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TRAINING |
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Training Projects l Voice l Choreographic Theatre l Cultural Studies
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THE LUNATIC LABORATORY PROJECT
IMPROVISATION : A TRAINING PROGRAMME
LABORATORIO : Choreographic Theatre & Alchemy
Choreographic Theatre was developed by Enrique Pardo - it is the label that best reflects the complexity of his work - related to, but distinct, from contemporary currents like dance theatre, physical and corporal theatre, image theatre, non-narrative theatre, performance art, etc.
Enrique's proposals offer one of today's most demanding synthesis in the inclusion not only of movement, dance, music, voice and singing, but especially of spoken TEXT - which has been excluded by too many contemporary performers whose work has become excluvely visual and musical pageants.
In his view, language is humanity's greatest conquest, and yet, like much of contemporary performance, he also reacted against the "classical" theatre model with its excessive dependance on acting rethorics, talk, dialogue and the need for linear narrative. His work offers both philosophical and technical tools to confront this dilema so that each artist can find his or her voice and performantive eloquence.
Enrique collaborates with artists from very different backgrounds, ages and esthetics - each bringing his or her own contribution to the work. This is especially the case regarding dance and movement styles. He favoured working with choreographers and dancers, sharing their corporal dream-like dramaturgies and their non-narrative sense of composition. But he also questioned dance's silence and its links with singing and music.
The training is sometimes described as "playing the piano with three hands", since it involves parallel work on movement, language and voice, their interconnections and, especially, their disassociations. Not cool chance collage work, but synthesis, involving actor and person. It explores fully the training and poetics of contemporary dance-theatre."
Voice and language become poetic partners to visual images. The body is caught in complex dream-images, while the voice harvests and expresses the emotion.
"Enrique Pardo's approach to physical theatre explodes the interpretation of texts by stretching them into choreographic networks: language becomes a poetic partner to image, and no longer its sovereign. Illustration yields to paradox. Texts unfold new versions, including subversions and perversions. The body is caught in complex images, while the voice harvests and expresses the emotion."
"Choreographic theatre includes language through a relentless fight against textual tyranny, in order to avert the kind of domination that binds theatre to declamation, illustration, demonstration. The aim is a dance of ideas, a dance of text and context - "choreographic" in this sense: the body, caught in complex images, the voice harvesting and expressing emotion."
Choreographic Theatre brings together text, voice and physical theatre. While based on exacting group-composition disciplines, it promotes personal expressivity - especially vocal. Previous dance experience is not essential, but one must be prepared to move, make moves and be moved.
Notes by Enrique Pardo
"Choreographic theatre" is the label that best suits my working proposals - close and similar to other contemporary labels such as "dance-theatre", "corporal theatre", "physical theatre", "image theatre". Its specificity is in the synthesis and paradoxical links it proposes between movement, language and voice.
The use of the term "choreographic" does not imply necessarily a specific know-how in dance or in movement techniques. The term is used directly in its etymological meaning: chorus graphics, that is, the reading of the relationships within an ensemble. To be present on stage is to enter composition, to 'take position' in image. This "taking position" is both a literal and metaphorical - even political.
Training exercises are based on ensemble composition disciplines: placing and displacing within an ensemble - with or against the others. The term "choreographic" usually refers today to the study of gesture, be it in solos or in group work - to a particular style and theatricality of gesture. Here the notion of "gesture" is understood first of all as "initiative": to "make a gesture", to come up with an initiative, to make a social and psychological move - which does not require necessarily a physical move, nor a specialized movement training. On the other hand, choreographic theatre can be very physical, and it does address an artist's gestural inventory - the types and styles of movement one relies on or needs to develop.
To "take position in image" must be understood here above all in its metaphorical sense, that is, to make an artistic gesture, a statement that proposes a commentary. There is therefore an aesthetic, cultural, narrative, and even political choice involved. This approach goes in hand with cultural and critical studies of the poetics of gesture in the manner of composing with movement, text and voice, and the resulting "quality of paradox".
The process could be summarized as follows : " choreographic theatre explodes the interpretation of texts by stretching them into choreographic networks: language becomes a poetic partner to image, and no longer its sovereign. Illustration yields to paradox. Texts unfold new versions, including subversions and perversions. The body is caught in complex images, while the voice harvests and expresses the emotion."
Choreographic theatre implies both a practical and a poetical engagement, artisanship and philosophy. Its artistic demands often go against the grain of texts (contra-diction): it dismantles (deconstructs) first degree identifications between the actors and his or her text. This non-illustrative constraint, this way of dislocating the subjective identification with the text brings up tragic emotion. Text is delivered and lived mostly in "contra-diction" - context and subtext start ruling the interpretations against the literary 'diction' of the text. It is in the voice of the actor that one hears the wealth and tragedy of paradox. The pattern is the one of tragedy: only the voice is free. Tragic glory is in the fact that the actor can "give voice" to the contradictions: the tragic hero loses on all other counts - undone and defeated by the logic (or caprice) of the gods.
