Audience enters into space. A table. Handed a piece of paper with the following printed upon it:

My Arm is partly about giving ordinary things extraordinary significance. What it needs is a supply of everyday objects from you: the stuff in your pockets, in your bags, your wallets; stuff you carry around; photographs (drivers licences, IDs, travel cards etc.), lucky charms, key rings, badges, toys. Useful things; useless things. Things no bigger than a shoe.

Anything you supply will be treated with care and respect. It will be in view at all times. No conventional magic will be attempted with it – no hammers and handkerchiefs. You will get it back at the end. But the stuff you supply will create a major part of My Arm. Please be ready with possible things when they’re requested.   ¹

^{1 Crouch, Tim (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.}

 

Collect audience objects – I need:

• Doll
• 7 objects of any kind

 

Perform from My Arm, script-in-hand: Plays One, 25-27. Using objects provided by audience.

My Arm, performed by Tim Crouch in Lisbon, 2005

 

Presentation segment:

• What I have just performed is from Tim Crouch’s play My Arm, first published in 2003
• Tim Crouch’s theatre is acknowledged by a range of academics to problematises the distinction between the traditionally dramatic and postdramatic theatre.
• The postdramatic is a theory which “denotes a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama, at a time ‘after’ the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre” (Lehmann, H., Postdramatic Theatre, 2009, 27).
• For many scholars, the postdramatic is in binary opposition to dramatic theatre, driven not by the “dictatorship of the dramatic text” (Boenish, P. M. Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience, 2010, 162) as drama is, but instead
• However, Lehmann identifies in Postdramatic Theatre that postdramatism “does not mean is an abstract negation and mere looking away from the tradition of drama” (Lehmann, 2009, 27) but that the written or verbal text has a space as a material element of a performance, wherein “the written and/or verbal text transferred onto theatre, as well as the ‘text’ of the standing understood in the widest sense […] are all cast into a new light through a changed conception of the performance text.” (Lehmann, 2009, 85)
• Tim Crouch’s work problematises the neat categorisation of theatre into ‘dramatic’ and ‘postdramatic’, led as they are by the traditionally-dramatic ‘story’ – born out of Tim Crouch’s history as an actor and his interest in storytelling as a subsequent result – but in which the materiality of the text is highlighted, and constitutes “a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these levels of theatre upside down through the structurally changed quality of the performance text” (Lehmann, 2009, 85)
• This problematisation, I believe, can have powerful effects in critically analysing Crouch’s work in a way which both illuminates his artistic techniques, and challenges the falsety that his work can be confidently labelled dramatic, or conveniently excluded from the realm of the postdramatic. This is a valuable liminality between forms which, by exploiting, can yield new understanding
• Crouch’s works are an example of what Lehmann calls an ‘almost still dramatic’ theatre (Lehmann, 2009, 69), or what Liz Tomlin calls in her article And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’ (2009) the “no-longer-dramatic text” (title), in which the narrative thrust of his theatre-making means the “written texts often predicate all other elements of the production process, thus aligning them, under Lehmann’s terms, with the dramatic” (Tomlin, 2009, 59) but his other theatrical techniques “simultaneously deconstructing the teleological implications of the dramatic, thus aligning them, one would surely argue, with the postdramatic.” (Tomlin, 2009, 59)
• For instance, in the performance I just gave of the first few minutes of My Arm, the casting of the objects I took from you as performers in the piece – playing the brother, father and mother amongst others – and their non-concurrence with those people and things they are intended to represent, clearly establishes that while driven by narrative, there is no illusion of a coherent “fictive and simulated text-cosmos” (Boenisch, P. M. (2010) Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience, 163) – and thusly draws attention to the materiality of the text as merely a constituent element of the overall performance event
• Crouch’s sceneography also creates a conflict between dramatic and postdramatic. My Arm’s sparse stage, open and uncluttered and set strikingly against a white curtain, reminds the audience of the lack of illusion of a three-dimensional fictive cosmos with its own rules of logic, and in a postdramatic sense “considers the new theatre aesthetics of space, time and the body, as well as the use of text” (Lehmann, 2009, 4). In Crouch’s theatre, these aesthetic choices are as striking and as important in contextualising a non-concurrence between narrative discourse and aesthetic presentation as the text is. These scenographic choices challenge the primacy of the dramatic text and highlight the text as a single material element of a range of phenomenological and recorded elements making up the performance event.
• This role played by the sceneography of the performance is nodded to in the play: “We worked under a bright naked light bulb. There was no refuge or pretence. She hid nothing of what she was doing from me” (Crouch, 2003, 43). Just like the artist this refers to, Crouch hides nothing of what he is doing from us, performing under bare lights on a bare stage.
• His use of the objects from the audience also illustrates that “postdramatic theatre is a theatre of the present” (Lehmann, 2009, 143). The objects taken from the audience situate the performance event in the moment of its live communication, the presence of the audience “reformulated as present” (Lehmann, 2009, 143) as the objects they offer reflexively reference their being at the point in space and time in which the performance itself occurs, the audience’s presence in the “absolute present tense” as Lehmann calls it. Similarly, the use of the items renders the performance as “a process, as a verb” through which the audience is made present and their objects are incorporated into the mise-en-scene in plain sight.
• I will now play a video of Crouch performing My Arm in Lisbon in 2005. I’ll play the video sound through headphones, and perform it back to you, in an attempt to navigate the tension between its intention as a live event, and its lack of liveness through its recorded form. This will also emphasise the discord between its narrative and aesthetic qualities, and in doing so will draw out the tension between dramatic and postdramatic within the performance. This will hopefully give context to the points I have made and illustrate what I mean by them.

 

Play video on tablet – hold close to audience. Script on stand or in hand. Objects close by – use as Crouch does. Read words into video.

THE END.

 

Citations

Boenisch, P. M. (2010) Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience: Reflexive Dramaturgies and Classic Texts. Contemporary Theatre Review, 20(2) 162-172.

Crouch, Tim (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.

Lehmann, H. (2009) Postdramatic Theatre. London and New York: Routledge.

Tomlin, L. (2009) ‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’: Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic text. Performance Research, 14(1) 57-64.