In your remarkable essay Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama, published in 2015, you approach theatre as an experience that can only take place once, rejecting theatre where everything has been planned in advance. Is that how you still view theatre?

It is a driving force in my work. I am interested in the essential power of events unfolding in real time; in performances that are very much alive and responsive to the present moment. Something truly live, something for which the outcome is not predetermined, is always something actively flirting with failure.

But failure can generate unique moments that expose our humanity. Disarming and revealing mistakes are not something that I confine to the rehearsal hall, but rather allow to be integrated into the final product. This is something that I’m looking for as a constituent element of liveness in the performances I offer to an audience.

Declarations is very much about the fleeting and ephemeral nature of both theatre and existence. It is a piece that also relishes in the failures and imperfections inherent to both live performance and living. The script attempts the impossible and ultimately doomed task of accounting for all of the sensations, images and impressions of a human life – « This is the colour yellow / This is a bully / This is Abraham and Isaac / This is the smell of my mother lingering in a closet / This is the last sentence in a long book.” In the original version of the production, five actors improvised gestures or movements for each of these declarations. These unrehearsed gestures created spontaneous image/word events, which, like life, could be anything from beautiful, comic, and poignant, to banal and meaningless. In this way, Declarations was a piece which changed substantially from night to night, always responding to the present moment in the theatre, and the impulses of the performers.

Now that Declarations is a staged reading, we loose the revealing moments of liveness that came with these improvisations. In their stead, I have replaced the image/text juxtapositions of the performers’ gestures with a series of images I have sourced from my own personal life. My desire is to recreate – and create anew – the sense of surprise, discovery, and revelation that came from the chance collisions of the text and gestural scores of the piece.

We are living in a very different world than the one Declarations premiered in back in 2018. I am grateful for this chance to reimagine Declarations at time when many of us have been taking stock, and contending with loss. It feels very special, almost sacred, to be back in a theatre, sharing this space with friends and strangers.

The actors have performed Declarations hundreds of times. How do you ensure that risk is a constant presence, that they don’t repeat movements or gestures that have previously proved successful?

It’s quite difficult to maintain that essential freshness. To answer the question, consider the very nature of the piece, which is fundamentally non-narrative, even though certain fragments have a narrative line: a mother-son relationship, becoming an adult, a mother who is dying.

The first question we asked in rehearsal focused on the nature of the text I’d written at one go during a transatlantic flight. I was flying back home after learning that my mother had less than three years to live.

We soon saw that this theatrical device was musical in nature, with three movements–the senseless abundance of existence, the death of the mother and love–and that it called for solos, duets, counterpoint. Rhythms gradually emerged, then more rhythms, then song.

All these elements combined to form a musical suite. It was with that process and in that spirit that we developed the movement and gestures. We eventually established certain rules for maintaining creativity in those gestures. For example: aim for simplicity, avoid illustrative mime or dance, avoid all facial expressions and familiar hand symbols (the peace sign, a pistol, raising the middle finger), no imitating butterflies or birds.

The most important thing is that during the performance spectators feel the difficulty of what the actors must accomplish; that they experience along with them the failures as well as the moments of grace. The audience becomes an active participant.

You describe Declarations as a ritual. In what sense?

Ritual is a word I do not use lightly. Declarations may be playful and often joyful, but it does ask some fundamental questions. What is it to live? What is it to die? What is it like to lose a loved one? These are essential questions that are part of everyone’s lives, but they are impossible to answer. Trying to do so leads sooner or later to failure. Nonetheless, because of those questions, for thousands of years and in all cultures people have gone to the temple. I may be an atheist, but I do have a temple. And it is theatre.

Interview with Jordan Tannahill | 2021

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