As a theatre deviser and director, my intention is to instigate a field of transformation, to encourage artist-performers and audience members to wake up from our everyday routines and to see the world from different perspectives with new possibilities. To achieve this, our performances are based in articulate physicality, in the specificity of the performers’ use of their bodies and their relationship to the space (often non-conventional site-specific spaces). Often the performances challenge the audience’s relationship to the space and to the performers, intending an intimacy and directness in communication between performers-audience, where the performance exists in this space of relationship-dialogue between them.
Themes that interest me often include an activist component, such as, in previous work: the horizontal possibilities of direct democracy, the sexual freedom and empowerment of women in a patriarchal society, the longing for a re-connection with nature for the city-dweller, the question of whether spiritual seeking is possible in the post-modern era, the resistance to consumerism. The intention is to pass the queries of each piece to the audience both through the formal elements of the composition as well as through the textual content. As a big believer in ‘form is content’, I find the forms most interesting for inciting the audience’s imagination include: performers’ physical vigor and specificity, ensemble coordination, composition that grows out of improvisation, site-specific interaction with the environment, live music and soundscapes, deep connection to and articulation of text, group creation of poetic imagery and unexpected uses of objects. In most processes, we work with ensemble training as a basis for group cohesion and communication, as well as group research and development of the subject matter in order to create from a collaborative pool of ideas.
This approach to performance-making is related to my hypothesis that part of our suffering as modern Global North people comes from being stuck in ruts that are not making us happy and that are contributing to the unraveling of society and the destruction of our natural world. My hope is that innovative theatrical approaches can contribute to loosening people from our ‘stuckness’ by offering other possibilities of engagement and synergy.
Increasingly, I am interested in work that is created through the co-intelligence of the ensemble, where the director may be the collaborative captain of the ship and the performers/co-creators the engaged crew, with our joint vision being the sea we are navigating on to hopefully reach a shore we can share with an audience. Such work takes time and commitment, both for the research and development of original devised projects with a clear and impactful dramaturgical throughline, as well as for the training, cohesion and trust-building of the ensemble, all of which I am developing further with a core group of committed collaborators.
— Angela Delichatsios