Physical Theatre and its Discontents

by Paul Davies
Reproduced from Staging Wales, ed. Anna-Marie Taylor (University of Wales Press, 1997)

Volcano is a national and international touring theatre company. The artistic directors are graduates of the University Wales Swansea and the designer and technical director was born and educated in Neath. Their work has not focused on the 'problem of Welshness identity, division, unity, past, present or future. One consequence of this is that itmight be said that Volcano has made little impact within the Principality.' Nevertheless the work has been widely seen outside of Wales, in Hong Kong, Greece, Spain, Macedonia, Germany, Montenegro, France, Italy, Russia, Holland . . . At the same time, Cardiff, in particular, and to a lesser extent Swansea, Aberystwyth and Builth Wells, have remained vital platforms for the development and promotion of the work of Volcano. Indeed Volcano were probably one of the first Welsh companies to play at the newly opened Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea in 1983.

Adapting the work of Steven Berkoff and Jonathan Moore provided the basis for the early touring success. The 1980s were a difficult decade. Conservative politics had not yet targeted the cultural infrastructure within Wales and Great Britain as whole. Thatcherism had older scores to settle. As a young Anglo-Welsh theatre company rooted in a dissident, sometimes Marxist, sometimes oppositional, sometimes just bloody-minded tradition, it appeared to us that Welsh theatre was curiously unprepared for the challenge that Thatcher's modernizing rhetoric posed. Culture and the place of theatre within that awkward claim does not just go on; it gets redefined, left behind, obliterated, the subject of doctorates and so on.

Just what happened to the culture of theatre in Britain in the 1980s is perhaps a story that remains to be told. Certainly the success of New Right ideology and the collapse of the Communist utopia signalled the end of one way of looking at, and living in, the world. Radical rethinking of a Marxist and non-Marxist hue declared that we were now living in 'new times'.

The old definitions would not do and various attempts were made to. reinvigorate our political, social, sexual and cultural vocabularies. Whilst it is too early to say how successful any of this rethinking has been, it cannot be doubted that postmodern theory casts a long shadow over all modern strategies for change.

Furthermore it would be a mistake to see these developments as purely narrow, academic concerns. The collapse of political, and to a lesser extent experimental, theatre can be viewed within the context of the triumph of the market and postmodern excess. Of course the situation is more fluid than this account suggests. Rearguard battles were fought, but whatever the outcome of particular struggles, it was clear that the 1980s were a critical decade for culture and capitalism in Wales. There was, for example, within funding bodies (and this to some extent remains true) a crisis of definition. Were they funding new work on the basis of old criteria or old work on the basis of insufficiently articulated new criteria?

It was from within this particular historical conjunction that Volcano developed as one of Britain's foremost proponents of physical theatre. The term physical theatre is imprecise. Volcano have not sought to articulate, or represent, an essentialized account of this new school of performance. We are historical animals and whatever the seductive charms of naturalism, theatre has always been, in some senses, physical. Nevertheless there was within Volcano the feeling that theatre had, unfortunately, turned its back on what was an increasingly complex political situation. And here the emphasis was on an expanded definition of the political. Sexual politics were now at the very centre of both our theatre practice and our imaginary speculations as to how we might live.There was in addition the problem of the text, the author and the audience.

We needed to use movement and words to break through what we considered to be irrelevant patterns of performance and inherited patterns of response. In a very obvious way this was theatre that was young, angry and urgent. However, beyond this immediate response Volcano had chosen their material carefully. The concern was to unlock the modern/ postmodern debate in ways that revealed new and unexpected theatrical possibilities.

Combining movement and text, dynamic and exhilarating versions of Tony Harrison's V, Medea: Sex War, Shakespeare's sonnets (L.O.VE.) and the Communist Manifesto were produced. The focus of these productions was in some senses the same. Volcano sought to disturb and sometimes destroy the classics (ancient and modern), to suggest that the tradition - be it political, cultural or sexual - is not so smooth, not so seamless. More recently we have examined the legacy of Ibsen in How to Live, the influence of Nietzsche and Baudrillard in After the Orgy and Chekhov's Three Sisters in our post-Tarrantino, post-feminist thriller, Vagina Dentata. The belief has been both that a truly contemporary theatre-must draw on a variety of sources and that the market system of production, exchange and ideology is differentiated but universal. The Anglo-Welsh experience can be seen within the logic of late twentieth century capitalism.

The vexed problems of nations, states and identities have not been addressed. Rather, Volcano have sought to reinvigorate theatre, reminding us of theatre's popular, even Dionysian, potential. The enemy here is, on the one hand, the complacency that surrounds much of our theatre practice; and on the other developing systems of technology that may render the culture of theatre an increasingly formal thing of the past.

This scenario is not doom-laden, although we have our problems in Wales. Foremost among these are: a coagulation of theatre, its practitioners and funders around Cardiff (although 1 would say that, as Volcano are based in Swansea!), a slender base for the production and touring of work within Wales and lastly a culture that when in retreat prefers the past to the present and the known to the unknown.

But these things change. Certainly our experience over the last ten years in Wales has seen the development of a more flexible approach to the problems, a willingness to discuss them - and sometimes even to do something about them! Diversity in theatre seems to us to be more of a healthy sign than some kind of national style or characteristic and as the end of the century approaches we seem to have more of the former than the latter. Whether the current situation reflects the policy of arts councils and the practice of artists is another matter. The profound challenge that the 'happy consciousness' of postmodernity offers to artists and funders alike seems, as yet, to have provoked little in the way of practical or theoretical response.

Our own intentions remain the same: to move between Wales and Europe, to find ourselves somewhere in the middle, on the edge perhaps off the map. In this vein we have planned a production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood with Welsh, Albanian and English actors and a Croatian director. But, wait a moment, we can't get the rights, they (who are they?) are performing it at the National. Oh well that's different isn't it, see ...

Note: Although the recent success of Frantic Assembly, who have worked with Volcano, and are recipients of ACW project funding does not bear out this claim.