Staging Scores: Devising Contemporary Performances from Classical Music

Abstract

In this article, we deploy overlapping conceptual frameworks to address contemporary performance work we were involved in making, which explored the representation and utilisation of classical music from theatrical and structural perspectives. We have been engaged in making score-based theatre since we started collaborating in the early 2000s and the two chosen case studies presented here are characteristic of our shared interest in a dramaturgical process that foregrounds music and musicality in the creation of new theatre performances. Combining elements of ‘postdramatic theatre’ (Lehmann, 2006), ‘composed theatre’ (Rebstock and Roesner, 2012) and ‘score theatre’ (Spagnolo, 2017) we expose how the two separate projects made use of the language, etiquettes, organisational structures, narratives and scores of classical music as creative inspiration for our respective devising processes. We have taken, as a creative prompt, Carolyn Abbate’s description of classical music, not as a work but as an event: ‘between the score as a script, the musical work as a virtual construct, and us, there lies a huge phenomenal explosion’ (2004: 533).