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DOI number 10.2478/tco-2021-0013

Performing Arts and Society’s Major Crisis

Bogdan Petre VLADU

Abstract: Moments of major crisis in a society subdued by economic and identity interests. Shutting down the performing arts with the intention of subjugating the community by eliminating forms of psychological resilience in moments of crisis? Is the medical crisis an engine of economic capture at the expense of maintaining the mental health of the population? Does political correctness have the power to change perceptions of immediate ? Can we look back to the immediate past in an attempt to untie the Gordian knot that suffocates theatre in this period of inquisitorial valence in an attempt to save the aesthetic approach?

Keywords: Ontogenesis, Triad, Performing, Consciousness, Pandemics.

Is theather, an alive entity, which can not be captured in the passing of current time, an entity that endlessly evolves with each new representation, will it have the capacity to selfconservate in the presence of massive kicks coming from all sides? Economic kicks, total blockage in presentation of the artistic demarch...will it be able to resist through its own forces keeping its timeless dimension, proved up till the present moment?... will it be able to swing between art and life, generating through passing of time the connection between space, time and expression? A chain of thoughts opened by these questions...Thoughts... I often understand how current and universal Cioran remains, how his thoughts can be found and in various life situations, in individual life, as well as in community life. “ I don't know at all why we need to do something in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't be 1000 times better to retreat in a far corner of the world where nothing of which makes the noise and complications of this world, have no

 Ph.D. student at George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași

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echo? We would then give up culture and ambitions, losing all and winning nothing. But is there something to be won in this world? There are some for which winning has no importance, they are forever alone and unhappy. We are all so closed up to one another! And if we would be so open that we received everything from one another, if we would be able to read souls all the way to the bottom, how much light would we bring to others destiny? We are so alone in life that you wonder if the loneliness of agony is not a symbol of the human existence. It's a sign of great deficiency in the willing to live and die in Society. Can there be tenderness in the final moments? It's 1000 times better to die somewhere alone and forgotten, when nobody sees you, without theather and without picture. I'm sick of people who, in agony, temper themselves and impose to themselfs attitudes to make an impresion. Tears can only be ardent when in loneliness. All of those who in agony want to be surrounded by friends, they do it out of fear and impossibility to bear the final moments. They want to forget in the capital moment, of their own death. Why don't they have an infinite heroism, why don't they lock the door to bear those crazy sensations with lucidity and fear beyond any limit?” 1 Are we assisting, without our will, to the retreat of theatre in a lonely corner, forgotten by the world, by the public, waiting it's end? we see the retreat in agony of theatre, wrapped up in a overwhelming loneliness that brings fears and spiritual restlessness to the ones that still believe and hope in the singularity and durability of the theatrical phenomenon? I will ask you to start with an exercise, by which we will state the existence of the theatrical sphere and the sphere of community morals, so that in time we can answer the questions born within us, to decipher the way to bring back to the immediate public reality, the purpose of theatre in the collective consciousness . Perhaps we feel the need to mix them up, to give them a different course, to find an existential common ground with our thoughts and hopes. Are we ready to fight and find real means of expression in the pandemic economic and political crisis? And perhaps by answering these questions we will find a solution to overcome the crisis of the theatrical

1 Cioran Emil, Pe culmile disperării, Editura Humanitas, 1993

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universe, the daily ontogenesis of the spectator and the inner tributaries of the performing art? ONTOGENESIS...Definition. Paradigm. Dogma. To be born. To learn. To accumulate. To develop. To die. The striking ontogeny of the spectator during the theatre performance. A flash of consciousness. The echo in the spectator's soul. Returning to the spectacular art by stimulating and shaping the performance with action in the spectator's emotion. Building a relationship of attraction between the spectator and the spectacular art through the magnetism of the ideational dimension of the performance. Theatre brings existential questions into everyday life, the possibility of being born and dying during the performance, learning with each performance to rise, grow, live and die with it. The playwright, the director, the actor, becomes the instruments through which spectacular ontogenesis acts on society. Is their removal by blocking traditional expression strictly a measure to protect the audience in the fight against the pandemic, or is it a manipulation of the community's conscience? A removal from the cultural act that may raise uncomfortable questions? Can we speak of a merging of two shaping spheres within the performing arts? An immanent sphere of the spectacle acting on a sphere of mores, aberrations and crises of society, fixed in the present time of the latter, with an action of shaping the past, present and future. Each repression by cancellation in itself of the artistic approach becomes a representation of the past with intrinsic effects in the future of each individual connected to the act of performance. The performance changes from one crisis to another through accumulation, leading to the absorption of the spectator within the spectacular sphere, using them as a bind of the triad of playwright, director, actor, and transforming them into instruments of application of the immediate ontogenesis of the performance. If we succeed in unlocking the spectator's primordial state during a crisis and transferring it to the past through the immediate present of the performance, it means that we have succeeded in projecting it into the future, that we have succeeded in bringing to it the ideational knowledge of the performance, that by acting through the essence, we have reached the imagination of each individual in the sphere of the audience and opened up new ways and meanings in the

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dogma of understanding the spectacular approach, raising its perception of its inner and outer crises. And will all these crises be found in the interior of the spectator? will he have in his soul, the echo Cioran wanted? “ And when you feel you die of loneliness, despair or love, the others fulfill this infinitely painful cortege. The feeling you can no longer live after this kind of swirls, is due to the internal consumption. The fire of Life burns in a closed oven, from which the heat can not escape. People that live on external plane are saved from the start; but do they really have something to save, when there is no danger? The paroxysm of interiority and living, takes you where the danger is absolute, because existence that updates it's roots with a tense consciousness can only deny itself. Life is too limited and fragmentary to resist great tension.” 2 Bearing in mind that any rift between the representatives of the audience and those of the community is redeemed through theatrical experience, as director Alexa Visarion so aptly puts it, there can be no theatre without the spectator, regardless of the method of address (live on-stage performance, online performance), without love and risk-taking on both sides. Each spectator will be co-opted, will unintentionally accumulate, artistic meaning and expression, will develop as a receiver of the artistic act with each presence in the stage space. He will become an extension of the performance and at the same time will become its censor. In the lack of stage space, of direct relationship, a tying imposition in these moments of constraint imposes the need to cultivate the spectator by stimulating the depth of his imagination in decoding the meaning and essence of the performance. However, we run the risk of losing contact with the spectator if we force them to witness a marked lack of concern, a lack of taking a stand in revealing the immoral codes imposed in crisis situations, instead of softly and understandingly guiding them through decoding meanings and emotions. Theatre, the remedy of life, the sine qua non of human freedom, living through theatre, freed from the grip of misunderstanding reality, will have to

2 Idem

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go through crises, storms, but also through sunny days, immediate satisfactions and memories with the audience. They can become a whole through mutual respect. We can become defenders and doers in protecting the act of Culture in the community of our world. As Constantin Noica says:“ in the closed community of family or in the big one of Society,on the path of loneliness with themselves, or the ones obeying something greater, there lies rules, commandments, decalogues or prescriptions, everywhere. Not everyone has the knowledge of the laws under which he lives, but culture on its own gives it to him; but anyone who becomes aware of the rules he must respect in order to be a human and the norms required so he can be a doer, and eventually a creator in his world. ”3 it's up to us and only us to raise culture and the consciousness of the reality of our art. The importance of the revolutionary direction of the theatrical sphere, in direct relation to the sphere of society's mores, of which the spectator is an integral part, leads us to recognize, without any right of objection, the role of theatre as a direct educator through the performing arts. Under these conditions we could achieve the twinning of the two spheres of shaping, avoiding the risk of one being taken over by the other. Unfortunately, nowadays we are witnessing a search for pecuniary ends demeaning of the performing art, which leads to the predominance of the sphere of society's mores over the sphere of theatre. A handful of dedicated people who sacrifice their lives for the theatre, without expecting any reward or recognition, just in the hope of saving it. Giving up their own lives to serve and honour the theatre, so simply and easily removed from public life in times of pandemonium, reveals an existence that turns all the history and ideals of the performing arts to ashes.But doesn't the actual existence of tributers of the theatre is risking to become mystical ecstasy? “didn't all mystics, after great ecstasy, had a feeling that they cannot continue to live any longer? And what can wait from this world, those who feel beyond normal, life, loneliness, despair or death?”4 .

3 Noica Constantin, Modelul Cultural European, Editura Humanitas, 1993 4 Cioran Emil, op.cit.

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The dramaturgical representation of literary works as a unique form of action creates a new dispute in the middle of the performance triad. Is a one- way theatrical production enough? Will framing it in time, space and meaning carry the essence of the message to the audience when the audience is different individuals with different perceptions? What is theatre heading towards when often devoid of respect for the reality behind crises, sometimes even their existentiality being the executioner of the creative act? Respect for moral and professional values, often overshadowed by the very exponents of this art in times of crisis? Will theatre remain a fluid social determinant and serve for a stable future audience? Can the existential stability of theatre be thrown on the shoulders of the spectator and left to evolve according to the interests and crises of the moment? If we are going through a historical period directed towards material gain, towards visceral self-protection, will theatre still be able to confess its weaknesses and its own truths? And with historical cyclicality, theatre being no exception, is there a chance that we will see a rapid degradation of theatre, by blocking the public expression of theatrical truth? A number of questions I am afraid to answer today. I'm afraid not to hear the sound of a guitar string, or whatever one wishes to imagine, pinched, tormented, stretched to breaking point. I am afraid of this sound that announces people like out of, and from, Chekhov's reality in The Cherry Orchard. A reality that is coming, with its novelties, upon all, those who are doomed to perish in perplexity. When society as a whole changes, moves in a new direction, a certain social group risks being overtaken, crushed by the new wave to make way for another new social group, which will take full power in the new order. Yes, sometimes a crisis of any kind becomes the sign of the end of a world, of an era. A reminder, which in the end will become a confirmation. A theatrical game of ending and beginning. Sadness, but also hope. Nostalgia and enthusiasm. Contrasts, mixed feelings, liberation and oblivion. The same as the brotherhood of rule with exception will be born, the same we can negociate the existence or disappearing of the theatre in the new punctual reality. Citing Constantin Noica, we can harness, here and now, the european cultural : “ The rule and exception have bonded so intimately,

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as the exception widens the rule, so that the European thinking has occurred independently of what is happening in the history of of whole philosophical doctrine in harmony with the history process mentioned: existentialism. At least in his popular version , existentialism says how the exception widens the rule. By the saying "existence precedes essence"5, when it comes to humans, the doctrine invoked, understands to reveal that the human law is not given, but by any human existence, in the heart of each and one of it, the law is being Redefined. Everything we do under the sign and often under the curse of , "makes us human". Perhaps if we could find the density and the dosage of meaning behind a crisis, to convey it correctly to the spectator, we would succeed in eluding a major decline in our lives, in our mores, which will even threaten the everyday life of the theatre. The chance is to return theatre to a spectacular existence in the first place, leaving commercialism in the background. Theatre is a form of meanings and essences that cannot be denied through the prism of immediate gain, camouflaged in the ambivalence of the two elements, art and economy, which in no way can coexist in opposition, without leading theatre into derision, futility, death.And maybe the theatre, as an integral part of culture, has the chance of living. What would happen if the European culture would disappear because of these crisis we live at this time? We have the moral duty and obligation I would say, to cite Constantin Noica: “ is the European culture would disappear, there still is something that might survive out of it: the model it gave to the historian world. It would reappear as the self-consciousness of any other whole culture- in case there might be one. Up until the European culture, all others we knew, were partial: they were aware only over a corner of Europe, no matter how large it was, teaching only their version of spirit. The only European culture, at least from our awareness, after trying different variants(Byzantine, Roman Catholic, Italian, French, Anglo-Saxon, the last two on a Germanic background), it opened, through historian consciousness, towards all the cultures know. Compared to this one, all the others seem parochial. Could this be a europocentric illusion? After all, we don't even

5 Idem

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register them as whole cultures, but cultural configurations : Egyptian configuration, Chinese, Indian, in some ways even the Greek one, admirable and seamlessly fertile as it is.”6 Some might say these are gloomy thoughts, that they do not reflect the existing state of affairs. But they are thoughts that have been haunting us for a year now. At that time, on 15 March 2020 I was shocked. How can theatres close? What will become of theatre? Will it be able to adapt to new economic and social changes? Who will protect it, the theatre? How will humanity exist without theatre? Without physical contact with the performing arts??? With great respect for all that theatre means and stands for.

Bibiography

Cioran Emil, Pe culmile disperării, București, Editura Humanitas, 1993 Noica Constantin, Modelul Cultural European, București, Editura Humanitas, 1993

6 Idem

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