The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

THE DRAMATURGICAL BRICOLAGE of A

Day, Across
Introduction
On the 6th of July, the SABC ran a news story on the re-internment of Private Baleza
Myengwa, a member of the South African Native Labour Corps who, having died in 1917,
had been buried in a civilian cemetery in France. According to the government practices of
the time, black soldiers were not honoured with a military burial due to their separate status.
Close to a century later, the current deputy president was back to correct this mistake and
rebury Private Myengwa together with the other soldiers who had died during the Great
War, the first truly global conflict which would have a lasting impact not only on the rest of
the century, but also every corner of the globe.

While the causes for the Great War are the subject of much historical writing, what is
popularly accepted as the trigger event happened in Sarajevo on the 28 th of June 1914. On
that day, the town, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, saw the royal visit of the
heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. Being aware of his visit,
a group of young radical students, Young Bosna whose aim was to establish independence
for the Slav peoples living under this colonial rule, devised a plan to assassinate him.
Despite their naivet, cold-feet and through a fortuitous sequence of events where the royal
car made a wrong turn, it fell upon a 19 year old Gavrilo Princip to fire two shots and trigger
the political maneuverings which led to the global conflict that would span the next four
years and have a profound effect on the worlds history. Among the many events that had
taken place before the assassination as part of the welcoming ceremony, was a recital of a
traditional Slav poem by a girl who would end up being my great-grandmother.

The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

The inspiration for this production was to link these two historical images: the South African
soldier who had died in France serving in the fighting of a global war, and a girl who was
witness to a day that would alter the history of the world; with the present moment. The
street corner of the assassination was a spot I would pass daily on my way to primary
school, so I had long been fascinated with something having such a historical significance
that had started in my birthplace. As a theatre-practitioner now working in Cape Town, I
wanted to develop a performance that would explore the separation in time and place
between the now of Cape Town and the 1914 of Sarajevo and the Great War that started
the process of making the world smaller. A hundred years later, how does the trigger pulling
action of one youth connect these different places and different times? One of the main
questions I wanted to wrestle with was how to build this performance to draw attention to
these links and separations between time and space.

In my previous practical work I had been developing live performance sampling, a process
of lifting and placing Theatrical images on stage that layer, complement, and are in
discussion with other Theatrical Images happening as part of the same performance. The
sources for the Theatrical images came from previous theatrical performances, but may
also be generated from the embodiment of other forms of media such as photographs,
music, speeches, television or film sources, etc This method of theatrical bricolage was
inspired by other art forms, which utilize the same methodology where material is isolated
and lifted from an original context and resituated (sometimes entirely reworked) in the new
work and context in surprising ways. (Bailes, 2010, p.86) Even though in the process of
live performance sampling there is no active objective in concealing the source of the
material, due to the multi-media nature of theatre-making, such sampling can work across
a range of elements: text, movement and gesture, sound, character designation, song, and
so on (Bailes, 2010, p.86). As such productions of live performance sampling are
constructed out of material that already exists, I have identified this process as a bricolage.
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

This paper aims to outline how this process of bricolage was used to develop the
dramaturgy of the production A Day, Across with the 3rd year acting students of CityVarsity
school of Creative and Media Arts in Cape Town. First, I will set up some of the given
circumstances of the process, including the context and link between the body image- and
Theatrical Image which is used within the devising process of bricolage. Secondly, I will
articulate some of the theoretical considerations towards establishing a dramaturgy of
bricolage by looking at the works of Barba, Scheub and practices from theatre groups such
as Complicit and Elevator Repair Service. Lastly, I will present a particular sequence of
Theatrical Images within the production and establish their placing within the dramaturgical
process. This is to present a working case for theatrical bricolage, and discuss how one
approaches it as a director, dramaturg, teacher and researcher.

SELECTION: Body Images Theatrical Images

The building blocks of live performance sampling are Theatrical Images, which Alan Read
(1995, p.58), identifies as being composed of two material elements - the bodies in action
(who produce the Theatrical Image) and the bodies in reception (who receive the Theatrical
Image). However, the interplay between the two is complex and as such it allows for the
image to be appreciated slightly differently from other arts: This engagement has a
metaphysical aspect in that the image between the performer and the audience adds up to
more than the sum of its various parts (1995, p.58). Not acknowledging this something
more is detrimental to the very idea of theatre and its objectives, as Read argues that this
metaphysics of theatre is what is not seen, beyond the minds eye it remains unwritten
(1995, p.58). The Theatrical Image is not only visual; it is negotiated through all the senses
available to the performer and audience member in order to access the metaphysical. Read
(1995, p.66) identifies it as a mixture of different components, combining several different
elements, a composite of the visual, aural and nasal.
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

Theatrical Images are in fact, according to Read (1995, p.63), a transaction which are part
of an economy of symbolic exchange. They would be the smallest piece of the larger
transaction of a theatrical event. The understanding of Theatrical Images, is something that
is not purely intellectual, but a practice that combines the physical and the mental in equal
measure. Read argues that images and the interplay are the continual negotiation
between what we know and our means of expressing that knowledge (1995, p.59).

As the creation of Theatrical Images has a body at both ends of transmission, it is

interesting to note how Hans Belting identifies the living body as the locus of images,
where bodies are a living medium and a place which enables us to perceive, project or
remember images; we can give imagination the power to alter them, as we receive and
interpret them (2011, p.37). Our own experiences, our choices of what we engage with, our
culture has an effect on the images that are not only stored but synthesized within the body.
Bachelard even argues for the predominance of image over text, and how its reverberation
connects the image to the soul and the breath before any other mental process. It is neither
inner, nor past but: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with
echoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away
(1994, p. xxiii). This reverberation of the image, he goes on to argue, allows the receiver of
the image to take it on as if it is something they created themselves and appropriate as part
of their language of expression, and consequently their being.
For this reason Belting argues that images and their expression are events that have been
happening since the dawn of humanity: (2005, p.303).
From early on, humans were tempted to communicate with images as with
living bodies and also to accept them in the place of bodies. In that case, we
actually animate their media in order to experience images as alive. (2005,
p.306).
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

The role of a performer becomes abundantly clear. He or she is someone who is given
special license to animate images with their bodies, which they can not do without engaging
with their own images. The bodys animation of the image is what allows for Bachelards
reverberation of the image, and subsequently, Belting once again places emphasis on the
importance of the body in relation to its animation: we know that we all have or that we all
own images, that they live in our bodies or in our dreams and wait to be summoned by our
bodies to show up (2005, p.305). When the images are summoned, this transaction is the
poetic act itself, the sudden image, the flare-up of being in the imagination.

Within previous editions of sampling projects, I had relied heavily on a performers own
archive of performance as the source of images to use as samples in rehearsal. The
objects that were to be selected to build the bricolage were the previous performances of
the actors. For the development of this project, the cast available were performing students
from CityVarsity, a tertiary arts-college, studying Professional Acting for Camera, who had
also received training for the stage and were now in their 3 rd and final year of study. As they
would be classified as young performers, with only a small amount of performance work
within their own archive, I decided to shift away from the previous methods of sampling,
which relied solely on the performer as a live archive of performance bits. What had
intrigued me within the writing of Belting was the notion of the human body being the locus
of images, together with Hayles post-human identification of the body as being made up the
media that it had consumed. While the young performers would not have their own
performed images in their archive, I hypothesized that they would still have a significant
amount of media that they had received and consumed. This archive of tv, films, music,
and written material, if embodied and performed, could then used as elements towards
Theatrical Images which could then be layered in performance.

The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

In our devising process, two different methods of developing Theatrical Images were used.
In the first approach, each student was appointed as an expert to a different medium:
photography, television, film, music, poetry and stand-up. Their job was to bring material
either related to a specific theme or to a narrative element to perform in rehearsal. This
material could be in the form of a poem, scene from a film or television, lyrics from songs, a
section of a stand-up show - with the criteria that it had to be performed in front of the rest
of the cast. When the cast had looked at all the various samples, it would then be possible
to analyze and discuss how to tie them together on stage to form a particular theatrical
image that would capture the theme. Through a further process of performing these images
on the floor and assembling them together as cast and director, it would be possible to build
up a composition that would result in a theatrical image.

However, I found that the students struggled and did not bring compelling enough samples
that could be performed. In the rehearsal process this approach did not generate strong
enough material to facilitate the bricolage for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it bypassed the
initial wish to find images linking to WWI as it was not encouraging the students to search
for those. As the event itself pre-dates a lot of the media forms they are accustomed to
encountering, the students were never brought into contact with that time. Secondly, the
approach to research the media images was very intellectual and lacked physical
embodiment in the research. The students identified themselves as researchers and found
it more an academic, inter-textual exercise than a practical one, which then resulted in a
distancing from the project. While the students could identify the narrative of a particular
theme in a specific media, i.e. they could identify that a film has a journey as part of its
narrative, they struggled in the research to extract a specific element or scene within the
narrative to perform. Sometimes the choice of what they would bring would be strongly
influenced by the word of theme itself, presenting a surface textual correspondence - songs
with the lyrics that had the word journey to it. Thus it became more of an inter-textual
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

exercise than a search for Image samples. Perhaps this is systematic of a first order search
for similar elements without getting into a more complex pattern of search, such as looking
for an image that has similar colours but not the same content. While the body might
remember media that it received, it doesnt necessary categorize it sufficiently to call it up
on command. We receive, perhaps archive, but not categorize.

This kind of devising approach links to previous bricolage projects, where a lot of the onus
of the sampling was left with the performer. In these versions, more seasoned performers
were given particular themes for which they would bring to the rehearsal process small
sequences of their performance archive. Obviously, the material that they were accessing
had been previously embodied, which within the performance culture means that it was
analyzed, rehearsed and performed. This allows for a much closer connection to the
samples that were being presented and for the performer to focus on smaller pieces of it,
rather than a general impression of a media example such as a song, film, tv show, or
poem. The performer has had the chance to work with the various images that lie within a
particular piece of performance, and thus has done a more thorough archiving which
probably included a categorization process. As a consequence, the director of a bricolage
can focus more on his role as a dramaturg in the layering the various samples, trusting that
the performer has already done a thorough selection process. However, in the case of A
Day, Across, working with students who were working with media which they received, but
certainly did not embody, it was necessary to allow the images to be generated as part of
developing the samples and include this process as part of the selection.

Thus the second method of developing images out of samples needed to come from a more
embodied approach to the process. Instead of the students being given a particular theme
to source media samples from on their own, they were instead provided with media stimuli
from which to respond and perform their own media samples. This media stimuli; which
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

could be photos, poetry, music, film clips and written articles, would be provided to the
students who then be guided through a devising process inspired by Anne Bogarts own
approach to composition.

For the sake of this project and in order to orient the students better towards the story and
the initial impulse of World War 1, the stimuli sourced were media pieces that could be used
to generate performance related to the story and the context. These included historical
photographs from World War 1 (with a special focus on South African involvement in the
war), and written accounts of events (speeches, letters from the front, etc), poems, and
recent news-stories chronicling the anniversary. Additionally the choice of material was also
placed into specific categories in order to investigate the impulse behind the production, the
impact of WWI on the culture of today. For this reason there were categories to be
explored in terms of themes of impact: 1) facial reconstructive surgery (as the precursor to
todays plastic surgery); 2) the changing role of women (stepping beyond traditional roles);
3) the families broken up by the war. While these were the initial starting points in the
categories other themes would later emerge that were important for me as a director to
generate images around - the soldiers experience of the front, the trigger event of the war
itself, and the role of the black soldiers within the conflict.

The devising process, borrowed and adapted from Anne Bogarts composition, asked the
students (in groups) to build a performance sequence that would either reference the
source media (by re-staging some of the photos) or by performing other media of today that
was inspired by their encounter with the source material. The media related to World War 1
there were provided were usually a collection rather than single one (ie photos of women
working during the war - as nurses, telephone operators and mechanics, together with a
news story investigating the impact of the war on womens role in society). Thus the
students were asked to respond to media stimuli from WWI by performing the media they
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

knew. This encouraged a more embodied process rather than an academic one. Bogarts
methodology of devising work is articulated through a process of composition, where
performers are given certain elements to work with and an exquisite time pressure to create
a sequence. The process would give the students just enough time in rehearsal with the
material, with exquisite pressure to first produce three frozen tableaus that would have to
reference the stimuli. The next step would allow for the animation of these frozen tableaus,
but only through the performance of contemporary media samples of their choice and from
their references that they deemed appropriate. Now with both modern and source images in
play, I as the director could step in to sharpen the image, by suggesting stronger choices,
either in terms of other contemporary media or by restructuring certain aspects of
performance. For example, the audio of the Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand song
Take-me Out (whose lyrics make vague yet consistent references to our trigger event) was
given to three students, along with a few images from the day of the assassination in
Sarajevo in 1914. The result of their immediate improvisation was a narrative of the events
of the day through a series of Charlie Chaplin film influenced images, resulting in a high
comedy, farcical performance style to the actual song. Any of these self contained pieces
helped generate the material to be used for the production. Afterwards, the composition
might be broken up over time, and into smaller compositions to suit their dramaturgical
layering within the final production. In the case of the assassination sequence, it would be
built up to incorporate the entire cast in creating the climax to the narrative layer in the
production.

This second way of developing theatrical images to use for the production was more
successful with this particular group of students due to the amount of exquisite pressure
placed on them to develop material. It is possible that with another group in a different
intuitional setting, and more time, the samples that they would bring on their own after some
reflection, would be even more appropriate. The second approach is valid for a more
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

intensive and supervised process, that places more creative responsibility with the director
in the selection and development of the samples themselves. This approach to bricolage
allows the media elements that a performer might hold to be embodied, which is hugely
significant in the work of sampling. The performer begins to embody their media by
performing it, and experiences the body as a locus, as described by Belting; actively
engaging in body going from archival source to a creation stage. This process would allow
for a deeper understanding of the media material which could be visible later in the process
and was an improvement on the previous rehearsals. When outlining the rehearsal process
of Complicite, Alexander describes that the company constantly searches for an inner
dynamic (of images, text and physical or emotional states) and a way of making that explicit.
This is an extra dimension that exists alongside all the more recognizable work on
character, text, acting, stagingif an inner dynamic isnt embodied, the work remains
superficial. (Alexander, 2013, p.67) This was the same goal that was driving the rehearsals
of A Day, Across.

LAYERING Dramaturgy, Narrative & Bricolage

The animation of images through the human body that is a key part of the devising process
of bricolage connects us to one of the oldest kind of performances, oral storytelling. Harold
Scheubs work in analyzing the work of South African oral storytellers offers much towards
the analysis of images within a performance, impressing upon us how the sequence of
images together with their repetition and rhythm can transform the audience and their
emotions. According to Scheub, images are the raw material that a storyteller uses and
places in a relationship to tell a story coming from two different sources, the contemporary
world and ancient tradition, each arousing a different kind of affect within the listener (2002,
p.4). Scheub argues that the weaving and rhythmical placement of these images makes
metaphors which we can analyze. Their complex arrangement is what reveals and uncovers
the story, and takes the audience on a united journey. He goes on to further identify the two
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

streams of performance. First, there is the melodic line that carries the narrative in a linear
cause and effect fashion. Second being the rhythmical complex patterning of images that
has the power to lead the audience into a new experience by subverting that melodic
narrative line. The story becomes a ritualistic experience, the objective of which is to move
the members of the audience into that metaphorical centre, into the poem in the story.
(Scheub, 2002, p.4). Scheub argues that the aim of this transaction is to take the audiences
varied emotional states and unite them together into one shared experience.

It is possible to draw parallels between Scheubs metaphors within storytelling and Reads
concept of Theatrical Images, as they are both transactions between performers, theatrical
elements and the audience which are negotiated through the imagination. It is evident that
Scheub and Read would agree that images and imagination have to be placed within the
poetics, ethics and politics that inflect on them and in turn are shaped by them (Read,
1995, p.59). If we were to apply this approach to the process of bricolage, we would run
into a problem that was identified by Read, who argued that if Theatre Images are not linked
to their ethical and political considerations, they might fall into a purely aesthetic judgment
and the symbolic exchange would not be understood. With the process of sampling within
Bricolage, as we attempt to place and layer the various Theatrical Images, are we only
creating an aesthetic experience without the potential of taking the audience into the poem
of the story?

To see how the process of bricolage relates to this symbolic exchange we must turn to
world of art and German art historian Aby Warburgs project called the Mnemosyne Atlas.
Between 1924 and 1929, on large panels covered with black canvas, Warburg placed
images of different origins: art reproductions, advertisements, newspaper clippings, maps,
and personal photographs. He kept re-arranging the images on the black cloth panels,
focusing on the space between the images, the intervals, as much as the images
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

themselves. Though the project was never completed, Warburgs intention, with the
placement of images on the panels, was to compare and contrast art works captured in
their most expressive freeze-frame by using the black spaces between them as visual
ruptures, disjunctions in which diminution or slackening energy was annulled (Michaud,
2004, p. 272). Each of his panels captured a desired canvas of art history of a chosen time
or place, but as Michaud (2004, p. 254) argues, the panels also articulated a chain of
thought in which the network of the intervals indicates the fault lines that distribute or
organize the representations into archipelagoes or ... into constellations. The images in
the Atlas get activated when seen as interconnections within such constellations, finding
their significance only in the sequence with other images and the intervals on the panels.
This physical distance between the images re-contextualizes the space and time between
the art works, inducing a tension in their signified levels of reality: "these violent
associations...arise not from simple comparisons but from rifts, detonations and
deflagrations" (Michaud, 2004, p.253).

Warburgs approach in decontextualizing original art work and highlighting a new context for
an old object is a process that brings back the sampling principle. It echoes the modern
equivalent of sampling in hip-hop music, where new songs are constructed out of bits of old
records, which, even though they are placed in a new context, retain the qualities of the
source material. Warburgs intention was more academic then audibly aesthetic, as his
objective was to activate the images, and his engagement with history is repeated in how
Scheub identifies South African storytellers, whose function was to link the modern
experience to the mythology of the past. In A Day, Across, the use of modern media
sources to explore a historical event allows for both an activation of images as well as the
potential for symbolic exchange. The aim of bricolage is not to simply create for an
aesthetic judgment, but allow for the selection, placement, and layering of images to create
an evocative transaction. In the multi-modal form of theatre, bricolage is a combination of
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image activation in Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas, the journey of oral storytelling and the
sampling of hip-hop music.

Bogart argues that as human beings we are all naturally geared towards receiving stories,
learning from them and also making them. We identify patterns and put together images in
order to construct a narrative. Within a performance studies context, that which shapes the
story is dramaturgy and it was Artaud who first put forward its multi-layered nature by
stating that theatres mission is to: organize shouts, sounds, lights and onomatopoeic
language, creating true hieroglyphs out of characters and objects, making use of their
symbolism and interconnections in relation to every organ and on all levels (1999, p.68).
Inspired by Artaud, Eugenio Barba seeks to identify dramaturgy outside the domain of
literature. After labeling directors as theatrical storytellers, he exposes the different layers
and patterning of images in order to achieve such a similar transformative effect for the
audience within the transaction of performance. He sees dramaturgy as the technical
operation inherent in the weaving and growth of performance and its different components.
(2010, p.8) The result of this operation, what the audience experiences and the story they
create, is according to Barba the visible side. It is the other side, the moon, that is the
domain of dramaturgy as it hides the knots and the threads which reveal the inner world
justifications and the emotional logic of the theatrical experience (2010, p.187).

Barba goes on to identify three layers of performance (dynamic, narrative and evocative),
arguing that the dramaturgy of how the three work together leads to new ways of seeing a
performance. It is not only what happens in each layer but also what happens across them.
First is the dynamic which deals with the material that forms the unique part of the theatre
language (lights, sounds, costume, placement of bodies). Second is the narrative which
works much the same ways as within literature structuring of characters and events over
time. Third and most mysterious is the evocative, which is the metaphysical that happens in
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the mind of each spectator. Barbas evocative dramaturgy is elusive, something that he
admits he was never able to deliberately shape even though he had experienced it many
times in performances, both his and that of others (Barba, 2010, p. 188). Barba describes it
as a shadowprojected by the living organism of the performance, one which might cause
a change of state in the spectator (2010, p.188). In his experience this shadow is not to be
constructed consciously, but is rather the result of the active body of performance created
by the director. This evocative dramaturgy links us to Scheubs complex patterning that
leads the audience into the poem of the story as well as Reads analysis of a Theatrical
Image. The dynamic and narrative dramaturgies are layered towards this evocative
dramaturgy where Barba desired to have the performance and its spectatorsgo beyond
their own limits (2010, p.183).

One of Barbas main purposes for defining performance dramaturgy in such a manner was
to enable him to play around and re-associate different layers of performance. He wanted to
exploit the material on stage with the meanings of the story creating different montages to
develop complex relationship rather than simple ones between the dynamic and narrative
layers. His own approach relied heavily on overturning the expected into the more
ambiguous, and while at times it was simply a mechanical reversal which was not born of
intelligence, it was also guided by an emotional coherence which led to an image, an
association, a memory towards an ever present shadow which should not be too
detectable in the performance (Barba, 2010, p.12).

Barbas main tool was the performer, their actions and how the director transforms those to
attack the spectators sense and memory. He borrowed from Etienne Decrouxs principle
of equivalence in having the legs do work of the arms (Barba, 2010, p.25). Barba would
explain that in an analogous way, in my performances, I might let a vocal action replace a
physical one and a stare be the equivalent of a piece of dialogue (2010, p. 25). The
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principle of sampling takes Barbas approach to dramaturgy to its maximum, substituting

associations between different layers of performance while also starting with the choice of a
performers actions. Within the process of bricolage, the directors role is to always allow
diverse associations to take place within the performers samples associations that would
span styles of performance and media. Much in the same way as Barba, the starting point
or the guiding point of evocation for a director within the bricolage was an image, a
thought; for a performer it is the action within the sample of the media that they are
animating. While the performers can only adjust his/her actions, the director can also
incorporate, mix, substitute, pattern and shift other layers from the media or other samples
in order to create a Theatrical Image. What is key to the dramaturgy of bricolage is the
reliance on the performers actions as the fundamental element in any kind of layering and
construction of performance because: the living roots of the performance...are a particular
quality of the actors physical and vocal actions (Barba: 2010, p.25). Thus the smallest
most indivisible Theatrical Image is linked to the performers action.

The sampling process of constructing a bricolage is what allows a director to focus almost
directly on the evocative dramaturgy as set out by Barba. Contrary to Scheub, Barba states
that his aim was not to necessarily have a shared experience of performance, but rather to
create: A theatre which is able to speak to each spectator in a different and penetrating
language is not a fantastic idea, nor a utopia. This is the theatre for which many of us
directors and leaders of groups have trained for a long time (2010).

While working on A Day, Across a particular focus was placed on the narrative layer, making
a concentrated effort on developing a story with the layering of diverse Theatrical Images.
Anne Bogart, who identifies herself as someone of the postmodern age for whom
deconstruction and a rejection of truth are a staple of her work, hints that times are
shiftingwe have reached the end of postmodernismit is the role of the artist to wright
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new fictions. (Bogart, 2014, pp.4-5) The storyteller, or theatre-maker is one who has to
assemble the stories that put the world back together into some kind of understandable
fashion to rebuild the deconstructed age we are leaving behind. Within the sampling work
on a bricolage, it is thus necessary to have a consistent element that doesnt alter too much
throughout the piece. This way it will guide the audience to construct the narrative
themselves around the actions of this element. The query being that the search for the story
of a particular piece needs an anchor, which perhaps is our modernist link in a postmodern
world. For A Day, Across the two elements were the plot and the hero.

In previous cases of bricolage, the anchor was a particular piece of set, or the location in
which it was performed, while this time around it centers around a main character of Alice.
The narrative of the production puts her as the protagonist, as she is handed over the
letters that belonged to her great-grandfather and decides to journey to the place where
these letters originated. In some way this mirrors the objective of the director and
storyteller, someone who has a mission to connect two different worlds - the one of today,
and the one of a 100 years ago, the one of Cape Town and the one of Sarajevo. For this
reason, the hero or heroine of the story would have a similar objective located within the
narrative frame. This objective was found during the research period of the production.
Grundlingh, who seeks to explore the historical connections between the non-white South
African population of the early 1900s and the Great War, writes of the South African Native
Labour Contingent and their fight in Europe during 1916 to 1918. Housed in compounds
from which they were not allowed to leave besides official duties, all with the aim of
preserving their view of the world, soldiers were known to have ventured clandestinely and
fraternized with the women of the French towns. The most interesting link was the very fact
that the South African censor, upon the conclusion of the war and the return of these
soldiers to South Africa, would prohibit the receipt of letters from the women in Europe to
the ex-army men (Grundlingh, 1987, p.123). The starting image and action would be the
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

woman who discovers a collection of these letters from her great-grandfather and then
departs to discover the decedents of the woman who sent it to him. Our heroine, even
though she participates in the images that are built by the rest of the cast, is always the
outsider and it is with her action that the audience journeys on this quest. She is the
audiences envoy into the world of bricolage.

With this inciting action, the narrative dramaturgy of the production, which Barba
establishes as the sequence of events and outline of characters, aligns itself with a certain
story pattern so that it can be identified through certain archetypal or key plots. Literary
scholars, such as Christopher Booker, have done research on the variety of plots that have
taken root in literature, and have attempted to identify the archetypes, with the Quest and
Journey being examples. For this production, the Quest was chosen as the initial plot
around which to structure the piece to use it as a narrative dramaturgical framework that
would guide the choice and placement of the theatrical images. Booker divides the Quest
into a few linear elements: 1) The call, 2) The Journey 3) The Arrival 4) The Final Ordeal
and 5) Goal. Within these five big events there are smaller narrative plot elements that,
when adjusted, give each quest story its own particular characteristics and allow for
different stories to emerge, all which follow a similar outline. From a building point of view,
the director working as dramaturge is selecting the Images that will represent the events so
that they communicate these different structural plot elements. It emphasizes the
importance of narrative dramaturgy within bricolage; too many random images and the
audience might lose the anchor and fall to a purely aesthetic judgment. If the images are
bound in someway to the narrative structure, and yet substituted, interchanged, made use
of the feet rather than the hands, it allows for the reception of bricolage. If the balance is
found in the knots that tie the images and the plot events, symbolic exchange will occur in
that metaphysical space, and Barbas evocative dramaturgy will activate.

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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

Barbas evocative layer addresses that Theatrical Images are created as a result of what is
displayed on stage a combination of the dynamic and narrative layers. An image placed at
the beginning of the performance might not have the same affect, or same evocation as it
will at the end of a performance after being placed following a whole other sequence of
images. That is indeed the art of dramaturgy the placement of images and how their
evocative power shifts in relation to where it sits. There is a matter of placement, but there
is also the idea of the composition of the dynamic image, how it is altered or incomplete
from what might be expected. As the image is drawn from media samples, what this remixing achieves can have a strong affect when presented on the evocative layer. This is of
course what Brecht intended with his theatre, by using alienation of elements and the
historification of context he could present the audience the unexpected, the thought
provoking, and the evocative. It puts the performance and reception of theatre within the
domain of the metaphysical.

Description - An Extract from A Day, Across

Alice is watching.

Commanding focus on the stage are the 3 Waiting Women. One is sitting by the right side
of the table and knitting, the second is standing on a chair behind the table and holding a
baby doll that is wearing a WW1 style gas mask; the third is sitting on the table itself with a
large belly that she keeps rubbing.

The woman with the baby is the first one to speak, and triggers the performance of dialogue
from Blackadders fourth season episode Godbyeee. She is Baldrick; the knitting one
speaks Georges lines, and the pregnant one is Blackadder. The woman with the baby asks,
in a very long winded way, how the war started. After Georges unhelpful answer, she
proposed that it started because a bloke called Archie-duke shot an ostrich because he
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

was hungry. After Blackadder educates the other two about the actual causes of the war,
the bollock plan of having two opposing superblocks meant to act as deterrents, the woman
playing Baldrick concludes So the Poor old Ostrich died for nothing?

An air-raid siren, and all the actors on stage clear leaving only the three generals, the three
waiting women, and Alice on stage. The generals, facing diagonally left begin performing
Wilfred Owens Dulce et Decorum Est describing the march back from the front and the
mustard gas that one of their colleagues can not escape from. Throughout the poem they
are supported by an intoning of a hum from the rest of the cast, which has now assembled
on both sides of the stage, in front of the lines of helmets and umbrellas on the ground.

At the conclusion of the poem, the whole group (except for the Waiting Women) joins them
in the final line:
Dulce et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori.
The three generals walk upstage left to where the Waiting Women are positioned. Alice,
who has been on stage all this time watching, tries to stop them, recognizing the box of
letters that they carry, which were given to her at her great-grand fathers funeral.
Nevertheless, the lead soldier hands over the box of letters he has been holding and hands
it over to the Woman with the Baby:
Im sorry for your loss he says.
The woman takes the box, and her companions stop their activities, the realization of the
death of their loved one, expressions changing to grief, and the sounds of tears, short
breaths, crying spread through the cast on both sides of the stage.
The woman holding the box finally responds with singing:
Senzeni Na which then leads all of the cast to join as the other two women on stage cry.

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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

The Woman with the Pregnant Belly then emits a very loud and powerful scream that
rouses the woman with the baby to rush to her. Senzeni Na with the whole cast continues
as she breathes sharp and keeps on screaming. The woman with the box, leaves it behind
and helps her lie on the table with her legs spread. The pregnant woman, goes to stand on
the table and squat lightly as she screams and after a very loud one a thud is heard. An
immediate silence as the singing, the crying, the heavy breathing stops, and as the woman
steps away and lifts her dress, we see a similar war helmet on the table. The general who
delivers the letter, tentatively goes and lifts the helmet to reveal a collection of small plastic
toy soldier action figures. With the cry of Toy Soldiers! he invites his two colleagues to
come to the table and they start playing, as if children with toys, making war sounds as the
women in waiting exit echoing the positions of the soldiers in their crossing of the stage.

Alice watches the boys play with the toy soldiers.

Conclusion
This paper attempted to highlight some of the dramaturgical concerns of devising a
bricolage production, using examples from A Day, Across. Within my ongoing practical
research around live performance sampling, which I have now identified as bricolage, I have
outlined two key steps in the process.

The first one, selection, focuses on identifying the various samples that will be used
throughout rehearsal. In previous editions, it was identified by a specific stimulus, such as a
theme or a piece of text, with performers sourcing material from their performance archive
to be sampled. Now bricolage also allows the performer to source from media images that
they have encountered in order to expand the performers archive. It is important that there
is a process of embodiment, as the performer translates the received sample into a
performed image. As the director identifies the main idea or thrust of the production, it
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

allows for the guidance of the actors by using media samples as stimuli. This serves to
remind us that bricolage begins with the body and its animation of images. As Barba
himself simplified dramaturgy to the level at which an actors actions enter into the work
(2010, p.8).

The second part of the process, layering, places more emphasis on the director as
dramaturge and how the various samples are layered on the stage in order to build the
performance. The director functions as a bricoleur, using the found media samples that
have been embodied and become images as the material to place across the dramaturgical
layers in order to create strings of Theatrical Images. On one hand there is the work within
a dynamic layer, adjusting the composition of each image as referenced from its media
sample to build a Theatrical Image. Examples from other theatre companies such as the
Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service give an indication of how to open up the
theatrical re-performance of media, but within bricolage that link is never hidden away from
the audience. And on the other hand there is the work within the narrative line attempting
to construct a story out of the collection of diverse Theatrical Images squeezing within a
modernist frame (the narrative outline of story) by populating it with a string of theatrical
images (post-modern process of sampling).

Bricolage leaves behind many questions to consider and a process that needs to be
qualified further. Because the nature of sampling extracts images from their original
narrative and places it into a new context, is the purpose to identify and question the
sources, or to test whether these images are archetypal through their encounter with
others? If different media tell similar stories, can we use different media to tell one story? Is
the process of sampling within bricolage reliant to an imagination that cross-references
archetypes? With all the questions, the excitement is in watching how the diverse theatrical
images interact and get activated within a bricolage on the same stage. In the case of A
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The Dramaturgical Bricolage of A Day, Across - Seminar Presentation Mufti

Day, Across, the contemporary songs, songs from a century ago, speeches, lines from
plays, lines from TV shoes, movie scenes, dance moves, choreography, revolving around
one historical event, all play in one place. Through the bodies of the performers they evoke
the recognition between two different locations and two different times.

Works Cited
Alexander, C., 2013. Complicite - The Elephant Vanishes (2003/4). In J. Harvie & A.
Lavender, eds. Making Contemporary Theatre. 2013th ed. Manchester: Manchester
University Press. p.67.
Artaud, A., 1999. Antonin Artaud: Collected Works. Translated by V. Conti. London:
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Bachelard, G., 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated by M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bailes, S.J., 2010. Elevator Repair Service - Cab Legs to Gatz. In J. Harvie & A. Lavender,
eds. Making contempoary theatre: International rehearsal processes. Manchester:
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Barba, E., 2010. On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House. Translated by J. Barba.
Oxon: Routledge.
Belting, H., 2005. Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology. Critical Inquiry, 31(2).
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Dunlap. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bogart, A., 2014. What's the Story. New York: Routledge.
Grundlingh, A., 1987. Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the First World
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Michaud, P.-A., 2004. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Translated by S. Hawkes. New
York: Zone Books.
Read, A., 1995. Theatre and Everyday LIfe: An Ethics of Performance. Routledge.

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Scheub, H., 2002. The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, Narrative. 1st ed. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.

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