Blood Wedding

Blood Wedding – Director’s Note, 2011

This production is a research and teaching-led project involving collaboration between Translation Studies and Drama Studies, the Sonic Arts Research Centre and the RESAD (Royal Society of Dramatic Art) in Madrid. 

As a teaching and research project we have made some risky dramaturgical decisions. Part of our challenge was how to work with using both English and Spanish, and how narrative works in this case. Another was the choices we would make in staging – such as casting – which have come about through research specialisms in queer theory and performance shared by the director, musical director and designer. In this case, we wondered how dramaturgical decisions to do with voice and staging could lend a queer perspective to the play. I understand a queer dramaturgy as working in ways that resist the normative – both in content and in form. This seemed appropriate in addressing a play by Lorca, who was immensely experimental in his form, while largely self-censoring on the experience of his homosexuality, out of necessity at that time. So in approaching the production we asked questions of the form: how we might frame it to highlight the construction of gender roles, for example. Or, if we want the moon to have an ambiguous gender and sexuality how does voice play a part in this? What meanings emerge in the choice to have a male actor play the (female) bride? One of the joys of working in a research environment is the opportunity to explore and experiment with these questions and to produce practice-led research in a team bringing their particular skills and ideas to the project.

DIRECTOR
Alyson Campbell

TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION
David Johnston

DESIGNER
Niall Rea

COMPOSITION/MUSICAL DIRECTION
Ross Anderson-Doherty