As a company, we have been inspired by a lot of things. Pretty much every performance we have seen this year has sparked a discussion and ultimately influenced something within the rehearsal room. Whether this is the layout of our stage space, or the addition of a narrative, or how to make bike wheels, as a grassroots theatre company we are taking inspiration from anything we can!
Every so often one of these ideas leads us to ask ourselves whether or not we are copying. In order to combat these questions I came up with a nifty little answer. Sampling. I first came across sampling at the beginning of my second year at university when I was reading Post production: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World by Nicholas Bourriaud. Bourriaud’s key thesis is based around the idea that there is no longer any such thing as an original idea. This got my brain whirring and a couple of weeks later I came across a TED talk by music producer Mark Ronson, all about sampling and of course although Ronson is talking about the music industry and I’m talking about the theatre industry, parallels can still be drawn.
Sampling is where a musician takes a line, lyric or riff of one song and places it in there own, in an entirely difference context. Ronson suggests that sampling in the music industry can be traced back to the advent of sampling machines in the 1980s but in the theatre the idea of sampling can be traced back even further to the time of Shakespeare and his contemporaries who regularly adapted stories from their own times to suit their means, right the way up to Tom Stoppard who effectively ‘sampled’ two of Shakespeare’s characters for his play Rosencrantz and Guildestern are Dead (1967).
So, as we proudly twirl our glow sticks in the style of Police Cops in Space and set out our auditorium in a fashion rather similar to Third Angel’s Partus I remind everyone that we’re not copying, we’re merely sampling.
E.H.
Another video for you if the topic of sampling tickles your fancy.
Works cited.
Bourriaud, N (2005) Post production: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Parkinson, N., Hunt, Z. and Roe, T. (2018) Police Cops in Space [live performance]. Performed by The Pretend Men. Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 22 February.
Stoppard, T. (1967) Rosencrantz and Guildestern are dead. New York: Grove Press.
Third Angel (2017) Partus [live performance]. Performed by Third Angel. Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 18 October.
TED. (2014) How sampling transformed music | Mark Ronson
. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3TF-hI7zKc [accessed 18 Sept 2016]
vlogbrothers. (2108) 5 Songs You’ve Never Heard That You’ve Heard 1000 Times
. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNH7qzyuT4M [accessed 12 Jan 2018]