Different Ways of Working, Part 3: Solo Performance

The next part of the syllabus this semester was about solo performance, and in preparation for writing and performing students' own stories, we viewed and discussed a number of different artists who work in a long tradition of people performing stories -their own or people's they know- by themselves on stage. It seems useful, since we'll be asking people to share their stories with us, to recognize the weight of telling something about yourself in a public way; and at the same time, it's a way of understanding what things in your life shape your identity and your own perspective, beliefs and behaviors.

The other thing that seems compelling about the form to me is that it often comes out of a desire to tell stories that aren't always told in mainstream theatre or film contexts. Many of the artist we discussed felt frustrated by the way they and people in their own communities were misrepresented or under-represented in plays and movies and in other media. Here are a few of the people we studied:

Peggy Shaw



Danny Hoch



and Rhodessa Jones

.

While each of these performers has a very different style (and it's kind of hard to get a sense of the actual performances, since these videos are very much about their reasons for working and their methods ... which I also find helpful), each works from a desire to resist or overcome predictable and often destructive patterns of representation. We also read Jo Bonney's introduction to a collection of solo performance scripts Extreme Exposure and watched videos of other performers telling their own stories, and my comments on those can be found in this earlier blog entry. This time around, watching these videos and discussing the work, I was struck by the courage these folks have in that they are essentially carving out places for themselves to be seen and heard. They are frustrated with the limitations of what actors are expected to do or be.

The students, having used these artists as inspiration, used the Viewpoints and composition to create their own solo pieces, theatricalizing their own stories in some really funny and smart and moving ways. (Again, a description of this process can be found in a blog entry from a previous semester.).

We then moved on to discussing a different kind of solo performer, Anna Deavere Smith, whose work is featured in the video bar on the right side of this page. We spent some time analyzing her work because the students will be practicing the kind of re-enactment she does as they interview community members in preparation for characters in A Perfect Wedding. Another thing I noticed in reading her work this time around was that, while she focuses on other people and their stories (as opposed to her own autobiography), and in fact began her work in part because she was frustrated with the "self-oriented" approach, she also in some ways was resisting the limitations of work offered by more conventional ways of working in contemporary American theatre. She shares with other solo performers a need to find different ways of working, along with an intense awareness of the power of telling a person's story publicly.

I plan to write more soon about our public reading, which I thought went quite well. One interesting thing I'll note here, though, is that there is some overlap between some of the themes of Mee's play and the work of the artists cited here. I noted, as did others at the reading, that there's a lot in this play about defying expectations: the characters often end up being the opposite of what you expect them to be. This seems to be another thing all of these solo performers have in common: pointing out that people's identities and behaviors are complex, sometimes contradictory, and often unpredictable.