Article 4
[I’m doing something a little different with Rick On Theater the rest of this month. When the
September issue of American
Theatre magazine came out, I
saw that there was an article on documentary theater, which, as ROTters know, is a subject of interest to
me. (See my article “Performing Fact:
The Documentary Drama,” posted on 9 October 2009.) I figured I’d republish the AT piece
in an upcoming slot on the blog. When I went to the AT website to download the article for my
files, I found that there wasn’t just one article but a series; the others
weren’t all published in the magazine’s print edition. There are seven
articles, three of them too short to run alone so I combined them. So I
have a series of five potential posts about documentary theater. I’ve
decided to shorten the gap to three days between posts (as I often do for
related pieces), and post all five selections in a row starting today, 15
September. The only other time I republished a bunch of pieces
together like this was a series of six open letters on theater by
Washington Irving I ran in August 2010.
[The overall on-line reference for all seven
documentary theater articles is on the American
Theatre [Theatre Communications Group;
New York] website dated 22 August 2017, http://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/on-the-real-documentary-theatre
(which has links to the separate articles).
The individual articles and the dates on which I’ll post them (under the
blog heading “On The Real: Documentary Theatre,” the series’ umbrella title)
are as follows: “A History of U.S. Documentary Theatre in Three Stages” by
Jules Odendahl-James, 15 September; “Ringside? Let’s Take Down the Ropes” by
Anna Deavere Smith, 18 September; “Real Talk About Real Talk” by Amelia
Parenteau, 21 September; “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Documentary Theatre?”
by Parenteau, 24 September; “A Room Full
of Mirrors” by Rob Weinert-Kendt, 27 September; “‘Foreign to Myself’ Delves
Beyond the Trauma of War” by Brad Rhines, 27 September; and “Our Reflection Talks Back” by Carol
Martin, 27 September.]
ON THE REAL: DOCUMENTARY THEATRE | THEATRE HISTORY
“HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE DOCUMENTARY
THEATRE?
By Amelia
Parenteau
Stage works based
on real material range so widely that about all they have in common is their
makers’ aversion to labels.
What’s in a name?
Of the seven
contemporary theatremakers I spoke to for this piece, not one was happy with
the term “documentary theatre” to describe their work. All had reasons for
rejecting it: it felt too clinical, or they didn’t know what it meant, or they
felt that other people were pursuing it more seriously and didn’t want to
falsely lay claim to it. Marianne Weems, artistic director of the Builders
Association, spoke for several artists when she confessed, “I don’t relate to
the scholarly aspect of the field.”
And yet each of these
artists is undeniably engaged in creating some kind of documentary theatre,
meaning that they draw from factual source material to craft their work and
tell engaging stories in direct conversation with our present reality. Above
and beyond holding a mirror up to society, as all art is charged to do, these
theatremakers are finding ties to specific communities and stories, proving the
old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.
But as these original
works often defy categorization, one of the biggest shifts in the contemporary
landscape of documentary theatre is a rejection of the term itself.
Admittedly, it’s
usually not a good idea to force labels onto contemporary artists’ work; one of
theatre’s most vibrant joys comes from the raw experience of savoring each new
work as an individual experience, with each creator adapting the tools and the
terms of the form to suit their own vision. But for lack of a better
encompassing word in a moment of shifting terminology, “documentary theatre”
will serve in this article to describe works that locate themselves in
proximity to each other on the contemporary theatre scene, even if the creators
are not necessarily in dialogue.
Although the
definition is as contested as the term itself, “documentary theatre” tends to
describe theatre that wholly or in part uses existing documentary material as a
source for the script, typically without altering its wording. This source
material can come from interviews, newspapers, court transcripts, oral histories,
etc. Alternative labels currently in circulation include “investigative
theatre,” “verbatim theatre,” and “ethnodrama.”
“Investigative
theatre” entered the lexicon thanks to the Civilians, a Brooklyn-based
theatre company founded in 2001. Calling it “an artistic practice rooted in the
process of creative inquiry,” the Civilians define it in their mission
statement thus: “Investigative theatre brings artists into dynamic engagement
with the subject of their work; the artists look outward in pursuit of pressing
questions, often engaging with individuals and communities in order to listen,
make discoveries, and challenge habitual ways of knowing. The ethos of
investigative theatre extends into production, inviting audiences to be active
participants in the inquiry before, during, and after the performance.”
Investigative theatre
provides a little more leeway than “documentary theatre,” blurring the lines
between factual documentation and artistic sensibilities in storytelling.
“Verbatim theatre,”
as one might guess, is the practice of constructing a play from the speech of
people interviewed about a given topic. Anna Deavere Smith’s work provides
a seminal example. Understandably, this creative process presents a set of strict
limitations on writers, which makes works of purely verbatim theatre few and
far between.
Aaron Landsman’s most
recent project, Perfect City, is hard for even him to define. He
describes it as an artistic process of inquiry in which young adults are paid to
gather once a week to think, talk, and make art over a span of 20 years, with
the end goal of making our cities and our lives more equitable. He concedes
that parts of his shows have been verbatim, though he and his co-creators
edited the transcripts they were using. He insisted, “It’s not nonfiction. We
used documentary editing choices, but I wanted us to own ‘we made this.’ I
worry these labels make one think the show is objective or journalistic, or
that because I conducted the interview I got the only ‘real’ story.”
Landsman developed
his ethnographic approach under the tutelage of Gregory Snyder. When he
interviews people for his theatre creations, he doesn’t take notes or record
the conversations. Instead, he listens actively, returns home, and writes what
he remembers. He then presents this accounting to the person whom he has
interviewed for feedback, and often has the interviewee perform their own story
in the show. “It’s amazing the way the mind works—what you remember, and
connections your mind makes between ideas that might have come up at different
points in the conversation,” Landsman said.
Methodologically,
then, Landsman dabbles in verbatim theatre and ethnodrama, but uses neither
label to describe his work.
What unites all
these examples is a focus on the “real”—a multifaceted attempt to unearth bare truth through theatrical
storytelling and engage audiences in meaningful conversation. The “documentary”
label is apt not only because creators draw from documentary source material,
but also because this theatre serves to document our time, in all its
specificity and contradictions.
It may not be just
the term that makes artists reluctant. The implication that a documentarian
assumes responsibility for other people’s stories—and is some kind of arbiter
or moral authority—is fraught in these times of increased social consciousness.
Cultural appropriation is a cardinal creative sin, and artists are more aware
than ever of the burden of responsibility that comes with telling other
people’s stories. It’s no wonder, then, that they shy from that perception.
Travis Russ, founder
and artistic director of New York City-based Life Jacket Theatre Company,
recently presented part of his company’s upcoming work about sex offenders in
Florida, America Is Hard to See, at New York University’s Forum on
Ethnodrama [Program in Educational Theatre at New York University’s Steinhardt
School, 21 and 22 April 2017]. Though Russ has a background in ethnography, he
is reluctant to put Life Jacket’s work in a particular box, insisting that he
is not a journalist and avoiding clinical terms that might make audiences
assume they’ll hear a lecture or history lesson at Life Jacket’s shows.
Said Russ, “Our goal
is to tell a story and make it engaging; [journalists’] is to report facts and
help readers draw conclusions based on the facts. We uncover truth, not just
facts, which makes theatre different.” Several artists interviewed described a
similar objective: access to essential human truths via “real” source material,
all the while protecting their creativity, and disavowing presumed authority,
by eschewing the documentary label.
Ideally, documentary
theatre is more of an invitation to open a conversation with the audience
rather than to teach them. The Builders Association in Brooklyn is currently
developing several projects, one of which takes the idea of opening a conversation
with the audience literally. In a new piece with the working title AYN
RAND: Trauma Response [5 October 2017, PRELUDE Festival; Martin E.
Segal Theatre Center, Graduate Center of the City University of New York], the first half will be a theatrical
meditation on Rand’s life, the second half a house-lights-up discussion with
the audience.
When the Builders tested
the concept at the Performing Garage in SoHo earlier this year, Weems
reported, the audience would not leave the theatre even after the discussion
portion was over, they were so hungry for the opportunity to engage in dialogue
in response to the work they had just seen. Particularly in light of much of
the Tea Party Right’s idolization of Rand, the Builders Association is eager to
delve deeper into her personal history and encourage a conversation with
audiences.
Even in less overt
forms of audience engagement, the relationship between actor and audience is
often a key element of documentary theatre. In the case of Life Jacket’s America
Is Hard to See, set to premiere at NYC’s HERE in January 2018,
Russ is acutely aware that he’s asking actors to channel another real human
being live onstage. “It is critically important for practitioners who make work
based on real people and events to be clear with audiences on what is real and
what is not,” Russ said.
Russ does not give
his actors access to the transcripts or recordings of the interviews used to
create the show. Instead, he explained, “I always want to know, as a human
being, what [actors] can bring to the table and infer from what’s given.” Russ
trusts that the verbatim speech in his script will provide enough material for
the actors—and the audience—to unearth the truth of each character and
empathize with them. When telling the personal stories of sex offenders, this
empathic engagement is essential, as it gives audiences room to confront their
own preconceptions and leave with more questions than they entered with.
Another way to
approach the dividing lines between what is real and theatrical is to have the
subjects of the show portray themselves onstage. Landsman, who describes his
own work as “socially engaged art,” had audience members reenact real
transcripts of city councilmembers’ meetings in his piece City Council
Meeting [performed at HERE in 2011
and 2012, Houston in 2012, and Tempe, Arizona, in 2013], which he
created with Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay. Audience members were also
encouraged to participate in the show, which has installed itself in local city
councils from Bismarck, N.D., to San Antonio, Texas, Portland, Ore., and NYC.
Sitting somewhere between performance and politics, City Council
Meeting is a formal experiment in that it draws not only from source
material but also real-life, present engagement. By blurring the distinction
between politicians and citizens, audience members and participants, City
Council Meeting is intended to spur a reconception of the limitations and
opportunities for political engagement on a local level.
Liveness and personal
engagement obviously distinguish documentary theatre from documentary film:
Physical proximity creates an opportunity for more immediate engagement with
the subject at hand. Both documentary film and theatre may set out to educate
and motivate their audiences, but there is something necessarily more personal
about the liveness of theatre.
Sam
Green came sideways at documentary theatre from a background in
film, and doesn’t use
the term to describe his work; he prefers “live documentary” when presenting
his work in a film-screening context, and “lecture performance” in the
performance world. Green’s ouevre includes works on the Weather Underground,
the Kronos Quartet, and R. Buckminster Fuller, in which he live-narrates a
series of projected images, accompanied by live music. “Coming from the film
world, liveness isn’t in the equation,” said Green. “It’s funny to be between
the two, seeing through both eyes. But you can’t deny with these pieces that
liveness gives the frisson. The energy in the room is a current running through
it.”
Green is explicit in
his desire to always be performing, not acting. He
explained: “This form has antecedents in film history, before cinema became a
popular form of public entertainment in the late 1800s. There was a huge
lecture tradition in the United States, and in the early days of film, people
did lectures with films.” Japan had a similar tradition called Benshi,
used when American films were first screened there, in which narrators “would
guide the audience through the film, sort of like a play-by-play sports
announcer. Some Benshi narrators became very popular, sometimes even more
famous than the films.”
When narrating his
own live documentaries, Green is not interested in dominating the audience’s
attention, but rather performing one role in the larger mechanism of the action
onstage.
Perched on another
edge of the form are the Neo-Futurists, an experimental company founded in
Chicago in 1988. They have been eliding the difference between “performing” and
“acting” for decades, and between fiction and reality as well. Their statement
of purpose alludes to “strengthening the human bond between performer and
audience” by “embracing a form of non-illusory theatre in order to present our
lives and ideas as directly as possible. All of our plays are set on the stage
in front of the audience. All of our characters are ourselves. All of our
stories really happened. All of our tasks are actual challenges. We do not aim
to ‘suspend the audience’s disbelief,’ but to create a world where the stage is
a continuation of daily life.”
With their emphasis
on indeterminacy and immediacy, the Neo-Futurists are feeding off the same
human gravitation toward the “real” that draws us to documentary theatre. When
a Neo-Futurist performs a scene from their life—from something as mundane as
grocery shopping to something as momentous as a first declaration of love to
their partner—an audience of strangers is granted access to a personal
narrative typically reserved for close friends and family. As in a piece of
verbatim theatre, audiences often regard material drawn from real life, whether
it derives from the performer onstage or from unseen interview sources, with
heightened reverence and empathy.
This October, the
Neo-Futurists are scheduled to premiere Tangles & Plaques [12 October-18 November 2017, Chicago],
a new work from their “Neo-Lab” created by ensemble member Kirsten
Riiber and memory care therapist Alex Schwaninger,
which attempts to demystify the experience of dementia through interviews
and personal narratives about the life and death of memories. The
Neo-Futurists, like many documentary theatremakers, discard the notion of
suspension of disbelief, welcoming audiences with the full truth of themselves,
absurd or difficult as it may be.
Clearly there is a
widespread cultural interest in seeing and hearing “real” stories in our
contemporary entertainment. “We learn about life through hearing other people’s
stories,” said Russ. “We’ve seen a resurgence of podcasts; human storytelling
events are thriving. We’re living in tumultuous times, and people want to learn
what strategies people are using and emotions they are experiencing as a road
map for their own lives.”
Green agreed: “People
are hungrier for ‘the real.’ We’re all junkies, needing more and more emotional
power in our culture, and real stuff is more powerful. When you’re really
scared watching a movie, you say, ‘It’s only a movie,’ and that power goes
away. But that power doesn’t go away with documentaries.”
Of course, wielding
the power of “truth” can be a double-edged sword for artists who want to both
do justice to their sources and build trust with their audiences. The hunger
for the real—for “reality” TV, for StoryCorps podcasts, for fictional TV series
“based on real events,” for documentary film—has been both sated and created by
popular media. But this appetite swings both ways, as the more we know, the
more we have to worry about—and the more we crave and take comfort in shared
human experience. As our global perspective expands and in-person exchanges
become rarer, our craving for interpersonal interaction intensifies. At its
best, documentary theatre can feed our insatiable thirst for information as
well as our need for something more personal, less quantifiable.
When Weems is asked,
“Why theatre rather than film or other media?” she said she replies, “There’s
still something to be said for creating spectacle. The pleasure of making and
doing is still specific to live performance.”
Another
opportunity afforded by the liveness presented by this kind of theatre is
its vital application as a tool for activism, for speaking to the political tensions of the
present moment. Socially engaged art can shine the spotlight on those in the
margins, bringing their stories to a wider audience. The safe space created by
the remove of the stage opens an opportunity for audience members to give
increased consideration to stories they might otherwise avoid.
Moreover, the
intimacy of live performance lets the audience feel they are in on the
conversation simply by listening. “If I as an audience member know that the
person being depicted onstage is real, I can’t deny their reality, story, or
existence in the world,” said Russ. “It makes me lean in more, listen more
closely, because maybe they’ll say something that helps me understand their
world better, express my own thoughts and feelings better, or helps me learn
about myself.”
Liza Jessie
Peterson’s solo show The Peculiar Patriot depicts one woman’s
experience visiting incarcerated family members. Though the characters in the
play are all invented, Peterson based them on newspaper stories, prison
reports, real prisoners’ stories, and her own experiences teaching in prison.
Peterson wrote the show in 2003, at a time when, she said, theatres seemed
“cagey” about presenting “politically, racially charged content, because it
makes people uncomfortable.” So she toured it through 35 prisons across the
country. Now, she said, “Mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex
are in the zeitgeist,” pointing to the book The New Jim Crow [Godfrey
C. Henry; Xlibris, 2005] and the documentary film 13th [2016 documentary by director Ava DuVernay],
which means that The Peculiar Patriot is “getting a different
reception.” It’s slated to have its New York premiere at National Black
Theatre Sept. 13-Oct. 1.
Peterson doesn’t use
the word “documentary theatre” to describe her work, preferring just “theatre”
or “political satire.” That said, her thorough research and unique perspective
render The Peculiar Patriot a record of America’s
prison-industrial complex, and opens up an empathetic conversation around the
personal effects of having loved ones incarcerated. “When there’s social
unrest, art—theatre—is most essential,” she said. “It gives people hope,
language, what they can’t articulate, provides road maps, reflections, is a
mirror and a lighthouse in dark times. Artists push culture forward.”
Kemi Ilesanmi is
executive director of the Laundromat Project in New York City, which
works with artists across multiple disciplines to create community-based art.
Among the dozens of works the Laundromat Project has commissioned and presented
since 2006, many projects draw source material from the local community to
create conversations between neighbors. “We are always trying to follow the
artists, shamans in this setting, to see what they are talking about, and what
issues are they raising and questioning,” said Ilesanmi. She cited “the power
of stories to be a site of resistance, a grounding for communities being
displaced, or afraid of being displaced. The power of story amplifies and it’s
important, because it helps shift narratives from the inside.”
The Laundromat
Project has launched several youth projects collecting oral histories of elders
from their communities, which is not just a way of preserving local history but
also of changing the narrative these young people learn about what is possible
and how they envision themselves in relation to those who came before. This
expression of documentary theatre takes place in the streets and in community
spaces, yet achieves the same truth-telling purpose.
“People of color have
been figuring out how to do this [community engagement] work for such a long
time, before it became the center of the academy,” said Ilesanmi. “The
Laundromat Project will continue to really be able to invest and give artists
the opportunity to be the creative change agents they can be in collaboration
with their neighbors in a real genuine way. The challenges of the world keep
reminding us this is something we need.”
As artists and
citizens grapple with understanding, articulating, and reflecting the
ever-shifting truth of the moment, documentary theatre continues to provide a
platform for social, political, and personal exploration. Call it what you
will—or just call it
theatre.
theatre.
[The print version of this article, in vol. 34, no. 7 of American Theatre, is entitles “Truth, Not Facts.”
[Parenteau defined all of her alternatives to “documentary theater” except one: ethnodrama. As it’s not a term I’d encountered before, I went in search of a definition. Finding a satisfactory one wasn’t easy, it turned out.
[Parenteau defined all of her alternatives to “documentary theater” except one: ethnodrama. As it’s not a term I’d encountered before, I went in search of a definition. Finding a satisfactory one wasn’t easy, it turned out.
[The symposium the author
mentions above, NYU’s Forum on
Ethnodrama, says ethnodrama is “the practice of creating a play script from
materials such as interview transcripts, field notes, journal entries, and/or
print and media artifacts.” But that’s
no more than a general definition of documentary theater. Besides, this definition merely describes the
form’s methodology, shared widely by pretty much all types of documentary
performance. What makes it “ethno”? The SAGE
Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods,
an on-line reference work, describes ethnodrama as “the written transformation
and adaptation of ethnographic research data (e.g., interview transcripts,
participant observation fieldnotes, journals, documents, statistics) into a
dramatic playscript staged as a live, public theatrical performance.” I suspect that’s accurate, but it’s so loaded
with jargon and academic-sounding terms, I can’t unpack it. It may be correct, but it's useless.
[A website called Medanth (for Medical Anthropology)
says: “Ethnodrama is an arts-based methodology for presenting participants'
personal stories which are often centered on social issues and traumatic, or
significant, events.” That seems to be
getting closer; the “personal stories” distinguished the form from run-of-the-mill
documentary theater. (Ethnography, a
branch of anthropology, is, after all, the scientific study of people and
cultures.) From the examples Parenteau
presents in her article, it sounds as if the researching and enacting of “personal
stories” is the key distinction of ethnodrama.]
