Jane Milling

Modern theories of performance : from Stanislavski to Boal

Preface Stanislavskis Theoretical System Proposals for Reform: Appia and Craig The Popular Front: Meyerhold and Copeau Artaud and the Manifesto Grotowski and Theoretical Training Boals Theoretical History Conclusion: From Theoretical Practitioners to Theorized Performance Notes Index

Siege and Cipher: the closet drama of the Cavendish sisters

Abstract This article sets out to explore the relationship between drama and the political during the Civil War. Using the closet drama of two sisters, Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish, as a focus, it examines the way national political movements were assimilated and produced in literature by the individual, particularly by women. The first section examines drama as a defining familial discourse for the Cavendishes. It goes on to look at the feminised arena of conversation and dialogue as sheered politically under the pressure of events. Finally it examines the idea of the closet and the regeneration of the language of romance to produce political commentary.

Performing Moretonhampstead: rurality, participation and cultural value

ABSTRACT This paper is based on a multi-sited ethnography of subjects engaged in performance-based participation – amateur theatre, community-based theatre and Carnival – in the market town of Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor in the South West of England. Given its setting, the case study examines the rural dimensions of participation and cultural value. In addition to understanding the meaning and value of performance-based participation taking place in shared communal spaces, including the parish hall and the high street, this article seeks to understand everyday participation as a fundamentally embodied and emplaced practice. Place is not simply a venue or site for performance (or any other type of) participation. Drawing on the place theory of Edward Casey, who follows the European school of phenomenology, it is argued that place is, rather, the fundamental ground of human experience: embodied subjects and places co-evolve in a dialogic process of inter-animation. The main question we ask is how rurality shapes participation and how participation re-produces material and imaginary rural spaces. A key characteristic of government funding of arts and culture in the UK is extreme inequality in the distribution of funds to the City of London compared to the rest of the UK. While the cultural ecosystems of all UK regions outside London are equally disadvantaged in this respect, economic and cultural development in the South West region exacerbates this unequal situation by focussing investment and service provision in urban hubs, leaving contrasting rural areas doubly disadvantaged. This case study argues that an idyll-ised rural imaginary re-produced in and through everyday participation is only compounded by government deficits. Furthermore, it asserts that cultural policy making concerned with the value of equality must adopt a co-ordinated approach that takes into account complex interdependencies of national, regional and local registers of place.

Conclusion: From Theoretical Practitioners to Theorized Performance

The best work of any practitioner might be considered theoretical, in the broadest sense, because it has a reflexive and thoughtful component to it. But it does not follow that all writing by practitioners is theoretical. Those theoretical practitioners that we have examined qualify for that description not just because they wrote down their ideas, but also because of the way in which they have expressed their thoughts. Their texts are sometimes prescriptive, often polemical, and frequently analytical. They have used written means to attempt to place their practice in a history or tradition of theatre (often one they re-make to suit themselves): to proselytize about their work, to quantify the purpose of their practice and to codify their working practices. The mode and rhetoric of this written material differ widely between practitioners, and may change through the working life of a given writer.

Stanislavski’s Theoretical System

Stanislavski (1863–1938) is one of the most familiar names in the modern theatre, and yet he is known primarily as a theorist. This situation is to some extent puzzling. Theatrical reputations might be thought to be generally established by prominence or reputation in performance or in writing scripts: quite simply, those who are famous in the theatre have traditionally been actors or playwrights, and more recently directors. In fact, Stanislavski was a dedicated and admired actor, and a significant director, but his prominence is undoubtedly due to the fame and reputation of his ‘system’, which is a mode of preparation for actors. There was, in the history of the European theatre, no real precedent for this, nor, indeed, for a pedagogic system of acting which crossed cultural boundaries to such great effect. So perhaps the opening questions in relation to Stanislavski should be why he felt the need to prepare actors, and why that need was experienced (and still is) so universally, or at least in a wide range of cultures.

Grotowski and Theoretical Training

Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99) occupies an unusual place in an account of theoretical practitioners. His engagement with theatre productions as such only lasted for the first decade of his working life. Between 1957 and 1968 he established an ensemble at the Theatre of Thirteen Rows, later the Laboratory Theatre or Laboratory Institute, in Opole and Wroclaw. After this period he retreated from theatre performances and developed work which he called paratheatrical in that it was linked to the performer’s craft but outside conventional theatre. Because of the limited opportunities to see his theatre work, or to participate in his training courses or post-theatrical work, written material by or about Grotowski has been the primary source of access to his practice. Grotowski himself wrote very little, producing only short articles for theatre magazines, occasional interviews and transcriptions of talks delivered at conferences or on courses. In particular, writing about the ‘paratheatrical’ projects became disproportionately significant, since only a small number of students and practitioners participated and witnesses were limited in number. Written accounts from short-term participants and occasional reflective articles from Grotowski form the only access to this work for the majority of those interested in tracing the development of his thought.

Proposals for Reform: Appia and Craig

Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) and Adolphe Appia (1862–1928), roughly contemporaneous practitioners and theorists, have frequently been linked because of the affinities between their visions for a reformed stage design and mise-en-scene. They had followed very different routes into the theatre; Appia had been a student of music and a spectator of theatre before his fascination with Wagner led him to analyse and design for Wagnerian music-drama. Meanwhile, Craig had started as an actor, coming from a family of performers, before running his own troupe as an actor-manager and later operating as a freelance director. The theatrical environments in which they worked were also distinct, and yet their writings and illustrated stage designs, the primary way in which they disseminated their ideas, reveal striking similarities. Apologists have tried to claim preeminence for each, but it is a futile exercise to attempt to untangle the lines of influence between the two, as Appia commented in a letter to Craig in 1917: In the depths of our souls we have the same vibration and the same desire; only expressed differently, owing to our different temperaments and our very different circumstances. What matter! (Bablet 1981, 77)

Boal’s Theoretical History

Augusto Boal is probably the most influential of contemporary theoretical practitioners, and his books have become essential reading for a new theatre of commitment, whether in aspiration or in practice. Boal advocates what is in many respects a blameless theatre, in which all are participants rather than practitioners and receptors and are involved in an effort of social progress. The promise entailed is that of an absence of futility, which is a sense that may all too easily accompany many initiatives in performance or in other arts, and there is a comforting geniality to much of his writing which suggests that the theatre has the potential always to be kind, no matter what the circumstances. This in itself poses an interesting contrast to the definitions advanced by Artaud and Grotowski, discussed in the last two chapters, and Boal’s popular theatre games convey a world of inclusion notably absent from the philosophies of these two practitioners. Similarly, Games for Actors and Non-actors is hardly a title which conjures up the systematic world of Stanislavski, with its assumptions of an institutional professionalism for actors in specialized schools, and neither mise-en-scene nor the arts of the director are apparently of the slightest concern to Boal. His initiative, then, may be thought to be timely, not just in the context of Latin American deprivation, but also in those contexts which have been found for the theatre of the oppressed in North America and in Europe, which demand a focus for activity and a purpose fundamentally separate from aesthetic aspirations.

Artaud and the Manifesto

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) is an artwork of the French theatre who has influenced other artworks. The periods concerned are, respectively, between the first and second major European wars of the twentieth century when Artaud was active, largely in Paris, and from 1960 onwards, when his influence has been active. That is perhaps the most concise description of a phenomenon. Further commentary is beset by difficulties.

The Popular Front: Meyerhold and Copeau

A danger in attempting to study the theoretical writings of two practitioners in one chapter is the powerful compulsion to find thematic links which elide significant distinctions, or to read the works only for their own sake without adequate alertness to the immediate context and purpose of their penning. Yet there are significant shared contexts for Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) and Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) which influence, and find expression in, their theoretical thinking in different ways. The first observation might be that they both participated in a rejection of the hegemony of naturalism in their respective national theatrical cultures. Their anti-naturalism was not motivated by the same aesthetic concerns that drove Craig and Appia’s work, with its atavistic homage to Wagner. This anti-naturalism considered art as an ideal realm, quite distinct from life; a place of transcendence, encouraging a different kind of illusionism to the grubby depiction of the everyday that was the alleged role of naturalism. Whilst both the practitioners under consideration here knew their Wagner and read articles by Craig, Appia and Fuchs, yet at the centre of Meyerhold and Copeau’s writing was a sense of theatre as a social art and a social act.