[Realism Now!] [Perf Art MAIN page]
Performance Frank (as art/perf object)
See also: [(art) concepts]
[Art Movements]
[Coerced performance]
-[post post-modernism]-
[Dada]
[Dadaism] (an art "ism")
[Fluxus]
[Street Art]
[T.A.Z.] (Association for Ontological Anarchy)
(Hakim Bey, chief janitor)
[Frank's stuff]
[Performance frank: Realism Now!]
[Performed Art]
[The Performed Art Act]
[The Performed Danse]
[The Performed Performance]
[The Performed Score]
[The Performed Text]
[Perf art: Technology]
[The Performed UFO's] (and esp, etc)
[The Performed WEB (including programming)]
[Sampler: Art X Science] (another crummy play by the non-artist)
Performance: Frank (as art/perf object)
On this page: {Types}
{Ritual}
{ShamanismThe Usual Suspects}
{Techniques}
{Jerzy Grotowski's notes on Theatre Lab}
{Augusto Boal "Theatre of the Oppressed"
{Inter-cultural Performance} (Patrice Pavis)
{Robert Wilson i/v}
{Sinulog} (Phlipine body pulses)
The Usual Suspects
Jacques Derrida
Ritual
References.
"Ritual, Play, and Performance - Readings in the Social
Sciences/Theatre", Ed. by Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman,
LCCN PN 2049.R5, ISBN 0.8164.9285.9 (Seabury Press, New York, 1976)
Konrad Lorenz, P. 5, et alt seq. [Translated by Marjorie Kenwilson]
"Shortly before the First World War, when my teacher and friend
Sir Julian Huxley, was engaged in his pioneer studies on the
courtship behavior of the Great Crested Grebe, he discovered
the remarkable fact that certain movement patterns lose, in the
course of phylogeny, their original specific function and
become purely "symbolic" ceremonies. He called this process [emph mine]
RITUALISATION and use this term without quotation marks;
in other words, he equated cultural processes leading to the
development of human writes with the phylogenetic processes
give rise to succh remarkable "ceremonies" in animals. "
...
[P. 25]
"[Lorentz' pet Greylag Goose, had a normal habit of how it came
in the room in the evening, but, one ] evening I forgot to let
Martina [the goose] in at the right time, and when I finally
remembered her, it was already dusk. I ran to the front door,
and as I opened it she thrust herself hurriedly and anxiously
through, ran between my legs into the hall and, contraary to
her usual custom, in front of me to the stairs. Then she did
something even more unusual: she deviated from her habitual
path and chose the shortest way, skpinning her usual right-angle
turn and mounting the stairs on the right-hand side, "cutting"
the turn on the stairs and starting to climb up. Upon this,
something shattering happened: arrfived at the fifth step,
she suddenly stopped, made a long neck, in gees a sign of
fear, and spread her wings as for flight. Then she uttered
a warning cry and very nearly took off. Now she hesitated a
moment, turned around, ran hurriedly down the five steps and
set forth resolutely, like someone on a very important
mission, on her original path to the window and back. [ie,
her *routine* path: in the door to the window, and then back
to the stairs and up them] This time shw mounted the steps
according to her former custom on the LEFT side. On the
fifth step she stopped again, looked around, shook herself
and greeted -- behaviour mechanisms regularly seen in greylag
geese when anxious tenxion has given place to relief. I hardly
believed my eyes.
To me there is no doubht about the interpretatio of this
occurrence: The habit had be-come [P.26] a custom which the
goose could not break without being stricken by fear."
Shamanism
[Introductory note from Op. Cit. by Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman,
P.123 (note: This is an excellent source and i will expand when
time permits)
... The paradox of acting is that in watching a Joan MacIntosh
play Mother Courage by Brecht, one does not see MacIntosh less,
but more, even as you see into Mother Courage herslef.
Shamanism is the oldest technique of theatrical performing.
Primary shamanism originated in paleolithic times in central
Asia (and perhaps in southwest Europe) [Note 1]
... (more rubbish skipped about the proposed authorotative history
of shamanism; i *am* a liberal you know) ... Shamanism is found ...
-- everywhere. Probably it arose independently in several places.
THe techniques of Shamanism are singing, dancing, chanting, costuming,
sotry telling. THe shaman goes on a journey, or is transformed into
other beings. In any case, multiple realites are super-imposed, much
as in the decorated caves of Europe, Africa, and Australia painings
are super-imposed upon each other. Like the actor in Western tradition,
the shaman is both himself and others at the same time. The audience
is engagted at a very deep level; participation is a necessary
conditin for the shaman's feats.
For the
Notes
(this section only)
[1] What utter bildge! Oh, yes you see a few of us were sitting
around the campfire (i think it was a Thursday) and suddenly
Grampa Dweezle got up and started dancing around and moanin. We
all thought it was some sort of religious experience. Turns out,
some ants bit him on the bumm! Obviously, if animals display
ritual and dominance and all of the things, it means that Lucy
(and her children) had ritual and most probably shamanims when
they decided to move to more moderate climes. (Dont' get me
started about cultural provincialism!
{Back to the TEXT}
Techniques
In this section:
{Jerzy Grotowski's notes on Theatre Lab}
Jerzy Grotowski's notes on Theatre Lab
[i/v format from Op. Cit. by Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman, Pp.128&ff]
[this section translated by Jörgen Andersen and Judy Barba]
"The Theatre's New Testament"
The very name "Theatre Laboratory" makes one thing of scientific
research.Is this an appropraite association?
The word research should not bring to mind scientific research. Nothing
could be further from what we are doing that science in the strict sense,
and not ony because of our lack of qualifications, but also because
off our lack of interest in that kind of work.
The word research implies that we approach our profession rather like
a mediaeval wood carver who sought to re-create in his block of wood
a form which already existed. We do not work in the sam way as the
artist or the scientist, but rather as the shoemaker looking for the
right spot on the shoe in which to hammer the mnail.
The other sense of the word research might seem a little irrational as
it involves the idea of a penetration into human nature itself. In our
age, when all languages are confused as in the Tower of Babel, when all
aesthetical genres intermingle, death threatens the theatre as film and
television encroach upon its domaain. This makes us examine the nature
of theatre, how it differs from the other art forms, and what it is that
makes it ir-replaceable.
[he then discusses the development of the "holy actor" - ie, one driven
by (i would say) almost spiritual devotion to creating theatre. He
makes the point, that if the actor *merely* does things (with their
body and voice in a public place) that an ordinary passerby could
do, then they are "doing nothing new" -- much of this is my prob
rather slanted view of G's statements. Near the end of the essay...]
How can such a threatre reflect our time? I am thinking of the
content and analysis of present-day problems.
I shall answer according to our theatre's experience. Even though we
often use classical texts, ours is a contemporary theatre in that it
confronts our very roots with our current behaviour and stereotypes,
and in this way shows us our "today" in perspective with "yesterday",
and our "yesterday" with "today". Even if this threatre uses an
elementary language of signs and sounds -- comprehensible beyond the
semantic value of the word, even to a person who does not understand
the langue in which the play is performed -- such a theatre must be
a national one since it is based on introspection and on the whole of
our social super-ego which has been moulded in a particular nautal
culture, thus becoming an integral part of it.
If we really wish to delve deeply into the logic of our mind and
behaviour and reach their hidden layers, their secret motor, then thee
whole system of signs built into the performance must appeal to our
experience, to the reality which has suprised and shaped us, to this
language of gestures, mumblings, sounds, and intonations picked up
in the street, at work in cafés -- in short, all human behaviour which
has made an impression on us.
We are talking about profanation. What, in fact is this but a kind of
tack-less-ness based on the brutal confronatation between our declarations
and our daily actions, between the experience of our fore-fathers which
lives within us and our search for a comfortable way of life or our
conception of a struggle for survival, between our individual complexes
and those of society as a whole?
This implies that every classical performance is like looking at oneself
in a mirror, at our ideas and tradtions, and not meerely the description
of what men of past ages thought and felt.
Every performance bult on a contemporary theme is an encounter between the
superficial traits of the present day and its deep roots and hidden motives.
The performance is national because it is a sincere and absolute search into
our historical ego; it is realistic because it is an excess of truth; it
is social because it is a challenge to the social being: The spectator.
Augusto Boal
Theatre of the Oppressed
Refer to "Theatre of the Oppressed" by Augusto Boal,
LCCN PN 2051.B63613'1985 ISBN 0.930452.49.6
(
Empathy
[P.113] Empathy must be understood as the terrible weapon it realy is.
Empathy is the most dangeour weapon in the entire arsenal of the theatre
and realted arts (movies and TV).
It mechanism (sometimes insidious) consists in the juxtapostion of
two people (one fictious and another real), two universe, making one
of those two people (the real one, the spectator) surrender to the other
(the fictious one, the character) his power of making decisions.
The man relinquishes his power of decition to the image.
Inter-cultural Performance
}
See also: {Sinulog} (Phlipine body pulses)
Reference: "The Intercultural Reader, Ed. by Patrice Pavis,
LCCN 2049.I58'1996, ISBN 0.415.08154.8 (Routledge, London, 1996).
Various notes from that work.
Robert Wilson
"Hear, See, Act" an i/v with Robert Wilson ("CIVIL warS") by
Der Spiegel (did the *entire* magazine interview him, a sub
group or did (perhaps) the magazine (the corpus) itself do
the i/v ?) 1987 No.10.
[P.100]
RW: ... In the CIVIL warS I wasn't hinking of civil war
in America or today's Beirut, where childeren grow up with
guns in their hands. i was thinking more of a peacful civil union
of many nations and the contest between them in the sense of the
Olympic Idea. [the project was intended as part of the 1984 Olympic
Games; you will recall "the height of the evil empire during the
Reagan Era]
DS: The project actually foundeered just before targe. At the end
you needed a few hundred thousand dollars in order to fuse the
sections produced in Rotterdamn, Rome, Cologne, Tokyo, Marseilles
and Minneapolis [see map ;)] together in a global work of art,
the CIVIL warS. What did you feel in that moment you realised
it was all over?
RW: I was sad and disappointed.
DS: When you prsented your first work in theatre at the end of the
1960's in New York -- wordless, image-plays, often in slow
motion -- it seemed utterly starnge and new. One hade the impression
that you had found your style of theatre without following any
particular school. Was that so?
RW: I grew up in a small town in Waco, Texas. It wasn't possible to see
theatre there. And when I came to study in New York, it didn't
interest me. I didn't like it.
DS: Why not?
RW: It seemed to me that the actors wwere rather push, like bad high-school
teachers alsways putting pressure on, always lecturing. I found it
insulting and unselttling. It was only many, mnany years later that I
found afome of theatre which satisfied my aesthetoic sense, the classical
Noh theeatre of japan. it earns respect form the audience, it doesn't
harras or attack them, it just gives them space.
DS: There is, however, one big difference: the Japnese audience is well
familiar with the form and ocntent of the Noh theatre, as it has been
passed [P.101] down over the centureures. your theatre, on the other hand,
seems un-expected, un-familiar, new.
RW: That' true. Anyhow, today I htink there was one influence that I wasn't
even aware of then: As a student I often used to go to George Balanchine's
ballet. I had no idea about ballet, but I enjoyed watching this flow of
abstract, geinetruc ir arcgutectonic patterns in a fixed space and to hear
the music accompanying it, I felt liberated.
DS: Your first productions used no speech and even when you've used speech,
it's as a purely rhythmical, musical structure, irrelevant to the
meaning. The composer Philip Glass who wrote the music for Einstein on the
Beach and parts of the CIVIL warS once said that the nice thing
about your theatre is that it is completely non-literary.
RW: No, no, that's not true: Or at least not any more. I've changed. I am
interested in literary texts, it's just the way that they are usually
presented on stage that I find consistently dreadful.
DS: Why is that?
RW: At home I can read a play over and over again, Hamlet, for example,
with great pleasure. I can keep finding an ever new abundance of
possible interpreations. In the theare, however, I generally find nothing of
these riches. The actors interpet the text, they enter as if they know everything
and understand everything, and that's a lie, it's a swindle, it's and insult.
I don't believe that Shakespeare understood Hamlet [yes, but what abou
Bacon?? hmmm]. Theatre should not interperet, but should provide us with the
possibility of contemaplating a piece of werk and reflecting on it. If you
behave as if you've grasped layered forms and meanings. I always tell my actors
"It's not our job to provide answers, but to raise questions. We must ask
questions so that the text opens itself to us, and by doing that we enter into
dialogue with the audience".
DS: Bu do you realise that actually all directors think the other way round
and work from interpretations? Or can you think of anyway who sees the
task as you do?
RW: No, not really, but I don't go to the theatre, it mostly confuses me. ...
DS: You don't want to be tied down. Is that why you set four different
possible versions of the text against each other in your Hamburg
production of Heiner Müller's Hamletmaschine?
[P.101]
RW: Yes, that's right.; I told the actors, mostly drama students: "Neither
you, nor I who come from Waco, Texas, can really grasp the experiences
that lie beneath the work of a Marxist author from East Germany. We have to
present it in a way that it can be observed and thought about. Only then is
it worthwhile". Recently I was in East Berlin [this would be before the
wall came down] and saw an early Müller play, Die Bauern (The Peasants),
and after the performance I said jokingly to Heiner, "Why don't we put this
play on in Waco, Texas for an audience that doesn't even know where East
Germany is? But, seriously, I mean, it would have been a kind of test to
find out what the play is really about and what it might mean in centuries
to come.
DS: Do you mean to say that one should avoid any interpretation on stage: No
answers, just questions? Bur how? You can't end every sentence with a
question mark.
RW" I know, that's why people criticise my theatre for being actor-hostile,
metchanical, machine-like. But, it only seems like that because we in
the West are not so familiar with formal performance art as it has developed,
for exampole, in Noh theatre. I tell the actos, "Don't push your feelings on
the audience, leave everything you've everf thought about the play back in
the dressing room and walk freah onto the stage as if you don't know anything".
DS: What is it then that our actors do wrong?
RW: It's these abrupt gestures and this pre-conceived sentence melody that always
drives toward the period. [NOTE WELL!!!!! Zound!s!!! Ach du Lieber mihne Gott,
he *is* such a genius; beauty, beauty squared] the full stop. Instead, everything
should be a continual movement, a continuum. Einstein was onced asked by a student
to repeat a sentence that he hadn't understood. Einstin said, "I don't need to
repeat it, because I always asy the same thing, it's all one thought, one
continuum". That's what I mean.
...
[P.103]
RW: [about using Franz Kafka lines/thoughts in a play ] ... But, I thought a lot
about Kafaka, in fact constantly, about Kafka. Of course, i didn't want
to just illustrate Kafka, but I had the feeling that I must destroy the Kafka
within me, in order to get closer to him on my own terms.
DS: Your theatre consists of architectonic structures, images, language, dance,
music; it is -- in a very german word -- a Gersamtkunstwerk. But, what are the
origins, what comes first, the images?
RW: I think everything should be of equal value. It always surprises me, when
people characterise my work as "image-theatre" because hearing is just as
important to me. Hearing and seeing are are our principle means of perception,
of communication. In the teharter, generally speaking, language rules. What one
sees is just the trimming, repetition and illustration. I would like each to
come into it's own: hearing and seeing.
DS: Independently of one another?
[P.104]
RW: No, each should alternately stengthen the other. Let's take an example.
We see a news-reader on the television and he says, "Gaddafi has just
bombed Washington DC and New York City [and this was written in 1987!], there
are 11 million people dead and Washington is in flames..." We probably
woulddn't take any notice of the news-reader, his gestures, mime, clothes,
because we are just listening to the words. If how-ever, we turn down the
sound and put a Mozart record on, then we actually *see* this man first and
then *hear* the Mozart even more clearly than without the image.
NOTES ON VIDESO #VT2953
"The Making of a Monolouge: Robert's Wilson's Hamlet
(again with the hat!)
sponsored by the Coddell & Conwell FOundation for the Arts
Shakespear's text is indestructable rock, that you can't really
destroy. and re-thinkingg it as a monlogue, a flashback, to
think about the text as something that hamlet
Ibsen's "When we did awaken"
"Danton's Death" by Buechner
image text movement (titles)
how dense/light/dark the space is
pile of rocks that diminishes
Next: Sinulog. (Phillipine body impulses).
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Sinulog
(Phlipine body pulses)
"Body, Movemment and Culture" by Sally Ann Ness, LCCN GV'1796.S57'N47'1992,
ISBN 0.8122,3110.4 (U.Penn Press, Harrisburg?, 1992).
[P.1]
Imagine gentle currents of energy, flowing freely through and beyond your
body, forming warm pools of movement in the space just around you. Your
hands are brought to life in this softly pulsing current. They wave around
in the watery space, leaving invisible traces of their movement hanging in
the air. The current spreads down into tyouer legs, which begain to bear
your body's weight alternately, subtly shifting your body from side to side
throught the liquid space in a slight sway. Your knees become invovled,
bending alternately as they adjust for the arrival and departure of your
body's weight. i
Unless its pulses are so gentle that they die away within your body's
centre, the reslilient current will eventually reach through to your
feet, which balance, each in turn, yoru swaying body. You step lightly,
as though you walk, or perhaps softly job, upon a smooth surface of
silken pillows filled with sand. Your dance continues for a timeless
internal, until the current dies away.
...
"Santo Niño de Cebu" (Cebu City), an image of Jeus as Boy King. The
figure of Santo Niño is venerated as the Almighty and Most Merciful
Defender of the Cebuano people.
May the spirit of Tamara Karsavina bless us and guide us in these
troubled times, -- Frank Leeding, 2005.11.22, 5pm CaDST