THERE'S a quiet revolution afoot in the theatre, more evident at the fringes, but creeping steadily towards the centre. You may have thought that an actor was someone who sat by the telephone for eight months of the year, "resting", before springing into action, to be moulded like plasticine to the will of a director, but it ain't necessarily so. The era of the actor as instrument is drawing to a close, and the act or as artist is born.
Increasingly, smaller companies are working as ensembles, with groups of actors meeting for a few hours every day, to improvise, develop technical skills, explore themes through movement, gesture and voice work, and jointly devise new theatre pieces which may or may not be based on a text written by someone outside the group and may or not be performed for an audience.
While the "death of the author" has become a commonplace, the death of the all controlling director seems a more risky proposition. Yet, somehow, the risibly earnest aspirations of countless student experiments in "non hierarchical" theatre have been transformed into something that not only works, but can be taken seriously. Just how seriously, could be observed over the past week in the Samuel Beckett Centre, TCD, where eight European theatre companies gathered for the First Dublin International Theatre Symposium, to learn about each others' work through presentations and workshops and to discuss points of intersection and divergence.
The symposium was organised jointly by the Dublin based Pan Pan Theatre, whose work has been seen at the Dublin Theatre Festival over the past few years, and ArtsLab (Ireland), a newly established group of theatre practitioners committed to fostering collaborative projects between companies and individuals, in Ireland and abroad. All of the invited companies - Mandala (Poland), Teatro Potlach (Italy), Theatre de L'Instant (France), Graeae Theatre Company (UK), Tyst Theatre (Sweden), Scarlet Theatre (UK), Scena Plastyczna (Poland) - were groups that Pan Pan had met on the festival circuit abroad, and were keen to see more of.
"We viewed this week as an informal work exchange," says Gavin Quinn, the Artistic Director of Pan Pan. "We want to foster collaboration between individual companies, rather than relying on theatre festival organisers to initiate contact and bring people together. It's a chance for practitioners to talk to each other in a relaxed way and to learn about each others' work, both through the presentations, where participants have shown slides and videos of their past productions, and through the workshops. It's an opportunity for young Irish actors to observe the approaches of older European groups who have worked together for a long time, maybe 15 or 20 years.
While the common thread between the participating groups is the fact that they all work as ensembles, and are, broadly speaking, exponents of "physical theatre", what became evident throughout the week was the diversity of approaches.
THE Polish group, Scena Plastyczna, works in a highly visual, design led style, while Theatre de L'Instant is a troupe from Brittany producing actor driven work in the popular drama traditions of bouffant and burlesque; Graeae Theatre from England is a disability theatre company "formed around identity politics", using elements of parody and the theatre of the grotesque, and Teatro Potlach is the driving force behind the Invisible Cities project, which entails the creation of site specific outdoor performances in different international locations, involving the local population. "These companies exemplify the breadth and variety of theatre now," Gavin Quinn says, "and some of the work is quite hard to classify."
While there was disappointment expressed by some audience members that what were billed in the programme as evening performances turned out to be presentations made with slides, video and discussion, Gavin Quinn and the co founder of ArtsLab, Chrissie Poulter, insist that the week's events were not intended to be a festival. "We wanted to do something other than a festival."
For next years symposium, however, there is a need to refine the details of the public access to events, acknowledges Chrissie Poulter. "We will have to give more thought to how that access is structured, certainly, but primarily the week was attempting, especially through the workshops, to make visible how an actor works and to facilitate a dialogue between artists."
For some participants, the emphasis on discussion and analysis was a considerable challenge. In a passionate address on Sunday night, during which he writhed in his chair, and tore his hands through his hair with frustration, the director of Theatre de L'Instant, Bernard Lotti, declared: "I don't like talking; I'm against theorising; I don't like symposiums; I'm incapable of abstraction." He continued, to general laughter, "my work is a complete mess."
HIS discomfort prompted one audience member to object to what she called the overly academic approach of the presentation, which "put theatre under a microscope. There's only one way to make theatre," she said, before walking out of the discussion, just get up off your butt and do it." On the whole, however, her's was a minority view. It was obvious that many of the participants in the week's events were steeped in theatre theory, from Artaud and Grotowski to Meyerhold and Valentin, and were graduates of university courses in drama studies, relishing the analysis as much as the participation in the workshops, which were all fully subscribed.
But lest we were becoming worried that the preoccupation with the actors' development and performance in ensemble was leaving the audience out of the equation and becoming a form of private group therapy, Tom Fjordefalk, the Artistic Director of Tyst Theatre, reminded the audience of the necessity for theatre to communicate. "Dallying with form, with the aesthetic of theatre is becoming more important than what is being conveyed," he said, in a stimulating presentation, which explored the languages of theatre, both verbal and non verbal. Tyst Theatre is a silent ensemble which uses sign language, and is part of the Swedish National Touring Theatre.
"Contemporary theatre has lost its danger," he said. Reinterpreting the ideas of Artaud, he concluded that the much cited "theatre of cruelty" was not concerned with violence, but with the conditions of our lives, the fact that "we are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads - and the theatre can teach us that . . ."
