‘… some trace of her’: Katie Mitchell's Waves in Multimedia Performance

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Notes

¹Title inspired by The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Adapted by Katie Mitchell and the Company from the translation by David Magarshack, Colltesloe Theatre, National Theatre, London. Production ran July-October 2008.

²Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3: 1925–30, London: Hogarth Press, 1980, pp. 128, 137.

³David Trotter, ‘Virginia Woolf and Cinema’ in Film Studies, Manchester: Manchester University Press, Issue 6, Summer 2005, pp. 13–26 (p.18). Freely available on line in PDF format at http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/download.asp?id=10

⁴David Trotter, ‘Virginia Woolf and Cinema’ in Film Studies,, p. 139.

⁵From my notes taken during the Waves performance at the Cottesloe Theatre, 18 November 2006 and 5 September 2008.

⁷Katie Mitchell, interview with Mark Kermode, The Culture Show, BBC2, 29 July 2008.

⁶Louise LePage, ‘Posthuman Perspectives and Postdramatic Theatre: The Theory and Practice of Hybrid Ontology in Katie Mitchell's The Waves’, Culture, Language and Representations 6, 2008, pp. 137–49 (p. 138).

⁸For a fuller discussion around this theme, see Janis Jefferies, Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan (eds), Interfaces of Performance, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

⁹From notes on a platform discussion, Katie Mitchell and Dan Rebellato, National Theatre, London, 12 August 2008.

¹⁰Andrew Haydon, ‘Waves’, December 2006, at www.culturewars.org.uk/2006-01/waves.htm (accessed 18 March 2008).

¹²Katie Mitchell, ‘Breaking the Waves’, Guardian, 11 November 2006, at www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/nov/11/theatre.stage (accessed 1 September 2010).

¹¹Katie Mitchell talks to Christopher Campbell about her new production, Waves, and about the process of devising with the company from the text of Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves, Cottesloe Theatre, 12 January 2007, at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/22204/audio-podcast-listings/interviews.html and www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/rss.php?id=12 (accessed 17 January 2011).

¹³Katie Mitchell in conversation with Dan Rebellato at the platform pre-show talk, at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/38744/programme-extracts/programme-extract-for-emsome-trace-of-herem.html (accessed 28 June 11).

¹⁴Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 19.

¹⁵Charlotte Loveridge, ‘… Some Trace of Her’, at www.curtainupcom/sometracaeslond (accessed 10 February 2010).

¹⁶Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

¹⁷Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

¹⁹Author's notes

¹⁸Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.

²⁰Aleks Sierz, ‘Some Traces of Katie Mitchell’, Theatre Forum 34, January 2009, n. pag.

²¹ Waves Education Workpack, London: National Theatre, 2006.

²² Waves Education Workpack, p. xi.

²³Bell, Diary of Virginia Woolf, p. 302.

²⁴ Waves Education Workpack, p. xi.

²⁵Bell, Diary of Virginia Woolf, p. 343.

²⁶J.R. Konieczna, ‘Przed premiera “Pechowców”: Rozmowa z rezyserem’ [Before the premiere of ‘The Unlucky’: a conversation with the director], quoted in Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre [1999], trans. from the German by Karen Jürs-Munby, London: Routledge, 2006.

²⁷Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘The Reconstruction of the Theatre’, in Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. from the Russian by Edward Braun, New York: Hill and Wang, 1969, pp. 157–67

²⁸These are points to which I shall return in the chapter on Katie Mitchell in Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan (eds), Intimacy, : Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.

²⁹Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 182.

³⁰Tina Jackson, ‘Daring to Take the Plunge with Waves’, Metro, 15 September 2008, at www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/309756-daring-to-take-the-plunge-with-waves (accessed 29 October 2011).

³¹Meyerhold, ‘Reconstruction of the Theatre’, p. 166.

³²Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 147. Following in the tradition laid out by Michael Kirby and Roselee Goldberg, Hans-Thies Lehmann, in his Postdramatic Theatre, attempts to define a critical vocabulary and landscape for what has variously been called performance, performance art, installation art and so on. More simply, it is theatre, but a theatre which decentres the text as a defining element in the production and reception of theatrical experience, rendering the text or the play as an element neither more nor less central than movement, light and set design, sound or multimedia. In a section titled ‘Panorama of Postdramatic Theatre’, Lehmann defines a collection of performances for study, beginning with the work of Kantor, Grüber and Wilson, and charting a path through a large body of contemporary performance, with frequent references to younger companies both in Britain and on the continent such as Forced Entertainment and Simon McBurney's Complicite.

³³Katie Mitchell talks to Christopher Campbell, Cottesloe Theatre, 12 January 2007.

³⁴Leonard Woolf (ed.), A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf,, quoted in the programme notes accompanying the National Theatre's world premiere of Waves, Cottesloe Theatre, 18 November 2006.