By Mikhail Ugarov, translated by Csenge Nagy.
The technique “Verbatim” refers to the instance when the creative team of playwrights chooses a theme and starts talking to real people whom they’ve decided to interview for the play. The questions are very important. The questions are the first, fundamental part of the future concept of the play. Actors with voice recorders record the interviews, and at rehearsals they bring not only transcripts of the interviews, but also notes for stage depictions of the characters. Next, they work on the performance and the play.
According to traditional, orthodox “verbatim,” not a word is added from the authors. In Russia, all these original concepts have taken on a life of their own: for as many plays as there are staged at TEATR.DOC, there are as many methods of bringing the real speech of the characters onto the stage. The technique of “verbatim,” the technique of “the play of life within a play,” is when the life of characters is played out right before the audience thanks to the techniques employed at TEATR.DOC: “deep interview” with the artist, immersion in the given circumstances of the hero (interviewee), and the actor drawing from the documentary material of the characters as if reincarnating them. Having already conducted interviews, the actor, after the performance, answers questions from the audience. Still, all these techniques, borrowed and invented, are not self-sufficient, they are just tools for the theatrical work of writing a play and staging a performance.
Performance art doesn’t always stick to the strict technology of “verbatim,” and as it is a young technology, it is used with many variations and has many prospects for diverse applications in the theater. But here’s the foundation we’re building on: the interview. In one approach, the playwright does the interview; in another approach, only the actors are interviewed, and the playwright is introduced to the interview later, in the actors’ show. In either case, from the preparation of the questions to the final handover of the interview by the actors, the main task is to restrain one’s own energies to understanding what is being said, and to treat the interview like a scientist treats a sanctuary.
Stephen Daldry, excerpt from a seminar with participants in the Documentary Theater Project on April 15, 2000 in Moscow: “At the beginning of your work, you don’t know the subject or the characters: you only have the subject you’re studying. And you have to rely on the fact that the process will lead you to the theme, to the characters, to the plot and to the structure. If you’ve tried to determine that ahead of time – at that point, you’ve stopped listening. The process of working is pretty scary because you’re starting from scratch, and it can happen that you’ll have zero results. But you have to trust yourself. Trust the subject matter. And – most importantly – trust the people you’re interviewing.”
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Project participants about the “Verbatim” technology, A. Zenzinov, V. Zabaluev: Verbatim is a technique that is initially focused on borderline, extreme states. Accordingly, we are talking about the states where life and death touch, feel each other’s breath. Prison, murder, rape, tragedies in the mine – everything is on the brink of death (or beyond it). The list of topics that the young drama writers have taken up definitely echoes the headlines of the “Urgent in Number” rubric, the same rubric that is supposed to scare and attract “MK” readers day in and day out.
These young authors are not afraid to dig into phantoms and the most real pains. The naturalism of their dialogues and remarks seems to be of an applied nature. And yet it is a naturalism that, it seems, authors writing for the theater have never allowed themselves before. And this naturalism
seems to be the natural payment that playwrights pay to the theater for not paying attention to themselves. When you don’t see your work performed and it’s hard to imagine how it will look on stage, you start to write without thinking. This is the fruit of this very carelessness that readers and viewers of the actor’s readings have to deal with.
In the reality of these new plays, the truth of life does not appear in blackness; not a domestic blackness, but rather some horrors, deadly diseases, extreme existence, the dwindling of hopes.
А. Rodionov:… “Verbatim is simply a technology for creating a play, one of many in contemporary theater, and the technology is bizarre, specific, and not the most convenient: the play is made from actors’ interviews with real people, transcribed verbatim by the playwright and accurately reproduced on stage. After a small seminar at the Royal Court Theater in Moscow in the fall of 1999, verbatim stood as a symbol of the new in Russian dramaturgy and new play theater. The word is used much more broadly than even the word “realism” has been used. Here are exemplary interpretations of the new word: “*) a technologically advanced work of spectacular art associated with a new dramaturgy, containing shocking elements, dealing with socially colored reality, reflecting the non-standard syntax of colloquial speech, ethically and morally unequal (. …); **) a vivid everyday incident or an unusual life story; ***) a conversation or situation in which the listener has lived an interesting experience; ****) an original expression heard in ordinary speech, *****) something genuine, real, something that cannot be invented on purpose.”
A frequent question from people familiarizing themselves with verbatim is, “Stanislavski had already done this when he went with the actors from At the Bottom Depths to Khitrov Market – (variant: Lev Dodin had already done this when he lived with the actors of Brothers and Sisters in the Village) – so what’s new here?”
When we began to get acquainted with English verbatim plays, with their recording of human speech as verilibré, we recognized the look of Peter Weiss’s classic The Inquest in them, with its montage of the transcript of the Nazi trials. Reliance on the document; social concern and a
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craving for information discovery; an easy acceptance of shocking themes: these qualities of today’s documentary theater have been revived in the past – and often very gloriously. But there’s one little technicality about verbatim that makes it a new thing that’s never been done before. From it comes the name “verbatim” – Latin for “literally.” The unit of documentation for verbatim is not fact, but word. The playwright montages the speech of others without editing their speech’s individuality.
A verbatim play is like gliding through the waves of a radio. You hear scraps of voices with words that are logical and bizarre, understandable and inexplicable, calm and playful: but in each voice there is the persuasiveness and truth of existence: each wavelength is part of a logical story; and your receiver is part of a puzzle, taken away from the whole – and yet it retains life in itself. And this is the key to preserving life in your performance: the reason why this theater is really capable of being a documentary.
The English verbatim is an invention of the eighties, serving simple and direct users to report a social problem.
Such are Anne Devereux-Smith’s mono-performances of the early nineties – interviews taken and performed by the intonation-changing actress with dozens of participants in race riots in New York and Los Angeles – performances after which enemies in the audience made peace with each other.
Such is Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues of the late nineties – where the author’s outcry about society’s social injustices towards women, still to this day, took shape out of interviews with women about their genitals, and the performance led to the rise of the feminist cult movement “V-Day.”
Sophisticated users have dealt with verbatim in far more unexpected ways, albeit with no less care. Caryl Churchill and Max Stafford-Clark created the scandalous 1987 political musical Serious Money at the Royal Court, which soon successfully moved to Broadway. The play about the London Stock Exchange and the approaching re-election of the Thatcherist Parliament – either a mystery or a farce, where the white knight Miss Biddulph (owner of a blocking stake) saves the corporation “Albion” from being taken over by the villainous nouveau riche, blatently resembles Richard III. The speech of brokers and top executives sounds like the chiseled verses of a medieval play: but these are verbatim interviews in which the playwright has heard the energy of the young medieval world and the poetic dimension hidden in everyday shorthand. Stephen Daldry’s laboratory performance “Body Language” is a technologically subtle montage of large and small fragments of interviews with men about their bodies. That spring of 1996 the interviews for the play were only conducted with educated white Londoners between the ages of 20 and 40, who, in the subsequent performances, stripped naked in front of a clothed actor and talked about all their body parts for the audio recording.
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The first seminars in Moscow (and a little later in Novosibirsk) were conducted by Elise Dodgson, Stephen Doldrey, James MacDonald, and Ramin Gray from the Royal Court in London. This was the beginning of Russian verbatim, and we owe it to the British Council and the Golden Mask, which brought the Royal Court to Russia for the first time. The Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation, Russia) changed the fate of Russian verbatim a second time – by supporting it with grants, and then – repeatedly – by serving to meet new donors and partners, among them were the theater of the inmates of a high-security women’s colony in the Orel region, and the luxurious Gorki Leninskie, the recent sanctuary of the Leninist cult, which has become an exemplary modern museum.
In December 2000 the Russian playwrights held the festival “Documentary Theater” and in October 2001, the first docudrama laboratory in Gorki Leninskiye. In March 2002 the playwrights opened their first theater: a small basement on Patriarshie Prudy, rented out on Soros’ money from within a condominium of tenants: TEATR.DOC.
I don’t know why so many people love documentary theater without collusion and want to do it – each in their own way. But it is obvious that this passion will not pass quickly and unnoticed.
If you compare verbatim with photography, you will see that it is just a print of a photo. You can tint the picture with chemicals, you can superimpose one frame on another, you can make a collage. But you won’t change what you have on film. It’s something you chose once and irrevocably when you chose the frame and focus with your lens. This choice in verbatim takes place at the moment of the interview.
How does a question provide an answer? It is an amazing mystery. A question is an ‘apophatic statement;’ the message it carries contains a vacuum that causes the production of another statement: the answer. A question is the only way to say something by not saying the wrong thing. The existence of questions is the answer to the problem “a thought uttered is a lie.”1 A question is an utterance with the ability to evoke creativity. A question is a task: a creative task offered by the asker to the asked: the task of creating a text. This creative exercise is practiced in everyday life; creativity – unconsidered, unplanned, functional – happens all the time in speech. This creative origin of the verbatim text is apparently the main source of its artistic value. This value is also confirmed by some of the laws of verbatim-interview that guide the respondent to answers that do not use the interviewees older formulations, such as telling the same story over again. Verbatim needs new words, answers that the person has never said; the first formulation of what lives in his personality. There is a positive purpose aimed at multiplying the world, renewing it: by the miracle of the question to create in the world what was not there just now. Verbatim plays are the preservation and disclosure of the artistry of this accretion.
1 Feodor Tiutchev’s poem Silentium! infused Russian culture with Symbolist philosophy in the Silver Age. The author refers to it even in this contemporary manifesto.
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To quote the contemporary director Declan Donnellan: “In reality, when a speaker begins an utterance, the listener does not know how long the speaker’s speech will last. This state is experienced everyday and habitually: but in its essence, which habit must conceal, it is also majestic when realized artistically.”
The verbatim-text is much closer to the laws of the real world than the author’s text; when you read the text of an author’s piece – an article, a play – you are likely to read a text that has been taking much longer to form than at the pace of real reading. The text of a verbatim play is closer to the real world in that it has always existed in a near-real time dimension.
What makes verbatim addictive? Is it the attraction of the stories? Or is it the energy of the conversation, the exchange of questions and answers, and the fact that the end of the conversation, the end of the work, is unknown, because real time, real space, the genuine – and therefore infinitely interesting – connection of cause and effect become the co-author? The therapist questions the patient. But in the therapist’s record the answer which concerns the diagnosis will go first. A folklorist or lexicographer in the village talks to elderly women – and their heart breaks when their workbook naturally contains only folklore and dialectal vocabulary, and not the story of their son’s death sixty years ago. Which of the thousands of people asking, listening to the answers, has it harder? A psychiatrist, a sociologist, or a journalist? Verbatim is an art that does not care whether the answer contained the target information or whether the answer told the truth. Verbatim only cares about one thing: the creative quality of the answer. These are the only correct cells for our sieve.
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