Gecko (theatre company)

Gecko is an international physical theatre company based in Ipswich, Suffolk, in the UK. Gecko was founded in 2000 by Amit Lahav and Allel Nedjari, who became co-artistic directors of the company. In 2008, Allel Nedjari left and Amit Lahav carried on as sole artistic director of the company.

The company embraces different forms of performance-based art, like mime, clowning, dance and circus. The concept of ‘actor as creator’ from Jacques Lecoq’s educational philosophy is at the heart of Gecko’s work. Most of their work is based on playful, improvised exploration and physical openness combined with skill.

Mission

The company was formed in 2001, Artistic Director Amit says "We were fuelled by a shared response to theatre that for years, had left us feeling dulled and uninspired. Unlike so much of the theatre we were used to experiencing, we wanted our work to serve as a launch pad for our audiences imaginations, to awaken their senses and to fill them with energy and vitality."

The process

Gecko’s work has been influenced by Lahav and Nedjari’s work with the David Glass Ensemble. Along with Steven Berkoff, a longtime collaborator of Lahav and Nedjari, Glass trained under Lecoq. A major idea with the David Glass Ensemble that can be seen in Gecko's work is the importance of participatory activities. Gecko focuses on their personal experiences, relationships, and emotional responses to the world for inspiration. Gecko attempt to follow Glass’s ideal methodology for creative development, which includes five steps: Preparation, Creative origination, Creative organization, Manifestation/presentation, and Reflection and renewal. As with most devised theatre companies, they never consider any of their productions to be completely finished.

Past productions

• Taylor's Dummies - Voted best performance off-West End by Time Out Live Awards and has toured nationally and internationally.
• The Race - Performed at the Edinburgh Festival, won a Total Theatre Award, and has toured nationally and internationally, including a four-week run in New York.
• The Arab and The Jew - toured extensively throughout the UK and internationally.
• The Overcoat - Adapted from Nikolai Gogol's short story a co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth.
• Missing - Started in 2012 and is still touring the globe. Performed in China in Macau and Hong Kong in September 2015.
• Institute Opened at Northern Stage in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 2014 and recently performed at the Pleasance Grand during the 2015 Edinburgh Festival.

The Arab and the Jew

The Arab and the Jew was the Gecko Theatre Company’s third production and began touring in 2007. The piece was the company’s first step toward political theatre, although unintentional at the beginning. The project began as a “highly personal investigation into their [Nedjari and Lahav] own ethnic and cultural heritage and how that affects their relationship,”. Nedjari and Lahav both state that their cultural heritage has always been a strong influence on their work. “Allel Nedjari and Amit Lahav grew up on opposite sides of the Arab-Israeli divide. Here they celebrate their brotherhood and laugh and cry at their reflections,”. The Arab and the Jew was co-commissioned by the Drum Theatre, the Lyric Theatre, the New Wolsey Theatre, and the Tobacco Factory, all of which are located in the United Kingdom. The venues offered their support on the basis that the company “undertakes audience-development activities during the process of creating a piece: these include workshops, residencies, and work-in-progress performances.” This was an extremely important aspect in their developmental process. The fact that the piece was presented to a live audience basically every night created a genuine exploration in the creation of the show. The performers shared this personal project with an audience at every point along the path from creation to polishing the piece so that their feedback was a crucial element in the direction the project took. “The Arab and the Jew is both a riot of sound, image and movement and an ambitious dance of reason and conciliation-performed with Gecko’s characteristic exuberance and physical skill." This production was not begun as a political piece. Nedjari and Lahav did not even originally do extensive research on current Middle East conflicts. However, through creating this piece, the company took a tentative step toward political theatre and became more aware of the socio-political situation of their company and relationships. The Arab and the Jew did not receive initial Arts Council funding. The financial uncertainty of Gecko and this work meant that all the members had to collaborate and perform various tasks and fill production positions. The group was lucky to have Dryden Goodwin spend three extremely productive days with the company during The Arab and the Jew’s early stages, but had to leave when they were unable to pay him for an extensive period of time.

Preparation

The first stage in Gecko’s work is preparation, in which it is crucial that they train and develop a physical vocabulary for the show and relate it to the subject matter and their original research. The company was put through demanding warm-ups, which honed their ability to communicate with and respond to one another physically. The Gecko group believes that through physical experimentation, the mental and emotional lines of exploration are opened. Specifically for The Arab and the Jew, the creators knew that wanted to have a boxing match at some point in the piece, so from the beginning the performers received boxing training. In one section of the training after Lahav reacted strongly to a hit from Nedjari, he “acknowledged that he had frightened himself with his own sense of aggression but emphasized that this kind of emotional discovery was essential to their journey."

Creative Origination

The second stage that the Gecko Theatre Company went through in their development process for The Arab and the Jew was creative origination, which is directly related to preparation. Because Nedjari and Lahav went into the process without a solidified narrative, structure, or specific meaning to the production, the creative origination portion of the development was extremely important. At first the company had many different types of narratives they were exploring, including a story about two trombonists searching for sheet music. This idea obviously did not make the final cut but contained the theme of celebrating their relationship as performers while revealing the hidden conflicts within it. Instead of trying to sit down and write something, Gecko used physical improvisation at the beginning stages of development. “When working physically, Lahav and Nedjari tended not to spend a long time on any one thing but to shift between several different ideas: developing each incrementally, filming everything and frequently breaking off to watch themselves and discuss what they saw and how they felt.” Two major physical compositions came out of this improvisation: ‘status gripping’ and the image of breaking a horse using two people. These images helped the group realize more consciously that a major factor in their work is the idea of control and power over another. This realization led the group in a more specific direction and helped in the creation of the piece. Even though Gecko technically moved on to the next step, creative origination is never over and is continually used throughout the process of devised theatre.

Creative organization

After a large bit of exploration is complete, Gecko moves on to the creative organization stage. In the case of The Arab and the Jew, because they had performances almost every night for a live audience, this stage was happening constantly. Under these circumstances, all the stages of the creation process for the piece were basically happening simultaneously. These “work-in-progress performances are used much more in devised practice than in other forms of theatre and grew out of its collaborative nature and its emphasis on the process over the product,”. Nedjari enjoyed the fact that the company was presenting its work to public audiences and was receiving feedback on it. He stated, “in a real true sense of the word we’re performers; we deal with a live audience,”. While performing at the New Wolsey Theatre the company began to organize the images and interactions within the show and learned quickly that not every scene meant the same thing to everyone. This meant that in most cases, the audience left the theatre with different, distinct stories and meanings to what they had witnessed. During the organization process Gecko began to do a lot more work with music because Lahav believed that music was an integral part of the experimentation and creative process. The music began to give the group a loose format for the show. They would time compositions to fit in specific sections of music and it started to shape the production. Around this point in the process the group moved to the Newbury and finally had access to technicians and technical resources, so the majority of the time spent at the theatre focused on set design. The set design was based upon an idea the group had originally for a “white walled, ‘neutral’ location into which their two characters would fall at the beginning of the piece,”. This concept quickly made the company realize that they were, willingly or not, presenting a political piece. The set “illuminated the fact that the area of hidden conflict between them was not solely personal, but grew out of a territory which was contested in both geographical and historical terms,”. Finally at Bristol and the Edinburgh Festival, Gecko obtained Arts Council funding for The Arab and the Jew and was able to bring Jackie Shemesh onto the team for lighting design. Shemesh and the company wanted to break the stage into key areas, and did so for example; by creating a tightly lit corridor that one of the characters seems to get pulled down. During the organizational stage of the process, many of the technical aspects and formatting of the show was complete and the company was able to focus on the next stage.

Final presentation

Manifestation and presentation was happening concurrently with all the other parts of the development process for The Arab and the Jew. The audiences had very strong reactions to the piece and found ways to make even the smallest action on stage a political statement. “It would be incorrect to imply that Gecko started trying to offer a defined political message; it did not,”. However, the company was glad that they created a piece that really had an effect on the audience. In the end, “the production remained abstract in style, the meanings of individual images and actions always open to interpretation and the overall emotional effect coming out of the accumulation of associative ideas rather than from a linear narrative,”. Gecko refuses to give definite clarification on the show because they do not believe it is about what they get out of it, but what the audience personally experiences while viewing it. In the final presentation of the piece, two images and compositions stayed from the very beginning of the process: the boxing match and the horse breaking image (with the Jew as the trainer and the Arab as the horse). For Nedjari and Lahav, The Arab and the Jew was the first time in their professional collaboration that they had to dig down and explore areas of conflict they have in their relationship. Through this exploration, Nedjari and Lahav, along with the rest of the Gecko Theatre Company, discovered many new things about their backgrounds and how they affect their professional and personal relationships. In the creation of The Arab and the Jew, the line between rehearsal and performance was blurred, forcing them to learn an incredible amount from their work-in-progress performances and hone their work in devised theatre.

External links

• Official Gecko Theatre Company website