by Alison Rockbrand, Artistic Director

Theatre is a complex and multifarious art form, incorporating at times every other art into its grandiose and affluent pervading expression; at other times minimalising its imagery into what its adepts can create with bodies alone. Theatre is said by some to be the most composite of all art forms, venturing easily into multi-media and monumentalism, which makes it the most accessible to an audience; there is something for everyone, either to watch, listen, or to identify with. Indeed, the theatrical context is immense and its defining qualities are of prime interest to those of us who practice it. We, as actors, directors, playwrights, designers, as theatricians are the voice of the art personified; when we discuss terms and share iconography we are feeding and abetting the art to flourish. As such, it is important that we continue to challenge our perceptions of theatre art by continuing an empiricist approach to our practice; to define and redefine what we mean when we say ‘Theatre’.

Each time we enter into a new production, to work on a new role, or to venture into the meta-theatrical, we are necessarily open to additional interpretations on the defining theme: our knowledge widens, and simultaneously our creative vision increases.  In this way we are able to create novel form out of ancient art, continuing in the lineage of the masters without following in their footsteps.  To define theatre means reaching into past aeons, dredging up the primal practice, and using these cognates as fuel for the journey we must take into the future form of the art. Using as a guide then, this particular re-invocation of dead theatrical practice and invocation of a future practice, we can come to some ideas about what theatre means in the present.

Theatre has been modernly and post-modernly used as psychology, as ritual, as revolutionary tool, as entertainment. Generically theatre is a way of mirroring humanity, either in an effort to change it, challenge it, placate it, inspire it, distort it, or heal it. For example, the idea of using theatre to heal someone is an approach common to tribal culture and pantheistic regimes, much as the cathartic process was common to Greek tragedy.  However, in the post-modern context within which we reside, theater has a chance to thrive cross-culturally.  It is therefore a meta-cultural creative force with distinctive empathic features afforded through live performance and a vast media scope.

Travesty Theatre, however, has a particular interest in using theater as a exploratory tool.  We use it to delve into the profound depths of both ourselves and our social contexts.  It manifests in various ways: at times as counter-cultural, at times uber-cultural, at times revolutionary and at times challenging to the makers of revolutions.  We use theatre to create new space for the dreaming up of Utopias and Republics, to open up the mind.  To us theatre itself is like a spirit, a teacher, or a daimon, an entity whose interest is in humanity’s ultimate survival.  The theatre, as all art, is an expression of sentience, and with the downfall of humanity comes the downfall of art as we understand it. Travesty Theatre aims to expand our sentience, to increase the virility, knowledge  and power of the human race.  In increasing the scope of our awareness, we find ourselves exploring contexts that remain for most beyond the pale; our theater can therefore be supernatural, ritualistic, and magically transformative.  By calling up the ghosts of the past, of the dead selves, or of those whose stories have yet to be told we are venturing into a realm of magical and political theatre conjoined.  The stories of the oppressed, the maligned, the populations injured by various forms of greed and ignorance are told through the voices of actors, and thus old tales regain relevance and challenge the existing power structures of today.  Our productions are created to defy repressive establishments, to reject the normative outlook, to abandon destructive thinking, to dispute answers to ethical questions and to generally promote an environment of ideological freedom   Our theatre is transgressive, dangerous and horrific; our subconscious wills are exposed and allowed to thrive, presenting the spectator with a series of ethical transitions exposing inherent emotions.  These primal expressions are then used to inspire discussion and debate on matters of direct social or personal meaning to the participants. The unrefined becomes stylized, manipulated into a consistent pattern in which we may discover gems of human similarity, unrealized potential or buried answers to the questions that plague us.  

Travesty Theatre’s empiricist approach is applied to its material, meaning that we are constantly searching for the contexts that contain the most belief, but it also applies to our practice.  Through collective creation and directed improvisation we are able to collaborate on projects and work in various roles.  Using cabaret and vaudeville show structures, the ensemble brings ideas together in a highly creative environment.  Travesty Theatre’s actors bring in material that stems from their inner arcana, their alphabet of desires and fears, and they use this somewhat secret information to inspire sketches, plays, or productions.  These ideas are workshopped by the collective along with a director and then compiled to form a production.  When creating characters, the actors work both with the material from their own research and with the idea of the character’s inner dream.  The characters we play are alive and inspired, their stories told as challenges to repression – thus the actor becomes absorbed by the character in a way different from most acting techniques; the actor becomes either an alternate form of her own ego, invokes a specific ego to portray the role, or does something in between.  The essential practical goal of Travesty Theatre  is for each actor to maximize and perfect their own specific method; every method should be adaptable to changes in paradigm, and be flexible enough to change its form without fracturing its integrity.

Our Theater of Horror, then, encapsulates all the techniques, practices and performances of the actors as they don the mask of the character, remove it or distort it.  These practices are used by us to elaborate certain illuminatory  ideas or ideals to an audience through the actors’ visions, nightmares, and desires; or by expressing universalist concepts of reality juxtaposed or even opposed to individualist glorification, subversive politics, acausal magic or aeonic distortion.

Our theatre is set up as an affront to its audience comparable to that of a shocking or terrifying transformative experience; an epiphany on the nature of art and the artist in the post- modern consensus.  This art is therefore meant to add to its own magnificence, to increase the artistic gnosis among the uninitiated; it is in itself a form of magical initiation into the meta-reality of the artist, magician, or philosopher.   The spectator is only separated from the actor by way of cognitive decision - a slight change in perception places them both in the same abstractive stance.

This perceptual change however -  like many an initiatory experience -  can be horrifying, and the material used by the actors is certainly not limited to what would be considered appropriate by the normative watcher.

The various forms of theatre we would like to propose are as follows.  These are forms of theatre that may be accessible to an audience in a traditional performance space or as street theatre, invisible theatre or as performed in other non-traditional performance spaces.    

Ritual Theatre, Aeonic Theatre, Art Theatre/ Installation Theatre, Reconstructive Theatre, Deconstructive Theatre, Theatre of the Eshu/ The trickster, Gnostic theatre, Philosophic Theatre, Shamanic Theatre, Theatre of the Gods/Devils, Theatre of the Elements, Healing Theatre, Textual Theatre, Directed Improv/ Collective Creation, Chaos Theatre, Structuralist Theatre, Modernist Theatre, Post Modernist Theatre, Meta Theatre, Eatable Theatre/ Food Theatre, Game Theatre/ Role Drama, Evolutionary Theatre ie ‘ the soap opera’, Meme/ Counter-meme Theatre, Surrealist/ Distortionate Theatre, Maverick Theatre/ Theatre of Danger, Theatre ‘ en direct’, Atavistic/ Animal Theatre, Theatre of Creative Anachronism, Mythic Theatre, Choral Theatre/ Group Mind Theatre, Secret Theatre/ Occult Theatre, Esoteric Theatre, Primal Theatre, Giant Theatre/ Titanic Theatre, Psionic Theatre, Sensory Theatre ie ‘ Theatre for the Deaf and the Blind’, Sacred Theatre, Irreligious Theatre