'The Dance of Opposition: Repetition, Legacy and Difference in Third Theatre Training’.

Turner, Jane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4585-0581 and Campbell, PGW (2019) 'The Dance of Opposition: Repetition, Legacy and Difference in Third Theatre Training’. In: Time and Performer Training. Routledge. ISBN 9780815396284

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Abstract

This chapter will demonstrate that Third Theatre communities continue to celebrate and offer a ‘time’ and ‘place’ - a way of being together - to diverse, foreign and unruly theatre practices. From the 1970s to the present day, Third Theatre has refined itself as a multifarious, transnational entity, comprised of groups and solo artists across the world (but primarily in Europe and Latin America) making theatre in a laboratory environment in which training is generally an essential aspect of the practice. Many of these artists are border-crossers, working with colleagues from an array of different countries and backgrounds, often gathering periodically in order to reaffirm a collective identity and replenish themselves artistically. It will draw on Delueze’s Three syntheses of time: the living present; the pure past; and the drive to the future as a means of situating three different practitioners and their modes of training. Methodologically, the chapter will be informed by case studies drawn from the Third Theatre community. The training developed by three Third Theatre performers affiliated to Nordiskteaterlaboritorium (NTL) will be explored. These artists are: Luis Alonso, an Afro-Cuban practitioner and member of Oco Teatro Laboratorio- as well as a member of Bridge of Winds – here the first synthesis will be employed: the difference underpinning habits in the “living present” actively (re)-determines processes in the past and the future by synthesising them in novel ways in the here and now. Carolina Pizaro, a freelance Chilean performance, who has trained in India, developed her own particular performer style and dynamic and currently trains and performs with Odin Teatret. Here the second synthesis will be applied: in the “pure past”, memory fails, and rather than visual representations (which are only ever partial, secondary approximations of past processes), it is abstract differences or becomings which are shown to be working incessantly on the present, engulfing it constantly. Finally, Mia Theil Have, a Danish performer who was a laboratory worker with NTL before moving to London to set up her own theatre company, Riotous Theatre. Her training is discussed in relation to the third synthesis; here the future is a novel event, the result of a defining “cut” or caesura made possible by the on-going “eternal return” of pure difference in the present, which allows for constantly differing orders and assemblages of repeated processes.