A year on the MA Advanced Theatre Practice

Getting to London

​Right up until the 24th of September I had not been sure whether I would make it to London.
 
The process of applying and starting the MA Advanced Theatre Practice had been a strange one from the beginning. It had begun when I saw the audition notice online back in late 2019, that the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama was holding auditions in Sydney for their acting and MA programs. I made the trip to Sydney for my audition and remember vividly wearing a mask on the walk due to the smoke from the bushfires. I remember thinking how strange that was, not knowing how familiar it would become.
 
It wasn’t until March that I received confirmation of my acceptance onto the course. Covid-19 was just bubbling to the surface. Within the fortnight I had lost all my work and all scheduled shows. Suddenly following an artistic practice felt precarious. I didn’t know if moving to the UK to devote myself to a year of study was the best possible idea at this time or the worst possible idea… or even going to be possible at all.
 
Skipping ahead to September; past lockdowns, travel exemptions, visa centre closures and numerous emails to admissions, I landed in the UK. It is not lost on me how lucky I was to still be able to complete this project during this time when the pandemic has been so devastating to the Arts Industry and how grateful I was to feel supported by the Trust in this endeavour.
 
As many students would know over the last 18 months, online learning has posed its challenges. Especially when working in a collaborative, theatre devising course where emphasis is so often placed on the ‘liveness’ of the form. Perhaps what I hadn’t anticipated was the oddity of not meeting the majority of my classmates and teachers in person. Despite these challenges it has also opened my thinking to how to create collaborative environments across distance, which feels particular pertinent to my practice and collaborations, which will exist across various time zones and oceans.
 
First term of the course was a hybrid experience of online learning and practical laboratory work, working in small clusters in rehearsal room to mitigate the risks of Covid. For me, this led me into the Scenography cluster unsure what to expect, but having any expectations surpassed.
 
Below I have attempted to reflect on three of the year’s particular highlights of the course, which have seen me grow and develop my artistic practice.
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Scenography

​I had worked before in what I would now understand to be scenographic practices however, learning on this module has reframed the way I think about performance and the techniques I use to create performative spaces. Working with the architecture and bodies of the space, sound, light and projection, my experience of this term was creative heaven. Working with a collection of talented artists from all around the world, we continued to find ways to transform a studio of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in new and unanticipated ways.
 
The physical restrictions of Covid and safety management became interesting creative provocations; how do you move an audience through space? How might you create smaller, more intimate one-to-one interactions?

The Scenographer's Toolbox

​I started to think more about installation-based performance and how my practice could become more cross-disciplinary. I experimented with headphone theatre and sound production, I made miniature fragments exploring movement through spaces and encounters with performance and I became interested in interactions with projections using live video feeds. My work over the term culminated in the showing of a fragment called Objects in the Mirror are Larger Than They Appear.

The piece attempted to reflect the experience of constantly having your image reflected back to you, which we were experiencing through video conferencing technologies throughout the pandemic. The work attempted to create this gaze in a dynamic, three-dimensional experience for an audience. The ideas from this fragment have continued to resonate with me over the year and is forming the basis of my research in the year two MFA I am about to undertake.

Perhaps the extreme circumstances bonded our class more than might have happened in another environment but what particularly exceeded my expectations was how close our Scenography cohort became. Despite creating solo fragments, we were deeply invested in the work of our collaborators, supporting their work wherever we could both practically and critically. Thanks to the emphasis from our tutors on processes of documentation and our investment in each other’s work, we became very good at documenting the happenings in the space; making sure we were documenting not only our own work but the work of everyone.

​In our final showing I found myself working and performing across other pieces; our cohort working as one energetic collective of individual makers.
The closeness of this term and our ability to work in space with each other became something to hold onto as the pandemic worsened.
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The Sceno-gang

Practices

​Winter brought increased cases of Covid and we were plunged into lockdown and completely online learning. This was the entry to a module called ‘Practices.’ Practices is the first opportunity in the year to work on a group devised project. I found myself across a screen from people I had barely worked with in our various online classes. I hadn’t even seen most of their bodies in space.
Workshops over this time focussed on techniques for devising performance but some of the most helpful insights were about creating online documentation and portals to share material; were about exploring epic ideas in simple ways; were about talking to each about how work collaboratively.
 
My group of six started amassing materials, setting tasks for each other that generated videos, music, poems, photos. We went on long walks over Facebook Messenger and had long talks on Zoom about everything surrounding the project. We wrote letters to our classmates and letters to ourselves, mulling through a sense of nostalgia and melancholy in the slowness of the unfixed time of that moment. We wondered how we could make time tangible again while we yearned to be together again.
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Letters from new collaborators

https://www.clusterflux.co.uk/home

​Eventually April arrived and we meet each other’s bodies in space for the first time. We spent three intensive weeks developing a performative installation, this dance, this act that fills the space. We utilised all the material we had generated online and transcribed it into the physical space, drawing in live sound production, creating physical choreographies and performing text in a gallery of objects amassed through our devising process. The piece alluded to a durational loop, where the performance continued long before and long after the audience had come and gone.

Making time tangible with cassettes in 'this dance, this act, that fills the space'

You can read the ClusterFLux blog about creating this dance, this act that fills the space here: ​https://www.clusterflux.co.uk/my-blog/categories/this-dance-this-act
​Through the process, the group I worked with became incredibly close; all excited by the same methodology of concept-led/ research-based practice we were developing. Even now that the year is finished we are still working together; through this process established our company ClusterFlux. I went on to work with this group in the MA SIP project, Please Leave (a message) acting as the project’s dramaturg.

MA SIP - CLUSTERFLUX

Through undertaking this course, I realised how interested I was in facilitation; creating processes for people or groups to work in and having the skills to provide critical feedback in thoughtful ways that allow people to realise their ideas.
When it came to the MA SIP projects and my involvement in them, it felt important to me to challenge myself by taking on a role less realised in my practice: dramaturgy. I wanted to gain the skills to begin to articulate this as an aspect of my practice and the techniques I use to do this.
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Through this project we were also lucky enough to be mentored by Goat Island’s Karen Christopher, whose knowledge and care in performance making was deeply inspiring and offered numerous learning opportunities as I witnessed her critical feedback and skills as a mentor/outside eye of the project.
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Chris Whyte, Trevor White, Linda van Egmond, Miray Sidhom and Jack Hilton of ClusterFlux at Karen Christopher's rehearsal studio in Faversham

​Through working in this way on the MA SIP project, facilitating the work, this meant I was able to also assist the project in a technical capacity; helping to curate the work through design aspects, such as using sound, lighting and projection. I became more confident using technical equipment and even worked as the show’s operator when it was performed at Camden People’s Theatre.
The performance itself was a great success with our live audiences, peers and tutors.

'Please Leave (a message),' ClusterFlux, Camden People's Theatre, 2021.

You can also read more about ClusterFlux here: ​https://www.clusterflux.co.uk/home

​The year that was

What I believe is most important about grants such as the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, is that they uniquely allow artists to develop their international networks and learn in ways that would not otherwise be accessible in Australia.
 
My main takeaways from my time in London is how postgraduate study here is so internationally connected. My classmates were from across the world and helped expose me to references and knowledge of different cultural climates as well as providing with a network of collaborators that now extends the world over.
I have been taught by some of the field’s leading artists including director Katie Mitchell, performance collective Rimini Protokoll and Gob Squad’s Sharon Smith.
 
Due to my involvement with ClusterFlux theatre collective, my practice is now situated across the UK and Australia. We are continuing to develop new work together, with a residency scheduled in April and performances of Please Leave (a message) planned for January 2022 at Camden People’s Theatre and plans to tour to Brighton Fringe and possibly even Edinburgh Fringe within a year of forming as a collective.
 
The learning itself has also been something, which I could not have achieved in Australia at a Master’s level. Not only has the course been practical and lab-based (meaning I have been constantly creating artistic content) but it has allowed me to expand my practice to become more cross-disciplinary and as a result more resilient to be able to be self-sufficient, present work in multiple environments and processes and confident in being able to identify my artistic practice confidently.

This project was generously supported by The Ian Potter Cultural Trust.