Features Published 9 February 2011

Devoted & Disgruntled: conferring in Open Spaces

The 6th annual event saw theatre's organisational avant-garde in friendly, pragmatic and inspirational form.
Aliki Chapple

For the opening of the event, chairs have been arranged in three large concentric circles. Few of them are occupied as, cup of free tea in hand, I stand at the edges of the crowd.  Despite the friendly atmosphere, I am slightly nervous. I barely have time to acknowledge this before I’m hugged by a friend I haven’t seen since we were in a show together more than ten years ago. He introduces me to several other people, and as we sit, others gradually start drifting towards the chairs. It’s a good indication of how the rest of the event will unfold, not just for me but for everyone I speak to; it will be exhilarating and sobering, pragmatic, idealistic, diverse and united, open-minded, focused, bracing and warm and overwhelmingly good-natured.

Phelim McDermott of Improbable Theatre is a champion of Open Space technology, and Devoted and Disgruntled is Improbable’s brainchild. He introduces the event, outlining the structure I’ve described above, emphasizing the Law of Mobility, and then offering the microphone to whoever has a session to announce. His tone is casual and friendly, inclusive. Inclusiveness is very much what it’s about, there are interpreters repeating everything in BSL, and we are reminded that some in attendance have restricted mobility, and asked to take care not to exclude them from our discussions.

And just like that, it begins. The topics people propose range widely from the very particular (I have a big idea but I don’t feel big enough to make it happen) to the industry-wide (How can we make the process of tour-booking better for artists and companies?), from the radically political (What does an un-capitalist mode of performance look like?) to the unabashedly commercial (What can we sell besides tickets?). Some sessions were clearly geared towards professional development, or particular pressing issues, others were more personal, expressions of social (Afternoon tea and biscuits with the gays) or religious (Buddhist chanting) interests.

This Devoted and Disgruntled, the sixth such event, was subtitled Singing in the Dark Times. Given that, and the general mood these last moths among the theatre folk I’ve talked to, I expected a lot of discussion of the cuts; as it happened, there was relatively little. A few sessions were devoted to specific questions about coping with expected cutbacks, and both fears and complaints were aired, but on the whole, the mood was upbeat and pragmatic; a session on the sharing of material resources has already resulted in a facebook page along the lines of Freecycle. Others took the title more literally; two songs for the dark times were composed, and we were taught how to sign “Devoted and Disgruntled”.  It is, perhaps, a shame that all the participants seemed to be from the more experimental end of the theatrical spectrum, a greater variety of voices would have made the experience even more rewarding. Nonetheless, I can’t conceive of not going back next year. I left York Hall on Sunday evening feeling more even devoted and less disgruntled than I arrived.


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Aliki Chapple

Aliki would do almost anything in order to get to spend time acting. Recently, this has included writing and directing. She is more of a materialist than a formalist, and fell into thinking theoretically about performance. Now addicted, she is opinionated and analytical without being notably well-read. She lives in Lancaster.

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