Mike Pearson and his new production of Aeschylus Persians (National Theatre of Wales) gets a superb review in the Guardian today [Link]

This is site-specific theatre with a vengeance. High up in the Brecon Beacons, in a mock-up village used by the military as a training-base, National Theatre Wales is recreating the oldest extant play in western drama: Aeschylus’s The Persians. The combination of the story and the setting ,with the sun slowly disappearing over the hills, is overwhelming.
The Persians

The play itself is extraordinary. Produced in 472BC, only eight years after the Persians had been routed at Salamis, it is the only Greek tragedy to be drawn from recent history rather than from legend. Obviously Aeschylus was celebrating Athenian victory. But what is astonishing is his sympathy for the vanquished. Atossa, mother of the defeated Xerxes, views the wreckage of her country with mounting horror. The ghost of Darius, her husband, rises from the grave to announce that grief is man’s lot and must be borne. Even “war-lusting” Xerxes himself, guilty of impetuously taking his country to war, is finally seen as an abject object of pity.

What is impressive about Mike Pearson’s production, however, is the totality of the experience. We assemble in a square in this deserted military village where the four-strong male chorus is rejoicing in war and announcing “no one can withstand this tsunami of the Persians in full rage.” We then march up a hill to sit in front of a four-storey house with the front cut away; and there we see, both in live action and on video, the tragedy enacted. There’s a wonderful moment when Atossa arrives in a white car to a blaze of trumpets. But, once she is in the house, a hand-held camera moves in close to watch the distintegration of her hopes as the news from Salamis arrives. And, with typical Pearson invention, that news is conveyed direct by video satellite.

Pearson puts the piece in contemporary clothes but makes no attempt to relate it directly to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead he and the translator, Kaite O’Reilly, focus on how war destroys the very fabric of people’s identity. At the beginning, the chorus praise Xerxes as “fierce as a dragon scaled in gold”; by the end, they are threatening to beat him to death with a hammer. Even Darius, ritually raised from the dead, starts out in Paul Rhys’s performance as a gently melancholy ghost, only to turn into a wrathful figure who talks of Xerxes as “a mortal playing God to gods”.

Sian Thomas, left, also puts in a tremendous performance as the queen, a woman of fiery splendour reduced to ululating agony as the disasters mount and she cries “this is the peak of my misery”. And the four strong chorus, in its turn, descends from arrogant state apparatchiks to figures writhing in torment.

This superb production, with atmospheric music by John Hardy, literally takes one on a journey. And, as one went back down the hill after, strange lamentations emerged from the deserted houses. Shivering slightly, one moved on, still hearing the aftermath of war in one’s ears.

Michael Billington

Charles Spencer in The Telegraph [Link]

This is extraordinary, one of the most imaginative, powerful and haunting theatrical events of the year … This rarely performed masterpiece, which taps so powerfully into our present concerns about the West’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be an event however it was staged.

But the director of this National Theatre of Wales production, Mike Pearson, has achieved an extraordinary coup by staging it in the military village of Cilieni, from which civilians are usually barred. Built during the Cold War, and perched high in the Brecon Beacons, it has a church, houses, a village square. From a distance it looks idyllic. But the breezeblock buildings have never been homes, and there are burnt out tanks in the deserted streets. This deeply creepy place is used to teach troops how to fight in built-up areas, which gives Cilieni its alternative, acronymic name of FIBUA.

Another Guardian review from Charlotte Higgins – [Link]

Kate Bassett in The Independent – [Link]

Video from the Guardian – music by John Hardy – [Link] -

The annual celebration of a great industry and labor movement, once a living force, now a memory, nostalgically inspiring at best, after Thatcher’s neo-liberal ideology and political spite closed all the coal mines in the UK and devastated the pit villages.

More photos – [Link]

In class: Robin Gianattassio-Malle (Blue Egg Media, Producer KQED’s Forum, with Michael Krasny). She made the case made for journalism being a field of design. It led to a fascinating discussion.

Journalism (the best): design with dialog and narrative (Robin said “with dialog and story”). Aim: to affect an audience, to elicit reflection, to generate insight and inspire change.

Narrative is a key component of journalism. If journalism is a pragmatic time-based and iterative process – design – it is crucial to distinguish narrative from storytelling.

Here’s my personal take on the distinction, coming from narratology. It is by no means the orthodoxy, though my emphasis on performance is commonplace.

Narrative refers to a set of formal properties of an account of a series of events. These typically include plot, event, agency, characters, points of view, and narrative often involves some kind of analysis and interpretation, implied or explicit, of causation – why things happened the way they did. Narrative begs narratology, the study of the structure and function of narrative as a kind of linguistic and communicative form – the themes, conventions and semiotics of narrative.

Story is sometimes used to mean narrative. I would let the word keep its broader and often more informal references.

Storytelling, for me, refers to the mobilization of narrative; it is located, time-based, performative, a relation between storyteller and audience. The best storytelling is responsive to changing qualities of the performer-audience relationship, as the storyteller adapts story to the reactions of the audience. Audience play an active role in shaping storytelling; conversations frequently involve storytelling, as does monologue, recounting to ourselves the narrative of experience, memory, hope.

We all easily recognize basic narrative forms. I am very fond of Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the formal properties, the basic morphology, the narrative components, of folk tales. Hayden White argued beautifully that there are only a few basic narrative forms in historiography. Tilley and I tried to do something similar for archaeology, showing that only a couple of narrative structures have been developed to account for changes in prehistory. (Just think of how often we recognize the plot and the characters in a movie or novel.) Narrative tends to lock things down in making sense of things, offering form in chaos.

Have all narratives been told? No – because storytelling introduces enactment and mobilization, the contingencies of specific connections between narrative form and the everyday experience. Storytelling often introduces doubt and reflection upon the neatness of narrative, the way narratives fail to cover everything. Good storytelling creates space for the listener to speculate and look for connections – it pulls you in, such that the story can become your own and shed new light.

Can there be new design solutions? Yes, because design is pragmatic and opportunistic, attending to local needs and desires in iterative and adaptive relationships between designer, maker, and user. Just like storytelling.

Robin talked about interviews as improvizations. Questioning, listening, probing, synthesizing, asking questions again … . Improvization, performance, ethnography.

Consider the potentiality now of new media – the facility for co-created stories. The ways blogs are impacting traditional journalism.

Mike Pearson – Esgair Fraith 1996 – storytelling against narrative – Theatre/Archaeology

Link – Presence – the conference

Next comes a book from Routledge – “Archaeologies of Presence” – due out in 2010

Here are Pearson/Brookes in a performance Friday 27 March 2009:

memory, family, being there/here …

Link – Theatre/Archaeology

Gary Hill in the Colosseum – part of the Presence Project at Stanford.

“Tri Bywyd” (Three Lives) – a work of theatre/archaeology by Brith Gof

Eddie Ladd as Sarah Jacob – read more