Waves marks the inauguration of an aesthetic style that is still being developed. Every show on which Mitchell and Warner collaborate extends the form in significant ways, or
deploys similar techniques under a new set of constraints.129 Tracing the evolution of
their experiments in blending live performance with recording technologies is a revealing
exercise; indeed, Waves in and of itself registers such a development. As Mitchell stated,
“if you look at the show it charts our ability to do the film stuff, which is harder. So it starts with more radio at the beginning and it gets more and more filmic” (Grylls 2012). After becoming increasingly confident in their use of live film techniques over the course
of their work on Attempts on Her Life (2007), Mitchell and Warner, in collaboration with
129 Mitchell and Warner refer to these events as “shows”. I adopt the term here to distinguish
between Live Cinema and more “conventional” theatrical productions. Each show in this
evolving genre responds to a unique challenge. Die Ringe des Saturn (2012) extended Mitchell’s
exploration of subjective sound and removed the reliance on pre-recorded acoustic elements. The entire soundscape was created live on a stage transformed into a Foley studio. The live-film aspects were relegated offstage, partially visible through glass windows in the back right hand
corner of the stage. For Reise durch die Nacht (2012), Mitchell put creative restrictions on the team
their cast, were able to achieve “sustained visual output” (Grylls 2012) by the time they
returned to the Cottesloe to tackle Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot in 2008 as …some trace of
her. Since then, productions including Wunschkonzert (2008) and Fräulein Julie (2010) have
engaged more explicitly with the conventions of cinema, placing centre stage fully constructed interior film sets with removable elements that facilitate complex camera setups, allowing for the projection of continuous footage captured in real time on a screen suspended above the stage. As always with Mitchell’s practice, individual works gain from being seen in the context of a broader artistic trajectory.
Although this work would later refocus around the productive tension between live performance and cinematographic representation, these techniques were discovered as pragmatic solutions to the challenge of realising Woolf’s modernist text within the limited stage resources of the National Theatre’s 400-seat studio space, the Cottesloe. Mitchell, with sound designer Gareth Fry, began by investigating with actors how the live creation of complex aural soundscapes could “instantly, effectively – and economically – transport the audience from one location or historical period to the next” (Kerbel 2006: 4). This line of creative enquiry led them to the techniques of radio drama – specifically the methods of the Foley artist who creates sound during the post-
production phase in order to enhance a listener’s sense of location.130 Resonating with
Woolf’s sea metaphor, the use of microphones to capture and isolate live aural effects made sound waves the dominant, fluid medium through which Mitchell transcended theatre’s fixity, and reflected the flux of perceptions, anxieties and desires caught in
Woolf’s prose.131
Mitchell and her team combined literal and abstract approaches to sound, exploring methods designed to work on the intellectual and emotional responses of the audience. The actor Liz Kettle recalled experimenting with techniques following a
130 The practice emerged in response to the challenge of joining moving pictures together with
sound, and took its name from one of the original practitioners of the technique (Jack Foley), who worked in Hollywood in the early twentieth century.
131 See Halliburton (2006): “Theatre’s not a naturally fluid medium, which is why it’s so clever
rehearsal workshop led by Foley artist Jack Stew: “Peeling a potato is running a knife along the seam of a cricket ball. Tearing up a polystyrene plate is for when emotions become more jagged” (Jackson 2008). Kettle’s account reveals the dual technical and creative application of the technique, used to score realistic activity as well as emotional states, but it also suggests a surprising consequence of performing Foley artistry in a live theatrical context. Spectators constantly saw the unusual objects used to create these realist sound effects including the potato peeling, or a startled bird taking flight from a tree (achieved by flapping a leather glove away from a microphone). As Mitchell’s performers continued to raid objects from stacks of freestanding shelves either side of the playing space, these curious audio-visual combinations set up a dynamic poetic interplay between object, action and effect that simultaneously invoked and disavowed naturalism. As actors took turns voicing extracts from Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative directly into microphones placed on a long black table centre stage, the rest of the company moved between various Foley stations. Throughout the performance they used roving props or stationary elements like gravel trays to underscore narration. Each of the seven sections of Woolf’s novel is bookended by an italicised description of a seaside scene witnessed by an omniscient narrator at various points over the course of a single day; as an actor read out the interpolated descriptions of waves and sea a performer drew a violin bow across the rim of a bell, creating an ambient metallic scrape, layered on top of the pre-recorded audio of waves washing back and forth against the shore. Indeed, Gareth Fry’s sound design enhanced the live effects throughout with pre-recorded drones and thuds as well as period music, compiled by music director Simon Allen and used, like the Foley effects, to evoke and shift location and time. Paul Clark’s original composition provided a final acoustic element, played by an offstage string quartet and written in the style of Beethoven’s experiments with counterpoint. Having learned that Woolf listened to Beethoven’s late quartets as she
wrote The Waves, Clark inferred the importance of counterpoint to the novel, offering
Woolf’s orchestration of the six subjectivities around whom the novel is organised (Kerbel 2006: 8).
Mitchell and her team discovered film later in the process. She and designer Vicki Mortimer quickly abandoned the idea of constructing a series of masking screens on stage, with open sections through which the audience could glimpse actors’ body parts (an arm or a head); nonetheless, the principle of visual fragmentation remained a central premise. The novel’s fragmentary prose was, for Mitchell, suggestive of a particular manner of perceptual encounter between work and reader that she intended to replicate in her adaptation. As assistant director Lucy Kerbel recalled:
Katie discussed with the company how our imaginations do most of the work when we read novels, visualising the world of the story. The author has laid down a framework that our brains flesh out by filling in all the gaps and turning the words on the page into a living, breathing 360-degree world. (Kerbel 2006: 4)
For Mitchell, gaps invite readers (and spectators) to fill them in, raising their consciousness of entire “living, breathing” worlds that aren’t limited by the tendency of external naturalism to over-signify clearly discernable referents in the objective world. Kerbel’s discussion of “brains” and reader psychology also signals the penetration of attitudes inflected by neuroscience into Mitchell’s rehearsal room culture, in this case mapping the cognitive mode of engagement that a novel stimulates in a reader, and using this as a basis for generating performance that replicates this cognitive mode for spectators.
Over the course of these exploratory workshops, the company settled on film as the most successful strategy for cropping and projecting visual fragments to accompany their work on the aural soundscape, leading Mitchell to invite Leo Warner to join the company as video designer. Before the eight-week rehearsal period that led up to the first
performance in 2006, Mitchell had streamlined Woolf’s 228-page novel into a 40-page
document (Jefferies 2011: 403).132 Rehearsals consisted of working methodically through
the document, exploring Foley techniques, and devising visual imagery to create dynamic sections of performance that solved the challenges of Woolf’s prose paragraph- by-paragraph. Like the acoustics, this visual imagery combined realist and abstract approaches. Tiny environments were quickly assembled and disassembled across the stage, at times as simple as a handheld board that provided a realistic backdrop (covered, for example, in a William Morris wallpaper). One actor would stand in front of it as his face was projected in close-up on the suspended screen, while another voiced his interior thoughts. Technology thus isolated and separated the body of the character from the various voices, both male and female, used interchangeably to narrate their stream of consciousness.
The cameras were also used to generate poetic and abstract visual imagery. Small tanks and fishbowls full of water allowed a performer-operator to capture footage through their transparent sides. Repeated visual sequences of Rhoda’s (Anastasia Hille’s) submerged head, her floating hair tangling with petals or blanketweed, provided a recurring visual motif. Occasionally, an abstract effect would be applied to the digital video itself; when Jinny was filmed frantically dancing after having burned the telegraph announcing Percival’s death, the projected image was rendered with a halting black and white effect that caught the body of the actress (Liz Kettle) in a series of frozen jagged shapes.
Mitchell’s experiments with technology were thus born out of pragmatic attempts to generate dynamic staging solutions in response to Woolf’s text, rather than an avant-garde strategy aimed at deconstructing a source novel. Whilst spectators were consistently able to assess the projected output against its means of construction – just as the aural effects could be related visually to their inventive origins in mundane objects – the aim was to stimulate creative perception and to work directly on the audience’s
emotions, rather than to unmask representational illusion. However, although Mitchell’s use of technology clearly challenges the representational orthodoxies of naturalistic theatre praxis, it may seem that this new intermedial methodology has steered her away from her original intention: the representation of “facets of consciousness” (Dramaten 2012). A means of addressing this issue emerges if we analyse Mitchell’s response as a spectator to the work of an experimental theatre troupe who similarly used technology to fracture their stage.