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Part of our research during the creative process and rehearsal period has been dedicated to locating some principles in our apparently fluctuating devising strategies, which could challenge the conventional vision of boundaries between the role of the performer, the writer and the director. We did so adopting a totally consciously experimental and potentially fallible interdisciplinary approach.
While the performer is asked by the writer to produce written notes and physical sketches of an emerging character and context, the latter starts to work on a collection of documentary material, and subsequently on the elaboration of it.
Some of the questions raised are:
• how to relate creative writing and a random, almost dramaturgical directing process to the coldness of documentary material -
• how the director can use the documentary material both as an imaginative stimulus and as a performance structure, that is, the skeleton of ideas and concrete information which sustains the creation of the performance -
• to what extent a writer can produce new writing in response to this material, as well as to the performer’s own inputs -
• how the writer can elaborate a final script, developing it just from the actor’s individual unshaped writing and through his improvisation inspired by several documentary sources -
• how can the writer avoid embracing a personal ideology while substantially re-elaborating original documentary sources -
• how to balance the phases of re-working and intervention on the script with the constraints of remaining coherent and not altering its organic development
• how to retain a plurality of points of view gained from documentary material in the spoken text, for a solo performance which uses the voice of only one character.
From the Sheepskin process other paths of investigation have emerged such as:
the use of original interviews to provide a grounded vocabulary for the character, a language rooted in the cultural and social context of its fictional life.
The nature as well the number of mutations that this material undergoes, from its transcriptions in prose to several other transformations, which can include re-writing in verse, or reshaping the text into monologue or dialogue, at other times into storytelling or narration.
The experience of a dissolution of traditional roles in a collaborative interweaving of creative tasks, where the writer devises the physical “text” with the performer, experimenting with different media (such as sequences of dance and body movements extracted from musical video clips) in creating an alphabet of actions and a vocabulary of gestures, which the performer can then use to create his own physical score.
The process of translation of these gestures and postures, absorbed and learned through strenuous and rigorous repetition, into physical impulses of the character when connected with the spoken words.
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