The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance

Jane de Gay, Lizbeth Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134686667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance brings together for the first time a comprehensive collection of extracts from key writings on politics, ideology, and performance.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and including new writings from leading scholars, the book provides material on:
* post-coloniality and performance theory and practice
* critical theories and performance
* intercultural perspectives
* power, politics and the theatre
* sexuality in performance
* live arts and the media
* theatre games.

PART ONE

Practice to theory:
Theatre games

Chapter 1


Clive Barker

INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

THERE IS A STORY, PROBABLY APOCRYPHAL, ABOUT A TIME WHEN SIR PETER HALL WAS REHEARSING A PLAY at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the rehearsal became bogged down. Turning to the leading actor he said: ‘Let’s put the books on one side and improvise.’ The actor considered this and replied: ‘You may, of course, exercise your director’s right and insist that we improvise, but if you do, I shall exercise my actor’s right and walk out.’ On another occasion a director had begun rehearsals with improvising and the process went on for so long that Hall was reduced to crying out: ‘For heaven’s sake, when are you going to rehearse the play?’ I hope I am not taking Sir Peter’s name in vain but these stories raise several important points about the need to escape the domination of the text, and the problems that are revealed when a director does.

Stanislavski opens his book of instruction, An Actor Prepares, with the case of a young actor beginning his training and being allocated the role of Othello to study. Returning home he begins to read. ‘Hardly had I read two pages when I was seized with a desire to act’ (1937: 2). Seized in this way the young actor begins to improvise, carried away by the emotion his improvisation arouses. ‘I had worked for almost five hours without noticing the passage of time. To me this seemed to show that my inspiration was real’ (ibid.). The result of this feverish activity is that the actor oversleeps and is late for rehearsal, the atmosphere is disturbed and the rehearsal consequently cancelled. Returning home, determined on an early night, the actor, once more, is seduced into improvising: ‘I didn’t invent anything new. I merely repeated what I had done yesterday, and now it seemed to have lost its point’ (ibid.: 3). When the actor finally gets to rehearse, he finds to his astonishment that the words don’t help him to define the limits and the usage of his improvisation. There are too many words and ‘the words [interfere] with the acting, and the acting with the words’ (ibid.: 4). The catastrophic rehearsals carry on as the actor struggles to escape from the seduction of illusory freedom and to avoid the entrapment of the text.

The central dilemma caused by the theatrical inversion of the normal psychophysical processes of everyday life has attracted the attention of many theorists and practitioners. In everyday life, something catches our eye or ear, some thought arises in the mind, and we react: we respond through action and finally verbalize. In the theatre we are handed the words on the first day of rehearsal, if not before. Different playwrights write in different styles and the function of the dialogue differs, quite widely at times. In some cases, the dialogue is definitive and contains almost all the audience needs to know, such as in Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. In others, such as Waiting for Godot, the dialogue is allusive and even elusive. Unless the actors in the Priestley can reconstruct the process which would precede verbalization in everyday life, the play remains literary and lifeless in performance. Unless the actors in the Beckett can construct some subtextual action, not necessarily clarified, the play doesn’t begin to exist. The former tempts the actor to hang on to the text and to illustrate it, rather than reconstitute it: in the words of Eugenio Barba, they will not launch themselves upon a voyage of discovery. In the latter, there is a temptation to leap bravely over the side and to lose all sense of direction, but it is not unknown for actors to cling to the text of Beckett’s play as if it alone contained everything to hold an audience and convey significance and meaning through the words. The strength and resolution of actors to hold on to the words should not be underestimated.

Many and varied are the methods and systems that have been called into being to break the defining and restricting power of the text, and Stanislavski’s pioneering work is pre-eminent, although there is a sense of abdication in his stress on the structuring of the inner life to create the conditions in which the life of the text arises naturally and without a great deal of attention being paid to it. Cicely Berry, in approaching the problem from the other end, seems in danger of oversimplifying the psychophysical processes of the way we live and conduct our relationships. Both have a great deal to offer the actor, provided they are not taken prescriptively. In the words of the other great theorist, Bertolt Brecht, they advance proposals for others to test out and build on. Boal, Brecht’s critic and follower, and Grotowski, Stanislavski’s heir and disciple, have both redefined the nature of performance, away from the traditions and forms of the Dramatic Theatre, to make the problems largely irrelevant by redefining the political and aesthetic parameters. Boal does not escape the problems. In the age of the mass spread of culture through satellite television and cinema, a South American peasant could conceivably express his experience not directly but through imposed stereotypes of performance, such as American soap operas. Grotowski withdrew further from public performance into enclosed forms, allowing spectators only for the purpose of justifying activities which had no dramaturgical intention. Without wishing to disparage the work of these great thinkers and practitioners, Boal’s methods for training actors are crude, facile, and tainted with prescription. The working process he set up cannot be exported. It has to be restricted to the people who work with him in the political situation and context which solely validates it. Grotowski’s work in Pontedera, for those of us privileged to glimpse it, had both beauty and spiritual power, without ever being directly referential. However, the long tradition, which he himself researched diligently, seems never to have been accessed by those who worked with him, with the result that there are wonderfully talented and accomplished actors who have little idea how to employ their skills in the theatre outside the barns of Pontedera or how to communicate them to others with more mundane aims. Barba, and Savarese his collaborator, have similarly avoided the dramatic problems by a comparative analysis of other forms of theatre, more stylized than the dramatic conventions, in which the problems simply do not arise. Out of Barba’s research and training methods, hybrid new forms of theatre have emerged and performers have experimented with them. There is much that could be said about the new work being produced in the theatre, but in this essay I want to stick to my topic.

The development of the work of the thinkers listed above took, or has taken, many years. What is written in books or imparted at workshops is the distilled result of research and experimentation. This means that the result of this process of research and experimentation is often communicated, but not always the process itself. Yat Malmgren (who I hope one day will publish his journey in which he interlocks the teaching ideas of Stanislavski and Laban) said that Laban once remarked towards the end of his life, that he had wished the Nazis had burned all his books, because so many people were teaching Laban and not movement.¹ What begins as free examination becomes reified, sometimes stultifying. Without either some access to the process of discovery or a critical attitude to it, students can acquire a vocabulary through which to describe what they are not doing. Beware those who teach the Stanislavski Method! Albert Filozov, who trained with Stanislavski’s colleagues, begins his classes not with theory, but with the actors’ own movement and builds upon that (Merlin 1999). Chkhivadze, the leading actor of the Georgian Rustavelli Theatre Company, says that although Stanislavski’s ideas are the best way to train actors, no professional actor would ever use them because acting is much more complicated than that (see Parkhomenko 1990: 229). In my own work, I am influenced by all of the people included in this section and in addition by Laban. I acknowledge their ideas in my classes but I would be appalled at any idea of teaching a Laban or Stanislavski class or of teaching Grotowski or Barba. I would be even more horrified if I thought anyone was teaching classes based on my work. My ideas (or some of them) are written down for other theatre workers to read and incorporate into their own work, if they find them useful. My instruction would be: if you think an idea is right, do not accept it but try to prove it wrong. I keep a work book in which I write down the form and content of every class I give. In my mind, I believe that I only have to look at the book to know how to run the next class I am going to give – but this is a total illusion. Every time I look at the book it is no help at all. I have no way of even guessing at why I ran the past classes in the way I did. At least one entry has an opening sentence, ‘Don’t try to make sense of this or you’ll go mad.’ Yet I still persist in believing that I never vary in the content and order of the classes. I will try to resolve this paradox one day. In the meantime, let us resolve that, if we insist on using the ideas of Stanislavski, Laban, Grotowski, and company prescriptively, we will give away any freedom we have tried to create and will have picked up one more stick with which to beat ourselves, one more concrete standard against which to measure our failure.

Note

1 Conversation with the writer.

Chapter 2


Jerzy Grotowski

TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE

From: Towards a Poor Theatre, tr. T.K. Wiewiorowski, ed. Eugenio Barba, preface by Peter Brook (Holstebro: Odin Teatrets Forlag, 1968; London: Methuen, 1969).

IAM A BIT IMPATIENT WHEN ASKED, ‘What is the origin of your experimental theatre productions?’ The assumption seems to be that ‘experimental’ work is tangential (toying with some ‘new’ technique each time) and tributary. The result is supposed to be a contribution to modern staging – scenography using current sculptural or electronic ideas, contemporary music, actors independently projecting clownish or cabaret stereotypes. I know that scene: I used to be part of it. Our Theatre Laboratory productions are going in another direction. In the first place, we are trying to avoid eclecticism, trying to resist thinking of theatre as a composite of disciplines. We are seeking to define what is distinctively theatre, what separates this activity from other categories of performance and spectacle. Secondly, our productions are detailed investigations of the actor–audience relationship. That is, we consider the personal and scenic technique of the actor as the core of theatre art.

It is difficult to locate the exact sources of this approach, but I can speak of its tradition. I was brought up on Stanislavski; his persistent study, his systematic renewal of the methods of observation, and his dialectical relationship to his own earlier work make him my personal ideal. Stanislavski asked the key methodological questions. Our solutions, however, differ widely from his – sometimes we reach opposite conclusions.

I have studied all the major actor-training methods of Europe and beyond. Most important for my purposes are: Dullin’s rhythm exercises, Delsarte’s investigations of extroversive and introversive reactions, Stanislavski’s work on ‘physical actions’, Meyerhold’s bio-mechanical training, Vakhtanghov’s synthesis. Also particularly stimulating to me are the training techniques of oriental theatre – specifically the Peking Opera, Indian Kathakali, and Japanese Noh theatre. I could cite other theatrical systems, but the method which we are developing is not a combination of techniques borrowed from these sources (although we sometimes adapt elements for our use). We do not want to teach the actor a predetermined set of skills or give him a ‘bag of tricks’. Ours is not a deductive method of collecting skills. Here everything is concentrated on the ‘ripening’ of the actor which is expressed by a tension towards the extreme, by a complete stripping down, by the laying bare of one’s own intimity – all this without the least trace of egotism or self-enjoyment. The actor makes a total gift of himself. This is a technique of the ‘trance’ and of the integration of all the actor’s psychic and bodily powers which emerge from the most intimate layers of his being and his instinct, springing forth in a sort of ‘translumination’.

The education of an actor in our theatre is not a matter of teaching him something; we attempt to eliminate his organism’s resistance to this psychic process. The result is freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. Impulse and action are concurrent: the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses.

Ours then is a via negative – not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks.

Years of work and of specially composed exercises (which, by means of physical, plastic and vocal training, attempt to guide the actor towards the right kind of concentration) sometimes permit the discovery of the beginning of this road. Then it is possible to carefully cultivate what has been awakened. The process itself, though to some extent dependent upon concentration, confidence, exposure, and almost disappearance into the acting craft, is not voluntary. The requisite state of mind is a passive readiness to realize an active role, a state in which one does not ‘want to do that’ but rather ‘resigns from not doing it’.

Most of the actors at the Theatre Laboratory are just beginning to work toward the possibility of making such a process visible. In their daily work they do not concentrate on the spiritual technique but on the composition of the role, on the construction of form, on the expression of signs – i.e., on artifice. There is no contradiction between inner technique and artifice (articulation of a role by signs). We believe that a personal process which is not supported and expressed by a formal articulation and disciplined structuring of the role is not a release and will collapse in shapelessness.

We find that artificial composition not only does not limit the spiritual but actually leads to it. (The tropistic tension between the inner process and the form strengthens both. The form is like a baited trap, to which the spiritual process responds spontaneously and against which it struggles.) The forms of common ‘natural’ behaviour obscure the truth; we compose a role as a system of signs which demonstrate what is behind the mask of common vision: the dialectics of human behaviour. At a moment of psychic shock, a moment of terror, of mortal danger or tremendous joy, a man does not behave ‘naturally’. A man in an elevated spiritual state uses rhythmically articulated signs, begins to dance, to sing. A sign, not a common gesture, is the elementary integer of expression for us.

In terms of formal technique, we do not work by proliferation of signs, or by accumulation of signs (as in the formal repetitions of oriental theatre). Rather, we subtract, seeking distillation of signs by eliminating those elements of ‘natural’ behaviour which obscure pure impulse. Another technique which illuminates the hidden structure of signs is contradiction (between gesture and voice, voice and word, word and thought, will and action, etc.) – here, too, we take the via negativa.

It is difficult to say precisely what elements in our productions result from a consciously formulated programme and what derive from the structure of our imagination. I am frequently asked whether certain ‘medieval’ effects indicate an intentional return to ‘ritual roots’. There is no single answer. At our present point of artistic awareness, the problem of mythic ‘roots’, of the elementary human situation, has definite meaning. However, this is not a product of a ‘philosophy of art’ but comes from the practical discovery and use of the rules of theatre. That is, the productions do not spring from a priori aesthetic postulates; rather, as Sartre has said: ‘Each technique leads to metaphysics.’

For several years, I vacillated between practice-born impulses and the application of a priori principles, without seeing the contradiction. My friend and colleague Ludwik Flaszen was the first to point out this confusion in my work: the material and techniques which came spontaneously in preparing the production, from the very nature of the work, were revealing and promising; but what I had taken to be applications of theoretical assumptions were actually more functions of my personality than of my intellect. I realized that the production led to awareness rather than being the product of awareness. Since 1960, my emphasis has been on methodology. Through practical experimentation I sought to answe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: Practice to Theory: Theatre games
• Part Two: Critical Theories and Performance
• Part Three: Theorizing and Playing: Intercultural Perspectives
• Part Four: Power, Politics, and the Theatre
• Part Five: Sexuality In Performance
• Part Six: Performance Theory, Live Arts, and the Media
• Part Seven: Political Theatres, Post-Coloniality, and Performance theory
• Part Eight: Post-linearity and Gendered Performance Practice
• Adeola Agbebiyi Open Air Theatre: A Performance Poem By Way of an Afterword
• Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading