This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
- Henry David Thoreau
This phase of my project was aimed at using data from phase one and two as source material to create a devised performance that will explore the intersections between the individual narratives, to see what collective storyline emerges from them. Whereas Phase 1) is focused on capturing each individual voice, and 2) is focused on commemorating each individual story, 3) breaks away from this individual-orientation, focusing rather on the emerging collective or common thread across the voices. Here, I am interested in how I can transform the individual stories (the i) into a collective voice (the we). This artistic exploration will happen in collaboration with a professional cast. This is expected to culminate in a play that will be performed either in a traditional theatre space or outside in public spaces as a site-specific piece.
In this phase, I will reflect on the early process of devising and turn to how things did not go according to plan, and how I had to be adaptable to the restrictions and reimagine the process into a different artistic approach. I guess when you set out a plan to explore a mostly uncharted territory, it is only natural to expect the unexpected. I will map out the developments that have influenced and impacted this process. I will also discuss how I was planning to use phases one and two in this process of devising a play with actors. I will start with phase 2 first, and then track back to one.
Approach to integrating monuments into devising process
I am going to be referring to the monu(mo)ments as monuments because this is the stage before my thinking and the concept had shifted.
I had a specific idea of how I wanted to work with the monuments. Being aware of the fact that I was talking about stories/monuments that no would have heard of – which at this point did not exist yet and I am still working with my initial assumptions of what a monument is – I wanted the theatre to negate their newness. Also, I didn’t want to treat them like they were new. Since the narrators have long been in Norway, the very stories I have collected are past events, I somehow wanted the theatre piece not to present the stories/monuments as new but to present the Norwegian society as outdated. So I devised a plan that the theatre piece should embrace and assume the ‘alternative history’ we had created in part 1 and 2 as an old thing that is now assumed/given, so if you don’t know about them at this stage, it is you who needs a reality check. That is, I wanted to treat them like things that were already normalised. So what I envisioned when I said I wanted to take the phase 1 and 2 as source material was to devise a performance in which the monuments are already important landmarks that people of Norway already use and refer to in their everyday life. Like how people talk about meeting in front of the tiger at Oslo S, or national theatre. That means in the play, the character would assume and use the monuments I was going to create.
For example, if there is an important decision that someone needs to make in the play, we would reference them going to Kjersti’s Line to an oath, so we can have a scene where one character really needs to make an important decision and they go to Kjersti’s Line and take the oath to change, and we see them stick to it! Come what may! And it’s not just that they go to the line but that it is well understood that this is what people do in this world of the play. It is the norm of this world.
(To cross Kjersti’s Line is considered the most binding informal or unofficial oath anyone can take. It is the closest thing to a legal contract. Between a legally binding contract and a pinkie swear is Kjersti’s Line. Anyone who crosses the line takes the highest oath possible with themselves to change. The change may not be immediate, but once you cross the line and take the oath, your journey to change has begun, and now you cannot go back!
This was an idea that could also possibly tease the work being a site-specific performance that goes to the different monuments. At this stage, I was still collecting data, so now all I had to do was wait for the monuments to be developed to try this.
The devising process
In preparation for the devising process, I decided to keep a sudelbücher for this phase as well. It was crucial to record inspirations and ideas of scenes as I was working through other parts of the research. By now I had gathered lots of interesting ideas I wanted explore with the group of actors.
Unlike the narrated events and their commemorative monuments which are focused on the individual person/story, the focal point of the theatre play is on the collective narrative that emerges from these individual voices. That is, to identify common themes – topics, ideas and patterns of meaning that come up repeatedly between the narratives, to explore what the experiences tell us about the lives/personal histories/stories of Norwegians with other backgrounds. As such, if the individual voices are the building blocks, then the primary task for the artistic practice is to seek ways to unify them – or at least, to find a way for them to speak together as a collective. This is where the artistic question stems from, how will I unify these individual voices into a collective perspective? How will I structure the devising process to explore this?
In my earliest conversations with my supervisor, it became obvious that I was interested in finding a[n artistic] way to build a collective narrative. So, I was really interested in how to narrate a ‘we’.
Who is ‘we’?
Initially, I thought about narrators as a ‘we’, the individual perspectives I was trying to build a collective voice from. But one day I asked uncle google to define it for me: “We is used to show a collective group of people, generally including the speaker or writer”. And as simple as this was, one of the important facets of it that I had missed in the way I had been thinking about a ‘we’, I had only really thought about it as something that emerges from the stories or voices that I was working with, but I didn't actually think about my own positionality in it. Additionally, I also have this immigration/multicultural background in Norway, so one could say that I share a similar positionality as the narrators. Forgetting to deal with myself as part of the ‘we’ was a blindfold, which was ironic because, given my ethical framework, it should have been clear from the start. Crucially, I am now the one who is speaking for this we.
There are hierarchical power dynamics behind the we because I (even if I invite others into the process to collaborate on the we) am still the creator, which puts me in different position than the other persons of the we. So, being a part of this ‘we’ does not absolve or make me disappear in the we, which is something I can't escape because I still have this central position within the we. In fact, the question is not even ‘how to narrate a ‘we’, but how do i, as the leader of this project, want to narrate a ‘we’. It was vital to reflect on this question and also extend it to those who are invited into the process.
Later, when I was thinking about how to invite the audience into the work, it was also interesting to think about how that affects the composition of the collective. What do they bring? And how does that (re)shape the ‘we’?
One of the things that seems to be crucial across the various phases of this project and collaborations, is that I'm asking everyone I work with to leave some kind of a trace behind. This starts in phase one, with the interviewees who are asked to leave their stories behind as a trace from our encounters. It goes into phase two, seeking to translate the stories into monuments, which will not only manifest traces from the stories but also go further to call upon the public when engaging with them to leave their own traces on them. And then it goes into phase three, which, in creating the performance, is asking the actors to leave a trace. And so there seems to be this focus on collecting traces that people leave behind after our encounters. Upon further reflection, I began to wonder whether a ‘we’ is something that emerges in the composition of the different ensembles, and the traces they leave behind become a representation of that collective/we.
Initial ideas about how to approach working with the question of a ‘we’:
After the discussion around the we, I began to grapple with two aspects or dimensions of it. When I'm talking about how to narrate a we, am I talking about the content or the form. Or both? The key difference between form and content in literature is that the content is what a text says while the form is the way of arrangement of the content. Content is what is communicated, that is the message or ideas. Form is the how or the structure of how the content is shared.
Content: what is your play ‘about’. What is the story? Or if there is not a ‘story’ in the traditional sense, what is being said, or done, or communicated.
Structure: If content refers to what’s being said, then structure, rather bluntly, can be defined as the order in which you say it. We’ll get onto the specifics a bit later, but essentially, when it comes to theatre: Structure is about controlling the progression of the audiences experience.
Form: If content is what’s being said, and structure is what order you say it in, then form is about the way you say it. Are there ‘characters’? Stage directions? it a monologue? A series of instructions? Does it break the fourth wall? Is it divided into five acts? And so on..
The first section will look at finding the perfect form for what you want to say, how it relates to content, and why that’s crucial in letting your idea reach its full potential.
The divide between form and content is always an artificial and conditional one, since ultimately attempting to make this division reveals the fundamentally indivisible nature of verbal expression and ideas. In other words, form and content are dependent on one another, and in written and spoken communication they always occur together. When we separate them, it's only for the sake of study.
Accordingly, how does one deal with both in this questioning. One of the things that this question forces me to do is to be clear about where it falls. Are my artistic investigations focused on the content of the thing or the form of the thing? Or both? And if so, how? Now, with all this in mind, I have outlined three ideas or approaches that I want to try out, to respond to this question.
1) A play with one actor who takes on many stories:
The idea is that one individual gets to embody multiple characters and their respective stories, attempting to ‘house’ many stories in the body of a single performer. The singular body holds a collective voice. I'm trying to play with this idea of a body, synonymous with the I, holding an I that is constituted of many I’s. In my head, it somehow seemed to suggest that there would be a way in which this ´I´ could also function as a collective of voices. Perhaps a royal I. So I would have to make a play that kind of plays directly on this idea, because this gives a sense of what the content is, not obviously the specific stories that I'm choosing, but the way in which the stories would be told, the way in which the content would be kind of dealt with, and that also speaks to the form, that would go to inform it and how I'm using the two to kind of create this we or this kind of I/we (locating the plural within the singular), if you will.
2) A play with many actors playing one character/story:
This is literally just the reverse of the first idea. And for this I actually already have an idea I would like to try. Let’s say we have a play with five characters: a child, a young person, an adult, a parent and then a grandparent figure. We see these characters interact throughout the play and at the end, we learn that these are the same character at different times and stages in his or her life. It is taking different parts of a person and breaking them up into the different characters or stages. This was just beautifully used recently. I was invited to review a new script that has been staged at the South African State Theatre where the writer took a historical character, of a famous woman in SA, who lived for six decades. She made a six-character play, and each character was embodying a decade of her life. So that could also be a useful reference to consider in terms of the division. Since we've been talking about a we, in her play, the characters are constantly bickering whenever one of them says I, they always correct each other and say it's a ‘we’. Interestingly, they are aware that they are separate parts, but still the same person. I find this choice fascinating, this awareness that they have of their collective identity. In my world, I see them as people who don’t have this awareness. They take themselves very seriously and as self-contained characters. I don't know why yet.
This can be something similar to Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, because Krapp plays the tapes of himself, and he has an argument between the present day him and old him (the tapes). And then you have this separation, the reflection and the now. Of course, the present him is present on stage, but the past versions of him are the tapes that he plays, so in a way, the past is quite stuck (in the past). It can't change itself. It can't argue back. It can only be the traces that remain, but it could be more interesting if the past ‘characters’ are people that can be engaged and interacted with.
My supervisor also spoke about one of the students that he is supervising. She wanted to do a performance where she was interested in the process of loss and grief, which is identified by five phases: chaos, refusal, negotiations, anger, and acceptance. She wanted five actors to represent the different phases of grief in the same person. That's another example of doing it. There are many approaches one can use when you separate a person into different voices and bodies. And it's good to have multiple ways of thinking through what I can do with this. At some point, it also means that either I have to deliberate between all these different possibilities and choose one or I have to try them all.
3) A play with multiple actors playing multiple stories:
Here we return to the ‘The meta-narrative’ idea, where we have multiple stories unfolding together that are completely unrelated, but because they are connected by a set, defined, or recognisable meta-narrative, we are able to somehow read them together as a unified whole.
Breakdown of the idea:
I also had an idea for the form, which should hopefully put things into perspective. To explain this form, I will use an analogy. Imagine the course of a couple's relationship and the different stages of its development: 1) they meet, 2) go on a date, 3) agree to become exclusive, 4) introduce each other to friends and family, 4) move in together, etc. This is the 'usual' trajectory of a relationship - in broad terms, at least within certain cultures. Now, I want you to imagine each phase of this relationship represented by a different couple, in a different place. We see two people meeting, they agree on a date, and then we meet two different people who go on a date. After this date, they agree to be exclusive and then plan to introduce each other to their friends and family, and at that point, we meet another couple introducing each other to their friends and family - so on and so forth.
In this example, the couples may change but the relationship grows because each one of them represents a phase of the greater whole (which is a love story of two people coming together).
This is the idea of the form I want to try. I will be examining the stories to see what their unifying elements are. And then I will compose a structure of the story (i.e. the plot) that will enable me to take parts of most - if not all - of the narratives. My priority here will be making sure that this plot tells a coherent story. To do this, I will need to find an equivalent of the 'relationship' that runs through all of them. The result will be a story made up of the narrators' different experiences but chained or weaved together to create and add a new dimension to the collective narratives.
The challenges
The first major challenge I faced was finding a professional cast. I wanted to create an ensemble of professional performers of color or with ‘immigration backgrounds’ that I could work with on an ongoing long-term basis. I had a good relationship with the Nordic Black Theatre, which, even though I haven’t done any work with them, they have been my adopted home. I imagine this is the case for many who arrive from the global south seeking a home in these Scandinavian woods. I had had some preliminary discussions with NBX to ask about who was available. Of course, eventually, the conversations came to a sticking point that would haunt my project: money. In my practice and freelance world in South Africa, we don’t let budgets price us out of working with each other when there’s no secured funding in place. If there is no budget, we still do the work, and if something comes up, it will find us along the way. That is the creative hunger I know and come from. But something was different now, I am not a freelancer. I am employed, with relatively good financial stability. It would be unethical to even consider working with someone for no or low pay.
As my plan was to spend the first part of the devising process really exploring different possibilities rather than working on a fixed plan, it became hard to throw the limited budget into a test run that could lead me nowhere. This financial calculus really short-circuited the hopes of floor work with actors without a concrete result in mind. Priced out. Talking to my Norwegian peers who have been in similar positions, it seems the answer to this is to find grants elsewhere or/and have a local network of collaborators you can work with. I had neither.
We also have to pay technical staff at the school if we want to use their services. I felt like it was bad enough that we can barely afford actors but to have to also think about the technical staff in addition has been a weird experience. This created a stifling learning/research environment for me as an international fellow. The premium to ‘explore’ artistic possibilities with other bodies in space has simply been unaffordable. The internal research funding model didn’t make sense to me. I don't know how other fellows are doing it, but I have spent more than 30 percent of my PhD time dedicated to the admin of looking for funding and collaborators. It was ironic that I felt freer to make theatre as a freelancer than being within a big artistic institution.
The only way this was going to work was if I wrote the text and then worked with the actors to stage it, but I had now become so uninterested in this direction. It would take one of the interesting dynamics out of the process. I really wanted the writing process to be a collective and collaborative process as well. I was not interested in writing alone, I wanted this creative work to be a shared effort.
An alternative plan to mitigate this issue was to try to work with student groups to explore the material. And so students it was.
Initial work with NBX
Planned timeline:
· Weekly sessions from November – December 2021
· Collaboration to generate scenes from January to February 2022
· Presenting some of the early results at the Artistic Research Week (January) and my mid-term assessment (February)
· Reworking the scenes into a play and performing it at NBT during the month of April
Weekly sessions
I first began working with NBX group in the latter part of 2021. It was a group of young people from different multicultural backgrounds (first and second generation) who were an introductory programme to theatre-making. In many ways, their composition was a good fit for this project. I was given a chance to meet with the students once every week for an afternoon. The point of these sessions was to get to know them and introduce them to my research ahead of our month-long collaboration at the start of 2022. Equally important, I wanted to use these meetings to prepare for our upcoming process where we were going to use devising as a method to generate new work.
Devising as a method to make theatre refers to a collaborative and often improvisational process where a group of theatremakers come together to create a performance piece from scratch rather than starting with a pre-existing script. This method is highly flexible and creative, allowing for a more organic development of the piece, by drawing from the unique perspectives and talents of all the artists involved. This is why the artistic result created often reflects the identities, experiences, and perspectives of the people making it.
In my experience, it is incredibly difficult to devise or improvise from what you don’t know or understand. This is because we largely draw from ourselves as the primary source of experience/knowledge. To have a rich devising process, as a playwright/director I always try to ensure that the actor(s) is given the relevant information and sufficient time to digest and process that into their own understanding. This is why for these introductory sessions with the NBX group, I focused on two things, 1) exposing them to the stories I had collected, and 2) getting them to respond to whatever was of interest to them in these stories.
In each session, I would give them two stories to read prior to our meeting, and then we would discuss the stories and their impressions of the texts. I intentionally chose to contribute as little of my own opinions during this process, to really allow them to speak to what they found interesting/curious without being overly influenced by my impressions. Since I am new to Norway, I was also sure there was a lot of nuance in the stories that was going over my head, so I really wanted to get their actual opinions, to see what was in the stories that I wasn’t seeing/reading. I would facilitate the discussions and I guess my questions often teased out certain things I was curious about as well.
Based on those impressions, I then asked them to create any kind of scenic work that responded to what they were curious to tease or explore further. This could be anything. They could take any part of the story or even add something to it, and then shape that as a response. Even though I was available to support them, they worked on the scenes individually. I wanted to see how they responded individually to the stories and their own impressions, thereof. Afterward, every time I gave them new stories I changed the group dynamic, first they worked alone, then in pairs, trios, and then as a big group. This variation of the group dynamic was just to see how they worked in different situations and configurations. I wanted to assess also how effective they worked in those different configurations.
The scenes were completed on different timeframes as well. Some scenes were created spontaneously on the floor without any prior preparations while for some scenes the students had a week or two to work on them without me. This was mostly because we couldn’t always meet weekly as they sometimes had other prior engagements. To avoid leaving them with gaps or lapses in our process, I gave them tasks to do over those weeks we couldn’t meet. As such, every week they created and performed those scenes whenever we met, and then gave each other feedback. I listened very keenly to how they spoke to each other and what specifically they were picking up. Given that most of them were training for the first time, it was important to see how far they were and what gaps needed to be closed.
Since they were given limited time to work on these scenes, the quality of their development was not the main focus. My main interest was communicated to them, to focus their scenic responses on what it was that they found interesting/curious, why was that the case, and how was it approached. I wasn’t so interested in what they did per se, but why they did it. These motivations were pivotal in order to situate their understanding of the stories but also the potential of what they say or use them to say. Additionally, I used this as a chance to do both what in qualitative research is called a thematic and narrative analysis of the stories. Thematic analysis[1] is a method of analyzing qualitative data. It is usually applied to a set of texts or data to identify common themes – topics, ideas, and patterns of meaning that come up repeatedly. And narrative analysis[2] was to understand the way people create meaning in their lives as narratives. Interestingly, this became a dual analysis of both the stories themselves but also the group as it responded to them from their own perspectives. It was a great opportunity to see what their radars picked up or related to across the different texts.
More than achieving any specified result, my aim was just to develop a broad understanding of how they could rationalise their own artistic responses, accounting for both their individual and collective responsibilities. I also wanted to gauge the gap between us. Furthermore, I wanted to give them a sense of how we were going to work together. That our task would be to take these stories apart, to find the nuggets that spoke to us, and then shape those into individual/collective scenes.
Preliminary devising process with NBX
Our collaboration was aligned to correspond with two upcoming public presentations, namely, Artistic Research Week and Mid-term Assessment, respectively. I was going to work with the students to prepare for what would be my first public performance. During this phase, I decided to divide the work according to what we needed to achieve for each.
Artistic Research Week:
Since the Artistic Research Week was first, it made sense to start with it. I was going to present the 'wall of fame' that is documenting the development of my research project on a public wall that everyone can comment on. The plan was to ‘activate’ the wall and open it up to the artistic community in the school. As part of it, I wanted some of the stories to come ‘alive’ for the audience to get a taste of their voices and histories, to invite them to read more and connect further with these voices. Since I was going to be working with the students at this time, I thought it would be a great idea to write brief summaries of the stories and then ask the actors to embody them. As it had now been a long while since they had read the stories, I asked the students to write the summaries for their chosen stories. I thought this would be a good way to re-read them and familiarise themselves with the texts again.
From the onset of our process, I set up a task they would use to write these summaries. The main focus was to build three plot points i.e., the beginning – which would focus on where the narrator was born; the middle – focusing on their movements/relocations, mainly how and why they moved from their birth country to Norway; and the end – looking at the main event in their oral narratives, these are the events they say have reshaped or redefined their lives since they arrived in Norway. This resulted in summaries that were between half a page to a page long. In addition, or along the summary, they would also create three tableaus, one for each plot point. I wanted them to also think about their own bodies, and how they could ‘embody’ these three moments, to imagine the trajectory of their journeys.
After creating these images, we would focus on how to develop the sequence to connect them into a single story. Since the original texts of the narrators’ stories were on the wall for the audience’s reference, I gave the actors the freedom to play with the original texts as such as needed to fit their own impressions of how they see the narrators. In the end, however, very little of the texts were altered that most of it remained the words of the narrators, meaning we ended up with a verbatim text. I wasn’t particularly interested or aiming to create a verbatim piece of theatre but given how much we wanted the audience to get a glimpse and sense of the narrators’ voices, it was not surprising that we ended up with this result. And it also worked very well because it complimented the original texts, allowing a seamless transition from listening to the stories to reading the rest of the written accounts.
We had 10 days from when we met to when we needed to present this at the wall. In my estimate, I thought we would only spend – at most – about 3 days on this task. Since we were summarising existing texts that were already familiar to all of us and worked on before, I was expecting us to hit the ground running. Unfortunately, despite the pedagogical work we had done last year, it now turns out that it was not enough, and it took much, much longer for us to find the ground, never mind to get running. Each part of the task now had to turn into a lesson. In hindsight, I could have expected some of it, instead of believing that clearer tasks or instructions of what they must do would direct them out of the ditch. I have worked extensively with young artists in their training, so the pedagogic work itself is not a problem but the time it takes to do it properly. In the end, it takes us the whole 9 days to barely put the summaries and have them more or less off script. With one day left, we had to put everything together and stage it.
Staging-wise, I had decided quite early on that we were not going to have the stories presented one after another because the monotony would be dull. Instead, I wanted to find moments where some of the stories came together or apart, and a choreography/visual motif to bind all these bodies on stage. I also wanted to show the audience the picture of these different bodies coming from different parts of the world and somehow ending up in Norway, like it was a magnet pulling them all together. I wanted the audience to see the whole corridor as a map of the world, with Norway at the centre, and then we see all the movements that the narrators have made from their birthplace until they arrive in Norway. In the end, we didn’t manifest the world map as a literal marking on stage but kept Norway at the centre. When the play starts, you see the narrators literally coming out of all the entrances doors, lifts, and corridors arriving at this place. Although less literal, I think it still gave the same impression.
I had the actors begin at different places, mainly playing one image from beginning to end, and then pausing that actor to begin another story. Instead of individual voices one after another, this allowed the individual voices to not only speak side by side, but also allowed them room to intersect, affect each other, and complete each other and this helped the performance develop a sense of these individuals' voices morphing into a collective story, blending into a oneness of sorts.
Given how long it had taken us to create the story from existing text that we could appropriate at will, the major lesson I had taken from this experience going forward was to rethink whether in the next piece, I should still try to create scenes from scratch, where we would only take inspiration and whatever else was relevant from the stories to create scenes. I didn’t see this process happening any faster, especially since it required a much deeper or more active engagement with the stories.
Here's an attempt we made of this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38WyrtkBwTM
Mid-term assessment
This collaboration was meant to be a solid month of uninterrupted work with the students, but a week or so after our showcase at the wall, due to to the death of my grandmother in South Africa, we ended up not being able to proceed with the process as planned. As a result, my mid-term assessment was cancelled as well. But I could still meet the students in April to work with them for two weeks to find a way to wrap up our collaboration.
In the week that proceeded the disruption of our process, the plan for this was to deal with the meta-narrative idea, creating one story from multiple voices, told through multiple bodies. I began preparing for this process with the students by trying to find a way to frame how we would approach the stories. An overwhelming majority of the narrators I interviewed were first generation immigrants, meaning they were born elsewhere and then moved to Norway either when they were young or later as adults. When I was developing their stories, I noticed – thematically – that most of their stories followed a similar plot structure. I started by breaking down the plot points of the structure to draw the common threads, which can be summarised as follows.
1. Born elsewhere (most of the narrators where born outside of Norway)
2. Growing up elsewhere (and they spoke about their childhoods from their birthplaces)
3. Travelling (for whatever reason, not many go directly from their birthplace to Norway, but instead go travelling elsewhere, before earmarking Norway as a destination)
4. Arrival in Norway (this is when they decide to settle in Norway)
5. Resettlement/integration (the process of adjusting to life in Norway and the challenges they face)
6. Finding/adjusting/making a (new) identity
7. (In)stability – which has more to do with finding acceptance and belonging.
We began our rehearsal by looking at these points. I wanted us to use them as anchor points for a potential story we could tell. We were meant to improvise a scene based on each plot point, drawing on all the relevant stories for inspiration. This could happen in three ways, 1) we could make each scene based on a specific story, ensuring that each scene is exclusively drawing upon one story at a time, 2) we could improvise each scene based on a number of stories with relevant experiences, or 3) we could do it without explicitly basing any of them on any specific individual story or part of the story.
I wanted to explore the third option first, I wanted to start as far from the stories as possible, by dealing them as memories or impressions but focusing on finding how we as an ensemble related to these points. I thought this could allow the actors to bring more of themselves and their understandings of such issues to the foreground. we could always go back and add more layers of from the texts later. I guess this must be the unreliable narrator at work. Not long after we started the work, there was a spike in covid infections which also affected us. Our rehearsal schedule became erratic with different people getting infected on different days – the lack of consistency made it difficult to proceed with this plan and the process became a little too slow. Even though I didn’t really wanted to work with the texts as they are, to give the actors a solid base to work from and fast-track the process a bit, we started taking bits of text from different stories to anchor the development of new scenes. I thought once we found a flow, I could lessen the reliance on the texts from narrators. I wasn’t that interested in reproducing the texts but in exploring the points of connections between the stories. But the more erratic the process became, the more dependent we became on the text. We were no longer improvising much of the development of new scenes, just exploring staging possibilities for the narrators’ texts. We were now pivoting more towards the first approach than then third.
I decided to embrace this new change, especially since we would have limited when we met again in April. So after this initial period of working together, we met again in April. But then I decided to develop the initial working script for the actors. Now we had two weeks to put it together and showcase a work-in-progress. This was the last time I could work with the students, as they were finishing their programme. So it was a good idea to find a good way to close the collaboration with a presentation of what we had done together.
During this whole collaboration, I had also wanted to invite some of the narrators to see our process and respond to it, but the covid infections made it a difficult health risk to call.
*****
I like to fictionalise real historical events, so that I can free myself from trying to reproduce something truthful in favour of working towards something dramatic.
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Later I went on to work with another group of first-year students at OsloMet. They were a group of ethnic Norwegian students, and I had previously decided only wanted to actors who had multicultural/immigration backgrounds. This was an interesting/unexpected situation. Since this was a much more limited collaboration that had more to do with their own learning than my research, I will not go into a detailed reflection, but I will mention one thing that I found quite fascinating. Because of the composition of the students, suddenly it became interesting to think of how to work with them in a devising process. They were all trying devising for the first time, so it was important to find an angle that would fit them.
I went back to the narratives to see which themes would suit them. I began to notice that most of the white narrators I had interviewed came to Norway due to love. The so-called love-pats (similar to expats). This concept became both the theme and title of the piece.
Meaning:
A ‘love-pat’ is a person who has moved to (and is living in) another country for the sake of love.
This is a story about someone who has just moved to be with the love of their life. We focus on how they ‘unpack’ themselves into their new life.
Visual motif:
After the boxes arrive, they must slowly be unpacked, without necessarily drawing much attention to the unpacking process. When the play ends, everything must be unpacked. It must happen as slow as the break of dawn. Seamless.
The piece tried to unpack what it may be like to try to introduce someone new into their life and the challenges that come with trying to find your place in a new place. Even though it seemed to have a different entry point, in the end, the journey converged into the same theme as the previous collaboration with the other student group: belonging.
Instead of working from the stories, I gave them articles to read about this phenomenon and we worked from their general understanding. As this was happening within the learning programme where I was following other students, I couldn’t be with them all the time, so it was important to work and respond from their POVs.
*****
The major challenge of working with both student groups was that I found it impossible to motivate them to see the value of the work outside of it being a class activity. A devising process relies a lot on active participation/collaboration and consistency. I don’t think I got to enjoy both of those things, especially the latter, which made the processes stagnant.
It was now to take a chance with a professional cast. I wanted to work with at least two actors but realistically I could only afford one.
*****
How to invite the public in?
As with the other phases, at this stage, I began / I was thinking about how to bring some meaningful interactivity of the audience into the theatre. I was thinking about how to include the audience. One of the key artistic challenges in the project was to grapple with the question of how not only the collaborators but also the public can be empowered to actively shape and engage with artistic works, becoming co-collaborators themselves. Now they have also become a part of the ‘we’. This was a challenging thing to resolve. One of the things I was struggling to figure out was how to make the interaction between actors and the audience meaningful. I couldn’t find a situation or setup where this could happen organically. I hate forcing the idea of form onto the content. It is always better to find an idea that synergises the two, but I was struggling with this.
For my mid-term presentation, I decided to invite a South African actor living in Sweden to come and work with me. We structured the collaboration to happen over two phases. For the first phase, we would meet for three weeks and work on some foundational elements, identifying themes and developing a rough idea and script of the story. We would present the intial results at the mid-term presentation and then take a break for a few months while we develop the script until we meet again for a month to complete our collaboration and stage the final work. During these two phases, I also wanted to see how different it would be to work with an actor that was versed in the devising process and I wouldn’t have to teach them first. Additionally, as he had experience in playback theatre,[1] I wanted to see how we could create something that would be interactive with the public.
I split up the process into phases for two main reasons; 1) so we could use the time in between to really develop the text, and 2) because I wanted to take this time to also engage the relevant narrators to hear what feedback they could give us with the process and use of their stories.
Going into the collaboration, I decided that since I was going to be working with only one actor, I could explore how we could use multiple stories told as if they were the voice and identity of one person. It is like having one character that is a patchwork of multiple slices or parts of different stories of different people but unified as one voice. Something I had not tried so far. The theme of ‘patchwork’ became interesting and I wanted to externalise it somehow so that it could be a motif.
Backstory:
I interviewed over 50 people collecting their individual stories, and now I am working with an actor to explore how some of those stories can be used to create a ‘collective’ narrative. That is, how can I blend the individual stories (i.e., “I”) into a collective voice (i.e., “we”). We want to deal with this question on two levels; namely, through the narrative (and resulting dramaturgy) and a visual motif.
Narrative level:
· We are going to do this by taking a slice of each story and connecting them to read like they were one text or voice. In essence, one actor will embody multiple narratives, moulding them into a unified voice.
· Questions to keep in mind: how will that work? And what cracks will emerge in this process?
Motif level:
· I want to use a costume to represent or show the various ‘slices’ of the stories and how they are being stitched together. Here is a detailed breakdown of the visual motif will work.
· I worked with someone from design/fashion, to develop this idea of the costume. I wanted the motif to be something quite central to the artistic work.
The main idea
What if we had a character that was wearing a costume stitched from multiple fabrics in different colours. Each fabric represented a place, a part of his identity, an event that happened to that person, a story, an experience, etc.
As the story develops, the character peels the fabrics which slowly reveal an uninteresting or dull suit or attire underneath. The character only peels these fabrics when they are confronted with an unsolicited question from the public about their ‘Norwegianness’ or lack thereof. These questions are stealing layers of who the character is. The idea is that the character is slowly losing their colourfulness, by trying to fit into a rigid set of standards and expectations of what it means ‘to be Norwegian’. Every time someone asks them where they are really from, they answer by peeling a layer of that place. Every time they are asked what language they speak; they respond by peeling another layer. So on and so forth.
We will use the different things people have said in the interviews, from the difficulty of finding friends as a new person arriving in Norway to the nasty/ignorant comments people say to immigrants – and the positive things too.
We use the questions as a prompt to remove the layers. Slowly, as more and more questions are asked, the character loses ‘who’ they are, forced to fit into the image of what is acceptable rather than accepted for who they want to be.
This is also a good way for the ‘I’ to embody the ‘we’. Yet when we tell the story, we keep the sense that this is one person.
Theme:
One of the themes from both first and second generation Norwegians who identify as Norwegians face is that they constantly have their Norwegianness questioned. There is always something they lack, questions about where they come from, how they look, how they behave, etc. So I wanted to explore how to work with these questions. One thing that stuck out for me was how it felt like there is a specific way to be Norwegian and they were essentially asked to perform or conduct themselves based on that standard. This had a similar ring to me… Franz Kafka’s A Report to the Academy (1917). This is a short story of an ape explaining his slow and painful domestication to the level of a cultured European. I thought this text could be an interesting story to work with, but not the text itself, I perhaps just inspired by the idea and possibly structure of it.
Since the questions these narrators were receiving were about policing which bodies fit into ‘Norwegianness’, I found A Report to the Academy to be a useful text to reference as a starting point for this piece. What I really wanted to do was cast my character into the role of the ape, to explain their slow and painful process of being Norwegian-ised – I’m sure no such word exists, but I think you know what I mean. Also, Kafka’s ape is presenting the ‘report’ to the academy. This was interesting for several reasons. One of my narrators was interviewed by me, a researcher from the academy. The piece would be presented at the academy, to mostly other academics, and then obviously the public which does the most to police people who don’t confirm. So, we wanted to have this character reporting the report to all three of these people. The audience shifts between being the perpetrators and the observers of the effects of their own perpetration. That’s why I wanted the audience to mostly be the ones who ask the questions that strip the character of who they are. (But because there is also self-censorship involved in this process, the character also sometimes asks themselves some of the questions. Dealing with the inner/internalised dimensions of the constant, unrelenting assault on one’s identity). The performance itself would also switch between a presentational and representational mode. And somehow I wanted to highlight how in both cases, the character doesn’t get a chance to escape our gaze. He can talk to us or ignore us, but he cannot free himself from our curiosities, suspicions, and questions.
But the play was also a protest against this because as this character is being stripped, they still make an effort to fight to take back what is peeled away. This is why I called it ‘A Norwegian Like Me’. It ends by insisting on the character claiming themselves as they are, to also be a norwegian.
The major challenge going into the process was how to work out the audience participation. We decided not to focus on this so much, but to develop the story first.
In terms of working with the stories, I decided to try to use different stories but make them feel like a unified narrative – much like the other ones, but just focusing on a different theme and stories from different narrators. Initially, we improvised scenes based on the stories we found relevant but our story was still not complete, so it felt like it would be a bit difficult to see the ideas, so in the last week, to prepare for the mid-term presentation, we decided to use as much text from the original story as possible. But we would strip it away when we continue the work.
Audience particiption:
In terms of the interaction with the audience, I wanted to see how the questions we use as a prompt for him to remove or put on layers could somehow come from the audience. I wasn’t sure how meaningful of an interaction this would be, but it became a starting point to build upon.
After working for almost three weeks, we had managed to find the skeleton of our story but had not been able to focus on the interactivity with the public yet.
Going forward:
This initial collaborative work with Luthando was promising, but due to financial constraints, we were not able to proceed as we had planned. This was quite a heavy blow to my project.
Here is a link to the documentation of the work-in-progress:
A New Artistic Direction
Away from devising towards LARP…
In September 2021, I attended an artistic research seminar at Vatnahalsen Hotel, Myrdal. This was an extra seminar offered by the research school to research fellows who would like to meet physically to discuss their projects with current and graduated research fellows. This was after COVID had made it impossible to have any physical meetings for a long while.
To make the journey to the seminar interesting, we were encouraged to travel with other fellows and use the journey to introduce each other to our projects.
I didn’t have a travel dialogue partner, but when our train arrived in Myrdal, I bumped into other fellows, and we decided to walk through the scenic route to the venue. On the way, I walked alongside a fellow, Nadja Lipsyc, from the Norwegian Film School whose research is exploring the possibility of combining VR with tools and techniques coming from LARP (live-action roleplaying), videogames, film, and participatory fiction. This encounter would be the first time I received an in-depth explanation of what LARPing means. To me, it sounded almost like something I have been doing in theatre, only calling it by a different name – workshopping. Throughout the seminar, we had many conversations about Nadja’s LARPing experiences, and the existing community in Norway and the Nordic region (which is largely white, middle class). After hearing about my workshopping experiences, Nadja encouraged me to think about the possibility of organizing some of my research outputs as a larp. I jokingly said I would think about it, but I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea to venture into a somewhat new territory at this stage in my research. I had enough on my hands with the monu(mo)ments as it was.
Fast-forward to the end of May of 2022, I was presenting a work-in-progress performance at the Nordic Black Theatre, which I had been working on with the NBX students who were mostly training in theatre for the first time. I invited people to come and see the show and Nadja was one of the people that were able to make it. After the performance, I asked a small circle of my peers and supervisor who wanted to give me feedback to remain behind and we had a discussion in which the question of working with LARP resurfaced. We discussed a little bit about how I could approach this material as a larp, but now I was really curious.
Parallel to this development, was also the troubles I had with finding money to work with professional actors. So far in the process, I had only worked with students (and later would cut the collaboration with Luthando due to money-related problems as well). And even though my processes with them were pedagogically interesting, the same could not be said about our artistic outputs. I found it difficult to motivate them to take our work together seriously enough, beyond just a school exercise. Devising as a method requires consistency, critical engagement, and showing up, something that fluctuated greatly.
In June, a month later, it became clear that I was not going to receive any additional funding to work with professional actors. This was almost a three-year quest that was not taking me anywhere. Even though we receive a modest budget for our projects, it is nowhere near enough to cover the ground for those of us whose practices are relying on durational collaborations with people we need to hire on an ongoing basis. But now it was time to work out a different plan, otherwise I was not going to have much floor artistic work to show. (Did I need it?) After a meeting with the Dean, it became even clearer that there were no alternatives the school could offer, I had to somehow find a way to activate the research material without actors. (There’s a serious broader discussion that needs to be had about how this artistic programme needs to meet and support international fellows who come to Norway with very little – if any – artistic networks, but that’s a struggle for the next tier of international fellows to pick up and continue further).
I had always been thinking of working through the research material with actors who would then take it to meet the public. But now it was time to cut the middleman and go directly to the audience. Suddenly, the LARP format shoot to the top of the list as a new approach to take. As this direction was knew to my supervisors and I, it was interesting to see what it would bring to the table.
Although it was not only a creative drive that had brought me to this path, it was still a good idea to establish and map out what my project could (artistically) benefit from this new format. Why was important to LARP? I found the larp format to be conducive both to engagement and co-creation. I was curious to see how live-action roleplaying could be a vehicle for my research to directly reach an audience – as it offers a unique and immersive experience. It has the potential to enrich the lives of the players and create lasting memories. And since it is a social activity, it can bring people together and help to provide a platform for individuals with shared interests to connect and form communities. It allows participants to immerse themselves in a fictional world or setting, providing an opportunity for them to step into the shoes of ‘someone else’ and fully engage with their narrative, environment, and social dynamics. Evidently, LARPing is largely about the interaction between characters. The events often involve teamwork, cooperation, and collaboration, cultivating strong bonds and relationships among players.
In terms of my research question, I wanted to see how larp could help me to explore further this idea of creating or narrating a ‘we’. I was interested in how these different stories could meet and how they move from their individual focus into a collective voice through their activation by the players.
As a starting point, I looked for a common denominator among the stories, something that could be a hook I can use to activate them. From the onset, I found it difficult to think of a hook or a way to translate my research material into a larp design. While I wanted to use the testimonies or stories as a basis to develop characters (this is the easy part), it was difficult to map out a convincing design of how those characters will interact. It’s a tricky puzzle to solve, to find a situation where it makes sense for all or some of the stories to meet and interact. This is because there is no obvious link or connection between all the people that I interviewed. They are individuals who live separate lives. And this problem of finding the common denominator is also linked to the research question of attempting to create or narrate a constellation of a ‘we’. This was the tough challenge I needed to crack, something that I am still working on.
Furthermore, since LARPing is something quite niche, and I wanted to make something that could be played in the existing networks, a community which is mostly white and middle class, it was vital to think about how such a demographic was going to impact the potential LARP design, and why I would want to engage them. Seeing as I was mainly dealing with experiences and life stories that were generally removed from their everyday lives, it became interesting to think about how I could use this to address that gap. In other words, how could this be a way to get a mostly ethnic Norwegian LARPing community to experience these stories as ‘…an opportunity to step into the shoes of a character’ they would ordinarily not get a chance to interact with.
With that in mind, my initial ideas were gravitating towards experimenting with non-verbal experiences or a design where I start with the testimonies (stories) but find ways to get people to interpret and embody them differently. I thought this would take away a lot of the improvisational struggle of trying to be clever and use the right words. Perhaps more importantly, it was intended to also lessen the barrier of participation for white people who may be scared of doing a bad caricature or a misrepresentation of a culture they don’t know, like not knowing what words to use. I wanted to find something that would challenge them, but still be inviting enough to attract them to participate.
Instead of dealing with individual stories from my research, I wanted to create a larp design that would focus on a common theme among (some of the) stories. In terms of the common denominator, I needed to find something strong enough to bring the different stories together around a central theme, i.e., an interesting idea and design. One such denominator came from one of the stories where the narrator talks about about the bag (i.e., baggage) that all those who migrate or relocate from somewhere must carry with them. I found that it responded very strongly to the stories of all those who came to Norway as first-generation immigrants. They can all relate to the experience of packing their lives into a suitcase. Additionally, we have all experienced some form of packing and unpacking in our lives, an experience which becomes a vital connection to story, regardless of race, nationality, gender, etc. This resulted in a larp design titled The Things We Left Behind.
The Things We Left Behind
Regardless of our varied reasons to migrate, the journey always begins with packing. While some might have the luxury of time and resources to contemplate what to bring, others only have a moment’s notice to take what they can. This LARP invites you to traverse the layers of things we lose and gain, the challenges and opportunities we meet in the process of migrating.
What will you pack when you leave?
Like most typical larp designs, this larp was divided into three parts:
- Pre-Workshop
- LARP itself
- Debrief
Pre-Workshop:
The players go through random objects in the space and find x number of items. They must spend time with them and then create a backstory for each item, to say why these objects are important things to them. There must be a memory of an event that is then associated with the items chosen. The backstories must be fairly elaborate – the player must investigate why each item is important to them i.e., if it’s a gift, they must work out where it came from, who that person is, what they mean to them, and why the gift from them was of significance. Each item must be indispensable to the player.
LARP:
Using their unique items, the players work together to create a character and their (bed)room. They can decide everything about this person and the room they are in. This character is like an avatar, and they must use their unique items to build this person’s character and life. Everyone must use their items.
After this is done, a conflict breaks out in this person’s home country, and they are forced to flee. Now comes the challenge, the players must – collectively – pack their belongings into one suitcase, for a journey into the unknown. The players must work together to decide what to take with them and what to leave behind. They must be reminded that they don´t know where they are going or what they will need along the way. As such, they can’t make the suitcase too heavy, but they still need to take enough varied things for the unknown journey ahead.
The objective for each player is to convince the group to take as many of their own personal items as possible on the journey. Collectively, they should still also try to take as many items with them as possible. So, they must balance both objectives. Of course, every player will want it to be their items that are carried forward.
The cycle of fleeing repeats three times, each time they are moving to a smaller and smaller room, given a smaller bag for packing and a shorter time limit to decide what to bring along until they are down to only what they can carry in their pockets.
Debrief:
The players talk about the process. We look at the different rooms and see the traces of their journey. What items made it (and why did those things make it?), and got left behind? How do the players feel about the experience? What do they feel about the precious things they lost along the way? What did they gain in this process, if anything?
*****
I ran the larp for the first-time last year at Grenselandet, which is an annual international chamber larp festival in Oslo. In terms of the design, I had tried to use the avatar as a way for the players to co-create a collective character from individual parts of people’s stories. This was intended to result in a character who had a multi-layered sense of identity and history, to create a sense of a collective perspective or shared experience. Some observations from the players:
- Establish a common identity: the avatar created a persona which came to embody a shared sense of the players as an entity, allowing the persona to stand as a representative of that collective.
- Use of inclusive language: the players used a lot of inclusive pronouns like "we," "us," and "our" instead of "I," "me," and "my", which helped establish the idea that they were speaking for a character on behalf of a group or community. It also became interesting to see when players chose to use ‘I’ vs ‘we’ pronouns, which reflected the complexity and dialectic nature of the character’s identity, which fluctuated throughout the larp. This was particularly important as a manifestation of a ‘we’, and its resulting cracks.
- Reflect diverse perspectives: with the players pushing both their individual and collective perspectives, the character presented multiple viewpoints or voices, which added depth to the character and their unfolding narrative.
Overall, the larp largely went well, but there were some teething issues. But the main problem was the lack of personal relationships between the players. Although they managed to co-create a collective character, I think they struggled to find the same sense of unity or shared identity among themselves. I had a feedback session with the players afterwards and I asked specifically about their personal relationships, which is something that I struggled to develop further. Luckily, one of them presented an interesting proposal to this problem. Instead of building an avatar as a symbol of their collective, what if the players used the items to create a family? I wasn’t sure if this was a good direction to take because the design relies on people being conflicted by their individual vs collective objectives, I thought it would be easy to prioritise others if you are family, but it was worth a try because being a family brings concrete relations to the players. They have to mean something to each other, which would make it natural to have or find ways to connect more deeply and build stronger relationships between players.
So, I submitted to run the larp at Knudepunkt 2023, which is an annual conference on larp (live-action roleplaying) that travels between Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden each year. I wanted to try the suggestion of organising the players as a family to see how that would affect their interaction and the design.
After playing the larp, during the debriefing session, I asked the players about how it felt to play as a family and it turns out that that was a better experience than the collective avatar. The players really enjoyed being able to bond with each other as a family. This is also when I realised how much players bring to a design. This group dived in and invested in these bonds they shared with each other – when all else was trying to tear them apart, it felt like having a stable unit of people you belong with suddenly became a source of strength and support for them. I was convinced – watching from the outside – that they looked like people who had known each other for a very long time. In actual fact, many were meeting for the first time in that room. Even though this was a simulated environment, the transformative potential of the players coming together as a unit was visible. I wondered, if they had found a sense of a ‘we’ in this temporary, fleeing sense of family and community they had built together.
If the larp could create such a profound connection between people and to a reality that may have seemed distant to one’s life just a moment ago, I began to wonder how best it could be used outside of my PhD project. Since I also make theatre for children and young people, I felt like perhaps I can make it available to schools as a resource pack they can use when dealing with related themes, especially now with a war going on in Europe and the rise of far-right populistic rhetoric that is anti-immigrant. Being forced to flee one’s home and sense of belonging is a difficult choice to make and often many’s last resort, something that is often forgotten in the way that the migrant story is told (sometimes this seems to depend on who the migrant in question is). I thought this larp design could bring connect young people who are far removed from such a reality to also get a glimpse of it, something that could help them relate with those arriving in their local communities looking for safety and a chance to rebuild their lives.
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