To date Swen’s work follows two major strands of practical research within differing and at times conflicting theoretical and poetic paradigms. Yet they are able to form productive dialogues and relationships that cross-fertilise one another.
The first line of enquiry stretches continuously from Swen’s first explorations with his previous theatre company Deer Park (2002-2006) all the way to his latest studio touring production I made you a submarine, the first work under the new company name hauser.
It is concerned with the poetic assemblage of fragmented narratives and a multiplicity of signifying source materials often taken from literature, film, history and popular culture.
Wild narratives incorporating wholes, jump cuts and juxtapositions render visible the non-representative content of performance: time, space, tone, rhythm and presence. These assemblages constitute worlds that are informed by a playful poetics of desire, love, loss and longing. They form temporal landscapes in which ideas, narratives and forces float and circulate.
The second and more recent strand within Swen’s practise stems from his explorations with large casts of students as a visiting artist within the context of Higher Education.
Concerned with the construction of non-narrative compositions and time structures, Swen researches and employs a variety of tools, frameworks and methodologies: task based actions, games, mundane or splendorous ways of being on display, musical structures, auto-eroticism and its relation to work, play, commitment, the squandering of excess energies and the sharing out of a surplus value of enjoyment.
These explorations make for performances that are attentive towards and reflective of the situation of performance as event.
They draw attention to the material singularity of the performer and expose an audience’s complicity in the erotic and autoerotic effects between the gaze of the witness and the performer’s display. The performances non-representative stance allows for the reflective exposure and celebration of an irreducible pleasure of performance beyond or beneath all efforts at signification.
Both strands of the work constitute open fields rather than closed signifying systems. They invite an audience to actively participate in the reading of the work.
Whilst an idiosyncratic continuity of style, tone and humour runs throughout the work, it’s formal and thematic explorations are open-ended.
Future works will develop Swen’s recent explorations of devising performances with non-professional performers. Whilst more rigorous journeys out of the black box theatre into other, diverse places, collaborations, time structures and medias will take the work into new and exciting directions in the years to come.