Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Devising Ridiculusmus’ Total Football : a schematic reading of performance process

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14682761.2013.877662

2040-0616

Richard Talbot,

Physical Education and Pedagogy

AbstractThis article critically reflects on a series of drawings created during the devising process for Ridiculusmus’ Total Football (2012). Ridiculusmus’ production, a narrative of a non-sporty bureaucrat tasked with harnessing the enthusiasm of football fans in the interests of national cohesion, examines the impossibility of thorough incorporation of a national body within the Olympic mo(ve)ment. Based on an existing convention among football commentators for contextualizing and narrating team play, photographs of sketches-in-process discussed here capture the marks of live notation as an urgent activity during devising, giving the reader access to a snapshot of Ridiculusmus’ rehearsal methods and process. The article analyses the notation devices employed in the sketches, arguing that the approximate qualities of sketched notation, and its failed totality, capture the tone of comedy in this work about masculine hubris. While the sketches attempt to keep pace with the spontaneity of tactics devised by performers, the article argues that performance systems and dance notation that have paid attention to architecture and spatial arrangement as a score do not generally notate intention or strategy. The article presents the idea that the sketches document a multiplicity of tactics, and footballing metaphor in process. The notation can be understood both as documentation of movement and a contribution to a theatrical and scenographic discourse that is concerned with more than a simple ‘blocking’. The article discusses the origins of ‘self-blocking’ in this production, its relation to a priori analysis of character, to unpredictable elements of game-playing in a piece about football and the way in which Ridiculusmus tackles the inherent rigidity of the British class system through a metaphorical critique of the ‘4 4 2’ team formation in football. Finally, the article, which includes original photographs and diagrams, suggests that similar crude schemata indicate a potential for digital software to expand on the score/ing function of dance notation and may be appropriate for devising in contemporary theatre. Notes1. Other creative collaborators throughout the devising process (which spanned two years) include Paul Bongiorno, Helen Chadwick, Paul Goddard, Rupert Jones, Renee Palmer and Fiona Roake.2. Full touring details and critical responses can be found on the company’s website: http://www.ridiculusmus.com/shows/on-tour/total-football.3. Some movement sequences had already been determined by Haynes and Woods before this development phase, for instance the idea that Nigel Burton would advertise a public seminar on ‘A Celebration of Britain’ and that he would be joined by a character seated in the audience. The second page of the flip chart advertised the time of the performance so that Burton inadvertently appeared to be offering a more incisive and critical seminar: ‘A Celebration of Britain Today’.NIGEL:It was actually originally a ‘celebration of Britain’ and I ermm … there was a mistake at the printers – ’cos I said ‘today at 8 p.m’ but they missed out the ….. – but I thought that’s okay ’cos it’s more than just contemporary or contemporary-ist – you know it’s more than that it’s history it’s historical … So what did you want to talk about?4. The term ‘blocking’ is used variously in different systems of rehearsal from nineteenth-century musical theatre to versions of naturalism in order to discuss the position of actors and the impact on the stage picture, its consequences for audience sightlines and so on. Traditionally, the stage manager’s book is a record of the blocking location of actors and props.5. Mischa Twitchin, email, 22 September 2013.6. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris, Drama Queens Review, blog, http://dramaqueensreview.com/2012/11/16/total-football-ridiculusmus-touring/.7. The ‘rabona’ involves kicking with the ‘wrong’ leg, wrapping it around a rigid correct leg, while the ‘Cruyff turn’ is named after the inventor of totaalvoetbal.8. ‘Not literally [like a plank]. More sort of at a diagonal. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think I was ever above David’s head. I remember at one stage during the tour D had ankle problems and couldn’t therefore be as athletic as he’d have liked. A few times we cut the move where he lifts me as it would have hurt him’ (Haynes, personal email, 12 September 2013).9. The relationship between performance and football can be seen in a documentary about French-Algerian player Zinedine Zidane that takes movement as an aesthetic criterion. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), made by the video artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, fixes 17 camera lenses on a sole player, Zidane, and follows a balletic performance as he plays in the Spanish league for Madrid in 2005.10. A detailed investigation of these methods is discussed in Woods’s unpublished PhD at the University of Kent, How To Be Funny (2007).11. Close interrogation of method can pose challenges for performers used to following an instinctive and playful method. ‘As soon […] as I put it into words in a rehearsal room I find it kills all enjoyment for me, all sense of play, which I suppose is what we’re about and I think what you’re capturing in the drawings’ (Haynes, personal email, 22 September 2013).12. From the rehearsal script, November 2010. Other script citations are from the 2013 performance script unless indicated.13. Totaalvoetbal was invented by Dutch football manager Rinu Smichels in partnership with celebrated captain Johan Cruyff for use by Ajax, an association football squad in the early 1970s. The strategy was expressed particularly through the innovation and speed in passing, demonstrated by Cruyff. Between 1971 and 1972 Ajax made effective use of this technique, at one point winning 46 games and losing none. (See Winner 2006.)14. David Woods, private email, 27 August 2013.15. For instance, Frieze (Citation2013, 7) identifies a tendency in the work, shared with writers like Crouch or companies such as Uninvited Guests, that he has called ‘intrusive-hypothetical’. This is a form of narrative that draws on lived experience, anecdote and actual conversation, but is reproduced as a voice or set of voices that offer a hypothetical narrative rather than delivering an actual narrative. ‘Mooted, proposed, quoted, imagined, these real yet hypothetical narratives court and assault their audience’. The difference between the ideal and actual potential for political participation by the audience, for instance, is invoked and mocked in such works.16. Field Opensource Software, Openended Productions, 2013: http://openendedgroup.com/field/FieldNews.html.17. How documentation of dance generates forms of dance and body knowledge, within a broader consideration of cultural heritage in dance, was the theme of the 3rd German Dance Education Biennale, which took place on 6–12 March 2012 at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Frankfurt. One consideration during the conference, as reported by Johannes Birringer (Brunel University, UK), was of the interactive processes through which documentation is produced, and the interactive processes through which products of documentation generate transfer of knowledge between people and over time, as a kind of social practice (email conversation with Birringer, 12 November 2013).