Day eleven

On Friday, we went (along with the production group) to have a class from Richard DeMarco, a 79-year-old, enormously influential theater person, who was born in Edinburgh and has been to every Fringe Festival since it started in 1947. He's worked with people like Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor, and knows pretty much all there is to know about the festival.

He's a very lively, interesting man, and spoke to us in a complete stream-of-consciousness about the festival and his thoughts on theater. He was very interested in all of us, too. He wasn't just being friendly; instead, he recognized that we are all genuinely interested in theater, and he clearly wanted to know our take on everything, as well. He openly recognized that there's always a chance we could be the next T.S. Eliots or Katharine Hepburns (both people he casually met at the festival or elsewhere). He gave us a series of questions to answer and send to him. Questions like: Why are you studying theater? Why do you think you have the right to say you understand what the Fringe Festival is about? Why come to the festival? Are your parents proud of you for studying theater?

We're meeting up with him again tomorrow, and he's going to hold a class on Kantor, who I mentioned above, and who was the brain behind the style of theater emulated by the play we saw last week on the island. I am really looking forward to talking to DeMarco about it, because Kantor's style, to me, feels like the way theater should be done, not simply an alternative method. The basis of it is that a company first finds a space to work with. They spend time (a week, two weeks) just exploring the space during rehearsal. Then, they begin to form ideas of what the space means to them. They begin to bring props into rehearsal that relate to how they individually see the space. Their ideas of the space may change, as they see other people interacting with it in different ways. They begin to develop their characters that way. The director will then start telling individuals to interact with others in certain ways. One action will spark a reaction, will spark a reaction, will spark a reaction. Text comes last in this process, rather than first, because just like in regular life, words are used to give more specificity and meaning to action. The story develops from there. Shows like this cannot be performed as meaningfully in spaces other than the original one they chose to explore, which I imagine keeps many modern companies from making them. But when seen in the original space, the play is intuitively cohesive and dynamic, unlike a show that can be done in just any performance space.

Ingenious, right?!! Maybe I'm overly-excited about it. Regardless, I know I want to use that style sometime to make a show.

Tonight, we have tickets for a literary pub tour, which I assume is going around to different pubs/cafes where famous writers have written or done cool things. MAYBE WE'LL SEE JK ROWLING. Probably not. BUT MAYBE. She is in town, actually.