-inducing' empathy, but which eliminates the need for identification per 
55 
se. The spectator is propelled into the spectacle precisely because the spectator is 
the spectacle. If our own lives are being lived increasingly as stories, then we might 
well ask what need we have of additional, performatised narrative forms. And yet 
the opposite is the case: in essence, we have reached the stage where we do not 
really believe things to be `true' until such time as they have been narratologised 
and archived, re-packaged into news bites and dramatisations. 22 
23-2-98 
At Last Sight will tread an uneasy way through all of this, as neither declared 
fictionality nor ironic imitation, as neither realism nor postmodernism, an attitude 
to the authority of representation is not simply `out there' waiting for the taking. 
The. attitude has to be created alongside and as part of the process of making the 
work. There is a curious type of mimetic referentiality going on here, because in 
highlighting the nature of narrativity the work becomes intrinsically intertextual. 23 
VT 
1LliJLÄt 
relating directly to `other texts' it nevertheless invites a contemplation of 
the fact that the past is not being shown as it was so much as how it is 
being 
represented. This demands knowledge of, aligned to an interest in, the procedures 
of performative representation, an interest, in fact, in a view of performance as a 
state wherein ideology and representation are inseparable elements. It is worth 
reiterating the fact that, certainly within the pages of this thesis, and possibly as a 
general rule, the ways of making performance are inextricably linked to that which 
is being made performative. The form is the content and the content is the form, 
and we are unable, or unwilling, to separate out the teller from the tale. 
That the text of At Last Sight will not be the text for At Last Sight is becoming 
clearer in the writing of this chapter. It is beginning to 
feel as though that text 
56 
should certainly be included, although that inclusion should sit somehow apart 
from the body of the work. This is a curious phenomenon: in writing the lines that I 
am, my mind is being drawn away from an analysis of what the work will seek to 
do and towards an appraisal of how the work under discussion will be used, of how 
it might 'fit'. It seems in many ways as though the text is beginning to explore, at 
least to a certain extent, the paradox of my own history. It is at once both `real' 
and `fictional', both discursive and intuitive (some sections of the text are 
ostensibly `crafted', whilst others are written as a sort of stream-of-consciousness). 
The text is subjective inasmuch as it draws attention to its own (to my own) 
narrative voice in a variety of ways. It is possessed of a form of self-reflexivity that 
will seek to break with the illusion of narrative at the same time as it hopes to 
absorb viewers into its own created world. It locates something of my own history 
as an exercise in creative writing and much that was experienced first-hand is 
deliberately offered up in the guise of fiction. 
27-2-98 
We can recognise here certain sites of something I am going to call a doubling of 
en nciation. This refers to those elements within the text of At Last Sight which 
are characterised by instances of deixis, a use of language that refers to the writing 
agent ... to the writer. 
The sites of enunciation create a linguistic pattern, or a 
network, that attempts to articulate the concerns of making which exist 
both on 
and beneath the surface of the work. If the instances of narrative and the constants 
(? ) of mood create a consistency within the text, then so 
does the self-reflexivity of 
the, writing itself. As a result of this, a reasonable expectation can exist 
that a 
spectator will be able to adopt a manner of viewing, a mode of receptivity 
that 
recognises and accommodates the particularities 
inherent in the presentation of this 
57 
type of text. The written text is seeking to provide a series of words which are a 
part of the very performance text that they provide comment on. In a sense then, 
the content of the scripted text will be intrinsically embroiled in the enuncitative 
fabric of the performance, at the same time as it also exists as a cohesive appendix 
to it. A consequence of this is that the words contained in the written text offer to 
the spectators both content and context. Creating an early indication of the 
performance's intention to reflect on an absence of artifice alongside the overtly 
artificial, to display the process of making (the then and the now) within the 
immediacy of the made. 
28-2-98 
If the making is part of the made, so too is the self an integral element of the 
subject. What then is involved in the process of writing the self into text for 
performance? Am I writing about myself or am I writing the (a) self? These 
questions are being played off against each other just as they are also working in 
close accord. What is of interest, to me, initially at least, is the relationship for a 
spectator between that which is encountered as written text - `I am myself the 
subject of my (work)', to paraphrase the Montaigne of this chapter's introduction - 
and that which is subsequently or simultaneously offered as performance. To what 
extent that which is seen will contradict that which is heard is, at present, 
unknown, perhaps even unknowable; what is `known' is that it is in this exchange 
between these two quite separate semiotic elements that a defining tension within 
the overall work is expected to exist. I have no clear rationale as to why I am 
drawn at this point towards an exploration of my self; neither do I have any real 
sense of whether the self I offer is a `true' one. As Luis Bunuel told us 
Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading 
g 5 
our memories, and since we are all apt to believe in the 
reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies 
into truths. Of course fantasy and reality are equally 
personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter 
of only relative importance. 24 
What does it mean to show oneself, to make oneself visible, to seek the offering up 
of oneself so as to be read as `subject'? Montaigne's `To the Reader' reveals an 
introduction to a number of key issues here, issues for which his text also provides 
explicit illustration. This occurs because that which Montaigne describes is more 
than (i>>st) an introduction to the idea of the self-reflexivity of his and our time; it 
also speaks to us of the ego of the artist. 25 The signature of the artist, we might 
say, is not placed, as is usual in visual art practices, at the bottom right hand corner 
of the work, at the last point at which the eye, conditioned to the reading of a page 
from top to bottom and from left to right, will reach. The last `word' in every 
sense. Neither is the author's name on the front cover, spine and title page of the 
work, eminently visible yet always a part of the frame rather than the work. With 
Montaigne's `I am myself the subject of my book' the signature, the author's name, 
is at once enunciator and enunciated. The subject of the artist takes for itself the 
position of the subject-proper, both a part of the frame and also that which is being 
framed. 
As Oscar Wilde informed us, life imitates art to a much greater degree than art 
imitates life. 26 Artists invent `types', which are then assimilated into human 
behavioural patterns. Writing at the close of the nineteenth century, Wilde's 
epigrammatical style may have lost much of its flavour, and yet his comments on 
the relationship between truth and art remain pertinent to late twentieth century 
Z9 
performance. When Wilde chastised the artists of his day for presenting for public 
consumption their "tedious document humaine(s)i27 he sent a timely warning to all 
of those (all of us) who attempt to offer up the barely repackaged self as subject. 
"The justification for a character", Wilde tells us "is not that other persons are 
what they are, but that the author is what he is. "28 In this sense, At Last Sight 
might reasonably be regarded as my own attempt to articulate who and what it is 
that I am. And yet, if a part of who I am is a liar, then the integrity of anything I 
prods jce can never be taken at face value. If, as a liar, I say that the work is truthful 
my claims cannot be believed; by the same token, any claim I may make that 
certain sections of the work are false is suspect. 
It is no Wildean wordplay to state that art is as concerned with the creation of 
aestheticised lies as it is with the articulation of truth. If it is `myself that I paint', 
then the subject of `myself is defined by the I of the artist; what is shown, revealed 
to the spectator, is always already mediated, selected and made false by the 
maker's judgement (as are the word written here). In this way, it is not the subject 
of `myself that is being offered to the spectator, so much as the artist's, this 
artist's, sense of self. 
1-3-98 
In his book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman cites an 
example of this phenomenon with reference to the former American president 
Ronald Reagan 
There was a downside to Reagan's emotional 
60 
intelligence capabilities, as he displayed a certain 
lack of self-awareness, if not outright self-deception. 
At times he seems not to have known the difference 
between films he had seen or stories he had heard 
and the actual facts. Reagan once brought tears to 
the eyes of Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister of 
Israel, with a story about his days with the U. S. 
Signal Corps recording the atrocities of the German 
death camps at the end of World War H. The 
problem: Reagan spent the entire war in Hollywood 
recruiting for the army's film units. He had, however, 
seen footage from the liberated camps and, 
apparently, convinced himself he's been there. 29 
Whether Reagan's comments were delusion or a conscious attempt to delude can 
never now be known. All that we can say is that fantasy and reality were blurred to 
the extent that an identity was made subject to a process of fictionalisation. 
Reagan's assertions were such that the `lie' could not survive for long without 
being discovered. For those of us whose assertions are smaller and whose lives are 
lived beyond the scrutiny of biographers, the `truth' of any given claim is harder to 
determine. Reagan aside, and notwithstanding John Cage's advice that the self 
should only ever rarely be the subject of art, 3° we can recognise self-portraiture as 
a form with strong historical precedents. Further, we can see - certainly no less in 
performance terms than in visual art - that it is generally reliant on 
four elements 
for its existence. 
These elements are the artist as subject (as model, as theme); the performance 
event that accommodates or provides a platform for the expression; the 
image of 
the self, the `myself, within the artist's own notion of that self, and, 
finally, the 
spectator's reading of the work. A fifth element exists 
in At Last Sight inasmuch as 
the `self of the subject is presented via the selves of the performers. 
My Seif 
61 
mediated through Their Selves. The written text alone can stand outside this 
equation, and the importance of the ways in which this text, or aspects of it, are to 
be presented and made public is becoming increasingly apparent. " 
The mediation of my own work through the contribution of others creates issues of 
creative and intellectual ownership. With issues of performance per se 
collaboration is contained within the very fabric of its being: in all but the rarest of 
cases performance is an intrinsically collaborative act. As part of an investigation 
of practice as research, however, the relationship takes on a different slant. The 
question of who `owns' the work moves beyond its usual realm of philosophical 
enquiry into the no less pertinent field of accreditation. This is an issue inasmuch as 
it creates something of a paradox, at least potentially. For that which stands as 
common practice in both direction and writing for performance is a type of `giving 
away' of the work. To the creation of a climate wherein the suggestions contained 
within the text, alongside any directorial preconceptions, are not generally allowed 
to blind the director to contributions from participants, be they performers, 
designers or technicians. In those instances where work is being made with 
students, as part of a wider programme of study, the compulsion to provide space 
for the creative and intellectual engagement of those student-participants is, if not 
necessarily stronger than in any other sphere, then certainly more overt . 
32 This is 
ev . denced not least in increasingly prescriptive 
learning outcomes, which, as well 
as threatening to imbue all creative work with banal and unworkable notions of 
`equivalence', seek to dictate the terms of closure to that which has not yet 
been 
made 
33 
4-3-98 
62 
Not all of these academically imposed `requirements' have a negative aspect. 
Creative involvement, in the sense of decision-making, for instance, alongside a 
`marked degree of personal engagement with the subject matter and superb 
integration of the student's own creative thinking and imagination' and an 
Originality na_ity of insight and perception'34 are features, if not always prerequisites of 
First Class work in the production modules at University College Chester. Just as 
they are at a number of other institutions. And it is hard to envisage a situation 
wherein any member of staff directing a performance project would not find these 
qualities desirous in any and all members of the company. Certainly, in terms of AI 
Last Sight, I am hoping to gather around me a group of creatively fertile and 
intellectually astute individuals who are in no way content to be moved through the 
period of rehearsal like so many sheep. 35 But how much of the process of making 
the work can be `given away' to the participants without the work itself ceasing to 
stand as my own? The fact that there are no satisfactory answers to this does not 
mean that the question itself should not be addressed. Notwithstanding the fact that 
the issue is more central to the submission of the work as part of the thesis than it 
is to the creation of work for public presentation. 
The issue of creating an example of practice as research, in which the participating 
students are also being assessed, is complicated. There are a variety of reasons as 
to why this is the case. Many of these reasons are subject to ongoing 
debate 
between the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD) and 
those British Government bodies which, act in response to the submissions 
received from respective departments as part of their particular 
Research 
Assessment Exercise (RAE). 
36 These responses determine the level of funding 
63 
afforded as an increasingly necessary top-up to the departmental subsidy received 
from students' tuition fees. The need for this additional income means that 
departments are becoming more inclined to include in their programmes of study a 
preponderance of modules which are designed to satisfy these exercises in staff- 
research evaluation rather than the more traditional requirement of learning 
outcomes which relate to the student. At University College Chester, this shift in 
emphasis has yet to occur. A consequence of this is that whilst At Last Sight has its 
generis as a research project, and that it seeks the continuance of that status, the 
project must also, and firstly, be seen to satisfy the learning outcomes for the 
students involved. This means that an exploratory project is being entered into 
which will have to satisfy certain outcomes ... a state that 
is almost entirely 
antithetical to progressive performance practice. 
Whatever this means it must not mean that the piece becomes all things to all 
people a safety net through which nothing, be it a learning outcome, an advance in 
theoretical understanding or some development in new performance can ever be 
allowed to slip. The fact that different people involved with the work will have 
different agendas for that involvement will not be allowed to hinder the project's 
intent. The students involved will thus be given something of the task of research 
assistants inasmuch as they will, in their role as performers, form a considerable 
element of the material of that which is to be presented. They add to the creation 
of a research framework within which their own selves are being researched. The 
rigours of undergraduate assessment, alongside the increasingly prescriptive rather 
than provocative nature of work in the university sector, could be seen to augur 
against open-ended practical and experimental practical work. '' But as long as the 
64 
participants are afforded a comparable opportunity to achieve the learning 
outcomes that have been written into the modular programme there should be no 
insurmountable difficulties posed. 
If the processes involved in At Last Sight are being offered here as a case-study of 
the making of work for performance then the work itself must not be made in a 
climate of fear connected to a crossing over of the line between my work and 
theirs. The work is being made in the here and now and it is being made to satisfy 
various and not always overtly compatible criteria. It is thus both mine and theirs. 
It is at one and the same time a student-project for these students and a student- 
project for this student. It is what it is, and it cannot, with any sense of legitimacy, 
disguise itself as anything else. If one paradox of the performance is that it will be 
seeking to deal with the (unattainable? ) idea of truth through the artifice of 
theatrical presentation, then another is that it is at once both mine and not mine. 
The intention, therefore, must be to articulate with as much integrity and accuracy 
as is possible those points - in so much as they are in any way recognisable - when 
new directions and possibilities are put forward by members of the group. In this 
way, the group members become collaborators in the widest sense, rather than 
mere communicators of my words and thoughts. The ways in which this happens - 
and we know already that happen it surely will - will form one line that will run 
through Chapter Two. Up until that point, I am afforded the luxury of an 
unhindered megalomania ... a megalomania which 
(if the truth be told) is as much 
about a putting off of the moment of collaborative enquiry as it is a preparation for 
it 
65 
There is a link in this work with the nature of performance itself, inasmuch as the 
work is concerned with a making visible, with a showing, of that very basis on 
which the notion of mimesis stands. With the image of a man which is being 
produced and articulated (enunciated) by the very means of the artefact of 
reflexivity ... of the mirror 
image. All performances are self-portraits to a large 
extent: the selves of the director, designer, writer, performer et al. Of these, it is 
the performer, usually but not always, who is the most highly visible and yet the 
least powerful. The performer performs other people's stories and the name, above 
the title or at the bottom right hand corner of the canvas, is rarely the name of the 
artist (of the subject) who is seen. At Last Sight is not a subversion of that `rule' so 
much as it is an exploration as to how far and to what extent the performer can 
present no fictional sense of self and yet still act as a signifier for another self. The 
`myself of the `I' of the unseen other. 
There is an arrogance at work here. It is a type of arrogance, furthermore, that 
locates itself at the centre rather than the fringes of the work. It is the arrogance of 
a presence, which, notwithstanding an act of representation and realisation through 
others, sees itself as able to permeate each and every aspect of the work. An 
arrogance which seeks the public identification of the `self as a subject worthy of 
spectators' and performers' time and efforts. There is, however, a fear that exists 
as part of the arrogance: it is the fear of an absence of something essential to the 
man of the artist which can only be dealt with, put right (? ) through the presence of 
performance. At Last Sight is thus as much about that absence as this presence, as 
much about the painfulness of experience as the pleasures of aestheticisation; as 
much about loathing as much as serving the self if the self is not known. And 
if 
66 
what little is guessed at is not particularly liked by that same self, then the self- 
portraiture or autobiography of certain types of art may well stand as a flawed but 
otherwise respectable attempt at locating, through the instability of performance, 
some sense of redemption through enunciation. Of catharsis. 
The material being dealt with here is about composing a life, and about composing 
a text for performance: that much, at least, is known. The challenge, is how, 
working with the self as subject, that subject can at once contain much of the at all 
times subjective and fragmentary complexities of existence and also maintain the 
legitimacy of a text which communicates something relatively coherent to the, 
spectator. Generally speaking, autobiography exists in order to provide an insight 
into the lives of important, influential and historically significant individuals ... 
in 
those instances, one's own pre-knowledge of the subject creates a veneer, or an 
illusion, of objectivity. With the subject of At Last Sight being this writer's 
unknown self - an `ordinary life' - then no such objectivity can be argued 
for. 
Theatre and performance provide platforms from which to speak in voices which 
are authentic at the same time as they will always be heard as `art' by dint of their 
qualities of presentation in front of an audience. The Twentieth Century has seen 
performance grow into a form for the presentation of self as much as it the 
representation of other. 38 In this, a distinction, or schism, has developed between 
theatre and performance. With the illusory nature of theatre acting standing apart 
from the more overtly personal tone of performance. This has happened to the 
degree that we can now say that when a spectator attends a performance art event, 
s/he does so with a fair assumption that that which will be presented will 
bear some 
67 
considerable relation to the concerns of those who are doing the performing. The 
performer here is in the role of the performer, rather than in any character. 
Writing from a gender-specific perspective, Catherine Elwes has described 
nerformýance as "the real life presence of the artist (who) takes no role but her own. 
She is author, subject, activator, director and designer. When a woman speaks 
within the performance tradition, she's understood to be conveying her own 
perceptions, her own fantasies, her own analyses. "39 By putting her own or his own 
body and experience forward within a live (arts) space, the artist becomes both 
object and subject within the frame of the work, and, as a consequence, this 
situation allows the artist to interrogate and articulate that relationship. The 
reference to the `real life' persona of the artist is the stuff of performance art. The 
context of performance provides the performing artist with the opportunity for a 
live address which is markedly dissimilar to the Brechtian verfremdungseffekt that 
comes with the breaking through of the imaginary fourth wall between spectator 
and spectacle. Within performance art, it is far more likely that the notion of there 
being any fourth wall to subvert would be regarded with a great deal of cynicism 
and a healthy mistrust. We can say, therefore, that the performing of oneself is a 
feature of performance, even something central to it, whereas the submergence of 
self into character is a defining trait of acting. 4° 
5-3-98 
If the mode of performance deals with the unmasking of self, of the act or event of 
performance as self-revelation, then where does this leave At Last Sight? It 
is 
interesting to note that we refer to the one who is present in front of the spectators 
as the `performance artist', suggesting an identification between the watcher and 
68 
the watched which, at least on the part of the watcher, seeks out an `honest' 
communication. This may mean that the performers in At Last Sight will be 
functioning as actors in a performance of self, rather than performers who are 
offering their own fantasies and analyses for perusal. This is a serious distinction, 
because the ways in which the spectators view the work will have a considerable 
bearing on that which they actually see. The role of the artist as performer is one 
which allows for the assuming of a series of transitory identities at the same time as 
the artist's own live presence is being signalled. No less complex, though in rather 
different ways, is the role of the performer as `self and representer of an unseen, 
writerly and directorial (and, let us not forget, teacherly) `other'. When the 
performer speaks of `I', within the context of At Last Sight, which `I' is being 
referred to? To which artist does the `I' refer? 
7-3-98 
Spalding Gray's `I' is clearly his own, 41 just as the actorly Uncle Vanya's `I' is 
Chekhov's. The device of `I' is generally held to be an attempt at the expression of 
self, a self that is particular and irreducible, and yet the `I' is available to any 
individual spectator - just as it is to each and every performer. It can therefore 
be 
regarded as the least particular of all words. 42 Accordingly, the `I' of At Last Sight 
has an unsettled nature, and this is made manifest in a writing of the text which is 
demanding of multiple readings. The `self in At Last Sight functions as a site 
wherein the meaning of identity is contested rather than confirmed. Where, through 
the self-revelatory act of performance, the artist (at this stage still and only the 
writer) is able to fix and unfix the relationship between representation and 
presentation and between the writerly and the performative selves. 
69 
In seeking to bring the real self, or selves - the Duchampian idealisation of the 
everyday - into the domain of art, and an attendant breaking down of the 
boundaries between art and artist, performance has been brought even closer to the 
realisation that whilst life and art may at times be one and the same thing, they are 
also always different. The difference is in context rather than content, but the two 
are the same inasmuch as life, like art, is always mediated, and the space occupied 
by the everyday is every bit as much a product of construction as that for 
pe formance. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah 
Every human identity is constructed, historical; every one 
has its share of false presuppositions ... 
invented histories, 
invented biologies, invented cultural affinities come with 
every identity; each is a kind of role that has to be scripted, 
structured by conventions of narrative to which the world 
never quite conforms. "43 
The textual strategy of At Last Sight is not to assume a false, collective identity, 
preferring instead to speak of slippage and fragmentation. To this end, no lines of 
text are attributed to specific speakers, either by gender or any other distinction. 
The text is written out as a series of sections, which, at this stage, may be 
addressed by one or any number of voices. The fact that these extracts of text, 
neither monologue nor dialogue, cross constantly between fiction and truth, lies 
and artifice, will, ultimately, be regarded in significant ways as much by who 
sneaks the words and in what ways as by any key qualities in the text's 
construction. 
If all of the voices contained within the text are my own, either as a result of 
experience or invention, then the question of whose mouth utters the words would 
seem to be a matter of singular unimportance. In fact, because any descriptions in 
70 
the text, such as they exist at all and being of either person or place, are 
emphatically not descriptions of the potential performers and/or the theatre spaces 
to be played in, then the gender of the speaker is, by definition, largely 
inconsequential. And yet this is to deny almost all of our experiences of 
performance, experiences which tell us that what we see is at least as important as 
the words which are heard. Linguistic distinctions certainly exist between television 
viewers, with a concentration on the view, and theatre audiences, with their 
concentration on the audible, and these are no doubt rooted in good sense, but 
such distinctions have been eroded by a collapsing of the once-vital differences 
between the forms. 44 Consequently, the visual elements of At Last Sight will inform 
ýý individual spectator's responses to the overall work in ways, which are 
considerable. The semiotics of performance bring with them a complexity which is 
every bit as demanding of the visual attentiveness of a spectator as it is of that 
spectator's aural sensibilities, and the ways in which work is presented go beyond ýr - 
issues of form, becoming essential elements of the content itself The different 
performers attracted to the project will each bring with them different qualities and 
characteristics. These will, hopefully, be deployed to a positive effect. Prior to 
meeting with the performing group, there is considerable effort involved in the 
writing of words which are not so much neutral as loaded with potential for a 
variety of voices. 
If my expectations of the performers have to remain at times frustratingly open, am 
1 able to determine what it is that is expected of the spectator? What 
is it that I 
4 want' from the spectators? For I am surely making the work with an 
intention that 
it will achieve certain things. At Last Sight is not being offered up as a copy of 
the 
71 
world, either my own small occupied space or the spectators' obviously wider one, 
and, accordingly, I would not wish to see a spectator impressed overmuch by any 
aspects of mimetic realism which might appear in the work. 
Philostratus warned viewers not to fall into this trap, arguing that to do so is to 
praise an insignificant feature ... one that 
has solely to do 
with imitation; but we should not be praising its intelligence 
or the sense of decorum it shows, though these, I believe, 
are the most important elements of art. "¢5 
Philostratus is talking here of visual art, but the comparison with performance 
holds true. By the same token, and despite the feel of this chapter, which is offering 
an articulation of the reasons `leading to' At Last Sight rather than taking the text 
apart line-by-line and providing an analysis as to where the words `came from', 
theory may prove to be, an anathema. Not to the thesis itself, which demands a 
theoretical approach as its natural right, but the performance, which I have no wish 
to develop into the thin theatricalisation of theory. Theory provides us with an 
invaluable means of reading the activities of ourselves and others, of reflecting and 
communicating much of that which is done, rather than merely accepting things as 
`happening'. At the same time, we need to recognise the fact that theory will 
sometimes amount to no more than a self-satisfying endeavour to justify the. 
narrowness of the world in which much of those same activities take place. At its 
worst, the seeming clarity of sight made possible through theoretically sustainable 
argument might actually reduce the potency of activity to little more than the 
legitimisation of tired techniques under the veneer of academic respectability and a 
dubious advancement of knowledge. 
72 
These sentiments are not intended to suggest that an interest in theory will always 
work against activity. Or that talking eloquently and incisively about art in some 
way augurs against the making of it. The words are offered as a recognition that 
theory is capable of determining activity in advance. That it can allow and even 
encourage the continuance of certain forms of practice simply by dint of the fact 
that those practices are grounded in a shared and critically established 
methodology. Used in this way, theory permits activities, which deny the specificity 
of particular investigations; it creates, in fact, the absurdity of experimentation as 
genre, of new work which is made to conform to the shape of the old. The line 
between a theory which drives work forwards and a theory which holds work back 
is afi_ne one, and difficult to trace. What occurs in the making of work for 
performance is that it is the specificity of this encounter, at this time and 
determined by these variants which determines the theoretical approach to be 
taken. That the work, and the attendant theorising, may lead those involved in its 
study beyond the usual Catch-22 of its enclosure, taking them towards a new 
topography of terms, is germane to the ways in which new work is made. As such, 
At Last Sight is not being deliberately constructed as a paradigm of a particular 
type of work. Considerable efforts are being taken to ensure that the writing of 
these words is not allowed to pre-empt the writing of those words of text, in much 
the same way that directorial and performative decisions, articulated in Chapter 
Two, will be the subject of analysis rather than that which takes analysis as 
its 
subject. 
11-3-98 
At the outset of this chapter, mention was made of my absence 
from my children as 
an element leading to the construction of At Last Sight; 
both in terms of the written 
I-, 
text and the overall feel of the performance. This creates a difficulty, because the 
prospect of making a piece of work which is about children, which takes the 
relationship of a father and his children as its theme, is something I would be at 
great pains to avoid. The text, as it stands, refers directly to children only very 
briefly, in a line which speaks of `seeing my children by appointment', but this line 
is `buried' in amongst a number of diverse references, making the paternal attitude 
of the specific five words a subject of diminished significance. What does remain is 
a tone, of loss, of remorse and regret, which, dislocated as it is from its actual 
source, reads as an elegy to a lost love. Which it is ... although the 
`love' 
articulated in the text is manifest in the form of a partner rather than a child. Partly, 
this is to do with a resistance to the peculiar type of sentimentality associated with 
the idea of children in art. Partly it is to do with a breadth of appeal, for, played as 
it will be to a predominantly youthful audience, 46 the issues of parenthood which 
n1lu the work might be best served by a reining in. Death is more than hinted at 
in the text, with notions of drowning featuring at regular intervals. In this way, 
death stands as a metaphor for absence in the same way that the constructed image 
of a `loved woman' is a metaphor for my children. Hypocrisy creeps in here, for it 
is undeniably the case that the decision to live apart from my children was largely 
my own. Consequently, an observer of this act of leaving might well recognise the 
treatment of that same incident in performance as an inappropriately public crying 
over long-spilt milk. 
The writing of At Last Sight is poetic, or poeticised, at least to the degree that 
none of the sentences reads like `natural' dialogue. Although there are some quite 
brief sections of the text which are designed to be indicative of two people engaged 
74 
in conversation, these `conversations' do not attempt to mirror those patterns of 
speech encountered in that which is regarded as `real life'. There are a number of 
distinctions between poetry and prose, the chief, perhaps, being the idea that prose 
represents reality, whilst poetry, ultimately, refers only to itself 47 This distinction 
exults in the act of prose being illustrative of an effort to translate an intention into 
an appropriate result, whereas poetry is more of a gratuitous discipline, one that is 
neither consequential nor motivated. As such, and sometimes perversely, poetry is 
both self-contained and open to a multitude of interpretations. Feelings are thus 
suited to poetic treatment in much the same way that facts are themselves the very 
stuff of prose. 48 Lacking the utilitarian or documentary drive of prose, a poetic 
approach seems appropriate for the material of At Last Sight. If it is the case that 
the act of specific remembrance itself is fundamentally inarticulate, in that any of 
the words of prose we might possess and use are incapable of communicating 
much more than the factual details of the phenomenon. Then the text of At Last 
Sight, written in the way that it is, is intended to function as an inculcation of a 
spectator's personal emotional experiences. It does so through the elegising of my 
own partly disguised responses to a difficult (and difficult to deal with) time. 
It may be true to say that postmodernism's predilection towards self-reflexivity has 
resulted in a situation wherein autobiographical material 
has become 
commonplace, where that which is, on the one hand, specific, 
is also representative 
of a rapidly tiring theme. In contemporary visual art we 
have seen enlarged 
Pndoscopic photographs of Mona Hatoum's internal organs projected onto gallery 
walls. We have walked around and into Tracey Emin's tent-installation, 
made art 
by the inscription on the canvas of the names of each of her overnight 
bedfellows. 
75 
We have looked at Piero Manzoni's canned faeces, Merda d'artista, '100% Pure 
Artist's Skit' in its absolutely literal sense. We have recognised Marc Quinn's heat- 
reduced Shit Head and deep-frozen Blood Head. We have gazed at Cindy 
Sherman's relentlessly imaged face, whether in its guise of 1940s film-still, 
pathologist's photograph or Renaissance painting. In performance we have seen 
Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scrolls produced from her vagina; Karen Finley's 
down-stage-pointing, yam juiced anus and Annie Sprinkle's `Public Cervix 
Announcement', a torch-lit invitation for her audience to peer inside her. 49 At 
perhaps its most extreme, we see the performance artist Stelarc suspended by 
hooks through his non-anaesthetised body as he hovers over New York streets. As 
we have seen Orlan subjecting herself to a series of surgical re-configurations - to 
plastic surgery - as art-event. The residuum which is left over from Orlan's 
operations have become objects of art in themselves, with Madonna, amongst 
others, owning a section of flesh which was removed by scalpel from Orlan's 
thigh. 5° Orlan is anaesthetised, but only locally, in order that she can speak to her 
spectators for the duration of the procedure. It is possible to make out a 
considerable list of self-reflexive practitioners, but to do so would serve only to 
labour an already-realised point. To the extent that the self has become the subject, 
so the subject of self has become an accepted and acceptable theme of 
contemporary art and performance. 
Along the growing continuum of body and performance artists, of those who 
project rather than use their own life histories, psychologies and obsessions, my 
own approach to making work might seem quite tame. It 
is unlikely, for example, 
that At Last Sight will involve any elements of physical risk on the part of either the 
76 
performers or spectators. The notion of taking risks in performance may provide 
for those artists, and perhaps also for some spectators, some form of liberation, a 
making-sense of the difficulties of existence. The less ostensibly emblematic risk- 
taking involved in the construction of the text for At Last Sight is in its encounter 
(in my encounter) with that which is most feared. With the personal perceptions 
and daily pain of past actions. The text `for' is also the text `of At Last Sight, but 
the use of the word `of carries with it the suggestion that the text is the work. The 
work of the text and the work of the whole process is thus redemptive - it already 
is, in part - inasmuch as it is built upon a desire to come to greater terms with the 
ramifications of my own behaviour. That, within the text, a woman is made to 
stand as a metaphor for my children is informed by the fact that for love of a 
woman I no longer live with my children, whom I also love, and equally. Love is 
therefore functioning as both liberation and loss, as a licence to leave and a longing 
to stay, as a form of salvation and a falling into selfishness. Self is the spine of the 
work because my own self-interests have taken something away from the two 
people in this world who were born of myself If this appears as a type of self- 
flagellation then that is understandable, unavoidable even, but if that is a large part 
of the motivation behind the work it is only a very small part of the work itself. It is 
certainly not my intention that the experience of seeing the work will result in a 
maudlin empathising with the background to the work. Indeed, that stimulus will 
not be made known in any form of programme or performance-accompanying 
literature. 
The art is being made with a multiple purpose. There is no one `authorial 
intention', because that which the author intends is precisely that which is intended 
77 
to remain hidden from view. The work is aiming for a form of redemption, and yet 
that which is being redeemed is not about to be made manifest to the spectators. 
What potential for truth there is in the work is thus made false by its very act of 
presentation. The fact that the presentational aspects of At Last Sight function 
through metaphor does not add to the falsity. The work is always already false in 
that there are no good reasons to support the idea that redemption achieves a 
greater value by dint of its being theatricalised and made public. We can say that 
the. concealed nature of the rationale behind the project serves a purpose in that it 
prevents any notions of martyrdom from fuelling the performance. But this only 
serves to make the endeavour even further removed from any claim it might make 
to he regarded in some way as an `honest' piece of work. The desire to tell in this 
way invalidates much of that which is told ... subsequently, we can no more trust 
the teller than the tale. 
14-3-98 
"No art could ever be truth", Richard Foreman informs us: "the truth of art is in 
the audience's, the individual's awakened perceptions. It is not in the work of 
art. 1-)51 If this is so, and I believe that it is, I have to question my own reasons for 
making work in the way that I am. Just as naturalism is theatre's truest absurdity, 
so honesty is the greatest myth of performance. Does this mean that I am making a 
cra ecl Lie (the stuff of theatre) at the same time as I am basking in the self- 
gratifying illusion of truth (the fiercely guarded territory of performance art)? 
Certainly I am. Of that I have no doubt. I want to make work that succeeds as 
theatre and performance; to make art that works within and without artifice. This 
reveals a desire on my part to synthesise live art and 
lived experience. To 
synthesise without also arriving at an unknowing state of confusion. 
We know 
78 
enough to know that the attempt to be oneself within a performance frame will 
always fail and become a (re)presentation of self, inasmuch as the frame of 
performance precludes authentic presentation ... as 
Mrozek states in his article 
Reality versus Theatre, " trying to work out how to look genuine will never 
achieve life's authentic spontaneity. "52 
The event of At Last Sight will be purposively mediated by the spectators, who will 
translate the experience via the individual processes of perception which they apply 
to the work. In effect, they will act as mediators between themselves and the 
stimulus, in much the same way that the participant members of the group will 
mediate between my intentions for the project and their own. 
15-3-98 
It might well be the case that to increase the stages of removal from whatever 
realness existed at the outset of the piece is to also increase the spectator's 
experience of a type of isolation. That the greater the mediation, the less potent is 
the sense of connection between the watcher and the watched. Exe Christoffersen, 
like Wilde, warns us against the pursuance of the real, telling us that 
authentic and original behaviour is an illusion. When the 
thought is first thought it is no longer something unspoiled, 
a change has taken place: a cultural change. "s3 
Irrespective of location, frame or context it is the spectator who culturally and 
subjectively creates a meaning and a `place' for the work. The spectator may be 
passive in an auditorium seat but is nevertheless active in a role of formulating a 
response to that which is seen. 
The see-er does not appropriate the world she sees, but 
in looking opens herself to it, lives in it from the inside, 
79 
and becomes immersed in it 
. 
"54 
If we combine this with Michael Kirby's well-documented `Symbolised Matrix of 
Acting'55 (a system which will clearly inform the performance-work to be 
undertaken) then the intention of At Last Sight can be seen as an affording to the 
spectator of a central point of "identification of self-hood". 
56 
As Marvin Carlson 
puts it, "The audience is invited and expected to operate as a co-creator of 
whatever meanings and experience the event generates. "57 
It is to be hoped that the heavily end-noted nature of these concluding paragraphs 
does not result in a structure which decelerates the thrust of this thesis, even as it 
inevitably slows this chapter to a halt. The references are intended as a preparation 
for the impetus of Chapter Two. A chapter which will attempt, within the context 
of subjecting a creative and collaborative rehearsal process to analytical 
documentation, to pick its way through a postmodern preoccupation, which is also 
my own. To grapple with the uneasy and shifting relationship between the signifier 
and that which is signified; to map a route which takes the reader through the 
making process and on to performance. 
From the `My Self of this chapter's introduction, the drift has taken us towards 
the Baudriiiardian concept of reality as that which is not only capable of being 
produced, but "which is always already reproduced. , 18 Towards Kantor's 
declaration that "in art truth is elsewhere. "59 It seems a relevant point of closure to 
this section. One which is also an introduction, and an invitation, to Chapter_T vwýo. 
80 
' Introduction to the Pierre Villev edition of Essays, Montaigne. Michel de Montaigne, Presse 
Universitaires de France, 1580. 
Montaigne wrote an autobiography, published in 1580, which contained within it a justification 
for devoting a book to the `trivial topic' of himself. Whilst admitting that his topic was relativem 
unimportant he argued that this was offset by the fact that he knew his subject so much better 
than any other author could hope to know his. Montaigne's implication was that knowledge of 
one's self was the most complete and perfect form of understanding. 
`I have visited the theatre festival in Liege on five previous occasions and know many of the 
personnel involved. I also know members of some of the troupes scheduled to perform this Year. 
Because the festival functions as a social gathering as well as a forum for performance, and 
because some of the festival-goers are friends of long-standing, details about my past are known. 
Having taught at Chester since 1990, many of my colleagues are aware of my divorced and 
remarried status, as indeed are a number of students. 
3I have two children, Danielle, born in 1985 and Jake, born in 1990. I was married in 1983 and 
divorced in 1993.1 remarried in 1994. 
4 By this I mean the following: 
That the public nature of performance amounts to a type of secret-telling to a room of strangers 
... which seems antithetical to the subject matter. That channelling (something of) my own experiences through other performers and thence to 
spectators might amount to a form of dilution. 
I ha t the activity of crafting something performative out of truth will take the presented form 
away from its origins and on towards something no less `fake' than a well-rehearsed lie. 
That, as Philip Auslander points out when he refers to Andy Kaufman in Presence and 
Resistance (1994) `any "Andy Kaufman" that appears on television cannot be real simply by 
virtue of having been constructed by the medium. ' (p. 151). In the same way, the fact that At Last 
Sight is being constructed for performance augurs against the sense of `real' I am pursuing. 
That performance might not be the most appropriate form to work through. The fact that 
performance is my `area' does not mean that the concerns of At Last Sight might not be more 
effectively worked through in another medium. I am not sure, for example, how much will be 
constructively added to the written text of At Last Sight by its being performed. Perhaps the work 
would be `better' were it to be `only' a written text, or a sculpting, or an abstract design. A part of 
this is not about a lack of confidence in my own abilities to make work of a certain quality so 
aach as it signifies a lack of faith in performance itself. 
5 See Kantor, T `The Theatre of Death (1975)' The Drama Review 30.3,1986. 
6 For a detailed examination of a number of devising processes see Oddey, A Devising Theatre. 
Routledge, London & New York, 1997. 
See Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Waugh, P. Routledge, 
London, 1984. 
8 Freud, S. Art and Literature. Penguin, London, 1985. pp. 66-68. 
9 For some of the occasions when this has not been the case see Bentley, E (ed. ) The Theory of the 
Modern Stage. Penguin, Middlesex & New York, 1982 
'o This is not to suggest that all `progressive performance practices' follow similar routes towards 
the interrogation a particular agenda, so much as it is a recognition that ideas of performative 
'truth' are being increasingly made subject to question. 
11 See Onega, S and Landa Narratology. Longman, London & New 
York, 1996. Particularly Part 
Three, No. 9 `Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers (F. K. Stanzel). pp 161-171 
12 By `my own', I mean that my organisational and selecting participation 
in the At Last Sight 
project is likely to make my own sense of where the work should go the most 
dominant factor in 
the group. This is not to deny participation on the part of group members. 
I am expecting the 
project to draw heavily on the creative input of its personnel. However, the group will 
be made up 
of s ,, dents, and the performance module this project will 
be a part of carries with it an insistence 
on staff-direction rather than devising in a non-hierarchical spirit. 
13 See Kaye, N (1994) Particularly the chapter `Theatricality and the Corruption of the 
Modernist 
Work'. Pp. 24-45 
81 
14 For an introduction to the work of Marcel Duchamp, see Duchamp. Mink, J. Taschen Press. 
Cologne, 1995 
15 See Modern Theatre: Realism and Naturalism to the Present. Brockett, O. G. Allyn and Bacon. inc. Boston, 1982. 
16 Again, it needs to be stressed that postmodernism is concerned with the unfixing of notions. As Hal Foster tells us, postmodernism "dissolves the line between creative and critical forms" (Postmodern Culture. Foster, H (ed. ) Pluto Press, London, 1983. p. viii) 17 ibid 
ltis is evidenced particularly in `student' work, whether supervised/directed by members of 
staff or students. There is a sense in which these approaches conflate influence with imitation. 
resulting in experimentation and postmodernism reduced to genre. In drawing so parasitically on 
recent history the work appears almost immediately dated. Professional companies are not above 
this type of aesthetic plagiarism, and readers will have their own experiences of seeing work 
where the borrowed origins are disconcertingly apparent. 19 
See MacDonald, C. `Assumed Identities: Feminism, Autobiography and Performance Art ' in 
The Uses ofAutobiography. J. Swindells (ed. ), Taylor & Francis, London, 1995. pp. 187- 195. 20 Derrida, J. `Psyche: Inventions of the Other'. Reading de Man Reading. Ed. L. Waters and W. 
Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. p. 194. 
21 See Hutcheon, L Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, Methuen, New York, 
1984. pp. 17-35 
22 ibid 
23 For an in-depth analysis of mimetic referentiality see Mimesis and Alterity. Taussig. M. 
Routledge, London & New York, 1993. 
24 Bunuel, L. in The Surrealist Connection: An Approach to a Surrealist Aesthetic of Theatre. 
David G. Zinder. UMI Research Press, Michigan, 1976. p. 40. 
25 See The Complete Essays. Michel de Montaigne. (Screech, M. A. trans. ) Penguin, London, 
1nn-t 
1773. 
26 See The Decay of Lying (1891). Wilde, O. Penguin, London, 1995. 
27 rbid p. 9. 
28 ibid p. 16. 
29 Goleman, D. Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bloomsbury, London, 1998. p. 355. 
30 Cage, J. Silence. Marion Boyars, London, 1995. Cage states "I have come to be interested in 
anything but myself as art material. " p. 70. 
31 It is evident by this point that, notwithstanding Barthes' assertions that `text is a tissue of 
quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture' (Barthes, R The Death of the 
Author', Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 146) I am regarding 
the text ofAt Last Sight as `mine'. 
32 See Maranca, B. `Theatre and the University at the end of the Twentieth Century', Performing 
A its Journal 17.2 and 17.3, May/September 1995, pp-55-71 
33 `Learning outcomes' have become a stated feature of modular study. Academic module 
descriptors generally contain sections such as `Aims', `Objectives', `Methods of Teaching and 
Learning' and `Methods of Assessment', alongside `Learning Outcomes'. At best, perhaps, 
learning outcomes provide students with a sense of their expected achievements. The negative 
aspect is that teaching and learning are steered towards prescription at the expense of 
provocation. For the creative study of creative subjects, this is particularly pronounced. 
34 University College Chester Department of Drama, Dance and Theatre Studies: Departmental 
Handbook, 1997/98. Section 6. p. 13-24. 
3' The students involved in At Last Sight will select the project. The directors or leaders of 
projects are expected to leave the students to reach their own conclusions as to which proposal to 
opt for, and canvassing by tutors is actively discouraged. Certainly, as far as At Last Sight is 
concerned, I will be approaching no students in advance. 
36 For the relevant documentation regarding research assessment exercises visit the SCUDD w eb- 
site. 
37 This is not to suggest that performance work in the university sector is entirely prescriptive ... 
far from it. Interesting and progressive work is taking place in many, if not all, departments. The 
82 
difficulty lies in finding spaces for this work to exist, and to locate these spaces within a more 
rigidly defined approach to the study of performance than existed prior to modularisation. 38 Writing specifically about Twentieth Century developments, Lea Vergine states that 
performance can be made of any aspect of one's own life: "The proofs of one's own existence, 
and the entire sphere of everything `private' are used as repertory material. Anything and 
everything can be pressed into service: any action from any moment of any day, photographs of 
oneself, or x-rays, or medical test graphs, one's own voice, all of the possible relationships one 
can have with one's excrement or one's genitals, reconstructions of one's past or the theatrical 
presentation of one's dreams. " The Body as Language. Vergine, L. Skira, Milan, 1974. p. 15 
39 Elwes, C. `Floating Femininity' in Catherine Elwes & Rose Garrard (Eds. ) About Time, 
London, ICA, 1980. p. 42 
40 Auslander describes this as The blending of real and fabricated personae and situations that 
occur when performance personae assume the same functions as "real". ' Auslander (1994) p. 78 41 Spalding Gray was a member of The Wooster Group for several years, developing ideas of his 
own self through the work, to the point where he now describes himself as a `monologist', teller 
of the tales of his own life. The impetus for this work began with his mother's death, which 
became a central aspect of The Wooster Group's performance of Rumstick Road (1976). The 
confessional tone of the work upset many critics, and a thorough description of both the work and 
the subsequent response can be found in David Savran's Breaking the Rules, TCG, New York, 
1988. pp. 74-10 1. The development of Gray's work, away from `character-acting' is chronicled in 
his own book Swimming to Cambodia, Picador, London, 1986. 
42 See James, W. `Sameness in the Self as Known' in Psychology. World Press, New York, 1948. 
43 Appiah, A. K. In my Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford University 
Press, 1992. p. 96. 
44 See Goodwin, A. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music, Television and Popular Culture. 
Routledge, London and New York, 1993, for a discussion on the ways in which live performance 
and video are collapsing in on and simultaneously feeding off each other. 
45 From the Loeb edition of Imagines, ed. T. E. page, E. Capps and W. H. D. Rouse. William 
Heinemann, London and New York, 1931. p. 34. 
46 Despite a reasonable number of mature students, the age of most students at University College 
Chester is 18-21. Members of staff attend in-house productions, as do members of the public, but 
they do not do so in large numbers. The bulk of the Chester audience will certainly be `young 
adults' . 
In Liege the students are older, as are members of other troupes, and this, alongside a 
wider mix of student and non-student spectators, will push the overall age of the audience up. 
Notwithstanding this, the spectators at both venues will be predominantly younger than one 
might expect to see in a different context. 
47 See `The Name and Nature of Poetry', Houseman, A. E. in The Creative Process. Ghiselin, B. 
(ed. ) New American Library, New York, 1952. pp. 86-91 
as 'bid 
9 Work of this description is documented in Rebecca Schneider's The Explicit Body in 
Performance. Routledge, London and New York, 1997. Writing from a strongly feminist 
perspective, Schneider interrogates and contextualises culturally framed depictions of the explicit 
body in performance. 
so A detailed analysis of Stelarc's performance activities can be found in Stelarc and Paffrath, 
James D. (Eds. ) Obsolete Body/Suspensions/Stelarc, Davis, CA: JP Publications, 1994. Orlan's 
work is discussed in the final chapter of Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed. ) From Acting to 
Performance, 
Routledge, London and New York, 1997. 
51 Richard Foreman, cited Drain, R. Twentieth Century Theatre. Routledge, London and New 
York, 1995. p. 68. 
52 Mrozek, S. Theatre versus Reality, `New Theatre Quarterly', Vol. VIII, No. 32, Nov. 1992. p. 
Ini Jul, 
53 Christoffersen, E. The Actor's Way. Routledge, London and New York. 1992. p. 158. 
4' Merlau-Ponty, cited Klaver, E. Spectatorial Theory in the Age of Media 
Culture, `New Theatre 
Quarterly', Vol. XI, No. 44, Nov. 1995. p. 312. 
ss See Michael Kirby, cited Zarilli, P. Acting (Re)Considered. Routledge, London and 
New York, 
1995. p. 44. 
83 
56 Klaver. p. 313. 
5' Carlson, M. Performance. Routledge, London and New York, 1996. p. 197. 
58 Baudrillard, J. Simulations. Semiotext(e), New York, 1983. p. 146. 
59Tadeusz Kantor, cited in Drain, R. Twentieth Century Theatre. Routledge, London and Ne«- 
York, 1995. p. 67. 
84 
Chapter Two 
7-10-98 
On October 6th, 1998, the group of students participating in the At Last Sight 
project was determined. The seven students, all Level 3 Drama Majors, are Sarah 
Skelton, Elizabeth Hague, Glenn Robertson, Christopher Roberts, Sarah 
Robertson, Anna Garnett and Andrew Proudfoot. The students selected the project 
from a choice of five, based, initially, upon a notice pinned up in the Drama 
Department corridor (Appendix 2). The students have all worked with me on 
earlier modules, and five of them, all except Sarah Robertson and Anna Garnett, 
were cast in a production of Jim Cartwright's Road, which I directed at University 
College Chester in 1996. Glenn Robertson was also cast in a version of Jez 
Butterworth's Mojo, which I directed in 1998. Each of the students, therefore, has 
what might be regarded as a reasonably close understanding of my own working 
methods and interests. 
I have not questioned the students as to the reasons behind their choice of 
production. Partly, this is because I am aware of the vagaries of student decision- 
making, which may have as much to do with the choices made by close friends as 
by the challenges posed by specific projects. -Primarily, however, it is because I 
have no desire to put myself in the position of appearing to solicit some sort of 
endorsement at the expense of colleagues. 
As a reading of the description offered of At Last Sight will reveal, very little 
information was offered, although, as a reading-through of the proposals submitted 
85 
by colleagues (contained in Appendix 2) will indicate this was no less than the 
norm. The student cohort, some twenty-four students, gathered in the Drama 
Studio, where staff elaborated on the written information. ' My own `elaboration' 
added little to the written statement, other than to stress the fact that the 
presentation in Liege would necessitate a more concentrated period of preparation 
and rehearsal and that, notwithstanding my `hook' that the work would be 
"devised and exploratory in nature. -)-)2 1 did, in fact, have certain existing ideas as to 
the ,, V-ways in which the piece might commence, if not quite develop. ' My feeling is 
that students attend as carefully to the manner in which the project is articulated as 
to the content or genre of the project itself It is certainly the case that the 
presentations from members of staff inevitably reveal more than they intend, and 
that our own often idiosyncratic methods of speaking about the projects to be 
entered into are highly, if perhaps incorrectly, illustrative of the ways in which we 
might work. 
This suggests that I am claiming an ability to `read' the significant elements of my 
own delivery, which I am not at all convinced to be the case. It is sufficient here to 
state no more than it is my belief that the students are drawn to people as much as 
to projects and that we are each, to a greater or lesser extent, aware of that. I am 
sure, for example, that my own body language and eye contact was `designed', 
perhaps intuitively, to attract certain students and discourage certain others. I 
have 
no knowledge that this happened, but my feeling is that it did. With the students 
ranged in a crude semicircle around the staff, and with students seated on the 
floor 
and staff standing, at least in those moments when we spoke, 
I have no reason to 
doubt that our physical emission of signs was insidiously 
influential. 
86 
Following these oral presentations, the students were given the opportunity to 
speak informally with members of the department, asking a series of questions as 
to preferred group-size and the potential complications on timetables stemming 
from specific rehearsal commitments. None of the seven students who gravitated 
towards the project offered by myself asked any questions as to the `intention' 
behind the piece, the processes we might undertake between now and March of 
next year and/or any aesthetic rationale I might be intending to work to. 
Interestingly enough, the experience which the students in question have of my 
own work, relating as it does to Road and Mojo, means that they have brought 
with them an assumption that I am primarily interested in directing published texts 
rather than devising work with no dramatic source-material. Or even, in the case of 
At Last Sight, with the development of a previously unperformed text. The 
impression that the students from this year group carry of my production-work is 
that I am more comfortably located as a disrupter of extant theatre tradition than I 
am as a creator of something new and unpublished. 
Road was presented as a promenade-piece, with a distinction being made inasmuch 
as the bulk of the scenes were played out simultaneously in various rooms around a 
public auditorium in such a way that no member of the audience could possibly see 
the entire (sic) play. Some scenes were repeated many times, whilst some were 
played once only. All alcohol consumed in the production was genuine, with four 
characters drinking to considerable and rapid excess in the final section of the play. 
Mojo was played out with male and female casts on alternate nights, with 
numerous and not always sufficiently judicious alterations to the text. 
Both Road 
87 
and Mojo were `popular' productions with the student-community, although 
neither one was particularly satisfying to myself in terms of directorial input. 4 The 
perception of these students then (and I am aware that this is a generalised 
projection on my part) is that my directorial penchant is for an irreverent form of 
deconstruction. I went to some pains to stress to the seven students wishing to 
work on At Last Sight that there would be few similarities between any projects 
directed by me which they had previously seen and this one. Although in the 
emphasising of this point I had to wonder whether I was seeking to convince 
myself more strongly than the group. 
The group accompanied me to my office, where I offered what little explanation I 
had at that time as to how we might commence the work. I had copies of the text 
for At Last Sight, which I passed out to the group. I emphasised the fact that no 
sections of the text had been written for either a male or female voice, but that I 
hoped the group would somehow draw on certain elements of that which was 
written, discarding others. I went to some lengths to explain that the text was to be 
regarded as one potentially influential ingredient in the creation of At Last Sight, 
hilt that we were not to regard it as an imposition. That it suggested a place to 
start rather than investing the project with a premature form of textual closure. 
Sarah Robertson asked if I would read the text aloud. She pointed out that my 
voice was the only one the group was more or less guaranteed not to hear in 
production. The students would accordingly be able to respond to the text in a 
manner which was not suggestive of any potential gender or casting distinctions. 
The group supported this idea and I agreed. 
88 
I have read aloud the existing text for At Last Sight on several occasions, and was 
surprised, therefore, to `hear' the words differently when they were spoken to or in 
front of, others within this situation. The effect was dissimilar to previous readings 
on my own, in order for me, the writer, to hear the words spoken. On reading the 
work `publicly', two things became apparent. The first was that the text, written as 
an elegiac, mournful exercise in what might be regarded at best as a striving for 
some sort of catharsis, at worst as a wallowing in aestheticised misery, sounded 
like 
an aggressive interrogation. The second, equally alarming aspect was that 
those sections which were originally intended to be confessional in an overtly 
romantic sense were now coming across as the words of an obsessive, of someone 
diet me throw caution to the wind here and say a character). A character, 
furthermore, who seemed to be confessing to a killing. 
Reading the text to the students felt like reading someone else's words, except that 
I was aware at all times that this was not the case. What I know is that I have had 
no inkling of this interpretation (another caution to another wind) prior to the 
forty-five minutes that it took to speak the text aloud. 
On one level, this was and is pleasing. It suggests a way into the work that has 
been absent up until this time. It suggests something of mood, at the same time as 
it provides an in-built opportunity for pace. My own history of making work is that 
whenever I am at a loss for ideas I opt to slow the performers and the subsequent 
performance down, leading to moments of longueur, which I consistently struggle 
with. ' The idea of an interrogative and aggressive 
feel to the piece creates a 
relatively new challenge to my own experiences, which 
is to the good. The 
89 
problem, at this stage, is that I am concerned that the shift in direction pushes me 
away from the thoughts contained in both the introduction and first chapter of this 
thesis. 
Without mentioning these new thoughts to the group, although with the suspicion 
that the manner of my own reading of the text, as my ideas of it developed, 
betrayed at least something of my thoughts, I asked the students for their first 
impressions. All said they felt, without prompting from me, that At Last Sight was 
a` question and answer' text: a text for multiple voices and that it possessed a 
strong narrative drive, which related to the confessions of a man and the 
disappearance, reappearance and possible death of a woman. One student, Glenn 
Robertson, felt that the `male' voices were precisely that, that they were plural, 
creating a `narrative' made up of several confessions. Reading the text now, as I 
interrupt the writing of this chapter, I cannot easily see how I could spend so many 
months without the slightest hint of these aspects, which now seem to permeate 
and drive the text, and also, inevitably, the production to come, quite so 
emphatically. I had become aware, in the days leading up to the establishment of a 
performance-group, that the text was 'dark'. That it might lend itself somehow to a 
certain film noir look and feel, but these thoughts 
did not serve as any real 
preparation for a directional, and directorial approach to emerge. I worry now that 
thi may seem like the setting up of some false and 
deliberately fabricated 
dichotomy. That I might appear to the reader to be manufacturing an opportunity 
to say that whilst then I was thinking like a writer, now 
I am functioning as a 
director, with all of the intentional ramifications which 
that particular shift in role 
and responsibility carries with 
it. The only way I can answer those potential 
90 
misgivings is to state that these are doubts which I myself do not feel. For me, this 
is a case of re-visiting one's own work with a fresh perspective. 
8-10-98 
One point, which needed to be stressed early on with the students, was that the 
work itself was going to be approached in a manner that embraced notions of 
heuristic research methodologies. This involved a degree of explanation on my 
part, as no members of the group were familiar with either the notion of heuristics 
or even the term. I explained my understanding of the etymology of the word. 
Heuristics stems from heuriskein, a word which comes from the Greek and means 
`to find'. It is more broadly associated with the idea of a search for information and 
knowledge which is as closely linked to internal and personal development as it is 
to the principles of fact-finding most commonly associated with research. I referred 
the students to a key text, `Heuristic Research', in Challenges of Humanistic 
Psychology, 6 and explained that heuristics allows, and indeed demands, that the 
opinions, feelings, moods and intuitions of the researcher are present throughout 
the period of research. And that in addition to an increased understanding of the 
area being studied, the researcher will also chronicle the specific phenomena of 
increased self-knowledge and awareness. 
The students were interested in these notions and seemed positive about the 
opportunity to legitimise their own feelings within a research programme. 
Chris 
Roberts described this as a way of "writing ourselves into the process". 
Heuristics 
can sometimes be regarded as `soft' research, as a 
liberal inclination towards a 
reading of mood, rather than the offering up of 
hard, scientific data. I was pleased 
and impressed with the students' 
immediate grasp of heuristics as an addition to 
91 
conventional approaches and not as a substitute for `hard' analysis. Research 
through practice such as is being undertaken here involves people. To approach the 
work as though that human material were to function as something inanimate 
would be to disregard the very thing that makes performance what it is. Live work 
is lived, and the lived experiences of the participating students need to inform the 
thesis. How could they not? To separate the two out and say that the students will 
influence the practice but not the accompanying theoretical writing is to miss the 
nnint. At Last Sight is a written text. In one capacity it will always remain so. More. rý 
importantly, however, it is now a project. People are involved. 
As was outlined in the introduction to this thesis, we can say that heuristic 
processes offer an embrace of notions of self-discovery. As such, these processes 
are aligned to the type of creative rehearsal which this project seeks to employ. 
The very act of discovery leads the discovering researcher to new points of 
knowledge and new directions to take, just as the irregularities of rehearsal, the all 
too familiar stop/start of thwarted ideas and precious days `lost', leads the director 
into new areas of practice. As surely as the practical project which I am calling At 
Last Sight is being commenced with no real sense of how the finished (sic) work 
will appear to an audience, so the written thesis, these words appearing now on the 
screen as I write them and on the page as you read, provide mute evidence of a 
heuristically driven journey towards an unknown and unknowable point. There is 
an immersion process with heuristics, which necessitates an openness and 
receptivity to the fluctuating (and frustrating) rhythms of research and rehearsal. In 
many ways, heuristics does not merely share a number of common 
features with 
the putting together of a creative project; it is a creative project. 
This means that 
q'ý 
heuristics functions as much more than a peg to hang the work on - as, in effect, a 
neat legitimising agent - it articulates a way of thinking, and a way of thinking 
about thinking, which has always formed the spine of the work. 
Because heuristics is concerned primarily with the nature of knowing, whatever 
thoughts and attitudes exist in the mind of the researcher/maker, however 
temporary and disconnected they may appear to be, are imbued with the capacity 
to shift the process of investigation on into new fields of thought. Accordingly, 
research into the ways in which a practical performance project is being made is 
this at the same time as it is also other. The process provides space for the 
extension and development of a knowledge which is subject-specific at the same 
time as the self of the researcher is enhanced. 
12-10-98 
The thrust of this chapter is to be a report on practical creative and rehearsal work 
undertaken with the group of seven students. In this way, it is expected that a 
pattern will emerge, apparent in the documentation, which the quite different 
pressures of rehearsal will not always reveal. In some ways, therefore, I am 
predicting that a more clinical and critical observation of the processes of making 
this production will be arrived at through the greater distance provided 
by writing 
than doing. I believe this to be the case, not because in the mode of student-writer 
I am any less `involved' in the project than when I am 
functioning as a staff- 
director, but because, by definition, a great number of directorial decisions are 
suggested without necessarily having formed an a priori understanding of 
the 
reasons, behind the choices. The relationship 
between director and cast 
(notwithstanding the additional relationship in this case of the 
lecturer and the 
93 
student, of one of the assessors and all of the assessed) is a responsive one. Ideas 
move back and forth and a series of adjustments, compromises and re-negotiations 
are undertaken. It is difficult within the context of such intense collaboration to 
keep track of whatever justifications might he behind words offered and direction 
given . 
The process of documentation does not automatically lead to clarity, but it 
does provide a period, albeit brief, of reflection. 
My primary motivation in documenting the creative process as it pertains to At 
Last Sight is to create a certain type of structure. A structure wherein I am able to 
recognise more fully the routes by which practical performance work is arrived at 
and to make that recognition public in a coherent manner. This calls for an equal 
measure of reflective and communicative skills ... 
for without the former the thesis 
is devoid of purpose whereas an absence of the latter would deny the successful 
dissemination which the discipline demands. In the documentary and analytical 
process, I will face, as I have already, a series of recurring doubts as to my ability 
to make the work work, alongside a gnawing concern for issues of structure within 
the self-avowed liberality of my chosen approach. For example, if what I feel about 
the nature of heuristic research (and heuristic rehearsal) is that my own ongoing 
and immediate observations and intuitions are both authentic and ipso facto valid, 
then I am unable, in advance, to know much, if anything at all, of the territory 
through which the thesis and the performance project will move. 
The way forward is to let go of structure. To recognise that the data, which this 
thesis will contain, resides already in me as much as it does in the nature of that 
which is being examined. To realise that the structure the thesis takes is the 
94 
structure that it has. The challenge is to chronicle its nature ... to extrapolate and 
articulate the salient elements of the process. This might appear to carry with it the 
implication of an editing process, of an after-the-event manipulation of material in a 
way which would then suggest a hidden structure (discernible to the informed 
reader) of a recognisably linear path through the process. This will not be the case 
here. Other than for the purposes of proof reading, the thesis will not be modified 
in any way via the knowledge afforded through hindsight. 
In place of a pre-ordained structure, the heuristic approach undertaken here will 
evidence a direct and personal relationship between `my self the researcher and 
`my work' the researched. This relationship ties in with the autobiographical thrust 
of the performative written material that is, at present, At Last Sight. It 
foregrounds the very ideas of self-directed search, immersion and experience which 
have already categorised both the thesis and the performance project thus far. 
14-10-98 
The `new' feelings about the ways in which At Last Sight appear to be developing 
will be conveyed within and through the differing manners of documentation. It 
may be the case that theoretical perspectives leading to analysis are integrated 
cleanly into some sections of the documentation, whilst at other times the 
`description' of activities might be written with little or no attendant critique of the 
work itself The activity of writing this section of the thesis as an integral part of 
the process of creating a performance event means that, at certain points, the. 
distance between the doing and the writing may well be too brief to allow thoughts 
to develop to an informative degree. If this should happen, creating a chapter of 
variable worth to respective readers, then it is hoped that those same readers will 
95 
not lose too much faith with the thesis itself Whilst it will seem to some readers 
inevitable that a chapter (this chapter) written during the process of rehearsal is 
essentially a draft, subject to suggestion, criticism and revision. It is the very 
linking in time of Chapter Two with the period of developing the text of Ai Last 
Sight into a performance that makes the work what it is. Accordingly, and 
heuristically, this chapter is commenced with no real idea as to where it might lead 
or by what it might be led, or even whether it will emerge as one chapter or more. 
It is thus as lacking in any projected sense of closure as the production itself The 
fact that this is being entered into without reservation is central to the work and to 
the ways in which the work is subsequently understood by future spectator/readers. 
15-10-98 
Because of the nature of this simultaneous doing and recording, it is necessary here 
to lay some theoretical foundations. Again, however, I am uncertain as to the 
extent to which I am creating and installing foundations as opposed to exposing 
those already extant positionings, which underpin the work being made. In many 
ways the work cannot be made other than from the theoretical positions I already 
o copy. The determinants mentioned in the introduction to this thesis have not 
disappeared and they still govern even the most seemingly intuitive approaches. 
The following paragraphs then are offered as an attempt at articulating those 
theoretically discernible phenomena, which are fuelling the practical decisions and 
suggestions being made to the cast of At Last Sight. Accordingly, that which I am 
now writing is not dissimilar to the words I have spoken to the performers. As an 
exercise in teaching as much as directing, I am duty-bound to discuss the rationale 
behind ideas, to foster a climate of developing confidence and collaboration 
amongst what amounts to an ad hoc and self-selecting group of students. A group, 
96 
furthermore, of varying abilities and experiences. The students, all of them, wanted 
to know something about the `structure' of the work, about how it might `look', 
about the type of performative `attitudes' they might be asked to adopt. None of 
the members of the group, for example, have any experience of entering into a 
production where they are not playing 'characters'. Although each member of the 
group has encountered a variety of methods of making work, they would, by 
almost any definition of the terms, be regarded as `unskilled' and '-inexperienced' 
performers. They are less than comfortable with the idea of an absence of fixity, 
which means that I may be tempted to give them more clues at this stage as to 
where the work might lead than I would by choice. ' 
One of the particular challenges about this triple-module in performance is that the 
participating students are not selected by the tutor/directors. The students choose 
the projects and we, the staff, have no say in the people we get. This is a given, and 
these words are not offered as a complaint. It would be foolish (though not 
without precedent) for a tutor in this situation to propose a project on the. 
assumption that certain favoured students would automatically enrol. " 
The challenge comes in making work without the dubious advantage of having 
formulated ideas to `fit' specific students. Working without pre-formed 
conceptions of the students involved with At Last Sight is appropriate to the 
process. Just as I do not know where the work is going, so I had no prior idea of 
who would be taking it there. Looking at the cast members as we meet -is 
revealing. There are, even at this early point, identifiable traits that they are 
carrying with them. One is nervous about the idea of performing per se, which was 
97 
a rather alarming confession to hear from a student electing this pathway. Another 
has a voice that never varies from the same ultra-steady monotone; another seems 
unable to direct text or attention at anybody else within the performance-frame 
without flicking his eyes towards the audience-area; another `acts' in a manner 
bordering on the melodramatic. To their credit, they each appear eager to give 
their all to the project, and I have no serious misgivings about any of them. What 
little mention I make here of their performative peculiarities is not meant to 
patronise; on the contrary, it is an inevitability of the recognition of my own r --- 
directorial inadequacies that makes me mourn the absence of a group of more 
highly skilled performers. As they, in their own turn, may come to mourn the 
absence of a more skilled director. 
16-10-98 
One of the first questions asked by the group about At Last Sight was about 
narrative. As this was the group's first concern, I shall begin there, although as the 
reader will note, the word is only used at this stage as a means of opening and 
broadening the area of discussion. I explained to the students that notions of 
narrative - much stronger to me now than they were 
just one week ago - alongside 
notions of character (vague but nevertheless apparent) were leading to questions of 
semiotics. Of what is intended to be significant in this work: of how I wish, or am 
imagining the audience to enter into the world of the performance. Ideas as to 
reality and artifice, which seemed to be driving me towards the project, are being 
joined as I write by issues of narratology and theme. As though that which once 
Was concerned primarily with performative and non-performative states, with 
`acted truth' and `presented lies' is now being made to attend to 
issues of what 
might almost amount to plot-conveyance. 
This does not mean that the production- 
98 
work will be allowed to drift too far away from my original intent. Indeed, the 
postmodern preoccupation with discerning signs from reality and also the 
phenomenologists' approach of a direct contact between an observer and an object 
or event which is classified as `art' are still relevant to the ways the work might 
now develop. As also are those `might have beens' of the way that it was shaping 
up to be before people, that sometimes-frustrating given of performance, altered 
my own insidious form of closure in the guise of freedom. 
17-10-98 
My `ideas' for the first stages of rehearsal are being influenced by my interest in 
Joiners, a photomontage by the artist, David Hockney. Joiners has been utilised by 
Rienelt and Roach in an introductory explanation to the fields of structuralism and 
deconstruction. 9 It was through their incisive relocation of a purely visual form 
into the realms of performance that my own long-standing interest in Hockney's 
work, and particularly of Joiners, was both accelerated and enhanced. Approached 
as a paradigm for the ways in which work is read, Joiners provides an interesting 
way into performance, a way which is not suggested by Reinelt and Roach, and 
which is demonstrative of the processes through which the viewing of aestheticised 
objects is undertaken. If sections of performance are regarded in a similar way to 
frames of Hockney's work, both as being possessed of individual matrixes and also 
as part of a larger `whole', then it is possible to set up a system of signs whereby 
the `meaning' for each section is resident within its relationship to, and position 
with, those other sections which are located before, after or even at the same time 
as the section itself. This is the nature of theatre direction and the essence of 
montage, but approaching direction in a fashion analogous to 
Hockney's serves to 
99 
foreground more directly the semiological connections that combine to form 
systems of signs. 
In Joiners, just as a number of photographs are presented, so "different ways of 
seeing come into prominence and recede. " 'O In a similar way, Hockney's creation 
of a grid, which is only apparent by the positioning of individual photographic 
images, creates a template for the ways in which At Last Sight might be 
constructed. Ferdinand Saussure posited the theory that individual `units of 
meaning' only ever gain whatever meaning they possess when they are held in 
comparison to other signs. " To the extent that "any individual element is 
In the same way, the scenic mean Bless outside the confines of that structure. "12 1iit. Gl. t 
elements that make up the performance event of At Last Sight will derive their 
meaning from the relativity of their position to the bracketing created by the 
proximity of other scenes. The `scenes' are thus offered as individual units at the 
same time as they are joined (to use the Hockneyesque term) by their relationship 
to the whole. 
It will be useful here to ascertain the sense in which certain terms used 
in these 
introductory remarks is offered. Notwithstanding the broad familiarity, which most 
students of Drama have of the area of semiotics, it is apparent that the 
language 
itself is prone to a degree of ambiguity. 
13 With regard to the notion of systems of 
signs, there will be evidence in the following pages of a 
debt to Saussure, for 
whom the sign is composed of two parts, a material signer, a word, spoken or 
written, an image, and a signified, a concept. 
There is no essential relationship 
between signifier and signified, only a culturally agreed 
link. In this way, signs are. 
100 
seen to operate as part of a system and their meanings (sic) derive directly from 
their relationship to the other signs within the system. They are unable to function 
as individual logos of identical, or even similar, meaning if they are isolated from 
that system. In subsequent paragraphs, I will refer to the referent, a term employed 
to considerable effect by Roland Barthes. `Referent' means the actual object, image 
or action which is referred to at any given moment in the work: so that, whilst a 
performer, Sarah Robertson, for example, is always Sarah Robertson, she is also, 
although not always, a referent for something (someone) else. Already it seems as 
though I am predicting a production wherein the independence and autonomy of 
each `moment', when located in a sometimes contradictory or juxtapositional 
relationship to other moments, will lead the spectator towards a questioning of the 
overall `meaning' of the work. It may be the case, and a part of me clearly intend 
it to be so, that the spectator is also invited to question the extent to which it is 
possible to derive any conclusive meaning from performance at all. 
Within this projected method of rehearsal, the biological presence of the one who 
refers is as important as that which is referenced. The created performance of At 
Last Sight is of a no greater consideration than the exposed pattern of signs 
contained in the production in both its `moments' and its entirety. As the eye shifts 
through time so the spectator will be encouraged to see the scenes as singular 
signs. The referent images (of scene, of sense, of other) are fractured and the 
signifiers and signifieds may confuse or even bar the way towards 
'understanding. 
This will result (and I am aware of the dangers, and contradictions, of speaking of 
`results' at the start of rehearsal) in the raising of questions as to the possibility of 
deciding upon any stable meaning whatsoever. At this point, 
I should perhaps turn 
101 
towards a post-structuralist view, to better see how it is that the reduction of 
emphasis on the signified, and the increased focus on the signifiers, will provide 
indications as to a spectator's directed reading of At Last Sight. If the meaning of 
each sign within the system is dependent upon its difference to other signs, then the 
overall creation or, indeed, identification of meaning becomes unstable. Each 
`scene' within At Last Sight (I could say `moment' or `section') will have its own 
relationship to the surrounding scenes and its meaning will be identifiable by its 
difference to its neighbours. I can go further and say that each scene will gain its 
meaning or its concept (its signified) from its similarities to its neighbours. Each 
and every performative moment is a sign comprised of a signifier (the image) and a 
signified (the concept). Within its own specific frame a signified of its own small 
referent is offered, whereas when the spectator begins (or is allowed) to add these 
moments together the referent becomes larger and the network and interplay of 
signs begins to build into a system. The written text of At Last Sight, as it currently 
stands, has itself been constructed in this way. 
The building of the system here will probably not, however, fully add up. The 
overall meaning of the system may emerge as somewhat greater than the sum of 
the signs, and aspects may well emerge in the work which are at once both within 
the system at the same time as they are unidentifiable as discrete and functional 
signs. As Derrida has written, "the movement of signification adds something ... to 
supplement a lack on the part of the signified"', 
14 and it is this added extra element, 
the `transcendental signifier', 15 to use Derrida's term, that allows the spectator to 
become the ultimate creator of meaning. `Sense' is thus defined by the way in 
102 
which the signs are read and by the receptive weight given to the elements seen 
rather than by the semiotic potency of the signs. 
18-10-98 
The At Last Sight of this point of rehearsal is revealing itself as intrinsically 
postmodernist. It is not my intention to submit At Last Sight to its spectators as a 
paradigm of postmodern performance. Postmodernism has already passed into the 
passe, to the extent that formulaic lists of its tendencies have been published. 16 
. 'here postmodernism still seems to possess vitality is in its refusal to fix and its 
disinclination to close down. If postmodernism is identifiable by one element, that 
element is contained in a shifting away from readily rationalised solutions. Where 
postmodernism has moved towards an awareness that the very tools and 
techniques we have been using to free ourselves from ignorance have themselves 
become enslaving doctrines it has left behind a philosophy that I remain happy to 
embrace. Postmodernism, although differing to a degree in terms of the specificity 
of some concepts and ideologies, can be said to subsume post-structuralism, and, 
as such, postmodern notions of performance making will be providing an umbrella 
underneath which this project is to be made. 17 
If we distrust and ultimately deny the idea of grand-scheme solutions, then we 
begin to see that the shift from a belief in something being an original to the 
awareness that everything is a copy leads inevitably towards a questioning of the 
validity and `realness' of all things. 
'8 It is certainly the case that these feelings are 
informing my ideas for the work. This continues to be the case even though, at 
this 
point, all that has emerged is a vague idea of performers playing out 
the `roles' of 
103 
the performance with varying degrees of certainty, so that issues of `acting', of 
`being', of `truth' and of `lies' permeate the fabric of the work. 
Even in writing these words, however, I am aware of my own unspoken 
inclinations towards a type of essentialism. As though a belief in truth - in 
something that matters - is within me, despite my embracing of notions of 
simulacrum ad infinitum. Writing the word truth without the qualification created 
by inverted commas or italicisation leads to a heady sensation: a queasiness 
brought on by risk and naivety in equal measures. If a gnawing essentialism runs 
counter to postmodern chic then so be it. This thesis is not intended as a mantra 
towards the idols of our age. If t did not believe in some form of redemptive 
qualities in the making of art (I have more doubts as to the possibilities of 
redemption through spectatorship) then I would not be trawling my own past for 
the written material of At Last Sight. Richer and more profound material is all 
around. I believe in redemption and I believe in truth. What concerns me is my 
ability (or otherwise) to recognise either if or when they appear. 
Notwithstanding this, I am continuing to work within and through an ostensible 
distrust of reality, just as postmodern performance strategies invite their audiences 
to deny authoritarian solutions through the adoption of a sceptically slanted gaze. 
If "the notion that our experience of reality is organised and 
determined by the 
images we make of it"19 is a true one, then the sentiment 
is appropriate to At Last 
Sight. It is so inasmuch as the work undertaken 
in rehearsal is designed to create a 
production wherein ideas of reality are 
brought into question by a process of 
looking clearly and with knowing doubt at the 
images we are making of the 
104 
performance. Baudrillard has attempted to remove our reliance on the word 
signs', replacing them with codes, which are seen to exist as unshifting points of 
reference. Although Baudrillard might follow the Saussurian concept that ``no 
object exists in isolation from others",, 20 this Baudrillardian `code' is actually 
replacing the sign. It is not only the reproduction of the referent, it is the referent, 
and the two have become indistinguishable, indeterminable one from the other. 
At Last Sight is thus a system of codes which, working in relation to each other, 
(re)produce the referent. Baudrillard forces us to stop searching for the referent: 
the search is futile as there are no `real' originals and everything is already a 
reproduction and representation ... 
"the difference between copy and original is 
redundant. "21 At Last Sight is claiming that the referent can be viewed from 
another position, the position of the creation of meaning. In this way - and this is 
central to the starting position - the moments refer to the referent, but the referent 
is the referral. What the spectator sees then is image and comment in one ... the 
two phenomena exist interdependently and cannot be separated. 
This ideological and directorial perspective has arisen out of a searching for a 
practical method of dealing with a shift that I have begun to recognise in my own 
thinking. The shift is from a search for explanations within the prescribed and 
directorial forms provided in performance towards a realisation that the referent' s 
meaning always resides within the spectator, which is the very stuff of 
heuristics. 
The interpretation and decision of a performance is never other than individualised. 
It is a series of meanings to which no universal or standardised explanation can 
fihlly apply. That it is the `I' of the spectator and not the 
`I' of the director who 
105 
determines meaning. Accordingly, my own directorial practice must strive, if I am 
in any practical sense committed to the idea of progression, towards an 
accommodation of this theoretical positioning. The difficulty occurs because of the 
realisation that these idealised notions of personal contextualisation are 
contaminated by the social and cultural determinants of thought which this thesis 
keeps returning to. In this way, the cultural circumstances which encapsulate every 
spectator's frame of reference will be what determines the interpretation. The 
director's role is subject to a deep and contradictory disturbance, for what is it that 
I am seeking to direct my individual spectator's attention towards? How can I 
direct the performers if I have so little idea of where we are going? 
23-10-98 
Clark Moustakis, in detailing the specifics of his own research procedures, also 
provides a telling treatise on creative, rather than interpretative, direction. If we 
substitute Moustakis' words `learning' and `searches' for `direction' and 
`directing' the similarities emerge with immediacy 
Learning that proceeds heuristically has a path of its own. 
It is self-directed, self-motivated, and open to spontaneous 
shift. It defies the shackles of convention and tradition.... 
It pushes beyond the known, the expected, or the merely 
possible. Without the restraining leash of formal hypotheses, 
and free from external methodological structures that 
limit awareness or channel it, the one who searches 
heuristically may draw upon the perceptual powers afforded 
by direct experience. 22 
24-10-98 
To add yet another complexity to the issue, my own acknowledged 
determinants 
include Roland Barthes. It was Barthes who, within the space provided 
by the 
short publication that was Camera 
Lucida, 3 set up an examination of the nature of 
106 
photographs. In so doing he initiated a discourse on the principles of absence and 
presence which has formed the mainstay of much subsequent writings on 
performance. For Barthes, "a specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished 
from its referent, "24 creating a tautological dimension to photography in which the 
referent is always present. Indeed, Barthes goes on to postulate that the referent is 
all that can ever exist, that the photograph is invisible and absent because it is the 
referent that consumes our gaze. Barthes' ideas of photographic absence are 
important to the creative processes behind At Last Sight, which is not to suggest 
that I have as yet located a comfortable method of dealing with them. 
If it is not possible to separate a theatrically constructed image from its referent, if 
there is an inextricable binding together of the two. Then the successful attempt to 
remove the referent (if such an act is possible) would be to render the image as 
referentially neutral, as nothing other than itself It follows then that in applying 
Rarthes' views to At Last Sight (or to generic performance) it would be possible to 
remove the problem of assigning signifiers and signified to the performance event. 
In so doing it would turn the spectator's gaze to the referent, to the performer as 
communicator and communicated. The compositional element of each performed 
image can and will consist of signification, inasmuch as an aesthetic directorial 
(directional? ) control will be in evidence. But in allowing the spectator to see that 
every scene within the production is the result of a conscious decision, of choice, a 
suggestion will be made that it is that choice which is significant rather than 
the 
ideas that are contained in the referentiality of acted `other'. 
107 
Hints of phenomenology are emerging here. At least to the extent that we can 
recognise that "phenomenologists like to pick up objects ... turn them around, 
examining them from all sides... (and that) this cannot be accomplished by viewing 
them frontally as they are embedded in the rest of the experiential world. "25 If there 
ýs an underlying conceptual distinction between semiology and phenomenology it is 
that whilst with the former everything relates to something else (we could even say 
that everything is something else) in the latter case everything is nothing but itself 
In this sense, a phenomenological position is informing the notions I have of the 
way the rehearsals of At Last Sight might develop towards performance. It is 
impacting on the ways that I would wish the work to be read; although we would 
do well to remind ourselves that phenomenology allows research without direct 
experience, whereas heuristics demands a full experiential engagement. Seen in this 
way, a phenomenological approach may be of value to a spectator in much the 
same. way that a heuristic approach functions for the researcher/maker who has 
experienced an ongoing contact with the work. 
Before proceeding further with this, however, I need first to make some decisions 
as to how this is likely to happen. In stating this I am recognising, as 
has been 
pointed out in earlier sections of this work, that the onus of analysis 
is already 
inclining me towards ways of working which are not normative within my own 
previous experience. What I mean by this is that I have never 
in the past, when 
working on productions, sought to document 
directorial inclinations in the way 
that I am attempting here. 
26 A consequence of this is that notions of the work on 
nt Last Sight as constituting a case study of a production 
from idea to realisation 
108 
are flawed before the event. What is being undertaken is an overt example of 
practice as research, which differs from practice for the sake of practice itself. 
Phenomenologically then, it is possible to approach At Last Sight as a developing 
object in its own right, to see it as a part of the empirical world, and to look at it in 
those terms. We can analyse At Last Sight, for example, in the same way that one 
could study a pebble or a blade of grass, not as elements of a coastline or a field, 
but as nothing more or less than the things themselves. Alternatively, we could say 
that At Last Sight will exist in a co-present state, whereby the empirical world is 
put on hold. In this way we accept that the production is at once an attempt to 
educe the spectator into a suspension of belief in reality at the same time as it 
activates a belief in the illusionary. It is this second approach that most powerfully 
engages me as a theoretical `ideal' that might, perhaps, lead the work into an 
interesting location. In this way, at least in my directorial imaginings, the spectator 
will be invited not so much to make an empirical inspection of the performance as 
to provide an imaginative intuition of it. If this is in any way successful, if it results 
in an ability to view At Last Sight as an event removed from its cultural and 
empirical connotations and if it frees the spectator to regard it as something which 
exists within its own frame of reference ... then the work will 
have achieved much 
of that which is being targeted. That in art all things function as they are perceived 
and that the event's relation to the percipient is ultimately the only one that 
matters. 
In this, phenomenology flirts with postmodernism, at once embracing an absence 
of mass meaning at the same time as 
it prioritises individual absorption. Bert 0. 
109 
States tells us that it is the "first four seconds" that are the most vital in our 
process of determination. 27 That the empirical world is put on hold as we trust only 
our connection with that which we see. And yet, it is this previously experienced 
outside world which has provided us with the library of seemingly intuitive 
references, which in their own turn allow us to arrive at the `immediate' and 
untrammelled perceptions of States' understanding of phenomenological 
immediacy. 
What a phenomenological approach does provide is a position whereby the debate 
as to the location and efficacy of signs becomes an irrelevance. The act of 
negotiation leading to meaning emerges as the sole responsibility of the percipient 
and it is s/he and s/he alone who must create a signification between performative 
moments and their relationship to a referent as and when they occur. Having Said 
this, it should be pointed out that At Last Sight contains its share of semiotic 
indicators, some of which are deliberately misleading ... or 
deliberately 'leading'. In 
a recent conversation between the performers and myself, 28 we began to discuss 
notions of truth in art. We discussed particularly the difficulty, or `impossibility' as 
one member of the group, Sarah Robertson put it, of creating moments wherein 
the spectators might reasonably be expected to doubt the artifice of any given 
action. With extremes of physical behaviour this is relatively simple. The dancer's 
exhaustion might be tangibly `real', just as in suspending his body by steel 
hooks 
Stelarc moves beyond the theatrical requirements of a suspended 
disbelief, and yet 
the question is more complex when we deal with emotions, with emotional 
'truths'. 
28-10-98 
110 
After discussing these ideas of `truth', `lies' and `belief with the group (inverted 
commas again: the absence felt like too much risk) we have decided to advertise 
the group as a collective of lovers, current and ex, and to include this false fact in 
any and all pre-production publicity. (It is important to note that this is the first 
time I am able to use the word `we' in this thesis without any feelings of trying to 
conjure up a false sense of democracy. ) The decision was not a whimsical one and 
neither was it intended to cause mischief. In terms of theatre, we are strongly 
predisposed to believe what we read about the company in question precisely 
because the written information is seen to exist beyond the frame of performance. 
This is so because the power of the written word is derived in part at least from its 
permanence. If I read that Goat Island is a performance collective from Chicago, I 
believe it because I have no reason to doubt it, and also because printed words 
afford the claim a different and more pressing type of authority to words uttered in 
performance. If the sleeve notes from Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me 
Yet tell me that the voice heard is that of a homeless man in London, now dead, I 
not only believe them whole-heartedly but the experience of listening to the 
compact disc is radically affected by that belief Similarly, if programme notes exist 
to tell me something of the genesis of the work I am about to see, then why would 
I distrust them? A woman tells a man, in performance, that she loves him ... 
it is 
performance ergo I (have to) doubt the voracity of the sentiment. If the same 
woman is described in a programme as being the same man's 
lover, I believe it 
entirely and without question. 
4-11-98 
The decision to advertise the group thus has opened up what appears to 
be a new 
way of working: simple activities and encounters are 
`loaded' differently and the 
performers' on-stage behaviour seems suddenly much less mannered. It has to be 
said that a part of the rationale behind this before the event decision is the hope 
that it will disguise some of the technical inadequacies of the individual members of 
the group. Certainly, I feel more confident about the piece now that it is (and we 
are) set to sail under this new and false banner. It carries with it the assumption, 
and it may be one that I make overt, that the group has been formed because of 
their emotional connections, rather than as an auditioned and selected troupe. As 
such, it may be the case that spectators read the work as something other than 
performance in the pursuit of polished excellence. It is much more of a salve here 
to my own insecurities than any damning critique of the performers per se. 
The students and I are attempting to extend the frame of the performance to the 
extent where, in effect, the spectators are unaware of the point where the work- 
starts and finishes. There seems little alternative to this. If the spectators were to 
know that the information they receive is untrue, then the frame would still be 
extended but the rationale behind it would be ruined. To this end, I have written to 
the organisers of the festival, RITU 16, in Liege (see Appendix 3), involving them 
without their agreement in the duplicity of the misinformation. It is still too early to 
foresee the implications of this deceit on the way the work of At Last Sight will 
develop. The vagaries of student-timetabling, alongside my own teaching and 
tutorial commitments means that we have only met as a group on seven occasions - 
but I have no doubts that the lie will drive the piece 
in directions we had never 
previously considered. 
11-11-98 
112 
This raises the question of the extent to which my words on these pages are to be 
believed by the reader. As a self-confessed dealer in `lies' in one form, that 
knowledge will compromise the integrity of `truths' in another. The assumption of 
honesty afforded by the reader may have been lost in the last few paragraphs. All I 
can hope is that a distinction can be made between telling the truth about lies and 
disguising lies as truth. As this thesis is not about `explaining things' so much as 
analysing my own processes as they relate to At Last Sight, I make no claims for 
(or against) one approach over another. We - the group and I- are telling lies to 
our hosts. I am attempting an honest documentation of the process of making AI 
Last Sight, even when that process involves dishonesty. The reader can trust the 
tale if not quite still the teller. 
26-11-98 
In the sense of analysing the processes of the construction of At Last Sight, it is 
appropriate here to include a section on why certain things are being done. To push 
the analysis towards the documentation of a particular rehearsal, which will also 
make the members of the group known more fully to the reader. To this end, I will 
detail the events of our eighth rehearsal, on Thursday, November 26th, 1998 at 
9.00 a. m. 
Firstly, I shall describe the space. We meet and work always, so far at least, in a 
room in the Drama Department at University College Chester; this room is known 
informally as the `Workshop'. It is a smaller version of the Drama Studio, which 
is 
now taken over almost entirely by classes in Dance. I have not chosen the space. 
Each production-group has been allocated a rehearsal space and 
the Workshop is 
ours. The Workshop measures 9.70 metres 
by 6.41 and is 3.75 metres high, with 
11 
Iii 
suspended lights. A scale drawing of the space is included as Appendix 4, 
alongside similar drawings of performance venues to be used. A sound and lighting 
rig is fixed to the wall. The walls are wooden, as is the floor, which is made up of 
solid blocks, and is not 'sprung'. Black canvas curtains hang from steel bars. 
Access is via the Drama Studio, with an additional alarmed emergency exit, which 
leads out to the car park. There is one other locked and non-functioning door. The 
space is never `clean', with the residue of previous classes and rehearsals propped 
against various walls. On November 26th, for example, in addition to our own 
materials, a full-size coffin, a lectern, a flip chart, two note pads, a bag, a cardigan, 
a wardrobe and a large corrugated and transparent rigid plastic sheet were in the 
space. This is in addition to a number of dismantled staging units, which are stored 
more or less permanently against the radiator-free wall. 
The temperature in the room is warm in the winter and warmer still in summer, 
with the radiators timed to come on daily, regardless of climate and conditions. 
Despite a departmental policy of no food and/or drink in working spaces, members 
of staff tend to work to their own agendas. So that, for instance, the first two 
members of the group, Elizabeth Hague and Sarah Robertson, are already in the 
space, drinking from cans of Coca-Cola, when I arrive at 8.55 for the 9.00 a. m. 
start. 
The relaxation of the non-drinking policy is symptomatic of a generally relaxed 
working relationship between the group-members and myself. There 
is a clear 
hierarchy in place, of course, with the students regarding me as a lecturer who 
happens to be directing them in a piece of theatre. The relationship when I 
direct 
114 
students in productions is pre-determined by the knowledge those students have of 
my role as a member of academic staff. For example, the students know that their 
working processes will have ramifications on their ultimate assessment, which 
cannot fail to alter the ways in which they function. Similarly, my own approach to 
directing, as has already been mentioned, is bound up with my role as a lecturer. 
Notwithstanding this, my aim is that the relationship feels like one between 
performers and director rather than students and lecturer. Relaxing some of those 
`rules' which might be regarded as informing teaching policy within the 
department, in favour of a less pedantic approach to eating and drinking is one way 
of moving towards this state. What I am saying here is that I want the relationship 
to be one of director and performers. 
The space has already been `set' by Elizabeth and Sarah. Our set consists, at 
present, of a single metal bed, five metal chairs with grey plastic backs and seats, a 
small wooden table and a larger steel table-like structure. Because the dimensions 
of the Workshop are considerably smaller than the theatre space in Liege, and also 
of the auditorium in Molloy Hall, where At Last Sight will be performed in May 
1999, we are having to work with the length of the room as its width. This means 
that the students are able to move in a manner that approximates to the projected 
performance, with the downside being that I, in the position of a spectator, am too 
close in to the `on-stage' work to be able to read it from any `true' perspective. 
This means that I am forced to watch everything in a quite extreme close-up. An 
examination of the plan of the space will support this feeling. 
115 
The bed is centre-stage left, placed on a diagonal line; one chair is next to the bed, 
another is downstage right. The small table is up-stage centre; the steel `table' is 
up-stage left, almost directly behind the bed. The set is designed to indicate rather 
than resemble a hotel room. 
The following paragraphs will provide brief thumbnail sketches of the participants. 
I will not attempt to describe their physical appearances, other than to say what 
they were wearing on the occasion of this particular rehearsal. Reproductions of 
Polaroid photographs of the group will be appended to this thesis. These will 
provide the reader with far more accurate visual evidence than my words could 
achieve. Where I begin to describe something of the attitudes and abilities of 
individual members of the group I do so because the students are integral to the 
process of making the work. If my descriptions are brief, it is because at this point 
in rehearsals I do not want to enter (even privately) into issues of judgement. 
Judgement will come. My role as one of the assessors of the students demands it, 
as will my role here as the disseminator of the experience of making At Last Sight. 
It is a question at this time of focusing on the needs of the practice. 
As I entered the Workshop, Elizabeth Hague was lying on the bed and Sarah 
Robertson was seated on a chair, which had been pulled close by. Elizabeth w- -g-,; 
wearing calf-length blue jeans, black boots and a blue and white striped shirt of the 
type worn by butchers. Sarah was wearing a long dark skirt, plimsolls and a 
light 
brown shirt. We spoke our greetings. Of the two, I know Elizabeth rather 
better 
than I do Sarah, although I am not aware that this is leading to any tangible 
difference in the ways in which either of these young women relate to me. 
116 
Elizabeth and Sarah are both twenty years old, as are all members of the group, 
with the exception of Chris Roberts, who is older. Elizabeth is the stronger 
performer, by which I mean that she is able to dominate a space, or scene, to a 
relatively high standard; she is also more able than Sarah to make sense of lines of 
text as she speaks them. There is a certain narrowness of range, to be expected in a 
student pursuing Drama as part of a programme of Combined Study (with English, 
in this case) rather than as a Single Honours subject. 29 Regardless of this 
limitation, Elizabeth is a student whom most of my colleagues would have 
welcomed in their production-groups. She is the one member of the group for 
whom a career in performance seems appropriate. 
Sarah Robertson is less dynamic a performer than Liz. She is able to bring a 
reasonable veneer of sensitivity to her performance work, but she moves in an 
awkward fashion and is uncomfortable with any type of vocal projection. There is a 
discernible quality to Sarah's work, but this is handicapped by a public reticence to 
any externalised display of mood. Sarah's contribution towards ideas is as strong 
as anyone else's in the group, and yet I have reservations as to her ability to 
embrace fully enough with the idea of public performance. A feature of the work at 
University College Chester is that Level 3 students can opt for a triple-module in 
performance without having any prior experience of performing publicly, other 
than in very brief presentations as part of taught classes. Sarah Robertson is one 
such student. I have to be concerned that Sarah has never managed a rehearsal 
without `freezing', turning out to me and telling me that she cannot remember 
what to say. My use of the word. `never' is no exaggeration. 
At least once every 
time we meet I tell the student that the one thing the performance will not 
be able. 
117 
to withstand is this sort of breaking down ... apart 
from anything else, it exposes 
the `acted' nature of her fellow performers' moments of seeming, or supposed, 
not-knowingness. Even after so few meetings, Sarah's uncertainty is telling. This is 
frustrating, because the `quality' I mentioned earlier is one of engagement. She 
performs as though she 
. 
feels. One's attention is drawn to her because of this and 
once there it stays. 
The next student to arrive was Christopher Roberts. At twenty-six, he is older than 
his peers. He is the most academically able of the group, with a keen interest in 
politics, critical theory and literature. At times, he appears to take his studies 
seriously to the point of taking little pleasure from them: work is to be worked at. 
As a performer, Chris is at times quite painfully shy, with a habit of looking 
towards his audience for what seems like a sign or signs of approval. 30 He has a 
tendency towards a mumbled inarticulation and, like Sarah, has a stilted manner of 
moving when in performance. My relationship with Chris is a good one, even 
within the context of the `good' relationships I share with each of the members of 
the group. Chris sat on a chair to the left of the set as I look at it, and said hello to 
Elizabeth and Sarah. He then asked me whether I had seen Ronin, a newly released 
film starring Robert De Niro. Chris works part-time at the local Virgin Cinema, 
where he is duty manager, with authority for the planning and execution of film 
`seasons'. I answered that I had not seen the film. Chris was wearing blue jeans, 
white training shoes, and a grey sweatshirt. He was carrying a waterproof dark 
blue jacket. At this point, just after nine a. m., Glenn Robertson, Sarah Skelton and 
Andrew Proudfoot walked in. Sarah and Glenn share a house together some five 
minutes' walk from campus. Andrew lives some distance further. 
118 
Glenn was wearing black jeans, white training shoes, a white shirt and a short black 
jacket. Andrew was dressed in a white sports shirt and dark blue trousers. He was 
wearing blue canvas training shoes and a jacket, similar in design and colour to the 
one Chris was carrying. Sarah Skelton was wearing a lilac T-shirt, black drawstring 
trousers and blue training shoes. She wore no jacket. Sarah is always well 
groomed. She is fastidious about her appearance and never arrives for rehearsal 
without having first applied make-up. 
Glenn Robertson is a confident performer, although the limitations within his range 
are becoming apparent as we work. It is difficult to gauge his responses to At Last 
Sight; his role as captain of the college football team undoubtedly affects his 
demeanour within the subject of Drama. Glenn is unusual inasmuch as he combines 
Sports Science with Drama -a rarely elected combination at Chester - and he, 
seems equally comfortable in each area, although his strongest commitment is to 
sport. His behaviour and appearance serve to locate him as a student of Sport more 
than Drama, and yet, despite the evidence of success as an athlete (he is a semi- 
professional goalkeeper), Glenn has decided to major in Drama in this the final year 
of his studies. As Glenn's personal tutor, I know him well and our relationship is 
relaxed. There are no discipline problems with Glenn, as, in fairness, I have to say 
there are with none of the group, and the relaxation of any authority I might carry 
with me shows no signs of leading towards either laziness or the taking of liberties. 
I have told the group that we are all looking for the same thing from this trinl_e- 
module: that the work is good and that it will not and cannot be so unless we all 
work well. This sounds trite, but I wanted to emphasise the fact that we are 
in this 
119 
together - the students know that the work forms a major part of my own research 
- and that we are each responsible one to the other. 
Sarah Skelton is, along with Elizabeth Hague, the most competent performer in the 
group, at least at this point. She can deal with changes of mood, pace and tone to a 
greater degree than the remaining six and has demonstrated a keen intelligence in 
matters of working through the text and selecting words which might compliment 
the theatrical moments we are seeking to create. Her delivery, albeit raw at times, 
is always matched to the mood and sense she wishes to present. Most importantly, 
Sarah seems very comfortable with the idea of stillness and silence, not feeling that 
she needs to be moving or speaking to appear as an integral element of the stage 
event. Other members of the group do this, but at present they all reveal a tendency 
towards an attitude of 'off-stage' whilst `on', which is not always the effect we are 
striving for. Of the group, Sarah Skelton and Elizabeth Hague are the most 
pleasing to work with. This is so because they appears to possess the ability to tune 
in to the work on a level which is both internal and external, whereas the others, at 
least at present, are only able to offer an either/or. 
Andrew Proudfoot is, at the moment, unable to act naturally ... and 
I am aware in 
using these words that any drama specialists reading this thesis will recognise the 
seemingly `natural' as an elusive state to achieve. 
31 1 am not, therefore, intending 
to suggest that acting in a way which approximates to natural off-stage behaviour 
is an easy thing to achieve, but with Andrew the difference between the two is so 
pronounced that he appears almost puppet-like when he moves 
in performance. 
120 
This is leading to difficulty. On the one hand, as a lecturer, I am bound to provide a 
parity of opportunity for the performers within the group, on the other, as a 
director, I need to make At Last Sight come together as a piece over which I have 
considerable control. Andrew has already asked if I can provide him with a scene 
wherein he `acts' (his term), in order that he feels more confident of achieving a 
high mark in assessment. The truth of it is that I do not believe that the interests of 
Andrew's assessment are best served by his being seen in a section where he seeks 
to convince his audience (his assessors) of the visible truth of a structured he via a 
naturalistic process of performance. 
I can go further and state that I do not believe that At Last Sight would be well 
served by this. Conversely, I do not wish to reduce Andrew's confidence by telling 
him this. At the moment, time is still on our side. This means that I am able to stall 
in a way which probably reads to Andrew as no more than a waiting for the `right' 
idea for the `right' scene to come together and then to offer him that scene as a 
platform for his work. I have explained that the project is intrinsically concerned 
with arriving at performances which are appropriate to the piece, rather than 
creating moments to serve each performer's individual agenda. However, inasmuch 
as At Last Sight has declared itself to be concerned with issues of truth and lies, of 
art with a maximum and minimum of artifice, then I can see little chance of 
carrying off the myth that apparently `truthful' performance moments are without 
currency. 
Anna Garnett is the last of the students to arrive, and she does so some twenty 
minutes after the time we were due to meet. 
She apologises for her lateness and I 
12i 
tell her that it is okay. Anna was wearing a grey woollen fur-collared coat, black 
trousers, flat shoes and a grey sweater. Like Sarah Skelton, Anna is always neat in 
her appearance. Anna has emerged as the weakest performer in the group. She 
seems to be always a beat or two behind the rest of the students. In terms of the 
theoretical framework within which At Last Sight is functioning, Anna appears lost. 
Issues of fragmentation make no sense to her, and she has made no contribution so 
far to any ideas for where the work might go. She is a pleasant girl, and popular 
within the group, and yet she is also noticeably reserved, almost distant. She is not 
a figure I have ever seen on campus unless she has been travelling to and from 
lectures. Anna's is the monotone voice mentioned earlier. 
As the writer of at least some of the words she is speaking, I am probably more 
concerned about Anna's vocal limitations than I would be if we were working on a 
published text. Hearing the words spoken in the fashion that Anna has no choice 
but to adopt is a disconcerting experience. 
32 So far, I have not tried to push any of 
the students towards a serious examination of their own weaknesses. It seems at 
this stage to be a question of inducement via the carrot rather than the stick. 
What 
I am cautious about is getting myself into a situation where I am 
being critical of 
the students for not doing certain things without also 
being able to tell them what 
those `things' are. Because I am committed to At Last Sight 
being a group-project 
(this group-project) it is not easy for me to be critical of the group 
for not being 
more able performers than they are. Who and what they are will make 
At Last 
Sight what it will be. 
12 ? 
There is also the issue of the confidence of members of the group. The confidence 
of student-performers is a massive issue. Their skin tends to be thin inasmuch as 
they have not yet become accustomed to the harsh criticism which more seasoned 
performers have to bear. It is hard to take criticisms of one's own work other than 
personally, and I speak here from my own experience as much as from twenty 
years of dialogue with performers and artists from a variety of disciplines. 
On one level, I have no problems with this. Like all lecturers in this discipline, I am 
well aware that my directorial role has a link with a series of wider and more 
pastoral responsibilities. We are, after all, concerned with the Liberal Arts' ideal of 
assisting our students on their journey towards a position of rounded individuality, 
rather than (merely) providing either routes towards successful assessment or some 
sort of academically approved professional training. " It sometimes has to be said, 
however, that the link is a difficult one to work with. The extent to which a 
director/tutor should go in order to 'push' a student towards the performance s/he 
might be felt capable of achieving is not always an easy one to determine. 
Thankfully, it does not appear to be an issue of any weight with At Last Sight, but 
nevertheless an issue it remains. It is perhaps the central paradox of practice as 
research for the tutor that the research in question is almost always mediated by the 
performing students' abilities to make the ideas tangible in performance. Viewing 
the work like this, as a project of no less importance to myself as to the group of 
participating students, then it is reasonable to assume that I should be afforded the 
freedom to drive the students hard, and to drive them in the directions I see fit. In 
practice, however, this `freedom' is tempered by the needs of the students and 
by 
my own contractual obligations to provide satisfactory opportunities 
for the 
123 
students to function in a supportive and democratic working environment. To this 
end, At Last Sight, like all such work, is compromised by dint of its necessary (and, 
I have to say, appropriate) curricular relevance. 
The issue, made overt in recent paragraphs, of student-confidentiality, of ethics, is 
the most troubling to me. To what extent am I justified, in pursuit of my own ends, 
to reveal what amount to no more than my impressions of either the inadequacies 
or insecurities of the cast? Certainly, the students are all aware of the fact that I am 
documenting the processes of At Last Sight. They also know that the printed 
words can be accessed by any student or library-user who may choose to follow up 
the information in the abstract of this thesis with a request for the full work. But 
does this legitimise that which might, quite reasonably, be regarded as a betrayal of 
the confidence of rehearsal? I have no answers to this; other than to reiterate the 
fact that it is my intention to document the processes involved in the making of At 
Last Sight as accurately as possible, and that, inevitably, this procedure disallows 
the employment of a disproportionately positive perspective. 
When the group had settled after Anna's arrival, we started to talk about some 
different styles or `states' of performance: imitative, indicative, expressive, 
descriptive, actual and metaphoric. '` The conversation was an attempt to deal with 
a number of issues. One was that, as a module which requires the students to 
submit a reflective essay for one third of their overall assessment 
it is imperative 
that the group are provided with a theoretical underpinning to the work 
although this would be provided and/or encouraged regardless of 
the need to write. 
It is a given of the nature of study at this 
level that the students are possessed of an 
eN 4 
'4 
ability to trace the footsteps leading to any and all work they make. They need to 
demonstrate, either in essay or viva voce that they are in possession of an 
appropriately academic and aesthetic frame of reference within which the submitted 
work can be contextualised. What this means is that rehearsals are never just that. 
The time spent with the group is always a blend of teaching, training and 
suggestion and the balance between these elements is in a constant state of flux. 
Sometimes, like in today's example, the drive towards the creation of performative 
action is almost totally sacrificed for protracted discussion. 
Our individual timetable commitments allow us only sporadic group-contact 
throughout the week. In addition to this the bulk of the group have had to take 
paid employment in order to supplement their grants. 35 Taken alongside the fact 
that the only appropriate practical working spaces on campus are in extremely high 
demand and, as a consequence, are difficult to gain access to, our time together is 
limited and dialogue when we could be `working' often seems to frustrate the 
students. A clear pattern, almost a schism, began to emerge in the group today in 
this regard. 36 
27-11-98 
In attempting to rationalise for the group a sense of why the predominant 
performance modes we are adopting are either descriptive or actual, inasmuch as 
neither the text we are working from nor that which we subsequently create 
is 
comprised of much `action', three members of the group took this as an 
opportunity to bemoan the fact that the work is becoming overly theoretical. 
The 
students who felt this, Sarah Robertson, 
Sarah Skelton and Anna Garnett argued 
that At Last Sight was/is a piece which would not be possessed of 
broad appeal. I 
I25 
was not entirely surprised by this perspective, although I do not necessarily agree 
with it. I responded by saying that almost all of the people who will see the 
production will be either students, teachers or makers of theatre and that, 
accordingly, the notion of At Last Sight requiring an abundance of those elements 
one would normally regard as being central to mainstream work was an 
unnecessary concern. The timing of the concerns (or at least the voicing thereof), 
coming at the point that it has in the period of making, seems to be both natural 
and proper. The work is beginning to require an audience of sorts, an `outside eye' 
to regard the work afresh and offer feedback as to the ways in which the work is 
read. 
In writing about general issues of making work with students I am aware that I am 
avoiding the matter of specifics. I am aware also that this drive to dissemble began 
at the very point where the documentation of individual students' behaviour was 
just beginning to emerge. Perhaps what it is that has pre-empted this unwillingness 
to write in any detail about the ways in which the group functions is no more than 
a primitive type of caution. A fear that to say too much about the students is to 
invoke the wrath of the idealised ensemble. There is also the feeling that to be 
critical in private - inasmuch as none of the students will have access to the tenor 
of these pages until long after they have graduated - is an invidious form of 
hypocrisy. That it is a praising in public and a subsequent carping in the seclusion 
of an office after-hours. Writing about a sense of `team spirit' was never my 
intention, and, in fact, I can state that the recognition of this has only arrived with 
the typing of these words. It is dawning on me (and I am more than a 
little 
embarrassed to realise how late) that my use of the term `the group' 
has been used 
126 
exclusively to refer to the seven students, never to the eight of us who are pooling 
our resources to one end. 
This is because we, as a group, are now much more aware of the vocabulary of the 
performance of At Last Sight. Whereas at the start of the academic year it was very 
much a sense of the group being directed it now seems as though the piece is being 
devised. I write this with a knowledge of the fact that distinctions between 
`devising' and `directing' are awkward and confused, and that the idea of devising 
is much more commonly associated with work where no text exists as a dramatic 
blueprint for performance than in instances such as ours, where the text, being all 
we had to start with, was imbued with prominence. 37 
Chapter Two: Part Two 
11-1-99 
As has been stated in the introduction to this thesis, the approach undertaken in 
this particular example of practice-led research is diachronic, in that the written 
elements of the submitted thesis are moving through time in a similar way to the 
practical element of At Last Sight. Accordingly, this chapter moves now some six 
weeks forward ... a new phase 
if not quite a new chapter. 
Many changes have happened and the performance piece 
is in certain ways 
unrecognisable from the work of late November. 
It should be stressed, to anybody 
who might be reading this work from a non-educational workplace or perspective, 
127 
that, in Higher Education at least, studies are suspended for some considerable 
time during the weeks either side of Christmas. As such, an extended period of 
inactivity is common within modules which are run across semesters rather than 
terms. One of the immediately identifiable areas of change is that of autobiography 
of At Last Sight as a project which is driven by my own desires for a work 
which leads towards catharsis for the artist. 
If at the start of the module my intentions were geared towards the performative 
articulation of `truth', of selected aspects of my own history given voice through 
the mouths and movements of others, then that desire has been diluted by the 
group's emerging `ownership' of the work. This is appropriate, in that the process 
of making the work is itself now some four months old, and that is without taking 
the process of writing the text of At Last Sight into consideration. Accordingly, a 
high degree of that which we can call catharsis has already been achieved. 
The group has two new performers, Anke Sauthof, a full-time Level One student in 
the Drama Department, and Laurent Ruggeri, a French exchange student who is 
enrolled at Chester until June 1999.1 offer here an explanation as to why, and how, 
the group has been enlarged, in the hope that in writing thus something of the 
ongoing `openness' of the work may emerge. 
14-1-99 
Anke Sauthof featured in a practical presentation for a Level One module, which I 
attended in this instance in my capacity as a second marker. During the 
presentation Anke spoke in German. I asked her afterwards if she would be 
interested in helping one of the cast, Chris Roberts, with some German translation 
128 
- there is a section of the work now (it does not appear in the first text) where 
Chris describes, in German, a film by the director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As 
Anna Garnett speaks some sections of the work in French, I also asked Anke to 
invite Laurent to a morning's rehearsal. As Anke and Laurent watched the 
performers, I found myself observing them as much as I was attending to the seven 
members of the cast. I spoke afterwards about this, to the original cast in the first 
instance, in private. I explained that the device of having the `on-stage' activity 
framed by a man and a woman who were in no way referred to by the `cast' 
opened the work up to a series of readings which were at once wider and more 
compelling than before. The group members had also been aware of this and, 
withough there was a degree of hesitancy over the issue of adding a new dimension 
to the piece at such a relatively late stage, there was a unanimous feeling that Anke 
and Laurent should be invited to participate in the project. 38 
The inclusion of native French and German speakers gives me a number of 
opportunities, although these break down into two choices ... choices which will 
doubtless fragment into less obviously exclusive areas. Initially then, I can either 
opt for a fluency in the delivery of sections in `foreign' languages, or I can decide 
to leave mute the two members of the group best able to communicate verbally 
with the audience. In Liege, the audience will be of predominantly French, Flemish, 
English or German origin. If this idea seems perverse , it 
is only in keeping with a 
performance wherein lies are offered up as truth and vice versa. As yet - and this is 
the project's sole consistency -I am unsure as to the ways in which these two new 
roles will develop. 
129 
I have asked Sarah Skelton to 'speak' her sections of text in sign language. This 
stemmed from an overheard conversation between Sarah and Elizabeth Hague, 
where Sarah happened to mention the fact that she is reasonably familiar with sign. 
I asked her to attempt a run-through using only her hands to communicate and I 
was surprised to see how effective it seemed ... although I am not sure what I mean 
by 'effective' when I do not really know much at all about the `effect' I am seeking 
to achieve. There is a worry here. I have arrived at that point, familiar to all who 
have directed work for performance (and perhaps to anybody involved in the 
creation of art-product, regardless of genre) where I can no longer `see' the work 
other than in relation to previous rehearsals. Nothing plays as new anymore, 
precisely because we are at the stage where rehearsals have shifted, both inevitably I-- - --- 
and inexorably, fi7om a process of creation to one of repetition. It may be the case 
that I am embracing and subsequently adopting this 'new idea' simply by dint of its 
newness. Watching it on a run-through worked for me, but I have long ago lost, if 
ever I had it at all, the ability to see the work through unfamiliar eyes. Accordingly, 
the perspective from which I watch is not compatible with that of a member of an 
audience coming fresh to the work. 
16-1-98 
If I am unable to regard the work with anything approximating to an 'outside eye' 
then I am no longer sure of my role. This feeling of increasing redundancy at 
precisely those moments when my knowledge of the work should (? ) make me 
most necessary, and useful is not a new one. I have experienced similar states whilst 
working on previous projects; however, in the past I have always seemed able to 
draw on something which provided me with a location from which to stand outside 
and view the work. Here, because I am working 
in a way which is new to me, I 
130 
have no responses to trust other than my own. For example, the issue of lies and 
truth, which could be said to have initially prompted the work, is one which I am 
coming to with no theatrical experiences to draw from. In effect,, the 'rules' of the 
performance are being drawn up alongside the piece and I have no way, other than 
by a series of estimations, of knowing the extent to which the choices I am making 
will hold good. 
This feeling is a tacit recognition of the ways in which the making of At Last Sight 
has been approached. I have utilised a way of working which has allowed me to 
'improvise' throughout the process. What is not meant here is improvisation in 
terms either of the Mike Leigh approach or of that made widespread by the 
publication of Keith Johnstone's 1981 book, Impro. '9 Rather, it is an approach 
towards directing which has allowed for the consideration of any and all 
interventions and shifts in emphases during the work's construction. This has been 
characterised as another kind of control towards the achieving of relevant form and 
not as a wilful and arbitrary procedure. 
20-1-99 
Relevance is measured from two points of view. Firstly, in as far as it fulfils my 
own acknowledged need not to work from a pre-determined plan but to create 
'intuitively' throughout the making of the performance piece, and secondly, to be 
able to effectively communicate this approach in written 
form. In these ways, we 
can say that the practical aspect of the research work undertaken 
is experimental, 
in as far as intuitions are tested out and remoulded in relationship 
to those tests 
(which is, in fact, the very stuff of rehearsal) in order to create appropriate 
solutions for performance. It is comparative as well as 
theoretical inasmuch as 
131 
certain o servations are made and conclusions are reached (as a consequence of 
these comparisons) about the nature of performance practice within the work of 
one individual practitioner (myself) and how this may subsequently be read as a 
valid part of the practice as a whole. 
Therefore, certain conditions which remained - or sought to remain - constant 
throughout the research have proven themselves too slippery, elusive and 
restrictive to maintain. Two examples serve to establish this point. Initially, for 
instance, and notwithstanding notions of heuristic methodologies, the research was 
intended to remain predominantly retrospective. The retrospection was intended to 
function inasmuch as I was operating, at the time, with the thought that this would 
avoid the situation wherein the creative work undertaken would be pre-emptively 
sullied by analytical concerns. It is also true (and it makes an obvious connection) 
that an early and unsustainable distinction was made between the activity of 
making and that of reflecting upon that making. These two issues were clearly 
interrelated and interdependent, but nonetheless were believed to have their own 
unique identities. What has actually happened is that the research has managed to 
become intertwined with the practice. There is no distinction: the process of 
thinking and writing, talking and doing feeds off itself without, as yet, any sign of 
exhaustion. 
Not only has it emerged that it is impossible for solitary reflection on one rehearsal 
to do anything other than inform work on the next, 
it has, with the benefit n--f 
hindsight, become crucial that it this cyclical pattern is encouraged, given space 
and licence to evolve. 
1? 2 
23-1-99 
Because research within the practice of performance, of practice as research, is a 
relatively new discipline, it has been necessary during this last year, to develop an 
effective means of carrying out the analysis needed to document the work. These 
means have borrowed, at least in part, from observations of non-theatre based 
disciplines 
. 
40 Notwithstanding its scarcity within the field of performance, the 
relevance of using an individual's own practice as a means towards an 
understanding of how artists work is not in itself new. It may, indeed, be the only 
way for an artist to examine the situation of the making of practice. For how else 
can the observer know more than he or she observes? Clark Moustakis found this 
to be the case in his study of loneliness as a subject, precisely within his own 
situation as the lonely subjeCt, 41 in much the same way that Igor Stravinsky's series 
of published lectures, Poetics of Music, contains the following progressive 
disclaimer 
What I intend to say to you will not constitute an 
impersonal exposition of general data, but will be an 
exploration of music as I conceive it. Nor will this 
explanation be any less objective for being the fi7uit 
of my own experience and personal observations, 
42 
Stravinsky continues by saying that because he tests his observations through 
his 
nwn-- expenences,, he is not offering opinions so much as findings, which, 
accordingly, are as valid for him as any others. Stravinsky's observations are 
echoed by the airtist, David Smith, who wntes 
I make no attempt to generalise dispassionately. 
My 
statements are coloured and prejudiced 
by my own 
concepts and experiences. 
43 
133 
We could say that whereas music, as Stravinsky's paradigm, occurs through and 
organises time, David Smith's sculptures exists in space, organising that space 
through material and process. As a hybrid form, performance can be seen to 
function at the interface between sound and object, between time and space, 
duration and location. Something of the difficulties of the two extremes are there, 
just as much of the licence en oyed by each form is present in the ephemerality of i 
live performance. I write this because the work that At Last Sight is 'becoming' is 
starting to 'feel' like it should be an installation. The fact remains, if only by dint of 
its inclusion at a festival of theatre and in a traditional theatre space, that the work 
will resist this pull, remaining a piece of work which moves through time whilst 
qt, q . 
, aying firmly rooted on the theatrical stage. 
24-1-99 
However, I will speak, if only very briefly, about why the pull towards installation 
is a strong one. Firstly, we know that theatre deals with metaphorical space- the 
stage masquerades as a drawing room, a battlefield, a palace; just as the theatre 
lights are signifiers of (an)other time, atmosphere and location. In short, the 
theatrical space seeks (usually) to invest its on-stage world with values and 
features of elsewhere. Even when the work is an overt reaction against naturalism, 
we are still likely to witness the invocation of 'other'. Peter Brook takes us, or at 
least our minds, to Muna's chambers. Bertolt Brecht takes us to Arturo Ui's 
dressing room, Steven Berkoff to a mythical East End of London out of 
Sophocles' Thebes. Installation, on the other hand, tends to utilise its own actual 
space, drawing on both the historical/cultural ambience of the 
location and its 
concrete physicality. In this, there exists a type of 
'truth' in installation. A truth 
that is more or less denied to theatre. 
For whereas an installation can move 
134 
towards the highly theatrical a theatre piece is hemmed in by its own artifice ... the 
truth can go on to lie, but the lie can never then tell truth. 44 
There is another, less philosophical and more pragmatic reason why the notion of 
developing At Last Sight into a work of installation is so tempting. Theatre 
requires and 'feeds off variations in pace,, rhythm, mood and meaning, amongst a 
host of other phenomena. The spectator is taken on a journey by the creator(s) of 
the theatrical product. The nature of At Last Sight is that it has developed its own 
somnambulistic pace ... 
its inner energies are overtly contemplative rather than 
dynamic. Re-working, or developing the piece into an installation would allow for 
the continuance of a lethargic pace inasmuch as differences in the receptive 
experience of the work would be determined by the spectators' activity of moving 
physically from one space to the next. The idea of turning a theatre into a gallery, 
at least in terms of experience and temporary function, is tempting, although I am 
aware that the festival organisers in Liege are strongly inclined towards the 
presentation of product which is fonnulaic in its use of space. 
25-1-99 
At Last Sight will maintain its theatrical essence, which is not the same as saying 
that the emerging interest in subversion via instaflation is something which cannot 
impact on the work. If nothing else has been learned by this stage 
it is that we 
cannot delete from the mind, and that all thoughts and 
ideas of the performance 
will inform the performance in one way or another. 
Indeed, we could say that the 
chief value of this thesis is that it is seeking to trace and 
document these very 
changes of mind as and when they occur. 
Any awkwardness in the reading, 
therefore, is a mirroring of this process of making. 
135 
26-1-99 
This is research on my own processes. It has excluded other approaches and is not 
concerned with the making of comparisons between my own and the practice of 
others. The research of perfonnance practice does not lend itself to statistical 
averages, as the practice, is designed uniquely in each case. One of the guiding 
principles of the research, and it is one which has remained throughout, is the 
notion of appropriateness. Of research which is not carried out primarily for its 
own sake., but for the development of research itself, of a way of researching, 
which is relevant to the wider practice and understanding of performance. This 
implies that the research will be at once unique - different to that which might be 
carried out by somebody else, elsewhere, looking at different work - at the same 
time as it is capable of dissemination amongst my colleagues and peers. 
A reading of 'explanatory" works from artists practising across a range of media 
ry is ascribed a differing value acre-sts. that the use of aesthetics or any kind of theo 
at the time of creation depending upon the working practices of the artist. 
A 
feature of much postmodem work, for example, is the relationship with theory 
through practice. 45 With a number of other approaches, although theory 
is clearly 
regarded as having a valuable role to play in post-creation analysis, 
it is not always 
deemed useful in creation. 46 As Claude Debussy was wont to say, 
(Aheories do not 
make works of art ) -, 47 and Picasso, famously, refuted all notions 
that his art product 
was driven in any way by a theoretically motivated mind . 
48 
My own experiences, 
however, suggest a broadly postmodern line; which 
is not the same thing as stating 
that my work on At Last Sight amounts to the creation of a set 
of rules or code of 
6 1) 
practice w. ch would be true for all practitioners and for all time. The subject of 
theatre may be taught in this way, but it is seldom practised like it. 
What is meant here is that the theatricalisation of theory has become a feature of 
my theoretical reflection on theatre. During the early stages of this project, my own 
process of working might, with hindsight, have been described as lateral rather 
than linear. I was seeking to address a number of aspects of constructing the 
discrete elements of performance in order that they might be later brought together 
into one final 'whole'. In later months, as the work developed, these processes 
evolved into a procedure wherein each of the processes was combined. 
Aut. ohistoriography of the writer 
Autohistorigraphy of the performers 
Information structure/fictional narrative 
Actions (performer is) 
Re-enactions (performer as) 
Lies 
Truth 
Causality 
Dialogue 
Description 
Determination 
Accident 
Consequence 
Originality 
Quotation 
Space 
4-2-99 
=At Last Sight 
The path of inquiry to this point has by no means been in a straight line. Rather, 
it 
has been comprised of a series of exploratory meanderings by means of which 
I 
have acquired valuable expenences - and continue so to 
do - as well as gaining an 
increased understanding of my own artistic personality 
during the Process of 
making a work of performance. 'Artistic personality 
1) may be at once the clumsiest 
1 37 
and Most pretension-laden of terms, but it is offered here as one which seeks to 
encompass something of the distinction between the T of everyday activity and 
the '1' as observed during the making of art. The edges are blurred and indistinct, 
and ideas of art 'Intrude' at tiMes when the mind is at its least expectant or inviting. 
7-2-99 
The fact that the inquiry has not followed a straight line has been a consequence of 
my undertaking of rehearsal as a process of creation rather than repetition. Tl-ýs has 
brought with it a rejection of certain lines of inquiry alongside the picking up of 
new ones, and dealing with these rejections and attractions will form much of the 
content of subsequent chapters. Relatively early changes were apparent in my 
rejection, or my move away from, initial ideas about autobiography, in favour of a 
more complex negotiation of truth and lies within an equally complex written 
frame. A new language was beginning to evolve which brought with it a dialogue 
between myself and the problems that I had created, both for myself and for the 
group - and, by wider implication, for any spectators of the work. 
11-2-99 
Where choices have been made, they are not offered here as solutions for every 
practitioner working on every project. My earlier comments sought to distance 
myself from such a claim (or charge) and I can only reiterate that to suggest a 
series of all-encompassing answers would be misleading in terms of understanding 
the practice of making performance. That which is documented in the pages of this 
thesis is no more or less than an articulation of the individual choices which have 
come to function as elements within a composed and evolving structure, which this 
practitioner has formed for this project. What 
is chosen is up to the individual, but 
I38 
those choices are controlled by the language and assumptions which every 
practitioner holds in relation to the practice they are undertaking. 
19-2-99 
The performance in Liege is only days away. At Last Sight is more or less ready. 
By 'ready' I mean that the work seems to be possessed of a structure which Will 
merit the attention of its spectators. I have written a programme sheet, translated 
into German and French in addition to the English original, and have arrived at a 
runmng o er of events, or 'scenes, although the existence of any sort of ordering 
of events is emphatically denied by the programme (Appendix 5). The spoken text 
at this stage is included here as Appendix 6, along with the 'original' At Last Sight. 
The performative structure of the work now reads in the following way. 
The performers are already located within the perforniance space as the audience 
enters. The performers are drinking, smoking and chatting to each other. They in 
no way ignore the presence of the spectators. The space Itself bears traces of 
previous (and fictional) presentations of the work. A senes of chalked lines on the 
floor, smudged and drawn over; overturned chairs, a battered leather suitcase, a 
basin of water and an unmade bed; an upstage flat, with a number of Polaroid 
photographs pinned to it; full and empty bottles of wine on the floor. The 
performers are removing these 'traces' during the opening few moments as the 
spectators find their seats. At a given moment, the cast members remove their 
shoes- the men are dressed in dark suits, the women in blue jeans and white shirts. 
Glenn Robertson alters the lights ftom an onstage board, taking down the house 
lights and bringing up a cold blue wash. Sarah Skelton explains to the audience that 
she will 'speak' in sign language for much of the performance. 
The bed is moved 
1 )9 
and its new position is marked with chalk. Chris Roberts speaks an introduction 
into a microphone, claiming that the work is his own story. Glenn Robertson 
refutes this,, claiming the events to be personal to him, Sarah Robertson asks the 
spectators to attend to her rather than any others. Sarah Skelton is placed on the 
bed and a chalk outline is drawn around her body. Laurent Ruggeri and Anke 
Sauthof 'frame' the on-stage activity without ever becoming a part of it. 
Sarah Robertson speaks her 'Betrayal' text, which leads into Andrew Proudfoot's 
words relating to the diary, the unprocessed film, the vial of seawater and the 
playing cards. Elizabeth Hague tells the audience that the work is somehow akin to 
the Italian word pentimento, in that it suggests both the opportunity for a second 
seeing and a bleeding through of the once-hidden past. Anna Garnett questions the 
origins of the diary. Chris Roberts touches Sarah Skelton in a manner which 
suggests that he is taking personal liberties with her within the safe context of 
nerformance. Sarah Skelton tells us that all of his words have been spoken before. 
'These are the facts', she says 'and this: this is the story. ) 
A crime-scene, perhaps a murder-scene is established, a Polaroid photograph of a 
woman lying on the bed is taken and pinned to the flat. Chris Roberts moves into 
the audience, identifying two spectators as characters in a film by Werner Rainer 
Fassbinder. Sarah Skelton moves suddenly, altering the perspective of the set. 
Andrew Proudfoot stops her, plies her with glasses of wine and asks her to 
in, the colour of the remember their own past experiences- a hotel room slept 
walls. Sarah Robertson pushes Andrew, calling him by his name and telling him 
that he's too close. Elizabeth Hague likens it all to a scene in an invented 
film by 
140 
David Lynch. The women collapse to the floor and the men arrange themselves in 
pornographic positions on the bed. Sarah Robertson takes a photograph of them. 
Two sections of recorded sound are played: one is of American actors, a male and 
a female, from the Hal Hartley film Simple Men, the other is of two Japanese 
actresses from his film Flirt. Andrew touches Anna's body. The men remove 
sections of her shirt, secreting them in pockets, a forensics bag and the suitcase. 
Glenn and Elizabeth play out a meeting between two characters who choose to call 
each other by fictitious names-, Sarah Skelton and Anna Garnett describe the action 
over a microphone. Andrew is subjected to an interrogation by the rest of the cast, 
wine is thrown over him, his head is held under the bowl of water. 
Anna lies on the bed and speaks some words in French. Chris Roberts describes a 
scene from an unmade Fassbinder film., a pornographic film. Chris describes himself 
and Andrew as identical twins. Andrew and Anna play out a scene where she 
dresses in his clothes and leaves him. Glenn returns her to the room. Sarah Skelton 
speaks some lines ftom The Liberated Orgasm. The bed is moved and a scene 
is 
played out between Glenn, Chris, Andrew, Sarah Skelton, Sarah Robertson and 
Elizabeth Hague- they kiss and switch partners. They consume alcohol rapidly. 
Anna sits up and tells the spectators that she is about to move 
her lips in 
synchronisation to a recorded song. She does this, as Andrew and 
Glenn dismantle 
the set around her. Andrew and Glenn leave the constructed set, and 
Chris 
attempts to manipulate the remaining women 
into characters from another 
Fassbinder film. They refuse to move, until, whispering lines from the original text, 
they vacate the space slowly. Chris continues 
to describe the Fassbinder scene as 
the lights are taken down by Andrew. 
141 
20-2-99 
The question of how this structure has been reached is complex, it amounts to a 
blend of detailed planning, desperation, intuition, theory and theatricality that 
denies any intricate form of documentation. To document in detail the reasons 
behind every performative decision and the ways in which those decisions were 
translated into actions would be a literally endless task. What I can do,, is offer my 
own reading of At Last Sight, as it now stands, and in so doing make an attempt at 
rationalising some of the choices made. In this, I am, whether by instinct or design, 
highlighting those choices which I have come to regard as 'key'. 
21-2-99 
The opening image bearing the traces of previous performances is intended to 
signal to spectators the idea that the work is cyclical, that the performers' personas 
are somehow locked into an endless repetition of the actions about to be presented. 
it is an obvious illusion, and as such, is dissimilar, at least in degree, to some of the 
less easily discernible lies to follow. It feels like a hedging of too many bets to 
write now about my "ideal spectator'. To suggest ways in w1fich I would most like 
At Last Sight to be read, having written so many words throughout this thesis 
about both the practical and ethical difficulties of imposing meaning on those who 
receive the work, would be both contradictory and unhelpful. Notwithstanding 
this, it would be dishonest of me to state that the work, and not least the opening 
scene,, is not designed to communicate a number of features which I regard as vital 
to the success of the piece. 
There are issues at work here such as the identities of the performers. 
They are 
dressed in clothes which function overtly as 'costume- the men 
in similar though 
142 
not identical suits, the women in blue jeans and white shirts. At the same time as 
the clothes are, in themselves, commonplace, the consistency denies any suggestion 
of the accidental or the 'everyday'. There is the possibility here of a confused or 
collapsed identity, of a sort of team which exists without a precise uniformity. 
Spectators are being asked to assume that the three male performers are 
manifestations of the same persona in the same way that the four females are also 
functioning as 'one I woman. The males are referred to here as 'three' and the 
females as 'four'. This is because Laurent Ruggeri and Anke Sauthof (inasmuch as 
they are kept separate and isolated from the action, at the same time as they are 
costumed in a similar way to the seven students being assessed) function as less 
fragmented aspects of the couple to whom the information structure of At Last 
Sight refers. Although it is unlikely that any of the spectators would pick up on this 
at this very early stage. 
The performers are consuming wine and some are smoking cigarettes. Two 
functions are In operation here. On one level, the alcohol and tobacco are acting as 
sedatives, calming the cast's nerves. On another, it creates an early indication of 
the idea of having an off-stage attitude whilst still plainly and deliberately on view: 
of presenting that which appears to be no more or less than a group of young 
people waiting for a performance to commence ... which 
is what they are. Eye 
contact between performers and spectators is easily made and held, although the 
cast members are free to look away at will. There is none of the pulling of focus 
which is common to performances where the audience are regarded as invisible to 
the cast. The items of furmture, the chairs, the bed and the wash 
basin, are 
presented as simple, functional objects. There 
is the appearance here of a random 
14) 
nature to their plac I ing, alongside a (seeming) casualness in the ways in which the 
performers move the objects from place to place, which indicates a deliberate 
unwillingness to foreground the differing aesthetic qualities of the seven wooden 
chairs 
This is at once both accurate and imprecise. The set has been designed, and all of 
its elements have been selected. There is nothing seen that has not been either 
deliberately placed or left exposed. However, within these parameters of design the 
students are free to improvise. An overturned chair is set upright in an approximate 
place, just as the bed is only ever roughly where I want (and expect) it to be. 
The chalk lines suggest a number of things. Impermanence, in that the earlier lines 
, are no longer clear ... the nature of chalk 
is that its lines are fleeting. There is an 
absence of illusion, brought about by the choosing of indicated lines rather than 
., 
and a feeling of police forensics ... to 
be made overt when the 'body' solid walls, 
of the woman is outlined in chalk. 
22-2-99 
The set is not without its own aesthetic quality. It is functional, inasmuch as 
nothing is there which is not used, but it is also possessed of much that is visually 
pleasing. The dimensions feel right. The space remains open behind the set, 
allowing the spectator to see that the set is no more important than the space 
around it. This contributes to the overall sense of artifice and construction that has 
been a constant feature of rehearsals. The set is thus seen (or designed to 
be seen) 
as an integral aspect of the performance, rather than the 
dressed space in which the 
performance occurs. In this it is a development of my interest 
in installation. The 
144 
set is a metaphorical space in that it is designed to look like 'somewhere else', but 
it is an actual space in that it foregrounds its own striving for the status of other. 
There are no particularly special lighting effects, no clothes which are designed to 
catch the light or engender spectatonal awe for the costumier's art. 
23-2-99 
The discipline of At Last Sight is not to be found in the creation of 'beautiful 
moments' so much as in a resistance to that very temptation. And beauty does 
indeed offer a tempting path to pursue, the slowly fading light, the chiarosciiro of 
the only half revealed, the ubiquity of the swirling mist. It all seems too easy, too 
pat, which in itself may not be good enough reason to resist, But if all that beauty 
will permit is the guarantee of at least a partial approval from the spectators - 
something along the lines of "I didn't Eke it very much, but I thought the set was 
gorgeous" - then beauty is a place I do not want to go. I do not know the extent to 
which this attitude stems from pride or perversity. I certainly do not want to deny 
'beautiful moments' through some high-handed disregard of aesthetics. Like most 
people, I would rather look at a flower than a weed. Perhaps the nearest analogy is 
to speak of a weed. If that is the chosen subject then I have no wish to depict it as 
other than it is. I have no wish to light it in such a way that it gives the illusion of 
being a flower. So, the opening of At Last Sight eschews a striving for that which 
might be termed as 'false beauty'. Because the audience in Liege will be made up 
of those who are relatively experienced in making and seeing theatre, 
I trust that 
they will recognise this absence as a choice rather than an unknowing 
disregard. 
145 
In discussing beauty, 
.1 need also to mention the cast. The students are presenting 
themselves to be seen and as such are subject to the same aesthetic concerns as the 
set. This does not mean that I shall be discussing the levels of attractiveness as they 
apply to each member of the group. The photographs provided within this thesis 
afford readers the opportunity to make their own judgements. What I can say is 
that the youth of the group is important. On one level, they seem too young to 
convey the narrative sense of At Last Sight with any conviction. The greater their 
conviction in rehearsals,, the greater the gulf between their obvious youth and the 
more middle aged melancholia of the material. This does not alter the fact that to 
observe them moving in the space is pleasing. This is so not because they are more 
or less attractive than other performers of their age, but because the world of At 
Last Sight is so at odds with the world of the group. Their 'beauty' then (if youth 
is a type of beauty in itself) provides a counterpoint to the darkness of the themes. 
Their unadorned beauty is fetishised by the improbability of people so young 
having seen so much. At Last Sight is revealed in this way as a mourning for the 
very youth that the performers so innocently embody. 49 
When Sarah Skelton speaks to the audience, saying the following, she is creating a 
further tension between the 'real' and the staged, at the same time as she is 
foregrounding herself as a subject to be seen 
Good evening. My name is Sarah. Sarah Skelton. I'm 
twenty years old. A little nervous, a little bit scared. I'm 
going to be speaking for much of the next hour in sign 
language. I can speak. It's just a theatrical device. A 
way of making words visual without inventing action. 
146 
The utilisation of sign language is an invitation to the audience not only to look at 
Sarah but also to read her actions as decorative rather than functional. The sign 
language caveat indicates right from the outset that this is not going to be an 
illusionistic performance. Not only will there be very little by way of 'sleight of 
hand',, but any moments approaching this state will be exposed. There is to be no 
hiding here behind a false theatricality. That seems to be at once the nub and the 
paradox of the piece, or at least of the interests which have driven me to this point. 
For if I am indeed interested, as I was at the start of this process, in the 
presentation of some kind of discernible 'truth', then theatre would appear to be an 
unsuitable medium in which to work. Theatre, after all, uses the words 'honesty, 
'integrity' and 'truth' relentlessly whilst at the same time trading in falsehood. With 
fine art - and I am thinking here of work which traces a route from Carl Andre and 
Jeff Koons back to Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp - the object is the object 
itself in the first instance and is something other only by reference or inference. In 
theatre, the performer is most regularly regarded as referring to other in the first 
instance and the seff only when that self is pushed to the fore. The telling of lies to 
the spectators about the students' relationships with each other is one way of 
focusing attention on the selves of the performers. 
The spectators are informed that all iAine consumed in the performance is 
our bottles of non-alcoholic grape juice, Laenume, ly alcoholic. In fact, there will be f 
decanted into bottles and placed amongst the ten containing standard red or white 
wine. Because a number of bottles are being opened with corkscrews as 
the 
audience enters the space I am assuming that all of the 
bottles will be regarded as 
not tampered with and 'real'. This 
does two things. It Introduces, or adds to, the 
147 
idea that unplanned for things may happen, that the performers themselves are not 
going to be entirely in control of the events to come and that directorial control is 
being surrendered to chance. It also creates an attention on the 'real'. 
24-2-99 
On one level, the barrier between watcher and watched is broken down by the 
performers relating directly to and with members of the audience. There are three 
things that this can achieve. 
1 -. It can create intimacy. 
2: It can create embarrassment. 
3: It can subvert the notion of the spectator as a darkened and unseen observer. 
25-2-99 
want the intimacy without the embarrassment, and am hoping that none of the 
spectators are made to feel awkward by the performers' retuming of their gaze. As 
ever with performance, one only ever reafly sees the work when it is presented to 
an audience. As a director, it is difficult to gauge with any accuracy the ways in 
which an audience will respond. It is , in many ways, the central challenge of 
directing performance: to make the work one's own at the same time as it is given 
away. Performing At Last Sight only once in Liege means that the piece cannot be 
reconfigured in-situ as it were, with revisions made on the days following evening 
performances. The next presentation after Liege will be at University College 
Chester, where the spectators have an existing knowledge of and relationship with 
the cast. What this means is that the members of the cast will have to make 
immediate assessments of the spectatorial response in Liege and then adjust their 
performances accordingly. 1, personally, will have no opportunity to make changes. 
This is not to make an assumption that the work will need to 
be altered in any way, 
148 
so much as it is a recognition that all work presented to an audience is always a 
form of work in progress. 
There are sections of the performance, particularly between Elizabeth Hague and 
Glenn Robertson and Anna Garnett and Andrew Proudfoot respectively, where the 
action is overtly filmic. The sections of text spoken here are played as dialogue 
rather than description. The perfonmng here is broadly naturalistic. This is 
intended to create a fusion of empathy and distance, so that at precisely those 
moments when the spectators are being invited into the work via a recognisable 
and consistent style there is also an exaggerated feeling of falseness. The 'acting' is 
no more or less than that and the empathetic nature of the playing is undercut. The 
theatrical naturalism reads as false by dint of the naturalness of all that surrounds it. 
It is important to me that these scenes are delivered in this way. If little of my own 
experienced narrative remains in At Last Sight then at least an idea of love as 
something which is in many ways formulaic and already always rehearsed still 
exists. 
The fact that the two scenes are concerned with a meeting and a separation is 
intended to both frame the relationship and exemplify the idea of influence. The 
courtship and the parting are seen almost as ntes of passage, of behaviour which 
is 
so modified by on-screen influences as to have become quasi-ritualistic. 
Relationships become then quotations of previous relationships ... one's own and 
others, which have been expenenced by proxy. 
In this way, At Last Sight functions 
ormation structure, as an indication of relationships per se at the same 
time as its inf 
its content, deals with the specifics of my own relationships. 
149 
Ultimately, my own directorial and writerly intentions will be mediated by the 
responses of the work's spectators. We know weU enough, as this thesis has 
already stated, that the act of presentation will always convey more than it intends, 
and that the very idea of the interpretation of performance is as complex a form of 
communication as one could possibly enter into. 'O At Last Sight is moving here 
from one set of complexities into another. 
27-2-99 
D- 
Reading and writing the experience of seeing At Last Sight in the company of 
others, and of taking the work forwards out of that, is the place this thesis now 
moves towards. 
150 
' The Department of Drama at University College Chester has a full-time staff of seven lecturers 
and one full-time technician. No part-time members of staff direct assessed student productions. 2 See Appendix 4. 
3 For an indication of this commencement point, see examples of correspondence between my 
supervisor and myself in Appendix 5. 
4 By 'popular' I mean that the productions sold out on every night that they played. 
Notwithstanding the fact that the bulk of any audience for curriculum -driven work is invariably 
made up of students in the department, work that is difficult to read finds it hard to draw a crowd 
at Chester. Mojo and Road made no particular demands on their audience; the work had a 'feel 
good' quality and it was this, I suspect, that resulted in the ticket sales. 
5 In this, my approach to making work is antithetical to Elizabeth Lecompte's processes with the 
Wooster Group, where she urges the performers on to greater speed whenever she gets bored with 
rehearsals. See Savran, D. Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. UMI Research Press, 
Michigan, 1986. 
' Clark Moustakis' contribution to the field of heuristic research methodology is considerable, 
and his writings have informed this thesis no less than they have impacted on lecturing 
undertaken by this writer at University College Chester. In addition to Moustakis' paper in J. F. T. 
Bugental's Challenges of Humanistic Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967, other 
influential works read in the period leading up to the undertaking of this particular research 
project include Moustakis, C. Loneliness. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1961 and 
Moustakis, C. Loneliness and Love. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972. The 
three texts, taken together, will provide any reader of this thesis with a thorough overview of 
heuristic research processes and will articulate and contextualise the area in ways which this 
writer cannot hope to match. 
7A consequence of this is that I feel I need to provide clues as to the potential shape of the work 
when I would rather let the project evolve in its own way. It is at this point that I am beginning to 
recall some of the negative aspects of working with a group. The fact that they care enough about 
the work to care about the way that it will (probably) be made is reassuring, but their collective 
need to know is out of sync with my own. 
8 Despite being strongly advised by the head of department not to enter into any canvassing of 
students for specific projects, students have been 'targeted' by staff on more than one occasion. 
9 Reinelt, J& Roach, J. Critical Theory and Performance. Michigan University Press., 1992 
'0 ibid. p. 109. 
" Pierce, C. S. Writings on Semiotics. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London, 
1991. pp. 47-54 
12 Lechte, L. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. Routledge, London and New York, 1994. p. 150. 
" See Pierce (199 1). 
14 Derrida, J. Structure, Sign and Play. University of Chicago Press, 1978. p. 289. 
15 ibid. p. I 11 
16 Martin, J. Voice in Modern Theatre. Routledge, London, 1991. p. 119. 
17 For an analysis of the ways in which the two approaches differ and overlap see 
Sarup, M. Post- 
Structuralism and Postmodernism. Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hertfordshire, 1993. 
18 1 am using 'we' here as a reference to spectators, critics and readers of this thesis, rather 
than 
the 'we' of the At Last Sight group. In fact, I am not convinced at this stage of the project 
that the 
members of the group share these views at all. That 
it will comprise a way of working does not 
mean that it will create a way of thinking. 
19 Simms, S. Postmodern Thought. Icon Books, 1998. p. 95. 
20 Lechte, L, 1994. p. 234. 
2' ibid. p. 235.0 1 of 22 Douglass, B and Moustakis, C. 'Heuristic Inquiry: 
The internal search to know. J urna 
Humanistic Psychology. Vol. 25(3). 1993. pp. 39-40. 
23 Barthes, R. Camera Lucida. Vintage Books, 1982. 
24 
ibid. P. 5. 
25 Reinelt & Roach, 1992. p. 354. 
151 
26 Production work feeds into one's teaching, just as teaching feeds into subsequent productions. 
The relationship is, in my experience, rich and rewarding. What distinguishes the approach being 
taken with At Last Sight is that the processes are being made subject to analysis, which is both 
immediate and reflective. Connections that might otherwise be made casually are, in this case, 
demands I am making on myself. 
2, States, B in Reinelt & Roach, 1992. p. 371. 
28November I Vh, 1998. 
29For an appraisal of directing within a variety of educational spheres see Rae, K. A Better 
Direction. Gulbenkian Press, London, 1991. 
30 1 know this from my experience of directing Chris Roberts in a production of Road, and this 
has been confirmed in rehearsals on At Last Sight. 
31 There are many texts available which deal with naturalistic performance, both as technique and 
movement. As useful as any is Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 1: Realism and 
Naturalism. Styan, J. L, Cambridge University Press, 1981. 
32 As a non-vocational programme of study there are no provisions for specialist voice classes as 
University College Chester. 
33Rae (1991) 
34 These pefformative modes seem to cover all of the choices we have at our disposal. There may 
be more than the six I name, but I am not aware of them. At this stage, I am encouraging the cast 
to look more closely at the descriptive and the actual, rather than dropping 'naturally' into 
imitation and expression. The students at ChesteThave been influenced too heavily by the maxim 
'don't tell me, show me', and they are uncomfortable at this stage with verbal description in lieu 
of imitative action. I am not arguing the students into a new hierarchy here, so much as asking 
them to recognise that the conventions they have been working through previously are themselves 
subject to hierarchical imposition. 
35 Glenn Robertson works evenings and weekends in the university bar, as well as captaining the 
football team, which necessitates attendance at two weekly training sessions and competitive 
midweek matches; Sarah Skelton works at a retail outlet in Chester ... the 
hours are erratic, often 
covering full Saturdays and Sundays; Chris Roberts works for Virgin Cinemas ... this 
is shift 
work, often taking place at precisely those times when a group would normally rehearse outside 
the usual hours of study; Liz Hague is a paid swimming instructor, running children's classes on 
Saturday and Sunday afternoons. These circumstances, which arc increasingly common to 
students in higher education, taken alongside theiTcommitments to otheTmodules and their need 
for a degree of genuine leisure time mean that the opportunities available for group-rehearsal are 
limited. 
36 Some members of the group feel that we are spending too much time talking and not enough 
doing. They feel, understandably according to their experiences of other projects, that an 
understanding of why they are working the way that they are is no substitute for rehearsal. Chief 
among the students feeling this way is Anna Garnett, but she is not alone. It is not a question of 
mutiny ... the group 
is still working well, but they are concerned that their marks for 
performance will be compromised by a reduction in the hours they feel we should be spending 
learning lines and blocking movements. I can understand their concerns ... although 
I do not 
share them. 
37 See Oddey (1997). 
38 We made this decision without ever having seen Laurent perform. Anke has been seen 
by me 
in the Level I presentation, but this comprised no more on her part than standing still and 
speaking. 
39 Mike Leigh's use of improvisation as a means towards the creation of character and plot 
has 
been evidenced most emphatically in his critically acclaimed productions 
for stage and screen. A 
critical referencing of his processes can be found in Clements, 
P. The Improvised Play: The Work 
ofMike Leigh. Methuen, London, 1983. 
Issues of improvisation in terms of theatre exercises are contained 
in Johnstone, K. Impro: 
Improvisation and the Theatre. Methuen. London, 1981. 
40 Books such as Gordon Graham's PhilosoPhY of the 
Arts. Routledge, London & New York, 
k 1997, cover the work of manY artists w0l ing 
in many forms. Performance references are notable 
through their absence. Graham's work is not alone 
in this regard. Other than through references 
152 
via Plato and Aristotle, no mention is made of performance in Shepherd's Aesthetics (Oxford 
University Press, 1987) or Cothey's The Nature ofArt (Routledge, London., 1990). It is as though 
something of the ephemerality of performance is carried over into analysis of its making. Nothing 
remains of one and precious little remains of the other. 
41 Moustakis, 196 1. 
42 Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics ofMusic, 1970. pp. 7-9 
43 Smith, D. in Gray, 1968. p. 137 
44 Something of the relationship between installation and theatre is explored in Performance ýI rt 
Into the 90s. Hodges, N (Ed. ) Art & Design, London, 1994. 
45 See Whitmore, J. Directing Postmodern Theater University of Michigan Press, 1994 and 
Birringer, J. Theatre, Theory, Posimodernism. Indiana University Press, 199 1. 
46 As the bibliography will reveal, the writings of artists working across a number of disciplines 
have been considered in the construction of this thesis. Many of these examples have been found 
in the pages of broad-spectrum publications such as The Philosophy ofArt, an Introduction to 
Aesthetics (Graham, G. Routledge, 1997), The Principles ofArt (Collingwood, R. G. Clarendon 
Press, Oxford, 1938) and Philosophy Looks at the Arts (Margolis, J. (ed. ) Temple University 
Press, Philadelphia, 1987). 
47 In Graham, G (1997). P. 86 
48 ibidp. 95 
49 1 was bom in 1959 and am forty this year. 
50 See Phelan, P. Unmarked. Routledge, London & New York, 199 1. 
153 
Chapter Three 
4-3-99 
The writing now is post-Liege. At Last Sight was presented in the Salle Les 
Chiroux, Liege, on March 3rd at 7.00 p. m. The spectators numbered three hundred 
and twelve paying, alongside some sixty performers from other troupes and 
organisers of the festival who were allowed fi7ee admittance. The performance ran 
for sixty-eight minutes, if we take 'performance' to mean that which occurred 
between the first overtly 'performed' action and the taking down of the on-stage 
lights before the cast bowed. However, as has been discussed in previous sections 
of this thesis, with At Last Sight the distinctions between theatrical performance 
and non-theatricalised activities have been deliberately blurred. 
If we measure the performance in terms other than 'acted' action under arranged 
stage lighting, then At Last Sight ran, for certain members of the audience, and 
excluding time spent following the performance in reflection and discussion, for a 
maximum of eighty-nine minutes. The performers greeted those who took their 
seats first, although the manner of the greetings themselves was not noticeably 
theatricalised. SiM. Ilarly, a black flat at the rear of the performing space, decorated 
with the traces of previous rehearsals, including Polaroid photographs (see 
Appendix7). In addition to the photographs, tom latex gloves, cigarette ends and 
fragments of a white cotton shirt, were taped to the board and studied by certain 
spectators for several minutes after the performers had left the space. 
154 
The programmes handed out to spectators appeared to be instrumental in the ways 
in which the work was read. This is more than mere assumption on my part. Upon 
returning to the festival base,, a youth hostel and performance venue in the centre 
of the city, the performers were immediately embroiled in a series of conversations. 
These conversations were primarily with representatives of the groups from the 
University of New York at Buffalo, Universite de Lille and the Hebrew University 
of Jerusalem. They concerned issues of off-stage 'relationships' within the cast and 
the ways in which these relationships had been seen to impact on the performance. 
To a strong core of spectators, the lies contained in the programme were taken at 
face value. Of the festival participants who spoke with either the students, or 
-myself none seemed to 
have even the slightest doubt that the information given 
was anything but true. For myself, this created something of a Catch-22, as I had 
no real wish to extend this aspect of the fabrication beyond the performance ... 
it 
had functioned, to my mind, as a method of extending the performance frame, but 
it had only done this really as a way in. Consequently, I had a strong inclination to 
(come clean' with the truth and rationale behind the misinformation in question as 
soon as was appropriate. The At Last Sight performers, however, were of a 
completely different mind. 
For the cast this was a wonderful and only partly unexpected opportunity to 
engage in a week long process of 'Invisible Theatre'. To this end, they continued C) 
the 'performance' by developing the story of romantic and emotional involvement, 
to the point where they were manufacturing arguments, 'tiffs' and intimate 
encounters in front of a number of fellow participants, who 
had themselves begun 
to form an unknowing and partly unwilling audience. 
155 
8-3-99 
There are a series of ethical issues at work here, which I am seeking in a 
hypocritical way to distance myself from. There is a sense of duplicity here 
inasmuch as I am raising questions of ethics at the same ti-me as I am claiming to 
want to divorce both myself and At Last Sight fi7om any ethical considerations. In 
this I am aware that my approach to analysis is on one level consistent with Gay 
McAuley's 
Insiders reporting on their own culture ... raises a 
very important methodological issue in terms of 
rehearsal analysis. Should the observation, 
documentation and analysis of rehearsal process 
be undertaken by the artists themselves? Is this 
possible .... 
Who has the right to tell the tale? 
Who sees more of what is going on? ' 
This consistency, however, is only temporary. When McAuley develops her 
argument, suggesting that "there are serious methodological problems for someone 
who has a major creative involvement with the production also attempting to 
observe and analyse the whole of the process 
-)-)2 1 have to disagree. Indeed, this 
entire thesis comprises a challenge to her claims. 
9-3-99 
Ethical considerations then are an issue within the work at the same time as they 
are not an issue within my analysis. Whereas McAuley's idealised and non- 
participant observer might be inclined towards a rationalisation of the ethical 
implications within At Last Sight I am not. As McAuley recognises, 
"documentation of any sort necessarily involves selection and is, therefore, already 
in itself a form of analysis". ' Accordingly, my decislon to raise an 
issue and then 
side step it is an integral part of the documentary process. 
Having agreed within 
156 
the group that any and all aspects of the making and performing process are likely 
to be used as grist to the mill of the thesis, the ethics of making and reading are 
taking care of themselves. Where ethics become questionable is in the act of telling 
lies within a framework which only exists for the tellers. And yet to hesitate at this 
point would be to deny At Last Sight what is becoming its central concern. The 
stretching of the frame of performance is now the defining feature of the work, to 
the point where I am able to say that the way the work is being made is what the 
work is about. What more apposite way of dealing with truth and lies than to 
develop the work itself into a position where lies are themselves read as truths9 
This is not to ignore the issue of ethics altogether, as though a refusal to discuss 
the, matter would make it disappear. In fact, the 'problem, such as it is that at all, 
is connected to ideas of invisible theatre per se, rather than to the specifics of At 
Last Sight. 4 
10-3-99 
At best, I have a cautious cynicism towards invisible theatre; at worst this cynicism 
threatens to become overpowering. It has always seemed to me that there are 
enough incidents occurring in the world at large, without actors, be they students 
or professionals, adding their own inventions to that mass. 'Terrible is the 
temptation to do well', as Brecht warned us, and that temptation seems never more 
terrible than when we come to regard performance as some sort of medicine for 
the masses. As a means of showing people how to live their 
lives according to our 
own intrinsicafly patronising notions of 'good' and 'bad' 
behaviour. 
157 
If that accounts for the cynicism, let me state that the caution comes from the 
notions of accountability and consequence. If an action takes place within the 
recognised confines of performance, then, broadly speaking, the propagator of that 
action is not likely to be held accountable beyond the metaphorical bringing down 
of the curtain. We accept that the act encountered is a lie and that, as such, it has 
no direct consequence on or in the outside world. Subsequently, we are able to 
recognise a dysfunctional form of over-empathy in those instances when - for 
example, as is the case for certain television soap actors - members of the public 
loathe or love the actor according to the on-screen activities undertaken and 
displayed. To this end, I have never been tempted by the ideas which fuel the desire 
in some to bring theatre into the realm of the real, so much as I have been, and 
remain, fascinated by the possibilities of bringing the real into the realm of theatre. 
Notwithstanding this, it was interesting to observe the ways in which the cast so 
ohviously relished the notion of - at least in public - living out the ties created by 
and through At Last Sight. What was perhaps of most interest was that the absence 
of any characterisation based on an emotional and psychological rationale, which 
was a feature of the 'Production' of At Last Sight, was so fully subverted by the 
off-stage behaviour of the group. It was as though, having acted as ciphers within 
the performance, the students were possessed of an eagerness to engage in forms 
of invisible realism within the elastic parameters of the performative frame. There 
was both more to it and less than this, of course. On one level, I have no doubts 
that the group took pleasure in what really amounted to a type of flirtation without 
consequence. For if the idea of observers as 'audience' imbued the behaviour of 
the group towards each other with a high degree of consequence, then, conversely, 
158 
the students themselves were able to flirt openly (and, it should be said, at times 
quite outrageously) with impunity. They were thus able to engage in flirtation with 
an absence of consequence. Their behaviour was legitimised and licensed from 
both sides- from the spectators' and their own. 
In terms of the performance itself, within the space of Salle Les Chiroux, At Last 
Sight could be said to have held together well in production terms. By this, I mean 
that the work had an internal coherence that ensured a correspondingly coherent 
'style'. The individual student's endeavours were carried through to a high 
standard, to the point - and this often seems to be the acid-test of curriculum- 
driven work - where I was able to observe the group as 'performers', rather than 
being rerninded of their status as students. There is, however, a large 'but' here. 
The fact that I was pleased with the way in which At Last Sight played does not 
mean that the piece is not also in need of a considerable process of overhaul and 
revision. The levels of energy within the piece meant that the pace was at times 
lethargic. The notion of deconstruction was so heavily applied that that there was 
no real sense of what it was that was being deconstructed. Conversely, the ending 
was too neat ... reading 
like the stitching together of something hitherto unseen. 
The space was played with too much width, meaning that performers simply 
getting into position took up an inordinate amount of time. 
Of all of these, this last point is the easiest one to address. In my experience, 
student performers have a predilection towards moving and then speaking. 
This i--,; 
a huge generalisation, which may not match the experience of the reader; 
however, 
my own time as a university-sector 
lecturer (some fifteen years) and also my 
159 
expenences of student work at festivals, has shown me that this is very often the 
case. It is something which often slips past in student rehearsals, probably for no 
more reason than the fact that these rehearsals often take place in blocks of three 
hours, be they morning, aftemoon or everung. It is usually the case that any full 
weekends of rehearsal are only used closer to the date of performance, when, 
effectively, the work is already 'set'. Short rehearsals mean that problems with 
pace are less readily picked up on. As directors/tutors we see short sections of the 
work, often with several days in between, and may only recognise a predictability 
in pace at precisely that time when we tell ourselves the all-too readily acceptable 
lie that 'all we need now is an audience7. 
t 1-3-99 
It is at this point, that this thesis, this reading and recording of the practical 
processes involved in making work for performance, moves into a new direction. 
Whereas the work of the previous chapters has been reflective only inasmuch as 
the written words have reflected on performative decisions already made, this 
chapter has to deal with reflecting on reflection. For it is clear that in the two 
months between now and the presentation of At Last Sight in Chester, when the 
students are assessed in performance, a number of key changes Will need to be 
made. 
As I write these words now, on March II th, 1999,1 am aware that the actual time 
available to work with the group is five weeks. We perform on the week beginning 
May 24th, but between now and then is a three week period of Easter vacation, 
followed immediately by two weeks which I will be spending at New 
York State 
University as part of a long-term exchange programme 
between faculty staff at the 
160 
two institutions. This means that all of the changes need to be worked through 
with expediency. An additional challenge to change comes ftom the positive 
feelings of the group members regarding the way At Last Sight was performed in 
Liege. There is a strong sense of satisfaction within the group, and deservedly so, 
which means that change may well be resisted from within. Whilst it is in the nature 
of the work that our rehearsals remain organic and progressive, rather than 
repetitiVe and fixed, it is in the nature of the group, as we have created it, that all of 
the opinions offered are listened to and respected. Whether this means, as I suspect 
it does, that I Aill (simply) attempt to introduce the notion of change as though it is 
part of a group-decision, remains to be seen. 
I am aware of the possibility that I am introducing change primarily (or even 
purely) as a research device. As something that is done in order to assess the 
reaction of the students as well as my own ways of dealing with their responses. 
The reader may wonder whether I am suggesting change for these reasons and that 
my stated perception of 'artistic concerns I is functioning as a smokescreen. It is a 
question I am unable to answer with any authority. Certainly, I can discount the 
idea of change as a research device in any 'pure' sense - and I can say the same 
thing about the word 'primaHy' - but this is not to suggest that any easy 
dislocating of research strategies per se from the subject of the research can exist. 
My actions and decisions stem from my interests, and my interests are located as 
firmly within the concerns of the thesis as with the construction of At Last 
Sight. I 
am not only unable to separate the researcher's role from the practitioner's, I am 
umvilling to do so. If as I have suggested, the way that the work is 
being made is 
what the work is about, then the complexity and overlap of my role is central. 
161 
What I can hope for is that any decisions stemn-fing ffom a drive towards research 
are strengthening rather than diluting the creative product of At Last Sight. But 
even within this hope there is defiance. The work is, after all, a research project. As 
has been pointed out throughout this thesis, At Last Sight was never intended as a 
process, as an event, which would then be made subject to analysis. This remains a 
key feature of the thesis. 
My roles have been complex and overlapping from the moment that this project 
wa-.,; conceived. The fact that this complexity is being negotiated in the here and 
now does not add to the initial level of complexity. It only takes it from the private 
and inarticulate into the public. The first point 'public' is the group. 
16-3-99 
The group met earlier today, now March 16th, for our first rehearsal since 
returning from Liege. I took this opportumty to discuss with them my feelings 
nil-. about the work,, along with some of my ideas as to how At Last Sight might be 
further developed. As I had anticipated, this caused something of a schism in the 
group, with some members resisting change and others more happily embracing the 
idea. There is, in fact,, an almost even spilt, although it has to be said that those 
who are most emphatically opposed to change appear to be so inclined because of 
pressures of time rather than any strong aesthetically driven disagreement With my 
proposals. My line of argument, such as has been given, is that we now have the 
safety net of the 'Liege Version' as a product which we can re-rehearse wIth 
relative ease should the revised and reworked production not match up to our 
expectations. Offered on these terms, it is difficult 
for individuals within the group 
162 
to hold onto their positions of resistance, and it now appears that we will be able to 
proceed with these modifications with a broad consensus of approval, 
We began the process of modification by introducing more elements of narrative. 
Not in order to give the piece a stronger sense of linear progression, so much as to 
provide the spectators with more clues as to what it is that is being fragmented. In 
Liege, At Last Sight felt like an ultifflately straightforward exercise in 
deconstruction and on-stage/in-situ assemblage, rather than an experiment vAth 
form and narrative, truth and lies,, experience and invention. The inclusion, 
therefore, of additional encounters between our 'fictional' man and woman, who 
have become known now within the text as Arabella and Paris, is intended to 
bolster the fictional thematics which were always at the core of the origins of At 
Last Sight as a written text. In fact, it is through going back to the onginal text of 
At Last Sight that these encounters will almost certainly emerge and take shape. 
I have no real desire to create a series of new 'moments of business' in order to 
flesh the work out, when there are a number of sections of the text where the 
germ, at least, of narrative-enhancing moments already exists. In part, the 
difficulties we have encountered in animating the work are to be found in its 
nature. Notwithstanding numerous theatrical precedents in naturalistic or otherwise 
mainstream practice, it still seems as though a relationship between a man and a 
woman does not necessarily lend itself to theatrical presentation of this 
kind. The 
fact that I have no real desire to engage the audience's attention through 
dialogue - 
a disagreeably glib form of communication within a piece with pretensions 
towards 
postmodemism. And without wishing to 
intimate, illustrate or otherwise display 
163 
sexual intimacy, there are precious few areas of human contact which come readily 
to my mind. That which is private in practice does not easily adapt itself to the 
public arena that is performance. 
Certainly, there are companies whose work could be regarded as the private made 
nnhfic. DV8 is one such example. ' However, the physical nature of their work 
means that imitation is tempered by an exaggerated expressivity. In this sense, At 
Last Sight can be regarded as occupying the spaces between expressivity and 
imitation. Between abstraction and intimacy. Without expressivity and the 
imitative, we are left with only four modes of performance. indication, metaphor, 
descnption and actuality, and it is to these modes that At Last Sight must now 
look. 
Within these self-imposed limitations some options already exist, and these are as 
folloWs. Dialogue can be placed at a greater distance from the audience ... and can 
be utilised in such a way that the potential for empathetic engagement is undercut. 
The consumption of bottles of wine within the production can be ritualised in some 
way, in order that, at the same time as the reality of the alcohol is blurring the 
divide between fiction and fact, the activity of drinking can be used to comment on 
courtship. And the ordering of those events which currently exist and which we 
wish to keep can be reconfigured in a way that augurs against a neat conclusion to 
an otherwise fragmented experience. 
Although this may seem like a going back to Square One ... as a peculiar return to 
a point of beginnings, two thirds of the way through a final academic year, this is 
164 
not the case. Telling the students that the version of At Last Sight presented in 
Liege allows us the luxury of change with a minimum of nsk was no mere 
platitude. The work undertaken so far will enable the group to re-create from a 
position of relative knowing; for just as 1, from a directorial perspective, can see 
areas that would benefit from change, so the students, as performers, are 
increasingly aware of discernible weaknesses within the piece. The palpable fear of 
change is not a response to the notion of change itself, so much as to the pressures 
of time ... to the temptation to settle for 'good enough'. 
It is a measure of the group's desire to produce a piece of work which stretches 
them both academically and creatively that they are willing to suspend these 
temptations and re-work At Last Sight with a renewed vigour. if anything, the 
C success' of the performance in Liege has made the group even more determined to 
work to their utmost. 
This notion of 'success' is a vexed one, By what critena could the work be so 
considered? By the volume of applause received? By the level and manner of 
spectatorial discussion? By the feelings of satisfaction inherent in the performers 
(informed as it undoubtedly is by their collective reading of the response)? By the 
layers of complexity within the work, over which the group feel they have 
established a high and surprising degree of control? There are no satisfactory 
answers. All that I can suggest, with a reasonable impunity, is that the perfon-ning 
students feel a greater sense of satisfaction at this moment in time than do 1. 
17-3-99 
165 
This in itself is a common enough feeling. From a performer's perspective, 
presenting the work to an audience wiU often bring with it an attendant sense of 
satisfaction via ownership. in performance the work seems to belong solely to the 
performer. Individual nuances are introduced, pace alters according to one's 
reading of the mood of the audience and the hours of rehearsal, of preparation, are 
brought to a conclusion for the duration of the piece. Speaking from my own 
experience, I can recognise that in my capacity as a performer within other 
projects, I have been satisfied with my own contribution to a given production 
even when or if that production is patently unsatisfactory to an audience. As a 
director, one has an overview that seeks at least to encompass the work as a 
whole. This is another reason why the idea of revision at this stage has not been an 
easy subject to broach: the cast are pleased with their individual contributions, as 
am I ... and to change 
At Last Sight is to inevitably change something of these 
sections. It is difficult, therefore, to praise the cast's efforts and accomplishments 
on the one hand and then be critical on the other. There are members of the group 
who make fewer attempts at distinguishing between critical commentary and 
criticism than others. ) seeing the call 
for change as little more than a polite form of 
chastisement. 
We elaborated on the process of change by talking through the work, establishing 
thoge areas within which the individual students involved 
felt any sense of 
particular concern. In this way, we established the 
following (and in this sequence) 
as scenes which we inight consider replacing or re-working: 
1: A scene between Andrew Proudfoot and 
Anna Garnett, where she goes to 
leave, dressing in his jacket and tying back her hair. 
166 
Anna Garnett was unhappy with her own performance in this section and prefers 
the idea of dropping the scene wholesale rather than going through a process of 
revision. Sarah Robertson has since indicated a willingness to step in for Anna and 
she, myself and Andrew Will spend some time looking at new ways of reworking 
both the text and action. With hindsight, I can see that there has always been a 
lacklustre quality to Anna's work on this scene, which disinclines me now towards 
any preventative intervention on my part. The way she perfonned in this section 
was always credible, but there has always been unwillingness on Anna's part to 
stretch herself as a performer. She has emerged as the weakest member of the 
group. She speaks very quietly, and she does so in the only genuine monotone I 
have ever experienced. A microphone helps, giving her speech volume if not range, 
but this scene has always been played with the naked voice. Accordingly, I raised 
no objections when Anna informed the other members of the group and myself of 
her decision to withdraw from this section. 
2: A scene where Andrew Proudfoot rubs himself against Glenn Robertson's 
leg, in the manner of a mating dog. 
I like the way this scene worked, but the group felt that it was 'too odd', even 
within the context of an often illogical-seeming production. I take this to mean that 
this action contradicted other scenes in a negative way. I had initially wanted the 
scene in precisely because of its overtly base quality. Where much of the rest of 
At 
Last Sight is elegiac in tone, this scene was always earthy, offering a glimpse of the 
profane in the midst of that which might otherwise appear to 
be pseudo-profundity. 
It looks now as though the scene will disappear wholesale, rather than 
being 
167 
reworked, as to integrate a contextualising moment or to reduce the lewd nature of 
the action would be to dilute any potency it may currently possess. 
I argued what I considered to be a strong case for retaining the scene, but the 
dynamics of the group are fim-dy set against it. Within the structure of At Last 
Sight, I suspect that they are correct in their opinion. There is no sense here of 
having to sacrifice my own ego, begrudgingly, to that of the group. We have 
worked this way from the very start and I am comfortable with that process - what 
is happening here has more to do with sacrificing a 'favourite moment' for the 
strength of the overall piece. It is a common enough occurrence in the making of 
theatre, as I suspect is the case with any form of art, but it gets no easier as time 
goes by. What is happening, in fact, is that at the same time as this teacher/director 
is becoming confident enough with the act of making work to be able to welcome a 
free and open exchange of ideas, that confidence is also breeding an arrogance that 
my own decisions and instincts are more often strong than weak. 'Strong' and 
'weak' in this sense function as a less immediately problematic way of saying 
'right' rather than 'wrong. 
3: A kissing scene between Sarah Robertson and Chris Roberts. 
This began as an exercise in 'staging the real' but has since taken on a rather 
gratuitous feel. Not least because there is evidence of a strong physical and 
emotional attraction between the two students. Nothing has 
been said - at least to 
me - by any of the group, 
but a perceptible feeling of voyeurism has descended 
whenever these two work through this scene. 
This in itself offers a curious element 
of role-reversal, as the scene was 
initially created in order to suggest voyeufism to 
168 
the spectators. As long as Sarah and Chris were 'acting' the kiss, no matter how 
seemingly authentically, we in the group were happy to watch it; now that we feel 
it may be driven by desire we are distinctly uncomfortable. I say z we' with a degree 
of authority, and notwithstanding the absence of any hard information, as the 
evidence of my own eyes tell me how awkward others in the group are feeling. 
There is a palpable discomfort, which is, I should stress, not aligned to any notions 
of imposed morality. It is at once much simpler and more complex than that. We 
are beginning to feel like 'Peeping Toms. 
Being outside of their 'relationship' we have become spectators rather than 
collaborators and this is leading to a sense of unease, which is separate from any 
shared happiness we might be feeling at two people who we care for who are so 
clearly enjoying each other's company. 
This raises the much larger issue of developing relationships within the group and 
the extent to which this quite common phenomena will impact on the ways in 
which we work. Even existing as a 'suspicion' it appears to have done so already. 
The group has always been ffiendly as a gToup, rather than as a collection of 
cliques. Notwithstanding this, however, each of the performers has another they 
feel closest to. Glenn Robertson and Sarah Skelton are close ftiends; Sarah and 
Glenn are also close to Anna Garnett. Elizabeth Hague and Sarah Robertson are 
ffiends, as are Chris Roberts and Andrew Proudfoot. Anke Sauthof is very friendly 
with Laurent Ruggeri, while Laurent has become firm fiiends with both Chris and 
Andrew. For my own part, I knew Glenn Robertson and Chris Roberts well before 
work started on At Last Sight, and I have a relaxed relationship with each of them. 
169 
This is not to suggest that I in any way gravitate towards them -I do not believe 
that I do - but it does indicate a history which has informed the comfortable way 
we are in each other's company. There is a common bond of humour in the group, 
which makes for a pleasant informality and which goes some considerable way 
towards undercutting the pressures of making and presenting performance. 
The balance of these sub-gToups has been altered by the developing relationship 
between Chris and Sarah. 
There is also the question as to the extent to which the nature of At Last Sight 
should be held accountable for this relationship. My instincts and experience tell 
me that to credit (? ) the production with bringing these two people together solely 
because of its insidiously seductive themes would be a mistake. It is in the nature 
of making performance rather than in the nature or theme of that which is made 
that result in romantic pairings. Working anti-social hours, often late into the night 
or at weekends, means that any socialising which is done tends to remain within the 
group. This, together with a shared interest and the emotional investment which 
comes with commitment to a project, can often result in relationships which might 
not have occurred under other, less intense, circumstances. Whilst it is true that 
this is the case, it would be naive of me to suggest that an on-stage or in- 
performance intimacy is not possessed of the capability to bleed into off-stage 
lives. Certainly, At Last Sight is a project that draws its strength from the 
advertised fiction of individual relationships within the group and it is easy to see 
how the edges between that reality and the one that takes place in a non- 
performative privacy might become blurred. It is enough, perhaps, to recognise 
170 
that At Last Sight has been a catalyst for this particular change within these two 
lives and to leave it, at least for the moment, at that. 
4: A section of guitar playing by Laurent Ruggeri. 
This was only ever included/created as a means of giving Laurent 'something to 
do'. That shows. There is no appropriate rationale for this scene; within the 
seen-iing irrationality of At Last Sight this moment has always jarred ... it 
is far too 
sentimental and it labours its point. Laurent's role within the piece has always been 
an awkward one to define - much like that of Anke Sauthof Laurent and Anke 
were each drafted into At Last Sight in order to provide both a stronger European 
feel to the work and also to frame the on-stage action, providing a point of 
contextualisation for the spectators. The problem with this has been that they have 
not been sufficiently challenged in any way by these demands. As People, rather 
than perfonners, I feel as though I have an obligation to provide them with 
material, or moments, which make Anke and Laurent feel fully integrated within 
the group. I should stress that this is due to no canvassing on their part, as they 
have each recognised, and with some considerable sensitivity and maturity, that At 
Last Sight is being created, at least in part, as a vehicle for the assessment of final 
year students. The difficulty is that, with Anke and Laurent, I feel at times as 
though I am painting with people, treating these two performers as though they 
were colours to be used as judiciously or as ruthlessly as I feet, without recourse to 
their own personal needs. On a directorial level, I have no desire to create extra 
material for them, and in terms of my role as a teacher I have no compulsion to 
provide assessable moments ... neither of 
them is engaged in At Last Sight as part 
of any assessment whatsoever. It is more a case of responding to 
them as members 
171 
of a group - which they have surely now become - and treating them as fairly as I 
would the original cast. 
5: The 'final' scene, where Chris Roberts speaks about sitting in the silence of 
thought. 
As I have previously mentioned, the ending of At Last Sight is at present too neat. 
The ending, as it currently stands, presents the spectator with an overly 
sentiMentalised view, which none of us within the group feel is appropriate to the 
work. An emotional response seems to be called for from the spectators without 
the work having eamed that response with an emotion-inducing structure. The 
literal quality of this section of the text: "In the silence of thought we sit ... close to 
the point where our breaths barely mist the glass. " is at once too conclusive and 
too retrospectively narratological. It reads as though At Last Sight is seeking to 
cloak itself in the status of wistful memory and nothing else. The scene has only 
survived this long because of unwillingness on my part to let go of the words. 
Words which appeal to a mawkish aspect of my own personality, and which only 
being heard uttered within the context of full performance has taken me to the 
point where I can see the necessity for excision. 
19-3-99 
I have to address here the fact that my interest within At Last Sight is to deal with 
sentimentality, whereas my own subconscious predilection draws me towards a 
sentimentality that simply is. It is as though the process of performance making 
functions as a form of exorcision, forcing a degree of control onto certain aspects 
172 
of my own life. I am aware of the distrust of sentimental art, both in academic and 
aesthetic circles, a distrust that says that sentimentality per se must be treated with 
a type of ironic distance for fear of falling into a Mills & Boon world of 
handkerchief-wringing romanýce. I can recognise in my own responses to 
sentimental material a willingness to engage uncritically, which might seem to sit 
uneasily with the cynicism of my adopted (? ) pose of world-weariness. 
Notwithstanding this, I do not regard this as symptomatic of any dishonesty on my 
part. Rather, I feet that the two aspects of sentimentality and cynicism find a 
balance in the creation of performance. For it is only at this place that the battle is 
in any way joined. Elsewhere in my life the two are able to function through a 
separation which is as comfortable as I could hope for. In this way, I am able to 
respond to a film such as The English Patient with tears which would never fall 
(would never be allowed to fall) if the same piece of work were to be staged in a 
theatre. 
Seen in this way, At Last Sight emerges as a rather different type of cathartic 
experience to that which I had originally envisaged ... 
if 'originally' can be taken 
here to refer to the beliefs I held at the start of both this project and this thesis. 
Whereas I had believed - however many thousand words and 
hours and thoughts 
ago - that the autobiographical content of 
At Last Sight was central to this notion 
of catharsis for the artist, I am now beginning to realise that what 
has been more 
important has been the relationship between that written content and this reallsed 
form. The catharsis, such as it can be said to apply 
in this case, is arrived at via a 
balancing of romantic ideas of redemption 
(my own) and the recognition of 
irredemption (also my own) when the past bleeds pentimento-like 
into every aspect 
173 
of the present. At Last Sight stands then not as a staged diary of what was, so 
much as the staging of what is. Encountered in this way, the entire piece becomes a 
necessary coming to terms with two aspects of my own personality. The public 
nature of performance may make the therapeutic side of this read as an indulgent 
ý11 abuse of the spectator/performer relationship, although my feeling is that a viewing 
of At Last Sight in production would not in itself suggest that the work has been 
thus driven. 
Jung said that "the work in process becomes the poet's fate and determines his 
psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates 
Goethe. -)-)6 If this is the case,, then At Last Sight has been, and remains, an 
indication, albeit unclear, of who I am. The process of creating the work began 
with a vague and confused intimation of a potential resolution; a resolution that 
would reveal itself as the piece progressed. In this, I can see now that there was 
considerably more intimation than deteMUnation. There was always a sense of 
inspiration, of a discernible type of impulse which has kept At Last Sight moving 
along, but this inspiration has never been harnessed to a projection of how the 
piece might appear in performance. At this post-Liege point, I am still in the 
process of creating, at the same time as that which has been created up to now has 
given me a strong sense of how the work will look in May. It is almost as if the 
group is now engaged in a process of interpretation rather than devising. The 'text' 
to be interpreted is the text as it was presented in Liege. The canvas is no longer 
blank, making choices easier, even in the midst now of a compromise to earlier 
freedoms. 
174 
Now that the work of At Last Sight is partly formed, it seems easier to write about 
the processes leading up to it. It is as though the concentration on creation worked 
against analysis even if at that time the analysis did not seem particularly 
problematic. Analysis might be thus seen to have diluted something of the tension 
necessary to create a production. In endeavouring to express the aims of At Last 
Sight it may be the case that the practical work itself has drifted too far towards 
becoming (little more than) an exposition of concepts. This is not to say that At 
Last Sight has suffered from my twin role as artist and analyst. The work is what 
the work is and can never be anything other than that. What has happened, and is 
still happening, is that that which would ordinarily remain subconscious has been 
summoned to the fore more than would be the usual case. In this fashion, the pages 
of this thesis can provide the reader with a series of insights that may be of some 
assistance in determining what happens during the processes of making 
performance. The thesis is adhering then to what it set out to be: not a general 
survey of performance-making - although it does contain that wider implication - 
but as detailed a reflection as is proving possible of the concerns noted during the 
making of this production at this time. 
Whilst it remains the case that this thesis has an intended application in the 
field of 
performance, it is being written - just as At Last Sight is 
being created - within a 
belief that the 'old' ideology which had it that all of the arts were subject to 
particular forms suggested or even imposed 
by works within the same field, is 
being replaced. It is being replaced by a conviction that any creative work, 
of any 
type, can lead us towards a meditation on the process of creation 
itself Such a 
cross-fertilised approach to study 
is not forced. In the same way that any maker of 
175 
art who wishes the process to remain as something alchemical is unlikely to find 
comfort in this thesis. Some makers of work will instinctively feel that a process of 
analysis is little more than an attempt to undermine the powers of creativity; that 
artists are meant to know their art through the making of it and through that 
making alone. There is a certain logic here. But only if one considers logical the 
notion that an extended period of analytical pre-requisition would effectiVely 
curtail all action. If, for example, one were to refuse to participate in the action of 
breathing until such time as that person had made a detailed analysis of the nature 
of breath s/he would asphyxiate long before the dissemination of any findings. This 
may well be the case. But this thesis is not concerned with the holding off of the 
breath of performance. On the contrary, it is the concern of this thesis that it is only 
through attaching a high degree of importance to the analysis of creativity that we 
will be able to contemplate the act of making with the same level of discipline that 
we have for centuries applied to studies of that which has already been made. 
We can find a ready example of this in the work undertaken on At Last Sight. What 
we have seen in this thesis is evidence that a number of decisions made during the 
'making process' have been arrived at out of a state which I can now recognise as 
alternating between self and other. By this, I refer to that state whereby the 'self 
of the creator is tempered on occasions by the 'other' of the spectators-to-be. In 
other words,, that which the self of the director creates is always already modified, 
or mediated, by an advance awareness, or at least a prediction, of the judgement of 
others. Of the work's spectators. It follows then that any assessment which I am 
able to make, either now or at some future time, of At Last Sight will inevitably 
necessitate the opting for one or other of these mutually exclusive positions. 
They 
176 
are inclusive in the process of making and exclusive when it comes to an 
assessment of that which is made. If I intend to analyse At Last Sight, I need to 
first be able to make a distinction between an investigation into the creative 
processes involved in making the work and an analysis of the work's values as a 
production. I can only consider At Last Sight either in relation to myself as a 
director/writer/creator or in relation to my perceptions of the work when I am 
positioned as a spectator. This may seem to be suggesting a compartmentalisation 
of roles which does not really, or at least not so neatly, exist. A spectator in Liege 
may have regarded certain elements of At Last Sight that may have been arrived at 
through some 'accident' of rehearsal as illustrative of a particular line of enquiry in 
-my 
directorial mind. In this way, the spectator has become the producer of 
meamng. 
Where this collapsing of roles is an integral element of spectatorship, it is one 
which 1, in my chosen role as maker, reader and wnter, need to maintain some 
considerable control over. This is the nature of research into practice. In exan-ýining 
the nature of making, one also casts a new light on the made. This is not about 
homogemsation. All processes are different, in degree if not always in kind. History 
has revealed to us, for example, that Mozart thought out symphonies, even entire 
operatic scenes, and then transcribed these 'completed' ideas onto paper. 
Beethoven,, on the other hand, wrote fragments of themes in copious notebooks, 
which he worked on and developed for years before formatting them as 
symphonies. 7 One artist plunges into the moment, the other treads warily around 
the edges. This thesis is attempting no documented hierarchy of approaches, any 
more than it is suggesting that the processes involved in At Last 
Sight are 
177 
somehow preferable to those sanctioned in any other project at this or any other 
time. Just as one can regard that which has been produced by either Mozart or 
Beethoven through the lens provided by a knowledge of the tools of their own 
creation, so any all work can be enhanced by an analysis of how the piece was 
made. 
20-3-99 
Performances may be made in many different ways and all creation of performance 
is to some degree automatic. But there is at certain times a very full consciousness 
of the process, or at least of such of its aspects as are open to introspection. 
Notwithstanding this, there are, as far as I am aware, no thorough accounts of the 
production processes of specific works. ' With At Last Sight I am able to say that 
the text was a beginning. Although it would be undeniably true(er) to regard this 
text itself as a stage along a process long ago commenced. The written text still 
stands as a reasonable place to start. Reasonable, that is, inasmuch as the genesis of 
the text has been dealt with in Chapter One. 
I can see now that early drafts of the text were weak, in that they failed to establish 
a diverse enough balance of moods and images. The structure of that early text 
gives few, perhaps too few, clues to a subsequent director ... even when 
that 
director is also the writer. There is something of emerging importance to me now 
in the text that has not been at A made clear- and that is the meaning of the sea in 
relation to the image of the woman. For it is not enough that the sea 
is constructed 
as a method of that woman's subsequent death. 
The sea also seems now to exist as 
some sort of force of nature (like the relentless nature of 
the rain, which is also 
mentioned on many occasions) which 
is relative and of some considerable 
178 
significance to the force of the woman. The obscurity, even I might say the 
invisibdiiy of this meaning seems now to me to be a central failing of the text. A 
failing which has reverberated throughout the process of taking that text to this 
point as a performance. 
The work undertaken on At Last Sight up to this point in time has been an aspect 
of an act of understanding, and also an attempt at understanding. It can be 
described as the effort of a man to present an account of his relationship to a world 
that allows him little certainty and vast regrets. This account has been at once 
performative and public. 
The structures engaged in were created with a predonUnance of forethought, even 
at those times when I was perhaps unable to see which way certain rehearsals and 
ideas were going. I would hesitate to regard these aspects here as completely 
accidental, although they were often informed by the random. The processes 
undertaken in the rehearsal process made space for the random to occur, and this 
in itself comprised a deliberate form. Because of this, I can see that At Last Sight 
has arrived at the transitional point that it now occupies through a series of 
intentions rather than calculations. There has been a strict, even a rigorous intent, 
which has allowed the separate elements of the work, as in Hockney's Joiners, to 
merge into one another without any absolute demarcation ... often 
being possessed 
of multiple functions. Being one thing at the same time as they are also another. 
f1istorically and currently, the making of performance 
has a practical aim. The 
standard question tends not so much towards an asking of 
'Where did the work 
179 
come from and why was it made? ' as to 'What did the performance achieveT. The 
Why and Where of the first question are never usually taken beyond the guessing 
stage, precisely because, in the language of those who most often will it to be so, 
performance is not easily made subject to the conditions of the scientific 
laboratory. Experiments can never be repeated, because the conditions, the human 
conditions of performance are never even remotely the same from one experiment 
to the other. Performance is creation. It moves and transmutes, even as we watch. 
It amounts to a type of knowledge that one could not be in possession of before 
the fact. We can say, therefore, that At Last Sight is not comprised of knowledge 
about something else ... 
At Last Sight is the fullness of its own knowledge. It is 
what it is., which is not to say that it is not, in its Joineresque aspirations, always 
also referring to the world of something else. 
at the outset of this project, I considered myself to be engaged in the 
theatricalisation of an abstracted version of my own history, I have since come to 
realise that what I have (or had) to tell is not nearly so important as the process of 
telling itself There is no goal. Whatever it is that I thought I knew, that I felt such 
a strong urge to tell, has become increasingly unstable, unfixed. 
I have invented, 
nI in %. IJLI distorted., lied, exaggerated and selected material for inclusion i this thesis 
in much 
the same way that I continue to work on At Last 
Sight; collapsing the processes of 
writing and directing in on each other. The edges 
have blurred to the point where I 
am no longer sure where practice ends and analysis 
begins. I am giving myself 
over, increasingly, to a state of knowing nothing in advance. 
Not the next line, not 
even the next word. What I am 
developing as a consequence is a faith in my own 
180 
ability to articulate the process of making, and to embrace the confusion therein 
with relish. 
The mystery of the sentence to come (of the rehearsal to come) is always there, but 
the existence of that mystery is no longer mysterious in and of itself 
Understanding, it seems, is not about solving the mysteries of making work so 
much as accepting that these mysteries are simply so. 
This thesis is about the ways in which writing relates to performance. That is what 
I want the thesis to be. Where this results in non-linearity, with sections of this 
thesis shifting from documentation and reportage to analysis and supposition 
without warning, the writing is at its closest approximation to the practice of 
making At Last Sight By this I mean that the structure of this thesis is flexible 
enough to move with thoughts and ideas as they occur, rather than 
compartmentalising them into passages which, whilst appearing coherent, would 
actually give a false flavour of the process of making the performance project. 
Where this results in obfuscation rather than clarity the reader is asked to accept 
this as a necessary by-product of writing which is engaged in during rather than 
- _n after the fact. The process is intrinsically elliptical in that spaces are left open, only 
to be filled in at a later stage. This is a deliberate act, for if the process of making 
At Last Sight is the object of the research, then it is appropriate that that process is 
articulated as much through the form of this writing as it is in the content. Words 
that might more comfortably sit within a concluding chapter are presented as part 
of the fabric of making because they are an integral part of it. They are, in fact, not 
so much Conclusions) as moments of insight, which are wont to occur at the 
least 
181 
expected times. To record them in note-form as a prelude to a later (writing up' 
would be to create a record of the production-process which augurs against the 
slippery nature of the creative activities undertaken. 
Confusion does not emerge, therefore, as the consequence of an unclear treatment 
,; n much as the inevitability of an unclear act. An act(ivity) within which certainty is 
sacrificed to a faith in doubt. A thesis is generally regarded as an exercise in left- 
brain thinking. It is logical, rational and systematic. 9 Creative activity, conversely, 
is a right-brain dominated process. As Stefan Brecht tells us 
The brain is functionally asymmetric .... 
It has been 
known for a little over a century now that it is the left 
brain that all in all, - linguistic and manual dexterity 
being coupled - is the linguistic, - has the powers of 
speech and speech-comprehension, writing and reading: 
but during the last thirty years, the right brain has 
emerged as particularly endowed with visual powers, 
the seer .... 
It seems clear that as naming is the left 
brain's tool of analysis, so the right brain's syntheses 
are spatial metaphors. 'O 
If the documentation of At Last Sight is to contain an awareness of the 
contradiction between writing and doing, at the same time as it is seeking to 
dissolve some of those contradictions in the writing itself, then a simple and clear 
record of the event is entirely inappropriate. Working in the way that 
it is this 
thesis stands as an attempt at avoiding the status of unchallengable 
'evidence', 
even in the midst of its reliance on the evidence of experience. 
The fixed nature of 
a thesis will tend to work against the 
fluidity of approach that is central to the 
making of At Last Sight. As soon as the thesis 
is typed, bound and presented as an 
artefact of leaming, it acquires a quality 
that the process it is trying to articulate 
182 
never had. We can go further than that and say that the qualities expected of a 
thesis are at odds with the spontaneous and accidental qualities employed and 
encountered in devising performance. That which exists as one of a series of 
possibilities runs the risk of calcification through ink into a specific set of actions, 
as though that which happened could only ever have occurred in the way that it 
did. 
The question then is 'How can this process of creative slippage be documentedT 
I-Tow can the documentation avoid the pitfalls of closure, when the practice it stems 
from is seeking an open and free interaction between spectator and performer, 
between the watcher and the watched? One way - and it is the way of this thesis - 
is to recognise the writing as a dialogue with the self. The activity of writing is an 
inevitable disseminating agent, but that which is written is primarily comprised of a 
making sense of making work. It seems logical then to see the thesis as being as 
indicative of a concern with my own understanding as it is with the understanding 
of any future readers. MThich brings us back to Jung's reading of the symbiosis 
between Goethe and his Faust. The core of this thesis, as indeed one could speak 
of the core of At Last Sight, is the maker's address to the being made ... which 
is in 
a constant state of slippage. Other researchers might adopt a more overtly divisive 
approach to the same relationship, separating out more cleanly the distinctions 
between action and analysis. In this way, writing a series of descriptions, followed 
closely by an attendant and thorough reading of those actions - by the construction 
of an event and its subsequent deconstruction -a clear(er) communication would 
emerge. But that clarity would disguise its own insidiously coercive 
intent. 
183 
In much the same way, any once-held distinctions between objective and subjective 
responses have been exposed as invidious and false. Everything has emerged as 
illusive. There have been,, throughout the process so far, no solid facts to address, 
other than the facts of writing, rehearsal and performance ... and the 
factual nature 
of these phenomena have been compromised, and permanently so, by my own 
interests and prejudices. In writing this thesis, even such deformations and 
distortions which exist are not, however,, necessarily untruths. The realisation that 
fiction and invention constitute the very fabric of life means that those elements 
infiltrate even the most scholarly and well intended of pursuits. In performance, as 
in other forms of art, it can be said that one adopts a mask in order then to tell the 
truth. But when the line between truth and false is so unclear (if it can even be said 
to be there at all) then how can the writer's words be trusted? All that can be said 
is that the words 'lies' and "truth' have lost much of their presumed currency at the 
same time as this thesis and At Last Sight are beginning to establish their own. 
Even those memories that have been regarded as 'inspiring' the text are not 
necessarily trustworthy. How accurately can I trust my memory, even before the 
activity of selection and of poeticising take their toll on truth? How can I trust this 
report as a truthful rendition of that which has occurred? How can I trust my 
memory of this morning's rehearsal and this afternoon's thoughts? 
If a flawed and increasingly suspect memory continues to prove central to 
At Last 
Sight - inasmuch at least as the work 
began with the structured recollection of 
certain of my own memories - then we can also say that memory 
is the mainstay of 
art. " We can say this because all imaginative thought 
is in one vital way an 
184 
exercise of memory. We are not able to imagine anything that we do not already 
know. 12 Through this we can suggest that the ability to imagine is actually the 
ability to remember. We remember that which we have already experienced and we 
apply it to a new situation. Creative ainagination is thus comprised of an abilitY to 
harness memory to invention. It is an action of the mind that produces a new idea 
or insight from out of the known. 
Looking at At Last Sight like this I can recognise a startling deficiency in my own 
11fili-sation of memory. I can identify a weakness that tells me much, now, about the 
ways in which At Last Sight is operating. My own subconscious approach to 
memory has been to seek to reproduce that memory rather than to exploit it in 
some new way. My memory is thus inclined to stay resolutely in the past. Where 
somebody else might be able to fashion the same memories as mine (if the reader 
will allow this flight of fancy) into a new situation, I have so far been unable to 
achieve this. The domestic nature of my memories has not been transformed into 
other than a domestic treatment of a domestic theme. Unable, or unwilling, to turn 
how it was into how I would now choose it to be, I find I am repeating history. I 
am, I feel, too often offering memory in place of imagination. 
This realisation - and it is one which has occuffed to me only during this session at 
my desk - has evaded me during four full months of rehearsal and some eighteen 
years as a student, practitioner and teacher of theatre. If evidence were ever 
needed of the importance of reflection on one s own practice then it is surely 
provided here. Whether or not I am able to act on this realisation is a 
different 
matter; but this difference in no way negates the value of the 
discovery. The die of 
185 
AI Last Sight may well be cast too far to re-assess the ways in which the group (for 
let us not forget that all decisions made are made within the certainty of group) are 
either willing or able to act on this 'new' knowledge. Assuming, that is, that the 
words written here are fed constructively back into the practical work. 
What is occurring most emphatically at this point in time is an informed (re) 
consideration of the project that was, is and is becoming At Last Sight. On one 
level, I have a confidence in the work which stems from my own feelings about the 
ways in which the piece has progressed, and also the ways in which the 'product' 
seemed to be perceived in Liege. By this I refer to the belief I have that the work 
thus far has contributed to a new and valid insight into the language of 
performance. That is a large claim. It is one I need to justify. A part of that 
justification is a sense of how well the work - the research-project - builds on 
practical and theoretical approaches currently at large. 
21-3-99 
Joseph Kosuth has suggested that "Art 'lives' through influencing other art, not by 
existing as the physical residue of an artist's ideas -)-) ) 
13 and the Standing Conunittee 
of University Drama Departments (SCUDD) has defined practice as research as 
being that which will "lead to new or substantially improved insights". 
14 According 
to these criteria, it would appear that the analytical approach to the work of 
At 
Last Sight is moving the thesis in the right direction. Despite the 
fact that I am not 
yet able to affirm that the production/thesis 
has influenced other art, I have a 
growing confidence that it will. On one 
level I can relate this to my own future 
186 
work ... 
for how could I make work after At Last Sight which would fail to draw 
upon the work of its own past? But this is to subvert Kosuth's statement to too 
great a degree. It is more acceptable to suggest, and indeed to aspire, to the idea 
that a significant proportion of readers of this thesis (and spectators to the 
practice) will elaborate in some way upon the ideas encountered therem. My role 
as a lecturer in the university sector means that this presumption is made more 
watertight than might otherwise be the case. My teaching has already been 
influenced by the work undertaken on this 'project' (by which I refer to the thesis 
and At Last Sight) and it is inevitable that a number of those students who are 
made subject to my teaching are going to be 'influenced' by my approaches. 
This type of influence, however, is not determined by any intrinsic quality. It is a 
fact of education that a tutor's own bias will infiltrate even the most rigorously 
exclusive curriculum. In this way, the 'influence' of the work done and the 'residue 
of an artist's ideas' become almost impossible to separate. The residue of ideas 
could, albeit somewhat harshly, be said to define much of what passes for research- 
driven teaching. Accordingly, if I talk long and hard enough to my students about 
the contents of this thesis then I will undoubtedly sway (some of) them, 
if only 
through insistence, towards a belief in the sanctity of these words. This is influence 
through persuasion ... through indoctrination. 
In some ways - actuafly, in key ways 
- this thesis acts as 
its own defence against influence-by-rote. If there 
is anything 
constant within the pouring out of words it 
is that provocation is prioritised over 
prescription. The thesis is thus always 
in one way arguing against itself. The solid 
appearance of the lines on the page is undercut 
by the fi7agility of any faith in the 
lines' own worth. 
187 
In this way, the thesis is locating itself as postmodern in its form, rather than the 
modernist analysis of a postmodern form. Postmodernism has been described by 
Jean-Francois Lyotard as a working without rules in order to establish the rules of 
that which has been made. Arguing against the 'solace of good forms, he suggests 
that postmodern practice is a 
... search 
for new presentations, not in order to be 
able to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger 
sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist ... is in the position of a philosopher: the ... work 
he 
produces (is) not in principle governed by pre- 
established rules,, and ... cannot 
be judged 
according to a determined judgement, by applying 
familiar categories to the text or work. Those 
rules and categories are what the work of art itself 
is looking for 
.... Hence the 
fact that work and 
text have the characters of an event, hence also, 
they always come too late for their author. " 
Taking this criterion we can make a case that its application is central to notions of 
all creative activity. When we say that an artist is creative, we do not do so because 
s/he has demonstrated an ability to obey rules which were known before the work 
was made,, so that the artist only succeeded in doing that which had been done 
before. We acknowledge as creative those artists whose work is seen to embody 
something that did not exist before. This is an implicit recognition of the creative 
artist as the originator of the rules s/he followed. Afterwards, other artists might 
deliberately follow these same rules and thereby achieve a similar 'success, but 
these artists are not engaged in the same level of creative activity. 
The creative artist - like Lyotard's paradigmatic postmodernist - 
does not know 
what the target is. Although there is a 
degree of 'ainiing', the artist is unlikely to I -- 
188 
know precisely where this aim will lead until after the event. Creativity in terms of 
making performance is not then a model of a purposive activity ... that is to say it Is 
not indicative of an activity which is engaged in and consciously controlled so as to 
produce a desired result. At the time of making the performance of At Last Sight 
for Liege, I was impelled to engage in that type of creative activity, but I was 
unable to envisage the results of that endeavour. The performance at Liege was 
largely unimaginable to myself in October 1998, when I met with the student-cast. 
This also applies to the performers themselves. None of the group had any real 
sense, from day to day, of the ways in which At Last Sight would develop in 
subsequent rehearsals. Each day was a making without rules In order to establish 
the -rules of that which was 
being made. Our coflective activity has not then been 
controlled or shaped ovennuch by a desire for a predicted result - 
This is not to say that the group has not been conscious of a certain direction, 
however vague this direction has been. We have known that our work has been 
heading towards a series of public performances, for example. The sense of 
direction has actually been more acute than this. Without any idea as to whether 
certain decisions were 'right' or 'wrong', I would have been unable to develop the 
work directorially through rehearsals, and the performance suggestions of the cast 
would have been considerably less valid than they have been in practice. Creative 
activity in the making of performance can be defined then as an activity which is 
subject to an applied critical control by the artists involved, at the same time as this 
control does not amount to any in-ýitation-seeking foresight regarding the work to 
be made. 
22-3-99 
189 
The ability to discriminate between levels of appropriateness in terms of the input 
of group members has required, of all of us, a certain fastidiousness in ongoing 
critical judgements ... and these 
judgements are more focused now than at any 
time previously. Each of the participants has developed a vocabulary of 
discrimination to the point where rehearsals now have a discernible coherence. We 
are becoming aware of the direction that At Last Sight is moving in only now that 
the piece has arrived at its first venue. The rules have been established, at least in 
part., to the extent where we are perhaps every bit as effective as we have ever 
been, but rather less creative than in the early stages of the work. In the same way 
that I am now able to use the past tense to describe certain processes, At Last Sight 
is both done and undone ... completed 
in one sense and also liable to significant 
change. The shift in tense is therefore both deliberate and inevitable. 
The 'product' of Liege is informing the ways in which the 'product' of Chester is 
now being shaped. This brings with it the possibility of new directions. Of the 
establishment of new rules of making, informed now by our developing 
understanding of the old. 
The performance artist, Chris Burden has put the argument that functionalism in 
art amounts to no more than propaganda, suggesting that the act of functionalism 
is intrinsically antithetical to creativity. 
16 There is a sense of an anti-functionalist 
approach in At Last Sight , inasmuch as only in a 
very qualified sense would I be 
able to say that I had before me any 'problem' which 
I felt that the work could 
provide a solution for. Perhaps it would 
be more apposite to say that any 
functionalist value which might be ascribed now or at any 
future time to At Last 
190 
Sighl would not be the result of a response to conditions set before the work was 
commenced. In terms of its artistic creation, the formulation of problems and the 
solution to those problems amount to one and the same phenomenon. The process 
of making the work can be revealed as at once creating the work and discovering 
that which the work has to say. The process is comprised of inseparable elements, 
The event thus created is a product of art, in that it is as new and unexpected to the 
maker(s) as it is to its audience. This creates a seeming contradiction. At Last Sight 
is presenting itself to the creating group as an event which has controlled our 
activities and which has resisted a great deal of our own attempts at control, and 
yet it is at the same time the product of a working through of tensions which we 
can recognise as being our own. It no more or less belongs to the group than we 
do to it. 
24-3-99 
In the course of writing this chapter, one of the performers has left the group. Her 
reasons for doing so do not impact on this thesis - or indeed on the remaining 
rehearsals for At Last Sight - so much as her absence now necessitates a re- 
working 
-of 
the piece, which will go beyond the relatively straightforward changes 
suggested at this chapter"s start. It also provides me with a valuable bringing down 
to earth. Just as I have been exercising certain theoretical positionings within the 
pages of this thesis, so an unforeseen act on the part of a student, Anna Garnett, 
has brought with it a reminder of the power of the random. In the midst of feeling 
that all is going well, something has happened to undercut that complacency. To 
say that the flow of this chapter is broken is to state no more than the reader will 
already know. But this has come at a useful time. It serves as a cautionary notice 
that this thesis is a response to the work of the production, and that the production 
191 
itself is still too unfinished, too unmade, to attempt to write about it as though it 
were now in the past. 
The irony of discovering this student's departure at the same time as I was writing 
about the group belonging to the work and the work belonging to the group is 
harsh. That the practical work is demanding now of renewed energies on the part 
of all its remaining members is apparent. I have not yet spoken with the group 
about Anna Garnett. She is in the process, I believe, of returning to her home in 
Scarborough, where she will either attempt to complete her studies by a negotiated 
package of distance learning, or she will rest and re-apply for entry in the new 
academic year. What this will do to the spirits of the group is impossible to predict 
with any accuracy, although my suspicions are that they will respond with the same 
level of maturity, adaptability and positivity that they have shown since the project 
began. Notwithstanding their practical responses, I suspect that they, like me, will 
feel betrayed by the sudden nature of Anna's decision to leave Chester,, recognising 
that her actions will inevitably make our own workloads that much harder to 
manage. 
The following chapter will commence with an analysis of the students' individual 
contributions to At Last Sight in perfortnance at Liege, alongside an explanation of 
key changes made prior to presentation in Chester. 
192 
' McAuley, G 'Towards an Ethnography of Rehearsal' in New Theatre Quarterly Vol. XIV, Part 
I (NTQ 53) February 1998. p. 80. 
I ibid. p. 81. 
3 ibid. p. 76. 
4 See Read, A. Theatre and Everyday Life. Routledge, 1995 and Boal, A. The Rainbow ofDesire. 
Routledge, 1994 
cý DV8 is a British-based physical theatre/dance company. The company was formed in 1986, 
under the direction of Lloyd Newson. Further information can be accessed by mailing the 
company on dv84xipe. nl 
6 Jung, C. G., cited in Critical Reasoning. Thomson, A. Routledge, 1996. p. 16 1. 
7 See Spender, S 'The Making of a Poem' in Ghiselin, B. The Creative Process. New Americaii 
Library, New York and Ontario, 1952 pp. 112-125 
81 am basing this belief on an extensive book, article and thesis search. 
9 See Theses and Project Work. Parsons, C. J. Heinneman, London, 1978 
10 Brecht, S. The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson. Methuen, London, 1994. pp. 9-10. 
11 Williams, B. Problems of the Self. Cambridge University Press 1973. p. 13. 
12 
ibid. p. 17. 
13KOSUth, J. Art after Philosophy. 'Studio International', October 1969. p. 78. 
14 Guide Linesfor the Submission ofPractical Projects in Drama, Dance and Performing Arts as 
'Works'. Standing Committee of University Drama Departments (SCUDD). Published April 
15 Lyotard, J. F, Answering the Question: "at is Postmodernism? In 'Innovation/Renovation', 
Hassan, 1. and Hassan, S. (eds. ), University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1983. pp. 81-82. 
16 Burden, C. in TalkingArt, Searle, A. (Ed), Institute of Contemporary arts, London, 1993. p. 25 
193 
Chapter Four 
24-3-99 
This chapter begins with an assessment of the performances of the students 
participating in At Last Sight in Liege. I do this not because I wish to venture here 
into issues of assessment for assessment's sake ... the status of the students as 
students works against that, even if such were my wish. 
What I am attempting is an explanation of some of the changes currently being, I- 
made, which is enhanced for the reader by an understanding of the context within 
which such changes are being suggested. The writing also serves the purpose of 
focusing my own attention as a course tutor on the individual performances, rather 
than concentrating in a solely directorial fashion on the performance as a whole. 
In this way, I should be able to make suggestions to the students,, which will 
provide them with opportunities to feel satisfied with their work when they are 
assessed in six week's time. 
The assessment offered here is a brief one. The thesis is not about the successes or 
otherwise of individual performances- As such, an appraisal of their relative 
abilities is necessary only inasmuch as it informs the decisions-to-be-made of 
future rehearsals. The appraisal entered into here is hindered as much as it is 
helped by access to video footage of the performance at the Salle Les Chiroux in 
Liege. It is helped in that I am able to watch what happened in order to refresh my 
memory; it is hindered in that what I am watching on video is not what 
'happened'. As Gay McAuley remarks 
194 
A video recording of theatrical performance will be 
misread by people who see only through their 
experience of television, or who expect a 'replacement 
performance' rather than an analytical document. ' 
Whilst my role as joint-creator of At Last Sight means that I cannot be regarded, in 
this instance,, as one who sees only through an experience of television, it is true 
that 
Video 
... 
impose(s) the single perspective of the 
camera) s eye ... while the camera also 'sees" much less than the human eye. In visual terms, theatrical 
expressivity depends crucially on the simultaneous 
functioning of detail ... the 
detail of objects and 
interactions and the ever-present reality of the 
performance space as a whole, 2 
There is a sense wherein watching a videotape still reads to us as the thing-as-It- 
was- 3 We know this to be false at the same time as we are seduced by the images 
before our eyes. We feel this to a much lesser extent, I thi* with still 
photographs. The Polaroid photographs from Liege provide a distorted record of 
At Last Sight, equal in distortion to the video itself But, perhaps for no greater 
reason than the fact that photographs offer an overt and unmistakably fixed picture 
of an event that happened through time, we regard them as partial traces of the 
documentation process and the video as a 'true record. 
Because of the inevitability of 'preserving' something of At Last Sight in 
performance, if only to assist in the reader's understanding of the work I need to 
start thinking now about ways in which this act of preservation can be enhanced. 
One possibility is of using a number of cameras and editing the footage together 
in such a way that multiple perspectives are being offered at any one time. 
This is 
195 
an example suggested by McAuley, who states that the use of three cameras 
allows synchronisation 
... so that the tapes will play together. It is entirely feasible for a spectator to view three images 
simultaneously, scanning from one screen to 
another in a way which may approximate the theatre 
spectator's pattern. 4 
Watching the video of At Last Sight in Liege (which was filmed with one camera 
from the centre of the audience) allows the eye to wander to a certain extent, but 
the manner of its filming suggests nothing of the deliberateness of this as a 
directorial concept within the live performance. I need to address this matter 
when it comes to creating a video record of At Last Sight at University College 
Chester in May. In heeding McAuley's recommendations I need also to resist the 
temptation to transform the video footage into an independently aesthetic artefact. 
The video has a purpose as an aid to understanding ... that is 
its intent. ' 
25-3-99 
I am aware of the contradiction here in offering any assessment of Anna Garnett's 
contribution, when that particular student is no longer a part of the group. 
However, it may well be the case that Anna Garnett's sole assessment for this 
module may rest on my own interpretation of her practical application within the 
production. We are unan'ble to offer a 'process' mark to students (much to their 
anger and disappointment), but this does not mean that this will necessarily be the 
case under a situation such as this. If Anna Garnett manages to negotiate a 
conclusion to her degree studies where she is able to submit all remaining work 
from home, then it may be the case that a type of process mark for At Last 
Sight 
forms part of that overall assessment. 
196 
The remaining members of the group were surprised by Anna's sudden departure, 
and were suspicious as to her motivations- They remain, in fact, very angry at 
what they are regarding as a betrayal. As I wrote towards the end of Chapter 
Three, I am neither able nor inclined to enter into any details here regarding the 
reasons given by Anna Garnett, nor is it the business of this thesis for me to 
speculate here as to any other excuses. What is of concern to this thesis, is that I 
am able to write honestly and openly about the methods of making At Last Sight, 
and this freedom is somewhat compromised by my academic and pastoral 
responsibilities. All that I can do - or hope to do - is treat such passages where the 
preservation of the student's personal privacy is in conflict with the requisites of 
my own analytical approach with caution and care. 
The matter has raised some interesting points. With the rest of the group, a student 
such as Chris Roberts, for example, I feel that I have carte blanche to write with 
freedom about any of his activities, attitudes or comments which happen during 
rehearsals. I feel this, in fact, with each of the remaining members of the group. I 
may then write something which runs counter to my role as a tutor, but I 
have the 
safety net of knowing (of feeling, of believing) that I will not 
be violating any 
principles of trust between us. This remains the case even at those times when the 
relationship between a member of the cast and myself 
is stretched to an almost 
intolerable degree. As it was with Sarah Robertson, whose role within At 
Last 
Sight was radically reconfigured no more than one 
hour before the audience 
entered the theatre. I will elaborate on the 
Sarah Robertson 'incident' during the 
course of this chapter. Any readers of this 
thesis will arrive at their own 
conclusions as to the validity of this 
decision, and indeed of the manner in which 
197 
the decision was employed. Suffice, at this stage and on my own part, to say that 
it was a decision I regret and one where, with the benefit of hindsight, I think I 
acted neither wisely nor well. 
With Anna Garnett, who is now no longer a part of the group, the contract 
between cast and director is broken. This does not mean that I am about to delete 
any mention of her from those elements of this thesis which are already written 
(actually, very little mention has been made of her up to this point). It does mean 
that any criticisms I might have of her work up to and including Liege need to be 
couched in more cautiously structured terms than those I might use for the 
remaining performers are. 
26-3-99 
I will attempt my analysis of the specific performances by concentrating on 
individuals, rather than by going through the work chronologically. A script of the 
words created for (rather than in) the Liege performance has already been offered 
in an appendix, allowing the reader to locate the actions described within the 
-0--- framework of the wider performance. 
Because I will be making no attempts to separate out my reading of individual 
performances from the wider issues of reflecting on their contributions to At Last 
Sight, it is expected that responses to the performance as a whole will permeate 
this chapter. Where the connections are clear no further explanation is required, 
where clarity gives way to seemingly disconnected patterns of thought I can do no 
more than state that the following words do indeed evidence connection. They 
do 
so inasmuch as the words written here are accurate traces of an ongoing process of 
198 
reflection and revision. Ideas do not emerge with an apparent logic, and this thesis 
offers no illusory evidence to the contrary. 
It should also be pointed out that I am making the following readings of the 
participating students' contributions public with their full knowledge and 
approval. 
1: Anna Garnett. 
Anna's performance was rather reserved. She is never a 'showy' per-former, 
speaking quietly and without a great deal of animation. Physically, she is rather 
stilted. she has a tendency to move at a pedestnan pace. Her vocal range is very 
limited, and there is a peculiar flatness to her voice. 
Her strongest moment in Liege, as it has generally been in rehearsal, was the 
section towards the end of the performance, where she speaks directly to the 
audience,, saying 'My name is Anna Garnett ... 
I have been lying on this bed for 
some time ... 
' There was a sense of control and good timing here, which the 
audience seemed to acknowledge. Because the response from the audience during 
this section was both immediate and strong, Anna's confidence appeared to grow. 
She performed the section with relish. Had she remained a part of the group, this 
section was one I had no intention of changing. With the new situation, we need 
to see if any of the rest of the group would like to take this part. Only then will we 
be able to begin working through the logistics of re-apportioning sections, and 
dealing with the ramifications of this on the overall structure. 
199 
Unfortunately, other sections were not presented with the same degree of 
authority as was evidenced in the above paragraph. Anna's first moment of 
'direct' communication with the audience (there is a lot of audience-address in At 
Last Sight) was awkwardly delivered, with no real sense of fitting in with any of 
the rest of the opening text. The flatness of her speaking voice (which is apparent 
even on the poor quality videotape) means that the start of a sentence does not 
seem to develop from the thoughts of the previous sentence. This works with 'My 
name is Anna Garnett ... 
' precisely because the text is meant to spring from 
nowhere. With other sections, the dislocation is acute, and acutely wrong. We 
have worked on Anna's delivery of the text, but no real progress has been made. 
Another key section is Anna's dialogue with Andrew Proudfoot. The moment 
begins with Anna raising herself from the bed, dressing in Andrew's clothes and 
leaving. This is accompanied by spoken text, which is naturalistic in tone, at least 
by the standards of the rest of At Last Sight. Again, the quality of Anna's speaking 
voice serves to slow the scene down. Even when the movements are relatively 
swift and fluid, the spoken delivery is such that the impression given is one of 
lethargy. I was aware of Andrew's attempts to work against this, to energise the 
scene even further, by means of speech and action, in order to inject some much- 
needed pace, but this served only to exaggerate the problems which were already 
there. Anna was aware of this, and asked that the scene be cut. I still feel now, as I 
felt then, that the scene is an important element of At Last Sight, and a decision 
had been made, before Anna decided to leave the group, that Sarah Robertson 
would replace her in this section. In this, at least, Anna's 
departure is fortuitous, 
'I 
-00 
as I have no doubts that Sarah will invest this section with the type of vitality 
which Anna has never been able to achieve. 
There was a sense with Anna, that she did not always fully comprehend the ways 
in which At Last Sight was, and is being constructed. Anna often met the 
procedure through which certain moments of potentially empathetic engagement 
were undercut with contrasting scenes with a type of incredulity, despite the fact 
that we, as a group, had established this practice almost from the start. Perhaps 
this confusion was what was being made manifest in her performance ... as though 
she was never really aware of what performance mode was being required of her. 
I suspect that there is a degree of truth in this. 
If this is the case, and I have to believe that it is, then I have to acknowledge a 
failing on my part to convey my intentions accurately enough. I wonder now, with 
the benefit of hindsight, whether I have ever really made my intentions clear to 
anyone in the group. A part of this is that I have never really had any 'intentions' 
in the first place. Much has happened instinctively, with the group developing a 
vocabulary of performance, which has, in its own turn, allowed us to develop At 
Last Sight throughout rehearsals. That which began as a difficult process of 
creation (effectiVely, making a performance without being able to articulate or 
even identify what it was that we were trying to make) has 
developed, smoothly, 
to my mind, into a process where we all (or nearly all) 
know the 'rules", without 
ever spending much time in their discussion. It is a process which many 
that have 
devised performance will be familiar with, 
despite the particularities of At Last 
Sight. 
I 
Writing this now is leaving me with no doubt that it has been Anna's 
awkwardness with the philosophy behind the process that has resulted in the 
awkwardness of her performance. It can be no accident that her moment of 
greatest 'success' (she, the group members the spectators and myself concur here) 
came with the delivery of an attitude of naivety. An attitude that was probably 
right for all, the wrong reasons. 
As the audience entered Salle Les Chiroux on Wednesday, March P, the cast 
spoke , 3v%jx, %. freely with them, offering them glasses of wine, welcoming them to their 
seats and chatting with members of other companies who they had become 
familiar with. I was sitting at the back left of the auditorium, where I was able to 
see the spectators as well as the stage. It is never easy to gauge an accurate 
impression of a spectatorial response, but it seemed as though the audience found 
this opening interesting and engaging. I saw no embarrassed looking glances from 
one spectator to another, for example. The spectators appeared to be reading their 
programmes attentively. These programmes had been given to the spectators as 
they entered the seating area. At one point, Anna asked of one spectator - and with 
greater volume than at any other time during the performance - 'Have you read 
your programmeT It is hard here to describe how crass this sounded (and the 
video documentation fýom Liege has recorded the moment as something quite 
inconsequential). Certainly, we were all of us, including Anna, embarrassed by 
the words. We spoke about it, and indeed laughed about it, after the performance 
had ended. But at the time, it was a cringe-inducing question to ask. 
202 
The fact that Anna has gone may make this read like an attack on someone who 
has no immediate means of rep ly. 
6 
That is not the intention. I would write the 
same words of criticism if Anna were still here. 'Have you got a programme9' 
was a crass thing to say, not because it came across as such to the audience (I do 
not think it did), but because it was so inappropriate within the mood that we 
were endeavouring to create. It was simply wrong. In this, it was by no means the 
only 'wrong' moment in the night (Chris Roberts spoke the last line of At Last 
Sight in Liege, and it was so crushingly inappropriate as to be almost 
unbelievable). Anna'sfauxpas, however, has to be considered within the context 
of her overall contribution, which was never as strong as that of her peers, and 
certainly much weaker than Chris Roberts' was. 
2: Glenn Robertson. 
Glenn arrived late in Liege. His passport had been left at his family home and he 
was unable to leave with the rest of the group on the evening of February 28 th . 
He 
travelled out alone, arriving in Liege on March 2nd. There was no sense that 
Glenn's delay had caused him any concerns, although the rest of us had been 
tense and anxious. 
In performance, Glenn was comfortable. Having worked with him on two 
previous productions, Jim Cartvvnght's Road and Jez Butterworth's Mojo, in 1997 
and 1998 respectively, I know how relaxed he is in front of an audience. For 
Glenn, an audience is regarded as a collection of fiiends rather than as a 
challenge. At times this frustrated other members of the group. There 
have been 
occasions when we have been struggling to work through certain sections 
in 
I 
)Oý 
rehearsal and Glenn has suggested that 'all we need now is an audience'. This 
approach suits Glenn, without necessarily being appropriate for everybody else. 
Notwithstanding this,, his radiation of an at-ease demeanour has done much to 
settle any nerves, which might otherwise have descended upon the group. From 
my own perspective, I have become used to Glenn's inaccuracy with the words of 
At Last Sight. He has always been the last to learn any lines, preferring to 
improvise his way around the text. This means that the poetic qualities of the text 
are sometimes sacrificed, but the text itself (whatever text he chooses to speak) is 
fresh in a way that it might otherwise not have been. 
This self-imposed freedom to roam around the text helped Glenn's performance. 
He has an easy charm, which makes his delivery conversational. His opening lines 
comprised a direct address to the audience, and the manner in which he delivered 
these lines established a rapport, which gave much of what followed its intimate 
and confessional mien. 
If Glenn's performance had an overt weakness, it was that he laboured a little too 
hard at times towards creating and maintaining a tone of pathos. I am aware that 
this may seem at odds with my earlier description of him, which sought to present 
him as a 'natural' performer; but my words here are intended to elaborate on this 
very 'naturalness', rather than to contradict it. Glenn performs as -though 
he 
believes in the words that he is speaking, as though the articulated mood stems 
from his own emotional background. This is no 
bad thing; indeed,, to many minds 
it is the basis of plausible performance. However, 
it led, in Glenn's case, to a 
reduction in the offering of text-as-quote, which was and remains 
a feature of At 
204 
Last Sight. This is not intended as a harsh criticism - it is, in many ways, no 
criticism at all - so much as it is the recognition of an over-empathi sing on the 
performer's part. This was not an issue when Glenn moved Physically, he 
seemed able to stand outside the piece, as it were, and demonstrate rather than 
engage. T is was most apparent in the section where Glenn and Liz Hague played 
out the 'Arabella and Paris' scene ... a section where the performers described, 
both physically and verbally, an encounter between a couple in a hotel room. It 
seems as though Glenn acts when he moves and feels when he speaks. When the 
two are done together, the acting undercuts any potential for emotional overload-, 
when he is relying solely on speech, he displays an actorly tendency towards 
naturalism,, which sometimes runs counter to the intentions of At Last Sight. 
Glenn is a prolific consumer of alcohol. He regularly drinks upwards of ten pints 
of beer as part of an evening's entertainment. As one would expect, knowing this 
information, the bottles of wine, which were placed in and around the performing 
area, held a considerable attraction, and Glenn drank perhaps three litres of red 
wine during the performance. In all, some twenty-eight bottles of wine were 
4 used' in At Last Sight, some of which were poured out for spectators. Glenn 
displayed no indication of drunkenness, remaining steady on his feet and sober in 
deed all evening. Indeed, as the performance progressed, Glenn moved into an 
overtly directorial mode of performance, organising cast members and moving 
them fTom one space to the next. This imbued his performance with a misleading 
authority, because his fellow performers knew, at least as well as 
did Glenn, 
precisely where they were meant to be from one moment to another. 
Glenn's 
height added to this on-stage 'authonty'. He 
is six feet,, two inches tall and has a 
205 
rather chunky frame. Seen next to the rest of the cast, none of whom are 
particularly tall, Glenn's size is exaggerated. He is the same age as most of the 
cast, and younger than some, and yet in appearance he seems considerably older. 
27-3-99 
In terms of achievements, Glenn's performance was mature. He was always calm 
and composed, despite the confusion which was inevitable once Sarah 
Robertson's role was altered so radically and so late. There was a steadiness to his 
work, which I believe the audience was calmed by. Bearing in mind the fact that 
many of the spectators believed in the improvised nature of At Last Sight, as we 
had suggested in the programme, this sense of calm was extremely useful. It 
helped the piece to look ordered even at those times when the illusion of disorder 
was being sought. Without Glenn's unflappable presence, At Last Sight may have 
appeared random to the point of unintelligibility. 
28-3-99 
3: Sarah Robertson. 
Sarah has never performed in a production at University College Chester, 
although she has done so elsewhere. This means that she has always been 
something of an unknown quantity to me. Whereas I am familiar with the work of 
the rest of the group, either from working with them on productions or from 
seeing them in work directed by colleagues, I had no idea what to expect ftom 
Sarah back in October. 
She has impressed me with her sensitivity to the concerns of the written text, 
although this has not always been aligned to a commensurate consideration 
for the 
ways in which At Last Sight has been constructed. 
In many ways, it seems as 
206 
though her empathetic engagement with the content has actually worked against 
the undercutting of sentiment in much of the performance. There have been times 
- admittedly during the early stages of rehearsal - when Sarah would invest such 
a high degree of emotion into her 'readings' of the work that she found the abrupt 
nature of some of our departures very difficult to cope with- This was not the 
same thing as was happening with Anna Garnett. Intellectually, Sarah was fully 
aware of the effect we were seeking, but emotionally she seemed to go so deeply 
into the character of the words that she almost lost herself in character. She has 
always been the first to recognise emotional mood and resonance, which has been 
a real boon to the group; but the switching in and out of these moods has been 
problematic. Sarah has been aware of this, and her confidence has not been high. 
She is an incredibly self-critical performer ... to the point where she 
finds it 
almost impossible to conceal her disappointment when her delivery does not 
match her intention. Whereas the rest of the group-members are able to work 
through the inevitable disparities between thought and technique without breaking 
stride, Sarah is compelled to stop and apologise. She has to make public the 
voices in her head. 
This has led to problems in rehearsal. Increasingly, as Sarah has arrested her work 
in this way, I became concerned that she would do the same thing in performance, 
In many ways this in-and-out-of-acting is precisely what 
At Last Sight is fuelled 
by; however, Sarah's public corrections are so obviously (and at times painfully) 
real that they are exposing as sham the acted 'corrections' of the other members 
of the group. I have talked with her at some 
length about this, and I have said that 
there could well come a point where I would quite 
literally pull her fi7om the work 
207 
if I felt that she was not achieving an ability to control these breaks. Sarah was, I 
think and hope, aware that I was not saying this as a threat designed to bully her 
into a different type of performance, so much as it was the articulation of my own 
genuine and increasing concerns. 
By the time we got into Salle Les Chiroux Sarah had not managed one rehearsal 
without halting her own performance to either apologise to the group or myself or 
to berate herself for 'getting it wrong. Her friends, particularly Elizabeth Hague, 
talked with her about this, with, it needs to be said, no discernible improvement in 
this area of Sarah's work. This has been particularly upsetting because Sarah's 
best work is really very good and she is always watchable. She has a type of 
presence which is exactly as it sounds ... she 
is present in the work. Her 
commitment and care are palpable and all she really needs to do is to believe in 
that. This may read like performance as self-help; as a blend of 1960's idealism 
and drama-as-therapy. If so, the words I am using are inapproprIate and clumsy. 
What I mean to suggest is that Sarah's work is in no way particularly weaker than 
that of her peers, other than in her inability to move seamlessly through 'errors 
She is overly harsh on herself, and nothing the group or I can say seems to offset 
that. 
What this is leading up to is the fact that in Liege, during our final scheduled 
rehearsal, Sarah was still unable to get through a run of At Last Sight without 
stopping. As soon as our last rehearsal was over, I told Sarah that her participation 
put the production at risk, and that I was going to pull 
her from the work. This 
-108 
was some two hours before the audience arrived. Even as I said it, I knew it was a 
mistake. 
Sarah was, quite naturally, deeply upset. More, I think, with herself than with me; 
although this may be wishful thinking on my part. I believe she expected me to 
respond in the way that I did. None of the rest of the group argued with my 
decision. I think they could all see it coming and felt a type of powerlessness. In 
hindsight, I wish I had acted differently. My decision hurt and embarrassed Sarah 
greatly, and I feel now that I should have put her feelings as a person, and as my 
student, ahead of my own concerns for the production. Perhaps an audience in 
ti ont of her would have led to a different and more sustained type of 
concentration. I have no way of knowing whether this would have been the case. 
Sarah went and sat in the dressing room as the rest of the group divided her 
sections up between themselves. I have to say that everybody dealt well with the 
consequences of Sarah's absence, and this included Sarah herself She was bitterly 
disappointed, and Yet responded with maturity and more good grace than I had 
any right to expect. I made it plain to Sarah that the events of today bore no 
relevance on future performances, and that I believed I had no real choice ... that 
to include Sarah in the performance at this stage was neither fair to herself or to 
her peers. Her performance had become like an accident waiting to happen. There 
was such a feeling of inevitability to her lapses that the cast was on tenterhooks 
every time she spoke a passage of text. 
209 
The closer we came to the performance the more upset Sarah became. She cried 
and was quite inconsolable. She sat in the audience space as we crammed in a last 
rushed rehearsal and her sobs acted as soundtrack for the performance. It was 
harrowing to experience. The emotion was so patently real that it functioned as a 
frame for everything on stage. I then asked if Sarah would be prepared to sit in the 
performance space, during the performance, and just allow her feelings, her tears 
and her pain, to be integrated into At Last Sight. I am not proud of asking this. It 
was an exploitative request, and one, which I would have considerable difficulty 
in justifying on any sort of humanitarian grounds. It was not a calculated request 
in the literal sense, because I simply asked it as I thought it; but it was cold and 
perhaps it was cynical. Sarah agreed to do as I asked, as much, I think, as a means 
of being part of the production as because she could see any logic in my thoughts. 
What happened in performance was something I had not anticipated. Sarah's new 
and temporary 'rolell , of a young woman seated at upstage right and sobbing, gave 
a charge to the entire work. Members of the cast would crouch next to Sarah 
during the performance, touch her, dry her tears and share lit cigarettes. It was, on 
one level, as though At Last Sight had become her story. On another level, and 
much more emphatically, it read as though the sexual and emotional relationships 
within the group - which I had fabricated in the programme notes - were of such 
an intensity that Sarah, as an individual rather than as a 
'performer', was simply 
unable to control her pain. 
It was apparent to me at this stage, watching 
from the audience, that Chris Roberts 
had an emotional connection with Sarah that went 
beyond friendship. The ways in 
210 
which he touched and looked at her were of a different quality to the behaviour of 
the rest of the cast. I know now, from speaking with Chris and Sarah after the 
performance, that they have, for some time now, felt a growing attraction for each 
other, which they have struggled against and which now seems set to develop into 
a love affair. Chris has a situation with a long-term partner, which adds another 
level of difficulty to their feelings, In writing these words, I am inevitably running 
the risk of moving into areas which are personal to Chris and Sarah and, as such, 
are not the business of this thesis. However, it would be remiss of me not to 
record something here,, which in its own turn cannot fail to impact on our future 
rehearsals. Affairs and sexual encounters between performers are common, no 
less so when those performers are students. In itself, it is generally no more or less 
than a consequence of late-nigbt rehearsals and the close proximity, at times both 
emotional and physical, between people with shared interests. Performance is also 
always about looking. It provides one of the very few occasions in our society 
when we are invited and even compelled to watch each other. There is an 
unavoidable crotics to this. It would be alarming in its own way if the erotic 
nature of this did not spill over into some type of sexual ftisson between 
performers. Some directors will counsel against this, believing that sexual 
relationships within the cast work to the detriment of the cast per se; that 
-jealousies, 
petty squabbles and perhaps even the collapse of the relationship will 
create problems. Others may feel that the group is what and who the group is. If 
they are lovers, so be it. If people in the group do not get on with each other, so be 
it 
II 
29-3-99 
With At Last Sight there is an irony to the fact that the lie of lovers is now 
becoming true. It is an irony, which I am happy to embrace. I feel no moral 
responsibility for their actions (or intentions), any more than I would if this were a 
production of Julius Caesar- The work is neither responsible nor accountable for 
any desires or passions within the cast. The group members are adults and are 
capable of arriving at their own decisions as to who they wish to be involved with 
and why. If Chris and Sarah become lovers during the time between now and the 
end of their time together in the group then we, as a group, have to IlVe and deal 
with that in the same way that we are dealing with Anna Garnett's departure. It 
happens. On a positive level, I would expect their feelings for each other to be 
explored (exploited? ) in future rehearsals and future performances. The work is as 
much about who the group members are and what they are feeling as it is about 
the words and actions we are seeking to present. 
The rehearsals for At Last Sight, which we will soon recommence, will find Sarah 
Robertson doing as much of the work she has already rehearsed as she so Wishes. 
What happened in Liege was a consequence of a series of phenomena, which are 
now history. The work is restarting, and so is Sarah. I have every faith in her. Not 
least because of the way she dealt with and worked through the disappointments 
of Liege. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Anna Garnett's disappearance 
means that the remaining cast will have more to do than we could have expected. 
Sarah is as enthusiastic as everyone else about the possibilities we now 
have to re- 
invent At Last Sight, to improve on something, which we are already pleased with. 
212 
One thing I should say is that the response of a number of spectators to Sarah's 
tears was incredible. Immediately after the performance, people, some crying 
themselves, approached Sarah and told her how brave they thought she had been 
to perform when she was so obviously upset. What they believed, having read 
their programme notes, was that Sarah, sharing the same surname as Glenn, was 
his wife. They assumed (and Sarah immediately confirmed this to them) that 
Glenn was conducting an affair with Anna and that Sarah had been left as a 
consequence of this. (Glenn was almost attacked later that night by members of 
the group from Buffalo, New Yorký when they saw him having a drink with Anna 
7 in the bar). It was at this point that the lies written in the programme really began 
be 
..., ar 
fruit. An admittedly strange fruit, but fruit nonetheless. There was no 
doubt that these spectators fully believed in the invented relationships, and that 
this belief had informed the ways in which they viewed the work. 
have written earlier in this documentation of my cynicism with regard to 
'invisible theatre' as a tool for social change, but as a theatrical device, and in this 
instance, it was effective, and,, as such, successful. The lies had been told in order 
to see whether an audience would believe what they read for no better reason than 
that those lies were being offered in a 'truthful' form. If the experience of At Last 
Sight in Liege stands in any way as 'evidence' - and I believe that it does - then 
the work is opening up possibilities for interventions that I had never, prior to this 
project, even considered. I can tell the truth in performance and the form makes 
that truth read as a lie; I can tell lies in the programme and that form makes those 
lies read as truth. The potential for future prOjects is 
immense. For anybody 
interested in truth and lies (and how can any of us make art and not be? ) then this 
211 
intervention provides a frame within which a seemingly endless series of 
explorations can be made. For if we are able to subvert and displace the idea of 
certainty even before the spectators take their seats, then perhaps we are more able 
to tell the truth about the lies of performance than if we were to perpetuate the 
belief that the world beyond the performance is somehow fixed and factual. 
30-3-99 
4: Chris Roberts. 
Chris has travelled further as a performer than anybody else in the group has. IFEs 
early rehearsals showed him to be nervous and shy. He was always hugely aware 
of being watched and his eyes would flicker towards those of the watcher(s) in 
order to see if he was being regarded with approval. We spoke at some length 
about this. I have worked with Chris on a production of Road in his first year at 
Chester, and was aware of this aspect of his performative behaviour in advance of 
commencing work on At Last Sight. In many ways, it was Chris's incessant 
looking towards the spectator that led to At Last Sight being presented in the 
manner that it presently is. We could never have operated with some principle of 
'fourth wall' mimesis, simply because Chris would inevitably peep through that 
wall and out at the watchers. 
There was never going to be any question of naturalistic acting as such, but had 
Chris not been a member of the group (and I feel able to write these words 
because I am so pleased that he is) then I may well have considered a style of 
presentation which amounted to less of a two-way gazing. 
2 14 
Because Chris speaks the first substantial section of text, and because the text and 
its delivery comprises an invitation to the audience to 'believe I in the words of the 
performance even as those same words are quite obviously quoted, his ability to 
strike an appropriate tone is important. Playing to an audience which was made up 
in considerable part of non-English speakers made that 'tone' even more 
important than it might be when At Last Sight is presented in Chester. To my 
mind, Chris dealt with this first section very well indeed. He may have been 
nervous (and I suspect that he was) but what nerves were there were disguised. 
There was an authority to his performance here, which settled my own nerves as 
much, I think, as his own and those of his peers. 
Of the four men in the group, Chris is possessed of the most 'honest' and 
engaging appearance. What I mean by this is that his face and manner seem open 
and without guile. He is blond, whereas the other men are dark, so it may be that I 
am doing no more here than enforcing a stereotype: one, which favours northem 
European, looks over those of the Mediterranean. Perhaps so. Whatever the 
origins of this prejudice, it does appear to be the case that there is a common 
association between darkness and danger. Where Glenn Robertson has dark 
stubble, Laurent Ruggeri has an olive complexion and Andrew Proudfoot has 
deep black and sinister-looking eyebrows, Chris is extremely pale-skinned. He 
looks innocent. Without wishing to perpetuate this idea of appearances as being in 
any way accurate barometers of nature, within performance it is clearly standard 
practice so to do. Heroes are handsome and heroines beautiful. Any deviations 
from this only serve to highlight the narrowness of our usual expectations. I 
suspect that the way Chris looks has more than a little to 
do With the plausibility 
215 
of his performance. One's first instinct may well be to trust the performer and 
then to carry that trust through to that which is being performed. 
The nature of Chris's contribution to At Last Sight is such that he appears to be 
claiming the events as his own. He begins the piece and he ends it. There is a type 
of framing here, which means that the 'story', such as it is, plays as though it is a 
re-staging of his memory. The fact that Sarah Robertson was sitting and weeping 
throughout the performance, and the manner in which Chris interacted with her, 
only served to add to this illusion. From my perspective, this resulted in an 
engrossing relationship ... one which the spectator was fully privy to, and one 
which made 'sense' when viewed after reading the programme. This meant that At 
Last Sight was able to Play with a core of perceived meaning ... at 
least 50% of 
which was impossible to predict prior to the reconfiguration of Sarah's role. 
Chris handled his moments of 'dialogue' with the audience comfortably and was 
credible throughout. He adapted well to the need to re-invent certain sections now 
that Sarah Robertson was no longer active in the piece. His only real moment of 
weakness came at the end ofAt Last Sight. He was speaking lines which described 
a scene in a film by Werner Fassbinder (one which Chris has certainly never seen) 
and we had rehearsed this so that Chris continued to speak for a few seconds after 
the on-stage lights were taken down by Glenn Robertson. At the time that the 
lights were dimmed, Chris was concluding the description of a character's 
costume. The rehearsed words were- 'He has a long coat. ' At this point, Chris 
should have continued speaking into the darkness. Whether he improvised the 
words or used the ones he had rehearsed was unimportant, as long as they 
216 
sounded appropriate. What Chris did was to stop speaking as soon as the lights 
went off. What he said was: 'He had a long -.. 
' Clearly, this was not what was 
required. 
No real damage was caused by this. I groaned inwardly, though I heard no 
chuckles or suchlike from the audience - and the applause that followed was both 
impressive and sustained - but I was disappointed that Chris was able to make 
such a naive error. in all,, however, this was of little or no consequence. What 
matters is that I was both pleased and proud with his overall contribution, and am 
looking forward to seeing how we can develop his performance over the coming 
weeks leading up to our performance in the Molloy Auditorium at University 
College Chester. 
Inevitably, this development will include some sort of recognition of his 
relationship with Sarah Robertson. In one way or another it is something which he 
cannot ignore. Chris is engaged to be married, with the date set for August of this 
year. Knowing Chris and Sarah as I do, I am expecting him to either resist his 
feelings for Sarah or else confess all to his girlfiiend. Similarly, Sarah does not 
strike me as someone who would be prepared to engage in an illicit and part-time 
relationship. Whatever they do will impact on the work. If Chris resists or denies 
his feelings for Sarah, or if Sarah chooses to maintain a distance between herself 
and Chris then his girlfriend will be coming to see At Last Sight in Chester. This 
could result in Chris and Sarah wanting to pull back from the sort of close 
physical contact with each other which is currently central to the perfonnance, If 17 .1 
he embraces his new feelings (his new relationship) and subsequently comes clean 
217 
with his girlfriend (I know her name, but do not really feel comfortable making 
her identity public, even within the narrow readership of this thesis) then that on- 
stage contact may become even closer. If I am reading Chris and Sarah 
incorrectly, and they conduct an affair in 'secret', then we the group will be made 
complicit in that deceit. 
There is a type of honour in both Sarah and Chris which augurs against that 
happening. Honour is a difficult word to use in this context, but I do not feel that 
it is inappropriate. I do not see either Chris or Sarah being comfortable with lies. 
Something will have to give. 
1-4-99 
5: Andrew Proudfoot. 
Andrew is a quirky performer. There is an unpredictable quality to his work, an 
edginess, which keeps me watching. He also looks quirky. He has an animated 
face, which seems even more pronounced because the rest of the members of the 
cast are fairly deadpan. There is an energy in him. 
It is in no way intended as an attack or a slight to say that, as an actor, 
Andrew has 
his limitations- The Drama Department at Chester does not provide vocational 
actor training, and the institution is not a conservatoire. 
There have been times in 
rehearsal when Andrew has been a little too 
keen to 'act', in the sense of wanting 
to create moments where he would be seen to show something of 
his range. A by- 
product of the way we work (and the way we 
do not work) at Chester is that 
students are not always aware of 
how little they (and we) can actually do. 
218 
Accordingly, one element of our work as directors of performance is to protect 
students from their own excesses and conceits. Sometimes it seems as though this 
is our main task: to make work which is as much about disguising inadequacies 
(again, our own as much as our students) as it is about providing a platform for 
credible skills. At one point in rehearsals, Andrew wanted to perform a soliloquy 
from Shakespeare's Macbeth. I cannot recall now what it was that started Andrew 
off on this quest, but it grew into something of a quiet obsession. For three weeks, 
Andrew would turn up to rehearsals with a paperback copy of Macbeth in his 
pocket and every time we would reach a point of not knowing where to go with At 
Last Sight he would suggest one speech or another fi7om that play. No amount of 
reasoning on my part would convince Andrew that a section of Allacbeth would 
enhance neither At Last Sight nor Andrew's own grade. Ultimately, Andrew ran 
out of steam and his copy of Macbeth was returned to his shelf. 
In performance in Liege, Andrew was strong. He functions as almost a dark twin 
to the clean-cut persona of Chris Roberts, providing the work with an air of 
predatory sexuality. When he thrusts his pelvis suggestively, in response to a 
description of a non-existent Fassbinder film, Too Naughýy to Say No, there is 
something base-looking in Andrew himself, which works well with the acted 
movements. The scene would be radically different with, for example, Laurent 
moving in the same way. If anything, I feel as though we should counter this with 
some moments of vulnerability, because as it stands, Andrew 
is too obviously 
representative of libido, whereas Chris"s actions, words and demeanour seem to 
speak to the spectator of love. Perhaps the recognition of this will 
lead to a way in 
which Andrew can display the 'range' 
he so seeks. 
219 
His weakest scene is the one with Anna Garnett, although, as I have already 
mentioned,, I believe that the fault here lay more with Anna than with Andrew. For 
the rest of the piece, Andrew was on good form, and I have no reason to consider 
changing what he does, other than to provide him with more opportunities to 
explore the more sentimental side of his nature. 
In terms of the structure of At Last Sight, there is a pedestrian quality to too much 
of the work and it is Andrew who seems most able and likely to alter that. He 
appears to be moving quickly even when he is no faster than the rest of the group. 
If pace is to come from any individual, then that individual Will almost certainly 
be Andrew. What needs to be guarded against is the temptation to have Andrew 
running riot whilst the movements of the rest of the cast remain ponderous. 
Notwithstanding my comments about appearance, it has never been my intention 
that different performers should embody different 'types, I do not want Andrew 
to appear as though he is in a different piece to the others any more than I want to 
limit his role to that of the Mr. Hyde to Chris's Dr. Jekyll. 
The way that the group looks, both individually and collectively, is important. 
Sarah Skelton, for example, plays a section where she approaches a male spectator 
in the audience and the 'success' of that scene is in part at least determined by her 
level of attractiveness. So I am not trying to negate or work against the physical 
impression which Andrew or any other member of the cast is capable of 
presenting. Rather, I am interested in the ways in which a working against the 
220 
ease with which he can play 'dirty' or 'dark' might make those moments which 
already exist seem darker still. 
I am expecting Andrew to do well when we perform in Chester, even better than 
he performed in Liege. He is a popular student, a keen Elvis Presley on Karaoke 
nights, (he has been nicknamed 'King' by the cast) and he enjoys playing in front 
of friends. There is a sly humour to his work, a knowing look, which I am excited 
about seeing when at least some of the spectators are also his ffiends. Because I 
know that Andrew is romantically interested in a fellow student (not a member of 
this cast), I know that he is regarding our production of At Lcw Sight at Chester as 
a means of performing to her. He has told me this, with a disarming and 
disconcerting honesty. He sees At Last Sight as a deeply seductive work, and is 
hoping that some of that seductive nature will influence the object of his desire. 
I have no objections to At Last Sight being seen or used in this way. If Andrew 
wants to regard the work as an aid to a romantic encounter then he will do so 
whatever I think or feel. As with the issue of Chris Roberts and Sarah Robertson, I 
feel no moral responsibility for the behaviour of the cast. I am their tutor but not 
their guardian. If they work well and hard on the project then I am pleased, 
Anything else that they choose to do is their own concern. 
6: Sarah Skelton. 
Sarah's contribution to At Last Sight has always been strong. Whilst she would 
make no claims to being a performer of significant range, she is possessed of a 
discernible presence, aligned to a quiet confidence and a willingness to put the 
221 
needs of the production above any desire she might have to achieve a high grade. 
This has been a constant feature of her work. Some two months ago, I suggested 
to Sarah that she use sign-language throughout the production and, whilst this was 
something which the rest of the cast were set against, Sarah herself was quite 
happy to go along with the idea. Complaints from other students that her 
assessment would inevitably suffer as a consequence of her not speaking (which 
were always unfounded and incorrect) did not alter Sarah's intentions. Ultimately, 
the sign-idea looked unconvincing in rehearsal, and it was subsequently reduced 
to a very short section towards the start of the piece. 
For Sarah, the process has always been both significant and enjoyable ... an end 
in itself as much as it has been a means. She is currently engaged in a dissertation 
on postmodern performance, as is Chris Roberts, both of whom are being 
supervised by a colleague of mine. Accordingly, her interest in the rationale 
behind At Last Sight is strong. She is an informed and popular member of the 
group, 
In terms of her performance, Sarah has perhaps three moments, which stand out. 
She addresses the audience directly, explaining that she will be speaking in sign- 
language for part of the performance, and that this is a 'theatrical device'; she 
delivers a description of the female orgasm, in the manner of a lecture; and she 
engages in a whispered dialogue with a male spectator. 
it I The section relating to the orgasin is perhaps the easiest one to 
deal wi h, as it is 
the most overtly theatrical of the three moments. Sarah's 
delivery was such that it 
I I') 
appeared to hold the audience, even those members for whom English was not a 
ýcomprehensible language. There was a flatness to this scene, which was not of 
Sarah's making. Despite intentions to the contrary, there are too many moments in 
At Last Sight - and this is one of them - when there is too little happening at any 
one time, In this case, that means that when Sarah is speaking the rest of the cast 
members seem to defer to her 'moment' and remain still for fear of upstaging. We 
have talked about this in rehearsal, and the problem is mine rather than the cast 
members'. We need to find some action that will provide the scene with a visual 
quality to offset the static nature of Sarah's speech. It is as though we are still 
clinging, subconsciously, to a cultural disinclination towards anything that might 
be regarded as 'scene-stealing', even when we know that a complex, overlapping 
and sometimes deliberately disruptive montage is precisely what the work most 
requires. 
It is a strange feature of performance-making that inadequacies in the work can go 
unnoticed prior to public performance; so that seeing the work as part of an 
audience is almost like seeing it for the first. This was certainly the case in Liege. 
I watched Sarah driving this scene and was pleased with her work at the same 
time as I was wondering how we could have failed to notice the spaces around 
her. Too much space and too little action. The fact that it is such an easy problem 
to resolve only adds to my feelings of directorial naivety. 
Sarah's sign-language section was performed as well as 
it had been in rehearsal. It 
is tempting to say that it was better, but the distance 
between the 'then' of 
rehearsals and (if not quite the 'now') the more recent 
'then" of Liege is not great 
enough for me to make that judgement with any accuracy. Certainly, playing to an 
audience helped the performers, just as it enabled me to see the work as part of a 
collective. But to suggest that certain performances were radically enhanced by 
the presence of spectators would be to buy in too heavily to one of the abiding 
my , 
ths of theatre. The performers presented the work as they had rehearsed it ... 
with the obvious proviso of having to work around the 'absence' of Sarah 
Robertson. Nothing '-magical' happened through the presence of an audience. All 
that we can say that it did was provide a focus for the actions and words. In this 
w, qV 
_,,, 
the effectiveness of Sarah Skelton's delivery was made more apparent here 
than it could have been in rehearsal. The audience watched and listened (or 
appeared to) and perhaps that again is all that we can say. 
As a director, one engages in a series of guesses. It is the same with any art. 
Choices are made in the hope that they will hang together and make a kind of 
aesthetic sense to the viewer/receiver. Just as in writing these words now I am 
Pessing that a sense will be transmitted to the reader. The more one writes, the 
better one's guesses become ... or at 
least that would seem like a fair assumption. 
The more one directs performance, the more effective those directorial 
judgements might be. It is a flawed premise; because we know that work is not 
made on the steadily upward spiral that would exist if such was always the case. 
Nevertheless, the premise is logical in a way that makes it difficult to ignore. The 
greater the control of technique, the greater the probability that this same 
technique will facilitate an enhanced process of communication. 
22 4 
2-4-99 
There is an awkwardly negotiated line between the benefits of experience and the 
perils of the cliched and the formulaic, Those of us who make work regularly will 
be aware of the temptation to succumb to the regurgitation of previous ideas 
rather than the invention of new strategies. This is not to suggest that dra'"ing on 
previous experience is wrong. For how could such be the case? But it is an 
attempt to highlight some of the problems that experience can bring. What worked 
once before is by no means guaranteed to work again; which does not always 
prevent us from integrating the 'good bits' of the past into the spaces where new 
ideas might otherwise bear fruit. My own predilection towards stillness and 
silence - which is perhaps no more now than a searching for the emulation of 
previous 'successes' via previous techniques - has led me to an economy of 
action, which in this case is working against the production as a whole. It is an 
area I need to address as soon as the cast reconvenes in Chester. 
Sarah's most complex moment is probably the one where she initiates a dialogue 
with a male spectator. What happens is that Sarah is seated in an extremely down 
stage position, almost touching the audience. She will have made a decision 
earlier on in the work about which spectator she will address, and this has 
influenced the position she takes up at this point. Whilst other members of the cast 
are presenting action and dialogue on stage, Sarah begins to whisper to a male 
spectator. ' She asks him why he is watching her rather than the perforinance per 
, 3. %,. 
She asks whether he likes looking at her. She tells him she has noticed that he C'O 
has been watching her. The words and the delivery are overtly flirtatious. In fact, 
the words are no more than a development of an earlier section where Sarah has 
22 
-5 
asked the audience whether they think that her lips are painted red for their 
collective gaze. Structurally, the only difference here is that the spectator is alone 
and is made complicit in that gaze: it is being returned. Emotionally there are a 
great many differences. Sarah is an attractive young woman. She is aware that she 
is exploiting this in this scene and is comfortable with the complexities of 
speaking in these whispered tones to a male stranger. The fact that this stranger 
may well not understand any of Sarah's words should not diminish the 
effectiveness of the encounter. It is loaded with whispered intimacy and 
invitation. 
It is perhaps a crude means of playing with notions of the gaze. It came about, like 
much of At Last Sight has, by accident. During one rehearsal, Sarah was sitting on 
the floor in a down stage position when she began whispering to me. The words 
were only whispered because other members of the cast were still performing and 
Sarah did not wish to upset their concentration. The words themselves were 
inconsequential: Sarah was asking if she could leave the space to make a pre- 
arranged phone call to a letting agent. Two things were interesting. The first was 
that I felt drawn into the world of the performance by the initiation of a dialogue 
with one of the cast whilst the rest of the performance continued. It was as though 
I were no longer invisible, which was a strange realisation, because we had never 
been operating with any notion of the 'fourth wall'. Whispering my own response 
to Sarah only served to enhance this feeling of participation ... of a 
being in at the 
same time as a being out. 
2-16 
The second was that I was made aware of the intimacy of whispers within a public 
space. There was nothing salacious about the content of our dialogue, yet the form 
imbued it with a kind of secret sharing. In terms of performance this is exciting 
because within a whispered relationship there is the possibility for empathy born 
of a primarily somatic engagement. The body can fool the mind. As an example of 
this we can say that if performer A were to prod performer B in the chest 
repeatedly there is a possibility that performer B would become angry, even 
though s/he is aware that performer A is only acting. The body's responses can 
over-rule the more reasoned responses of the mind. In this way, Sarah's 
whispering to a stranger might lead to an emotional engagement on his part. This 
P engagement would exist 
in spite of the fact that he would know, logically, that the 
words were either part of a prepared text or else were negated by the context 
wit in which they were being uttered. 
This may not amount to a 'legitimate' working through of the idea. Certainly, I 
grasped the idea almost as it came with little thought of any problematic 
consequences. Fortunately, there were no problems with this section In Liege. 
According to Sarah (I was too far away to bear reliable witness to the exchange) 
the spectator, a Belgian male in his thirties who spoke English well, responded to 
her words with whispers of his own. He said that yes , indeed, 
he had been 
watching Sarah more than any of the others, and that yes, he was enjoying looking 
at her very much. According to Sarah and also to other members of the group, this 
same spectator spent the remaining fifty minutes following Sarah with his eyes, 
ignoring everything else that occurred on stage. 
22-, ' 
3-4-99 
I am able to trace this interest I have in on-stage whispers to a production of A 
Winter's Tale at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool in 1987. Before the 
performance could begin, the director came out on the stage and addressed the 
audience. She told us that the actress playing the part of Paulina had lost her voice 
and would have to whisper the part. The audience duly applauded this spirit of 
'The Show Must Go On'. When the character of Paulina first spoke, and indeed 
she did so in a whisper, I was drawn in to her words to a much greater degree than 
had she proclaimed them in the manner (and at the level) of the rest of the cast. 
The words carried easily. No sounds came from the audience and the acoustics of 
the space ensured that every word was clearly heard. After a few moments, the 
actors sharing scenes with Paulina (the performer's name escapes me) began to 
moderate their own voices until before long every performer in the cast was 
whispering. 
I did not particularly enjoy the 'play'. The direction did not impress me and the 
set, costumes and actors were ordinary. Had it not been for the whispers I suspect 
that I would have forgotten the experience almost as soon as the evening had 
passed. As it was,, it remains one of the most powerful examples of theatre I have 
ever witnessed. Years later,, when watching a production of Othello at the Young 
Vic Theatre, I can remember aching for some of the unplanned for whispered 
restraint of the Everyman Winter's Tate. Willard Whyte, as Othello, bellowing his 
speech over the dead Desdemona as though he were shouting instructions across a 
parade ground and in a high wind had little to offer. When the audience had been 
invited to listen attentively in Liverpool we had done so. We had listened in the 
228 
way that one listens to conversations through a hotel wall. The fainter the words 
the greater our urgency to hear. There had been more intimacy, more sharing and 
more engagement in that straining to hear than in any of the Young Vic 
projection. 
Whispers then have long been an aesthetic device I have wished to utillse. The 
intimate nature of At Last Sight has allowed me to explore this aesthetic without 
feeling that the device is either arbitrary or ill conceived. Again, it is a guess. 
What works for or appeals to me may not work for an audience. It will certainly 
not work for all members of an audience. As ever, all that one can do is make 
guesses based on the blend of judgement, experience and instinct that we each 
carry with us. If a whisper is also possessed of a certain filmic quality, of an 
eavesdropping on the part of the spectator, then that too is appropriate to At Last 
Sight, which has always been driven by a sensibility born of a love of film. 
Three years ago, I performed at the Spiel Art Festival in Munich in a production 
of Insomniac Productions' Clare de Luz. The work, directed by Pete Brooks, was 
concerned with theatre-, as-film; or, to be more accurate, with the construction of a 
theatrical event which would result in a similar experience to watching a film. The 
structure was one of jump cuts, swift shifts in perspective and lip-synching to a 
soundtrack presented in surround-sound stereo. The production was successful on 
many levels, receiving critical acclaim and playing to a number of appreciative 
audiences. As a performer drafted in for the dates at Spiel Art only I can take a 
share in none of this credit, and mention it here only as a means of acknowledging 
the achievements of Insomniac's creative team. 
229 
Clare de Luz was a production of significance to myself It had impressed me 
hugely when I had seen it, and I enjoyed the expefience of performing in the piece 
when I did. What it has not done is make At Last Sight any easier to create. In this 
way its signi icance has not functioned as a lib in erat' g device. Where Clare de Luz 
seemed comfortably sui generis At Last Sight seems derivative. I realise that this 
is because I am aware of my own influences to .a greater degree than those of 
Brooks. That which seems effortless and original within Clare de Luz is born out 
of the same world of memory and influence as At Last Sight ... the 
difference is 
that Brooks' influences are hidden from view (from my view at least) in a way 
that my own are not. 
The unqualified success of Clare de Luz made the initial processes of creating At 
Last Sight even more difficult than might otherwise have been the case. Whereas 
Insomniac Productions had utilised a filmic form with what amounted to a highly 
theatrical, not to say melodramatic, content, we were attempting with At Last 
Sight to achieve something of the feel of film without recourse to any cinematic 
devices. Just the opposite in fact, because At Last Sight opens itself up to a 
multitude of viewing perspectives which are the stuff of live theatre and the 
antithesis of film. This has resulted in an incessant self-doubting. A doubting 
which has been much more pronounced than is usual for me. It feels as though I 
am chasing a cinematic ideal at the same time as my brief experience of Clare de 
Luz has served a dual and perhaps even a negative purpose. It exists as a 
paradigm, which I cannot realistically expect to match, and 
it also denies me the 
possibility of using a more overt film-form precisely 
because to do so would 
2U 
result in a feeling of aesthetic plagiarism. Even if those feelings were not 
recognised by the cast or any spectators. 
This is not to suggest that I would like to wipe Clare de Luz from my memory. It 
is more a case of something that I have come to regard as a landmark production 
haunting At Last Sight by dint of its own internal and performative coherence. It is 
in the nature of influence that that which inspires us most has competencies that 
are also so tantalisingly beyond our reach. 
4-4-99 
7: Elizabeth Hague. 
Elizabeth is the most accomplished performer of the group. The rest of the group 
members recognise this. She has a strong emotional range, can be by turns 
inviting and forbidding, and is the only member of the cast who seems ready, at 
this stage, to work with a professional company. She is the performer whom my 
colleagues in the Drama Department would most wish to be a member of their 
groups, and, as such, is a great boon to At Last Sight. 9 
Watching the work in Liege, I was aware of how little Elizabeth is being asked to 
do. She speaks a section early on, which is one of a series of 'introductions' to the 
piece; she plays an Arabella and Paris scene with Glenn Robertson and she 
describes a non-existent David Lynch film. Because she is capable of a level of 
performance that is greater than her peers are, there is a temptation to give her 
more to do than them. Trying to read At Last Sight as a spectator, meant that I 
wanted to see more of Elizabeth ... as a 
director and tutor, I have to balance this 
with considerations of parity within the cast. This is most important perhaps in 
231 
terms of my role as a tutor. The role carries with it an obligation of care to each of 
the students. They are each deserving, through their status as students, of the same 
opportunities for learning and for presenting the evidence of that learning ... 
in 
this instance via performance. The simple fact that Elizabeth appears capable of 
performing at a level beyond that of her peers in no way legitimises a situation 
where the process is loaded in her favour. By this I mean that this project will not 
succumb to the temptation to create 'star' parts for 'star' players. 
At times, this can result in difficult decisions. With a taught programme such as 
the one at University College Chester, where no consideration of process is 
afforded to Drama studentsl assessment becomes a case of the point arrived at 
rather than the distance travelled. According to our assessment criteria, each of the 
students begins at a common level. A gifted student will receive high marks for 
the production of good quality work, even when that work has been produced 
without any considerable effort on the student's part. I have no problems with 
this. Good work is good work and it seems appropriate that it should be rewarded 
thus. The problem comes when a student who is perhaps weaker in terms of 
technique works twice as hard to produce work of a similar quality to that 
produced by his or her more gifted peer. My instincts tell me that this student 
should be rewarded more handsomely ... although 
I am aware that there are flaws 
to this argument. For instance, if one were to operate this procedure with practical 
work, why not also do the same with written assignments, where marks 
for 
4process' are rarely, if ever, argued for? 
232 
Notwithstanding this, it seems unfair that work, which may go unseen in 
performance in front of an audience, is not credited in assessment. The fact that 
Elizabeth has worked diligently throughout rehearsals, contributing a number of 
key ideas and, no less importantly, raising the performance-levels of the rest of 
the cast through her own efforts, should be both acknowledged and rewarded. By 
the same token, I could argue that, at least at this point in time, Chris Roberts and 
Sarah Robertson (despite my problems with her in Liege) have travelled further as 
performers than the rest of the group, whilst Sarah Skelton has been perhaps the 
most constructively and consistently unselfish. None of this will be taken into 
consideration in assessment. The students will be marked solely on an assessment 
of their performances on the night or nights that At Last Sight is seen by members 
of the department. 
There is nothing Elizabeth does in performance that is weak. I could write here a 
list of her qualities, but this would serve to shift the chapter away fi7om its aim. 
What matters is that she performed admirably and, if possible, and without 
upsetting either the balance of At Last Sight or the balance of the group, I would 
like to see her do more. To this end, and once again, Anna Garnett's decision to 
leave the group may well serve as something of a gift to the remaining cast. Anna, 
I should say, has by now left Chester and is back at her home in the North East, 
with her studies suspended until such time as she negotiates some package of 
distance learning or re-attendance. The dividing up of Anna's role between the 
remaining members of the group will inevitably provide further opportunities 
for 
Elizabeth. I am happier with this than with the idea of creating an abundance of 
new material. At Last Sight was solid enough in performance 
for me to be 
13 
confident in the work as it currently stands. I am aware of what has sometimes 
been an over-willingness on my part to make quite radical alterations to work 
when that work might be better served by polishing that which already exists. I 
need to maintain this awareness throughout the crucial few weeks that remain 
between now and the presentations of At Last Sight in Chester. 
5-4-99 
Anke Sauthof and Laurent Ruggeri did everything that could be expected of them 
after such a brief time as members of the group. In terms of their performances, 
Laurent's movements have a ponderous quality, which suits the thematics of At 
Last Sight, whilst doing little to offer hope of any accelerated pace. Anke moves 
like a dancer. She is dance-trained and this shows in everything she does. She is 
intelligent and has grasped very quickly the nature of the work, but physically she 
is prone to movements and the adoption of positions that are considerably more 
stvlised than anything else on show within the piece. Her feet shift, almost by 
their own volition, into dance positions, and any gestures she makes have the 
grace of dance rather than the inelegance required for much of At Last Sight. We 
have talked about this, and I have asked her not to 'prettify' the work. All that is 
required is concentration and the breaking of habits, which her previous training 
has made into a type of instinct. 
6-4-99 
Something which both Anke and Laurent bring in addition to their rehearsed 
contributions as perfonners, are their nationalities. This lends a European feel to 
At Last Sight, which is more than a mere nod towards an anti-parochialism. Text 
spoken in foreign languages brings something else to the work. One of the ideas 
for performance which has stayed with me for fifteen years (it was spoken by one 
23) 4 
of my tutors during my final year on an undergraduate programme) is of 
characters who have everything to say and nobody to speak to, and of characters 
who are surrounded by others yet have nothing to say. I think it is as a (somewhat 
muddled) response to this that I am drawn towards words on stage which have 
meaning, but where that meaning is lost in the space between the speaker and the 
listener. It allows the work to be both literal and obscure; to be meaningful and 
meaningless at one and the same time. In performance-making terms it is no more 
than another guess. I am guessing that this will read as more than simply a 
collection of languages; more than the random configuration of student- 
performers with different levels of bi-linguality. 
11-4-99 
In writing these words, I am coming to realise that these guesses are really wishes 
dressed up as strategies. They are hopes and very little more- and in this they are 
at least as optimistic as they are informed. That this is the nature of creating work 
does not make its realisation any easier to accept. It makes the creation of 
performance more of a lottery than I would normally care to admit. The very 
absence of any 'rules' of success, which makes the commencement of each 
project such an exciting leap in the dark, is the same thing that leads to 
experienced practitioners feeling every bit as vulnerable as the new. We move 
bodies in space and time and light, and sometimes give them words to speak, in 
the hope that something of our original intentions will find a way to speak to 
strangers seated in the dark. We play - or I am playing here - with issues of 
redemption towards a decidedly unstable end. The spectators of At Last Sight no 
more share my world-view than I feel any desire to make a work that seeks to 
235 
show them how to think. Which makes the construction of the work seem 
somehow shallow and without purpose. 
12-4-99 
I can recognise these doubts as a direct consequence of reflective analysis. In 
tracing my intentions thus I am also inevitably recalling something of my fears- 
When a project has no clear function other than as an example of an 'interesting ) 
way of making work, then there are times when one's faith in the interest of 
spectators is stretched too thin to bear. With At Last Sight - as a performance- 
project rather than as a subject for my own written analysis - the absence of any 
obvious function places an almost intolerable weight on the success of the work 
according to purely aesthetic criteria. When there is no 'message' all that can 
remain is the hope - or at best, the belief - that the work will be sustained through 
the internal logic of its own construction ... that the aesthetic qualities 
displayed 
will be enough to make an audience attend. 
There is a Catch-22 in my own argument here ... which exposes my concerns as 
no more than a wishing for protection via the very criteria for theatre as a tool for 
social reform that I am resolutely disinclined towards. For whereas issue-based 
dramas can take solace in the assumed worthiness of their causes, be they stated 
or implied, work such as At Last Sight has no such safety net. Offering audiences 
no more or less than an 'interesting take' on performance, the project almost 
invites criticisms of esoteric and elitist self-indulgence. 
There is a perversity to my mood now, as we enter what are the 
final stages of 
making the work. Liege was a success, according to my own terms and 
2 '16 
expectations. The piece went well, the cast pulled together and the response from 
spectators was sufficient to make the entire group feel a genuine confidence about 
the project, 
This last point is an interesting one, because the words spectators offer to makers 
of performances are not always accurate responses. I know this to be so by the 
dishonesty of many of my own post-performance comments to actors, directors, 
dances, musicians and writers. To say that a spectator enjoyed any given 
produe I tion is an impossible claim to support: the comments made by spectators 
are simply not sufficient to be afforded the status of evidence or proof 
Notwithstanding this, we continue to believe the good things that we hear from 
sDectators,, Just as we seek to discredit and dismiss the bad. A desperate triumph of I-- ---- -- -1 
hope over experience. 
The lies we told in our programmes served their purpose, and indeed exceeded our 
expectations in an entirely positive way. The work contained an interesting blend 
of the at-risk and the well rehearsed. We are left with enough time in Chester to 
work through any changes we feel necessary, and all is set-fair for performances 
in May, The absence of Anna Garnett is unlikely to disadvantage the piece and 
should in fact provide opportunities for other members of the group to develop 
their current roles without upsetting such structure as already exists. Why then 
these self-doubts? I suspect that they are nothing more than the usual concerns, 
exaggerated here by their inclusion in a written documentation. Under 'normal" 
circumstances, by which I mean the making of a project with students, which 
would not be accompanied by a written discourse, there would be precious 
little 
2-337 
time for such doubts to emerge, Other tasks take up other t1mes and any concerns 
that do exist would be reconciled in the rehearsal space rather than at the desk. 
This does not mean that a process of reflective documentation is to be avoided. I 
have no doubts that At Last Sight is and will be a better and richer piece of work 
than would have been the case if the 'making' were not so closely aligned with 
reflection and explanation. But the process is draining. It provides no respite. one 
is rehearsing or else one is writing. 
14-4-99 
The result of this is a concentration that borders on the obsessive. At the same 
time as I write these words, during the Easter Vacation of 1999,1 am also 
preparing to travel to the United States , in order to teach on an exchange 
programme at the University of New York State. This is one element of a long- 
standing arrangement. On the one hand then, I am looking forward to a break 
from At Last Sight, on the other, I am unhappy at the separation. The project has 
been such a central part of my thinking and doing for so long that to leave it 
behind for five weeks (three weeks during Easter and then two in upstate New 
York) seems like an overlong absence. The members of the cast have agreed to 
meet at their usual times and so the work will have inevitably altered by the time I 
return. This also accounts for an element of the trepidation I currently feel. The 
process of constructing At Last Sight has been genuinely collaborative. It has been r- 
so in ways that have not been evidenced in any project I have previously led, and I 
am proud and pleased of the manner in which the entire group has made the work 
thus far. It is in an acknowledgement rather than denial of this that I am able to 
recognise a coming to the surface at this point of a hitherto concealed craving for 
power. 
, -, ) ') 
A consequence of the performance in Liege was that the cast felt an ownership of 
At Last Sight. Any doubts they may have harboured as to the ways in which the 
work would be read seemed to be allayed by experience of performing the work in 
public and by the immediate and subsequent responses of spectators. They feel 
now as though the work is theirs. I feel threatened here by the very thing that I 
have so strenuously sought to achieve, and which the group has so clearly 
attained. I am not happy with the idea of myself as an autocrat, although I realise 
that this is an articulation of the way I feel. This makes me wonder whether I have 
only been seeking the illusion of collaboration, whilst secretly (as a secret even to 
myself'? ) wanting to maintain a directorial control which would subjugate the cast 
to the status of breathing puppets. Certainly, a part of my antipathy towards the 
idea of visiting America at this time (something I have been looking forward to all 
year) is connected to the fear of letting At Last Sight pass out of my hands. If I 
were to ask myself now how real are my fears that this relocation will be manifest 
in the work being substantially changed by the time I return, then the answer 
would be 'I do not know' 
What I do know is that I trust the group. I have every faith in their individual and 
collective abilities to develop the work constructively; which leaves me with the 
bleak realisation that any concerns I have are not for At Last Sight as much as for 
myself That I care less about the changes they may make to the work than the 
ways they may change how they care about me. 7 
2 ') 9 
do not think that the cast members are aware of this, and I hope that they are not. 
It was not something that I was aware of until such time as I sat down and wrote 
the words preceding these. I wonder whether a part of this is tied in with the 
feelings I often have of anti-climax when I see work I have directed being 
performed. I say this not because the work itself fails to match up to my hopes or 
expectations (that it singularly does so is another issue altogether) so much as 
because a part of me is sitting in the audience and envying the performers. This 
envy is not connected to the quality or otherwise of the work they are in; nor is it 
because I regard myself as an actor manque. The envy exists, I think, because the 
work is passing out of my hands and into theirs. The pleasures ordinarily felt by 
performers during and immediately after a performance only serve to highlight the 
emptiness of this director's role. One becomes redundant after so many weeks or 
months of being in a position of control. 
This may leave me with no alternative to the idea that a function of creating At 
Last Sight has been, for me, a means of satisfying some desire for control. Perhaps 
then the issues of catharsis, which I raised and then dismissed in so peremptory a 
fashion in the early sections of this thesis, are being met by this exercising of 
control. Rather than seeking to hide from this in shame, perhaps I should simply 
be acknowledging it as an inevitable aspect of performance-making and as a 
(presumably) constructive and (hopefully) harmless means of giving vent to that 
which might otherwise emerge in everyday life. Whatever the wider ramifications, 
I am still left with the feeling that I have been deluding myself as to too many of 
the reasons behind embarking on the project of At Lmt Sight. It concerns me that 
much of that which has felt good through the giving away 
has been no more than 
240 
a sham. It is actually twice as false as it first appears, because in the first instance, 
my feelings of collaboration have disguised a number of submerged but no less 
strong feelings of control, and in the second I have never really given the work 
away. I am clinging to the work precisely because the project provides me with 
the tools for controlling the group. 
We can go two ways with this. I can either accept this desire for control as 
something which exists and that can itself be made subject to control; or else I 
regard it as something invidious and beyond restraint. Because this thesis has been 
driven from the start by a reading of what is rather than by that which might 
otherwise be ... 
by a commitment to working with the givens of the specific 
experience of making this work, at this time and with this group, it would be 
illogical to bemoan the situation. The flip-side of an interest in heuristics, of the 
process of research being as concerned with the researcher's developing 
knowledge of the self as it is with a knowledge of the subject, is that this 'self 
may not be the type one would wish to discover. Notwithstanding this, the 
recognition of any given aspect of my own behaviour would only be more or less 
'good' than any other if this thesis were concerned with the valuing of self 
Recognising my self as one of the elements of At Last Sight means that I am also a 
sUbi ct for the study that is this thesis ... even the subject. 
Which is not the same 
,e 
thing as turning the thesis into a value-judgement as to my own worth. 
To 
recognise it, to read it and to be able to make judgements as to the impact it may 
be having on the work is one thing, to seek to subvert it simply because the 
process of reflection has unearthed it is another thing entirely. 
-141 
It may be that the distance provided by a vacation and then an exchange is exactly 
what At Last Sight needs. I may need a rest from the project, just as the project 
may need a rest from me. My absence over the two weeks that the group will be 
working without me is inevitable. The changes they implement during this period 
will become part of the fabric of the work and, as a consequence, will inform this 
thesis. 
It is interesting to note that despite the fact that the group will now be working 
without me for only two weeks, whereas Anna Garnett has gone for good, it is my 
own absence that I am writing about. A part of this is surely that I always 
regarded Anna as the most peripheral of the core members of the group, and also 
that she was the weakest in terms of performance, And yet, when my absence was 
known well in advance and Anna Garnett's was impossible to predict, one might 
have thought that it would be the impact of random which would be most heavily 
felt. That it is not probably says more about the nature of making work with 
groups than I would have anticipated. An awareness of the random is built into the 
process of performance, and we live and deal with it almost without thought. An 
artist can ensure that s/he does not run out of blue paint, whereas we cannot 
ensure that performer X will turn up for tomorrow's rehearsal, or even be on time 
for a scheduled performance. We function in a state of temporary facts, with no 
guarantee that the givens of 'today will approximate in any way to those we 
.1- 
experience the next time that we meet. 
16-4-99 
The random and the unexpected. It seems now that At Last Sight will be given a 
life beyond Chester. An invitation has arrived from a university theatre festival, 
242 
Testupic', in Compiegne, for At Last Sight to be presented in June. Further 
invitations have arrived from Uttrecht, for a performance in June and fi7om 
'Arena', a festival of experimental theatre in Erlangen, for performances in July. I 
have already turned Arena down, because too many members of the cast have 
commitments for July, which would prevent them from travelling to Germany at 
the time of the festival. Participation at the festival in Compiegne and at Uttrecht 
may be possible, although this would necessitate a degree of further funding from 
University College Chester, which experience tells me we would be unlikely to 
receive. 
The invitations - which have come &om people who saw At Last Sight in Liege - 
confirm my belief that the work has been successful in its only public 
performance to date. My feelings that the piece would be improved by a number 
of changes have not been altered, however, and I am expecting the work to be 
different in a number of ways by the time we next present the work in May. 
243 
1 McAuley, G. The Video Documentation of Theatrical Performance in 'New Theatre Quarterly' 
Vol. X No. 38. May 1994. p. 184. 
2 
ibid. p. 186. 
3 See Theorising Video Practice. Wayne, M. Lawrence & Wishart Ltd. London, 1997 
4 ibid. p. 189. 
' Ultimately, I decided against including video evidence of the production in this thesis for 
precisely the reasons mentioned in this chapter's opening paragraphs. I did not wish the video 
footage to read as though what remains approximates absolutely to what occurred. (12 - 10-00) 6 Anna Garnett will be as able as any other member of the group to access this thesis. My 
reservations stem from the fact that she has absented herself from the project, not from any 
comments I might make about her in these pages. 
' Three of the students from Buffhlo, two males and a female, became angry with Glenn. Thq 
voiced their criticism of his behaviour (as they saw it) and were abusive in their language. No 
threat of physical violence was made, but the atmosphere, by all accounts, was tense. This was 
witnessed by Anna, Andrew and Sarah Skelton (none of whom did anything to alter the American 
students' views). Glenn offered no excuses for his actions and the B"o group left that part of 
the bar. They then found Sarah Robertson, drinking with Chris Roberts and Liz Hague. At this 
point their tension faded. One of the male students told Sarah that she was better off without 
Glenn. Surprisingly, my own behaviour, in exploiting the Glenn and Sarah 'situation' was not 
mentioned at all. 
8 Sarah speaks only English, which meant that there was the possibility of her initiating a 
4conversation' wiffi someone who understood little or nothing of what she said. Sarah was aware 
of this. We felt that the tone in which she spoke, and the overall mwiner of the address, meant that 
the words themselves, whilst important, where not the only means by which she would be making 
herself understood. 
9 This is not an assumption. Colleagues working on other Level 3 productions have told me this. 
244 
Chapter Five 
7-5-99 
This chapter will articulate key changes made to At Last Sight prior to its 
presentation at University College Chester and to offer an ongoing explanation of 
pertinent developments as and when they might occur. The performances at 
Chester themselves will be discussed only briefly. The fact that a broad address to 
the overall process undertaken will form the basis of the subsequent conclusion to 
this thesis will not prevent a number of summative ideas from emerging in this 
fifth (and possibly final) chapter. 
As was described in Chapter Four, a number of changes from the presentation of 
At Last Sight in Liege are unavoidable. The cast is one down on this time six 
weeks ago and the need to alter the work has thus been imposed on the group. As 
ever, it seems, a certain caveat exists. There will be no easy distinction here 
between the process of revision through rehearsals and the process of evaluating 
the performance at University College Chester. In writing at the time of making 
there is a progression from one to the other, but this will not be articulated here 
under headings such as 'Revisions' and 'Evaluation' or 'Process' and 'Product'. 
Rather, the two will collapse in on each other even as I write. 
There are certain 'givens' for the revised production: many elements that will not 
change. Thus, the process of revision is also always in part a process of 
projection. No matter how radical the changes to the piece may be, I have a firm 
idea now of how At Last Sight will emerge. I cannot isolate my developing 
familiarity with and understanding of the work from this period of re-evaluation 
245 
and revision. If At Last Sight were never to be performed again, I would still be 
able to make an assessment of it as a thing done. As a publicly presented event, 
This changes my role. I am no longer engaged entirely in a process towards an 
end, so much as I am moving from one realised end towards another. How it wa, ý 
is a part of my thinking now, in the same way that how it will be is 
Changes in the spoken text can be identified through an examination of At Last 
Sight as it is in Appendix 8. The shifts in wording from the 'original' working C-7 
script, through its transformations for Liege and on to the version for Chester will 
reveal to the reader much about the process of revision. The texts as shown in 
Appendix 8 are not records of what was spoken in performance, but that which y 
was created in rehearsal. Much of the spoken text was deliberately inaudible, 
consisting of whispers between performers and from performers to spectators. In 
this way, no authoritative record of words spoken could ever exist. Increasingly, 
as the cast has come to regard the work as their own, they have been willing to 
provide verbal as well as physical ideas. Indeed, if there is an imbalance in terms 
of material, that imbalance now is even more noticeable in the ease with which 
the group is able to draw on a literary rather than a physical confidence. As such, 
rehearsals are still as prone to being word-bound now in early May as they were 
back in October of last year. The principle difference is that now we are aware of 
the changes that need to be made to At Last Sight, which is enabling us to force 
moments of movement, even at those times when we would all seem more 
comfortable with the further provision of words. 
246 
It is ironic that it is only now, when the work is being made for an exclusively 
English speaking audience, that we are beginning to make the work play with a 
visual coherence instead of a predominantly verbal one. 
My 'concerns' that the group would change At Last Sight during my absence have 
proved unfounded. In fact, the group met regularly without altering the shape of 
the work in any discernible way. What they have done is to divide Anna's scenes 
up between themselves and to block these 'new' moments in. They have used 
their time constructively and At Last Sight does not seem rusty. There are more 
significant changes: three new elements have been introduced specifically as a 
consequence of the time I spent recently in America. 
The first is a section of text, which has been written as a type of American B 
Movie dialogue. Sarah Skelton and Andrew Proudfoot will be performing this 
section, for no better reason than that they were the two members of the cast I saw 
first on my return. The dialogue, which is concerned with an encounter between a 
man and a woman, has not been constructed with any sense of which gender 
speaks which words. We will work that out in rehearsal. The text is written as 
follows: 
247 
A- Drink? 
B: Yes. 
A- Come and get it then, 
B: Oh I'll come and get it all right. I'll come and get the drink and I'll come and 
get you. 
A: So, where do we go from here then? 
B: Information you mean? 
A- That's right. 
B: Well, why don't you fire a question. Nothing too loaded. 
A- So I fall for a mystery? 
B: There's no mystery here. How fast do you fall? 
A: Too fast. 
B: It needs to be right on the first time and wrong on the last. There's nothing else 
to know. 
A. So, will you make love to me? 
B: Ohl, I'll make love to you all right. But first, tell me what day it is. 
A. Tuesday. 
B. Well,, we'll have to be quick. I'm due elsewhere by the weekend. 
A: Kiss me? 
B: Not in front of all these people. 
A: Why not? 
B- I'm more at ease without an audience. 
8-5-99 
I am making no claims as to the quality of the text as it reads. It is simplistic, even 
4 cod' dialogue. However, we have already begun to work the words into a scene, 
with Andrew and Sarah doing the bulk of this without any great interference from 
myself, and it seems as though the section is developing into a scene of some 
pace, energy and action. A drink is thrown, a kiss is attempted, an embrace is 
made and the performance space is used both intelligently and well. 
The text was introduced because At Last Sight is suffering from an absence of 
encounters. It is as though we need to build more moments of dialogue into the 
work and take out some of the long(er) sections of monologue. Similarly, we need 
to exploit the possibility of physical contact between performers, which is made 
logical by the thematic structure of At Last Sight as at least partly concerned with 
a series of meetings between a man and a woman in a rented room. Without 
248 
physicalising these meetings between performers (perhaps I need to swallow the 
false pride of postmodernism and say "meetings between characters) the 
audience may not be receiving enough identifiable elements for them to engage in 
a readerly process of deconstruction. Too little is being placed before them for any 
engagement to take place. 
This feels (or at least it may sound) like capitulation. Like an admission on my 
part that spectators need straightforward elements of narrative in order to attend to 
performance. I know this not to be the case. If it is an admission of anything it is 
of my emerging recognition that whilst others may possess the necessary skills to 
make work that functions adequately without recourse to a structure of 'story', my 
own skills are not at this level. The capacity for recognition may be a useful 
component of analysis almost in itself However, in terms of making performance, 
I am still faced with the challenge of developing At Last Sight into the best work 
that it can be, and of doing this in the realisation that my own best may not always 
be quite good enough. 
The way in which I am making an assessment as to the 'needs' of the production 
is no less a process of guess work now than it was at the first. The fact that I am 
able to respond to the production in Liege is still exemplified by a faith, blind or 
otherwise, in my own reading of a situation. In many ways, directing can be seen 
as a placing oneself in a spectator's position- of making decisions based on one's 
own judgement and taste. 
249 
Adding the new Sarah and Andrew scene feels right, and I am affording that 
feeling the status of a requirement. The work fieels as though it is short of 
something, I think I know what that something is, and accordingly I can then say 
that the work needs something else in order to be put right. It is a process of 
assumptions wherein the language one uses (even if that language is no more or 
less than the language of thought) presupposes some kind of logical link between 
response and reaction. The reality may be no more than a stumbling in the half- 
light of the latter stages of making, rather than in the darkness of beginnings. 
'Thoughts', in this sense and at this point in the process, emerge as combinations 
of memories, expectations and sensations, in the context of making performance 
they can be described as movements (or moments) which have not yet happened- 
Some are more fleeting and ephemeral than are others. The ones that last longest 
or arrive with most force are the ones most likely to be translated into action and 
transcribed into the performance text. 
9-5-99 
Because the brain is not like a computer - inasmuch as it is not capable of 
repeating its actions and it is equally incapable of preserving ideas in a vacuum - 
thoughts are subject to the vagaries of time. 
' The wonderful idea of today is 
exposed tomorrow as a sham device. This happens. Experience - or thought as 
memory - tells us not to worry overmuch about these shifts, 
for just as much 
scientific research concludes that its original hypothesis was 
fundamentally 
wrong, so the creation of performance is a fluid game of re-adjustments, re- 
negotiations and blind alleys. The only litmus paper we possess is the way we 
feel 
and think the work is shaping up. It is as imprecise an endeavour as one could 
ever encounter. Wittgenstein told us that problems are solved, not 
by giving new 
250 
information, but by arranging what we already know, and this is a close 
approximation to the act of creative making_2 We work with what we know, 
arranging that knowledge into a new syntax. A syntax that allows us to create a 
structure that is then able to convey more than the individual elements could hope 
to contain. We trust that this structure will work, and by 'work' we mean that it 
will communicate something of the maker's intent. 
With work where the structure is complex, the maker might favour a certain type 
of spectator, Certainly, with At Last Sight, the work has been made thus far with a 
view to presentations to 'informed' viewers. The ways in which these spectators 
have been so informed (and the ways in which I hope future spectators will be) is 
in the sense of them constituting a 'guessing right' group. Every maker of work 
will have her or his own 'ideal'. John Cage, for example, has written that he is 
on the side of keeping things mysterious, and I have 
never enjoyed understanding things. If I understand 
something, I have no further use for it. So I try to 
make a music which I don't understand and which 
will be difficult for other people to understand, too. 
3 
A cognitive process is required fi7om spectators- one that allows for them to piece 
together a positive response out of their own experiences of non-narrative theatre 
forms. Just as my own processes of making are guesses, so then do spectators 
undertake the processes of reception. Writing specifically about spoken language, 
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh nevertheless goes some considerable way towards 
articulating the process of making work for public reception, alongside the 
attendant process of receiving, when she states that 
251 
Comprehension demands an active intellectual process 
of listening to another party while trying to figure out 
... the other's meaning and intent - both of which are 
always imperfectly conveyed. We know what we think 
and what we wish to mean. We don't have to figure out 
cwhat it is we mean', only how to say it. By contrast, 
when we listen to someone else, we not only have to 
determine what the other person is saying, but also 
what he or she means by what is said, without the 
insider's knowledge that the speaker has. 4 
We make performance in the knowledge of this imprecision because, as Lewis 
Carroll's Dodo says to Alice, it is generally the case that the best way to explain a 
thing is to do it. We can imagine 'perfect' performances without ever being able 
to make them, just as we can harbour dreams of 'perfect' spectators, who pick up 
on our every nuance, no matter how subtle or strange. But the testing ground for 
performance is performance. Written words are measured. They can be corrected 
and refined. A draft is recognised as such in ways that performances are not. 
When practical work in progress goes public it does so, almost always, without 
the safety net status of a work in transition. Weak work analysed well is still weak 
work, even though the analysis may break new ground. We make work because 
we need to test our own (guessing right'. The results are only ever good for the 
time it takes for the performance to run in the there and then. Perhaps not even for 
that long, because in watching work play, we are already refining and rethinking 
as we watch. 
As ever, it seems, within the pages of this work, this sounds more bleak than it 
feels. At Last Sight is already as accomplished a piece of work as I had ever 
allowed myself to expect. Perhaps there is something in the nature of a reflective 
process, which is drawing me towards an articulation that proffers gloom 
in heii 
252 
of the optimism that I actually feel. Anybody who has made performances will 
realise that certain of the issues arising in rehearsal are actually pleasant to work 
through in practice and equally unpleasant to describe. ' We need to remember that 
the making of performance in the context within which I am functioning is a 
choice and not an imperative. There is a joy in the process, which the isolation of 
writing this thesis is at some odds with. There have been no rehearsals that I have 
not been excited to attend; no problems of where to go next that I have not been 
pleased to seek solutions to. Even during those rehearsals when the work feels like r 
a game of Solitaire in which the shuffling of the deck has created a situation 
where no possibility of 'success' is possible, something positive remains. For, 
unlike the imposition of order on a chance configuration of a hand of cards (where 
each new configuration is indeed 'new) every 'failed' rehearsal is always also a 
success. I can recognise from this that the stages of the creative process 
undertaken to this point have involved preparation, incubation, inspiration and 
evaluation, and that any divisions between the stages have been elastic. 
10-5-99 
One of the central ideas of At Last Sight is the conflict between truth and lies. To 
this end, differing perceptions are actively encouraged. A truth may be read as a 
lie and vice versa. There is, I hope, a tension in this which is more than glib and 
ironic. When detachment and engagement are being sought in this way, however, 
it is difficult to envisage any distancing from that same postmodernism where 
irony is seen to reign. At Last Sight is about representation, and 
it plays with 
representation in a self-conscious way. It is about an erosion of 
fixity and a 
F 
distrust of meaning. It is about the recognition that everything spoken is always 
the already said. it is concerned with the slippery relationship 
between T and 
- -- 
'You'. It wants control and it wants to be given away. It seeks indeterminacy (and 
is determined to have it). It strives for originality within an absence of faith in 
originality as a realistic aim. 
I write the above as reminders to myself as much as pointers to the reader. I write 
because, like the performers in At Last Sight, I am no longer sure of the distinction 
between the truth as it was and the truth that I have subsequently invented. Like 
Alice, I am losing and finding myself in a strange place. For me, that place is the 
Wonderland gap between the past events of rehearsal to performance and the 
present event of performance to rehearsal. Derrida's assertion that nothing can 
exist outside of the text is becoming all too painfully real. Lost in the text of At 
Last Sight I am no longer able to see a way clear. I am not sure whether At Last 
Sight is a fact or an event. Whether this thesis is the experience itself or merely a 
trace of the experience of the performed other. As Laura Marcus states in 
AutolBiographical Discourses 'The self does not pre-exist the text but is 
constructed by it ... the self 
'finds' itself in its acts of self-expression. i, 
I know that the work's proceeding without a clear plan is no handicap. What At 
Last Sight may have been hindered by in terms of its having no blueprint for a 
route by which to progress, has been equally fortuitous in that that same absence 
has provided space for progression, which was impossible to predict. The 
educational philosopher I P. Guilford recognises this as being paradigmatic of 
divergent thinking 
In tests of convergent thinking there is almost 
always one conclusion or answer that is regarded 
as unique, and thinking is to be channelled or 
controlled in the direction of that answer.... In 
254 
divergent thinking, on the other hand, there is 
much searching about or going off in various 
directions. This is most obviously seen when 
there are no unique conclusions. Divergent 
thinking ... 
is characterised ... as 
being less 
goal-bound. There is freedom to go off in 
different directions 
.... 
Rejecting the old solution 
and striking out in some direction is necessary. 7 
The process of creating At Last Sight is an example of divergent thought 
although at times this seems like to complimentary a term to describe that which 
ftels so chaotic. 8 Bertrand Russell's Enquiry into Memory and Truth tells us that 
for a journey of investigation to have any worth it needs to be commenced with 
inarticulate certainty and concluded with articulate hesitation. 9 Allan Owens 
writes in Mapping Drama that whilst the most overtly problematical educational 
states are ignorance and certainty the single worst case scenario is always 
encountered in 'articulate certainty 5.10 If the process of making At Last Sight is 
demonstrable of a faith in anything at all then it is of a faith in doubt. In the 
concept of uncertainty as a thing to be clung to and sustained. Kenneth I W. 
Craik embraces doubt as a positive phenomenon 
If I ever conceive o any original idea, it will be 
because I have been abnormally prone to confuse 
ideas 
... and 
have thus found remote analogies 
and relations which others have not considered! 
Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed 
by precise analysis. " 
There is also the issue of group. Not in the sense of the feelings of power 
recognised at the close of Chapter Four, so much as in the pleasure of working 
with people who share a commitment to making work work. The feelings of 
camaraderie are at times quite intense. As a teacher, I take pleasure 
ftom 
introducing ideas, which the students will be encouraged to learn from and 
255 
through. As a part of the group, I take even more pleasure in the erosion of the 
teacher/student relationship that exists elsewhere within the curriculum. A part of 
this has been formed by the trip to Liege. We travelled together, took our meals 
together, drank together and talked for extended periods of time, all of which 
would be impossible within the 'normal' structures of timetabled contact on 
campus. Accordingly, I feel that I have come to know the cast well, and to like 
them as people at the same time as I can acknowledge their accomplishments as 
students. 
How far can this go before it reads as a clique? How openly can I state my 
emotional attachment to the group and still function in my professional capacity 
as a lecturer? Although I will not carry out the assessment of the At Last Sight 
group, I do teach a course in Contemporary Theatre Practice where Andrew 
ProUdfoot, Elizabeth Hague, Sarah Robertson and Glenn Robertson are my 
students. I am also likely to function as a second marker on the assessment of 
these and other members of the group on other courses. Whilst I may feel able to 
separate issues of affection fi7om those of assessment, I need to remain aware that 
other students (and indeed my colleagues in the department) may not be quite so 
sure. Perception is important, and it would be foolish of me to think that the 
ar opinions of others did not matter so long as my own conscience was clear. As f 
as the students in the group go, I am confident that they share my faith in 
dispassionate marking. They know (I hope) that being pleased with their progress 
is one thing (I cannot mark that anyway, even if I were able to mark anything at 
all) whilst being pleased with them (because I find their company pleasing) is 
another thing entirely. 
256 
What I would be distressed to discover would be any reduction in the recognition 
of the group's worth as students, for no greater reason than that they are working 
closely with a tutor for whom that close working relationship is inevitably spilling 
over into close relationships. 
This is not to suggest that we socialise together outside of rehearsals. I do not 
meet with members of the group at times other than those we have arranged as 
part of the course. But it does happen that when I see them by chance in the 
department we are likely to stop and talk, in ways that are less likely to occur with 
cother' students. To a certain extent, this is happening with each of my colleagues 
who are working on productions. The closeness is a part of the process. In making 
work together, we reveal much of who we are, and in so doing an intimacy is 
created. Without some sort of trust, much of the work made would never (could 
never) emerge. With At Last Sight this phenomenon is writ large because the work 
is intrinsically dealing with aspects of self Just as the cast has had nowhere to 
hide from the exposure of much that makes them who they are, so I have been 
unable to avoid witnessing these acts of revelation as and when they have 
emerged. As we have seen through Grotowski's work, this revelation is at its most 
acute when performers play their characters by playing who they are. They 'must 
1,12 not illustrate but accomplish an act . 
In so doing they 'express as fact the fiction 
of their narratives'. 
13 
These last few paragraphs will be regarded as either a deviation from or a 
development of my rationale for the new scene with Andrew and Sarah, 
257 
depending upon the views of the reader. For my own purposes, the thoughts are 
developmental, in that the process of description and explanation is perpetually 
interlocking. One cannot be separated out from the other, so that pages of 'what' 
are followed neatly by pages of 'how' and then still more discrete pages of 'why'- 
The rehearsal process of At Last Sight is the same as this- We throw ideas around 
and are as likely to sit down and talk the ideas through as we are to get on our feet 
and try to work them out practically. The thinking is as central to the work as is 
the doing, If this is regarded as a 'luxury' (and I am sure that a great many 
directors working professionally with only a very limited time to create would feel 
that it is) then it is a luxury that is receding as the time between the now of 
rehearsal and the then of the final performance is collapsing. 
The second idea brought back from America is that the consumption of alcohol as 
a part of At Last Sight needs to be ritualised in some way. There seems to be 
something innately British about drinking such vast quantities in such a brief time. 
The fact that it conforms to one of the abiding stereotypes of British behaviour is 
making me feel that we should exaggerate the actions somehow. There are also 
the ongoing issues of energy and pace. I have been wondering if some sort of 
drinking game (which again seems to be a quintessentially British pastime) would 
not provide a means of investing the work with pace at the same time as that pace 
is arrived at via an activity that is appropriate within the performance framework 
already in place. 
It-5-99 
In the rehearsals leading up to the performance in Liege, the cast worked with 
non-alcoholic drinks, rather than wine. 
14 We had only one full rehearsal where 
258 
wine was used. This was a matter of cost as much as anything else. I am already 
facing the prospects of explaining to my head of department how much money we 
will need to spend on each of the four performances in Chester, just in terms of 
buying wine. This is going to cost upwards of 00.00 per night, In Liege, where 
table wine is cheaper than Coca-Cola, this was not an issue, and I was happy to 
pay for the wine myself In England, the costs will have to be met departmentally 
and then paid back out of box office receipts. We have considered using either 
non-alcoholic wine or coloured water in performance, and although this is 
something we have currently decided against, it is not ruled out for some time in 
the future. At the moment, the drinking, and the ways in which that drinking 
impact on individual performances within the work, are features of At Last Sight. 
This was never likely to be a production where the imitation of an action was 
going to be favoured over the presentation of an action itself To borrow again 
from the traditions of Grotowski- "The performance is not an illusionist copy of 
reality, its imitation ... 
The actor does not play, does not imitate, or pretend. He is 
himself'. " 
Whilst the performers will not be 'acting drinking', they will be drinking in a 
performative fashion. We have written a series of words and numbers, for which I 
am planning to create corresponding 'ways of drinking'. The cast will inevitably 
develop these 'ways' further. At the moment, they are movements such as 
swirling the glass numerous times and then draining it; spinning wildly, coming to 
a halt and drinking; drinking whilst attempting to speak- drinking from each 
other's glasses; drinking whilst laying on one's back; shaking the glass up and 
259 
down, in the manner of slamming Tequila. There is no overt logic to the 
movements themselves. The words written are as follows. 
1: Absolution. 
2: Redemption. 
3 
. ): Ephemera. 
4. Solace. 
5 -. Isolation. 
6: Indicative Thought. 
How the words and the actions come together, even if the idea stays, is not yet 
known, 16 1 am imagining a concentrated burst of activity. A wild drinking game, 
where the rules seem to make absolute sense to the performers and absolutely no 
sense to the spectators. So that one performer might start the 'game' by calling a 
word -a literal cue - and then the cast drink themselves into near-oblivion, 
perhaps until another cue is uttered, or perhaps until all of the wine is consumed. 
What I do not want any more is the leisurely drinking of Liege without something 
more urgent that lifts it. There is an obvious analogy to be drawn between 
drinking and forgetting. I like the idea of this forgetting being twofold. In the first 
place, it is consistent with the content of At Last Sight, inasmuch as the content is 
thematically concerned with love and loss. In the second place, I will be interested 
to see what effect swift drinking has on the performers' ability to remember the 
words and actions still to come. It is a means of denying the performers the 
chance to drink at their own pace and also of a giving away of control .. ý of my 
control as a director and of the students' as performers. 
I have talked some of this through with the group and we are already looking at 
ways of working this scene and of a point in the work where it might best fit. We 
are also discussing the possibility of allowing any one member of the cast the 
260 
opportunity to start the scene at any time that she or he chooses. Leaving it, if not 
entirely to chance, then at least to the instincts of the cast, rather than to the 
decidability in advance of the director. 
The third intervention is a piece of music, Lullaby, recorded by Shawn Mullins. 17 
Tb; c trn 
L ,, LL,. uack was played repeatedly on American radio stations and on my return I 
played the song to the group. It was played in a rehearsal and at some 
considerable volume. The song became an instant soundtrack. We played it 
wheneVer we reached moments in rehearsal of not knowing where to go next. The 
song is so 'American' that I want to use it in some way, if only because it is a 
record of a particular period of the process of making the work. The words of the 
song are delivered in a laconic fashion (the words themselves tend towards the 
maudlin) apart from the chorus, which comes in with a rush and lifts the track. 
In Liege we used a radio, tuned in as part of the performance in order to allow the 
random to infiltrate the work. We all liked this idea, although we probably liked 
the reality rather less. Not only did the tuning in take some time, it also happened 
upon some dour-sounding stations just at the moment when the piece was so in 
need of an injection of pace and volume. At one point, I had wanted to use the 
sound of a radio playing softly all the way through At Last Sight, as though the 
sounds the spectators and performers were hearing were the sounds of a radio 
through a hotel wall. Like the whispered words of A Winter's Tale. We lost that 
idea somewhere along the way and the piece now feels like it does not need it. It 
smacks now of too naturalistic a device, as though I had been striving for an 
imitative 'other', rather than seeking to exploit the space as it is. Using Lullaby in 
261 
place of the radio takes us away from our original idea. Notwithstanding that, I 
strongly suspect that we will end up using the track. 
Andrew Proudfoot has created a piece of text that centres upon an appeal for a 
partner. The words are not without a sense of desperation. When he read them out 
in rehearsal, we all felt that they should be included in the performance. It seems 
appropriate for Andrew to speak this section immediately after either a session of 
manic drinking, or the section where he forces his own head under water- This 
may, of course, have no logic whatsoever. It may be no more than another guess. 
Be that as it may, watching and listening to Andrew's delivery sparked these 
connections and they seem to make sense within my own reading of the structure 
of our work. Andrew seems to want to place himself at some emotional risk 
within At Last Sight, and I like the idea of this emotional risk coming after the 
physical risk of the drowning scene. The moment where Andrew puts his head 
under water does bring its own risk. Rather than holding his breath, he attempts to 
breathe the water, to take it deliberately into his lungs. To force himself to 
drown. " 
Sarah Skelton's section on the female orgasm is being reworked. The way the 
scene works now is that whilst she is in the process of speaking in a dry and 
informative manner, pointing to the prone and shrouded Sarah Robertson with a 
cane, Elizabeth Hague is mirroring the words with actions of her own, and is 
doing so in an equally deadpan way. As Sarah says that 'nipples become erect', 
Elizabeth points to Glenn Robertson's chest (Glenn and Elizabeth are seated side 
by side on the bed at this point), when Sarah speaks of the vagina contracting, 
262 
(adjusting to circumstances', Elizabeth closes her own fist in front of Glenn's 
groin. Whilst this is going on, Andrew is plunging his head into a basin of water. 
In rehearsal, at least, this compression of three previously discrete scenes into one 
collage is playing effectively enough for us to run with the idea. Learned text, a 
disturbing level of risk and deadpan humour are placed side by side in a recurring 
montage. The eye of the watcher is drawn around the space in ways that seem to 
exemplify the freedom of watching live work, and the layering of sounds and 
images is creating a constructive cacophony. 
Sarah Skelton knows that she will have to work hard to attract and hold the 
spectator )s attention, which is giving her more of a challenge than was previously 
the case. Andrew's plunging (which is a development of an earlier scene where 
his head was held under water as part of an interrogation that never really worked 
in rehearsal) does now play as an attempt at suicide. Andrew emerges from the 
water gagging and coughing, only to thrust his head back under. There is 
something deeply disturbing about the action at the same time as it is 
fundamentally absurd. Sarah is ignoring both Andrew and Elizabeth and is 
playing only a response to the spectator's displacing of attention. 
At the moment, I am the only spectator. Sometimes Chris, Laurent and 
Anke join 
me. We find the scene funny and moving in tums, and the performers 
involved 
enjoy playing it. There are no doubts that we will use 
it in the piece. The only 
concern I have is that it may look as though we are expecting a certain response. 
I 
do not think that this is the case anywhere else in 
At Last Sight. What I want to 
avoid are moments where we run the risk of 
failing in public to match up to our 
263 
directorial and performative intentions. During the rest of the work, our conceits 
are less overtly displayed than they might be here. 
Increasingly, the work reads, I think, as elusive, as a thing almost but never quite 
accessible. The scene I have just described feels a little like we are going for 
broke, pitching a mass of energy into one extended moment as a type of climactic 
dMouement. 
The work is becoming multi-layered, to the extent where the thinness of certain 
layers is disguised by a number of other (perhaps equally thin) layers. Whereas I 
was able, much earlier on in the process of making, to refer to Hockney's Joiners 
as a type of blueprint for AI Last Sight, the grid-like placing of images side by side 
has shifted now towards a more appropriately performative overlap. One of the 
strongest things to have emerged in recent rehearsals is this sense of simultaneity. 
It is as though the running orders we have been so keen to create, as a means of 
confirming structure, have worked against us up until this point precisely because 
they have located actions sequentially. Our running order still exists - and we still 
value the sense of structure that it brings - but we are much more inclined of late 
to see scenes bleeding into each other. Joiners was useful as way into At Last 
Sight 
... the problem, 
I feel, has been one of knowing when to let this work break 
free of that structure. 
The running order we have now is one which, although it will be inevitably 
sulýiect to change (and overlap) nevertheless serves as an indcat, on of the ways in 
which At Last Sight has shifted since its presentation 
in Liege. For ease of 
264 
understanding and for purposes of economy within this chapter, I will refer from 
this point on to the Liege version as At Last Sight I and the yet to be performed 
version in Chester as At Last Sight 2. It is my intention that in the conclusion to 
this thesis I will be referring to the work in its entirety whenever its title is used. 
Whereas At Last Sight I began with the cast removing the traces of previous 
performances, At Last Sight 2 will begin with the cast milling around as a French 
language tape plays. The removal of traces looked fine, but I was always 
concerned that it was beginning the work with too much that was overtly illusory. 
The space was new to us and the traces were faked. Ironically, because we will be 
performing at Chester over four nights, the traces of rehearsals and previous 
performances will be real. Notwithstanding this, the on-stage eradication of 
evidence as a starting point no longer possesses the currency it once did. What we 
have now is the cast behaving rather than acting naturally. Having no prescribed 
movements to engage in means that they are able to initiate a performance 
wherein the lines between 'ordinary' and 'performatiVe' attitudes are 
immediately 
introduced. As director, I have no idea of who will do what and when. They move 
amongst themselves and into the audience as they so choose. 
The French language tape is one that was played by my wife at our home. My 
Wife is currently taking a French evening class. The formulaic 
banality of the text 
amused us both: a customer in a bar ordering a coffee; a traveller, 
lost and asking 
for directions to the railway station; an encounter at a Lost Property 
desk, with an 
enquiry about a mislaid camera. The dialogue 
is delivered in so flat and colourless 
a fashion as to drain all of the emotion 
from the words. The tone is every bit as 
216 5 
monotonous as Anna Garnett's speaking voice, but the context of the tape 
subverts this monotony, changing it from weakness into choice. Listening to the 
tape felt a little like the experience of watching At Last Sight. It was both similar 
to and different from. Using the tape at the start of the show provides a type of 
clue for the spectators. It suggests being somewhere far from home, where the 
rules are not quite the same and have only been half-learned. '9 It communicates 
everything necessary to comprehension and nothing that is needed to feel and to 
emote, In this way, it is both a parallel to At Last Sight and its antithesis. 
The French language tape is replaced with another cassette. All of this is done in 
full view of the audience. The lights are 'theatrical', but basic. A general wash of 
light across the space. The only change to this state now is towards the end of the 
piece, when the lights are taken half way down, paused and then taken to black. 
At all other times, the lights stay as they are. The new tape contains dialogue 
lifted from a Hal Hartley film, Flirt. Two American performers, a male and a 
female, have a brief conversation about commitment. We hear a crash, a chair 
breaking, which signals an abrupt end. The next voices we hear belong to two 
Japanese women, taken from a video recording of an extract of an unknown 
f-IM. 2 10 They speak in whispers, urgently. The tape shifts then to a section from the 
Mann film, Heat. Four men and three women talking in restaurant. This 
conversation cuts out and a telephone conversation between one of the males and 
another woman fades in. 
During the Japanese section, Sarah Skelton walks off-stage, through a swing door 
and into a shower and toilet area. She showers, fully costumed, as are all of the 
266 
women, in a white shirt and blue jeans. The men are all in dark suits and white 
shirts. All are barefoot- Sarah re-emerges as the telephone conversation ends. The 
tape is clicked off and thrown to one side by Glenn Robertson. Sarah speaks 
falteringly, using a type of half-invented sign language as an attempt to add to her 
articulation. She is wet through during this section. The sentences she speaks are 
sometimes no more than one or two words. The tone is sombre. At one point she 
takes a Polaroid photograph of the audience. She lays down stage right, holding 
this photograph. 
The running order we have is full enough for me to be able to go through each of 
the elements and provide a commentary and explanation, which would run to 
several thousand more words. The running order is currently comprised of fifty 
seven separate sections, and to describe and explain each one would be perhaps 
not the most purposive way of providing the reader with a developing sense of the 
work. The text we worked with is transcribed as an appendix; the same will be the 
case with At Last Sight 2. Better then to use this chapter to underpin and 
theoretically contextualise my current feelings and thoughts about the worký and 
also about this stage of making work, rather than to describe in words that which 
the reader will have access to on video. 
12-5-99 
I will describe the thinking that is driving At Last Sight. Like the project itself, this 
thinking has changed and developed. I am less inclined at this point to be satisfied 
with an inability to articulate (even to myself) the rationale behind directorial 
and/or writerly decisions. Where I was, only a matter of months ago, prepared to 
accept creative making as a thing driven in part at least by untraceable stimuli, I 
267 
am now inclined towards a searching for the ongin. This does not mean that the 
search is always successful. But it does mean that ideas that cannot be 
comfortably traced can be made subject to the same level of analysis as those 
ideas that can be seen to stem from a logical body of theory. At times, this might 
result in the articulation of incomprehension. Where this occurs, I am confident 
that this articulation is as valid as any other. It is not the job of this thesis to prove 
that the writer has the 'correct' answer to every challenge thrown up in the 
activity of making work, so much as it is to document a particular process in a 
manner that is as thorough as it is informed. To argue thus - for an analytical 
framework that can be applied to the creation of a performance event - does not 
amount to an attempt to fix meaning. Rather, it allows me to identify the various 
elements of At Last Sight that exist for analysis from the perspectives I am 
choosing to employ. 
At Last Sight 2 is likely to contain more elements of narrative, and indeed more of 
a narrative drive, than did At Last Sight 1, and there are certain (broadly 
postmodern) notions of narratology that inform the work. It begins with an 
acceptance that one's identity is determined by the narrative elements of one's 
own life. By this I mean that the best, perhaps even the only way to establish an 
identity is via the telling of story. We could better describe this as an ordering of 
episodes in such a way that one's life can be read as a narrative. 
What we do is 
thus who we are. Events, which we might regard as 
having a particular 
significance, are organised in ways that allow us to understand who we are. 
In this 
way, narrative provides us with the opportunity to conceive of self 
21 
268 
Any and all narratives have a point of view, whether concealed or overt. The 
narrative itself goes some considerable way towards determining the location 
from which the spectator/reader experiences events and the narrative will always 
seek in some way to exert a control over the spectator's ways of perceiving. (At 
this Doint, I will abandon references to 'readers' and use 'spectators' as an all- y 
encompassing term). By controlling, or guiding, the spectator's perception of Ai 
Last Sight I am attempting to suggest an identification with a certain way of 
watching. I am asking the spectator to engage in a particular type of watching, one 
that allows the spectator to believe that s/he is making of the work whatever s/he 
feels, at the same time as this process is actually set up and controlled by the 
maker. It offers a freedom from a directorial 'directing of the gaze", which is 
actually quite false. In creating a performance wherein the spectator's eye can 
wander without shame, I am still very much seeking control. We can recognise 
this as being in relative accord with notions of Althusser's 'interpellation', 
inasmuch as it is "a process which is controlled by the text, yet the reader is under 
the illusion that identification is freely entered into. 
-)722 
At Last Sight abandons the idea of an audience as a like-thinking mass, since the 
product will be played in the knowledge that spectatorial identification and the 
reading of our played out narrative will differ from one person to the next. It is 
also being created with a faith (a faith in right guessing? ) that enough of the 
audience will respond in similar ways to certain sections. For example, there are 
points when I want them to make certain connections, even at the same time as I 
cling fast to their freedom to choose. Aeorefically, I want fteedom; 
direclorial4v, 
want control. The narrative of At Last Sight is also the narrative of this tension. 
269 
Notions of the male gaze are explored in At Last Sight (in both versions I and 2) 
and issues of gender in terms of the way we play and the way we watch have 
always been a concern of this work. It is a commonplace reading of the way 
performance is generally constructed to say that narratives are split between the 
passive,. and often eroticised image of women and the more active portrayal of 
males. 23 Men are doubly active in performance, in that they are usually the people 
who make things happen - the pro-actors to the women's reactors - and they are 
also the active lookers. This gaze provides the male spectator with a different type 
of identification with the narrative in question from females. This results in a 
situation where males are afforded a narrative and visual pleasure, whereas 
women are more likely to associate themselves most strongly with the passive and 
prettified object of the gaze. The old idea (of old art) is an illustration of this, 
where we see galleries filled with paintings by men of female nudes. 
Male performers often function then as surrogates for spectators. We could 
describe this as an activity where men are subjects and women are objects. The 
narrative of At Last Sight subverts this. The text was always written without 
gender specification ... partly as a consequence of not 
knowing the gender 
breakdown or number of students who would sign up for this project, but 
primarily because I did not want to write certain lines or situations for men and 
others for women. Keeping the written text open in this way affords the cast the 
opportunity to impose gender on words simply by dint of the choices they make. 
In this way, either Sarah Skelton or Andrew Proudfoot could 
have elected to read 
the parts of A or B in the newly scripted section. The fact that 
Andrew has by now 
270 
opted for B and Sarah A may or may not be the most appropriate choice, but it is 
their choice. The imposition of gender was not of my making. 
In terms of the ways in which the gaze could be said to rest on a person as object, 
I have attempted throughout to avoid a situation where women are 
disproportionately passive. The ways in which this has been achieved (and I think 
it has and is being achieved) are not through a counting up of situations, so that a 
passive female here is replaced by a passive male in the next ' I: --- - scene'. What we 
have done is to make all of the cast viewers of their own and their fellow 
performers' actions. By this, I mean that each scene within the performance space 
created by the chairs, back board, sound desk and lights, is observed by the rest of 
the cast, whether these observers are actively engaged in the scene or not. At its 
most successful - if by 'successful' I am referring here to the success of the 
subverting of the male gaze - the entire performance and all within it function as 
both object and subject. We watch the performers making the performance and we 
watch them watching the ways that it is made. The members of the cast adjust 
their positions as they go. 
At times, the issue of gaze is treated more directly. When Sarah Skelton asks a 
male spectator why he is watching her at the expense of other performers, she is at 
once identifying herself as the passive subject and the active watcher. In returning 
the gaze she shifts the balance. At another point in the performance, Sarah, in the 
midst of applying lipstick, says to the audience- "And now you watch me.... Are 
my lips painted red for you? Is this done for your gaze? Am I becoming someone 
2-11 
else for you? Well, I'm still Sarah. Some of you know me. I'm twenty-one years 
old. I'm Sarah. "' 
The only time that a photograph is taken of the audience, it is taken by a female 
performer 
24 
11 17 -. Again, this is Sarah Skelton. This is no accident. In opening the live 
text of At Last Sight 2, and then laying on the floor, to be looked at by the male 
performers as well as the spectators, Sarah is the most likely of the females to be 
regarded as 'objectn,. 25 Further to this, she describes a female orgasm and Is 
subsequently photographed by Glenn Robertson as she lies on the bed. It is 
imPortant to me that this objectification is challenged in the work. 26 
Perhaps three quarters of the way through At Last Sight 2, as the running order 
currently stands, three of the men, Glenn, Andrew and Chris, sit on the bed and 
contort their bodies into positions that approximate to pornographic images 
normally associated with women. The women move into the audience and watch 
this section, with either Sarah Robertson or Liz Hague taking a Polaroid 
photograph of the men and then pinning the picture up on the board. It is perhaps 
in every sense of the word too crude an indication to the audience. Nevertheless, it 
serves I think a useful purpose. It is an image I would never consider asking 
female students to adopt (I should point out that the men are clothed throughout). 
The chief reason for this, even if the context of the work made the request 
'reasonable% would be my own position of power over the cast. As a man, such a 
request would be likely to read as precisely the type of active gazing at an 
eroticised female passivity that I am seeking to avoid. 
'- 
7 
217 2 
At Last Sight is attempting to raise the issue of sexual identity through the 
impossibility of any fixing of the subject ... not least the 'subject' of Sarah 
Skelton. When she is presented within the piece it is done - in almost every scene 
that she 'drives' - in a way that turns her into both the reader and the read. as a 
spectacle and also as a spectator. Inasmuch then as the spectator is refused a 
permanent position from which to view, the very process of perception is rendered 
unstable. 
Issues of gender are central to At Last Sight and I am pleased that the ways in 
which it is being treated are consistent with my views at the start of the process. 
Other things have changed. I am aware, for example, that I am referring 
increasingly to 'the audience', instead of 'the spectator' of earlier chapters. Again, 
I put this down to the same tension between the theory of ideas and the practice of 
action as was mentioned a few paragraphs ago. There are inevitable compromises 
between intention and application, which mean that one's beliefs are tempered in 
part by the process of working collaboratively and in part by the absence of the 
safety net that libraries and offices provide. Performance can be unforgiving of 
theory (Brecht told us that a good idea badly presented dies a long time)28 just as 
in its own way theory can be unforgiving of perfortnance. Ideas of ga, -Y-,. l 
subversion and authorial redemption may be all well and good, but the pragmatics 
of making a performance mean that many ideas that are sound in theory are 
sacrificed in rehearsal. 
Within the narrative of At Last Sight there has been an attempt to match what is 
being said with the manner of its saying. The written language of the performance 
27 ') 
itself could already be said to have form, even before it is made physical in 
practice. By this I mean that the manner of the writing carries with it a certain 
formal implication: it is episodic, it is fragmentary and it is possessed in certain 
sections of a particular melancholy. We cannot then refer to it as content without 
form. By the same token, the form of At Last Sight is also a type of content. The 
ways in which the work is constructed and the elements that make up its parts are 
sympathetically inclined, to the point where any attempted separation would be 
invidious. Similarly, it makes less sense to refer to 'narrative elements' of At Last 
Sight than to regard the entire work as narratological. Just as a life is contained in 
a series of episodes, which we string together, overlay and juxtapose in order to 
obtain an overall image, so the sometime s-di sparate elements of At Last Sight 
combine to make up the narrative of itself 
We can take this further and suggest that the narrative of At Last Sight and my 
reading of it here in this thesis are identical. As Derrida would have it, any 
standing outside of the text is impossible . 
29 This may mean that the work is so 
self-referential that I am unable to read it at all. My own theorising would thus 
become not so much a critical practice beyond and outside the performance, but 
an indivisible element of the (critical) performance itself. Am I able to refer any 
longer to At Last Sight as a performance in time, which is discrete,, and this thesis 
as words, which occupy space and are separate? I feel not. The project is no 
longer that and the thesis this. 
Any shift ftom theory into practice - such as my own movement 
from full-time 
immersion in academia to a sustained attempt at making performance - 
has the 
274 
potential to lead to a type of self-contemplation that in turn renders performance 
theoretical . 
30 1 can recognise At Last Sight as a performance that is at once a 
discourse on narrative and a narrative itself Just as I would be unable to describe 
something 'postmodern' as 'original'. so this work is emerging as a revisiting and 
rereading of its own (my own) past. At Last Sight seeks to alert or remind the 
spectator to the fact that it is itself an artificial construct, and it does this through 
an abandoning of representation (mimetic or otherwise) in favour of a self- 
referentiality where nothing is ever fully fixed. That it does this in the same space 
and at the same time as it offers the 'reality' of the rapid consumption of alcohol 
only serves, it seems to foreground these issues of deconstruction and 
undecidability. Deconstruction is always an issue. From the start, At Last Sight 
has been assembled in a way that has invited deconstruction, and it has done this 
because its structure reveals something of its own knowledge of certain 
deconstructive theories of performance. The work thus advertises itself as an 
appropriate site for deconstruction. It does this through the lack of 'plot' and the 
irregularity of the authorial voice. Its openness to deconstruction is taken further 
still by the disjunctive distinction between the illusory nature of certain events and 
the non-illusion of others - for example, the illusion-breaking activity of 
consuming considerable quantities of alcohol - which combine to create a world 
of slippage rather than of meaning. 
31 
This slippage exists within the words as well as the actions of At Last Sight. The 
appropriation of certain extracts of text from, for example, L. P. Hartley's The K- 
V- 17 
Go-Between (spoken variously by Glenn Robertson, Andrew Proudfoot and 
Elizabeth Hague) and Montaigne's 1580 dictum on the presentation of self as 
'a 
27 
-5 
work of good faith' (delivered, with a name-change by Chris Roberts) sits 
uneasily alongside 'original' words, such as those composed by either the cast or 
myself When fictional films by famous directors are described as though thq 
exist, and when these descriptions are intercut with descriptions of 'genuine' 
films, which are described in the same manner, then any comfortable acceptance 
of either 'truth' or 'fact, is denied. The cast are 'advertised' as lovers (two of them 
are now openly so), assuming that the spectators believe that to be true, then they 
will be inclined in Chester, as they were in Liege, to puzzle over which embraces 
are '-real' and which 'false'. 32 Everything slides out of place. The wine and 
cigarettes are 'real' and the Polaroid photographs provide evidence that certain 
events did indeed take place. And yet the performers embody no 'characters' with 
whom the spectators are allowed to engage and the work's fictionality is 
consistently exposed by the deliberate visibility of stage lights and control boards. 
The aim is to produce a persistent destabilisation of expectation. The work 
purports to be about truth, yet it deals in lies (and lies in the way that it deals with K- - 'r --- 
truth); it foregrounds its status as a theatrical construction, and thereby as 
something false, at the same time as so much of it is seemingly 'real'. What At 
Last Sight is doing then is exploring the relationship that exists between the 
spectator and the work. The spectator is being asked to enter into more than the 
customary 'suspension of disbelief: s/he is being asked to 'believe' and to do this 
33 
in spite of the fact that much of the performance is blatantly false. I would argue 
that in this way the spectator is afforded a huge importance. 
The importance of 
spectatorship is not here that a particular response to 
At Last Sight might be more 
or less profound or incisive than any others, so much as 
it is the individual 
"176 
spectator's own response. The 'you' of the spectator becomes as vital as the 'Y of 
the instigator of the action or the text. Furthermore, this 'you' is considerably less 
vexed. For whereas the T is problematised by the difficulties of establishing any 
fixed sense of where the T resides, the 'you' is always and only you the 
spectator, regardless of the text's chosen mode of delivery from one moment to 
the next. 
13-5-99 
In the continued use of T in the text for At Last Sight, the spectator is reminded 
that any identification between the watcher and the watched is troubled. Who, 
after all, is the 'F that one is seeing? There are no character's names, other than 
Arabella and Paris, and these are decided within the context of the performance. 
"You can be Arabella, " Glenn Robertson tells Elizabeth Hague, "and I can be 
Paris. " The identities are fictionalised even within the fictional frame of the 
performance. Elsewhere, Glenn is Glenn and Liz is Liz. What they are saying to 17 -- 
the spectator is that this is one layer of performance within many others. At its 
most mimetic, then - and the Arabella and Paris section is played very 
naturalistically - the process of imitation is subject to its most emphatic exposure. 
What can be trusted here? When Andrew Proudfoot and Sarah Skelton work 
through the scene that was written in America, they do so with texts in their 
hands, long after they have learned the words. It is though At Last Sight is fearful 
of giving in to any type of empathetic engagement on the part of the spectator. 
This is both true and false. When Andrew tells the audience how lonely he is (and 
his is a loneliness that is true at the time of writing) I certainly do want an 
empathetic response from the spectators. What I do not want is empathy througli 
fiction. If the spectators want to care, then let them care about truth (or at least a 
277 
kind of truth) rather than about the lie of lines written by another hand and 
learned. 
The truth, though, cannot be easily tracked down. If the text tells the spectator that 
it is dishonest and this statement is seen to be true, then that truth belies the claims 
of dishonesty, even as they are being made. Equally, if At Last Sight is true,, then 
its assertion of its intrinsic dishonesty is shown to be incorrect and false. The only 
claim for truth that can be made is that the work is never fully one thing or the 
other. Its journey from truth to lies and back is such that I am no longer able or 
even inclined to keep track of where truth starts and ends. I am not sure now that I 
ever was. 
If we accept that realism is generally seen as something that has as its aim a type 
of mimetic transparency - so that its spectators witness an imitation of an action, 
which is 'life-like' without ever being really 'like life' - then At Last Sight can be 
seen as a work that sets out to foreground that very fakery. Theatncal devices are 
made visible and the language of the text tends towards opacity. Where words can 
be said to be imitative of particular experiences, the delivery of these sections is 
such that the very act of imitation is exposed. This self-reflexivity is a theme of 
postmodern performance ... 
it could even be said to define particular 
performances as postmodern. Linda Hutcheon explores this aspect in the chapter 
'Historiographic Metafiction' in A Poetics of Posonodemism, where she argues 
that self-reflexivity is a positive force in the construction of text 
... provisionality and uncertainty 
(and the wilful 
and overt construction of meaning too) do not 
ýcast doubt upon their seriousness', but rather define 
the new postmodem seriousness that acknowledap-. 
17, 
,S 
the limits and powers of reporting or writing the 
past, recent or remote. 34 
I can draw parallels between Hutcheon's notions of postmodern self-reflexivity 
and At Last Sight, as performance text, as performance and also as this thesis. The 
three aspects each explore issues of identity and subjectivity, of representation and 
reference, of intertextuality and appropriation, of the implications of the reading 
of one's self A narrative voice that is subjective will inevitably draw attention to 
itself The pronoun 'F is likely to be used; the location and time of the text's 
construction will perhaps be made evident. This subjectivity is a feature of all of 
the work engaged in on this overall project, and it would be possible, and simple., 
to pull sections of writing from both the thesis and the text of At Last Sight as a 
means of exemplifying this point. In fact, the prolific nature of the references to 
person and place is such that the extrapolation of examples would be almost 
entirely unnecessary. The '1' is everywhere in the work. 
If received wisdom tells us that acting is about recreating truth from accepted 
words and repeated patterns of words, then the performers in At Last Sight are not 
acting. Clearly, they are. One can draw distinctions between 'performance' and 
9 acting, as indeed this thesis has attempted elsewhere, but these distinctions are 
often no more than tendentious exercises in the justification and promotion of one 
approach over another. Michael Kirby 1) s continuum of acting, which he 
describes 
in On Acting and Not Acting, serves as a useful reminder that whereas 'acting' 
will generally function within a number of matrices, each of which combines 
to 
create the illusion of 'other', 'performance' can exist with no matrix whatsoever. 
35 
What Kirby's continuum does not provide for is the fact that a matrix 
is as likely 
279 
to be internally as externally applied. If, for example, Sarah Robertson invests 
elements of her performance with an emotional and psychological underpinning at 
the same time as Laurent Ruggeri might be doing no more (? ) than speaking 
remembered lines at given times and in certain spaces, can we say with any 
authority that one is acting and the other is not? If we accept that acting is as 
concerned with a state of mind as it is with any physical activity, then it becomes 
impossible to make any externally imposed distinctions between acting and 
performance that will hold true. 
Conversely, if we believe the shifting state of 'acting' to be definable only by the 
C actor', then we are denying the spectator any status as a valid provider and 
creator of meaning. 
Because I am unable to monitor the states of the performers' minds at any given 
moment of any rehearsal (even if the students themselves were able to recognise 
the shifting ways in which they are attending, engaging and pretending from one 
instant to the next) I am unable to make any usefully distinctive detennination of 
an 'in and out of actedness'. in effect, the performers are presenting their own 
agendas within a text that also announces my own presence, and it is doing so at 0 3P 
the same time as I am physically absent from the performance. In this, they are in 
one way indistinguishable from the performance per se. Their performances are 
ironic imitations in much the same way that At Last Sight is an ironic imitation of 
a performance. The performance, like the performers, and like this thesis, adopt 
different attitudes to self-narration. In the performance, certainly, there is evidence 
280 
of a denial of truth, which runs simultaneously with a contradictory assertion and 
of signs that function as little more than signs of signs. 
It will be apparent to the reader that this thesis is troubled by time. I am not able 
to write about what might take place in any given rehearsals at the same time as I 
am writing about the thinking that is informing the work. Not within the form of 
notation adopted in these pages. Perhaps the only way to have achieved this would 
be to have written the words in overlapping boxes, so that what the reader 
experiences is 
281 
My ability to write about the falsification of facts as a means of foregrounding, through 
performance, the impossibility of presenting 'truth' and the unavoidable nature of error. So 
that the spectators can witness performers who are trying to make sense of the words of At 
Last Sight in ways 
Thus articulating the 
fiction, truth and lies i 
At the same time as I take an extract of the written text of At Last 
ostmodern tenet that the assertion of difference between fact and 
Sight that exemplifies this. For example, the section where Elizabeth 
less relevant than an exploration of the spaces in between the two. 
says "Even when it's ditterent, it always starts like this, wi 
a world not listening to nothing to hear. When in this place and at 
this time: silent witnessed,, watched) we are wakened by dreams too 
sad for sleep. " Only to have Anke Sauthof instructing her in very 
loud German to be more authoritative in her delivery, so that 
Elizabeth's words are displaced in the same way that a non-German 
speaking spectator's sense of how to view the scene is shifted even 
xq it i. p. beinoný, qAý the same time as I describe the way 
this scene is being rehearsed at this point 
in the rehearsal process. Explaining why 
the scene has been moved to the place it 
now occupies. Letting the reader know 
what my expectatiOns, for the scene might 
be; how Anke's interruption came about, 
why Elizabeth opted for the words she 
insz elsewhere in the 
At the same time as '- ratibnalise th 
space 4s they 
reasons for the changes after Liege. 
282 
This would result in a situation where the very thing that is designed to transmit 
comprehensible information would be rendered intelligible. The overlap inherent 
in the performance of At Last Sight is impossible to recreate on the printed pages 
of a thesis. This would not be the case with technology available on the World 
Wide Web. We are advised that 
Literary theorists ... are predicting that in the twenty-first century people will be so used to 
receiving messages in non-linear forms that they 
will no longer think of writing continuous prose 
as the default means of conveying meaning. 36 
As a document with roots in the twentieth century, however late on that century 
may be, this thesis remains predominantly prose-bound and continuous. 
14-5-99 
The thesis itself is moving through time, as is the process of rehearsal, and yet its 
written form is a denial of the multiple layers of simultaneous occurrence 
experienced in practice. This results in a collapsing of time. The reader is aware of 
the point in actual time that rehearsals of At Last Sight have reached, because that 
time of the making is also this time of the writing. Recording the date on which 
each section of thesis is being written provides information about the stage in the 
process. However, it also suggests many periods of inactivity, when in fact the 
thoughts and events to be documented are perhaps being thought about at length. 
Reading may be being undertaken, or rehearsals may be so intense that time for 
writing is limited. Dating this section now tells the reader that the performances in 
Chester are imminent. 
We have, in fact, only a matter of days before the work is presented. It feels ready. 
The cast seems to be as prepared as is possible, and they are all looking forward to 
283 
presenting the results of their endeavours. Three Level 3 performances have been 
presented in the last two weeks. An installation/performance, Wounded with 
Dreams; a three-act play from 192 1, Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf, by 
Stanislaw Witkiexicz, and an untitled choreographic work. 37 At Last Sight is the 
I 
, ast of the scheduled student-cast performances. 
This chapter has moved from the beginnings of a description of changes wrought 
by a trip to America, and on through a rationalisation of those changes according 
to aspects of postmodern theory, to a position where At Last Sight is almost ready 
for performance ... and this movement 
has been swift. So swift, in fact, that the 
paragraphs to come will relate to a reflection on At Last Sight, rather than as a 
type of preparation. In these last few days, the pressure of bringing the work to its 
optimum state is denying the opportunities to write that existed when the rehearsal 
schedule was more leisurely. It is not just about the time spent on rehearsals, and 
on full-time teaching. It is about the necessity for some time spent away from Al 
Last Sight. So that time spent away from rehearsals becomes time spent away 
from the thesis. 38 We pause here, not to gather breath so much as to preserve any 
breath that remains for the production. Our pause is a pause in the time of the 
writer, if not quite the reader. For the reader, we move immediately here into a 
reflection on the performances of At Last Sight at the Molloy Auditonum, 
University College Chester, on the evenings of May 11'h, 18t", ISP and 21" at 
8.00p. m. 
284 
Performance 
23-5-99 
In writing here about At Last Sight as something finished, I am aware that the 
word 'finished' may be misleading. I have accepted the invitation from Festupic 
in Compiegne, and am in discussion with the International Association of 
University Theatre about ways in which At Last Sight might be integrated into a 
European performance project, Connect, which will run ftom November 1999 
through till March of 2001. The work then is clearly ongoing. Notwithstanding 
this, it was always the intention that this thesis would chart the developments of 
At Last Sight up until such time as the work was presented for the academic 
assessment of the participating students. 
It almost goes without saying to report that the work was different on every night. 
The human material of performance, in the sense of both performers and 
spectators, ensure that no two occasions will ever match up. The opening night 
audience was responsive. Laughter, where it came, came freely. It was, for the 
cast and myself, an ideal start. We felt, after only a few moments, that the 
production was a 'success'. This thesis is not focussing on the certain dynamics of 
audiences, so there is little point in a deviation here that moves in any detail away 
from what happened and on to the ways in which it was or was not received . 
39 It is 
enough, perhaps, to recognis% that the relationship between spectators and 
performers is such that each is as likely to be termed 'good' or 'bad' as is the 
other. From a performance perspective, a 'bad' audience is often no more than a 
group of people whose collective response suggests that the process of guessing 
entered into by the performance group was misjudged. As makers of work, we 
285 
seek confirmation from spectators of the wisdom, appropriateness and 
inventiveness of our decisions. An audience that fails to confirm this wisdom will 
be regarded as 'bad'. In this way, a totally silent audience can be interpreted as 
cgood', as long as their silence is possessed of the capability of being interpreted 
as attentiveness. 
According to the above criteria, the audience at University College Chester was 
good. Each performance had its own flavour, and each of the performers was C-) - 
happier on certain nights with aspects of their own performance than they were on 
others. From the Monday through to and including the Wednesday, there were 
qualities and weaknesses in everybody's performances. For example, Sarah 1- -- 
Robertson was visibly shaking when she was waiting for the audience to settle at 
the start of the performance on Monday. This was noticed by a colleague of mine 
who was in the audience in his role as assessor, and it is difficult to see how this 
shaking would not have been seen by every spectator. The shaking was prolonged 
and difficult to watch. As soon as Sarah was engaged in more overt 'performing, 
the shaking stopped as suddenly as it had started. The fact that this shaking was 
the physical manifestation of nervous tension made it something that was beyond 
Sarah's control. Notwithstanding this, she was eager on Tuesday to demonstrate, 
not least to herself, that she was able to assume a degree of control. Chris Roberts 
stumbled over lines on Tuesday in ways that were not apparent on other 
evenings; 40 Elizabeth Hague's performance was more powerful on Monday and 
1XII. 
v. . dnesday than on Tuesday and 
Glenn Robertson was physically sick on 
Wednesday. That he was able to walk quickly out of the auditonum and on to the 
toilets situated in the corridor meant that the spectators were unaware of his 
286 
purpose. When he re-entered the space, I suspect that most of the audience felt 
that his leaving had been no more or less than a further example of the 
performers' freedom to behave naturally for much of the duration of the work, 
The performance on Friday was the most effective of the four. To my mind, At 
Last Sight is a stronger and more internally coherent piece of work now than it 
was in Liege, which meant that every performance in Chester was a vindication of 
our decision to initiate a process of reconstruction. Be that as It may, the 
41 performance on Friday, May 21" saw At Last Sight at its best . 
It was a powerful 
point for the project itself to end,, and I am aware that the group Will need some 
lifting if they are to recapture the qualities they displayed on the last night of the 
run at Chester. The audience was not set up to be supportiVe. The performance 
had sold out,, but this was the case with every one of the performances. Perhaps 
the feedback that the group had received from audience members on the previous 
evenings had filtered down to subsequent spectators, so that they arrived with a 
positive anticipation. Many of the spectators were returning for a second sight. 
26-5-99 
As this thesis has progressed, it has become increasingly difficult to engage in 
analysis that is not second-hand. The key moments in At Last Sight remain key 
moments, ) 
despite the fact that they have been discussed elsewhere in this work. 
This does not make them any easier to revisit. A useful articulation comes 
fi7om 
the Level 3 students involved, each of whom has written about their experiences 
of making At Last 
Sight. 42 The level of both their eloquence and understanding 
has been impressive. With their approval, I will be including these essays under 
Appendix 9.43 These essays will be assessed, with the grades being worth one `vF 
287 
third of the overall mark. The other two thirds will come from their practical 
contribution to the module. I have been particularly impressed with the students' 
abilities to go beneath the surface of the work undertaken. In the occasional places 
where problems with vocabulary work against an easy communication of their 
thoughts, I am reminded most acutely that their own eff 
--t is orts 
have a validity tha i 
missing at times &om my own. Where I feel that I am searching for ideas to fit 
words, the students - each of them - has sought words to fit ideas. Their 
inadequacies pale against my own. 44 
28-5-99 
At Last Sight became, in performance, something that belonged almost solely to 
the cast, and in reflecting here on some of their own experiences of the project I 
will make reference to all six of the Level 3 students' essays. I refer here to their 
essays because I am convinced that, like this thesis, they form part of the critical 
project that was and is At Last Sight, rather than as discrete critical commentaries. 
At times, the students' readings of the work will be challenged. When this occurs, 
it does so within the spirit of ongoing dialogue that has been a feature of the group 
since the very start. 
The essays did not require titles, although each of the students in this group gave 
their work a name. These titles give a strong indication of what the students 
believed At Last Sight to be about- Truth'and 'Lies' in Performance: At Last 
Sight (Andrew Proudfoot); At Last Sight: Alienating or Liberating the Audience? 
(Sarah Robertson); 'Art is a Lie which tells the Truth': Truth and Lies in AI Last 
Sight (Sarah Skelton); Theatre is What Theatre Did (Glenn Robertson); At Last 
Sight: Truth & Lies, Reality & Fiction, Acting & Being (Chris Roberts), Al Last 
288 
Sight: Poyeuristic Intention? (Elizabeth Hague). I am unable to disclose or discuss 
the grades awarded for these essays, and readers will have to judge for themselves 
the quality of the work. What I can say is that the essays share what the 
assessment team took to be an intellectual engagement with specific concerns of 
45 
the project. My failure to reveal marks is not something that is done to protect 
the students from any embarrassment. 
29-5-99 
Before I begin to highlight here certain sections of these essays, in order to 
provide the reader with an insight into the perspective of particular students, I 
should note that the use of the pronoun T is a feature of all of the work. None of 
these essays were 'tutored', in the sense that each of the students worked alone 
and without my guidance. Theoretical discussion was a part of the process of 
rehearsal, but did not carry over into specific assistance with essays. The work, 
when it was submitted, was as new to me as it was to my colleagues in the 
department. The use of '1' is not then an attempt on any of the students' part to 
mirror in some way the T of this thesis ... none of the students 
have seen any of 
this thesis and its structure has not been discussed. Their collective use of the '1' 
is, I feel, a logical continuation of the prioritised T of the production. Because 
their thoughts, ideas and feelings have been so central to the process of 
constructing At Last Sight it is only right and proper (as well as only natural) that 
this foregrounding of their own agendas is a feature of their written submissions. 
Where certain modules undertaken by students at University College Chester have 
an express concern with the 'inculcation of technique, rather than the pursuance of 
personal agenda' 46 (and I place these words in inverted commas because they are 
here so often used verbatim) this project has actively sought to reverse that 
289 
concern. The work has been made to the students' agendas, and also, of course,, to 
my own. Accordingly, their use of the personal pronoun is both expected and 
acceptable. 
Elizabeth Hague's essay picks up on certain key moments in At Last Sight in order 
to explore the work's relationship with its audience. The way she cites these 
moments is indicative of the sense of ownership felt by the group. When Elizabeth 
writes "'Most performance is disguised autobiography, however, this 
autobiography is a disguised performance' (Andrew Proudfoot, At Last Sight)" 
she applies the authorship of that line to Andrew. In one vital sense, of course, this 
is true. Andrew authored the line in performance. But the reference removes the 
line from its written origins ... 
it becomes only performative. This performative 
authoring continues through the essay: "'In the room with her it is dark, and 
sshhhhh it is very, very late' (Liz Hague, At Last Sight); "'He wants to touch her' 
(Chris Roberts, At Last Sight), "'Am I doing this for your gaze? (Sarah Skelton, At 
Last Sight). No distinction is drawn between these lines and "'I'm alone, it's quite 
sad really' (Andrew Proudfoot, At Last Sighf' even though this line was doubly 
authored by the performer in a way that the previously cited lines were not. 
The sub-text of Elizabeth's essay then is as focused on the event of performance 
as its title would suggest ... although its sub-textuality 
hinges on performative 
rather than spectatorial ownership. With an examination of the presentation in 
Liege, the essay itself articulates a concern with the specifics of this performance 
and at that time. That it addresses issues of watching through reference to the 
comments of particulair spectatoirs and not through a blanket assumption that any 
290 
one response was automatically shared by the audience per se is an indication of 
the student's sensitivity to the idiosyncratic nature of perception. 
Chris Roberts' essay sets out to investigate the extent to which the selves of the 
performers informed At Last Sight- In precisely the same way as Elizabeth Hague, 
Chris apportions ownership of the text used in performers to s/he who speaks, 
rather than the writer of the work. This is evidenced most emphatically when 
Chris, in his endnotes, attributes words from the programme to Freeman, J. and 
words delivered by himself in the performance to Roberts, C.. From this 
separating out we can assume that Chris is regarding performed words as 
something distinct from words about performance, even when those words have 
been penned by the same hand. When Chris writes that the group were afforded 
the freedom to choose "the lines, stories, speeches and moments for ourselves", he 
seems to be developing this freedom into ownership. 
Chris Roberts' essay moves into a reading of At Last Sight within a context 
created by Wilshire's article on paratheatrical form. In citing Wilshire, Chris 
begins an exploration of the extent to which At Last Sight tested the boundaries 
between 'theatre' and 'life'. Although Chris's essay does not touch on it directly, 
the issue here is one of consequence. Whereas events in life have ramifications 
beyond the event, it is usually the case that events in performance are removed 
from the consequences of any continued response. The actor playing Othello is 
unlikely to be berated in the bar for slaying Desdemona in performance. For Chris 
the performance brought about profound consequences. He ended one 
long- 
standing relationship and began another. His performative behaviour with 
Sarah 
291 
Robertson may turn out to be the most consequential act of his life. Certainly, the 
couple have become the couple of At Last Sight. 
Sarah Robertson's essay begins with an assertion of Derrida's notion of 'wfiterly' 
and 'readerly' texts. Using this binary oppositionality, for Sarah at least, At Last 
Sight was writerly. Sarah recognises the fact that a move away from the 
conventional spectator/performer relationship may be more difficult for the 
spectator to adjust to than the performer: "audience members may feel more 
comfortable in the type of performance that restricts their behaviour,, for example, 
where the fourth wall can serve as a protective device". Sarah's essay suggests 
that At Last Sight was more 'writerly' than I had believed. For Sarah "The 
intention of At last sight (sic) was that no interpretation should be ruled out. " As 
My written comments on the essay indicate, my own feelings are that this is too 
liberal a reaction. I do not believe that any one interpretation of At Last Sight 
would be as valid as any other. In fact, we created the work with the intention of 
taking the audience along a journey towards a broadly shared interpretation. The 
work was not created out of chance and directorial decisions were made in pursuit 
of a particular resonance. 
On Page 4 of her essay, Sarah quotes from the text and attributes the words to At 
Last Sight. On Page 9, four sections of text are quoted, with each being credited to 
the speaker/performer. On the same page, programme notes are attributed to 
freeman, I (sic). There are two ways of looking at this. One is to regard it as an 
inconsistency and therefore a 'fault', the other is to regard it as evidence of 
thinking, which is at once inconsistent and apposite. Thus, as the essay 
develops, 
-, g, ) 
so does Sarah's position in relation to ownership. This may be no more than my 
own attempt at an interpretation of the essay that suits my overall view of both the 
work and the group. In the cold light of reflection it does seem to be unavoidably 
so. However, in my initial grading of the essay as the communication of thought I 
may be more critical (or critical in a different way) than when I now re-read the 
essay as a documentary artefact. 47 From my present perspective, I am more 
concerned with the thoughts contained in the essay than with the grammatical 
vagaries of communication. 
'Truth and lies' form the basis of Sarah Skelton's essay. Like Chris Roberts, she 
refers to Bruce Wilshire; she also locates her own performative persona, and those 
of her fellow group members, within Michael Kirby's notion of a continuum of 
acting and not acting. The essay exposes the complexities involved in the idea of 
playing oneself Referring to Andrew Proudfoot's invitation to any female 
spectator who so desires to meet him after the show for a drink, and whilst 
recognising that "Andrew almost certainly believes what he is saying to be true", 
Sarah nevertheless identifies Andrew's behaviour as actorly, In informing us that 
"Andrew is always aware of the presence of the audience and the fact that he is 
6 on stage"', Sarah points us towards the incontrovertible fact that Andrew is 
indeed "acting out his own emotions and beliefs ... 
for the sake of the audience. " 
In the middle of her essay, Sarah quotes Nietzsche's maxim that "truths are 
illusions we have forgotten are illusions. " It is perhaps the most succinct way 
into 
At Last Sight that one could imagine. The fact that I did not point any of the group 
towards Nietzsche makes the integration of his words into the essay even more 
telling than had I referred to him during rehearsals. Where my own thesis 
is 
29 
-') 
seeking explanatory articulation via many tens of thousands of words,, Nietzsche 
encapsulates all this and more in eight words. Ten thousand - fifteen thousand 
maybe - of mine for each one of his. 
As with Sarah Skelton, Andrew Proudfoot attempts in his essay to explore truth 
and lies. For Andrew, and very interestingly, 'truth' is somehow inextricably 
caught up in spontaneity, so that the more a scene is rehearsed the less 'true' it 
becomes. Andrew's essay does not really explain why he believes this to be so, 
but as a document for my assessment now - now that I am no longer involved in 
an arithmetical assessment of the essay's 'worth' - it creates an exciting point of 
departure for new work. A truth twice told is less true the second time than it was 
on the first? A matinee is more truthful than a performance later that night, simply 
by dint of the fact of its status as 'prior'? The implications of this within 
performance are incredible. If truth recedes with each consecutive telling - and if 
'truth' is an aim - then work must inevitably deteriorate from first rehearsal to 
performance. It seems to throw received wisdom on its head. 
For Andrew,, if my reading of his essay is reasonable, he feels that 'truth' happens 
once, only and that what follows is the recreation of that same 'truth' in 
performance. As an example of this, he writes about a scene he had difficulties 
with, and the way that those difficulties were incorporated into the eventual 
playing out in public. As is to be expected in a relatively short essay, the issue is 
left unresolved, inasmuch as Andrew never explains why this might be so. Why a 
rehearsed 'truth' is less true than when it was unrehearsed. I think, perhaps, the 
issues here are of control and imitation. In the first instance (and I am referring 
294 
here to Andrew's problem scene) the difficulties are beyond his control. This is 
what leads to the difficulty. In the performance, these same difficulties are 
controlled in that they have been fashioned into that which is an imItation of its 
original state. There is a sense to this. A sense we can trace back to Plato and to 
Aristotle. It relates to those imitation theories of art, which have influenced for 
centuries the way we feel about perception. What it does not do is address the 
issue of truth as a state in itself 
If I rehearse the delivery of biographical details about myself, they are no less true 
simply because, as time passes, my phrasing becomes more polished or my body 
language more contrived. What potency do we afford to repetition when we say 
that its very process leads to the irretrievable dilution of truth? 
1-6-99 
The last of the students' essays to be discussed here is Glenn Robertson's, Aealre 
is what Meatre Did. This essay differs from his peers' in that it is an extension of 
a separate essay, 7heatre is what Aeatre Does, submitted for a taught module 
in 
Contemporary Theatre Practice. Glenn's essay differs also because it is the only 
one that does not credit words spoken in the performance to the performer. 
In order to rationalise the lies told in the programme, Glenn cites 
Plato's belief 
that "the 'truth' of things did not lie in the way that they most 
directly appeared - 
not in the shadows on the cave wall ... 
but in the figures who cast them. " This 
idea of truth as something that casts a shadow - the shadow of performance - 
is 
295 
central to Glenn's essay. He isolates a section of Andrew Proudfoot's emotional 
address to the audience as an obviously acted ýelement, at the same time as he 
recognises that the relatively stilted delivery of this one line was disguised "in the 
way that a transition from 'acting' to 'non-acting' had already been made". For 
Glenn, what is of most interest is the fact that Andrew was using one truth (or one 
illusion of one truth) as a disguise for another. When Andrew delivered his 
personal plea, he did so in a way that allowed the audience as a mass to regard the 
words in one way, whereas he hoped that one specific spectator would recognise 
the words as aimed only at her. In this way, Andrew's 'truth' could be said to be 
the one thing he most wanted to conceal from most of the watchers. It was akin to 
the hiding of a tree in a forest. In offering up such an overtly generic 'truth', 
Andrew was concealing the specific truth at its core. 
Taking his cue from the performance, Glenn allows his essay to answer nothing. 
As mentioned in my response to the rest of the students' essays, I am able to read 
their work in a different way now that the pressures of assessment have shifted 
ftom my role (then) as lecturer through to my role (now) as student. In this way, 
many of my initial criticisms of the essays have disappeared. Rather than 
regretting the absence of any coherent line of argument, I am inclined now 
towards an acceptance of the essay as a collection of thoughts. Where one thought 
gives way to another without ever going deeply into an analytical rationale, the 
thoughts are still valid. It is better, perhaps, that the students feel able to ask 
relevant and difficult questions than that they provide easy second-hand answers 
in response to the already long solved. 
296 
Whilst it is true to say that At Last Sight had a life before the students' 
involvement, it is also true that their perceptions of making the work have become 
part of At Last Sight itself Their essays are appended to this thesis, not in order to 
make the group feel a part of this submission ... their 
involvement has been so 
total that their not feeling a part of it is unthinkable. The essays have been 
appended because they provide a valuable insight into the ways in which At Last 
Sight was made, and of the investigative spirit of that construction. Readers of this 
thesis are urged to consider their words not so much as written submissions for 
assessment but as traces of perception. Just as each of the students gave more to 
the practical project than could have ever been expected or asked, so each of their 
essays reveals an equally honest trawling of the Self 48 
In the same way that At Last Sight has been informed by a collapsing of issues of 
ownership, so this thesis is informed by the thoughts of its key personnel. As the 
last words before the thesis draws towards its conclusion, there has been evidence 
in this chapter of an accelerated concern towards a reading of the past of the 
project. Postmodernism would have it that whilst the past did indeed exist, 
knowing it today is an impossibility. All that we have to go on are the traces of the 
past and the way that we read them. 
297 
' See Calvin, W. H. HowBrains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now. HarperCollins, New York, 1997. p. 146. 
I - Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. Harper, New York, 1953. p. 89. 3 Cage, J. Conversing with Cage. Richard Kostelanetz (ed. ). Omnibus Press, Londoii, New York. Sydney, 1989. p2O8. 
4 Savage-Rumbaugh, S. and Roger Lewin. Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink ofthe Human Alind Wiley. 1994. pp. 111-112 
' This is recognised by H. A. Simon in his study of 'trial and error leading to breakthrough'. 
'Scientific Discovery and the psychology of problem solving' in R_ G. Colodny (ed. ), Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy. University of Pittsburgh Press, 
Pittsburgh, 1966. pp. 73-86. 
6 Marcus, L. A utolBiographical Discourses. Manchester University Press, UK, 1994. p. 180 Guilford, J. P. 'Traits of Creativity' in Creativity and its Cultivation. H. H. Anderson (ed. ) Harper, 
1959. p. 48 
'3 J. P. Guilford in Creativity. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967, pp. 110-133 proposes two general 
types of thinking: 'divergent thinking' and 'convergent thinking'. In convergent thinking the 
thinker is expected to 'converge' on the 'appropriate' answer to a problem. Convergent thinkers. 
therefore, have a preference for problems that require a single, correct answer. Divergent thinking. 
however, involves producing a variety of possible answers to a problem; thus, divergent thinkers 
prefer open-ended questions that allow for a range of possible answers. We can deduce from this 
(as we can from the making of At Last Sight) that the making of performance, which has no 
prescribed outcome, is suited to an approach where divergent thinking is allowed and encouraged. 9 Cited in Owens, A. Mapping Drama. Carel Press, UK. To be published in 2000. 
10 ibid 
11 Craik, K. J. W. The Nature ofExplanation. Cambridge University Press, 1943. P. 98 
12 Grotowski, J. Towards a Poor Theatre. Methuen, London, 1969. p. 213. 13 Mitter, S. Systems ofRehearsaL Routledge, London, 1992. p. 79. " The consumption of alcohol by students as an assessed part of their studies raises some 
interesting ethical dimensions. University College Chester does not possess any published 
documents, either in terms of teaching or research that throw specific light onto this. The 
committee responsible for 'Ethics and Research' at Chester has stated that 'No activity should be 
entered into that causes - or intends to cause- harm or offence to the public'. Because the students 
are not, in this sense, regarded as menibersof the public, this caveat does not apply. A further 
statement firom the committee informs staff that (wherever possible) 'Students should be ad%ised 
of the content and nature of modules Prior to commencement. ' In this sense, my approach to 
working with this student-group falls within the regulatory guidelines. The fact that alcohol - 
particularly when consumed in the quantity and at the pace that it is - is a mind-altering substance 
does add complexity to the matter. I am Health and Safety trained and have been on a First Aid 
course at Chester; this, alongside my head of department's fiffl knowledge of what is happening 
and the students' willing participation in the activity, means that I have done all that need be done 
in order foTthe work to go ahead. 
Ethical issues of another kind are raised by the lies I am telling to members of the audience. This 
could be regarded as causing offence to members of the public. However, the fact that this 'public" 
needs to enter willingly into a theatre space in order then to read the programme and see the 
subsequent work changes their status, if only inasmuch as they are offering themselves as 
participants in a creative exercise, albeit without knowing the extent to which their own 
participation is crucial. 
On an individual level, I have few, if any concerns about these matters. The spectators' 
unknowingness is an important element of the work and it is difficult to think of a way in which 
they could 'not know' and still not be lied to. Similarly, my interest In changing the physical 
conditions of the performance, and of the performers, contains within it the necessity to engage in 
practice that places the participants at some (very MMor) risk, whether this be through exertion, 
duration or drink. It should be noted that I am always with the students when they drink alcohol in 
this piece, and that I am always sober. 
298 
I am aware that the education sector is becoming increasingly aware of its responsibilities, both to its immediate clients and the wider community, and it is in this spirit that I offer the above 
observations. 
I suspect, in defence of the work, that this module is the first time that the students involved have 
been put in a situation where ethical issues have been considered at any length. From this 
perspective, the approaches taken could be regarded as vital to their studies. 15FIaszen, L. in Mitter (1992). p. 89. 
16 The words were chosen by the members of the group, myself included. We an made 
suggestions, only retaining those on which we were all agreed. 17 Mullins, S. Lullaby. Columbia/Sony Records. Sony Music, 1998 
'8 The idea of Andrew trying to breathe water, rather than holding his breath, came from watching him in rehearsal. Holding his breath brought with it a sense of predictability: he would remain 
motionless for a minute or so, only to emerge gasping. Asking him to open his throat and gulp the 
water as though it were air means that Andrew's body is racked and he emerges retching. 
Watching Andrew doing this in rehearsal seemed somehow familiar, and then I remembered 
reading about a Chris Burden performance, Velvet Water, in Chris Burden: B, ývond The Limits. 
Peter Noever (ed. ), Cantz Verlag, Germany, 1996. Looking at the book in my office immediatelv 
after the rehearsal, I read the following statement by Burden: "Today I am going to breathe water, 
which is the opposite of drowning, because when you breathe water, you believe water to be 
richer, thicker oxygen capable of sustaining fife. ' p. 164. 
Because I had the idea without a conscious awareness of Burden's prior performance I can regard 
it as 'psychologically creative', as opposed to 'historically creative'. This is a distinction suggested 
by Margaret Boden in Dimensions ofCreativity. Boden (ed. ), MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1996. In 
Boden's words, "to be historically creative the novel product would have to be one that had never 
been seen or thought before. p. 17. 
This raises the question of originality, and -the extent to which something '-new' is also (might also 
be) something previously known ... even to the secondary thinker. 
I feel no less a sense of 
ownership of Andrew's drowning scene now that I am able to recall Burden's earlier project. The 
idea was not knowingly derivative. Seeing Andrew's work reminded me of reading about 
Burden's, not vice versa. 
19 The language tape also provides a thematic link with A. P. Hartley's words re the past being a 
foreign country, which are spoken by Glenn Robertson early on in At Last Sight. 
20 1 have been unable to track down the title of the filin in question. It was discovered at the end of 
a videotape, which has been recorded over so many times that the original material (part of a film 
shown on television) is impossible to date. The tape ends before the credits roll and the beginning 
is missing. 
" 'Identity is not within us ... 
it exists only as narrative. The only way to explain who we are is to 
tell our own story, to select key events which characterise us and organise them to the formal 
principles of narrative .... 
This gives narration at large the potential to teach us how to conceive of 
ourselves. ' In Currie, M. Posimodern Narrative Theory. Macii-fillan Press, UK, 1998. 'The 
Manufacture of Identities' pp. 17-32 
22 Althusser, L. Lenin andPhilosophy. Trans. B. Brewster. New Left Books, London, 1975. p. 31 
23 See Burchill, J. Girls on Film. Virgin Books, London, 1986 for an analysis of the ways in which 
women are consistently portrayed as passive in cinema. Michelene Wandor's Look Back in 
Gender. Methuen, London, 1987 provides an analysis of the same phenomenon in live 
performance. 
24 Sarah Robertson always took this photograph in performance, although the action was not 
rehearsed or 'blocked' in a way that made Sarah the most likely photographer. 
Despite the relative freedoms offered within At Last Sight members of the cast tended to do much 
the same firom one performance to the next. Actions that in the first instance were not directed, or 
even discussed, thus lost much of the appearance of spontaneity as the run of At Last Sight 
continued. Certain movements from certain performers became rigid, despite our best intentions to 
keep the work fluid. By the time these actions had become habitual, rather than 
improNrisational (or 
by the time I became aware ofit) the work was almost at an end. 
299 
25 Sarah Skelton's performance is the most overtly sexualised of the women's. This is a 
performative construction, which was developed through Sarah's own construction of self At Last 
Sight has been created out of the performers' own notions of who they are and of what thev vosh 
to show. In this way, Sarah's desire to be seen as desirable (even more than her level of physical 
attractiveness) has resulted in a preponderance of on-stage actions which are suggestive of 
sexually charged encounters. 
This is not to suggest that I have not had responsibility for the actions, words and images engaged 
in. As director of the work I have a considerable influence on the way that At Last Sight is both 
made and shown. Accordingly, I have to realise that the notions of self I am discussing might say 
as much about my projections as the performers'. 
26 A part of this urge to challenge came from my own concerns as a teacher, as much as from any 
directorial initiatives. I did not wish to be 'seen' as someone who shared in the spectatorial 
objectification of an attractive young woman. 
27 1 am asking the male performers to carry out an action here, whereas with the AB scene 
between Andrew and Sarah I was happy to let the performers decide on the way the lines were 
divided between male and female. I do not, however, feel that this results in a contradiction. The 
'pornography scene' works because those carrying out the actions are male, and this has as much 
to do with my decision as do any notions of directorial and gender-based power. It would only be 
iI thought that the women working the scene would be more effective than the men that my f 
notions of manipulation would be questioned (and exposed perhaps as false). It should be pointed 
out that this ideaof not asking females in the group to do certain things has more to do with my 
role as their teacher than as director. 
28 Volker, K. Brecht. Marion Boyars Ltd. London, 199 1. Chapter 34 'A Great Time Wasted' pp. 
369-376 
29 The 'text' can be said to be the work that is At Last Sight, this thesis and also myself James 
Olney's Metaphors of&ýf The Meaning ofAutobiography. Princeton University Press, USA, 
1972 asserts that text is 'always a projection of the 'inner space' of the observing or conceiving 
self (and that) all forms of knowledge are in some way autobiographical' (p. 3). It has not gone 
unnoticed that the intention to make At Last Sight self-revelatory has been transcended by the self- 
revelation that is this thesis. This is only in part to do with the collaborative nature of making the 
performance as opposed to the solitary practice of writing these words. Fundamentally, I feel, it is 
about the fact that 'you must have a self before you can afford to deconstruct it. ' Jouve, N. W. 
"ite Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism asAutobigraphy. Routledge, New York and 
London, 199 1. p. 7. The creation of At Last Sight has thus provided a creating self that this thesis is 
able to deconstruct. 
30 Brecht commented that 'In practice the theatre does not fulfil its social function. At a time like 
this the really practical talents are relegated to the field of theory in order to remain active. ' 
Volker, 199 1. p. 106. Whilst I would take exception to Brecht's use of the term 'relegated', his 
words are as relevant today (perhaps more so) as they were at the time of writing. 
31 'Slippage' may be literal in this sense. After draining litres of wine and then spinning wildly 
there is every possibility that some of the performers will slip and fall. The only safeguard against 
injury is that the cast members know that they can stop their actions at any time they choose. The 
context of the performance allows and even encourages this. 
32 1 am aware here that I am making assumptions about an audience, which is a trap I would 
normally wish to avoid. in this case the assumption seems a reasonable one to make, based riot 
least on the evidence of Liege. 
33 an th al This is a crucial aspect. In assigning a distinction between t ie 'real' de1 se' I am seeming 
to ignore those same theories of 'constructedness' that I elsewhere embrace. This is problematic, 
and yet to deny it, to state that all aspects of the work are as 'false' as each other, would 
be to 
ignore those very notions that brought me to the work in the first place. Essentialism is not a 
fashionable term. its insistence that there is something 'real' has been argued against so cogently 
that, on an intellectual level, I am convinced of its internal contradictions. I cannot 
help but 
wonder, however, whether Baudrillard would regard it as 'real' or not 
if he stubbed his toe on the 
edge of his bed and cried out in pam. This may be a facetious example, 
but the fact remains that I 
do believe in the existence of the real: At Last Sight is founded on that belief. no 
less than it is 
founded on a desire to explore the distinctions between the real and the 
false in performance- 
Indeed, if there were no distinction between one and the other, then what would 
be the Point of any 
artists making work that abandons illusion? When Abramovic; and 
Ulay walked the Wall of China 
300 
it was the reality of the action that gave it currency, no less than when Chris Burden was crucified 
to the bonnet of Ins Volkswagen. Conversely, we can say that exposing artifice only succeeds as a 
premise if one accepts that the act of exposure is somehow less artificial III nature 
" that which 
is being exposed. 
I began this thesis by talking about the absence of my children as a catalyst for a work that dealt 
with loss, it is the truth of these feelings that provides a context within which the rest of the work 
is able to function. Perhaps it is my belief in the truth of feelings that is more important than any 
faith I might have in facts over fictions. The emotional content of At Last Sight (and the emotional 
content of this thesis) is a testament (at least to myself) of the truth of feelings. TI-iis has been 
developed into ideas, such as the consumption of alcohol, which stand as 'truthful' in and of 
themselves., rather than solely as metaphors for 'truthftd' origins. 
I can accept that my 'life' is made up of constructions, without accepting that my life is not 'real'. 
At Last Sight is an attempt at making art out of this. The 'loss' in the performance of time passing 
is not designed to stand in some equation to the loss of children to a father, but its elements of (at 
least) reduced illusion are necessary counterpoints to the overt illusion of reading lines of text in 
lieu of natural(istic) behaviour. 
There is a reality to the fact of performers in a space, carrying out actions at a certain time, but this 
is not the only reality of the performance. The investment in the work is personal and it matters. 
The distinctions between real and false may mean more to me than to any spectator, and more than 
they do to the performers, but they do exist. If art is a part of life, rather than a representation of it. 
then why should art be denied the same freedoms as life? At Last Sight was fuelled by the real and 
has now become a part of my reality. Howsoever we engage with the theories of the day, we live 
our lives with the intrinsic and essentialist regard for the real. What price parenthood if feelings 
are not real? What price this thesis if its words are false? 34 
Hutcheon, L. A Poetics ofPostmodernism. Routledge, London, 1988. p. 117 
35 yirby, M 'On Acting and Not Acting' in Acting (Re)Considered. Routledge, London, 1995- pp. 
43-58 
36 Clark R& Ivanic, R. The Politics of Writing. Routledge, London & New York, 1997. p. 16. 
37 The three works in question were directed respectively by my colleagues Ian Watson. Adrian 
Guthrie and Matt Wellings. 
38 1 am aware, with hindsight that the sessions I spent at the computer during this period resulted 
in relatively large sections of text. It seems that at the very time I had a lot to say about the way the 
work was proceeding I had very little time to say it. 
39For a focus on the role of spectatorship, see Beckerman, B. Theatrical Presentation, Routledge, 
London, 1990 and Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences, Routledge, London, 1994. 
40 This 'stumbling' also occurred when Chris sturnbled and fell during a prolonged bout of mid- 
performance drinking. He drank a litre of wine, spun vigorously and fell to the ground. When he 
regained his footing he had no idea where he was in relation to the spectators, and he began 
speaking to Glenn as though he were a member of the audience. 
41 1 use the term 'best' here to describe this performance of At Last Sight as the closest 
it came in 
approximation to the intentions I developed during the rehearsal process. 
" These essays were handed in on May 24th , 
1999, which was the deadline for all of the Year 3 
students following this production module. The fact that the students involved in At Last Sight 
had 
less post-production time to compose the essays than their peers almost certainly Pushed them 
towards an investigation of the processes that had taken them through the module rather 
than a 
concentration on the performances per se. As a second marker on students' essays 
from across the 
year I am aware that this focus on process was not common. 
I might like to think that the At Last Sight group would have written their essays this way 
in any 
case, but it is likely that the shortage of time to reflect on their assessed performances was a major 
contributory factor in the way their essays were approached. 
43 The students involved gave their approval to their essays 
being included here in an appendix. 
University regulations mean that I can do so only if their grades are not published. 
Rather than 
asking the students to submit new copies of the essays, 
I have included the originals, NA-ith mN 
written comments intact, although no grades are shown. 
I do this because the essays, in the contex! 
lot 
of this thesis, form part of an ongoing dialogue. My responses to the students' work are as much a 
part of this thesis as are any other words. 
44 By this I mean that the students' documentation of their processes may be more -honest' than 
my own. There are times when I have been aware of manipulating the documentation to suit a 
theoretical perspective of my choosing, rather than of finding the most pertinent words and 
theories to match the practice. The students' essays reveal varying grasps of an 'appropriate 
vocabulary' ... what they all share is an immediacy that my own (more studied) words might 
sometimes deny. I am using an example of practice to engage with a theoretical work, whereas the 
students, I believe, have used their understanding of theory to engage with the practice. 
4' The essays were marked quickly, firstly by myself and subsequently by two of my coll! Tfues. 
Three of the essays were passed on to an external examiner, who returned them on June 15 , 
1999. 
The external examiner agreed the internal marks and in one case increased the grade. 
If the haste of the internal grading system seems to augur against contemplative critical reading it 
is important to note that it was entered into as a consequence of rapidly approaching examination 
boards. 
46 University College Chester Drama Handbook. UCC Press, 1997 
47 1 make no apologies for this. The essay, as part of an undergraduate submission, is not read in 
the same way as it is as a piece of the jigsaw ofA t Last Sight that is this thesis. 
48 The students' essays are more than a contribution to the documentary information of this thesis. 
The essays' inclusion passes part of the ownership of this thesis over to them. That the students arc 
making a contribution to the written submission of this thesis illustrates something of their 
importance, and it gives that importance pennanence. 
Just as I have been both subject and observer so too have the students. Their responsiveness to the 
nature of the work has taken At Last Sight into directions that I could never have anticipated and 
their contributions have been creative and intelligent. 
Every maker of any performance knows that the work could not be the work that it is with 
different personnel. That is the nature of collaboration. At Last Sight would have been the same in 
name only with different performers. That the group's involvement has gone deeper still than thesc 
words suggest should be apparent in every section of the thesis. 
102 
Conclusion 
24-9-99 
At Last Sight is now finished. 'Finished' is not an easy term. It is loaded. It carries 
with it all of the implications of practice as something fleeting and time-based at 
the same time as it suggests a clean delineation of process into product and thence 
into past. Inasmuch as the work of performance was always gomg to be an eveW 
and not an object, this is certainly true. 'It' happened. And having happened is now 
gone and gone forever. This provides me with a little distance ... a suitable 
distance. A necessary distance. 
This distance allows the conclusion to begin with a recognition of At Last Sight as 
a part of history, at the same time as notions of 'history' wifl be somewhat 
undermined. Later paragraphs will articulate the position on performance as 
research which has been arrived at during the course of this project. 
The work of At Last Sight is now history. As such, and as the last piece of 
performance work I had any responsibility for making in the Twentieth Century, it 
is consigned, in my own small orbit of practice, to the world of the previous 
millennium. To the world of the gone. This imbues the piece with an 
accompanying status. A label. At Last Sight was a project central to my research. It 
follows then, if only within the narrowness of my own experience, that it has 
become a part of my reading of theatre history. Whereas the performance is past, 
the reading of that performance, of this thesis, is always in the present. It Is thus 
U-, 
history made known in the here and now. It is theatre scholarship through theatre 
history. 
There is nothing 'wrong' with theatre history per se. It is only through a viewing of 
the, past, we might say, that we are able to make any valid sense of our present: 
that we can locate our present activities as part of a continuum of practice. It is 
also the case that theatre history, via the calcification of living form into prescribed 
fact, has a responsibility for much that is recognisably sterile in current practice. 
The history of theatre is a positive (and indeed inevitable thing) but its pervasive 
influence can turn out to be negative. Which means that my own reading, and re- 
working, of the history of At Last Sight needs to be approached with considerable 
caution and no little care. 
25-9-99 
There are two problems with theatre history. The first one of these is the way in 
which that history has been and continues to be written, for the manner of much of 
this writing impacts to a serious degree on how the past is read and employed. And 
that is where the second problem is located, because the very nature of theatre's 
history is that it is, or was, primarily shown rather than written about. This is not to 
suggest that theatre is about the activity of organised looking without thought, of 
an immediacy which belies reflection ... to even 
hint at that would be to undercut 
the ethos which is at the core of this thesis. We would 
do well in fact to remember 
that, etymologically, theatre and theory share the same source, theatron, meaning 
where to look. ' What does need to be guarded against, 
however, is the idea of the 
written past as some sort of foolproof 
blueprint for work of the future. 
Descriptions Of creativity do not teach us how to create, any more 
than books that 
3,04 
are the proýduct of deep thought show us how to think. By the same token, the 
study of theatre history is an insidious way of filtering the past, of telling us, of 
teaching us what it is important to remember. Of shaping and classifying works 
into recognisably coherent genres. Of pigeonhofing. It also, through a process of 
omission, tells us what we should not remember ... what 
is not worth remembering. 
It teaches us dismissal with the same words that it uses when it asks us to embrace. 
Theatre historlans - and I write this because the reflective nature of these words is 
threatening to make me a part of that which I most fear - create a lens through 
which they, and subsequently we, view theatre. This lens is both selective and 
subjective ... 
it is a subjectivity, furthermore, which is dressed up in the clothes of 
an assumed objectivity. It focuses in on a work and in so doing blocks that vital 
periphery of vision which would otherwise exist. What we are presented with is a 
narrow tract of history; a personalised reading that masquerades as a view of the 
way things really were. Inevitably, that has been the case with all of the words I 7 
have written to bring the reader to this point. All that I can hope is that by 
embracing the notion of subjectivity, by a relentless utilisation of the personal 
pronoun T rather than the ubiquity of 'one', I have avoided, at least in part, the 
pitfalls of seeming to proffer an unchallengable truth. 
The history of theatre provides us with a terminology ... a terminology which often 
annears as a litany of movements, of an identifiable idea of 'progress'. Futurism, rr--- 
Dada, Surrealism, Modernism, Absurdism, Kitchen Sink, Political, Situationism, 
Feminism, Agit-Prop, Popular, Community, Invisible, Intercultural, Intracultural, 
Forum, Functional, Renu*niscence, Documentary, Celebratory, Postmodernism, 
305 
Performance Art, Happenings, Live Art 
... the 
list, even of Twentieth Century 
terms, is seemingly inexhaustible. A procession of departures, each one defined by 
its distinctiveness from the rest. The terms are offered and perpetuated through the 
creation of a consensus. This over-simplification of tendencies into 'movements' 
disguises a far more complex reality. Most of us have been taught to believe that 
there were 'great' and 'classic' works of any given period- Ubu Roi, Rhinocerous, 
Waitingfor Godot, Mother Courage, Look Back in Anger, we could choose from 
a really rather narrow field. Just as Jarry, Beckett, Brecht and Osborne are seen as 
lasting paradigms for their age ... and also, through that peculiar conceit of 
'Theatre', as voices that continue to speak to our own present. What this 
canonisation does, whether by default or design, is provide us with a limited view 
of the same periods it purports to describe. If we consider work of the 1930s and 
40s we can see that it is not in fact epitonused by the theatre of Brecht; just as 
British theatre of the mid-1950s was not exclusively determined by the programme 
at The Royal Court and the pen of Kenneth Tynan. We know how selectively 
theatre history remembers, at the same time as our shelves bow to the weight of 
the tomes in which that selective memory has been enshrined. The names of the 
great and the good function as little more than co-ordinates of a fraudulently 
received version of the past. Their larger than life status casts shadows over much 
that is equaUy worthy of consideration. 
In recognition of this, I should stress that At Last Sight is not being 
historicised in 
this thesis in order that any future reader might come to regard the work as 
being 
emblematic of a particular (. style' or movement within 
ffigher Education. If the 
practical production was reflective of anything it was of an eclecticism-in-demal, 
of 
306 
an appropriation an assemblage which took little heed of the restraints of cultural 
anchorage and/or heritage. 
28-9-99 
The lens of historical perspective is both a way of seeing, to borrow John Berger's 
term,, and a way of not seeing. 3 Of both inclusion and exclusion. With the 
exception of Barba's 'living links': the embodied and learned techniques of, for 
example, Japanese Noh theatre, when we look back at eras that happen to lie 
beyond personal memory and experience we become ultra-dependent on the gaze 
which is permitted by the boffowed lens of Theatre I-Estory. 4 This happens to the 
point where that which is not seen, that which has not been written about and 
subsequently bound, ceases to exist. Where the lens tells us which work we should 
know, remember,, admire and emulate. This restricted view of the past cannot but 
fail to restrict the view we have of the present, whilst the wider terminology of 
theatre brings its own weight to bear, so that words such as 'significant' and 
'logical' are regarded as good, whilst 'insignificant' and 'illogical' are held to be 
bad. We could chase this list down, taking to task such commonplace words of 
theatre-debate as 'coherent' and 'convention, to the point where the tenns we use 
to describe the thing we practice are exposed as being firmly entrenched in value 
judgements. Judgements so deep as to have become seen now as part of the very 
fabric of theatre itself. 
Theatre is neither so easily nor so rigidly defined. Theatre is the use of words 
(sometimes) and actions (sometimes) in a constantly evolving vanety of contexts. 
Theatre is not so rarefied, nor is it so special as the language of theatre 
implies. It 
is at once a profession, an academic subject, a pastime, a medium, a 
form of 
33 07 
address, a spectacle, an event, a means of communication something, anything, to 
someone. ) even to the self It is used everywhere, at varying levels of complexity. It 
is at work everywhere where there are people. ' And yet the history of theatre, 
'Theatre I-Estory', does not work this way. It operates within the same set of 
restrictive definitions - or different definitions that lead to the same restrictions. 
Contemporary performance, we would be led to believe by many historians, is a 
professional practice with its roots in the modernist avant-garde. As such, it is 
RI lubject to measurement according to comparison. By its very definition then, 
theatre history is in the business of creating boundaries: on one side we are 
presented with Tfigh Art, while on the other side we are offered 'Low Art. On 
one side is professional theatre, on the other is amateur; on one side is the 
mainstream and on the other the marginal. The practical reality is one of parallel 
developments, progressions and regressions, cul de sacs, confusions and conceits. 
Ideas of seamless progress and neat categorisations are fundamentally false. 
For theatre history to have any real worth, it should be striving for a more inclusive 
definition of performance, alongside a more inclusive way of looking at 
performance ... a way which recognises 
'theatre' as one element of 'performance', 
rather than seeing the two as oppositional and competing factors. For if the theatre 
of the twentieth century can be defined in terms of any one unifying theme, then 
that theme is of an insatiable quest for the new. It is a theme of influence and 
rejections, of cross-fertilisation and the hybndisation of different practices. This 
creates a splintering of views which cannot be packaged off into a tidy coherence 
7 
of discrete 'styles . 
308 
Theatre history presents us with the past of theatre as a parade of events turned 
into artefacts, each with its own date, director, author and location within a 
specific movement or 'ism'. This thesis may not be so immune to that as it wishes. 
The word 'postmodernism' has already peppered its pages, and continues so to do. 
But whilst each historian's artefact creates the marking of a point in the 
progression of theatrical sensibility, it is hoped that this thesis does something else 
... something rather more than this. 
Theory, after all, is a 'schema of explanation 
according to which a diversity of phenomena are accorded a significance'. 6 Seen in 
this fight, this thesis is theory in action. A work where phenomena encountered 
along the route towards performance are regarded without hierarchical judgement, 
and where findings are always discovered in the interconnected here and nows of 
making and of writing. 
Just as At Last Sight as a live performance in either Liege, Chester or Compiegne 
cannot be, adequately replicated in the writing and subsequent reading of this thesis, 
so the formal evaluation of work which was unseen in its intended manifestation 
remains problematic. As Peggy Phelan has warned us, many 'performance critics 
realize that the labor to write about performance ... 
is also a labor that 
fundamentally alters the event. ' 7 That which looks a certain way on paper may 
have looked different in performance. Published words last long after individual 
memories fade and I-figher Education is filled with lecturers speaking borrowed 
'truths' (those Kosuthian residues of ideas) to students who will then go on to 
perpetuate these self-same claims. I speak to my students of cultural 
differences 
between Eastern and Western performance and, notwithstanding a modicum of 
directly experiential evidence, I vill often find myself passing on the 
thoughts of 
309 
Schechner and Barba, out of Turner and Savarese, as though their published words 
stand somehow as a proven truth. At best, this is a fourth-hand notion by the time 
the student comes to formulate a responsive thought. I speak of Brecht, who died 
before my birth, as though the words of Willett and Esslin were in some way 
metamorphosed into my own. ' The permanence of the ink and the weight of the 
publishing house transforming the historian's view into 'fact". 
Work made with students is rarely given this type of permanence. Despite the 
world of critical thought within which such work has its origins, there is a lack of 
critical commentary and documentation. Writing about performance made with 
students can seem like a suspect task. And so student-performance becomes mute. 
As an assessable component of students' work at University College Chester, At 
Last Sight itself was not 'marked% although all of the Year Three students were. 
As I have stated earlier I am not at liberty to publish their grades in this work, but I 
can attest to a department-wide recognition of the students' achievements. By this 
I mean that the marks awarded for performances within At Last Sight were high, 
This may seem somewhat surprising when one considers the assessment criteria for 
'Performance' that were in operation at University CoUege Chester in June 1999 
when the students' marks were negotiated, agreed and awarded. I make these 
comments in order to stress here some of the difficulties of assessing certain types 
of performance according to guidelines which are written in an agenda-specific 
way. 
For example, 'First Class' performance work is expected to be demonstrative of 
excellence which is evidenced through 'expressive control of voice', 
r role or roles 
110 
fully realised and maintained, 'sustained concentration throughout' and an ability 
to 'seize and maintain focus throughout. None of these elements were present in 
the performances relating to At Last Sight, whereas the criteria for the lowest 
'Pass' mark, which I include here in their entirety, are those which were directed 
into the work 
Pedestrian and lacking in confidence. Although real 
effort is made there is a failure to demonstrate style 
or focus. May be uncomfortable to watch and 
communicate insecurity. Does not give appropriate 
support to fellow performers. Mistakes may be 
made and acknowledged. Lacking in expressivity 
and awareness. May inadvertently upstage. Slow 
in response and uncertain. 
What the expectations of 'First Class' and 'Pass' work reveals is itself an 
articulation of a received wisdom which does not stand up to challenge. The 
students at Chester - the human material of At Last Sight - are told that 'excellent' 
work is implicitly role-driven and focused, whilst weak work is visibly insecure and 
inexpressive. The criteria make too strong a contribution to the idea of absolutes. 
Of a right and a wrong way of making work, which not only impacts on the ways 
in which those students are taught but also on the views of performance they carry 
with them beyond graduation. There is no mention in the criteria of 
appropriateness; principally, I feel, because it is neither quantifiable nor fixed. 
Cofleagues in the department at Chester were supportive of the six students' work 
on At Last Sight in spite of the criteria rather than according to it - 
1-10-99 
This criticism (for such it is) of the assessment procedures in place at University 
College Chester has nothing to do With my own predilections towards one way of 
311 
working over another. My concern is not so much with issues of the marginal 
(whatever that is) set in opposition to the mainstream (whatever that may be), as it 
is with the imposing on students (and staff) of what amounts to a type of half- 
hidden hierarchy. By this I mean the predisposition towards certain approaches to 
performance, which are deemed 'more acceptable' than others, without that same 
agenda being made overt. It is possible to compare works that fall under one 4-7 
heading, perhaps 'Modernism, with others which are influenced more directly by 
'Postmodernism', but these comparisons need to be made in a non-hierarchical 
spifit. In essence (and here this thesis plunges once again into those very 'Isms' 
which the first few paragraphs of this conclusion sought to refute) I can say that At 
Last Sight was a postmodem piece. The postmodem aspects of the work were 
never intended as a departure from modernism per se, so much as an implicit denial 
of that faith in the power of the present and the yet-to-be which has become 
synonymous with modernism, as it is generally taught. 9 Where modernism can be 
seen (through that morally complex historicising lens) as an attempt to replace the 
nineteenth century's glorification of the past with a twentieth century optimism, 
postmodernism is conversely identified by an infatuation or obsession with the past. 
At Last Sight's starting obsession with my own past - which constituted a pleading 
for redemption without an accompanying offering up to change - was in this way 
steadfastly postmodern. No solutions, no functionalism, not even any real and 
identifiable trace of idealism. 
Artists working through modernist beliefs invented new formal languages that 
chanyged not just the way theatre looked, but the way in which spectators were C) 
encouraged to see. 'O Modernism then can be seen as no less than an attempt, 
312 
through theatre and other art forms, to change the world. It was both a success 
and a failure. Even the most absurd and abstract of practitioner/philosophists, the 
futurists, dadaists and surrealists, like so many more to follow, believed that theatre 
had a responsibility to carry a new message. Even in the midst of mayhem there 
lurked an undercurrent of functionalism. A belief in the capacity of performance, 
art., literature and architecture to bring forth change. The aesthetic aspects of the 
moderrusts' message were carried forward successfully. And that very success may 
he 
-modernism's 
failure 
... 
its ultimate irony. We have teamed modernism by rote, 
and we go on to repeat that mantra as faithfully as the words of 7-he Lord's Prayer 
spoken in chorus in a classroom assembly. Modernism failed because its spirit of 
optimism was lost and with it went any claim to potency. Its impotence rises to the 
surface in every verftemdungseffekt that no longer defamiliarises; in every political 
play which fails to persuade (and which fails even to persuade its cast). It became a 
Communion Mass teamed by disbelievers- a ritual as empty as a ticketed trip 
through the Holocaust Theme Park. " The zietgeist shifts and all that we have left 
are historians' words. Bound and binding. 
When postmodem performance feeds off modernism it does so with less hypocrisy 
than modernism shows when it feeds off itself If work is to be parasitic 
in nature 
then let that nature be exposed for what it is. It is a singularly one-sided 
relationship. The parasite, the maker of work, does not care what the 
host subject 
thinks or thought. It treads over the politics and philosophy of the past ... which, 
at any rate, can never fully match up to its own. 
Modernism is exposed as 
nostalgia, and so it succumbs to its very own 
bete noir, In displaying a pessimistic 
mien in lien of hope, postmodernism seeks to provide itself with 
the luxury of 
'I 
dealing with sentimentality without at the same time seeming sentimental. It is 
difficult to think of a more appropriate framework to put around work that deals 
with love and loss. Postmodern performance thrives on our collective and 
individual experiences of a theatrical past, and all conventions employed are 
themselves only ever the hand-me-downs of work seen. 
Theatre history, badly used, reduces all things to names as names-of-note. Two 
books, published in consecutive years by the same publisher, Routledge, achieve 
precisely this, offering theatre history as a succession of sound bites. Twentieth 
Century Ihealre: A Sourcebook, edited by Richard Drain, consists of five sections- 
'The Modernist Dimension', 'The Political Dimension', 'The Popular Dimension, 
'The Inner Dimension' and 'The Global Dimension". The book contains "key texts 
by renowned writers", 12 placing them in chapters deemed logical by the editor. Ihe 
Twentieth Century Performance Reader, edited by Nfichael Huxley and Noel 
Witts, adopts a different format,, listing practitioners alphabetically and thus 
alloWing its readers to create their own categorisations. Where Drain's editing 
prescribes, Huxley's and Witt's provokes. In so doing it at once encourages the 
creation of those notions of hybridity and idiosyncratic contextualisation which are 
at the core of contemporary work. Because, at least in part, it avoids imposing its 
own 'reading' on the reader, it is theatre history that does not, by its nature, seek 
to create an authoritative history of theatre. 
2-10-99 
This conclusion is not intending to take the fonn of a book review. That is not the 
business of this work. But the stuff of theatre past is an intrinsic historicisation 
wherein careers of shifting practice are metamorphosed into systems and schools. 
A necessary aspect of my own analytical reflection on At Last Sight is the extent to 
which this project - which was always an amalgamation of my own previous and 
less coherent productions - will now become the marketplace where I shop for 
'new' ideas. The point of these paragraphs then, is not to argue against the 
appropriation of ideas, any more than it is to argue against influence. Cross- 
fertilisation is an important and legitimate aspect of the ways in which 
performances are made and culture functions. What I am doing here is making 
explicit my recognition that a tendency exists, certainly within my own way of 
making work, to, as it were, cash in on history. To take ideas which once seemed 
radical and re-use them with no attendant re-interpretation. Which is not the same 
thing as reference. Reference means just that, that one refers to something, that 
ideas of the contemporary and ideas from or of the past clash and spark and make 
something which is at once recognisable and fresh. That seems to be the strength 
of postmodemism. 
And just as postmodernism has an obligation to learn from the past, to interrogate 
its ideas, rather than endlessly repeating them, regurgitated and reframed, so it is 
vital that At Last Sight, my own past, is not reduced, in work to come, to an 
alternative to new ideas. What is needed is an investigation of the vaned strategies 
and ideas of the work and not its stylistic trickery. What is needed of work gone is 
not simply that it is perpetually re-questioned, but that we ask the right questions. 
And what are these questions? They should be the questions that cannot 
be 
an. -; wered by the work alone ... questions that cannot necessarily 
be addressed 
directly or empirically, but which are elusive. They are questions such as- 
What is it 
jI 
about this Particular Performance that we cannot understand because we are not a 
part of the culture or zeitgeist in which it was created? What is it that we can 
understand precisely because we are not the target group ... what aspects of the 
work have become visible to my eyes? What did the performance seek to 
communicate to its audience and why? What was the relationship between intention 
and result? Was the performance an example of 'good' theatre of the time or 
'bad'? What types of theatre were considered good or bad, or exciting or banal at 
that time? At this time? Richard Foreman has offered the apposite statement that 
"The spectator's question should not be, 'What does this play mean? ' The question 
should be, 'In response to which of the world's possibilities and tensions is this 
play created? ""' 
3-10-99 
Good theatre history then should be interested in the finished product not as a 
point of closure or culmination, but as one stage along a continuum of process. It 
is because of this that theatre history has an obligation to consider the fiinges of 
practice as well as the award-winning mainstream ... to 
look to work which might 
all too easily be regarded as insignificant. It is not enough that our published 
notions of marginal performance are almost exclusively limited to the marginal- 
made-mainstream. To Robert Wilson and The Wooster Group, to Impact Theatre 
Co-Operative, The People Show and Forced Entertainment ... to the 
formerly 
esoteric as the television chat show guest. 
Theatre history, I would argue, needs to be something that does not see itself as 
being anything other than a history of ideas. Good theatre history then is not really C, 
concerned with a history of theatre at all. It is a history of ideas and therefore of 
316 
culture ... two of the most precious elements to be found in Higher Education. It is 
not a barely changing roster of names, etched in stone, as though Twentieth 
Century theatre were the sole province of the famous names from Stanislavski 
through to LeCompte, it is the history of how we each have come to believe the 
things we do about theatre. If this reads like an advert for a Liberal Arts approach 
then so be it. As the project of At Last Sight took form as part of an undergraduate 
progranime and draws to a close as a doctoral thesis it is hardly inappropriate if the 
philosophy that drives the language of the perfonnance is now allowed to drive the 
language of the page. Good theatre history is good theatre scholarship, and it 
should act as a catalyst for our own ideas. Good theatre scholarship says, this is 
how somebody thought about his or her work then, and this is how that work was 
bom out of their own culture. The question such scholarship asks is this (and only 
ever this): What can you do? 
If this thesis achieves this, then in doing so it has provided a contribution to 
knowledge that is fundamental to the study of Theatre at this time and also at times 
to come. Words remain long after memories fade. This thesis has many aspects. It 
is the chronicling of a project, from inception to production; the charting of an 
example of performance practice as performance research; the publication of that 
which would otherwise remain as ephemeral as the time taken by spectators to take 
to their seats and then to applaud; as the analysis of a particular process of making 
work, including a rationale for words written as performance text and also for 
directional input,, as a chronicle of work that has been overtly driven by the 
demands of a specific cumculum and which has, in its own turn, been influenced 
by 
the 'accident' of modules undertaken as a student myself, of performances seen 
317 
and read about, of conversations and criticisms, of the inexplicable and the 
explained at length, of reflection and supervision, of revision and immediacy. 
Whereas At Last Sight has functioned, at least in some ways, as a peg on which 
this thesis hangs, rather than operating as an assessable element of the overall 
submission, the thesis has constituted an attempt at defining a position on the 
nature of research-driven practice. This is one of the struggles of university theatre 
in our time- to have practice afforded the status of research. This thesis functions in 
part then as a mechanism through which a personal example of this struggle is 
being reported. 
Issues of status do not just affect research as practim the status of the researcher 
is also an element (if one has a proven and established track record in research then 
(sitnilar' outcomes from "dissimilar' forms may be more readily accepted). The 
position adopted by the researcher is equally important, making the publication of 
'knowledge' via practice a complex outcome to determine. At Brunel University, 
where I am registered for the period of this research, the situation regarding 
practice-based research was articulated thus in an open e-mail to the SCUIDD 
Mailbase 
c practice-based , ... refers to 
things like the EdD 
and EngD where a substantial element of the 
doctorate is about professional practice - almost 
denoting work-based activities .... this 
is not to 
be confused with what we mean by the words 
ýpractice based'. Practice, in the widest sense of 
performance/artefact, and the theorising around 
it, 
which we permit for our PhD at Brunel ... 
does 
present a challenge to the definition of research and 
to the idea of credit which the QAA is applying at 
doctoral level. 
2) the QAA want to defend the PhD as research 
based, but will quite explicitly allow this award 
where the artefact or other form of work is 
accompanied by a 'written explanation that is 
examined'. It is only when the artefact or 
performance is the sole outcome that the PhD is 
not available. There is no indication ... of word 
count in relation to this 'written explanation'. 
There has to be a rationale in place of course, 
but the weighting of performance to written 
explanation is something that is determined by 
each individual phD. 14 
As part of an ongoing debate as to the possibilities for practice to be credited as 
research per se, the communication from Brunel is interesting. Whilst it offers 
succinct advice and a large amount of creative freedom to a PhD student 
researching under its own institutional auspices it also highlights the problem for 
artists working within academic structures. For the purposes of QAA. practice Is 
afforded a type of validity only when it is subsequently 'explained' in written text. 
For researching practitioners this is something of a handicap, inasmuch, at least, as 
one needs to demonstrate an ownership of the 'product' which is of both creative 
and intellectual worth. For the purposes of PhD this seems appropriate ... the 
thoughts contained within the submission need to be capable of a dissen-ýination 
which is coherent and permanent. But for practice engaged in with undergraduates 
the situation remains vexed. Processes undertaken in the creation of public 
performance are unlikely to be written down in anything like a systematic fashion. 
Indeed., the process of making almost augurs against writing. And I speak from the 
experiences gained during the process of creating At Last Sight. The making and 
writing are compatible and mutually enriching, but the activty of making work in 
and with a group can, at its most telling times, be so intense as to eat into the time 
3,19 
put aside to write. The pressure to present is always in the present, and the 
pressure to publish follows. Writing has a life of its own and the gap between that 
which is being made and the words that explain it can be wider than the researcher 
would care to admit. 
What I have been afforded through the process of making this work - the thesis 
and the production - has been a position of experience that may be of some benefit 
to other researchers within the field of performance. The words to come are 
offered as an encapsulation of that experience, rather than as an 'explanation' of AI 
Last Sight. What follows then is an attempt at outlining the area of practice as 
research, both as it has applied to my own experience and as it appears as a wider 
issue for colleagues elsewhere. In this way, the tnicro of At Last Sight feeds into 
the macro of practice as research. It does so through the case study of an 
otherwise culturally invisible work. If there are times when the language of this 
chapter seems to move too readily towards generalisations and the dread of 
'universal truths,, it does so from a need to widen the scope of what has been an 
otherwise tightly focused study. 
6-10-99 
We know that a debate concerning the accreditation as research for performance 
has raged in recent years. Out of this debate, a feeling has emerged that the event 
of perfonnance should, in certain situations, be afforded the validity of research. 
What it is that defines one 'situation' from another is the key area of debate. What, 
for example, makes one piece of work 'research-driven) and another not so9 
In 
fulfilling its obligation to address that question, this chapter will 
function as both 
320 
conclusion and introduction. tidying up the slippage of my own processes and 
offering a point of departure for others. 
7-10-99 
The differences between Theatre studý and Theatre training still exists. They are 
many, but we might say that chief among them is that the former looks at why 
decisions are made, whilst the latter concentrates on how those decisions are 
carried out in performance. It is a crude but nonetheless useful distinction, with 
some considerable bearing on the ways in which notions of practice as research 
have been regarded. Where practical work, or performed output, is prioritised, 
theory may find little room; where theoretical study is the aim, practice may be 
regarded as no more than a 'playing'. A small number of Drama departments at 
British universities are moving away from the assessment of practice, and, whilst 
this movement is regarded by some as a response to questions of quality assurance 
rather than as a positional shift which is supported by a persuasive philosophy, its 
significance should not be overlooked. What this is saying to students on its 
courses in Drama is that practice in and of itself is not commensurate with the 
presentation for assessment of thinking that is deep and analytical. 
This looks likely to achieve two things- it will widen further still the gulf between 
scholars and practitioners, which the industry of commercial theatre is already 
predisposed towards. " And it will reduce the belief in the potency of performance 
as its own expressive language which is in need of nofurther explanation. 
I shall deal with these issues in order. It is a fact of life, rather than a rumour, that 
students graduating fi7om accredited Drama Schools in Britain, who are also 
321 
graduates of academic Drama programmes at universities, are advised by many of 
their Drama School tutors and agents not to mention their academic histories to 
casting agencies and directors. 16 The logic of this advice is clear. Directors are 
looking for practitioners- they want doers, not thinkers. The British tradition of 
'intellectual' directors and 'instinctive' actors is clear for all to see. Directors are 
also scholars, whereas actors are not, The exceptions to this rule do little to affect 
the overall picture. It is rare to find a mainstream director of influence who is not 
also a graduate. 17 Notwithstanding their much greater number, it is rare to find a 
mainstream actor who is a graduate (or who broadcasts this history). The 
difference is no less pronounced in British cinema and television. Whilst the 
American system does not provide an exact parallel, inasmuch as a college or 
university education is more commonplace than in Britain, the American film actor 
and director, Sean Penn, has likened directors to hammers and actors to nails. 
18 It 
is a violent image, but one which is nevertheless apt within a profession (an 
industry) that sees the ideal performer as somebody both 'beautiful' and I stupid'. 
To stop students from 'doing' practice as a part of their assessable academic 
prOgramme 
is to perpetuate the myth that separates out instinct and analysis. This n 
is not to argue for students' performances to demonstrate no more than a technical 
accomplishment, so that a juggler keeping three objects in the air is seen as weaker 
than s/he who juggles with four. Technical accomplishment in terms of the craft of 
performance is much more the stuff of drama schools than of university 
departments. What performances within academic departments can and should 
provide are opportunities for students and staff to engage in research through 
practice. This remains the principle distinction between the types of 
'training' 
offered to students, and it is precisely why universities have provided professional 
cexperimental' or 'alternative' theatre companies with so many of their core 
members. '9 
This brings us to the second danger. The mainstream has operated on something of 
p plo-licy of exclusion with regard to Drama graduates, but this exclusion is in no 
way one-sided. Students who have spent three years engaged in critical thinking 
about and through theatre are probably more inclined to gravitate towards a 
professional practice that is concerned with change above reiteration. Indeed, 
hindsight allows us to see that the rise in 'fringe' companies in Britain owes as 
much to the upsurge in and availability of Drama as an academic programme of 
study as it does to the students' uprising in the Paris of 1968, an uprising which 
history has written as being of seminal influence. The majority of Drama graduates 
do not seek employment as professional practitioners: these paragraphs are not 
intended to argue a case for the employability or otherwise of Drama graduates per 
se. But former students on degree programmes (primarily Drama programmes) do 
form the mainstay of non-mainstream companies. Accurate figures are impossible 
to obtain. Companies come and go, sometimes lasting for the duration of only one 
short tour; personnel can change rapidly; and many company members are not also 
members of the actors' union, Equity. Only the evidence of one's own experience 
as it can be said to exist at all, offers such proof Anybody who has regular social 
contact with non-mainstream companies will know that they are predominantly 
Drama graduates, and also that very few will have opted for an additional 
postgraduate year at an accredited Drama school. 
il-i 
Taking away the opportunity for non-Drama school students to engage in the 
practice of performance, which is recognised as commensurate with the practice of 
20 
writing essays, is a doomed idea. What it might gain in accountability, in that an 
essay is a tangible and permanent record which can be assessed according to 
recognised criteria, it must lose in terms of the faith those students might have 
otherwise gained in the potential of performance to speak for itself 
In addition to the internal differences between institutional and individual 
annmwhes within the Higher Education sector, all Drama lecturers are aware of 
the difficulties of having practical work credited as research- significant by 
colleagues from other departments. Senior management are traditionally cautious 
in terms of sanctioning an adequate hourage for production work, whilst the term 
'publication' is still seen to refer to publications in print rather than performance. 21 
The predominantly audience-friendly product of university 'drama societies' only 
adds to this difficulty. When unsupervised students are seen to mount a full-scale 
play entirely from their leisure time (and when that play is also 'successful' in terms 
of its feel-good popularity and box office receipts) then timetabled productions can 
appear esoteric, expensive and self-indulgent. 
22 
Theatre professionals may harbour feelings of suspicion towards scholars, with 
their inteRectualising of that which the profession regards as alchernical. 'Those 
who can, do; those who can't., teach' is an adage that continues to carry weight 
in 
. 
23 rom the our culture The vocabulary of academic critique is so markedly 
distinct f 
vocabulary of the professionals' rehearsal room as to 
leave little room for 
constructive cross over. Where the vocabulary is antithetical, communication is 
)24 
lost before it is able to take root. This is true despite the fact of once-marginal 
companies like Theatre de Complicite and The National Theatre of Brent 
becoming part of the fabric of mainstream performance. Notwithstanding these 
transfonnations,, it is still the case that thinking or talking about theatre is held in 
less regard than making it, and making a public form to suit a private agenda is 
seen as an equally dubious endeavour. " 
In this climate,, one has to ask what the role of scholarship might be. Is it self- 
Rerv ing masmuch as it speaks of a desire on the part of acadernics to engage in Cý-) 
practice without any of the pressures of commercial success which would 
ordinarily accompany production-work? Is it of long-term benefit in that its 
influences will come to fruition in future performances? If the study of theatre is 
regarded with distrust by the theatre profession itself, is the exercise fundamentally 
flawed? If theatre scholarship serves no more than the interests of the scholar 
(tenure, readerships, professorships etc. ) is it automatically invalidated? It may be 
the case that much of that which appears as theatre scholarship is merely self- 
promotion in disguise. If I am to be honest about my work on and around At Last 
Sight, I have to recognise the fact that I have been driven as much by a desire to 
concentrate attention on a given project as to make that project worthy of the 
attention of others. This may mean that my sustained enthusiasm for the project 
has been misplaced. That my time would be more appropriately spent in the 
analysis of the performance of more weighty others, rather than labouring within 
the assumption that I am capable of creating a comparable theatre product of my 
Own. 
25 
3' 25 
To suggest this, however, is to deny my own status as both maker and scholar; as 
the creator of that which I am simultaneously holding up to the light of analysis and 
explanation. What does it mean to create? To write that I have created At Lasi 
Sight, albeit as one part of a team, is to imply that I have an answer to this 
question. This brings with it an attendant obligation. 
Art is usually something made by an artist. The artist creates. The word 'create' 
stems fTom creare, meaning to generate or provide offspring. The word 'procreate' 
reminds us of this. The Spanish use the term criatura to refer to a child. The type 
of making employed by an artist is then the type we call creating. Art is made 
deliberately by artists. Artists can create art even when they have no real sense of 
what that art will be. 26 What follows is that the (prospective) artist needs to find 
the means through which an as yet unknown activity, event or object will find 
empression. When we say that an artist is creative, we are saying that s/he has 
produced something that is different from that which has gone before. Art is 
distinct from written analysis in this key regard. If I am offering a performance as 
research-in-practice, then the form of that performance will be likely to subvert 
expectations and extend conventions, whereas,, by contrast, an essay, a thesis or a 
dissertation will probably conform to conventions. We fink creativity to change, so 
that it is always in some way experimental. 
The artist is always also a critic. Not necessarily in the way that 
I am offering 
critical information here on At Last Sight, but inasmuch as an artist 
inevitably 
functions in two simultaneous ways. S/he is the imaginative producer of art 
(in my 
case, the event of At Last Sight) and s/he is also a critic, observing 
the work as It 
32 
proceeds. In this way, the activity of self-criticism is always spectatorial. The 
artist's critical faculties are prompted by personal experience to the extent where it 
is difficult to envisage an artist creating, by choice, something which lies beyond 
the parameters of her or his own 'taste. With At Last Sight, I have been working 
creatively in terms that related to a central theme, which was in turn favoured by 
my other identity, that of the critic. It has been apparent throughout this process 
that whatever I thought, as well as whatever performance decisions I made, have 
been constantly taken apart and reconfigured in the light of developing attitudes. 
There is an appropriateness to this. For just as I had set myself the challenge that 
At Last Sight should not misconstrue my personal mode of thinking (about theatre, 
111, aDOUt teaching, about my own life) then I have also been forcing upon myself an 
unusual alertness to precisely what it is that I think. 
The published writings of theatre makers are often found to be contradictory, 
eyasive and elliptical. Even for those of us whose making exists within an 
education frarnework,, what we do and what we say often function at a tangent to 
one another. We have a concern with events, with moving bodies through time and 
space, which does not always dovetail comfortably with the theoretical notions we 
might discuss as part of our formal teaching. As researching practitioners, we have 
a duty to address these contradictions, which is why this thesis is written In the way 
that it is ... one that 
is similar to the logic that the work of At Last Sight embodied. 
There is a way in which the maker of work is also an onlooker, a 
beholder and 
reader of the work made. As such, the maker (the T of the artist) suffers - and 
suffers no less than any member of the art event's audience - 
from the problem of 
defining just what it is that has been thought and made. A mixture of conjecture, 
.32 
anecdote and metaphor are the likely companions of a working process which is 
concerned with the ambiguities of performance and the clarity of words written. 
8-10-99 
Recent exercises in the assessment of research within universities have been useful 
in many ways ... not 
least in that they have created in their wake discussion as to 
the primary object of research. The Higher Education Funding Council for England 
offers the following definition 
'-D - Research' for the purpose of the RAE is to be 
understood as original investigation undertaken 
in order to gain knowledge and understanding. 
lt includes 
... the 
invention and generation 
of ideas, images, performances and artefacts 
including design, where these lead to new 
or substantially improved insights. 27 
The document goes on to define scholarship as "the creation, development and 
maintenance of the intellectual infrastructure of subjects and disciplines, in forms 
such as dictionaries,, scholarly editions, catalogues and contributions to major 
research databases. 
28 
10-10-99 
We can say then that, like other forms of research, research by means of 
performance has the aim of making a contribution to knowledge, and that this will 
usuafly be achieved by suggesting new perspectives on the known. Contributions 
to knowledge will rarely be manifest in expansive leaps of consciousness. 
Contributions to knowledge are complicated phenomena within the study of live 
performance. Research outcomes are open to challenge through the unreliability of 
evaluative processes as applied to performance. Where multi-interpretation 
is 
prioritised oveir a monologistic C meamng' this is doubly 
dIfficult. If a commonality 
-328 
of understanding is being denied at source, then the utilisation of the tools of a 
standard scientific enquiry are simply not adequate. In fact, we may find the answer 
closer to home than we might imagine. The ways in which we can assess the 
'findings' of research through performance are not dissimilar to the ways in which 
we can assess practical work submitted by our own students. 
It is to these issues of assessment that this thesis now moves. In doing so, two 
purposes are served. In the first instance, I am able to offer a position on 
assessment as it applies to students who may be participating for assessment in the 
practical research projects of members of staff. And here the experiences of my 
own graduating students of last year, having been assessed for their work on At 
Last Sight, are uppermost in my mind. In the second instance, the suggestions can 
provide parallels between the ways in which we assess the work of students and 
the ways in which we wish our own research projects to be assessed. 
16-10-99 
There has been a long-standing difficulty in assessing the live product of students 
and the introduction of Drama and Theatre as academic disciplines has met with 
considerable resistance. This resistance has stemmed ftom. a position which deals in 
I. 
universal standards of 'truth , viewed 
from such a perspective, where findings are 
presented as quantitative results, outcomes (practical performances, workshop 
participation, this research) can never be fully or comfortably accepted. 
To respond 
to this with the writing up of generic criteria to cover a 
diverse range of practices 
(as has been attempted at University Coffege Chester) Is to engage in an 
unmanageable and misleading conflation. 
329 
Assessment procedures in the study of performance, as in other areas of the 
curriculum, must be capable of revealing progress ... or a lack of it. Procedures 
need to be capable of offering objective criteria for what counts as achievement. In 
performance terms, it is frequently the case that the criteria for achievement are 
implicit, rather than being formulated explicitly. For example, as a lecturer running 
a module in Devised Theatre,, I need to have an implicit (although not exclusIve) 
notion of what it is that counts as devising. Documentation which makes this 
implicit understanding explicit needs to do so with an awareness of the prejudices 
of one's own position. Many of us who teach Drama in the university sector are 
reluctant to make explicit the criteria on which we inevitably depend. We feel, 
perhaps, that to state an objective criterion is to generallse in a way that would 
inhibit our students' opportunities for individual creativity, or to tie us into one 
mode of practice at the expense of others. In practice, however, the fact that we 
are aH engaged in assessment as a natural consequence of our professional lives 
means that we do need to be possessed of an ability to articulate a rationale for 
grades awarded. Certainly, when we are increasingly offering our own work for 
assessment as research, the obligation to couch a vocabulary of assessment in a 
way which provokes rather than prescribes is of paramount importance. 
The following points can be made- 
1- in order for an academic judgement to be regarded as 'objective' it does not also 
need to be 'true. We are prepared to accept scientific judgements as objective 
even though there might be fundamental conflicts of opinion - or 'findings' - within 
the scientific community. We can go further than this and state that 
it is actually the 
indefinite possibility of differences and changes of opinion which gives objectivity 
"' 
its status. What this means is that it is a feature of theory that it is , in principle, 
falsifiable, and not that it will be held as true for all time. Changes of perspective 
wrought by new research inevitably change the character of that which we are still 
able to term as an observation or outcome. Artists work within conceptual notions, 
and usually within one paradigm ... or at least one paradigm at a time; spectators 
and/or other 'readers' of the work will not necessarily be functioning within that 
same paradigmatic frame. The perceiver may regard the work in a different way to 
that which the creator intends. As professional assessors, we need to be able to 
recognise the conceptual framework within which the work is created and offered, 
and this requires sensitivity to a number of different approaches. 
This is not about denying our prejudices so much as recognising and controlling 
them. 
It says nothing whatsoever against the possibility of objective assessment of 
performance that there have been and still are changes of opinion and approach. 
Quite the opposite. We can see that such variety, alongside assessment criteria 
which embraces diversity is vital for the advance of practice as research. In work 
submitted there is an unlimited opportunity for individual differences of imaginative 
and creative approach. The assessment of this work has to be justified by reference 
to what is objectively there. To what the work is, rather than to what the specific 
assessors might prefer it to be. And this needs to be carried out with a recognition 
that advances come &om new insights and conceptions. The 
fact that different 
types of work can emerge from the same stimulus is the nature of our subject. 
To 
assume that 'objectivity' means 'similarity' is to reduce creativity to the crass. 
__ __ 
2: Facts rely on theories. A fact is only given any sense by an underlying 
conception, or theory. Facts may be objectively established, but this is inevitably 
done in the light of a particular theoretical approach. As theories are always open 
to modification, so are facts. The situation of no permanent absolutes does not 
mean that we cannot regard ephemeral theoretical positions as objectively arrived 
at phenomena. We can assess the articulation of a position (in whatever forms that 
articulation might take) without having any personal belief or investment in that 
position. 
I It is incorrect to assume that there can be no objectivity where judgement is 
based on interpretation. To believe this is to equate objective assessment with 
quantifiability. I can be objectively convinced that somebody is delighted, irate or 
in love without necessarily being able to reach such a conclusion by procedures of 
quantification. All judgement is interpretative as a matter of course and no 
quantification can exist without interpretation. Scientists interpret data in their 
field, just as we do in ours. Interpretation and judgement, not quantification, are 
the methods of assessment in performance-related subjects such as Theatre or 
Drama. What matters most to the creator is that this interpretation and judgement 
are infonned. 
4: The distinctive feature of performance is that feelings can be, and generally are, 
expressed via artistic means. That is to say that emotional content is a 
characteristic of performance. The presence of an emotional content 
does not 
imply that the work cannot be objectively assessed. Judgements about 
the 
3 332 
emotiona resonance of a performance are just as open to rational justification by 
reference to objective criteria. The feelings expressed and evoked by a particular 
performance, At Last Sight,, for example, are assessable by reference(s) to objective 
features of the work. There can be no workable separation of understanding and 
feeling, of knowledge and experience. In order to be able to respond to the work a 
spectator does not need to have understood it. In order to judge the work 
(academically) an assessor does. Performance involves a negotiation of emotionally 
complex structures, we need to be able to be carried along by the work, but not to 
the degree that we are not also able to recognise and respond critically to the 
arrangement and ordering of those structures. In short, we need to be both 
responsive and receptive, 
What underlies our resistance to stating objective assessment criteria is a fear that 
it would stifle creativity. In fact, the opposite is true. That is to say that unless the 
student has a sense of what counts as achievement,, there can be no notion of 
personal development. If there are no declared criteria, the notion of development 
becomes meaningless. Thus, it is the lack of objective criteria which is, in fact, 
restrictive. Nevertheless., it is ffighteningly easy to impose narrow criterta on 
students' work to the exclusion of other equally valid possibilities. Again, I am able 
to cite our own criteria at University College Chester- criteria which uses an 
overtly objective terminology as a means of reducing students" opportunities to 
create. Assessment needs to provide room for difference, and this can only be 
achieved when the assessors are as open-minded as is possible. 
In order to be capable of creating a perfon-nance which is appropriate at a 
particular level of submission, an abilitY to work through processes is required. 
This is a skill in itself A technique. To concentrate on the acquisition of technical 
skills, however: juggling, stilt-walking, verse-speaking, tumbling etc. is to run the 
ris of applauding a display of technical competence, rather than the work of an 
artist who has something to say. Too rigid an emphasis on the learning of technical 
skills is likely to have the consequence of destroying creative potential; of imbuing 
skills with the status of an end-product rather than as choices which may or may 
not be taken in the pursuit of a given means. A performance should not be assessed 
according to its degree of success in the instwitiation of skills, so much as to the 
ways In which such sUls as are employed contribute to the effectiveness of the 
particular performance. 
The skills we need to encourage, and I speak here of practice as research at all 
are, the skills of discrimination and discourse. At Last Sight was illustrative 
of discriminatory skills at a level appropriate to my own position. And the 
participating students' reflective essays reveal an impressive ability to discriminate, 
and also, by definition, an ability to express that discrinlInation through discourse. 
20-10-99 
Discriminatory skills open up a subtle and complex range of possibilities of 
performative expression and appraisal. Discourse skills consist of a means whereby 
discfin-ýination is given voice. It consists of a knowing how to use the vocabulary of 
a particular art form. Learning the use of working vocabularies provides a means 
of communicating clearly with others about one's areas of interest. This is not 
about using language to obscure, to create a closed world where only the 
initiated 
ý -1 
-3.34 
can enter, although that may well be a consequence. Facility in language, again, 
whether that language be the language of a perfonnance, an essay, a viva voce or 
this thesisl is critical for the development and dissemination of conceptual 
repositiomngs. 
Skills of discourse allow us to identify the research project to be undertaken and to 
locate that project within a broader field; to accumulate relevant information, to 
analyse the results of the project and to disseýninate any conclusions. A willingness 
and ability to engage in and promote discourse is perhaps the most important 
distinction between academically driven practice and practice which might be 
regarded as existing for its own sake. Tracing the footprints that lead to the work 
is so central to the principle of performance study that it almost goes without 
saying that it is the scholar's greatest asset. It is also a process which involves an 
increased workload. Whereas the maker of work where the performed product is 
the sole outcome 'only' needs to be concerned with dissemination via 
performance, the researching practitioner's dissemination will almost always 
include an attendant written explanation. 
5-11-99 
There are many different ways of documenting performance. Noted examples come 
from Tim Etchells and also from Richard Schechner, particularly 
in his book 
Performance Meory. 29 Although Schechner's ideas have been in the public arena 
for some time,, they have not directly influenced the approaches taken 
in this thesis. 
Etchell's documentation of his work with Forced Entertainment was published only 
as my own writing has been drawing to a close . 
30 Nevertheless, mention needs to 
be made here of the ways in which these two practitioners 
have sought to 
)35 
disseminate their performance work in book form. In the same way that the 
introduction to this thesis acknowledged the writing to come as indicative of only 
one process amongst many, so it is appropriate here to acknowledge something of 
that potential for diversity by referring briefly to examples that are easily available 
to the reader. 
8-11-99 
Tim Etchells discusses the work of Forced Entertainment in his 1999 publication 
,, -I Certain Fragments. It has been impossible for me to read this book without 
comparing Etchefls' chosen format With my own. The format of Certain 
Fragments is as follows. A series of essays are intercut with anecdote and 
interviews. Diary notes overlap critical analysis and performance texts. Four 
performance texts are included, without any explanation as to why these are 
selected and the twelve remaining theatre pieces made prior to publication are 
excluded. Photographs are included without concern for chronology. These are 
photographs of performances and pacemaker scars, rehearsals and envelopes. The 
book is an exercise in ensemble wnting and assemblage. This is writing with a 
genuine faith in the interconnectedness of a son's ptastic ducks with the 
documentation of process. This is writing out of a fifteen year long dedication. 
This is writing with enigmatic headings ... with 
headings that read like the text-lists 
of the company's performances. This is writing that luxuriates in the knowledge 
that the practice it discusses is described on its cover as 'Britain's most briBiant'. 
Certain Fragments is a timely publication. It articulates much of what makes 
Forced Entertainment's work as vital as it is, and in so doing it leaves many things 
out. The book reads as though it knows it exists to 
be critiqued rather than being a 
336 
critical study in itself The gaps it leaves are filled in by the access the reader is 
given to the performance product, either live or recorded onto video tape. As a 
result of their extensive touring over a period of years it is safe to suggest that no 
higher education student in England is ever more than fifty miles away from at least 
one of their performances each year. This allows the luxury of space. That which is 
not written can still be seen. 
By comparison with Certain Fragments my own thesis amounts to a more prosaic 
re-telfing .. 
Where Etchells weaves stories my thesis remains rooted to description 
and analysis. Where Tim Etchells has spent the last fifteen years talking and writing 
about his own work, I have spent the same period taMng to students about the 
work of others ... often, 
in fact, about Etchells' own work. Etchells familiarity 
with the mechanics of his own processes is apparent on every page of Certain 
Fragments. 
10-12-99 
In Performance lheory Schechner's approach to documentation is given a 
scientific look. A series of graphs are utilised, which provide a diagrammatical 
support to the written words. Schechner writes specifically about 
his production of 
Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime, which played at the Performing Garage, New 
York in 1973. In Schechner's twelve-page analysis one graph is used, alongside a 
scale drawing of the Performing Garage, two production photographs, a 
letter 
Ive 
from Sam Shepard to Schechner and a boxed off plot summary. 
Schechner writes about intention and realisation rather more 
than the process by 
wNich one aspect moves into the other. He 
discusses 're-scening" and describes 
ii 
(after Grotowski) the spatial relationship between spectators and performers. 
Descriptions are offered as to which events take place in the 'public' side of the 
space, which are 'private' and which are in the 'centerpiece'. Schechner's overall 
description, in fact, displays a marked concern with performer/spectator 
relationships. This is made possible because Schechner's staging of Tooth of Crime 
allowed the spectators to move in and around the performance space. As a 
consequence of this, Schechner is able to write with authority about what the 
spectators did, whereas 1, with At Last Sight, cannot write, other than with 
assumption, about what our spectators eitherfelt or thought. 
Notwithstanding this, Schechner's section on Tooth of Crime is not dissimilar to 
sI ome, of my own writing on At Last Sight. Where it differs most overtly is in 
Schechner's absence of a theoretically contextualising frame, and this is proVided 
elsewhere in his book. Schechner's writing is less poetic than Etchells', and more 
firmly rooted in a searching for historical and socio-cultural connections. Etchells 
does rationalise Forced Entertainment's work, through references to The Wooster 
Group, Impact Theatre and Bobby Baker, for example, but the connections are 
011- 
onered as a shared exploration of contemporary concerns, rather than as the type 
of anthropological study undertaken by Schechner. 
'D 
waders of this thesis might also wish to consider Nicolas Whybrow's article 'In its 
Own Write 5, which appeared in Performance Practice Vol. fV and dealt 
innovatively with aspects of his performance wo . 
11 
3338 
11-12-99 
D- 
-Research through performance is at once similar to and distinct from other forms 
of experimental research. As in any approach, we can say that in instigating the 
research, any number of practices through which the investigation can develop are 
employed. Because practice as research - when that research involves an analysis 
of somebody else's practice - is not the material of this thesis, what it is that 
distinguishes research via perfonnance is that the research is based upon the 
researcher's own location within the work to be studied. This involves and engages 
an essentially heuristic position. The position makes it vital for the researcher to be 
self-reflective and to move carefully through those areas where an objective 
terminology is offered as the articulation of subjective beliefs. When the distance 
between the researcher and the researched is dissolved to such a degree, the results 
are imbued, at best, with a unique and intimate perspective; at worst, those same 
results are so contaminated by the researcher's intention in the act of making that 
they disseminate little more than the researcher's own private agenda. 
The dangers in assuming that one's own position should be regarded as universally 
applicable are clear to see. Notwithstanding the belief in objective criteria offered 
in previous paragraphs of this conclusion, we do need to proceed with caution. 
Objectivity is not a term which we can have any faith in if it is assigned on an 
almost ad hoc basis to each and every researcher's nuance. The findings of 
personally complicated research need to be analysed for what they are, according 
to the critical faculties of s/he who is analysing the work. Research through 
performance is providing scholars and practitioners with remarkable opportunities 
to have their voices heard and to extend the shelf-life of work which would 
339 
otherwise suffer the inevitable end of all ephemeral product; but this does not 
automatically mean that what we hear is important. 
In searching for cures for cancer, scientists discover a formula for anti-depressants, 
in research towards anti-depression, scientists find a strategy for deating with drug- 
dependency. The examples of scientists discovering something of value, which was 
patently not the thing they were looking for are legion. Performance research is no 
different. With At Last Sight, the findings do not create an accurate match up with 
the intentions. There are accidents. The group size shifts. People fall in love. 
Autobiography and a search for truth make way for group collaboration and 
presented fies. It is the nature of all performance research that the environment is 
never fully controlled. There is no sterility. There are no opportunities, ever, for 
repeating an experiment, simply because the human material of that experiment is 
never the same material twice. In this regard, we can say that performance is a 
generative process. Findings in practice as research threaten to fix as permanent 
what is in reality only ever a fleeting perspective on an equally fleeting event. 
An engagement in practice as research necessitates a faMiliantY with the ways 
in 
which the project in question was organised. A heightened understanding of the 
importance of the researcher's own positionality is equally vital, alongside an 
acknowledgement of the limitations and privilege of that perspective. 
Researchers 
need to be able to have sufficient control over the vocabulary of their chosen 
field 
in order to articulate their findings to a reasonably InfOnned third party, and also 
to 
be able to defend their research verbally. 
340 
12-12-99 
There are a number of ways in which the individual researcher's position, intention 
and methods of demonstration can be stated. The following suggestions are in no 
way intended as an exclusive list and are offered here in no hierarchical ordering. 
They are posed, chiefly, as questions, which is not to say that they are designed as 
some sort of check list for practice as research. They are intended to function, 
primarily, as an encapsulation of my own experiences, which may prove useful to 
32 
other researchers in the field of performance. Different forms of research will 
carry with them their own unique emphases. Now - in hindsight -I am not even 
sure of the extent to which these questions were adequately addressed at the start 
of the joint processes of At Last Sight and this thesis. I can take some (small) 
solace in this from the knowledge that the researcher's own developing 
understanding is a central feature of research. Better by far to understand more at 
the close than the outset. 
28-12-99 
1: Where did the work take place? How did it differ from one space to another? 
How different were the rehearsal spaces to the performance space(s)? How are or 
were these spaces manipulated? What was the proximity of the spectators to the 
work? How determined and fixed were these distinctions? Did the project function 
within a space which was metaphoric or actual? What was the relationship of 
technical equipment to the project? At what point was any technical 
input 
incorporated into rehearsals? 
341 
2: If the above are examples of spatial location, what are the examples of a location 
which is social? Who was the work made by? For whom was it intended9 What 
was its social purpose? What was the relationship between the aesthetic and the 
functional? 
I In what ways was the work made? How are specific elements of performance 
shaped and ordered? What are the relationships vAth the personnel involved in the 
project? To what extent is status an issue and how is it defined? How collaborative 
was the making process? 
4: What is the intention behind the project, and to what extent is this intention 
manifest in any subsequent production? What is the relationship between the 
spectator and the to-be-seen? To what extent is any attempted closure invoked by 
the project? 
5- What is the relationship of narrative to the work? How was any written text 
generated? Does the work have a single 'author? Does the project exist as part of 
a recognisable genre? Is the work intended to be transferable, inasmuch as other 
companies might be invited (or expected) to revisit the material at some later 
stage? 
6: What theoretical positionings informed the work as it was being made, and what 
theoretical positionings inform the written analysis? (Even when the maker and the 
analyst are one and the same person, these positionings may be different). 
In what 
ways can these different positions be regarded as compatible? 
342 
T What are the backgrounds of the project-personnel? How does this work differ 
from their previous or usual practices? Is the project intrinsically investigative, or is 
it the researcher's subsequent (? ) investigation which is seeking to make a 
contribution to knowledge? 
8, To what extent are any performance elements within the project illustrative of 
action in and of itself, and, conversely, to what extent are these actions primarily 
representative of actions elsewhere? For example, are the on-stage actions intended 
to function as 'real? To what extent does the performance relate to a world 
beyond itself? 
9-, What is the relationship between the researcher and the researched? Is the 
researcher 'inside' or 'outside' the work? Is the researcher also a participant" In 
what ways and to what extent has the researcher's role impacted on the project? In 
what ways has the project changed by dint of its being observed? 
10 - What stages of the work are being researched? is the research focussing on one 
period, or on a number of periods? How are these research choices made? 
11: What are the chief methods whereby performative commumcation is attempted 
and/or achieved through the project? What are the modalities of the performance? 
Why were they chosen? What was their effectiveness? 
And how can any such 
9 effectiveness' be measured? 
343 
12: How is the project itself being notated and/or recorded? How important is the 
visual evidence of the performance to the explanation? How are decisions as to 
notation arrived at? 
13: What was the relationship of time to the project, and also of time to the 
re,, Search? At what times did rehearsals take place? When did the researcher write 
up any practice observed? What processes of reflection were allowed between the 
researcher's experience and the documentation? What was the extent to which 
possible reconsiderations of the researcher's position led to the revision and 
modification of previously written work? How did the researcher keep records of 
work seen? What were the ramifications of penods of rehearsal time on the 
performed project? Did the researcher attend every rehearsal? How was rehearsal 
time spent? Were any warm-up exercises used, and if so how were these seen to 
impact on both rehearsals and performance? 
14- What was the relationship between those elements of the project which could 
be 'controlled' and those which could not be anticipated? Were there any 'random' 
instances, for example, which could be regarded as particularly significant, and in 
what ways was this 'significance' identified as such? 
4-1-00 
Research through one's own practice requires a concentration. A focusing of the 
attention in a specific way, so that one is as aware as possible of all of the 
implications and possible developments of a performance project. This runs parallel 
to an awareness that performance research (and in this it Is no different to 
performance itself) has no givens. No absolutes. None other than the fact that 
)44 
every maker of performance has something which is demanding of expression. 
Every maker of performance is of her or his time. ) and 
is so impelled to create 
within the spirit of that time. Exceptions to this can only result in a type of 
'museum-art', and even this is marked more strongly by the age in which it was 
made than by any age it might be seeking to emulate. 
We can see this in photographic evidence of re-staged historical plays, where even 
in the frozen moment, the physical attitudes of the performers (not to mention hair 
styles) will give us a close approximation of the decade at least in which the work 
was re-staged. Notions of reality do not stay fixed. Images of psychic chicanery 
from the turn of the century read to us now as so obviously fake and staged as to 
be laughable, and yet we know that they were, at the time, regarded by many as 
being 'real' manifestations of the recently dead. Faked paintings, indiscernible from 
the original at the time of their appearance at auction houses, emerge, over time, as 
obvious copies, as though time is exposing the space between versions. We make 
art of our own time then, even when we are actively intent on recreating the past, 
and this is one of the identifying features of creativity. 
The word 'conclusion' seems not quite appropriate for the words of this chapter. It 
is as though I am seeking to bring the thesis to a point of arrival, when in fact that 
point feels much more strongly like departure ... an opening up of possibilities. 
A 
braver writer than I would grasp the nettle here and abandon the term completely. 
Just as At Last Sight was concerned with a resistance 
to closure, so its 
documentation is equal-ly disinclined to state its case. -As though 
to do so would 
345 
stand as a betrayal to interpretative license. Issues of essentialism, of ownership, of 
frames of performance') of process and articulation, of borrowing and bending 
theoretical positionings at will and by default have been constant in each and every 
aspect of the work ... whether I was always aware of it or not. It is only now, 
with a pause at the very dawn of the new century, that I am able to gain 
perspective on the breathlessness of the thesis. A chain of doing, writing, taMng, ) 
writing, doing that has taken this project from the relative clarity of first intentions 
to the confusion (a much more appropriate chapter heading than 'Conclusion') at 
its end. 
What is most important is not what I have learned or think I know so much as 
what it- is, that the reader takes away. This is neither apology nor evasion. It is the 
premise on which the project was started and it remains that premise now as that 
same project draws to a close. 
These words mean that I am faced with feelings similar to those at the end of 
rehearsals for At Last Sight. When adjustments cease, the maker is effectively 
saying that the work is ready. It is now to be given away. It becomes the property 
of the reader, and the safety of the desk - like the safety of the rehearsal room - is 
sacrificed to public perusal. This is not about fear. It is not about the fear of 
response, of criticism, of disapproval. It has much more, I think, to do with the 
pleasure of making ... and this 
has really been the thrust of everything connected 
with this thesis. The pleasure of making. And, as with At Last Sight, that which has 
been made has been constructed in the knowledge that it would inevitably pass 
from my hands into the hands of others. 
346 
' Freeman, I 'The Location and Theory of Looking. Journal ofDramatic Theory & Criticism 
Vol. X11, No. 2, Spring, 1998 pp. 129-141 
2 In many ways the assemblage of which I speak is part of a recognisable shift within 
performance work as part of undergraduate study, albeit not at every institution. University 
departments carve theiTown agendas and new members of staff and students bring new ideas. 
The journal Studies in Theatre Production, available through SCUDD, provides examples of the 
types of work engaged in at a number of institutions. The practical work undertaken at places 
such as Liverpool John Moores University and Bretton Hall, with their emphasis on theatre as a 
story interestingly told, is different in kind as well as intent to work at Manchester Metropolitan 
University and Nottingham Trent University, where dramatised narrative is less likely to be a 
focus for students' engagement. 
3 See Berger, J Ways ofSeeing. BBC/Penguin Books, London, 1977. 
4 Eugenio Barba discusses the organic transference of performance techniques and traditions in 
The Paper Canoe, (Barba) Routledge, London and New York, 1995. 
See Schechner, R; Between Theater andAnthropolgy, University of PennsylvaniaPTeSS, 
Philadelphia, 1985; Performance Theory, Routledge, 1988; and Schechner and Appel BY -, Ifeans 
ofPerformance, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 
6 Edgar, A and Sedgwick, P. Keynotes in Cultural Theory. Routledge, London and New York 
1999. p. 2. 
7 Phelan, P. Unmarked The Politics ofPerformance. Routledge, London and New York, 1993. 
pp. 148 -9. 
8 Willet, J. The Theatre ofBertolt Brecht. Methuen, London, 1959 and Esslin, M. Brecht: .4 Choice ofEvils. Heinemann, London, 1959 are standard academic texts on the work of Brecht. 
9 My 'evidence' here is based on fifteen years of lecturing, with experience at a number of 
institutions, both in further and higher education, with considerable experience of seeing student 
work at festivals and from discussions with colleagues and students. 
'0 There are many published and available works which describe the development of modemisin 
in theatre. 
11 The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, U. S. A provides a 'theme park' approach 
to the acts of genocide perpetrated in the Second World War. Visitors are allocated identity cards, 
which approximate as closely as possible to 'real fife' victims of the Holocaust. Some victims 
lived and some died. The museum visitor inserts the card into various terminals located at 
computer stations along the museum's route and is provided with updates of their 'character's' 
progress. Video footage plays as part of the 'experience'. 
12 Drain, R. (Ed) Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. Routledge, London and New York, 
1995. 
p. xv 
" Foreman, R Art +Performance: Richard Foreman Gerald Rabkin (Ed). The Johns Hopkins 
University Press, Baftimm and London, 1999. p. 18. 
14 Edwards, B. QAA + PhD. Electronic correspondence to SCUDD Mailbase. 14th April 1999. 
15 When Kenneth Rea writes that 'The standard of acting in university or polytechnic productions 
is likely to be lower than that of the average drama school. ' (Rae, K. A Better Direction. Calouste 
Gulbenkian Foundation, London, 1989. p. III he is arguing from a mainstream perspective that 
seeks to reinforce rather than challenge the status quo. 
16 My evidence here is anecdotal, but consistent. 
17 'VAiile the older director tends to be Oxbridge, male and ex-public school, among the younger 
generation there is a higher presence of women directors, less Oxbridge dominance, 
but a greater 
degree of university education. Thus, eight out of ten directors under thirty are graduates. 
' (Rea, 
1989. p. 24. ) '39% of theatre directors have come from independent schools, which 
is extremely 
high, considering that the overall national figure for independent school education 
is only 7%. ' p, 
25 
See Mathur, P. 'Method and Madness' in Blitz, October 1988, No. 70. pp. 44-50 
Again, the evidence for this is anecdotal, and also of one's own eyes. 
Small and middle scale 
touring theatre companies, dealing with non-mainstream practice, 
feature fewer drama school 
347 
graduates than graduates of arts-related disciplines at universities. Talking with company 
members reveals this to be the case, as does following the careers of former students. Not all of 
the companies in question are members of the ITC (Independent Theatre Council), issuing Equity 
contracts to employees, and the itinerant nature of the work makes data unreliable. In this 
instance., the best evidence is of experience. 
20 '(University) Drama departments often encourage their students to create their own 
opportunities, and indeed this has given rise to theatre groups that have stayed together on a 
professional basis. ' (Rae, 1989. p. 114) 
21 The document RAE 2001 
published on the internet at http: //www. hiss. ac. uk/educatio-n/hefc/rae/2001/2. html 
22 Drama Society productions at University College Chester during recent years have included 
Bugsy Malone, The Best Little "orehouse in Texas, Grease, The Rocky Horror Show and Gui.? s 
and Dolls. Each of these productions sold out on all of the performance nights, and members of 
senior management (principal, deputy principal or dean) saw each one. The local press covers 
Drama Society productions, running photographs and articles prioTto the opening nights. There 
is a feeling amongst colleagues and students who are outside the Draina Department that these 
productions are generally more satisfying than our own internal productions. This is perhaps to 
be expected, in that productions as research tend, almost by definition, to subvert expectation and 
to stretch theatre conventions. For those members of an audience who are not primarily interested 
in experimentation through performance, these productions are likely to alienate rather than 
engage. Some colleagues make no distinction between Drama Society and Drama Department 
productions, believing that musicals are part and parcel of our undergraduate programme of 
study. 
It is a fact that Drama Society productions pull in an audience of non-drama specialists; a fact 
which adds to their attraction in some eyes. Whereas Drama Department work is largely seen by 
Drama students and staff, Drama Society productions attract spectators from every academic 
department, as well as members of the general public. The profile of Drama Society work then 
can be seen as higher than that of the Drama Department. 
23This is in many ways a British phenomenon. Teaching performance skills. as part of a 
traditional student/teacher relationship, is highly respected in many parts of the world: in 
mainland Europe, in Asia and also in America, where actors such as Al Pacino regard time spent 
teaching at the Actors' Studio in New York as valuable. 
24 Under the heading 'Quality Control', Rea (1989) draws on the opinions of two people, Les 
Blair and Peter Gill. Blair is credited with 'Who is going to teach these courses? Please don't let 
it be the academics' (p. 100), whilst Gill says 'I don't think (university) drama departments, as 
they are organized at present, are of any use because they reflect the prejudices rather than the 
enthusiasms of the teachers' (p. 10 1). No contradictory views are offered in this section. 
In some ways, the early decision to concentrate attention on my own practice was based on a 
pragmatic approach. As a full-time lecturer with a relatively heavy teaching load, my 
commitments at Chester would make it difficult to spend enough time with a professional 
company to make an accurate assessment of their making processes. This, combined with the 
fact 
that I am obliged to make at least one piece of work each year with undergraduates, had some 
bearing on my decision. 
This is not to suggest that the chief reason was not to observe the creative process 
from both 
inside and out, so much as it is a recognition that some aspects of decision-making are 
driven less 
philosophically than others. 
26 Henry Miller writes 'I know nothing in advance ... 
I have faith in the main who is writing' (in 
Ghiselin, 1952. p. 180). Miller's views are consistent with many artists working across a range 
of fields. It is interesting to note that even when the artist does know 
how the artwork is likely to 
proceed (as was the case with Francis Bacon, if Joule is to 
be believed) the idea of instinctive 
progression is adopted as an aid to even greater artistic credibilitý-. 
27 Research Assessment Exercise in 2001 ME 2001). Published on the Internet at 
p. 4 
28 ibid 
348 
2' Schechner, S. Performance Theory. Routledge, London and New York, 1988. 
M) Etchells, T. Certain Fragments. Routledge, London and New York, 1999. 
31 Whybrow, N in Performance Practice Vol. IV, 1999. pp. 9-2 1. 
32 The practice as research schema offered here is a development of the approach Fred McVittie 
used in his case study of The Bureau of-Internal Affairs. For McVittie's analysis see *A Case 
Study into Practice as Research'. Performance Practice. Vol. 3,1997. pp. 19-25. 
i49 
Postscript 
8-8-2000 
'Every practical procedure ... presupposes a theoretical perspective of some kind. ). 
I 
With the practice of performance, theories - some of the theories of postmodernism, 
for example - are part of the conceptual apparatus of making work. This is not the 
same thing as saying that theories provide fixed referents. In the context of the 
documentation undertaken, and also with the performance that was At Last Sight, the 
theoretical perspectives ranged from multifaceted interpretations of the maker/writer's 
own intentions to methods that offered apparently coherent narratives of empirical 
evidence. In this way, something of the spirit of selective eclecticism that fuelled the 
process of creating At Last Sight also informed the methodology of documentation. 
Whilst the approach to making At Last Sight was consistently made subject to 
theorisation, the theorisation was not always consistent. A number of positionings 
were adopted and discarded at will. The processes of making and of making-reading 
were synonymous with 'the human condition of trying to construct a viable and 
meaningful existence' when those meanings were being undermined by their own 
internal contradictions, and this demanded a relationship with theory. 
2 Mat art- 
theory is about, according to Lyotard, is encapsulated in the question: 'Why 
does 
something happen rather than nothing? )3 It is for this reason that the approaches to 
theory in this thesis were used in the ways that they were: as evidence of what 
happened rather than of nothing happening at all, and of why things 
happened In the 
ways that they did. 
350 
When Susan Melrose argues for a reappraisal of 'theory' within performance, she 
remarks that 'theory may, indeed, be counter-productive in the context of effective 
performance-making. 54 My conclusion based on research with At Last Sight lead to 
both a reiteration and a rebuttal of these claims. Theory is not something other, 
somet ing applied, either before or after the event of performance. What we think is 
what we do, and the investigation has been a charting of this process of thought as 
deed and deed as thought. 
The writing of this thesis has been an experimental action, the outcome of which 
could not have been foreseen as the work was commenced. (In Jeanette Winterson's 
1991 preface to Oranges are not the onlyftuit she asks the question 'Is Oranges an 
autobiographical novelT Her answer of 'No not at all and yes of course' is equally 
true of this thesiS. 5 ) The thesis acquired its own determination, within which the 
writer's intentions were only one factor among many. Of equal significance to the 
reader may have been those elements that remained (and remain) unknown to the 
writer. In this way the reader has been more capable of determining the meaning of 
the thesis than have 1. We should,, however,, remember Zygmunt Bauman's assertion 
that the reader 'understands as much as his knowledge allows him.... If the author 
sends his signals from an island whose interior he has not and could not explore in 
full, the reader is a passenger who walks the deck of a sailing ship he does not 
navigate. The meaning is the instant of their encounter. 
The thesis has been concerned with fieldwork. Fieldwork vanes, as a practice, 
according to the degree in which the observer controls the situation s/he is 
investigating and the extent to which s/he participates in that situation and 
interacts 
with the subjects under investigation. Because the field-work in question was a 
construction and rehearsal process carried out with undergraduates in the final year of 
their degree programme, my participation and interaction, as tutor, director and 
observer was both complex and full. The ways in which the relationship between 
observer and observed developed over the period of a full academic year formed a 
narrative that went undetected during the period of writing, but which has emerged, in 
subsequent readings, as a central feature. 
There is a distinction between the 'F of the knower and the 'Me' of the known, and 
we can say that the self contained in the thesis has consisted of both parts. Similarly, 
this thesis has a preoccupation with ideas of 'truth' at the same time as it deals in lies 
(that this is a curious admission with which to conclude a contract between the reader 
and the read is not in doubt). This amounts to an invidious-seeming essentialism. 
Whilst much of the language of the thesis deals in uncertainties much of the 
addressed reveals a search for something 'true', so that my public self is embracing 
postmodern terminology at the same time as my inner self is seeking (and not always 
consciously) to imbue feelings with authority. If there Is any evidence of catharsis in 
either the thesis or At Last Sight, at least for the maker, then that catharsis is achieved 
in the pursuit of something 'true'. Why this truth has been sought at all in art, rather 
than elsewhere, where one might argue that it matters more, is dealt with in the body 
of the work. 
If we accept that the certainty of 'truth' is lost to us, which is a theory rather than a 
fact, then it becomes difficult to see any space beyond this for theory to occupy. 
Interpretation per se relies upon arriving at a distinction between what is offered as 
352 
the surface of a text and what is thought to exist beneath it ... 
interpretation is in this 
sense the making of a distinction between surface and depth. If all that we are able to 
say is that something happened, or did not (to take Baudrillard's assertions that the 
7 Gulf War never really took place) then there is little left for theory to do. If the 
dear zero of postmodernism is left unchallenged, if truth is to remain as a 
disenfranchised concept, then the idea of academic honesty is equally bankrupt, for 
we cannot believe in one type of 'honesty I in a world where no truth can be said to 
exist. 
This contradiction is a part of making performance. The printed word has a 
permanence (and a status) that is denied to the ephemerality of performance- 
However, the existence of live performance in the now imbues it with a different 
relationship with truth. The work seen may be illusory, but the seeing of it, in this 
space and at this time,. is rarely, if ever, in doubt. Readers of words written are not 
usually witnesses to the process of writing. Words, no matter how truthfully they may 
read, are constructed in the elsewhere, whereas performances, no matter how other 
they may seem, are constructed in the here and now. Where, on the surface, thi s 
thesis has charted a wrestling with the contradictions between truth and lies that 
contradiction has been between performance and print. 
Whatever it was that I was working through at the time of making, I was also always 
aware of myself as a thinker. In this way the existence of the T that was aware 
created a duality: partly known and partly knower, partly observed and partly 
observer. We can relate this to Zupancic's statement that 
11 ý 11 
The fact that somebody else views me as an object of his 
outer intuition does not yet permit me to draw any conclusions 
about my identity. Such an inference would be possible only 
if I were able to put myseff in the very place from which I am 
being observed, if I were able to view myself at the same time 
as object of inner and outer intuition - if I were able to see 
myseff the way the other sees me. 8 
This thesis has shown that the act of making performance, no less than the 
documenting of one) s own creative processes, demanded the inner and outer intuition 
that Zupancic comments deny. 
Notwithstanding the temptation to make post-performance adjustments to the thesis, it 
has remained a narrative written in its own present. Because the present is live 
performance this method of documentation has been consistent in kind with its 
subject. As performances shift, fold in on themselves, find new forms and strategies, 
so the processes of documentation need to develop and keep pace. The documentation 
that has been this thesis is a contribution to development. 
Identifying the methodological approaches appropriate to an area of investigation is a 
major element of the process of research. The documentation of performance has not 
yet developed a singular defining methodology, and different writers will document in 
different ways. A distinction between research and documentation per se, however, 
between scholarship and reportage, is that in research the methodologies need to 
be 
identified and articulated. This distinction continues inasmuch as researchers need 
also to separate methodology from method. For the purposes of this paper, 
I am taking 
C methodology' to refer to the theoretical framework which informs analysis and 
method' to refer to the procedure(s) of gathering information 
for the study. In this 
way, method is the 'how' of the research and methodology the 
'why'. Richard 
)54 
Beardsworth urges caution, however, in terms of a too-readily arrived at acceptance of 
'method'. He notes that Derrida is careful to avoid the term 
because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided 
how to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the 
matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria 
which structure his or her conceptual gestures. 9 
Notwithstanding Beardsworth's reminder of Derrida's caveat, we can say that the 
method is the 'how' of the research and methodology the 'why". 
The process of making At Last Sight has been charted in a way which is identifiable as 
a method,, and yet that same method has been approached in a way that seeks to resist 
the type of closure that Beardsworth identifies as Derrida's fear. 
Whilst the thesis has adhered to its own particular method, what is of equal 
significance are the methodologies that the writing has revealed. This creates an open 4..? 
relationship between words written and words read, inasmuch as 'methodology' is 
something the reader, no less than the writer, will bring to the page. 
A weakness with much documentation of performance is that it tends to concentrate 
on the phenomenon of performance rather than what it was that led to the work being 
produced. This leading up is vital to our understanding of how performances are 
made. Without it we are left with the idea of performance as something magical, as 
alchemy. The documentation entered into here is as closely concerned with the 
processes leading up to performances as to descriptions of that work as 'finished 
Product'. Pavis warns us that 'No performance description is ever without subjective 
elements that influence the fundamental understanding of the work'. 
10 Accordingly, 
this documentation is subjective and partial. It would be futile to pursue an objective 
and complete documentation, since on the one hand every decision to include is also a 
loss. 
) and on the other the activity of observing brings with it its own impositlons. The 
issue of documentation has two elements- what to document and how to cany out the 
documentation. These elements are choices, and choice cannot be separated from 
subjectivity. I chose to write about this material, at this time and in this way. " What 
marks this thesis apart from much that has gone before is that the writers' subjectivity 
is rarely concealed behind a screen of objective terminology. The subjectivity is open 
and discussed. The reader, like the writer, has to remember that the documents 
encountered here were created out of particular approaches. The wnting does not 
articulate what it was so much as how it was seen and how I choose to make that 
seeing seen. 
Whilst the performance text of At Last Sight does not exist, the dramatic text remains. 
It is offered here as a partial illustration of the work. One piece of a jigsaw. Were I to 
concentrate more fully on At Last Sight as an example of theatre performance I would 
be imposing my own reading on that which was made to be given away. At Last Sight 
as a performance text belonged to particular times, places and people. Performers, 
director, crew and spectators remember it happening, and each of these memories 
determines what it was that took place. My documentation of the processes leading to 
At Last Sight, and also out of it, is my own- Any one of the performers would write 
differently about different stages, but this partiality, like all others, is unavoidable. 
To 
offer something under the guise of a 'full account' would necessitate the impossibility 
of everybody involved writing about everything that happened before, 
during and 
after we met ... and 
in what font? The partiality of process, however, 
is less severe 
)56 
than with product. The product was created to be interpreted by hundreds of strangers. 
The process was for nine performers and myself 
That said, this documentation is not a surrogate for performance. Neither is it a 
surrogate for process. The documentation is the documentation. It is ftom the 
selectivity of the process that its reliability and scholarly relevance comes. It identifies 
documentary as fiction; albeit a fiction that seeks to seduce its readers into belief 
Theories are not self-contained. They bleed into each other. This does not mean that 
we cannot apply a particular analytical framework to any type of performance event. 
This is not about transforming research into calcification. That the adoption of a mode 
of analysis enables the researcher to utilise certain investigative procedures does not 
mean that the investigation-outcome is either assumed or predetermined. 
The researcher's intervention has been made manifest in the personal pronoun. This is 
an acknowledgement that the T has an overt function. We need to remember Barthes' 
waming, however, that the 'I which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of 
other texts, of codes which are infinite or more precisely, 
lost 
., 
12 This applies to the 
researcher's '1' no less than to the 'F of a subsequent reader. The sense we send is the 
sense we make. This sense is flawed and incomplete, but only inasmuch as 
it is born 
of partiality. Scholarship will always reveal more about the student than the studied. 
Approached thus, the choices we make as to what we omit are as significant as the 
ways that we deal with what remains, and partiality is accepted as an act of revelation. 
When Geraldine Harris writes of Rose English's Ihe Double Wedding 
(1991) she 
explains that the theoretical terrain in which this piece appears to 
be placed, in and of 
35-, 
itself, suggests that in the final analysis this is a show which cannot be interpreted, 
only described. 13 This is a negation of the fact that all description is interpretative. 
What it is that Harris chooses to describe is the result of an interpretative act, not vice 
versa. To suggest otherwise is to argue for a type of factual reporting that we know is 
impossible, and, ultimately, undesirable. What makes Harris' reading of English as 
interesting as it is is the perspective she brings. The place that we view from is as 
central to our findings as the subject on which we fix our gaze. 
As a piece of dramatic text At Last Sight is relatively 'wordy'. 14 Furthermore, its 
words are often descriptive. The words stand thus as both substitutes and prompts for 
physical activity. This is text as verbal deictic reference. 15 Because At Last Sight 
conveys a number of messages about actions, which subsequently do or do not take 
place, we can say that verbal deixis is its dominant code, both as a written and 
performance text. 
The text was written for narration as much as for any conventional notions of 
representative acting. The ways in which the narrators describe events will affect the 
spectator's understanding of the narrators' motives, which will have some bearing on 
the 'trust' felt and the level of 'truth' attributed to that which is narrated. If the 
spectator trusts the narrators then s/he will be inclined to believe the descriptions 
presented, even (or especially) when the narrator is both speaker and doer. With the 
role of narrator in At Last Sight these aspects of 'trust' are subject to a continuous 
shift. As a link between the overt fiction of performance and the assumed 
fact of an 
outside world, the narrators' function is problematised. by their own 
failure to locate 
themselves for any length of time within one world or the other. 
This signals a 
1 358 
deliberate collapsing of confidence in the distinction. Inside and outside performance 
is no greater a distinction than inside and outside any place at all. Conventions may be 
different, but that does not mean that one place is 'real' and the other 'false'. The 
performance of At Last Sight is as much a part of the 'real world' as a trip to a 
supermarket or an hour spent in a library. 
Essentialism is often associated with biological determinism, with the attribution of 
particular traits as being unchangingly human. In this way, essentialism could be 
regarded as a denial of cultural shifts in the ways that different people function. 
Approached from this perspective it is difficult to regard essentialism as anythiniz 
other than naive. We know that differences in gender, race, health, wealth, education 
and class, ) 
for example, have ramifications on the ways in which we live. However, 
this is not the way I am using essentialism here. For the purposes of this thesis, 
essentialism has been used to refer to certain phenomena, which, whilst they might be 
no more than cultural impositions, are so deep-rooted as to be regarded as essential to 
the way we live our lives. I include in this our need to distinguish between 'truth' and 
'fiction' 
... a 
distinction that is critically impossible to uphold. Nevertheless, in the 
way we function as people we make constant decisions as to the truth-status of events. 
As a father, I believe in the love of and for my children as something unchangeably 
creal', even in the same moments that I read, write or talk about truth as a Nietzschean 
illusion. 
In performance terms,, we do not always know whether a particular work makes any 
claim for truth. In these circumstances it is difficult, and perhaps even inappropriate, 
to arrive at a judgement as to 'truthfulness'. Because performance per se 
has the 
359 
complex relationship with 'truth' that it has, any assessment has to be arrived at 
through consideration of context. In certain contexts, for example, actions or words 
might be regarded as ironic ... 
in other contexts the same phenomena might be 
regarded as truthful. 16 In its broadest sense, contextualisation is provided through 
-r, - . %. atures of the work that are suggestive of intent. Certain forms of address claim to 
deal in truth, and their reliability can be measured against this intention. These forms 
can be assessed according to their self-imposed terms. A news report, for example, 
sells itself as a truthful reading. So does a scientific report or a thesis. The writings 
that make up this thesis are expected to function as 'truthful statements'. Similarly, 
programme notes to a performance would be expected to conform to our cultural 
expectations of reliability. 
Any work that makes a claim for truthfulness is compromised at source by the 
inevitability of its mediation. The truth in performance, no less than in performance 
writing, cannot be regarded as either absent or present ... the 
differences between 
production and reception make any such claim redundant. We might argue that the 
here-and-nowness of performance makes it more 'truthful' than the there-and- 
thenness of writing; however, performance is no less subject to mediation than is 
written text. Any apparent immediacy is illusory. The moment is loaded, and only 
i)artly by the performance maker. To say that activities take place in the same context 
in which they are read is to disregard the fact that the frame around performance is 
always also a contextualising framework within the spectator. 
This takes us some way towards an understanding of truth's adulterated transference - 
as an omnipresent act of spectatorial deconstruction - it also throws into 
doubt the 
, 60 
possibility of truth having any currency for the performer. If truth has no possibility of 
4successfUl transmission', then its value as currency is reduced; equally, we have to 
question the extent to which a performance maker has an adequate understanding of 
how and why performative choices have been made. What we think is the truth may 
not be so. This thesis has operated within a fluid arena, a place of shifting 
relationships between investigations and omissions, between claims for truth and 
untruthful claims. The doubly-autobiographical nature of At Law Sight and this thesis 
has resulted in a number of truth-claims,, many of which have been created with as 
honest an intent as has been possible. It has been possible for the reader of this thesis 
to identify me as the writer, in a way that makes the authorial T my own. It has not 
been as possible for the spectator of At Last Sight to make those same assumptions. 
The performance project was instigated out of an interest in confessional art, and yet 
it is the thesis that has developed into a confession, at the same time as it became 
increasingly apparent that At Last Sight had little or nothing confessional to say. At 
Last Sight was an identifiably autobiographical work, even within the context of all 
IM work being autobiographical, but it was not confessional. 17 1 am drawing on Derrida 
here in his distinction between autobiography and confession. For DeMda confession 
is connected to the idea that truth is concealed until its moment of confessional 
articulation. 18 Confession denies the possibility of anything other than a truth-claim, 
its whole raison detre is a claim for truth. This has been the case with the thesis, but 
not the performance. Part of this is to do with authorship ... the wor s written are 
mine, the sentence and paragraph lengths are chosen by me, even the choice of font is 
mine. As I M. Coetzee says of his own work 
361 
This is a question about telling the truth rather than a 
question about autobiography. Because in a larger sense all writing is autobiography: everything 
that you write, Including criticism and fiction, writes 
you as you write it. 19 
While the words I choose remain MY own - at least prior to the act of being read - the 
performance of At Last Sight was mediated,, long before it reached a public audience, 
by the concerns, attitudes and individual nuances of the performers. Like Derrida, 
Coetzee tells us that confessional writing is identified "on the basis of an underlying 
motive to tell an essential truth about the self -)-)20 The writing of this thesis has been 
governed by a need to write what it is that I do not yet know, and to do so as part of 
the same activity of writing as a claim for truth. The essential truth of the thesis is also 
then the essential truth of my self That which the thesis has confessed has been my 
own need to confess. The confession has made the thesis a witness to my own 
witnessing of the process of making At Last Sight, and this act of witness could only 
be achieved via the setting down and the giving away. The documentation of At Last 
Sight has not amounted to a truthful documentation so much as to an act of 
confession. The publication of the document is necessary then in more ways than the 
obvious one of disseminating the findings of a particular experience. It is necessary 
because confession cannot be separated from language and because language can be 
defined as an attempt to shape an experience into a comprehensible form. 
Derrida has it that a "true act of giving (only) ever occurs ... without any 
-21 
consciousness of the possible response of the other. I can make no similar claims 
for this thesis, and yet it remains an act (a 'true act'? ) of giving. That which began as 
the documentation of a process has developed into the documentation of a 
methodology of documentation. Immersed in all of this, in every page, every line and 
362 
every word, has been the documentation of the self who documents. Rather than 
pulling the focus away from an analysis of performance making this has resulted in a 
deepening belief that who we are is what we make. Making a deliberate choice to 
write ourselves into the ways we write about the work we see is not 'more honest' 
than choosing otherwise, but at least the dishonesties are borrowed less fteely from 
others 
This thesis makes no claims for documentary truth. It provides no more than a fleeting 
glimpse of the ways in which a performance was made, and the ways in which that 
making has been subsequently described. Its value lies not so much in any idea of 
objective authority as in its recognition of bias. 
If this form of documentation reveals as much about the student as the studied, then 
this is a consequence rather than a denial of the autobiography of spectatorship. The 
seeing self is not distinct from the self who then makes seen. Such could never occur. 
This thesis is a record of a particular process of seeing and of making seen- a work 
created through a claim for truth that draws to a close with a disclaimer. 
"There is no such thing as an objective, innocent, 
primary document. The document ... 
is the result. ) 
above all, of an assemblage, whether conscious or 
unconscious, of the history, the time and the 
society which have produced it, and also of the 
ensuing periods through which it has continued to 
be used, even if perhaps in silence.... The 
document is a monument.... In the end, there is 
no documentary truth. Every document is a lie. 
22 
36', 
As it was with the act of At Last Sight, so it is with the words that have sought to 
discuss it. They end not with closure or emphasis, so much as with a fading away a 
running out of space. 
-or 
)64 
1 Barry, P, 1995. p. 35 
2 Smith, D Zygmunt Bauman, Prophet ofPostmodernity. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999. pp. 13 7-13 8 3 Blistene, B "A Conversation with Jean-Francois Lyotard, " Flash Art- Two Decades ofHistorv, AX! 
years, pp. 129-130 
4 Melrose, S. 'Restaging'Theory' in the Postgraduate Performance Studies Workshop' in New Theatre 
Quarterly Volume XV Part I (NTQ 57) February 1999. pp. 39- 44 
1 Winterson, J Oranges are not the onlyfiwit. 1991 
6 Bauman, Z Hermeneutics and Social Science: approaches to understanding. Hutchinson, London, 
1978 p, 229' 
' For an elaboration of Baudrillard's thoughts, see Norris, C Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, 
intellectuals and The Gutf War. Lawrence & Wishart, 1992. 
Zupancic, A. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. Verso, London & New York, 2000. p. 70 
Beardsworth, R. Derrida and the Political. Routledge, London, 1996. p. 4 10 Pavis, P. 'Notes Toward a Serniotic Analysis' in 7he Drama Review. Vol. 23, No. 4 (T84), 
December 1979. p. 95 
This was recognised as forming a central aspect of the research as early as 1997. The importance of 
choices was articulated on the first page of the introduction. 
" Barthes, R. SIZ, trans. Richard Miller, Hill & Wang, New York, 1974. p. 10 
13 Harris, G. Staging Femininities. Manchester University Press 1999. p. 23 
14 By 'wordy' I refer to the fact not only that At Last Sight contains upwards of 10,000 words for 
speaking, but that the work began as a written text. Had I started the rehearsal process with no written 
words it is likely that At Last Sight would have developed with a different and MOTC pronounced 
physical vocabulary. 
15 Matejka, L&1. Titunik. 'The Hierarchy of Dramatic Devices' in Semiotic Art. Vintage Books, New 
York, 1983. p37 
16 A phenomenologist would argue here that this sentence is unsupportable, inasmuch as a different 
context denies the possibility of 'the same phenomena' taking place. Indeed, no performative 
phenomena could ever exist within the same, repeated context, precisely because contexts shift no less 
than anything else. What happens at one moment can be repeated, but never absolutely and never to the 
same effect. 
" it is interesting to note that I referred to idea of confession as something 'ominous' in January 1998 
(ref, p. 44). The shift in attitude between then and now is pronounced. 
18 Derrida, J. Acts ofLiterature. Derek Attridge (ed. ) Routledge, London & New York, 1992, p. -3 14 19 Coetzee, J. M Doubling the Point,, Essays and Interviews. David Attwell (ed. ) Harvard University 
Press, Cambridge, USA, 1992. p. 17 
20 ibidp. 252 
2' Derrida, J Given Time. Peggy Kamuf (trans. ) University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 199 1. p. 11 
22 De Marinis, Marco. 'A Faithful Betrayal of Performance: Notes on the Use of Video in Theatre' in 
New Theatre Quarterly. Vol. I No. 4, November 1985. p. 383 
365 
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Appendices 
The pagination for appendices is located at the bottom right hand side of each page. 
Any alternative pagination forms part of the original document. 
374 
Appendix One 
375 
This is a blueprint for the practical project of At Last Sight, rather than the written 
element. The written element is the investigation of a methodology of documentation. 
Name of Researcher: John Freeman 
Name of Project: At Last Sight 
Type of Project: 
Scripted, devised and directed performance. At Last Sight will be cast with Level 3' 
students from University College Chester, as part of a triple module in production 
work. 
Status of project with regard to the overall research process: 
Practical investigation, which will form the basis of a written thesis. The writing in the 
thesis will be commenced at the same time as the practical element (the creation of a 
performance text for At Last Sight) is undertaken. The performance project will not 
fonn part of the overall submission for assessment. 
Aspect of project under investigation: 
The development of a form of performance which will allow the participating students 
a high degree of autonomy, within a structure which is initiated and controlled by a 
writer/director. Notions of truth will be explored via a scripted content which is 
autobiographical, alongside various concerns and situations within the group. The 
relationship between the academic honesty and the masquerade of performance will be 
a concern of the research. 
General aims of the project: 
The project is thematically concerned with investigating the currency of truth within 
art. Issues of presentation and representation will be explored, as will notions of 
performative identity. 
Research Questions: 
What form might a performance project take if it seeks to explore truth? How possible 
is it to construct a performance wherein the distinctions between 'acting' and 'being' 
are eroded ... to the cast as well as 
the spectators? To what extent can truth be said to 
have any currency in art? What strategies of rehearsal need to be implemented in order 
to achieve these aims with a disparate group of students? How can the preparation be 
allowed to bleed through the performance in a manner that works against hierarchical 
distinctions between 'process' and 'performance"? 
-, 
76 
Context of the project: 
AI'Last Sight will be made as part of the Drama curriculum at University College 
Chester. It will be presented in March, 1999 at the 16th Festival of International 
University Theatre in Liege, and subsequently in the Molloy Auditorium at Chester. 
Method of documentation, notation and analysis: 
Documentation through the publication within the thesis of the performance text (in 
whatever manifestations that text may take); through retrieval of any programmes and 
advance publicity; through written responses from the participants (subject to faculty 
approval); through a documentation of the ongoing thoughts of the researcher; through 
diagrams of performance venues and chief rehearsal sites. 
Necessary demands made on participants in the project: 
Participants in At Last Sight will be operating in a real-time mode, without any marked 
reliance on characterisation. The primary demands on the performers will be: 
1: Openness to new and untried forms of performative expression 
2: Willingness to approach performance as an opportunity for revealing rather than 
disguising 'self 
3: Ability to explore theoretically coherent matter within the context of experimental 
performance 
4: Flexibility in terms of expectations. 
Description of the project: 
The cast of At Last Sight will be determined by the number of respondents to the 
published proposal. I have no say in who works with me. At present, I have no idea as 
to the size or gender of the group. This means that I could, feasibly, work with a very 
small group: three would be an absolute minimum. It is possible that non-assessed 
students could also be asked to participate. Due to the fact that At Last Sight Will be 
presented in Liege, it is expected that the production will be relatively simple in terms 
of staging. This is not to suggest that issues of design are secondary, so much as it is 
recognition of the implications of transporting a 'set' from one country to another 
without any budget. 
am anticipating that At Last Sight will play for between fifty-five and seventy 
minutes, without an interval. 
377 
Appendix Two 
Level 3 
Draiwa with Offenders Performance ProiLect 
Tutor: Allan ON-vens 
Venue,,, 's: H. M. Prison &- Y. O. I. St%-Lil & U. C. C. 
This perforramice project will centre around worlk ý%ýith women (-)n 
Butler House which is the national centre for Rule 4 -') inmate-c, Due to 
the nature of the crimes they I-Yave conuiiitted they live in a prison 
within a prison. 
The form mid content of the project will. be necyotiated benveen us ý, t- ID group ancl the women in-mates. We have the intere 111 1e -1 It) st of e vo ii i 
and the full support of tlie Heaci of h-imale Activities, He'--výi Of 
Education, Prison Psychologist an"I other key prison 
, -ýt this stacle of plam-iino 
it is envisa'TeCl (IDLIF Still to be ne' T, ý1ý, ý_j )T JJLJTý 
the project ý\Ul con S( JL (" ý'ýS: sist of the fullowin, j T 
1. Autumn: Initial \ýsit s to the prison to esTabliýýIicoritact 
form and content with the women and staff. 
A de,, -isin(, -y re-hear&al pe-, t. ýod. 
2. Spring: Perforii-iLuice in piýson. 
Follov, --up workshoj: %s with an eniphasis on the social 
artistic and aesthetic action and intervention. 
3. Late Sprino sumirer: Performed e-\ altLitions of tilie projecT. 
I Luu particularly interested in exotoring tiow far itie neeý_! s anQ1 watits 
of the women, the re(yinie Mid OLU'Selves can be r, _-alisefýi tlarouoli drmiaa process. Doc-u-,,. -iientation of pro)ject sil., iouLIML I-Lelp Lý, '2', \ -eI 
practice as well as hi(---1l-1lioht the potentLil of vheatre in 'PL'ice, ý , If 
ciiscom-for-t ý to other owside a(, Tencies. 1T Is in Tlivz; sense t1l'al Me 
'Offenders' performance project will contribut(2 to the g7rowinýý, bo(ýý of 
resea. rch in the field. 
The project ývill be driven by your creativity ancl will draw upon aný 
skills you bring to the work. There will be a large degree of ý. -UtOnOIIIY 
within the supportive structures that all professionals need when 
Operating in this demanding ei-Mromient. 
I- I- 
A-0.1998 
"'There is no need for prior e-,,, perience- A conditiOll Of th", project is that 
Participants, would under-g-o -a police central records, check. 
, 79 
DR3014 Proposal for a Devised Performance 
Ideas about shadowing or ghosting in performance will be 
the focus of investigation for this project. 
Starting points are a short, modernist text, Footfalls., by 
Samuel Beckett, and versions of the Phaedra myth. 
The process is intended be collaborative. Students will be 
invited to contribute to all aspects of researching and 
making a new performance for May 1998. 
The performance will last 56 minutes precisely. 
The final piece will seek to capture some of that quality 
outlined by Herbert Blau: 
" [an] almost unabating intensity with which the 
theater (sic) has always questioned what it 
fetishizes, distrusting the very appearances 
from which it is made. J) 
(To all appearances: ideology and performance, 1992, 
197) 
kate malone smith july 1998 
'80 
Theatre of Image 
fuld-Aledia Experiments Midti-Media E.. periments Multi-Aledia 
-What I really want to know is: Are things getting better, Or are they 
getting worse? "' Laurie Anderson. 
"'Probably getting better, but slow-w-wly". John Cage. 
Wounding with dreams 
an experiment with installation, performance and multi media. 
This piece will attempt to create a montage of film, video, photo-image and 
performed image within the structure of an installation. The piece sets out to 
investigate design in performance, as performers become the designers, 5o it is 
essentially a work in which the college of processes, becomes the performance. I 
have written a scenario for the work, which pre-figures the question posed by 
Laurie Anderson and presupposes that John Cage is correct. Our experience of 
childhood is the pretext for the scenario, which takes an extreme of adult 
behcviour as a model for the unlicensed desires of children. 
The scenario can be summarised brief iy as follows: 
A woman takes a room to make a new life. After a violent relationship she 
seeks some peace. Memories be. ---ome her companions, they seem different in 
multimedia, she joins them in a search for the 'real'. She confronts the 
damaging desires of chiidhcod as adult games where there are no winners in 
the playground of her mind. 
The piece has been offered to be shown as 'work in progress' at a National 
Conference for Drama at Manchester University in January next year. The work 
will be developed in collaboration with two groups of children who will illuminate 
and inform the scenario from their own perspective with dialogue and imagery, 
Some of them will perform in the work with us. The final version of the work will 
become available in June. 
The work is about process itself and as such is the subject of my Ph. D. research. 
Týe making process will be documented closely by me and reflected on in 
liscussion with those who participate. 
Can Watson. 
SePtember 1998 
I 
-18 
At Last Si2ht 
I'm looking to make a piece of work here that deals with truth and lies. with 
experienced events and invented histories: and, to a certain extent- with issues of 
loneliness made public through performance, These will be some of my own 'truths, 
and 'lies' and also those (ýf the performers/participants ... one of the things Fm interested in is whether or not truth has any currency in art. 
I have some ideas as to how work might begin on this (Ive already written some text. 
which I plan to use somehow, although it's far ftom a 'script for performance'). I've 
some idea of length (between 50 and 70 minutes); and I know that I want to use film 
(Proýjected film as well as video). I'm toying with the idea of collapsing narratives or 
performance styles on too of each other- so that we can use some film noir anproaches 
in there somewhere. If all of this is vag-ue it's because I genuinely don't know how the 
work vAll emerge (how could I without knovAng who']] be in the group? ) the piece 
will form a central -Dart of mv own PhD submission- so I'll be documentinQ the 'makinQ 
process' tightly- as well as reflectinQ on that which gets made, 
A condition of this oroiect is that oarticinating students would need to travel to Liege 
between March I st aný 7th: 'At Last SIQht will be nremiered at a universitv theatre 
festival there. Accommodation and food (4- wine) alongside admission to other 
t)erformances is nrovided bv the hosts- it mav be the case that students would need to iind their own return fares' Depending upo'n the availability of the group- there are 
invitations to take the piece to 
'Other iestivals. We can disc'uss all oFthis'at our -first 
meetin, 2. 
The work will be devised and exploratory in nature, a result of which is that creativity 
and a willingness to experiment are as necessary as any technical skills the participants 
might bring to the group. 
John Freeman 
i2 
Appendix Three 
C) 1 
3O) 
28th October, 1998 
prof Robert Germay 
Universite de Liege 
Place Cockerill 3, Bat. A. 2 
B-4000 Liege 
Belgium 
Dear Robert, 
/A 
JA1'1 
riIij 
I offer here a little more information about At Last Sight. There are three elements which are really 
driving the work. One is that the production forms part of my PhD submission. which is look-insz at the 
ways in which performances are made ... as such, the performance itself is being constructed vvithin a 
stron(y theoretical framework of current contemporary techniques of making work z-. The result is a blend 
of illusion and truth, of postmodernism, realism and the real that, I think, will make for an interesting 
and original production. 
The second point is that the work is being made specifically for festivals, It premieres In Liege before 
a going on to 
Erlangen, Edinburgh and Casablanca, and possibly Lyon. Spoken text is in En, -Yllsh and French. I have no doubts that even those sections in Eng-lish will be comprehensible to any non-En2lish 
speakers. I believe the piece would sit well within the ethos of the festival. 
Thirdly, what marks this company out is that the seven performers are all 'real-life' lovers of each other, 
either current or ex (that was a pre-requisite in terms of creating the group) as such, their own histories. 
desires. antagonisms, regrets. intentions etc. are constantly and constructively infiltratinu the 
work. At Layt Sighi is a piece about love ... the challenge is 
how to do that without resorting to 7 
sentiment or cynicism. What is emer2inLy throuQh rehearsals is that the fictional elements of the w-ritten 
text (which is constructed as a non-dramatic series of my own memories.. inventions and remembrances) 
are bein! z radically restructured throuah the emotional content of the performers' experiences of each 
other. The written tex. t is in no way an accurate projection of the productloný the performers, all final- 
year students at Chester, are speakina only those sections they are drawn to, are altenna words as they 
choose and are translatim-Y into French the parts they most want to be heard and understood. The fact 
that the text has an absence of action, of act1VIty, means that our rehearsals are currently focused on the 
creation of physical encounters, of movements which are themselves developing into a sort of ritualised 
pattern of behaviour. 
I am currentlv in the process of oraanising photographs. and will send copies to you as soon as they are 
ready. Similarly, I will video-tape a rehearsal sometime In December and send that to you. 
Having made a considerable number of performance projects, both with students and professionally. I 
feet reasonably well placed to assess the merits of this work ... 
I am very happy with the way rehearsals 
are developing and I have high expectations of the finished product. 
Technically, we require very little. I'd like us to play in the central theatre-space. We need one 
microphone, a stand, speaker and lead, house-lights plus two simply nigged states and nothing else. The 
set-furnishings Will travel with us fi-om Eno-jand. The performance will run for approximately one hour, 
with no interval. I need some sort of firm black flat at the rear of the space ... something that can take 
drawing pins. That's about afl. 
I'll send photographs soon, along with names of performers, and a video of rehearsal. Anything else you 
ar Ie need to know, just ask. We will need very little get-in or strike time, but one rehe sa in the spac 
would be useful. Chester College 
Best vashes, of 
Higher Education 
CH, -'Sj 
39: 3 John Freeman 7, - 012,14 37ý4_'-: 
3C Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies 
, 84 
Founded in 181, Q by 
, 
1.3 nd the Church of Eng 
As Requested 
Biography of Writer/Director: 
John Freeman BA Hons, M. A 
Editor of Perfonnance Practice (copy included). 
Contributor to a number of internationally refereed journals (most recent publication included). 
Former actor, having worked with companies such as Optik and Insomniac, performing extensively in 
Britain and abroad, most recently at Spiel Art, Munich, in Clair de Luzz, directed by Pete Brooks. 
Performed in the world premiere of Edward Bond's Jackets. Founder member of Two Up Theatre 
Company. Member of jury at ARENA 98 (Erlangen), invited observer and guest speaker at Amman 
International Theatre Festival, 1999; commissioned to devise and direct a new text for New York State 
University in April, '99. Member of ELIA. University lecturer since 1985: course leader MA Drama 
Practice at Chester; programme leader in Live Arts and Contemporary Theatre Practice. PhD research 
student (Brunel University of London), engaged in an analysis of practice as research, With specific 
reference to the creation of At Last Sight. 
At Last Sight: 
This is a new piece of work, created specIfically for this group of performers. The text itself revolves 
around the fairly common issues of relationships: love, loss, guilt, redemption etc., but this is given an 
added complexity by a concern for matters of truth and fiction, remembrance and (re)construction, 
which run through and inform. the work from start to finish. What this means, for instance, is that whilst 
the piece is dealing with remembrance, which might be said to legitirrýise the random configuration of 
scenes', it is also emphatically concerned with the ways in which performance is constructed ... which 
carries with it an assumption (even an invited imposition) that the work itself wifl be comprised of a 
thematic and theatrical unity. The ways in which the work is made are thus made manifest . .. they 
bleed 
through the performance, exposing their own traces as they do. 
Truth and fiction vie continually for precedence: the performers are lovers and their own relationships 
occasionally clash with those 'fictional' determinants provided by the text of At Last Sight. The 
performers are then always working through their own histories at the same time as they are dealing 
with the present of performance. In a work abaut a relationship, we can say that they are, to a large 
extent, precisely that which they play; the nature of the work, however, is that roles are fragmented and 
interchangeable, meaning that those elements of 'truth' which exist are always already compromised by 
the 'fictions' which frame them. My own 'truths', as writer of the work, are likewise recontextualised by 
the fact that the words are spoken by others. At Last Sight is a struggle against artifice at the same time 
as so much of it is plainly and unashamedly artificial. 
In terms of its structure, and bearing in mind the fact that the work is still in the process of beim-, made, I 
In an image o can offer the following information ... although this 
'sketch' of the piece very much that- f 
where At Last Sight stands at the present, which may not be the case in March. The set is constructed 
in-situ. By this I refer to the fact that the performing space is defined and redefined by the performers 
during the performance. This applies to concrete imagery, such as the physical placing of space-defining 
objects- performative 'states', such as on-stage 'on' and on-stage 'off, 'acting' and 'doing' etc.; and the Cý 1"n 
charting of key movements via chalk outlines drawn around performers' 'places', These chalk outlines 
also serve as a fink to the notion of police forensics, because the piece is also, in many ways, the story of 
a death. As such, a number of objects are intermittently extrapolated fi7orn the performance proper and 
Pinned onto a back wall ... evidence of an act 
in the same way that the performance itself is evidence of 
the performers' lives. 
Effectively, although not always perhaps discernibly, At Last Sight is a two act work- the 
first act 
establishes the context, whilst the second fills in the gaps ... provides 
the elements of story which 
themselves provide a purpose for the performance. There is no clear sense of linear narrative, although 
there is an information structure which makes the piece understandable. It's not-about obscurity, or 
difference for its own sake. The piece has been made quite organically, with an order emerging naturally 
during the process of rehearsals. In this way, there is a genuine logic to the work and 
I am anticipating 
no real problems in terms of an audience's understanding. The bulk of the spoken text 
is in English, 
although there are enough sections in French to provide an aural coherence at those moments 
when 
there may be a visual ambiguity, 3,85 
it is worth pointing out that At Last Sight is being made for an international audience and that there is a 
real desire on my part to make work which is capable of playing to a non-English speaking audi 1. - ience at the same time as it is built on my own 'traditions' and also those of the performers. So, it's an 
identifiably British piece, which is also, and intrinsically, a work for non-British consumption. I don't 
want that to result in some sort of homogenisation, a levelling out of all things to the lowest common 
denominator of 'all things to all people'. It's a sometimes awkward balance to aim for. 
In terms of tangible 'reality' ... well, there are obvious things, such as the fact that any and all 
consumed during the performance is 'real' (it's not so much 
I that you 
wine 
should be concerned for safety! ), 
but there's more to it than that. On many occasions, the actorly 'as if Is sacrificed for the more 
performative 'is' and these moments - so many and so compromised by the performers' experiences that 
I myself am only rarely sure of the points where fiction starts and ends - comprise the most Interesting 
negotiations of pretence and presentation. 1= 
We use music, operated by the performers from the stage, and likewise lights --- only two 
different states 
and one very simple 'special'. Again, these are operated by the performers from the stage. We use one 
microphone and speaker and require only a reasonable sized space to work in and some simple stage 
furniture too large to tour: a single bed, six chairs, two tables, a black stage flat. That's all really. It's a 
very simple show technicaRy ... as the piece is 
'self-contained', I'm only going to require technical 
assistance to focus lights and rigg up an on-stage board ... the rest 
is in no way problematic., with a very 
quick turn around at either end of the performance. 
What else" WeIl, there's no fourth w" and the acting owes more to Brecht than Staruslavský. although 
ifs in no way a Brechtian piece. The text is or-ic-, Inal and I suppose it's fair to say that the piece is 
broadly postmodem in its look. That hasn't been the expressed intention, but my own background in 
contemporary performance has clearly pushed it in this direction. 
In terms of travel, we wiU be arriving by n-dM-bus on Monday, March Ist (afternoon probably) and 
leaving on Friday morning, It would be best for us to present the work on Wednesday evening. although C I am aware that that may not be possible. Technically, I require the following items: 
*1 sinaJe bed. 
*6 wooden chairs. 
Two wooden tables. 
A black flat or flats, measuring maybe 4 metres wide, at the rear of the stage-space. This flat needs to 
be able to take -,,, riting in chalk and also items (photographs) being pinned into it. =1 
In terms of lights. very simple: houselights, a blue wash, a general warmish state and one special ... a 
shaft of light corming at the stage from above the audience. The cast will operate lights from an onstage 
desk. Sound comes from a portable player, which we will bring with us. I also need one microphone on 
a long lead ... the microphone needs to 
be one we can switch on and off in-situ. 
I look forward to sseing you soon. 
Best wishes, 
John 
)86 
Appendix Four 
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NIVERSITAIRE 
LIEGEOIS 
SALLE DU THEATRE 
AU CENTRE VILLE 
S11U UQN: Universite de Lieure Bdtiment A4 
Quai Roosevelt, lb B 4000 LIEGE 
La salle du theatre est situee dans les batiments de 
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XX AoUh la Place Cocke-rill et le quai Roosevelt, en bord de Meuse. Situation clentrale. 
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Appendix Five 
I 
F,, ax 
-1,0M 
Naomi kate Edwards- 
ýpple FaxlData Modem 
Fax Number 
Voice Number 
. )ubject 
ij response (WP) 
Date 
Iii I .1 L1. aJa 
iI J ja. t 
To 
Fax Number 
01244373379 
Voice Number 
Number of Pages 
T715198 19: 46 
Note 
john Freeman Drama Departmentfrom Barry Edw(, 
-JOHN 
FREEMAN 
DRAMA DEPARTMENT 
Two pages including this one 
John Thanks for the stuff on AT LAST SIGHT, Some feedback as requested 
I virote loads and then realised maybe there was some basic non alignmer t going 
on. When we talk about process whose process are you thinking of, your Dwn or 
vour's and the participants' ? From my perspective, as a director let's say, I always 
presume that I am talking about the process that goes on in the performers ý. nd the 
Structure of the process is built in order for there to be communciation betw(! en me 
(who does not perform) and the performers (who do) and ultimately for this to link 
Lip with the spectator (Grotowski's pontifex: bridge builder). I need to be cle<-,,, about 
this. I have presumed in my response that we are talking about the procesE of you 
and them together. But you may want to tell me that we are talking abo it your 
process alone. In other words you could have a process of conStru,. ting a 
performance piece which would then be more or less complete before you net the 
performer groups whose task would then be to bring your piece to the stage. 
Perhaps there is an ambiguity in your position over this, perhaps the confusion is in 
tny reading. Either way, the ambiguity needs to be removed, it should tý clear 
which process is involved. So, the following comments weave their way around 
this dual notion of process. Whatever, the primacy of process remains. 
1'rri thinking of the context., groups of students from different countries wcrkiný' on an 
international performance project. As you say there's GOT to be mileage in t iat. 
My first response is to ask what's in it for these students. What I mean by that is-. 
what's their contribution to it, and their role? Take memory- well, whose m ýmory? 
Ycur's? What about their memories? How far back ? Ancestry ? Inte esting. 
, Jordanian, Finnish, German and British ancestry, going back over a hundrec years, 
a thousand, four, how many ?- there's got to be something there (including people 
in hotel bedrooms). And this has got to have a compelling relationt; hip to 
location/place for each one of them (given the history of the past hundred y ýars or 
longer). I agree with what I think you've concluded, which is that I dont sEe what 
relevance Anglo/American cyber/cine speak would have for these question ;. The 
construction of identity : how ? From the different propositions coming fr)M the 
individuals in your group(s) ? What identity: individual ? national ? tacial ? 
tiniversal ? What is identity ? 
I dont quite see the way in which cleconstruction works here. I would concertrate 
Fax to John Freeman page 2 Of 2 
3 99 
on construction. How is memory constructed ? How does this construction ý ecome 
apparent to others ? Can it be ? Before you've constructed something It seems 
premature to consider cleconstructing it. 
'ýCu talk about something being 'not explicit', but I would argue that eVErything 
needs to be just that-. absolutely explicit, open, obvious. If something *is mplicit 
doesnt that simply mean that you are the only one who knows about it ?S louldnt 
your own process be explicit to others ? But it is more than words. The-e is a 
structural question here. The 'investigative process of making' will in, Mtably 
produce something that becomes 'the made' . 
If it is not then where does t le final 
work come from? So to ask 'should it be linked' seems to me tc be a 
misunderstanding of structure, or to be asking something else, which you ire not 
making explicit. When you ask should the process be linked to the rriý. cle my 
answer is yes, not as an opinion but as a principle, because it could not be 
otherwise. Which makes me wonder about the question. Do you see my prc blem ? 
Ard as you know I feel that the process should anticipate what this 'made' will be 
as little as possible. You can relate the process to the made after the event, but nct 
beforehand. So rather than 'sticking with the known' (your known ?)I would 
encourage the project to work with the unknown (your unkown ? ). The cliestion 
then becomes what is the starting point ? What is it that you dont know anc which 
the performance process will make known to you ? You also need a structtire that 
enables action to take place. I would argue that your image (man in bedr( om) is 
your projection of a possible outcome of the rehearsal process, but it ir, not a 
starting point, and it is not a structure. What is the 'crude' material here, th ý basic 
StUff with which you will work. You, the participants, the space you are wor<ing in, 
a OrT e from cand maybe (using memory) an idea of another place, the pl ce I have c 
maybe ? (to work with you). How will this internal become external ? OL 3stions 
like: what is the first thing you will say to the participants looking at you ? ýVhat is 
the first thing you / they will do ? What is on the ground between you ?) ou talk 
about the 'known'. Is this what you bring ? What does it consist of, this 'knov, n'. Do 
you put this before them ? How will you do this ? Do they also have 'k iowns, 
which they bring ? How will these be shared, explored ? What is your 'ur known' 
and what is theirs (the performance outcome ?) What is the structure that w 11 allow 
this to be explored and that will enable something to be constructed from it ? 
'rI-e 'performed product' and the 'analysis' are different ways of -looking at the 
same thing. The question is, what are you looking at ? BARRY 
400 
From: Self <VULCANIJFREEMAN> 
To:, Barry. Edwards@, brunel. ac. uk 
Subject: Re: The Work 
Date sent: Mon, 18 May 1998 13: 11: 47 +0100 
Barry, 
Thanks for your fax, which I've just read, and thanks for being so 
thorough. III respond as best and as honestly as I can. I found your 
responses really interesting and provocatiVe. I hope I can do them 
some justice. 
For me, it helps (maybe it hinders and I've misconstrued) to have an 
atmosphere, a notion of how I think the'thing'might feel: a place 
to start, a mood. Thafs what I mean, at the moment, when I speak of 
structure. Not how the piece will be, but where it starts, which is 
not the same place for me as it is the performers or spectators. The 
space I'm enetering with these performers is not empty, of course, we 
both know that, but for me there is also always (? ) a sense, not of where it's gomiil 
so much perhaps as where it starts thematically. So, I have notions 
of this thematics but none, as yet, of theatrics. I don't have, nor 
am I intending to have, a performance piece which is 'more or less 
complete be&e meeting the performers'. Part of it, I think, is that, 
prior to meeting and working with PEOPLE, all I have are notions. 
Perhaps those notions were stated in a way that made them seem rigid 
and fixed. 
The process is mine and theirs. A process of makmig 1 , which 
incorporates rather than excludes the pre-emptive 'stuff of thoughts 
I might have about directions the 'thmia'micaght move in. I have a.. 
disnclination towards certain 'types' oTperformance ... which moans that if I have a map at all it's a map of places I don't want to go. 
I am thinking of a type of melancholy, and that mood comes before the 
notion of memory played out in a rented room. The room gives me a 
concrete(ish) place to start In my head. A sense. I'm not writing 
performance text to take to Helsinki, although I have written words 
which I may or may not include in that which is created in my time 
with the group(s). You ask what will be the first thing I say to the 
gýoup I meet. I dodt know. Something about what I'm not looking for. 
Something about fmdmg ways of exploring their own memories, 
feelings, responses ... of what? 
To what? To the 'theme'of 
lonelMess. To an idea of someone, some group, some piece, some 
people, tying (or seeming as if they're tying? ) to locate 
themselves through their re-telling, re-remembering of an incident 
that never happened. Of having everything to say and no-one to say it 
401 
to, or of being witnessed and having nothing to say. 
You suggest that there should be no ambiguity, that I should be clear 
which process is involved. I think I'm using words too loosely, or 
else suggesting a closure that doesn't exist. Perhaps I am using 
structure' thematically and not as an articulation of HOW people 
create work (THESE people, THIS work). My image, of a man in a hotel 
bedroom, is not, for me, 'a projection of a possible outcome of the 
rehearsal process', but it IS one of the star-tini! points, even if I 
choose never to speak of it again. I carft delete it from my own 
consciousness. It's a tangible place for me to start in as much as I 
elflneT need or cling to, depending on one's perspective, some idea of 
a body in space, showinwnot showing something. 
TIt. I 
In 1erMS oT now the work gets made, I certainly expect the 
performers' own memories, or imagined rnemories., to play a part. 'Maybe 
- s"Mm. 1-11ing me is thils memor-y thing. I don't know if I'm 
he trawling through memory. You say- rightly. that the made can't I- 
I inv to separate, Iýrn Just as from the mak'ng. I'm not seek' 
concerned with the aesthetics of the product(7) a-, I am with the 
integriMT1 of the nrocess. I'm not anticinating cultural ancestrv 
in ways other than 'now fhese people respond to the NOW of making 
performance that in turn deals with the theme of memory. What is 
identity"? I don't know. Maybe that's what it is that I don't kr., %: 
and -v-., 'hjc1h tLhZ- performance process will make known A part of me wants 
work that tells secrets to strangers- 'Why? r, . 4, -n?, L 1,11-now. It sounUs 
iike a sort of catliarsis., but I don't really believe that. 
You say that'the process shouldAn I ticipate what the made will be a-, 
little as possible' ... you say that 
I can 'relate the process to the 
de aftzr evc-it, hut not beforehand'. I don't mean to be doing 
th"at. It feels. to me , is iifth- vd-, ch so , ds to m (hased on 
'nitial fax) as the'made'is in realitv (Somerfield 
notwithstanding! ) not. go much a. proiection of the product as a wav 
into MY process-, for better or worse I'm not seeing the product in 
terms of any specific images, but I am anticipating a tone, the hotel 
room thing concretises that tone for me.. enough to create a place for 
magination to star.. Now- how I tan into 
ý14FIR 
imagination-, is a 
TIr to 
.. n. guilty.. 1 think- of allov--mg the I 
f6stivals infim-ate too freely my thesis-relatedanalysis (I can 
hear you sayinp already that. the analysis TS the thesisi) and 
certainly that's the case with my nse of the term deconstniction, 
which fits more neatly into my spiel re the piece to festival 
orjRanisers than it does to my genume thought on the niece 
402 
I'm not sure about your comments regarding making the processes 
'absolutely explicit, open, obvious'. To whom? To you, certainly 
(when I have them), to any subsequent readers of the thesis, yes. But 
to those who view the piece" I'm less sure. To the performers? I 
don't know. How do I balance my processes with theirs? If I make that 
which I want explicit, how does that not shape their OVVTI lnLerests 
ý1- Vý r. -tui e) Ir - Q1 C? fiCif- their app. n pattern. Do you mean L proiaches to rny ow I 1-4. V- 1 4L LiiciL I LC. i-i ii!; C pCI-jU I jj.. tý t Li i-- -u I WU Iiii ik; k; i\ 
+1-4- 140 
-v Plightly 
. ý, - --j-- ,-ý 1-1 1-, . - 
+4f 
. ... ....... ........... 
-A 
That for me accommodates'wh2t's in it for there stiidents' Tbt-. v mnk-p 
work Thev give of themselves their own perforTmitive 
e7 It: ....... 1,1110,1-. OV. ne trie iT OW7. `; eca CtS 
the 
........... n%iT'P thn- 
nnk. 1-nx-v 
+ 1ý es 
m.,,, proiected('? ) mooci of melqncholl, 0 -. \I: lx! l-)e gnoken langi uqý! e 
the harrier (Arq. hlc. Finnish. Fnglisb etal) rather than the I-mdi, -e to commimication? All I know is that I can't deal with until it's 
done or is in the process of doing., and that I'll retiirn from 
--Mnk- q4t-ptighits ideas finistrations. challenges etc All of 
YvIoat air, I lonkmu aO Mayhe I won't knowuntil Isee it 
up aq much at the wa-V I'T11 100klesti-, ej, e-it 
to he How thp mtp. rnnIq (theperqnnnel thtý qnAve the 
time. the differences andsimilarites) hecome externalised into a 
stnictiire for workinLa. for making'? I don't know I helieve that the 
performers involved want to he there in order to mike wor. 
-; LZ ,: 1 '-. . .*;. . M. III%- V ISCII-C %- IIIILI VVIOCIt qf. kýv 
I ; ti ;VV 
PIA ^4: 47-, 47-r MýVqp f 
403 
Appendix Six 
404 
&- A At Last Signi 
It is here a book of good faith, reader. It warns you, right from the outset, that 
I here envisaged no end other than a domestic and private one. Here I in no 
way considered your interests, nor did I look to my own glory. Such a project 
lies beyond my powers. I have destined my book to serve as a certain comfort 
to my parents and friends: having lost me (which, indeed, they soon will) they 
will find here not a trace of my condition or humors, and thus will cherish 
more wholeheartedly and vividly the knowledge that they have had of me. 
Had it been a matter of seeking the world's favor, I would have adorned 
myself better, just as I would have presented myself in a more studied 
manner. I wish to be seen here in all my simplicity, quite natural and ordinary, 
without effort nor artifice: for it is myself that I paint. Insofar as respect for the 
public will allow, my flaws will be readily legible here as will my artless shape. 
For had I found myself amidst those nations that are said yet to live under the 
gentle freedom of the first laws of nature, I assure you that I would more than 
gladly have painted myself here in my entirety, and completely naked at that. 
Thus, dear reader, I am myself the subject of my book: it is not reasonable 
that you should squander your leisure on a subject so frivolous and vain. 
Montaigne, The First of March, 1580 
This is a piece about a group of people. 
This is where the piece begins. 
Some people can just look at what's in front of them and tell you what's 
happening. 
In a couple of years all trace of this is gone. As if it never happened. 
You need to imagine a type of pre-fabricated prosceniurn arch, over here. 
Fringed with heavy velvet drapes and lit chiefly from front and above. 
Awareness of memory. Always lost, seeking elsewhere for a half-invented 
past. Against better judgement. About time. Always about time. Age 
countered by dreams. Awkwardness smoothed through the thin veneer of 
lies. 
Before her. Back when she was no different to the rest. Blind to all that she 
would become. Borrowing images from strangers passing in the street. 
Begging gifts of love from loveless lips. Brushing dreams from waking eyes. 
Caught up in nothing. Consoled by fiction. Catching traced steps of the 
imagination. Carrying luggage in and out of rented rooms. Crying tears 
without substance. Careless, without care. 
Drunk on memory. Driven by a lost faith in one's own stories. Dreaming weary 
dreams. Draped across a foreign bed where light falls everywhere without 
escape. 
Every time is now her time. Each memory is of her. Even in sleep. Even in the 
arms of others. Emptiness, like silence. Echoes of all that was. - 
Finding solace in loss. Feeling better in the feeling worse. Forgetting not to 
remember. Frightened of the present. Fantasising wildly, uncontrollably. 
Forging a false past. 
40 
-5 
Glimpses of a might-have-been. Glances misconstrued. Grieving for a never- 
really-was. Growing older through the search for past. Gambling the present 
against the never-losing past. Gladdened by sadness. 
Hotel rooms visited and left. Half-things. Half-lost. Half-real. Hoping for 
something. Hiding from truth. Hearing whispers through walls. 
I listen to the waves of never. I confess lies to strangers. I barter loneliness 
for lines of text. In rented rooms. Imagined places. Inside the worlds of others. Just her. Journeys only to the place she is. Jumbled images of truth and false. Joining memory with wish. Judging others by her borrowed perfection. 
Jealous of happiness. 
Killing time with talk. Keeper of a long-dead flame. Kidnapper of words. Kisser of forgotten mouths. 
Liar. 
Important things: 
Jake's secret Will Smith dance. 
Good coffee 
Journeys through night-lit cities. 
The pseudonyms 'Bohemian Brown' and 'Lovelace Rocksavage 
Danielle's deep sleep. 
Photographs of parents, young and not yet quite unhappy. 
Whispered secrets. 
Made-up lives. 
Lipsticked mouths and half-sad eyes. 
Low art. Credit cards and soft-soled shoes. 
Community shopping. 
Frankie Dettori. Belmondo. Sinatra. 
Backless dresses. Edible underwear. Pinkie rings. 
The Little Audrey. Microphoned voices. Black ink. 
New York City. Madrid. Monte Carlo. Casablanca. Spectacles. The nape of 
her neck. Asparagus. Gianluca's white shirt. Hopper's diner. The park in 
central Lisbon. Puzzling evidence. Steve McQueen's great bike. Voting 
membership of an immoral world. Tom Waits. Sleeping through Kubrick. 
Sleeping through Stoppard. 
Recreational drugs. Out of control and falling. Faith in doubt. Sea. Sky. 
Bricks. Imaginery landscapes. Armageddon. Voices heard through hotel 
walls. Architecture. Widescreen television. The Marlboro Man. The mystery of 
fax. Milk. The nation's favourite song lyric. All letter with photographs 
answered. Early exits. Sleeping on your side of the bed. Physiotherapy. 
President Kennedy Comprehensive School. The colour blue. Those pale 
leather gloves. Your exhibition of shoes. Cashmere. Ou est la plage? The 
death of music hall. Ellen Barkin in 'The Sea of Love'. Jan Saudek. 
Duchamp's vial of air. 
One hundred and thirty along the M4. 
A grandmother's tea. Escape. Departing guests. The pleasure of forgetting. 
Soft fruit. The pewter nude. Mauri's band. 
Mohamed's apartment. Black and white film. 
Not knowing what it is that he's building in there. 
406 
1) 
I say these words: 
Sit there and say nothing to me. Not yet. 
And, listen. 
There are things I have wanted to say 
Although I wonder, perhaps, whether these words are the best ones I can 
choose to speak my thoughts, 
Whether these words are enough to keep you listening. 
Sit there, say nothing, and I can imagine you are listening. 
A listener. A listener to my voice. 
My voice needs to be listened to tonight. 
The words I choose to speak need to be heard. 
Je porte le jean blues et une chemise clarte en coleur. 
Je suis nu-pieds. Je fembrace. Je decris notre avenir. 
Je te montre les cicaturices sur mon corps, je mets tes mains sur ma paitrine. 
Je faits des promets. 
Je ne veux que ce que tu veut me donner. 
Je te dernande a aublier mon passe. 
Old paint. On canvas. As it ages. Sometimes becomes transparent. When 
that happens. It is possible, in some pictures. To see the original lines. A 
portrait shows through a landscape. A tree will show through a woman's 
dress. Black lines will bleed dark through the faces of saints. 
That is called. Pentimento. 
Because the painter is repenting. Changing his mind. 
Perhaps, it would be as well to say, that the old conception, replaced by a 
later choice, is a way of seeing, and then of seeing again. Of second sight 
and second chances. 
Dans le cadeau de la mernoire qu'on ouvre, la chanson des portes qui ne 
sont pas ouvertes. 
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. 
When I came upon the diary it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered 
manila cardboard box. Someone, perhaps it had even been myself, had filled 
it with treasures dating, it seemed, from my own youth: some negatives rolled 
up in a tight coil; a vial of water; held tightly in a rubber band; a pack of 
playing cards, red-backed with images of semi-naked women on the front; 
four lines of text on yellowed card: 
But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers, 
The bright blue sky and velvet sod 
Were strange conductors to the bowers 
Thy daring footsteps must have trod 
407 
... a small 
combination lock with three rows of letters, worn flat and illegible; a 
petrol cigarette lighter, long-smoothed by smoker's hand, and one or two 
ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once 
apparent: unsilvered glass, framed as a mirror; a fragment of what looked like 
a white cotton shirt, smelling faintly of the sea. 
The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the 
patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time in a long time, or 
perhaps for the first ever time, a recollection of what each must have meant 
to me came back, faint as a whispered voice heard through a wall or as a 
face seen through the window of a passing train, but as perceptible, as 
known. The children of the past were presenting themselves to me, and as I 
held them in my hands I knew them all. Only the diary refused to disclose its 
identity. And how could I know of whom its secrets speak if I could not be 
sure whose hand had guided the pen that wrote the words? How could I know 
how to feel if the memories contained in the book were other than my own? 
Or if any of that which was written, which my eye passed over, had been the 
product of invention rather than experience? 
My first impression was that it was a present someone had brought me from 
abroad, from Morocco, perhaps, or from Spain. A gift from someone non- 
existent. The shape, the lettering, the dark limp leather curling upwards at the 
corners, gave it a foreign look, and it had, I could see, gold edges. I did not 
want to touch it and told myself that this was because it challenged my 
memory. i knew why i distrusted it, as I knew that my distrust was born of 
fear. I looked away and it seemed to me that every object in the room exhaled 
the diary's enervating power, and spoke its message of disappointment and 
defeat. 
I felt, with a bitter blend of self-pity and self-reproach, that had it not been for 
the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be different. I should 
not be here, sifting where the curtains were not even drawn to hide the cold 
rain beating on the windows, or contemplating the accumulation of the past 
and the duty it imposed on me. Nor should I be here, telling secrets to 
strangers. I should be sifting in another room, rainbow-hued, or blue, blue- 
walled, looking not into the past but into the future, and I should not be sitting 
alone. 
And now. You watch me while I'm dressing, applying make-up. You see me 
here, in front of you, in public, on display. Am I becoming someone else? 
Are 
my lips painted red for you? Is this done for your gaze? 
You see me. I am known to some of you. The words I am speaking are not my 
own. They tell you little. They are nothing more than a series of. words. 
They 
are words without gender. I have gender. They are words In 
English ... 
but 
you see, now they are words in German, in Spanish, in Finnish, 
in French. 
The words describe themselves and they describe a situation: 
I am standing 
here in front of you and I can speak. Do these words 
describe or do they 408 
A 
deceive? If I dress myself in someone else's clothes, if I take another's name, 
if I speak in an accent or language other than my own. If I convince you of the 
fullness of an empty cup. If I cut my throat with an empty hand, if I cry 
because of some imagined pain? 
Even when it's different. It always starts like this. 
With a world not listening to nothing to hear. 
When, on this night, like any other, 
In this place, 
Silent, witnessed, watched, 
We are wakened by dreams too sad for sleep. 
Two unspoken questions, written in the steam of bathroom mirrors and in 
blood on bedroom walls: 
Why does the ocean taste of tears? 
And is a woman who disappears and is remembered 
More in the present than a lonely man? 
The colour of light. The scent of battle or of love. The taste of wine. The trace 
of perfume on a long-discarded shirt. 
The memory begins in a room. A room made only partly visible through 
dimmed stage-lighting. A room of the imagination. A room made of words and 
of objects and of light. 
It's hours before that. Leaning in the half-light of a hallway, against a 
whitewashed wall, thumbing through the pages of a borrowed book, 
paperback or hardback, fact or fiction, it doesn't matter ... 
it's just a book. 
Listening to things half-heard and not quite yet remembered. 
What does the man do? 
He enters through an upstage door. 
He washes in the water. She comes to him and sits and watches. 
She tells him that the magic of new love, is his ignorance that it can ever end. 
What does he see? 
He sees her. On a boat. 
She's 
... out at sea. He's telling her more than he ever dreamed he'd dare. 
He tells her that his heart speaks with a foreign tongue. 
He abandons all sense. He gives himself over to the momen t, loving her 
completeness and the way her face is captured in a shaft of light and the way 
she sits, erect and unashamed and self-composed. 
He wants to look at her forever; to hold this image of her here with him. 
409 
He wants to listen to her speak until all other sounds recede; he wants to use 
words he has never used before, to speak them fresh into her own ears and 
to her lips. 
He sees her framed between the shoreline and the sea: the breeze caressing 
her; the salt-spray moistening her hair. He sees her as all men see her and 
he sees himself as foolish and afraid. 
He wants to touch her. He wants to lie down beside her in a hotel room where 
all are seen as strangers. He wants his words to travel into her. He wants her 
to see the way he sees her. 
He recalls Luis Bunuel's words, not knowing their truth: "You have to begin to 
lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what 
makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all .... 
Our memory is our 
coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are 
nothing. " And he wonders what happens when invented memories become 
believed; and he wonders whether what he remembers ever took place; and 
he wonders whether the present without the past has no future; and he 
wonders whether the dead have the power to remember. 
Lost, isolated, mournful, melancholic, weary, riddled with barely reallsed 
yearnings, awkward, alone, lost within the whisper of her voice, the languor of 
her smoke-plume, her enigma, her sadness and dignity, within his own 
inability to cry and mean it, within the past as present, as lost magic, as tired 
hope, in the recollection of the time when ail the time was slow, slow cigarette 
smoke, slow nights and music, slow lights, slow heels, slow clothes, slow 
bodies, time slowed down to nearly still. Slow. 
The moment of love's conception as the beginning of the world. Nostalgia as 
the afterglow of love. Loneliness as foreplay. 
These are the facts. The details. All of the words have been spoken before. 
And this: this is the story. 
Once upon a time in Europe, towards the end of a century. At a once-upon-a- 
time of endings and beginnings. Beneath the sea. Between that heaven and 
this earth, and passion and pain. Somewhere between desire and death. 
She, the woman, sees the world in all its colours. All its mountains and its 
trees. All its houses and its fields and all its people. All its lovers. Fucking in 
doorways and dying in each other's arms. Checking into rooms and checking 
Out with secrets still intact. Undressing each other in bedrooms and in 
kitchens and in elevators and on trains. Stealing kisses behind locked doors. 
Looking at the other as she or he still sleeps. 
She sees all the not-yet lovers. Those who know and those who 
love will 
startle when they're least aware. She sees the lonely and the left-behind. 
Sees the masturbators and the fantasists. The celibate by accident and 
choice. She sees the young and beautiful and sees the old. in every 
drop of 
410 
I- 
) 
water, she sees happiness and misery. She hears every whispered word and 
knows the truth to every lie. She sees the living and the dead and those not 
born. She sees the flags of every country, every war and every corpse. She 
stands beside soldiers in trenches and mothers at graves. She reads the last 
thoughts of the condemned man and sees the bomb that ends the world. 
She sees each grain of sand, each pebble, every blade of grass and brick 
and pane of glass and every film in every cinema in every town across the 
world. She sees the men and women that she's loved, and places them in 
order, according to their worth. She sees mistakes made and rectified. Battles 
won and lost. Hearts and countries conquered and lain bare. She sees the 
lifelessness of every planet, but her own. 
She crosses towards him. 
What's she wearing? 
You would like to see her? 
She's wearing blue jeans and a light in colour shirt. 
She's barefoot and her hair is wet from either the sea or rain. 
She has the eyes of the woman on the Nine of Hearts. 
She lies beside him on the bed and tells him of her dreams. 
When I sleep, she whispers, I imagine myself as older. Looking back on my 
life. At the same time as I live it. 
I see myself smoking a cigarette in a narrow doorway leading out onto the 
shore. I see myself reflected in a mirror with a wooden frame, being kissed 
and touched by strangers. I see myself undressing slowly. I see myself 
floating aimless in a sun-warmed sea. I see myself in a car at night as it 
drives through cities and through a thousand miles of empty road. I see 
myself drunk on magic wine that leaves no ache and Tequila sipped from a 
man's cupped palms. 
He stops her. He asks her to remember Montpellier. To think of the flat in 
Scotland; the bed and no breakfast in hotels with fading once-blue paper on 
the walls. The night the policeman watched them make love. 
She tells him that her dreams are video. That she dreams their lives as film 
fast-forwarded and paused at will. 
He moves around her. He's drinking in the scent of her; he's feasting on her. 
He wants her to remember how it was with them. He sees the way she 
moves, the way she chooses what to wear, the way she sleeps when she's 
alone. He sees the way she's looked at by men and he sees her indifference. 
He sees the way she carries herself. He sees the loneliness she never shows 
and hears the tears that fall. He sees the way her body shines in water. He 
sees her hands. He sees the way her clothes caress her body where they 
touch. He sees the space she leaves when she departs. 
She sees the death and life of his own passion. She sees his age; his 
eMptiness; his regrets and his remorse. His endless hope. She sees 
his lips 
move as they speak her name. She reads the words he writes 
her. She 
411 
7 
touches her hair where it brushes her face and she steps back from the 
window and into the darkness of their room. She wants to touch the walls. To 
feel the size of the room, to know the limits of their world. She wants to tell 
him that she understands, that if this is all they have then it's enough, that 
love is taken where it's found and that wishes are the enemy of fate. 
She wants to stay forever in this rented room, this place of paid for by the 
night, to hear nothing but their breathless words and the sounds of their own 
bodies where they touch and the rain against the glass and in where the 
window won't close and the sea as it crashes and roars. 
He's crying. His hand goes to his mouth as if the tears were words. 
The man lights a cigarette, striking his match against the wall and shielding 
the flame with his hand. He moves closer to the woman, whispers, touches 
her face. She walks towards him. She's remembering the feelings she 
thought she'd forgotten. She's reeling. She tells him as much truth as she 
knows. She's wearing the dress from Montpellier and the sky outside is dark. 
The man lights a cigarette, striking the match against the wall and shielding 
the flame with his hand. He moves closer to the woman, whispers, touches 
her face. The cigarette is burning his fingers. 
He's too close. She can't breathe. She feels herself fall. He catches her. He 
catches her before she falls. 
And somewhere, a pretty young French girl is getting ready to meet her 
boyfriend. French girls are the cleanest in the world. And down there maybe 
one of those poor girls without husbands, who have to do all kinds of things 
to make ends meet, will be leaning against a wall. Midgets and dwarves like 
to have sex too, but she'll cut them down to size. I know enough about the 
Parisians to know that they are among the most uninhibited in the entire 
world. 
There is a small apartment, by some ramshackle houses, and a young gIrl is 
sunbathing. Honestly ... a girl 
just can't get any privacy around here. All those 
voyeurs getting their kicks watching innocent young girls just trying to relax. 
And somewhere, a pretty young French girl is getting ready to meet her 
boyfriend, or someone else's husband. French girls are among the cleanest 
in all the world. Maybe she's a poor girl, just sunbathing. Sunbathing in front 
of all you voyeurs. 
Les acteurs ressuscitent les gestes et les mots qui furent ceux 
des 
personnages perdurant dans la memoire d'une homme qui, il, est encore 
de 
ce cote-ci du monde. 11 essaiera de les rejoindre. Mais on ne rejoint pas 
les 
Morts. 
41' 
He smiles awkwardly at her, reddens and turns away, so that she might 
van, ish. But she stays where she is and says to the wall, I don't know what 
you're saying. Can we not talk about it anymore. Please. Not another word. 
Okay? ly 
"Quiet", he had told her. And: "Try to sleep. " And he had known then that he 
would fall in love with her every minute, every second, over and over again, 
for all of his life. And his body grows cold in the evening chill of the hotel 
room, as he lies back in the darkness of the bed they shared. 
Nights in unfamiliar rooms. Days spent waiting in pavement bars. A train 
compartment. The night train to someplace unknown. Somewhere between 
the glamour and the garbage, amongst the search for perfect moments. We 
are running out of time. 
And the lights are flashing, Do Not Disturb. And the radio is screaming, Do 
Not Disturb. And there are flowers in the flower beds, and there are flowers in 
the vase and there are photographs in frames long-cracked, and there was a 
woman walking barefoot in an evening dress, and there was a woman who 
could sleep through continents, and there was a woman who sang, and there 
was a woman who always knew the words to every song, and there was a 
woman who always knew how to laugh. And there were cold walls on warm 
nights. And breezes through the open windows, and tears for no reason at all. 
And an unwritten note, which would have said, How can you begin to forgive 
me, if you cannot understand? 
And: 
How can you forgive me if you cannot understand? 
And: We know nothing. Nothing at all. 
And: The heart is fallible and the world chaotic. 
And: How can you forgive me if you cannot understand? 
And the cigarette we shared and smoked so low it burned our lips. And the 
mistral and the thunderstorm. And the shirt of yours she loved to wear. And 
the journeys from home to here. And the reflections in the window-pane and 
in the mirror with no frame. 
And the sound of the sea. 
And the dark of the night. 
And cities we've driven through and know we'll never see again. And the sea. 
And the night. And the search for meaning, like the search for faces in the 
fire. And the business of frightened desires. And the certain knowledge that 
our pasts, are also always our futures. And the two of us. Together, in this 
room. 
She says: No. 
And she says: Now and forever. 
She says: All that I can I shall make real. 
She says: This four-walled world of ours. How can it be big enough for you? 
1 33 
9 
The first thing for her was the loss of her voice. Unable to speak, she was left 
with everything to say. With no means of making herself heard, she knew at 
last both the power and the impotence of words. The first thing for her was 
the loss of her voice. 
The first thing for her was the loss of her breath. This was like the time when, 
as a child, she, surrounded by her friends, had spun around and around and 
then been squeezed tightly while she let her limbs go limp until at last she 
had collapsed to the ground. This was like the time she had woken with her 
own hands at her throat. this was like the time that she had choked on dust. 
The first thing for her was the loss of her breath. 
The first thing for her was the loss of her strength. Like being carried by a 
crowd, like hypnosis, like drunkenness, like weightlessness, like clouds. 
Without control, not even of will, not even of thought, not even of hope. 
The last thing for her was the loss of her hope. 
And these are words, written at a desk to be spoken much later, in another 
country, in another voice. And these words are written in English. And these 
words are chosen ... selected. 
Black shapes on a screen for eyes to follow 
and mouths to speak. And is writing eight parts memory or invention? And is 
art a lie that tells the truth? And why do we choose to share our secrets with 
people we don't know? And who, of those who listen, cares at all? And who 
understands? And in the speaking and the writing of the past, I re-shape the 
way things were. Structure the present from the wreckage of the past. Pick 
over the bones of the dead, like carrion. Dig up the corpse of text and give it 
life. Put words in other people's mouths. Speak now those words iong-gone, if 
ever they were here at all. Make lies of truth. Place people in a half-invented 
room. Throw light against walls and faces. Trust to words and sight. 
Et ce sont les mots, ecrits au bureau pour etre parles plus tard, clans un autre 
pay, clans un autre voix. Et ces mots sont ecrits en Anglais. et ces mots sont 
Choisis, selectionnes. les Formes noirs sur 1'ecran pour les yeux a suivre et 
les bouches a parler. Je mets les mots clans les bouches des autres. Je 
fabrique des de la verite. 
Well, you said. You look beautiful. 
You saw her blush. Through the skin and through the make-up. She smiled. 
As if she did not expect you to say that, 
but was pleased that you did. 
She said, 
Well thanks. 
And then she started talking, the words rushing out of her, everything coming 
too fast, too hurried, too rushed. 
414 
10 
I thought I would get dressed up, she said. I thought I would have my hair cut 
and fix my face and put on something pretty and just go out. Just take a walk 
around the world. 
is it still raining? She asked. Is the rain still failing into the sea? And if it never 
rained again would the sea dry up? Would the corpses of fish and people rise 
up to the earth and could we walk across the world? 
Who is she? 
You want to see her? 
She is a naked woman bathing at nightfall. 
She is a sphere with several reflections. 
She is the deepest river and the deeper sea. 
She is the scent of chaos. 
She is the place where darkness grows light and where the light fades out to 
black. 
We see the room of the imagination. The self-portrait three times denied. The 
photograph remembered. The messages written in steam. 
We see the way the world spins slowly and the fast cars crawl. We are in the 
cafe, with the never-ending drink. We are holding an unbeatable hand as we 
play for high stakes. We are swimming in the crystal sea and in the heated 
pool. We are riding motorcycles in the sand. 
Untold numbers are dying, violently, or in sleep as we speak. Millions more 
are in pain. Still more are making love. 
Do our actions affect the movement of the stars through the sky? 
Who would weep for me but you and who for you but I? 
She asks him then: 
Are there more broken hearts than stars in the sky? 
Do those same stars know their names? 
And who among us has never known love? 
Who else has stared unseeing into the night? 
Ce spectacle porrait etre un hymne a la difference, une cartographie des 
frontieres quaucun etat ne pourra abolir; car I'autre quel qu'il soit, ne sera 
jamais tout a fait notre semblable. 
It's raining. We undress ourselves and swap our clothes. We remember 
reading somewhere that you can know a person by their clothes and by their 
favourite book and film and by the way they walk. That to see and know these 
four small things is to understand it all. And so we change our clothes and 
alter now the way we walk. And, leaning differently against the wall ... we now 
replay the past. 
A default d'eveiller les consciences et de changer le monde, nous livrons 
notre emotion. Ceci etant notre, dernier don interesse au monde. 
41-7, 
-. I 
it's raining and the sky is black. It's 2 a. m. it's in a room, some hotel room 
beside the sea. You're looking in a mirror and you can see him lying on the 
bed. He's naked. He's dressed. He's dressed. he says something to you 
which you only half-hear. He crosses to the window, lights two cigareftes, 
takes one to you. He kisses you. He tries to kiss you and you turn away. It's 
warm. The sun's shining. He takes off his jacket, then his shirt. It's raining. 2 
a. m. A hotel room. It's earlier, downstairs. It's 1 a. m. it's midnight. It's earlier 
and you're breaking things, you're breaking things while other people watch. 
it's 2 a. m. You go outside. It's raining as if the world is upside down and now 
the sea is sky. It's 2 a. m. 
Ne fumes pas depuis toujours irremediablement etranger parmi les autres, 
nous qui jusqu'au fond du souvenier demeurons etranger a nous-memes? 
She says: nothing you could ever say could hurt me. And I won't come after 
you, not now, not ever. And she says: this is who I am. And this is who I am. 
And lying to me won't alter the truth. And lying to others won't alter the truth. 
And I used to love you. And every moment that we spent together in this 
place was wrong. And I should go down to the water and I should wash 
myself clean of you. And there are things I've seen and done that you could 
never know about or even imagine or draw a picture of inside your mind. And 
these are my hands. And I loved you more than you loved me. And I loved 
you more, so much more, than you loved me. And don't think I'm coming to 
find you. And you're making me tired. Just stop it with these games, alright? 
In the time of the best times she wore your shirts and slept in the sun that fell 
across the room. In the time of the best times she spoke of the artist who died 
like a crucified Christ, naked and covered in snow. In the time of the best 
times she could wash your body with her tears and drink cheap red wine from 
plastic boftles. In the time just before the very best time she told you each 
one of her secrets ... whispered 
them all into your ear during one long night 
and by the time the morning came you knew her absolutely. In the time when 
the best time came you weren't ready. In the time you remember best of all 
she used to stand naked in shadows. But this you only half-remember. 
The half-remembered best times took place in what was probably, or 
possibly, a hotel room. 
What's he wearing? 
You wish to see him? 
He's wearing blue jeans and a light in colour shirt. 
He's barefoot. He holds her. He describes their future. 
He asks her to forget his past. 
He shows her the scars on his body; he places her hand on his chest. He 
makes promises, 
He wants only from her that which she is willing to give. 
He tells her he is so lost in her beauty. 
416 
2 
He falls. 
You're packed and just about ready to leave. Sifting on an unmade bed in a 
fresh dress and humming slightly out of breath and out of tune to the radio. 
You have pulled apart the heavy hotel drapes to let in our last sight of sun. 
You have said that there are no clouds and that you've never seen a sky so 
blue. 
I carry your suitcase downstairs and we embrace in the hall. a white 
Mercedes taxi waits. I worry that I'm holding you too tight. 
One hundred and fifty black and white photographs give the woman flesh and 
blood. The same watch in all the pictures. Five rings on four fingers. 
Silhouetted against the shoreline. Sleeping in unidentifiable countries. In 
cafes and bars, at airports and bus terminals. With companions or without. 
If this is love, she asks him, why do we not touch? Why are you crippled by 
description, like a voyeur who sees language through half-closed curtains? 
Why do we hide from that which we write, from that which we speak? 
Because words can cross the room to touch you. Because these words are 
gifts for you. Because I can write and speak you naked. Because we can 
shape disorder into paragraphs and chapters, into scenes. Because I can 
write the way you raise your arms to brush your hair back from your face. 
Because I can speak the way your hair is different from the time before. 
Because words can explore every inch of you. Because what else will remain 
when the sea has consumed us? Because of the perfection of your throat. 
Because your wrists are so slender. Because I mean at least a part of what I 
say. Because of cool rooms on warm nights. Because of silver jewellery 
against your skin. Because I am a slave to your beauty. Because these words 
are the confessions of my heart. 
Staring into the darkness above the bed. Hearing age whispering about me. 
Dreaming unfulfilled dreams. Seeing my children by appointment. Turning up 
to catch a fleeting glimpse of all that was and ever will remain. I move within 
the orbit of my woman's light. Wanting only, seeking only to know the 
difference between tears and rain. Trying never to forget that beauty is rarely 
if ever found in the defeat of our expectations, but in the joy that they were 
ever there at all. In the beauty of hope. 
The smell and look and feel and taste of you. The remembering of you. May it 
always extinguish each and every light in my mind and teach me, to wait again 
until my senses learn to see once more into the dark. 
You wanted to touch her. But you feared her sarcasm, her bitterness, her 
denial and her contempt. And she was singing. Not quite in tune and at not 
quite the right pitch. But you listened because she made the words sound 
like 
41- 
3 
her own and because her singing another man's words were the closest she 
could come to an explanation of the workings of her heart. 
All those dreams that seemed so important, 
Well, mister, they vanished right into the air, 
Now I act like I don't remember and Mary acts like she don't care. 
But I remember us driving in her brother's car 
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir. 
At night on them banks I'd lie awake, 
And hold her close, just to feel each breath she'd take. 
Now those memories come back to haunt me, 
They haunt me like a curse. 
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true? 
Or is it something worse? 
And the words reminded you of different words. Words similar but not the 
same, that you had sung along to on the soon-to-be-torn-out-radio in a stolen 
car as you had gripped and held on tightly to the dashboard as the friend you 
haven't seen for oh, it must be thirteen, fourteen years now drove drunkenly 
out into the night of some strange, long-forgotten city you spent all those 
years in. 
And she started to cry. 
And lean into you. 
You took the glass from her hand and put it on the table. 
She cried. Full of her pain and her loneliness. And you put your arm around 
her and moved her so that she was facing you, her cheek against your chest 
and your arms around her, and she kicked off her shoes and curled her legs 
up on the too-small couch and you held her. Until after a while she said you 
were the only one in the world who cared for her. 
Elle a crie. Plein de sa douler et sa solitude, vous avez s'embrace. en la 
tournant en face de vous. sa joue sur sa potrine. Et vos bras autour de lui. 
You said that it was hard to call her by her name and she said that then you 
should call her something else. 
Call me Arabella, she said. I will be Arabella and you can be ... 
Paris. 
Her mascara was smeared by her tears. 
Hi, Arabella. When did you arrive in this hotel room? 
Well, she said, I just got off a train. I came all the way from nowhere to 
be 
with you. 
Nice to meet you, Arabella. 418 
14 
I am pleased to meet you, Paris. I hope you are not already taken. I hope you 
are 
' 
not already in love with someone else. With somebody else. With some 
other woman. 
Hell, 
you said. 
I just have never met the right girl. 
Listen, 
she said. 
What have you got that shirt on for? It's too hot in here. In this room with the 
rain on the outside of the glass. You have no need for this shirt. All these 
buttons. What do you need them for? 
She told you that your skin was smooth, and the fear inside you came right up 
to your neck. You mumbled something, started to speak. 
She said, 
hush now, Paris. You hear? 
She took you by the hand and led you over to the bed. You went to where 
she took you. Did what she did. 
You should look at me, she said. You should look at me, and speak my name. 
Arabeiia, 
you said. 
And you watched her. As she undressed in the rented room. 
Arabella. 
There is nothing to worry about, Paris. The door's locked. There's nothing to 
worry about. 
Yes, Arabella. I understand. 
She said she wanted to know everything about you. And she asked you: 
"What do you believe in? " And she asked you: "How do you love? " And you 
answered her. 
The rain fell steadily. There were sounds from the sky and from the street and 
there were also the sounds from the sea. 
All things lost in the time it takes to turn a corner, or a page, or in the briefest 
blinking of an eye. 
Do you want to see me? 
I'm wearing blue jeans and a light in colour shirt. 
I'm barefoot. I hold you. I describe our future. 
I ask you to forget my past. 
I show you the scars on my body, I place your hand on my chest. I make 
promises. 
I want only from you that which you are willing to give. 
Through the thin-ness of the walls we heard people speak. 
Sssh, you said. Listen. And together you had listened to a man's voice: 
My dear I'm just immersing myself in early Mailer: not his recent stuff of 
Course, so pass6. And ... 
I'm finding this populist avant-gardism increasingly 
419 
5 
tiresome. And ... then 
I dropped in at the danceteria and well apart from the 
beautiful people there was this brilliant, totally beautiful guy standing 
absolutely still to an operatic soundscape. And. Have you heard about this 
wonderful new group-show out of God knows where? Painters a la Magritte 
who take all the characters from every Wirn Wenders film, jumble them up 
with some shaky high-grain Bill Viola and have them tumbling through a 
chopped up Hockney-montage. It's a real pre-millennium neo-nostalgia trip. 
I'm telling you, you'd love it. 
And she said. Frankly I can't keep up with all this post- postmod e rn ity. But at 
the same time I so love the state of knowing-not-knowingness. Darling. He 
said. You sweet innocent. Don't you know that inesspressionismo was last 
year's thing? 
You heard the click of their light switch through the wall without knowing 
whether it was going on or off, and you turned to her and said. Who is less 
real, those owners of voices through the wall or you and I? And would we 
know those peo I by sight? And which one of them loves the other most? 
And do they mak7love in the dark or light? And do they have secrets? And 
are their bodies touching now? And what colour are her eyes? And if voices 
had colours what colour would mine be? And how long after seeing you did It 
take me to care? And do you think their characters are logical? And do they 
move their hands before or after words? And whose position holds the status 
in the room? And whose eyes flicker most during speech? And how and when 
did they arrive and when will they leave and who will outlive the other? 
Enough of that. I remember lying on your bed and watching you dress. I 
remember drinking the perfect secret drink you made for me. The dress you 
wore was black and clung like paint. I told you you were beautiful and you 
smiled. The room smelled of our bodies and I knew then that I would always 
love you. 
I'm watching you dress. The room smells of you. I know that I'll always love 
either the memory of you or love remembering you or remember how it felt to 
love you. 
And she said. I remember being pressed by you against the cold hard wall of 
a railway bridge. I stood against you as you touched me. I kissed your face 
and breathed your name. Your hands were soft and hard on me. I still can 
smell the air and the sex and the sweet sharp leather of the collar of your 
coat. 
And 
... 
I remember nights we didn't sleep. A computer-game of football that 
you cheated on. Records we kept playing on the juke box in our favourite and 
special bar. I remember failing to the forest floor and felling every tree we 
loved and leant against. 
And you told her. I remember you on my shoulders as high as the sun. 
The 
lapping of the low waves and the plans we made. I see your 
beauty framed 
4-'() 
16 
against the evening light. The sorrow of your dark dreams and all the 
pleasures still to come. I taste the softness of your sleeping mouth. Hear the 
life'Work of your heart. 
And. In the speaking of it. He looks in the mirror and sees a child of seven, of 
twelve, a middle-aged man. A cadaver. Sees empty rooms off endless 
corridors. Grey waves, white foam, rocks and photographs of friends long 
gone. He sees a road which leads down to the shore. Sees everything 
through the wooden, whitened frame of a hotel bedroom window. Sees a 
tattoo of a heart and sword. An unmade bed. a cigarette end reddened by her 
lips. 
She comes towards him. He hides his face. She whispers to him, takes his 
hand. They kiss. He faints. She catches him. She feels a sorrow far too deep 
for words. 
I love you. Are my lips lying to you? Could my mouth ever lie to yours? 
You're seeing her from across the room. You're seeing the way her rain-wet 
hair fails on her neck and throat. You're seeing the way she takes a cigarette 
from some half-hidden place about her waist and lights it with a lighter you 
can't see. You're seeing her. Walking through the snow. You're seeing snow 
on her hair and on her flesh. You're seeing the vapours that she leaves from 
nose and mouth. You're seeing her in a crowded place: a market place one 
weekend morning in the spring. You're watching her as she walks and 
searches, face turned mostly to her left: her hair has been cut and she's 
wearing a scarf and brown flat leather boots. She buys fruit. And a second- 
hand book in paperback. She sees you: the book is a present for you: she 
gives it to you and you sit down. At a stall, a coffee stall. You have regular 
coffee and she has ... and she 
has. She has a double-espresso. She has a 
double espresso and the stall smells of Italy and Africa. 
You can feel her here now. Beside you on the bed. Lying here with you and 
her face is touching yours and together you watch breath steam from your 
mouths and there is rain outside and on the glass and some comes in 
through where the window does not close and your bodies are heavy, like 
stones and you can only move your arms and you whispered something to 
her in a foreign language and she turned to kiss you and the radio was tuned 
in to the long wave and your bodies were tan and you could see the palest 
line on her skin from the wearing of her wristwatch. 
There was. A smell of coffee and the sound of traffic from the street and on 
the wall behind the bed were framed photographs in black and white of 
people you had never known. And her body grew light. And she rolled on top 
of you. She spoke in some Italio-Spanish tongue and you could understand 
her and she placed a filterless cigarette against your lips and lit it 
for you from 
a bookmatch. And you blew smoke above her breasts while she looked at you 
and she moved against you and you made love so slowly that no ash 
fell. 
42 1 
17 
And who among them, she had said once, pointing through the window. 
Ampng us, ever stops, ever pauses to read the paper bills that the council 
sticks to buildings due for demolition or development? 
Who among us. Does not inhabit a zone for forgetting and another one we 
use to re-invent our pasts? 
Who desires strangers? 
Who has made love on the concrete floors and walls of car parks? 
Who is anonymous 100 metres from home? Who has gone a day without 
speaking? Who has killed a day by counting cars? 
Who among us has seen their city at dawn? From the air? Through the 
windscreen of a stolen car? Through tears? 
In a cafe full of late-summer light, you celebrated what you knew would be the 
closest thing to a goodbye glimpse of us by drinking as if to will the walls to 
collapse in on our ash-stained, wine-stained table. Without a thought for the 
candle flame that would surely die as the board and plywood left the 
doorframes and the windowsills and dropped to the floor with a gasp of paint 
and mirror-glass that ate into our lungs. 
You are packed and just about to leave. Sifting on the unmade bed in a fresh 
dress and humming slightly, out of breath and out of tune with the radio. You 
have pulled apart the heavy hotel drapes to let in our last sight of sun. You 
have said that there are no clouds and that you have never seen so blue a 
sky. I carry your suitcase down and we embrace in the hall. I worry that I'm 
holding you tight and let you go. 
It's raining. We undress ourselves and swap our clothes. We remember 
reading somewhere that you can know a person by their clothes and by their 
favourite book and film and by the way they walk. That to know these four 
small things is to understand it all. 
It's raining and the sky is black. It's two a. m. It's in a room, some hotel room 
beside the sea. You're looking in a mirror and you can see him lying on the 
bed. He is naked. No. He's dressed. He's dressed. He says something to you, 
which you only half hear. He crosses to the window. Lights two cigarettes, 
and takes one to you. He kisses you. He tries to kiss you and you turn away. 
It's warm. So he takes off his jacket, then his light in colour shirt. It's raining. 
Two a. m. A hotel room. It's earlier. What time is it? It's two a. m. It's midnight. 
She says. Nothing you could ever say could hurt me, and I won't come after 
You, not now, not ever. She says, this is who I am, and this is who I am. 
And 
lying to me won't alter the truth and I used to love you and every moment we 
spent together in this place was wrong and I should go down to the water and 
should wash myself clean of you and there are things I've seen 
that you 
4-11 
18 
could never know about or even imagine or draw a picture of inside your 
mind. And these are my hands. These are my hands. And I loved you more 
than you loved me and I loved you more, much more, than you loved me and 
I loved you. And don't go confusing love with lust. And. And you're making me 
tired. Just stop it with these games, alright. 
It's two a. m. He's naked on the bed and there's a window open and the rain is 
leaking into the room. 
In the bed with her it is dark. And she says: "Let me tell you something. I have 
to spoil things now. I have to dress and leave. " 
And he says "No. Just stay. " 
"But I have to go", she breathes into his mouth. "It's risky enough already. I 
don't want to make things worse. 
"Alright", he says. 
"Please". She touches his arm. "Don't hate me. " 
"I don't hate you", he says. He sits up in the bed. He speaks falteringly, as 
though the words are in a foreign tongue. "It's just that I hate to see you 
leave. " 
"I know", she tells him. "I hate it too. " 
There, in the darkness of the room, she rises from the bed. He can hear the 
rustling of fabric as she, as you, begin to dress, to put on your clothes. The 
sound is difficult for me to take. You're getting dressed to walk out of here 
and it's not easy to take. 
"Arabella 
"Yes? " 
"Let's go away. " 
"What? What's that? " 
"We'll go away. It's the only thing we can do. " 
"But 
... 
yl 
"Look, I know it's wrong. It's wrong. It's all wrong. " 
"What do you want me to do? " 
"Pack some things. Write a note. Meet me at the station, at the harbour, at 
the airport, at the side of the road. Meet me in the lobby, in the car park. Wait 
for me in the corridor, in the dark, by the elevator. Wait for me and I'll find 
YOU. " 
You finish dressing. There's no further talk. I try to count the floorboards, 
imagining them as minutes till you leave. "Arabella. ') 
Describe the room. 
You would like to see the room? 
It is not too small for two people to conduct or end a love affair in. 
It has no 
nice French windows. Its view is of the sea. The window is both tall and wide. 
There are no bookshelves built into the walls, no books of poetry or prayer. 
No dusty Japanese paper shade protects the bulb. 
What would you write on the walls, you asked her, 
if your blood were ink? 
And she had said, immediately, as though without 
thought: loneliness, 
darkness, light, foolishness, stumbling, awkwardness, realisation, choices, 
42 ', 
19 
Joss, blindness, recognition, insomnia, thirst, hunger, memory, fear, poverty, 
rem 
' 
embrance, amputation, solitude, silence, incompatibility, the present and 
the past. And these words are my blood; my own red tears. And you had 
looked at her, sifting in the hard-backed chair, where the light from outside 
made the particles of dust cut through the air and where you could see only 
blue behind her, and you had tried to smile and make light of her list and she 
had held your gaze and in that moment you had known that nothing else 
mattered. That she was like a tattoo covering your life from start to finish, like 
the journey of your own blood through your own at-rest body. And you had 
closed your eyes then, feeling and knowing the impossibility of at-peace, and 
your lids had felt heavy on your eyes and you had wished the room smaller 
and the sea closer still and her mouth exactly as it was and the line of her 
body no different and the light that circled her and the space between her and 
you and you had snapped your eyes open, afraid that she had gone, afraid 
that she had turned herself to light. To dust. 
If I raise my eyes from here, from this place now, I can see where the sea 
meets the sky. I can see the stars, like fires through the clouds. The woman 
had asked him to swim below the surface. On a night so dark that the ocean 
was no blacker than the sky. On a night much like this night. To swim 
together without a sound. And on this night they were, they are, as beautiful 
as one another. On this one night they can still speak in tongues. On this 
dark night our bodies glow, and on this night, tonight, for one night only, our 
dreams are cinema and our capacity for alcohol is incredible and every want 
we ever wished for could be ours without pain and everyone who has ever 
cried is on our side. On their side. 
The trace of sadness at the water's edge. Where water is off-stage and only 
ever described, suggested, spoken of as though the words made sense. They 
touch each other. She leads him. The letters he sent her saying, "Meet Me 
Whenever You Can". The wanting and the never speaking. 
The last time he saw her she was dressed in blue and white. 
The last time he saw her she was wearing a dress so dark her skin shone 
where the flesh was bare. 
The last time he saw her it rained forever. 
The last time he saw her she was sleeping and the radio was on, or off ... 
he 
can't remember. 
The last time he saw her was before she stopped smoking cigarettes. 
The last time he saw her she had just received news of the death of a friend 
The last time he saw her was when the room spun. 
The last time he saw her she was lying naked on a beach in France. 
The last time he touched her was in a cheap hotel in Paris. 
The last time you saw her she was telling you about her dreams. 
The last time you saw her was through the open window. 
The last time you saw her was at a party in Montpellier. 
The last time you saw her was before you knew her, when she was 
knocked 
off her bicycle. 
The last time you saw her she was looking through the skylight. 4-14 
20 
The last time the woman whispered he couldn't understand the words or even 
hear them properly. 
The last time he saw her was on the train home from Liege, when she had the 
psychic flash. 
The last time that he thinks he saw her was when she was shopping in a 
store called 'Love Museum). 
The last day you saw her was the day you saw her in a supermarket buying 
fruit. 
The last time she spoke to him he couldn't hear the words. 
The last time the man heard her speak was when she told him that the sky 
was dark. 
The last words he heard her speak were in a foreign language. 
The last time he touched her face was in the elevator. 
The last night that he watched her sleep was when her dress lay by the door. 
The last time they spoke was when she was drunk and tried to cheat at cards. 
The last time they spoke was when she asked him his name. 
The last time they danced to music was on the evening of the wedding of a 
friend 
- The last time they danced was to 'The Magic of Shirley Bassey'. 
The last time she danced was to something by The Fugees shown on MTV in 
Lisbon. 
The last time he thinks he saw her dance was to Finlay Quaye heard through 
the wall. 
The last time he saw her was on the night the moon seduced them. 
The last time he saw her was in a black and white film as a train left the 
station. 
The last time he saw the woman was on the night she tried to change the 
world. 
The last time he saw her was the day he cut his hand on broken glass. 
The last time he saw her was the time he went three days without a word. 
The last time he saw her was when it ended and it all began. 
The last time he saw her she was naked and the room was cold. 
The last time he saw her she was running in slow motion. 
The last time that they met was on a balcony in Barcelona. 
The last time they made love she spoke to him in Spanish. 
The last time they drank together was the time they drank Chianti. 
The last time they touched it was only just the touching of their legs together. 
The last time that he didn't see her was the time she travelled to Vienna. 
She wets her hair. And ties it back. 
And when she comes to him, at night, she kneels above him. 
What next? 
You want to know her? 
The curve of her back where it dips. The nape of her neck. 
The width of her 
mouth. Her shoulder blades, the way they arc. The nakedness 
beneath her 
clothes. 
21 
What next? 
A land without language. A dark hotel. Her strength. The view from the 
window across the sand. The way she holds the silences. What next? What 
next? The first kiss and the last. The blue-tiled bathroom and the bareness of 
the bulb. What next? The wanting you so long it almost went away. 
images happening without warning in the mind. Like remembered fragments 
of a dream. Like lightning which illuminates memory, like a self-stricken 
photographer. Images of her, off-centre: out-of-focus snapshots taken by a 
drunk in a too-dark room. Like a neon sign screaming "Fuck all this lying. 13 
"Fuck all this lying. " Like flashbacks from a damaged night. Like half-heard 
whispers in a cave. Like a memory of a face glimpsed once in the heaving 
nightclub of your own lost youth. Or seen in a train station late at night. Or in 
the briefest holding of a glance as strangers pass. In the unseen contact of 
an unknown hand. In the dream that you store in the back of your mind until 
sleep lets you visit again. Like an unsigned letter. Like the trace of two names 
carved, a thousand lifetimes ago, into a tree long-since destroyed. 
And she said, where does love come from? And where does it go to when it 
leaves? 
And she said. Let's invent names for ourselves. 
And let's imagine that this room is the world. 
And you called her Arabella. Because that was the name she desired. 
And she called you Paris. 
And the rain fell as if it could wash away every footprint on the earth. 
And the rain ran like tears along the window and into your room. 
And within your four-walled world you were together and nothing and no-one 
could touch you. 
And all that had passed before the moment was erased. 
And you knew that the future could only harm you once you stopped living life 
in the present. And the woman who had become Arabella moved around the 
room like mist. And the woman you called Arabella was a woman who called 
you Paris. 
Paris, she said. Will you swim with me? 
Will you leave this room and swim with me in the sea? 
Will you, Paris? 
Will you? 
And I am touching you, where your throat meets your shoulder. 
And I'm touching you where your wrist becomes your hand. 
Arabella. 
Arabella. 
And I know that the past can only harm me when the present is lost. 
And you said that you would open the window and let the rain 
fill our room. 
And that the bed would be an island, a country. 
And that we could swim together and yet never leave the room. 
And she could have risen on a sea of rain and tears. 
And she was leaning against the wall to the left of the 
door. 
And she was smoking a cigarette from the never-ending pack 
of the way I 
recall it. 4 20 
22 
And she was standing in such a way that you could see her from all angles. 
And her eyes were open. 
And her lips were slightly apart and the colour of the walls was blue. 
And she was barefoot and her shirt was light in colour and her jeans were not 
quite the blue of the wails and not quite the blue of her eyes. 
And on her wrist was the thin line of pale from her watch. 
And is it time that moves, or do we move through it? And who says that the 
past is another country? 
And she crosses to the window. 
And I look again, and she's wearing a black dress, and her hair is different, 
and the room's the same, and the bed I'm lying on is the bed I shared with 
Arabella. 
And I'm seeing the reflection of her face in the glass. 
And the rain reads like tears on her face. 
And who can tell the difference between tears and rain? 
And who knows the difference between tears and rain? 
And is a woman who is remembered more or less in the present than an 
isolated man? 
And she's tuning in the radio on the shelf by the bed. 
And she's pausing on sections of songs. 
And she's naked in the half-light from the forty-waft bulb. 
And she's lost in a book called 'Nothing to Say'. 
And she's reading the letter she chose not to send. 
And I trace a route in her lipstick across a map of the world. 
And I watch her as she brushes knots from her hair. 
And as she drinks from a glass. 
And I ask her where bullets fired into the sky come down. 
And I ask her whether memory is the same thing as remembrance. 
And I ask her whether liars can ever be trusted. 
And I remember to ask her if she thinks that the sea is a woman. 
And I think I can remember to ask her to tell me why the ocean tastes of 
tears. 
And the room is as dark now as the sky beyond the glass. 
And Arabella is as dark now as the night beyond the glass. 
And her shape is consumed by the shape of the room. 
And the sound of her breath ... 
is the sound of the rain. 
In the silence of thought we sit. No more than a written trace without an 
origin. An ageless still-life. Locked into the moment, devoid of destination. 
Seeing traces of you at the edge of the Sea. Remembering an invented time 
when things were otherwise and things were worse. Feeding off neither hope 
nor despair. Existing halfway between the grave and the womb. Between 
darkness and light. Close to the point where memory blurs with imagination. 
At 
a place where our breaths barely mist the glass. 
4 27, 
23 
Appendix Seven 
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Appendix Eight 
439 
At Last Sight 
(Liege) 
The performers are on-stage, chalking around key objects: a single bed, 
wooden chairs, some of which are overturned, wine bottles, empty or full, a 
battered leather suitcase. Upstage, a large wooden blackboard is partly 
covered with Polaroid photographs depicting previous rehearsals, a torn latex 
glove, cigarette butts, spent matches. Each object is described in chalked 
writing, although this is too far away from the audience for words to be legible. 
The members of the cast are drinking wine from plastic glasses, and greet 
certain spectators as they arrýive ... some are offered drinks. The atmosphere 
and attitude suggest a preparation for performance, rather than of 
performance itself. 
After some minutes the lights, which until then have illuminated the entire 
auditorium, are taken down until the audience is in semi-darkness and the on- 
stage space is bathed in a clearly artificial blue wash. The lights are operated 
from an on-stage board, as is all amplified sound. A radio and cassette deck 
sit next to the lighting rig and a microphone on a long lead is plugged into the 
speaker. 
The performers line up, facing the audience, before the women lie down, as 
though dead. Glenn Robertson changes the lighting state to white and the 
women rejoin the line. The entire cast begins to speak. 
SS: I should tell you that I will be speaking in sign language 
for much of the next hour. I can speak. The signs are just 
a way of making words visual. I'm Sarah Skelton. I'm 
twenty years old. A little nervous. A little scared. 
The bed is moved downstage and Liz Hague and Sarah Skelton sit on it. 
Andrew Proudfoot moves chair centre stage, as if to speak but Sarah 
Skelton signals for him to stay silent. 
Chris Roberts picks up the microphone and addresses the audience. 
Laurent Ruggeri, speaking without a microphone, translates random sections 
into French as and when CR leaves appropriate silences: 
CR: (mic) It is here a work of good faith. And it warns you, right from 
the outset, that I here envisaged no end other than a 
domestic and private one. Here I in no way considered 
your interests, nor did I look to my own glory. 
Such a 
project lies beyond my powers. I have destined my work 
to serve as a certain comfort to my parents and 
friends: 
having lost me (which, indeed, they soon will) they will 
find here not a trace of my condition or humours, and 
thus will cherish more wholeheartedly and vividly 
the 
knowledge that they have had of me. Had it been jý4() 
matter of seeking the world's favour, I would have 
adorned myself better, just as I would have presented 
myself in a more studied manner. I wish to be seen here 
in all my simplicity, quite natural and ordinary, without 
effort or artifice: for it is myself that I show. Thus, I am 
myself the subject of my work: it is not reasonable that 
you should squander your leisure on a subject so 
frivolous and vain. Chris Roberts, 3 rd of March, 1999, 
Liege. 
GR: I say these words: sit there and say nothing to me. Not 
yet. Just listen. There are some things I have wanted to 
say, although I wonder, perhaps, whether the words I 
have chosen are the best ones I can choose to speak my 
thoughts. Whether these words are enough to keep you 
listening. Sit there, say nothing, and I can imagine you 
are listening. A listener. A listener to my voice. My voice 
needs to be listened to tonight. The words I choose to 
speak need to be heard. 
EH: (mic) Old paint, on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes 
transparent. When that happens. It is possible, in some 
pictures. To see the original lines. A portrait shows 
through a landscape. A tree will show through a woman's 
dress. Black lines will bleed dark through the faces of 
saints. This is called. Pentimento. Because the painter is 
repenting. Changing her mind. 
CR: His mind. 
EH: My mind. Perhaps, it would be as well to say, that the old 
conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing, 
and then of seeing again. Of second sight and second 
chances. Liz Hague. March, 1999, Liege. 
AP: When I came upon the diary - this diary - my diary. It was 
lying at the bottom of a rather battered manila cardboard 
box. Someone, perhaps it had even been myself, had 
filled it with treasures dating, it seemed, from my own 
youth: some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; a vial of 
water; held tightly in a rubber band; a pack of playing 
cards, red-backed with images of semi-naked women on 
the front; four lines of text on yellowed card: 
EH: (mic) But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers, 
The bright blue sky and velvet sod 
Were strange conductors to the bowers 
Thy daring footsteps must have trod 
441 
CR: A small combination lock with three rows of letters, worn 
flat and illegible A petrol cigarette lighter, long-smoothed 
by smoker's hand, and one or two ambiguous objects, 
pieces of things, of which the use was not at once 
apparent. Unsilvered glass, framed as a mirror; a 
fragment of what looked like a white cotton shirt, smelling 
faintly of the sea. 
AG: My first impression was that it was a present someone 
had brought me from abroad, from Morocco, perhaps, or 
from Spain. A gift from someone non-existent. The 
shape, the lettering, the dark limp leather curling upwards 
at the corners, gave it a foreign look, and it had, I could 
see, gold edges. I did not want to touch it and told myself 
that this was because it challenged my memory. I knew 
why I distrusted it, as I knew that my distrust was born of 
fear. I looked away and it seemed to me that every object 
in the room exhaled the diary's enervating power, and 
spoke its message of disappointment and defeat. 
SR: (mic) The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite 
clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, 
for the first time in a long time, or perhaps for the first 
ever time, a recollection of what each must have meant to 
me came back, faint as a whispered voice heard through 
a wall or as a face seen through the window of a passing 
train, but as perceptible, as known. The children of the 
past were presenting themselves to me, and as I held 
them in my hands I knew them all. Only the diary refused 
to disclose its identity. And how could I know of whom its 
secrets speak if I could not be sure whose hand had 
guided the pen that wrote the words? How could I know 
how to feel if the memories contained in the book were 
other than my own? Or if any of that which was written, 
which my eye passed over, had been the product of 
invention rather than experience? 
GR: You see me. I am known to some of you. The words I am 
speaking are not my own. They tell you little. They are 
nothing more than a series of words. They are words 
without gender. I have gender. They are words in English 
... 
but you see, they could be words in German, in 
Spanish, in Finnish, in French. 
EH: I felt, with a bitter blend of self-pity and self-reproach, that 
had it not been for the diary, or what the diary stood for, 
everything would be different. I should not be 
here, sifting 
where the curtains were not even drawn to 
hide the cold 
rain beating on the windows, or contemplating 
the 
accumulation of the past and the duty it 
imposed on me. 44- 
Nor should I be here, telling secrets to strangers. I should 
be sifting in another room, rainbow-hued, or blue, blue- 
walled, looking not into the past but into the future, and I 
should not be sifting alone. 
SS: (Sarah either signs or speaks the following) 
And now you watch me while I'm dressing, applying 
make-up. You see me here, in front of you, in public, on 
display. Am I becoming someone else? Are my lips 
painted red for you? Is this done for your gaze? 
AG: The words describe themselves and they describe a 
situation: I am standing here in front of you and I can 
speak. Do these words describe or do they deceive? If I 
dress myself in someone else's clothes, if I take another's 
name, if I speak in an accent or language other than my 
own. If I convince you of the fullness of an empty cup. If I 
cut my throat with an empty hand, if I cry because of 
some imagined pain? 
EH: Even when it's different. It always starts like this. With a 
world not listening to nothing to hear. When, on this night, 
like any other, in this place, silent, witnessed, watched, 
we are wakened by dreams too sad for sleep. 
The radio is tuned into a local station. 
AP: The memory begins in a room. A room made only partly 
visible through dimmed stage lighting. A room of the 
imagination. A room made of words and of objects and of 
light. 
SR: It's hours before that. Leaning in the half-light of a 
hallway, against a whitewashed wail, thumbing through 
the pages of a borrowed book, paperback or hardback, 
fact or fiction, it doesn't matter ... 
it's just a book. 
Listening to things half-heard and not quite yet 
remembered. 
What does the man do? Glenn? 
EH: He enters through an upstage door. He washes in the 
water. She comes to him and sits and watches. She tells 
him that the magic of new love, is his ignorance that it 
can ever end. What does he see? 
SR: He sees her. She's out at sea, he's telling her more than 
he ever dreamed he'd dare. 
44 ', 
CR: He abandons all sense. He gives himself over to the 
moment, loving her completeness and the way her face is 
captured in a shaft of light and the way she sits, erect and 
unashamed and self-composed. He wants to look at her forever; to hold this image of her here with him. He wants to listen to her speak until all other sounds recede; he 
wants to use words he has never used before, to speak them fresh into her own ears and to her lips. He wants to touch her. He wants to lie down beside her in a hotel 
room where all are seen as strangers. He wants his 
words to travel into her. He wants her to see the way he 
sees her. 
SS: These are the facts. The details. All of the words have 
been spoken before. And this: this is the story. She 
crosses towards him. 
CR: What's she wearing? 
SS: You would like to see her? She's wearing blue jeans and 
a light in colour shirt. She's barefoot and her hair is wet 
from either the sea or rain. She has the eyes of the 
woman on the Nine of Hearts. She lies beside him on the 
bed and tells him of her dreams. 
No. I remember myself as younger. In a different room 
CR: (mic) This is a Fassbinder movie. It's called 'The Merchant of 
Four Seasons'. (To a member of the audience) Excuse 
me, what's your name? (Speaking the spectator's name) 
... 
is Hans and, excuse me what's your name? (Name) ... is Elke. Hans stays out late every night and he comes 
home and he beats Elke. She uses her victim status to 
gain sympathy from the audience. From us. And whilst 
Hans is in hospital, she has an affair with another man 
..... 
What's your name? (Name) ... 
is Gunther. She has 
an affair with Gunther. 
Look, I feel I ought to apologise. I'm no actor. I'm here 
because of who I am, not what I can do. Where I feel 
sadness maybe you could act tears. To be honest I'm 
scared and a little drunk. What with the lights and the 
wine and with you watching me. I had hoped that this 
would be the type of performance where I could pretend 
that you weren't there. But every time I look up I see you. 
So, for my absence of acted tears, I'm very, very sorry. 
SS: Thank you. 
444 
AP: He stops her. He asks her to remember Montpellier. The 
bed and no breakfast ... and the flat in Scotland. Hotel rooms with fading once blue paper on the walls. There 
was paper ... blue ... 
SR: The man lights a cigarette, striking his match against the 
wall and shielding the flame with his hand. He moves 
closer to the woman, whispers, touches her face. She 
walks towards him. She's remembering the feelings she 
thought she'd forgotten. She's reeling. She tells him as 
much truth as she knows. She's wearing the dress from 
Montpellier and the sky outside is dark. He's too close. She can't breathe. You're too close Andrew. She feels 
herself fall. He catches her ... 
he catches her before she 
falls. She falls. 
AS: (mic) Betrayal. Betrayal. Betrayal. 
SR: She says this over and over, like a mantra. And Andrew 
tries to stop her. He takes her by the arm- she stops, 
goes perfectly still, and says: 'take ... your ... 
hand 
... off 
... me. 
' And the camera cuts and we see Liz peddling 
home from college on her bicycle, and the camera sort of 
wobbles and we're back in Sarah's memory ... 
in my 
memory. And I'm lying in a bed, I'm naked in a hotel bed. 
And I turn to Andrew and I ask: 'how old will I be? How 
old will I be before you love me? ) 
EH: This is a David Lynch film. That's all it is. It's called 'No 
Silence'. Sarah 
... 
Juliette Lewis, and Andrew, Nicolas 
Cage, are standing over the body of her dead brother, 
Chris 
... 
Sean Penn 
, 
he's still holding the knife he used to 
kill him with. And the sheriff, Glenn, is on his way .... 
but 
he's taking too long, he's just too slow, and Sarah, the 
one-armed woman, is just around here. And Anke, Anke 
isn't in this bit, and Sarah sings, the words just coming 
out , and she sings: et ce sont 
les mots, ecrits au bureau 
pour etre parles plus tard, dans un autre pay, dans un 
autre voix. Et ces mots sont ecrits en Anglais. et ces mots 
sont Choisis, selectionnes. Les Formes noirs sur 1'ecran 
pour les yeux a suivre et les bouches a parler. Je mets 
les mots dans les bouches des autres. Je fabrique des de 
[a verite. Ce spectacle porrait etre un hymne a la 
difference7 une cartographie des frontieres quaucun etat 
ne pourra abolir; car I'autre quel qu'il soit, ne sera jamais 
tout a fait notre semblable. A default. d'eveiller les 
consciences et de changer lemonde, nous livrons notre 
emotion. Ceci etant notre dernier don interesse au 
monde. Ne fumes pas depuis toujours irremediablement 
445 
etranger parmi les autres, nous qui jusqu'au fond du 
souvenier derneurons etranger a nous-mernes? She falls. 
The men sit on the bed and assume a collectively pornographic pose, as a 
Polaroid photograph is taken of them. 
SR: Chris. 
CR: Yes. 
SR: Will you make love to me? 
CR: Yes. 
SR: When will you make love to me? 
CR: When I've finished my cigarette. 
SR: How will you make love to me? 
CR: Gently. 
SR: How gently? 
CR: I've already started. 
EH: I feel I should apologise. 
We're not actors. We find it difficult to speak words 
learned, as well as words which are our own. There are 
things going on within the group that make interaction on- 
stage difficult. So if we stumble or make mistakes, please 
try to find a way to forgive us. 
A cassette tape is played: two American voices, male and female, speaking of 
the future. The women return to the stage area 
SR: She says: nothing you could ever say could hurt me. And 
I won't come after you, not now, not ever. And she says: 
this is who I am. And this is who I am. And lying to me 
won't alter the truth. And lying to others won't alter the 
truth. And I used to love you. And every moment that we 
spent together in this place was wrong. And I should go 
down to the water and I should wash myself clean of you. 
And there are things I've seen and done that you could 
never know about or even imagine or draw a picture of 
inside your mind. And these are my hands. And I loved 
you more than you loved me. And I loved you more, so 
much more, than you loved me. And don't think I'm 
coming to find you. And you're making me tired. Just stop 
it with these games, alright? 
SS: (Mic) And she started to cry ... and 
lean into you. You took the 
glass from her hand and put it on the table. She cried, 
full 
of her pain and her loneliness. And you put your arm 
around her and moved her so that she was 
facing you, 
her cheek against your chest and your arms around her, 
and she kicked off her shoes and curled her 
legs up on 
the too-small couch and you held her. Until after a while 
446 
she said you were the only one in the world who cared for 
her. 
AG: Elle a crie. Plein de sa douler et sa solitude, vous avez 
s'embrace. En la tournant en face de vous. sa joue sur sa 
potrine. Et vos bras autour de lui. 
SS: (Mic) You said that it was hard to call her by her name and she 
said that then you should call her something else. 
EH: Call me Arabella. I will be Arabella and you can be ... LR: Paris. 
SS: (Mic) Her mascara was smeared by her tears. 
GR: Hi, Arabella. When did you arrive in this hotel room? 
EH: Well, I just got off a train. I came all the way from 
nowhere to be with you. 
GR: Nice to meet you, Arabella. 
EH: I am pleased to meet you, Paris. I hope you are not 
already taken. I hope you are not already in love with 
someone else. With somebody else. With some other 
woman. 
GR: Hell, I just have never met the right girl. 
EH: Listen, what have you got that shirt on for? It's too hot in 
here. In this room with the rain on the outside of the 
glass. You have no need for this shirt. All these buttons. 
What do you need them for? 
SS: (Mic) She told you that your skin was smooth, and the fear 
inside you came right up to your neck. You mumbled 
something, started to speak. 
EH: Hush now, Paris. You hear? 
SS: (Mic) She took you by the hand and led you over to the bed. 
You went to where she took you. Did what she did. 
EH: You should look at me. You should look at me, and speak 
my name. 
LR: Arabella. Arabella. 
SS: (Mic) And you watched her. As she undressed in the rented 
room. 
EH: There is nothing to worry about, Paris. The door's locked. 
There's nothing to worry about. 
GIR: Yes, Arabella. I understand. 
SS: (Mic) She said she wanted to know everything about you. _ 
And 
she asked you ... EH: What do you believe in? How do you love? 
SS: (Mic) And you answered her. 
A cassette tape is played: two female Japanese voices whispering 
Cast to AP: It's raining and the sky is black. It's 2 a. m. it's in a room, 
some hotel room beside the sea. You're looking 
in a 
mirror and you can see him lying on the bed. 
He's naked. 
447, 
He's dressed. He's dressed. he says something to you 
which you only half-hear. He crosses to the window, 
lights two cigarettes, takes one to you. He kisses you. He 
tries to kiss you and you turn away. It's warm. The sun's 
shining. He takes off his jacket, then his shirt. It's raining. 
2 a. m., a hotel room. It's earlier, downstairs. It's 1 a. m. it Is 
midnight. It's earlier and you're breaking things, you're 
breaking things while other people watch. It's 2 a. m. You 
go outside. It's raining as if the world is upside down and 
now the sea is sky. It's 2 a. m. 
AG: Je porte le jean blues et une chemise clarte en coleur. Je 
suis nu-pieds. Je fembrace. Je decris notre avenir. Je te 
montre les cicaturices sur mon corps, je mets tes mains 
sur ma paitrine. Je faits des promets. Je ne veux que ce 
que tu veut me donner. Je te demande a aublier mon 
passe. 
Another cassette tape is played: American voices, from the film Heat. Men 
and women at a dinner party. The on-stage lights are dimmed slightly. All 
embrace except CR and LR. 
CR: This is another Rainer Werner Fassbinder film. It's from 
1962. It's called 'Too Naughty to Say No'. Anna plays 
Helga, she's recently married to Franz, who has gone into 
town to buy cigarettes, leaving her alone, semi-naked and 
semi-aroused, in a forest. Two brothers, identical twins, 
Stefan, played by Andrew, and Heinrich, played by me, 
come down from their house in the Bavarian hills and see 
Helga lying there. They approach her carefully, scared 
that she might flee, but instead she moves to a clearing 
and lies down, but there's gorse. Thorns are digging into 
her. Her body is torn, but the pain becomes part of the 
pleasure. Heinrich, the younger twin by four minutes, 
starts thrusting into her, while the older brother watches 
on. Fassbinder and his estate have denied all knowledge 
of the film, but for any of you who know his work, it's 
undeniably his: the lighting, the mise en scene, the 
camera-work ... 
it's all there. 
SR: She says nothing you could ever say could hurt me, and I 
won't come after you, not now, not ever. She says, this is 
who I am, and this is who I am. And lying to me won't 
after the truth and I used to love you and every moment 
we spent together in this place was wrong and I should 
go down to the water and I should wash myself clean of 
you and there are things I've seen that you could never 
know about or even imagine or draw a picture of inside 
your mind. And these are my hands. These are my 
hands, And I loved you more than you loved me and I 
4 48 
loved you more, much more, than you loved me and I 
loved you. And don't go confusing love with lust. And. 
And you're making me tired. Just stop it with these 
games, alright. 
EH: (mic) In the bed with her it is dark. And she says 
AG: Let me tell you something. I have to spoil things now. I 
have to dress and leave. 
AP: No. Just stay. 
AG: But I have to go. It Ys risky enough already. I don't want to 
make things worse. 
AP: Alright. 
AG: Please. Don't hate me. 
AP: I don't hate you, it Is just that I hate to see you leave. 
AG: I know, I hate it too. 
EH: There, in the darkness of the room, she rises from the 
bed. He can hear the rustling of fabric as she begins to 
dress, to put on her clothes. The sound is difficult for him 
to take. 
AG dresses in APs jacket, wets her hair and ties it back. 
AP: Arabella ... 
AG: Yes? 
AP: Let's go away. 
AG: What? What's that? 
AP: We'll go away. It's the only thing we can do. Look, I know 
it's wrong. It's wrong. It's all wrong. 
AG: What do you want me to do? 
AP: Pack some things. Write a note. Meet me at the station, 
at the harbour, at the airport, at the side of the road. Meet 
me in the lobby, in the car park. Wait for me in the 
corridor, in the dark, by the elevator. On page 22. Wait for 
me and I'll find you. 
EH: He tries to count the floorboards, imagining them as 
minutes till she leaves. 
LR: Arabella. 
AG is placed on the bed by the men. She is positioned: 
her hair is fanned out 
on the pillow. A Polaroid photograph is taken of the men as 
they manipulate 
Anna's body. 
SS: (Mic) Tonight, let us discuss the physiology of the 
female 
orgasm. Stage One is called 'Excitement'. 
Within ten to 
fifteen seconds after erotic stimulation the vaginal 
lining is 
lubricated with fluid. Nipples erect, the breasts 
begin to 
449 
swell. Some women develop a measles-like rash or 'sex flush' across their bodies. 
Stage Two is called 'Plateau'. The tissue surrounding the 
outer part of the vagina now balloons out to form a cavity. The uterus enlarges and the outer third of the vagina now 
reduces its diameter - adjusts to circumstances one might 
say - in order to grip the penis tighter. The labia minora turn pink or bright red. When a woman develops sex skin 
reaction she is almost certain to go to orgasm. 
Stage Three is called 'Orgasm'. The typical orgasm lasts 
only ten to fifteen seconds, if that long. Three to five 
contractions is a usual orgasm, fifteen is the most. 
Thank you. 
SR: And the room is as dark now as the sky beyond the glass. 
And Arabella is as dark now as the night beyond the 
glass. And her shape is consumed by the shape of the 
room. And the sound of her breath ... 
is the sound of the 
rain. 
AG: Good evening, my name's Anna. I speak a little French. 
I've been lying on this bed for some time now, and in 
case you're concerned, I'm very happy. Really, I am. I 
have my lover here. I'm going to sing a song in a minute 
... well, not sing 
it really. I'm golng to move my lips to the 
words ... 
I wouldn't want any of you to think I was trying to 
fool you. Thank you. 
AG 'sings' to Bessie Smith's recording of You've Got MeCrying Again as AP 
and GR clear the set. 
CR: This is another Fassbinder film ... 
it's called 'The 
Merchant of Four Seasons '. Liz plays a sportswriter, 
who's sifting at a typewriter, typing. It's .... 
Sarah plays ... 
Sarah plays Veronica. She's at a party ... 
it's her party. 
She's surrounded by friends and the camera sort of pans 
back as we see them all. They're milling around her. 
She's singing: she's singing ... 
'Memories are Made of 
This'. She's singing and her friends ... 
they're laughing 
and smiling and .... 
A sportswriter, Veronica, played by 
Sarah. Veronica, played by Anna, is singing. She's at a 
party, it's her own party and she's singing Memories are 
Made of This. Anna. Well she's singing. The camera pans 
around. All of her friends are milling around her. 
The women turn to look at CR. They whisper as they walk past him. The lights 
shift back to blue. 
4-50 
CR: Veronica's singing. She's singing, and her lover walks in. 
He's got a long overcoat on and he's smiling. He's smiling 
at Veronica. Just watching her. Watching everything she 
does. 
The lights are taken down slowly to blackout. 
451 
At Last Sight 
(Chester) 
Laurent Ruggeri 
Anke Sauthof 
Sarah Skelton 
Sarah Robertson 
Glenn Robertson 
Liz Hague 
Andrew Proudfoot 
Chris Roberts 
A French language tape plays. The cast members are on-stage. There are 
objects: a single bed, wooden chairs, some of which are overturned, wine 
bottles, empty or full, a battered leather suitcase. Upstage, a large wooden 
blackboard is partly covered with Polaroid photographs depicting previous 
rehearsals, a torn latex glove, cigarette butts, spent matches. Each object is 
described in chalked writing, although this is too far from the audience for 
words to be legible. 
The members of the cast are drinking wine from plastic glasses, and greet 
certain spectators as they arrive ... some are offered 
drinks. The atmosphere 
is of a preparation for performance, rather than of performance itself. The 
performers are preparing the space as much as themselves. 
SS leaves the space. After some minutes the lights, which until then have 
illuminated the entire auditorium, are taken down until the audience is in semi- 
darkness and the on-stage space is bathed in a clearly artificial blue wash. 
The lights are operated from an on-stage board, as is all amplified sound. A 
radio and cassette deck sit next to the lighting rig and a microphone on a long 
lead is plugged into the speaker. Japanese voices emerge from the cassette 
deck. 
SS re-emerges. She is wet through. 
SS: Impotence. Sterility. Substitution. Denial. The steady beat 
of the sleeping heart. Loneliness. Doubt. Belief. Truth. 
The bliss of the body deluding the heart. Self- 
consumption. Solitude. Silence. Letters. Dust. The tear 
that falls. (Takes Polaroid photograph of audience. Looks 
at the picture and lies down). 
CR: It's that Fassbinder movie. Glenn, look. 'Merchant of Four 
Seasons'. This is Franz and this is Elke. Franz stays out 
late. Mistreats her. And Elke uses this to gain sympathy 
from us. Whilst Franz is in hospital she has an affair with 
another man ... 
Gunther. 
(On microphone, with LR offering occasional translations 
into French) It is here a work of good faith. And it warns 
you, right from the outset, that I here envisaged no end 
452 
other than a domestic and private one. Here I in no way 
considered your interests, nor did I look to my own glory. 
Such a project lies beyond my powers. I have destined 
my work to serve as a certain comfort to my parents and 
friends: having lost me (which, indeed, they soon will) 
they will find here not a trace of my condition or humours, 
and thus will cherish more wholeheartedly and vividly the 
knowledge that they have had of me. Had it been a 
matter of seeking the world's favour, I would have 
adorned myself better, just as I would have presented 
myself in a more studied manner. I wish to be seen here 
in all my simplicity, quite natural and ordinary, without 
effort or artifice: for it is myself that I show. Thus, I am 
myself the subject of my work: it is not reasonable that 
you should squander your leisure on a subject so 
frivolous and vain. Chris 'Roberts, May 17 Ih, 1999, 
Chester. 
AP: Most performance is disguised autobiography. This 
autobiography is a disguised performance. However 
adroitly I attempt to disguise my intentions, I can be sure 
there are enough unintentional revelations to betray me. 
GR: I say these words: sit there and say nothing to me. Not 
yet. Just listen. There are some things I have wanted to 
say, although I wonder, perhaps, whether the words I 
have chosen are the best ones I can choose to speak my 
thoughts. Whether these words are enough to keep you 
listening. Sit there, say nothing, and I can imagine you 
are listening. A listener. A listener to my voice. My voice 
needs to be listened to tonight. The words I choose to 
speak need to be heard. (LR translates into French the 
sections he chooses ... 
from this point LR and AS repeat 
words in French and German as and when they see fit). 
I remember lying on your bed. I said you were beautiful 
and you smiled. I told you you were beautiful and you 
smiled. Smile. You're beautiful, smile. The room smells of 
our bodies and I know I'll always love you. I know 
I'll 
always remember this. Remember loving you. 
Or love 
remembering you. Or remember to remember 
that I'll 
always love you. I love you. Are my lips 
lying to you? 
Could this mouth ever lie to yours? 
And I wonder if that's enough to keep you 
listening 
tonight? 
SR: it's my voice that needs an audience tonight. 
It's my voice 
that needs to be listened to. 
EH: What would you like me to do next? Would you like me to 
improvise something? Would you like to see panic? Don't 
you think that I am in a state of panic now? Would you like to see tears? I mean, I can't cry just like that. Put me in a play with characters and I could perhaps imagine ... but not just like that. You would like to see drowning? 
What is it to drown? The first thing is the loss of voice. 
Unable to speak I'm left with everything to say. With no 
means of making myself heard I know at last the power 
and the impotence of words. The first thing is the loss of 
breath. Like waking with my own hands upon my throat. 
Like being choked on dust. The first thing is the loss of 
strength. Like being carried by a crowd. Like 
drunkenness. Like hypnosis. Without control, not even of 
thought, not even of hope. The last thing is the loss of 
hope. 
Is that enough? 
SR: Will you make love to me? 
CR: Yes. 
SR: When will you make love to me? 
CR: When I've finished my cigarette. 
SR: How will you make love to me? 
CR: Gently. 
SR: How gently? 
CR: I've already started. 
SS: (Sarah either signs or speaks the following) 
And now you watch me while I'm dressing, applying 
make-up. You see me here, in front of you, in public, on 
display. Am I becoming someone else? Are my lips 
painted red for you? Is this done for your gaze? 
The words describe themselves and they describe a 
situation: I am standing here in front of you and I can 
speak. Do these words describe or do they deceive? If I 
dress myself in someone else's clothes, if I take another's 
name, if I speak in an accent or language other than my 
own. If I convince you of the fullness of an empty cup. If I 
cut my throat with an empty hand, if I cry because of 
some imagined pain? 
LH: I think I should apologise. We're not actors. We find it 
difficult to speak words learned, as well as words which 
are in fact our own. It's hard for us. There are 
things 
going on within the group that make it awkward. 
If we 
stumble, please try to find a way to forgive us. 
4ý: 4 
CR: I feel I should apologise. I'm no actor. I'm here because 
of who I am, not what I can do. Where there's sadness 
perhaps you could act tears. Who knows. To be honest, 
I'm a little bit scared and a little drunk. What with the wine 
and the lights. I had hoped that this would be the type of 
performance where I could pretend the audience wasn't 
here, but every time I look up I see you. So, for my 
absence of acted tears, I'm very, very sorry. 
EH: Even when it's different. It always starts like this. With a 
world not listening to nothing to hear. When, on this night, 
like any other, in this place, silent, witnessed, watched, 
we are wakened by dreams too sad for sleep. 
CR: He abandons all sense. He gives himself over to the 
moment, loving her completeness and the way her face is 
captured in a shaft of light and the way she sits, erect and 
unashamed and self-composed. He wants to look at her 
forever; to hold this image of her here with him. He wants 
to listen to her speak until all other sounds recede; he 
wants to use words he has never used before, to speak 
them fresh into her own ears and to her lips. He wants to 
touch her. He wants to lie down beside her in a hotel 
room where all are seen as strangers. He wants his 
words to travel into her. He wants her to see the way he 
sees her. 
SS: These are the facts. The details. All of the words have 
been spoken before. And this: this is the story. She 
crosses towards him. 
CR: What's she wearing? 
SS: You would like to see her? She's wearing blue jeans and 
a light in colour shirt. She's barefoot and her hair is wet 
from either the sea or rain. She has the eyes of the 
woman on the Nine of Hearts. She lies beside him on the 
bed and tells him of her dreams. 
No. I remember myself as younger. In a different room 
AP: The memory begins in a room. A room made only partly 
visible through dimmed stage-lighting. 
A room of the 
imagination. A room made of words and of objects and of 
light. 
When I came upon the diary - this diary - my 
diary. It was 
lying at the bottom of a rather battered manila cardboard 
box. Someone, perhaps it had even been myself, 
had 
filled it with treasures dating, it seemed, 
from my own 
4 55 
youth. Some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; a vial of 
water; held tightly in a rubber band; a pack of playing 
cards, red-backed with images of semi-naked women on 
the front. Four lines of text on yellowed card: 
EH: But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers, 
The bright blue sky and velvet sod 
Were strange conductors to the bowers 
Thy daring footsteps must have trod 
AP: He stops her. He asks her to remember Montpellier. The 
bed and no breakfast ... and the 
flat in Scotland. Hotel 
: rooms with fading once blue paper on the walls. There 
was paper ... 
blue 
... 
SR: The man lights a cigarette, striking his match against the 
wall and shielding the flame with his hand. He moves 
closer to the woman, whispers, touches her face. She 
walks towards him. She's remembering the feelings she 
thought she'd forgotten. She's reeling. She tells him as 
much truth as she knows. She's wearing the dress from 
Montpellier and the sky outside is dark. He's too close. 
She can't breathe. You're too close Andrew. She feels 
herself fall. He catches her ... 
he catches her before she 
falls. She falls. 
And then the camera cuts and you can see Liz, peddling 
home from college on her bicycle. The camera goes in 
close on the spinning of the wheel and I say to Andrew: 
'How old will you be before I love you? ' 
AS: Betrayal. Betrayal. Betrayal. 
SR: She says this over and over, like a mantra. And Andrew 
tries to stop her. He takes her by the arm: she stops, 
goes perfectly still, and says: 'take ... your ... 
hand ... off 
... me. 
' And the camera cuts back and we see Liz 
peddling home again from college on her bicycle, and the 
camera sort of wobbles and we're back in 
Sarah's 
memory ... 
in my memory. And I'm lying in a bed, I'm 
naked in a hotel bed. And I turn to Andrew and 
I ask: 
'How old will you be? How old will you be before 
I love 
YOUT 
EH: This is a Michael Winner film. That's all it is. 
It's called 'No 
Silence'. Sarah ... 
Juliette Lewis, and Andrew, Nicolas 
Cage, are standing over the body of her 
dead brother, 
Chris 
... 
Sean Penn , 
he's still holding the knife he used to 
kill him. And the sheriff, Glenn, is on his way .... 
but he's 
taking too long, he's just too slow, and Sarah, 
the one- 
4 
_5 
6 
armed woman, is just around here. And Anke, Anke isn't 
in this bit, and Sarah sings, the words just coming out , and she sings: et ce sont les mots, ecrits, au bureau pour 
etre parles plus tard, dans un autre pay, dans un autre 
voix. Et ces mots sont ecrits en Anglais. et ces mots sont 
Choisis, selectionnes. Les Formes noirs sur 1ecran pour 
les yeux a suivre et les bouches a parler. Je mets les 
mots dans les bouches des autres. Je fabrique des de la 
verite. Ce spectacle porrait etre un hymne a la difference, 
une cartographie des frontieres qu'aucun etat ne pourra 
abolir; car I'autre quel qu'il soit, ne sera jamais tout a fait 
notre semblable. A default d'eveiller les consciences et 
de changer le monde, nous livrons notre emotion. Ced 
etant notre dernier don interesse au monde. Ne fumes 
pas depuis toujours irremediablement etranger parmi les 
autres, nous qui jusquau fond du souvenier derneurons 
etranger a nous-memes? She falls. 
The men sit on the bed and assume a collectively pornographic pose as a 
Polaroid photograph is taken of them. 
SS: Drink? 
AP: Yes. 
SS: Come and get it then. 
AP: and I'll come and get you. I'll come and get the glass 
SS: , So, what's next? 
AP: Information, you mean? 
SS: Yes. 
AP: Well, fire a question. Nothing too loaded. 
SS: Later maybe. 
AP: How fast do you fall? 
SS: Too fast. Take me to bed, I'm tired of all this talk. 
AP: Are you a romantic? 
SS: Romantic enough. Kiss me. 
AP: Not in front of all these people. 
SS: Tonight, let us discuss the physiology of the female 
orgasm. 
Stage One is called 'Excitement'. Within ten to fifteen 
seconds after erotic stimulation the vaginal lining is 
lubricated with fluid. Nipples erect, the breasts begin to 
swell. Some women develop a measles-like rash or 'sex 
flush' across their bodies. 
Stage Two is called 'Plateau'. The tissue surrounding the 
outer part of the vagina now balloons out to form a cavity. 
The uterus enlarges and the outer third of the vagina now 
reduces its diameter - adjusts to circumstances one might 
say - in order to grip the penis 
tighter. The labia minora 
457 
turn pink or bright red. When a woman develops sex skin 
reaction she is almost certain to go to orgasm. 
Stage Three is called 'Orgasm'. The typical orgasm lasts 
only ten to fifteen seconds, if that long. Three to five 
contractions is a usual orgasm, fifteen is the most. 
Thank you. 
An audio-tape is played: two American voices, male and female, speaking of 
the future. The women return to the stage area 
SR: She says: nothing you could ever say could hurt me. And 
I won't come after you, not now, not ever. And she says- 
this is who I am. And this is who I am. And lying to me 
won't alter the truth. And lying to others won't alter the 
truth. And I used to love you. And every moment that we 
spent together in this place was wrong. And I should go 
down to the water and I should wash myself clean of you. 
And there are things I've seen and done that you could 
never know about or even imagine or draw a picture of 
inside your mind. And these are my hands. And I loved 
you more than you loved me. And I loved you more, so 
much more, than you loved me. And don't think I'm 
coming to find you. And you're making me tired. Just stop 
it with these games, alright? 
SS: And she started to cry ... and 
lean into you. You took the 
glass from her hand and put it on the table. She cried. 
Full of her pain and her loneliness, and you put your arm 
around her and moved her so that she was facing you, 
her cheek against your chest and your arms around her, 
and she kicked off her shoes and curled her legs up on 
the too-small couch and you held her. Until after a while 
she said you were the only one in the world who cared for 
her. 
AS: Elle a crie. Plein de sa douler et sa solitude, vous avez 
s'embrace. En la tournant en face de vous. sa joue sur sa 
potrine. Et vos bras autour de lui. 
SS: You said that it was hard to call her by her name and she 
said that then you should call her something else. 
EH: Call me Arabella. I will be Arabella and you can 
be ... 
LR: Paris. 
SS: Her mascara was smeared by her tears. 
GR: Hi, Arabella. When did you arrive in this hotel room? 
EH: Well, I just got off a train. I came all the way 
from 
nowhere to be with you. 
45 8 
GR: Nice to meet you, Arabella. 
EH: I am pleased to meet you, Paris. I hope you are not 
already taken. I hope you are not already in love with 
someone else. With somebody else. With some other 
woman. 
GR: Hell, I just have never met the right girl 
EH: . Listen, what have you got that shirt on for? It's too hot in 
here. In this room with the rain on the outside of the 
glass. You have no need for this shirt. All these buttons. 
What do you need them for? 
SS: She told you that your skin was smooth, and the fear 
inside you came right up to your neck. You mumbled 
something, started to speak. 
EH: Hush now, Paris. You hear? 
SS: She took you by the hand and led you over to the bed. 
You went to where she took you. Did what she did. 
EH: You should look at me. You should look at me, and speak 
my name. 
LR: Arabella. Arabeila. 
SS: And you watched her. As she undressed in the rented 
room. 
EH: There is nothing to worry about, Paris. The door's locked. 
There's nothing to worry about. 
GR: Yes, Arabella. I understand. 
SS: She said she wanted to know everything about you. And 
she asked you ... EH: What do you believe in? How do you love? 
SS: And you answered her. 
CR: This is another Rainer Werner Fassbinder film. It's from 
1962. It's called 'Too Naughty to Say No'. Anna plays 
Helga, she's recently married to Franz, who has gone into 
town to buy cigarettes, leaving her alone, semi-naked and 
semi-aroused, in a forest. Two brothers, identical twins, 
Stefan, played by Andrew, and Heinrich, played by me, 
come down from their house in the Bavarian hills and see 
Helga lying there, They approach her carefully, scared 
that she might flee, but instead she moves to a clearing 
and lies down, but there's gorse. Thorns. They're digging 
into her. Her body is torn, but the pain becomes part of 
the pleasure. Heinrich, the younger twin by four minutes, 
starts thrusting into her, while the older brother watches 
on. Fassbinder and his estate have denied all knowledge 
of the film, but for any of you who know his work, it's 
undeniably his: the lighting, the mise en scene, the 
camera-work .... 
it's all there. 
An audio-tape is played: two female Japanese voices whispering 
459 
AS: It's raining and the sky is black. It's 2 a. m. it's in a room, 
some hotel room beside the sea. You're looking in a 
mirror and you can see him laying on the bed. He's 
naked. He's dressed. He's dressed. he says something to 
you which you only half-hear. He crosses to the window, lights two cigarettes, takes one to you. He kisses you. He tries to kiss you and you turn away. It's warm. The sun's 
shining, He takes off his jacket, then his shirt. It's raining. 
2 a. m., a hotel room. it's earlier, downstairs. It's 1 a. m. it's 
midnight. It's earlier and you're breaking things, you're 
breaking things while other people watch. It's 2 a. m. You 
go outside. It's raining as if the world is upside down and 
now the sea is sky. It's 2 a. m. 
EH: In the bed with her it is dark. And she says 
SR: Let me tell you something. I have to spoil things now. I 
have to dress and leave. 
AP: No. Just stay. 
SR: But I have to go. It's risky enough already. I don't want to 
make things worse. 
AP: Alright. 
SR: Please. Don't hate me. 
AP: I don't hate you, it's just that I hate to see you leave. 
SR: I know, I hate it too. 
AP: Everything's been said. 
SR: What would you write on walls if your blood were ink? 
AP: Just a list of words. 
GR: My problem with women is that I have no problem with 
women. She said to me once, you know, there's less to 
you than meets the eye, and the problem with our 
relationship is that we're both in love with the same man. 
She didn't mean it. How could she mean what she says 
and still say she loves me? I understand women. There's 
no mystery there. 
EH: Old paint. On canvas. As it ages. Sometimes becomes 
transparent. When that happens. It is possible, in some 
pictures. To see the original lines. A portrait shows 
through a landscape. A tree will show through a woman's 
dress. Black lines will bleed dark through the faces of 
saints. This is called. Pentimento. Because the painter is 
repenting, Changing her mind. 
CR: His mind. 
EH: My mind. Perhaps, it would be as well to say, that the old 
conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing, 
4()0 
and then of seeing again. Of second sight and second 
chances. Liz Hague. May, 1999, Chester. 
AP: She was like a tattoo, covering my life from start to finish. 
Her lids felt heavy on her eyes. The line of her body no different. Her smile exactly as it was. She held my gaze, 
and from that moment on I knew that nothing else 
mattered. 
My name's Andrew Proudfoot. I'm in this show. I'm alone 
at the moment and IIm looking for somebody, for 
someone. This show finishes in not too long. I'm going for 
a drink afterwards. If any of you fancy a chat, or a drink 
... 
My name's Andrew Proudfoot. Thanks very much for 
listening. 
SR: Good evening, my name's Anna. I speak a little French. 
I've been lying on this bed for some time now, and in 
case you're concerned, I'm very happy. Really, I am. I 
have my lover here. I'm going to sing a song in a minute 
... well, not sing it really. I'm going to move my lips to the 
words ... 
I wouldn't want any of you to think I was trying to 
fool you. Thankyou. 
SIR 'sings' to Bessie Smith's recording of You've Got Me Crying Again as AP 
and GR clear the set. 
CR: This is another Fassbinder film ... 
it's called 'The 
Merchant of Four Seasons'. Liz plays a sportswriter, 
who's sitting at a type writer, typing. It's .... 
Sarah plays ... Sarah plays Veronica. She's at a party ... 
it's her party. 
She's surrounded by friends and the camera sort of pans 
back as we see them all. They're milling around her. 
She's singing: she's singing ... 
'Memories are Made of 
This'. She's singing and her friends ... 
they're laughing 
and smiling and .... 
A sportswriter, Veronica, played by 
Sarah. Veronica, played by Anna, is singing. She's at a 
party, it's her own party and she's singing Memories are 
Made of This. Anna. Well she's singing. The camera pans 
around. All of her friends are milling around her. 
The women turn to look at CR. They whisper as they walk past him. The lights 
fade out to black. 
CR: Veronica's singing. She's singing, and her lover walks in. 
He's got a long overcoat on and he's smiling. He's smiling 
at Veronica. Just watching her. Watching everything she 
does. He's always watching her. It's what he does. It's 
everything and all he knows. 
461 
appendix nine 
4o-I 
0 
at last sight: 
00 voyeuristic 
w0 
intention',? 
liz hague 
level III 
may 1999 
463) 
The relationship between the performers of At Last Sight and their audience is 
one of great interest, due to it's lack of traditional convention i. e., the unwritten rule 
that neither company invades the other's space. Here we see the performers work in 
the audience's 'designated' area and particular spectators are embraced within the piece 
itself - yet what effect does this have9 The question I would like to address is whether 
such a direct interaction created a voyeuristic feel. As I cannot speak for many of the 
audience members, I will concentrate on the performer's opinions - predominantly my 
own. I would particularly like to ascertain whether such enjoyment from watching 
intimacy was invited by the piece itself, and if so for what purpose" I will be referring 
to some ideas which do not appear in the final construction, as I feel their inclusion is 
justified due to the line of progression At Last Sight has made. 
The first consideration when researching was that perhaps there is a voyeuristic 
nature to all performance. That even in a piece where the audience occupy a space 
which is not overrun by the performers directly, these artists are still putting 
themselves on display to suffer great scrutiny from their watchers. Some may be seen 
as sexual objects when this was of no necessity to the piece. However, this essay is 
not concerned with all performance, and its relationship between the doer and the 
watcher, it would like to focus on performance which actively encourages a voyeuristic 
view. Although a lot of art may contain a hidden truth, At Last Sight involves its 
audience intimately, by implying that the truth is visibly exposed; "Most performance is 
disguised autobiography, however, this autobiography is a disguised performance" 
(Andrew Proudfoot, At Last Sight) 
The second question to address is; can naturalism be identified as the foremost 
initiator of voyeuristic spectators or is it the "stage-audlence exchange" (Bennett, 
1990, p. 22) of the postmodem theatre? Surely, one would expect the answer to be the 
forrner, where the audience is hurled in to a re-invented reality and expected to 
suspend all disbelief Only then at their lowest awareness of fictionality, 
do they begin 
to feel like unauthonsed watchers. Yet, if this is the case, what 
does At Last Sight 
intend to convey? A piece which utilises Brechtian techniques of 
Alienation, and 
rather than requiring a suspension of disbelief it simply asks you to 
believe. Bertolt 
Brecht desired to impose "an uncomfortable and self-conscious state on the audience 
in 
am attempt to reduce the gap between the two" (Goldberg, 
1979, p. 162). Although he 
was "always aware of the theatre's need to be geared 
in to reality" (Bennet, 1990, 
464 
p. 24) his motivation was to provoke social change rather than pushing his spectators in 
to the role of voyeur. Therefore At Last Sight has taken Brechtian theory further, 
perhaps in an attempt to express the ineffectuality of naturalism. 
Chrissie Iles gives us a definition of voyeurism when referring to the work of 
Abramovic and Ulay; "the audience's witnessing of, but exclusion from, intimate 
experiences shared by the artists )ý. Intimate experience such as Imponderabilia (1977) 
where they stood naked, facing each other in a doorway which the spectators would 
have to pass through. On second thoughts, perhaps this example is not the most 
appropriate as the audience are far from excluded from the intimacy - close proxinuitv 
of nudity is something which makes many people very uncomfortable. In 1997, 
doodpaard performed 2SKIN at the Green Room, Manchester, here the audience was 
confronted with male and female nudity in close vicinity and the feeling it created was 
unfamiliar. Nervousness, a sudden sense of panic about what one was about to watch. 
At the time this was passed off as shock at witnessing something unusual, however 
now I wonder whether it was a fear of watching something which we feel we should 
c4see on video and not live, cause I feel like a real voyeur, like I'm intruding" (Audience 
member at Franco B. performance quoted on South Bank Show). 
Returning to the work of Ulay and Abramovic, it has been said that 
voyeurism ..... was given 
it's starkest expression in the action, Communist Body - 
Capitalist Body" (Stedelijk, 1997, p. 133). This was where 11 known gUests were 7 
invited to a private room just before the artists' birthday (they shared one). However, 
when they arrived they discovered their hosts asleep on the floor where they stayed for 
the duration of the piece. The guests were unaware of a camera filming their actions 
and yet it was the action of both observing and participating which made them so 
uncomfortable, as they looked upon the couple; "objectified in silence and stillness, 
here in a kind of living death" (Stedelijk, 1997, p. 13). Thus implying that the passivity 
of the piece was the perpetrator of such intensity-, 
As the performance of At Last Sight opened in Liege, the audience came in to C) 
see the performers tidying up the space, pouring drinks and smoking cigarettes. 
They 
shared the odd quiet word and visually acknowledged their witnesses, 
'providing them 
with glasses of wine - remeniscent of Pina 
Baush's Tanztheatre "where separation 
frOm social space was undermined" (Counsell, 1996, p. 
226). When everything was 
prepared and each actor had found a location, there was silence. 
Although every40-5 
performer knew who would be the next to speak, they also knew the possibility that 
anyone could choose to interrupt this moment. They looked around at each other, 
motionless,, waiting, expectant, until Chris began. This appeared to be a moment to 
introduce the intimacy of the piece and perhaps the audience began to find "themselves 
implicated in their voyeurism". (Carr, 1993, p. 20) 
This essay will now turn to investigate this last point with reference to some of 
the audience members spoken to in Liege. The most interesting reaction came ftom a 
Jordanian Director - Makhled Al Zyoudey - who believed the perflormers were going 
to have sexual intercourse on stage. His reasons behind this were the number of 
boundaries broken down in the performance and the fact the cast were past or present 
lovers working out their feelings. (see appendix 1) However, most of these reasons 
were in fact deceptions, as he believed they were choosing the action randomly from a 
running order (see appendix 2) and speaking their truths directly to the audience. 
Therefore, was the voyeunstic feeling intensified by these deceitful truths" 
It is difficult to provide a definite answer to this question as one cannot speak 
for an entire audience, however, it does appear that this rehearsed truth enhanced the 
feeling of intrusion for certain spectators. When speaking with the group ftom Buffalo 
University, New York, after the performance, they expressed a great empathy for what 
we were trying to do and an acknowledgement of how personal the piece was. Their 
comment of 'perhaps too personal' made me wonder if may be we had made them 
uncomfortable with our intimacy, and immediately this posed questions such as; was 
this the piece's intention? Was this voyeurism encouraged by the performance9 
The play began as a very intimate piece, as the lyrical language demanded a 
languorous tempo and subdued voice - sometimes just whispers in to a microphone - 
forcing the audience to listen attentively; "In the room with her it is dark, and sshhhhh 
it is very, very late. " (Liz Hague, At Last Sight) The group soon identified a woman1s 
suicide emerging from the text, which they began to work towards presenting onstage, 
through movement and text. Watching someone end their own 
life must be the 
ultimate voyeunstic experience - an event no one 
is supposed to watch passively. 
Therefore, this occasion reflects the more sexually explicit moments of the piece as 
again the audience is drawn to watch through morbid 
fascination. Pornography has in 
fact been described a "a nuxture of eroticism and 
death, liberation and defilement" 
(Savr . an, 1986, p. 44). Photographs are taken of moments, to preserve 
them forever, 
466 
enhancing this feeling of intrusion upon the performers. These photos are (generally 
taken of sensual moments and yet they have the feel of crime scene evidence, thus 
again blurring the lines between sexuality and fatality. 
Of course, there are many scenes where the audience is asked to accept what 
they are watching as fiction and not necessarily believe they are witnessing truth, such 
as the Arabella and Pans episodes. The voyeuristic feel of these moments was 
intended to increase through their filmic quality (ie, - little movement and naturalistic 
speech) as we often find it easier to become engrossed in what we watch on the screen 
rather than the stage. In addition, these small snippets of film created a contrast with 
those moments presented as reality. They created an intimacy the audience could feel 
comfortable and distanced from, then suddenly they are thrown into an uneasy 
familiarity as the performers communicate directly with certain members. This was 
interesting as the performers felt that although those spectators spoken to were the 
ones put on the spot it was those seated around them who became intensified voyeurs 
as they found themselves listening to private conversations such as; "I know you've 
been watching me, is this because you find me attractive". There are also moments of 
intrusion where theaudience are not expected to answer, but their personal space is 
invaded. One example being the moment when Sarah places a member of the 
audience's hand on her arm, looks them in the eye and says "Take... your... hand... 
off.. me" (Sarah Robertson, At Last Sight). The reaction to this is as yet unknown. 
but I am interested in whether they will appear threatened or simply enjoy the close 
contact - the feeling that this moment is exclusive to them. 
Not only is this voyeurism encuraged by in teraction but also the actions and words 
spoken on stage, inviting the audience into the privacy of the performers, 
In Liege, 
when Chris was carresing Sarah's body, he informed both the audience and the 
performers that "He wants to touch her" (Chris Roberts, At Last 
Sight). Even the 
actors looked away as he embarked on a violation supposedly prohibited. 
When Sarah 
Skelton puts on her lipstck she says; "Am I doing this 
for your gaze? " (Sarah Skelton, 
At Last Sight), immediately confronting the specators inttrusion, and posing the Z=) 
question; is she doing this because her character needs make-up, or is 
she in"Ating 
those watching to gaze on her as a woman? 
I would like to point out here the 
diference I experienced when being directly spoken to in 
the performance space and 
then when I was seated amongst the audience. 
Although I was still a performer. xk-hT)7 
Glenn spoke his lines, "I love you, could my lips ever lie to yours" (Glenn Robertson, 
At Last Sight), I suddenly felt a little embarrased and a lot more self conscious of those 
seated around me. It is moments such as these which cause me to believe in the 
spectators inevitable voyeurism. 
When the group returned from Liege and began to re-work the piece, new 
ideas materialised but not all were necessarilly used in the piece. For example. - two of 
the cast undressing on the stage, yet covered by a sheet , in 
fact for all the audience 
know, they're not even naked! Again, a Polaroid was to be taken and pinned up as 
evidence, but too far away for the audience to really see. It's almost like they are being 
dared to become voyeurs, tempted to give in to that sexual pleasure, but always denied 
the entire picture. When Sarah Skelton informs the audience she will take her shirt off 
as long as no one looks at her, she is attempting the impossible. Is any human 
prepared to close their eyes and imagine the nudity of the person in front rather than 
look straight at them? No, because our voyeuristic nature is far too strong, the desire 
to look at something/someone for sexual pleasure. However, the group began to feel 
they were presenting the 'woman' as a victim, even though they started with the idea 
of a couple destroying each other, how did this happen? Is it inevitable that a woman 
being watched takes on the victim status? Akin to the photography of Cindy Sherman, 
whose portrayal of the female - herself - began as simply obscure and et tumed into _1D 
y 
something grotesque as 'she' became a symbol of the slaughtered prey. (Cindy 
Sherman Video) 
There were times when At Last Sight confronted its audience with a more 
openly sexual attitude. For example-, the moment where the four men get themselves 
in to typical female pornographic poses. The men were baring sexuality, 
but perhaps 
not their own. This moment was intended to disturb slightly as some may 
have 
considered it erotic, yet also grotesque. When watching pornographic material 
I X1 belonging to the Wooster Group, their audience took the stance; 
"It doesn't e st', 
they're think, 'I'm Just going to stare up there. I don't want to 
be a voyeur" (Savran, 
1986, p. 3 7), where as the Liege audience appeuýed to see a 
humorous side. They were 
still experiencing voyeurism, but it now felt licensed as they could 
laugh. The audience 
were also confronted with sexually explicit language 
in Chris' Tassbinder Porn' and 
Sarah's 'Orgasm', generally people don't wish to be 
faced with somebody else's sexual 
pleasure or the clinical detail of their own arousal. 468 
One may wonder what reaction would have been received if the women had 
taken on the role of the pornographic pose and whether the audience would have 
expected this. However, there is a different connotation behind the naked female, "The 
exposure of the female body in particular, whatever the intent of the artist, always runs 
the risk of being re-appropriated by the eroticizing, patriarchal gaze" (Campbell & 
Spackman, 1998, p. 57). In our society, the gaze on women becomes licensed in a 
perfonnative context and in the world of politics, yet also in the under-world of 
prostitution and erotic dance. This has been explored by artists such as Annie Sprinkle 
and Karen Finley who exhibeted their naked bodies in an explicit manner. However, 
they were the ones in control of the piece as they decided who looked and who 
touched - unlike a prostitue (Counsell, 1996, pp. 222-4). The group did have this 
similar feeling of control over their spectators, yet they did not go to the extremes of 
Yams Up My Granny's Ass and they did not wish the piece to be "serving- a repressive, 
male gaze" (Campbell & Spackman, 1998, p. 6-3 3), therefore they swapped the gender to 
subvert this. This is not a feminist point, they are simply showing how easily the gaze 
can become licensed on the men, as the voyeur can just as easily be a woman, and as 
already noted the 'gaze' can effortlessly be placed on the audience also 
Although the audience may feel licensed to look at the performers on stage. 
that does not mean there is no feeling of resistance within them. Just like the group, 
who wanted to be looked at and yet couldn't help feeling as if they were exposing 
something they shouldn't - it is all about our internal contradictions. 
Just like the 
performance itself - one big contradiction - Sarah lies on the 
bed saying "I wouldn't 
want to fool you" (Sarah Robertson, At Last Sight), yet the audience have already 
digested the lies presented in their programme. In the case of the audience, one is 
instilled from youth that pornography is bad, masturbation is bad, and one must not 
have sexual intercourse until married - thus suppressing our sexual appetite. 
Although 
one may not adhere to these rules, it begins to explain our fear of watching sexual 
activity in public, particularly when there are other spept4prs who 
know you are 
watc*g! "We have, as psychoanalyst Melanie Klein realjýe4, a fascinated 
horror with 
bodies- tQ explore our fantasies about-the. --body-is a 
dangerous foray" ('- HYPERUNK 
http: //www. mg. co. za) Ei [Ihttp: //www. mg. co. za)[1. Perhugs 
ft only way we earr 
overcome these voyeuristic fears is to explore these 
fantasies. 
469 
To conclude, I do believe there was a voyeuristic relationship between the 
au4ience and performers of the Liege performance of At Last Sight, of course, I am 
only able to speak for myself and a few of the spectators. The spectators' status as 
voyeur was undeniably enhanced by their belief in the 'truth, those who believed the 
cast to be lovers seemed to feel a greater degree of intrusion. I would like to back this 
up with an example of human nature within the performance group itself It occurred 
when two of its members formed a relationship out side of the play - suddenly art had 
begun to mirror life! As soon as this change was known to the rest of the group, their 
kiss - within the piece - took on a different meaning. The other performers did not feel 
they should be watching such a truthful display of emotion - therefore taking on the 
role of voyeur themselves. 
Of course, it is a difficult task to establish the general feel of an audience when 
they are now scattered across the world! However, hopefully this essay has managed 
to establish the performance's voye-uristic intention as it dared its audience to Dve in to 
it's enjoyment, providing them with a serni-licensed gaze, and yet had to pull some of 
their material back as the power of the human gaze began to take control of the piece. 
The group was very interested with their audience - how much they would believe, 
how well they would respond to their invasion. They were very aware of "Duchamp's 
notion that it is the observer who completes the work of art" (Van der Marek quoted 
in Kaye, 1994, p. 43). Perhaps one could even suggest that they "made the viewer's 
response the subject of the piece" (Stedelijk, 1997, p. 13), a response which conveys 
the stereotype of the spectator. Their willingness to believe expresses a move away 
from naturalism, perhaps even the death of naturalism as truth takes over 
from 
rehearsed realism. 
However, the viewer's response was not easily definable as their 
desire to 
watch clashed with their fear of perversion. As Mekhled Al Zyoudey said 
I loved 
your work, it was so new, but I was not sure if I wanted to watch". 
At Last Sight 
confronted the audience with their conflicting feelings, and according to 
Manna 
Abramovic,, this is the way forward; "Now that I get in to my 
fifties I discover more 
and more that we definitely must learn about the contradictions 
in ourselves and not to 
be ashamed or afraid of them" (Stedelijk, 1997, p. 12 1). 
Research and Productionfor Performance. 
0 
Theatre Is 
What 
Theatre Did. 
470 
I 
Theatre is what Theatre Did. 
Whereas the essay submitted for 'Contemporary Theatre Practice' dealt with 
heuristics, the nature of meaning and the gulf between the intention of the writer and 
the interpretations of the reader - an area dealt with during that module - this essay 
will concentrate on applying those thoughts to the year-long practical project that 
became 'At Last Sight. The two areas are inevitably and inextricably linked by the 
inseparability of the hand typing this essay, which has already typed that one. The 
ideas of that are the basis for this. To have written then is to apply now when words 
having translated thoughts now apply context. 
To describe myself as an actor could only - or let me say primarily - be justified in the 
way that Foreman, (1991) writes of himself 
'I am a comic actor. The more people laugh, the 
better I like it. I'm happier the nights we get ten 
laughs instead of seven. If we get fifteen laughs, 
I'm even happier. I wish the audience were 
roaring with laughter throughout. ' (Foreman, R. 
199 1, p. 16). 
By reputation, I am, as Foreman is 'a comic actor'. My performances on stage (as with 
many off the stage) are those that make people laugh. I base the 'success' of mv 
performance on the number of people I make laugh and indeed the number of times 
people laugh throughout a performance. However, this year saw a change of focus for 
my actorly self My involvement in 'At Last Sight' which, although encompassing 
many amusing aspects during rehearsal, started out with the intention of being what 
appeared to be a serious piece; one that was not necessarily striving to become a 
comedy and did not end up being comical. 
'At Last Sight', was written originally by John Freeman as part of his PhD submission. 
I use the term 'originally' because as written, the original script merely consisted of 
words on paper. There were no stage directions, no indications of who says what, no 
determination of characters and indeed, no further indications of gender - the 
breakdown within the play, nor what sequence of words is attibuted to which gender. 
47t 
it was not fixed. It was subject to interpretation and of development. It was, however, 
evident that the text was somewhat autobiographical and therefore the show was to 
reflect autobiography- "Most autobiography is disguised is performance. thi 
performance is disguised autobiography. " (At Last Sight. 1999). As will be seen later 
the extent to which this would occur turned out to be far greater than anyone, even the 
author, (of that text and, indeed of this work), had originally expected. 'At Last Sight' 
had no particular, definite narrative, other than the fact that women were women and 
men were men. It was experimental in so far as each night would be different, things 
constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in different ways. It was also a mixed 
bag of acting, acted acting and non-acting. The ability to be oneself on stage was 
constantly prevalent and the essence and extent to which this would happen was 
presented in different ways and, again, differed from night to night. I--- 
A starting point for the project was to read the text and each member of the group 
chose what s/he wanted to say within the final performance. This personified the fact 
that even at the early stages the text was not to be fixed, and was therefore subject to 
change. Given the text we had to work from (and with) it was then up to the group to 
decide where go next. In a way, the task ahead was to devise a piece of theatre from a 
stimulus, (the text). Given the stimulus, the group now had to work together, 
creatively and practically in order to achieve the result as shown firstly in Liege- 
Belgium, then again for the performance in Chester, England 
Devising is a process of making theatre that 
enables a group of performers to be physically 
and practically creative in the sharing and 
shaping of an original product... (Oddey, A. 
1994, p- I)- 
As addressed in the first part of this double submission -a submission which 
is both 
separated and inseparable - the links between this essay and the one submitted 
for 
'Contemporary Theatre Practice' rest with myself, my typing hand, my thoughts and 
my ideas. However, the connections go further than that. I spoke of truth and what 
constitutes truth. A large aspect of 'At Last Sight' was the inclusion of 
'truths'. 
However, as previously seen from my own assumption, the actuality of truth 
lies onl,, - 
472 
3 
(and entirely) with the beholder and disclosure of such immediately initiates the truth 
into being subject to interpretation. Taking my own interpretation, the telling of the 
, truth', arguably has the potential, at times, to be as influential to the listener as the 
portrayal of a character, by the actor on stage. Does the idea that once a truth is told it I 
becomes what can only be described, and understood as a lie, constitute the telling of 
a lie? A lie: an indifferent instance of continual deceit. A seemingly deceitful act 
momentarily prolonged only by the possibility of the hidden 'truth' of the deceiver and 
the ignorant acceptance, or denial, of the intentional believer. 
'At Last Sight' played home to many 'truths' and lies. They existed within the group 
and they existed in ftont of the audience - both in England and abroad. The existence 
of such 'truths' also gave licence for the existence of Nietzche's 'Illusions'. Those 
'truths' within the group were extracted by means of a certain 'truth' (and indeed an 
'illusion'), used in the Performance - alcohol. I use the term 'Illusion' as is created by a 
'truth'. The use of alcohol, for the most part, was as real as the actors in the show. 
However, this 'truth' acted as a disguise to create an illusion, Some of the opened 
bottles on the set actually contained wine-coloured grape juic, -.. yet only exposing the 
audience to the real wine, created the illusion that all the bottles contained the real 
thing. The realistic element of the grape juice gave scope for us in the show to expand 
on the notion of acting and non-acting. When drinking real wine we were doinQ just 
that, when drinking grape juice: we were acting drinking wine. Even given the 
occasional sceptic in the audience, for the most part - as determined by conversing 
with members of the audience after the show - it was generally accepted and 
believed 
that all of the bottles contained real wine. 
Returning to ones inner-self and losing, (or if not losing, placing to one side for a 
while) ones inhibitions and indeed allowing oneself to partake in things that might not 
seem acceptable should the alcohol be removed. With the aid of alcohol, 
it soon 
became apparent that the dynamic that existed within the group hosted a little more 
than that which had been initially, I assume, anticipated. The truths were not as they 
originally appeared. The truth of the matter is that there is no actual truth of the 
matter, only different interpretations as to what happened. The programme that we 
sent in advance of the festival opening in Belgium invited the audiences to 
believe 
that there were either existing or previous relationships within the group. 
The 'truthsý7, 
4 
2 
that actually accompanied the group to Belgium were not necessarily as they had 
previously appeared; as Plato suggests, "the 'truth' of things did not lie in the way they 
most directly appeared - not in the shadows on the cave wall, for example, but in the 
figures who cast them. " (cited in Wheale, N. ed. 1995, p. 132). In this way more 
, truths' actually became apparent from the group, about past experiences with each 
other, than had been anticipated in the sending to Liege of the programme. 
Another issue that arose had a certain resemblance to invisible theatre, when the lie of 
two members actually being married and then split up in Belgium, after the revealing 
of the 'husband' sleeping with another member of the group was told after the 
performance. The effect of this 'truth' (110) was immense. Groups that we shared 
accommodation with were fascinated by the fact that this could happen and more so 
that it could happen and have so much relevance to the piece. The 'wife' (of same 
surname as a man in the group - the 'husband') had sat at the back of the set crying 
throughout the whole performance, while the rest of the group performed without her. 
This had actually stemmed ftom another reason, but once the 'truth' had been told to 
one member of the audience, it had to be carried on. Therefore, after the performance 
it was continued for the following days until we left. To see the relationships on stage 
is to accept a notion of performance, however, for the spectator to be subjected to an 
extension of that which is seen on stage is to alter the aesthetic notion of what had 
happened previously. The distance from where the spectator is viewing has changed, 
therefore changing the outlook of such. It is... 
- the 
distance of the spectator, which determines 
the nature of the aesthetic ... 
The spectator does 
not hold himself aloof at a distance of aesthetic 
consciousness enjoying the art of 
representation,... the real emphasis lies ultimately 
on what is represented and recognised and to 
share in it is not a question of choice. (Gadamer, 
H. G, 1975, p. 117). 
The outcome of this was the fact that a particular American 
director spent hours 
consoling the 'cheated wife' at the same time as the 'husband' and the 
'mistress' were 
acting as if they were getting together, much to the disgust of the 
Americans. It has 
since evolved that, this lie, actually represented a'truth'. 
Another male member of the 
474 
5 
group was actually engaged to be married when the project began. However, during 
the process of making and performing 'At Last Sight, he and the 'cheated wife' fell in 
love and are now happily together - unless by some disturbing continuance of 
'invisible theatre' the nightly love making of the couple exists only to satisfy a 
Boalesque notion of art within the realm of life. 
As previously stated, the project was about acting, acted acting and non-acting. This 
leads me onto the idea of interpretation and meaning. Much of the work centred 
around the actors, and not necessarily the characters within the show. The actors were 
in a sense the characters, inasmuch as everyone used their own names and either 
presented themselves on stage or when re-presenting themselves were actually 
representing the character using their own name. 'At Last Sight' was constructed 
where a '-working process established a grid on which to operate where meanings 
were generated within the parameters of the ... text. 
' (Wheale, N. ed. 1995, p. 166). As 
the group chose the segments of text that they wanted to speak, the meanings were 
derived from what the text chosen meant to firstly the individual, and then to the 
group as a whole. Only after the segments of text were chosen, did the words 
constructing the text develop and generate meaning. As suggested in 'Theatre is what 
Theatre Does' 'Meaning only exists once the author or the reader has associated a 
meaning with those words. ' (Robertson, G. 1999, p-3). 
So what of meaning within the group? For me the most substantial meaning extricated 
ftýom the show belonged to a male member of the group, for all intents and purposes 
tk, sý named 'King'. This par-ticular member found the piece somewhat relevant and 
meaningful to a particular point in his present (as it was then) life. For King, once he 
had read the initial text and begun working with it, the idea of a relationship, the truth 
and lies within such a relationship and indeed the feeling generated from such, held 
much resemblance with that of his own life. It seems somewhat appropriate 
here to 
include a piece from 'Feminism and Deconstruction' on King's behalf 
2 
We do not yet know what women are. It remains 
uncertain what it would be like to be a woman (to be 
part of the group "women"), just as it remains 
uncertain what precisely would constitute 
knowledge of women. (Elam, D. 1994, p. 27). 
4 75 
6 
King's desire was to utilise the piece for self-expression in such a way that could be 
interpreted as acted within the show. He wrote a piece of text to be spoken by himself. 
as himself - later to be called 'King's Plea'. The short piece was to act as a 
disassociation from the 'acting' that he performs just pýyýus to it, the difference 
being the relationship between the performativity of the King's acted self and his 
actorly self, presenting a piece of text as if it were spontaneous. The basis for King's 
plea rested with his personal situation and involvement with females (or certain 
female), at the time. His plea came fi7om his feelings and he wanted to let people (or 
maybe a certain person), know how he felt. The show was about a relationship and 
indeed generated certain feelings within the group - as seen with the 'cheated wife' and 
the male member leaving his fianc6 for her. What was happening in King's life 
subsequently progressed into a memorable part of 'At Last Sight'. Goffman relates this 
to the fact that performance is related to the performers' surroundings, evidently this 
was the case with King 
When the individual presents himself before others, 
his performance will tend to incorporate and 
exemplify the officially accredited values of a 
society, more so, in fact than does his behaviour as a 
whole. (Goffman, E. 1959, p. 3 1). 
So for whom did King present himselP Well, as it turned out not just for the one 
concerned that he initially wrote the piece. On more than one occasion he received 
sympathetic responses from the audience after such admissions as "I guess what I'm 
trying to say is that I'm alone, " and "I'm looking for someone, a kind of soul mate 
really" (At Last Sight. 1999). One particular girl came to see the piece twice, as it 
turns out, to see King again after being touched by his plea the first time she saw it. 
This represented an interesting contrast within the show, as one of the females also 
spoke to the audience, asking them whether they thought that what she was doing was 
for their benefit and, indeed,, for their "gaze"? When applying her m*e-up, for whom 
did she do it? Simply by talking to the audience would, possibly, seem enough to 
obtain their attention. However, where does the barrier of acting and non-actIng 
lie 
within this part of the show? Is the female putting on her make-up 
for the benefit of 
4-0 
7 
the audience, or for the next part of the show that she appears) It is not necessarily 
clear. However, with King, he is distinctly asking the audience to take note of what he 
says, in the hope that something might come of it. His actorly barrier might seem to be 
surpassed, or is it" At the same time as it mi(-)-ht appear that King's spoken words are 
natural and not necessarily, specifically learned, there did exist one line that came 
across as being just that. After having said that he does not want an-y-thing heavy, he 
said, "God knows, I've made that mistake before. " (At Last Sight. 1999), which always 
came across as being acted, instead of seeming almost spontaneous. It became a 
learned line as delivered by the actor. However, this seemed to be dispised in the way 
that a transition from 'acting' to 'non-acting' had already been made be-f-w-e-en KinQ"s 
"She was like a tattoo... " (At Last Sight. 1999), speech and his plea. 
It would seem as though King used the nature of 'At Last Sight' to disguise the fac-, 
that he wanted to speak words that were meant for one, in such a way that they were 
actually heard by all. The way in which the performance was constructed ler"I many 
issues to the interpretation of the individual spectator and therefore who was to say 
when the members of the group were acting, non-actina and portraying acted acting. 
This was the ideal disauise for King, as who determines whether or not to take his plea 
serious or not9 
Illusions are created in order for them, at some level, to be believed. In theatre., it is 
rare that total illusion is achieved. Believing is the ability to conVince oneself that 
something is true when it has the possibility of being false. Yet how different, or 
indeed, close is the relationship between truth and falsity (or in this case, truth and 
lies)'ý How real was the wine in the bottles in 'At Last Sight'9 Even if the 'wine' is, for 
the most part believed to be real, this does not proclaim to suspend the possibility of 
disbelief. So if it is 'real', does that constitute the element of truth that exists within? 
As was suggested previously, truth is dependent upon the beholder and however s/he 
decides to disclose that 'truth' determines to what extent it remains true, (if it does at 
all). 'At Last Sight' had a great deal to do with the realisation of truth, or at least 
interpretations thereof, for the members of the group . 
It was also governed by each 
member's different meanings that they attributed to the piece. What did each member 
intend to portray when performing? And how did they want it to be received? 
Obviously, as seen in 'Theatre is what Theatre Does', one cannot assume that ýN-hich 
477/ 
8 
rnight be deter-mined by someone else, nor can someone attempt to tell of someone 
else's thoughts. When looking at meaning, we saw that it was an individual concept, 
I 
and therefore can only be determined by such. 'At Last Sight' presented the performers 
with the ability to govern their own intentions. King was able to voice his feelings in 
such a way that they could be heard by the person that he intended them for, without 
necessarily offering an 'obviousness' to his situation. 
The truth, the lies, the intention, the interpreted, the meaning, the revealed. The sound 
of the wine spilling and the sound of water splashing. The sound of bristle on blade. 
The photos, the cigarettes, the chalk, the anticipation, wanting to talk, The absence and 
the presence. The audience, the eight performers. The female whispers, the fade, the 
bow. The bow. 
4-i 8 
I 
References/BiblioQrqph'V. 
Appel, W. and Schechner, R. ByMeans of Performal7ce. (1990). Cambridae 
University Press. 
Auslander, P. From A cting to Performance. (1997). Routledge. 
Bauman, Z. Postmodernity and its Discontents. (1997). Polity Press. 
Birrinuer, J. neatre, neory, Postmoderifism. (1991). Indiana University Press. 
Cahoone, L. ftom Modernism to Postmodermsm, An Anthology. (1996). 
Blackwell Publishers. 
Cage, IA Year From Monday,, lectures and writings. (1968). Calder and Bovers Ltd. 
Carlson, M. Performai7ce -A MtiCal 
I17t7-OdIICtiOj7. (1996). Routledge. 
Clark, M. Nietzsche on Truth and Phdosopkv. (1990). Cambridge University Press. 
Elam, D. Feminism andDeconstruction. (1994). Routledge. 
Foreman, R. Love and Sciel7ce. (1991). Theatre Communications Group. Inc. 
Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge. (1972). Routledge. 
Freeman, J. 'The Location ca7d Theog of Looking' i17 Journal of Dramatic theory and 
Criticism. (1998). 
Gadamer, H. G. Truth andAlfethod (1975). Sheed and Ward Ltd. 
Hirsch, Jnr. E. D. T'alidityil7b7terpretation. (1967). Yale University Press. 
Kaye, N. Postmodernism andPerformcuwe. (1994). The Macmillan Press Ltd. 
Lechte,, I Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. (1994). Routledge. 
Mann, P. Ae Theory-Death of the A vant-Garde. (199 1). Indiana University Press. 
Moustakis, C. Heuristic Research. Design, Methodology and Applications. (1990). 
Sage Publications, Inc. 
Norris,, C. 777e Truth About Postmodemism. (1993). Blackwell Publishers. 
Oddey, A. Devising 7heatre. (1994). Routledge. 
47 9 
1 
References/Biblinra-ph 
. 
Appel, W. and Schechner, R. By Alleans of PerformaMe. (1990). Cambridge 
University Press. 
Auslander, P. From Actin to Per miance. (1997). Routledge. 9 fo 
Bauman, Z. Postmoderniýv and its Discontents. (199 7). Polity Press. 
Birringer, J. Theatre, Theory, Postmoclernism. (1991). Indiana University Press. 
Cahoone, L. ftom Modernism to Postmodernism, An Amhologj,,. (1996). 
Blackwell Publishers. 
Cacre, J. A Year From Monckiy, lectures anduntings. (1968). Calder and Bovers Ltd. 
Carlson. M. Performance -A criticalIno-oduction. (1996). Routledge. 
Clark, M. Nietzsche on Truth andPhdosoplýv. (1990). Cambridge University Press. 
Elam, D. Feminism ca7d Deconstruci7on. (1994). Routledge. 
Foreman, R. Love, andkience. (1991). Theatre Communications Group, Inc. 
Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge. (1972). Routledge. 
f Dranwtic theory and Freeman, I The Location cuid Theory of Looking'in Journal o 
Criticism. (1998). 
Gadamer, H. G. Truth andAl-fethod (1975). Sheed and Ward Ltd. 
Hirsch, Jnr. E. D. Validity in Interpretation. (1967). Yale University Press. 
Kaye, N. Postmodernism andPerformcnice. (1994). The Macmillan Press Ltd. 
Lechte, J. Fifty Key Contemporary Ainkers. (1994). Routledge. 
Mann, P. The neory-Death of the Avant-Garde. (1991). Indiana University Press. 
Moustakis, C. Heuristic Research. Design, Methodologý and Applications. (1990). 
Sage Publications, Inc. 
Norris, C. Ae Tnith About Pospnodemism. (1993). Black-well Publishers. 
Oddey, A. Devising Theatre. (1994). Routledge. 
47 
iol 
2 
Wheale, NjEd). the Postmodern Arts. (1995). Routledge. 
Winner, E. Invented Worlds. The Psychology of the Arts. (1982). Harvard UnIversity 
Press. 
480 
,,, ah Skelton, yr. 3. 
"Art is a lie which tells the truth" Truth and Lies in 'AT LAST SIGHT' 
'At Last Sight' started out as a mainly autobiographicai text, written and directed by John 
Freeman. The text was not assigned to any particular people, and there was no hint of 
vvhether parts were meant for either males or females. The process began with each 
member of the group reading through the text and selecting the parts they wanted to speak 
in the play. The choices were totally individual, and any sections not chosen were not 
included in the performance, Over the months the group worked from the chosen secticns 
of tL-xt, whilst also clevi-sing other scenes that seemed appropriate to the stylle of the piecee. v 
This process appears similar to that descibed by Churchill during her production of 'Joint 
Stock': 
"The play is not improvised: it is a written text and the a-tors did not 
make up its lines. But many of the characters and scenes were based 
on ideas that came from improvisation at the workshop and during 
rehearsal. I could give endless examples of how something said or done 
by one of the actors is directly connected to something in the text" 
(Churchill in Oddey, 1994, p. 50). 
in this essay i am going to concentratee on th-e truth and h-eS within 'At. Last Sight', and how 
they altered the rehearsal process, performance, and general interpretation of the piece. 1 
will also look at, how truth and reality are perceived, and whether it is possible to 
t 
successfully stage the 'real'. "You are getting closer to reality when you say that it 
I-& presents itself'; that means it is- not, ther. e, existing as an object. It is a process" (Cage 
Charles in Kaye, 119996. p. 31j. L'ý 
As Goffman suggests in The Presentation of Self 
_in 
Everyday Life (1959) characters staged 
in the theatre are not generally real. Therefore, an act in the theatre does not 
hold the 
same consequences as an act that happens in the real world, outside of the 
theatre. 
Usually the playing area would be sealed off form the outside world in ways which are 
sOfficient to call what occurs in there fiction. How. ever, with 'At 
Last Sight' this is not 
strictly true. The consumption of real alcohol throughout the piece 
by each member of the 
481 
to Kirby's acting 
continuum. 
"Although acting in its most complete form offers no problem of 
definition, our task in construcing a continuum is to designate those 
transitional areas in which acting begins. What are the simplest 
characteristics that define acting? " (Kirby, 1987, p-6). 
The simplest characteristics may be either physical or emotional, although it is easier to 
recognise physical acting than it is emotional. In 'At Last Sight' we have evidence of both 
these types of acting. The most obvious physical acting takes place during the drinking 
games, where each member of the group adheres to a fixed routine. They do not really 
ýnvolve any emotional thought, but the performers are nevertheless acting. However, there 
is also a degree of non-acting in the game when, for example, someone accidently throws 
wine in their eye! There is also evidence of acting -existing in emotional rather than 
strictly physical terms. One -example is when Andrew pleads to the audience near the end 
of the piece. He begins: "HI, my name's Andrew Proudfoot.. " and Continues by telling the 
audience how lonely he is, and inviting anyone that likes him to meet him after the show 
_I--- for a drink! In this instance Andrew is being himself, as much as he is not portraying a 
'character', or pretending to be in some imaginary or represented place. What he is saying 
is certainly true as he wrote the text about himself, for himself to speak. It is also true 
that Andrew almost certainly believes what he is saying to be true, and yet according to 
z 
Kirby, he is still acting. I "Acting exists only in their emotional presentation" (1987, p. 7). 
As Andrew is always aware of the presence of the audience and the fact that he is 'on 
stage', he will react to this situation by energetically projecting emotions and elements of 
his personality, for the sake of the audience. 
and beliefs. 
He is therefore acting out his own eemotions 
Throughout the piece there are many other incidents where a member of the group speaks 
is directly to the audience, intending to give the impression that what they are saying , 
real' and spontaneaous. When Liz and Chris apologise to the audience, they are acting as 
themselves. What they are saying is not true, but has been prepared and rehearsed 
many 
times before. However, the way the performance has been constructed allows 
for either of 
them to say something completefy different during performance, 
thus, adding a certain 
48 ') 
to Kirby's acting continuum. 
"Although acting in its most complete. form c;. f. -rs Inio proble-m ! --f definition, our task in construcing a continuum is to designate those 
transitional areas in which acting belgins. What aree the SiMplesst 
characteristics that define acting? " (Kirby, 1987, p-6). 
The simplest characteristics may be either physical or e ctional, I I'-- ) -I it 
recog nisee physical acting th an it is emotional. In 'At Last Sight' we ha,, ýe e,,, ite 
these types of acting. The most obvious physical actng takes place dwing 
games, where each member of the group adheres to a fixed Tý- cay t, 
involve any emotional thought, per - rme but the .f0 _rs ee ar :ý nvF ee le ss ac1,1 n g. H cv. 
is also a d--g?, ----- -of non-acting in the ggamee IA... t, -11, - 
for e ar-f-le, s--eriýe acci-e 
winee in their eyee; The:: -re, is also e-videencee of ac-Ling existing in ee-, _-to7. aI, - 
stictly physical t-erms. One -example is when Ar., &-ew ýea-, -- he audie-ce -, E 
fthepi re c ee. Fike lb e g;, -,, s: "Hi, myr, am e's And, ewP, --, ifoo o t.. "an --l ý: o 7- -, i -i ýý estý 
audien f ce how lonely he is, and inviting any-,,, I-. -- +1111at likes ýiim to meel ýýilm al-E 
for a rurink! in this instance Andrew is being himseelf, as much as he is -,, ot p 
I, a cc te r', or lia?. -, . -p,, --se-, )ted pýaze. W. I J-har pretending to be in some imagir -y cr re -, a-, ý 
is certainly tr. u-- as he wroltee the text about himiself, f-r hirrr-, self to sp-eak. It 
iue -lieves. what he is! saying .- 
be and ye+ a, that, Andrew almost certainly be + 
Kirby, he is still acting. "ACting eX'iS+LS only in their emotional p-, esentta'ýilrcn" 
As An-drew is allways awaree of thee c-r t,, '-,, e audience ard lac+ tliia 
stage', hee will react to this situation by energetically prc]-ecting eemotions and c 
his personality, for tI ence. He is therefore acting out his he sake of the audie I 
and beliefs. 
Throughout the piece there are many other incidents where a member of the g, 
sion that what they a7-, directly to the audienc intending to give the impres I 
I taneaous. real' and spom When Liz and Chris apqlogise to the audience, 
th ey ar 
themselves. What they are saying is not true, but has been prepared a nd rehelý 
times before. However, the way the performance has been const-, uc+, ed allows 
ý 
them to say something completely different during performance, 
thus, addiný 
r ýk 
means that there 
is an overlapping from the 'fiction' of the play into the real world. 
. group. 
During and after 
each performance it was noticebly obvious that the performers were 
affected 
(some more so than others! ) by the wine they had consumed. Although it was 
stated on 
the programme that any alcohol drunk in the piece is as real as the bottle 
suggests, I 
felt that some of the audience were still not convinced (and many that were 
seemed unable to comprehend why we 
hadn't 'acted' with cordial, instead). So, in this 
case it is fair to say that the actions of the people in the play did spill over into the 'real' 
world 
Beforee considering the effect of truth and lies within the piec- it is first, necessary to 
assess what, exactly c can be interpreted as real, and whether it possible to stage reality att 
"Offstage we view reality itself, but how can we view anything but 
appearance, however beguiling and refreshing, when we view what is 
presented onstage? Offstage one is oneself, whereas onstag. - one feigns 
to be another self" (Wilshire, 1982, p. 3). 
in this quotation, Wilshire is assuming that. all performers are taking on a role, other than 
their own, on stage. In 'At. Last, Sight' this is an accurate assumption of certain scenes, I 
such as 'Arabella and Paris' or the one between myself and Andrew; however, for a major 
part of the performance we all play ourselves. When I say to the audience "I'm still Sarah, 
I'm 21 years old, I'm known to -ýome of you" I am not feigning to be anyone else. Although 
I am 'p erforming' in front of an audience, 1 am not pretending to be in a role other than my 
own, However, this then raises the issue of what is actually considered to be acting. As 
% represent, to imper, sonate" (1987, Kirby states, "To act, means to feign, to simulate, to 
P-3) but not all performing is acting. When I speak to the audience I am not pretending to 
be anyone other than myself, nor am I representing, or pretending to be in a time or place 
different to that of the audience. In most performances it is easy to tell when a person 
is 
e et t not, so easy 
because the difference acting or not acting, in 'At Last Sight' hoWpVnr, i" is 
between the acting and the non-acting is very small. 
I--"' 
To help trY and establish the acting and non-acting in 'At Last 
Sight' it is heipful to fer zsýý 
, realness' 
to what they do. This also raises an important question, is something more 'real' 
when it is'sponataneous 
rather than rehearsed? Kirby would suggest that it actually makes 
no difference, 
because as long as you are aware of the presence of the audience you will 
always be acting. 
One of the major lies in 'At Last Sight' actually appears in the programme: 
"This work is cast exclusively with lovers, and their relationships have 
informed the ways in which 'At Last Sight' has been both approached and 
presented: the group have worked through their own histories at the same 
time they have dealt with the present of performance" 
The audience are given the impression that everyone in the group are, or have been at 
some stage, in a relationship with someone else in the group. This idea was used as a 
device to make the audience watch and interpret, the play differently to the ways they I-- 
would if they assumed the group had no history together. However, as with so many of 
the truths and lies in the piece, it was not as clean-cut as we first imagined. Not only had 
one of the men had sexual relations with nearly all of the women in the group, another 
man left his fiancb because he had fallen in love with one of the women. This is another 
ncident whereby the 'reality' of the performance was becoming more and more blurred 
with the 'reality' of our everyday lives. The situation was certainly taken to the extreme 
when we performed in Belgium. If the audience were confused during the piece, they were 
left even more puzzled afterwards when everyone played up to their roles and pretended to 
be in relationships with other members of the group. Again, the lies in performance were 
bleeding into our everday lives. 
Another device which we used during performance was that of sign language. The idea 
originally stemmed from a rehearsal where we were looking at different ways of 
cOmmunicating with the audience. It was decided that I would attempt to speak in nothing 
but sign language for the entire performance. Although challenging, there was a problem 
In that I was unable to say much other than 'my name is Sarah' and 'Jesus'! However, 
in 
f'tting with the rest of the play we agreed that it didn't matter if I just made a series of 
random hand gestures, all that counted was that it looked convincing, not that 
it actuO 
Some members of the group raised objections at this as they felt that we 
were deceiving 
people, and also that I may offend any sign readers who happened to be in 
týe audience, 
However, it was agreed that I would try it and see how how 'real' I could 
rnake it 
look. After a few rehearsals we also decided that at the beginning I would 
announce to the audience 
that: 
"I will be speaking in sign language for much of the next hour. I can speak, 
it's just a theatrical device we're using designed to make words visual 
without resorting to a series of invented movements.. " 
1-ý-- 
This succeeded in enhancing both the truth and lies. By announcing 'I can speak' at the 
beginning, shattered any illusion that I was actually communicating by sign language 
because I was deaf. However, it also seeme, d to validate the sign language, suggesting 
that what I was doing actually made sense. When we finally came to perform in May, the 
sign language was just used at the beginning during my suicide text. Together with a few 
random gestures-what I actually signed translated as: "My name is Sarah. Maybe. Blue. 
White. Woman. Thank-you", but I gather from the people I spoke to afterwards that 
1A 
everyone assumed what I was signing to be both meaningful and significant to the 
development of the performance. 
Niýtsche believes that "truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions" (1990, p. 2). He 
also states that "truth is a kind of error without which a certain kind of being could not 
ive., there are no facts, only interpretations" (abid). This is certainly true of 'At Last 
Sight', for we present so many truths and illusions that in onee sense perhaps there is no 
singular definition of the piece, but only the spectator's interpretations of it. 
One Of my favourite aspects of the play was when I went and talked to someone privately 
in the audience. In the early stages of rehearsal I would kneel in front of a man, however, 
this was later changed as we felt it made the woman appear too subservient. This 
device 
nOt only emphasised the lack of 'fourth wall', but also gave me an opportunity 
to 
BXperiment with truth and lies again. From night to night my conversation would vary 
depending on the response I got, however., it would normally begin in the same way: 
485 
"Why are you watching me? Why are you watching me and no-one else? 
Do You think I'm wearing this shirt because of you? Do you think I put 
this lipstick on because I thought you might like it? " 
he responses I got were dramatically different every night. Sometimes I would get no 
'esponse at all and the person would sit staring at the performance in order to avoid any 
, ye contact with me. Others responded by saying they were watching me because I was 
)retty, or that I was interesting to look at, and some got embarrassed and denyed having 
ooked at me at all. I felt that this definitely added to the truth and lies of the piece 
because at least one person believed that. what I was saying him was genuine. It, was also 
interesting in that during the early stages I would say my lines without really thinking 
about what I was saying. However, the more times I did the 'scene' the more I began to 
truthfully believe in what I was saying and become genuinely interested in the response I 
got. By the final few performances I no longer felt like I was acting. ellý 
So far I have attempted to show how some of the truth and lies have affected 
performance, and the different ways we have presented them to the audience. I have 
mainly concentrated on the occasions where the group are acting as themselves, however 
there are also incidents where we take on other roles. Both the 'Arabeila and Paris' scene 
and the one between myself and Andrew, were designed to look like clips from a film. 
Rather than just playing the scenes naturalistically though, we decided to act as if we 
were still rehearsing, by reading our lines from the script. The audience were not awarea, 
that the lines we were reading were not from the actual. play, and although I didn't feel 
that anyone would seriously be convinced that we were still rehearsing the scenes, one 
member of the audience did whisper to his friend, "why haven't they learnt their lines 
Yet? ". This demonstrates the difficulties for the audience in differentiating between what 
was true and what was a lie, and although some people found it confusing, 1 felt that 
it 
actually succeeded in making the piece more interesting to watch. 
hope to have demonstrated how the truths and lies within 'At Last Sight' affected the way 
the performance was received and interpreted. I also hope to have shown 
how truth and 
4 18, () 
-eality are perceived. 
As this essay explains, the truth and lies in the performance were 
lot consistent 
from night to night, and I would even go as far as to suggest that each 
member of the group was not always aware of when others were being truthful or not. 
Therefore, it seems fair to conclude that truth and reality is something which is both 
As Erika Fischer-Lichte states: 
, onstructed, 
and interpreted differently by everyone. 
"There is no opposition between a given reality and its representation. 
.. there are as many realities as 
the different spectators can construct 
by relying on their own perception of performance" 
(1995, p. 103). 
JL 
487 
REFERENCES 
CLARK, (1990) Nietzsche on truth and Philosophy 
Cambridge- Cambridge University Press. 
GOFFMAN, E. (11959) The Presentation of '--', elf in Everyday Life 
Middlesex: Penguin. 
KAYE, N. QI. 9c. --, N Art into Thehatre 
OPA 
ODDEY, A. 4) Devising Theatre 
London: Routledgee. 
WILSHIRE, B. (1982) Role Playing and Identity 
Indiana: Indiana University Press. 
Journals 
FISCHER-LICHTE, E. (1995) 'From theatre to theatricality' 
Theatre Research International (20,2) pp 97-105. 
/ 
488 
v 
DEPARTMENT OF DRAMA, DANCE AND THEATRE STUDIES 
MONITORING SHEET 
module Title and Number: 
student Name- 
WRITTEN WORK: EssaystDissertations[Referenced Journals 
Criteria strong 4 4 weak 
presentation 
utilisation of bibliography 
additional sources 
perforniance references 
appropriateness of references 
spell-Ing and granimar 
referencing and bibliographic format 
conceptualisation and line of argument 
evidence of personal position 
PRACTICAL WORK: Performance (Acting) 
Criteria strong weak 
expressive control (VOICE) 
expressive control (N40VEMENI)_ 
spatial awareness 
interactive skWs within the 
ensemble 
realisation of role(s) 
working with audience response 
sustained concentration 
Control of performance within role 
willingness to experiment 
ability to seize and maintain focus 
without detriment-to others 
GENERA, L COMMENT 
7rnk cö[ 
, b, zu) ov ýJqh 
tA IA'm 
1v0Q, akloLA) t aMcfi 
I 
7 
At last sight. alienating or liberating the audience? 
This essay seeks to explore the 'writerly' nature of the performance of Atlasi 
Sight, and the effect this had on the audience. Performances are either 
predominately 'writerly' or'readerly'. The main question addressed in the esS 
will be, whether At last sight alienated or liberated its audience, through bein( 
'writerly'. Brief explanations of these two terms will be given, as their meaniný 
will become more apparent as the essay unfolds. 'ý' 
A 'writerly' performance invites the audience to establish (or write) the' 
own meaning of that which they encounter. This type of performance allows f 
open interpretation. In contrast, the 'readerly' performance generally tells the 
audience member how to feel and think. At last sight achieved a multiplicity c 
interpretation through characteristics such as the lack of the following, "charac 
narrative or plot and logic of events, these and others will be discussed 
throughout the essay. 
Stating that a 'writerly' performance allows for open interpretation may 
seem ridiculous, as all performance is percieved by people in different ways. 
David Savran observes, 
" As with any piece of theatre, each spectator will be assured a differE 
chain of associations and way of making sense of the action" (Savran, D 19E 
p. 54. ) 
Any performance also has the opportunity to either suppress or enhar 
individual response. In 'traditional' theatre (for. the purpose of this essay, this 
refers to 'theatre' that is possessed of a clear narrative), such as a Shakespe 
-- 
- Th 
play, a narrative or clear story 
is apparent, therefore ) even 
if people feel differently 
about it, the story will generally be read the same. Traditional theatre promotes 
'readerly' expectations, as Colin Counsell observes, 
" perhaps the first thing that we expect of it is a plot or, more accurately, a 
narrative, a series of events and actions which succeed each other according 
to ... 
logic. " (Counsell, C 1996 p. 3. ) 
In the twentieth centurymany forms of 'theatre', or more appropriately 
performance, question the need for the aspects mentioned above, " the 
indispensability of each of these components has been challenged. " (Counsell, C 
1996 p. 3) The emergence of Performance Art, (where art and performance blur), 
highlights this, as does the paratheatrical (going beyond the theatrical). It may be 
that these characteristics are dispensable for the performer, but not for audience 
member, this will be discussed in the essay. 
However, when the elements mentioned by Counsell are apparent, the 
II 
audience is guided more in their meaning making. For examplein Macbeth, a 
I 
clear story exists- Macbeth commits murder in order to achieve power and 
subsequently is killed because of his actions. This is a simplistic summary, but 
one would assume that the majority of the audience members would be aware of 
this. In regards to'Macbeth, the same understanding could be reached whether 
reading or viewing it; this is apparent with lots of work. If one read the words that 
are spoken in At last sight, the reader could interpret it as they wanted to, the 4ýý 
&0 J-4ý S, 
same effect is achieved with the performance. 
CýI 4 
More 'traditional' or mainstream theatre, adheres to coercing the audience 
in interpretation and behaviour, with rules laid out about the role of the audience 
491 
rner. nber. Restrictions are in place, some are explicit, such as not being abie to 
smoke, others such as feeling that one cannot cough/talk/move or leave, are 
more implicit. Placing restrictions on the audience's behaviour in this way, 
enhances the restriction on their reaction. " Such uniformity of behaviour, 
however, is always to some degree also a uniformity of response. " (Counsell, C 
1996 p. 21. ) 
At last sight strove not to restrict its audience, inviting them into an 
alternative 'theatre', where the performers spoke to them as they entered and 
offered them wine. The performers also talked openly to each other as the 
audience entered. This beginning was part of its comment on 'performance' itself, 
and being the usual rules that performers and audience members adhere to. 
Audience members may feel more comfortable in the type of performance 
that restricts their behaviour, for example/where the fourth wall can serve as 
protective device for the audience. At last sight was not this type of performance 
as Chris Roberts observed, "I had hoped this would be the kind of performance 
. 14*' ý, 
that I could pretend you weren't there, but every time I look up, I see you. " (At 
last sight) The performance of At last sight obse d both the existence of the 
audience and the existence of the perforME 
CrS; 'self'. This contributed to the 
1writerly' nature of At last sight. This may have been one aspect that could have 
disorientated the audience at first, but hopefully allowed foýa more interesting ?ý, 'ýVý ý-NýS - 
and engaging performance. Contemporary artist, Robert Wilson also wishes to 
engage the audience in a more personal journey, his work seeks to promote free 
interpretatio 
492 
.-" 
Most forms of theatre coerce the audience member into accepting their 
proffered meanings ... 
Wilson in contrast seeks to cultivate each spectators 
individual response. " (Counsell, C 1996 p-180. ) 
This license given to the audience may be confusing, liberating, or both. 
will now discuss how At last sight offered the audience the opportunity to make 
3 
their own meaning of the piece. Some of the elements discussed will also 
highlight how the work was connected to the'postmodern condition', this is 
simply acknowledged here, but will not form part of the esslay. 
I I have talked about Shakespeare's work as 'readerly, mainly because of 
the rigid text that is apparent in his works. At last sight did originate as a text, 
written by John Freeman, a text without a linear narrative. The performers 
established their own ideas about the text, and the general consensus did 
emerge that it was about a reiations hip that had ended in some way. This is 
expressed in the program for At last sight, 
J, If at last sight is not possessed of clear narrative, then we can at least 
recognize an information structure which communicates the salient points: 
women, a woman; men;, a man; a performance space masquerading as another 
room; beginnings and Ondings, remembrance and remorse. " (Freeman, J 1999 
Program) 
,S -,, \j. 
The last words ' remembrance and remorse' express what it was for the 
VýýIt 
performers and director, but for the audience member, this may not be'the case. 
The text of At last sight was largely discarded, but its influence is seen through 
the themes expressed in the piece, such as love, loss, desire and memory. 
Therefore the performance became more devised and eclectic, using music and 
film sound extracts, both on tape and spoken. Thisý therefore, placed more 
49', 
5 
freedom for the viewer to establish his/her meaning. More questions and 
answers can be sought, about for example, the reason for using particular 
material, and placing them in the context of the whole. When a written text is 
apparent, possibilities of variation of interpretation may be reduced. The intention 
--7 ý_j C_: ý, Uý 
of. At last sight was that no interpretation should be ruled out. 
-I 
LZ'L 
(-" 
)\Lký_V 
Where a written text (rather than an improvised) dramatic text is 
produced, that text-whether familiar to the audience or not- will inevitably hold 
inscribed points of entry, strategies for interpretation. " (Bennett, S 1990 p. 15 1. ) 
At last Sight realised the potential of the creative role of the audience, 
informing the performance itself and their own meaning. This was evident when 
Liz Hague highlighted,, that there was no point in rehearsing any more, stating, 
We need an audience now. " (Hague, L June 1999). 
Theaudience' is invited and expected to operate as a co-creator of 
whatever menages and experience the event generates. " (Carlson, M 1996 
P-151. ) 
The performers in At last sight were engaged in a two-way relationship, where 
the performance could be driven by audience-reaction. For example when Sarah 
Skelton gave the 'orgasm lecture', and Liz Hague gave related actions, the 
Possibility of the audiencýes -, distraction from the words to the actions, would result 
in Sarah Skelton trying to recapture their attention. Therefore the audience was 
given license to drive Sarah Skelt )seactions, role-reversal. 
The absence of an established text allowed the audience to be more open-- 
minded and not effected by popular opinion, for example, "king Lear 
( is designated 
as a Tragedy andVdsummer Night ýdream a Comedy. Audiences are told what 7 
494 
to think, not only during individual performances, but also about piaywrights, for 
example, Shakespeare, and the existence of canons. Jean. E. Howard observes- 
of Shakespeare, and the traditional relationship between text and audience 
reaction, 11 as he orchestrated the play, he was indirectly orchestrating the 
theatrical experience of the viewer. " (Howard, J-E 1984 p. 6. ) Some may feel 
more comfortable watching a performance where meaning is more obviously 
accessible, and would feel frustrated at being left to their own devices. The 
orchestration mentioned by Howard may also be apparent in At last sight, but his 
orchestration promoted, rather than restricted interpretation. 
At last sight attempted to allovv the audience members to use their 
imagination. Meyerhold recognised that audiences were (through the dominant 
form of naturalism) beng refused the power of their own imaginations C) 
His earliest writings challenge the conventions and underlying 
assumptions of naturalist theatre and pay direct attention to the creativity of the 
audiences. " (Bennett, S 1990 p. 5. ) 
Meyerhold referred specifically at that time to the use of set/design, and 
the way that every detail was, or tried to be exact or'real'. Meyerhold observed 
that audiences that viewed medieval drama, succeeded in doing so by using their 
imaginations. At last sight took this further, it was not just about trying to imagine 
that it was day/night/castle/hotel room, for the audience it was about deciding 
what the performance meant for them. The work of Robert Wilson takes t jbj5L 
further, and some people dismiss his work as making no sense at all, but here 
lies the question of how audiences respond to not being told what to th-ink; 
acceptance or dismissal? An audience member at CompTiebnn 
.e 
did in fact 
L 
495 
7 
, question At last sight's status as theatre. In answer to this, it was still held in a 4. z 
performance space, lighting was used and we were at times demonstrating being 
other than ourselves. For this particular audience member who had traditional Nýý 
ideas abouttheatre', these elements mentioned should be demonstrative of At 
last sight's status as 'theatre'. Yet I also recognise that At last sight is more 
appropriately cast under the heading of 'performance'. This audience memb`e 
reaction highlights the frustration that may occur by some, at not being told what 
to think. 
However, At last sight did offer tangible aspects but remained open to 
interpretation, for example through the presence of emotion but absence of 
61c 
character. Emotion was expressed, which the audience could buy into, if only for 
a short time, for example, Liz Hague drowning and then §tatrn-"g, ' Is that enough? " 
(Liz Hague At last sight) The absence of character is one main reason that the 
[& 
play At last sight was 'writerly' rather than 'readerly'. A difficulty is imposed on the 
audience with absence of character. Characters were not introduced, established 
or built upon as the performance progressed, the audiences were not informed 
through characters, as they may be in a'readerly' performance. This was 
enhanced through the performers use of their own names. The performers 
presented different layers to themselves and acted selves. 
This confusion of reality and fiction may have left the audience members 
questioning when acting was actually occurring. David Robertso 5 an audience 
member at Chester, stated that he could not at times decipher what was real and 
what was part of the performance. This is connected to the way in which the 
8 496 
'performers interacted on stage, often whispering to or talking to each other 
(inaudible to the audience) The performers did to adopt 'character', other than 
themselves, but the selves were also apparent, through lines such as " My name 
is Sarah, I speak a little Welsh" (Sarah Robertson At last sight) "I'm still Sarah, 
M -I'm 21 years old " (Sarah Skelton At last sight) and y nams; Andrew 
Proudfoot" (Andrew Proudfoot At last sight). The one time that different names 
were used, they still did not inform the characters of the apparent 'couple, Call 
1ýý 
me Arabella, and you can be ... 
Paris" (Liz Hague At last sight) The audience 
member has to seek why/how these are connected for the individuai performer or 
performance as a whole. Therefore the spectator is continually trying to make 
decisions about what is occurring. 
This is similar to the performance of Brace Up! by the Wooster Group, 
"performances often featured what appeared to be 'real' behaviour, actors 
relaxed, prepared and discussed roles, and even arranged props. The overall 
effect was to break down the distinction between locus and platea, offering the 
audience no coherent other-place. "(Counsell, C 10996 p. 228-229. ) 
As characters were not estabiished nof was a narrative, the performance does 
begin and end and has a middle, but this did not take the form of theusual, 
conflict, struggle, resolution. Yet this lack of logical narrative opened up the 
interpretative freedom of the performance. Linear events did not occur, and this 
statement from the program, 
" the text for at last sight is not fixed, and each member of the group will speak 
and perform only the sections they choose during any given performance-" 
(Freeman, J 1999 Program) 
497( 
\J: 
, enhanced the random nature of the performance. This introduced the element of 
spontaneity for both performer and audience member. Many performers have 
utilized spontaneity, for example John Cage's piece, 'Untitled Event', allowed a 
number of artists to do what they wanted, often overlapping each other. 
" each participant was free to choose what he or she would do, but none knew 
what the other had planned. " (Counsell, C 1996 p. 221. ) 
Another example is that of Rose English in 1991 'My Mathematics' which 
involved having a horse on stage, which would inevitably do what it wanted. 
Although the element of spontaneity in At last sight began as a lie, it became 
truth (especially by the last performance at Chester). Either way the statement in 
the, p'r'ogra ,m informed the audience's perception of the fragmented events that 
occurred. The audiences were told from the outset that meaning could be made 
through their own perceptions. The audience may have been intrigued or put off 
1'. 4 by the apparent unpredictable nature of At last sight, not being bound by cause 
and effect. Ij 
This fragmentation of narrative may have made the audience member feel 
alienated, as`theý may find this structure disorientating. Yet, again this did give 7 
the prospect for different reactions, understanding or dismissal. Events were 
repeated, for example at different times during the performance Sarah Robertson 
and Sarah Skelton lay down as if they were dead, yet this still offered no more 
explanation as to why this happened. Confusion or contradiction played a big 
part in the audienoe '- reception of at last sight, but hopefully., through the 
confusion will come ideas/questions/answers. As audience member Martin 
10 
49S 
Cr6ckett: observed, " It really made me think about performance in general and I 
was able to make up my own story. " (Chester May 28 th) Confusion is offered 
when Sarah Robertson shouts at Chris Roberts on the microphone, expressing 
anger and distress. " nothing you could say could hurt me ... I loved you more so 
mush more than you loved me. " (Sarah Robertson At last sight) immediately 
afterwards they kiss, diffusing the emotion and situation that has just been 
established. 
The confusion in At last sight, regarding narrative and meaning, was 
grounded in the comment that it epdea-yored to make on performapce itself. At 
last sight and its performers refused the frames (plot/narrative, character, 
resolution. ) that many people may perceive as indicating it as performance in a 
traditional sense. 
" Frames, then, constitute the foundations of sense making, for they 
determine how we perceive and read works. Thus the exploding of such frames- 
even in limited, partial and momentary ways-effects the most potent assault 
against available strategies of making meaning. "(Counsell, C 1996 p. 21 0. ) 
A'writerly' performance like At last sight leaves the audience asking more 
questions, even if they decide that the performance is futile because it offered no 
ing, they think more. At times in the essay I may appear to speak 
for an audience as a whole, yet specific opinions are offered. However I will now j 
examine my own reaction to a 'writerly' performance, ShowTime by Forced 
Entertainment, in order to highlight my own feelings of liberation and alienation 
as an audience member. It is indeed my experience of this type of work that 
11 
ýmade me question how the audience members may have felt when faced with At 
last sight. 
Forced Entertainment is a company that reacts against the imposition of 
the media upon us all, therefore it is almost inevitable that their work offers the 
opportunity for individual meaning to flourish. As Tim Etchells of Forced 
Entertainment stateso 
11 
... we're 
trying to make theatre that's both emotionally and intellectually 
engaging, allowing audiences to create their own meanings in the spaces 
between the texts, a theatre that trusts in it's audiences to find it's own way 
through. " (Etchells, T in Devising Theatre 1994 p. 85. ) 
ShowTime did not possess a clear narrative and characters were not apparent, 
also an obvious transition took place, at the beginning an actor stood on stage 
alone and spoke to the audience, and informed the audience of when they had 
begun. I felt confused at watching ShowTime, asking over and over what did it 
mean, stating that I didn't understand it, but realized that I had at times laughed 
and felt sad. I had developed my own way of viewing the performance, enabling 
me to attain my own meaning. I was disorientated by the performance, as I had, 
like many people, a traditional and narrow view of 'theatre'. ShowTime also had a 
chaotic structure, which at first I found disorientating, but I later realised that it 
was this apparent chaos that held the performance together. The chaotic nature 
Of ShowTime ensured that I was constantly trying to understand what was 
happening. I kept looking for the meaning that was trying to be conveyed and if a 
deep significance was to be found. After the performance I realisýd that it was 
my own meaning that became important. To use an analogy, ShowTime did not 
499 
12 
bake my cake for me, but gave me the ingredients and told me to go and cook. In 
ShowTime, much was presented, but implication was left up to the individual. It is 
understandable that audience members watching At last sight may have felt 
alienated. When watching ShowTime I felt that I had missed the point. I realised 
that this was not the case, and that I enjoyed the performance not because the 
story was good or the acting was impressive, but because it engaged me and 
made me think. It introduced me to a new way of viewing theatre and opened my 
mind to other types of performance, rather than just traditionai narrative driven 
theatre. I am not dismissing the validity of 'readerly' performances, and 
understand how people feel more comfortable with this type of performance. 
In conclusion, I think that it is more interesting as audience member and 
performer, to engage in performance that allows for an array of interpretation. 
Through my involvement as both audience member and performer, I am aware 
that it may be more liberating for the performer, as they are able to explore ideas/ 
concepts/ theories more. This was apparent in At last sight, playing with modes 
of acting/ theatre/boundaries. However, I think that At last sight contained 
enough to keep the spectator watching, -, 
" No matter how adroitly I attempt to present my intentional revelations, I 
can be sure that there will be enough unintentional ones' to give the spectator an 
accurate impression. " (Andrew Proudfoot At last sight) 
These "unintentional" revelations may have been connected to the 
spontaneity of the performer or the spectator's own interpretation. Also, the 
"accurate impression" given to the spectator, may be accurate in different ways, 
as the individual decides what is accurate or not. Although there was-no story 
13 
apparent in the performance of ShowTime, it is more memorable for me; a 
Ireaderly' performance may offer a story that is easily absorbed, but just as easily 
forgotten. At last sight does not set out to tell a story, like ShowTime, 'I ... may S. - e- 
contain hints of narrative, but are not obliged to tell a story. " (Oddey, A 1994 
p. 86. ) At last sight is more concerned with how things are done rather than what 
IMW 
is done, " At last sight is a struggle against artifice... " (Freeman, J 1999 P, 
.ý 
ýram) 
For the audience of At last sight, their struggle against having meaning imposed 
on them is reduced. Therefore offering liberation. Howeve3 it is apparent that 
some may feel alienated, and not want to be part of this struggle. 
Biblioqraphv 
Bennett, S 
Carlson, M 
Counsell, C 
Howard, J. E 
Kaye, N 
Norris, C 
Benjamin, A 
Oddey, A 
1990 Theatre Audiences A theory of production and 
Prod uctiqýcegti on. Routledge. London. 
1996 Performan&e---a7ritical introduction. Routledge. 
London. 
1996 Sicins of Performance-an introduction to 
twentieth-century theatre. Routledge. London. 
1984 Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: stage 
Technigue and audience response. University 
of Illinois Press. Urbana/Chicago. 
1994 Postmodernism and Performance. The 
Macmillan Press ltd. Hampshire. 
1996 What is Deconstruction? Academy Group 
Ltd. London. 
1994 Devisina Theatre a practical and theoretical 
Handbook. Routledge. London. 
14 
'7 C 
501 
Chris Roberts Level 
At Last Sight: Truth, & lies, reality & fiction, acting & being 
. g. 
This essay will be an investigation and analysis of the performance, At Last 
Sight. The main terms of enquiry will be to what extent our notions of self (so far as 
these are readily accessable) inform the piece, and are played out within the frame of 
perfonnance. In short. how, and if our 'true' realities find credence within the 
performative 'fictions. It will also attempt to address the notions of perforrning truth 
11/ý 
and lies within the frame of art. Finally, I will strive to trace a continuum of acting 
styles. From acting to performing to just being, or self in the performance space. I 
acknowledge that the concept of self is now problematized, however, for the purpose 
of this essay, the tenn self is used to describe that state that is not recognized as 
performing for an audience in the traditional arena of performance. This transition is 
most easily traceable in the different places we performed at last sight, and this 
transition will be traced via a brief evaluative commentary of the different 
z 
performances in each place. 
When talking about a performance that one has been involved in, by means of 
concept, creation and performance, the main problem lies in how to academically 
theorize an essentially personal and playful piece. It is not my intention to gTound this 
essay in totally theoretical parameters, but a cultural positioning may Inform and suit 
the enquiry. I intend to frame the essay in personal articulations regarding 'acting' 
styles, and furthermore position myself within each style when and where they occur. 
However, to adequately contextualize this project , it might 
be of use to site previous 
paradigms that fall withinX similar boundaries of style, content and concept, and then 
refer back to them throughout, in an attempt to give this thesis some frame of 
reference. The main theorist alluded to will be WilChire. i 
02 
Chris Roberts Level 3ý 
Once the performance programme had been wntten,, we, as a group, had made 
the collective decision to lie. This, for me is not ethically problematic, we had just 
decided to dress up lies as truth, and truth as lies. This is always the case in the 
representation of an other of course, and indeed some might say, the skill of 
naturalistic acting is to implore the spectators to suspend their disbelief Nevertheless.. 
in at last sight we constantly refer to the fact, that we are performers, by means of 
drawing round the space, carrying scripts and telling the audience that: "... I'm no 
actor, I'm here because of who I am, not what I can do... " (n). This is a crucial, though 
obvious-difference between us as character, and us as performer. To what extent did 
we expose the failings of naturalistic modes of representation by effectively not 
asking our audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to just believe" At this point, 
it must be noted that this apparent faillure of naturalism is not intended to be an 
evaluative comment. It actually should be viewed as an exploration. Our undercutting 
of the few moments of naturalism that do exist i actual fact, an attempt to 
demonstrate itý' limitations, and in doing so propose an alternative style of 
presentation. Whilst feigning drowni I Liz Hague demonstrates a level of 
applaudable skill with great accomplishment, she then breaks the moment by asking: 
"Is that enough'ý? This is one of the most poignant moments of the entire piece, her 
immediate transition from actor to performer is a clear indication of her skill and 
furthermore visually,, verbally and emotionally indicates our 'intention. We never 
1ý 
allow the audience the oppotunity to emotionally engage in character and narrative 
drive. In doing so, we are, to a certain extent-disreguarding the notion of empathy. If (b r---- 
the audience has no immediately recognisable narrative or psychological motivation 
to cling to, then to what end can they empathize and understand what it'is they are 
50 33 
ý,, Iij Ino xwuý:, I L5 Level 3. 
seeing? Narrative and emotion are ways in which we as sentient beings make sense of 
the world,, by catergorically disenfranchising these understandings, there is a danger 
of alienating an uninitiated audience. In at last siglit, many moments of apparent 
character and narrative are discredited soon after they are established, with the 
potential to f I/ rustrate an audience hungry for meaning. - However, we save the audience 
(hopefully, and from most accounts probably) from this frustration and 
at; ý'yance by 
imploring them to empathize with us as performers, as opposed to characters. 
".. where there's sadness perhaps you could act tears, who knows? .... so 
for mv absence 
of acted tears, I'm very, very sorry" (iv. ). This quote is symptomatic of an attempt to 
I'll 
engage the audience in a certain amount of empathy and understanding. I am 
explaining my position, and furthermore, asking the audience to see me as a limited 
performer, and to not judge me too harshly. This exposing of the artificial, in some 
ways provided a safety net through which we could not fall, and also helped us 
establish the 'real'. 
At the start of the process of making at last sight, we were interested in 
whether: 'truth had any currency in art. This was an interesting theory that drew a 
variety of people together, nevertheless, I don't think any of us envisaged quite the 
route this would take. I know from John Freemans perspective that he was not 
interested in taking theatre into the realms of the real, but was/is interested in putting 
the real into the theatre (I use theatre in its broadest sense, encompassing all modes 
of performance). This is an important distinctioný and leads us into a discussion of 
- ýf 
I alysis of invisible theatre. Willshireýs' paratheatrical theories, as well as towards an an IIII 
At what point can what is seen 'on stage' affect the real beyond the ephemeral event 
"What is a human activity which is an artistic performance? An essential 
feature of this activity is that be bounded and protected by a playing area of 
some sort. The boundaries are spatial, temporal and cultural, and they 
504 
Chris Roberts 
informed by our invisible theatre, but 'on stage. ' I was actIng the part of a pert 
rather than just performing. 
Whilst performing in Chester, the levels of acting and performir 
significantly shifted. There are various contributary factors in this evaluatlol 
piece had evolved to a point that discarded the 'othee of character far more t 
Liege. Formerly, there were more moments of acted 'other', the Road scene a 
crime suspects photograph, to name but two. Once back in Chester, the ca 
director began to change the performance sio-nificantly. In hindsight, I novv t 
that our vvillingness to repudiate sections that had worked perfectly well in Lie, 2 
a finding of our performative selves, and the piece evolved to allo%,, - those voic 
selves to emerge. It now was moving toward an exercise in presenting fragm 
sections of our selves. Most cast members had either created sections for therný 
or become so familiar with the piece, that they began to stamp their indelible 
upon those sections which they performed. Some of this was by accident and so 
desi--n. but either wav it had the effect of dissolving, to some extent, the acted 
and the performed self began to be priontised and foregrounded. As the 
progressed this became even more obvious, and by Friday 28 May 1999 (th 
performance in England) the extent to which the "actorly as if' was "sacrificed t 
is" oiii) was almost total, or as total as context would allow. 
In Compiegne, the foregrounding of self, was for me, complete. 
allowing for context, the piece could not afford to totally disreý'gard the noti 
performers performing, besides which, this is a state probably not possible to ac 
anyway. However, I now felt so happily familar with at last siglu and my place 
it, that at times I considered myself to be not performing. It was akin to being 
Chris Roberts Leý, 
:X 
many in a room full of people, as opposed to being in front of an audience, It has t, 
said that these moments were usually when I was not directly involved in 
actiom'speech, nevertheless', the evolution of the piece was such, that I was invol 
most of the time, so to feel this way at all is quite spectacular. I had made 
transition from actor to per-former to self on stage. I genuinely felt closer to 
presented self than the presented perforiner, and yet further still from the actor .E 
whilst performing those sections which were previously AndrewS' and Glenn§'l 
confident and familiar enough to assume ovvnership. As ever. 4we can never 
be 
how real and truthful any performance may look to an audience, but I can say with 
iron-., -. that I had achieved as close to th ot naturalistic) on stagge as I assu 
is possible for me to feel. At certain tim*es, - nuinely 
felt there was more perform 
'offstage' in Liege, than there Nvas 'on stage' in Comptulne, where I had reached 
nnint xvht-ri- T mqnnuiari tn'ctnat-' thp'rpni rni-' 
Chris Roberts 
References 
(1) Freeman, J. 
(11) Roberts, C. 
(lil) Hague, E. 
(lv) Roberts, C 
1999. Proggarnme. ut lust sight 
1999. Spoken Text. at last sight 
1999. ibid 
1999. ibid 
(v) Willshire, B. 1990. The Concept of the Paratheatrl'cL]. From T. D. R. p It 
34 no 4. Winter 1990. 
(vi) Frel-man- J. 1999. Programme, at last sight 
(vii) Roberts, C. 1999. Spoken text. at /ast sig-ht 
(viii) Freeman, J. 1999. Pro--ramme. at lust sig'ht 
Biblioua0v 
Auslander, P. 1996. From Acting to Performance. Routledge. London. 
Auslander, P. 1994. Presence qnd Resistance. Routledge. London, 
Banes, S. 1990. Will the Real please stand up. From T. D. R. 1990. 
Carlson. M. 1996. Performance. Routledaye. London. 
Counsell, C. 1996. S'--ns of Performance. Routled, -, e. London. 31 
Diamond, E. 1997. Unmaking Mimesis. Routledge. London. 
Kirby, M. 1987. A Formalist Theatre. U. P. P. Pennsylvania. 
Savran, D. 1988. Breaking the Rules. Theatre Communications Group. 
New York. 
51 
Chris Roberts Level 3: 
radically limit the influences which can pass between events in the playing 
area and events in the outside world. " (V) 
So, if what is seen,, no matter how true or real, is protected by the playing area 
(performance space) then surely anything (re)presented on stage is already 
I---- 
compromised by the framing device, and is thus rendered artificial. When we 
performed at last sight in Liege, I believe we crossed the boundary into the 
paratheatrical. The programme that was distributed to the audience stated that: 
"This 
i 
work is cast exclusively with lovers, and their relationships Inforrn the 
ways in which at last sight is both approached and presented: the group are g working through their own histories at the same time as they are dealing with 
the present of perforinance. " (vi) 1-ý- 
The programme, in this respect-Nbore no significance to real events, it was just an 0 
artistic device used to see whether we could get the audience to invest in the lies. I am 
not for one minute suggesting that this had a life-altering effect upon those that 
výatched at last sight, nevertheless for two cast members the border between the 
fictional performance/acting, and reality was crossed. The programme began as a lie 
but for Sarah Robertson and myself, it became a truth, in this respect we effectively 
managed to 'stage the real'. Not only that, we were 'working through our' presents, and 
at the same 'dealing with the present of performance'. This is given further 
complexity, when we consider that in Liege, the cast embarked upo&what can only 
be described as invisible theatre. We decided to 'play up' the role(s) of lovers both 
before and after the actual performance. In talking with various audience members 
after the show , it 
became clear that many of them, if not qujite all, believed what was 
stated in the programme. Beyond the staged performance. I 'played the role' of Sarah 
Skeltons' lover, to all intents and purposes/thIs 'staging' was believed, and for me, 
there was , in 
hindsight a great deal of acting going on for the best part of a week. This 
505 
Cnns Kooerts Level 3 -. 
was unforseen by the cast and the director,. and to my mind, (disreguar in I d' g the ethical 
questions of invisible theatre) enabled us to create an original piece of perfon-nance. 
Some of the lies in the programme became truths in reality. 
However, conversly, some of the truths, in as much as they were truthful, over 
a period of time, became lies in performance. For instance, a piece of dialogue written 
for me, that was intended to utilise my natural nervousness as a performer, became a 
lie: 
11 
... to 
be honest, I'm feeling a little bit nervous, what with the lights, and you 
looking at me. I had hoped that this would be the kind of performance where I 
could pretend that the audience wasn't there, but every time I look up, I see 
you ... 
It (Vii) 
At the start of the first performance in Liege, this was another safety net through 
which I could not fall. It was the moment where I was effectively performing a part of 
'myself 
, and asking to 
be forgiven any mishaps or stumbles. However, by the 
conclusion of the project, it had become the moment where I felt as far removed from 
myself as I had previously felt close. In short, what began as a 'truthful' presentation'. 
1ý-ý 
had become the most 'acted' section. This was/is a measure of how far I think I have 
travelled as a perfortner/actor/person, throughout the course of making at last sight. I 
will endeavour to trace, briefly, this transition now. 
As previously mentioned, we claimed that the text was not fixed and that we 
were licenced to perfon-n any sections that we wished at any given time. In Liege 
certainly, this was palpably not true. The familiarity was, to a large degree acted. This 
is not intended to be derogatory, as it was our premiere performance, we were not as 
familiar with the piece as we are now. It is ironic, that in Liege, the audience 
V- 
. appeared to convinced by our plausibility at the very same time that 1, at least, 
Considered it more acted than ever before or since. This though may well have been 
506