[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.