Documentary Theatre: Methods of Creating Verbatim

Doctoral student: Loreta Vaskova
Supervisors: Prof. Jonas Vaitkus, Prof. Dr. Ramunė Marcinkevičiūtė
Department: Acting and Directing
Intended duration: 2015–2019

Abstract

Loreta Vaskova

Artistic research project “Documentary Theatre: Methods of Creating Verbatim” has developed from my active involvement in theatre directing. In the process of producing “59’Online” performance for the Arts Printing House project “Open Space”, I was faced with the problem of dramatizing documentary sources. Thus, I undertook to do a review of world-prevailing forms of documentary theatre and methods of creating it. I have stopped over one of the most widely used techniques – verbatim, a form where documentary performances are created from interviews. The tradition of this technique was not born in Lithuania: it appeared in Great Britain in 1974, when the English theatre director Peter Cheeseman used records of interviews for his play “Fight for Shelton Bar”.

The present research analyzes the historical perspective of the form, but also gives focus to the latest works of its practitioners, among which, the hybridized genre of verbatim play is dominant. Therefore, in the first part of my study I refer to the authors who continue to develop verbatim: playwrights and theatre directors Alecky Blythe, Max Stafford-Clark, David Hare, Nicolas Kent and Moisés Kaufman. In analyzing their works, I explore the verbatim function and the role of authors at the time of creating it, and also discuss the aspects of ethics and social change that are important in documenting the authentic narratives of individuals. In the second part of the study, basing on socio-linguistic research of colloquial language, and by applying the immanent analysis by Charles E. Bressler, representative of New Criticism, I explore local-type verbatim plays. In the third, practical part, I test this analysis and the various methods of creating verbatim in production of performances or holding workshops. For example, in 2016 I tried pure verbatim by making a theatre walking tour “Personnel” („Personalas“) over the Klaipėda Drama Theatre. Or the so-called headphone verbatim that Mark Wing-Davey invented in 2001 during his “Drama Without Paper Workshop” – I have tested that at interdisciplinary festivals “Operomanija‘s Summer Creative Residence” and “Compressed Time” in Neringa seaside resort. These practical works complement the theoretical part of the present artistic research, and provide an opportunity to present in the context of Lithuania a study that carries out detailed analysis of methods of creating verbatim.