Theatre-Making

Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century

D. Radosavljevic,Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137367884
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Dirección y producción cinematográfica

Theatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs. devised theatre, East vs. West, theatre vs. performance - with reference to genealogies though which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world.

1

Staging a Play: The Problem of Page and Stage

[M]y complaint was against the nature of most plays: their thinness, lack of depth, eloquence, substantial theme. It didn’t matter so much that a play was ‘well done’; what mattered was what was being done.

No, no, Strasberg argued with astonishing heat and pedagogic finesse, the manner in which a play is done is in itself a content. What I was talking about was literature; what he was interested in was theatre […] – and the debate continued for weeks.

(Clurman 1941/1983: 11)

In working with plays and playwrights, one of the underlying aims of New York’s Group Theatre throughout the 1930s was, according to Harold Clurman, to challenge the tradition of plays on the stage being judged ‘almost entirely in terms of texts’. This tradition was seen to be the result of ‘the fact that dramatic critics were literary gentry […], not theatre people’ (1983: 13).¹ Having been founded in 1931 by Clurman and Lee Strasberg together with the producer Cheryl Crawford, in some 20 years of its existence, the Group Theatre collective went on to produce such remarkable twentieth-century artists as Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, Sanford Meisner and Morris Carnovsky.

Clurman and Strasberg originally met in 1925 when they were working as apprentices at New York’s Guild Theater. Clurman had studied in Paris where he had seen Jacques Copeau and the Moscow Art Theatre but was becoming disillusioned with the contemporary American theatre scene. Strasberg had taken classes with Stanislavsky’s students Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya at the American Laboratory Theatre. In the debate described by Clurman above, both were also learning from one another. Clurman learned to think of theatre ‘not simply in terms of plays performed but in terms of entities, in which each moment contributes to a total effect’ (1983: 11-12). Strasberg ‘began to accept the validity of [Clurman’s] insistence on the text […] as a vehicle of human meaning’ (1983: 12).

When it comes to a piece of theatre that entails the staging of a play, there has been a long-lasting tendency to consider the notions of the page and the stage in relation to each other, as illustrated by the text-performance conflict depicted by Clurman above.

As a Theatre Studies scholar and practitioner in the twenty-first century, I lean towards Strasberg and tend to enjoy the kind of theatre that makes its form part of its content. However, I must admit that Clurman’s point about the importance of text as a ‘vehicle of human meaning’ is also indispensible. One might raise the question, however: why should it be taken for granted that issues of ‘human meaning’ are solely in the domain of the writer or text?

It is the purpose of Chapter 1 to examine the practice of staging a play, which dominated theatre production processes in Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century and continues to be the primary mode of production in many cultures to date. Its overview of some key staging methodologies of the twentieth century is auxiliary rather than systematic, serving to contextualize further the scope of this book, and beginning to define a range of theatre-making strategies in the twenty-first century.

The legacy of Stanislavsky is important here because his departure point in theatre-making was text and he spent much of his time dealing with issues of textual analysis in relation to both actor training and the rehearsal methodology towards production. It is interesting that even when he made his final breakthrough discoveries, such as the ‘method of physical actions’, for example, or the notion of ‘active analysis’, whereby the actors work out the shape and movement of each scene through improvisations before memorizing the text, the necessity of the text still proved to be paramount:

[T]he time would come when the actors needed the actual text, at which point in rehearsals Stanislavsky fed them with the writer’s words from the sidelines, like a football coach. They grabbed these words hungrily as – by this stage – the author’s text expressed a thought or carried out a piece of action much better than their own made-up speeches.

(Merlin 2003: 31)

At the other end of the scale, the problem of text and performance (or more specifically: page and stage) has generated much thought and discussion around the work of William Shakespeare, particularly in the English-speaking world where an accessible ‘translation’ is not readily available as it is in other languages – but neither is a definitive ‘original’ (due to the existence of several published versions: folios, quartos and subsequent edited versions of the text). As suggested by Worthen (1997), Shakespeare’s work has therefore become a site of contest for authority, especially in academic circles, and a site of struggle for accessing the text’s meaning in contemporary production.

An interesting event, which brought these two theatre traditions (Russian Stanislavskian and English Shakespearean) together, took place in September 2010 in Stratford-upon-Avon. Organized by Paul Allain (Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Kent) and Struan Leslie (Head of Movement, RSC), the event was a culmination of a two-year research project between the University of Kent and the Moscow Art Theatre (MHAT) School entitled ‘Tradition and Innovation’. Both in the run-up to the ‘In the Body’ Symposium, and in the course of the weekend during which it took place, I repeatedly observed an interesting phenomenon. There was a mutual fascination between the British and the Russians. The British were often greatly impressed by the rigour, intensity and virtuosity with which the actor training is taught at MHAT.² Many student actors are professionally engaged while still in training and their performances testify to a well-rounded and highly refined training philosophy. The Russians, on the other hand, are intrigued by the apparent variety of working practices that exists in England, such as devising, immersive or site-specific theatre. But both of these sets of experiences have their limit and their flip-side too. The Russians are quickly disappointed when they find that the theatre they see is of apparently indeterminate genre, below a standard they expected, or so verbal that it does not sustain their attention. Conversely, the British are worried by what they perceive to be a certain dogmatism that underlies Russian performer training as there is little accommodation of personal ability of the students in it.

In Stratford, the British participants were dazzled and thoroughly exhausted by a sprightly, charismatic septuagenarian, Andrei Droznin, an engineer-turned-acting coach who teaches his extremely dynamic movement classes in a suit and tie.³ He was accompanied by his former students, MHAT movement teachers Slava Rybakov and Natalia Fedorova. However, when experiencing British movement workshops, often designed to provoke an individual response from the participants, the Russians found this too basic and amateur. The project examining tradition and innovation therefore revealed an entrenchment of the respective positions of both sides. In my experience – and because I could intuit the reasons for the impasse between them, having witnessed similar encounters between Eastern and Western Europeans – this seemed like a problem of cultural translatability and translation. I was reminded of an anecdote I was once told about the first experiment in computer translation conducted between American and Soviet scientists. The format was to feed a phrase in English into the machine, have it translated into Russian, and then, as a means of testing accuracy, feed the Russian translation back and have it translated into English. The original phrase was ‘out of sight, out of mind’. It came back as ‘the invisible lunatic’.

No successful act of translation can ever be literal. But could we view the relationship between text and performance by means of translation?

This is not to propose a return to a linguistic or semiotic framework for analysing performance, although the following sections will contextually review some of Patrice Pavis’s past ideas concerning the relationship between the text and the mise-en-scène. My intention rather is to underline the notion of a categorical difference between distinct cultures as well as the paradigms of text and performance, whereby the process of any ‘translation’ between them must be understood as an epistemological rather than a mechanical endeavour. This notion of translation presupposes therefore that not only the verbal content is rendered from one idiom to another, but also its contextual meaning. Although adopted by Pavis (1992), this conception of translation could be seen to have evolved particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s alongside the rise of postcolonial critical theory (thanks to theorists such as Douglas Robinson, Lawrence Venuti, Michael Cronin, Mona Baker, Anthony Pym). The emergence of Translation Studies as a discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, within an overlap between linguistics and cultural studies, carried an initial focus on the language itself and a process of seeking semantic equivalents between languages. However, the ‘cultural turn’ (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), rooted in the Foucauldian concern with mechanisms of discourse and power, and coupled with the diminishment of the nation state and the rise of globalization, has gradually led to a proliferation of conceptions of translation. Hélène Buzelin, for example, lists the notions of translation as ‘transformation’ (Lewis 2002), ‘métissage’ (Nouss and Laplantine 1997), ‘hybridity’ (Wolf 2000), a ‘zone of tension’ (Simon 1996), to which she adds translation as ‘an instrument in the construction of collective identities’ (Buzelin, in St-Pierre and Kar 2007: 43). Buzelin, however, ultimately finds that the sociological and anthropological conception of translation is increasingly metaphorical and not really concerned with the methodological issues of the practice, which is why she proposes a more systematic adoption of Bruno Latour’s post-Cartesian idea of translation as a key epistemological process of modernity, alongside purification.⁴ Latour’s ideas, developed through the late 1980s and early 1990s, seem to have more of a paradigm-shifting power than a direct application in the study of translation itself – they provide an alternative from the linguistic and socio-cultural view of translation. Philosopher Levi R. Bryant has also adopted Latour’s idea of translation because of its inclusion of objects and relations between objects. Bryant therefore offers a very useful interpretation of Latour’s ideas which seem particularly suitable for the purposes of this book: ‘to translate is to produce something new’, ‘the translated is never identical to the original’, ‘in being translated the text becomes something different’, ‘all objects are mediators [rather than intermediaries] in respect to one another’, ‘all systems produce their own information according to their organization’ (2011: 178–84). In other words:

Think about photosynthesis. Here we have photons of sunlight, the leaf and its photosynthetic cells, and the sugar produces [sic.]. The leaf ‘translates’ the photons of sunlight and produces something new: the complex sugars. There is no resemblance or identity between the photons of light and these complex sugars. Rather that sunlight becomes something new in passing through the medium of the photosynthetic cells.⁵

Given this conception of translation as photosynthesis – as a process which yields ‘something new’ – we can perhaps begin to conceive of the relationship between text and performance as translational – or, more precisely, transformational. In this vein, the notion of ‘theatre language’ is also briefly introduced here as a means of setting up a discussion of the adaptation mode of theatre-making in the following chapter.

In considering the process of staging a play, we may need to resort to the notions of director’s theatre which, due to distinct cultural genealogies, will have different manifestations in continental Europe as opposed to the anglophone world. Needless to say, those traditions must be understood paradigmatically, in relation to their own contexts, before they can be appropriately related to each other. Despite living in an age of globalization, the MHAT/RSC encounter mentioned above has highlighted that the pre-1989 conception of the East/West binary is still at times difficult to overcome. The Slovenian philosopher Rastko Močnik has noted that in comparison with the East, the West sees itself as ‘timeless, canonic, general, it is a non-space, since it is a norm, a measure against which the peripheral, the provincial is to be measured’ (quoted in Buden 2010: 6). As an individual in between the East and the West – faced with pertinent examples of theatre-making within both of those contexts – I reserve the right of recourse to the reversed perspective too.

The relationship between page and stage

Jonathan Pitches has made an interesting link between Stanislavsky’s work and science. He notes that despite Stanislavsky’s own self-contradictions, a close reading of his work reveals ‘a deep and consistent relationship between science and the System’ and that a ‘scientific subtext to the work is detectable’ in his disciples’ own work around the world (2006: 2). He attempts to place both Stanislavsky himself and his followers (Boleslavsky, Strasberg, but also Michael Chekhov and ultimately Anatoly Vasiliev) within a framework inspired by Kuhnian scientific paradigms. This approach is defined by Kuhn as follows:

Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, [modern historians] attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time.

(Thomas Kuhn quoted in Pitches 2006: 5).

Pitches identifies two currents that these practitioners are respectively seen to belong to: one linear, logical, rational – Newtonian, and the other fluid, organic, intuitive – Romantic scientific. Although this might risk being seen in terms of the problematic left brain/right brain dichotomy, a scientific lens offers a useful way of looking at the System and its legacy. I would only add, in Kuhnian style, the observation that Stanislavsky’s work paradigmatically coincided with the emergence of Russian formalism and Saussurean semiotics and structuralism,⁶ and although he may not have been aware of these developments, the spirit of the time will have been such that it produced a way of thinking about theatre-making that was based on systematic communication of meaning.

The semiotic view of theatre began to exert influence in Europe thanks to the work of the Prague School (1928–39) and the French theorists Roland Barthes, Anne Ubersfeld and Patrice Pavis in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1991, despite resistance from British theatre practitioners who considered theatre semiotics a source of unnecessary jargon, Elaine Aston and George Savona finally offered up a ‘methodology’ in their volume Theatre as Sign-System to British theatre students, partly as a means of emancipation of the subject from literary studies and as a way into understanding the process of staging a play. Nevertheless, some Eastern European systems of director training could be seen to feature principles ...