Download 2. An archaeology of song in performance: exploring the associative

2. An archaeology of song in performance: exploring the associative character of
performance and performance training (a praxis proposal)
Caroline Gatt (Anthropology/Theatre Research Fellow, University of Aberdeen)
Ang Gey Pin (Theatre Practitioner/ Candidate in Drama: Practice as Research PhD, University
of Kent),
To be presented at the conference “The Performing Arts in the 20 th Century Malta”, 28th
and 29th March 2014, Malta
Abstract:
We propose a praxis session that intertwines a dialogue between a theatre practitioner and
a theatre/anthropology researcher, a performance-demonstration and open discussion.
A performance artist raised in the fast-changing urban landscapes of Singapore in the 1970s,
Ang Gey Pin experienced a period when the many local Chinese dialects were forbidden.
Driven in some way by this, Ang embarked on her theatre career to rediscover and translate
her own tradition. Inspired by a resonant desire to perform ‘living memory’, Gatt recently
began a theatre anthropology project in collaboration with Ang, exploring the songs her
grandmother ‘Mariuccia’ taught her in childhood. ‘Mariuccia’s’ songs were in Italian, Sicilian,
Neapolitan, English and Maltese. As a child, Mariuccia would be sat upon the piano during
rehearsals at the Royal Opera House in Malta, listening to international singers. Mariuccia
shared this experience of performance in Malta at the start of the twentieth century
through her stories and her songs. Gatt explores these oral histories by means of actor
training, especially as guided by Ang, to develop performance material imbued with such
living memory. The hope is to bring to life these memories of performance in the Malta of
another century: An archaeology of song in performance.
Both Ang and Gatt have found their paths to be characterised by constant mobility. Ang has
found that her work has taken her from Singapore to Europe, but also much further beyond,
working with performing artists inter-culturally. Gatt’s theatre work began in Malta, but
since then her performance training comes from inter-cultural workshops across Europe.
Consider the multiplicity of origins in Mariuccia’s songs. Consider also the mobile character
of performance training contexts. How useful is it to understand performance or
performance training along the lines of local or foreign? Far from being locally bounded,
what has emerged from Ang and Gatt’s collaborative reflections is that actors in training and
in performance often form transient groupings, comprised of practitioners, collaborators
and observers from diverse cultural roots, who find connection through performative
experiences. Here community and belonging are associative and affinitive, rather than
genealogical and homogenous.
The session offers the very context in which to explore what ‘locality’, ‘tradition’ and
‘community’ could be, when performance artists reside and relocate themselves in
intercultural contexts.
Space: a studio rehearsal space for performance-demonstration.
Time: dialogue (15min), performance-demo (15min), open discussion (15min).
http://www.um.edu.mt/nocentries/eventsitems/the_performing_arts_in_20th_century_ma
lta_heritage,_transmission,_relevance.