In the spoiler-heavy second half of our interview with writer/director Jack Aldisert, we dissect the key moments in The Manikins: a work in progress.
Photo: Marc Tsang
This interview contains major spoilers for The Manikins: a work in progress. |
Immersive Rumours: So Jack, let's dive into specifics about some of the big moments in The Manikins. After entering the venue, there's a pre-show briefing in which you explain to participants that if things get too much for them, they can loudly say 'I want the show to stop'. You're planting a seed for later in the show where people need to say that phrase as part of the narrative. It's a really interesting subversion of the typical immersive theatre rules...
Jack Aldisert: It goes back to what I was saying earlier when I was talking about Ligotti and layers of reality and incorporating the participant's reality into the piece as one of many. I think a very effective way to do that is through conventions and the subversion of conventions. A convention is something which is totally expected to the degree that it disappears into the background. For example, when you go to the theatre, you expect that there's a bar, you have drinks at the bar, there's a bell that rings, you go into the auditorium, you sit at your seat, you're chatting with whoever you came with, lights go down, the crowd hushes. Everyone knows to do all those things. There are these framing devices like the curtain opening, which are conventions that signal the shifting frames of the show. Because they are conventions, they disappear into the background. There's nothing realer than that because it's totally unquestioned. Every time we subvert conventions, it's like we're grabbing a chunk of the participant's experience of reality and putting it into the fiction or revealing to them that it was always part of the fiction. That's powerful because it takes something so real that you never would have thought to question it and makes you realise it was part of a fictional scheme or fictional framework.
[The 'I want the show to stop' line] was always part of the show, but as something real - we didn't subvert it. It was there in case they wanted it to happen as an actual safe phrase - which it still is. People still could use it like that, even after it gets subverted. It's those things that I think make the piece powerful because that's what helps the piece eat your reality.
There's a fantastic book by Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. There's a section where he says something like 'The history of theatre, especially when it comes to its avant-garde development can largely be characterised as a gradual colonisation or appropriation of reality.' He argues that all of the most avant-garde theatre in its day has been avant-garde and gotten its power from how it takes something real and uses it within its fictional or theatrical framework in an unexpected novel way. That's what I think we're trying to do with this, incorporating reality into the piece in a novel way.
Photo: Rebecca J. Windsor.
There's a question that gets repeated a lot by the characters to the participant or to each other - 'Who are you?'. One of the things I love most is when the participant gets asked that and they say 'I don't know anymore'. That tells you it's working.
IR: Another element of the show that I think is incredibly interesting, and it's something we mentioned in our review, is that the participant ends up playing as much of a role in the experience as the two actors. They start as a version of themselves, then they're playing a version of that performance's actress, at one point they're the Doctor, then they're playing a version of you as the Director amongst several other roles. It's a really effective way of having people lose their sense of self during the show.
Jack: Yeah, it's another attempt to transfer a literary technique or concept from weird fiction into a theatrical medium. Something that's classic weird fiction is that it's not just your sense of reality that gets subverted and altered, it's your sense of identity. Often there's a theme in weird fiction of an interchangeable and permeable sense of identity where the characters don't know who's who anymore. They get exchanged with each other. There are a couple of really useful qualities of theatre that can harness a sense of shifting and permeable identity.
Something else that States talks about, when you're watching the theatre, you're inherently watching two worlds at once. You're watching the world of Hamlet and the world of Olivier. You're seeing both simultaneously. They oscillate between each other. He talks about how great actors are the ones who are able to use themselves in the performance to make the performance of the character even stronger. The idea is to put the participant in this situation, which goes back to the identity crisis that Sophie Nield talks about. The identity crisis is what happens when you take that Hamlet/Olivier split off of a stage, which a more traditional audience is watching, and you put that dichotomy into a conversational interaction with an audience member. We try to fuel that intentionally by having the participant be asked to play multiple roles, which is again just a convention of theatre - the actor playing a character becomes something that makes you feel like your identity is shifting.
One of my favourite moments is near the end of the show, there's a question that gets repeated a lot by the characters to the participant or to each other - 'Who are you?'. One of the things I love most is when the participant gets asked that and they say 'I don't know', or 'I don't know who I'm supposed to be anymore'. That tells you it's working. That's what I want them to feel like.
I don't know exactly what, but I think this piece is doing something around identity essentialism. You take a person and maybe they construct their identity based around a certain set of characteristics or they say 'My identity is essential to who I am. These certain identifiable traits about me are essential to who I am', and the experience that you go through in this show isn't that. At the end of the day, you might find yourself playing five different roles. You see other people playing you and anyone can play anything in the show. It's not just the role you're playing that changes, it's what that makes you feel about your identity changing.
Photo: Rebecca J. Windsor
I don't think of this piece as something I've made, I think of it as an activity that I do with whoever else is involved in it that day.
IR: This is quite a big statement, but The Manikins is the closest I've ever come to having a life-changing experience from a piece of theatre. In the realest sense possible, I felt like a different version of myself when I walked back out that door, and the old version of me was left behind. It's an incredibly powerful thing.
Jack: Fantastic. You can't ask for anything more as a creator. A friend and I talked a couple of years ago about who theatre is for. We were talking about how in both of our experiences, theatre really is for the actors. You're giving a performance to the audience. but in my mind, the core of the magical transcendent experience of theatre is the experience of being an actor playing a role in this suspension of disbelief and the feeling that you get from the experience of leaving yourself in a way. Finding a different version of yourself feels like the transcendent part of theatre. What we talked about was that one of the great potentials of interactive theatre would be to give that experience to an audience member who doesn't have to have any experience as an actor or in doing immersive or interactive work. Giving that experience of what it feels like to be an actor in a role to someone who hasn't had that before and doing it in a way that we support them, the process of them becoming that is part of the storyline of the piece.
That's why at the very beginning I explicitly say, 'I want you to feel like you're inside the story, but without you having to act. I don't need you to pretend to be someone else, just somewhere else.' The whole thing is telling them at the start, you don't need to be an actor, you don't have to act. Of course, by the end of it, they've been acting their asses off. Most of the time without even knowing it, without even noticing it.
One of my favourite moments in the piece is the scene where they become the doctor and they're interviewing me, where I'm playing probably the closest version to myself of any other point in the show. The vast majority of people, even people who characterise as very passive participants in that scene, do lead and do push the scene forward. I'm thinking in my head as it's happening 'Wow, this person must have acting experience. This is a fantastic performance'. Then you talk to them at the end, and they've never acted in their life.
We had one person the other day who just stared at me in that scene. I thought she was trying to make a power play or make a choice in the scene, in the way that an actor would make a choice in a scene. It turned out she was just really nervous and she didn't know what to say. She was trying to put on a veneer of confidence and wait for me to say something. I do think people get to experience what it feels like to have that sort of transcendent stage-acting experience through this. I don't want to sound like I'm talking myself up because I don't think about it that way at all. A piece of work is something you find rather than something you make - you find it. I don't think of this piece as something I've made, I think of it as an activity that I do with whoever else is involved in it that day.
Photo: Rebecca J. Windsor
IR: The 'intermission' interview that happens after passing through the curtain a couple of times I imagine catches people off-guard. It feels like a break from what is going on, but in the five minutes between the end of that conversation and the recreation of that conversation after taking off the headphones, for me was the moment where everything clicked into place. In the first couple of scenes, answering questions as either myself or Serena [the actress performing during our show], you're still trying to find your footing and work out exactly what is happening, but haven't yet dived into the dream space. It's a pivotal scene.
Jack: Exactly. I talked earlier about the turning point for me in terms of the creation process was when I had that realisation - the meta stuff from the dream. I'd been asking people questions like that during the workshops, so the interview really just came out of the idea I had for that turning point scene where the actor is playing you. I had that idea and we just needed something to set that up, so we do a false intermission interview, which is why the show needs to still be referred to as a work in progress in the marketing, because it justifies the existence of that intermission.
The main idea there goes back to when I first wanted to have a naturalistic office - you take off the headphones and eye mask and you're in a completely new space. What was exciting about that was you're now in a world of unlimited dream-like possibility, and it's undisputed - the situation just makes you inherently know that you're in that world of open possibility now, where it's like a dream and anything could happen. That's the feeling I wanted to give them. It came from when you're in a dream, and you can see someone in the dream, for example a figure that you know is your mother. She doesn't look like her, but you know that that person, despite their appearance in the dream, is who you think it is. That scene you're talking about is in my mind, a way to take that experience, which seems like it's only possible in a dream, and give it to the participant, They know, suddenly in that moment, without us having to say what's happening, they are having an out of body moment, where they're seeing someone else being them.
Then we come over to them, and we ask them for director's notes, and they realise that they've become the director. No one has to ever acknowledge that in the scene, we don't have to hand you a script that tells you, we don't have to tell you what the situation is. We've set it up with quite a lot of logical plotting and planting of details so that in the moment of payoff, it feels like you're feeling the truth of that situation in the way that you feel the truth of something in a dream.
Most people say that that's their favourite scene, and I know for a lot of the actors who play the Secretary, that's their favourite scene to play. It's really, really fun. Most people keep their directing notes to us very simple, or they don't know what to say at all. It can be very fun sometimes when people give us some wild ones.
It's the turning point of the show because it signals that you've now entered the place where anything is possible, as in a dream. I think it also signals to people as a device that they have more agency and more room to improvise than they previously realised. Everything that comes after that is set up to be as open as we can make it in order to encourage them to use that agency.
Photo: Marc Tsang
IR: Speaking of agency, there's a moment that comes towards the end of the show where the participant has complete freedom in how to proceed. Is there a scenario in which people can break the show by doing nothing? I certainly found the number of possibilities in that moment a bit overwhelming.
Jack: The only way that someone could break it is if they did something harmful or dangerous or sat in a corner and just kept going like, "La, la, la, la, la, la, la," and wouldn't engage. The only way to break it is act entirely outside of the framework we've created. But we've created an extremely broad framework so someone would have to do something not okay to break it or they'd have to refuse to engage entirely. Besides that, one of the backing devices that makes the whole second half work is that if something happens that's just too difficult for us to control, we can snap out of the show instantly and we can snap into our capacities as actor and director and we can dictate what's going to happen next, which we haven't had to do for that reason ever. I feel very secure in knowing that that's a possibility.
IR: Do you think people would accept that as being a break from what's going on or do you think people would just assume it's another layer of the show?
Jack: Depends on how we played it. It could be either of them for us too. We could use that however we wanted to. The last resort if something goes really wrong or if the participant is feeling really uncomfortable, they need out. You've set up this device where the actor and the director themselves are also part of the show and fictional characters as well. So to bypass that, the easiest way to do it, the final resort is to go outside, leave the venue, remove costume pieces, go outside and just be very clear that it's over or you're out of it and that I can either talk you down from here or I can just step away, go back inside and leave you to it. We've never had to do that. There are things you can do to prove that it's true.
Parts of the show are wanting to give the participant the experience of reality that I have sometimes had in my life. The way that reality seems to me a lot of the time is it's dark, it's chaotic. There are a million and one things that you could choose to do with your life or with your day or with your hour. There is no ultimate authority that is going to be able to tell you which of those is right. You just have to do something because otherwise you rot. I wanted to take that experience of things and put it into a piece of theatre so that the participant could feel a heightened and metaphorical version of that experience for the last 15 minutes of the show. They feel like a tightened version of 'Wow, there are so many possibilities. There are all these figures around who are confusing, but they're telling me that they know what to do. They're telling me that they have it figured out. They have the right way to do it. They have the path that needs to be followed but there's nothing that's going to tell me which of them I should trust'. There's also the possibility of making my own path, but then I'm confronted with infinite options, and that's just as crushing. Do I follow the path that either one of these two characters is laying out for me? Or do I try to do something myself? Or do I just sit here and wait for someone to figure it out for me? Either of those options should feel equally daunting I think.
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For further discussion with Jack Aldisert on The Manikins: a work in progress and immersive theatre, check out voidspace's interview on voidspacezine.com
The Manikins: a work in progress ran at Parabolic Theatre's Crypt in Bethnal Green from 3rd June to 13th July 2024. Visit themanikins.com to find out more about the show.
Deadweight Theatre is currently crowdsourcing funding to bring the show to a new London venue this August and send the show to Gothenburg Fringe in September. To support them, visit crowdfunder.co.uk/the-manikins
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