Over the past couple of weeks, the cast and I have been watching, talking about and responding to Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’. It’s been an intense, informative process, and one that has brought us a lot closer to having an idea of what this show might be about.
Thomasin’s response was in two parts. The first section took the form of an interactive monologue in which she taught an audience member how to knit, whilst simultaneously telling them an alternative version of the myth of the rape of Philomela. In the background, a close-up video of knitting played, emphasising the nature of the memory of the Holocaust as being interwoven into the lives of the 2nd and 3rd generation, as well as playing with the idea of traditions being passed down within families, such as cooking, knitting etc. The second part relied on the audience questioning her decisions, asking something along the lines of ‘Why did you do that?’ or ‘I didn’t understand that’, to which she responded with a second video of herself underwater, and a live monologue in which she described her feelings of only being able to hear testimony ‘as if underwater, partially or not at all.’ Something we took from Thomasin’s piece was the idea of our show being something of an ‘art installation’, with lots of different media going on at the same time in the room.
Angus’s piece was more abstract, and was inspired by the folk song that we hear from Simon Srebnik’s at the beginning of ‘Shoah’, among other things. The song that was sung by Angus, we were told, was the lullaby that his father used to sing him to sleep with. This led us to thinking about items that we own in some way that are ‘memory containers’. At one point, Angus placed a rosary around each of our heads; none of us questioned his authority to do so. The idea of an empty jacket on a hanger, deprived of its owner, unwilling to fit another, was affecting, although I think it’d be best for us to steer clear of suitcases/clothing etc., as it’s been done. The image of the jacket triggered us to thoughts of grief, for example a son trying on his dad’s clothes after his death. What happens when you interfere with the grieving process: when children can no longer register their father’s death (and vice versa) or when entire families are killed at the same time? Both Nima and Daisy chose to respond through spoken word poetry. Their performances were the most graphic in detail and allowed the listener no respite.
The performance of testimony has been the trickiest part of our process. We’ve been focusing on Filip Müller thus far, as it was his contribution to ‘Shoah’ that caught us the most. The problems that we have encountered have a lot to do with the ethical issues of impersonating a Holocaust survivor, and pretending to have access to a memory that is not ours. Very quickly, we eliminated the ‘verbatim theatre’ style of acting, whereby one performs testimony as if one were the person whose testimony it is. This style may well have its uses, but we found that our particular context demanded a less invasive method. The cast were very uncomfortable with the idea of pretending to ‘be’ a Holocaust survivor. On our first attempt at performing testimony, the text was split into three chunks, and given to three different actors who then recited it more or less monotone, emphasising nothing. This was so that no one person could be said to have been ‘playing’ Filip Müller. We then tried having just one person perform the testimony in its entirety, with slightly more emphases and stresses, but, again, making no attempt to inhabit Müller in a Stanislavskian sense. A couple of different actors tried this, and it was found that this was actually more effective in transferring the content and affect of the testimony that when it was split up, but still left us in a slight quandary regarding having just one person pretend to be a survivor. It was decided that the use of a verbal disclaimer prior to the delivery of the testimony, pronouncing the true source of the words would be of use. Similarly, something along the lines of Charlotte Delbo’s prohibitions in the foreword to her Holocaust play, ‘Who Will Carry the Word?’ (i.e. ‘No sets…No make-up…The faces do not count…The costumes do not count) might be a useful tool insofar as it allows specificity without encroaching upon memories that are not ours to appropriate. What are the limits with testimony? Must it be treated reverentially? As one cast member said, ‘Just because it’s testimony, it doesn’t mean you can’t ‘do’ something with it’. I think I agree, provided the thing that is ‘done’ enhances rather than detracts from the content and affect of the testimony, whilst not being emotionally manipulative.
Monday 27 January 2014 was Holocaust Memorial Day, and it was suggested that we use the day to capture people’s responses, via a video booth, to the question ‘What do you know about the Holocaust?’, to gauge the level of public knowledge from our relatively diverse sample at the University of Warwick. I didn’t have particularly high expectations regarding the public’s general knowledge, personally, but that (potential) failure in itself would have been useful to have as part of our performance. I won’t get the video responses back until next week, so we’ll have to wait and see what kinds of things people said, if there were trends in their language/performance habits, etc.
In our rehearsals this week, we’ve mainly been improvising around a skeleton scene of a bourgeois dinner party in which issues of Holocaust representation are discussed. It sounds quite clichéd, but the point of it is to let the improvisations run on longer than is comfortable – recording all the while – so that bits of the conversation can be extracted to then form part of a more subtle, denser script.
For next week, the cast are preparing responses to Primo Levi’s ‘If This is a Man’.
J
Thomasin’s response was in two parts. The first section took the form of an interactive monologue in which she taught an audience member how to knit, whilst simultaneously telling them an alternative version of the myth of the rape of Philomela. In the background, a close-up video of knitting played, emphasising the nature of the memory of the Holocaust as being interwoven into the lives of the 2nd and 3rd generation, as well as playing with the idea of traditions being passed down within families, such as cooking, knitting etc. The second part relied on the audience questioning her decisions, asking something along the lines of ‘Why did you do that?’ or ‘I didn’t understand that’, to which she responded with a second video of herself underwater, and a live monologue in which she described her feelings of only being able to hear testimony ‘as if underwater, partially or not at all.’ Something we took from Thomasin’s piece was the idea of our show being something of an ‘art installation’, with lots of different media going on at the same time in the room.
Angus’s piece was more abstract, and was inspired by the folk song that we hear from Simon Srebnik’s at the beginning of ‘Shoah’, among other things. The song that was sung by Angus, we were told, was the lullaby that his father used to sing him to sleep with. This led us to thinking about items that we own in some way that are ‘memory containers’. At one point, Angus placed a rosary around each of our heads; none of us questioned his authority to do so. The idea of an empty jacket on a hanger, deprived of its owner, unwilling to fit another, was affecting, although I think it’d be best for us to steer clear of suitcases/clothing etc., as it’s been done. The image of the jacket triggered us to thoughts of grief, for example a son trying on his dad’s clothes after his death. What happens when you interfere with the grieving process: when children can no longer register their father’s death (and vice versa) or when entire families are killed at the same time? Both Nima and Daisy chose to respond through spoken word poetry. Their performances were the most graphic in detail and allowed the listener no respite.
The performance of testimony has been the trickiest part of our process. We’ve been focusing on Filip Müller thus far, as it was his contribution to ‘Shoah’ that caught us the most. The problems that we have encountered have a lot to do with the ethical issues of impersonating a Holocaust survivor, and pretending to have access to a memory that is not ours. Very quickly, we eliminated the ‘verbatim theatre’ style of acting, whereby one performs testimony as if one were the person whose testimony it is. This style may well have its uses, but we found that our particular context demanded a less invasive method. The cast were very uncomfortable with the idea of pretending to ‘be’ a Holocaust survivor. On our first attempt at performing testimony, the text was split into three chunks, and given to three different actors who then recited it more or less monotone, emphasising nothing. This was so that no one person could be said to have been ‘playing’ Filip Müller. We then tried having just one person perform the testimony in its entirety, with slightly more emphases and stresses, but, again, making no attempt to inhabit Müller in a Stanislavskian sense. A couple of different actors tried this, and it was found that this was actually more effective in transferring the content and affect of the testimony that when it was split up, but still left us in a slight quandary regarding having just one person pretend to be a survivor. It was decided that the use of a verbal disclaimer prior to the delivery of the testimony, pronouncing the true source of the words would be of use. Similarly, something along the lines of Charlotte Delbo’s prohibitions in the foreword to her Holocaust play, ‘Who Will Carry the Word?’ (i.e. ‘No sets…No make-up…The faces do not count…The costumes do not count) might be a useful tool insofar as it allows specificity without encroaching upon memories that are not ours to appropriate. What are the limits with testimony? Must it be treated reverentially? As one cast member said, ‘Just because it’s testimony, it doesn’t mean you can’t ‘do’ something with it’. I think I agree, provided the thing that is ‘done’ enhances rather than detracts from the content and affect of the testimony, whilst not being emotionally manipulative.
Monday 27 January 2014 was Holocaust Memorial Day, and it was suggested that we use the day to capture people’s responses, via a video booth, to the question ‘What do you know about the Holocaust?’, to gauge the level of public knowledge from our relatively diverse sample at the University of Warwick. I didn’t have particularly high expectations regarding the public’s general knowledge, personally, but that (potential) failure in itself would have been useful to have as part of our performance. I won’t get the video responses back until next week, so we’ll have to wait and see what kinds of things people said, if there were trends in their language/performance habits, etc.
In our rehearsals this week, we’ve mainly been improvising around a skeleton scene of a bourgeois dinner party in which issues of Holocaust representation are discussed. It sounds quite clichéd, but the point of it is to let the improvisations run on longer than is comfortable – recording all the while – so that bits of the conversation can be extracted to then form part of a more subtle, denser script.
For next week, the cast are preparing responses to Primo Levi’s ‘If This is a Man’.
J