An Empty Room A Burning Stage.

The Shipment

A racial comedy in three acts. 

The Shipment is Young Jean Lee’s brilliant take on a comedy of racial commentary. It begins with an empty stage, a completely black background against which the actor’s bodies are framed - all white elements in costuming pop out dramatically, particularly during the first dance sequence. Two actors dance around the stage, shifting between dance styles reminiscent of blackface performance, funk, rock, and blues. The soundtrack accompanying them tracks a musical evolution beginning with blues and ending in rock. The dance piece serves as a chronology of dance associated with black culture in america, despite (and quite interestingly) being overlaid with instances of music more traditionally tied to white popular culture. The dance is extremely gestural, the faces playing a central role as detached masks more than holistic elements of the body.

The actors leave the stage, and are replaced by a black comedian, cued in by a gangster rap track (Lil John and Pitbull) - “Seattle motherfucking Washington!” It’s somewhat of an uncomfortable moment, as this second act clearly marks and defines a series of performances of culture particularly catered to a white audience. The standup is traumatic, shocking in its delivery, and yet extremely funny. It touches on a huge range of uncomfortable topics, everything from white and black lesbian girlfriends to pedophilia. In a very calculated manner, the comedian enter’s the audience’s psyche through a series of “ugly feelings” - the beginning of this act is then followed by an auto-analysis of black comedy: “Why do black comedians still do white people like this, black people like that, jokes?”, “White folks be evil. White people are stupid.”, “Do you think its comfortable to talk about race?”, “We got to talk about race, white color blind people.” The standup act is also filled with concepts that allude to larger racial topics; particular words jump out, words that then tie to specific moments in black history and culture - the poop face, railroad tracks, beastin’, lynching, playing stereotypes. 

The audience diverts this commentary. The uncomfortable silence is at times palpable, and at other times, the clapping seems like a clear defense mechanism of detachment. The comedian acknowledges a strain of systematic racism in american culture, pointing at the fallacy that is the assumption of background by reading performativity. At times reading like a political speech, the poignant commentary is applauded by the attendants. 

Following the comedian’s act, the performance undergoes a 180 degree shift. Black stereotypes are brilliantly and blatantly portrayed in an extremely Brechtian fashion by an all-black cast. Interestingly, the result is extremely hilarious (without necessarily trying to be so), despite the pervasiveness of these stereotypes in popular culture. A young black teenager’s narrative is portrayed through detachment and temporal shifts, tracking his experience of wanting to become a rapper, and slowly sinking into the implications of this desire in a black community. What would normally be read as a tragic and violent narrative instead becomes a comedy of thought through a very calculated style of acting, in which the body is extremely controlled, and yet the voice is allowed to run free in terms of volume, while kept monotone. The physicality of the characters is brilliantly calculated to enact these very stereotypes - a black woman sways excessively from the hips, a black man crosses his arms in a “hood” gesture (it’s ridiculous to put quotes around these terms) every time he mentions drugs. Every once in a while, a line of dialogue that speaks for itself jumps out, grounding the comedy for a fraction of a second, enough to pierce deeply into moral mechanisms - “If you don’t shoot people, they don’t respect you”, “I don’t remember which one of us is talking anymore”, “you’re a pussy who doesn’t want to sell drugs”. 

Finally, The Shipment enters the reenactment of white physicality with black bodies. A simple scenario is laid out - a man invites friends over, threatening to kill himself due to his solitude. A morbid topic, it again falls into comedy as a white audience begins to recognize themselves in a highly stereotyped portrayal. The question asked is, who performs white and who performs black? It’s probably the most effective use of Brechtian acting I’ve ever experienced. I’m still fascinated by the small “plants” of highly impactful text disguised behind what seems to be a comedy of thought.

Our Town - Thornton Wilder Our Town, set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corner, is Thornton Wilder’s dissection of American small-town life in the early 20th century. Written in 1938, the play posits a significant break in American theatrical paradigms - Our Town is performed on a bare stage, with characters miming their actions without the aid of props. It also incorporates markedly Brechtian techniques in the form of a stage manager who refers directly to the audience and discusses the passage of time in the town. 

Donald Margulies, in his foreword to the play, defends a text that at times might seem uneventful, and quite lacking of a narrative arch of any consequence. “The simultaneity of life and death, past, present, and future pervades Our Town... With the specter of mortality hovering, the quotidian business of the people of Grover’s Corners attains a kind of grandeur.” In many ways, Wilder’s text becomes a sort of Waiting for Godot a la Americana, a text that while reaffirming the almost absurd circularity and futility in life, also manages to incorporate established notions of Americanness in the mid-early 20th century. Yet where it fails (and perhaps it’s a failure to transmit the irony inherent to the text), is in its portrayal of a completely homogenous community - one devoid of any real issues pervading American society at the time of its writing. In this sense, Our Town becomes both escapist and conformist, despite its brilliant attempt to redefine theatrical convention in the United States. Fair enough, it deals with the human condition, but not the social condition - how much merit this holds is unclear.

Waiting for Godot & Godot in a Political Context

  Waiting for Godot, at times subtitled as “Tragicomedy in two acts”, is Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece - written in the 40’s and first performed in the early 50’s. Becket, a poet, novelist, and dramaturge - disciple of James Joyce - is considered along Ionesco, Genet and Adamov, as one of absurd theatre’s most representative figures. The proponents of absurd theatre posit the nonexistence of God, the pointlessness of human life, and the failure of language as an effective communicative tool. Faced with the failure of conceptual thought to understand the essential truths, they reaffirm that the absurdity of existence cannot be explained; rather, it must be lived. From this theoretical pillar is born Waiting for Godot, a harrowing text in which two characters - Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) - wait in vain for the apparition of “Godot”. 

Waiting for Godot has a tendency of falling into fatalist textual interpretations. The endless wait for an entity that never arrives, as well as the evident circularity (and thus futility) of a flat narrative in which everything threatens to whither away brings about connotations of abjection and depression. Nonetheless, if we assume that Godot is not simply a figment of Vladimir and Estragon’s imagination and therefore symbolizes the hope for a project of liberation and emancipation of man, the question of whether or not to wait passively for Godot becomes central. In many ways, Beckett’s text can be considered revolutionary in that the absurd becomes not a tool for incessant ponderation and inaction, but rather prompts political and social action. The ambiguity of Godot and the centrality of a narrative so thoroughly common to all humanity, particularly to oppressed peoples, makes Waiting for Godot a text ripe with possibilities for politically-driven staging (theatre of protest). 

This is the basis for Bradby’s analysis of political stagings of Waiting for Godot in Godot in a political context. Bradby recollects a series of these performances in Belgrade, Sarajevo, Cape Town, Haifa, and Naneterre. They all share similar social contexts, in that the productions were all staged to articulate or wrestle with minoritarian oppression and conflict. Bradby’s dissection points at an interesting phenomenon - namely that the more specific the production, the weaker its impact. This is particularly evident in Ilan Ronen’s production in Haifa, where all the ambiguity’s in Beckett’s text were filled in with direct allusions to the immediate Palestinean-Israeli conflict. Godot’s power seems to dissolve with specificity. The problem is also that Waiting of Godot is also an extremely easy text to stage in any context where struggle or helplessness is rampant. Lacking a revolutionary reading of the text, the production simply turns into the staging of pointless self-reflection rather than productive social and political action.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o - Oral Power and Europhone Glory “The war between art and the state is really a struggle between the power of performance in the arts and the performance of power by the state - in short, enactments of power”. Wa Thiong’o recounts how, upon being commissioned to create a performance piece for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria. Representing Kenya, Wa Thiong’o suggested to the appropriate authorities that The Trial of Dedan Kimathi be performed first in Nairobi, open to the audience it would eventually represent internationally. The trials around performing at the National Theatre are used by Wa Thiongo to exemplify the constructs of political power that regiment performance both geographically and socially. He posits what I think is his most important point in response to Brook’s empty space. “...the real magic and power of performance. It incorporates the architectural space of material and immaterial walls into itself and becomes a magic sphere made still by its own motion - but it is potentially explosive, or rather, it is poised to explode”. Wa Tiong’o builds on this theory by arguing that there are several ways to look at performance. We reveal the first layer when we discover that “the performance space is also constituted by the totality of its external relations to these other centers and fields... The real politics of the performance space may well lie in the field of its external relations”. “...the performance space, in its entirety of internal and external factors, may be seen in relationship to time; in terms, that is, of what has gone before - history - and what could follow - the future”. It is clear then that “the performance space is never empty. Bare, yes, open, yes, but never empty. It is always the site of physical, social, and psychic forces in society.” Thus Wa Tiong’o adds a significant amount of complexity to Brook’s argument by incorporating elements external to the theatrical space itself. These elements have the power to dictate everything - from content to impact. His theory becomes interesting when applied to institutions of power that diverge from the traditional democratic spectrum; it explains the traditional saying that dictatorships either love their artists or kill them. The conflict over performance spaces are in reality “also [struggles] over which cultural symbols and activities [to] represent...” We’ve moved past purely colonial struggles, and nonetheless the same issues resurge in postcolonial situations, where “performances [are] to be contained in controllable enclosures: in licensed theatre buildings, in schools, especially - but they were not to take place in open spaces where the people resided”. The artist becomes a criminal by default - it is therefore necessary to create an abstract prison in which he must reside and work; any alternative might poses a threat to the power of government structures. The paradox is the more repression the artist faces, the more the risk of insurrection grows (or is cultivated), as evidenced by artistic rebirth and re-saturation in every post-dictatorship period around the world.

Griselda Gambaro - Information for Foreigners About a year ago I found, on a small piece of parched paper, the following phrase: “Nada era cierto. La muerte de Carlos ocurrió un verano como este. Mientras algunos disfrutaban del sol y el mar un grupo de jóvenes eran detenidos y torturados”. This excerpt, part of a longer letter written by the mother of one of the victims, speaks of a segmented reality - one where disparate paradigms are bounded by invisible walls of hypocrisy and torture. And then I found Gambaro’s Crónica en 20 Escenas. Somehow I want to group all these texts together, these horrendous experiences. I want to label them as one; segment them, partition them neatly and tuck them in a drawer somewhere far down a mental corridor. Gambaro’s work diligently set fire to these drawers, bursting them open with an insatiable brutality. Crónica en 20 Escenas is an exploration, a recreation of the abuses and torture the Argentine populace suffered during the Videla regime. Set in a large house, an audience is split up and led across the building’s rooms - each of which is populated by a performance of torture or abuse, factually based on the events that plagued Buenos Aires in the 1970’s.

Peter Brook - The Empty Space “The theatre has often been called a whore, meaning its art is impure, but today this is true in another sense - whores take the money and then go short on the pleasure.” Peter Brook, in The Empty Space, posits the existence of two forms of theatre - Holy Theatre and Deadly Theatre. Brook equates the Deadly Theatre with widely prevalent “industrialized” contemporary spectacle. Holy Theatre, on the other hand, represents the “Theatre of the Invisible Made Visible”. This theatre is viscerally linked with the idea of “true” rituals, with performances that respond and grapple with concepts. A tremendously important concept of Holy Theatre is the idea of presence - the presence of the performer; this ties in with Brook’s second argument: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.” 

Brook warns of a dangerous societal symptom: namely, the dangerous association between culture, antiquity and its preservation, and an inevitable sense of stagnation and boredom. Not that preservation is wrong, but “current preservation has no more than an antiquarian interest, none had the vitality of new invention.” Contemporary theatre is not immune to this plague - the industrialization of theatre has created a fundamental disconnect - audiences that have been constantly let down; therefore the wrong audience is drawn in, and the cycle perpetuates. Prevalent is also a lack of response to what audiences are truly looking for: “In America today, the time is ripe for a Meyerhold to appear, since naturalistic expression of life no longer seems to Americans adequate to express the forces that drive them.” “The problem of the Deadly Theatre is like the problem of the deadly bore. Every deadly bore has head, heart, arms, legs; usually, he has a family and friends; he even has his admirers. Yet we sigh when we come across him - and in this sigh we are regretting that somehow he is at the bottom instead of the top of his possibilities.” The Holy Theatre, in comparison, is the exact polar opposite. The Holy Theatre is governed by “the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts.” Brook sees a holy theatre as a theatre that is alive and breathing, that impacts, that spreads, that dialogues, in the same way that Artaud calls for a theatre to “impact, to pillage, to ravage the soul.” “All we know is the end result: we know and we like the feel and sound of celebrating through applause, and this is where we get stuck.... we have largely forgotten silence.” The fundamental question that Brook puts forth is where to find this theatre. He seems convinced of its relation to ritual, to an energy beyond our physical realm that manifests itself in the presence of the performer, similar to Lorca’s “duende”. “Can the invisible be made visible through the performer’s presence?” “Where should we look for it? In the clouds or on the ground?”

Flower Drum Song

Rodger and Hammerstein

Rodger and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song is a 1958 Broadway musical that takes place in Chinatown. It’s notable for being one of the first musicals to incorporate an all-asian cast, where race issues are not necessarily explicitly represented on stage, but rather run along all the play as a significant undercurrent. The play is based on a novel by C.Y. Lee published in 1957. In the musical, a Chinese girl arrives in Chinatown illegally, accompanied by her father. The musical revolves around their experiences and eventual acclimation to American culture. 

While it may be an interesting exercise to read Flower Drum Song in the same way as The Sound of Music - i.e. under a feminist lens, I completely disagree with the idea that these two achieve an even remotely similar level of depth and strength of commentary. My problem being that Flower Drum Song seems like a liberal fiasco to reconsolidate American culture with a rapidly growing and yet segmented Asian population in the 1950’s and 60’s. Particularly after reading Adrian Piper, who advocates the concept of “acceptance” over “tolerance”, Flower Drum Song inevitably feels like a piece that ideologically reduces members of the Asian population to non-threatening, non-complex members of a ghettoized society. Fighting cultural xenophobia, particularly endemic to one’s own geographic and spatial domain, cannot be achieved through the disqualification and over-simplification of “guest” cultures, which is precisely what Flower Drum Song attempts to do. 

A Problem Like Maria Stacy Wolf

Stacy Wolf, in her book A Problem Like Maria, attempts to “reread musicals from a lesbian and feminist perspective by design.” Not that they necessarily are - Wolf’s rereading serves as a prompt to delve deeper into a genre that is often undervalued and ridiculed for its perceived lack of depth. Wolf focuses strongly on the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, sometimes bringing to light their religious and political backgrounds to argue the need for more liberal readings of their work and musicals in general. While Wolf is quick to acknowledge the cliché of the musical - “American art is dishonest - which explains why our only major narrative invention is the musical, a fantasy form (Mordden)”, she also points out the major contributions of musicals to broader societal advancement in the United States - “the Broadway musical is the one performance form that features women as neither passive objects of desire nor subjects of vilification.”

Perhaps one of Wolf’s most interesting observations is the disjunctive relationship between the popularity and importance of musicals to American popular culture and its nature as an art form incredibly tied to gay and lesbian leftist movements - “Miller asserts that virtually all 1950s musicals have a gay subtext. Musicals have long offered personal, emotional, and cultural validation for gay men... gay men have been its most visible devotees.” In conversation with friends, suggesting a lesbian or gay subtext to the most popular musicals in recent history was akin to pointing out the window and screaming about flying pigs. It seems utterly unreasonable, but Wolf’s points are brilliantly put forth; followed by a viewing of The Sound of Music, I couldn’t help but realize that they do indeed have a myriad of layers - one of them obviously gay and lesbian. Wolf also strongly pushes for a deeper analysis of the songs themselves, pointing out Stephen Banfield’s point that we should “hear the song as a single aesthetic entity in which the strategies of similarity and difference, of repetition and contrast, in syllable and note are mutually illuminating.”  

The Black Beat Made Visible: Hip Hop Dance and Body Power

DeFrantz’s “Black Beat Made Visible” is an exploration of Black Social Dance (more specifically Hip Hop), and its role as an articulator of several levels of understanding based on perspective and participation. DeFrantz begins by posing questions of sexuality, recursiveness of dance across practitioners, physical eccentricity, non-verbal realms, and fundamentally, the power of the body in hip hop. His basic and perhaps most transcendent point is that “Black social dances contain dual transcripts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ meaning.” He argues that these dances thus enact duality, visible in divergent resonances available to both dancers and viewers. 

DeFrantz’s cursory overview of the history of black social dance proposes an underlying theoretical basis for these performances, namely that of the “call and response” as expressed in the relationship between the drum and the performer. DeFrantz proposes that this relationship allows black hip-hop dancers to break with overarching structures of dominance and repression, essentially training the body for resistance. The tremendous physical discipline required both for breakdancing and contemporary hip-hop dance are argued to be reflections of both rhythmical structures present in the music as well as indirect forms of physical resistance training. It is still unclear to me whether the popularization of hip-hop is viewed as a positive or regressive trait to DeFrantz. On one hand, the massive popularization of hip-hop has deprived it of its narrative of resistance and dissent, as well as its strict narrative of male dominance and “battle”; on the other hand, it has made it a more inclusive and prevalent art form, appropriated by communities that despite not understanding its “inner” qualities, still re-perform it for its perceived notions of dissent.

Bill T. Jones (b. 1952), North American choreographer, director, and dancer. It’s been a long time since I found myself completely transfixed by nothing but the movements of a body. It calls to mind the beautiful subtlety of Michael Langan’s Choros and the brilliant control of physical effort in Tobias Hutzler’s Balance - a perfect blend of choreography and mind that eventually becomes a beautifully disjointed blend of movement and impulse. His four stages of progression are deeply theatrical in their execution, tricking us into believing that impulse and subtlety cannot be choreographed, but stem from the deep Dionysian corners of the performer’s mind and body. 

I wonder if perhaps the fascination with Jones stems from a perceived weakness, trapped in a perfect, refined body - the release of this weakness in the fourth stage of Breathing Exercises is preceded and underscored constantly by a perfection in movement and control; the release slits your throat with the realization that the performer is everything but perfect, but is subject to the same life and world as you are (“I put my mother in the ground”). I’m left with a profound sense of desire for movement, for pure, uncensored expression. In this way, Jones constructs a performance that is deeply political - it requires response, it encourages digression, it demands expression. 

The Wooster Group - House/Lights

The Wooster Group’s House/Lights is a performance piece directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. It combines two main sources of text - Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights by Gertrude Stein and Olga’s House of Shame, a movie by Joseph Mawra. The play is an intersection of Stein’s exploration of the idea of Faust and Mawra’s narrative of prostitution, drug and crime. This combination is intended to elucidate the curious parallels between both works, and eventually becomes a meditation on ideas of gender, technology, archives and repetition. The play is chaotically staged in a set plagued with incongruent pieces of furniture and technology, accompanied by an equally incongruent score and coated with a playful disregard for theatrical convention. 

The minute, tiny portion of residual understanding I’m left with after watching the entire performance seems due to the fact that I know little if anything about the source texts. It’s wildly confusing to try and cage the beast that the Wooster Group has created; in my mind it’s so different to anything I’ve seen before. If anything, House/Lights seems like a cyborg-bastard of Artaudian Theatre of Cruetly - it truly shocked me, disgusted me, confused me. The costumes along with the padding around the women’s waists slowly degrade into a strange anomalous mass that is never explained - the movements of the men seem graceless and violent, and the sound effects seem to be designed exclusively to annoy the hell out of you, drawing you away from the performance constantly. At times I thought I perceived traces of meaning, not from the text but rather from the physicality of characters (the devil and Valk touching each other, the strange ambiguous sexuality portrayed by Valk). Experimentation in relation to video technology was overshadowed by how little isolation was given to those moments - the technology became a given as opposed to a tool.

On Adrian Piper, Out of Order Out of Sight. Adrian Piper (b. 1948) is an analytic philosopher and conceptual artist (considered first generation). Her work, as she herself claims, focuses on issues of sexism, racism, and xenophobia in American culture. Out of Order, Out of Sight (Selected writings in Art Criticism) is a compilation of essays relating to personal and external works, many of them resembling ideological manifestos in which she elaborates on her stances related to the issues mentioned above. Xenophobia and the Indexical Present I & II are lectures in which she dissects the phenomenon of acceptance vs. xenophobic tolerance in society, articulated from her own experiences as a black woman in bourgeoise American circles. Her focus is on the importance of generating a social paradigm where Others are integrated and accepted fully - where this acceptance becomes a “social norm of etiquette”, i.e. complete digestion and assimilation whilst retaining identity. She then retroactively analyses the motives for her work from this theoretical perspective, discovering and re-discovering previously unexamined ideological components in her art. Ways of Averting One’s Gaze is a much stronger beast, a true manifesto in which she actively responds to criticism directed at her work by Elizabeth Hess and Donald Kuspit, arguing that her dehumanization is a veil behind which the true meaning of her work can be normalized and dumbed-down. She concludes Ways... by issuing the following warning in relation to her own experience with art-criticism: “replacing art criticism with artist biography can be a particularly insidious trap for colored artists”. 

Adrian Piper’s works in an interesting framework, in that she refuses to take the stance of a minority where protective walls of theory and legislation provide pseudo-assimilation into society. Rather, her point is that minorities must be accepted, integrated fully and without question in what she acknowledges as an unavoidably lengthy process. It’s quite a break from the literatures and theories that fed my own education both in Costa Rica and Chile. The work of everyone from Galeano (who works with the concept of economic racism), to Mapuche leaders (cultural racism), Augusto Boal and Luis Valdez, all stress a prevalent detachment from the oppressor as necessary for revindication, cohesion, and power. These scholars acknowledge the division between minority and oppressor - a necessary and unavoidable symptom of the problem that cannot necessarily be fixed, and in many cases must be strengthened rather than weakened. This need for movements based on divisive ideologies might be a result of a fundamental disgust with the established power structures; assimilation would mean becoming the power, therefore invalidating any struggle. Piper on the other hand insists on the blending of the two, a merger devoid of any implied hierarchies. In many ways this is the most sustainable and utopian form of racial and sexual assimilation - what’s unclear to me is what comes after integration. In other words, does integration imply cultural change on both parts (logic dictates it would)? She is firm in believing that the creation of this ubiquitous cohesion is dependent on the minority forcibly inserting itself into the majority - like a dose of medicine - where time becomes the only volatile variable. And yet her work is both a search for and a display of identity (and an extremely strong one at that), which risks the creation of higher walls between groups as each reinforces their identifying components. 

Theatre in Theory - Notes

Political, Folk, and Ritual

Romain Rolland - The People’s Theatre 

A revolutionary theatre - a popular theatre that caters to the masses and advocates political action. 

This theatre must not be condescending - rather, it must inspire action through three principals: recreation, energy, and a path to intelligence. 

It is hard not to attribute a tone of sarcasm to The People’s Theatre. 

Rolland advocates a theatre that does not cause suffering, or delve into misery and the humdrum of everyday life (of which the workers have enough already). 

Instead, theatre must provide joy, relief. Melodrama causes stupefaction, rather than action. 

It ought to be a source of energy: the happy, working man is never complete without a sense of purpose and drive, let the theatre be that source.

Finally, the theatre must be a guiding light to the intelligence. It must exercise his brain; a task impossible while the man is at work. We must not bother with moral purpose; rather the permanence of theatre alone will create a sense of brotherhood. 

Joy as the fire of revolution.

Alain Locke - The Negro and the American Stage, The Drama of Negro Life

The Negro brings to the drama the gift of a temperament, rather than a gift of tradition. 

The Negro brings with him dramatic spontaneity, free use of the body and the voice as direct instruments of feeling, a control of body plastique that opens up the narrow diaphragm of fashionable acting and breaks the conventional mannerisms of the stage. 

Self imposed limitations of blind imitation and stagnant conventionalism. 

Negro theatre must be allowed to experiment.

If the sophisticated race sense of the Negro is allowed to combine with its underlying African roots, an electrifying theatre can result.

Negro theatre must start looking for itself in everyday life, as opposed to in the Caucasian stage.

Peasant folk arising from repression is the soil most fertile for dramatic resurgence.

The problem with the Negro dramatist is his inability at self-criticism, and thus a tradition that in terms of objectivity pales when placed next to Caucasian drama.

Race drama needs psychological distance desperately.

Race drama must be saturated with folk in order to preserve itself.

Race drama must therefore facilitate the imaginative channel of escape and spiritual release, and cover life with the illusion of happiness and spiritual freedom.

Because Negro drama has nothing to cling onto culturally, it must innevitably return to find itself in its originally African traditions, now broken.

W.E.B Du Bois - Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement

Sub-tropical peoples have more vivid imagination, are accustomed to expressing themselves with greater physical and spiritual abandon than most folk.

The Negro actor has, for a long time, been asked to entertain a more or less alien group.

The plays of real Negro theatre must be: 1. About us. 2. By us. 3. For us. 4. Near Us. This is what the real folk-play movement of American Negroes will entail.

The world is full of Beauty, and yet today the mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly.

White men begin to find great satisfaction in younger Negro writers because they think it is going to stop agitation of the Negro question.

It is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty, and we must use in this work all methods that men have used before.

The apostle of Beauty thus becomes the apostle of Truth and Right.

Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be - I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

Bertold Brecht - The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre.

A devoted Marxist who believed the social realistic form to be outdated.

The term Epic theatre is borrowed from director Edwin Piscator. It consists of a drama containing episodic scenes fashioned after Shakespeare, with each scene a kind of mini-play of its own.

Brecht nullified empathy by estranging the audience. He wanted to stimulate awareness over identification.

This artistic device, estrangement, is intended to lead to the audience’s questioning of the event and challenging its inevitability.

Brecht wanted audiences to observe the power dynamics of authority, how it imposed its will through illusion, empathy, and charm. His theatre is meant to replicate the circus.

Questions like: is the music the pretext for the events on the stage, or are these the pretext for the music? etc.- can simply be bypassed by radically separating the elements. 

The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art.

Moral tableau: the text had to be neither moralizing nor sentimental, but to put morals and sentimentality on view.

Showing independent works of art as part of a theatrical performance is a new departure.

Let us just point out that the technical advances alone were enough to permit the stage to incorporate an element of narrative in its dramatic productions.

The stage began to tell a story. The narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall. But the actors too refrained from going over wholly into their role, remaining detached from the character they were playing and clearly inviting criticism of him.

The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means of simple empathy with the characters in a play.

When something seems “the most obvious thing in the world” it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it - That’s not the way. That’s great art: nothing obvious in it - I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.

The stage began to be instructive

It is really a commercial transaction. Knowledge is just a commodity.

Theatre remains theatre even when it is instructive theatre, and in so far as it is good theatre it will amuse.

But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences.

The epic theatre was likewise often objected to as moralizing too much. Its aim was less to moralize than to observe.

Similarly the object of our inquiries was not just to arouse moral objections to such circumstances, but to discover means for their elimination.

Similarly the modern epic theatre is linked with certain trends. It cannot be by any means practiced universally. It demands not only a certain technological level but a powerful movement in society which is interested to see vital questions freely aired with a view to their solution, and can defend this interest against every contrary trend.  

The use of the alienation effect in traditional Chinese acting. This method was most recently used in Germany for plays of a non-Aristotelian (dependent on empathy) type as part of the attempts being made to evolve an epic theatre.

The efforts in question were directed to playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious. 

Chinese theatre uses a lot of symbols.

Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. 

A further means is that the artist observes himself.

In this way the artist separates mime (showing observation) from gesture (showing a cloud).

The artist’s object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. The performer’s self-observation, an artful and artistic act of self-alienation, stopped the spectator from losing himself in the character completely. 

The audience identifies itself with the actor as being an observer, and accordingly develops his attitude of observing or looking on.

These problems are unknown to the Chinese performer, for he rejects complete conversion.

The alienation effect intervenes, not in the form of absence of emotion, but in the form of emotions which need not correspond to those of the character portrayed. 

On the contrary, the achievement of an A-effect absolutely depends on lightness and naturalness of performance.

The Chinese performer gets his A-effect by associating with magic. “How’s it done” remains hidden. 

Why shouldn’t art try, by its own means of course, to further the great social task of mastering life?

The A-effect was achieved in the German epic theatre not only by the actor, but also by the music (choruses, songs) and the setting (placards, film etc.).

But for historicizing the theatre everything is different. The theatre concentrates entirely on whatever in this perfectly everyday event is remarkable, particular and demanding inquiry.

In setting up new artistic principles and working out new methods of representation we must start with the compelling demands of a changing epoch.

Among other effects that a new theatre will need for its social criticism and its historical reporting of completed transformations is the A-effect.

Federico García Lorca - The Prophecy of Lorca

Necessity and struggle, grounded on critical love, temper the artist’s soul, which easy flattery makes effeminate and destroys.

A nation which does not help and does not encourage its theatre is, if not dead, dying.

The theatre must impose itself on the public, not the public on the theatre.

The public can be taught, this has to be done for the good of the theatre and for the glory and status of its interpreters.

Art above all else.

Luis Valdez - Notes on Chicano Theater

At its high point, Chicano theatre is a religion.

Chicano theatre then is first a reaffirmation of life.

It reflects a characteristic “American” hangup on the material aspect of human existence.

In Mexico, the greatest examples of total theatre were, of course, human sacrifices.

It is particularly important for teatro Chicano to draw a distinction between what is theatre and what is reality. The people must act in reality, not on stage, in order to achieve real change.

Augusto Boal - Empathy or What? Emotion or Reason? and Experiments with the People’s Theatre in Peru.

What Brecht does, fundamentally, is to place the emphasis on understanding (enlightenment), on dianoia (understanding).

Poetics of the Oppressed - to change the people, “spectators”, passive beings in the threatrical phenomenon, into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action. 

Aristotle - poetics in which spectator delegates power to the dramatic character so that the latter may act and think for him. Brecht - poetics in which the spectator delegates power to the character who thus acts in his place but the spectator reserves the right to think for himself, often in opposition to the character. 

Theatre is a rehearsal for the revolution. Quote on Political theatre (pg. 396).

Raymond Williams - Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1921-1988)

A marxist literary critic and social theorist. 

The crisis of performance, and of the theatre as an institution, itself affected by new means of dramatic performance in the cinema, in radio, in television, has made the continuing problem of dramatic form especially acute.

The problem of conventions is necessarily central.

Conventions exist as both tacit consent and as accepted standards.

The Romantics advocated the right of the artist to disregard the rules that had been laid down by others for the practice of his art. For an artist only leaves one convention to follow or create another.

Ultimately, we judge a convention by what it manages, in an actual work of art, to get done. 

Thus we have the necessity of tradition - convention as tacit consent - and at times the equal necessity of experiment convention as a dramatic method.

A dramatist must win the consent of the audience to any particular means that he wishes to employ. 

Too great a consciousness of the novelty or strangeness of the means may as effectively hamper the full communication of a play as would open hostility. The effective changes took place when there was already a latent willingness to accept them. 

There is a very difficult relation between conventions and structures of feelings.

All serious thinking about art must begin from the recognition of two apparently contradictory facts: that an important work is always, in an irreducible sense, individual: and, yet there are authentic communities of works of art, in kinds, periods and styles.

Structure of feeling - the continuity of experience from a particulary work, through its particular form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.

To realize that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element for which there is no external counterpart. It is this, the structure of feeling.

Dramatic methods - what is being defined is more than technique: is indeed the practical way of describing those changes in experience the responses and their communication; the subjects and the forms.

Naturalism refers to theatre that attempts to create an exact illusion of reality through a broad range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. Among them: “detailed, three-dimensional settings (which bring Darwinian understandings of the determining role of the environment into the staging of human drama); everyday speech forms (prose over poetry); a secular world-view (no ghosts, spirits or gods intervening in the human action); an exclusive focus on subjects that are contemporary and indigenous (no exotic, otherworldly or fantastic locales, nor historical or mythic time-periods); an extension of the social range of characters portrayed (away from the aristocrats of classical drama, towards bourgeois and eventually working-class protagonists); and a style of acting that attempts to recreate the impression of reality (often by seeking complete identification with the role, understood in terms of its 'given circumstances', which, again, transcribe Darwinian motifs into performance, as advocated by Stanislavski).” - Wikipedia.

Realism refers to a movement in the 19th century that attempted to develop a series of theatrical conventions with the explicit aim of bringing greater fidelity (real life) to texts and performances. “It shared many stylistic choices with naturalism, including a focus on everyday (middle-class) drama, colloquial speech, and mundane settings. Realism and naturalism diverge chiefly on the degree of choice that characters have: while naturalism believes in the overall strength of external forces over internal decisions, realism asserts the power of the individual to choose (see A Doll's House).” - Wikipedia

August Strindberg (1849 - 1912)

A leading contributor to theatrical modernism. His plays are seen as important influences to Naturalism, Symbolism, and Expressionism. He wrote naturalist plays that delved into the nuances of sexual warfare and individual psychologies. Advocated the introduction of psychological depth in characters as opposed to linear development arches. 

He is adamant about the fact that drama, in Europe, is dead. His case study of Miss Julie advocates a modernization of form to satisfy up to date necessities of the public. For example, the fact that the heroine wins sympathy is due entirely to the fact that we are still too weak to overcome the fear that the same fate might overtake us. He claims that “Naturalists have banished guilt along with God.”

Regarding play construction, he’s made an effort to get rid of act divisions. In terms of dialogue, he refuses to “make characters into interlocutors who ask stupid questions to elicit witty answers.”

He calls “not for a [theatrical] revolution, only for some small changes. I am well aware that transforming the stage into a real room with the fourth wall missing and with some of the furniture placed with backs to the auditorium would only upset the audience, at least for the present.”

“If we could get rid of the proscenium boxes with their occupants, giggling diners and drinkers; and if we could have it dark in the auditorium during the performance; and if, above all else, we could have a small stage and a small auditorium - then possibly a new drama might arise and at least one theatre become a refuge for cultured audiences.”

Valery Bryusov (1873-1924)

Leading symbologist of Russian literature. Bryusov shared with his contemporaries an important departure from the realism of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre. For Bryusov, the mundane focus on realistic detail denied theatre of its artistic possibilities. 

“Success attests that what the Art Theatre offers its audience is not the genuinely new, but the old refurbished. Together with the entire European theatre, with insignificant exceptions, it is on a false path.” “It is time that the theatre stopped counterfeiting reality... “for tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is the imitation not of men, but of action.”

He claims that to reproduce life faithfully on the stage is impossible. The stage, according to Bryusov, is conventional by its very nature. There are two kinds of convention in this realm. “One kind arises from the inability to create successfully.” The other is deliberately applied. “It is a convention that statues of marble and bronze are left unpainted. Thus wherever there is art, there is convention.”

The creative urge is the only reality that exists on earth. Everything external is, in the poet’s words, “only a dream, a fleeting dream.”

Thus, we must attempt to let our setting aim not at truth, but at the suggestion of truth. He summons us away from the unnecessary truth of the modern stage to the deliberate conventionalization of the ancient theatre.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Playwright, socialist, and vegetarian. Shaw distinguishes between the social problem play and the “well-made-play,” the former concerning social matters and the latter a recreation of the trivial. Our real difficulty is the almost boundless docility and submission of social convention which is characteristic of the human race. “The more a dog suffers from being chained the more dangerous it is to release him.”

The moment the dramatist gives up accidents and catastrophes, and takes “slices of life” as his material, he finds himself committed to plays that have no endings. “Art for art’s sake” is the formula of the well-made play, meaning in practice “success for money’s sake.” Now great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort. 

“The well made play’s formula grew up in the days when the spread of elementary schooling produced a huge mass of playgoers sufficiently educated to want plays instead of dog-fights, but not educated enough to enjoy or understand the masterpieces of dramatic art... In a popular play, the process of creation can be described as the process of manufacturing misunderstandings.” 

“The playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audiences until he has cured the of looking at the stage through the keyhole and sniffing around the theatre as prurient people  sniff around the divorce court... The playwright is not merely a marchand de plaisir, but, like Brieux, a ruthless revealer of hidden truth and a mighty destroyer of idols.”

Qasr al Hosn Festival 

For two years I walked past the high bounding walls of the Qasr al Hosn compound, thinking I would never set foot inside. Why would I? Looking down at it from my apartment, there’d be no reason to expect the empty and disheveled lot to be opened to the public anytime soon. I remember trying to catch glimpses inside on my way to uni, wondering what the buildings meant, why they were still standing, why they were in this condition. And then they announced the Qasr al Hosn festival. I’m still not sure what I expected - I was intrigued, thinking that maybe behind the lime-white walls there was some grain of truth, a final piece of the cultural puzzle. The machines rolled in overnight, and the arid square of terrain slowly began to swarm with people - ants through my window, diligently erecting tents, stands, and boats, terraforming the flat square. Days walked by, and the place slowly began to look like a sandbox. 

Instead of knocking down the walls, they were cut ajar, like a cell pried open. A small entrance, adorned in a bright modernist orange and bright robotic lights, promised an in-depth exploration of Emirati cultural heritage. A myriad of paths - capillaries cutting through the imported sand - led to the different “areas” of the festival. At each sector performers and volunteers sat at stands, rehashing movements illustrative of century-old traditions. A few meters away, troops of singers and folk artists engaged in a sort of musical theatre, recalling the songs and dances indigenous to the region. The oasis area promised food and refreshments prior to the lavish performance by Franco Dragone. Everything was QR-tagged, so people could read up on the events as they happened. 

Walking through the heavy sand, I felt the premonitory onset of cultural thirst. The festival was beautiful and I learned little. The castle remained cordoned off. The steady beat of the drums plunged everyone into a sort of precise trance devoid of conversation. The realization that you’re involved not in culture, but spectacle, begins to slowly wash over you. 

Because in the end, QR codes are not replacements for dialogue. Performance is not conducive to conversation when performativity in a space is constant - Brechtianism is vital in culture, the ability to abstract ourselves momentarily and analyze what is before us. And if we do allow ourselves the momentary indulgence of stepping back a second, we encounter something bizarrely shocking: an event of cultural performance orchestrated by external agents - foreigners. Franco Dragone designs an interpretation of history played by Europeans and Americans wearing dark make-up, and later, while you go for a stroll around the oasis, Philippine women dressed in traditional dress offer you dates or arabic coffee. Are we perhaps seeing the advent of the Arabic Blackface? 

The Birth of Tragedy Friederich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in history. The German poet, composer, and cultural critic wrote countless treatises on religion, morality, science, and culture. His book, The Birth of Tragedy, is an in depth examination of Greek Tragedy - a deconstruction that he then utilizes to examine the state of modern culture (particularly in relation to its decline and potential resurgence). Nietzsche’s analysis identifies two main philosophical concepts governing theatricality and the Greek arts - the Dionysian, and the Apollonian. Nietzsche goes on to berate Euripides for introducing the Socratic obsession with knowledge and human thought (traces of stoicism). The obsessive focus on the individual eliminates the essential musical element, crucial to the exploration of the Dionysian aspects within the collective. Nietzsche then proceeds to look at contemporary culture, arguing that we continue to live in a dying Alexandrian age of culture - this paradigm will soon shift, giving way to a rebirth of Dionysus (the first traces of which are Wagner’s music). Thus the final tone of his work is an optimistic one.