Between Then and Now: Performing Archives
Last month, PRG hosted a conference, Between Then and Now: Performing Archives at Royal Exchange Theatre. The keynote of the second day of the conference was MMU’s visiting Professor Matthew Spangler. He invited three people to perform an extract of a new play that he is working on called Operation Ajax. Theodore Castle is a current MA Performance student at MMU and he was invited to read as one of the characters in this extract alongside Drama and Contemporary Theatre graduate Adam Fidan and Actor, Adam Sina. Below is Theo’s reflections on this experience.
Theo’s reflection
It is not everyday that you are asked to perform with an award-winning playwright and the lead actor of his recent highly successful play – The Beekeeper of Aleppo. That was, however, my day one Thursday in mid-June when I received an invitation to take part in a reading of Prof. Matthew Spangler’s work in progress, Operation Ajax. On a blistering hot summer’s morning, I strode my way into the Royal Exchange Theatre and watched as the first few speakers rose and delivered their seminars. Each session, prepared independently, dovetailed through the themes of preservation and restoration of lost knowledge.
The speaker who lingered the strongest in my memory was Riham Isaac, whose session was called The Palestinian Archive as Embodied Practice. The congregated audience stood around this collection of writings, phrases and photographs, all compiled into single book. Isaac placed such emphasis on the tactile nature of possessing a book filled with these increasingly rare slices of Palestinian life, and encouraged us to hold the loose papers in our hand. Delicately turning the pages, the importance of such preservation was compounded by her own experiences of war as a civilian, isolated from her homeland. After Matthew arrived, we stood and looked at the archive for some time, the historical connection to his own play providing a fresh reminder of protecting the knowledge before us.
I was fortunate to watch two other performance pieces during the session, one utilizing projected animations to colour the spoken words of the reader, and the other a disturbing yet brilliant semi-verbatim text performed by three undergraduate students from the University of Manchester. Each were opposite in tone and subject matter, yet when paired in a conference day, they complimented the other perfectly. The harrowing and utterly beautiful existing in tandem, articulated with care and depth to their perspectives. Matthew and I took several opportunities to stand in the air-conditioned atrium and work through the text. Despite the heavy connotations and subject matter of the titular 1953 coup of Iran’s government, humour had weaved its way into the extract perfectly. As our small crew of performers grew, with Drama and Contemporary Performance student Adam Fidan and actor Adam Sina joining later, we slipped into synchronization. Matthew continually tweaked the script throughout as new moments flowed naturally in our characters’ voices.
The performers, sat in front of the hard working fan as Matthew delivered his keynote paper, elaborating on his experiences with researching the NSA Archives while writing the script, preserved knowledge informing of what was intended to remain forever hidden. The interplay formed in the rehearsal deepened to a newfound energy between us, bouncing ideas back and forth between our lines as the text flowed; the applause we were greeted with afterwards confirming the sense of success between us. Following the closing remarks, we stepped out into the warm evening air, and after a detailed philosophical debate, headed to the nearest pub where the conversation about archives and how to perform them continued…
