Articles
The Community Play and the Genesis of the Social actor
By Jon Oram
This article was written as an afterword to ‘A Time To Keep’, the Dorchester Community Play by Stephanie Dale and David Edgar published by Nick Herne Books in 2007.
In 1974, Ann Jellicoe, an established playwright, theatre director and literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, was feeling dissatisfied with the theatre in London, and decided to leave and move to Lyme Regis in Dorset. The old instincts however had not died so she asked the local school if they would like her to write a play for them. She set the play’s story in Lyme Regis during the Monmouth rebellion of 1685 and wrote on such a large scale it became necessary to involve not only the children but also the wider community. Ann brought in professional theatre friends to help with the making, but involved the energy of huge numbers of local people. It proved to be a major object lesson; the more people were asked for help, the greater became the interest in what was happening. The greater the interest, the more people helped and commitment grew. An amazing energy emerged; long-lost feelings of belonging to a place and a people began to surface. The play became a topic of conversation in the pubs and shops. The Reckoning was a promenade production, a relatively little known style at the time; it had come about almost by chance - by a kind of serendipity. It was only in hindsight that Ann realised the measure of what had happened, and that perhaps, unwittingly, she had created a new form of theatre. It established the basic elements of what has now become known as the community play. It was especially written for and about the town, involved a professional production team and was inclusive to anyone who wanted to participate.
Following the experience of The Reckoning, Ann set up the Colway Theatre Trust to develop the concept and set up what was to become a pattern and rhythm of work for the next decade. In the period between 1978 and 1985 she was responsible for producing eight West Country community plays. It became a custom that she would invite the best possible writers to her productions in order to persuade them to write for Colway. Because the work was so evidently innovative, she was able to attract writers such as Howard Barker, Charles Wood and David Edgar. David was riding a crest when Ann invited him to see her second Lyme Regis Play, The Western Women. He had only recently finished Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC and the production was on its way to Broadway. He was in huge demand. One might think it was not the best of times to ask, but Ann had such conviction of the importance of the work that she would think an invitation to any writer a great opportunity for them. Writers will only take on these vast projects with such little financial rewards if they see the extraordinary potential and significance, and to David’s credit he not only saw it, he embraced it. David’s understanding of the concept was evident in his decision that each member of the 130 cast of Entertaining Strangers should play a character who really existed, that they should be able to look in the local records and find out more about who they were playing. It demanded a huge amount of investigation from the local research team that gathered around him, but I am certain that the sense of responsibility, connection and ownership it engendered was the inspiration that led Dorchester to go and produce four more community plays, culminating now with A Time to Keep.
In the lead up to the Dorchester Play Ann decided this would be her last play as director of Colway. Her resignation followed South West Arts inexplicable decision to halve the company’s tiny grant. Community Plays in the southwest had become highly prized events and ironically as the echoes of protest died away, Entertaining Strangers and my independent production of Nick Darke’s Ting Tang Mine remounted at the National Theatre and ran consecutively in their 1988 season, evidence that there was a growing national respect for the work.
During the debacle Ann asked if I would take over the reins of Colway. I joined her on Entertaining Stranger’s as co-director and to prepare for the work ahead. Since then I have gone on to direct write or produce thirty community plays, taking the concept to Canada, America and mainland Europe. Colway and now Claque have created plays for rural villages, towns and cities; they have been performed in barns, schools, the ruins of a mill, churches, factories, tents, a castle, and in woods but only once in a theatre (theatres paradoxically are rarely the best venues). Each play project has had distinct elements and demanded different approaches that forced me to reappraise every time, exactly what a community plays was. There are, however, consistent basic criteria by which I judge whether I will work with a community or not. Foremost, the plays should be inclusive (anyone can take part). Then there has to be enough time, no less than eighteen months, to carry out a specified process for finding the play that involves a writer of quality working collaboratively with the community. I always insist there should be a local steering committee driving the project and helping to define and implement its social agenda. I have strong ambitions too that the plays themselves should implicate the audience, that they have high aspirations to produce real works of art. The process properly executed should not only support personal and social development but also set the foundations that enable the community to continue a sustained programme of cultural activities beyond the life of the play.
The work is demanding, exhausting and you certainly feel exposed, so I frequently feel I want to return to the sanctuary of conventional theatre, but I know that community plays have more potential to be radical and subversive. Regular theatre audiences can leave a performance elated and enlightened but in time those feelings generally fade away. Here is an art that touches people to an extent that adjusts their long-term attitudes and changes their lives; I’m constantly receiving letters and meeting people years after their plays that tell me this is so. I believe this is because actors who live and work in the community to whom they perform are uniquely placed to offer something professional actors aren’t generally placed to do. I first became aware of this during the first community play I saw, Howard Barker’s Poor Man’s Friend. The experience was full of startling revelations, but one scene changed my view of theatre forever. The scene was a courtroom. Magistrates behind high desks addressed us as members of the courtroom. The cast pressed round us, muttering dissent at us as if we were court attendees. A judge was delivering a sentence of death on a young boy for burning down a flax field. A girl in costume who was standing next to me grabbed my hand. We looked at each other. “Why? She asked, and I knew she demanded a response. Here was an eight-year-old girl identifying with an ancestor of her community 200 years ago and pulling me in, implicating me in her world, bringing the past into the present. I can’t remember what I murmured, something like ‘sorry’ I expect. The point is I felt the hurt, anger and impotency to do anything that this community must have felt when this boy was sentenced to death. But I wasn’t just observing events, events were happening to me. It was a profound moment that changed the direction of my life; I knew this was the theatre I wanted to be working with.
In 1990 I was invited to work in Eramosa, a rural community in Canada that was concerned about uncontrolled development on prime agricultural land around their village. The process involved the community sharing their concerns in what we have come to call ‘soundings’; public meetings that try identify and explore the most potent contemporary issues. The Spirit of Shivaree, written by a local, writer, Dale Hamilton, expressed both the community’s anger at the imposed development and their sense of history. Following the play a group from the cast felt motivated to write an alternative township plan for their local council. When that failed they stood against and replaced the council and within three years had control of the development. I believe the play had united and motivated them in three important ways, they had become informed, they had a more profound sense of history and belonging and they had developed the confidence to feel they could make a difference. When I returned to England I wrote and co-directed ‘Vital Spark’ for Hull about the women who had campaigned to improve safety conditions on trawlers after three had sunk in the storms of 1968. The real campaign women informed younger women in the cast who were to play out their experiences. It was, in the words of one of the campaign women, “a chance, at last to exorcise our ghosts”. The same was true when I worked with the miners of Aylesham, in 1996. They still held onto the bitterness of the coalminers strike. Here there were two camps with different agendas, one group of people wanted a play that would show their children how the village arose out of the depression of the twenties, and the growth and life of the community through five decades of change; another, albeit smaller group, wanted to express their anger in a play about the strike. We decided that the first idea was a subject for their community and the second for communities outside of Aylesham. I first wrote Over and Under the Earth that we performed in a circus tent on the grounds of the welfare club. The second became the first touring community play Fightback that I wrote for eight community actors. These community plays demonstrated that they are capable of being powerful triggers to galvanize and motivate groups of people who have feel quite the opposite.
I have come to call performers who act out these potent local stories to their community ‘Social Actors’. A social actor somehow has permission to implicate the audience in the drama, because this is their home territory and the actors and audience are neighbours. Audiences are implicated to an extent the moment they step through the door and the promenade style makes this fact more potent. The performance places we use generally comprise of stages round the edge of a central area so the actors and audience can share the same space. The audience find themselves surrounded by the action of the play. There are situations in the play where the audience is addressed in a way that places them in a role themselves. It’s not that shallow audience participation where people are dragged on stage to be humiliated, but an invitation to the audience to get involved in the drama as someone other than themselves - an invitation to perform. There are times the audience might be addressed as a jury; an angry mob; mourners or a Quakers at a meeting - all in the course of one play. Essentially the audience are not a separate society from the actors but are embraced by the cast as members of the same group. There is a sensitivity that exists between the local audience and the local cast that infect visiting audience members, empathetic feelings are heightened. Theatre depends on empathy but community plays present a heightened awareness that will sometimes prompt audiences to enter the world of the play physically. The fact that the actor comes from the community makes the audience’s transition from spectator to involved performer almost seamless. Whilst we might be in awe of professional celebrity, there’s a feeling of equality and intimacy when the cast and the audience come from the same community.
Ironically the expectations and demands on the social actor are more substantial than most professionals. They need the same skills as regular actors but additionally we are emphasising and developing social and improvisational skills. In a single promenade show social actors play a range of styles and performance energies: proscenium, thrust stage, in the round, street theatre but also skills of social behaviour- conversation, status, negotiation and so on. The plays are spectacles so there is also a huge dependency on mime, mask, physical theatre and visual techniques. Centrally too, the cast have to work as a collective, an ensemble not only among themselves but also with the audience. We are discovering strategies to entice audiences to attend or participate at a deeper level by stopping the play to reflect, involving them in ritual, interjecting probes and questions; practices perhaps more associated with educational drama than theatre. In all this I’m determined not to bully but to edge the audiences in almost unawares. It’s my constant goal in rehearsals and performances to use the dramatic situation to remind the group that we can all find something of significance for us in everything that has ever happened, is happening or will happen in the future. Theatre can help build our belief in the dramatic events but once that is established the social actor can move the audience towards a depth of insight about the experience. When that child confronted me, theatrical convention had led me to believe I was in a courtroom but she took me one step further into a moment of new awareness. True gut level drama has to do with us at our deepest level, to know about what it is to be human. How would you act under pressure? Do you change when situations are extreme? What can you discover about yourself as you respond to a threatening event? We can only discover these about ourselves inside events. These are the boundaries I want to push – where the audience learns something about themselves because they have been placed in situations rather that watched other characters respond in theirs.
The dilemma of community plays is they are one-offs and the three months rehearsal is barely enough time to teach people to be social actors, never mind develop the concept. There may be a downside to untrained actors not having the voice or technical skills to support their performance. It’s been interesting working on A Time to Keep because it’s Dorchester’s fifth community play, unique in my experience. Here are actors who know what promenade means and audience growing used to the style so it’s possible to open the boundaries a bit more. I am now based in Kent, and we have plans there not only to build a local tradition of plays but to create a centre where we can develop performance skills, the concept of the social actor as well as ‘seasoning’ or training audiences to their role in the performance. I am sure that by working with the same community again and again, building a performance centre, experimenting long term with local audiences will change our perspective on how to present community plays, how plays should be written, what’s written, how they are staged and designed. They are still, as yet, a great-untapped art form.
© 2007 Jon Oram
Director A Time to Keep
Artistic Director Claque Theatre
Regenerating Community through Performance
By Jon Oram.
Written for Resurgence Magazine 2009
“Every human endeavour however singular it seems involves the whole human race” Jean Paul Sartre
Creating Theatre with Communities
I’m interested in creating theatre for by and about communities that strives to affect social change and make sense of the world. Progressive theatre has always consciously used performance to challenge our traditional thinking habits and transform social activity. I began working on community plays in 1982 as an instinctive response against a political obsession with individualism; the stand-alone – “there’s no such thing as society” culture. We are clearly living increasingly isolated lives; we have seen a breakdown of churches, clubs and societies, once so central in community life. We have become less tolerant of the other person, the foreigner, the asylum seeker, the concept of Europe and even our neighbour.
Experience has shown communities are capable of creating dynamic high quality theatre that can and has profound and long-term effects on their neighborhood. Communities can improve skills in communication and management, feel more confident and empowered and better informed through participating in a community play. The cast of a rural Canadian community, concerned about uncontrolled development on prime agricultural around their village, wrote an alternative township plan for their local council. When that failed they stood against and replaced the council and within three years had control of the development. In other communities festivals have been created, community and art centres built, and organisations have been created to sustain the energy and cultural life of the towns. Some of these activities are still running up to twenty-five years after the event.
The term ‘community play’ was first used to describe a production Ann Jellicoe created in 1979 for and with the people of Lyme Regis. Although Ann and I have continued to develop the approaches to the work the process has remained much the same. A small professional theatre team is brought together to work with a community, for up to two years. The community gathers historical and contemporary research to inform a professional writer who creates a script that both celebrates and challenges. A voluntary steering committee instigate and support an abundance of fund-raising activities, performance workshops and rehearsals that culminate in an ambitious promenade play with a cast of up to 200 people. The process and the play are unique to the town they serve. The result, properly executed, is not only a thrilling climax of achievement but also a catalyst that can transform communities.
Performance in life and theatre
Two key observations influence our work today, associated with the transformative power of ‘performance’ and ‘groups. Working with both professional and community actors I’ve noticed that the creative process of making theatre is a greater vehicle for social change than spectatorship. Performers are more affected by theatre than the audiences. This is not to belittle the value of theatre for audiences rather to heighten the value of ‘performing’.
We need to think of performance in a broader context, the truth is everyone performs. Theatre is based on actors consciously changing their behaviour to affect the ideas, attitudes and behaviour of the audience. In everyday life we use conscious behaviour to create impressions on others so we appear likeable, intelligent, and attractive and so on. The significance of this is that ‘performance’ can give us much greater control over who we choose to be. We don't have to be restricted by who we or anyone else thinks we are. It’s also possible to build on characteristics we already have: our friendliness, humour and so forth. We can approach activities as if they were performances broadening our aspirations about what we’re capable of doing. Every time we step up to the plate to try something new we are performing, we are reaching beyond ourselves, doing and being something other than who we’ve been before. Without performance there is no personal development - that wonderful evolutionary process of becoming. The sadness is we mostly perform less than the extraordinary person we are capable of being.
Some of us have been under the spell of good teachers who enrich and enlighten us. All of have been under the whip of the bad teacher, engaged in the contrary activity of diminishing us, robbing us of what is inherently possible, limiting our self-expectation and teaching us to perform like failures. One common technique people use to protect themselves from further embarrassment of failure is to lower other people's expectations of them by demonstrating that they are dull, because being dull takes away the pressure to be interesting. Performing the dullard then further reduces their self-esteem. We have to make a shift culturally from being so heavily transfixed by what’s wrong with us, to thinking of our potential. I promote a more positive attitude to failure. Why things work or don’t work often remains a mystery, so the fact that something you expected to happen doesn’t should inspire curiosity, not despair. Failures are fundamental in the learning process.
Developing the Group
I find the characteristics of the group stimulating – they throw individuals into being creative in ways they can’t achieve alone. Groups consist of many voices; if an individual were to think and speak like a group you would think them either a genius, or crazy. A group can simultaneously engage in a whole host of contradictory activities; consequently it is restless; unexpected; spontaneous; less patient; more impulsive and takes you to places you wouldn’t normally go - these are all virtues in developmental terms. This is not a metaphor for individual creativity - groups have the characteristics of groups and individuals have the characteristics of individuals. Individuals are more of a problem; they can be too emotional and have to spend years getting over their habits, blocks and resistances. The beauty of a group is that there is less resistance, because groups don’t behave that way. Of course it varies from group to group, but in general they are more reckless and more open to transformation. Individuals are more conservative.
I believe a group has an identity distinct from the individuals who make it up and that we should all focus our attention, not on ourselves as much as the development of the group. I’m always saying– “work to make the group look wonderful.” Shifting the focus away from the individuals to the group appears to make everyone more relaxed. It challenges the competitive character associated with learning by creating a more supportive environment that promotes individual development, where it feels safe to take risks.
I use group-orientated games to sensitise people to attend to the group’s mood and inclination and to what the group wants to do collectively. The groups identity like any individuals is subject to change so it has to be found each time it comes together. The group is constantly evolving which means what it couldn’t do an hour ago it might be able to do now. Thinking this way makes us more aspirational in our evaluations of ourselves. The group constantly strives for its democracy, each member listening and responding to what the group needs collectively, offering ideas, accommodating and compromising, sometimes leading, sometimes being led. Allowing the group to take you places is not because you are weak, but because it’s a path not taken. The greatest ills in the world, I feel, are connected to the fact that we cannot seem to live up to the expectations of a democratic free society. I think that’s partly because we are educated as individuals and not given the adequate social skills to know how to work together. Even though it’s quite obvious we are a social species, it’s left to our instincts to function socially.
Inclusivity
A farmer, who I’d interviewed as part of the research for a play once said to me “The trouble with Dorset is that it’s been too long since we had a war; back then we knew who our enemy was.” Months later, after innumerable rehearsals he caught up with me again. “Brilliant” he said, “Now I know who my friends are.” I don’t believe you can have a healthy community if it’s exclusive. I believe community is about an inclusive relationship where we work at discovering what we all have in common. Like any relationship, finding common ground, understanding differences and negotiating compromises needs to be worked at - Theatre is an astonishing tool by which people can do this. When groups accept the collective responsibility to create something that speaks for the group it becomes a social tool that can kill prejudice born of ignorance stone dead.
All our projects are all inclusive. When we hold casting sessions there’s always a sign on the door, before anyone has met the director that says ‘Congratulations you’ve got the part’. We proactively try and get together the broadest mix of people as possible because the greater the range of life experiences and cultural influences, the closer we get to understanding the community. The fascinating quest is searching out what we can create together out of our differences and what common voice can we find. People in society are deeply deprived of this experience of inclusivity if they only function within the limits of their own cultural cliques.
Finding the Play
The source material for the play comes from local historical and contemporary research. We start with community soundings to identify the most potent contemporary issues. Through public meetings, debates and brainstorming the community becomes better informed of itself, not only about the nature and complexities of issues but their collective reactions to them. We search for common ground about what issues the play should tackle. However diverse a group of people seems to be on the surface, we always discover we are also much the same and given the opportunity our instincts are to co-operate in finding expression. It may well be enough for writers to write about the human condition based on their personal experience, but community plays, by their very nature, are about the relationships, actions and interventions of a particular group of people that make a place unique. You can’t find the essence of community or interpret it without listening to it. Community plays can only succeed under an egalitarian regime, forcing the writer to pay attention to the numerous voices.
Next we research the community’s history looking for metaphors, images and events that have a resonance with the chosen contemporary issue. The plays are often historical with a contemporary theme. Although we are not closed to the idea of setting plays in the present day we are aware that they can be divisive in a way that shuts people’s minds. Don’t underestimate history’s ability to illuminate the present, particularly so because we don’t have to adhere to past behaviour. If the plays can simultaneously shed light on contemporary issues, and connect us to our past, we develop an understanding that we are part of a continuing process. What our ancestors did affected us, what we do will affect our children. We are not independent of our past or future but continually in a state of affecting. The past and the future are fundamentally contemporary issues. The important rule is for the creative impulse to come from the community. The play draws on what we have and who we are collectively, something other and bigger than any individual idea. What makes collective creativity work is not only relying on how creative the director or writer are - that can sometimes stand in the way- but making something with all the elements you have to work with- making what you can with what you’ve got.
We then bring the research and findings to a Drama Search to explore the material improvisationally through role-play to influence and inform the writer and hence the play. We improvise spontaneously around events and reflect on the consequence of those events from perspectives of the individuals involved - the repercussions of any one event will affect different individuals in many ways. So we try to include as many people as we can from the widest possible backgrounds - how the contemporary participants empathise with the historical characters becomes the material of our drama. We are not looking for consensus but attempting to understand the kaleidoscope of the different perspectives. Everyone matters because everyone’s experience and interpretation is different.
The Social Actor
Given the right conditions good art and community are compatible. Aspiring to create high quality works of art enhances people’s development; anything less robs the arts of its function to change things and denies the participants the role of revolutionaries. We have a responsibility to support communities in making challenging work, relevant to their own lives, rather than dismiss them as hobbyists. Local people are in a unique position to offer their communities something professional theatre can’t.
I’m interested in developing what I call the Social Actor; local actors who belong to a community trained to collaboratively create and perform new work specifically drawn from their unique environment, with skills in theatre performance and everyday behaviour so they can draw audiences comfortably and naturally into a new form of theatre experience. Being a member of the audience’s community gives the social actor certain rights to express things that might be objectionable from someone outside. They have access to and a closer relationship with the audience. They can be harder on audiences because any challenges or criticisms they level at their community they level at themselves. Their relationship increases the possibility of finding the common ground. It’s also very significant how the emancipatory effects of the play on actors is almost always translated and absorbed to some degree by the audience because they feel the same sense of ownership for the play. Audiences feel more secure among a cast of their own people allowing the social actor to push the relational boundaries of theatre because it dilutes the feeling of ‘us and them’.
A Shared Space
I said at the outset that I thought the creative process of making theatre is a greater vehicle for social change than spectatorship and that ‘performance’ and the ‘group’ were key factors. It seems logical therefore to invite audiences to become members of the performer’s group and offer them the opportunity to perform so they become implicated in the world of the play. We present our plays in a promenade style, with the audience and cast sharing the same space. This way we put audiences inside the action, on their feet, so they are in a more active state of readiness to participate. Scenes move between the surrounding stages and the floor where the audience becomes included in the drama. I love images, and like the plays to be on a spectacular scale. However, whilst that inspires the audience there are more fundamental places to take them, integrating them into what is happening, treating them as a character in the drama. Audiences by turn may be treated as members of a courtroom or a crowd at a hanging. Being given a role encourages the audience to empathise and feel implicated in events and responsible for the outcomes. Whatever world has been created for the audience, be it historical, futuristic or fantasy, if it has a recognisable relevance to their own lives they will transfer their concern for the welfare of the fictional world to the welfare of their own community. And who knows, they may leave the theatre ready to participate in their community and feel a little bit more empowered to affect its future.
© 2009 Jon Oram
The Social Actor
Jon Oram
This article appeared in Mailout March 2006
e original meaning of amateur - for the love of - has become corrupted to suggest performances lacking in quality, there’s a similar perception of community theatre. In my experience, poor quality can be just as of true of some professional theatre. Quality depends on the integrity of the company or the individuals, so let’s knock on the head the idea that community theatre has to be shoddy just because it’s the community. I’m an advocate of good theatre and see lowering expectations of community actors as condescending. Good and bad theatre isn’t doing the same thing in different measure; good theatre illuminates and enriches us, bad theatre diminishes us and drives audiences away. Whether amateur or professional if you perform you have to be tough about your responsibility to the audience. I use a small team of professional practioners to work with communities most of whom have never acted. My interest in community performers is their relationship to the audiences. It’s my belief that actors who live and work in the community to whom they perform are uniquely placed to offer something professional actors aren’t generally placed to do.
Having worked in mainstream, mainly physical theatre, I came back to work with the community because I believe the work has more potential to be radical and subversive. I direct community plays with casts of up to 150 local people. The plays are specially researched and written with, for and about the community by proven, experienced writers and supported by a small team of professional theatre practioners: designer, musical director, etc. The performances are in a promenade style with stages round the outside of an open space that the actors and audience share. The audience find themselves surrounded by the action of the play and sometimes implicated in the drama – there are situations in the play where the audience is spoken to as if they were playing a role themselves. It’s not that shallow audience participation where people are dragged on stage to be humiliated, but an invitation to the audience to get involved in the drama as someone other than themselves - an invitation to perform. There are times the audience might be addressed as a jury; an angry mob; mourners or a Quakers at a meeting - all in the course of one play.
25 years ago I heard about Ann Jellicoe’s groundbreaking work in the South West and her discovery of what was being called the community play. I went to see her production of, Howard Barker’s, Poor Man’s Friend, to find out what all the media plaudits were about. The experience was full of startling revelations, but one scene was to change my view of theatre forever. The scene was a courtroom. Magistrates behind high desks addressed us as members of the courtroom. The cast pressed round us, muttering dissent at us as if we were court attendees. Next to me, in costume, were a mother and daughter. A judge was delivering a sentence of death on a young boy for burning down a flax field. The girl next to me grabbed my hand. We looked at each other. “Why? She asked, and I knew she demanded a response; her mother equally waited for an explanation. Here was a six-year-old girl identifying with an ancestor of her community 200 years ago and pulling me in, implicating me in her world, bringing the past into the present. I can’t remember what I murmured, something like ‘sorry’ I expect. The point is I felt the hurt, anger and impotency to do anything that this community must have felt when this boy was sentenced to death. But I wasn’t just observing events, events were happening to me. It was a profound moment that changed the direction of my life. Three years later I was artistic director of Colway Theatre and twenty-five years on I’m still pursuing community play’s inexhaustible possibilities.
I’m interested in bringing the actor and the audience together as a single community so that everyone feels implicated in the dramatic situation as if it were happening to them in the now. Audiences, of course, are traditionalists and expect to sit in the dark and watch the play within a lit magic box, safe and secure in the knowledge that nothing more is asked of them than attentive respect. Entering a theatre with no seats and all surround staging is initially disconcerting. What is immediately needed is an actor who has developed new social skills to put the audience at ease, an actor who plays the perfect host to the arriving guests. So I am trying to develop what I call a ‘social actor’ – community members who have developed skills to draw the audience towards performance.
We all perform. We all play out numerous roles in any single day. We can learn to perform our roles differently, improve them, or play new roles. Performance is, in my opinion, so essential to personal and social development that it should be offered up as a possibility to everyone, including the audience. The only way we can develop is to try things we’ve never done before, in other words play something other that what we normally play. I want audiences to play something more than being spectators. The first step, it seems to me, is to build on the their natural ability to empathise. Whenever we read books, watch plays or films we respond and empathise at a distance; but only theatre has the unique prospect to respond to the audience’s responses. In theatre, because it’s live, we have the chance to converse and negotiate rather than just show and tell. We can give audiences the opportunity to physically enter the world of the play.
There are conditions about the actor coming from the community that can make the audience’s transition from spectator to involved performer almost seamless. Whilst we might be in awe of professional celebrity, there’s a feeling of equality and intimacy when the cast and the audience come from the same community. Non-actors are closer to natural social behaviour than ‘actors’ heightened performance. I build on these conditions by ensuring that the subject of the play is about the history of everyone in the room, and that they all share the same space’ put succinctly there is a sense of community ownership about the play.
Ironically the expectations and demands on the social actor are more substantial than most professional theatre. They need the self same skills as regular actors but additionally we are emphasising and developing social and improvisational skills. In a single promenade show social actors play a range of styles and performance energies: proscenium, thrust stage, in the round, street theatre but also skills of social behaviour- conversation, status, negotiation and so on. The plays are spectacles so there is also a huge dependency on mime, mask, physical theatre and visual techniques. Centrally too, the cast have to work as a collective, an ensemble. They go on stage, not for their own ends but to make everyone else look wonderful.
There is a unique aspect of the craft the social actor that I believe has huge potential for development; that is the possibility of the one-to-one relationship such as I described earlier when the six-year-old girl demanded a response form me as an audience member. it’s my constant goal in rehearsals and performances to use the dramatic situation to remind the group that we can all find something of significance for us in everything that has ever happened, is happening or will happen in the future. Theatre can help build our belief in the dramatic events but once that is established the social actor can move the audience towards a depth of insight about the experience. When that child confronted me, theatrical convention had led me to believe I was in a courtroom but she took me one step further into a moment of new awareness. True gut level drama has to do with us at our deepest level, to know about what it is to be human. How would you act under pressure? Do you change when situations are extreme? What can you discover about yourself as you respond to a threatening event? We can only discover these about ourselves inside events. These are the boundaries I want to push – where the audience learns something about themselves because they have been placed in situations rather that watched other characters respond in theirs.
We are discovering strategies to entice audiences in by: stopping the play to reflect, involving the audience in ritual, interjecting probes and questions; practices more associated with educational drama than theatre. In all this I’m determined not to bully but to edge the audiences in almost unawares. The dilemma of community plays is they are one offs and the three months rehearsal is barely enough time to teach people to be social actors never mind develop the concept. I’m now basing my work on one community and building a performance centre to explore the social actor and experimenting long term with local people. My hope is that what we learn will enable us to pass it on to other communities. I think it will change our perspective on how to present theatre, how plays should be written, what’s written, how they are staged and designed. The centre also opens up the strange idea of training an audience, of changing their expectations of theatre, inviting them to respond in new ways.
The work of community plays is demanding but the effects can be profound. I sometimes hear myself sounding too evangelical but the fact remains people are never less than surprised by their achievement, they constantly refer to the experience as life changing. It certainly offers overwhelming evidence that performing is socially and personally developmental. Audiences often feel something extraordinary is happening to the people taking part, but that can be alienating, if the audience don’t feel included. So I don’t want audiences to simply feel what others are experiencing I want them to get that experience too.
© 2006 Jon Oram
Artistic Director Claque Theatre