RICHARD GOUGH:
EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE ARTIST

Richard Gough’s talent for taking risks came at an early age. He left school at age 17, and while others were deciding whether to take up a trade or go to college, Gough struck out on his own journey. He decided to create his own education program by travelling extensively through Europe and participating in a number of theatre workshops along the way. This initial risk paved the way for what became, in essence, a career based on risk-taking—a career as an artist creating experimental theatre.

Currently, Gough is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, as well as Artistic Director of the Centre for Performance Research (CPR), the “Aberystwyth-based powerhouse of international theatre" (The Guardian, April 2002). He has dedicated the last 28 years to developing and exploring interdisciplinary, experimental performance work. As Artistic Director of CPR and its predecessor Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, Gough has curated and organized numerous international theatre projects including conferences, summer schools and workshop festivals, and he has produced nationwide tours of experimental theatre and traditional dance/theatre ensembles from around the world. He has directed over seventy productions, many of which have toured Europe, and he has lectured and led workshops throughout Europe and in China, Japan, Colombia and Brazil. He edited The Secret Art of the Performer (Routledge, 1990), is the general editor of the Routledge, Taylor and Francis quarterly publication Performance Research (Journal of Performing Arts) and publisher and series editor of Black Mountain Press.

During the fall semester of 2003, Richard Gough will serve as an Arts Institute Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence. His residency is sponsored by the Departments of Art and Theatre & Drama and the Dance Program, and will include a semester-long workshop in performance, a seminar on “Performance, Food and Cookery,” and a specially created performance work —the latest installment in his Last Supper series.

Gough’s vast experience as a performer, curator, director, and educator offers UW students from all departments not only the chance to learn a unique method for devising performance, but also the opportunity to research, explore, discuss, and create in a truly interdisciplinary environment.

In Gough’s practice, performance is not limited to what we typically think of as “theatre.” Instead, performance creates a space that “promotes a broad-spectrum approach to the appreciation and understanding of human endeavor-culture in the broadest sense including language, sport, art and play,” ultimately creating “a wide avenue for intercultural exchange and understanding.”

Creating such an avenue involves taking risks, since Gough’s take on performance “does not enshrine cultural values and pronounce upon them with certainty. Rather, it contests them and offers a space/site for dynamic negotiation. It includes uncertainty and diffidence, promotes experiment, nurtures a sense of becoming and evolving, and encourages reflection.”

Working in such an environment will give students and the University community a unique educational opportunity to simultaneously learn, teach, and create while exploring new territory.

In 1974, Gough joined the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, an experimental performance group based in Cardiff, Wales, and founded by Mike Pearson in the previous year. Within five years, Gough turned the project-based organization into a revenue-funded theatre company. During that time, he also founded the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre Resource Center—a library of scholarly materials on world theatre, dance, and music—which eventually evolved into the Centre for Performance Research. He continued his work with Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, performing in and producing such works as Moths in Amber, The Wedding, and The Heart of the Mirror, all of which toured Europe, and he became Artistic Director of the company in 1981.

The Cardiff Laboratory Theatre’s tremendous growth in scope inspired its transition into a larger organization, the Centre for Performance Research, which “produces innovative performance work, promotes tours, collaborates and exchanges with theatre companies of international significance, arranges conferences, stages workshops, master classes and lecture demonstrations, publishes and distributes theatre books, mounts exhibitions and runs a multicultural reference library for the performing arts.” Gough continued his position as Artistic Director for the CPR. Speaking of the evolution and long-term success of the company, he states,

“It’s no joke—in terms of the theatre forms pioneered, we have taken major risks, artistically and financially . . . [T]o have managed to succeed on what is in effect a 22-year old programme is probably better than any single project.”

Those risks built up the CPR’s artistic muscle and reputation, and Gough together with long-term collaborator and professional partner Judie Christie (CPR Executive Producer) was invited to incorporate the CPR into a number of universities in the United Kingdom. In 1995, Gough and Christie chose to associate the CPR with the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, a decision that has further strengthened the organization. He explains, “The move certainly enabled the CPR to leap forward—the conference organizing, the exchange of scholars, the exchange of practice and theory—there have been great benefits.” That same year, Gough co-founded and became general editor of Performance Research, and he continued to expand the CPR’s work by developing a summer school program that features short courses by both CPR staff and guest artists, such as Phillip Zarrilli, Goat Island, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Tess De Quincey and Daksha Seth.

While Richard Gough’s work has touched on a vast number of subjects, one of his most prominent artistic and research interests is the intersection of food and performance. He explains, “I am obsessed with food and performance, food in performance and food as performance: with the process of cooking and making theatre; with presentations at the table and on the stage; with the creative fervour of the kitchen and the rehearsal room, and with the very material of food as a medium for performance and as a model of performance: multisensory, processual and communal.” Gough has centered a number of works around various aspects of the food/performance connection, beginning with the theatre production The Origin of Table Manners that subsequently toured Europe and South America.

In 1994, he curated CPR’s fifth Points of Contact festival, the topic of which was “Performance, Food, and Cookery.” The festival provided a forum for artists who shared this intense interest, and the presentations and performances at the festival made a lasting impression on Gough. He insists that

“the themes explored at the event and connections made between ideas, people, processes and cuisines have continued to inspire me, nourish me and, at times, consume me with a passion that can only be described as a ‘food disorder’.”

Gough explored this consuming passion further while artist-in-residence at DasArts in Amsterdam, resulting in The Last Supper (1999)—a stimulating, multi-layered performance installation he created with his students. The success of the work encouraged him to turn The Last Supper into a series—each installment containing original material generated with participants—with subsequent performances at Theatreshop Cymru in Aberystwyth, Wales (2000) and the Fabrica Europa festival in Florence, Italy (2002).

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