JISCMail - BRITISH-IRISH-POETS Archives

I'm enquiry as to anyone on the List knows anything first or second-hand about 'The Black Box' Visual Theatre experiment, 1965 to 1971? Was created around artist John Epstein at Exeter School of Art, with a connection to Dartington College. Latimer published a book about the experimental project (they journeyed from Devon to London to realise their project).

Basically, the project was to create a visual theatre (120 by 44 foot). In blackout they projected images and film, combined with static performance, music and the sound track of their story 'Piktor's Metamorphosis' by Hermann Hesse (an allegorical retelling of Adam and Eve in Eden).

Their subject matter doesn't interest me, for they wanted a rural base to explore "qualities of nostalgia, simplicity and magic." While they related the 'actual' to the 'perceived,' essentially they wanted to retell a story in a new way - enhancing the essences of the narrative rather than interposing with/in it or breaking from it.

What excites me are their theatrical devices like Pepper's Ghost, and the interplay between some modern film techniques and some very old theatrical mechanisms. I've spoken before about creating a 'broken theatre' and the concept of a black box, in both theatrical and cinematic terms, seems to be a vehicle. I think the huge space required for the 'Black Box' defeated them. Mine would be tiny. Also, as story, its appeal was consciously focussed on performances (a bit like Punch & Judy). Their black box of a theatre had to be filled as a theatre - show over and the space closes down, goes dark. My idea is that this is reversed: the black out is the means to create the show - lights up and the show continues in the objects/artefacts/visuals thereby seen as a reality - concretely connected with the illusion.

Also, 'The Black Box' was fixed for six years to the same story. That's one hell of a lot of belief to stick with. 'A Broken Black Box' would be the opposite: continual change within the box - bits of theatre, poems, non-poems, music, non-music, changing day to day... pieces unmade up. Ironically, John Epstein refers to his 'Black Box' story as 'The Change' - as metamorphosis is. Yet is it enough that the story is about change? I'm sure 'The Mouse Trap' was minimally different every night but what of change?

I started this "broken" discourse with myself and others on the basis that mine was "made up in the broken." I've lost a couple of artists since because, for me, this is too much like a story, like a conclusion, like things get sorted out, while what I'm really interested in is "made up broken." Wonderfully poets on this list like Mairead are exploring this terrain.