Caroline
London, December 2009: Over the years I have had the privilege to work with Bryony Lavery on several occasions. We were ‘lab-directors’ for Performing Arts Labs at Bore Place near Sevenoaks, near
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Lavery’s first association with the word ‘witnessing’ is a witness in trial. Witnessing is not a word she uses to describe what happens in theatre. Being a writer of theatre plays, for Lavery
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An actor is believable when he inhabits his role, according to Lavery. In the rehearsal process actors do a lot of thinking both with their bodies and their brains to find the believable moves and to
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When rehearsing her play Stockholm, which is about the relationship of two people who are very much in love with each other but very destructive of one another, an anthropologist was observing how it
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When confronted with the definition of a play as a system of time, place, relations and actions, Lavery emphasizes that theatre is a collaborative thing. It is a synthesis of actors, lighting,
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As playwright Lavery suggests a rhythm, using her sense of where people’s behavior needs silence, focusing on the eloquence of movement rather than on the eloquence of words. While writing the page
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In good stories, finds Lavery, you feel a story and every secene is about slightly more than it seems to be about. It has the notion of a myth or a story we’ve known from the dawn of time or you
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Creating the sense of place in theatre is mostly a collaborative effort of many. As a playwright Lavery is mostly concerned with creating an emotional sense of place. It’s a mixture of research and
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Full transcript including film fragments you find at: http://www.systemsdesign.tbm.tudelft.nl/witness
Hereunder the transcript in text.
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