Case Study #1. Theatre Counterpoint – Am I Pretty?
Theatre Counterpoint’s work uses musical analysis to devise an end-on performance. Their current work-in-progress attempts to translate the structure of All the Things You Are (as performed by Dave Brubeck) into a play about cosmetic surgery. With small casts, the company’s performances include personal stories which simultaneously feel made-up and real. The company’s work aims to strike a balance between improvisation and scripted elements, leaving audiences continuously trying to identify the voices behind the performers.
While the company’s main preoccupation is with testing the potential for deriving a performance structure from music, their plays deal with themes relevant to the performers. Their first work derived from Bach’s Fugue No.2 in C Minor and the performers’ fragmented memories of their teenage years with a focus on their sexualities. Their current work similarly derives from the performers’ own fascinations with how cosmetic surgery could change their relationships to their own bodies. Theatre Counterpoint’s productions blur the distinctions between scripted and improvised material, between the character, the persona, the performer and the person delivering this material.
They achieve this by editing anecdotes from the performers as themselves and as the various characters/personae they embody into the same score. They also develop ‘games’ (to include in the final pieces), where the performers draw on their own thoughts. One such example comes from Don’t Turn the Lights On, their first full work. In it, the two performers take turns to write a message to the other and hide it somewhere on their body. The other blindfolded performer is spun around several times and is tasked with finding their counterpart and searching them for the message. The chits that have been written on are then thrown along the floor in front of the audience. Most of them are observations about the audience, or of the relative success of their acting.
The most obvious part of Theatre Counterpoint’s work that excites me as a scholar-artist is the way they use games. In my project, I wish to draw on the ways in which Theatre Counterpoint blur an audience’s grasp of what they are experiencing. Using the expected audience’s familiarity with my preoccupations with race, identity and decolonisation, I hope to confuse notions of whether I’m acting a character or a persona or if I’m simply being ‘myself’. I will attempt to bring these ideas into my project by developing rules for a game for me to play with the audience without their knowledge.
Case Study #1. Jamal Harewood - The Privileged
Jamal Harewood's work requires audience activity for the performance to go beyond its initial image. Numbered envelopes are left on random seats with instructions for the spectators that begin playful and become more uncomfortable as they go on. Harewood's only full performance work to date has been The Privileged, where they are naked underneath a polar bear costume, lying on the floor in the middle of a square of audience seating. There are fried chicken pieces laid across the floor. The instructions begin with waking up 'Cuddles' the polar bear (Harewood), with instructions to remove the costume from Harewood and to force 'Cuddles' to eat from a KFC bucket coming later.
Harewood’s work focuses on identity and race. He uses the demographics attending a performance to interrogate the racial politics and racialized ethics of that specific group of people. In this, his performances develop from their individual contexts, with no distinguishable line between the form and the content of the pieces. Harewood is most interested in establishing a tenuous ‘temporary community’ and asking it to govern its own relationship to the material provided (in The Privileged, this is a living human body). Harewood’s approach stems from a preoccupation with notions of community and how these ad hoc organising structures can affect the ways in which a group of middle-class white people (the most represented demographic in his audiences) deal with being confronted by race. His creative process begins with a set of questions Harewood would like to ask his audience, before the development of a stimulus that allows for open-ended answers to arise from the multiple ways audiences could react to Harewood’s instructions.
Like Harewood, I wish to interrogate the racial politics of the specific audience that views my work through their interactions with my body. I aim to similarly instrumentalise the racialised and gendered lenses through which people of varying ethnicities and genders view my body to provoke often uncomfortable feelings, thoughts and conversations about such lenses. My project draws on Harewood’s use of costume to invite the white gaze through an engineered sense of safety around the politics of dehumanising him by pretending he is a polar bear. I hope to extend this into durational interventions by wearing a red sari with my tongue sticking out and positioning myself to partially obstruct important doorways during the PbRP festival. Through this, I hope to invite stereotypical readings of my brown, gender-fluid body that equate South Asian transfeminine identity with a sari. This would form the basis of a durational performance that, like The Privileged, becomes increasingly obvious in its relationship to race and identity by encouraging more violent interactions between performer and participant as the performance unfolds.
Theatre Counterpoint’s work uses musical analysis to devise an end-on performance. Their current work-in-progress attempts to translate the structure of All the Things You Are (as performed by Dave Brubeck) into a play about cosmetic surgery. With small casts, the company’s performances include personal stories which simultaneously feel made-up and real. The company’s work aims to strike a balance between improvisation and scripted elements, leaving audiences continuously trying to identify the voices behind the performers.
While the company’s main preoccupation is with testing the potential for deriving a performance structure from music, their plays deal with themes relevant to the performers. Their first work derived from Bach’s Fugue No.2 in C Minor and the performers’ fragmented memories of their teenage years with a focus on their sexualities. Their current work similarly derives from the performers’ own fascinations with how cosmetic surgery could change their relationships to their own bodies. Theatre Counterpoint’s productions blur the distinctions between scripted and improvised material, between the character, the persona, the performer and the person delivering this material.
They achieve this by editing anecdotes from the performers as themselves and as the various characters/personae they embody into the same score. They also develop ‘games’ (to include in the final pieces), where the performers draw on their own thoughts. One such example comes from Don’t Turn the Lights On, their first full work. In it, the two performers take turns to write a message to the other and hide it somewhere on their body. The other blindfolded performer is spun around several times and is tasked with finding their counterpart and searching them for the message. The chits that have been written on are then thrown along the floor in front of the audience. Most of them are observations about the audience, or of the relative success of their acting.
The most obvious part of Theatre Counterpoint’s work that excites me as a scholar-artist is the way they use games. In my project, I wish to draw on the ways in which Theatre Counterpoint blur an audience’s grasp of what they are experiencing. Using the expected audience’s familiarity with my preoccupations with race, identity and decolonisation, I hope to confuse notions of whether I’m acting a character or a persona or if I’m simply being ‘myself’. I will attempt to bring these ideas into my project by developing rules for a game for me to play with the audience without their knowledge.
Case Study #1. Jamal Harewood - The Privileged
Jamal Harewood's work requires audience activity for the performance to go beyond its initial image. Numbered envelopes are left on random seats with instructions for the spectators that begin playful and become more uncomfortable as they go on. Harewood's only full performance work to date has been The Privileged, where they are naked underneath a polar bear costume, lying on the floor in the middle of a square of audience seating. There are fried chicken pieces laid across the floor. The instructions begin with waking up 'Cuddles' the polar bear (Harewood), with instructions to remove the costume from Harewood and to force 'Cuddles' to eat from a KFC bucket coming later.
Harewood’s work focuses on identity and race. He uses the demographics attending a performance to interrogate the racial politics and racialized ethics of that specific group of people. In this, his performances develop from their individual contexts, with no distinguishable line between the form and the content of the pieces. Harewood is most interested in establishing a tenuous ‘temporary community’ and asking it to govern its own relationship to the material provided (in The Privileged, this is a living human body). Harewood’s approach stems from a preoccupation with notions of community and how these ad hoc organising structures can affect the ways in which a group of middle-class white people (the most represented demographic in his audiences) deal with being confronted by race. His creative process begins with a set of questions Harewood would like to ask his audience, before the development of a stimulus that allows for open-ended answers to arise from the multiple ways audiences could react to Harewood’s instructions.
Like Harewood, I wish to interrogate the racial politics of the specific audience that views my work through their interactions with my body. I aim to similarly instrumentalise the racialised and gendered lenses through which people of varying ethnicities and genders view my body to provoke often uncomfortable feelings, thoughts and conversations about such lenses. My project draws on Harewood’s use of costume to invite the white gaze through an engineered sense of safety around the politics of dehumanising him by pretending he is a polar bear. I hope to extend this into durational interventions by wearing a red sari with my tongue sticking out and positioning myself to partially obstruct important doorways during the PbRP festival. Through this, I hope to invite stereotypical readings of my brown, gender-fluid body that equate South Asian transfeminine identity with a sari. This would form the basis of a durational performance that, like The Privileged, becomes increasingly obvious in its relationship to race and identity by encouraging more violent interactions between performer and participant as the performance unfolds.