Browsing by Author "Crewe, Jenni-Lee"

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    Fragments of Encounters
    (University of Cape Town, 2020) Blum, Nomi; Crewe, Jenni-Lee; Jackï Job
    FRAGMENTS OF ENCOUNTERS is an experimental interactive performance project operating within a 'practice as research' (PaR) paradigm-defined as a continually emergent and open-ended process. The participation and interaction of the audience and the feedback received from lecturers and fellow students were central to the development of this research and are integrated in my work. Description of this feedback and its impact will be visible throughout this paper. I will be engaging with my research through the lens of two performances, fragments of encounters 1 & 2, which act as embodiments to my research. The work(s) is a narrative about lives relieved through memory and whose re-narration gives rise to a new present time-that of the narrative, which is the performance. The subject of my research is fragment(ation) seen through the prism of memory, however, not as a main subject but close to Henri Bergson's shining points, round which other subjects 'form a vague nebulosity' (2002:171). The making of this project began in the street; from my interaction with people of different ages and from different socio-political and cultural realities. These encounters make up a personal audio archive of oral interviews recorded, which serves as the source material for my project. The recorded material are life-fragments-memories of the people interviewed and fragments of my own. Overlapping with Herman Parret's (1988) vision, for whom 'life' is a narrative and the narration time is an 'invented' time, the archive I present in my practice is a 'construct', and the re-fragmentation of the fragments of memories in the work opens a field of possibilities of interpretation. Some of these possible reinterpretations are actualised at each re-narration. This in turn opens new interpretations, possibilities or actualisations. By fragmentation and re-narration a mosaic of fragments-memories originate, which are in effect re-narratives... ad infinitum. In the same time, the possibilities that remained unactualised, not narrated, but which are virtual real, amplify the state of tension and uncertainty provoked by fragmentation, which in the end can lead to chaos.
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    Hallways. Place and object between body and narrative: scenographic approaches to devising theatre.
    (2021) Glanville, Joanna; Crewe, Jenni-Lee
    This explication seeks to frame a practice-led research project that explores the scenographic elements of place and object as an intermediary device between body and narrative in devising theatre. A focus of this work is scenographics as a mediating moment between traumatised body and painful narrative; using objects and place as a means of safely exploring and un/recovering memory to make theatre. The research also explores wider applications of scenographics in their formative and generative potential in devising theatre. The practical research is underpinned and located in various conceptual frameworks. Place is guided by Rachel Hann's work Beyond Scenography (2019) with a focus on place orientation, as well as terminologies of space and place introduced by Gay McAuley in various texts. Object is primarily considered through assemblage, semiotics and phenomenology with a focus on a disruption of the subject/object hierarchy as a means of facilitating a scenographic mediatory stand-in during the devising process and in the final theatre piece. The final practical output is process-orientated and focuses on devising a piece of theatre, Hallways, with other participants using place and object. This will be achieved through sets of exercises, activities and games developed throughout the research process; these will be expounded on in the paper.
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    [Re]rendering the real: experiments in phantasmagoric intervention and scenographic reverie
    (2023) Brooks, Jesse; Crewe, Jenni-Lee
    The research centres principally on the experience of wonder; specifically, exploring strategies for engendering moments of wonder, and allied experiences of intrigue, curiosity and fascination, in both audiences and makers. This enquiry is particularly concerned with the pursuit of wonder in terms of the practice of scenography; understood broadly as the modulation of and play with experiential textures of light, space, sound and object through time. The research is thus embedded within contemporary scenographic context, imperatives and praxis. Drawing on a rigorous theoretical bedrock spanning fields of theatre, architecture and the art of illusion, findings from concomitant research undertaken over the last two years is mobilised towards deepening an enquiry into wonder from a scenographic perspective. Using the notion of ‘phantasmagoria' as an in-road into the research, I utilise performance and scenographic intervention to explore oscillations between the mundane and the extraordinary. A comprehensive analysis of the created performance, its conceptual roots and influences, as well as its position within the rhizomatic research output generated within the coursework forms part of the data that is thoroughly and reflexively analysed; opening up the possibility of noting the ways in which the experience of wonder and the practice of scenography might intersect. As such, the research aims to reflect on, react to and re-render the real.