Narrativising the facts: acting in screen and stage docudrama

This article presents findings and seeks to establish the theoretical markers that indicate the growing importance of fact-based drama in screen and theatre performance to the wider Anglophone culture. During the final decade of the twentieth century and the opening one of the twenty-first, television docudrama and documentary theatre have grown in visibility and importance in the UK, providing key responses to social, cultural and political change over the millennial period. Actors were the prime focus for the enquiry principally because so little research has been done into the special demands that fact-based performance makes on them. The main emphasis in actor training (in the UK at any rate) is, as it always has been, on preparation for fictional drama. Preparation in acting schools is also heavily geared towards stage performance. Our thesis was that performers called upon to play the roles of real people, in whatever medium, have added responsibilities both towards history and towards real individuals and their families. Actors must engage with ethical questions whether they like it or not, and we found them keenly aware of this. In the course of the research, we conducted 30 interviews with a selection of actors ranging from the experienced to the recently-trained. We also interviewed a few industry professionals and actor trainers. Once the interviews started it was clear that actors themselves made little or no distinction between how they set about their work for television and film. The essential disciplines for work in front of the camera, they told us, are the same whether the camera is electronic or photographic. Some adjustments become necessary, of course in the multi-camera TV studio. But much serious drama for the screen is made on film anyway. We found it was also the case that young actors now tend to get their first paid employment before a camera rather than on a stage. The screen-before-stage tendency, along with the fundamental re-shaping that has gone on in the British theatre since at least the early 1980s, had implications for actor training. We have also found that theatre work still tends to be most valued by actors. For all the actors we interviewed, theatre was what they liked doing best because it was there they could practice and develop their skills, there they could work most collectively towards performance, and there they could more directly experience audience feedback in the real time of the stage play. The current world of television has been especially constrained in regard to rehearsal time in comparison to theatre (and, to a lesser extent, film). This has also affected actors’ valuation of their work. Theatre is, and is not, the most important medium in which they find work. Theatre is most important spiritually and intellectually, because in theatre is collaborative, intensive, and involving; theatre is not as important in financial and career terms, because it is not as lucrative and not as visible to a large public as acting for the screen. Many actors took the view that, for all the industrial differences that do affect them and inevitably interest the academic, acting for the visible media of theatre, film and television involved fundamentally the same process with slightly different emphases.

Svetlana

Svetlana is a series of photographs documenting rehearsals for an opera that was never performed. Written by Waw Pierogi, founder of the 1980s group Xex, little is known of the opera, only that it was inspired by Svetlana, a character from one of their songs and the daughter of Stalin, who defected from the Soviet Union twice. A fictional Svetlana and a bogus Leon Theremin - inventor of the eponymous hands-free electronic musical instrument who was later kidnapped by the KGB - inhabit an archive of photographs from a session of stage rehearsals and location shots. Combining Svetlana’s narrative with a conspiracy to create sound weapons, this documentation of theatre workshops, styled after Bauhaus drama class exercises, produces an entirely spurious story of espionage, sonic weaponry and the clash between love and ideology. The performers sport geometric military costumes, brandishing sculptural forms fashioned after the acoustic locators that preceded radar technology. These redundant locators were still kept in use as props, concealing the introduction of radar from the Germans. They perfectly capture the theatricality of military might and suggest the rhetorical force of sound or even the political power of art. Svetlana was originally produced as part of a residency at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, and was later shown at Tatty Devine, alongside a special capsule collection of jewellery made by Tatty Devine.

Children with Special Educational Needs as film makers: Using digital video to support Understandings of Narrative

The literature has identified issues around transitions among phases for all pupils (Cocklin, 1999) including pupils with special educational needs (SEN) (Morgan 1999, Maras and Aveling 2006). These issues include pupils’ uncertainties and worries about building size and spatial orientation, exposure to a range of teaching styles, relationships with peers and older pupils as well as parents’ difficulties in establishing effective communications with prospective secondary schools. Research has also identified that interventions to facilitate these educational transitions should consider managerial support, social and personal familiarisation with the new setting as well as personalised learning strategies (BECTA 2004). However, the role that digital technologies can play in supporting these strategies or facilitating the role of the professionals such as SENCos and heads of departments involved in supporting effective transitions for pupils with SEN has not been widely discussed. Uses of ICT include passing references of student-produced media presentations (Higgins 1993) and use of photographs of activities attached to a timetable to support familiarisation with the secondary curriculum for pupils with autism (Cumine et al. 1998).

“Ce n’est pas elle qu’on voit”: the photograph in the work of Annie Saumont

The incorporation of ekphrastic evocations of photographs into fictional works is a growing trend charted by (mostly) literary and (occasionally) art critics interested in the effect of their inclusion in a narrative. What has emerged as a veritable affinity of photography with literature has produced a fertile interdisciplinary critical discourse around areas of intersection between visual and verbal. With regard to short fiction, the photograph is often subject to investigation as analogy, the photograph and the short story being considered metonymically related with regard to form and effect. This notion of a structural equivalence between short story and photograph is one stressed by author/photographer Julio Cortàzar, concerned to highlight the quality of intensity he ascribes to both forms, which he saw as ‘cutting out a piece of reality’ in order to ‘breaking out’ into a wider one. Given Annie Saumont’s oft-cited admiration of Cortàzar’s work it is unsurprising that in her own writing – of stories themselves often classed, in their elliptical density, as verbal snapshots – she should take an interest in photographs and/or photographers. This article seeks to explore and analyse different values Saumont ascribes to what was paradoxically described by Barthes as ‘invisible’, in that what we see when viewing a photograph is, (often treacherously), ‘ pas elle qu’on voit’: never, or never solely, the actual object itself …

Serving two masters: a reflective narrative of reconciling the tensions faced in designing doctoral research

This paper presents a reflective narrative of the process of designing a PhD project. Using the analogy of the play 'One Man, Two Guvnors' , this paper discusses the tensions a beginning researcher faces in reconciling her own vision for a project with the academic demands of doctoral-level study. Focusing on an ethnographic study of a reading group for visually-impaired people, the paper explores how the researcher's developing understanding of the considerations necessary when working with disabled people impacted on the research design. In particular, it focuses on the conflict faced by doctoral students when working in a paradigm that requires actively involving research participants, thereby relinquishing some control over the project. The aim of the paper is to provide an honest narrative that will resonate with other beginning researchers.

‘These changes and accessions of knowledge’: translation, scientific travel writing and modernity - Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative

A second English translation of Alexander von Humboldt's account of travel to South America, the Relation historique (1814–25), was published between 1852 and 1853. Appearing some 30 years after the first seven-volume translation (1814–29) by Helen Maria Williams, this second rendering of the Personal Narrative by Thomasina Ross was an abridged version that aimed to make Humboldt's travelogue more relevant to the mid-century reader. This translation has largely been overlooked by Humboldt scholars, despite it being a far more affordable, accessible and popular edition. I discuss here how Ross's revisions can be understood within a larger process of rereading and revision that responded to critics’ assessments of the first translation. Emphasising the status of the Personal Narrative as a text in flux, I assess how Ross modernised it to meet the demands of a new readership, recasting the image that Humboldt had constructed of himself as a travelling scientist, scientific writer and member of the international scientific community.

Task design and second language performance: the effect of narrative type on learner output

This article reports on a detailed empirical study of the way narrative task design influences the oral performance of second-language (L2) learners. Building on previous research findings, two dimensions of narrative design were chosen for investigation: narrative complexity and inherent narrative structure. Narrative complexity refers to the presence of simultaneous storylines; in this case, we compared single-story narratives with dual-story narratives. Inherent narrative structure refers to the order of events in a narrative; we compared narratives where this was fixed to others where the events could be reordered without loss of coherence. Additionally, we explored the influence of learning context on performance by gathering data from two comparable groups of participants: 60 learners in a foreign language context in Teheran and 40 in an L2 context in London. All participants recounted two of four narratives from cartoon pictures prompts, giving a between-subjects design for narrative complexity and a within-subjects design for inherent narrative structure. The results show clearly that for both groups, L2 performance was affected by the design of the task: Syntactic complexity was supported by narrative storyline complexity and grammatical accuracy was supported by an inherently fixed narrative structure. We reason that the task of recounting simultaneous events leads learners into attempting more hypotactic language, such as subordinate clauses that follow, for example, while, although, at the same time as, etc. We reason also that a tight narrative structure allows learners to achieve greater accuracy in the L2 (within minutes of performing less accurately on a loosely structured narrative) because the tight ordering of events releases attentional resources that would otherwise be spent on finding connections between the pictures. The learning context was shown to have no effect on either accuracy or fluency but an unexpectedly clear effect on syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. The learners in London seem to have benefited from being in the target language environment by developing not more accurate grammar but a more diverse resource of English words and syntactic choices. In a companion article (Foster & Tavakoli, 2009) we compared their performance with native-speaker baseline data and see that, in terms of nativelike selection of vocabulary and phrasing, the learners in London are closing in on native-speaker norms. The study provides empirical evidence that L2 performance is affected by task design in predictable ways. It also shows that living within the target language environment, and presumably using the L2 in a host of everyday tasks outside the classroom, confers a distinct lexical advantage, not a grammatical one.

Towards a ‘civic’ narrative: British national identity and the transformation of the British National Party

This article examines the ways in which the BNP utilises the elements of British national identity in its discourse and argues that, during Griffin's leadership, the party has made a discursive choice to shift the emphasis from an ethnic to a civic narrative. We put forward two hypotheses, 1: the modernisation of the discourse of extreme right parties in the British context is likely to be related to the adoption of a predominantly civic narrative and 2: in the context of British party competition the BNP is likely to converge towards UKIP, drawing upon elements of its perceived winning formula, i.e. a predominantly civic rhetoric of national identity. We proceed to empirically test our hypotheses by conducting a twofold comparison. First, we compare the BNP's discourse pre- and post-1999 showing the BNP's progressive adoption of a civic narrative; and second the BNP's post-1999 discourse to that of UKIP in order to illustrate their similarities in terms of civic values.

Storytelling in song: television music, narrative and allusion in 'The O.C.'

Television’s long-form storytelling has the potential to allow the rippling of music across episodes and seasons in interesting ways. In the integration of narrative, music and meaning found in The O.C. (Fox, FOX 2003-7), popular song’s allusive and referential qualities are drawn upon to particularly televisual ends. At times embracing its ‘disruptive’ presence, at others suturing popular music into narrative, at times doing both at once. With television studies largely lacking theories of music, this chapter draws on film music theory and close textual analysis to analyse some of the programme's music moments in detail. In particular it considers the series-spanning use of Jeff Buckley’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’ (and its subsequent oppressive presence across multiple televisual texts), the end of episode musical montage and the use of recurring song fragments as theme within single episodes. In doing so it highlights music's role in the fragmentation and flow of the television aesthetic and popular song’s structural presence in television narrative. Illustrating the multiplicity of popular song’s use in television, these moments demonstrate song’s ability to provide narrative commentary, yet also make particular use of what Ian Garwood describes as the ability of ‘a non-diegetic song to exceed the emotional range displayed by diegetic characters’ (2003:115), to ‘speak’ for characters or to their feelings, contributing to both teen TV’s melodramatic affect and narrative expression.

Task design and second language performance: the effect of narrative type on learner output

This article presents a study examining how narrative structure and narrative complexity might influence the performance of second language learners. Forty learners of English in London and sixty learners in Teheran were asked to retell cartoon stories from picture prompts. Each performed two of four narrative tasks that had different degrees of narrative structure (loose or tight) and of storyline complexity (with or without background events). Results support the findings of previous research that tight task structure is connected to increased accuracy and that narratives involving background information give rise to more complex syntax. A comparison of the data from the London and Teheran cohorts showed that the learners in London used significantly more complex syntax and diverse vocabulary even though they did not differ from the Teheran learners in other performance dimensions.

No Haus Like Bau

The project consists of a live performance taking the 2005 IKEA riot as the starting point for a speculative history of a fictional future, culminating in a choreographed re-enactment of the original event. It is accompanied by a film series explores the possibility of collective action emerging from the capitalist relations inherent in the consumer riot. The performance, staged at the Berlin Biennale, continues this research into re-enactment and post-1989 politics, using a stage set made of flatpack furniture. Using the aesthetics of Modernism and the avant garde, the project transposes early twentieth century utopian ideology to a present day setting where mass uprisings are motivated by cheap commodities. By re-evaluating biomechanics and Bauhaus theatre theory, these explorations of consumerism and revolution propose that the mechanized movement developed in conjunction with industrial labour survives as a historical re-enactment in the wake of manufacturing work in the west. In the absence of a visual language apt to the contemporary, No Haus Like Bau uses re-enactment as a retrogarde tactic. Its purpose on the one hand is to invoke trajectories for alternate futures that never materialized at an originary moment. On the other hand, the clash of past forms with present content serves to accentuate the historical changes that have thrown into question these forms. Rather than reflecting the present, the projection of the past into a fictional future aims to destabilize the dominant narrative that suggests the current configuration of art, politics and human nature has always been this way. The project has been widely exhibited internationally and supported by Film London and Arts Council England. A theoretical essay on re-enactment as a strategy for performance has been published in Art Papers and in Memory [MIT]. The project also formed the basis of a solo exhibition at Te Tuhi Art Centre, Auckland.