Conference Theatre and the City, Cité Internationale Paris 23-26 juin 2022

Marianne Drugeon

Redefining and Reappropriating the city through Community Plays

I will center on the Community plays written for the city of Dorchester, from 1985 to the present, following the model elaborated by Ann Jellicoe, who was artistic director of the Roayl Court before settling back in the SE of England. My aim is to show how this type of immersive theatrical experiment is closely knit into the fabric of the city and becomes a defining factor of the identity of its inhabitants.

The principles of those creations:

A committee of inhabitants commissions a professional playwright to write a play about Dorchester and for its inhabitants. They choose a period of the past in which the play will be set, and delve into the archives of the city. The playwright will then work on that material and produce a play that is city-specific and citizen-specific, as it will be performed by the inhabitants themselves.

Specifically, the principle being that anyone who shows up for casting will be offered a talking past, this means that playwrights have to add as many characters as there are going to be actors.

Specifically also, many if not all of the characters of the plays are based on real people who have lived in the city, based on what can be found about their profession, who they were married to, or whether they were famous because they murdered somebody or headed the main beer factory of the town. It is not documentary or verbatim theatre though. The playwrights will rather create a fictional story which fits the characters who have based on real people.

The result is a large community performance, with casts of between 100 and 150 people (cf PPT) and audiences of around 200 spectators/participants. "Participants" because the performances are organised along the principles of environmental theatre as defined by R. Schechner: no separation between actors and spectators, promenade performances, the spectators are not seated but instead, they move around and about the actors, following the action as it develops at the same time in different corners of the room (PPT video)

PPT list of plays

The CP that I will explore today are *Entertaining Strangers* written by DE in 1985, *A Time to Keep* written by DE and SD in 2007, and *Spinning the Moon* written by SD in 2021 (and scheduled to be produced after postponements due to COVID in April 2023).

All those plays are city-specific, and could not be experienced in the same way were they recreated elsewhere (ES was also created at the NT but I won't have time to dwell on the very interesting differences between the two today). This is not only because the texts are about the city proper, but also because almost all the participants, either as amateur actors or as immersed spectators, are from the city and those who are from elsewhere are made to feel part of a community of citizens. The choice to create those plays is therefore also political: the idea being to inhabit a common ground, and envision our common surroundings in a new way, and also think about what it means to live in a city today, and on what grounds we build what we consider to be our community.
In that regard, those productions can be described with the same words as those used by Imanuel Shipper in his article entitled "City as Performance" (PPT):

"they propose new modes of appropriation of the public sphere through the use of performative, narrative, and other creative means. Such performances do not simply blend in with big urban events; they do not simply help market a city; they cannot move from festival to festival; and they may not even create an outstanding aesthetic product. They do, however, initiate a process in which a city's inhabitants and users view familiar places from new angles, and fill them with new stories." (Shipper, 24)

Those experiments are about creating, or producing in common rather than proposing that the audience consume a creation. They are highlighting the process of creation much more than the finished product. In that light, they are comparable to a city which, for Imanuel Shipper, is "a coproductive process undergoing constant transformation and development. (Schipper, 22).

For purposes of clarity, I will explore those experiments diachronically, considering how they map or remap the city by excavating/remembering its past, then moving on to the present and analyzing how they redefine the city in which we live, to finally contemplate how they remember the community that will live in the city, imagining its future in the process.

## PPT

### I. Mapping the city to remember its past

Remember (in one word) the past in CP

ES is set in the 1830s to 1870s; TK is set at the turn of the 19th century; SP is set in the early 16th century. The common denominator of them all nevertheless is space: they all take place in Dorchester, and the well-known streets, mansions, meeting places that have existed along the centuries. Street names, names of churches, famous buildings are constantly mentioned by the actors and serve as settings though of course the set is not realistically reproduced, and relies on the memory of the spectators who can picture in their mind those well-known places, some of which still the same centuries after: PPT

The courtyard that John Trenchard was so keen to show off to royalty exists to this day. (...) The play is set in key areas in and around Dorchester including:

Wolfeton Manor, Fordington Church, Abbotsbury Monastery and surrounding downlands. (SM 3-4)

Sometimes a sound is enough to evoke a place, for instance "the midnight chimes of Corn Exchange clock" (ES, 13)

What is more, that map is not only a geographical organization: the space of the city is endowed with a social and political meaning, as inhabitants gather in certain neighbourhoods according to their wealth and social status: PPT

The upper orders are concentrated in High West Street, the commercial and public classes in Cornhill, and in High East Street, and there are a large number of lower sorts amassed round the White Hart and the Fordington turn-off. (ES 40).
The political message of the plays is embodied, materialized in the geography of the city, as its aspect is shown to change because of political or financial decisions. For instance, SM tells of the shift from the Manorial agricultural system to private ownership of the land. This gave birth to a new class, the landless, who, as their communal appellation suggests, have lost their right to a place to live because they are too poor to either rent or buy land. Forced to take shelter in the woodland, they are in effect marginalized, thrown out of the community through their eviction from the common ground of the city.

The community plays thus work horizontally at reactivating the link between the geography of the city and its politics. Moreover its history, its past is also shown to be inscribed, this time vertically, in its aspect, as it is literally excavated and brought back to the surface. In TK for instance, some scenes take place in the Maumbury Rings, a Neolithic henge in the south of the city. It is now a public open space, but it was used in the 17th century as a place of public execution, and being told or reminded of that prior use, the spectators of today will remember it when they next find themselves there. The bridge or rather ladder between past and present is thus incarnated by particular locations which are familiar to the spectators but which acquire a new meaning thanks to the community play.

## II. Redefining the city to engage with its present (PPT)

T: this is indeed one of the aims of the cp: the city where you live, the familiar streets and places, resonate with stories of the past and seem to be peopled with your ancestors when you visit them again. I had the same experience after following an actor through the streets of my home town; every stop he made to tell his text is now fixed in my memory, and whenever I walk the familiar streets I associate those places with the stories he told then. This will probably be your case too when you next go to Place Denfert-Rochereau or wander in the paths of the cimetière Montparnasse. The experience of this itinerary through the city, with stops at different points, may also be compared to that of the spectators of mysteries performed in various station wagons scattered along the main streets of medieval towns.

But CP are not performed in the streets, neither are they put on stage in theatres: they are occasions for the participants to reclaim public spaces, or more generally the public sphere. Streets are places of passage, which are not dedicated to a particular activity. On the other hand, CP will be performed in school halls or churches: those places, which are supposed to be public, are in effect reserved, for school children or for Christians. When a CP is created in those spaces, they necessarily open themselves to people who were so far excluded from them, either because they are adults without children at school or because they are Protestants, Muslims, Jews or non-believers and feel they should not get inside the church.

What is more, the participants who are acting in the CP also take part in the creation of the costumes and the sets: their personal space, at home, is being invaded throughout the long months of creation (usually 18 months), and in return, the set of the CP is sprinkled with their personal belongings which are granted the status of prop or décor. The personal and communal spaces of the city are thus porous and mutually enriched by the experience.
For all those reasons, participating in the creation of a CP is very often unforgettable, because it is inseparable from the rest of the life of the participants. Jon Oram PPT, who worked with Ann Jellicoe and is now a playwright and stage director of CP around the world, sums it up
thus: "it has allowed to glimpse a vision of theatre and art which is part of life, not simply set aside in some special building which we walk by and ignore." (ES, 5).

This idea of sharing the common space of the city works also as regards the play which is created by and belongs to all participants equally. Though there are a handful of professional artists who are paid for their work (the playwright, the stage director, the music director and a few other technicians), the others are all unpaid, which does not mean that they are exploited. The idea is for them to learn new skills and, even more importantly, to feel the benefits of owning the shared creation, after having participated throughout the creative process.

This shared creation is then also co-owned by the audience during the performances, and this inclusion is embodied in the space.

When the spectators enter the building, they discover a fair, in which some are dancers, musicians, magicians or craftspeople in reality, while others are actors in the play, who offer drinks, play music or perform magic tricks both as themselves (recognized as such by their family or friends among the audience) and as their character in the play. Thus the audience participates, both as individuals who enjoy themselves at a fair, and as spectators of the community play which starts progressively, during the fair. Then when they enter the play space proper, the spectators are not separated from the actors: as this is environmental and promenade theatre, the spectators are absolutely free of their movements. But they are always subtly directed so as to share the same angle of vision, or point of view: in crowd scenes, actors are there to lead the gaze of the spectators and ensure they all look in the same direction PPT thus in SM: "All of Dorchester turns its attention to the trial of Emma Gawler." (SM 110). This quote is quite telling: Location, the city of Dorchester, becomes a metonymy for a united people conjugating in the singular and including not only the actors who are inhabitants of Dorchester in reality and in the play, but also spectators who are inhabitants of Dorchester in the play, but not necessary in reality!

The same blending of fact and fiction through the blending of spaces and statuses is at work at intervals, as spectators are forced to share in the plot. PPT Thus in TK, in which many of the characters are smugglers:

> During the interval, the audience becomes gradually aware that everything on sale from costumed salespeople – drinks, snacks, merchandise – is contraband. In addition, selected members of the audience are approached and asked to ‘look after’ items. At the end of the interval, excise men raid the refreshments and merchandise stalls, dragging the salespeople away. (TK 75)

Audience participation is of course not new in a theatre, but community plays are felt as occasions for the community to gather around the hearth, for citizens to gather on the central square of the city, to listen to the tales or the myths of their own common origin, to share in the festivities, to partake of the adventure, and this experience, in our modern world where people change places more rapidly and more easily than ever before, is not that frequent anymore. Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds us that myth defines itself first and foremost as with it, or through it, time becomes space. The CP embody that transformation as, through them, a
common history, a common heritage, are embodied by common grounds on which the
community meets, unites and gathers strength.

When compared to more recent experiments with participatory theatre in Britain, such as Punchdrunk's immersive theatre which was presented yesterday PPT, CP are about building group feelings, whereas, according to Felix Barrett:

> The whole thing with Punchdrunk is it's always for the individual. So even if it was a larger scale show, an audience of two thousand people, it's still about each one as an individual, and we'd want to make sure each single one of them had their own experience they had ownership of, and there were enough beats of intimacy and that panic-induced alone time. (Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience, 201).

We have discussed yesterday the ethical limits which seemed to be sometimes trespassed by
such experiences, inducing fear and loneliness (cf my emphasis). On the contrary CP are meant
to create communal feelings of comfort and a sense of belonging which are made possible
through the sharing of well-known homely space that is owned by all. They are feel-good
plays.

PPT

### III. Re-membering the community to imagine its future

According to Jon Oram, it is because participants and spectators live in the same city that the plays work: not only do they emphasize a feeling of belonging, but they also enable the actors to go much further in pushing forward an ideological message. He theorises this relation through the concept of the social actor: PPT

> Regular theatre audiences can leave a performance elated and enlightened, but in time those feelings generally fade away. Here is the community play, an art that touches people to an extent that adjusts their long-term attitudes and changes their lives (...). I believe this is because actors who live and work in the community to whom they perform are uniquely placed to offer something professional actors can't. (...) A social actor somehow has permission to implicate the audience in the drama, because this is their home territory; the actors and audience are neighbours. Audiences are implicated the moment they step through the door and the promenade style makes this fact more potent. (TK 129-131)
The city is here revigorated as a potent community of people who gather not for individualistic purposes, because they can find work or earn more money, but because they want to live together and share experiences together.

Once more I find it interesting to compare with other experiments of immersive performances in the city: in our walk through Paris yesterday, we had headphones which are usually associated with a breaking up of the social community and the tendency towards individualism. But listening together to the same songs, we were reshaped into a community, sharing the same experience. On the other hand we were also looked at by passers-by as a group separated from them: people could see that we walked differently, our rhythm was different, we seemed to have a common purpose, we shared a secret, we knew something they didn't, we were having fun and they were not: they were the outcast.

Participating is exhilarating, it makes you feel you are part of, and that is comforting, but it also necessarily means casting out the other.

CP are meant to be more inclusive: playwrights who are commissioned to write a play should feel part of Dorchester. Ann Jellicoe thus writes: PPT

> "If we were to commission writers from outside the area, however high their reputation, they must be prepared to come physically down to the town, to be part of it, associate themselves with it, learn from it" (ES 4)

The phrasal verbs suggest a circulation of knowledge and energy within the community which would be beneficial to all. They also imply the disappearance of a hierarchy which would give precedence to the professional over the amateur, as well as, implicity, to London, the capital, over the rest of the country.

In the cast as a whole, there are no lead parts, no paid actors, everybody is on an equal footing.

Interestingly, spectators from outside of Dorchester also recount feeling included as citizens of the city:

> This is the case of SW PPT who was a member of the audience of Drummer Hodge in 2014:

> In Drummer Hodge, there was a scene where women passed through the crowd asking for donations to the war effort. Watching, I realised that I myself was part of this general 'crowd', the general mass of Dorchester was also me (...). In this instant, I did not feel like an audience member targeted for some tokenistic audience participation, but a conscious person being asked a moral and political question about whether I should donate to this cause. (...) Though in affect I was a double outsider: both outside the world of the play by being an audience member, as well as being from 'outside' of Dorchester, the staging conventions led me to feel 'inside'.

This analysis points to the very reason why community plays are effective at creating a sense of community that is inclusive of all spectators at least for the time of the performance: because they partake in a live experience, but because above all they have to participate and take decisions which impact the group to which they are associated, the audiences feel rooted on common ground, and responsible for the community in which they are included.

In lieu of conclusion I would like, nevertheless, to evoke the limits of this naively idealistic vision of what CP can do:
For one thing creating a community, however inclusive, by definition means that some will be cast out from it. It comes as no surprise that all the texts of the CP play with the rhetoric of inclusion but also of exclusion: there are enemies, for each story needs an enemy, and that enemy is the stranger, or foreigner, or the intruder, or the newcomer, maybe even the black sheep in our midst. Cities have built walls to protect themselves, CP cannot satisfactorily build a sense of community without delimitating the limits of this community.

For another thing, the fact that what brings the community together is that they share the same space seems sometimes secondary, if not anecdotal: considering that spectators or participants who are not inhabitant of Dorchester recount feeling part of the adventure, as much as “real” inhabitants of Dorchester, it seems that the feeling of cohesion that can be felt inside the community is more a shared solidarity that is born of circumstances, those circumstances being creating or participating in the play itself. The community is thus not the result of a common geography but of a common artistic creation.

This echoes the geographer David Harvey’s vision of a re-membered city, and epitomizes the potential of the CP: PPT

“The question of what kind of a city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kind of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold” (Rebel Cities, 2012: 4)

PPT bibliography

Marianne Drugeon