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Influenced by the Italian futurist manifestos of the teens and twenties of the last century, we drew up a series of aims for our work:
1. Theatre is art in a unique social position. In the theatre the experience of art is SHARED.
2.When considering production we ask what is it about this text/space/idea that demands production - and demands production NOW
3. Dramaturgy plays an ever present role in our work. ie research into and continued awareness of the historical/philosophical/linguistic background to a text or space.
4. The production of site-specific theatre where the space does not merely perform an aesthetic function.
5. Equally if in a more traditional theatre space the questions are asked: why do we need an anonymous space for this piece? How do the rules which actors and audience observe when entering a theatre apply to this work?
6. Always: what is the relationship between play and the space played in?
7. That in theatre there is not only politics in terms of content - there is also a politics of FORM. How? (this is what we should be asking ourselves when we produce theatre at the present time)
8. That this notion has been clouded by overfamiliarity with theatrical form, such that the entering of the auditorium often is a stepping out of the real world and into the imagination. We say that these two cannot and should not be so easily separated.
9. Dramaturgy is needed in order to reestablish this connection between play and the political and social world in which it takes place.
11. Theatre can neither lie nor tell the truth, it can only play. Theatre is art.
12. People often set up an antagonism between theatre-as-art and theatre-as-entertainment. We consider them indistinguishable. Unentertaining theatre is not art.
13. Just because the theatre is entertaining does not mean that it does not make you think.
14. We want people to laugh AND think.
15. We are not suggesting that any of this is new. However it is easy to forget to ask these questions - only when these questions are forgotten does complacency arise and the work become old.
16. 'Theatre cannot be imprisioned inside theatrical buildings, just as religion cannot be imprisioned inside churches; the language of theatre and its forms of expression cannot be the private property of actors, just as religious practise cannot be appropriated by priests as theirs alone' (Augusto Boal). To find a wider audience by playing in non-theatre spaces.
17. 'We can only return to the release of art, to the other theatre [as opposed to the theatre of politics], theatre-theatre where you can tell the truth without killing anybody, and may even illuminate the awesomely durable dilemma of how to lead without lying too much. The release of art will not forge a cannon or pave a street but it may remind us again and again of the corruptive essence of power, its immemorial tendency to enhance itself at the expense of humanity'. Arthur Miller, 21 July 2001.
18. To provide a forum in Britain for foreign drama through the encouragement of translation and the organisation of readings - in conjunction with research into and discussion of the original circumstances of production.
19. Generating awareness in audiences of foreign drama of how the aesthetic operates differently in different cultures, such that the drama can be understood and judged against the socio-political world it was written out of (without suggesting that plays are not capable of transcending such apparent barriers).
See also: About Context Theatre
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