Here’s a short bibliography, which might constitute a set of ‘memes’:

Richard Florida, in The Creative Class, postulates that creative people are driving urban regeneration, and indeed the modern economy. Cultural diversity, rather than being a problem, is active ingredient in the ‘funkiness’ of an area; attracting the gay community adds to the number of creatives in an area.

Charles Landry extends this idea to the UK, creating blueprints for regeneration.

Peter Drucker, in a number of books, argues from a demographic perspective that the 21st century will be a knowledge-based economy where the 20th was based on manufacturing.

John Kenneth Galbraith argues for a new reading of class divide: those who are secure and have a vested interest in the status quo; those who are insecure but still being funded by the system;  those who are marginalised: unemployed, casualised labour and so on.

Ken Robinson argues for creativity in education to be taken seriously, as a third objective alongside literacy and numeracy.

Richard Sennett points out the effect of a privatisation of experience and of craftsmanship under late capitalism.

Clay Shirky is pointing out that Web 2 and other development mean that patterns of organisation are changing under the influence of technology in “Here comes Everybody”.  There are important implications in quality judgements that result from the development of current information technology.

What to make of this?  Well at least it explains the changes that are happening in the arts, from some of the zeitgeist.  I think it also indicates part of a fundamental shift in the emphasis in society; one can even read into this the recent credit crisis is a result of a change in economic model.  Intellectual property rights in the age of mash-up become problematic.  And all the time the working classes know something’s going on, and are in fear of joining the marginalised and are tempted to retreat into nationalism.

From an arts perspective, the traditional model of being driven solely by aesthetics won’t quite hold.  It requires a high level of patronage: by the aristocracy, by the State, by big business. There are at least three aspects of quality, of which aesthetics is only one.  We should also add social impact - this is the basis of the duality that Tessa Jowell was exploring in her essay, the Role of Government in the Arts, which lead to to ACE’s arts debate.  And of course, there has for thirty years now been an attempt to measure the economic impact of arts actvity, both on a macro-economic scale, and as a measure of a model of successful arts organisations.

As artists - perhaps in this context I should say creatives - there is a responsibility on us to start measuring our work and make more explicit our intentions artistically, socially and commercially.  We are living through a fundamental social shift.  It’s not enough just to live through it, or even just to comment on it; we have to embody it, going beyond description into demonstration.

Over the years I have been struck by the methods used by stage managers in supporting the creative process.  Creativity is a sensitive process, full of vulnerability; unstable and volatile, while also intimate and friendly.  There is a strong sense of discipline about theatre and performance, but not in the regimented way one might associate with military discipline, for example.

Most models of management focus on strategic leadership qualities; less attention has been given to day-to-day problem solving, dealing with issues ‘in the moment’ - an area where stage managers excel, of course.  The pressure of the real-time flow of events that is the performance; combined with the interface with hyped and stressed performers, leaves little time for reflection.  The stage manager is only too sensitive to the volatility of the situation, and the need to persuade rather than command.

This isn’t new -  in fact, the character of the stage manager goes back a long way.  Alan Read, in Theatre and Everyday Life, (Routledge 1993) cites a journal from 1734 called  ‘The Prompter’ which describes someone who “though he seemed not to command yet all his instructions were punctually complied with, and in the modest character of an adviser had the whole management and direction of that little commonwealth”. The characteristics described - punctuality and modesty - are still the same one can observe today.

The sheepdog theory works on a number of levels. Primarily it describes an approach to problem solving.  Sheepdogs circle the flock (ie the problem) rather than barking at it, slowly moving the sheep in the required direction from behind.  They have to work hard in covering all that ground, making sure none has been left out.  Unlike the leadership model, where the emphasis is on ‘the shepherd’ setting the task, the reality is that the sheepdog uses a wide range of discretion in achieving the objective.  Even the casual observer will recognise the teamwork quality of the relationship, however much whistling and shouting is going on.  Skilled sheepdogs know what the task is, and hardly need telling, reading the signs almost before they have been made.  And it goes without saying that the sheepdog is totally loyal to both the shepherd and the flock, and will flog themselves to death to get the job done, coming back from the ravine with the lost sheep, dripping wet and exhausted.

Contemporary management, in a democratic setting which still demands decisiveness, seems to need more of the sheepdog style: the ‘modest character of the adviser’ rather than the imperiousness of the shepherd; creative artists require curating more than directing.

The power of a metaphor.

There is tradition, in western thinking at least, of trying to put ideas into categories. Just as donkeys are different from horses, knowing the difference is useful if you’re trying to work out how to pull a cart; similarly, working out false logic is useful in the search for truth.  And truth helps us to decide what reality consists of – if I can be allowed an –ity in this case.  In many ways this can be helpful, but is less so when we are dealing with more complex ideas.  We also fall into errors of category; none more so when we are dealing with metaphors and legends, stories and narratives.

As a stage management tutor, I have been working with material metaphors all my working life.  A teapot is a teapot, something to make a brew in.  Put it on stage it takes on a life of its own, and whether it is brown earthenware, or ornate silver, or something for a dormouse to sleep in becomes more significant, because of what it says to the spectator. Shining blue light on someone can be taken as moonlight; or as proximity to a neon sign, or a warm summer day depending on context.  Everything put on stage will be read as a message – and actor who can’t find their shoe will still go onstage on cue, and we will all try to work out the significance of the missing footwear – it becomes for many a metaphor of unpreparedness, which might be true for the actor, but was not intended for the character.  At its best, theatrical metaphor can become a thing of real, sometimes unbearable beauty.

The point here is that the metaphor and the reality are there together – their categories are not an either/or, but a more/less relationship, much fuzzier than we might think.  Theatre people talk of a suspension of disbelief, but it is more complex than that.  As audience members we are asked to hold two incompatible truths in our minds together, and mostly we do. You are sat in a warm room watching skilled people pretending to be other people. Jack is climbing a beanstalk, while the actor climbs a rope ladder. And for the stage manager, I’m also aware of a series of other truths and realities which are also concurrent, while trying to empathise with what you are feeling and with what the actors are trying to do; knowing that a lighting change is about to happen; and that the bar staff need to know when to pour the interval drinks.

All of these are realities, but different ones.  In everyday life the power of the metaphor, and of the sign, surrounds us, and pervades family life, social life, personal and professional relationships; and as importantly, our interior life.  One of the benefits of  the wisdom that age brings is the recognition that there is a difference, but it is not one of pure category.  Father Christmas is pure metaphor; but a reality too, at least for the six-year-old.  To love someone , and to tell them, involves layers of reality and metaphor; of association and reference; but also ambiguity and equivocation that has kept poets busy for centuries.

Where does this lead? I had an exchange with a Christian colleague recently where I said I could accept Christ and as a metaphor: her response was that for her Christ was experience.  I’m aware that there is a difference.  What I’m exploring here, I think, is that experience itself can be metaphor – a metaphor that gives life itself meaning, and can motivate people to undertake extraordinary journeys, to work in dangerous places and with the outcast. It becomes the only way to express its own truth.  The mistake we often make, is not to recognise the metaphor.

Recently I talked to Rebekah Davies, a student on the BA American Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford, about stage management. As part of her project, she very kindly transcribed the interview, which I’ve now put into the learning zone as “Thoughts on stage managing”.

Given that the name of the website refers to creativity, it’s about time there was something here about the processes of creating theatre. What’s set me off is that I’ve just been asked by my friend Gail Pallin to comment on her research paper about creativity and stage management. It has triggered an impulse to try to quantify my own thinking on these matters.

There a different issues here. Some are about the whole issue fo creativity in a cultural context; about value sets , about use value, and about power operations – whose culture, whose creating, and who is consuming the production of creation. We live in consumption-oriented society (so did the Victorians but not in the same sense) and there is a whole literature about the relationship of culture to meaning, cultural production and use.

The question here is about creating meaning however.. and how that gets managed – specifically, in a theatre performance or event context. A few thoughts, coming from Gail’s original book, from the paper, and from thoughts I’ve been having:

1 Creative process as recombination of existing things (“Standing on the shoulders of giants”).

2 Following on from this, the value of contextualised knowledge

3 The ability to recognise the value of unforeseen outcomes, to seize on them and capitalise on opportunity

4 Understanding the rights of the SM to engage in the creative process, and the responsibilities and duty of care that come with it.

5 Creating environments within which creative process can happen; including the social psychology of creative groups.

6 The application of imagination, both in conceptualising the outcome of the developing event, and in plotting missing or conflicting components.

7 Inventiveness in problem solving on all fronts

8 Understanding the visual, spatial, and dynamic aspects of live and recorded events, and being able to correlate the intellectual , emotional and spiritual impact of the performance on its audience.

9 The values of craft skill in refining and developing aspects of the event

10 Chaos and complexity models, comedy and surprising turns

These issues come to the fore in particular when working ina devising situation, whether as actor, director stage manager or designer. I’ll flesh this sketch out in the next few days.

References
Ken Robinson – address to TED conference www.ted.com
Pallin G, Miller Judd P Stage management and creativity www.stagemanagement.co.uk 2008

While much of the time there’s a load of crud on my bookshelf, such as french atlases and camping directories, cookery books and playtexts, there are some books I can’t face putting up in the loft; either because they are too important or because I haven’t finished reading them yet. Here’s a selection of what appear to be the most important / formative. They are also the ones I find myself recommending on a frequent basis.

Senge, P et al Presence London, Nicolas Brearley, 2005

Asking questions about humanism and leadership.  Senge is better known for “The Fifth Discipline” - his description of the qualities of mastery is, er, masterful.

Gardiner, M Critiques of Everyday Life London, Routledge 2000

Traces ideas of the individual quotidian experience through Surrealism and the Situationists to de Certeau and Dorothy Smith

Benjamin W trans Zorn H Illuminations London, Pimlico 1999

(Contains The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - 1936 Discussion of the ‘Aura’ of artwork among other things)

Boal, A Theatre of the Oppressed London, Pluto 1979

The interchange of culture which is needed to cope with asymetric power relationships, through class or other difference.

Fo, Dario trans Emery E Mistero Buffo in Plays One London Methuen 1992

Totally delightful mix of performance and lecture on medieval clowning

Brook, P The Empty Space London Penguin 1968

Devastatingly great analysis of the process of theatre. I was bowled out by it, and went to see the White Box Dream expecting to see it put into action. Maybe he’d moved on; maybe I was reading something else into it.

Sennett R The Fall of Public Man London Penguin 2003(new edn)

Insight into contemporary and historical attitudes to being and doing in public.

Sennett R The Corrosion of Character (The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism) New York, Norton, 1999

Sennett R The Craftsman London, Allen Lane 2008

First of a trilogy on material culture. This guy is tapping into the zeitgeist, trying to work out why it feels like it’s all going wrong, in the midst of material wealth.

Huxley A The Doors of Perception London Penguin 1959

On the nature of mystical experience .

Berne, E Games People Play London, Penguin 1967

Transactional analysis. Explains a lot about why people often act in strange ways. Performed as a play in the 60’s.

Campbell, J The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

An attempt to chart the ‘monomyth’ - te psychic blueprint of human development as expressed through religious symbolism.

Shlain, L The Alphabet and the Goddess (The conflict between word and image) Penguin 1998

Associations between Logos and Eros; monotheism and mother goddess worship; changing technologies; images and iconoclasm.

Bakhtin, M The Carnivalesque in Storey, J Popular Culture and Cultural Theory: a reader.

Explanation and enquiry into the role of the demotic in performance.

Julian Bryant

Background

Having trained as a teacher in the early 70’s, and moving on to work as a performer, lighting technician and stage manager professionally, I came to Rose Bruford to teach in 1981. My interest had always been with a radical tradition, touching briefly on TiE with Perspectives; with diversity theatre with Temba; children’s theatre with Unicorn and Robert Cooper; but mostly shades of community through the rep movement, roadshows and main auditorium work.

Starting a family and becoming part of a community meant I was able to, and needed to, become politically active; campaigning with Labour through the Thatcher years, through into the heady days of Blair and seeing a left-of-centre agenda being played out locally; in Westminster and in Brussels. Seeing regeneration at work in poorer communities, and new visions of the role of the arts emerging that seek to engage a broader consensus, as Jack Lang did in France.

And professionally I see my work changing, taking into account a certain class bias; questioning assumtions of cultural value. Trying to be honest with students about the challenges that face them as practitioners; about ethical dilemmas on who is included, and who isn’t.

In 1974, while I was ‘resting’ I was employed by Labour to canvas Coalville, Leicestershire. As a town it did what it said on the tin. One night my last call was to a collier’s house (his description) - the guy was now a bus driver, having laid out an overseer over a professional disagreement. An emotional man; but as I though, not greatly cultured - I’d read Sons and Lovers so I had an idea. He then told me that his family knew to get clear when he got out his violin and played the Bruchner concerto.

Discussions about class culture are complex, and riven with contradiction, just like the collier violinist. Cultural capital varies from person to person; and one is constantly surprised by richness and dearth each springing up ide by side, in many different places. In the end one is searching for the value of a life well lived; of demonstrations of human kindness and compassion; of understandings of the world which may be expressed as easily, and as movingly, by the recollections of a pensioner as by a poet laureate.

Some issues:

• Poetics in performance. It’s not about the language content as such, more the structuring . May be this is the craft versus Art debate.
• Ownership - whose show is it anyway? The manager who put the deal together that made it possible, and who pays the wages and takes the, er, profit? The Director whose vision and foresight is n display, and who wrings the performance from their cast? The Actor who struts and frets every night, and whose timing and talent keeps the audience on the edge of their seats? The Audience member who bought the ticket, and without whom it would be so much more easy, and so much more onanistic to do the show? Or the Stage Manager, whose “unassuming control of that small empire” allows for an operational reality?

This post is being written in Blackpool, where I’m about to work with young people from the local FE college. From the hotel room I’ve a clear view of the Tower. Two days ago I was doing the same in Nottingham - from my room I could see the castle lit up, looking for all the world like the image on the old Players’ fag packet. The city of Raleigh bikes; of lace and the Huguenots; of DH Lawrence and coal miners. Tonight the pub quiz was about entertainment, with a few geography questions thrown in for good measure.

If you’d have asked the question in the fifties, those in the know would have said working class drama was about kitchen sink - Arnold Wesker; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; The Knack. Scripts written by aspirational writers, maybe a product of grammar school class mobility, keen to establish an alternative reality; the form of the drama set by precedents going back to GB Shaw or Miss Horniman, and watched by similar. A skilled working class, proud of its craft tradition, resentful of its exploitation in factories and at least one of two world wars, that had taken part in creating nationalised medicine, transport and energy. Plays were asking where were we to go, in effect.

Then these achievements become normalised (or of taken for granted, but that mis-states it). Education allows these working class kids to join the middle classes, but with a folk memory of a different value set. And the world of work changes too - out go the smokestack jobs, whether it be mining, or boilermaking, or cement - many exported overseas. In come the new jobs like retail - 1/8 of the British economy is run by Tesco? Or finance - 1/3 of GDP is created in the Square Mile or thereabouts. Or Creative Industries.

So where is working class drama now? I’ve slightly set it up; because working class drama is probably where it’s always been, not where academia looks for it. It’s in the pantomime, that 90% of the public go to watch. In the variety shows, full of camp and feathers - Blackpool still going strong. In stand-up comedy in so many forms, including bingo callers and quiz league hosts (excepting of course the university school, though even there one can trace influence). In seaside carnival, and processions around the Illuminations. In Gospel choirs, rock concerts and in clubbing, in hiphop, trance and garage, and on occasions stadium rock, as camp as it comes.

This is a theatre of Everyday Life in the sense Alan Read describes. Its rituals are about call-response rather than rapt attention. Audiences participate, usually actively rather than the passive sense that is implied by Peter Brook, when he points out the use in French of the verb assister. It tends to Bakhtin’s sense of carnivalesque; of a world (pretended to be) turned upside down.

The textuality of the fifties (as elsewhere) isn’t as important, it’s a much more visual world now. And it isn’t about content - fun though Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels might be, it’s a rich kid’s pastiche of working class life. It’s more to do with structures, and often with visuals. Where it gets interesting is in the negotiations with young working class people about the culture. Exploring creative process, rather than playtext, so that it becomes about doing - about crafting rather than analysing (except on the sense of reflecting-in-action). So ….

Let’s see if Blackpool rocks!

Perhaps the epitome of the modern celebrity, Jean-Claude has made a significant contribution in a wide variety of fields. He first shot to prominence as a backing singer to Robbie Williams on Charles Trenet’s La Mer, he added his own quality to the chansonier’s oeuvre. He went on to create a celebrated Sci-Fi creation with Omega-6, which describes the inner world of a protagonists battle with pre-senile dementia. Along with his colleague Andre Aiglefin he has lately made a substantial contribution as a restauranteur to the quality of fast-food techniques in British cuisine.

His origins are in his native region of Gascony, but went to study at the Sorbonne under Alan Sokal, becoming deeply involved in the development of the concept of transformative hermeneutics. He went on to the University of Biarritz, where he developed his doctoral thesis on the Basque contribution to early maritime navigation, and where he also developed his taste for the bizarre and unusual while playing pelota at an international level.

He is well-known for his aversion to modern net technologies. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he has developed through his online presence a transatlantic reputation, partly through the dryness of his humour. With his partner Lisette MacKerrow he moved to London in 1997 to develop their eating club La Rascasse. Through a chance meeting, he became responsible for introducing the French company Royale de Luxe, (hailing from the seaport of Nantes) who brought The Sultan’s Elephant to London in 2006. He has been seen at a number of festivals, where he is rapidly gaining an avid following.

Unusually for such an active practitioner, he has become known as something of an authority on postmodernism, and especially on the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. He has given lectures on the subject at Rose Bruford College; characterised by his typically enigmatic style of presentation. It was there that he discovered the celebratory art company Bohemian Events, for whom he has become an important mentor and inspiration. His latest work, about to be unveiled, is about the process of mythopoesis and the growth of urban legends; not without a measure of self-referentiality.

Looking at performance now, I’m exercised by what the world of performance is about. It feels as if it’s changing - witness Mark Lawson’s recent comments in “The Guardian” where he discusses the relationship between TV and stage acting. But it’s not just about the relationship with TV but all of the mediated world. The extent to which young people (in particular) use mobile technology to interact with the world. The use of the IPod (and before it the Walkman) to create a soundtrack to lived experience, and by implication subjecting it to alteration.

Modern performance has a tendency to blur distinctions between actor and audience; performer and technician; scenographer and scenographee (to coin a neologism). The impact of opening out the culture of British arts allows in carnival, street performance, music festivals, rock and gospel into the canon of performance. the role of the writer is challenged by devising; Forum theatre subtly undermines authority in other ways.

The debate started by Tessa Jowell’s 2004 essay and the Arts Council centres round a dichotomy between aesthetic and instrumental views of the arts. The response from Demos is a little more nuanced.

However, it might be useful to regard theatre now as a number of projects. These might be an approach to defining contemporary genres. Here is a suggestion (the list isn’t meant to be complete):

• exploration and transmission of a heritage
• new writing that explores the state of the nation; or the human condition (what Aleks Siertz famously referred to a “Me and my mates theatre” - New Theatre Quarterly (2004), 20: 79-83 Cambridge University Press
  Copyright © 2004 Cambridge University Press)
• Theatre for young people, and theatre by young people.
• Theatre from communities (whether geographic, ethnic, of gender attitude or sexuality)
• Music-based theatre and opera
• Dance theatre and physical theatre

Further thoughts

• Theatre event as an expression of culture
• Theatre and reality
• Changing definitions of quality