Journey To Karawane 2011- 2013

 

Journey  To Karawane was our end of University show with which we won the Graduate Prize for it. This then led us on a mentorship scheme with the York Theatre Royal as well as performing it as Scarborough Literature Festival as well as highschools in Yorkshire.

 

If we break the work down we have to look at what we were reading at this time. Adam became very interested in existentialism, primarily the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and his notion of existence preceding essence. First used explicitly In ‘Existentialism and Humanism’, Sartre clarifies and partly revises his view of existence and essence. He divides the things that exist into three kinds: human beings, artifacts, and naturally occurring objects. In the case of human beings, existence precedes essence. In the case of artifacts, essence precedes existence and in the case of naturally occurring objects, existence and essence coincide.

 

Our process seems as if existence precedes essence. That only afterwards we can look at it and understand fully what it is and then can give meaning to it. It is like we are presented a fruit. Which is ripe, we watch the apple fall to ground. The apple is the performance and we stumble upon it. We see it's existence merely form right before our eyes! The apple is ripe and we are watching it fall. But what about the tree? What about the roots? What about the soil? We work in a natural process, existence of the piece and it's essence coincide. If something forms from our mind it is natural, we accept it.

 

We all encounter images, texts, philosophies, phrases, nuances, sounds, silences on a daily basis. Nothing is filtered out of the cylinder to start with. Everything is accepted, if not considered. Intertextuality is heavily at play, everything is connected and we try to find the connections.

 

Let me present an example in the work. The title itself referenced a sound poem (Karawane) by Hugo Ball, a dadaist. But we had no intention of sound poetry in this performance. Karawane in our performance was personified as a monster wearing a mask, the design for the mask Karawane wore was based on one created by Marcel Janco. Janco was another Dadaist who worked alongside Hugo Ball at The Cabaret Voltaire and our connection is complete. Non of it forced or pressured but carefully watched to see where a link was created.

 

For Joel he was coming at it from a different angle but we can see the crossovers. Some of the things he has encountered in life that was greatly interesting him at the time, and still does, was comedy. Namely The Goons, The Crazy Gang, The Marx Brothers, Beyond The Fringe and Monty Python. This helped with the framework of the play, we created vignettes, sketches, that were held within a larger framework. Particularly comedy that was iconoclastic, absurd and involved parody. Parody ridicules any construction that tries to impose direction, order, or meaning upon existence.

 

The larger framework was inspired by Waiting For Godot. The characters are there for something, waiting for something but in the meantime they must keep themselves entertained. Waiting For Godot can be read as a questioning of faith, this is what Joel was questioning at the time. We then applied our interests in absurdism to it as well, which for us absurdism implies a thoroughgoing rejection or complete inversion of the rules governing ordinary reality.

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So for us in our story we were inverting that Karawane was not a place (which the characters believed it to be) but a person and not a person but a monster. We were also rejecting, at the time, certain performance styles and techniques that we were being taught at university. This came from our interest in Dadaism. Which was a revolt against art by artists themselves who, appalled by developments in contemporary society, recognised that art was bound to be a product, reflection and even support of that society and was therefore criminally implicated. This is explored further in our work when we went to Edinburgh as well as informing many performances to come.

 

This is how the play was formed, a series of unconnected ideas brought together, founded by understanding and going through them and seeing where the connections were.

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We then developed this with The York Theatre Royal and took it on a mini tour but swiftly moved on to our foray into nothingness.