The end [programme]

Inspired by the stage direction from The Winter’s Tale, ‘Exit pursued by a bear’, The End explores endings and exits and asks why we perform and how we will know when to stop. Developed at The Junction (Cambridge), Brighton Dome and Festival, New Art Exchange and Lakeside Arts Centre (Nottingham). Commissioned by Chester Performs. Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Selected for the British Council’s Edinburgh Showcase 2011

The trilogy

From 2010-2014, Michael Pinchbeck created three devised performances inspired by the work of William Shakespeare. The Beginning, an interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Middle, a reconstruction of Hamlet, and The End triggered by a stage direction from The Winter’s Tale, are shown together as The Trilogy. Fusing an experimental approach to Shakespeare’s text with the company’s personal stories about their first or last times onstage, The Trilogy asks the audience to enter a world where a performance can be a rehearsal, text can be both script and set and they are always aware of where the fire exits are. Supported by Arts Council England through the National Lottery, Nottingham Playhouse, Brighton Dome, Lakeside Arts Centre (Nottingham), Leeds Met Studio Theatre, The Junction (Cambridge), Lincoln Performing Arts Centre and Loughborough University

Bolero

Bolero is a multi-lingual devised performance that involves six performers from three different countries (UK, Germany and Bosnia & Herzegovina) and a community cast of performing arts students and graduates from Nottingham Trent University, De Montfort University and University of Lincoln. Bolero continues research into the role of the dramaturg in contemporary performance and asks how we write texr, how we perform text and how text performs. The performance is a biography of the music of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ and explores the materiality of music by having manuscripts onstage that are read from and then discarded to create a visible dramaturgy. I am interested in how the performance has a musicality and speaks about music to the rhythm of that music. Its dramaturgy follows the score of the Ravel original. Bolero premiered at Nottingham Playhouse as part of NEAT 14 Festival on 31 May and 1 June 2014. It was then restaged at Sarajevo War Theatre on the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. This activity enabled me to cement a reputation as an internationally touring theatre maker on a high profile Arts Council and British Council supported project. It consolidates and builds on my existing relationships with the British Council, Nottingham Playhouse and Sarajevo War Theatre. The community cast choreographer and senior lecturer in drama and linguistics at Loughborough University, Arianna Mairorani, has already spoken about Bolero at conferences and is writing research papers about the choreographic process. I have been in contact with Routledge about writing a monograph about the role of the dramaturg in contemporary performance. In both Sarajevo and Pristina, the project kickstarted a Youth Theatre group who made their own performances inspired by our production of Bolero. This has had a tangible legacy that outlives our visit. In August 2015, Bolero was selected for the British Council Edinburgh Showcase. In October 2014, Bolero toured venues in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar and Tuzla) to coincide with 2014 Culture and Conflict programme. In March 2016, Bolero toured Kosovo (Pristina and Prizren). In 2016, I delivered a provocation about Bolero at TaPRA

Errors of memory, memories of error: slip-roads and pit-stops on the long and winding road

The Long and Winding Road began on 17 May 2004 when I embarked on a journey in a graffiti-covered car from Nottingham to Liverpool. The journey lasted until 17 May 2009 when I drove the car into the River Mersey. This paper distils five years of practice and 20 years of loss into 25 minutes. From 2004-2009, I toured a one-to-one performance in a car. Passengers were invited to fasten their seat belts and join me for a travel sweet as I shared the reason for the journey via the rear-view mirror. The narrative of the performance was the journey of auto-recovery I made following my brother’s death on 17 May 1998, as the car was dented, damaged, written off and towed for five years. On 17 May 2009, I presented the final one-to-one performance at The Bluecoat (Liverpool) and immersed the car in the River Mersey to mark the end of the road. It was both a baptism and a drowning. The car and its contents were then crushed. In March 2010, the remains of the car were discarded in Michael Landy’s Art Bin at the South London Gallery and then deposited in landfill. The only criteria for acceptance into the Art Bin was that the artwork had to be deemed a failure. I argued that if the project was intended to repair the damage left behind by loss then it had failed. The submission was accepted. This paper explores the erroring of memory implicit in auto-biographical projects as creative mistakes were embraced and the car’s breakdown was retro-engineered into an act of catharsis. As Cage said, ‘there is no mistake, only make’. As Beckett wrote, ‘Fail. Fail again. Fail better’. The project memorialized my loss and commemorated errors. Presented at Association of Art History Annual Conference, 6 April 2018, King’s College, London. Part of a panel on The Politics and Aesthetics of Error co-convened by Dr. Martin Lang and Dr. Tom Grimwood

Or in the future: Utopian and dystopian dramaturgy in Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties

This paper takes Forced Entertainment’s performance, Tomorrow’s Parties, and casts a dramaturgical eye on how the text enacts and erases a series of utopias and dystopias. Standing still on wooden pallets for over an hour, two performers, one woman and one man, describe and then discard a string of fictive futures. Illuminated by coloured light bulbs that fade out over the duration of the performance, the pallets represent both a life raft and a soapbox for these two lost politicians of hypothesis, building on and deconstructing each other’s arguments about life in the future. The paper imagines the text as a shifting landscape of potential that ebbs and flows and questions notions of politics, gender, ethics and environment. With reference to the company’s devising processes drawing on Tim Etchell’s practice of iterative writing and Austin’s notion of the ‘performative’, the paper explores how the text corrects itself, questions its logic and reflects on its origins. Tomorrow’s Parties is a post-dramatic text that sits somewhere between science fiction and fantasy and touches upon terror and catastrophe. It predicts and undermines the endgame of the world but also the endgame we play when we are making the world of a performance

No rehearsal is necessary: the politics of the guest performer in The man who flew into space from his apartment

I will explore the politics and the ethics of the guest performer in The man who flew into space from his apartment (2015) and other work that uses a guest performer e.g. Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree (2005), Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. I propose that this enacts a dramaturgy of not knowing, a curating of the unknown. For this article, I explore the politics of the guest performer and how they become an inside eye or internal dramaturg in the process of making a performance. In doing so, I propose a new dramaturgical paradigm for the guest performer involved and reflect on the way practice as research is an inherently dramaturgical and curatorial process. The performance takes place in liminal space between composition and dissemination and sees dramaturgy as process and product. The text is the seed but it grows in different ways depending on how it is interpreted by the performer. It is germinated in performance in front of an audience not the usual incubation in the rehearsal room. The piece explores the process of raveling the work from its own devising, of making something wide open and making something narrow, of opening and closing a weave. I relate the role of dramaturg to that of curator and argue that it is a catalysing role that enables intersubjective relation with a number of texts authorised by an audience

The middle

Inspired by Hamlet, The Middle (2013) is a one-man show devised for a theatre foyer – a liminal space between outside and inside, the real world and the theatre. Hamlet is a character caught in a limbo between ‘To be or not to be’ and by casting his father, Tony Pinchbeck, to play the title role, Michael Pinchbeck explores time passing, ageing and the relationship between father and son. Supported by Curve (Leicester), hÅb (Manchester) and LPAC (Lincoln), The Middle is the final part of a Shakespeare trilogy - The Trilogy (2014) and took place in the interval between The Beginning (2012) and The End (2011)

Rear view mirror: blogging as a reflective tool for practice as research

For Michael Pinchbeck's PhD project exploring dramaturgy he kept blogs for each performance process and an online appendix to the thesis which housed interviews with artists about why they worked with or as dramaturgs. Now he reflects on the critical and creative role blogs play in practice as research as a 'rear view mirror'. The online space allows an 'embedded dramaturgy' to take place and makes more visible a private process, to invite and enrich a wider debate of the work

Making Bolero: dramaturgies of conflict

This provocation reflects on Bolero, a multi-lingual devised performance I directed exploring war, conflict and music devised in the Balkans. I explore working in these contexts and weaving together dramaturgies of conflict and about conflict. I discuss the political conflict inherent in the way these narratives are interwoven to address the way the Bosnian war was somewhat overlooked in the West at the time. I highlight strategies we employed and draw on Dragan Klaic’s contribution to Theatre in Crisis (2002), where he writes about the catalyzing role theatre plays in times of conflict. This project sought to shine a light on the human tragedy that consumed Sarajevo and the Balkans and I invited its Bosnian cast members, who lived through the war, to share their autobiographical experiences of the siege as part of the piece. The style of the piece was post-dramatic and devising theatre was a new experience for them. As such, there was a conflict of styles as well as narratives of conflict implicit in the process. The role of dramaturg in this context was to seek ways in which our theatre-making might find a shared language and it is this role which will underpin my paper. Bolero was devised with an international cast, and toured to Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo since its premiere at Nottingham Playhouse in May 2014. It was performed in Sarajevo on the centenary of the assassination and supported by the British Council and Arts Council England

Concerto

A unique musical experience inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and featuring world-renowned concert pianist Nicholas McCarthy. Paul Wittgenstein commissioned Ravel to write him a piano concerto after he lost his right arm during the First World War. Assassin, Gavrilo Princip, is in prison, his withered arm tied up with piano wire. Unravelling narratives such as these surround this music’s composition – and together they weave a true story that spans 100 years. Musical manuscript will fall from the sky like snow on a battlefield. Doctors will persuade shell-shocked soldiers to play again. An apple crate will become a piano keyboard. Two conductors will become assassins. An audience will become an orchestra. And a pianist will play. Michael Pinchbeck’s Concerto is a deconstructed and re-orchestrated exploration of the legacy of war and the healing power of music to overcome tragedy. Commissioned by Attenborough Arts Centre (Leicester), Nottingham Lakeside Arts (Nottingham) and Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. Supported using public funding from Arts Council England