Build a Theatre

James (u.k.)

[Writing experiment]

[I have used this exercise to find a different way to discuss the results section of a paper on design education. I have been struggling with presenting the results for a long time. This week’s creativity catalyst has taken me down a fun and possibly strange road towards a curious amalgam. I have staged the results as an act in a theatre performance (build a set), and as part of this process, I imagined placing my results in a painting called Children's Games by Breughel. My paper/research has nothing to do with this painting, but I think it liberated me to think differently – there is something analogous about design studios and this painting. Perhaps it is the idea of “many dramas are unfolding simultaneously”. So, below is an alternative results section with each element of the results taking on an actual character located in and speaking to the figures in Breughel's painting.]

Act 5 – The Results

(Narrators Voice):
In Breughel's Children's Games, for instance: how many dramas are unfolding simultaneously.

(Two heavy curtains pull back to reveal an enormous stage dressed as a town square).
The large town square is populated by two hundred children playing games. So many games. A pair of children playing with wooden hoops. Three children are poking a pile shit with a stick. There are children playing leapfrog, walking on stilts, and one group to the right-hand side of the stage are engrossed in a game of marbles. Elsewhere, children climb fences or swing on bars while a solitary child in a building is flying a kite out of a window.

There is no single narrative, main plotline, or binding story. Instead, the audience is confronted with a stage of multiple dramas happening simultaneously. Even the children playing games at the margins of the stage are lit with the same intensity as the children occupying the centre. No matter where the audience looks, they will see groups – and sometimes individual children – utterly absorbed in their games – an encyclopaedia of games, a community of play, a milieu of absorption.

Slowly, the audience starts to notice a small area of difference, which is at variance with the children and the play. In this area are six “object practices” (Humphries and Smith 2014).

(Narrators Voice)
An object practice is a practice that enmeshes objects and people (Humphries and Smith 2014).

The audience can make out partially familiar forms of people and sofas but in a curious configuration. This is a chimaera of sofa and person. The sofa appears subsumed into the person, and the person appears subsumed into the sofa, forming a hyphenated practice of foam-flesh. This upends your ideas about actors and props because here they are co-joined. It is such a startling idea that the audience forgets momentarily that a noisy mass of children playing surrounds these object practices.

(Narrators Voice)
“The post-social turn in the social sciences calls upon researchers to de-centre the human actor from the heart of analysis and to recognize the constitutive influence of non-human actors, including technologies and material objects.”
(Humphries and Smith 2014:478).

One of the object practices begins to address the audience. “I am called Immobility, and I don’t move. Instead, I prefer people to come to me, I prefer to be invited into a space….at this level (level 6) and where you’re trying to teach them, trying to get them to demonstrate autonomy. So, to go into that space is almost negating that. You’re going in there and almost and imposing your will on them … so you have to put yourself in a position where you are accessible; that is about where you sit. Of course, I may not impose my will on them, but I ensure they see me”.

The object practice of immobility pauses and then looks across to the object practice of visibility, who speaks up, “I make sure I am seen. I want them to know I am here. I am fused to a spot where most children can see me. They know where to come for conversations, discussions, and questions. They can see I am present and not hiding; visibility matters because I need to see the children, I need them to see each other, and I need them to see me. “I’m definitely clocking who is around, who is there…you’re scanning who’s in, who might need you ... you’re telling them that I’m here... they know you’re in that space, a child wouldn’t say I couldn’t see, you weren’t there…”