Bakhtin and Theatre

Dialogues with Stanislavski, Meyerhold and Grotowski

Dick Mccaw

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317486589
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Artes escénicas

What did Bakhtin think about the theatre? That it was outdated? That is 'stopped being a serious genre' after Shakespeare? Could a thinker to whose work ideas of theatricality, visuality, and embodied activity were so central really have nothing to say about theatrical practice?

Bakhtin and Theatre is the first book to explore the relation between Bakhtin's ideas and the theatre practice of his time. In that time, Stanislavsky co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 and continued to develop his ideas about theatre until his death in 1938. Stanislavsky's pupil Meyerhold embraced the Russian Revolution and created some stunningly revolutionary productions in the 1920s, breaking with the realism of his former teacher. Less than twenty years after Stanislavsky's death and Meyerhold's assassination, a young student called Grotowski was studying in Moscow, soon to break the mould with his Poor Theatre. All three directors challenged the prevailing notion of theatre, drawing on, disagreeing with and challenging each other's ideas. Bakhtin's early writings about action, character and authorship provide a revealing framework for understanding this dialogue between these three masters of Twentieth Century theatre.

PART I Bakhtin and theatre

1 Bakhtin and theatre

DOI: 10.4324/9781315709659-1

Introduction

Throughout his career, Bakhtin used drama and theatre as a means of explaining his ideas about the novel. He used references to plays and to the situation of the actor in three ways. In his early manuscripts he compares how a writer and an actor author their characters. This is the only instance of him actually engaging in the creative process of the actor, and this engagement is in most part a rhetorical device to explain the creative process of the writer. More frequently Bakhtin refers to drama as being one of the older genres along with epic and lyric, all of which have been overtaken by the more multi-dimensional and open-structured novel. Although these references to drama as a fixed and old-fashioned art form are very general, even so Bakhtin does provoke the student of theatre to consider the differences between drama and theatre and the novel, and how both generate meaning within the reader/spectator’s imagination. His third set of references are to specific character masks or roles from theatre – for example, from Atellan farce or Commedia dell’Arte – which are used as a means of exploring and explaining different kinds of authorial activity in novelistic discourse. In other words, this last use of theatre reference returns us to the first one where he explores the activity of the author relative to the characters in a novel. Because Bakhtin used theatre as a constant point of reference, it is possible to offer an overview of his principal concepts while at the same time discussing his field of theatrical reference. Janus-faced to the last, my argument will be a reading against the gradient of Bakhtin’s arguments about drama and theatre.

Bakhtin's involvement with theatre

Clark and Holquist’s biography indicates that Bakhtin showed an early interest in theatre. His German governess organised him and his brother Nikolai ‘in dramatic renderings, such as acting out scenes from the Iliad. The boys continued to put on dramatic performances long after the governess had gone, and Mikhail was still involved with theatre in Nevel after his university days’. ¹ They go on to note that in the 1920s he and Lev Pumpiansky (a member of the Bakhtin Circle) ‘together produced an open-air production of Oedipus at Colonnus, using a cast of over 500 pupils from local schools’. ² They also refer to two lecture series that he gave ‘for the Artists’ Trade Union, on theatrical production and the history of literature’. ³ From this biography it appears that Bakhtin maintained an academic interest in theatre throughout his career: ‘For years he also ran a seminar on aesthetics and the history of the theatre at the Mordovia Theatre for Music and Drama, as he had in Nevel and Vitebsk.’ ⁴ Clark and Holquist also refer to a broader theatricality both in the conduct of Bakhtin and other members of the Circle. Later they note members of the Circle were This is a reference to Medvedev’s active involvement in Gaideburov and Skarskaia’s Travelling Theatre and his writings for their journal. ⁶ A final portrait of Bakhtin and the Circle seems to be a back-projection of the carnivalesque that is described in Rabelais and His World: Was this suspension of differences, and the transcendence of barriers between the members of the Circle, really characteristic of their behaviour, or a projection of Bakhtin’s later theory onto his early life? In all events, this anecdotal evidence of Bakhtin’s theatricality in no way helps us to understand the more substantial questions of theatre that arise from reading his works.

Another idiosyncrasy was Bakhtin’s love of eccentricity, peculiar people, and recherché jokes. In those turbulent, post-Revolutionary years, Bakhtin forged bonds with people who had a common flair for theatricality, disguises and pranks. These qualities permitted them to transcend the restrictions that ordinarily close people off from one another and to create a kind of community of the spirit that rendered immaterial, if only briefly, the differences between commissar, actor, philosopher, and musician. ⁷

all verbal and contentious. None could have been called a passive disciple. Moreover, the thread of theatricality bound them all, from Pumpiansky’s tendency to dress in costumes, to the entire group’s love of charades and word games, to Medvedev’s close involvement with the theatre itself. ⁵

Secondary material

One of the first commentators to write about Bakhtin and theatre was Tzvetan Todorov. In The Dialogical Principle (1984) he cites a text by Goethe (though co-signed with Schiller) from 1797 called ‘On Epic and Dramatic Poetry’ where, as suggested by the title, the epic is opposed not to the novel but to drama: ‘The epic poet relates the event as perfectly past, while the playwright represents it as perfectly present.’ The opposition between epic and drama is clearly rooted here in the dichotomy of ‘relating’ and ‘representing’ (which in turn refers back to the opposition of diegesis and mimesis). ⁸ But, he concludes, ‘we never find (unless it is in the unpublished materials) the confrontation we await, between the novel and drama’. ⁹ There is a reason why there is not and could not be such a confrontation: Bakhtin never specifies what he means by the words ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ as either a genre or a medium. His interest extends only in so far as it illuminates, positively or negatively, the nature and function of verbal creation or the novel. Drama and theatre are never the primary subjects of enquiry.

Another early commentator was Julia Kristeva, whom Marvin Carlson cites as a proponent of what he calls a ‘theatre within language’. The phrase ‘drama becomes located in language’ could also describe how Bakhtin uses figures from the Commedia dell’Arte to explain the discursive activity of the author in the novel. Kristeva echoes a passage cited by both Todorov and David Lodge where Bakhtin argues that ‘every writer (even the purest lyric poet)’ is ‘a “playwright” insofar as he distributes all the discourses among alien voices, including that of the “image of the author” (as well as the author’s other personae)’. ^{11 , 12} Once again, theatre is not the subject of enquiry but a source of metaphor.

She speaks of carnival and dialogism under the operations of performance and dramatic action. She speaks of carnival as a mise en scène in which ‘language escapes linearity (law) to live as drama in three dimensions. At a deeper level, this also signifies the contrary: drama becomes located in language. A major principle thus emerges: all poetic discourse is a dramatisation, dramatic permutation (in a mathematical sense) of words.’ ¹⁰

In his 1993 article ‘On the Borders of Bakhtin’ Graham Pechey contends that drama is the master genre for understanding the distinction between voices: ‘Without that dramatic model of individuation constantly before them, the voices of novelistic prose would scarcely be formed.’ ¹³ In a much nuanced discussion of Brecht he not only returns to Todorov’s distinction between narration and imitation (diegesis and mimesis), but also between epic and drama. Very often in Brecht’s plays the characters are ‘actor-narrators’ as well as being embodied characters in the action; Pechey underlines the playwright’s insistence that he was interested in characterisation, and cites Galileo and Courage as examples of fully drawn characters. ¹⁴ Precisely because of this mix of the diegetic and the mimetic, Brecht’s drama is ‘open’ and challenges Bakhtin’s argument that ‘drama’ is a closed genre. Pechey goes on to argue that Bakhtin can help us to understand Brecht’s ‘non-dramatic dialogism’: The key point that Pechey makes in the context of this study is that these distinctions are often made when drama is reduced to the written text, to literature: ‘Drama is perhaps not so much monological in essence as monologised by being read as “literature” rather than theatre.’ ¹⁶ He also makes an excellent point about theatricality: in Renaissance tragedies the drama parodies the theatrical pomp of royal ceremony and procession: ‘the “power” of theatre we might say lies in its formal parody of the “theatre” of power.’ ¹⁷ Pechey opens two lines of enquiry that cannot be answered in this study, but are worthy of future research: that drama can appear monological when read as literature and that Brecht’s Epic Theatre (there is a reference to Brecht on page 46 of Rabelais and His World) demonstrates the open-ness that Bakhtin claimed for the novel.

with Bakhtin’s help we can see that what Brecht projects and seeks to realise in epic theatre is nothing less than a (non-)dramatic dialogism; that it is called ‘epic’ precisely because its every word and movement is not only ‘shown’ but told, inwardly divided between ‘dramatic’ actualisation and an ‘epic’ retrospection which both ironises them and hypothesises alternatives. ¹⁵

Pechey has also suggested that Bakhtin’s ideas could be applied to a broader notion of theatre. Once again, this reverses the thrust of Bakhtin’s argument that the novel had overtaken older genres like the epic, lyric and dramatic. Pechey argues that theatrical modes of ‘semioticity inhabit in our time a multitude of institutional sites besides theatre’, and points to an ‘exponential growth of the dramatic’ in contemporary culture. Bakhtin and other members of the Bakhtin Circle most certainly did make use of theatre as a field of metaphor to illustrate the different ways in which language is used both in speech and writing. Although the greater part of this study will loo...

Índice

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations of works in the notes
• Introduction
• PART I Bakhtin and theatre
• 1 Bakhtin and theatre
• PART II Bakhtin and Stanislavsky
• Introduction to Part II
• 2 Time and space in the novel and in theatre
• 3 Psychophysical acting
• 4 Authoring a character
• PART III Meyerhold and Grotowski
• 5 Meyerhold, a revolution in the stage
• 6 Grotowski: beyond theatre
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index