To access the dynamic material conditions of the past in its most banal, everyday forms, artefacts and their mechanisms are visualised and played-out in theatrical space (for this project, a stage adaptation of Georges Perec’s novella entitled The Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise)¹ utilising constraint operations (defined by Harry Mathews as, “A strict and clearly definable rule, method, procedure or structure that generates a [textual work],”² expanded by Georges Perec as, “describable, definable [and] available to everyone.”)³

This process of adaptation through constraint produces a condition of differential concealment and revelation through the process of landing narrative conditions within a dynamic field of material-spatial mechanisms. As these simultaneous and interlocking constraints play against each other on stage, their points of interface emerge within the circulation of characters and distribution of action; however, the constraints themselves are concealed within the resulting thickened material-spatial condition. The Art and Craft of the Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise manifests in a series of presentational modes, as sketch, drawing, image, model, and performance. Each medium provides a differing mode of engagement with artefacts and their mechanisms, interoperating to form a cross-referenced body of work.

Keywords: theatre, constraint, adaptation, past-making, material mechanisms

¹Georges Perec, The Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, translated by David Bellos, (New York, NY: Verso, 2014).

² Harry Mathews et al., editors, OuLiPo Compendium, 3rd edition (London, UK: Atlas Press, 2011).

³ George Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited by John Sturrock, 3rd edition, (London, UK: Penguin Books Ltd., 2008).