Monday 3 June 2013

The Contemporary Ensemble

ALEX: There’s a section in What I Heard About The World that we call ‘radio silence’, which we tried in a couple of different ways up on our feet, and then in one of those moments where it was just ‘Right, I’m going to write something’, Chris came back after an hour with this text almost as it is in performance now. So the story was very familiar to us but we didn’t have the mechanism for telling it. And at some point in that hour, I don’t know if it was the beginning or half way through, Chris had got this particular text device.
CHRIS: Yes, I think that kind of sums it up. There’s now an option, where there wasn’t before, within devising time to just say ‘Leave me alone for an hour, we’ve tried this out, we’ve been talking about this, we know what we want to say’. One of the options we have is for us to just go into the corner and come back and put a text on the table and say: ‘This is what I have interpreted as what we want to say’, and quite often that works.

We've just received our copy of The Contemporary Ensemble, edited by Duska Radosavljevic, which looks like a really great addition to the discussion of how theatre is made now. One chapter is an interview with Chris Thorpe and I, discussing the making of What I Heard About the World, Presumption and Parts For Machines That Do Things, as well as the sometimes intertwined histories of Third Angel and Unlimited Theatre.

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