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Spontaneity and Repetition Towards Immanence in Text-Based Performance

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Spontaneity and Repetition Towards Immanence in Text-Based Performance Spontaneity and Repetition Towards Immanence in Text-based Performance Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Filippo Romanello June 2020 LIST OF CONTENTS: Abstract 5 Introduction 6 Part One – the theory Chapter 1: Defining the argument 12 1.1_Immanence (et alia) 12 1.1.1_Freud and the Scene of Writing (via Derrida) 16 1.1.2_Artaud and the Closure of Representation (via Derrida) 19 1.2_Spontaneity (and thereabouts) 24 1.2.1_J.L. Moreno’s Spontaneity 25 1.2.2_J.L. Moreno’s Theatre of Spontaneity 28 1.3_Repetition (in theory: Deleuze) 32 1.3.1_The proposed investigation 35 1.3.2_Concluding argument 40 Chapter 2: Proposed methodology 43 2.1_Acting principles: approaching text as a score 44 2.2_Writing principles: the characteristics of a written score 48 2.3_Openness, theatricality, performativity 53 2.4_Practice as Research: experiments in dramaturgy 58 Part Two – the practice Chapter 3: Creative practice 63 3.1_Practice part 1: writing the text 64 3.1.1_The writing method 65 3.1.2_Additional notes on openness, theatricality, 70 performativity 3.2_Practice part 2: the acting workshops 75 2 3.2.1_The tester workshops 78 The early tester workshops 80 The late tester workshops 92 3.2.2_The ensemble workshops 105 Physical training 108 Vocal training and improvisation 112 More on the process of scoring physical actions 114 Scenic work on the experimental text 117 The performative work-demonstration 121 3.2.3_The Acting Research Lab (ARL) 123 The ARL and its ethics/aesthetics 124 A bidirectional system of training 125 Voice: compositions and isolations (first attempts at 141 deconstructing speech) Conclusion 149 Bibliography 155 List of Appendices 168 3 Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Dr James Frieze for his prompts, guidance, and support throughout the project. I am also grateful to Dr Colin Harrison, for ‘indulging’ with me in stimulating and challenging conversations, and to Prof Elspeth Graham for her ‘bursts’ of insight and sympathy. Thanks to all of you for your alert supervision and constructive feedback. I wish to thank Dr Nick Phillips and Dr Rex Li for backing my practice-as-research, and for allowing me to test its pedagogical value in a teaching environment. A special thank you goes to Prof Rachel McLean for supporting my study during the writing up phase. I wish to thank Jessica Huckerby, Charles Sandford, Marta Casado Toledano, Annie Smith, Daryl Rowlands, Jessica Bockler, and Sophie O’Shea for their countless precious contributions to this research. My gratitude also goes to all the participants, and to all staff and students whom I met during my stay at LJMU. Finally, I wish to fix a natural thought for Kristin Linklater. 4 Abstract: This study proposes repetition as an underlying principle of theatrical performance alternative to representation. It outlines, both in theory and in practice, a method to trim a certain type of intention away from representation, and to apply what’s left, namely repetition, in the process of staging the pre-written text. The aim is to achieve a new ‘aesthetics of spontaneity’ in the passage from text to performance. This aesthetics is new insofar as it employs artificial means to facilitate spontaneous reactions on the part of the actor, under the assumption that the predetermination of intentions, intrinsic to certain modes of theatrical representation, can hinder such reactions. How can repetition be allowed to operate so as to foster spontaneity in the interplay between a given (dramatic or postdramatic) composition and its performance? The research explores the idea of composition as an ‘inscribing practice’, manifesting not only on the page, but also onstage, through a mode of fixing and arranging physical and vocal actions so they can be repeated. Extending Deleuze’s theorizations of Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 2014, first published in 1968) to theatrical performance, I shall demonstrate how spontaneity can be accessed through the performative power of repetition to create ‘difference’, namely to trigger a new reality not as the result of a designed will to novelty, but as the sprouting of spontaneous reactions to the repeated composition. Initially, the study investigates whether the text itself can stimulate the actor’s spontaneity in performance, by means of certain characteristics embedded in the writing. Later, the focus of the investigation shifts from writing to performing: to an exploration of ways of approaching text in general, alternative to representation, capable of producing spontaneous reactions. The practice elements are therefore two: an individual research into writing for performance, and a collaborative research into acting the text. 5 Introduction In the theatre, whatever happens in the mind of the actor or in the original intention of the dramatist or the director is, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What really matters is the way in which these ideas, images, narratives, themes etcetera are concretely expressed by the actors onstage, and whether these manifestations reach and stimulate the spectators. In other words, what matters is a certain language of the stage, a language whose morphemes are called actions. Out of theatre’s complex communicative system, which includes scenic, sonic, scenographic and architectural elements variously triggering the senses, this study will explore those signs directly produced by the actor, namely the physical and vocal actions, in relation to another set of signs that do not normally appear as such on the scene: the words of a pre-existing text. A semiotic approach to theatre provides a useful framework of theory to address the practical problem at hand: the question of what facilitates spontaneity in the performance of a pre-written text. By considering the actor’s actions as signs, one can distinguish – after de Saussure (1959) – their two components in the signifier and the signified; the former being the external perceptible manifestation, the latter what it signifies in the body-mind of the perceiver. This study wishes to explore how such a process of signification can happen spontaneously in performance, when actors need to react unknowingly to something that they already know. How can they pass from the written sign to the dynamic sign-action in a spontaneous, unpremeditated way, and how can they repeat such a process at every performance? The first question refers to the process of composition of performance, the second to the performance of the composition. The composition referred to is the ‘scenic’ composition, intended – as we shall see – as the final interweave of the actors’ sign-actions: the ‘scenic life’ produced in response to a written text. Quite like a text, and quite unlike everyday life (at least in the common perception of it), such ‘scenic composition’ can also be fixed and repeated, thus becoming itself a ‘performance text’, or ‘score’. And although generally, in life, be it on or off stage, the more one encounters life’s structures, life’s iterations, the more one gets to know it, problems may arise whenever the knowledge thus gained diminishes one’s will to know more. In other words, there is a limit to this willful repeating and knowing that is critical to maintain one’s capacity to be stimulated by life; such capacity is hereby described as 6 spontaneity. This study sets out to research the conditions under which spontaneity operates to ensure that the life of the stage – the performance – remains stimulating to all those encountering it. And given that the parameters of ‘scenic life’, like its duration and material conditions, are better controlled than those of everyday life, the theatre may function as a suitable laboratory to this end. Furthermore, since both daily and theatrical life are submerged in language, I found it natural to approach the topic also from a linguistic point of view. That is, I propose to consider spontaneity as that unaccountable quality infusing an act that, precisely because of its openness to stimulation, is capable of expanding its communicative potential even when the act’s signification is well known and codified. Although in performance, like in life, the actor is always expressive beyond the literal or codified meaning of a speech or a gesture, as well as beyond the presupposed intentions underlying them, I suggest that it is the ability to consciously trigger such extensions that is required of an actor to uphold the performance’s potential. A linguistic expansion manifests in an apprehension of difference within language, to the extent that such difference creates the possibility of new significance, including unaccountable significance, like an affect. From a semiotic point of view, and remaining within the field of existing codifications, that is, excluding experiments in new languages and glossolalia, this difference or deviation would manifest in an altered relation between content and form, signified and signifier, or perhaps more precisely, in the inexhaustibility of their relation. This study suggests that it is precisely such spontaneous quality of embracing the possibility of difference that ultimately attracts the attention and stimulates the senses of the spectator. In his research on theatre anthropology – defined as the study of human behaviour in a performance situation – Eugenio Barba identifies certain recurrent principles that seem to be shared across all theatrical cultures and performers. What these principles have in common is
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