ANNE BOGART
All the
She did A Streetcar Named Desire with seventeen Stanleys and staged Miss Julie as a boxing match, now ANNE BOGART is taking on Orson Welles and the art of theatre itself. Sometime collaborator JOCELYN CLARKE explains why the US director is so exciting.
ANNE BOGART HAS MANY FAVOURITE THINGS. Every week she has a new favourite thing. sometimes every day if it’s a particularly good week. Anne’s favourite thing can be the new book she is reading. the CD she’s currently listening to. the painting she saw in a gallery yesterday. the deli she found on the way to rehearsal. or the new electronic gizmo she bought last week. She talks about all of them with an infectious enthusiasm that begins with ‘this is my new favourite thing . . .’
Anne’s most favourite thing of all. however. is the theatre. She has been a theatre director since the age of sixteen — her first production was a high school version of lonesco’s The Bald Soprano — and has been responsible for creating some of the most extraordinary. occasionally controversial and exhilarating productions in American theatre for the last two decades. With her SITI company. which she co-founded with Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. she is bringing two very different but related productions to Edinburgh: Cabin Pressure and War Of The Worlds.
The first is a theatre ‘essay’ about the relationship between actor and audience. in all its various conventions and forms in both theory and practice while the second is a ‘biography’ of theatre and film director Orson Welles. refracted through his infamous radio production of War Of The Worlds and his film Citizen Kane. Moreover. both share. in their very idiosyncratic way. Anne’s ongoing fascination with popular culture — her second most favourite thing — and its merging with performance and design on stage in an act of theatre.
Anne’s insatiable curiosity about the world. in part a happy result of travelling all over the world as a navy brat with her family. and her almost evangelical love of theatre — ‘I work in the theatre because it is an activity that feels right and human to me’ — infuses her work with an extraordinary immediacy and urgency. From her theatre essays The Medium and Going Going Gone — an exploration of media savant Marshall McLuhan’s theories. and an investigation into quantum physics via Who ’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf — to her unconventional productions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (with
14 THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 17—24 Aug 2000
seventeen Stanleys). Elmer Rice’s The Adding Mae/zine (with mini ‘fuck’ ballet) and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (as a boxing match). Anne’s shows blaze with intelligence and feeling. as much in their playful theatricalin as their dramatic force. Each of Anne’s productions. even the most seemingly serious. are imbued with a gentle humour which invites the audience to participate with their imagination and experience: unlike most post- modern theatre. Anne’s work is both serious and fun.
Since I first saw her work — and having worked with her as a writer and dramaturg on two productions. Bob and Alice 's Adventures — I am continually surprised by the contradiction between its accessibility and its complexity. Though the creation process may vary slightly from production to production — between an essay with assembled text and a written play — all the SITI company’s productions are grounded in the collaboration between Anne and her actors. specifically through the ‘Viewpoints’.
Viewpoints. first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie and expanded by Anne. have made the SlTl Company a unique phenomenon in contemporary American theatre. at company that not only produces new work but also teaches and trains new actors and directors; there are programmes all year round. Not only do Viewpoints challenge traditional naturalistic and ‘psychological’ theories of performance and direction with their emphasis on physical technique and group collaboration. but more importantly they offer a rigorous system of physical performance which includes a wide variety of sources from other artforms: dance. sculpture. and architecture. Viewpoints require the actor to create moving images on stage in ‘kinesthetic’ — spontaneous and unthinking — response to the gesture and movement patterns made by other actors. the physical environment (architecture and lighting) and music.
Anne acts primarily as a facilitator and uses the Viewpoints to communicate and shape the creative input of her actors in the
'I work in the theatre because it is an activity that feels right and human to me.’
creation and rehearsal of their work. In order to achieve an emotional life on stage. the physical structure of the work — everything from the actor’s gestures and positions on stage to Darron West’s sound design cues — is set during rehearsals. so the actors are then ‘open’ to the emotional and psychological vulnerabilities of the piece. The result is a densely layered and organic piece of theatre which evolves and grows with each iteration as both Anne and her actors continue to discover and explore new meanings. She strives to ‘undefine. to present the moment. the word. the gesture as new and full of controlled potential’.
Though all the SITI company’s productions are built on strong intellectual and rigorous technical foundations — the SITI actors are proficient in both Viewpoints and Suzuki’s ‘martial arts’ physical training methods — they contain highly intuitive elements. as much in their instinctive dramaturgy as in their dynamic design. Amid the science of Anne’s productions. there is always magic to be found in an unexpected gesture or a surprising image on stage. It is this ‘controlled potential’ which enables the audience to access and to participate in the complex and dynamic interplay of Anne’s work on stage. between word and gesture. design and movement. and between actor and audience. In Cabin Pressure. and to an extent in War Of The Worlds. Anne makes it explicit: ‘theatre is what happens in the space between spectator and actor.’
Anne’s favourite place in the world.
Cabin Pressure (International) Royal Lyceum Theatre, 473 2000, 19—22 Aug, 7.30pm, Sun and Tue mats 2.30pm, £6—£22.50.
War Of The Worlds (International) Royal Lyceum Theatre, 473 2000, 24-27 Aug, 7.30pm, Sat and Sun mats 2.30pm, £6—£22.50.
War Of The Worlds The Radio Play (International) Royal Lyceum Theatre, 473 2000, 25 Aug, 11pm, £12.50.