Alchemists of the Stage

Theatre Laboratories in Europe

Mirella Schino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000674385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

What is a theatre laboratory? Why a theatre laboratory? This book tries to answer these questions focusing on the experiences and theories, the visions and the techniques, the differences and similarities of European theatre laboratories in the twentieth century. It studies in depth the Studios of Stanislavski and Meyerhold, the school of Decroux, the Teatr Laboratorium of Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen, as well as Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret.

Theatre laboratories embody a theatre practice which defies the demands and fashions of the times, the usual ways of production and the sensible functions which stage art enjoys in our society. It is a theatre which refuses to be only art and whose radical research forges new conditions with a view to changing both the actor and the spectator. This research transforms theatrical craft into a laboratory which has been compared to the laboratory of the alchemists, who worked not on material but on substance. The alchemists of the stage did not operate only on forms and styles, but mainly on the living matter of the theatre: the actor, seen not just as an artist but above all as a representative of a new human being.

Laboratory theatres have rarely been at the centre of the news. Yet their underground activity has influenced theatre history. Without them, the same idea of theatre, as it has been shaped in the course of the twentieth century, would have been different. In this book Mirella Schino recounts, as in a novel, the vicissitudes of a group of practitioners and scholars who try to uncover the technical, political and spiritual perspectives behind the word laboratory when applied to the theatre.

III

1. In the first half of the century

A closer look at Konstantin Stanislavski’s Opera-Dramatic Studio (by Franco Ruffini) and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Studios and Workshops (by Béatrice Picon-Vallin).

2. In the second half of the century

Jerzy Grotowskes and Ludwik Flaszen’s Teatr Laboratorium (by Zbigniew Osifiski and Ugo Volli) and Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret (by Nando Taviani)

One must take a long, close look to understand the special nature of what is happening in the laboratory zone of the theatre. So at the risk of interrupting the flow of the discussion, the time has come to examine carefully some of the places in question and their activities.

We will home in on the various Studios and theatre laboratories through the voices of some of the Aarhus conference speakers. This chapter does not include the situations that lie outside the geographic area on which our discussion focuses (in Aarhus Richard Schechner spoke about the situation in the US, Raquel Carrió about that in Latin America, while Nicola Savarese described the situation in Asia). This book does not cover all the proceedings of the conference. Also left out, according to the same logic, which gives precedence to only four cardinal points of reference, are the analysis of figures such as Decroux, given by Marco De Marinis, and of Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, who were the subjects of talks by Georges Banu and Béatrice Picon-Vallin during the conference.

The chapter is in two parts, mirroring the two halves of the twentieth century that we are questioning. It should be viewed as an interlude, an essential detour to look at the actual work of the individual subjects of our discussion and to discover the face of laboratoriality. This chapter is the pivotal point of our discussion, and thus of the whole book. It is also a pause in the tale.

1. In the first half of the century

What was going on in the theatrical homes of the great directors of the early twentieth century, in their separate spaces, be it Studios, workshops or schools? Franco Ruffini on Stanislavski and Béatrice Picon-Vallin on Meyerhold look back at that work.

In his talk on Stanislavski, Franco Ruffini focused in particular (but not only) on the Opera-Dramatic Studio of 1935. He described a laboratory-type work hinging on the relationship between music and the actor’s art, an area in which Stanislavski appears to have forced himself to choose the essential elements of his old theoretical, and above all practical, researches. Ruffini also mentions fundamental points, useful for exploring the multifaceted laboratory sphere. These can be summed up as follows:

a) The importance of the shift away from the company (or from the class of a theatre school) to the theatrical community.

b) The problem of a path (and thus of a guide) that is not only theatrical but also spiritual in nature. In other words, a path that extends beyond the realms of the performance.

c) The shift from the construction of a performance to the need to build for oneself a different space in which to seek creative states conducive to constructing not only a new actor but also a new human being. This is how laboratorial work goes beyond the purely theatrical dimension.

d) The problem of youth as a necessary requirement for embarking on work to radically renew the actor’s art.

e) The drive to leave behind performance and move beyond it. Theatre and performance, Ruffini argues, are not the same thing: the theatre includes the performance, but the two are not synonymous.

I believe questions on the relationship between (artistic) youth and old age and between theatre and performance are the thorniest and certainly the most disturbing.

For the past twenty years Franco Ruffini has been a point of reference for the ‘invisible’ young theatre groups in Italy. He is a theatre scholar specialising in studies on Artaud, Stanislavski and Italy’s Renaissance theatre. He has been following Barba’s work for over thirty years and also that of Grotowski, especially after the foundation of the Workcenter in Italy, about which he has often written.

Allow me to add that among the Italian scholars appearing here, especially Franco Ruffini, Ferdinando Taviani, Fabrizio Cruciani, Nicola Savarese and myself, there has been an affinity for many years, with a tendency to share working and critical methods. This has led some people to believe that this quintet was actually a sort of ‘school’. A part of this book ends up by being, perhaps unintentionally, testimony to a tiny, compact and unruly working milieu, with a penchant for debate and contradiction. I cannot help but wonder whether the mixture of unity and fractiousness is the quintessence or the parody of what we call laboratory.

The second essay is on Meyerhold and on his penchant for founding new Studios. Four in particular are emphasised: the Studio in Borodinskaya Street, the KOURMASTSEP Labora-tory, his actor’s school and the Workshops of 1921-22. Béatrice Picon-Vallin suggests that to these should be added at least the 1905 Studio, created by Stanislavski within the Art Theatre and directed by Meyerhold.

Over the years Béatrice Picon-Vallin has become Meyerhold’s spokesperson in Europe. She has translated his writings, reconstructed his performances, studied his creative processes, his pedagogy and experimentation. Her contribution has been fundamental in informing the theatre world about probably the best director of the twentieth century.

Béatrice Picon-Vallin stresses that, in Meyerhold’s eyes, no matter how urgent and relevant the artistic creation was, pedagogical activity and pure research were always crucial, sometimes also a compensation chamber. It was not so much the idea of pedagogy that interested him — even though he ascribed great importance to it — as the degree of unrestricted experimentation afforded to him by the Studios: ‘I am not a teacher,’ Meyerhold said, ‘I am an explorer of new shores on the ocean of the theatre.’

Experimental as well as pedagogical work appears to have flowed parallel to that of performance production, as if the creation of performances and continuous laboratorial experimentation were the two rails of the great director’s working track. We might say that the Red Queen’s race, for directors like Meyerhold, worked first of all like a form of internal stimulation. It was a moment of pure research never really detached from the parallel creation of performances, and it allowed a gathering of materials irrespective of the themes or texts he wanted to put on stage. In this unceasing work it is difficult to separate what is intended for performance creation from pure research.

FRANCO RUFFINI
Stanislavski’s Extremism

What is a theatre laboratory, irrespective of periods, names and proceedings? Is it a study centre for performance, an avant-garde theatre, an advanced actor training school?

A theatre laboratory may be defined as a theatre in a state of effervescence. It cannot exist without theatre or without the work allowing it to move to a higher temperature. But it is something else.

Artaud

Artaud was notoriously alien to theatre experimentation, the avant-garde and pedagogy, even more so in his last years.

During the days of madness and the mental hospital, electroshocks and hunger, from 1937 to 1948, when he died — stripped of free will, thought and feeling — he simply took to the extreme his long-held belief that one can rely only on one’s body, as he describes it with anatomical rigour: the limbs, external and internal organs and everything else. There is nothing but the body. He realised however that the body, left to the automatism of its organs, is reduced to an ‘overheated factory’ that ‘expels filth’. They are his words. The limbs move, the lungs breathe in and out, the stomach digests, the liver secretes, each organ having a specific function. And the final product of all this activity is ‘shit’.

The theatre conceived by Artaud is an appropriate point of departure for discussing the actual nature of the theatre laboratory: a laboratory that builds a human being liberated from automatisms, using the tools of the theatre and starting off from the body alone.

One might argue that Artaud is an extremist. That is true.

But the theatre laboratory has to be observed from the viewpoint of extremists. Otherwise it would fade away into a series of individual cases which, by indicating what makes them different, risks missing what actually unites them deep down. An extremist is not someone who exaggerates and talks nonsense about things. Quite the opposite: he is someone who reasons about things in a logical yet intransigent manner, seeking to uncover what lies beneath the surface.

An extremist’s eyes focus on the essential. The masters of the theatre laboratory possessed such a gaze. Focusing on the essential is not a continuous process. There is a break in the gaze, an interruption. The break occurs in the gaze, and alters the nature of the observed phenomenon.

Put more bluntly: by stressing the essential, one revolutionises it.

In the footsteps of the First Studio

Before the official opening of the First Studio, in September 1912 — first in the former Lux cinema, then in the Hunting Club in Tverskaya Street — Stanislavski had attempted for two years to teach the ‘system’ to the actors of his Art Theatre. The experiment had been a complete failure. Stanislavski then decided to establish the Studio in a different location, using different methods from those of the Art Theatre.

‘Attempt to use the “System” in life’ is the name of the chapter of the Russian edition of Stanislavsld’s book on attempts made within the Art Theatre. It is followed by a chapter entitled ‘First studio’.⁷² In the 1924 American edition the chapter on experimentation was entitled ‘The First Studio’, and the following chapter ‘The Founding of the First Studio’.

⁷² Cf. Konstantin Stanislavski, Sobranie sočinenij v vos’mi tomach. 1, Moja žizn’ v iskusstve (Selected Writings, Vol. 1: My Life in Art) (Moscow: Islcusstvo, 1954) and Konstantin Stanislavski, My life in Art, trans. and ed. by Jean Benedetti (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 297 and 301.

Stanislavski himself explained the reason for the change in titles: ‘laboratory work cannot be done in the theatre itself, with its daily performances, its concerns over the budget and the box office, its heavy artistic commitments and the practical difficulties of a large enterprise’.⁷³

In the Russian and new English versions, this begins the chapter ‘First studio’ (in the corresponding chapter of the original English version this statement is missing).

There was a break in Stanislavski’s gaze. While working on the Russian edition, he realised that the First Studio began only when it became detached — not only physically — from the Art Theatre. What in the English version were already credited as being Studio activities were traced back to what they had really been: experiments. Invaluable and courageous, but part of the ‘Before’.

Prior to the laboratory there had been the territory of experimentation. But experimentation in itself does not constitute a theatre laboratory.

From the class of a theatre school or a company to the theatre community

The first revolution produced by the break in the gaze is the shift from the theatre company or the class of a school to the theatre group or theatre community, as it was called by some of the people involved as well as by leading historians.⁷⁴

The notice put up by Stanislavski to seek applicants for the First Studio in September 1912 was in no way the same as recruiting actors to form a company or as an examination for admission to a school. With that notice Stanislavski was searching for fellow travellers with whom to explore an unknown territory, jeopardising the performance side of the theatre. The long duration of rehearsals, which characterised experimentation, brought about a breakthrough in quality It became the ‘adventure of the rehearsals’.⁷⁵

_______________

⁷³ Stanislavski, My Life in Art, p. 301.

⁷⁴ Cf. in particular Fabrizio Cruciani, Teatro nel Novecento. Registi vedagoghi e comunità teatrali nel XX secolo (Twentieth Century Theatre: Pedagogical directors and theatrical communities in the twentieth century (Rome: Editori & Associati, 1995; revised edn.).

A theatre community is not just a company or a school class.

A theatre community continues to have the size of a company or a school class. Indeed both types, as far as dimensions are concerned, are ‘chasing’ each other, are in dialogue and influence each other, just as in Alice’s Red Queen’s race. It is not possible to know who is behind and who is ahead. They are different, yet they are in the same race.⁷⁶

When operating only as a company or as a class, the company and the cla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface The Laboratory Dimension
• I Recalling a strange discussion: the first questions and the first definitions. Leszek Kolankiewicz introduces the themes of Grotowski and alchemy
• II Conflicts within the ‘collective mind’. Discussion on Decroux and the theatre as a non-religious abode. Also discussion on body language, on the value of the laboratory for self-knowledge and on its importance in the creation of performances
• III
• IV The relationship between Studios in the first half of the twentieth century and theatre laboratories in the second. The appearance of the Red Queen and her race
• V Five pieces from different mosaics, with views of vanished landscapes
• Index of Names and Places