John Britton, Wendy Smith, Hilary Elliot

The following article is the first half of a trascript of a conversation between John Britton, Wendy Smith,
and Hilary Elliot. John and Hillary are the codirectors of Quiddity Theatre. Wendy Smith is
Australia’s only qualified Skinner Releasing Technique teacher and is also a founding member
of State of Flux.

JB ...we were talking, briefly before about the nature of ensemble improvisation, especially relating to when the ensemble share a specific aesthetic, such as contact or circus compared to the development of ensemble improvisation when the group does not come from a specific, shared aesthetic – where people bring in diverse skills, but it is not a skill-based ensemble – such as a contact ensemble or a circus ensemble or a contemporary dance ensemble. The question is how you can find improvisatory structures and training structures that work for people bringing in very different skills, without going down to the lowest common denominator of ‘hey we can all stand up so that’s good enough for today’.

WS I think there does need to be some level of commonality and I think the commonality in the structure is to do with what the activity is – which is improvisation. So the search is for common ground within that. Because if you are constantly working without common ground it strikes me that things are so random that you bounce and bounce off – it’s all hit and miss. I think you create common ground.

JB Yes, but I wonder whether ‘improvisation’ is so broad a term – as it should be – that you need to narrow it a bit. I think that for Quiddity the common ground – taken as given the fact that we work in improvisation – the common ground is an attitude of mind, an attitude to oneself as an artist and as a performer which is to do with energy,
commitment, experimentation, and selfdevelopment. Now improvisation is the terrain through which that happens, but we’d not take people into the Quiddity Ensemble who were good improvisers, purely because they were good
improvisers, because what links the performers, I think is an attitude to performance, as opposed to a facility within improvisation.

WS But what happens if somebody comes in with a particular attitude to performance – why can’t they slot in?

JB It immediately goes to the question of what improvisation is and what it’s for. For Quiddity, before you can answer that, you have to try to define what the links are between the performers. What I think we are working on is finding strategies for communication within the group – through energy and focus and concentration.

WS You see, I think they are the primary factors. I think it’s important to differentiate here between improvisation as a training ground and improvisation for performance, because I think they are incredibly different things. At VCA I see a lot of improvisation for choreography being worked on in performance workshops, but when I
introduce students to the idea of improvisation for performance, it’s very clear to me that it’s a very new ball game for them. At first they don’t understand what I’m trying to get at with them and then, when they connect with it, they are incredibly energised by it.

JB Then maybe part of what Quiddity is working on is questioning that division between the process and the performance. Performance is also always a process. I suppose that one of the things I’m really interested in is that even very fixed performance – where you are working to very tight choreographic scores or you are working to script – maintaining the “Energetic Improvisation” within it, so the process of performance is really just the
process of development as expressed at that particular moment in front of that particular audience, so the product is always just about where the process is up to at any particular moment. So in that sense there is no difference between improvisation as a training process and improvisation as a performance aesthetic.

WS I think there is a difference. I think that one can be transcribed into the other. I think it’s possible, in fact I think it’s to be encouraged that people bring their improvisation skills to every performance, so that they are trying to discover something new within each moment and to fully inhabit that moment, and to discover the freshness of the unravelling of an event. But I think there are very different skills as well for improvisation within performance, because you are trying to find content as well as inhabit it. It’s like rubbing your head and patting your tummy all at the same time. I think that’s quite different and I think it requires a more sophisticated capacity, because you are being asked to do a number of jobs at once. I think it’s a bit like learning to ride a bike – you don’t learn first to do the peddles, then the steering, then use the seat – you learn it all at once. I think that’s one of the things with improvisation – it’s one of the things that over the years I’ve learned to appreciate about how Al Wunder teaches – particularly in the beginning stages – you are thrown in at the deep end and you have to begin to learn all the skills at once.

JB I think there’s a couple of things in there. I mean Al talks very clearly – and I absolutely agree – that being out there and having to do it, is a core training mechanism. Otherwise training has a danger of becoming very introverted and very precious. Particularly laboratory-based physical theatre can become very precious if it doesn’t have the external eye turned on it. But the other thing that’s really interesting about that – and again we are moving to the question of what comes before improvisation – is the question of what constitutes the ‘pre-performative state’?
What is the attitude of mind that the performer needs to have towards themselves as a performer before they can be a good improviser, a good choreographed dancer, a good spontaneously composing musician? What is the commonality of attitude that links all these skills? What is the key creative state? For me one of the key things about improvisation, as a training mechanism, is that it allows to go very deep towards what you might call the pre-performative state – the core moment of possibility located within the performer. Before the performer does anything comes the knowledge that anything is possible, through the application of energy, concentration and openness and the willingness to use one’s body and voice as a tool.
In Quiddity, although improvisation can be about the accumulation of skills, it’s primary use is to strip away, to enable performers to go deeper and realise that they can. It actually enlarges the ball of possibility within the actor before they ever actually do anything.

WS What you are calling the preperformative state is, I think, the artistic process; the core unit in artistic process. I don’t think it matters if it’s in music, visual art or performing art. It’s that baseline of ‘what is fundamental in
engaging in an artistic process?
Alot of people spend an awful lot of time accumulating skills, but I think it’s got to do with how you integrate that ‘core unit of creativity’ with your life. I don’t think it can sit separate from your life. Because what you bring to that moment of discovering, that moment of the wealth of possibilities in improvisational training – you arrive at that as a result of how you are in your life.

JB If one accepts the notion that there is a pre-performative state – which is a sort of energy of possibility – and whatever skills one has accumulated as a dancer or as a composer or a visual artist can grow out of that – it seems to me that the engine that drives that energy of possibility towards the process of making art is imagination –
being able to make from fresh, from the imaginative journey. And that’s either a personal thing or it’s to do with a collective imagination if you are working in an ensemble (ie. what is the imagination of the ensemble). That seems to me absolutely to do with the artistic process being connected with your life. Because the imagination is not something you turn on and off like a tap – it’s to do with being able to say “I’m full of possibility – switch off all the other things, the distractions, and where is the imagination going to lead me?” And this is a multi artform thing – it doesn’t matter what art form we are talking about.
If energy represents possibility, imagination is the route map.

WS So what do you call imagination?

JB The ability to extrapolate – to go somewhere. Either to know where you are going or the ability to say “OK I’ll take this first step and my body and my energy will allow me to do it.” So a lot of our training is to do with getting rid of the things that prevent you from doing things, from taking those steps, rather than training in
acquiring certain skills. So that your body becomes a tool that is adaptable to whatever the impulse of the imagination is. WS A removal of inhibition? JB Yes, coupled with an understanding of possibility, so that the removal of inhibition opens up other possibilities, plus an understanding of appropriateness. Working in an ensemble, nobody wants someone who is entirely uninhibited in an ensemble….

WS Nobody wants them in a solo either – not if you’re watching it!

JB And this brings us to the really interesting question of whether an ensemble share a ‘skill’ – because part of the removal of inhibition is also about getting the performer to master his or her craft, so that when the impulse comes they are able to structure it spontaneously.

WS Say that again...

JB The removal of blocks, inhibitions, is all very well, part of the training is making sure the performer has the vocal, physical, concentrational skills to actually spontaneously structure something when the impulse comes. And in an ensemble that means being able collectively to develop and grow impulses – which is to do with an instinctive understanding of one another. If one is within a ‘skills discipline’ ie. the ensemble is linked by a shared knowledge of contact impro for example, there is a pre-existing shared series of languages that one might use. But then what happens if you have within the ensemble, as we do with Quiddity, a couple of people who are highly trained within contemporary dance, a couple of highly skilled circus performers and a couple of people who are extremely exciting performers but who, rather like me, would not claim to have any specific skills base. How, in such a diverse group, can you enable people to find a collective language that allows individuals to use their individual skills without letting those skills become the dominant energy.

WS So is the question ‘how do you find the common ground?’ or is it ‘how do you find the gel which holds it all together, so that it can evolve and develop?’

JB Both of those, and ‘how, within an ensemble, can you have all the performers empowered and able to use the full range of their accumulated skills, while also having the indefinable ‘other’ which is the shared aesthetic – the invisible shared language which, in an ensemble of five is the sixth performer’

WS Are you saying that the five performers become as one?

JB No the five performers become as five, and there is a sixth performer there too, an invisible and shared understanding dancing among them – I can’t really define it more clearly than that – but that is sort of what I see when they are performing.

WS It’s all to do with when it’s working. When that moment strikes – at least this is my experience in State of Flux – there are moments when the piece has become so much bigger than its individual performers. You are not driving the material, the material is driving you. You are no longer in search mode – you’re well out of it – and you are pulling the material from thin air. I think that one of the things that happens then is that there is a very common reading of the piece – everybody is reading it in a similar way. You’d never read it in the same way, but the reading is similar. There is a shared grammar (for want of a better word), a way of punctuating – an understanding about the moment to move, from the group supporting a solo to the group working as a whole-group. All becomes clear and the whole group responds. It’s kind of the grammar of how you move through evolving material.

HE We’ve had that a couple of times in impros – only a couple of times. It’s partly to do with that incredible ‘buzz’ that exists between people as part of an invisible awareness. But it’s also to do with not being so immersed in the material that you don’t know how to shape it, using your outside eye.
And that takes so long to develop within a group.

JB I think there are quite specific, quite technical explorations that one can do to make that more likely to happen. We do a lot of work on the nature of vision within a group, how, with what attitude and for what duration one is looking at other members of the group. We work on questions such as – when you are moving are you talking, physically, in words or sentences, and what’s the punctuation. It’s quite technical. We do quite a lot of work – again quite technically – about politeness or lack of it in one’s interaction with other members of the group. I mean Quiddity Ensemble members are very sensitive to one another, improvisationally, and I try to do a lot of work encouraging them to be much ruder.

HE Like, I’m going to take a solo now just for the hell of it…

JB Precisely! Someone else is soloing, so you just go ‘bugger this I want a go now’ and you cut across them. Or you just go and pick someone up and throw them around a bit. Or when someone makes an offer you just refuse to accept it. Leaving people stranded – I think that stuff can be really useful.

WS That sort of thing is what Nancy Stark- Smith calls ‘exercising particular muscles’. you strengthen them –

HE And for things to have real texture.

JB Also in the process of developing you have breakthroughs – suddenly everything feels very new – then you hit a sort of plateau – and my job as the ‘facilitator’ of the group is to look at the fact that the group has really settled into enjoying what they are doing and to think ‘that’s fine, but what muscle needs exercising now?’ So for a while our vocal work was very beautiful but not very daring, so my job was to say to people – you know that what you do is beautiful so in the middle of an exercise I want you to destroy it. In physical work we hit a ‘groove’ after a while – a very physically beautiful way of working together – and whenever someone introduced a different energy it would be there for a while then everything would decay back towards the groove. So recently we’ve been trying to smash that. You can always go back to it, but the muscles that allow you to be cheeky and daring and rude and complicit all start to atrophy because we are all being very beautiful. So we smash it and then the beauty muscle start to atrophy and we have to just be nice for a while. That’s my job as the outside eye, which must have been different for you with Flux when you didn’t have an outside eye. My job is to appreciate where we are but to be looking towards where we are going – and there is at times a level of resistance to that. I mean the‘groove’ represents a level of achievement, and I come along and say ‘get over it’…

WS A groove is a very nice place to be. It’s very comfortable. We found that in Contact a lot. It’s very seductive just to get into beautiful, liquid dancing. All three dimensional – up is as valid as down, curved is as valid as straight, never a jarring moment. Until suddenly someone will just go‘resist!’ – and that’s the moment that it gets interesting to watch. Suddenly there’s interest because there’s friction. It’s tricky because you have to be very careful in improvisations not to get stuck in comfort zones. But you have to know what your comfort zone is, because then when you need to use it you can. When you need to go into search mode you can head there because you know what your base line is. You need things like that when an improvisation is not working. You need to know how to survive within an improvisation. If you are doing a forty minute piece and you have no material, you’re in a group of five, everyone in search mode, nobody has struck anything yet – you need to know how to survive it in a way that is basically still interesting. Those things are valuable, but they are also hazards.

JB What happens then if what you are trying to do is not develop the possibility for the group to improvise, but to create quite structured work. It brings us back to that whole thing we started with which is the idea of improvisation as a training mechanism.
One of my core beliefs with Quiddity is that this whole business of having to grow and learn, to improvise, to get out of the groove, to smash things and find material leads to a level of profound understanding and connectedness between performers. And whatever you do with them then, this will deepen the level of communication on stage. Down to tiny adjustments of vocal or physical relationship. And this is the point at which even highly structured work becomes underpinned by the improvisation aesthetic. The performers simply connect with one another because they have been on these long journeys with one another. All the improvisational training is a fantastic compost, a very rich mulch which leads to the thing that I’m really interested in, in theatrical ensemble work, which is that an ensemble simply has a level of connectedness that a non-ensemble will never have. For me it simply leads to better performance.

WS I agree. There have been spells during my time with Flux when I’ve thought ‘oh you know we don’t do that much’. Then I watch people come together who have just formed an alliance for a brief period of time to perform and I think ‘ no, I can really see our history’. If people have just come together their work can be great, but there is a lack of history present in their improv performing, of that shared experience, a lack of that mulch.