ARTISTIC RESPONSE
In 2009, I was about the start rehearsing a play in Herning, Team Teatret in Herning, Denmark. I had prepared everything. I knew everything. I was kind of bored with myself, and I did not want to once again sit there with actors saying: ‘I do not think I agree with you . And who am I to be wiser than all these wonderful people I was working with? So in the middle of the rehearsal I decided that I wanted to try something. All these questions they wanted me to answer I would let them ask these questions themselves and answer them themselves. We read through each scene, and when they read a scene I said, ‘Do not ask me. Write it on the wall. Find the answers through a small piece of art, a diary, a video, a painting, improvisation, whatever. Find the solutions yourselves’. And we loved it. We laughed and cried, and they felt so secure when they performed the play. This was an amazing experience.
I have had many reflections on how - what I experienced in Herning - can be transformed into teaching, how I as a teacher can create conditions, that did not posit predetermined goals. Molin’s words on facilitating development processes that extend the range of action, have been key words in developing this new approach. I’ve also been very aware that it is essential to create very clear and well-structured frameworks.
The goal of the artistic response is to create a “first look” into a text that gives the team the possibility of discovering all of the imaginative, unpredictable and personal material that occurs when one has free rein. We take our starting point in the text’s themes, the relationships between the characters, the time in which the text was written, philosophical/ideological thoughts and the various readings of the basic conflict that existed in the text. The first step of the method is that the team read the text together. Then the team asks questions about everything one is allowed to wonder about the text. After the open brainstorming session an organisation of the questions takes place.
This illustration pictures who creates the content. If you think of the content as the yellow circle, the creator of the content is the black circle. In the first circle the director creating the whole content. working with artistic response I make frames for the collaborators to create content. In human migration I have actually stepped even further away to let my colleagues and the audience and the performers do it alle be the creators. Being in this position I think of my job as a film editor’s job. People create a lot of things, and I use my knowledge and skills to put it together in some kind of succession.
