Transcript Come! And the day will be ours

 Grotowski’s
approach aroused considerable
interest among the major avant-garde directors in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among those he
has worked with are Barrault and Brook as well as
Joe Chaikin and Luca Ronconi, all of whom also
participated in his 1975 ‘research university’ in
Wroclaw, together with his leading disciple,
Eugenio Barba.
 Grotowski
himself rejected such direct attempts to
create audience participation as ‘a new myth’,
pointing out that true intimacy is more likely to be
achieved through physical distance.
 Grotowski’s
only true followers were his own acting
group, although the Polish Laboratory Theatre only
achieved one independent production before their
dissolution, Thanatos Polski (Polish Lament, 1981), a
highly abstract and musically structured
participatory piece, directed by Ryszard Cieslak,
with an all too accurate poster depicting two coiled
serpents swallowing each other’s tails.
 Barba’s
Odin Teatret founded in 1964 and
transferred from Oslo to Denmark in 1966, has
remained within the circle of the stage while
rhetorically announcing ‘the death of the theatre’,
and condemning even experimental theatres as ‘the
blasphemous caricatures of a ghost’.
 Specializing
in the ‘transcultural analysis of
performance’, ISTA (International School of Theatre
Anthropology) applies the techniques and artistic
approach of Oriental traditions to develop a
western form of physical stylization.
 However,
just as this remained a technique for
actor-training, rather than becoming a therapeutic
process with little theatrical relevance, so Barba’s
work has retained the dimension of stage
performance, while moving from a drama rooted in
myth towards akin to international circus.
 Myths
were used as images of ‘the worn-out
stereotypes that make up our habitual social
conduct’ to reveal these as inherently primitive,
repressive and violent. Against these false myth
were set ‘ritual’ behaviour patterns, ‘biological
reactions that spring up in extreme situations’,
where the socially conditioned gestures of
everyday life are transformed into a ‘natural
physical language’, which paradoxiacally was also
a ‘sacerdotal sign language’ of hieratic attitudes.
 Feraï
attempted to present a universal paradigm
of social structures by combining the legend of King
Fredegod – whose rule was so Draconian that
valuables could be left on the open street, and
whose death was concealed for three years in
order to preserve social discipline – with the myth
of Alcestis, Pherai with the Faeroes.
 One
another level the play is a conflict between
male and female principles, symbolized in the three
props that formed the only materisl or scenic aids in
the production” the masculine symbol of a knife
with leather thongs, which was used as a whip
representing political repression, as a sabre for the
duel, as a royal sceptre, as a flute; the feminine
and passive symbol of a blanket, used to represent
the subjugated kingdom, swaddling clothes, Alcestis’
corpse; and an ivory egg, symbolizing life and
death, a skull and the fertile womb.
 The
figure of Kaspar Hauser has almost become a
hallmark indicating Grotowski’s influence, being
used as an image of ‘natural man’ versus society
not only by Barba, but also by Joseph Chaikin (in
The Mutation Show, 1971) and by Brook (1973).
 When
the 16-year-old boy, who had been kept
totally isolated from all human contact since birth,
appeared in Numbering in 1828, he immediately
struck the public imagination as the epitome of
ideal innocence. His murder shortly afterwards
came to symbolize the death of the spirit under the
pressures of social conditioning; and his story has
since become a familiar literary archetype.
 Barba’s
version exactly parallels Hndke’s play in
scenes where Kaspar learns to walk, or where ‘the
community as educator’ makes its appearance.
 As in so much avant-garde work, the main problem
with a production like Barba’s Kaspariana, which
was also referred to as an atheist mass, is that any
challenge to religion presupposes a climate of
belief, which has become increasingly marginalized
in western society.
 The
eclectic mix of archaic languages in
Kaspariana, and the choice of an Oriental
comparison to define the aims of his group, point to
the direction taken by Barba in the 1970s.
 Taking the avant-garde cult of primitivism a step
further, instead of receiving foreign images through
the filter of anthropological studies or in a western
context, the actors became anthropologists.
 Using
Danish as a working language in Italy or
Venezuela automatically restricted communication
to a physical level, so that the Odin Teatret
offerings in the early stages of their global tour
were dances.
 The
purpose of this street-theatre in gathering
spectators from the whole community , who would
then perform something in their turn, was to foster
indigenous, non-professional theatre groups that
would act as ‘the cells of a new social body’.
 Barba labeled them Third Theatre.
 Thus
for Barba’s group to act as a catalyst it was
essential for their art to change, while conversely, if
somewhat solipsistically, changes in their
performance could be seen as guaranteeing tan
equivalent effect on the global ‘cells’ of the Third
Theatre, and two of the various Odin Teatret’s
productions from this period are representative.
 Come!
And the day will be ours (1976) was based
on historical incidents and images from the conquest
of the American West, the title coming from the last
letter sent by Custer before he and his soldiers
were all massacred at Little Bighorn in 1876.
 The
spectators were thus an integral part of the
action, representing the tribespeople around a
campfire or city crowds at the circus.
 The abstraction of these terms reflected the
generalization of the theme, in which the genocidal
process of American colonization was intended to
be merely a paradigm for ‘the way one man
destroys another in the name of values which he
believes to be universal..the violence hidden behind
words such as Altruism, Progress and Truth’
 The
Million (1979), prepared after the group’s
return from global travel, offers a fuller example
of such reciprocity and its implications.
 Primitivism and ritualistic drama became a striking
display of physical virtuosity.
 Another
director to have labeled himself explicitly
as Grotowski’s disciple is Richard Schechner, whose
Performance Group in New York achieved
overnight notoriety with Dionysus in 69 (1968).
 In
Dionysus in 69, the ambivalence of the god was
intended to represent the tendency to fascism
inherent in the retreat of the ‘new left’ from
political revolution, to the introverted sexual
liberation of the drug culture.
 This
was Schechner’s most overt attempt to recreate
ritual drama, an aim which led The Drama Review
under his editorship to explore modes of nonverbal communication, the connections between
human and animal behavior patterns in play and
ritualized activity, and the types of religious
performance surviving in primitive cultures.
 As
opposed to a conventional play (an action
presented by professionals to a separated and
passive collection of individuals), ritual is defined
as an action in which all the members of a
community actively participate, one which
symbolically or even actually transforms the status
and identity of the group, depending on the
degree of participation.
 Euripides’
play was restructured into an initiation
rite. ‘Opening ceremonies’ were designed to create
contact between actors and the audience, who
were carried individually from the entrance to the
performing area in explicit imitation of ceremonial
practices described by Van Gennep.
 The
rhythmic writhing and groaning of the group,
naked and in unison, the men stretched out flank to
flank on the floor with the women standing above,
legs straddling them from shoulder to buttock to
form an arched tunnel of flesh, created the
dominant image of a birth-canal, adapted from a
New Guinea rite of passage.
 This
was repeated twice, at the beginning, when the
actor playing Dionysus was ‘reborn’ as a god,
being literally pushed through the ‘passage’ by
pelvic thrusts, and again, reversed, at the death of
Pentheus.
 Instead of being torn to pieces, the actor was
symbolically reingested into the community that he
had tried to dominate as an individual.
 Indeed
certain sections of the performance could
not be completed without a predetermined
response from a specific number of spectators,
while at the same time simple rules were laid down
to increase the degree of participation.
 As
Dionysus repeatedly announced, ‘It’s a
celebration, a ritual, an ordeal, an ecstasy’, and
the audience were encouraged to join ‘the
community’ by stripping and dancing with the
performers as a positive act, even though by the
time this level of participation was reached the
group had a negative significance in terms of the
play, mindlessly following a megalomaniac quasifascist leader in acts of violence.
 Indeed,
then Schechner gave his audience a more
specific function – as in Commune (1971), where
fifteen randomly selected spectators were required
to act as villagers in the My Lai massacre, or find
others from the audience to take their places – the
actors’ relationship to them was clearly one of
intimidation.
 In
addition, participation only becomes more than
an illusionistic device when it can change the
outcome of the performance. This possibility was
built into Dionysus, though in a way which
effectively precluded its realization.
 Schechner
derived his term ‘Environmental Theatre’
from Kaprow’s concept of the Happening, and tried
to incorporate such disruptions by interspersing
organized action with ‘open’ sections.
 But
in his later work participation was limited to
physically following the action, with scenes being
played throughout the available area, forcing
spectators to change their position in order to see,
or as a simultaneous montage so that spectators
had to be selective, each making their own logical
connections.
 This
movement through a complex arrangement of
the play in Schechner’s Makbeth (1969) , where the
performance was given focus by the way groupings
of spectators gathered and dispersed.
 Genet’s
play, once a revolutionary text for the
avant-garde, had now become a ‘modern classic’
for Schechner; and just as Marowitz had done with
Hamlet, he ‘deconstructed’ it, eliding scenes and
altering sequences.
 He also used extensive doubling, as well as crossgender casting.
 Instead
of sexual/political revolution, the
mainspring of the performance became theatre
itself, both experimental theatre and brothels being
seen as in the business of selling fantasy.
 Schechner
wanted to show that ‘theatre is a “house
of illusion”, sister to the whorehouse. After all, one
of the root meanings of prostitute is substitute:
someone who stands for someone else ( in the
mind/body of the client)’
 But
the metaphor works both ways. Here the
Performance Group ideal of audience participation
was explicitly voyeurism, a perhaps unintentional
acknowledgement of what had always been
essentially the effect of their attempts to create
direct physical involvement.
 Other
radical American groups followed much the
same trajectory in their careers, such as Joe
Chaikin’s Open Theatre, which developed from a
closed acting workshop to ritualistic performances
of archteypal material with The Serpent in the
same year as Schechner’s Dionysus.
 Chaikin,
who had started out with the Living
Theatre and worked with Peter Brook on US, began
developing The Serpent following sessions with
Grotowski and Ciéslak at a Grotowski workshop
laboratory in 1967.
 The
Open Theatre’s subsequent productions
included one of Jarry’s Ubu plays, along with three
developed out of ensemble improvisations: Terminal
(1969), The Mutation Show (1971) which was partly
based on the histories of Kaspar Hauser and the
wolf-girl Kamala, and Nightwalk (1973).
 In
both the Open Theatre and even more in the
Performance Group, the merging of illusion and
reality and the stress on total commitment, together
with the subjective nature of the dramatic event,
turned productions into a form of psychotherapy.
 Personal
tensions constantly plagued the Open
Theatre, fostered by the incompatibility between
ensemble creation and productions that expressed
Chaikin’s vision as a director.
 The
model for all Grotowski’s disciples was that of
the Asian performer whose training was seen as
‘holistic’ and ‘the primary means of personal
growth’. Their ideal was to recreate a shamanistic
performance exorcizing the ‘disease’ of the
community in the form of taboos, hostilities, fears.
 Schechner’s
claim that ‘the locus of the essential
theatre shifted from the page to somewhere
between the navel and genitals of each
performer’ – from his point of view a positive and
progressive state of affairs – was unfortunately all
too accurate.