Charmian Smith finds out about verbatim theatre.
Many people have stories to tell but few have the opportunity to have them told in their own words and gestures by actors.
Be/Longing, a verbatim play opening at Allen Hall Theatre tonight does just that.
It retells people's stories about what it means to belong to New Zealand, replicating sections of real-life interviews.
Associate Prof Stuart Young and senior lecturer Hilary Halba, of the University of Otago theatre studies department, are presenting their latest work in an ongoing research project on documentary and verbatim theatre.
It's a form of theatre flourishing in the UK and US, but little has been done in New Zealand, according to Young.
The pair received a research grant for the project, which included Gathered in Confidence (2008) and Hush (2009), which toured Otago and Southland and was staged in Auckland.
They combine techniques developed by Anna Deavere Smith in the US, who constructs plays from interviews and re-enacts the movements and gestures of the interviewees, and Alecky Blythe, in the UK, who uses the words of interviewees relayed to actors through earpieces, who repeat them with all the inflections, pauses and emphases.
For Be/Longing, Young and Halba interviewed people who had come to New Zealand from overseas, and a few New Zealanders who had lived much of their life abroad before returning.
"We were asking people where they came from, why did they leave and what did they leave behind, why did they end up coming here, what did they expect when they came here, what did they find when they came here and what are their impressions, and challenges, pleasure, satisfactions and dissatisfactions of the life they'd been living in New Zealand," Prof Young says.
"It means the play is obviously about these people's experiences of New Zealand but also it becomes about New Zealand and about us, because we are refracting through these people who we are. They become us or we become them," Young said.
Because Young and Halba do not want to appear like anthropologists, they include themselves in the filming, asking questions, and talking about their own experiences of living abroad.
From more than 40 hours of filmed interviews, Young and Halba, with the help of writer Simon O'Connor and Auckland dramaturge Fiona Graham, selected and shaped extracts into a play. It was like editing a film, Halba says.
The actors repeat the words of their subjects, which are relayed to them through earphones, and they replicate their inflections and intonation. By studying the visual score of the interviews on screen, they learn and reproduce physical gestures as truthfully as possible.
The question then arises, why not make a film, rather than repeating the recorded video and audio on stage as a play?
Halba explains that not only does Be/Longing follow on from Hush, which was about family violence and the interviewees wished to remain anonymous, but also because a live performance is more potent than one on screen.
"There's something incredibly interesting theatrically that happens to the actor when they do this, and we are interested in the fact that the actor is there but there is this invisible trace of the other person over the actor," Halba explains.
Be/Longing premiered at the New Performance Festival in Auckland last week and opens in Dunedin tonight. Several other shows at the festival questioned the nature, role and function of the actor and there were many conversations about that, she says.
"What we often do as actors is make a whole bunch of presumptions about a character and then we perform those presumptions based on a whole lot of things we've already done in our lives in the world, and the expressive tool that is our habituated body.
"I guess what happens with this process is you don't get the opportunity to do that because you are copying the physical score."
Replicating the movements of the interviewees means the actors do actions and use words and gestures they would not normally do, even on stage.
Also, replicating a real conversation has more life and immediacy than a written script, she says.
"That to me is the fascination of this interface between real life and representation. We used the same words they've chosen, so in real-life conversation people go off on tangents and sometimes use odd and interesting and poetic and often quite oblique phrasing.
"There's a young man in our piece - one of his physical gestures is he lifts and crosses his arms over his head and it's physical choices like that that actors would very rarely make.
"The way people laugh, the engaging thing that happens when people laugh in real life. All those things become fascinating when you replicate them in that stage environment. To me this is the fascination of this interface between real life and representation," she says.
To keep the actors true to the original words, they have the soundtrack playing in the earphones while on stage, rather than memorising the script, Prof Young says.
"Even if an actor drills herself with the words in her ear then takes the plug out and repeats it, you'd be amazed at how quickly there is slippage and amplification. Actors want to interpret and that leads to embellishment and while that is often very interesting to us in performance, it's not honouring the people we've interviewed," he says.
- Be|Longing opens at Allen Hall Theatre in Dunedin at 7.30 tonight.