The Dramaturgy of Space

Ramón Griffero, Adam Versényi

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350235595
• eBook ISBN: 9781350235618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Drama

In Ramón Griffero's seminal work, The Dramaturgy of Space, the playwright and director describes his aesthetic philosophy and theoretical approach to theatrical creation, illustrating his theory through practical application in a series of exercises. As well as touching upon some of Griffero's own work, like Cinema utopia (1985), Tus deseos en fragmentos (2003), Fin del eclipse (2007) and El azar de la fiesta (1992), this book also reinforces the practicality of Griffero's concepts through a series of online videos, breaking down each exercise and allowing readers to engage with the effects of his celebrated approach. Published here in English for the first time, in a translation by the leading expert on Griffero, The Dramaturgy of Space reveals the internationally renowned Chilean artist's thought process, and how his practice has influenced the theatrical, political, and social context, from the Pinochet dictatorship to the present day.

CHAPTER I

Theatre is my life, which is why I never tire of it,
I think its life itself that tires me.

– HERBERT JONCKERS

A Beginning

From an apartment in Brussels in 1980 I observed the tiled roofs marching into the distance across the gray, cloudy background of the city while I typed my first play, Opera pour un Naufrage. At the time I didn’t sense I had started to follow the path I’d keep on until today: shaping texts and images emerging from a cranium to manifest themselves on a stage. Nor could I glimpse that I was beginning to scrutinize the world of representation, and that the confrontation with this necessity to shape subversions, desires, and pleasures would take me places where the doors of creation would break open locks on other doors that, if not hidden, were unknown. Even today I can’t say that I’ve exhausted thresholds to cross, or that one can find the Holy Grail of scenic art where two roads diverge.

Writing challenged forms of representation, texts were interrogated so that bodies spoke, and the stage became the basis of so many laborious studies—visualizations of emotional contents that chose this format in which to manifest themselves. I wrote from exile, for a place somewhere beyond my personal situation. A dialogue of being with art, trying to express an unofficial story.

But we’re talking about an art that didn’t end in that apartment, that requires interlocutors and others who can visualize and concretize those texts. That’s where meetings with those who keep opening places arise.

Meeting Herbert Jonckers¹ gave this first text a spatial narrative, which he began to build in the pantry/wine cellar of that house; to define the concepts, the temporal scenic areas, the objects, the faces to make-up: he began to give it a vision so distinct from the written, that I was confronted with the infinite nature of an artistic language.

Twenty-six years later, I am examining in this book some of the artistic thoughts, actions, creations, and exercises, that have constructed what I am calling The Dramaturgy of Space. Its definition will become clear as it is sketched over the course of the book’s chapters.

This is a glance at gestures of creation that give us perspectives on artistic action. In no sense is it meant to establish a model but is presented as a theoretical elaboration of an artistic experience. As such, the book is incapable of encompassing the sum total of that experience’s metaphysics, its continuity, or its constant explosion.

The exercises and reflections in this book are directed towards those seeking a space to trigger their own convictions, to generate their own theatrical activity. And towards those who want to see the world of representation from another place. Last, but not least, they register and point out that creative work and theories about an art of the species gestate in other territories of this planet as well.

Let’s begin, then, this journey that, for all the linear continuity of its pages, takes us through a horizontal structure, while maintaining the perception that these sentences form part of a universe containing several dimensions that coexist.

The Dramaturgy of Space—Its Origin

The concept of The Dramaturgy of Space is proposed as a way to think about the theatre that departs from practice with and reflection upon its format: space. A format for the construction of scenic languages and, of course, authorship.

In my theatrical practice, as much in writing as in production, there are two elaborations that for me have been the axis of scenic creation, that of “Textual Poetics” and its interaction with the “Poetics of Space.” These two instances produce a single piece of writing. The scenic fact.

When I had to define the foundations of my relationship with theatre arts, I combined these two terms beneath that of The Dramaturgy of Space. This perception confronts the scenic fact as much in its writing as in its manifestation upon the stage.

Dramatic writing for a spatial format. A spatial construction for dramatic writing.

Here I develop a re-elaboration of what I have received from theatrical tradition, and of what I have received from my Western cultural formation.

But above all, from the contributions that my friend and set designer Herbert Jonckers offered me during sixteen years of work. With his creative obsession in the formulation of spaces, he built forms and designs that transgressed what existed in order to generate the spatial fiction of a text and allow me to see the hidden. There are also the contributions generated during the process of creation with actors, actresses, lighting designers, visual artists, set designers, and the audience.

And essentially, everyone who has been involved with Teatro Fin de Siglo’s productions. Finally, we can add the presence of the hundreds of students in courses and workshops on The Dramaturgy of Space that have taken place with professionals in different countries who have made these principles theirs and have given life to the exercises described here.

Viewing the spatial narrative of the scenic fact from another perspective also led to my first addiction to this phenomenon, to making this concept appear, elaborated in such a way as to point out the compositions inside the rectangle that generate stories and their forms.

The need to approach the stage from other perspectives arose out of a political conviction, one that believes in the power of the theatre to construct discourses and languages that are dissident, alternatives to the discourses that want to determine our perception and feelings about our history, our existence, and the facts that surround us and are ours to live.

At the beginning, I postulated in Manifesto for an Autonomous Theatre, written in 1985, that the only tool I had to resist the dictatorship was art, in this case the theatre. In that historical context, the principle was: “We have to change the codes and images of the theatrical form so that we don’t talk like they talk, so that we don’t see like they see, so that we don’t show what they show. We have to return to the alphabet, decode the vowels of scenic language first.” Naming in this “they” not only the authoritarian gaze, but also “certain artistic and political ways of seeing centered in reiterated languages or pre-existing models.”

From there came a self-definition: I will situate myself as dissenting as much from authoritarian power as from official dissent, sliding away from cultural forms or theatrical expressions that had already lost their capacity for transgression or subversion. “Autonomous because nothing they’ve given us do we owe them, autonomous because we will auto sustain ourselves and auto generate ourselves.” Postulating the artistic conception of being dissidents from dissent, and an autonomous art in the face of political discourses that have lost their fictional truth.

The theatre should be a form of subversion, but for that to surge forth it was urgent to change the means of representation which, through use, had lost scenic truth or had returned to the quotidian.

I was convinced by the principles of artistic subversion at the beginning of the twentieth century, where the vanguards postulated a break from preceding models, with creative structures that aspired not only to artistic subversion, but towards the gestation of other social relations. The utopias they wanted to establish needed ad hoc artistic forms, in order to create the culture of the “new man.”

Today these aspirations of social intervention seem ingenuous to us; nevertheless, they re-elaborated and enlarged the signs and codes of representation and generated visions of change and a perception of reality departing from the politics of art.

That was why I named our action in 1984 Teatro de Fin de Siglo, as an homage to the artistic movements from when the twentieth century was young, and therefore resistant to and rebelling against the inheritance of the nineteenth century. A metaphor for a rebellion that was cruelly repressed by the authoritarian fathers that would emerge and crush these new perceptions. The arrival of Mussolini in 1928, Stalin in 1931, Hitler in 1933, and Franco in 1936 was a violent reaction against other fictions that could constitute themselves in reality. Then, the Second World War and the bipolarity of the Cold War prolonged and justified the necessity for the patriarchal powers in the face of whatever undermined their ways of seeing and governing the planet. If they permitted the end of the colonial period with the collapse of now unmasked colonial empires—English, French, or German—they gave way to the emergence of authoritarian systems, products of colonial revolutions where, amidst traditional, authoritarian, and monarchical regimes, they institutionalized the annulment of creation. All to end in our new era of globalization and uniformity of markets and mentalities so that the new imperial system can continue.

The name Teatro de Fin de Siglo, besides being an homage to the artistic creation of the beginning of the twentieth century, was also a challenge to those who constituted it, since it gave us a place and a period in which to realize our proposals: the period between 1983 and 2000, sensing that this was the period during which we should conceive or announce our visions and creations.

So, we resisted the dictatorship in order to sense the democratic ideal again, in order to realize that this wasn’t Sleeping Beauty either, but a face that came marked with scars. If scenic action was a form of resistance, it seemed to extend itself into a time beyond the existence of the dictatorship and to realize that the option of art, since this conception, transformed itself into the metaphor of the no-response, like that question about existence.

Art and Existence

We were born on a planet whose physical space was inhabited, where its couples aren’t the originators, where each culture has transformed it in places. We were born on a planet where every territory already has an owner.

During our lives, we rent or buy the place we inhabit. We arrive in cities where the streets and parks have already been laid out, where the urban center is defined according to levels of ingress and egress. We choose the neighborhood that gives us the most access—depending upon either our inherited resources or those that we generate during our existence—to a range of possibilities, the beach or the countryside.

We don’t define how our supermarkets are built, buildings are constructed or demolished, nor where parks, industries, or gas stations are placed. The objects to which we have access are already there, designed, elaborated according to their technological function, decorative nature, functional purpose, etc.

We won’t reach the point of creating another civilization or another language during our existence. We arrive so that they can educate us to feel what exists is ours, “my country, my house, my language.” During the years of our presence on this planet, we will, perhaps, be part of the appearance of other forms of dressing, living, governing or of influencing how a thought is inherited and other forms of knowledge are constructed. We can reorder objects, make them ours, re-elaborate their significance, project the concretion of our desires in our space-time and inhabit the diverse spirits of the age.

It’s not a matter of rejecting or renouncing our species. On the contrary, we love it. We are part of it, and we assume responsibility for its errors and successes, we rebel against our evil and kindness. We nourish ourselves from our legacy, we have our own spaces, and we live according to our own emotions. We arrive to strengthen our culture, to reproduce it, to maintain it and to transform it, to reconstitute it with difficulty. We arrive at a planet where empires and economic systems are prevalent, and it is improbable that, during our passage our territory-nation will transform itself into a new empire and its action will produce the ways of seeing that will transform a planet.

But this is the imaginary of being human: its thoughts, its ideas, the creation of spirit that can give birth to non-existent fictions, speak and build from another dimension that isn’t the quotidian, the material. That can create fictions out of emotions, and motivations as true as our gods. Finally, we are in a universe, and we confront death, and give impulse to feelings, that transcend whatever pre-existing empire or concrete modes of production, domination, or survival we find.

For the imaginary our fictions are realities, they are all at once the place to construct thought, the past and the future. The fictions of creation and artistic production gestate that other territory where our world can be reconstructed, deconstructed, and reformulated. From that place, we can say that the visions of our surroundings divulged by the media, the voices of politicians, of education, of the cultural values and beliefs in which we are immersed, lack, from our feeling, veracity. Where the logic of the discourses and thoughts that invade us, despite emerging from solid and consolidated structures, are only fictions for sustaining the space-time of the present.

The world transmitted to me, the world that I had to perceive, as well as the institutions that promulgated its ethics and its historical continuity, felt to me so far away from my perception of reality and its convictions, that creative forms transformed themselves into the place where I could resist and manifest my perceptions.

Artistic creation, its history, is where other places than the spaces of our existence register themselves. They transmit the reflection of imaginaries. We also know that we generate other perspectives and visions from artistic sites, some of them so formidable that they resituate the way the species looks at its material space, carrying us towards different paths than those prescribed. The creator reflects the species in its different dimensions and from different places and means.

We arrive at a space-time where art has its places and each one of its artistic expressions its own trajectory. The construction of humanity’s fictions is also inherited baggage.

I am not postulating purifying or romantic ideas. Art and religion, as manifestations of the soul and the spirit, are not beyond good and evil.

We see priests blessing warplanes, battalions of soldiers—carrying medallions of the Virgin or saints—going to assassinate others of their species beneath the standards of national flags, some incriminating themselves for Allah and others for Jehovah.

We are surrounded by monuments glorifying generals and soldiers rewarded for their heroic massacres, or for having succumbed beneath enemy bullets on all the avenues of the great capitals.

The hero of the neighboring country is the enemy of the adjacent country.

Art also adds to the paradoxes of this reality; there is that of National Socialism, Stalinism, art of the market or of empire, conceived in connection to the money and fame that it brings with it.

Thus, each artist and religious person is rewarded and elevated to the altars for being in consonance with the spirits of the age of their culture. And those that reject the conceptions of their time will be sublimated because they resisted their age.

In our country, there are also artists who were faces or accomplices of the dictatorship, out of fear, for questions of labor, or because they were convinced that the regime was the best one for that historical moment.

I don’t wish to make apologies for the correct or the incorrect, only to make our labyrinth plain.

There are also creators who subscribe to diverse ideological orientations, but who nevertheless contribute and reveal new paths of creation in their work, beyond their terrestrial ideological convictions.

Each new generation will emerge to align itself with what contains it or will have a passionate desire to transform it; perhaps they will reiterate, with each vote for existence, their love of nature, their hatred of war, and their feeling of solidarity. In others, their militancy for the destruction of what exists and for the eternal construction of a happy world will gestate.

The question becomes from which place will this happy world be visualized...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER I
• CHAPTER II
• CHAPTER III
• CHAPTER IV
• Epilogue
• Imprint