Creating by Annotating

Abstract

Reversing the common understanding of annotation as a posterior act of adding information to already existing sources, this article argues that annotation also serves as a pre-performance procedure facilitating artistic creation. Through an analysis of the notebooks of Jan Fabre and Jan Lauwers, two leading directors in the international theatre scene, it becomes evident how they each develop distinct annotative strategies (including drawings, fragmentary lists, comments and so forth) that provide insight in their artistic poetics. The article discusses to what extent these annotated notebooks differ from the most common type of annotation in the theatre, usually termed ‘didascalia’, which refers to stage directions and glosses appearing in the margins of the dramatic text. Postdramatic directors such as Fabre and Lauwers, however, substantially broaden the scope of these didascalia, insofar as text is no longer the epicentre of theatrical creation and other parameters (body, movement, space) become equally important. This juxtaposition is palpably visible in their annotated working documents, in which the interaction between word and image is a central given. The article further considers how this expanded use of annotation brings to light its beneficial impact on creative cognition, suggesting that the acts of drawing, jotting down notes or making lists are crucial strategies to articulate incipient ideas in the artistic imagination. Finally, the importance of the annotated drawing page as a materialization of creative thinking is elucidated against the background of the philosophical debate on hypomnesis and anamnesis, two terms introduced by Plato and recently revived by Bernard Stiegler. By approaching annotation as a means of creation, the article thus demonstrates how it enables artists to proceed from the realm of imagination to the reality of the stage.

Notes

1. The title of this section is also the name of the joint research project from which the present article derives. ‘The Didascalic Imagination’ is an inter-universitary initiative, supervised by Luk Van den Dries (University of Antwerp) and Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). The project examines the changing role of director's notebooks in contemporary theatre as a means to gain further insight into the various creative processes that inform theatrical production. As such, it aims to contribute to the emerging field of theatre genetics. For more information, see: http://dighum.uantwerpen.be/didascimagination.

2. All translations from the French are our own, unless indicated otherwise.

3. The practice of Flemish director Luk Perceval, who currently works at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg (Germany), provides a telling example of how video recordings, computer files and social media can be a constitutive part of creative processes in theatre. For a discussion of his working methods, see Crombez and Cassiers (forthcoming).

4. The names refer to two performers in the original staging of the piece, Roberto De Jonghe and Wim Vandekeybus.

5. The most notable exception to this is the solo exhibition Restlesness (2007), which was curated by Jérôme Sans and that showed for the first time an impressive collection of visual works that Lauwers created between 1996 and 2006.

6. The works that Lauwers created during the beginning period of Needcompany were often inspired by literary and dramatic texts, including the work of Ernest Hemingway in the 1991 production Invictos as well as several plays of William Shakespeare. Yet he never staged this material in any traditional way, bending it instead to his own theatrical poetics.

7. For a discussion of the appearance of similar lists and the use of punctuation in the notebooks of Romeo Castellucci, see De Laet and Cassiers 2015.

8. Frédéric Kaplan, who is founder of the Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLAB) in Switzerland, has done interesting interdisciplinary research on annotation, combining cognitive science, literary studies and linguistics. Other noteworthy studies are Wolfe and Neuwirth (2001), Liu (2006) and Johnson et al. (2010). Most of these investigations focus on annotation as a pedagogical tool to enhance learning processes in educational contexts.

9. In his more recent book Supersizing the Mind (2008), Clark talks about sketching, drawing and other related activities as ‘surrogate situations’ that ‘allow human reason to be disengaged … while at the same time providing a concrete arena to deploy perceptuomotor routines of a fundamentally world-engaging kind’ (155).

10. For more on the recurrent motif of the rabbit mask in Images of Affection and Jan Lauwers's work in general, see Van den Dries (2007) and Le Roy (2007).

11. For a more elaborate discussion of Plato's Meno by Stiegler, see his Technics and Time 1: The fault of Epithemeus (1998: 95–100).