The arresting strangeness of Wormwood
'Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness.' (J.R.R.Tolkien, 1966, 'On Fairy Stories')
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The devising of the storytelling, puppetry and poetry performance ‘Wormwood in the Garden’ started as an ‘applied theatre’ research project involving myself as ‘storyteller/facilitator/researcher’ and young adult ‘participants’ in an adolescent mental health setting, Maple House. However, with one of the participants (Imogen, a poet and blogger), it became a profoundly dialogic, collaborative praxis cycle in which such designations were no longer accurate.
It became, in fact, a joint investigation of the uses of epic narrative: how does epic facilitate a meeting of very diverse personal perspectives; to what extent do we choose to use its sparse structure to tell our own stories? And importantly, what are the relational and aesthetic qualities of such an encounter? We performed 'Wormwood in the Garden' three times: at Maple House for young people and staff, at the Love Arts festival and conference (respectively) of arts and mental health at York St John University. We also showed and talked about an extract of it at Higher York's 'Everybody's Business' conference on young people's mental health in further and higher education. |
Process
Imogen's account of our devising process can be found here. From my perspective, it looked like this:
As starting point for a group poetry workshop, I chose a folktale, ‘Wormwood’ (from Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, for its provocative surreality. It resembled a wheel with no centre, its heroine Wormwood a mere, undeveloped 'figure' (Amelie Rorty 1976) ensnared in relationships with others but making no reply to their actions. In my initial retelling I deliberately sought to keep this sparseness, what Walter Benjamin (1973(1955)) calls a ‘lack of psychological shading’, and suggest no answers to the story's enigma.
As starting point for a group poetry workshop, I chose a folktale, ‘Wormwood’ (from Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, for its provocative surreality. It resembled a wheel with no centre, its heroine Wormwood a mere, undeveloped 'figure' (Amelie Rorty 1976) ensnared in relationships with others but making no reply to their actions. In my initial retelling I deliberately sought to keep this sparseness, what Walter Benjamin (1973(1955)) calls a ‘lack of psychological shading’, and suggest no answers to the story's enigma.
Of all the young people present, Imogen and (in the early stages) a young man particularly experienced the story as a summons to interpret and overlay their own experiential knowledge. We proceeded to work together making puppets of characters, creating dialogues between them, and stretching the story to meet our needs.
This threw up strong differences of opinion between us as to the apportioning of blame among characters in Wormwood's story, and their very status as characters (were they capable of responsible action or were they mere symbols?) - disagreements that were allowed to remain visible in the script.
This threw up strong differences of opinion between us as to the apportioning of blame among characters in Wormwood's story, and their very status as characters (were they capable of responsible action or were they mere symbols?) - disagreements that were allowed to remain visible in the script.
THE KING HER FATHER (his puppet comes forward on the rotating table):
I am not a man.
I am a force of nature, and the winds demanded from me a son.
You cannot blame the winds for blowing.
WORMWOOD:
It was your decision.
You faced every parent’s dilemma – nature vs nurture – and chose neither.
I am not a man.
I am a force of nature, and the winds demanded from me a son.
You cannot blame the winds for blowing.
WORMWOOD:
It was your decision.
You faced every parent’s dilemma – nature vs nurture – and chose neither.
Imogen, who was Wormwood's puppeteer, also overlaid her autobiographical poetry onto moments in Wormwood’s story.
From 'I Am Exhaled: A Poem' by Imogen Godwin, featured in 'Wormwood in the Garden'
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We transposed the reckoning between Wormwood and her antagonists to a ‘garden’, where she found a temporary stronghold of peace and control. Following each performance, audience members were offered an apple from the garden to transform into a ‘creature’ using natural materials.
Collaborative reflection in and on the creative process
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Following the initial performances of 'Wormwood in the Garden' at the Love Arts festival and conference, Imogen and I held several collaborative reflections on the devising process, in the form of written dialogues, one of which is included here. These informed both our future presentation of the show (at the Everybody's Business conference), and my theoretical understanding of our process.
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Edited film of 'Love Arts' performance:
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Summoned by the epicMikhail Bakhtin (1981) might have described our process as one of 'novelisation' - of introducing multiple voices into a distant authoritative text. ‘Novelisation’, however, suggests a knocking down of epic stereotypes, as for example in Jack Zipes’ (1995) influential work with young people using fairytales. Our use of ‘Wormwood’ rather resembled Petra Kuppers’ (2007) understanding, drawing on de Certeau (1984:106), of legend as ‘Spielraum’ (play space). Yet, whereas for Kuppers working with this oral heritage material is akin to squatting, our starting point was less that we were excluded by the epic, than that it needed us to inhabit it.
Within this strange play space, where characters' agendas and desires were so irreconcilable, there was no requirement for our own views to coincide. If our meeting inside the story was a 'microtopia' (Nicolas Bourriaud 1998), a 'social interstice' which enabled us to come together, it was one which did not exclude the 'antagonism' for which Claire Bishop (2004) wishes artists to make room. Yet, by interspersing the narrative with 'dialogues' between characters in a sort of 'time out of time', we could experiment with making them comprehensible to each other. Surprisingly those whose offence initially seemed greatest (Ali, the servant who incriminated Wormwood) became most forgiveable, while others, for their refusal to transcend their social role (Wormwood's royal parents), were never reconciled with her. Meanwhile, Imogen's poetry suggested a level of empathy with the perspectives of 'others' implied by the figures in our performance (e.g. mental health professionals), of which Wormwood herself was not capable. In the process, therefore, it became clear that while Wormwood was a character in her own right, there was overlap between herself and Imogen - as there was between the young man and the characters he 'adopted', and also between me and the characters to whom I gave voice. Yet, the post-show discussion made it evident that while audience members discerned this, it was difficult for them to discern exactly where the boundaries lay. In this ambiguity was great freedom. There was a contrast here between what James Thompson (2011) identifies as the ‘imperative to tell’ one's own personal story of trauma, prevalent in much storytelling and applied theatre work in mental health, with the summons made by this story to resolve its perplexity by whatever means we had available to us. Each of us made our own free choice how much of ourselves to bring to this task, and how visible to leave the seams. The summons could not be fully answered: the story’s refusal to conform to any known and loved narrative arc left its unease intact, yet its very oddness created a ‘Spielraum’ in which our inability to reach interpretive closure no longer seemed a problem but a strength. |
REFERENCES:
- Bakhtin, M.1981. "Epic and Novel." In The Dialogic Imagination, 1-45. Austin: University of Texas.
- Benjamin, W. 1973. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.." In Illuminations, edited by H.Arendt, 83-109. London: Fontana.
- Bishop, C. 2004. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." October Magazine 110: 51-79. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Bourriaud, N.1998. Relational Aesthetics. Les presses du reel.
- Calvino, I.1956. Italian Folktales. Penguin Classics.
- de Certeau, M.1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press.
- Kuppers, P. 2007. "Community Arts Practices: Improvising being-together." InThe Community Performance Reader, edited by P. Kuppers and G. Robinson, 34-47. Abingdon: Routledge.
- Rorty, A.1976. "A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals." InThe Identity of Persons, edited by A.O.Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Thompson, J. 2011, Performance Affects: Applied theatre and the end of effect. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Zipes, J. 1995. Creative Storytelling: building community, changing lives. London: Routledge.