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Arches states that experimental theatre began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry (2018). Alfred Jarry was a French writer mainly known as the creator for his play, Ubu Roi. The play caused a riotous response in the audience as it opened and closed on the same day. Ubu Roi was considered a wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms, and conventions. Jarry also published stories, novels, and poems. (Lennon and Griffith, 2011)

The term "experimental theatre" has changed over time, as mainstream theatre has accepted many forms that were once considered radical. Experimental theatre originated from the the term avant-garde theatre (HE, 2015). Roughly speaking, avant-garde means ‘out in front of everybody else’. For example, a person who is out in front of everybody else is fully exposed to the fire of the enemy. To experiment is to make a venture into the unknown. It is something that can be charted only after an event. To be avant-garde is truly to be way out in front of the ‘fourth wall’ – a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience (Roose-Evans, 1994). However, the role of an audience member is not often recognised. In experimental theatre, the audience often do not realize they are participating and becoming an audience, this is called ‘the alienation effect’. The Alienation effect or German Verfremdungseffekt idea was portrayed by dramatic theory of the German dramatist-director, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht's principle of using innovative theatrical techniques was to ‘make the familiar’ strange in order to provoke a social-critical audience response to stimulate debate (Brecht et al., 2015).

Whereas traditional theatre, or as many theatre goers would claim ‘the norm’ is performed in front of a live audience in a specific place, often a stage in a theatre. Traditional theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event. Contemporary theatre includes performances of plays and musical theatre (Cohen, 2007).

Brook argues that you do not need a traditional theatre space such as a stage to create a performance.

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all is for an act of theatre to be engaged.” (2008)

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Different Genres of Experimental Theatre.

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Different Genres of Experimental Theatre.

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Guerrilla Theatre

The term guerrilla theatre was coined by actor-playwright Peter Berg who suggested to R.G Davis for the title of his essay. Guerrilla theatre grew directly out of Davis's rediscovery of commedia dell'arte, which he became interested in after studying modern dance and mime during the 1950s. Davis credited Peter Berg with the term "guerrilla theatre” (Doyle, 1988).

Bogad proclaims that guerrilla theatre uses public performances to directly engage with people over social and political issues. The performance relies heavily on satires which is one of the principal forms of communication. Guerrilla theatre is generally unscripted and sometimes results in the arrests of its actors (2016). Bogad continues to state that guerrilla theatre involves frequent forms of performance, from stage and street plays. It is meant to question social and political norms which are unfair or oppressive and evoke a response from the audience. However, guerrilla theatre is meant to be seen. The public, highly visibly nature of it is important. You don't always choose to be the audience of guerrilla theatre, you may not even know you are part of the audience at all. After all, the goal is to force people to address political issues, and to shake the foundations of cultural normality (2016).
An example of guerrilla theatre can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEVZMmKEWfk

Street theatre

Street theatre is performed outdoors but not in any specific venue, typically in an improvised manner. Street theatre goes to its audience rather than the other way around. Its appearances depend on the time and the place, it can range from promenade theatre through a town or village to outside a factory, linked up with a social or political campaign. There is an enormous range of outdoor theatre, for example, from a solo juggler performing to a small crowd, busking musicians, magicians that approach the public to perform a trick and amaze the crowd that follows to Individuals or casts of actors performing pre-rehearsed or improvised scenes. Agreed by Mason (2002).

Hale expresses that the origins of street theatre started in the 1600’s from Italian theatre ‘Commedia dell'arte’. Commedia dell'arte also known as ‘Italian comedy’ was a humorous theatre presentation performed by professional actors in the 1600's. This type of theatre used masks which were designed with colourful leather. The masks were used to project their characters' emotions through the body. They would incorporate Leaps, tumbles and obscene gestures into their performances. Commedia dell'arte was mostly improvisation. Performances started off taking place on the back of wagons but where then later performed on temporary stages, mostly on city streets, but occasionally even in court venues (2018).

As stated by Esslin, commedia dell'arte influenced a lot of practitioners such as Jacques Lecoq, who is said to of been one of the greatest mime artists and perhaps more importantly one of the finest teachers of acting in our time. Lecoq was born in Paris 1921 and died aged 77 in 1999, he began his career as an actor in France. He was passionately interested in the commedia dell'arte, he went to Italy to do research on the use of masks by strolling players of the 16th century (2002).

An example of street theatre can be found here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6SC37kMlkI

Forum theatre:

Forum theatre allows the audience or spectator to change the outcome of a scene. As explained by Farmer:

“A play or scene, usually indicating some kind of oppression, is shown twice. During the replay, any member of the audience is allowed to shout ‘Stop!’, step forward and take the place of one of the oppressed characters, showing how they could change the situation to enable a different outcome” (2014)

This technique was pioneered by Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal and is part of the 'Theatre of the Oppressed'. Forum Theatre is an applied drama technique and participatory theatre practice created to empower audience individuals to determine social change (Hammon, 2015).

According to Coudray, the roots of ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ (Forum Theatre) began in the late 1950s, prior to this, Augusto Boal was a director for a theatre company named ‘Teatro Arena’. Boal had written and staged plays for fifteen years, his goal was to lead Brazilian theatre to become national, more popular and political rather than its classical, bourgeois and European roots (2017).

Forum theatre or ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ is proposed to take over the traditional opposition between actors and audience, as supported by Coudray:

“The very core of the Poetics of the Oppressed is that theatre should be performed by the people instead of for the people, by the oppressed themselves and not by professional actors claiming to stand on the stage for them…  This is why the poetics has been considered as a method to help non-actors to use drama techniques for themselves as political tools or weapons in their liberation struggles” (2017).
Forum Theatre example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi1HfSiMxCU

Invisible theatre:
Mitchell explains that Invisible theatre is theatre that seeks never to be recognized as theatre itself. It is primarily performed in a public place and the objective is to make the experiment as realistic as possible so that it provokes spontaneous responses. The scene must be loud enough to be heard and noticed by people, but not so loud or noticeable that it appears staged. Unlike street theatre, during a piece of invisible theatre, the audience or spectators are unaware that they are the audience or that there is a performance taking place (2008). Invisible theatre is also a technique that originates from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal used invisible theatre as one of his main techniques to make social structures, power relations and individual habitus visible and provide tools to facilitate change. Boal argues that theatre is necessarily political because all the activities of man are political, and theatre is one of them.
“Those who try to separate theatre from politics try to lead us into error – and this is a political attitude” (2013).

Because of Boal’s work on Theatre of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator was inspired by this which influenced the writing of his book ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ (Paterson, 2018).

Invisible Theatre example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu0iLRH8zM0

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After research on different genres of experimental theatre, the idea of invisible theatre was very appealing. The idea of receiving a genuine audience response influenced one as a practitioner.

First initial idea:

Being a part of the LGBT community, it seemed apparent to base one’s invisible theatre piece on this specific topic as there a lot of social and political issues.  An example of this which influenced one’s decision, was an event that took place in the united states of America and made worldwide news as Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cake in Denver, had refused to bake a wedding cake for a same sex couple. Phillips argued that his cakes are works of art and that requiring him to bake them for same-sex weddings would force him to express a view that violated his religious beliefs (Edelman, 2018).

According the Edelman, in a statement defending his decision Phillips explained that: “I don't discriminate against anybody — I serve everybody that comes in my shop, I don't create cakes for every message that people ask me to create. This cake is a specific cake, a wedding cake is an inherently religious event and the cake is definitely a specific message that is against my religious views.” (2018)

A newspaper article written by Bowcott states that judge Hale argues that: “It is deeply humiliating, and an affront to human dignity, to deny someone a service because of that person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation or any of the other protected personal characteristics,” (2018)

With this in mind, the idea was to organise a lesbian marriage proposal in a public place in one’s hometown, providing a plant that would disagree with the act to see if other spectators would respond either agreeing/disagreeing with the person passing judgmental comments.

Final decision:
Unfortunately, the project did not come to any success as it was proven difficult finding a volunteer to pretend to have a different sexual orientation and feel comfortable with doing so. A new idea was put in place that would only require one single person instead of relying on others. An inspiration that the majority could relate to, that being mental health issues.

According to Halliwell, Main and Richardson, there are 16 million people people that experience mental illness in the UK. One in four adults will experience a mental illness at some point each year in the UK. This can range from, depression, anxiety, alcohol dependence, drug misuse and psychosis (2007).

As a practitioner who suffers from mental health it was confirmed that this would be the chosen topic of the invisible theatre piece. The first step was finding an appropriate performance space one would feel comfortable with but also have a fair amount of public attention. As a practitioner suffering with anxiety as well as other mental health issues it was decided to travel out of town for the performance as one did not want to be seen or recognised by anyone that may distract and potentially ruin the piece. It was appropriate to find somewhere that was privately owned, to avoid having to contact the council and await their response. The performance took place outside a chip shop in Caistor that also had a busy food store close by. Contact was made to the manager of the chip shop explaining the plan and reasons behind it. It was explained that the piece was only to last 15 minutes and insurances were covered by the university. A full risk assessment would be conducted and proof of this could be shown if requested.

Before the event took place an ethics form and a risk assessment were completed to ensure that all guidelines were being followed. Health and safety of the public was also considered.

The idea was inspired by studying YouTube videos of invisible theatre, one video in particular stimulated the piece which was an actor portraying they wanted to commit suicide and members of the public reaching out to prevent them from doing so.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXSmhA9I2gI

The invisible theatre performance would not include any speaking unless a member of the public came and approached the practitioner off their own back. But how could one get mental health awareness across to the public without calling them over? A proposal from another YouTube video inspired this.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14npG9l4FRA

Unlike the video shown, the idea was to stay silent but provide a board with “I need help, talk to me” (see image below) in writing big enough for the passers by to see. It was then down to them whether they talk and try offer help or turn a blind eye towards mental health. Mental health has the potential to take away the best versions of ourselves, but for many people mental health isn’t seen as an issue at all. It is often dismissed as something made up, an over-dramatic illusion so you can be signed off work, or an excuse used by ‘sad’ people. Many people choose to ignore people suffering. As supported by Knott who argues that “The mentally unwell are often referred to as “madmen" and dismissed because of it. It's like people are blind to them. I've seen groups pass by these people on their way to church without looking down at the dehydrated body at their feet” (2016).

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It is believed that invisible theatre is improvisation only, but how much can practitioners rely on improvisation in a performance? Augusto Boal’s view on this is not a lot. Boal considers it to be very important working to a tight structure and a carefully crafted semi-improvised script. Whilst studying into invisible theatre one has reflected whether it is responsible to go into a situation without careful planning and script writing. When do we know when to move away from the script and respond to our audience ‘off script’?

With this in mind, it was decided to consider thinking of a response to the message written on the board.

Responses such as:

“Are you okay?”

“Whats the matter?”

“What do you need help with?”
Where taken into consideration when planning the piece. As there is a lot of truth behind the mental health awareness experiment, one decided the best way to answer the following questions would be with personal experiences. Such as:

“I’m really struggling with depression, I’m up and down all the time, I don’t know where to go from here”
“I can’t cope anymore”
“I need support on how to get me through my bad times”.

Appearance:

It was suggested by a friend that one should ‘look scruffier’ and ‘less pretty’, this was disagreed as it came across that she was stating all mental health sufferers are homeless or have poor hygiene. Mental health is an invisible disease and you can’t put an appearance on that. However, water was applied to the eyes to make the mascara run to create the look of tears rolling down the face as if one had been crying and was in distress to attract the members of the public. As demonstrated in images below.

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The experiment needed to be filmed discreetly, which is why it was decided to record the piece on a mobile phone to avoid members of the public noticing this and recognising it as an act. An opportunity to set up and approach the spot for filming arose when there were no members of the public around. Many passers-by ignored the message on the board and some glanced but didn’t say anything. In judgement of this, it is believed people appear to be slightly uncomfortable and don’t know how to approach the situation. After two minutes of filming a middle-aged gentleman came to offer support. He asked if one needed food or drink and even offered money. After explaining the mental health issues, he then began to relate and explain his own sufferings. The gentleman was an alcoholic who suffered with depression also. He explained how he goes to see a counsellor and recommended one should go too. The male saw how distressed one appeared and didn’t want to leave until he knew he had made a difference, he even brought along his dog to enlighten the situation. It appeared the gentleman needed help just as much as one did and that helping someone else helped him forget about his own problems. After recording, the gentlemen stayed for a further 10 minutes until it was explained it was an experiment, but also had truth behind it. With the gentleman sticking around the whole fifteen minutes to ensure one was ok, in reflection of this, if the experiment was to happen again one would have told him sooner it was an experimental theatre piece to gain more public acknowledgment. It is assumed nobody else came as they saw that one was pre-occupied and seen talking to someone else. A bigger board with larger writing would also be changed so that it would definitely be recognised as people from a distance wouldn’t have been able to read it. Appearing sadder and more distressed would have helped attract more members of the public, such as hysterically crying. Overall, the experiment was a success as it achieved the objective but making minor changes as stated above could have made it a greater success and by doing so, achieved experimental theatres full potential.

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