Staged Conversations Using dialogue as both method and form when staging documentary material for theater and film
(2024)
author(s): Marcus Lindeen
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Between 2017 and 2024, I have conducted an artistic research PhD project at Stockholm University of the Arts resulting in a feature length documentary film (The Raft, 2018), a documentary based theater play (The Invisible Adventure, 2020) and a book with his work diaries documenting the process of creating the two works (Staged conversations, 2024). The research project focuses on using the conversation as both method and form for staging documentary material for theater and film.
The Raft reunites seven people who were all part of a social experiment crossing the Atlantic on a raft in 1973. The film mixes archive footage from the original journey with scenes shot in a studio, where participants share memories onboard a scenographic replica of the real raft.
In The Invisible Adventure three characters – a scientist, a video artist and a transplantation patient – meet for an intimate conversation on identity and transformation. The performers who interpret the characters through repeating dialogue from a sound script in hidden ear-pieces, sit together with the audience members in a circular scenography, where there is no separation between stage and audience seats.
Both the film and the play are using the staged conversation as a shape for the storytelling and share similarities in their visual expression with wooden scenographies set in a black box studio environment. In the film it is the real people from the raft journey who reunite 43 years later in the studio. In the play the script is based on three separate interviews with people who have never met, but who are interpreted by performers.
The research project will be finished and presented publicly in January 2024. The film and play will be presented together with the release of the book at Gothenburg International Film Festival in collaboration with Gothenburg City Theater.
We Would Strike!: Beyond Representation in a Post-Industrial Town.
(2022)
author(s): Arturo Delgado Pereira
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
On 30 July 1984, 11 mercury miners locked down in the mines of Almadén (Ciudad Real, southern Spain) to protest against their precarious economic and social conditions. 650 metres deep inside the oldest and most productive mercury mines in world history, the miners endured the dark and contaminated galleries for 11 days and nights until their claims were addressed. As an emigrated local filmmaker, I come back to post-industrial Almadén in 2019 to make a documentary film about the mining strike. The premise is to find young locals willing to live inside the now-closed mines for 11 whole days in homage to the older miners and to recreate the experience of 1984, 35 years later. Apart from engaging our collective mining past, performing the form and duration of a previous workers strike, Encierro proposes the underground as a living and symbolic space to foster a series of conversations, encounters, and social and political propositions to reimagine Almadén, which rose from a mine shaft more than 2000 years ago, as ‘something else besides’ a mining town.
This exposition explores the potential of documentary film fieldwork to take on a different relationship to normal life that the same or similar events would have as ‘untransformed reality’ – a strike versus the reenactment of a strike – and its potential for activism and social transformation. I will also explore the use of the conditional tense in documentary; a speculative and hypothetical approach to reality sensitive to the ‘potentially’ real, the ‘possible’, and the ‘what if’ as modes of documentation. What happens when the forms of ‘documentary’ and ‘reenactment’ are exceeded, and act upon the world rather than only represent it?
Testifying for the Invisible: Documentary Poetics of Estrangement
(2019)
author(s): Susanna Helke, Alejandro Pedregal
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition is a semi-dialogical inquiry into the potential of the methods and poetics of estrangement in documentary and political cinema, where we focus on the representation of the “neoliberal condition” in present-day society. We reflect on and rethink ideas that stem from various theories and strategies of emancipatory practices in cinema and literature. Here we acknowledge the tensions between conventions in for example social documentary, political cinema, and different conceptions of realism versus the idea of estrangement as an artistic strategy. The struggle to emancipate spectatorship and readership from the passivity and uncritical temptations promoted by the spectacles of the hegemonic culture industries has been a central concern in theoretical debates and artistic praxis that involves estrangement as a technique. How do Jacques Rancière’s notions on emancipation and radical equality challenge Brechtian ideas and methods of estrangement? How could the lineages of Third Cinema and testimonial literature help to rethink these matters today? What are actually the relevant means of estrangement in contemporary documentary art and literature?