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art action anamnèse esthétique, histoire et théorie de l'art contemporain @ |
revelint - revue électronique internationale
- Paris
Massimo ZANASI "Beyond The Theatre - For a
Dramaturgy of the Arts", in : InterActions Project, catalogue. Sardinia-Italy : Arka (H.C.E.), 2000.
1. The impossible
theatre
Everything has already been said,
everythings has already been written. Everything and its opposite.
Contemporaneous theatre goes on by will, as life, and so it participates in a
continuous growing of needs, a spiral of anxiety for their satisfaction and a
dull pain for their ineluctable persistence. After the false joy of the past
years, after the anaesthesia of fear and after the hedonistic fulfil of the
purposes, which allowed the will to still, here the boredom of the existence,
even more destructive than the will. Most of the contemporaneous theatre
participates in this failure, where men and poetry meet in a vain competition
of overpowering, unable to remove the sand from the eyes, continuously thrown
by the present.
Can the theatre be different from
all this stuff, without hoping rationally for a positive result of its
own existence? In three words, a Theatre without Show, an useless
theatre finally aware of its absurdity? By the way, some details. Theatre does
not involve will, it is an adventure in space, time, causlness. Even when it
tries to create a world, theatre loses itself; it is a degeneration which
prevens from serving a will, that is typical of the knowledge coming from the
show-performance. Theatre is a poetics transfiguration, not a postal
communication. So, the intuitive contemplation of the theatrical genius sets
itself against the rational knowledge, which is always involved with the hidden
purpose of the will. It is this kind of useless knowledge which
differentiates the theatrical composer (The Artifex) and makes a special kind
of him his admiring is deconditioned by the common representations, it is a
long and winding exercise of Silence. But silence has to be said, so that it
can be heard. Silence must be tuned so that you can listen the noise of
the universe, like human poles. And here the theatrical accent falls on the
notion of epoché : word which literarily means suspension and
that, in philosophy, of course not in the performances of the petty
politicians, shows the attitude to the not think, the behaviour, which suspends
the obvious reality of the world, also of the words in their daily meaning, to
try to catch the ways and conditions of its giving. It is like a coming back to
yourself to understand the real meaning of the experience and lose yourself
inside it. But theatre as epoche’ is not the way to put the subject to
the centre of the everything, the same subject that, after Descartes,
has turned the world into an handling object and itself as an handling
function. Make theatre, taking care of it, really handle (from the inside of
the thing), can be a static experience, taking the individual to the dejections,
to the chatting, to its miserable being an artist or, on the contrary,
theatre can be an experience coming from an opportunity that the artifex
finds in himself. In this case the artifex goes beyond the conditions of
the artist, of the author and the director together, to resume them on himself
to bring his own project, his own scenic s-composition: he goes out of the
anonymous people say (what is commonly said, and done), and tries a real
experience. Insisting on the ethical and aesthetic aspects of the epoché,
it is not only a cognitive reflection but first of all withdraw from the
anxious game of the daily interests, this blessed (when properly said) theatre
could offer many reasons to look over its own language and, more in general, to
review the radicalism of what the artifex has to say to whom is not involved
with it.
2. The possible scene
Theatre does not exist, ha never
existed. Theatres exist and they build the wider ground of linguistic interactions,
synthetized by the word scene exactly as philosophies exist and
not only one way of thinking. Talking about theatre nowadays means finally
consider all the specifications that are part of it, all the languages, codes,
poetry (that compose it), to throw it on the dimension of a continuous
overcoming, beyond the traditional political, technical and economic limits
which have conditioned it over the time. It is extremely reductive and
misleading to think to the theatre only through the ways of the director’s
theatre, that specially in Europe, from the twenties until now, has brought
the meaning of any staging on the tracks of a convention which shows the
passage from a palaeocapitalistic management of the theatric performance to
another which tends to its industrialization. In this passage is concentrated
the nucleus of the artistic problem which is born with the modernity,
not only concerning the languages of the performance. Together with the growing
of the great artistic international vanguard of the 20th century, infact, was
developing the figure of the director as general co-ordinative of the
performance, respecting the script and the needs of the author,
considered as the more authentic expression of the middle-class market through
dangerous authoritative methods and protectionism1. Maybe the
destruction of the figure of the spotlight chase actor
(actor-author-director-performer) represents the highest price the present
theatre has paid for its industrialization and modernization. When the
audience is no more satisfied with the individual performances and pretends,
conditioned, some mise-en-scene of a whole cast, it always coincides with those
inexperienced trials to raise an everlasting industrial revolution, and more in
general with a decline of a certain kind of a poetic individualism in a complex
system that comes off as a mass society 2. But art, as anything
developing into the stratified societies of our planet, is also inserted in a
system of interdependence: like the oxygen cycle is connected with the
cycle of carbon, so the cycles of theatre are strictly connected with painting,
music and literature. In the era of the swift moving, of information in real
time, of the multiethnic areas and of the cultural exchanges, scene
communicates with sounds, imagines and concepts travelling more or less
contemporaneously. Of course, an art does not wait for another one, evolution
or modifications of an art do not necessarily depend on the other, but if these
expressions feel each other, they cannot pretend to feel isolated. This
gives to the one working in the different fields an interactive
awareness, which is not translated into rough formulas like the fashionable one
of contamination. It is in this case necessary to distinguish the
phenomenons of avant-garde entertainment, fundamentally scenographic and
gaudy from the real researches, compositions, possessions and de-constructions,
which are transversally made on the languages of the art by poets, quacks,
people who do not belong to any trend (fashion), but simply for the strength of
their work and of their peculiar procedures3.
InterActions is the project we inserted in the programms of study and artistic
research of the Cultural and Theatrical Association ARKA (H.C.E.), has been
worked out because of a need to compare side by side on the different languages
of the contemporaneous art which inspire theatre as scenic writing
cheerful and worrying and not only as entertainment element. This idea of a
lasting laboratory of scenic thoughts and works, has needed till now the
definition of steady contacts and extremely stimulating with other artistic
managements with whom it is possible to rewrite (not only in Europe) the
result of a particular field of experimentation, which almost never
makes products of immediate use. Therefore the choice to propose
periodically to an open audience the researches of artists coming from
different fields but speaking the same artistic languages, compared with
the current institutions become a political choice in favour of the cut
tongues and of the great minorities of history (not only in the artistic
area). The common levelling on artistic production standard which homologate
the research to the old assembly chain, bring to the exhaustion of the
peculiarity of each author and of every area of thought and existence and to an
irreversible loss of identity, whatever it is. With regard to this Jean
Baudrillard, in a quick transaesthetism, suggested a summary, even emphatized,
of the present situation, where you play the game of the difference without
believing it: ...it is important to notice how the artistic utopia has
materialized everywhere under an operational cover. Therefore art is compelled
to become minimal, to disappear, and act its own disappearance. And more: It
is the same plan of the fractal and is the present plan of our culture. And
inside our individual research of identity and difference. We do not have time
to look for our identity in the archives, in a memory, in the past, not in a
project or in the future. You need an instantaneous memory, an immediate
connection, some kind of an advertising identity, which can take place in the
same moment 4. In our case, as it has been underlined more
times, the theatrical parameters of the visual arts, music, poetry and
literature are insufficient if considered individually and when used it is
necessary to connect them continuously by an approach even anthropological not
only aesthetic, because the artist of the present, who often moves in the
sunset and in the art decline as, specific phenomenon, drawn in a general
aesthetism of the existence, beyond the knowledge of the language, is able to
test old and new ways to testify the present era, to discover constantly, what
has to be said. It is not a matter, as many think, of a lasting restore of the
three Wagner argumentation (before) and Kandinsky (after) one, about the Wort-Ton-Drama
and all its derived, but about an even more materialistic connection
between philosophy and art (theatrical and not), between fate of the
individual, and destiny of the community 5.
Therefore has been coined also a real
formula which resumes a wide range of contrasting tensions regarding ways and
forms of the present-day artistic expression on and off stage: Dramaturgy Of
The Arts, to underline a hypothesis of developing and deepening of the
so-called Poetry Theatre; through compared researches, open to
comparison and cooperation, for the development of the poetic, ethical and
linguistic relations among word, vision, writing and movement. It is a question
of developing the same notion of scene to discover, beyond the limits of
the "performance", what happens when a voice enters the imagine, when
music gives sound to poetry, painting gives imagine to music and movement gives
shape to voice, until the crucial point (one of the possible theatres) of an
author’s voice which becomes echo of all this in a dramaturgical global
project.
From a privileged observatory as an
island like Sardinia, in the heart of the Mediterranean Area - a passage place
of races and different cultures -, is seems that, on the trail of these InterActions
also other organisms (scenic, musical, poetic, visual ones) are moving for some
time in these direction, finding with surprise the courage to risk. But while
in Italy the most meaningful experiences of the last 15 years where bound to
the theatre-ensembles (or meta-theatrical), and, less, to the visual artist who
implicitly refereed to the wide mental territory of the last seventies, Europe
of the beginning of the third millennium resumes the fragments of itself
exported all over the world since the beginning of the modern era. The great
wrecks towards Asia, Americas, Afrika, Middle East and the cosmic space, return
us the sublime wreckages of our cultures, like out of time and history, out of
itself. But it is not a question, in this case, of a simple refluence of
summons and attitudes, and not of a coming back home, because in the meantime
it has been destroyed, but of a real ultraideological rendez-vous on the ruines
of our Troade. The works of the ultra-artists - of the artifex, who are
beyond the listed kind for the overcoming of the traditional administrative
limits among word, body, sound, imagine, concept, show that the impossible
coming back home does not condemn us only to a knight errant life, perpetual
wayfarer, but it turns us, as artists and poets, into witnesses of a repeating
Final, demiurges of the Nothing, angels without aureole. Here is also the
absurdity of the theatre, the impossibility of the Tragic. Therefore you can
talk about the scene and its beyond especially when the
conventional vision fails, the same one that theatre imposes as the only
interpretation and organization of events. We pay attention to the words of
Camille Domoulie’: Dramaturgy has always been a therapeutic technique:
catharsis, exorcism, dread and mercy, castigat ridendo mores, brechtian
estrangement: everything announces that theatre is made for ill, wakened and
incurable convalescent people. Even Nietzsche, after believing in a rebirth of
the tragedy, was disgusted by all this theatercracy and defined himself as an
essentially antitheatrical nature. He wrote, that an artist contributes to
theatre only with the most vulgar part of himself, you become a neighbour,
flock, females of the harem. Theatre is a plebiscite against the good taste
6.
In other times, the great italian
actor-performer (matador) Ettore Petrolini thought to a realization of a
Pavillion Of The Wonders, against the pedantry of the officials and the
strictness of the aesthetic classes. Well: again involved on an anthropological
ground, often unhooked from wrong progressive trusts, this new kind of planners
of worlds represents, best hypothesis, an overcoming of the stylistics
previous formulas in favour of a planning visionary which finds the edges of
the absence again, thinking not only on themselves but finally against
themselves. Making this, and therefore confined to their areas of problematic
art, the researchers moving to the direction of a possible (because very
ancient) Dramaturgy Of The Arts stay - as we said at the beginning - and
listen patiently, like human poles trying to decipher the background sound of
the Universe. And the most touching hearing, as in Samuel Beckett,
Francis Bacon or Joseph Beuys, always happens halfway among ear, eye and heart.
Between mind and sleepwalker feeling for a scene beyond shapes and criticism.
Massimo
Zanasi
Bibliographic notes:
1. see The big slaughter by M.G. GREGORI in The
lord of the scene, Milan, 1979; and Theatrical industry in Italy is
born: director against actor, by G. LIVIO in Fourth Wall, Turin,
1983.
2. see Theatre as difference by A. ATTISANI,
Milan 1978, and Ravenna 1988; and Scena Occidente by A. ATTISANI, Venice
1995.
3. see After modern Theatre, by V. VALENTINI,
Milan. 1989.
4. see The disappearance of art, by J.
BAUDRILLARD, Milan. 1988.
5. For the complex relation between theatricalism and
modern imaginary, see Rhythm and Voice by U. ARTIOLI, Milan, 1984; and
relative appendix by F. BARTOLI Kandinsky between apocalypse and
abstraction.
6. see Theatre Without Show, by C. BENE, Venice,
1990.