Short (Research) Stories: Drama and Dramaturgy in Experimental Theatre and Dance Practices
by Danae Theodoridou BA (Hons), MA (Dist)
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD
Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance University of Roehampton
2013
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Abstract
This practice-as-research project discusses modes, processes and aesthetics of contemporary dramaturgy, as practiced in experimental theatre and dance works in Europe from the 1990s onwards. In order to do this, the project draws particularly on discourses around ‘drama’ and suggests that the term can be redefined and usefully rehabilitated for both analysis and the creation of experimental performances. More specifically, this project defines drama (deriving from the Greek dro=act) as stage action, and dramaturgy (deriving from the Greek drama + ergo= work) as a practice that works endlessly for the creation of this drama/action on stage and is therefore always connected with it. In order to approach the newly proposed notion of ‘experimental drama’, this research uses the six main dramatic elements offered by Aristotle in his Poetics: plot, character, language, thought, the visual and music. Furthermore, it adds a seventh element: the spectator and contemporary understandings around the conditions of spectatorship. It then offers an analysis of dramaturgical processes and aesthetics of experimental stage works through these elements.
Given that this is a practice-as-research project, it is accordingly multi-modal and offers its perspectives on dramaturgy and experimental drama through both critical and performance texts, documentation traces (photographs and video recordings) of artistic practice – all present in this thesis – and a live event; all these modes complement each other and move constantly between the stage and the page to proceed with the research’s inquiries. The current thesis has borrowed the dramaturgical structure of two artistic projects, created within the frame of this research practice, to generate its writings. The introductory parts of this text place the work within the discourse on practice-as-research and discuss the project’s proposal for an analysis of contemporary dramaturgy through drama. The Short (Research) Stories that follow analyze experimental works, created both within the frame of this research practice and outside it, by other artists, following the Aristotelian model. The element of spectatorship intervenes in this analysis instead of standing separately in the thesis. The project’s closing live event returns from the page to the stage to continue and add to discussions around central issues of the work, in its various distinct modes.
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Table of Contents Abstract …………………………………………………………………………
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Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………...
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Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………..
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To the Reader…………………………………………………………………...
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The First Short (Research) Story or As If Writing From the Past ……...….
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I. The Introductory Short (Research) Stories Some Thoughts About the Words and Other Materials of This Space …………. ‘There We Are. What Do You Tell and How Do You Tell It’ …………………. Some Thoughts on Dramaturgy ………………………………………………… Some Thoughts on Drama-turgy ………………………………………………… ‘Let the Sun Shine In (The Rest Is Silence)’…………………………………......
29 46 56 65 87
II. Short (Research) Stories In Pieces (on plot) ………………………………………………………………. How Do We Understand Something? (on plot) ……………………………….... As Far as the I Can Be or Where Are the Edges of Your Body? (on character)… Who Am I? (on character) ………………………………………………………. I Am… (on character) …………………………………………………………... ‘You Are Welcome’ or ‘Thank You For Making Me the Artist I.M.’ (on character)…………………………………………………………………….. A Group Acting Together (on character) ……………………………………….. Flowing Characters in Still Bodies (on character) ……………………………… From Mouth to Hand or People Talking Without Speaking (And No One Dared Disturb the Sound Of Silence) (on language) …………………………………… The Titles Are Promises or ‘Yes, But Are These Their Stories?’ (on language)… Thinking on Our Feet (on thought) ……………………………………………… The Lion or Dancing the Linguistic Animal (on thought) ……………………… Remembering That Which Never Happened (on thought) ……………………… Stepping on Stage Not Knowing Your Words (on thought) ……………………. What Do You (Not) See? I See Nothing (on the visual) ………………………... What Do You (Not) See? I See Nothing (Part 2) (on the visual) ………………. Lookatmenowandhereiam (on the visual) ………………………………………. ‘But It’s Clear, Isn’t It, I’m Not Writing Music Right Now?’(on music)………..
106 125 141 148 154 155 159 169 173 187 197 207 221 235 241 248 254 255
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The Voices of Silence (on music) ………………………………………………. A Fatal Weapon (in Moving Images) (on music) ………………………………. ‘Would You Like Me to Seduce You? Is That What You Are Trying to Tell Me?’ (on music) ………………………………………………………………… A Fatal Weapon (in Words and Images) (on music) …………………………….
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The Last Short (Research) Story or As If Writing From the Future ……...
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Appendix ……………………………………………………………..…………
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Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………
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Acknowledgements
I would firstly like to thank my Director of Studies Prof Adrian Heathfield, who has supported and led my research work with profound generosity and untiring intellectual sharpness. My development, both as a researcher and an artist, has been significantly influenced by his close, generous and inspiring guidance, especially in the difficult conditions of the start of this project. I would also like to thank my second supervisor, Dr Simon Bayly, deeply for the constant care, interest and thoroughness with which he approached my project. He has contributed greatly with detailed and insightful advice to the most critical stages of my research. A deeply felt thanks to all my collaborators for their commitment, enthusiasm and great generosity with which they supported my work; a very special thank you to Ioanna Asimakopoulou and Panagiotis Katsolis, who have been on my side consistently both as artists and as friends throughout this project, contributing in a unique way with their faith, passion, inspiration and questioning of my propositions, to the creation of many of my live works. I extend my thanks to all staff, colleagues, fellow researchers and students I have worked with in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University. I have benefited immensely from belonging to such a vibrant research community and I look forward to our future dialogues. A very special thanks goes particularly to Annalaura Alifuoco, Raymond Justin Hunt, Joe Kelleher, Eleftheria Rapti and PA Skantze for their invaluable support in different ways. A heartfelt thanks to my mother, Sonia, for her strong belief in me, and for expressing both her admiration and her concerns with utmost honesty; and also to my other family, my ‘sisters’ Konstantina Georgelou and Efrosini Protopapa, from whom I am continuously learning to think, work, collaborate, create, connect and love, in unexpected ways; to all my friends, especially those who offered me a desk or a quiet room in the most unexpected of places, and to all who were luckily around to provide me with alternative perspectives towards life when I most needed them, during this often hard and exhausting journey. Finally, I am grateful to all the artists and theorists whose work has inspired the way I think, write and create on stage; especially to Tim Etchells, the start of it all, and Bojana Kunst. This work is dedicated to all of them and to the potentials of ideas shared and multiplied.
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‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’1 R. Barthes
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Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Trans. Howard, Richard. USA: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989, p.1.
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To the Reader
When reading this thesis, please take your time to go through its texts, images and videos. Remember that you do not necessarily need to start at the beginning. The following Short (Research) Stories draw on dramaturgical methods and structures of two of the live works created within the frame of this research practice, entitled 50’00’’Short Stories and Short Stories, to generate their writings. A more detailed analysis of this suggestion, to transfer studio-based working methods to the practice of research writing and the production of critical texts, is found in the (research) stories that are about to follow. What is useful to note at this point, though, is the fact that both abovementioned works were largely based on writing practices and exchanges among all participants, towards the creation of a fragmented text-based narrative for the stage. As their title implies, they were made of all kinds of short stories and were presented to the audience in a different order each time and an open form similar to that of a book of short stories, i.e. by announcing the title of each story and then narrating it. In a manner similar to the fragmented manner that has inspired what is written here, all materials below create in their summation the space of these Short (Research) Stories allowing for a more fluid and holistic understanding of the work and its creative progression, rather than being put in a specific order so that they construct a carefully orchestrated space with a concrete beginning, middle and end. By the time you reach their end, hopefully they will have managed to contribute in an effective way to discourses on dramaturgy, offering their distinct image of the landscape of dramaturgical processes in experimental stage works today.
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The following short (research) stories constitute texts written of four years of theoretical and artistic research explorations related to dramaturgical structures, aesthetics and modes of experimental theatre and dance works;1 of the way these are created and presented on stage. They are texts that aim to get a glimpse of the restless movement of these works’ dramaturgy. And it is important to clarify from the very start that the term ‘dramaturgy’ will be used here to refer to the emerging area that relates to dramaturgical developments of the late 20th and 21st centuries which have often been discussed with terms such as ‘new dramaturgy’, ‘open dramaturgy’, etcetera.2 In contrast to previous definitions of dramaturgy, understood either as the interpretation of a text that the director and the dramaturge worked out before the beginning of the rehearsals which constituted the goal that the whole work had to move towards;3 as a series of ‘golden rules’ regarding the ‘right structure’ of a theatre play;4 or as the work of a literary advisor responsible for planning a theatre’s repertoire, this type of dramaturgy is not identified with the backbone of an anterior narrative to which the work will aim, or with a concrete technique or preconceived structure seen as specific points of departure for a work’s creation. Instead, it is characterized by an extreme heterogeneity of working methods and is understood more as ‘the consequence of a process’ directly connected with all people involved in a work.5
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‘Of’ is used here as a precise conjunction, in the sense suggested by Adrian Heathfield in his essay ‘Writing of the event’, to denote a kind of writing that ‘is not simply upon a subject or about it but, rather is “of” it in the sense that it issues from it, it is subject to its force and conditions.’ (Heathfield, Adrian,”Writing of the Event”. A Performance Cosmology – Testimony from the Future, Evidence of the Past. Eds. Christie Judie, Gough Richard, Watt, Daniel Peter. London: Routledge, 2006, p.179). 2 The terms have been suggested by the dramaturges Marianne van Kerhoven (Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. “Introduction”. Theaterschrift On Dramaturgy. No5-6 (1994): 8-34) and Myriam van Imschoot (Van Imschoot, Myriam. “Anxious Dramaturgy”. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 13.2 (2003): 57-68) respectively. 3 Bleeker, Maaike. “Dramaturgy As a Mode Of Looking” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 13.2 (2003):163-172. 4 Ruhsam, Martina. “Dramaturgy Of and As Collaboration” Maska -Practical Dramaturgies. Summer 2010, p.29. 5 Turner, Cathy and Behrndt, Synne. Dramaturgy and Performance. UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, p.170.
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One such dramaturgy thus refers to a hybrid constellation moving between arts, science and society, and to the diverse, multi-modal artistic but also critical, theoretical and reflective methods that each project invents anew ‘so that the piece that no one knows what it will be, can become actual’.6 And it constitutes an area that has generated increasing scholarly interest over the last few years, mainly in Europe but also in North America, which has resulted in the organization of a series of major conferences and other research events, as well as the publication of books and thematic journal issues dedicated to this topic.7 This practice-as-research project places itself within this research frame, aiming to propose an alternative methodological tool for the analysis of one such heterogeneous area of study and offering a systematic investigation into the diverse dramaturgical working methods of experimental theatre and dance works.
The use of the term ‘experimental’, both for the works that will be discussed here, but also for the type of dramaturgy I wish to focus on, which in this sense is suggested to be an ‘experimental dramaturgy’, constitutes a choice made for specific reasons. As Elinor Fuchs aptly notes, we still don’t know whether, for this type of theatre, we should use terms such as ‘avant-garde’, ‘experimental’, ‘postmodern’ or ‘new’, since all of these may be used and none is wholly satisfactory.8 Although I agree with the thought that each one of these terms entails its own problems, I consider the use of terms that refer to constitutive aspects of a work and designate practical approaches to theatrical
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Lepecki, André. “We’re Not Ready For the Dramaturge: Some notes for dance dramaturgy” Rethinking Dramaturgy, Errancy and Transformation. Bellisco Manuel, Cifuentes, María José, Ecija, Amparo, Eds. Madrid: Centro Párraga, Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo, 2011, p.193. 7 Indicatively see: Conferences and other research events: ‘European Dramaturgy in the Twenty-first Century’, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 27–30 September 2007; ‘I International Seminar of New Dramaturgies’, Murcia, Spain, 2010; ‘PLAY - Relational Aspects of Dramaturgy’, Gent, Belgium, 15-16 March 2012. Thematic journal issues: Performance Research ‘On Dramaturgy’ 14.3 (2009); Contemporary Theatre Review ‘New Dramaturgies’ 20.2 (2010); Maska ‘Practical Dramaturgy’ vol.XVI, no.131-132 (2010). Books: Turner, Cathy and Behrndt, Synne. Dramaturgy and Performance. UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008; Luckhurst, Mary. Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Rudakoff, Judith and Thomson, Lynn M., Eds. Between the Lines. The Process of Dramaturgy. Toronto: Playwrights of Canada Press, 2002; Jonas, Susan, Proehl, Geoffrey S. and Lupu, Michael, Eds. Dramaturgy in American Theatre: A Source Book. USA: Wadsworth Publishing Co Inc, 1996; Cardullo, Bert. What is Dramaturgy? USA: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995. 8 Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of the Character. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, p.9.
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conventions to be more effective, than specific formally or temporally defined terms such as ‘postmodern’, ‘new’ or ‘avant-garde’, for example, which are highly characterized by their temporal or ordinal/hierarchical specificity and require additional explanation as to what kind of works they include. The term ‘experimental’, on the contrary, points to methodological aspects and qualities of the works discussed, defining them as practices largely characterized by their aim to experiment with, question, test, de- and re-construct theatrical elements and conventions. The alternative term that could possibly be used in this case, both because it designates a similarly practical approach to theatrical conventions, in a way, and because it constitutes a widely accepted and used terminological choice in many similar cases, namely the term ‘postdramatic’ proposed by Hans-Thies Lehmann, has not been used because – as it will be analyzed in detail in the following short (research) stories – the approach to ‘experimental dramaturgy’ proposed here aims exactly to create a dialogue with Lehmann’s understanding of recent common theatre and dance developments as ‘postdramatic’, and discusses certain experimental practices through a different perspective on the ‘dramatic’, and in a new relationship to ‘drama’.
It is necessary at this point though to refer also to the problems that the use of the term ‘experimental’ entails. More often than not, this has been connected with the ‘very’ latest, ‘unique’, ‘radical’, ‘innovative’ developments of theatre and dance. Although I too wish to discuss recent stage practices here, I do not aim by any means to suggest that experimentation is only to be found in these recent developments. The fact that this term does not denote a specific temporality can be seen as indicative of the fact that the ‘experimental’ should not be understood as confined solely to specific periods, and more particularly to the ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ periods. On the contrary, it is to be
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found in different historical moments and can be understood in terms of the dialogue that the distinct theatrical experiments of each time open with previous forms of tradition. While we may often need to emphasize the modernist break with tradition, in order to acquire an insightful understanding of, and to register important aesthetic and methodological shifts in, the latest theatrical developments that take place in our own time, in fact experimentation and the gradual transformation of tradition are to be found in any time.
Although this thesis refers primarily to recent theatre and dance practices, this is not presumed to have an exclusive claim to experimentation. In fact, the main argument suggested here as to how we could approach the dramaturgy of experimental stage works today through drama and dramatic theory aims exactly to emphasize the continuity that takes place in the development of theatre and dance practices, and problematizes the overtly antithetical approach in relation to them (between ‘conventional’, ‘traditional’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘new’, ‘innovative’, ‘postmodern’, ‘postdramatic’ practices) expressed by several modernist and postmodernist scholars and practitioners. Fuchs, for example, despite the fact that she recognizes the complexities involved in defining specific theatrical modes as ‘postmodern’, ends up choosing this term to discuss a theatre that is primarily characterized by the fact that it ‘is itself most interested in defining itself by measuring its distance from the long practice of traditional, dramatic theatre’.9 Nick Kaye also refers to ‘all the difficulties that intrude upon any categorical definition of what the “postmodern” actually is’, arguing that in this case certain works can more appropriately be understood by means of what they are not;10and what they ‘evidently’ are not, as he notes, is ‘conventional’
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Fuchs, The Death of the Character, p.7. Kaye, Nick. Postmodernism and Performance. London: Macmillan 1994, p.1.
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theatre and drama.11 Once more here Kaye departs from a similar antithetical approach in order to continue by defining ‘postmodern’ theatre and dance almost exclusively in terms of its oppositional relationship to previous ‘modern’ artistic forms and methods, which it explicitly disrupts. In these terms, the ‘postmodern’ should be understood as ‘that which is disruptive of categories and categorizations and which finds its identity though an evasion or disruption of conventions’;12 as a series of conflicts and exclusions; as a making visible of instabilities, a fostering of differences and disagreements, an instability produced as reactions to modernist notions of ‘foundation’ with a faith in legitimacy. Of course Kaye himself concludes by recognizing the danger of defining in such strict and concrete oppositional terms an area understood as that which cannot be defined and categorized, and refers also to the fact that what importantly characterizes the ‘postmodern event’ is that it is inclusive and allows an exploration of connections between very obviously divergent elements.
Martin Puchner writes extensively about similar antithetical approaches to theatre. He refers to the fact that a substantial tradition within modernism finds it necessary to define itself against ‘theatre’, as this has been defined by its main dramatic conventions. Theorists such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Michael Fried, Puchner argues, have explicitly defined the values of modernism through an attack on this kind of ‘theatre’, and avant-garde artists continued this attack, in a way, with their desire to go beyond the circumscribed spaces of the theatre, their dissatisfaction with the stage and its mimetic actors but also with almost all forms of existing theatre. Although both movements aimed to constitute forms of resistance, ‘one does not need to turn to Freud in order to understand how much the act of resistance
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Kaye, Postmodernism and Performance, p.3. Kaye, Postmodernism and Performance, p.3.
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remains determined by that which is being resisted’, Puchner posits.13 Their negation and rejection of previous theatrical modes, he continues, is therefore not to be understood as a doing away with theatre but as a process that is dependent on that which it negates. One such resistance thus does not describe a place outside the horizon of dramatic theatre but a variety of attitudes through which this theatre is kept at arm’s length and, in the process of resistance, utterly transformed. In this sense, according to Puchner, drama and theatre did not so much suffer from their modernist enemies and avant-garde enthusiasts; on the contrary, they have always recorded and responded to the arguments of their detractors, internalizing both their critique and their enthusiasm for the purpose of a far-reaching reform of the dramatic form and of theatrical representation. Instead of being interested in banishing drama or preserving stable dichotomies and antitheses then, Puchner concludes, we rather look for tools to analyze a variety of positions and phenomena that turn out to be variously intertwined and interconnected, constituting a productive force responsible for theatre’s most glorious achievements.
Aligning with such ideas, this thesis departs from the challenging hypothesis that experimental works of theatre and dance continue to create dramas for the stage. In order to approach and analyze this (experimental) drama, it draws particularly on Aristotle and the six dramatic elements offered in his Poetics (the plot, character, language, thought, the visual and music), and discusses the way experimental works today respond to these elements.14 It is thus the dialogue that specific works create with the Aristotelian dramatic elements, the negotiation of their relationship to them, their response to the ways one can work on them today, that the following short (research)
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Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: modernism, anti-theatricality, and drama. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002, p.2. 14 Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. McLeish, Kenneth. London: Nick Hern Books Limited, 1999.
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stories attempt to discuss, by carefully examining the process through which all abovementioned aspects are being addressed: their dramaturgy. This analysis, drawing on the first European analysis of drama and dramaturgy belonging to Aristotle, aims to make an unusual suggestion about the way that a research on ‘experimental’ stage practices could as well be based on a seemingly ‘conventional’ discourse on drama and dramaturgy, and constitutes an explicit attempt to see what emerges when one moves ‘backwards’ instead of ‘forwards’ and resists the perhaps more common tendency for such analysis to be based on continuously new terms, such as ‘performance art’, ‘live art’, etcetera. In this way, it wishes to argue that a deeper and better understanding of experimental theatre and dance practices should avoid an analysis of them based on the relatively overused and exhausted notions of performance and performativity.
As Jon McKenzie observes, such terms have been used in so many distinct fields (managerial, technological, cultural etcetera) and in so many distinct ways that they end up constituting almost normative concepts, which carry disparate nuances according to their context, being sometimes read as signifying resistance or experimentation (cultural performance) while at other times signifying productivity and efficiency (managerial, technological performance).15 One should then look for another base to start her research explorations from. A base that would not include such blurred notions and would, moreover, avoid what Jérôme Bel has called a contemporary anxiety to continuously change the name of theatre and dance works, positioning them under new genres such as ‘live art’, ‘performance’, ‘body art’, etcetera.16 Aligning with Bel’s thought that such anxiety prevents us from understanding theatre and dance better and
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McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001. This thought was expressed by Jerome Bel during the talk he gave as part of the retrospective to his work that took place in Sadler’s Wells theatre, London in February 2008. 16
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deeper, I conduct a research practice based on traditional theatrical discourses on drama and more particularly on the dramatic model offered by Aristotle.
This research practice constitutes of course only a starting point for an alternative approach to recent dramaturgical developments. It conducts a very concrete experiment that suggests an examination of experimental stage works through the six dramatic elements of Poetics as demonstrated through their interrogation in the performance work, proposing that they can still be used as a practical artistic tool. But it does not aim in any way to constitute an exhaustive investigation (even if this was ever possible) of Aristotle’s work, or the way this resonates in today’s artistic creation. The experiment conducted here aligns well with the scope of the particular research – which is to offer an alternative tool and concrete materials for both the analysis and the creation of experimental performances, redefining and opening a dialogue with earlier discourses – and it certainly has its limitations. What follows are stories that examine practical artistic suggestions and studio-based explorations made today by theatre and dance artists in relation to what an ‘experimental drama’ is or can be; how its plot can be constructed; the way one can understand and create characters in it; the use of oral and written language; and the creation of the visual and the musical environment of the event. They thus examine the ‘open to a wide range of interpretative possibilities’ way in which these works deal with Aristotle’s dramatic elements, seeing them as elements ‘to be partly resolved in and through performance’.17 Of course it becomes immediately obvious that this analysis refers only to specific Aristotelian dramatic aspects, leaving aside several others, such as the hierarchical order in which Aristotle discusses the six dramatic elements of his carefully orchestrated
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Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, p.192.
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event, which could not be preserved in a discussion on one such heterogeneous object of study as the dramaturgy of projects that work against such hierarchical understanding of their materials, and on a rich diversity and heterogeneity of working modes, presenting their distinct elements as temporally and spatially equivalent. Other Aristotelian aspects, such as his understanding of drama and its relation to tragedy (but also to comedy), and his analysis of the major aspects of tragic fear, ‘catharsis’, etcetera, are also absent. The aim here has been more about opening a space for the creation of an alternative dramatic discourse that will invite further contributions – both from other researchers, artists and scholars but also from my side – which will approach recent experimental artistic practices through it. This discourse is not suggested as something entirely new though. It develops suggestions that have already been made through the work of a significant number of both artists and theoreticians who have largely worked with and reflected on the Aristotelian dramatic aspects and their relation to current artistic aesthetics and modes. Extremely interesting material for one such discourse could be for example the work of Romeo Castelluci and its very particular relationship to tragedy; or the significant texts of Martha Nussbaum, F.L. Lucas, Nietzsche and several other theorists;18 whilst it would certainly be more than challenging to view the works of artists such as Bel or Ivana Müller, who are being discussed here, as tragedies and discuss the way in which they could relate to the main tragic attributes.
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Indicatively see: Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Lucas, F L. Tragedy: serious drama in relation to Aristotle's poetics. London: Chatto & Windus, 1972; Jones, John. On Aristotle and Greek tragedy. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962; Belfiore, Elizabeth S. Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Transl. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Janko, Richard. Aristotle on Comedy: towards a reconstruction of "Poetics II". London: Duckworth, 2002; Chaston, Colleen. Tragic Props and Cognitive Function: aspects of the function of images in thinking. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010.
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Hoping that this thesis will indeed be received as the invitation that it aimed to be, and that one such discourse will expand in the years to come, I warmly welcome you to Short (Research) Stories. If you could see me now, it would be from your seat in the auditorium. You would be sitting there and I would be on stage (others would be next to me or sitting behind me) standing behind a microphone.
I could look like this:
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Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: I.Florakis).
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or this:
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50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E.Mitsi).
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or this:
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Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: I.Florakis).
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or this:
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50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E.Mitsi).
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I could narrate to you stories entitled like this:23 1. A man’s voice 2. Many bad words about you 3. Obsession 4. The great moment 5. Untitled 6. Morning rain 7. 1989 8. Thriller 9. Preferences 10. Stolen 11. I kiss you like we used to kiss 12. Solo 13. The man with the wrong name 14. Automatic translation 15. James Bond 16. The other bed
Or this:24 1. The getaway – 322BC 2. Party in the ruins 3. Open embraces 4. A small, tiny snake but still a snake
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The list constitutes part of some of the title of the stories heard within my project 50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance. 24 The list constitutes part of some of the title of the stories heard within my project Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance.
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5. Body commutability 6. Euphoria 7. Waiting for an earthquake 8. As secretly and quietly 9. Something drags me to you 10. Time does not work on our side 11. Take that image away from me, I don’t want to see me like this. Don’t you remind me of me. 12. The clarifying question takes place in 30’’and the reply is given in 1 minute. 13. That’s why I am with you today 14. By the year 2020 15. Broken eggs that are put together again
But this not a theatre space and we are not in it. You are not sitting in the auditorium and I am not on stage. We are both here, in front of these pages. And yet, this is once more a performance, entitled: Short (Research) Stories. Instead of speaking, my voice will write to you a number of other titles with the various kinds of (research) stories that accompany them.
Here it goes:
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The First Short (Research) Story or As If Writing From the Past
Dear Danae
We are now in the year, say, 2006, almost two years before you start your research practice on dramaturgy and its modes in experimental theatre and dance works. Although the final decision to start a PhD is not completely here yet, the ideas and thoughts related to methods used by artists to construct their stage works, to the potentials and problems of this process, are already here affecting the way you think and work yourself. The thoughts about which might be the possible ways to proceed with your inquiries on such issues are also here, and the option of relocating yourself and beginning a research on them has certainly made its appearance. You are aware of the fact that Greece will not be able to offer you much space or support on this, plus you are very eager to meet other working modes and practices and come in contact with another way of thinking and working, outside the one you have been seeing and practicing in your country. But what kind of relocation could that be and what kind of research could start from that state of yours? Also why? And what would be its main questions, its main urgencies?
You do not know. But you start anyway.
Let us proceed with this experiment. Let us fictionalize further this past time and look of yours.
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So here we are in 2006:
Starting from a point where all you have got is your sincere interest and urgency to go deeper into matters that will help your work develop further, but not much more than this – since both bibliographical resources and relevant guidance as well as the creation of works similar to the ones you are interested in seem still to be absent in your place of residence – you are trying to draft a research proposal to send to the institution that could possibly host you and your inquiries for the next years, offering them a ground to evolve. But how can you write such a proposal? What can you say in it from your current position? Why would such research, a research observing, critically analyzing and practicing modes and potentials of dramaturgy today, be a useful and needed one? What are the questions or the problems that it comes to reply to or to deal with? Who does it come to dialogue with? Which is its place in the existing discourse?
Having very little idea about how to reply to such questions and having even less idea about the discourse on dramaturgy and the processes that create the works you are interested in within the rest of Europe, you wish that you would now hear about a conference on European dramaturgy, about the organization of an event that would host some of those working in this area, some of those who are thinking and reading and writing on similar issues and who would be there all together for some days to share their concerns. You are thinking of a two-day event organized by a number of institutions, hosting a large number of international critical voices and therefore allowing space for broad and diverse discussions on the topic. Something like that would be so helpful for you! It would offer you a frame, it would give you a good idea about what is going on in the area of dramaturgy at the moment and it is very likely that
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it could form a very useful ground for the beginning of your work, let alone the fact that it would certainly help you find some replies to those necessary initial questions that you need to include in the proposal you are struggling to write. You fantasize about one such event; about this useful possible start of yours. You are thinking of the ideas that could be heard there and could help you clarify what you have in your head about the area you are just about to enter: not because you would always agree with them but because you would sometimes disagree. And through this tension you would be able to proceed with a better articulation of your own research.
You could hear there, for example, that the aim of dramaturgy is to make meaning and find exercises to reveal one such meaning in and of a work. You could hear that the main characteristic of the dramaturgy you aim to explore is that it is non-verbal, that it is not based so much on text as on the visual aspects of a work. You could hear about dramaturges operating as educators in theatre. All these ideas would certainly make you realize some initial lines of your own thinking, which moves away from any attempt to ‘make meaning’ or find ways to generate such meaning; or ‘educate’ someone, be that the audience or your performers or even yourself; or focus more on the visual side of a work and not being continuously obsessed with text and language, but still consider your work as being placed at the centre of contemporary discourse on dramaturgy.
You could also hear there about ways to provoke a genuine encounter, understood not so much as an affect but as a change in the way of thinking. You could hear about dramaturgies that are not so much interested in what ones sees but in what takes place between people. You could hear about individual processes within a work which do not dissolve into the group nor are they disconnected from it. You could hear about the
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body defined as a space for negotiation and about ways to measure the distance from the other within the event. And you would want to dive much deeper into dramaturgical practices to explore similar ideas more.1
Unfortunately you do not hear about one such event taking place though. You then have to continue working on your own; drafting that proposal, drawing almost exclusively on ideas that have been wandering in your head for many years during your training as an actress and your work as a performer and spectator of live works. Half-articulated, halfshaped thoughts on that paper; trying to express what it is that they are urgently looking for – and the dream of another city and another way of working. Within a year’s time this process will be completed and you will actually move to London to start your research practice, though still not having absolute replies to those questions or knowing exactly what it is that you are doing and why.
What you also do not know now, in 2006, is that you will spend four years and you will almost finish your PhD and those questions will appear again and again in your work, and you will attempt over and over again to reply to them. Just there though, just before you finish, a few months before you submit your thesis, you will eventually hear about that so much anticipated event. The first conference on dramaturgy that has taken place since you started your research (at least the first one that you are aware of, taking place in a European context) will take place in Belgium and it will indeed be an international
1
All abovementioned thoughts and ideas are part of my personal notes as these were written during the two-day conference: ‘PLAY - Relational Aspects of Dramaturgy’ that took place from15-16 March 2012 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, University College Ghent, Belgium (for more information:
http://www.theaterwetenschappen.ugent.be/play).
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gathering of people working in this area.2 And maybe there you will finally be able to find some possible replies to those questions.
This gathering could indeed be the thing that could initiate it all. It could indeed reply to questions at the beginning of the process and shape the ground your research work would evolve on. But it did not. It came last. This text could also come first. It did not. And although it appears first, it is the last one you write. But you always enjoyed mixed up temporalities anyway, orders of things coming upside-down, different combinations and potentials of futures and pasts: to form a present carrying both in it, finding its way through them; a vulnerable formation and fragile definition of the ‘now’.
Good luck with your research work, Danae. Enjoy its four years to come!
All my best wishes, Danae
2
The conference ‘PLAY - Relational Aspects of Dramaturgy’, which took place in March 2012 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent, Belgium, constitutes the first publicly advertised major European event on dramaturgy that took place since the beginning of my research project in January 2008. Of course, within the frame of the increasing interest of researchers on dramaturgy, a number of similar research events took place elsewhere too (for example in Poland 2009, Spain 2010, Slovenia 2011, and elsewhere), some of which also led to publications mentioned later in the thesis (for example the book ‘Rethinking Dramaturgy, Errancy and Transformation’ published in Madrid in 2011, including texts presented in the ‘I International Seminar of New Dramaturgies’, which took place in Murcia, Spain).
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I. The Introductory Short (Research) Stories
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Some Thoughts About the Words and Other Materials of This Space
In the interdisciplinary work that practice-as-research is – consisting both of forms and methods of critical thinking and writing, as well as those of artistic stage practices – one is reading, writing, working on theory and, at the same time, creating live works. Each of these processes informs the others, but none of them separately constitutes the research project itself. This project could then be better understood as the dialogue among the abovementioned processes and their materials in a third space, where they coexist and interact within the frame of a new common creative process; a process that in turn produces new materials.
Roland Barthes argues that, in order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a subject and arrange two or three disciplines around it since ‘interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one’.1 What form then could this third new object – that is not entirely theoretical practice and is not entirely stage practice – take, in the case of practice-as-research? This is one of the main questions that researchers working on such projects deal with, and their multi-formed final submissions are possible replies to this question. The following Short (Research) Stories also attempt to create one such proposal: a proposal largely based on the way that dramaturgical processes of the stage can interact with critical writing processes of the page. This journey back and forth between page and stage practices, practices of writing and performance, is what attempts to take place in the space of this new object, the thesis you now have in your hands, created as a result of a four-year interdisciplinary research practice.
1
Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Howard, Richard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p.72.
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In the introduction to his recent book Blood, Sweat and Theory, which examines structures and methods of practice-as-research projects, John Freeman notes that ‘research generally concludes with the written word’, implying that all kind of research, whether entirely theoretical or practice-led, most of the time (if not all) will have to conclude in a written text.2 This constitutes a thought found in several texts dealing with practice-as-research. Robin Nelson talks about the outcomes of such research, which cannot just take the form of a theatre piece, a film or a dance piece etcetera, no matter how successful these may be, but are in need of additional writing as evidence of their research process and imperatives.3 Stephen Goddard goes even further into naming this form of writing when he notes that ‘creative arts research practice in universities is the requirement not only to undertake a substantial practical project but also a reflexive exegesis that contextualizes the methodologies and significant contributions of the research’.4 Estelle Barrett refers also to the term ‘exegesis’ – a term that seems to have established itself especially in the Australian-based discourse on the topic – to talk about the final submission of a practice-as-research project.5 Being a direct use of the Greek word εξήγηση (exegesi=explanation), one such submission constitutes the justification of the artistic work that has been conducted within the frame of the research practice, linking the imperative to write within one such research mainly with the need to ‘explain’ it. Within these terms, various questions are raised by the abovementioned writers regarding the risk of diminishing the status of practice itself (the term ‘practice’ used and understood by them solely as art or stage practice here) and restricting or even impeding the actual process of the research practice through
2
Freeman, John. Blood, Sweat and Theory. UK: Libri Publishing, 2010, p.ix. Nelson, Robin. “Modes of Practice-as-Research Knowledge and Their Place in the Academy”. Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen. Eds. Allegue, Ludivine et all. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 4 Goddard, Stephen. “A Correspondence Between Practices”. Practice as Research, Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. Barrett, Estelle and Bolt, Barbara, Eds. London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010, p113 (first published in 2007), my emphasis. 5 Barrett, Estelle. “The Exegesis as Meme”. Practice as Research, Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. Barrett Estelle and Bolt, Barbara, Eds. London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010 (first published in 2007). 3
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imposing on the researcher/artist the production of one such written ‘exegesis’. And one can find several other texts focusing on practice-as-research that move even further towards this direction, arguing in a similar way for the integrity and validity of the art process, as far as the generation of aesthetic knowledge, understanding and insight is concerned.
It is within such a frame that the contested and antagonistic discussions on practice-asresearch processes are more or less taking place. Nevertheless, the submission of a final text (in the various forms that this can take), which critically accompanies the stage practice, is still considered necessary. The creation of an artistic work or a body of artistic works is not yet accepted as sufficient for a PhD submission, able to reveal the knowledge conveyed through that work by itself, at least within the frame of the current UK regulations for performing arts research but also of the equivalent Australian ones discussed above.6 In the current situation of this necessary passage of practice-asresearch through the written text, the main question seems to be: what is indeed the actual process of the research practice? For it becomes clear that one would arrive at contested conclusions if one identifies that process solely with the artistic process of the creation of the live works that take place within a research practice – as implied in the abovementioned ideas. If that were the case then obviously a written companion of any kind would not be necessary. It is for this reason that an understanding of the text created with the research practice as a ‘written exegesis’ (i.e. as an explanation that aims to justify the artistic work), seems to contradict itself, since it attempts to prove the
6
Susan Melrose refers to ‘the outcome of the Christopher Frayling-led debates initiated by the UK Council for Graduate Education on the question of practice as research in the creative and performing arts, fed into the Quality Agency higher degree qualification consultation process, which concluded in 1999 that a mixed-mode PhD submission could be entertained, to include an artefact or a performance together with a written commentary of appropriate length and function.’ Professor SF Melrose “Entertaining Other Options…Restaging "Theory" in the Age of Practice as Research”. 15 August 2011. (my emphasis).
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research value and sufficiency of a work that is considered already from its inception (and even before that) as an insufficient one, at least within the current circumstances of practice-as-research.
Much more productive questions then within the frame of a research practice that eventually reveals as its actual process both the creation of a body of live works as well as the creation of a text, would be the following: What can it mean particularly (but not only) for a practice-as-research project its passage through textuality? Is the creation of a text as ‘an exegesis’ the only option offered by the written word? If not, what other kind of text might it be? How do the two modes of theoretical/critical thinking and stage practicing coexist and interact in the space of that text? Or else: What might be the most productive relationship between one or more stage works and writing? What can the imperative to write offer to stage works and what can they offer to it within the frame of a research practice?
I would argue that – at least within the current situation – when stage practices enter critical discourse through practice-as-research, they denote exactly the aim to elaborate their means and methods, not only by creating and presenting new live works, but mainly by thinking and talking about them in this critical way, by placing them in a critical, theoretical context; and then also by writing on and of them. It is through this certain way of thinking and writing, I believe, that these artistic practices wish to create new objects within their territories. At the same time though, it is on this certain way of thinking, talking and eventually writing, that stage practice is able in its turn to apply its distinct operating modes; and in this way to affect and expand the forms and methods of
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such critical writing, inventing space for the creation of new objects in that area as well; inventing alternative forms of theory, as Susan Melrose has argued.7
Now the question once more seems to be this: What kind of writing might that be and how is it different from the writing of what Melrose has called ‘spectator studies within the university’ or indeed of that pursued in the traditional 80,000 words dissertation? Melrose has extendedly written about what she characterizes as a concern with the writing-production of performance-experts, with the ways this is produced, with the institutional setups and situations it is produced in, etcetera. She distinguishes this writing from the writing of the ‘spectator studies’ as she calls them, which have been to a large extent identified with Performance Studies, whereas in reality they mostly constitute the summation of writings belonging to ‘experts spectators’, who see what they see and then attempt to reproduce in words their own relationship to a performance product. Although Melrose eagerly recognizes the value of these writings for several reasons, she insists that this ‘spectator theory of knowledge’, should be distinguished from what might constitute an ‘arts-practitioner theory of knowledge’ with distinct positions, presuppositions and inquiries from the former one. This latter theory then should be better understood within the institutional context, as a mixed-mode metapractice equally ‘theoretical’ to hegemonic modes of theoretical practice solely in/as writing, according to Melrose. When writing appears or indeed ‘figures’, to use Melrose’s words, within this interdisciplinary meta-practice, its registers may well be
7
All ideas of Susan Melrose mentioned both here and in the next paragraph constitute recurring topics and concerns that are discussed in plenty of her texts. Indicatively see: Professor SF Melrose “Entertaining Other Options…Restaging “Theory” in the Age of Practice as Research”. 15 August 2011. http://www.sfmelrose.org.uk/inaugural/; “please adjust your set”. 17 August 2011. ; “Words fail me: dancing with the other's familiar”. 16 August 2011. ; “...just intuitive...”.17 august 2011. . And also the majority of the essays available at: .
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those of the ‘meta-languages of production’, i.e. languages full of modes, elements and forms of artistic production.
Moving away from the use of terms that imply that a practice of any kind is indeed in need of an ‘explanation’, I therefore stay in the area of writing (which I could not avoid anyway) and very consciously choose for this first public presentation of my research practice the creation of a written thesis, instead of proposing alternative forms for my final text submission as other projects have often done. It is in this way that I wish to explore what an ‘arts-practitioner theory of knowledge’ can be and how it can be created in writing terms. By doing so, I do not think that I ‘diminish, restrict or impede’ the artistic processes of my research but on the contrary I expand them on the space of these pages through writing processes that I consider to be an equally practical part of my work; processes that create new objects within the frame of this research.
The writings found here then can be viewed more as an ‘experience of negotiation, rather than explication’, as Andrew Quick has suggested;8 more as a space of dialogue between my distinct practices rather than an ‘exegesis’. By suggesting such ‘writing-asresearch’ model of work as a methodological possibility for practice-as-research, this work recognizes writing as a clear mode of practice, a performance in its own right; as a writing practice able to offer an effective link between theoretical and stage practices, between the research and its object. Through such practice I construct here a written dramaturgy to generate short (research) stories drawing on other short stories, which appeared on stage within the frame of my artistic practice. In this way I aim to conduct what Barrett has called the ‘staging of research’, namely a re-versioning of the studio
8
Quick, Andrew. Cited in Freeman, Blood, Sweat and Theory, p. ix.
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process as a means of locating the work within the fields of practice and theory.9 Goddard refers also to a similar notion of ‘staging of research’ when he argues that the final submission of a research project can provide, in parallel with the rest of the creative work of the project, another arena of creative practice, and that both can significantly contribute to knowledge in the field through the opening of a third creative space, wherein they interchange and integrate in order to generate a combined and reflexive research praxis.10 The final submission of a research work then should, according to him, look at the overall research process as a creative, systematic narrative. His proposal thus is for a final submission that functions as a creative and reflexive research practice at the same time; one that aims not only to attempt an analysis or critical interpretation of the research work but also to continue the practice instead of just summing it up; and for that reason it should develop its own narrative by utilizing a reflexive methodology.
Goddard uses such arguments to align himself with those who question the role of the written text as the compulsory final submission in practice-as-research. Focusing mainly on the areas of visual and media arts, he argues that what makes them so distinctive are exactly the forms they create to conduct their inquiries beyond the sphere of written discourse. Nevertheless, he offers a very apt description of the way that the final submission of a research practice could work as another arena of creative practice instead of simply a justification, explanation or summation of it. Starting from his ideas then, I would like to question his thought that the ‘sphere of written discourse’ constitutes a somewhat less distinctive form for a research practice and to suggest that practices staying within that sphere, as mine is, can be as distinctive and important in
9
Barrett, “The Exegesis As Meme”, p.186. Goddard, “A Correspondence Between Practices”, p.113.
10
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their contributions as other, less writing-based submissions. It is in these terms then that I wish to follow Goddard’s suggestion and create a narrative of my research practice by utilizing a reflexive methodology, i.e. by using reflections of methods that came out of my studio-based work to produce my research writings.
But, weirdly enough, it is exactly on one such largely writing-based ground – which constitutes a highly familiar space within critical discourses, as has been extendedly discussed above – that I am likely to face the strongest objections, maybe even more intensively than in the case of other, less writing-based submissions. As Lelia Green argues, while creative work has been accepted as part of the research quantum and creative writing is generally regarded as one such creative work, it has been less easy to establish consensus on its status as a higher education research output.11 It is for this reason, as she says, that many commentators insist on the existence of the ‘exegesis’ in the creative and performing arts research degree, in order to make acceptable the notion of practice-as-research. But the methodology of practice-as-research, she continues, is the carrying out of the work of creativity, i.e. the making of the art as part of a response to a research question. The issue of its methodological integrity though, as she calls it, which has to do with questions, distinctions and acceptance of practice-led methodologies, constitutes an important concern, especially regarding the writing modes of such research; a concern that mainly refers to the integrity of a research outcome based on alternative writing suggestions other than conventional ones. However, the rules, aesthetics and methods of creative writing are in position, according to Green, to lead a shift in such understandings and to determine an appropriate documentation model that complements (rather than detracts from) the research
11
Green, Lelia. “Creative Writing As Practice-Led Research”. Australian Journal of Communication, 33:2-3 (2006): 175-188.
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practice. And although Green refers specifically here to the research area of creative writing, she brings forward important issues regarding the written forms that a research practice can take in general.
Gregory L. Ulmer refers exactly to this issue too. He talks about established modes of academic writing as practices that ‘tend to be positioned on the side of the already known rather than on the side of wanting to find out […] and hence discourage learning to learn’.12 He proposes the work of the avant-garde artists as a model able to produce an alternative use of theory as research. Instead of considering avant-garde work only as an object of study, as is usually the case according to him, Ulmer aims to use it in his Heuretics in order to generate alternative academic writing processes ‘without relinquishing the presently established applications of theory in our disciplines’ but adding to their critical and interpretive practices a generative productivity, as he notes. Ulmer roots his suggestion in the idea that artists – especially the work of avant-garde artists that he discusses – can demonstrate the consequences of the theories for the arts by practicing arts themselves, generating models of prototypes that function critically as well as aesthetically. In this way instead of analyzing existing art they compose alternatives to it. Considering such perspectives to be extremely useful for the academy, Ulmer aims to construct in his Heuretics a similar model of work characterized by an assimilation of theory into the humanities through an artistic experiment that aims to ‘reproduce historical inventions (to learn about the vanguard or any other rhetoric/poetics) from the inside, through the experience of making works in those styles but also to invent new poetics’.13 Heuretics thus, Ulmer concludes, aims to contribute to a writing concern that involves not only analysis and comparative
12
Ulmer, Gregory L. Heuretics -The Logic of Invention, Baltimore and London: The Johns University Press, 1994, p.xii. 13 Ulmer, Heuretics -The Logic of Invention, p.xiii.
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scholarship but also a move towards a poetics that will lead to the production of new types of written work.
Marcel O’Gorman discusses a similar notion of poetics when he argues that the relationship between scholarly, academic language and such poetics, or what he calls ‘the remainder’ of language, is that of master and slave.14 O’Gorman borrows JeanJacques Lecercle’s term of ‘the remainder’ of language to refer to poetics related to the use of puns, anagrams, false etymologies, macaronics and metaphors, all repressed elements within the area of academic or scholarly language, as he notes. All these linguistic characteristics though, the monstrous ‘other’ of conventional academic discourse, as he calls them, not only should not be repressed according to O’Gorman but should be used as a means of the revolutionary potential of critical language. As he argues:
If the remainder is the hidden or repressed, monstrous ‘other’ of the conventional academic discourse, then those who seek to change that conventional discourse might engage in a science of anagnorisis; that is, a science of invention and knowledge-production that depends on a face-to-face encounter with the monster.15
The aim of his book then becomes to let these monsters out of the dungeon, if only for a moment, as he says, and follow their game in order to explore the ways that writing becomes scholarship not only by examining the practices and structures of the academic apparatus but also by imagining a new method of scholarly writing.
14
O’Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit -Digital media, critical theory, and the humanities, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 15 O’Gorman, E-Crit -Digital media, critical theory, and the humanities, p.4.
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Long before writers like Ulmer and O’Gorman though, Barthes expressed similar ideas and demands in relation to academic writing. As he notes, the work of research must ‘be from its inception the object of a strong demand, formulated outside the institution – a demand which can only be the demand for writing’.16 Staying as well within the sphere of writing, Barthes argues that the researcher should work towards the destruction of the separation between scientific discourse (discourse of the Law) and the discourse of the desire for writing, and to perceive the research task entirely within this latter desire; a desire that is not impelled solely by the necessity to report some research results so that she passes an examination but by a strong demand to write, to thus talk about her research work and interests through the practice of writing, through the use of written words. At the same time, Barthes suggests that institutions should dispose of a fiction that maintains the idea that research is reported but not written and that once the researcher has communicated her ‘results’, everything is solved. According to this fiction, as he notes, the formulation of the research text, i.e. the modes and forms according to which this text is written, is considered to be nothing more than ‘a vague final operation, rapidly performed according to a few techniques of “expression” learned in secondary school and whose only constraint is submission to the code of genre (“clarity”, suppression of images, respect for the laws of argument)’.17 The disposal of such fiction and the deeper attention to the research text’s formulation seem for Barthes to be even more urgent when it comes to writing for the disciplines of ‘the Letters’, as he calls them. Because it is exactly then, as he says, that one is faced with a very important dilemma: either to speak according to the conventional code, as a scholar ‘who […] believes himself exterior to the object of his study’, or else ‘to enter the play of the signifier, the infinity of the speech-act, in short to “write” […] to cast the
16 17
Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language, p.70 (emphasis given in the original). Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.70.
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subject across the blank page, not to “express” it (nothing to do with “subjectivity”) but to disperse it: to overflow the regular discourse of research’.18
The choice that the researcher makea is of extreme importance, according to Barthes. More particularly, he argues that it is the latter path described that can be seen not only as a possible but also as a necessary ‘methodological field’ for the research of the ‘Letters’; a method that manages to expand conventional limits within a research work to effectively ‘link its object to its discourse and to dispossess our knowledge by the light it casts on objects not so much unknown as unexpected’. Such types of research writing, Barthes’s concludes, although it may contest the generally accepted scholar’s discourse, ‘in no way does away with the rules of scientific work’.19
My proposed overview of critical writings concerned with the problems, possibilities and demands involved in writing methods and processes of research practices like this one, frames very accurately the area within which my writing will evolve. Drawing on such suggestions, the work you now have in your hands constitutes a staging of my research, one of its creative practices, which performs in the space of these pages. In this work theoretical, critical and stage encounters of my four-year research practice interchange and integrate in order to generate a combined and reflexive praxis as a documentation and re-enactment of my research process; a praxis that complements and does not detract from my other practices. I thus conduct a ‘performative research’ through these writings, which I consider to be a practice moved by similar imperatives to my stage practices. This practice is interested both in the analysis of other artists’ and my own creative processes but also in the creation of a poetics that becomes and
18 19
Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.71. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.71.
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expands these processes at the same time. For this reason, it lets the ‘monstrous other’ of the conventional academic discourse free here to explore modes and structures of the theatrical apparatus in order to imagine a new method of scholarly writing. More particularly, it draws on structural and methodological processes that emerged within the frame of my stage projects so that it produces research writings, and creates a text that not only expresses the research but becomes the research itself, by staging a reversioning of my studio-based processes as a means of locating the work within the fields of practice and theory. These Short (Research) Stories thus follow dramaturgical methods and structures of two of my live works, 50’00’’- Short Stories and Short stories, to generate their writings. This transferring of studio-based working methods to the practice of research writing constitutes my proposal for the creation of this project’s third object. In this way I attempt to bring critical and stage materials together and create an effective dialogue between their theoretical and artistic modes of thinking and creating, more as a continuation than a summation or explanation of my practice.
Both 50’’00’’- Short Stories and Short Stories have been the result of my collaboration with the Athens-based company Construction works of which I am also the artistic director. The first piece was presented at the Devised Theatre Festival of the Theatre of Neos Kosmos in Athens, Greece in May 2009. After being awarded at that festival, it was presented again in the same theatre from October 2009-January 2010. The second project has been created during the period of June-September 2009 in Athens as a threemonth collaboration between founding members of Construction works and artists working in the areas of theatre, cinema and writing. It was presented in the Theatre of Neos Kosmos in September 2009 and the texts that were produced within its frame were published in a book dedicated to the project’s rational and structure. Short Stories was
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supported by the Greek General Secretariat for Youth and the European Union as part of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation initiative.
A detailed discussion about the creative processes of all the stage projects that took place within the frame of my research practice can be found in the (research) stories that are about to follow. What is important to note at this point, especially for the two abovementioned works in particular, is that they were largely aimed towards the creation of a fragmented text-based narrative for the stage. Within these terms, both projects explored tools of performative writing, fragmented poetics, and experimental modes of writing and telling in theatre. Entering the studio space where we rehearsed for them, one would mainly see papers, everywhere and in all sizes. From tiny ones with just a word or a phrase written on them, to A4s with all kinds of stories on them, to blank A4s waiting for a story to come and lie on them. During the creative process for the production of both works, the performers were not given specific instructions regarding the topics or forms that their stories could have. Our work was mainly focused on constructing stories for the stage drawing on all kinds of phrases and short fragments of language that we collected, which we then used as links to bigger stories that we wrote, inspired by those fragments. Or you can imagine it like this: as if someone had given us the contents page from a book of short stories and we had the task of creating the stories contained in that book.
One more time here then I draw on different kinds of short fragments of language, phrases I noted here and there or words I copied from other texts or heard in various contexts and which I found inspiring or relevant or helpful in different ways for my research. I use these phrases as initial points of departure to unfold my stories. Their
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relation to the stories written here is an open and loose one: they are either used as titles or parts of the stories or they are absent in them but have inspired their words. Apart from the research words generated in this way though, a vital part of this text is also the use of traces of documentation gathered within the overall research practice. These include:
a. Text-based stage materials: I refer here to documents in the form of performance texts presented on stage, which were created either within studio-based improvisational and devising processes or on stage in different occasions as part of my research work. The use of this font indicates them in the text.
b. Video recordings and still images taken from my live works: When referring particularly to the use of such visual materials within the research process, O’Gorman argues that these should be considered as part of the ‘remainder’ mentioned above and thus be placed vis-a-vis traditional scholarship too. It is a remainder, as he says, in the sense that it constitutes a neglected element of conventional academic discourse used simply as material to be ‘added’ to an essay or a critical argument and not inherent in the processes of writing, reading, and learning. Such materials though, O’Gorman suggests, are extremely productive as generative instruments, capable of generating divergent cognitive responses from the viewer.20 Traces of documentation are being used here in a similar way, i.e. as materials inherent in the process of writing able to generate cognitive responses. They don’t aim to stand in the place of and re-present what was done and presented earlier and elsewhere, or to demonstrate and confirm a particular research outcome or process. This work does not attempt to fully represent
20
O’Gorman, E-Crit Digital media, critical theory, and the humanities, 2006.
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any previous work. It is for this reason that you will not encounter these visual materials in their original context here. Such effort towards a realistic depiction of the initial projects they originate from, or towards as realistic as possible a documentation, or reenactment of that past performative experience, will be avoided here. This is another experience. The image-repertoire included here is seen, as Barthes has proposed, as ‘a detached being’ that aims less to reflect any kind of identity (of a person or a work) and more to become the object of new imagery acts.21 All images found here are thus performing in a new role. This performance is new; it is called Short (Research) Stories. All gathered research materials are now part of a new process that has worked towards the creation of this third object. All of them are re-performing themselves in it. They function here more as performers that took part in those previous shows and carry this experience and memory in them, but are now commissioned to perform in this new show. I use them as materials similar to the way I use the English words I have at my disposal, to write this text. They come in contact and create a dialogue with those words and with each other so that they delve deeper into the research’s inquiries. And I strongly believe, at least as far as this research process is concerned, that it is through this kind of presence, through this performance of themselves and this interaction, that the documentation traces of my stage works can be much more effectively presented, understood, contextualized and evaluated.
Theory and its concepts travel, Meike Bal suggests.22 They take shorter or longer routes among disciplinary, geographical, historical boundaries in order to affect and be affected by subjects and objects encountered on their way. It is only in this way that they are able to become live cultural objects. The journey for theory suggested here, as a
21 22
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989 (first published in French in 1975). Bal, Meike. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
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possibility for practice-as-research, departs from the stage and gropes through its dramaturgical structures to produce its words. On this journey, theoretical concepts travel under the guidance of stage works and proceed in their discourse through an interactive relation with the object they examine. By dismissing their well-known oppositional and binary relationship, theoretical and stage practices explore what they can do together and what can emerge from such interactivity.
So here we are; Into what little by little may start to reveal that practice-as-research aims for and manages to renegotiate distinctions between modes of thinking and stage practices in such a way that, after spending four years in this practice, one performs as she thinks, writes as she performs, reads as she writes. In all cases she acts moved by similar imperatives pushing her to delve deeper into recurrent research questions.
Here we are; a little deeper into a text that now hopefully starts to look more like research-as-practice rather than practice-as-research.
Let us start.
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‘There We Are. What Do You Tell and How Do You Tell It’1
Were it possible for a PhD thesis to have only one sentence written in it, I would paraphrase the opening words found on the website page of the Chicago-based performance group Goat Island to give an accurate description of my research practice. That sentence would then be:
I have discovered a research by making it.2
In his Manifesto for Performative Research Brad Haseman attempts a description of the characteristics of what he calls ‘performative research’.3 Although an extended discussion on the multilayered and contested discourse related to aspects of practice-asresearch projects has already taken place earlier, I would like to take advantage here of one of the very few attempts to create a ‘manifesto’ for this kind of work and of the helpful descriptiveness and concreteness that this can possibly offer as far as the processes involved in such research are concerned, and to make another introduction to my work by drawing on it. In this manifesto Haseman talks about a distinct emerging research paradigm that stands next to the other two more established ones, those of quantitative and qualitative research.4 One of the main characteristics of such research
1
Stein, Gertrude. Narration. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969, p.31. On the opening page of Goat Island’s website, before entering the site one sees the phrase: ‘We have discovered a performance by making it’. Goat Island Performance Group. 21 February 2011. < http://www.goatislandperformance.org/> 3 Haseman, Brad. “A Manifesto for Performative Research” Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 118 (2006): 98-106. 4 The term ‘paradigm’ is used here and will be used again in the following stories in the sense described by Giorgio Agamben in his essay What Is a Paradigm? found in the book published in 2009 entitled The Signature of All Things - On Method (trans. by D'Isanto L. and Attell K., New York: One Books). According to this essay, the ‘paradigm’ serves as a common example that replaces explicit rules in a discipline. As a singular object that stands equally for all others of the same class, it defines the intelligibility of the group of which it is a part and which, at the same time, it constitutes. In other words, the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes. It is in this sense that Foucault talks about paradigms more as ‘discursive practices’ to be gathered into a new intelligible 2
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(which is obviously mostly found in the area of performing arts research), he argues, is the fact that it does not commence so much from a central research question or problem statement, as from an enthusiasm of practice. Whereas researchers working on quantitative or qualitative research base their work on a clear statement of their research problem, aims, objectives and questions, researchers that conduct ‘performative’ research do not necessarily commence theirs with a sense of one such ‘problem’ in mind. On the contrary, they may begin with something that is exciting, possibly unruly or even just emerging and thus be uncertain to them, in order ‘to discover it by making it’, to use Goat Island’s words once more. Within this frame, they construct experiential starting points from which practice follows. And they tend to dive into them; to commence practicing to see what emerges, Haseman concludes.
The talk here is about one such dive. A dive that commenced four years ago and still continues to wander in its desired sea, the area of contemporary dramaturgy, in order to explore it further and deeper. The point of departure for this dive was not some central research question or problem but rather an enthusiasm for the dive itself, as Haseman puts it. Without clear research aims and objectives then, what has taken place in the course of these last four years emerged from a desire to create points from which to dive into my fascination with practices and aesthetics related to dramaturgical processes and structures of specific works of experimental theatre and dance; and at the same time
ensemble, aiming not so much to form rules but rather to establish a new problematic context, new questions, problems and -subsequently- areas of exploration in regard to the discipline in question. It is for this reason that Aristotle in his Prior Analytics, the classical work on the epistemology of the example, as Agamben notes, argues that ‘the paradigm does not function as a part with respect to the whole, nor as a whole with respect to the part, but as a part with respect to the part, if both are under the same but one is better known than the other’ (Agamben:18). By being then analogical rather than inductive or deductive, the paradigm Agamben posits, neutralizes the dichotomy between the general and the particular but also the so much favorite to the western thought operation of thinking in similar dichotomies in order to produce scientific rules.
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from a desire to commence practicing similar dramaturgical processes to see what emerges. More particularly this research practice aimed to approach and analyze the aesthetics, materials and methods which European-based artists, coming from both a theatrical and dance background, use in order to make and present to their audiences works created from 1990 onwards.
One could then say that the research conducted here involves ‘contemporary’ experimental works. The term in this case though is not to be understood in its maybe more commonly used sense, i.e. as a term pointing to up-to-date, innovative, mainly Western-based aesthetics and practices, but rather as a conceptual device that reveals the togetherness implied in ‘synchronous’, the corresponding translation in Greek of the Latin-derived term ‘contemporary’. Although there is an etymological similarity between the two terms (with-time: syn-chronos, con-tempo) the use of the Greek prefix ‘syn-‘, used not so much to indicate ‘with’, as to reveal the notion of ‘together with’, might allow for an opening up of new perspectives in our understanding of the contemporary. Within this idea of togetherness, which also denotes an encounter, what is defined as contemporary suggests the co-existence of two or more synchronous events, which may differ significantly or not, but which in any case happen ‘together with one another’, side by side in a more or less shared time, moving through more or less parallel paths. In this sense, the term – at least as it is understood and used here – does not connect exclusively with an effort for a concrete historical contextualization of innovative Western practices but with a concept-based attempt to approach works that take place ‘together with’ the creations produced within the frame of this research practice. In these terms, the thesis you now have in your hands includes live works and texts that were created and/or presented together with mine in a more literal sense, i.e.
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works chronologically and geographically close to my own, works I could therefore have easier access too. However, it also includes works and texts whose authors are many centuries removed from us, in an attempt, as Agamben has suggested, ‘to be in some way contemporary of these texts’.5
The contemporary for Agamben is the untimely; for him ‘those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands’.6 But it is precisely through this disconnection and anachronism that one is capable of perceiving and grasping one’s own time, as he argues. For the contemporary is not someone who lives in another time, ‘a nostalgic who feels more at home in the Athens of Pericles or in the Paris of Robespierre and the Marquis de Sade than in the city and the time in which he lives’;7 but a person who knows that she irrevocably belongs to and cannot escape from her own time, and at the same time keeps a distance from it so that she manages to see it better. Contemporariness thus for Agamben, constituting a singular relationship with one’s own time that recognizes the interpolation of the present into the inert homogeneity of linear time, puts to work a special connection between different eras, creating a meeting place or an encounter between times and generations. In this sense one is contemporary not only of her century and the ‘now’ but also of its figures in the texts and documents of the past, Agamben posits.
Drawing on such ideas, what is considered as contemporary here is not so much the chronologically close or the ‘radically new’ but all the works – of others and mine – that
5
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, Transl. Kishik, David and Pedatella, Stefan. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009, p.39. 6 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, p.40. 7 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, p.41.
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have shaped the frame of this research practice, positioning themselves around each other within the course of the last four years; or else, it is all the works that I encountered in these last few years and in this sense were synchronous to, ‘together with’ my theoretical, critical and artistic explorations, standing by their side, interacting in a more or less straightforward way with them.8
And although one might expect that a research aiming to explore contemporary artistic works in terms of their dramaturgy – i.e. an area that could be characterized as traditionally theatrical – would be mainly based on works made by theatre artists, the artists found here not only do not belong exclusively to the field of European experimental theatre but in their vast majority are widely known as choreographers. This fact is, I believe, indicative of the connection, interaction and disciplinary similarities between dance and theatre that took place in the last few decades, especially since 1980. Most importantly, this fact reveals the great contribution of dance to processes of dramaturgy and subsequently to processes of drama creation today, in the way that the term is being discussed here.
Adrian Heathfield refers to the transformations of contemporary scene in the last thirty to forty years through the aesthetic agendas of dance-theatre and conceptual dance, which have led to an opening of space for dramaturgical practice and have questioned the foundations and disciplinary boundaries of dance and theatre.9 In a similar way,
8
Suggesting such ‘untimely’ understanding of the contemporary, such an active involvement of the past in it, means of course that some of the research inquiries addressed here, have constituted major and recurring questions in other times too and not an exclusive radical requirement of the present time. Being impossible to include here all views expressed on such issues, and referring only to those which stood closer to this specific research practice and influenced a large amount of researchers since their creation (as is for example the work of Aristotle), does not imply in any way that those similar inquiries have not been expressed again before or after the creation of works presented here, or that they are not to be found in the influential work and theories of many other important artists and scholars. 9 Heathfield, Adrian. “Dramaturgy Without a Dramaturge”. Rethinking Dramaturgy, Errancy and Transformation. Bellisco Manuel, Cifuentes, María José, Ecija, Amparo, eds. Madrid: Centro Párraga, Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo, 2011.
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André Lepecki refers to the dance paradox, as he calls it, of dance receiving the suffix ‘theatre’ to qualify the specific genre of ‘dance-theater’, a paradox that took place particularly since the 1980s. It is in that moment, Lepecki continues, and by entering into the name of dance, that theatre sets aside the problem of drama.10 Although what is argued in these (research) stories is that it is exactly the opposite movement from the one proposed by Lepecki that brought dance and theatre practices closer, what is important in both abovementioned arguments is that they reveal a connection between theatre and dance based on similar stage inquiries. Unlike Lepecki though, I would like to argue that these similar stage interests between artists working in the areas of experimental theatre and dance not only do not denote an exclusion of drama but they are based on common dramatic inquiries. The moment when the suffix ‘theatre’ enters dance is exactly the moment when both realize the nature, notion and practices of drama as something distinct from what had been established up to that that point and they recognize this new understanding of drama as their common ground. From that moment on artists who call themselves or are called by others (scholars or critics) ‘choreographers’ or ‘theatre directors’, are creating works that explore similar dramaturgical questions.
It is for this reason that I have chosen in my research process not to deal with defining and distinguishing specific genres and areas of interest but to focus on particular works from particular theatre and dance artists, whose creative processes align with the inquiries of this research. I do not wish thus to define my ‘area of research’ following well established, solid critical boundaries but to allow it to form itself based on an
10
Lepecki, André. “We’re Not Ready For the Dramaturge: Some notes for dance dramaturgy” Rethinking Dramaturgy, Errancy and Transformation. Bellisco Manuel, Cifuentes, María José, Ecija, Amparo, eds. Madrid: Centro Párraga, Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo, 2011.
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imperative to come to dialogue with specific works that deal with certain dramatic questions and attempt to invent possibilities for dramaturgy both in the area of theatre and dance today. It is within this frame that I will discuss here works belonging to artists and companies such as Jérôme Bel, Forced Entertainment, Ivana Müller and Xavier Le Roy.
Apart from the creation of a critical discourse drawing on these works, a central part of this research practice has been, of course, the creation and critical analysis of my own stage works, which were presented publicly in different occasions. From late 2008 onwards six research projects have been created for the stage, either as solo or collaborative works, aiming to examine and practice different dramaturgical aspects to ‘see what emerges’. These projects are: Reply to all (October-December 2008), 50’00’’Short Stories (January 2009-May 2009), Short Stories (June 2009-September 2009), A Single Voice - 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ (October-November 2009), The Words Between Us (April 2010) and Lookatmenowandhereiam (April 2012).
So here I am after four years of research practice. Stage works have been improvised, structured, performed, photographed, recorded; books have been read; critical texts have been written on theory and on performance works of other artists and mine. All these materials, words – stage words, critical words, theoretical words, oral words – performances, photographs, video recordings, constitute a part of this research practice. But how does one tell of them? How does one speak of them and what does one do with them? Which are the working methods that the researcher of a practice-as-research project has at her disposal in order not only to conduct the theoretical, critical and stage
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practices of her work but, most of all, to link them together and build a creative dialogue between her diverse material outcomes?
The second main characteristic of performative research, according to Haseman, has to do with the fact that researchers working on such projects have little interest in trying to translate the findings and understandings of their practice either into numbers or words such as those preferred by the other two research paradigms (the qualitative and quantitative research), which are most commonly met in disciplines other than the arts. The way performative research chooses to express its findings instead has more to do with J.L. Austin’s notion of performativity and the use of utterances that perform an action instead of describing or explaining it. Within these terms, practice-led researchers prefer the use of alternative ways to present their research practice, which may also include various forms of still and moving images, forms of music and sound or forms of live action and digital code. All these data though can also be seen as a ‘text’ understood in the original meaning of the word discussed by Eugenio Barba, i.e. as a weaving together.11 This kind of text works performatively in the sense that it not only expresses the research but it becomes the research itself. Performative research thus, Haseman concludes, represents something larger than a closer relation to performance work only. It represents a move which holds that practice is the principal research activity rather than only the practice of performance.
Here I am then standing among my materials as a worker that spectates and discovers her work as she makes it. My practice as this worker is not limited to the practice of the performances I have created for the stage though. It is more a practice that can be
11
Barba, “Dramaturgy: Actions at Work”, p.68.
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understood as the principal activity of all my research and thus includes my distinct writing practices (writings on theory and other people’s artistic creations; writings created for or of my own live works) as well as stage practices and documentation practices (video recordings and photographs) that took place within the frame of this research. The creation of the text you are reading here, including parts of all abovementioned practices, constitutes also one of my practical works.
But which is this here I keep referring to? What is this space I now occupy with these materials? How can I work in this space? And what do I want to do in it? Could this be another kind of studio? A place aiming to host the worker and the work offering them time and space to discover each other further? I like to think of it that way: the four years I spent occupying different spaces wherein to create, research and spectate; the four years I spent in studios, theatre venues, libraries, my desk, the university; these four years were a rehearsal process. A process full of inquiries and questions, full of theoretical, writing and stage practices. And what is taking place in the space of these pages is the performance of the findings of that rehearsal process, wherein they perform together as a group for the first time. Such thinking of this space as a performance space though, does not imply any intention to propose the work presented here as a ‘final’ or ‘completed’ product. Its worker is deeply aware of the fact that neither this text nor this research practice could ever ‘finish’ at the arbitrary ending point of a PhD program or at any other predetermined and specific point, in the sense that all research questions explored here constitute continuous and limitless imperatives of my artistic and theoretical practices. What is presented to you is a work that attempts to reveal in a clear way the research process that has, up to this point, set these imperatives in motion and delved deeper into them in order to proceed with its inquiries. What constitutes the
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essential difference between the previous rehearsal space and this one then is not the fact that that was a work-in-progress whereas this is the end product. What constitutes the essential difference between that rehearsal space and this one is you; the fact that that rehearsal space is now opening its door and invites you in it. The diverse material outcomes of my continuous research-in-progress are gathered and structured here for their first public presentation as a whole performance to you, their audience, who is already wandering in it.
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Some Thoughts on Dramaturgy
Marianne van Kerkhoven, one of the central figures in the area of dramaturgy in Europe today, opens the conference on European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century that took place in Frankfurt am Main in September 2007, by confessing that after all those years of working on dramaturgy, she still does not know properly what dramaturgy is – let alone European dramaturgy.1 When talking in particular about the figure of the dramaturge, Lepecki refers to his first ‘nameless collaborations’, as he calls them, between certain choreographers and himself, which took place in the late 1980s-early 1990s.2 These were situations, as he notes, where although none of the two sides knew exactly what they were doing when working together, they perceived this collaboration as necessary; a not knowing that was ‘resolved and dissolved by a practice of doing’.3 According to Lepecki whatever tension may follow the presence of the dramaturge in the rehearsal space – a tension usually accompanied with questions such as: what is her role in the creative process alongside the choreographic and compositional processes of creation that are assigned to the choreographer, director and/or the performers? How can she prepare her contributions to the work? What exactly is her position or function? What exactly is being surveyed, looked for, analyzed, or retained by her activity? Etcetera – it has to do with a tension between knowing and owning in a work. How can those who are supposed to hold knowledge over the work being created (the author, the choreographer, the director, the performers, etcetera), those who ‘know’ what the work needs, those who in this sense ‘own’ the work, relate to the dramaturge who is also
1
Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century” Performance Research, 14.3 (2009): 7-11. A figure probably not so familiar in the UK – although companies such as Loan Twin and others have a continuous collaboration with a dramaturge, whereas the ‘dramaturg’s network’ already celebrates its 10th anniversary (dramaturg’s network, 26 September 2011 ) – but much more known in the broader European context within which this research practice is being placed. 3 Lepecki, “We’re Not Ready For the Dramaturge: Some notes for dance dramaturgy”, p.187. 2
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supposed to come in the process to bring a certain kind of knowledge to and about the piece that is yet to come? What is usually expected then, Lepecki notes, is that when the former ‘know’ what the piece is about, they can tell it to a dramaturge, who will then have something to tell them in her turn about what they told her. And then she can help. In this way, they will all know. Once we have found a way to overcome and dissolve such tensions and anxieties though, what is revealed, Lepecki posits, is dramaturgy’s proposal about a work that has itself its own force. In this sense, the dramaturge does not work for or with the other collaborators, but rather she, as well as everybody else, works for and with the specific piece to come, from this position of not knowing: what the piece is about, what the dramaturge exactly is or does etcetera.
It is indeed true that when it comes to dramaturgy the possible replies to the question of ‘what is this?’ or ‘what kind of work does it entail?’ seem to be as many as the multiple and diverse dramaturgical practices that take place within the area of theatre and dance. No wonder, then, that it becomes difficult to offer a concrete and clear answer when the time comes for the question: ‘What do you mean by dramaturgy? What is dramaturgy?’ and then ‘Isn’t that a little too broad?’. Such questions have been particularly popular within the last four years of my research on dramaturgy, appearing immediately almost every time I announced my main research interest. My reply to such questions would then be: ‘Yes, dramaturgy is indeed something that can be too broad or too difficult to define or describe’. As Una Bauer writes, dramaturgy seems to constitute an area that possibly does not fit within the categories of classification of other jobs; an area that is so appealing exactly because it resists such a disciplinary role; and subsequently an area that reveals a rupture in our thinking about classification and categorization in general. So why should we want to delineate its role instead of, as Bauer notes quoting Marx,
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considering dramaturgy as our opportunity to ‘do one thing to-day and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, […] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic’?4
Recognizing and aligning with such thoughts does not mean though that I could or I wish to neglect objections that may be raised to them. Bojana Cvejic argues that ‘the temptation of unfolding the many dramaturgies hides the danger of arbitrary relativization – everything and nothing is or can be (considered) dramaturgy – and one loses a position to defend’.5 Jeroen Peeters also expresses the thought that ‘it is difficult and somewhat problematic to speak about dramaturgy at large’.6 Instead of the attempt to ‘unfold the many dramaturgies’ then, as Cvejic puts it, Peeters suggests a discourse based on specific practices and experiences of dramaturgy in order to delve deeper into contemporary dramaturgical practices. Such a suggestion, that wishes to start from and base its dramaturgical analysis on concrete frames, conditions and practices, seems to follow a line of thought similar to that expressed by Gilles Deleuze in his Method of Dramatization, wherein he argues that it is not certain that the question ‘what is this?’ is a good question for discovering the essence of something. It may be, as he says, that questions such as ‘who?’, ‘how much?’, ‘how?’, ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ are better and can determine something more important.7
Instead of feeling uncomfortable with not having a concrete reply to the question of what exactly is this that I am researching, I attempt too to explore contemporary dramaturgy through the ‘who, where, when and how’, as these have been approached by
4
Bauer, Una. “Networked Publics and Dramaturgy”. Maska -Practical Dramaturgies. Summer 2010, p.65. Cvejic, Bojana. “The Ignorant Dramaturg”. Maska -Practical Dramaturgies. Summer 2010, p.41. 6 Peeters, Jeroen. “Heterogeneous Dramaturgies”. Maska -Practical Dramaturgies. Summer 2010, p.17. 7 Deleuze, Gilles. “The Method of Dramatization”. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Deleuze, Gilles. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, p.94. 5
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certain artists and myself within the course of my research practice. By doing so, I believe that not only do I not ‘lose a position to defend’ but, on the contrary, I create that position. It is for this reason that, as said earlier, I don’t feel the need or urge to define my ‘area of research’ following well established, solid critical boundaries but want to allow it to form itself based on the imperative to come to dialogue with specific works that deal with certain dramatic questions and invent possibilities for dramaturgy in the areas of experimental theatre and dance. An approach different from this one would constitute an almost impossible task anyway. As Hans-Thies Lehmann observes:
[…] today a Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who could develop ‘the’ dramaturgy of a postdramatic theatre, is unthinkable. […] Recommendations, let alone prescriptions, are no longer possible, merely partial perspectives and stuttering answers that remain ‘works in progress’8
What becomes obvious in Lehmann’s statement is that contemporary dramaturgical processes cannot be included in a single ‘guide’ that will provide us with ready-made recipes for the creation of a certain kind of works, or be organized around fixed analyses and interpretations. What is presented on stage within their frame then should be seen more as ‘a consequence of the process’, as Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt argue, which directly reflects the dialogue between people involved, rather than a closed and fixed entity or sample of a norm.9 We are thus talking about a dramaturgy of process in works that are oriented towards the construction of possibilities for the stage and not the establishment of clearly definable and repeatable schemas. The diverse
8
Lehmann, Hans Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. UK, USA and Canada: Routledge 2006, p25 (originally in German in 1999). Dramaturgy, more as a critical term and less as a theatrical process, has been marked by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy in the 18th century (see: Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburg Dramaturgy. Trans. Zimmern, Helen. USA: Dover Publications Inc, 1962). 9 Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, p.170.
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variability of the structures and aesthetics of these stage possibilities and their distinct relation to the conventional seem to almost demand that their researcher recognize their singularity and face them more as paradigms, instead of striving to recognize in them solid rules, results and methodologies. Lepecki’s understanding of contemporary dramaturgy as a processes aiming exactly to assist the work to discover that it itself has its own performative desires, wishes and commands, its own force, perfectly aligns with these thoughts.10
It is such works, I would argue, that constitute the reply of experimental theatre and dance to the thought, expressed by Lehmann and many other theorists, that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries theatre sees a crisis in the dramatic form. The multiple and diverse ways in which the dramaturgical structures of these works produce and understand ‘reality’; the ways they interrogate and define their relationship with representation, with modes of telling, with notions of presence, with the meaning, content and forms of story-telling and stories themselves, all of which constitute constant theatrical inquiries, demand that we talk more about distinct experimental dramatic forms rather than a crisis of dramatic modes and structures.
So… ‘what more about dramaturgy?’11
Dramaturgy, according to Van Kerkhoven, is learning to handle complexity; feeding the ongoing conversation on the work; taking care of the reflexive potential as well as of the poetic force of the creation; building bridges. It is the readiness to dive into the work, and to withdraw from it again and again, inside, outside. Dramaturgy then, as Van
10 11
Lepecki, “We’re Not Ready For the Dramaturge: Some notes for dance dramaturgy”, p.193. Van Kerkhoven, “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century”, p.11.
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Kerkhoven concludes, is above all this constant movement. But whose movement is this? Definitely such movement does not concern solely the dramaturge, which may or may not be present in a work. It seems to constitute a common ground in contemporary discourse on dramaturgy, what Myriam Van Imschoot describes as a shift from the dramaturge to the ‘dramaturgical’.12 This depersonalization of the dramaturgical function according to which dramaturgy is considered more as a characteristic of a performance rather than a process identified exclusively with the ‘dramaturgical person’ – i.e. the figure of the dramaturge – renders such function a ‘continuing dialogue’ for the production of the work as a shared responsibility of all collaborators involved in it.13 It is for this reason that what we need today, as Van Imschoot argues, is not so much more dramaturges but ‘more dramaturgical contexts in which artists, scholars, scientists, light designers, musicians etcetera can have an ongoing dialogue about the work, the concepts they use, the ideas they are exploring, without the mediating filter of “the” dramaturg’.14 In this sense, contemporary European dramaturgy could be aptly described through the words of Janez Janša as: ‘a fluid, dynamic and “dispersed activity” in the working process – immaterial work par excellence’.15
In contrast to previous understandings of dramaturgy then, that defined it as the creation of certain compositional rules, which aimed to uphold the tension or excitement of the spectators in an attempt to direct their attention towards a climax in the middle or end of the piece that would categorize performance-time into ‘more important’ and ‘less important’ segments and would carefully prevent spectators from either reaching a state of boredom or becoming overwhelmed, contemporary dramaturgical functions work
12
Van Imschoot, Myriam. “Anxious Dramaturgy”. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 13.2 (2003):57-68. 13 Van Imschoot, “Anxious Dramaturgy”, p.63. 14 Van Imschoot, “Anxious Dramaturgy”, p.63. 15 Janša, Janez. “From Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical”. Maska -Practical Dramaturgies. Summer 2010, p.57.
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towards the opposite direction.16 They negate the aforementioned classical structures and are more than eager to create and expose gaps, breaks, contradictions, frictions, and holes in the empire of common knowledge shifting the focus from those carefully orchestrated events onto the vulnerability and fragility of bodies – bodies full of history, full of memory, full of misunderstandings, as Ruhsam concludes. Heathfield refers also to cases that view dramaturgy as a process of shaping, ordering, cohering and making sense. And he points out once more that it is exactly the necessity of such cohesions of sense and sedimentation of meaning in a work, that contemporary dramaturgical functions question. Instead then for the role of dramaturgy to be conceived as being responsible for making sense, either for the makers of the work or for the audience, it ‘might be better conceived as a form of responsibility towards (and response to) that which is immanent in a given performance, its phenomena and forms of representation’ Heathfield suggests.17
Dramaturgy as the process of the composition of a work and the means used for it but also as the discussion of that composition, i.e. as a process that includes both an engagement with the actual practical process of creating the work and with the reflective analysis that accompanies such a process, as Turner and Behrndt define it;18 Dramaturgy as the twilight zone between art and science that is ‘concerned with the conversion of feeling into knowledge and vice versa’;19 Dramaturgy as an artistic and theoretical practice at the same time wherein both are experienced as complementary references: such dramaturgy can be seen as a space of movement. A movement distributed across the various performing agents in the room; across the various
16
Ruhsam, Martina. “Dramaturgy Of and As Collaboration” Maska -Practical Dramaturgies. Summer 2010, p.29. Heathfield, “Dramaturgy Without a Dramaturge”, p.112. 18 Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, p.3. 19 Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. “Looking Without Pencil In the Hand” Theaterschrift No5-6 On Dramaturgy, Brussels Kaaitheater, 1994, p.142. 17
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theoretical, critical and artistic thinking and operating modes; across the diverse disciplines and cultural sites of theatre and dance, without belonging to any of them. ‘Wherever there is a performance taking shape there are a set of dramaturgical questions being asked and dramaturgical principles being tested’, Heathfield aptly observes.20
But if contemporary dramaturgy constitutes indeed this constant movement among such multiple diversities, an otherwise intangible movement, if it is indeed the paradigmatic and always unique and newly created process that was described above, and should be approached as such through specific artistic propositions and forms, what could be a possible entry point to its processes? From which point could one enter dramaturgy in order to be able to grasp an insightful pulse of its movement, even momentarily? I would argue that such palpable and always shifting movement needs the construction of an at least temporary concrete point of view, so that it can be grasped. It thus needs the construction of a temporary ‘theory’ in the original sense of the word, coming from the Greek noun θέα (thea=view) and the verb οράν (oran=to view/see), which reveals theory to be the creation of certain points of view, places from which to look at things.21 A ‘theory’, a viewing point then, that could work as a temporarily constructed ‘what if’ to approach for a while the ever changing movement of contemporary dramaturgy; a ‘what if’ that would then immediately dissolve again to let this movement continue its
20
Heathfield, “Dramaturgy Without a Dramaturge”, p.113. It is often the case that my thinking practices draw on and are inspired by the etymological origin of words. This has not so much to do with the ‘prejudice’, as Steven Connor calls it (Steven Connor, “Writing the Lives of Words”, 26 September 2011 ), that there can be true and false names or that names were once more tightly locked on to their meanings than now, and that etymology can help us to tune words to things because it is the origin that defines essence. Despite the fact that etymology in this sense has become the receiver of a severe critique on behalf of twentieth-century linguists though, the etymological origin of words, as Connor argues, has maintained continuous popular fascination and prestige in certain influential modes of argument within critical and cultural studies. I would argue that this fact has largely to do with the possibilities for thought that are opened through the activity of re-searching into the (hi)stories of words and the different nuances hidden in their meanings as part of their genetic code of which we (as speakers of these words) are the carriers. Etymology or wordhistories thus are not used in my work as the singular core truth of words but as this dynamic field of possibility that they can constitute. Etymology then is in no case proposed here as an indisputable source but it is surely used as inspirational food for thought, especially in cases where it proves able to generate fruitful ideas and concepts for my work. 21
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diverse, restless formations. What if this viewing point then, this ‘theory’ for approaching contemporary dramaturgical functions, can be achieved, if only for the sake of these (research) stories, through another kind of thoughts on dramaturgy? What if it can be achieved through ‘some thoughts on drama-turgy’?
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Some Thoughts on Drama-turgy
Bojana Kunst observes that the dramaturge enters contemporary dance simultaneously with the changes in European dance that have been taking place from the 1980s onwards.1 This is the time that, as Lepecki described earlier, theatre also entered as a suffix to dance in order to qualify the specific genre of ‘dance-theater’ and in this way, according to Lepecki, to set aside the problem of drama. Is this – the simultaneous entrance of theatre and the dramaturge in contemporary dance – just a coincidence? Ruhsam notes that dramaturgy today does not refer to any dramatic text or action even though the word ‘dramaturgy’ still suggests a connection with drama.2 When the dramaturge Susanne Traub refers particularly to dramaturgy in contemporary dance, she talks about what she characterizes as ‘the quite amazing’ fact of dramaturgy becoming a feature of artistic productions and practices that actually have nothing to do with drama itself. A fact that, as she says, raises the question as to why a term that has long since discarded its subject still lives on.3
I would like to start unfolding my thoughts on the relation of dance and theatre to drama and dramaturgy and on the way that drama can be used for an alternative approach to experimental stage practices, from some questions that arise from the abovementioned notes. Why does the term ‘drama-turgy’, a term closely connected with drama, still live on and constitute a main feature of experimental artistic productions? Why does dramaturgy enter the area of dance simultaneously with the entrance of theatre as a suffix to it? And, maybe most importantly, why is it easier to neglect those questions
1
Kunst, Bojana. “The Economy of Proximity”. Performance Research, 14.3 (2009): 81-88. Ruhsam, “Dramaturgy Of and As Collaboration”, p.31, my emphasis. 3 Traub, Susanne. “Dance Dramaturgy -a Critical and Discursive Practice”. 6 July 2011. (my emphasis). 2
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and facts and assume that dramaturgical processes do not refer to any dramatic action and have nothing to do with drama although drama is still present in drama-turgy? Or why is it easier to assume that, by entering the area of dance, theatre sets aside the problem of drama although this drama seems so closely connected to the theatrical process that, as soon as this entrance is taking place, the drama-turge enters the creative processes of dance as well? Wouldn’t it make more sense if we would instead look for the reason why drama-turgy – and the drama that it carries in it – not only is still present but moreover expands itself in areas other than the theatre, as a main part of their creative processes? What does this fact reveal for drama and drama-turgy today? I would like to argue, unlike Ruhsam and Traub, that drama-turgy still suggests a connection with drama because it still works towards the creation of dramatic actions. In a similar way, the dramaturge enters contemporary dance when the suffix ‘theatre’ enters it because, unlike Lepecki’s argument, it is then that the creation of drama is recognized as a common fundamental aim of theatre and dance.
In the prologue of Postdramatic Theatre Lehmann declares that ‘the theatre of dramas’ that was identified with the European theatre for centuries seems to have come to an end.4 The main characteristics of this theatre (its apparent subordination to the primacy of the written drama; its attempt to illustrate this drama on stage; its formations of an illusion of a fictive cosmos; its dependence on the categories of imitation and action/plot) have subsequently, according to Lehmann, disappeared too in ‘postdramatic’ theatre. What I would like to create here is an alternative perspective on drama and its drama-turgy, according to which the theatre of dramas not only has not come to an end in the case of experimental stage practices but vividly continues to
4
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 2006.
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produce, through its dramaturgical processes, works that deal with always-present elements of the dramatic process. Some main characteristics of that specific dramatic theatre then, the one ‘identified with the European theatre for centuries’ as Lehmann describes it, may indeed have come to an end today, especially in particular areas of theatre and dance, such as those examined here.5 This does not mean though that drama does not continue to unfold its practices, even if in a different way, within the space of these areas too, as it will be further discussed below.
Of course, the ‘drama’ that Lehmann refers to as something that seems to have come to an end, as well as the ‘drama’ that Lepecki talks about, when he says that, by entering dance as a suffix, theatre sets aside the problem of ‘drama’, constitutes a ‘drama’ understood mostly in the sense that the term has dominated current critical discourse. According to this understanding, ‘drama’ is more or less identified with the written play or, as Lepecki notes, it is identified with the backbone of a structuring and anterior narrative to which the work will aim, or else with a concrete technique or a plot or a text that is seen as a specific point of departure instead of the field of heterogeneity that both experimental theatre and dance works wish to expose.6 It is this definition of drama that I wish to question and reconsider here in order to possibly open up space for an understanding of the term that could be used as a helpful tool for the analysis of experimental theatre and dance practices.
5
For one should not also neglect the fact that the ‘European theatre of dramas’ exactly as Lehmann describes it, has not come to an end in a much more literal sense too, since it continues to create theatre works today in a very similar way to that described. Lehmann here of course refers to, observes and analyzes newer developments in the European theatrical scene, as these (research) stories also aim to do. One should always bear in mind though that these developments, strong and distinct though they are, constitute only one part of stage practices that continue to work both towards more traditional, conventional dramatic directions as well as towards more experimental ones. 6 Lepecki, “We’re Not Ready For the Dramaturge: Some notes for dance dramaturgy”, pp.188-189.
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But before doing that, it might be useful to note that this research practice in no way aims to constitute the space of a detailed historical examination of drama and its discourse. It is more than certain that during the many centuries of theatrical practice from ancient Greece to today’s stage works, a significant number of theories and critical analyses have been created from an equally significant number of scholars and critics to analyze dramatic notions and practices.7 Within the course of the years that I have spent examining and practicing actions for the stage, I have encountered and been inspired by an important number of them. However, my aim has never been to exhaust them – even if that was ever possible – or to include them in these (research) stories. That would definitely be the work of another kind of research, one with totally different interests. I nevertheless would like to refer here to some of the thoughts found in those approaches, which proved to be helpful for the way my own approach to experimental dramatic practices has been shaped.
Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama, originally written in 1956, includes some of those useful points to initiate a new approach to drama.8 If Lehmann in 1999, with his Postdramatisches Theater, talked about a crisis in dramatic forms and drama itself, and established the concept of postdramatic theatre ‘as the widely accepted terminological “upgrade” of current theatre-aesthetic discourse’, offering a broadly used
7
From F.W. Nietzsche’s The Birth Of Tragedy (1872), H.D.F Kitto’s Greek Tragedy (1939) and the several studies on ancient Greek drama, to studies on medieval drama, J. Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) and the many other publications on Shakespeare’s dramatic art; and from there to the various studies of modern drama or those examining dramatic notions and forms in a broader sense, some of them arriving to quite recent dramatic developments (indicatively mentioned: R. Williams’s Drama In Performance in 1954, P. Szondi’s Theory Of The Modern Drama in 1956, L.J. Styan’s The Elements Of Drama in 1960, M. Esslin’s An Anatomy Of Drama in 1976, W. Raymond’s Drama From Ibsen To Brecht in 1987, R. Schechner’s Performance Theory in 1988, E.F. Lichte’s History Of European Drama And Theatre in 1990, J. Sidnell’s Sources Of Dramatic Theory in 1991, M. Vanden Heuvel’s Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance. Alternative theater and the dramatic text in1991, H.T. Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre in 1999, S. Shepherd’s and M. Wallis’s Drama/Theatre/ Performance in 2004), the number of theoretical and critical texts and publications related to dramatic discourse are indeed numerous. 8 Szondi, Peter. Theory of the Modern Drama. Trans. Hays, Michael. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press, 1987 (originally published in German in 1956).
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analytical tool for looking at contemporary stage practices;9 it might be useful to take things from even earlier and start a discussion on such practices with the book that ‘Lehmann’s book is mainly a response to’ and ‘a continuation of’.10 And this is the book of Szondi, which much earlier than Lehmann attempted to indicate the major shifts that have occurred in theatre studies and practices and to interpret the history of modern drama from Ibsen through Arthur Miller as another ‘crisis to drama’, by which Szondi meant once more the widening gap between a historically conditioned and understood notion of the Aristotelian form of drama and a modern content for which that form was no longer suitable.
In his introduction to this work, Szondi argues that the generally established dramatic theory expects one to adhere to formal rules assuming that drama is based on a preexisting form embodied in dramatic art and constitutes the union with a subject matter chosen with this form in mind. Such an idea recognizes neither a historical nor a dialectical relationship between form and content, according to Szondi. Drama though, he continues, is a time-bound concept that stands for a specific literary-historical event, namely the drama as it arose in Elizabethan England and above all as it came into being in seventeenth-century France and was perpetuated in the German classical period. This drama then should be viewed and analysed as the literary-historical phenomenon of its specific time that necessarily reflects much of the characteristics of that time, Szondi continues. According to this analysis, drama constitutes the result of an intellectual effort made by the newly self-conscious being of that period to fix and mirror himself on the basis of interpersonal relationships. After the collapse of the medieval
9
Wessendorf, Markus. “The Postdramatic Theatre of Richard Maxwell”, 2003. 8 May 2012. 10 Wessendorf, “The Postdramatic Theatre of Richard Maxwell”, 2003.
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worldview, man enters drama in an attempt to explore the ‘between’ and it is exactly for this reason that drama could not take a different verbal form than that of the interpersonal communication expressed by dialogue, which by entirely replacing the previous forms of prologue, chorus and epilogue, became the sole constitutive element in the dramatic web. In this respect, the ‘neoclassical drama’, as Szondi ends up calling it, distinguishes itself not only from antique tragedy but also from medieval clerical plays and baroque world theatre.
After a quite extended description of this drama and its main characteristics, Szondi sets as his project’s aim to question that taken-for-granted form and, through this questioning, to explore the possibilities of ‘modern drama’. As he argues:
We usually arrive at a clear understanding of such formal statements only at a time when the unquestionable has been questioned and the self-evident has become problematic. It is in this light that the drama will be dealt with here – in terms of what impedes it today – and this notion of the drama will be examined as a moment of inquiry into the possibility of modern drama.11
With these words he sets to work on his real interest, as Jochen Schulte-Sasse notes in the foreword of the book, namely the process of disintegration and fragmentation of established cultural formations. Within this exploration though, as Szondi stresses himself, he designates only a particular dramaturgic form as ‘drama’, the one belonging to the written dramatic dialogue described above.
11
Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, p.5.
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Although Szondi starts from a very useful basis here, one can detect numerous contradictions in his argument that seem to keep his discourse restricted in a way to the cultural formations he wishes to disintegrate. He initially seems to recognize the problematic approach of dramatic theory as far as the notion and practices of drama are concerned, when he refers to the fact that this theory mistakenly views drama as a set of formal rules based on a kind of pre-existing, unquestionable form embodied in dramatic art, through which all subject matters should be expressed. He himself later defines drama too though only as a ‘written dramatic dialogue’ following the suggestion of the theory he had just criticized. But if dramatic theory has incorrectly defined and misused the term, how can one continue to use it with the exact same meaning while criticizing it and without attempting an analysis of the problem or a re-definition of the term in question? If drama is indeed not based on a pre-existing form embodied in it, as the dominant dramatic theory assumes, then what is it based on, what forms can it take?
Szondi also aptly argues that, for a good understanding of drama, one should take into consideration the historical and dialectical relationship between form and content. What such statements seem to suggest is the idea that drama deploys distinct practices to connect its forms and content in order to produce actions for the stage and that these distinct practices are connected with the historical conditions they appear in. After one such insightful observation though, Szondi once more contradicts himself, declaring that drama is a time-bound concept connected only to one specific historical period and constitutes an exclusive product of that period’s historical and intellectual conditions. It becomes obvious then that for him drama not only is not a concept that proposes different connections between form and content according to different times, but has originated in one very particular historical time. What is worth noting here too is that
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Szondi identifies drama in this case with what he himself later calls ‘neoclassical drama’, in opposition to the ‘modern drama’ that he wishes to examine. But if drama is an original and exclusive product of one specific time, then what is the point of looking for it in another time, for example in Szondi’s time of the ‘modern drama’? If drama, on the contrary, is not a product of a specific time but a concept existing in ‘neoclassical’ as well as ‘modern’ times and should be examined every time in relation to the particular period of interest, then why is he unable to detect the existence and continuity of a practice that existed already from ancient Greece and Aristotle? Or is it just a matter of confusion between the first appearance of the actual dramatic practices in theatre (which coincide with theatre’s appearance itself) and the first use of the very specific notion and definition of the term drama within critical discourse much later?
Being aware of such contradictions, these (research) stories wish nevertheless to follow Szondi’s aim and to ‘question the unquestionable’ way that drama has been defined so far within critical discourse, as a moment of inquiry into the possibility of drama in experimental theatre and dance today. Starting from Szondi’s ideas then one could further argue that an investigation of drama should move away from a critical analysis that attempts to summarize it in only one pre-given dramatic form, i.e. the one mainly conceived as a written dialogic text, and open up towards a multi-formed perception of drama in order to achieve an insightful understanding of its notion and nature. According to this perception drama is not identified solely with the way it was practiced from the Renaissance onwards until the 19th century but with the distinct dramatic practices that take place in different historical times, from ancient Greece and the first appearances of theatre to today’s experimental works, all of which respond to similar,
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recurring dramatic questions in their diverse ways, depending on the distinct characteristics of their time.
Even much later than Szondi though, another theory, this time a theory of Performance, proposes a similar analysis and understanding of the term ‘drama’, which could also be used as an interesting point of departure for another discussion on drama. This theory belongs to Richard Schechner.12 At this point, more than thirty years later, the practices and critical recognition of performance art have already been established to such an extent that made it possible for Schechner to shift focus and write a theory wherein he analyzes the nature and origins of this kind of art as well as its relation to theatre and drama. Especially in regard to this later issue, Schechner proposes a schematic model towards a better understanding of the way performance, theatre and drama are connected and interact with each other. According to this scheme, a set of four concentric, overlapping circles are resting on one another. The largest and least strictly defined of these circles is ‘performance’; each of the other three discs rests on the one immediately larger than itself, in the following order: theatre, script, drama. The larger the size the more space covered and the broader the ‘idea area’ occupied. Within these terms thus, ‘performance’ is defined as something which may include all the other three as well as the whole stage event (audience, performers and possibly the technicians too); ‘theatre’ can include ‘script’ and ‘drama’ and is defined as the domain of the performers and the specific set of gestures used by them in any given performance; ‘script’ can include ‘drama’ and constitutes the interior map of a particular event; and ‘drama’ stands in the centre of this scheme as the smallest circle that can or cannot be part of the rest and is understood as the domain of the author and what he writes. Of
12
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2003 (first published in 1988).
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course, Schechner himself recognizes the danger and risk of such concrete, taxonomical delineation of these terms and acknowledges the difficulty of using them in this way, for, as he says, such distinctions are somewhat arbitrary since ‘taxonomy in a social science is based on structures that tend to blend into each other on a continuum rather than exist as compartmented “species” of events’.13
And one could argue that it is indeed true that Schechner once more, after Szondi, risks falling into the trap he is acknowledging, because in his book he offers a description of the origin and history of drama by defining it as a specialized form of ‘scripting’ that arose long after writing was invented.14 However, although he defines ‘scripts’ as ‘patterns of doing’, he identifies ‘drama’ – earlier defined as a kind of ‘script’ – with the ‘written word’ and that ‘written word’ with a power that much later, as he says, took over theatre’s space, imposing a distance between it and its ‘script’, i.e. its doing, its actions.15 That ‘much later’ time was of course once more the time from the Renaissance onwards. According to Schechner the rapid extension of literacy during the Renaissance resulted in the inversion of the ancient relationship between doing and script. From then on, in the tradition of the West, the active sense of script was forgotten, almost entirely displaced by drama understood solely as the pre-scripted written work; and the doings of a particular production became the way to present such drama in a new way.16 Within these terms, the script no longer functions as a code for transmitting action but is identified with the words of the drama. Maintaining these words intact grew in importance; how they were said and what gestures accompanied
13
Schechner, Performance Theory, p.88. ‘Script’ is defined by Schechner as ‘something that pre-exists any given enactment which persists from enactment to enactment’ (p68). This script works then as a ‘what to do’ plan, a code for the transmission of action, accompanying numerous kinds of ceremonies and public events almost since the beginning of human history and expands through early antiquity and Greco-Roman times until our own epoch. 15 Schechner, Performance Theory, p.69. 16 A process that also gave birth to the art of theatre directing. 14
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them was a matter of individual choice, and of somewhat lesser importance. Most of us in the West have since then become accustomed to concentrating our attention on this kind of script called drama, according to Schechner. Avant-garde artists though, he concludes, refocused attention on the doing aspects of script and on its active sense through their works and stage structures.
Up to this point Schechner attempts to follow theatrical developments, offering a description of theatre’s historical continuation and arriving at the effort made by avantgarde artists to re-discuss and redefine certain terms, rules and methods within it. His analysis, though, stops there, and does not attempt to go further into this effort and the distinct views and perspectives that avant-garde works offered towards an insightful understanding of stage and its drama. Instead of trying to maintain the continuity of the definition of ‘drama’ as a ‘pattern of doing’ and recognizing that it is exactly one such continuity that avant-garde artists – and more recently the theatre and dance artists discussed here – wished to reveal and base their work on, Schechner restricts himself to an analysis, use and identification of the term ‘drama’ as something that, as he himself notes, belongs to the concrete period of the Renaissance and reflects its specific characteristics. The fact that this specific perception of drama seems to have dominated critical theatrical discourse for centuries and met its peak during the late nineteenth century – the only time that, as Schechner notes, has so privileged the written text as to almost exclude theatre and performance altogether – does not mean that it should be identified with the origin and characteristics of dramatic practices in general. However Schechner insists on defining drama after the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, like Szondi did, and to position it in the smallest circle of his proposed scheme, implying that it occupies the narrowest ‘idea area’ in relation to the rest. A different
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perspective, though, on the relationship between performance, theatre and drama can be revealed from a different look on Schechner’s scheme because, if viewed in another way, drama in the model proposed by Schechner constitutes the core of performance and theatre art. It is exactly that element which lies at the heart of these stage practices and in this way can be seen as their raison d’être, defining the creation of drama as the goal towards which all theatrical processes work on. It is one such view that could be used as an interesting departure point for the discussion I wish to stage here.
Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis offer a rich overview of the way drama has been understood within a large part of critical and academic practices.17 In their work drama is once more being defined mainly as the study of plays, as dramatic literature. Tracing back a brief history of the institualization of the term in order to confirm such definition, Shepherd and Wallis refer also to the opening of the first Drama Department in USA in 1914 and of the equivalent one in UK in 1947 in Bristol, both of which studied drama as text and playwriting and had no intention to train students for theatre. Starting from such facts, they go on to offer a number of bibliographical sources that refer to and analyze drama in a similar way.18 Commonplace in all these sources is an understanding of drama as literature and a definition of its critical method as the observation and description of key ideas of a series of canonical authors. Within such frame, as Shepherd and Wallis note, the history of drama has been characterized by the value it placed on literary texts, preserving in this way the tensed relationship between dramatic text and its bodily performance.
17
Shepherd, Simon and Wallis, Mick. Drama/Theatre/ Performance. Oxfordshire, USA, Canada: Routledge, 2004. Indicative sources mentioned: Philip Sidney and his ‘Defence of Poetry’ in 1579; John Dryden and his ‘Of dramatic Poesy: An Essay’ in 1665-6; L.C.Knight’s essay ‘How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?; Brooks and Heilman’s ‘Understanding Drama’ first published in 1945. 18
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Together with this description of the way drama has been established and perceived within institutional and critical discourses for an extended period of time though, Shepherd and Wallis refer also to views that attempted to lead the discussion to a different direction, based on alternative models for its analysis, which raised objections to ‘drama’ as described above and proposed an understanding of it as a core activity of the artistic process.19 As mentioned earlier, the interest of these (research) stories is not to create an extended analysis of the history and discourse of drama, so I will not go into a detailed examination of each one of these views, which draw both on artistic and philosophical discourses as well as sociological and anthropological ones. What is worth mentioning though and is extremely useful for the discussion that takes place here is that common ground in all these views constitutes the fact that drama imitates actions that are ‘prior to the arts, the sciences of man and the philosophies, of modern civilization’; actions that are ‘linked to the basic make-up of our species’.20 This understanding of drama as an action that works responsively to recurring questions of humanity distinguishes it, according to Shepherd and Wallis, from literature and renders drama a significant and powerful action. Such action then, I would argue, should not be conceived only in its narrower sense and be constricted under only one specific understanding, i.e. as written plays, as this has dominated critical discourse after the Renaissance. It should instead be examined in the distinct forms it takes so that it responds to those recurring questions – questions that have to do with our relation to imitation, identity etcetera – within each historical time. And one could argue that the work made by several artists in the 1960s, which opposed dominant text-based theatre, emerged out of similar thinking processes. The focus was on the ‘performative’ of theatre in the sense of performed
19
Shepherd and Wallis refer here to F. Fergusson and his Idea of a Theater written in 1949, which is based on the work of the Cambridge School of Classical Anthropologists that trace the roots of Greek tragedy and drama to Greek myth and ritual. They refer also to Martin Esslin’s connection between rituals and drama, and to similar attempts made by other contemporary theatre makers and critics such as P. Brook, J. Grotowski, J. Kott and A. Artaud; as well as to the views of F. Nietzsche. 20 Shepherd and Wallis, Drama/Theatre/ Performance, pp58-59.
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actions taking place in the ‘here and now’ of their utterance instead of aiming to create realism’s illusion of another place and time. One such aim though does not necessarily mean that those performative actions and dramatic practices are opposed terms that compete with each other. Performance art – at least as this has developed within the theatrical frame – may indeed have emerged largely out of an artistic quest for resistance to conventional text-based drama or, to be more precise, from resistance to the dominant notion and hitherto established practices of text-based drama (for, of course, text is still widely used in experimental performances) but not necessarily from a resistance to dramatic modes and forms themselves.21
Michael Vanden Heuvel’s book Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance already from its title seems to examine possible connections and interventions between drama and more experimental stage practices.22 Once again in this book, drama is primarily defined as a literary artifact, which is often performed. Performance art, on the other hand, is defined as an alternative to this ‘literary’ drama and a mechanism for deconstructing its dramatic conventions. Within this frame, Vanden Heuvel refers to the ‘problem’, as he calls it, of the centreless diversity of twentieth century dramatic forms. What for him becomes problematic is, on the one hand, the fact that new forms of performance work indeed against conventional literary drama through stylistic and conceptual changes of dramatic language, characterized by ‘the use of nonlinear narrative structures, the development toward more physical acting styles, the innovative experiments in the use of theatrical time, space and the mise-en-scene’ while at the same time such innovations have also been incorporated into the mainstream of
21
Of course there are also other major reasons and developments – most of them having largely to do too with a need to question established ineffective artistic forms and contexts and suggest alternatives to them – that have led to the emergence of performance art both in theatre but mainly in other artistic areas such as those of the visual arts or more social/action based practices. 22 Vanden Heuvel, Michael. Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance. Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text. USA: The University of Michigan Press, 1991.
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contemporary drama by playwrights like Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard.23 But on the other hand, as he says, the problem includes also the exactly opposite phenomenon, i.e. the increased marshaling of traditional dramatic elements within avant-garde performance theatre groups and artists, such as the Wooster Group, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman etcetera. Such blending, Vanden Heuvel concludes, renders a cohesive picture of what is termed ‘drama’ problematic to such an extent that it seems hardly possible today for books to be written with titles like Elements of Drama.
Drawing on the landscape of thoughts shaped from all the above, the suggestion now is the following: if we want to arrive at a clear understanding of the possibilities of drama and drama-turgy, the unquestionable has indeed to be questioned and the self-evident has to become problematic, as Szondi argues. I therefore propose a questioning and redefinition of the narrow sense in which drama has mainly been discussed up to this point within critical discourse. Through this questioning I aim to achieve an alternative understanding of contemporary dramaturgical processes, which, instead of being based on the anxiety for the creation of new terms and genres that Bel described earlier, will possibly shed another light on the creative processes of experimental stage works, while offering a possible reply to the question of why drama-turgy still implies connections with drama, as well as why it enters the area of dance as soon as ‘theatre’ enters it as a suffix.
And I would like to argue that this suggestion goes much deeper than constituting a mere logocentric point of view on the topic. For a possible critique to one such analysis
23
Vanden Heuvel, Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance. Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text, p.8.
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– which uses dramatic discourse and ‘drama’ as a key term for the exploration of experimental stage works, instead of most commonly used terms such as those of ‘performance’ or ‘live’ art – could be that it is simply ‘playing with words’, risking to bring the matter to the relatively superficial level of terminology and the specific words used in the place of others. Although I admit my keenness for language games in general, I strongly oppose this in these cases. The question then seems to be: what is the difference if, instead of calling a work ‘performance’ or ‘live’ art, we call it instead ‘theatre’ or ‘dance’ or even ‘experimental drama’ work? How much do words count in this case? Or, to put it differently, in which sense will we be able to understand theatre and dance better and deeper, as Bel suggested, if we do not invent new names all the time for the theatre and dance works we make and/or see? The suggestion here thus is not solely for a different use of names. It is rather about following a line of thought that explores the potentials that lie in views that preserve continuity (of dramatic practices) instead of causing ruptures (among ‘drama’, ‘performance’, ‘live art’ works). It is through this continuity that such views are possibly able to offer a distinct understanding of the nature of dramatic practices, which allows for a diverse multiformed perception of them and in this way opens up a broader space for their further development and experimentation. These thus constitute views that can possibly offer a distinct and useful perspective not only to a critical analysis of dramatic forms but also to their artistic development, providing artists with a very concrete tool through which they might be able to proceed with their research inquiries on stage.
And one could argue that it becomes obvious anyway, from the situation described above by Vanden Heuvel as a ‘problem’, that experimental stage practices already seem to share similar views, when they create space within their frame for the coexistence
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and interaction between conventional and more innovative dramatic aspects. I would argue though that this fact not only does not constitute a ‘problem’ but, on the contrary, is quite revealing for the discussion that wishes to be staged here in relation to the nature of drama, since it draws a connecting line between common inquiries and aspects of dramatic action within the space of both ‘conventional’ and ‘experimental’ stage practices. Let us agree then, even if it is only for the sake of these (research) stories, that as Vanden Heuvel observes too, experimental stage practices indeed still work with traditional dramatic elements. Unlike Vanden Heuvel though, let us assume that it is not that hard to define these elements; let us say that, in order to detect them, we will draw on the first attempt made towards theirs analysis. It is this hypothesis that is suggested here as possibly revealing for the continuation of drama and the dramatic action created on stage.
This first attempt at a dramatic discourse belongs to Aristotle and his Poetics, written around 335BC. Aristotle seems to have offered in this book not only the first analysis of drama but also the first discussion on the operational modes of drama-turgy; a work that ‘should need no introduction’ as is stated in the dramaturgs’ network of the UK, wherein Poetics is proposed as one of the essential readings on dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturge.24 From the very start of that work Aristotle declares that he will discuss the way that the basic elements of drama could be composed. Such declaration usefully reveals connections between drama-turgy, as the compositional process described earlier, and drama, as the product that this compositional process creates. It is such connections that have been to a large extent neglected by contemporary theory and critical analysis mainly due to the way that drama has been defined and used in theatrical discourse. It is
24
Dramaturgs’ Network. Books on Dramaturgy and the Dramaturg. 3 August 2011. ‹http://ee.dramaturgy.co.uk/index.php/site/comments/books_on_dramaturgy_and_the_dramaturg/›
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exactly these connections though that could be effectively used towards an alternative and insightful analysis of experimental works by rehabilitating drama as a term for both analysis and creation of contemporary dramaturgical practices.
When Lehmann discusses his aim to mark the shift of the aesthetic logic in contemporary theatre, he also discusses extensively the influence of the Aristotelian conception of theatre on Western drama. He observes that drama has its roots on the Aristotelian understanding of theatre, as it shows a recognizable narrative coherence, logic and totality after Aristotle’s suggestion for a strictly structured theatrical event. It is Aristotle’s theoretical construction of theatre, as it appears in Poetics, that became the paradigm that shaped the entire Western conception and reception of theatre, Lehmann argues; a paradigm that has been historically and culturally used as a manual about how theatre should work and be theorized. Although, of course, Aristotle wrote his work on the basis of a careful examination of the performances that were better enjoyed and more easily understood by the audience at that time, Poetics remains indeed a unique study for theatre. And despite the fact that Lehmann makes the distinction between dramatic and post-dramatic theatre, he also insists on the fact that post-dramatic does not equal non-dramatic. In other words, he explicitly argues that there are still dramatic elements in post-dramatic theatre, though their meaning and perception often changes under the new historical circumstances. More particularly, in another one of his texts, written around the same time as the original German version of Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann discusses certain aspects of Aristotle’s Poetics from a different perspective and arrives to the interesting suggestion that ‘it would be tempting to read Aristotle’s notions in the light of a certain (post)modern practice’.25 In other words, Lehmann
25
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy”. Performance Research 2:1 (1977): 63-69.
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proposes there an approach of Poetics that, instead of entirely rejecting the Aristotelian tradition of Western theatre, it will re-examine elements that have perhaps remained unnoticed until now and will in a sense reveal a quasi-Aristotelian notion of postdramatic theatre which seeks to de- and re- construct those elements.
According to Aristotle ‘drama’, or the ‘things done’ in theatre, as he calls it, ‘depends for its effect on six constituent elements: plot, character, language, thought, the visual, the music’.26 In contrast to currently dominant views that see drama as a genre belonging almost exclusively to literature and can be found in the majority of the relevant bibliography, ‘drama’ here does not refer to a pre-written text created outside the theatrical process by one or more authors more or less included in that process; instead it is being considered as the stage action included in its etymology. ‘Drama’ thus, deriving from the Greek verb δρω (dro=to act), denotes the action or rather the summation of actions that are taking place on stage within the frame of a work, whereas drama-turgy is understood as the process that works towards the construction of such drama, such stage action, as the etymology of the term implies (drama+ergon=work), defining dramaturgy as ‘actions at work’.27 This drama, although it also includes the written text spoken on stage, recognizing it as a strong stage action, seeks to be understood solely as the interpretation of this text and abolishes distinctions between drama, dramaturgy and the performance per se (such as those made by the theatre that established drama as a mainly written form and has been identified by means of the words spoken by the characters in its performances).
26
Aristotle, Poetics, p.10. The phrase ‘actions at work’ is borrowed by Eugenio Barba’s essay “Dramaturgy: Actions at Work” found in Barba, Eugenio and Savarese, Nicola, Eds. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1991, pp.6871. 27
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In order to approach the fleeting movement of the drama-turgy of the works examined here then, let us construct a temporary ‘what if’ drawing on Lehmann’s suggestion: what if experimental works still create drama as a response to the abovementioned six Aristotelian dramatic elements? What kind of responses are these? How do dramaturgical processes in works of experimental theatre and dance today work on their plot, characters, language, thinking and conceptual processes, visual aspects and understandings of music, for the drama they construct? Which are the ways that these experimental works de- and re- construct these elements? All these questions will be addressed in the short (research) stories that follow as part of the ‘theory’ that I attempt to momentarily create here as a viewing point of contemporary drama-turgy.
Apart from the six abovementioned elements though, I will also refer here to an additional element of drama. When Eugenio Barba discusses actions on which dramaturgy works, he more or less discusses too those mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics. He thus talks about actions in theatre – i.e. about all that which has to do with drama and drama-turgy – not only as what is said but also as sounds, lights, episodes of the story or the different facets of a situation, as well as all the relationships and all the interactions between the characters or between the characters and the lights, the sounds and the space. Although Barba seems generally to recognize Aristotle’s dramatic elements though, he reveals one more element and therefore another interesting dimension in relation to drama-turgy and the space it locates itself in. ‘Everything that works directly on the spectators’ attention, on their understanding, their emotions, their kinaesthesia’ is also an action, he concludes.28
28
Barba, “Dramaturgy: Actions at Work”, p.68. (my emphasis).
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Drama-turgy thus – creating the actions of a performance – does not mean only to interweave these actions but also to work on the spectator’s attention without trying to impose an interpretation. Including a work’s encounter with its spectators within dramaturgical processes means also that drama-turgy should not be considered as a practice taking place only ‘in something known as rehearsal’, to use Heathfield’s words, but also in the event of performance.29 As Turner and Behrndt also observe, dramaturgy tends to imply an observation of the structure of the artwork in all its elements, but also an awareness that theatre is live and therefore always in process, open to disruption through both rehearsal and performance. By moving towards such recognition of the work and its actions (its drama) as a living system then, contemporary drama-turgy creates performances that ‘call on a dramaturgical sensibility from all those involved’: the dramaturge, the director, the performers, but also the individual spectator.30
And in this sense it constitutes also a critical move towards a re-discussion of theatre as theatron (deriving from the Greek θέα-thea = view and the verb θεώµαι-theomai = to view, see) as a ‘seeing place’, which ever since its beginning functions to allow through its actions spectators to develop a means to interpret and speculate about the world in which they live. Hence the drama created, the actions taking place in this theatron, must be conceived as actions placed both on stage and in the auditorium. Apart from questions related to Aristotle’s six dramatic elements then, what is also of great importance to the way dramaturgical processes will be discussed here are the links or bridges they construct between their creations and their audiences, as well as audience’s role within the event. Subsequently, these (research) stories add one more element to
29 30
Heathfield, “Dramaturgy Without a Dramaturge”, p.105. Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, p.203.
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Aristotle’s list. This element is closely connected with all the rest and cannot be clearly distinguished from them. Therefore, the newly proposed seventh dramatic element I offer here, namely contemporary understandings and discussions around the conditions of spectatorship and the spectator, will not stand independently as a separate section in the following (research) stories. Discussions on it will instead intervene and be continuously present within discussions on the Aristotelian list of dramatic elements, shedding in this way another kind of light on current understandings of them; and thus ‘letting the sun shine in’ during encounters between experimental drama works (made of those elements) and their audiences.31
31
It might be useful to note here that the discussion on the other six dramatic elements that follows will also not always be able to keep them distinct and talk separately about each one of them. Issues around character and language or language and thought etcetera will thus more often than not be present side by side in the following Short (Research) Stories.
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‘Let the Sun Shine In (The Rest Is Silence)’1
‘Hello, I would like to ask you why do you consider your work to be theatre and don’t show it in galleries or other art spaces like several people who work towards your direction.’ ‘Because I need you to sit in the dark and shut up. I need time for my work to develop.’
Here is a quote that could frame the one edge of the area in which discussions on spectatorship take place. And here is its reference: Bel, Jérôme and Member, Audience. Talk-Event/ Q and A Session, London: Sadler’s Wells Theatre, 2008. What interests me in this short dialogic exchange, which takes place between an artist and one of his audience members, is the quite straightforward absoluteness included in the former’s reply. If Bel indeed needs audience’s seated position and shut-up-ness, the time they give to him, in such an absolute way that he appears – through his abovementioned words – to almost impose it on them, it means that this seated silent time, this ground his work develops on as he says, is the necessary precondition for his creations and therefore an offer of the greatest generosity on behalf of the audience. Lisa Schwartz talks about ‘Harpocratic’ silence ‘the empty silence of reflection and meditation […] anything can be done in this emptiness; it is pure freedom for creativity and imagination without constraint’.2 This is the kind of silence a theatre audience seems to offer in this case, a silent ground for artist’s creativity and imagination to unfold. Pushing things more towards their edge, one could even say that it is exactly this silence that constitutes the impetus of artistic creation, because as Schwartz concludes: ‘Where nothing is
1
Let the Sun Shine In (from Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical). Creation James Rado, Gerome Ragni (lyrics) and Galt MacDermot (music). 1968. Song. 2 Schwartz, Lisa. “Understanding Silence: Meaning and Interpretation”. Performance Research, 4:3 Winter 1999, p.8.
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offered, the task of the perceiver [in this case the task of those on stage] is to create’.3 In other words: the performers go out there and, once faced with the silent ground offered by the spectators, they cannot but respond to it, they cannot but create. According to Rudi Laermans, these works might not even be able to exist if it was not for the particular qualities of audience’s silence, which is the one that ‘makes modern art possible’.4
The other edge of the discussions on spectatorship could be marked by equally absolute ideas and statements that express opposite views, such as those of Guy Debord, who posits that to watch a spectacle ‘is the opposite of dialogue […] It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity’.5 Or those of Allan Kaprow, who demands that ‘the last shred of theatrical convention disappears’ and suggests that ‘audiences should be eliminated entirely […] a group of inactive people […] is just dead space. Movements call up movements in response’.6
I would like to position myself right in the middle of the line that connects such absolute edges and from this position to unfold my views on spectatorship. From here, I am looking at the one side the conventional dark auditorium Bel talks about and I am listening to his shut-up-ness as well as to Schwartz’s and Laermans’s silence as an obligatory condition for art to exist and develop. And then I am looking at the other side Kaprow’s dead space of inactivity and Debord’s darkness and silence, the result of the sun that never sets in the ‘empire of modern passivity’ because of this silence. I am listening to the muteness created by an event defined as ‘the opposite of dialogue’.
3
Schwartz, “Understanding Silence: Meaning and Interpretation”, p.8. Laermans, Rudi. “Performative Silences”. Performance Research, 4:3 Winter 1999: 8-11, p.1. 5 Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone books, 1997 (first published in French in 1967), p.17 (my emphasis). 6 Kaprow, Alan. “Notes on the Elimination of the Audience” (1966). Participation. Bishop, Claire, Ed. London: Whitechapel and the MIT Press, 2006, p.103 (my emphasis). 4
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Could there be a way to bring these two edges closer? To let the sun set and shine in theatre? To reveal the activity of the theatrical dialogue while preserving the necessary for artists and spectators – as it will be further argued below – silence, without either imposing and identifying it with the creation of art in an absolute way or equating it with muteness and considering it as a sign of the spectators’ passivity? How could one then form an understanding of the conditions of spectatorship that negotiates absolute notions of shut-up-ness, darkness and passivity under a sun that always shines in the event? It is exactly one such understanding that works discussed in the following (research) stories have attempted to create in their distinct ways through their dramaturgical structures.
Before I go on discussing such concerns though, it seems necessary to reply to some other questions first: when we say that – at least within the frame of contemporary dramaturgical processes – theatre and dance works call on a dramaturgical sensibility from the individual spectator too, in the same way that they do from all other contributors of the work (directors, dramaturges, choreographers, performers); when we say that the spectators’ attention, their understanding and individual encounter with the work constitutes also a dramatic action, so closely connected with the event that it becomes part of its dramaturgy; which are the spectators we are talking about? How do we understand their position?
Especially since the 1960s, the spectator’s position within the theatrical event has been widely tested by artists and seriously criticized by scholars and critics within spectatorship’s discourse.7 Claire Bishop in her Participation notes that it was at that
7
This critique was based on distinct views expressed against the conventional conditions of spectatorship, which came from artists and theorists working on and with various art forms. Baz Kershaw, for example, talks about the
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point that the conditions of spectatorship became explicitly related to issues of participation and by extension to the issue of political commitment as well.8 It was then that the demand for a re-definition of art, the expansion of its limits, the renewal of conventional, ineffective forms and the subversion of linguistic domination led to so many developments of the avant-garde theatre and of performance within the frame of visual art. Bishop discusses in particular the social dimension of spectatorship as a collective experience and creates a reader focused on projects that are ‘striving to collapse the distinction between performer and audience’, as she says, by requiring the physical involvement of audience members in order to turn them into collaborators instead of spectators.9 Based on the theories and practices of two leading figures of contemporary theatre, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, Bishop seems to offer a quite accurate description of the frame within which the discussion has often been taking place. As she notes,
‘syndrome of the audience acquiescence’ in theatre. What has taken place mainly within the last decades in theatre, according to him, is a taming of the audience which elevated applause to its only and major expression as community, a fact that reveals nothing more than audience’s lack of confidence. It is on this basis that Kershaw discusses political notions of democracy and ecological notions of a system’s organization and health within contemporary theatre. In these terms he argues that the audience of contemporary Western theatres has been transmuted into a customer of cultural products restricted to applauding as the only form of participation whereas the rest of its participatory modes are under serious suppression by those involved in the production of the ‘industry of culture’. (See: Kershaw, Baz. Theatre Ecology –Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Laura Mulvey focuses instead on cinema audiences in order to arrive to similar conclusions. She uses psychoanalysis to discuss pre-existing patterns and social formations according to which the individual subject watches a film. The spectator’s gaze, she argues, is governed by a controlling unconscious formed by socially pre-established attachments one is not able to detach from one’s self but that need to be detached. The first one is ‘scopophilia’, the pleasure in looking, which subjects other people to a controlling and curious gaze that takes them as ‘objects of sexual stimulation’. This is a kind of pleasure that arouses the feeling of voyeurism, which is being reinforced by the darkness of the auditorium and the isolation that this imposes among spectators. The second pleasure is the one developed through narcissism and derives from the identification of spectator’s ego with the image he sees on screen. Audience’s reception of a work of art that is taking place in a dark auditorium seems then to equal spectator’s incapability to act without the socially established interpretations of her unconscious, rendering once more the role of audience’s silence an ineffective one. (See: Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. The Audience Studies Reader. Brooker, Will and Jermyn, Deborah. Eds. London: Routledge, 2003). 8 Similar issues around spectatorship and participation constitute the main topic of Claire Bishop’s book Participation (Bishop, Claire, Ed. Participation. London: Whitechapel and the MIT Press, 2006). 9 Bishop, Participation, p.10. Bishop refers specifically, among others, to the work of the Brazilian theatre artist Augusto Boal as a characteristic example where similar ideas of participation in arts have reached their highest point. According to Boal theatre events should transform the ‘monologue’ of the theatrical stage into a ‘dialogue’ between the audience and the stage by being up to a large degree interactive. This is why he experimented quite a lot with such kinds of practices that aimed to transform the spectators to ‘Spect-actors’ as he called them, an activated audience that takes part in the action and gets explicitly involved in it.
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many would argue that the Brechtian model offers a relatively passive model of spectatorship, since it relies on raising consciousness through the distance of critical thinking. By contrast, a paradigm of physical involvement – taking its lead from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty among others – sought to reduce the distance between actors and spectators […] In this framework, physical involvement is considered an essential precursor to social change.10
It thus becomes obvious that, according to the discourse initiated in the 1960s – and which in several cases continues up to quite recently – the distant silent thought included in the act of spectatorship more often than not is deprived of any sense of active participation, whereas the physical involvement of the audience in the work of art seems to secure not only their active participation in the event but also a possible change in the social realm within which this event takes place. Such ideas seem then to be based still on the Cartesian mind/body dualism, in order now to make the reverse assessment by negating Descartes’ precedence over mental processes in favour of the physical ones, giving thought a role immune to human activity and therefore considering the conventional auditorium as an inactive space. It is within this frame that several works since then have attempted to experiment with the condition, position and role of the spectator and test the limits of art.
Today, though, most of these limits have already been tested and expanded quite a lot in works which have challenged again and again – in more or less successful ways – both artistic and physical edges. The abandonment of the theatrical convention of silent spectatorship in favor of a vivid interactivity, as well as the different kinds of physical
10
Bishop, Participation, p.11 (emphasis given in the original).
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erotics or aggressions in art works, have intruded on audience’s silent position more than enough in order to, as Susan Sontag argues: ‘eliminate “art” altogether in favor of “life”’.11 Nevertheless, as Sontag observes already in 1969, ‘none of the aggressions committed intentionally or inadvertently by modern artists has succeeded in either abolishing the audience or transforming it into something else […] they cannot’.12 Daphna Ben Chaim aptly notes too that while such vanishing point may seem possible ‘it is questionable whether it can in fact be reached. Even the abandonment of traditional auditoria, traditional stage-audience relationships, and other visible theatrical conventions does not mean that the concept of theatre will necessary disappear as well’.13
So here we are discussing notions and understandings of a theatre that still remains; a theatre that did not disappear despite the multiple efforts made to abandon its main conventions. Here we are discussing still the conditions of an audience that ‘cannot be transformed into something else’. Today. In the ‘noisiest of centuries’.14 In a ‘today’ which has ceased to define itself so much as a temporal adverb, as it does as an attributive adjective to imply a media, consumer, bureaucratic, post-industrial, postmodern society. How is this discussion different today? And what does this difference say for the way we should now think and talk about the spectator in theatre? Based on the abovementioned characteristics of ‘today’, one could argue that what matters at this point is the almost opposite artistic request from that of the 1960s; a request that insists on people meeting people in silence, resists art’s extremely noisy social background, creates works within which simply silently getting together can be already enough as a
11
Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1969, p.8. Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, p.8. 13 Daphna Ben Chaim. Cited in Bennet, Susan. Theatre Audiences, London, USA and Canada: Routledge, 1997, p.15. 14 MacDonald, Claire. “Editorial: Sounding out”. Performance Research. 4:3 Winter 1999, p.iii. 12
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highly revolutionary act, and maybe much more radical today than any other form of interaction or participation that has been practiced.
In the introduction of Paul Virilio’s Art and Fear, John Armitage seeks a redefinition of the politics of human silence. Drawing on Virilio’s ideas, Armitage refers to ‘the right to remain silent in an era that is increasingly shaped by the shrill sonority of contemporary art’.15 And then he attempts to articulate the writer’s thoughts regarding contemporary aesthetics, politics and practices that eradicated silence in art. According to these thoughts the carnage of the First and Second World Wars and the catastrophe of the Nazi death camps, instead of encouraging the respect to the human body and its capacity for silence, has lead to twentieth-century theories and practices which removed this silence from contemporary art and rejected humanism or the real human body in a time of the ‘sonorization’ of all visual and virtual representations. In Art and Fear, according to Armitage, Virilio laments exactly this loss, that ‘is also an injury to all those who still yearn to speak even when they remain silent’, those seeking a right to silence without implied assent.16
Later on, in his own text, given the apt title Silence on Trial, Virilio himself talks about a programmed demise of the voices of silence in art. More specifically, he argues that it was in the beginning of the twentieth century that the Western political culture started trying to control the silent majorities by putting silence on trial. From there on, ‘TO MAKE SOMEONE TALK would suddenly become a major requirement with the advent of the poll and television ratings systems’.17 Consequently, from that moment, whoever says nothing consents to cede her ‘right to remain silent’, her freedom to listen.
15
Virilio, Paul. Art and Fear. London: Continuum, 2006, p.1. Virilio, Art and Fear, p.9. 17 Virilio, Art and Fear, p.47 (emphasis given in the original). 16
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The digital situation of the synchronization of everything in art imposes, according to Virilio, the idea of action and reaction put into an instant interaction, which only destroys the nature of art promoting instead its communication. Contemporary art’s request for everything to be done, seen, heard, acted and reacted without delay, that is, without necessitating attention, consists for him in a certain kind of hostility towards the attention of the onlooker, especially in theatre and dance, those arts involving immediate presence and therefore still demanding prolonged attention. What contemporary art does then is to ‘denounce OMERTA, this law of silence of art, and promote instead some so-called “freeing of speech”’.18
Interestingly enough Virilio here refers to silence not only as a necessary condition for the artistic work to develop – as was mentioned above – but also as the desired state of the spectators too, who need time and space for their attention, their encounter with and reaction to the work that takes place in front of them. Instead of aiming towards a highly physical interactivity and involvement of the audience then, a radical revolutionary act in relation to spectatorship could as well be understood through the thoughts of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark below, expressed already in 1965:
‘Lygia, my Dear […] the relax in participation is a non-repressive activity […] and in this, I believe, you base yourself on your own experience, which is also highly revolutionary’
‘Dear Hélio […] As far as the idea of participation is concerned, as always there are weak artists who cannot really express themselves through thought, so instead they
18
Virilio, Art and Fear, p.46 (emphasis given in the original).
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illustrate the issue […] True participation is open and we will never be able to know what we give to the spectator-author […] the dialogue is now with himself, to the extent of the […] magic that he is able to borrow from within himself’19
In this kind of revolution the relaxation of the seated, silent position of the audience is seen not as a passive activity but as a non-repressive one; an activity that allows spectators to be based on their own experience and in this way it makes their sitting position alive and important. In this revolution participation depends on the dialogue that each spectator-author has with himself rather than on what the artist thinks about the way this participation should be practiced or about how much is or should be given through it.20 One such participation does not exclude physical engagement though. It just perceives it in a different way. In a way that stands possibly closer to the etymology of the word ‘audience’ itself: an assembly of listeners, deriving from the Latin verb audire ‘to hear’, which goes back to the PIE compound *au-dh- ‘to perceive physically’, which by its turn derives from the base *au- ‘to perceive’ which is also the base of the Greek αισθάνεσθαι (aisthanesthai=to feel).21 According to this etymology then, the audience participates in a work by physically perceiving actions and emotions while listening.
The explicit physicality included within such perception, is a physicality that Sara Ahmed extendedly talks about. Ahmed investigates the physical extensions of emotions
19
Oiticica, Hélio and Clark, Lygia. “Dance in My Experience” (1965-66). Participation, Bishop, Claire, Ed. London: Whitechapel and the MIT Press, 2006, pp.113-115. 20 Of course similar ideas have been further discussed in Barthes’s famous essay ‘The Death Of The Author’, written in 1968, where he argued that the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text. In other words, Barthes defined the action of reading a text as the action of writing one’s own version of it. In a similar way, what seems to be argued here is that during the act of spectatorship, one creates her personal performance of the work, with all the activity that one such process implies. 21 PIE refers to the Proto-Indo-European language, a reconstructed language believed to have been spoken between the Caucusus and Vistula River around 7,000 years ago. The speakers of that language then migrated in all directions, into Europe and India, which gave it its name: Indo-European. It is believed to be the mother of most European Languages.
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starting again from the etymology of the word deriving from the Latin movere ‘to move’. So emotions, according to Ahmed, are once more about movement, about what connects us and moves us towards things. To use her precise words, it is emotions the ones that ‘work on bodies to materialize the surfaces […] that are lived as worlds’.22 This is why they cannot be separated from bodily sensations. In close connection with the way emotions are being perceived, Ahmed also proposes a reflection on the word ‘impression’, according to which the term involves both acts of perception and cognition as well as emotions. But what is also involved in impression is ‘press’, the mark on the surface, the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace. Such understanding of impression as Ahmed says: ‘allows one to avoid making analytical distinctions between bodily sensation, emotion and thought as if they could be “experienced” as distinct realms of human “experience”’.23 Drawing on similar ideas, what a revolution on spectatorship could possibly argue today is that, in the silence of the auditorium I am touched and moved without even touching or moving, my vision and listening are modes of touching rather than of separation and inactivity. In this sense, one should then talk of audience’s experience less as belonging to a ‘group of inactive people’ and more as a physical experience of ‘sentient beings in a situation’.24
It is exactly one such approach to issues of spectatorship that Jacques Rancière’s already widely acclaimed essay The Emancipated Spectator aimed to discuss further. In this text Rancière links notions of Education and Pedagogy with Theatre and grounds his arguments specifically on the theory of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who at the beginning of the 19th century ‘asserted that an ignorant could teach another ignorant
22
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2004, p.191. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p.6. 24 Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, p.9. 23
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what he did not know himself, proclaiming in this way the equality of intelligences and calling for intellectual emancipation against the standard idea of the instruction of the people’.25 It is not his knowledge that the master transmits to his students, Jacotot argued, but the way to venture forth into the forest, to tell what they see, what they think of what they have seen, to check it and so on. Because the master is not the one who knows the right way, form, time and place for the transmission of knowledge and he is not the only one who knows the exact distance between ignorance and knowledge. Based on an equality between the master and the students, the former cannot ignore than the so-called ‘ignorant’ who is in front of him knows, in fact, a lot of things and she has learnt on her own, by looking and listening around her, by figuring out the meaning of what she has seen and heard, repeating what she has heard and known by chance, comparing what she discovers with what she already knew.
Those criticizing the silent state of spectatorship though increase the pressure on the spectator (the ‘ignorant’ of this case), Rancière posits: maybe one will know what has to be done if the performance changes her, if it sets her apart from her passive attitude and makes her an active participant. Even when they do not know what they want the ‘ignorant’ spectator to do, they know as a default request that they have to switch her from passivity to activity. They become ‘masters’ for the spectator/student not in the sense that they want to ‘teach’ something literally but because they aim to bring about a form of awareness or a force of feeling or action. Not the spectator’s awareness, force and action though, but the ones they have put in their performance, as Rancière notes.
25
‘The Emancipated Spectator’ was Jacques Rancière’s keynote lecture given for the 5th International Summer Academy in Frankfurt on the 20th August 2004. Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator”. 2 May 2012.
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They want the ‘ignorant’ to see, feel and understand specific things and to subsequently proceed to specific actions as a result of what she has seen, felt and understood.
The opposition between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ spectatorship is based, according to Rancière, on similar presuppositions about looking and knowing, watching and acting, appearance and reality, which create an unequal relation between artists and spectators. It is ‘they’ on stage who know and are capable of doing, and ‘they’ in the auditorium who don’t know and cannot act. In these terms spectatorship acquires a negative meaning. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking is a questionable action. For looking means sitting motionless in front of an appearance without any power of intervention, without knowing the conditions of its production or the reality that is behind it. Hence, Rancière argues, comes the request from many theatre scholars and practitioners for a theatre without spectatorship. What has to be pursued, according to them, is a new theatre where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and they will become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers.
There is a reference here, according to Rancière, to the socio-political dimension of theatre through ideas that imply that a good community is a community that does not allow the mediation of theatre, a community whose collective virtues are directly incorporated in the living attitudes of its participants. And it is at this point that the same two names come up in his discussion; Brecht and Artaud are once more mentioned here as the two main figures that have to a large extent defined similar ideas and the theatrical discourse in general. According to the first artist ‘Theatre is an assembly
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where the people become aware of their situation and discuss their own interests’.26 Whereas for the second: ‘Theatre is the ceremony where the community is given the possession of its own energies’.27 Following their paradigms, Rancière argues, the theatrical mediation should either make spectators aware of their social situation and force them to act in consequence, or it should make them leave the position of spectators: instead of being in front of a spectacle, they should be surrounded by the performance, dragged into the circle of the action which gives them back their collective energy. In both cases theatre is defined as a self-suppressing mediation.
What if though, Rancière suggests, instead of suppressing the theatrical spectacle and conventions (that are supposed in their turn to suppress their audience), we respect them and treat the spectacle as a crucial third term, which both artists and audience refer to and interpret? In this way we might actually achieve communication’s immediacy much more successfully, since spectatorship is anyway ‘our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamt’.28 In this sense it constitutes the precondition of any communication. Spectators are therefore active as long as they have the opportunity and space to observe, select, compare and interpret what they see, according to Rancière. As long as they are able to make their poem with the poem that is performed in front of them, in the same way to what the performers have done. And it is in this way that they participate in the performance; by being able to tell their own story about the story which is in front of them. It is exactly in this power of translating what they are looking at in their own way, Rancière argues, that their collective power lies; within a force that makes any of them similar to any other in so far as her way does not look like any other.
26
Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator”, 2004. Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator”, 2004. 28 Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator”, 2004. 27
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This common power is the power of the equality of intelligence; a power that binds individuals together to the very extent that it keeps them apart from each other, able to weave with the same power their own way.
And this is also why there is no reason to request the transformation of spectators into actors, since any spectator already is an actor of her own story, in the same way that any actor is also the spectator of the same kind of story. This is what emancipation is all about: the blurring of the opposition between those who look and those who act; those who are individuals and those who are members of a collective body. It is in this sense that works such as those discussed here, call for a dramaturgical sensibility from all those involved in their creation; and among them of course also the individual spectator who creates her own work from the work she has in front of her within an event that is taken more for what it is, a spectacle for emancipated spectators, instead of a ‘password’ that enters us to a new life devoid of our socio-political problems. Because as Rancière posits:
We have heard so many speakers passing off their words as more than words, as passwords enabling us to enter a new life. We have seen so many spectacles boasting on being no more spectacles but ceremonials of community. […] Breaking away with the phantasms of the Word made flesh and the spectator turned active, knowing that words are only words and spectacles only spectacles may help us better understand how words, stories and performances can help us change something in the world where we are living.29
29
Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator”, 2004.
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Although more concrete discussions on aspects of spectatorship and the role of spectators in the creation of drama and dramaturgy today will take place in the following (research) stories drawing on specific artistic practices, what this story aims to do is to form the ground for these discussions. Every time the talk focuses on the spectator then, this will be done with the ‘emancipated spectator’ in mind and it will always refer to one such spectator, but not as an attempt to suggest any revolutionary act though, or to stand in an absolute way on one of the two edges of the line that was drawn in the beginning of this story. During the years of my research practice the relation of my work to its audience has been an issue of particular attention and thought. I have mainly created live works that took place in theatre spaces and encountered their spectators in conventional auditoriums. The works of other artists that I discuss were also largely made within a similar frame. There will also be very difference cases here though, where the works (both others’ and mine) presented could be considered as more ‘interactive’, inviting the audience not only to physically stand closer to them but also to create them with their actions. In all cases, standing in the middle of the line that connects absolute (and possibly less effective or useful) distinctions and binaries of inactive thought and active physical participation, of imposed shut-up-ness and mental inequality, of passive darkness and socially transforming sunshine, the works discussed here have been particularly interested in preserving and respecting the emancipated spectator’s silence and position, looking for ways to dramaturgically open the necessary space that the attention of all those involved in the event (artists and audience) need. In these terms, these works have explored possible distinctions between actions of participation and physical involvement and intrusion, or between ideas of action and reaction put into an instant interaction and those offering time to the onlooker, as well as
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the choice to co-author and co-create a work if she wants to, in the same way that (and at the same time as) the performers do.
Sharing a realization similar to that described by Matthew Goulish then, the realization that all the performers and actions on stage make up only half of the work, whereas ‘silence makes up the other half’, all works discussed here aim to delve deeper into understandings and practices of this silence, a silence that is not understood, of course, as a literal one.30 In a post-Cagean era it seems almost impossible to even imply that such kind of silence can exist. The works and writings of John Cage seem to have satisfactorily argued that we can talk about silence only in metaphorical terms, in the sense that we can never experience a state of absolute silence, since there is always something there to be heard. After his renowned statement that, even in the completely ‘silent’ state of a soundless chamber, one is still able to hear the sounds of one’s own blood and one’s own heart beat, silence is mainly being conceived within the new terms he introduced.31 What can this metaphorical understanding of silence mean within the theatrical frame? It means that this is a silence made of the various reactions of the audience, their murmur, coughing, giggling, laughter, even their words; it is made of all the similar reactions of the performers as well; it then includes all ‘the voices of silence’ that Virilio talked about earlier.
Forced Entertainment has made a quite interesting attempt to approach such silence, in their Bloody Mess. I remember sitting in the auditorium watching Davis Freeman and Jerry Killick, after almost an hour and a half of total stage mess, proposing to us all to keep a mutual ‘beautiful five-minute silence’ as they call it. This is ‘something we can
30 31
Goulish, Matthew. 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance. London: Routledge, 2000, p.154. Cage, John. Silence. London: Marion Boyars, 2006 (first published in Great Britain in1968), p.51.
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all do together’, Killick says in the performance I am watching; this is ‘something that can bring people together’, is written in the performance’s text that I am reading. No matter how hard they try, though, for almost fifteen minutes, they constantly fail to maintain this silence, as they cannot stop filling it with a list of different kinds of possible silences that we could do, confirming in this way once more that silence in theatre (and everywhere else) is more an experience than a literalism for both those on stage as well as for the audience; it is a ground for creation upon which various stories and the event itself unfold. Thus there is the kind of silence you have when you are alone in the countryside, the kind of silence you have right before a five-year old girl blows her birthday candles, the kind of silence you have when a baby stops crying after many hours, etcetera. When this list has been completed and we are finally ready for the ‘actual’ silence, Robin Arthur naively asks which one of these silences we should do, implicitly commenting once more on the fact that silence constitutes just the metaphor used for the various kinds of deep or stupid or serious or funny experiences. Then it is a deal: each one of us should choose whichever she wants, her favorite silence; and do it. So here we are: among the thousand options of our individual silent experiences in theatre. Even after all our agreements on which kind of silence we will do, though, or about how we are going to time that silence, etcetera, we never succeed in actually keeping it. There is always a murmur, or steps on stage, or the gorilla walking in space on its pushchair; or there is Richard Lowdon with his endless ‘shhhhhhhhh!’ to the audience as if he could re-impose our already given silent state or stop our inevitable responses, murmurs, laughers; all the sounds that our silence is made of. Apart from all these interruptions of the ‘actual’ silence, a series of disagreements also takes place on stage, which has to do with whether it is silence or not if we have some music on, whether it is silence or not when there is a buzz coming from the speakers, whether it is
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silence or not when there is a noise but you cannot hear it etcetera. Of course eventually we beautifully fail to keep one ‘beautiful five-minute silence’. Among all those other silences though, among all objections, reactions, interruptions, disagreements, voices, we are indeed ‘brought together’. In silence.
Leaving aside binary edges, it is in a very similar sense that silence will be discussed here through works that take place in more or less conventional auditoriums and are based on a more or less explicit interchange with their audience; works that explore the silent condition of spectatorship in the different types and forms it can take, in the different ways it can operate and activate the audience, in the various replies its distinct operational modes provide to questions such as what an audience is or can be; what kind of spectators we want to be, what it means to ‘participate’ in a work; and how close or far from the stage one such action is placed, etcetera. In all cases these works see conventional aspects of spectatorship, such as its silent, seated frame, as the condition for emancipated spectators and performers to create. As a condition that allows for individual processes that do not dissolve into the group and are not disconnected from it, as a condition that defines the body as a space for negotiation that measures the distance and the closeness from the other within the event, as a condition that no matter how many pauses or words or sounds or actions it includes, it does not intrude the spectator’s mind or body but offers space and time to her attention, within an event that sees itself just as an event, a crucial third term which both creators and audience refer to and interpret, not as a password to another kind of life but as a condition that lets the sun shine in theatre, contributing more in this way to a possible change in the world we are living.
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II. Short (Research) Stories
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In Pieces Fragmented plots in experimental drama (on plot)
‘By plot, I mean here the structuring of the events’, the greatest of all dramatic elements. This plot constitutes an imitation of an action that is complete and whole and has some magnitude. ‘Whole’ is that which has a clear beginning, middle and end, for well-constructed plots should neither begin nor end at any chance point. Furthermore, the artistically made plot should not only have these in fixed order to one another but it should also possess a definite size which does not depend on chance, one that can be taken in in a single view; hence a length that makes the plot easy to remember and still perspicuous. This could be defined as the length in which, with things happening in unbroken sequence, a shift takes place either from bad to good fortune or from good to bad. The action imitated within the frame of a plot thus has to be both unified and complete, and its component events have to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated. For an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible extra difference is not really a part of the whole. The development of the events in a plot must therefore grow out of the very structure of the plot itself, in such a way that on the basis of what has happened previously this particular outcome follows. Finally, do not make an epic mass of incidents into a plot (‘by “epic” I mean that which includes many stories’).1
If the above advise and instruction from Aristotle relating to the construction of a drama’s plot (ideas that to a large extent constituted the base of theatrical creation for
1
This paragraph mimics the voice of Aristotle, consisting of his ideas as these are found in: Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Gerald F. Else. USA: The University of Michigan Press, 1983 (first edition 1970). [All references to Aristotle’s Poetics made from hereon in the text refer to this edition of the work – unless otherwise stated.]
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several centuries and may still continue to do so in the so called ‘Western traditional theatre’) were to be given to experimental theatre and dance artists, then the drama created within this area would definitely seem to be quite a disobedient one. For if plot, the structuring of the various events that constitute in their summation the dramatic action, is indeed one of the most significant parts of a stage work, then works such as those discussed here have definitely attempted to explore alternative understandings of the completeness, wholeness and magnitude that this dramatic action should have. It is within the frame of such explorations that we witness today explicitly fragmented works of a length that may vary from some minutes to several hours, works with no specific beginning, middle or end, works with a totally broken sequence of events, ununified works, incomplete works, works where what follows has nothing to do with what precedes it, works that do make an ‘epic’ mass of incidents into a plot; and nevertheless these are works that can still be considered as whole and complete, only now in a completely different sense.
In May 2009 I am in Athens working on the new project of my research practice. It is called 50’00’’- Short stories and its performers are asked to create stories for the stage, which they obsessively narrate, one after the other, without stopping for precisely fifty minutes, until the clock that is counting the event’s duration rings. One day, during our rehearsal, P. goes up to his microphone and declares:
‘I am sleeping. What you hear may never have happened. It may be a lie. A dream. Something I wanted to happen but it didn’t. It may symbolize something. It may be a parable. I
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don’t know. I am sleeping. And I have the right to say whatever I want. WHATEVER I WANT.’2
I am standing there struck, looking at him, trying to understand what he is doing. Is he asleep? Is the utterance ‘I am sleeping’ a performative one? Does it do what it says? What kind of sleep is this and what does it do? What kind of story is this? How can one witness one’s sleep-words? What is this space they create? And what kind of plots, of structuring of events, could be created within that space? Valentina Valentini argues that to say ‘I am asleep’ within performance’s frame denotes exactly the time and place where performance inhabits because, as she notes ‘time in contemporary performance is “dream-time”, the condition between sleeping and waking, the moment before awakening’;3 which is of course the time of dreaming, a place full of recurrences, repetitions and hesitations. Barthes – drawing on the opening passage of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu that is exactly about this state of half-waking or half-sleeping – speaks about the statement ‘I am asleep’ as a grammatical scandal. This constitutes for him a paradoxical sleep since ‘to say “I’m asleep” is in effect, literally as impossible as to say “I’m dead”’.4 What does this paradoxical sleep do then within performance’s frame? It leads us to a ‘“false consciousness”: a consciousness out of order, vacillating, intermittent wherein the logical carapace of Time is attacked […] A man who is asleep [read: that Proustian sleep which is a half waking] holds in a circle around him the course of the hours, the order of years and worlds… but their ranks can mingle, can break’.5
2
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance Text Valentini, Valentina. “Encuclopedia: Fiction/Non Fiction”. Theaterschrift 5-6 (1994) “On dramaturgy” p.122. 4 Barthes, The Rustle of Language p.280. 5 Barthes, The Rustle of Language p.281. 3
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What this story argues is that the half-sleeping, half-waking state described above can be used as a useful frame for the understanding of the way plots are being constructed in experimental drama today. The structuring of the events in such works could then be seen as a constellation of awakening. Or else, as a sleep that establishes another kind of logic based on what Barthes calls ‘false consciousness’, a sleep that denies our thinking as a linear or precise process. Or else it can be seen as a waking dream, as the moment just before the world gets put nicely together again and things start to become familiar and causally connected. Works made within this sleep, this waking dream, under such consciousness, rest on principles that move away from the abovementioned Aristotelian ones and towards the disorganization of time, the reconstruction of the relation between time and space, the working with rhythm as a force of a highly complex system of moments. In this sense, the structure of these works can be understood more, as Barthes notes, as ‘rhapsodic, i.e. (etymologically) sewn’.6 From the Greek verb ράπτειν (raptein), which means to sew or stitch or stitch together. The fragments of experimental dramas/rhapsodies thus sewn together shift between the dramatic and the epic, the tragic and comic, the high and low, without following the strict chronology or the linear narrative of Aristotle anymore. In this way, one could argue that they constitute an appropriate response to the fragmentation of the modern world. Because if indeed:
after the death of the God (Nietzsche), the end of grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we would want to develop a poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database.7
6 7
Barthes, The Rustle of Language p281 (emphasis given in the original). Manovich, Len. Cited in O’Gorman, E-Crit -Digital media, critical theory, and the humanities p.12.
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The plots of experimental dramas, seen as this necessary development of a poetics and aesthetics of our contemporary fragmented database, are characterized by a voice other than the unified and complete one of earlier dramatic voices, by a voice that lacks a previous sense of authority. This voice is, according to Jean Pierre Sarrazac, more a hesitant one full of questions, doubts and palinodes; a voice of the multiplication of possibilities.8 An uncertain voice that presents the process of shaping and communicating its rhapsodic compositions as a live act; as an event that as Della Pollock describes: ‘anxiously crosses various stories, theories, texts, intertexts, and spheres of practice, unable to settle into a clear, linear course, neither willing not able to stop moving, restless, transient and transitive, traversing spatial and temporal borders’.9
How can one then approach such restless plots offered in pieces? How can one approach the plot that derives when one asks her performers to follow a list like this:10
1. Silence is Sexy –Ensemble 2. A man’s voice –solo(E.) 3. Denmark-India via Kavala –duet(P. and E.) 4. Kastelorizo –duet(I.and P.) 5. Automatic Translation –solo(E.) 6. Suicide Note –solo(P.) 7. For all those who were not there –solo(I.) 8. The tastes –Ensemble 9. Untitled 1/ex The Young One –solo(I.)
8
Sarrazac, Jean Pierre. Cited in Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance p.191. Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing”. The Ends of Performance. Eds. Phelan, Peggy and Lane, Jill. New York and London: New York University, 1998, p.91. 10 50’00’’ - Short Stories, Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance – Such lists, different each time, were given to the performers just before their entrance on stage. Through following the structures suggested in them, the performers would construct the event’s plot, a fragmented narrations of all kinds of stories. 9
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10. Untitled 2 –trio(P.,T.and E.) 11. Not Now –solo(T.) 12. Project for a Video-Clip or Triffon Iglesias and Sultey Houston or simply ‘cult’–trio(P.,I.and T.) 13. Thoughts I did while walking –duet(T. and P.) 14. May day/My day –solo(E.) 15. Together with them –solo(I.) 16. Exercise –solo(P.) 17. Comics –duet(P. and E.) 18. Constitution 1986 –solo(T.) 19. Constitution 1989 –solo(P.) 20. A man’s voice -solo(I.) 21. Obsession –duet(T.and E.) 22. Questions –solo(P.) 23. James Bond –duet(E. and P.) 24. The man with the wrong name –solo(E.) 25. Solo –solo(P.) 26. Denmark-India via Kavala(part 2) –duet(P.and T.) 27. Rain is a daily phenomenon here –trio(E., T.and P.) 28. Morning rain/classroom –solo(P.) 29. Probably Seferis otherwise Madam Bovary -solo(T.) 30. Be ready –solo(P.) 31. Copy Paste 80’s –solo(P.) 32. I kiss you like we used to kiss –solo(I.) 33. All will pass –solo(T.) 34. The other bed –solo(E.)
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35. We are many –solo(T.) 36. Mpou! –solo(P.) 37. Many bad words about you –solo(T.) 38. Questions –solo(E.) 39. A man’s voice –solo(T.) 40. Countdown –ensemble 41. Thriller –trio(E.,P.and I.)
Or how to approach the plot suggested here:
Socks are gloves for the feet. Snow is cold. Water is the same thing as ice. In America things are bigger. America is a country. Korea is also a country. Some men have sex appeal. Blind people cannot see anything. Burglars are men that go into houses and take things which do not belong to them. Mist is like smoke but it comes without fire. The telephone is an amazing invention. A mouse that is dead is sometimes referred to as a specimen. Love is difficult to describe. Fire is what happens when things get very hot.11
Or here: [see: Video No1]12
Works such as the above explicitly construct their dramatic plot far from the Aristotelian demand for strictly linear, causal connections among a very specific, limited number of incidents. Such linear dramaturgies are seldom to be found in
11 12
Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First. Creation: Tim Etchells. 2008. Performance. Reply to All. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2008. Performance.
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contemporary theatre and dance anyway, as Van Kerkhoven argues. What on the contrary constitutes a much more common case today is a dramaturgy that exposes the vulnerability of its building blocks, appearing as a process of solving puzzles and learning to deal with complexity.13 Etchells calls this dramaturgy a dramaturgy of ‘separation and combination’ and describes it as a process wherein one leaves things unconnected in parallels tracks. Within such dramaturgy then individual parts of a work, its ‘component events’ as Aristotle calls them, are allowed an autonomy, and interact with each other in this autonomy. The distinct fragments in this case are speaking across their gaps and resonate in terms of each other.14
It is exactly one such dramaturgy that creates plots like the ones given above. Etchells talks about his work Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First as a shifting, decidedly imprecise and badly organized taxonomy. The show constitutes for him of a monologue in the form of a free-associating list that tumbles from topic to topic in an attempt to describe, define and explain the world through language. This results in a plot structured as an accumulation of un-linked facts in a performance that makes the viewer highly aware of its gaps in its grasp on the world; of the effort of consciousness to seize and define everything that it encounters; and of the narrative and conceptual possibilities created through its evolving sequence of dissociated facts and opinions.15
Such plots, based on listing and cataloguing through language acts, constitute a quite common practice both in the work of Forced Entertainment (FE) as well as in the
13
Van Kerkhoven, “Looking Without Pencil in the Hand” p.146. Etchells, Tim. Body: language talks, a conversation with Guy Cools. 11 Oct 2010. Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, London (personal notes). 15 Etchells, Tim on Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First. 10 February 2012. 14
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personal work of Etchells, their artistic director. Works diverse in their duration and rationale such as Speak Bitterness (a line of people making confessions from behind a long table for over six hours, created by FE in 1994), Quizoola! (a durational catalogue of written questions and improvised answers, created by FE in 1996), And on the thousandth night… (an entirely improvised compendium of stories developed by a group of eight performers over a period of six hours, created by FE in 2000) and Tomorrow’s Parties (a list of utopian and dystopian projections into the future, created by FE in 2011); but also works such as That night follows day (a performance about the relationship between children and adults made for a group of sixteen young people aged between eight and fourteen, created by Etchells with the Belgian Victoria company in 2007) and Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First, use as a key element of their plot the construction of a list that itemizes, catalogues and stores data, presenting its acausally connected contents as temporarily equivalent, without transparent comment or opinion. This act of listing does not merge or blur items together. On the contrary, as Etchells describes, based on a seriality that implies but never fully delivers narrative, such lists allow their items to stand alone and together like a menu or line of ingredients rather than a soup.16
Turner and Behrndt discuss in a similar way works that construct plots that challenge the possibility of coherent storytelling and are organized according to a different compositional logic from that of the linear story. In these works the relationship between structure and content is seen as a dynamic one and is continually kept in process constructing a composition in time and space, as opposed to an event
16
Etchells, Tim. “‘Confess to Everything’: A Note on Speak Bitterness (2008) and Speak Bitterness (1994-)”. The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook . Eds Gale, Maggie B. and Deeney, John F. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, pp.734-735.
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understood as prefixed and resolved.17 These, according to Turner and Behrndt, are plots that have become quite common particularly in the past twenty years and are described once more as being based on an episodic structure that lacks linear plot development and owes little to the convention of causality, consisting of unconnected episodes rather than unified actions. Moving in the opposite direction to that suggested by Aristotle then, such plots, even when they preserve a certain, stable seriality in the way they construct their fragments, seriously disrupt the Aristotelian logic of the organized ‘complete’ and ‘whole’ plot. Instead of telling one linear coherent story with a beginning, middle and end, what these plots do instead is to ‘attack the logical carapace of Time’ through their ‘waking dreams’ that Barthes talked about earlier, and to present unconnected episodes that stand both alone and together at the same time. Nevertheless such practices are still following a compositional logic and they still imply (if not fully deliver) a narrative, as Etchells argued. Thus the question returns: How can we approach the compositional logic of plots where what we get is ‘a cluster of parallel, intersecting, juxtaposing, colliding stories and narratives, producing new narratives from their very collisions’?18
The term ‘narrative’ is commonly defined with an emphasis on structuredness and the organization of events, instead of the (maybe more expected) linguistic nature of the narrative text. Bal defines narrative as the structure of ‘a text in which an agent relates (“tells”) a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings or a combination thereof’, whereas Monika Fludernik also connects narrative with the relationships that are applied to sequences of events and she refers to Gérard Genette’s distinction between ‘narration’ (the narrative act of the narrator), the ‘narrative’ (text),
17 18
Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance pp.29-30. Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance p.33.
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and the ‘story’ (that the narrator reports, represents or signifies in the narrative).19 José Angel García Landa and Susana Onega, in their turn, define narrative once more as ‘the semiotic representation of a series of events meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way’ and mention Poetics as the first narratological treatise wherein Aristotle offered ‘extraordinary narratological insights which are applicable to all genres that use plots’.20 The Aristotelian definition of ‘narrative’ is thus, according to Landa and Onega, ‘a work with a plot’ (examples of such works in ancient Greece were epic poetry, tragedy and comedy), and it is exactly this connection that reveals, as Fludernik notes, the ‘significance of action sequences for the definition of narrative’, bringing together ‘narrative’ and Aristotle’s ‘plot’ or ‘mythos’, as terms all referring to a structural process common to dramatic and literary genres.21
Once it becomes clear that narrative processes/plots deal more with inventing the synthesis, the organization of and the relationship between the events of a work, rather than with these individual events themselves (which are maybe more connected with the ‘story’), what remains is to ‘understand’ this narrative/plot, according to Paul Ricoeur; and to understand ‘in the case of narrative, is grasping the operation that unifies into one whole and complete action the miscellany’.22 Ricoeur’s Time And Narrative not only focuses on issues of understanding structural processes of narratives and plots but he also does this specifically through discussing Aristotle’s ideas, a fact that can be quite helpful for the discussions taking place here. The theory of plot in Aristotle is viewed so
19
See: Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985, p.5; and Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. Trans. Patricia Häusler-Greenfield and Monika Fludernik. London and New York: Routledge, 2009, p.2. Bal offers another quite helpful example for the distinction between the narrative and the story. The story of Tom Thumb, she notes, a widely known story at least in Europe, has been read in different narrative texts by its millions of readers. 20 Landa, José Angel García and Onega, Susana, Eds. Narratology: An Introduction. London: Longman, 1996, p.3. 21 Fludernik, An Introduction to Narratology, p.5. 22 Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative -Volume I. Trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984, p.x.
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strongly from the side of the intelligible organization of a narrative, Ricoeur argues, that it remains completely silent about the relationship between this poetic activity and temporal experience. Within these terms, in Poetics the three features that characterize the definition of ‘mythos’/’plot’ as the organization of events (i.e. completeness, wholeness and an appropriate magnitude) far from being oriented towards an investigation into the temporal character of this organization, are fixed on its logical character. Subsequently, a plot is ‘whole’, according to Aristotle, if it has a beginning, middle and end but only in virtue of poetic composition. This means that what defines the beginning is not the absence of some antecedent but the absence of necessity in the succession. The same goes for the middle and the end, all of them understood as the effects of the ordering of the poem. The idea of a ‘whole’ is therefore put on the absence of chance and on conformity to the requirements of necessity or probability governing the logical connections of succession, and not on ideas of a beginning, middle and end taken from experience. The same goes for magnitude, which has to take the space and time of a reversal from bad fortune to good or the opposite. Although this length is certainly temporal, Ricoeur notes, it is once more the work’s time and not the time of events in the world. It is in this sense that time is excluded in Poetics, according to him. ‘The world unfolded by every narrative work though is always a temporal world’, he continues. A narrative is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience; in the same way, time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative.23 I would like to argue that it is exactly from such ideas that one should start thinking about the way that experimental narratives can be seen as whole and complete, through creating temporal worlds that portray features of human temporal experience. But I will return to this again a bit later.
23
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative -Volume I, p.3.
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In close connection with issues of time and its relation to narrative and plot, Ricoeur discusses another very interesting issue too. The imitation of action that the plot is, he argues, ‘does not reach its intended term through the dynamism of the poetic text alone. It also requires a spectator or reader’.24 This, for Ricoeur, constitutes a fact that reveals another side of poetic composition, equally important but more or less equally neglected too in Poetics. Although, as he notes, in Rhetoric, Aristotle subordinates the order of discourse to its effects on its audience, in Poetics he indicates no explicit interest in the communication of the work to the public. He creates instead a treatise about composition with almost no concern for anyone who receives the result. He thus talks about ‘a poetics that puts its principal accent on the internal structures of the text, of locking itself up within the closure of the text’.25
Instead of critiquing the two abovementioned issues as somewhat problematic aspects of Poetics though, Ricoeur suggests that we look for views expressed within the work itself that deals with them. Regarding the latter issue, for example, he posits that Poetics does not speak of structure but of ‘structuration’; and he defines structuration as an oriented activity that is only completed in the spectator or the reader. Aristotle does this (though in an implicit way) from the very beginning of his work, when he depends for the definition of tragedy – among other things – on the feelings of fear and pity that it should engender. For it is, of course, in the spectator that these properly tragic emotions flower. Turner and Behrndt stress also the fact that Aristotle’s compositional principles place ‘particular emphasis on the ways in which dramatic structure can shape audience experience’, ensuring the careful orchestration of one principal action whose unity and wholeness should be easily perceived by the audience and thus have a strong effect on
24 25
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative -Volume I, p.46. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative -Volume I, p.48.
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them.26 Although the reception of the dramatic work is not a major category of Poetics, this is one of its very characteristic points, where one could argue that Aristotle overtakes the movement from the work to the spectator. And he does that in a way that moves in opposition to – and therefore is able to create an interesting dialogue with – dominant ideas on spectatorship today (including those of Rancière, but also those expressed in this thesis, about a spectator that acts independently of the artist’s intentions, creating her own work from the work she has in front of her), implying that artists (being themselves writers, directors or performers of a piece) are able to know and construct in advance the effect that an event will have on its spectators.
To return to what interests us in this story though, I would like to suggest that there are other points too where we could detect not only connections between the work of Aristotle and issues of spectatorship but also connections of this work and the issue of time, which, for Ricoeur, also seems neglected in Poetics. And these are moreover connections that could have something to say about the way that experimental plots are being structured too. When considering the epic and its connection with the requirements of completeness and wholeness, Aristotle opposes two sorts of unity to each other: on the one hand, the ‘temporal unity’ found in epic poetry, which characterizes ‘a single period of time with all that happened therein to one or more persons, no matter how little relation one event may have had with another’; and, on the other hand, the ‘dramatic unity’ that characterizes ‘a single action (which forms a whole, complete in itself, having a beginning, a middle, and an end)’.27 In close connection with this distinction Aristotle also talks about the opposition between episodic and simple plots. The former ones are again best used in epic poetry (whereas
26 27
Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Perfomrance, 2008, p.21. Aristotle cited in Ricoeur, Time and Narrative -Volume I, 1984, p.39.
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drama disapproves them) and are defined as the plots in which the episodes follow one another in no probable or inevitable sequence, instead of following one because of another in a causal sequence, as is the case in dramatic forms.
One could argue though that the Aristotelian descriptions of temporal unity and episodic plot describe in a quite accurate way the processes that experimental dramatic works follow towards the construction of their narratives, taking the single period of the time of the event to put therein all that can happen to one or more persons, no matter how little relation one event may have with another. In this sense they move towards what Aristotle defines as ‘epic’. And although it is of course not easy for the Brechtian theory to not resonate here (a theory that has certainly influenced in many ways later theatrical developments), I would like to argue that, unlike Brecht, these experimental works do not aim to propose their episodic plots as a political device that aims to create a rupture between drama and its audience, offering the latter a necessary critical distance from the event, and thus able to result in possible social changes. On the contrary, these works use the characteristics of plots defined by Aristotle as ‘epic’, as purely dramatic ones, in order to achieve a further intimacy and closeness with their audience through processes that organize time after the manner of a narrative and thus make it human, as Ricoeur described. Aligning with his demands and following features of contemporary temporal experience, which appears equally fragmented and dispersed, I would argue that such works construct a structural device for drama that explores further the potentials of its plots, its completeness and wholeness.
In order to approach the ‘wholeness’ and ‘completeness’ of such dramatic plots though, we should not focus so much on whether or not they follow Aristotle’s definition of the
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terms but instead try, as Ricoeur argued, to ‘understand’ them, in the sense of ‘grasping the operation that unifies into one whole and complete action the miscellany’. Or to put it differently: if we continue to accept the hypothesis that these plots still draw on Aristotle’s ideas regarding the necessary qualities of wholeness and completeness that a well-constructed dramatic plot should have, we should now look at the particular ways in which such fragmented narratives understand this unity. Janža talks about conventional forms of drama as the structuring of an arc; there the dramaturgical work consists of constructing this arc as a kind of smooth and functioning structure going from the beginning, reaching the peak and creating an epilogue. He then wonders what would be the analog to this in experimental art. The biggest difference between conventional forms of theatre and more experimental ones, Janža argues, is that the former seem to be inscribed in a humanistic tradition that always tends to somehow tell the ‘truth’ about reality and the world; a truth that will be eternal, a truth that remains.28 And of course, the more stable the truths, the more stable the structures are that are needed for these truths to be expressed. On the contrary, experimental theatrical forms most of the time have the structure of a broken line, the structure of a broken arc. These broken lines though don’t necessarily mean that the structure will fall apart. For although we see the holes and the breaks in between, somehow the structure still holds. The question then, for Janža is: what is holding the structure together in this case?
If the composition of experimental stage works seems arbitrary and broken in its fragmentation, it is only seemingly so. Because although in this kind of composition we have a complex, episodic plot where we cannot simply identify a single story that combines all dramatic elements, we still look for the unifying force that folds these
28
Janža, “From Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical. Self-Interview” p.55.
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many strata into a work. The space to look for this force though is not placed only on stage anymore. It is also placed on ‘the other side of poetic composition’ that Ricoeur talked about, which is to be found in each one of the spectators sitting in the auditorium, who receive the work in their very distinct ways while spectating. As Barthes has argued then, we could say that the unity now is not in the origin of a work but in its destination.29 More specifically and drawing on earlier discussions, we could say that the unity and wholeness of a plot is now placed in the ‘waking dreams’ of those involved in the event, performers and audience, who receive the work during the time between sleeping and waking up, which is the time of the performance. It is in this sense that structures of narratives made from disparate, diverse, juxtaposed elements and moments; structures of narratives made from a combination of stories, tracks, or ‘strata’, which produce new meanings not inherent in any of their distinct elements if viewed singly; structures wherein the spectator is expected to fill in the gaps, make choices and adopt a personal position towards the drama placed in front of her; ‘still hold’, to use Janža’s words. Etchells describes such plots as rather ‘spacious’, since they create a very well calculated disconnection of events to allow the spectator’s act of looking to connect tracks in any way she wants, to guess the constituency of the listed items and unpack their individual meaning.30 In other words, to provide space to the spectator to make her own drama from the drama she has in front of her, in any way she wants.
It may be that my thoughts for the construction of such acausally connected, ‘spacious’ plots of ‘waking dreams’, which work as an invitation to the audience to fill in the gaps, were initiated when I heard P.’s story during that rehearsal of 50’00’’- Short Stories. And I decided to explore further such plots and their relation to time by structuring the
29 30
Barthes, The Rustle of Language p.54. Etchells, “‘Confess to Everything’: A Note on Speak Bitterness (2008) and Speak Bitterness (1994-)” pp.734-735.
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show as a series of multiple stories with no clear beginning, middle or end, where different people narrated different stories in a different order each time, within an event that was always interrupted at an unknown, random moment (that of the 50th minute of the show). Such an approach nevertheless produced a whole and complete narrative in its own right that took place live in time and space and was continually kept in process, with the four performers having to decide each night anew about the structure of the event, not based on the need for causal connections and strict coherence that Aristotle asked for, but on another kind of need: that of the people involved in the event and their temporal experience; that of the rhythm requested by the very specific event that they (audience and performers) were constructing together in each show; that of their waking dream.
It may also be though that such thoughts were already there from the very beginning of my research exploration on the way contemporary dramaturgy deals with the creation of its plots; already there from the creation of the first project of my research practice, Reply to All, another list that ‘tumbles from topic to topic as a decidedly imprecise and badly organized taxonomy’ so that it follows the unity and completeness of a temporal experience that ‘makes the viewer highly aware of its gaps in its grasp on the world’, and at the same time highly aware as well ‘of the narrative and conceptual possibilities created through the evolving sequence of dissociated facts and opinions’. In all cases, what I aimed at was to push to its limits Aristotle’s demand for well-structured plots with concrete beginning, middle and end, which leave nothing to chance. To exhaust his demand for works whose component events are so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; or for works that do not make an epic mass of incidents into one plot. What I aimed was to
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claim from within those limits wholeness and completeness for the plots I created; to demand for such fragmented narratives –proceeding in leaps, attacking a causally connected sequential chain of events – to be considered as equally perspicuous and perceptible as other more linearly structured ones; if not according to Aristotle’s logically constructed plots, then surely according to Barthes’s ‘false consciousness’. What I aimed for was to explore how a dramatic plot operates during that moment just before the world gets put nicely together and things start to become familiar again. And hence, instead of constructing one fixed narrative for my stage works, I created plots where the relationship between structure and content was always an open one, suggesting endless series and organizations of the work’s component events, within structures that changed in every show. This was the thinking frame within which my ‘rhapsodies’ were created, offering to those involved in them space to fill in the gaps and construct their own narratives. I suppose this is how they must have worked for all of us (the audience, my collaborators and myself). I suppose so. I don’t know. We were sleeping anyway. What eventually happened could never have happened. It could be a lie. A dream. Something we wanted to happen but it didn’t. It could symbolize something. It could be a parable. I don’t know. We were sleeping. And we had the right to say whatever we wanted. WHATEVER WE WANTED.
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How Do We Understand Something? Task-based plots in experimental drama (on plot)
Even before his book 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance starts, Matthew Goulish overflows its space with some questions and their possible replies. These are questions that seem unable to rest only in one page or in a single articulation but they are constantly present in his whole work, his whole book, even before or after it, inside and outside it, constituting the base of his thinking and research process. Before we even open the book and start our reading, as soon as we hold it in our hands and carelessly look at its cover, not paying too much attention yet, here we are already confronted with those restless questions:
How do we understand something? We understand something by approaching it. How do we approach something? We approach it from any direction. We approach it using our eyes, our ears, our noses, our intellects, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with childhood. We use pain. We use history. We take a safe route or a dangerous one. We discover our approach and follow it.1
Following a similar line of thought to that found in the opening page of Goat Island’s website (a company Goulish worked for twenty years with), where they state that ‘they have discovered a performance by making it’, Goulish once more suggests that when working on performance what one mainly works with is a restless force to search and search even more, search from all possible directions and in all ways. What one is
1
Goulish, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance, front cover.
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searching for is being realized only later and it does not seem to matter so much as does this restless need to look for it. It is then through this continuous quest for the discovery of her approaches, and not through any other sort of in advanced knowledge of what she is searching for or of her final product, that one is able to understand something.
What if I attempt a look backwards then to see what I have been looking for, to discover what I have made, to research my approach so that I understand it? What if I look back at the force that, without knowing what it was looking for, nevertheless kept looking? What if I turn my gaze at what has been created within the frame of this research practice because of that force? What will I see there? To reply to the question in a quite practical way, what I see behind me is six live works, Reply to all, 50’00’’- Short Stories, Short Stories, A Single Voice - 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ, The Words Between Us and Lookatmenowandhereiam. What else? The text you now have in your hands, these Short (Research) Stories, another exploration of my research approach, this time in writing. What did all these projects create and how did they create it, while I was researching? What was the approach I followed during this research? What was the route I took so that I kept searching? Looking back I see that all these projects are structured around some very specific rules, some tasks set in advance, which I then followed towards the structure of each work. These are tasks that I followed in the past four years in order to proceed with what now has been shaped as my research practice, an endless process of re-searching, searching and then searching again. How can I understand this approach? Why have I followed it? Looking back at it, how did these task-based navigations, these structures of works, created always according to some very specific rules, work for me?
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Janža talks about a dramaturgical feature that deals in a particular way with the time of a performance. This is a feature that has appeared in several theatre and dance works particularly during the last ten-fifteen years, as he notes. A feature that connects once more with Ricoeur’s demand for dramatic narratives to relate explicitly to the human temporal experience, I would add. This feature is called ‘predictability preservation’ and it is present in works that clearly show from their very beginning the structure and rules upon which they are based, their ‘initial scenario’ as Janža calls it, only to then just follow it, stay with it, preserve this predictability. Nevertheless, the spectator does not somehow say ‘Ah, now I know what will happen’. This does not constitute an answer anymore or a way to respond to these works. Because since you already know what will happen, you have to somehow find another way to relate to what you witness taking place in front of you. One of the most well known artists making these kind of works – works where, although the viewer knows fairly early that something will go on like this till the end, yet she still finds the performance very dynamic and communicative – is of course the French choreographer Jérôme Bel, Janža notes.2
Etchells also refers to Bel’s work as being legendary for the simple structures employed in it, where the events of an entire performance can often be governed by the patient observance and manipulation of a single rule.3 He then goes on to discuss the way that an ostensibly confining and predictable rule can create a new richness of dramaturgical possibility in which the watcher, attuned to the game, its language and limits, becomes sensitized to the smallest variations. Because, as mentioned above, when one knows the rules of the game exactly and that what one sees is what one gets, then one has to find another way to relate to it, another way to look. And that is when the smallest variations
2
Janža, “From Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical. Self-Interview” pp.54-61. Etchells, Tim. “More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid” in Live. Ed. Heathfield, Adrian. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, pp.198-199. 3
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of the ‘known’ and of the ‘same’ seem to matter differently to one’s attention. That is when a different meaning and pleasure derive from the ‘small’ and the ‘stupid’ and the ‘less’. Etchells talks particularly about Bel’s The Show Must Go On, a deceptively simple choreography, as he describes it, in which a blunt and singular illustration of the lyrics of popular songs is preferred to any supposed nuance of creative spin or depth.4 Within the frame of such choreography, all that is asked of the performers is to listen to the lyrics of those songs and to illustrate them in a quite literal and direct way (e.g. to move one specific part of their body while the song ‘I Like to Move It’ is heard). The show thus evolves in a quite straightforward manner, as a series of songs illustrated in all different kinds of ways, separated from each other by the time that it takes Giles Gentner – the event’s DJ who is sitting in the first row of the auditorium with his back to the audience – to change the CD playing and put in the next one. This structure establishes something of a convention for the work, declaring that things there will take their time. And Bel, Etchells notes, knows well how to work with time so that he creates his ‘conceptual time-based sculptures’.5 Recognizing that theatre is a game constructed so that people can look at other people, Bel takes time to explore ways to dig deeper into this act of looking by producing deceptively transparent frames to continuously create vantage points on the faces, bodies and movements of those on stage. And in this way, he offers time to his audience for more careful, detailed, deep looks at the way one moves her wrist or the way one dips his eyes etcetera. The uniformity of the line, the coolness of the performers as they approach their task, the slowness of change in the piece and its simplicity of movement, all hide, or rather occasion, an amazing wealth of vivid detail, Etchells concludes.
4
Etchells, “More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid” p.198. The whole text draws its ideas on the dramaturgical structure of: The Show Must Go On. Creation: Jérôme Bel. 2001. Performance. 5 Etchells, “More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid” p.198.
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Thus the drama created in this case instead of demanding or even forcing one’s attention on a moment-by-moment basis, offers for Etchells the space and time one needs to look, to be bored, to find an interest. Being constructed as the result of a simple labour, as a task to be undertaken in public, The Show Must Go On does not ask the performers to develop in any way the rule they are working with so that they create some more ‘wellstructured’ drama, other than the one already created by that simple rule. There is no insistence or unnecessary dramatics here, according to Etchells. The performers working with this rule exist within it ‘content while contained’, as he aptly puts it.6 Their passions, enthusiasms, ideas and so on only last as long as the song or the requisite line last. The characters, as well as all the other dramatic characteristics, thus emerge through obedience to that simple rule of ‘doing what the song says’, through this simple task-based plot.
Of course one can very easily understand why Etchells is particularly interested in approaching and analyzing the creation of one such drama, since Forced Entertainment and himself have also been busy for more than twenty years working on similar dramatic approaches, constructing dramas that, although often taking place within very tightly defined rules and structures, are able to trigger an excessive production of ideas. As he himself admits, the rules of works such as Quizoola! (1996) or And on the Thousandth Night… (2000) can really be written on a postcard, but in performance terms their possibilities are endless because things there seem to work in a paradoxical way: ‘the tighter the structure or rule is the freer the play can be’.7 When coming to his own work with Forced Entertainment then, Etchells describes it in a similar way. It becomes clear within ten seconds, he says, what rule the performers are operating under
6
Etchells, “More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid” p.198. Heathfield, Adrian. “As If Things Got More Real. A conversation with Tim Etchells” in Not Even a Game Anymore, Eds. Helmer, Judith and Malzacher, Florian. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2004, p.81. 7
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and that the game that will be played is called: ‘this is a rule that we will subject ourselves to’ and ‘everything you are going to see will be derived from this very simple rule’.8 But that is exactly what makes rule-based works interesting, Etchells argues. Because in them one has none of the problems of ‘reading’ a work where one thing has been put next to another in a carefully constructed way. Those things don’t really arise in works where the rules are so simple and clear, because the mechanism of the rule is doing all the work for you. The drama then, the action created in them, is nothing more than the product of this rule. But sometimes this may be all one needs from a drama; performers and audience are simply enjoying the game. They are inventive in it. They surrender to it and are pleased by it. And these pleasures are really important, Etchells notes.9
Apart from the abovementioned approaches to such dramas though, which have to do either with the indeed really important pleasure that one can derive from making or seeing these works, or with the new richness of dramaturgical possibility their performance can offer both to their performers as well as to their spectators – who attuned to the game become sensitized to the smallest variations – there is also another way to approach the operation of talk-based plots. This approach not only reveals the particular way in which experimental drama responds to the dramatic element of plot, but it can moreover be quite significant and helpful particularly for a researcher working on this kind of drama. It is through this approach that I was able to understand my research practice, a research largely focused on creating both my live works but also the work you now have in your hands mainly through following some simple, very specific
8 9
Heathfield, “As If Things Got More Real. A conversation with Tim Etchells” pp.88-89. Heathfield, “As If Things Got More Real. A conversation with Tim Etchells” p.99.
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rules; and to understand why I have followed such practice as well as how these taskbased navigations have worked for me.
Some history though, as Goulish suggests, could be useful here before I proceed with my approach. The construction of task-based plots in theatre and dance that appeared particularly during the last ten-fifteen years, as Janža said, draws of course on similar instructional procedures developed since the late 1960s and early 1970s, mainly from artists working in galleries or from other performance artists and writers. Hans Ulrich Obrist refers among others to Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Yoko Ono as well as to the Surrealists and André Breton or the Situationists and Guy Debord, as artists and writers who extendedly worked on the creation of artworks or texts in the form of instructions. Inspired by such kind of works – and mainly from ‘Jerry Rubin’s battle cry from 1968: ‘Do it!’ – Obrist curates and organizes the do it exhibition, which took place for the first time in 1994 at the Ritter Kunsthalle in Klagenfurt in Austria to then travel to several countries and cities all over the world.10 Do it invited contributors from different generations and cultural backgrounds to deliver instructions that would be followed and performed each time anew in each venue, leaving behind no ‘original’ art product. New contributors were added in each new do it, whereas the ideas and results of the exhibition kept changing as it journeyed, transforming into a complex and dynamic learning system always governed by ‘a few rules of the game’.11 What for Obrist constitutes an important particularity of do it is the fact that it remains an ‘exhibition in progress’ since ‘each city in which it takes place actively constructs the artwork context and stamps it with its own individual mark or features’.12 What is important in this kind of work is that it is not so much interested in issues of signature,
10
Obrist, Hans Ulrich. do it. EU: e-flux, 2004, p.9. Obrist, do it p.10. 12 Obrist, do it p.11. 11
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authenticity, copies, etcetera of an artwork but in interpretation instead. Having no complete work to send to the venues, do it used everyday actions and materials to ‘serve as the starting point for artworks to be recreated at each “performance” site’ as a recurrent activity in time and space.13 The essential nature of this activity is characterized, according to Obrist, by the permutation and negotiation found in its repetition and difference, as well as by the multiplication of meaning that its various interpretations offer.
Back to me now and to another kind of history, which took place in the last four years: For Reply to All, inspired by the possibility offered by email exchange systems to send your ‘reply to all’, I decided to take this suggestion somewhat literally (as the possibility to literally reply to everybody, to the whole world). I thus committed for two months to note down all questions I received on various occasions in my everyday life, questions people asked me on the street, in train stations, in my house, on the phone, in romantic encounters etcetera, so that I could then ‘reply to all’. This task of gathering a list of all kinds of questions and then attempting to reply to them, creating for the stage another list of replies to those questions which are never heard, is what creates the plot of Reply to All, a drama presented in December 2008 as a stage action unfolding through a list of seemingly unrelated text-fragments based on the abovementioned rule.
A few months later I took over the task to fill in the fifty minutes offered to me by the Theatre of Neos Kosmos in Athens with a show and create a new ‘devised’ drama in that time frame.14 Inspired by this so concrete interference of the festival’s curators with the
13
Obrist, do it p.11. In May 2009, the Theatre of Neos Kosmos in Athens, Greece organized the first ‘Devised Theatre Festival’ for emerging artists. The rule in order to participate in that festival was to create works that would last no more than 50 minutes. 14
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duration of my work, I again chose a rule in order to create this drama: if there are strictly fifty minutes that I have at my disposal, if I am given a stage for exactly this amount of time and then I have to evacuate it, then it is mainly time that structures the stage action. I thus chose to time these fifty minutes and see what I could do against that clock, until it interrupted my drama when the time came... and here is the first part of my work’s title: 50’00’’; working in a way similar to what Steven Connor has described as an ‘exceptional materializing of time’.15
Connor refers to sports games taking place in stadiums and argues that in them ordinary, progressive time gives way to the ‘remorselessly and exceptionlessly materialized’ stadium time. Everything there becomes time, time solidified, materialized, made palpable and therefore put into play. The game, whatever it may be, is a choreographed agon of speeds and durations and a struggle against time. In this sense, time in those games is present and absolutely immanent in physical form, Connor concludes.16 The rule followed in 50’00’’ – this time a theatre instead of a stadium game – presents time physically too, both in a more literal sense (a timer appears on stage and takes its place in front of its microphone next to the rest of the performers in the show, staying there for the whole duration of the event and intervening in its dramaturgy when the time comes), but also in the sense described above by Connor, since the four performers are continuously struggling to fit even more stories in, even more ‘world’ in the structure of the show, against the ticking of the clock.
In order to explore what kind of stories these could be, I again chose a rule: the four
15
Connor, Steven. “Play Grounds: The Arenas of Game” (A talk given in the Bartlett School of Architecture International Lecture Series, February 13th 2008). 31 December 2011. 16 Connor, “Play Grounds: The Arenas of Game”, 2008.
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performers and myself write or gather phrases, sentences, titles from various sources for stories that do not yet exist. Then we have to create those stories and narrate them on stage. And here is the second part of the work’s title: Short Stories. Now, in order to perform our stories on stage, there is yet another rule: The show will have no stable structure: the performers will be given two lists each time just before their entrance on stage, wherein they will see the way they should construct the performance either by following the order of the stories proposed in those lists, or by seeing the stories each one of them could narrate during the show but then deciding the rest of the structure themselves while performing. And thus we created 50’00’’- Short Stories, a list of all kinds of stories narrated against the ticking of the clock according to a task-based plot constructed ‘on the spot’ during the event, that was different each time.
Later that year, wishing to expand and explore further this kind of work, I collaborated with the performers of 50’00’’- Short Stories and other film and theatre artists as well as writers to create Short Stories. Another rule shaped our time frame here, which this time depended on the audience. A performer reads to the audience a list of phrases taken from all the stories created for the show. Audience members can interrupt the reading by saying ‘Stop’ whenever they want to hear the story the phrase has been taken from. The rest of the performers have to immediately narrate that story before the first performer goes back to the reading of her list. The show can thus last from ten minutes to two and a half hours, depending on the stories that the audience will ask to hear and see. In order to create those stories, again a similar rule is required: We would have to collect phrases, titles of nonexistent stories and give those titles a story. This time though, there was a slight alteration: our titles would have to be taken from the media
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and the Greek and international press, creating stories that moved between fictional, political, social and everyday life frames.
Two months later, finding it impossible to go on with my research practice and the creation of the work I had to present as part of my major project, 10 Performances, I once more devised a rule to help me continue searching and discovering. I asked other people to send me texts written in the first person singular (I). Within a few weeks, I had at my disposal many stories of ‘my’ self, many stories ‘I’ can tell on stage to create ‘my’ story. How could I use them though? Another rule was created to help me overcome this problem and keep me searching: I would give instructions to myself and then follow them to construct the performance. What can one do with a text? Speak it, write it, copy-paste it, read it, whisper it, say it repeatedly while writing it, copy-paste it while saying it, read it in silence, read it out loud etcetera. A series of similar instructions guided my Single Voice to go through those different texts, its various types of ‘I’, and play them as another kind of DJ, a TJ, a Text Jockey that would play texts, her voice, her ‘I’s instead of songs. And thus A Single Voice – 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ is created.
A few months later, I was given another time frame to work with. This time the curators of the Performing Idea Laboratory offered us ten-minute slots wherein to create and share new work.17 What could I do in that time? I knew that I wanted to explore writing practices in my work as well as notions and understandings of relational aesthetics. Another rule was put into operation: A timer will time the ten minutes. An audience
17
The Performing Idea Laboratory took place at Club Row, London, on the 30 April 2010. Responding to the framework of Performing Idea, fifteen researchers and artists associated with Performance Matters presented a series of solo and collaborative works. For more information about Performance Matters, a creative research project taking place as a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Live Art Development Agency (http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/).
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member will join the performer at a small table and sit opposite her. The performer will write a phrase taken from a list she will have next to her, suggesting the beginning of a written dialogue drawing on that phrase. For the rest of the ten minutes a silent dialogue would take place between them, until the timer interrupted their exchange. This one-toone performance would be repeated in ten-minute slots for the whole duration of the laboratory, creating something like a board game or, indeed – as the Greek name used for these kinds of games denotes – an ‘on the table’ game (epitrapezio paignidi) for two players who would have to expand an initial phrase placed between them in all possible directions, during a silent written exchange. Other audience members could visit and watch the game, both as it was being created as well as by reading the previously written exchanges, laid on the floor as soon as they were created, around the table where the game would be still taking place. Seen as another kind of chess then, a writing chess, The Words Between Us invites an audience member to respond to the initial move made by the performer to place a totally out-of-context fictional phrase between them on the table. As is the case with chess, the game then evolves with the two players taking turns and making one move at a time, responding to each other’s previous move, i.e. previous writings; until they are interrupted by the timer on the tenth minute of the game. No one wins. Or it may be better to say that hopefully at the end both players win.
Soon after the creation of the abovementioned works, I started putting the rules for the work you now have in your hands: Drawing on 50’00’’- Short Stories and Short Stories, these Short (Research) Stories borrow stage dramaturgies to create written dramaturgies. They thus take the form of research texts produced as short stories based on various kinds of phrases that were used as their title, were present in them or were
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not included in them but inspired their story. And the questions return: how can I understand my approach of conducting my research practice and creating both my stage works but also the work you now read, mainly through following some simple, very specific rules? Why have I followed such an approach and what did I want to achieve through it? Looking back at it, how did these task-based navigations work for me?
In her PhD thesis, Efrosini Protopapa proposes a connection line between the creative process of setting rules and applying them in performance and the process of being engaged in board games. Similar to those games, she argues, the performers of such work engage in a series of tasks on stage and it is through this activity that the performance unfolds. Following this parallelism even further, Protopapa suggests that the performer involved in these performances can be seen as operating in a similar way to that of the player of the board games, i.e. both as a player forming the game (as a performer playing her part) and as a spectator observing the board from the outside, watching the way that this game (the performance) is being constructed and is moving on based on its rules and task-based activities.18 In this sense, task-based plots can be considered as the devised system that holds together the series of actions (the drama) to be performed on stage.
Protopapa refers also though to the critiques that works constructed through scores or task-based systems have received. These works, she notes, have been often characterized as dry or as very restrictive in terms of the freedom they leave to the performers to make choices and respond spontaneously or express an opinion or attitude about the proceedings on stage. Furthermore, as Boris Groys also observes, the
18
Protopapa, Efrosini. “Possibilising Dance: A Space For Thinking in Choreography”. PhD Thesis, 2009. Roehampton University Research Repository. 01 January 2012. .
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integration of a creative act into a specific system has been interpreted as a sign of the death of autonomous artistic subjectivity. But when the creative act becomes indeed part of a certain system guided from the beginning by a certain set of rules, Groys continues, then the artist also has a unique inner access to that system. And this means that she has a unique competence and power to successfully survive the supposed ‘death’ of her artistic subjectivity by making the system itself the object of that subjectivity’s inner, intimate experience.19
What if then instead of seeing such works as a threat to the performer’s creativity and subjectivity or as somewhat dry works, we would see them as an intimate experience of the subjectivity of an artist powerfully involved in them, Protopapa suggests? This is a kind of intimacy that stems from the performer’s labour as she appears to engage with the purposeful constructedness of the stage system. And by doing so – by explicitly recognizing the stage as a system defined by specific rules and putting herself on it to follow those rules and play their game – the performer is also actively involved in the construction of this work, its narrative, its plot. What we have in this case then in theatre, similar to what Obrist described earlier for galleries, is a ‘show in progress’, a stage system that always stays open, working as a score, until a venue is found in which it could be interpreted and performed anew each time. And the one who offers this interpretation and in this way completes the score, the one mostly responsible for the creation of the show’s construction/plot in this case, is, in the first place, of course, the performer who is invited every time from the start to place herself in and outside of the game, to follow its rules, to play it and watch it taking shape through her moves and decisions; to thus create it. It is in this sense that, as Etchells argued, ‘the tighter the rule
19
Groys, Boris. “The Mimesis of Thinking”. Open Systems Rethinking Art c.1979. London: Tate Publishing, 2005, pp.50-63.
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is the freer the play can be’. For rules can never take the form of a closed shape or structure; the tighter they are, the more open they seem to be. For they always seek for someone to interpret them in order to validate them as the rules of a game. In this sense, when they are asked to hold the structure of a live work, it is these rules that impose a constantly open narrative seen as a game, constructed each time anew, as soon as the performers enter themselves in it. In the same way that a game becomes a game as long as it is played, as long as one goes through its rules to create it, to make it a game, so task-based narratives become narratives as long as one decides to go through their tasks, to play them and create them, make them happen through active moves. What they do for her in return is to allow her a spacious room to enter their process over and over again, to go through their open action again and again so that she explores it again and again; so that she approaches it from every direction. So that she understands.
Looking back at my projects, I see that this is exactly what they wanted to do through their instructional procedures: to find a position for me, the research, which would allow me to be inside and outside at the same time, to create the work while being its spectator, to be a player and a spectator at the same time. I thus constructed them while seeing them being constructed. I surrendered to them and followed their rules to discover them. Those games, those tight rules seemed to indeed offer me the way to proceed with my research, their tightness seemed to provide a particular freedom that allowed and showed me the way to keep searching. This is why I followed such games as strictly as possible to created a series of task-based plots. I invented their rules, I surrendered to them. I played them. Inside and outside at the same time. Playing and looking. Not in order to suppress my work, my research practice or my subjectivity though; but so that I would leave them as open as possible. Based on those rules, I
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constructed again and again the narratives and plots both of my live works and of my research practice in general, so that I reinvented, understood and approached them. From any direction.
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As Far as the I Can Be or Where Are the Edges of Your Body? (on character)
This story is about multiple characters in singular bodies. In Bel’s The Last Performance four people continuously change identities, subjectivities and languages, attributing to their performer’s body that they bring out on stage names and features of different characters both fictional and historical. One after the other the four performers enter the stage in different clothes, depending on who they ‘are’; they announce the person they are – always in that person’s language: ‘I am Andre Agassi’, ‘Je suis Jérôme Bel’, ‘Ich bin Susanne Linke’ – and then become him or her through practicing some of his/her basic characteristics (for example playing tennis in the case of Andre Agassi, the famous tennis player).1
If the origin of ‘character’ from the Greek χαράττειν (kharattein=to engrave) implies, according to Hélène Cixous, an engraving on the body as a mark by which the character is assured to be that which has been characterized, and which functions as an active element in the process of social coding as something of ‘specific nature’;2 if the notion of ‘character’ in (and outside) theatre is defined, as Bert O. States notes, as ‘a code that guides the “machine” of the body’ composed of specific traits, i.e. distinguishing qualities and characteristics;3 then Bel gathers these distinct traits, these engravings, these characters, into singular bodies able to become Andre Agassi, Calvin Klein (the famous fashion designer), Susanne Linke (the German choreographer) but also Hamlet and Bel himself, at the same time. In this way, one could argue, that for Bel it is not a
1
The Last Performance. Creation: Jérôme Bel. 1998. Performance. Cixous, Hélène. “The Character of ‘Character’” New Literary History, 5.2 (winter 1974): pp.383-402. 3 States, Bert O. Hamlet and the Concept of Character, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p.3. 2
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character or a code but instead multiple characters or codes that co-exist and guide our body machine.
Elinor Fuchs posits that character in theatre as a term of dramatic art, ‘can never be independent of contemporary constructions of subjectivity’.4 According to these constructions, she notes, the interior space known as ‘the subject’ is no longer an essence. On the contrary, central questions towards the creation of contemporary subjectivities become some of the following: What is a person? Can one ‘have’ an identity, ‘own’ one and achieve ‘self-mastery’, the highest evolution of subjectivity under the old paradigm? Or does identity consist of continuously changing personae with no inherent self? In The Last Performance Bel seems to deal with exactly such questions. As Lepecki notes, what is at stake here is the fact that bodies and subjectivities are held captive within material and physical spaces.5 Bel plays with the names of historical and fictitious characters, problematizing in this way the relationships between body, self, identity, body-image and name. Hence, it becomes obvious that for Bel, ‘character’ (on stage and consequently also in life) has nothing to do with a subjectself as a closed entity contained by the limits of the body, as has dominated the cultural logics of Western thought. On the contrary, the whole structure of The Last Performance contributes towards an understanding of the notions of subjectivity and the self clearly not as singularities but as open collectives, multiplicities not contained by the legal enclosure imposed by a name but by a number of names and characters both fictitious and real, Lepecki concludes.
4 5
Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of the Character, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, p.8. Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance, New York and London: Routledge, 2006, p.47.
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Based on such ideas and practices what this story argues is that in order for experimental drama and dramaturgy, as discussed here, to deal with the creation of their characters on stage, they need not to attempt any of the previous efforts made by theatre artists to create through their performance coherent, concrete and clearly identifiable personae driven from their distinct and distinguishing traits. In other words, experimental drama and dramaturgy need not make any effort to create a character that, as Cixous describes, is:
figured out, understood, read: he is presented, offered up to interpretation, with the prospect of a traditional reading that seeks its satisfaction at the level of a potential identification with such and such a “personage”6
Drawing on the work of three central figures in the area of theatre, Constantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski, Philip Auslander also discusses ideas of the self and its presence. There are several artists, Auslander notes, who tend to treat acting and the actor’s ‘self’ as a transparent medium that provides access to a certain truth. And thus one can praise acting by calling it ‘honest’, ‘self-revelatory’ or ‘truthful’ when one feels that she has glimpsed some aspect of the actors’ psyche through their performance, and applaud them for ‘taking risks’ and ‘exposing themselves’.7 Recognizing the ‘problematic of the self’, as he calls it, as central to performance theory, Auslander questions the authority with which such statements are made. It is within this frame that he goes on to discuss the practices of Stanislavsky, Brecht and Grotowski, as practices that assume – in their distinct ways – that the actor’s ‘self’
6
Cixous, “The Character of ‘Character’” p.387. Auslander, Philip, ‘“Just Be Yourself”: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory’. Acting (Re) Considered. Ed. Philip B. Zarrilli. London and New York: Routledge 2002 (first published 1995), pp 53-61. 7
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precedes and grounds her performance and that it is the presence of this self that provides the audience with access to human truths.
According to Stanislavsky’s discourse on acting, the presence of the actor’s self constitutes the source of truth. Stanislavsky treats his actors as autonomous entities (‘selves’) on whose emotional experience and psychological ‘inner truth’ – a term that, according to Auslander, uncritically equals ‘meaning’ in the artist’s work – the second ‘self’ (that of the theatrical character) must draw on. It is only in this way and by borrowing subconscious material of memories, emotions, thoughts, etcetera of the self of the actor, that a real self-presence of the character’s self can also be achieved for Stanislavsky. Although Brecht overturns Stanislavsky’s central priorities and privileges the conscious mind over the subconscious, he once more bases his work on the ‘self’ of an actor who indicates through her performance the social indoctrination that poisons the psyche and demonstrates a specific knowledge of human relations and behavior. In order to achieve this, the actor will not have to identify herself with the other self, that of the character, but will have to keep it at some distance and show it to the audience. Taking this line of thought even further Grotowski’s privileging of the self is more radical, Auslander notes. He is concerned with the relation of the ‘mask of lies’ we wear in everyday life, to the ‘secret motor’ behind that mask. And he seeks through his work to confront the everyday self with ‘its deep roots and hidden motives’, aiming to produce an ‘excess of truth’, a revelatory self-exposure of the core of the performer’s character; an act that will then work as an invitation to the spectator to do the same thing, to discover and confront the truth about her own self.8 Although, as Auslander observes, there are of course wide ideological gaps and distinct characteristics in the
8
Auslander, ‘“Just Be Yourself”: Logocentrism and Difference In Performance Theory’ p.57.
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work of the three artists, all the abovementioned perspectives and practices seem to argue for a performance that can be truthful only if it invokes the presence of the figured out, clearly presented ‘self’ that Cixous described earlier.
But how could one think of one undifferentiated self when this self is already divided into a subconscious and a conscious one, one being ‘poisoned’ from social indoctrination and one holding the knowledge of human relations, one wearing the ‘mask of the lies’ and one being the ‘secret motor’ behind that mask? How could one think of one ‘self’, or even one body since by being internally divided in so many parts, this body is already ‘several’? Or how could one think of one ‘self’ when scholars who have studied acting in terms of semiotics, have discovered that the body of the performing actor does not constitute a simple text to be read for ‘content’, but on the contrary a space for each audience member to implicitly compare it with other interpretations of the same role (or with the way they feel the role should be played), with their recollection of the same body/performer in other roles, with their knowledge of the stylistic school to which the actor belongs, with their knowledge of the actor’s private life etcetera? Which is then the self we are talking about, the one we would be able to read of the actor’s performance, Auslander wonders.9
I would argue that it is a similar understanding that experimental theatre and dance artists such as Bel share, as far as the idea of the self, the body and their ‘figured out’ presence is concerned. They seem to acknowledge that the simple fact of putting performers on stage in terms of mere physical presence is sufficient to provide both audience and performers with all the amount of real and fictional characters they need
9
Auslander, ‘“Just Be Yourself”: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory’ p.54.
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for the construction of their drama. They thus seem to acknowledge a function of the ‘“ego” as something of “imaginary nature”’, to use Cixous’s words.10 Eventually, what these artists share in common is an understanding and examination of subjectivity not only through fiction but also as fiction. Fiction here though is not understood simply as the opposite of whatever constructs ‘reality’. On the contrary subjectivity is now being defined as a game of reality continuously worked over by fiction. Within the frame of this playing process the two (reality and fiction) co-exist in a subject that stands between what already exists and what does not yet exist, i.e. the imaginary. And it is such play, Auslander argues, that disturbs the idea of ‘presence’ considered as a figured out notion. It is such play that makes meaning at once possible and impossible and proposes itself as an alternative to the yearning for presence.11 In this game then subjectivity is defined as something that is always being disturbed and changeable, ‘literally populated with a mass’, to use Cixous’s words once more.12 And it is this mass of characters that populates the bodies of the four performers in The Last Performance.
It is this mass of characters then that constructs one of the central scenes of the work where all four performers, one after the other, walk in dressed in white ballerina’s clothes, declaring that ‘Sie sind Sussane Linke’ (They are Sussane Linke) and then dance a fragment from the German choreographer’s work Wandlung made in 1978, to Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. In this way they seem to offer a fresh perspective to Aristotelian ideas about the ‘character’, according to which the stage figures do not act in order to represent their character but on the contrary they include their character for the sake of their actions.13 Drawing on similar ideas, the performers
10
Cixous, “The Character of ‘Character’” p.383. Auslander, ‘“Just Be Yourself”: Logocentrism and Difference In Performance Theory’ p.59. 12 Cixous, “The Character of ‘Character’” p.383. 13 Aristotle, Poetics p.28 (my emphasis). 11
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of The Last Performance declare that the self is not an autonomous foundation for performing but is produced by the performance it supposedly grounds; the self is indeed its actions. It is through these (distinct each time) actions that (distinct each time) characters are revealed. And here are some actions: One sees Linke entering and reentering the space in different bodies wearing white tutus, saying that they are Sussane Linke; then dance. One sees bodies experimenting on what happens when one decides to move alongside a name. And through this repetitive presence, one sees them revealing once more how moving alongside a name is to break the illusion of fixity this name is supposed to bring to its referent; to look at the other through the cleft between the quotidian and the imaginary and to try to move within her space. As the four performers, male and female, become Linke and themselves at the same time, as they demand their Linke’s dance to be seen as equivalent to the choreographer’s first work, they strongly suggest that ‘character’ does not require from the body to be an unmediated reflection of ‘the self’ but the space of its numerous Linkes, Hamlets or Calvin Kleins.
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Who Am I? (on character)
Room 625. In a cheap motel. Time: right before midnight. Damp. The phone rings. He picks it up. He: … He: No. He rings off. He goes to wee. The phone rings again. He finishes quickly, pissed off, he splashes his shoes and picks it up again. He: … He: I don’t know. He: Come over. He rings off. He takes the beer he had left on his bedside table. He drinks. There’s a knock on the door. He stands up, he is waiting for a moment and then he opens. It’s her. She is obviously drank. She: Hello my baby, my gorgeous, my cock, my love, my god, my summer sun, my fuck, my man, my king, my lord, my beautiful baby my life my beginning my end my flower my water my life my sea my tempest my salvation my child’s father… He: Eeeeee! She: Ok
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He: I’ve got you something. (He gives her a wrapped book) She takes it. She starts to cry before she opens it. He: … She sobs while opening it. She: Didn’t… ever… me… you should… why… this… no… I… count… no… love… present… why… that… no… He: Please calm down. It has a return card. She laughs. He: Now that you calmed down I need to tell you something. He (not easily): What difference does it make if it happens today, or tomorrow, or now. She: No He: …1
The above story entitled Untitled 1, was one of the first stories that was written in our rehearsal room while working for 50’00’’- Short Stories. It was also to be one which would give us most trouble; the one that we would return to, over and over again, not only while we rehearsed, not only when the show was first presented, but also almost every time it has been presented since then, on different occasions, in different cities and venues and by different performers.
From the very beginning we had decided that for its narration, its presentation on stage, we would use the actual three characters of the story, i.e. the narrator who opens it and the two partners of that bleak love affair. Hence, Untitled 1 would be announced as ‘trio’ by one of the performers and two others would accompany him/her in its
1
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou, 2009. Performance.
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narration.2 So far, so good. Initially we tried the obvious: as many characters, so many voices. One performer would speak the words of the narrator, a second those of the male character and a third those of the female. Almost immediately the idea collapsed. We tried the use of different props and we tried the use of different performers for each character, but still it was not there. Having a person on stage speaking the lines of a character, in other words attempting to ‘become’ that character according to representational techniques of acting methods such as those of realism or naturalism – even if such methods were more than loosely used within the frame of our narrations – did not seem effective enough as a way to create space for the characters that the story wished to bring on stage. In some weird way, the more things we would attempt to use on stage (more voices, more props etcetera), the less that love story would reveal itself. Hence, we decided to work in the opposite direction: instead of trying more, to try less. We would use no props and no voice for the two characters. No one else would speak apart from the narrator who opens the story. All the words would belong only to him/her. The story would not be a solo though. It would still be a trio. The other two performers would still be next to the narrator, just stand there in front of their microphones. This seemed to satisfy us all. Surprisingly enough the two wordless bodies standing there just looking at the audience ‘became’ those male and female characters, those failed lovers, much more convincingly now than in any other of our attempts; just because someone next to them announced the story as trio, just because they moved from the back of the stage (where all four performers stood during the show preparing their stories and narrations) to the stage front, just because someone spoke those words next to them, putting them in their mouths.
2
50’00’’- Short Stories were presented using the relevant dance terminology in order to announce the number of performers involved in each of its stories. Within this frame, every time one of the performers was announcing the title of a short story as part of the show, s/he immediately had to announce as well whether that constituted a ‘solo’, a ‘duet’, a ‘trio’ or an ‘ensemble’ (narrated by all four performers), implying in this way that a choreography made of words was about to take place by one, two, three or four performers.
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And just when the problem seemed to be solved is when it really started. The question came back stronger and stronger, more and more insistently, more and more demandingly, more and more worryingly: ‘Who am I? I am standing here in front of the audience, while these words are heard next to me, I have stepped to the front line of the narrators but I do not narrate nor do I do something… Are these words about me? Am I that dark and ridiculous character of the story or am I myself, a performer of the show, when I am standing here?’ And then again: ‘Who am I? What should I do? How should I be? How should I stand? How should I look at the audience? What should I think?’ And then again: ‘Who am I?’ The question would return again and again no matter who were the ones to perform the two characters. In an open dramaturgy like the one of 50’00’’- Short Stories, where no one knew the structure of the show in advance, all performers would sooner or later have to be one of the characters of Untitled 1; all of them would sooner or later be confronted with the troubling question: ‘Who am I?’
So who are they? Or one could pose the question the other way around: where exactly between those bodies on stage, ‘the self’ they are supposed to carry with them and the words heard next to them, are the characters of the story located? As soon as the narrator speaks the first words of the male character of the story, the performer standing next to him/her seems to immediately ‘become’ that character. The heard words are continuously projected on his body, making him the man who once abandoned his girlfriend in a motel of questionable quality in such a way. The performer does not need to do nothing more than ‘being himself’; nothing more then than stand there, hearing the words spoken next to him, being ‘Nobody’, as another Ulysses, and exactly for this reason, being the character of the story;3 a character who knows that those spoken
3
“‘Cyclops, you asked about my famous name. I’ll tell you. Then you can offer me a gift as your guest. My name is Nobody. My father and mother, all my other friends— they call me Nobody.’ ‘Polyphemus, what’s so bad with you
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words are indeed about him, simply because he stands next to them on stage. He knows that they reveal a secret and potentially embarrassing part of his life – imaginary or real, it makes no big difference anymore. He knows that it is he who says and does what the story says and does. While he does nothing, while being nobody; or rather: because he does nothing and is nobody. The same goes of course for the female character. She is the drunk, hysterical presence who begs for love because the story stands next to her and she stands next to it. Similarly, I would argue that it is for this reason that the audience of the work which sees those bodies while hearing those words, is more likely to know that this is about them (the two bodies on stage): exactly because it is not; exactly because they do nothing to prove it that way; exactly because they stand there as ‘themselves’, i.e. as characters ‘unmasked but not revealed’, as Cixous argues, returned to the complexity of their subjectivity, to their multiplicity;4 containing under those masks of ‘themselves’ both the indifference, drunkenness and failure of Untitled 1 as well as other more or less successful, more or less ‘real’ love stories.
Character, Fuchs notes, is the theatrical element that best represents the ‘standing in’ of the performer for someone who is not there.5 During the theatrical event thus an actor stands in the place of an absent character. The two performers of Untitled 1 though seem to propose that characters in theatre do not work so much as ‘stands in’, as they do as ‘stand by’ for the characters that they wish to bring on stage. They stand by them, next to their narration, in order to bring them on stage. If then, as mentioned earlier,
that you keep shouting through the immortal night and wake us up? Is some mortal human driving off your flocks or killing you by treachery or force?’ From the cave mighty Polyphemus roared: ‘Nobody is killing me, my friends, by treachery, not using any force.’ They answered him—their words had wings: ‘Well, then, if nobody is hurting you and you’re alone, it must be sickness given by great Zeus, one you can’t escape. So say your to our father, lord Poseidon’”. Homer .The Odyssey. Book 9: Ismarus, the Lotus Eaters and the Cyclops. 18 Oct. 2011. 4 Cixous, “The Character of ‘Character’” p.387. 5 Fuchs, The Death of the Character p.8.
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according to Aristotle the stage figures do not act in order to represent their character but on the contrary they include their character for the sake of their actions – an argument that shifts the focus of attention from the character as a stable entity towards the summation of actions that the figures on stage do – then the two performers in Untitled 1 attempt to challenge the forms that this stage action towards the creation of a character can take, by defining as such the fact that they just stand there silently in front of the audience and in front of their mute microphone voices, while someone next to them reads words exchanged by two lovers in the damp of a cheap motel room, right before midnight. And through this action they create those characters. This might also be one of those cases where, as Cixous suggests, something more is given to enjoy: the performer is at once the personage of the story, the artist who attempts the admirable job of being that, and the actual person who is threatened by on-the-job accidents.6 Standing between ‘themselves’ as ‘artists’, ‘actual persons’ and the ‘characters’ of Untitled 1, the two performers attend and participate in the process of offering their body as a projection space for different kinds of stories. I remember them anxiously standing there again and again, in the rehearsal studio, in the theatre space of the Theatre of Neos Kosmos, in the theatre space of the old Oil Factory of Elefsina by the sea, in the theatre space of Shima Ektos Aksona in Thessaloniki, in the open space of Ag. Asomaton square in Athens; standing there between the space of the show and that of the cheap motel, silently looking at the audience and for a way to understand and to reply to their recurring question (of stage and of life): ‘Who am I?’
6
Cixous, “The Character of ‘Character’” p.401.
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I Am… (on character)
[see: Video No 2]1
1
Lookatmenowandhereiam. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2012. Performance.
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‘You Are Welcome’ or ‘Thank You For Making Me the Artist I.M.’ (on character)
This story is about the use of magic tricks on stage. In her last solo work, 60 Minutes of Opportunism, Ivana Müller appears alone on stage for one hour.1 She announces that the piece has been commissioned by the curator of a festival who imposed in their agreement that she should appear herself on stage physically, probably in order to avoid her usual tricks, as she confesses, of making works where she is presented on video etcetera. So for sixty minutes Müller is indeed on stage, flesh and blood. This time though, there is no voice. Or rather there is a voice and it is her own voice. But it is not spoken by her mouth. It is instead placed next to her body and is uttered by a recording machine. For the whole duration of the work Müller controls this machine, letting it speak her voice most of the times or stopping it when she wants to use her mouth for that work. Towards the end of the piece, Müller’s voice from the machine says something like: ‘We are now heading towards the end of the show and I would like to thank the festival who commissioned this work, my friends and collaborators and most of all myself’, while Müller’s voice from her mouth immediately replies ‘You are welcome’. So she did manage again to find a trick to question and comment on the dispersed nature of our character, identity and self. Although we see one body on stage, the show presents two voices and two characters: the person who created the piece (who speaks to us from the recording machine) and the one whom that person thanks (the one who performs the piece). Yes, the voices may sound the same; yes, they may both inhabit the same body; but they do not reveal one concrete and distinguishable character but at least two.
1
60 Minutes of Opportunism. Creation: Ivana Müller. 2010. Performance.
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Kunst talks about a body that discovers its voice after years of silence in dance, and through this discovery it shatters the harmonious relationship between its presence and representation.2 She also refers to the alienation that one feels when hearing one’s own voice, the feeling that this voice belongs to a stranger, to someone else. The Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar pushes such thoughts about the relationship between voice, body and presence even further when he proposes an understanding of the voice as an object and maybe even as the minimal definition of consciousness instead of a privileged evocation of presence.3 Dolar refers to a prejudice, as he calls it, which prioritizes the voice as a privileged point of self-transparency, as holding the presence. The voice thus, and especially the voice understood as coinciding with language, seems to offer the illusion that one could get immediate access to an unalloyed presence, an origin not tarnished by externality, a firm rock against the elusive interplay of signs. But as soon as we conceive an understanding of the voice as an object (the body itself can be conceived in exactly the same way according to Dolar), a rupture is introduced at the core of self-presence. The voice is something that cannot itself be present, although the whole notion of presence may be constructed around it; voice can be established only by its elision. Similarly the subject, far from being constituted by self-grasp in the clarity of its presence to itself, only emerges in an impossible relation to a voice that runs counter to self-transparency and presence and that cannot be made present, Dolar concludes.
In 60 Minutes of Opportunism Müller conceives of her voice in a very literal way as an object, by placing it next to her. The two voices, Müller’s voice and Müller’s voice, an object voice as the creator of the piece and a voice coming from the object body of the
2
Bojana Kunst, “The Voice of the Dancing Body”. 16 June 2011. 3 Dolar, Mladen. “The Object Voice”. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Eds Renata Saleci and Slavoj Žižek. Durham and London: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996, pp.7-31.
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performer on stage, become the voices of two different characters which continuously negotiate their impossible relationship to each other; and thus the subject of Müller appears. Later that night in the bar of the theatre, she says that this is the only way it could be, since this is indeed the way things happen: one creates a piece in her studio, but that one is not the same with the one who presents that piece on stage. If in 1958 Samuel Beckett attempted to explore similar ideas of the dispersed nature of subjectivity in time with Krapp's Last Tape wherein we witness an elderly man on his 69th birthday going through the recordings of his younger birthdays, i.e. the younger versions of himself, commending and interacting with them before creating the version of his current ‘self’ (a new recording commenting on the events of the previous twelve months);4 more than 50 years later we witness Müller taking this exploration even further by discussing this multiplicity (of the self working in the studio, the self performing on stage, etcetera) within the same time period of one’s life, and then taking it even more further by experimenting with the simultaneous ‘I’s in operation while being on stage.
Cixous, refers to a ‘furious we’ of the artist who interrogates her art as if she were more than one and as if she weren’t the master of her own mastery.5 In 60 Minutes of Opportunism Müller being deeply aware of this ‘furious we’, presents herself on stage without owning anything, not even her voice, let alone the work she performs. One could then argue that she constructs her work as an anti-solo where although one sees only one body on stage, the traditional understanding of a ‘solo work’ is continuously being undermined. First with the double voice and later with the presence of other (object) bodies on stage used as figurines; invisible bodies covered up with black cloths,
4
Beckett, Samuel. “Krapp’s Last Tape”. Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers. Beckett, Samuel. London: Faber and Faber, 1998 (first published 1965). 5 Cixous, “The Character of ‘Character’” p.392.
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then uncovered but mute; then gone. Bodies followed by a series of questions, some of them already expressed by Müller on stage: When does one ‘perform’ in a show? After which minute of her appearance is she ‘in’ the work and not just an ‘extra’? How much of her body should appear on stage in order for her to perform? How much of her words should we hear? Who am I with, when I am alone on stage during what is usually called a ‘solo’? It is similar questions that the ‘furious we’ of Müller attempts to investigate and reply to during the 60 Minutes of Opportunism. What this ‘we’ – this subject who keeps looking for her impossible relation to herself through her object voice – wishes to do then, among other things in this work, is to say to herself performing on stage: ‘Thank you for making me the artist IM’ – to borrow the title of one of Müller’s earlier works.6 Only to then reply, in a wonderful move of generosity towards her own multiplicity: ‘You are welcome’.
6
The title of the work ‘Thank You For Making Me the Artist IM’ (2009) attempts a witty language use of ‘IM’ both as ‘I am’ and ‘Ivana Müller’, the initials of the artist’s name, at the same time.
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A Group Acting Together (on character)
‘In bed, early, Miles is jabbering and making jokes about breakfast and porridge in particular. He tells me that for breakfast we will have spider porridge, and I ask, “What’s that?” and he says “spider porridge – with spiders in it...”and I say I will feed him helicopter porridge or something like that and he threatens me with many other kinds of porridge until at last he gets to this one: radio porridge. He says we will have radio porridge with voices in it. [...]
Who puts those voices in radio porridge? No one. Whose are the voices in radio porridge?
The voices in radio porridge come from the dead. They come from stray signals, lost letters. They come from people who wrote graffiti on all the walls in town, or the people in books and stories we’d read and many other places. [...]
I couldn’t get excited about a deep voice or an authentic voice, but I could get excited by a gabbling voice composed of scraps and layers, fragments, quotations. No editorial, or at least no centre. Like I don’t have a voice – I’m just a space this other stuff is flowing through and lodged inside.’1
1
Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments, London: Routledge, 1999, p.99.
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Being in a moment of frustration and despair with my work and research process but still committed to go on with the project I was at that time working on presenting it as part of my major project 10 Performances I decided to become the ‘space other stuff is flowing through and lodged inside’ in a more literal sense.2 I therefore looked for other voices to speak through this space/my body, since I seemed to have none of ‘my own’ for this purpose. I asked friends to send me their words to use as part of the performance. Their texts could be one paragraph to one page long and they had to follow only one rule: they had to be written in the first person singular. What I did then was to send them my at that point wordless I and the self and character included in it, asking them to return it with words. At the same time I looked around for other words as well; quotes from different books and authors related to the specific project and my research practice in general. And thus I create A Single Voice - 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ. Using no words of its own, my single voice as another kind of DJ, a Text Jockey, borrows texts from friends and strangers always written in the first person singular, and ‘plays’ them, tells them, writes them, reads them to the audience, in order to become able to speak, as it has done just now, using the words of Etchells above. Hence, my voice becomes a space that lodges inside all those words, which by their turn give my voice its substance, i.e. its ‘character’.
During the performance of A Single Voice I find myself, after a while, completely absorbed by these words, all these ‘I’s. I am what these words are making me. If my character coincides with the summation of its actions, as Aristotle has argued, I then am the character composed by the action of uttering those words. While I am speaking Goulish’s words, regarding the way that he (I) has started to write by copying word by
2
10 Performances has been an AHRC funded project created as part of the Beyond Text student-led initiative. Within its frame 10 international artists were invited to create and present new works focused on aesthetics and forms of performative writing.
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word other people’s texts, by using their words as his (my) own, since there are no words that he (I) considers his (my) own, the audience is laughing to tears with his (my) story.3 At a certain point I really feel the urge to interrupt my speaking and ask the audience whether or not they are aware of the fact that it is not me who says that story, that these are not my words; a fact that was of course clearly stated beforehand.4 Or rather, I feel the urge to interrupt and ask myself: ‘Who is speaking?’ But it is indeed me who is saying those words and it is me who is speaking. It is me who says: ‘I copied my report word for word out of the encyclopedia.’ It is me who says: ‘I didn’t at that time have any words that I considered my own and still don’t.’ Is it then what Michael Marmarinos, the Greek theatre director, said in another part of the words I am speaking during A Single Voice: ‘Within us the voices of the world?’5
Roland Barthes in a book that has his name as its title, refers to a ‘deconstructed, taken apart, shifted without anchorage’ subjectivity.6 And he then poses the question: ‘Why should I not speak of “myself” since this “my” is no longer “the self”?’7 In the Single Voice, my I becomes a character of its own, performing through my body; this possession though does not coincide with ‘myself’ but rather with a dispersed idea of the self that ‘was represented in many different ways in the contemporary alternative theater’;8 and unlike all kind of ideologies that work as symbolic systems aiming to permit the human subject to wield the ‘I’ as an arena of the known, as Fuchs notes, such
3
Goulish, 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance pp.18-19. One could of course argue that this operation is very similar to what happens in theatre in general anyway, ever since its appearance: people are speaking words of others as their own. What makes practices of experimental theatre quite distinct on this issue though, is the fact that they commence from the opposite edge, making the reverse move: instead of putting a concrete fixed character on stage to present the public words of a play as private and strictly her own, there is in this case a single, dispersed voice and subject talking private words of others or even of itself as public, belonging to numerous selves and ‘I’s. This difference is quite important and characteristic both of the way this type of theatre deals with the construction of its characters but also of the ground on which it wishes to communicate, through these characters, with its audience. 5 National Hymn. Creation: Michael Marmarinos. 2001. Performance Programme. 6 Barthes, Roland Barthes p.168. 7 Barthes, Roland Barthes p.168 (my emphasis). 8 Fuchs, The Death of the Character p.9. 4
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dispersal continues to shake the ‘I’ rendering it as a sense of being adrift on the planet without a guidebook. Cixous too argues against unitary versions of the self. The ‘I’, she suggests, must stop purporting to be a ‘true subject’ and reveal itself as a succession of masks. It is one such succession that my Single Voice attempts, by bringing on stage as a ‘character’ the merging and co-existence in my body of the ‘I’ as the author of the piece, the ‘I’ as its performer and the enunciatory ‘I’, hosting and being at the same time ‘the voices of the world’, the voices of all the people who gave me theirs words; or – to use Cixous words – by bringing on stage a Single Voice that understands itself as ‘more than one, diverse, capable of being all those it will at one time be, a group acting together, a collection of singular beings that produce the enunciation’.9
From one such subjectivity, who flounders in the exploded multiplicity of its states, shatters the homogeneity of the ego and spreads out in every possible direction, being all those that precede it and those it anticipates – as Cixous describes – my Single Voice continuously asks questions such as: ‘what do I have to do with it?’; ‘who is speaking?’; ‘who am I when I am you, you, or him, and pretty far away from myself?’; ‘if I can be all my others, who couldn’t I be?’; am I ‘all the names in history’, as Nietzsche has said? And, if yes, then ‘how can I not question the “proper” Name’, the ‘proper’ selfcontained and self- consistent character?10
It is similar questions, related to the broader problem of consciousness and the construction of subjectivity, that the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger attempts to work with in his book Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. What exactly does it mean to have the conscious experience of ‘being someone’ and to
9
Cixous, “The Character of Character” p.387. Cixous, “The Character of Character” p.388.
10
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investigate notions and ideas related to consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first person perspective, Metzinger asks? ‘Being someone’ is not a well-defined technical term in either philosophy or in any other discipline, according to Metzinger. Therefore, it simultaneously means many different things to different people who use the idea of ‘being someone’ in many different ways and in many different contexts – as citizens of a state or as psychological laymen, in ethical and political discourse or even in religious matters. But for Metzinger no such thing as selves exists in the world. Nobody ever was or had a self. All that exists are conscious self-models that cannot be recognized as models. These models work as wonderfully efficient two-way windows that allow an organism to conceive of itself as a whole; they are models we cannot recognize, since they are transparent, but we look right through them. We don’t see them. But we see with them. We constantly confuse ourselves with the content of these self-models. What our human brains do though is to construct an internal model of external reality from internally represented information by utilizing continuous input supplied by the sensory organs. It is in this sense that subjectivity and the conscious experience that is tied to a first-person perspective can be understood as a representational phenomenon, Metzinger continues. This global model is a real-time model; it is being updated at such a great speed and with such reliability that in general we are not able to experience it as a model anymore. And this is why phenomenal reality for us does not constitute the simulational space constructed by our brains (that it actually is), but, in a very direct and experiential manner, it is simply the world in which we live our lives. Just as we don’t confuse ourselves with the shadow cast by our own body, or with a reflection of it, or with the body as it appears in a dream or in imagination, so we should not identify with what appears to be our bodily self right now, Metzinger posits.11
11
Metzinger, Thomas. Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge-Massachusetts, LondonEngland: The MIT Press, 2003.
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When we come to express thoughts and speak about ourselves as first person then, as ‘I’, we should bear in mind that we refer to the phenomenal content of the opaque component of the abovementioned self-model. Of course when one uses the ‘I’ to express these thoughts, one does not consciously experience one’s self as referring to a content but to herself, that is, to a subject as the speaker of the sentence. Because it is not necessary only to have thoughts that can be expressed using ‘I’; what is necessary, according to Metzinger, is the possession of a concept of oneself as the thinker of these thoughts, a character as the owner of a subjective point of view. In short what is needed is not only reference from the first-person point of view but the capacity of mentally “ascribing” this act of reference to oneself while it is taking place. One can linguistically refer to one’s self then only via one’s conscious self-model. The neurocomputational tool has to be in place before the linguistic tool can start to operate and act as speech, Metzinger concludes.
Here it is on stage though, my Single Voice, pushing the idea of ‘being no one’ further because, in this case, my ‘I’ uses speech acts and expresses thoughts without recognizing herself as the thinker or the owner of them. It nevertheless goes on using the ‘I’; it goes on using the words of other ‘I’s as hers. She speaks them; she writes them; she reads them.
She says: ‘And now I'd like to share a story from my childhood’
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She says: ‘For many years I found writing impossible, although I loved to read. The time came for me to start writing, or become very unhappy.’
She says: ‘I RARELY WRITE IN THE FIRST PERSON. Even if I do I usually suggest that this is somebody else speaking and not me. Maybe I should point out that it is someone else reading’
She says: ‘When I was growing up in Greece, my grandparents owned a large dog, which they called Stella. Stella always had 5 or 6 cats circling around her wherever she went. We used to refer to the cats as Stella's fans. They seemed to worship her. It all started when a kitten fell into the river one day, and Stella leapt in and rescued it. From then on, the cats orbited around her. Stella was black, so black that when she was out at night she disappeared completely, as if melting into the background.’
She says: ‘Actually I wanted to talk about being a foreigner.’
Or: ‘I speak in English now. This does not come without saying. It needs effort. It needs English words’
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Or: ‘I would love to be able to say a story but I can't.’12
Am I indeed no one in this case, when I use language to express thoughts that I do not recognize as my own? Could it be that the conscious self-model that forms my first person does not work so effectively in this case? Or could we rather say that such issues may sometimes relate less to the ‘experience of “being someone”’ – that Metzinger talks about – and more to what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as the experience of ‘being some one’? Because, if I am indeed no one, then who am I? Or to put it differently: ‘Who comes after the [my] subject’?13 Nancy talks about the deconstruction of ‘the firmness of a seat (hypokeimenon, substantia, subjectum) and the certitude of an authority and a value (the individual, a people, the state, history, work)’ which characterizes a substantial amount of contemporary philosophical work. This should not be considered as a process aiming to simply obliterate its object though.14 There is nothing nihilistic in such deconstruction, according to Nancy. All that exists is an understanding of the subject – the property of the self – through the clear distinction between the one and the some one. When the question is posed as ‘Who comes after the subject?’ instead of ‘What comes after it?’, it becomes obvious for Nancy that what we try to approach is exactly that one we henceforth have to deal with and not to suggest the subject’s simple liquidation. It is within this frame, as he posits, that he moves towards analyzing the ‘someone – some one – else’ who takes one’s place (the subject’s understood as one solid entity). Questions of subjectivity thus do not constitute questions of essence anymore but of identity, Nancy argues. It is not so much that, after the absolute dissolution of the dispersed subject, no one remains, but that we will have
12
A single Voice-3000 English Words In The Hands Of A TJ. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance Text Cadava, Eduardo, Connor, Peter and Nancy, Jean-Luc, Eds. Who Comes After the Subject? New York and London: Routledge, 1991. 14 Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Introduction”. Cadava, Eduardo, Connor, Peter and Nancy, Jean-Luc, Eds. Who Comes After the Subject? New York and London: Routledge, 1991, p.4 (emphasis given in the original). 13
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to define the subject’s identity anew, as one does ‘when one asks before a photograph of a group of people whose names ones knows but not the faces: “who is who?” – is this one Kant, is that one Heidegger, and this other beside him?’15 It is in a similar sense that we will need to reply to the question ‘who is present here?’ and we will need to understand presence as the presence of the existent subject which ‘comes into presence’ by occupying a place.16 There where there was nothing, later there is something, some one; ‘“one” because it “comes”, not because of its substantial unity: the she, he or it that comes can be one and unique in its coming but multiple and repeated “in itself”’, Nancy argues. ‘The subject is that which comes indefinitely to itself, never stops coming, arriving: the “subject” that is never the subject of itself.’17 Presence is thus defined for Nancy more as presence to presence than to self (or of self); whereas the coming into presence is for him always plural, ‘“in each case ours” as much as “mine”’.18
So here comes my Single (plural) Voice again:
She says: ‘I can't believe life's so complex. When I just wanna sit here and watch you undress.’
Or: ‘Hi, My name is Ioanna, I am 26 years old and I live in Greece. I am very happy to be here and talk to you today. You see in my country we learn your language from a very young age. Like I did. But unfortunately I never had the opportunity to speak it. That's why I am so happy because
15
Nancy, “Introduction” p.7. Nancy, “Introduction” p.7. 17 Nancy, “Introduction” p.7. 18 Nancy, “Introduction” p.8. 16
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it is the first time I can actually speak in English. Of course you can't hear my voice, you can only hear her voice carrying the sounds of my words or you can't see my body, you can only see her body trying to build a bridge between you and me and unfortunately I can't see you either. But she can and she is here with you. What is she wearing really? Speaking for myself I'm sure I would wear my green skirt. I'm also sure I would make an effort trying to speak clearly in order for you to understand my heavy GreekEnglish accent. How is she coping with that? Do you understand her in what I'm saying?’
Or: ‘I am writing slowly so that the words will come out of you slowly. Now I am pausing. I am typing. You are speaking. I am at home, I am at a place that passes for home. I am here. You are there. Danae. I am not you. You are not me. You don't know me. I don't know you. You are speaking me. Voicing. I am writing you Danae. Deny. There is something inside you – me’.
Or: ‘On this note I withdraw. No. I first want to thank you. I might come back to you with more.’19
And here I am: ‘space enough for everyone and for each one of me’.20
19 20
A single Voice-3000 English Words in the Hands Of A TJ. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance. Cixous, “The Character of ‘Character’” p.402.
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Flowing Characters in Still Bodies (on character)
This story is about me, an audience member, as the creator of characters. I am in theatre sitting still in the auditorium together with others in the same position, looking opposite to us other still people doing the same. Two still groups facing each other. One is the one I am in. The second one is on stage, standing motionless in weird bodily positions. One of them has her left arm lifted up in front of her (as if she was looking at her watch?); another one stands with his hands open to the two sides (as if he was welcoming someone?), etcetera.
Both groups are here to ‘hold it together’. This is what Müller suggests in a piece dealing with exactly this kind of action: While We Were Holding It Together.1 It is through this title that she aims to describe the process that the imagination follows in order to construct its stories and their characters in theatre, i.e. the theatrical process. And she suggests that this constitutes a common process, taking place at the same time both on stage as well as in the auditorium. All participants of the theatrical event thus ‘hold it together’ within a ‘choreography of imagination’ as she calls it. According to Müller, this is a choreography that takes places in the space of our mind and uses mainly words as its dancers, creating a certain kind of mind-movement able to offer many different perspectives in our thinking and imagining practices.2 This dance of imagination constitutes of course the work of every audience member in every practice
1
While We Were Holding It Together. Creation: Ivana Müller. 2006. Performance. On Imagining Together: Interview with Ivana Müller. 19 December 2011. 2
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of spectatorship. Only this time, the performers choose to ‘hold it together’ with us, to stay still as we do and dance their mind with us.
But what is this ‘it’? What do we hold together? Certainly ‘it’ does not refer to one thing, one story, one storyteller, one character or one performance. As Umberto Eco notes in his essay about the Open Work: ‘every performance makes the work an actuality but is itself only complementary to all possible other performances of the work’.3 These other possible performances of the work are of course the ones that are taking place in the head of each one of the audience members and the performers who view the work with their eyes only and dance it with their imaginations. This ‘it’ then refers more to the summation of all those performances that both audience and performers are involved in while being in theatre spaces, rather than in any singular understanding of the event. So, standing still, all participants of While We Were Holding It Together, are imagining the I.
‘I imagine us still here in 300 years. Being discovered by an archaeologist.’ ‘I imagine we are not that well preserved.’ ‘I imagine we were found in a third world country and then brought to the British museum for professional restoration. Now we are part of the permanent collection.’ ‘I imagine we are a rock band on tour. We are called Barbarella and the Bad ants.’ ‘I imagine I am Barbarella’4
Say the performers on stage. Thousands of stories are going around in an endless game of invention; thousands of characters, starring in all kinds of stories for over an hour, are
3
Eco, Umberto. “The Poetics of the Open Work”. Participation. Ed. Bishop, Claire. UK: Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press, 2006, p.22 (essay originally written in 1962). 4 While We Were Holding It Together. Creation: Ivana Müller, 2006. Performance.
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produced in the painfully still body of those on stage.5 They are moving in space, passing from one body to another in an attempt to argue that this still position in theatre is far from a comfortable, inactive or passive one, as the critique of numerous theorists, scholars and artists has it. All these images and imaginations of who the ‘I’ can be become flowing figures travelling in space among performers and spectators. After a while the performers are even exchanging places in space (where one takes the still position of another) or voices (where one performer speaks with the recorded voice of another) letting their characters flow and flow even further, travel and travel all over the place, from one body to another, from one voice to another, creating more and more perspectives of more and more characters, always in motion, always holding it together. Where among all these characters, all these stories, all these bodies and all these voices could one then locate the character?
Fuchs notes that each substantial change in the way character is represented on stage and each major shift in the relationship of character to theatrical representation concerns not only the perception of self that each ‘epoch of character representation’ has but also – and maybe even more importantly – it concerns a manifestation of a change in the larger understanding of the relations of self and world.6 As Joseph Roach has argued:
When an actor takes his place on a stage even in the most apparently trivial vehicle, and his audience begins to respond to his performance, together they concentrate the complex values of a culture with an intensity that less immediate transactions cannot rival. They embody its shared language of spoken words and expressive gestures, its social expectations and psychological commonplaces, its
5
Especially after a while one is able to notice clearly the extreme physical difficulty that the action of standing still for an extended period of time has on the bodies of the performers. 6 Fuchs, The Death of the Character p.8.
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conventions of truth and beauty, its nuances of prejudice and fear, its erotic fascinations, and frequently its sense of humor.7
In an epoch that thus loses its interest in the principle of character as the motor or agency of dramatic structure, in an epoch where the character is no longer the single, perspectival ‘point’ of stage performance, Müller and her audience share ‘with an intensity that less immediate transactions cannot rival’ an attempt to acieve its further displacement by suggesting that this character not only does not constitute the single and unique perspectival point of the stage of experimental drama, but is not even placed on stage anymore, since its place belongs now more among the audience members and the choreographies of imagination produced within their heads while standing in their still positions and watching. And thus they all ‘hold it together’ during the construction of a drama, an action, which is transferred from the stage to the auditorium and then back again, all over the theatre space, manifesting contemporary understandings of the relation between the self and world. And thus the four figures on stage stand still for over an hour, as the audience does, proving the huge difficulty, endless intensity and unlimited movement of such ‘motionless’ positions, within a process that keeps imagining and creating the I: standing in the middle of the forest; being on a family weekend; being a famous rock singer; being a statue; being a fox; bringing a tea to a family member…
7
Roach, Joseph. The Player’s Passion. USA: The University of Michigan Press, 1993, p.11.
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From Mouth to Hand or ‘People Talking Without Speaking (And No One Dared Disturb the Sound of Silence)’1 (on language)
In The Words Between Us, presented in the ‘Performing Idea Laboratory’ that took place at Club Row, London on 30th April 2010, two people (the performer and an audience member) were sitting opposite each other for a fixed amount of time (ten minutes).2 During this time they exchanged writings initiated by a specific fictional phrase offered by the performer at the beginning of their encounter, until the timer that was timing the process interrupted them. I was none of these people. I was supposed to be but I was not. The work has been created to be performed by me as part of my research but it was instead performed by Karen Christopher so that I am able to continue this research elsewhere. In March 2010, after proposing the presentation of The Words Between Us to the curators of the ‘Performing Idea Laboratory’, I was invited to Amsterdam to take part in a residency workshop with Ivana Müller. This residency coincided with the presentation of the work. Since Müller’s works constitutes a big part of my research too, I decided to present The Words Between Us in my absence and asked Karen Christopher to perform in it in my place.
With The Words Between Us I aimed to focus on the area of performative writing and explore structures for the use of written language in experimental drama. Although performative writing constitutes a practice that has gathered the significant attention of numerous artists and scholars in the last few decades, its processes are often discussed
1
The Sound of Silence. Creation: Simon and Garfunkel. 1964. Song. Performing Idea Laboratory. 29 May 2012. 2
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from the writer’s point of view; namely its forms and methods are often analyzed from within that individual space of creation (the writer’s desk or working space) that attempts to approach performative modes through them. The Words Between Us, on the contrary, has been my attempt to focus more on the former part of the term, on the ‘performative’, and to locate the investigation of such forms and methods, which allow writing practices to be created and performed within the space of performance itself, within the time and the space of the live event. In order to achieve this I located writing itself in the work and, more specifically, I made the writing process not only part of the work but the work itself. In contrast with what I had done in my previous projects, where I presented studio-based explorations of performative writing and language as the text of my stage works (Reply to All, 50’00’’- Short Stories, Short Stories, A Single Voice), this time I decided to treat the work less than an object to be put on stage and more as a process that would allow for the artwork to be created as it was being performed. In this way the creation of the text would somehow reveal its own process, since the liveness of The Words Between Us was based exactly on the fact that one could witness the two participants of the performance (as they could witness themselves and each other) in the process of producing the performance text. Both this process as well as the texts produced (and later laid on the floor for other spectators to read) were part of the work.
Etchells talks about his fascination with language and more particularly with the words that are present in space between people witnessing an event; with the words that bring us closer and those which force us all apart while sharing the time of this event. Language for performance he posits ‘is that maybe, not so much a matter of writing, as one of speaking. Speaking is always bodied, provisional, temporal. Always
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performance. Now’.3 Departing from a similar fascination with the language used in the space and time of performance to create a series of attractions and repulses, as Etchells suggests, I investigate in The Words Between Us the forms that this ‘bodied speaking’ can take. I attempt though to practice an alternative understanding of the speaking that Etchells talks about (a speaking which he seems to distinguish from writing, at least in the abovementioned quote) and to practice writing as speaking within the shared time and space of the event. I thus use the visual image of words as an image particularly associated with the voice and perhaps similarly to those ‘talking notes’ of the nuns in a thirteen century abbey in England that Annette Iggulden refers to in her Silent Speech; where the women lived in silence within a religious enclosure and left notes in specifically appointed places so that they could communicate with their guests and each other.4
Or it might be better to describe my work through Pollock’s words and to say that in The Words Between Us the page becomes the material stage whereon language is practiced as a series of events and it performs itself through shaping and testing its territories so that it makes ‘writing speak as writing’.5 By exploring possible intersections between speech and writing and by incorporating the oral as a writing device, the work forms itself exactly in this act of speaking/writing, exactly in this movement from mouth to hand, creating a live dialogue, a connection and an interplay between its participants (being creators, authors, performers, readers and spectators at the same time), through its themes and structures. What kind of writing was that though? That written language used in the space and time of The Words Between Us to
Etchells, Tim. “Notebook”. 30 May 2012. Iggulden, Annette. “Silent Speech”. Practice as Research. Approaches to Creative Enquiry. Eds Barrett, Estelle and Bolt, Barbara. London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007, p.66. 5 Pollock, “Performing Writing” p.76 (emphasis given in the original). 3 4
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connect and create a dialogue not only between the two participants of each one of its dialogic written exchanges, not only among those participants and the rest spectators seeing and reading the work in Club Row in London on the 30th April 2010, but also between all of them and myself, the absent creator of the work, walking around the streets of Amsterdam as the work was taking place in London? What kind of communication was created through this language?
When Aristotle in his Poetics talks about language and the way it can be used in drama, he does so in a quite practical and material way. He refers to the ‘verbal expression’, as he says, through which the conveyance of thought takes place. And he talks about this expression, this language, about ‘speech, as a whole’ – to use his own words – as being created from eight parts: ‘letter, syllable, conjunction, noun, verb, article, inflection, utterance’.6 Now, a knowledge that relates to a branch of theory that has to do with the modes of utterance produced by these parts ‘concerns the man who possesses the master-art of poetic interpretation’ but not the poet herself, according to Aristotle. ‘For no criticism worth serious attention is directed towards poetry on the basis of knowledge or ignorance of these matters’.7 Drawing on Aristotle, I would like to continue his line of thought by arguing that when it comes to the ‘poet’, i.e. the creator of drama (for in Aristotle’s time the poet constituted of course both the writer of the text of the stage drama, as well as its director and sometimes even its performer), it is not so much in terms of knowledge or ignorance of specific linguistic analyses, structures and uses of utterances that criticism should discuss the works she produces, as in terms of the different modes of knowledge on such issues that her works include and convey; a knowledge that possibly moves away from strict, scientific linguistic terms and
6 7
Aristotle, Poetics p.53. Aristotle, Poetics p.53.
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understandings. What kind of theory would then be concerned with this kind of knowledge?
Kunst discusses the intertwining of theory, art and writing in writing processes. Although she refers specifically to the ways that theoretical critical writing for art interacts with the event rendering itself performative, her ideas can become an initial viewing point (theoretical point) from which to look at The Words Between Us. Kunst refers to a theoretical writing in which the event and materiality of writing, i.e. its affective body (or to put it differently: the body of language constructed by the eight abovementioned Aristotelian parts) are fundamentally intertwined. This kind of writing is participative or performative, in the sense of lending itself to a total actualization of a certain event, triggering and being triggered by it; always in tune with the novelty of the moment and committed to this event’s time and space. It is this proximity of writing to the event and its actual time, that renders it not only a singular but also a universal act, i.e. fundamentally committed to community, Kunst argues. Within these terms writing changes with the event but also brings about a topical change to the event; it is marked by movement and changes in time and space. And it is precisely in this relation between art and writing that the relationships between reception and participation, implication and distinction, the singular and the universal, can be rethought and redefined, according to Kunst. For only if we understand theoretical writing in the light of one such understanding of participative thinking, in the light of the fundamental markedness of this writing with change, which directly influences its ‘realization’ (that is its performative power), can we can move on to the question of how the gesture of writing effects by its turn a change in the shared, Kunst posits.8 Here then we have to do with a
8
Kunst, Bojana. “Demand the Impossible: Writing for Art”. Maska -The Art of Writing. Autumn 2007:pp.10-17.
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theory understood more in its original ancient Greek meaning, i.e. as the procession of men walking through the city, as the change related precisely to this shared movement of bodies through the ‘polis’; as the contemplation, the speculation, the looking at, the spectating, both with the eyes and with the mind, that this movement includes. Theory then entails here the act of experiencing and observing and then contemplating and comprehending. Eventually it includes the space that the theoros (the ancient Greek term used for the person practicing theory, i.e. the person being actively involved in the act of the shared movement and contemplation through the city), the thinker, the spectator, the writer establishes within this movement, and the change that this brings about, to the shared. It is such theory – seen as a physical action – that produces a writing that has a lot to do with the intensity of presence, with the commitment to the event and to the present moment. This writing becomes itself a material articulation of the process and it emerges as a praxis which effects change and cannot but be marked by the intensity of change itself. What do I have to do with this theory, this action, though? What does The Words Between Us have to do with such process?
Being absent when the work is being presented, I obsessively attempt to create a presence for me there (London) as well as to open space for it in Amsterdam and create the event in my mind. I therefore select as many words and images I can from people being there and from the event’s documentation traces. I watch Lois Weaver in the video of her response to the works presented during the ‘Performing Idea Laboratory’. I hear her talking about ‘process’ as the most delicious part in a work, involving a creative anticipation as its main ingredient. I hear her talking specifically about her anticipation during The Words Between Us about what Karen was going to write in response to what she had written. I hear her talking generally about the different kinds
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of sharing of such delicious meals, such delicious processes. I hear her talking about the ‘sharing of the beside’, related to who sits beside you in a meal. But then I hear her talking also about the absence in the beside, which she finds wonderful – as she says – because it makes her think of who is not at the table and about how do we set a place for those who are not with us, how the absences incorporate into the moment of sharing a meal together.9 While I hear Weaver talking I cannot but think about the delicious meal that took place in Club Row and about my absence. I think about the way that the meal was shared with me, about how they set a place for me there and about how I set a place for them as I was walking around the streets of Amsterdam on that same day, another kind of theoros, moving through the city’s intense festivities of the ‘Queen’s Day’, looking at its multiple, noisy events, contemplating the silent exchange of The Words Between Us through them. Always in the proximity of the event, as Kunst suggested, I produced theories, writings that changed and were being changed by the shared time and space of this event.
I was listening to phrases and descriptions over the phone. I was seeing images from people present during the delicious meal: my writing was changing in the shared.
I was sending written phrases to them. I initiated exchanges: their event was changing through my writing.
Walking through the city I changed, I wrote: ‘My dear,
9
Lois Weaver responds to the theme of 'process'. Performing Idea Laboratory. 15 January 2012.
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It’s very nice to be here. It is a national holiday today so it’s my only chance to see the city a bit. The 30th of April though is a very particular day. They call it the ‘Queen’s Day’ and the whole city is out celebrating something that started as the Queen’s birthday celebration many years ago but now looks more like a bizarre bazaar where people are allowed to sell in the streets whatever they can think of: from food, clothes, old discs and toys to weird dancing, singing and acrobat routines; in front of the house doors, from the windows, in the streets, in parks, by the canals; everything’s on sale. I hear stories about families that have been rehearsing for a whole year for this day and have been planning marketing policies to sell their products, families that today have Michael Jackson for father, Madonna for mother, tiny rock stars for kids and they dance to the music for 50cents. It’s such a weird performative frame, isn’t it? You really don’t know where to look first; so many people, so many offers, so much investment. Certainly the weirdest kind of trade I’ve ever witnessed. I am walking among them and don’t know what to think. A friend here says that such investment is always admirable… maybe… Investment can be such a nice word anyway...
I hear you are in a really beautiful space there. I hear it’s on the top floor and that the light is nice and that things are beautifully silent and calm up there. I hear there are others around from time to time, waiting for their turn or reading the previously written words, now laying on the floor. How is Karen? What does she wear? I remember what I’ve read once. I think it was Wooster Group’s Ron Vawter saying that in performance we are the ‘stand-ins’, people who stand on stage in the place of others who cannot be there. I found it such a wonderful thought with great political and philosophical extensions, but I am now thinking of its literality and what it means in this case. What it
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does to our voice and presence: yours, Karen’s, mine. Karen is there because I am here. I am here. You are where you wanted to be (?). Who’s talking (writing) to whom?
I am still walking in this crowded absence of mine, trying to imagine what your words are. I know some already. I know ‘I am afraid of letting you down’.10 I know ‘Things that look ordinary but become extraordinary when written’.11 I know ‘A sentence is that he came in’.12 I know ‘It is best of all to be met and meant for it’.13 These words were my way to be with you today. So here we are. The three of us. I (Karen) speak (write) these to you. I (Karen) am looking forward to the rest. You reply. Karen (I) is writing some more. You go on. I imagine you: how you look like; what you think; how you feel. I am absent, I am here. You write. I am longing for your words. And I thank you for them. From this absence, I am sending you some more of mine. Here they are: thinking of you.
Love, Danae. Amsterdam, 30th April 2010’14
Sharing the silence and light of the room in Club Row in London, in their turn the participants of The Words Between Us use my phrases to move, think, theorize, change and exchange, together in the shared time and space of the event. To act:
Cocker, Emma. “Re: writing, ‘1993-2009, 2000 words”, in Rite, UK: Critical Communities, Open Dialogues, New Work Network, 2010 (phrase used for The Words Between Us). 11 Shonagon, S. The Pillow Book. London: Penguin books, 2006 (phrase used for The Words Between Us). 12 Stein, Gertrude. “Sentences and Paragraphs”. How to Write. Stein, Gertrude. USA: Dover Publications, 1975 (phrase used for The Words Between Us). 13 Stein, “Sentences and Paragraphs”, 1975 (phrase used for The Words Between Us). 14 Danae Theodoridou in response to The Words Between Us, 15 January 2012. 10
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15
15
The Words Between Us. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2010. Performance.
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It is this kind of action, of drama, that The Words Between Us is, an act that as Shoshana Felman notes, articulates ‘not so much what is said or could be said but what is happening, taking effect, producing acts, what is being done or could be done between speaking bodies, between languages, between knowledge and pleasure’.16 Drawing on the myth of Don Juan, Felman refers to the two views of language, as she calls them, namely the cognitive (or constative) and the performative. According to the cognitive view, language is an instrument for transmitting truth, i.e. an instrument of knowledge, a means of knowing reality. According to the performative one though (and Don Juan with his repeated, broken promises for love to different women, certainly aligns with this view), the use of language is in no case tantamount to knowing, but rather to doing: acting on the interlocutor, modifying the situation and the interplay of forces within it. Played on the stage of the speaking body, language continuously makes acts. And if languages are tongues, then tongues are bodies and these acts are played totally between tongues, between bodies changing something in the shared time and space of the event. It is in this shared time of The Words Between Us that its participants form the action that constitutes its drama. Man, Felman notes, from Aristotle onwards has been defined as a political animal, i.e. an animal characterized by the very specificity of her acts. Nietzsche further commented on man as the promising animal, i.e. a human being characterized not simply by acts but by speech acts. Later on and taking it even further, she continues, Mallarmé defined this act as that which always applies itself to paper, as that which leaves traces.17 It is one such line of thought that brings the question of what an act is or can be very close to writing practices, and offers an interesting perspective towards an understanding of the writing processes involved in The Words Between Us as an action, i.e. a stage drama; an action that works on what Felman calls ‘the
Felman, Shoshana. The Scandal of the Speaking Body. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2003, p.5 (emphasis given in the original). 17 Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.64. 16
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indissoluble relation between the physical and the linguistic, between body and language’.18
The problem of the human act consists exactly in the relation between language and body, Felman argues, and this is because the act of the speaking body problematizes, or rather destroys from its inception, the dichotomy between the domain of the ‘mental’ and the domain of the ‘physical’, breaks down the opposition between body and mind, between matter and language. We now talk thus about a new type of materialism that is concerned with the speaking body. We talk about a matter, which, like the act, without being reducible to language, is no longer entirely separable from it. And we talk about the speech (writing) act as the relation between the matter of language (little bits of sentences, phrases, signifiers of the speaking body, or else Aristotle’s eight parts) and energy, between ‘things’ and ‘events’. For if the matter is made up also of speech acts, this is because matter itself has ceased above all to be a ‘thing’; matter itself is now considered an event, Felman argues.19 This is the event of The Words Between Us. A drama full of speech acts made written, full of the materiality of words existing not in the individual space of the subject who writes anymore, but in the shared time and space of the performance; words that have become an event by standing there, between the participants of the work in the room, between them and myself in Amsterdam, by endlessly moving from mouth to hand, from body to body, on the paper.
According to scientific discourse or a certain discourse of science, Felman posits, knowledge is a statement; in writing, though, it is an utterance. The statement, used as the usual object of linguistics, is given as the product of the subject’s absence. On the
18 19
Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.65. Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.109.
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contrary, the utterance, by exposing the subject’s place and energy, focuses on the very reality of language. Words are no longer conceived as simple instruments of transmitting truths. They are cast as projections, explosions, vibrations, devices, flavours. Writing acts, utterances in writing, make knowledge festive, and understand it as what is to be tasted in a feast of language (could this be also the delicious meal that Weaver talked about?). This could be considered as the knowledge conveyed in The Words Between Us. And this is a kind of knowledge that, as Lin Hixson said, knows that to know that things are is not to know what things are. And to know that is to know otherness.20 It is to know the shared space and time you spend, to know your acts in it, to participate in the thinking, to participate in the doing, to write to the other; and even if you don’t know what this is, in scientific, critical, academic terms, you still know that it is. And the participants of The Words Between Us carried that knowledge. Gathered for several hours in the upper room of Club Row knew that sitting at the table opposite one another is to sit at the table opposite one another; they knew that to share written words is to share written words; they knew that to play is to play; they knew that silence is silence. They kept it wonderfully, I hear, as I wander around the streets of Amsterdam. They queued in it so that they broke it with the materiality of words, when their turn came. And when their turn had passed they queued again to do it once more. Because they knew that things are.
I hear that at some point an audience member wished to break that silence with some spoken words. I hear she said something like this: ‘Oh, so now we shouldn’t talk?’ I never asked Karen to request the audience’s absolute silence, and I am sure that neither did she. The rule applied only to the two participants and it said that they should not use
20
The Word Butterfly. Creation: Hixson, Lin and Goulish, Matthew. 2012. Performance Lecture.
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oral speech in order to talk between themselves (for one could even talk to someone else in the room, if she wanted to): they should only talk in writing. But of course this rule was not for all the rest of the attendees, who could come and go, read the previously written documents or watch the two participants exchanging writings. Nevertheless, most of them seemed to know that things are. That silence is. That the game is. They seemed to share Baudrillard’s idea that a rule of a game
Can be perfectly arbitrary in its enunciation, but it is much more unbreakable than the “law” which can be transgressed. You can do anything with the law. With the rule, on the other hand, either you play or you don't play. If you play, the rule is implacable. You can’t get round it. It would be idiotic to transgress it.21
And so they played without transgressions; without stop for more than four hours. ‘Talking without speaking […] and no one dared disturb the sound of silence’. From mouth to hand, stage actions, a sharing of the beside and a sharing of the absent; practicing a writing that they rendered performative because they lent it to the total actualization of a certain event, The Words Between Us, because its movement was endlessly changing the shared time and space of this event.
Baudrillard, Jean. Cited in Connor, Steven “Play Grounds: The Arenas of Game”. 15 January 2012. 21
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The Titles Are Promises or ‘Yes, But Are These Their Stories?’ (on language)
Silence is Sexy, A Man’s Voice, Suicide Note, For All Those Who Were Not There, Not Now, Thoughts I Did While Walking, Obsession, The Man With the Wrong Name, Solo, I Kiss You Like We Used to Kiss, The Other Bed, We Are Many, Many Bad Words About You.1
‘The titles, as titles, are promises’, Felman argues.2 And this is a story about such promises; promises that were kept, broken promises, theatrical experiences that could not keep the promise of ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ or the ‘real’ and at the same time they could not but continue to make this promise and to believe in it. It is about ‘modern Don Juans, who know that truth is only an act. That is why they subvert truth and do not promise it, but promise themselves to it’.3 It is about the scandal of the seduction of the human body insofar as it speaks, as Felman puts it.
My project 50’00’- Short Stories has been the result of my studio-based research and exploration of my obsession with titles; that is, with short fragments of language that became promises for hundreds of stories yet to come, exactly because they were being placed in the position of constituting the titles of those stories. Working in a room – or later in the virtual space of an internet blog – full of the titles we brought in it, full of these promises, we were trying for almost five months to keep as many of them as we
1
The phrases constitute some of the titles of the stories of 50’00’’- Short Stories. Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.92. Felman starts here specifically from Austin’s title ‘How to Do Things With Words’ to talk about titles as promises of new subjects, authorial authority, knowing and learning; and she then refers to titles such as that of Austin, which ‘suspend their own entitlement – their own authority’ through humour. 3 Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.111 (emphasis given in the original). 2
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could, to break others and to then transfer these promises on stage.4 Because of the stage dramaturgy of our work that indicated a different structure for each show (different stories being narrated from different performers), many of these promises, many of these titles and stories were very often not narrated by the people who had written them.
Our narratives for 50’00’’- Short Stories focused particularly on the personal everyday nature of experience of those involved in them. All five of us (the four performers and myself) who wrote the stories were more often than not sharing in those texts memories of everyday life experience, treating these pieces of language probably in a similar way to that discussed by Robyn Stewart in his description of a research process that creates new stories for praxis, which he calls ‘neo-narratives’. This, as he notes, constitutes a process that treats its participants as ‘natural philosophers, embedded in a cultural system and critical of it’, in an attempt to look at the world as people experience it and to hear it through their narratives, tracing how experience modifies (or rather creates?) reality.5 In this sense, Stewart argues, the narratives produced can be interpreted as essential aspects of social life that enable the passing on of knowledge without being necessarily concerned with the legitimacy of such knowledge. It is one such ‘illegitimate’ knowledge that I would like to discuss here. A knowledge created by the theatrical sharing of narratives considered as an everyday life philosophy embedded in a cultural system and critical of it: the philosophy of people experiencing the world and hearing it through their narratives, tracing how this experience creates ‘reality’.
4
Due to my absence from Greece for a period of three months while we were working for 50’00’’- Short Stories, my collaborators and I have continued to work and write stories – based on a similar method of expanding certain fragments of language and creating stories from certain titles – online through a blog that we made and used as our rehearsal space for this period of time. 5 Stewart, Robyn. “Creating New Stories For Praxis: Navigations, Narrations, Neonarratives” Practice As Research. Approaches to Creative Enquiry. Eds Barrett, Estelle and Bolt, Barbara. London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007, p.131.
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Walter Benjamin, in his Storyteller, discusses at length similar kinds of narratives too.6 Already in 1936 he has argued that if the art of storytelling seems to be coming to an end, this is because the experience (the source from which all storytellers have drawn) has fallen in value, and it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. According to Benjamin, the dissemination of information is largely responsible for this state (and of course one need not comment on the vast expansion of information in many different ways that has taken place from 1936 onwards). As he writes
The newspaper every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it.7
Storytelling does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, its ‘meaning’, its ‘truth’, its explanation, like information or a report, Benjamin continues. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of her again. This does not mean though that it attempts an analysis of her inner, psychological, ‘true’ situation. On the contrary, for Benjamin, the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into her own experience. It is in this sense that storytelling plays a primary role in the ‘household of humanity’, Benjamin
6
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”. (Published originally in1936). 25 January 2012. 7 Benjamin, “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”.
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argues;8 exactly because it constitutes an art that does not care about any kind of explanation or authenticity or legitimacy of the knowledge it carries; exactly because it is an art of repeating stories, yours, others’. True or not, it does not matter; what matters is that they place you in a world and in a situation rather than describing one to you.
Now, when it comes more specifically to theatre narratives, Lehmann talks about a passage from the epic theatre of Brecht – which wished to distance the spectators in order to turn them into assessors, experts and political judges – to the post-epic forms of narration, which are all ‘about the foregrounding of the personal, not the demonstrating presence of the narrator, about the self-referential intensity of this contact: about the closeness within distance, not the distancing of that which is close’.9 In this theatre we then witness personal stories in a different way. These are not stories understood as personal because they attempt any kind of close psychological analyses or demonstration of their narrator’s presence, neither because they offer explanations or assessments of any kind, either of the narrator’s life or of ‘reality’. These are stories that can be understood as personal more because they take place among persons, they are intimacies within distance, as Lehmann aptly puts it. One could then argue that these are stories that although they make explicit the fact that they are part of a theatrical process (revealing to their audience all representational mechanisms in operation and often referring to such mechanisms in an explicitly self-referential mode), they nevertheless manage to create an intimacy and closeness exactly because of the personal contact of sharing the distance of such a theatrically structured event (instead of creating an illusion of a close seamless reality, the main aim of other, more conventional theatrical modes). Etchells talks about performances where he wished to make this theatrical
8 9
Benjamin, “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre p.110 (emphasis given in the original).
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distance even more visible by featuring the performance text on stage ‘as paper or script – a physical object which can be picked up, handled, subjected to scrutiny, curiosity, indifference, contempt.’ In such works, one can thus see the performers eyeing up to the text, wondering about it, knowing that whatever it is, it isn’t them, as he adds.10
In 50’00’’- Short Stories one witnesses stories that can be considered personal in a very similar way. They don’t analyze psychologically; they don’t explain; they are physically present on stage (in the hands of the people narrating them, who can eye up to them whenever they need to); they expose their distance. But they still sink into the life of the storyteller (each time a different one) in order to bring themselves out again and to thus render that distance as the most intimate closeness. Furthermore, in those short stories ‘we soon discover that we are not to hear about narration from the point of view that the rhetorics usually discuss the subject’ – to borrow the words of Thornton Wilder when he attempts a description of Gertrude Stein’s narratives.11 Offering nothing of the more expected aspects related to narratives (such as those of where to place a climax or of how to heighten vividness through the use of illustrative detail, as Wilder notes), these narratives return us to first principles and define narration, as Stein has put it, as ‘what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen, that has happened or will happen in any way’.12 And it is this almost terrifying exactness in Stein’s use of words otherwise employed so loosely (anybody, anything and any way), Wilder argues, that leads the discussion on narratives at once into the realms of philosophy and metaphysics, to a theory of knowledge and a theory of time. It is exactly one such theory of knowledge of the ‘anybody, anything and any way’ (could this be another
10
Etchells, Certain Fragments p.105. Wilder, Thornton. “Introduction”. NARRATION. Stein, Gertrude. New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1969, p.vi. 12 Stein, Gertrude cited in Wilder, “Introduction” p.vi. 11
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name for the abovementioned ‘illegitimate’ knowledge of the everyday life philosopher?) that the performers of 50’00’’- Short Stories seemed to share with their audience when telling ‘personal’ stories of all sorts; stories about the biggest things and stories about the smallest things; stories that were theirs or not theirs depending on the night of the show; stories that might describe the experiences of their narrator or the experiences of another narrator of the show, or the experiences of the director of the show, or be narrated as experiences of an audience member or of all audience members; stories thus talking about the experiences of ‘anybody and anything’. And this is a knowledge that does not seek for any kind of legitimating of ‘the truth’; the truth of the story, the truth of its narrator, the truth of its experience or the truth of its words.
Nevertheless, I spent a five-hour train journey with one of my audience members right after she had seen the show, having to defend the fact that it doesn’t matter to me whether the stories told on stage belong to the people narrating them or not, whether they have happened to them or not, whether they are ‘true’ or not. And surprisingly enough, after almost two years from the completion of the work, I still spent a good amount of time during the Q and A session of the panel I was part of in PSi #17 conference in Utrecht, where I presented the work, defending the same idea: that it does not matter to me whether the stories told on stage belong to the people narrating them or not; this does not make them more or less true for me, a strong defender of the fact that, in all cases, ‘it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’.13 ‘Yes, but are these their stories? It is not the same. Are these their stories? It is not the same to know that the person narrating that dark childhood story actually had that experience.
13
Barthes, Roland Barthes p.1.
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Are these their stories?’ I struggled to ask why, why, why it mattered whether the story had actually happened to the person telling it; it may have happened and it may not have happened; Isn’t it dark? Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it good or isn’t it bad? Isn’t it true all the same? As much as I struggled, sitting there in that train for five hours or standing there in the middle of Drift 23, Room 2.07 of Utrecht University, the reply always came back the same: ‘No, it is not the same. Are these their stories?’ Even more surprisingly though, the opposite thing happened as well: there were audience members who came back to see the show again exactly because they heard that the stories narrated on stage did not necessarily belong to those narrating them and that those same experiences ‘happen’ to different people each night.
Felman talks about the human action that is played on the stage of the speaking body as the question of the relation between speech act and theatrical act. As such it ‘proposes itself as a mythical question to speech act theory; what is speech when it performs? What are acts, when language is involved?’14 What are acts then, what are theatrical acts, on the occasion of 50’00’’- Short Stories, when language is involved? And then who are the four autobiographical selves (the four performers of the show) constructed in these acts, in this language, on the stage of each night’s show? Drawing on the myth of Don Juan, Felman summarizes the rhetoric of the seduction of the speaking body in the performative utterance par excellence, as she calls it: ‘I promise’. This utterance, constituting Don Juan’s most preferable speech act, it is also
An utterance in which all the force of Don Juan’s discourse is subsumed and which is opposed on the other hand to the meaning of the discourse of the other
14
Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.15.
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characters in the play, a discourse that is better summed up by Charlotte’s demand – the constative demand par excellence: “We have to know the truth”15
I would like to parallel these two roles (those of Don Juan and Charlotte – one of his lovers/receivers of his endless promises for love) together with their favorite speech acts (‘I promise’ and ‘We have to know the truth’) with the performers of 50’00’’- Short Stories and their audience respectively. And this in order to argue that it is the former who keep promising on stage that they had this or that experience; the ones who attempt to keep the promise of the titles announced and to narrate the stories that those titles promise, as speech acts in which the force of their stage discourse is subsumed; the ones who construct their autobiographical self in language, in those speech acts, in those theatrical acts, like contemporary Don Juans who keep promising each and every night that they are such and such, that such and such happened to them. And they make this promise to an audience who, like another Charlotte, insists on ‘wanting to know the truth’ and the meaning of things. It is in this sense that the ground upon which the seductive relationship between performers and audience is taking place, based on the relation between the speech and the theatrical acts of 50’00’’- Short Stories.
And this does not constitute a stable ground. It works more through its loss than its stability. For the relation between speech and theatrical act, as Felman posits, entails the loss of ground in itself, ‘it is the performance of the loss of the ground’.16 If the analysis of Benveniste argued, according to Felman, that the authority of the performative is nothing other than that of the first person, then Don Juan or the performers of 50’00’’Short Stories subvert this authority through the infinite repetition of his promises for
15 16
Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.17 (emphasis given in the original). Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.41 (emphasis given in the original).
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marriage the first one, or through their promises for real autobiographical stories of the ‘I’ the second. For those Don Juans do not seem to believe in any unique value of the ‘first’. The multiplication of their promises brings out the division inherent in this first person. And it is in this sense and within this repetitive performance of the performative ‘I’ that the originary values of the ‘first’ lose footing and become the performance of the loss of the ground, Felman argues. When the speech act of the ‘I’ thus meets the theatrical act of the ‘I’, when the two are so closely connected with each other on the stage of the speaking body, then the ground is lost. Or should we rather say that another kind of ground is created in this case? Shouldn’t we then assume that on this ground the self-reflexivity of ‘I’’s consciousness and the linguistic self-referentiality of its subjectivity no longer refers to an identity but to a performative excess?
It is on one such ground that the Don Juans of 50’00’’- Short Stories perform. Four ‘I’s on stage who cannot stop promising, who cannot but see their titles as promises on stage and deliver their narratives, passing on knowledge as philosophers embedded in the cultural system of the everyday, tracing how experience modifies reality without being necessarily concerned with the legitimacy or truth of such knowledge. Or rather they are. They are concerned with such truth. But they understand this truth more as an act. They thus use language to make this act (this drama) on stage, to create this truth; a truth that may subvert the other ‘truth’ (that of the audience, seeking for the ‘true’ narrator of the story), but it is still true. And they do not promise it, but promise themselves to it, to use Felman’s apt articulation once more. Because theatre, just like literature ‘is precisely the impossibility of choice: the impossibility of keeping the
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promise of meaning, of consciousness; [and at the same time] the impossibility of not continuing to make this promise and to believe in it.’17
So please, do insist, insist. Make the question over and over again; and I will reply, over and over again. Come on:
‘Yes, but are these their stories?’ ‘Yes, of course they are. I promise.’
17
Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body p.47 (emphasis given in the original).
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Thinking on Our Feet Some thoughts on the dramatic element of ‘thought’ in experimental stage practices (on thought)
‘I don’t know how to name it, as they [mental and dance training] exist together. The English language has an expression – “thinking on my feet”’.1
If an understanding of the other five dramatic elements (plot, character, language, the visual and music) seems to be clearer, this may not be the case with the element of ‘thought’. What does it mean that one of the constitutive elements of drama is ‘thought’ and even more particularly, what kind of thought that is when we come to the drama and dramaturgy of experimental works? Could the English phrase ‘thinking on my feet’, that Müller uses above to express the way she perceives the relationship between mental and dance practices in her work be used as an apt one to describe the particularity of thinking processes that take place within the drama of experimental works of theatre and dance? Processes that require choreographers, directors, performers and all those involved in a work to be literally ‘on their feet’, on stage moving while preserving the state of mental agility and alertness that the metaphorical sense of the phrase denotes, in order to elaborate their concepts and create their work?
Giorgio Agamben talks about the relationship between thinking and walking/moving processes. And although he does that in a different context than that of Müller, one
1
Kopač, Andreja. “I.M. If You Are Outside The Logic Of Language, You’re Basically a Little Crazy – An Interview With Ivana Müller”. Maska.Performing Action, Performing Thinking. Spring 2005, p.79.
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could detect interesting correlations between the two, which can be quite useful for an understanding of the way thought works and relates to body and movement:
When in the evening we walk through the woods, at every step we hear the rustling of invisible animals amidst the bushes that line the path, knowing not whether they are lizards or porcupines, thrushes or snakes. The same happens when we think: what counts is not the path of the words we are traveling, but the indistinct toddling we hear occasionally moving by the edges, a fleeing animal or something suddenly aroused by the noise of our footsteps.2
If being on our feet, i.e. moving, is closely connected with thinking processes – as Müller says – then thinking processes, in their turn, can be seen according to Agamben as moving/walking; a physical process of the mind, a walk through a path where what counts in what we hear is not so much the concrete words as the ‘rustlings’, the ‘indistinct toddling’, the moves of ‘fleeing animals’ and, from time to time, that something that is ‘suddenly aroused by the noise of our [mental] footsteps’. Barthes has also talked about one such ‘rustle’ of language and described it as the ‘music of meaning’, as ‘meaning, undivided, impenetrable, unnamable […] a meaning henceforth liberated from all the aggressions of […] the sign’;3 hence, once more, a meaning heard more as a rustling sound rather than concrete distinguishable words.
In Italian, Agamben notes, the word ‘thinking’ bears originally the meaning of anguish, of burning anxiety, as can still be found in the Italian expression ‘stare in pensiero’, which means to be thoughtful, to worry; whereas the Latin verb ‘pendere’, from which
2 3
Agamben, Giorgio. “The End of Thinking”. Differentia: Review of Italian Thought I. Autumn 1986, p.57. Barthes, The Rustle of Language pp.77-78.
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the word is derived in the Roman language, reveals the state of ‘being suspended’.4 Anguish, anxiety, suspension or else agility and alertness (as comes out ouf Müller’s ideas), all qualities included in the thinking process, a process that appears here as an actively physical one, within which the seeker walks through the woods of her head hearing the rustle; always moved by the desire inherent in such kind of research, a desire that does not rest, does not stop walking, does not stop seeking. What the seeker desires and looks for within the rustle she hears during her walk in the woods of her thought, is her voice, Agamben posits. This is what is suspended, what ‘hangs’ in thinking. And this is exactly why we can think only in language, because language is and is not our voice. There is a pending, an unresolved question in language, according to Agamben, and that is whether language is or is not our own voice, the way braying is probably the voice of a donkey and chirping that of a cricket. We therefore think – i.e. we hold the words suspended and ourselves hanging in language – because ultimately we hope to find our voice there. Thinking thus is eventually defined here as the pending of the voice in language. The seeker wanders in the wood of thought, looking for her voice in language, hearing its fleeing rustle through her words and still searching (walking) more and more for it, anxiously, alertly. I would argue that it is this walk, this quest of the seeker for her voice in and through language while moving; this thinking on her feet until ‘something suddenly arises by the noise of her footsteps’ that characterizes processes of thought in experimental works.
When Aristotle in his Poetics talks about thought as one of the constitutive elements of drama, he refers to it once more as something closely connected to language and more particularly as ‘all the effects that have to be deliberately and consciously achieved
4
Agamben, “The End of Thinking” p.57.
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through the use of speech’.5 ‘Thought’ for Aristotle denotes the ability ‘to state the issues and appropriate points pertaining to a given topic’.6 It therefore includes ‘all the passages in which they [the characters] attempt to prove some thesis or set forth an opinion’.7 Elements of this endeavour in the case of ancient Greek drama include, as Aristotle mentions, ‘proof and refutation and the stimulation of feelings such as pity, fear, anger and the like’, thus of course the famous ‘agon’ of the Greek tragedies as well as other well-known monologues and dialogues of their protagonists.8 Based on a text that has been pre-scripted with great precision – namely on a carefully constructed speech – the characters of ancient drama were seeking in their way to find through thought their voice in language.
What kind of thought through language though is the one produced on ‘our feet’ during creative processes of experimental works today, processes that rarely include something equally pre-scripted or constructed a priori? How do such processes ‘state issues and appropriate points pertaining to a given topic’, in a similar – though quite distinct in its modes – way to that of ancient Greek drama? And what is the relationship of this thought to dramaturgy and the drama eventually presented on stage within this frame? I would argue that a helpful path to approach and understand what the role of the dramatic element of ‘thought’ in contemporary experimental creation might be is through the notion of what the Serbian art theorist and conceptual artist Miško Šuvaković has called ‘theoretical performance’.9
5
Aristotle, Poetics p.52. Aristotle, Poetics p.28. 7 Aristotle, Poetics p.26. 8 Aristotle, Poetics p.52. ‘Agon’ in ancient Greek drama refers to the formal convention according to which the struggle between the characters takes the form of a formal debate that takes place between the chief characters of the play, protagonist and antagonist, usually with the chorus acting as judge. 9 Šuvaković, Miško. “Theoretical Performance”. Maska -Performing Action, Performing Thinking. Spring 2005: pp.67-72. 6
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Art in the 20th century, according to Šuvaković, has been characterized by the struggle between anti-theoretical and pro-theoretical principles as far as the approach to modern art and culture is concerned. With the term ‘anti-theoretical’, Šuvaković refers to canonical ideas of the autonomy of art within society, related to the intuitive creation and attaining of preverbal existential experiences and aesthetic values. According to such ideas, theory always follows creation as the critical and poetic interpretation of a work of art that had come into being from non-transparent creative intuitions. Criticism and theory of art thus constitute here subsequent functions in the process of understanding, archiving and valuing the unattainable creative act and its effect.
The term ‘pro-theoretical’ on the contrary is connected with the interdisciplinary tactics of the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde phenomena. This is an approach based on the anti-canonical notion that the autonomy of art is relative and functionally determined by the political organization of the public and private domains as well as of the controlled and uncontrolled institutionalized creative context. It is for this reason that creation according to ‘pro-theoretical’ ideas is seen as something arising from conceptually envisaged or theoretically determined starting points. In this case then, Šuvaković concludes, theory as well as critical artistic processes are not considered as a subsequence of receptive and aesthetic experience but as the constitutive and constructive practice of every artistic creation, even one that is presented as antitheoretical.
Starting from one such description of the way that theoretical and thinking processes have related to art from the 20th century onwards – a description that I find quite
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accurate – I would argue that the artistic processes that I discuss here could be understood as part of the ‘pro-theoretical’ approach and connect particularly with what Šuvaković calls ‘theoretical performance’. This kind of work, as was mentioned above, results from distinct but somehow interrelated areas of action of artistic avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, such as experimental practices in theatre, various performing procedures within other forms of art (a characteristic case in music is for example the work of Cage who developed his verbal or lecture performances, one of the first models of theoretical performance), as well as experiments in dance. As far as theatre is concerned, such practices designate theatrical works that move from the concept of drama as solely representational art to drama as a researching performance practice. And they thus introduce, practice and experiment with the idea of theatre and its dramatic action as laboratory, as a space where theatrical art is experimentally and theoretically researched, while its various and multi-perspective aspects are being constantly deconstructed, redefined and reinvented anew as a result of this endless research process.
Moving in the same direction and driven by similar inquiries, a generation of choreographers and dancers, which appeared during the late 1990s, conducted similar experiments aiming at an unusual change towards the theoretization of choreographic and dance work. This new dance, most often discussed in critical language as ‘conceptual dance’, once more appeared – as is the case with experimental theatre – as a practice resulting both from critical/theoretical research and the deconstruction of dance paradigms (the institution of dance, established dance and choreographing techniques and methods etcetera). Choreographers and performers working in this area (such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Ivana Müller,
Mårten Spångberg and several others) are
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thus interested in introducing a conceptually or theoretically constructed positioning into the rhetorical systems of dance. And especially when it comes to dance, maybe even more than in theatre, the role of such theoretical performances becomes much more obvious, since theory and the entry of thinking processes in this area of art represent a more obvious means of attack on its previous ‘technical fetishism’ and ‘choreographic aestheticism’, as Šuvaković puts it.10
Within these terms, the pro-theoretical approach in the areas of experimental theatre and dance is being developed according to Šuvaković both as a self-reflexive approach – wherein artistic work becomes research into a specific process of artistic creation based on the function of art in the world of art, culture and society – as well as a conceptual approach, where the artist offers the work for reception on the basis of exhibiting concepts (ideas, notions, mental representations) leading to a provocation of artistic practice.11
One such entrance of thinking processes in experimental theatre and dance practices as a means of attack on previous established methods and techniques, constitutes of course part of the general shift that has been attempted already from the late 1960s and the 1970s through the broader art genre of ‘conceptual art’, to which these practices directly relate. Tony Godfrey talks about conceptual art as ‘Modernism’s nervous breakdown’. If ‘a nervous breakdown happens when we can no longer believe in all we have based our lives on: friends, family, job, beliefs’, Godfrey notes, then conceptual art could no longer believe in what art claimed to be, nor in the social institution it had become.12 By the 1960s the dominant strand of modernism had become a formalism that focused
10
Šuvaković, “Theoretical Performance” p.71. Šuvaković, “Theoretical Performance” p.67. 12 Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon, 1998, p.14. 11
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solely on forms and styles interested in refining and purifying the medium as an end in itself (even when this medium was understood as the body itself), instead of explaining life in a rapidly changing world. Objecting strongly to such art forms, which had become too rational or too Cartesian in their strict preservation of the body/mind distinction (even if in the opposite way, privileging the superiority of the body instead of the mind), conceptual art comes as a violent reaction against the status of the art object as a special kind of commodity, reintroducing the conceptual through the body. Within its frame thus art works are not about forms or materials, but about ideas and meanings not being defined in terms of any medium or style but rather by the way they question what art is or could be, in a process that, as Godfrey writes, refers back to its subject, ‘as in the phrase “I am thinking about how I think”’, representing a continual self-critique.13 In these terms, conceptual artists also emphasise the crucial role of language, philosophy and social sciences in all visual experience and understanding, within the frame of an art that ‘whatever else it may be, is first and foremost an art of questions’, as Peter Osborne has argued.14
It is then in this sense that theory moves the body within experimental creative processes. Abolishing the traditional distinction between body and mind, thought now is body; a body which becomes part of a theoretical, that is, cultural, political and existential performance. In this way theory and its thinking processes cease to be solely an area of reflection (the mimesis of the world by the process of thought) and become the time and space of the performing body through which the world manifests itself. Within this process, philosophical concepts also cease to be understood merely as a discourse of analysis, discussion, and hermeneutical speculation, but can also be
13
Godfrey, Conceptual Art p.12. Osborne, Peter, Ed. Conceptual Art. London, New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002, p.14 (emphasis given in the original). 14
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conceived and created within their intervention and interaction with the stage; constituting in this way another kind of theory or philosophy produced ‘on our feet’, to use Müller’s words once more.
‘On its feet’ then, the performing body in experimental works walks and walks in the woods of its head; it hears the rustle of its voice, it seeks for it in words, in language, in thought; it can never find it, it can never know what exactly it is that it hears, it seeks and seeks, always alert to grasp that something that arises from the noise of her mental footsteps. It is during such walks and processes that works of experimental theatre and dance, such as those discussed here, are being created. And in contrast to Aristotle’s carefully pre-constructed thinking, this is exactly the way that the element of ‘thought’ can be seen in these works: not necessarily as strictly theoretical, in the maybe more commonly used understanding of the word related to strict academic norms, or as illustrative of theories, nor even as ‘necessarily logical’, as Solomon LeWitt has argued.15 The logic of the walking thoughts of such works can rather be seen more as ‘a device that is used at times only to be ruined’, to use LeWitt’s words once more, so that it is created over and over again allowing those involved in them to take the walk again and again seeking and re-seeking in the rustle of language.16 Not because they expect to find or create a concrete object through this process but because they are deeply aware of the fact that it is this fleeing rustle, these invisible animals amidst the bushes, that indeed ‘line the path’ of the work, as Agamben noted earlier. They know that the thoughts, ideas and theories that come up from this kind of walk constitute utterly significant elements of the work, not restricted solely to its process of production but which moreover change the essential character of the work during its performance too,
15 16
Solomon LeWitt cited in Osborne, Conceptual Art p.26. The quote belongs to: LeWitt cited in Osborne, Conceptual Art p.26.
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from that of an object of aesthetic reception to another kind of work that brings about an issue that lies at the heart of conceptual art, according to Osborne: ‘its dependence on the participation of its audience for its realization’, even if purely imaginatively.17
The next three short stories attempt to follow such walks and the ideas, thoughts and theories that came up during them, in order to observe the processes within which specific issues (related to politics, language, memory and experimental dramaturgical structures themselves) were thought through language within the frame of specific theatre and dance works, made both inside and outside the frame of this research practice. More particularly, the three forthcoming stories attempt to explore the relationship of this thought to dramaturgy and the dramatic action that was eventually presented on stage within the frame of the works discussed. Belonging both to theatre and dance, the works discussed below share a common understanding of the essential role of walking/thinking processes – as they have just been described – towards their creation and reception, which allows for experimental transformation in the relation between their elements beyond established forms of dramatic play.
It is exactly for this reason that all those involved in these works entered the woods and wandered in their rustle. It is exactly for this reason that they walked and moved; on their feet. It is exactly for this reason that they thought.
17
Osborne, Conceptual Art p.22.
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The Lion or Dancing the Linguistic Animal Some thoughts on politics (on thought)
‘You should now look at me as you would look at the lion in the zoo, only of course the lion would not talk to you’. These words belong to Xavier Le Roy and this story speaks about lions, movement, language and politics. During his discussion on Dance and Politics with Andre Lepecki, Bojana Cvejic and Tania Bruguera as part of Move: Weekend at Southbank Center, London in November 2010, Le Roy encourages us to look at him as a lion. Ignorant still, I am sitting among the other animals in Purcell Room of Queen Elizabeth Hall, not being able to realize exactly what he had in mind and where this awkward image came from but still laughing along with the joke (or was it one?), though not paying too much attention to the comment anyway.
A bit later here I am again in Queen Elizabeth Hall to watch Le Roy’s Low Pieces.1 Entering the space we now see him on stage together with eight more choreographers and dancers from all over Europe. They are sitting on a line at the stage front waiting for us to take our seats too. When we are all in place Le Roy says something like this: ‘Hello, welcome. We would like to start tonight’s show by having a discussion with you. Since we don’t want to go way beyond our scheduled show time, this discussion will last fifteen minutes and the technicians will make a blackout to mark the end of this duration. Don’t worry the lights will go up again and the show will continue. We’ll have the opportunity to go on with our discussion later in the show if we want to.’
1
Low Pieces. Creation: Xavier Le Roy. 2011. Performance.
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Pause. Pause. Pause.
That was it. They wanted to have a discussion with us, they wanted to do exactly and literally what they said: a discussion, not a discussion about something, about a specific topic. Bit by bit the voices both from the auditorium and the stage start talking, saying things such as: ‘What’s your name? ’Where are you from?’ ‘Is this now a discussion or an interrogation?’ ‘What makes a discussion?’ ‘Why did you choose that title?’ ‘Is this a discussion now or a Q and A session?’ ‘I agree. A discussion is a place where we all think together, we don’t just ask questions from the one side and reply from the other’, ‘How long does it take to really start discussing?’ ‘So now why is this not a pre-show discussion?’
A sudden blackout.
Let us stay in this darkness for a while, before we go on with the rest of the show. I suggest staying in this blackout in order to insist and think further on the last question asked: ‘So now why is this not a pre-show discussion?’ Why was that not a pre-show discussion? It is around this question that I wish to place here some thoughts on the way experimental works think about politics through their dramaturgical structures and the use of language. In order to do this I will draw in particular on Le Roy’s specific work as well as on the thoughts and ideas of the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno in relation to modes of artistic production (among others) in, what he calls, the ‘Post-Fordist times’.2
2
Lavaert, Sonja and Gielen Pascal. “The Dismeasure of Art – An Interview with Paolo Virno”. Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times. Eds. Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2009.
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For I believe that an examination of both abovementioned works – the one artistic and the other theoretical/philosophical – and more particularly a combined examination of them, can possibly offer an interesting alternative perspective on the way that the political can be understood and discussed in relation to the arts today.
So, let us go back to the darkness. And to my question of interest: Why is this not a preshow discussion? Why the discussion that Le Roy asks us to participate in or rather to create, is becoming part of the staged drama and its dramaturgical structure, i.e. part of the theatrical machinery of representation, and is not a discussion that could be – and indeed most commonly is – taking place outside that machinery, before or after it? First of all, this choice seems to reveal Le Roy’s understanding of theatre (coming from the Greek verb θεάσθαι-theasthai=to see, to behold) as what it literally is, i.e. as a ‘seeing place’ that ever since its beginning it functions to allow spectators to develop a means to interpret and speculate about the world in which they live through its actions. In this place things are put so that they are shown and thus seen and observed. Putting a discussion in theatre then (and not before or after it) means wanting to show this discussion more than just to have it, wanting to observe and reflect more on its structures and modes and – more importantly maybe – on the ways it organizes itself among the people who are having it.
Secondly, this action relates to one of the main aims of conceptual art that has to do with the creation of ‘environments to be inhabited and be transformed by the public’.3 What Le Roy (following constitutive ideas of conceptual art) clearly states with the creation of one such environment is that in experimental dramaturgical processes, the
3
Osborne, Conceptual Art, p.39.
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work as an object constitutes only one of the terms of a new relational aesthetic, whilst the other one is the embodied viewer. Recognizing the essential role of the viewer in the creation of the work, Le Roy produces a form of responsive activity, a critical conversation or inquiry. Preserving the conventional stage-auditorium relationship and respecting audience’s seated position and their space, he confers a participatory dimension to the work, requiring its audience to – at least partly – ‘complete’ it in a voluntary way, challenging in this way the modernist conception of the artwork as an autonomous or self-sufficient entity.
It is still dark. Some voices go on talking: ‘We should now continue the discussion by ourselves’, ‘Yes let’s do that’, ‘So do you really think that…’ The lights are on again. For the biggest part of the rest of the show we see our nine interlocutors fully naked, first lying or sitting on the floor in one group making tiny, sharp movements, then lying down in two groups moving slowly in two weird body constellations where one cannot tell which leg or arm belongs to whom anymore, or even later we see them coming on stage one by one on all fours walking around like animals – or indeed most likely like a pack of lions – softly bumping into each other and then continuing their walk, or lying on one another or next to each other, or touching their heads, communicating in different ways until they find their way out of stage again one by one… A blackout and now the darkness will stay for much longer. After a while one can barely distinguish in the dark the nine figures (all dressed up again) standing at the front of the stage, ‘on their feet’, suggesting that we go on with our discussion. Some audience members eagerly start talking again. More now than before. ‘Why is it easier for some people to speak in the dark than in the light?’ ‘Well this now looks more like a monologue from the audience than a discussion’ ‘But what do you mean? Do you think that we in the
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audience are one person? How could this be a monologue?’
This time, let us keep the darkness until the end of this story. As Le Roy did in Low Pieces. And let us bring back the question: Why is this discussion, this activity almost exclusively dominated by language, not a pre-show event but rather an integral, repeated part of the theatrical process? I could go on with similar questions, which haunted me during the Low Pieces: What is this staging of a discussion all about? What could it mean for the connection that a discussion can have with theatrical and dramaturgical modes? How does it connect to the scenes of nude physical movement? And to arrive to this story’s main interest: What has this staging of a discussion to do with, or indeed to propose to a contemporary understanding of the relationship between theatre and politics?
And it is important at this point to distinguish, as Joe Kelleher has suggested, two separate discourses, that of ‘political theatre’ and that of ‘theatre and politics’.4 The first one is interested in stage attempts that engage in social relations aiming to have a strong impact on a smaller or larger community to directly change its problems from within. Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi have argued that these are attempts deeply rooted in the project of Enlightenment, in the urge to educate the people and to build up the cultural identity of a nation or community. In this political theatre it is often the role of dramaturgy to place a production in the framework of a social and political context, for instance by giving some allusions to real events during the performance, or by providing additional information in program notes. In others words it is dramaturgy’s work to raise the political consciousness of the production team as well as of the spectators.5
4 5
Kelleher, Joe. Theatre & Politics. UK and US: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p.3 (emphasis given in the original). Lehmann, Hans-Thies and Primavesi, Patrick. “Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds”. Performance Research 14.3
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Especially after the decline of twentieth century ideologies though, as Lehmann and Primavesi note, the relation between performing arts and politics has moved towards a different direction. The trust in the artist’s right and ability to tell the truth and the urge to interpret and explain works in the light of a current perspective in order to educate the masses, have been questioned by many artists and dramaturges who would rather let spectators themselves reflect upon their position than teach them lessons in politics. Within these terms there has been, according to Lehmann and Primavesi, ‘a shift from the use of art for politics towards a political way of making art’, a shift that is particularly important for the role of dramaturgy in contemporary theatre and performance.6 And this is also what Kelleher calls theatre and politics. I would like to relate my thoughts, placed in the darkness of the final scene of the Low Pieces that still surrounds us, to this shift and to examine its relation to contemporary dramaturgy.
Van Imschoot talks about dramaturgy as a shared intellectual responsibility that creates a shared ground on which people could meet.7 It thus does not coincide solely with the particular presence of the dramaturge nor is it taking place only ‘in something known as rehearsal’, as Heathfield has suggested, but also in the event of performance, and it calls on a dramaturgical sensibility from all those involved in it: the dramaturge, the director, the performer, but also the individual spectator.8 Van Kerkhoven refers to contemporary dramaturgy as a time that neglects and works against the main characteristics of neoliberal times: the heavy pressure that current production modes impose, the pressing request for speed, adaptability and short-term visions that haunt theatre and society in
(2009): 3-6. 6 Lehmann and Primavesi, “Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds”, p.5. 7 Van Imschoot, “Anxious Dramaturgy”, p.63. 8 Heathfield, Adrian. “Dramaturgy Without a Dramaturge”, p.107.
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general today.9 This does not coincide with a working without political engagement though, but on the contrary as van Kerkhoven puts it elsewhere, with a microdramaturgy of the theatre that should communicate with a macro-dramaturgy of the social.10 What is implied in this thought is that the ways we come to meet and work together within dramaturgical theatrical processes can be used as models for imagining the ways we could come to meet within the rest of the social realm. Such dramaturgy then becomes political not on the level of the message it conveys. This is a political dramaturgy that seeks theatrical forms to make it possible for those involved in it (artists, dramaturges, spectators, etcetera) to think and eventually to live together in new ways. And I would like to argue that it is through this seeking for new artistic forms that the political can be addressed much more effectively today, rather than through any other attempt for the creation of ‘spectacles boasting on being no more spectacles but ceremonials of community’, promising political messages as ‘passwords’ that will enter us to a new life devoid of our socio-political problems.11
In one of her recent talks, Claire Bishop posits once more that art’s main aim is to enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew. And she stresses the fact that in order for this aim to be achieved, we should carefully preserve the distance and limit that separates artistic processes and the social realm. When the significance of the aesthetic values and other mediating aspects involved in these processes, Bishop argues, are being undermined in favour of the creation of socially and politically transforming processes able to liberate us from all our problems; when the art event and the social, political event are seen as indistinguishable, then art, far from opposing the
9
Van Kerkhoven, “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century”, pp.7-11. Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. Cited in Stalpaert, Christel. “A Dramaturgy of the Body”. Performance Research, 14.3 (2009): 121-125. 11 Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator”, 2004. 10
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‘society of spectacle’, as this has been described my Guy Debord, becomes totally merged with it and risks producing ‘twitter art’, where anyone can have her go. Only once we make sure that such distinctions do not collapse, only once we don’t lose faith in the work of the artist and the intrinsic value of art as an aesthetic third term that we need in order to communicate, as Rancière has famously argued, we can actually start imagining another social and political realm, she concludes.12
It is in this sense that contemporary dramaturgy, instead of a process that aims to directly link artistic and political events, abolish their distinction and thus offer solutions to our socio-political problems, should be understood more as the process of bodies that are political by themselves. These political bodies insist on meeting within the theatrical frame and working on the production of the aesthetic values and dramaturgical forms of the artistic work, not because they do not care about the social and the political or about bringing possible changes to them but because they care too much about it and about creating a fruitful ground to imagine these changes through this dramaturgical work. For all bodies involved in the dramaturgical context of a performance share the responsibility in a recasting of what Rancière has called ‘the distribution of the sensible’.13According to Rancière politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. And artistic practices, he argues, are political exactly in the sense that they entail a certain recasting
12
Bishop, Claire. “Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?” A lecture presented as part of Living as Form exhibition in New York City, September 2011. 17 November 2012. . Bishop refers here to artistic productions where the aesthetic values and structures of the art-work are undermined in favour of a vivid interactivity. In this frame every audience member can take the place of the artist and take over the theatrical stage for a certain amount of time to create her own ‘art’. She refers also to the term ‘social practices’ used in North America for similar participatory artistic works, from which ‘art’ is even totally absent. And she argues that such practices denote a lack of faith not only in the power of art and the work of the artist, but also to politics and democracy itself (implying that its forms and structures, as well as all the fights done in its name, are ineffective in themselves and art should take its place). 13 Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2006.
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of the distribution of the sensible. They are ways of doing and making that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making, as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility. They are works that comment exactly on who has the ability to see and the talent to speak in society.
Let us take all these thoughts with us in the darkness of this second part of the discussion during Low Pieces. Here we are within a dramaturgy that, right after it worked carefully for a prolonged time on the extraordinary aesthetic value of the naked human body and its organic movement, extends this value on the way we discuss, and explicitly gives us all the opportunity to see and speak and ‘distribute the sensible’ in any way we want in this small theatrical community, by self-organizing a discussion for fifteen minutes and then fifteen minutes more; in other words, it gives us the opportunity to use language in any way we want twice for fifteen minutes, first in the light and now in the dark. The participatory dimension given to the work through this responsive activity should not be seen, as Lygia Clark has argued, as participation for participation’s sake or an aggression for its own sake, but rather as a request for the participant to invest her gesture with meaning and for this act to be nourished by thought.14 And it is exactly through this thought that we go back to Agamben’s ideas. Because the thought that Le Roy seems to wish to share with his audience can be seen as related to those fleeing animals Agamben talks about; and to our endless looking for our voice in them. One could then argue that the environment (‘to be inhabited and be transformed by the public’) that Le Roy aims to create here quite closely resembles Agamben’s ‘wood of thought’ and invite us all to walk through it and listen to the rustle heard at the edges of our linguistic path, listen to the fleeing animals that line that path.
14
Clark, Lygia. Cited in: Osborne, Conceptual Art, p.39.
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During the two talks/walks that take place in Low Pieces we become aware of the selfreflexivity inherent in linguistic expression, of the limitation of a discussion that cannot but be about ‘the discussion’, of the endless struggle of the voice to find itself in this limitation, in this language and –through that struggle – to think. Between these two discussions, addressed to the linguistic animal, we see the bare human and the echo in her human movement of the way that other animals or living organizations self-organize their own communities too. It is this echo of organic organization inherent in our movement that Le Roy seems to parallelize with our thinking/language processes, which now appears to be closely connected with this movement.
Thus, when in Low Pieces we do not draw attention to the way our discussions are selforganized, to the self-reflexivity of the animal that we are and to its rustling thought, we witness traces of organic organization that move between the body of this linguistic animal (our body, the body of those on stage) and that of other animals and living organizations. The two activities are counterposed. If the rest of the animals organize their communities within a thinking process expressed through their movement, this is exactly what the linguistic animal does as well. The human has her animal fleeing thought and voice in the same way that other animals have theirs. One could then argue that the movement presented in the scenes between the two discussions can be seen exactly as (a continuation of) the movement that takes place in those discussions, i.e. as the movement of the linguistic animal that walks in the woods of its thought listening to the rustle of its language, looking for its voice. This animal should then indeed be looked at as the lion (as Le Roy suggested in the discussion that took place before the show), with the particularity that this lion talks in a human language. It is in this way that Le Roy attempts to comment on the organic operation of thought and language,
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their finite power (equal to that of the languages of other animals) and therefore also – and maybe most importantly – the carefulness with which one should approach their structures; not only the ones structures taking place in language and the use of concrete words, but also those more closely connected with the movement of thought that really ‘lines the path’ as Agamben says, the ones that take place at the edges, in a rustle seen as ‘the meaning liberated from all the aggressions of the sign’, as Barthes has suggested. But what does all this has to do with politics particularly today?
Paolo Virno posits that our era, the ‘Post-Fordist’ era, as he calls it, is mainly characterized by the fact that it became first and foremost linguistic and communicative. According to Virno, we live in a time in which every aspect of human nature, even the fact that we are linguistic beings, has become an economic stake and constitutes raw material for production. The qualities required of a post-fordist worker is thus the ability to anticipate unexpected opportunities and coincidences, to seize chances that present themselves, to move with the world. These are all skills people do not learn at their workplace but by living in a big city, by gaining aesthetic experiences, having social relationships and creating networks within a life that becomes, in its entirety, job competency devoted to the labour process. In such linguistic and communicative labour, speaker-workers must be of course, as Virno stresses, permitted an autonomy and freedom – instead of pre-recorder or scripted sentences and dialogues – in order to produce intelligence and collaboration which will then be exploited.15
It is exactly from one such ground – the absolute dominance of language and the necessary for its exploitation autonomy and freedom – that Le Roy seems to start his
15
Lavaert, and Gielen, “The Dismeasure of Art – An Interview with Paolo Virno”, pp.17-44.
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discussion in the Low Pieces too, in order to explore what the possible form of resistance to this situation can be, because as Virno notes, when ‘language is the key to creating surplus value, it becomes our mission to free our linguistic competence of this role of production power, by turning it into the foundation of another public sphere’.16 And, to a significant degree, it seems to be the work of the arts, and more particularly here the work of dramaturgy, to explore how this ‘other’ public sphere might look like. Because ever since language became the main principle according to which social reality is recognized, social reality as a whole became aesthetic and thus maybe more closely connected with the arts than ever before. Art then becomes the place par excellence to explore ways to cast, as Virno says, the ‘language games’, which are presently ‘production power’, in the role of a ‘foundation of a new politics’, by looking for forms that ‘combine given elements in a new way, like the wordsmith’, a game which refers specifically to the linguistic animal.17
With one such aim in mind art from the avant-garde onwards attempts to find new standards to measure prosperity within a domain of intelligence, language and collaboration of an era where prosperity is no longer produced by labour time but by knowledge and intellect. And when the old standards prove impotent, what is needed, Virno argues, is mainly a formal investigation for new ones. The common ground of art and social movements thus is not about content. Art expressing views on social resistance is not relevant anymore. The ‘aesthetics and social resistance today meet in a quest of new forms. Political art or not, the contents hardly matter’, Virno suggests, sharing ideas that were also expressed by Van Kerkhoven and Bishop earlier.18 What art
16
Lavaert, and Gielen, “The Dismeasure of Art – An Interview with Paolo Virno”, p.32. Lavaert, and Gielen, “The Dismeasure of Art – An Interview with Paolo Virno”, p.43. 18 Lavaert and Gielen, “The Dismeasure of Art – An Interview with Paolo Virno”, p.17. 17
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and, more particularly here, its dramaturgical structures seek instead then are new forms denoting new ways of living which result in new standards. The form of an artwork is like the form of a new public sphere, like the structure of a new idea. Looking for forms in the arts is like looking for new standards of what we may regard as society, power, work, activity and so on, according to Virno. In this sense even art that is remote from political engagement touches upon the social and political reality, as do artists remote from the political movement through their search for new forms and expressions, he concludes.
And this seems also to be the case for Le Roy and his Low Pieces. By recognizing the movement of the naked body as the movement of the naked voice and by placing next to each other scenes of naked physical movement and dressed physical language, Le Roy thinks about the political. He parallelizes those two dances in a dramaturgy that suggests that the man, the linguistic animal, should observe carefully the way she self-organizes her discussions and thus her communities, based on that linguistic characteristic. In an explicit dramaturgy of a shared intellectual responsibility, structured as a ‘microdramaturgy in the theatre that should communicate with a macro-dramaturgy of the social’, Le Roy stresses the need to carefully observe the structures, roles and dynamics that take place in our discussions as if those were staged events; the need to constantly listen to the rustle, to think of the limits of language, to endlessly look for our vulnerable animal voice, especially within the post-fordist era we live in; and to use theatre and its dramaturgical forms to constantly search for ways to combine and distribute given linguistic elements in new ways for the ‘foundation of a new politics’ and the creation of another public sphere…
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Towards the end of the darkness, it all starts to make sense. This is the lion. This is movement; this is dance and this is politics.
And this is why this is not a pre-show discussion. The lights are now on. The show is over.
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Remembering That Which Never Happened Dramaturgical apparatuses to think about memory in experimental works (on thought)
We are inside the car. I am sitting at the back seat. You’ll stop outside a bookshop. You want to buy a present. I’ll wait for you silent and still. ‘Will it take you long?’ ‘No’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes’ You leave. You lock the car. I stay there silent and still. I start looking myself in the mirror. I cry. Some people enter the bookshop and shoot you. I cry. Someone hits you with his car while you return to me. I cry. Someone kidnaps you. I cry. You are leaving with someone and you leave me locked in the car forever.
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I cry. You are coming. You enter the car. We leave.1
This story is about dramaturgical processes that think on memory through language; and more particularly it is about dramaturgical attempts to ‘theorize’ memory. What would an action of theorizing memory imply and include though? As mentioned in the introductory stories, the term ‘theory’, deriving from the Greek θέα (thea=view)+ οράν (oran=to see), implies that to theorize something means to create a certain ‘point of view’ for it. And to then look at it from that certain point, from that certain place. This action of looking at things is interestingly enough also present in the etymology of ‘theatre’; another word coming from the Greek θέα (thea=view) and θεάσθαι (theasthai=to see, to behold), revealing strong connections between the two terms. Theatre and theory then both as spaces, points, wherefrom one looks at things; spaces with a view to the world in which one lives; spaces through which one develops a means to interpret and speculate about this world. To theorize memory then. To create points of view, spaces from which to look at memory and to remember. But what kind of theories, of viewpoints, can be created for memory when the viewing space from which one looks at it to create such theories is placed in theatre, the space par excellence for looking at things?
The theories discussed here as dramaturgical suggestions through which theatre thinks and looks at memory will be mainly based on aspects related to the creative process of one of the projects that took place with the frame of my research practice, 50’00’’
1
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance.
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Short Stories; a work almost entirely based on personal memories from all its five participants (the four performers and myself). What is examined here is the way that the dramaturgical structures that occurred within the frame of this work, can be understood through Agamben’s notion of potentiality and the experience that he has described as ‘remembering that which never happened’.2 Through this connection I argue that dramaturgies similar to that of 50’00’’- Short Stories can be seen as a theory produced ‘on our feet’, as a point of view for memory according to which the act of remembering constitutes a performative act in the sense proposed by Austin, i.e. an act that does what it says by saying it, an act that views the uttered words not just as statements about something but as actions, something that is happening now and now, while being uttered, spoken, told. Such dramaturgies then define ‘remembering’ as a stage action during which ‘to remember’ in theatre becomes a very practical process that constructs memories that return new every time and exist only as long as they are uttered and remembered on stage regardless of whether they really happened or not, in exactly that way or any other way, to the person remembering them.
50’00’’- Short Stories is a response to suggestions similar to those made by Cage for the use of a stopwatch to facilitate a performance and for time-structured creations such as his ‘45´ for a speaker’.3 And at the same time, it was a response to the curators of the festival of the Theatre of Neos Kosmos in Greece, for which the piece was originally made, who requested that all participants create pieces no longer than fifty minutes. Within this frame, 50’00’’- Short Stories creates fifty minutes for a listener, made from all kinds of stories and narrated by four performers until the stopwatch that was put on stage from the beginning of the show interrupts them exactly on the fiftieth minute of
2
Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. Trans. and Intro. Heller-Roazen,Daniel. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999. 3 Cage, Silence p.146.
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the event at an unknown and, of course, different point each time. The work thus constitutes an explicit dramaturgy of ‘doing time’, as Tim Etchells has aptly characterized it;4 a dramaturgy that practically fights against the ticking of the clock to fit even more stories in, even more worlds in, even more people in, even more things in, even more memory in.
During our rehearsal process for the creation of 50’00’’- Short Stories, the performers were not given any specific instructions on the topics or forms that their stories could take. As mentioned in the introductory stories, our work was mainly focused on constructing stories for the stage, drawing on all kinds of phrases and short fragments of language that we collected, which we then used as links to bigger stories that we wrote inspired from those fragments. After a while of improvising on expanding fragments of stories that did not yet exist, it became obvious that all this fragmented process, inevitably I suppose, linked mostly to one space: memory and stories remembered. One after the other the five of us were writing and sharing memories from childhood, trips, love affairs, the Greek constitution, the first basketball championship of Greece in 1987, etcetera; stories that were brought back in the room after being well hidden in memory for years just because of a single phrase that opened up space for them to be remembered once more.
One of the greatest difficulties we faced after collecting some of these stories was related to who would be each one’s narrator. Most of the time the person who had written a memory was the least able to carry it on stage. On the contrary, one’s memories seemed to us much more vividly ‘remembered’ when given to one of the
4
Etchells, Tim. “Doing Time”. Performance Research 14.3 (2009): pp.71-80.
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other performers to narrate. Wishing to delve deeper into this observation, we spent hours and hours in the studio remembering the same memory, one after the other. It became one of our most favorite games. The writer of a story was not allowed to reveal any more information about it other than what was already given in it. Most importantly, she or he was not allowed to cast light on any of its darker parts, which we found more difficult to grasp. What we loved was exactly this process of trying ‘to remember’, narrate and clarify in our different ways parts of the stories that were not there, that preceded or followed it, or even trying to ‘remember’ the actual written story by creating personal images and associations attached to it, as if what is needed is a necessary distance and a necessary fiction to be able to remember; as if what is needed is first the memory and then the experience attached to it. After a while you did not really know which memory belonged to whom, nor did it matter anymore. Even the person who had initially written a story was now standing there with a new memory, more or less connected with his/her ‘real’ one.
We then looked for a stage dramaturgy to facilitate such process of remembering, a dramaturgy that would enable our memory exchanges to continue without caring too much about rendering any kind of truth or authorship to those memories. And we arrived at this: our stories would never be narrated by the same performer or in the same order. Each show would follow a different structure based on a simple rule given by me to the performers in two lists just before their entrance on stage. Within this frame, on those lists they would either see the running order of the stories and the narrators involved in each one, or they would see the stories each one of them could narrate on the night but they would have to decide themselves on the order. And so they would construct the show while performing it. One after the other would go in front of their
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microphones, placed in a row at the stage front, ‘to remember’ memories of their own, or of others or to attribute some of those personal memories to the audience or an audience member.
Within such space that goes back and forth between ‘real’ memories and memories shared in theatre, remembering ceases to constitute a private, closed or personally owned space and has more to do with a common open space wherein more or less ‘real’ memories perform, exploring the potentiality included in this action. It is within one such performance that ‘to remember’ denotes the action of placing one’s self in the process of following the path of certain memories, going through them as new, regardless of whether they are actually one’s own or not; regardless of whether they actually happened to the person remembering them. Remembering thus becomes a stage action that constructed memories by and while narrating them, and it is in this sense it can be considered as performative.
Paul Antze and Michael Lambek also discuss acts of remembering that often take a performative meaning. And they do this ‘in ways that reflect specific beliefs about the nature of memory itself and about its relationship to identity’.5 According to Antze and Lambek, ‘memories are never simply records of the past, but are interpretive reconstructions that bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discursive formations and practices, and social contexts of recall and commemoration.’6 Given the fact that memory is indeed made of highly complex records, formed as the result of diverse aspects (varying from our identity, to local narrative conventions, to social contexts, to cultural assumptions, etcetera), it becomes
5
Antze, Paul and Lambek Michael. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, 1996, p.vii. 6 Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory p.vii.
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clear why the relationship between performative aspects of such memory and its capacity to recall ‘truth’ becomes an equally complex one. For this reason, I would argue that an approach to memory based on Western ideas, products of the rise of scientific disciplines that take memory as their object and therefore assert that ‘there is an underlying knowledge or truth about memory waiting to be discovered’, does not constitute an effective one.7 On the contrary, memory could be much more effectively approached when it ‘becomes a “site”, a monument visited, rather than a context, a landscape inhabited’.8 In this ‘site’ all ruins ‘are subject to restoration, and we all become the alienated tourists of our pasts’, as Antze and Lambek have aptly described.9
Becoming a ‘tourist of your past’ means that you stop looking at memory exclusively as something you know only intimately or as something being uniquely yours (as is more usually the case especially in Western cultures); it means, as Antze and Lambek argue, that you make a distinction between memory (as the possibility of an unmediated natural fact or process) and ‘memory’ (as ‘“the very idea of memory”, the culturally mediated acts, schemata and stories – the memory work – that comprise our memories and the way we think about them’).10 And you choose to focus on the latter. It is within this frame that more ‘practical forms of remembering’ explore the ‘relationship between narrative and experience that lies at the heart of memory’.11 As humans, Antze and Lambek note, we draw on our experience to shape narratives about our lives but at the same time we equally let the narratives we create shape our identity and character. And one could argue that experimental works such as those discussed here (constituting in themselves some of the ‘practical forms of remembering’ that Antze and Lambek talk
7
Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory p.xiv. Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory p.xiii (my emphasis). 9 Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory p.xiii. 10 Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory pxv. 11 Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory p.xv. 8
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about) seem to be fully aware of such views, which they share in quite distinct ways through their structures. Going back to previous discussions of these Short (Research) Stories regarding the way ‘character’ is perceived more as being constructed on stage through the performer’s actions and less as a preexisting, figured out entity that has to reveal herself on stage, the essential role that narratives – i.e. specific constructions of actions – play towards the formation of identity and character becomes more than obvious. Such kind of works then not only know but are also strongly based for their creation on the fact that we emerge from, and as the products of, our narratives about ourselves, as much as our narratives emerge from our lives. In this way, who we are in (and outside) the frame of these works ‘is closely linked to what we think about memory, what we remember and what we can claim to remember’.12 And let me stress here again the last part of the quote: ‘and what we can claim to remember’.
In this sense, 50’00’’- Short Stories can be seen as a very obvious ‘practical form of remembering’, one that explicitly deals with ‘memory’ rather than memory. Its characters/narrators are shaped by the narratives they have made out of their experiences but at the same time – and maybe in this case even more strongly – they emerge as the products of the stories they say about themselves on stage (stories that can either be or not be ‘truly’ about ‘themselves’). Or else: the characters of 50’00’’Short Stories are what they ‘claim to remember’ on stage. Narrating their own memories as well as those of others in the same way, they become ‘imagined’ characters, which is not to be confused with ‘imaginary’, as Antze and Lambek posit. They are players in the larger narratives of a community whose ‘memory becomes a locus of struggle over the
12
Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory p.xxi.
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boundary between the individual and the collective’;13 characters whose personal memory is therefore defined as always connected to social narrative and vice versa.
Cathy Caruth talks also about this entanglement of the personal and the social as the base upon which our (traumatic) memories and narratives are created. In her Unclaimed Experience, she discusses the complex way that memory (and more specifically traumatic memory) relates to what is known but also to what remains unknown. She talks about stories associated with this entanglement of knowing and not-knowing; stories that moreover ‘must be spoken in a language that is always somehow literary:
a language that defies even as it claims our understanding’.14 These are stories that do not reveal so much ‘the individual in relation to the events of his own past’ as ‘the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound’.15 It is only in this way that events are registered as stories in memory: as long as they implicate others. In this sense one’s (traumatic) (hi)story is never simply one’s own, but it is rather the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas. These are stories then that above all move ‘in between’: knowing and not-knowing, you and the other. Making it impossible to ever be fully grasped, they come back over and over again (like trauma does). And it is indeed the ‘enigmatic language of untold stories – of experiences not yet completely grasped’ that allows us to communicate across the gap between our cultures and experiences, precisely through what we don’t directly comprehend, Caruth concludes.16
13
Antze and Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory p.xx. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience - Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p.4. 15 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience - Trauma, Narrative, and History p.8. 16 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience - Trauma, Narrative, and History p.56. 14
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Through what they don’t directly comprehend then, the performers of 50’00’’- Short Stories hear and speak each other’s memories, go on implicating each other and the audience in their stories. Such action, such practice of remembering, can be seen as a dramaturgical ‘apparatus’ that thinks about memory operating in a similar way to the abovementioned ideas. This apparatus though, is not to be understood in technological terms related to digital spaces and the relevant discourses that are currently taking place in relation to performance. This is an apparatus of a technology much more understood as the τέχνη (techne=art, craft, manner by which a thing is gained) and λόγος (logos=word) that are included in its Greek etymology, and thus a technology considered more as the words or discourse about the way things are gained. It is through one such technology that dramaturgy, and the dramaturgical structures of stage narratives based on personal memories, create theories, think, talk and work on the way we imagine and gain our remembrance. And thus they construct an apparatus that explores personal (hi)stories, their writing and representation on stage. Dramaturgy is then understood here as an apparatus in the way that this has been defined by Agamben, i.e. as a set of practices and mechanisms that aim to obtain a more or less immediate effect (in this case the production of memories). And most importantly as an apparatus at the root of which lies, according to Agamben, the common to all apparatuses desire: the all-too-human desire for happiness.17 The main aim of one such dramaturgical apparatus, therefore, is to ‘make the incomplete happiness complete and the complete pain incomplete’.18 And this aim can be achieved through the notion of potentiality, as has been proposed and explained by Agamben.
17
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, Transl. Kishik, David and Pedatella, Stefan. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009, p.8. 18 Benjamin, Walter. Cited in Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.267.
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Potentiality, Agamben posits, constitutes a notion closely connected with a change in the concept of past as has been established by History science and scientific study in general. This change is based on remembrance and on the fact that remembrance can modify what science has established, as he says. Because it is through remembrance that potentiality can be turned back toward the past, working against the principle of the irrevocability of the past or of the unrealizability of potentiality in the past. According to this principle there can be no will with regard to the past, since no one decides what happened but only what will be and is possible. Nietzsche also talks about this repugnance of will toward the past and its ‘thus it was’ as the worst punishment devised by men, wherein they stand ‘powerless against what has been done, angry spectators of all that is past’.19 According to the way that the past is understood by science then, the will cannot will backwards. Its fury is that time cannot go backwards. ‘“What was” – this is the stone the will cannot turn over’, Nietzsche argues.20 And it is this understanding that he attempts to change through his Zarathustra, who teaches exactly this will to ‘will backwards’ and to transform every ‘thus it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’, wherein the future auxiliary verb ‘will’ and the past ending ‘-ed’ coexist.
Through one such ‘thus I willed it’ understanding of the past, contingency returns to it, Agamben argues. And it is in this sense that remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance then for Agamben is neither what happened nor what did not happen but rather their potentialization, their becoming possible once again. This potentiality does not concern the occurrence or nonoccurrence of a particular event anymore but rather the Aristotelian alternative ‘it-will-occur-or-it-will-not-occur’ being true as a whole, beyond
19 20
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Cited in Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.267. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Cited in Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.267.
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the taking place of either of the two possibilities.21 In the occurrence of a potentiality as such, something can both be and not be. Not thought then as this or that specific statement but the potential to think, holding all possible thoughts and non-thoughts in it; not writing on specific facts but the white sheet, holding all potential writings and nonwritings in it. That is what philosophy refuses at all costs to forget, Agamben states. Not memory then but the potential to remember, the action of remembering, that holds all possible memories and non-memories in it, those that occurred-or-not-occurred at once, I add.
Sharing similar ideas, the dramaturgical structures of stage narratives based on personal memories, such as those described above, constitute a technological apparatus of remembrance that, instead of caring so much to reach back to that which actually occurred in human (hi)story, attempts instead to reconstruct that which might have happened and did not as well as that which might have not happened and it did. And it is exactly within this ‘thinking possibility’ of memory, wherein ‘there is no difference between the possible and the impossible event’ as Kunst has argued, that performance opens up to a field of potentially by rendering the individual memory collective.22
Upon this field then the performers use language to remember their own or other people’s memories in the same way. Upon this field one remembers what happened (which could not have happened) and what did not happen (which could have happened) in the same way. Memories wander in space, changing owners, being attached to people who may or may not ever have had their experiences. And thus they
21
Aristotle. Cited in Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.264. Aristotle talks about these ideas in his ‘De interpretatione’. 22 Bojana Kunst, “On Potentiality and the Future of Performance”, 18 May 2011, .
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are remembered. And thus, you were once:
…coming down the stairs of your block of flats one by one. Hip-hop. Hip-hop. Hip-hop. Hip-hop. From the sixth floor to the basement. Hip-hop, hip-hop. You were 8 years old. Hiphop. Hip-hop. At the ground floor you stopped. An old lady fallen on the ground and a lake of blood next to her head. You were barefoot, you dipped your feet inside the lake and you looked around with apathy. For a long time. Motionless. Then you walked to the front door leaving footsteps of blood behind you. You came out on the pavement.23
And thus this becomes a possible memory of yours, or of the performer who narrates it in 50’00’’- Short Stories but now places it in your memory, or of another of the performers who takes part in 50’00’’- Short Stories and not the one who happens to narrate it now on stage. Having little interest in such kinds of authorship, the dramaturgical memory apparatus of theatre uses language to produce practices to obtain an immediate effect on the ‘all-too-human desire for happiness’. It thus constructs a viewpoint, a theory according to which the act of remembering can make the incomplete happiness complete and the complete pain incomplete through a sharing of memories, through an understanding of remembering as a space full of potentiality, wherein things that happened could as well not have happened and things that did not happen could as well have happened; wherein to-happen-and-to-not-happen can be seen as a whole. And this constitutes a thinking apparatus always addressed to those immediately involved in it. Always then another kind of technology, another kind of ‘logos’, far from the digital
23
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance.
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one. Always an ana-logue. A kind of ‘logos’, of words and discourse, always depending up to its immediate context, as the Greek prefix ‘ana’ (‘up to’) reveals. An analogue technology, an analogue dramaturgical thinking apparatus for memories then, always depending upon its performers and their audience (upon the others, as Caruth argued), the event and the very concept and nature of theatre; to remember.
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Stepping on Stage Not Knowing Your Words The end of thinking in open dramaturgies (on thought)
In 50’00’’- Short Stories the four performers enter the stage having little idea about how the show is going to unfold. Its structure – based on an open, almost exclusively textbased dramaturgy – although following some simple rules, defines little of the aspects that a work’s dramaturgy usually does. When the performers start the show thus, they have no idea about the order of things in it, how and where it is going to end and, most importantly, which are their ‘words’, i.e. the language that will be spoken through their mouths during the show. The stage is almost empty. One sees nothing on it except for six microphones on a line at the stage front; four of which are waiting for the performers’ voices; one for the timer that will count the 50’00’’ (the event’s duration); and one for the CD player that will contribute its music to the narrations whenever necessary.
As soon as the four performers appear on stage – at the same time as the audience, which is now entering the theatre space – they occupy a personal space on it and start laying the show’s short stories on the floor. All four of them carry a pack of A4 papers in hand with all the stories, all the words, all the language written within our five-month collaborative work, which have been chosen for presentation (almost twice as much did not have the same luck). Later in the show they will pick up the story they have to narrate each time and come to their microphones to do so. As soon as they have all prepared their space, they hang on the walls the two lists given to them right before their entrance on stage, which show the event’s structure. On these lists they can now see who is narrating what and in which order; or at other times they can see who can narrate
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what (certain stories can be suggested to more than one person) and they will have to decide on the order of things and who is saying what, during the show.
By this point, the stage looks something like this:
1
And they are ready to start. The performer instructed to open the show, comes in front of his/her microphone and narrates the first short story of the event, which is always the same:
The Time. Solo.
1
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E.Mitsi)
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50 minutes.2
S/he then sets the timer to ring on the fiftieth minute of the event and leaves the ‘real’ time there on stage, in front of its microphone, to count its solo trip; to silently run the ‘theatrical’ time of the event, which now starts, next to the other time, and to intervene in it by interrupting the show exactly on its fiftieth minute at an unknown, unexpected and at every time different point. Within the next fifty minutes, all kinds of stories will be heard, from intimate love stories to impossible road trips and encounters; from dark childhood experiences to absurd, before-sleep fantasies.
Each performer navigates among the two lists, his/her papers, the other performers and his/her narration to the audience. Each story is announced by its title and the number of people who are to take part in its narration, either by narrating as well or just by standing there in front of their microphones or dancing or singing or putting the music on. We thus have solo stories, duets, trios and ensembles, where everyone is involved in the narration in some way. By facilitating such a dance vocabulary we construct a choreography of stories and words. We decide that the rule is strict: You either need our help and invite us next to you right after announcing the title of the story or you are on your own. ‘And what if the story is then destroyed?’ one asks, ‘What if one forgets to invite us, what if he says “solo” instead of “duet”, who is going to narrate the rest? The story is then destroyed…’ ‘You have to find your way with it and be more careful next time. Life is tough…’ another one replies. So, it is a deal. They had to leave E. alone on stage for his Automatic Translation and they had to leave P. alone for his Final Countdown; because they did not ask for collaboration… On stage things can be tough
2
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance.
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as well…
At other times, though, they would be there to support you so much, to be right there for you exactly when you need them, to find solutions for you when you are mostly lost and panicked, to help you out, to stand in your place, to ‘save’ you… They had to immediately figure out a solution for Io. when she went in front of her microphone to narrate a particular story only to hear her voice announcing a totally different one that she did not have in hand (thus she could have no access to). They were there, just standing by my side, even though they had no idea what they were supposed to do, the first time I performed with them, and had totally lost control and started to improvise on a story which was unknown to them, but which I nevertheless announced as trio so that I had them next to me…
What the performers eventually do during 50’00’’- Short Stories could be understood as a process similar to the one that Agamben described as ‘the end of thinking’. They bring their bodies on stage and right there, ‘on their feet’, they depart on a walk in the woods at the edges of thought, at the end of thought, wherein they hear the fleeing rustle around them, seeking to indentify their voice within language. This, according to Agamben, constitutes the continuous quest that is called thinking; the continuous process of using language to reply to the unresolved question of whether this language is or is not our own voice in the same way that braying is probably the voice of a donkey and chirping that of a cricket. There is no end to this seeking, there is no end to the hearing of the fleeing rustle of the voice that we always hope and we never manage to find in language during our thinking walks, Agamben posits, because ‘thinking is not the encounter with but the flight from invisible animals’, and thus language always
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anticipates the voice.3 Only when we know that the meeting between voice and language will never take place, that in this sense we will only end up ‘thoughtless’; only when we know that we will again leave the voice there, in the woods, a fleeing rustle to hear again next time, in our next walk, in our next thinking, in our next seeking for it, does language does indeed become our voice, our language, our thought. And so the four performers are walking anew each time in each performance of 50’00’’- Short Stories through the work’s texts to find their voice; they hear the rustle of their wordless voice that waits for them on stage to speak different words each time, to help and to abandon in language those involved in such walk.
I remember in one of our rehearsals the performers improvising on the ways they could narrate some of our already written stories. They had already used the space we were working in quite enough and they had come to a point where they had created some ‘unofficial’ habits, things that, without ever being agreed, had somehow established themselves in the room. One of these habits was the use of microphones and the fact that all stories should be narrated through them. After a while, each one of the performers has his/her own microphone where s/he should always go when s/he wanted to become a narrator. We call these microphones ‘their little houses’ and each one of the four of them has his/her own ‘little house’ that hosts his/her voice whenever it wants to narrate something. They keep going back and forth to the microphones’ line, trying various things in different stories. At one point G. came to the front and, without thinking much, headed towards E.’s microphone to talk, because it happened to be the closest to her. As soon as she arrived and was ready to open her mouth, she sharply stepped back and said: ‘Oh, sorry, sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that!’ and then more
3
Agamben, “The End of Thinking” p.58.
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calmly she added: ‘Oh! For a moment I thought that if I’d speak to his microphone, his voice would come out instead of mine’. Those ‘little houses’, those microphones, bearers of the voice, could be what Agamben calls the ‘woods’. You walk in them and hear the rustle of the voice that stays there, that you don’t have, that you don’t own, that you endlessly seek. You try language; you try thought to approach it. And then you look for it again, in words, in language, in thought. Always unprepared, always knowing that no matter how far you reach, no matter what or how much you think, the seeking will not stop.
Etchells writes about performances for which it’s hard to prepare, for which preparations are almost completely pointless. And he describes them as balancing acts ‘between the ideas you can think of at any given moment, the lurching mood or dynamics of the performance itself, and your own shifting state of tongue-tiredness’.4 Each performance of 50’00’’- Short Stories seems to constitute one similar balancing act: between the ideas and thoughts you have about each particular story you have to narrate, the overall sense of the event’s dramaturgy so that you can move it forward with your choices, the particular dynamics of the day’s audience and your stagepartners’ needs. And you have to endlessly take the risk; the risk of trying something new that will fail; the risk of attempting to help in a certain way that may prove to not be helpful at all; the risk of not helping, finding it a better solution and hoping that everything will go well… Most importantly though, all performers take the risk of making that fifty-minute walk with each other, over and over again; there in the woods, at the end of thinking, within a research process that endlessly looks for the voice in words, in language, in thought, on stage.
4
Etchells, Tim. “Tim Etchells on Performance: Improv Storytelling's Peculiar Joy”, guardian.co.uk. 19 May 2011.
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What Do You (Not) See? I See Nothing (on the visual)
When Aristotle refers to the dramatic element of the visual (elsewhere also translated as ‘spectacle’), he does that in quite a brief way. He positions it last in terms of importance in relation to the other five elements, and does not dedicate more than three of four lines to its analysis. ‘The spectacle, though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts, and has least to do with the art of poetry’, he posits.1 Nevertheless, he himself admits that since dramas act their stories – and this is their distinct characteristic in relation to other forms of poetry – the spectacle has to constitute some part of the whole. And not only that, it is this element, Aristotle later notes, that is able to give rise to tragic fear and pity, the two aspects of drama considered so essential to it that he even includes them in the definition he offers for it. If thus, in order for drama to be completed, the necessary feelings of fear and pity have to be aroused in the spectator, and if this happens through drama’s visual aspects, then the importance of this dramatic element seems undisputable. If one additionally takes into consideration the fact that, especially at that time, much more than perhaps today, when the advanced technological developments allow easy access to all kinds of texts, including theatrical ones, dramatic poetry was created exclusively so that it would be performed with the specific drama competition of the Dionysia festival of Athens in mind, and that there was no other access to it by its audience apart from this public acted presentation, it becomes easily understood why – contrary to Aristotle’s argument – the dramatic text should be
1
Aristotle. “Poetics”. The Complete Works of Aristotle –Volume Two. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1991, p.8.
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considered more as the performance’s script, and therefore closely connected with the event of its performance, as well as with all other dramatic elements, and not as a text that could be evaluated by itself.
What if though we would assume that experimental works of theatre and dance still reflect in a way on similar ideas and they draw on Aristotle’s argument that the dramatic effect can indeed be quite possible even without visual elements? What if then, without questioning the necessary connection of drama and its acted narratives to its performance, we would accept the somewhat lesser importance of its visual aspects (especially as these have been defined and practiced in more conventional dramatic forms using heavily constructed sets and costumes) but still defend though the utterly significant dramatic force of one such performance? What kind of drama would that be?
This story departs from the quite common tendency of contemporary dramaturgy to use the empty stage as all the set it needs for its drama to unfold. It includes one general light that stays on for the whole show. And it includes the other tendency of experimental works to put on stage performers in their everyday clothes as all the costumes that their drama could need. It also includes the endless hours we spent during the rehearsals of 50’00’’- Short Stories and Short Stories deciding on those everyday clothes; and how the performers of these shows begged me, exhausted from trying on too many clothes, to bring them any kind of costumes, even heavily traditional ones, as they said, instead of having to go through this torture. It then includes all the complexity, the effort and the investment of the seemingly ‘empty’ and ‘easy’ and ‘simple’, of events where all one sees is people in their ordinary clothes on an empty
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stage or where there is just that empty stage to look at, with no people and no clothes on it.
It thus includes too the Empty Stages, the ongoing project of Etchells and Hugo Glendinning that since 2003 have sought out empty spaces all over the world to photograph them and their invisible drama in various contexts (amateur theatres, church halls, city theatres, working men's clubs etcetera) exploring their temporary emptiness as a space of imminence, expectation and potentiality, inviting the viewer to imagine different kinds of theatre in these theatres; theatres (seeings) that have taken place, will take place or might take place in these locations.2
And the story takes such invisible presence of drama even further until it passes it to the other side, to the ‘too present event’ of another ongoing project, the Theaters of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Within its frame, Sugimoto visited cinema theatres in the USA from 19752001 and shot whole movies in a single frame, resulting into one white capture of a shining screen so full from the film included in it that it rendered it ‘empty’.3
Of course this story includes as well the ideas of one of the most important figures of contemporary theatre, Peter Brook and his statement that he ‘can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’ as long as he has a man walking across this space whilst another one is watching him.4 It includes Brook’s ‘Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible’ and the testimony of many audiences all over the world who, as he says, would ‘answer
2
Etchells, Tim and Glendinning, Hugo. 3 February 2012. 3 Theaters. Creation: Hiroshi Sugimoto. 1975-2001. Photography project. 4 Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: Penguin Books, 1972, p.11.
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positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on stage that transcended their experience in life’.5
The story also includes Etchells as an audience member of Bel’s The Show Must Go On and his ideas about the effect that the show’s extreme emptiness and minimalism had on him. It includes his description of the game that Bel plays ‘with the watcher, who faced with more and more less – nothingness, voids, doubling, blankness, redundancy, the banal, the obvious, the everyday – begins to find more and more more’; as well as his description of an audience that is ‘repeatedly “abandoned” by the onstage spectacle (there are no dancers and at various points no lights or no music either)’, and which thus has little choice but to look at themselves or their neighbours or the performers who quite often look back at them too, on several occasions, rendering such stage game (drama) a series of challenges focused very much on the public, its role, expectations and creativity while spectating.6 Within such a process that pushes those watching into an encounter both with the more or less empty stage and what they desire from it, and with themselves too, the auditorium, like the stage, becomes a void, a blank screen for projection, wherein the audience’s bodies and faces (like the performers’) become also screens, spaces, clues for fantasies, dreams and narratives of others, according to Etchells.7
This story includes all these in order to redefine and expand understandings of the visual aspects of drama. It includes them as a counterbalancing force to the critique I have often heard in theatre from those looking – audience members who have witnessed my and other artists’ work in various occasions – that ‘this is not theatre’ or ‘this is not
5
Brook, The Empty Space p.48. Etchells, “More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid” p.199. 7 Etchells, “More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid” pp.198-199. 6
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dance’, since it does not present anything ‘theatrical’ or ‘dancing’ in it; there is no-thing to see there, no movement, no set, no costumes, no visual elements, they argue. This story attempts to imagine how this no-thing might look like in that audience’s eyes; to understand what one can not see in the plurality, multiplicity, richness, complexity and infinite variability of what some may perceive as nothingness.
And it does all that, it redefines, it expands, it includes ideas, it counterbalances, it imagines and attempts to understand views on (an otherwise replete) nothingness, by looking at this:
8
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Empty Stages - The Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent. Creation: Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning. 2003-ongoing. Photograph project.
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9
10
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Theaters- Paramount, Oakland. Creation: Hiroshi Sugimoto. 1994. Photograph project. Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: I.Florakis).
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50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E.Mitsi). Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: I.Florakis).
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What Do You (Not) See? I See Nothing (Part 2) (on the visual)
1:
2:
3:
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Let us imagine that the images above belong to three works: a dance work, a theatre work and a work of visual art respectively. Let us then say that these pictures were taken during: 1. Xavier Le Roy’s final scene in Low Pieces, which involves both performers and audience taking part in a fifteen-minute discussion within a total blackout; 2. The opening scene of Lookatmenowandhereiam, my most recent live work, which takes place within a very sudden, total blackout wherein for almost ten minutes a performer reads to the audience the opening scene of José Saramago’s Blindness, describing the way someone loses his sight suddenly and unexpectedly while driving his car; and 3. One of the blackouts of Martin Creed’s Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off Work, where an electrical timer is set to turn the lights of a bare white gallery space on and off every five seconds. This constitutes a work that has aptly been compared to Cage’s 4' 33" composition of silence, since it attempts in a similar way to subvert the normal parameters of sensorial experiences, this time by challenging spatial and temporal parameters of viewing experience (instead of listening, as is the case with Cage’s work).
What does one see in them? One could argue that to begin with, within such absolute darkness one barely sees anything. One then sees more or less nothing. I would though argue that what one sees in this darkness is the attempt of these works to explore the potentials of contemporary art by pushing dramaturgical understandings of the visual even further than emptying the stage and putting casually dressed people on it (in the case of theatre and dance) or (in the case of visual art) creating visual works which are as abstract and minimal as possible. What the works mentioned here seem to attempt
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then, is to undo entirely this specific element itself and in this way to challenge the fundamental characteristic both of theatre (as the seeing place par excellence) as well as of visual arts: vision. Immediately of course the expected question arises: what remains of theatre (which mainly interests us here) but also of visual arts, especially when seen as theatre, such as I believe is the case with Creed, when vision is removed from it, when it takes place in darkness? What does one see in it when one literally sees almost nothing? Or would it be better to ask ‘how’ instead of ‘what’? How does one see in a theatre that takes place in a blackout?
If the empty stage and the absence of all expected visual elements of set or costumes or lights (as expected especially in more conventional forms of drama) can evoke the imagination of all those involved in the event, creating a displacement of drama’s stage from the space of the theatre to that of the spectator’s mind, then how could we say that works such as those mentioned above, works that take place in the dark (at least for a certain part of them), works that suspend vision itself, operate?
In order to attempt to reply to this question, I will borrow Agamben’s words and say that such works by ‘exhausting all their impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such’, reveal their entire true potential.1 Because if we consider theatre from its inception as an art closely, exclusively and irreversibly connected to vision (as θέατρονtheatron=the seeing place), i.e. as an art that holds its potentiality mainly within that visual experience, then to suggest a theatrical act without vision surely means not only bringing all theatre’s impotentiality into the act but also exhausting it, as Agamben notes. In what way though could this act of exhaustion operate, not only not against
1
Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.183.
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theatre but for it, revealing its true potential?
In order to talk about potentiality, Agamben borrows Aristotle’s ideas. According to these ideas, two kinds of potentiality can be distinguished. One is the ‘generic’ potentiality by which we say, for example, that ‘a child has the potential to know, or that he or she can potentially become the Head of State’, and the other one is the one that belongs to someone who already has knowledge or an ability, by which we say, for example, that the architect has the potential to build or the poet has the potential to write poems.2 It is this second kind of potentiality, this existing potentiality, that mainly interests Aristotle and Agamben, because in the first case, the child has to suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning, whereas in the second, whoever already possesses knowledge is not obliged to suffer an alteration but is instead potential thanks to a ‘having’, on the basis of which she can also not bring this knowledge into actuality by not making a work. In this sense the architect is potential insofar as she has the potential to not build, the poet insofar as she has the potential to not write poems. In a similar sense I would argue that theatre is potential insofar as it also has the potential to not show things. We thus talk here about a potentiality that is not understood so much as the potential to simply do this or that thing, but more as the potential to not do, the potential to not pass into actuality; or else the im-potential. This nevertheless does not coincide with a non-existent potentiality. On the contrary, it is a potentiality that is present and has a face exactly in this non-actuality, in this state of not doing. It is a potentiality that introduces its privation as a face, as a form. And which is this face for Aristotle and Agamben? Darkness.
2
Aristotle cited in Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.179 (Agamben discusses here Aristotle’s ideas as these are found in his work De Anima).
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The understanding of potentiality is thus connected here with the understanding of vision and sight. And if ‘the object of sight is color’ then light is the color of actuality and darkness the color of potentiality, Aristotle posits.3 In this sense, being both colors, what is sometimes darkness and sometimes light is one in nature, since the principle of sight possesses colors in all cases, even in the in-visible; and these are colors of light and darkness, actuality and potentiality, presence and privation. Because even when we don’t see, i.e. when our vision is potential, there is still something we see: darkness, which we distinguish from light. If, though, potentiality was only the potentiality for vision in the actuality of light, then we could never experience darkness (nor hear silence, in the case of the potentiality to hear). The simple fact that we have the potential not to see, i.e. we have the possibility of privation, the potential for darkness, is exactly what reveals the greatness of human potentiality, Aristotle concludes.
And to bring the conversation back to what interests us here: What the abovementioned artworks suggest – by putting next to each other scenes in the light and in the dark; by showing but also not-showing things – is that the greatness of theatre’s potentiality may not lie so much, or at least exclusively, in the actuality of what one sees in it under the lights but also in what one does (not) see in it in darkness. For if ‘to be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity’, then theatre becomes potential exactly when it is in relation to its own ‘not being’, i.e. when it becomes notseeing, when it relates its main characteristic, vision, to darkness.4
How can this potential not-to-be though relate to the potential to-be? What is the relationship between this impotentiality and potentiality? And how is it possible to
3 4
Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.180. Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.182.
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perceive the actuality of the potentiality to not-be (of impotentiality) in theatre? For, as Agemben posits, ‘what is essential in potentiality is not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-being, the presence of an absence’.5 How can then non-being exist and be present in theatre? Exactly through the creation of dramatic actions that take place in darkness.
Let us take darkness then and add invisible visual actions to it on stage; numerous notseeings that offer a new definition to the dramatic element of the visual, by creating another kind of drama not as ‘theatron’ (theatre = ‘the seeing place’) anymore but more as ‘atheaton’ (the ‘invisible’ in ancient Greek, what can(not) be seen in darkness). Let us discuss in this atheaton (as in Low Pieces); let us look at the walls of a gallery (as in Greed’s work) or let us listen in its darkness about another case of visual privation (as in Lookatmenowandhereiam):
[see: Video No3]6
And let us experience this new vision under the light of theatre’s true potential.
5
Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy p.179. Opening scene of: Lookatmenowandhereiam. The performer reads in complete darkness a part of: Saramago, José. Blindness. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997, pp.2-3. 6
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Lookatmenowandhereiam (on the visual)
The eye looks, the eye sees. Daily, nonstop, nonreversibly, everywhere, always, it watches, it sees, the eye, it combines, it knows, it doesn’t know, it looks, it sees, it fights, it knows that it is responsible for what it sees, and at the same time it knows that it doesn’t always know what it sees until later, perhaps years later, and it knows that most of what it sees will never even make it at all, they will remain stored there, within it, it will have looked at them but it will not have seen them, but it will not know them. It knows. The eye. It fights, it looks, it sees, it trains to look, to see, to know, to remember what it sees, what it knows, it fights, it is irreversible. It trains. What it looks at is not what it sees. It knows it. What it looks at is what it sees and another thousand. It knows it. And it fights. It continues. It looks. It sees. It looks. It sees. Endlessly. A Fight. It exercises. It trains. To see. To understand. To store. Rapidly. The eye. Athletics. The eye of the tiger. It survives. It fights. It looks. It sees.1
(to be continued on stage)
1
Lookatmenowandhereiam. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2012. Performance.
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‘But It’s Clear, Isn’t It, I’m Not Writing Music Right Now?’1 (on music)
When referring to the dramatic element of music Aristotle connects it particularly with language; music thus (translated also as ‘melody’), especially when it comes to drama, refers (apart from the additional use in poetry of musical instruments, such as the lyre or flute) mainly to ‘language with pleasurable accessories’, by which Aristotle means, as he notes, the harmony and rhythm created through the construction of the drama’s verses.2 Now when the talk comes to the use of this music, namely to the harmony and rhythm created through the use of language, in experimental works, which are the possible ways this could be understood and practiced?
Cage talks about a request for a new music, which coincides with a request for a new listening. Within this frame he makes innovative suggestions for a music that includes everyday noises, which are only annoying as long as one ignores them but become music as soon as one starts paying attention and listening to them. Most importantly though, the new music Cage suggests includes silences, not as a literalism anymore but as distinct listening and musical qualities since, as he argues, there is always something there to make a sound. And not only that. Cage pushes limits even further when he declares that: ‘while studying music things get a little confused. Sounds are no longer just sounds, but are letters: A B C D E F G’.3 It is exactly this kind of music that The Words Between Us aimed to explore and play: a music where silences and letters interchange and interact in a creative composition; a music wherein ‘there are silences
1
Cage, Silence p.48. Aristotle. “Poetics”. The Complete Works of Aristotle –Volume Two. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1991, p.7. 3 Cage, Silence p.165. 2
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and the words make help make the silences’.4 And the musical instrument used for this music is our head, an instrument full of harmony, melody, and rhythm, as Cage has described it. This is, of course, a kind of music that has also been widely played by Cage himself through his numerous writings that produced and composed language, according to him, in the same way he composed music pieces with notes and sounds.
It is in this sense that The Words Between Us could also be described as a music piece composed by sounds of silence and letters, played each time by two participants/musicians (the performer of the piece and a different audience member each time, who joins and co-authors the music piece during her ten-minute slot) sitting opposite each other around a table, exchanging written words. And if Cage has proposed two of the sounds that silence is made of, when he argued that even in the completely ‘silent’ state of a soundless chamber one is able to hear one’s own blood and one’s own heart beat;5 The Words Between Us add one more sound to this list, maybe the most deafening of all: the voice of one’s own head. And it is mostly this sound that they employ for their compositions. Having voluntarily suspended their right to communicate with each other orally, the two co-composers of the work are meeting through the silent words they play on the page, following Maurice Maeterlinck’s idea that people can really start to know each other only when they dare to be silent together and explore the actions involved in this silence.6 And they thus explore their writing actions, creating music within a silent frame where one ‘has nothing to say and one is saying it and that is poetry as one needs it’;7 within an organized space of time, as Cage has proposed, wherein we need not fear silences but can love them and create words as
4
Cage, Silence p.109. Cage, Silence p.51. 6 Maeterlinck, Maurice. SILENCE -Three essays. City of Birmingham: School of Printing, College of arts and crafts Margaret Street, 1946, p28. 7 Cage, Silence p.109. 5
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an unexpected and unintentional poetry. The musical compositions produced within this frame are constantly laid on the floor as soon as they are written, for other audience members to listen to. And here is one of them, played once more:
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8
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The Words Between Us. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2010. Performance.
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The Voices of Silence (on music)
The main sound heard here is the recurrence of a voice ‘subject to the imaginative projection of the reader, who hears this voice, through the filtration of their own voice slipping through their mind’s mouth. The relation is a textual consummation: tongue over tongue, words trickling into dissolution in the sensate, meaning atomized’.1 The main sound heard here then is this:
2
1
Heathfield, “Writing of the Event” p.182. A Single Voice - 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: Ch. Holka).
2
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Or else: the main sound heard here is that of approximately 100 people and 200 eyes reading silently together during the Single Voice-3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ.
Within the duration of the Single Voice, many voices are heard as one; or rather one voice is heard as many; or rather there is no difference between the singular and the multiple voices. Like a peculiar kind of Disc Jockey, my voice uses texts she does not own, as discs, proposing them as another kind of music. The sound of this single voice is not always physically heard though. Within the mixes of my TJ (Text Jockey), silence often becomes the ground for that voice to be heard. During this silence my voice plays its words on a screen, inviting the audience to a mutual listening/reading; an act otherwise performed in our private, individual spaces. It is within this space that ‘begins with words only, signs traced on the blank page’ – as George Perec notes in one of the texts that are being read in silence during the performance – that those 100 recurrent voices listen to The Single Voice through the filtration of their own voice slipping through their mind’s mouth.3 One such dense music aims to undo Maeterlinck’s observation that:
We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation but the silence of many – silence multiplied – and above all the silence of a crowd there are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul. We spend a good deal of our lives in seeking places where silence is not. No sooner have two or three men met than their one thought is to drive away the invisible enemy.4
3 4
Perec, George. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p.13. Maeterlinck, SILENCE -Three essays p.26.
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Unlike this thought then, the audience’s recurring voices during the Single Voice seem to look for a place where silence is, acknowledging its ‘somber power and its perilous manifestations’ and practicing them without dread.5 And if there is indeed ‘an instinct of the superhuman truths within us which warns us that it is dangerous to be silent with one whom we do not wish to know, or do not love’, then the 100 single voices that are listening to the Single Voice, follow that instinct;6 to produce music within silences that ‘occur when people are confident of each other’s friendship and wish to know each other’, as Cage describes. ‘No nervousness, only a sense of at-one-ness’, as he would say.7
5
Maeterlinck, SILENCE -Three essays p.26. Maeterlinck, SILENCE -Three essays p.25. 7 Cage, SILENCE p.140. 6
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A Fatal Weapon (in Moving Images) (on music)
[see: Video No4]1
1
The video presents silent scenes from the works: 50’00’’- Short Stories, The Words Between Us and A Single Voice3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ.
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‘Would You Like Me to Seduce You? Is That What You Are Trying to Tell Me?’1 (on music)
In this story silence in theatre is not defined as a traditional theatrical convention anymore but as a common ground of creation and seduction; silence is considered here as ‘sexy, so sexy, so silence’.2 This is a story that draws on Schwartz’s argument that silence constitutes an empty space of reflection and meditation wherein anything can be done; silence thus becomes ‘pure freedom for creativity and imagination without constraint’ since ‘where nothing is offered, the task of the perceiver is to create’.3 With such thoughts in mind, we started 50’00’’- Short Stories by using theatrical silence not as something that belongs merely to the audience but as a common listening experience of both spectators and performers, which moreover works as a dramaturgical tool towards the construction of the whole work. The usual silent state of the audience was thus reinforced by the silence of the performers and became the space of reflection, creativity and imagination upon which the rest of the work unfolded.
In 50’00’’- Short Stories the performers appear on stage and, after preparing their space, they stand at the stage front facing the audience.4 For the next ten minutes they choose to silence their voices for a while without taking away the presence of them – represented by the full of voice instruments that the microphones are, which stand between them and the audience. It is as if the stories that are about to come, are already there between them, and they will unfold themselves shortly upon the silent space they
1
Too Funky. Creation: George Michael. 1992. Song. Silence Is Sexy. Creation: Einstürzende Neubauten. 2000. Song (The song is heard during the scene that is described here, in 50’00’’- Short Stories). 3 Schwartz, Lisa. “Understanding Silence: Meaning and Interpretation” p.8. 4 ‘The preparation of their space’ is what the performers have to do as soon as they appear on stage, lay down on a part of the floor all stories of the work – at the same time with the preparation of the audience who is taking its seats to do its part of the work, i.e. silently spectate – before they are both ready to start the show. 2
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are now creating. Audience and performers stay there for more than ten minutes confronting each other. A prolonged mutual silence that negotiates their common space and time and defines their relationship; a silence that affirms the event that has just started and offers it the space of creativity and imagination that Schwartz talks about: a mutual consciousness of being together in space and time, a starting point one can wait for everything from. In a similar sense, Etchells talks about the line-up that they often use in their work as an act of mutual revelation and confirmation, for both performers and audience, that they are all there, all in place, all present. He calls this act ‘the zero of theatre’.5
It is because of this silence, this ‘zero of theatre’, that the performers are able to do all that is to follow. Staying in it for such prolonged time, both audience and performers confirm the always-present theatrical agreement: that the former are there to offer space through their silence, while listening, to the latter to create. And they both prepare for that creation. After a while, this mutual silence is not so much a literal silence anymore – not that it ever was (since during the performance we had numerous reactions from the audience, varying from giggling and laughter to applauses or talking to the performers) nor could it ever be (since there is no such thing as silence, as there is always something happening to make a sound, to use Cage’s line of thought once more). One of the performers presses the play button of the CD player next to her and the rest of the silence becomes a lack of words for those in the room but a presence and hearing of other sounds and words, those of the music and lyrics of Einstürzende Neubauten’s Silence is sexy, a piece inspired by Cage’s 4’33’’, made more from silences and pauses rather than music notes. Hearing such silence in silence, a sexy silence, becomes now a
5
Etchells, Tim. “Incomplete Alphabet”. A Performance Cosmology. Eds Christie J, Christie, Judie, Gough, Richard and Watt, Daniel Peter. London: Routledge, 2006.
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self-referential move that attempts to reveal erotics (and therefore also aggressions – the vital part of all attractions) of silent co-presence in theatre, and to comment on the nature and role of theatrical silence.
In his Silence, Maeterlinck encourages us to ‘cultivate silence among ourselves, for it is then only that for one instant the eternal flowers unfold their petals, the mysterious flowers whose form and colour are ever changing in harmony with the soul that is by their side’.6 This first part of 50’00’’ - Short Stories aims towards a similar cultivation. For Maeterlinck’s beautifully expressed mutual silence, especially when cultivated in theatre (and it is a nice coincidence that the word ‘culture’ also relates to a practice of cultivating, rendering theatre and arts in general a certain kind of garden for the cultivation of distinct mind, imagination and body qualities), becomes an activator, an intensifier of attention that gives density to the objects, as Lepecki argues.7 And it thus creates a music that is not understood in terms of certain compositional practices using music notes anymore, a ‘music’ that returns us more strongly to ‘theatre’, occupied with ‘all the rest that enters through the ears’.8 It is in this sense that the opening scene of 50’00’’- Short Stories becomes a musical story. And more particularly, it becomes a ‘contemporary’ musical story; ‘not the music of the future nor the music of the past but simply music present with us: this moment, now, this now moment’;9 within the seduction and sexiness of the ‘zero of theatre’.
Then other stories follow…
6
Maeterlinck, SILENCE -Three essays p.30. Lepecki, Exhausting Dance p52. 8 Cage, Silence p.190. 9 Cage, Silence p.43. 7
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A Fatal Weapon (in Words and Images) (on music)
This story takes place in theatre spaces and is a silent one. In it the silence offered by the audience is offered back. Spectators and performers use silence here and explore the potentiality of such music. Such mutual silences are then offered as a space
1
1
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E.Mitsi).
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a space
2
3
2 3
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E.Mitsi). Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: I.Florakis).
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a space
4
of creation.
It is in this space that ‘the monologue that silences the public’ – as Laermans has described the performance event – does so both for the seated public as well as for that standing on stage, who are both facing each other silently;5 it goes on like this first for three months, October 2009-January 2010, Mondays and Tuesdays at 9.15pm in Athens in the Theatre of Neos Kosmos where 50’00’’- Short Stories is shown, during its opening scene. Then it silences from time to time on 26th November 2009 in London during the Single Voice opening space for a mutual collective reading. And it goes silent repeatedly once more in ten-minute slots for a whole day on 30th April 2010 in London
4 5
50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E.Mitsi). Laermans, “Performative Silences” p.1.
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during The Words Between Us, before it silences again during our mutual attendance of this reading’s event.
Yes, this is a silent story; the other side of the Siren’s music. Because as the writer said: ‘the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. […] Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never’.6
So here we are:
7
6
Kafka, Franz. “The Silence of the Sirens”. 7 June 2012. 7 50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: A.E. Mitsi).
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8
9
8
A Single Voice - 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance (photo: Ch.Holka). 9 The Words Between Us. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2010. Performance (photo: H. Glendinning).
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within seducing, inescapable musical practices of language: those of the stage and those of the page.
Here we are. In silence.
And here is where the story ends.
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The Last Short (Research) Story or As If Writing From the Future
Dear Danae,
We are now in the year, say, 2020. Eight years after the completion of your research. It could be more, it could be less; it does not matter. It is in all cases a year of the future that offers you the necessary distance that one needs to realize better and more concretely maybe what she has done at a certain past period of her life. At least, this is how things usually work for you. So let us fictionalize that distance and place you in that later point. In 2008 you decided to first dive in your research practice and then to discover that practice and see what emerged from it. So how could you describe and (re)discover now what emerged back then from that dive of yours? How does Short (Research) Stories look in your 2020 eyes? How do you think now that your four-year research practice has worked not only for you as a researcher and artist but also for the area and discourse you wished to place it in? What has happened back then within its frame?
How do you proceed with such questions in 2020? If you could adjust your eyes to that distant look and attempt some answers, what would those answers be?
Let us proceed with this experiment. Let us fictionalize further this future time and look of yours.
So here we go, in 2020:
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Several years ago Short (Research) Stories aimed to propose and explore the notion of drama as able to offer an alternative perspective to the analysis of experimental theatre and dance works based on traditional theatrical discourses. This proposal was created as an ‘arts-practitioner’s theory of knowledge’ aiming to capture for a while contemporary dramaturgy’s endless movement by placing theatre, dance practices and drama next to each other in a creative dialogue. An image you had about ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’ constituting real bodies, having physical substance as words becomes clearer now. Theatre is sitting in the auditorium, looking at the stage. From this position, it talks more from the perspective of a spectator who θεάται (theatai = beholds, looks at) the event, creating a unique, individual experience out of that look. Drama, on the contrary, likes to sit on stage and create the actions that constitute the event that theatre looks at. Sitting opposite each other in this way, theatre and drama negotiate their relationship in an endless process of looking at each other, which creates various perspectives, viewpoints, actions, discourses. The force, or better, the third body that acts as an agent, a mediator between those two fixed points (the auditorium and the stage) of theatre and drama is dramaturgy. You imagine her body (the word ‘dramaturgy’ in Greek is feminine and you usually enjoy preserving those genres) like this: a flexible, agile body that thinks on its feet, moving between the auditorium and the stage, discussing both with theatre and drama, looking and acting at the same time, or rather acting (since to look constitutes a highly active practice as well) and acting at the same time, both as theatre’s companion and as drama’s. It is this body that you tried to know and understand better, in all the studio, theatre and desk spaces that you occupied either alone or with others, during your four years of research practice. It is this body that you tried to come in contact with through the creation of all your live works. And it is this
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body that you have tried to photograph in Short (Reseach) Stories through your critical writings.
This somehow looks now like a good metaphor to express how the research text you produced has worked for you. Short (Research) Stories have attempted to ‘photograph’ contemporary dramaturgy, i.e. to capture a still image of her continuous movement. Regardless of how successful or not this photograph may have been, you know now as you knew from the beginning of your research work, that there is a vivid and ever changing movement before and after it, which cannot and will not be captured. You also know and knew that especially when we talk about one such kinetic object of research, the photographs one can take of it or the angles from which one can shoot these photographs are infinite. A research practice that states from its very start that it considers its whole analysis as a temporary theoretical construction, as a critical proposal working as a momentarily ‘what if’, could not but recognize the various other directions that a similar research inquiry could take. The questions thus of how one can unfold the ‘many dramaturgies’ of contemporary dramaturgy – as Cvejic put it in the introductory stories – or what ways and methods there are for a researcher to approach the constant movement of this dramaturgy, remained, remains and will probably continue to remain unresolved.
You also know though, as you knew back then, that nevertheless there are photographs that do manage to offer a quite useful and vivid sense of a movement; and this is what you hoped to do. In this sense you could say that you have worked as a photographer who, being fascinated by contemporary dramaturgy, by that wonderful female body, wanted to have a photograph of it so that you could carefully and repeatedly look at it to
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understand better its operational modes. In order to do that you tried to find a good angle, one that would be able to provide an appropriate shot of that body. And you came to think of the work of Aristotle as one such angle, a possibly suitable one for that purpose. It is more in this sense, it seems now, that you have suggested an analysis of contemporary dramaturgy through the six Aristotelian dramatic elements, and not because you aimed to suggest that Aristotle some thousands years ago have written the one and only dramaturgical analysis, and that no one was able to do something of similar critical value since then. This would make no sense. Aristotle’s suggestion on the way drama is being structured around six specific elements, worked then more as a useful, clearly structured starting point, but in no way as a unique one.
But let us go back to that photograph, created of your four-year interdisciplinary research practice. You have thought several times since its completion about the way that the borrowing of stage dramaturgical structures to produce research writings has worked for you and about what might be different if you had instead gone for a much more linear writing structure, divided into the maybe more expected PhD chapters. The use of so many phrases from various distinct sources (academic books, performances, song lyrics, oral utterances, sayings, etcetera) to initiate critical writings, has worked as a method that was continuously showing you the way to move on with your writings, guiding your thought to many directions by shifting your point of focus and refreshing your starting point all the time, offering you new perspectives to approach, re-approach and then approach again your area of interest. In this sense it still looks like the most suitable method to analyze an equally kinetic object of research, that of contemporary dramaturgy; one that does not rest in order to be observed but it can rather be grasped only momentarily and always in motion while shifting to many different places. The
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fragmented nature of your writing, borrowed from those dramaturgical practices, seems to have worked in a similar way for you. After all these years you still believe that if you were to do it again you would use very similar writing methods. Because how else could one attempt to approach such dramaturgy if not by following her movement?
As far as the opposite is concerned, the use of writing processes to produce your stage works, the importance and role of their creative aspects seem obvious even from the most basic description of all your projects. Writing, language and words are never absent from your work. As if your main aim on stage is to pose Austin’s question ‘how to do things with words’ over and over again so that you can reply over and over again in different ways and through different practices. It was the same in all of your stage projects. Words and language processes were always there between you and your audience and you always looked for ways to negotiate the distance in that relationship through them.
When it comes to critical aspects of your writing and the way they influenced your live works, strong memories come to mind: you remember the endless hours you spent during your rehearsals discussing all dramatic elements in such an exhausting detail. Many times you came to think that your rehearsals were mainly about discussions, an endless negotiation of things, which often resulted in tiny differences in the stage action; tiny shifts, which were nevertheless the ones that essentially shaped your work as well as the ground that you and your collaborators were meeting on. You therefore chose to have those discussions again and again; on the structure of your works, on the way the performers could ‘stand by’ their characters, on specific words that should be used in the place of others, on things that should be shown, things that should be implied, things
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that should be described or things that should be hidden, on the way music should be used not as a background noise or soundtrack but as a distinct listening quality and major part of the work’s narrative, etcetera. Yes, it definitely seems now that approaching your work through drama and the Aristotelian dramatic elements was a tool that helped you to shape your stage practice, working as the ground that its dramatic actions evolved on.
You also remember M., one of the people you invited during your rehearsals for Lookatmenowandhereiam as – what you called – a ‘guest’, telling you that he is not able to go on discussing possible experimentations on theatrical conventions, unless you would define and agree on what exactly you called ‘conventional’.1 For, as he argued, in order to experiment with something and shift its boundaries, you should first explore your understanding of its conventional principles, of what it is commonly expected in it, so that you can then re-construct those conventions.
It is exactly in this way that your analysis of experimental creative processes through the six Aristotelian dramatic elements could contribute to artistic processes and be seen as a useful artistic tool through which one might be able to proceed further with her research inquiries on stage. For once one accepts specific dramatic elements as her working materials for the creation of her stage works, and she explores the way in which these elements have been defined and used for a long period in theatrical practices, as well as the way they have been redefined, readdressed and reworked in experimental works, she is possibly able to establish a clearer position from which to
1
In Lookatmenowandhereiam instead of working with one person as the work’s ‘dramaturge’, I decided to invite different people each week, both artists and theorists, introduce them into our creative process and collaborate with them for a specific period of time, sharing concerns, thoughts and practices in relation to the work that was taking shape; allowing in this way for more and more diverse dramaturgical ideas and discourses to reach and affect the work.
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expand and experiment with them. For things in this case seem to work similarly to the way that the setting of specific tasks and rules works for task-based plots: the more strictly and concretely you define the area you move in, the more space you allow for imagining and practicing endless possibilities in it. You like to think of your research work and the model it offered in a similar way: as an approach that has been able to propose in quite concrete terms a possible ground on which experimental practices could further negotiate their relationship to theatrical and dance conventions. And it is in this way that it can be seen as a very practical tool for artists to use, so that they proceed with their research stage inquiries.
Furthermore and given the fact that experimental works constitute practices that largely ‘depend on the participation of their audience for their realization, even if in purely imaginatively way’, as Osborne has argued in Thinking on Our Feet, the addition of your seventh dramatic element, the role and understandings of the spectator’s position in drama, played an utterly significant role in this suggested new approach, able to change the understanding of the rest of the elements too in the stage practices you created and/or discussed. What has been quite helpful to your work, moreover, was the way you chose to discuss this seventh element. Instead of creating an additional space for its analysis, instead of having it standing separately as a discourse, as is more usually the case with discussions on spectatorship, you preferred to filter all other elements through it so that you could explore and comment on the way experimental understandings of the conditions of spectatorship directly affect dramaturgical processes and the creation of stage works. Instead of thus focusing exclusively on discussions that approach the conditions of spectatorship as an external element of theatre, and talking about it independently of the theatrical situation, in oppositional terms that define the
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spectator either as a ‘passive’ or an ‘active’ one based on various sociological, psychological or other criteria, you have chosen to work on and talk about the specific and deeply influential ways that the construction of plots, characters, language and conceptual structures, etcetera, is affected by the presence and operation of the spectator not only during the event but also in the studio-based creative process.
Taking your body out of that dive felt like a letting go. The momentary grasp of dramaturgy’s endless movement had been completed, her photograph had been shot and you had to let her go. Back to her practices, processes that cannot be grasped, defined or explained; and that is just fine, as Bauer has argued. The temporary ‘what if’ you had constructed to capture that image, the fleeting theory you created, had already dissolved before you even officially finish your research practice. Your last live project Lookatmenowandhereiam was being created as you were completing your thesis and its creative process continued after the completion of your writing practices; standing half in them and half outside them, already moving in many different directions, already back to dramaturgy’s endless movement. Defining in this way the ground of your research work both as the more stable and somewhat more graspable space of the pages your critical writings and theories evolved on, and at the same time as the alwaysshifting open space, the ungraspable territory on which contemporary dramaturgy unfolds its practices.
It felt weird, this letting go: a relief and a panic at the same time. A relief because of the joy following the end of an exhausting process and the great expectation and anticipation for the future dives; and a panic for exactly the same reason, which at times looked exciting and at times as a falling into an unknown, unprotected territory; the
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ending point of a frame that threw you in a void you did not know what to expect from. You knew that what might have relieved that panic would be to already start fantasizing, making hypotheses and suggestions about forthcoming dives; about ‘what comes next’. The fact that you were deeply aware that your research inquiries did not ‘finish’ at the arbitrary ending point of your PhD program, as well as the fact that you had already started to discuss and organize the research projects you would be part of, made it more than certain that your practice would continue. Nevertheless you refused at that point to proceed with such fantasies, hypotheses and suggestions. Although you knew that (apart from constituting a favorite tactic of capitalistic practices wishing to schedule the discovery of new territories and the production of new works as soon as, or even before, they complete their previous ones) these suggestions would probably align too with what is usually expected from a researcher who is about to complete her PhD; to open up space for ‘what comes next’, to address in some way this pressing question; you preferred not to do that.
Skipping similar anxious anticipations, you preferred to not think further at that point. What felt like the end, was the end and you preferred to become its ‘contemporary’, to stay ‘together with’ it and experience it exactly as what it was. A goodbye. You wanted to let go and you wanted to keep holding on to it. As in all goodbyes. How precious it became at that point that wonderful scene from Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, a work that recapitulates the thoughts of people working together for twenty years, just before they end this common path.2 How precious that moment when Mark Jeffery waved goodbye to all theatrical stage objects and materials one by one, from tiny to huge ones. A small, simple, calm goodbye:
2
The Lastmaker. Creation: Goat Island. 2007. Performance.
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Goodbye Reply to All. Goodbye questions. Goodbye answers. Goodbye black tutu. Goodbye 50’00’’- Short Stories. Goodbye six microphones. Goodbye piles of papers. Goodbye lists. Goodbye titles. Goodbye Short Stories. Goodbye stories. Goodbye Single Voice. Goodbye I. Goodbye strangers who gave me your words. Goodbye friends who gave me your words. Goodbye ex-lovers who gave me your words. Goodbye The Words Between Us. Goodbye unexpected, marvelous collaborations. Goodbye unexpected absences. Goodbye table. Goodbye timer. Goodbye Short (Research) Stories. Goodbye endless hours of writing. Goodbye exhaustion, boredom, excitement and inspiration at the same time. Goodbye studio. Goodbye laptop screen. Goodbye documentation. Goodbye Office Word. Goodbye library. Goodbye dramaturgy. Goodbye momentary glimpse. Goodbye fleeting encounter. Until the next time…
At this point, you put some music on. Something that goes well with your mood, no matter how many years shall pass. It is Leonard Cohen (he seems to have accompanied many similar moments in your life). And for this one, the memory of this deeply desired and at the same time terrifying separation, you could not think of a better song.
‘And I just don't care what happens next looks like freedom but it feels like death it’s something in between I guess it's CLOSING TIME’3
It is only in these terms that you were always able to talk about new dives and the opening of new spaces. Without making concrete suggestions or, even worse,
3
Closing Time. Creation: Leonard Cohen. 1992. Song.
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scheduling them though. So that you stand closer to their true potential, in the way it is described by Kunst: as a potentiality that comes to light only when the potential of a thing is not realized. Because only then one is open to one’s being in time, to one’s eventness.4
To all the dives you have done since 2012 and the ones that you will!
All my best wishes, Danae
4
Kunst, Bojana. “On Potentiality and the Future of Performance” (2009). 12 August 2012.
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Appendix: DVD
Video 1 (5min.): Edited video including still images and performance text from the work Reply to All (Jubilee Theatre, Roehampton University, London, December 2008). Concept, Creation: Danae Theodoridou Performed by: Danae Theodoridou Music heard: C.Vita (Thkouter, creation:2002) Video editing: Danae Theodoridou
Videos 2 (6min.) and 3 (7min.): Edited videos from the work Lookatmenowandhereiam (Theatre of Neos Kosmos, Athens, April 2012). Concept, Creation: Danae Theodoridou in collaboration with: Ioanna Asimakopoulou, Konstantina Georgelou, Akillas Karazisis, Panagiotis Katsolis, Tzeni Theona, Efthimis Theou, Efrosini Protopapa, Mixalis Titopoulos Performed by: Ioanna Asimakopoulou, Panagiotis Katsolis Lighting design: Sakis Birbilis Text heard: José Saramago (Blindness, trans. Giovanni Pontiero. San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997, pp.2-3). Video: T. Kafes Video editing: Danae Theodoridou
Video 4 (13 min.): Edited video including silent scenes from the works: 50’00’’- Short Stories (Theatre of Neos Kosmos, Athens, October 2009), The Words Between Us (Club Row, London, April 2010) and A Single Voice – 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ (Jubilee Theatre, Roehampton University, London, November 2009). Video editing: Danae Theodoridou
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Scene 1: 50’00’’ - Short Stories Concept, Creation: Danae Theodoridou in collaboration with: Ioanna Asimakopoulou, Panagiotis Katsolis, Efthimis Theou Performed by: Ioanna Asimakopoulou, Panagiotis Katsolis, Theano Metaxa, Efthimis Theou Lighting design: Sakis Birbilis Music heard: Einstürzende Neubauten (Silence Is Sexy, creation: 2000). Scene 2: The Words Between Us Concept, Creation: Danae Theodoridou Performed by: Karen Christopher Video: British Library Sound Archive Scene 3: A Single Voice – 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ Concept, Creation: Danae Theodoridou Performed by: Danae Theodoridou Text: George Perec (Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p.13). Video: Media Services, Roehampton University
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Bibliography References and Bibliography:
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Cited Performances: And On The Thousandth Night… Creation: Forced Entertainment. 2000. Performance. A Single Voice - 3000 English Words in the Hands of a TJ. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance. Bloody Mess. Creation: Forced Entertainment. 2004. Performance. Lookatmenowandhereiam. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2012. Performance. Low Pieces. Creation: Xavier Le Roy. 2011. Performance. National Hymn. Creation: Michael Marmarinos. 2001. Performance. Quizoola! Creation: Forced Entertainment. 1996. Performance. Reply to All. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2008. Performance. Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First. Creation: Tim Etchells. 2008. Performance. Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance. Speak Bitterness. Creation: Forced Entertainment. 1994. Performance. Thank You For Making Me the Artist I.M. Creation: Ivana Müller. 2009. Performance. That night follows day. Creation: Tim Etchells. 2007. Performance. The Last Performance. Creation: Jérôme Bel. 1998. Performance. The Lastmaker. Creation: Goat Island. 2007. Performance. The Show Must Go On. Creation: Jérôme Bel. 2001. Performance. The Word Butterfly. Creation: Hixson, Lin and Goulish, Matthew. 2012. Performance Lecture. The Words Between Us. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2010. Performance. Tomorrow’s Parties. Creation: Forced Entertainment. 2011. Performance. While We Were Holding It Together. Creation: Ivana Müller. 2006. Performance. 50’00’’- Short Stories. Creation: Danae Theodoridou. 2009. Performance. 60 Minutes of Opportunism. Creation: Ivana Müller. 2010. Performance.
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