(Ebook) Lightwork: Texts on and from Collaborative Multimedia Theatre (ISSN) by Alex Mermikides, Andy Lavender ISBN 9781789385021, 9781789385014, 9781789385038, 1789385024, 1789385016, 1789385032

(Ebook) Lightwork: Texts on and from Collaborative Multimedia Theatre (ISSN) by Alex Mermikides, Andy Lavender ISBN 9781789385021, 9781789385014, 9781789385038, 1789385024, 1789385016, 1789385032

This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions, presented between 1997 and 2011.Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and formats – scripted plays such as Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall, a Victorian theatre in London’s East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story.The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and fate.The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, text and ‘non-text’, were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its…