TIRESIAS: King Though You Are, – One Right, to Answer, Makes Us Equal; and I Claim It

Chapter 1: “On the Shoulders of Giants”1: an Introduction. “TIRESIAS: King though you are, – one right, To answer, makes us equal; and I claim it. 2 It is not you, but Loxias whom I serve.” Sophocles: Oedipus Rex. 1 The title of this chapter is drawn from Sir Isaac Newton’s letter to his peer, Robert Hooke. An analysis of this letter, as a response to appeals for re-conciliation between the two scientists, reveals how status operates through interaction and exchange and the rhetorical assertion of superiority is exemplified in the references to bodily and spatial configurations. 2 In his response to the “King”, the priest and seer Tiresias invokes Apollo who is interested in “all matters affecting law and order *…+ He presides not only over the arts and all that manifests the well-springs of man’s conduct, but also over much public activity, such as the establishment of cities, constitutions, codes of law and their interpretations” (Warrington 1961:53). The confrontation between two powerful representatives of two domains, the secular and the spiritual, is further delineated by what Samuel Weber (2004) suggests are two representatives of antithetical views on autonomy and authority: Oedipus ‘believes’ that he is the ‘self-made man’, the author of his own speech and edicts, Tiresias ‘knows’ that his certainty is produced by an authority beyond his own ‘natural’ capacity and that Apollo ‘writes’ his utterances. 1 Towards defining a field of interactions and encounters: the aims and scope of this study. Through the interrogation of interactive status relations, this study addresses the rhetoric and expressions of dominance or submission, positions of agency and affect or lack thereof, that arguably underpin all everyday encounters, but in the interests of social order are conventionally under-played or tacitly ignored. As Keith Johnstone observes: “Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time” (1997:33). His statement introduces the tensions that are central to my study of the rhetoric and dynamics of status relations as socio-cultural realities embedded in a range of representational media of which performance is one. Tensions between what is seen and heard, between what is revealed (represented or presented) and what remains undeclared (invisible, anonymous or even unacknowledged) extend to shaping modes of interaction between performers as well as between performer and the audience. According to Samuel Weber,3 theatre is inextricably bound to a display of power which is lodged in the medium and the mode of live transmission, reception, interpretation and construction of meaning. If theatre proposes visibility in the public domain, the extent to which “oppressor and oppressed” and representations of iconic figures (whether so-called ‘heroes’, ‘victims’ or even the ‘ordinary citizen’) and as crucially, relationships between disparate groups and figures and their representation are significant political and cultural questions. This thesis seeks to expand Keith Johnstone’s notion of status interaction as outlined in Impro (1997), first published in 1981. In this seminal work, he introduces his training method and his ideas regarding status dynamics both as structuring principles and as a means of generating nuance and credibility in spontaneous performances. Developing improvisation skills is committed to forging an autonomous approach to performer training in addition to serving as a basis to stimulate emergent writing. On these grounds, formulating and implementing a training model within the South African pedagogical context (both pre- and post-1994) may well have drawn productively on the modality of improvisation (and particularly Johnstone’s formulation of a socially orientated approach to this model) and continued to do so as a means of liberating performances from a reliance on culturally inscribed dramatic texts. Johnstone documents and explains the efficacy of a series of exercises which mobilize the understanding of status positions and momentum between these positions, observing that these patterns typify real social interactions. As he acknowledges, his improvisation model was developed in response to the unsatisfactory flatness of new dramatic writing. In his assessment, the latent dynamics of interactive exchanges remained largely undeveloped. On the basis of this observation, he set about establishing a more thorough interrogation of individual and human behaviour through improvisation workshops which aimed to invigorate both performance and writing. Within his paradigm, Johnstone posits a matrix of status markers and determinants through which variables in capacity surface during the course of routine exchanges and operate to reveal status differences. Throughout his writing, however, status positions are articulated in terms of “high” and “low”, 3 Theatre “entails a place in which events take place. *...+ although these events are generally defined as either ‘dramatic performances of spectacles’, they can also be of a quite different nature: ‘significant events or actions...of public life,’ for instance medical demonstrations, lectures, or more alarmingly, military events, such as those involving ‘nuclear weapons.’ [...] The dictionary confusion or confounding of theater with spectacle is surely as significant as it is symptomatic: the allusion to ‘nuclear weapons’ brings to the fore one of the striking and distinguishing factors affecting the notion of ‘theater’ and’ theatricality’ today, namely, the preponderance of energy over matter, of force over bodies, of power over place” (Weber 2004:98). 2 indicating either superiority or inferiority in relations between parties and suggesting a vertical hierarchy congruent with class-based social structures. It is this discourse of hierarchies that indicates a need to modify and adapt his model within the local context which is palpably fraught by divisive inequities. The process of developing and offering classes in improvisation technique during the final decade of an Apartheid governed society and subsequently in the context of transformation to a fully democratic social structure committed to the restoration of basic human rights, has provided a perspective that opens up ways of augmenting, even re-defining, core components of Johnstone’s vocabulary and approaches to its implementation. There are several strands to the primary assertion that any application of Johnstone’s method calls for reformulation in a South African teaching and learning context. Firstly, within a contemporary multi-disciplinary approach to performance training, the degree to which status-interplay is culturally contingent and discursively constructed invites the explicit foregrounding that Johnstone’s writing is obliged neither to address nor to interrogate. His book documents exercises and games that he has deemed generative together with their objectives and descriptions of his ways of implementing them. Moreover, his work is produced within a specific context, culture and referential idiom. Despite his emphasis on ways in which performance variables establish asymmetrical relations, it is difficult to ignore how shared cultural values and frames of reference are presumed as an underpinning linking participants. This underlying assumption cannot reasonably be sustained in a context in which diversity and multi-cultural pluralities increasingly define the dynamics of the interactive teaching and learning laboratory. The historian Ian Knight, introducing his recent study of iSandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, Zulu Rising, makes the point that present socio-cultural perspectives are anchored in ‘problematic’ aspects of South African history, broadly one of a series of unmitigated conquests. He implies, moreover, that this history encompasses not only contemporary but more distanced events and their consequences. He suggests that: … – political divisions, economic disparities, the stripping of the rural areas of human resources and consequent social dislocation and rootlessness – are the direct result of the complex conflicts of the nineteenth century, and have created between them a dark undercurrent that still profoundly affects life (here) today. *…+ In the ‘Rainbow Nation’4 (the) recourse to violence is the unglamorous underbelly of the historic ‘warrior tradition’ of colonial interlopers and indigenous societies alike, of a society built on overlapping layers of conquest and dispossession (2010:5, my emphasis). The continued circulation of diverse, or even antagonistic, cultural perspectives and values constructs the medium in which pedagogy and cultural practice take place in contemporary South Africa, defining a field by which to negotiate both practices, which cannot be glossed. While Johnstone stresses multiple practical performance concerns (and explicitly affirms the need to eliminate the reliance on verbal utterances as the primary objective of improvised performances), he frequently resorts to reproducing fragments of improvised dialogue in order to convey the material substance of status-based interactions. Although his express purpose is to stress that it is the performance delivery of dialogue that ultimately acts as an index or marker of high or low status, he nonetheless relies on dialogic exchanges to exemplify the performative and behavioural patterns 4 The epithet was forcefully introduced by Bishop Tutu and deployed as a key trope in the Inauguration address of President Mandela

Load more