Julia Lee Barclay On … Apocryphal Theatre
January 30, 2009
In 2004 Julia Lee Barclay formed Apocryphal Theatre, a theatre laboratory whose aim is to explore new techniques in the creation of experimental theatre. The company’s latest project, Besides, You Lose Your Soul, appears at the Camden People’s Theatre from 11 February - 1 March and will use a text written by Barclay which the company will manipulate to create a new performance, combining photography, music, dance and visual art to present every night. Barclay told us a little more about the influences behind the play, and what we can expect as audience members.
In a concluding statement in an interview with the New Yorker a U.S. Army General said that torturing people wasn’t a good idea because you don’t get accurate information and “besides, you lose your soul.” This statement and indeed the whole interview haunted me for years. I am an American so the whole advent of torture as somehow justifiable seemed like such a betrayal of the Constitution and the fact it was being normaled so horrible, and then this interview appeared in 2005, and felt like a breath of fresh air (and fresh horror).
I knew I wanted to write about it but wasn’t sure how. Then I attended a lecture a couple years later by Hans-Thies Lehmann (a German dramaturg who wrote a seminal book Postdramatic Theatre) which included the insight that the individual soul was a Western concept and then the whole piece fell into place. I yanked out all my old books from my first year at university when I studied ‘Western Civilization’ (something I have since found out is not taught in the same way here), where we spent the whole year reading the classics from the Greeks up to about late 19th Century in literature, history and philosophy. This was before the idea that the canon could be radically questioned had yet taken hold, so there was no idea that we should question the choices of books. I spread them out in front of me and was shocked to confront the most obvious thing: no women. Anywhere.
So, the text I wrote is a conversation, an argument, a dialogue, a colloquy between these three poles: why are we torturing people? where does the soul come from in Western Civilisation and have we lost it? and where are all the women?
The next step in creating our performances is that members of Apocryphal, who have been working together in an experimental theatre lab and on shows for close to 5 years, look at this text (which is not written like a traditional play but is more like a word collage, in this case with a lot of philosophical arguments and quotations thrown into the mix) and we see how we can use the techniques we have been developing to somehow embody this text. There is no one style in that each member comes from different performance training and/or entirely different disciplines. We do not attempt to resolve differences but instead enhance them. Each performer/artist/musician must confront the text bringing herself to bear against it. It is this attempt to accept and embrace conflicting strategies, even as we work to create a common language to understand them that is the central paradox of any ‘style’ we may have.
In this show, we will have varying configurations of artists each night, with only two people (Bill Aitchison, performance artist and Birthe Jorgensen, visual artist) present at every show. There are core performers, Zoe Bouras and Rachel Ellis who, like Bill and Birthe will have developed personal scores through the piece over a rehearsal period, and there will also be special guests, artists who have worked with us over the years who will come into performances with maybe one or two rehearsals at the most, improvising with the core group to create a kind of theatrical event which works almost like a jazz jam.
When an audience member comes to our show they can expect to sit amidst lots and lots of books, mostly pre-WW II. From within that rubble of Western Civilsation, they will see some combination of performers, artists and musicians work their way through a question which overrides the whole project: where is and what happened to the soul? They can expect to be invited to join us in this search and hopefully be moved in some way they can’t quite place and maybe have never experienced before. And, hopefully, even though the subject can at times be weighty, laugh at the absurdity of the search, which is no less necessary for being absurd.
When creating a show of this kind, the final act of creating is obviously in the performance itself, as a writer and director does this excite you or does it terrify you?
Both, in equal measure!
Why do you think that it is important to develop experimental theatre techniques?
Two primary reasons: first, there needs to be as much precision and craft in experimental work as there is in more mainstream work. Our work may not appear precise or crafted on the first level, but if you watch it closely, and understand that our aesthetic is a rough one on purpose, you will see there is a lot of precision within and between the performer- artists.
Second, these techniques create a language between us as artists which make improvising and creating on the level that we do possible. Aside from the specificity of the work, we have developed over time a kind of subconscious awareness of each other that deepens the work over time.
However, we also bring in new people at different intervals so that the work and the group does not get stagnant. One of the special guests, in the first week of the show, for instance, is Fred Backus, a New Yorker who worked with me in the first labs in the 90s. He has worked with Bill but not with anyone else in the Apocryphal lab. This experiment will show how techniques begun in one place can re-locate in another context with a different group of people.
Also exciting and terrifying in equal measure!
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