Verbatim and Documentary Theatre - Coursework Example

VERBATIM AND DOCUMENTARY THEATRE Location Introduction Documentary theatre has experienced such a great boom in popularity over the last ten years or so following the success of works like Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight among others. The works covered almost all aspects of life ranging from survival during natural disasters through the display of dramatized versions of inquest to the special examination of violence at the family level in New Zealand as observed in Hilar Halbas and Stuart Young’s Hush. It is only after a given period of time that we shall be able to determine whether the cycle of the documentary boom will be similar to its economic counterpart and lead into a bust. This paper looks at the representation of the documentary theatre and verbatim and their relationship to reality especially by considering the choice of performers and reaction of the audience (Taubin, 2010). Critical Evaluation It is evident that the documentary theatre is moved by two extremes that are polirised in terms of the economic patterns of this theatre. In as much as these two broad spectrums of economic trends actually exist, they are considered to be a range of shifting that make efforts of trying to reconcile tensions from competition. The two economic patterns are hence not just a pair of sinusoidal oscillations when it comes to delivery of viewing services to the audience. The documentary theatre has made attempts of staying away from manipulation the source materials in which if such is not avoided, this may result in muted presentation which may place the theatre at one end of the spectrum. Moreover, there are other attempts that are actually made to creatively configure testimony and context for yet another time which can as well lead the documentary theatre into sensationalism and aestheticization. This new behaviour in simple theoretical evaluation is the one that leads to the boom in performance out of synchronicity with the source material, pushing the theatre to the opposite end of fictional spectrum (Fisher, 2010). Basically, it is by turning our eyes as spectators to this theatre if we intend to create a reasonable distance between ourselves and the reality that we are able to observe by our own eyes. The documentary theatre has been associated with the proliferation of capital and the exchanges that concern culture, politics, and personality and public exchanges among many others. It is still not yet clear that the heightened desires for public investment and practitioner as outlined in this documentary theatre will actually collapse. It is only a change in the bust or more precisely the continued change in trends one of which is the increased desire from the public and also the reality that is depicted on the stage (SEN, 2014). What are very important here for our discussion are the already mentioned boom and the busty nature of the relationship to the reality, performance and aesthetics and also the engagement of the audience in the recent past. In this case, the documentary theatre is actually not viewed to follow the cycle of boom and bust that is normally demonstrated in models of economy. On the other hand, the documentary theatre is depicted as one theatre that is actually falling along a long range of complex spectra. There however exist two main and nominally opposed extreme responses towards the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas experienced by the documentary theatre as are outlined in the models of the growth and the collapse of the economy (Taubin, 2008). The documentary theatre is known to present several extremities in which at one extreme lies the hyper-aestheticized production that have the full power of exploiting and manipulating the source materials with one interest of the spectacle, the appeal to the eyes and the engagement of the audience. The other extremity is the aspect of highly ethical productions that are expected to be based on some already perceived truths. What determines the aspect that sits at any given extremity is the subject matter in the particular show or the source material that is being documented in that specific performance (Adami, 2007). Most are the times when the reality television seeks to achieve significant mediation in order to produce drama and conflict from some mundane situations. At an event like this, the documentary theatre also becomes subject to mediation and most are the times it focuses on past events that signify traumatic experiences. Such events give a detailed account of the traumas that befall the victims of natural disaster; sometimes also performing the domestic and violence while at other times presenting the issue of abuse (Linden 2013).Therefore, there is bound to be the connection of reality that is very fore grounded with respect to the documentary theatre. The documentary theatre is said to have been raise through archived material that include interviews, documents, photographs, videos and films, hearings and records among others. In a more contemporary argument, the documentary theatre is said to have a claim that everything that it presents is actually solely a part of the archive. It is however very important to understand the fact that not everything that is presented by the theatre is part of the documentary (Ford, 2010). Activities that range from editing omissions and presentations play a very major role in the process of mediation and thus are actually how the creative work is done. When the documentary theatre focuses on traumatic events, it actually becomes biased on political aspects as it tries to show change and understanding while it makes an attempt to represent the experiences that are gone through by the survivors on the stage. It the nature and the sensitivity of the source material that brings up several issues with respect to some ethical considerations and the representation of the characters (Bishop & Waring, 2011). In as much as the documentary tries to focus on the reality of the traumatic events, the issue of prevalence of the subjected matter still arises and requires to be discussed. The documentary theatre enters into the precarious territory while it tries to handle the issue of trauma in a more realistic way. This kind of an approach is perhaps responsible for the up-come of several tasks that actually involve irresolvable conundrums. Such conundrums are like the representation of those that cannot be represented and the attempt to reconcile the aesthetic distance with pushing the audience and spectators into live action in addition to arousing their empathy, understanding and engagement. These can be well illustrated by David Hare’s the Permanent Way produced in 2005 and the traumatic circumstances that surround a good number of rail disasters in Britain (Harker, 2009). Another work that will be of importance in this discussion is Hush, produced in 2009 by Stuart Young and Hilary Halba. This is a verbatim piece that concentrates on the aspect of family violence in New Zealand. Both of these works focus on several aspects of the philosophical and aesthetic approaches to the source material and consequently practically illustrate the perceived spectrum that exists between the fiction and reality. The works also touch on some aspects of the self-imposition of some ethical restrictions that may as well cause tremendous impacts on the production and reception of the performance. T. Minh-ha is both a theorist and a film maker who described aesthetic of objectivity as the development of technologies that are easy to understand and are of truth. Such technologies according to her are supposed to promote the rights and wrongs of the world and emphasize on the distinction between what is honesty and just happens as a result of manipulation in the documentary. This according to Trinh was supposed to be the true picture of the struggle towards naturalism in the technology that hovers around cinemas. She went ahead to explain how the various aspects of film production are bound to target the truth especially as exemplified in the film production process in documentary theatre (Linden, 2013). An example is the close-up which is actually not as supported because of partiality while wide angle is preferred in terms of objectivity due to its more inclusion in the frame and hence was considered the best to mirror with faithfulness of the events in context. Similarly, the documentary theatre features an aspect of aesthetic of objectivity as it focuses on the approaches that actually purport to truth claims which were a suspect and were being exemplified by the form of verbatim theatre. The verbatim theatre in this case was pioneered by Alecky Blythes and participated so much for use by the creators of the Hush. The idea of objectivity according to the film maker is just a construction and requires a matter of a lot of dialogue for a value-free documentation as oppose to Stella Bruzzi, another filmmaker that argues that documentary film is just but a doomed enterprise (Ford, 2010). According to Stella, the ideal of a clean documentary that is not contaminated by the subjective vagaries of the representation that we earlier discussed is upheld at all times. The existence of non-fictional films is hence compromised to living as per its intention and for this reason, a documentary is actually what one does after failure. Another argument is brought about by Reinelt who confidently believes that the statements that relate to the contamination of the documentary theatre have not considered the recognition of a true consideration of reality and the acting of its results is about reality and not just a copy of reality. Some documentaries have a very strong impact in some documentary theatres, an impact which can prevent the documentary practitioner direct link to features that make the presentation more lively and engaging. In one of the sub-branches of the documentary verbatim theatre, it is very possible to chart the prevalence and the sticking to this form of a restrictive drive in addition to the nature of its booming (Harker, 2009). It is obvious that the verbatim material is re-represented and manipulated on the stage but in this case the extent to which or the ways in which this happens is dependent on a series of ethically and aesthetically disputed spectra. The Joint Stock is actually a British theatre company that is known to have members who are responsible because of a very good reputation in terms of productions with the use of verbatim techniques since as early as 1976. This documentary theatre that still raises some issues was established by David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark, William Gaskill and David Aukin. For instance, one of the pioneers of the Joint Stock, Hare, had to face the blame of failure to acknowledge the dual and therefore ambiguous status of this theatre. The expectation her was that the newly established theatre was to consider both document and play that typically belongs to itself while at the same time addressing other works. Stafford Clark was the director while Hare was the writer admitted their blunder and consequently Stafford Clark re-shaped the verbatim material as one that explores the story within a story. After production of the verbatim play The Permanent Way by Hare, Stafford Clark became the director and both try their level best to explain the grief that the victims of rail accidents in Britain went through. This is properly explained in order to direct the thoughts of the audience in a particular way by use of the material. The documentary theatre is bound to have a metaphor to avoid the story being just an imaginary tale, a condition that makes the story so boring. It would be such a total misunderstanding of the documentary theatre that the whole story presented on the stage is just a representation of mere facts, which is of course boring (Taubin, 2008). Conclusion It is funny how the current wave of mergers of the media and acquisitions that occurred since the late 1990s to the present day has led to environment of commercialization. In this type of commercialization, the interests of the shareholder and the economies of scale are responsible for the increase in the homogenized media context. McChesney goes ahead to warn that the decrease in the points of view and a decreasing number of opportunities for debate and for various communities to acknowledge or possesses their own stories establish the template on which democracy is compromised. References "United Kingdom Materials on International Law 2009", 2010, The British Year Book of International Law, vol. 80, no. 1, pp. 661-949. Adami, T.A. 2007, ""Who will be left to tell the tale?" Recordkeeping and international criminal jurisprudence", Archival Science, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 213-221. Bishop, S. & Waring, J. 2011, "Inconsistency in health care professional work", Journal of Health Organization and Management, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 315-331. Fisher, R.S. 2010, ""Say it aint so, Joe": Haydn, Pleyel and Copyright in Music in the Late 18th Century", Intellectual Property Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 1-35. Ford, R. 2010, "Complex adaptive leading-ship and open-processional change processes", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 420-435. Harker, B. 2009, "Class Composition: The Ballad of John Axon, Cultural Debate and the Late 1950s British Left", Science & Society, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 340-355. Linden, A. 2013, "Beyond Repetition: Karl Krauss "Absolute Satire"", German Studies Review, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 515-536,749. SEN, U. 2014, "The Myths Refugees Live By: Memory and history in the making of Bengali refugee identity", Modern Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 37-76. Taubin, A. 2008, "Signs of Life", Film Comment, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 52-55. Taubin, A. 2010, "Being There", Film Comment, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 52-53. Read More