{"id":267,"date":"2022-04-30T08:55:18","date_gmt":"2022-04-30T08:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/?p=267"},"modified":"2022-07-06T15:35:46","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T15:35:46","slug":"dramaturgy-of-form-performing-verse-in-contemporary-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/dramaturgy-of-form-performing-verse-in-contemporary-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Dramaturgy of Form: Performing Verse in Contemporary Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Kasia Lech<\/strong>
129 pp. Routledge<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Patricia Keeney<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kasia Lech is a Polish scholar based in Canterbury. She is Executive Director of the online publication The Theatre Times <\/em>and has worked as an actor, storyteller and puppeteer. In this slim but exceedingly dense monograph Dramaturgy of Form<\/em>, she looks at the role of verse in the theatre generally and specifically in contemporary theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acknowledging that verse has been essential to theatre from the Greeks through hip hop, she examines the resurgence of interest in verse as a theatrical language and shows how it can expand current (and future) theatre practice. Because it contains diversified speech within its own specific language, verse, she argues, reflects the globalized world\u2019s multi-faceted and pluralistic nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Lech\u2019s many theatre examples, verse becomes a reinforcing agent heightening multivocal value and facilitating a broad internal dialogue. And because it is porous, it can activate participation, \u201cengaging the audience in co-creating a performance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing from her own experiences of theatre in Poland, Ireland and the U.K., along with other examples using the work of Spanish, Nigerian, Canadian, Australian and Russian artists, she explores how verse dramaturgy can extend theatrical work, how it can empower actors and enrich actor training. She also discusses how it can facilitate translation and adaptation in the theatre. She notes that verse dramaturgies also figure prominently in post-dramatic theatre preoccupied as it is with identity, marginalization, precarity and political unrest and how it can generate multi-voiced forms and even fuel playwriting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the examples she uses and artists she discusses feed off hip hop (including rap), a form connected to \u201ca global, multi-ethnic grassroots youth culture committed to social justice and self-expression.\u201d Hip hop is<\/em> verse, and its popularity is connected to the tension it builds between rhythmic structure and the words it shapes. Verse dramaturgy can also mirror the authenticity of a linguistic multiverse and challenge the authority of a single authorial vision, thereby reflecting real conditions in society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lech starts with the kind of analysis we all know from poetry studies in school with metrical terms such as iamb, trochee and dactyl, learning that \u201cenjambement\u201d can bring new meaning to words, learning how structure and rhythm make meaning. It is verse structure, she says, that can perform the core functions of theatre speech. That is, poetry on the stage can create meanings not always apparent on the page. This is both an obvious and a dazzling concept already enlivening much current theatre and one with many possibilities for future theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The major problem with Lech\u2019s presentation, however, is that its often brilliant observations sink too deeply and too quickly into the quicksand of academic jargon, into over-conscientious acknowledgment of sources and into over-meticulous technical analysis, materials that, on their own, could easily be handled as footnotes or in a separate reference section at the end of the volume. Such notes might well be crucial for voice or acting coaches or for directors inspired to use elements of it in their work. However, within this text it impedes coherent argument and dims any hope of theatre people themselves actually reading it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undeniably, though, there is ongoing relevance here. Lech begins with the important recognition that verse has long been used to extend dramaturgical potential whether in the work of Stanislavski or Kristin Linklater, Yeats or Seamus Heaney. The Greeks understood the onomatopoeic effects of verse structure in their use of the anapest to denote marching, in the dance-step meters in which choral speech was written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lech\u2019s many examples from Polish drama illustrate how verse rhythms uniquely transmit information in such classics as Wyspianski\u2019s The Wedding<\/em>, where folk meter mimics Polish musicality and folklore. Dance, too, becomes an extension of the verse allowing actors to move and speak robotically \u201cas if enslaved by Polish tradition.\u201d Her extensive and illuminating analysis of Mickiewicz\u2019s Forefather\u2019s Eve<\/em> describes how verse dramaturgy can restore the richness of language lost, as the play emphasizes, after the standardization of Polish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Verse dramaturgy, she argues, can also challenge anxieties of understanding in experiencing multilingual theatre, anxieties that arise from our monolinguistic need to know every word. Peter Brook\u2019s Orghast<\/em>, based on a text by Ted Hughes and performed in 1971 at the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts, used verse as part of an invented language. The musical effect of those innovative sounds countered, she argues, the spectator\u2019s need to understand each and every word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lech also describes a puppet play done in Wroclaw in 2016 called Yemaya<\/em>, Queen of the Seas, <\/em>a piece written in response to the death of a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015 trying to escape disaster. Yemaya<\/em> used verse delivered as rap only once, preparing the audience to listen to sound and rhythm rather than any literal sense of the words and to realize that language is not a unique human ability. Indeed, Yemaya herself often communicated with dolphin-like vocalizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lech believes that dramatic classics can rediscover their contemporary potential through verse that thickens and deepens text. Using Seamus Heaney\u2019s adaptation of Antigone <\/em>(The Burial at Thebes<\/em>),produced at the Abbey Theatre in 2004, she notes that the tension there was not between a Greek text and an English one but rather between an English text and an Irish one, with Heaney reading the Antigone myth in the light of Irish suffering. Heaney refers to the \u201cIambic drums\/ Of English\u201d beating in the Irish woods. His inventiveness with conventions of lament opens up a healing space of inclusive communal lamentation that \u201crhymes between hope and history.\u201d For Heaney, poetry and poetic drama can go further than protest, can go beyond character to a Yeatsian summoning of \u201crhythm, balance, pattern,\u201d to images of \u201cvast patterns, the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once Ibsen\u2019s \u201clanguage of the gods,\u201d verse can also become a \u201ctheatrical language of the marginalized.\u201d In Niall Ransome\u2019s FCUK\u2019D<\/em> (performed at London\u2019s Bunker Theatre, 2017), rhythmic language evoked urban space, \u201cwrit[ing] the architecture of Hull into the \u2018bones\u2019 and fates of the characters,\u201d to recreate Baudelaire\u2019s poetics of the ugly. Cursing and terrified, the two main characters jump from their window on a flight path of poetry:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My eyes are gunna burst,
Air rushes up my shirt,
And when my feet touch ground,
Gravity hits.
IT HURTS<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Verse, Lech suggests, contextualizes the story within U.K. politics, the pressure that years of Conservative governments put on social services, essentially giving form to the anguish of individual victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, no volume on verse in the theatre can avoid Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s Hamilton,<\/em> arguably \u201cthe most publicized theatre protest against right wing politics in recent times.\u201d Miranda\u2019s cross-racial casting reconstructed the past almost totally through rap, collapsed time in lines that juxtaposed received history with current global situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also discussed is another fairly recent hit, Emilia<\/em> (premiered in 2018 at London\u2019s Globe). Based on the life of Emilia Bassano, a seventeenth-century English poet thought by some to be Shakespeare\u2019s dark lady of the sonnets, the role of Emilia, played as a fierce early feminist by three different actresses \u201cuse[d] verse to reinforce its key theme of female solidarity, pushing the protest beyond the time frame of the performance into the social world.\u201d The play ends as Emilia reclaims her creative space and exhorts the audience to \u201clisten to us.\u201d Enthusiastic spectators, joined in and then continued the cry in a \u201cverse\u201d rally on Twitter<\/em>, illustrating how verse can help drive theatre\u2019s political punch into public action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lech\u2019s final chapter looks at the role of verse dramaturgy in post-dramatic theatre with such productions as Carthage\/Cartegena<\/em> by Caridad Svich, written in English, Spanish, verse and prose. These are languages and forms \u201cbeing \u2018wrenched\u2019 from one another\u201d to illustrate the displacement and wrenching of forced migration. She writes of Bozena Keff\u2019s A Piece About Motherland Fatherland<\/em> spotlighting not a Holocaust survivor but a survivor\u2019s adult daughter, who creates a book of poems expressing the deepest communication between mother and daughter. Using chorus, opera and oratorio, the text references the \u201cpolyphony of Polish-Jewish history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Lech, verse-music experiments (or Gig Theatre) also \u201cbuild on a largely feminist tradition of verse-derived experiments,\u201d such as Ntozake Shange\u2019s choreo-poems evoking the African American perspective. Shange\u2019s larger aim \u201cwas to deform the language and its traditional modes of representation,\u201d to \u201cextend space for the inter-generational community of women, and by extension, all voices through the breath of verse-speaking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such radical inclusivity animates Lech\u2019s enthusiastic embrace of the power of poetry in theatre\u2014an idea both timeless and newly discovered in this volume. The old\/new art that Lech is at such pains to describe is one that intentionally deconstructs familiar theatrical forms to create an artistic continuum. As such, it is part of an important ongoing conversation among the spectacular range of voices from the multiverse in which we now live. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Patricia Keeney<\/strong> is an award-winning Canadian literary and theatre critic as well as a widely published and translated poet and novelist. Her most recent books are the novel One Man Dancing<\/em> (Inanna), based on the history of Uganda\u2019s legendary Abafumi theatre company, and a collection of poetry and contemporary verse\/theatre dialogues called Orpheus in Our World<\/em> (NeoPoiesis), based on the earliest Greek hymns. Keeney is a professor of Literature, Humanities and Creative Writing at Toronto\u2019s York University. Her website: wapitiwords.ca<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2022 Patricia Keeney
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n

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