This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions
by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from
Lightwork's precursor company Academy Productions, presented
between 1997 and 2011. Lightwork specialized in collaboratively
created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented
with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the
twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific
approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and
formats - scripted plays such as Here's What I Did With My Body One
Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia
adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the
story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the
story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as
The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton
Hall, a Victorian theatre in London's East End; and the use of
verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story. The defining
aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and
scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the
mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional
resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will
encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between
lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as
personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of
life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and
fate. The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period
in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and
stage, process and production, text and 'non-text', were being
radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre
making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element
among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than
its precursor. How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ
from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based
playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the
work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of
one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a
number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing
for the stage. The performance texts are each preceded (and
sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many
people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork,
including established academics and theatre practitioners: David
Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender,
Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan
Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the
collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it
accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a
theatre company. There are sections on scenography, sound design
and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more
usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These
contributions offer an insight into the collaborative,
multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from
an individual maker's or spectator's point of view. This book will
be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching
performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource
for the rehearsal room. Primary readership will include
researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in
creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and
performance, and contemporary theatre. It will be an important
resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all
levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design,
dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and
media arts programmes. It will have appeal for general readers
interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance,
and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist
researchers working in related fields - for example performance and
the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).
General
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