Author: TOM CORNFORD
In the same week that I sent the final manuscript of my book Theatre Studios: A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making (just published by Routledge), I stumbled upon a critique of the research that had created it. Jack Belloli, then a PhD student at Cambridge (his extremely interesting thesis is here), had written an article, ‘Theatricality and the Construction of Skill’, which, in his words, ‘interrogates Tom Cornford’s recent attempt to [make] a fuller, fully progressive, proposal for a “turn to the crafts” in contemporary British theatre’. GULP. I’ve met Jack a couple of times – he very kindly invited me to speak to the postgraduate seminar at CRASSH – and he hadn’t alerted me to his piece, so I feared the worst: a devastating critique of a book that had taken me something like a decade to research and write and hadn’t even been published yet.
In the event, of course, my worst fears weren’t realised. Jack’s article mainly pursues a theoretical interrogation of the writings of Richard Sennett and Tim Ingold, two thinkers whose attention to the detail of how work is done represented crucial sign-posts for my research (though as it happened Sennett’s work became much less significant in the end). When the critique of my ‘proposal’ arrived, I found myself relieved to agree with it:
Without wishing to deny the political necessity of changing the conditions under which contemporary theatre is made, or the value of the work that new studio conditions might produce, Cornford’s commitment to imagining new conditions leads him to overstate the potential that studios have for achieving a reliable synthesis of thinking and doing, rather than keeping it as a deferred horizon. For all that the studio provides conditions for greater creative risk than a product-focused and profit-chasing theatre industry allows (Cornford 2012: 353–4), its survival on such terms is dependent on the wider social conditions of the studio themselves not being risked […].
Reflecting on my reasons for agreeing with this critique proved instructive. First, the charge of overstatement – in my earlier writings on the studio – of the political capacities of this model of creative practice is entirely justified. In fact, we often engage in research projects precisely because of an optimistic attachment to the possibilities they represent – and this is no bad thing, provided it is accompanied by a reflexive critique of that attachment. Secondly, Jack’s observation clarified something to me about the book that I had just written but not entirely articulated within it: that the studio is – and always has been – a deferred horizon: a vision that may orient or inspire us, and that we can never reach, but only measure our distance from. Lastly, the focus, in Jack’s critique of my work, on the function of ‘wider social conditions’ is something that came up more and more as I wrote the book and asked myself how and why these theatre-makers were able to do what they did. Answers that cropped up included: a plane crash on the moors, the Allied occupation of Germany, military training in maintenance and repair, bomb damage, the emergence in nineteen-sixties Britain of a new epistocracy, and the earlier collapse of the economic model that sustained large country houses and their estates.
Research is always a dialogue – with others and with ourselves. It is always provisional and contingent; it proceeds through insights, mistakes and overstatements, clarifications and reversals. It is a process we use to test our commitments, question our beliefs, and tease out our contradictions. My book, then, represents a double commitment: both to experimental and collective forms of creative practice, and to testing and questioning them rigorously and analysing their inevitable contradictions. If you’re interested, there’s a tweet thread starting here, that lays out briefly what it involves.
Thanks Jack – and here’s to continued critique.
THEATRE MATTERS: RESEARCH@CENTRAL 