Dartington College Research Articles

The Translation of Protest: The Worldwide Readings Project of Andrei Kureichyk’s Insulted. Belarus

On 9 August 2020, Belarus erupted in protest over the falsified election results promoted and endorsed by existing president Aliaksandar Lukashenka. Playwright, director, and member of the Coordination Council for the peaceful transfer of power in Belarus, Andrei Kureichyk was one of the thousands on the streets that month. In early September he finished a new play depicting the events leading up to and surrounding the largest anti-government demonstrations in Belarus’s history. Before going into hiding, Kureichyk sent the play, Insulted. Belarus, to former Russian theatre critic John Freedman for translation. Together, the two men hoped to have a few theatres in various European and North American countries give a reading of the play in solidarity with the people of Belarus. Neither of them expected that, within two months, the play would be translated into eighteen languages and receive over seventy-seven readings on digital platforms. While many companies were eager to add their name to the global ledger of solidarity, the rise of authoritarianism, as well as the renewed reckoning with systemic racism and sexism in many cultures and countries around the world, additionally meant that many theatres found in the play a vehicle to reflect and comment on their own situations. This article, written by one of the initial participants of the project, attempts to chart how the Worldwide Readings of Insulted. Belarus navigated the translation of protest from Belarus to the world. Bryan Brown is Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter and co-director of visual theatre company ARTEL (American Russian Theatre Ensemble Laboratory) and author of A History of the Theatre Laboratory (Routledge, 2019). He is a member of the editorial board of Theatre Dance and Performance Training, co-editing the special issue ‘Training Places: Dartington College of Arts’ (2018).

Postpoetry

Dartington College of Arts, in Devon, United Kingdom, spearheaded a course known as ‘Performance Writing’ in the 1990s. Subsequently, the course generated an ongoing field in which to situate art and writing practices, referred to today by the same complicating phrase, performance writing. Lesser known is how Charles Olson’s Black Mountain College Charter, The Act of Writing

Tristan and Isolde by Martin Shaw (review)

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2020), pp. 138–142. Copyright © 2020 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 P E R F O R M A N C E R E V I E W Review of Tristan and Isolde, Performed by Martin Shaw, February 1, 2020, The Gatehouse, Dartington Hall, Totnes, UK Joseph Sobol M artin Shaw is one of the foremost exponents in the United Kingdom of what might be called the archetypal activist school of contemporary storytelling . This school (in the artistic, not the institutional sense) is distinguished by loosely discursive performances with spontaneous associative commentary, projecting narrative imagery through the prism of Jungian, Campbellian, or gender -political interpretive frames. Often, interpretive counterpoint is drawn from the audience as well as the performer/leader, so that events become collaborative social-psychological explorations. As Shaw declared late in this seven-hour marathon journey through the foundational myth of European romantic love, “The stories are alive, and where they live is inside of you.” The setting for this event was a chapel-like gatehouse on the grounds of Dartington Hall, formerly the site of Dartington College of Art. Dartington, fittingly, was a medieval demesne that in the 1920s came into the possession of a wealthy Bloomsbury denizen and his American heiress wife who turned it into a center of progressive agriculture and arts education. From the late 1960s, it housed the renowned Dartington College of Arts, a countercultural hub for post­ theatrical Sobol n 139 performance art. After the transfer of the Dartington College programs to Falmouth University in 2010, the facility has endeavored to reinvent itself as a community arts center, with a mixture of adult education, crafts instruction, natural foods café and family park, along with a couple of free-standing graduate courses administered by Plymouth University. The setting of an event forms part of its subtextual framing, infusing the atmospherics and blending with the peripheries of the performances themselves—so the green swell of the Devon landscape and the excellent organic café on the rise above the gatehouse became portals into and out of this visualization of the Tristan myth. Shaw’s portrayal of the hero as a puer aeternus, far more at home in hopeless pursuit than in satisfied desire, resonated with my own memories of a disorderly hitchhiking visit to Dartington College forty years before, in the depths of my own puer miseries. The eighty-five-seat hall was nearly full by the 10:00 a.m. start time. Shaw began with a leisurely introduction tracking his own relationship with the story and the various texts through which it has been handed down to us, in particular the monumental version of Gottfried von Strassburg, dated approximately 1210. He traced the poetics of the troubadours and trobairitz, the lesser-known female court poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and touched on their animating philosophy of courtly love and the political, economic, and cultural conditions that circumscribed it. In a milieu where marriages were mainly alliances arranged between ruling powers, Shaw suggested, the outlets for romantic love these poets would have had were primarily adulterous. He suggested that this historical metanarrative infused the poem with a continuing significance—that it represented one of the originating imaginings of romantic and sexual agency within the Western tradition. With this hypothesis as a thematic frame, he gradually eased into the body of the story. This lengthy prologue was curiously congruent with Gottfried von Strassburg ’s own practice. Gottfried also framed his text with a prologue in which he claims his intended audience—those elect souls willing to endure ennobling sorrow for the sake of love—and indicates the scope of his research into the many sources of the tale. He thus distinguished those few who “told the tale aright” from the many who had not—with precedence given to the version by Thomas of Britain, composed at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1150s. The formal progression seemed natural here as in the old text, arising from the need, residually oral in the manuscript but immediate in performance, to prepare the ground for trust and mutual visualization to grow between teller and audience...

Talking Politics of Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton

In the autumn of 2015, on the back of the publication of my monograph Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Mitra 2015), I was settling into my Brunel University London-sponsored sabbatical to kick-start my postdoctoral research project, then titled “Historicizing and Mapping British Physical Theatre.” At that stage, this new field of study, methodology, and tone of enquiry felt significantly different from the decolonial spirit of my book, which examines the works of the British-Bangladeshi dance artist Akram Khan at the intersections of postcoloniality, race, gender, sexuality, mobility, interculturalism, and globalization, arguing for his choreographic choices as discerning political acts that decenter the whiteness of contemporary western dance from his position within this center. With this new project I was keen, instead, to investigate the development of “British physical theatre” as an interdisciplinary genre that emerged interstitially between and through its “double legacy in both avant-garde theatre and dance” (Sánchez-Colberg 2007, 21) with a particular emphasis on what the import of the choreographic vocabulary of partnering would have brought to these experiments. Very conscious that the now ubiquitous aesthetic of partnering in contemporary Euro-American theater dance derived its roots from the somatic explorations of contact improvisation, I was intrigued to examine how the genre of British physical theatre would have engaged with choreographic touch from its somatic beginnings in contact improvisation to its politicized and aestheticized manifestation in partnering. I was also conscious, of course, of the role that Steve Paxton, the artist whose name has become synonymous with contact improvisation's inception and development in 1970s United States, had to play in teaching contact improvisation in the dance program at Dartington College of Arts in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1970s and 1980s. Driven by a need to examine the potential relationship between Dartington's 1970s movement experiments with Paxton and contact improvisation, and the emergence of partnering as a key aesthetic within British contemporary dance, specifically its manifestation in physical theatre, I wanted to interview Paxton himself. Needless to say, I was of course fully aware of the difficulty in making such an important research opportunity materialize. However, within months, the remarkable generosity of our dance studies network, in this instance embodied by Professors Susan Foster and Ann Cooper Albright, and the dance artist Lisa Nelson, led me to the inbox of Steve Paxton himself in November 2015. Paxton was instantly responsive to my e-mail communications, and deeply invested and committed to sharing his experiences and insights with me. We arranged our Skype interview for early 2016, agreeing that this would give me enough time to research existing interviews with Paxton, in print and on video, to ensure that I could delineate my own questions for him in productive ways. The more I researched, the more a feature of the extensive archive of interviews with Paxton revealed itself: the predominant absence of bodies and perspectives of color from the early days of contact improvisation's experiments. This absence, in turn, became more and more present in my thinking.

‘My aunt was always doing wild things’: the long-term impact of Dartington Theatre Training on theatre and community in south-east London 1978–2017

‘“My aunt was always doing wild things”’ traces the ongoing ripple effect of a question posed by Dartington College in a submission to the Council of Europe in 1983 for a week-long seminar on Theatre and Communities: ‘What contribution can theatre practice make to the welfare of the community in which it occurs?’ By focusing on one point of radical theatre practice happening within a south London Care Home for older people in 2017 the article seeks to describe ways in which the ecology and pedagogy of Dartington College in the 1970s and 1980s continues to have direct influence on a network of artists and creative producers working in south-east London 40 years later. The paper outlines the innovate practices that underpinned the development of Dartington’s four-year Theatre Language course (1978–1985), notably the skills used to negotiate and establish sustained relationships between theatre, people and place. It illustrates how the processes of unlearning and not-knowing supported Theatre Language students to engage openly with the complexity of real contexts.

A school for adventure: the journeys of Dartington College of Arts

This reflective essay looks back at the adventure in learning that was Dartington College of Arts (DCA). It considers the specific context and conditions that fostered its distinctive model of learning for almost 50 years on the Dartington Hall Estate in rural Devon and considers the legacy that was carried to its new campus in 2010 following the merger of DCA with Falmouth University in Cornwall in 2008. DCA’s distinctive curriculum had been distilled and shaped over many years by many hands at Dartington and was informed by its specific historical, social, geographical and pedagogical context. Like any living system, DCA’s educational approach was not something that could be sustained in some generalised context, but rather needed a specific habitat, optimum conditions to thrive, and the skills necessary to find, create and sustain it. While DCA was a specific place that can never be again, this essay considers what conditions might be needed to sustain learning as adventure. In doing so, it traces some of the journeys that led to and followed on from that educational approach at DCA in hopes they might provide some orientation towards such learning elsewhere and when.

Radical connections: the Dartington Dance Festival/X6 Dance Space axis

The article discusses the extraordinary time of ferment in British dance in the late 1970s and 1980s and the significant role played by the ‘axis’ between Dartington College of Arts and the London-based X6 Dance Space. This relationship centred upon members of the X6 collective and Mary O’Donnell Fulkerson, the dance leader in Dartington’s Theatre department, as well as other visiting US and European artists and teachers. The importance of X6 as a platform for radical and innovative dance and performance is discussed, as is its role in hosting the first London workshops in Release (Fulkerson) and Contact Improvisation (Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson). Critical connections are revealed between X6 and the Dartington Dance Festivals, together with the part played by X6’s quarterly magazine, New Dance. The article ultimately addresses the question of what was lastingly significant about this extraordinary M5–M4 trajectory, both artistically and politically, and therefore how much we owe to it today. Jacky Lansley and Fergus Early were both central as being among the founders of the X6 collective and regular performers and teachers at Dartington. They reference critical sources such as New Dance magazine, as well as excavating their own memories of that particular and seminal era.

Here we are, let’s go: Dartington College of Arts, 14 June 1997, Studio 11, 6.30 pm. A revision of Lone Twin’s On Everest

This article borrows the structure and content of a performance text (Lone Twin?s On Everest) and, through the intervention of a parallel discursive text, seeks to explore how the performance, developed on Dartington's Performance Writing BA (Hons) in 1997, functions as a response to, and a reflection of, the pedagogic environment encouraged by Dartington in the late 1990s. The article focuses on how textual and contextual practices were facilitated at Dartington, how ideas of writing, performance and performativity were shared and taught on Performance Writing and how Dartington?s interdisciplinary approach to pedagogy finds an expression in Lone Twin?s continuing collaborative practice.

The question is not …

This essay offers a personal and critical reflection on some of the approaches to practice and research found at Dartington College of Arts. Its foundation is my experience of studying for an MA in Performance Writing part-time between 2001 and 2003. Taking its title from a sentence spoken to me at my interview for the course, the essay contemplates how the practice of the college was to offer an environment to nurture and develop unique methodologies as well as a language for continuing artistic and practical as well as theoretical and academic activity. To finish, the essay considers how and why Dartington could be viewed as a pioneer in the often discussed and still contested field of practice-as-research.

Walking to Dartington

In 2008 the author, accompanied by staff and students, walked from London to Dartington College of Arts, shortly after the announcement of its forthcoming merger with Falmouth University. This text documents fragments of conversations that took place along the way, exploring questions of what was important about Dartington. The overlay map re-presents the shared daily journeys connecting to each quotation, navigating the landscape between London and Dartington. Fellow walkers in order of appearance are: Alan Read, Gary Winters, Emilyn Claid, Dan Gretton, Augusto Corrieri, Sue Palmer, Jerome Fletcher, Joe Richards, John Hall, Simon Persighetti, Misha Myers, David Williams, Josie Sutcliffe and Simon Murray. Edited audio recordings of several conversations are available online to accompany the text. The personal reflections of former tutors and students present a multivocal account of the college’s influence. Extracts of dialogues included in this text discuss: histories and evolution of the courses; ideas of community, collaboration, contextual practice; staff engagement and dialogue with students and connections to the broader contemporary arts scene; ways of being, questioning, exploring, presencing, opening; pedagogy, cultural theory, the project system, site work, contemporary and experimental ethos; psychogeography; intensity, passion, bureaucracy, homogeneity; challenging dominant paradigms and the complexity of becoming artists.

Dartington: a reflection of the training

This article examines the pedagogy adopted by Dartington College of Art. It reflects on the value of 'learning through doing' and training which prioritises exploration and discovery as a foundation for craft and artistic freedom.

These people, this time, this place: a conversation about Dartington as methodology

This contribution is a conversation between Avia Moore and Sarah Hart on our experience as North American students in the MA Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts during the final two years of its existence. We are now PhD students in Performance Studies, at York University (Toronto) and the University of California Davis respectively. This issue of TDPT comes at a moment when the uniqueness of our Dartington experience has become a reference point for our process of reverse migration back into North American academia. We reflect on the tension between looking back and moving forward through the lens of Dartington’s Devised Theatre approach: ‘These people, this time, this place − what do they produce?’ Most significant was the cross-pollination of disciplines, diverse skills brought together in an isolated, idyllic environment that stimulated creative play. Dartington taught us a way of thinking, which we continue to cultivate. This is a self-reflexive conversation drawn from personal experiences at and beyond Dartington. We asked questions, recording and notating our conversations. We paraphrased these answers through correspondence, compiling an edited version here. Finally, responding to the peer review process, we recorded an additional conversation and integrated parts of it into our previous responses. This methodology reflects our shared and divergent perspectives, and the constant balancing act between theory and practice that we found so important to the Dartington ethos.

Dance in the 1970s ‒ a crucible for de-schooling: releasing into being danced

In this article I focus on the immersive experience of being a student in the Theatre Department of Dartington College of Arts during the mid 1970s, majoring in Dance with Creative Writing as a second subject. US dancer, teacher and choreographer Mary Fulkerson’s approach to what is now called somatic dance, which she and colleagues named Release, or Release Work, was at the heart of my studies there. I will give a brief description of some key elements of her approach to teaching and choreographic practice, drawing upon Fulkerson’s own writings in Dartington’s Theatre Papers.

Peter Hulton on Dartington College of Arts

In this interview Peter Hulton discusses the role of training at Dartington College of Arts (DCA) between 1969 and 1990, the history of the Dartington project, its Arts Centre, the College and specifically the structure and development of the Theatre Department. As a leading educator within the Theatre Department and Principal of the College, Hulton offers insight into the choices behind, and application of, DCA’s pedagogy of learning by doing. This pedagogy and the structure of the Theatre Department is connected to the Dartington project’s main aims of community, reconstruction and internationalism. The interview ends with discussion of the creation of Theatre Papers and its successor Arts Archives.

The potentiality of collaboration at Dartington College of Arts and the future of performance training

If the neoliberalisation of cultural institutions has led to a profound crisis of the role of art in society, it is also impossible to ignore the current crisis of solidarity in the West. Meanwhile, interdisciplinarity and socially engaged art practices have found growing audiences in the UK, but these developments are little reflected in university curricula and pedagogies. Considering the progressive models of education at Dartington College of Arts (DCA), this article investigates the ways in which the collaborative ethos of DCA might be rediscovered for exploring the potential of collaborative ways of working in performance within current social contexts. Examining specific phases of the development of the college, the article reviews the DCA’s cross-departmental activities, and its social awareness and balancing of collective and individual creative endeavours. Focusing on the early years of DCA, it discusses the socio-political conditions under which new ways of working together in performance emerged at DCA. This demonstrates how the collaborative aspect of Dartington’s ethos continues to offer insights of relevance for current educational models for collaborative training in performance. While artistic and creative methods are invariably informed by specific socio-political and economic contexts, it is argued that in the rise of collective and creative appropriation by neoliberal agendas, the distinction between utilitarian collaboration and conceptual interdisciplinarity is crucial for understanding the legacy of DCA as a radical site of collaboration and learning.

‘Performing, Writing’

This paper is a reduced and edited version of a keynote address given at the Performing, Writing Symposium, held in and around Wellington, New Zealand, in March 2017. The author, who played a leading role in conceiving and developing Performance Writing as a field of study, practice and research at Dartington College of Arts in Devon (England), uses the opportunity to compare the Wellington and Dartington projects and in doing so to assess the continuing salience of the conjoining of the two terms, ‘perform’ and ‘write’. He considers the formulation of their respective titles, including the suggestive differences between the ‘-ing’ and ‘-ance’ suffixes, word order and the use or absence of a comma between the key terms. He also considers the terminology used to indicate different options within the implied fields. In both cases writing and performing are seen as having potential for complementary relationships of ’differences that augment each other’. The Dartington context for the conception of performance writing is sketched, emphasising the significance of writing forms that emerge out of performance practices rather than exclusively from literature. The final part of the paper offers a list of nine open thoughts on the continuing multiple dynamic relations of ‘perform’ and ‘write’, with implications for different modalities of practice. The list includes a return to the valuable extension of the term ‘perform’ to encompass J.L. Austin’s concept of ‘performativity’ and tentatively suggests, with thanks to M.A.K. Halliday’s concept of ‘grammatical metaphor’, the notion of ‘domainal metaphor’ as a term for the transference of qualities and modes of discourse between domains of cultural practice, largely through collaboration across fields or mixed modal work.

AMERICAN LOCAL AMERICAN GLOBAL

Of the conversations I had with Bob Gilmore when he was a Dartington College lecturer and lived in Totnes, five minutes from where I live, there was one in particular that we returned to a few times. And it concerned the way the burgeoning American folk movement from the 1920s through to the 50s interacted with experimentalism in music, perhaps surprisingly, yet in some significant ways.

In the Ruins of the University

My title is a conflation of two sources that would appear to mark two ends of a cycle between promise and petrification. The first a bowdlerization of Bill Readings’, now two decade-old work, The University in Ruins published after his untimely death. The second the title of a course taught by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in 1954-1955. By reaching back towards Merleau-Ponty's exploration of meaning, how meaning in instituted, how it is transformed, how sense is ‘deposited’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it in beings and institutions, and importantly how innovation can arise in such relations, I would wish to historicise a moment of threat to any such expectation of innovation, any hope that institutions might be expected to institute anything. Bill Readings’ eloquent work chimes with that accord for a ‘threatened field’, it echoes for me and in me, still, in its insights for the University today: “We have to recognise that the University is a ruined institution, while thinking what it means to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia.” There is, as Claude Lefort explained when considering Merleau-Ponty's course, but equally might have been channeling Bill Readings’ principle theme: ‘[ … ] no call to the future which does not imply a decline of the past.” In this essay I would like to put Merleau-Ponty's lecture within a University, and Bill readings’ book about a University into play with each other to understand something about my own institutional history, working alongside the theatre makers Forster & Heighes, at Dartington College of Arts, at Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, at the London International Festival of Theatre, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, at Roehampton University, and at King's College London. Institutions where nothing need happen, but something, apparently, did.

Arts for what, for where, for whom? Fragmentary reflections on Dartington College of Arts, 1961–2010

In the summer of 2010 Dartington College of Arts (DCA) closed after almost 50 years on the Dartington Hall Estate in rural Devon, following a passionately contested merger with University College Falmouth in Cornwall in 2008. This essay – an unfinished and open-ended collection of reflections and fragments – maps out some of the key tropes, principles and practices of this remarkable and renowned project. Charting a singular path between the liberal humanities of the university sector and the vocational training of the conservatoires, DCA explored models of learning through practice in theatre, music, performance writing, choreography and contemporary visual arts.

Actors as Signposts: a Model for Site-based and Ambulatory Performances

In this paper Phil Smith examines the proposal of Simon Persighetti of Wrights & Sites for actors to behave ‘as signposts’. It describes the circumstances from which the proposal arose, a particular moment in the work of site-specific artists/performers Wrights & Sites, and argues for the wider application of the proposal to the making of site-based theatre and performance. The paper describes four main features of the proposal for ‘actors as signposts’ – pointing to specificity, movement from anti-character to collective subject, performance as trajectory, and the restoration of corporeality – illustrating these with reference to the work of Punchdrunk, Francis Alÿs, and geographer Michael Zinganel, among others. Phil Smith is a Senior Research Associate at the School of Art and Media, University of Plymouth and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Exeter and Dartington College of Arts. Author and co-deviser of over a hundred plays or performances for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Tams Theater (Munich), and New Perspectives (Nottingham), he is company dramaturg for TNT (Munich) and a core member of Wrights & Sites. His solo walking-based performances include The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside (texts published by Intellect, 2009).