In January 2009 Accidental Collective received a grant from the Arts Council of England to rework Postscript as a stage performance. This allowed the company to dedicate two weeks of rehearsals to intense research and development. The point of departure were the themes and creative questions risen by the piece’s previous incarnation, but essentially the work had to be remade to suit its new setting. Since this was Accidental Collective’s first return to the stage, the company decided to refine its participatory strategies. Postscript was more of a ‘show’: addressed to a small group of ‘spectators’ and presented in a theatre setting. However it was a continuation of Accidental Collective’s investigation of the roles played by an audience. In this case the company explored Roland Barthes’ paradigm of the audience/reader as author; their agency in the construction of meaning. When brief fragments of performance are stripped of context and supporting narrative structures, what life do they have of their own? How are they read by the audience? How will they reconcile alternative interpretations? Aesthetically the piece marked a maturation of Accidental Collective’s DIY approach to performance making. Moments of precise choreographed action and a tight structure, borrowing heavily from cinematic language, were combined with Accidental Collective’s characteristic emphasis on liveness. With an imaginative use of objects and an unconventional approach to storytelling, Postscript explored the deep recesses of our collective unconscious. This strongly visual piece conjured stories told and retold, and confronted the audience with a barrage of broken narratives and images that somehow seemed familiar. In doing so Postscript openly implicates the spectators in an exploration of our shared cultural reservoir. The fragments linger; they bump into one another – archetypes, words, clichés, moods, icons, images. A rose, a wineglass, a gun… A cowboy, a princess, a detective…
This reworking of Postscript was showcased on 3rd May 2009 at Artsdepot (London).
The piece was then performed on 6th June 2009 at Quarterhouse (Folkestone) with the collaboration of PANeK.
You can read more about the rehearsal process for Postscript v2 at www.theworldofaccidentalcollective.blogspot.com under 2008.
