Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Department of English Literature and Culture School of English
The Theatre of the Director-Auteur: Text, Form and Authorship
by Avra Sidiropoulou
A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty In Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION: Auteurism: A New Theatre for a Changed Perception of the World 1 Contemporary Auteur Scholarship and personal contribution 9 Methodology 14 Chapter Breakdown 19
CHAPTER ONE: The Rise of the Modern Auteur
1.1 The early director-producer 23 1.2 The director’s new role 27 1.3: The Significance of the Performance text and the Legacy of 51 Early Experimentalists on the “écriture” of contemporary auteurs
CHAPTER TWO: Artaud and his Legacy
2.1. Rapture and Utopia 57 2.2. Myth and Metaphysics 60 2.3. Representation, mediation and interpretation. The spectator’s 66 new role 2.4. Renunciation of verbal language and the new mise-en-scène 77 2.5. Artaud’s Legacy 87
CHAPTER THREE: Beckett’s Later Drama
3.1. In quest of a new form 92 3.2. Beckett as director and the question of authorship 98 3.3. Stage Directions and the languages of staging 105 3.4. Lighting, Set, Movement and Costume 108 3.5. Structure and Characterisation 117 3.6. The sensory image 122 3.7. Technology 126
CHAPTER FOUR: Auteur Practice
Directors’ Method 4.1.1: Creating an autonomous universe on stage: self- 131 collaboration, recycling, and Gesamtkunstwerk 4.1.2: Activating the Creative Impulse and Ensemble Work 146 4.1.3: Manipulating emotional involvement: alienation and 150 festivity Creative Sources of auteur performance 4.2.1: Devised theatre 156 Case Study: Complicité’s Μnemonic 162 Case Study: Marmarinos’ National Hymn 167 4.2.2: Adaptation and Re-contextualisation 171
Case Study: Houvardas’ Bérénice and Sara 178 Case Study: Ivo Van Hove’s The Misanthrope 184 4.2.3: Modern (-ised) Myth and Mythologised History 187 Case Study: Brook’s The Mahabharata 191 Case Study: Terzopoulos’ work on Tragedy 197
CHAPTER FIVE: Languages of the Stage: The Means to an End
5.1.1: Image structuration-Framing Devices 204 5.1.2: Time and Rhythm 213 5.1.3: Technology-Mediation 218 5.1.4: The Body as Text 225 5.1.5: Sound as Language 232 5.2: The Pursuit of Beauty and the Loss of Relevance: A Critique 235
CHAPTER SIX: Authorship and Authority: The Conquest of the Text
6.1: New Structures for a Changed World & the Mise-en-Scène as 248 Confrontation Directors Vs Playwrights: A Battle for Supremacy 6.2: The Challenge of Neo-dramatic Writing 261 6.3: The Question of Authorship The Text-less stage and the Ethics of Auteurism 279
AFTERWORD 286 Appendix 287 Bibliography 294
This dissertation is dedicated to my son, Nikiforos, whose birth coincided with the beginning of this research journey and whose smiling face is behind each and every thought put forward on each and every page of this work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation would not have been made possible without the help of a number of people. I would like to extend the warmest thanks to those numerous friends who have encouraged me to embark on this demanding project and have stood by me in the process.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Elizabeth Sakellaridou for all the support and encouragement, together with all the constructive comments and criticism she provided throughout. Her comprehensive expertise has made her guidance invaluable. Moreover, I appreciate our heart-felt sharing of theatre-going experiences and the exchange of ideas and creative input.
I am also profoundly grateful to the other two members of my thesis committee, Professor Nikiforos Papandreou and Professor Telemachos Moudatsakis for their valuable suggestions, as well as to Professor Savas Patsalidis for sharing with me his profound knowledge of contemporary American theatre.
The research done for the dissertation involved a great deal of work in the U.S. I have been very privileged to recurrently hold long conversations on the nature of auteurism and the future of the theatre with playwright Charles Mee and director Robert Woodruff, both of whom have been a major source of inspiration not only to the writing of this dissertation, but also to the shaping of a personal aesthetic in my directing work as well.
Furthermore, I am indebted to my good friend in New York, Mr. Tom Dale Keever, a theatre scholar and practitioner himself, an invaluable source of production history with an insider’s knowledge of the contemporary Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway scene. I cannot thank him enough for sharing it with me, as well as for all the audio-visual material he has provided me with in the course of working on the dissertation. I also appreciate his endless trips to the Butler Library at Columbia University to procure several articles relevant to my research. I also wish to thank my good friend, Alisa Regas, for supporting me in every way possible during my New York trips.
Finally, this dissertation would not have been realised without the continuing, tireless support and patience of my family. First of all, I would like to thank my husband, Dimitris, for being there always and surviving it all with me. My gratitude extends to my my parents, Frideriki and Panayiotis and my aunt Dina, for relieving me of all practical burdens to make it possible for me to work. I can never thank all of them enough for their unwavering belief in me at times when I felt my courage failing. I am also highly indebted to my sister Chryssi, whose academic experience and distinguished intellect have been of major help in guiding me through my research and the clarification of my argument.
Last but not least, I feel that I need to thank all those imaginative artists working in different parts of the world, whose names may not appear in this dissertation, but whose commitment to a surprising, sincere, as well as profound theatre has helped keep this artform alive.
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INTRODUCTION
Auteurism: A New Theatre for a Changed Perception of the World
In 1960, Eugene Ionesco likened the avant-garde artist to “an enemy inside a city which he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels.” He argued that like any system of government, “an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system. He is a critic of, and not an apologist for, what exists now” (45).
Since the beginnings of the 1960s, the role of the director as maker, creator, ultimately, “author” of the theatre event has been firmly rooted in the reality of the avant-garde stage. Among the most common titles that came to be identified with innovative directors, such as “conceptualist”, formalist, avant-garde artist and scenic writer, the term “director-auteur” has been the most apt.
Borrowed from French film criticism, auteurism applies to the work of imaginative directors who adapt/ “play around with” and/or deconstruct the playwright’s original script, or devise their own, developing their own unique style, a trademark that characterises their work.
In effect, the concept of the auteur (French name for “author”) emerged with Alexandre Astruc’s
1948 article “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo” in L’Écran Français. The camera, according to Astruc, was the director’s pen, and cinema could provide a potent means of expression, such as writing had been doing for a very long time. Astruc’s ideas were taken on by a number of critics, like André Bazin, and filmmakers, like François Truffaut, who used the
French cinema journal Cahiers du cinéma as a forum to voice their iconoclastic ideas on art. In fact, François Truffaut’s revolutionary article in 1954 “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” first introduced the term auteur in the coined phrase “la politique des auteurs”, which celebrated the director’s total control, claiming that he/she was the only person in charge of all
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aesthetic choices in the cinema. Later on, American film critic and writer Andrew Sarris in the
U.S. developed the notion of auteurism in his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory” in 1962. For
Sarris, a director qualifies for the title “auteur” if and when he/she displays a unique personal technique and consistent style in the work. Sarris’ the American Cinema: Directors and
Directions, 1929–1968, quickly became the unofficial “bible” of Auteurism in the cinema.
As in film, auteur theory in the theatre ultimately espouses that the director is actually the
“author” of the work, leaving a distinctive imprint on a production, which expresses a unique sense of visual style and thematic concerns, consistent across a body of work. It was essentially the film auteur theory of the 1950s that gave the extra (necessary) push from the 1960s on to awakened critical interest in the concept of performance as autonomous text, a text quite separate from the dramatic play which originates in the playwright’s mind and is exhausted on the printed page.
Thus, from its inception, the practice of auteurism in the theatre has displayed a thematic, stylistic and methodological consistency, based on the director’s strong personal vision and aesthetic; moreover, it has produced recurring themes, manifested an established technique, and been characterised by the director’s significant degree of control over the process of production.
In such way, the works of acclaimed auteur directors are stamped by the personality and artistic vision of their creators, just as recognisable and distinctive as would for example be the paintings of a particular Impressionist, or the scores of a specific Baroque composer. In general terms, in auteur work it is the director who controls the artistic statement, takes credit for the end result and is responsible for attracting an audience. Today, the theatre of the director-auteur is almost instantly identified with experimental, image-oriented, non-linear work, often associated, in “distinction to normative directing practice in the theatre [. . .] more with the symbolic than
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the naturalistic” (Schneider and Cody 125). Whether they stage a traditional dramatic text, create a new version of a classic, adapt, deconstruct or devise a new piece, auteurs will always ensure that the end product will bear their own signature, as much (if not more) as the original playwright’s, when there is one.
“My responsibility as an artist”, claimed Robert Wilson, perhaps the most celebrated among auteur directors to date, “is to create, not to interpret. [. . .] We create a work for the public and we must allow them the freedom to make their own interpretations and draw their own conclusions” (Wilson and Eco: 89-90). The twentieth century happily celebrated the arrival of the director-auteur, who came to give voice to the restlessness that had informed the revolutionary work of artists like Craig, Appia, Meyerhold, Brecht and Artaud, to mention only some of the most prominent ones (see Chapters 1 & 2). The reconsideration of the role of the director, the broadening of the notion of text and the revised practice of the mise-en-scène as an autonomous art (dating back to the first historical avant-garde and culminating in the establishment of directors’ theatre in the 1980s) has given theatre its present multifaceted, pluri- vocal form, to a significant degree purging the stage of sentimentality and high drama.
Today, auteur performances that rethink the text with strong visual images have become standard production fare in international arts festivals, frequently provoking heated debate, which often verges on animosity. The artists’ need to express the unseen and the intangible; the tortured aspiration to give shape to a fleeting, as well as fractured, consciousness; the inability for the most part of formal and realistic language to capture states of liminality, discontinuity and fragmentation, false starts and stops; the necessity for a new form of theatre that will accommodate the evanescent element of existence and voice its multi-vocal nature; all of these factors have contributed to the flourishing of auteur theatre, a theatre willing to take risks. Eager
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to shed off the skin of verisimilitude which defines the structural logic of Realistic theatre, auteur theatre lends itself to continual transformation, “making text” of anything and everything that surrounds us. Similarly, cause-and-effect, seamless narratives are replaced by self-reflexive, associational motifs and imagistic language heavily relying on signs. Fragmentation and indeterminacy in structure and theme, a formal expression of the loss of belief in rational thinking, have well discarded Aristotelian teleology and declared character redundant and/or dead. Finally, the soothing structural comforts of linearity that are normally associated with plays depending solely on verbal language, masking subjective reality by rounding up its sharper edges, are now exposed and seen for what they are: a deceptive rendering of a world that refuses to be contained and explained merely in words.
Having said this, impossible though it is to sum up all the characteristics of auteur theatre, it may be worth mentioning some of its key elements, bearing in mind that most of them are invariably attached to the postmodern aesthetic. Thus, in its axiomatic conception of text as material for use, auteurism also celebrates deconstruction, non-textuality, pluralism and heterogeneity.
Auteur theatre is mostly anti-mimetic and subversive, presentational and ritualistic, often non- verbal and intensely physical, while performance is frequently structured as a Cubist canvas, built out of disparate events, which the spectator is invited to view from alternate angles.
Equally, visual actions stand in oblique relationship to the dialogue, while stories can be told simultaneously, borrowing from film’s techniques of dissolves, cuts and framing. Language can be non-semantic, whilst imagery, carrying the force and impact of archetypes and symbols, replaces verbal expression. In addition, design and technological perfection, as well as the manipulation of rhythm and bodily expression are given priority over a dialogue that simply explicates action. In this sense, space, lighting and costume are stories in themselves, producing multi-layered narratives, characterised by stylistic eclecticism and fusion. Similarly, the
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inclusion of inter-textuality, pertaining to the intricate web of connections, styles, and expectations by which the text is defined, enables the dialogue and commentary among different texts to exist. Moreover, the concepts of transformation, repetition and free invention are also prominent, while fragmented, associative memory is valorised over linear story telling, to the effect that ellipsis becomes a major punctuation mark. Further attributes, as Hans-Thies
Lehmann demonstrates in Post-Dramatic Theatre, also include:
[. . .] ambiguity; celebrating art as fiction; celebrating theatre as process;
discontinuity; heterogeneity; non-textuality; pluralism; multiple codes;
subversion; all sites; performer as theme and protagonist; deformation [. . .]
moreover: nihilistic and grotesque forms, empty space, silence. (25)
If we reflect back on the early experiments in theatrical form, we will observe how, following
Jarry’s shocking innovations, Edward Gordon Craig’s writings on the existence of an abstract theatre, where setting, mood and atmosphere, together with the actors’ expressive physicality, would be the principal elements, duly anticipated the authoritative existence of a director who would supervise and unify all such aspects of performance and devise a tight, well thought-out form to accommodate a solid artistic vision.1 Expounding his revolutionary, if ultimately inapplicable views in his series of essays In the Art of Theatre (1911), Craig first used the term
“stage director” to refer to the person who masters all practices pertaining to the stage.
Furthermore, seeking to deconstruct the long-lasting hierarchy of playwright, director and actor, perpetuated in “literary” theatre, he thoroughly rejected the role of the director as mere interpreter of the dramatic text, expressing his opinion that:
1 Craig’s legacy on contemporary auteurs will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1.
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When he [the stage director] interprets the plays of the dramatist by means of his
actors, his scene-painters, and his other craftsmen, then he is a craftsman –a
master craftsman; when he will have mastered the use of actions, words, line,
colour, and rhythm, then he may become an artist. Then we shall no longer need
the assistance of the playwright -for our art will then be self-reliant. (Qtd in
Walton 56-7)
It took many years for Craig’s prophetic statement to materialise. Directing as a “self-reliant” art, an art that no longer depended on the dramatic text, but could instead generate its own discourse and produce an un-repeatable narrative within the performance event, actually took shape only in the later part of the twentieth century. However, Craig’s visionary conception of the “director-author” laid the foundations for intense experimentation in performance form.
Since the beginnings of the twentieth century and, in particular, after the total shattering of all illusion resulting from World War II, visionary directors have been summoned to mirror, serve, as well as credit the monumental changes in cultural circumstances, namely, the phenomenal shift in the perception of a world no longer viewed as whole, but instead, as a multi-perspectival mirror of disparate, disjointed “texts”. Suspicious of Realistic theatre’s blind insistence on intelligibility in a world which makes little sense, auteurs have worked hard at creating new forms of theatre that strive to capture the restlessness of modern drama, ranging from Realism,
Surrealism, Symbolism and Expressionism, to Robert Wilson’s Theatre of Images, and simultaneously dramatising “the obsessional dimensions of historicised memory to create images that verbal language cannot reach, or amplify sounds which return words to an inexorable materiality” (Schneider and Cody 126). The arrest and depiction of consciousness and corporeality, aided by the multifarious use of technology on stage provided a vital
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alternative to Realistic theatre’s reliance on an eventful plot as the sole criterion for artistic merit.
Within this dazzling vortex of changes, Antonin Artaud, working in the 1930s, was rightly credited as the first official exponent of the new function of theatre, underlining the necessity for groundbreaking devices in the mise-en-scène. Artaud’s theories were monumental in establishing a long line of directors-auteurs, like Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio
Barba, who made it their goal to locate, together with their own group of artists, theatre’s lost spirituality in a non-verbal, intensely physical performance score.2
At the same time, anchored on Artaud’s theories on The Theatre and its Double (1938), auteur directors’ interest in the physicality of performance as a new potent language for the stage betrayed their conviction that for theatre to really “speak” to people, the intellectual appeal of a principally literary text was no longer enough. The tendency to valorise the physical experience reached its peak in the American performance experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, as will be illustrated in Chapters 1, 2 and 5. Long before that, however, the early century experimentalists had already acknowledged that the only means by which to retrieve theatre’s lost relevance and rub off the lingering effects of Realism and Naturalism was to re-invest language with significance. Half a century later, in defining the theatre of the absurd, in his essay “The Avant-
Garde Theatre” (1960), Ionesco would also speak of “the denunciation of the ridiculous nature of a language which is empty of substance, sterile, made up of clichés and slogans; of theatre- that-is-known-in-advance” (48-9). The idea that language is transparent and therefore unreliable received further theoretical backing from the Post-Structuralists’ conviction that it is impossible
2 The chapter on Artaud will thoroughly illustrate the nature, as well as influence of his theories on the work of avant-garde directors today.
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for any work of literature to attach itself to a fixed meaning.3 In this respect, Barthes’, Eco’s and
Derrida’s theories on the “death of the author”, “the open work” and the concept of différance, respectively4, would ultimately embolden directors-auteurs to view their own work as a field of play and dynamic interaction between writer, director and audience.5
Hence, the reinvention of theatrical language and the renouncement of canonical works of drama
(what Artaud ironically defamed as “masterpieces”) presupposed an investment in the new text that would emerge out of the collaborative intuitions of the different artists involved in a piece, but would ultimately bear the signature of a director no longer acting simply as an empowered stage manager of slightly increased creative responsibilities. Notwithstanding the enthusiastic, for the most part, acknowledgment of the director’s new function, no one can deny that the pyramid of interpretation in the theatre has undergone a dramatic (no pun intended) reversal.
Replacing the author hitherto posing at the highest tip of the pyramid as the exclusive interpreter of the world, his/her view of which having thus far been unobstructed, the director-auteur
(director-author) causes a shattering displacement of authority.
3 Auteur caution vis-à-vis language’s construction of meaning has taken off from Derrida’s exposing language’s fragile subjectivity and invalidating the sign-signified relationship that had been explored by De Saussure. Fundamentally suspicious of people’s ability to construct and sustain meaning, postmodern productions attempt to transfer this attitude of wariness to stage narratives that reveal and reinforce the fractured nature of the audience’s cognitive process.
4 See Chapters 2 & 6.
5 As Roberta Mock illustrates in Performing Processes:
The reading process is a dialogue between author/text and reader; the dialogue results in the formation of a set of new, possibly different, meanings. Because theatre production is collaborative, the process of interpreting theatre is even more layered than that of constructing meaning from a novel. The ‘conversation’ is a public debate between at least four elements –the written text, the performance text, the scenography and the spectator. The individual spectator is thus creating a meta-production influenced by what cultural experience or expectation s/he brings to this event. (104)
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Contemporary Auteur Scholarship and personal contribution
Even though there have been many studies dedicated to the contemporary avant-garde theatre of the West and to the rise and establishment of the so-called directors’ theatre, auteur theory still remains within the “jurisdiction” of film studies. In other words, there have been no actual studies of auteur theatre practice. This is where this dissertation comes in, recognising the need to place the work of theatre auteur directors within a more specific theoretical framework.
The more recent scholarship on avant-garde theatre and performance theory has often addressed contemporary performance from the perspective of a postmodern media culture, trying to come up with a consistent methodological and conceptual framework, in order to identify and analyse current trends on the contemporary stage. Along these lines, there has been an on-growing interest not only in the new functions of the mise-en-scène (see Patrice Pavis’ La Mise en Scène
Contemporaine [2007] and Languages of the Stage [1993]), but also, in the revised position of the performer (see Phillip Zarrilli’s Acting (Re)Considered [1995] and Philip Auslander’s From
Acting to Performance [1997]), as well as the changed (now creative and involved) role of the spectator (see Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audiences. A Theory of Production and Reception [1990] and Bert O. States’ Great Reckonings in Little Rooms [1985]).
Moreover, one should also take into account the gradual re-evaluation in theatre scholarship of the dramatic text and of text-based theatre as a whole. One of the studies that documents and analyses the new position of the dramatic text in avant-garde, media-dominated performance is
The Transparency of the Text: Contemporary Writing for the Stage, edited by Donia Mounsef and Josette Féral (2007). Up until very recently, most studies of contemporary avant-garde performance have contrasted “properly” dramatic theatre to postmodern performance, painlessly equating all dramatic texts with realistic, well-made plays, abiding by the conventions of
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verisimilitude and psychological development of character. Lately, however, theatre scholarship has started to reflect the need to explore the new dramatic text’s performative potential, which can adequately express the particular experiences of a twenty-first century, media brainwashed audience.
Among the more active of theatre scholars, Patrice Pavis, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Marvin
Carlson, Elinor Fuchs, David Bradby and Arnold Aronson, to name but a few, have been consistently producing excellent work that explores the changing landscape of the modern stage.
Two of the books that have in many ways informed and influenced the critical thinking of my dissertation are David Bradby’s study Directors’ Theatre (1988) and naturally, Hans-Thies
Lehmann’s seminal work Post-Dramatic Theatre (originally published in German in 1999), inspired by the work of experimental theatre directors and playwrights from the 1980s and
1990s, such as the Wooster Group’s Liz LeCompte, Jan Fabre, Robert Wilson, and Heiner
Müller, among many others. Surely, Pavis’ thorough examination of the semiotics of stage direction and the creative collision between the director’s conceptual, sign-defined process, on the one hand and the fluid dynamics of performance, on the other (see La Mise en Scène
Contemporaine, 2007) has taken existing scholarship many steps further. Moreover, studies such as Christopher Innes’ “old-time classic” Avant-Garde Theatre (1993), Bonnie Marranca’s The
Theatre of Images (1996), James Roose-Evans’ Experimental Theatre from Stanislavski to Peter
Brook (1991) and more recently, Fifty Key Theatre Directors, edited by Shomit Mitter and
Maria Shevtsova in 2005, constitute valuable sources of production history within the broader context of the avant-garde theatre.
Additional discussions pertaining to the theoretical context of auteur work, which have been taken up by theatre scholarship, include some seminal studies on the new function of writing,
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such as Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference [1978]). Similarly, on reader-response theory
(Wolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader [1974]); the semiotics of the stage (Anne Ubersfeld’s Lire
Le Théâtre [1977], Marvin Carlson’s Theatre Semiotics, Signs of Life [1990] and of course, Keir
Elam’s Semiotics of Theatre and Drama [1988]); the debate on Interculturalism (The
Intercultural Performance Reader, edited by Pavis [1996] and Theatre at the Crossroads of
Culture [1992], Rustom Bharucha’s Theatre and the World [1990], as well as The Dramatic
Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte [1990]); theatre phenomenology (Stanton Garner’s Bodied Spaces [1994] and Bert O. States’ Great Reckonings in Little Rooms [1985]).
Finally, there have been some insightful treatises on the complicated subject of textual authorship, as is Gerald Rabkin’s article: “Is there a Text on this Stage? Theatre/ Authorship/
Interpretation” (1987), as well as the study Playwright Versus Director. Authorial Intentions and
Performance Interpretations, edited by Jean Luere in 1994. However, the dialectics of directorial interpretation and the ethics of auteurism still remain relatively unexplored and are mostly attached to a more general criticism on the limits and limitations of directors’ theatre.
Under such light, this doctoral dissertation aspires not only to adding to the existing scholarship, but also to creating a theoretical context to examine and accommodate the auteur’s contribution in the theatre. Furthermore, it should also be read as a reaction against the pessimism overriding contemporary theatre criticism that has been for the longest time prophesising the death of theatre. As the dissertation argues throughout, the art of the auteur is still very much alive in our times, facing the same type of challenges that had informed the work of early twentieth century experimentalists. Essentially, I am discussing how the main challenge for auteur directors has always been to fight against a closure of form, as well as to successfully compete against those
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cultural circumstances that can perpetuate via theatre a soporific, complacent and non-committal stance vis-à-vis society. Surely, Tom Bishop’s semi-rhetorical question in “Whatever Happened to the Avant-Garde?”: “after all, after nudity, after incest, after murder, rape, or cannibalism, how can you still shock a public that is force-fed the worst horrors daily on the evening news?”
(in Mounsef and Feral 11) is valid; yet, it is exactly this flatness of experience largely deliberated by the media culture that theatre still tries (and I argue, always will try) to over- come, some times by fighting the system (the media world, for that matter) from within. For one thing, competing against the speed, as well as the literal representability of film and television, meaningful theatre must struggle to retain its unique position among the arts, by re-inventing itself in multiple forms: cross-disciplinary exchange, characteristic of auteur practice, has successfully managed to bring the up-to-date media aesthetic into the more literary structures of the theatre. This is no surprise, since the most significant artistic experiments throughout the twentieth century have been based on collaboration across disciplines and the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art, see Chapter 4). Yet, in the more resonant of auteur productions, as in the work of Sellars, Complicité, Lepage, and the Wooster Group, which will be examined in Chapters 4 and 5, the media aesthetic functions principally as a structural tool, often exposing its own transparency and underlining the fluctuating identities of men and women in a brutally anaesthetised world. In the hopes of developing further some of the points raised by theoreticians like Pavis or Lehmann with regard to the future of avant-garde performance, this dissertation brings into sharp focus the auteurs’ process of marrying form with meaning and underlines the dangers involved in ambitious, yet ultimately frozen, formalism.
Besides the future viability or not of valid forms of theatre (See Theatre in Crisis?: Performance
Manifestoes for a New Century [2002]), another question that has repeatedly resurfaced in theatre studies scholarship and which this study is hoping to address, is what it is exactly that the
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twenty-first century theatre is reacting against. As has just been contended, the Cassandras of critical theory have been presaging the death of theatre, claiming that the institutionalisation of auteur directors has manufactured an overly comfortable context for them to create in; in other words, it has made them part of the social, ideological and cultural system they had originally struggled against. My own view of auteur theatre does not necessarily locate its perils within the bosoms of a festival-sized, high budget, high-production-values context. Whether “grass-roots” experimental or opera-scale, auteur theatre will always be facing the issue of meaningfulness, of how to stimulate thought, memory and the senses, by reinventing its form.
Finally, I have actively tried to work on the hypothesis that the most successful auteurs manipulate to their advantage what used to be considered an opposition between the semiology of the mise-en-scène and the phenomenology of performance. In resonant auteur work, the somewhat ambiguous relationship between mise-en-scène and performance has functioned less as a polarity and more as an imaginative co-habitation. Similarly, the conviction that the functions of director and actor are actually complementary suggests that auteurs who attempt to unite theatre’s inherent duality as a semiological/ mimetic field and a phenomenological performing space, have a lot more space to move in and more weapons at their disposal. In fact, only if we take this duality seriously by beginning to accept that its two poles are mutually connected, rather than downright opposing, can we actually begin to grasp the range of creative possibilities available to directors.
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Methodology
Given the extensive scope of auteur work, this dissertation has “married” directing theory with contemporary production practice, simultaneously taking into account theatre semiology and theories of audience reception.
I have chosen to start my analysis of auteur theatre by tracing the beginnings of avant-garde directing practice and dedicating a chapter to the theory and the aesthetic of some major early twentieth century directors, both of which, in my view, foreshadow the establishment of the director-auteur several decades later. In this endeavour, I could not have by-passed the central position that the theories, as well as the actual work of Artaud, Brecht and Beckett hold on the modern Western stage. Historically, widening the gap between text and performance by challenging the authority of the text and its author with regard to performance values, Brecht’s politically driven “epic theory” fundamentally infiltrated theatre practice, as will be illustrated in
Chapter 1. In effect, Brecht’s position vis-à-vis performance was ambivalent. Even though he was an active supporter of Aristotle’s belief in the supremacy of plot (fable), his meta-theatrical devices were strongly based on the acknowledgment of performance’s indispensability. More than anything else, his concept of Gestus foregrounded the idea that in the theatre a statement is articulated through the equal participation of verbal and kinetic elements and is not simply of a literary nature” (Lehmann 33). However, the self-consciously performative elements in Brecht’s writing were actually employed as a means of making the story even more transparent to his audiences, not to be admired or reflected upon for their own aesthetic value.
While Brecht’s theatre ultimately signifies a revised form of classical dramaturgy, Beckett’s drama is clearly the first major departure from it. Beckett was actually the first writer-artist to hint at the existence of a “post-prefixed” theatre aesthetic, daring to explode dramatic form to
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incorporate performance in writing for the stage.6 Dedicating a whole chapter to the significance of Beckett’s later (short) drama has given me the opportunity to step over the boundaries of literary modernism into the realm of postmodern performance and explore the issues of the centrality of the image in writing for the stage, as well as the integration of staging preoccupations into the dramatic text, and also the question of authorship, particularly in reference to how broad the notion of directorial interpretation and authorial “copyright” can and/or should be.
In more general terms, what is broadly explored in this dissertation is how, influenced by
Beckett’s fusion of writing and directing in his late drama, as well as by Artaud’s viewing of the theatre event as an autonomous text, auteur directors felt the need to transgress, rather than demarcate, the boundaries between drama and performance, and consequently those between the authors of the literary and the scenic text, respectively. It is in this spirit that I have included an analysis of Artaud’s concept of the “metaphysical” mise-en-scène and of the existence of alternative languages for the stage.
The discussion of Artaud and Beckett helps trace the development of the auteur director and illustrates the ways in which his/her work questions traditional theatre’s hierarchical categories and rethinks the notion of dramatic text as exclusive carrier of “content” and “meaning” in a work of theatre. The collapse of hierarchy opens up a wide spectrum of interpretative possibilities. Barthes’ notorious equation of author with a Creator-God7, as well as Derrida’s in-
6 Chapter 3 investigates the ways in which Beckett’s later plays integrate performance considerations into the dramatic form.
7 According to Barthes’ the “Death of the Author”, the “Work” may indeed “belong” to its author, but the Text, which exists only in discourse, “defied filiation”. Once the text is released to the world of discourse, the Author- God who created it controls its meaning no more than any reader. “To give a text an ‘Author’” –that is, to accept his/her intentions as its single “theological” meaning-is to “furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing”. “It
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depth analysis of Artaud’s theory (see Chapter 2) suggests that the symbolic death of the playwright truly liberates the artists involved in the production of performance meaning, turning them from slavish interpreters of someone else’s text to creators of an original event that bears their own stamp and reveals a personal connection to the material.
Moving from directing history and theory to actual directing practice, I have chosen to include different examples of auteur productions, especially by means of case studies, in order to underline the vast variety of creative experiments that exist in auteur work, as well as to show how the gradual democratisation in the process of conception, rehearsal and production has generated multiple types of collaboration among artists. No longer relying upon the genius and uncontested authority of the author, simultaneously annihilating the modernist identity of the writer as primary interpreter of the world, auteur theatre became the meeting place for artists struggling to unearth performative structures in all kinds of art forms. Even though the director- auteur ultimately becomes the über-figure in total control of the end result, nevertheless, it is important to remember and do justice to the creative contributions of the directors’ close collaborators. Indeed, in the work of auteur directors, the new performance text is born through the mediating contributions of artists like designers, choreographers, musicians, digital experts and of course, performers, each claiming for him/herself, whether consciously or unconsciously, a slice of the role of “author”.
It must be mentioned that during the process of selecting my material, I have thought it better to concentrate on productions of directors whose work I am quite familiar with; in this respect, I have often used my own experience as audience member in attempting to grasp the effect of is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but then does so as a guest” (“From Work to Text” in Rice and Waugh 195).
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most of the performances discussed in this dissertation. Writing primarily on auteur theatre in the West, I have brought in the examples of established European and American auteurs; this choice is not accidental, since most of these directors (as for example, Kantor, Brook,
McBurney, Wilson, Foreman, Van Hove, Marthaler, etc) are artists whose work has been acknowledged for several years now and thus serves the purpose of exploring to what degree it has resisted retraction to easy pattern (as opposed to a recognisable style), which is one of the dangers mostly associated with the decay of avant-garde art.
However, because one can surely benefit from identifying and examining the future potential of an avant-garde while it is at its early stages, I thought it useful to also draw from the theatrical experience of a “peripheral” European country like Greece, where the concept of auteurism is relatively new. I thus tried to document the auteur trend through the work of three prominent
Greek directors, namely Yannis Houvardas, Michail Marmarinos and Theodoros Terzopoulos. I am fully aware that this analysis and partial evaluation is only a beginning and as such, a limited approach to the phenomenon of the director-auteur in Greece. I do hope, however, that it can nonetheless lead to a more thorough investigation of the work of a lot more directors (both established and from younger generations) in the future, also based on the existing bibliography of acclaimed scholars like Yorgos Pefanis, Dimitris Tsatsoulis, Savas Patsalidis and Elizabeth
Sakellaridou, among others, and in this respect bring sharper attention to the dialogue that has started to take place on the Greek stage: a dialogue between text and performance, writer and director, the past and its present “double”.
Focusing on the creative sources of auteurs, I have chosen to examine the three main threads of devising stage-scripts, adapting and re-contextualising classics, as well as creating modern versions of myth. In addition, I have tried to discuss some elements that are common in auteur
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directors’ methodology, desiring also to connect their own conceptual process to the kind of communication they have established with their actors and designers in rehearsal. Because of the vast variety of styles and methods, the main challenge has been to group together some principal elements and techniques that are consistently present in many directors’ work. This has not been an easy matter, given the fact that a lot of the artists discussed in this dissertation not only operate under very distinct socio-cultural contexts (with varying budgetary/production restrictions), but also belong to different traditions of avant-garde practice, in terms of the time period, sources of influence and international impact of their work. It must be said that in this process I have been greatly assisted by incorporating select excerpts from newspaper articles and reviews, which not only mark the critical reception of these artists’ work, but also help place it in a broader temporal and cultural context. In this project, daily and weekly papers like the New
York Times, the Village Voice, the Guardian and the Independent, among others, proved a valuable source of information and insight.
Similarly, in my discussion of neo-dramatic writers in Chapter 6, I have mostly included play- texts of more established playwrights, fully aware that there is a continual emergence of younger voices, whose plays are also characterised by a desire to bring issues of theatrical representation to their pages.8 The exclusion of these younger writers does by no means reflect my lesser degree of fascination and respect towards their work; rather, it is dictated by the need to remain focused to the analysis of a trend that has produced writing which has over the years received both critical acclaim and strong audience response. Nevertheless, I am conscious of the fact that in this section there is plenty of room for a great deal more of playwrights, as there is certainly ample room for the discussion of a lot more auteur directors in this dissertation. And that is, no doubt, a positive sign, a good omen. While people continue to breathe, they will still feel and
8 As is for example the young British playwright Simon Stephens.
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imagine. In so far as imagination and inspiration exist, new forms of art will emerge. Finally, as long as there are battles to be fought for in society and within oneself, there will also be a desire to transform or transgress. Theatre has no choice but to live up to the challenges of its time.
Chapter Breakdown
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 revisits the origins of directors’ theatre and provides an overall historical context for the theatre of the auteur, documenting the uninterrupted chain of theatre’s formal developments to date. It briefly demonstrates the impact of the movements of Realism, Naturalism and
Symbolism on the new stagecraft, which in itself generated a new role for the director.
Moreover, it discusses the theories of Edward Gordon Craig in relation to the director as creator and brings into sharp focus some of the early twentieth century innovations in theatrical form, such as the changes in set and lighting design, the reconsideration of theatrical space and acting technique, the integration in performance of mime, circus and stylised choreography, as first introduced in the work of Jarry, Stanislavski, Antoine, Copeau, Meyerhold and Reinhardt. At the same time, it touches on the foundations of the social function of theatre and the shattering of illusionism, instigated by artists like Copeau, Piscator and Brecht, and helps draw parallels with the work of numerous auteurs in the more recent years, who celebrate the communal nature of theatre. Finally, this chapter paves the way to a more in-depth analysis of the reconsidered notions of mimesis and representation in auteur work, as well as of theatre’s mistrust of the literary text.
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Chapter 2
Chapter 2 investigates Antonin Artaud’s monumental influence on auteur theatre and specifically on the revised role of the director as author of the theatre event. It explores the ways in which Artaud’s theory in The Theatre and its Double has been responsible not only for the total reinvention of theatre, but also, for a radically changed conception of art, particularly in proposing a new language for the stage, which would be pre-thematic and primordial, and thus anticipating the work of auteurs like Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Robert Wilson, who have based their theatre on signs shared by all human beings and as such, guaranteeing a universal impact. The chapter also marks Artaud’s revolt against Western theatre’s aesthetics and his rejection of Aristotelian mimesis. By bringing in Derrida’s analysis of Artaud’s work, particularly in relation to the notion of the “theological stage” and the banishment of the author-
God from the stage (parricide), it illustrates the ways in which Artaud locates the ultimate
“triumph of the pure mise-en-scène” in its disentanglement from literature and the tyranny of the word. Moreover, while this chapter acknowledges the practical inapplicability of some of
Artaud’s theories of the mise-en-scène, it nevertheless endorses their influence on the physical experiments of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde and on the new role of the audience as one of participation and visceral involvement.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 is dedicated to an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s later drama, establishing the connection between his performance texts and the revised notion of the dramatic (literary) text as a dynamic space of confrontation between the word and the image, where staging elements like lighting, set/props, sound/silence and movement become important structural devices.
Furthermore, this chapter provides examples from Beckett’s later plays which illustrate how the possibilities of image, sound and technology subvert conventional forms of representation. By
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exploring Beckett’s self-collaboration as author and director of his texts (what would be an ideal union for Artaud) and discussing the writer’s tight control over the text’s staging possibilities, as well as his notorious reluctance to grant directors the freedom to creatively “tamper” with his plays, the chapter also brings to attention issues of interpretation and authorship, which are fundamental in auteur practice.
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 analyses the actual directing work of established auteurs in Europe and the U.S., describing their method of work, their sources of inspiration, as well as the challenges and problems involved in their process. More specifically, it includes sections on auteur directors’ methods of self-collaboration, recycling, collage and Gesamtkunstwerk, ensemble work, incorporation of dream-structures and archetypes, as well as strategies of manipulating the audience’s emotional involvement. In addition, it includes five case studies of recent auteur productions: Simon McBurney’s Mnemonic, Michail Marmarinos’ National Hymn, Yannis
Houvardas’ Bérénice and Sara, Ivo Van Hove’s The Misanthrope and Peter Brook’s The
Mahabharata, all of which analyse in detail these directors’ work on devised theatre, adaptation/re-contextualisation and myth, respectively. Finally, there is also a section on
Theodoros Terzopoulos’ work on ancient tragedy.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 traces and analyses how, inspired by both Artaud and Beckett, contemporary auteurs have manufactured and manipulated an array of stage languages, in order to create a sensorial text that runs parallel, or even counter to the verbal text in performance. Based on numerous examples from recent acclaimed productions by Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group, Martha
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Clarke, Peter Sellars, Tadashi Suzuki, Anne Bogart, and Robert Lepage, among others, the chapter explores in detail how directors use image structuration and framing, technology and mediation, the body and the sound as text and language. At the same time, this chapter puts forth a critique of auteur practice, pointing out the challenges involved in the directors’ attempt to communicate meaning while remaining true to their desire for formal innovation. In exposing some specific dangers inherent in empty formalism and the postmodern proclivity to groundlessness, it foregrounds the on-going dialectic between content and form that still continues to provoke controversy in current theatre criticism.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 explores the nature of the performance text, offering a brief semiotic analysis of the creative collision between the mise-en-scène and the performance. Similarly, it brings to the fore the post-Structuralists’ views on the open text, and the authorial contribution of the spectator. In addition, it examines the emergence of a performance-informed new dramaturgy (what this study has termed “neo-dramatic” writing), identifying some of its predominant structural, linguistic and stylistic foundations, as revealed in plays by Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp,
Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mark Ravenhill and Valère Novarina, to name but a few.
Finally, it addresses the issue of authorship, discussing the battle of supremacy and ownership of the text, which regularly defines the relationship between playwright and director; it thus lays out both sides’ perspective and argues for the possibility of constructive and inspiring collaboration, as opposed to a barren conflict over ownership and copyright, between them. On that account, it opens up the discussion on the viability of a text-less stage, proposing the reconsideration of verbal text as a necessary partner in performance.
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1. THE RISE OF THE MODERN AUTEUR
1.1. The early director-producer
The term “director” is only one century old. Directors working mostly as producers and stage managers began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century. Essentially, those self-proclaimed actors-managers were the forerunners of the modern director, since before that, in the eighteenth century, companies were “sponsored” by royalty and competition was banned. It was only in the nineteenth century that old monopolies were gradually dismantled and theatre assumed a different role, with several new companies emerging. Not surprisingly, the new and varied audiences that ensued demanded novelty, and thus “spectacle” was introduced onto the stage thanks to successful managers, who secured new and improved stage equipment for their theatres. At the same time, due to rapid developments in stage machinery and lighting (one of the major changes being that old gas lamps were replaced by electric lighting), an on-growing emphasis on design became apparent. Theatre artists grew more and more involved in issues of staging, competing against each other in originality of costume and sets. This in turn intensified the need for one single person, namely a stage manager, (a regisseur in French) to co-ordinate the numerous dynamics of the stage.
Consequently, the role of the so-called “producer” (“metteur-en-scène”) became more acknowledged around the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, the term “metteur-en-scène” captured the hybrid function of a modern-day director, stage manager and producer, closer to what we now know as “artistic director”. British actor, director and scenic designer Edward
Gordon Craig (1872-1966) was the first artist to embrace the term “stage director”, which he
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applied to the person mastering all practices pertaining to the stage.9 For Craig, the director was the orchestrator and arbiter of events, a supreme theatre artist, one who monitored all creative processes and unified the different expressive idioms of the stage. Influenced by Wagner’s principle of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) Craig in 1905 insisted that the art of the theatre was “neither acting, nor the play”, it was not scene, nor dance, but consisted of “all the elements of which these things are composed [. . .] action, words, line, colour, rhythm” (qtd in Walton
52).10 It was only in the 1950s that the word “director” was more consciously taken up and henceforth consistently employed, as a result of the broad usage of the term in the film industry.
Tracing the beginnings of stage directing in Europe, we should in all fairness credit the Duke
Georg of Saxe-Meiningen as the first “official” director. His company, formed in 1866, toured
Europe extensively, putting a lot of emphasis on visuals and serving his comprehensive artistic vision, especially vis-à-vis the “faithful” restoration of historical drama. Indeed, the nineteenth century revealed a strong interest in historical reconstruction on the whole; Duke Georg’s restoration of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1867) in its exact reproduction of historical detail, generated controversy regarding the ways for directors to treat classic works of literature.
Surely, in the years to follow, directorial interpretation became an issue to be tackled with caution.
At the same time, the longing for a realistic portrayal of life signalled a turning inwards of the theatre, simultaneously occasioning a new set of administrative demands, which constituted the role of director-producer necessary, as Craig had first suggested, especially as far as overseeing
9 See also Introduction.
10 Similarly, Craig defends the superiority of action to all other elements of the theatre art, since “the art of the theater has sprung from action-movement-dance” (qtd in Walton 52).
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the unity of design and overall staging was concerned. Being the first to take upon him this new task, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen laid out the foundations of a viable modern theatre practice.
Having put together a potent theatre ensemble, he insisted on long periods of rehearsals and demanded that the actors work with sets, costumes and properties from the very beginning of rehearsals. In this respect, he explored the ideal circumstances for the production process, one that today appears possible only in financially healthy, state-subsidised theatres and opera houses, where set designers are asked to deliver a complete model of the set long before rehearsals with actors actually begin.
Indeed, the time seemed ripe for several disparate artistic movements and trends to flourish in the theatres of Europe. Accordingly, the fin-du-siècle emergence of the new stagecraft came as a reaction against the scenic practices of traditional European theatre, such as naturalistic scenery and the excessive clutter on stage of archaeologically “authentic” detail. In effect, most of the late nineteenth - early twentieth century pioneer directors like Craig, Stanislavski, Antoine,
Copeau, Meyerhold and Reinhardt proposed a new staging style of austerity and suggestion,
(which would also extend to the actors), putting their stamp on the freshly established practice of mise-en-scène and contributing valuable insight vis-à-vis its compositional languages, namely, scenic and lighting design, movement, etc. As a consequence, new techniques were instantly developed and groundbreaking devices of staging invented, mostly to serve the needs of the increasingly sophisticated spectators.
In 1896, Alfred Jarry presented his play Ubu Roi at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris, in what was to become a landmark performance. Jarry dared to put on stage the “full implications of an irrational and destructive existence” (Braun 1982: 57) in a liberated form of theatre, which celebrated a strong aesthetic autonomy. In Ubu Roi, the playwright literally attacked the
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complacent bourgeois audience of his time and used every means available to shatter all sense of illusion, bringing the anarchic and the clownish element into performance and ultimately restoring to the theatre a “license to confront the world with its own brutishness” (Braun 1982:
52). In particular, Jarry and his actors deployed lines, characters, settings and music to create within the theatre a kind of event that brought stage and audience together in direct confrontation, rather than re-enacting, as the theatre of illusion repeatedly did, a situation presumed to have occurred in some other place or some other time (56). Jarry himself was ecstatic at the shocking effect his Ubu had on the audiences. After the opening performance, he maintained:
It was intended that when the curtain went up the scene should confront the
public like the exaggerating mirror in the stories of Madame Leprince de
Beaumont, in which the depraved saw themselves with dragons’ bodies, or bulls’
horns, or whatever corresponded to their particular vice. It is not surprising that
the public should have been aghast at the sight of its ignoble other self, which it
has never before been shown completely. (Qtd in Braun 1982: 52)
Jarry’s influence on the next generations of avant-garde artists was enormous. Not only would his theatre become a prototype model for Brecht’s theory of alienation, but some of the techniques widely employed in Ubu Roi, as for example, the distorted and staccato delivery of lines, the exaggerated use of masks, ultra grotesque characterisation and stylised movement, would all point to a future acting and directing style, free from realistic constraints. Breaking all rules of theatrical representation, Jarry became the official father of the fin-du-siècle avant-garde movement, as well as the adopted father of the Surrealists, the Symbolists, the Dadaists and the
Absurdists, his influence extending to the more recent generations of directors-auteurs.
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1.2. The director’s new role
Within this vortex of changes in theatrical form, French poet, painter and director Αntonin
Artaud (1896-1948) followed course, theorising on the new function of theatre and underlining the necessity for profound changes in the mise-en-scène.11 His manifesto theory on the “theatre of cruelty” and on the stage director’s reconsidered role was expounded in The Theatre and its
Double, published in 1938. Writing in a time of doubt and despair, he stressed the importance of a priestly figure in the theatre, of a director-creator who would ultimately assume the role of a shaman in order to reconstitute theatre’s lost spirituality in the minds and lives of people.
Comparable in scope to Jarry’s iconoclastic rethinking of the stage, Artaud’s theories were monumental in establishing a long line of directors-gurus like Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and
Eugenio Barba, among others, who in the 1960s and 1970s made it their mission to search for this lost spirituality with their own group of artists. It goes without saying that Artaud’s theory of the mise-en-scène was largely indebted to Craig, who had already emphasised the important role of the stage-director as creator. Seeking to deconstruct the long-lasting hierarchy of playwright, director and performer perpetuated in literary theatre, both Craig and Artaud rejected the role of the director as mere interpreter of the dramatic text.
In reality, already at the end of the nineteenth century, Europe had welcomed a new sensibility signalling the break with conventional modes of representation and especially with Romanticism and Melodrama, in favour of a realistic and/ or naturalistic rendition of reality. Correspondingly, the sweeping changes in the social climate of the times, affected by the coming of the Industrial
Revolution, were followed by a demand for realism in the theatre, as well as by the necessity for
11 A whole chapter on Artaud is dedicated to the analysis of his theory of the new mise-en-scène, as well as to the impact of that theory on contemporary auteur directors.
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new plays and innovations in staging. At the same time, the ostentatious and melodramatic acting style which had until then dominated the European stages was also severely questioned.
This new direction of art was ardently supported by major writers of that period. As early as
1827, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) published his manifesto on Realism in the introduction of his play Cromwell. In it he condemned the artifice of Classicism and claimed the necessity for art to deal with the full picture of truth: “that the ugly exists there beside the beautiful, the deformed next to the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light.”12 Significantly, Emile Zola’s (1840-1902) writing would lay the ground for the advent of
Naturalism, a movement that sought to portray the nitty-gritty details of life, dismissing surface depictions of outside reality.13 All in all, Zola’s partiality to Naturalism, along with his condemnation of the exaggerated, as well as empty acting of his contemporaries facilitated the rise of the “New Naturalists” movement, whose first exponent in the theatre was director André
Antoine (1858-1943) with Théâtre Libre (formed in 1887). A true champion of Naturalism,
Antoine was preoccupied with the notion of the “fourth wall”: plays should be rehearsed in a real room with four walls, without worrying about the fourth wall, which will “later disappear so as to enable the audience to see what is going on” (Roose-Evans 17). Antoine’s fourth wall, whose existence came to be identified with a fundamentally realistic directing and acting style, would reinforce the empathetic bond between actor and spectator. Enveloping the spectator into a world of complete illusion, the “fourth wall” was in the years to come intensely critiqued by politically inclined artists like Brecht, whose aspiration was to intellectually stimulate rather than emotionally engage their audiences.
12 Hugo further revolts against artifice: “Let us take the hammer to theories and poetic systems. Let us throw down the old plastering that conceals the façade of art. There are neither rules nor models; or rather, there are no other rules than the general rules of nature which soar above the whole field of art and the special rules which result from the conditions appropriate to the subject of each composition.” (Qtd in Roose-Evans 14)
13 In fact, August Strindberg’s infamous introduction to Miss Julie (1888) was greatly indebted to Zola.
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In any case, the movement away from the mostly grandiose and superficial productions of the past towards realism duly brought with it the desire for realistic detail in staging. Both Antoine in Europe and David Belasco in America were among the first directors to work within these new demands, creating spectacularly naturalistic sets, and trusting that “it is the environment that determines the movements of the characters, not the movements of the characters that determine the environment” (Antoine qtd in Innes 2000: 52). Similarly, Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) was also concerned with how to apply the rules of the “New Realism” onto stage, after these have been absorbed and creatively digested by the actors. The longing for a truthful portrayal of character advocated by Zola became for Stanislavski an ever-lasting obsession. In this sense, his directing work at the
Moscow Art Theatre (founded in 1898) was pioneering in that it gave prominence to the role and preparation of the actor, as opposed to merely administering the technical issues that a director-producer also faced. Admittedly, Stanislavski considered performance not a social event, but an artistic experience, a journey into the human psyche. Longing to make his audiences’ experience more entrancing, he catered to the creation of atmospheric detail and paid special attention to the design of both sets and costumes. In this manner, despite being generally regarded as a staunch realist, Stanislavski also invoked mood and symbolist nuance (both principles instigated by Craig) in his stagings.14
As a result, while Realism continued to flourish, at the other end of the ideological and aesthetic spectrum, the advocates of Symbolism would theorise on the nature of art and the new role of the theatre artist. In this perspective, Craig’s theories on theatre were particularly popular.
14 In effect, contrary to what is broadly believed, Moscow Art Theatre’s experiments in style were not exclusively realism-based. In the production of Knut Hamsun’s The Drama of Life by (1905), Stanislavski used the effect of shadow play, with the use of back lighting foregrounding the silhouettes of the spectators. Similarly, staging Leonid Andreyev’s The Life of Man (1907), Stanislavski’s sensational black velvet design was used to cover up the whole stage, against which a set made of rope was built in a way that the outlines of doors and windows were suggested (information in Roose-Evans 19).
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Craig’s predominantly symbolist vision rendered him the founder of non-illusionistic theatre, together with the Swiss lighting designer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928). Loyal to their symbolist roots, the two artists aimed to rediscover the lyrical and often obscure aspects of life that lay hidden beneath pictorial realism. Those were precisely the aspects that the “New Naturalists” would choose to veer away from.
In contrast, for the Symbolist artist, spirituality and the inner workings of the soul are the sources of a profound truth much superior to the truth derived from objective observation.
Similarly, because truth ultimately reaches well into the realm of the soul, it is subjective and impossible to grasp with the five senses and thus cannot be expressed directly via tangible means, but is suggestive and can only be hinted at through a system of symbols that evoke feelings and states of mind. Again, according to the Symbolists, art can only be real if it has the potential to become metaphysical. This notion prefigures Artaud’s adulation of the
“metaphysical mise-en-scène”, what he considered the only viable alternative to a stale representational theatre, because, in his words, “to link the theatre to the expressive possibilities of forms, to everything in the domain of gestures, noises, colours, movements, etc., is to restore it to its original direction, to reinstate it in its religious and metaphysical aspect, is to reconcile it with the universe” (TD 70).
It is, then, no accident that during the concurrent appearance of the Symbolist and Naturalist movements several diverging theories on the nature of art and the essence of truth began to emerge. For one thing Symbolism, pleading for trust in the subjective experience, instigated a reconsideration of the relationship between individual perception and the representation of outside life. The premise that this relationship was no longer indispensable in artistic creation gradually carved the path for the appearance of the Modernist movement, which endorsed a
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distinct emphasis on form over content. Pictorial exactitude in the depiction of recognisable subjects was no longer the point; instead, what were above all valued in a work of art were innovation, imagination and style, qualities that to a great extent characterise the work of the best-known directors-auteurs to date.
Along these lines, Stanislavski’s experiments with mood and atmosphere at the Moscow Art
Theatre also reveal a tendency to view design as one of the rudiments of the stage. As a matter of course, the intense and constructive dialogues on the potential stage renditions of a text held between Stanislavski and his designer, scenic artist Simov, during the rehearsal process, inaugurated a trend of life-long collaborations between directors and their creative team.
Once again, more than any other theatre artist of his time, Craig exerted a profound influence on stage designers thereafter. His contribution is related to the introduction of abstract design to the stage and the use of different scenic elements such as set, costume, movement and lighting in a unified design that aimed to transcend rather than represent reality. Similarly, his claim that
“realism is only exposure whereas art is revelation” (qtd in Roose-Evans 45) was based on the conception of theatre not as an intellectual (literary) event, but as a visual experience appealing to the audience’s emotions. “I let my scenes grow out of not merely the play, but broad sweeps of thought which the play has conjured in me” (qtd in Innes 1983: 240), Craig insisted. In fact, the conventional elements of dramatic art, such as plot and character were to Craig rather inconsequential; as design increasingly became basic food for theatre and the stage event started to depend on the fusion of movement, rhythm, lighting and music, the verbal text surrendered its revered position as the cardinal element of performance.15
15 As Innes stresses in Edward Gordon Craig:
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Around the same time, Adolphe Appia, in his 1895 book Die Music und die Inscenierung (Music and Stage Setting) proposed reforms for the revival of scenic art. Earlier on, both Meiningen and
Antoine had experimented with the possibilities of lighting and shadow to create mood and atmosphere. However, Appia took lighting design several steps further: musically trained and significantly inspired by the work of Wagner, he sought in lighting the creative fluidity of music; first and foremost, rhythm, tone and melody would determine the production’s setting and lighting, as well as the actors’ movement in and out of them. In his view:
Light has an almost miraculous flexibility [. . .] it can create shadows, make them
living, and spread the harmony of their vibrations in space just as music does. In
light we possess a most powerful means of expression through space, if this space
is placed in the service of the actor. (Appia 114)
Like Craig, Appia too, whose stage environments were conceived around a visual score that was to be fully realised in the minds of the spectator, valued a theatre of atmosphere rather than of appearance. Abstract simplicity was also significant: quite in line with Craig’s set designs, characterised by rostra, columns, steps and ramps, Appia’s lighting was environmental and architectural, making a three-dimensional use of space. In fact, Appia’s ideas on lighting design were based on the principle that lighting defines and reveals, highlighting the emotional mood of a scene from moment to moment.
On all accounts, Craig’s and Appia’s influence on contemporary set designers is colossal.
Today, some of the most acknowledged scenic artists and auteurs work mostly on mood and
For Craig, theatre is the equal of literature, but a very different form of art that can reach its full potential only if it is no longer subordinated to the written word. The richer the verbal imagery of the play, and the more expressive the dialogue, the further the stage is forced into a simply illustrative function and the less it fulfils its true nature. (113)
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suggestion, rather than on description and illustration. In particular, Appia’s influence on modern lighting design is extensive: lighting in contemporary auteur performance is mostly used as a structural tool and very often becomes a character in the play. It goes without saying that some of the most visionary directors to date have depended upon the vast technical possibilities of lighting to create visually ravishing landscapes on stage. In like manner, contemporary theatre practice deeply values the director-designer relationship, while for many directors-auteurs, design constitutes an equally important stage language, often carrying the same weight with verbal text itself16, as will be further explored in Chapter 5.
In effect, the innovations in stage machinery at the beginning of the twentieth century allowed directors to create impressive spectacles and satisfy their audiences with new stage effects. In
Germany, the Austrian Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), artistic director of the Deutsches Theatre and influenced by both Craig and Appia, introduced in his staging three-dimensional sets. As will be illustrated further down, Reinhardt paid great attention to the design of his productions, which were celebrated both for their epic-scale, as well as for their spectacular effects, sensational sets, advanced stage machinery, lighting and colour. Reinhardt worked in detail, transforming stage technology and developing a unique eclectic style by borrowing from several other traditions. Notably, he often preferred incomplete plays where the text could be used as a pretext for his large-scale shows, to which he would without exception introduce effects of his own devising.
Today, “spectacle”, translated as visual excellence, continues to play a prominent role in the work of directors-auteurs. However, criticism can also be ruthless in those cases where directors
16 Peter Brook’s view of the director-designer relationship in The Empty Space is telling: “The earliest relationship is director/subject/designer. [. . . ] The best designer evolves step by step with the director, going back, changing, scrapping, as a conception of the whole gradually takes form” (113-4).
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make up for dramaturgical and/or directorial inadequacies by resorting to sensational effect.
Most of the times, these productions are criticised for treating the verbal text merely as an excuse, a convenient cover-up of empty form and visual ploys. A detailed critique of the dangers of Formalism will be provided in Chapter 5. However, it is worth noting here Aristotle’s utter rejection of spectacle, which he considered to be the least important among the elements of tragedy, treasuring plot (action) as the fundamental principle of theatre, instead.17
Nevertheless, audiences have always appreciated the generous provision of visual entertainment, especially when that is accompanied by fresh theatrical conventions. An additional outcome of the innovations in stage design and technology in the early twentieth century was the reconsideration of theatrical spaces at large. In this spirit, Appia would urge his contemporaries to leave their theatres to their “dying past” (qtd in Roose-Evans 51) and construct buildings, designed to cover the space in which they work, enthusiastically maintaining:
We shall arrive, eventually, at what will simply be called the House: a sort of
cathedral of the future, which in a vast, open and changeable space will welcome
the most varied expressions of our social and artistic life, and will be the ideal
place for dramatic art to flourish, with or without spectators.. (Appia 115,
emphasis original)
Nevertheless, it was Reinhardt who was especially drawn to unusual spaces wherein to host his epic-scale events. Quite regularly, he chose to stage his productions in unorthodox, non- theatrical places such as cathedrals, squares, streets, even entire villages, as was the case with his
17 For more on the Aristotelian model and its (non) application in contemporary dramatic structure, see Chapters 2 & 6.
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production of Everyman18, in which he managed to involve the population of a whole town. Yet, the need to reconsider theatre spaces was more “officially” articulated by Artaud, who in 1921 argued that dramatic art was the art of life that could be expressed without major theatre machinery, sets and buildings, since time and space were enough.19
Several other directors in the early twentieth century experimented with unusual spaces and stage configurations, taking into account the audience-stage relationship they wished to establish. One of them, Nikolay Okhlopkov (1900-1967), a disciple of Meyerhold, would strip the stage and all seating from the theatre, a radical gesture later on taken up by Peter Brook, who conducted similar experiments with space in his Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in 1970s Paris. In the same decade, Ariane Mnouchkine’s production of 1789 displayed a circle of stages surrounding the audience, who sat in the middle. Moreover, in 1966, that is a few years prior to
Mnouchkine’s production, Luca Ronconi, whose work is vastly indebted to Reinhardt, tackled space issues spectacularly in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. There, the audience was made to follow the actors around and be exposed to selected fragmentary scenes from the play, unable to see the whole picture. In a way, Ronconi has been concerned with manipulating theatre space ever since, consciously breaking away from realistic representation by effectively handling multiple stages and depicting scenes with no logical progression. Finally, Richard Schechner of the Performance Group was a pioneer in articulating the need for what he called “environmental theatre”, whose first principle was to create and use whole spaces, as well as to involve the outside (namely, the city) in the action, through the modalities of time and space. Generally, in
18 Reinhardt staged Hofmannsthal’s Everyman (1927) in the cathedral square of Salzburg and placed actors on the towers of churches throughout the town, calling the name of Everyman. Similarly, Reinhardt’s Faust was staged on a mountainside in Salzburg (Information in Roose-Evans 65).
19 In fact, not only did Artaud propose a theatre that would put the audience in the centre, platforms in the four corners, and a gallery all around, so that the action could be pursued form one point to another; he went as far as to suggest abandoning the architecture of existing theatres and insist that reform of theatre spaces is necessary.
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making the outside environment a home for their productions, directors were fundamentally attacking linear representation, as each spectator would now by definition be subjected to a different version of reality. Today, the concept of found space20 has been a recurrent feature in the site-specific concerns of auteurs, including the early productions of Anne Bogart and some recent work of Michail Marmarinos21, among others. These directors revolt against the comforts of the conventional proscenium arch that has been for the most part associated with realistic, mainstream productions, fighting for uncharted, yet exciting spaces that can house, as well as nurture their performances.
In essence, in the early twentieth century’s mélange of artistic and aesthetic trends, one can clearly discern two different tendencies shaping up fast: on the one hand, there was Antoine’s and Stanislavski’s devotion to Realism, brought forth and encouraged by the social circumstances of their era; at the antipodes, however, one sensed a predilection towards
Formalism, as expressed by Meyerhold, Craig and Appia. As a true Formalist, Craig had anticipated Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (1874-1940) conviction that theatre could appeal to emotions only through movement, wishing to create a kinetic experience for the audiences and contesting the emotional character of acting. In reality, Craig’s conception of theatre was akin to what we now term “dance theatre” and in fact he should also be credited for his immense influence on modern dance, which is still largely based on what he had originally conceived as “correlated movements of sounds, light and moving masses” (qtd in Roose-Evans
41). In this respect, his collaboration with dancer Isadora Duncan was only a token of his
20 The search for alternative or environmental performance spaces, also called created or found space, dates back to 1960s’ protest movements in the United States. In their revolt against society and the cultural establishment at that time, artistic groups created theatrical performances that rejected conventional stages and seating arrangements. In most of the cases, the audience became a part of the playing space. Streets, basement garages, warehouses, art galleries, lofts, a side of a hill, apartment rooms, all became performance spaces.
21 See Marmarinos’ productions 2004: An Invitation to Dance (2005) and Dying as a Country (2007).
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fascination with the new style of movement that was rapidly dominating the theatre. Ultimately, his rebellion against realistic representation was not limited to scenic design: for him the performers’ structured and controlled movement was fundamental. By contrast, the verbose artificiality of former acting styles had led him to a general mistrust of the actor:
Do away with the real tree, do away with the reality of delivery, do away with the
reality of action and you tend towards the doing away with the actor. Do away
with the actor and you do away with the means by which a debased stage realism
is produced and flourishes; no longer would there be a living figure to confuse us
into connecting actuality and art. (Qtd in Huxley and Witts 159)
Specifically, Craig defied the kind of rhetorical acting which was at that time popular at the
Comédie Française, paving the way to both Copeau’s and Artaud’s similarly polemic reactions a few years later. Beyond any doubt, pompous acting had been a dominant trademark in the overall tradition of the European theatre, fundamentally a theatre dominated by words and a blind reverence to the author. Scandalously against actors, Craig, in his seminal essay “The actor and the Über-marionette” (1907) maintained that the most beautiful form of acting can only be achieved through the controlled movement of a marionette. Like Meyerhold, he, too, contemplated a theatre that would appeal to the spectators’ emotions through movement alone:
May we not look forward with hope to that day which shall bring back to us once
more the figure, or symbolic creature, made also by the cunning of the artist, so
that we can gain once more the ‘noble artificiality’ which the old writer speaks
of? [. . .] To that end we must study to remake these images-no longer content
with a puppet, we must create an über-marionette. The über -marionette will not
compete with life- rather it will go beyond it. Its ideal will not be the flesh and
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blood but rather the body in trance –it will aim to clothe itself with a death-like
beauty while exhaling a living spirit. (Qtd in Huxley and Witts 161)
It is questionable how successful Craig’s theories on acting would have been, had they ever been put into practice, exhibiting, as they often did, a fervent conceptualism largely inapplicable on the stage. In this respect, even though Craig shared Reinhardt’s emphasis on “mechanics” and the use of the actor’s body, the latter’s experiments in controlled acting were more effective; his company was perhaps the only troupe in Europe that proved able to realise most of those pioneers’ theatrical vision. In reality, Reinhardt’s actors shared some of the qualities embodied in Craig’s ideal über-marionette, having been trained to take direction “almost as if they were puppets, controlling every movement and gesture, the slightest change in intonation” (Innes
1983: 110) and subordinating their personalities to the director’s primary concept.
Yet, inevitably, the plethora of varied styles in the emerging theatre of the twentieth century, together with the ever-growing demand for formal innovation, stimulated discussion on whether form should precede content or vice versa, a question which to our day remains very much part of the agenda in auteur theatre practice. In many ways, to shatter the stiflingly realistic staging of the nineteenth century was a goal that united many artists of very distinct claims and styles, as were Meyerhold, Tairov, Okhlopkov, and Vakhtangov, among others. For example,
Meyerhold’s rejection of Realism led to experiments in grotesque representation that in themselves required more stylised techniques. Moreover, his insistence on perfecting a stage idiom of his own recognisable forms foresaw the work of several late twentieth century auteurs, particularly those whose work pivots around a more heightened style of language and in whose productions, Realism, whether in acting, design and/or story telling is systematically shied away from. As Meyerhold characteristically declared:
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When in the art of the grotesque form triumphs over content, then the soul of the
grotesque and the soul of the theatre will be one. The fantastic will exist in its
own right on the stage; ‘joie de vivre’ will be rediscovered in the tragic as well as
in the comic. (Qtd in Braun 1982: 142)
In such fashion, Meyerhold’s claims on the supremacy of form and physicality (over plot and characterisation) by far outdid psychologically driven concerns; these claims duly placed him against Stanislavski’s life-long search for inner truth in acting.22 As is clear from his theory of the jeu de théâtre, he was adamant about the sovereignty of theatrical form: “Two things are essential for a play’s production [. . . ] first, we must find the thought of the author; then we must reveal that thought in a theatrical form. This form I call a jeu de theatre and around it I shall build the performance” (qtd in Roose- Evans 21). Accordingly, Meyerhold’s innovative contributions to the stage encompassed a broad use of circus, mime and music hall techniques.
In viewing mime as superior to words, Meyerhold somehow anticipated Artaud’s condemnation of the written text as the exclusive carrier of meaning, since for both artists the important thing was for the theatre to get disentangled from literature. Characteristically, Meyerhold would argue that words are “a design on the fabric of movement” (qtd in Roose-Evans 23). Similarly, in 1912 in his groundbreaking essay “The Fairground Booth”, he underlined the primacy of pantomime over words and stressed the significance of reviving the primordial elements of the theatre, such as mask, gesture and movement. In this, too, he was not alone. Craig had already underlined the need for the theatre to return to the formalist stylisation of the classical Greek stage, where the choreographed physicality of the actors was masterly pronounced.
22 See also the work of Russian theatrical innovator Alexander Tairov (1885-1950).
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Nevertheless, although Meyerhold was one of the most fervent supporters of Symbolism, his search for a new form of expression led him back to the acting tradition of Commedia dell’Arte, prompting him to place the physicality of the Commedia in a modern context and putting trust to the trained physicality of the actor as the most effective way of communicating emotions. More specifically, in his attempt to produce a company of actors who would live up to his expectations, he developed the system of Biomechanics in the 1920s, a form of rigorous training for actors destined to be partly acrobats and athletes, partly animated machines. Thus trained, actors would then be fully prepared to work within Meyerhold’s functional constructivist sets in several challenging ways.
In effect, Meyerhold’s goal was to help the actor acquire emotional discipline and muscular response, in order to convey a sense of truth to the audiences. Whereas Stanislavski’s system of
“method acting” involved strategies of stimulating the actors’ memory and inner emotional process, Meyerhold worked reversely, “from outside in”; rehearsals would start with the company’s exploration of formal patterns and the setting up of a preliminary physical score
(design) for actors to expand on. This method of work suggested that psychology was directly related to physical response, as well as systematised movements and gestures in a manner that expressed outward emotion. In principle, Meyerhold’s technique renounced the habit of
“emotionalising” in the theatre and advocated that the truth of human relationships is best expressed physically. The assumption holding that because movement precedes emotion, actors through practice can assume movements and gestures which will let emotion occur automatically, led Meyerhold to produce an inventory of gestures and movements for each emotion that the actor could in turn assume.
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Furthermore, movement and gesture were to be precisely calculated to allow for “no accidents”, since the basic principle of Meyerhold’s training system was the actors’ ability to command themselves on stage. Actually, the search for consistency in acting went back to the eighteenth century, with French philosopher Diderot’s (1713-1784) famous treatise on acting “Paradoxe sur le comédien”, published in 1830. In it, Diderot argued for the actor’s controlled, as opposed to emotional (and thus unreliable) performance:
In my view he [the actor] must have penetration and no sensibility; the art of
mimicking everything, or, which comes to the same thing, the same aptitude for
every sort of character and part. [. . .] The extravagant creature who loses his self-
control has no hold on us; this is gained by the man who is self-controlled. The
great poets, especially the great dramatic poets, keep a keen watch on what is
going on, both in the physical and the moral world.23
Developed with the view to producing actors that would physically live up to the formal requirements of Meyerhold’s demanding stagings, the system of Biomechanics had a remarkable influence on modern dance and physical theatre in the years following Meyerhold’s directing practice. The notion of rigorous, physical acting, later on adopted by Artaud in his essay “An
Affective Athleticism” (1935), was further explored in Beckett’s treatment of the actors’ bodies as fragmentable and machine-controllable.24 In addition, for many directors in the second part of the twentieth century, choreography became one of the principal elements of form, particularly
23 In his essay The Paradox of Acting (1773) Diderot regarded actors’ sensibilité [sympathetic feeling] as the source of mediocre acting. In his view, great actors do not lose themselves in feeling, but “imitate so perfectly the exterior signs of feeling that you are thereby deceived. Their dolorous cries are noted in their memory, their despairing gestures are carefully rehearsed, they know the precise moment when their tears will begin to flow”. Spontaneity is dangerous; rather, a systematic study of action, diction and gesture are the means to secure consistency and truth in acting. (In Cole and Chinoy 162-3, Trans. Walter Herries Pollock) 24 See Chapter 3.
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in relation to the sophisticated manipulation of the actors’ movement and the company’s physical life in general. The notion that movement is as suitable as verbal language to shape and reveal feeling, has been shared by several formalist auteurs, like Robert Wilson, Liz LeCompte,
Theodoros Terzopoulos and Anne Bogart, among others. A similar principle applies to the work of Tadashi Suzuki in Japan, whose approach to acting and directing nevertheless originates in a different tradition and therefore his sense of formalism cannot be solely attributed to the same influences and/or ephemeral practices of the Western theatre.
On the other hand, despite the emergence and appeal of an increasingly “aestheticised” theatre, propounded by artists like Craig, Appia and Meyerhold, the times that followed World War I required quite a different function of the theatre. Fundamentally, art had to assume a social role in order to make sense of reality in the midst of the sweeping changes in the social and economic circumstances of the new era.
Hence, in 1913 Paris, Jacques Copeau (1879-1949), a former drama critic, founded the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, with a repertory based on the classics, which nonetheless aimed to provide a commentary on contemporary life. In his work, Copeau pursued a simplicity and selective elegance that he applied to both directing and acting. These went hand-in-hand with a desire to eliminate “theatrical elements” from his work and could also account for his zealous command
“pour l’oeuvre nouvelle qu’on nous laisse un tréteau nu”25, later on taken up by Peter Brook’s theory of the stage in The Empty Space (1968). Furthermore, even though Copeau believed in the text, its rhythms and sounds, he emphasised the function of theatre as communal art, an art that would bring people together through the guidance of a director acting as spiritual guide.
Wanting to put his theories to actual practice, he formed a school of training for actors, largely
25 “For a new play that leaves us the stage bare” (my translation).
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based on physical theatre, wishing to develop the same principles of an organic, holistic theatre which were to influence the work of Grotowski, Brook and Barba from the 1960s onwards.26
In a different manner, but serving the same purpose of restoring theatre’s lost sense of community for the people, Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), a keen supporter of the political function of art, in the 1920s advanced a new form of theatre, which he labelled epic theatre. Desiring to awaken society to face the social and ideological challenges of its times, he devised a new style of episodic representation (adopted and perfected by Brecht), which thoroughly undermined any sense of comfortable illusion in the spectator, by attempting to register reality as convincingly as possible.
Moreover, Piscator became a prototype of a multi-media artist, being the first director to introduce film in his stage work. Mostly involved in documentary theatre and mounting expressionist productions at the Volksbühne in Berlin, he used technology and new production techniques such as scene titles, photo-montage, photo projections, split-level stage on revolve, etc., in his ambition to fulfil his sense of social purpose by giving his work authenticity.27 In this spirit, he professed that because the main function of his “theatre of search” was to instruct, a social message would be better put across through a form that guaranteed the accurate depiction of reality. Rooted in Piscator’s theatre, current auteur work often foregrounds political issues by means of advanced theatre technology (including sophisticated multi-media equipment). For instance, the revisionist and hugely political interpretations of Greek tragedies by American
26 At the same time, Copeau trusted that for the theatre to regain its lost spirituality, actors should spend a lot of time in intense self-exploration. That thought, in itself challenging, was later on explored by Artaud in detail, as will be discussed in the next chapter.
27 Piscator believed that the theatre is part of the media and must disseminate information to the public.
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director-auteur Peter Sellars are often filtered through state-of-the art monitors and digital technology.28
Significantly, in the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht developed his own form of epic theatre, largely fashioned after Piscator’s theories. Drama was to him a form of serious practical sociology, whose purpose was to teach us how to survive. Because survival was not instantly relevant to people’s feelings, (Brecht aphoristically claiming that the truth was “concrete” and as such, not subjected to psychological implications), it was the audience’s critical, rather than empathetic, reaction that the new theatre had to generate in the audience. Having said this, in more recent theatre scholarship, Brecht’s objectivist view of art has been questioned and the German writer has been also broadly appropriated by postmodernism, partially because of his iconoclastic formal innovations, as well as his aversion to conventional narrative flow.29 As Elizabeth Wright argues in her analysis of the postmodern elements in early Brecht’ plays such as Baal (1922) and
The Jungle of the Cities (1923):
In this other Brecht of the early plays [ . . .] the performative mode appears
instead of the denotive mode of the later plays, with the result that accidental
meaning subverts any didactic intention. [ . . .] In these plays there is no appeal to
the audience to solve the contradictions outside the deliberately unfinished work.
The work of the plays is on language, with the effect that the characters are not
self-present but continually constitute themselves via an other. (97)
28 The implications of contemporary experimentalists’ use of technology on stage are extensively laid out in chapters 4 & 5.
29 Surely, Brecht’s statement in 1920: “A man with one theory is lost. He must have several, four, many! He must stuff them in his pockets like newspapers, always the most recent, you can live well between them, you can dwell easily between the theories” has adequately fed these new directions in critical thinking. (Brecht qtd in the book description of Brecht on Art and Politics: Kuhn and Giles, eds).
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Still, while new perspectives are being called for in evaluation of Brecht’s supposed integration into postmodernism and even though we can neither fully ignore, nor whole-heartedly accept the validity of Brecht’s absolute faith in objective truth, any more than we can painlessly sum-up
“survival” in today’s art-satiated world, the fundamental split between the social and the aesthetic function of art remains. Brecht’s exclusive application of Verfremdung (alienation effect) in his productions was invariably embraced to eliminate the soporific complacency of a theatre steeped in illusion. Reacting against the conventions of Realistic theatre, whereby the legendary “fourth wall” was conceived as a shelter to the actor, protecting him/her within an area largely off-limits to the spectator, Brecht thoroughly abolished this imaginary fourth wall, shattering the boundary between illusion and reality, mimesis and presence, and thus effectively rendering the identification between audience and stage action/character impossible.
Undeniably, the theatre of illusion has been for a very long time tied to a fundamentally teleological narrative, as dramaturgically manifest in the Aristotelian adherence to the laws of a universe ruled by divine justice. However, the symbolic death of telos (both as redemptive end and as purpose) in the post-World War I era, signals a sharp turn away from the mimetic space of recycled illusion associated with Realism, towards less linear narrative forms in the theatre and in the arts, in general, as will be argued extensively in the following chapters.
Consequently, as directing and acting styles were relentlessly put into trial, so was the audience- spectacle relationship continuously examined and redefined. The yearning was common in many directors to bring audiences closer to the event of the play. Meyerhold, for one thing, had infinite trust in the spectator’s use of imagination, claiming that “the audience is made to see what we want them to see” (Roose-Evans 25) and breaking down the barrier between spectator and spectacle. Similarly, Reinhardt attempted to recapture the fusion of actor-spectator, longing to resurrect the ancient Greek ideal, whereby theatre contained modern life. Although Reinhardt’s
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ambitions to achieve such complete union ultimately failed, his search had been in earnest. Last but not least, the conviction that theatre is a fundamental human need reached its peak with
Nikolai Evreinov, who had succeeded Meyerhold as director of the Vera Komisarjevskaya
Theatre in Moscow. In 1908 Evreinov published his sensational ideas, insisting that “theatre is a basic organic urge like hunger or sex” (qtd in Roose-Evans 26), a thought advanced by Peter
Brook, especially in the 1970s.
Further, for the theatre to reach out to a broad audience and leave a meaningful and lasting mark, it needed to return to its primal, festive roots. This desire to make art more emancipated and alive and bring it down to the people had been in fact prompted by Copeau, who liked to urge his contemporaries to “leave literature and create a fraternity of players [ . . . ] living, working, playing together, [ . . . ] creating together, inventing together their games, drawing them from themselves and from others” (qtd in Roose-Evans 87). Similarly, in his days at the Berliner
Ensemble, Brecht often re-wrote his plays in rehearsal, together with his long-term collaborators.30 Significantly, in this process, no final version of one script existed: text was freestanding and provisional, an “encounter” and an experiment. The preliminary and un-fixed quality of text, often built out of anecdotes from the company’s personal experiences, helped the members of the group bond creatively, share ideas and work together towards common pursuits, which also included the “writing” of the production script. It is no surprise, therefore, that inside those creative communes, actors would connect more and more to each other.
In consequence, initialled by Brecht, ensemble acting became extremely popular especially in the 1960s, when companies like The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, The Bread and Puppet
Theatre, The Performance Group, to name but some of the most established ones, blossomed in
30 A later side of Brecht, often neglected in theatre history.
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the U.S. Furthermore, ever since the 1980s, ensemble companies have provided a welcoming environment to the practitioners of devised theatre (see Chapter 4), procuring the means for extensive discussions among the company’s members, intense physical work, interviews with people outside the commune, specific fieldwork and naturally, improvisation. Elements of this process can surely be traced in the work of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, Liz LeCompte’s The
Wooster Group and Simon McBurney’s Complicité, among others, as will be explored in more depth in the following chapters on auteur practice. In addition, it may be worth noting that lately, as a result of such circumstances conducive to ensemble work, so-called “playwrights in residence” have increasingly become leading figures inside several theatre companies, commissioned to develop new scripts in collaboration with the director and the actors. Among recent examples are the creative encounters of postmodern playwright Charles Mee with choreographer-director Martha Clarke, and innovative New York-based stage auteurs Robert
Woodruff, Anne Bogart and Tina Lindau.31
Surely, the communal sense of art, which can be tracked down to Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, suggested the need for the theatre to return to its primal roots of festival, divested, however, of all religious nuances and enriched by an awareness of the social function of art. In the New York based Living Theatre, artists all worked and lived under the same roof, while Ariane
Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil in the outskirts of Paris has since the 1970s operated as a creative commune, where myths and stories have been reshaped and presented through the filter of a contemporary eye, in an attempt to demystify their traditional significance imposed by canonical literature. Essentially, the work of the Théâtre du Soleil is frequently seen as the “kind of political theatre which seeks to advance the role of theatre through awakening the audience to
31 Some of the most remarkable of such collaborations include Mee’s work with Woodruff’s company at A.R.T. on Full Circle (2000) and Bogart’s SITI on Hotel Cassiopeia (2007).
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the conditions of their existence and the possibilities of change” (Roose-Evans 88). Through research, improvisation and experimentation with a range of theatrical idioms, the company aims to “take some trivial happening and make it concrete, bring it to life, not merely do a play about the opinion we hold on some political problem”, as Mnouchkine once claimed in an interview
(qtd in Roose-Evans 88). For example, in the renowned production of 1789, the reinterpretation of the French Revolution was done from the point-of-view of the common French people, providing a fascinating twist to the interpretation of history.
Likewise, in his theory on the Theatre of the Oppressed (put together in the early 1970s), the late
Brazilian director, activist and innovator of Post-Brechtian political theatre, Augusto Boal, attempted to undo the audience/actor split and propose a new form of political theatre based on the dynamic interaction of actors and spectators. In fact, the concept of the spect-actor became a dominant force within Boal’s later Forum Theatre work, where the newly empowered audience was encouraged to not only imagine change but to gradually, upon communal reflection, generate social action.32
In the line of political artists like Brecht, Mnouchkine and Boal, many other theatre directors have over the years tried to “institutionalise” the explosive co-existence of artists and the circulation of thoughts that can develop into ideas and gradually, under ripe conditions, into a
32 In a somewhat similar, though less political spirit, a passionate follower of Artaud, Jerome Savary of the Grand Magic Circus (known as Théâtre Panique in the 1960s), rejects the high-brow literary aspect that held theatre captive for many years and uses fireworks, pulleys, magic, live music, vaudeville, animals, etc, to celebrate its festive nature:
Theatre should be a feast, a joyous occasion, a festival. [. . .] Theatre is not and should not be a literary form of expression. A theatrical celebration can take place anywhere: out of doors, in a garage, in a stable. The problem with the avant-garde theatre today is that it is absolutely intellectual. You have to be cerebrally inclined to understand what is going on. We, on the contrary, try to appeal to everyone: the illiterate, as well as the intelligentsia. (Qtd in Roose-Evans 86)
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more coherent and resonant work of art. Today, theatre companies often offer themselves the possibility of what is known as a “creative retreat” of hard work and self-analysis, in the hopes that during that period of creative gestation, ideas can be shaped into narratives and gradually into scripts.
However, the split between the perception of theatre as a fundamentally intellectual affair and the celebration of its intuitive nature lies primarily in the reconsidered role of verbal language within the dramatic text. Craig and more notably Artaud some years later, were both against the supremacy of the word, placing the true origins of theatre in dance and mime. In this sense, even though Craig did not utterly eliminate text, he dedicated his attention mostly to unfinished texts that left directors room for creative exploration:
When no further addition can be made so as to better a work of art, it can be
spoken of as “finished”, it is complete. Hamlet was finished -was complete- when
Shakespeare wrote the last word of his blank verse and for us to add to it by
gesture, scene, costume, or dance, is to hint that it is incomplete and needs these
additions. (Craig qtd in Walton 55)
Characteristically, several decades later in The Empty Space (1968) Peter Brook spoke of the three main elements of theatre: space, actor, audience, omitting the need for a text: “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (20). In an attempt to sum up the nature of the debate between the literary (dramatic) and the “physical” (performative) nature of theatre, director, playwright and theatre historian James Roose-Evans aptly stresses the point of contention, exploring this argument further by quoting Swiss psychoanalyst and philosopher Carl Jung’s theory of the unconscious:
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There is an undeclared war between the intellectual and the intuitive, each fearing
the other. The intellectual clings to the concept of a literary theatre because he
regards words as man’s highest achievement; where, then, does he place music,
painting, dance, and sculpture? [ . . . ] Without our knowledge, the life of the
unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates, the
more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of
myths we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. (87)
Evidently, Roose-Evans’ observations take on Nietzsche’s fascinating distinction between the intuitive and the intellectual, whereby the Dionysian artist, almost uncontrollable in his/her urges and instincts, was pitted against the cerebral, sensible Apollo. In Nietzsche’s own words:
Dionysiac art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal delight of existence. It
makes us realise that everything that is generated must be prepared to face its
painful dissolution. It forces us to gaze into the horror of individual existence, yet
without being turned to stone by the vision: a metaphysical solace momentarily
lifts us above the whirl of shifting phenomena [. . .] now we see the struggle, the
pain, the destruction of appearances as necessary, because of the constant
proliferation of forms pushing into life, because of the extravagant fecundity of
the world will. (Nietzsche 102)
However, the ideological foundations of the battle against theatre’s literalisation were first laid out by Artaud, as the following chapter illustrates in detail:
I say that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language. And this
concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree
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that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. [. . .]
All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to
translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest.
That is why an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal has
more significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics. (TD
37, 71)
1.3. The Significance of the Performance text and the Legacy of Early Experimentalists on
the “Écriture” of Contemporary Auteurs.
Pondering on the playwright/director relationship through the ages, we ought to recognise that its codes had remained more or less undisturbed from the classical times up until the Elisabethan
Age. The writer being usually the director of the play, production was thoroughly and harmoniously controlled by the same person, whether that was Aeschylus or Shakespeare, an ideal state of self-collaboration, which was also distinctly celebrated by Artaud in the 1930s. In the post-Elisabethan era, however, adaptations of existing plays became standard practice.
Directors-producers often tampered with “unacceptable” scripts, modifying the scenery and altering the movement of the plot, wishing to produce more digestible spectacles. Gradually, in the late nineteenth century, directors triumphed in their role as authors of the theatre text, exploring the potential of an ever-growing array of scenic languages available to them. In the words of Pavis:
Things changed radically with the recognition of the director’s function, towards
the end of the nineteenth century, when it was acknowledged that a director is
capable (or culpable) of marking a text produced on stage with the stamp of a
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personal vision. For the theatre of mise-en-scène, therefore, it is quite logical to
focus analysis on the performance as a whole, rather than considering the latter to
be something derived exclusively from the text [. . .] So in the space of fifty
years, there has been a shift from one extreme to the other: from philology to
scenology. (Pavis 2003: 198, my emphasis)
Once again, Meyerhold was among the first directors to dismiss the role of the playwright in the making of performance, boasting of having removed the author as far as possible from the theatre, since, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who quotes him, reminds us in “Auteur directors bring new life to theatre”: “the playwright always interferes with the true director- artist.” Later, when referring to his collaboration with Stanislavski, Meyerhold modified his original condemnation of the author, speaking of “two systems, each of which completes the other”. In any case, however, his precocious observations regarding the tension involved in the collaboration between directors and playwrights repeatedly resurface in the work of contemporary directors-auteurs.
Surely, playwright and director roles competed for authorial control of text and meaning from as early as the 1900s, with Copeau insisting that directors were but translators, who must render the playwright’s intention precisely:
It is easy to understand why a gifted director is tempted to conceal the
playwright’s lack of skill by means of his own technical resources. Admittedly
too he becomes impatient when certain masterpieces are said to be unplayable; so
he toys with the idea of revising them or removing the difficulties in them. It
need not surprise us, therefore, if he proceeds boldly up to the very source of
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creation and convinces himself that he can shape the entire process. (Qtd in
Huxley and Witts 155)
Copeau’s declaration of war on directors, which three decades later would be totally reversed by
Artaud’s theories in The Theatre and Its Double, was only one instance of the conflict that would arise between director and playwright:
Let us hope for a dramatist who replaces or eliminates the director, and
personally takes over the directing; rather than the professional directors who
pretend to be dramatists [. . .] But since we lack great dramatists who stage their
own plays personally and with authority, the great director shows his mettle only
when he confronts a written master-piece, particularly when that masterpiece is
considered unplayable. Because he believes in it, he understands it; and because
he has insight and respects it, he wrests its secret from it. (Copeau qtd in Huxley
and Witts 155, my emphasis)
Induced by Artaud’s theories on the new mise-en-scène, the sweeping changes in the perception of art as a whole in the 1960s and 1970s brought about a profound reconsideration of the role of the dramatic text in the theatre and subsequently, that of the director as creator of the theatre text and author of performance. Already in 1964 French actor and director Roger Planchon would speak of an “écriture scénique” (scenic writing), which would manifest itself in a wide range of spectacles with a strong visual and physical emphasis. At the same time, the 1970s marked the declaration of the “death of the author”, which consequently encouraged the mise-en-scène to exist as an open text of scenic writing. Essentially, the role of the author was believed to be equally, if not more viably served by the director-auteur, who had the right to treat the playwright’s text merely as a scenario fleshing itself out in performance. The tendency to view
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the playwright as redundant became particularly dominant in the 1980s, a decade, during which, the institutional glorification of the director-auteur also coincided with the emergence of the theatre of images; initiated by visually-minded artists like Robert Wilson, Liz LeCompte and
Peter Sellars in the United States, or Tadeusz Kantor, Theodoros Terzopoulos and Simon
McBurney in Europe, visual formalism, substituting images for words, would inform the work of several avant-garde artists in the years to come.
Τhus, it came as no surprise that in the later part of the twentieth century the literary text occupied a secondary position in theatre practice and was considered just one among the many other materials of the stage, rather than the primary locus of performance. As will be more extensively illustrated in Chapters 4 and 5, many performances have resulted from the synthesis of different texts and/ or adaptations from fiction or poetry, enriched with bits and pieces of dialogue resulting from the actors’ countless physical improvisations. With the performance script being built out of pieces of literature, history, or media reports, the idea of fragment as a structural devise for theatre also became very pronounced. Yet, notwithstanding Pavis’ absolute maxim: “tout texte est théâtralisable, dès lors qu’on utilise sur scène” (“all text can be theatricalised as soon as it is used on the stage” [Pavis 1996: 353, my translation]), the new direction in performance practice inevitably affected the kind of dramatic writing that would ensue in the subsequent years, namely, in the late 1980s and 1990s: dramatic texts became more theatricalised, incorporating the increasing demands of performance within the literary form.33
In this respect, we can never stress enough the immense influence of the early experimentalists in the repositioning of the linguistic sign within the totality of performance’s signifying systems, as manifest in the first experiments in language and form of the fin-du-siècle “first avant-garde”
33 See Chapter 6, Section on Neo-Dramatic Writing.
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(namely, of the Surrealists, the Dadaists and the Futurists), with Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) providing a jarring alternative to the complacent bourgeois art of the late nineteenth century.
Following Jarry’s steps in re-prioritising the elements of theatre, in the 1930s Artaud provided the bedrock for the experimental work of Schechner, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Joseph
Chaikin and Peter Schumann, in the1960s and 1970s. Around that time, Beckett’s revolutionary integration of performance into the dramatic text, as well as his interest in issues of self- representation and mediation through technology prepared the ground for further experiments in dramatic form, to the effect that the boundaries between playwriting and mise-en-scène as scenic writing became increasingly blurred.
Evidently, reception of the auteur-director’s text, often the product of convergence of several art forms, like film, the visual arts, dance, etc., has posed an additional challenge to the spectators, who had been for centuries trained in perceiving theatre as a mostly linear, logo-centric arrangement of plot incidents. Ever since the physical productions of the 1960s, the audiences of avant-garde performances have been asked to understand and appreciate the new frame of theatre, which often includes new unconventional performance spaces, as well. In many cases the spectators encounter difficulties in absorbing an image-based, multi-perspectival in structure, performance event. However, we should always remember that the image-based theatre practiced by Wilson, Brook, Lepage, Marthaler and Sellars, among others, had been already foreshadowed by pioneers like Craig, Appia, Reinhardt and, of course, by Artaud, who in some fashion or other were the first to recognise, although not fully put into practice, that to be trained away from literature and logos into the arts and the image presupposes a willingness on the spectators’ part to let go of their expectations of performance as “illustration of classic texts.”
After those directors’ precocious attempts to educate their audiences, it has become gradually less “painful” for spectators not only to “accept the “modern” set, but also to refrain from
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subscribing to “a comprehensible fable (story), coherent meaning, cultural self-affirmation and touching theatre feelings” (Lehmann 31). This explains why, in contrast to the lethargic encounter between spectators and the stage, caused by an ever-fixed relationship between signifier and signified, the most exciting and viable forms of auteur theatre occur when semiotic relationships are (imaginatively) disrupted. And this daring of conformism can surely be credited to Jarry, Cocteau, Meyerhold and their followers. In the heart of auteur practice, where surprise lies, transformation replaces identification.
Inspiring the actual theatre practice of the above, Antonin Artaud’s theories of the new mise-en- scène would significantly change the aesthetic of the theatre and firmly establish the stage director as “scenic writer”, the author of the performance text. With his theory of the theatre elaborated in The Theatre and its Double, Artaud planned the seeds for the experimental theatre movement that reached its highest peak in the 1960s and has remained active (even if transmuted and/or dispersed into different forms) ever since.
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2. ARTAUD AND HIS LEGACY
2.1. Rapture and Utopia
My aim is to liberate a certain theatrical reality which belongs exclusively to the stage, to the physical and organic domain of the stage. This reality must be liberated by means of spectacle, and therefore by mise-en-scène in the broadest sense of the word, that is, as the language of everything that can be put on the stage, rather than as the secondary reality of a script, the more or less active and objective means of expansion of the script. Here, therefore, the director becomes the author, that is, the creator. (“Letter to Andre Gide” in Selected Writings 299, emphasis original)
This chapter aims to forestall the importance of Antonin Artaud (1895-1948) as a pioneer theatre theorist who vehemently dethroned those “reptiles of authors”34 in order to establish the director as new theatre authority. The specific ways in which Artaud’s writings affected the art of several auteurs will be analysed in detail in the following chapters. More comprehensively, Artaud’s astounding impact was mostly associated with his innovative ideas in relation to the spiritual and holistic view of art, the cultural and anthropological interest in performance, the imagist and sensuous conception of the theatre event, the redefinition of the performance text and, in the end, the emphasis on theatre as “process” and not finished product. Indeed, the influence that
Artaud’s theories on theatre and art had on the twentieth century avant-garde movement was remarkable: he has often been hailed as a shaman and a physician for culture, responsible not only for the total reinvention of theatre, but also, for a radically changed conception of art. From the 1960s on, the avant-garde movement, fighting for the “reinvention” of theatre, eagerly took on Artaud’s iconoclastic theories, making him a banner for artistic revolution, including the
34 In the poem-like text “What I Lack Is Words That Correspond To Each Minute” Artaud ferociously addresses his opponents, “literary” people: “For the mind is more reptilian than you yourselves, messieurs, it slips away snakelike, to the point where it damages our language, I mean it leaves it in suspense” (in Auster 261).
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deconstruction of literary text and the redefinition of performance. Artaud’s emphasis on the creative role of the director is inextricably linked to auteur practice. Clearly, as debated in
Chapter 1, Artaud’s writings formulated a trend, an aesthetic giving momentum and support to the work of prominent theatre companies from the 1960s onwards, especially to those falling under the somewhat portentous, all-inclusive labels of “avant-garde”, “underground” and
“experimental”.
Originally, it was these revolutionary directors of the 1960s and 1970s like Julian Beck and
Judith Malina, Joseph Chaikin, Richard Schechner, Peter Schumann, Andrei Serban and Jerzy
Grotowski, who re-discovered and invested in the significance of Artaud’s writings, his heart- felt outcry “theatre must be thrown back into life” and the anguished renouncement of literature in “no more masterpieces” (TD 74). In the more recent times, acclaimed auteurs all over the world, like Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Ariane Mnouchkine, Theodoros Terzopoulos and
Tadashi Suzuki have invariably taken on Artaud’s emphasis on the nonverbal aspects of theatre in their productions.
Essentially, Artaud conceived of the world in binary oppositions. Throughout his life and in his extensive theoretical oeuvre, laid out in sixteen volumes, he struggled to reconcile the fundamental split between life and art, the body and the mind, reality and metaphysics. A deeply tormented individual, he often used his own experience of suffering as a metaphor for the malaise of art. Having experimented with hallucinatory drugs and institutionalised to his death, as a writer and director he worked with images of violence, danger and madness, voicing the disturbing erosion that had seeped into the theatre of his times. As George Wellwarth would argue back in 1964, Artaud “was the catalytic agent for an entirely new drama that used the complex resources of the modern theatre to express the age-old cry of fear and protest, the most
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elemental human impulse from the most primitive man to the present” (25-26). In principle,
Artaud reacted against the Realists’ and the Naturalists’ claim that life could and should be copied on stage, rejecting what he saw as shallowness in psychologically motivated drama.
More importantly, he dismissed the hegemony of literature over theatre as dangerous and advocated the liberation of the stage from the written word, becoming one of the first writers/artists to explore the fluid boundaries between text and performance. Despite the fact that his theories were seldom tested within the four walls of a theatre (the total of his directing work limited merely to the productions of three full-length and four-one act plays),35 it cannot be denied that Artaud’s observations in The Theatre and its Double (1938) acted as a catalyst in the already changing climate in the arts back in the 1920s and 1930s.
The underlying principle in Artaud’s theories was that in order for the theatre to reattach itself to humanity and regain its lost vitality, new stage languages had to be introduced or given stronger emphasis; these languages should be manipulated in ways that would render them open and flexible enough to address issues never expressed in ordinary discursive speech. Moreover, they should be physical and spatial, that is, generated and perfected in the actor’s body, while simultaneously able to travel through space to “speak” viscerally to the spectator. In this sense, they would also be pre-thematic and primordial, based on signs which, being shared by all humans, would guarantee a universal impact. Attacking Western bourgeois culture at large,
Αrtaud extensively elaborated on the necessity for new forms of theatre and an uncompromising mise-en-scène, which would bring together actor and spectator in a mystical and shocking co- habitation.
35 During his lifetime, and despite his overwhelming involvement with the stage from the early twenties until his death in 1948, Artaud wrote only three plays; Le jet de sang (The Spurt of Blood, 1925), Ventre brûlé, ou la mère folle (The Burnt Belly, 1927), and The Cenci (1935), of which two, The Burnt Belly and The Cenci were produced in his lifetime, and the third by the RSC as part of their Theatre of Cruelty season. What is more, none of Artaud’s pieces enjoyed notable acclaim either from the audiences or from the critics.
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The perception of the world as a profoundly divided place, tortured by violently contradictory forces, led Artaud to a systematic formulation of binary oppositions in the spectrum of art.
Among those, the immediately striking are the opposition between art and life, performance and poetry, physical and psychological theatre, sensory impact and intellectual/cognitive understanding, Oriental force (“cruelty”) and Occidental complacency, image Vs word, director
Vs Author, myth Vs literary masterpiece and visual Vs verbal. These oppositions Artaud sought to bridge through a new model for the theatre that “would continue to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way” (TD 12). Essentially, the originality of this model lay in the reconsideration of the mise-en-scène and the revised role of the director as author, that is, as ultimate creator of the stage event and writer of the performance text.
2.2. Myth and Metaphysics
Because theatre for Artaud should exist on a pre-logical and pre-thematic level, it has the potential to be purgative, unaffected by the corruptive filter of speech or the logically organised thought processes imposed by Western philosophy and cultural practice. Making such strong claims, Artaud’s writings were so extreme, as to almost instigate a cultural revolution. Among other things, they propounded that theatre artists should find recourse to myth in order to regain their lost spirituality and remain in touch with divine forces. “We aim to do no less than return to the sources, human or inhuman, of the theatre, and raise it from the dead”, he argued in his
“Manifesto for a Theatre that Failed” (Selected Writings 161).
Like the Surrealists, Artaud trusted that a magical, universal language articulated through the actors’ bodies and communicated to the spectators’ sense organs, would ultimately reveal to the audience those profound metaphysical truths that lay buried under several layers of intellectual
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reasoning. Thus, theatre had to release the hidden energies contained within oppressed individuals and help them achieve catharsis through delirium and emotional violence (“cruelty”).
Corresponding to this was Artaud’s metaphor of the plague; like the insidious, deadly disease, theatre ought to affect the spectator in an instinctual, overwhelming manner:
Like the epidemic, the theatre attacks the body unexpectedly and communicates
by affecting its processes through a delirium of the imaginative. [. . .] The action
of the theatre, like that of the plague, is beneficial, for, impelling men to see
themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness,
baseness, and hypocrisy of our world. (TD 31)
Manipulating the metaphor of the plague, Artaud undermined the notion of theatre as a meeting place for those seeking to shut their eyes to the dangers befalling the soul, especially those that perpetuate the illusions reproduced by quotidian speech. Instead, the stage needed to assume a metaphysical quality and actually “hurt” all participants (actors and spectators equally) by
“touching life” and revealing to them the naked truth of human existence. Characteristically, the main conceit was one of slaughter:
Like the plague, the theatre is a formidable call to the forces that impel the mind
by example to the source of its conflicts [. . .] the theatre, like the plague, is in the
image of this carnage [of essences that appeared in creation] and this essential
separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if
these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor
of the theatre, but of life. (TD 30-31)
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Artaud’s preoccupation with theatre as life, has found fertile ground in auteur theatre, especially in productions that blend theatre with performance art. For one thing, the pursuit of the “real” can be detected in performances that manipulate live organisms on stage, as in the work of
Flemish multidisciplinary director Jan Fabre, whose productions have often been filled with beetles, frogs and silk-worms36, reverberating the auteur’s desire to bring an element of anarchy, surprise and danger into the work.
Similarly, for Artaud, the timeless themes of love, madness and crime demanded a stage both resilient and broad to contain their magnitude. Not surprisingly, Artaud’s holistic stage sought refuge in archaic, Dionysian sources. The stress on primitivism is no accident: at the time when
Artaud radically challenged what it meant to be civilised, the overriding question had been how to redefine the role of art and culture in general. People’s spiritual rebirth and a sense of revised morality in art were essential, and hence the theatre had to retrace its steps back to its religious, ritualistic origins, shedding off all tangential elements that clouded its ethical, as well as aesthetic purpose. In principle, Artaud suggested that myth, untouched by literature, should become the main ingredient of the new theatre, containing as it did truths that had remained pure, uncontaminated by the mediating hand of the author. In addition, it was also necessary for the artist to transubstantiate myth into new (modern), yet universal fables, using the power of images, since “the true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves” (TD 116).
Artaud’s urge for a theatre of myth was fully engaged by directors like Brook, Mnouchkine and
Terzopoulos, who have repeatedly looked into the vast resources of myth in both Western and
36 See Fabre’s The Power of Theatrical Madness (1984).
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Eastern cultures in productions like The Mahabharata (1985) and Ik (1975), Les Atrides (1992) and The terrible but unfinished story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (1995) and
Bacchae (1986) respectively.37 In reality, Artaud’s trust in myth inaugurated the major trend of
Interculturalism in the theatre, more or less officially institutionalised by avant-garde director- theorists Richard Schechner in New York and Eugenio Barba with the Odin Teatret in
Denmark.38
Considering the plethora of experiments of the greatly reputable auteurs who have for the longest time manipulated myth’s infinite possibilities as a basis for their performance texts, we can clearly discern how revolutionary Artaud’s concept of a “theatre of myth” was at the time when he was writing. Until then, theatre had been in principle based on literature, its textual core subjugated to the interpretative hand of the author, who shaped myths into small-scale stories, conveniently contained within words. Yet, words could never in themselves trigger the rebirth of the “total man”, or exude the taste of true madness and magic, which for Artaud were the fundamental ingredients of theatre. Hence, the “cruelty” that Artaud’s theories aspired to must be seen in the light of theatre’s vulnerability, its pursuit of inner truth, its exposure to madness and despair, ultimately, its readiness “to hurt”. In this respect, the primordial savagery of myth is perhaps one of the most effective means through which to set off a forceful reaction on the part of the spectator:
37 A detailed analysis of some of these productions will be provided in Chapter 4.
38 It was especially Schechner, who in his directing work first sought to integrate stylistic elements of non-Western theatre traditions, particularly with regards to the relationship of the audience with the stage. Having travelled in India, China, Japan and other parts of Asia, he developed an aesthetic largely based on the possibility of cultural exchange in the arts, what he termed “Interculturalism”. At the same time, in Barba’s common method of devising a script around a theme, stories and artists from different cultures joined forces, as was true in his version of the Faust myth, where actors and musicians from India, Bali, Japan and the Odin worked together to develop the project.
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The theatre will never find itself again -i.e., constitute a means of true illusion-
except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in
which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his
utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not
counterfeit and illusory, but interior. (TD 92)
At the same time, behind the need for catharsis, a rigorous moral stance is suggested:
The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a
passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent
rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is
based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but
not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity
which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. (TD 122)
In this quest for the origins of theatre, Artaud turns to archetypes and symbols which substitute for psychologically defined characters and misleading signifiers, and make up the canvas of the new stage, attacking audiences in a chthonic, yet cathartic way:
[Theatre] recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent
blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images
thrust into our abruptly wakened heads. The theatre restores us all our dormant
conflicts and all their powers, and gives these powers names we hail as symbols
[. . .] for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really
begins, and when the poetry which occurs on the stage sustains and superheats
the realised symbols. (TD 27-28)
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Along these lines, the re-attainment of the “primal appetite for life” and the recovery of intuitive wisdom, which had been buried under layers of stagnant intellectuality, could in Artaud’s visionary stage function as a “stirring up of shadows, while life endlessly stumbles along”
(Oeuvres Completes, IV 5). The idea that theatre should not simply reflect life, but create the circumstances for its regeneration suggests a perception of art as more than just spectacle, an art generating metaphysical states of being which have the power to transform. As Naomi Greene argues:
Artaud believes that our dreams disclose the terror and cruelty which govern our
fundamental instincts. And it is the task of the theatre to present these dreams in
all their nightmarish reality. [Similarly he] justifies his conception of the theatre
with the argument of theatrical catharsis: man can rid himself of undesirable
desires and drives by presenting them on stage. (Greene 115-7)
Clearly, the concept of theatre as a metaphysical experience was indebted to Appia and Craig, who had in the wake of the twentieth century professed that “the theatre of the future” would be
“a theatre of visions, not a theatre of sermons nor a theatre of epigrams” (Roose-Evans 76).
Fundamental to those visions would be dreams acting “not as a servile copy of reality”, but allowing the public “to liberate within itself their magical liberty” (TD 86). It must be said, however, that in Artaud’s mind, these dreams are only recognisable when “imprinted with terror and cruelty” (OC, IV 103). In the end, in order to express emotion truthfully and transform dreams into stage action, theatre must discover the right form and language, while mise-en-scène should be considered:
in the light of magic and sorcery” [. . .] not as the reflection of a written text, the
mere projection of physical doubles that is derived from the written work, but as
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the burning projection of all the objective consequences of a gesture, word,
sound, music, and their combinations. (TD 73)
2.3. Representation, mediation and interpretation:
The spectator’s new role
Thus for Artaud, the equation between life and art had been solved early on, with life being certainly the most favoured part. “We need to live first of all”, he claimed (TD 7). Similarly, because life was a “fragile, fluctuating centre which forms never reach” (TD 13), theatre ought to reveal the otherwise elusive core of humanity, where words could never penetrate. Ultimately, for Artaud theatre was “the creation of a reality, the unprecedented eruption of a world. The theatre must give us this ephemeral but real world, this world tangential to objective reality.
Either the theatre will become this world, or we will do without the theatre” (Selected Writings
155). In this respect, Artaud vehemently expresses his commitment to a theatre of an actor- creator, the actor here being one of the original generators of the text, along with the director, since, evidently, in a theatre immersed in the reality of life, the actor does not “perform” but creates. This is where the concept of a “theatre of blood” originates. In a letter to Paule
Thévenin” on 24th February 1948, Artaud poetically elaborates on this concept:
[. . .] A theatre which at each performance will stir
something
in the body
of the performer as well as the spectator of the play,
but actually,
the actor does not perform,
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he creates.
Theatre is in reality the genesis of creation:
It will come about. (Qtd in Schumacher 200)
In effect, in a theatre that creates, rather than imitating life, the performance refuses to merely transform into spectacle for the stage events that have been framed outside life; rather, it breathes life to the stage and produces “temptations” and “vacuums” around things, setting the body of the actor against those dynamic sources of life that can speak to the spectator. A new life is thus being born, one that remains largely unmediated and finite, no less because it is by definition impossible to repeat life’s unique moments. Evidently, in Artaud’s theory, mistrust for repetition is central and the creation of reality, the “unprecedented eruption of a world” is indeed
“the crux of the matter”.
Considered this way, repetition is a poisonous slave to representation, a mechanism that kills all art. In his elaborate analysis of Artaud’s theory “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of
Representation” (1978), Jacques Derrida significantly quotes Artaud’s “I have therefore said
‘cruelty’ as I might have said ‘life’” (TD 114) and insists on the non-representability of theatre:
“The theatre of cruelty is not a representation. It is life itself, in the extent to which life is unrepresentable. Life is the nonrepresentable origin of representation” (234, emphasis original).
In fact, as Derrida illustrates, Artaud disengages mise-en-scène from any responsibility to represent; moreover, he locates the falsely imposed need for representation in the appropriation of the stage by literature and speech:
So long as the mise en scène remains, even in the minds of the boldest directors,
a simple means of presentation, an accessory mode of expressing the work, a sort
of spectacular intermediary with no significance of its own, it will be valuable
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only to the degree it succeeds in hiding itself behind the works it is pretending to
serve. And this will continue as long as the major interest in a performed work is
in its text, as long as literature takes precedence over the kind of performance
improperly called spectacle, with everything pejorative, accessory, ephemeral,
and external that that term carries with it. (TD 105)
Revolting against Western aesthetics at large, Artaud naturally rejects Aristotelian mimesis as obsolete and potentially dangerous. “Art is not the imitation of life”, he claims, “but life is the imitation of a transcendental principle which art puts into communication with once again” (OC,
IV 310). Indeed, according to Derrida’s analysis, representation (mimesis) guarantees the perpetration and perpetuation of the Christian God’s design for the universe. A non-believer, almost a pagan, Artaud turned against the teleological structure of Aristotelian drama and sought inspiration in a text-less (therefore, God-less) theatre, where the authority of the Author-God, formerly imposed on the spectators, would be replaced by a process of creation in which they would be invited to participate actively. Not surprisingly, in the dichotomy between Occidental and Oriental thought, which can often be seen as the cultural side of the argument for or against the existence of the Christian God, Artaud clearly opted for the latter, seeking to infuse the
Western stage with archetypal patterns and hieroglyphs, which he hoped would carry through to the audience a more authentic life experience. Implicit in his choice was the idea that if indeed theatre created life, the experience of reality should remain unmediated for the spectator.
In essence, the ever present problematic of artistic representation has always revolved around the issue of mediation and consequently, interpretation. Therefore in literature-based drama, governed by the premise that the playwright is the primary interpreter of the world, the director, a “servant” to the playwright’s text, is at best a second-hand intermediary between the world and
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the actors (who actually become interpreters of the director’s interpretation of the playwright’s text). Naturally, at the bottom of this pyramid of interpretation is the spectator, the end receiver of the initial interpretation of the world.39
Yet Artaud unsettled this pyramid and proposed a different model for interpreting the text: renouncing the mediation of the author, he handed instead all power of interpretation to the director-creator. Clearly, the ideal artist for Artaud was embodied in the composite artist-creator, namely the writer-director, a role in which artists like Beckett in the second half of the twentieth century and British dramatist, Howard Barker, or American director Richard Foreman in more recent decades have triumphed in.40 Similarly, the battle for the appropriation of the stage, which to our day continues to upset the relationship between playwrights and directors41, was no doubt instigated by Artaud’s theories for a liberated mise-en-scène; in effect, these theories stipulated that either the author must assume the role of the director, or the director must reinforce his/her role as a creator, becoming an omni-powerful interpreter of the universe:
The author must discover and assume what belongs to the mise en scene as well
as what belongs to the author, and become a director himself in a way that will
put a stop to the absurd duality existing between director and author [. . .] An
author who does not handle the scenic material directly and who does not move
39 A similar pattern of dramatic interpretation is suggested in Plato’s dialogue Ion. The rhapsode (performer, actor) is not guided by rules of art, but is an inspired person who derives a mysterious power from the poet (playwright); and the poet, in like manner, is inspired by the God. The poets and their interpreters may be compared to a chain of magnetic rings suspended from one another, and from a magnet. The magnet is the Muse, and the ring which immediately follows is the poet himself; from him are suspended other poets; there is also a chain of rhapsodes and actors, who also hang from the Muses, but are let down at the side; and the last ring of all is the spectator. The poet is the inspired interpreter of the God, and this is the reason why some poets, like Homer, are restricted to a single theme; hence, the rhapsode is the inspired interpreter of the poet, and for a similar reason some rhapsodes, like Ion, are the interpreters of single poets.
40 For more on the work of Barker and Foreman, see Chapters 4, 5 & 6.
41 See Chapter 6 for a detailed analysis of the playwright-director conflict.
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about the stage in orienting himself and making the power of his orientation serve
the spectacle, has in reality betrayed his mission. (TD 112)42
In fact, a closer examination of the roles Artaud ascribes to both playwright and director reveals his insistence on the director-creator’s in-depth knowledge of the stage and its inner workings:
“in my view no one has the right to call himself author, that is to say creator, except the person who controls the direct handling of the stage” (TD 117). Characteristically, in a letter to French actor and director Louis Jouvet in 1913, Artaud also stipulated that the duty of a good director was “to betray the author, if necessary, in order to give his play a production that holds together and makes an impression” (TD 11).
Needless to say, this challenging notion of interpretation as betrayal has been at the root of almost every single aspect of the debate on the limits of artistic (namely, directorial) freedom, and is directly associated to the definition of the term “interpretation” itself. Examples of contemporary auteurs who would not hesitate to interpolate scenes/dialogue/characters in the performance of an existing play abound, while the great classics continue to be the most vulnerable of all sacrificial victims as far as directors’ creative experiments (or abuse) go. In
Greece, for example, the unconventional treatment of writers like Euripides, Shakespeare or
Racine by Yannis Houvardas, currently artistic director of the National Theatre of Greece, has raised ferocious controversy over the years, with labels such as “irreverent”, “disrespectful” or at
42 It is in this fashion that Artaud urges the director to assume responsibility and take control of the theatre event:
I claim that the director, having become a kind of demiurge, at the back of whose head is this idea of implacable purity and of its consummation whatever the cost, if he truly wants to be a director, i.e., a man versed in the nature of matter and objects, must conduct in the physical domain an exploration of intense movement and precise emotional gesture which is equivalent on the psychological level to the most absolute and complete moral discipline and on the cosmic level to the unchaining of certain blind forces which activate what they must activate and crush and burn on their way what they must crush and burn. (TD 114)
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the antipodes, “ingenious” and “fearless” variously applied to his productions. Similarly, in
Germany, in the productions of Thomas Ostermeier with the Berlin Schaubühne (see Hamlet
[2008] Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [2007], Hedda Gabler [2005]), visual and audio quotes from the cinema, TV soap-operas, comics and pop culture underscore the action, frequently disorienting, or, reversely, enraging a part of the spectators. For that matter, Ostermeier’s 2004 Nora, an iconoclastic revision of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House caused a sensation, as well as uproar to the New
York audiences, when Nora, rather than simply walking out on her husband, issued a gun and fired against him.
However, one of the most noteworthy influences of Artaud’s theories on contemporary auteur practice is related to his condemnation of linearly conceived narratives. Artaud ferociously argued that the audience should reject purely literary artifacts: in his famous essay “No More
Masterpieces”, he professed that the reason why the public felt no affinity to the existing literary masterpieces, was precisely because those masterpieces were “literary, that is to say, fixed; and fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time” (TD 75). In his re-imagined stage, verbal language should be abandoned for failing to capture the evasiveness of experience and the depth of feeling that theatre should ideally generate. As Paul Arnold characteristically asserts:
[In Artaud’s view], from the moment of “transport”, immediate reality, everyday
experience, became insufficient, inoperable. [. . .] It was necessary to introduce a
super-reality [. . .] which would embrace tangible daily experiences, plus spiritual
leverage, plus an immanent metaphysical and meta-psychological power for
which daily experiences would be a most incomplete medium. (Arnold 18,
emphasis original)
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In prioritising the power of “spectacle” over speech, Artaud was profoundly anti-Aristotelian, since “spectacle”, as has been already contented in the previous chapter, was for Aristotle the least respected among the six elements of tragedy.43 Once again, in Artaud’s implied metaphor
οf Western theatre, the Author-God offers the audience a definitive and omniscient text, messengered by his slavish representative, the director; a gift that virtually guarantees the longevity of his reign. However, it is only when the slave rises to question his master that this
“gift” will be truly beneficial to the spectators, since it will be modelled after their own needs, and put together by one of their own kind (the director). The loathing of the “theological stage”, to borrow Derrida’s term, culminates in the expulsion of the Author-God from the stage, in a violent act that the French philosopher calls parricide:
Nevertheless, there is always a murder at the origin of cruelty, of the necessity
named cruelty. And first of all, a parricide. The origin of theatre, such as it must
be restored, is the hand lifted against the abusive wielder of the logos, against the
father, against the God of a stage subjugated to the power of speech and text.
(Derrida 238-9)
In Derrida’s view, Artaud, like Nietzsche, has banished God from the theatre as an “interloper”, a “transgressor” attempting to impose the “Logos” upon the pure, primordial sensibility of the
“Action”. In fact, as Colin Russell emphasises in his article “A New Scène Seen Anew:
Representation and Cruelty in Derrida’s Artaud”, “God’s text” is “underlying the operation of the classical theatre”, and allows no escape from the “perpetual representation of the original
43 Reversely, it can be argued that Aristotelian drama, based on logos and primarily identified with Western forms of theatre, derived its force from the literary elaboration of stories uniformly served to an audience duly anticipating uniform responses.
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creation.”44 Therefore, the expulsion of the Author-God from the stage is instrumental to the redefined role of the spectator. The way Derrida sees it, if and when the stage is finally released from the tyranny of the author,
[. . .] Mise-en-scène would be returned to its creative and founding freedom. The
director and the participants (who would no longer be actors or spectators) would
cease to be the instruments and organs of representation. [. . .] The stage,
certainly, will no longer represent, since it will not operate as an addition, as the
sensory illustration of a text already written, thought, or lived outside the stage,
which the stage would then only repeat but whose fabric it would not constitute.
The stage will no longer operate as the repetition of a present, will no longer re-
present a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it [. . .] nor will the stage
be a representation, if representation means the surface of a spectacle displayed
for the spectators. [ . . . ] Cruel representation must permeate me. And
nonrepresentation is, thus, original representation, if representation signifies, also,
the unfolding of a volume, a multidimensional milieu, an experience which
produces its own space. (Derrida 237, emphasis original)
Interestingly, Artaud considered theatre a “no thing” making use of “everything -gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness and rediscovering itself “at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations” (TD 12). His desire to replace “dialogue theatre” by multi-vocal art forms borrowing from several sources across disciplines, (namely, the visual arts, dance and cinema, circus and mime) in many ways inspired Beckett’s hybrid
44 All electronic articles, where no page numbers or specific publication details are provided, will be henceforth referenced by name of author and title of article. For more bibliographical details and access URL see bibliography section.
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performance texts from the 1960s onwards, as will be debated in the next chapter. Moreover, it created the circumstances for the writing of plays that were open to interaction with the spectators and as a result, a lot more relevant and interesting to them (see also Chapters 4 & 6).
The ultimate “triumph of the pure mise-en-scène” (OC, IV 305) gave the “confused” spectator an outlet for his/her repression; greedy for mystery, and with a mind “poisoned by matter” in a theatre that had for the longest time deceived them, the audience eventually rebelled against an art which inadvertently ignored actuality. The sad fact that the theatre had “turned away from this mythical and moving immediacy” (TD 116) was ultimately to be redeemed by the new mise-en-scène.
Following up on Artaud’s administrations for a revised role for the audience and downright rejecting the bourgeois “theological” theatre, where, in Derrida’s apt description, the spectator is a mere “enjoyer”, a voyeur, a “passive, seated public, a public of spectators, of consumers” 45, many directors-auteurs have been trying to annul the distance between stage and spectator in order to include the audience in the process of devising new scripts on stage. Undoubtedly, the unification of spectator and spectacle into one festive event had been pioneered by Appia,
Meyerhold and especially Reinhardt, who seemed to despise the proscenium stage and sought to bridge the gap between actor and spectator by placing the latter in the centre of the action, as has been illustrated in the previous chapter.
45 According to Derrida’s definition:
The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance. The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the ‘creator’. Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the ‘matter.’ (30, emphasis original)
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Likewise, in recent auteur practice, the play-text is often constructed through audience responses to questionnaires, short interviews or critical opinions. Sometimes this confrontation of directors-auteurs with potential audience members, where the exact words of the latter become the basis of the script (as in verbatim theatre)46, precedes the actual stage production of the play.
Other times, directors structure their performances around direct audience participation (as in interactive theatre), or in less drastic, yet equally deliberate ways try to involve the spectator in the action, a practice favoured by directors like Mnouchkine, Marmarinos, or even McBurney.47
Nevertheless, the breaking down of barriers between audience and actors has never been a bloodless affair. Artaud’s criterion for good art is not the standard entertainment fare of audiences in the conventional manner of Realistic theatre, but what Susan Sontag sees as
“sensory violence” (introduction to Selected Writings xxxii), an attack on the spectator’s senses and sensibilities. Ideally, because the theatre event for Artaud is an innately dangerous operation, the audience should leave the theatre touched, shaken and altered. In such light,
Artaud’s metaphysically conceived theatre conveys a violent, physical determination to demolish all falsity, the concept of cruelty based on the idea of “a mode in which one is shocked bodily into an awareness of the undomesticated or the uncanny” (Artaud in Tharu 75). An
“emotional and moral surgery upon consciousness” (Tharu xxxvi), theatre has to be “cruel”. The
“theatre of cruelty”, argued Artaud, means a “theatre difficult and cruel for myself first of all”
(TD 79), adding: “We are not free. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all”
(79). At length, a consuming, emotional response, as well as the experience of “human anguish”
46 Verbatim theatre uses the actual words of people interviewed by the playwright on a variety of different subjects, providing a sense of authenticity and a documentary-like quality to the script. Some of the structural principles of verbatim theatre are present in plays like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996) or Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s The Exonerated (2002), which dramatised the cases of people sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit, constructed out of the interviews that the authors held with 60 former death row prisoners who had been exonerated.
47 Some of these auteurs’ strategies of involving the audience will be discussed in detailed in Chapter 4.
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would secure the spectator’s involvement in the spectacle, a prerequisite for the viability of the stage. A detached observer no longer,
The spectator who comes [to the theatre of cruelty] knows that he is to undergo a
real operation in which not only his mind but his senses and his flesh are at stake.
Henceforth he will go to the theatre the way he goes to the surgeon or the dentist.
[. . .] He must be totally convinced that we are capable of making him scream.
(TD 156-7)
In a spectacle that confronts the audience directly, Artaud’s “cruelty” seems tantamount to
“necessity” and “rigour”, upsetting preconceptions and reversing expectations. Describing the emphatic connection between spectator and spectacle, Artaud repeatedly emphasised that “in the theatre of cruelty the spectator is in the centre and the spectacle surrounds him” (TD 81).
Similarly, in Derrida’s view, the theatre of cruelty “lifts all footlights and protective barriers before the ‘absolute danger’” (Derrida 244). Yet, the loneliness of the spectator, which marks his/ her experience of the danger that lurks behind the unpredictable nature of the event is also liberating, since this cruel theatre eventually replenishes us with an “appetite for life, a cosmic rigour, an implacable necessity” (TD 102).
2.4. Renunciation of verbal language and the new mise-en-scène
Artaud’s theories on the universal impact of physical language, taken up by many experimental directors from the 1960s onwards, resulted from his deep mistrust of verbal language, traditionally considered the only possible system of communication. Directly associated with the lifelessness of Western civilisation and a culture that had been petrified under complacent, as
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well as clichéd assumptions, dramatic language (speech) should make room for alternative forms of expression, for fresh and inspiring stage idioms to enter the theatre, which could bring to light the subtlest nuances of the human condition and reinforce the metaphysical dynamics of theatrical action.48 Artaud’s perception of the dramatic text as subordinate to theatrical performance and his concept of a director no longer serving as an “artisan” or an “adaptor”, but as a creator responsible for the formation of a new world on stage, were major points of affinity to the philosophy of Craig, Appia and Meyerhold, all of whom, as we saw, demonstrated again and again that theatre was a creative art in itself and not a mere illustration of the playwright’s text.
Contrary to a theatre based on verbal language, Artaud transferred the onus to space and employed stage means, like painting, dance, music, sound incantation, gesture and pantomime, architectural shapes and lighting, to create a theatre that would be a “magical operation”, a “total spectacle”; a theatre that could display the same sense of total freedom existing in music, poetry, or painting.49 In effect, Artaud’s preoccupation with painting and film affiliated him with a more visual language, “coinciding with being” and corresponding to emotion and thought much more directly than verbal language ever did. In this aspect too, Artaud actually foreshadowed
Beckett’s experiments with performative language and sensory images (see Chapter 3); he also
48 Thus removed from the sultry emptiness of bourgeois culture, the theatre ought to put forward its proposition for a magical, yet relevant medium, able to reveal, as well as enhance, art’s moral and aesthetic function. Therefore “the director will be forced to play second fiddle to the author only so long as there is a tacit agreement that the language of words is superior to others and that the theatre admits none other than this one language.” (TD 119)
49 Supporting Artaud’s vision of a revised theatre, his actress and companion, Paule Thévenin claimed that:
[. . .] writing, painting, music, theatre are so many diverse means of bringing forth what is buried and shadowed in our own depths, bringing it to light, trying to render it perceptible. Theatre, able to utilise different media, shows in addition this essential particularity of not being able to do without the public, this multiplied body that the public is, and having to act upon it by the intermediary of the actor’s body. (Derrida & Thevenin 1998: 11)
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made a strong case for the argument that, unlike poetry, theatre is a superior art, as Susan Sontag expresses in her introduction to Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings,
[Being] an art made out of one material (words), theatre uses a plurality of
materials: words, light, music, bodies, furniture, clothes. Unlike cinema, an art
using only a plurality of languages (images, words, and music), theatre is carnal,
corporeal. Theatre brings together the most diverse means –gesture and verbal
language, static objects and movement in three-dimensional space. (Xxxi)
Claiming that the dramatic text had taken siege of the stage, Artaud advocated a unique language that would exist “halfway-between thought and gesture” (TD 89). Regaining its original mythical stature and form, physical language was essentially the only means to “link the theatre to the expressive possibilities of forms, to everything in the domain of gestures, noises, colours, movements, etc” and, consequently, “to restore it to its original direction, to reinstate it in its religious and metaphysical aspect” and ultimately “to reconcile it with the universe” (TD 70). In this light, Artaud was searching for a “concrete language for a concrete stage, which asked to be filled” and in which the purely theatrical elements of the mise-en-scène could be unified into a creative whole, making up a “total art.” In his own words:
The new physical language consists of everything that occupies the stage,
everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is
addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the
mind as is the language of words. (TD 38)
What clearly marked Artaud’s divorce from verbal language was the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris. His experience of the Balinese dancers shook him profoundly, for in their ritualistic
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performance he first glimpsed at the possibilities of a dynamic stage idiom based on incantation and highly codified physicality. Moreover, he was particularly impressed by the dancers’ impressive array of gestures, which instantly struck him as a potential rudiment of the physical language he had hankered for: “the theatre also takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go” (TD 27), he claimed, observing that in the Balinese theatre, “there is no transition from a gesture to a cry or a sound: all the senses interpenetrate, as if through strange channels hollowed out in the mind itself” (TD 57). Gesture and bodily expression, so wisely manipulated in Oriental theatre to convey human feelings and metaphysical concerns, provided a fascinating alternative to the Occidental stage’s (overly) verbal manifestation of psychology. In Artaud’s words:
In the Oriental theatre of metaphysical tendencies, as opposed to the Occidental
theatre of psychological tendencies, this whole complex of gestures, signs,
postures, and sonorities which constitute the language of stage performance, this
language which develops all its physical and poetic effects on every level of
consciousness and in all the senses, necessarily induces thought to adopt
profound attitudes which could be called metaphysics-in-action. (TD 44)
Fascinated by the primitive sources of inspiration and exploring their application on existent forms of theatre, Artaud held onto the symbolism (what he called “hieroglyphs”) of Eastern performance, in order to fortify his attack on Western theatre’s worn out forms, which had not only ceased to express a modern problematic, but essentially provided shelter to a decaying morality. Thus on the one hand, speech could extend beyond and outside words, its
“dissociatory” and “vibratory” action “developed in space” (TD 68); while on the other, the visual features of things such as movement and gesture were fundamental in re-conceiving the
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language of the stage as truly spatial. Indeed, physical signs had to be understood and made into some sort of an alphabet for that new language, the same way that shouts, sounds and lights needed to be organised to create “true hieroglyphs” out of characters and objects (68). In line with the observation that “the Balinese theatre has revealed to us a physical and non-verbal idea of the theatre, in which the theatre is contained within the limits of everything that can happen on a stage, independently of the written text”, Artaud also equated Oriental culture with a more spiritual attitude to life and art, claiming that speech should ideally try to create a metaphysics of language and to consider language “as a form of incantation” (TD 46).
Similarly, “to break through language in order to touch life”, claimed Artaud, is to “create or recreate the theatre” (TD 13). On all accounts, the new God-less, word-less theatre he proposed was to be formulated and realised inside the actor’s body. After all, the overarching dichotomy tormenting Artaud had been above all the one between body and mind. Moreover, it is worth noting that corporeal expression has always been primal to the communication of metaphysical feeling, uncensored as it is by cerebral processes and, therefore, universal. Because the body is the fundamental generator of praxis, the body alone is able to reconcile all formative dualisms that can jeopardise the unity of the theatre event. Taking up on Artaud’s emphasis on an actor’s body that can act inside the silences granted by the new physical language, contemporary auteurs like Brook, Kantor, Wilson, Suzuki, Bogart and others, have been ready to espouse performance inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions, trusting that the actor can physically translate into powerful forms of story telling (see Chapter 5). In fact, in his essay “La parole soufflée” (trans. “the breathed word”, [1965]), Derrida finely elaborates on Artaud’s pledge vis-
à-vis “the existence of a speech that is a body, of a body that is a theatre, of a theatre that is a text” (174). Artaud’s impulse to redefine and empower the actor’s body, which has been shared by many representatives of the American avant-garde movement, provided the basis for the
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establishment of physical theatre, in which the logo-centric text is no longer relevant.50 As Suzie
J. Tharu points out in The Sense of Performance:
Artaud takes the ‘obedient, conformist’ text (that which is and can be spoken)
and juxtaposes it with a bodily statement that contradicts, questions and
undermines it, but also makes for an engendering of the new. What results is not
so much a meaning, as an event. (64, emphasis original)51
It should be stressed however, despite the propensity for a strong sense of physicality in the theatre, Artaud refrained from entirely banishing the word from the new performance text; rather, he reversed its function, cleansing it of psychology and re-accessing its musical, incantatory sense, the actual flesh of it:
The pitch of the voice, the repetition of certain syllables, could affect our nervous
system and so influence us emotionally. If sounds, noises and cries are chosen
first for their vibratory quality and only secondly for their meaning, language will
communicate physically –not intellectually, and therefore superficially. (Greene
149)
50 See Chapters 4 & 5.
51 Thus, the performing body holds an indispensable place in Artaud’s relentless critique of verbal language; the body conveys ideas and emotions and, as Artaud stressed in “An Affective Athleticism” (1935), feelings and thoughts correspond to specific bodily movements, patterns of breathing and universally comprehensible gestures. “Without a doubt”, he wrote, “an appropriate breath corresponds to every feeling, to every mental movement, to every leap of human emotion” (OC, IV 155).
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Although Artaud conceded that this language’s “grammar” was “still to be found”, he saw
gesture as “its material and its wits” (TD 110).52 In his mind, the grammar of the new language would provide a base for new forms of theatrical writing, consisting not in the transcription of speech and phonetic writing, but in “hieroglyphic” writing, “the writing in which phonetic elements are coordinated to visual, pictorial, and plastic elements” (Derrida 240):
When I say I will perform no written play, I mean that I will perform no play
based on writing and speech, that in the spectacles I produce there will be a
preponderant physical share which could not be captured and written down in the
customary language of words, and that even the spoken and written portions will
be spoken and written in a new sense. (TD 111)53
From the 1980s on, Artaud’s impulses have been shared by a significant line of avant-garde
directors and writers, who are consistently trying to restore in their work the immediate,
sensorial effect of a more physical language.54 Robert Wilson’s work, for one thing, is hugely
indebted to Artaud’s focus on physicality. Very rightly Andreine and Bernard Bel in a seminar
entitled “Artaud and the ‘deconstruction’ of contemporary theatre-dance” argued that:
52 In Artaud’s ideal new stage, music (intonation and incantation), the visual and the plastic arts (painting, sculpture and dance), mime and circus, scenery and lighting, costume and props, all recover their rightful place on the stage, ousting the elitist word and “the exclusive dictatorship of speech” (TD 40) to a secondary place. Characteristically, in his “Draft of a Letter to Rene Daumel” (1931) Artaud laments the fact that “all specifically theatrical means of expression have gradually been replaced by the text, which in turn has absorbed the action so completely that in the final analysis we have seen the entire theatrical spectacle reduced to a single person delivering a monologue in front of a backdrop” (Selected Writings 206). This conception, however valid in itself, confirms in the minds of Westerners the supremacy of spoken language, which is both more precise and more abstract, over all other languages. Along these lines, Artaud duly proceeds to an aphorism: A theatre which subordinates the mise en scène and production, i.e., everything in itself that is specifically theatrical, to the text, is a theatre of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e., Occidentals (TD 41).
53 In some ways, Artaud’s emphasis on a language that could provide space and time co-ordinates through its sheer physicality had been already anticipated by the landscape plays of Modernist writer Gertrude Stein, whose contribution to the resurgence of a contemporary performance-oriented dramaturgy will be discussed in Chapter 6. 54 Discussion of the practices of these auteurs will be provided in Chapters 5 & 6.
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Wilson had made it clear that Artaud’s dream of a theatre occupying the space of
plasticity and “physicality”, rather than psychology, could be achieved. Wilson’s
work on language, the way he displaced visual and auditive dimensions of
discourse, dissociating sign and meaning, may be paralleled with Artaud’s effort
to expand articulated language beyond the metaphysics of words.
At the same time, even though Artaud’s vague reference to writing’s “new sense” leaves plenty of room to speculation and even more space to criticism, nevertheless, it is also clear that his vision of the new spatial language is not limited to the employment of a language merely for the purposes of communicating, but mostly as a means to serve the ultimate goal of creating a performance text. Faithful to his iconoclastic conception of the theatre, Artaud also encourages experiments at “direct staging around themes, facts or known works” (TD 98), “encountering the obstacles of both production and performance” (TD 41), where not only is the stage realisation of an idea or a concept negotiated and formulated during the process of performance, but also the means of implementing the spectacle are shockingly innovative; in this way, he becomes the father of many current devised theatre companies, such as British groups Complicité,
Peepolykus, Kneehigh and Improbable.55
Above all, Artaud professes that for performance language to validate itself as the only vital alternative to an obsolete stage and a “sacred and definitive text” (TD 89), the challenge will be for the mise-en-scène to resourcefully bridge the gap between body and mind, intellectual and sensory perception and reception of the spectacle. Essentially, the task of the new director, the director-creator, the director as author of the performance, will be to gracefully unite sense and
55 For a more complete analysis of the work methods of Devised Theatre see Chapter 4.
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sensibility, the Apollonian and the Dionysian nature56 of both performer and spectator. While words can no longer provide the sole carrier of meaning, the organic basis for emotions is located inside the actors’ bodies and the tools for liberating those emotions are visual, as well as aural. Therefore, language, embodied in the actor, will be transmuted into action; in the same way, unprogrammed, unpredictable performance will replace the complacent imperviousness of the literary text. Again, the binary pole of mediation Vs interpretation is critical: rather than blindly submitting to the author’s text, the actor collaborates with the director in interpreting the original text, whose material is the world itself, thereby expelling the playwright from the stage.
As Artaud contests, “it is in the use and handling of this language that the old duality between author and director will be dissolved, replaced by a sort of unique Creator upon whom will devolve the double responsibility of the spectacle and the plot” (TD 94). Essentially, this dual function of the artist simultaneously as director and author is the basis of auteur theatre.
At the same time, since the new text will be written on stage, the resulting performance text will be free from the restrictions of pre-determined dialogue. In effect, Artaud is also introducing the concept of improvisation, one of the most compelling means of supplying details of thought, action and blocking to the main structure of the play. In such way, the little of dialogue that will remain “will not be written out and fixed a priori, but will be put on the stage, created on the stage, in correlation with the requirements of attitudes, signs, movements and objects” (TD 111).
In effect, renouncing “the theatrical superstition of the text and the dictatorship of the writer”
(TD 124), Artaud appears fearless vis-à-vis the challenges of an unknown text that the director- auteur must compose entirely from scratch. “As far as mise-en-scène and principles go”, he claims, “we entrust ourselves bravely to chance. In the theatre we want to create, chance will be
56 See Chapter 1.
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our god. We fear no failure, no catastrophe” (TD 158, my emphasis). Consequently, by bringing in the liberating notion of chance in his theory of theatre, Artaud is actually celebrating the openness and vulnerability of performance, which will be discussed more in the following chapters. As a result, given that the verbal text vandalises the stage (“toute l’écriture est de la cochonérie”/ “all writing is garbage” [qtd in Selected Writings xxii ]), the overall rejection of literary masterpieces, by definition relying on authorial authority, is essential for the vindication of theatre. The loathing of words reveals a broader rejection of literature as a fixed, stifling and elitist genre that deepens the gap between creator and receiver.57 Artaud’s mistrust of literature originates in what he thinks is its inability to coincide with life, by virtue of its having been predetermined, pre-selected and pre-performed by the author and thus prohibiting the dynamic interaction with the audience it supposedly serves.58
Having said this, we should by no means ignore Jean-Franҫois Lyotard’s wariness in relation to the efficacy of a purely visual language for the stage, as propounded by Artaud. Pavis discusses
Lyotard’s analysis according to which Artaud, wanting to “destroy not the theatrical system termed Italian, that is European, but at least the predominance of articulate language and the effacement of the body”, stopped halfway and turned towards “the construction of a tool, which was to be yet another language, a system of signs, a grammar of gestures, hieroglyphs” (Lyotard qtd in Pavis 1981: 80). Pavis also trusts Lyotard’s conviction that even though “silencing the
57 Sontag describes literature as “the corrupt, fallen activity of words” (Selected Writings intro xlix/l).
58 Artaud’s cautiousness vis-à-vis literature’s role in the theatre is justifiable. For literature as product (and not process) remains fixed to the moment of its inception. To crack literature open is to cancel its original mission, which rejects the cataclysmic penetration of action, and relies instead on the inevitability of contemplative interpretation, an auxiliary process of creation. Nonetheless, literature can become theatre if and when it lends itself as primary, gross material in the hands of the director, ultimately the sole one responsible for the new performance text. If and when playwright and director agree to engage in a work that interweaves literature with physical/ performative language in a way that guarantees that the latter does not simply “decorate” the former, can perhaps theatre become a meaningful and fulfilling experience, a “total” art (see Chapter 6).
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body through the theatre of the playwright is nihilistic, making it speak in a vocabulary and a syntax of mime, songs, dances, as does the Noh, is another way of annihilating it: a body
“entirely” transparent, skin and flesh of the bone that is the spirit, intact from any pulsional movement, event, opacity” (80). More specifically, according to Lyotard:
Artaud’s failure was his wanting to counter the fossilisation of the theatre by
putting in its place a vision of the theatre that was too spatial and not sufficiently
inner and pulsional, his searching for an impossible scenic and gestural language,
his forming an ideal likewise too specific, in this case too spatial and visual, of
the theatrical event. (80)
In any respect, since the time of The Theatre and its Double, avant-garde practice, both in terms of directing and playwriting, has explored ways to make Artaud’s visual theatre exist in the context of a new text, which, as will be examined in Chapter 6, without regressing to the traditional hierarchies of psychological character and linear structure, can still express (through language and sound poetry) the “unseen” and the “usaid”.
2.5. Artaud’s Legacy
How can everyday language go beyond the quotidian experience? What possible form could encompass the ruptures of modern consciousness? What is the role of art and the artist today?
Some of these questions Artaud struggled to address in his feverish writings. And even though his lofty theories and ideas had little opportunity to be tested against the harsh logistics of stage practice, nevertheless, profuse and vehement as these theories are, they constitute an inexhaustible source of inspiration to date. Affiliated with the movement of the Surrealists and
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founder of the Theatre Alfred Jarry, Artaud was constantly looking for a forum through which to instigate his ideas on “cruelty” and metaphysics, contemporary culture and the reformation of life. Simultaneously provocative and affirmative, the theories expounded in The Theatre and its
Double, together with Artaud’s extensive correspondence with actors, directors and other artists of his time, have provided firm ground for further artistic exploration, updated according to the revised terms of contemporary performance. As Susan Sontag aptly maintains in her introduction to Selected Writings: “what [Artaud] bequeathed was not achieved works of art but a singular presence, a poetics, an aesthetics of thought, a theory of culture, and a phenomenology of suffering” (xx). In effect, while the necessity for change and revolution against established norms exists in every culture and at all times, Artaud had the vision to conceive of and the courage to articulate a changed world, a new theatre, a reformed language and a deconstructed form.
Since the second half of the twentieth century, the broad range of staging possibilities available to theatre makers has created surprising stage texts consisting of anything that can be made into theatre material and in which the verbal text is considered just one more element among the many materials of the mise-en-scène. Notwithstanding the utopia of Craig’s and Artaud’s passionate celebration at the beginnings of the twentieth century of a theatre which not only
“eliminates words”, but expresses “a state prior to language” in presenting “a secret psychic impulse which is Speech before words” (TD 53-54), it is no surprise that the avant-garde movement, which has displayed strong anti textual sentiments, was strongly encouraged by
Artaud’s writings.
After Artaud, the logo-centric approach to the theatre was replaced by the viewing of performance as an art form in its own right and from the outset, the dominance of the word, of
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“theatre as text” was the locus of fierce avant-garde opposition. Whether open or latent, antagonism between text and performance generated extreme animosity, posing serious axiomatic questions as to who the author of the “theatre text” is and whether it is possible to legitimise and give credit to the writer of the performance text. All these issues, which will be thoroughly addressed in the final chapter of this dissertation, continue to reverberate in current auteur practice, but the interest now lies both in the directors’ attempt to approach non-verbal methods of communication and perception, and in their stimulating the audience’s mechanism of nonlinear association.
It was no surprise that Artaud lent himself to appropriation: not only did he mirror a general discontent with mainstream forms of art and the on-growing need for an overwhelming reform of the stage; he also expressed the “profound and more general disillusionment with conventional forms of society and religion” (Innes 1993: 60). Artists are always eager to dash towards anyone and anything that can contain their dissent and help voice their claims; Artaud was an excellent vehicle for that, because his theories remained unscathed by practice, pure and resilient through the years. Strongly original and really ahead of his time, he provided a viable context for speculation on the role of the arts and exploration of stage parameters. His texts, full of highly abrasive ideas, introduce, as Donald Gardner professes: “certain new criteria, not so much for aesthetic form, but, more disturbingly, for what a work of art is.”59 Seeking to go beyond the limits of speech, in fact, beyond all limits imposed by literature and received intellectual processes, Artaud was instrumental to the development of physical theatre, and of course, to the establishment of performance as an equal, if not superior, partner to the dramatic text.
59 In the electronic article “The Reinvention of the Human Face.” 20 Aug. 1987.
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Among the most consistent followers of Artaud, Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz set up “The
Theatre of Cruelty Workshop” in 1964, as a training arena for actors who would experiment with the exceptional physicality promulgated by Artaud.60 Similarly, Brook’s and Grotowski’s
“holy” theatre has also been greatly indebted to Artaud’s concept of performance as a vessel for a spiritual trip undertaken by both actors and spectators. In fact, Jerzy Grotowski’s (1933-1999)
Laboratory Theatre was created so that the whole process of rehearsing and putting on a play could serve the spiritual re-education of the actor, and thus furthering and completing Artaud’s preoccupation with the ritualisation of theatre and the pursuit of the primeval, almost religious forces innate in Eastern art and philosophy. Undoubtedly, Artaud’s emphasis on forms of unconventional staging has had also influenced the non-text based work of Eugenio Barba, the unusual audience- participatory spaces of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and Beck’s and Malina’s physical productions with the Living Theatre, all of which shared Artaud’s concern with discovering new ways to communicate with the audience and produce meaningful theatre. Further, the eclectic borrowing from Oriental art forms, pioneered by Artaud, has been central to the work of auteurs like Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil.
Last but not least, Robert Wilson found in Artaud the validation he sought, in order to create a theatre based on emotive images, where gesture replaced words and speech became sound and incantation.61
Undoubtedly, some of Artaud’s followers have taken on his theories undigested, eager to hold onto the title of the “intellectual”/ “revolutionary”/ “innovator” that comes attached to his
60 Brook’s and Marowitz’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ experiment culminated in a series of performances that included the first staging of Artaud’s surrealist playlet, The Spurt of Blood.
61 Artaud’s concept of extending the audience’s imagination, by destroying conventional assumptions and simultaneously presenting alternate visions of the world, can be found in the work of dramatists as different as Genet or Robert Wilson, as can “his methods of achieving this effect –hallucinatory distortions of scale and perspective, and overloading the brain with emotive images” (Innes 1993: 63).
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legacy. Similarly, we cannot deny that the question as to whether Artaud’s theories can actually apply to artistic practice today, or should be merely used as source of inspiration, still remains.
As Donald Garner further contests in “The Reinvention of the Human Face”:
Artaud’s genius [. . .] consists in the courage with which he returned again and
again to the thematic of the transformation of life. The theatre that claims to
derive from Artaud has, by and large, stopped short of this extremism. It has
rarely been motivated by this abrasive spirit of criticism which is a basic
energising feature of all his work. As a result, it has often done exactly what he
denounced and concentrated only on the formal aspects of what now carries the
jargon term “total theatre”. Theatregoers will all be familiar with certain
‘productions’ where a fanfare of portentousness will be sounded every time the
interest flags, in order to herald a supposedly deep metaphysical theme, that
director and actors have sweated like demons to uncover.
Perhaps the ideological courage and theoretical depth that Artaud’s writings displayed will remain unchallenged for many more years to come. The era that gave birth to Artaud’s theories was a turbulent one; the socio-political instability of the 1930s was ultimately reflected in the orgasmic eruption of pioneering movements in art and literature, some of which, such as
Modernism, thoroughly renounced realistic (representational) art. Artaud’s disciples in the sixties had different social and political battles to fight. However, despite the fact that the institutionalisation of the avant-garde in the late twentieth century brought with it a degree of reluctance for any extremist and/or truly confrontational stance vis-à-vis the world we live in and the conditions that render art meaningful, it might be worth asking oneself if a cultural
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revolution can occur in our days. And if yes, what kind of artistic conditions can such revolution occur in, since already, the demand for ideological, as well as meaningful theatre is high.
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3. BECKETT’S LATER DRAMA
3.1. In quest of a new form
There will be new form, and this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.62
Beckett’s influence on auteur directors is revolutionary and manifold: from the standpoint of a playwright transferring performance parametres into the dramatic text, Beckett put the notion of the mise-en-scène’s centrality into actual practice, proposing a creative junction of director and writer within the same text. Indeed, when staging Beckett’s late plays, directors are dealing with the works of an author-director. Simultaneously, Beckett was rightly credited as the father of avant-garde dramaturgy, his tremendous impact stretching to the plays of many of today’s
European and American writers, such as Caryl Churchill, Valère Novarina, Michel Vinaver, Jon
Fosse and Richard Foreman, to name but a few.63
Βeckett came into writing in the 1950s and throughout his long and prolific career as a novelist and playwright, he has been alternately labelled a modernist, an absurdist, an existentialist and even a postmodernist, each title attesting to his multifaceted, as well as precocious genius.
Introducing performance issues and staging matters into his writing, Beckett’s drama evolved from what was often regarded “mainstream classic” to “minimalist avant-garde”, a process that had started with Happy Days in 1961 and came full circle in most of his later plays and more
62 Beckett interviewed by American academic Tom Driver in 1961 in “Beckett by the Madeleine” (qtd in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 14).
63 Beckett’s immense influence on contemporary dramaturgy will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6, Section on Neo-Dramatic Writing.
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shockingly so in Not I (written in 1972), which pushed theatrical form to its limits. Beckett’s ambition was to explore the potential of as much artistic material as was possible, joining different media together in order to achieve a new form of theatre that would be based on drama and yet would include para-linguistic/para-literary elements. Consequently, he experimented with plays for radio (All That Fall--1956, Embers--1959, Rough for Radio I&II--1960/1, Words and Music--1961, Cascando--1962), film (Film--1963), television (Eh Joe--1965, Ghost Trio--
1975, ...but the clouds…--1976) and mimes (Act Without Words I&II--1956), all the while continuing to produce pieces for the stage. Eventually, however, the borders between Beckett’s
“regular” stage plays and his plays written for other media became blurred. In particular, the generic distinctions between radio dramas and stage dramas started to break down, as Beckett made sound and voice key structural elements of his later plays.
Essentially, Beckett’s short plays raise the issue of representation in the arts, but more importantly reveal his on-growing conviction that in the theatre, the literary text is only one part of the overall experience, in itself inadequate to express or foresee the intricacies involved in the hydraulics of performance. This explains his fascination with more “open” texts, in which the playwright’s innate (and to a degree, inevitable) directorial vision formally becomes part of the written script. Introducing performance criteria into the dramatic text, Beckett uses the stage elements of lighting, set/props, sound/silence and movement as structural devices, often filling in for “gaps” in plot and characterisation. In addition, he organises his stage directions into very definitive sets of rules for prospective directors, demanding that these be observed as instructed and be treated as text, rather than as mere suggestions for blocking. What thus emerges is a hybrid form of no specific hierarchies, which mixes verbal language with performance idioms and essentially constitutes the writer “director” of his play.
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In addition, resisting both psychology and Aristotelian validation in his drama, the playwright concerns himself with the subtle processes of performance, which inevitably call for different kinds of authorial attention. In doing so, he disrupts the stability of the relationship between signifier and signified, uncontested in more realistic forms of dramatic writing, opting instead for patterns of fragmentation, repetition and silence, which open up the plays to a much wider range of signs, generating equally alluring and disorienting emotions in the audience.
At the same time, working along the lines of Artaud’s rejection of literary language in favour of a new language for the stage, Beckett questions the omnipotence of the logo-centric order of drama which had dominated theatrical representation up until his time. At the bottom of
Beckett’s attempt to crack theatrical experience open lies his investment in alternative mediums of representation, as is the case with the play Breath (written in 1969), perhaps the most minimalist play conceived within the Western dramatic canon. Ironically, the play features no dialogue, or actors, but just a concept of a set (a stage filled with rubbish), on which consecutively a cry, a respiration and an expiration take place. Lighting, too, plays a very important role in the piece, as is indicated in its different scaling/ grading. In this text of no text, even the most immaterial qualities assume the function of language:
B R E A T H
CURTAIN
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about
five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light
together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and
hold for about five seconds.
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3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum
together (light as in 1) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as
before. Silence and hold about five seconds.
CURTAIN
RUBBISH
No verticals, all scattered and lying.
CRY
Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical,
switching on and off strictly synchronised light and breath.
BREATH
Amplified recording.
MAXIMUM LIGHT
Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about
3 to 6 and back. (Complete Shorter Plays 211)
Breath gives startling proof that theatre can emerge even out of the most basic elements of human existence. The mere length and duration of the play reinforce that idea. Similarly, in
Nacht und Träume (1982), “elements” replace what are conventionally known as “dramatis personae” in the introductory page of the play:
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Elements
Evening light
Dreamer (A)
His dreamt self (B)
Dreamt hands R (right) and L (left)
Last 7 bars of Schubert’s Lied, Nacht und Träume. (CSP 305)
Curiously, in Nacht und Träume Beckett’s originality is not limited to his reversing the formal order of dramatic writing; in fact, what can be loosely termed “dramatic characters” (for example, Dreamer A and his dreamt self B) are boldly mixed with principles of performance
(such as Schubert’s music), images taken from nature and even dreams (evening light, dreamt hands). Beckett’s protagonists are no longer recognisably human, a conscious choice made by the pessimist existentialist, mirroring his disillusionment with the world’s dehumanisation after
World War II. Characteristically, in one of his rare statements on art, Beckett declared that
“there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, together with the obligation to express.”64
This aphorism reflects Beckett’s deeply wounded vision of humanity and makes it clear that the existential void that his drama struggles to express can only find shelter within a startlingly innovative form of writing. This is a form that clearly leaves no room for teleology, celebrated in the Aristotelian hopeful pattern of “beginning-middle-end”, since in reality contemporary experience emphatically dispels all belief in either safe beginnings, or redemptive ends and is
64 Qtd in Mel Gussow’s “Samuel Beckett Is Dead at 83; His ‘Godot’ Changed Theatre.” New York Times 27 Dec. 1989. All newspaper articles and theatre reviews will be henceforth referenced by name of author and title of article/review. For full bibliographical details see bibliography section.
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instead marked by discontinuity and flashes of chaos, no matter how masterly and soothingly organised into a semblance of normality these are. Neither structure, nor language “as we know it” is in any way capable to arrest the fluidity of the modern (post-World War II) condition, and
Beckett is the first to formalise the need for a new dramaturgy. In reality, not only does he portray the fragmentation of human consciousness in the highly patterned and heightened speech of his creations, but digs even further into the duality of the human self, the clash between the
“I” and its other half, whether it is a voice, a tape recorder or simply, an image. The torture of subjectivity, which continues to haunt the works of some of the most prominent auteurs today65 is constantly underlined in the battle between the dramatic (psychological, recognisable and human) character and its performative counterpart (imagistic, elusive and unreal). Needless to say, Beckett’s choices reveal a profound understanding of a spectator’s process of reception:
“When I write a play I put myself inside the characters, I am also the author supplying the words, and I put myself in the audience visualising what goes on onstage” (qtd in McMillan and
Fehsenfeld 14).
At the same time, in Beckett’s short plays, the relationship between “textual language” (where text equals literature) and “performance language” (pertaining to a wide array of elements of mise-en-scène), which still undergoes a serious strain in the theatre of the director-auteur, is put into trial. Although Beckett is careful not to jeopardise either one of the two poles in favour of the other, the sense that we are experiencing a very fragile tension between the word and its scenic counterpart is almost always present. As drama merges with performance, the spectator may lose track of the story, the characters, or the text itself, striving instead to locate and sustain the central image of the play, which often seems blurred or simply surreal. Verbal language, frequently spoken by one sole actor and getting more and more elliptical as the playwright
65 See Chapters 4 & 5, especially Section on Technology.
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moves further and further inside his exploration of the theatre medium, is now mixed with the numerous languages of the mise-en-scène, such as blocking/choreography, sound, echo and silence, abstract costume and set design and, of course, lighting. Similarly, as verbal images alternate with visual ones, the reader is mentally connecting the two, unconsciously becoming a spectator in a performance. In effect, the merging of drama with performance is everywhere, as
“one genre breaks into another” (Brater 17). Consequently, as readers/ spectators of Beckett’s late plays, we are not always sure whether we are dealing with works of dramatic literature or with written “spectacles” for the stage. These plays stimulate our perception, by attacking us in a sensory way and demanding that our attention be equally distributed among our visual, aural and intellectual channels. As Enoch Brater points out:
[In Beckett’s theatre] genre is under stress. The theatre event is reduced to a piece
of monologue and the play is on the verge of becoming something else, some-
thing that looks suspiciously like a performance poem. All the while a story is
being told, a fiction closely approximating the dramatic situation the audience
encounters in the theatre. (3)
3.2. Beckett as director and the question of authorship
I am naturally disturbed [. . .] at the menace hinted at in one of your letters, of unauthorised deviations from the script. This we cannot have at any price and I am asking [London producer Donald] Albery to write [American producer Michael] Myerberg to that effect. I am not intransigent, as the [bowdlerised] Criterion production [in London] shows, about minor changes, if I feel they are necessary, but I refuse to be improved by a professional rewriter.66
66 Beckett qtd in Gontarski 1998. All information on Beckett’s correspondence with Barney Rosset and Charles Monteith is quoted in the electronically disseminated article “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre” by S.E. Gontarski, 1998.
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The above warning message belongs to Beckett, who on 2nd February 1956 wrote to his friend and American (Grove Press) publisher, Barney Rosset in order to prevent what he called
“unauthorised deviations” in the forthcoming Broadway production of Godot, after a failure in the Miami première. Since the Broadway production was to have a new director and cast,
Beckett wanted to make sure that his text was to be respected to the fullest.
Having discovered theatre at middle-age and engaging in the dialectic between the page and the stage, Beckett not only decided to immerse deep into the world of the play and create works that carried performance inside them; he also became actively involved in the staging of his plays, wishing to explore the possibilities of performance first-hand, in order to apply his own observations to already existing (published) play-scripts, actually hoping to turn them into theatrically viable pieces for the stage.
After the success of Waiting for Godot (1948–1949) and Endgame (1955–1957) in English and
French, Beckett first began to observe the productions of his plays, taking an active interest in the artists involved, with whom he often collaborated closely. What added to his resolution to keep an eye on what each director brought to the table was his desire to set for his plays a
“standard of fidelity”, as he called it, which later on took larger dimensions and earned him the reputation of an author exceedingly possessive of his texts and therefore tremendously difficult to work with.
Fifteen years into his playwriting career Beckett turned to the practice of theatre and this turn signalled an enormous change in the shape of dramatic writing worldwide. From the early 1960s up until his death in 1989, Beckett continued to redefine the shape of drama, inventing a new form which brought together literature and theatre. In the process of shedding off his playwright skin in favour of a multifarious theatre personality, Beckett would go back to his earlier plays in
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order to fix what he thought was wrong, superfluous, or simply not theatrical enough. This concern started a whole practice of revisions in works that had already been published but on which Beckett was at the time working as a director. Surely, his persistence in correcting texts that were already out in the market often caused havoc to publishers, who would have to wait for
Beckett to complete a number of rehearsals before going back to the text to make what he thought were necessary revisions. Sensing how important it was for a writer to endorse performance in his/her work, Beckett would only complete his plays “on stage”.
To illustrate the point, as reported by Gontarski, on 24th November 1963, Beckett wrote to
Barney Rosset about his wife’s disappointment with the German production of Spiel (Play):
“Suzanne went to Berlin for the opening of Play. She did not like the performance, but the director, Deryk Mendel, is very pleased. Well received.”67 As Gontarski reports, Beckett also pointed out the necessity for even more rehearsals, before authorising the play’s publication.
Consequently, he wrote to Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber first on 15th November 1963:
“I’m afraid I shall have to make some rather important changes in the stage directions of Play”, adding similarly, on 23rd November 1963:
I suddenly see this evening, with panic, that no final text of Play is possible till I
have had a certain number of rehearsals. These will begin here, I hope, next
month, and your publication should not be delayed [that is, publication should
follow soon after production]. But please regard my corrected proofs as not final.
I realise I can’t establish the definitive text of Play without a certain number of
rehearsals.
67 Qtd in Gontarski’s “Revising Himself”. According to Gontarski, the correspondence of Beckett with his publishers as appears throughout his article is in the respective publishers’ archives, Grove Press, Faber and Faber, and John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., and is used with permission of the publishers and Samuel Beckett.
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Not surprisingly, different versions of the plays began to circulate among producers and playwrights. As he continued to direct, Beckett continued to revise, and this self-collaboration produced a proliferation of variants of the same text. As Beckett’s close friend and long-time cultural reporter and critic for The New York Times Mel Gussow remarked: “Each time [Beckett] staged a play, the play changed. While directing he found ‘superfluities’: words as well as actions” (Gussow 1996: 37).
Gontarski’s aforementioned article “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s
Theatre” (1998), as well as his more recent study “Reinventing Beckett” (2006) both provide an insightful exploration of Beckett’s evolution from playwright to advisor on productions of his plays to director of them. In “Revising Himself”, Gontarski traces Beckett’s process particularly in reference to his self-reinvention and self-discovery during his nineteen-year directing career, from 1967 to 1986, when Beckett staged more than twenty productions of his plays in English,
French, and German. In Gontarski’s words:
Much of Beckett’s most intense and concentrated theatrical work with his texts
occurred well after their original publication when as a director he turned to them
afresh. Staging himself even well after initial publication would mean revising
himself and would allow him to move forward by returning to the past, to
implement, refine, and extend his creative vision to work published before he
became his own best director. In retrospect, such self-collaboration seems
inevitable since Beckett’s theatrical vision was often at odds with those of even
his most sympathetic directors.
As a modernist, Beckett was adamant about the aesthetic value of the work, a fact reflected in the corresponding mandates of his stage directions. But more than his aesthetic sensibilities, it
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was Beckett’s commitment to the idea of performance that made him realise that no play can claim finality unless it is tested against the realities of the stage. Yet, the questions that come to the surface when we consider the dilemmas posed to a director working on a play by Beckett have mostly to do with whether a Beckett text can ever really be owned by another artist. The definitive mark of the playwright on the overall dramatic image he creates, as well as the restrictive specificity of his stage directions, often seem to undermine the possibility of any other interpretation.68 To put it more bluntly, how can a director work on an already staged text? How do you stage Beckett’s “directed” plays? In other words, how much room for individual interpretation and creative thinking does Beckett (or after his death, the notorious Beckett Estate, which handles the rights of Beckett’s plays) allow those directors who ultimately dare stage his plays? Speaking from the perspective of an actor, Beckett’s close collaborator, Billy Whitelaw, who had performed in several of his short plays and most notably in Not I, tried to dispel the theory that Beckett was indeed a tyrannical auteur: “A lot of people think he’s a dictator, who insists, ‘You must say it this way’. He’s not. He has a very definite idea of how he wants it to go, but within that, I can emotionally take off on my own” (qtd in Gussow 1996: 85). And yet, in the same interview with Gussow, Whitelaw contradicted herself when conceding that [Beckett]
“drives actors nuts. He keeps saying he’s been thrown out of most theatres. It can be very trying sometimes” (90). Indeed, Beckett’s own self-sarcasm concerning this strenuous “affair” is humorously reflected in his play Catastrophe (1982).
Undeniably, working on a Beckett text is perhaps even more trying for directors than it is for actors, given that his stage directions, exacting, as well as definitive, allow for little variation in staging. As has been argued, his plays convey in them such a strong sense of performance that it is almost prohibiting for anyone to try and “do them differently”. Taking the point a little further
68 For a detailed analysis of the issues of authorship and the ethics of interpretation see Chapter 6.
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and addressing the issue of what is legal and/or legitimate in theatre performance, Gontarski raises a question which still sounds very relevant, not just among Beckett critics and theorists, but also to those directing Beckett’s plays:
Is there a future for Beckettian performance? Can it be reinvented again? And if
so, what might such reinvention look like, given the restrictions on performance
imposed by the legal heirs to the work, heirs who function with all the droits
d’auteur, but none of his flexibility? (Gontarski 2006: 436, emphasis original) 69
On that account, it is no surprise that many directors refuse to give a Beckett text a chance, precisely because they fear the limitations that they would probably face in the process, together with the cost of having to give up their own artistic identity, as they see it. Without a doubt, the
“double” of Beckett the playwright, namely, Beckett the director, adds an extra layer of complication to the already charged relationship between writers and directors. Hence the joke in the theatre market, namely, that the only way to direct is to resort to the obvious comforts of dealing with dead authors; a choice often taken up by auteur directors, who feel intimidated by the presence of a living playwright in the rehearsal room. In relation to the terror that possesses directors when it comes to directing a Beckett play, Jonathan Kalb in Beckett in Performance has an astute comment to make:
From the standpoint of contemporary performance theory, [Beckett] is the
embodiment of the director’s nightmare, the Ghost of Banquo in the person of the
Author, who was supposed to have been mortally wounded at the end of last
century and dead since Artaud. (Kalb 150)
69 Gontarski is here questioning the sparing, if not altogether relentless ways in which the Beckett Estate handles performance rights based on the assumption that it is difficult to “determine authorial intent off the page.”
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How far can a playwright and a script determine and control a production is a question that arose painfully in JoAnne Akalaitis’ 1984 production of Endgame at the American Repertory Theatre
(A.R.T.) in Boston. Beckett denounced the production altogether, discrediting the director’s choices as reflecting a vision of the play very far removed from his own. In the A.R.T. programme notes he made his discontent very clear: “Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me” (qtd in Brustein). Surely, given
Beckett’s intimidating desire for control and his proprietorial zeal, one cannot help but wondering what exactly is the allure of staging his plays. According to Beckett’s probably most favourite American director, Alan Schneider, directing a Beckett text is simply a matter of making sure that “the nonessentials don’t creep back in” (Brater 4). Once again, it is the definition of “nonessentials” that lies in the heart of the matter.
The question, which this dissertation will address in more depth in Chapter 6, remains an open one. Nevertheless, any directors prepared to delve into the intricacies of a Beckett play and follow the thread carefully laid out by the playwright, should remain aware that no matter how original they would like their own version of the play to be (always within the set performance- related limits), the production can never really look much different from any other production of the same play staged by a different director. No matter how ingenious the director, how different of a persona an actor/actress carries within, how distinct the posture and levels of emotional content in the production, as well as the details of design, there is very little you can do to break free from the formal requirements of Beckett’s performance scripts. Stepping outside the prescriptive diagrams that Beckett repeatedly inserts in his play is not just a risk; for these diagrams are part of the script, and ignoring or deviating from any part of the “text” is in this case a way to declare your opposition to the right of the text to be anything else but simply
“literature”.
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3.3. Stage Directions and the Languages of Staging
Beckett’s infamous rejection of Akalaitis’ staging of Endgame in 1984 was legally speaking, attributed to her refusal to conform in her performance to the play’s stage directions. Essentially, in Beckett’s late drama, stage directions constitute a vital part of the text and are not to be taken lightly by any director, since they do not simply serve as the latent voice of the director-author, but also provide a structure that accommodates dramatic action. As has been noted, however, the authorial and authoritative function of these stage directions, together with the implied command that they be followed strictly, results in remarkably similar-looking productions, where any possibility for variation seems indeed very limited.
Characteristically, in his late plays, Beckett increasingly lists production parametres in detailed stage directions at the beginning of the play, instead of introducing the dramatis personae, as is commonly the case; this strategy signals his moving further and further inside the practice of directing. An example of such practice can be seen in Rockaby, where the opening indication of
“light/eyes/costume/attitude/chair/rock/voice” immediately captures our attention (CSP 273-4).
Moreover, the stage directions that appear either at the beginning or the end of Beckett’s text are frequently as great in volume as the text itself. In Come and Go (1965), in a fashion typical of
Beckett, the stage directions are so precise that actually include a diagram of each of the characters’ position in performance (CSP 196). That this may be due to the complexity of the movements throughout the piece does not necessarily justify Beckett’s insertion of a diagram of the rings that the characters meaningfully refer to, as well as the diagram of the way they should be formed by the actors’ arms. In addition to dictating the successive positions that the three females take up on stage, the notes that appear at the end of the play contain detailed information
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on the lighting, costume, set pieces (seats), exits, etc., inevitably assuming a prescriptive function. Even the ohs heard in the play are fully accounted for. The unique, if authoritative, function of Beckett’s “NOTES”, transforms readers into audience members, invited to picture the performed version of the text they have just read. Thus, in a most satisfying process of imagination, the reader is subconsciously/mentally involved in the mechanics of directing, applying Beckett’s directions to the literary text.70
Similarly, in Not I (1972) the reader is coerced into reading the text in visual terms, since the stage directions command a performative reading (that is, a reading informed by stage considerations), rather than a literary one, a formal strategy first conceived in Happy Days. This in turn entails the sensual, rather than intellectual processing of all information:
NOTE
Movement: this consists in simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their
falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion. It lessens with each recurrence
till scarcely perceptible at third. There is just enough pause to contain it as
MOUTH recovers from vehement refusal to relinquish third person.
Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8' above stage
level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow. Invisible
microphone. AUDITOR, downstage audience left, tall standing figure, sex
undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood,
fully faintly lit, standing on invisible podium about 4' high, shown by attitude
alone to be facing diagonal(r across stage intent on MOUTH, dead still
throughout but For four brief movements where indicated. See NOTE. (CSP 216)
70 For more on the audience’s co-authoring function, see Chapter 6.
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Fully developed in the text’s opening directions, staging elements function as dramatic principles and a way to structure Beckett’s performance texts. As Herbert Blau eloquently explicates, “Beckett taught us before theory that paratextuality is built into the language.” (67).
Therefore, the section at the end of each play, which Beckett dedicates to staging issues does not function as an addendum for production, but is part of the text itself. Moreover, verbal language is only just one additional element in the composite stage picture, as Artaud had first insisted.
Framing devices such as set and props, choreography and silence, lighting and repetition are for
Beckett equally important performance languages, running parallel to the verbal (literary) language of the text. As such, they exist not only to provide clues for the text’s physical realisation on stage, but also, to reveal a form of writing that is as malleable and open as performance itself. This way, barriers between drama and performance collapse and the new text can accommodate the discontinuity and vicariousness of contemporary experience. As the
Existentialist meets the Postmodernist, anything and everything may happen on the way.
Clearly, the incorporation of NOTES in Beckett’s performance texts is an extra piece of evidence justifying his writing’s precocious postmodernism, because it vindicates the possibility of anything becoming text. The dramatic text, in which essentially a story is being told, depends for its completion (that is, its realisation on an actual and/or imaginary performance level) on the playwright’s vision of a broader performance scheme within which to place it. Recently, several imaginative experiments with the form itself of dramatic writing have produced multi- dimensional texts that resist any attempt to separate the conventional dramatic parts (for example, dialogue) from their performance context, as in Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal (1998).
The ways in which this significant formal innovation has been passed onto Prichard’s writing, as well as to several other contemporary neo-dramatists, will be fully examined in the final chapter of this dissertation. However, we should also note here that the interaction of the performing arts
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(dance, music, etc) with literature (logos) introduced by Beckett’s radio plays, as well as by texts such as Ghost Trio, Quad, ...but the clouds..., Nacht und Träume, all written for television, has further anticipated the production of enthralling mixed-media plays, as in the case of some of
British playwright Caryl Churchill’s more recent writing, like the play Hotel (1997), a choreographed opera or sung ballet set in a hotel room.
3.4. a. Lighting
Similarly, in Beckett’s short plays the interplay between light and darkness, as well as the contrast of the lit and dark areas of the stage are clearly defined in the stage directions. The author uses an imaginative range of lighting possibilities to create liminal spaces that place particular emphasis on the precariousness of the characters’ lives. In addition, his use of lighting is varied. In Rockaby (1979), for instance, Beckett manipulates lighting possibilities to create revolving perspectives on the main visual image: that of an isolated female figure sitting on the rocking chair. Different gradations of lighting appear throughout the play, patterning not only the actor but the space too, by sculpting it with shades of dark and grey:
LIGHT:
Subdued on chair. Rest of stage dark.
Subdued spot on face constant throughout, unaffected by successive fades. Either
wide enough to include narrow limits of rock or concentrated on face when still
or at mid-rock. Then throughout speech face slightly swaying in and out of light.
Opening fade up: first spot on face alone, long pause, then light on chair.
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Final fade-out: first chair, long pause with spot on face alone, head slowly sinks,
come to rest, fade out spot. (CSP 273)
In effect, lighting is a powerful index of possibilities, providing, defining or refining identity and/or often acting as the “third character” in the play, granting favours or obstructing action.71
In particular, one of Beckett’s favourite staging devices that help him control his characters is the use of the spotlight, which serves as a symbol of the writer’s authority over the story being represented, as well as his ultimate weapon over the characters that tell it. In Play (1962-3) the stage directions stipulate that:
Speech is provoked by a spotlight projected on faces alone (see page 318).
The transfer of light from one face to another is immediate.
No blackout, i.e. return to almost complete darkness of opening, except where
indicated.
The response to light is immediate. (CSP 147)
Similarly, in the notes placed at the end of the play Beckett clarifies that “the source of light is single and must not be situated outside the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims”:
The optimum position for the spot is at the centre of the footlights, the faces being
thus lit at close quarters and from below. When exceptionally three spots are
required to light the three faces simultaneously, they should be as single spot
branching into three. Apart from these moments a single mobile spot should be
used, swivelling at maximum speed from one face to another as required.
The method consisting in assigning to each face a separate fixed spot is
71 The importance of non-realistic lighting in auteur work, greatly attributed to Appia (see Chapter 1), will be also discussed in Chapter 5.
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unsatisfactory in that it is less expressive of a unique inquisitor than the single
mobile spot. (CSP 158)
Pondering upon the sadistic role of the spotlight in Beckett’s theatre, Anna McMullan argues that:
Much of Beckett’s theatre focuses on strategies of surveillance and spectacle-
most of the bodies which appear in his plays are subject to discipline and cannot
escape either the confines of the stage or the relentless glare of the spotlight. [. . .]
Beckett plays on relations and levels of authority within the theatrical apparatus:
the authority of the text, the author, the director or the audience. The body of the
actor is frequently foregrounded as the material on which this authority is
inscribed and displayed. (16)
Interestingly, in Play, the writer assumes the role of stage manager/ light board operator, controlling the blackout sequence. The use of spots that get transferred from one character to another reinforces the authority of the writer as a director/God bestowing the power of speech on his subjects. Therefore, lighting becomes the main protagonist in the play, since the omni- powerful spotlight enables and monitors the characters’ speech. More specifically, the three characters are obliged to wait for the spotlight’s arrival, in order to get on with their story, welcoming the right to recite their lines that the spotlight alternately grants on each one of them.
Surely, Beckett’s preoccupation with darkness and light is haunting:
W1: Yes, strange, darkness best, and the darker the worse, till all dark, then all
well, for the time, but it will come, the thing is there, you’ll see it, get off me,
keep off me, all dark, all still, all over, wiped out - (CSP 147)
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The function of lighting is also prominent in Footfalls (1975), adding to the intriguing aural atmosphere of the play and reinforcing the recurrent and principal structural element of the protagonist’s footsteps. In the play’s stage directions, Beckett presents us with a lighting scheme that ironically conceals, rather than reveal: “Lighting: dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head” (CSP 239). Mary is clad in a “worn grey wrap hiding feet, trailing” and the patterned dimming of light on the strip guarantees that most of our attention will be concentrated on the aural, rather than visual details of the play. Inevitably, the insidious presence of lighting isolates the acting area and directs our concentration to the “clearly audible rhythmic pad” of nine steps on a strip downstage, parallel with front, “width one metre, a little off centre audience right” (CSP 239).
3.4.b. Set
Writing to Jean Reavey in 1962, Beckett underlined the use of stage space as “primary in dramatic construction” (qtd in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 15). In point of fact, Beckett’s bare stages intentionally contain no specific representational value, thus allowing him to open up the world of his characters to even greater abstraction. In Play the curtain rises on two women and a man (referred to only as W1, W2 and M) in a row along the front of the stage, with their heads sticking out of the tops of large urns and the rest of their bodies unexposed. In the course of the play, there is no change in either landscape, or the positions of the actors. Rather, drawn into this barren space, the spectator experiences isolation in its extreme form, a slave to the discretion of the spotlight. Isolation is of course a key theme in Beckett’s Godless universe, constantly manifest in landscapes permeated with alienation and impotence. Accordingly, the scenery in
Beckett’s plays is minimal, as well as symbolic, mirroring a world devoid of substance, where
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the subject remains suspended, disoriented and abandoned. In an illuminating article entitled
“Ambient Space in Twentieth century Theatre: The Space of Silence”, Dean Wilcox explores how Beckett’s later plays “allow the space of the stage to resonate a presence with its presumed absence”. In his view:
Beckett created a dramaturgical structure in which the space of the theatre is
addressed as space and not as an illusionary place. It is with this understanding
that Beckett was able to side step the notion of dramatic place to allow the
theatrical space to take precedence and [. . .] illuminate the power and presence of
that which is presumed empty. (550)
In reality, in none of Play, Not I or That Time (1975), do Beckett’s landscapes manifest any visible signs of human presence or even traces of a life that had existed in some remote past. The bare stage, typical of his short plays, isolates the voice in a space “emptied of all but the word”
(Tharu 92). It is as though the earth has sucked up all humanity and the sterility of the surrounding space is only fit for those disconnected from a whole and/or wholesome self. Unlike the sets we encounter in realistic representational theatre, in Beckett’s world, the stage cannot hold memory or echoes of anything that stretches beyond the unbearable “now” of the protagonists’ narrative. Steeped in non-descript stillness, his barren stage too, hankers for a vibrant image (whether visual or aural) that will animate it.
3.4. c. Movement
As with every other element of the mise-en-scène, Beckett is also extremely specific about the actors’ movement. Once again, blocking refuses to reflect a realistic or predictable sequence of
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the positions and postures that human beings normally assume in the course of an action; rather, the physical life of the actors is activated within a tight choreographic pattern, where all the elements of the mise-en-scène are inextricably linked to express the playwright’s view of the universe. In the play Quad (1982), labeled “A piece for four players, light and percussion”, one, then two, then three, then four figures appear in succession to describe a quadrangle to a rapid, polyrhythmic, percussion beat, and then depart in sequence (CSP 291). The play contains no dialogue, only four Players who traverse the perimetre and the diagonal of a square. Beckett defines the paths of each Player with absolute precision, analogous to that a computer programme and, as in a game, fully determines in advance the course to be taken by the players, as well as the demarcation of the rules. This fact alone magnifies the sense of inexorability which lies underneath the formalised movement. The Players rush towards what initially appears to be a collision point, but instead of achieving a climactic encounter, they start all over again and the pattern keeps repeating itself. What initially appears to be a comedic routine is gradually transformed into a determined march, poignantly echoing Winnie’s lamentation in Happy Days:
“What a curse, mobility” (46).
At the same time, movement cannot be separated from the text. Beckett insists that certain words and speech patterns can only be uttered in specific body positions and that certain lines are only produced from a specific physicality. For example, text and choreography collaborate closely in
Rockaby. Essentially, the rhythm of textual delivery is not simply adjusted to the movement of the rocking figure, but written into it. However, Beckett pieces together several other performance elements in favour of a total work of art. Lighting here is instrumental: when there is speech, the face is “slightly swaying in and out of light” (CSP 273); similarly, when Voice gives way to an echo and the rocking comes to rest, there is a “faint fade of light” (273). In fact, sound, movement and lighting work together in admirable synchronicity, aided by occasional
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touches of colour and shades in the playwright’s black and white canvas: W, sitting on a chair that is “pale wood highly polished to gleam when rocking” (273) wears a black evening gown, while her unkempt hair is grey and her face and hands are white. The correspondence of the visual to the audible image is so solid, that one seems unable to stand on its own without the other. This said, the language we hear not only offers us background exposition for the image we see, but describes it neatly and precisely, as well. The poetic form of the text matches the rocking movement of the protagonist in such a way that it is difficult to tell if it is the rhythm of the text that generates the rocking, or if the pattern of the rocking gives the particular poetic shape to the text, instead:
[. . .] A little like
Going to and fro
All eyes like herself
All sides
High and low
For another
Another like herself
A little like
Going to and fro
Till in the end
Close of a long day
To herself
Whom else
Time she stopped
Going to and fro
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Time she stopped
Time she stopped
[Together: echo of ‘time she stopped’, coming to rest of rock, faint fade of light.
Long pause].
W. More.
[Pause. Rock and voice together]
V. So in the end
Close of a long day. . . (CSP 276)
When the rocking momentarily stops, the voice (V) stops as well; it is only the woman’s (W) plaintive interjections that urge both rocking and the voice to keep going.
3.4. d. Costume
Not surprisingly, the description of costume in Beckett’s stage directions is also extremely specific, a reflection of the playwright’s fascination with otherworldly and grotesque images. In most cases, the figures that Beckett creates are dreary and devoid of individual characteristics, with their facial features often concealed. Once again, their nondescript-ness serves to highlight their trifling position in a meaningless universe. In the end, because Beckett’s world cannot nurture humanity, the function of the costumes is either to underline the uniformity and drabness, or the extraordinary un-naturalness of the figures. Here are only a few examples of the playwright’s attention to costume detail:
Come and Go
Costume
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Full-length coats, buttoned high, dull violet (Ru), dull red (Vi), dull yellow (Flo).
Drab nondescript hats with enough brim to shade faces. Apart from colour
differentiation three figures as alike as possible. Light shoes with rubber soles.
Hands made up to be as visible as possible. No rings apparent (CSP 196).
Not I
AUDITOR, downstage audience left, tall standing figure, sex undeterminable,
enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood, fully faintly lit.
(CSP 216)
Sometimes, as in Rockaby, Beckett wants the costumes to work together with lighting in certain ways:
Rockaby
W:
Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face.
White hands holding ends of armrests.
Costume
Black lacy high-necked evening gown. Long sleeves. Jet sequins to glitter when
rocking. Incongruous flimsy head-dress set askew with extravagant trimming to
catch light when rocking. (CSP 273)
Moreover, costume often functions as a structural element in the play, as in the case of Quad:
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Costumes
Gowns reaching to ground, cowls hiding faces. Each player has his particular
colour corresponding to his light. 1 white, 2 yellow, 3 blue, 4 red. All possible
costume combinations given. (CSP 292)
In similar fashion, in A Piece of Monologue, the Speaker in “white hair, white nightgown, white socks” (CSP 265) is more of an apparition than a fully fleshed individual, while Catastrophe offers another aspect of the organic function of costume. The autocratic Director exercises his power over Protagonist, by constantly dressing and undressing him (coat, hat, gloves) in order to achieve the desired aesthetic effect and impose his personal vision. Finally, what significantly adds to the overall alienating effect in Beckett’s plays, is the masterful use of make-up, which produces white faces, ghostly, sexless and of no particular age: characteristically in Play, the faces are “so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns” (CSP 147).
3.5. Structure and Characterisation
In Beckett’s later drama, form often fills in for plot and exposition. Particularly in terms of the latter, detailed stage directions leave little room for questions concerning background information. Evidently, Aristotelian rules on dramatic structure, regarding elements of exposition inherent in the dialogue (such as rising action, reversals, recognition, climax, and denouement) could not be further removed from Beckett’s modernist drama. Rather, we are now obliged to “unearth” any kind of referential clue mostly in the stage directions, which vastly determine the progression of dramatic action, a role traditionally held by dialogue. And if we were to compare the whole set of dramaturgical principles expressed by Aristotle and Beckett,
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we should not fail to address the question of characterisation, particularly vis-à-vis Beckett’s iconoclastic obliteration of psychology. Suffice it to say that as we move further and further inside Beckett’s non-eschatological writing we notice that the presence of psychologically defined characters becomes less and less apparent or relevant. Arguably:
In the later plays the strategies that Beckett employs to diminish the presence of
his character become more schematic -to the point when the words that form the
text are removed from the actor and presented independently as a recitation to
which he or she listens [. . .] Beckett’s characters seem trapped both within some
defined space and within these verbal structures that possess their minds. (Lyons
300)
And while in more traditional forms of drama, elements of structure such as exposition are often revealed in the dialogue or in its underlying subtext or both, Beckett relies on the juxtaposition and/ or conflict of the main dramatic character and his/ her abstracted double in order to expose a story well hidden in the past and in constant battle with the character’s now. Sometimes, this double takes the shape of the other dissociated half of one’s self, or of a complementary “other” in the form of a Voice, a tape recorder or a Mouth. In Footfalls, for instance, the reader/ spectator witnesses a dialogue between a dramatic character, May (M) and her mother’s voice
(V). Although it is unclear whether what we see and what we hear actually refers to the characters’ own past or to sheer bits and pieces taken from other people’s personal histories,
Beckett establishes a basic plot structure based on the encounter of May with V, without however specifying if this encounter is experienced, remembered, or manufactured. It is in this spirit that Enoch Brater talks about a “compensatory formal coherence” provided by the
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playwright, which replaces the easy apprehension of plot summary (Brater 53). Here is a telling excerpt from Footfalls:
M. What age am I now?
V. And I? [Pause. No louder]. And I?
M. Ninety.
V. So much?
M. Eighty-nine, ninety.
V. I had you late. [Pause]. In life. [Pause]. Forgive me again. [Pause. No louder].
Forgive me again.
[M resumes pacing. After one length halts facing front at L. Pause.]
M. What age am I now?
V. In your forties.
M. So little?
V. I’m afraid so. (CSP 240)
Along these lines, in exploring issues of subjectivity and embodiedness in Beckett’s work,
Stanton Garner argues:
By the time of such late works as Not I (1972), Footfalls (1976) and What Where
(1983), the body is almost a ghost of itself, reduced and decentred in the minimal
space it has left, doubled by words that both address and disown it. Invaded on all
sides by an irremediable absence, its very presence to itself is no longer secure
[. . .] From the physical harshness of Godot [. . .] to the simultaneously bodied
and disembodied spaces of the late plays, Beckett’s drama explores the instability
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between a profound material inherence in the physical body and a corresponding
alienation, and it dramatises the subject’s futile pursuit of any means for
overcoming its own non-coincidence. (29, 31)
This sense of alienation that Gardner impresses is further reinforced by Beckett’s masterly control of time. A primary concern in matters of exposition, the concept of a well-defined time- frame as attacked by Beckett, has informed the daring choices of contemporary auteurs who distort, accelerate, or annihilate time to undermine smooth representation. Accordingly, there are several examples of directors like Robert Wilson, Polish auteur Krzysztof Warlikowski,
Complicité’s Simon McBurney, or Wooster Group’s Liz LeCompte, who manipulate dramatic time to stimulate in their audience a feeling of fluctuating, unstable and yet mesmerising realities. Examples of such auteur strategies will be adequately illustrated in Chapter 5. It is important however to trace some of these strategies back to Beckett: rather than exposing issues of historical time in the characters’ lives (that is, of time that has been known to have existed and can be therefore accounted for), Beckett’s dramas oscillate between a timeless past and a flexible present, both stretching beyond conventional measures of temporality and viability.
Dramatic characters compete against stage abstractions that also carry a story within them; consequently, the battle of literature with live performance produces a different kind of structure, where exposition often lies at the mercy of the spectator’s bridging the gap between the two. In Rockaby, for example, the rocking figure in the chair urges her own recorded voice to tell her story, always interjecting with the imperative “more” at well-timed moments.
Repetition, too, constitutes one of the most effective mechanisms that facilitate exposition in the frequently delirious narratives of Beckett’s characters. Constantly referring back to specific parts of a story, as well as repeating key words and phrases, Beckett accentuates the importance of
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one theme over another and directs our attention accordingly. Therefore, in Not I, underneath the main narrative of Mouth reporting a nameless woman’s inability for speech is the story of an infant’s abandonment. This keeps coming back as a repeated motif in Mouth’s story, opening the play and featuring throughout it:
MOUTH: . . . out…into this world…this world…tiny little thing…before its
time…in a godfor-…what?…girl?..yes…tiny little girl…godforsaken hole
called…called…no matter…parents unknown…unheard of…he having
vanished…thin air…no sooner buttoned up his breeches…she similarly…eight
months later…almost to the tick…so not love…spared that…no love such as
normally vented on the…speechless infant…(CSP 216)
Further down in the play, after ‘pause and movement 3’:
[MOUTH]…Something she had to…had to …tell…tiny little thing…before its
time…godforsaken hole…no love…spared that…speechless all her days… (221)
And later on, after ‘pause and movement 4’:
[MOUTH]…tiny little thing…out before its time…godforsaken hole…no
love…spared that…speechless all her days…(222)
Similar patterns of repetition exist in Rockaby, A Piece of Monologue and Ohio Impromptu.
They all help establish a sense of unified story that one is encouraged to follow, even if this sense is based more on the spectator’s eagerness to catch the thread of a basic plot, rather than on an actual line of action.
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3.6. The sensory image
When directing his plays, Beckett encouraged his actors to visualise every action of their characters. “Know precisely in what direction they are speaking”, he urged them. “Know the pauses” (qtd in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 15).
Fundamentally, for Beckett, the sensory image lies at the center of theatre praxis, affecting sight, hearing and intellect. Visual representation is just as important, if not more significant than verbal communication, the one sometimes supporting and complementing, other times contrasting and antagonising the other. Thus in his short plays, verbal text exists in fragments, pitted against the stark visuals of barren landscapes, (as in the mime Act Without Words I
[1956]), geometric configurations (as in Quad [1981]), or singular forms (as in Not I). In these plays, the jarring junction of logos and image generates multi-layered texts that challenge our faculties of perception, and simultaneously reflect the writer’s profound understanding of the audience’s processes of reception.
It is Beckett’s visual sensibilities that inform his process of creating through words in motion a sustained image. As argued, the centrality of the image is primarily reflected in the minimal landscapes of his plays, bare, abstract and highly suggestive, an endless horizon of visual possibilities, allowing the verbal text to come to life. These dramatic landscapes, frequently injected with technological potential, demonstrate an intense fascination with visual composition and often resemble paintings, whether symbolist (as in Come and Go, [1965] and What Where
[1983]) or purely surreal (as in Not I). Yet, however Beckett composes his images, the result is always at the very least dramatic. Like a visual artist, he is meticulous with the materials and techniques he applies on his canvas. In Play, as already described, the dominant image is that of three heads emerging out of three large urns, the rest of the bodies unexposed and immobile
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throughout; beyond any doubt, a uniquely original comment on the disconnected-ness of an individual trapped within a hostile universe. Perhaps less alarming, but equally sensational is the single image of the rocking figure in Rockaby (1980). Dressed in formal costume and lit from different angles throughout the play, the woman (W) may remind us of a Baroque portrait, immersed as she is in chiaroscuro cadence. Furthermore, as in many of Beckett’s late plays, here, too, text has been choreographed in detail, in order for the dramatic conceit of rocking to embrace a broader sensory image.
Sometimes, however, the effect is more than simply painterly. Not I takes place in a pitch black space lit only by a single beam of light, which illuminates just the actress’s mouth. The mouth stands on its own, uttering a monologue of fragmented sentences and making a visual statement on the dismemberment of the self, the dislocated body. The very fact that the protagonist is a mouth, a purely visual element, is telling; accepting a mouth as the unorthodox focus of the play pre-disposes us to think of the text in staging terms. At the same time, any hint of characterisation is entirely annihilated, precisely because you cannot attribute psychological intentions to a compositional element.
Significantly, visual metaphors are predominantly employed to represent the subject’s displaced identity. In effect, preoccupied with putting forth on stage ravishing icons of dissociation, the playwright never ceases to underline his special interest in the visual impact of the plays, as opposed to the intellectual understanding and appreciation of plot and subject-matter: “I am not un-duly-concerned with intelligibility”, Beckett told actress Jessica Tandy, who played Mouth in the Alan Schneider New York premiere of Not I in 1972. And he added characteristically: “I hope this piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect” (qtd in McMillan and
Fehsenfeld 15).
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Indeed, living up to his promises, Beckett constantly tests his audience’s tenacity, balancing out sound and visual stimulation so that the spectators’ ears and eyes are never given a rest. In Not I, he manipulates both sight and hearing: while Mouth speaks, Auditor hears, and audience sees,
Beckett makes sure we never lose track of the point where sound and image converge. This
“anguish of perceivedness”, to use Beckett’s term (Film, CSP 163) is experienced directly by
Beckett’s audience. In Enoch Brater’s words: “As Mouth talks about fixing something with her eye, ‘lest it elude her,’ this is precisely the audience’s visual limitation in focusing the lenses of its own eyes on the minimal image of Mouth” (Brater 20). Since the spectator has trouble locating the physical presence of Mouth, he/she is actually partly deprived of the image; similarly, it is equally challenging to follow Mouth’s torrential monologue and it is no surprise that certain words will in fact elude us. At the same time, “as members of this audience we wonder how the dialogue is carried on. Auditor is “practically speechless”, and Mouth is only lips, teeth, and tongue, not, as far as we can see, eye or ear” (21).
The image-metaphor in Not I is particularly complex, as all of the speaker’s three sensory organs
(eyes, ears and mouth) are dynamically involved in the action, each offering a different kind of stimulus to the spectators. Fundamentally, the convergence of “textual” and “performance” languages not only brings a tension in the dramatic action of the play, but also forces the reader/ spectator to actively participate in all aspects of the play’s making, in order to form his/ her own interpretation. And just as textual language is reinforced and enriched by evocative stage images, in the same way visual images need the words that generate and support their formation.
This is the case with A Piece of Monologue (1979), in which Speaker describes the props we see and through his words indeed we gradually expect these objects to materialise in front of our eyes, and transform from static images into dynamic properties of action:
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Takes off globe and disappears. Reappears empty. Takes off chimney. Two hands
and chimney in light of spill. Spill to wick. Chimney back on. Hand with spill
disappears. Second hand appears. Chimney alone in gloom. Glimmer of brass
bedrail. (CSP 267)
Ironically in A Piece of Monologue, visual considerations are not just overtly addressed in the stage images Beckett sets up, but also unfold in the dialogue, simultaneously facilitating exposition. In fact, Speaker tells his story in visual terms. It is language that forms the pictures as word-scapes and as is true in all performance, these take place in the present tense, the inexorable, irredeemable “now”. Just like the images and the action, the props are also generated and executed via language:
In the light of spill faintly the hand and milkwhite globe. Then second hand. In
light of spill. Takes off globe and disappears. Reappears empty. Takes off
chimney. Two hands and chimney in light of spill. Spill to wick. Chimney back
on. Hand with spill disappears. Second hand appears. Chimney alone in gloom.
Hand appears with globe. Globe back on. (CSP 267)
Moreover, sensory images are created by combining and/ or contrasting visuals with sound, like in Footfalls, where sound goes hand-in-hand with movement and movement itself determines the overall visual effect of the stage picture, as was earlier on illustrated with Rockaby.
Specifically, in Footfalls, choreography and sound-score are closely interconnected through a tight rhythmic pattern which dictates the words and sounds that should accompany the footsteps.
Even though the choreographic pattern of the play is compelling in itself, Beckett also wants to satisfy our sense of hearing. Not only is the voice (V) haunting in the recitation of its story; the sound-scape of steps, chimes and echoes reinforces the play’s dramatic effect. In the opening
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stage directions Beckett describes the steps as “clearly audible rhythmic tread” (239). He also makes reference to the voices “both low and slow throughout” (239), while he also incorporates a “faint single chime” and “pause as echoes die” (239). Further, May’s pacing makes a strong visual image, but it is in relation to the actual sound of the steps, the compulsive speech of V and the chiming accompanying the action, that this image achieves greater resonance. Once more, the audience’s attention is shifted from one sensory source to another.
Nevertheless, the dominant image remains aural. Sound is framed, rather than antagonised by the visual impact of May’s pacing. In addition, the sound of chimes, echoes and the shuffling of
May’s feet are all enhanced by lyrical lighting and a tight choreography. Thus, the uncanny sound of footsteps, as imagined by the reader and perceived by the audience, opens up to an infinite time, a metaphysical topos of endless vagrancy.
Incorporating performance in his drama, Beckett achieves a kind of stage poetry that would be hard to exist or be sustained through verbal language and literary form, alone. As the sensory image establishes its concrete physical entity, a new dramatic form beyond the abstract signification of the word begins to emerge. Defying all genre classifications, ironically Beckett’s performance texts may partly justify actress Jessica Tandy’s semi-comedic view of Beckett’s drama: “you may find nothing in it, but I suspect you will never forget it” (Brater 21).
3.7. Technology
Beckett’s interest in combining different art forms to create a new language for his plays also led him to a sophisticated involvement with stage machinery: on the simplest level, technology took the shape of the spotlight that determined the action and speech of characters in Play; it also became the simple mechanical equipment for the movement in and out of the props in Act
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Without Words I and the mechanical movement of the rocker in Rockaby. In a more sophisticated metaphor yet, it was embodied in the tape-recorder controlling memory and time in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Stretching the boundaries of dramatic form to thus far unimaginable extremes, Beckett employed technology (new and old) as yet another powerful tool in the service of experimentation. In this respect, the pivotal use of technology in his late plays, imaginatively supportng and enhancing viable stage images, has influenced the multi- media work of established auteurs such as LeCompte, Sellars and McBurney, as well as that of smaller theatre companies, like the New York -based Ridge Theatre.72
The use of the tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape is perhaps the most celebrated example of
Beckett’s manipulation of the dramaturgical potential of technology. Similarly, in the radio play
Cascando (1961) an Opener “opens” and “closes” two characters: Voice desperately promises
“this time” to tell a story he/she can finish, while Music also struggles to create a finished composition. In a way, Cascando dramatises an existential quest for resolution. The interplay of the three “characters”, whereby when instructed by Opener, Voice begins mid-sentence, is reminiscent of Krapp’s taped diary entries:
OPENER: [With VOICE.] And I close.
[Silence.]
I open the other.
72 Ridge Theatre is an avant-garde theatre company based in downtown New York. Founded by artistic director Bob McGrath and visual artist Laurie Olinder, the Ridge has staged theatre, opera and new music performances at venues such as the American Repertory Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Centre, among others. In the company’s words, “Ridge productions are epic visual and aural works that typically position performers within film and video projections, redefining traditional theatrical boundaries.”
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MUSIC:……………………………….
OPENER: [With MUSIC.] And I close. (CSP 137)
Technology is also present in the small megaphone in What Where (1983), functioning purely as an exposition device.
Ultimately, technology adds another dimension to the dramatic form, because it introduces the element of the non-human into live action, reinforcing the sense of alienation that penetrates the
Beckettian universe. Characteristically, Linda Ben-Zvi argues that “what technology can do is to provide one more way of calling attention to ‘the mess’ by allowing chaos into art and not trying to quell or explain it –Beckett’s way of ‘failing better’ in the contemporary world” (486).
Moreover, technology also provides the means to control the mechanics of memory and time, manipulated at will by the playwright-director. At the same time, mechanical devices frame the action, signalling the shift from present to past time. Thus, in Krapp’s Last Tape, old Krapp listens disdainfully to his earlier self recorded in several tapes, choosing to intervene by either rewinding the tape at specific moments, or suspending the recorded narrative altogether:
TAPE: -back on the year that is gone, with what I hope is perhaps a glint of the
old eye to come, there is of course the house on the canal where mother lay a-
dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity [KRAPP gives a start] and the –
[KRAPP switches off, winds back tape a little, bends his ear closer to machine,
switches on] –a-dying, after her long viduity, and the – [KRAPP switches off,
raises his head, stares blankly before him. His lips move in the syllables of
‘viduity’. No sound…] (59)
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Yet, temporality and memory, initially manipulated through recording devices, are later on controlled by less realistic means, and heavy, material apparatus such as the dramatically and dramaturgically awkward recording machines are replaced by more abstract forms of memory signifiers. In effect, cumbersome realistic devices eventually disappear from Beckett’s writing, in favour of the human voice, which is granted character and stage presence. This voice, freestanding in its separation from the human body, is also able to express the subject’s immersion into the paths of consciousness. As theatrical form increasingly looks inwards towards greater depth and abstraction, Beckett explores the physicality of the inner voice, against which the conventional “dramatic” persona is pitted. We have but barely touched upon the issue of the dismembered body in Not I, where the Auditor remains silent, confronted by the terrifying presence of Mouth. In similar ways, the central image of the divided self in Rockaby is on the one hand expressed in the split between the voice (V) and the body (W) of the same person; yet, the most dramatic effect is achieved thanks to the interplay of recorded and live voice. In That Time, this disconnection is manifest in the triple split in the Listener’s consciousness, as in the stage directions, Beckett introduces us to Listener’s face and to “Voices
A B C” that are “his own coming to him from both sides and above” (CSP 228).
Last but not least, it was Beckett’s on-going interest in integrating filmmaking and television strategies to drama that led to the writing of texts like A Piece of Monologue and Ohio
Impromptu, in which the inexorable rhythm and repetition of sounds and images structure the verbal texts of Speaker and Reader, respectively. Despite the lack of a recorded voice, the actors’ voice follows a strict and precise rhythmical pattern.
Ultimately, poetry and drama merge in Beckett’s text, creating new forms of theatre that feature conventions of their own. As the plays become shorter and shorter, the sensory image dominates
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the dramatic landscape of the page, ousting the word to a less domineering position. Beckett’s acquired sense of minimalism guarantees that nothing less than absolutely necessary will enter his pages, his essentialist attitude bearingthe test of performance.
Embodying Artaud’s ideal of the archetypical auteur, as well as confirming it as a viable possibility, Beckett provides a perfect writer/director composite, paving the way for iconoclastic experiments in dramatic writing and in performance forms, relentlessly generating sensory images that continue to stimulate our perception. Among other things, the following three chapters explore some of the tremendous influence of Beckett’s art in contemporary auteur work and further delve into questions of textual authorship and of the ethics of directing, which
Beckett’s theatre has repeatedly given voice to.
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4. AUTEUR PRACTICE
Directors’ Method
4.1.1. Creating an autonomous universe on stage:
Self-collaboration, recycling, and Gesamtkunstwerk
Strongly influenced by the aesthetic and philosophy both of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and
Beckett’s performance writing, and following course on the early twentieth century experiments in technique, as well as in form, directors from the 1960s onwards responded to what Hungarian literary critic Péter Szondi described as “the crisis of drama”, which manifested itself in an
“increasing tension between the formal requirements of Aristotelian drama and the demands of modern “epic” social themes which could no longer be contained by this form” (qtd in Lehmann
2). This chapter examines the different ways in which theatre auteurs, especially from the mid-
1980s on furthered and perfected the methods and discoveries of pioneers like Jarry, Craig,
Meyerhold, Appia, Stanislavski, Piscator and Brecht, conscious that a more abstract/formalist theatre (as far as the performance’s conception, design and acting style are concerned) was gradually becoming a valid reality in itself. Having acquired confidence in this shifting of emphasis from mimetic, plot-driven drama to the process of an ever-fluid image-based performance where various media, textualities, cultures and styles combine and collide, avant- garde directors in Europe and the U.S.A. have been developing their own unique sense of style, contributing to the firm establishment of auteur theatre in the 1980s and 1990s.
Some of these directors’ methods, pursuits and strategies in both rehearsal and performance will be explored schematically in the following sections; yet, the important point of focus here is that
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all these artists, elements of whose process this study attempts to address, share a common impulse, namely to reconsider the notion of text as a dynamic field of interaction where playwrights, directors, actors, designers and spectators come together creatively, co-authoring the event of performance. Creative “loans” are naturally a given in this process of interaction, and many auteurs share similar strategies and theatre languages to create an autonomous world on stage, as will be highlighted in the next chapter. However, as New York Times critic Frank
Rich argues in “Auteur Directors Bring New Life to Theatre”, [even though these] “directors’ devices sometimes overlap, [. . . ] the visions they offer, however elaborate, are not decorative or illustrative –they transport the audience into states of mind rather than real places.”
For one thing, auteur fascination with process and form renders directors’ work susceptible to highly solipsistic creations. What better medium for an auteur than self-referential theatre, drawing attention to the act of self-genesis? A sense of solipsism inevitably informs the process of self-collaboration73, which is often a trademark of auteur work. In current theatre practice examples of directors writing their own texts, as is Richard Foreman, artistic director of the
Ontological-Hysterical Theatre in New York, or American avant-garde auteur Richard Maxwell with The New York City Players, abound. While Foreman’s works are mostly self-referential comments on the process of writing and often “wittily deconstruct themselves in the very process of their enunciation” (Vanden Heuvel 1994: 50), Maxwell’s productions tightly place his writer’s textual ellipsis within an urban space constructed through his director’s eye and ear for the contemporary. In both these artists’ work, control of the process is crucial. A similar need for control of the overall artistic outcome has led self-termed dramatists like the British writer
Howard Barker to also direct their own stage-minded, conspicuously stylised pieces. Together with his company, The Wrestling School, Barker, also a visual artist and a theorist, has written,
73 Naturally, Beckett is a prototype of a “self-collaborating” artist.
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broadcasted and produced over a hundred plays, uncompromisingly mixing images of explosive violence, passion, history and current politics in his performances and viewing each one of them as a forum for public debate, where audiences are in constant struggle to keep up with the frenetic pace of his writing, as well as the complexity of his stage images.
In general terms, the variations of self-collaboration are plenty, ranging from short performance acts to self-directed solos. Sometimes, the process of creation underpins the actuality of the play, disrupting the flow of the narrative and consequently deconstructing the illusion of totality. In this self-reflexive process, Brechtian principles of distancing prevail. As Pavis illustrates, “there is always a moment at which the performance indicates how it is constructed (and therefore deconstructed), an element which at the same time discourages any referential allusion to the outside world” (Pavis 1992: 100). However, the obsessive deliberateness of this attack on logic and meaning is also a symptom of directorial insecurity: often, the random selection of disruptive and distracting elements rather than provide the desired critical distance between the spectator and the spectacle, altogether disengages the audience from the process of appreciating the performance. In this respect, the construction on stage of an autonomous universe adhering to its self-determined rules can only achieve clarity and meaning if it is based upon the director’s conception of some world, even if fictitious, or illusory. Surely, it is up to the auteur to empathetically engage or not his/ her audiences. Nevertheless, there needs always be an inner core of structure in the heart of the theatre event, an indication that the desired aesthetic distance is meaningfully preventing identification with something that is in fact, genuine and truthful.
You can only refuse to engage with something that actually exists.
Collaborating with himself for several years, Richard Foreman has often been seen as the archetypical auteur in terms of redefining the relationship between playwright and director. In
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the earlier plays, “Foreman the director” consciously served “Foreman the playwright”: “The sets were extremely minimal [. . .] I built everything. But I added no decoration”, Forman explains (1992: 71). Later on however, in more recent productions like Paradise (Hotel Fuck)
[1998], Permanent Brain Damage (1996) and Pearls for Pigs (1997) Foreman resolutely altered his previously minimal stagings, creating ebullient environments that made his directorial resourcefulness soar up high and let the director-designer take over. Nevertheless, the relationship between writing and directing in his work remained ultimately one of mutual
“respect”, with writing informing his stage choices and directing often being an extension of his writing. In fact, at one point Foreman claimed that his staging functioned “not as an attempt to
CONVINCE the audience of the play’s reality or verisimilitude [. . .] but rather [as] an effort to rewrite the text back into manuscript. It is a CONTINUATION of my writing process”
(Foreman 1977: 21, emphasis original).
In quite parallel ways, Robert Wilson’s production of Hamlet (1995) could be seen as the result of a director-auteur’s perfectly synchronised control of dramaturgy, staging, design and acting.
Wilson worked with the text adapted by Wolfgang Weins, and performed Hamlet as a monologue in 15 scenes. The ingenious conception of Wilson’s solo not only constituted the director the über-writer and performer of the piece, who additionally stages and designs it, but ironically introduced the character of Hamlet as an omni-powerful auteur as well, incorporating all aspects of performance into his role. Hence Hamlet-the character spoke all other characters’ lines, assuming Claudius’, Polonius’ and Ophelia’s personas. In discussing the conceptual basis of his solo adaptation in the New York Times article “‘Hamlet’ as Autobiography, Spoken in
Reflective Voice” (1995), Wilson reveals:
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In rethinking the text as a monologue -- trying to find the device where Hamlet
could speak the words of other characters -- I thought to do it as a flashback. So it
begins seconds before he dies and ends with his last speech. [ . . . ] It’s all in a
sense in his mind, so it’s a monologue. In this one split second before he dies, one
sees the whole play, the whole life. So we can see him in many different ways, as
a child, or a boy; reflecting on an older person and thus being an older person;
reflecting on a woman and being a woman; being a man.
Reinforcing his authorial function by graphically jotting down his thoughts and plans in a notebook as Hamlet, Wilson proves the ultimate auteur of his own show, responsible for staging scenes, selecting costumes and props, devising and supervising the solo, as if he were effectively the orchestrator of a large symphonic piece. Naturally, in such all-inclusive self-collaboration, the authorship of the performance text is a fascinating matter; even when an auteur stages a pre- existing text, the final performance carries with it his/her mark, validating itself as the director’s piece.74
Evidently, the construction of an autonomous world on stage, liberated both from the binding hold of a self-proclaimed “outside reality” and the “only acceptable reality” of the literary text, has been a constant pursuit in auteur work. In his theory of “Pure Form”, Polish playwright and theorist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) professed the autonomy of the stage world, a world functioning merely according to its own laws of internal composition. Rejecting all sense of mimesis in art, the theatre of “pure form” should only be regarded (and thus decoded) as a fiction constructed exclusively out if its formal elements.
74 [“Create”] thus, is the proper word, for any Wilson production of a text by someone other than himself is still a Wilson work: not only does he direct, design and light the productions, he also reshapes the original text into something that counts as both his and the author’s. (John Rockwell in “Robert Wilson Tackles the French Revolution.” New York Times 3 Nov. 1992.) See also Chapter 6.
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Consistent to the theory of Pure Form is the understanding that each theatre event has its own logic and that part of the director’s job is to organise for and communicate to the spectator the rules that govern it. At the same time, “reality” in art, as Polish auteur Tadeusz Kantor (1915-
1990) argues, “can only be ‘used’”:
Making use of reality
In art
Signifies
An annexation of reality. […]
During this process,
Reality transgresses
Its own boundary
And moves in the direction of the
‘impossible.’ (Kantor 1993: 96-7)
In this spirit, rather than “annexing reality”, directors- auteurs concentrate on the reality of the present moment, on the “presence” of the now which enters the dramatic form, causing a series of collisions. For this reason, the revised sense of the “real” has become a seminal metaphor particularly in projects of self-collaboration: for example, Foreman “writes in” his own directing vision of the text, integrating scenic elements, the way Beckett did in his later drama, as has been highlighted in the previous chapter.
Indeed, at times self-conscious and/or self-indulgent, Foreman’s writing produces “staged performances” rather than dramatic plays, which almost “look back” to what the writer has created, rather than forward to an opening up of the work to a broader concept. In essence,
Foreman’s writing for the stage constantly and deliberately undermines itself, sabotaging the
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possibility of meaning; even though the text resists the lure of conventional structure, initially capturing the audience’s attention, one finds it difficult to remain engaged for too long, for the additional reason that Foreman frequently “disrupts any sense of centre by the presentation of simultaneous and irreconcilable focuses” (Kaye 54). Attacks on sense and continuity, dispersal and fragmentation of dialogue, the performers’ attention to the audience rather than to each other, all reinforce the self-reflexive, if sometimes fragile nature of the performance text.
Moreover, self-collaboration and the struggle for artistic autonomy are frequently accompanied by a self-referential, almost incestuous recycling of themes and techniques, where artistic methods as well as products are processed into new configurations, a constant strategy in the work of Foreman, as well as in the productions of The Wooster Group, Wilson, Suzuki and
Terzopoulos, to name but a few. Thus, in auteur collage, texts, media, traditions and genres are rubbed together in countless combinations. It was French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who had repeatedly spoken of “recycling” as a vital aspect of contemporary culture, in discussing people’s need to be professionally updated. The recycling metaphor in the theatre suggests that besides the blending of compositional materials, namely, of images, sounds, pieces of text and music, one is immediately struck by the postmodern pastiche of techniques and methods, often so deliberate, to the effect that incongruity becomes a matter and element of style.
Along these lines, manipulating the relationship of object to its scenic environment, Polish director Tadeusz Kantor challenges conventional representation: objects are recycled, stripped of their representational potential and re-articulating “their functions in relationships which were accidentally formed and which could not be anticipated according to any pre-given norms”
(Kobialka in Mitter and Shevtsova 70). As such, ready-made elements like environments or objects are “incorporated into artistic activity” (70), juxtaposed in dynamic relationships and
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forming fascinating collages that carry history and memory within them. For example, Today is my Birthday (1990) was bombarded with basic, as well as marginal objects and people from
Kantor’s space of imagination/memory: paintings, objects, characters from past productions and people paraded on stage, creating a world where the distinction between illusion and fantasy was nearly impossible.
Like Kantor, Foreman uses recycling and collage in an attempt to illuminate the fraught relationship between illusion and reality. However, taking the technique of collage a step further, he recycles not only images and framing devices like variegated strings, collagist detail, or lines of force, but also titles, such as My Head was a Sledgehammer (1994) and I’ve got the Shakes
(1995), as well as intellectual considerations and directorial strategies, like presentational acting, constant interruption, Brechtian distancing through blinding lights, buzzers and musical fragmentation.
Similarly, both recycling and collage have provided a strong structural axis to Anne Bogart’s
SITI Company, co-founded with Tadashi Suzuki in 1992 in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Dance-theatre and opera pieces (for example, Seven Deadly Sins and Lilith at the New York City
Opera, in 1997 and 2001, respectively) feature together with new works composed in collaboration with contemporary playwrights, such as avant-garde writer Charles Mee75; or with devised works (as was the film-industry inspired production of American Silents in 1997), adaptations of classical texts and original collage pieces woven out of texts by a single playwright, mostly created by members of the SITI Company. At the same time, biography constitutes a valid framework for Bogart’s devised work, as manifest in her staging of pieces revolving around major contemporary cultural figures, like Andy Warhol (Culture of Desire,
75 See Chapter 1.
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1998) and Robert Wilson (Bob, 1998), as well as monumental personalities like Virginia Woolf
(Room, 2002), Gertrude Stein (Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving, 1999) and Orson
Welles (War of the Worlds, 2000).
However, nowhere is the science of generating creative collisions through collage more powerfully conquered than in the work of the Wooster Group, whose members also incorporate principles of film editing into their process. Having accumulated and recycled a vast volume of material, such as the company’s inside stories and jokes, dance movements and interesting mistakes, the company browses through it and adjusts it to the needs of each show. Yet, Wooster
Group’s director Liz LeCompte refuses to use this material in ways that will facilitate the manufacturing of unified mimetic narratives; rather, the precise use of contrast constantly underpins the assimilation of collage pieces into a seamless composition, as can be noticed in the group’s recent production of Hamlet (2007), where a filmed version of Richard Burton’s
Hamlet (1964) provides the background to the live action on stage. In this case, juxtaposition rather than integration of found elements, works counter to the functional principles of collage, giving the term a new significance, divorced from the philosophy of reflecting some totality, no matter how fragile or tentative that may be.
In such productions, the all-embracing eclecticism that marks the stylistic outcome of the collage process comes as no surprise; nor does in fact the non-committal reflection on our hybridised cultural consciousness that this process produces. In quite a singular manner,
Mnouchkine, to bring another xample, borrows from the Orient the presentational and distancing elements of movement, costume, mask and make-up, which add a different sensibility to her narratives, mostly derived from the Western literary canon and history. In her exploration of remote cultures Mnouchkine is actually very close to Artaud’s appreciation of non-Western
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forms of theatre as the only alternative to a word-dominated society. Her imagination having been inoculated with the theatricality of Asian performance, she finds no difficulty in merging classical Western texts with acting techniques from India (Kathakali), as notably, in her adaptation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Les Atrides (1991). Indeed, her research on Asian forms back in the 1960s secured for her a solid point of reference in her later work. In this respect, her recent productions remain imagistic hybrids mixing East and West, languages and textures, which transform contexts and cultures.
In similar fashion, the mixture of global acting idioms and performance genres is equally inspired in the highly idiosyncratic experiments of the Wooster Group, whose wide range of materials stretches from vaudeville and black minstrelsy in The Emperor Jones (1998) and the
Hairy Ape (1997), to digital technology and Japanese costume and movement.
However, it is mainly Robert Wilson who represents the archetypical figure of the eclectic artist par excellence and the claim that in his theatre “anything goes” is really no exaggeration. Thus, minimalist design combines with Expressionistic extravagance, while superbly conceived
Symbolism alternates with Surrealist imagery. Quite uniquely, postmodern choreography and
Asian acting techniques such as Kabuki and Butoh are set against pop-culture imagery. A prime example of auteur directing, Wilson’s collaboration with composer Philip Glass, Einstein on the
Beach (1976), is a marked case of how the creative amalgamation of disparate styles constitutes a new style in itself, held together by Wilson’s breath-taking imagination.
At the same time, if outside reality can only be used as yet another element of composition on stage, the vast territory of dream has provided fertile ground for auteur formal and thematic experimentation. Seeking a freedom that remains independent of dramatic cause-and-effect logic, directors have also borrowed from the extensive techniques of Expressionism and
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Surrealism, by delving deep into the world of the unconscious for inspiration. Given that our subconscious mind works alongside, counter to or beneath our conscious mind, auteurs actually enter the landscape of dreams and the unconscious “through the back door”, following the example of Artaud, Jarry and Apollinaire, to name but a few, whose contribution was discussed in the Introduction, as well as in Chapters 1 and 2. It is in this light that Wooster Group’s Liz
LeCompte describes her own directing as a process for framing people’s dreams about themselves: “I hook into people’s dreams about themselves. I make a frame for them. I get to know them” (qtd in Kramer 52).
In effect, dream structures often define performance structure, as in Wilson’s work, which de- hierarchises both images and verbal text according to the non-discursive logic of dreams. At the same time, the most imaginative auteurs make use of the ever-shifting angles of the sub- conscious to alter our perception of events. Running on a similar track, the use of symbols on stage creates an environment of shared understanding; because symbols are the property of all, a common language, they do in fact provide generous access into the intuitive understanding of the material in hand and therefore constitute invaluable elements in the semiology of the mise- en-scène. To an extent, symbols represent the emotions and instincts which are hidden or repressed and are stored in the unconscious mind, where they reside until some stimulus brings them to consciousness. The observation that archetypes and primordial images are specific forms and pictorial relationships not only consistently appearing in all ages and in all latitudes, but also haunting people’s dreams and fantasies, had already led Carl Jung76 in the wake of the twentieth century to theorise on the existence of a collective unconsciousness – the sum of all experiences that the human race acquired in its phylogenetic development. Jung claimed that it is in the collective unconscious that these symbols’ meaning has been inscribed. Putting this
76 See also Chapter 1.
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theory to test, auteurs manipulate the emotional resonance of archetypes, attempting to forge an access-way into psychological states, as well as a strong experiential journey for the spectator.
This said, the process of stimulating associations via a less recognisable route than recourse to archetypes, is a much more evasive, complex and ultimately rewarding mechanism: in some ways it relies on the gradual, as opposed to instant, gratification of the spectators’ senses, in effect, on the director’s triggering inside the spectator a personal connectedness to an image, a thought, or a phrase that may or may not have been also personal to the auteur upon its inception.
In practice, auteurism proposes a new model of structuring the imagination of the artist and redirecting the perceiving powers of the audience. Evidentlyy, a key element in this process is the issue of freedom: this is freedom from submission to expected norms and surprise-proof narratives. The disengagement of art from the necessity to rely on external reality generates performances that are built out of separate nucleuses of meaning and intensity and which render the spectator open to multiple perceptions. In this train of thought, Russian formalist critic
Victor Shklovsky, instigator of the concept of defamiliarisation in literature, already in 1917 shared his conception of art in his landmark essay “Art as Technique”:
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and
not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to
make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception
because the process of perception is aesthetic and in itself must be prolonged. Art
is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.
(Qtd in Wilcox 2000:80)
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For one thing, the use of collage, montage and recycling and the manipulation of technology to render a mediated version of reality, together with an attempt to access the unconscious (first manifest in the structures of Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism), prevent our perception from comfortably resting on familiar and expected patterns. On the other hand, the democratic employment in performance of different genres of literature and the arts has resulted in a changed notion of perception on the whole. In more than one ways, perception is frequently
“cracked open”, allowing directors to creep inside its crevices. Thus, the spectator’s contemplation of the performance lies in the slow absorption of image and meaning and the adamant resistance to technological speed, as will be debated in the next chapter on the languages of the stage. Furthermore, because it is impossible to take in the multiple signs of performance at once (as a rule organised in extremely complex ways), the spectator is discouraged from processing the perceived signs instantaneously, but is instead prompted to
“postpone the production of meaning (semiosis) and to store the sensory impressions with
‘evenly hovering attention’” (Lehmann 87).
Within the newly conceived frame of relativised time, synthesising the particular moment is therefore only possible through the imagined totality of the envisioned event, since the constituent parts of a performance move parallel to each other, rather than towards the centre of the event. Auteur directors’ predilection for simultaneous and multi-dimensional stage action further hinders the audience’s ability to instantly acquire a sense of totality in their understanding of the stage event. Sometimes, the desired effect is a prolonged time of audience reception, as in the case of the Wooster Group’s rapid succession of contrasting images, or the jarring, yet calculated bombardment of narratives in the productions of Complicité; in both cases, the spectators’ multiple impressions are first stored in their depository of mental associations, to be later processed in detail and registered in some kind of imaginary totality.
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Wilson, for that matter, has repeatedly tried to train his audience’s perception towards greater diversity, in the hopes that this new focus can trigger a broader sense of freedom from limiting social and artistic structures. His systematic observations on physiological perception eventually led to the formation of a distinct directorial as well as performance idiom, abiding by new rules of coherence and cohesion, albeit strictly non-realistic. To an extent, Wilson’s encounter with two “maladjusted” children, and in particular his experience with Raymond Andrews, a deaf- mute black boy, enabled him to experiment with alternative perceptual modes in Deafman
Glance (1971). Wilson discovered that the “maladjusted” children’s own sense of perceiving the world contained a logic that became increasingly coherent once one has had some exposure to it.
Ever since that production, Wilson has used the sense of freedom that this realisation had granted him in his attempt to liberate his audiences from all kinds of societal impositions. His actors were trained accordingly; the performers’ non-verbal body language, together with the unique sounds they were led to produce were further elaborated during rehearsals and workshops, eventually building up to Wilson’s highly idiosyncratic, non-naturalistic style of directing.
At the same time, the sense of freedom these artists experience when dealing with the subconscious is also present in their desire to create “total works of art”:
For me it’s all opera in the Latin sense of the word, in that it means work: and
this means something I hear, it’s something I see, it’s something I smell. It
includes architecture, painting, sculpture, lights. [. . .] We are developing a
theatrical language with the body that can parallel the language of literature.
(Wilson qtd in Delgado and Heritage 303-4)
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Hence, Wilson’s major works, from Deafman Glance to the CIVIL warS fifteen years later, are an attempt to realise a modern-day version of Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of disparate art forms –dance and movement, light, design and music into a total work of art. Fusing elements of theatre, opera, dance, and performance art in his productions, Wilson is not a stage-director in the typical sense, but more of a “sculptor of space and time” (Delgado and Heritage 304). Moreover, because he organises his text visually, writing mostly scenically, he has the freedom to jump from one aesthetic to another, simultaneously manipulating his audience’s perspective and angle of vision.
Along the same lines, auteur approaches to directing often include the viewing of performance as a musical score, putting forth the idea that directing can work almost exclusively on musical terms with every element of the mise-en-scène being a part of a musical composition, as was clearly the case with Beckett’s rhythm-based pieces. Aside from this structural similarity, powerful performances achieve the same unmediated immediacy of feeling that is singular in music. Just like in music, whereby the abstract and simultaneously distinctly open quality of the text grants the listener a greater freedom to creatively “fill” in the missing parts, in auteur
“abstract” performance, no predetermined path of interpretation has been set out in advance.
Consequently, in the productions of directors like Wilson and Complicité’s McBurney, the construction of storytelling has more to do with the work of a conductor of music than of the mere blocker of action that a director sometimes appears to be. Particularly in relation to the work of Complicité, it has been argued that:
Complicité has been known for “specialising the topographies of internal
journeys”. [. . .] McBurney’s work since the 1990s proposes a distinctly
European, multi-lingual, poetic integrating image, narrative, and a choreography
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of bodies, objects and space to produce a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk.
Within this symphonic form, the creative agency of the performers and their
bodies comprises the very foundation for a compassionate celebration of the
extraordinary in the everyday and the marginalised, and an articulate humanist
enquiry into a “politics of the imagination.” (Mitter and Shevtsova 249, my
emphasis)
4.1.2. Activating the Creative Impulse and Ensemble Work
When discussing auteur practice, the need to refer to rehearsal techniques employed by directors to help stimulate the actors’ creative impulse is always present and relevant. Because the process of rehearsal is mostly a private affair, ordinarily held sacred by both directors and actors, most directorial rehearsal methods will forever remain hidden from the public eye. Having said this, there is a number of auteurs, renowned for their innovative work with the actors, such as Brook,
McBurney, Lepage, Mnouchkine, to name but a few, who try to set in motion their actors’ imagistic talent, by accepting the obvious function of the body as a primary agent of translating private visions into physical images.
More specifically, these directors have developed their own set of innovative, as well as comprehensive rehearsal techniques, designed to liberate the body from all physical, mental and emotional constraint, in order to render it a viable instrument in performance. This pursuit has by no means been a recent phenomenon: several innovators of theatre had already focused on the theory of semiotics that treated the actor’s body as sign, as for example, Meyerhold, whose system of Biomechanics had prepared the ground for the celebration of the physical life on stage,
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by making the actor the principal force in the theatre, communicating the concept of “character” physically and replacing conventional setting and props through sheer bodily expression.77
Equally, Artaud had placed all emotion in the body of the actor, envisioning a kind of actors’ training that would resemble that of athletes and dancers.
It is in this spirit that Ariane Mnouchkine of Théâtre du Soleil considers actors authors who use their bodies. In her physical work, what starts off as research on a theme jointly selected by the company is subsequently improvised by the group, often producing the most improbable, yet highly original forms and formations. Other examples that illustrate the physical work of directors and actors range from former Mabou Mines’ artistic director JoAnne Akalaitis’ stimulation of a subjective and private space inside the actors body (gradually generating physical images), to Canadian theatre and film auteur’s Robert Lepage’s “tossing” of a theme in rehearsal to unlock his actors’ imagination. Regarding his work fundamentally as a work-in- progress, Lepage characteristically identifies performance with “more or less a public rehearsal”
(qtd in Delgado and Heritage 141). Liberated from the limiting presence of a playwright,
Lepage’s performances and rehearsals are sparked by the ensemble’s imagination and not by a text per se. A notable example, The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994) was shaped into performance after Lepage’s desire to work on “something about Hiroshima”:
Our creative work begins with a huge brainstorming and a collective drawing
session where ideas are grouped together. Then, we discuss ideas that have been
singled out, which leads to improvisation. Then there’s the phase of structuring
the improvisations, which we rehearse, and eventually perform publicly. These
77 Meyerhold’s system of Biomechanics has already been presented in Chapter 1.
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performances, rather than being the culmination of the process, are really further
rehearsals for us, since the show is not written down or fixed. (Lepage 177)
Similarly, with no fixed script in hand, international devised theatre company Théâtre de
Complicité, currently known simply as Complicité, puts particular emphasis on establishing the right conditions for collective discoveries on the outset of rehearsal. Espousing Lecoq’s physical training in which collaborative work is central, Complicité’s “magician” Simon McBurney prepares his company’s bodies and voices by toning the “muscle of the imagination” in search of a “moment of collective imagining” (qtd in Giannachi and Luckhurst 71). McBurney recognises the significance of his own Lecoq training in so far as it has helped him replicate in his work the same sense of unharnessed energy that stems from effecting his actors’ abilities to suggest images through their bodies, to produce spectacular forms as one living organism and to virtually defy the laws of gravity, as for example, in the production of Out of a House Walked a
Man at the Royal National Theatre’s Lyttleton in 1994, which was in the company’s own words a “musical response” to the work of Russian surrealist and children’s writer, Daniil Kharms, and where the audience came close to feeling that actors had grown imaginary wings and were actually flying around the space.78
Quite in line with Complicité’s productions, Anne Bogart’s SITI Company’s creative collages are also almost exclusively based on detailed and intensely physical ensemble work. To some degree, collective work is a process typically employed by the followers of Artaud who view performance as a metaphysical and communal event. In some cases, this collective spirit extends beyond the space of performance; besides keeping its members together to share living space
78 Most of Complicité’s production information and programme quotes are taken from Complicité’s website:
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and house-work and operate on an equal-salary basis, Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, formed in 1964, has featured several other attributes of a commune that do credit to the title Création collective, attached to the company.79 Indeed, working together, Mnouchkine’s actors help to make costumes, sets and props and clean and cook by rooster. When there is a performance, they prepare meals for audiences as well, whom they serve at a counter in costume and apply make- up during intervals. This is consistent with Mnouchkine’s idea of the theatre as a total event. A convivial atmosphere and a sense of occasion are fundamental to her notion of theatricality, which she sees as the bringing together of environment, actors and spectators. However,
Création collective mostly describes the ensemble’s collective writing on stage. Such process gave shape to the Soleil’s early productions –Les Clowns (1969), 1789, 1793 and L’Age d’or
(The Golden Age, 1975), for which all company members had to research their material. In the end, scripts were written from improvised exercises, stories, scenes, and characters. Mnouchkine values this method of work because, as she contends, “actors are authors more with their sensibilities and their bodies than they would be with a blank sheet of paper” (qtd in Williams
57). Gradually, however, by the time of L’Age d’or the role of the director was once again reconsidered. Having formerly surrendered to the collective process, Mnouchkine reclaimed her position as the person responsible for centralising all artistic activity, retaining however, what she called a sense of “democratic centralism.”
It must be said, however, that ensemble involvement in the making of a piece can be even more extreme, as journalist Jane Kramer illustrates, when describing a typical rehearsal process of The
Wooster Group:
79 The communal aspect of Théâtre du Soleil, as well as of some of the theatre companies established in the 1960s and 1970s are also examined in Chapter 1.
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In Wooster Group’s productions, almost everyone will take part in the making of
the piece. LeCompte will assemble her players and call in her designers and
technicians and engineers. She will listen to their thoughts and look at the things
they bring –a book or a picture or a piece of music or, for that matter, a piece of
clothing –and take in their reactions and sometimes laugh or, more often, groan
while they stumble around inside their own heads in what could be called a first
rehearsal. (53)
Consequently, even though their rehearsal techniques may by and large vary, in all these directors’ rehearsal practice, the intensive physical and improvisational work with the actors is a powerful weapon for generating not only strong stage images, but in some cases, parts of the performance text, as well.
4.1.3. Manipulating emotional involvement: alienation and festivity
When we consider the actual mechanisms involved in perceiving a piece of theatre, we can quite easily realise that as soon as a performance is put out in front of an audience, the spectator instantly and simultaneously engages in a dual, if paradoxical process of involvement and distance; in order to follow the story and store up their impressions of character and situation, spectators engage with the spectacle through an immediate sensory perception; at the same time, they are called upon to mentally decipher the numerous signs employed and to untangle the thread of the mise-en-scène. Bert O. States’ Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (1985) offers a detailed analysis of the audience’s binocular [phenomenological Vs semiotic] perception of the theatre event:
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It has become evident to me, in arriving at my own form of narrowness, that
semiotics and phenomenology are best seen as complementary perspectives on
the world and on art. [. . .] If we think of semiotics and phenomenology as modes
of seeing, we might say that they constitute a kind of binocular vision: one eye
enables us to see the world phenomenally; the other eye enables us to see it
significantly. These are the abnormal extremes of our normal vision. Lose the
sight of your phenomenal eye and you become a Don Quixote (everything is
something else); lose the sight of your significative eye and you become Sartre’s
Roquentin (everything is nothing but itself). (8)
It is theatre’s “double affiliation” to the mimetic and the performing arts that brings about the tension between the director’s control of stage semiology and the actor’s inevitable phenomenology of presence. In terms of audience reception, this tension generates in the spectator on the one hand a sense of distance and alienation during the cognitive understanding of the process of semiosis, and on the other, of empathy, through the audience’s visceral confrontation with the performer’s live presence.80
80 For more on director’s control of the performer’s significatory presence see also Chapter 6. Also, Martin Puchner’s work Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama aptly traces this duality:
As a performing art like music or ballet, the theatre depends on the artistry of human performers on stage. As a mimetic art like painting or cinema, however, it must utilize these human performers as signifying material in the service of a mimetic project. Once the nature of mimesis is subject to scrutiny and attacks, as it is in modernism, this double affiliation of the theatre becomes a problem, because, unlike painting or cinema, the theatre remains tied to human performers, no matter how estranged their acting might be. The theatre thus comes to be fundamentally at odds with a more widespread critique, or complication, of mimesis because this critique requires that the material used in the artwork be capable of abstraction and estrangement. Directors may try to estrange or depersonalize these performing humans…but an actor’s impersonation remains nonetheless fundamentally stuck in an unmediated type of mimesis that keeps the work of art from achieving complex internal structures, distanced reflectivity, and formal constructedness. (5)
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In the process of absorbing the semiology of the mise-en-scène, in effect, of detecting the director behind the work, as well as of purely enjoying the actor’s presence, the audience may or may not identify with the situation it is presented with. Associated with more experimental forms of drama, distancing techniques, under the tremendous influence of Brecht’s emphasis on alienation, have been increasingly infiltrated into contemporary performance, manifest in the strategies of casting against type, cross-gender and cross-racial casting, as in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production of Hamlet [2001], starring a black actor, Adrian Lester, in the title role.
Similarly, a prominent feature in the work of Peter Sellars, cross-racial casting, keeps resurfacing in his work. Notably, in his production of The Merchant of Venice (1994) according to an account of the performance by New York Times reviewer David Richards:
Although the words remain Shakespeare’s, Mr. Sellars puts such an idiosyncratic
spin on scenes that he might as well be rewriting the script. Shylock, the Jewish
moneylender, is portrayed by Paul Butler, a black actor. Portia (Elaine Tse) and
her entourage are Asian-Americans. From the Spanish-speaking sector come
Antonio (Geno Silva), the titular merchant, and Bassanio, who were lovers once,
apparently, even if Bassanio (John Ortiz) is now intent on winning Portia’s hand.
At the same time, cross-gender casting is a recurrent strategy in the productions of The Wooster
Group, with the company’s leading actress Kate Valk really excelling in the title part of The
Emperor Jones, where surprisingly, a white woman in blackface is cast in the role of a black man.
Besides those stratagems, devices for distorting space, time and sound, as well as for disrupting the synchronisation between image and text abound in the work of Foreman and Wilson. To a
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degree, Foreman is preoccupied with de-familiarising the spectator’s perception of the everyday: his stage characteristically becomes a painting canvas, where space is framed and time is distended, objects change in size and sounds are out of proportion. Foreman’s desired effect is to shock us into confronting things by seeing them anew. With that in mind, he approaches his own plays with a gnawing sense of irony, as well. It is an irony that lurks behind not only of the dragged-out, hyper-realistic delivery of lines that renders all sense of empathetic relationship with the characters impossible, but also of the divorce between the conventional/accepted meaning of the lines and the actors’ actual emotional and physical reactions to them. In the words of Dean Wilcox:
Foreman’s Brechtian impulses, such as shining light in the spectators’ eyes, the
use of buzzers, thuds, tape loops, and other loud noises, continually interrupt this
type of spectator association and force the audience to be aware of their own
perceptions as they are simultaneously perceiving them. (2003: 555)
Sometimes, techniques of involvement and distancing co-exist, as characteristically, in Greek director Michail Marmarinos’s work. In the production of National Hymn ([2004], see Case
Study) the spectator is among the actors, a part of the scenery, which in itself is organised in such a way as to involve him/ her in the action on stage. It is the setting of the play that first creates intimacy: the dining table is a pretext for actors and spectators to meet up, creating a sense of community. At the same time, however, the space keeps changing, assuming a cameo dimension by refusing to provide a fixed point of reference. That is consistent to the director’s avoidance of an empathetic relationship between spectator and space and ultimately, between spectator and character. To this end, constant role-playing guarantees the performers’ transformation: there are no fixed parts, just multiple, fluid personas.
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Another example of distancing is revealed in the conflict between the assumed “meaning” of the enunciated text and the visual image that accompanies it and which frequently works counter to it. Similar is the clash sometimes produced between the actors’ and/ or the characters’ emotional responses in a certain scene and the spectators’ expectation of them, although this clash is often accompanied by a titillating and satisfying sense of tension.
Still, part of the auteurs’ job is also to break free from established narrative conventions and penetrate the visceral, guttural response of the spectator, whether through empathy or distance.
“I’m very influenced by theatre that is primarily experiential; rather than being about an experience, it actually is the experience”, says Peter Sellars (qtd in Delgado 234). Obviously, this is not a new claim for the theatre’s mission, having been foreshadowed by Artaud long before Sellars’ time. In addition, back in the beginnings of the avant-garde movement in the
1960s and 1970s, even though markedly less so today, attempts were made to unify spectator and spectacle in more tangible, primarily physical ways, as was the case with Grotowski’s production of Doctor Faustus (1963), where as part of the action occurring during a banquet on the night the Devil is to claim Faustus’ soul, the audience was seated at long tables on or around which the action occurred, asked to respond to it as people might at such a function; apparently inspiring Marmarinos’ extending an invitation to to the spectators in the sit-down dinner of
National Hymn.
In some cases, too, the union of actors and spectators became a strong structural axis for the production, beyond the logistics of mere seating configurations. Thus, attempting to tackle the spirit, circumstances and social ramification, as well as the civic significance of the French
Revolution, Théâtre du Soleil’s 1789 (1974) brilliantly manipulated the innately communal nature of theatre: the play, collectively constructed by all members of the company, was
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presented on five stages, reminiscent of Artaud’s ideal of a stage surrounding the audience, and linked by pathways around the spectators, obliged to follow the action from one stage to the next. Actually, the sense of emotional involvement reached its peak in the scene representing the taking of the Bastille, for which “each actor positioned himself at a different point in the central area, gathering a small knot of spectators around him and describing the storming of the prison as if he was telling it to a few friends” (Bradby and Williams 92-3). Since then, great many crowds flock the company’s space in the Cartoucherie area of Paris, wishing to partake of
Soleil’s event-like festivities. In the end, despite the sense of otherness often communicated by
Mnouchkine’s eclectic style, as well as the setting up of her actors’ identities as those of
“performers acting a part”, engaging the spectator intellectually and emotionally has always remained among the auteur’s highest priorities. Obviously, even though Mnouchkine is totally opposed to psychological Realism, she does not hesitate to take her audiences on an emotional ride.
In conclusion, notwithstanding the fact that the utopian attempt to achieve Artaud’s sought-after communion did eventually give way to forced and naïve physical patterns, imposing external structures, instead of exploring ways in which meaning can be constructed jointly, the sense of festivity and participation cultivated mostly in the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, provided a valuable alternative to the realistic, narrowly-conceived notion of empathy.
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Creative Sources of auteur performance
4.2.1. Devised theatre
Manifest in a number of different ways, in current performance practice there has been a questioning of the hierarchies defining conventional productions. One of the vital questions has been whether there exist in performance any reference points, other than the original writer’s text. Essentially, a big bulk of the auteur’s work has to do with the exploration and handling of several creative sources of material other than the dramatic text, in order for an autonomous performance script to be constructed (as in the case of devised theatre), as well as with ways to creatively alter, interpolate, extract or contextualise the text of an existing play, as often happens with adaptations of the classics or with modern revisions of tragedy and myth. The ever-growing discovery of more material in hand that could be put on stage and made into a theatre event has freed up the creative potential of many directors and opened new critical insights to the notions of interpretation and authorship, as will be argued in the final chapter of this dissertation.
In this way, driven by their distrust of playwriting, auteur directors have resorted to a variety of sources, putting together new scripts after intense improvisation in rehearsal. In the case of devised theatre, the source of inspiration for directors-writers has been endless. In effect, devised theatre borrows from life and essentially dramatises culture, by constructing collages out of pieces of news, photographs, non-literary books, the internet, interviews with spectators or random passers-by, extracts from improvisational workshops with actors, newspaper and magazine clippings, recipes and poems, overused sayings and foibles, as well as many other items from a long list of most improbable sources. Manufacturing text out of sounds, gestures
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and images, dethroning the verbal and rewarding the visual, these directors tirelessly produce stage “scores” that are both eclectic and all-inclusive.
In one of the very few fully-fleshed studies of devised theatre, Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling aptly sum up the identity and function of the devising process:
Devising is variously: a social expression of non-hierarchical possibilities; a
model for co-operative and non-hierarchical collaboration; an ensemble; a
collective; a practical expression of political and ideological commitment; a
means of taking control of work and operating autonomously; a de-
commodification of art; a commitment to total community; a commitment to total
art; the negating of the gap between art and life; the erasure of the gap between
spectator and performer; a distrust of words; the embodiment of the death of the
author; a means to reflect contemporary social reality; a means to incite social
change; an escape from spectators; an expressive, creative language; innovative;
risky; inventive; spontaneous; experimental; non literary. (4)
Already in 1981, American auteur Richard Schechner traced the development of that trend of alternative ways to create texts for the stage, stretching it as far back as in the time of the early twentieth century innovators:
Then people like Meyerhold, Grotowski, the Becks, and Brook came along and
said: Look, the authority, the main creator, is not the playwright, but the director.
The director took unto himself the means of theatrical production [ . . . ] and the
playwright –when not present during all phases of making a work: constructing
the text, participating in workshops and rehearsals –was regarded as an absentee
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landlord. The writer’s words were used, but his authority ceased to be regarded as
absolute. Productions were no longer interpretations. They became original
versions “after”, “based on”, “using the words/themes of”. Often the productions
were collages of several texts. The director became the centre, the transmitter, of
theatrical creativity: he was the new source. (5.2: 52)
In Schechner’s view, directors “wanted to shape texts –the whole collection of ‘texts’ theatrically speaking: words, space, audience interaction with the performance, performer training, acting” (1981, 5.3: 10). And indeed, no longer do theatre artists simply resort to the practice of scouring dramatic literature in order to come up with some rare unperformed play.
Once a piece of the outside social or cultural reality stimulates the artist’s imagination, the writer incorporates direction into his /her script and the two art forms merge, whereby the blending of the dramatic and the performative produces a hybrid text, placing “meaning” in the audience’s egalitarian absorption of the verbal and the visual. Thus it comes as no surprise that in answer to what the allure of devised theatre is, the artists involved in this form of theatre unanimously reply that it all has to do with the sense of freedom in the process of creating, the uninhibited license granted to all participants to view theatre as a venue for uncensored expression. In essence, they all cherish the boundless promise for creativity; no matter what, the furtive, yet persistent desire to claim a slice of authorial privilege, is inherent in most humans, conspicuously more so in artists.
The operating principles of devised theatre are the democratic distribution and relegation of different signifying systems, but the problem often lies in the absence of one unique, as well as unifying vision, responsible for the operational control of those systems. In some of the least successful experiments of devised theatre, a lack of structure together with an overall sense of
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meaninglessness and disconnection are common, very often trying the spectators’ patience.
Naturally, underlying this problematic is the fundamental question whether the interpretation of the world is the exclusive property of a single writer or the anarchic energies of the ensemble, since, in devised theatre, “ready-mades” are analysed dramaturgically as compositional elements of performance. In the same spirit, a lot of devising practices highlight process and view performance as a constant work-in-progress, with the performance script, at times un-fixed and incomplete, being adapted to the needs of the varying audiences. This marks a greater tendency in contemporary art, where the work’s openness also results from the artist leaving the
“completion” of some of its constituents to the public or even to chance.81
Whether good theatre can ever be created without a playwright is an issue that keeps resurfacing in theatre criticism. The pressure is familiar to many devised companies, which have in the past borne the price for lacking one individual agency to guide them. In fact, it was British theatre critic Michael Billington who had at one point equated devised theatre with “total mess”, as
Brian Logan, another critic for the Guardian reports in rage in the article of his arts-blog aptly entitled: “Is ‘devised’ theatre always a case of too many cooks?” In actual fact, Logan views some people’s aversion to devised theatre in terms of a kind of threat that British devised theatre companies such as Right Size, Improbable, Shunt, Complicité, Peeplykus and Theatre Workshop pose to the theatre establishment. After all, he claims in the same article, “if you take the ensemble ideal far enough, even directors (a relatively recent innovation in theatre) can be surplus to requirements.” On the other hand, even though the number of devised companies especially in Europe is steadily rising, it is more or less taken for granted that the more established or mainstream among those companies will still maintain the strict hierarchy that
81 Instrumental to this tendency is Umberto Eco’s seminal book The Open Work (1962). For Eco, an open work is a text which is not limited to a single reading or range of readings; it admits complexity, encouraging or requiring a multiplicity of readings, depending on what the reader brings to the text.
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regards the director as the virtual master of the piece. For example, in SITI Company’s rehearsals, the performance material is jointly collected, improvised and/ or generated by every member of the ensemble, but it is director Anne Bogart who channels this creativity into a final product for the stage.
The same is true of Complicité, where the role of Simon McBurney as primary instigator and final arbiter of performance meaning remains uncontested. “Everything begins with a text of some sort”, says McBurney.82 Indeed, part of the recipe in devising meaningful theatre lies in securing the right circumstances for creativity and invention to occur. Complicité had first appeared at the Royal National Theatre of London in 1991, performing Durrenmatt’s The Visit.
Despite their reputation as one of the leading devised companies internationally, their productions have been critically acclaimed and validated as part of the current Western theatrical canon. Almost all of their work, from the adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles in
1992 to the award-winning The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994) and more recently, the multi-media Japanese spectacle The Elephant Vanishes, adapted from Haruki Murakami’s fiction in 2003, has been based on the principles of devised work: extensive research of material, including interviewing people and collecting information from all sorts of unlikely sources, together with multifarious physical exercises and intense improvisation with themes, objects and forms are only some of the techniques employed by the company. Devised theatre par excellence, Complicité’s complex treatment of stimulating subject-matter is satisfying to both actors and spectators. One of their most remarkable pieces, The Street of Crocodiles (1992), adapted from the fiction of Bruno Schulz, was constructed as a moveable (as well as moving) canvas of stories interwoven with images, all coming alive through the physical dexterity of the performers. By contrast, less established, yet still very original devised theatre companies, such
82 Qtd in Neill’s “Simon McBurney, Magic Man”.
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as London-based Right Size, Improbable Theatre, Shunt and Filter, are mostly known for their collective work, the figure of the director rather than dominating, discreetly blending in the creative process.
Moreover, through its very nature, devised theatre by-passes some of the steps ordinarily taken by playwrights in their rendition of the world; namely, those of conceptualisation, visualisation, structuration, (improvising), organisation, character build-up and dialogue construction. In this perspective, devised theatre provides artists with an opportunity to create collectively, liberated from the controlling hand of the playwright-God.83
Hence, in Mnouchkine’s seven-hour long Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odysées) [2005], the director takes up the principles of Création collective once again, to engage her audiences emotionally in another reflection of current politics and social debate. In this production, the narrative is structured around the fate of a countless number of refugees from all different parts of the globe, like Afghanistan, Iran and Chechnya. The epic dimensions of the play –perhaps spectacle would be a more appropriate term here — are made solid by the use of the extensive material that the Soleil has collected and devised through several weeks of interviews with refugees in the detention centres of Sangatte in France and Villawood in Australia. The result is a singular montage of moving snapshots of refugee lives, performed by approximately forty actors in several different languages.
The following two case studies will hopefully further illustrate some of the methods involved in the making of devised theatre.
83 The notion of the author as God was discussed in Chapter 2 and will be further examined in Chapter 6.
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CASE STUDY: Complicité’s Mnemonic (1999)
In 1999, Complicité’s preoccupation with memory led to the production of Mnemonic.
Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney, the show was first produced at Riverside Studios in London and has subsequently travelled to New York and all over Europe since then, receiving critical acclaim. Since its founding in 1983, the company has been dedicated to staging authentic works, theatrical adaptations, and revivals of classic texts. As in their past work, in Mnemonic too, the vigorously trained ensemble focuses on immersing both viewer and performer in a hypnotic and seamless integration of new media into physical performance. In reality, this goes hand-in-hand with a fusion of dreamscapes with reality, where the choreographed, disciplined physicality of the actors becomes a powerful language in the process of writing the performance text.
The play tells the story of Virgil, whose lover Alice has left him, as well as the story of Alice, who travels across Europe in search of her father. Underpinning this narrative is the account of the discovery of the Ice Man, a 5,500-year-old corpse found on a 3,000m alpine peak in 1991.
Through time shifts and dreamlike scenic superimpositions, the performance manages to create a powerful story, following two simultaneous detective trails to the past: one is the attempt to reconstruct the history of the ice-preserved corpse of the Neolithic man; the other is Alice’s adventures. Both these paths converge in the consciousness of the protagonist, from whose perspective the story is told. McBurney, who also acts the main part, travels us in space and time, where the immensity and elusiveness of the past is made manifest in a series of sequences that take us from the depths of underground stations to the vast emptiness of the Italian Alps.
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Purely in terms of structure, the stories of Virgil, of Alice and of the Iceman run parallel to each other, allowing the piece to become a comment on origins and their echoing effect on our lives.
As Gordon Millar notes in his review of the Oxford production: “Our current thoughts, memories and discoveries are keys to a vast back catalogue of experience compiled from the histories of countless previous generations.” McBurney himself views the process of devising as one related to creating a sense of community and continuity:
I had wanted to make a piece about memory for many years. At the source, we
merely investigated our own memories and how they functioned. How much do
you remember? How far back does your memory go? To your childhood?
Beyond into your parent’s childhood? If memory is not possible without
consciousness, and our conscious selves are created by our backgrounds and
where we come from, how does what we remember tell us who we are? And if
we forget where we come from, what continuity we are part of, does that mean
we forget who we are? [ . . . ] So the root of the piece in this instance was our own
experience. It was about what we remembered, about where we came from. That
was our text. But it became more complicated. I had also been fascinated with the
discovery of the 5000 year old Neolithic corpse in the Austrian Alps, written up
by the archaeologist Konrad Spindler as ‘The Man in the Ice’. And Rebecca
West’s journey to Yugoslavia in the 1930s. And Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s
musings on civil war at the end of the 20th century. And without knowing exactly
how we would do it we began to connect these and many other texts together [. .
.] until the piece emerged.84
84 Qtd in Complicite’s website (
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The structurally brilliant conception of Mnemonic lies in its ability to connect seemingly unrelated events. Techniques of collage and cinematic montage abound: past merges with present, personal history with public reference. Similarly, performance styles are also mixed.
For example, the stand-up comedy act at the beginning of the play inviting audience participation and disguised in the form of a biochemistry lecture with philosophical resonance, eases the way into the protagonist’s story, by making the audience partake, if vicariously, in a collective quest for the roots of humankind. As these narrative fragments flow seamlessly into action, questions of existential implications and collective memory link the Ice Man to each character and ultimately, to the spectator. In McBurney’s words:
We are all alone. We all spend much of our lives trying to reach out to others
with at the same time a profound sense of our own solitude. Yet in the theatre, at
moments of genuine transformation, as we all ‘see’ the same thing at the same
moment, we touch the solitary imaginations of our neighbours and so for a brief
moment we too are transformed, by the sense and realisation that we are not
alone. We are not mere individuals but part of a community. (Qtd in Complicité’s
website)
When the protagonist, Virgil, alone in his apartment in London, drills his memory in a bout of insomnia, it becomes difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. Essentially, in
Complicité’s words, “Mnemonic questions our understanding of time, our capacity to distort history and our attempts to retell the past” (qtd in Complicité’s website). Similarly, leaps across time and space also help enhance the feeling of disorientation that ultimately, however, offers us a truly satisfying visceral experience.
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Complicité’s type of devising method has given them the freedom to create epic narratives that resonate with existential significance, as well as with a hilarious, yet often poignant, sense of humour. Normally, during rehearsals, the company engages in several physical and devising exercises, or as McBurney likes to describe it: “actors might “play children’s games, or paint all morning, or work with clay [. . .] work with buckets of water, or create instruments out of pots and pans” (qtd in Giannachi and Luckhurst 76), which help stimulate their conceptual imagination in order to generate physical metaphors:
We played together [. . .] we’d kind of sit around banging tables and chairs for
hours on end and then gradually somebody would come up with a character, just
kind of out of desperation. And then somebody would play with somebody else
and gradually these fragments would emerge. (Qtd in Tushingham 17)
“Multi-formal”, as well as multi-media in its aesthetic, the production’s imagistic simplicity is nonetheless truly engaging: a chair becomes a body, sound-scapes of trains travel us across
Europe and a museum is conjured with a picture frame. The devising process is effectively iconoclastic: within the framework of the proscenium, the company has created a hybrid performance piece combining dramatic action with video installation, sculpture, photography and dance in startling configurations. The haunting imagery of Mnemonic prevails until the very end of the play, which features the naked body of McBurney in the pose of the Neolithic man’s corpse, adding further to the accumulated sense of existential loneliness and death. More specifically, the visual resonance of the physical images culminates the final enthralling sequence of the play, in which the cast takes turns in impersonating the iceman in a masterly folding-chair game, suggesting endless generations tumbling through time, and poignantly
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underlining the impossibility of escaping time and memory. The director duly acknowledges the
charm of transformation, inherent in his process of making theatre:
It is marvellous when a chair becomes a human being. That is clear. People
marvel. Literally. I too am astonished, that for the audience the five people
operating the chair, making it ‘walk’ and ‘fall’ should somehow disappear so that
all we see is the man. But what is more marvellous is what it reveals. That theatre
does not exist up there, up here on the stage. That is not the space of theatre. The
space of theatre is in the minds of the audience. It is what separates this art form
from all others. Not the fact that we imagine something to be there when it is not,
nor the fact that we suspend our disbelief in this way, but the fact that we do it
together [ . . .] in the same moment. (Qtd in http://www.complicite.org/
productions/review.html?id=6)
If anything, the production’s reception has been enthusiastic all over Europe and the States, with critics and spectators, alike, sharing Guardian critic Lyn Gardner’s conviction: “Let me put it very simply: I think about the world differently now than when I entered the theatre, and I know that I shall remember Mnemonic all my life.” This triumphant reception cannot be merely attributed to the company’s noble endeavor to search for ways to embody memory on stage; it may be that the process of devising has surprisingly enabled the ensemble to capture notions as abstract, in an economic, unpretentious and in the end, moving manner.
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CASE STUDY: Marmarinos’ National Hymn (2004)
Michail Marmarinos, artistic director of the Athens-based Theseum Ensemble built up his production of National Hymn (National Anthem) using common devised theatre strategies. The text’s composition began with the director handing out a questionnaire to friends, colleagues and people from the general public, containing questions like: “What does the National Anthem mean for you? Has it ever moved you? Would there be anybody that could sing it today?” The result was a long, plurivocal text that featured mostly newspaper and history book extracts relating to the period of time ranging from the 1922 Asia Minor tragedy to Greece’s occupation by the Germans, and from the Greek dictatorship’s tank invasion into the Polytechnic School in
1973 to today.
As the audience enters the theatre, some people are invited to sit together with the actors along a big table. There is a chorus-like quality at the beginning of the performance, as the play’s characters rush in, bringing with them a variety of different energies. Some of them sell “good quality memories at a price you can afford”, or alternatively, “the other side of suicide” (qtd in
Hatziandoniou). From that point on, history and memory take on. The voice of an invisible actor-character starts enumerating dates, to which the “Chorus” responds. These dates are mostly associated with important events in Greece’s history, whether the destruction of Smyrna, or the rise of the Socialists into power. The strategy is repeated throughout the performance, giving way to an endless number of quotations from newspapers, Greek and foreign literary texts and to an extent attempting to answer the questions posed by the spectators’ filled-in questionnaires.
Both the devised text and its actual performance could be viewed as evidence of the changed cultural circumstances of the country, especially in present-day multi-ethnic, multi-lingual capital Athens, where the issue of identity is now constantly confronted. Arresting time and
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history, some of the speeches in performance contained the director’s own phrases. In addition, the actors had been provided with photographs, newspaper clippings, drawings and lines taken out of poetry books and novels. Marmarinos called these ready-mades “fragments of dramaturgy”, stressing the tentative nature of the performance text. “In the end, you just forgot whether this phrase was actually yours, or was a poem, or a photograph, or some sort of document. In this process, directing itself had created dramaturgy” (qtd in Keza 24). 85
Laying the questionnaires aside, the ensemble started rehearsing with no text, guided solely by a kind of “amorphous emotion.” This in turn resulted in interesting abstractions that functioned as characters. For example, in performance, one actor standing still mirrored the director’s conception of a “history example.” Further, Marmarinos’ performance text was a synthesis of autonomous, yet interconnected fragments of plot, the central tenet, being, of course, the Greek
National Anthem. Inevitably, however, certain thematic and structural sub-sets did not always manage to relate to the main core of the action. Nevertheless, the breadth of the concept of a
National Anthem ultimately provided the missing links for the audience to mentally connect the disparate found texts in an emotionally and intellectually charged depiction of the individual’s position in a changed world.
Another important point of focus is that for Marmarinos, the self-referentiality of performance invites us to undermine the essential artificiality of the stage. The event of the theatre establishes itself as an artificial spectacle. This is reinforced by the strategy of actors giving each other directions when on stage, in an attempt to draw attention to the fact that they are merely performing. Brechtian alienation is further enhanced by the interactive quality of the spectacle,
85Henceforth, all articles and/or reviews from Greek publications will be referred to by name of author and title of article/review, trans. in English. Due to the complex and varied nature of newspaper articles, reviews and electronic resources in general, the type of inter-textual referencing may also vary, in order to facilitate understanding. For full bibliographical details see bibliographical section at the end of the dissertation.
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in which the spectator is never left at peace: we are constantly bombarded by questions, invited to join in a dance, or offered soup by the actors-waiters. In addition, during intermission, the actors remain on the set serving the audience, a strategy of involving the spectator first introduced by Ariane Mnouchkine, as illustrated already. In effect, the performer cries out his/her own performing-ness, while at the same time engaging spectators in a performance act that has a peculiarly palpable presence. Having the actors and the audience co-author the script anew for each show, the end-text of the performance is a moving, if occasionally heavy-handed example of how devised theatre can capture the moment, the instantaneous response, the sense of communal feeling, the totality of experience. As Marmarinos explains to Aphroditi Grammeli in “Six characters in search of Kafka”, literature is by definition, “unfixed theatricality”:
It allows many liberties and also gives you the illusion that you are actually
directing. It’s much closer to my own personal preoccupation with directing as
dramaturgy, also because it is much closer to the primal function of theatre as
narrative [. . .] some time ago we adapted texts. Today things are different. There
is freedom in composition, the way an actor approaches literature is also
different, much broader, richer and crucial to the final make-up of the text. In
essence, dramaturgical work happens through the process of rehearsals.
It is hardly surprising that the play-text is subtitled: “a theorem for collectivity”. The production is actually set up in such way as to encourage audience participation. It is only when the spectator comes to recognise Marmarinos’ stage codes that the performance feels complete.
Moreover, the notions which Marmarinos tackles (nation, nationality, national anthem) are naturally ideologically, as well as emotionally charged and thus fascinating and relevant to all.
On this account, the production seems to have offered a sense of communal belonging and a
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sharing of identity even to the most cautious spectator. And even though it is not beside the point to argue that some parts of the text are in need of heavy editing, trying to say it all and include everything within compact dramatic time; yet, in the end, most of us can claim a small part of the issues raised and improvised during the performance. Because of that we can only admire Marmarinos’ often over-enthusiastic-scope. There is almost something child-like in some of the “skits” that make up the stage collage. And as in most things child-like, there is also something moving about them.
Ultimately, Marmarinos chose the National Anthem as a major point of reference for most people: As he claims in his interview with Natalie Hatziandoniou entitled “The spectator as participant”: “[this] is a name to which everybody can refer. [. . .] As for me, I’m interested in theatre events that have to do with the meeting of people at a certain point, as well as with the collective. I’m looking for that small, yet significant common experience that will open us up”
(my translation).
Both Marmarinos’ and McBurney’s productions are permeated with a sense of thrill at the freedom that is granted not only to artists, but also to audiences to interpret beyond the dangers of pre-existing, preconceived notions that are normally associated with more established plays.
Most of the productions’ reviews have also referred to the sense of emotional involvement that these audiences experienced during performance and the exhilarating disentanglement from empty formalist structures. However, it is important to note that both of these auteurs have been excelling in this kind of work for several years now and they still hold on to their directorial authority, retaining a strong grip of the production’s orchestration. In this respect, they manage to keep the occasional chaos that can result from smaller-scale, more “egalitarian” devised work at bay, while still experimenting with interesting ways of creating stage narratives.
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4.2.2. Adaptation and Re-contextualisation
[Adaptation is when you] “take something familiar, something you know, or think you know, subject it to every conceivable transgression of interpretation and form, and return it to you illuminated and deepened” (Kramer 49). Thus spoke Liz LeCompte, artistic director of the New
York-based Wooster Group, a company notorious for its guilt-free revisionist productions.
Starting in the 1980s, adaptation became a hot trend in legitimising directorial choices, thus far unacceptable in mainstream theatre. In the past thirty years, almost every respected auteur has at different times and under different circumstances “creatively” tackled and/ or tampered with
Greek tragedies and Shakespeare.
Fundamentally, adaptation is an attempt to unearth the “meat” of the play, digging inside both universal reference and personal inference. It is a medium that reconnects spectators to the timeless themes of great works of literature by illuminating them in ways that seem to address issues of today. In the words of director Anne Bogart:
I have this theory about plays, that they’re little pockets of memory. Like a Greek
play about hubris -- if you do it now, it’s a chance to bring that question into the
world and see how it looks at the time you’re doing it. We’ve lost the sense that
theatre has this function of bringing these universal questions through time.
(Qtd in Shewey,
In the heart of this process of revision lies the method of re-contextualisation, which is in certain respects the subtlest form of auteurism and, in effect, the most essential element of adaptation.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of re-contextualisation is the use of current cultural
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references in an attempt to contemporise the classic work. Standard adaptation fare includes unedited scripts set in altered environments, usually in the present time context. Other times, auteurs are more daring (or irreverent, as more traditional criticism would have it) in their treatment of the original text, cutting lines, re-organising scenes and interpolating material.
Thankfully, our days are marked by a more mature attitude towards the staging of the “big classics”. Rather than dressing up all male actors in military uniform and all females in vinyl outfits to indicate a modern context (to use a cliché example of re-contextualisation), the most interesting auteur productions are more concerned to light up the play from the inside and find ways to make the old text speak to contemporary audiences. As a result, a lot of attention is now paid to the work’s translation, often, the outcome of a fruitful collaboration between the translators and the directors of the piece, the latter imparting their own vision of the classic text, in order to make the language “bend” to their revision.
An increasingly popular form of adaptation, that of updating the visual mise-en-scène of a classic play while leaving the original text (the words) intact, is an old-time favourite with
American director Peter Sellars. Sellars gained notoriety at the Pepsico Summerfare in Purchase,
New York in the second half of the 1980s, when he revisited the action of Mozart’s and da
Ponte’s operas, setting Don Giovanni in the streets of Harlem, The Marriage of Figaro in The
Trump Tower, and Così fan Tutte in a diner. Convinced that our culture today is verbally dominated, Sellars wanted the audience of his productions to take in information through other pores, “be sensitive to other indicators”, as Lancaster argues in “Theatrical Deconstructionists.”
During one of the arias in Don Giovanni, for example, while the title character in the text sings to his sword, Sellars’ visual metaphor in performance has the actor sing to a .45-caliber pistol.
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Revisionist renderings of classical works are ultimately an attempt to veer the audience’s attention away from a mere following of the words of the play towards an understanding of issues of the timeless, universal human condition, which are embedded in the text and which the mise-en-scène will ideally expose. Openly political, Sellars uses deconstructive “distancing” and
“alienation” techniques by layering his productions with a visual mise-en-scène that does not necessarily relate directly to the text. An illustration of this method is his 1986 production of
Sophocles’ Ajax at the American National Theatre in Washington, DC: Sellars set the story immediately after an American war in Latin America. American General Ajax was played by deaf-mute actor Howie Seago, whose lines were spoken by a five-person chorus, each person representing a different part of Ajax’s mind. Characteristically, the movements of the actors reflected the gestures used by contemporary politicians. The production also included a projection of a photograph of the Pentagon, in addition to the Pentagon’s loading dock set.86
Similarly, Sellars’ The Persians (1993) was an overt critique of America’s role in the Gulf War.
Once again, the structured argumentation of Greek plays provided the director with a powerful model for addressing contemporary politics.
It might be worth at this point to also bring up the example of Peter Brook, whose work on the classics betrays a reverse thought process. Instead of tweaking the original text to serve the current political climate, Brook strips the plays of their historical detail, extracting and distilling, as he claims, the essence of the dramatic situation, in what sometimes appears to be a mythifying process. In this manner, his A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970), and later on,
86 Account of the performance in Lancaster’s “Theatrical Deconstructionists”.
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Hamlet (2000) both manifested a desire for refinement and liberation from political and/or politicised content.87
Similarly, much less overtly political than Sellars, Japanese auteur Tadashi Suzuki is another lover of the “great big classics” (in particular of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare), which he adapts in characteristically hybridised postmodern stagings, mixing elements of old and new acting traditions. Suzuki has spent many years exploring the gap between traditional and modern, mainstream and marginal cultures, “high-brow” and “low-brow” literature. In addition, one of his recurrent techniques is to view the action of the play through the distorted gaze of a senile, mad or alienated man or woman, underwriting a “strategy for uncovering and ‘making visible’ the invisible world of the human subconscious by which we are all ‘possessed’”. In the end, Suzuki’s expressly original application of surrealism helps make human fantasies visible
(Mitter and Shevtsova 170). In effect, this strategy is present in Suzuki’s productions of The
Trojan Women [1982], King Lear [1984] and more thoroughly so in The Bacchae [1978], where members of a mixed cast of Japanese and American actors interact with each other in their mother tongues, as well as in signs. Evidently, the familiarity of content in classical works becomes a valuable aid in Suzuki’s experimentation with relatively uncharted forms of expression.
Perhaps a more risky type of adaptation is the juxtaposition of the original play with a devised and/or found text. In 1984, The Wooster Group caused Arthur Miller’s rage by incorporating fragments of The Crucible into a new piece provocatively called LSD (... Just the High Points
...). Miller claimed that his work had been “mangled” and took legal action, forcing the company to substitute his text with other material. This did not stop LeCompte’s group, however, from
87 However, Brook has been repeatedly blamed for his a-political stance. See Chapter 5, Critique.
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experimenting further with collaging classic and modern texts: Flaubert, Chekov, Thornton
Wilder and, O’Neill, among others, all became, on occasion, source-texts for the The Wooster
Group’s performances. One of their most successful productions, the 1997 version of O’Neill’s rarely seen Expressionistic play The Hairy Ape featured Dafoe in blackface. Similarly, as already discussed, in 1998, Wooster Group veteran actress Kate Valk (a white woman) played the title role of a black, male, railroad porter in a rare reclamation of O’Neill’s The Emperor
Jones.88
Nevertheless, reaction from living playwrights against use of their texts simply as source material for new pieces, gradually turned auteur directors to the safe haven of out-of-copyright classics. In such light, auteur Robert Woodruff’s urge to fellow directors sounds appropriately ironic: “forget”, he says, “living playwrights. It’s always easier to deal with the dead.”89 Surely, one cannot but make a mental note of this directional change in auteur choice of material.
In any case, given the on-going pressures that often mark auteur-directors’ process, the fundamental issue to address is ultimately what the limits of adaptation actually are and whose work we are dealing with after all. The issues of interpretation and ownership of the text will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6. Still, it is important to keep in mind the unwritten consensus that exists among theatre artists, which holds that as long as the playwright’s words remain untouched, the production script still carries the stamp of his/ her authorship. This also holds true even when the setting is well over-written and the dramatis personae’ identities lose their original fixity and flow into cultural circumstance.
88 For more on the production see Chapter 5.
89 In conversation with the author. New York 18 May 2007.
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Underlying the process of adapting and re-contextualising the dramatic is a constant search for and application of contemporary metaphors and parallels, since the real challenge is to come up with a modern-day equivalent that will manage to evoke in the modern spectator the same feeling of unadulterated and immediate response produced in the original audience. To illustrate the point: LeCompte uses the metaphor of badminton in her mixed-media deconstruction of
Phèdre (2002), borrowing the title To You, the Birdie! from the game of badminton, which actually gives the production its leitmotif. Thus, the game of fortune in Racine’s play is represented by a strenuous game of badminton in the performance text, whereby Hippolytus competes against the referee Venus. LeCompte’s insight is once again telling: “This is what I do
–bring things together. I take something, I copy it, and maybe something’s revealed that’s not in the original. I go for that. It’s a way of passing on a tradition by reinventing a play” (Kramer
54). Along these lines, it would be fascinating to explore what might be the present-day equivalent to Hippolytus’ physical outlet. What kind of an activity would a young chaste man of today ordinarily engage in, in order to vent off his repressed sexuality? Certainly, hunting is not the first thing that comes to (a contemporary) mind and the badminton solution is in many ways ingenious.
Nevertheless, even when the metaphor is found, it takes a lot of effort to keep it not just consistent, but also dynamic. Besides, it is a common place that “all-embracing metaphors can be dangerous. They can be dead ends in that they can’t develop in the way that a text develops”, as British set designer John Gunter rightly observes (qtd in Mock 111). Similarly, it can certainly be argued that subtle contextualisation is a much more effective strategy than a “door- to-door” adaptation of a text. This said, re-contextualising the original is also a much more creative, demanding and ultimately, satisfying process than entirely “disembodying” it, to use
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Gussow’s term.90 To an extent, it suggests and simultaneously presupposes a kind of maturity consistent with the director’s renouncement of his selfish appropriation of the text.
Further, re-contextualising a performance by definition involves the manufacturing of a new semiological code which has its own logic, not necessarily tied to a single reading of the performance. The redefinition of the semiotic relationship between object and spectator will ideally secure a sense of freedom for both director and audience. In this process, dialogue, actions and scenic environments are celebrated in extraordinary juxtapositions, and it is through this process of defamiliarisation that we are ultimately forced to look beyond the expected for a deeper connection between text and sub-text. Context is now re-evaluated as a powerful given for clarifying “grey zones”, areas of uncertainty in the text, without incapacitating or devaluing the language. Rather, as Michael Vanden Heuvel, author of Performing Drama/Dramatising
Performance stresses: “the oedipal logos is now understood as pre-existent discourse that needs to be re-marked and contextualised so that an understanding of its affiliations to culture and to various acculturating agencies can be exposed” (Vanden Heuvel 63, emphasis original).
The redefinition of language’s function in the process of re-contextualisation is also central in the work of Flemish auteur Ivo Van Hove’s on the classics, whose deconstructed production of the Misanthrope (2007) will be discussed in detail separately. Van Hove’s productions have gained increasing popularity among the sophisticated audiences of the New York theatre scene, for offering imaginative versions of classics. Some of these versions include Williams’ Streetcar
Named Desire [1999], O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions [1997], Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler [2004] and more recently, Molière’s The Misanthrope [2007, See Case Study], all staged at the Down-
90 Gussow views re-contextualisation as a cubist process, in which we are invited to view events from different angles, in newly chosen environments, both “eye-impelling” and “mind-provoking”. In “Cranking up a powerful ‘Hamletmachine.’” New York Times 25 May 1986.
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town New York Theatre Workshop. In all these performances, language is rendered fresh by being placed in a startlingly appropriate situational context. Moreover, the patterning of performance and the coaching of the actors is also extremely innovative and effective, rendering the play’s subtext strangely visualised, nevertheless in a subtle, ever-surprising manner. Finally,
By impelling audiences to find connections from the entirety of the work, to
examine the tangential, as well as the central or immediately apparent themes,
[auteur work] summons the audience forward, exacting a kind of involvement
that neither ‘message’ plays nor the old genre of audience participation achieve.
(Vanden Heuvel 180)
In effect, if we take a somewhat reductionist view, we can consider contextualisation an organised form of fleshing out contemporary metaphors for classical texts. However, it is also true that interpretation cannot be limited to clear-cut analogies. Straight-forward metaphors
(modern military milieux being amongst the most popular when dealing with Shakespeare’s
Histories, or with the Greeks) no matter how apt at the beginning, soon lose their freshness when over-exposed. When all is said and done, it cannot be stressed enough how demanding auteur work is, for it constantly needs to discover, invent and sustain the necessary context for the audience members to make connections and ultimately engage with the reality of the performance. The following examples of two auteurs’ revisionist treatment of a drama classic aim to introduce some of the challenges involved in this process.
CASE STUDY: Houvardas’ Bérénice (2006) and Miss Sara Sampson (Sara) (2007)
Re-writing established texts while simultaneously struggling to retain their established meaning is the underlying principle of adaptation. In a revisionist treatment of Racine’s verse play
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Bérénice, Yannis Houvardas, currently Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Greece, radically changes the context of the play, remaining nonetheless in tune with its basic conflict, that of the love triangle between Bérénice, queen of Palestine, Roman emperor Titus (deeply in love with Bérénice but prohibited by law to marry a non-Roman) and Andioch, friend of Titus and also enraptured with Bérénice. The play opens at dawn, right before the Emperor Titus’ father receives burial. Titus must decide between the throne and his passion for Bérénice, while
Antioch also suffers for the same woman. In Racine’s play, the love triangle is set against a background of minimal action.
In the recent years, Houvardas has established his own method of dramaturgy and direction: he takes rarely produced classics (such as Bérénice, Goethe’s Clavingo or Alain-René Lesage’s
1709 comedy Turcaret) and modernises them, keeping their core untouched and yet selectively playing around with the language.
In Bérénice, challenging the difficulty of staging Racine’s rarely performed text, Houvardas takes a huge leap of several centuries, setting this play, in which as the director claims “nothing happens”, in 1960s Rome; the production is markedly stylised, while the use of microphones further undermines realistic representation. Houvardas remains unconcerned with externals, and in particular with any historical characteristics in the play. Rather, he is drawn to the desperate struggle of the protagonists to free themselves from fear and desire. In effect, it is the timelessness of this struggle that he chooses to focus on. His aim is to extract, as well as construct a new world out of the original text, divesting it of its historical cover and therefore make the play’s 1670 verse speak volumes to contemporary spectators, since in his view, Racine himself uses historic events merely as a pretext which allows him to speak on the pains of love.
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In such light, Houvardas refuses to tackle the socio-historic background of Bérénice, focusing just on its emotional suspense, as he claims in an interview to Photini Barka:
This is why there are neither palaces, nor servants or court attendances, none of
that. [. . .] Any references to historic personages, to Rome, to the Senate subside
to the background and function as a mere curtain in the spectator’s ear. In front of
the curtain are real people, such as the ones we could meet at a bar at 4 am. (My
translation)91
Accordingly, in Houvardas’ Bérénice, the action takes place in a decadent bar, constantly underscored by familiar tunes of the times, like Umberto Tozzi’s Ti amo, ti amo, ti amo and
Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas. The three main characters sit around the bar drinking up their sorrows in characteristically mannered fashion. At the same time, all the secondary characters, namely, the savvy barman, the worn-out pianist and the wardrobe lady complement the production’s almost painterly canvas and add to the overall mood of despondency, which substitutes for historical accuracy. “I had this image of Rome as portrayed in the films of Fellini,
Antonioni and Visconti, an atmosphere of decadence and alienation, of excess”, explains
Houvardas to Loverdou in “Whatever we do, love forgets us not”, adding: “I’ve never really seen a classical work as old. I can only read it with today’s eyes, try to see what’s of interest to me, to those around me, to the audience. If it doesn’t give birth to a world related to now, then I don’t deal with it.”
Similarly, in his interview to Hadjiioannou entitled “I’m interested in submersing into bodies and souls”, Houvardas discusses his fascination with the way in which historic reference and
91 All quotations from Greek newspaper or magazine articles and reviews have been translated by the author of the dissertation. Allowances should be made to the English spelling of the Greek names. For the original names, titles and publication information in Greek see the end of the Bibliography Section.
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dated external elements would simply exist in production, without distracting the audience, just so the elements that render the play modern are foregrounded. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that for any director to claim to have to some extent “owned” Racine’s text entails having somehow mastered the cumbersome verse of the French poet. Surprisingly, even though
Houvardas distances himself from Racine’s time, he manages to retain Racine’s poetry and yet make it sound like everyday speech, largely thanks to Stratis Paschalis’ evocative translation.
Ultimately, under Houvardas’ direction, Racine’s text is not only illuminated, but also made relevant to the modern-day spectator. At no point does the production sag, despite its length.
Instead, the audience, both seduced and deeply moved, is increasingly drawn into the director’s world. Interestingly, in Bérénice, Houvardas is more and more distancing himself from his earlier, largely forced attempts to come up with digestible directorial gimmicks in order to comment on the text. Undoubtedly in this production he has successfully liberated himself from the agonising attempt to be on top of the text.
Houvardas’ approach to Lessing’s Miss Sara Samson, written in 1755 is similar, even though the reception of his production Sara has not been as warm as that of Bérénice, with many audience members feeling that character delineation was bordering on caricature. Sara’s plot has
“respectable” William Samson arrive at a run-down hotel with his valet, to find out that his daughter Sara has run away with the good-for-nothing Mellefond despite her father’s admonitions. Samson has been informed of the young couple’s run-away by Mellefond’s ex- lover, Margwood, who is trying to gain her lover back by blackmail. While Sara’s father gradually forgives his daughter’s “sinful” behaviour, the ending of Lessing’s play is tragic.
Together with his designers, Houvardas worked hard at transferring the core of the dramatic action from an eighteenth century German domestic context to a timeless mid-western American
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motel in the middle of nowhere. This way, in his direction, a drama of illicit love is transported to the vast-ness of the American inland, in a production where Lessing seems bound to meet
Sam Shepard. However, exact cultural reference is omitted, given that the director’s purpose is primarily to universalise the action and satirise the melodrama of the love drama, exploring the bi-polar oppositions of sexuality Vs religion, social conventions Vs personal decency, familial and moral freedom. Essentially, the adaptation concentrates and attacks religious fanaticism, as embodied in Sara’s father. Nevertheless, contemporary pop-culture references abound, as for example in the video projections of “demolition derby” scenes, symbolically reflecting the lives of the protagonists. At the same time, the aesthetic frame of the production invites identification with the perceptual techniques of soap-opera. Indeed, the very set of the play, inviting us to peer into the actions taking place in several motel rooms simultaneously, seems to be wholly taken out of a modern soap-opera, where prying into the characters’ lives is a matter of course.
Houvardas has no qualms when describing his unorthodox conception of Lessing’s play: “If it sounds like a tragedy, it is very close. If it looks like a melodrama, it is not far from one. If it comes close to a soap-opera, indeed it borders on it. If it flirts with the kitsch, it is not afraid of it” (qtd in Dimadi 66).
In fact, the performance is full of country songs and the whole mood of the show reminds us of an MTV video-clip. What we get, as Dimitris Foinitsis put it in “Lessing in Far West”, is not
Lessing’s domestic drama, rather a sophisticated “road movie, especially adapted for the stage.”
Seen through the emancipated gaze of the director-auteur, the result is itself liberating. This holds particularly true in the scene where the company together sing Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire facing the audience. Ultimately, as Houvardas tells Elena Hatziioannou in “The New Dogma is
Us and You”, he attempted this adaptation because he saw all the action through a contemporary point-of-view:
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I did not take the text apart to re-assemble it anew. I didn’t touch its structure. I
made small changes and modernised the language. What was needed was a small
dosage of making the ingredients lighter to resemble today’s time. The
performance actually highlights the element of parody, popular melodrama, what
we now call soap-opera.
Yet, at the same time, he claims that he has avoided contemporising the action, being after “a kind of abstraction and a poetic dimension” instead (qtd in Angelikopoulos). What remains uncontested is the director’s daring choice to de-dramatise the action and emotional atmosphere of the play. The performance’s cinematic staging, with the constant framing of the actors and the rapid succession of images adds to that effect, making it next to impossible for the spectator to identify with any of the characters, as the actors move in and out of drama, parody and soap- opera.
As a result, critical response to the production has been ambivalent, bringing to attention the ways in which the staging distances us from the plight of the heroes by parodying their hardships, so that in the end it becomes almost impossible to speak of real “characters”.
Similarly, few critics failed to comment on the actors’ oscillation between character and caricature, bringing home the sad point that after having invented an acting style, these actors mostly reproduce and repeat it unceasingly, as if indifferent to explore the text any further. In fact, it is as though they came up with the right trick and then altogether gave up trying, manifesting an almost mechanical wit and piquancy. Again, critics have noted how, even in the most surprising and what are meant to be dramatic turns, you can never fully empathise with the characters’ condition, trapped in the director’s formalist stylisation. Essentially, on the one hand,
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we are drawn and entertained by the production’s country aesthetic; yet, we soon lose interest, due to the director’s unredeeming obsession with startling, yet frozen images.
In effect, Lessing’s original text is used as “primary material”, a vehicle for the director to expose a variety of social issues (in this case, a young woman’s struggle to break away from the confines of a patriarchal, puritanical society) and the growing awareness of the violence and anarchy that lie at this society’s antipodes. However, having settled on a fixed relationship between the mise-en-scène and the original text, Houvardas, like his actors, relaxes in the form he has invented, not daring to transgress its boundaries and explore its possibilities. Reproducing a given formula, besides being tedious, defeats the principal purpose of adaptation, which is to stir up the “muddy waters” of centuries-old texts. Characteristically, some of the articles-reviews of those two productions by Houvardas feature titles that can account for the director’s notoriety as an irreverent teaser of classics: “A Country Sara” (Sariyannis, Tachydromos, January 5,
2007) and “Bérénice’s Piano Bar” (Sariyannis, Tachydromos, March 11, 2006), among others.
CASE STUDY: Ivo Van Hove’s Misanthrope (2007)
Ivo Van Hove’s The Misanthrope, performed at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2007 is auteur work par excellence, highly consistent with Van Hove’s anti-naturalistic re-workings of the classics. In this production, the director manages to unearth and render relevant Molière’s concerns about the nature of human beings at large, while at the same time re-contextualising the action of the play altogether. To his credit, Van Hove ingeniously involves his audiences in a simultaneous distancing from and empathetic relationship with the text. Based on a 1971
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adaptation by British poet Tony Harrison, Van Hove’s rendering of Molière’s seventeenth- century romantic comedy becomes a biting social commentary.
Plot-wise, the play revolves around the protagonist Alceste, whose total rejection of his own culture’s social conventions make him tremendously unpopular to his peers. Van Hove builds a very sympathetic portrait of Alceste, still caught-up in the “dated” principles of loyalty and truthful emotions. Alceste’s intense love for Célimène, a superficial socialite, whose actions oppose all that he stands for, counters his determination to defy society and its hypocrisy.
Designer Jan Versweyveld’s set is a pristine gray box walled with semi-transparent glass panels and vertical video screens. At some point the stage is filled with garbage: food, paper, and bottles are strewn everywhere. Food quickly becomes a metaphor for consumption, suggesting that people are always ready to consume each other. This way, a hilarious scene of innocent chat and raillery gives way to Alceste’s covering up himself with all kinds of assembled snacks, to which he finds access by gliding onto the table. Characteristically, he uses chocolate sauce for the face and ketchup for his chest, while inserting a baguette down his pants and covering his exposed penis with whipped cream.
Further, the modernisation of the space is apparent not only in the high-tech set, but also in most of the director’s blocking choices. At one point, the theatre doors are burst open to reveal a street-fight. Similarly, Acaste plays her avatar92 while reciting a speech, while most characters find comfort in their cell phones, appearing and disappearing behind computer screens as they
92 An avatar is a computer use’s representation of himself or herself, whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon (picture) used on Internet forums and other communities, or a text construct found on early systems such as MUDs. It is an “object” representing the embodiment of the user. The term “avatar” can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user (Taken from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(computing)>.
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speak. In addition, cameras follow the protagonists everywhere, so that they can never truly escape from their image.
In effect, technology allows Van Hove to manipulate emotional distance and proximity to his advantage. For example, a conversation between Alceste and Oronte off-stage is fully recorded by a cameraman, and duly projected onto a screen at the centre of the stage, where other characters eagerly watch. When Alceste and Oronte return, we glimpse at them whisper to one another, their backs turned to the audience. However, a technician holding a microphone makes sure we know exactly what they are talking about, broadcasting their murmuring confessions all over the theatre. Alexis Soloski in the Village Voice review of the New York production describes this experience of technologically aided communication quite adeptly:
The effect is striking: the camera magnifies their intimate exchange, making us so
privy that we can see Camp’s [the actor playing Alceste] brow rise. Under bright
lights, the close-ups might look superficially like a soap-opera, but it’s just Van
Hove’s zoom lens on Molière’s domestic interior.
Notwithstanding the director’s superb use of technology as a means for prying into his characters’ inner essence, Van Hove’s genius is manifest primarily in his treatment of Moliere’s text. His method is almost clinical in precision: he keeps every word of the original, yet the words almost always seem to acquire new meaning, as if meaning and significance are finally popping out of an aged shell. Lines are stripped clean of familiar resonance and clichéd usage, allowing for raw feeling to flow uninhibited. In each of Van Hove’s auteur experiments you start to discover that the text used in performance is in fact the very Molière, Williams or Ibsen original, without one single line cut, changed or added. Yet, understanding the sub-text is not the only thing: in Van Hove’s productions, once discovered, the subtext and all the given
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circumstances of the play come to the surface, freely embodied in impressive, if often extreme ways. In a recent interview with Tom Sellar for the Village Voice, the director discusses his process of re-writing the play by means of re-contextualisation:
My theatre is based on psychology, but not only on psychology. I try to make an
X-ray of a character, to bring the subtext out where it can be seen. American
actors learn to keep it hidden [The institutional set with fluorescent lighting] is a
laboratory of human behaviour. [The video cameras flanking the stage perimeter]
let us look much more closely at an arena of conflict. Like masks in Greek drama,
they give huge expression to small things onstage. [. . .] Characters are created
out of 184,000 different moments.
Controversial and thought provoking, Van Hove’s production of The Misanthrope raises the question of how many different readings a play can receive; and in the end, whether it really matters if the costumes are not all taffeta and velvet, if the metaphor is right.
4.2.3. Modern (-ised) myth and Mythologised History
In the age of technology the comfort of myth is a blessing privileged by many reputable auteurs.
Against the speed of the mediated image, the integration of themes or elements of myth in performance offers us the possibility to contemplate our own existence and position in the world, together with the necessary links that help us reconnect to the vast history that precedes us. “Mythmaking”, writes Elizabeth M. Baeten in The Magic Mirror: Myth’s Abiding Power
(1996), “is the backbone of culture, the fundamental means by which human beings demarcate, that is to say, create, human beings” (20). Similarly, as Levi-Strauss extensively argued in The
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Structural Anthropology, myth helps explain both present and past, as well as the future, presenting, as it does, timeless patterns.
On the other hand, the task of an artist, in Robert Wilson’s view, is not simply to tell a story, but to create an event. Artists take the communal ideas and associations that surround the various gods of their time and “play” with them, frequently inventing a new story for these mythic characters. In this respect, part of the auteur’s job is to manufacture modern myths, as Wilson explains in an interview with Umberto Eco in 1993: “We in the theatre do not have to tell a story because the audience comes with a story already in mind. Based on this communally shared information, we can create a theatrical event. An artist recreates history, not like a historian, but as a poet” (89).
As myth on stage replaces dramatic action, and images substitute for verbal narrative, so do spectators, no longer bound by dramatic logic, employ their powers of association to become part of a totality of experience investigating states of being that will always remain deeply personal and yet painfully common to all. Moreover, myth sets different temporal rhythms, dissociated from real time, becoming yet another source of fascination for theatre artists, who are often on the look-out for ways to de-compress dramatic time and generate in the spectator a mood of the “timeless.”93
Similarly, several modern-day storytellers pursue a holistic quality in their work, ambitious to return theatre to its religious origins, just as Artaud had first envisaged. Hence today, there is a desire to revive the universal elements of history, but this revisionism is not attached to the discourse of social and political theatre. The performance groups of the 1960s and 1970s, like
The Open Theatre, The Living Theatre, The Performance Group (see Chapters 1&2), explored
93 For more on the function of time in current auteur practice see Chapter 5.
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ancient myths as pre-narrative poetry-in-space, rather than relying on the actual verbal text of the tragic poets themselves; Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 (1968), the notorious reworking of Euripides’ Bacchae with the ritualised integration of the audience into the spectacle, is only one such example. Even more notably, the quest for the sacred origins of theatre, which Artaud had first detected in Balinese drama, took Peter Brook on long, spiritual journeys across the globe, as will be explored in the Case Study that follows.
Furthermore, the preoccupation with non-Western forms of theatre foregrounds the dialectic first identified by Artaud between Western theatre as dramatic, literary, and logo-centric and Eastern art as instinctual, physical, and purely sensorial. Some of the experimental work of the 1970s in particular, tended to demonise anything Western as by definition impure, claiming that its dynamics had been contaminated and rendered weak and meaningless through the slow yet fatal process of loss of the oral tradition, which was distinctly immediate and experiential.
Significantly, interest in remote cultures fed auteur imagination with images that generated wonderment, as well as distance. For instance, Théâtre du Soleil’s political agenda drove Hélène
Cixous, the company’s long-time collaborator, to embark on a recounting of Cambodia’s history from 1955 to 1979 in The Terrible but Incomplete Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of
Cambodia (1986). The text, fashioned by Cixous, gave Mnouchkine plenty of room to create yet another hybrid form of theatre, blending elements of Kabuki, Kathakali, Peking Opera,
Indonesian shadow puppetry and, no doubt, specifically Cambodian theatrical devices. In that production, different cultures converged and collided on the stage, a vast universe appearing paradoxically contained within the solid walls of the spectacle. Truth be told, the immersion into otherness can be a very fulfilling experience, especially to an uninitiated spectator. As John
Rockwell put it in his New York Times review “If Length were all, or, why a 10 1/3 Hour play?”:
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[In Mnouchkine’s theatre] “images and sounds assume an importance equal to language, all conspiring to create a theatrical experience closer to the mysteries of opera than to the earnest banalities of commercial American theatre.” Similarly, Bonnie Marranca elaborates on directors’ fascination with re-tracing lost civilisations in their productions:
The cultural displacement of contemporary life finds its double in the lives of
texts. These are the dispersed, refugee texts from lost civilisations, those of
unknown or forgotten authors, the texts of books languishing on library shelves,
texts found in archives, texts exiled into oblivion. They find a home in today’s
world, preoccupied by restoration. [. . .] Dispersed texts then create a mosaic
pattern in which the refracted light of ancient suns turns old books into
illuminated manuscripts. (1989: 37)
As early as 1972, Roland Barthes discussed the ideological impact of myth inherent in popular culture in Mythologies. In his view, cultural assumptions are embedded in the form of the myth.
Barthes stresses the importance of myth analysis, particularly in relation to its seeming divorce from history, which privileges a natural order of understanding over a historical and socially constructed perspective. In other words, if history (memory) is absent, then meaning cannot be constructed but through communication. In some cases, it is precisely those cultural assumptions assigned to myths that auteurs manipulate, without attaching a careful reading of history to their work.94
On top of that, even when the subject matter of auteur theatre is not directly related to myth, mythical reference is always alluring, transporting the spectator beyond the walls of the theatre, across time and space. Archetypal images and universal symbols, available to us unconsciously,
94 For the debate on Interculturalism see the following Case Study on The Mahabharata, as well as Chapter 5.
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exist in abundance. To give an example, in Wilson’s productions, mythical figures of all times and cultures appear on stage, carrying their own symbolic significance and resonating universal, human reference, shared by all: thus parading on his quasi-biblical/timeless stages are Noah’s ark, the book of Jonas, Leviathan, ancient and modern Indian texts, a Viking ship, the Pyramids,
Mycenae, Don Quixote, Tarzan and Mata Hari, to name but a few. It is on this account that
Lehmann calls Wilson’s theatre neo-mythical, yet stresses that these myths function as “images, carrying action only as virtual fantasies” (Lehmann 80). Or, as Bonnie Marranca argues:
“[Wilson’s] theatre does not make history, only its poetic other side, memory. He lingers in myth, the space between literature and history” (1989: 36).
CASE STUDY: Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985)
Inspired by Artaud’s theories, directors like Brook and Mnouchkine conceived of a theatre event that would seize the spectator by sheer force of the spectacle. The underlying assumption in their work has been that a non-verbal, almost religious ritual could induce trances, which would act in the audience like “Chinese acupuncture”, as Artaud had eloquently put it in his essay on the
Theatre of Cruelty. This undercurrent is strong in Brook’s theatre rituals, in which dramatic time is completely subordinated to a mythic dimension, while the narrative frees itself from conventional dramatic structure, opening up to the scope of history and the attainment of a “new religion” and a lost spirituality. Brook made the capturing of a holy mystique a life-long goal, looking for archaic, pre-narrative responses to non-Western, vibrantly physical forms of Theatre.
After extensive experimentation with physical forms, Brook’s sacred topos, the “empty space” was infused with images of myth and memories taken out of our collective unconscious. His
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nine-hour long The Mahabharata (1985) consisted of a condensation by Jean-Claude Carrière of the 12,000-page Hindu epic, an 18-volume Sanskrit poem dating back to 400 B.C. and based on
Hindu history, mythology and philosophical thought. The text tells the story of the birth of heroes and gods, the partition of the world and a brutal civil war that leads to the destruction of humankind and the reign of heavenly paradise. Both writer and director worked intensely on covering the whole poem, by compressing action, characters and secondary plots.
Notwithstanding the heavy editing of the epic, the production ultimately featured twenty-two actors and six musicians, who also took part in the action. In addition, the performance began at sunset and ended at dawn.
In the Mahabharata, Brook mixes contemporary elements with beautifully staged physical action, mime and spectacular scenes of battles, animal and divine masks and magic fires. In a space that evokes a huge archaeological excavation site, with two permanent bodies of water (a downstage pool and upstage river), all our physical senses are aroused: the haunting otherness of the musical score, together with the subtle burning of incense and the rich textures of the costumes, all add to the mood of the total (semiotic) feast brought about by the mise-en-scène.
Furthermore, making use of elements explored in all previous stages of Brook’s career, the production builds up with astonishing clarity and simplicity, with a spiritual feeling of detachment that has over the years come to characterise the director’s work. Hence, the main story-line is reduced to its bare bones. Visual eloquence and ritualistic choreography are instrumental in communicating a sense of timelessness and shared humanity. Brook’s imaginative direction is really boundless: blood is represented by a piece of red cloth dipped into one of the two rivers on stage. Unrolling a carpet and throwing some cushions on the sand
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provides access to a court-room. The actors throw powder in the air to create the effect of dust from the battle.
Moreover, the evocative simplicity of Brook’s staging goes hand-in-hand with symbolic undertone, to carry the weight of an extravagantly long and complex epic of supernatural beings
(the sun-god or the vast-belly demon), as well as of intriguing battle scenes with assumed torrents of blood, streaks of thunder and meteors, uprooting of trees and sacred weapons.
Symbolism replaces naturalistic detail impossible to achieve on such epic scale, inviting the spectators to make the imaginative connections themselves, as myth is “brought down to the human level” (Innes 1993: 145).
Theatre, writes Brook in The Open Door (1995) is a “mysterious marriage at the centre of legitimate experience, where private man and mythical man can be apprehended together within the same instant of time” (56). Thus, in the Mahabharata the director appealed to the audience’s intuitive perception of myth by having the human body of the performer move to the rhythms of latent states of being, which are inherent in myth. Brook actually attempted to communicate an internal state by pure “thought transfer”, adding vocal rhythms “to discover what was the very least he needed before understanding could be reached” and developing a body language
“beyond psychological implication and beyond monkey-see-monkey-do facsimiles of social behaviourism” (Brook qtd in Innes 1993: 127). Undeniably, since the establishment of his international company, Brook has been very consistent in and committed to the exploration of myth in search of the “Great Narratives”, repeatedly encouraging audiences to “see myth and
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archetype as dynamic, provocative and potentially trans-cultural paradigms for exploring present absences and possible futures interrogatively.”95
Nevertheless, within the framework of the recent debate on Interculturalism, which will be further highlighted in the following chapter, Brook has been criticised of carelessly and painlessly attempting to condense the enormity of myth into a digestible Westernised spectacle for the stage. Part of the critique focuses on Carrière’s ambitious, yet in parts shallow abridgment of the original poem, which sometimes produces telegraphic descriptions of action, often more recited than dramatised. The result of this is frequently a feeling of heavy-handed sermonising, which attempts to fill in gaps in the story-telling and provide expository information concerning war battles, familial history and genealogy, as well as philosophical debates.
At the same time, criticism falls on Brook’s appropriation of Eastern tradition to forge a hazy atmosphere of universal myth. Indeed, in the Mahabharata, Brook makes extensive use of Asian puppets, Japanese drums and Peking Opera military costume, so that in the end everything blends nicely into a digestible spectacle, tailored to the palate of a Western audience and to an extent relying on cultural stereotype. One of the staunchest critiques of the production sees the
Mahabharata as “one of the most blatant (and accomplished) appropriation of Indian culture in recent years [. . .] an appropriation and re-ordering of non-western material within an orientalist framework of thought and action, which has been specifically designed for the international market” (Bharucha 68).96 Along the same lines:
95 David Williams. “Remembering the Others that are US: Transculturalism and myth in the theatre of Peter Brook” (in Pavis 1996: 68).
96 Similarly, Bharucha argues that context “is not an issue for Brook. What matters is the ‘flavour of India’ that is suggested through the mise-en-scène” (70).
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In an intercultural performance [. . .] the communication of the foreign does not
occupy foreground interest. The goal is not that the audience be brought closer to,
or made familiar with the foreign tradition, but rather that the foreign tradition is,
to a greater or lesser extent, transformed according to the different conditions of
specific fields of reception. (Fischer Lichte: 1990: 283)
Albeit derived from a desire to speak across cultures, such appropriation of Indian civilisation, at points simplistic and conspicuously adjusted to Western cultural and literary sensibilities, unfortunately borders on naïve and dangerous a-historicity. Reviewing the New York production at B.A.M., Frank Rich contests:
Mr. Brook’s smorgasbord of Oriental stagecraft also can appear a bit synthetic: A
puppet sequence is perfunctory, and the relentless Eastern music (played by
onstage musicians who come and go with distracting frequency) sounds as if it
were purchased by the yard, along with the rugs. For all the Eastern exotica, the
staging and the script still end up accentuating the common ground shared by
“The Mahabharata” and the West. In the wanderings of the blind prince
Dhritarashtra and the forest exile of the Pandavas, we are encouraged to make
associations with Oedipus, the Old Testament, Shakespeare. Though the
similarities are there to be found, one can’t help wondering if the
idiosyncratically Eastern character of “The Mahabharata” has been watered down
to knock international audiences over the head with the universality of mankind’s
essential myths.
Yet, Brook’s “appropriation” can reversely be seen as an attempt to bridge difference, by bringing disparate cultural elements together in a single production and thus uniting different
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traditions. Still, the yearning to discover a universal language for the stage, that has been
Brook’s goal, is inevitably exposed to a certain degree of naïveté and as such feels vulnerable to severe criticism. In discussing the intercultural element in contemporary world theatre, Erika
Fischer-Lichte ponders on how the intercultural is geared towards the idea of a “future world culture-to-be” and reaches the conclusion that “in this respect, theatre functions in one sense as the aesthetic beacon of Utopia” (in Pavis 1996: 38).
All the same, it would be wrong to underestimate the impressive, if guileless scope of Brook’s ambition, namely, to wrap up the immense historical, moral, philosophical and aesthetic magnitude of the Indian myth within one single performance. As Christopher Innes points out:
By relying on the figures of the actors alone to inspire the audience’s
imagination, Brook deliberately brought myth down to the human level [. . .] The
significance is that men and gods are interchangeable, divinity is within us; and
the link between archaic myth and the present is underlined by a narrative frame
imposed on the action. [. . .] The performance is therapeutic, producing a spiritual
change in each spectator by revealing that (as the boy discovers) ‘I have the same
blood. I come from the gods’, to which indeed Vyasa replies: “that’s what the
story tells.” (Innes 1993: 145-6)
No doubt, achieving global significance is in itself a noble goal; in the search for that allegorical empty space of myth, Brook’s quest has many a time appeared romantic and/or futile. Perhaps the challenges involved in staging the epic poem’s apocalyptic vision defy even the genius and earnestness of a director like Brook, whose artistic pursuits are always profound, if sometimes utopian. Ultimately, however, whether utopian or a-historical, Brook’s The Mahabharata takes the director’s preoccupation with shared (universal) communication via theatre’s return to
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“roots” even further; at the same time, it has helped the director ground and elaborate an acting style that is rigorously physical, at the service of a theatre of visual brilliance and constant surprise.
CASE STUDY: Terzopoulos’ work on Greek tragedy
Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Athens-based Attis Theatre has been committed to exploring the potential of physical theatre in order to express the grand dimensions of myths, and in particular of Greek tragedy, valorising the body of the actor over speech. Not surprisingly, the company is named after God Dionysus, who stands for the absolute loss of self-control to which young actors are often led. In essence, the company’s work focuses on the “violently physical, as well as violently ritualistic expression” (Varopoulou, introduction to Terzopoulos 9). 97
Terzopoulos has over the years developed a distinct way of reading classic texts. While in most directors’ revisions of the classics it is the timelessness of the texts that matters the most,
Terzopoulos is more concerned to discover those elements in ancient tragedy that speak across cultures, rather than through time. So in a way, his theatre could be called “intercultural”, in that it uses the actor’s body to make the text speak to different audiences, since in his view, the suffering body, the body as it manifests itself in ancient tragedy, displays common characteristics in different cultures and religions.
Moreover, in his work on tragedy, Terzopoulos always focuses on what he calls a “nucleus” of meaning, and principally works around specific themes that surface in the plays (such as the theme of heroism in Prometheus Bound or of mourning in The Bacchae), rather than “psycho-
97For more on Terzopoulos’ emphasis on the “performing body” see also Chapter 5, Section on The Body.
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analysing” the characters to make them familiar and easily accessible to the audiences. In such perspective, the sense of emotional involvement is not achieved through the empathetic relationship of the audience to the stage, rather, through the evocation of primal, archetypical images brought to life through the physicality of the performers.
Equally, even though Terzopoulos’ theatre is mostly concerned with how to make myth reverberate in audiences across the globe98, the director appears highly suspicious of the temptations that lurk behind adapting a classic work by means of re-contextualising its action or setting. In reality, Terzopoulos is totally adverse to restoring tragedy by ways of painless metaphor and gimmicky directorial transposition to contemporary times. He actually believes that restorations give birth to still-born babies. More than anything else, he is concerned to highlight something in the ancient tradition that would be relevant today and therefore, instead of small details and particular-case aesthetics, he creates the energy of collective integrity, of a harmonious and passionate play of actors. Along these lines, his performances display an orgiastic feeling of ancient ritual and an intensity of tragic rhythm.
Terzopoulos’ best-known productions of ancient Greek drama include The Bacchae (1986), The
Persians (1991, 2006), Antigone (1994), Prometheus Bound (1997) and Heracles Furens (2000) among others. In them, he returns to the primal, uncontaminated source of myth and refrains from resorting to what he sees as the readily available psychological material of modern theatre.
“We can’t turn ancient theatre [. . .] into chamber drama”, he exclaims passionately in an interview with Antigoni Karali. “Tragedy needs stature.” Naturally, he also rejects the current trend in some postmodern productions to turn tragedy into psychological theatre, mixing it with
98 In fact, Attis remains the most international among Greek theatre companies.
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naturalism or performance art. He is adamant about his (op) position. In the same interview he elaborates:
I don’t do adaptation. Rather, I go straight to the archetypes; anthropomorphism,
animal forms, these things. And in this respect, beyond lament and guilt, beyond
mourning even, new vistas have opened up in my exploration of the form of
tragedy. [. . .] Tragedy is an open form. It has several levels, which are extremely
dense. We can only interpret few of them, but the greater part remains
unexplored, adjusting itself to new social, political and human conditions. We
can adjust the “timelessness of wars, modernise it, transfer it to human situation,
to a the city, and other contemporary issues, such as the environment, to the
issues of love and death, even to cloning; but we can never transcend certain
principles that have to do with self-concentration, the grand stature, the grand
energy [. . .] because we can never whisper those issues by adapting them to the
new circumstances.
Terzopoulos’ desire to arrest states of liminality that only myth can encompass gave shape to the production of Bacchae in 1986, in which he launched his first major attack on conventional forms of representation. The choice of the specific play was not accidental: its very subject- matter gave the director plenty of opportunity to explore the extremes of human behavior, of individuals led to destruction through divine intervention. And this is precisely where the body comes in to foreground the existence of archetypes, manifest in people’s shared instincts, behavioral patterns and conditions.
In effect, throughout Terzopoulos’ work on tragedy, the irreparable rupture between thought and feeling, between reason and the “irrational” has been continually reflected in the half-naked
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actors’ physical codes. Their bodies are almost exclusively operated by instinct alone, as though
God Dionysus himself is incarnated in each one of them. To further grasp the essence of ritual and ecstasy, Attis had thoroughly researched age-deep traditions in several religious and folk festivals all over Greece.
At the same time, Terzopoulos found fertile ground for his experimentation with myth and tragedy in the plays of German postmodern writer Heiner Müller Despoiled Shore,
Medeamaterial and Landscape with Argonauts (1988) and Heracles (1997). Influenced by the formalist aesthetic of Suzuki and Wilson, Terzopoulos sees in Müller’s fragmentary production- plays99 the opportunity to delve deep into a post-apocalyptic space in order to explore the primal streams of energy that run through the human body across time and cultural reference.
Indeed, in order to work completely uninhibited from set forms, often auteurs by-pass other writers’ revisions of myths, resorting to the very sources of the myth itself. Responding to this challenge in his treatment of the myth of Heracles, Terzopoulos also departs from the text of
Euripides, not to mention Heiner Müller’s text, entering the mythological pre-sources of the plot, in order to dig deep inside the archaic layers of myth and find its cultural significance in today’s world. Thus, in more than one ways, Terzopoulos, truthful to Artaud’s vision, chooses the difficult road, striving to achieve contemporary relevance by freeing up the elemental force of violence, ritual and ecstasy. Commenting on Terzopoulos’ treatment of myth, Müller in 1987 pronounced that:
In Terzopoulos’ theatre myth is not fairytale, it is condensed experience; the
process of rehearsal is not the performance of a dramatic concept, it is an
adventure on a journey to the landscape of memory, a search for the lost keys of
99 For more on Müller see Chapter 6.
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unity between body and speech, the word as natural entity. (Qtd in Terzopoulos
35)
Therefore in Heracles, where the hero triumphs as “Heracles-Hydra-Machine”, the theme of heroism and obsession is passionately scrutinised. Through the looking glass, Heracles sees the reflection of Hydra whom he identifies with the “Machine”, and subsequently kills his wife and children. In his more recent production of Heracles Furens (part of the trilogy Descent [2000]),
Terzopoulos has his hero recognise his deed and realise that he is not responsible for it. Instead, it is his divine-originating madness that drove him to his heinous crime.
In all of these works, Terzopoulos has applied the principle that our body carries inside it memories and images that have been pushed aside; these he sees as imprints of other times and other lives, in effect, as a kind of consciousness of the world itself. Effectively, he has also applied in his productions the theory that tragedy holds one captive within its possibilities, providing an entry-way into the very essence of humanity, its blood and human cell and releasing this almost metaphysical consciousness through its form and stature.
Having travelled all over the world, Terzopoulos has studied keenly those elements that are common in every culture, concluding that there exist in each person instinctual patterns of behaviour, which have been inscribed long before he/ she has been marked by a particular local or national culture. Carrying on this line, his method is to identify and classify these elements, to subsequently transfer them onto his actors’ physical training, always with a view to communicating a heightened sense of ritual. His style is duly eclectic: he borrows disciplined physicality from the formalism of Wilson and from Suzuki’s training, while at the same time valorises the voice of tragedy, which emerges from the transparency of the performers’ bodies.
Thus, “in Terzopoulos’ theatre of ritual the body is transubstantiated into an archetypical body,
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giving the director the freedom to work upon it through an aesthetic of sculpture, so that the body can manifest itself as a ‘hieroglyphic’ body” (Hatzidimitriou 154, my translation).
Terzopoulos’ most recent experiment on ancient Greek tragedy, his production of Sophocles’
Ajax at the smaller theatre of Epidaurus in July 2008 was based on a stage composition that had resulted from the company’s work on some of those “nuclei” of tragedy specific to the play, namely, the themes of betrayal, madness, revenge, suicide and remorse. In the Sophoclean myth, heroic Ajax goes mad because of the injustice his co-warriors inflict on him during the Trojan
War and as a result, slaughters a flock of sheep, believing that they are actually his enemies.
After he realises his self-ridiculing act, he commits suicide.
Terzopoulos brought onto the stage red stiletto shoes, knives, butcher knives, seven bare-chested
“Ajaxes”, and one mourning woman. Lasting a mere one hour and fifteen minutes, Ajax makes use of very few lines of Sophocles’ tragedy, and gives a new dimension to the myth of the ill- treated hero: that of satyr play, where because of the chorus of satyrs, the stateliness of tragedy is no longer very strong, even though the heroes remain tragic. This was not the director’s first treatment at the text. Yet, unlike his past productions of the play, which principally foregrounded the issue of madness, Terzopoulos now chose to research Ajax’s guilt and lament.
The effect of such emphasis is stunning, especially in the part when Ajax fully realises his crime of having killed a goat. Terzopoulos turns the victimiser into a victim, whose cry becomes an ode –the goat’s cry, making allusions to the origins of tragedy itself. The actors narrate Ajax’s crimes and in the end are themselves transformed to victims-victimisers. Ultimately, remorse is choreographed, acquires flesh and blood, and is subsequently turned into an object of mockery.
Ajax’s ode adds to the overall effect of modern ritual, while the performance closes with Pink
Floyd’s Final Cut, perhaps the sole overtly anti-war statement in the whole production.
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Despite the physical and rhythmic rigour of his performances, in his most recent work on tragedy Terzopoulos has been repeatedly accused of reproducing mere variations of the form he has devised in each of his experiments.100 If anything, his style frequently borders on mannerism, as though the director’s creative resources have been exhausted and he feels forced to resort to risk-free technique. Yet, one cannot deny that Terzopoulos’ approach is consistent and to an extent, original. At a time when endless postmodern revisions of classical drama fail to register the volume and magnitude of the profound issues embedded in myth, Terzopoulos offers an alternative which in the very least strives to communicate the sense of primal force and energy that informs the ancient form.
100 See Chapter 5, Critique.
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5. LANGUAGES OF THE STAGE
The Means to an End
5.1.1. Image structuration-Framing Devices
Having looked into some of the work methods and sources of inspiration of contemporary auteurs, we will now investigate the principal scenic languages these directors employ in their writing of the performance text. As expressed in the previous chapters of the dissertation, some of these languages had been introduced by the early twentieth century experimentalists, like
Jarry, Craig, Appia and Reinhardt, theorised upon by Artaud and shaped into formalist innovations by Beckett. The importance of the visual image, the creative handling of time, rhythm and sound, the emphasis on the physical life of the performance, as well as the integration of technology as a potent layer of textuality, have in some form or other been present in the productions of the auteurs we have been primarily examining.
“When I make a play”, argues Robert Wilson, “I start with a form, even before I know the subject matter. I start with a visual structure, and in the form I know the content. The form tells me what to do” (qtd in Homberg 84). Contrary to verbal language, often characterised by abstractions hard to penetrate, an image set in space and transformed by stage co-ordinates foregrounds a concreteness that is not simply mesmerising, but fundamentally carries within it interpretative significance. Still, it is not only the choice of images, but significantly, the auteurs’ re-ordering, refining and re-framing those images that creates for the audience an altered perception of the world. Auteurs like Wilson, Clarke and Foreman, among others, bring in a painterly perspective to the appreciation of performance, following course on Beckett’s
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pioneering establishment of the stage image as an integral part of the text itself, as was examined in Chapter 3.
Lehmann rightly purports that the de-dramatisation of text, together with the allure of scenic writing have in post-dramatic/postmodern productions reduced plot to a secondary place in the hierarchy of performance in favour of the scenic process:
There are directors who may stage traditional dramatic texts but do so by
employing theatrical means in such a way that a de-dramatisation occurs. If in
the staged text the action is relegated to the background altogether, however, it is
in the logic of theatre aesthetic that the peculiar temporality and spatiality of the
scenic process itself comes to the fore. It becomes more the presentation of an
atmosphere and state of things. A scenic écriture captures the attention,
compared to which the dramatic plot becomes secondary. (Lehmann 74,
emphasis original)
Similarly, serving to enhance the aesthetic quality of a visual image, or even assume the role of a
“third character in the play”, lighting is another powerful framing device: it can isolate, juxtapose, or superimpose actions on stage, surround actors, sculpt bodies, demarcate space and reinforce a feeling of ritual. Wilson views lighting just as important as the actor on stage: “I paint, I build, I compose with light. Light is a magic wand” (qtd in Mitter and Shevtsova 186).
In this, he follows the path laid out by Appia, who regarded light’s role in performance just as crucial as the music’s function to the score, as well as by Beckett, who made ample use of functional lighting in his plays.101
101 For more on the function of lighting in auteur work see Chapters 1 & 3.
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On the other hand, an object can function either as a symbol (which can actually be calamitous if it is conceived literally) or evocatively, rousing emotion by stimulating subtle association. In this sense, objects on stage are part of the auteurs’ arsenal of scenic tools in the making of the performance text. When eloquent in their stage presence and associational in their function, they constitute a powerful visual language, triggering mental images and memories unique to each spectator.
Possibly, the best-known innovator of objects and props in the theatre was Tadeusz Kantor. A visual artist to begin with, he worked in daring experiments in performance art and happenings, well versed in the languages of postmodernism. In his productions, objects were valorised to the extent that they became elements of the action, in dialogue with humans. Kantor, however, never resorted to representationalism. His found objects, as well as his ready-made spaces102 and events were perfectly integrated into the newly structured compositional frame of performance, true as Kantor remained to Witkiewitz’s theory of “Pure Form.”103
Seen in perspective, the creative use of lighting, object and image serves the human need for metamorphosis that theatre is asked to fulfil. Images of entrancing, seamless transformation are often quoted in auteur productions, not simply a result of directorial manoeuvres or of the ability to translate an idea technically, but rather, a product of the boundless imagination of an artist able to conceive of connections between seemingly incongruous things and reach beyond the
102 The term readymade or found art—more commonly found object (French: objet trouvé) describes art created from the use of objects that would not normally qualify as “art”, often because they already have an every-day, utilitarian function. Ordinarily, a ready-made object is made art once it is placed into an unusual context.
103 In Kantor’s production of Witkiewicz’s The Cuttlefish (1956), the environment, objects and actors were engaged in an intricate process of constituting diverse spatial formations, shocks and tensions, in order to unblock the imagination and to crush the impregnable shell of the drama (Michael Kobialka in Mitter and Shevtsova 71).
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tangible icon into the recesses of the subconscious, in order to unearth what has been lying there buried, in a way that may surprise, shock or altogether enthral the audience.
Manifesting an ever-surprising visual sense, in his recent Andersen Project (2006), the one-man show he has written, directed and performed, and inspired by two stories by Hans Christian
Andersen (“The Dryad” and “The Shadow”) Canadian director, actor and musician Robert
Lepage, artistic director of multidisciplinary production company Ex Machina (founded in
1993), manifested the same creative genius that has over the years earned him the reputation of a visual wizard. According to the account of the London production at the Barbican by Guardian critic Michael Billington:
What holds the attention is less the novelty of the ideas than Lepage’s visual
brilliance and satiric humour. At one point, he moves seamlessly from the tall
albino Frederic to a crinolined dryad emerging from the gnarled bark of a tree.
Andersen’s doomed love for the Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind, is beautifully
caught in a sequence where he hopelessly strips a fully-clothed female dummy.
And only in a Lepage show could Andersen’s museum-case luggage turn into a
high-speed train rattling between Copenhagen and Cologne.
Not only does Lepage, in his own words “whisk the stage from one era to the next”, as Susannah
Clapp characteristically reports in her review in The Observer; he also takes on several personas and morphs from one character into another, “from the Opera director, that Machiavellian master of arts politics into a fond father reading a sad bedtime story to a beloved daughter [. . .]
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along with his wife”104; while at the same time he infiltrates the fairy-tale element in his text, mixing it with scenes from every day life and video projected images.
Transformation and contrast both reveal Lepage’s preoccupation with enabling alternative ways of seeing. John Cobb, one of the Scottish actors working with him on the production of Tectonic
Plates (1990), tellingly conveys in a production review by Mark Fisher that “Lepage is an artist and actors are his pencils. [. . .] He is an auteur and watching his work in progress is like going into Picasso’s studio when he’s making a sculpture.”
The same can be said of Wilson, whose painterly genius lies in his altering our perception of the ordinary. His pictorial sense is always inventive, the visuals “angled” and surprising; no image, despite its outward stillness, can remain internally static for too long. Each human figure positioned on stage contains a secret, the potential for instantaneous transformation. In like manner, the ground that these bodies tread on is shifting, uncertain, treacherous, while the kernel for change in size, shape and otherwise, remains integral to all of them. In the words of New
York Times critic Ben Brantley, who reviewed the production in “Journey in a Labyrinth of
Dreams”:
Mr. Wilson also makes as keen a use of basic human physiognomy as any
director working now. He can induce appreciative gasps simply by having a
literal giant of a man fully extend his arms. A gnarled, bearded, gnomelike man,
so frail-looking you expect him to break, suddenly erupts into transporting
laughter. And you are always aware of the contrasts in the sizes and shapes of the
104 Account of the performance in Natalie Bennett’s “Theatre Review: The Andersen Project by Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina”. January 30, 2006.
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people onstage, who suggest a multiplicity of forms of being and, by extension,
seeing [. . .] Many of the scenes in “Days Before,” especially those featuring
headless torsos and seemingly empty suits of clothes that come to life, bring to
mind the paintings of Magritte, de Chirico and Dali. Others, which prominently
display chairs and lighting fixtures of Mr. Wilson’s design, suggest a furniture
showroom in Milan.
An innate flair for visual dramaturgy, together with a strong background in the fine arts has given Wilson both the impetus and the tools to construct plays as landscapes, influenced by the principles of Gertrude Stein’s landscape writing.105 In 1922, in discussions of how she writes and why she writes, Stein postulated that she used words to paint pictures and that the viewing of writing plays as analogous to the practice of landscape painting freed her up from the conventions of realistic drama.106
In point of fact, in Wilson’s performances, exact painterly composition and three-dimensional staging, together with an acute attention to detail, transubstantiate objects and bodies into still lives and real life portraits on stage. Conventional narrative techniques are jettisoned in favour of the visual evocation of mood. Such concern is notable in almost all of Wilson’s more recent productions, such as Alice in Wonderland (1995), Time Rocker (1997) and Dream Play (2000), but it is especially in such early works as Deafman Glance (1971), The Life and Times of Joseph
Stalin (1973) and Einstein on the Beach (1976), where his landscape aesthetic works alongside
105 For more on Stein’s landscape writing see Chapter 6, Section on Neo-Dramatic Writing.
106 As Laura Schultz explains in her lecture on “Gertrude Stein and postdramatic theatre”: “By defining the play as a landscape, Stein implies that she does not want to write dramatical plays with a fictional, linear plot. Instead she tries to create a kind of text that is able to produce visual relationships between characters and objects in a spatial presence and simultaneity. These landscape plays do not create a fictive universe in any conventional sense. Rather, they generate visual compositions in a scenic space” (University of Copenhagen, 21 Sept. 2008).
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with a more daring and much less linear treatment of the verbal text. However, even though in later works Wilson returns to more accepted forms of narrative, his imagery continues to remain associational and abstract. In his stunning treatment of Strindberg’s Dream Play (2000), for example, Wilson comes up with a visual masterpiece consisting of thirteen tableaux, whereby reality is constantly interrupted by dreams. On top of that, gradual shifts in the lighting go hand- in-hand with these lyrical intrusions, as in the scene of the remote house’s yard turning suddenly amber in colour in anticipation of autumn. Moreover, strikingly stylised choreography, filmic devices such as dissolves and black-outs, and an evocatively conceived sound-scape, are all elements of Wilson’s mise-en-scène, adding to the idea of manufacturing a performance as a painting that has been also set to divine music.
In ways parallel to Dreamplay, Wilson’s Alice in Wonderland registers a similar array of pictorial images, arranged mostly in the form of symbolically conceived tableaux, ornamented with music and song. The juxtaposition of pristine images with moments of violence is another function of contrast as a means for creating disorientation and thus reinforcing a sense of dream and hallucination in the minds of the audience. In Stephen Holden’s New York Times account of the performance:
Early in the show, Alice finds herself in a kitchen, with flying plates coming from
all sides. And later, she doesn’t demurely step through the looking glass, she
crashes through it. A duel between the Black and White Knights is prefaced by an
ear-splitting thunderstorm. “Jabberwocky” is sung by a chorus of Victorian vicars
to the accompaniment of furiously banging percussion. As leeringly interpreted
by eight bald, chalky-faced clerics, it has the ring of an obscene marching song
translated into code.
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Moreover, avant-garde directors’ concern for visual perfection has also produced stage adaptations of actual paintings, in what might seem to be the most self-conscious process of visualisation. In particular, choreographer-director Martha Clarke, formerly a member of the
Pilobolus Dance Theatre and a co-founder of Crowsnest employs a decidedly voluptuous scenic imagism to render alive painterly compositions or even just an atmosphere. Characteristically, in
The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), Clarke dramatised the Hieronymus Bosch triptych, just as later on she would stage the atmosphere and character of fin-du-siècle Vienna in Charles
Mee’s Vienna: Lusthaus (2003). Both productions actually introduced a new kind of painterly performance, unifying theatre, dance, music and fine art. Thus in Vienna Lusthaus, images build into whole worlds, with the actor’s body working as an additional element in the painterly composition and choreography supplying the totality of brush strokes in the canvas of performance. Though it has no narrative line, Vienna Lusthaus is full of dramatic resonance.
According to Mel Gussow’s account of the production in “Martha Clarke speaks the language of
Illusion”:
We are swept along in this lusthaus, or pleasure pavilion, until one receives a
vision of vertiginous days in Vienna. As a theatrical conceptualist, [Martha
Clarke] has bound all her thoughts and impressions (and research) into a seamless
collage, a series of living tableaux (with text) that capture the decadence as well
as the beauty. Always behind the beauty, one feels the imminent dread, yet
decadence has never seemed more beautiful.
Having established at length the function of image and scenography as text, it may be worth observing how even in the most formalist of auteurs the original conception of an image is generated in emotional connections, which help transform feelings into concepts. If this organic
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process is reversed, with personal connectedness to the material surrendered or sacrificed to the idea, the concept or the form, then the image exacted will inevitably be doomed to meaninglessness, despite its spell-bounding beauty. The final section of this chapter indeed investigates the dangers that loom behind many auteurs’ purely formalist considerations.
This said, set designers should constantly struggle to break new communication barriers, in order to accustom spectators to challenge. However, they must also remain aware of the fact that in doing this, they inevitably run the risk that their unconventional, non-representational and ultimately, abstract designs may not be easily or automatically processed by the audience. In the end, the process of visualisation is almost inevitable in the directing process, ideally defined by a strong imagistic base. New York based auteur JoAnne Akalaitis describes her own image- inspired sources as follows: “I get most of my ideas from pictures. In fact, all images in the theatre are visual, even language –it’s impossible to read without making pictures in your mind.
The crucial thing for me is always to remain true to your images” (qtd in Wetzeston 30).
Yet, it is worth keeping in mind that an image is never a still or shallow property, but on the contrary, it is something that reflects, shapes and accommodates meaning. As Simon McBurney explains:
“Image” is not simply pictorial representation or coup de theatre, but rather a
complex, dynamic syntax allying and layering movement, rhythm, text, music
and object, engendered by the poetic logic of the forms and narratives at play
within a production: image as the fusion of form and content in an embodied, if
fleeting “world.” (Qtd in Mitter and Shevtsova 250, emphasis original)
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In addition, given that visual interpretation begins the moment one starts to read the performance text, and that the language of scenography is an alternative medium to logos, it follows that:
Every reading of the theatre text imposes choices of spatial structuring, as soon as
one has to decide who is speaking and according to what proxemic relationships.
Space is organised as much within the scenographic framework as it is by the
actors’ bodies and the individual and social distances to be observed between
them. (Pavis 1993: 156, emphasis original)
It is therefore instrumental for the uninhibited reception and absorption of scenography (image) that the director can allow the visual materials of the stage to fall into a natural balance between clarity and suggestion.
5.1.2. Time and Rhythm
Perhaps more than any other aspect of the audience perception of a performance, it is the sense of time that has been the most seriously “wounded” in auteur theatre semiosis. In principle, the loss of a stable time frame can be attributed to the over-all reconsideration of dramatic time
(crisis of time). Previously, the convention of realistic theatre held that the spectators would ideally abandon themselves to the illusory world on stage, altogether pushing back any irritating intrusions of a “real-time” dimension. In effect, they were forced to keep themselves “locked” inside a zone of quarantined time, namely that of the compressed time in which the spectacle was to unfold.
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However, the gradual identification of scenic time with audience time brought with it endless perceptual possibilities, which in turn informed the auteurs’ signifying choices. Dramatic time, which used to reinforce the sense of narrative completeness in realistic drama was in auteur work rendered subjective, irrelevant and/or invalid. Shattering the illusion of dramatic continuity, the new dramaturgies of the 1970s first attempted to access the dimension of shared time between audience and performer, manipulating the aesthetic of “real time”, which virtually joins the perceptual process of the spectator to the experiential one of the actor. As a result, not only is the performance’s unity of time cancelled; in recent auteur productions, particularly those influenced by information technologies, time can be fast-forwarded, distended and reshaped at will.
In most cases, the manner in which time is manoeuvred is geared towards generating a distancing effect. For example, the effect of real time, used in the practice of artists like
Foreman, Wilson, or downtown New York based company, Elevator Repair Service107, requires a different kind of concentration of the spectators. These new demands could be associated to the fact that because audiences had for a long time been schooled in understanding and accepting compressed dramatic time as the only viable paradigm in the experience of live performance, following the (natural) rhythms of real time required a gradual shifting of focus and emotional attention.
107 Run by Artistic Director John Collins, the company has been famous for its deconstructive versions of great American classics, like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Gatz, 2005) and recently in 2008, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury [The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)].
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A telling example of a hyper-real use of moment-to-moment theatrical time is the work of renowned Swiss auteur, Christoph Marthaler.108 His double interest in directing and musical composition has made him especially conscious of the rhythmic patterns and the nature of time in performance. As a result, the excruciatingly slow pacing of his performances, where clocks have stopped, an ordinary action such as getting up from a chair takes up to five minutes to complete and the most banal activity seems to be repeated ad infinitum, reveals his existential concern with those “in-between moments” where people are forever locked. As director
Benedict Andrews comments:
Marthaler’s music theatre shares Italo Calvino’s favourite motto, ‘festina lente’,
hurry slowly. Against capitalism’s perpetual novelty and urge to speed, he allows
theatre to maintain a distinct tempo. He slows the heartbeat and stops life’s flow
to observe and reflect. Duration is staged as a musical melody, a multiplicity and
a dynamic continuation of past into present time into a future. Marthaler’s
humanist theatre is a refusal to speed up or catch up. (8)
This observation surely applies to Marthaler’s recent production of Riesenbutzbach - A
Permanent Colony109, created jointly with Anna Viebrock (2009). Dragged out movements, minute-long pauses and relentless repetition, create a veil around the core of the action, enveloping the audience in a mist of time, where each minute seems to expand into an eternity,
108 Born in 1951, Marthaler studied music in Zurich and later trained at the Jacques Lecoq Institute in Paris, developing his own kind of music-theatre, in which characters of a (usually) forlorn, non-descript community, unite in notably quiet choral singing, as a way to purge their existential anxiety. 109 According to the production’s programme notes, in the colony of Riesenbutzbach, encompassed in the minimalist environment created by Anna Viebrock, twelve artists, actors and musicians present a nightmare life, in which each place and each person is continually subject to controls. The play examines the impact of a culture of consumption upon Central Europeans, foregrounding their anxieties relating to the loss of their privileges and material riches.
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and where we, the spectators, eventually become part of the claustrophobia of a consumerism- drained society of ghosts.
Similarly captivating is the exploitation of time as memory, as well as the function of theatre as time machine, by no means a recent development in auteur work.110 To use an illustrious example, Kantor’s obsession with past and childhood led him to the creation of a form of theatre that would contain and communicate a sense of dramatised memory. In I Shall Never Return
(1988), the director elaborated on his notion of the “inn of memory”, in which past creations merged with present circumstance. In Kantor’s time-less space, the “I” of the creator (Self) confronted his past, embodied in objects, phrases, collaged pieces of previous productions and other “ghosts” from his vast storage of memories. The exploration of memory has also provided a valid pretext for those auteurs wishing to take us on a journey into the remotest strata of history, as in the case of Mnemonic, discussed in the previous chapter, which was sparked by
McBurney’s reading of Konrad Spindler’s book, The Man in the Ice, an account of finding the body of a man preserved for 5,000 years in Alpine ice.
In similar ways, control over time is yet another effective framing device. For one thing, repetition produces emphasis, as becomes clear in Mnouchkine’s epic spectacle Le Dernier
Caravansérail (2005), where the structuring of the production focuses on the unflinching presentation of refugee plight. In reality, deliberate emphasis on how these refugees are kicked, robbed, harassed and prostituted is achieved through the heart-wrenching repetition of these actions. The effect of such “over-kill” is however tremendous: by the time the audience feels it has had enough of this endless torture, Mnouchkine changes gear and relieves us of the tension.
110 The author’s fascination with matters of memory and different time levels could be traced back to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and more recently, to Pinter’s memory plays.
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Therefore, in the second part of the production, the rhythm changes into a contemplative tuning of the spectator to the small, yet tangible pleasures of life (the final picnic scene topping them), that even victimised refugees can still enjoy.
Simultaneity also shapes time by means of compression. By setting one image, one body, one space against another, directors can simulate the effect of speed. Naturally, the use of technology grants artists different means of manipulating simultaneity to an extreme degree, radicalising and relativising time more than any other medium. On the other hand, hypnotic stasis, long pauses, silence and slowness are all parts of a postmodern, post-apocalyptical landscape of ellipsis and emptiness, where Beckett’s existential angst often penetrates Heiner Müller’s bombarded collages.
Fundamentally, when time is distorted, the action on stage acquires a new significance, given that our perception of this action is totally reframed, to the effect of prolongation or emphatically extreme duration. Thus, in Complicité’s Mnemonic, almost by definition a play about time and remembering, the stunning stage images manage to arrest time in its stillness or acceleration, and eventually to evoke in two hours the icon of memory itself. In reality, in most of
Complicité’s productions, one often feels as though the images have been timed to attain, as well as sustain, a rhythmical quality which adds to the consistently non-linear story telling.
Most theatre deals with speeded-up time, but “I use the kind of natural time in which it takes the sun to set, a cloud to change, a day to dawn”, Wilson maintains, talking about the hallucinatory expansion of time in his work (qtd in Mitter and Shevtsova 188). Fundamentally, prolongation of time, following the cycles of nature, opens up theatre to the space of myth. For example, in
Wilson’s theatre, the stillness, suspension or excruciating elongation of time, where the action of crossing the stage sometimes takes up to one hour to complete, all reinforce the impression of
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the stage as a mystical space of mythology, where time has frozen. Wilson’s distension of time paradoxically seems to generate spatial expansion. At the same time, in this revised space, which exists outside “normal” time, the human figure is reduced to infinitesimal points in the universe of the stage. The elongation of time simultaneously alters our perception of the world. There is no “plot” as such; instead, people’s personal stories become human history.
In contrast to the “theatre of slowness”, where deceleration and immobilisation are standard strategies for manipulating time, other avant-garde productions engage in the aesthetic of the media, combining live and mediated presence, recorded voice and television-like segmentation of theatrical time in an attempt to compete against the speed of the image, as will be discussed in the following section on technology.
5.1.3. Technology-Mediation
At the antipodes of Artaud’s celebration of a mystical, metaphysical theatre based on the sacred immediacy of the actor’s body, the widely-spread, consistent use of technology in auteur productions has been a given for the past three decades at least. Often quite radically, technology registers a sense of resistance to psychological realism by collapsing representational conventions and ultimately addressing the question of what realism, as well as reality mean in a postmodern world. Complicité, Sellars, Wilson and The Wooster Group are all primary agents of this problematic.
Naturally, one must credit Beckett for his profound influence on contemporary technology- oriented auteurs; as discussed in Chapter 3, Beckett was the first playwright to integrate the use of technology in his plays: the aesthetic strategy of technologically mediated selves and
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electronically controlled memory, so very central in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), is in current auteur practice enhanced beyond belief. For example, the manner in which Complicité’s
Mnemonic relies on and is haunted by the ambiguities of communication and recording technologies like mobile phone and video, is highly indebted to Beckett. In this production, already discussed in detail in the previous chapter, during the protagonists’ struggle to approximate their origins, technology replaces memory, stopping and moving forward in VCR fashion.
Brecht and Piscator were among the first propounders of the use of technology in the theatre as a distancing method. For one thing, they would notably ensure that the stage machinery they employed in their shows would be on open display.111 Similarly, today, the technical equipment of performance often co-exists on stage with the actors, as a reminder of the tentative relationship between rehearsal and performance.112 In this respect, the “live” presence of cables, lighting instruments, sound equipment and inactivated video projectors scattered all over the stage, constitutes yet another self-reflexive strategy in auteur work.
Most importantly however, the integration of film and the media in performance is all the more dominating contemporary experimental work, having originally crept into the stage around the mid-1970s, when information technologies were first introduced in the form of microphones and television screens. In this perspective, even though the argument has it that it is precisely the limitations of theatre that make it such a powerful and imaginative medium, and notwithstanding film’s uncontested role as a unique carrier of realistic detail, theatre auteurs repeatedly borrow from cinematic techniques in order to create striking visual narratives, in which time and space
111 For Brecht’s and Piscator’s formal innovations in the theatre, see Chapter 1.
112 See Wooster Group productions.
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are accelerated, annulled, or blurred.113 This reliance on technology as a powerful means of story telling is very present in productions by McBurney, Sellars, Lepage, Wilson, LeCompte, Fabre and Foreman, among many others.
It may be significant to note that because the centuries-old allure of mimesis remained for many directors a mighty barrier to overcome, the crossing the boundaries of theatre into media-related disciplines constitutes a major point of departure in contemporary performance. Lehmann actually demarcates the beginnings of post-dramatic (as opposed to dramatic and mimetic) theatre in the advent of technology, asserting that:
Certainly the theatre revolutionaries broke with almost all conventions but even
in their turn towards abstract and alienating means of staging they mostly still
adhered to the mimesis of action on stage. By comparison, the spread and then
omnipresence of the media in everyday life since the 1970s has brought with it a
new multiform kind of theatrical discourse that is here going to be described as
postdramatic theatre. (Lehmann 22, emphasis original)
By extension, changed social communication as a result of the spread of information technologies in human interaction ushered new “technology-hyphenated” forms into the discourses of the theatre. Notable examples include American experimental performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson and her multimedia “music-theatre” productions Songs and
Stories from Moby Dick (1999), where dance, music and text interact with video, and United
States (1983) in which rock performance blends with fine art. Originally trained as a sculptor,
Anderson started to work on performance-art pieces in the late 1960s and has since then created
113 It should be pointed out, however, that the use of technology is not the sole instrument for such transpositions. Often, it is the choreographed simultaneity of action on stage, the framing of the actors’ physical activity, and more than anything else, lighting, which help enhance the effect of cross-cuts, dissolves or close-ups.
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large-scale theatrical works combining a variety of media —music, video, storytelling and projections of images.
Likewise, echoing Beckett’s strategies of representation in his later drama, the imaginative uses of technology have rendered themselves powerful mediators and agents of identity. In the multi- media productions of The Wooster Group, for that matter, television, plasma screens and microphones on metal stands proliferate, allowing the performers to demonstrate the work of acting through the objects of technology, and using technology to produce a mediated and distorted vision of the human body. The high-pitch, microphoned voice of the performer is an effective way to convey a sense of distance, as the body oscillates in its dual role of living entity and machinery component.
In effect, the Wooster Group interrogates essentialised attitudes to gender, race and the body, by undermining and fragmenting the actors’ presence on the stage, and simultaneously constructing consciously inauthentic bodies in performance. As Aoife Monks contends, while the company approaches theatricality as a central characteristic of identity, there is also a sense of regret in their work, that bodies are inevitably mediated through representation (in Mitter and Shevtsova
210). This is also manifest in the kind of “bodies” the company explores in performance. More than once, the Wooster Group has implicated the theatre in the formation of unequal hierarchies of identity by linking the traditions of blackface minstrelsy with the racism of American society, as well as by interrogating the reductive representation of femininity in canonical play-texts, and by examining the ways in which technology can construct and medicalise the human body in a post-AIDS culture (Mitter and Shevtsova 208). In particular, the company’s preoccupation with the issue of black minstrelsy, has been a major structural, as well as visual anchor in several of their productions, such as Route 1&9 [1989], LSD (…Just the High Points) [1984], The
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Emperor Jones [1993] and The Hairy Ape [1995]. As American playwright and critic George
Hunka rightly contends in his blog article “Ghosts in the Text: Thirty Years and More of The
Wooster Group”:
In Emperor Jones in a way, Valk found and exhibited the spirit of O’Neill’s text
in the smallest but most remarkably effective of physical gestures. Though in
blackface, Ms. Valk left her arms and legs untouched: quite white. So when they
became visible underneath the heavy, overwrought, Kabuki-inspired costumes,
Ms. Valk became the vulnerable, marginalized, tragic figure that O’Neill
envisioned, but more: as a white woman playacting as a black man, she embodied
the vulnerability of all humanity. Those late scenes of the play, in which Jones re-
enacts a sketchy racial memory of torture and a slave auction, therefore echoed
the grotesque sadism and possessiveness of the entire species. (In
Similarly, technology for the Wooster Group also functions as a means of mediating and meditating on gender in productions such as House/Lights (1999) and To You The Birdie (2002).
Yet in this process, as Philip Auslander (also quoting Barthes) interestingly demonstrates:
In constructing their performance texts, the [Wooster] Group seems to assume a
poststructuralist idea of textuality like that advanced by Roland Barthes, for
whom a text is “a multi- dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from
the innumerable centres of culture.” (Auslander 1987: 33)
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Not surprisingly, technologically mediated selves produce a tension within the performers, who watch themselves perform on the video screen. This tension is carried through to the perception of the event by the spectators, who often find it hard to hierarchise the images projected. Still,
LeCompte is very much aware of how the mediation of identity works on her audiences and how in general, the performance of identity on stage can alter or define the audience’s perception in issues of gender, race and sexuality; for one thing technology sheds light and redefines the reductionist views of femininity in canonical texts, as it in fact does in LeCompte’s portrayal of the invalid Phèdre in To You the Birdie. In this production, Racine’s tale of illicit love becomes an intimidating, yet ironic multi-media meditation on questions of image, body representation and celebrity in the West. To that effect, the performance is layered with alienating voice-overs, while Kate Valk’s (the actress playing Phèdre) body is split into two on the video screens.
Forced to become her own viewer, as she mimics her filmed self, Valk cannot but set-up a correspondence between herself as a performer and Phèdre’s “body as a spectacle of tragedy and femininity, incapable of any greater physical action than being looked upon” (Aoife Monks in
Mitter and Shevtsova 210).
Equally powerful is the ability of technology to decompose the actor’s voice, a strategy once again foreshadowed by Beckett. In To You the Birdie some of Phèdre’s soliloquies are spoken into microphone by another actor, producing an effect reminiscent of Beckett’s faceless voices of his short plays.114 Phèdre’s words fly away from her body, unsettling the perception of her identity as “whole”. As in most of its previous productions, here too, the Wooster Group ultimately reveals contemporary, postmodern, post-industrial identity as valid and possible only as a construction filtered through mediation and (inauthentic) representation.
114 See Not I, Cascando, A Piece of Monologue and Ohio Impromptu, among others.
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At the same time, the use of technology in the theatre opens a door to contemporary cultural reference, facilitating the projection of images in places where performance cannot enter. In this way, it helps “quote” visual material, as a background (or often, foreground) of the action on stage. On that account, technologically processed material is a valid and fast means of documenting and inserting reality onto the stage.
Rendering the co-existence between the performer and his/ her mediated video presence possible, technology is able to produce simultaneity, “bringing body time and technological time into competition with one another” (Lehmann 158). In doing so, it further shapes and relativises time. The use of video as a way to integrate absent performers into the action is particularly effective: in Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2007), the actor playing the title role interacts with
Richard Burton’s filmed version of the character, which is projected on a large movie screen all the way upstage. Inspiring and informing stage material, the function of the background video additionally provides structure to the theatre event, as manifest in the organisation and succession of the images, the framing of the event as a talk show and the overall atmosphere of popular TV culture.
Moreover, technology has the extra advantage of relating everything to the present, in the sense that it can automatically produce or facilitate shared cultural understanding. In other words, technology functions as the mirror of a mediatised age dominated by MP3s and Google quotes.
In such a way, the use of technology helps contemporise the theatrical event. Along these lines, technology also globalises experience and furthers inter-cultural dialogue. As Lehmann rightly points out: “thanks to radio, television and the internet, reality from all parts of the world can be integrated into the performance, putting the spectators in contact with people far away from the actual site of performance” (Lehmann 158).
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Ironically, in a self-conscious twist, technology sometimes acts as a mirror of the individual’s entrapment by the media industry and of the loss of individuality in a media-dominated world.
For example, even though Peter Sellars’ reputation is mostly a product of the extensive and expert use of technology in his controversial adaptations of classic texts, his fundamental aim, as shared by McBurney when capturing in The Elephant Vanishes (2003) an “alienated, sped-up hyper-modernity” (Mitter and Shevtsova 251), is not merely to modernise the plays by setting their action in high-tech environments of amplified sound, microphone voices and movie clips; rather, over-exposure to technology is a means for both these auteurs to shock audiences off their complacency, and to encourage them to reflect on the actual necessity for such exposure. It also serves their purpose to foreground the negative impact that the media has on people’s lives, by representing not just fictitious, but ultimately false versions of the world.
In the end, the challenge for the auteur in all such multi-media experiments is how to stretch the limits of technology to reflect the characters’ inner selves and also to offer the spectators a different sense of space and time. In other words, the question becomes how to avoid the gratuitous use of technology as a more glamorous alternative to action and acting, since in its most potent function, technology does not describe or narrate but ideally becomes an actor in performance. In their successful manipulation of technology, whereby a balance between the live and mediated action, the Real and its simulacrum is masterfully conquered, Lepage,
McBurney and LeCompte have entered new territories of scenic writing; other auteurs, however, have often fallen short of the challenge not to let technology take over as a sensational means and end in itself.
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5.1.4. The Body as Text
The increasing significance of “body” and “presence” of the early avant-garde experiments of the 1960s represents the performer’s on-growing hold over the playwright’s and, increasingly, the director’s text. Counter to Craig’s rather disconcerting vision of “actor as marionette”, later taken up in Beckett’s dehumanised stage bodies (see Chapters 1 & 3), many actors in postmodern theatre have advocated their own “meta-text” (interpretation) on stage, claiming their right for supremacy in performance. Hence, despite the misconceived notion of the actor as yet another, auxiliary pole in the pyramid of interpretation, primarily serving the director’s understanding and rendering of the playwright’s vision of the world, respect for the performer’s autonomous presence signals a changed perception of the function of performance on the whole.
Accordingly, the prominent position of directors’ theatre, which has been celebrated for over thirty years now, has been lately challenged by the “new actor”, the self-proclaimed
“performer.” The entropy that has marked the series of power shifts is only natural: just as playwrights were gradually asked to succumb to the controlling genius of the director, performers have been asserting their own right as interpreters of the theatre event. The question that duly arises is whether the newly empowered performer has actually the right or the potential to be an even more privileged interpreter than the director-auteur, being the audience’s closest interlocutor. As Richard Schechner demonstrates, soon a distinction began to be drawn between
“actors” (embracing a role and engaging in a mimetic process) and “performers” (embodying the presence of the theatre event). Performers didn’t hide their own personalities but let them show side by side with the roles they were playing. Schechner is also bringing to memory
Meyerhold’s theory of the “straight line”, where the director absorbs the writer, then the
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performer absorbs the director, leaving the performer to face the spectator alone (Schechner
1981: 11).
While theatre reformers like Craig insisted on retaining total control over their material and therefore replacing living actors with marionettes, the mechanisation of the actor, propounded by
Meyerhold, Schlemmer115 and Beckett became another sign of the directorial desire for control of the performance. Fiercely against this practice, Artaud’s conception of the “holy” body, of the body as a medium for the expression of mystical states of being, which has considerably influenced the work of Brook, Grotowski and Suzuki, among others, first highlighted the performers’ supremacy, establishing the “body’ as one of the principal languages in scenic writing.
Nevertheless, the principal critique relating to some directors’ treatment of actors centres on their depriving them of their interpretative individuality, while manipulating their bodies as pawns on a chess-board stage, as lines in their drawings, or as musical notes in their musical scores. For example, in Wilson’s exacting choreographies, actors are divested of any representational responsibilities or possibilities; rather, their presence “holds together and structures the work in a certain way” (Kirby 23). Similarly, in Foreman, as much as in Bogart and often in Marmarinos, it is movement that shapes an action, rather than the reverse. Surely, this observation leaves room for speculation on the actors’ initiative in these auteurs performances.
However, the actor’s reclaiming of his/her “body” has disturbed the balance of power between actor and director. As performing replaces acting, a strong sign of the performer’s right to
115 Painter and choreographer Oscar Schlemmer (1888-1943) was a Bauhaus pioneer, fascinated by geometric body positions in his involvement with dance. Characteristically, Schlemmer’s performances “Dance in space” and “Figure in space with Plane Geometry and Spatial Delineations”, were built around the need to view the body as a “mechanised object”, placed into a space, itself austerely defined by geometric co-ordinates.
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maintain a sense of control over the performance duly ensues. Besides, because Performance Art is closely connected to the notion of time and in particular to how real time touches upon theatrical time, the convention of dramatic time is also increasingly disrupted by the actual presence of the actor holding onto his/her corporeality. In some respect, disguised in the very body of the actor, reality intrudes into the artificiality of the stage and the forced compression of
(dramatic) time. Therefore, the element of the improbable and the unforeseeable brought about by the living presence of a performer who refuses to remain idle within the structured frame of fixed performance, carries the outside world and its contingencies inside the safe haven of the stage world, and consequently furtively jeopardises its cushioned, yet tentative fiction. It is no secret that the performers’ re-appropriation of their body involves a sense of risk, and adds an extra degree of complexity in the already challenging process of theatre semiology.116
In that event, as the ostentatious body asks for the right to exist independently of the text and not as a signifier, no longer will the body merely represent or illustrate; rather, it is the actor who will have to offer him/herself up as a signifier. Equally, the interference and interruption of the actor into the space of the action, safeguards the quality of the theatre as an ephemeral, live and interactive art form. Through its sheer flesh-ness, the physical body ultimately conquers its electronic mediated “double”. In Lehmann’s words:
As postdramatic theatre moves away from a mental, intelligible structure towards
the exposition of intense physicality, the body is absolutised. [. . .] By pointing
only to its own presence in an auto-deixis, the body opens the pleasure and fear
of a gaze into the paradoxical emptiness of possibility. Theatre of the body is a
116 For more on the semiological control of the actor’s body see Chapter 6.
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theatre of potentiality turning to the unplannable ‘in-between-the-bodies’. (96,
163, emphasis original)
Obviously, the love and respect for the sacred and suffering body dates back to Artaud’s writings on the “Theatre of Cruelty”. Altogether resistant to technological mediation, Artaud’s metaphysical view of the body was in the second half of the twentieth century researched and made complete by Brook, who more than anyone else trusted the body as an “organic root” uniting all men. Similarly, Brook saw the actor as ultimately the only source of creativity in the theatre, a vehicle for spiritual search, a “search for a renewed theatre language as penetrating, rich and alive [. . .] a grail-like quest for totality in theatrical expression” (Bradby and Williams
145). For him the actor’s training ought to be a holistic process, “a physical approach to understanding”, to borrow the words of Brook’s long-term collaborator, actor and director Yoshi
Oida (in Bradby and Williams 156).
At the same time, however, Brook sees theatre as an opportunity for pure “play”. Thus, in his famous rendering of Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971), intense physical exploration with pre- verbal techniques and improvisation was meant to provide insight to the sense of “primitive savagery” and “mischievous joy” underpinning the wedding scene between Titania and Bottom.
In attempting to describe the release experienced by the ensemble in the staging of this scene,
Brook’s actors speak of a “revelation”:
As the noise and the laughter died away, we looked around the room, and as
though awakening from a dream ourselves, we realised that we had been
possessed by some wild anarchic force, that we had been in contact with elements
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of the play that no amount of discussion or carefully plotted production could
have revealed.117
Releasing the right amount of energy of the body in the right moment has been a paramount factor that sets off the actor’s ability to communicate emotion and intensity in a visceral manner.
In Suzuki’s own postmodern understanding of Artaudianism, this energy is built via a coherent system of restraint (tame). In fact, freedom and restraint, the Dionysian and Apollonian elements of human existence, recurrently feature in Suzuki’s method. Purely in terms of physiology, the battle between the upper and the lower halves of the body balances the performer on a state of endless alert. Hence, even though Suzuki has been repeatedly accused of terrorising his actors into remaining in a painful uninterrupted state of tension, beyond any doubt, accessing those regions of the body where the unconscious reigns seems to produce and sustain a subliminal physicality in performance.
Familiar with Suzuki’s system of actor training, Terzopoulos has also been preoccupied with ways to make the body an instrument for ceremony and ritual violence, as was illustrated in the previous chapter. His biodynamic method of acting, with special emphasis on body and voice in
Greek tragic performance, has shaped a training technique geared towards the stimulation of the power conduits of the performing body and the unleashing of repressed memory. As
Hatzidimitriou notes in her comprehensive study of Terzopoulos’ theatre:
Following on Artaud’s and Grotowski’s steps, Terzopoulos succeeds in entering
deep into the core of his main ambition, namely, the structuring of a training
method for actors, primarily serving the scenic transcription of tragedy [. . .]
117 John Kane, the actor playing Puck in Brook’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, interviewed in The Sunday Times 13 June 1971.
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Rejecting the Western logo-centric theatre, in favour of a theatre of the senses,
with fury constituting a sine qua non of tragedy, the director shapes a method that
transforms the body of the actor into a bacchaean body. (352, my translation)
Accordingly, in the production of The Persians (2003), instead of the expected Chorus of old
Persians, their King and Queen, the stage was dominated by five raging Pythias, five sacred monsters, whose lips were uttering all the words. Similar in function and form to ancient Sybils, magicians and oriental shamans, those quivering bodies were possessed by sacred ecstasies and hoarsely screamed out their dark prophecies, shuddering in rhythmic convulsions from oracular inspiration and physical pain. Terzopoulos’ focus on the tormented body’s self-inflicted pain is a reflection of the violence that surrounds contemporary experience. The audience is being shocked into recognising elemental emotional states stirred up by the performer. Combining ritual and emotion, this frenetic rhythm of the suffering body is an expression of the performer’s potential freedom to explore through intense bodily discipline, states of liminality. One should never ignore, however, that in Terzopoulos’ work, this rhythm is in most cases painfully induced and vigorously controlled by the director. In this sense, manipulation of the actor’s movement by the director defines the degrees to which the body is distorted and/ or exposed as through a magnifying glass.
Yet, as has been already argued, faithful to Artaud’s celebrated anarchic energy, often the performer strikes back, resisting the auteur’s control: unprotected by the shield of the “role”, the performer’s body transfixes the audience with its raw presence, flirting, as in Beckett’s
Catastrophe, with the voyeuristic tendencies of the spectator, also liberated from the frame of signification and guilt-free to enjoy the bodi-ness of the performer. Thus in its public access, the body is both glorified and victimised. Once again, one must note that the “theatre of presence”,
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in most cases a physically intense and visually ostentatious form of performance, can also be pretentious. Chapter 6 will further illustrate how on several occasions, the performer’s impeccable, yet somewhat exhibitionist mastery of the body, masks the necessity for reflective absorption and processing of actual “presence”.
In conclusion, technological/mediated plots and images, designed and executed by the director- auteur, are fixed and unchangeable. They abide by a given linearity –nothing can change their course. It is only the pure, essential presence of the performer’s body that can bring in the element of surprise, the unforeseeable and, therefore, the dangerous and the challenging element into performance. Narrating its own story, the body is subject to the laws of gravity, not simply in dramatic terms; having shed off its cumbersome “psychological character” skin, it can be free to suffer the contingencies of real life, even when on stage, and expose itself to the relentless gaze of the spectator. In the end, the element of presence, which nevertheless embodies representability, unmediated, uncensored and unique to each theatre event night after night of performance, is finally a factor that can perhaps enhance, as well as perpetuate the fascinating function of theatre in the arts and in society: to valorise the momentous significance of a shared, unrepeatable experience. For this reason, it is a sign of both courage and intelligence on the part of the auteur to allow for this chance element to enter the performance, even at the risk of ultimately “losing” total control of it.
5.1.5 Sound as Language
Preoccupation with the aural possibilities of performance also refers back to Artaud and in particular to his fascination with the sonority of language. In more recent auteur experiments with sound, once again collage becomes a structuring device. The imaginative sound-scapes
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conceived by directors, often in collaboration with famous composers118 attest to the fact that an artist’s style sometimes consists in the appropriation of several styles, or the absence of one single unifying style.
In the late 1970s, Romanian director Andrei Serban, who had worked as an assistant to Peter
Brook in the production of Orghast, created a sensation with his adaptation of Fragments, a trilogy of ancient Greek plays (Medea, Electra, and the Trojan Women). On top of their extraordinary physical score, all three plays were performed in a newly devised language composed by renowned musician, director, and composer Elizabeth Swados and being based on the rhythmic quality of archaic languages, most prominently, of ancient Greek. In one of the most spectacular and moving scenes of the Trojan Women (1974), the crowds of Trojans surrounding the cart that carried the naked and beaten Helen of Troy, mixed with the spectators, who followed the action together with the actors and moved around Helen’s cart in order to catch different glimpses of the story. Throughout this sequence, the effect of listening to the
Chorus of Trojans singing in made-up cadence was nearly mystical, approximating Artaud’s conception of a strong, metaphysical connection between performer and spectator.
Undoubtedly, the paradigm for this kind of work on sound could only be attributed to Brook’s production of Orghast (1971), a version of the Prometheus story written in an invented language by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. The production, which travelled to Persepolis in Iran, was a culmination of Brook’s “Theatre of Cruelty” season;119 it explored the communicative potential embedded in physical modes of communication, extending the work previously conducted on sound and rhythm in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970), by abandoning
118See Wilson’s celebrated collaborations with Philip Glass, Lou Reed and Tom Waits. 119 Undertaken together with Charles Marowitz in 1964 at Royal Shakespeare Company to research the potential of practical application of Artaud’s radical core theories through a theatre of ritual, see Chapter 2.
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conventional language altogether. Orghast was Brook’s first experiment with a text of pure sound. The so-called “words” were designed to have the effect of physical action and communicate, as the poet explained, “below the levels where differences appear, close to the inner life of what we’ve chosen as our material, but expressive to all people, powerfully, truly, precisely” (qtd in Innes 1993: 137).120 Fundamentally, Hughes’ and Brook’s ambition was to invent an Ur-Sprache, an archetypical language that could communicate across cultures. To that purpose, the actors improvised with various combinations of cries, chants, and guttural howls. In an attempt to create this universal language, meanings for different basic sounds were derived from common physiology (for example “Gk” was the sound for “eat,” “ULL” for “swallow”, etc). Hughes’ “words”, conceived physiologically (in a way that Artaud would understand theatre language) were ultimately vocalisations of music. Again, according to Hughes, the language was intended to affect “magically” the mental state of a listener on an instinctive level, in the same way that “sound can affect the growth of plants or the patterning of iron fillings”
(Innes 1993:137).121
It was Aristotle who in The Poetics first connected the birth of poetry to the human beings’ innate sense of rhythm. Brook’s search for rhythms where meaning is contained was ultimately based on the assumption that rhythm supersedes discursive meaning. In his words:
Our work is based on the fact that some of the deepest aspects of human
experience can reveal themselves through the sounds and movements of the
human body in a way that strikes a chord in any observer, whatever his cultural
120 See also Haydn White’s Tropics of Discourse, where White argues that the deep structures that define human consciousness have a certain stability that allows for the creation of sound representations of human perceptions of reality.
121 Christopher Innes in “Text/Pre-Text/Pretext: The Language of Avant-Garde Experiment” (in Harding 66). The physical language that Brook displayed in Conference of the Birds was also largely anthropomorphic.
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and racial conditioning. And therefore one can work without roots, because the
body, as such, becomes a working source. (Qtd in Innes 1993: 142)
Because Brook’s search had always been to discover the conditions that make it possible to create a piece of theatre that can speak to audiences cross-culturally, his primary concern was to find out whether there existed vocal or gestural codes that were instinctive and inherent in human nature. As a researcher into non-imitative, intercultural forms of expression, Brook has viewed the value of the word in today’s theatre with suspicion and scepticism. Yet, like Artaud, he has never proposed a total abolition of language, but rather believes in the need for a critical re-evaluation of its role and fundamental nature. In fact, myth is equated with a language of sensory, rather than discursive meaning. Our experience of myth, which Brook identifies with a primal kind of music, is in his view based on our intuitive responses to sound and image.
Carrying on Artaud’s line, directing experiments with sound-language are based on the philosophy that conventional language, with its logical linear structure, stops these “pre-logical faculties” from coming to surface and, consequently, undermines the ability of myth to enter our perception through the senses.
It may be true that few artists and writers today will actually go to extreme lengths in order to manufacture a wholly new idiom based on sounds, the way Brook and Serban did; yet it cannot be denied that in some of today’s most resonant and innovative dramaturgy, the same quest for linguistic immediacy and the autonomy of the word has given birth to a new theatre of speech and poetry, where words generate meaningful rhythms. More specifically, disconnected from clichéd symbolism, words no longer signify, but rather become forceful and effective as poetry of sounds, as will be further argued in the next and final chapter of the dissertation.
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5.2. The Pursuit of Beauty and the Loss of Relevance: A Critique
Moving beyond the comforts of mimesis, contemporary performance processes have gradually swallowed up dramatic theatre and representational direction. However, the battle of content Vs form constitutes a key dialectic in today’s theatre, with the adversaries of auteurism pointing their fingers to those directors-auteurs who, in their view, forego essence while scrambling to create impressive forms. It is a well-known experience among contemporary spectators that the much sought after form is often just a shell containing little or no substance; similarly, it is a sad reality that more and more acclaimed artists today give in to the pressure of “coming up with” a new aesthetic frame, which will nonetheless accommodate scanty meaning.
At best, this new aesthetic form results in startling imagery. Ultimately, though, some of these images fail to sustain the weight of the play’s dramaturgy and often end up embarrassing the spectators, who seem unable to place or connect them to the dramatic situation in hand, and who may also be unconsciously seeking something more profound than technical wizadry. In this respect, some directors’ emphasis on purely sensory effects, on “precious visuals” can be damaging; visual signifiers, while appealing to the eye, are often out of context, detracting from the thrust of the play’s action. Many directors-auteurs’ visually striking landscapes are based on elements that are often external, foreign and/or irrelevant to the overall concept of the production. In such manner, Lehmann explicates:
If texts and staged processes are perceived according to the model of suspenseful
dramatic action, the theatrical conditions of perception, namely, the aesthetic
qualities of theatre as theatre fade into the background: the eventful present, the
particular semiotics of the bodies, the gestures and movements of the performers,
the compositional and formal structure of language as a sound-scape, the qualities
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of the visual beyond representation, the musical and rhythmic process with its
own time, etc. These elements (the form), however, are precisely the point in
many contemporary theatre works [. . .] and are not employed as merely
subservient means for the illustration of an action laden with suspense. (34-5,
emphasis original)
Equally obsessive can be some directors’ preoccupation with expensive accessories, such as video monitors or computer paraphernalia, and in general, with theatre as an image-producing form, rather than one of movement, of confrontation, of inner action. The problem is heightened by the directors’ “falling in love” with their discoveries, which they consider too precious to review. This reluctance indicates a desire to maintain constant control over one’s work.
Nevertheless, the complications are greater once the form is conquered and its principal motifs conveniently reproduced. The danger looming in the directorial misapplication of formalist principles to the work can be associated with the comfortable recourse to already tried out patterns of staging, a process representative of the work of theatre artists who have rejected verbal texts for physical language. Specific combinations of movement and gestures generally arrived at in rehearsal exercises, “become fixed images that appear as identifying ‘trademarks’”
(Innes 2000: 63). In principle, predictable methods and styles, variously applied to different plays and different actors, deaden the text’s potentiality, taking out any element of surprise and flattening its dramaturgical particularities. If surprise is for the theatre the equivalent of what
DNA is for life, then habit (set patterns) can be natural deadeners. Directorial style should never be confused with airtight staging formulas, robotically manufacturing predictable and as such, unimaginative structures. Rather, the question for directors to ask is whether the scenic language
(s) they employ can facilitate the intended process of the text’s reception both by the actor and
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the spectator. At the same time, it is always important for auteurs to consider if their method of work will ultimately grant their actors and designers the necessary leeway to open up and enrich the form that they themselves struggled to construct.
The proponents of formalist theatre, like Anne Bogart, argue for the necessity of form as a
“container in which the actor can find endless variations and interpretive freedom” (Bogart 46).
Bogart observes that limitations invite the actor to meet them, disturb them, transcend them; however, she ultimately recognises that the shapes and forms that actors and directors seek in the process of rehearsal should produce currents of “vital life-force, emotional vicissitudes and connection” (46).
By the same token, as the final chapter of this dissertation will discuss, faith in what Ariane
Mnouchkine sees as “magical treasured words”122 makes the issue of equal distribution of performance languages all the more relevant. Can we altogether discredit and discard language as an utterly obsolete element of contemporary performance?
Essentially, the central issue in auteur practice is how the director’s sense of form can generously accommodate the text’s ardour, as well as the actors’ embodied emotion. No one can deny that form, under the presumption of “art for art’s sake” is often granted vampiric properties, devouring those elements on stage that threaten its tight design. In his own provocative manifesto of formalism, Wilson encourages us to profusely abandon ourselves to his visual genius:
Go [to my performances] like you would go to a museum, like you would look at
a painting. Appreciate the colour of the apple, the line of the dress, the glow of
122 See Chapter 6.
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the light [. . .] You don’t have to think about the story, because there isn’t any.
You don’t have to listen to words, because the words don’t mean anything. You
just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements in time and space, the
music, the feeling they all evoke. Listen to the pictures. (Qtd in Brustein’s
introduction to Shyer xv)
Underneath Wilson’s open invitation one detects glimpses of the auteur’s determined attempt to impose “spectacle” upon the spectator. Without a central vision to drive it, however, the mise- en-scène can only produce a mechanical array of visual effects lacking in depth, essence and ultimately, resonance. In the end, instead of being taken on a journey, the audience is forced to accept the director’s self-indulgent fantasies. Wilson’s, Clarke’s and Bogart’s work can at times generate that feeling: self-conscious tableaux, perfect in execution, yet empty and shallow, abandon spectators to their own devices and leave them wondering whether they have been once again fooled by yet another emperor’s “new clothes”.
In this spirit, to never underestimate one’s audience is a precious, if often equivocal piece of advice for auteur directors. Despite its surface simplicity, it seems to suggest that spectators will not be deceived by spectacular visual and extravagant metaphors, if the inner core of performance remains hollow. Accordingly, Nick Kaye recognises that:
Striking ideas and visual imagination can only work if there is a deeper
connection to the artist’s viewing of the world that holds them together and
breathes life into them. The inability of form to echo content underlies the
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fundamental criticism of New Formalism, an “increasingly self-absorbed focus
upon form and structure in its own right.” (46) 123
Along the same lines, John Rockwell hits the nail on the head when critiquing another one of
Wilson’s ambitious theatre events in the New York Times review “Robert Wilson Tackles the
French Revolution”:
At their best, [Wilson’s] productions become conversations across time,
juxtapositions of his own very individual, very (post-) modern sensibility with
another’s from the past. At their worst, they cannibalize the original, allowing
mannered superficiality, gimmicks and half-thought-out quirks to replace true
dramatic insight. Whether that fascinating form alone is a substitute for
stimulating content is another matter. Instead of sparking provocative thoughts
one finds oneself dwelling instead on the impressive marshaling of stage images,
pretty singing voices.124
Similarly disconcerting can be the divorce of the visual mise-en-scène from the verbal text, another distancing strategy, which can nevertheless initially occasion ephemeral thrill and keep the audiences on the alert by demanding all their devoted attention.125 However, the downside of this is a repeated (and forced) obscurity of meaning. Forceful resistance to identification and to
123 Similarly, Lehmann points out that “what is missing in [several auteurs’] work is a dramatic orientation through the lines of a story, which in painting corresponds to the ordering of the visible through perspective. The point about perspective is that it makes totality possible precisely because the position of the viewer, the point of view, is excluded from the visible world of the picture, so that the constitutive act of representation is missing in the represented” (79).
124 See also Brantley’s 1999 critique on Wilson Death, Destruction and Detroit III, which traces a similar problematic: “At his best, Robert Wilson can reduce you to the state of a spaced-out, slack-jawed teen-ager, the sort who attends midnight shows of Disney’s “Fantasia” with an attitude of religious awe. ‘Oh, wow,’ you think, as Mr. Wilson summons yet another phantasmal image that seems to have stepped right out of your own subconscious. ‘How incredibly cool.’”
125 See also Chapter 4, Section on Alienation and Festivity.
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what auteurs consider trouble-free seduction into empathy could reversely lead to an irritating, because unnecessary, sense of un-connectedness: a separation between content and form, image and word, as well as a more general sense of confusion in the audience, which gradually undermines its ability to enjoy the event on stage. What seem to be taken for granted in this broken equation of the visual and the linguistic text are the associative links that the audience must provide, which are simply not always inscribed οn the performance’s genetic code.
Moreover, central to some auteurs’ productions is also a poignant lack of emotional resonance.
Undoubtedly, the “de-psychologisation” of the original texts can generate a sense of indifference in performance. More often than not, representing raw “human-ness” in avant-garde work can be an anathema, a taboo issue. Ideally however, fanciful imagery should contain some sparks of passion that will make it come alive. Unfortunately, emotional depth usually finds itself at the bottom of formalist auteurs’ priorities. Sometimes the fear of the director’s own emotional involvement in the piece results in the deliberate flattening of the actor’s expressiveness. The fact that once the image has been shaped, whatever emotion it might have awakened in the actor is clinically removed, betrays the auteur’s obstinate protection of the form that he/ she painstakingly manufactured. The assumption that this holds particularly true in the work of
North American directors, such as Wilson, LeCompte, Bogart and Foreman may be too risky to venture on. Yet, it is true that the patterning of these directors’ performances might be an indication of their profound terror of the spectator’s (and possibly also of their own) emotional, as opposed to purely aesthetically contemplative, involvement. By contrast, European auteurs like Mnouchkine, McBurney, Brook, Marmarinos, Van Hove and Polish director Krzysztof
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Warlikowski126 among others appear less “repelled” by emotion, wishing to capture their audience’s feeling on some level, notwithstanding their visually elaborate staging. New York
Times critic Frank Rich’s biting observations on Wilson’s bloodless, painless, finally lifeless, directing of Deafman Glance in 1987 are once again worth mentioning:
Where is the profound emotional range? Though reaching for the universal and
the ritualistic, the tableau of primal murder in “Overture” seems denatured and
impersonal, rather than timeless. As one watches the immaculate, seemingly
painless carnage, it’s hard to be certain where abstraction and asceticism end and
anesthetization begins. Mr. Wilson’s pristine set is as elegant as a tony
department-store window: even the butcher knives and milk bottles (they look
more like carafes) might have been picked up at Bendel’s. After a while, one
wonders whether the audience is spared blood and agony only to prevent so icky
a visitation of death from messing up the meticulous mise-en-scène. At Alice
Tully Hall, the one aspect of Mr. Wilson’s “Overture” that should have been
depressing -its tragic content - proved to be the only element that was not.
If anything, formalising emotion is perhaps a safe way to tell an unsettling story. In this vein, in his directing work, Terzopoulos frequently frames the irrational in such manner that its core is appeased and ultimately rendered feeble. Rather than containing the passionate impulses of the actors to which the director aspires, the mise-en-scène silences them to death. Terzopoulos’ work method, which was captured in one of the Case Studies in Chapter 4, has produced mixed critical responses. Commenting on Attis’ formalisation of feeling in a review of the production
126 One of the most important contemporary European auteurs, Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski has worked on numerous theatre and opera productions all over the world, always leading his actors into the deepest levels of creativity, manufacturing astounding theatrical images and transporting his audiences to profoundly metaphysical states of being.
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aptly entitled “Bloodless Geometries”, Stella Loizou gives an insightful critique of the sense of choreographed suffering one repeatedly encounters in the company’s productions:
[In Terzopoulos’ Heracles Furens] there are attempts to violate [Terzopoulos’]
geometry, yet the impression of a tightly structured totality remains; we sense
that there is nothing that could really threaten these well-worked alignments.
These actually function more as shields against any real explosion of violence,
terror or madness. The stylised clarity of his lines and the mechanical aspect of
the movement conceal from our senses the bloody core of the drama [. . .] the
director invests and exhausts all his energies in the shaping of his form: the vital
aspect of the play, the sense of irrational, unbearable horror remains unexplored
till the end. Not that this feeling needs more realistic devices in order to be fully
realised. Yet, this specific formalist method, not only does not free up the essence
of the play, but creates misleading impressions: Heracles Furens is here
registered as a simple game of balances and oppositions. (My translation)
At the same time, in their relentless pursuit of formalist excellence, directors-auteurs become dangerously oblivious to social and historical specificity and as a result, frequently verge on cultural appropriation and a-historicity. Should theatre claim absolution from memory and history? In rejecting verbal language and intellectually processed thought, some avant-garde artists of the 1960s and 1970s were attacked on the grounds of a non-committal attitude to history and culture. Even today, imagist auteurs, too, favouring visuals and form over discursive thought and meaning are also blamed for their a-social and apolitical agenda.127
127 Much of the work of the seventies, as Vanden Heuvel argues, had essentially no temporal or thematic relation to history. Creating indeterminate structures of play –rather than the logical or temporal frameworks of a stable
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Thus, in Peter Brook’s version of Hamlet (2000), Fortinbras is excised, Denmark is under no military threat and the corrupt court has been depoliticised. When Brook stripped Hamlet off its politics in his quest for theatrical truth, British playwright David Hare spoke of “a universal hippie babbling which represents nothing but fright of commitment.”128 Even though Hare’s criticism sounds especially harsh and unwarranted, although partly justified by his commitment to political theatre, the word “babble” interestingly resurfaces in another critique of intercultural theatre, this time by Pavis: “Never before”, he writes, “has the western stage contemplated and manipulated the various cultures of the world to such degree, but never before has it been at such a loss as to what to make of their inexhaustible babble” (Pavis 1992: 1). Undoubtedly, the lack of political validation has been rightly associated with the acts of “cultural piracy” which both
Brook and Mnouchkine are said to have committed while exploring remote civilisations and integrating non-Western cultural forms in their theatre.
It is in such manner that the desire to illuminate and in the end, appropriate cultural otherness has over the years been identified as a one-way road to a-historicity. It may be true that the brilliant utopias of some of these projects belie a fear of commitment, characteristic of the artists’ tendency to embrace an unknown cultural landscape, because they may be unwilling to confront the immediate social and political issues of their own context. Yet, ultimately, as has been already argued, the appropriation of cultural myths and archetypes helps the artist invent a new style, in which the intermingling of images, cultural notions and symbols approximates in
narrative –allowed performers and directors to create an immanence of a continuous present, during which the urge to repress experience and sensory input into patterns of determinate, fixed and (therefore) illusory meaning could be deferred. Instead, unrestricted flows of libidinous energy, of sensory images, and so on, were experienced firsthand, unmediated by a preconditioned schema of meaning. One result, however, was that the liberation from the rational, ordering principles of the mind was tantamount to an abrogation of memory and history. (1994: 51).
128 Source: Bassett, Kate. “Peter Brook: Of Masters and Masterpieces.” The Independent on Sunday 18 Mar. 2007.
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varying degrees of success the kind of universal theatre, a theatre of roots, that directors like
Artaud and Brook aspired to.
Eventually, lack of historicity and perspective, dispersed imagery, scattered perception and a fragmentary vision of the world led to the fatuousness that first came upon some of the avant- garde work in the 1970s, that is, after the initial fervour of the 1960s experiments in performance possibilities had been replaced by a tired reproduction of empty formal structures.
Against the spectacular formalism of postmodernism, anaesthetisation is a recurrent charge, with the audience sitting back comfortably to extract maximum pleasure from an aestheticised but at the same time often anaesthetised political spectacle.
Moreover, in their over-zealous avoidance of verbal language in their productions, groups like the Living Theatre ultimately fell prey to the literalness of translating everything the dialogue would hold into readily accessed imagery. Having thus sacrificed the lyricism and richness of language to the often trite, unimaginative and ready-made reference of images, they did little justice to Artaud’s “precise and immediately readable symbols” (TD 94) because their work ultimately lacked in both subtlety and poetry. In such productions, the actor’s body remained a signifier, charged with predetermined meaning. In fact, rather than being “hieroglyphs” communicating in non-verbal codes, these bodies merely substituted for missing speech. This way, the physical translation of dialogue happened by forms of disposable visual transference of discursive meaning, and physical presentation remained in principle “structured by spoken language” (Innes 2000: 64).
In addition, the theatre’s over-reliance on technology has frequently reduced performance to a mere display of “technicalism”. Undoubtedly, it is difficult to avoid the truism that emotion cannot be successfully mediated or represented, as much as that its mimicry on stage generates
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nothing but exhaustible sentimentalism. Still, the feeling of imposed emotion is often further enhanced by the structure itself of some auteur performances, where the uninspired mix-and- match of inter-textualities is boosted by the arbitrary, as well as redundant integration of multimedia, an instance of half-baked, yet technologically empowered concepts. As a result, strong controversy has arisen in the productions of directors like Peter Sellars, who have been consistently criticised of alienating, rather than engulfing their audiences, by allowing and/or encouraging high-tech technology to devour the words of the text.
Finally, the painful side effect of over-conceptualisation is an obvious feeling of heavy- handedness and pretentiousness, more often than not also the result of auteurs’ lacking a powerful primary response to the material they must tackle.129 In many cases, the production’s design dresses up a weak interpretation of the text; other times, it seems totally at odds with the play’s subject matter. Several set-designers argue for an emotionally driven, if ambiguous set, which will engage the audience in a less cerebral, more visceral way. Their conviction holds that once a conceptual design has been decoded, there are no more surprises for the audience. In this light, exceedingly conceptual directing betrays a kind of “closure”, ironically akin to the one it professes to have overcome. And even though representationalism cannot be the answer to this problem, it is true that obscure and abstractly thought-out concepts are often merely indulgent, irritatingly solipsistic and in the end, unapologetically disenchanting exercises in form. Having said this, it may come as a natural conclusion that all auteur work should strive to strike the balance between the abstraction of the auteur’s imagination and the solid structures of an inspired, as well as inspiring, narrative.
129 Post-modern aesthetics have been recurrently held responsible for such portentous “mumble jumble” experiments. See Georgousopoulos’ observation: “In the heart of postmodernism lies irony. Beyond that, postmodern jumble can lead and indeed it does, to monstrosities, to stylistic Frankensteins, to teratogenesis” (Georgousopoulos: 2005, my translation).
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This sense of disillusionment at what pessimists consider theatre’s “regression” to and entrapment in empty formalism has provoked heated discussions over the future of art in general and of performance in particular. More and more today, artists and theatre critics alike, acknowledge that text in the theatre can take as many numbers of forms as there are combinations of artists working together. Naturally, the performance text has been established as the potential realisation of all such combinations. Yet, in any kind of dramaturgy, whether literary or visual, the theme, the situation, ultimately the story, is the one and only indispensable component.
At a time when all art forms seem saturated, when experimentation with ever-multiplying performance genres appears exhausted, we should definitely take note of the directors’ return to the primary, that is, the original text of the playwright, perhaps as a reaction against the overly indulgent and downright empty equation of scenic writing with pretentious exercises in fanciful staging. Whether this return constitutes a regression to conservative performative structures, compliance to “rational” thought, or simply, an expression of the artists’ exploration of ways to resuscitate the primal forces of theatre, remains to be seen. When all is said and done, whether treating a pre-existent text, or a wholly new creation, the director-auteur, by exploiting all possible languages that the stage affords him/her, “writes” together with the performers and the audience, the viable text of the performance. Ultimately, it is the director’s job to create the circumstances for this text to be meaningful.
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6. AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY:
THE CONQUEST OF THE TEXT
6.1. New Structures for a Changed World and the Mise-en-Scène as Confrontation
Directors Vs Playwrights: A Battle for Supremacy
The few examples of auteur practice that have been examined in the previous two chapters cannot perhaps adequately represent the scope of the imagination and creativity that is invested in avant-garde work. They do, however, image forth a problematic that keeps asking whether dramatic texts have a life of their own or whether performance is a prerequisite for textual meaning to be complete and reversely, if a performance event that refuses to negotiate with literature can ever be meaningful, surviving beyond ephemeral sensation. In this light, are text and performance by definition inter-dependent or can they operate as separate entities?
One of the main repercussions of the stage’s liberation from what has been variously characterised as “tyranny” of the playwright’s text was the awareness that theatre is a crossroads of several art forms and not a bastard relative of dramatic literature. Today, increasingly complex concerns pertaining to the question of the theatre text’s authorship and the ethics of performance permeate auteur practice. In essence, the prevailing dialectic in theatre research has to do with what exactly constitutes “meaning” in the theatre and whether it is predetermined by the playwright, served and/or re-imagined by the director and/or the performer, or ultimately, constructed anew by the individual spectator. Similarly, this debate brings into sharper focus the issues of the dramatic text as simply one among the many ingredients of the performance event, along with set, costume, music, choreography, etc; at the same time, it explores the
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subordination of the dramatic text to the “totality” of the mise-en-scène, the boundaries of directorial freedom and the redefinition of directorial interpretation and ultimately, the issues of authority, trust, and the playwright’s and director’s mutual fear of giving in (to each other, as well as to the reality of live performance), together with their insidious terror that the interaction of the performance piece with the spectator is stronger than either one of their texts. In addition, attention is now paid to the equation with or conflict between interpretation of the playwright’s vision and illustration/translation of the playwright’s words on stage, paraphrased as the playwright’s intention and the mise-en-scène’s subjective rendering of it, together with the co- existence and battle for supremacy on stage of the playwright’s original verbal script and the director’s “sensorial” (that is, visual and aural) text.
Furthermore, discussion has duly turned to the tentative definitions of “respect” and “loyalty” to the dramatic text and the notion of directorial intervention as an attempt to “improve” an inadequate dramatic script. Finally, mimesis and representation as opposed to devised or improvised performance and presencing, as well as the equation of “literary” with “academic” and ultimately of the “dramatic” with the un-dramatic (in the sense of dull) have also entered the debate on authorship and auteurism. Indeed, these are only a handful of the nagging questions and assumptions central in contemporary auteur practice, the issue of the play’s authorship lying at the bottom of the contention. A unique opportunity for a shared live(d) experience between artists and spectators, the performance event realised on stage through the synergetic involvement of many, yet ultimately orchestrated through the agency of one (the director), questions earlier assumptions that theatre is merely a scenic illustration of the dramatic writer’s intentions.
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After Beckett, artists and audiences have been suspicious of verbal texts’ ability to capture the intangible and evasive sensibilities inherent in the twenty-first century multifarious and fragmented experience. As we have discussed already, this is by no means a surprising development, since mistrust of literary masterpieces had already made its presence felt in the early surrealist experiments with the language of dreams and the unconscious, and the discovery in automatic writing, in Breton’s words, of “a key which could open this box of multiple depths that a human being is.”130 Surviving the trauma of the two world wars, theatre has nonetheless been injured by their repercussions, taking a sharp turn inwards, towards extreme self-reflexivity and fragmentation. It was this loss of confidence in the capacity of traditional drama to express contemporary conflicts that in 1981 led Arthur Miller to characteristically lament the disorienting demolition of structure in dramatic form: “I don’t know what’s happened. It used to be a problem was put in Act I, complicated and brought to crisis in Act II, and resolved or answered in Act III” (qtd in Corrigan 154).
Historically, Western theatre placed primary emphasis on the plot, which Aristotle referred to as the “first form of action”. As was argued in Chapter 1, in his theory in The Poetics Aristotle identified plot (structure) as the most important among the elements of tragedy. No doubt,
Aristotelian structure, both teleological and eschatological in nature and principally served by realistic plays, has for centuries continued to provide comfort to spectators by perpetuating the illusion of order in a no longer orderly world.131 At the same time, the ability to imprison and
130 “Écriture automatique” in Dictionnaire abregé du surréalisme, Paris: Galerie des Beaux Arts, 1938, my translation.
131 In The Poetics Aristotle further argues that there cannot be a tragedy without action, whereas it can exist without a character. At the same time, he regards the performance (spectacle) aspect of the theatre as of the least artistic merit. Aristotelian drama is teleological in that it views the world through the existence of a unique cause based on a design or purpose that controls all our actions in an inevitable manner. Action moves to endings. It is
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contain order within a text entails some form of authorial control and guarantees that the playwright, who makes sure that the story is told, retains a firm grasp on the piece’s overall frame.
At the other end of Miller’s rather predictable bewilderment, Richard Foreman in the program notes of his production Pearls for Pigs (1998) argues against the validity of linear story-telling.
Describing the process of writing his play, he reflects that in it “there is no ‘story’ in the normal sense, but there is definitely a SITUATION …” (qtd in Schneider and Cody 172, emphasis original). Such a statement vindicates the free-floating structure of several postmodern writers, who, like Foreman, react against the tight coherence and psychological portrayal of character, typical of realistic drama, regarding them both as dated mechanisms for conditioning the spectators’ behaviour.132
Along these lines, in Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (1999), the questioning of the canonical literary text’s structural supremacy is captured in what the author sees as a dichotomy between dramatic and post-dramatic theatre. Even though Lehmann sees texts as “at least the imagination of a comprehensible narrative and/or mental totality” (21), he points out that dramatic theatre is the “formation of illusion”, interested in constructing a “fictive cosmos and let all the stage represent – be – a world [ . . . ] abstracted but intended for the imagination and empathy of the spectator to follow and complete the illusion” (21, emphasis original). He
eschatological in that it affirms that the action will be completed in a linear manner, moving towards a final definitive end where judgment (catharsis) awaits.
132 Foreman explains that there is no story in his plays:
Because IMPULSE is set free to deflect normal linear development. Linear, narrative development in the theatre always ends with a denouement, which delivers a ‘meaning’ –i.e., moral . . . This kind of narrative, this kind of logically arrived at ‘moral’ conclusion, is in fact, a way of reinforcing the spectators’ behavioural conditioning –conditioning provided by the world which exists ‘as we have been conditioned to perceive it’ by physical reality, society, inherited psychological patterns, etc. (Qtd in Schneider and Cody 172, emphasis original)
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stresses that wholeness, illusion and world representation are inherent in what he calls the model drama and that dramatic theatre, through its very form “proclaims wholeness as the model of the real” (22, emphasis original). By contrast,
Postdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging –and even less a
new type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns
both of these levels of theatre upside down through the structurally changed
quality of the performance text: it becomes more presence than representation,
more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more
manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information. (85,
emphasis original)
One should always keep in mind, however, that when Lehmann refers to “dramatic” theatre, he mostly identifies it with “model drama”, his own version of dramatic Realism. This misconception can lead to a dangerous slippery slope. For the purposes of this analysis, it is important to avoid falling into the trap of equating all dramatic theatre with realistically structured drama, since, as will shortly be examined, there are numerous examples of playwrights whose dramatic (verbal) texts display a fragmentary structure, a rejection of psychologically-driven characterisation and an aversion to linear narrative. Historically, it was the theatrical avant-garde of the 1960s which had already brought in the physical environment and the lived body experience and therefore challenged even the notion of representation with the phenomenological notion of presencing.133 Needless to say, in the theatre of the director- auteur, whose roots are traced in those early formalist experiments of the 1960s American avant- garde, realistically defined and psychologically validated representation is no longer relevant,
133 See also Chapters 4 & 5.
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since representation presupposes the existence of a core, a point of reference and a structural axis, a skeleton of a plot, an illusion, even, of action. As Michael Vanden Heuvel asserts in the enlightening article “Complementary Spaces: Realism, Performance and a New Dialogics of
Theatre” (1992):
At a time when the pluralistic values of decentrement, deferral, and the
diffraction of meaning into difference are being strongly foregrounded, there
seems not to be much patience or desire for texts and theatre events that explicitly
privilege acts of authority and power such as definition, judgment, interpretation,
and the creation of presence. (48)
And yet, the ultimate test in all artistic creation being audience reception, one often wonders whether the emancipation of meaning from traditional realistic structure has not yielded some degree of confusion, as well. Besides the fact that exposition, ascending action, reversals and catharsis are markedly more “entertaining” to a spectator, encompassing kernels of suspense,
Aristotelian structure, propounding as it does clarity, order and teleology can also satisfy our need to believe in something bigger than ourselves, as it surreptitiously concedes to the existence of a divine agency and in such manner appeases (or momentarily silences) our existential terror. Accordingly, director Richard Schechner poses a telling question to avant- garde composer John Cage: “How do you take into account the fact that people, as soon as they become an audience, demand structure and impose it even if it’s not there?” (qtd in Carlson
1990: 7). Hence, ironically, the existence of hierarchy, limiting though it may be, remains a powerful source of comfort to audiences, for, to surrender to the primal “authority” of the writer perversely seems to grant us a sense of security. It is against this kind of comfort that contemporary auteurs continue to revolt, underlining the illusory nature of security at an age
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defined by discontinuity, fragmentation and chance. In this process of “enlightening” the audience, auteurs make use of their triple function as readers, scenic writers and by proxy spectators.
Essentially, it is this very function that affords auteurs a privileged position vis-à-vis the text. At the same time, theatre semiotician Anne Ubersfeld defines the dramatic text as troué, namely, as something containing “holes” and “gaps”, which will be subsequently filled by the mise-en- scène (24). More extremely, in the insightful article “Reversing the Hierarchy Between Text and
Performance” (2001), Erika Fischer-Lichte views the relationship between text and performance in terms of a “cultural paradigm of sacrificial ritual” and argues that “each and every production that comes into being by the process of staging a text, performs a ritual of sacrifice [. . .] It is only the sacrifice of the text that allows the performance to come into being” (283).
Conclusively, in 1993, that is, at the height of the reign of directors’ theatre, Pavis identifies three different levels of texts which coexist and intersect in every performance event: the linguistic text, the text of the staging (known as mise-en-scène) and the performance text. The linguistic material and the texture of the staging interact with the theatrical situation understood comprehensively by the concept “performance text” (Pavis 1993: 85).
Pavis’ typological analysis of the mise-en-scène helps clarify its function. In his view, the term does more than simply refer to the stage realisation of a dramatic text. Instead, “sometimes it designates an aesthetic practice of expressing and enunciating the text through the stage and in this way establishes itself as the meeting point of the interpretation of a text and its artistic realisation” (Pavis 1993: 133, emphasis original). Similarly, the writer argues that the role of the mise-en-scène as (faithful and proper) illustration of the playwright’s text has been thoroughly misconceived and mis-interpreted. Essentially, the practice of mise-en-scène in the work of
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avant-garde directors has fought for its autonomy from the dramatic text, rendering itself instead
“a pragmatic activity involving the reception by a public called upon to perform a semiological undertaking as much as the production of a theatrical team” (135).
Pavis’ theory suggests that it is primarily the directors’ meta-text, product of their reading of the text, and subsequently, the scenic writing of this meta-text/reading, which structure and inform the choices in the mise-en-scène. In this process, what results from the collision between the mise-en-scène (which reflects the director’s reading of the text) and the spectator’s interpretation of this reading, is the writing (production) of the performance text. Interpretation, thus, has always something fluid and “undecided” about it; at the same time, since “one can no longer exercise any authority upon either the text or its representation, the power of decision-making is passed onto the actor and ultimately, the director” (135). Yet, it cannot be denied that even in the most carefully designed mise-en-scène, the actual performance will always reassert itself, putting forth its own inevitable presencing, since the interpretation of the mise-en-scène is subject to what Derrida calls “distinerrance”, “la possibilité pour un geste de ne pas arriver à destination” (the possibility that a gesture will not reach its destination, [Pavis 2007: 53, my translation]). Among the first to theorise on the typologies of contemporary mise-en-scène,
Pavis has formulated a potentially conclusive definition of it as:
The establishment of a dialectical opposition between T/P which takes the form
of a stage enunciation (of a global discourse belonging to the mise-en-scène)
according to a metatext “written” by the director and his team and more or less
integrated, that is established in the enunciation, in the concrete work of the stage
production and the spectator’s reception. (Pavis 1993: 146, emphasis original)
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The viewing of the mise-en-scène as text is no doubt reinforced by structuralism’s approach to literature on the whole. As far back as in 1963, in his seminal work Literature and Signification,
Roland Barthes lays the foundations for a more in-depth exploration of the relationship between writer, text and reader. More recently, Barthes’ theories on the “open text” have been taken up by theatre semioticians like Keir Elam, Anne Ubersfeld, Patrice Pavis, Marco De Marinis and
Marvin Carlson, who in some way or other agree that the process of interpretation in the theatre culminates at the point where the processes of textual conception by the author and audience reception meet. Naturally, as has just been argued, this convergence will result in the shaping of a unique performance text, the ephemeral, yet exclusive property of actors, director and writer, shared with a particular group of spectators in a given place and moment in time. In Keir Elam’s words:
The genesis of the performance itself is necessarily intertextual: it cannot but bear
the traces of other performances at every level, whether that of the written text
(bearing generic, structural and linguistic relations with other plays), the scenery
(which will “quote” its pictorial or proxemic influences), the actor (whose
performance refers back for the cognoscenti, to other displays), directorial style,
and so on. “The text”, remarks Julia Kristeva, “is a permutation of texts, an
intertextuality. In the space of a single text several enonces from other texts cross
and neutralise each other”. An “ideal” spectator, in this sense, is one endowed
with a sufficiently detailed, and judiciously employed, textual background, to
enable him to identify all relevant relations and use them as a grid for a
correspondingly rich decodification. (93)
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Similarly, as Elam would also contest back in 1980, every spectator’s interpretation of the text is in effect a new construction of it according to the cultural and ideological disposition of the subject:
It is the spectator who must make sense of the performance for himself, a fact
that is disguised by the apparent passivity of the audience. However judicious or
aberrant the spectator’s decodification, the final responsibility for the meaning
and coherence of what is constructed is his. (95)
Confronted with the issue of interpretation as a creative, as well as democratic process, one can ultimately wonder if it is the sum of the individual interpretations that gives a work of art its totality. In other words, could authorial intentions and directorial point-of-view rely upon the spectator’s perception of the performance for their full realisation? Similarly, could reception of a performance text ever inform the conception of a dramatic text? Such an assumption would by definition appear absurd and pointless, no less because no matter how significant the contribution of each individual spectator may be, the hierarchy of meaning is still firmly controlled by the author’s (whether the playwright or the director-auteur) text.
Evidently, however, a piece of theatre is only set in motion once the spectators decide to embark on the journey of interpretation, decoding the several perspectives that the text affords them through the lens of their own aesthetic/social/ideological background, and subsequently applying these perspectives to the structuring of a brand new creation, that usually contains its own rules.
In this perspective, interpretation presupposes contextualisation. Furthermore, the interaction of author and spectator is a never-ending, dynamic and highly idiosyncratic process. In addition, because the process of decoding a performance is a form of authorship in itself, stimulating
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strong emotional and intellectual responses in the spectator is the only guarantee that the work of art can be put to test and thus reveal its strengths or limitations.
Directly related to the audience’s reception of a performance is the director’s manipulation of theatre semiosis. It is a common place that theatre signification is a lot more intricate and demanding than literary signification, given theatre’s polyphonic nature, which in turn renders the process of decoding theatrical signs very complex. As has been illustrated in the previous chapter, contemporary auteurs manipulate all five communication systems (linguistic, visual, aural, olfactoral and tactile) in infinite combinations, in order to exploit all possibilities of the mise-en-scène. In defining theatre as a “privileged” semiotic field, Barthes would claim already back in 1979:
At every point in a performance you are receiving (at the same second) six or
seven items of information (from the scenery, the costuming, the lighting, the
position of the actors, their gestures, their mode of playing, their language), but
some of these items remain fixed (this is true of the scenery) while others change
(speech, gestures). [ . . . ] We have therefore, a genuinely polyphonic system of
information, which is theatrical; a density of signs (this in contrast to literature as
monodic). [ . . . ] The theatre constitutes a semiotically privileged object, since its
system is apparently original (polyphonic) compared to that of language (which is
linear). (Barthes 29, emphasis original)
It goes without saying that within the increasing democratisation of the stage and the new mise- en-scène’s revised signification, each auteur favours a different prioritising of the stage
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languages.134 For example, it has been pointed out that Robert Wilson glorifies the painterly composition, whereas the Wooster Group’s emphasis is on technology as a means for mediating identity. On the other hand, Brook’s work centres on the actor’s body as a physiological agent of spiritual expression. In this perspective, it is nearly impossible to see all potential theatrical signs simultaneously operating on stage. All in all, we should view mise-en-scène as a vehicle, a system that may bring us closer to the playwright’s original conception of the world, but which does so through added layers of interpretative associations; in fact, it is “a framing device, a modality, and a key to the reading of the fictional world” (Pavis 1993: 147).
Going back to the notion of freedom, we should always bear in mind that directorial control of semiology tends to be a fixed, deliberate and often cerebral affair. As has been argued in the previous chapters, several formalist auteurs leave little, if any, breathing space to the actor, who suffocates inside the airtight frame of signification.135 Often, the auteur’s masterly manipulation of signs clashes bitterly with the actors’ constructions of fluid identities and unpredictable performances, as well as with the audience’s “pre-expressive”, non-intellectual interpretation and enjoyment of the performance event; hence, the conflict between the sign and the event, representation and presence.
In practical terms this explains the challenge to detect in performance, which among the stage signs, are actually intended by the director. It is often the case that “staged accidents” are integrated into stage action to foreground the illusion of immediacy and “presence”. We just can never know if these “cracks” on the surface of performance are non-intentional intrusions of the outside world or simply directorial quirks, in the same way as it is very difficult to distinguish in
134 See Chapter 5. 135 For more on the emancipation of the performer see Chapters 4 & 5.
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performance, if it is the performer’s live presence that has consciously or unconsciously interrupted the production’s flow.136
Along these lines, in the 1990s, after the effect of viewing the mise-en-scène as a purely semiological activity had started to wear off, increased emphasis on the phenomenological approach to performance, influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, has tended to investigate the kind of emotional, as well as cognitive experience that is transferred from the actor to the spectator.
All in all, the dominant view of performance is that of an open theatre event, relying for its velocity on the dynamic presence of the human element (the performer), the carrier of contingency, play and chance that will forever perpetuate theatre’s status of indeterminacy. It is this anarchic performance in all its Dionysian festivity that Artaud had celebrated. By contrast, mise-en-scène as a conceptual, closed system of signification, Apollonian in its rational manipulation of signs and exclusively controlled by one agency (the director), prohibits the intrusion of outside elements (and more particularly the performer’s autonomous presence), for any such interaction would cause a tremendous imbalance in its foundations. It is in those circumstances that Pavis in 2007 proposes a new model of theatre practice, condensed in his devised neologism of performise (mise- en- perf/ormance). Performise, hence, can be seen as a hybrid meeting place and viable interaction between a conceptual, director-controlled, and heavily semiotically defined mise-en-scène, and an open, physical and liberating actor- controlled performance.
136 Discussing the work of Jan Fabre, where the house lights have been known to come in the middle of the performance and exhausted actors may take a cigarette break watching the audience, after a particularly demanding scene, Lehmann perceptively claims that “the interruption of the real becomes an object not just of reflection (as in Romanticism) but of the theatrical design itself (100).
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This necessary convergence of the two basic components of the theatre event, namely, of the director and the actor, almost beckons to the return of the third ousted party, the playwright. This said, one cannot help but envision an ideal, if virtual, space in the theatre, which will base the interaction between director and performer on a meaningful text, whether that of the playwright or the auteur, linguistic or sensorial, literary or imagistic.
6.2. The challenge of Neo-dramatic Writing
In the 1990s, dramatic writing emerged from its state of hibernation and lethargy, claiming its right to exist on stage not merely as an employee to the performance text, but as a keen partner to the director’s creative expression. As expressed in the plays of Crimp, Churchill, Foreman,
Novarina, Wellman, Fornés, Mee, but also in Jon Fosse, Sarah Kane, Howard Barker, Franz
Xaver Kroetz and other neo-dramatists, fragmentation of character, fracturing and distortion of narrative, and mistrust for conventional representation are key characteristics of the post-1980s dramaturgy, part of the inevitable development of dramatic writing towards the ambiguity and abstraction that best expresses our twenty-first century sensibilities. In fact, in Europe and the
U.S., there has been a marked interest towards new plays, with the encouragement of new writing subsequently resulting in several playwriting workshops and writers’ residencies in various theatres, as well as academic institutions. While the previously uncontested authority of the director is now reconsidered, reversing the traditional roles of “author-supreme text” and
“author-servile” performance has advanced not only new ways of devising stage narratives, but also extraordinary forms of writing, as well. Equally liberated from the necessity to provide a unique and absolute interpretation of the world and strongly inspired by Beckett’s later work, the author’s text began to assume different functions, dictated by the laws of performance. As such,
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it has placed itself at the disposal of the director’s imagination, as a malleable and thus viable corpus of meaning in search of contextualisation. Texts no longer have to provide full service to the audiences’ innate quest for unity; moreover, they let the director take on several tasks: determining the play’s circumstances, assigning different lines to different personas, isolating actions and characters out of a thick body of text. Long, dense monologues, lack of descriptive stage directions and logical chronology, removal of all punctuation and an uncanny disappearance of characters, are some additional features of this new dramaturgy. At the same time, there is a collapse of traditional linear structure and the idea of psychological conflict as the core of the narrative. In addition, as Donia Mounsef and Josette Feral argue:
These forms of writing often combine the verbal, the vocal, and the pantomimic,
calling upon the stage to give them their strongest expression. They resonate in
the body of the actor and in the space of representation; in that interstitial and
transient space between the self and other, the one and the multiple, the
individual and the city, at the interface of what is said and how it’s lived [ . . .]
Located at the intersection of presence and memory, duration and transience,
individualism and collectivity, meaning and insignificance, poetry and the
concrete, contemporary writing is scored throughout by enunciative and
corporeal influences [ . . . ] These texts demand a particular investment from the
actor, calling for a style of acting different from the usual representation of a
character’s psychology. [ . . . ] The actor can no longer simply interpret a
prescribed role but must make audible a text, vocalising its musicality, rhythms,
and tempos, like the early poet-dramatists. The playwright is likewise endowed
with a new mission. Far beyond the conventional task of storytelling, he or she
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reinvents language, exploits its fault lines, in other words, infuses writing with
performance. (Mounsef and Feral 2-3)
Running parallel to the development of auteur practice, this “reformation” of dramatic writing, an “écriture” enriched with the potentialities of the stage, foreshadowed by Beckett (see Chapter
3), was developed in the late 1970s by playwrights like Heiner Müller, Caryl Churchill and Peter
Handke, among others. These writers’ dramaturgy pays tribute to the hierarchical shift in recent theatre practice. It is no wonder that what fascinates contemporary audiences nowadays is no longer the phantasmagoria of visuals in yet another avant-garde piece, as much as the freshness and meaningfulness of the writing. Theatre’s return to the text reveals a need for a strong narrative as a point of departure for performance. It also testifies to the emergence of a type of neo-dramatic writing, where textual primacy is restored, but done so after having been percolated through performance considerations, while simultaneously it underlines the dangers of over-exposure to visuals and the limitations of empty formalism. Essentially, the neo- dramatists’ emphasis is on how to grant back to language its immediacy, buried underneath clichéd usage. Phenomenologically speaking, verbal language as a sign system (and as such, a system subject to the individual and subjective understanding and/or misunderstanding of symbols) is much more opaque than all the other sensory and corporeal theatre languages, which fact naturally renders it more susceptible to abuse, as well as to fast decay.
Moreover, the neo-dramatists’ decentring of Aristotelian elements and thorough undermining of plot opens up textuality, testing its limits and potential, while re-focusing both the artists’ and the audiences’ attention to the issue of representation itself. This function of language highlights performance issues, as was clearly the case in Beckett’s late drama, wherein stage directions constituted a detailed production score. As Martin Puchner asserted in 2002:
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Theatrical representation is not left to designers, actors and the director but is
placed, once again into the hands of the dramatic author. Instead of visual
representation, such as stage props, lighting, and the organisation of the space of
the stage, as well as movement, choreography, and acting, we now have
descriptive language. (25)
In its most powerful function, descriptive language, by definition carrying within it the issue of representation, assumes directorial function and incorporates notes to actors, whose presence it does not hesitate to acknowledge and foreground. In Stanton Garner’s words:
Whether it has the scrupulously detailed stage directions of a late Samuel Beckett
play or the minimal scenic specifications of Caryl Churchill’s drama, the written
text is both a blueprint for performance and a specific discipline of body, stage,
and eye. In its directions for setting, speech and action, the dramatic text
coordinates the elements of performance and puts them into play; reading
“through” this text, one can seize these elements in specific and complex
relationships. (3)
To illustrate the point, in Peter Handke’s works Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation
(1966) there is a clear acknowledgment of the performer’s (as well as of the audience’s) presence by the author. Handke refers to his plays as Sprechstücke (spoken plays), placing them on bare stages where actors are allowed to be themselves, unencumbered by the burden of illusionistic setting and the pretext of character.
In the gap of the three decades that separates Handke from the neo-dramatists of the 1990s, one can detect traces in the evolution of dramatic writing, reminiscent of the gradual process leading
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to the coming into power of the auteur-director. Such process also puts a new emphasis on issues of representation and identity. Thus, on Handke’s steps, the work of British playwright Martin
Crimp is telling of the new dramaturgy’s interest in theatrical representation: Crimp intelligently unearths and enhances what Anne Ubersfeld calls “matrices of ‘performativity’”, the “kernels of theatricality” (8) that exist inside the dramatic text. Attempts on her Life, subtitled Seventeen
Scenarios For Theatre (first produced at the Royal Court in 1997), immediately places us on unstable, yet fascinating ground: each “scenario” is an “attempt” to capture the elusive nature of the protagonist, Anne, who is variously described as a terrorist, porn-star, a refugee, a singles- holiday hostess and a make of car, among other things. Attempts does not allocate specific lines to any particular speaker, a strategy also taken up in Mark Ravenhill’s play, Pool, no water
(2006), in which the characters also remain nameless and alternate in the delivery of monologues. A similar dramaturgical frame is present in Simon Stephens’ Pornography (2007), which deals with the 7th July 2005 London bombings, and where the dialogue is free-form, leaving the order of speeches to the director. Stephens’, Crimp’s and Ravenhill’s choices suggest that there is no sense in which any production of the piece can ever be definitive. Evidently, we are dealing with plays that give the director carte-blanche to realise, rather than complete their meaning, by being a creative co-author, without however tampering with any of the words. As
Crimp makes this clear in the foreword to Attempts:
This is a piece for a company of actors whose composition should reflect the
composition of the world beyond the theatre.
Let each scenario in words –the dialogue –unfold against a distinct world –a
design –which best exposes its irony.
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In addition, the text’s non-linear narrative is constantly shifting between dialogue and monologue forms, interspersed with media imagery and excerpts from the discourse of theory.
Once again, Crimp contests the possibility of fixed representation, playing meta-theatrically with both the nature of (theatrical) representation per se, and with the “death of character”, as Anne is actually a ghost character, existing between presence (as imagined and described) and absence.
In typical Pirandellian fashion, the playwright constantly underlines the fact that stable and coherent identity is a myth. In the end, Attempts brilliantly expresses people’s need to fabricate reality, incorporating self-reflexive devices that draw attention to the world as a stage and to life as, ultimately, a performance:
If on the other hand she’s only play-acting, then the whole work becomes a mere
cynical performance and is doubly disgusting
-But why not? Why shouldn’t it be/ “a performance”?
-Exactly –it becomes a kind / of theatre (Attempts “11. Untitled: 100 words” 50)
The manipulation of theatrical representation is also manifest in British playwright Rebecca
Prichard’s non-linear play Yard Gal (2000), which describes the dire circumstances of two
London Eastender teenagers, Marie and Boo. The play is set to action in a self-conscious beginning, with the two girls urging each other to get the play started. Gradually, the two characters create a bridge of communication with the audience, which ranges from the openly confrontational to the purely confessional:
Marie: Ain’t you gonna start it?
Boo: I ain’t starting it start what?
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Marie: Fuck you man, the play.
Boo: I ain’t telling them shit.
Marie: What?
Boo: I ain’t telling them shit. If you wanna make a fool of yaself it’s up to you. I
ain’t telling them shit.
Marie: You said you’s gonna back me up! You said you’s gonna back me up
telling the story.
Boo: Is backing you up starting it . . . Don’t start calling me names Marie or I
ain’t doing this play at all. (Yard Gal 5)
In addition, in various scenes Prichard has her characters engage in vigorous role-playing, impersonating other characters from their gang, as well as from their arsenal of lovers and enemies. Theatrical devices abound: for example, after Boo has been incarcerated, we learn the characters’ thoughts through the content of letters. Moreover, the agility of the text is built on an ingenious use of real story and the characters’ auto-transformation, which Lehmann sees as one of the most dynamic properties of Performance Art, but traces of which can also be found in the theatre:
The action of the artist is designed not so much to transform a reality external to
them and to communicate this by virtue of the aesthetic treatment, but rather to
strive for a ‘self-transformation’. [The actors] refuse to be doubles of a character,
may appear as “epic” players who “demonstrate”, or a self-performers, as
“performers” who use their own presence as their primary aesthetic material.
(Lehmann 137)
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Thus, the two women characters mix third person narration with self-dramatisation, enactment and demonstration, Brechtian alienation, real conversation and direct audience address, as well as the use of pseudo-dialogue and the monologue form, which generates a sense of oscillating, yet breath-taking type of story-telling.
Unstable representation and a fragmented view of the world is also suggested in a variety of new plays that do not hesitate to juxtapose seemingly opposing narratives and conflicting time reference in a style reminiscent of the collage performances of postmodern auteurs. It was
Heiner Müller (1929-1995) who first treated his plays as “synthetic fragments”137, a kaleidoscope of images and memories derived from past events, mostly from Germany’s history.
“Fragments have a special value today”, the writer claimed, “because all the coherent stories we used to tell ourselves to make sense of life have collapsed.”138 Fundamentally, Müller viewed his plays as “production pieces” (Produktionstücke), a dense body of material, out of which directors could shape their own unique performance text. By mixing myth with contemporary history and refusing to revere classical texts, as his adaptations of Greek tragedies testify (See
Despoiled Shore Medea Material Landscape with Argonauts [1982/1983], Philoctetes [1968],
Prometheus [1969], among others), Müller expanded on Brecht’s theory of Kopien, a practice in which an author regards texts by others as “inducements to work rather than as private
137 In his introduction to Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, Müller’s translator Carl Weber defines synthetic fragment as follows:
[ . . . ] Seemingly disparate scenes, or parts of scenes, are combined without any particular effort at a coherent, linear plot. The result is a kind of assemblage, much like a not yet fully structured work-in-progress. [. . .] Muller’s fragments are painstakingly crafted texts, “synthesised” from often widely diverse constituents, as CUNDLING’S LIFE FREDERICK OF PRUSSIA LESSING’S SLEEP DREAM SCREAM, HAMLETMACHINE, THE TASK, and DESPOILED SHORE MEDEAMATERIAL LANDSCAPE WITH ARGONAUTS attest. This is a dramatic structure, or rather antistructure he has developed and refined to arrive at a dramaturgy which could be defined as “post-structuralist” or “deconstructionist.” (17, emphasis original)
138 Müller qtd in Arthur Holmberg’s “In Germany, a Warning from Heiner Müller.” New York Times 8 July 8 1990.
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property.”139 Müller’s love of literature was closely linked to his trust in the essentially protean quality of writing and the idea of text as fluid and malleable. He actually believed that literature had the task of “offering resistance to theatre. Only when a text cannot be done the way the theatre is conditioned to do it, is the text productive for the theatre, or of any interest.”140
The adoption and adaptation of history as a context for language to breathe in is also characteristic of postmodern playwrights’ revised sense of dramatic form. For American avant- garde writer, Charles Mee, best known for his contemporary revisions of Greek tragedy, drama is an opportunity to expose historical and cultural fragmentation. In his afterword to The Trojan
Women: A Love Story (2001), Mee describes the process of writing the play in collage terms:
This piece was developed ---with Greg Gunter as dramaturg –the way Max Ernst
made his Fatagaga pieces at the end of World War I: incorporating shards of our
contemporary world, to lie, as in a bed of ruins, within the frame of the classical
world. It incorporates, also, texts by the survivors of Hiroshima and of the
Holocaust, by Slavenka Drakulic, Zlatko Dizdarevic, Georges Bataille, Sie
Shonagon, Elaine Scarry, Hannah Arendt, the Kama Sutra, Amy Vanderbilt, and
the Geraldo show.141
Similarly, he invites readers and spectators to a form of postmodern (co)-authorship:
139 The transparency of Müller’s texts encompasses post-apocalyptic settings as abstract as a “time-space” in the opening stage directions of Quartet, with the action starting in a parlour before the French Revolution and ending in a bunker after the Third World War. 140 “A Discourse with Horst Laube about the Tediousness of Well-made Plays, and about a new Dramaturgy which deliberately challenges the Spectator” (Müller 160).
141 The writer, in the preface to his webpage “about the (re)making project”.
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Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a
resource for your own work: that is to say, don’t just make some cuts or rewrite a
few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but
pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of
Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap-opera Digest and the evening news
and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece--and then, please, put
your own name to the work that results.142
Furthermore, by developing language’s visual (spatial), as well as incantatory qualities, Mee’s work, as much as several plays by other neo-dramatists, restores to language a particularly theatrical status; indeed the density of language assumes a threatening, yet vital physicality, quite reminiscent of Ionesco’s absurd plays.143 This is a language that no longer claims its function as speech, but rather celebrates its original “vocation” of sound incantation, as envisioned by Artaud’s early theories on the re-discovery of language’s poetic essence. In this spirit, contemporary writing takes pleasure in its newly found freedom, displaying an exciting wordiness. Along these lines, Pavis stresses that in the new conception of dramatic text, where writing (écriture) meets the performer’s play (jeu) and the spectator’s gaze (régard), meaning is not generated in the words but in the rhythmic associations that are revealed upon the words’ enunciation. The playwright and the spectator meet in the performer, who ultimately realises the text’s incantatory possibilities. In his exact words: “This is how writing becomes theatre, because it mixes material with spirit, and also because it chooses the performer’s body as its
142 All information on Charles Mee is taken from the writer’s website
143 For example, in The Lesson, words become weapons in the hands of the Professor, who actually kills each of his students in his ferocious verbal attacks.
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ultimate destination. The barrier between an act of writing and an act of performing is lifted”
(Pavis 2007: 27, my translation).
Not really a neo-dramatist but an auteur often involved in the writing of his scripts for performance, Robert Wilson used his director’s sense of rhythm, while literally scripting his production of A Letter for Queen Victoria in 1974. Wilson characteristically worked on freeing up words from their signifying structures. His aim was to restore these words’ long lost poetry, which had been tied up to accepted meaning. He explained the principle underlying his process:
By repeating dialogue over and over again you become more careful about what
you’re saying and what you’re feeling when you say it. You also become more
aware of what somebody else is saying and feeling at the same time [. . .] People
can do several things at once. (Qtd in Marranca 2005: 49)
Interestingly, Wilson’s theatrical language, his “visual semantics” gave shape to a text which, notwithstanding the intentional misspells and the surface illegibility, remained curiously resonant:
AND THEN ABOUT THE UM THE UMMM ABOUT THE MOST FLEETING
ATTENTION AND ABOUT ABOUT THE ABOUT THE TREES IN IN THE
WOODS IN IN IN IN WHERES WHERE WHERE IT IS TO DO THE
EXERCISE OF OF THE ADDRESSING KN-KNOWING FULWELL AND
THEN SOMETHING IT IS, OF THE PARADISE, PUZZLE OF THE
PARADISE. GOOD.144
144 Wilson’s Letter to Queen Victoria (in Marranca 2005: 52, emphasis original).
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A similar concern with language’s potential for unadulterated communication is also present in
Swiss-born writer Valère Novarina, the French Michel Vinaver (whose work has often been compared to a musical score), as well as American poet/playwright Mac Wellman, all of whom display in their writing mechanisms not only for poeticising the language, but also for directing the actors in how to enunciate the text.145 “What we cannot speak of, that is what must be spoken” insists Novarina (169) and adds: “I have never been anything but an actor, not the author but the actor of my texts, the one who breathes them in silence, who speaks them without a word” (85). In some of Novarina’s more extreme experiments with the dramatic form, ostensibly indebted to Beckett’s late dramas, language also provides the subject-matter of the play and becomes embodied: thus, in Le Babil des classes dangereuses (Babble of the
Dangerous Classes, [1978]), Novarina engages 297 characters in a “battle of languages” that culminates in the struggle of the two most fiercely articulate characters - Mouth and Ear - to silence 295 others. In a way, the author’s assertion of writing “books that have speech for a plot” holds particularly true (10). As writer and professor of theatre Jean-Pierre Ryngaert claims:
The basic question is no longer “What is the story?” The text exists for its own
sake, for its own qualities, for its literariness perhaps, or even of its
“theatricality”, while the story develops on the surface of the language only, in
fits and starts, instead of being a deep and essential structure.146
145 In an interview with Noëlle Renaude entitled “L’écriture, le livre et la scène” (13), Novarina insists that: “Les acteurs les plus extraordinaires ne jouent pas autre chose que la vraie musique du poète qu’ils font toujours entendre pour la première fois.” (“The most extraordinary actors never play anything else, but the music of the poet, which they always make us hear for the first time”, my translation).
146 “Speech in Tatters: The Interplay of Voices in Recent Dramatic Writing” (In Mounsef and Ferral 19).
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The physicality of the word is also present in African-American writer Suzan-Lori Parks, who actually defines language as a “physical art”, understanding words as “spells which an actor consumes and digests –and through digesting creates a performance on stage.”147 Like Parks, other American dramatists like Adrienne Kennedy and Maria Irene Fornés use the violence and absurdity of language to communicate the displacements of contemporary American society, building up with words, as Marvin Carlson points out, “landscapes of the psychic imagination, recalling the earlier experiments of symbolism and expressionism.”148
In exploring the tradition of dramatic writing in the United States, Carlson brings up the example of Gertrude Stein’s landscape writing and explores the ways in which her essentially
Modernist writing reverberates in the powerful mix of “actual physical landscapes of psychic projection with verbal langscapes” that characterises the work of playwrights like Foreman,
Kennedy and Mac Wellman, among others (in Fuchs and Chaudhuri 2002: 148). 149 In this spirit, in the modernist 1910s and 1920s, Stein experimented with various ways of rendering “alive” human consciousness by means of objectifying it through language. Essentially, for Stein, the importance of the theatrical event lay in detaching words from their trite or formal contexts
(Stewart 63) and placing them against a static dramatic background in a paradoxically dynamic juxtaposition. For her, language was the play, words were the stage properties pertinent to each production, and similarly, the characters were created and developed linguistically, their physical selves frequently subordinated to their speech. “Plays are either read or heard or seen”, she argued , “and after, there comes the question which comes first and which is first, reading, or
147 “Elements of Style” (The America Play and Other Works 11).
148 “After Stein: Traveling the American Theatrical ‘Lang-scape’” (In Fuchs and Chaudhuri 2002: 148).
149 In principle, as Carlson notes, Stein’s plays are involved with] spatial configurations of language itself, that like landscapes, frame and freeze visual moments and alter perception.
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hearing, or seeing the play” (Stein 94). Furthermore, in Stein’s language theatre there is no concept of individuality and as an underlying direction the agents of the “action” are usually words rather than human beings. Having said this, Stein’s methods of linguistic subversion and disengagement, of the total obliteration of syntax and the carefully selected randomness of
“word heaps”150, have served many neo-dramatists’ intentions to disentangle theatrical experience from any illusionistic identification with the outside world and attack the preconceived ideas of dramatic linearity promulgated in the Aristotelian poetics. Yearning for a dramatic form to express dystopia, Adrienne Kennedy characteristically bombards her readers with imaginary, yet highly pictorial and poetic linguistic metaphors, such as the Jungle, or the
Victorian castle that haunt Sarah, the protagonist of Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) or the Tower of London in The Owl Answers (1963).
On the forefront of all neo-dramatists, British playwright Caryl Churchill has taken performance writing many steps ahead of her time, mixing in her plays different forms of art, as is dance, and faithfully following the tradition of performance inaugurated by Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty”.
Her drama clearly shies away from naturalistic representation; fragmentary and conspicuously imagistic, it is also inhabited by surrealistic elements, craftily composed into a totality adhering to a logic of its own. In such light, A Mouthful of Birds (1986), inspired by Euripides’ Bacchae, is an exploration of madness and violence, structured around a series of seven independent vignettes, each focusing on a different character. The actors play ensemble roles in all scenes other than their own. Dance sequences are at the center of the episodes, involving those of the pig and his lover, the schizophrenic and her hallucinated tormentor, as well as the serial killer.
150 Roman Jakobson defines the “words heap’ as a “vocabulary without syntax, which occurs with the suppression of the linguistic operation of combination” (Stewart 56).
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At the same time, Churchill succeeds in unsettling her audiences, not only by laying bare the notions of gender, race and age in her work, as in Cloud Nine (1979)151, but mostly by resorting to the associative logic of dreams. In the jarring modern-day fairy-tale, The Skriker (1994),
Churchill’s intensely bizarre, Joycian linguistic experiment, an “ancient fairy” flees the underworld in an attempt to communicate with human beings. Similarly, in Far Away (2000),
Churchill’s unbridled imagination manages through a lyrical, albeit terrifying, language to strike home the notions of terrorism and global calamity. Subversively, the play’s idyllic opening, which reveals a colorful scene in the Countryside, is, in American critic Alisa Solomon’s words,
“a muddled Manichaean total war in which ‘the cats have come in on the side of the French’,
‘the elephants went over to the Dutch,’ and even the weather takes sides” (3). As British theatre critic, Benedict Nightingale observes: “More than any other writer, [Churchill] has transformed the theatre into what it needs to be: a gymnasium that exercises the imagination, shakes up the moral sense, stretches the spirit”.152
It was mostly in the 1990s onwards, that Churchill’s work developed into a mixed-media theatre of text, dance, and music, foregrounding the playwright’s greater interest in space and movement and hence bringing the stage onto her pages. Such was the case with Lives of the
Great Poisoners (1998), a narrative in song and dance about the murderous paths of four prisoners from different eras; the same is true of the arresting diptych of plays Blue Heart
(1997): in Heart’s Desire there is choreographed repetition in almost every action in the play, while in Blue Kettle, despite language’s disintegration to the level of disconnected sounds, the visual element manages to hold together the essential narrative. Similarly, Churchill’s work with
151 In Cloud Nine’s Act 1, set in British colonial Africa in Victorian times, Betty is played by a man, Joshua is played by a white and Edward is played by a woman. In Act 2, set in a London park in 1979 Betty is played by a woman and Edward is played by a man.
152 In “An Imagination That Pulls Everyone Else Along.” New York Times 10 Nov. 2002.
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dancers gave birth to the play Hotel (1997), structurally built out of 14 movement-based visits to the same hotel room. Over the years, the playwright has collaborated extensively with several theatre companies, trusting that collective research helps her explore the boundaries of writing from a more experiential standpoint.153 This may certainly explain the perfection of a dramatic language that contains a profound knowledge of the actor’s processes and communicates a strong sense of direction.
Last but not least, one should certainly take note of a new tendency in writing, to display the writer’s text, valorising its autonomy, and treating it more as a sound or a graphic installation
(Pavis 2007: 300). In such process there is no actual interpretation, for speech is divorced from its agent. Rather than explain (interpret), the writer’s desire is now to cite (project/display) and thus narration becomes the predominant discourse. This tendency is surely served by an increasing tendency towards the “novelisation” of the dramatic text. In the words of Jean-Pierre
Ryngaert:
For twenty years or more the dramatic text has been infiltrated by forms that
contribute to its “novelisation” (Bakhtin’s term). [There is] a general tendency for
dramatic dialogue to be contaminated by narrative features [. . .] The dramatis
personae thus come to include all manners of narrators, reciters, monologists,
storytellers, and reporters –all manner of mediators between the fiction and the
public. (In Mounsef and Feral 19)
153 Churchill collaborated with Stafford-Clark’s now-defunct Joint Stock Company (currently known as Out of Joint) on Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, A Mouthful of Birds and Blue Heart, among other productions. She also work-shopped plays such as Vinegar Tom (1978) with feminist theatre group Monstrous Regiment.
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In this manner, in Irish writer Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom (2008), a play about the lonely life of three sisters who ritualistically reproduce the memory of one single night of their lives ad infinitum, the characters’ solliloquies not only constitute the spine of the play’s structure, but also reveal a fascination with the non-semantic, purely incantatory aspects of language:
Breda: (fast and frightened):
By their nature people are talkers. You can’t deny that. You could but you’d be
affirming what you’re trying to argue against and what would the point of that
be? No point. Just adding to the sea of words that already exists out there in your
effort to say that people are not talkers. But people talk and no one in their right
mind would challenge that. Unless you’re one of those poor souls starved of
vocal cords or that Willy Prendergast boy who used to live in town and only
managed three words. One was ‘yes’, one was ‘no’ and one was ‘fish’. Yes yes
yes. No no no. Fish fish fish. Fish yes yes. Fish no no. Yes no fish. Fish no fish.
Fish yes fish. So even he talked. (The New Electric Ballroom 5)
Similarly, Howard Barker’s recent play The Dying of Today (2008), inspired by Thucydides’ account of the Athenian military disaster in 413 BC and the impact of war and devastation on people, largely revolves around the self-conscious narrative of a patron of a barbershop who verbally tortures the barber who shaves him. This is matched by the barber’s long monological divination. Barker’s play is imaginatively stylised and produces a mesmerising effect through repetition.
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One point that we should make, however, is that this paradoxically purist conception of language as text, as a fully autonomous and meaningful drama devoid of thematic reference, has also led to exaggerated experiments in stylisation; in essence, the novelisation/optimisation of dramatic writing runs the same risks one notices in the suffocating aestheticism of ultra- formalist directors, as is debated in Chapter 5. Traces of this tendency to over-stylise language can be found in the plays of Mac Wellman: a poet, as well as a playwright, Wellman sometimes oscillates between the structures of poetry and theatre in his dramatic work; as a result some of his plays display a portentous verbosity that actually flattens the characters, cerebralising and ultimately sabotaging all sense of emotional content; as for example, in one of the most characteristic speeches in Description Beggared; or the Allegory of WHITENESS (2000):
FRASER
Can you believe it? I am surrounded by
maniacs and idiots. It is hard to say
which is worse, the maniacs or the idiots.
It is hard to say which is worse, the
mania of the maniacs, or the idiocy of the
idiots. For if there is one thing I
cannot abide it is the mania of maniacs;
for if there is something I hate even more
than that it is the idiocy of idiots.154
Similar examples abound in all dramatic traditions: an acclaimed Greek novelist, Dimitris
Dimitriadis, like Wellman, sometimes finds it difficult to escape in his dramatic work the
154 All information on Mac Wellman’s texts taken from the author’s website:
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structural principles of fiction. As a result, some of his plays (perhaps less conspicuously so his lyrical trilogy Odysseus-Ithaka-Homer [2003-4]) but more notably works such as I Anathesi/The
Assignment (1986), I Arxi tis Zois/The Beginning of Life (1994), Lithi/Oblivion (2000), capture this narcissistic trend of certain writers to over-verbalise, which is in theory similar to some auteurs’ image-saturated and as such, fatuous and heavy-handed performances.
This observation, together with readers’ and spectators’ (ever-revised) quest for essence and meaning does by no means vindicate a return to the structures of well-made plays. However, we can never stress enough that what defines the identity of neo-dramatic texts, is a “reformed” type of language. It is a language as sound, as body, as music; a language of multiple and fluid referentiality, celebrating repetition, hesitation, and ambiguity. It is also a language that is gradually healing its wounds, emancipating itself from the dictates of linearly conceived meaning. Finally, there is hopeful evidence that this language is gradually restoring the balance between drama and theatre, accepting the dual function of the word as a complex system of mental and symbolic association on the one hand, and a generator of sensory impact, on the other. Ultimately, as Pavis seems to suggest, it is the language that decides on the text’s destination. Perhaps we can in conclusion risk an assumption which would hold neo-dramatic texts to be the result of a fertile confrontation between writer and language.
6.3. The question of Authorship
The text-less stage and the ethics of auteurism
Even though the question pertaining to who the author of performance ultimate is remains always open, the definition of the mise-en-scène as the result of the collision of different signifying systems helps clarify the multiple layers of interpretation leading to the construction
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of the performance text. Ironically, Edward Albee’s contention in 1987: “There is a kind of proof of existence that the print gives” (qtd in Luere, introduction vii) subtly hints at the fragile balance between the dramatic text, controlled exclusively by the playwright, and the performance event, ascribed to the director. Despite the fact that at the beginning of the third millennium the role of the director-auteur seems to lose some of its earlier uncontested authority, as a result of both the emergence of the new dramaturgy and the performer’s autonomisation, several avant-garde directors are still ready to claim authorial function, whether they interpret someone else’s script, create their own version of an existing text by ways of adaptation, or form a devised piece out of infinite sources of material. In reality, however, it is interesting to note that while in many directing projects one feels that if there is a play at all, it is a broken text strewn about the stage amid all kinds of theatrical debris, the main criticism on auteur practice principally revolves around its transgressing the boundaries of legitimate interpretation.
In this respect, as has been thoroughly argued throughout this dissertation, when it comes to the fierce debate on the ethics of directing, and in the light of reader-response theories155 (especially since Barthes and Eco’s views on the “openness of a work of literature” came to the fore), the conception of meaning as something fixed by the playwright, (or in the case of auteurism, by the director) is severely contested. When discussing a piece of theatre, meaning is always a dynamic, ever-changing process, a visceral, complex encounter between playwright, director and spectator. This said, one can never stress enough how paradoxical the notion of directorial neutrality on stage appears to be; if we agree on the impossibility of any artist not to interpret
155 Reader-response theory focuses on the reader (and the spectator) and his or her experience of a literary work, recognising him/her as an active agent who imparts “real existence” to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader’s role in re-creating literary works is ignored, and which markedly emphasised that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text.
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when dealing with a work of art, the function of the mise-en-scène as a faithful rendering of a written text becomes absurd. Therefore, to aspire to a “pure” reading of any text is simply a dated, as well as naïve idea, if not an altogether dangerous one.156 This holds especially true in the case of the previously discussed challenging neo-dramatic texts, whose form is open and characterisation unfixed.
Reversely, it could be argued that modern theories of the stage which regard dramatic texts as fundamentally “unstable”, mere pretexts for performance have unfortunately gone too far and that the staunch polemicists of dramatic theatre refuse to do justice to language as speech, the way Artaud had celebrated it, devaluing its physical and incantatory aspect. By dethroning speech from its formerly revered position, these critics often reach the opposite extreme; namely, they refuse to give literature a chance to reveal its performative potential, which, as illustrated in the previous section on neo-dramatic writing, is also inherent in language. It is in this spirit that Vanden Heuvel discusses the “aggressive dichotomising” of the duality of text and performance, condemning its “limiting” and “self-cancelling dualisms”. He argues that the terms “text” and “performance” should be seen as “dialogic”, rather than as “mutually exclusive”, as well as “asymptomatically”, “allowed to move flexibly and interchangeably when they are in proximity to one another, but reined back toward one another when they begin to drift too far apart” (Vanden Heuvel 1992: 52).
156 In Pavis’ “Which Theories for Which Mise-en-scène?” it is further understood that even if the mise-en-scène attempts to contrive a space of neutrality between the dramatic text and the scenic configuration, the practice of the mise-en-scène soon fills this space in an “author-itarian” way; for it is the mise-en-scène as scenic writing and subject of the enunciation that decides, that creates meaning at the same time in the configuration and the dramatic text. Even if the director pretends not to want to assume a stable position with regard to the text, the mise-en-scène will suggest a connection between text and scenic configuration; if this connection manages to remain open, then the spectator will make a hypothesis of this openness and will assume that this connection is metaphoric, scenographic, or event-like (to take up Lehmann’s categories). Therefore there will necessarily be deconstruction of the text by the stage (or if there is no text, of one scenic system by the other). In more general terms, the fundamental instability of the mise-en-scène will readily produce the impression of self-deconstruction.
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In attempting to come to a more conclusive understanding of both the aesthetic and the need that informs the practice of auteur theatre, one can only suggest the obvious: namely, that writing is a fascinating process, offering us the possibility to become semi-gods, to receive the adulation even of those very few that will read/watch/experience our own vision of the world, contained in the solidity of a frame, whether that of the page, or the stage. Directors’ sacrilegious impulses, their drive towards writing, which sometimes appears to be a more solid instance of creativity, the undercurrent need to fight against the ephemerality of performance, all constitute a basic source of jealousy and antagonism against writers. In reality, it is what pushes directors further to claim a portion of the playwright’s text and make it their own in any way they can, whether by changing words into sounds or paragraphs into sequences of images. It is in such perspective that auteurs like Brook, McBurney and Wilson, inspired by Artaud, insist on the potency and necessity of a purely theatrical language of the body that can parallel the language of literature.
Conceiving and staging images is for them the most satisfying form of authorship. In this form of “stage literature” the main agent is a visual language which the audience can learn to appreciate, by being essentially trained to a new scenic vocabulary and remaining open to
“interior impressions”.
On the other hand, however, Ariane Mnouchkine claims that you just start higher when you have a text. “But the way of improvising, researching and working collectively”, she explains “is the same [. . .] the only thing that you don’t have to look for is the words. They are there and they are magical treasured words. So you immediately start higher and higher” (qtd in Delgado and
Heritage 182). In the new dramaturgy of the 1990s, what Mnouchkine sees as “precious words”,
(the same kind of words that had undeniably been put aside in some of the most extreme physical productions of the 1960s, 1970s and the 1980s) now strike back.
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“With a play that wants its text respected”, urges Edward Albee, “respect its text; with a play that is a set of improvisations or that approaches theatre from a totally different point of view, then do it that way, I’ve never thought anything was the wave of the future except possibly diversity” (qtd in Luere 22).157 Of course having one’s words changed or cut, whether on page or stage is an irredeemable insult to the playwright. And yet, we cannot exactly dismiss some playwrights’ nervousness vis-à-vis experimental directors, as one entirely without cause.
Albee’s view that the print gives playwrights “a kind of proof of existence” seems sound. Jeane
Luere in her study of the playwright-director conflict recognises that authors like Beckett and
Miller who refuse to have their texts re-examined have become a kind of spokespeople for authors in general;158 moreover, she claims that there should be sympathy for:
Authors [who] go deep inside themselves to find precise phrasing -a more
ultimate or intense search, perhaps, than a designer’s for a sleeve-line or an
architect’s for a stair. Since playwrights come up with their words and metaphors
after struggle, directors may be perceived as insensitive when they fear that some
of these hard-won lines or phrases may not work as theatre. What authors may
fear is that if they free up what they formed out of blood and inspiration, they’ll
lose their text’s essence. And we may ask why we - wish to shatter their shaman
status when art needs leaders today. (Luere 12)
At length, no matter how hard theatre scholarship and the experience of avant-garde practice have tried to answer them, the vital questions remain. Is theatre possible on a “text-less” stage
157 Albee also makes allowances for “anything that illuminates without distorting, anything that reveals without distorting” (in Luere 22).
158 For Beckett’s reluctance to grant performance rights to directors see Chapter 3.
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(“text” here equated with a printed, as well as “printable” play)? Can language simply be replaced by any compositional element of the mise-en-scène? In fact, would the omission of language cause a tremendous imbalance in the performance event? In the end, how disposable is dramatic language? What are the boundaries of directorial intervention? Where does interpretation cease and “re-writing” begin? How can a director deal with the writer’s stage directions and character distribution? What “should” directors adhere to and playwrights allow?
Finally, can we talk about the ethics of stage direction and who’s to set the limits of directors’ freedom to interpret?
The questions, it seems, cannot yield any easy answers. Without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most important things that experimental performance has taught us is that even though you can treat the text as texture and material, ultimately it is impossible to liquidate it; no matter what, language remains a “symbolic system, a textual hydra” (Pavis 2007: 299), complex and resilient.
At the same time, in his enlightening 1985 article “Auteur Directors Bring New Life to Theatre”,
New York Times critic Frank Rich adamantly corroborates that “it’s a sign of a thriving theatre that a director’s actions can speak as loudly as, if not louder than, a writer’s words.” One can make endless assumptions about whether a written text is completed and/or perfected merely through directorial intervention; no less can we wonder as to whether it is still legitimate to talk about the same play, or two different scripts in the cases where the director consciously digs into the very foundations of the piece and works around its hydraulics, contextualising the action, interpolating scenes and/or restructuring the plot, as was examined in Chapter 4.
Thankfully, more auteurs today “concede” to becoming “co-writers” of a piece of theatre, seeking alliances in their contemporaries and actually commissioning plays to writers they respect, with whom they will work in close and constant collaboration. In those cases,
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playwrights are often an integral part of rehearsals from the start and frequently shape their texts according to the special requirements of casting. The secret motive of monitoring the process of writing in its various stages is balanced out by the directors’ contribution of valuable insight to the work-in-progress, particularly vis-à-vis performance possibilities. This delicate, yet inspiring, exchange renders the dialogue between playwright and director more open, fluid and constructive, generating stimulating texts that seem to vibrate with the interactive blending of the writer’s disciplined technique and control of structure on the one hand, and the director’s intuitive grasp of embodied character and staged situation on the other.
It might be appropriate at this point to bring up another one of Wilson’s insightful observations:
“An artist can create a new language; and once this language becomes discernible, he can destroy his codes. And in this deconstructive process he can then reconstruct another language”
(qtd in Luere 58).
No doubt, this is an optimistic statement about the future of the theatre, underlining the responsibility of the director to remain open to change, aborting the old and the tried. It further proposes that the artist, emancipated from the censoring hand of convention has discovered in the theatre of the auteur the freedom to conceive of and construct a new world, give it a language, and finally grant it as a gift to the spectators, hungry to inhabit it each time they go to the theatre.
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AFTERWORD
No one can deny that there are periods when theatre grows tired of the struggle to keep up with the galloping speed of technological achievement and consequently, of the cultural assumptions of its time. Sometimes, it feels as if the theatre is on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the effort. Forms may be getting sick, even dying. Yet, right before the moment of expiration, a legacy is always passed on. Despite the numerous deaths and burials, the avant-garde will always rise from its ashes, art’s impulse and imperative for life and change out-winning its mortality.
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APPENDIX OF MAJOR DIRECTORS AND COMPANIES (In alphabetical order)
Bogart, Anne (1951) is an American theatre director. She studied at the Bard College and the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. In 1992 she co-founded with Tadashi Suzuki the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI), with which she has presented many of her productions. Bogart, who helped develop the theatrical technique of Viewpoints, believes in the cultural exchange between artists of every art form, a belief she has incorporated in the SITI. Her original goal, when founding the SITI Company was to breathe new air into contemporary theatre in the USA. Among her most important productions are: No Plays No Poetry But Philosophical Reflections Practical Instructions Provocative Opinions and Pointers From a Noted Critic and Playwright (1988), The Baltimore Waltz (1990), Going, Going, Gone (1996), Alice’s Adventures (1998), Death and the Ploughman (2004), among many others.
Brook, Peter (1925) is a British theatre and film director, theoretician and innovator. His involvement with the theatre began during his university years at Oxford. He directed plays for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Stratford upon Avon, toured Europe and the USA and finally in the 1960s returned to Stratford to direct plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1970 he co-founded with Micheline Rozan the International Centre for Theatre Research, based in Paris. Brook was influenced, among others, by Jerzy Grotowski, Bertolt Brecht and largely by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. To this end he undertook a Theatre of Cruelty Season in 1964, to discover ways of putting Artaud’s ideas into practice. He is also famous for his adaptation both for stage and television of the Indian epic poem The Mahabharata, which was first performed in 1985. Other important plays he directed were: King Lear (1962), Marat/Sade (1964) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971). He has won many awards and distinctions both as a theatre and film director. He has
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also written many books and articles concerning theatre, with the most influential being The Empty Space.
Clarke, Martha (1944) is an American choreographer and director, renowned for her unique approach to dance and theatre. Clarke’s work is greatly inspired and affected by the visual arts and mostly by painting. She was a student of great dancers such as Carolyn Lynn, Antony Tudor and Anna Sololá and a co- founder of the Pilobolus Dance Theatre and later the Crow’s Nest. Besides her highly innovative choreographies, she is also famous for her approach to directing operas and classical plays, as well as for being always extensively involved in almost every aspect of every new major production. Some of her most important productions are: The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), Vienna: Lusatia’s (1986), The Hunger Artist (1987), and Endangered Species (1990).
Complicité is a British experimental theatre company, founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden and Marcello Magni. Greatly influenced by Jacques Lecoq and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the company combines realistic and stylised acting with narrative text, dance, music and visual art and, apart from its stage work, has done productions in other media as well, such as radio. Their goal is to create surprising and disruptive theatre through the integration of text, music, image and action. Complicité claims that there is no method to their work and that in the overall result, the collaboration of the participants is the most important thing. Consequently, the work evolves through exploratory workshops, out of which exciting productions are born. Some of the company’s most memorable productions include: Please, please, please (1986), Help! I’m Alive (1990), The Street of
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Crocodiles (1992-94, revived in 1998-99), A Disappearing Number (2007, revived in 2008) and Shun-kin (2008), Mnemonic (1999), etc.
Foreman, Richard (1937) is an acclaimed American playwright and theatre director. His work is associated with the Ontological – Hysteric Theatre, which he founded as a nonprofit theatre organization in 1968. His plays are usually based on misunderstanding instead of a typical conflict. Foreman himself describes his work as “Theatre of Coincidence”, and his goal is to present a “Disorientation Message”, instead of the Aristotelian catharsis. In 2004 he co-established with Sophie Haviland the Bridge Project, which aims at the international art exchange, through various activities. Moreover, since 2006, has has been incorporating new technologies such as video art in his productions. In addition, he has worked together with important theatre companies such as The New York Shakespeare Festival, La MaMa ETC, The Wooster Group and others. Some of his acclaimed productions are: Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights (1982), Birth of a Poet (1985), The Threepenny Opera (1976) and Zomboid (2006).
Houvardas, Yannis (1950) is a Greek theatre director and actor, currently artistic director of the National Theatre of Greece. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the National Theatre of Württemberg. In 1991 he founded Notos Theatre Company, furthering the collaboration and the cultural exchange between artists from Greece and Europe. Since then, he directed a number of acclaimed productions for this company, receiving several awards. Moreover, he has written four plays. In the past few years, he has turned his directing interest to the productions of operas, working mostly abroad. Among others, he has directed
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plays by Shakespeare, Euripides, Racine, Marivaux, Oscar Wilde, Von Horvath, as well as by Greek and European playwrights.
Kantor, Tadeusz (1915–1990) was an avant-garde Polish painter, assemblage artist, set designer and theatre director, who searched constantly for new ways of representing things both on stage and in his paintings. He is most famously noted for his “Theatre of Death”, which was the culminating point after a long experimental period. In 1955 he co-founded with other visual artists the Cricot 2 Theatre Company, with which he achieved his greatest stage successes. Some of Kantor’s artistic preoccupations include the use of mannequins, emballage and the extension of the stage into the audience. He also incorporated many elements of the so called “Jewish Theatre”, being sympathetic to the Jews himself. Some of his most important productions were: The Cuttlefish (1956), The Water Hen (1968), The Dead Class (1975), Wielopole, wielopole (1980), You will never return here (1985) and Today Is My Birthday (1990-91).
Lepage, Robert (1957) is a highly acclaimed Canadian playwright, actor and film director. He started as an actor in the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Québec in 1975 and in 1980 he joined Théâtre Repère, where he directed Circulations in 1984. In 1994, and after a very successful international career, he founded the multidisciplinary production company Ex Machina. In 1997 the company opened its production centre called The Caserne in Quebec City. Besides his theatre productions, Lepage directed operas, films, music tours by Peter Gabriel and a spectacle called KÀ, for the Cirque du Soleil. He has been awarded several important prizes and honored with distinctions in many countries. Among his most notable productions are: Tectonic Plates (1988), A Midsummer
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Night’s Dream (1992), The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994), Elsinore (1995), The Far Side of the Moon (2003). Marmarinos, Michail is a Greek theatre director and actor. After completing his studies in Biology, Acting and Theatre, he joined the newly founded group Diplous Eros Theatre in 1983-4, which was later to become the Theseum Ensemble. Throughout his innovative work in Greece and abroad, Marmarinos has been primarily concerned with the communal aspect of performance, the individual personality of the actor as a “document” and finally the influence that everyday life has on the production of a play. He is also extremely keen on applying the strategies of devised theatre in performance and in most of his deconstructed versions of classic texts, he has incorporated several elements from biology and the theories of A. Lowen. Moreover, he has given many lectures on relevant topics both in Greece and abroad and has collaborated with many acclaimed Greek and foreign artists. Some of his most remarkable productions are: Medea (1990), Electra (1998), Agamemnon (2000), National Hymn (2001).
Terzopoulos, Theodoros is a Greek theatre director, running the Attis Theatre Company and famous for his body – kinesthetic approach to theatre. He studied at the Berliner Ensemble, where he was acquainted with current theatrical methods, highly influenced by Bertolt Brecht. He returned to Greece and produced many plays in the National Theatre of Northern Greece according to this way. However, very soon he realised that he needed a new approach to direction. The result of this was a whole new theory, influenced by many great theoreticians of theatre. Terzopoulos turned his focus on the body of the actor, rather than the language. To him the body is the starting point in theatre and has to be cultivated as such. Terzopoulos also believes in the cultural connection that exists in the theatres of the world, which he came to realise after having observed many theatre cultures.
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Théâtre du Soleil is a Parisian avant-garde stage ensemble. It was founded by Ariane Mnouchkine, Philippe Léotard and students at the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in 1964. The company is based in an old munitions factory in Paris. Moreover, it has been inspired by the traditions of the Asian theatre, other Eastern forms and the popular theatre of the West, with influences also by the tradition of commedia dell’ arte. Théâtre du Soleil’s goal is to establish a whole new bond with the public and as a result create a more popular form of theatre. Similarly, the company acts as a collective, viewing each member equally, while there is a keen interest in unconventional performance spaces, as well. One significant innovation, as well as artistic trademark, is the breaking down of theatrical conventions, merely by having the actors prepare on stage, while the audience is entering. Among their most important productions are the following: 1789 (1970- 71), Le Shakespeare Cycle (1981-84), Les Atrides Cycle (1990-93) and Le Dernier Caranvansérail (Odyssées) (2003).
Van Hove, Ivo (1958) is a Flemish theatre and opera director. He began his directing career in 1981 with the production of some of his own texts. He served as artistic director to such companies as AKT, Akt-Vertikaal, De Tijd and Ziudelijk Toneel. Since 2001 he is the general director of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. His productions, of mostly classical plays, have appeared all over the world and he has collaborated many times with German and American ensembles. Some of his most controversial productions are: Ajax/Antigone (1990-91), A Streetcar Named Desire (1998), True Love (2000-01), Hedda Gabler (2005-06), Coriolanus (2006-07), Julius Caesar (2006-07).
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Wilson, Robert (1941) is a highly acclaimed American avant- garde stage director and playwright. He is an innovator in many aspects, redefining theatre in different ways. Wilson studied Business Administration and architecture before focusing his interests on theatre. In 1968 he founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, with which he presented his first productions. In his work, Wilson is very interested in presenting trivial things in an unfamiliar, intensely aesthetic manner. Similarly, he places great emphasis to language and silence and movement, which he choreographs and stylises for his productions, lighting design and props, both of which he often creates himself. Some of his major productions are: The King of Spain (1969), Deafman Glance (1971), Einstein on the Beach (1976), the CIVILwarS (1984).
The Wooster Group is an ensemble of artists, who under the direction of Liz LeCompte has over the past thirty years produced more than forty theatre productions. All productions take place in The Performing Garage in Soho, New York City. The Wooster Group is renowned for the cultivation of techniques that reflect the evolution of our culture and display a wide repertory, largely revolving around revisionist renderings of classics. In each production The Group gives emphasis to the radical staging of texts, with the use of films and music, dance and movement, multi track scoring and an architectonic approach to theatre design. The company has toured with its very successful productions, which attract a large audience, all over the world and have also produced for other mass media, such as the radio. Some their influential productions are The Emperor Jones (1993), To You, the Birdie (2002) and Hamlet (2007).
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