What is The Lure and Blur of the Real?

As a director, how do you explain what it is you're interested in and what are the techniques you adopt to find these things?

Well for me its um... I don't particularly trust my imagination. I enjoy it I have a lot of fun with it but I don't make work or use it consciously when I'm making work because I don't trust it ultimately. I have enough trouble with reality - so 'the lure and blur of the real' is a line from a book by David Sheilds called 'Reality Hunger', where he articulates a kind of a manifesto um... that responds to contemporary society and what he calls our thirst for all things real. In the last 15 or so years we have been increasingly obsessed with 'reality ', via information pathways , the way the media operates now, reality tv shows and our culture has become , he says, obsessed with real events because in our lives we experience hardly any.

And I'm just interested in how that manifests itself in performance. It opens up a whole lot of questions... What is real? What's fiction? What's non-fiction? That if something is perceived to be real it has a tantalising hook for us to the point that we actually blur what's real. The line between what's real and what's not is utterly blurred.

I'm interested in the world I live in, the world outside and how we live our lives. I'm interested in personal stories. How we feel about ourselves. I'm interested in relationships that people have to the worlds that they live in, how connected or unconnected we feel and for me that's enough to explore as an artist. I'm not interested in the history of theatre. In one sense I'm not really interested in theatre - I'm interested in using theatre as a way to express aspects of how we live in the world. I'm interested in the everyday, I'm interested in the ordinary. I like to be surprised. I like imperfection.

Our main technique or method would be using the participants as the primary source for the work - so we look at our own lives, we look at how we experience the world.Its a very personal vision that we hope people can identify with. I like to take time when creating a piece of work - I think, for me, slowing it down, slowing down the process of creating work is really important. We start out with and idea and see where it takes us. We search hard with the participating artists to find personal connections to a concept to the point where we start using the performer's own lives (literally) as the written text.

Adriano Cortese, Artistic Director Ranters Theatre