Playdate 3: Can’t be created or destroyed, only converted

Playdate #3 Reflections

For the final playdate, we explored headphone verbatim theater in a two-day workshop. The participants were actors myself and others who are theater makers in their own right.

On the first day, we began with a simple warm-up activity to focus our attention. The first proper activity involved interviewing each other. I used the same interview questions from the first playdate: "What was a dream that you had to let go of?" and "Tell me about a time when you were wrongly accused of doing something."

We paired up, interviewed each other, and spent time with our partner's recordings. When we reconvened, we put on our earpieces and attempted the exercise. Everyone, including myself, was trying headphone verbatim theater for the first time. It was a fascinating experience.

There were multiple layers to the experience: performing headphone verbatim theater, watching someone perform, and watching someone perform your own interview.

My experience performing was challenging, especially with the room's poor acoustics. What I realized while performing was that there were very few opportunities to interpret or make assumptions about the interviewee. You simply can't think while doing it you're just trying your best at an already difficult task. My brain was primarily focused on the core challenge: listening and speaking simultaneously.

Interestingly, I noticed my body naturally assumed a position similar to my interviewee's. This could be because I remembered how she sat during our interview, or because voice and body are connected when speaking in a specific way, your body aligns itself with that voice and speech pattern.

There were practical challenges too: trying to catch what the person was saying while speaking it aloud the embodied practice that I hadn't yet mastered.

Watching myself being performed was equally intriguing. My brain quickly recognized that the performer was representing me. Despite the performer being a woman with a higher-pitched voice than mine, the cadence, word choice, pace, and thought patterns came across accurately. The others had similar experiences watching themselves being performed.

During our reflection, we discussed capturing the "essence" of each other. The idea of "not performing" was freeing for most of us. The performances were captivating to watch because of their stillness and honesty, and the lack of trying or performing. It's reminded me of the theatre adage that warns against sharing a stage with animals or children because they steal attention by never "performing."

We gained a different kind of understanding of the person we'd just spoken to not cerebral but embodied. Most of us had just met our partners, yet performing them made us feel we understood them in a way beyond conscious thought.

Another reason these performances might be captivating is knowing that the performer is doing something complex similar to watching a circus balancing act. Visually, it might just be someone standing at a higher level, but knowing the complexity draws our attention.

The complexity might also explain why it's fascinating to watch, similar to puppetry. While some puppetry shows could be done with just actors, there's something special about the manipulation of an inanimate object a transference happening that enhances the performance.

Whether it's performing reality, reflecting reality, or mimicking reality as truthfully as possible, the transfer of essence through different mediums be it an inanimate object in puppetry or an audio interview channeled through an actor's body and voice creates an intriguing and magnetic performance. It gives viewers multiple layers to engage with.

Headphone verbatim theater also allows us to tap into an essence or truth that would normally take an actor significant time to rehearse or would require exceptional skill. There's something special about this approach that helps shed our biases. The only biases present during the performance were our tone, pitch, and bodies but even these were subconsciously trying to match the input we were receiving.

These reflections apply not just to our initial exercise but to the entire playdate. After that first exercise, we moved on to listening to oral archives. We split into three groups: two pairs and one group of three. The trio received an interview I conducted with three Singaporean women discussing their time in girls' school, gender, sex education, womanhood, and femininity versus masculinity in Singapore. This recording was given to three men to perform.

Another group received an audio recording of a Chinese man recalling his childhood in the 60s and 70s. The final group worked with an interview of a Malay woman recalling her childhood around the same period.

The Malay woman's recording was given to Mysara and Jasmine. The Chinese man's childhood interview was assigned to myself and Gabby. The assignments were intentional to explore the mismatch between the identity of the interviewee and the body and voice of the performer.

We worked on these for about two to three hours and returned the next day to present. Our reflections were similar to those from the earlier exercise.

One important note: the recording I made the one given to the three men wasn't high quality since I recorded it on my phone at a mall. The other two archive recordings were professionally done. This affected our performances significantly.

As we spent time with the recordings, we became familiar with the cadence and pace of the speakers. Even without memorizing the interviews, we could anticipate what might come next. This was much easier than our first attempt when we only had about five minutes with the recordings this time we spent around two hours preparing.

The concept of accents was particularly interesting. No one deliberately put on an accent, which would have been difficult while performing this task, but certain elements of accent naturally emerged. It was less about mimicking an accent and more about capturing how a person specifically speaks. This helped us avoid generalized speech patterns as we tuned into each speaker's unique way of talking.

We also noticed interesting moments when speakers would overlap. Another fascinating element was breathing patterns especially in the higher quality recordings where you could hear the specific breath points of the interviewee. Since breath, body, and voice are all connected, those breath points, when incorporated into our performances, added layers to the thought patterns of the person. As we breathed like the person in our ear, we thought like them too.

Playdate Wrap Up Reflections

This exploration of essence has made me realize that all three playdates offered different entry points into accessing someone's essence or experience.

The first playdate focused on holding onto a person's words and drawing connections to other words and existing literature situating them in the world around them or the world we're presenting their words in. It involved transforming their text, making or finding or exploring essence. This essence-finding was about how we as artists or writers interpreted words, what they reminded us of, and how we transformed them into a new script. This approach came from the tradition of writing, collaging, and dramaturgy.

The second playdate was more experiential. Rather than exploring a person's essence, we explored the essence of an experience what it means to receive something corporeally or embody an experience. It was even broader. We took an experience, translated it, identified its essence, and transformed it into a performance experience that an audience could engage with. Then, through that performance, we relocated the essence within the audience member working backward so they could find their own essence that belonged uniquely to them, though it could also be shared.

Finally, with the headphone verbatim theater playdate, our approach was more specific and embodied. It explored how to extract a person's essence through deep, specific listening to their voice. We let our bodies, brains, voices, and breath fill in gaps without cerebral intervention. What emerged was a pure translation of this person's voice and essence through our physical medium that the audience received.

In my reflections of my second playdate, I talked about "verse jumping" which is how to guide an audience member to a certain place through specific experiences. With headphone verbatim theater, there's no verse jumping per se, but time moves through the performer’s body. The interview happened in the past and exists in digital memory, but through headphones, we bring that time experience back through the portal of the performance body, breath, and voice.

Since time keeps passing and can only be experienced, we can experience an interview from the past through an audio recording. But we can experience it more intimately through a performance body, which becomes a vessel, a portal to that past interview with all its details and nuances. Yet, it is transformed and rearranged in another form, creating an opportunity for the audience to notice what’s important to them.

Much of this work and reflection around documentary theater involves finding ways to create experiences that bring the past into the present authentically, with nuance and detail. But it's also transformative not a one-to-one translation but something elevated and creatively transformed. The artist doesn't impose or shift the source material into something it's not, but rather delves deeper to reveal what that moment in time actually offers us.

Time is something we experience. When we create based on that experience, we can extract, expand, and stretch that moment into all its parts making it beautiful, reflective, and introspective.

Many of these reflections apply to all art. That's what art is about: extracting and finding moments, seeing beauty in simple things, breaking them down, and making something slightly different. I'm not discovering anything new, but I am discovering new approaches and methods that can drive this process, and for the first time for myself, the experience of engaging in a sensitive and intentional process of creating about others.

Essentially, documentary theater, like journalism or writing a book, captures moments in time that we've experienced. Time can only be experienced, so these moments can be experienced again and again by audiences and artists.

There are many approaches, but at the heart of it, we're not creating something new but discovering the essence of a thing, a moment, or a person. It's not creating something new, it's like energy: energy can't be created or destroyed, it can only be converted.

Yeah.