Simon McBurney – Director/Actor/Performer
- Doesn’t have/use theoretical techniques. He thinks it limits imaginative creation. And rather looks at a performance as a whole rather than what elements it is made of.
- Theatre (like most other art forms) is a magpie art form – people in theatre steal from each other, and theatre steals from other art forms.
- Nothing new and inventive in theatre, its all been done (video and projection is just light), it’s about the story, and how you tell it, not with what you tell it with. “Everything in the theatre goes round in circles.” (McBurney, 2013).
- The text – not specifically words that are spoken, could be an object or any kind of stimuli. Plays are not automatically theatre, it’s the basis. Its what they’re made into which makes theatre.
- Things that can affect and influence may not be what we enjoy. “I’m fascinated by the things that I was hopeless at or that I know nothing about…I see my life as a continuous exploration of things that I don’t understand.” (McBurney, 2013).
Complicite 1983 – now
- Started as a comic mime troupe, one of their early shows was A Minute Too Late (1984) which was a “speechless comedy about speaking about death.”.
- Pieces are driven by the subject, every show is different.
- Storytelling, puppetry, physicality, and visual theatre (rather than dialogue),
- Adaptions, originals, classics, and international pieces.
- Tom Morris, an associate director at the National and a champion of Complicite’s work, “with a technical visual language that makes the company so extraordinary. The body of a performer becomes the imaginative trigger which releases a picture or a memory in the mind of the audience.” It is “using the bodies of the performers in a way that Shakespeare used text”.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mqTCoM3zd0 Show reel
Complicite Performances
- A Dog’s Heart (2010) – puppetry and opera. Adapted from a short story about a dog medically turned into a man (and back again). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Un_xrytw4
- Shun-kin (2008) – inspired by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s A Portrait of Shunkinand In Praise of Shadows. Performed in Japanese with an all Japanese cast. Mime, kabuki, and puppetry. About a servant who blinds themselves because he is in love with a blind shamisen player. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkouylM8qNE
- The Vertical Line (1999) – site specific promenade, in the Strand disused tube station. Theatrical and archaeological, with audio-visual installations.
- Food stuff (1986) – performers from different cultures eating together
- Please, Please, Please (1986) – family Christmas dinner “where taboos are treated lightly, while unimportant details become monstrous in their implications,”. Absurd comedy.
The Encounter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKWv001zJ_Y trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cxnzcsHuKM explanation
An adaptation of the book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu,
based on Loren McIntyre’s adventure in the Amazonian Rainforest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49xrUurfqNA BD audience opinion
Inspired by Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia
Solo performance, storytelling, consciousness, solitude,
technological immersion, imagination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcBYj4zRY-k process part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou6if25vs8E process part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdxcQGJ_drw process part 3
