Exploratory Session with Ralf Richardt Strobeck: Sunday, 11 April

The genetic structure of theatre

What does theatre and evolutionary theory have in common? According to Ralf Strøbech, everything. After working with Hotel Pro Forma for several years, he is taking a new direction in his work: he now wants to start with people, not with the specific place and set, and this morning's exploratory was a condensed version of the laboratory, which takes the people in it as its starting point.

Evolution is never random, but conditioned. You may say that the materials we chose were random, but they were nevertheless conditioned by the surroundings. The objects we used had been hunted down by the lab participants, and was pretty much what could be found within two minutes proximity from the studio. So however much you think it might be random, the specific environment and surroundings allow for specific elements to be found and events to unfold.
The structure of the session was to create a piece of about 30 seconds. We then reproduced not our own work, but that of someone else. In the new version, some elements remained unchanged, but most was affected by new people and new interpretations which profoundly changed the meaning of the scene. In the style of Chinese Whispers, elements remained the same, but different, and when we “married” disparate pieces in a good old Darwinian gene mix, a new context was created where some elements were simply more fit to survive there.

What is the result of this Darwinian thinking? Evolutionary thinking creates a space where the material is allowed to evolve organically, where one ends up at one end of an evolving tree of connections, mutations and adaptations. Whatever remains at the end, is what is strongest. It stays in because it works, it changes because it does not. So what happens when you marry together a and b and come up with their “baby”? What happens five generations down the line? Whilst the director needs to be able to trace the trajectory, conditioned evolution may lead to exciting new work. Whilst the space of two hours is far too short for this process to blossom (evolution has, after all, been going on since before humans even existed), it provided a fascinating insight into a process just about to begin. What it will evolve into remains to be seen, as the result never is seen at the outset.

- Ragnhild Dale