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Exploring Mnemonic by Simon Mcburney

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Exploring Mnemonic by Simon Mcburney STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LXII, 2, 2017, p. 221 - 239 (Recommended Citation) DOI:10.24193/subbdrama.2017.2.12 In Search of the Theatrical Unit of Meaning: Exploring Mnemonic by Simon McBurney ANA BOARIU1 Abstract2: The author is searching for the theatrical unit of meaning exploring the way Simon McBurney builds up the performance in Mnemonic, a Complicite Theatre production created for the 1999 Salzburg Festival. Inspired by head- driven phrase structure grammar and Chinese pictograms, the paper looks for verbs and actions that define a matrix, where each element determines the complex theatrical sign. Any change of one single sign-element causes the meaning of the whole to change. Keywords: Simon McBurney, Mnemonic, Complicite, theatre semiotics, morpheme “Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text – but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.” Simon Mcburney The beginning of the performance: A few objects and, suddenly, a world is born. How? When we watch a performance, do we understand it only through emotions or do we perceive it as another kind of language? Can we analyse it from the viewpoint of the signs used, and, if so, we should then ask ourselves: What communication code is used? What kind of signs are present? How can we understand the signs paradigmatically 1. Université de Lorraine, Metz, France; Faculty of Theatre and Television, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. [email protected]. 2. Translated into English by Camelia Oana ANA BOARIU and sintagmatically, as they appear simultaneously and successively? How is the meaning of the performance built? Can we identify one unit of meaning in theatre, as there is one in spoken languages? What would this be? The question of the theatrical unit of meaning is a very debated one and several researchers, among which Anne Ubersfeld3, deny its existence or, at least, the capacity of a theatrical unit of meaning to function similar to a morpheme in natural languages. We will discuss here, from a semiotic point of view, a production of Complicite Theatre, Mnemonic, a performance created in 1999 for the Salzburg Festival, later played at Riverside Studios, London, after a two-year long tour in Europe4. The scope is to see how signs function, how minimal units of meaning are built through a complex sign and how this complex sign can switch meanings, when only one component of it is changed, through the permanent re-semantisation of objects on stage. Mnemonic (Original) cast: Katrin Cartlidge, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Eric Mallett, Kostas Philippoglou, Catherine Schaub Abkarian, and Daniel Wahl Set Design: Michael Levine Lighting Design: Paul Anderson Sound Design: Christopher Shuff Director: Simon McBurney Duration: 2 hours, no intermission Just a Chair As indicated in the stage directions in the printed version, the performance begins with an empty stage, on which there is a chair. Simon enters the proscenium – and Simon is not the name of a character, but the very author, director, and co-founder of Complicite5. McBurney asks the audience to turn off their phones and introduces the theme of the performance. The author- 3. Anne Ubersfeld, Lire Le Théâtre (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978). 4. Author has seen the performance during the European tour, at Bobigny, in 2001. 5. Complicite is a British group founded in 1983 by three former students of the Paris international school led by Jacque Lecoq, i.e. Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden and Marcello Magni. At the beginning, their performances were based on scripts written by McBurney, such as A minute too late (1984), A disappearing number (2007) or Mnemonic (1999), but also on classical texts, like The Master and Margarita (2011/12), Endgame (2009), Measure for Measure (2004), The Chairs (1997). http://www.complicite.org/ 222 IN SEARCH OF THE THEATRICAL UNIT OF MEANING: EXPLORING director gives a short speech on memory, in which scientific information intertwines with anecdotic details, everything connects, or rather does not connect, just like memories, he jumps from one thing to the other and ends up presenting the chair on stage. It is not just a chair: it is the chair that the director inherited from his father, a chair he used in a previous performance, The Chairs. The author invests the chair with an emotional charge, shares personal memories with the audience, individualizing the object and granting it an identity. Later on, this information will help spectators perceive the chair as a sign. A sign of the absent, who has left, and, at the same time, a sign of the expected, who isn’t coming, a presence-absence. Later on, when scientists present their theories and point towards the empty chair as if Ötzi were there, the semantic charge of the object not only turns it into an indexical sign for the iceman. It becomes a symbolic sign of the presence-absence. Through this chair, the iceman who lived 5,000 years ago can also be identified with the absent father, who will never come back. At the same time, the empty chair is waiting to be occupied, it calls for a presence. The expectation is finally met when Simon-Virgil “lends his body” to signify the iceman, becoming a sign by resemblance, an icon of the perfectly preserved mummy studied by the scientists. And which they cannot know. Finally, all the actors become Ötzi: one by one, they lie on the table, freeze, are exposed, the previous gets up, joins those walking, projected like shadows on the wall behind the stage, a wave that propagates and returns. The people walk. They each stop for a second, lying on the table in Ötzi's position, then start walking again. Repetitively. Once again. Once more. For the last time. The Sleeping Mask and the Leaf in the Plastic Bag Let's go back to the director’s speech at the beginning of the performance6. Entering the proscenium and starting a dialogue with the audience, Simon McBurney engages the spectators by asking them to take the plastic bag they found on their chairs, to put on the "sleeping mask" (similar to the one you receive in a plane), to hold the leaf in their hands, and to try and feel its 6. Simon McBurney: in an interview for Studio 360, the actor recites the monologue at the beginning of the play again. You realize it sounds very realistic, not at all like a monologue – you actually have the feeling that it is the beginning of a conference and that the speaker is a passionate scientist. 223 ANA BOARIU ribs. The "sleeping mask" is just a scarf, the leaf is just a leaf. Everyone is invited to go back in time, imagine they are children on a beach, their parents at their side, their grandparents behind them. They are asked to imagine all their ancestors, one by one, to the most distant. To feel the ribs of the leaf and compare them to the lines of a family tree. To watch the lines of ancestors come down to each of us from the depths of time. After the chair, the leaf is the second object invested by McBurney as a symbolic sign, leaf-family tree; it is not abstract, but a very concrete symbolist sign for spectators, emotionally charged with the memory of their own parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. In the end, the line of people succeeding one behind the other, evoked at the beginning through the leaf-sign, materializes. The mere line of actors becomes the sign of your own ancestors, succeeding like a wave, always coming. They become... us! By taking two objects and investing them with – his own and the spectators’ – personal memories, McBurney invites the spectator to open up and be part of a process of signifying, remembering and imagining. For each person there, the performance that is about to take place will resemble a memory process like a game of imagination. SIMON: Modern theories of memory evolve around the idea of fragmentation. Different elements are, apparently, stored in different areas of the brain. And it is not so much the cells that are important in the act of memory, but the connection between the cells, the synapses, the synaptic connections. And these connections are being made and remade. Constantly. (…) Anyway, our job, the job of remembering is essentially not only an act of retrieval but a creative thing, it happens in the moment, it’s an act, an act… of the imagination.7 Back then, and even today, it is striking to use a direct speech at the beginning of the performance, held by the leading actor (who also happens to be the author and director), which, throughout the performance, blends with the cast’s stunning cohesion, with an exceptionally qualitative impro based on physical actions, with a power of suggestion based on just a couple of props and set elements and with an apt use of light, sound and video projections to tell the story. The theme of the performance – as announced by Simon McBurney – is memory and identity; a feeling of 7. Simon McBurney, Mnemonic (London-New York-Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 15. 224 IN SEARCH OF THE THEATRICAL UNIT OF MEANING: EXPLORING uncertainty connects the two, by the impossibility to determine one or the other. The only real thing left is imagination, theatre. Watching the performance, the audience perceived it as a wonderful speech about the meaning of theatre: a fusion of memory and imagination, with the complicity of the spectator. Talking about the meetings with the audience after the performances in the European tour, McBurney states: It is like this everywhere: outpourings of individual stories provoked by the ‘memory journey’ on which we take the audience.
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