While reflecting on the main topic of my interest, I realized that it is the moment of pure experience of the visible world before its transition into individual and subjectively perceived reality. Playing as a means of staying in that moment is a main strategy of my practice. As we can perceive very little of the true workings of the world by a momentary experience, the only impression we can gauge from it will add to the fictional nature of our understanding of it. “’Reality’ is the word that belongs in quotation marks” (Nabokov, 1995). My goal was to trace this process from the very first moment of actual sensory experience, and the resonance it creates in the mind and body, to the second when it becomes a driving force of art production and manifests itself in the art form. It is a very slim sliver of time and space in which this transformation actually happens. The work I create aims to capture my own experience and create experiences for my audience. The means by which I create and convey this experience is play. The complexity of analyzing this triad – moment-play-fiction – through practice brought me to the necessity of analyzing my methods of production as well as the necessity of contextualizing my practice in a broader philosophical and critical discourse. Inspired by Mikhail Bahktin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, I focus on art as act, in my case the act of playing, and play as a means of engaging with the momentary existence. Establishing the rules, and contextualizing my practice led me to experimentations with a variety of media, and studying the work of other artists. Yayoi Kusama, Elmgreen and Dragset, Marina Abramovic, Elizabeth Price, Bill Viola, Douglas Gordon, and Akira Kurosawa are but a few whose work and life inspired me in the last three years. Analyzing my own methods and staging the viewers’ experience, I find it is important to keep observing my own, as well as my viewers’ behavior. Exploratory travels and international art residencies provided just those necessary research opportunities. Just as, according to Umberto Eco, one should see the difference between story and discourse (Eco, 2004, p. 36), my aim is to understand the difference between the moment of experience (story) and the moment of perception (discourse). The desire to further explore these topics in the future led me to enumerate and summarize all the thousands of the last three years’ moments that yielded the story entitled Staging the Moment: Play and Fictional Reality.

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This dissertation comprises a trilogy of original anti-war plays and an analysis of their contribution to the on-going development of a new dimension of the branch of playwriting known as “documentary theatre.” It seeks to clarify precisely what constitutes this form of theatre and explores how current practitioners have tested and extended its boundaries. It is my contention that my own practice has been part of this process of reinvigorating the tradition of documentary theatre, allowing what I have called “poetic faction” to fill in the historical gaps often left out by more orthodox exponents of this brand of theatre. The commentary will attempt to illuminate the telling of these stories by drawing on the insights of documentary theatre, which itself draws attention to the limitations and nature of historiography, as well as to the use of memory and postmemory as documents. In addition, while all of the plays were intended to be part of the tradition of British documentary theatre, the use of elements in-between verifiable verbatim and documentary evidence – which for our purposes will be called and defined as “poetic faction” – problematized its relationship to the very tradition it was defining itself as being a part of and raised ethical questions as well. This commentary will seek to position the plays and the practice around them within the wider context of documentary, tribunal and verbatim theatre, as well as the theatre of the real, as these various branches of contemporary drama have been labeled in the United Kingdom. It will also seek to probe the boundaries of documentary theatre, attempting to justify its inclusion of more poetic elements.

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Arguing that fundamental aesthetic elements of Noh are deeply imbued with ethical qualities, the thesis describes how, throughout the different socio-economic scenarios that marked the transition of Japan and the West to new phases of modernity, Noh became part of an international debate on theatre and ethics. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, European practitioners such as Yeats, Pound, Copeau and Brecht sought to ‘restore’ theatre by returning to ideals of honesty and spirituality that were thought to be lost as a consequence of the rise of bourgeois materialism. The promotion of Noh in Japan and its reception abroad was appropriated both by right and left wing political discourses that provided contrasting and converging interpretations of its theory and practice. With the advent of ‘interculturalism’ Noh was inscribed in a renewed ethical rubric, and became part of a return to the ‘spiritual’ dimension of Asian theatre by practitioners such as Yoshi Oida and Eugenio Barba. However, today Noh is still enmeshed in misconstructions that limit its understanding: drawing on historical research and ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis uses ethical criticism (Carroll, Cooper, Gaut) and Watsuji Tetsurō’s thought in order to analyse past and present reception of Noh, shedding light on the inextricability of the aesthetics and ethics of Noh and seeking to provide a balanced view of individual/communitarian and spiritual/secular dimensions of its contemporary practice, thus placing Noh within the broader perspective of a global discussion of theatre and ethics.

This Practice-as-Research project investigates documentary performance from the perspective of the dramaturg. Through analysing two specific practical approaches to working with documentary material; one with non trained performers related to methods of socially engaged and participatory art practices, and the other with professionally trained performers, I argue for moving away from the perceived dichotomy between the discourse of reality and fiction in documentary work entirely. Introducing object-oriented philosophy and new materialism as an ethical framework, I propose a third way of framing work that use testimonial, tribunal or other materials derived from contemporary lives, arguing that a document is neither real nor fictional – it is a thing. I have explored practical ways for performers and dramaturgs to work with text-things, and a conceptual framework for the theatrical event called theatre-ting. The etymological root of the word ‘ting’ (thing) connects to practices of assemblage and gathering, still found in the Nordic languages. The theatre-ting brings the factual into the spaces of the fictional, which destabilizes both demonstrating how they are equally theatrical, truthful and mystical. It is a space where common questions and issues can be staged and discussed. It is an arena for testing, rehearsing, and practicing ethics. The materialist practice of staging documents questions notions of authorship, subjectivity, relation, and control in performative practices. In dialogue with object-oriented philosophy I have developed a conceptual framework to work from, challenging anthropocentrism and pointing to the ways things (including human bodies) are co-dependent and form each other, and where neither have the power of definition over the other. This demands ways of dealing with listening, time, relation, chance, and uncertainty. It is a matter of moving the attention to a materialist rather than individualist view.

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Although a new tradition of non-mimetic theatre has secured a place in Western theatre history, I find that existing critical vocabularies fail to embrace various theatrical forms of today. Alternative frames of discussion are sought after, and I propose that a culturally distinct one will open up possibilities of perceiving contemporary performances in different ways. In this thesis I turn to the aesthetics of Chinese painting. The Western concept of mimesis in theatre is seen as being strictly related to the verbal aspects of the drama rather than the performed spectacle. Turning to paintings as a lens through which to look at theatre enables one to focus on the extra-textual aspects of performance. At the same time, looking at painting directs one to the issue of ways of seeing, which is fundamental to theatre. Looking at Chinese paintings will disclose the unique Chinese ways of seeing that affected their artistic creation and reception, as well as what different concepts of representation prevailed. In this thesis I trace the mimetic foundations of Western theatre by investigating the writings of Plato and Aristotle as well as looking at Classical Greek painting, its modern reflections and counteractions. I then propose the aesthetics of Chinese painting as an alternative lens through which to look at contemporary non-mimetic theatre. Focusing on landscape and literati paintings of the Sung era I examine how adopting this lens initiates a mode of perception that differs significantly from the Western. Finally, I explore the validity of Chinese aesthetics as a critical device with which to look at contemporary non-mimetic theatre, case-studying selected theatre performances of Tadeusz Kantor and Forced Entertainment

The central purpose of this thesis is to chart the ideal of ensemble theatre in Britain and its development in the country throughout the twentieth century, referring specifically to selected directors. The Stanislavskian model of the ensemble, as exemplified by the Moscow Art Theatre, served this ideal, pursued by Edward Gordon Craig, Harley Granville Barker, Theodore Komisarjevsky, Joan Littlewood and Peter Hall, who are the focus of the argument. Craig and Barker’s understanding of ensemble work was significantly influenced by their meetings with Stanislavsky in 1908 and 1914 respectively, while Littlewood and Hall were influenced by his writings on the theatre. Following Stanislavsky, the thesis offers a definition of ensemble as a permanent group based on shared values. The chosen directors are the most representative of attempts to establish ensemble companies in Britain in the twentieth century. They are also landmark cases in the sense that they initiated change in the perception of what a theatre company could be. The thesis argues, however, that the continued domination of the commercial theatre over the art theatre has been an impediment to each director’s attempts. Each chapter of the thesis is dedicated to a specific director, and, with the exception of Craig’s work at the Moscow Art Theatre, analysis is confined to the directors’ work in Britain. Methodologically rooted within the sociology of the theatre, the thesis maps the progression of ensemble practices in British society. It interweaves extensive archival research with an exploration of the sociological, economic and political factors that underpin both the attempts to establish a permanent company and the resistance to it. The thesis explores the pervasive influence of individualism and commercialism in all areas of British life, arguing that their principles generate a theatre climate that was not conducive to the establishment of a permanent ensemble company and was even antithetical to it. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of culture, and Maria Shevtsova’s development of Bourdieu’s theory in relation to theatre, provides the theoretical frame of the thesis.