ACTING ARCHIVE

This solo-show was created as part of Robert’s MA at Kent University.  An autobiographical piece about love, loss and the losing of self.  It was performed over 2 nights at the Aphra Theatre, University of Kent, September 2008

It was accompanied with a written thesis entitled What to do with Gestus Today Version II

Even when a character behaves by contradictions that’s only because nobody can be identically the same at two unidentical moments.  Changes in his exterior continually lead to an inner reshuffling.  The continuity of the ego is a myth.  A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew.  We have to show things as they are.

(Brecht, 1964: 15)

ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the common and dialectical features of pedagogy, Bertolt Brecht’s Gestus, and identity construction.  It speaks from the perspectives of pedagogue, actor and subject.  It argues that in each of these modes the subject is necessarily engaged in both an ontological dilemma and opportunity, which is performative.  It exposes embodiment as an oscillatory process of absence and presence.  This is predicated on the impossibility of arriving at a fixed notion of being in the world.

The thesis is set within an autobiographical frame.  First because each mode marks an encounter in the life of Rob Vesty, and second because the practice-based-research uses autobiographical performance.

It advances by constructing a piece of performative writing, an autobiographical timeline, to affect an experience of the practice, which informs this thesis.  This piece introduces a montage of three juxtaposing studies.  The first draws on Robert Vesty’s work in TIE with Splendid Productions and uses the company’s 2007/2008 performance and workshop tour of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechuan.  It argues that a dialectic, rather than didactic, process must occur in the pedagogic setting and that this is dependent on the presence of a creative gap produced by a strong aesthetic. 

The second study then argues that the Gestic actor embodies and ‘writes’ this creative gap in a parodic way and that a virtue is made of showing its construction.  The final study turns to Robert Vesty’s (2008) solo theatre show  – One Man Good Woman – to chart the way identity impacts upon autobiography.  It argues that the ‘written’ nature of autobiography and identity renders the subject both absent and present and retains dialectical features in its construction.